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Feferi & John Relax By The Pool

Summary:

The sun beat down heavily upon the pool in what could charitably be called Feferi's "back yard" in loud, sonorous waves, thrumming like a heartbeat in the sky, a pulsing mass of incandescent plasma casting his or her bright white light upon the Earth that orbited it. The heat, too, arrived in waves, along with the light, each photon a direct shot from the ball overhead, imparting its thermal energies down onto the ground below. White concrete was the most effective in guarding from this summer heat, but even then, it was not something one wanted to experience barefooted, outside of the simmering edges of the pool where the water had splashed over the sides.

88/365

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

The sun beat down heavily upon the pool in what could charitably be called Feferi's "back yard" in loud, sonorous waves, thrumming like a heartbeat in the sky, a pulsing mass of incandescent plasma casting his or her bright white light upon the Earth that orbited it. The heat, too, arrived in waves, along with the light, each photon a direct shot from the ball overhead, imparting its thermal energies down onto the ground below. White concrete was the most effective in guarding from this summer heat, but even then, it was not something one wanted to experience barefooted, outside of the simmering edges of the pool where the water had splashed over the sides.

Feferi, for what it was worth, was not swimming, although she had been swimming recently, in the past hour or so. Her skin, which was once covered in a thin sheen of chlorinated water, was now almost entirely dry on the front, and was currently drying on the back, while she relaxed on a pool chair with her phone in hand and a towel-covered pillow underneath her stomach. The mesh pool chair itself was pulled down on the latches into a lying position, for maximum comfort and minimum sitting-up allowed. On a fancy glass table next to it, there sat a cool, tall glass of fresh lemonade, always available at the Peixes residence for no charge whatsoever. Feferi reached over, grabbed it blindly (having drank many lemonades in her life, and knowing exactly where she put them down), and pulled it over to her lips so that she could take a sip through the straw. Savoring the sour-sweet flavor, she put it back on the glass and continued reading.

It was a comfortable, lazy summer day. The temperature was high, the humidity was low, and there was nothing to do, no homework to focus on nor chores to complete nor aquariums to visit. The only thing really reasonable to do during a day like this with a friend like that is to relax by the pool, an architectural feature of which John's home sadly lacked, and thus one they were eager to dive into with reckless abandon and great aplomb. Several large cannon-balls and belly-flops ensued, stinging much less through John's wetsuit, the sort of thing you'd normally go surfing with, covering most of their skin from the blazing hot ball of fire overhead. Still, bellyflops were bellyflops, and John did indeed sting, which is why, now, an hour later, they were instead doing anything but splashing about in the water.

One of Feferi's gigantic flotation devices was inflated and set about in the massive pool for mass consumption. There was nobody else around to ride upon the veritable fortress of a pool floaty besides John, but that just meant more room for them, which was perfectly fine in their eyes. They laid on their back, a glass of ice cold, fresh lemonade diet Coke sitting in the inflatable's cupholder, sandwiched inside of blue rubber or plastic or whatever it was the inflatables were made out of. John sat up for a moment, abdominal muscles working to pull themselves up against the force of their comfortable laziness, and reached out to grab their soda - unlike Feferi, they had to look to aim. They pulled it to their lips and sipped through the cold metal straw with a loud, satisfied sigh, feeling the slight tingling pain of millions of tiny soda bubbles popping along their tongue, down their throat. Comfortable carbonation in the way that soda was meant to fizz, almost spicy, in a sense.

Underneath John, one of those tiny little pool cleaning robots ran quietly, sucking up detritus and debris from the bottom of the pool, rolling along like a horseshoe crab, or some other bottom-dwelling oceanic creature. It consumed trash with the same fervor that our two protagonists consumed refreshing drinks in the summertime, keeping the water clean and filtrated, pulling microscopic garbage particles up that little tube thing and into the trash storage where it could later be disposed of, possibly by Feferi, probably by Feferi's mother when she begged loud enough.

There was nothing to do, and it was good.

Notes:

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