Lesson Learned

For the first few days after Milton's arrival in Aletta, he'd been very hesitant, if not full-out resistant, to actually accept help from Flora, or even Addam himself, despite all how emphatically enthusiastic he'd been about coming to Torna rather than staying with survivors from his village who'd known his late parents.

They'd intended on giving him about a week to settle in anyway, before even coming close to broaching the subjects of schooling and chores - because those were requisite, weren't they? What else would the boy do with himself?

But this was a little different, and they weren't quite sure how to gauge it. To be sure, anyone mourning such a loss, let alone a seven-year-old boy, was allowed to be as sullen as they wished, without firm expectation of presentable cheeriness, but how do you help someone hurting like that? So they let him be.

He emerged from the spare guest room right on time for meals, and he stood attentively by the sink when it came time to wash up and pack away the dishes and silverware, and sometimes he could even be caught nosing around the library or the workshop. He was a perfect little houseguest, except that he was quite plainly unhappy, and certainly, that's fine for an adult, but...not so much for a child.

Of course, Flora studied him, as gently as she could, and even just there at the beginning was able to gauge that he liked seafood the best and preferred talk about people to talk about problems, stories of the city over stories of the farm because what was the point of talking about nature when you could just go out and be in it?

Or could you?

Then, one day, they were to have guests, some stopover noblemen from Heblin, and it wouldn't do to have gray hair tousled or brown hair loose (or gray-brown hair a little bit of both, for that matter). And Flora knew, just as well as she'd known it when she'd first arrived at the manor herself just a few months prior, that it was one thing to be in a strange new place all alone, and quite another to be there with Company.

So she knocked on that door, which was neither very small to match its occupant nor very large to dwarf the very same and his visitor alike, on the first floor early that questionably fateful morning, and a minor grumbling sound came from within, and she counted herself bang on the mark again for having known that he'd already be awake.

"Can I help you with anything, today, Milton?" Because she knew the difference between asking if one needed help and if one could be helped, for the former could skew existential while the latter granted at least a little bit of agency (unless it was, in fact, just as confounding, which it might have been).

The grumbling sound came again, along with a bitter rustling, and then frustrated little hands flopped on frustrated little knees. "Maybe," answered Milton at last.

"Would you like to come out, or shall I come in?" With her own hands currently occupied doing up her right braid, which always came second, it was really a rather operative question. And, out Milton came, dragging a limp piece of red-orange cord behind him, almost as if to hide it but really as if to put it in very conveniently plain view.

This, of course, made perfect sense. They'd not been all done up in their churchgoing finest for the rest of the week, Addam in rumpled old shirts as he rushed to take care of everything he'd missed while in Gormott and Flora in more worn varieties of her usual diamond-patterned dress, and they'd never come anywhere near poking at Milton for not being in such fine repair himself either. Even the matching clover knots at about chest height on his overalls were drooping, due for a tightening if not a full re-tie.

She could ask if he'd never done it himself before, or she could ignore that and show him, without asking any more and further condescending questions, how to do it - so she did. With an affirming "I see," Flora left the dangling braid to the side (no use in stopping up her current progress just to have it get all slouchy when left unattended) and stooped down to redo the lower two knots. On the first, she went at a regular speed, just the way she'd do anything like tying up shoes for kids who didn't want to be caught having the teacher helping them, but on the second, she pretended to make a mistake, so she could backtrack and slow up a bit.

When done, she stood up and brushed out any wrinkles in her skirt, very obviously except not so very very very making sure not to look as if she was checking for Milton's reaction, but she could catch him trying to make eye contact anyway, fingers tapping excitedly at his collar all the while.

"You'll look very snazzy indeed with that, I think."

"Even if I do it myself?"

"Especially if you do it yourself."

But those same fidgeting fingers were quite small, as would again befit someone of Milton's age, and had a hard time gaining purchase on the slippery cord, so he darted back into the room to snatch up his gloves, at first begrudgingly but then with at least a little bit of excitement, and then he tried again.

(And maybe again, and again, and again, and again, because Mistress Flora had done the ones lower down so well, and it wouldn't do if they didn't match, and Titan's foot, he was going to do it right!

(.you didn't hear him say that. He got it from Master Addam....

And when Addam rounded the corner, ever so slightly out of breath, to mumble something unintelligibly hearty about getting ready to go up into the parlor and open the door, his recent residential acquisitions just rolled their eyes and shared a glance with each other, glad to have everything sorted on their own.