Work Text:
Lucy
hey
hey cas
wanna come camping in the catskills with me?
Caspian
when?
Lucy
this weekend
sorry for short notice!!
Caspian
done
Caspian stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the contents of his attic. It was in a sorry state at the moment, with one roommate moving out and another moving in, and it wasn’t as though it was a very tidy space at the best of times. He shifted a box of magazines off his plastic tub and began looking through it. He had a ton of camping gear as a kid, since his dad took him camping all the time, but what he hadn’t outgrown he’d had to leave with his uncle when he took off. Like hell was he going to ask that bastard for anything. Caspian had boots that would work well enough for hiking, if they went on a hike; a first aid kit; a Swiss Army knife; and sunscreen, but not the essentials. Not a tent or sleeping bag.
Caspian
do you have a tent?
Lucy
yes :))
and a camp stove
just bring a sleeping bag basically
Caspian grabbed the few things he knew he could use and crawled down the ladder back to solid ground.
“Going somewhere?” his roommate asked, eying the first aid kit.
“Camping. You don’t have a sleeping bag, do you?” Caspian asked, without much hope.
“Actually, yeah, at my mom’s place.” Josh slid his phone from his pocket and fired off a text.
“Is that okay?”
“Hell yeah, dude.” Josh slapped him on the back. “She’ll be glad to have some of my shit out of the garage.”
Two days later, Caspian lifted his packed duffel into his trunk alongside the borrowed sleeping bag. He put on the playlist Lucy had made him for road trips and set off. It was a gorgeous day to be out of the house; he basked in the sunlight as he drove deeper and deeper into the mountains. Trees flashed past the windows, mostly green at first, but soon he was surrounded by fiery fall foliage, orange and red and even a little bit of purple.
“Caspian!” Lucy shouted his name before she was even out of her dinged-up old car. Caspian couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her, her easy smile a sight for sore eyes. She dropped the five million things she was carrying to run over and give him a flying hug, knocking the air out of him.
“Lu!” He lifted her off the ground and twirled them in a circle.
“It has been way too long.” Lucy grinned at him and patted one of his cheeks before stooping to pick up her various bags and boxes.
“Can I carry anything for you?”
“No, I think I’ve—oh.” Lucy watched helplessly as two small boxes tumbled to the ground. “That would be nice, thanks.”
Caspian laughed and took some of the packages from her, including the two on the ground. “Doing too much at once—that’s so you, Lu.”
“Tell me about it!” she said cheerfully, walking stiff-legged to the picnic table and dropping the boxes she carried. “I’m taking classes and doing how many clubs, and they’ve just asked me to coordinate the dance performance at the end of the semester, and on top of that I’m volunteering at the animal shelter—“
“I’m tired just hearing about it all.” Caspian set his boxes next to hers and went to the car to get his things.
Lucy laughed. “Coffee, my friend. Lots and lots of it.”
Caspian shook his head as he closed the trunk and locked the car. “Anything from your car?”
“Oh, yes.” Lucy popped her trunk. “The tent, my sleeping bag…” She loaded up her arms once more and carried everything to the picnic table.
“Want help with the tent?”
“We just got here, Cas! Let’s get settled first.” Lucy planted her hands on her hips and looked at the piles of things on the picnic table. “Actually…you might be right.”
They caught each other up on all the happenings of their lives while organising the things on the table: food in one pile, dishes and the camping stove in another, sleeping bags and the tent on the benches.
“You’ve brought enough to feed an army,” Caspian observed, reading the back of a box of pancake mix.
“I like to have options, you know that.” Lucy grinned and plucked another paperboard box from the pile. “We have blueberry pancake mix, too.”
“I think this might be the first time I’ve ever glamped.”
Lucy laughed and punched his arm. “I’m pretty sure you need electrical outlets to go glamping.”
“Whatever you say.” Caspian smiled at her.
The tent was surprisingly easy to put up. Caspian remembered he and his dad scratching their heads over diagrams, turning them this way and that, taking tent poles out and trying them again in a different place. This one took about a minute total, popping up from a flat pile of fabric, and only required them to hammer in the stakes at each corner. They dumped their bags in the corner of the tent before going out to get a fire started.
“Do you know how to do this?” Caspian asked.
“Yep!”
“Good, because I don’t. Can I help?”
Lucy directed him to find kindling for her while she opened the bag of logs. There was plenty of it, since their campground was amidst many tall trees, all shedding their twigs and branches to the ground below. Caspian had known how to build a fire as a kid, but like so much else from that period, the knowledge was lost. In any case, he remembered it taking much, much longer than it took Lucy to get a fire going, though perhaps the memory was colored by waiting impatiently to make s’mores. She made it look like starting a fire was not much harder than striking a match.
By that point, both of them were hungry, so they wrapped potatoes in aluminum foil and rolled them into the fire.
“It works better with embers,” Lucy explained, “but I’m too impatient.”
“It’s not as though we don’t have plenty of other food,” Caspian laughed, gesturing towards their table.
Lucy waved him off with a smile. “Not baked potatoes, though.”
They made s’mores while they waited. True to Lucy’s statement about impatience, she could barely wait for her marshmallows to get a golden blush before she put them between graham crackers.
“The others always tell me these don’t count as s’mores,” Lucy confided, popping one of her creations into her mouth.
“I’m afraid I have to agree with them,” Caspian said gravely, rotating his marshmallow over the coals. “S’mores by the letter of the law, but not in spirit.”
“Said like a true lawyer—are you sure you studied the right thing?” Lucy sucked a bit of marshmallow goo off one finger (why did Caspian have to look away?) before putting another marshmallow on her roasting stick.
“Fairly sure.” Caspian checked his marshmallow and put it back over the flames. “But, you know, there isn’t a whole lot I’m one hundred percent sure of.”
“No?” Lucy turned to look at him.
Caspian shrugged. “I’m just trying to keep my mind open, I suppose.”
Lucy searched his face before nodding and turning back to the fire. “That’s sensib--my ‘mallow!”
Caspian laughed as Lucy snatched her marshmallow from the fire and extinguished the flames in the dirt. “Here, you can have mine.” He pulled his own marshmallow away from the coals and extended the stick towards her.
“Are you sure?”
“Go on.”
Lucy pulled the marshmallow off the roasting stick and plopped it onto a cracker. “Thanks. Mmmm…okay, I can see why you guys roast your marshmallows.”
“It’s good, right?”
Lucy nodded, her mouth full of s’more.
“I haven’t had one in ages. Not since…not since my dad.”
“Mmmf.” Lucy swallowed. “Well, that makes sense. I don’t see you wanting to go camping with…” She twirled one hand in the air, like she always did instead of speaking that dreaded name.
“No.” Caspian drew figures in the dirt with the non-marshmallow end of his roasting stick. “It’s good to be back.”
“It’s good to have you here.” She smiled at him and slapped her palms on her thighs. “D’you wanna learn the dance I’ve been learning?”
Caspian readily agreed. Lucy started showing him the steps. What seemed impossible to follow when Lucy did it at full speed was surprisingly easy to learn at a slower speed, one chunk at a time, and the evening quickly passed as they danced beside the campfire.
When they stopped dancing—Caspian was exhausted—they noticed ominous clouds had piled up in the sky and were rapidly coming toward them.
“Let’s get the food into the car!”
“Good idea!”
They rushed to load the tableful of food into the back of Lucy’s car in the dark before tumbling into the tent. Not a minute after they’d collapsed into the tent did the rain start, drumming on the nylon roof, forming droplets and rivulets that raced each other to the ground.
“That’s a bit of a letdown.” Lucy peered out the front flap of the tent at the storm. Their cars were barely visible in the downpour.
“Did you bring cards?”
Lucy’s face brightened. “I did!”
The storm hadn’t lessened by the time they wanted to go to sleep a few hours later. Lucy dug around in her stuff, frowning.
“What’s wrong?” Caspian asked.
“I can’t find my sleeping bag.” Lucy picked her bag up off the tent floor. “Have you seen it?”
Caspian looked through his things as well, but the sleeping bag was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh no.” Lucy put one hand to her forehead. “I think I left it by the table.” She unzipped the front flap and peered out. “Shit.”
Caspian took out the borrowed sleeping bag. It wasn’t a fancy nylon camping kind, merely the wide fabric kind his roommate had taken to sleepovers when he was younger. If they were anywhere with a bed and a couch, Caspian would absolutely take the couch. But he didn’t like the idea of sleeping on the floor of the tent with no padding at all between him and the packed dirt beneath. “Uh…we could share?”
Lucy’s eyes widened as she took in Caspian and the sleeping bag. “Okay.”
“Do you need to change?”
“Yeah.” Lucy dug through her bag and pulled out a pair of pjs. “Do you?”
“Yeah.” By silent agreement, they each turned their backs to face the tent wall and silently changed into pajamas. Caspian didn’t usually wear a shirt to bed, but he absolutely would that night, so he kept on the same tee he’d worn that day.
Caspian laid out the sleeping bag, taking his time smoothing out the fabric. Eventually he got in, scootching all the way to the left. Lucy got in after him, doing up the zip halfway and pulling the fabric over them.
“Goodnight,” she ventured.
“Goodnight,” Caspian said, and reached out to turn off the solar lantern Lucy brought.
They normally got on like a house on fire, and Caspian was sure they would have been fine if they’d had two separate sleeping bags, but something about it being one bag made both of them silent as church mice and just as awkward. At one point, Lucy slipped out of the sleeping bag to put on a sweater and an extra pair of sweatpants. Caspian was tempted to do the same. He’d been so excited at the thought of camping with Lucy that he hadn’t thought about how late in the year it was getting.
“Caspian?” she asked at one point, quiet and hesitant. “I’m cold.”
He stopped breathing for a second. “Do you wanna…”
“Yeah, if that’s okay?”
“Yeah, of course.” Caspian shifted onto his side and put one arm out as Lucy tucked herself against his side. She rearranged the sleeping bag over them both. Caspian kept his other arm alongside his own body, careful not to touch her, but she grabbed his free hand and brought it down around her. He uncurled his hand from the fist he had it in.
Okay. Caspian reminded himself to breathe. It was fine, he was fine. He was just spooning one of his best friends for the first time, and that was fine. It was just…he’d never noticed how nice her hair smelled until then, when it was in his face, and he’d hugged her and even had his arm around her waist once or twice, if they were waltzing or something, but it was different like this, his arm across her stomach. Her back against his chest.
“Is this okay?” Lucy asked.
“Yes.”
“You can relax, you know.” Lucy sounded sleepy already.
It was easier said than done. Caspian was just so conscious of every little shift in his weight, every movement, every time he had to swallow or cough. Had he always felt this way about Lucy? Surely not, right? But the more he scoured his memory, the more he came up with memories that suddenly made sense.
Shit.
It felt like he laid awake thinking all night. All the same, he must have fallen asleep at some point, because Caspian woke up to sunlight and the smell of pancakes streaming through the nylon top of the tent. It took a moment for him to remember the events of the night before: getting the food into the car, the storm, sharing the sleeping bag, cuddling… He groaned and rubbed his face with both hands before getting dressed and exiting the tent.
It was a crisp fall morning, beautiful and clear, with cotton-ball clouds dotted across the sky. Lucy waved good morning with her spatula, a smile on her face that quickly went lopsided. Great, she was probably having regrets about the night before.
“Morning.”
“Good morning! Blueberry or buttermilk?” she asked, prodding the pancake in the pan.
“One of each?”
“Good choice.” She nodded and smiled, flipping two pancakes onto a plate, one after the other. She handed him the plate and a bottle of syrup.
“You thought of everything, didn’t you?” Caspian asked, drenching the pancakes in syrup.
“I didn’t think of bringing my sleeping bag in, apparently,” she said, rolling her eyes, but she was still smiling.
Caspian cleared his throat. “Yeah…I wanted to—“
“It was too much? I thought so. I’m sorry.” Lucy sighed and avoided his eyes, flipping the pancake onto a teetering stack of pancakes and pouring fresh batter into the pan.
“No, no!” Caspian assured her. “I—I thought maybe you thought it was too much.”
“Not at all!” Lucy sat down next to him. “I’m glad you’re fine with it.”
“Of course.” Caspian scanned her face. His revelation the night before still felt so fresh he wasn’t sure he wanted to put words to it, but he wanted to know what she was thinking. She looked steadily back at him with her warm brown eyes. “You…you’re important to me, Lu.”
Was it his imagination, or did she look a little disappointed? “You’re important to me, too, Caspian.” She hesitated for a split second before turning back to the camp stove to flip the pancake.
Why did he feel like he’d said the wrong thing?
She turned back to him, spatula still in hand, a cheery smile on her face. “Let’s go hiking today! I’d love to see the fall colors.”
“Wait. Lucy.”
“Yeah?”
Caspian bit his lip. “If you want to share again tonight…I’m okay with that.” Understatement of the century. Now that he’d slept next to her, he didn’t want to sleep anywhere else: he always wanted to feel like he had an armful of sunshine and a face full of her soft hair.
A smile spread across her face like syrup over a pancake, slow and sweet. “Okay with that?”
“More than okay with that,” he clarified.
Lucy grinned. She leaned forward and cupped his jawline with one hand, rubbing his cheek with her thumb. “Me too.” Her eyes flicked downwards and lingered there before she looked back up at his eyes.
Caspian’s heart felt like it was about to burst. He impulsively moved towards her, reaching out to cup her face with both hands. She moved to close the distance between them, and when their lips met, Caspian felt filled to the brim with sunlight.
He’d never been more grateful for a rainstorm.