Chapter Text
It’s early in the morning when Stephanie wakes up, a bare half-light filtering in under her curtain, but she can already tell that she won’t be able to go back to sleep. She’s restless, for some reason, an agitated kind of itch that Sportacus had said might be growing pains. He’d recommended going for a nice walk, just to stretch out her muscles, and Sportacus has never given her bad advice, so she pulls on her dress and shoes and sneaks out of the house. She can hear her Uncle snoring from the street; he clearly hasn’t woken up yet.
It’s still early enough that the sun isn’t quite over the horizon. She should be able to see the sunrise from the park if she’s lucky. The air is fresh and cool, although it’s strange walking around town when nobody else is about. Although she isn’t, she realises. A familiar figure in blue is kneeling down by a park bench, poking at something on the ground. It’s Sportacus!
Unless it’s Robbie Rotten in disguise, she thinks suddenly. She’s never seen him up this early, but he has to put his schemes together at some point, she supposes. She sneaks over to investigate and taps him on the shoulder.
“Oh, hello Stephanie,” Sportacus says placidly. He doesn’t cringe away or jump ten feet in the air, which means this probably isn’t Robbie in disguise. “What are you doing up this early?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I remembered that you told me to take a walk when I felt restless, and I did. It really helped. Are you making mud-pies?”
Sportacus looks back from Stephanie to the hole he’s dug in the dirt. “No, no. I am planting flowers. I thought that it might look nice here beside the bench. They are not flowering now, because it is not good to move plants when they are flowering, but they will have lovely white flowers when they grow a little more.”
“So they don’t grow sportscandy?”
He laughs. “No, they don’t. But plants make our air fresh so that we can breathe it, so they are still doing a very important job. Would you like to help me plant them?”
“Yes please,” Stephanie says. Sportacus hands her a tray of seedlings and shows her how to gently push one out without damaging it.
“Now all you have to do is put it in the hole, and fill the dirt back in around it,” Sportacus explains. “Try not to knock any of the dirt away from the roots, because they will get damaged. Yes, exactly like that. You are a natural at this, Stephanie.”
“Thanks, Sportacus. What about the other one?”
“That one will go on the other side of the bench, I think. I will dig the hole, because the ground is quite hard here, but I would love it if you would help me plant it too.”
“Sure,” Stephanie says, and watches him vault over the bench and dig the spade into the ground. “What kind of flower is this?”
“Poppies, because I already had some poppy seeds,” Sportacus explains. “I noticed that this is the bench that Robbie Rotten likes to sleep on most. There is an old language of flowers that says that poppies are good to help people sleep. I thought that they would be a good fit for this place. Here, Stephanie, it’s time for you to put the plant in the hole.”
She eases the tiny seedling carefully into the hole and pats the soil down around it. Sportacus shows her how to carefully water the base of the plants, then stands up, hands on his hips, and nods decisively.
“Good job, Stephanie!” he says. “Now I’ve got to go!”
He flips off, watering can in one hand, leaving Stephanie to sit on the bench and watch the sunrise. It was nice of Sportacus to think of Robbie like that. Maybe if he could sleep a little better, he wouldn’t get mad and interrupt their games so much.
But if Robbie didn’t interrupt them, he’d never get to play with them. And Stephanie’s pretty sure that Sportacus likes it when Robbie joins in with their games.
Stephanie frowns. Robbie always tells Sportacus to go away after he saves him, but Sportacus says it’s just because he’s embarrassed. Maybe if she made friends with Robbie first, he could stop being embarrassed and play with them all. Robbie’s really just a big softie, after all. All she has to do is make friends with Robbie.
How hard could it be?
It’s late in the afternoon when Stephanie finally gets a chance to talk to Robbie on his own. She’s been planning this all day, trying to work out what she might be able to say to him to get him to spend some time with her. All the best games she knows are ones for a lot of people, not just two. She can’t just ask him to be her friend. Robbie’s tricky, and if you want to be friends with him, you have to be tricky too.
She can’t change her plan now. Robbie’s already slinking off, making for the edge of town much faster than she expected. His legs are much longer than hers, and she has to run to try to keep up with him. She was going to try to sneak after him, but he ducks behind that weird cow billboard and she realises that she’s going to lose him if she doesn’t say something.
“Robbie, wait!” Stephanie says. She rounds the billboard to find Robbie looking down at her suspiciously.
“What do you want?”
She hesitates. Maybe she should come back later. She likes playing with Robbie, but Sportacus had said that sometimes some people need a little more space than others. Robbie doesn’t look angry. He just looks worn out.
“Spit it out, Pinkie, I haven’t got all day.”
Here goes nothing, she thinks. She puts on her best innocent face, all doe-eyes and smiles, and says, “I was wondering if you could teach me how to do my hair. It keeps getting in my face when I’m playing, and since yours always looks so nice, I thought maybe you might be able to help me?”
“I do always look good, don’t I.” Robbie says, looking into the distance as he absently smooths down his hair. After a few second his gaze snaps back to Stephanie. “I suppose I could take some time out of my busy schedule to help you. What’s in it for me?”
“Cake?”
Robbie shakes his head. “Nope, nuh-uh, I’ve already got as much cake as I want. I don’t need you to make it for me.”
Oh no, she didn’t plan for this. She thinks and thinks, but she honestly doesn’t know what else Robbie would want. She’s not going to offer to help get rid of Sportacus, because she likes Sportacus. She doesn’t want to stop playing, either. It’s actually a bit sad how little she knows about Robbie, considering how much time he spends around them. She knows that he likes sweets, and people being quiet. That’s it.
“Please, Robbie. Everyone knows you’re the best at this! Nobody else knows enough to be able to help me, not even Sportacus.”
Robbie frowns, then kneels down and looks her straight in the eyes. He stares at her for the longest ten seconds of Stephanie’s life. Then he abruptly straightens up and makes for a hatch Stephanie hadn’t noticed.
“Fine then. Come along, my time is important, the faster you learn the faster you can leave.”
He throws the hatch open and gestures at Stephanie to follow him, then jumps down the pipe. She climbs the ladder and looks down into the pipe. It’s deep and dark, and all of a sudden it hits her that she’s following the town villain into his lair.
Robbie’s voice echoes up the pipe, telling her to hurry up, and she grits her teeth. Robbie needs a friend, and she’s going to make sure he has one. She takes one last look into the pipe and jumps.
She shoots out the far end of the pipe and lands upside-down on a squashy orange armchair. She’d expected something dark, all blacks and muted purples, but there’s actually a lot more orange in the room than she expected. Robbie himself is standing off to one side, covering his mouth as he yawns hugely.
“I don’t suppose you thought to actually bring any hair ties,” he says wryly. She shakes her head and he huffs, yanking drawers opens and spilling their contents out onto the floor.
“Aha!” Robbie says, and holds a couple of brown hairties up in triumph. “Not quite your colour, but we’ll make it work. Sit up properly.”
She slides around until she’s sitting upright in the chair. Robbie spins his finger to indicate that she should turn around, so she faces the back of the chair and sits cross-legged. Her hair doesn’t tangle easily, which she’s grateful for, because Robbie isn’t quite as gentle as he could be as he brushes it out and pins one half off to the side.
“I don’t suppose you know how to plait?” Robbie asks. She tries to shake her head before she realises he’s still holding some of her hair, and winces.
“No. Sorry.”
“Then we’d better start there,” Robbie says. He’s doing something strange to her hair, and before long he’s tied it off with a hairtie and is working on the other side. “You’ll be better off with a braid, since your hair is so short. I’ll braid it for you today, and you can practice plaiting. It’s not difficult once you’ve been shown how.”
She does her best not to squirm. “This feels funny.”
“Of course it does. Have you ever done your hair properly in your life? No, don’t answer that.”
Stephanie shuts her mouth.
“At any rate, you don’t look as horrendous as you did a few minutes ago. What do you think?”
She looks in the mirror that Robbie is offering her and gasps. “I look so different! How did you do that?”
Robbie scoffs. “I didn’t even put any makeup on you. You look just as annoying and pink as usual.”
“I love it, Robbie,” she says honestly. “Can you show me how to do it myself?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Pinkie. I’ve got yarn around here somewhere. Don’t move.”
He wanders off to rummage through the drawers again, and Stephanie lays back, slides down towards the ground and kicks up off the chair, pushing herself into a handstand. Her hair doesn’t get in her face at all! She’ll have to do something really nice to thank Robbie for this. Maybe she’ll bake him a cake after all. He said he didn’t want one, but Robbie says a lot of things that aren’t really true.
“Must you do that?” Robbie says as she tumbles back to the ground.
“I had to test it out,” she says defensively.
“Whatever. Come over here, and walk, please, there will be no flip-flopping about while you’re in my house.”
She follows him around to the back of the chair, where three differently-coloured strands of yarn have been tied into a knot and safety-pinned to the back of the chair. He sits her down and arranges her hands around the yarn.
“Hold the strands away from each other like this. You need to pass the purple strand on the right over the top of the white strand in the middle, so they’re in opposite places. Yes, just like that. Hold them apart again so they don’t get tangled. Now pass the blue strand on the left over the top of the purple strand in the middle, so they switch places.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly. Then you repeat those steps, except the colours have moved places, so instead you’re always just moving an outside strand over the middle one, right and then left.”
Stephanie screws up her face in concentration and twists the white strand on the right over the blue strand in the middle, then rearranges her hands so the strands are all separate. She looks up at Robbie to check she’s doing it right, and he nods.
“Now the left.”
The blue strand twists over the purple, and Robbie nods at her once more. “You’re a pretty good teacher, Robbie.”
“No, it’s just easy,” Robbie says. “Now sit there and practice until you’ve used up all that yarn. I don’t want to hear a peep out of you until you’re done.”
“Of course, Robbie,” Stephanie says, and sets to work twisting the strands of yarn around each other. She’s really slow at it, nowhere near as fast as Robbie was when he did her hair, but the repeating pattern of purple, white and blue starts to show up and she feels really proud of herself.
“Look, Robbie, I did it!” she exclaims when she reaches the end of the yarn. “I did just what you told me to and it-”
She stops abruptly and covers her mouth when a loud snore comes from the other side of the chair. “Robbie?” she whispers.
He doesn’t respond. She sneaks around the other side of the chair to find Robbie curled up, eyes shut. He’s even sucking his thumb. He must really be tired to fall asleep at this time of day. No wonder Sportacus was worried.
His blanket’s fallen on the floor, so she pulls it back up over him and crawls up the pipe. She’s not quite sure how she’s able to, given how steep it is, but she can, so she’s not going to question that bit of luck. The hatch itself is really heavy, but she opens it too, with a little bit of effort. Maybe Robbie did something with one of his machines so that he could come and go all the time. She thinks the hatch would be hard to lift even for Sportacus, and Robbie’s definitely not Sportacus.
She climbs down the ladder and looks around. She’s never been around the back of the billboard before. There’s not really anything there except the entrance to Robbie’s lair and some flowers, gently bending in the breeze. They’re really pretty. She’d pick one, but the ground around them is all muddy, like someone’s just watered them.
It can’t have been Robbie, because she’s been with Robbie, and before that he was busy trying to convince Trixie to move to Mayhem Town, and before that he was sleeping on the park bench. The park bench, which also had newly-watered flowers around it, courtesy of Sportacus.
These ones aren’t poppies, though. Stephanie knows what poppies look like, and these are very different. They’ve got a white spotty petal at the top, two reddish petals almost like arms, and a bowl-shaped red petal at the bottom. She’s never seen a flower like them before. And why did Sportacus plant them here, where no-one would see them?
No, she realises, that’s wrong. Robbie would see them, almost every day. She bets they have a meaning, too, just like the poppies. Maybe they’re meant to help Robbie calm down or something. The library in her home town would have a book on plants, but Lazytown is so small that it doesn’t even have a library. How is she supposed to find out what they mean if she doesn’t even know what kind of plant they are?
Suddenly she brightens. She might not know what they are or what they mean, but she knows who does.
Pixel is right where she expects him to be, in his room surrounded by his computers. Lazytown might not be lazy any more, but it’s getting dark outside. They can’t play in the dark.
“Hey Pixel,” Stephanie says as nonchalantly as she can. “You can find anything on the internet, right?”
“Yeah, of course. What are you looking for?”
“I’ve seen some flowers around town and I don’t know what kind they are, that’s all. I want to be able to tell what kind they are, and how they grow, and when they grow, and what they mean, and everything. Sportacus has been so busy lately that I don’t want to trouble him, but I really want to know more!”
“Hm,” Pixel says. “I could invent something that does that. It shouldn’t be too hard to integrate a photographic imager with an information database, and maybe with…”
He trails off, fingers tapping at the keyboard almost too fast for Stephanie to see. She knows better than to interrupt him when he’s hit inspiration, so she smiles and writes him a quick note.
‘Thanks, Pixel! I really appreciate it.’
He’ll find it when he eventually surfaces, she thinks, and sticks it to the outside of his door.
She could just ask Sportacus. But she thinks about the sad smile he has sometimes when he talks about Robbie, and she doesn’t.