Duck Pond (Treebros 2.0/Slushlee Oneshot)

DUCK POND

A/N YELL AT ME AND I WILL CHANGE SHIT

       "Okay, let's make a plan or whatever adults do," Laurs huffed. "There's only one bathroom stall here, and y'all are impatient as hell, so Heidi can go here and Jane and I can go back to the visitor center. Is that good enough?" They looked at Jane and Heidi, who had been throwing dirt at each other seconds ago in frustration. The 21-year-old simply couldn't believe that their friends still acted like this.

       "And we're still meeting up at the duck pond, right?" Jane asked, dusting herself off from the thrown dirt.

       "Yep," Heidi dumped something out of her shoe and then stood up straight. "Okay then, see you fuckers there," she added, walking towards the bathroom. Laurs shook their head and followed Jane back up the slight slope.

       Laurs pushed out of the single stall unisex bathroom and walked over to the other door and knocked loudly.

       "Are you done yet?" The door swung inward, and Jane walked out, wiping her hands on her pants. Laurs and Jane lightly jogged back to where the first bathroom was. Somebody else walked out of the bathroom, meaning Heidi had already left, which made sense since she was far more efficient than the other two of the trio. The two friends studied the routes posted on the stand that was a little ways from the bathroom. However, they didn't notice that there were multiple maps, instead trying to mentally trace their path on the wrong map. After a while, Jane noticed something.

       "Wait," she said, squinting through her glasses. "There's no duck pond here. That's a lake or whatever."

       "The fuck?" Laurs started to panic a little. "How're we supposed Heidi at a duck pond if there's not even a duck pond?" Laurs quickly pulled out their phone to call her, but much to their dismay, there was no service so high up.

       "Hold up," Jane said, thinking again. "Heidi was wearing her yellow Crocs, right?"

       "Yeah, and that's our best guess, isn't it?"

       Laurs and Jane ended up stopping to look for the telltale chevron pattern of Heidi's shoe prints, and then rushing at a brisk pace to make up for the time spent staring at dirt. It was actually kind of exciting to zip around and sift through prints on the ground, sprint across bridges, and huff after running for a stretch and marvel at their progress. After many repetitions, Laurs and Jane were self-acclaimed experts at squatting to look for tracks, and their guts were telling them that they would find Heidi soon.

       They ran past roots, jumped tiny tributaries, and crossed a bridge. But as the two friends stopped to rest at the end of the bridge, the sky's demeanor shifted.

       It started as just a couple of wet spots dotting the dirt path, and though the sky didn't start pouring, the persistent droplets indented the dirt incessantly. Soon, whatever shoe prints left were gone, tapped away by the rain. Laurs huffed through the back of their throat in defeat.

       "Well, we're fucked," they commented. Jane only nodded.

       "We should just stay around here so we don't get even more lost," Jane added, hugging herself. Carefully, the two friends wound their way through the moist dirt to a relatively dry space with a large tree overhead. Laurs took a spare jacket from their backpack and wrapped it around their torso and Jane's, and the two friends sat silently watching the rain.

       Heidi sat on the large branch, threw her head to the raining sky and groaned. She felt like her emotions were being combined in an attempt to make her feel the worst. Frustration was one; she'd been waiting for her two friends for ages. This also worried her. What if something happened to Laurs and Jane? What if it was all happening while Heidi sat by a duck pond, waiting for nobody to come? She also knew that it would be best for her to stay where she was, but her urges goaded her to quickly solve everything and find her friends. She wished she could swat her emotions away for a while like she would an annoying fly.