Perfect

[furgood]

Meulin is there first. The desert is wide and and the mountains tall and her hut is covered in beautiful drawings, that swirl around the walls and wind down the legs to the ground. It takes her some time to make it up the mountain to that tree. It takes her longer to form the wish, to pull a bit of knotted white cord from a dress and wrap it around a branch and just wish. The ocean that appears a half a month later is bright and the river moved into flow into it, brackish water and papyrus lining the delta, elegant birds swooping along it and lunmbering somewhat dangerous beasts and she walks the long long length of the river up to the ocean and dives deep into the salt water. It's different but it makes the desert a little more like home.

She's lonely but she dreams.

Derek and Chuck are next. She wakes up to her home, the little hut, turned bigger. Another room beside her own, the addition sticking out awkwardly to one side. She bursts into the room with a breathless anticipation and it's not disappointment on her face when she sees it's not everyone, it's not Kurloz too, but they're here and she forgets they might be on edge, forgets it's been months since she's seen them, that anything could have happened, because she's too busy flinging herself at them and burying herself in the space between them.

She surprises herself a little by kissing them both, immediately and a little desperately. It's a little more surprising when they don't immediately push her away. Tucked between them, it feels like safety.

Together they make a hut out by the ocean, for themselves. They help her with the beams and she climbs that mountain again and again to wish for nails and books and clothing and all sorts of things. She's wearing a path into that mountainside. The place beside the shore is lifted off the ground for the heavy rains she tells them will come and done up with all the weatherproofing a set of Districters can manage. It's quietly made for four.

Kurloz is last and it's easy, waking up beside him one day and curling around him and crying into his shoulder when he wakes with a start. Easy to kiss him, easy to drag him out into the main room where Chuck and Derek are already awake and she kisses them too and it's easy. It's easy to be family, it's easy to fall back into each other, out on the edge of things.

She likes to lean on the porch railing, staring at the ocean and feel one of them come up behind her and rest their chin on her head or her shoulder and know they've got her. She likes to drape across their laps, likes to watch Kurloz mend all the tears in their clothes. She teaches him to fish and spear and garden. Derek reads books with her, they teach each other things they learn and debate in furious bouts of signing when something contradicts. Chuck catches her when waves pull her off her feet and teases her when her hair gets in his face. They argue, they laugh, and she carefully pulls all the bits of them together until it doesn't matter where they're not all together whole, because they fit together perfect.