(906) first sighting dubai
How many stories lie there beneath the sands?
I see dots, trees perhaps, or stones,
With semblance of shade;
One lone car driving a forever road,
A tiny toy car on a horizon-spanning highway.
It's days to walk. I can feel the dryness
crawling up my throat, already.
Low-lying, spread out compounds
Sectioned out like farmlands in more temperate climes
Blocks and borders of desert;
Dunes undulating like waves on an ocean
It is like every scenery I have seen under the surface of an airplane's wing
Rendered in hill-high sand.
A racetrack spotted with deciduous trees
A tennis court marked by blowing sands
Pylons like fragile spiderwebs.
A plantation of forests, still marked apart by dirt paths
Azure blue swimming pools within white-marble borders
Contrasting, standing out,
of the sand-clay beige of the city.
Twelve-lane highways, busy with trucks and traffic;
The skyline fading into desert haze,
Cutting into the cloudless blue-smog sky.
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Adrigami: Ocean (One-Shot)
@bootsssss requested Adrigami
Summary: On day two of the combined Agreste, Tsurugi, Bourgeois, and Graham de Vanily family vacation from hell, Kagami helps Adrien get some enjoyment out of their trip to the beach.
Read it on AO3: Adrigami: Ocean
It was the second day of the combined Tsurugi, Agreste, Bourgeois, and Graham de Vanily family vacation from hell, and no one was having a good time.
Well. Almost no one.
André and Zoé were caught up in trying to appease Audrey and Chloé as the latter two hurled abuse and dissatisfaction left and right.
Tomoe remained as stoic as ever as she sipped tea with an impassive Gabriel on the patio of their rented beachfront home for the week.
Neither looked to be in a worse mood than normal, but they certainly didn’t seem like they were having a pleasant holiday either.
Kagami didn’t care much for all the sand, but the views were nice, and she was getting in some quality sketching time. Still, the company left a great deal to be desired, and Kagami would have rather been back in Paris where she could at least retreat when other people got to be too much to bear.
Adrien didn’t appear to be enjoying himself either between having to deal with Chloé’s demands on his attention, his father’s persistent lack of time for him (despite the fact that Gabriel should have been freed from most work obligations), and the pitiful, longing glances Adrien cast at Amélie and Félix.
Those two were the exception to the diffuse cloud of misery that was hanging over the rest of the party. Despite the horrendous company, Amélie and Félix seemed to unflappably be having a decent time.
They strolled along the beach, collected shells, built sandcastles, kicked up the tide at one another, played volleyball, and soaked up the sun in turns. They didn’t let the drama of the rest of their number affect them.
“…Why don’t you go join them?” Kagami inquired as she took a seat on the beach towels beside Adrien.
He broke his gaze away from where Félix and Amélie were gathering shells and holding them up to one another’s ears. “Hm? Sorry. What?”
Kagami got out her sketchpad and began to draw the curved rock formation a ways off from the shore. “Why don’t you go join your aunt and your cousin? They look like they’re having fun. You should go have fun too. You are on holiday, are you not?”
Adrien winced, pulling his knees into his chest and getting sand on the blanket.
He pointed up at the large beach umbrella shading him from the sun’s rays.
“I have to stay in the shade,” he muttered miserably. “I can’t get sunburned because there’s a photoshoot scheduled for right after we get back.”
Kagami blew out a snort. “So, your father brought you here to torment you with more things you can’t have?”
Adrien’s gaze dropped to his knees. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Can’t you just put on sunscreen?”
She had a feeling he was going to say no because his father was almost as strict as her own mother, but she thought she’d go ahead and raise the argument anyway.
Adrien just shook his head. “Even if that were good enough for Father, I still couldn’t go out there with Aunt Amélie and Félix.”
“Oh?” Kagami glanced up from her drawing to sneak a peek at his forlorn expression.
Adrien blew out a sigh. “I’d be intruding.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Intruding?”
“On their family vacation.”
Her eyebrow rose ever higher. “Are you not family?”
He shook his head. “Not in any way that counts. To them, they’re the only ones in the world who matter. I’m as good as an outsider.”
“I see,” Kagami whispered, adding a little shading to shape the cragginess of the rock face in her drawing. “…Were you and your mother like that?”
Adrien blew out a lead-laced sigh. “Exactly. That’s part of why it hurts so much to watch them and see what I’m missing out on.”
Absentmindedly, he looked back to the house where his father had his nose buried in a tablet, too busy to give Adrien the time of day.
“Well. It sounds like we need to take matters into our own hands, then,” Kagami announced, setting aside her sketchbook and getting to her feet.
Adrien tipped his head to the side as he watched her take hold of the large umbrella and pry it up out of the sand. “Kagami, what are you doing?”
“Making the shade mobile,” she informed, taking the umbrella and starting to make her way down to the water. “Come.”
“Whoa. Hey. What are you doing?” he demanded once more as he scrambled to his feet and hurried after her. She was a good head shorter than he was at that point, but she moved briskly when she was on a mission.
“I already told you. Please listen to me when I speak,” she huffed and then let out a grunt as she speared the umbrella down into the sand at the edge of the waves. “So. What would you like to do first?”
When Adrien just blinked at her like a small, confused rodent, Kagami elaborated, “Collecting shells might be nice. I’ve never done that before. I don’t quite see the draw of kicking sand at one another, but I’m willing to give it a try once, if that’s something you’re interested in.”
A gradual smile dawned like a sunrise on Adrien’s lips as Kagami kept going.
“Perhaps it might be interesting to find a little tidal pool and watch the miniature ecosystem for a while. Or, if you’d rather, I doubt we could play a very effective game of volleyball underneath this umbrella, but we could probably bump the ball back and forth if I step back a bit and we’re careful not to take the umbrella out with an overly zealous rogue pass.”
“Thank you, Kagami,” Adrien whispered, radiating gratitude.
She rolled her eyes and waved him away. “Don’t thank me. I felt compelled to do something because your aura of depression was spoiling my holiday.”
“Thank you, Kagami,” he repeated, leaning in and placing a kiss on her cheek. “You’re the best.”
She tried her hardest not to show any outward sign of the way his lips on her skin made her melt on the inside.
“Here.” Adrien bent down and retrieved a sizeable shell, inspecting it and brushing away the sand before holding it out to her. “Have you ever listened to the sound of the ocean in a seashell before?”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “You do know that that’s not actually the sound of the ocean, right?”
Adrien gave his eyes an overexaggerated roll. “Do me a favor and pretend to be five years old for a second.”
“Five-year-old Kagami knew that it wasn’t possible to hear the sound of the ocean in seashells either,” she informed bluntly.
With a longsuffering sigh, Adrien held the shell up to her ear. “Listen.”
All she could hear was the sound of her heart as he leaned in close to listen to the shell with her.
She let her eyes slip closed as she attempted to engrave the memory of that moment on her heart forever.
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