Chapter Text
When she told the real estate agent she was interested in the Eremity house, the lady had laughed. Then she'd seen the look on Pearl's face, and had quickly changed her tune to something more relieved.
Which could be nothing but a good sign, she's sure.
Eremity is a countryside town — lake at one edge, mountain on the other, forests all around. The pictures that she can find verge on fanatically cosy, like a romance writer's wet dream. It boasts, according to one review she finds online, 'a town centre chock-full of history but comfortably modernised' and 'trails that wander between tame farmland, overgrown forests, and ruins of old!' Other than the cackling estate agent, people are basically singing its praises, especially her (former) coworkers.
She's trying not to be bitter about the eagerness they seem to be sending her off with. Pearl tells herself, between parting drinks, that they're just trying to make it easier on her, let her go like they're setting a bird free of its cage rather than deserting a dog on the side of the road. Not that this is a situation that relates to either of those; she just got hurt.
Damaged goods, someone's ghost whispers. If she was feeling particularly maudlin, she'd say it was her own.
It did feel, for a while after the burn, like she was a wraith. Something that just jerked her body along on a string, into physical therapy and out of hospitals, leaving a freakish snail-trail of bandages and flaky skin. A part of her expected to feel reborn, once the official recovery period hit, but, she muses as she listens to her (former) friends joke about calls she missed, apparently that wasn't a thing. Apparently she doesn't get to forget about the part when she was sick and tired all the time, because life goes on. Life goes on, and so does Pearl, all the way into transferring to a tiny country town.
[ * ]
She's loitering outside her own house, trying to look strong and useful even as the movers firmly ignore her, hefting boxes to and fro. It's all labeled, plus the few pieces of furniture she didn't sell off or donate before the move. Pearl is now the proud owner of a house but not a couch or dining table. Not that she'd ever had an actual dining table in her apartment, but this is a house. She has a mortgage — but no table, or chairs for guests. Just boxes of books and trinkets and blankets, cookware that she can already tell won't fill the little kitchen, a bedframe with one cracked leg and a mattress that has her imprint basically sewn in.
It doesn't take long for the movers to be done.
One of them comes out brushing his hands off, and offers her a smile. "All finished here," he says, "and your landscaper is out the back, we left all that in her capable hands." He winks, not salaciously, but the way an uncle does when sneaking you a dollar behind your dad's back. It's the kind of familiar, familial act that has Pearl momentarily stunned before she catches up to the words. And by that time, the man has already meandered off to his truck.
"Landscaper?" she mutters to herself, for a lack of anyone else. She straightens her shoulders, shakes out the aches of a too long drive, and sets her sights back on the house. Her house.
Pearl maintains confidence until she passes the door; it's still a new place, and she brushes her fingers against the walls as if it will help her remember their orientation as she sneaks through the hall. Quaint but modernised, just like everything else she passed in the town centre.
The back door is open, a sliding screen door in place instead, and she can see shadows move outside of it. Time to face someone and awkwardly say that she could in no way afford landscaping, especially for a yard of that size. Insular economies can be horribly confusing when confronted by an outsider. For all she knows, everyone here gets their garden landscaped, and that's just par for the course.
As she unsticks the screen from its track, she spots what she had previously considered to be a autumnally red bush rise from its place on the ground. Beneath the mountain of hair — which she can see actual leaves sticking out of, so she doesn't feel too bad about the mistake — a woman appears.
"Hi!" The lady near charges forwards, a hand out to shake as a smile squishes her face, and Pearl finds herself grasping the offered hand on pure instinct. "I'm Cleo, you must be Pearl, right?"
She feels briefly afraid, and then remembers every TV show she had ever seen based in a small town. Normal, probably.
"Right indeed," she murmurs, a little dizzy from the friendliness. "You're, um…landscaping?"
"No?"
"Okay." They both pause, sorting through the conversation.
"Did you hire a landscaper?" Cleo asks eventually.
"…No." Pearl winces. "That's why I was confused."
"Right." She shifts on her feet. "Oh! Oh, right! No, sorry, I'm an archaeologist!" She reaches her hand out as if to shake again, and then quickly hides it in her pocket with a bashful look. "No, I'm totally sorry for the confusion, that's absolutely my fault, I really should've started with, y'know, the whole reason I'm in your backyard, I guess."
Pearl finds herself nodding along.
"There's-" Cleo pauses, and glances back with a gesture to follow her further outside. "There's a lot of history here, I'm sure you've heard, but it's weird history, too, which is the best kind. So, under this space here." She gestures to a rather large section of the yard that she can now see has little flags placed around as markers, and the beginnings of ripped up grass. "This should have an entrance — potentially, of course, can't be sure until it's done — to this huge covered colloseum-type structure that people have been finding on ground penetrating radar, see?" The cheer in her voice is catching, and Pearl leans over her shoulder to look at the maps she had printed. There's a lot of vague shapes and notes next to long lines of numbers, but Cleo's green eyes are so wide where they trace the lines that she smiles anyway.
They stay like that, crouched over the dirt while Cleo talks until the sun breaks its rays on the fence line, causing her to look up and squint. It's barely four, but Pearl has some primitive certainty that evening is coming fast. She traces a finger through the dust as the archaeologist's words trail off, both of them suddenly struck by shyness.
"You should probably be unpacking."
Pearl glances back to the house. None of the lights are on, and it… scares her. It's a future home, it's a current investment, it's a right-now maze of rooms she doesn't yet know in the dark.
"Actually, you wouldn't know the best local take-aways, would you?" Cleo's voice is light. "And obviously, as your historical guide and somewhat back-yard squatter, it's basically my duty to, maybe, order something in and help get a couple of your boxes done?" They look at Pearl out the side of their eye while they speak, a smile twitching their lip.
She finds the place is a lot brighter with the lights on and someone asking where to put things from another room. The smell of fresh pierogis goes a long way for comfort, too.
And at no point through the evening, all the way till the moment she waves Cleo out her front door with a promise to sleep, does she think to ban her from demolishing her garden in the name of historical investigation.
Oh well. She sleeps.
[ * ]
The fire station, when she peeks into the open garage, is the stuff of a children's animated show. Red brick walls, two shiny trucks (one ladder, one water tank), a metal staircase up to a mezzanine and the classic fire pole between them both. She scuffs a shoe on the well-loved concrete floor, and thinks of her nine-year-old self's imaginings of the future; as far as this place goes, it's pretty damn close.
"Heyo, what's a big city girl doing in a town like this!?"
Pearl glances up at the call, where a greying man with a huge grin on his face leans over the balcony railing. Next to him, another man is shaking his head.
"He's not…he's not flirting, or being inappropriate, I swear, just…" The voice of a third person emerging from behind one of the trucks has her spinning in place. "He's just been really excited to say that line. Watches too many movies. Skizz!" She can see a captains badge on this man, and feel it in the exasperated exhaustion in his voice as he yells up at the other. "I told you, no being weird!"
"You just don't want me to be myself!" Skizz yells back dramatically, already circling towards the stairs. Still at the railing, the other man raises a hand in an awkward wave. She can see the outline of old burns edging up his face, and she shouldn't be staring, but her own are itching under her sleeves. Blinking hard, she turns back to the captain.
Impulse has a soft smile on his face as he shakes her hand, deep set eyes and close-cropped brown hair that's been flattened in odd spots by a helmet. They'd called twice before now — once with her previous union representative as their formal introduction, the second on her own just a few days back to get the last details hammered through. It seems the estimation she made of him through the phone remains true for real life: kind, easy to make laugh, but difficult to rattle. There is something truly settled in his posture, legs set and hands loose at his sides.
"It's nice to properly meet you, Pearl," he says, eyes skipping around as his coworkers take the final steps to the ground level. "You've had an on-brand introduction to Skizz." He gestures at the older man, who salutes her with a grin, "And the bald one is Tango." The Tango in question narrows his eyes at Impulse for the jab, but sends her a bright smile and a second wave.
"It's good to meet you guys," she says, and feels her cheeks warm at the attention. It is, afterall, a very small company.
"And our paramedic, Zedaph-"
"Zed the paramed!" Skizz and Tango crow in unison.
"- should be in his lab with the ambulance. Sorry, they're like a greek chorus." He smirks as the other two splutter, and she grins back. "Eventually you get used to it. Background noise, ya'know."
They tour her around. She picks a locker and shoves her stuff inside, and lets them point out a thousand things she already recognises with the excitement of children at an art fair. The pantry is stocked with snacks, and the fridge has a range of ingredients that implies at least someone cooks.
She meets Zedaph the way one meets a nervous cat, by peeking her head around the door and waving while he stares with eyes magnified by a pair of goggles. Something is very obviously bubbling in the row of vials behind him, but no one seems particularly concerned, so she leaves it be. The place shows, at least, all the vital signs of fire safety she would expect.
"Again, today, we take it easy on you," Impulse says, idly re-winding a hose. "We'll take you on a town tour, start getting you familiar with the roads and any of our more common locations, the elderly population, good food spots, places where cattle get onto the road, all that jazz."
"Do we deal with cows often?"
"Hm?" He looks up, and giggles at the strained expression on her face. "It's not too often, no, and we've got plenty of riders that do most of the actual rounding up if things do go awry."
A loud bang sounds from upstairs, and she can very clearly hear Skizz roll out a string of swear words as he plummets down the firepole. It's not a graceful landing.
"Imp, Gem's gonna message you in about twenty seconds, bet!" he crows, head already buried in his locker. Next to her, the captain's eye twitches, and he turns to one of the bigger windows.
Through it, Pearl can see a clear line of smoke rising from the forest.
His phone chimes.
Raising his eyes to the sky and not bothering to check, he jogs off to the lockers as well.
"So, about taking things slow!" he calls back at her, "How about meeting our local arsonist instead!?"