castadrift | [open]

Kaoru sits on the bank of the spring near the camp, considering it with a thoughtful expression on his face. He has many thoughts, among them whether or not it was worth the risk to go for a swim and how much he wants something to eat that wasn't fruit or a vegetable. Even if they are rescued today, he thinks, he will not be eating much fruit when they get home.

When. When when when when. Not if.

How useful would a swim be for a bath without shampoo or any soap at all? Kaoru tugs at his hair a bit in thought, wincing at how greasy and limp it is now. He's always taken a lot of pride in his hair; for now, he is very glad there are next to no mirrors on the island. It is hard enough to know his hair is limp and greasy and ugly without having to actually see how horrible it looks.

Bath without soap. More failed attempts at catching any fish at all. Neither option sounds very appealing, so he continues to just sit at the edge of the water, occasionally throwing a rock into the water to break the tedium. The water is lapping at the bottom hem of his Oscar pajama pants, but he doesn't care right now about that. It dries fast enough.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oscar." The greeting is quiet and toneless, but civil enough. Drake has arrived in silence, a fact that he regards with some satisfaction. Walking silently in houses, halls and streets is an achievement he's long since mastered, but in the jungle with twigs and leaves and branches, the challenge has proved far harder to surmount. Drake spends most of his time with his ear to the ground, and at times this has proved detrimental. Fortunately, nobody has yet been present to witness his numerous collisions with trees.

He takes another few steps into the small clearing, but refrains from sitting. 'Oscar' might not want him around. He knows what Kaoru's name is, but the pronunciation of it is alien, and rather than screw it up and feel like an idiot, Drake chooses to avoid the attempt entirely. The pants the man wears, grubby as they are, provide an easy replacement. Drake looks over him, examining the river. He, too, desperately wants a thorough wash, but Hell will freeze over before he steps foot off the security of the bank. So far he's limited himself to stripping down and using leaves. One day he's going to find a leaf that's poisonous or something, he's positive.

"Boring, isn't it."

That name again. Kaoru nearly responds to it automatically now, although he continues to add an edge of a glare whenever anyone calls him Oscar.

Kaoru tosses another rock before answering Drake, disrupting a few silver fish that were swimming by in a small group. Perhaps he could hit one with a rock and capture it that way.

"A bit. I never really believed it when some of the students in my Latin classes claimed that hunter-gatherer societies only work twenty hours a week until now."

Drake glances down at him. The comment is a trifle odd, but then he presumes anyone who's studied a great deal of Latin is odd. He took it for a while, thinking it useful for the law side of things, but quickly realised that all the terminology he would need was included in the directly related classes. Perhaps, when they all go home, he'll take an elective.

It's all about 'when', Drake realises, because he, like Kaoru, maintains a silent mantra of enforced positivity.

"Why's that?"

Kaoru shrugs. "It didn't seem logical. Having to search for food each day, living without any safety nets whatsoever, and yet work less than everyone that has the safety net."

He lays on his back and stares up at the trees above him. They could do with some of the anthropology students now. He owed them many apologies for some of the comments he's made about their academic focus.

"Yet, here I am. I collect food for a few hours, study the plant life and make sketches for a few hours, and still have hours left where I can just lay around and stare at the sky for planes."

If this had a definite ending date, it would have been surprisingly enjoyable. Since it did not...

[[sorry this took so long.]]

... They would dislike it as much as they wished.

Drake finally makes the decision to relax a trifle. Nobody is here to watch him other than Kaoru himself, and what will he have to say about it? Nothing. Drake has sand in his shoes, in his hair, and in several other places he'd rather not think about, and he musters up courage enough to remove the battered footwear, the socks he's willfully managed to keep hold of, and gingerly eases his feet into the water. It's as pleasant as he's imagined, and the youth lets out a quiet breath.

"We don't seem to be on a regular flight path," he notes. "Must've gone off course during the emergency."

"Of course we did. The only thing that's helped us so far is that we are stuck on an island with food and a lack of polar bears." It'd just be too easy if they were on a regular flight path and someone had a set of binoculars to see them with.

Kaoru doesn't care that Drake takes off his shoes. Fuck, Drake could probably strip and the only effort Kaoru would allow himself would be to close his eyes and not lift his head until Drake was done.

That is not going to happen.

Drake sits in silence for a while, letting Kaoru's last comment drift away on the air. It's thick with mosquitoes this near to the water, and the American huddles deep within his suit in an effort to keep them at bay.

Something tickles his foot. He sucks in a sharp breath, darting backwards and out of the water. It's probably the fastest move Drake has ever made, and from the dubious safety of the bank he stares into the water.

Kaoru opens an eye when he hears Drake move, and chuckled. It doesn't take too much brainpower to figure out what happened. "Nothing in there is going to hurt you," he says, still not bothering to move from his spot. "Nothing I've seen yet, at least. We must not be in the Australia part of the Pacific, or else there'd be a bunch of crazy ecological shit around us."

Drake debates whether the details are things he wants to hear. He decides not. Instead, he peers into the water again. It's relatively clear once you see past the fallen leaves, and there are a few small fish milling about. An idea strikes him, and he looks around him again. Would there be any poles suitable?

"Do you know how to fish?"

Probably not. Some of those details are keeping Kaoru from going near the ocean in case he's wrong and there are the terrifying miniature jellyfish of poison and death, among other things like sharks and stingrays. A stingray killed Steve Irwin - Kaoru wouldn't have a chance.

"Not without a fishing pole and they don't seem all that inclined to swim into my backpack. You have any ideas?"

"Not a backpack, perhaps." Drake goes quiet, his expression turning inwards as he considers the germ of an idea. He doesn't hurry it, knowing that it will form itself in its own time and be better for his patience. "But maybe a shirt, or something bigger." They don't have access to a traditional net, of course, but there has to be something around they can put on the bottom of a pond and lie in wait with.

"Only if you can convince someone to sacrifice their shirt. For the record, you cannot have mine. Or my hoodie." Kaoru only has so much clothes and if he isn't careful, he has a feeling he'll end up wandering around in his cookie monster boxers before long. Pajama pants were not made for any long term wearing.

"What about leaves or coconuts? We seem to be able to do anything out of them."

Automatically, Drake fishes out his mobile phone to google making nets out of coconut leaves. It's only once the svelte wooden casing is in his hand that he remembers it's nothing but a hunk of junk out here, and his fingers tighten around it defensively, frustratedly. He doesn't put it away though. It's comforting, solid, a remnant of the world they haven't got access to.

"We could weave the leaves I guess," he said. "But it doesn't seem like they'd be very strong." He sends a further glance to his rear to look for vines. "Maybe we could make a temporary pond out of sticks or something; trap them in."

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