Chapter Text
The reward came, as most small mercies in the realm did, without explanation. A good round with no losses, the timer run down with time to spare, and afterward, five small paper packets appeared among the usual scattering of coin and scrip in the form of their player points. The packets were labeled cress seeds.
"I did ask," Two Time said, turning one packet over in their hands with evident satisfaction, "for a greater variety of vegetables. It appears, on occasion, that even the Spectre listens."
"Or it simply wished to mock us with something so small," Dusekkar offered, though not unkindly.
Elliot took one of the packets, inspecting it with the practiced eye of a boy who'd grown up around a kitchen. "You're supposed to soak them first, usually. Or eat them with something else — a sandwich, a salad, that sort of thing. Not much of a meal on their own."
Dusekkar, who had already opened his packet and tipped a small measure directly into the flickering grin of his mouth before anyone could finish that sentence, chewed thoughtfully.
"A modest taste," he pronounced, with the air of a man rendering formal judgment. "Not fine, nor foul. Rather okay, in fact. I shall not soak mine, Elliot; I find I do not mind the plainness of the act."
Elliot opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and simply sighed the way one does around someone who has, historically, eaten far worse.
Two days passed before Two Time noticed the small green shoot growing from the seam of Dusekkar's pumpkin head.
"You appear," they said, rather curiously, "to be sprouting."
Dusekkar attempted, and failed, to look at his own face, and settled instead for patting along the rim of his pumpkin until his fingers found it. There was a thin, pale sprout, entirely undisturbed by the fire burning an inch away.
"Ah," he said, with remarkable composure. "So that explains the itch I could not place. It would seem, Two Time, I've become a growing space."
By the following morning, there were four more.
It became, briefly, something of an event. Taph found it delightful and started trying to stick garden labels onto Dusekkar's robe whenever he sits still long enough, the way you'd label plants in a garden bed, before opting to string tags on the pumpkin's antlers instead.
Veeronica asked, with great politeness, whether she might record the growth rate for her own records, and received a solemn nod in return. Two Time inspected the sprouts each morning with the seriousness of a farmer conducting rounds, occasionally offering commentary such as "Coming along nicely", as though Dusekkar were, in fact, a plot of land.
Dusekkar bore all of it with good humor.
"A pumpkin's meant for growing things, it seems I've simply proven true," he said one afternoon, watching a sprout sway gently as Two Time hurried past mid-chase. "Peculiar, yes, and yet, in truth, I do not mind this life anew."
By the third day, the sprouts had filled out properly, a small green tuft crowning one side of his head like an ill-advised hat. By the fourth, they were simply gone, with no warning, no fanfare. Dusekkar checked with both hands the moment he remembered, found only smooth pumpkin where the cress had been, and paused, for a moment, with something that might have been genuine wistfulness.
"They've had their span, and now their time is spent," he said. "A short life, given freely. Well lived, and well content."
Elliot, overhearing, produced a second packet with the eagerness of a boy who had been waiting the entire four days for precisely this moment.
"...Another round, then?"
Dusekkar regarded the packet, then Elliot, then, with as much dignity as a man in his position could summon, extended an open palm.
"Go on," he said. "Plant away. I find I am, it seems, agreeable to being a garden."