Vanilla

Twenty

A/N: So this is the full 9.3k words that I posted on Inkitt and separated into three chapters over the past week! ^^ Here's the compilation and it'll prroobably be two weeks later till I update here again but the special Kingdom AU for Prince Leroy and Prince Julian is coming up in a few days so :> Look out for that too. 

Enjoy.

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And as though the night had a mind of it's own and, humanly jealous of the eventful morning, decided against disappointing anyone with some peace and quiet. This, I experienced in the form of odd holes littering the ends of my blanket inviting every bit of the forest chill onto the surface of my skin and the tips of my toes.

Furthered by the unzippable gap in the middle of the tent where my feet were placed right in front of, sleep was not an option. Wisps of the night slithered in at a passing breeze.

"Good god," I whispered into my jacket, wrapped around my neck like a scarf. Needless to say, I was a shivering mess—which certainly wasn't the most pleasant kind of person to be sleeping with since, well, this was a shared tent and waking up to humanly vibrations, however gentle, would be fairly unpleasant.

After all, the continuously pleasant disposition of everything else earlier this evening had to, at some point in time, take a turn for the worse. Knowing this meant that I could have very well braced myself for the inevitable nosedive, which I was sure we would soon experience at daybreak (all this, I'd attributed to the overly-critical part of my brain cultivated by the perfect combination of being around Uncle Al and Chip's husband).

Because the freezing waterfall bath had turned out fairly bearable and the walk back to the campsite fearfully dark but oddly safe, I was lulled into a false sense of security that somehow managed to even silence my inner critic, sated by a mere cup of hot 'refreshing spring water', the only beverage available to us miserable homo sapiens.

I'd spent the rest of the evening listening to everyone else's input as we gathered around the fire for the day's discussion, led by Leroy, whilst trying to figure out the strange presence of Debussy in the distance as though there was a piano in the trees and Clair De Lune was the only thing it could play. Ridiculous, was all I'd found myself thinking, unable to understand the several beats it'd missed and how terribly absurd I must've been to be playing the worst version of Clair De Lune in my head since, logically speaking, there was simply no way a piano could exist in a rainforest—let alone among the trees.

And by the end of the night, as the flames began to laze and burn down low, we'd managed to pan out morning duties and split ourselves accordingly into respective groups responsible for each task to be completed. Naturally, I was assigned something apart from knives and flames considering my absence of proper vision, which was also the last thing I remembered having sufficient energy to register.

That, and Raul climbing into his sleeping bag at the far end of the boy's tent whilst going on about this being the coolest sleepover experience he's ever had and suggesting we stay up all night chatting and playing non-existent card games. Bank had disagreed before the sleeping bag beside Raul's, snoring in a matter of seconds; leaving Leroy and myself to the pile of covers that the facilitator had left us due to the lack of sleeping bags.

"So like I counted the number of mosquito bites I have," mumbled Raul as he stifled a yawn and reached up to rub his eyes that were barely half open. "And like, thirty-two was the rough estimate but... what do you think? I could totally count mosquito bites all night man... I'm wide awa—" He'd fallen asleep sitting upright.