The Glitter Jungle:
Fiction:
Touch Up The Roots
Ethan returns to the source.
A hitchhiker stands by the side of the road, thumb up and bag slung on his shoulder. Cars go by, trucks ignore him, and the night begins to fall. The air is cooling, late September going on winter.
Finally a car stops by. Goes right in his direction. Golden oldies on the radio, the driver's fingers drumming quietly on the wheel to the rhythm.
A couple of hours later, they require a stopover. A soda, a bathroom break.
Tumbleweed drifting outside in the wind, like a beach ball tossed between imaginary kids, playing in the yard while mommy and daddy are having their sad, dull meal in the diner. The back roads are deserted, nothing but the rare call of a wild bird to startle them in the silence. Hissing of the grill from the kitchen. Quiet laughter from the waitress as she talks on the phone, blushing and whispering into the receiver.
Chance meeting in the prairie. Could be the start of an adventure.
Ethan hopes it isn't. He's had enough adventure for a lifetime or ten. He's hitched here all the way from Nevada. He shouldn't have made it to Nevada in the first place, could've escaped the moment they left Sunnydale, but he stayed to see what would happen, stayed for the adventure.
You live and learn. Well, you barely survive, and learn.
He's relieved when the car simply pulls at his stop, and even bothers to thank the driver.
It's the complete opposite of where he's been in the past few weeks. Noise and people rushing to their business and the tall buildings blocking out the sun and the sky. The big city. He's had people here who owed him for a past job, and a plane ticket just waiting for him to get back home to England and to the countryside, and maybe to an old family home he hasn't been to in at least three decades, and retirement.
What a ridiculous word, retirement. He could never retire the magic in his veins, the chaos in his very being. All he could do was take less active steps and stay away from adventure. And maybe even, if he possibly could, stay away from Rupert Giles.
He doesn't spend too much time in the city, the smog and car pollution he once loved are now nothing but sad reminders for a life he chose to put behind. One day to locate his friends, one night sleeping on a park bench and barely avoiding an arrest with just a glamour spell to blanket his shivering body, one day to collect the money, buy the ticket, spend hours in the airport and home he goes.
The plane and the train ride home go by in a haze, signing things and paying without thought and just drifting home. It used to repel him, this countryside environment, the greenery, the old familiar red brick train station. Used to make him want to scream and break things and run away, and eventually he did, using his magic and what little money he had to leave.
Right now it calls to him, the fresh green welcome after the city he no longer belonged in and the vast desert he's wandered through. Water everywhere relieving a more mental thirst, streams and rivulets wherever you look and he could feel non-existent dust peeling off of him. Could be also that he's heading towards an empty house, furniture covered with sheets and not a voice to be raised at him in disapproval. A place he can call his own and do whatever his heart desires with.
Large dark rooms, where the light barely makes it through heavy curtains. So different than the scorching Nevada sun. His own music as loud or as quiet as he chooses. For a while, at first, he blasts it until the old mansion's walls shake. But he soon finds it pointless and turns it down so it's only heard in the rooms he lives in. He enjoys this serene freedom, so unlike the snarled, intoxicating freedom he had with his rebellion and his chaos. He lets his wounds heal.
He sits outside on the dewy grass, naked as the day he was born and just as innocent, for the time being, and breathes in the lack of clamour.
Magic in nature. He's almost forgotten how beautiful and whole it feels. Chaos is in everything, it's in the way the leaves move with the wind and it's in the worms crawling through the earth. He reaches down to everything to heal himself. He never had roots to call his own but he has come to a stage where he wants to connect somehow to the earth, to the roots.
And not far, he senses a flicker of something familiar. Someone he knows. Perhaps something he's played with before?...
Not Rupert. At least that, because any more coincidences in his life and he'd think they were destined to something, and he doesn't believe in destiny, doesn't believe in pre-determined order.
A young woman, powerful to the extreme, and Ethan reaches the barest of tendrils of his magic to see what she does, what she wants. Like him, she's communicating with the roots, learning the secret, silent language of the flowers and the chaos. She's making things grow, a power so fresh and young and bright green that he almost forgot how it's done.
Everything around is pure nature. Miles and miles of green, of grass, trees, hedges. The birds, rodents, worms, all living creatures. He decides to try and play on the clean slate. Touches a seed and lets it grow. Lets the water and the air and the nutrition of the earth feed it.
Lets her see it. In a connection that passes through the roots and the dirt, she smiles at him. He nudges her flower and can feel her delight when the petals change colour, even though he can't see it. She pushes back and a circle of daisies blooms around him.
Hesitant not to push too much, push her away. Not to let her see him, because he's bare, nakedness more than purely physical. It's also in his lowered shields, his mind open. On the other hand, he doesn't want her to feel as if he's cloaking himself. They touch only through magic, for now.
Every day he does this. A solitary man in the vast fields, standing tall, proud and nude, growing flowers out of seemingly nothing and reaching out to a little girl in search of herself.
And slowly, day by day, he finds his own roots again.