A/N: Hey, I'm sorry again for the long wait. Not only is my mind kind of barren of ideas (and it would be lovely if you could supply me with some in a review or PM), but I've been a bit occupied lately with friends, and 'the adults', who are trying to strip me of my freedom. So, anyway, this chapter was, ironically enough, inspired while listening to 'Six Feet Under the Stars' by All Time Low, 'Oh Star' by Paramore, and 'I Will Follow You Into the Dark' by Death Cab for Cutie. I'll admit, I'm not happy with this chapter and it's more of a filler than anything else, but I couldn't leave you guys empty-stomached. Er, empty-minded. Or whatever.
Six Feet Under the Stars.
--
Chelsea had never seen stars, not in her entire life. It was kind of ironic; she'd just never paid much attention to the sky, was all. Whenever someone said "night sky", an irresolute image of a thick black sheet filled her mind. An empty, blank space with no pretty glimmering stars to fill it. Maybe it was plain ignorance or something else; when the city air wasn't all cloudy and disgusting with factory smog, she was usually already asleep. Truth be told, if someone asked her to describe a real-life star, she wouldn't know how to. She could only pull out the fiction she'd drawn from fairytales and stories: silver? gold? dense, packed? sparse, scant?
It was funny, since she dreamed about stars that night. In fact, she'd been dreaming about stars a lot lately, and the images had been obscure and eclectic each time. Just something from a dream and nothing more.
Her most recent dream, as a whole, seemed rather surreal…one might assume she were under the influence or something, if they had the eyes to see into her subconscious thoughts.
Chelsea, on the other hand, found it pretty damn ironic.
--
The stars were out that night, entering the stretch of pitch blackness with a burst of light, like a rainbow with no clouds. Each star had a very pronounced shape - starlike, of course. They were bright yellow, the yellow of sunflowers and daffodils and spring sun, but in a texture that looked like plastecene.
Beside the rivulet of stars, which filtered in from the void of the sky like sunlight streaming through the weak glass of a window, was a crescent moon, curved and glowing palely. Comically, there sat atop the half-moon's sinuous head a soft-looking hat, light purple with a little white ball on the end. The moon's eyes were slid shut, a look of perfect peace present on its sleeping, fictional face.
Under the brilliant display of stars and night and sky, there was Chelsea, toiling away in her field. Sweat ran down her forehead and thickly down her arms and back. A farming tool she'd been tinkling with had clattered to its side, chipped roughly and looking indebted to her for the rest.
Beside Chelsea was a cow, however out of place that sounded. The marble-white-and-black-smeared beast was grazing the dark green grass, chewing in that wide, sloppy, revolting way that cows did.
Chelsea lifted her arm to examine the skin, and like flowers popping up in unrealistic, untimely seconds like they did on TV commercials back in the city, blotchy hives began to form on her arm. She swatted at the red marks frantically as they accumulated - poppies in a field.
And then there was Denny. Out of nowhere, he appeared. But that was nothing new, was it?
"You look kind of stiff," he told her, a cheeky grin on his face, and in a sudden flurry of colours and a blinding light, the whole farm, Denny's face, the stars and moon and sky and everything disappeared and was replaced by a familiar, endless blue.
Chelsea stood at the end of the dock, her heels perched precariously at the sharp, broken edges. Her arms were outstretched, and the waves sparkled below her, looking tempting in ways it never did in reality. She blinked, and a large ship was suddenly rocking in front of her, wooden and sturdy-looking and enormous.
"Where are you going?" called a voice from behind her, far distant and muffled.
"I'm leaving," Chelsea answered flatly, not turning around.
"Don't leave," pleaded the same voice in what couldn't have even passed for a whisper. Maybe a barely-there breeze in the widespread air surrounding the world.
But she had boarded the ship now and it was gone, gone forever.
--
Hours later, Chelsea had come to the conclusion that, if she had even the slightest ability to draw, she should've considered being an artist.
The memory of the dream was so everlastingly vivid, so sharp and pronounced that she had difficulty remembering whether or not certain parts had actually occurred. She thought back to the sunshine-yellow stars and the cornstarch moon and automatically looked up.
Her expectations were crushed. Hazy blue-gray, cloudy skies and dim, glaring, I-hope-I-woke-you-up sun was what stared back at her. She squinted and looked back down into the gently pouring river below her.
It felt like she had gone back to square one, week one. It was like she hadn't progressed in the least over the amount of time she'd spent on the island - and truthfully, she hadn't done much, besides meet Denny and get an imprudent, savage, yellow, two-legged creature, which she'd begrudgingly fed after she'd rolled out of bed in the early hours of the A.M. and trudged all the way back to her farm.
However, with the fishing rod glued in her two hands, well, it was already starting to feel tedious. The monotony of the habit-in-the-making…Hadn't the whole point of moving out been to escape the tedium? And not to mention, she hadn't gotten a single bite…
She tried to ignore the fact that there was a better chance of catching a fish in the ocean, and then tried to ignore the consequential self-nagging. You're ignoring Denny. You're ignoring Denny. Dishonest brat.
Was there really any reason to ignore Denny? It wasn't like he'd done anything to her, or vice-versa. He was her…acquaintance. The closest thing to it on the little island, at least. She just didn't have the…initiative, the motivation to talk with him, she decided at long last. Having a conversation with him usually took the equal amount of effort as tilling an entire field.
Um, yeah, whatever. You're ignoring him and that's that. There's no excuse.
"Ugh." She pulled away from the stream with a scowl carved into her face, deeply annoyed by her tangle of thoughts. Not bothering to drop it off at the farm first, she lugged her fishing rod alongside her as she started walking in any direction that pointed in front of her.
Ironically, she was making a direct beeline for the beach. She stopped halfway through the fork in the road. In front of her, the beach. To her side, the store, and all the chocolate she couldn't have. Her scowl deepened as she twisted around and strode into a field she'd never entered before.
--
Denny groaned as he brought a hand around to massage his stiff, tense back. Sleeping on the sand wasn't nearly as comfortable as it looked; the inappropriately named sand beds felt hard rock as he laid onto his side and drifted into restless slumber just last night. When he'd awoken, the first thing he'd noticed - and felt - was the sharp ache in his back. When he pulled himself upright, his head pulled along the rest of the world up with him and it took him a few moments to adjust.
You should've just woken her up, his inside voice berated him. But when Denny saw Chelsea's sleeping form on the cot he'd been staying nights in since his arrival, the thought had never even crossed his mind. After seeing each cloud of distress, misery, dejection, bleakness and feebleness cross her face one after another, the untainted, untouched, almost appeased look on her face and body was comforting to see. He didn't want to take it away.
He sucked in the salty ocean scent. To be honest, he'd been waiting for her to come outside the shack all day. For all he knew, she could've left at dawn while he was still sleeping and wasn't even on the beach anymore, but he had patience - and hope, however brittle it was.
A tug at the end of his line brought his thoughts to a decline. He wrestled and pulled and gritted his teeth - to dramatize things, make it look cooler in case someone was secretly watching, of course - until his hook dragged back up the shore.
Nothing.
He sighed, grabbing the bare hook by its dull, wet curve. He turned to his side to retrieve bait, but was forced to stop abruptly.
Again, nothing.
He let out a small, immature grunt of exaggerated strain as he pulled himself to his feet. A short visit to the new shop for some bait wouldn't hurt, would it? It beat sitting around and waiting. For all he knew, Chelsea could still be fast asleep, having no hopes of getting out of bed until late afternoon.
On the other hand, Denny didn't know much today.
--
It was like stepping into a dream. And as badly as Chelsea felt the urge to smack herself for using the overused, obsolete, completely lame metaphor, there really were no other words to describe the experience of coming across this vast plane.
The field she'd seen upon continuing down the pathway wasn't anything amazing. The grass wasn't the most heartbreakingly beautiful dazzling brilliant viridian green she had ever seen in her life; the sky didn't suddenly look bluer and clearer and brighter over this chunk of the island; there weren't fairies with iridescent, translucent butterfly wings skipping through the air with their arms linked.
No, but the thing was, this wide lot was different. Unique. Chelsea had been seeing so much brown lately - the buildings, the tree trunks, her house, the (rather vacant) shipping bin, the sand at the beach - that she'd been starting to get sick of it. In fact, the only shade of brown she'd enjoyed seeing lately was the crisp colour of toast, for a reason she couldn't quite recall at the moment.
And she didn't want to recall it. All she wanted to do was stare, stare at the long rows of grass, which blew and rolled along with the gentle waves of wind. The field was enormous, and she was barely able to see the hem of the horizon, far in the distance. She'd taken but a step in the surreal land before a furry russet figure bounded in front of her.
She almost screamed. It took her about two seconds to identify the inhuman being - was it a squirrel? Chipmunk? She didn't know the difference, but it was one or the other. She stared at the animal, not having seen one up close since Douche, who was just unnatural and demonic. The furry chipmunk-squirrel itched at its tiny, round head with an even tinier paw. Chelsea almost aw'ed.
"Hello?"
She whirled around, startled at the unfamiliar voice, feeling her cheeks furl; she hoped she hadn't been caught gawking at the day-to-day squirrel. Recently, she had only been used to three voices thus far - her own feeble voice, another male's amused and playful chatter, and an old man's whiny demands.
There was a man standing a few feet away from her, his clothes unfitting both for someone who lived in a city and one who lived on an island.
"Um, hi," Chelsea responded, seconds too late.
The man watched her indifferently, his eyes scanning hers with little interest. It was like they were in some commonplace park, or in a mall, and not some island off the coast of who-knows-where.
"Do you possibly know where I could find a man by the name of 'Taro'?" he continued to ask, his eyes glazed and face bored.
Chelsea felt her eyebrows stitch in confusion. The old man had company? She wasn't sure what she had to say or think about that. "Um…yeah, he lives in one of the buildings at the end of the path, on the right," she directed him, pulling the instructions out of the map in her mind.
The man nodded once, memorizing her words. "Thanks," he grunted shortly, and strode past her abruptly, formalities omitted. Chelsea scratched her head in his absence, puzzled.
"Well…see you," she called into the empty silence shortly after he'd left in his long, sweeping steps. She turned back to the field, which had seemed to lose its majesty and inimitable appeal in his presence. That stranger was buzz kill.
Feet pivoting, she retraced her footsteps, and after a deep breath and one butterfly fluttering through her stomach later - just one - she made her way for the sands of the beach.
To her disappointment and relief, though more relief, the purple-clad man she'd been expecting was nowhere to be seen, and she whirled around immediately and started her trek back to her farm, since it was becoming quite dark, night looming on the edge above her head.
As she walked, there was some odd buzzing in her head. Not literally the incessant humming of bees, but some unspoken thoughts which she couldn't depict. It created a discreet emotion in the backseats of her mind, stirred a sort of anxiety in her stomach which eluded her. What could possibly be causing this? Shouldn't she know, rationally?
And then the dream hit her. The stupid pointless star dream. But what she thought of wasn't the comical stars, nor the snoozing moon, nor the fat and completely irrelevant cow, but simply two things: Denny, and the ship.
Denny, first of all, because, well, it was Denny. He'd been invading her thoughts more than the chocolate that eluded her, his voice a constant background conscience to hers. She didn't know what she found so interesting about him - the fact that he was some type of drifter, someone who fished for a living, someone who actually wanted to live on an island, as far as she knew. But she didn't know, and that annoyed her.
But lastly, what she thought of was the ship. The enormous replica of one she'd seen in a movie when she'd been littler - Pirates of the Caribbean? Ah, that one; it had always been one of her favourites, and Orlando had always been quite the eye candy…
She backtracked. If possible, there was some subliminal, minor, secret part of her that longed…to leave. Some part of her that wanted out. Some part that wanted to leave the peaceful, wild island and return to the grimy city streets. Some part of her that preferred greasy fast food to wild herbs and freshwater fish.
No, she thought, it wasn't a secret. It wasn't minor. It was blatantly obvious, what she wanted. It was totally, completely clear in her mind that she wanted to go home, whatever home meant to her now. She wanted that ship in her dream to come to the real dock, yeah, the broken one - and she wanted to board it and leave. Like her imaginary self had, she'd sail far away, deep into the horizon, so far that not even her mind could reach back and touch the visual photographs of the island.
And then she thought of Denny again, and she didn't know what she wanted.
When she had gotten back to her farm, it was already dark. She called it a day, frowning when her back slid against the hard, flat surface of the bed and wishing she could have spent just one more night in the one at the beach shack. But she had felt some sort of ominous feeling when she had awoken there, one of unfamiliarity and something compelling. She didn't belong there; she belonged in this crappy, uncomfortable, shoddy farm house.
Right now, she didn't really know where she belonged.
--
Denny sighed as he set his fishing gear down on the floor and a dusty, long table in the shack. Just a few minutes ago, he'd returned to the beach, biting his lip and stepping on his feet and taking deep breaths outside the shack. It'd taken a lot of senseless bursts of courage and mindless split-second decision, but he'd knocked tartly, waited an eternity, and then creaked the door open, his breath still hiding in his throat. He'd expected to see Chelsea asleep in the bed, breathing softly…maybe standing up, taking a look around.
But to his utter disappointment and annoyance, he'd found the building empty. So he'd done all that for nothing, consoled himself to make interaction with a dumb, ditched shack. Yeah, ditched. He knew it probably wasn't Chelsea's fault, and it really wasn't, but that was how he felt - ditched. Forgotten.
Pulling out of his memory, he dejectedly realized he'd forgotten his fishing rod, of all things, on the dock, and went out the door to go retrieve it. Just as he'd walked up the final boards of the narrow berth and grabbed the flimsy rod by its handle, he saw the clear yellow refraction in the waves. Dancing, dazzling, minimized spheres of light, mirrored by the dark blue ocean.
His eyes flickered skyward and he muttered a "Damn," and found that he couldn't break his gaze. When was the last time he'd seen something so breathtakingly…pretty? He tried not to sound mushy, over the sky, no less, and finally looked away.
His final thought was that whoever couldn't see the amazing celestial display today could only be ignorant.
--
A/N: So...many...words...so...much...crap...blah. If you have any concrit in regards to this chapter, I don't need to be told twice. It slightly blew, I know; I'll make up for it. XD And if you're wondering, Chelsea might be dreaming quite often, if you look at the pattern.