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Spoke snaps the rose off of the bush, careful to avoid the thorns.
It's the same practiced motion he's been repeating all day since the crack of dawn. His yield—nearly three stacks of cornflowers—sits preserved as items in his inventory. And that's the only type of flower he picked— no lilies, no daisies, no poppies. If anyone were to ask 'why?' he would probably answer with a shrug. Maybe a 'just felt like it' for good measure.
With the thorned flower still in his hand, he ungracefully plops down onto the damp grass and crosses his legs. Only now does he realize how much he needs a break from all the walking he's been doing. His legs feel sore.
The view is pretty great from where he sits. A sea of flowers extends from the hill he's on all the way to the snowy mountains in the far distance. He has to squint to make out where the flowers end and where the snow starts.
Only one block to his left is the rose bush he had just plucked from. It shouldn't be here, actually, that's why he approached it; rose bushes only spawn in forests and there's not a tree to be seen within a 16-chunk radius. How odd.
Spoke tries to figure out what might have led to this odd generation, but frankly, he's drawing blanks. He's no ParrotX2 after all, with all his knowledge about obscure game mechanics and what not. But wait, what if this wasn't naturally generated? What if someone placed it and it's actually a marker for a deadly trap?
He lets these speculations bounce in his head freely as he absent-mindedly twirls the rose around in his hand. It's a pretty flower, though it isn't fully bloomed yet. Its tender, red petals stack together, overlapped in a way that creates a swirly pattern, and in the centre of it all is a small hole that seems completely dark, leaving the content entirely unknown.
Now that he thinks about it, what is in the centre? It should be the yellow little stems that all the other flowers have, but he doesn't think he's ever seen them before in roses. Spoke lifts the rose closer to his face to inspect it. He can see something glisten between the petals, which he assumes to be leftover dewdrops from the morning. He spins it around some more to get a good angle, when suddenly he's met with a faint scent that makes him stop his movements completely.
The sweet fragrance of the rose tugs at something in the back of his mind, a fragile thing that should stay on the shelf of recollections. Spoke tries to redirect his brain immediately; surely there are things he needs to be thinking about, like uh— what is he going to have for dinner? That's important, just like the kind of prank he will pull tomorrow. Or maybe he could go invis and hide behind the wall of someone's base to scare them! Wait, no. He doesn't do that anymore.
What about the cornflowers, then? What is he going to do with all of it? He probably should have thought of it when he picked this many. Maybe he could make dye with it; make a banner for the Spoke empire that's planned for next week, dye sheep all around the server blue to confuse players, but then he'd just look down and sees his hands stained with blue and a singular cornflower is floating above the ground in front of him. At least he fulfilled the promise, he catches himself thinking and immediately shoves it away.
The ground spins, the sky falls onto him and as the blue collapses, he notices red sparks flying in the air. Red as the redstone trim on his last piece of armour from him, red as all those poppies he didn't pick, red as all that he can see when he closes his eyes, which is weird, because it should be black.
Next thing he knows, he's in an entirely different place completely. He's at the unfinished house again, despite all. Crouching at the decorative ledge made of extinguished campfires, he listens to the soft thuds of wooden planks being placed and the quiet singing of the builder that accompanies it. She hums a chipper tune that has started to sound familiar to his ears. So familiar, in fact, that he occasionally catches himself humming the same song in his day-to-day activities before inevitably stopping when he realizes what he's doing.
The subtle smell of fresh roses hangs in the air as always; it did nothing back then to calm his growing panic and it does nothing now to stop the bile from rising up. He just takes a deep breath and lets it simmer. At times he wishes it could just go away. He'd come up with all these excuses on why it's morally better, on how she would've wanted him to forget it all, surely, but then he snaps out of it and thinks: Wouldn't it mean that he doesn't care? And somehow that feels more painful than this, something his good reasons can't gloss over, so he just endures it.
There's no use fighting against it all— no matter what he does in his memories, it will stay the same and trying to escape just keeps him here for longer. So, he sits down at the ledge, legs dangling from it, and decides to wait it out. His feet kick back and forth in slow, small arcs. Rose has now switched to placing cobblestone, but the song stays the same. Spoke's tail gently swishes along to her low humming; he has to will it coil around his body instead.
In the distance, Becky has once again returned from his mining trip. He excitedly reports his finds to his sister, who praises him for the good work, and they make their way back to the house. Even without seeing it, Spoke knows that there's a grin of excitement hanging on Becky's face, the one that shows off his missing front tooth that he's so proud of. He told Spoke the story of how it fell off during the month or two he and Mapicc stayed with Becky and Quackenstein.
The houses at Quackenstein's base had been cozy too, with the difference that it smelled of pine and charcoal. The three wooden cabins are still fresh in his mind, and he knows their layouts like the back of his hands— even the hidden passage in Quackenstein's cabin and the secret room it leads to. Actually, no, that wouldn't be quite right to say. He knows the layout of Quackenstein and BeckyTron's cabins like the back of his hand.
When he and Mapicc stayed with the little family they didn't have a hut of their own, nor did they ever move into the houses— Quackenstein was cautious until the very end, which is a relief to Spoke now. However, they did make a little camp right at the edge of the woods, where they watched the stars at night and woke up in the morning to Becky's giggles and his father's tired but gentle chides.
And throughout it all Spoke often found himself sitting alone by the river; it was like he was drawn to it. It always looked so blue despite being frozen over, so comforting. He often got lost staring at it, so much so that he sometimes felt like he was underneath the thick layer of ice himself, hibernating alongside the other fish.
Being fully submerged in the ice-cold water wasn't as scary as it sounds, at least in Spoke's imagination. It didn't hurt at all, and his mind felt pleasantly numb— if he opened his eyes, he'd only see the clay below him, the squids that were somehow still moving and everything would be tinted blue by the sunlight that's filtered through the ice above. And George Jr. was with him too.
He continues to swim along the lane of memories, mostly lingering on the simpler, nicer occurrences until he eventually resurfaces and notices that he's back in reality, staring at the bright afternoon sky. This episode isn't as bad as usual, but there's still a tingling in his fingertips that won't go away.
Judging by the sun's position, some time had passed since he sat down next to the rose bush. Actually, speaking of the bush, he just realized that he was still holding the rose in his hand. An impulsive part of him wants to throw it away, but another wants to store it in his ender chest and forever preserve it in its half-bloomed beauty. He wouldn't want to see it every time he opened his e-chest to get more restock, though. What if he puts it in a shulker? Then he wouldn't see it immediately.
No, this is stupid— he's looking for an answer to a problem that doesn't exist. It's literally just a flower, who cares what he does with it. Sure, it's pretty and the bush it's from is a bit odd, but there are plenty of pretty flowers out there and probably plenty that were generated weirdly. If he wanted a rose, he could get one any time, so he might as well just throw it away now.
He pulls back his arms and takes aim. He could just chuck it down the hill and never see or smell it again. It's not hard to do, in fact, it's easy; as easy as breathing, as easy as running, as easy as breaking gravel with a maxed-out shovel. He just has to— just has to get himself together and do it.
Then a buzzing sound grabs his attention and he turns his head, ready to call on his inventory in case it's one of the many people that are out to get him— but it's just a bee. It sways in the air, just a few blocks in front him, and between his confusing thoughts, he distantly wonders how far out it must've flown from its hive to get here. It hovers between the flowers, as if undecided on which one would taste the best. Spoke's body gradually relaxes, and he watches the bee fly from an azure bluet to a white tulip, then from the tulip to a poppy. His eyes are completely trained on the irregular movement of the little mob, which has developed into steady laps around a cornflower.
He really thought it was going to settle then, but out of nowhere another bee shows up and bumps it away. In the end, the bee lands on the poppy.
Spoke huffs out a breath of disappointment. He would've lost a stack of iron if there was a bet going— good thing there's no one here to bet about stupid things with. Mapicc probably would've bet on the poppy. That second bee is a paid actor, Spoke is sure of it.
Having lost interest in the bees, he looks into the distance instead and lets his eyes wander. There's not much to see aside from the flowers and the snowy peaks. Nothing new or exciting. Actually, he wonders what Mapicc is doing. He had left their base this morning while his friend was still sleeping, but he did leave a sign telling him that he'd be on a short walk. Well, it's already afternoon now, so it's not so short after all.
To be fair though, he hadn't known he was going to be gone for this long. It was supposed to be a short walk, but he kind of got off the road to go pick four or five cornflowers to decorate their base with, and then he saw a few more in the distance and then some more behind a tree and— well yeah, he's at the flower field now, with the three stacks of cornflowers still in his inventory. It also just occurred to him that he's pretty far out from the base. What if Mapicc's looking for him?
...
Nah, he's probably stocking up on TNT or something. Spoke cracks a grin, though he's not sure what's so funny about it. Either way, this isn't the first time he accidentally stayed out for too long so it should be fine. He doesn't really want to go back home right now.
With nothing else to do, he returns his gaze to the sky in hopes of seeing anything of interest. Nothing but the sun and some clouds. There's a cloud that looks like a chicken. A pretty well-fed chicken though, it looks kind of bloated. And the cloud next to it looks like a turtle with a sword in its mouth; kind of like this one pirate-samurai guy from a manga series that Spoke and Mapicc found in the Mafia's library while he was infiltrating.
Maybe the turtle is chasing the chicken because it's secretly a super bad criminal with a 10 million bounty on its head. Or maybe the chicken ate the turtle's dessert that it was saving for after dinner, which would explain why it's so fat. Ooh, what if the turtle is actually training the chicken like in that one story where a Panda learns kung fu? Like, the chicken would have to peck open training dummies to get to the seeds inside and that's how it learned PvP. Is this how Theo was trained?
At that thought Spoke started snickering. Instead of pecking though, he would be using TNT minecarts. And then when it explodes the seeds inside the dummies become popcorn and then Parrot swoops in to steal all of it to prove that he's the biggest bird. His chuckles grow in volume, and he makes a mental note to tell Mapicc all about it later.
Leaning back his upper body, he looks up for any more funny clouds he can find. He reaches the hand that isn't holding the rose behind him to help support his weight, but he flinches back the moment he touches the ground. There was something wet, something soft and malleable. Dirt is by no means unfamiliar to him; it's one of the most readily available blocks when he's on the run or when he just needs some blocks to get around. They're usually drier than this, though.
Twisting his torso to look at what he accidentally pressed his hand into, he sees that it is indeed a pile of dirt, just a little patch on the ground with no grass. But what does he do when the patch of dirt spreads around him like a ring? The grass just disappears, as if weeded out by invisible, glitching hands and the brown, damp dirt starts welling up like soup in a pot that's boiling over and he's the kung fu chicken getting boiled in the hot soup. Bits and pieces of mushrooms float around his head, a whirl of red and white, as the dirt rises up from his knees to his chest to his chin.
He feels a bit like a zombie, but in reverse, if that makes sense. Instead of crawling out of the grave and finally being on the surface again, it's like he's getting buried again and instead of craving brains, he wishes he could leave his own in an odd corner of the server where he will never find it again— even if he wanted to. Still, against his better judgement, he willingly leans into the soup-grave because when has he ever actually listened to his better judgement.
And so, he's swallowed by the ground and falls into the impossibly cold void, which is wet and all but weightless, like he doesn't even exist, like he never has, but then he does and he's standing in a makeshift mine again, with grey stone walls on all sides, the one that he dug out himself. He stares in front of himself for a whole horrifying eternity of existence.
"You're back."
She's still wearing that pastel blue and purple dress. Her hair is still that soft pink that reminds him of pink sheep, and if you think about it pink is just a washed out red, but that doesn't really say anything.
"Spacing out again?"
She's looking at him so curiously, so unafraid. Her head's tilted to the side and she's smiling, but it feels even colder than the lake. He won't let her blue dress deceive him, she's as red as can be.
"Unstable to Spoke?"
He never told her his name, this is fake. This isn't her.
"Where are you?"
His throat feels so dry that these three words alone shredded his vocal cords.
"What do you mean, I'm right here?"
Her smile is wrong. This isn't her. This is an illusion. He can't speak, not after he swallowed razors and cut his throat open, but he can still stare at her. Stare into those purple eyes. What a confusing colour, a confusing gaze, just pick a side. Her smile shifts when she realizes he won't answer.
"Look down."
Below them is a chasm that runs impossibly deep, which should be impossible because he didn't have the time nor patience to dig such a deep hole, but he sees that it did the job anyways. Impaled on a stalagmite at the bottom of the ditch is iMajesticRose. The dripstone looks like it's growing out of her stomach, just like it's growing out of her smashed in skull and her left thigh and right calf and left shoulder. They're like roses that feed off of the blood that is still flowing from her body. There's a warm, red puddle on the ground. Fresh paint that covers the wall in splatters.
Actually, now that he thinks of it, didn't his invisibility run out at just the last second? She saw him. She does know his name.
Her loot is scattered between the dripstone pillars. An axe, a pickaxe, a fishing rod, a chest plate, all in iron, but there is no sword. Wooden planks, cobblestone, oak logs, some leftover campfires that she hasn't needed for days but still keeps in her inventory anyways. Becky told him that she never had space in her inventory because she always forgot to put them in chests.
He still has that chest plate. Not hers, he didn't go down to pick it up, he couldn't. The chest plate he got from Ash. It's still there in his enderchest, the embedded diamond is still shining. He can't let her death go to waste, he always reasons, she can't have turned into a bloody, mangled lamb skewer for nothing. How much time did he spend digging that hole? Not more than ten minutes, he's sure, but it took only seconds for her to fall down, that he still remembers.
Her scream was also a short one, loud and shrill, but in his memories, it tends to be stretched out, like it is now. It rings in his ear like a perfectly looped song that plays for all of eternity, that comes from all sides, and he feels like he's the one falling down the ditch, not her, and maybe he wishes that it was him. Quackenstein probably wishes it was him, maybe even Becky, if he knew.
Spoke feels sick to his stomach. The cave is spinning, or maybe he's just being dramatic. It feels like someone threw windcharges in his insides, like his organs are rearranging themselves and the air is getting punched out of his lungs. He feels pain in his ears and realizes that he's been holding them with his hands to block out the sound, but he didn't notice any change in its volume. Nails dig into the shells of his ear in an attempt to dampen it, but he doesn't dare close his eyes.
His eyes, that stay glued to the once gentle and beautiful girl that is now a rotting corpse beneath the earth of wherever Quackenstein buried her. How must it even feel to have dripstone penetrate your stomach entirety, from the back to the front. Did it hit her spine? Did she hear the sickening crack when it happened? Did she feel it vibrate through her? He knows he heard it. Her skull, her shoulder, possibly her spine.
His own bones start aching in a way that they shouldn't, and his muscles feel like they're disintegrating, falling apart like strips of rotten wood. His face is melting, drooping like wax, and Spoke moves one of his hands from his ears to cover his mouth, as if that would keep everything in place, but he can only feel in horror as his nose and lips and eyes shift and swim in the soup that is his skin of wax.
As he does so he also feels the rough texture of some kind of sand rub against what he believes to be his cheek. He removes his hand, fingers bent in all the wrong angles, and looks down at it to see something shimmering even in the low light. Ah, the dripstone dust on his cheek. He remembers that someone had wiped it off with their sleeve after he came back from the mission. They had wiped it off so gently that he wanted to cry, so gently like he wasn't some disfigured monster, like he wasn't a heartless killer, like he was still just Spoke.
But he's not.
And so, his face drips down into the ditch, slides down the stalagmites and mingles with the pile of blood. His bones disintegrate into dust and all his rotten flesh collapses in itself, but he's still floating above the chasm. His limbs fall into the pile of gore one by one. His fingers first, then his forearm, his legs, the rest of his arms and his hips. Each piece looks more like malleable clay than the piece before, until his torso falls down as a half solid blob of flesh that is as black as the void.
He sees his white eyes that are devoid of sclera and pupil lie down there in the puddle of red, next to them is his hand, which is crushed under his ribcage, at least he assumes that's what it is. His thumb in particular is caught between the dripstone that grows from Rose's head and his left leg, which presses it into the sharp stone. The persistent prick of it feels oddly grounding, like it's proof that his nervous system still connects all parts of him. And he can still feel everything.
The warmth of the blood against his skin that doesn't feel wet at all, the softness of Rose's dress against what used to be his chin, the stinging pain from the dripstone, the stinging pain from the dripstone, the stinging pain from the thorn. The stinging pain from the thorn? The serrated edges of the leaves, the softness of his own sweatpants against his chin, the warmth of the low hanging sun shining down on him.
Spoke is in one piece again. Solid, connected, sobbing. He's hugging his knees to his chest, with his head resting on his knees and one of his hands splayed across his face. In his other hand he is holding the rose. His thumb it placed directly above a thorn, which has already pierced his skin. He can feel the sting clearly. He turns his hand slightly so that he can see where his thumb and the thorn connect. And he stares. The hand on his face slowly falls. The sting doesn't feel bad. So he pushes his thumb further.
The sting is stronger now and he almost lets out a sigh of relief. Blood now quells up from the wound and collects in a tiny bubble of surface tension; it is a droplet-to-be. It's fascinating to watch, how the red bubble grows and how the green thorn disappears into the pad of his thumb. It's red as the rose petals, red as the TNT in his hotbar, but against his pitch black skin it doesn't seem as vibrant as the blood on the pastell coloured dress. Would it penetrate his bones too, if he presses hard enough? If not, then what if he just tears a new one?
But just as he touches another thorn with his index finger, he hears rockets in the distance. He debates on whether to do it or not. Mapicc would be mad if he saw that, so he doesn't.
"Yo Spoke!"
He lifts his head and turns it around to see Mapicc flying towards him. Mapicc, red as fire and red as netherack; Mapicc, his best friend. He lands just a few blocks behind him. Spoke turns back around and lifts his thumb from the thorn. Mapicc sits down next to him.
"Dude what are you doing?"
Spoke contemplates for a second.
"Looking at flowers."
Mapicc is silent for a bit. He's also thinking. Of course he noticed.
"And before that?"
"Picking flowers."
"Right."
The sun is starting to turn orange, but the sky is still blue. Spoke stares off into the distance and twirls the rose in his hand absentmindedly.
"You got an enderchest?" he asks.
Mapicc doesn't respond. He's still observing him, taking in all the details in his face, but Spoke keeps it neutral. He places the enderchest down anyways. Spoke opens it, stores the rose into a random, unused shulker and throws it back in the enderchest.
"Did you prick yourself?"
"Hm?"
Mapicc points at his thumb and only now does Spoke notice that the blood has become a proper droplet and dripped down to his wrist. He makes an uncommital noise and lifts the hand to his mouth to lick the blood away, from his wrist to the pad of his thumb. Even after that, Mapicc is still staring at him.
"What?"
His friend's lips press together in a thin line.
"Dude, your face. Honestly, what have you been doing..."
Slowly, just slow enough so that Spoke can move away if he wants to, Mapicc extends his arms and cups his face with one hand while the other shuffles inside his sleeve. He uses the sleeve to gently rub away the dirt on his face. It must have come from the hand he held to his face. Spoke leans into the hand against his cheek and stares at him while Mapicc slowly wipes away all his filth and lies.
His soft, black hair falls over his bandana and hangs down the sides of his face. It's getting pretty long, he'll probably start complaining about it getting into his eyes in two weeks. His brows are pinched together, have been ever since Spoke turned around to look at him flying towards him. Concentration? That's a part of it, but it's mostly worry. He knows that Mapicc knows, it's probably not hard to guess. He can try to look as neutral as he wants to; he can't hide it.
"It happened twice today," he confesses, but the words aren't articulated clearly as his cheek is still smushed to Mapicc's hand. Mapicc flashes him a quick look before returning to looking at the dirt stains. He hums as a sign to continue, but Spoke has nothing else to say. So they just sit in silence until Mapicc is done cleaning his face. And when he's done, he looks him over one more time before dropping his hand. Spoke almost wants to tell him to keep it there, but he doesn't. They're both now facing the ever sinking sun, still not saying anything. In the distance, the parts of the sky that is closest to the sun starts to turn red and chases away the blissful, ignorant blue.
Then, because he can't keep what he banished to the back of his mind any longer, and he hates it when he can't, he realizes just how awful of a person he is. He killed iMajesticRose, an innocent player who was even willing to help him improve and decorate the make shift cave that he only made to kill her. He remembers it clearly as if it was yesterday, the fear in her eyes, the chocked back sobs, the promise he made to her to bring Becky the cornflower. And how Becky had screamed at him when he gave him the flower. Scared and confused but still somehow understanding of the fact that his sister is gone. How he knew Spoke quite figured out; he even sometimes muses about a telepethic connection between them that might've let him know.
During their time with Quackenstein and Becky the kid already seemed to be doing better. You could still see the sadness in his eyes when he spoke of his sister, no matter how excited he always is to talk about her. Quackenstein had also been hit deeply by her death, Spoke knew it ever since they first met. There's a lethargy about him that doesn't just come from personality and indeed, as time went on he noticed this melancholy fading bit by bit. The pain still lingers until this day, of course, he assumes it's a different kind of sorrow when the one who died is your child, someone who's supposed to outlive you.
All this for a fancy chest plate that wasn't even as good as the one he already had back then. Was it the power, was it the ranks he'd be climbing? Was it the control? Was it worth it?
"I'm just as bad as Ash, if not worse."
Mapicc, who's been fiddling with the hem of his hoodie, looks at him in confusion, like he has just randomly revealed that he's secretly an undercover agent whose name isn't SpokeIsHere but actuallyListenNotThere. And to be fair, it did come out of the blue, unprompted. It's true though, no matter how hard it is to admit. He's thought about this again and again, and after he's thought about it completely he'll just do it again and again and again, but he hates thinking about it. He always feels so bad when his thoughts go there, but he always forces himself to anyways because otherwise there's going to be something gnawing on his consciousness for the rest of the day and that feels just as horrible. After some time the lies really just don't work anymore.
"No bro, you're not," Mapicc finally says and Spoke recites his lines to this conversation that they've had multiple times before, just in different fonts and with different pacing.
"I killed someone who's innocent, someone with a father and brother, just for what, a stupid diamond trim chest plate?"
He hugs his legs even closer to his body and rests his head on his knees. His head is angled in a way that lets him see Mapicc still. Based on his expression, he's proabably connecting the dots right now. Pursed lips and once again furrowed brows. And there it is, he averted his eyes. Yeah he knows what he hallucinated about today. It's one of his heavier flashbacks, so he doesn't blame Mapicc when he ruffles his own hair and sighs deeply.
"You were doing it for the mission, you thought it was to kill Ash."
And because they've rehearsed this conversation countless of times before, they both know how flimsy of an excuse it is. In fact, it was Mapicc who called it out first, but still, in these conversations he always takes the of the one who says the line. It's one of the only ways for Spoke to keep talking by having him debunk his own excuses, and it's weird that it works but it works.
"No bro, I wasn't thinking about killing Ash at all, not seriously. I just wanted to feel important, I just wanted his-"
He can't bring himself to say it out loud. Admitting would mean that it's true, truer than his own words, and he's not ready for it, won't ever be. Never ever ever, no matter how many times they do this. It'd be too pathetic, too horrible to have wanted because of the terrible terrible implications. Because then he'd actually be right. Honestly what even is the point of this conversation if he won't be admitting that. Mapicc also doesn't say a word.
"Sorry."
For making you repeat this with me. For not saying anything new. For being a horrible person.
Mapicc looks back at him and they stare at each other for a long moment. They're breaking character. Then, in a low, soft voice that neither are really used to yet, he breaks the silence.
"I've been dealing with you for so long, I won't just stop now. You're good."
Spoke doesn't deserve it, so he doesn't take it. He'd like to, really, his instincts or whatever it is in him yells at him to take it. How selfish of him, how absolutely deplorable.
"I do wish sometimes that Minute could come back and take half the load, though. It was way easier with him around."
It's not a joke, but Spoke laughs anyways. A quiet breath of air that was more agreement than humour. And they just let it be, don't add anything to it.
The sun sinks further. It always seems to move faster when it's rising or setting, but so incredibly slow when it's high up in the sky. The red of the sky is spreading, and oddly enough, Spoke thinks for the first time about the possibility of the red sky taking over the blue sky's shift so that it can rest up for the next day.
"Hey Mapicc, wanna make flower crowns?"
"Hell yeah."
Spoke took the three stacks of cornflowers out of his inventory. Mapicc is stunned to see the little moutain of flowers and only cornflowers sitting in the grass in front of them.
"Dude, is that what you've been doing all day? Picking cornflowers?"
"Yeah! Do you know how long it took me to gather so many?"
Mapicc laughs heartedly and it heals a crack in Spoke's soul.
"Spoke, you're unbelievable," he says, but it sounds so fond, so so fond.
They start to thread the flowers together by the stem with the expertise of two barely-adult boys who practiced for weeks just to entertain a little boy who recently lost his sister. It involved a lot of threading between and wrapping around stems while being careful not to crush the flower petals. Spoke used to struggle with it a lot, but then Becky showed him how Rose taught him to hold the flowers and ever since his flower crowns only had a few crumpled petals.
Making flower crowns is a calming activity. It allows his brain to slow down for just a little while. They don't need to speak when they're in deep concentration. It's just weave, twist, repeat and occasionally they'd look up to admire the setting sun or to appreciate the wind that gently combs through their hair.
"You know Spoke, you're scarily self-aware sometimes. "
Spoke hums in a way that says 'you think so?'
"Yeah, and it's really weird too because other times you'd be lying and everyone knows it's a lie but you somehow believe it. Like, you're supposed to make other people believe it, bro, not yourself."
Spoke takes a new cornflower from the pile and threads it between a gap between the woven stems.
"It is weird," he agrees, and they continue in silence. Mapicc places his finished work on the pile of flower crown that has been steadily growing and starts a new one. Spoke adds two or three more flowers to his and adds it to the pile, but he doesn't take up another cornflower.
"Hey Mapicc, do you think it'd be possible to make a thorns trap?"
It takes a moment, but Mapicc responds.
"You mean like, if we tricked someone into hitting a bunch of armour stands with thorns and they instantly die?"
Spoke thinks about it for a moment. He hadn't been expecting this kind of answer.
"Uh, no, but that is absolutely genius, Mapicc, we actually need to try that out."
Mapicc huffs out a chuckle and twists two stems together.
"Wait, what did you mean by thorns trap then?"
Well, now he feels like his plan is a bit silly.
"Um. I actually thought that, you know how roses have thorns? What if we just glue a bunch of it onto pistons and push someone with it."
Spoke picks up a flower to start his next crown.
"Nah, it sounds like a pain to set up and doesn't do enough damage. It'd be like a cactus trap but like what's the point."
"Hm. Yeah you're right."
Mapicc is always right, always there to tell him when his ideas don't make sense. Spoke looks up from the blue, half done flower crown to look at him. Always right, always honest, always red Mapicc against the sky that is also red by now. In just a few minute the sun will set fully and they'll say that it's time to go home but stay out for longer anyways.
"Ooh by the way, dude I have a theory on how Theo learned minecart pvp. Do you know that one movie where a panda learns kung fu?"
"The one where he learns with dumplings and stuff?"
"Exactly! Ok so what if instead of dumplings..."
The voice of their laughter gets carried away by the wind, through the blooming valleys to the peaks of the distant mountains. They stay out until the moon hangs high in the sky and all cornflowers have been woven into crowns. And even though it's getting darker, the world feels just a bit lighter than before, just for that night.