sixthiterationlogs | stuff from june

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stuff from june

WHO: Natasha Romanoff
WHAT: an open post for being hot and miserable, exploring, and also attempting to shield some plants from the sun
WHEN: all of June
WHERE: the river, while it's still a thing, and anyplace with shade once it's not

River - early June

While the water is still high enough to swim in, that's where Natasha stays. She gives up all pretense of going swimming, and just stays there with brief trips home to eat and change and be productive. The heat is insufferable, and only getting worse. The dropping water line is worrying, but she knows there's nothing she can do about it. Doesn't make it easy to watch it happen, day by day. As the arrowheads begin to reveal themselves, she's there to spot a few, curious enough to pick them up, mildly freaked out when they begin to react the closer she gets to the waterfall.

Fields - attempting to save some plants

Natasha doesn't know a ton about gardening, but you don't exactly need to be a botanist to figure out that this much sun has got to be hell for their tiny little sprouts. Dragging buckets of water to them only helps if they don't end up cooked by the unrelenting sun. Which, given the way everyone in the village is roasting, their crops don't really stand a chance.

So, while she's not sure it'll actually help, sitting around doing nothing is not her style. There are plenty of houses still unoccupied, with curtains thick enough to offer shade. She's got a hatchet, and a need to not be idle, and rigging up little to shelters is easy enough when the only thing they need to keep out is the sun.

Wildcard!

Natasha is going to be mostly in the water, or searching out shade, but as long as you don't want her to work up a sweat, she's always up for a chat.

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Peggy's grown tired of resting up, especially since it's been weeks. The wound is healed and she's feeling absolutely fine. She also knows that she's not mad enough to try doing something that might get her a very doctorly glare at her doing too much in the heat. She's compromised by taking the birds out, trying to find Sam and failing. She doesn't want to think about what that might mean, but doesn't allow herself to think about it just yet, instead taking the self-built cage out towards the water where she can try to do some of the training that she'd started so long ago.

She doesn't expect to find Natasha also there, but she supposes that some help wouldn't hurt. "I hope you don't mind company," she says, gesturing to one of the taller rocks. Peggy probably shouldn't have come back to the scene of her injury, but then, when has she ever been sensible about such things?

Natasha minds pretty much everything right now, but that's only because it's so sweltering. Swapping between quick dips in what's left of the water, and waiting in little patches of shade while the droplets evaporate is incredibly boring. Logically she knows it's not a bad way to deal with the heat in the absence of any sort of air conditioning, or even a mission to force her to focus and make the discomfort worth something. Doesn't make it fun.

"I don't mind you." Natasha smiles a little and pushes damp hair off of her forehead to squint at the cage. "So... what's with the birds?"

Peggy sets them down far enough away that she doesn't have to look at them as she levers herself carefully down to sit, taking off her shoes to put her feet in the water, enjoying the coolness of it as it takes her mind off the last few weeks. "Rather useless, at this point," is her disapproving remark.

"I got them a year ago, they're meant to be messenger pigeons, but I've been awful at training them. Sam was helping, but...well, I'm beginning to think this place doesn't want us communicating from far away," she says, sliding to a lower rock cautiously.

Natasha shifts herself up and over the rocks, making her way to Peggy and offering the woman a hand to help her with her progress. Well, not offer to much as reach out and take her elbow and forearm. She doesn't say anything about it, doesn't give Peggy the chance to decline the assistance. She's not going to let the other woman stumble and fall and crack her head open. They have plenty of dangers around this place without adding any more on top.

She's also not foolish enough to suggest that maybe Peggy shouldn't be pushing herself. Were their situations reversed, Natasha would happily rabbit punch anyone who tried to pull the same crap on her. Sill, she's not going to let go. She's going to maintain a gentle but firm grip on her until Peggy is sitting on a wide flat stone just above the water level. If she wants to get all the way in to cool off, Natasha will help her with that, too. "Sam was helping. So you... haven't seen him recently?" It's been a while for her, too. That can't be good.

Peggy takes the hand with a murmured 'thank you' as she settles in, not intending to become twice-bit by a bunch of rocks that get the better of her. "No, I haven't, but I haven't been in the best of positions to look," is her dismayed remark, wishing that she was well enough to be able to traipse through the canyons and the woods in order to look for him as she once had the woman sitting across from her.

Perhaps that means that he might return, at some point, just as Natasha and James and Steve have. Perhaps it's a rotating door and Peggy's challenge is simply patience. "I needed to get out of the house," she says. "I was going crazy staring up at the same ceiling."

Nat just nods, rather than telling Peggy she's welcome. Then she slips back off the rock into the water, dunking her head underneath before popping back up, sitting far enough away that she won't get Peggy wet. It's easier to be in the sun with the cool water on her skin. "Worst part of being injured is having to find ways to deal with the boredom." Natasha can agree with that entirely.

She doesn't mention that she has been in a position to look for Sam. Not for him specifically, but she's been all over the place thanks to these stupid arrowheads, and she hasn't seen Sam in far too long for her to be comfortable about it. "Mind you, I never brought a bunch of birds to a river, but you do whatever works for you."

"Boredom here is even worse," is her heated disparage against this place. At least at home, Mr. Jarvis had been good enough to leave her some books and a radio in order to tide away the worst of her boredom. She also had a case to work on, which had kept her mind occupied, even while her body failed on her.

"These," she says, tipping her head to one side to look at the birds with mild irritation, "are my messenger pigeons that arrived in a box last year. I've been working, rather unsuccessfully, to try and train them to do something." Clearly, their current state in a cage is proof enough that her work has been far from excellent.

Natasha just chuckles. "You can call them messenger birds as many times as you want, but all I'm seeing is... pre-dinner." She picks up a little stone, weighing it in her hands before flicking it at the cage with her thumb. It's not a large rock, and she doesn't send it sailing through the air too quickly. It just clatters against a couple of the bars and then falls harmlessly onto the cage floor. "I'd offer to help, but I know nothing about training birds. I mean, I'll still help, if you want. I make an excellent cheerleader and snack fetcher."

She stops just shy of saying she can also help her kill and clean them, if training proves impossible.

She's thinking it, though.

"That was their back up purpose during the winter, but it never got quite that desperate," she admits, staring at them with very little fondness or warmth. If they actually completed the purpose that they were meant to do, perhaps Peggy would appreciate them more, but the trouble is, she can't manage to train them to a specific location. Maybe it's a side-effect of this place, she doesn't know.

Then again, she also suspects it's her own lack of skills. "I know that I have to pick one place, so I'd chosen the springs for one of them. Only, it just keeps getting lost. Maybe no one wants us to have a clear, straight line," she complains.

"I wonder... do you think you could teach them to recognize simple symbols from the air? What if one was trained to fly between, let's say, a large triangle painted on the roof of a building and one painted on your own roof?" She doesn't know how to train birds. She kind of inadvertently trained a stray cat, back home, but she doesn't think that counts. You have to keep an animal to be counted as training it, don't you?

She hadn't thought to use visual symbols before, but it's a decent enough idea. "I'll try anything, at this point," she admits. "I was mostly using little bits of food as bribery, but given how hot it is and how worried I am about our own food supply, I'm not entirely in a rush to be giving it all to the birds," she notes with irritation, because they're meant to be doing something.

Her little rant has also made her a touch tender and Peggy adjusts cautiously to slide her palm gently to the side, just away from the worst of it. "What I would really like is to train one to go between here and the canyon, especially if I can manage to get it to deliver a message."

"If the weather keeps up like this, we might be able to pull dead seeds up from the fields." It's not exactly a joke, but only because they both know how dire a situation they'll be in if that happens. All of them. The birds will be the least of their concerns. "I could help. I mean, I will help, if you like." It's probably easier with one person. Especially climbing up onto roofs to paint pigeon pictionary." Peggy is free to insist that she is up to the task, but Natasha will absolutely call bullshit on that one if she tries it.

"If you truly are willing to, I could use the help," Peggy agrees, not to admit that she's useless, but in the interest of both acknowledging her current physical failings, but also her intellectual ones. In this case, the mere fact that she simply doesn't know how to properly train a pair of pigeons. "Do you have much experience with any sort of animal training at home? In the future," she clarifies, as if that will somehow make the difference.

"Does SHIELD employ such tactics?" Peggy still finds it odd, asking questions about an agency that she, supposedly, founds. Yet, she doesn't know the slightest thing about it. "What are the general tactics, actually? The primary mission?"

Oh, wow. That is... Natasha does not let her face shift out of her careful nonchalance. "Law enforcement and counter-terrorism." On paper, anyway. In the past. Peggy doesn't need to hear how things fell apart, not when it's her life's work they're talking about. "And I managed to teach a stray cat to bat relentlessly at my elbow until I give it turkey out of my sandwiches. Does that count?"

Baze happens to be doing the same thing. The sun may not be as hot where he's from, but too much of it can still scorch a plant, and those things are their main source of food. So he's out on the other end of the garden, though setting up shades with woven grass rather than actual fabric. He hadn't wanted to cannibalize an empty house, and sitting around weaving dry grass into light screens is easy to do in the heat.

So he nods at the red-head, coming to do the same, pausing and sitting back on his heels to watch her settle in.

Natasha has no idea how to weave dry grasses into sheets. Not something anyone had ever foreseen her needing to know. She's awfully good at looting, though, so linens are what she has. She's interested in the coverings he's making, though, and glad she's not the only one out here doing it. When he nods at her, she raises a hand in brief greeting.

Those woven grass sheets, they might be good for fans, rig them to ceilings. Would need a way to keep them moving, and she's pretty sure that fanning yourself more or less cancels out the relaxing aspect of it. Something with pulleys, maybe an improvised tension spring?

Stir crazy has apparently reached brand new heights in Natasha's mind.

"Been out here long?"

It's not hard to go a little stir-crazy when you don't have anything to fight and you're used to fighting every day for the past decade or so. Baze understands. Hence, the grass weaving. "A little while," he answers her. "Don't want our food to burn up."

"Difficult to think of a worse time for a heat wave," she agrees, taking her hatchet to a nearby tree for a few of the younger branches. The curtains and sheets and blankets are going to need support, far more than the lightweight woven grass shades. At least it's more work to distract her. Hatchet back in the bucket, she sits down and pulls out a knife, bracing one branch against the ground in front of her and hacking off smaller shoots, beginning the process of turning it into a support pole. "I'm Natasha."

He gets up to come help, since hers are likely to be more effective than his, and he can pretty easily work out how she's going to set it up. "Baze Malbus." He kneels down with a bit of a groan-- his knees are not happy with all the time spent on them lately-- to lift one edge of the cloth to attach to her support. "I haven't been this domestic in years," he grumbles.

"I..." Natasha cocks her head to the side slightly while the thinks about it. "Don't think I've ever been this domestic. I had a cactus on my kitchen windowsill for a while. It died." Yup. She is a woman who has killed a cactus. A cactus. She's pounding the pole deeper into the ground with the butt of the hatchet to be sure it will hold under the weight of the cloth. Not that it weighs much. The poles are only about a foot and a half long, about a foot sticking out of the ground. She doesn't want to give the wind (ha!) a chance to catch them, or the movement of the sun across the sky to shift the shadow too much. It might not be setting, but it's still moving. Which is infuriating.

While Baze holds the cloth in place, Natasha uses a short length of rope made from braided strips of a sheet to tie it securely to the post. It's much easier with two sets of hands, and she smiles at him. "Do you have experience with farming?"

"Some. A long time ago. My planet was very different, though," he has to admit, holding steady while she works. "More cold than hot, not a lot of atmosphere." So while plants could still be burned, it was more from UV than actual heat. They were more likely to freeze, though, or wilt for lack of light.

It also makes being in this heat and endless light a bit miserable, though. Since he refuses to cut off his mass of hair, he's mostly taken to tying it back and up. It often winds up with the bound ends sticking straight up on top of his head, but honestly, he doesn't care if he looks silly.

Natasha is kind of digging the pineapple look. It suits him. Well, it makes him look less severe, anyway. She hammers in another short peg, and he holds the curtain while she ties it. Stretched tightly enough, it looks like it might work. The more opaque linens she'll have to come every so often and pull back so that the plants can get sunlight. She thinks. Stands to reason. Some of the lighter, gauzier material does let some through, though.

"What is your planet called?"

Less severe is a sliding scale with Baze, though he may actually know how ridiculous he looks with his hair like this. That may or may not be on purpose, but at the very least he just doesn't care. "Jedha." He pauses, then adds, for the sake of honesty, "Technically it's a moon. Yours?" He's going to guess "Earth" because that seems to be where most of these people came from. Nevermind that he's never heard of it.

"It's-- It's a planet. Called Earth." She's thrown, but not so much that it kills the curiosity. "You live on a moon? What's wrong with the planet it orbits? Do many moons have enough atmosphere to support life where you come from?" So very many questions, but she keeps it to just those few for now.

"Hey, get up here."

That's a voice Nat knows well, no doubt - Clint's tones and inflections are as familiar to her as her own in a lot of ways, and there's not a lot of people that would just yell out at her like that. When she looks up, she'll spot Clint at the mill, finishing the last of the repairs that the big group effort hadn't been needed for, mostly reinforcing the new blades on the wheel that he'd put in where the old ones had rotted away. He hadn't had quite as many nails as he'd needed to fully complete the task before, but some more scavenging of parts of the destroyed buildings had yielded enough. Right now he's straddling the stone wall built into the riverbed around the wheel, that helps direct water around the wheel and make it turn, looking a little upriver to a familiar head of red hair.

"You wanna dive into the river, it's better to do it from up here right now."

Natasha turns her head automatically at the sound of Clint's voice, and her face splits in a smile. "Who says I want to dive into the river?" Still, she's changing the direction of her walk to head for Clint, picking up the pace until she's jogging. "You look happy," she observes, once she's close enough to see his face clearly. "Having a good day?"

"With this heat? Pretty sure everyone wants to most of the time,"

Her question gets a shrug, though not a dismissive one as he glances up at the treeline. There's still so many, many problems with this place - where the hell did the night go? - but right at this moment he is feeling pretty... content. Sam's gone, things are beyond weird with the weather, but Clint's got the outlook that you control what you can, and what he's got his own hands in is going pretty well. "We finally got this place fixed up - it's been a wreck since before I got here. Feels good to actually get something done. So what're you out for if you're not looking for a swim?"

"I suppose I can trust you of all people to not have me diving down into rocks. You'd be too bored if I died." She reaches the wall, and scales it quickly, arms and legs sure and moving without hesitation. Once she reaches the top, she swings her leg over and puffs out a happy sigh, facing Clint and looking past him to the mill he's repaired. "It looks good. You did a great job. And for your information, I am out here collecting." Natasha has made a little pouch from some sturdy cotton, and she fishes it out of her pocket and tosses it to him. Inside, Clint will find Natasha's first three arrowheads.

Nat gets a grin in return as she climbs up to join him, and he sets the hammer down on the wall next to him as he swings his right leg over to take a normal seat and not straddle the hot stones. "Things'd be a lot quieter without you around, that's for sure." They know each other far too well at this point to not be able to know how to wind each other up - and calm each other down - any time they want, or need. It's good to have her around with him in this weird place, fall back into their usual banter, something utterly normal in the midst of all this strangeness.

"Collecting...?" Clint knows she's going to answer his prompt, and she does. The toss is an easy one and he catches it without effort, feeling the sharp edges of the metal through the cotton and making an educated guess about what's inside. Pulling the closure open and taking a look just confirms it. "You too, huh? Found a few myself when I'd come down to work here." He'd picked them up, of course - he can make a lot of things, but he's nowhere near a blacksmith, so any arrowheads he can get his hands on are hoarded. It's been a few years since he's had to make arrows, but no time like the present to pick it up again, right?

"What do you think of them? Way too bright and shiny, right?" Even for being in the river. The water is not soft, she can taste the mineral content some days. These should not look this new, for how deeply some of them are buried. It's deeply unsettling for many reasons.

Naturally, the deeply unsettling thing is something Natasha is hunting down like it's her job. Because what the hell else is there to do? She's not good with plants, there are only so many small forest creatures you can murder in a day, and apparently the worst threats they're going to face are going to come from members of their own community keeping secrets from the rest of them. At least hunting down arrowheads is straightforward, even if the artifacts themselves are not.

Clint pulls one out of the pouch, letting it sit in his palm and running the pad of his thumb over one flat side, careful to avoid the edges. "Too bright, too shiny - too sharp." Metal doesn't dull like flint does over time, no, but with anything buried so deep in the mud and especially underwater, he'd expect some form of wear and tear to show. Parts of the edge could still be sharp, sure, but the entire thing? Oh, he could get them sharper with his whetstone, but they were still plenty sharp enough to cut, as Peggy'd found out. "Doesn't feel like they're coated with anything, the normal texture of the metal's right there, but at least some of them should be showing some damage if they were stuck down there for awhile."

Of course, there's the obvious conclusion to that thought - that they weren't stuck down there for awhile, but put there for people - them - to find when there was an opportunity to do so. As if someone knew the river was going to go down and all of a sudden all this extra ground would be exposed. And Clint knows that Nat has had that thought just like he has.

"Do you think it's possible we all missed someone coming through here and seeding the riverbank? It seems kind of unlikely, given how many of these are turning up, and how many of us they'd have to get past." She chews on her lip a little, looking down at the river, eyes glancing between where the water level is now, and where it had so recently been. "Magic, maybe. Localized teleportation? Not that that makes me feel any better." None of this does.

She reaches for the bag, like inspecting them will reveal some additional clue. She knows it won't. Still, it's not in their nature to be inactive.

"Not as unlikely as a lot of the other shit that's gone on here." That feast a couple months ago that Nat'd gotten sick at. The sudden heat wave. The sun reversing in the sky and the night disappearing. Clint's long since decided that there's just not anything they can do to predict what'll come next, since there's clearly forces far beyond what he's familiar with even though his teammates at work here. "We don't have enough information, and we don't have the tools we need to get more."

It's a frustrating thing, it really is, because both of them hate not being able to do something. Clint's got skills he can put to use in the village, at least, a list of jobs to do that stop him from going stir-crazy, but it all pales in comparison to his want to go home. It's been something like half a year since he's seen his family, the longest stretch he's ever been gone. Nat doesn't even have the distractions he does, not really. With a grimace, he hands over the arrowhead he'd been inspecting, meeting her eyes and dropping into Russian out of habit. "Do you have any new ideas?"

She sighs, using the tip of the arrowhead to scratch a symbol lightly into her thumb nail. It'll be gone tomorrow, smoothed out through normal day to day living in this place. "I was considering getting fall down drunk tonight, but that's not really what you mean, is it?" She knows it's not, and it's not even a very funny joke. It's just - Clint is right, she doesn't feel all that useful. Natasha knows how to help out around the Barton farm, but all that really means is she can do some of the things he can do, only slower and less effectively. WHich is also not entirely fair. There are some things she knows, rough survival skills learned in the harshest possible sink or swim circumstances, they just aren't useful right now. She's run out of containers to preserve food in, so even with that she can't be actively useful any more.

"I know you already shot this down, but I can't help thinking this smells of Loki. Thor isn't even here any longer to insist he can't feel his brother's involvement. This gets less scientific every day." Another explosive sigh, and she frowns, setting her backpack on the wall next to her and putting the arrowhead bag into it, keeping the one she has out on her palm, turning it over with little movements of her fingers. "Hungry?"

Even with the way their talk has segued into something more serious, Nat's quip gets a chuckle and a grin from Clint. "You still have that much alcohol left?" He's not one to drink a lot, but even he'd stolen a couple of bottles from the feast, along with most of the village. He's been portioning them for the really bad days, but he's gone through about half a bottle each of whiskey and vodka in the couple months since then. He's got roughly seven thousand ideas in his head for potential projects to make living around the village easier that Nat could help with, but they both know that that wouldn't be solving the much bigger problem they desperately want to figure out.

"What was it you said? This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for?" That awful, awful day is still crystal-clear in his memory, the day he woke up and finally shrank away from the blood on his hands. The smile this time is bitter, a little twisted. "Maybe you're right - all this, it's too big for just that asshole, but maybe he's got more help. Another army." Which they'd basically be powerless against, given the number of civilians in the village and the lack of effective weapons. "You brought food?"

"Nope. Just wanted to see if you wanted something to eat that I couldn't give you." She doesn't mention the mind fuck Loki pulled on Clint, but she very briefly takes his hand, squeezes it. Then, without any further concession to it, she digs a cloth napkin out of her backpack. It's wrapped around some dried meat, made from what was left over at the end of the feast. It's not salty enough, and it will taste vaguely of char, but it's edible and very well preserved.

She takes a long thin piece for herself, putting one end of it in her mouth and beginning to chew on it, and holds out the rest for him to take as much as he wants. "Something I can do to help, at least. It might not taste amazing, but if it keeps on getting hotter, we might not have much of a harvest."

"I can think of seven hundred things I want to eat that you couldn't give me. You got chow mein or a burger in that bag?" He knows she doesn't, but, you know, she did start it. It's a brother's job to poke at his sister. Still, what she produces is certainly edible, and it's protein. He's going to need it to keep working out in the sun, so he splits off his own long splinter and starts chewing. As jerky goes, he's had a lot worse. "We're down to, what, about two-thirds of the crops? We're keeping them watered okay, even with the heat, but that hail and now all this sun - they're never getting a chance to rest. Some of them are baking right in the ground."

The fact that Natasha's gone so long at preserving meat is a huge warning bell for him. Neither of them likes being idle, but being without possibilities is so much worse for both of them. He's got his distractions, but Nat needs something to focus on that will get actual, tangible results. "You know, back right after I arrived, someone proposed that we start up a police force?"

That makes her snort with laughter. Good thing she doesn't have a cheeseburger, cause she might have choked on it. "Police force? When I first came, there were goats locked in the cells." Which does not really mean anything, and she knows it.

Natasha pulls a metal flask from her bag, takes a sip and passes it to Clint. It's just herbal tea, reasonably cold from being in her cellar. Well, it's cool, which is about the best to hope for in this weather. "This community is so small already. If we end up needing to throw people in cells, we're well and truly fucked. You know that, right?"

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stuff from june

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Fields

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River

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