Work Text:
The book picked for today meant Buddy would be spending a lot of time with the hero. Usually, this meant hearing a lot of bland dialogue about saving young maidens from dastardly foes such as himself, but today it meant sitting on the couch with Prunella, listening to her recount various facts about wilderness survival.
There were two hot chocolates sitting on the coffee table, both made by Buddy and tasting surprisingly good. He figured the saving grace had to have been the fact his character was a witch. If he didn’t have magical powers, he probably would’ve burned the milk. God, that would’ve been humiliating to tell Violet--she would’ve laughed at him, probably so hard she’d end up in tears. Keys couldn’t even cry.
“…You do know the three three’s, right, Buddy?” A shrewd voice was saying, breaking him from his spell of distraction.
He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, struggling for words and coming up with an amazingly witty, “Uhm.”
She scrunched her nose up at him.
“Buddy, I’m eight and I know this.” Before he could interject with anger, she went on, “Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Got it?”
He bit back a sigh and rested his head against the palm of his hand, nodding. He considered informing his companion the last time he’d taken a real drink of water was around three hundred thousand days ago. It would’ve been far past three weeks since the last time he’d eaten if Chase didn’t keep on slipping him chocolate.
“Good,” she said, patting his knee like a parent might to a child. “That’s like, super important. If you ever get stranded, then you gotta know it.”
“Really?” he murmured, voice low with disengagement.
“Yes,” Prunella stressed. “I can’t call you a wilderness survivor like me if you don’t know it. Even Deacon’s one.”
“Is he now?” Buddy asked, raising an eyebrow.
“After he passed my test, yes,” she said, patting Buddy on the shoulder this time. “It sounds hard, but it’s really not.”
In the least offending way possible, he reached over and gently pushed her hand off of him, not in the mood for being touched by her. Children had grubby hands and he had a nice outfit.
With a slight frown, Prunella’s hand went back to sitting in her lap, which Buddy noticed. He cleared his throat awkwardly.
“I, uhm,” Buddy was getting choked up on the word to follow. “Sorry— can you ask before touching me?”
The word ‘sorry’ rolled off of the tongue too easily and left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth. He’d been apologizing a lot more after meeting Chase. He was stiff with them, like testing a sore muscle that he slept on wrong, but he figured this was an appropriate time to test it.
Prunella looked at him, unmoved.
“Yeah,” she said, nowhere near as emotional as Buddy was. “You don’t gotta say sorry. Mom says I shouldn’t be sorry for feeling uncomfortable, so you shouldn’t be either.”
Then she added, “Buddy, you’re a bit of a wimp.”
“Excuse me?” he snapped, a more villainessesque tone finding its way to his words.
“I can tell,” she said, smiling cheekily at him.
“You are a child. You’re not such a judge of moral character or anything remotely in that field— I am absolutely not a wimp.” Buddy let his distaste for the word be known by a harmless flick to her forehead.
She flinched away, scowling playfully. “HEY! I’m eight, not three! I can tell when people are wimps, Buddy!”
“Tit for tat,” he muttered, leaning back before she could try and retaliate.
Prunella resettled herself on the couch, sitting criss-cross on the nice, plush red velvet cushions. He looked down at her shoes, a frown flickering across his face before smoothing itself into a controlled neutral. Maybe the real crimes were being committed against this couch; as a self respecting villainess, Buddy rarely dirtied storybook furniture. Prunella, on the other hand, was a messy child who liked to stomp about in muck and cause a ruckus.
Maybe Goldie did have more in common with her than he thought. The two were bold and loud, and Prunella did have some heroic traits, like the way she left huge messes everywhere. Heroes, always creating the most havoc.
“Which one of you picked this book out, anyway? Freckles?” Buddy asked her, picking his mug of hot chocolate and taking a contemplative sip. (Or chugged it, as Prunella would share with the Hollows later)
She eyed him, catching onto his impatience. “I did!”
“Oh?” he said after a beat of silence created by the drink occupying his attention and mouth. “It’s a rather…slow book, isn’t it? Why’d you want to do it?”
The only thing taking a long time was the scene where, after fighting off ten million evil bears in the forest, the heroine finally encounters the villainess. This had been a big part of Prunella’s strategy, and a sweet, faux smile spread across her face.
“I wanted to ‘cause then I could play with kitties. And deer. Oh, and that evil-turned-nice bear.”
However, Buddy seemed to be getting fed up with how little time he was getting with Chase. He was looking a bit anxiously over at the door, like a nervous cat waiting for his owner to return home.
“Do you think we should see if he’s okay? Uhm, Freckles, too I guess,” Buddy said.
“Nope!” Prunella chirped. “I wanted to ask if you’d make potions with me.”
To try and get him to refocus on her and not on his cooties infested boyfriend, Prunella snapped her fingers at his face. His eyes widened and he did look at her, startled.
“...What?” Buddy asked, guard up. “Are you trying to…play with me?”
“Yep!” she said, grinning and already getting ahead of herself. “We could play Lady Lovalorn if you don’t wanna do potions-- or maybe even cards? Or could I tell you more fun facts? For knowledge?”
If he were a cat, his ears would be flattening and his tail bristling. “Huh?”
She slowed down, catching his hostility towards the very suggestion. Her smile fell into a soft frown that fit her face: almost babyish and still innocent. A pang of guilt kicked him in the heart, and he swallowed, trying to figure out what to say next.
“...Uhm, don’t you have…companions in the real world that’d play with you instead?” Buddy said, speaking carefully now.
Prunella’s frown deepened in severity. “No, not really.”
“Oh.” Maybe that was a bit of a leap in assumption on his end. He remembered looking for meager work when he was around her age, so it wasn’t like he had any playmates. Or schooling, even.
“I mean, Chase and Deacon have already heard all of my stories, Mr. Ralph is busy all the time, and…mom’s busy, too…” Prunella’s disappointment was starting to radiate off of her in waves, making Buddy feel even worse. “The keys know all of my games, too…”
“Okay!” he half said, half exclaimed sharply. She startled, eyes widening and a sparkle returning to them. “Fine! Yes! We can make potions or whatever it is you do to play.”
This was how Buddy found himself squatted down in the grass while Prunella dug a hole in the ground. He had tried to negotiate some better terms for himself but to no avail; he had to be a helper.
“Water.” A very grabby hand was held out, and Buddy relented, handing her the water bottle she had taken into the book. She poured it in and the two watched it get absorbed into the dirt instantaneously.
“Isn’t this how you make mud?” he asked her, unimpressed with the result.
“Not if you add enough water. Then you’ll get a puddle,” Prunella replied, demonstrating by dumping the rest of her bottle in.
It made for very ugly, muddy brown water. “Okay. Grass.”
Buddy groaned. “Do I have to? I don’t want to get dirty.”
“Buddy, we’ve gone over this. It’s being a helper or the potion tester, and usually I only make my animals test ‘em. We’ll be working with dangerous materials. Poison, even.”
He sighed and trotted off, picking some green blades of grass and throwing in some dandelions and daisies for extra measure. If a mundane backyard’s variety of grass and flowers were considered poisonous, then yes, Prunella would be an experienced stuffed animal assassin. Buddy snorted underneath his breath as he brought it back to her.
Buddy dumped the flowers and grass down by her, and Prunella nodded in a distracted thanks. She had started humming while he was away, and kept it up while she worked. It was a cheery, off-key tune.
Prunella picked the petals off of the daisies with practiced precision, then offered the stem to Buddy. He accepted, staring at it dumbly.
“Disposal,” she said.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Get rid of it.”
Buddy tossed it over his shoulder and tried to hide his amusement. Trying to squat by her was getting tiring on his legs, so he sat down with crossed legs, even if he couldn’t help but worry about grass stains.
Wordlessly, Prunella stood up and scampered off, coming back with a leaf that she ripped into pieces before mashing up with the stick. “Okay. It's done.”
“What’s it do?” Buddy asked her, smirking slightly. He leaned over to examine the end result, which looked like an eight year old had dug a hole and put a bunch of plants in it.
“Well, I think I’ll make Chase drink it. I think it’d be funny.”
“...Sounds good,” Buddy agreed, expression sharpening into something more mischievous. Not like he would do that for real, but it would be kind of funny to try and get him to.
“Okay, we can go back inside now,” Prunella announced, standing up and dusting her pants off. “I think Chase and Deacon and Wave will be here soon. Then you get to threaten them. That’s fun, right?”
“Sure, kid,” Buddy said, following after her with an awfully sincere smile on his face. Maybe he did have a little fun, after all.