Archive of Our Own ^beta

When he steps onto the sand, it pulses outwards making little ripples around his tracks.  At first Jimmy thinks he's imagining it, but when he looks later, there it is, faint, concentric circles rimed with ice, as if a stone had been dropped in water.  But in the beach sand next to the sugarcane.  He notices his own footsteps leave faintly raked lines here too, but nowhere nearly as strongly.  the faint ripples extend two feet.  There's something about the emeralds they dug into the soil, and the way they've made this little pond that seems to make everything brighter, wilder here. But with Scotty, it echoes in him, somehow.  The grass too, Jimmy's been tending a tulip that sprung up on the edge of a path where Scott tread.

It's just an experiment, it doesn't take long for the shoes to come off.  

"How's this, Jimmy?" 

Scott, a blur of green hair and fluttering piratical shirt in a wind that has no right to press it against his frame right now, and the faint, pale arch of his foot as he leaps from one stepping stone to another. Jimmy gasps.

Scott brings another sheaf of bluebells and lays them at the chair's feet, sitting down.  Jimmy arranges the red roses around him.  And goes over to the canvas and frame, and begins to paint, stroking out the lines of the curving soles.