#it's late in the year so I'm planting from seedlings instead of seed | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tessiete · 3 years

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"I wish you would write a —" continuation or AU of that scene from away the vapour flew (because I've seen you mention that even your AU's have AU's lol and I'm selfishly hoping you'd consider revisiting that fic and coz I can't let this opportunity pass when this fic literally lives in my mind rent free lol)

Alright! At long last I have figured out what happens next. This is for you, dear thing ❤️❤️❤️ ( @lightasthesun on - or very near thereabouts - your birthday)

LED BY THE WANDERING LIGHT

It starts with a very little thing: a seed.

It is slipped from the glove of a Republic aid trooper who smiles as he passes it over.

“From the General of the 212th,” he says. “Don’t know what it is, but I damn near lost the thing on the way over.”

“For me?” he asks, and the man nods, his grin growing wider.

Then he leans in as though commiserating with a friend. “Jetiise sha’bise, lek?”

“Elek,” agrees Korkie, dubiously, turning the little living pebble between his fingers.

The trooper grins, and gives him a friendly shove before trotting off back to his ship. Korkie has come down on his aunt’s behalf to oversee the relief efforts, but he is distracted by the seed in his hand. It is flat, and furry, and pleasingly plump. If he squeezes it, he can feel the skin relent and rebound, and if he digs in his nail ever so gently, he can feel the taste of water upon his thumb, and see the pale blush of springtime in the depths of the cut. It is a seed of something, he knows, but of what?

He places it in the breast pocket of his Academy jacket, and turns his attention back to the work. It is an impressive, and important sight, but his thoughts linger on the seed, and he feels it sit bright and eager against his heart.

Later, when the supplies have been unloaded, and the aid troopers seen off, when the ceremony of thanks and assurances of neutrality have all been displayed, when he is back in his room at Sundari only hours away from the magtrain ride back to school, he plants the seed in a little pot of black earth, and dampens the soil. It will not grow tonight, but he cannot help but stare at it anyway, waiting in the dark, beneath the stars, so patient.

A week passes, and he is back at the Academy when the mail officer - an upperclassman he’s never met - stops at his place during first meal.

“Su-su, Kryze!” he calls. “A package for you from the Core.”

A small bundle wrapped in layer upon layer of bonding tape, and stamped with the ink of a hundred spaceports too numerous and cramped to decipher lands upon his lap. He uses the thin knife from his plate to slice through the plastifibe envelope.

When his fingers graze the object within he gasps, and pulls back the wrap to reveal a real, proper book. It’s not even printed on flimsi, he notes, cracking the aged spine and letting the pages fall open, but on actual paper. They don’t make these in the Core, and hardly ever in the Mid Rim, it’s just not economical, and most planets don’t have the resources to spare. But this one is old, it’s pages creased, and worn smooth at the corners with the turning of many fingers. It is about horticulture, though the illustrations of green and growing things have faded to browns and burnished golds. It is beautiful.

A piece of dried grass has been tucked between two pages, and when Korkie folds them back to look he sees an image of the seed he’d sown in the pot by his bed. Beside it, a riotous bouquet of blossoms burst in an array of different colours. It is a daesyn flower.

He tucks the book in his kebisebag, and carries it around for the rest of the day. At nightfall, he takes it out with careful reverence, turning the pages back to the daesyn slowly lest they tear or turn to dust. Then, by the light of a little glowrod, he props the book against his window and reads along as he tends to the small green sprout only just peeking through the soil.

He buys a sun lamp, and a watermeter, and adjusts the temperature of his quarters much to Amis’ chagrin, determined to provide the most optimal growing conditions he can for the little plant.

After a month, the seedling has become a sturdy sprout, with prickly leaves of a green so deep it might be blue. He is attempting to commit those variegated lines to flimsi when Amis returns to their quarters, a small pouch swinging from his hand.

“I’m supposed to give this to you,” he says, tossing the pouch. Korkie reacts without thinking, snatching the bag out of the air before it can hit the ground.

“Who’s it from?”

“Front desk. Said some high up Republic alor sent it.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t ask, did I? Too busy polishing the silver.”

Korkie grimaces in sympathy, having spent many an afternoon of his first year cleaning the trophy case in the main hall. He thinks that Amis’ plight could be easily avoided if only he behaved himself, but refrains from saying so to his friend.

Instead, he pulls the drawstring at the top of the purse, and turns it over his hand. A dozen discs of coloured glass tumble into his palm. They are thick, and smooth, though not polished by anything but time. Each is a different colour, though some are struck through with shimmers of gold and silver.

“What’s that?” asks Amis over his shoulder.

“Don’t know,” he echoes. The glass feels comfortable in his grip. Made to be held, and carried, and passed from hand to hand.

“Should ask Lagos,” says Amis. “That seems like her kind of thing.”

He makes no reply to Amis, but of course, he does as he suggests. Lagos is, after all, a walking encyclopaedia, and of all their friends the most likely to at least have an idea of where to start looking.

The excitement on her face when Korkie shows her his hoard tells him she has more than an idea - she knows.

“Oh, oh, oh!” she gasps. “Where’d you find Abafar trading beads?”

“They were a gift,” he replies. “What are they for?”

She picks them up one at a time and holds them to the light. By some trick of their design, they cast no shadow, but seem to capture the rays inside like banked embers, or twisting prisms. The ones marked with ribbons of ore grow warm in her hand, and she presses them to his cheek so he can feel their heat.

“They’re the traditional currency of Abafar,” she explains. “It’s a desert planet in the Outer Rim, and craftsmen in the Void used to make these beads as a means of facilitating trade over great distances. Metal was scarce, and the beads could also be used to retain heat for longer - that one in your hand could keep the warmth of the sun all night, if you wanted it to.”

He considers the disc of deep indigo, and holds it up to the sun until it turns red. The glass seems to have become molten, but its warmth is not painful in the hand. He leaves the bead out for the rest of the afternoon to test Lagos’ theory, and brings it into bed with him at night. Tucked beneath his pillow, it radiates a soothing heat, and he feels his muscles relax and his worries melt as he drifts away into an easy slumber.

The next gift he receives is shattered into bits.

“Sorry, kid,” says the attendant at the delivery depot when he arrives to claim his parcel. “Happens sometimes with these packages from the front. The war is not a safe place for fragile things. Bic cuyir meg bic cuyir.”

He takes the present anyway, carrying it delicately back to the Academy, fearful of breaking it further. When he finally tears through the tape and plastifibe, clay and ceramplast pieces give up any pretense at form and clatter over the surface of his desk.

It was beautiful once, he can tell. Perhaps a bowl or a cup turned by hand - he can see the telltale print of a foreign finger pressed into a section of naked clay - but now it is only fragments and dust.

Still, he hovers over the pile, turning the pieces this way and that, trying to see how they fit together. He doesn’t notice when sixth bell rings, or when Soniee pings his comm, or when Amis sneaks in past curfew and turns out his light. He stays up late into the night, until the form takes shape, and through the cracks and crevasses of painted clay dawn creeps in.

It is an amphoriskos. A small vessel for storing precious oils, like the kind used in the rituals of so many traditional peoples. There is none in it now, and Korkie retrieves the sachet to see if perhaps it was spilled into the weave of the plastifibe wrap. But it is dry. And the clay, when he looks at it more closely, is dry and unstained by use. The gift was always empty.

The shards sit upon his desk in their loose arrangement until, one afternoon, Amis moves to sweep them off into the dustbin.

“No, no!” protests Korkie, before Amis can complete the task. “I want to keep it.”

“What for?” his friend asks. “It’s broken.”

“I don’t know yet.”

He collects the bits of amphoriskos into his hands, and arranges them about the base of his daesyn pot. The paint glints in the light, and so too do the Abafar beads nestled amidst the debris. The plant grows green and bushy, its leaves reaching out to skim the rim of its bed as though a swimmer poised on the edge of emersion.

He receives Theelin singing strings wound tight around a holodrive meant for the Duchess, paired basalt spindles from Hapes, seashells from the deep oceans of Mon Cala, and a set of Lateron hoops carried on the wrist of the visiting senator from Naboo.

“From Master Kenobi,” she says, and she smiles at him with a warmth that feels like family. He wonders if they’ve met before, if he should know her, but she moves along with the entourage of press and government officials before he can ask.

He is home for Holyrod month, and has brought his prizes with him carried along specially in his kebisebag, his daesyn in his hands. He sets them out along the windowsill in his rooms at Sundari. The watchet blues and greens of crystalline filtered light play over his collection, illuminating one after the other in joyous turn. He does not know what they mean, or why his father has sent these particular things to him, but they are all precious, and he longs for a way to display his gratitude for the thought he has been spared.

The daesyn itself revels in its new surroundings, and leans close to the glass to get as close a view of the sun as it can, budding with imminent delight.

The Senator from Naboo is called Padme, he discovers when he is introduced to her again at mealtime. And she has not come alone. She is part of a delegation of foreign ambassadors, all from the Republic, but not all, Korkie suspects, as enthusiastic about the Chancellor as they had once been. There are murmurings and whispers amongst them, hurried out between thin lips and caught only in the corner of his eye, or the turn of his head, but whether satisfied or not, they are accompanied by the ceremonial force of the Senate, and the might of Palpatine himself - Two Jedi travel with them.

Anakin Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

He sees him through the crush of bodies, and later down the line at suppertime. In the midst of deep blues, and mauves, and furs, and silks, his earthen tunics stand out, but he is always distant, always just out of reach. All he needs is a moment, he thinks, to make sure he’s seen, so he can acknowledge his father - even in the polite, and suitably respectful language of perfect strangers if he must, but it never comes.

The plates are cleared, the halls are emptied, and Korkie finds himself bidding his aunt (she is always his aunt here) goodnight, and wandering back to his rooms alone.

It is dark when he arrives, though by the window the Abafar beads glow like the distant lights of the city. He slips off his stiff shoes, and his raiments of clan, but is interrupted by a knock at the door. He waits, uncertain, until the knock comes again.

Perhaps his mother come to assure herself of his health and presence, as she has done so often in the past, but he opens the door to find Obi-Wan Kenobi waiting, with his hand out. In the euphoric rush of astonishment, he hastens to place his own hand upon his father’s as is customary on Stewjon, though he holds fast in a manner peculiar between children and their parents.

“Master Kenobi,” he stammers. “I did not expect you. I thought you’d left. Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Obi-Wan replies. “I’d rather hoped to catch you alone, but I’m afraid our schedule was somewhat packed.”

“Of course.”

He is staring, he knows it, but he can’t seem to think of anything else to say, caught up in looking at his father and searching for all the commonalities between them. Does he tilt his head like that? Does he stroke his chin? Does he frown and smile by equal measure?

But the weight of his scrutiny is too much to bear, and Obi-Wan cracks.

“I thought to ask: did you get my gifts?”

“Yes,” says Korkie. “Thank you. They were very thoughtful.”

“Ah...And did you - did you like them?”

At this, Korkie cannot help but smile, and he shakes his father’s hand, tugging him forward with zeal.

“Yes, of course,” he says. “Would you like to see?”

If he is confused by his son’s desire to reintroduce him to items he has already laboured over and seen, then he does not show it. Nor does he resist when the hand in his pulls him further into the room, and doesn’t let go even as a curtain is flung open, and a light flicked on low.

He is pulled over to the broad casements and left to bask in starlight as Korkie steps aside to reveal a colorful mobile hanging from the frame of his window.

“The amphoriskos broke,” he explains, and sees a shadow flicker in his father's eyes. “No, no,” he insists. “It wasn’t your fault. It just happened. But I couldn’t bear to throw it away. It was so beautiful.”

He gestures at a silver thread from which hang a variety of irregularly shaped clay shards. The shiny amber and black paint catches the light thrown by the glowing Abafar beads strung further up, and on another and another thread. When he blows on them the threads hum, and sway together, the seashells and pottery and glass clattering together like wind chimes.

“The singing strings,” notes Obi-Wan, and Korkie grins.

“And the Lateron hoops,” he says, pointing to the frame from which the strings are suspended. “And the spindles, for balance. It’s meant to hang with my window open, like it is at school. And then, at night, when the dreamwinds come, the whole thing sings, and shines, and glows like the stars.”

“It’s beautiful,” says Obi-Wan with awe. He reaches out with one hesitant finger, the beads flickering beneath his touch, and the strings murmuring the low notes of an opening phrase.

“You gave it to me,” says Korkie with a shrug, and Obi-Wan turns his awe upon his boy.

“No,” he says. “I gave you fragments, but you have made them into art. You gave them meaning. You gave them a soul.”

Korkie shifts on his feet, fretting at the cuff of his sleeve, and diving in.

“Would it be okay, do you think -” he starts, then stops. Then he starts again. “Do you think it’d be alright if I wrote you? Every once in a while.”

“Wrote me?”

“Or com’d,” he says, quickly. “Only I know you’re busy, and I can’t expect to lay claim to any of your time, not really, but I -”

“Com me,” says Obi-Wan. “Write me. Send me anything you like, but only say you will and I will have all the time for you I can spare.”

“I promise that I only want a very little.”

“If it’s mine to give it’s yours to have, Kiorkicek,” his father swears. His grip upon his hand is firm, willing him to believe him, and Korkie nods his head because he does.

They stand there, hand in hand, reading themselves in each other, and learning the other in turn, and in the glow of the stars, and the city, and the Abafar beads, the daesyn flower bursts from its roots into a riot of colour and life.

#Obi-Wan Kenobi #Korkie Kryze #SW #Star Wars #my fic #GFFA #prompt fill #Korkie is a Kenobi

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humming-bird10 · 4 years

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GARDEN PICS!!

I wanted to do a show of my garden for a while, cuz I'm just so proud of my plantbabies! But I wanted to wait until everything was a bit established so I wouldn't just be showing patches of dirt lol.

Starting of with the left corner.

This is a bit of a rummage corner. But I like that. This has my snapdragons, parsley in the blue laundry hamper, two oaks that were dropped in our garden by magpies and we decided to keep. They are Annie Oakley 1 and 2. There's some cat grass and the seedlings in the bucket are snapdragons grown from the seed of my own ones. I'm gonna gift them as a housewarming present to friends who have just bough a new house.

Next up is my herb planter. This thing just exploded! From left to right there are chives, sage, dill, cilantro and basil. In the right corner you can see a pot full of mint and the pots in front are zucchinis that will be going to friends soon.

Here we have my long planter. This year I am trying to see if the garlic likes this better than my garden beds, cuz it didn't really do so well there. I have four bags with red potatoes in front. The two on the left were planted two weeks earlier and are sprouting well, the two on the right were planted this morning. The four little potd in front are romanesco cauliflower. I have never succesfully grown cabbages but it's always very popular with the local cabbage whites. So this year I am growing these purely for the cabbage whites. I see less and less of them each year so they're getting a bit of help from me this year.

On the right side of the garden we have some thyme, rosemary and lavender. The rhodondendron is almost bloomed out and underneath it the nasturtium I planted is sprouting.

Up against the right fence I have three long planters. This one has radishes on the right and red beets on the left. In the middle I've got spring onions that I regrew from the bottom bits.

The middle ppanter has more regrown veggies. The two in the left are bok choi and the one on the right is chinese cabbage. In the back I sewed a row of sugarsnap peas to see if they like it as much in a planter as they usually do in the beds.

The left one has soybeans in the back that I want to harvest for edamame and three cellery plants regrown from their butts as well :P the two soybeans in pots are going to friends and the one in the purple pot is a wisteria cutting I hope will take so I can plant it somewhere in my garden. I love wisteria.

Now the garden beds!

The first "square" is framed all around by various kinds of sunflowers. I purposely put all different kinds of sizes and colours together cuz I hope to be able to breed a really really weird one. Last year I sowed too late for the flowers to form but this year I was early and it looks like they are really loving it!

I have three rows of carrots. I don't think I'm going to thin them, I'm jist going to let them grow and pull the bigger one out to give the smaller ones room. This way I hope to extend the harvest. The two rows in between the carrots have marigolds in them. To drive away pests and because I think they're pretty. :)

The left bed has two pumpkins. Though I am starting to doubt whether this was the best place for them. I think the apple tree is taking away too much sun, especially for the one on the right. I'm going to see how they do, if they fail I might try a fall crop that doesn't need a lot of sun there instead.

Next to the beds I have two zucchinis in pots. I like putting them in pots so I can get around them easier. It makes finding the zucchinis much easier.

And that's it! As far as the veggies are concerned anyway. I have some bushes and a little wild area where I sowed a bunch of bee and butterfly attracting flowers. Those are coming up nicely.

I'm pretty proud of my garden. Everything is doing really well and I really feel like I am optimizing the space I have to grow as much as possible. We are already getting so much from our little herb planter that we are eating way more herbs than we did before haha.

#my garden #solarpunk #solar punk #gardening #growing your own food #plantbabies

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