Work Text:
Whittling.
It was a new-
ish
hobby that had been vying for Kel’s attention over the past month, competing for time with the constant,
grueling
reports he’d have to scribble down every day. Every day. Without fail, every single
sparkling
morning, upon booting up his state-of-the-art “computer” (if one could even call it that - he’s pretty sure he saw some sort of mysterious
meat
stuffed into the side, hidden behind a messily screwed-together panel), he would be greeted with
another
mildly-infuriating, mildly-
demeaning
e-mail telling him to curb his excitement for exploration in favor of returning to those
same
satellites. Every single morning.
Did they know what he had to deal with out here? What razor-legged, sack doll-faced
creatures
had
barked
him off his vehicle at three-o’-clock in the morning in the Northwest? What hungry scuttling he heard in that cursed cave, which was mysteriously blocked by
fibers
in the daytime? What invisible aliens there were, pelting his window with rocks in some oddly-successful attempt to terrorize him? How many packets of
shrimp
had gone missing, just because the local cryptid population- probably some stupid, warped-up, invasive
feline
pawing through his trash - had a taste for his delicious frozen crustacean delicacies that he paid so damn much for to be shipped from the
ocean
to the
drone outpost
to his
house
-
He wasn’t angry, no. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do to control it! Those packets were going missing from
inside his freezer
, for god’s sake, and if there was one thing he held onto before shipping himself off with a Doctorate in Astronomy to the mountains of Switzerland, it was that he should save his energy for what he could and couldn’t control.
What he could control, however, was what he did with the free time he had left at the end of the day - when the birds were quiet, when that serene golden light still peeked over the Alps… when those monsters weren’t out.
And what he did was whittle.
A bear, a cougar, a horse… it was hard to get the details right at first, but he was slowly, surely, becoming skilled at the craft. He learned quick, after all - that’s how he managed to slip in and out of structured learning as fast as possible.
And now, on the barren “porch” of his garage, where the drone landed each morning to only
sometimes
deliver his rations, he was carving an owl. Big, round, watchful eyes. A crest of feathers that shaped its face into that of a disc - a mechanism that acted like a giant ear, catching and funneling sound to be processed - so that they could pinpoint their prey and
strike
without an out-of-place noise of their own. A quiet, productive predator. A burly shape for an avian, yet as gangly as they all came underneath.
A snort left him as the image popped in his mind - an owl without feathers. It looked frail, and downright stupid. He liked seeing them with the fluff that made them so paradoxically deadly. The eyes that terrorized rodents, big and small. He’d be sure to carve in those stoic, definitive features when he finally came to them… But for now, his owl was more of a palm-sized, vaguely bird-shaped log.