Work Text:
“...What is that?”
Intrigue flashed like a firefly in Sienna’s mind before she looked out the driver’s side door at Gale, who had their flashlight aimed not out at the forest but rather at the little brown parchment paper bag in her hands, their eyebrow arched and one corner of their mouth quirked in a tentatively amused smirk that planted the seed of amusement in her own chest.
She looked down at the bag, herself, peering through its jagged-toothed mouth at its contents, and lets that seed bloom.
“I dunno,” she snickered. “It’s supposed to be the St. John’s Woods Tiger!”
From the bag, she produced a brownie-blondie-baked-thing and waggled it like a tambourine, which it resembled in size and shape, if not appearance, with its marbling of white chocolate and obnoxiously orange batter. Let Gale eyeball the “face” baked into it with triangular eyes of hard triangular cherry candy; a nose and teeth which she can only assume have achieved their color with that appropriately oddball, ill-understood (by either her or Gale), and vaguely baleful-sounding compound called activated charcoal.
Gale scoffed, their expression holding nonetheless as they held out their hand to pull her out of the car. With the other, she kept the brownie a-wiggling. “Thought we should get all the extra references we could get at the cafe!” she said. “All the encounter photos taken head-on are crap, and you wouldn’t let me take a picture of the face quiche, so…”
“Right,” they said with just a trace of the tart-sweetness of sarcasm, taking the room she’d presented them with her lack of intent on finishing her sentence - certainly not to imply that there was anything unreasonable about wanting to eat the first proper meal you could get on arriving in town after a five-hour drive, one of many areas where they found each other’s stances on conducting everyday life as sensible as if it was all simply agreeing that breathing was good.
She dangled another verbal string for them, that said. “Or maybe we can use it as tiger bait! Lacey Everett said it took, what did she have - her hand pie, right? This has cherry in it - don’t know if that was the flavor she had, but…!”
They didn’t reply, but she caught their lips parting and their eyelids lowering in a silent, preemptively triumphant laugh before she turned to shut the door, and she smiled with teeth as if for a cheering crowd with self-satisfaction over the mental images she’d no doubt put into their head - scenes from a found footage popcorn flick.
The two of them were united in their love for adventure - had been since their meetup three years back by happenstance in the lobby of a hotel in a foodie town out west, herself an odd-jobs wannabe travel blogger and them, an urban folklorist, as they’d tentatively described themselves over a dinner they’d shared to discuss their game plan for sneaking two people into one room. They’d rolled in without any pre-planning, expecting at least one vacancy in the area, but found none.
Gale was no liar under any circumstances, Sienna knew now. But she’d humored their story more than anything at the time. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d done so and enjoyed it. She’d run into a woman in the bar of another hotel about a year before that who’d come up to her all grins and giggles, shooting her a good ol’ “I lost my room key. You mind sharing yours?” line. Angie, she thinks her name had been. Cute, with wavy sandy-brown hair and candy-bright lipstick and blushy cheeks that’d grown blushier as she’d turned away, hands rising to her face before Sienna’d laughed back and humored her, too.
And Gale was and had also been cute, although she now knew they had reservations about being referred to as such. They were tiny in stature, with big dark eyes and rectangular glasses, ears and neck sporting two tones of jewelry that added an audacious pop to a style of dress that back then she’d gone ahead and labeled as “librarian-cute”. The eccentricity behind that bit of flash coupled with the oddball self-styled occupation had marked them as her type that she wouldn’t have minded much if it’d all been a put-on, as much as she favored earnestness. Not so long as they maintained their image long enough for her and them alike to have a night worth looking back at fondly.
And oh, how Sienna did consistently look back at what happened when they returned to her room and feel a pleasant rush in her head afresh: them unloading her bags and asking her if she wanted to see any of their work material. Binders of notes and printed photographs laid out over the single bed, their laptop open to a pulp documentary about prehistoric sea creatures on the nearby desk. Not a move made between the two of them as Gale allowed themself to get more specific with their title: they were a cryptozoologist, in the area after some Monster of Montessori living out in a ravine past the local orchards. Sienna eagerly humoring them again with an offer to hold their camera when they went out investigating the following night before the two of them fell asleep, two feet apart but with an electricity felt between them, on Sienna’s part, as if she’d been having a sleepover for the very first time with a friend.
Gale was anything but new to her now, of course - and the same went for sleepovers, camerawoman duty, and hunting for mythical beasts that they were still the expert on, not her. But their shared life was about as much boring to her as the concept of experience could be, and they’d made it clear that they felt much the same way about her and the concept of the fantastic. They agreed on enough that when she’d told them that she’d wondered if them fitting together so much was what falling in love felt like, they’d given her a mirror of her own feelings when they’d said that they wouldn’t know, and that some part of them hoped not: they were partners - partners, they’d explained with gestures and the swells that their soft yet tonally rich voice was capable of. That was a good word. Not romantic partners. Not business partners. But partners, and friends, at the same time. It was the best way to put it besides… just them.
Meaningfully, the only point on which they didn’t seem to agree seemed to be on the existence of the vast majority of the creatures their hunts had covered, and even then, they knew perfectly well that she was a skeptic, on one hand, and on the other, she knew perfectly well that flaunting it was pointless - for the both of them, especially when even in a vacuum, she didn’t particularly take any joy in it. She loved the hunt the same way she loved buying novelty brownies with cherry and charcoal topping: no matter how dubious, the strange was fun.
So it was that she pocketed that tiger brownie, and produced her mini-camcorder from her fanny pack. Followed Gale down a short hill, the two of them stepping high over rocks and twigs.
Gale began the narration for the footage - as they should, Sienna agreed internally with a smile, as the expert - by stating, loud as she’d advised them, “The Tiger is most often encountered – west of the campground where we started – and we’re well into the west now, so…”
“Hun,” she said, hearing a sound like thick cardboard tearing slowly. “You hear tha –”
“Oh, my god,” they breathed, turning their flashlight beam on something that could’ve been a big white dog or a big white cougar or a big white bear, and she swung the camera to catch it –
Seeing the same movies as them, her heart racing for reasons other than ones of excitement to find someone who is like you for the first time in a while, believing in cryptids long enough to remember Lacey Everett’s encounter story, and that the brownie might, indeed, save them from the tiger, whatever it really is.
Leave them with a shared story, scratched onto the record - they will survive, they will! And will be able to add their own story to the mythology - let the partnership of Gale and Sienna go down in mythology, too, like the accounts of people like Lacy Everett; let us be legends, too.