Yet, for all the effort they had put in until now, he couldn’t imagine getting to the end.
That was the problem with wanting to make something good. Love for something that “could be” also summoned a fear that he wouldn’t accomplish it, and it was even worse when he started to think about the next and hardest steps; after putting these limbs together, the apocalypse of every bowyer would come next: tillering. He’d have to string up the bow, draw it, step away, take a look, unstring it, then shave it down, ten to twenty to a hundred times over — as many times as it might take to create a perfectly balanced bow. But, each time this cycle repeated, it presented a chance for the bow to break — to die before it was even born. It would waste Otto’s efforts, disappoint Lei-rei, and make him slide back into thinking it wasn’t worth staking his feelings after all.
He tightened his hold over the limbs. It was tempting not to tiller it.
Another silhouette approached him and crouched down beside him. Perhaps the impostor had finally shown their face and had come to mock him. Just how long had it been since they’d last seen each other? When he turned his head, however, he found the impostor holding a baking tray, wearing an apron and Lei-rei’s face.
He narrowed his eyes. He had never seen Lei-rei wear a ponytail before, but the way this person glared at him was familiar. “Wait, is that actually you?”
A cookie got flicked into his mouth. If nothing else, he couldn’t imagine the impostor replicating the adventurousness of a baked, crispy exterior and a fudgy cookie dough filling rolled into a ball that rolled around his mouth. He chewed down.
[+10 HP]
Some of the dull aches went away. That was weird, too.
“You know,” Lei-rei said. Craft’s vision got clearer, and he found her munching on a spherical?…?‘cookieball,’ probably. “I was inside for just twenty minutes. Twenty minutes.” She looked up and around. “What — why? How? I” — she shoved another cookieball into her mouth — “t’k resp’b’ty f’r m’ stress.”
It was magic how she’d managed to pronounce the last word correctly.
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He looked at her, then at the sky behind the branches over them. “Apparently,” he explained, “if you burn thermite inside a forge slapped together from moist dirt, you can get enough of a steam explosion to turn the thermite into an exciting dust cloud.”
“?‘Thermite’?? Is that some kind of fuel?”
“I don’t recommend it for cooking.”
“Damn.” Lei-rei clicked her tongue. “Anyway, it seems the most arduous step is complete. Are you going to complete it now?”
Craft sighed. “I don’t think so.”
Lei-rei dangled a cookie over him, but even then, he didn’t bite. She put it back on the tray. “I’m surprised. You were so passionate about it just a while ago.”
“There’s still a lot to do, and honestly” — he sighed — “I’m tired.”
“Is that really all?” Lei-rei bit a chunk out of the cookie that was supposed to be for Craft — and it was her cue when he didn’t reply. “Would you allow me to ask something?”
“What is it?”
“While you were still preparing the branches” — she paused — “you seemed sad.”
‘Why?’ He filled in the rest of the question himself. “Someone used to teach me,” he said. “If she were here, she’d tell me to do this crap all over again and not blow up the forge this time.” He chuckled. It still amazed him until now how forgiving Rafflesia was to those who stood beside her. First impressions really were inaccurate.
“You?…?miss her?” Lei-rei continued. She had an uncertain tone in her voice.
“Yeah. I miss her, that’s all,” he assured her. “It isn’t complicated.”
With the way he frowned towards the end, Lei-rei was certain he lied. She furrowed her brows at that, but she knew not to pry.
She picked up another cookieball from the tray, flicking it into his mouth with deadly, fudgy precision. “She sounds strict.”
Craft paused mid-chew. “No, actually.” His words were slurred by the half-masticated cookie. He shook his head, grating the back of it against the gravel of the road to his own displeasure. “She’s a lot kinder to me than myself” —
“Respect the cookie.”
Mastication unpaused and completed. [+10 HP]
“Though,” he continued, “I’ve never really beaten myself up for a bad job before. A job’s just a job and all that.”
Lei-rei balanced the tray on one hand and extended the free one to him. “And a Hobby’s just a Hobby. Are you ready to keep going?”
He looked at her hand for a while. “To keep going” — Raffie used to say that a lot. Even when the CAZ had found their little hideout, she never did believe in absolute defeat, not while her hands could still move and make miracles. It hadn’t been courage that kept her moving, though.
— “It’s not my place to decide how everything will end, but I must arrive there.”
She’d said that only once. For someone like him who had worked tirelessly to control the outcome, only to arrive at everything he hated, her words had stuck with him. Leaving some things to fate was the only sane choice when there was nothing he could change anymore — not after everything had already ended.
He took Lei-rei’s hand and pulled himself up. He didn’t expect his legs to wobble like stilts, but Lei-rei had helpfully remained stable.
“Are you okay?” she asked. He nodded.
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath. He was still hugging the four bow limbs close to his chest. “I’ll put this thing together, tiller it maybe five times, then I’m stopping right there. Not my fault if it turns out crap.”
Every single time.