Chapter Text
Her first morning was frigid, the early spring chill held at bay only by the husk of a house she had spent the night in. The blankets stayed firmly planted around her body and tucked close to her chin until the sun had well and risen. The frost thawed to dew and disappeared.
Tilly remained in bed.
It took a great deal of back-and-forth-ing to convince herself to even kick one foot out from under the cover. The scratchy woolen fabric yielded, flopping back onto itself on the mattress. The next came more willingly, accompanied by a groan she stifled into the blankets she had yet to pry back from her face.
Tilly's sock feet felt around the ground by her bed for her boots while her eyes stayed tightly shut. She kicked one over, groaned again, then shoved her toe into the second.
She always felt safer in these boots. The laces were old. Reknotted beyond recognition. The leather was patchy, dull in colour, and worn thin around the toe. But they were her grandfather's gift to her so many years ago when she first had the chance to visit him on his farm. Wearing them now was like carrying his spirit to guide her through the next few weeks.
One boot on, one eye opened. Tilly scanned the room half expecting some wild animal to have crawled into the shelter in the night. But it was just her, the empty fireplace, and the old television that only worked when you pried the antenna in certain angles. Even then it only showed a small handful of channels. Tilly recalled her grandfather checking the weather every morning.
“Cross your fingers for rain,” he would say, running his thumb across the old metal of the watering can handle.
“Welcome to KOZU 5,” the television would reply.
Tilly pressed the power button with her thumb and the television hummed to life. The blanket scraped across the floor as she dragged the rickety wooden chair from the table to the space beside the fireplace. Nothing but static appeared on-screen. That would be a Later Tilly issue.
Right Now Tilly needed to prepare herself for what lied beyond her threshold. The door that barely sealed, backlit like a silver cloud. So much of this cabin needed fixing. Another Later Tilly issue.
She tapped her feet in a particular way, counting the rhythm in her head. Once, twice. Another time. Once more for good measure. Finally she stood and shed the blanket onto the chair behind her. Ten paces to the door.
One. Two. Not right, try again.
She backed up and wrapped the blanket around herself again and put her butt in the chair.
Tilly repeated this action a few times. Two paces, a spike of discomfort, a retreat. The chair became her safety net catching her every time she couldn't take another step closer.
At last two steps became three, then four, then a brave journey right up to the door. All ten paces. Anxiety lanced through her chest as her palm met the handle. With a determined twist, she allowed light and fresh air to rush into the cabin.
The forest lay just beyond the deck stairs. The farm had become so overgrown in such a short time. Sure, Tilly's grandfather would have struggled to keep up with the work in the last few years, but not this much. The trees and undergrowth looked decades old. Her grandfather always joked there was magic in the soil. That's why the crops grew so nicely, why the trees grew fast and healthy. That's why he couldn't part with the property until he was too old to live on his own. Even now, on some distant corner, he had been buried here. Locke Farm and its magic had been his whole life.
And suddenly it was Tilly's.
She felt for the letter in her pocket, the one that granted her sole ownership of the land. She was one of the only heirs he had, and certainly the only one he could trust with his precious farm. She had read the letter a dozen times, memorized its lines, and sought his voice in the hand writing.
“If you're reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. The same thing happened to me, long ago. I'd lost sight of what mattered most in life... real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong...”
All of her grandfather's tools remained carefully arranged under the side shed roof next to where he kept the firewood. There was very little firewood left, but that problem could wait. Next to the tools was a red tin case with a strip of tape that once might've read “seeds” if the pen marks hadn't worn off. One of the latches was broken off and the other proved very difficult to pry open, but after some effort it sprung open revealing disorganized rows of seeds packets. Most were empty, but there was one package of parsnips left unopened. Tilly pocketed these, then picked up the scythe and hoe and walked down the steps.
Finding somewhere to belong started right here, in the enchanting wilderness of Stardew Valley. It started with parsnips.
The underbrush gave way slowly against the dull blade of the scythe. There were still chunks of it bent back from her walk to the cabin yesterday evening after the bus had dropped her off. What a totally abysmal time it was. Not only had the mayor himself, Old Lewis, met her at the bus stop, but he actually escorted her here. Couldn't he tell she just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep the day of travel away? Couldn't he tell she had no idea what to say to him, how to speak at all, and had no memory of him from “when you were barely to my hip!” as he so affectionately described? He looked about ready to cry seeing the farm in disarray, talking about how much he missed Tilly's grandfather. Awkward didn't even begin to describe the whole thing.
She took out her frustration on the weeds. Heat flared into her face and chest. The interaction played on loop in her mind until she had to sit down and put her head in her hands. Tilly felt dirt smear over her cheeks and forehead but she ignored it.
Often Tilly felt like she would be better off invisible. Being seen, perceived in any way, being interacted with and expected to reply. It was all so exhausting. Back when she worked at Joja Corp, she had to spend hours building herself up to get to the office and hours more afterward decompressing. People didn't really talk to her in her cubicle much, and when they did it was faux-niceties, scripted small talk, always the same. It was perfectly manageable and totally soul sucking. It was that which finally pushed her to read the letter and move out to Stardew Valley. Real life, fresh air, the potential for new connections, as terrifying as the thought was. The small mining town hardly boasted its population. She would be able to work and go unnoticed until she was ready to face the town. All she had to do was make it here.
And here she was.
She stood and paced back and forth between her front steps and the mailbox. Her breathing came in rhythm with her steps. In, out. Left, right. Back and forth. Just beyond the mail box was an old shipping container where her grandfather used to store produce for selling. It looked about ready to fall over. Everything on this farm did. So much of it needed fixing. Fixing was something she was good at. She reminded herself it wasn't just for her sake she was living here. For her grandfather's legacy, for the heart of her mother. For the magic in the soil.
She tilled the earth, churning it into something usable, and started shoving seeds into the ground by the instructions on the back of the packet. Not too deep, a few inches apart. When she ran out of room for seeds in her new little garden bed she stood and put her hands on her hips. It was a long strip that took up much of the space in front of her steps, but that was alright. That could be managed. Now she just needed to water them.
She found her grandfather's old watering can full of rain water just a few feet away from the rest of his tools. It proved deceptively heavy. The handle creaked but didn't break. Yet. That would just be another thing to repair. The can drenched the soil easily, but left Tilly struggling to lift its heavy weight by the end of the row. Her arms ached. She jiggled the handle, listening to the water slosh around inside. There would be plenty left to water again tomorrow.
She crawled her way back into the porch, already dead on her feet. The watering can hit the wood with a crunch and she winced. More repairs. Luckily, she would have no lack of wood.
Tilly cast a glance around the forest as another thought came to mind. She recalled a pond and a small lake somewhere on the property. But she couldn’t see it. There may have been a well somewhere too, but the odds of that still standing with this much overgrowth were low. She stepped back into the cabin and looked around. What was left of the decrepit kitchen had collapsed in and been boarded up. There was no running water in the house.
Oh, Yoba, what had she done?
She put herself to bed and tried not to think about it.
The next day, the TV reflected a similarly dismal staticky lack of information. Tilly smacked the top of the frame, then jiggled the antenna until a grainy faded image of the weatherman appeared on her screen. She crossed her fingers.
“Welcome to KOZU 5…” the figure said. It was the same, now much older, man that had always been the weather anchor for KOZU 5. The familiarity brought her comfort. “It’s going to rain all day tomorrow.”
For the first time since stepping off the bus, Tilly smiled.
She watered her crops with arms so sore she thought they might fall off, then ordered Joja takeout to her door. With some of the last logs in the storage outside she built herself a meager fire and dragged her bed closer to enjoy the warmth. Hope blossomed in her chest. It would be hard, but it wouldn’t be all bad all the time.
The rain came and time passed. She enjoyed the cool air and spent most of the day tidying the house and assessing the damage. Most of the main room was fine enough, a few patch jobs here and there. The kitchen and cellar were totally unusable, dangerous even. She wouldn’t be able to fix those on her own. The porch and siding she could do herself if she had the supplies. Soon she would have to get out there and clear some of the trees out, but a rainy day wasn’t made for that. Rainy days are made for reading.
She dug through her grandfather’s old stuff and pulled out his journals, scouring the pages in much the same way she had with his letter, with a desperate hunger for a remnant of his voice. The journals told of his first years here, how much he struggled to manage on his own, how many of the Stardew residents had helped him overcome it with gifts, advice, and company. They described a community center with a communal pantry and a gorgeous fish tank. That’s where he met a man named Willy.
Her eyes drifted to the mailbox outside her window. Yesterday a letter had come in from a man named Willy, offering to meet at the beach. The idea filled her with fear. Was it the same Willy? Had she met him once upon a time and forgotten? She had no idea. Everything still felt too new to risk it. Maybe one day. Certainly not today.
In his last journals her grandfather lamented not being able to take care of the land like he used to. New generations had come in and he couldn’t maintain the community center for them. Neither could Lewis, he was just as old and half as competent (if he was being generous). Willy would have loved to, but he had his own struggles with his boat breaking down.
That night, Tilly dreamed of the community center. An old memory from her childhood. The smell of cedar wood and fresh produce, the sound of the other children playing. She wanted that feeling again. Innocence, play, friendship. All the things working for corporate Joja had taken from her.
She woke up more determined than ever. The Valley had breathed new life into her already.
Her first harvest of parsnips came fairly quickly. Thick, pale vegetables with a hearty flavour. She piled them into a bag and put them in the shipping bin. The next day she found a bag of gold in her mailbox. Crazy old Lewis was at least good for one thing.
Her new routine became easier. Every morning those ten steps to the door became less of a chore and more like a habit. A second harvest of parsnips came and went to the bin. Before she knew it, spring was almost half over. The shed was freshly out of wood and so she had a new task. The trees were calling.
On a clear and warm morning as she stood bravely on her porch, Tilly’s eyes landed on a new sapling, just beyond her usual step path. She searched her mind for the name of it based on Grandpa’s old books. An acorn maybe? It would be hard to say from this distance. She stepped down to it with a heavy, nervous breath and reached for the sapling.
Something on her hip snapped open, her axe popping free of its holster before she could catch it. The rest happened in slow motion. The sharp head hit the sapling dead on, crashing into the soft earth and breaking the seed at the base. She yanked the axe back but the damage was already done. The leaves lay pathetically on the ground. She stared at it for several moments, her heart sinking.
Maybe she should have checked the fortune teller channel today for luck.
Tilly decided to go back to bed. Trees could wait for another day.
Only a few days later, after she had wallowed in bed until the rain came back, she heard a knock at the door. A wizened woman with a long red braid and a lumpy bundle in her arms stood on the porch. The lump meowed.
“Hello there, um,” she blinked the rain out of her eyes. “Tilly, right? Mayor Lewis said that you had moved here to fix up your grandfather's farm.”
The woman waited for a response, but Tilly found her throat closed up tight and her jaw clenched shut for good measure. The woman gave Tilly a good natured smile and kept speaking.
“Well, you see this cat here?” The lump began to wriggle, two little orange ears popping out from under the fabric. It gave another mournful meow. “I found it outside the entrance to your farm. I think it’s a stray, poor thing… He must not be liking this rain.”
Again the woman paused, waiting for a reaction. Tilly just stared at the cat. The cat stared back, wiggling further out of the woman’s grasp. It sprung free and landed with a damp thud by Tilly’s feet before scrabbling into the cabin without asking permission.
The woman laughed lightly. “I think he likes this place. Hey, um… Don’t you think the farm could use a good cat?”
Tilly glanced into the room to where the cat had already found the warmth of the fireplace and rough carpet to curl up on and dry off. She shrugged, managing a small smile to appease the stranger.
She wrung her hands together. “What will you call him?”
Ages ago, her mother had brought home a similar looking creature. Just as disheveled and just as pathetic. It was adorable, orange, and oh so stupid. Tilly loved the thing until its last days. She loved it still.
“Cricket,” she recalled its name.
“Cricket,” the woman echoed. “Well, I hope he’ll be a good kitty now.” She took a few steps back from the porch back into the rain. She looked around the farm with that familiar look: pity. Grief. She smiled at Tilly once more and waved. “Oh,” she added from the fence line as if just remembering. “My name is Marnie, by the way.”
Tilly spent the rest of the day trying to bond with the cat. Cricket wasn’t responsive to treats or noises, and preferred to keep to the corner of the cabin. The next day Tilly found he had wriggled out some hole or another and had disappeared into the trees.
After that, days began to fly by. She took her sweet time with things, taking care not to disturb any more baby trees. First the shipping bin was repaired, making it more secure from animals and better for storage. Then her porch. Then the breezy siding and even a small chunk of her roof she felt brave enough to patch up. Tilly got stronger.
On rainy days the cat would return to the cabin to keep dry and warm. Tilly enjoyed those days the most. He wouldn’t cuddle often, only occasionally sleeping at the end of her bed, but kept the place relatively pest free and Tilly found herself adding toys and treats to her regular Joja deliveries.
She took a long break over winter, her Joja take out boxes piling up as a cardboard monolith of her past. Cricket enjoyed a few of the bigger boxes, but the rest became an eye sore. She wasn’t running out of money yet but her second year here would have to be different. She would have to really commit to the farm.
The next two seasons she spent clearing more of the land and selling her spare lumber. Maybe it was just her way of spending more time away from the town, but it made her happy enough and kept her afloat. She made herself a brand new storage chest out of some of the spare wood. By Fall of her second year she had gleaned enough information from the old books to capitalize on the magic of the land and cultivate her little lumber farm.
It wasn’t much. But, Yoba, it was better than Joja.