[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Summer Home

Genre: Slice of life

Length: 2818 words

B/D: After a little bit of a hiatus (where I spent a lot of time trying to do stuff and not getting that far), I decided to try something different. Here's a little bit of 1st person Nath.

I leave my baggage at the door, and roll my aching shoulders as I stalk into the house. It’s been a long flight. It’s always a long flight, but this year it felt longer As a rule I travel light – it isn’t like I can carry a suitcase, so I make do with what I can fit in a backpack. But I thought it would be a good idea to wear my arms this time, and I didn’t realise how heavy they were, or how much extra air resistance they’d cause.

Or maybe the flight just felt long because I didn’t want to make it.

My first port of call is the living room, where there stands an old, high-backed armchair, cushioned in red velvet. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture I brought back to this place, and I only took it because it was sturdy. It’s a nice place to sit for a few minutes after the flight, and I fall into it almost out of habit. I rest my prosthetics on the arms, decide it feels strange, and put my hands back in my lap. For a few minutes (hours? Time is difficult to keep track of sometimes), I sit.

This is my summer home, for want of a better word. It isn’t really a home; a home is a place you’ve decided to live. This is the place I’ve decided to die. I stumbled across it one day in my travels, and it spoke to me on some level – the way the stone was so out of place next to the beach, the ruined portico at the entrance, the way all the windows faced the setting sun. It was a wreck when I found it, abandoned and unloved; each year I add something, and each year another part of the house threatens to crumble away. I feel like that’s been true of myself as well, for a very long time – constantly treading water.

Maybe it’s strange to have picked out your deathbed. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and to set my affairs in order. Long enough for my affairs to fall out of order, and for me to have to chase them again. I’m not immortal. I won’t live forever, and I’m not sure I want to. It’s hard to tell how long I’ve got left. My body stays the same, more or less. But whenever the time comes, I want this to be the place I come to rest.

The minutes pass, and so does my tiredness. There’s work to be done, and I can’t relax when I have an objective in mind, no matter how much I’d like to. This year, I’m going to add more than one thing, fix more than one problem. That’s the reason I set out in spring instead of summer, and brought my arms with me, even though they’re heavy. I won’t fix everything – I feel that would change the very heart of this place – but I want to make it more livable.

My first job is to make a list, an inventory of what needs fixing that I can narrow down to whatever’s plausible in the time I have. Item number one is the wallpaper and the plastering. Just the walls, in general. A long time ago, there was a mix of white stucco walling and some kind of rich purple wallpapering, but the stucco is cracked now, and the wallpaper peeling into flakes that fall like dead leaves to the polished floorboards. I’ll have to get a steamer from somewhere, and a chisel, and take off the entire surface little by little. That might keep me busy for a few weeks by itself. I’ll probably just put new stucco over top; I like the idea of a surface that can be painted, and it might be nice to hire an artist and have them put some kind of mural on one of the walls.

The kitchen needs re-tiling, too, and I have to check the stock of preserved food. Some of it is probably beyond saving now, and if I’m honest, most of the cans are full of things I used to like and don’t any more; my body might change little, but my sense of taste continues to drift.

I kick off my shoes, take out a notepad from an old, dusty end-table and start to scribble down a few ideas. I think of the kinds of foods Sora might like to eat, and Hime; from what I can tell, Suguri isn’t fussy. I’ll invite them here when it’s less of a state. I’ve never brought anybody to visit before. I never really intended to live here. But Sora needs to see this house, and what lies beyond it.

Sora, Sora, Sora. I think of Sora a lot nowadays – probably too much, although it’s not like I have all that much else to think about. For thousands of years, she was a distant memory. A face I could never forget. I still remember the way her eyes looked when we talked after her battle, and a brief flash of shock and sorrow when I was blasted from behind. The girl I know today is rounder and fuller as a person than the one I met on the battlefield, and I’ve been around to see that growth. I once heard a person say that ‘blessing’ is what you call a pain in the neck you couldn’t do without, and I suppose Sora falls into that category.

I told her I’d be leaving a few days in advance. It was an impromptu decision. She looked at me with those wide green eyes, and I thought for a moment she looked… lonely, I suppose. I’m jealous of those eyes. The world is still a place of wonder for her; there are still things she has not seen, and cannot yet imagine. I want to see her reaction when she does see them. That said, she has a talent for surprising me, even though I’ve lived for so long.

“Are you going to sunbathe naked?” was the first question she asked.

“Quit imagining weird things.”

“It’s not weird. I like to imagine you relaxing. Your back is straight all the time.”

“Then imagine me relaxing with clothes on.”

“But then you’d get tan lines.”

Even days later, it makes me smile. She isn’t wrong, oddly enough – I usually take some time to top up my tan whenever I visit my summer house, and the beach is private so there’s nobody to see me. I don’t like my complexion when I’m pale. It reminds me of the moment I first looked in the mirror after I came off the operating table – after they took my arms. But I always wonder how she reaches her conclusions, and why she reaches them at the moments she does. She must have some kind of intuition, or her head must be a very mysterious place.

When I’m finished, I look my list up and down. I’m more or less happy with it, although it’s a few months’ worth of work, and I only really intend to spend a month or two here. There’s one thing on my list which isn’t about the house itself, and it’s by far the most important thing on there. But it’ll wait until I’ve had a glass of wine. Tucked away in a quiet, dark corner of the house is a wine-rack I brought myself. I usually buy a bottle or two each year and squirrel it away there. Most of it isn’t exactly the kind of wine that ageing improves; I make it a rule not to buy anything too good. All I want is something I can take out and drink a glass of on the beach as I watch the sunset. I don’t want to sit here in this half-abandoned place, drinking entire bottles by myself. I’ve done that kind of thing before, and nothing good comes of it.

I dither a little as I pick my drink, before going for a sweet, fruity white. I used to prefer reds, but lately I find them a little too heavy. I want something brighter, more refreshing. I pour a glass, stop up the bottle (so much easier with fingers and thumbs) and set out onto the beach to enjoy the sound of the ocean. It’s too late today to get started on anything. Before long, the sea and the sky begin to lull me towards an easy sleep.

“Sorry. I’ll be intruding.”

Nobody answers, of course. I smile; the sun is beaming down through the canopy, warming my skin. I’m prepared for a good day’s work.

This place, this shaded grove, is the real reason I visit my summer house each year. This is a man-made place of nature, an open space; I planted these trees many moons ago, and built the latticed pergola on which the vines grow overhead. I trim them back every year so the sun can shine through them and reach the ground, and that’s one of my jobs for today. The other is to look along the headstones for any signs of damage, and clean the ones that need it.

This is the graveyard that I built, for all those soldiers fallen in the Great War.

There’s no way I could have gravestones for them all. Not even a fraction. There were simply too many that died in the line of duty: too many people who did what their country asked them to do, and did it until the bitter end. Because they believed in it. Because they thought it would protect their families. Because they had no other choice. Many reasons. The number who died is lost to time.

But in my travels, I come across records of them – old, fragmented data disks with records of men and women killed in such-and-such a skirmish. Sometimes even dog tags, ancient and tarnished but still at least recognisable as relics of the war. For each set of dog tags, I make a grave and bury them; each name, I have carved on a great marble slab that rests beyond the plots. It’s been a few decades since I found any, but the work continues. I collect things, and this is a collection that will never be complete.

One day – not soon, but one day in the far future – I’ll pick out a plot for myself here. I don’t know quite where it’ll be. Not in the middle, certainly. Maybe near the edges, but far enough in that the vines are thinner and there’s a little sun. I think it’s important for these graves to see the sky that became blue, to be cradled by this Earth that was healed.

And I think it’s important that, when the house is presentable and everything is in order, I invite Sora here. She needs to know that this place exists, what it is and what it stands for. That even if it’s only a handful of the people who died, they’re being remembered. I hope that, whenever the time comes and I can’t do it anymore, she’ll walk along these graves from time to time and make sure they don’t become a ruin.

Until then, it’d be nice to relax by the sea together. The sands of this beach are always clean – something I probably have Suguri and her world regeneration to thank for, in hindsight. The heat is fine and dry, never clingy. It’s a good place. …That means I’d have to go and shop for a swimsuit, and learn how to do all the straps and clips. Ugh. Maybe next year.

The sun slowly shifts overhead, and the hours pass. As much as they’re sometimes inconvenient, the new arms do make the work much lighter. By the time I’m done, I’ve got a note of what stones need cleaning and which ones are okay until next year, I’ve thinned the ivy overhead and trimmed back the weeds, and quietly read out the names on the monument as a way of honouring them. I’ve noticed there’s more butterflies hanging around than last year, and more flowers are creeping in through the shadows of the trees at the perimeter. It’s an irony, I suppose, that this graveyard is teeming with life, and the house is as still as the grave.

…Well, that’s what I came here to fix, I guess. Come to think of it, I should probably check that the phone line still works. I promised to call from time to time, and I’ve gotten too used to having people to talk to all the time. I set down my tools and amble back to the house.

After a little fiddling with the telephone wires, I manage to connect the old home phone up. I get halfway through dialing Suguri’s number before thinking a second, putting the phone back on the hook, and then dialing the number for my apartment.

“Hello? We don’t want any,” a sleepy voice mumbles after a few rings.

“Sora? It’s me.”

“Oh! Major, Nath’s calling. Say hi.” There’s five seconds of silence as, halfway across the world, Sora holds up the phone to the cat and the cat says absolutely nothing. “He used up all his meows earlier. It’s fine. Did you make the flight okay?”

I roll my eyes. “If I crashed into a fighter jet, the fighter jet would lose. I made the flight okay.”

“Good. Don’t let light aircraft bully you. That’s what Suguri always says.”

I smile, but instead of inquiring about Suguri’s contentious relationship with the aviation industry, I decide to move the conversation along. “While I did say you could use my apartment while I was gone, I didn’t expect you to be there the first day.”

“I’m looking after the cat.” There’s another pause, and I can hear purring faintly from over the phone. “Also, I’m giving Suguri and Hime some time alone. They keep smooching when they think I won’t notice it.”

Something between a snort and a splutter forces its way out of me, but I cover the mouthpiece before she can hear it. “A… ha. Well. I didn’t… know they had that kind of relationship.”

“They’re bad at being sneaky. It’s very funny,” Sora replies, as seriously as ever.

“Sounds like the height of comedy.”

“Yes.”

I lean back against the stucco, cradling the phone against my ear. The wall is warm against my back. I wasn’t expecting talking on the phone to be so relaxing. “Well, anyway. I’ll have to get the house fixed up a bit, but maybe next month you can come over and visit. There’s a beach.”

“Do you have a swimsuit?”

“…No.”

“Lewd.”

“Shut up. Do you have one?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go then.”

“I’ll get one. Hime says they went to the beach last year and they got kicked out for making a mess. It was lots of fun.”

I spy an opportunity, and decide to take a gamble on it. “Get me one too, then. You’re good at that kind of thing. You guessed my sizes straight away last time.”

“Okay. I’ll pick out something cute.”

“Nothing too risqué, please. I’ll pay you back next time I see you.”

“Roger.”

There’s a lull, and it feels like the right time to end the call. Neither of us are the type for long phone conversations. Leave that to Hime. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Stroke the cat for me, and try not to make a mess. I’ll tell you when you can come over.”

“Mm. Call again soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

Unceremoniously, she hangs up. Well, that’s fine. No sense in long goodbyes. I put the phone back on the cradle, and start thinking about what to do next. There’s plenty of sanding that needs to be done, but to be honest, I just want to take a shower and lie on the beach for a while. I wasn’t planning to invite her over that soon, and now I’ve put a time limit on my sunbathing. Oh well.

When I’m ready I step out onto the sand, sunlight beating down on bare skin – the way it was meant to be felt. As I set down my towel and a bucket of ice to keep my wine in, I feel happier in this place than I have in years. Without realising it, I had grown to dread this journey – dread this lonely and abandoned house. But now it feels like there’s some potential to it. Just like my graveyard is full of life, maybe I can fill that house with laughter. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago. For now, it is a place of peace, and I lie down to start a silent communion – between myself, the sand, and the sky.

A/N: Just something a little light and contemplative. Inb4 Sora inevitably picks out a slingshot bikini.