2019-10-27 - Scientific Observation

August's responses to texts today have been a little odd. A lot odd, really. He's not particularly forthcoming about what happened, but something did, when he and Finch answered a call for downed trees on Bayside the other night. He called out sick for the day, and Jen said something about moose attacking.

But he insists he's fine, it's not a relapse of the flu, and these aspen saplings are growing so fast, he can feel how fast they're growing. And he had a really nice bath earlier, and now he's going to make some tea. Or stare at the ceiling. One of those two.

It was the staring at the ceiling comment. I mean, August can be a little weird on a regular basis, but staring at a ceiling is really not how the man tends to spend his free time. Reading, sure. Gardening? Definitely. Cooking, hunting, listening to music? Yep. This strange text is what has Ellie packing herself into her Honda Element and braving a drive into the Firefly Forest to Roen's cabin. She pulls off the road to reply to his text, the engine idling, and tries not to think about the woods surrounding her as she taps at her phone.

Jesus. He's rescuing spiders now. Ellie puts the car back into drive and risks all sorts of speeding tickets as she veritably flies down the road towards the little block of cabins. The redhead is in jeans and a cream-colored cable-knit sweater and navy blue Keds. She pulls into the drive and parks near the cabin, listening to the protests of the geese as she climbs out and heads to the door. She raps on it with her knuckles. "August?" she calls.

On the plus side, August has to set his phone down to rescue the spider. He can feel that it was injured in the fall, and because he's himself and high as a kite, he actually heals it. No sooner has he done so than it launches out of his hand and flees across the floor. "Be more careful," he says to it and it scuttles under the futon.

The guard geese honk excitedly. August makes a face, but hears Eleanor and smiles. He has to negotiate the path from where he is, by the woodstove, to the door with a good deal of care. His senses are all off kilter, telling him new information that, while fascinating, isn't helpful in the least for living inside a building. (He's had to remind himself four times now that digging a hole and crawling into it won't be a viable way to live.)

He opens the door, smiles at Eleanor. His hairs a little messy from the nap he's been taking in a nest of pillows and blankets by the stove, and his pupils are a bit dilated, but otherwise he looks mostly normal: dark blue slub t-shirt, black commuter pants, dark gray hoodie, black wool socks. "You didn't have to come out here," he says, breaking into a full grin. There's a happy, drunken quality to him, though his speech isn't slurred in the least.

Eleanor looks him over for any injuries first, but he seems ok. "What on earth did you get into, August Roen? Are you drunk? High? Both?" she asks. She steps inside and blinks at the nest he's made for himself, and adds, "Possessed?"

August shuts the door, chuckles at the questions. "None of the above." He holds up his left hand, runs a finger along a gash in it. It's mostly healed, and seems to have been sealed with something gold and thick. "There were dryads," he says, like he's just remembering it again, and rubs at his temple. "Sorry, I spent a lot of time laying on the ground today, so I could feel everything. It made me achy. After that I just wanted to soak in the tub and sit by the woodstove." He moves to Eleanor, slips an arm around her waist to pull her close. "I'm fine, just it makes me feel a little weird, whatever they did."

"Dryads? Were you attacked?" Eleanor asks, with wide eyes. "You can feel the grass' emotions? You're feeling like they do? Communing?" she posits. She lets him pull her into his arms, but the concern is still written all over her face. She pushes her glasses up on her nose, having left too quick to bother with the contacts. "Did you touch them or something?"

"Yeah, we were," August says, sounding a little more like himself as he focuses on Eleanor. If a very muzzily happy version of himself. "Maybe it's not really...emotions. That's just how I think about it. More like, I think it would be frustrating, constantly rebuilding." His eyes narrow as he tries to pick through it.

Her second question gets his attention. "We did. They gave us a ride, and then we shook hands with them to seal a deal." He holds up his hand with the healed gash for her to see. There's a faint line of something golden under the skin. "I think some of their sap got under our skin." He frowns. "My skin. Well, probably Finch's too, she was also feeling kind of spacey, she said."

Eleanor lets out a short bark of a laugh. "You're high on Dryad sap? That's a new one. I'll need to write this all down. Do you have a pen and a notebook I can borrow? I need you to tell me everything, what you see and how you feel. This is very valuable research, August!" Also, she's ardently hoping that keeps him busy until it wears off, so she doesn't find him wandering naked in someone's garden and having to explain to the cops that, no officer, he is not a pervert, just high.

August frowns down at his hand, flexes it. "I guess I am. Though Alexander said 'ichor' might be a better word." Does that make the oath more official, if it's ichor and not sap? August isn't sure how this works. "Yeah, in the drawer on the end of the kitchen cabinets." His 'stuff' drawer which as stuff drawers go is relatively organized.

But before letting her go he nuzzles her neck, takes in a deep breath and lets it out. "You smell good. Have I told you that lately?"

"You have not, but you may do so anytime you wish!" Eleanor declares cheerfully. She extracts herself from his embrace to go root through ye olde junk drawer, a kitchen staple since the beginning of time. She grabs a little notepad and a pen and begins excitedly writing down what he's told her so far as she heads back over to the futon and sits on it.

"So, where did you run into these dryads? What did they look like?" she asks.

August makes a small sound of protest when Eleanor pulls free, though doesn't attempt to stop her. He watches her with a warm, fuzzy expression, moves to sit with her on the futon when she takes her seat. He curls up against her, sighs with contentment. There's silence for a spell, and it'd be easy to think he's dozing off. In reality, he's studying Eleanor's hand with intense focus. Eventually, he says, "Sort of like if a tree grew to look like a centaur. Not like human and horse, just that overall shape." He makes a face. "They felt the trees die, were made we were clearing them and not healing them."

Eleanor writes some things down and then taps the pen to her chin. "Hm, I'm not sure even you could undo a tree being felled by a storm, or a chainsaw. Maybe grow a new one from the stump though? Or from cuttings? I mean, can any of you bring a person back from death? Because I think that is tree death, right? At least the part you'd be clearing?"

August shudders, curls up against Eleanor more closely. "We can...if someone's close, to dying. We can yank them back. When they're...about to..." He shuts his eyes. "Sorry. Anyways. But not after they're gone, no. I think they thought we were stronger than that." He stops a second, wincing. He wishes he was. Oh how he wishes he was...

He rests his face against her hair. "That's what I'm going to do. I kept pieces. Cuttings. I'll make new trees from those." Another tremor. "When we...were riding them, we could see what they saw. The trees, on the highway like that. They were like chopped up corpses." He swallows. "Which I guess is why they got so pissed."

"Interesting," Eleanor murmurs, scribbling furiously in the notepad and planting a kiss on top of his head. "So, they have a vastly different mode of perception from us. This could be a large part of any hostilities between the two sides of the Veil. I wonder if they got a taste of how we see the world from you and Finch."

She reaches her hand to run it through his curls soothingly when he mentions the corpse-trees. "That makes sense. I can imagine they loathe us, but are we over there destroying Veil trees? Or did they just stumble over here? Or was the tree the storm fell existing on both sides?"

August makes a low sound and leans into her hand in his hair. It does the trick; he forgets about dead bodies hacked up in ugly roads on the instant. "Not totally sure. Sometimes I think there's a connection between both sides for plants. Or, if it's thin, there is." His tone grows absent. "Like how the aspen had no grove here, because it was on the other side. And now there's a grove here, once we cut it down, like there is Over There..."

He licks his lips. "We'd have to explore more to find out, I think. Have people on both sides mapping areas." Which isn't, now that he thinks about it, a bad idea. But like all ideas right now, it's ephemeral. The house plants are breathing, the spider's made it half way up the wall. She's moving with more care this time. The silk she spins is a series of beta-pleted sheets.

He reaches up to rn a finger along her jaw, down to the hollow of her throat. "You're beautiful. I don't tell you that enough."

Annnd there is the blush she's so good at. Eleanor turns scarlet and she looks over at him with a grin. "You're somehow even more adorable when you're high. You know that? I shouldn't take advantage of that though. Should I?" she taps her chin, pondering the moral and ethical issues associated with having sexy times with your boyfriend totally high on dryad ichor.

"I'm pretty sure I look the same," August murmurs into Eleanor's neck. His hand slides lower, down to her heart. "Not sure it's taking advantage. It's not like I wouldn't normally." His eyes half-close. Another slow breath in and out. "I can feel the blood moving each time your heart beats. And every time you breathe it's like ocean waves on a beach. It's amazing." He closes his eyes completely, spends some time just like that, listening to Eleanor exist. He kisses the pulse in her neck, rests his face there. "All the little rivers that are you."

And that is somehow, the sexiest thing the man has ever said. Eleanor's heartbeat speeds up, and those rivers of blood pulsing through tiny veins beneath her skin run like rapids. "You make a good argument, about it not really being me taking advantage of your somewhat altered state," she rationalizes. She does take a moment to jot down the notes about him being able to sense a body's inner workings on a microscopic level in this state before she turns back to him. "So, what does it make you want to...explore? In regards to me?" she asks carefully. Because for all she knows, Dryads may drink human blood and that's what he's hankering for.

August makes a low, appreciate sound at the blushing, and the meaning behind the reaction, at the feel of skin responding. "Explore? Mmmm. Not sure it's exploring. More like," his hand moves down her belly to her hip. He kisses her neck thoughtfully, "reveling in you. Learning you all over. Like this. Before I forget how to do it. Before I can't feel every bit of you like this anymore." And he knows he will forget, really is forgetting already. The ichor was only a few drops. (He's sure, on some fundamental level, that any more than that would have killed them.)

"Well, I for one am a great believer in higher learning, and this sure sounds like that," Eleanor agrees with a silly grin on her face. "I also wonder if I lick your palm will I get a contact high off you?" She gets up off the futon and gives him a beckoning curled finger as she heads towards the stairs to the loft.

The suggestion of licking his palm and then getting up from the futon has August staring after Eleanor with a look of utter betrayal. But then she's beckoning him to the loft, and for a few seconds he sits there on the futon, staring at her like he's trying to commit that visual to memory.

"Oh, I'm gonna get you a lot more than high, sweetheart," he says, easing off the couch and following after her.