oblivions { lex & denali | argos

It's nice, Lex Lionel remembers thinking right before the power went out, finally getting back to normal like this.

It had been nice. It had even started to feel as though they'd reached some sort of consistency in the time spent together and the time spent apart. The word equilibrium kept coming to mind, even though it didn't seem quite right, or at least she couldn't think of a way to apply it to their relationship in a complete sentence. The syllables just felt right — calm, stable, balanced, level. Not the tumultuous place they were at headed into last summer.

It's been good since that fight. Better, even. The months between their visits may not have gotten any shorter, but at least the visits themselves have been more focused. More intentional. They've gotten better at making time for one another — on the phone and face to face. Lex has gotten better at listening. Sometimes it's easy to forget just how lucky they've been, but sometimes it's easy to remember, too. Lex managed to swing a last-minute trip to Five a mere month ago and even got to spend Ratmas with the Lyons family. And now Denali is here again for some sort of vague business meeting that she may or may not have even planned on attending, a much quicker turnaround than their usual.

It's her fault, Lex supposes, for thinking the word normal. She ought to know better than to tempt fate like that. She'd laughed out loud, actually, when the power had gone out, thinking that was some sort of cosmic joke instead of some sort of cosmic farce. Blown fuses in the shop aren't unheard of, and the Lionels are halfway off the grid anyway — Arthur built a wind turbine to power the woodshop just for the occasion. And with everything heated by wood (well, usually by sawdust pressed into briquettes, since they've got plenty of it and it's not good for much else) even cold winter nights like this one aren't much of a problem. Really, with some candles lit in the house and ice brought in from outside to pack the freezer, it's all fine. Check the breaker, and wait til it comes back on, which it always inevitably does by morning.

It hadn't come back that morning, so they'd taken a walk towards the district center, Lex keeping an eye out for downed power lines the whole way. Even all the way out in the woods, the world had been unsettlingly quiet. Foreboding. Town was twice as busy as usual, bustling with peacekeepers who were less interested in speaking with the two of them than Lex had been to approach the whitecoats in the first place (even with an anxious hand on the multitool in her pocket.) Denali tracked down some official, who reluctantly relayed what he'd been told: There had been some accidents impacting production in two of the other districts, and as a result, power would be rationed and a curfew had been enacted.

Lex spent the whole walk home recounting every detail of the embarrassing time she'd accidentally glued all of the fingers on her right hand together and couldn't unstick them for several days, while Denali said nothing.

With the turbine up and running at home, Lex and Arthur immediately start planing down their 2-grade lumber. Surfaced boards are easy enough to cut with a handsaw, to shape or sharpen with a spokeshave, to stud with nails or top with a spent saw blade. All that time she spent teaching herself to build traps and improvise weapons from whatever's lying around seems to finally be coming in handy four years later. Denali is given the task of cataloguing all of their tools and other sharp things, anything that might be useful. They don't say the scenarios out loud, but it's obvious in the work they're doing: 1) Maintain a defensive perimeter; 2) Arm their friends and neighbors. Not to start anything. Just to be prepared in case it comes to that.

After surfacing half of their stock that isn't quite furniture grade, Lex finally breaks her trance and looks up from the meditative calm of readying for a war in her backyard. The auditing doesn't seem to be going quite as well as the planing, but that's okay because that wasn't really the point. Four piles of hand tools and nails sit on top of Arthur's workbench, and Lex knows better than to try to interpret the sorting scheme that's been applied to them. Drill bits and awls and nails and a hand auger that she's never seen before occupy one corner, another stack contains hand saws and larger chisels and the set square and the adze, and another contains half of the smaller chisels and the keyhole saw and some gouges and some spare blades for the hand planes, and a rasp and more nails and a putty knife and a box cutter that she lost three years ago. Unsorted odds and ends are scattered in the no-man's-land between the haphazard stacks.

"Y'okay, Freckles?" Lex knows the answer to the question, but she asks it anyway. "C'mon. We could both use a break. Let's take a walk." She puts on her coat, slipping the multi tool into her pocket. In response, an awl rolls out of its pile, off the table, and clatters to the floor. "Denali."