the devil makes woe for idle hands | Glowfic Constellation

my-compass-is-true

Marek is honestly not sure what he's doing with his life, these last few years, even if it does seem to be working somehow. The army felt like a reasonable place to spend his life in, until it suddenly wasn't, and after that and everything else, he was too politically inconvenient for any decent job he was qualified for. But his maternal uncle died without children and left a small farm in a village he only had vague memories of, somewhere out of the way of all the complicated politics, and that seemed as good a place to be as he was likely to find.

Finding things to do without the structure of army life didn't turn out to be difficult at all. There was the house to restore, and the land to find a use for, and neighbors to help with a diverse range of village problems, and sometimes the school needed an extra hand to keep everyone out of trouble, and occasionally so did the police department, and then there was that runaway boy who jumped out of a moving train at night and it just seemed like a much better idea to let him stay at the farm for a few months than to risk him trying that again...

That, skipping over the next couple of years, is why Henryk, the chief of the two-and-a-half-person police station in the unimportant village of Bobowa, is the person who gets a phone call from the Kraków orphanage. There's a girl they really don't want to keep dealing with, all right, that seems odd and the man's tone seems even more odd, but Henryk doesn't need or want to know the details, it's not like he can't predict Marek will say yes. It's urgent? Why would it possibly-- no, it doesn't matter, yes he can go out and get Marek here before noon so someone can tell him whatever this is all about.

The police station being one of the relatively few places in the village with a phone, it's where Marek ends up for his own call with the orphanage director, which he hopes will provide at least a little more information than the "I don't know, a girl, how can they possibly have much trouble with a girl?" he heard from Henryk.

"Hello, this is Marek Dąbrowski. I was asked to call you about a child you wanted to move somewhere quieter?" He's been in occasional contact with the place for a couple of years now, as a place to temporarily keep the occasional stray kid they couldn't figure out what else to do with. He turned out to be good at that, or at least so they said, and he could hardly be worse than some of the stories he'd heard of the other options. Well, most people were doing the best they could with much less than they needed, and he didn't need very much and so could sometimes do better.

Total: 275

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 10 of 11 Next › Last »

my-compass-is-true

Predictably, it stings when she touches it.

"Good - I wouldn't want you to have trouble avoiding them. Or to miss out on painful but mostly harmless revenge possibilities, I suppose." He sounds perfectly cheerful about that. If she can restrain herself to nettles everyone will be perfectly happy (well, nearly everyone), and they are traditional.

rien-de-rien

A hint of a smile. "Noted."

my-compass-is-true

"And about things being different in America, be careful with mushrooms. ...As food, I meant, not revenge, although that too." That option he's less happy with, but it's not as if telling her that would stop her, and he's not even entirely sure he'd want it to.

rien-de-rien

"Understood. I have no intention of handling poisons incautiously."

my-compass-is-true

That gets her an only slightly wry smile. "I didn't think so, really."

"Your turn to read?" He passes the book over.

rien-de-rien

She nods, and applies herself to the task with careful attention, reading out each passage in the original and then either venturing a translation or asking about words she doesn't recognize.

my-compass-is-true

He provides definitions, corrections and comments as necessary, appreciating her patience at the rather demanding task. She's going to do just fine learning the school material at home, and in a quarter of the time, he bets.

Asking him about words does make it obvious that he's missing many of the English equivalents - more than one would expect from his conversation. He sounds slightly embarrassed every time it comes up, and comments after the third time he had to talk around something: "My English isn't as good as it sounds at first, is it. Maybe if I started asking you about words it would get better faster than by guessing."

rien-de-rien

"It seems only fair to trade vocabulary lessons for vocabulary lessons," she agrees.

my-compass-is-true

"Mm, all right," he smiles. "Maybe you can finally tell me what 'interfering' means."

rien-de-rien

"Hmm, how to explain... if you are trying to do something, and I am getting in your way or making it more difficult, I am interfering. If you have something important to do, and I am bothering or annoying you while you do it, I am interfering with your work. If you have something to do that you want done one way, like watering a plant only a little and only in the mornings, and I sneak into your garden and water the plant twice that much in the afternoons, I am interfering with your gardening."

my-compass-is-true

Unsurprisingly, her explanations are just as thorough as her other work.

"Mhm. And which of those were you doing about the bullying? ...I'm only guessing about what that means, too, but I'm pretty sure I'm more or less right." Still, a whole-paragraph definition from Wednesday will still add plenty of useful information, and he may as well get in the habit.

rien-de-rien

"Getting in their way and making it more difficult. And bullying, hmm... a child who likes to beat up other children, or say nasty things to them, or take their things by saying 'give me that or I'll beat you up', is a bully. Bullying is doing those things and things like them."

my-compass-is-true

"Yes." He didn't realize talking counted, but, well, he can imagine talking that probably should. "It was good of you to interfere with that."

rien-de-rien

"I didn't do it to be good. But I see what you mean," she concedes.

my-compass-is-true

"I know you didn't," he smiles, "but I'm not going to stop giving my opinions just because you don't do things for the same reasons. Well, maybe I would if it was just annoying you, but I think we're getting along better than that."

rien-de-rien

"Yes, I think we are."

my-compass-is-true

Another smile. "It'll be funny when the orphanage director calls me to ask how bad things are."

rien-de-rien

"I was expecting him to just want to forget about me."

my-compass-is-true

"Mm, maybe. But he does have a job and he usually does it, so I expect he'll talk to me again eventually."

rien-de-rien

"What will you tell him?"

my-compass-is-true

"That you're a great thoughtful responsible kid and I like you very much and will be happy to have you here for however long you want," he gives her a quietly fond look. "And then he'll make the sort of confused face you can see even over the phone."

rien-de-rien

"I can see how saying that would confuse him, yes." She looks just a little bit amused.

my-compass-is-true

"Exactly," he grins. It's not as if he dislikes the man (although Wednesday might), but the situation is still funny.

"Did you go to school back in, uh, the future? Have they figured out how to make it go better?"

rien-de-rien

"I went to school. It was... mostly tolerable. I think I'm not suited to being around normal children."

my-compass-is-true