Cliché
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Riviera, Ein, Ledah, Malice, Rose, or Seth. This original storyline is mine, though… This is Hikaru Tsukiyono's return gift for "Promise", the wonderful Roswell/Nessiah oneshot she wrote for me! :D
There were lots of reasons why people climbed mountains.
Some did it because they had something to prove, whether to someone else or to themselves. Some did it for pride's sake, or vanity's—they wanted to be able to say they'd done something of that kind of great magnitude. Some did it because they'd been suckered into it, or because they were bored—and some just wanted to see what was on the other side with their own eyes.
The rest—the real mountain-climbers—did it because the damn things were there.
--
It was the same reason why real mountain-climbers investigated interesting things on the way up—because they were there to investigate. Trees, animals, treasure.
Caves.
Ein didn't need any more excuse than that, not really—it was there, it broke up the monotony of gray stone and green moss and frail, twiggy little trees, so why not go look at it?
Even if Ledah had chased after him with a shouted protest and the girls had looked at him in alarm, and even if he hadn't paid any attention to the structure of the place.
It wasn't his fault the entrance had decided to fall in practically right on Ledah's heels.
--
"Oh, for the love of… are you idiots alright?" It was Malice's voice, slightly muffled as she was on the other side of the collapse. She sounded more pissed at them than worried.
"…ouch…" Ein managed. Ledah had tackled him when the collapse had begun, and had not gotten off. Consequently, Ein's backpack was digging into his spine at impossible and very painful angles, and the grit of the cave floor was poking his cheek.
"Don't you go crying for pity now! This is your own damn fault, you imbecilic men!"
"We're uninjured," Ledah replied.
"Yippee," Malice said dryly.
"There're too many boulders for us to shift by ourselves," Rose added. "We're gonna go get one of the demolition specialists from the last checkpoint, but that's prob'ly gonna take us half a day. You're just going to have to sit and wait, and that won't be a problem if you're not hurt. See you soon."
Then the voices were gone.
The pressure of Ledah's body vanished from his, and there was the sound of a zipper, then rustling, then the sharp strike of a match, and Ledah was slipping flame into the lantern he'd been carrying for when it got dark. Shaking the match until the fire died, he closed the lantern and set it on the floor of the cave.
Ein sat up with a groan, staring at the somewhat accusing carmine eyes of his best friend, climbing partner, and lover.
Well, what did Ledah want him to say or do? This was stupid, and, and it was impossible—and it was too damn cliché to actually happen to people in real life!
"…I'm… sorry…?" he decided to venture.
Ledah reached out and cuffed him in the side of the head.
--
There weren't that many things to do in a cave that was basically a twenty-five-foot-by-six-foot tunnel, and fewer things to do that lasted half a day.
They'd eaten, of course, and taken stock of what they had—which was enough to last them for up to a week, if Malice and Rose were extra-slow in getting some kind of assistance. They'd checked the map and made sure of where they were and where the post was, and decided that it should take the girls a day at the longest to get there and back. Probably less; Malice and Rose were at least as good at this kind of cross-country trek as Ein and Ledah were. Experience cut time.
Still, it was a little bit on the ridiculous side, what he and Ledah had been reduced to in what time there was left.
"Hey, Ledah, got any sixes?" Ein asked boredly.
Ledah glanced impassively at his hand, then stared expressionlessly at Ein over the tops of his cards. "Go fish."
--
Five hours later, the score was zero to forty, Ledah's favor.
They hadn't just stayed with playing Go Fish; after Ein had gotten irritated with his losing streak there, they'd switched to Hearts, then Bullshit, then Speed, then Egyptian Rat-Screw. It was no use. There was absolutely no way of getting past Ledah's poker face—or the way that he remembered every card that had been played.
"You now owe me two and a half weeks' worth of submission and new positions," Ledah remarked with a small and self-satisfied smile as he reshuffled the cards. "Would you like to keep going, or have you learned your lesson yet?"
Ein grumbled. "Gimme those," he said irritably, grabbing the deck out of his lover's hands and rifling through his backpack to find the box he'd carelessly stuffed back in. During said rifling, he managed to unzip the pack a great deal wider than he'd meant to, and wound up spilling most of the pack's contents across the cave floor.
Swearing, Ein stuffed the cards back in their box, then crammed bits and pieces of necessities and knickknacks back where they belonged. However, he came to a halt with raised eyebrows as his hand fell on a clear plastic bottle, still three quarters of the way full of translucent honey-colored gel.
He didn't remember specifically packing this—he'd probably just thrown it in his bags at the beginning of the trip out of habit; he and Ledah usually made their way across mountains by themselves. This time was unusual in that Malice and Rose had decided to come along; the four of them did spend a lot of time together, but that was mostly because they worked together. Ein liked having mountain treks with Ledah to himself.
But since they were traveling with a party of four instead of two… Well, there'd been essentially no point in packing something like this. Maybe Ein preferred to thoroughly wear himself and Ledah out each night before they settled down to sleep, but when you had company along with you and one member of that company threatened evisceration if awakened by anyone else's extra-curricular activities…
Still, that didn't exactly matter now. They were alone now.
"…Ein? What are you doing?" Ledah asked, and Ein realized that he'd been sitting staring at the bottle for a while.
In answer, he turned and held his discovery up. "…Am I the only one who's thinking this might actually be a blessing in disguise?"
Ledah arched one dark-gold brow, the way he always did when suppressing a smile. "Ah, I see… so you've decided to begin working off that debt now, have you?"
Ein couldn't help it—he gave a little snort, then laughed. "…If you think you can make me."
--
"…Anyway, I guess it's really lucky that we left our extra set of rope and grapples back at the checkpoint," Rose was saying. "It shaved a lot of time off the trip back."
"It's luckier that you brought your dynamite with you. Though, I can't say I wouldn't've liked for those two idiots to be stuck in that stupid cave for the next several days. Dumbasses," Malice put in with a shake of her head.
Seth just sighed. If this was a sample of what Ein and Ledah had had to put up with over the course of their trek so far, she felt sorry for them.
They were lucky, though—several times over. The cave could've fallen down right on their heads, and it was only due to checkpoint policy that Seth always carried her pack of explosives with her when she left base. She was one of the demolition specialists employed by the company who oversaw mountain travel; helping people was fun, but blowing things up was even more fun—so since she got to do both, this was basically her dream job. She'd been one of the few staff members on call when the abandoned rope and grapple was discovered in the room Malice had stayed in, so she'd been sent out to deliver it to them. And so, she'd run into Rose and Malice on their way back, heard them out, and just walked with them towards the offending cave.
After a few hours of walking—and constant complaints from Malice—they'd finally arrived, and as Malice turned to rant about her traveling companions to Rose, Seth carefully placed small detonators around the lowest boulders and debris closing off the cave's mouth. She could only put explosives here—if she set them any higher, she might set off another collapse, burying Ein and Ledah completely.
"You guys'd better back up," she called to Malice and Rose, and set the timers for forty seconds, then went to join them behind a distant outcropping. The explosion was small, and not particularly loud—it only had about the force of a commercial firecracker—but it could still be dangerous if they were too close. It went off like a dream, crumbling the low boulders and sending the higher rocks and dirt spilling so that the cave's entrance was clear again.
As soon as she signaled that the coast was clear, Malice stood up and marched towards the cave, the expression on her face saying she clearly couldn't wait to dump her heaps of complaints on Ein and Ledah's heads. Rose sighed, stared heavenwards, and followed her, Seth trailing after them.
But where Malice would've stomped right into the cave itself, she made as if to step over the debris, then stopped short with an odd look on her face.
Exchanging confused looks, Rose and Seth moved to stand on either side of her—and got a good eyeful and awkward expressions themselves.
It was at the back of the cave and there wasn't much light, but the scene in front of them looked to Seth like something you'd find in only the raunchiest of porn magazines. Ein was on his hands and knees with Ledah on top of him, one hand reaching down to grasp him tightly. They were rocking vigorously and panting desperately, and were both bright scarlet in the face. They had to've heard and seen all the commotion of blowing the entrance open, but apparently they were too involved to even think of stopping.
As Seth stood there and watched, knowing she should really turn and walk away but unable to help staring, Ein let out a choked cry and slumped to the cave floor; Ledah kept going a moment longer, then relaxed. Finished, they pulled apart from each other very quickly and turned their backs to their unexpected audience, quite clearly mortified.
"Annnnd I think this's the part where we all exit stage right," Rose remarked faintly, and walked off. Seth followed her.
Malice didn't. There was a long silence, and then Seth heard her screeching, "CAN'T WE TRUST YOU TWO ON YOUR OWN FOR SO MUCH AS AN HOUR WITHOUT YOU IDIOTS ATTEMPTING TO FUCK EACH OTHER'S BRAINS OUT—?!"
Seth and Rose just kept walking, until they couldn't hear her raging anymore.
"…It's like some bad article out of Playgirl magazine," Rose said at last. "I mean, seriously, what the hell? I'd think this is all way too cliché to happen in real life except that it just did."
Seth shook her head, barely stopping herself first from agreeing with Rose's assessment (she couldn't without looking a little… well) and asking incredulously if Rose actually read something like Playgirl (who was she to talk?). Finally, she just shrugged.
"Well, cliché stuff couldn't be considered cliché if it didn't actually happen sometimes," she said at last.
Rose nodded thoughtfully, then laughed. "And I'm going to have to top off the levels of cliché by say this is the kind of day that makes you really, really wish that life had a rewind button."
Seth couldn't help but snort. "I hear you."
(owari)