Dergtober Day One -- Harvest.
"So you're an apprentice now?"
Aristarchos stared down at his daughter, digging through the dirt for potatoes. Clods of soil stuck under her claws, a smear of mulch on her cheek.
"Yes. Oupis' has taken me on to help her vegetable plots."
"I see... Are you sure you want to be a gardener?"
Aristarchos peered inquisitively at her as she held a particularly large tuber in her hands and dusted it off, before chucking it in her basket.
Perpetua grunted. She was wrapped up in her task, a shower of mud clods cascading behind her with every buried treasure. Aristarchos watched awkwardly. He wasn't sure he could say anything without seeming as if he disapproved. It was just such an odd choice, from his, admittedly, odd daughter.
Aristarchos recognised that tone from himself when he was a teenager, stubbornly practicing inking on his skin instead of on parchment like his teachers would have preferred.
"True. I'm sorry, Perp. Its just... surprising, that's all. It feels like it came out of nowhere. You spent all that time in the library reading and doodling. You made all those scrapbooks and drew all those flowers... I'm not saying you ought to have apprenticed with me, its just--"
"That's because you never ask, and if you do, you don't listen."
She stopped, sighed and sat up. Perpetua cleared her throat and began fishing a notebook from her satchel.
"Pink Perpetua. A climbing tea rose cultivar popular in the Northern Light territory for its musky scent and ostentatious pink hues. I got curious and began researching all the different names of roses and then I would draw them all, label them with their botanical features and colour them in. See?"
Aristachos looked over her shoulder; he'd never seen inside her books before, he was too scared to ask in case they were private. He stifled a shudder as he remembered his old tutor ripping up his tattoo sketches; Lassuarium kicked him out after that incident. But he never let anyone near his scrapbooks again. When he had asked about her notes, he never quite understand the long rambling stream of concious she would chatter on about as a kid.
"Then I got reading about other plants, I got to studying botany with Sphene and when he started falling asleep in our sessions I got talking to Ouzel who would let me play in his greenhouse. Then Oupis started asking me for help with potatoes and then I researched the Nightshade family and began sketching them..." She paused to catch her breath before snapping her notebook shut, "I know what I'm doing."
"I never, ever doubted you, love." He said, "You've always been so confident in what you're doing, I never wanted to interfere with what you loved. I could never even keep up! My mother and father were always telling me what I could and couldn't do. I didn't want that for you...What I meant to ask was are you enjoying yourself?"
Perpetua gave him a wobbly smile. She was never great at facial expressions, or grand displays of affection. She wasn't a talker, she was a doer. Maybe that's why they often butted heads, she was too much like himself.
"I love it dad." She said, taking a long deep breath, a breeze rose behind them and stirred the nodding wheat, "I love the fresh air. I love knowing all the names of the living things around me. I love the quiet, but I also love the bird song and the squirrels chittering. I love sun's warmth and the patter of the rain on the greenhouse. I love being able to wear crappy old clothes and get mud on my face. Its like the library but its full of life. Its a living, breathing, bright, dark, colourful, wet, dry, cloudy, sunny world... I never got out here as a kid because... well, its hard to make friends."
Aristarchos pulled her closer, the other hatchlings didn't always understand Perpetua as she was growing up. They never teased her, just ignored her and left her to her reading and strange ways of playing.
"But I already knew everything out here. Me and the dirt are firm friends."
"I'm so happy, love." He hugged her and scraped a little dirt off of her cheek, "Just wear a coat in the rain and come see in the chamber, I'll open the windows and let out the stink."
She giggled and nuzzled him, "Love you dad. You always do your best."
"Love you, too, Perp."
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