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Bdubs is late.
Well, he’s all shattered shreds of vine and grass, is what he is, and he’s trying to gather himself up, pull himself up out of the jungles and forests into one discrete place so he can exist properly again, but more importantly than anything else he’s late.
He’d realized he was late some weeks-or-months ago, and he’s since pieced together that the others had started without him when he didn’t show up. He doesn’t begrudge them that, of course, temporality has been a sort of hazy thing for him lately, he’s sure it’s entirely his fault, but he hates to not be timely, so he’s been trying his best to finally get back to existing so he can start trying to make up for all the lost time.
But every time he tries to finally get a move on with it and get back into the world, any fledgling body he manages to put together comes out too fragile, too dry, to be viable. One time he came together in the middle of one of the new oceans which was just manifestly uncomfortable, saltwater, yuck. Usually all he can get is a quick, grainy impression of the world before his twined stems come apart and he disintegrates back into soil and sand.
He’s pretty sure he doesn’t remember it being this hard to exist. He remembers not even having to think about existing, actually, just doing it, being all one lump of normal old muscles and bones and blood and waking up with the sun every morning with his consciousness in one place. He misses that, actually, he thinks, and he starts to wonder what exactly changed and when, and then he loses the thought with the latest attempt at a physical form when the too-dry dirt he’s mostly made of loses cohesion and takes him to pieces.
He tries again, and again, and again, and then-
On the fifth or tenth or hundredth try, he stumbles into water, fresh water, clean water, and every leaf and stem of him floods with relief.
He doesn’t waste any time, sucks in as much of it as he can from the immediate space around him and then sends roots out crawling for more, prioritizes putting himself together at last, forcing connections between the new-grown wood of his bones, building tissue over it from pulp and root, finally gorged on enough hydration to stay in place. The water is already pushing nutrients through his budding vasular system before he’s even finished putting it together, sending fluid to the delicate little fruits of his eyes so he can finally see when he blinks them open. He drags in a breath- carbon dioxide, very nice, lungs, also very nice- and the sunlight on his back finally sets the chemical processes in his brain into motion enough for him to identify that he’s looking down at concrete.
He rolls onto his back. Stares up at the sun, eyes huge and grateful, and basks for a moment. Oh, yeah, that’s the stuff. Delicious.
He’s staring up at the sky from the bottom of a bowl of concrete and glass, he realizes after his brain kicks up another gear, root system crawling up its sides in search of more water. He doesn’t have to wonder at the construction for too long, though, because barely a moment later a very recognizable face pokes over the rim, and breaks into a grin.
“Bubbles! You made it after all!” Keralis says brightly. “I was not expecting to find you in my pool!”
“Keralis!” Bdubs manages, shoving himself up onto his hands on the second or third try. His skeletal system is, he thinks, a little janky. Sue him. He’d like to see anybody else do better on their first try. “Hey! Uh, your pool?”
“Yes, my pool,” Keralis agrees. “You appear to have confiscated it?”
“Did I?” Bdubs blinks, looks around. From this angle, the concrete bowl does, indeed, appear to be a rapidly emptied-out swimming pool, a few shallow puddles of water lingering around its edges. “Oh, goodness, I’m sorry about that, that was unintentional. But boy, am I glad it was here, you have no idea.”
“Very happy to help!” Keralis says cheerfully.
“I’ll clean it up once I’m settled in, of course,” Bdubs says, making his way unsteadily to his feet. He has to tug himself loose of his impromptu root system to do so, which isn’t an entirely pleasant affair; it doesn’t hurt, but discomfort and a sense of loss spikes up the vines of his spinal cord, and he drips a fair deal of reddish sap to the concrete before his body realizes it needs to recirculate. “…And that also. Sorry, K, I’m really making a mess of your place.”
“No worries, no worries!” Keralis says. “Let me find you some ladders. Not your favorite kind, unfortunately, he hasn’t shown up yet this season. The pool was not engineered for this sort of situation.”
“Oh, nah, nah, I got it,” Bdubs says, wandering over to the edge of the pool. A few roots are still trailing behind him. It’s not too hard to just reach up-and-up-and-up and hoist the primary mass of his body up over the rim of the pool and onto solid ground. Readjusting his arms back into their sockets is barely an afterthought.
“Oooh, very neat trick, Bubbles!” Keralis says. “Where did you learn how to do that?”
Where did he- huh.
Good… question.
He feels, all of a sudden, extremely aware of the wrongness of his body, of the slithering movement under his skin and the sluggishness of the pressure in his veins. Something’s uncomfortable, unstable on a layer that goes deeper than bone-deep; he feels acutely aware of how easily he could fall apart, and even more acutely aware that it wouldn’t actually kill him.
He makes his excuses, compliments Keralis lavishly on his house, steals a few diamonds on the way out. When he looks down at his hands as he walks, he can see the vines twisting under the skin, making little readjustments to his underlying structure as he walks. He’s pretty sure they didn’t look like that last time he had hands.
Every step takes a little more effort than it feels like it should, because his nerves keep wanting to set down root. As soon as he gets a starter base set up, he’ll have to do something about that, lay down some kind of semipermanent root system to keep himself fed.
The idea of staying unrooted makes him anxious. He needs- trees. He needs a jungle. He was a jungle, at one point, or was something much larger than this, at least. And now he’s just small and fleshy and he doesn’t know what he’s thinking at all, actually, because he’s also just Bdubs, arriving slightly late to the season, and there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that whatsoever.
…Yes. He’s glad he resolved that.
He will need to plant some trees, though. The sooner the better.