sixthiterationlogs | 🍁 the times they are a changin' (ota)

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🍁 the times they are a changin' (ota)

WHO: Jax Teller
WHERE: porch of the 6I inn
WHEN: 25 October - mid afternoon
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: cursing, lbr

Hey, Abel. It's been a little while since I wrote to you so I wanted to sit down and tell you what's going on in this ~~fucked up~~ crazy prison I'm in. I miss you. You need to take care of Thomas and your mom, all right? I know I tell you that every time but I'm gonna keep writing it just to make sure it happens.

Snowed here the other day. It's getting cooler here but I don't have any idea of what the date is or shit like that. It's not like the real world, this place, and the longer I'm here the more it feels like I'm losing touch with what's real and what I can see and touch. It hadn't been that cold though, before, so the snow kind of came as a shock - seems to have melted, though.

Snow reminds me of Tahoe or up in Oregon where Gemma's people are from. It's not something we're ever gonna see in Charming, not unless something crazy happens. I'll take you kids skiing sometime when we get away. We're gonna get away someday, you know. Your mom's been after me to make that happen and I...

The wind catches then and the sheets come flying out of Jax's notebook, scattering the letter and some of the previous ones out across the porch and into the street in front of the inn. He scrambles to gather them up before they get trampled on and muddy because fuck if he's letting his only connection to his kids go and get ruined.

Is this what happened to his old man when he wrote his letters? Did John Teller write letters on scraps of paper on blustery fall days and hope that someday he was going to get to read them to his son? Jax has no fucking idea. There's so much shit he's finding out about his father after the fact that makes the hazy, golden childhood image of him tarnish a bit. He's afraid that's gonna be what happens with Abel and Thomas, that they'll read his letters and hear stories about him and think of him as some asshole and not as a hero like a father ought to be.

Jax pushes that down for the moment and focuses on grabbing up as much of the paper as he can, trying to keep his words and his tether to Charming and the real fucking world from getting soaked up with the mud and gloom of this place. Even if the snow's melted now and the leaves are pretty shades of red and gold he doesn't want to fucking be here.

"I hate this fucking place," he grumbles, stuffing bits of the letter back into the binding of the notebook.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Everything that matters," Jax says, snorting a little. "When God was handing out skills to survive in creepy villages, he gave you all of them and he gave me none of them."

He grins, though, and tips his head toward Moana a little. "But at least you pity me enough to keep me alive."

Moana leaned against the porch, her hair falling over her shoulder as she turned to look at Jax. "It isn't pity." She replied with an easy expression. "It's a chief's duty to keep their people safe and help them." He wasn't from her island but as far as Moana was concerned he was part of that family.

"I can teach you?"

She thought he might enjoy having things to keep his mind occupied.

"Hey, if I learn a bunch of survival crap when I'm out here, I'll be the best tatted-up Boy Scout leader that Charming's ever seen," Jax says. He's never going to be a traditional parent but he wants to try and be there for his boys as best he can and the idea that he's here away from him pulls at him sometimes and makes him feel guilty. Having something else to focus on would be beneficial.

"I'm a blank slate. Teach me anything you want. I almost got the hang of the rope stuff, you know."

"Have you been practicing?" Moana asked, her tone betraying her disbelief.

She knew that he had practiced some but Jax was one of the few people that she could tease. One of the few people still left in the village. So many friends have come and on in that time. It made things difficult but Moana kept going, she'd continue to keep going.

"So what do you want to learn next? Fishing? Basket weaving? How defeat a lava monster?"

"The lava monster might be the most relevant thing you've mentioned," Jax says. He's a little wary if only because there's been a lot of fucking earthquakes in the last year and with earthquakes, there could be volcanoes. He'd learned that shit in school a long time ago but it stuck - in Japan and places like that? Earthquakes came with tsunamis and lava. He's not going to dismiss that possibility here in the village.

"Fishing's probably gonna keep me fed, though. You're probably able to do it with your bare hands, right?"

Moana lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

Her lava monster was probably different from any lava monster that they ran into here. Then again, she somehow had the heart. It wasn't completely out of the question. For now she'll focus on the fishing.

"I can teach you to fish. I have an extra net I can lend you." She laughed and shook her head. "Why would I do that? I can use a spear, a net, I have some traps I've been putting out in the ocean." So far to no luck. The only thing Moana hasn't used was a fishing poll but she could probably figure it out quickly.

"Well, you're pretty awesome at everything else, I figured you didn't need anything else to fish," Jax teases. He thinks learning to fish is probably the best idea considering it's one of the steady food supplies in the village and he gives her a quick nod.

"If you're willing to teach me how to use the net and the spear, I'm willing to learn. It'd be good to know how to do something other than fix roofs and trade."

"Hey." She tried to sound offended but there wasn't any strength behind the word. Instead she smiled and shook her head.

"Yeah." Moana leaned back, and glanced up at the sky as she continued. "You know how to make rope which means you can make a net if you wanted too. I can show you how to make a spear too." It'll break over time and it'll be good if he knows how to repair it. "If you don't mind. Then fishing."

Learning to build the tools might be important, if Moana ever finds herself whisked away from the village. She'd feel more comfortable if she's able to teach people what she knows.

"Might need to know how to build one in case we get any wildlife down here in the village," Jax says. "I don't like my chances against a bear if I'm bare-handed. Feel better about it if I've got a spear."

It only raises his chances by about ten percent or something but that's better than fucking nothing.

Moana was thinking along the same lines as Jax though she wasn't considering that a bear might suddenly attack him. "I ran into a bear here once." She thought back to the event trying to remember the details. Itiiti had been a piglet then and she had been teaching him how to sniff for roots and mushrooms. She had run away from the bear then.

"When do you want to start? We'll need to find the materials if you want a spear." This was the perfect time of year to look for a very straight stick.

"I'm game whenever you are," Jax says, spreading his hand out toward her as if to demonstrate she should show him the way. He knows shit all about making weapons other than shivs in prison so really, Moana is going to have to do all the leading on this one.

"I've got all the time in the world. You're the one who's busy making shit all day to keep us alive."

"Not all day." She had been focused on the boat for the last two months and was finally getting back into her daily routines. Now that the land was freezing she could collect more stalks and materials to use over the winter.

"What are you doing right now? We can start by finding materials and then I can go over assembly another day." She thought it was better to approach these things in steps, plus it was the afternoon and it'd be harder to do anything once it was dark. Without torch lights around it was very dark around the village, something that Moana had hoped to fix at some point.

"Not doing anything but talking to you," Jax says. "So I'm good to go whenever you are so far as making shit and being useful."

He's always tried to clean up his language around Moana but there's only so much he can do; he's still a roughneck and a biker and no amount of scolding from a Polynesian Girl Scout's gonna change that about him.

Moana flashed Jax a disapproving look before rolling her eyes and gesturing him to follow. She didn't like it when he swore but she had know him long enough to realize that he wasn't about to stop. At the very least, he seemed to swear less which Moana counted as a win.

"Let's go. It's a good time to find wood. A lot of plants seem to die around now and we can probably find a small tree to use as a spear." She'd have to swing by the inn to grab her mini hatchet but it wasn't out of the way.

Thanks to Moana's boat building adventure with Owen, she had learned a lot about finding useful sticks in this climax. The cold killed a lot of the smaller trees and plants leaving behind wood that was sturdy and hard to break. She wanted to find Jax something that he'd have trouble snapping in half.

"A whole tree? You're pretty confident about my abilities," Jax teases. He's glad for the confidence, even if it comes from a weird place, and he gives her a bright grin. Maybe it's still a weird as shit relationship between them but he can't deny that Moana knows her shit and she's taught him more about how to survive than anyone else here.

"You teach me how to do this and I don't know, maybe I can teach you how to fix roofs. That's about all I'm good at around here."

"A small tree." Moana specified as she glanced over her shoulder with a smile. She was looking for something that was about an inch and a half in diameter but also several feet long. There aren't that many things out there besides small trees that fit the description of what Moana was looking for, then again, they might not find anything.

"Could you? I can use a hammer. I used to help fix roofs at home but they were made out of stalks not..." Moana looked up at the roof of the house. "Whatever that is." Slate? Wood? She didn't know.

She walked slowly, trying to remember the best place to look. It was times like this that she hated that the forest moved.

"Yeah, I have figured out that I'm damn good at roofs so I just keep fixing them in hopes that nobody will notice I'm shit at everything else," Jax teases.

"I figure that way someone will still keep my sorry ass fed and clothed even though I don't contribute anything else to this place."

"That sounds useful." Moana didn't know anyone else who was good at fixing roofs though she remembered a few of the construction projects where people hammered wooden planks into the roofs. She didn't understand why they didn't just use frawns here. They insulated and kept out the elements and were a lot easier to repair.

She looked back at Jax thoughtfully. "Are you worried?"

"Worried? Nah. Not like me to be worried. You know I take it as it comes," Jax says. Still, she's plucked a nerve and he's reminded that all the things he's good at and all the ways he's known how to make things happen his whole life don't seem to work here. Nobody cares about money or power in this place, after all, and without vehicles there's nothing for him to fix. He's close to useless.

"Not when I got you to take care of me, right?"

Her dark eyes started at him as if she was trying to see through him. "If you say so. I'm happy to teach you." She continued her way forward, her fingers curling and flexing as she began to search for a stick or small tree that Jax might be able to use as a spear. They were more options the further away from the village they traveled.

"I want to take care of everyone. If I can-" She looked back at Jax. "Like the people in my village. I want to take care of them too."

Jax smiles a little and shakes his head. "You gonna be chief of that village someday or something, aren't you?"

It's far from what he is, even if some of the jackasses he runs with back home like to call him the Prince of Charming or some shit. It's not the same as Moana, who genuinely seems to like helping people. Jax is mostly out just to get his.

Moana felt herself flush at Jax's observation. "After my father, yes. I actually already have... but I guess, not while I am here." She had taken over for her father but it didn't feel like that had happened when she was trapped so far from her family.

"I think everyone should do what they can." And she knew enough to share those skills with others. "I was thinking, with the cold coming that I'd have another dance class at the inn. Do you think people would like that?"

"I think anything to take our minds off the snow is probably going to be a good thing," Jax says. "Because I can't stand the damn snow and I can't be the only one. It's miserable shit."

Especially for him. While he's not from the coast where they never get snow at all, he's from the valley and it probably happens once every seventy years or so. It's not a common thing. They sure as shit don't get it in the volumes this place does.

"You're gonna teach me some more moves? I'm gonna be an expert by the time I get home."

"I hate the snow." Moana scrunched up her nose remembering the day of her arrival. It had snowed several feet making it frustrating and difficult for Moana to get around and explore the village. Not to mention that it had been her first encounter with snow.

"Do you think there is going to be a lot of snow this year?" She really hated it though she'd wear shoes, like Rory had taught her.

"Yeah. If people want. I think it's something to look forward too while it's so dreary out." It was better than feeling cold and miserable all the time.

"I hope there's not a lot of snow," Jax says. "I hate it too. It doesn't get cold like that where I'm from and we don't even have the tools to dig ourselves out from it like a normal person would."

You'd think, given that it snows here, that whoever has them here would give them shoves. That'd be wrong.

"Fucking sucks. Don't know how you can stand it, being an island girl."

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