ataraxionlogs | Two can be just as lonely

CHARACTERS: Tom McNair [OPEN]
LOCATION: Gardens
WARNINGS: none
SUMMARY: Tom is still in a funk about Hal and Hayes so he's been spending a lot of time in the garden

There wasn't that much to actually do in the gardens. The place was still quite wild. Where fruit and vegetables grew the passengers who worked in here had managed to make it look tame and decent. Personally Tom liked the wild areas best. It was probably the wolf in him.

Since coming out of the jump he had taken to spending nearly all his time in the garden. It was the sort of place a person could spend the whole day not thinking about anything except the most basic of thoughts. One would think he would find spending so much time here troubling with how it reminded him of home before he'd moved in with Annie and Hal. All those years it was just him and his Dad living in a caravan out in the woods, doing hard labor when needed to buy necessities, and just being with nature and each other. He missed that life, but he also appreciated having a real home and family.

He didn't have that here.

With Hal acting strange and him avoiding Alex, Tom found he didn't have much here but this garden that reminded him so much of when things were happy.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The solidity of being on this ship brought some relative inconveniences along with all the comforts, such as finding that one had to deal directly with the environment they were placed in--in this case the expanse of the greenery all about. After Alex's initial venture into the area had ended in stains, torn tights, and muddy boots, she had sworn off the gardens for a while. The appeal was rather negligent.

Her resolve to stay away only came back with a loud, disgruntled curse, a few moments too late. Rentaghosting into the gardens did save time and effort. It also meant popping up in savory places, such as the tree branch she found herself stuck in.

Inconsiderate, inconvenient tree branch that was too high above the ground for comfort.

"Well, cock it." Alex muttered with resignation, fishing twigs out of her sleeve.

Here in the depth of the garden the last voice Tom expected to hear was that of Alex. He twists his head to look up and wonders what she's doing in a tree and how long she'd been there.

"You work in the garden now too?" Normally all he saw were other workers and maybe one of their friends.

"Oh, you know me," Alex grumbled, struggling for a while before dangling her legs closer to the ground, "Doing my bit to serve the great mothership, one shrubbery at a time."

The grass flattened underneath her noisily, but at least she was on steady grounds once more, "Thought you'd be here, is all. Haven't seen you since the... thing with Hal."

He didn't think Alex was one for gardening but then again he didn't really know her too well.

"Oh. Yeah." His foot kicked an exposed root and he shrugged. He wasn't hiding exactly but he wasn't making an effort to be around anyone either. There were a lot of confusing feeling inside him and he had found that it was easier to just ignore them altogether. "Just lotsa work here." From the looks of the place that wasn't exactly true.

She felt no qualm about letting the grass stain her clothes as she sat down, pulling one knee closer to her chest. She'd fallen out of the habit of minding herself after her death, and it was easy to launder things on the ship.

"Work. Right. No, that's not right at all. You've become all but a recluse. I don't think I remember the last time I've seen you smile, and you smiled quite a bit out of all of us, and not always when the telly was on." soon enough, tufts of grass snapped between her fingers as she tugged at them absently, "That's not like you at all."

Tom shrugged. He wanted to argue that he wasn't hiding except he knew that wasn't quite true. "Not much to smile about I guess. Don't matter really, does it?"

He pulled out a small wind-up wolf toy from his pocket and and fiddled with it before setting it on the grass to "walk." "Maybe I got space fever or something."

"Wonder why we don't all have that," Alex muttered under breath, settling down to draw one knee to her chest. Next would come the awkward silence as she struggled for words to show concern. It was only marginally better than the deluge of words.

"Listen, Thomas. That thing with Hal back then... That wasn't your fault. None of it was. And it does matter. You were only trying to do what was right."

That's a whole lot of uncomfortable feelings Alex just made him think about. He misses Hal more than he's willing to admit even to himself. "Didn't do nothin' though did I? He still ain't 'al and everything is still different."

And wasn't that the kicker? If they had to be stuck on this ship then why couldn't something just stay the same?

Two can be just as lonely

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