summerdude | I Embrace My Inner Tarzan [open post]

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I Embrace My Inner Tarzan [open post]

There's a massive old oak about fifty yards west of Magnus's favorite clearing. It has thick, sturdy branches; he can climb nearly forty feet up it before he starts to worry about them holding his weight. There's a family of squirrels that lives nearby -- good squirrels, nothing like Ratatosk -- and Magnus likes to listen to them discuss their acorn deposits. Sometimes, when they're not looking, he'll grow and stash more acorns for them to discover; he's not sure how long the winters here get.

He's pretty sure it's cold outside, but it's not cold enough to affect him, and so he's still barefoot and in a t-shirt pretty much all the time.

Today, he's been scrounging in some of the out-buildings. There's a portable outdoor fireplace. While he doesn't feel the cold, he finds (contained) fires comforting, and it'll be nice to have some hot food, so he shoulders it and a makeshift grill surface, and lugs them to the base of his oak tree. Now he'll have an easier way of preparing the fish Mothwing sometimes leaves him than trying to summon the right amount of summer into them so that they cook and don't explode, at least.

He lights a modest fire, feeding it with fallen sticks. Then he shoves an apple, picked from another nearby tree, into his mouth and a book he'd pilfered from the library into the waistband of his pants, and climbs up an easy ten feet to his favorite branch. Things don't seem so bad, living out here.

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"I don't think so?" Magnus says. He drops his book to the ground, bites partway into his apple to keep hold of it, and climbs up a few more branches so that he and Gu Xiang are on a level. He straddles a likely-looking branch and takes the apple out of his mouth again. "I'm just... chilling."

"You're not going anywhere. You don't need to camp out here. Why are you out in the cold?" Unhooking her legs from the branch, Gu Xiang descends to balance daintily on Magnus's bough. "If you pissed someone off, you can tell me. I'll put horse shit in their bed for you."

Magnus gives a surprised bark of laughter. "I appreciate the offer, Gu Xiang, but I really don't think I've pissed anyone off. I just wanted to be outside for awhile, you know?" Gu Xiang makes him feel playful, and so gives in to whim and hooks his legs over the branch, then leans all the way back until he's dangling by his knees. Unlike earlier, he's careful to tuck his shirt in his waistband as he leans so it doesn't fall over his face. "And the cold never bothered me anyway; I can sleep outside through a snowstorm and the only thing that affects me is if I get wet from it."

"Oh, wow." She gives due consideration to the benefits of being so warm that a snowstorm is barely an inconvenience. For one thing, she wouldn't have to carry nearly so much firewood! "So you just like it out here?"

"I do," Magnus says. He leans up, bending at the waist, and then drops back, letting the force of that lead him into rocking back and forth, still hanging by his knees. "Camping reminds me of my mom." And his dad, but since Frey isn't answering his prayer, that's increasingly less of a draw.

On an upswing, he raises his eyebrows at Gu Xiang. "What have you been up to lately?" he asks her. "Wreck any cool devastation upon your enemies since our competition?"

"No." She sighs, then wraps her legs around the branch and hangs upside down with him. "I don't have any enemies here. I'm so bored! And I'm supposed to be writing bad poems, but I don't know what to write about!"

Magnus considers this with all of the gravity it deserves (so, all the gravity). "You could write a poem about my sword," he offers. "Jack has been bugging me to get poems written about him for years now. But if you don't want to do my dirty work for me... A poem about how much you miss having enemies? What you would do if one emerged? Or an ode to someone with really phenomenal eyebrows. The best trick you ever played on someone. The feeling of hanging upside down on a big tree. I can keep going, if you want?"

Gu Xiang folds her arms. "How would you write a poem about hanging upside down on a big tree?" she asks, hanging upside down o a big tree.

Magnus, who knows almost nothing about poetry, says, "Well, what are you feeling right now?"

"Upside down, obviously!" she says, making a little abortive lunge at him that's mostly with her eyes. "I like to sleep like this. When I was traveling with my master, I'd hang from the rafters of his room sometimes and sleep that way."

"That's so cool," Magnus enthuses. Gu Xiang is so cool. Maybe he'll try sleeping like this -- on a lower branch, probably, just in case. "So you could write a poem about how you like sleeping upside down. Any fun memories you have about it, that kind of thing." He pauses as something occurs to him. "I'm pretty sure poetry is different in different places. How do poems where you're from typically go?"

"Oh, you know." She sucks in a breath and holds it in her cheeks, then blows it all out at once and recites, "'I went up the mountain and you weren't there, I knocked on your door and looked in the window, maybe you're doing something cool like riding around in your carriage or going fishing, but right now you're not here so I guess I'm going away now.¹'"

¹ The poem that Gu Xiang is mangling here is 'After Missing the Recluse on the Western Mountain.'

"I took some Poetry Recitation to the Death classes in Valhalla," Magnus tells Gu Xiang. He tries to remember a snippet that might interest her. "'Dew of corpses flowed over the, um, beach? together with the blood of the attack-elf to the ground, where there were piles of hewn arms and legs. The ale-dispenser fell head-first into a well mixed with blood; the battle is painted on the leaf of the trees of the lands of the sea-king.'"

He's pretty sure he got some words wrong, but the gist is there, at least.

"Oh, wow, no one writes poems like that where I come from. Do you like those kinds of poems?"

"Not as much as some of the people I know," Magnus says, with a laugh. "My friend Halfborn is really into that stuff."

"Is Halfborn here?" she asks--maybe Halfborn can give her tips!

"I wish," Magnus says, with great feeling.

"Huh." Gu Xiang considers a little longer. She isn't sure why, but she cares about Magnus and wants to protect him. She knows he can take care of himself in a fight--probably better than her, even!--but there's something about him that's vulnerable in a way she recognizes. It's the kind of vulnerability that makes you want to pluck a child or a dog from the riverbank, because even if you don't have anything to give, your nothing and their nothing are not the same.

"When I was little, Wen Kexing found me on a riverbank," she says. "He was just a kid, and he didn't have a real home or anything, but he picked me up anyway. He saved my life. In Ghost Valley, people don't save other people--but he saved me." She smiles a little, upside down, swaying. "And now I want to get my teeth into everything, because I lived, and he taught me how to bite."

"I love that," Magnus says. "Wen Kexing sounds great." He swings for a moment, then says, "My friends Hearthstone and Blitzen did basically the same with me, but I was a little older -- fourteen. Hearthstone is an elf, who needs the sun, and Blitzen is a dwarf, who can't stand the sun, so Hearth took the day shift and Blitz took the night shift when I was homeless. They'd help me out, clue me in to the places where people dumped good food, make sure I didn't get beaten up or caught by the police. Or the wolves." Thoughtfully: "I'm not as much of a biter, but they put so much into keeping me alive -- apparently they saved me, like, seven separate times -- that I don't want my death to go to waste."

"Wow, how did you pay them back?" Because obviously you have to pay someone back for saving your life. That's just how it works.

"Oh, our relationship isn't like that," Magnus says. For one, their initial caretaking was a job given to them by Mimir, so the help they gave him was paying off a debt to a god. But that changed pretty quickly, and they did it just because they liked him after that. "But I guess I have healed them a few times." He purses his lips. This isn't the story he loves sharing, but he's pretty sure it's the sort of story Gu Xiang would love hearing, so: "Also once I turned Hearthstone's dad into a dragon and then killed him and ate his heart. But it wasn't paying him back for his help, it was just the kind of thing you do for a friend."

She nods, as though this is indeed a perfectly normal thing to do for a friend. "I don't know if Wen Kexing really wanted me to pay him back, either," she says, admitting it to herself aloud for the first time. "But he wanted me to have a reason to stick around, so he made me his servant, and now he relies on me for everything. I do his washing, manage his money, make sure he remembers to eat and drink--back when it was just the two of us, he needed me. Now ... maybe not."

"No? What changed?"

There are two answers she can give to this--one is, He became the Master of Ghost Valley, and we went from scrounging and suffering to living in a palace. But closer to her heart is the moment when he outpaced her, when he left her with no duties or expectations in a hard rain. "He fell in love with someone," she says, her voice a little smaller. "Someone who was dying. And I guess laundry and money and food and drink didn't matter so much anymore."

"Oh, Gu Xiang, that's so rough," Magnus says. He stills his swinging and looks over at her. "I'm sorry."

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