Ah, jeez. More fic.
Sometimes, I really hate how my brain works. Nothing for months, and then I can't stop.
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8.
After awhile, a long while of misery and a strange sort of growing complacence, as if it's customary -- no, normal, normal and ordinary to feel all the time as if all Rodney's internal organs had been removed with a rusty blade -- it occurs to him that perhaps giving up offworld missions was not the wisest course of action.
If he'd stayed with a team, any team that would have him, Rodney surely would have noticed Parrish in the fields before the man came up and touched his shoulder.
Startled, Rodney jumps, overbalances from his squatting position, and lands ass down in the mud.
Parrish laughs, but it's a warm laugh of shared humor rather than bitterness, and he plops himself down in the puddle right next to Rodney before showing him a new cultivation tool that he claims will revolutionize the growing industry.
The old Rodney would have said something cutting about the soft sciences, but the new Rodney, deeply chastened and starved for human contact, volunteers his small plot for guinea-pig duty.
When he pulls potatoes the size of his head out of the ground two weeks later, he thinks that maybe David Parrish isn't as dumb as he looks, after all.
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8.
After awhile, a long while of misery and a strange sort of growing complacence, as if it's customary -- no, normal, normal and ordinary to feel all the time as if all Rodney's internal organs had been removed with a rusty blade -- it occurs to him that perhaps giving up offworld missions was not the wisest course of action.
If he'd stayed with a team, any team that would have him, Rodney surely would have noticed Parrish in the fields before the man came up and touched his shoulder.
Startled, Rodney jumps, overbalances from his squatting position, and lands ass down in the mud.
Parrish laughs, but it's a warm laugh of shared humor rather than bitterness, and he plops himself down in the puddle right next to Rodney before showing him a new cultivation tool that he claims will revolutionize the growing industry.
The old Rodney would have said something cutting about the soft sciences, but the new Rodney, deeply chastened and starved for human contact, volunteers his small plot for guinea-pig duty.
When he pulls potatoes the size of his head out of the ground two weeks later, he thinks that maybe David Parrish isn't as dumb as he looks, after all.
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