Blackwood Grove, Fandom, Wednesday Morning

[witchoftheflesh]

It had taken awhile to get everything ready, especially with the break in the middle to go to Quebec, but Adrian and Boston had been working like mad to finish getting the stones ready. He wanted to make sure everything was done by the time the ground froze - which, sure, might not be as much or as soon as he was used to in Massachusetts, but neither witch nor familiar were keen on taking chances and the rocks still had to settle into their new locations. It had been several days of intense labor, hoisting rocks and digging ditches, moving in patterns that left beautiful markings on the ground wherever they went. Or, at least, he thought they were beautiful and that was what mattered. Some of the stones had been put flat into the earth, creating large stone spirals like the one in front of his house. Others were standing stones, dotted around his grove. There were a few more rocks to place, these ones nearly Adrian's own height, and a large hunk of natural quartz he'd found, but these were the last, getting placed not far from his garden.

"Proper circle or elliptical?" he asked Boston, using the bottom hem of his shirt to wipe the sweat and grime from his face before peeling it off entirely. There was a definite chill in the air, but he'd be working too hard to notice it soon enough.

Boston hopped down from the tree he'd been perched on, and wandered around the planned location, then began drawing a spiral pattern in the dirt with a claw. "Circle," he declared. "Make the radius bigger than the last one, though. Between the garden, greenhouse, and your heart tree, this will end up handling a lot of magic and the less we need to diffuse through the spiral--"

"--The better off we'll be in the long run," Adrian finished. "At least we got good rocks. I was worried we'd be working with shale."

"So you've said," Boston noted. "You've got the markers, right?" Adrian held up a fistful of long, wooden stakes. "Excellent. Let's mark out the proper places and then you can start digging."

"And then hauling. And then more digging," Adrian said, though he sounded happy about it, rather than complaining. "Let's get this done then, huh? After lunch, there's vegetables to harvest in the garden and the tomatoes should be done simmering by the time I'm done with that, and that'll leave us the evening to bottle more potions..."

"Less talking about things on your to-do list, more actually doing them," Boston said. "Get to work."

[Open! Conversation about Natasha NFB, please!]

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[joan_of_bark]

"I found ways to keep myself occupied," Pam said easily. (She'd already roped - intentionally or not - two people into this. She'd like to keep Adrian out of it for the time being.) "The island is beautiful when it's quiet."

[witchoftheflesh]

And when Adrian turned to literal ecoterrorism - that was, terrorizing people with the ecosystem - in the battle against the warlocks, everyone would know where he got it from.

"I would say you missed an equally beautiful trip, but I think you would have spent the entire trip seething." Nothing said 'capitalism on display' more than a tourist town, unless it was a wealthy tourist town. "I spent a lot of time handwavily hiking and exploring the green spaces. And there were a couple of sustainable restaurants I had to try. One of them had a garden on the roof...beautiful."

[joan_of_bark]

Pam sipped her water, letting the chattering of the forest wash past her. "That's the thing about cities," she said. "People always find little ways to make up for all the concrete and the glass."

[witchoftheflesh]

"I don't think people can really be whole without it," Adrian said. "At least in my world, it's a reminder that they can't sense about what they should have been given. But still, it fills a part of them."

A pause.

"Mind you, that's entirely conjecture and I've barely been out of the woods so..."

[joan_of_bark]

"I've spent most of my life in cities," Pam offered. She took a bite of bread to go along with her water. "Gotham, especially. It can be oppressive, but there's so much life in them at the same time."

[witchoftheflesh]

"Little rooftop gardens and green spaces?" he asked. "Or live in totality - humans, rats, pigeons, the never ending cycle of life and death?"

[joan_of_bark]

"The latter," Pam said. Another bite. Then she set the bread aside. "Sometimes it's easy to forget we're all part of the same ecosystem. That we're all little things that grow in symbiosis with our world."

[witchoftheflesh]

Adrian smiled over his shoulder at her. "That's magic," he said. "At least, my magic. The cycles of life, the world. That's why forests are so powerful. So many cycles crossing over one another."

[joan_of_bark]

"Sometimes I think the city has its own cycles," Pam said. She set her glass aside, and rose to her feet. "We just don't think to look to find them."

[witchoftheflesh]

"It does," Adrian said, then amends, "it should." He couldn't speak with authority on the matter, of course. "All magic comes from the great cycles. Life, death, the seasons, the weather, the phases of the moon, the orbits of the earth and sun - they all turn and spiral through each other, and that movement creates magic. Why should a city be any different? If cities can thrive and if cities can die, I can't believe that don't have cycles."

[joan_of_bark]

"It saved my life," Pam said.

She strode towards him, hands in the pockets of her overalls. "Realizing that even within all that concrete, if you reach out-- find the life playing across the skin of a million human beings-- there is boundless renewal."

She thought about Gotham. About Queen Ivy. How she'd shared some of that story with a stranger, but not with Adrian, yet. Should she?

She wondered if he'd think less of her.

[witchoftheflesh]

Well, he hadn't thought less of Yelena when she admitted she'd been an assassin, so...Who knew?

"Not to mention the dandelion growing up through the cracks in the concrete, the mushrooms growing anywhere they can take hold, the poison ivy reclaiming abandoned areas. They're still there. Cockroaches, bedbugs, mildew, mold. As people, we think of them as filth, something to be destroyed, but it's thriving life."

[joan_of_bark]

Did Pam's lips twitch a little at that 'poison ivy'? Well. Maybe.

"Exactly," she said. And then: "How about that tour?"

Still toying with a thought. Was it cowardice? More like caution.

[witchoftheflesh]

"Right!" Adrian said. "Here, we'll start with the house." He led her over to the snug wooden cottage that he'd brought with him from Massachusetts.

The front door they stepped through was intricately carved, and decorated, though that level of decoration did not seem to extend into the house proper. Here, simplicity and ruled, letting the craftsmanship speak for itself. Most of the space was taken up by a single vaulted room that seemed to be a combination kitchen and workshop. Where they weren't pierced with tall antique-glass windows, the wooden walls were covered with built-in shelves containing every sort of witchy ingredient from rosemary to dried snakes. One entire corner was dedicated to a fieldstone fireplace with a massive cauldron hanging from an iron chain at its center. The kitchen area beside it had a wood-fired iron stove along with a deep enameled sink and a spice cabinet the size of a wardrobe. Well-used copper pots and pans hung from an iron rack above the wooden island, which had a second cauldron stowed beneath it as well as rows of glass bottles in all different shapes and sizes. A small bedroom lay off to one side of the workshop, and a door out the back led to a glassed-in greenhouse patio that was already full of plants. The ceiling was steeply pointed and braced with massive oak beams, one of which supported a ladder-accessed loft that appeared to be Adrian's office. There were several bookcases up there along with a large circular window to let in the light, a comfy-looking pile of cushions for reading, and, oddly, a laptop computer. Other than that, nothing in the house seemed to use electricity.

"This is my home," Adrian said, pulling his phone out of his pocket and hooking it up to a portable solar charging panel, which he shimmied up the ladder to place under the loft's sunny window. "The greenhouse out back already has full rainwater capture and filtration, which means I won't have to worry about digging a well. I use a combination of aquaponics and compost for waste removal, so that takes care of septic and trash. Food scraps go to the garden - I will have to buy some real solar panels for the roof eventually, because those I couldn't make myself, but this should do for now."

[joan_of_bark]

Pam's eyebrows had steadily risen as he showed her around.

"You've been busy," she commented, looking not so much at the phone as at the-- everything else. "And all that with just one shovel."

[witchoftheflesh]

Adrian laughed. "No, no, I built it before I got here," he assured her. "I would have needed a shovel and at least a screwdriver to have gotten it done here."

[joan_of_bark]

"Magic?" Pam guessed, as her attention finally passed back to him.

[witchoftheflesh]

Adrian shook his head. "Practice and hard work," he said. "We build everything we use. It's called witchcraft for a reason. Though I'll admit the only reason any of the metalwork in here is fit to be seen is because I traded my cousin Deena three quilts and a carved headboard. I never took to blacksmithing the way I did sewing or woodworking."

He could make things, they just often weren't up to his standards.

[joan_of_bark]

Pam let out a soft huff. She shook her head. "We'd be better off if humanity showed the same work ethic," she said, and then sighed, well aware she was getting her own particular maudlin all over his pretty home.

"It's lovely, Adrian. Thank you for showing it to me."

[witchoftheflesh]

"Thank you," he said, running his hand over a bookshelf, looking quietly pleased. "I'm very proud of it. It was not at all motivated by the dressing down my Aunt Lydia gave my sister Annaliese when her floor caved in."

[joan_of_bark]

Pam smiled. "Is that a story I should ask about?"

[witchoftheflesh]

"You might have noticed from, oh, everything about her, Aunt Lydia isn't one to suffer fools lightly. She had gone to my sister's house to berate her about being careless and taking easy shortcuts. I wasn't there, of course, certainly not in a tree, eavesdropping. Even at ten, I was far too mature for that. But as she was just getting to the crescendo of her argument, Aunt Lydia stomped her foot to make some point or another - and her foot went right through the boards. Because most of the floor was actually particle board. And Annaliese, rather than trying to help her, said something like, 'Okay, thanks for the chat Aunt Lydia, bye!' and ran out the door. I think she was hoping to get to Mother before Aunt Lydia heaved herself out of the hole and caught her."

[joan_of_bark]

She could picture it. (This nice, comfortable family life that Adrian had had-- despite it all.)

Pam let out a soft laugh.

"So you decided to be more particular about your building materials."

[witchoftheflesh]

"Ten was an impressionable age," Adrian said with a laugh. "I swore right then that I'd learn to do everything right so that Aunt Lydia would never had a reason to put her foot through my floor."

[joan_of_bark]

"That also sounds like a wise lesson," Pam said, a twinkle in her eye.

Her eyes scanned over the shelves, making quiet notes about just-- how many spices Adrian really stocked.

"I guess I don't have to lecture you about respecting the women around you."