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petroniaThe SBR fic I was trying to finish for Ka's birthday, only it took a great deal more grunt work than imagined. This may be the first SBR fic anyone's ever written in English, actually. I'd prefer if it weren't as the idea of being the first ficcer in a fandom gives me the heebies. XD;
I've been told several times recently that I undersell so I'll refrain from using words such as "pointless" to describe the story, but please to note it really is a 2300-word fic about people doing their laundry. Also contains - pace JoJo - bad physics, traumatizing male nudity and a digression on Renaissance art, but not actually all that much ghei. Have tried to avoid Brokeback-isms but is erm difficult given settei.
Laundry
They were a half day's ride ahead of the pack and well into the foothills when Johnny broached the topic, only to encounter stiffer resistance than expected.
"If we find a stream or creek or something, I mean. This isn't the Arizona desert, there's plenty of—"
"I don't feel like it."
"What?"
"I don't feel like it," Gyro repeated cheerfully, and patted his saddlebag. "Teddy will tell me when he needs to bathe."
At this juncture a reasonable man would have held his nose and abandoned efforts, but Johnny hadn't gotten to his current position by relying on reason (a naysayer might substitute 'sanity'). Half an hour of lecturing later the answer was different.
"Not until we can get supplies. I always lose a sock. Never two, just the one. It's fate."
"That's ridiculous," said Johnny. Gyro shrugged.
"Cleanliness is next door to godliness, is it?" he said. "What hygienic puritans you Americans are."
It was the same tone of voice he might have used to remark What excellent headhunters you pygmy tribes are. Johnny sighed and nudged his horse down the slope.
***
They forded the creek an hour before sundown and made camp on the far bank, at a place where the current widened and curved before tumbling through rocky crevasses; southward down their travelled path, part of the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Johnny started the fire while Gyro unslung the saddlebags and led the horses to drink. The creek had shrunk as summer approached, uncovering a broad, half-moon stretch of riverbed. Flat slate boulders led down to the water's edge, worn smooth by torrential snowmelt.
Driftwood was plentiful; so was dry brush for tinder. He had a good flame going and was rummaging through a saddlebag for tin cans when he heard footsteps approaching, and lifted his head.
Gyro had a suspicious gleam in his eye – not easily named, but one that set off warning bells in the back of Johnny's mind. He was grinning a little. A stray shaft of dying sunlight glanced off his teeth, and Johnny had to narrow his eyes against the glare.
"Did you bring the water?" he asked, wary.
"In a moment," Gyro agreed amenably. "You still up for getting clean?"
"What?"
Gyro bent down. Johnny thought he was reaching for the frying pan. The next thing he knew Gyro had slid one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders, and was heaving him up bodily. For a split second he didn't understand what was happening; then he had to scramble for purchase, clutching at Gyro's vest.
"What," he said. Gyro was striding toward the creek, as easily as if Johnny weighed little more than a goosedown pillow in his arms. "Gyro, what the hell are you doing?"
"Laundry," Gyro said. "We're going to do laundry, just as your lordship requested. Actually, to be precise-"
He stopped at the edge of the water. Johnny realised the danger too late; he grabbed abortively at Gyro's shoulders, slipped, and fell in with an undignified squawk.
"You're going to do the laundry," said Gyro. His grin had grown into the full dazzling display. "I'm going to cook. This is what is commonly known as division of labour."
Johnny struggled to a seated position, spluttering and pushing wet hair out of his eyes. The splash landing had done for him from head to foot, but the creek itself barely came up to his chest: the level of a tin tub. In fact – he realised – he was sitting in the natural equivalent thereof, a hollowed-out depression surrounded by a circle of boulders that slowed the rushing current to a trickle.
Or maybe not entirely natural. Someone had blocked the gaps between boulders with pebbles the size of a man's hand, and cleared out the weeds that clogged the pool. Would Gyro have had the time? They'd crossed no one in the foothills – the locals were forewarned of the race's passage – but the ford was marked on the map for ranchers and miners alike to find.
"Half an hour until sundown," Gyro was saying. He'd dropped his vest and hat on the shingle and was stripping his undershirt off over his head. "Better hurry. It's going to be a warm night, but no good either way if you can't see the washing."
Johnny opened his mouth to protest. Then Gyro's belt hit the ground – holsters, balls and all – and with a shock he realised Gyro was shimmying out of his jeans. "Don't do that!"
"Why ever not?" said Gyro. That grin again. Johnny gritted his teeth.
"It's indecent!"
"And he calls himself a sportsman." Gyro spread his arms in a grand gesture. "No member of the fairer sex for a hundred miles in any direction to take offense, Johnny-princess, and I trust there's nothing to see here that causes you undue astonishment. Ready?"
"Get me out of here, I'm not going to sit in the middle of the creek and—"
The balled up shirt and jeans hit him in the chest, cutting off the end of his sentence. "Oilskin package in left back pocket, that's soap powder," said Gyro. "Right pocket is socks. Choose wisely, as the saying runs... I'll come get you when the food is done."
"Gyro! Gyro Zeppeli, I am not washing your socks! Do you hear me?"
Gyro only turned and waved; he was halfway to the campfire already. Johnny scowled and retrieved the soap from the specified location.
***
He considered letting Gyro's socks be carried off downstream: a regrettable oversight, hardly sabotage. But Gyro probably wasn't carrying a spare pair, and they were supposed to be in this together. Sort of. In a sense. In a not-dropping-the-other-into-the-creek sense.
He washed his own clothes first, and himself while he was at it. The former was an inexpert process that took longer than Gyro's estimate: even during the last two years of cold-water flat living it had been the landlady who took pity on him and did his washing. The water was cold, the soap powder scratchy and smelling of lye, and he kept having to add more so it would lather. He was still scrubbing his shirt against the top of a boulder when Gyro wandered back down to the water, not twenty minutes later.
"I got your pork and beans here," he said. "Coming out of the water yet?"
Johnny rolled his eyes, not bothering to dignify with a response. Gyro had kept his boots and hat on – only his boots and hat on – with the addition of a blanket draped Indian-style around his shoulders, which Johnny felt was missing the point rather. He was carrying the frying pan in one hand; it smoked and emitted the tempting aroma of scorched bacon fat.
"You're doing this the long way, aren't you," said Gyro. "What did I tell you about practical applications of centrifugal force?"
Did snapping a wet shirt in someone's face count as a practical application of centrifugal force? But he'd have to be within range. "Geez, I don't know, Gyro – you're the expert, why don't you come over here and enlighten me with your expertise?"
"Have to get you out first," said Gyro, oblivious to industrial-grade sarcasm. He set the frying pan on the ground, shrugged off the blanket and waded into the creek. "Put the shirt down. Hey, stop that – ow – no, really, there's an easier way. Sit. Sit and watch."
Johnny sat on the blanket and watched as Gyro gathered the wet clothes into a pile, blocked the current with a rock and sprinkled the water in the resulting pool with a liberal quantity of soap powder. Finally he produced one of his steel balls, seemingly out of thin air, and dropped it in the water with the clothes.
At first nothing happened. Then – as Gyro watched with lazy concentration – the surface of the water began to churn and foam. Soon soap bubbles were spilling over the lip of the pool and rising into the air, drifting to shore with the breeze. Johnny saw one of Gyro's socks float to the surface of the water and duck under repeatedly, going round and round.
"Ten minutes ought to do it," said Gyro, "they've been soaking for a while. Another ten-minute rinse cycle after that, and bob's your uncle."
Fascination warred with outrage. "You don't mean to say you could have done this all along."
There was a pause that spoke of backpedaling. "Eat your dinner," Gyro said finally.
Johnny sniffed and dug in. Beside him Gyro stretched out on the boulder like a sunbathing mermaid, although the sun was dipping red below the horizon and the comparison in general did not hold well in a visual sense.
"Say, Johnny," he said after a few minutes, "you know Leonardo da Vinci?"
Johnny swallowed his latest mouthful of dinner. "Personally?"
"This," said Gyro, scooting closer so that his feet dangled over the creek, "reminds me of one of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. A few years ago I had the opportunity to view the original, in a travelling exhibition from Florence. You may have seen engravings of his major works on this side of the Atlantic, of course, but—"
"What was it of?" said Johnny, who had just placed the name.
"Machinery – canal locks and such. Water."
"Water?"
Gyro turned to look at him, then suddenly grinned. "Say I spin my ball in the center of a calm pond. What do I get?"
You get non-sequitur time again. "Waves, I suppose. A whirlpool."
"So. And as you get further and further from the center—" Gyro gestured with one hand. "See the way the creek runs over the rocks, there?"
Johnny nodded.
"Shape of the water stays; each drop is here and gone. The wave in the pond is the same, only it moves and the water stays in place. The wave's the thing itself. Learn to use it and it extends your reach through any material and along any surface, just as long as there's something there: wood, water, flesh..." Gyro reached out and caught a soap bubble. It didn't pop; instead it balanced improbably on the tip of his index finger, glistening iridescent, until Gyro blew it gently away. "...Soap."
The bubble hit Johnny in the chest with a sharp report, like a kernel of corn popping in the fire. Johnny flinched, startled.
"Ow!" It didn't really hurt, though, more like he'd stopped a tuning fork with his ribcage.
"That's the water da Vinci sketched," said Gyro. "He painted it too, if you know how to look. Streams, clouds in the sky, the twist of a vine... the hair of angels... what a thing genius is."
As a rhetorical flourish he reached out and twined a damp strand of Johnny's hair around his finger.
Johnny glared, inhaled to speak, then stopped short. The tuning fork or whatever it was Gyro had done was still going: a faintly perceptible, purring vibration was burrowing into his chest, like a happy kitten under a blanket.
He must have had a odd look on his face, because Gyro got an equally odd one on his and lowered his hand. Not very far.
There was a silence of several seconds, during which Johnny learnt that Gyro's eyes were very green. He looked away hastily.
"Was he—" not 'stand user', but there was no generic term for someone of Gyro's ability— "related to you?"
"Hmm? Not that I know of. Principle's the same for everyone."
—Gyro said in absentminded tones. He was staring openly, as if the source of distraction were located on Johnny's face. In the vicinity of Johnny's mouth, in fact.
The kitten drifted left, tickling Johnny's lung.
"Gyro, I—"
Gyro wasn't listening. He'd shifted his weight and was leaning closer still, still intent on something Johnny couldn't see. His fingers slid over Johnny's shoulder and came to rest on the nape of his neck.
"Say, Johnny," he said (and Johnny could suddenly hear his accent again, the way the J softened in his mouth and stresses shifted). "Do you ever get the urge sometimes to—"
Spend a couple of years without the use of one's legs and practicality becomes second nature. It flashed through Johnny's mind that if Gyro tumbled him over backward as he was clearly about to do Johnny wouldn't be able to get his legs out of the way in time, and furthermore would not be able to brake the movement as he was still holding the frying pan, and thus his head would hit a rock unless he dropped the frying pan right now but in any case Gyro must conservatively weigh— and his back-
He prodded Gyro in the stomach with the frying pan, hard. Gyro blinked and let go.
The kitten expired with a hiccup.
"Clothes," said Johnny. "Time to get the clothes out of the creek."
"Right," said Gyro. He got up, then paused, looking down at Johnny. Johnny fixed his gaze determinedly on the creek's opposite bank, now grown hazy with approaching dusk. A breeze was rising, but it wasn't cold. In fact – now that his brain was recovering the processing lag of the past minute – he felt far warmer than warranted.
Gyro, at any rate, appeared to reach a conclusion sans verbal assistance. He gave Johnny a crooked grin and splashed into the creek, whistling as he went. By Zeppeli standards it was not a particularly manic expression, but somehow rated more bells than a five-alarm fire. Johnny buried his face in his hands.
"This," he said under his breath, "is going to be interes—"
***
In the end Gyro did lose a sock. Some things, he said, were manifest destiny.
I've been told several times recently that I undersell so I'll refrain from using words such as "pointless" to describe the story, but please to note it really is a 2300-word fic about people doing their laundry. Also contains - pace JoJo - bad physics, traumatizing male nudity and a digression on Renaissance art, but not actually all that much ghei. Have tried to avoid Brokeback-isms but is erm difficult given settei.
Laundry
They were a half day's ride ahead of the pack and well into the foothills when Johnny broached the topic, only to encounter stiffer resistance than expected.
"If we find a stream or creek or something, I mean. This isn't the Arizona desert, there's plenty of—"
"I don't feel like it."
"What?"
"I don't feel like it," Gyro repeated cheerfully, and patted his saddlebag. "Teddy will tell me when he needs to bathe."
At this juncture a reasonable man would have held his nose and abandoned efforts, but Johnny hadn't gotten to his current position by relying on reason (a naysayer might substitute 'sanity'). Half an hour of lecturing later the answer was different.
"Not until we can get supplies. I always lose a sock. Never two, just the one. It's fate."
"That's ridiculous," said Johnny. Gyro shrugged.
"Cleanliness is next door to godliness, is it?" he said. "What hygienic puritans you Americans are."
It was the same tone of voice he might have used to remark What excellent headhunters you pygmy tribes are. Johnny sighed and nudged his horse down the slope.
***
They forded the creek an hour before sundown and made camp on the far bank, at a place where the current widened and curved before tumbling through rocky crevasses; southward down their travelled path, part of the headwaters of the Rio Grande. Johnny started the fire while Gyro unslung the saddlebags and led the horses to drink. The creek had shrunk as summer approached, uncovering a broad, half-moon stretch of riverbed. Flat slate boulders led down to the water's edge, worn smooth by torrential snowmelt.
Driftwood was plentiful; so was dry brush for tinder. He had a good flame going and was rummaging through a saddlebag for tin cans when he heard footsteps approaching, and lifted his head.
Gyro had a suspicious gleam in his eye – not easily named, but one that set off warning bells in the back of Johnny's mind. He was grinning a little. A stray shaft of dying sunlight glanced off his teeth, and Johnny had to narrow his eyes against the glare.
"Did you bring the water?" he asked, wary.
"In a moment," Gyro agreed amenably. "You still up for getting clean?"
"What?"
Gyro bent down. Johnny thought he was reaching for the frying pan. The next thing he knew Gyro had slid one arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders, and was heaving him up bodily. For a split second he didn't understand what was happening; then he had to scramble for purchase, clutching at Gyro's vest.
"What," he said. Gyro was striding toward the creek, as easily as if Johnny weighed little more than a goosedown pillow in his arms. "Gyro, what the hell are you doing?"
"Laundry," Gyro said. "We're going to do laundry, just as your lordship requested. Actually, to be precise-"
He stopped at the edge of the water. Johnny realised the danger too late; he grabbed abortively at Gyro's shoulders, slipped, and fell in with an undignified squawk.
"You're going to do the laundry," said Gyro. His grin had grown into the full dazzling display. "I'm going to cook. This is what is commonly known as division of labour."
Johnny struggled to a seated position, spluttering and pushing wet hair out of his eyes. The splash landing had done for him from head to foot, but the creek itself barely came up to his chest: the level of a tin tub. In fact – he realised – he was sitting in the natural equivalent thereof, a hollowed-out depression surrounded by a circle of boulders that slowed the rushing current to a trickle.
Or maybe not entirely natural. Someone had blocked the gaps between boulders with pebbles the size of a man's hand, and cleared out the weeds that clogged the pool. Would Gyro have had the time? They'd crossed no one in the foothills – the locals were forewarned of the race's passage – but the ford was marked on the map for ranchers and miners alike to find.
"Half an hour until sundown," Gyro was saying. He'd dropped his vest and hat on the shingle and was stripping his undershirt off over his head. "Better hurry. It's going to be a warm night, but no good either way if you can't see the washing."
Johnny opened his mouth to protest. Then Gyro's belt hit the ground – holsters, balls and all – and with a shock he realised Gyro was shimmying out of his jeans. "Don't do that!"
"Why ever not?" said Gyro. That grin again. Johnny gritted his teeth.
"It's indecent!"
"And he calls himself a sportsman." Gyro spread his arms in a grand gesture. "No member of the fairer sex for a hundred miles in any direction to take offense, Johnny-princess, and I trust there's nothing to see here that causes you undue astonishment. Ready?"
"Get me out of here, I'm not going to sit in the middle of the creek and—"
The balled up shirt and jeans hit him in the chest, cutting off the end of his sentence. "Oilskin package in left back pocket, that's soap powder," said Gyro. "Right pocket is socks. Choose wisely, as the saying runs... I'll come get you when the food is done."
"Gyro! Gyro Zeppeli, I am not washing your socks! Do you hear me?"
Gyro only turned and waved; he was halfway to the campfire already. Johnny scowled and retrieved the soap from the specified location.
***
He considered letting Gyro's socks be carried off downstream: a regrettable oversight, hardly sabotage. But Gyro probably wasn't carrying a spare pair, and they were supposed to be in this together. Sort of. In a sense. In a not-dropping-the-other-into-the-creek sense.
He washed his own clothes first, and himself while he was at it. The former was an inexpert process that took longer than Gyro's estimate: even during the last two years of cold-water flat living it had been the landlady who took pity on him and did his washing. The water was cold, the soap powder scratchy and smelling of lye, and he kept having to add more so it would lather. He was still scrubbing his shirt against the top of a boulder when Gyro wandered back down to the water, not twenty minutes later.
"I got your pork and beans here," he said. "Coming out of the water yet?"
Johnny rolled his eyes, not bothering to dignify with a response. Gyro had kept his boots and hat on – only his boots and hat on – with the addition of a blanket draped Indian-style around his shoulders, which Johnny felt was missing the point rather. He was carrying the frying pan in one hand; it smoked and emitted the tempting aroma of scorched bacon fat.
"You're doing this the long way, aren't you," said Gyro. "What did I tell you about practical applications of centrifugal force?"
Did snapping a wet shirt in someone's face count as a practical application of centrifugal force? But he'd have to be within range. "Geez, I don't know, Gyro – you're the expert, why don't you come over here and enlighten me with your expertise?"
"Have to get you out first," said Gyro, oblivious to industrial-grade sarcasm. He set the frying pan on the ground, shrugged off the blanket and waded into the creek. "Put the shirt down. Hey, stop that – ow – no, really, there's an easier way. Sit. Sit and watch."
Johnny sat on the blanket and watched as Gyro gathered the wet clothes into a pile, blocked the current with a rock and sprinkled the water in the resulting pool with a liberal quantity of soap powder. Finally he produced one of his steel balls, seemingly out of thin air, and dropped it in the water with the clothes.
At first nothing happened. Then – as Gyro watched with lazy concentration – the surface of the water began to churn and foam. Soon soap bubbles were spilling over the lip of the pool and rising into the air, drifting to shore with the breeze. Johnny saw one of Gyro's socks float to the surface of the water and duck under repeatedly, going round and round.
"Ten minutes ought to do it," said Gyro, "they've been soaking for a while. Another ten-minute rinse cycle after that, and bob's your uncle."
Fascination warred with outrage. "You don't mean to say you could have done this all along."
There was a pause that spoke of backpedaling. "Eat your dinner," Gyro said finally.
Johnny sniffed and dug in. Beside him Gyro stretched out on the boulder like a sunbathing mermaid, although the sun was dipping red below the horizon and the comparison in general did not hold well in a visual sense.
"Say, Johnny," he said after a few minutes, "you know Leonardo da Vinci?"
Johnny swallowed his latest mouthful of dinner. "Personally?"
"This," said Gyro, scooting closer so that his feet dangled over the creek, "reminds me of one of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. A few years ago I had the opportunity to view the original, in a travelling exhibition from Florence. You may have seen engravings of his major works on this side of the Atlantic, of course, but—"
"What was it of?" said Johnny, who had just placed the name.
"Machinery – canal locks and such. Water."
"Water?"
Gyro turned to look at him, then suddenly grinned. "Say I spin my ball in the center of a calm pond. What do I get?"
You get non-sequitur time again. "Waves, I suppose. A whirlpool."
"So. And as you get further and further from the center—" Gyro gestured with one hand. "See the way the creek runs over the rocks, there?"
Johnny nodded.
"Shape of the water stays; each drop is here and gone. The wave in the pond is the same, only it moves and the water stays in place. The wave's the thing itself. Learn to use it and it extends your reach through any material and along any surface, just as long as there's something there: wood, water, flesh..." Gyro reached out and caught a soap bubble. It didn't pop; instead it balanced improbably on the tip of his index finger, glistening iridescent, until Gyro blew it gently away. "...Soap."
The bubble hit Johnny in the chest with a sharp report, like a kernel of corn popping in the fire. Johnny flinched, startled.
"Ow!" It didn't really hurt, though, more like he'd stopped a tuning fork with his ribcage.
"That's the water da Vinci sketched," said Gyro. "He painted it too, if you know how to look. Streams, clouds in the sky, the twist of a vine... the hair of angels... what a thing genius is."
As a rhetorical flourish he reached out and twined a damp strand of Johnny's hair around his finger.
Johnny glared, inhaled to speak, then stopped short. The tuning fork or whatever it was Gyro had done was still going: a faintly perceptible, purring vibration was burrowing into his chest, like a happy kitten under a blanket.
He must have had a odd look on his face, because Gyro got an equally odd one on his and lowered his hand. Not very far.
There was a silence of several seconds, during which Johnny learnt that Gyro's eyes were very green. He looked away hastily.
"Was he—" not 'stand user', but there was no generic term for someone of Gyro's ability— "related to you?"
"Hmm? Not that I know of. Principle's the same for everyone."
—Gyro said in absentminded tones. He was staring openly, as if the source of distraction were located on Johnny's face. In the vicinity of Johnny's mouth, in fact.
The kitten drifted left, tickling Johnny's lung.
"Gyro, I—"
Gyro wasn't listening. He'd shifted his weight and was leaning closer still, still intent on something Johnny couldn't see. His fingers slid over Johnny's shoulder and came to rest on the nape of his neck.
"Say, Johnny," he said (and Johnny could suddenly hear his accent again, the way the J softened in his mouth and stresses shifted). "Do you ever get the urge sometimes to—"
Spend a couple of years without the use of one's legs and practicality becomes second nature. It flashed through Johnny's mind that if Gyro tumbled him over backward as he was clearly about to do Johnny wouldn't be able to get his legs out of the way in time, and furthermore would not be able to brake the movement as he was still holding the frying pan, and thus his head would hit a rock unless he dropped the frying pan right now but in any case Gyro must conservatively weigh— and his back-
He prodded Gyro in the stomach with the frying pan, hard. Gyro blinked and let go.
The kitten expired with a hiccup.
"Clothes," said Johnny. "Time to get the clothes out of the creek."
"Right," said Gyro. He got up, then paused, looking down at Johnny. Johnny fixed his gaze determinedly on the creek's opposite bank, now grown hazy with approaching dusk. A breeze was rising, but it wasn't cold. In fact – now that his brain was recovering the processing lag of the past minute – he felt far warmer than warranted.
Gyro, at any rate, appeared to reach a conclusion sans verbal assistance. He gave Johnny a crooked grin and splashed into the creek, whistling as he went. By Zeppeli standards it was not a particularly manic expression, but somehow rated more bells than a five-alarm fire. Johnny buried his face in his hands.
"This," he said under his breath, "is going to be interes—"
***
In the end Gyro did lose a sock. Some things, he said, were manifest destiny.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 06:30 pm (UTC)Sequel.no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 10:06 pm (UTC)Also, Teddy! I like.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-27 03:32 am (UTC)... no, I must not think of stand powers used in that manner.
*notices new icon*
Date: 2006-07-27 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 11:53 pm (UTC)Of course, ♥ for fic; come online tonight to taaaalk to usssss~
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 11:59 pm (UTC)I THINK YOU ARE THE BEST THING EVAR
WRITE MOAR PLZ T____T
no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 01:13 am (UTC)HOTTer, I mean, damn that mental image!...Poor Johnny, he has to guard his behymen against all and sundry. XD
no subject
Date: 2006-07-30 01:20 am (UTC)