Something of a Guardian Angel

There’s a bottle of Lipton iced tea rolling beneath Bones’s palm, leftover condensation dripping down the band of his glinting watch.

“Are you sure this is right?”

“I’d hesitate to say there’s anything right about this.” Suki responds somewhat tetchily. He’s still adjusting to the idea of his merry band of boarding school classmates jumping onto a 13-hour flight and following him to his hometown.

All in the name of a school trip.

“It’s always warm this time of the year.” Laurie supplies with a breezy grin.

“Even in the city?” Akaashi asks with genuine interest and Suki doesn’t dignify him with a response. Bones twists the bottle in his hand, glancing at the label – peach – before sending the densest person in their company a shrug,

“This is the city…I think.”

Right. Maybe nobody present actually has any braincells. Suki included, because anyone with some semblance of sense wouldn’t have agreed to this. Jacob Bones and Tobio Akaashi sitting side by side on a bus station bench, washed in the gumtree-lined suburbia that Suki himself grew up in. Tugging at the mildly burning collars of their polos as they blink around like weirdly, judgy owls or something.

Maybe a pair of too pale housecats constantly disorientated as they try to scramble together a single coherent and worthwhile thought.

He suppresses the urge to break out into a scowl.

“Hey Laurie,” Marv calls from where he’s got his elbows leaned against the railings, returned to them after a particularly lengthy daydream. Laurie jolts like someone got a secret tackle on him and Suki feels the edge of his mouth start to kick up.

“What about where you’re from, do you miss it too?”

This is precisely why Marvin Woodcock is something of a guardian angel. With decidedly more of a loosely decipherable Scottish accent than one might expect, but nonetheless.

“Oh,” Laurie laughs, a little surprised, “yeah, I do.”

A sly look Bones and Akaashi’s way confirms that the boot-shaped peninsula of Laurie’s roots in the Southern region of the country has come as a complete surprise.

“I didn’t know you weren’t from here.” Bones says with a touch more grace and Suki finds it surprisingly easy to hold back a snarky quip about his candid ignorance. After all, Suki’s been skulking around like a peevish cat all weekend when he could have very well paid more attention to how his closest friend has been doing now that he’s so near to home. Because where Laurie comes from is a little different from here. Suki’s seen it himself, back when their school ties felt like a momentous posh accessory rather than a perfunctory afterthought, struggling to cipher how someone so well-liked and mad about football had ended up in his orbit. And it had been him, who a grinning and sure of himself Laurie had extended an invitation home to in quiet, moonlit corridors after a stupid midnight frisbee match. So, he’s seen it, the town Laurie's from itself, and the mellowed veil that seems to strangle the words from that figure of exuberance. Until he’s just Laurie, trying to convey how special that little, far-away place is to a blinding wall of prestigious tiepins and ears that swim with the economists.   

Marv steps down from his perch, tucking the mural magazine picked up from the art gallery into the back pocket of his jeans, “what’s it like?”

“Is it similar in size to here?” Akaashi flings out a hand behind him with little consideration for the proximity of his flailing flagpole of an arm to Bones’s head.

Laurie blinks, “er…no. It’s Main Street, First, Second, Third Street. That kind of small.”

“A commune?”

Suki shifts his shoulder against the warm metal of the bus shelter and peers at Akaashi with a patience that has long since wavered.

“No,” he crosses one ankle over the other, “it’s a country town named by the traditional custodians of the land. A place where the sky doesn’t end, and you fall asleep to the distant bark of farm dogs.”

“It’s really peaceful. Sort of makes you feel alive.” Laurie says and reaches a hand to the back of his neck, “the stars and the sky.”

Out the corner of his eye he catches the bounce of Bones’s head of curls as he perks up in anticipation for a possible tangent of conversation to the topic of his favourite movie series of all time. Marv, like the nonchalant saviour that he is, folds downwards into a languid sprawl on the ground and offers his thoughts before Bones can really get his Galactic Empire engine going, “the land is considered sacred, there’s a spiritual sort of connection isn’t there.”

“There’s a temple out there?” Akaashi asks in disbelief and Laurie opens his mouth to answer before thinking better of it.

“Well, sort of. Older than any of the one’s you’re thinking about. There’s this spot, out by where they were gonna build a mine. Big plans to clear everything, milk the land for millions,” Laurie tilts his shoulder in a shrug, “guess none of them took any stock of what the people had to say about it.”

Or the whispers on the wind Suki thinks. He never speculates too hard about the eerie stillness of the night all those years ago.

“If you go past there now it’s like they were never there at all. Everything’s exactly the same, except for the lone cat.”

Bones has paled a bit. Beneath the sunburn as he keeps his wide eyes fixed on Laurie, “a cat? As in- “he then ducks his head over his hand and Suki realises a beat too late that he’s miming a cat licking their paw.

Akaashi doesn’t bother to hide the curl to his lip as he stares at his seat neighbour, “never do that again.”

“Not that kind of cat,” Laurie says around a contained smile after they’ve all ragged on Bones for his nonconformist pastimes, “a Bobcat. The one trace of their presence left behind. My mate’s uncle said they couldn’t get it out. Locked in even though the earth’s all clay.”

“So now it lives there,” Marv muses, “man-made machine rusting within a living landscape. A reminder that some things ought to be left alone.” He then proceeds to give a proper spooked- looking Bones a friendly pat on the foot.

Akaashi nods, making a motion as though he’s dredging confetti from his chest whilst he talks about respect and duty and the role of humans in looking after the land. And despite the default irreverent tone he’s actually making sense. Being thoughtful, even. That is until he ties his reverie into the nature-related properties of their names. Heading down a path that looks suspiciously like the build-up to a joke about Marv’s last name.  

“…well I sure hope it wouldn’t be comfortable, he’s literally called splinter dic-“

“I’ll hit you.”

“Just you try it, Spiky.”

Suki shares a knowing look with Laurie who’s relaxed enough to waggle his eyebrows at him,

“Gonna show us around your crib?”

He rolls his eyes but he’s definitely smiling. The sky is dotted with cotton buds above him and the air smells of eucalyptus and sun-warmed tar.

It’s not like he’s got anything better to do ~