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15_minute_ficTitle: Soul and Centre
Fandom/original: Original
Rating: PG13 for swearing~?
Word count: 506
It didn't stream with rain, nor did the sunlight filter through the leaves and dapple the bemossed ground with treacles of gold. The day wasn't precisely overcast, nor was it particular fine.
Really, it was just being extremely damned lazy.
A pair of well-worn boots tramped steadily through the underbrush. They were scuffed at the toes, and what had once been thick soles were now uneven, so that the instep was significantly higher than the outer side. Cheap laces were frayed at the ends as well as where they pulled through the eyelets. Clearly these boots were made for walking, and they'd done a hell of a lot of it.
Their owner grunted as a fern played typical fernish mindgames and deceived the eyes carefully perusing the forest floors for hidden pitfalls and dangers; an ankle jangled warningly as it was placed down slightly heavier than it would have liked and as a result jarred the rest of the body. There was brief stumble before balance was regained and the trek continued onwards. Slightly dirty fingers wrapped around a mostly-empty water canteen, pulling it to lips that guzzled thirstily.
Somewhere off to the left, hidden safely in the thick green foliage, a woodpigeon warbled in soothing soprano. The lips smiled briefly before sputtering as a small fly decided they'd be fun to explore; the woodpigeon was silenced in shock as muttered expletives bounced between the trees. "
Aargh. Fucking Nature. Why I keep coming back out here, I have no freakin' idea." It was a familiar litany, though, and soon the forest ignored the words to continue with its normal agenda for any given day. The boots kept walking.
The boots
always kept walking.
He'd been walking this thin track for nearly fifteen years now. Not every week - sometimes Life got in the way of living. Sometimes he had to go months without the soothing caress of this familiar shade, and by then he was always edgy and anxious, a junkie for the rock-cracked slopes and gullies that suddenly cleared out of the embrace of the trees. Every time he walked here, he cursed his stupidity as insects attacked him and trees scratched at him and animals left lovely little presents for him to step in. He was
not a 'Nature' person. He didn't like the outdoors.
But he needed the silence and the uncompromising peace and the sense that everything was
forgiven and forgotten as long as he kept walking. Just as long as he kept walking through the forest, he could have peace, because everything narrowed to one foot in front of the other.
The nature was messy and frustrating and unwholesomely whimsical. But he could depend on it to be the same for him every time he needed it to be. That was why he always came back to have bugs fly into his teeth and birds try and shit on his head. It was inside his soul now, and he wouldn't let it go because that would be letting go of
him.
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