Work Text:
It was a beautiful day in the middle of the summer in overcast New York, the sort of overcast that was usually rare on a day this deep into the season but somewhat typical if you were in this area of the state. Every so often, a crack would open up in the clouds, revealing shimmering rays of sunlight that would slice down across the forest of the park, cutting shadows into the grass and the bushes from the tops of each tree like a storm of rapiers, pointing towards the hidden moon beneath the horizon's surface. Because of this, that meant, for the middle of summer, the temperature was delightfully comfortable, with cat-sunning warmth casting itself across the porch every so often followed by glorious, blissful shade.
The wind carried pine-tree scents through the air with the thin intensity of incense that was a mile away in a different house's garden. This was, of course, metaphorical, because there were no houses for miles in the Lalonde estate that Roxy temporarily housed herself within. She leaned back on a chair on the porch, humming quietly to herself to some noncommittal tune on the radio she had set out while browsing her phone, idly swiping through something or other just as something to keep her thumbs moving and her brain sort of working. A pair of sunglasses rested comfortably on her head while John, cutie that they were, was sitting in the chair next to her, sleeping quietly.
John occasionally mumbled, murmured, and/or snored, their phone resting in the collar of their shirt, where they had dropped it once they passed out. Poor thing evidently got pretty jet lagged on the way here, and took the opportunity to catch some ZZZ's on a lovely afternoon, and really, who could fault that? The chairs were sproingy, padded, comfortable, and like all good deck chairs, able to be reclined to a ludicrous degree, which John put to good use by making theirs literally just lie flat down so they could internet in the most comfortable position possible. Who could possibly begrudge John for falling asleep like that, with the whistling winds, the light radio songs, the little chair pillows? Nobody could.
Roxy looked at John, smiled a little bit, and looked back at her phone. Her thumbs tapped about on the solid screen as rapidly as they could punch text into any keyboard, moving with the practiced precision of someone who had been using a smartphone almost all of her life, which was, uh, exactly the case. Someone who had been using a smartphone almost all her life and planned to go into computer science for college, natch, so suffice to say, her typing skills were top notch. What exactly was she expending so much effort on, typing on the phone, every little keyboard key rhythmically plopping its faux clacka-clacka-clackas out the tinny phone speakers? What? Why would she tell you that? Every woman's gotta have her secrets, after all. Suffice to say, it was possibly illegal. But also, possibly not.
The clouds drifted overhead, lazily blocking the sun from view like someone in your way at a movie theater because they were a little too tall. Did they intend for it to happen? Not really, it was just sort of the luck of drifting, winds pushing them across the slowly darkening sky like boats on a still sea. But, nevertheless, it happened, they blocked the sun, and then they didn't, and then they did again. It smelled like rain, but the rain was far away, and weather dot com didn't predict anything landing over their heads. Roxy yawned quietly, plonked her phone down on the same little glass table that the radio was sitting on, and cranked her chair back until she was lying down at a slight incline, letting her eyes drift shut.