Chapter Text
When man was put in the garden of Eden he was put there so that he should work, which proves that man was not born to rest.
It’s the noise that wakes him.
The chill makes itself known not long after, and he burrows deeper into his shitty, scratchy blanket for half a minute, refusing to open his eyes just yet.
He’s been waking before the sun and keeping odd hours so long on someone else’s word, he can steal thirty seconds to himself.
There’s a sort of muffled impact, and then another grating scrape. Earth sounds, after he listens for a bit. Dirt, stone.
It’s repetitive, but sporadic. The metal-on-stone is what gets him, in the end, to grunt and raise himself upwards, curling at the torso and shoving an elbow under him to blink at the cold dawn light, watery through the skinny, high window.
His candles have burned out, and it’s bloody fucking cold.
Waxy smoke lingers faintly in the air; the fat candle on his bedside stand has only just extinguished, it seems. He supposes it’s time to get up, what little warmth his too-small cot holds rapidly escaping into the early morning chill.
Not that it’ll warm up much yet, as spring still can’t be arsed to come out yet.
His spare quarters have a small but serviceable little wash station, with a pocked mirror that’s in fair condition otherwise, set in a wooden frame built directly into the cabinet that holds a working sink.
Simon stares at his face for too long, bleary and tired, and wonders what stares back.
Maybe it’s the other way round; here stands a shade, looking at the vessel he used to be, and now merely inhabits.
He scowls at himself.
Too fucking early for this shit.
A splash of cold water is a touch of masochism, but that’s probably par for the course here. May as well make some fitting habits.
Another scrape grates against his ears, and pushes him to dress for the day.
They’re still trying to figure where to stick him, other than his comparatively well-appointed quarters. He’s big and capable, so he’s certain he’ll be doing more general labor. That suits him fine, keeps his body busy, and he can shut off his mind. At least make a show of keeping the whispers from the shadows at bay.
He’d apprenticed to a butcher, before the War swept him up, a child in its arms, and then the ones after shaping whatever he is now. Turns out that a church doesn’t have much need for a trained killer, oddly enough, and he’d never learned a trade outside of the darker work he’d been doing just before this, before he’d gotten his just rewards for his service.
He dries his face, debates shaving. He’s got a barebones kit, same as the clergy use, but his face…some parts of him are still raw. Healed, he supposes, but skin pulls uncomfortably, or tinges with remembered pain.
He’s not a man of the cloth. They can deal with his face as it is.
Not like they’ll be seeing much of it, anyway.
Simon dresses in something warmer; thick trousers that’re more like…braies, almost, he thinks, far too short at the leg and ill-fitting at the waist. He cinches the drawstring, glad that they’re at least not a burlap sack with a rope, and tucks the tall wool socks under the cuffs.
They still don’t have shirts that fit him, but that’s not too surprising; short of donning a monk’s robe there’s not much yet to be done about that. One of the sisters had made noises about making him proper clothes, though he’s not sure how long he’ll be here or if the labor’s worth it. The church is so far removed from just about anything in this land of hills and peat that he suspects they’d have to go wrangle one of the sheep and make him a few shirts from that.
A heavy woolen sweater goes over the shirt, the worn sleeves too short but loose such that they don’t catch on his arms, and it stretches well enough (it makes odd creaking noises, for fabric) across his torso. It billows out at the belly, enough he can shove his hands under it if he wants.
A jacket that he can’t button but that fits his shoulders goes over this, before he thinks he should just throw his coat on instead. It fits, and he has half a thought to use his uniform trousers. They’d be longer, if not much warmer, though with those and the coat he’d look a right mess. Half a soldier, half a man, entirely out of place.
He opts for the coat. Too bloody cold.
Last is the scarf he wraps around the lower half of his face, winding it around his neck and tossing the last tail of it to the front where he can tuck it in and up near a shoulder, where it’ll hopefully stay. His mussed, curling hair is unkempt, not quite low enough to get into his eyes, and he half-heartedly pushes it back. If they’d give him shears, he could at least tame it a bit. Maybe even ask one of the nuns for proper grooming—the smirk fades as quick as it comes, under the scarf.
He doesn’t know what he’s meant to do here.
Another grating scrape.
Instead of dwelling on it, he opens the wooden door to his quarters and enters the hallway, dim at this end but much brighter morning light coming from the far end.
May as well see what the ruckus is about.
The idiot making the godawful racket isn’t a monk, or a nun, or, by all appearances, a clergyman.
Around back of the…rectory? Dormitory? Whatever it’s called, the wall at the arse-end of the church not too far from Simon’s room, there’s a narrowish strip of land between the outer wall that rings the back end of things, including the cemetery at the very rear, and the near-featureless side of the larger building. It’s newer, Simon knows that much, judging by the lack of pointy architectural bits, but the stone is still weathered by centuries.
In this strip of stony grass is the idiot. A gardener, he’d guess, if that’s the kind of person who’d be swinging around some kind of implement at the crack of dawn in the dirt doing what appears to be sweet fuck-all.
The gardener, or groundskeeper’s assistant, perhaps, is young, at least a decent bit younger than he is. He’s got a half-feral look about him, in his current state: mud up to his knees, along one hip like he’d taken a spill, a thick, bulky-knit woolen sweater over his arms, but the sleeves shoved up to his elbows despite the chill. His hands are ungloved, the knuckles raw in the cold, and his work trousers pull like he’s got braces under the sweater to hold them up. Presumably there are boots under all that muck.
His dark hair’s shaggy, in the damp, and his face is unshaven for at least a couple weeks if not more. He’s got some kind of pick, or digging sort of tool, at any rate, a sharp sort of blade fixed perpendicular to the old wooden staff that he’s apparently been using to make noise and a right mess of things, by the look of it.
Simon should go back inside, where he’s got things to do (and what are those? his mind whispers) and it’s a sight bloody warmer, but this is the first person he’s seen that’s not clergy or a nun. Simon’s not one for conversation, but he’s even less for interaction with any of them.
“You the gard’ner?” he says, voice full of rocks. He doesn’t care.
The young man startles, swinging the tool up and around, flinging a little bit of dirt. “Th’fuck are you?” he hisses, and Simon blinks.
That’s…not what he expected.
“…Simon,” he says, dryly, after a second. He doesn’t think about offering his name so readily, his given name. He tries not to think much on it at all.
The gardener, or whoever he is, looks at his state of dress, and seems to fixate on the coat a bit. He’s bristling, fit to make his hair stand up, knuckles going even whiter on the tool.
He doesn’t look like he’d swing it, but it’s definitely defensive, like he expects Simon to come at him, perhaps. He’s not sure what he did to warrant the attitude, but the young man’s eyes are unsubtly hostile. “You’re Army, then?” he says, and Simon supposes he shouldn’t be surprised at his accent. Northerners all round.
Leveling a measured look at the scruffy man and letting him take in his mismatched secondhand wardrobe, he takes his time answering, finally saying shortly, “Ostensibly.”
His brows are bold lines, coming down over his eyes. He’s quite striking, in the sunlight that’s come over the wall through the morning cloud, and Simon isn’t bothered at all that he has to squint up at him from his little ditch. He doesn’t break the silence.
“M’not the gardener,” the Scot says shortly, and his accent is different, Simon thinks, than those from the convent. He almost looks…surly, and Simon finds the corner of his mouth tugging. It pulls at his face, and he schools it before it can blossom into pain.
“An’ I’m not ‘the Army,’” Simon says evenly. “So we’ve established that.”
Something…comes into the man’s eyes, something that prickles. It puts Simon on his guard, a little steel back in his spine where there wasn’t before.
“They shove ya here too, then? Hide ye away?”
Simon’s eyes narrow, and he realizes after he’s done it that he’s crossed his arms. The sweater’s bunching under the coat, and he feels himself clam up. Probably for the best and what he should’ve started with.
This whole stupid stunt was to keep him away, forgotten, out of sight, and here’s a bloody deserter or worse and yet…he doesn’t feel like a spy, that’s too far-fetched, and besides his cover as a groundskeeper’d be shit.
Simon makes his shoulders come down, but he doesn’t uncross his arms. There’s…something in the way this kid is looking at him, eyes unrepentantly roving over his dress, his figure, lingering on his arms. Simon realizes the sweater sleeves are bunched such that they make him look muscle-bound, probably, in a lumpy sort of way, and as the sun shines down on the kid’s face (he’s not a kid, he doesn’t think, but there’s something now very mischievious there), Simon feels something click in his mind.
“So yer not Army, or not anymore,” Simon’s eyes go to slits, “an’ yer not here fer me, I’m guessin’. So…what are ya here for, big man?” The not-gardener now leans forward against the shaft of the tool he’s planted on the ground, furrows of dirt and mud around his ankles, a streak along one of his forearms. His teeth are bright, in the sun, the shape of his mouth framed by his scruff in a way that makes his lips very. Noticeable.
Simon blinks, on his back foot, and finds he doesn’t have immediate words available.
He could leave. Just turn and go. He doesn’t know this man, doesn’t have any reason to (aside from a scratching impulse to learn every person in this bloody place, to learn the layout proper, the nooks and crannies and hidey-holes, the ways out—it’s the middle of nowhere—)
“What—what the fuck are you doing?” he hears himself say, and his arms come apart so he can gesture vaguely at the…carnage the man’s wrought of the grounds.
He can’t help but notice how eyes follow his movements, and he makes himself lower his arms by his sides instead of crossing them again, but he also can’t stop from reaching into his open coat to shove at the bunched sweater sleeve. He feels like an idiot, the way he’s being watched, face heating under the scarf.
The kid’s smirk turns into a full-out grin, and he doesn’t press Simon for the answer not given. “Drainage,” he says, like that makes sense, and Simon looks more at the haphazard furrows. Those cannot be channels for directing water.
“Gotta get the stones out,” the kid continues, “an’ then I can dig proper. Somethin’ ta do, before the springtime rains hit an’ I gotta get on the planting.”
Simon’s brow furrows. “Thought you weren’t the gardener.”
“M’not,” the kid says easily. “I’m John.”
Simon watches that grin turn into a wide, toothy smile, and when the kid says, “An’ delighted to make yer acquaintance, Simon,” rounded words rolling from his mouth, he feels like he might be in some kind of trouble.