The small child crouches low on raised heels next to her, leaning so far forward that he has to gently prop out an arm to keep himself from falling over. His olive-skinned hand places softly, carefully in the rich, dark earth. He's round and baby-faced with dirt smeared on his features. The boy can't be more than six or seven.
"And so you dig a lil' hole, like this, David." She speaks his name with a soft a and a hard i that drips comfortably with an accent. Her fingers sink gently into the slightly-damp dirt, parting it into a small pocket. She reaches into a red-capped pocket of her pink apron to pull away a small packet filled with seeds. She rips them open, sprinkles two or three into her hand, then reaches to do the same for him. He holds out his hand and stares, enchanted, down at the precious little nodes, barely larger than specks. Then, his face twists in a funny way that just screams skepticism.
"This'll be food?" he asks incredulously, like she's pulling a prank. The dark woman can't help but give a fond chuckle. She sprinkles her own seeds into her hole, then creates another small cavity a couple of inches away.
"With a lot of love and a lot of time. Here." She helps guide the child's hands to drop the seeds. He brushes them together to unstick them from his skin. She smiles, shows him how to cover the seeds, and watches as the soil washes in to cover them like a blanket.
A call rings out from a distant house. "Caaaaaleb!" The kid perks up immediately and bounces spryly to his feet.
"Coooooming!" he shouts back at the top of his lungs. He starts to run off between the rows, but stops to run back to Camellia. He rummages in his overall pockets and pulls out rounded little pebble he'd stashed away. It's perfectly round, probably a river stone plucked from the shores where it'd been tumbled for years. "Put this one 'ere, so I know it's mine!" She takes it from his waiting, outstretched hand, and watches him run into the squat houses of the neighborhood.
Camellia stares after him, smiling softly, then crouches back to place the stone in front of the little mound. She hears heavy footsteps and rustling leaves behind her, and feels a wide muzzle nuzzle against her back. Hand rests gently on the creature's head for a moment as she stares at the spot where Caleb had disappeared. Then, she turns to her companion and starts checking up on the small ecosystem fostered on his back.
Her greatest regret was having to dip out when Gawain had saved Ajani. She knew they didn't have much of a choice; Gawain had basically traitor'd his Strike Force, and the last his unconscious teammates knew, there was a poisonous spitting lizard on a murderous rampage that had escaped with a big blue afro'd lady. By the time things settled down enough for them to come back, her mother's house was gone, leveled. As soon as she'd stopped paying rent, they reclaimed it, bulldozed it to sell it the property.
Such was the cycle. She'd already seen it happening the last few years she'd been there. She remembers her mother turning away buyers. They were offering the sort of money that would have made their problems go away for a bit, but it'd been passed down for generations. That house had her mom's great-grandfather's blood, sweat, and tears in it--and most importantly, his love. All because the areas in the city had been too filled up with the poor folk tryin' to get close to the jobs, so it became trendy to live in the suburbs where the rising rent drove the people out who'd been there for years. A nice-looking family had filled the space with a nice, tall house and a pristine green lawn with manicured grass, and paved over where Camellia's garden used to be with a wooden deck propped on a concrete slab.
As soon as she came back, the community gardens in the heart of the city's stone walls were her baby from day one. She remembers toddling next to her mother in their backyard, sunhat on and plastic shovel clenched tight in chubby hands. She hoped she could do that for someone else, too. One of the greatest feelings for her and her mother was knowing they'd have food on the table, and there wasn't anybody that could take that away from them.
She's raises one of Ajani's chipped fronds--the backwardmost one--to take a look beneath. "Oh, look at that," she breathes with a smile. A small round leaf pokes from the damp soil spread on the creature's flat back. "It sprouted! Great job, Aj'!" She'd been doing a little horticulture experiment. Ajani seemed to naturally grow some leafy fronds on his back naturally (as well as a pretty smelly rafflesia-type plant that may or may not smell slightly of dead bodies and attract a concerning volume of flies in the summer). His skin was a strange mixture of a reptile's scales and an amphibian's porous, water-permeable membrane. It seemed to excrete a slightly adhesive slime on the softer parts of his back. That's what gave her the idea of seeing what else he could grow. A little soil to stick to the back, some seeds to test on, and the natural humidity of his moist skin sheltered beneath wide fronds made the perfect greenhouse.
This one was a mint plant. She hoped it would help hide the dead-body smell of the flower on his back.
Now she just had to figure out how to get sun to it. She'd had him rest with his vines peeling back that frond for a bit during the bright hours of the day to give it a little, but that wasn't very convenient or sustainable. Maybe she'd see if any of the Avalon--
A vibrating in her pocket interrupts her. Speak of the devil.
"Hmm," is all she says at first as she checks the message from Gawain. He was headed here, and something big was headed to Erana. She purses her lips, then climbs up behind Ajani's head, minding and pushing aside his frond. Even as she does, she sees a massive flock of birds take wing like a distant gray cloud at the edge of the city. "Let's go." Heavy feet fall as they thunder their way in that direction. Camellia keeps an eye out for the white-winged rendezvous in the sky.
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