By Your Side (JWCC Darius x Oc)

The Watering Hole

Darius was laying on the ground, writing about Compies while staring at them while they were sleeping, until Kenji scared them away.

"Shoo, shoo, you retro iguanas!" Kenji yelled. The Compies ran off and Kenji picked up the rug they were laying on. I giggled as Darius sent Kenji and annoyed look before they climbed up the ladder to our shelter, where the rest of us were. Darius sat down and started writing in the journal he found at the clinic while Kenji went to take a shower. "Yagh! Does this water ever get warm?"

"Five more minutes." Brooklyn mumbled as she rolled over in her sleep. Yaz was walking around with a makeshift splint on her ankle and Sammy was trying to open a can of fruit with an ice cream scooper.

"Come on, just open!" Sammy grunted. Sammy had accidentally dropped the can and it rolled over and hit Yaz's ankle. "Oh! Sorry, Yaz!"

"It's cool. And another one." Yaz mumbled as she marked a tally on the board to signal a completed lap. She then sat down next to Darius before an empty water jug was thrown across the table, curtesy of Kenji.

"No mas agua. A little help." Kenji yelled from the covered shower.

"I got you, Kenj." Darius said as he got up.

"If you keep doing that for him, he'll never learn to do it for himself." Yaz said. Darius just shrugged before sliding down the slide.

"Uh, guys!" We heard Darius call a second later. We all, minus Kenji, raced down to see what Darius was calling us about. All the water from the stream was gone.

"Where'd the water go?" Sammy asked.

"Why don't we ask Mr. 45-Minute Shower?" Yaz said as she sent a pointed look at Kenji.

"Hey, looking good is part of my brand. And no way I drained a whole river." Kenji defended. I noticed Brooklyn slide down the side of the empty stream before crawling up the other side.

"We better figure out what's up. We're gonna run out of water. Let's-" Darius was saying before being cut off by Brooklyn.

"Shh!" We all went silent and looked around, scared a dinosaur was gonna attack us. "I hear that him again." Brooklyn said which made us groan. "The river must've been drowning it out. If I follow that, I can find-"

"Frozen patch of flowers." The rest of us said in unison, cutting her off.

"Oh. Ive mentioned it, huh?" Brooklyn asked.

"The frozen flowers you saw once but have never found again? Yeah. A few hundred times." Kenji said.

"Uh, I'm sorry for wanting to get to the bottom of all this weirdness. I came to unbox-" Brooklyn said before we all cut her off again.

"'Unbox Jurassic World, and that's what I'm gonna do'." We synched.

"If you're gonna go look for the noise, I'll come too. If that's okay." Sammy said as she ran to the other side of the empty river. "It'd be nice to have an adventure for a fun reason and not a 'fleeing dinosaurs or facing imminent death' reason."

"I'll go if Sammy is. And Brooklyn too." Yaz added as she went it the other side of the river. I had a feeling she just didn't want to stay with Kenji.

"Ooh, it's a Camp Cretaceous girl adventure!" Sammy cheered.

"Great! You do that. Kenji and I will figure out why the river stopped" Darius said.

"Kenji do what, now?" Kenji asked.

"You wanna keep up your shower habit, don't you, and also survive? Let's go unbox the mystery of the missing water." Darius said.

"Fine, I'm in. It makes sense. I know this island like the—" We cut Kenji off.