Gestures, part 7
Oct. 28th, 2012 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frogs_of_warSome days I really love my job. Today I had three customers that stood out. One guy came to get a single rose. He’d come in yesterday for one as well. When I gave my parting comment ‘Have a nice day’ he responded that he was working on it. I had to smile. I don’t mind helping someone get laid.
The second guy laid down almost eighty dollars without blinking. The huge arrangement of stargazers and pink roses was for his wife. He’d been meaning to buy her flowers for a while, so he picked an arrangement worth all the ones he would have bought. He planned to put this arrangement on the center of the kitchen island. She is five months pregnant and he wants her to be happy and stress-free.
The last guy wanted his single rose dressed up. Instead of the free clear plastic, he paid extra for shiny pink cellophane. Then he tried to pay. The resister wouldn’t take his credit card. He tried a couple of times, but it kept declining his tender. But he had enough change in his pocket. He paid for a six dollar rose with quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies. As I counted out the change, he repeated that he knew he had $10.15 on his card. When I was done, he had only thirty cents left in change. So he spent over one third of his money on a flower for his girl, which is romantic. Although I’m glad he’s not dating my daughter.
Title: Gestures
Status: Part 7 of 10
Genre: science fiction, romance, slash
Rating: PG (13?)
Content: a delicate nose, homesickness, brooding, rocks, holes, glass beads, beautiful tools, sand, heat, minerals, gravity, and centrifugal force
Length: about 2,000 words
Summary: Colt raises his spirits with craft time.
Masterlist
When the meat was finished cooking, Lion woke Colt. They ate and then scraped the wet wood off the cat’s pelt and put on a new layer. They were almost out of bark to brew up.
Children came. The village had been wondered where the four were. The kids asked Python why he was leaving the hair on the deer hide and he said that was because Colt had a delicate nose.
The children laughed. Colt didn’t even want to image what that would smell like since Python hadn’t seemed to think Colt needed protection from the boiling spoiled animal brains.
Python built a small fire under Orion’s log structure and smoked the deer hide with the wet bark. At least that didn’t smell too horrible even if Colt didn’t enjoy breathing in the smoke.
Orion amused himself explaining the chemical reaction in skin in as first tannic acid and then smoke saturated it. He mused on the difference between salted and therefore dried hide and one that was fresh.
Colt listened with only half an ear. He was tired and homesick and would rather have spent the evening with the happy children than with these three men he couldn’t understand.
—
Colt woke up as the sky faded from purple to grey. He needed to do something to keep his hands and mind busy. His mother always said he went broody when he was bored. He carefully extracted himself from Orion and tucked the blanket around Orion that hadn’t been there when Colt fell asleep.
Time to get busy.
Python lifted his head from Lion’s chest as Colt passed. He hoped the two would be happy together.
He followed the sounds of children’s voices. Kids always knew things. He let the smaller ones clamber up his back and sides. He had a request, so he was going to spoil them first. He asked them where they found the beads they wore around their necks. Every child had their favorite spots.
He followed the kids back to the village for breakfast, stew made with the deer creature. The adults kept asking him to stay and talk Lion and Python into staying. He was happy to slip away with the children as soon as his stomach was full.
He followed them into the hills he hadn’t known existed and waded in pools below waterfalls and along cliffs as he filled his pockets with treasures.
As the sun set, Colt and the children returned to the village and looked through their haul. By the light of the fire, the children showed him how to put the holes in the tiny rocks and shells.
Orion sat down beside him. “If you would have known I had a furnace to make glass beads, you still would have gone.”
Colt would have, but… “You can make beads?”
“In several colors.”
Colt looked around at the other villagers. None of them wore glass beads.
Orion took a necklace out of his pouch. The glass beads glinted in the firelight. “I made them for Jaguar. He’s the only one who wore them.”
Orion frowned and played with the beads. Colt touched Orion’s arm. “Show me how. Tomorrow.”
Orion smiled and put the necklace away. “It’s going to take you weeks to put holes in any of those.”
Colt grinned. “That’s why I have help.”
The children each worked on a bead as they vied to show Colt how small and perfect a hole they could make.
Orion kissed Colt’s cheek. “Come to bed when you are ready.”
Colt watched him go, but was distracted by the children. Orion would be ready and waiting whenever Colt went to bed.
—
Orion’s furnace was smaller than Colt’s sister’s makeup case. He had a slightly bigger, but much lighter kiln plus many more things for Colt to carry to the riverside clearing.
They ate breakfast as Orion fed already charred wood into the furnace. “This is where I could really use a thermometer. I have to guess, so it might take a while to get started.”
He laid out his tools and many little jars. “Graphite absorbs heat quickly so I don’t have to worry about shocking the glass. Plus there’s a vein of it not far from here.”
Colt picked up a pair of metal shears. “How you get these?”
Orion put them back on the clay tray. “I’ve had years to experiment and,” he lifted one of the small burnt logs, “charcoal can get hot enough to melt iron.”
He’d put effort into his tools. “They were all wonderfully made.”
Orion fed the charcoal into the furnace. “But I haven’t spread the technology around. I don’t want to mess up their progression. My goal was to leave no mark.”
That wasn’t possible. Orion was so smart and beautiful he’d leave a mark wherever he went. “Have you?”
“Maybe a little. My goal changed, after I was here a while, to live comfortably.”
Orion had rods of glass in several colors. He dropped into bead-making like he’d done into every other project or idea he’d had since Colt had arrived. Colt went back to drilling tiny holes.
The next time Colt looked up, Orion rolled a beautiful, bright colored bead into his kiln.
Colt sighed. Drilling holes into rocks felt like a waste of time when Orion could produce several bigger, brighter, perfectly round beads in less time and Colt would still need to polish his beads later.
Orion twirled the rod in his hand and somehow produced another little bead just like the first. He rolled that one into the kiln and smiled at Colt. He pointed a short, very thin iron tool with a wooden handle. “Use this for the hole. It’s faster.”
It was, but Orion still had a dozen more beads finished before the new tool finished Colt’s first bead.
“Something different,” Orion opened a roll of leather and took out a long thin length of glass. But after he’d heated the colored rod, he barely touched it to the clear glass lump in his other hand.
Colt went back to drilling. This second bead was faster, but that must mean the rock was softer and more likely to break. When he looked back at Orion, the small lump of glass in his hand now contained a flower.
“How did you do that?”
“Sand, heat, minerals, gravity, and centrifugal force.” Orion grinned.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It will be.” Orion added a bit more glass and gravity and set the drop shaped bead into the kiln. Then he started another.
Colt sighed. “Why do I even bother?”
Orion nodded to Colt’s pocket. “Got any pretty ones too small to put a hole in, but too pretty to pass up?”
Colt found just the one: a smooth blue rock he’d found on a dry river bed that was barely too big to be called sand.
Orion rubbed it between his fingers then grinned. Using a pair of long tweezers, he heated the rock and then set it in the hot glass and somehow wrapped the glass around it. Then he set this new drop in the kiln.
Orion was amazing.
“Can you make a tooth shape? Like a big cat’s?”
Orion grinned and did so. “Python will really like this.”
Colt looked out over the stream. “Who said I would give it to Python?”
“Your body language. Plus he’s making your shoes, isn’t he? So either it’s a fair exchange or courting gifts.”
Colt blushed and couldn’t look at Orion. “I’m not courting him.”
Orion touched Colt’s arm. “Sorry to tease you. Jaguar was always getting gifts and giving them. He was quite a catch. I was jealous of him all the time.”
“Did he cheat on you?”
“Not that I know of. Remember they could have been saying anything. Jaguar liked attention and the people here always felt sorry for me like I was mentally deficient.”
Jaguar didn’t sound like a good catch to Colt, but that wasn’t the right thing to say to a man who had just lost his lover. “If you can make these, why aren’t everyone in the village wearing them?”
Orion added a drop of color to the wheel of clear glass. “First, because I didn’t want to give away technology. I’m sure someone on this planet knows how to make charcoal or glass or work metal, but I don’t want to be the reason they know. I’ve always done my work away from others. They tend to leave me alone.”
That was an understatement. Colt, who had been surrounded by children for an entire day, couldn’t even hear one from where he sat.
Orion added a squiggly line. “And two, Jaguar wanted to be the only one wearing them. He told everyone I found them. The children searched for weeks and just to test what they were looking for, I dropped a broken bead while on a walk and the next day the villagers, young and old, had dug a pit in that spot and were sifting through dirt. They found bones, shells, copper, and lots and lots of sand.”
He pressed into his design with a pointed tool and let heat and gravity work for him. This bead looked like a sunburst. When it was safely in the kiln, Orion looked through Colt’s bounty. He picked up a bumpy yellow stone. “This one is gold. You can drill to make a bead or I can heat it and shape it or we can draw it through a die and make it into wire to fit around another rock.”
He sat it down and picked up his rods and held them over the heat. “The locals here aren’t interested in gold. Until it is polished, it is really very ugly.”
Colt had to agree. “I can make wire?”
“Let me finish this one and I’ll show you how.” Orion made a long rod of two colors twisted together and then popped the gold into a clay bowl on the top of the furnace. “We need to warm it thoroughly, but not melt it. A thermometer would come in handy right now.”
He made a series of beads with the twisted glass. Then he picked up the gold with tongs and carefully set it on a piece of charcoal. “We’ll wait for it to cool down.”
He twisted two new colors together into a rod. Then he showed Colt how to draw a wire. Once he got the wire started he handed the draw dies to Colt. Pulling the lump of metal through the die was fascinating. The wire kept getting longer and longer while the lump didn’t look that much smaller. This new project also gave Colt a chance to keep his hands busy but still watch Orion work.
Once the wire was all the way through, Orion wound it loosely and set it back in the bowl to warm up. Then he had Colt rub oil into the holes. “Friction heats up the die and degrades it. You don’t even want to know how long that took me to carve.”
Getting the first bit of wire small enough to fit through the hole was more difficult with greasy fingers or maybe Orion had just made it seem easy. He made everything seem easy. But once Colt’s pliers got a grip on the wire coming out the far side, he had no problem. “How thin should I make it?”
“Not too thin or you’ll have meters of the stuff.”
Colt looked down at his wire. It was longer than his arm. “I think I’m done.”
He set the wire back in the bowl and picked up his biggest stone. It was black, except when held up to the sun. Colt practiced the design he’s use for the wire with a thin root he dug out of the gravel. He didn’t think the vine would mind very much. It had many more.
Orion grinned. “Python will clank when he walks.”
“Then he won’t wear it. Python only makes noise when he wants to.”
“Like all good Hunters.” Orion touched the back of Colt’s hand. They weren’t Hunters, neither of them.
The second guy laid down almost eighty dollars without blinking. The huge arrangement of stargazers and pink roses was for his wife. He’d been meaning to buy her flowers for a while, so he picked an arrangement worth all the ones he would have bought. He planned to put this arrangement on the center of the kitchen island. She is five months pregnant and he wants her to be happy and stress-free.
The last guy wanted his single rose dressed up. Instead of the free clear plastic, he paid extra for shiny pink cellophane. Then he tried to pay. The resister wouldn’t take his credit card. He tried a couple of times, but it kept declining his tender. But he had enough change in his pocket. He paid for a six dollar rose with quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies. As I counted out the change, he repeated that he knew he had $10.15 on his card. When I was done, he had only thirty cents left in change. So he spent over one third of his money on a flower for his girl, which is romantic. Although I’m glad he’s not dating my daughter.
Title: Gestures
Status: Part 7 of 10
Genre: science fiction, romance, slash
Rating: PG (13?)
Content: a delicate nose, homesickness, brooding, rocks, holes, glass beads, beautiful tools, sand, heat, minerals, gravity, and centrifugal force
Length: about 2,000 words
Summary: Colt raises his spirits with craft time.
Masterlist
When the meat was finished cooking, Lion woke Colt. They ate and then scraped the wet wood off the cat’s pelt and put on a new layer. They were almost out of bark to brew up.
Children came. The village had been wondered where the four were. The kids asked Python why he was leaving the hair on the deer hide and he said that was because Colt had a delicate nose.
The children laughed. Colt didn’t even want to image what that would smell like since Python hadn’t seemed to think Colt needed protection from the boiling spoiled animal brains.
Python built a small fire under Orion’s log structure and smoked the deer hide with the wet bark. At least that didn’t smell too horrible even if Colt didn’t enjoy breathing in the smoke.
Orion amused himself explaining the chemical reaction in skin in as first tannic acid and then smoke saturated it. He mused on the difference between salted and therefore dried hide and one that was fresh.
Colt listened with only half an ear. He was tired and homesick and would rather have spent the evening with the happy children than with these three men he couldn’t understand.
—
Colt woke up as the sky faded from purple to grey. He needed to do something to keep his hands and mind busy. His mother always said he went broody when he was bored. He carefully extracted himself from Orion and tucked the blanket around Orion that hadn’t been there when Colt fell asleep.
Time to get busy.
Python lifted his head from Lion’s chest as Colt passed. He hoped the two would be happy together.
He followed the sounds of children’s voices. Kids always knew things. He let the smaller ones clamber up his back and sides. He had a request, so he was going to spoil them first. He asked them where they found the beads they wore around their necks. Every child had their favorite spots.
He followed the kids back to the village for breakfast, stew made with the deer creature. The adults kept asking him to stay and talk Lion and Python into staying. He was happy to slip away with the children as soon as his stomach was full.
He followed them into the hills he hadn’t known existed and waded in pools below waterfalls and along cliffs as he filled his pockets with treasures.
As the sun set, Colt and the children returned to the village and looked through their haul. By the light of the fire, the children showed him how to put the holes in the tiny rocks and shells.
Orion sat down beside him. “If you would have known I had a furnace to make glass beads, you still would have gone.”
Colt would have, but… “You can make beads?”
“In several colors.”
Colt looked around at the other villagers. None of them wore glass beads.
Orion took a necklace out of his pouch. The glass beads glinted in the firelight. “I made them for Jaguar. He’s the only one who wore them.”
Orion frowned and played with the beads. Colt touched Orion’s arm. “Show me how. Tomorrow.”
Orion smiled and put the necklace away. “It’s going to take you weeks to put holes in any of those.”
Colt grinned. “That’s why I have help.”
The children each worked on a bead as they vied to show Colt how small and perfect a hole they could make.
Orion kissed Colt’s cheek. “Come to bed when you are ready.”
Colt watched him go, but was distracted by the children. Orion would be ready and waiting whenever Colt went to bed.
—
Orion’s furnace was smaller than Colt’s sister’s makeup case. He had a slightly bigger, but much lighter kiln plus many more things for Colt to carry to the riverside clearing.
They ate breakfast as Orion fed already charred wood into the furnace. “This is where I could really use a thermometer. I have to guess, so it might take a while to get started.”
He laid out his tools and many little jars. “Graphite absorbs heat quickly so I don’t have to worry about shocking the glass. Plus there’s a vein of it not far from here.”
Colt picked up a pair of metal shears. “How you get these?”
Orion put them back on the clay tray. “I’ve had years to experiment and,” he lifted one of the small burnt logs, “charcoal can get hot enough to melt iron.”
He’d put effort into his tools. “They were all wonderfully made.”
Orion fed the charcoal into the furnace. “But I haven’t spread the technology around. I don’t want to mess up their progression. My goal was to leave no mark.”
That wasn’t possible. Orion was so smart and beautiful he’d leave a mark wherever he went. “Have you?”
“Maybe a little. My goal changed, after I was here a while, to live comfortably.”
Orion had rods of glass in several colors. He dropped into bead-making like he’d done into every other project or idea he’d had since Colt had arrived. Colt went back to drilling tiny holes.
The next time Colt looked up, Orion rolled a beautiful, bright colored bead into his kiln.
Colt sighed. Drilling holes into rocks felt like a waste of time when Orion could produce several bigger, brighter, perfectly round beads in less time and Colt would still need to polish his beads later.
Orion twirled the rod in his hand and somehow produced another little bead just like the first. He rolled that one into the kiln and smiled at Colt. He pointed a short, very thin iron tool with a wooden handle. “Use this for the hole. It’s faster.”
It was, but Orion still had a dozen more beads finished before the new tool finished Colt’s first bead.
“Something different,” Orion opened a roll of leather and took out a long thin length of glass. But after he’d heated the colored rod, he barely touched it to the clear glass lump in his other hand.
Colt went back to drilling. This second bead was faster, but that must mean the rock was softer and more likely to break. When he looked back at Orion, the small lump of glass in his hand now contained a flower.
“How did you do that?”
“Sand, heat, minerals, gravity, and centrifugal force.” Orion grinned.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It will be.” Orion added a bit more glass and gravity and set the drop shaped bead into the kiln. Then he started another.
Colt sighed. “Why do I even bother?”
Orion nodded to Colt’s pocket. “Got any pretty ones too small to put a hole in, but too pretty to pass up?”
Colt found just the one: a smooth blue rock he’d found on a dry river bed that was barely too big to be called sand.
Orion rubbed it between his fingers then grinned. Using a pair of long tweezers, he heated the rock and then set it in the hot glass and somehow wrapped the glass around it. Then he set this new drop in the kiln.
Orion was amazing.
“Can you make a tooth shape? Like a big cat’s?”
Orion grinned and did so. “Python will really like this.”
Colt looked out over the stream. “Who said I would give it to Python?”
“Your body language. Plus he’s making your shoes, isn’t he? So either it’s a fair exchange or courting gifts.”
Colt blushed and couldn’t look at Orion. “I’m not courting him.”
Orion touched Colt’s arm. “Sorry to tease you. Jaguar was always getting gifts and giving them. He was quite a catch. I was jealous of him all the time.”
“Did he cheat on you?”
“Not that I know of. Remember they could have been saying anything. Jaguar liked attention and the people here always felt sorry for me like I was mentally deficient.”
Jaguar didn’t sound like a good catch to Colt, but that wasn’t the right thing to say to a man who had just lost his lover. “If you can make these, why aren’t everyone in the village wearing them?”
Orion added a drop of color to the wheel of clear glass. “First, because I didn’t want to give away technology. I’m sure someone on this planet knows how to make charcoal or glass or work metal, but I don’t want to be the reason they know. I’ve always done my work away from others. They tend to leave me alone.”
That was an understatement. Colt, who had been surrounded by children for an entire day, couldn’t even hear one from where he sat.
Orion added a squiggly line. “And two, Jaguar wanted to be the only one wearing them. He told everyone I found them. The children searched for weeks and just to test what they were looking for, I dropped a broken bead while on a walk and the next day the villagers, young and old, had dug a pit in that spot and were sifting through dirt. They found bones, shells, copper, and lots and lots of sand.”
He pressed into his design with a pointed tool and let heat and gravity work for him. This bead looked like a sunburst. When it was safely in the kiln, Orion looked through Colt’s bounty. He picked up a bumpy yellow stone. “This one is gold. You can drill to make a bead or I can heat it and shape it or we can draw it through a die and make it into wire to fit around another rock.”
He sat it down and picked up his rods and held them over the heat. “The locals here aren’t interested in gold. Until it is polished, it is really very ugly.”
Colt had to agree. “I can make wire?”
“Let me finish this one and I’ll show you how.” Orion made a long rod of two colors twisted together and then popped the gold into a clay bowl on the top of the furnace. “We need to warm it thoroughly, but not melt it. A thermometer would come in handy right now.”
He made a series of beads with the twisted glass. Then he picked up the gold with tongs and carefully set it on a piece of charcoal. “We’ll wait for it to cool down.”
He twisted two new colors together into a rod. Then he showed Colt how to draw a wire. Once he got the wire started he handed the draw dies to Colt. Pulling the lump of metal through the die was fascinating. The wire kept getting longer and longer while the lump didn’t look that much smaller. This new project also gave Colt a chance to keep his hands busy but still watch Orion work.
Once the wire was all the way through, Orion wound it loosely and set it back in the bowl to warm up. Then he had Colt rub oil into the holes. “Friction heats up the die and degrades it. You don’t even want to know how long that took me to carve.”
Getting the first bit of wire small enough to fit through the hole was more difficult with greasy fingers or maybe Orion had just made it seem easy. He made everything seem easy. But once Colt’s pliers got a grip on the wire coming out the far side, he had no problem. “How thin should I make it?”
“Not too thin or you’ll have meters of the stuff.”
Colt looked down at his wire. It was longer than his arm. “I think I’m done.”
He set the wire back in the bowl and picked up his biggest stone. It was black, except when held up to the sun. Colt practiced the design he’s use for the wire with a thin root he dug out of the gravel. He didn’t think the vine would mind very much. It had many more.
Orion grinned. “Python will clank when he walks.”
“Then he won’t wear it. Python only makes noise when he wants to.”
“Like all good Hunters.” Orion touched the back of Colt’s hand. They weren’t Hunters, neither of them.
