ArchivedLogs:Under the Cherry Tree

Under the Cherry Tree
Dramatis Personae Hive, Jim, Rasa	2013-05-25 '
Location Holland Farm, Georgia
The farm is very farmlike. Wide orchards. Neat rows of corn. Two acres of vegetable garden. Picturesque farmhouse, barns, stables. Hive isn't at any of these places. He's out farther, where farm ends and forest begins, tall trees by the quiet stream that runs through. This is probably where he and Jim were dropped off by Joshua. He is, to all appearances, napping. Jeans and heavy workboots and his brown hedgehog t-shirt, tucked up beneath a cherry tree. Head tipped against its trunk, eyes closed, a few cherries uneaten nestled in a small pile at the hem of his shirt. The tree might be wearing a Hawai'ian shirt and kilt but aside from that it's an idyllic sort of scene. Rasa is out exploring. On the relative safety of the Holland farm, ze has abandoned some of hir usual precautions in regard to clothing and is wearing layered yellow and pink tanktops over baggy jeans, feet bare and covered in dirt. There has been some concession for the new tail that Rasa loves so much, and the jeans have been split in the back to a point, then buttoned up again, over the base of the new appendage. Hir hair is caught in pigtails behind hir ears. Alone and quiet, thoughts pour over hir skin, words to the song ze is humming most prominently feature on hir left arm, but they keep getting crossed out and rewritten due to faulty memory. Other parts of hir are covered in things that do not have words yet. There's read splashed across one shoulder, with flashed of blue darting here and there - blue black and shark blue. There even appear to be bite marks on hir throat, leaking red colour, but flesh there is perfect, smooth, and unmarred. Hir eyes eventually catch sight of the hawaiian shirt wrapped around a tree and it causes a small smile, drawing hir closer. Ze approaches quietly when ze sees the legs of someone there, pausing to consider whether or not it is worth it to approach someone sleeping. but.... the tree has cherries - big, delicious looking cherries where none of the other trees are anywhere near producing fruit. Surely, if ze is quiet, ze will not wake the slumbering man and still get those cherries. Right? Tail held high in mischief, Rasa begins to climb. Something in the tree's bark /clenches/ under Rasa's weight, as though the long plantfibers beneath the hard trunk were a sort of cement-packed muscle. Randomly dropping loose of its upward reach, a branch drops down against Rasa's face in the shape of a warped human hand, wrapping around hir head and /shoving/ hir at the ground. Snap, crackle, pop, the serene base of the tree suddenly churns with a crunch and rustle of roiling plant roots that are yanking up from the soil. A pair of /sharply/ alert, startled-wide blue eyes peer out from the center of the trees trunk. << - shit. >> "What the fuck, get down from there." Hive is in fact not asleep, and his eyes open abruptly when Rasa approaches, the feel of an arriving mind more than enough to alert the telepath to another presence. "Jesus Chris, teenagers." He rolls to the side to peer around Jim's trunk, narrowed eyes looking around at Rasa. "Sorry," is directed more at Jim than at Rasa. To the latter, he's holding out the cherries he's already got. "If you want some, eat these, don't fucking climb him. Didn't you notice the gorram /clothes/?" << Shit. Jim? >> Rasa leaps away when Jimtree starts to move, looking up in wonder at the eyes ze finds there, after making contact telepathically, of course. The contact is brief and Jim's form nearly uncopyable. When ze lands, ze lands on all fours, tail held high and agitated. Then the sleepying guy starts snarking at hir. "I don't know. I'm new here. It's a hippie farm where my teacher's family lives. Maybe the they dress all the trees when they are in fruit." Rasa slowly draws hirself back to two feet, eyeing the man and walking forward to take some cherries. "But I won't climb him again, if he doesn't like it." << Who likes to be fucking climbed. >> Jim is thundering from beyond the long, immensely slowed-down distance between one thought and the next. His REJECTION arm is rolling back inward, a second creaking and crunching on his other side as it devours in obstructing shoots to make it possible to /cross his arms/. It's a very gradual process, flakes of treebark and a few odd cherries raining down on Hive and Rasa as it does. A few cherries even then swing off his arms like a bizarre red bead-fringe. << That's the shapeshifter girl. Rasa. >> It's not /all/ intended specifically for Hive, just grouchy surface thoughts filtering slowly by in a moment of lucidity, grinding like tractor tires. << Tail's new. Tell little Miss Meatbag to stay off my god damn branches. >> There's, subtly a successful pulse of /horror/ sighing through inner leaves; a quieter, dire mutter as he sags against Hive's mind. << -christ, Hivey, I almost put a spear through her. >> He's settling back in again; it's hard to imagine a human shape standing upright 'settling', but he does, eyes growing heavy-lidded. << Make sure. Other kids know. Don't fucking jump on me. >> << I'll make sure. >> There's still a sussuration of whispervoices underlying Hive's but they're muted, subjugated to the stronger dominant sound of his voice. Aloud: "The fuck, kid, you /see/ any other trees with fucking /clothing/ on?" Hint: the answer is no. He is gathering up the shower of cherries into the makeshift pouch of his t-shirt, offering the whole lot to Rasa. "Look, everyone's here cuz they're fucking relaxing, let people fucking relax." For all the default gruff of his voice, its not raised, just sort of grumbly. He settles back against Jim's trunk, on a new side this time. << Shapeshifter. Ngh. >> This has a flicker of recognition to it. "This isn't a hippie farm anyway, dude, Jax is a hippie his parents are straightlaced fucking Southern as they come." After this there is a quiet poke to Jim's brain, not hard or anything but habitual. Hello, hi, just checking in. Stay Jim. Thanks. Rasa looks down and away, not really interested in cherries anymore. Ze stares down at the disturbed ground around Jim's trunk and follows it up to where his arms are crossed. Hir skin goes dark and hir tail droops. << Of course they're straight laced, >> ze thinks, disheartened further. << family... >> the concept is distant and unpleasant to hir. << I'm here for the boys. They needed me here. I can deal with straightlaced families, for a while. >> "I'm sorry to have troubled you. I'll go now. Have a nice afternoon." zzz zzz then ze is off, plodding along on two feet, looking for somewhere else to go explore. Agh. Jim makes annoyed, /cranky/ shoves back at Hive for his quiet poke, sissy slap-fighting at him at being /irritably/ woken up a few more degrees by it. Fine god /dammit/ you win, you bastard. Damn. Now he's awake. Ish. And blinking owishly after Rasa. << Y'know her? >> "Fucking teenagers," Hive mutters, nestling back comfortably into Jim's roots, "gorram fucking sulkfit the second you ask them to think of anyfuckingbody else." He pops Jim's cherry into his mouth. His eyes close as he chews it. Spits the seed out to the side. << ...hived her, >> he admits grudgingly, and then corrects, << hir, >> as afterthought. << Never met in the flesh. >> "I'm not sulking." Rasa replies quietly from a distance. Ze turns around and looks at Hive. "I was giving you space to recover." Rmgle grumble. This is the sound /of/ the tree as well as its thoughts, Jim's roots adjusting under Hive to roll in any knots that might jab him in the back, padding softer with an influx of dense moss. << Hir? >> It's probably not slow-plant thought to blame for his awkward handing of the word. As a vinery of kudzu begins to pack in around Hive, mostly beneath him but some invasively curls around him. Catching one of his arms. << -- think you should tell -- >> Fumble. Deep plant-creaking sigh. << -- hir? >> "Not /me/, dipshit," Hive grumps, gesturing to Jim-tree, "/him/. Do /I/ look like I'm recovering from anything." << Gender-neutral pronoun, >> Hive says with the slow-delay of someone not entirely quick to remember this himself. "Who the fuck likes being climbed." He doesn't seem to mind the vines settling around him, settling /into/ them with a quiet sigh both physical and mental. "Come. Sit. Have fucking cherries." The cursing sounds more habit than hostility. "Wounds aren't always visible," Rasa notes as ze makes hir way back to the tree, moving to sit down, shifting hir tail out of the way. "I don't know. I've never had a chance to talk to a tree before. I do know this girl who looks really hot guys and says, 'I'd climb that,' but I don't think it's the same concept." With hir tail touching the tree, there's a little bit of contact and while Rasa mostly keeps to hirself, but does offer a quiet, << sorry. >> << Oh. >> Jim isn't - /arguing/ with Hive's pronoun correction, though he's handing the word 'hir' around from branch to slow-reaching branch with the kind of awkward discomfort he had originally handled his /cell phone/ with not that many years ago. << Eugh. >> It's a MIND sound he makes to Rasa's mental touch, turning away from it as though his mental face were something more unsavory for viewing than his physical one, muttering, << This tree ain't much feeling like fucking talking, kiddo. S'what I got the fucking /Lorax/ here for. >> Regardless, wordlessly, he's at least withdrawing whatever hardknuckles of roots might jab into Rasa's seat as well. It's only polite. Hive is getting kind of... overtaken a little. But kudzu. Because. Kudzu man. It's blanketing over one of his legs in a loose green-smelling net. Don't mind me. "Yeah, well, I wasn't part of any fucking murderclub." Hive unceremoniously dumps a fistful of cherries into Rasa's LAP. "I know you." He says this post-cherrying, as his hand drops to rest atop the kudzu climbing over his leg. His fingers stroke against a viney stalk lightly, unthinking. << Jax has a shirt, >> he comments this absently. << Speak for the trees -- actually, >> he remembers this only in afterthought, complete with brain-imagery of colorfully tattooed disembodied leg, full of rather beautifully done Seuss-images of the Lorax, truffula trees, animals from the book, quotes, "he has a whole fucking sleeve." He slips from thoughts to words unthinking, sleepily-murmured as he nestles. Against tree. Against kudzu. Rasa slips hir shirt over the top of hir tail, trying to break the contact between hirself and Jim so he doesn't have to talk. Ze looks over at Hive when he starts dumping cherries in hir lap, closing hir knees tight so they don't roll away. "You know me?" << Should borrow it. >> The tree advises after slowbrain processes, Jim imagining the bizarre vision of Hive wearing Jax-bright duds. << Maybe I'll be. Fucking. Truffula tree for Halloween. >> There's a long ancient forestry in pauses, cracking the earth, drinking in the sun. His deep dark treemind makes an appropriately cryptic tone when he adds. << Or Yggdrasil. God damn mother fucking. World Tree. >> “Yeah.” Hive’s fingers still play against the kudzu-leaves. << Hah. Yeah. Like to see that. Your hair all puffed up in pastel pink. >> He picks up a cherry by its stem, not biting into it, just popping it in his mouth and sucking on it. He twirls the stem between his lips. << Yggdrasil’d be more involved. Less people’d get it. Maybe. Though. I dunno. With the crowd we run with. >> “I was,” he says, and it’s slow, quiet as his sleepy half-lidded gaze shifts towards hir face, “in your head, once. It didn’t go great.” "Ah" Rasa considers. << When I ended hospitalized and finally sapped. >> "Well. It was a lesson, in the end. Possibly too soon of one, but helpful... in the end." Ze pulls hir tail into hir lap and pets it quietly. Hir other hand pops a Jimcherry in hir mouth. After a moment, ze spits out the pit into hir hand and throws it out to infest the ground possibly a birth baby Jim. By the time they're done, there could be baby Jim trees all over the place. << I'll go as a truffula. >> Slow-speak maybe, but Jim can drag out a good /dry/ mental tone for ages. << If you go as the god damn. >> Hff. Thinking. Chug. Chug. Chug - << ...Onceler.>> His eyes grow heavy again, watching his little progeny be distributed across these fertile lands. Go forth, children. Flourish. As weight drags him deeper into a healing exhaustion, a curled string of vine overtakes Hive's thumb, ensnaring in the blind pattern of upward mobility. And then, fast-motion erupts into a ladder of livid blue buds that begin to open, bottom rungs first and then upwards, into a stock of trumpet-shaped kudzu blossoms. Gently, Hive pries his hand free when the vines start to curl around his thumb. Patpat. He pats at them gently, but watches with slightly wider-eyed fascination at the blossoms’ rapid unfurling. This keeps him momentarily quiet, both audibly and mentally. “Yeah,” he finally answers, out loud. “When your brains got fried all to shit.” << Think I need a giantass fucking moustache for that, >> he grumbles. Hive -- probably can’t grow decent facial hair to save his life. It is kind of sad and PATCHY. His finger uncurls to trace against one of the blossoms. << Fine. I’ll paste one on. >> "So, did you want to talk about that? It's kind of weird to put a face with that whole situation." Rasa eyes him for a moment, moving the cherries off hir lap and onto the ground, shifting to actually get a look at his face for once. Hir hand and feet grip the ground as hir knees settle onto the surface, tail arching up and over hir shoulder. It twitches at him for a moment before moving backward, and stretching out over the ground behind hir. "Kind of hated you for a long time, but Shelby's so damn in love with you... I kind of had to put it aside." There's a pause as hir head tilts to one side, still studying him. "I suppose this is the point where I make the obligatory threat about how you shouldn't hurt her. I mean, she's /really/ in love with you, so if you're just dicking around with her, you shouldn't." Jim is - essentially deadweight. He's ponderously imagining Hive in mustaches - /many/ mustaches. Handlebar. Pencil-thin. WALRUS. He circles back to a fu manchu rather often, in which the image inevitably involves Hive stroking a matching beardlet sagely. << Heh. >> Mental leaves ripple, stretch skyward as though in a long yaaawwwwn, retaining very little conversation spoken for the moment. Aside from a gradual. << -readin you your rights. >> Zzzrxxz. “Not really,” Hive says, after some consideration. He tips his face over towards Rasa, studying hir right back. “I mean, I’ve eaten a lot of brains. It’s shitty. Didn’t mean to fuck you up. Did you want to talk about it?” He sucks another cherry into his mouth. The stem sticks out from his lips. His brows crease suddenly. He exhales a sharp snort. “In love,” he echoes, and his head drops back to thud against Jim’s trunk. “Dicking around. The fuck you think I’m going to do. The fuck you think I’ve /been/ doing.” Hive supplies his own moustache-image for Jim. Just HUGE and bristly-bushy, explosion of facehair on his lip. << Could pin Alanna there. >> The image of Dusk and Ian’s ferret wriggling around as his moustache for the night amuses him. It would be a very short-lived moustaching. She has little attention span. "I don't know what you're doing or what you've been doing." Rasa states simply, amber colored eyes searching his face. "She could just be throwing herself at you and you could be being a perfect human being and not doing anything wrong, but as her friend and roommate, I … have no real say in anything, but a definite interest in her emotional wellbeing." Ze backs up, sitting on hir haunches. "You should at least know how seriously she takes it, you know? I wouldn't want to think I was having a casual thing when my person was imagining us married forever and having babies." That said, ze exhales and looks over hir shoulder, tail slinking back to hir cherry pile to /try/ to wrap around one and pick it up. It's more for practice than cherry-having, as the tail is not at all dexterous enough. "I don't know. I don't particularly need to talk about it. It was a while ago and so much other stuff seems to have happened between now and then. Thanks for the... uh," well, it wasn't /precisely/ an apology, "better intentions." << Don't. >> Advises the sage old tree. << Strap weasels. To your face. Hive. >> “S’shit in between marriage and casual fucking,” Hive says, and he sounds kind of bland here, a little distant as his eyes slip half closed. “Good intentions don’t mean for shit. I fucked up. It was shitty. Might do again some day. Hopefully not to you. You doing alright with all this, uh.” His eyes lift to the sky. Patches of it blue and bright through Jim’s foliage. “Bullshit going on.” << But, >> he answers Jim, almost kind of entreating. << Lipweasels. >> Like this is an argument. "Yeah." Rasa agrees quietly to the sentiment about the various levels of relationships. Ze eventually scuttles a few feet back to hir cherry pile, no longer sitting against Jimtree, but facing him instead, still able to see Hive better. Hir legs relax to the ground, tail shifting comfortably out of the way. "I am... dealing," ze decides at length, lips pursing as ze examines a cherry. "Telepathy isn't ... it's a mixed bag. I..." flashes of what ze got from Peter course through hir mind once more, intimate details of the horrendous fight between him and the half starved twins warring with an intense and almost foreign sense of possesiveness of all three of them. It's something needs a second or two to push down again. "I just want to support them during this hard time, like people supported me." Here, hir mind dwells momentarily on a memory of a fugue state where all ze could do is cling to Ivan and his sense of self and his sense of hir to maintain hir sanity -- which is then replaced forcefully with the memory of Peter, hanging from the ceiling, delivering books to hir and Ivan in the medbay when they were recovering from the hiving/teenage-emotion aftermath. There's a small smile on hir face now at the thought of Peter, upside down and helpful. "But I also kind of feel periphery. They kind of just want their ... particular people and maybe I came to support Ivan more. But supporting a supporter is still support." And then, ze picks up hir previous train of thought. "Telepathy is hard. I could use more practice, but practice comes at the expense of the people I would practice on and that's not very good either. You said you might do it again." << resignation? Expection of bad? How do you cope? >> "How do /you/ not get lost in what you do?" Rasa is very curious, hoping to glean some tips from the man. << Live weasels. And faces. Do not mix. >> The TREE imparts. << Fucking. Bendy... spoony bastards... >> Is - oh god, is Jim thinking of a period of time when he had a mustache? The image burbles up gradually from the greasy-black depths of his peatbog memory. Hair less gray. A few less lines. And a Burt fucking Reynolds mustache. The 80's were not kind to James Morgan. << Bendy spoony /fuzzy/ bastards. So full of good moustaching hair. >> Hive’s mental image echoes 80’s Jim back to him (admittedly with an undercurrent of /amusement/ to the mental picture) except with a ferret on his upper lip in place of Burt Reynolds moustache. The ferret is squirming excitedly, as ferrets are wont to do. He twirls the cherry stem in his lips. “You’re their friend too, aren’t you? Didn’t all that shit start ‘cuz you kissed Shane?” His finger toys with the stem. Inside his mouth, his tongue wiggles at the cherry. His eyes slip from half-closed to full-closed, head shaking, once. “I get lost,” is the answer he gives. He lifts his head, thumps it down again against the tree. “Need anchors. To find your way back. How /do/ you practice?” "I touch people." Rasa replies calmly, still staring down hir cherry. "But my telepathy gets crossed with my other power and I end up looking like them a lot... and then well, I sort of broadcast what they are thinking with writing on my skin." Ze looks up at them. "Sure, some people like to look at themselves and read their... my face like a book, but lots of other people find it tremendously creepy. I don't... exactly forget who I am, but it is strange to have my entire body change to reflect them for a while. I … have been working with some of my teachers, a lot with Ivan. Some with Shelby." Then ze finally pops the cherry in hir mouth and makes quick work of the fruit, spitting the pit into hir hand to toss away. "Yes, I am friends with all of them," ze adds after finishing, "but as you probably know kissing Shane is actually not a good indication of friendship." Smirk. "That day, He wanted to see what my telepathy was like, decided that kissing me was the best way to do it, then … well, kissed me. It was consensual, but mostly his idea. I think he liked the idea of kissing himself, truth be told." Jim is bemusedly responding to Hive's mental image with a returned one of Ferret RIPPING HIS FACE OFF. Except it's a tree face now so it's mostly just sharpening its sweet little claws and teeth on his bark. Small flakes are chipped off at chaotic angles. It's kind of a smeary image, drifting like the pattern on a flag in high wind. And he adds, exhausted.<< I'm gonna sleep, Hivey. Focus on healing a while. >> Hive takes that mental image, collects it back together. Returns it to Jim in solider-sharper focus. And then just tucks his mental presence back /in/ around Jim’s mind like a blanket. << Sleep. But I’m waking you the fuck up in a couple hours to make sure you haven’t become ONE with the fucking earth. >> He still toys with his cherry stem, a kind of distracted restless fidget of motion as it twirls in his lips. “Telepathy only comes through when you’re touching them?” he wonders. “Do you still feel what they’re thinking when you let go? Keep their form after?” He finally bites down into the cherry; there’s a brief catlike squeeze of eyes as the sweetness fills his mouth. Mm. “... s’it take work to put yourself /back/?” His eyes open. He’s scraping flesh off the cherrypit, the stone clacking quietly against his teeth. “Man, he could kiss himself any time he wanted to. -- how did /you/ feel about it?” "It was... hot - for the short while it was enjoyable." Rasa concedes, cheeks leaking red swirls across hir nose. "I considered doing it again, but it ended up being too complicated with Ivan." Ze gives a little shrug before taking a deep breath, refocusing on the other questions. "I have no connection after. I work off of memories that I glean and I'm pretty good at remembering the physical feelings of a certain body, like slipping into a particularly comfortable glove or your best friend's jeans and finding that they fit me... but they are just memories." << and some memories stick with me longer... >> Rasa's is distracted momentarily by a hyponotic and terrifying memory, the impression of yellow eyes, which are quickly submerged in a sea of blue, a color that quickly spreads across hir skin. "To... pull myself back? I... hm. I haven't... I don't really pull myself back. I process the memories, try to understand the feelings, and just am me again." Rasa falls quiet after that and conversation starts to lag, staying mostly superficial and lazy, the heat of the day starting to sap the words from the group. They eat cherries for a while, juice soaking across tongues and sweeting their words.