"This, this, this assbutt disappears for two months and he thinks he can just show back up like nothing happened and look at me like a, like a dumbface and not say anything—"

He leans down closer to her chair and wraps his arms around her in a hug.

"—I'm still mad at you!!"

"I know," he says, before straightening back up.

"Is the problem here that you only know like five words? Should I be teaching how to say things? Say 'I'm sorry for being a buttface, Lucky'."

"I'm sorry for being a buttface, Lucky."

Lucky blinks.

She had uh. Not really been expecting him to go ahead and actually say it? Now her sail's windless.

"...I'll let you kids figure it out," sighs Jon, making his way back out. "Yell if you need me."

Gonie watches him leave, expressionlessly, then turns to look at Lucky, expressionfully.

"...well, was there anything you wanted?"

He shakes his head.

"So... why are you here?"

He blinks.

"...okay. Sure," she sighs, rolling back over behind the counter where she'd been messing with the magic crystal again. "If you're just gonna stand there then—"

Except that he actually followed her, and when he's by her workbench he grabs three smaller crystals from his pocket and drops them onto its surface.

"...what are these?" she asks, curiosity winning over annoyance.

Gonie shrugs.

"Well. I'll figure it out myself, then. Humpf," she humpfs, and then gets to work on doing just that.

Gonie pulls up a chair and turns it around so that he can sit on it and hug its back while watching her work. The effect is slightly ruined by how he's tall for a kid his age and not in any absolute terms, so his legs are kind of open at a weird angle and his feet aren't touching the floor, but it works well enough and he's not complaining.

He comes back every other day, sometimes two days in a row, and doesn't say anything, just watches her work. Occasionally she asks him for things, to fetch this or that, or hold something still while she drills it, or grab a customer delivery, and he does what she asks. Occasionally he shows up with offerings, bits and bobs, shiny rocks and trinkets, kind of like a magpie if magpies were tall and gangly and really really quiet. And he always spends the whole day with her, when he's over.

It makes her feel bad at first, how he does everything she says without ever complaining, but eventually she guesses that if he wanted to do something else he'd be able to. It's not like she's making him do it or anything.

And the crystals he brought her on that first day turn out to be really useful. When she arranges them in an array just so she gets an interesting amplification effect that she doesn't really understand, and she hates not understanding things, so she spends all of her free time trying to understand it until she does, at which point it's obvious to her why her second crystal wasn't cooperating with plan "make her chair hover", and she scraps her plans and starts them over with better understanding of how to integrate multiple crystals together.

And while she works, she talks. A lot. Having Gonie around to listen is surprisingly nice, even if he doesn't say anything or ask any questions. She's not sure he actually understands half of what she's saying, but he always looks really interested, and maybe even happy to see her talk. She guesses she doesn't really have any reason not to talk, anyway.

Jon was wary at first, but slowly warms up to the boy and gets used to his presence. With the two of them spending so much time at the counter, he can spend most of his time in the back working on requests or just tinkering, and trust that things will be alright.

With demand climbing back up to its usual levels, soon Lucky gets tasked with another supply run to Einbroch. She's happy to go, as usual, and she can use some of the money she saved up for another magic crystal, of a kind she thinks will work better for her current purposes.

Gonie shows up on that day while she's getting ready to go and peers curiously at what she's packing up.