What She Likes
Lepius
When he returned to his room after the conversation with Rosemary, he penned down everything he could remember straight away. Their talk had been long and winding. It had slithered through the little nooks of her he hadn’t ever seen, then back out between them, then sometimes into his own, too.
His pen was a blur. For the first time in two days, he didn’t need to demand his muscles to move – they moved by themselves, and by minutes the paper was half-filled with it.
What she liked. And he was going to make it come true.
He glanced down.
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She likes silverback trout. The ones that glitter in the sunlight.
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“Lepius, what is that?”
He looked up from his work to see Rosemary, standing with her arms crossed and left eyebrow cocked. Oh, no. This was ‘suspicious’ Rosemary, the one that snuck into his room while he slept if she smelt even the faintest of alcohol on his clothes.
In a blink, he was standing in front of her and rotating her away.
“It’s a surprise, Rosemary! You can’t look at it.”
“Lepius, the last time you said that, we had to evacuate your room.”
“Ah.” He blushed, and rubbed the back of his neck, “Well, this is a good surprise. There’s no fungal fumigation this time, I promise.”
She shook him off, “You’re sounding… chipper. What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing,” and he almost lost his smile, but it remained unconquered when he thought of the surprise, “something you’ll like.”
“Sapling, you’re supposed to wait at least two days, after I tell what I really like, before getting me a surprise. I’ve only told you four or five things. I can try a guess.”
“Well, I worked really hard for it.”
She gave him a long, searching look. Then, she reached closer and slapped him, but it was no more than a tap, as if to check if he was real and not her imagination. Only after a second slap did she say, “You’re acting strange. You were only so tired yesterday, and you didn’t want to get up to do anything, and here you are, preparing a surprise for me?”
Yesterday… he didn’t want to think about it. If he did, he might just remember what the world looked like without its colours, or how berries would taste like sawdust even if he plucked them fresh off the stem. And the worst of them all, the darkness. The eating, ravenous darkness, how it ate and ate him up until -
“Hey. I asked you a question, sleepyhead. How are you feeling?”
He blinked back to Rosemary, back to colour.
“Oh. I guess… I was feeling tired yesterday. And I was feeling pretty bad. Now… and here, I’m still tired, but I’m feeling a tiny bit better.”
She smiled and stepped into a hug, “That’s good. You were right, then. I have to keep you working, keep you interested in something. Otherwise you’ll just go to bed, hmm?”
“Yeah.”
“And… may I see the surprise?”
When she saw it, she screamed.
“Lepius! What have you done?”
A fire sat enclosed by a ring of pebbles. He had toyed around with it (from quite a safe distance), and despite squirming every time he had poked the fire, he thought he had done rather well. The twigs and dried leaves he had thrown in were glowing red. Those flaming tongues lapped up with the wind, trying to taste the catch that Lepius had hung above the flames.
And what a catch it was. More specifically, it was what she liked – silverback trout.
She whirled on him, “Why are you burning such a beautiful fish? Is it dead? Did you kill it?”
In the face of such rapid-fire questions, he wasn’t sure what to answer. So first, he backed away and raised his hands.
“What… what do you mean? I thought you’d be happy! You said you liked silverback trout.”
“As fish! Not as food! I love seeing them leap from the streams and show their scales, see them slithering in between my feet! Not roasted on a spit!”
“Oh…. oh…”
“Is it dead? Can we still bring it to the stream? Oh Eldertrees, did you kill it, Lepius?”
He started backing away further, “W-well, I think it might have… died? The fire did it, not me? B-but, hah, um, maybe it’s still breathing? We can try take it to the stream.”
They turned to look at the fish, mouth open and its silver scales blackened. She wrinkled her nose and turned to look at him.
“Clean this up. And the next time you try to cook a fish, I will get violent. Understand?”
“Yes, Rosemary.”
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She likes turtles. Big ones.
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He wasn’t really sure with this one.
Turtles were hard to come by, weren’t they? He had seen one or two drifting past the many streams in his village, their shells sticking out above the waterline as they paddled by. But they were the small kinds.
There were other kinds, spoken of by the strangers passing through his village. Turtles the size of a thumb, all the way up to larger than a horse, and those were just the beginnings of such tales. But all he had were tales, and Rosemary deserved more than that.
He sighed, and crossed it out for now.
Little did he know, he would return with a turtle for Rosemary in three days’ time.
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She likes when people cook. She says it feels like a home.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
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As the Hospes didn’t yet have a dedicated kitchen, the responsibility fell back to the campfire he had started earlier.
He looked down at the embers that remained of the fire half an hour ago. The fish he had disposed of with a little ceremony and a grave to appease Rosemary, so now the spit hung empty atop the ashes. The twigs were little more than charcoal smattered with white, and the leaves dust on the wind, but the pit was still warm enough for this next surprise.
He looked down in his hands.
There was a tuber in each. He had found them between the larger roots of an oak, and now they were ready to be roasted.
When he was done, the tubers sat plump on the stick, and he turned them every so often. Even without open flame, the heat lingering from before managed to crisp up the skin, and he hoped it would also make the insides softer, the way Mother served hers. They’d be slightly salty, soft but still crunchy on the inside, with that fresh, earthy taste everyone loved.
“What… are you doing?”
He looked up, “Oh. Rosemary… ah, it’s-”
“If you tell me it’s another surprise, I already warned you. I can be violent.”
“Well… it’s not a surprise. How about… a… fun thing you didn’t expect?”
Her eyes flickered between the tubers and his face a couple of times, her nose wrinkling more and more as she did, but then she plopped down next to him. She began to turn the spit. And when they were flipped upside down, Rosemary’s lips began to twitch, as much as she tried to keep them still. He was blushing.
The tubers were black.
“A fun thing, huh? I didn’t expect this, that was for sure.”
“No, I literally took my eye off them for… for like, a second, and-”
“Quiet.”
She prodded the charred corpses, and some of it dissolved into the wind. “I’m no expert on potato economics… but these are some bad products you’ve got here.”
He wrestled away the spit, “Like you could do better.”
“Uh- excuse me?! I will have you know I can cook potatoes without cremating them!”
He laughed.
Those had been the shortest seconds of his life, here in the sunlight with Rosemary. Of course he had a rebuttal ready. And the second before he spoke it aloud, he was a little scared, for it almost felt like they were returning to that morning before it all happened, trading jabs as they always did. Maybe there was another tragedy waiting behind the treeline. But after looking at those blackened tubers, he couldn’t find himself to do anything but laugh.
To hell with it.
“Go on, then. How do you cook potatoes on a fire?”
She huffed, “Allow me – move over, sapling – allow me to show you. Okay, now, watch how I turn the spit all the time, not just once every two or three minutes.”
Her hands paused near the fire, and the comeback rising in his throat sank down as something else got to his mouth first.
“Are you feeling all right? “
I’m so stupid. Her old grove was literally set ablaze. And here I am, starting up fires for no reason?
He pulled her hand away, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started a fire. I know-”
“No. No, I’ve failed before. But now I’m stronger now, right? I can whack a Stalkerwolf into paste. I won’t let fire scare me… that much.”
She moved her hand over to the spit, which she started to turn.
“See? Slow movements, always turning, so every side of the potato gets roasted at once, instead of just one-”
The potato slipped from the spit and into the fire. She stared at the spit in betrayal.
The other one fell, too.
He tried to hide his laughter, but couldn’t. It was a lot easier, though, with a howling dryad-spirit chasing him with a sharp stick.
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She likes me. Well, she didn’t say it explicitly, but I hope she does.
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“Hey, Rosemary, how much do you like me?”
She looked up from her basket of berries, “What do you mean?”
“On a scale of one to ten, how much would you say you like me?”
“Now I must quantify how much I like you? Must we reduce my affection to you to a simple number?”
“That’s… that’s not the point, really, I just want to know-”
She flapped a hand, “You just want to know, huh? You already know. So stop bothering me.”
He took in the set of her jaw, the mechanics of her fingers as she slipped each berry off the branch. Her eyes were still stormy. Around him, he could smell something faint - a smoky smell, almost like burnt tubers, coming from every corner of the Hospes. Ah, Rosemary. Still sore? Her mana had given her away. And a thousand teasing comments rose up at the bottom of his throat, and he only realized now how much he missed having them.
Time for some fun.
His lips twitched, “I’m sorry. I’m being a potato, aren’t I?”
Her fingers paused on plucking the berries from the stems.
“Lately… it’s just… I’m feeling a bit burnt out, if you know – yeow! I was joking, I was joking, relax!”
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She likes wood carvings. Of people she loves, and sometimes landscapes.
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“Lepius, what is that?”
He had his hands outstretched to her.
Nestled in between them was a piece of wood, whittled from the trunk of a fallen tree nearby. But it was no ordinary piece of wood. He had muscled it into a passing imitation of his face, and maybe his eyes were a little big, and maybe his chin was a bit bigger than expected, but he thought it something Rosemary would show off to guests when they first arrived. He certainly would.
“It’s me! What, you don’t see me in it? Look, those are clearly my eyes!”
She squinted, then clapped a hand to her mouth and turned away.
“What? Rosemary, this isn’t funny, I worked pretty hard on this!”
“Lepius… Lepius… you look like… hahah… I thought it was a frog! Why are the eyes and chin so big?”
He scoffed and yanked the figurine back to take a closer look. It was him, wasn’t it? Rosemary was probably just being silly, so he shook his head, then wagged a finger at her, her who was wheezing and leaning on the wall.
“How dare you. It looks like me. Even if it doesn’t, I did the best I could do with what I had! I didn’t have Father’s carving equipment! I just had a rock… with a sharp edge. And a pointy stick.”
She struggled to get anything out, “You… that’s a frog… oh… ahahah… oh, dearie…”
“It is not.”
“It is not? My dear Lepius, I am ever so proud that you have had the energy and the will to follow in your father’s footsteps, but until… until we get some proper equipment, I would suggest laying down your ambitions for now.”
He pouted, and rotated it, “How about now? Does it look more like me?”
She plucked it out of his hand, and he almost tried to grab it back. What stopped him was how she held it in between her fingers, so gentle as if to capture a feather on the wind, how she tucked it close to her chest. How she traced her fingers around it. Underneath all her laughter, there was a smile, the smile he remembered two mornings ago, when he had left his grove and everything had still been beautiful.
“It doesn’t look like you. But it’s good enough. Thank you, Lepius.”
“Wait, hang on! I’ll make a new one, a better one, you don’t have to keep that one-”
She waved him off, and he was not sure what had happened to it, for he never saw it again.
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She likes talking. To anyone, really. But she says it sometimes takes a while for her to warm up to strangers.
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They sat around the table in the main room, picking apart the mushrooms at the bottom of the basket. At the moment, a silence reigned. But then he opened his mouth, and the final note he had jotted down came out.
“So, you like talking to people?”
She sighed and put down her mushroom, “Lepius, are you really trying to get through every single thing I like today? Why?”
“Well… I guess… I need something to do. My mana tells me so. I need to be doing something.”
“Do you? You’ve never shown so much energy before, my dear.”
“I… I suppose I haven’t… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t want to think… think about what…”
“Nothing’s wrong with you, okay? We’ve gone through something terrible, and it’s okay to be a little bit crazy about it all.”
“You aren’t crazy, though. How are you so strong?”
She smiled a little, and returned to her mushroom, “I guess… I guess I broke, back in the invasion. And a couple more times, in between then and now. Maybe the breaking made me stronger.”
“And-”
“But I’m no invincible steel that cannot be broken, my dear. No one is. And sorry for cutting you off, you were saying…”
“Just… I suppose no one can. But I would like to be.”
“Of course you do. I want to, too. But we have to break, because this world loves its broken things.”
“You speak of it like… like the world is some audience, clapping at a play.”
“I know. I’m being stupid and dramatic. But sometimes… I don’t know. It just feels…”
He remembered laughing voices, ever so faint. They came from a darkness, and he felt as if he should’ve remembered them, but he didn’t, and that confused him. Had it been a dream he had forgotten?
“Feels like… like there has to be a reason to all this?”
Rosemary tossed away the mushroom, “Yeah.”
“Mm.”
“It just feels like… all we do, all that happens to us, is all written down in a script. We just have to act it out. And all the scripts of all living things are written the same way: break, break, break. Then you go out of character to avoid it, but now the others get a new script: break them. So in this play, all we can do… is break each other, or ourselves. And maybe it’s just us in the audience, pointing and laughing at others breaking others, knowing it’ll be our turn next on the stage…”
“Rosemary…”
She wiped her eyes, “Sorry. It’s just so cruel for no reason. Andura… your parents…”
Just like toys. Broken toys. Why did that sound so familiar?
He looked down at his hands, at the smudges of dirt gathered in between the cracks in his bark. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the entrails atop them, the innards of the gold man who he had mutilated. There was more than that, too. Below his hands sneered the darkness, the one that had held him captive yesterday in bed, that whispered about the emptiness and the futility of it all and sucked the colour out of everything and -
Something tapped his shoulder.
Mana.
Healing. And Rosemary’s, too. Home.
They draped themselves atop him and submerged him, and he held in his breath for the first second. But then, he released it. This was himself and Rosemary distilled to magic – why would he be drowning?
The mana would not harm him. And so he sunk.
Back down, to imagination.