(no subject)

[formicine]

The air feels heavy as Blue opens her eyes. Slow, heavy, weighed-down like this mugginess that the air hasn't cut through, the sort of summer heat that lulls you to sleep and coerces you to come out only at night. She'd been dreaming of flying, or maybe not flying, just seeing a million places far away. Reaching, up up up with limbs that seek sunlight and intertwining, part of something big, breathing out-in with life, spanning --

A shrill chirrup that is not a cat's cry breaks the silence and Blue starts awake.

Next to her head, a tiny green bird barely taller than her thumb inspects her critically from the top of the lamp, chirrups again and flies off into --

the canopy?

She sits up, putting her hands behind her on the bed. Where a decorative garland of fabric leaves usually hangs across the corner of the room, there's a tree branch: Persephone sits there calmly as though she is quite accustomed to trees showing up in her room. That branch leads to a bigger branch, which traces the length of the room; vines trail in from the window and leaves cover the ceiling and much of the floor. Brilliant tropical flowers have burst into bloom.

She'd seen a weird vine trying to work its way in at the kitchen window the other day, and an even stranger beetle -- pretty enough that she'd captured it in a mason jar and taken it outside -- too, since then, but --

She sits there in awe for a moment. If she'd been told in this moment that she'd been granted Ronan's ability to dream something into reality, she might have believed it, though Blue thinks practically, and nonsensically, that she'd have certainly dreamed herself proper field clothes instead of a t-shirt and pajama shorts. What if she gets bitten by something?

Then she takes a picture with her phone, which is still sitting perfectly safely on the night stand, because of course she does, and sends it: tell me you see all this too, before getting up to pad across slightly condensation-heavy wood flooring and see if Kat's woken up to this in her bedroom.

Comments

[floozyfacade]

It's still fairly early, but Olive is up, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and Duckie at her feet, when the text comes in. She's in the process of trying to decide what they'll make for breakfast today, picking up the phone and swiping it open idly to take a look at the message from Blue.

it's beautiful, she types back. where are you??

[formicine]

Um, Blue types back, in my bedroom???

For effect, she turns the camera around and sends Olive a picture of herself, a quizzical expression on her face and the headboard visible in the background. Well, somewhat visible. It, too, has some vines trying to wrap around it. She puts a questioning emoji and a frog as stickers on the photo and messages it back.

if you've ever wanted to go visit the amazon, come on over i guess?? is there anything else weird going on lately?

[floozyfacade]

Okay, that is super weird.

not that I know of, she writes, but it's Darrow, so probably.

There's no doubting, though, that what Blue's seeing is real. Olive can see it, too, and that is 100% rainforest surrounding her friend. should I come over? bring a weed whacker? :p

[formicine]

FAIR, Blue answers, wondering if she should start texting other people to see if their houses have transformed. Garden shears? But do come over. If only so someone else can see this.

Well, Kat will, undoubtedly -- even if it's not taking place in her side of the house. But it seems like a hallucination, anyway, just pumped straight into their apartment. She gets up and digs through her dresser. Everything is just a little damp in the humidity, as though they'd run a load of laundry but the dryer hadn't quite finished. Which occasionally happens, but ew. She puts on a shirtdress and chunky boots in some sort of compromise to trying not to get bitten by anything that might have Jumanji'd its way into her bedroom and still stay cool, and heads out into the kitchen to examine further.

[floozyfacade]

It's probably a joke, but Olive ventures into the yard anyway, digging the garden shears out of the shed along with a pair of gloves in case there's anything with thorns to take care of. She doesn't want Blue getting all scratched up or poisoned or whatever just because Darrow decided a little magic was the way to go here.

It's not all that long after that she turns up at Blue's door, knocking and curious. It looked pretty intense from the picture, but she wonders what it's actually like in person.

[formicine]

Blue comes to the door, smiling sheepishly. At first, the apartment might look normal, if you didn't look too hard. It's not until you get through the front hall toward the kitchen that things get, well, -- rainforesty. It's definitely not just in her room, vines climbing outward and canopy from seemingly nowhere, though there is still some clear counter and the refrigerator, thank god, doesn't seem touched.

It is humid, right away, though. Like they've just turned off the ACs, locked the windows and doors and run all the hot water in the house.

"Hey," she says, and ushers Olive in waving around as they hit the kitchen. Blue deadpans, "Welcome to the jungle."

[floozyfacade]

"This is intense," Olive says, looking around as she heads inside, spinning in a slow circle to take it all in. "Yikes. And it just popped up overnight? How does that even happen?"

She's not even sure why she's asking, honestly. It's Darrow. Darrow is weird. She's not used to it, exactly, but she's come to accept that sometimes there's just no good answer. Doesn't keep her from asking; she's just less hung up on getting the response.

[formicine]

Blue spreads her hands. "If Ronan were still here, I'd blame him," she says with a little huff, as though that's what she's most frustrated about his absence, that she can't blame him for the rainforest in her bedroom. "He could ... pull things out of his dreams."

"Only this is more like my dreams," Blue confesses. "I used to -- well, I've told you this. I used to want to be a field researcher or some kind of biologist. See animals and plants I'd never be able to in Henrietta. Just the other day I was thinking about it, actually." She reaches to touch a brilliant tropical flower, looking at the way the dew collects on it.

"But I'm not..." She laughs. "I can't do anything like this."

[swerved]

The moment she wakes up, Kat knows something is different. She usually keeps her room nice and cool and with good air circulation, especially with as hot as it's been lately, but it feels humid like she slept with her window open instead. Loud, too — maybe not incredibly so, but a different sort of white noise than just the electricity and the air usually provide.

And then she opens her eyes, and it's easy to see why. There's so much green, it's like she fell asleep in the goddamn park or something, except she didn't, this is her room and her bed and her window, and she's pretty sure nothing could grow this much overnight. Not on its own, anyway.

Carefully hauling herself out of bed, she heads out into the hallway, unsurprised to see Blue up as well. "You know," she says, biting back a yawn, "I feel like I should ask what's going on, but I'm not even sure how to."

[formicine]

"I'm not even sure what to tell you," Blue says, ruffling a hand through her hair and looking around in wonder. The vines and tree canopy spill outward from her bedroom. The kitchen is intact, sort of, but there's also tropical flowers sort of spilling out from over one cabinet and a frog sits looking at them from the counter. She has to wonder if the food's okay.

"I just -- woke up and it was like this."

She shakes her head and reaches to touch what looks like a banana leaf, though she can't find the trunk of the tree it belongs to. It is very much real. "I've always wanted to see the rainforest -- that was what I was going to do, back home, you know, if I could figure out how to afford to do it? -- but it's not like something I had that this place could bring me. I very much did not have it, really."

She's heard of Darrow dumping items, even people -- in the case of Robin -- onto its residents, but this is something totally new.

[swerved]

"And even if you did," Kat says, "there's a difference between that and having it... woven all into everything like this." There's something bizarrely natural about it, really. It all fits like it's supposed to be here, not like someone dumped a bunch of plants onto their furniture and let some animals loose. For that matter, it couldn't all just grow on its own. She's not really sure what that means, too stunned to try to piece it together, but she has a feeling that there isn't just going to be a simple, logical explanation for this.

Around here, there so rarely is.

"Who do you even call for something like this? Do we just wait it out?"

[formicine]

She nods, thoughtfully, wandering closer to a vine to inspect it. It's true, it's woven in. There are some places where leaves are poking out of odd areas, and a busy leaf-cutter ant seems to be wandering into a hole in the wall near the electrical socket -- that'll be a hard one to explain -- but for the most part, it seems as though the apartment has just given way to nature.

It's beautiful, in a really screwed up way.

Blue laughs in a sort of ha!, as much a dubious exclamation as a laugh. "I don't think we can just call the super, that's for sure," she says. "I..."

She darts a guilty look at Kat. "I'm not sure I love the idea of all my clothes being damp, but it's sort of beautiful, isn't it?"

[swerved]

"I have a feeling it's going to get really old, really fast," Kat admits, her nose wrinkling as she speaks, "but while that hasn't happened yet, it's... Yeah, it's kind of beautiful. We should try to take pictures of all of it." It'll help anyway, like some kind of proof that they didn't do — couldn't have done — this, but she wants something to remember it by, too. She doesn't add that she has no idea how they'll possibly clean their apartment up. If there are plants growing into and out of things, actual insects and animals who've made homes here, it can't possibly be as simple as cutting everything back and acting like nothing happened.

It's more than a little intimidating, but it's also hard to think that far ahead just yet. She's barely managed to take all of this in. She can manage not to freak out about it just yet.

"I've never heard of something like this happening here, have you?"

[formicine]

"Yeah," Blue says with a wry laugh. "It definitely will. But we should take photos. Maybe we can print them out after and hang them somewhere."

She sighs, almost wistful with the idea of an after, even as she knows that this is going to be sticky and wet and awful and she has no idea how to make sure animals don't crawl in their fridge. The practical, Sargent part of her knows all of these things: she's also thinking about putting on boots and bottling water and watching out for snakes and maybe taking clippings to take to the lab.

But there's the other side, the Blue side, and all she wants is to roll around in it.

"I haven't," she says. "Well, I mean. The city turned completely into another...messed up, ashen city full of dead things and demons, when I first got here. But that was the whole city." She leans to glance out the window. It's not all a rainforest, as far as she can see. "And I've heard of people thinking they were home for a day or a week or so, but it's only a dream. This...is something else. More like from a dream..."

"If Ronan were still here," she says, "I might think I'd switched powers with him, but." She shrugs with a obviously not sort of expression. "He could pull things out of his dreams, sometimes without meaning to. Whole farmyards of live animals, as long as he dreamed them to make sense. And I've always been trapped somewhere and wanted to explore. I mean, I still wish I could see the world, all the time..."

She trails off and glances at Kat, thoughtful.

[swerved]

"We should," Kat agrees. "We could probably do something neat with them. Some hipster clothesline thing, or arranging all of them on a wall." It's hard to think about that, though, when it's all around them now, not a decoration but something they're living in. It seems real, too, as impossible as that ought to be. A shared hallucination wouldn't be all that surprising, given this place, but that will at least be easy to disprove, and it's so goddamn elaborate, down to the humidity in the air, it's hard to consider that this could only exist in their minds.

Around here, of course, nothing is impossible. Somehow, though, that makes it more plausible that there really are vines and foliage growing in their apartment.

"This is a big leap from wanting to explore, though, isn't it?" she asks. "Unless you just... I don't know, picked up the ability to do that somewhere or something." It's the most reasonable explanation, as odd as that is in its own right. Dreaming all of this into being would at least explain how it could be here when, the last time she checked, plants don't usually start growing out of walls.

[formicine]

"Ooh," Blue agrees, nodding already. "That's a good idea." To her, this is so much a reminder of all the things she was never able to have, that it seems as though it's probably going to disappear any moment now. She remembers distinctly sitting in the guidance counselor's office holding back tears over the financial impossibilities of any sort of college, much less the field research program she'd wanted.

But if it starts actually raining in their apartment, Jumanji-style, they really are going to have a problem.

"It's a pretty big leap," she agrees. "I -- maybe? It wouldn't be the weirdest thing Darrow has done. Maybe it's switching powers again. But I don't discount anything, up to and including something in this place reading minds. Did I ever tell you about the other Darrow half of us ended up in not long after I got here?" She makes a face. It's not as traumatic a memory anymore as it used to be, but it still creeps into her nightmares, sometimes. This, at least, is minor compared to that. So far.

[swerved]

"I think I've heard something about that, yeah," Kat says, shuddering at the thought. At least whatever is going on doesn't seem to be anything like that. At least they're in their own apartment, even if she is struck by a sudden worry about the state of the clothes in her closet. She probably ought to air everything out just so none of it retains any dampness. Logistically, this is likely to be somewhat disastrous, but so far, it could definitely be worse on the scale of fucked up Darrow nonsense.

The way things are around here, she knows she ought to be grateful for that.

"So this... isn't that. That's something. Maybe we should find out if it's happening in the rest of the building, too?" If Blue is right, though, about any of it, then Kat suspects it will just be them, aside from any effects of plants actually growing through their walls and in the building. God, she hopes this doesn't fuck up their security deposit somehow.