The beach, Tuesday morning

[betterthanaplan]

Another Tuesday, another yoga lesson on the beach. Duke set up and started stretching out -- only to pause mid-upward dog when a little pear shaped, beakless bird thing hopped up on the end of his mat and gave him an enormous, wet-eyed coo.

". . . The fuck are you?" Duke asked. "Some kind of mutant penguin?"

The bird thing started trying to eat his mat.

[Tuesday morning yoga is open!]

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[thatwaslucky]

Another Tuesday meant Rey showing up again, smiling when she did.

"I see you've made a friend."

[betterthanaplan]

"Not what I'd call it." Duke shooed the . . . thing . . . away again, examining the damage to his mat. (It was a nice mat, dammit!) "What is this thing?"

[thatwaslucky]

"It's a porg," she said, crouching down and making a little noise to try and call it over. "They're harmless. Unless maybe you're a yoga mat."

[betterthanaplan]

"A porg. They edible?" The porg gave him such a deeply insulted look that he immediately regretted the question. He covered by glaring at it. "Yeah, well, neither is my yoga mat, buddy!"

[thatwaslucky]

"He's just curious," Rey assured him.

Hopefully. She'd seen what they'd done to parts of the Falcon.

"Is the damage that bad?"

[betterthanaplan]

". . . Nah. It's just a little -- chewed." He nudged the porg out of the way, only to end up with it hopping up onto his shoulder blade. "Friendly little suckers, aren't they."

[thatwaslucky]

"I think they got a little used to people," Rey admitted, smiling. "They've been aboard my friends' ship for about a week."

Time moved weird. She tried not to think about it too much.

[betterthanaplan]

"Is that how they ended up here?" Oh lord. They were going to overrun the island, weren't they. He'd seen the cane toads in Australia. . . .

He sat up, sending the porg fluttering back to the ground with a little chirp-yelp noise. Ugh. It had to be cute, too.

"I take it you had a good visit this weekend?"

[thatwaslucky]

"I did. It was busy, a lot of work, but it was really good," she said. "How was yours?"

[betterthanaplan]

"No complaints," Duke said, with a slightly doofy smile. "An old friend of mine decided to surprise me by showing up." After they hadn't spoken in more than ten years. . . . "Apparently one of our local gossips follows the squirrels' reporting. Somehow."

He still wasn't sure how that had worked.

[thatwaslucky]

Rey eyed him. "Which means...?"

[betterthanaplan]

"That he knew where I was?" Duke shrugged. "I don't think he paid much attention to anything more than that." And even if he had, Nathan's powers of denial were extremely potent.

[thatwaslucky]

Was she really hoping she wasn't being the exact-opposite-of-slut-shamed across some town in Maine? Kind of a lot!

"I'm glad it worked out for you then," she went with instead.

[betterthanaplan]

Vince Teagues was surely scandalized!

"Yeah, me too." Duke gestured to the mat across from him. "Shall we get started?"

[thatwaslucky]

"Yeah," she said, eyeing the porg as she stepped onto the mat. "Same as last time?"

[betterthanaplan]

Duke nodded, getting to his feet. "It's nice to have a standard warm up routine."

He nudged the porg back out of the way when it darted forward. It hopped back and watched them avidly, seeming to set its feet the same way Duke did.

"Swear to god, if that thing ends up trying to do downward dog. . . ."

[thatwaslucky]

"I could probably tell it to stay back but I'm sort of curious now," Rey admitted.

If the porg did the cow one that she couldn't take the name of seriously she'd have to be done for the day.

[betterthanaplan]

Yeah, they probably weren't going to manage to be very zen, here.

"I guess so long as it doesn't start chewing the mats again, it's okay." He gave it one last narrow-eyed look then visibly recentered, turning towards Rey and bringing his arms up and around in a circle before settling them in the prayer position at his chest. "Namaste."

[thatwaslucky]

"Namaste," she repeated, following the moment.

And may have been shifting a little as she considered what she was doing with her feet and how she was standing.

[betterthanaplan]

Duke waited, giving her a chance to settle. "When you're ready, deep breath in."

[thatwaslucky]

Rey closed her eyes to focus on her breathing, how she was breathing, and how she felt. Maybe it was weird how much she liked this part. Maybe that meant she should just do it more normally.

"Okay."

[betterthanaplan]

Hey, it was hard enough to remember to do on a regular basis that multiple traditions around the world had invented formalized rituals for it. "Good," Duke said. "Let's do a sun salutation."

[thatwaslucky]

"That's not the string thing, right?" Rey checked.

[betterthanaplan]

"That's the flow," Duke said. "The string thing is something you can keep in mind while doing the flow." He gave her a little rueful smile. "You know, with everything else."

For a meditative process, there could be kind of a lot to think about.

[thatwaslucky]

"I'm sure the day I keep it all straight is when you'll know I'm really zen," Rey said.