2021-05-14 - Defy the Frost

Dreams happen to August more than they should. Or maybe that's as often as they should. Sure, he tries to be careful about using Glimmer lately. He has a wife, they live together, he has a bunch of animals. He wants all of this to remain safe. It's easy for him to forget that he should try to keep Dreams at a minimum to protect himself, too.

Ostensibly, he'd gone to the Vittorinos' cabin to chat with them about better broadband for their section of the forest. It was a slow process, convincing everyone to chip in. That had been a success. On the way back, he'd found himself dressed in spiked leather armor on a dais in a puzzle world.

So he comes home, at least an hour later than he should have, dusty and dirty with what looks to be soot and dead plant matter. He's also intensely upset, which sets the animals off the second he gets inside the perimeter fence. The geese start honking, Latte hops to the window and meows, the pigs begin milling around the door, making sounds of distress.

Eleanor's mind reaches out first, that tangle of interconnecting threads forming a red cloak around her mental self, the cloak the selkies gave her. Her Maestro cloak. August!? What happened?! Where have you been? comes the worried thought. The lights are on in the cabin, and the door swings open to reveal his wife, in jeans and a GHCC hoodie because it's chilly tonight. Her hair is in a pair of braids making her resemble Pippi Longstocking's older sister (if that character hadn't been a singular orphan).

Ellie steps out onto the porch, eyes searching for him, even as she shushes the little pigs which squeal.

August has paused by the garden, staring at it, like he's willing it to--something. He starts when Eleanor says his name, and settles some; what was becoming a steady spiral into panic slows, stabilizes. "Ellie." He runs a hand over his face, immediately regrets it. "It was...a Dream. Some sort of puzzle...world. And..." He gets a distracted look, eyes roving as he tries to remember...something...

He winces, shies away from the garden towards the steps. Whatever it is, his mind isn't interested in going there. "Sorry. Didn't mean to scare everyone." He hesitates halfway to pulling her into a hug. "I...think something's maybe wrong with me."

Eleanor pulls August into her arms instead, and then leans back to look him over, the sense of her Glimmer seeping out like those red threads from the cloak to curl around his own Glimmer. "Nothing looks out of place, AJ," she murmurs, then inspecting his physical form for injury. "What feels wrong?" she asks, green eyes narrowed in concern, forehead furrowed with worry.

August flinches when Eleanor touches him, bracing himself--except, nothing happens. He relaxes, shudders, pulls her into a tight embrace. He's not injured in any significant way; a little bruising, some minor cuts. To mental Glimmer he's confused, hurting, scared, though not overtly damaged. Certainly not like when he let Megan kick down the doors to the blank space in his memories.

He hides his face in Eleanor's hair. "When I woke up, I was in a clearing and everything in it was dead. So tried to heal the plants, but..." He swallows. "All I could do was kill them. I couldn't actually make them grow." Though hes resigned himself to holding Eleanor, she can feel his hyper vigilance, that readiness to launch clear of her should the same thing happen to her.

"Oh no," Eleanor whispers quietly, holding him tighter. "Take me there? We'll see if I can fix them or not? It may be...localized to an area, or it may be everything Glimmer?" she posits. That's the researcher in her trying to logic something that is completely illogical in every respect. "We need to get you cleaned up first though. A hot shower, some soup, some meds, then we can go where you landed, ok?"

She begins working on leading him into the cabin to get him settled, because he's no good to anyone in this state.

Right. Right, it might not be all plant Glimmer. Just him. Which isn't great but he'll take it over all of them being jacked up. "Yeah. Okay." He pulls back, gives her a look equal parts apologetic and sad. "Used to coming back from these just banged up, not..." Not broken.

He's easily lead into the cabin, offering no resistance, pats the pigs and scritches the cat (who licks his hand and paws at him, concerned). "I can still fix things, I think. I broke a rock and put it back together." His gaze wanders the cabin, taking it in like he might an alien landscape. He can break this, and that, and that, and that potted Ficus. And he can put all of it back together...all of it, save one.

We'll see if I can fix them.

"I have to admit, it'd be par for the course for them to break our Art like this." Or, at least his.

Eleanor watches him cautiously for signs of concussion or other injury. If the Art is off, she might be missing things by relying on Glimmer. "They don't particularly like you, Them, that is. You undo a lot of what they do, and I love you for it. I also want to wrap you up in bubblewrap and duct tape to keep you safe," she notes, moving to get him some headache meds and a glass of water.

August can't help a small smile. "I guess I'm just contrary that way," he murmurs. "We both know I'd manage to get banged up, bubblewrap or no." He kisses her on the forehead, brief and gentle, heads into the bathroom. He stares at himself in the mirror for several long seconds. The water runs for a good five minutes or so, after which he comes out with his shirt off, face and arms scrubbed clean. No real injuries, just like Eleanor's Glimmer indicated. Really, he seems more emotionally exhausted than anything else.

He sits on the futon, Latte hops into his lap a moment later. "Hey you." He sighs, sets to petting her. He starts without pre-amble. "It was me, and Everett, Kailey, Diana...James, he was there, at the end. And Joey Kelly. We'd been turned into," his eyes narrow, "characters, of some kind. Like, I was dressed in this leather getup with," he gestures at himself, "thorns. And I could turn into a bear."

Eleanor has nuked some leftover vegetable soup, made from the fruits of their garden of course. She brings it over to him and sets it down with napkin and spoon. "What, like Dungeons and Dragons? Or more like my the City I kept getting pulled into? With the Selkies."

She moves about the room, packing up a bag to bring with them to where he landed. Bits and bobs, camera, sketchbook and pencils, everything from an infrared thermometer to her pet rock, the glowstone from the previously mentioned world she visited a few times.

August pets Latte, the motion and her purring calming him. The pigs have already parked next to his feet. Operation: Soothe is a go. And here comes Eleanor with soup, ready to work the problem.

His expression grows distant. "...Dungeons and Dragons," he says, only half-certain. "Not like the city you described. It was, this series of little islands, connected by bridges. And there were these beast-people with wings--kind of like harpies, if they were from a horror movie. And a dragon made of stone. Once we got to the end, there was a door for each of us. I stepped through mine, it was red, and..."

His voice fades. He's staring, unblinking, tense and wary. Latte licks his hand, startling him out of whatever fugue that was. "Ah...I don't...remember that part too well. But then I woke up in a crater."

Eleanor frowns as she continues to putter, keeping herself busy and preparing to head out there. "Have you tried texting the others, make sure they made it back, see if they had a similar incident with their abilities?" She sets the pack down by the door and moves to slide onto the futon beside him, running her fingers through his hair gently.

August finally takes the headache meds, knocking them back with a healthy glass of water. Next comes the soup, which Latte sniffs at only to reject because ugh, just veggies? Ew. He sips methodically, unable to articulate why he thinks he has to move with care.

"Not yet," he admits. "Figured I'd...go see them, tomorrow, on my way into work." Oh yes, he plans to go to work tomorrow anyways. He leans into Eleanor's hand, sighs. "What if it's permanent this time." Ah, there it is. The real concern.

Eleanor smiles with a soft expression at him. "Then I'd say They are idiots, because they took the good part of your gift away, and left you with the part you can rip Them to shreds with," she points out. "It'll be all right, no matter what. We have each other, we have dear friends, we have our family. And we always find a way back to good, August."

August sets the last of the soup aside, leans into Eleanor. "Yeah," he agrees, voice low. "Except...if they were trying to fuck with me, this is a good way to do it." What better way to hurt him but to take away the one part of shaping he loves the most; the one that doesn't hurt things, the one that lets him be that much closer to the botanical world.

And even if it is permanent, he can get used to that. It'll be frustrating, after so much of his life spent with this ability, but he can cope. "Yeah," he says again, kisses her neck. "Lemme get some new clothes on."

Eleanor watches him go to change, before she lets her real worry read on her face. She reaches to stroke Latte with a grimace. "So help me, if they make this permanent, I'm going to unleash ginger fury on the Dark Men," she hisses quietly.

Latte bumps Eleanor's hand agreeably. She will chew them to bits. Also knock everything off their shelves, shed on their clothes, shred their furniture. They'll never know what hit them.

August comes back downstairs after a few minutes, oddly soot-covered clothes replaced by a worn pair of work jeans, a purple hoodie over a black tee, and his hiking boots. He fetches a flashlight and water bottle, gives the pigs some pets. "We'll be right back you two." Soup and headache meds seem to have done him some good, as does a change of clothes. He looks less shell shocked, a bit more awake. "It's not far, and there's a game trail."

Ellie nods and gets up, shouldering her pack as she follows him out, pulling out a flashlight of her own, as well as her stone. If something is up, if a spot is thin, it should alert them at least. "If you start feeling unwell you tell me right away, got it? No sense in making things worse, love."

August nods, mostly intending to do that. Mostly. He's still himself, remains inclined to insist he's okay until he's falling over dead. "Yeah." He takes Eleanor's hand, not caring how ridiculous it's going to look. He feels safer that way. (He'd done a lot of hand-holding after Bosnia. It had helped. It doesn't occur to him if there's a connection just now.)

As August had said, it's not far to walk; they make it there in about thirty minutes. The sky's not dark yet, so the forest is in that hazy half-light stage of dusk, where a flashlight isn't that helpful, yet it remains hard to focus on details.

The clearing is small, surrounded by hemlock, spruce, and fir. The sides of the trees' facing the interior of the clearing are withered and dead; their branches droop, the needles and foliage are stiff and brown in the evening breeze. The short, scrubby grass is brittle and dead, blackened and gray in some places. Towards the center is a person-sized crater, about the right side for August to have landed in if he'd been curled up on himself.

August stops at the edge, swallows. "I'm not...sure, but I think I did this."

Through the touch connection of Eleanor's hand, he can feel her mental presence, just there, reassuring. It's interesting how it's evolved. It was once a chaotic mass of threads of every color, knotted and tangled, crossing over each other and stretching into oblivion, like the strings on her murder boards. Then came the Selkies and the City and the threads began to take a more coherent shape, much as her thoughts, and as her abilities did. Now they are that cloak, drifting, empty but animate, like it's related to Doctor Strange's.

When they reach ground zero she slows, then stops, taking in everything with her eyes, and her senses, mundane and magical. She looks at the crater with a scowl, then up to see if there is damage in the tree canopy above to indicate how far he fell. "Stay back, AJ. I'm gonna look around, see if I can reverse some of the damage. I'm not as strong at this stuff as you."

In contrast, August's mind isn't the calm, wide-ranging wilderness it usually is. It's a dimly lit forest, creatures hiding within its undergrowth, evading onlookers. Some of the aspens in the volcano caldera are dead and withered, barren of leaves despite the time of year. Tension has seeped into the river's voice, the wind in the trees.

August doesn't need to be told twice. He nods once, moves to stand next to a hemlock, the first un-injured tree outside the clearing. Within, as Eleanor might expect, the plants are indeed deal. It's the kind of damage she could expect someone with Spirit could inflict, pushing entropic decay to its maximum, withering them for a good decade of drought and decay in mere moments.

But, as August has always said, she can bring them back. Or, in theory, she can. They've been pushed quite far, so pulling life back out of the few remaining cells, multiplying it out, might be difficult.

Eleanor steps into the crater itself and she crouches down, to dig her fingertips into the earth there, where he landed. She focuses, and bits of her cloak unravel to begin traveling out through the soil like tiny streams of red water, seeping up through the roots of all the dead or dying plant life in a twenty-foot radius. Her glow has grown, considerably. She's no longer the flicker she was when he met her. She is a radiant beacon of light now in Glimmer measurement.

The plants don't resist Eleanor's shaping. The last few living cells resume the business of growing, consuming the dead matter around them to turn it into new cells which do the same. New, hardy green grass pushes up out of the ground around her, bark on the handful of trees closest to her fills out, branches straighten, foliage fills back out.

She can't do the whole clearing in one go; there's maybe two, three more pulses of power to get all of it. Yet this section looks whole again.

August steps out into it, crouches down next to Eleanor. He rests a hand on her back, sighs with relief. Some of the tension eases in him. "You're perfectly good at this. See?" August couldn't have done a better job himself.

Eleanor smiles at him, after the third pulse finishes the job. She looks tired though. Spirit has always taken the most out of her, where Physical is as natural to her as breathing. She gets up out of her crouch. "Not like you are." Were? No, are. It'll come back, it has to. "Hopefully this is just temporary. A system shock. Get in touch with the others tomorrow, but no work for you. Just in case it," she looks around at the formerly nigh-dead clearing, "Has a will of it's own."

August helps Eleanor stand, wary now that she's done so much. Will They come for her, punish her for undoing Their work? Who's he kidding, it's not 'will', just 'when'. And will he be there to stand beside her, or will They separate them, make sure to deny them the chance to help one another?

The smell of the grass and the trees growing again soothes some of his fears. If They do come for her, They'll have no idea what hit them.

The crater he left has become a grass-filled depression in the ground. No one will look twice at it, except to wonder if a rock once sat there, or what sort of animal burrow collapsed. "Not so sure about that," he says, one around around her waist. "I do want to drive in--I told Conner Hawthorne I'd help him sort out this fig fruit he found in a Dream. But no work." Conveniently, Finch can then have a look at him with her shaping. She's as strong as he is, if there's anything to see, she'll see it.

And if there's not, well. "Yeah. Probably just needs time to heal." He kisses Eleanor's forehead. "Come on. Let's get you home. I'll make us some dinner."

Ellie leans into the forehead kiss, and his words seem to settle her worries a bit. He seems less freaked out, and that is the important thing. "Home and food, you know how to charm a gal," she quips with a smile, then slides an arm around his waist and heads for home.