sixthiterationlogs | and the ground opens up

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and the ground opens up

WHO: Cougar Alvarez
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: Hours post-quake, September 6th (pre-aftershocks) / September 6th, evening
OPEN TO: OTA / Closed to Jake (cut content)
WARNINGS: Slight injury
STATUS: Closed

cougar's barbershop of necessity

Cougar's beginning to think the boxes that arrive are possibly saving their lives. He wants to pretend they're from a friendly, but he also knows plenty about being used when needed. For all he knows, the boxes are coming from someone like Max, who is keeping them alive because there are nefarious plans in place for them. Unfortunately, Cougar has learned that you use what you need to and if you have to take advantage, you have to turn the tables for yourself.

The barbed wire that he receives in a box is small, but it will do the job. He really only needs it to create a mesh on the ground to catch the eggs in the small coop he's built for the chickens. The chicks are growing by the day and he thinks with another two weeks, they might begin laying their own eggs, which will take him from a production of three a day to twelve. With a dozen eggs a day, he knows that the food situation can alleviate a little and he can hunt less, which is something he's been worried about as the population of animals is only so finite.

He's on the ground looping wire when he feels something beneath him that troubles him.

The ground had moved earlier in the month, he swears, but Cougar is currently precariously positioned under a wooden chicken coop built without much sturdiness and the quake seems to be getting worse and worse. Sharply exhaling, Cougar bolts upright without thinking, the side of his neck slicing hair and skin as it hits barbed wire and makes him roll onto his stomach, deciding to use the very wire he's been hanging for eggs to protect him from anything that might fall during the quake (which is worse than the last).

Palms flat to the ground, he prays to God that nothing too big falls on him, his quiet litany of words keep going until the ground is stable beneath him. Blood, tacky and dripping, is now pooling at his neck and he crawls his way out of the protection to glance in the first water he can find. He lifts up the other side of his uneven hair as he realizes that the wire has taken off most of his hair to the jawline. While he can patch himself up from the wound, he cannot fix the hair emergency.

Which is why, once he's stitched, he finds the kitchen shears and goes to the inn, plonking them down at a table firmly and sitting there, waiting.

Someone is going to need to help cut the rest off and while he feels like a boy in Mama's kitchen again waiting his turn, he knows he cannot keep walking around with a half shorn head. Best to cut it to the curls, again. It will be short and strange, but it will grow properly, then.

the picnic

Jake's birthday is September. Without a calendar, Cougar is left without knowing what day it is, but the weather and other things give enough indications to tell him that summer is fading into fall. The way the sun sets, the temperature of the air, and other clues tell him that either Jake's birthday is about to come or it's passed. Either way, it's a good opportunity for Cougar to try and finally mend the ground between them.

He intends to do more than just mend, of course, but he'll take the small steps if he can't take the bigger ones. He uses the eggs to make meringue cookies, makes a salad with the greens and strawberries, and cooks up a hare before stuffing it into one of the boxes that had brought his items to him. When those are ready and Baby is at his heels, Cougar slips up to collect Jake, trying to tell himself that this will not go badly if he doesn't let it.

With his hair newly shorn, he feels more like a civilian than ever. In the humidity of the wet air, it's already begun to curl the way he hates and the stitches along his neck aren't hidden the way his hair or hat would keep them. He settles, instead, for trying to hide it with the collar of his scrubs shirt, though he has no luck.

He finds Jake, eventually, and whistles for Baby to go collect him at a gallop, yipping away as Cougar closes the distance just a little slower.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Her hands drop from his hair, one still holding the cutters and the other moving to curl around his shoulder. She thinks it looks nice, even though Raven's always been hard on her work. It could be a little better. She suspects a portion of it may be uneven, but considering how dark his hair is and how it seems to curl and take on a life of its own, she doubts anyone would be able to spy the slightly different lengths.

Besides, she suspects Cougar's never let anyone stand at his back.

"We'll have to do it at one of those meetings," she smiles. He may slip into Spanish, but she remains in English. It's not necessarily any different than speaking a tongue she hasn't quite thought of for a good four months, but he knows she can understand him, and she thinks that's all that matters. "Make them paranoid we're talking about them. I think we deserve to have some fun, don't you?"

Cougar smirks at the idea, knowing that it will definitely make people paranoid, but at the same time, he kind of likes the idea of making people think twice about what they might be saying. He offers a firm nod of his head, seeing as he very much likes it. "Yes," he confirms. "We should do that," he agrees, his smirk wider as she finishes with the job.

"You should come by," he offers, "collect some eggs as a thank you."

Raven arches her brow. He may not be able to see it, but he may be able to hear the bemusement in her voice when she questions, "What am I going to do with eggs?"

Despite having landed on the ground, there hadn't been any chickens in the area of the dropship. She doesn't quite know what she's meant to do with eggs. She'd seen them in the nests of birds, but given the small size of them, they hadn't quite been acceptable food to share amongst ninety or so kids.

Cougar gives Raven a wary look, worried. "You don't know what an egg is?" he asks, not sure if she's saying this as a joke. He looks at her expression, trying to see any hint of a smile in her eyes or in the corner of her lips, but it doesn't seem to be there. Which means that she's serious.

It seems beyond strange that she wouldn't know, but this place is teaching him that even his wildest expectations can't be trusted.

"I know what an egg is," she says, rolling her eyes. They'd learned it in Earth Skills. If they happened across a nest filled with round shaped objects that were light in the hand and broke easily if dropped, that meant they'd found a nest of food for themselves. They'd never had the fortune of quite finding any chickens on the ground.

Had Raven ever touched one? That's another story altogether.

She lifts a shoulder, feeling slightly foolish. "I've just never had to use one before. It's not like there was a chicken farm where we landed on the ground. I think the Mountain Men scared them away."

He tips his head to the side. Now that his haircut is done, he stands and beckons that she follow him with a nod of his chin. "You have to come with me," he says matter-of-factly. "I can't let you go another minute without at least knowing what a scrambled egg tastes like. It's very sad to me that you don't."

He's on his feet, holding a hand out to her. "It won't be long. They are just at my house."

She keeps the shears in hand, unsure if she's going to need them to cut a mullet in a chicken's feathers or to defend herself from what Cougar has planned for her.

She easily follows him at his nod. "I've got all the time in the world, wild cat." There's nowhere important to be, no pressing issue to tend to. It's strange being without the tethers that kept her busy in Arkadia, but it's also freeing, too.

Good-naturedly, she pouts, "Are you going to cry?"

"I might if you don't at least come try some scrambled eggs," Is Cougar's wry response, because he thinks it's a sad thing when someone hasn't even tasted a simple, staple food that other people often enjoy without thinking too long about it.

"Let's go," he coaxes, leading him to the house he shares with Jake and Veronica. "I left some for dinner, but I can hunt game instead, to give you a sample."

Teasingly, she says, "You really don't have to feed me. I'm a bird; I scavenge for myself."

But she follows him. Raven's never done well with letting others take care of her. She'd always been embarrassed by Mrs Collins' kindness, and even Sinclair's extra tutelage and compliments of her skills. It's not something that's grown into a particularly good skill on the ground, despite having needed others to take care of her from time to time. It's remained as it is, leaving her feeling a little awkward, and very much like the bird she's named after, pecking at others to give her things when she's never learned how to accept it.

For once, it's not due to pride. Raven has an inkling as to why she bats away any act of kindness, but she refuses to dig deep and analyse it.

"But I don't want you to cry. You're too pretty."

While he's very much taken (or at least, he is in his mind), Cougar still has enough vanity to preen a little and enjoy the way that she calls him pretty, even if it's not crying that she's talking about. Lucky for them, they have only a short distance to go before they reach the house.

He knocks his boots off on the stairs, nudging aside bloody towels that he had used to stem the flow of blood. "If Veronica and Jake are here, please ignore," he insists. "They will only make annoying faces." At least, in Jake's case. It might be good for Veronica and Raven to meet, he thinks, but he can do that later when he is not introducing Raven to eggs.

She takes a good look at the house once they've approached it, completing a quick assessment so she can figure out which house is Cougar's if it's dark, which one is his when she's not particularly interested in taking her time in noticing the bungalows lined up outside of the town's main square. Raven's never quite seen a house before she'd come to this town, and she finds she wants to compare a lived in one with one thats been abandoned.

Following suit, she kicks off her boots, liking she can do that with her left leg. Looking around inside, she finds the inside of Cougar's house is much different to the ones she'd snuck into to raid for a few spare parts.

"Veronica doesn't have an annoying face," she says. She glances toward the bloody towels, eyebrow arching. She loses her amusement when she eyes him. "Did you see one of the doctors after you hurt yourself?"

Cougar knows that Veronica is not the annoying one in the household, but says nothing because she already knows that. "Why would I need to?" is his reply about the doctor question, putting some wood on the stove in order to start it up. "It was only a cut, I stitched it myself."

"Besides, what doctor do we have?" he points out. "I'm a medic, I can do the same job for little things as a doctor."

"A cut with a lot of blood," she points out. Raven made it a point to steer far away from the medical bay in Arkadia. If it meant going the long way and aggravating her leg even more, she did it in order to avoid being spied by Jackson or Abby.

She knows she'd tried to patch herself up a few times on the ground, but had to inevitably ask Clarke for help. She's not great with blood or opened wounds, even if she can steer past it to hold someone's hand while they're covered in it.

"As great as your stitches are, you really should let someone else who isn't squeamish at blood make sure you didn't make yourself any uglier. Scars are hot, but even you have to admit that depends on how it'd been stitched up."

Cougar shrugs, because Jake's never seemed to mind what his hair looks like (though, given how tense things are between them right now, he also isn't sure that Jake would be so willing to give him any praise). He still doesn't like the idea of wasting anyone's time, though, and as he cracks some eggs to start beating them in a bowl, he gives her a flat-lipped look that says this much.

"Waste of time," is all he says, more of a grunt than actual words. "I am not dying, I am not even very hurt. You shouldn't worry so much about a little cut."

Raven stands beside him to watch him break the eggs and do something odd with them. The movement reminds her partly of how some of the kids had brought paint to life. Plop the colour in some curved surface, begin to mix.

Except the eggs kind of look a bit disgusting.

"That small little cut could get infected, and then you'd lose your head." She looks at him with a raised brow, then shrugs her shoulders. "Your loss. It's one of the only heads I actually like around here." She looks down at his ministrations, and without much of a breath between her last comment and now this, she teases, "You're really good at scrambling eggs, huh?"

If he does lose his head, then he will be very headless, and it might be very cool. "I'm very good at lots of things," is his reply, lacking much modesty. He's not good with being modest, if he's honest, because Cougar knows how good he is at things. He wishes he had milk or salt, but he does have some other flavours from foraging that he adds in to give the eggs body, hauling out a large pan to put them in, starting to give them a light stir.

"Did no one cook for you like this? No mother? Grandmother? Aunts?" The notion passes over Cougar like a wild thing, because he can hardly imagine that kind of life for a child. As a teenager and adult is a different story, of course.

Raven doesn't answer immediately.

"No." It's easier to answer in Spanish. In some way, Raven wants to hide from it.

Her mother took her rations to trade for booze. Raven's family consisted of the people in her section on the Ark, and Finn Collins. But the melancholy doesn't have time to settle as it had teased her a few weeks ago with Jess. She keeps her expression masked with a smile, even if it's small.

"Where I lived, no one had siblings. I don't have an aunt, and my grandmother died from sickness. Cooking was given to specific people." She lifts her hands and wriggles her fingers. "I put myself to better use."

It doesn't take long for Cougar to finish up the eggs, listening to her speak. She reminds him of Pooch in the way she's so handy, but he doesn't know how to explain that to her, so he hasn't. "Why no siblings?" he asks, reaching for a plate and having to blow short curls from off his forehead when they fall there.

"I had too many," he shares. "Three sisters, all younger. Very noisy house." He hands her the plate of eggs and a fork, an expectant look on his face.

She takes it, but doesn't so much as dig in. It'd be a good distraction and a tangent to fall on, but Raven has a feeling Cougar will bring it back to asking her about why she has no siblings or family to speak of.

"The Ark had a policy. One kid per couple." She shrugs her shoulders. With that, she balances her plate on her hand and moves the egg around, studying it. Stabbing the scrambled eggs with her fork, she tries to tear off a bit of it, and then eats it.

With her mouth full, she says, "You're a decent cook."

It's a policy that he doesn't understand, but then, his family had many children and all the families on his street had been in the same situation. "I served with four other men who were worse cooks," he says, starting to clean up some of the pots and pans. "Better my food than Jake or Pooch's," he notes.

He watches her as he leans back against the counter. "Pooch was our mechanic. He fixes things," he says, gesturing to her with the cleaned whisk. "Like you."

While Cougar cleans up and speaks, Raven begins to shovel the eggs into her mouth. It first starts off as a slow process, and then deviates into her almost forgetting she has to breathe and swallow.

The town was comfortable, to say the least, but it wasn't what she had been hoping for when Arkadia had finally settled. There was more food than the dropship camp had offered, but she was still left hungry. The same could be said for a town where they still had to ration as though they were on a different type of Ark.

Looking up at him, Raven arches her brow. "Really?" she asks, mouth full. She swallows, and her voice is clearer, "He's one of your good friends?"

He watches the way she eats and thinks that she'd belong at a military table for nothing other than for her ability to get food down quickly - you never knew when you'd be packing up again, which made it a helpful talent. "Pooch? Yes. Other than Jake, he's my best friend," he shares with a fond smile for the man.

Clay had been in charge and Roque...well, he's not around anymore. Jake may be Cougar's best friend, but Pooch had been the kind of sensible man you want in a crisis. "Our driver. And mechanic," he says. "Could invent anything, especially weapons."

"I like the sound of him," she smiles. A guy who was a mechanic, much like her, and could invent anything? That was the type of person Raven wanted to know. It was also the toy of person she wanted to become.

Hadn't she already? Sometimes Raven's not quite so sure what her role has ever been once she hit the ground.

She scoffs down more egg, liking how it tastes. It's different to what she's used to, and while she can hear Clarke in her head telling her to take it easy, she ignores it.

With her fork, she gestures toward Cougar with a smile, "I might like him more than you."

He raises his brows and smirks at her when she announces her affections out loud so easily. He thinks about it and as he sets the pan to dry, shrugs. "He is Pooch," is all Cougar has to say with a shrug. "I understand that the little bird may prefer friendly dogs over a big cat. Big cat is a better hunter, though," he points out.

Wiggling one of the eggs before he puts it back in storage, he gives her a grin. "Better foraging, too."

"But he's a mechanic," she says, emphasising it with a pointed look and an arched brow. Her lips remain curved in a smile. Cougar may be a forager, a hunter who can easily be depended on to help keep everyone alive, but Pooch speaks her language. Raven finds that invaluable.

And it's fun to tease Cougar. She hasn't felt like letting anything that's kind slip from her lips in a long time.

"You can't hunt or forage without a good mechanic at your back, big cat. You should know that as well as I do, unless you're all ego under your fur."

and the ground opens up

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