[EP] hands in the dirt, head in the sun

[st_rigaetsica]

After Vax'ildan caught her giving some of the plants a little nudge, Joanna was being more careful and not using magic as she tended the plantings. Getting her hands in the dirt and around growing things was grounding in ways she needed, with or without magic.

"No. Thank you. I have all the towels I need." The staff's obsession with offering towels was beyond Joanna's understanding, but was easier to ignore than the lack of aura and their general vagueness. "The fuchsias could use some attention, though. I was going to get to them after I finished here, but you could take care of them." The groundskeeper looked at Joanna with confusion. "The fuchsias. Bushes... small, carmine-" With no signs the woman knew what Joanna was talking about, she shook her head. "I'm going to clean up this bed today. Maybe you could find another part of the grounds to tend?"

The groundskeeper toddled off to do... whatever it was she was going to do, and Joanna let out a sigh of disbelief before catching the eye of someone passing by. "I had middle school students who were easier to talk to."

Comments

[st_arkcrowblack]

Snow blinked stupidly at that. It was more than a little ironic that anyone would talk to her of all people about being unable to have a conversation with someone, and that perhaps made her self-conscious enough to say something rather than staring blankly as the groundskeeper had done. "I... don't know what middle school is."

[st_rigaetsica]

"Eleven to fourteen year olds, usually," Joanna explained. Younger than Snow, who wasn't much for talking either, but who didn't seem to miss anything. Understandable, given the protective spikes in her aura, and Joanna was glad she normally shielded well enough not to pick up people's emotions except when she needed to.

"They're usually too absorbed in their own little worlds to care about anything else." Their own little worlds, hormone overload, all that kind of thing.

[st_arkcrowblack]

"Oh." Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, all Snow had had was her little world, and her world had grown only smaller in that period as her stepmother entered her life and one by one pruned away the few people she knew. First her governess. Then the maids. The housekeeper and the cook. Until they were the only women in the house.

The menfolk stayed, though, because someone had to fill the milk bath. Ostensibly it was because Mrs. H would not diminish her husband's personal staff, but as Mr. H had been home so seldom, Snow knew all she'd really needed was the muscle.

"Never went to school," she mumbled instead.

[st_rigaetsica]

"Sometimes my daughters didn't either." Most people would assume homeschooling, which fit with the impression Joanna sometimes gave of a vaguely new agey, granola type. But some lifetimes formal schooling wasn't easily available, or if it was, safe for young witches just coming into their powers.

"I'm Joanna. I'd apologize for not having introduced myself sooner, but you first four had enough with welcoming so many of us when we arrived."

[st_arkcrowblack]

"Snow White," she murmured, though it occurred to her the moment after she said it that Joanna already knew her name. But she hadn't really known how else to respond to that. She had largely been hiding from the other guests as best she could, so it probably wasn't that people hadn't introduced themselves so much as she'd been determined not to be introduced to.

She ducked her head.

[st_rigaetsica]

"I'm glad I finally got to meet you, Snow." Joanna offered the girl a warm smile, then turned back to the bed of salvia. She didn't think she or her girls had ever been the kind of hurt and skittish Snow was, but Joanna understood about walls and keeping distance for your own protection or someone else's. Not devoting all her attention to Snow as they talked was something she hoped would help.

"If I thought the gardener had any feelings to be hurt, I'd worry about stepping in and taking over some of the work," she explained. "It probably wouldn't stop me, because I feel better when I can get my hands in the dirt and help things grow, but I might feel a twinge of something about doing it. I think we're all trying to find those things that help us, though, now it's sunk in we're stuck for awhile."

[st_arkcrowblack]

This was something Snow understood. She spent whole days with the horses practically because it was just easier to focus on them than the fact that they were effectively trapped here and she felt that much more keenly in such a confined space. She nodded. "Wasn't anybody at all in the stable."

[st_rigaetsica]

"Just horses needing someone to look after them." Horses, who didn't talk and wouldn't expect Snow to either. Joanna could see the appeal. "And you can ride when you feel the need to move. I remember days like that, saddling my horse and just letting him run until there was no one and nothing around."

[st_arkcrowblack]

Snow perked at that, though she didn't realize she had done. "You ride?" So few people had, since she'd left home. Once technology had replaced horses, horses had become a niche pastime for rich people rather than something everyone with enough money to scrape together strived for.

[st_makemeastone]

River was in a tree. So it was possible Joanna wasn't talking to her, as she may or may not be visible from where she was perched on a branch about ten feet off the ground. But she answered her anyway.

"Nothing there..." She frowned and watched the caretaker walk away. As she saw it the people from here were all ego. No id or super ego. Just rational executive function.

And towels.

[st_rigaetsica]

"It's a bit disorienting," Joanna answered, as though the one she was speaking to wasn't up in a tree. Or maybe like a mother who'd had similar conversations with daughters doing the same.

"Can you see what she's doing now, from your perch?"

[st_makemeastone]

She couldn't, not quite, so she popped up onto her feet on the branch and up on her toes one hand wrapped around a branch as she leaned out to look.

Precarious but she was obviously at ease doing it.

"Hedges." Where had the clippers come from she mused. Had the woman HAD clippers?

[st_rigaetsica]

"Then we may have a reprieve on towel offers for awhile." Trimming hedges could occupy the gardener for a long time, leaving Joanna free to focus on other parts of the landscaping.

Aware of the girl in the tree, Joanna went back to clearing leaves and random bits of trash mostly from a bed of Bee's Bliss, a faint scent of sage rising up where her hands brushed over the plants. "It's been a long time since I gardened with a young woman watching from a tree branch," she mused after a little while.

[st_makemeastone]

River had a number of towels in her room. Stacks of them. They just kept being offered so she took them.

She watched for another moment, still half dangling before she slid gracefully off the branch and swung for a moment like a monkey before landing on the damp ground with a soft thump.

"My intent was not to observe you," she said after a brief pause to check that all her parts remained cohesive. "You were not here when I arrived."

The words were a little rude, but the tone was not, it was somewhat apologetic and explanatory.

[st_rigaetsica]

"And my intent was not to be observed," Joanna countered before looking up at the girl who'd landed near her, the corners of her eyes crinkled slightly with amusement. "The things we didn't intend sometimes make life more interesting."

She cleared away some dead leaves from around the base of a plant. "Then it's a question what we intend to do with the interesting bits that come up. For instance, I could decide to introduce myself to the young woman who intended to come down from a tree. I'm Joanna."

[st_makemeastone]

She blinked, this woman sort of reminded her of Inara. The calmness of body and mind.

"River." Not a non-sequiter. Her name. "What if the plant prefers the blanket?"

[st_rigaetsica]

If Joanna was surprised by the question or how it was phrased, she recovered quickly. River obviously didn't see the world the way most people did. Neither had Ingrid and Freya, either when she raised them as witches or when she hid their powers from them. "Blankets can be nice," she said, gesturing toward other parts of the bed where the earth was lightly covered. But as cozy as a warm blanket can be, if it was so heavy I didn't get enough to eat, I'd start wasting away eventually. I can push that kind of blanket off, a plant can't."

[st_alksthroughwalls]

Most of what Kitty knew about plants could be lumped under the heading "Ororo taught me," but it was really more knowledge osmosis, since 'Ro always tried to treat her more like a sister than a student. However she categorized it, Ororo had been a formative influence and, these days, she missed her old teammate (the other one who had been a minority before she was a mutant) more than ever.

She felt it keenly when she heard the note of frustration in the voice of the woman speaking to--it would have to be the Gardener, Kitty assumed, even though it was all any of them could do to keep the most basic details of each of their caretakers in mind. "At least she's not sullen and wearing body spray instead of deodorant," Kitty found herself saying, instead of simply passing by.

[st_rigaetsica]

"You've spent time with middle schoolers, then," Joanna observed, wondering what the woman who'd taken on bartending duties here had done before settling so easily into a roach motel new world.

"On the other hand, they may be loud balls of hormones wrapped in questionable fashion choices and artificial scents, but they are very clear presences. The staff here seem more like absences."

[st_alksthroughwalls]

"A little, but not much." It was more that Kitty had seen dozens of television shows, and, "Frat guys aren't that different from middle schoolers. Neither are gamers. I was at university before I came here. Science and engineering. I knew a lot of unsocialized guys."

Grinning a little, Kitty shrugged and crouched down to say hello. She felt a little awkward, since she didn't really know many women this age besides Moira. "We haven't met, really. I'm Kitty."

[st_rigaetsica]

Working her way through school as a bartender, then, and a science background that explained the notebooks the girl usually had nearby when at the bar.

Joanna brushed her hand off on her jeans, not minding the dirt, before shaking Kitty's. "Joanna. Art teacher and green thumb, among other things. It's nice to meet you, Kitty."

[st_alksthroughwalls]

"At home," Kitty said after they shook hands, and gave Joanna a lopsided grin. "I'd probably have to go scrub my hands now to make sure I didn't take any dust or bacteria with me that could get into sensitive equipment. Thank God for small blessings, my Dad would--" There it was, that familiar pang, right on cue. "--have said."

She hastened past the subject to ask, "Did you teach art appreciation or art skills?" which added another pang, kin to the first. Piotr.

Apparently today she was taking her walk down Memory Lane.

[st_rigaetsica]

Joanna felt a spike of sorrow echoed in Kitty's voice and face, but when Kitty pushed past it, Joanna didn't push. Some things needed to be held close.

"Some of both. Predominantly skills, but teaching my students how to appreciate other people's art got them thinking about their own in new ways. Skills, because as a single mom raising two girls, I needed the stability of teaching instead of trying to support us by selling paintings."

[st_alksthroughwalls]

"Oh, you're an artist. What do you paint?"

Kitty told herself it was only being trapped here that made her think of Piotr, and she almost believed it. She'd been thinking about Pete lately, too. "I've never been good at art. An old friend said it was because I think too much."

Dance was different. She could lose herself in the music, the math of it or the beauty, either way, and her brain got out of her body's way.

[st_rigaetsica]

"There can be art in making cocktails. That's my younger daughter's preferred medium, and she's quite the bar artist. Although she'd say it's her sister who thinks too much." Mother and teacher, of course Joanna would touch on Kitty's comment about herself before answering her question.

"My preference is working in oils, but the style and subjects vary." That happened when you'd been painting as long as Joanna had. She shrugged. "Not that I've had much time for painting lately. A strange few months was finally at an end. Then I was here."