#candleburningup

In town, you have some friends yet, do you not? 

Yes. Three of them. We were inseparable when we were kids.

He personally earned the split lip and bone bruising dealing with the other most heinous group of villains the area had to offer. As usual, he’s an thumping sore with a business agenda, books to balance, and a spot to occupy behind the working counter of the shop. 

The sign in the hall states: clock repairs, watches, timekeeping, and occasionally cobbling. It’s deathly cold outside, and the business is barren enough to pull his own watch out. It’s shattered on the face. The casing’s a crushed wreck. 

She looks like a downed bird. He could harvest the guts for parts and try again, and melt the silver in a crucible down. He’s still got Victor’s old moldings and could do it.

It’s why he ends up in a pile of loose shirts, an old, very heavy frock on his shoulders. The stove’s in the other ground floor room, burning low, and he’s in no mood to get up from the stool to feed it. The pins, needles, and tumors of blazing pain are barely contained in his attention to the little poor watch on his counter.

He’s got a glass over it, and is plucking the guts out to set on a small white cloth for safekeeping. There are some gears he has to re-cast, and then etch again. It’s funny how Victor enjoyed his small mechanisms but couldn’t see the larger ones in motion to influence them. Everything he could control was tinier than a pinhead.

The insides of his gears look like the tines of a music box, moving and ticking against the invisible threads of possibility to make a melody. There was a memory in him of a fourteen year old boy, himself, listening to a watch in Victor’s workshop without a sound, and amazed at it. They do make a melody. It’s a very specific vibration. The clocks sound it too, and it’s not their chimes.

Though...

He set the screwdriver and the lockpick he’d been using down. His set of picks had been broken too with impacts, and now functioned expertly as small grips. He’s lucky he has hands still. Actually, he’s lucky he has anything still.

Of course it was.

He couldn’t find Gravel’s anywhere. She had come to the clinic a dozen and a half times when they were kids, but the papers are just gone as far as his searching is concerned.

He picks through them one more time before he sighs and realizes he’s going to need help finding them, which means asking Stahk to help find them.

Which means talking to Stahk when the man’s been barely holding back from scolding Artemy for rearranging the house.

“ Stahk! Hey, I need your help finding something. ”

He’s got a stack of the folders in hand when he stands at the top of the stairs to address him.

“ Come here for a second? ”

this is our kind of surgery, cutting to the bone, sewing together guts and soul…

“Feels like you’re finding footin’. Like you can’t decide if you’re water or the reeds or air. Indeed. This’ what bein’ dead feels like, huh? Hell, I wondered if the ferrymen found fortune in th’ vaults down below th’ ground. Y’know th’ coffers of Pluto’s palace are loaded.”

He’s muttering to himself while walking and tooling the last scratch into the gorgeous piece. He’s getting better or the injuries are making him focus. One of the two. Both. Both.