#completely clueless as to the quality of this. who knows! I'm not editing anything today and you can't make me

[spellsparkler]

27 with Lae'zel!!

27: Maintaining a weapon between uses

Confusion, Row learns, makes Lae’zel look faintly murderous. They could laugh at the look on her face, but she wouldn’t appreciate it, so they don’t.

Instead, they both stare at the blade on the tarp on the ground, the clouded metal too filthy to shine in the sunlight. The scabbard rests against Row’s knee. “Huh,” they say, and glance up at Lae’zel’s slitted eyes and incredulously raised eyebrows, back down again. “Mortifying.”

Lae’zel – of course – agrees more fervently than they’ve ever seen from her. “It is,” she says emphatically. “You should be embarrassed.”

Row didn’t even plan it this way, which is perhaps the most ridiculous part. They’d approached Lae’zel’s tent – rapidly growing from their scrounged poles and lengths of fabric into some elaborate set-up that borders on ostentatious – with their sword-scabbard hanging from their hand by its straps, and they’d asked a favour. (Sword, is, perhaps, a misnomer. They found it – honestly can’t even remember where, the ship and the first few hours out of it are a blur – and stuck it onto their belt at some stage, the dull-metal blade with its thick handle and blunt edges. It’s not long, but it’s no hand knife, either. A longer sort of dagger, maybe. It doesn’t seem like it’s made for smallfolk, so the distinctions aren’t perhaps of much note. It’s something that can be used for stabbing, under the right circumstances and when few other options are available, and they’d been under those circumstances today, when their citole had been knocked out of their grasp – thank fuck it hadn’t been really damaged – hence the inept stabbing. And hence the blood.)

(Lae’zel is interesting, in that she’s stubbornly difficult and also profoundly, logically easy. The thing coiled watchful behind their right eye helps, of course, but of their quick-growing and motley crew here Row honestly finds her the most straightforward; all harsh-cut stone and if, then. But the magnitude of the threat as she perceives it is quite different, and the unfamiliarity of everything around her puts her on her guard, if she’s ever known how to be off it in the first place. Mapping her out is simple – laughably so, with the tadpole there to chart the topography at a glance – but finding a hollow to mould themself into is extremely hard. She’s too scared shitless to want anything, which is odd, seeing as how some of the others’ wanting is made entirely out of fear. Row is unconvinced she knows what a friend is, so any quest to puzzle out how to become one might be entirely doomed from the get-go.)

(But she is fun to poke at; and the gambit Row’s taken, much as it seems to vex her, is not without its merits. The earth’s been so thoroughly knocked out from under her that any steady footing brings relief, and to that end she seems to like the pattern of Row’s raillery and her own answering irritation almost as much as they do. She likes things that have become familiar. And she visibly hates to be idle.)

Row had asked for help with their more-or-less sword, seeing as martial weaponry is their last resort but it’s still better than nothing; they needed it today, they could need it again, and it won’t do them much good if it’s rusted or dulled or otherwise damaged. Lae’zel had glanced up at the orange-washed sky and magnanimously agreed. The blade hadn’t come out of its scratched leather sheath on the first pull, which was, in retrospect, the first clue – but they’d pulled, and pulled, until finally it came loose and clattered on the tarp-covered ground, smelling quite bad and tacky with hours-old blood.

The inside of the sheath must be filthy, too. Row wrinkles their nose. Lae’zel continues to stare at the weapon as if it’s a personal insult – as if the blade had killed all her family, or, worse, had tried to and failed.

“You didn’t clean it,” she says.

“I didn’t,” Row agrees gravely. “Evidently, I need the help.”

There is a lengthy pause. Lae’zel reaches out to touch the dried-out grime, pinches still-viscid gore between finger and thumb. The makeup around her eyes has smudged something fierce. She asks, “Why?”

Row pokes at it, too, still watching her carefully out of their right eye. It feels unpleasant. “I didn’t think about it,” they say smoothly, and Lae’zel looks, still, like she is considering taking up the sort-of-sword and plunging it directly into their gut, which Row is beginning to think is just the expression her face makes when she isn’t sure what else to do. (It’s very strange to her, perhaps more so than literally everything else. She was practically born – hatched? – with a weapon in hand; Row’s ineptitude is not just an embarrassment, it’s incomprehensible. It affronts what it is to be alive.) (Behind their eye, the tadpole writhes.)

Honestly, Row isn’t sure how they forgot to wipe it clean. They remember they’d gotten within reach of their instrument very suddenly – they must have just stuffed it away so they could grab the citole out of the mud. And promptly forgotten about it. They’d all been in danger of dying – there’d been other things on their mind.

Lae’zel’s lip curls. “Get the soap,” she says, and Row does.

(It’s the one bar of soap they have, residing in its pouch in the supply pack. It smells a little of lemongrass. It’s used sparingly, shared between the whole camp – except Shadowheart, who had her own with her and seems ill-inclined to share, and Wyll, who found a sliver of lye soap in the pack he was given before he left the Grove. It’s a shame Row didn’t anticipate getting snatched up by a flesh-ship on a quiet mid-week night; they’d have prepared better.)

Lae’zel takes the soap; she scrapes off just a corner with her short-clipped nails and mixes it in with enough water to make something like a lather. She doesn’t speak while she does it, but she moves slowly, careful to let Row see what she’s doing, the way she spreads the mixture down the flat of the blade, bubbly and sweet-smelling. When she takes up a ragged scrap of cloth, she tosses them one, too – they fail to catch it and pick it up from the dirt. They watch as she starts scrubbing the blade – fiercely, in long lengthwise motions, even the particularly stubborn gore yielding eventually under her hands.

“Should I clean it like this every time?” Row asks, fixing her motions with rapt attention.

“After every use,” Lae’zel says. She turns the blade over. “It shouldn’t take this long.” A pause; she glances up from her work, eyes rimmed with black. “This is a shoddy weapon. The metal is weak. I’ve never seen its like.”

Row shrugs. “It’s a backup.”

Taking care of a sword-thing, they learn, is not difficult. It’s essentially the same process they go through with any bladed tools, and that’s something they’re no stranger to. The only difference is preparing for and attempting to negate the corrosive influence of blood. Lae’zel offers to show them how to sharpen it, although she seems unconvinced that its edges won’t crumble at the slightest pressure. They agree, and discover they don’t enjoy the sound of a whetstone.

She looks at them – straight-backed and stern, hand resting by the oiled whetstone – and scoffs. “You’re worse than a child,” she says; her voice is very muffled by the fingers Row’s stuck in their ears.

They remove them. “Than a Gith child,” they reply, because they’re quite confident they’re better at weapon maintenance – or usage, when it comes to that – than any child not hatched with a sword in hand. Lae’zel glances at the blood-smeared rags, thoughtful, and Row doesn’t even need the tadpole to see her remembering the tiefling children and their wooden weaponry, their grips uncertain, their feet slow and arms ill-weighted. She’d looked very perplexed, upon seeing them.

She nods, now, sharp and expressive. “Yes,” she says, “You’re right. Faerûn’s children are much worse at combat.”

It sounds so unfamiliar in her mouth; Row quirks a brow. “Did you mean Fay-run?”

“I said –” Lae’zel starts, and then she scowls, eyes slitted, looking down her nose. She sits so steel-straight that she’s got double height on them, even when they’re both on the ground. (Row thinks they might need to start dragging around crates to stand on; craning their head to look everyone in the eye is starting to give them a horrendous crick in the neck.) “I said it correctly,” Lae’zel insists, icy. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

The hollow space behind Row’s right eye shifts, cold and running as river-water. “Sorry,” they say lightly. “I was joking.”

Lae’zel looks at them. In the faint orange light of the sun beginning to set, her eyes look molten golden.

She takes up the apparently abysmal-quality blade. “Don’t,” she says, with steely finality, and she holds it out to them, hilt-first.