[fic] Walk in the Park [ryan/alex, pg]
Now with minor editing and an extended ending! Oh boy oh boy. Also, if you're really into stories about squirrels in Central Park (and other parts of New York City), you should read Jon Evans' Beasts of New York, which owns owns owns, though unfortunately none of the squirrels in that novel are gay hipsters.
I mostly blame this on languisity.
Walk in the Park
Ryan/Alex Greenwald. PG. 3,474 words.
They’re squirrels. Hipster squirrels in New York City. Take that as you will.
"So," Ryan chitters. "What's your favorite kind of nut?"
"Oh, well." The other squirrel examines him for a moment, sniffing the air. The both of them freeze in momentary horror as a human walks by, but it leaves them alone. "You probably wouldn't have heard of it."
Ryan thinks about this for a long moment. "Where do you find it, that I wouldn't have heard of it?"
"Outside," the other squirrel says.
"Outside," Ryan repeats, this time as a question.
"You know, across the waste of stone and metal," the squirrel says, trying to play it off as nothing, though his scent gives away the fact that he's bragging.
"There's no food there," Ryan says disdainfully. "There's nothing there but humans and death. You're making things up."
"I'm not!" The other squirrel's tail stiffens and he sits up, affronted. "I'll show you."
"But we can't just leave." Ryan huddles down in horror just thinking about it, teeth chattering. "There's only death out there. Humans and dogs and death."
"And delicious, delicious food." The other squirrel starts to run, towards the west, towards the huge stone faces that rise straight from the ground and surround the forest. The forest is cut through with paths of the same stone from outside, and there are dogs and humans here, too, but there are also trees and safety and everything Ryan's ever known.
"There's food here," Ryan says, but he's following anyway. "Who are you, so I know what to tell everyone when you die?"
"I'm Alex," the dark-furred squirrel tells him, not stopping in his run for the wall. "Of the Greenwald tribe."
-
Alex lets Ryan stare at his surroundings in half-frozen awe for a few moments before nipping at his side. "Come on, we don't want to stay here. This isn't where the food is, plus." He looks up, nostrils widening, and then Ryan smells it too -- dogs, three of them, coming nearer.
He begins to run, but Alex says, "No! Not that way, there's monsters. Here, over here. Then we wait until - see? They stop. Then we run."
The smells out here are strange and overpowering. Ryan has caught whiffs of all of them before from inside the forest, but here in the shadow of the stone walls, his claws scrabbling across flat stone, it's too much for his brain to process so he keeps his eyes on Alex's tail and runs singlemindedly. There are dog-smells all around, and they've passed so many humans by now that it seems absurd that they should still live.
They reach a dark and shadowy stretch of stone, where there are no strange machines and no humans, and a dank smell tinged with rot. Going a little further, though, there's human-smell, recent and near, and Ryan chitters a warning but Alex just laughs and keeps going, tail held high, right up to a human that's sitting leaning against one of the stone walls. The walls here are rough and reddish-colored, run through with bands of white and grey.
Alex stops in front of this human. Ryan is no fan of the shadows, but he tries to hide unseen in them. "What are you doing?" he squeals, as Alex sits up on his haunches and chatters his teeth. The human hadn't noticed him until he did that.
The human makes its low, strange cry, going on for some time, rising in pitch at the end, then pushes one of its paws into the pile of cloth covering it until it retrieves a packet of paper.
"We should go," Ryan says, babbling a little and speaking more in intention and the reek of fear than in sounds. "What is it doing? We have to leave. Alex. Alex. Alex of the Greenwald tribe. We have to go. I'm going, I'm going, I'm going. Ryan of the Ross tribe is going, goodbye."
"No, wait," Alex says, and in the next moment the human is throwing something towards Alex, and Ryan turns and runs. There's no fear-smell from Alex, though, and no sound or sign of the human moving except to breathe, and Ryan isn't sure he knows how to get back on his own. He creeps back, staying close to the wall, shivering in terror because it's stupid to be here. He should have stayed in the forest. The forest has dangers, too, but he wasn't out looking for them.
The human is still speaking - or Ryan assumes that's what it's trying to do, though its smell is weak and strange and its sounds don't make sense. Most animals can talk, though some of them are more interesting than others, but humans - humans are strange. Alex is ignoring it in favor of eating something.
"Are those seeds?" Ryan asks.
"Yes," Alex says. "Come here. They're good, I promise. They're the best."
Ryan edges forward nervously, grabbing one of the large black-and-white seeds in his mouth and going back to hide again. He pulls it from his mouth and holds it in his paws while he cracks it open, eating out the inside, then he stares first at Alex then at the human. "This is good."
"It's my favorite," Alex says. "Though I guess it isn't really a nut. Have more. There's lots."
There are a lot, in fact, and Ryan eventually gives up on hiding to eat and just sits with Alex devouring as many seeds as he can. Once he's full, he packs more into his cheeks to take back to the forest with him. "Really good."
"I told you," Alex says, smug.
-
The return trip doesn't seem as long. Ryan can see the appeal of coming out here for seeds, but crossing the blackness where the monsters roam is still too much for his tiny heart.
"You're not from this part of the forest," Alex tells him when they get back.
"No." Ryan looks north. "I'm from the Ramble."
"Why aren't you in the Ramble now, Ryan?"
"I left."
Alex looks around, and leaps onto a tree, climbing it then leaping to another branch, and another, following what must be a familiar path. Ryan chases after. It's early summer, and not worth the effort of thinking any further than that.
Alex disappears into a hole in a tree, and Ryan clings to the side of the tree, waiting outside. Alex peeks his head back out. "There's room," he says. "This is my drey. I made it bigger a while ago."
"That's nice," Ryan says, and misses his own drey, but he can't go back because of what he did. Instead he's here in the southern part of the forest, not far from the Pond, talking to a strange squirrel with an affinity for human seeds. He thinks for a moment. The sun is in the west now, and falling off the edge of the world again, and the night is no place for a squirrel at all. "You say there's room?"
"At least for two," Alex says. "It's very spacious. I think I might hire an interior designer to help me decorate. C'mon, check it out."
Ryan decides not to look for a hollow of his own. There's no time to build a new drey tonight, and with the owls, he doesn't want to risk sleeping in the branches. "Okay, I guess."
"I can show you around tomorrow," Alex tells him when Ryan is curled up inside the hole in the tree. "D'you wanna see my collection of vintage leaves?"
-
It's June, and in his sleep Ryan dreams of the chase, of following a ready female and beating the other males in pursuit, and she is so coy and charming and lets him catch her when he is almost ready to give up because he's hungry from so much running, except the squirrel he's dreaming of was carried off by a hawk not so long ago and when he wakes up it is to an acorn and an unfamiliar drey.
Ryan clutches at the acorn possessively, sniffing at the air, and the other-squirrel smell is still very recent and he remembers his trip into the waste and the human with the seeds. He and Alex ate the rest of those before night fell, and then they slept.
The thing with squirrels is that they don't usually share their dreys. Ryan is grateful for having had shelter, but he heads outside and looks around and doesn't see or smell anything too dangerous in the immediate area, so once he's done with the acorn he starts looking for a promising spot of his own. There's a lot of food here, and not too many other squirrels, except Alex, who Ryan is happy to live near. He thinks maybe Alex, at least, wouldn't mind him being close-by, not yet.
Ryan finds one promising hole, but the smell makes him cautious, and he pokes his nose in only to get bitten at by a centipede, and more of them come pouring out so he runs back along the branches. The centipedes were just defending their home, and too small to be much trouble if left alone, so Ryan opts to leave them alone. He doesn't always have the best of ideas when it comes to personal safety - see yesterday's trip outside - but he knows better than to mess with crawling things and their poisons.
He smells Alex nearby, and goes to say hello. Alex is eating flowerbuds from a smaller tree, that's a little difficult to jump to from the main tangle of branches. Ryan lands the jump, but only barely, and has to scramble to pull himself up onto a branch.
"I met a crow once," Ryan says, because he sees a pigeon down on the ground and it makes him think of it, and he thinks it's kind of cool, because crows and squirrels don't usually have very much to talk about and, in fact, usually just avoid each other altogether. He hopes Alex will be impressed.
"Yeah?"
"I scared him off," Ryan says. "He found one of my tribe's dreys, and the opening was big enough so he could almost get at the babies."
"Well, damn."
"I told him where else to get food, though, so he left," Ryan concludes. "Which was nice."
Alex laughs. "I bet."
Ryan puffs up his fur a little, tail straightening, trying very hard to look impressive. "I thought it was a good story."
"Yeah, no, it's cool," Alex says, and Ryan is unduly relieved by that. "Did I ever tell you about that time I got away from a hawk?"
Ryan stares at him for a moment before deciding to eat a little bug he spots climbing on his branch.
"Well," Alex begins, sitting up on his haunches to point out his scars, which are mostly covered by shaggy fur. He launches into his story and Ryan inches forward to listen with rapt attention.
Ryan is pretty sure he'll never be that cool.
Ryan spends the next few days looking for a good spot for his new drey, but there is always something just a little bit wrong - a draft, he saw a cockroach, the wood is too soft, the bark is sharp and cuts his paws. Little things, every time, but he ends up back in Alex's drey looking over Alex's collection of leaves and of tiny little human things - strange objects that look like humans but so very very small, and bits of glass and shining things.
"I just really need to get it all organized," Alex says. "But I'd rather just sleep or eat flowers."
"I feel you." Ryan nods. That's totally understandable. He had some neat things at his old drey, too, and he wonders who has them now, or if whatever squirrel took up residence in his absence got rid of everything.
Another day, Ryan finds a little iridescent glass ball, so he brings that back and deposits it at Alex's feet, since Alex is sleeping through the mid-day heat. Alex wakes up at the movement, and pulls it closer with one paw, curling up around it and going back to sleep. He looks - and smells, which is more telling - happy.
It's nice here, down in the southern forest, and much closer to the human with the strange, delicious seeds. Sometimes the human doesn't have any, and has odd little nuts instead, which taste strongly of salt, but mostly it's the seeds.
After a while, Ryan forgets to even miss his old drey and his old friends and the Ramble.
And Alex is always very nice, and whenever Ryan says, "I swear I'll find my own drey soon," Alex laughs and says that he really doesn't have to, which is very generous indeed because it's usually only mated pairs that share a drey for so long.
June turns to July turns to August turns to winter, and along the way Ryan builds up a good store of food to last through the cold months, and sometimes when he can't find one of his nuts - when one has been stolen already, eaten by either another squirrel or an insect or fate - Alex will share with him, and he shares with Alex, too, sometimes, when it's the other way around, and having two warm bodies in the drey at night makes it very much easier to get through the season.
This is Ryan's second winter, and so far it's going a lot better than his first.
"This is my third," Alex says, and he's not bragging, just stating fact.
Eventually, it comes the time to chase after females, and Ryan considers it, and participates in one chase that he has no hopes of winning because the other males are bigger and braver and better at jumping, and anyway, it seems as if the female has her mind made up almost as soon as it begins.
He still likes the acrobatics of it, though, and the energy and thrill of it all, even if at one point things stall out because of a pair of unleashed dogs singing songs of blood and death at them. The chase is back on after that but Ryan just scampers back to his drey - he considers it his now, at least, because he's lived there long enough, though it's still very much Alex's as well.
Alex is crouched on a treebranch, chittering angrily at a human who's flailing around in the snow, on its back waving its legs and arms around. Ryan perches next to him and joins in the scolding, before finally asking, "Why are we mad at it? I think it’s insane. Rabies, maybe."
"I buried a walnut there," Alex says. "I was going to go down and get it but now that human won't go away and let me dig it up in peace."
Ryan doesn't have a good solution for that. "You could eat something else."
"I wanted my walnut."
Ryan understands that. "What if we went outside again, to get those seeds, instead?"
"Do you think that human is still there in winter? I've never left in winter."
"Maybe," Ryan says. He doesn't know where humans live in the winter, or really where they live at all, though he's seen them go in and out of the great rises of stone before. Maybe humans live in caves.
Sometimes there are humans in the park who will throw out crumbs of bread or mixes of strange and fascinating seeds, but there haven't been any of those in a while. It's late in the season and Ryan's supplies are all running very, very low, and so are Alex's. "We could try it," Alex says thoughtfully.
"We could." Ryan agrees that it would be possible, and so, without bothering to think, he heads for the wall and the outside again. He runs and jumps very fast, showing off his most acrobatic skills. Alex chases after him.
-
There are a few very lean, very hungry weeks before spring comes again, but it does, as always, and there are leafbuds and grubs and other fine, delicious things to eat again. The two of them gnaw at the wood of Alex’s drey, hollowing out a larger space to make comfortable with feathers and leaves and twigs.
Days and nights go by, and sometimes there are humans to worry about, and unleashed dogs, and, once, a coyote, strange-smelling and fearsome, but otherwise things are good and peaceful in the forest. Ryan is very happy where he is and he never thinks of the Ramble at all anymore, only of what he will eat next and whether or not Alex will like the little shiny things he finds.
Then one day, still early in the spring, Ryan finds a baby bird on the ground. He’s seen baby birds before, of course, has run past plenty of nests in his day, but a bird that can’t even fly yet on the ground is a strange thing, especially since he doesn’t see its parents around anywhere.
Ryan looks around. He thinks maybe he sees the nest the chick fell from, so he runs up and tries to tell the birds about their baby, but the mother bird is having none of it. Ryan never was very good at speaking bird.
Nothing makes him go back down to the orphaned bird, but he does anyway. It is delicate and very pink and starts screaming shrilly when he approaches it. Ryan tries to pick it up by the nape of the neck, but the little bird protests even more. He chitters angrily at it until it quiets down, trying to convince it that he is here to help, really.
“Helping,” he attempts to say, in very stilted bird-speak, but the little bird just keeps screaming. He’s pretty sure it isn’t saying anything, in bird language or otherwise. Ryan has only a very little experience with babies, but he’s well aware that they’re not good at communication other than expressing hunger and fear. Not that there’s usually a lot else that needs communicating beyond that anyway.
Eventually, Ryan gets the little bird back to the drey, and brings it a few grubs that he finds down on the ground. The little bird eats greedily, then sets to screaming again.
Alex comes back for the evening, and the first thing he does is say, “You did notice that a bird invaded the drey, right?”
“Yes,” Ryan says. “I brought it.”
Alex smells worried and a little frightened, and Ryan can’t work out quite why until Alex also says, “We’re not going to eat it, right?”
“No! No. Its parents left it on the ground and wouldn’t save it.”
“That’s too bad,” Alex says. “Why is it here?”
“It would have died.”
“Yes.” Alex nudges the little bird with his snout, which sets it off chirping and screaming again. “It’s very loud.”
“It quiets down if you give it food.” Ryan knows this from experience. He’s spent most of his day trying to get the little bird to quiet down, and already it is a little more comfortable around him, though Alex has the little thing terrified all over again. “You should give it food so it will like you and stop screaming.”
“Hm,” Alex says, looking back outside again because it’s starting to get dark and that’s a dangerous time to go outside. “Tomorrow? Can it wait outside until then?”
“An owl will eat it.” Ryan’s fur bristles. “Or something else will. It won’t live through the night alone out there.”
“It’s a bird, not a squirrel,” Alex begins, but the little bird has tucked its head under one wing and seems to be asleep. Alex lies down and looks at it. “It would be mean to wake it up, though.”
“Yes, exactly.” Ryan’s glad that Alex understands that much. Ryan hopes they can keep this little bird alive long enough until it can fly away and live on its own and have tiny hatchlings of its own, and that maybe its chicks won’t fall out of the nest.
“I guess we can keep it for a while,” Alex says. “Until it’s big enough to fend for itself.”
Ryan nuzzles his face up against the warm fur of Alex’s side, and curls up next to the other squirrel, rather proud that they eventually came to the same conclusion about the little bird.
“Maybe we can even teach it to talk,” Ryan says, sleepily. “Do you think birds can talk like us?”
“I think birds can talk like birds,” Alex says, thoughtfully. His tail curls around Ryan protectively. “I know a little bird, though. We can think about it tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Ryan says, going to sleep happy and quite sure that raising a baby bird can’t possibly be all that difficult.
I mostly blame this on languisity.
Walk in the Park
Ryan/Alex Greenwald. PG. 3,474 words.
They’re squirrels. Hipster squirrels in New York City. Take that as you will.
"So," Ryan chitters. "What's your favorite kind of nut?"
"Oh, well." The other squirrel examines him for a moment, sniffing the air. The both of them freeze in momentary horror as a human walks by, but it leaves them alone. "You probably wouldn't have heard of it."
Ryan thinks about this for a long moment. "Where do you find it, that I wouldn't have heard of it?"
"Outside," the other squirrel says.
"Outside," Ryan repeats, this time as a question.
"You know, across the waste of stone and metal," the squirrel says, trying to play it off as nothing, though his scent gives away the fact that he's bragging.
"There's no food there," Ryan says disdainfully. "There's nothing there but humans and death. You're making things up."
"I'm not!" The other squirrel's tail stiffens and he sits up, affronted. "I'll show you."
"But we can't just leave." Ryan huddles down in horror just thinking about it, teeth chattering. "There's only death out there. Humans and dogs and death."
"And delicious, delicious food." The other squirrel starts to run, towards the west, towards the huge stone faces that rise straight from the ground and surround the forest. The forest is cut through with paths of the same stone from outside, and there are dogs and humans here, too, but there are also trees and safety and everything Ryan's ever known.
"There's food here," Ryan says, but he's following anyway. "Who are you, so I know what to tell everyone when you die?"
"I'm Alex," the dark-furred squirrel tells him, not stopping in his run for the wall. "Of the Greenwald tribe."
-
Alex lets Ryan stare at his surroundings in half-frozen awe for a few moments before nipping at his side. "Come on, we don't want to stay here. This isn't where the food is, plus." He looks up, nostrils widening, and then Ryan smells it too -- dogs, three of them, coming nearer.
He begins to run, but Alex says, "No! Not that way, there's monsters. Here, over here. Then we wait until - see? They stop. Then we run."
The smells out here are strange and overpowering. Ryan has caught whiffs of all of them before from inside the forest, but here in the shadow of the stone walls, his claws scrabbling across flat stone, it's too much for his brain to process so he keeps his eyes on Alex's tail and runs singlemindedly. There are dog-smells all around, and they've passed so many humans by now that it seems absurd that they should still live.
They reach a dark and shadowy stretch of stone, where there are no strange machines and no humans, and a dank smell tinged with rot. Going a little further, though, there's human-smell, recent and near, and Ryan chitters a warning but Alex just laughs and keeps going, tail held high, right up to a human that's sitting leaning against one of the stone walls. The walls here are rough and reddish-colored, run through with bands of white and grey.
Alex stops in front of this human. Ryan is no fan of the shadows, but he tries to hide unseen in them. "What are you doing?" he squeals, as Alex sits up on his haunches and chatters his teeth. The human hadn't noticed him until he did that.
The human makes its low, strange cry, going on for some time, rising in pitch at the end, then pushes one of its paws into the pile of cloth covering it until it retrieves a packet of paper.
"We should go," Ryan says, babbling a little and speaking more in intention and the reek of fear than in sounds. "What is it doing? We have to leave. Alex. Alex. Alex of the Greenwald tribe. We have to go. I'm going, I'm going, I'm going. Ryan of the Ross tribe is going, goodbye."
"No, wait," Alex says, and in the next moment the human is throwing something towards Alex, and Ryan turns and runs. There's no fear-smell from Alex, though, and no sound or sign of the human moving except to breathe, and Ryan isn't sure he knows how to get back on his own. He creeps back, staying close to the wall, shivering in terror because it's stupid to be here. He should have stayed in the forest. The forest has dangers, too, but he wasn't out looking for them.
The human is still speaking - or Ryan assumes that's what it's trying to do, though its smell is weak and strange and its sounds don't make sense. Most animals can talk, though some of them are more interesting than others, but humans - humans are strange. Alex is ignoring it in favor of eating something.
"Are those seeds?" Ryan asks.
"Yes," Alex says. "Come here. They're good, I promise. They're the best."
Ryan edges forward nervously, grabbing one of the large black-and-white seeds in his mouth and going back to hide again. He pulls it from his mouth and holds it in his paws while he cracks it open, eating out the inside, then he stares first at Alex then at the human. "This is good."
"It's my favorite," Alex says. "Though I guess it isn't really a nut. Have more. There's lots."
There are a lot, in fact, and Ryan eventually gives up on hiding to eat and just sits with Alex devouring as many seeds as he can. Once he's full, he packs more into his cheeks to take back to the forest with him. "Really good."
"I told you," Alex says, smug.
-
The return trip doesn't seem as long. Ryan can see the appeal of coming out here for seeds, but crossing the blackness where the monsters roam is still too much for his tiny heart.
"You're not from this part of the forest," Alex tells him when they get back.
"No." Ryan looks north. "I'm from the Ramble."
"Why aren't you in the Ramble now, Ryan?"
"I left."
Alex looks around, and leaps onto a tree, climbing it then leaping to another branch, and another, following what must be a familiar path. Ryan chases after. It's early summer, and not worth the effort of thinking any further than that.
Alex disappears into a hole in a tree, and Ryan clings to the side of the tree, waiting outside. Alex peeks his head back out. "There's room," he says. "This is my drey. I made it bigger a while ago."
"That's nice," Ryan says, and misses his own drey, but he can't go back because of what he did. Instead he's here in the southern part of the forest, not far from the Pond, talking to a strange squirrel with an affinity for human seeds. He thinks for a moment. The sun is in the west now, and falling off the edge of the world again, and the night is no place for a squirrel at all. "You say there's room?"
"At least for two," Alex says. "It's very spacious. I think I might hire an interior designer to help me decorate. C'mon, check it out."
Ryan decides not to look for a hollow of his own. There's no time to build a new drey tonight, and with the owls, he doesn't want to risk sleeping in the branches. "Okay, I guess."
"I can show you around tomorrow," Alex tells him when Ryan is curled up inside the hole in the tree. "D'you wanna see my collection of vintage leaves?"
-
It's June, and in his sleep Ryan dreams of the chase, of following a ready female and beating the other males in pursuit, and she is so coy and charming and lets him catch her when he is almost ready to give up because he's hungry from so much running, except the squirrel he's dreaming of was carried off by a hawk not so long ago and when he wakes up it is to an acorn and an unfamiliar drey.
Ryan clutches at the acorn possessively, sniffing at the air, and the other-squirrel smell is still very recent and he remembers his trip into the waste and the human with the seeds. He and Alex ate the rest of those before night fell, and then they slept.
The thing with squirrels is that they don't usually share their dreys. Ryan is grateful for having had shelter, but he heads outside and looks around and doesn't see or smell anything too dangerous in the immediate area, so once he's done with the acorn he starts looking for a promising spot of his own. There's a lot of food here, and not too many other squirrels, except Alex, who Ryan is happy to live near. He thinks maybe Alex, at least, wouldn't mind him being close-by, not yet.
Ryan finds one promising hole, but the smell makes him cautious, and he pokes his nose in only to get bitten at by a centipede, and more of them come pouring out so he runs back along the branches. The centipedes were just defending their home, and too small to be much trouble if left alone, so Ryan opts to leave them alone. He doesn't always have the best of ideas when it comes to personal safety - see yesterday's trip outside - but he knows better than to mess with crawling things and their poisons.
He smells Alex nearby, and goes to say hello. Alex is eating flowerbuds from a smaller tree, that's a little difficult to jump to from the main tangle of branches. Ryan lands the jump, but only barely, and has to scramble to pull himself up onto a branch.
"I met a crow once," Ryan says, because he sees a pigeon down on the ground and it makes him think of it, and he thinks it's kind of cool, because crows and squirrels don't usually have very much to talk about and, in fact, usually just avoid each other altogether. He hopes Alex will be impressed.
"Yeah?"
"I scared him off," Ryan says. "He found one of my tribe's dreys, and the opening was big enough so he could almost get at the babies."
"Well, damn."
"I told him where else to get food, though, so he left," Ryan concludes. "Which was nice."
Alex laughs. "I bet."
Ryan puffs up his fur a little, tail straightening, trying very hard to look impressive. "I thought it was a good story."
"Yeah, no, it's cool," Alex says, and Ryan is unduly relieved by that. "Did I ever tell you about that time I got away from a hawk?"
Ryan stares at him for a moment before deciding to eat a little bug he spots climbing on his branch.
"Well," Alex begins, sitting up on his haunches to point out his scars, which are mostly covered by shaggy fur. He launches into his story and Ryan inches forward to listen with rapt attention.
Ryan is pretty sure he'll never be that cool.
Ryan spends the next few days looking for a good spot for his new drey, but there is always something just a little bit wrong - a draft, he saw a cockroach, the wood is too soft, the bark is sharp and cuts his paws. Little things, every time, but he ends up back in Alex's drey looking over Alex's collection of leaves and of tiny little human things - strange objects that look like humans but so very very small, and bits of glass and shining things.
"I just really need to get it all organized," Alex says. "But I'd rather just sleep or eat flowers."
"I feel you." Ryan nods. That's totally understandable. He had some neat things at his old drey, too, and he wonders who has them now, or if whatever squirrel took up residence in his absence got rid of everything.
Another day, Ryan finds a little iridescent glass ball, so he brings that back and deposits it at Alex's feet, since Alex is sleeping through the mid-day heat. Alex wakes up at the movement, and pulls it closer with one paw, curling up around it and going back to sleep. He looks - and smells, which is more telling - happy.
It's nice here, down in the southern forest, and much closer to the human with the strange, delicious seeds. Sometimes the human doesn't have any, and has odd little nuts instead, which taste strongly of salt, but mostly it's the seeds.
After a while, Ryan forgets to even miss his old drey and his old friends and the Ramble.
And Alex is always very nice, and whenever Ryan says, "I swear I'll find my own drey soon," Alex laughs and says that he really doesn't have to, which is very generous indeed because it's usually only mated pairs that share a drey for so long.
June turns to July turns to August turns to winter, and along the way Ryan builds up a good store of food to last through the cold months, and sometimes when he can't find one of his nuts - when one has been stolen already, eaten by either another squirrel or an insect or fate - Alex will share with him, and he shares with Alex, too, sometimes, when it's the other way around, and having two warm bodies in the drey at night makes it very much easier to get through the season.
This is Ryan's second winter, and so far it's going a lot better than his first.
"This is my third," Alex says, and he's not bragging, just stating fact.
Eventually, it comes the time to chase after females, and Ryan considers it, and participates in one chase that he has no hopes of winning because the other males are bigger and braver and better at jumping, and anyway, it seems as if the female has her mind made up almost as soon as it begins.
He still likes the acrobatics of it, though, and the energy and thrill of it all, even if at one point things stall out because of a pair of unleashed dogs singing songs of blood and death at them. The chase is back on after that but Ryan just scampers back to his drey - he considers it his now, at least, because he's lived there long enough, though it's still very much Alex's as well.
Alex is crouched on a treebranch, chittering angrily at a human who's flailing around in the snow, on its back waving its legs and arms around. Ryan perches next to him and joins in the scolding, before finally asking, "Why are we mad at it? I think it’s insane. Rabies, maybe."
"I buried a walnut there," Alex says. "I was going to go down and get it but now that human won't go away and let me dig it up in peace."
Ryan doesn't have a good solution for that. "You could eat something else."
"I wanted my walnut."
Ryan understands that. "What if we went outside again, to get those seeds, instead?"
"Do you think that human is still there in winter? I've never left in winter."
"Maybe," Ryan says. He doesn't know where humans live in the winter, or really where they live at all, though he's seen them go in and out of the great rises of stone before. Maybe humans live in caves.
Sometimes there are humans in the park who will throw out crumbs of bread or mixes of strange and fascinating seeds, but there haven't been any of those in a while. It's late in the season and Ryan's supplies are all running very, very low, and so are Alex's. "We could try it," Alex says thoughtfully.
"We could." Ryan agrees that it would be possible, and so, without bothering to think, he heads for the wall and the outside again. He runs and jumps very fast, showing off his most acrobatic skills. Alex chases after him.
-
There are a few very lean, very hungry weeks before spring comes again, but it does, as always, and there are leafbuds and grubs and other fine, delicious things to eat again. The two of them gnaw at the wood of Alex’s drey, hollowing out a larger space to make comfortable with feathers and leaves and twigs.
Days and nights go by, and sometimes there are humans to worry about, and unleashed dogs, and, once, a coyote, strange-smelling and fearsome, but otherwise things are good and peaceful in the forest. Ryan is very happy where he is and he never thinks of the Ramble at all anymore, only of what he will eat next and whether or not Alex will like the little shiny things he finds.
Then one day, still early in the spring, Ryan finds a baby bird on the ground. He’s seen baby birds before, of course, has run past plenty of nests in his day, but a bird that can’t even fly yet on the ground is a strange thing, especially since he doesn’t see its parents around anywhere.
Ryan looks around. He thinks maybe he sees the nest the chick fell from, so he runs up and tries to tell the birds about their baby, but the mother bird is having none of it. Ryan never was very good at speaking bird.
Nothing makes him go back down to the orphaned bird, but he does anyway. It is delicate and very pink and starts screaming shrilly when he approaches it. Ryan tries to pick it up by the nape of the neck, but the little bird protests even more. He chitters angrily at it until it quiets down, trying to convince it that he is here to help, really.
“Helping,” he attempts to say, in very stilted bird-speak, but the little bird just keeps screaming. He’s pretty sure it isn’t saying anything, in bird language or otherwise. Ryan has only a very little experience with babies, but he’s well aware that they’re not good at communication other than expressing hunger and fear. Not that there’s usually a lot else that needs communicating beyond that anyway.
Eventually, Ryan gets the little bird back to the drey, and brings it a few grubs that he finds down on the ground. The little bird eats greedily, then sets to screaming again.
Alex comes back for the evening, and the first thing he does is say, “You did notice that a bird invaded the drey, right?”
“Yes,” Ryan says. “I brought it.”
Alex smells worried and a little frightened, and Ryan can’t work out quite why until Alex also says, “We’re not going to eat it, right?”
“No! No. Its parents left it on the ground and wouldn’t save it.”
“That’s too bad,” Alex says. “Why is it here?”
“It would have died.”
“Yes.” Alex nudges the little bird with his snout, which sets it off chirping and screaming again. “It’s very loud.”
“It quiets down if you give it food.” Ryan knows this from experience. He’s spent most of his day trying to get the little bird to quiet down, and already it is a little more comfortable around him, though Alex has the little thing terrified all over again. “You should give it food so it will like you and stop screaming.”
“Hm,” Alex says, looking back outside again because it’s starting to get dark and that’s a dangerous time to go outside. “Tomorrow? Can it wait outside until then?”
“An owl will eat it.” Ryan’s fur bristles. “Or something else will. It won’t live through the night alone out there.”
“It’s a bird, not a squirrel,” Alex begins, but the little bird has tucked its head under one wing and seems to be asleep. Alex lies down and looks at it. “It would be mean to wake it up, though.”
“Yes, exactly.” Ryan’s glad that Alex understands that much. Ryan hopes they can keep this little bird alive long enough until it can fly away and live on its own and have tiny hatchlings of its own, and that maybe its chicks won’t fall out of the nest.
“I guess we can keep it for a while,” Alex says. “Until it’s big enough to fend for itself.”
Ryan nuzzles his face up against the warm fur of Alex’s side, and curls up next to the other squirrel, rather proud that they eventually came to the same conclusion about the little bird.
“Maybe we can even teach it to talk,” Ryan says, sleepily. “Do you think birds can talk like us?”
“I think birds can talk like birds,” Alex says, thoughtfully. His tail curls around Ryan protectively. “I know a little bird, though. We can think about it tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Ryan says, going to sleep happy and quite sure that raising a baby bird can’t possibly be all that difficult.