free falling

where: the path towards the farm who: @thecatastrophicstarter​ ( open. )

it’s surrounded by overgrowth and weeds but, she’s sure of it. an easy and useful gem hidden away on the outskirts of the farm. she’s not surprised someone may have missed it, all things considered and perhaps there’s simply no one else with an eye for such things around here. not that it mattered; because she’d found it. and she’d take care of it better, anyway.

and she’s already got a nice few cuttings of it sat beside her on the ground as she sits before it, trimming away just enough to give her plenty to work with and perhaps encourage the growth of more while leaving the plant alone to recover on its own. 

hearing footsteps coming up the path, however, rina turns and places a hand protectively over her cuttings, eyeing the stranger carefully.

“watch where you’re stepping. you ruin these and the clinic loses out.”

feng’s gotten much better at being around strangers—it’s hard not to, when the townsfolk come and go so often—but sometimes he still finds it overwhelming. on good days, he hides out in his little studio, but on bad days the tiny space feels too much like the home he shared with his mother, and he can barely spend two minutes in there without feeling claustrophobic. 

it’s a bad day today, and he’s on his way to the farm for a little peace and quiet. he likes the open sky over the farm; sometimes spend entire afternoons just lying in the overgrown fields surrounding the farm, watching as the clouds drift by.

he’s surprised to bump into someone on the usually deserted path, and he hadn’t noticed her at all crouched among the weeds. “sorry,” he says instinctively, and he’s just about to side-step her cuttings and continue on his way when a flash of green in her hair catches his eye. “you have... grass in your...” he tells her, gesturing at the right side of his head.

he can probably count on one hand the number of times he’s ever initiated conversations with strangers, and it’s never happened on a bad day before, but he can’t deny that he’s curious about what she’s up to. and despite her wary gaze and clipped tone of voice, the bit of dried grass in her hair is more endearing than intimidating. 

Harper wasn’t born hard, but she had to grow a thick skin. Fast, if she had any plans of succeeding in the path she received in the first few years of her life. Dancing had never been an option. It wasn’t as if her mother hadn’t tried to teach her a few tricks here and there, and Harper simply lacked the desire to learn. It wasn’t as if she thought she would spend her life doing that. No. She was adamant about never turning into her mother, who relied on strangers to put food on the table. That was how she had learned to see the world. And in her world, there wasn’t room to move their feet to the rhythm of the music.

She heard the words but didn’t linger on their meaning. If this man had apologies to give, she could find reasons why he was offering them. “I wasn’t around,” the woman replied with a shake of her head. It felt relevant to explain why she was there, and maybe it would make him understand the potential threat in his behavior. “But I heard music, and it was enough to tickle that part in my brain telling me there was something wrong, and I should be alarmed,” it was how it had always been. Music blasting in the night air? A beacon for walkers everywhere.

This time, however, Harper cocked an eyebrow. Her eyes moved across his frame, almost as if that would give her the answer she was searching for. “Why do you keep saying that?” Harper finally asked. Saying it once would have sufficed her. But saying it twice? Well, now she had a reason for suspicion. Not that Harper had ever been someone who needed a lot of encouragement to be suspicious over anything in her life. She would gladly doubt her shadow if given a chance.

he’d grown comfortable in fairvale, had forgotten that not every stranger would be kind, and the woman’s obvious suspicion and hostility catches him off-guard. 

unbidden, a memory of his mother comes to mind. she’d locked him in the tiny bedroom they shared, punishment for getting home fifteen minutes later than usual because he’d stopped by the convenience store with a classmate to buy a popsicle. “mama’s just worried about you,” she had sobbed from outside the room, as if she was the victim in this situation and not him. “there are many bad people in the world. mama just wants to protect you. this is for your own good.”

what does it say about him, he wonders, the fact that he misses a mother like that. but he does, and he wishes she was here now, standing between him and this strange woman, a barrier between him and the rest of the world. he tries to put some distance between them, taking small steps backwards until he feels his back collide with the cool surface of the mirror. “i was just dancing,” he tries to explain. 

there are tears prickling in his eyes, but he bites down on his lip, forcing himself to hold them back. he can’t cry. his mother doesn’t like it when he cries. if he cries then she will hit him. “i was just dancing,” he repeats, chest heaving with the force of holding back his tears, and his breathing growing erratic. “i didn’t do anything wrong,” he bites out, forcing himself to lift his head up to look at the woman in the eye, but his little act of defiance is short-lived, and he quickly squeezes his eyes shut.

“i think you and i might have different definitions of easy.”

she lets phoenix drag her into the room fully anyway, grinning at his enthusiasm if nothing else, she knows him well enough to know the way he’s bouncing around is basically for her benefit, his way of providing her some kind of distraction both from the day and what it represents and also from her ‘relationship’ troubles.

she supposes though that if anyone were capable of teaching her basic rhythm it’d probably be the young man in front of her, he was beyond talented with a genuine love for his craft and she didn’t need any natural ability of her own to recognize that.

what she did dispute though, quietly to herself at least was whether or not the unstoppable force of his talent would be any match for the immovability of her complete lack of it.

“sure” she shrugs nodding her head with a self deprecating smirk on her face “sounds easy enough, as long as you explain to me exactly how i’d go about keeping my core tight to begin with.” 

she snorts before kicking off her shoes to the side of the room, deciding making a fool of herself with a friend for a few songs was a better way to pass some time than sitting in her classroom alone with her thoughts “fine let’s do this, but if i fall you’re buying me dinner.”

“deal,” he agrees easily, and then just to coax another smile out of her, he adds, “and if you don’t fall, i will also buy you dinner as reward.” 

it’s not like he’s lacking in tokens anyway; a childhood of scrimping and saving is hard to shake off, and he’s never gotten into the habit of spending money on himself for anything other than necessities. so even though he knows there’s no use in hoarding tokens, feng doesn’t really have any reason to spend them.

before they get to any lifting though, the first thing he does is turn the music off. while it may seem counterintuitive to dance without music, he knows how distracting the melody can be when trying to keep track of the rhythm. then, he leads her to the middle of the room, moving to stand an arm’s length away from her. “all you need to do is walk towards me, put your arm around my shoulder, and then...” he pauses, not sure how to describe it. “you have to be very stiff,” he tells her, and then deciding it would be easier to just show her, feng suddenly stands up straight, like a marionette with its strings pulled taut. “like this.”

It was time to go back to her lodgings. And if Harper were lucky, she would have an uneventful night of sleep. The crowd around the main square fastly dispersed, with everyone saying their goodbyes and heading their ways. She did the same, and soon she was quietly traveling the path that led her to the space she was occupying, only halting when she heard something unfamiliar.

Circling her hand around the handle of a hunter’s knife, Harper stilled in her spot, trying to pick up anything else that might be following the music. In her experience, it wasn’t something that people did anymore. Not when the walkers were so keenly attracted to any sounds. Cautiously, she moved around the street to find the source of that noise. It was never out of Harper’s mind that this could be a trap set up by any one of the other clusters of survivors out there, and as someone who didn’t feel like she had any more to lose, she also assumed she was the most indicated person to investigate the threat.

And as she entered the doors to what looked like a studio, her confusion only grew as she found herself staring at someone happily twirling to the music. Abandoning the knife back where it belonged, Harper watched the scene with absolute mystification. “What the,” she muttered under her breath, letting the sentence trail off as she crossed an arm over the other on her chest.

She even needed a moment to gather her wits as she realized the dancer had stopped. Slightly moving her head from side to side, as if to snap out of a daze, Harper responded. “Long enough to be confused by,” she realized she didn’t have any words to describe what was happened and resorted to a circling gesture of her hand. “All this.”

he feels a twinge of self-consciousness at the way she looks at him—it’s more confusion than judgemental, but it makes heat rise to his cheeks. he’s no stranger to being on the receiving end of these looks; before the end of the world, back when he still went to regular school, a lot of his classmates hadn’t been able to understand why a boy would choose to learn ballet, but then he’d gone to dance school, and there were other boys just like him, so it didn’t matter as much to him that there were people who found it weird.

it’s probably strange that he would still be dancing even after the world had ended, he guesses, but then again, feng thinks that it’s even more important to hold onto the things that you love now that everything has gone to hell, and since he has no idea if his mother is alive—and even if she was, he has no way to get to her—dance is all that he has left.

“sorry,” he says by reflex, not really sure what he’s apologising for. her confusion, perhaps? “all of the kids have already left, so i did not think anyone else would be here...” 

he’s never been great with strangers—had kept his head down without talking to anyone until livia had arrived in town and proceeded to coax him out of his shell—and he feels the familiar prickle of anxiety at not knowing what to do. if it had been anyone else, someone he’d known, he might have asked if they wanted to join him, but he doesn’t recognise the woman standing a few feet away, and he’s pretty sure she would only be even more confused if he’d invited her to dance with him.

“sorry,” he says again eventually, just to break the awkward silence, fiddling nervously with the hem of his t-shirt with his gaze trained on the floor.

🎨

she wasn’t avoiding the memorial, not exactly, although being anywhere where she could potentially run into youra wasn’t somewhere she especially wanted to be. mostly she was just flat out avoiding mourning.

she’d done too much of it, half her life really spent mourning her parents once they were gone, over a year mourning her brother even though she still had no idea what had actually happened to him. 

the school had been one of her only options when it came to hiding out in a place where she wouldn’t be found, she knew it’d be mostly deserted for the day and she figured getting a head start on next weeks lessons plans was a better way to spend the day rather than in the centre of a town full of people trying to keep dark memories at bay.

she should have known though that phoenix would’ve been spending his time similarly.

both orphans and artists in vastly different fields the two of them had several things in common. nix had been quiet and shy when the two of them had first met just after livia had arrived in town, but he’d also been the first person besides madison that had made her feel like part of the community.

he’d needed a friend and it had felt good to be needed especially back then when youra’s betrayal had still been fresh in her mind, threatening to harden her heart.

shrugging her shoulders she continued to lean against the door frame she stopped in to watch him work through his routine, his movements so graceful it was almost like he’d been born to do it, and it was almost enough to make the rhythmically challenged liv feel just a touch of envy.

“not too long, just for those final few light footed spins. if fearing for the safety of your toes wasn’t a real issue, i’d be tempted to get you to teach me that.”

of all people, he’s not surprised that it’s livia who’s found him. he’s pretty sure that the both of them spend more time at the school than anywhere else, and he figured she wouldn’t want to spend too much time at a public gathering—especially when the woman who broke her heart was in town.

feng isn’t great with words of comfort, but he wants to help livia feel better. even if she looks fine, the faintest of smile curling against her lips, he knows that nobody who is okay would be wandering these halls at this time. and really, is anyone truly okay during these times? but even if he doesn’t have a way with words, he does possess an earnestness that most people don’t, and maybe his company will help distract her from her thoughts at the very least.

“i can teach you some easy stuff!” he offers immediately, darting towards the doorway to grasp her hands and pull her into the room. vaguely, he remembers that she might have mentioned how awful she is at dancing but feng’s optimism is nothing if not naive. he knows that she won’t lose herself to the music the way he does, knows it won’t even come close to the joy that art brings her, but it might be a good distraction.

“we can do some simple lifts,” he tells her. there’s something about him that gives people the impression that he’s weak, his slim physique and soft demeanour making it easy to overlook the fact that he stands at almost 6ft tall, and has the muscles to show for a lifetime of dance training. sometimes, when dancing with holly, he’ll lift her into the air and twirl her around just to make her laugh. he’s sure he won’t have any problems lifting livia, and hopefully she’ll find it fun as well. 

one of feng’s most important tasks in fairvale is making sure that the few children that are in town get the chance to have as much of a normal childhood as they can—this means making sure that they have some form of structure in their lives, a routine to fall back on when the chaos of the outside world gets too much to deal with.

and that means leading dance classes even when the rest of the town is in mourning, providing a safe space for the younger children while the rest of the adults are at the memorial. he doesn’t mind it though, not when he feels much more at ease in this tiny dance studio than he would in the crowded town square, and the kids make great company anyway.

as the evening wears on, more and more of the children get picked up by their guardians, until eventually feng is the only one left. he doesn’t pack up and leave just yet though, putting the music back on, standing in the middle of the studio with his eyes closed for the briefest of moments—and then he starts dancing.

the routine is choreographed on the spot, but the movements are intimately familiar and as natural to him as walking is to others, his feet barely on the floor as he jumps and glides over every inch of the room. he only opens his eyes when the music fades out, jumping slightly when he catches someone’s gaze through the mirror.

pivoting on his heels, feng comes face to face with the face by the door, the surprise on his face fading into a bashful smile instead. “you scared me,” he says, the faintest trace of a whine in his voice as he reaches up to brush the sweat out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “how long have you been standing there?”