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the-blind-assassin-12 · 3 years ago

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June Prompt #2- Carpe Diem

A POINT OF NO RETURN FLASHBACK

A/N: Shh. It’s still June. Couldn’t leave past Clara and Ezra in the past, so here is another flashback from those three happy years on the farm before everything fell apart. This is closer to the three year mark in the PoNR timeline. I loosely based the stream behind Clara’s farm on the photo below- it’s one I took a few years back at Enfield Falls in NY. (The darker parts right under the small waterfalls are the deeper pools)

Request: “skinny dipping” from @cannedsoupsucks

WC: 1.6k

Warning: oh just a little hint of zesty times. can’t really skinny dip without those.

Seasons turned quickly on Kamrea.

The Thulian harvest spanned only three weeks before the rains came, soaking the land and raising the water level in the streams. After the month-long deluge, there was a blip in the weather patterns lasting anywhere from a few days to a week or two when the combination of the planet’s position and the clarity of a sky scrubbed clean of clouds made for breathtaking views. During that indeterminate window, the Vernal Star was at its brightest, giving the world a golden yellow glow, but the cerulean hued ocean planet Lao and its moon Brizo were also visible to the naked eye, and at certain times of day the light refracting off of Lao’s waters made the whole sky flash green. When the winter came it did so in a hurry, too, sweeping in under the dim purple light of the Hibernal Star, flash freezing the fields and orchards, and turning the Lakelands to ice. Snow flurried lazily for a fortnight or so and melted before it ever added up to an inconvenient amount. Before long the rotation of seasons was pivoting back towards planting and tending and time to get to work before the harvest crept up again.

To an outsider, someone who hadn’t grown up there, life on Kamrea might easily seem rushed, stressful. Clocks ticked and calendar pages filled with Xs as Kamreans bustled along to keep with their constantly shifting time constraints and limitations. Nothing lasted long, and if you blinked you could miss things like the malachite color of the spring starshine bouncing off the waves on Lao or the iridescent glow Brizo gave off, even the faint but sweet smell in the air that signaled the beginning of the Thulian growing season, and you would have to wait an entire year for another chance.

But to those who had spent enough time there, whether they grew up on the fertile planet like Clara or had transplanted themselves on Kamrean soil as Ezra had done, the pace and rigidity of the seasons wasn’t something to fight or fear. Instead it was a constant reminder that life was happening now, not later, that there was beauty in catching a moment that was meant to be fleeting, in appreciating small slices of time. Each day came with the potential to see or hear or feel something never experienced before, and the potential to miss those moments seemed only to invigorate the Kamrean philosophy of making every moment count.

Which is precisely what I am doing.

Ezra looked up between the branches of the crater-oak that the swing he and Clara occupied hung from, at the thunderhead that had been gathering in the sky over the last hour or so. Kamrea was about to experience one of those split-second switches, where it would cease to be Harvest season with the first raindrop to plummet from the fat-bellied clouds. Any minute, they and the fields and the barn and the town over the hills and everything else on this side of the globe would be caught in a deluge and soaked to the bone, to the roots, to the bedrock. He moved his arm from the backrest of the wooden swing to wrap around Clara’s waist, hand resting at her hip.

Any minute now.

Looking back down at Clara, he saw that she had taken her eyes off of the rippling stream that the swing was situated on the bank of, and turned her attention skyward as well. What little daylight that hadn’t been squeezed out by the clouds and managed to make it down through the foliage lit the profile of her face in clean, green-tinted hues and he briefly wondered if other people felt this level of awe and devotion when they were with the one they cared about most in life, or if this was unique to the two of them. If they don’t then I truly pity them.

He watched her shoulders rise and fall as she sighed, the small motion one he had seen her do countless times before but still always bringing a flush of warmth to his chest. “End of another season.” She gave him a smile that quirked to one side, a mixture of pride and nostalgia and love for her farm twinkling in her eyes to make her face light up more than the leaf-filtered, cloud strangled starshine could. Oh, look at you, my Clara. Her tongue poked out then to wet her lips, and she stood from the swing, both of her hands clasping around the one of his that had been at her waist to pull him to his feet. “We should get inside before it starts coming down, or we’ll be soaked.”

We certainly will be, that’s correct.

“I think that you are absolutely right, Huckleberry.” Ezra took his turn to smirk then, catching her completely off guard as he stood only to use her own grips on his much larger hand against her. Pulling back, he yanked her into his arms, the second one swiftly enveloping her to make sure she was tucked tightly against his body, and then he jumped from the bank into the stream, plunging them both into one of the naturally formed deep pools at the base of one of the stream’s small cascades. Clara’s surprised gasp of his name devolved into a laughing shriek as their clothing suctioned to their skin, their hair dripping in their eyes, rivulets of cool, clear liquid running down their cheeks.

The pool that he had jumped into was shaped like a circular basin, cut and carved by the force of the water spilling over the tiered rocks that brought the upper level of the stream to meet the level at the bank. It wasn’t rushing with extreme force now due to the dry harvest season, but once the rains came and filled the stream past its bursting point, the water would fall in relentless torrents that over centuries had created a deeper pocket in the streambed, an ephemeral pool that was currently deep enough for both of them to be submerged when he jumped, but still shallow enough for him to be able to touch the bottom.

He set his feet down, thankful that the two of them had kicked their shoes off before sitting on the swing, both pairs still dry under the tree, and Clara wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms winding around his neck as his hands bolstered beneath the pockets of her denim shorts. Her eyes were still wide with shock, her lips wide in a laughing grin, and her sopping wet ponytail sprayed him with droplets as she shook her head. “Ezra! What are you- why did you do-”

Before she could get a full question out, ripples started appearing on the surface of the water, a slow pattering sound accompanying them as rain started to fall, hitting the leaves of the crater-oak and plopping into the stream. “Well, it’s like you said,” he leaned in and used his tongue to collect a bead of water from in front of her ear, lips brushing her skin as she shivered and clutched him closer. “It was inevitable that we would end up water-logged one way or another.”

He pulled back in time to see her breastbone sink, her breathing labored from his warm tongue on her damp skin, her light colored tank top nearly see through and plastered to her curves. Ezra had seen Clara come in from the rain. He’d seen her after a shower, Kevva, he’d seen her in the shower. He had seen her get wet when making adjustments to the irrigation system, or when he’d splashed her with soapy dishwater in the kitchen. But he had never seen this- the unexpected look in her eyes, the rush of excitement, the sheer absurdity of trying to avoid getting rained on and ending up in chest high water instead. You are the most ravishing woman in all of Kevva’s creation, Clara.

She laughed, pressing and rolling the curve of her forehead against his before replacing it with her lips. “Yes, but now our clothes are all-”

Ezra took one of his hands away from where he held her to work its way between her shirt and her body, pulling upwards until his fist with the material bunched in it surfaced, and he peeled the soaked garment over her head. Making expert work of the clasp on her bra, he rid her of that, too. Before he returned his hand to the globe of her ass beneath the water, he let it trail down the valley of her chest, thumb and pinky grazing the inside curves of her breasts and pulling a breathy sound from her throat. “What was it you were saying about our clothes, Huckleberry?”

He tilted his chin, cocking his head to one side as he switched hands beneath the water, bringing his other one between their bodies to the zipper of her shorts, yanking down as she stuck both of her hands under his shirt, running up the sides of his body as she followed his lead and rid him of his top. Flinging the olive green shirt that now looked black with how soaked it was onto the bank, Clara reached under the water to help him free her from the cutoffs she wore, their eyes meeting as their wet fingers bumped together in their hurry.

“Just that we need to get them off, Ezra.” That clean, innocent light in her eyes that was filtering through the trees just moments ago was gone, replaced with a burning desire that the stream nor the rain could do anything to quell. “We need to get them off, right now.”

*taken from JSTOR: Gathering flowers as a metaphor for timely enjoyment is a far gentler, more sensual image than the rather forceful and even violent concept of seizing the moment. It is not that as a culture we can’t understand what it means to harvest something when it’s ready—we do have related metaphors like “making hay while the sun shines,” after all. But there is something in the more Hollywood phrasing “seize the day” that has clearly resonated with people in the last thirty years. We understand the phrase to be, rather than encouraging a deep enjoyment of the present moment, compelling us to snatch at time and consume it before it’s gone, or before we’re gone.

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