His knees and knuckles are covered in dirt as he finishes harvesting the beetroot to replace it. No one’s used it yet, but the way Joe figures, Pearl will either realize there’s another flavor of liquid she can put in a bowl, or he’ll fill every one of the emergency food chests with beetroot, and either way, it’ll be funny.
“You know, do you every get tired of doing this?”
“Oh, howdy Grian!”
“Hi, Joe.”
Joe stands up. Grian is perched on the canvas covering for the HHH tent, looking down over the community garden. His wings—great grey-and-black speckled things this season, almost like a stone—are draped around him, almost defensively. There’s probably something to that? But Joe’s no expert on birds, or wings, or the expression in Grian’s pitch-black eyes.
“Tired of doing what?” he says, suddenly aware his hands are beginning to stain red, on account of all the beetroots. He hopes that washes off? It probably does? Probably?
“This,” Grian says, gesturing widely. “You do it all the time. You barely work on your own stuff, and you sit here, making a garden for everyone else. Of doing all this and getting nothing?”
“Oh no, this is entirely selfish,” Joe says promptly.
“What?”
“Well, see, I like gardening, and I get to use the carrots too. And the potatoes. And the beetroot, I guess, although I’m mostly gardenin’ that because Cleo will yell at me. Plus, I get to stand right here, in the middle of everyone, so if I feel talkative, it’s really easy to force someone else to suffer it. So, as you see, I’m actually terribly selfish, sittin’ here with my hands in the dirt.” Joe nods quietly to himself. Yes, that sums up his motivations well enough.
Grian stares at him very intensely. It makes Joe feel a bit like a rat, or a small dog, maybe, under the eyes of a circling hawk, which is entirely silly. Hawks don’t have grey wings. Joe stares right back, if only out of stubbornness.
“It’s still something for everyone else,” Grian says after a moment. “Don’t you ever want to be selfish?”
“I just told you I was being,” Joe says back irritably. Honestly. “Never understood why people keep asking me that. I’m being plenty selfish, doing things that make me happy. Doesn’t make me better than any other man. Besides, I’m doing this alone. Now, if I’d set it up as some game, so everyone else could have fun on the project—oh, like that Tegg game! Now, that was fun, and—”
“Was entirely because I enjoy causing problems?” Grian says.
“Well then,” Joe says. “Either we’re both being entirely selfish, or there are different ways to help people. Now, if you excuse me, there’s only but so much time in the day to be irritating, and I have a lot of beetroots.”
“You are a strange little man.”
“Never claimed otherwise!”
Joe stares back right up in Grian’s black hunter’s eyes a little longer, the coiled wings around his back, the way he rocks on the canvas. There’s probably something to that, but Joe’s tired, and he’s pretty good at misunderstanding Grian most days. So he’ll just keep staring back, if just to prove he won’t bend. Joe’s pretty good at not bending for anyone, after all.
A moment later, Grian huffs out something like a laugh and hops off the canvas. “Give me some of the seeds then. Show me how to plant gardens.”
Joe blinks. “…you were callin’ me weird,” he says slowly.
“I want to cover Mumbo’s base with beetroot.”
“Oh, that’s a good cause right there.”
“I know, right?”
The feeling of being hunted leaves, and Grian’s wings relax. He hands Grian some of the seeds and shows him the rows he’s been planting, and watches Grian put his own hands in the dirt, and sighs.
“…that was weird, right?” he says to no one. But, well, it was as he’d told Grian—there’s only but so much time in the day for building community gardens, and Joe will not waste it. He turns to the dirt himself, and returns to staining his hands red with beetroot.