writing challenge prompt: apricity - the warmth of the sun in the winter. (Pairing Peter/Alex/Ruth if you fancy it)
prompt list
apricity - the warmth of the sun in the winter
The farmyard looks like it’s on fire. Great coiling, curling masses of steam are rising off it and ascending heavenward, for all the world as if a large dragon had set up shop beneath the chickens’ feet and is now puffing away to itself. The steam is solid silver and grey in the midmorning light, swirling on invisible thermals like Degas’ ballerinas, and edged with sunlight that is altogether too bright to look at.
He is looking anyway.
His eyes are scrunched up with an intensity usually reserved for awkward texts and inscrutable hill forts, brow furrowed and creased over heavy, dark brows. He’s got one hand on his hip, the other wrapped thoughtfully around his chin; his feet are planted squarely in boots coated in solid, cloying mud. He looks immovable as an oak tree, there in the farmyard. The world around them could end, he thinks, and Peter would still be standing.
Peter shifts, hand moving from chin to forehead to form a slight shield against the vivid wall of brightness. His sleeves are rolled up and it is possible to watch his muscles shift under his skin, as has been impossible for the past few weeks of seemingly endless rain. It has been cold and wet and miserable for all of January, feels like, and the dawn of February has not given them much cause for hope; but now, the rain has stopped, the clouds cleared, the mercury in the thermometer made the effort and risen above five degrees, and Peter has his jacket off and sleeves rolled back right away, as if this is the only sunshine he expects this year and he had better appreciate it.
In fairness, it is Britain. Stranger things have happened.
And anyway, Alex can understand the idea. He is, after all, watching Peter as though the man might disappear; as if this is his only opportunity to lean propped up on the cart in the sunlight and see him, sleeves pushed back and squinting and lit up by light and steam. How very long the winter has seemed.
Alex leans back a little and folds his arms, glaring into the east a little more himself, to look the same way as Peter. Ruth - of course, of course they are watching Ruth - is talking with great animation to their flock of chickens, hands on her hips as she chides them. They keep ducking about around her feet rather indignantly, dipping their heads with their strange stop-motion movements to tap their beaks unenthusiastically against the frozen ground as if to say why aren’t you feeding us? we cannot possibly be expected to feed ourselves in this weather! And Ruth is laughing at them, with the sun behind her head and behind the trees so that the rays are oddly defined; segmented spikes, like a great art deco sunburst.
“I will not feed you,” she is telling the birds with stern amusement. “You do not need it. It is a glorious day, at last, and you can go and enjoy it. And eat all the other things who are out enjoying it, too. It’ll be good for you. Lazy sods.” One of the chickens, the buff-coloured, famously bad-tempered one, darts forward and then struts nonchalantly away towards the pig sty. Ruth sputters an indignant laugh, jaw dropped in surprise. “Did you just peck my shoe?” she cries after the retreating bird, who puts on a burst of speed. “The audacity!”
Alex can feel the grin that’s lodged on his face; Peter, face still screwed up against the light, snorts inelegantly and she looks his way and beams. “Are you no longer a chicken authority?” he asks her very solemnly and sympathetically.
“My shoe has been pecked!” she informs him, rather redundantly, but it makes them both grin all the same. “They’ve lost all respect for me.” She watches the other chickens follow the vicious ringleader towards the patch of grass by the pigs where they peck morosely at the grass and dirt as if they don’t expect to find anything and reckon they’ll have starved by lunchtime. The various worms and insects which have ventured to the surface to enjoy the rare sunlight and which are now being snapped up by the sharp, aggressive movements of the chickens appear to do little to make them feel better.
“Get free-range chickens, they said,” Peter sighs, not unhappily. “It’ll be so rewarding to watch them hunt for themselves, they said.”
Ruth turns back to him, hand dropping from over her eyes, to laugh. Then she tilts her head on one side, offering him a lop-sided smile. “Are you alright?” she says. “I’m sure the camera crew would lend you some sunglasses until we film, if we haven’t got any thirties specs - face all screwed up, you look like a gargoyle.”
“I’m feeling great, thanks,” Peter says, voice all level and dry to make her laugh. “Really complimented and supported too. Have we actually got any proper shades, though? Alex’ll love them - he likes pretending he’s in Top Gun.”
“I do not,” Alex protests automatically and without a great deal of conviction.
Peter and Ruth turn to the sound of his voice, faces open with pleasure and slight surprise. “Oh, hello lurker,” Peter says cheerfully. “Was wondering where you’d got to.”
“I do not pretend I’m Tom Cruise,” Alex tells Ruth firmly, ignoring the lurker comment. She raises her eyebrows, one finger pressing against her mouth in futile prevention of a smile, and waits with interest for him to elaborate. “That - that bloke in The Mummy,” he finds himself saying, snapping his fingers as the name escapes him. “He’s got to wear sunglasses at some point, hasn’t he? I’ll be him.”
“Who, John Hannah?” Peter says, chirpy and obtuse with a grin from ear to ear and his hand cupped around his eye to shade against the February sun. Alex sends him a mock-withering glare and his smile somehow widens; Ruth laughs, bright and affectionately evil. “You do kind of look like John Hannah, you know,” Peter says, very deliberately reasonable.
Alex points at him warningly. “I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he tells Peter’s smirk, “but you know I was talking about the other one. O’Connell,” he says, snapping his fingers again in triumph.
Peter tuts and shakes his head sadly. “Nope, the hairstyle will out - you’ll have to be Hannah and I-” he places his hand on his heart like an old-timey Shakespearian actor about to monologue his way through a half-hour death scene, “-shall be O’Connell.”
Alex spreads his arms in indignation, appealing to Ruth in supplication for aid; as expected, she laughs at him.
“Ruth can be whatsherface. Evie,” Peter adds happily.
“No, no, I’m being Lara Croft,” Ruth corrects. “I want to run about in temples and have a mansion and a butler.”
Alex nods, conceding this point. Peter wanders over and places one large, sun-warmed palm on Alex’s shoulder, gesturing at him with the other and squinting towards Ruth. Heat leeches from the sun to the air to Peter, and he presses it into Alex’s joints like a balm. It soothes and steadies, even as Peter says “Do you want Alex for your butler?”
“Oh, yes please,” Ruth says cheerfully and Alex sighs, as deliberately and falsely put-upon as the chickens. Peter snorts and hauls him closer, half hug half headlock; he goes willingly, even as he makes an effort to look hard-done-by for Ruth.
“Why aren’t there any more cool archaeologists?” he says.
“Well,” Peter says, sounding rather apologetic, “there is always…”
“Indiana Jones is a terrible archaeologist,” Alex says firmly. “Great jumped-up cowboy.”
Ruth huffs a laugh at the tired old argument and tips her face up into the sun rather than engage with its well-trodden lines. She breathes deeply, inhaling great lungfuls of warmed, clear air; against his back, Alex can feel Peter breathe slow and steady and perfectly in-time. There’s something soothing about it, in the same way that there was something soothing about watching Peter watch Ruth: it is nice to know, sometimes, that other people operate the same way he does. For a moment, there, in their long-awaited sunlight, the whole thing had been as mana from heaven, all warmth and brightness and that peculiar kind of beauty that cannot be looked at head-on. He’s not sure he had really noticed, before, how much the interminable, rainy January had worn on him, until he had been confronted by the sunshine; by Ruth’s art deco halo, and Peter’s scrunched-up gargoyle face; by truculent chickens for the laws of farm and man. And intensity of emotion can be isolating, if the moment is not shared - but it is. Ruth is breathing it; Peter is holding him a little too tight; they are all together under a sun a little too warm for the season.
“There should be more films about historians,” Ruth declares to the sky, eyes resting closed. “What’s not cool about this?”
“Right,” Alex says. “We haven’t been rained on for, ooh, must be twelve hours now. Hours of action and entertainment in this line of work.”
“What’s it mean for Candlemas weather predicting,” Peter says, shaking Alex’s shoulders slightly but letting him stand fully and lean into his side, “if Candlemas itself is disgustingly wet and rainy but the day following is worryingly sunny?”
“Worryingly?” Ruth snaps, cracking an eye open to frown at them.
Alex ignores this and sucks his teeth. “Oh, nothing good, I’m sure. We’re being lulled into a false sense of security, mark my words.
Peter frowns with deep and false concern. “Snowed in by the morning?”
“If we even last the night.”
Ruth works one glove off her hands and throws it at them, nailing Peter in the chest; he scrambles to catch it. “Worse than the chickens, you two are,” she says, fighting a smile. Peter holds out the glove and she presses her lips together and crosses the yard. Her fingers fold around the leather in his palm; his thumb falls gently to rest over her knuckles. Ruth looks up at them, all amused reproach. “Can’t you just enjoy it?”
Alex and Peter share a look, and then Peter shrugs. Alex looks back at her, and the sunlight, and the chickens and the pigs and the way her hair shines copper and Peter’s scrunched-up face and the warming, thawing ground - like spring is coming. He shrugs too. “We’ll give it a go,” he says.
I’ve gotten very little done today, but @izzyovercoffee and I learned that Tarre Vizsla, least in Izzy’s headcanoning, is apparently Lancelot, specifically the Knight of the Cart variety, so it wasn’t a wash.
╰ ♡ ✧ ˖ @scriptisarcanisx / continued from the source.
Mister Parker, it was enough to cause Wyatt to blush and rub the side of his face to hide just how red his cheeks were from something so simple. “I felt myself internally cringe at that, I hope you know.” He teased. He couldn’t help but find himself amused by the way Blesse seemed to be out to give him a hard time already, in the best way possible. If anyone else had been hired as his assistant, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to joke around so freely with them. “I know, I know… but it’s best to get a taste of the job right out of the back.” He scrunched up his nose up slightly. When those actual nights he would have to stay late at the office, they would be more tolerable knowing that she was there to help him and keep him company if need be. “You drive a hard bargain, Ms. Salvador. But I think dinner could be arranged, I’ll even let you pick the place.” He had to tease her back a little bit by using a proper title. “C’mon, we should probably get out of here before my dad gets out of his meeting and decides to talk your ear off and give you unnecessary details about the company.”
