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

"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."

Moana looked back at Jax with a crocked smile. "I complain about it a lot."

Her complaints were usually only heard by Itiiti but it was how Moana dealt with the snow and the cold. It wasn't something she could change and having an outlet helped her cope. At times she'd kick the snow or throw something at it but that worked about as well as kicking the ocean did.

"Oh. What about this?" She stepped over to a small dead looking tree and began to pull off a few of the branches. It was about five feet long and an inch and a half in diameter. "Is it too long? We can shorten it. After we cut it down." It was a weirdly straight small tree, just as Moana had hoped.

[ooc: this tree is 100% based off a small tree I found when I was hiking in middle school that my friend turned into a staff. Not important but it excited me.]

"I'm pretty tall, so I don't think it's gonna be too long for me," Jax says, giving the tree a careful eye. He's a tick over six feet and the tree isn't so big that he's gonna have trouble wielding it as a spear if they shape it up some.

"I think it'll work."

"Great!" Moana circled the tree twice before pausing to kneel at its roots. "I just cut here." She slipped her mini hatchet from the navy blue belt around her waist. It wasn't too thick but she wanted to cut as close to the roots as possible.

Dark brown eyes looked up at Jax. "Can you hold the tree so it doesn't fall on me?" Knowing her luck, it would.

Jax reaches out and holds the tree, not wanting it to crash down on Moana while she's cutting it. He's more than tall enough to hold it up and keep it steady while she's chopping.

"So all this stuff you do - everyone in your village does it? There's not one guy who cuts trees and another guy who hunts and all that?"

It was a good thing that he was there to hold the tree because Moana wasn't paying attention to which direction the tree was going to fall. A little wiggle, another chop of her hand ax and the tree was free of the ground. As Moana expected, the last frost had already killed this tree; else it would have been a lot hard to chop down.

"Not everyone. There is usually a person for each task. As the village chief I need to understand these tasks so I can fix problems that come it." It was all for the survival of the village. "There." Moana released the tree for Jax to hold it as she slipped the small ax back into the band of her dress.

"There are people who tend to the coconuts, fisherman, cooks, farmers, there is a task for everyone though people usually change after a while. The younger boys usually handle fishing while the elders cook and teach the children." Her island had a very good system for getting things done.

"But you learn everything so you can understand everyone, right? Makes sense. If you're gonna be in charge of them, you better know how to do their job," Jax says. It's a lot of damn responsibility for someone as young as her but he can understand it. He's always been expected to be president someday, to run the club. Her shit's a lot more productive than his, though, so he kind of wishes Clay and Gemma taught him how to chop trees instead of how to trade guns.

"People more likely to listen to you that way."

"Yeah. So I can help everyone." It meant that she spent less time playing and more time learning as a child but Moana never minded. She loved her island, her family and her people. It was worth every moment to become the leader that they deserved. "I don't think anyone listens to me." At least not here.

She looked up at him and then passed him the small hand ax.

"Here. You want to strip the twigs and leaves from the stick so it's smooth." It was his spear and Moana thought that Jax should learn this part of making a spear too. "You want to keep it straight so don't dig in too much. If it's not straight then you won't be able to throw it straight."

"Leave it to me to fuck up carving my first spear," Jax says, laughing. He thinks everyone back home would laugh their asses off if they knew he was taking instructions from a nineteen year old on how to make a hunting spear but fuck them. He feels good here, unburdened, and it's kind of nice. Nobody depends on him to make decisions and nobody looks at him as someone who's supposed to be pushing the envelope and changing the direction of the club. He's just Jax.

He starts stripping the twigs off the branch as she instructs. "How many of these have you made in your life, huh? A million?"

"Maybe over a dozen." Moana watched him work, making sure that he didn't mess up since she didn't want to try and find another stick that suited him. "I've made three since I arrived here and only a few at home. We have better materials at home so the spears I've made here have been more... breakable." Though one of them did safe Moana's life before snapping in half.

"There is something different about the wood here. I'm not sure what it is." She wished that she had something from home to compare but she didn't.

"Once all the twigs are off then you'll need to smooth it out some."

"Maybe it's harder. This is redwood, like we have where I live," Jax points out. "Not exactly where I live but they have trees like this in parts of California. They're really old and really tall, taller than the ones we have here. The wood's probably more brittle than the wood you have on your island."

He works on the twigs, finishing up removing the last of them. "You've got what, coconut palms?"

"Redwood." Moana looked at the stick a little closer. It didn't look like it was red but then she's discovering that some names didn't make a lot of sense. At least, not until they were broken out and explained to her.

"Huh? Oh. Yes." She nodded her head, her dark gaze shifting from the stick to Jax. "Also mulberry and Uru."

"Not sure why it's called redwood, by the way," Jax offers. "It just is. It stays green all year round - most of the trees where I'm at get brown when it gets cold and the leaves fall off but not these. They keep their leaves and stay green."

He finishes up with the stick and offers it to her for inspection. "Do I pass Spear Making 101?"

"I wonder why its called redwood then. Who named it?" It sounded like a very silly name.

Moana took the long stick from Jax and inspected it carefully. He did a good job though it felt a little off balanced. It might be something that he'd have to get used too since Moana didn't see anything noticeably different along the length of the stick.

"Looks good. Now we find a tip and make the string to lash them together."

"Don't know. Those trees are thousands of years old, Moana. Been there since before I was born and they'll be there after I'm dead."

Being in a forest like that where everything is so old is kind of overwhelming but it's not something he can seek out here in this place. It's not the same.

"What should I get for a tip? Some kind of rock, right?"

"Yes. I had found arrowheads in the river bed during the summer. They are too small but we need to find something in that rough shape. Then we chip at the stone to make the edge sharp. If it dulls you'll need to replace it but it usually take some time. You can also see if you can use a small shovel head from the inn. I don't know how many of those we have but metal won't dull as quickly as rock."

Moana wanted to give him options so he could find something that he wanted to use. Technically he could lash a knife to the edge of the stick though Moana would ask him to be careful with anything that sharp.

"I guess it's time to learn all the Boy Scout shit I never learned," Jax says. "Lets go look for some rocks so you can teach me how to make my own arrowheads. There might not always be some already made and it sounds like a good thing to know how to do around here."

There's animals big enough to need a spear to take down, after all, and those types of animals threaten the livestock and can keep people fed for a few days. Taking them out is beneficial in a couple different ways and Jax wants to feel like something other than a waste of goddamn space.

"Sure. The best place will be by the river bed." Moana didn't know why but the rocks she pulled from the water often worked better than the ones she found along the base of the cliff. They were somehow more resilient if they managed to survive the steady flow of water.

She turned and heading in what she thought was the direction of the river.

"You can also make spear heads out of bone and other hard materials." Moana was going to continue to think of ideas in case they couldn't find a rock.

"Bone isn't too brittle or anything?" Jax doesn't know how he feels about using bones. He's killed people, sure, but using bones? He's assuming these are going to be animal bones but with this place, there's no fucking telling what the people who run it will end up doing to him. He thinks Moana is probably the expert, though, so he ought to shut up and just let her do the talking and he do the walking.

"Obviously you know what you're talking about more than me, though."

They would definitely be animal bones but Moana didn't think she'd have to clarify that. "Bone is strong if you shape it the right way. There is also things like horns from animals though I have no idea how to shape that into something without breaking it." So maybe that was a bad idea.

Moana lifted her shoulders in a shrug as they picked their way over to the river. "I know the things from my island. It's all a little different here. Things don't act the way I expect." They were usually small changes but even a small change can completely ruin one of Moana's projects.

"Makes you the same as everyone else," Jax says. "I know how shit works back where I'm from, what the rules are and how to play them. This place is completely different. Nothing I'm good at applies here."

He's a halfway decent mechanic, when he wants to be, and he's got a head for running a business so long as it isn't legal. He's not really sure what to do with all the Boy Scout shit but he's been here for months and he hasn't died; that's success, right?

"I suppose so."

Moana didn't know if it was a good thing or not. She felt conflicted at times, feeling like the daughter of the chief and then like everyone else. No one here knew more than another, at least not when it came to why or how any of this had happened.

She'd never thought she'd see herself this way.

"Ah. the River." Moana paused to find a good cropping of rocks to find something that looked close enough to arrow shaped.

"How do you know what kind of rock to use? What's going to hold up and what's going to crumble?" This is something Jax wants to learn how to do for himself in case Moana ever disappears on him. If you'd told him a year ago he'd come to depend on a nineteen year old girl to get through the day to day and it wouldn't be a sexual relationship, he'd have laughed. Still, he likes what they have. He likes having a little sister who knows a shit ton more than he does.

"Just luck?"

"Luck is part of it. You know how rocks are all different shapes? Well you can see where they'll break or if they're strong enough to withstand more force." She picked up a rock from where the water rolled against the shore and held it up for Jax to see.

"This one for example. Will break. Watch." She threw it against a bolder, not particularly hard but with the force that you might throw a spear. A third of the rocks break off and Moana began looking for the pieces.

"If I can find it again. Their was a crack in it, like the way that it had grown was uneven. Here it is." She picked up the two pieces and held them where they had broken. "See?"

Jax looks at it and he can see the fracture lines, sees where it wouldn't hold up. It's knowledge he tucks away for the future and while he hopes that Moana doesn't ever disappear on him, he knows he can't bank on stuff like that either.

"So you want something that's gonna take a beating then, right? Maybe something like flint? I don't know anything about rocks, just that one."

🍁 the times they are a changin' (ota)

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