Gonna burn those blue suede shoes; [OTA & 2 Closed Starters]

[teen_angst_bullshit]

WHO: Veronica Sawyer
WHERE: The River & Various
WHEN: June 23-25
OPEN TO: ALL, Kira & Nerys
WARNINGS: n/a

---

[OTA]

Dear Diary,

It's really fucking hot.

Understatement of the year, Veronica thinks as she stares down at the line, sweat tickling down the back of her scalp to gather at her hairline.

Thinking about going bald, she adds in a looping scrawl. Could start a new village fashion.

The sad truth is that she probably could. With the sun giving them the finger day in and day out, it's surprising people aren't lined up at Kira's door begging him to shear them like the sheep. It might even look cute, now that she considers it—

That's it. She's got to get some kind of relief or she really will hunt down the kitchen shears and do something she'll regret later.

Even at half capacity, the river's still the best option available. Well, unless you want to swim in the fountain, and Veronica's just not that comfortable with the idea of accidentally dog-paddling into somebody fresh arrived to what's beginning to actually feel like hell.

Towel in hand, she abandons the steamy shade of the house and trudges to the river, where she strips all the way to her panties and bra before wading in. No jumping from the dock today, unless you want to break something.

[For Kira]

Even with all of the windows pushed all the way open in this house, the breeze that slips through the dining room is paltry at best, barely ruffling the pieces of paper she and Kira have neatly stacked to one side. It's worse outside, though, the sun aggressive and unrelenting. It's a miracle there haven't been more people sick from it.

"Okay, so a map," Veronica says as she flaps a makeshift fan she folded from a piece of her precious typing paper. "We should see what's in the storeroom, too."

[For Nerys]

Truthfully, Veronica feels just a little guilty. In a normal situation, there would be nothing wrong with snagging the discards and peelings that don't make it into a meal, but here, everything always feels so damned precarious, like they're one bad day away from starving or freezing or succumbing to heat exhaustion. Like you have to monitor every step of the food chain like a hawk. Fretting, she'd walked past the compost pile enough times that Mark had begun to look at her funny, and realistically, a few bits of potato and root snagged before they made it in weren't going to make a difference.

Still, she feels a little bad. Not that getting drunk won't immediately fix that.

Soup pot in hand brimming with cast-offs, she knocks on Nerys' door.

Comments

[thenewways]

"True, though the thought of starting a cookfire makes me feel even warmer somehow." Nerys sighs, chewing on her lip as she thinks about it. "Well, if we make the fire and don't go too far away from it, I think it'll be okay. Just don't want it to boil down and burn, and then we'll have to explain why we ruined a pot by cooking scraps soup."

She snorts laughter as well. "Not to mention we wouldn't have anything to show for our booze efforts. But you know, if we go down by the pond, we don't just have water to keep topping up the pot, but somewhere to cool off while the fire's going. Sound like a plan?"

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"Like starting a campfire?" Veronica asks, and then can't help a full laugh, her shoulders hitching forward with the sound. "I mean, if we're going to do this, might as well go full hillbilly and cook it over a fire in the woods." Not to mention that, yeah, it really would be a bummer to come back and discover they had to start over from scratch.

"That would be a good place," Veronica nods, sobering a little. "It's cleared out a little because of the rocks. So, far enough from the trees for the fire to be safe, but we wouldn't stink anybody out like if we did it by the dock."

[thenewways]

"Hillbilly?" Nerys asks, though she's sort of picking the meaning up from context. There are backwoods folk on Bajor, plenty of them--they'd made for some good scouts and guerrilla fighters, when you could convince them to join a group. Emphasis on when, seeing as Bajorans don't tend to go that completely off the grid unless they're utter iconoclasts.

"It's probably not going to smell too bad," she theorizes, though the pot is letting off a vegetal aroma that might get unpleasant if they don't start cooking it. Also, Nerys' definition of 'not too bad' is probably not equivalent to that of Veronica. "Sorta like soup, probably. It'll only really reek if it burns."

She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, squinting up at the sun to judge the time. "Fuck, it's hot. Let's get moving before we pass out from the heat. There are worse ways to spend a summer afternoon, we could be hoeing the garden or something."

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"Yeah, like..." Veronica trails off, trying to think of a way to describe a hillbilly without sounding like the pampered suburban teen queen that she is. "Someone who lives in the woods— The hills. They shoot their supper and make their own booze." Which is apparently all of them in this place now.

She hefts the pot and heads back out to the road, waiting for Nerys to follow, glad for the sunglasses she got in her last creepy-but-useful gift box. If only there had been a bikini in there, too.

"I feel bad for Mark, trying to keep everything from dying," she says with a little frown, thinking of last winter's struggle to keep everyone fed.

[thenewways]

"Oh, okay, like," Nerys says a word in Bajoran, "back home. Though it's not exactly a way I ever thought I'd be living." She laughs, with a faint shake of her head. "Expectations, I guess. And if we can make our own booze, then maybe that makes things a little less crappy." Okay, maybe more that it makes people forget that things are quite as crappy as they are, but they can't exactly be choosy.

She closes the door behind her, then grabs a couple of the curtain-towels hanging on the washline outside her house--fortunately they dry fast in this weather--before following Veronica up the road. "Mark doesn't seem to ever catch a break," she agrees. "Either it's too cold or too hot, there's too much rain or not enough. I mean, even without climate control technology, I'm pretty sure farming isn't always this difficult, right?"

Not that Vee will know much about it, either.

[teen_angst_bullshit]

"I mean, I'm not exactly an expert on farming and I have no idea what things are like in the future, but where I was from, the weather was definitely less of a pain in the ass," Veronica answers with a roll of her eyes. "This place, it's like everything that's actually important has to be an uphill climb. Pet dogs and Christmas sweaters, those we get handed to us, but having enough food for the winter, we have to deal with this." Hands full, she casts a glance toward the brutally bright sky.

"It really makes you wonder, these people -- If they are people, the ones keeping us here... If we royally screwed up, would they actually let us starve?"

[thenewways]

Nerys, even after the amount of time she's spent here, still misses a good half of the references many people use (what exactly defines a sweater as being 'Christmas'--and, for that matter, the point of that holiday, seeing as she's had three or four different explanations of its 'true meaning'), but she gets the gist of what Vee is going for. "It's pretty classic psychological manipulation," she says, "with some variations. I saw the Cardassians do it sometimes, when they felt like putting in an effort to break someone. As for the presents, there's a human saying, something about a root vegetable and a stick?"

She ducks underneath a low-hanging branch before it can smack her in the face. The shade feels good, or at least marginally less oppressive in the heat. "Would they let us starve...is a good question," she muses, after a moment or two of walking. "I guess that depends on how much they want us alive, and for what."