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sand

Summary:

Building on sand.

Written for Fluffbruary 2022 and prompt #8: sand | quiet | colourful

Notes:

I couldn't resist a little bit of angst, after all the previous sweetness. But it's still fairly fluffy, I think. Enjoy!

Work Text:

I don’t know what possessed me to follow the solitary trail of footsteps in the sand that led away from where we had set up. I wasn’t looking for company – in fact, I would have much preferred the solitude and quiet of my Liberator cabin. But Dayna had put the idea of a seaside holiday into everyone’s head. I suppose, having grown up on Sarran, it made her feel at home.

Even with the wind blowing from inland and not a sign of human – or alien – habitation, it made me feel exposed.

The seabird colony nearby had certainly noticed us but had refrained from approaching. So far. One could only hope that it would remain that way.

The footsteps were leading the other way, at least, away from the birds as well as from us, towards the steep cliff face in the distance, but he hadn’t walked that far, of course. I could still hear Dayna’s shrieks of delight over the dunes when I found him, sitting on a little mound of sand.

You would think that so soft a surface as sand would make for a quiet approach – it does not. Unless packed tight with pressure, sand is almost impossible to move in without a veritable avalanche of noise, even over the rushing of the waves. He knew I was there long before I bothered to announce myself.

Vila twisted around and squinted against the sun only long enough to confirm that it was me – and not, for instance, a native animal – before he turned a dismissive shoulder. “What is it now?” he asked the ocean.

“A beach and the sea, I should think,” I said, stepping to his side.

He’d fashioned himself a somewhat stable seat from the slightly moist sand to be found under the surface layer before throwing surface sand back over it as a protection from the wetness. It was simple but clever, under the circumstances – something that would never have occurred to me to do. Had Vila been on a beach before, I wondered.

“I don’t need supervision, Avon. I’m not going to do anything stupid, am I?” he groused.

A little taken aback by the bitterness, I sat by his side – with his improvised seat, that made him taller. “I didn’t intend for this to be a supervision. Where did you learn to build from sand?”

Vila shrugged, accepting – or at least not protesting – my company. “Used to build castles out of muck, back home, when we were kids. This stuff isn’t all that different. Besides, it’s hardly complex, making a seat. ’s just a little hill.”

Home, he’d said. He meant Earth, of course. Were we really still thinking of it as home?

“Mind you,” Vila went on – prattling, but in his more serious tone. I liked being allowed to see that side of him. “You could construct something really impressive with this.” He picked up a chunk of sand that clung together before crumbling into smaller, clumpy pieces between his fingers. “It’s denser than the muck – or at least the way I remember it. I used to be quite good at muck castles.”

“Why don’t you show me?”

He eyed me askance. I suppose I deserved that. “You want to build a sandcastle? With me?”

“Why not?” I said, shrugging. Who else? I thought. “I seem to have nothing better to do.”

“Are you feeling all right, Avon?”

“Yes, of course.”

“That’s what you always say, these days.”

“Are you?”

Vila glanced away at that and began brushing the dry surface sand off a larger area in front of him. “This would be easier closer to the water, you know. Where there’s more moisture.”

“Do you want to move?” I asked. He ignored me.

“And of course for a proper castle you need moulds, tools. Nothing electronic. The m– sand will ruin it.” He’d begun making a circular grove around his chosen platform.

I helped, curious at how the feel of the sand was so different from Sarran – there, it had been full of little rocks and bits of dried vegetation, unpleasant, coarse. Here, it was soft and dense.

“You know there’s a saying? About building on sand?” Vila said, after we’d been digging in silence for a few minutes, and he’d begun to collect some of the sand in the middle of the platform we’d cleared.

“I do know, yes.”

“Do you think that’s what we’re doing?”

I was tempted to say that, in this moment, it was precisely what we were doing – but I knew that wasn’t what he meant. “All human endeavour is building on sand, Vila. In a cosmic sense, nothing we do matters. It’s a question of scale. Will the universe care that you brought us back those weaponry crystals? Probably not. But it may just save our lives.”

He nodded, quietly separating his collected sand into smaller piles. “Thanks,” he said at last,” Avon. For doing this. Really.”

I nodded in acknowledgement. It was all he needed.

“Now,” he went on, sounding far livelier, “let me show your Alpha eyes how to build a proper sandcastle. Come here–” He seized my hand, giving me a direct demonstration of how to shape little turrets from the piles of sand.

We left that castle behind when we returned to the ship, still standing, untouched, on a beach of an uninhabited planet.

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