Work Text:
Gangie knows what a gun feels like in his paw. A knife, blade red and dripping. A broken bottle, just cracked over a man’s head. A brick that has been bashed into a face again and again and again. A smoking cinder of match that lit an entire building on fire. All of those things had been easier to hold than this.
“Oh, there you go, dear. Keep your stitches even, now.”
Gangie grunts, stabbing the needle through the dishcloth. There’s no squeaking, no pleading, no sound of pain, as he pulls the thread out the other side. It’s just… quiet, save for the shuck, shuck of Mrs. Molesly’s knitting needles across from him.
“What are you making again, dear?”
“A flower,” Gangie says gruffly, forces the needle back through the cloth.
“How lovely. And what kind?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Very nice, dear. I do love the flower you gave me.”
Gangie looks up to see the wilted green stem of a dandelion tucked behind Mrs. Molesly’s ear. He gives her a new one every morning, and every morning she has the same reaction: huge eyes and giant smile and oh, I’ll cherish this. It’s usually seedless in fifteen minutes, and he’s trying to work a schedule out so he can replace it throughout the day, but he’s afraid Loam Hall will run out.
There is, of course, the option of giving Mrs. Molesly a different, less fragile flower. But that defeats the point. A wilted green stem and a trail of white, feathery seeds has become theirs. Gangie hasn’t shared something like that with anyone before. He doesn’t want it to end just yet.
Change, too, is scary, because Gangie has always had to live with it. Change growing up, as a kid in the orphanage and then a kid on the streets. Change as an adult, living as a career criminal. Gangie’s life has been full of change and he’s… tired? Done? Fifty years old and ready to have something reliable in his life that isn’t judging glares and children pulled across the street to avoid him?
It doesn’t matter. He looks over at Mrs. Molesly and her little, contented smile and her clacking knitting needles and her wilted green, seedless stem, and for the first time in his life Gangie doesn’t want this to change.
“You’re really kind to me, you know that?” He says, makes another stitch.
Mrs. Molesly keeps knitting. “Well, you’re a nice young man.”
Gangie laughs roughly, “ʼM not.” Young and nice are two words Gangie has never heard directed at him before, even when he was just a little kid trying to keep his head above water.
“You very much are, dear. No one else has ever taken me up on my offer of crafting.”
Gangie grunts, “Why not? It’s fun.”
“Isn’t it? I think so.”
Gangie squints down at the beginnings of his embroidery. It looks mostly like a squiggly line of green, inchworms crawling their way across the fabric. There are pieces missing, where he didn’t line his stitches up, and the broken stretches of thread are lonely against the emptiness around them. Gangie sighs through his nose and makes another stitch.
“I was wondering, dear, you know how the old groundskeeper’s hut is all alone? And no one’s ever quite patched up the leak in the roof?”
“Yes,” Gangie says slowly. The roof leak is bothersome, because it’s not just a leak but rather leaks plural, and one of them happens to be directly over his bed. It seems to move, too, so even when he flips the pillows to the other side the water finds its way to his face. And he can’t rearrange the space because the bed was screwed to the wall by one Mr. Gilfoyle as Gangie stood in the doorway, holding his bag and tired from travel and just ready to settle in somewhere new. Hah. As if he’d try to steal a bed. As if some bolts could stop him.
“Well, I have a nice little space here. With a stove and a roof that doesn’t leak, and the adjoining room has been empty since Miss Phyllis left.”
“Aren’t groundskeepers supposed to stay in their huts?” Gangie asks, ignoring the way his heart softens at Mrs. Molesly’s words.
“Who says that? Jeremy? No, I’ll talk to him for you, dear, don’t you worry. You know, he does like you.”
“Oh,” Gangie says, who has had maybe one conversation with the new Squire Badger, in which Gangie had grunted twice and left Jeremy thoroughly confused as to how to talk to such a generally unpleasant person. “Well. I’ll think about it.”
“That’s all I ask.” Gangie doesn’t look up from his embroidery, but he can hear Mrs. Molesly’s smile in her voice, and he feels a smile of his own crack his stony frown.
The kettle on the stove beside them starts to whistle, and Mrs. Molesly is up and bustling before he can get to it. He takes the time to try and fill in some of the gaps in his line, to smooth out the ridges so it looks more like a smooth stem than the jagged edges of thorns.
Flowers aren’t… familiar to Gangie. Well, no, that’s not true. He’s seen a lot of flowers in his years, because he’s existed in the world as a weasel and a person. And he’s seen flowers nowhere quite so much as Loam Hall, the hill of which is dotted with wildflowers, or beside the graves he frequents under cover of night.
He remembers a day in the orphanage, eight years old and starving, holding a match to the petals of a weed he found in an alleyway. They’d curled up, blackened, and the sickly smell of burning and perfumed pollen had filled his lungs. Made him cough. He’d burnt his fingers on the stem of the flower, when he held his hand too close to the flame. Not badly enough to last, but that type of pain was new enough, unknown enough, for Gangie to remember how it made his nerves alight and scream at him to pull his hand away. He hadn’t. Had kept holding on, that flower fisted in his grip and crushed into pieces of ash. He’d burnt the flower. He’d choked it. He’d killed it.
It’s what flowers represent, that Gangie has never known. That softness. That beauty. He gave Mrs. Molesly a dead dandelion that first day because he’d seen the blossoms with their perfect petals and their delicate hearts and he’d felt the curl of flame burning those flowers into crisps.
Mrs. Molesly is delicate. Mrs. Molesly is soft. Mrs. Molesly is beautiful, in that kind old lady way where her outside is all wrinkled up but her inside is the sweetest swirl of honey in a steaming mug of tea.
Gangie has never known a flower without burning it before.
Mrs. Molesly spills boiling water over the side of the mug she is filling, and Gangie is already there, darting out to pull her aside by a grip on her waist to avoid the splash.
“Oh, dear me!” Mrs. Molesly exclaims, pats him on the arm.
“Here, let me help,” Gangie pushes himself up, wincing as his knees creak and click, the first sparks of arthritis lying just below the surface of his joints.
He steps over and takes the kettle from Mrs. Molesly’s hands, finishes filling the mugs and swipes the edges of his dish towel—embroidery hoop dangling heavily from his paw—over the water on the stove top.
“Hopefully the tea will be worth the excitement, hm?” She asks, reaches out and slips three cubes of sugar into his tea, just as he likes it.
His aching joints are feeling better in this warm room, and the hut doesn’t have its own sugar dish, because he’s never been brave enough to request one from the kitchens. So, it’s better in this little warm room with this little warm woman already. If he hadn’t been here, who knows what would’ve happened to Mrs. Molesly? It’s dangerous to have an open stove in a room with a woman who is slowly losing her balance. What if she trips and falls? Hurts herself and no one checks up on her? No, no, it would be much better if Gangie moved up here, to be with Mrs. Molesly, so he can keep her safe.
“You’ll talk to the Squire? About me moving up here?” He asks, eyes darting to his dish cloth, to the beginning squiggles of an embroidery.
“Of course, dear. If you’d like me to.”
“Right, uh, if you’d— Yeah. I’d like that.”
Mrs. Molesly pats him on the arm, leans in and hugs him slightly, presses her face to his bicep, and doesn’t say anything.
Gangie swallows, fists his hand in his embroidery. He looks down at the curling licks of steam from the twin mugs, and thinks about a wilted green stem tucked lovingly behind Mrs. Molesly’s ear.
Warmth doesn’t have to mean fire, doesn’t have to mean burning and destruction and charred edges. Warmth can mean safety. Comfort. The feeling of a little old woman pressing her head into your arm. Warmth can mean choosing the side of softness.
Gangie looks down at his embroidery and the mugs pressed up beside each other, and he chooses the side of flowers.