Gabriel's knees are always (skinned) wrote in repose,
Re: On the shore: Marta / Ronan
As far as town-wide events went, Ronan figured that a bonfire with precisely zero indications of supernatural shenanigans had to be one of the lowest risk options he’d attended in the last several years. Not that he was ruling out the possibility that all of this was going to go up in flames, figuratively speaking. Repose was still Repose. Would always be the place where wishes and nightmares came true in fading shifts and with consistent regularity like moon phases, or global warming. So, okay, he was apprehensive on the self-preservative level that always simmered away under his metaphorical surface. But man, did he really want this to just be a bonfire night.
And as such, he’d instructed Ben to stop on his way over from running his evening class in order to pick up some hot dogs and marshmallows. Sure, there might be some who categorized it as a demand rather than an instruction, or thought that the promise of sexual favours in exchange for said treats was tacky. Ronan was glad that he was not one of those people. And, okay, let’s be real here - the favours were coming into play anyway. He’d been late for work three times this week alone because of Ben’s reluctance to let him leave the apartment or, like, put clothes on. And he’d yet to come up with a decent excuse as to how he’d managed such a feat, when he lived above the bookshop. It was a wonder he hadn't been fired. But he was workshopping a few more excuses, and in the meantime he could drink some truly terrible beer out of a red plastic cup and follow Freki and Geri as they trotted along the shore, weaving in and out of figures sat on blankets near the water.
Having the dogs with him was a welcome relief to break up the press of so many unfamiliar minds. Most of them were easy enough to brush away on their own: the people with heads full up of sour carbonation and liquor’s tang, giddy or horny or ready to pass out, those ones he could dodge without much effort. But so many at once, the collective weight of all that unfamiliar consciousness surrounding? That was trickier. But with Freki and Geri sniffing along the sand and darting out to splash against the lap of the little waves against the shore, Ronan could reach out and soothe the sharp edges of his anxiety with the simple comfort of their minds. Fish smell. Seaweed smell. Meat smell, drifting down toward them from the bonfire when the wind caught just right.
Girl smell. Girl touch? Ronan looked up quickly as Freki’s attention turned to one of the figures on a blanket, sitting alone off to one side of the dock. He was doing what Ronan referred to as his army crawl - wiggling along with his belly to the sand, hind legs stretched out behind him and front paws slowly pulling him along by inches towards the girl where she sat, head low and tail wagging furiously. ‘Look at me, I’m so non-threatening that you must pet me!’, said his body language to anyone remotely familiar with dog-speak.
With a roll of his eyes, Ronan jogged a few steps to reach out and hook one hand in Freki’s collar. “Sorry,” he said, but the grab was mostly for show because he knew that Freki wasn’t about to do anything except roll over to show his belly if his first attempt at attention-seeking proved fruitless. That is, pet-less. “He’s a bit of a ham, if you hadn't noticed.”