Chapter Text
Plain and nondescript below the proudly displayed medals that distinguished him from his subordinates, Captain K.P. Hob’s simple military uniform was, most did not realize, the same set he’d worn for hundreds of years. It had seen him through countless battles, several wars, and multiple promotions. By the time Captain Hob arrived at the Bloom, he had spent cumulative decades secreted away under the high canopy of his tent, bent like a question mark over the fabric, meticulously pulling tears shut and weaving, like a deep blue fishnet, thread back into the perennially thinning fabric of the elbows. In all likelihood, the jacket comprised less of the fabric it was originally crafted from than it was of Hob’s careful additions.
It was a skill seldomly taught in the Goblin Court, clothing repair, a process too delicate and time-consuming for a court that prided itself on its own impatience. But for something to last in a court that lacked magic, it had to be cared for by hand. The jacket Hob wore to the Bloom was far from the first set he’d worn in his career, having lost quite a few when he was younger and less adept with the needle, but he was determined that it would, one way or another, be his last.
Of course, to mend invisibly was the essential goal of his practice. Hob was already thoroughly eccentric in the eyes of his peers without them knowing of his love affair with lasting, and it was important, as a frequently utilized tool in off-court negotiations, to appear similar to the magic, high-stationed fey of other courts when meeting them. To have a stitch out of place, for the color of his darning to be a shade off in the light, was an embarrassment that Hob was intimately familiar with, even as he worked tirelessly to avoid it. He often wondered if that particular feeling were something that only he, with his strange coveting of permanence and his long nights spent trying to summon it to being around him, had ever experienced.
When Hob met the Lady Binx - and it was Binx, namely, rather than their glamor, that he cared for - he immediately admired her. She had a deftness of hand in her craftwork that he could not imagine possessing, formed clever and beautiful things from nothing as if by some incredible magic of thread. But of course, he knew it was more the product of their bare hands than the magic that nonetheless coursed through her veins. He was as intimidated by her skill as he was elated to find a kindred spirit in her.
It was only after the Bloom ended that he fully realized how similar they were. He and Rue had been staying together for some time at the outskirts of the Court of Craft, taking up residence in one of the old, forgotten buildings while they figured out where they would end up next. One chilly autumn night, Hob ventured to Binx's quarters to trouble her for some extra blankets, and they opened a closet, reached into a pile of quilts, and pressed them into his hands.
He quickly returned to his and Rue’s room and spread them over their bed, and when he lifted a corner to slip beneath them and back to Rue's side, he noticed a subtle difference in texture in the fabric below his thumb. He paused, frowning lightly, and turned the corner toward the moonlight filtering through the window to inspect it. Bright blue thread had been woven into a hole in the material some time ago, standing out in stark contrast with the mint green fabric that surrounded it. He turned his gaze slowly down the length of the blanket. Patches and stitches of all colors and shapes greeted him from the uneven surface of a thing proudly and exuberantly mended - a thing imperfect, persuaded to last by hands that loved it.
Hob stared at it for a moment in shock before tears began to prick at the corners of his eyes. Startled by his own reaction, he quickly slid below the covers and pressed himself to Rue's still-sleeping side, burying his unshed tears in their feathers. It took him time to fall asleep, but when he did, he slept warmer than he had in his entire life.
Despite the reputation for chaos and disorder that the Goblin court earned, cultivated, and gleefully maintained, enrollment in its military still demanded a uniformity and discipline that would surprise fey of other courts. While obviously not the main draw for new recruits, it was a means to an end, tolerated as a necessary tool for effective combat. If it meant soon having an outlet for their chaotic impulses, goblins of all shapes and sizes were willing to fall into their roles. They did so largely for the release they had been someday promised.
Hob, on the other hand, had possibly never been as happy as when he stood in line with the other recruits, listening to his commanding officer’s booming voice in the stiff, itchy cotton jackets they’d been provided. He had just been sworn in alongside his peers only an hour before. In a single thirty-second ceremony, they had all become Privates together. Too green to have earned the respect of other officers knowing their names, they had since all been referred to by their shared title. To his left, Private. To his right, Private. All the way down the line, Private, Private, Private. And he was one of those, too. He thought he might never take the jacket off.
There were many things Hob knew he did not live up to as a goblin. They didn’t suddenly fall away, having joined the military. But the jacket was a gift like no other Hob could ever dream of receiving. To be dressed and addressed like his peers; to, at least at first glance, seem a part of them; to receive rules, clear cut, on how to be. The comfort of it, of wearing his uniform and knowing he was doing at least one thing right, was a secret Hob knew he would have to take to his grave.
Young yet, Private Hob had been hurt plenty of times, but he had never felt a part of something before. Maybe that was why, when the cruel point of a Hoof and Claw warrior’s horn slashed deep into the meat of his shoulder and provided him with his first battlefield injury, he thought first of the state of his jacket before he thought of his own body.
Their first battle ended late in the night. It was unclear who won, at least to Hob. Both sides limped away bloody, leaving behind on the darkened battlefield a scattering of lifeless cavalry. Many of them were privates, and so in a way, that meant he had died, too.
Still, adrenaline simmered through his veins and the veins of his fellow soldiers in the aftershocks of fading battle-rage on the march back to camp, a feeling that gradually crystallized into a frenetic, survivalist mania. Upon reaching camp, the commanding officers demanded a bonfire, and by the time they were satisfied with the size of it, the tongues of its flames licked gratuitously at the stars. From where he lay waiting in a recovery tent, Hob could hear the distant sounds of goblin chaos celebrating the bloodshed and singing songs of fallen friends’ final moments of mischief.
Part of him had hoped the heat of battle would change him, but he still couldn’t find an echo of the calamity outside his tent anywhere inside himself. He was almost glad to have been injured; it gave him an excuse not to participate. He couldn’t understand how anyone could throw themselves into revelry after having just barely escaped battle with their hide still attached. He was exhausted, and the smell of blood and death clung to his nostrils. To dance, now? To cackle and wrestle one another? He closed his eyes, wondering when his heart would learn to love so fleetingly.
The canvas flaps of his recovery tent parted with the barest flutter of noise. Hob’s ears pricked forward. He looked over to see junior medic Catgut’s slight form barely occupying the opening, dragging her medicine bag behind her labouredly.
A salt goblin medical officer, Catgut, more than anyone in the Goblin Court, understood urgency. She had precious little life to live, and tens of injured grunt-fighters to tend to before she could lay herself down. Stepping into Hob’s tent, she wasted no time. She came to Hob’s side, rolled out her pack of instruments, and, readying her suturing needle, the diminutive length of which equaled her full wingspan, reached up and ripped the sleeve clean off of Hob’s jacket to get access to the wound. Then she set about giving him a series of lopsided stitches. Hob, fully detached, only stared at the sleeve where it lay discarded in the dirt, barely feeling her needlework.
When she finished, junior medic Catgut didn’t give him any medicine or tell him to rest. She just gathered up her supplies and went.
Alone in the tent, Hob retrieved the fallen sleeve and cradled it in tender hands. He regarded it for a moment in still silence, before coming to a kneel and slowly undoing the thick copper buttons that ran down his front. He disrobed, folded the jacket gently into a square, and gripped it tightly in his claws. Another casualty.
The thick cotton of the jacket was rough under Hob’s hands. It had not yet had time to wear in and grow soft with use, cut down in its very first combat. Of humble and simple origins, the jacket likely never knew where it was being taken, what terrible thing fate had in store for it, but when it came time, it faced it nonetheless with a fraternal courage that, in the end, led the jacket to absorb the majority of the glancing blow that Hob had not been swift enough to avoid. A brutal laceration crawled up the sleeve’s long arm, ending in an abrupt puff of frayed fabric, the tips of which were crusty with dried blood. Inches above that, the sinew of connective thread that held the arm to the jacket’s shoulder was exposed, sundered by Catgut’s expedient claws.
To have given so much in combat, and to have still more taken from oneself in wake of it. Did the plant from which the fibers of this fabric had been spun know, when its seed was first sown into the earth, that it would someday be a martyr?
Hob’s eyes trailed to his side, only to find the suture needle lying, still bloody, on the ground to his side. Catgut must have forgotten it in her haste to leave. He looked down at the stitches on his shoulder and studied the pattern, recalling the way she had linked and locked the knots with an intellectual distance. He picked the needle up, spit-shined the viscera off of it, and reached down to pull a long clump of fur from his chest. Sitting down, he rolled the fur until it resembled a thick yarn, threaded the needle, and brought the sleeve back to the seam of the shoulder, painstakingly stitching it into place in the dark.
Hob held onto this first jacket for some time past the point of practicality. Looking back, he was sure he looked perfectly ridiculous walking around in it, the dark blue fabric dotted all over with clumps of his bright, orangish brown fur-thread. But he had been so honored to receive it, so enamored with the fabric and with the meaning it gave his body when he wore it, that he couldn’t imagine parting with it, even as more and more of his own fur began to poke from holes and from half-baked repair attempts, the stolen Catgut needle growing ever duller at the tip. As the weeks accumulated, it became ever harder to imagine parting with it. It had protected him through six, seven, eight battles, which made it the closest thing Hob had ever had to a friend.
Eventually he woke one day to find that it had been taken away in the night. Perhaps it was a superior officer wordlessly ending his display of grotesque sentimentality. Perhaps it was a cruel joke played on him by his more properly mischievous battle brothers. He never did find out. Perhaps it had simply been time for it to end.
It didn’t take long before he wore holes in the second set; and then after that, the third, the fourth. The Goblin Court was not a court of artisans. The clothing, especially for lowborn grunts of the Goblin Military, was not of incredible make. The seams were too tight or too loose, the hems were not always finished. And so it was not entirely Hob’s fault that he lost so many, in the beginning. He had tried his best, but no one had ever taught him how to keep anything, and the jackets, like the many salt goblins that lay forgotten in the fields, were, of course, not made to last or be loved.