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The clock on the wall ticks away patiently. And loudly. This is unfortunate, because - well, Flame is in the middle of reorganizing his ender chest for the third time tonight. He’s not really reorganizing anything, just filling empty time with shulkers and gapples. Not that he has anything better to do, though.
“Lomedy,” he yells, poking his head out the door. His farmer friend has just finished replanting the carrot field. The golden rim of the sunset - it’s almost fully night now - shines behind him. “Lom, can you turn this clock thing off?”
“Hm,” Lomedy yells back, “what?”
“Turn the clock thing off!” Flame yells. Lomedy skips across the gap between them - not very big, really, just a good-sized path and a few bushes, Flame was just yelling ‘cause he was lazy - and enters the house.
“Bro,” he says, “why are you reorganizing your shulkers again? Didn’t you do that the day before yesterday?”
“Stuff gets lost,” Flame lies.
“Right,” Lomedy says, unconvinced. “Bro, we got lots of stuff to do, if you’re bored.”
“Yeah, but -”
“But you’re scared of hurting my crops? But the chickens are so easy to step on?” Lomedy laughs - clear and ringing and unafraid. In a word: free. “C’mon, they’re not that delicate.” Before Flame can protest, Lomedy grabs his arm and drags him out the door. “I’m gonna need you to drop some fertilizer on the crops. A little for each, remember? Just a pinch.” A bag of something - Flame squints his eyes and reads DARNIE’S FERTILIZER - is tossed into his arms. The rough cloth, probably an off-white in the day, is gray in the newly-born night. “You won’t hurt the green things if you walk in the dips between crops,” Lomedy demonstrates. “Got it?”
“Uh.”
“Bro, you’ll be fiiine,” Lomedy assures, and then pushes him off.
For a moment, Flame has this utterly lost expression on his face, like a duckling separated from its mama in a too-big lake. And then a breath of wind sends him into action, and he’s marching between rows and endless rows of black-brown dirt - “good dirt”, as Lomedy calls it - with tiny little green things poking out. It’s work, but it’s easy work, compared to all the battles he’s fought. It’s awkward work.
He’s never had to care for something so little, so delicate, so precious. Not like Lomedy, who’s well-practiced in the art of being kind and caring and gentle. No, Flame’s brutal and quick; he’s a killer. Not like Lomedy, who strolls through the fields so easily, graceful like tree leaves rustling in the wind. No, Flame marches like a soldier sent out to his doom. Not like Lomedy, who drops a pinch of fertilizer on each plant like rain and sends them off with good wishes and prayers. No, Flame drops fertilizer and walks to the next, leaving the plant in somehow-awkward silence. Like it was the good, the right thing to talk to it.
Crazy, Flame thinks, but the next time he drops fertilizer he’s more gentle, whispers a good luck under his breath.