Ryan Armsford (blindsides) wrote in thefield, @ 2009-06-29 12:38:00 |
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Current mood: | soggy |
Plans
Who: Helena and Ryan
Where: At the camp
What: Talking about plans
When: In the early afternoon drizzle.
Helena carefully picked her way through the debris of the camp. One of the lean-tos hadn't stood up to the onslaught and it lay in a sodden heap off to the side of the soggy firepit. She expected a rebuilding effort would start up again once they got the fire going again. That was the priority. Today, though, Helena had a bit of a priority of her own. "Ryan," she said as she crouched down next to the young man. "I have half a milk melon if you want it." There would be no roasted meat or seafood soup today. Not until they got the fire going. "I have some stuff I want to talk to you about, too." It felt like it had been days since she'd spent any time with Ryan. She wondered how he was adjusting to the island.
Ryan had been staring at the ruins of his makeshift kiln, feeling soggy and quite discouraged at the moment. He and Thorne had gotten Rowan and little Nameless and all of their bedding into Jasper's lean-to when the storm had started, and they'd huddled in there with her and the children for hours through the torrential rains and hail. It had been a perfect front-row seat for the tornadoes across the plains... perfect if you weren't terrified of the damned things, that was. Ryan wasn't thrilled by them-- he couldn't see them, but he could sure as hell hear them-- and he'd ended up with Corbin in his lap, hiding the little boy's eyes and forcing himself not to ask anyone if they were getting any closer or if they were still off at a distance. They'd sounded like they were about to roar right at them at any second.
"Hey, Helena," he said when she greeted him. "That's cool, I got nothin' but time." He shrugged and smiled, though the smile might've been a little weak behind the edges. "You don't want it?" he asked of the milk melon, not wanting to take it away from her.
Smiling as she sat nice and close so that she'd be within his limited sight range, she presented him with the melon. "I can only eat half of one at a time. So I thought I would share." She might have been smiling but she was damp and shivery even though she was swathed in all of her clothes. "I dragged everything out of our lean-to and I'm trying to dry it all out but the drizzle won't let up. It's practically mud inside." She heaved a sigh, sure that everyone else was in just as rough a shape when it came to shelter. Nudging his shoulder gently with hers, she gave him a sympathetic smile. "You look about as miserable as I feel."
"Thanks," Ryan said, taking the melon half from her. It was absolutely delicious; he hadn't realized how hungry he was until he bit into it. Somehow, even being drizzled on wasn't so bad right then. He nodded as he listened to her words. "Yeah, I tried to hang some of our stuff up too, but it's not helpin' much." He heaved a heavy sigh as she nudged him; he tried to keep a positive attitude, but some days it wasn't all that possible. He was in a downer of a mood, definitely. "That'd be 'cause I am," he said. "I'd give just about anything to be dry right now."
Helena heaved a sigh and nodded. "Me too. I'm just thanking my lucky stars right now though. You didn't see them but did you hear them? The twisters? We're so lucky they didn't come anywhere near us. This whole camp would have just disappeared." She nodded. "We live, albeit damply, to figure out another way to survive in this place." She took a moment to sip the juice that was pooling in the hollowed out middle of her melon before turning back to him. "So Ryan, I was thinking about those small clay furnaces again. Do you think we would need to fire them in a kiln? A more proper kiln than the makeshift one along side the fire?"
"There wasn't a whole lotta way I could miss hearin' them," Ryan said after another bite of melon. "You wanna talk about loud? Damn. I was tryin' to keep Corbin's ears and eyes covered up at the same time." That was one cute little kiddo. Ash too. He nodded when she mentioned a kiln. "For somethin' that size, I don't think I can make just the firepit work," he told her. "It's interesting enough to do that with the smaller stuff, like the medicine jars." He'd produced a couple of serviceable lidded vials the day before, which were currently beneath a stand of bushes nearby with some of his other pottery efforts. Soaking wet, but then everything was right now.
Helena nodded. "I have something in mind, purely from a book I read in the year before I came here. It was a piece of fiction but so well researched that I wonder if the kiln is possible," she began, setting aside her melon so she could talk with her hands. "In the book, an engineer from the nineteen sixties went two hundred years into the past and was living in the mountains in North Carolina." She waved a hand dismissively, "but none of that is really important. What is important is that she had her father and husband there help her build a massive kiln in her yard. She dug a deep hole and ramped one side," she made a motion close enough to Ryan's face that he would get her meaning. "When you walked down the ramp, it led to the oven below the kiln where she could feed the fire to keep the heat high. Then above ground there was a platform for the pottery items to sit on, enclosed I assume and with a door, just to control the heat a bit better." She bit her lip and smiled at the Southern boy who was politely allowing her to babble about something that might be completely out of their reach. "Unfortunately, beyond that description I have no idea what materials she used to do it, or if we could duplicate it. What do you think?"
Ryan had been drinking the juice from his melon half as he listened, nodding, and he set it aside as she finished speaking. "Well, we could dig somethin' like that if we had the tools to dig with." He knew that the digging of Quinn's grave had been a long ordeal with Cross and Arlo forced to use the most makeshift of tools along with their bare hands, and what she was suggesting would be much larger than a grave. "If I had enough clay to make bricks, we could make a kiln in an area like that. It'd take a long time to get that ready." He sighed. "Not that I'm sayin' it isn't worth a try, but I'd need to be able to make stuff in the meantime. More vials, pots, ya know."
Helena nodded. "I've kind of committed myself to making clothing out of all of the yarnball fibers we harvested. I've got a pretty big stack of yarn now. There's a bunch of people who aren't all that occupied these days. Now that food sort of just walks into camp, maybe we could organize the people who used to be our gatherers," she suggested. "There's no reason why Meredith, Olivia and Irish can't make bricks." It wasn't the cleanest job, but the end result was so desperately needed.
"Yeeeah," Ryan replied, stretching it out a bit, looking unsure. "Guess they could." He squinted around them, unable to see if anyone else was within earshot. He didn't think so, but he lowered his voice anyway. "Long as I don't have to be the one to ask Olivia. I don't wanna be mean, but she creeps me out." Just thinking about the night she'd offered to have sex with him if he wanted was almost enough to put him off women forever.
Helena smiled, fully aware that Olivia was off-putting. For some reason the street woman had taken to mothering the young girl, Meredith. Or maybe it was the other way around. To any end, they kept each other busy and on their best behaviour. Irish seemed to have joined their little clique and Helena privately thought Olivia was reconnecting with reality a little bit, the longer she got to live in her tiny world of women only. Clearly, the lady just needed to get away from her poorly programmed responses to men. "I'll ask them," she said with a reassuring smile.
"You're awesome," Ryan told her, his normally sunny smile resurfacing. "I know I'm a wuss." He picked up the melon half again and took another bite, enjoying the sweet taste of it. Just sue him; he was an artist, not a shrink. "How'd your lean-to hold up?" he asked her. He hadn't yet walked around and viewed the various damages up close.
She sighed. "Pretty well. Cross spent a long time really anchoring it and tying it down with tough knots. We lost a lot of the thatching though. And also some of the clay mudding I packed the long wall with yesterday. It just wasn't dry enough to hold up to the storm. You crawled in with Jasper and the kids, right? You and Thorne and Rowan?" The three of them were a bit of a point to gossip about. Everyone was making assumptions about their relationship but Helena didn't think it was as sordid as everyone said. Rowan would joke about it and Thorne, well, maybe he was a touch hopeful about it, but she had no idea how Ryan viewed his bed partners. Then again, people had assumed that she was involved with Rowan at first, just because they shared a hammock at night.
"Yeah," Ryan said in answer to her question. "They were closest to where we were sleepin', and we wanted to get Ro under cover as quick as we could." It was tough enough having no privacy to speak of; Ryan would have been quite annoyed if he'd realized people were actually discussing the matter. He shouldn't have been surprised, but then at times he was the ultimate naive idealist. People were so quick to view things as dirty, but then everyone's ideas of morality were different. Some people, he was sure, would have been appalled by what he and Thorne had shared the other night, not to mention Thorne's suggestion that they invite Ro to sleep with them in more than a literal fashion.
Helena nodded. "I haven't talked to her today yet. Is she alright?" It was hard to believe that the days got so busy here that she didn't have the time to sit down with the woman she considered her best friend. She made a mental note that tomorrow would be the day. She'd find a job they could do together, even if it was just sitting around and making braided cords. Or knitting. She really needed to get back to the knitting.
"Far as I could tell, she is," Ryan told her. Of course, Rowan wasn't much for complaining the majority of the time. "She's pretty zen about most stuff." If it had been him, he would've been freaking about the notion of squeezing out a six to eight pound baby without anesthesia in a couple of months. Not Ro. She'd remained fairly calm in the face of the hail and tornadoes, even.
Helena smiled as Ryan described Rowan as zen. She didn't think that was entirely the case, since her friend had confessed a mounting worry about her impending labor. It was just that Rowan was pretty sensible about things, especially things she couldn't change. "She's being a good sport," she agreed. "I need to catch up with her sometime today or tomorrow. We need to start working on her lean-to and someplace for the baby to sleep," she wasn't keen on the little one sleeping on the ground like the rest of them. "Maybe some kind of woven basket will work," she mused. They certainly had access to enough reeds!
"A basket, a crib," Ryan mused right along with her. "Definitely somethin' that isn't on the ground." Maybe they could make some sort of mattress for it, and of course the baby would need blankets. There was so much that needed doing on all fronts, not just for the baby, that it almost made him exhausted just to think about it. Also, it was a great source of frustration to him that he was limited in what he could do to help, because he couldn't see what the hell he was doing unless it was something that was right up next to his face. He tried his best to pull his weight, but on days like today he didn't feel as if he was doing a very good job.
She nodded. "Well, we have a few weeks yet before we need to worry about the crib. And Ro has that baby bag that Sophie and Quinn found on the walk here," she didn't even pause on the name of their fallen comrade. "So she has a few diapers, blankets and jumpers for the baby. Really it's just a safe bed for it that's the most pressing. Well, after a roof over it's head that is." She smiled and patted Ryan. "Once we assess our building strategy, we'll get to work on one for you, Thorne and Rowan. A big one so that Thorne can store all of the medicine jars and Ro has room for the baby." She though that maybe their lean-tos needed to be a bit stronger than they were, given the one that had collapsed in the storm.
Helena always seemed to have a plan, some idea of what to do next. Ryan thought that was one thing he found so reassuring about her beyond simply her calm presence. "If I can help, I want to," he said. "With the lean-tos, I mean. Guess I could always stand and hold things." When she patted him, he leaned against her, hoping she wouldn't mind. It was pretty close to a hug, and sometimes you just needed one, particularly on a day when everything around them had been turned upside down.
Helena never shied away from a little bit of physical affection, especially given from some of those members of her tribe who had been with her the longest. She looped an arm though his and leaned in toward him so that they supported one another. "You can always help," she said with a smile. "None of the grass is dry but if we can get some together how would you feel about restocking our dwindling braidcord stash? We've been using a ton of it in the lean-to building and we're getting pretty low. You're faster at it than even Rowan is." She chuckled and shrugged slightly. "There's no rush, it's not dire, but I can tell we'll run out before we finish the shelters for every one."
"Yeah, I can braid some grass," Ryan said, smiling ruefully. He had gotten really fast at it, and once he got into the groove of it, he didn't need to look down at what he was doing. He guessed it was a lot like touch-typing, which he could also do, not that there was any call for that here. "Once things dry out we can make some brick and I can finish the medicine jars. I have several done already, and they're airtight with the lids on, far as I can tell." He was proud of that. It might not be much, but the medicines would be more effective if they were stored properly.
Helena's eyebrows raised, impressed. "Really? That's really good. It'll keep the medicines fresher longer, right?" She'd hunted for a source of wax for the purpose of sealing some of his earlier attempts at jars. Larger ones, just for the sake of preservation. So far though there just didn't seem to be any wax making creatures of plants. None that she'd seen, anyway. "You're an amazing potter, Ryan," she gave him a good-natured grin. "I could never do what you do. None of my jars or bowls keep their shape!" She'd tried, of course. No harm in playing around, after all.
"'Least I'm good for somethin'," Ryan said, sitting up with a grin that was more like his usual impish one. He was like a sponge sometimes: the least bit of affection to soak up and he was saturated, good to go again. "I'll teach you some techniques if you want. All that arts education should be helpful with that." He was getting a second wind now, trying to get his natural good cheer back.
Helena smiled. "I'd love that. Want to learn how to knit? I could teach you how." She'd offered to teach Adnan too but it was plain to see that Adnan was far more suited to much more physical labor. Not that Ryan couldn't build if he wanted to. Helena would be lying if she said she wasn't keen on protecting Ryan's artistic ability. She wanted him to remain the tribal artisan that he was. Vision or no, he was a really great potter, to be making products they could use under such rough conditions.
Ryan grinned at her. "Why not?" he asked. He was by no means too manly to be caught with knitting needles-- or whatever one used to knit with out here-- in his hands. "I might suck at it, but it's worth a try." Or he might not, considering that he was used to fashioning all sorts of artsy things with his hands. "It can be an even trade," he said. "I'll teach you to throw pots, you teach me knitting." He nodded. It seemed fair to him!
Helena nodded, a smile on her face. "Deal. Kind of nice to have hobbies that are actually desperately needed. Maybe someday we'll be comfortable enough in our lives that the things we make can start to be beautiful and not just functional, hmm?" His pots had a sturdy aesthetic to them. They were a bit chunky and kind of...manly, she supposed. They looked like they'd been made by men, for the purpose of whatever purpose they were meant for. No flower vases or fluted water ewers. Just plates, bowls, jaws and pots. They were very Ryan.
"Maybe," Ryan said. He'd made some very aesthetically pleasing pots and vases when he'd been in New Orleans, when he'd had an actual kiln and paints to work with, but who knew what would happen in the future? If there is a future, his brain tried to interject. He ignored it. "For now I think I'm gonna try to clean up some of the mess around the fire pit." He knew they'd need to get a fire going again, and he'd only have limited opportunities to get the side of the fire he'd been using like he wanted it before that happened.
Helena nodded. "That's a good idea. Cross said something about looking for wood that was dry enough to burn." Not an easy task after such a violent downpour. "I'm sure we can figure something out though." She glanced at the mess that was the firepit. Nothing but ash mud and a few sodden stumps. At least the bulk of it was made out of stone anyway. She pushed herself up to her feet with a groan. "I'm going to go help the others in finding some place to dry out their bedding. Need me to hang up your sleeping bag?" She hadn't noticed if his stuff was amongst the others flapping in the wind on the nearby bushes and trees.
"Thanks, it's already up," Ryan told her. The first thing he and Thorne had done after seeing that everyone was okay was to hang up all the bedding and hope for the best. He got to his feet, brushing off the seat of his damp pajama pants and sighing. "Another day in paradise," he remarked before he was off to get filthy digging around in the wet, ashy, dirty firepit.