Aaron Ackles (wanderingaaron) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-05-20 19:07:00 |
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Entry tags: | aaron, delilah, z - 1st tribe - day 20 |
Cold Stone Stairs
Who: Aaron and Delilah
When: Late afternoon
Where: Within sight of the wagon train
What: Finding something cool.
Rating: G
The walk was ... difficult. To put it mildly. Delilah had no shoes, it wasn't very forgiving terrain, and it was hot. Even though she hadn't had a long turn at helping pull the cart, she'd tried. She didn't know most of the people's names yet, but they were all working hard. She was keeping her pillow physically on her for the time being, carrying it by the pillowcase. In it she'd stuffed the sticks she'd broken off into varying lengths to read, and a few of the so-called soap-pods that Quinn had told her about. She'd found some when she washed herself down, and tucked them away. It was probably silly to be even thinking about when her next bath would be, but it was something that she could ... control, maybe.
By late afternoon she'd fallen back from the group some, her feet absolutely hurting and protesting every step. She had no idea what she was going to do about tomorrow, but her best guess was 'suffer through it like everybody else.' Still, it had slowed her down some. That, and how her eyes constantly wanted to wander. It wasn't like their scenery was changing overly much, but it was just so different, she had to look at it. Squinting a bit, she looked up into the sky yet again, hunting for signs of birds.
Aaron had pulled the cart he'd stashed his cat-like pets in for as long as he could hold out. Now, though, the callouses on his hands were giving way to blisters and breaking open. He might had boots, but man had he done a number on his hands. Hanging back as someone took his spot he took the time to just...look around. Despite the fact that the grain that lazily waved back and forth all around them was definitely purple, this part of this world looked a lot like...well, like Saskatchewan in late summer. Not quite time to harvest yet, but getting there. Lots of open air and sky and sun.
He'd pulled his t-shirt back on at some point with the hope of sparing his shoulders and back but there was nothing to be done for Aaron's ruined arms and hands. Heaving a sigh, he noticed that there was a dark haired woman lagging behind the train. Seeing her steps falter once but pick back up again, Aaron turned to walk back toward her. "Excuse me," he spoke up once he got within easy hearing range. "Are you alright?" Plenty of people were suffering from the long walk without shoes. This poor girl didn't even have pants.
Delilah looked a tad bit startled as she was addressed, and she blinked at the tall blonde man. Dear, she really had to work on that being-aware thing, didn't she? She hadn't even noticed that she'd caught up to him. "Oh ... yes, I think so," she said, glancing down at herself. Yes, still just in the t-shirt that just barely made her decent. Her feet looked red and swollen, and they certainly felt unhappy. "I think I'm going to burn," she said mildly, poking at one of her thighs with her free hand and then glancing up as she touched her nose. Definitely tender. She never did tan well. Or at all, really. Delilah gave him a smile. "But none the worse for wear. How are you holding up?"
Aaron looked down at his hands, carefully curling his fingers in over the coin sized blisters on the meaty parts of his palms. "Ah, I'll be alright. I'm pretty sure we're all going to be lobsters when we get where we're going. I hear there is water though, a lake or something." He squinted at the girl's face, the sun arcing down behind her to the west. The thought of spending tomorrow submerged up to his chin sounded blissful. He'd accepted the pruned fingers and toes for a little relief.
"I heard that too," Delilah said, and it was obvious by her tone she was already looking forward to it. She could do with a soak. And another washing, the feeling of being that sweaty was unpleasant at best. "I'm Delilah," she told him, and almost reached her hand out to shake, but thought better of it as she noted how he had his curled up. She'd seen him pulling one of the wagons, blisters were bound to happen. "Just arrived yesterday, I suppose you could say." She wasn't sure if she was quite dealing with anything any better than she had been, it all just seemed to be oddly muted for now.
Aaron had experienced a similar sense of shock which - now that he was confronted with a mirror of what that must look like - he now realized it had faded away. Two days, and he had accepted his fate. That didn't seem like him at all. Instead of shaking he gave her nod. "Aaron Ackles," he introduced himself. The wagon train was continuing along at it's increasingly slow pace and it was definitely encouraging a wandering mind. Something caught his eye and he gestured off to the south. "I think I spot another stream over there. Want to stop for a drink before we catch up with the others?" They'd stopped at several of these streams. The water in this world seemed to bubble up of the ground, cool and drinkable.
Her gaze followed his and was something like grateful. The little streams were heaven in this vast grassland, and if they got one to themselves, all the better. "Yes please," she said with feeling, looking back over at Aaron with a soft chuckle. Maybe she'd take a moment to wash her feet off again as well and assess the damage. Delilah -- a little gingerly, as she always was when changing course, as though she was cautious of the land itself being booby-trapped -- started to walk in that direction. "So Mr. Ackles ... where do you hail from? And how long have you been here?" she asked, looking over at him sideways. She was always interested in people, but here ... it was amplified.
Aaron didn't miss her tentative steps because he'd been looking at her feet. Dainty and narrow and rather dirty, he was pretty sure that his size fourteen hiking boots wouldn't do any good for her if he offered to let her borrow them. She'd probably spend most of the trip falling over those pontoons. Not to mention he'd been sweating in them for more days than he'd actually been here. His socks had to be dawning their own intelligence by now.
"Uh, Toronto," he said, tugging his blue eyes back up to her face, noting she had some clear gems for peepers herself. "But I was conducting some research in the Yukon when I ended up here. It's been three days. I think it might be starting to sink in now," he confided as he tried to pick a relatively safe route toward the stream. "Yourself?"
She smiled faintly as he said that it might've been starting to sink in. She couldn't imagine that yet, she was just very quietly rolling along with things while the back half of her brain struggled to make sense of everything. "From New York. Ukraine, originally," she added, making a gesture up toward her mouth to indicate her accent. Almost a decade in the Big Apple hadn't done anything to get rid of it, and she was happy that way. Americans had such a ... queer way of saying their own words. She was opening her mouth again to say something else when her foot landed oddly on some uneven ground. Delilah automatically reached out and steadied herself on his arm, convenient and sturdy as he was. "What sort of research?" she asked.
Aaron naturally steadied her when she stumbled in to him, glancing at her quickly to see if she'd hurt herself. A twisted - or worse yet, broken - ankle out here would be a nightmare. Since she'd launched right into the question, he assumed she wasn't hurt. "I was coring trees in the woods in the Yukon to demonstrate that there is clear evidence of climate shift within the last hundred years. Even some place so far away from polluting industry. It's actually really compelling, what you can learn from the rings in a tree." He gave her a quick smile. "I guess at heart I'm just as much hippy as I am scientist."
"Nothing wrong with that, it's something that needs to be done," she said, watching her footing a bit more carefully. She hadn't hurt herself, but she could, was the thing. My kingdom for a pair of good boots, she thought to herself, a little glumly. Maybe where they were going would be easier on the feet. And wouldn't require climbing trees to sleep, she didn't think she'd closed her eyes for more than five minutes the night before. "Were you alone?" she asked, curious. Delilah looked back up and over at him, still hanging on to his arm for stability. A broken ankle or something would be disastrous.
Aaron looked at her in surprise. No one had asked him that question. "Was I alone in the room when I....left? Or, was taken. Whichever?" He asked to clarify. Squinting, he tried to remember if he'd heard anyone else come into the bunkhouse before he'd passed out. He didn't think so. "I don't know, to be honest. No one was in the bed with me, if that's what you're asking." He gave her a brief and possibly flirty grin before turning back to her question. "I fell asleep in the research station's bunkhouse though. Some other guys probably came in after I fell asleep. I felt rested the day that I arrived. I was sure I'd at least had a good night's sleep." He didn't think he'd dropped off to sleep and immediately arrived here. "I wonder what that means," he mused. "Were you alone?" he queried her, just as curious.
She laughed a little at him assuring her that nobody was in bed with him and the grin that came after, which surprised her a bit. But it came out of her just the same, strange alien world or no. "Yes, I was alone. I lived alone, just myself and my cat, Igor," she said, and her brow creased momentarily. Who was going to feed him? How long would he be alone before someone realized she wasn't coming and going from her apartment as usual? She tried simultaneously to cut off that line of thinking for the moment and remember what her schedule was the day she was supposed to wake up to, who would miss her first. And oh, what would they tell her family back home? They'd arrived at the little stream of water and Delilah let go of him to kneel and cup up some water to splash on her face. "It just makes me wonder, you know?" she said with her eyes closed.
Aaron nodded, crouching next to her on the bank. The stream was little more than a trickle and the bottom was a sun-dappled, sparkly sand. He wondered if that was mica or something completely alien winking up at them from down there. The water was...well, Aaron had never seen water that clear and fast moving anywhere on his travels, both at home or abroad. The sediment at the bottom of the stream must be heavy, he decided. Too heavy to be stirred up and pushed along by the water.
He, too, scooped small handfuls of the crisp and cool water down the back of his sunburned neck. It felt like bliss as it trickled down his spine and absorbed into his dirty t-shirt. "So you have a cat," he commented, thinking of his brand new charges. "I'm more of a dog person myself but I seem to have been claimed by some of the local felines." He gave her a dismayed look. "I didn't even get to sleep in my sleeping bag last night. Some huge cat gave birth in it and now she's refusing to leave. I don't have the heart to dump her out."
Delilah made a murring noise at what he said, as she was drinking down some of the water at the moment. It was delicious, absolutely pure-tasting. As when she had bathed in it the day before, she found herself wondering if water back home had tasted this way before so many ... people had been there. Once she'd swallowed, she looked over at him, one eyebrow quirked. "Some huge cat?" she echoed. "It's not ... is it dangerous?" Because that seemed to be an important question to ask about the wildlife here. There were the small odd-looking things that they were carrying with them in the cages, and then the laughers ... which seemed just a terrible name to Delilah, though she could hear where it came from, and even thinking it gave her the creeps.
Aaron chuckled. "I think so. I sure don't want to mess with her. Hopefully she'll calm down soon enough. Either that, or take her babies and go." He could survive without his sleeping bag as long as it didn't get too much colder at night. He'd been lucky enough to not only arrive fully clothed, but he arrived with a hoodie and a jacket. He glanced at Delilah and realized she was one of the ones who was worse off than most. No blankets, pants or shoes. He decided he would do his best to move the mother and babies and offer his sleeping bag to her. She sure needed it more than he did.
"It does seem universal, that new mothers are very protective," she said with a nod. Delilah cupped up some more water and let it run over the tops of her sunburned thighs. That was going to be rather uncomfortable tonight. Her face too, the skin felt taut and overheated. "Perhaps she'll be jostled enough on the cart to decide that your sleeping bag is an unsuitable place to raise a family." She looked over at him with a small, slightly teasing smile. At least it was something light to talk about. "Or who knows, the babies might decide you're their father."
Aaron's look was blank. "I honestly cannot imagine looking after four little baby cats out here. Can cat's swim? We're moving to an island." Bless him, now he was worrying about the small helpless souls in his sleeping bag. All of his life he'd found it easy to shoulder the burdens of people around him. His brother Tim, for instance, who's independence was slipping away from him more and more every day as his Huntington's Disease progressed. He could grumble about cats all he wanted but Aaron knew he'd make sure they were cared for if the mother took off or if they stuck around for very long.
She laughed just a little, lightly, and shrugged her t-shirted shoulders. "I wouldn't presume to say yes or no, here," she said, scooping up more water to pat down her arms with. "Who knows how different they are to our cats. At worst, I believe they probably can if they have to, they just don't like it. Tigers love to swim, after all, why not your invaders?" The water felt absolutely delicious, and it was all she could do not to just lay down in it and stay there. Delilah wet her face again and then pulled the neck of her t-shirt out a bit to dump some water down her front, too. At least the thing wasn't white.
Aaron slurped a couple more handfuls of cool water, nodding. "I hope so. I'd hate to see them panic and try to bolt when we bring them across the lake. And hopefully I'll figure out what to feed them while we're there. I think maybe they must eat the birds that were in the canopy in the forest. Or pesks, probably." He turned to look back toward the cart train. They were still moving at their slow, lumbering pace. "Those are those things in the cages. They lived in the trees." He'd never seen any other cats like the one who'd chosen his sleeping bag though. Maybe they weren't native to the forest at all.
"Pesks?" Delilah echoed with a soft chortle. The water was making her feel genuinely better, and she sort of didn't want to leave their little oasis. "The name suits them, I suppose. But if they are to be used for other means of food, I would not test the theory that they're prey to your adopted pets." Glancing back behind them toward the wagon line herself, she rocked back on her heels and stood, carefully stepping into the stream itself. "Ah, glorious," Delilah murmured and let her eyes close for a moment. That felt so good. "It can always be said that things struggle to survive," she added in a dreamy sort of way.
Aaron almost envied her ability to step barefoot into the stream but he didn't dare take his feet out of his boots. For one, he might somehow lose them and be much the worse for wear. For another, he wasn't so sure he'd be able to get them back on again for all of the blisters.
Instead, he employed his superior length of stride and hopped to a broad flat rock in the middle of the stream and then to the opposite bank. "I think I see one of those....salt hives that I heard the colonel talking about. Some kind of hummingbird-like avian that live in mud hives and create some kind of salt. I bet you if we could get some of that, it'd be really appreciated." He glanced back over his shoulder with an arched golden brow. Was she up for a little wander, he wanted to know?
She opened her eyes when she sensed his movement, and watched with a tiny, buried bit of appreciation at the deft hop. With as many brothers as she'd grown up with, she knew the look he gave her, too. It was half-challenge, half-curiosity. Delilah gave him a smile and started wading, her arms out for balance. At least the stream wasn't deep, that was a blessing. And didn't seem to have anything ... squishy in it. "God knows we want to be helpful," she said amiably, though she was more interested in the exploring part of the idea. "Everybody needs salt."
He chuckled. "It could have a few uses, yeah. Preserving the meat and our hides. I'm surprised no one's gotten any serious infections yet." Twenty days with so much exposed skin in a sweltering, humid forest? They were very lucky indeed. Unless, of course, the alien bacteria local to this place didn't know what to make of the humans that were settling in it's habitat. He supposed that was always possible.
Aaron reached across and caught her hand, helping her make it across to the opposite bank without a slip or injury. "Alright..." he said, turning his narrowed gaze out across the waving sea of grain. "How about that way?" He gestured vaguely to the southeast.
Those were two options she hadn't even considered needing salt for, quite honestly. She was a city girl at heart, truly. Delilah accepted his helping hand, and hung onto him until she was on solid ground again. She looked around for a second, then followed his gesture and nodded. "Looks as good as any," she murmured, and headed off in that direction, albeit slowly.
Aaron didn't mind the pace, he was enjoying the company. Plus, the carts were moving so slowly at this point he wasn't too worried that they wouldn't be able to catch up. "So what did you do before you ended up here?" he asked, making conversation has he skirted her around rocky patches or holes in the ground. The sun was still beating down on their backs as it sank back toward the forest they had left. His inner heater was confused, having just come from a northern forest where it was still very much winter time, to this place where it was practically a rain forest and now wide open plains. Very little about this place made sense to the environmentalist.
"Oh, a little of this, a little of that," she said with a little smile, allowing him to direct her through the safest path. In the meantime she was keeping her eyes peeled for anything that might vaguely resemble what he was talking about. Salt hives. "I was a waitress, I taught Russian at the community center some nights, I read fortunes other nights, it just depended on what came about. Nothing nearly so interesting as studying climate change in the Yukon." Delilah looked over to give him a little grin. As she glanced back, something caught her eye and she stopped, squinting a bit into the grass. "Do you see that?" she murmured. It was ... well it looked like a rock jutting up, only with a particular sort of angle to it ...
Aaron's brows had shot up and he'd been about to ask read fortunes? in what would possibly have been a disbelieving or maybe even a little bit rude sort of way. Thankfully, he was utterly saved from making a faux pas in the politeness department when she stopped and stared intently in a different direction. "Yes, there's something there." His height difference didn't give him much of an advantage at this distance but he certainly could see what looked like a tipped triangle of bluish gray rock.
While he hadn't been much of a geologist in his day, it didn't take much more than a full three hundred and sixty degree turn to notice that every rock in view had the look of bleached bones. Maybe whitish, maybe a little gold, but all of them were of some variety that looked like it had been laying around and soaking up sunlight forever. These blue stones ahead looked...cold. Sort of like the misty mountains in the distance to the north. A chill walked down the back of his neck as well as he moved them in that direction. "It looks kind of man made, doesn't it?" He took hold of her hand a little tighter as they moved closer. He wanted to tell her to run if something happened but what could possibly happen? It was just an odd stone, right? Why the nerves?
Delilah had a similar feeling of disquiet as they got closer to the stone, and her grip back on his hand was just as tight. She was torn directly halfway between not wanting to go to the stone, and wanting to investigate. And since someone was pulling her toward the second option, she was going, stepping carefully still. Once they got close enough to see it more clearly through the tall grasses, her breath caught and she stopped short again. It wasn't just an oddly square stone. She could see now that the squarishness was in a pattern, and that pattern was very familiar.
They were stairs. Roughly-hewn and a little uneven, but a set of stone stairs, nonetheless. Of a rock that was entirely different than what she had seen so far. It gave Delilah goosebumps up and down her sunburned arms. And as she gazed at the thing that her gut felt like shouldn't be there, she started to notice other dark, square structures, scattered around the field. Some were huge, coming up out of the grass for several feet, others just dark smudges amid the purple, but they were all stairs.
Aaron sucked a breath in that was almost a gasp but really served more to steady his nerves than anything else. When they came to a stop in the shadow of the first set of stairs, it proved to be nearly as tall as he himself was. Each stone riser was cut almost a foot high, an uncomfortable height for most human strides. Even with his long legs it just wouldn't feel natural. "This is...so weird." He dropped his hand to reach out and touch the stone. The cold made his fingertips numb, like when you pressed your hand to a frosty window from the inside. He pulled his hand back right away. "That's...really weird..." He blinked and peeked out of the shadow, noticing what Delilah had seen. There were many more. Maybe once, there had been a whole village here but where were the ruins of walls? Columns? Arch ways?
Her stomach felt fluttery and uncomfortable just being there, and she halfway wanted to snatch his hand back as soon as he'd let her go. She didn't want to touch it, that was for damn sure. She rubbed her palm against the t-shirt on her hip and eyed the other structures uncertainly. Here ... here would be a good place to throw bones, like every other place of history. Because that had to be what it was, some ancient remnants of a civilization that used to be here. Regardless of her feeling of forboding, Delilah walked forward, heading toward another set that was near them, much shorter than the first one they'd seen. Three stairs that came up to her ribcage. "They don't even look very weathered," she said to Aaron, looking back at him with her hand hovering just over the rock. It never descended, but the air around it felt cooler.
Aaron nodded as he tried to follow what he suspected would be the line of the wall where the stairs would have met it. Nothing. No cold blue stone on the ground or any other kind of stone. "I find it hard to believe that if a culture could bring these stones down from the mountains and carve stairs..." His eyes tracked back and forth on the ground. "That they wouldn't use the same masonry skills to build the rest of their structures." Not mud and straw houses, which would completely disappear out here over the years. While those stone stairs stayed put. "That just doesn't make sense." He stopped walking and crossed his arms over his chest, frowning as his blue eyes peered out over the field of stairs.
It didn't make sense, but their whole being there didn't make sense. Delilah took her hand back without touching the stone and stood there for a moment, just looking at it. Part of her wanted to explore, poke around, see if there was anything else to find, but the rest of her ... yeah, no thanks. She had enough insanity to deal with at the moment. She turned and walked back to Aaron, the gooseflesh on her arms and legs still not going anywhere. She took his arm and started pulling back toward the stream. "Come, we don't belong here," she said, more or less firmly. "Let's catch up with the others."
"Yeah, let's get back." It struck him a little odd that she'd phrased her declaration that way. That they didn't belong there. Like maybe it was some sort of holy spot. He recalled just a couple of minutes ago she'd claimed to read fortunes. He supposed she was just that type of girl. Though he was pretty strictly science-minded, his high school girlfriend had been a hippy and so had her parents. Her mother had read his tarot every year on his birthday for four years. She'd made a bit of a ceremony of it and he'd bore the whole thing with good natured silence and a fond smile for the woman. He decided he'd follow her lead on this sort of matter. After all, his tarot readings had usually been spot on, for good or ill. He could summon that tolerance again for Delilah because Aaron decided she was sensible in her fanciful nature and he liked her just fine the way she was.