#even fruitier than usual loop

[bunnymadeofstardust]

the.. the fruit snack loop

fruoop

[birlcholtz]

deep blue flowers

read it on ao3

Alex hasn’t been listening to Elliot for about the past half hour. If he’s going to barge into the training room and start rambling about Danny while pacing around the treadmill that Alex is currently on, he’s going to have to accept that Alex is not focusing on him. Not once he’s been running for over an hour and needs to focus on breathing, anyway.

“...so I was hoping that you knew a way to get into Ouranos and—”

“What?” Alex almost topples off the treadmill. “You can’t go there unless you’re dead. Everyone knows that.”

Elliot shrugs. “I’m dead, technically.”

“And why do you want to do this again?”

“To get something for Danny!”

“Why do you think this is a good idea?”

“It’s not, but it’s a really fucking awesome one.”

Well, at least he knows that. “And you need me to get you in and out?”

“...Yeah. I would normally ask Danny but it’s a surprise.”

“How are you even going to bring something back? You need to burn everything for the ritual, and it just fuses your soul with your body.”

“Oh, the Witch Mother has that covered.”

“Ugh.” Alex stops the treadmill and grabs his towel and water bottle. “You’ve thought of everything. I don’t even have a good way to convince you that this is a bad idea.”

“I already know it’s a bad idea. I almost always have bad ideas. Besides, I knew you would be hardest to convince, so I sorted everything else out first. Everyone is just waiting for me to confirm that you’re on board.”

“You’re a little shit.”

“I am.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Cool.”

Kal and Samji are at Willow’s house, which is good because that’s the only place Elliot could think of that they might be. Well, and Skytown, but he can’t exactly get there without Samji’s speeder.

“ELLIOT IS HERE,” Kal says from inside as Elliot gets ready to knock. The door swings open without him touching it.

“Wow, just in time for breakfast,” Samji says when he walks into Willow’s kitchen. “What are you doing here? Thought you ascended back to Gaia like six months ago.”

“I did,” Elliot replies as Willow hands him a bowl of cereal.

“DID YOU DIE AGAIN?”

“Nope. Looking for something for my boyfriend.” The cereal tastes like Froot Loops, but fruitier. “He’s the one who brought me back to Gaia last time.”

“So what’re you gonna get him?” Willow asks.

“I was hoping you could help me with that, since I have no idea. I wasn’t exactly here very long last time.”

“BRING HIM WILLOW’S WAFFLE RECIPE.”

“No way, Kal, I’m not giving anyone my waffle recipe.”

“I TRIED,” Kal sighs.

“You can have Stephanie’s game console,” Samji suggests. “I never use it anyway.”

“Are you kidding? No.”

“So then what do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Something you can’t find on Gaia.”

“Does he like plants?” Willow asks.

Elliot blinks. “Uh, yeah.” Danny helps Tanya in her greenhouse sometimes, but he’s usually more preoccupied with school. “Why?”

“Let’s go to my balcony, c’mon.”

Elliot follows as Willow leads the way upstairs, to a part of her house he’s never been to before. Samji and Kal seem to know the way, as they aren’t at all confused by the painted stairs that are seriously messing with Elliot’s depth perception. He stumbles and almost trips more than once— would have tripped, if not for Samji grabbing his arm and stabilizing him.

“Awesome, isn’t it?” Willow asks without turning around. “I painted the stairs myself. Had to get eight different colors of paint. Some of them were supposed to sparkle, but I think that’s worn off with time because they don’t anymore. Here we are.” She opens a door that Elliot hadn’t noticed before (it blends perfectly into the orange wall) and they step out onto a balcony.

It’s almost like an open-air treehouse, a platform wrapping around one of the larger branches of the tree that Willow’s house sits at the base of. There’s no railing.

“If you fall, you won’t die,” Samji says, noticing Elliot’s look at the edge. “The balcony isn’t high enough for that.”

“UNLESS YOU FALL HEADFIRST,” Kal adds. “THEN YOU MIGHT DIE.”

“Wait, you can die in Ouranos?”

“You can, probably,” Willow says. “Seeing as you’re technically sort of alive. If one of us falls off headfirst, we’ll be fine in an hour or so. I’ve done it before and after a day I barely even notice the headache.”

Elliot decides then and there to stay away from the edge.

Willow’s balcony is huge, first of all, so he can pretty much walk around freely. The platform is made of some sort of smooth, wood-like material, cut into planks that are wedged so tightly together, Elliot doesn’t think they could fall if they tried. And there are plants everywhere.

“You’ve added some new ones,” Samji says to Willow as she inspects something that looks like a fern, if ferns were shimmery and pale pink.

“CHECK SAMJI’S POCKETS BEFORE WE LEAVE,” Kal mutters. “SHE DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO TAKE CARE OF PLANTS SO IF SHE TAKES ANY THEY’LL DIE.”

“I had to get some variety,” Willow says. “Too much green. I got some toadstools that are cool, they’re over in the shady part.” She wanders off with Samji (Elliot notices that Willow is keeping a careful eye on her) and pretty soon they’re lost in the foliage.

“GET HIM FLOWERS,” Kal suggests.

“Yeah, think so.” Elliot steps around the bright yellow shrub in front of him and looks around— Willow’s garden is a riot of color. There’s a trellis by the tree trunk, draped in a shimmering silver vine. He makes a mental note of that one and keeps wandering around. There’s a crash from somewhere behind a flowering purple sapling and Samji’s voice saying “Ow, Willow, I just wanted to look at it!”

“Look with your eyes, not with your kleptomaniac fingers,” Willow replies, and then they quiet back down.

“ELLIOT, I HAVE FOUND A NICE PLANT FOR YOUR BOYFRIEND,” Kal says from somewhere on the balcony. “IT IS EXTREMELY AESTHETICALLY PLEASING.”

“I HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOU ARE,” Elliot yells back.

“I AM NEXT TO THE AESTHETICALLY PLEASING PLANT.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t help,” he mutters.

Eventually, Elliot finds his way back to the door. Samji is there too, sulking, and Kal and Willow are debating the logistics of taking a bud from the plant Kal found.

“There you are,” Willow says when she notices him. “What took you so long?”

Oh my fucking God. It took Elliot at least ten minutes to find his way back to the door, and he’d gone approximately ten feet. “Your garden is a maze.”

“It’s great, isn’t it?” Willow doesn’t wait for a response before she says, “We got some stuff for you.” She and Kal have brought over some ceramic pots, and Kal must have snagged the trellis with the silver vine on the way over. “That boy Kal likes knows how to make flower arrangements so I figured you could just go over there for some help.”

“IT WAS HER IDEA,” Kal says.

“But we’re all gonna need to go over there because there are too many things to carry,” Samji says.

“I normally would just make all of you carry it, but I’m going to come along to keep an eye on my plants.”

“Kal can carry all the heavy things anyway.” Samji nods to the trellis. “That way he gets to show off how strong he is.”

“YOU ARE VERY IMMATURE AND FRIVOLOUS.”

“Shut up and pick up the trellis.”

Kal’s mystery boy is called Geo, which initially confuses Elliot.

“You’re a nymph. Why are you named Geo?”

“Like ‘geode,’” Geo says with a smile, nodding at the crystal walls.

Frankly, Geo is a ray of sunshine. He’s shorter even than Elliot, which is not something Elliot’s seen often, and his smile is almost bigger than his face. He’s decorated his horns with an elaborate flower crown.

He also cuts snippets from the plants they’ve brought wickedly fast and Elliot swears that when his finger touched a thorn, his finger bent it out of the way insted of it pricking him. (It’s difficult to tell, since Geo’s skin is the same green as the stems.)

“So are you going for a bouquet or did you have something else in mind?” Geo asks, twirling a bit of the silver vine into a loop. He intertwines it with some of the pink fern and hops up on his table. “Tell Kal to get over here so I can put this on his head.”

Kal is already on his way over, since he apparently has a radar for whenever Geo says anything (not that Elliot is surprised), so Elliot just decides to answer his question.

“I guess a bouquet? I’m not sure how he feels about flower crowns so I think maybe we should stay away from that.”

“Good plan,” Geo says as he perches the pink and silver crown on Kal’s head. (Kal has a look on his face like he’s been touched by an angel.) “I have two different ideas, do you want me to just make them both and then you can decide?”

“What’ll you do with the extra one?”

Geo shrugs. “Depends. If Willow doesn’t want it, then I’ll keep it! I’m sure I’ll find some occasion to give someone a bouquet.” He hops off the table. “And when I say that, I mean that I could really use a bouquet to give someone.”

“Okay, then yeah, making them both would be helpful.”

Geo starts with the potted plant that looks kind of like a rosebush, except the flowers are a deep blue and there’s a shimmering gold light emanating from the center. Then the silver vine (Kal just picked up the entire trellis and brought it with them), then the pink fern, then a pot of what looks like black and white irises. He plants a white flower Elliot can’t identify in the center of a bouquet that’s mostly the irises and silver vine, and lays it across the table, apparently done with it. The second one, which Geo takes longer to finish, shines. Some of the blue rose-like things are open enough that the golden light is prominent, and it makes the pink fern and the silver vine shimmer, even in the somewhat dim lighting of the geode. He doesn’t add the irises, but he intertwines the fern and the vine and weaves them through the blue roses.

“Oh my God, that’s beautiful,” Elliot blurts out.

Geo smiles as he finishes it up. “I thought you’d like it.”

Leaving is difficult, since they not only have all the plants they started out with, but also a bouquet. Kal offers to take the pink fern, which Elliot is holding in addition to the bouquet, but Elliot says no. Kal’s already got the trellis and the irises, and no matter how capable he claims to be, he doesn’t have any more arms available.

Unless he can grow more arms?

Elliot doesn’t know and he’s not anxious to find out.

It turns out to be a good thing that Elliot keeps the fern, because they haven’t even gotten onto Samji’s speeder before Geo comes back out of his geode with the extra bouquet and hurries to catch up to them.

“Kal!” he says.

Kal immediately stops, and there’s a bit of a scramble to prevent him from dropping the irises (which have decided to continue carrying forward with momentum). Willow snatches them before they fall and holds on to them while Geo approaches with the bouquet.

There’s a brief moment where Elliot thinks there’s going to be confessions of love or something, but in the end Geo just blushes dark green and holds the bouquet towards Kal, who takes it with his newly freed hand and stares at it in wonder as Geo rushes back into his house.

“He’s shy,” Samji murmurs to Elliot. “That’s the most overt declaration of interest I’ve ever seen from him.”

They ride back to Willow’s house almost silently— Kal is in awe of the flowers from Geo, and usually he would provide a majority of the noise.

“So how are you going to get back to Gaia?” Willow asks.

“Oh, a friend of mine is going to help.” Alex has been instructed to wait six hours before summoning Elliot back to the world of the living, so it might be a while before he goes back, but the Witch Mother has assured Elliot that it’ll work. He’s both dead and alive, so he can go back and forth, which is pretty punk rock. It also means that they don’t have to cover Elliot’s corpse in blood and burn his clothes, which is nice. He’d arrived in the same clothes he was wearing when Alex did the ritual to send him, and the bouquet will almost definitely come with him on the trip back. Or at least, the Witch Mother says that he can bring things back.

“You can hang out at my place until you have to go, I don’t think Kal and Samji will be leaving for a while. I’m making lunch.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks.”

Lunch at Willow’s is just as good as last time, and Elliot’s lucky he gets to stay to enjoy it— less than a minute after he finishes his plate, he starts floating again. It’s good that he hung on to the bouquet while he was eating, just in case this happened. It’s floating with him up towards the world of the living.

“See you sometime,” Elliot says before he hits the ceiling.

“Don’t die too early,” Samji responds.

“I’ll try.”

Alex knows that Elliot is back when his body twitches on the floor and a weird-looking bouquet of flowers appears, cradled in his arms.

“You’re stupid,” he says when Elliot opens his eyes and looks around. “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever participated in.”

“Not to hear Eli tell it.”

“Maybe Eli’s wrong.”

“He’s probably not.” Elliot sits up. “Anyway, I gotta go find Danny. Thanks!”

And then he dashes out of the training facility with the flowers.

He left his shoes on the floor.

“How is he older than me?” Alex asks himself.

Danny is reading an engineering textbook and eating a granola bar when Elliot finds him. Someone (probably Madina) has installed a shelf above his desk and filled it with snacks. They must have put that there today, since Elliot was here with Danny last night.

He knocks on the doorframe of the room (the door is open), and when Danny looks up, he says, “Danny, I have something for you!” and holds out the flowers.

Elliot can practically see Danny’s mind zooming around before he says, “What kind of flowers are those?”

“They’re from Ouranos.”

Danny blinks.

“The underworld. Afterlife. Whatever.”

“They’re really cool,” Danny says, finishing his granola bar and getting up to take the bouquet. “How do they glow?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Hmm. Maybe Tanya will have some ideas. Or I guess I could ask Magda? Tanya knows plants, but I don’t think she knows much about Ouranos... Hey, did you know you’re not wearing shoes?”

“I’m not?”

“No,” Danny says, going back to inspecting the bouquet. “I’ll start out with Tanya then, and if she doesn’t know I can ask Magda. Or Greg, Greg would probably know...”

Elliot just smiles.

@sharperzero @dannybecketofficial @tobuggsy @scythio @vanishedschism @peppernine-me @finalscrisis