Chapter 8
“Yoba Maru, since when am I the one trying to convince you to socialize?”
She doesn’t answer so he goes on.
“It’s not even a social event, for fuck’s sake. It’s a farm. It’s inanimate plants.” He’s standing in the door to her room and she’s lying back in her bed with a book she hasn’t been reading in her lap.
“Plants aren’t inanimate, they’re actually much more complex than you would guess. They have social lives, they can smell and taste and learn, we don’t even know how-” She starts to explain, to deflect.
“Well there she is.” Seb rolls his eyes, but he’s got the hint of a smile on his lips. With anyone else she’d regret falling into her old pattern of geeking out, not wanting to give them false hope that she was back or whatever else they were thinking, but with Seb it felt safe. It’s not like she could disappoint him.
“Seb, I… I just don’t feel like.. I can.” It comes out way more honest than she anticipated, she wants to swallow it back as soon as it leaves her lips.
“I get it.” And he does. Seb was right about how strange it was for him to be the one pushing her to go out. It used to be her sent down to the basement to drag him up for an family event, town festival, dinner. Back then he’d been snarky towards her at best, sometimes vile and cruel, but the worst was when he would just lie there.
His despondency back then had unsettled her.
He sighs and she’s not sure if he’d giving up or processing a new plan of attack.
“Look Maru, take it from someone who knows… sitting around inside isn’t going to change anything.”
Before she can ask for specifics he leaves. Leaves her thinking what the hell is that supposed to mean?
It took two years for the sobriety to stick.
He tried to do it on his own.
Shane had a lot of bad feelings about himself, was chalk full of self-pity, but when Finn started calling him all sorts of names he couldn’t reconcile the image.
He was useless, lazy, a suck on society. His life amounted to nothing, he was a disappointment because he was drunk all the time, he was drunk all the time because he was a disappointment. An idiotic cycle of comfortable self-loathing.
When Finn called him a dumb hick or a hillbilly fag it didn’t exactly align with this representation of himself. He had lived most of his life in the city. Finn was clearly stupider than him. In fact, Shane thought he was probably smarter than most people but there was just something detrimentally wrong with him that made him incapable of reaching success.
sheep fucker
inbred bumpkin
He kept fucking Finn out of self-loathing. This is as good as you can do, this lousy stupid asshole is as good as you can do. It made him feel sick. It made him furious. He couldn’t see the line between if it was himself or Finn making him feel this way.
One day, working at Joja, he got so mad about it he went to Finn’s directly after work. He’d been inside, binge watching some show, when Shane had barged in. He barely gave him time to leap up in surprise before he shoved him face down over the side of the couch.
“You think you’re too good for my cock, city boy?” He pressed himself against him.
“I am, you filthy farmer.” Finn might have lived on a farm, and everyone in town might have considered him a farmer, but he never considered himself one.
Shane reached around and grabbed his erection, “then why are you hard for me?”
Finn gasped, pushing back against him, “I need you,” he groaned.
Shane wasn’t expecting this.
“I need you.” He repeated, desperately.
Shane didn’t understand why this felt so different than any other time. It suddenly dawned on him that he was sober. He fucked him hard, loving the effect he’d never fully noticed he’d had over the other man.
Afterwards he got a real screwy notion that Finn could help him.
Ry and Sebastian’s friendship had been accidental. Like Maru, he’d originally read her as being optimistic, too outgoing to be someone he’d gravitate towards (though if you consider his relationship with Sam you’d realize that wasn’t true, but he doesn’t consider his relationship with Sam).
She’d caught him smoking weed by the lake. He can’t really remember who started talking, or about what, but it ended with her giving him a jar of pumpkin soup. It hadn’t been intended for him - she was trading recipes with Linus and he was getting the leftovers - but that didn’t matter. He’d slopped it down right there, in the cold, and he’d almost cried because of how good it had been (he was high, ok).
After that they were on chill terms, never really hanging out, but never upset to see each other. It wasn’t until after Abigail and Sam left that they really became friends, when Sebastian was feeling particularly dark. She was easy to be around. Didn’t pressure him. He liked that, didn’t realize how badly he needed it.
Shane hadn’t been working on the farm back then. It had been just Ry on the sprawling property, grappling with the immensity of it, the smallness that was her individual self. Sebastian had been on that land many times when it was abandoned. With Sam and Abigail, smoking weed, drinking, being dumb kids. It changed when Ry became the farmer - and not only in the new building editions, the plants she had planted – there was something in the air. Something about Ry, something about the nature of that place, were meant for each other.
With Shane living there now everything seemed intensified. More intensely green, more intensely sprawling, jungle-like, lush. Somehow it seemed simultaneously less regulated and more so. Maybe self-regulated. A strong, resilient, biological system.
They were creating a diverse eco-system that was nothing like any farm Sebastian had ever imagined. Walking one to the property the first time since he’d returned put words in his head like sanctuary. First arriving, he just had to stand there in awe for several minutes.
“Seb!” Ry had called, noticing him from up in a tree. She was harvesting apples, barefoot, more graceful in precarious positions in branches than she was on the ground. She jumped down, removing her picking bucket and coming over to hug him.
“This is fucking insane.”
“It makes me feel just the opposite, actually.” She’d replied, trying and failing to supress her beaming smile at his awe.
The rest of the day she’d given him a tour of the grounds, and he’d helped her pick fruit, and then they’d made soup. Shane flitted in and out, clearly wary of Sebastian’s presence, but making snarky jokes with Ry. They were strangely good together, something Sebastian never would have guessed.
“Uh… Are you and he?” He’d asked, after Shane had dropped off some goat cheese from his latest batch. He’d heard his mom speculating about them earlier that week, and at first had dismissed as absolutely whack, but now…
“I think you know the answer.” She said flatly, not looking up from the onions she’s dicing, no hint of a tear in her eye.
“Sorry, just that… you seem good together.” He gives her a smug but slightly sheepish look.
“We are. Platonically.”
He nods in understanding.
“So, you ready to talk about why you’re back?” She asks, after a few minutes of quiet working.
He sighs, “I don’t think so.”
She nods, understanding without him having to elaborate. Or else, if she doesn’t understand, she knows she doesn’t need to.
He made a game out of being sober. If he could get Finn to profess his need of him three times in a night he wouldn’t drink. Of course there were exceptions.
If Finn offered him a drink he’d obviously have to take it. He didn’t tell him he was trying to go sober, because for one he figured he would fail, for two he figured Finn would laugh at him and for three he didn’t want to recognize that he actually needed to go sober in the first place.
Sometimes he would also convince himself the rules were the other way around, that if he got Finn to profess his desperate need three times, he deserved a drink.
In the end he was drinking the same amount but sustained an illusion of control he hadn’t had before. He also kept Finn out of the Stardrop and away from the other villagers by always keeping the nights secluded to the farm, which he figured he deserved to be commended for.
After a couple weeks of this people started to notice his absence at the saloon. First it was Marnie, asking him where he was getting off to at nights. She asked with wary hope, like she knew the answer still involved a lot of drinking but was allowing herself the optimism that maybe it didn’t.
He had shrugged, irritated by her watchfulness, “nowhere really.”
Sebastian’s return didn’t break Maru’s habit of visiting the basement. She would often go down there still, just to hang out silently. They would watch a movie, or play some two person game that didn’t involve talking. It was peaceful and easy. Robin was pleased about it, Demetrius on edge.
She hadn’t been down since Sebastian had said what he’d said the other day. It had bothered her. She wanted a deeper explanation and to forget it at the same time.
Sitting around inside isn’t going to change anything.
But she wasn’t trying to change anything. She hadn’t said she wanted a change. Maybe he was just reading into her lack of desire to socialize and perform botany experiments, projecting onto her something that had more to do with him.
She decides to push it out of her mind.
She decide to visit him in his room again, thinking there’s no danger in watching some old sci-fi movie.
She is not expecting anyone else to be down there.
She is definitely not expecting it to be Ry.
“Hey Maru!” She says, from inside the sunken confines of her brother’s old beanbag chair. She looks strangely gangly sitting there, out of place.
“I didn’t know you were here.” She states emotionlessly yet it still comes out sounding like she’s been caught.
“She was just returning my copy of Borne.” Seb says, going through a stack of slim books in his hand, organizing them carefully.
“Fellow sci-fi geek.” Ry grins sheepishly.
“Oh.” Maru isn’t expecting that from her. She stands there dumbly for a minute, halfway through the doorway, not sure what to do.
“You coming in or?” Sebastian gives her a sceptical look.
She decides she has to, considering she’s just barged in, it would be too awkward to leave now.
“So what have you been up to?” Ry asks politely, innocently unaware of how much Maru doesn’t want to account for herself.
She feels she can’t get away with her usual shrug with Ry, so starts bumbling through a list, “uh, reading a lot, enjoying being outside…” That’s her whole list? Feeling lame she finds herself lying without thinking, “I’m going back to work for Harvey.”
“You are?” Sebastian says dubiously. Why the fuck did she say that?
“Yeah.” She shuffles her feet. She had been thinking of it, after all, just not in a… real, actually-going-to-happen kind of way.
“Does he know that?” He says, once again, disbelieving.
Shut the fuck up, asshole she wants to hiss at him.
“Yes.” Glowering, hoping her face expresses what she really means. Now she’s going to have to tell Harvey to give her the job back. At least the offer was already on the table. That made it less pathetic.
“Damn, he must be glad.” Ry muses, “he always speaks super highly of you, Maru.”
Maru doesn’t know what to do with the praise. She runs a hand through her tangled hair, “yeah well… we’re friends.” For lack of anything else to do she sits on the floor opposite Ry, hugging her knees up to her chest.
Sebastian’s still organizing his bookshelf, seems to be in the midst of unpacking a box he must have brought with him from the city. Is this what the two of them do? Just sit here in silence?
“So uh… how’s the farm?”
“Good. Pomegranates will be fruiting soon, for the first time. Pretty stoked about that, and so is Elliott.” She laughs at his last part, Maru’s not in on why. But she’s grateful she doesn’t invite her over again.
Maru just nods, not sure where else she can take this conversation without getting into nit-picky botanical details she doesn’t have the patience to explain.
From the top of the stairs she hears her mom yell, “hey Seb! There’s someone here who wants you to sign for a package.”
“Oh damn, that’s probably my new monitor, I’ll be right back.”
And now Maru’s alone with Ry. For the first time since the luau. She’d pushed that night out of her memory, and now it’s fuzzy, and she remembers being drunk and… and what? Nothing. She feels her face heat up but she can’t for the life of her figure out why.
“You glad to have Seb back?” Ry asks casually, picking at a thread in her jeans.
It takes her a second to come out of her head and realize she has to answer. “Oh? Yeah… I mean, we were never really friends.” And what relevance does that have to Ry? she thinks, annoyed at herself.
Ry raises an eyebrow, “seems like you are now.”
“I guess.”
“Kinda weird how things change, huh?”
They hear laughter from upstairs. Sebastian and Robin? Maru can’t remember the last time she’s heard them joke around. It used to be normal, but not since she was very, very young.
Ry’s noticing it too. “He seems good.”
“I think he is.” She doesn’t realize it until she says it, and then it makes her grimace. All she’s done is think about how weird it was that he was being more outgoing than her, how he wasn’t being mean, never phrasing it as him being good, him being better. Why hadn’t she taken that in?
Some of this must show on her face, because she realizes Ry’s studying her expression. Something about being under that gaze makes her feel exposed, cracked open like she can’t hide. Like Ry’s seeing something she herself doesn’t have access to. It makes her want to run.