Enoch Crosslin (crossedwire) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-04-13 20:56:00 |
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Current mood: | tired |
The Island at Last
Who: Cross and Helena
When: noonish, Day 15
Where: the stream, then Grazer Island
What: arriving
Rating: PG
Cross didn't know about Helena, but he'd had very little sleep. Every time he'd started to drift off, he'd jerked awake, always conscious of the fact that he was perched in a tree with very narrow branches, up above a section of ground where carnivorous predators lurked, snarling and making those high laughing sounds. It was going to be as close to heaven as he ever expected to get to sleep tonight in a place the creatures couldn't access, he thought.
Before leaving the place where they'd camped for the night, they'd made sure the water bottles Helena had found were filled completely up and eaten the bits of food they had with them, then set out to travel the rest of the way. The last portion of their walk took place in near silence, but it was not an uncomfortable one. They would speak if there was anything that needed saying, and that seemed to be fine with both of them. Cross felt comfortable in a way he could not have put into words to know that it was okay to be silent; that was his nature most of the time anyway.
He heard the water before he saw it. The stream was wide and reasonably swift-running, and he couldn't tell how deep it was when it came into sight. Turning his head, he murmured, "Well, here we are." Now the question would be how they'd get across without completely soaking their bedrolls.
Helena sighed as they came to the stream. It seemed to flow out of a low end of a vast lake. In the distance across the water she could make out some land and assumed it must be the island. She shaded her dark eyes with one browning hand and thought she saw animals moving along the beach of the island. They'd arrived! From here it didn't look like much but there were several pool lengths between them and the land. Maybe it would be more promising once they got across. "Wow, it's much bigger than I thought," she murmured as she dropped her hand.
Helena shrugged off her pack and sloshed right into the stream to splash some water down her neck which was also browning darkly. She hadn't reddened, she rarely ever burned, but she still felt baked like a fillet of fish. Poor Cross just seemed as red as a tomato next to her. She hoped he wasn't hurting. It felt amazing just to be able to stop but she could tell as she ladled water into her palm that it wasn't safe to drink from this stream. Little brown flecks and mud swirled in her hand. "This water isn't very clean. Did you guys drink it the last time you were here?"
Cross was staring at the expanse of water and the placement of the island a good ways past it. "I didn't come out this far," he told her. "Everyone but Jasper and the colonel stayed back to dress the grazer they killed." The island wasn't quite what he'd expected; for some reason he'd thought there'd be trees. There seemed to be shrubbery, and there were animals moving around at the closest point he could see from here. "Glad we have some water with us." He didn't like to think about drinking that mucky-looking water, and fortunately they shouldn't have to. He wondered if there was another source on the island somewhere. He set his own bedroll down and proceeded to kneel down and splash some of the water onto his own neck, not caring that it wet his sweaty and grimy shirt. He was indeed sunburned, but he'd just about gotten to a point where he didn't notice it. His skin burned, then darkened, then burned again in this climate.
Helena took a sip from her water bottle and sat down on her bedroll. "Ok, second problem then. How do we get across with our bedrolls without drowning?" She could see that the lake grew gradually deeper but she had to assume that it grew considerably deeper. "Ken's got to be working on a raft back at home which we'll bring with us but for now...how are we going to get across to investigate things?" She lightly and rhythmically tapped her fingertips against her bare knee in thought.
"I dunno if they found out how deep it was," Cross said after he'd straightened up to stand once again contemplating the island and the water. There was a frown on his face, but in this case it was an expression of almost studious contemplation. There was a solution to every problem in his opinion. It was simply a matter of finding it. "Can you swim?" he asked. It seemed a fair enough question; some people could not. "Wonder if we could find somethin' to float the bedrolls across on?"
Helena nodded. "Yeah, in a...summer vacation at the beach kind of way." She'd never been on the school swim team. Nope, she'd been more of a committee member than a team player in school. "We could always pick a direction and start walking." She gestured left and then right along the bank of the lake. "Maybe we'll find something that'll float." She stood up again and sighed, her focus sharpening on him a little more closely. "Does your skin hurt? You look incredibly red." She didn't think she had anything to ease it, other than urging him to take a swim, but she felt compelled to fuss just a little bit.
Cross nodded to her suggestion, picking up his bedroll with a heavy sigh of his own. He gave every appearance of patience in most situations, but he was tired right now. The sheer amount of walking he'd done between the first Eastern expedition and now this one was staggering, and add a missed night's sleep to that? Not his finest hour. His light eyes turned to hers when she asked him if his skin hurt, and his lips curved upward in a reluctant smile. As little as he would have liked to admit it, it was nice to have concern shown toward him, particularly by someone he'd come to admire. "It'll be all right," he said. There wasn't much he could have done if it wouldn't, since their main concern right now was finding a way to get themselves and their bedrolls across to the island.
She shouldered her own pack with just as much reluctance and fell into step beside him. The shoes he'd brought her worked like a charm and even though she'd been walking in them for more than a day, she didn't feel like her feet were blistered. She thought that maybe the callouses built up from walking around shoeless for days probably had a lot to do with that. "Well hopefully by the time we get over there, there'll still be plenty of daylight for soaking." She had every intention of scrubbing her skin with sand and then, if the packs stayed dry across the water, laying out on her blanket. A nap was sorely needed.
She turned her attention to the land immediately nearby. Sandy and rocky beach seemed to wrap around the lake. Animal tracks were abundant and more than once she caught sight of some small animal she couldn't identify moving fast back into the sweetgrind stalks to escape the two humans.
The bright sun was high in the sky; hopefully it wouldn't take them hours to find a way to get their things across, he thought with unspoken impatience as they walked along. Cross' eyes scanned from side to side as he searched for any possibility. Sure, they could probably swim across with their bedrolls on their backs, but it would take a while for them to dry. It would be more ideal if they could find something on which to ferry them across. Rock wouldn't work, nor would the thin branches of the scrubby bushes they passed by. It would take too long to tie sweetgrind stalks together, and it was possible that they wouldn't hold weight, anyway. He wished they had something waterproof to encase them in so they could float them across, but nothing of the kind had presented itself at camp.
Half an hour later as they followed the curve of the lake, Helena had caught sight of one of the fast little creatures much more out in the open. It lapped water for a moment before zipping away. It had looked sort of like a golden furred otter or maybe a prairie dog. Its long body was low to the ground and it moved incredibly fast. "Did you see that?" She pointed after it and then shaded her eyes. "Wait a minute..." In the distance there was a smudgy stand of objects. She thought they were maybe trees or odd columns of rocks. Whatever they were, they were something new that she hadn't seen before. "What are those, do you think?"
"Dunno what it was, but yeah, I saw it," Cross said, his voice a low rumble. He was hot and beginning to be cranky, on the verge of taking off his sweat-drenched shirt and stuffing it in the back pocket of his khakis as he was prone to do. But when Helena pointed, he saw the same thing she did, though he couldn't tell for sure what it was. "Let's find out," he said, heading in that direction at a brisk pace. The sooner they could find a solution for their problem, the happier he was going to be. His heavy shoes made faint thudding sounds as he traversed the sandy, sparsely grassy ground, and once they got close enough to what Helena had seen, he squinted at it and proclaimed, "Some kinda trees?" They looked dried-out and not particularly solid, but what caught his attention was the size and shape of what seemed to be the branches.
"Yeah....they look sort of like cacti, don't they?" She walked around the base of the nearest one. It was a small clump, each tree several feet apart. They all appeared to be dead. "Except woody." She reached out and knocked on the trunk. It was solid enough. "Seems totally dried out. Maybe we can snap one of these branches off." Again, she was shrugging out of her pack and looking for a way to climb the trunk. The bark was smooth, matte and dark brown. "Do you see a way up?" Maybe he would give her a boost.
Cross shrugged out of his own pack and yanked the horribly sweaty shirt over his head and let it drop to the ground simply because he couldn't stand it anymore. Once he'd done that, he wiped his hands on his khakis and approached the trees himself, looking for potential footholds. "They look like they'd float," he said, his tone almost hopeful. It was just a matter of getting a couple of them down. His brow furrowed as he walked around one tree, then another, then another. Nothing could be simple at all, could it? The third tree he approached had slightly lower-hanging branches than the others, and without preamble he stretched as high as he could and grabbed hold of one, pulling himself upward, his feet trying to find purchase on the trunk. It wasn't the easiest climb he'd ever experienced, but determination won out and he kept at it until he'd attained the lowest branch, not minding that he'd scratched himself in several places in the process.
Helena watched from the ground, shading her eyes as she tried to watch what he was doing. With the sun almost directly overhead, he was a smudge framed in light against the washed out blue denim of the sky. "Do you think it's safe to try to snap off a branch?" He was a large man and despite the lean diet they'd been living on, he was considerably heavier than she was. Laden with firm muscle, she had no doubt that Cross could separate a branch. She was just worried he might fall in the meantime. Helena wasn't too sure what she would do if he got hurt. She supposed she'd have to drag him to the lake and get him across to the island somehow. "Be careful," she cautioned.
"Why not?" Cross said when she asked if it would be safe to snap a branch off. He'd carefully gotten to a standing position as he held to the trunk of the tree, and he began to shift his weight, testing various branches to see which ones felt the most flexible and the easiest to potentially break off. He wasn't afraid of falling, but he did see the wisdom of being cautious. He certainly didn't want to get hurt at all, and he particularly didn't when he was out here with just Helena. He was too big for her to haul around, and he knew she'd feel compelled to try. "I'm bein' careful," he replied, both hands on the trunk, one foot on a solid branch and the other on a looser one. He leaned all his weight on the loose branch once, twice, three times. There was a cracking sound of wood splitting, and he put pressure on it once more, sending it tumbling to the ground.
Helena squeaked as she stumbled back from the tumbling disc-like branch. It reminded her of the plastic saucers that she and her friends used to use to toboggan down snowy slopes when she was a small child. She reached for it and dragged it back away from the falling zone under the tree. "That's amazing, it's so light!" It felt almost like some sort of dried out husk rather than the branch of a tree. "Can you find another one that might come down?" she asked once the disc was safely out of the way.
"Sure," Cross said, working his way around the periphery of the tree and continuing to test branches. He was able to begin to let go of the aggravation of the long walk and not yet being on the island now that it seemed like they'd found a solution. He used his shod foot to press on the spot where each branch met the tree, looking for a weak spot... and then he had it. A couple more good hard pushes and the second oddly shaped branch tumbled to the ground. Cross lowered himself to a sitting position and then swung himself to the ground, pleased.
Helena dragged the second disc branch out of the way and wiped her hands on the backside of her boxers. "I think these will really work. They aren't all that heavy at all." The whole branch curved in a gentle bowl and Helena envisioned setting the pack in the middle and then gently guiding the entire thing in front of her toward the island as she swam. Rest was within sight, just one last leg of their journey and she could lie down flat and sleep.
Cross had never imagined anything like these branches, but that was par for the course. Admittedly, he wasn't strong on imagination, anyway. It wasn't practical. He reached down to pick one up and examine it, tapping it with his knuckles and turning it over for a closer inspection. "Hm," was his comment before picking up his bedroll and carrying both items toward the lake. He was as anxious as Helena to get across it and over to the island. Once he'd gotten to the sandy, rocky edge of the water, he turned his head to see if Helena had followed him, if she was ready to start across.
She sure was. She walked right in to the water, albeit cautiously, and set the wooden disk down. There didn't seem to be any currents tugging at this lip of the lake and so the disc floated against her knee caps as she carefully shifted her pack off and around her body to lower it into the bowl of the tree branch. It sank deeper into the water by a couple of inches but it didn't dip below the water. Helena let out the breath she was holding and flashed Cross a grin. "It works." Now all she had to do was push it across ahead of her toward that distant island shore. It looked like a long way from where she was standing but it couldn't be that bad. The animals, even their baby animals, swam it every night.
Cross quickly got his own pack settled on his disc branch and began pushing it through the water, smiling as Helena said that hers worked. "Lemme know if you have trouble," he said as he got knee deep and then thigh deep in the water. He was going to get his clothes soaked, obviously, but he didn't care. First order of business might just be a bath, anyway, and hopefully shaving, if the soap pods he had in his bedroll would work up enough lather. The lake deepened, and soon Cross was submerged to his waist. The cool water felt good on his overheated body. He glanced over at Helena to see how she was doing in the water, since she was quite a bit shorter than he was.
As she sunk deeper, she took a moment to tuck the front of her t-shirt into the waistband of her boxers just to prevent the garment from getting away from her. When he looked back at her she'd given up on walking and smoothly lunged forward, pushing her disc ahead of her. She had never been on the swim team at school but she'd loved to swim. It had been a while since she'd had the chance to swim in a murky lake but she wasn't one of those people who thought about what may or may not be in depths they couldn't see. She chuckled as she sailed past Cross's hip and scissored her legs in the direction of the island.
She was doing just fine, Cross saw, amused by her little chuckle as she scooted past him. He pushed his disc on ahead and began to swim, himself, heartened to see the small land mass toward which they were headed getting closer and closer. They'd have dry bedding thanks to their discovery of the disc-like branches; it almost made hunting for them worth it. His swimming wasn't expert, but it was serviceable, and soon enough he was rising to his feet in the shallows that surrounded the island, using one shod foot to push the disc well out of the water so it wouldn't be caught by any currents and taken back out into the lake. "Here we are," he said to Helena, sounding unimpressed. Possibly that was because of how fatigued he felt at the moment.
Helena staggered out of the water and honestly thought about sitting down on the spot. Breathing hard she brushed her wet hair back out of her face and finger combed it. For more than two weeks now she hadn't had a brush to get through her hair. She was worried about developing dreadlocks at this point. She sighed as she heaved the disc with her pack higher onto the beach and then turned to look around. It was...bigger than she had thought. Here and there were stands of bushes that didn't grow much higher than the top of her head. There were open clearings where the familiar purple grass swayed in the breeze and a little ways west down the island there was a tall jutting pile of rocks which seemed to be the only feature on this blank little spot of earth. Sort of like the nose in the middle of the island's face. Aside from that, the beach was full of animal tracks just like the other side of the lake had been. It smelled like a barn and there were obvious piles of droppings scattered on the ground. "Hmm," she said thoughtfully. "Not so pretty at this point."
"Not a bit," Cross agreed, his expression caught somewhere between blankness and a scowl. He was hoping that the entire island didn't smell this foul, though it very well could considering that grazers used it as a refuge. He picked up his bedroll and carried its wooden conveyance over to the nearest stand of bushes, wanting to tuck it away where animals might not drag it off; the hollowed-out branches would be nice to have when they left, so they could do the same thing in reverse. He squinted over at the rocks that were visible to the west and asked, "Think we should see what's over there?"
Helena dragged her disc up to the bushes and set it out to dry with Cross's before shrugging her pack back on and nodded. "We should probably try to find some decent shade before we pass out. Those rocks look like the only thing around here casting a solid shadow." The sun was really beating down on them now as it curved in the washed out bowl overhead. Helena could tell lean-tos and trellises were going to be very necessary here, if they decided to make camp. That is, if there was water here that proved to be fresh and clean. Falling into step beside Cross she heaved a tired sigh. It was hard not to feel the pack weighing her down at this point.
"Mmm." The noncommittal sound of vague agreement was all Cross could force past his lips as they walked along. It was amazing how he'd felt as if he could have walked for hours more while they were actively making their journey, but now? It seemed to be all he could do to drag himself along, and actually speaking was way too much effort. He could feel the hot sun baking into his bare back and shoulders, and his fingers clenched more tightly around his bedroll so he didn't drop it. As they drew closer to the rocks, he heard the welcome sound of moving water.
Helena heard it too and it brought a relieved sigh past her lips. "Thank God," she murmured as they rounded the boulders, searching for the origin of the sound. On the northern face of the rockfall the stone was slick and mossy with citruscress, which was a welcome surprise. Water tumbled down a chute of stone made by the passage of water for many long years. She wasn't sure if this was the source for the lake as a whole but she thought it was unlikely. It was very evident that the chute where it flared out into a deep bowl and then trickled away from the rocks to the edge of the lake, was where the animals came for their fresh water. It was cooler here and Helena shrugged out of her pack, nudging it up onto a boulder that appeared to be dry and shaded. She fished out her water bottle and set the whole thing in the bowl of water to cool off. "Looks clean and smells really good," she said.
Cross wouldn't go so far as to offer praise, but his expression said it all. He put his own bedroll down and leaned over the closest section of the pool and began to splash water over his face and chest, letting it fall where it would. Once his hair and skin were freshly drenched, he drank from his cupped hands and then straightened up again, feeling slightly better. "Tastes great," he offered. Thus fortified, he located his own water bottle and put it in the pool, as well. He sighed, relaxing his stiffly held shoulders a little and then lifting the back of one hand to muffle a yawn. They had work to do here, but he had the feeling a nap was going to be in order first.
Helena was also looking around for the best spot. This north side was rather damp and shaded but she wasn't so sure she could see a spot on the rocks that was flat enough to lay out her blanket. Shading her eyes, she peered up before dropping her hand and finding some footing to start climbing. Her muscles groaned in denial of this fresh exercise but she thought that she spotted a larger flat rock up higher in the pile. It should also put them out of range of the grazers if they tended to be curious. "Hey..." she called down to him. "There's a shaded plateau up here." She was easily twelve feet over his head but no one could deny that Helena Chu climbed like a pro. "Can you pass up my pack or toss it or something?" She had every intention of padding this outcropping, which had proven to be just as wide as her double bed back home, with her blanket and pillow, and sleeping away the rest of the afternoon.
Cross' eyebrows lifted as Helena started quickly and surefootedly up the pile of rock. She was so fast that he didn't even have time to protest or to move into place at the bottom of the giant mound in case she fell. He exhaled a sound that was close to a laugh as he gazed way, way up above. Of course, he had no choice but to climb up there now, lest he be bested by a tiny woman who hadn't even seemed to think twice before taking that on. "Hang on," he said, quickly tying his own bedroll over one shoulder and hers over the other. At least he'd have balance as he hauled himself up the rock face, hopefully finding handholds and footholds as easily as she had. He began to climb, his ascent a more carefully thought-out process than hers had been. If he fell, he was a lot heavier and more likely to come to the permanent sort of harm. He reached the outcropping and paused before climbing onto it, saying, "Why don't you take your pack off me?" That would be easier, he thought, than him struggling to get it off from this position.
Helena grinned. "How about I take both of them?" She reached for hers first and shoved it back behind her into the deeper shade of the outcropping and then reached for the other. Once she had him divested of his burdens, she shuffled back a little ways to give him the room he'd need to climb up. "Not bad, huh? Plenty of room for both of us to stretch out." It was hard not to smile despite her advanced fatigue. They had made it to the island, they'd found clean water and a safe, secluded space to lay down for a nap. There was even citrus cress literally within reach, should they be hungry. She sat back on her heels and waited for him to get his bearings and take it all in.
"Not bad at all," Cross said once he'd hauled himself up. He surveyed the area all around them from this vantage point, marveling at how far he could see. Whatever else one might say about it, it could not be denied that the landscape was intriguing. He shook his head and turned to unroll his bedroll, tucking the razor in its pouch and the other bits he'd had tucked inside the blanket beneath it. He spread the pillow out at the head of it and then lay down, stretching out on his stomach and hoping he wouldn't suddenly roll over and go plummeting down eighteen to twenty feet; he had, of course, put himself on the outside edge of the plateau. It was incredible how good it felt to stretch out, to be in the shade, to be still.
Helena set up her own bedding in the cool shade of the rock. Like Cross, she tucked all of her tools and anything important underneath the double folded blanket and set her pillow in line with his. "Don't roll over, whatever you do," she mumbled into her pillow as she stretched out. It didn't even occur to her that her clothes and hair were still wet. All that mattered was stretching out and getting some well needed sleep. After all, they had already accomplished the first mission of the day when they had found this spring. Helena checked clean water off of the checklist in her mind.
"Not plannin' on it," Cross rumbled. He was as close to her as he felt he could get without crowding her, because if he happened to fall off, he'd probably break his neck. Not that he really thought that would happen. If anything, he figured he'd sleep completely without moving for at least a couple of hours. He exhaled a soft breath, his eyes closed, his muscles relaxing. After last night sitting up in the trees, this was going to feel almost like a featherbed, rock ledge or no.
From where she was lying, Helena could feel the heat rolling off of Cross's scorched skin and she thought he might be in trouble later once the sunburn really set in. That was, however, her last thought for quite some time.
To her intense surprise, she didn't open her eyes until the laughing started. Helena's senses we so turned to life near the field that even though they were far away, racing after some straggling prey toward the lake, she instantly reacted. Sitting up, she grazed her elbow against the rock wall and cursed under her breath before looking to see if Cross was still beside her.
It took Cross a couple of minutes to truly wake up although he heard the unpleasant strains of the laughers as clearly as she did. He looked disoriented as he pushed himself up on his elbows, not having moved from his prone position lying on his stomach the entire time he'd been asleep. He bit into his lip at the twinges from his reddened skin; it felt stiff and painful and several spots would undoubtedly blister. He gazed at Helena almost blankly and then turned himself around and sat up so he could see what was going on. Grazers had begun to flood onto the island; he could see them far below, and in the distance he could see a pack of laughers chasing several more of the creatures.
There was violent splashing as the more powerful elder grazers forded across the lake. There was bleating from the younger grazers who didn't quite have the muscle power to get quickly through the water and the elders made an encouraging trumpeting sound. Or at least, that's how it sounded to Helena. Below their perch she could see a thick mass of milling bodies. Some of the animals seemed disturbed, perhaps they had narrowly missed one of the laugher packs. Others seemed as calm as though it were still a bright and perfectly safe afternoon as they drank from the spring and moved back into the shadows. "I wish we had candles," she murmured to him since it was getting very dark where they were huddled. "Maybe we'd be able to move around if we had some light." She carefully edged around him so that she could see more clearly what was going on down below. "I wonder if it's safe? It looks like chaos down there right now." She recalled some piece of a television show she'd seen on herding cattle into a small holding pen. The grazers grunted and lowed and jostled each other to get to the water. Helena had a sense that if she tried to climb down now, she might find herself trampled or crushed by a heavy body against the rocks.
Without thinking about it, Cross reached for Helena's shirt and grasped himself a handful when she leaned around him; he had no desire to see her lose her balance and go plummeting down the rocks to the hard ground. Although, he thought with mild amusement, the animals that were everywhere might provide a cushion of sorts. "We might oughta stay here," he remarked, "unless there's a reason to have to get down. 'Til they thin out." He wasn't that worried about coming to harm from the grazers unless they stampeded, but he believed in being cautious. It was dusky-dark, and they wouldn't be able to explore that much anyway until morning. Using the restroom might be a problem, more so for her than for him. A thought occurred to him, and he smiled faintly. "Hope they don't try to eat the water bottles." Which they'd left in the rock-lined pool. Hadn't that been brilliant?
When she felt him grasp her t-shirt, Helena had to chuckle. His overprotectiveness wandered back and forth across the line from exasperating to kind of adorable. She was sure that back home in New York, she'd have been annoyed by his tendency to pigheadedly step between her and any sort of danger. Here, though? Well, it was easy to see how fragile their lives were in this strange place. She found it hard to be irked by his casual safety precaution. "Oh no!" she said in a loud whisper. "I hope they don't!" She would kick herself for weeks if they lost something so precious to themselves and their people.
There had been many women over the years who'd seen Cross as the ultimate chauvinist, a big, overly macho and incredibly repressed lump of a guy. That had never bothered him. He was who he was, and to him women were undeniably the fairer sex. Not helpless, not less intelligent, nothing like that. But he wouldn't deny that he could be overprotective. That was just him. "Plastic wouldn't taste that great," he said in an effort to be reassuring. Of course, the grazers wouldn't know that, but thus far they seemed to be ignoring the bottles. Maybe they'd be lucky and the animals would continue to do that.
Sighing, Helena shuffled back from the edge a little and sat next to him. "Guess all we can do is wait." She sounded a little bit glum, kicking herself for making a mistake that could potentially lose them a valuable asset. Turning her attention to her traveling companion she took a breath and let it out. "How did you sleep? I was completely oblivious. I think that's the best sleep I've had since..." there was a definite pause. "I was home." Was that true? Was the sleep in the hammock with Cross a few nights ago not comfortable, warm, safe and by those definitions the best sleep she'd had in a good long time?
Cross let go of her when she moved away from the edge, and he muffled a yawn as they sat overlooking the huge throngs of grazers. "Think I died instead of slept," he commented. That was how deep and refreshing a sleep it had been, rest he'd needed desperately. He carefully flexed one shoulder and then the other, exhaling a sigh at how tight and sore his skin was. Some of that water the grazers were slurping up would feel good on it, but he'd have to wait for that.
Helena pressed her fingertips lightly to her cheeks and forehead and the bridge of her nose, which seemed to be the only places that she ever burned. She felt a little bit tight and warm under her own touch but she suspected that would go. "I need to learn how to weave straw hats," she said conversationally as they were stuck waiting for a while. She glanced at his face and grinned. "Not that I can picture you wearing one. You wouldn't, would you?" They had so many fair skinned blondes and redheads in their group, though. She was sure that someone would be grateful. Maybe even Rowan. The Canadian woman looked rather tender-skinned as well. "Maybe some great big sombreros to keep the sun off?"
"I don't wear hats," Cross said, wry amusement in his tone as he glanced back at her. He hadn't requested the knit hat he'd found back from that Ryan kid for that very reason. The winter weather in London could be like Antarctica and he wouldn't bother to put one on. "Not even sombreros." Though it was amusing to think about Helena making an actual sombrero out of the grasses that could be found here. "Think I'd rather we found somethin' like aloe here."
Her eyebrows crept up. "Well that's possible. A lot of the plants back in the climber forest seem kind of...fleshy. One of them might have the right kind of pulp inside to be helpful. Something to ask Thorne and Rowan about before we pack everyone up and march them across the grasslands, right?" She peered out across the water. On the distant banks the hulking form of the laughers were barely visible. They could hear them, though. The insane, garbled laughter echoed across the water in a chilling way. "I think it's better," she said as she commented on her own thoughts. "It sounds better with them across the water rather than right below us."
"Right," Cross said to her suggestion that there might be something helpful contained in one of the plants. They hadn't looked around here very thoroughly yet, but he didn't think that there'd be anything that would work here on this island. He could always check at first light, because it was clear they wouldn't be seeing much of anything until the sun came up the next day. He'd never thought he'd miss electric light before. He shifted around and stretched back out on his pallet, this time on his back. "I can handle 'em from a distance," he agreed.
With a sigh, Helena mimicked his move to stretch out. She tucked her hands beneath her head, under the pillow and looked up. Way, way up at the slowly emerging astral spectacle in the sky. Never in her entire life had she imagined stars like what were beginning to appear. There was no moon and no light on the ground to detract from the billions upon billions of pinpricks. They grouped and clustered and flowed like spilled milk across a velvet blanket or stood out as singular brilliant jewels. Her breath escaped her in a tiny rush as she took it all in. "Me too," she agreed.
Cross had never been the sort to stare at the sky, to watch stars, to gaze at the clouds sliding by. It was too ethereal, too abstract, and he was a realist. At the same time, he'd have to admit the attraction of the vast nothingness over their heads. It was awe-inspiring, incredible and at the same time, there was something very lonely about it. Possibly it was the unspoken realization that most likely, they would never see the sky of their home planet again. He continued to look up, his breathing steady, his gaze as intent as if concentrating would somehow change the situation. It wouldn't, but it gave him something to do with the well-hidden emotion he felt.
Helena heaved a tiny little sigh. Anyone else, and they would be complimenting the beauty of the astral visuals. Cross, if he was even noticing what was going on above their heads, would likely never offer an observation on the stars. It was just a touch too whimsical for her steadfast travel companion. She was wide awake, had no place to go and found herself feeling as though she had no one to talk to. For the first time since she had met Cross, she felt lonely. It was oddly disturbing to realize that fact. She turned her face to look at him looking up at the sky and that feeling completely evaporated. From the profile, she could see that his eyes were open and his brows were drawn down. It was his usual expression of thought that he supplied when he was feeling something, or so she thought she had noticed. She turned her eyes back up to the sky and had to smile as she spotted a shooting star.