Content Warning: mentions of depression, alcoholism

Spoiler Alert: my interpretation of Shane's two-heart event.

Chapter Two

~ A City Girl in a Farming Valley ~

I approached the pier. At the end of it stood a bright oil lamp and a shadowy figure with messy dark hair.

An oil lamp. Does Stardew Valley even know what the twenty-first century is?

It was unlikely, I reflected as I stole quietly up the pier.

I knew who it was before I reached him. I don't know what caused me to interfere that night; the only other times I'd seen or interacted with him, I'd been coldly polite in the same way as he had been to me, or I'd avoided him.

Maybe it was his comment in the Saloon; maybe it was the liquor bottle he swigged from. I was used to seeing him with beer, but this was harder stuff. Many of my co-workers in the city were alcoholics. Not that I was calling Shane an alcoholic: I didn't know him. But I felt like I recognised the signs.

I caught myself wondering if it was a saviour complex that caused me to approach him, and then I laughed out loud.

Me, a saviour complex? Pig will fly first.

His head swung my way. He'd heard me laugh.

He said nothing. His eyes glared; black as the night.

"What are you drinking?" I asked. What else could I say? Any other sentence would be taken as judgement.

He took it as judgement anyway. "What are you doing here?" Despite the liquor on his breath – tequila, I ascertained – his voice was sharp.

"Wandering," I answered. "Since I moved here, I've been doing a lot of wandering."

It was true. I'd found myself doing a lot of exploring after moving into my grandfather's old farm. I knew the rough circular route through the forest, around the lake, back to Marnie's farm. I'd never walked it at night though.

"You're up late." His tone was heavily laced with the judgement he'd detected in mine. At least I'd tried to conceal my opinion. He didn't care to afford me that curtesy.

Unsure whether to approach or walk away, I hovered behind him. He didn't turn fully towards me. He kept his head crooked at an awkward angle, his black eyes not leaving mine.

I gazed into them for a moment. They sparkled like obsidian; like a contradictory substance that should never have been created.

"Here," he said abruptly, reaching into the blackness behind him. "Have a cold one."

He presented me with a beer. I stared at the condensation on the can, glittering in the reach of the oil lamp.

"You're drinking tequila but you offer me beer?"

I made a decision then. I walked forwards, into the light, until I stood next to him. Then I sat down and dangled my legs off the pier.

"Tequila isn't for farmers," he said. He withdrew the can and dropped into a slow crouch, bracing his hands on the dock and swinging his own legs over the edge of the pier. He stayed there a moment, suspended in the air, until he dropped onto the wood. It groaned under his sudden weight. He grimaced. "Buh, life."

I wanted to ask who tequila was for, then. Instead, I reached out my hand.

He placed the can into it, a grim look on his face.

"You ever feel like…" He stopped.

"What?" I prompted, cracking the can open.

Sitting down, we were the same height. He gazed into my eyes with a sadness I'd never noticed before.

"No matter what you do, you're gonna fail?" His voice was rough. No hesitation. He was either drunk or depressed. Maybe both. The thing was, I knew how he felt. I'd been stuck in the rat race my whole life. My dad telling me to study hard, get a good degree, graduate, get a job that pays well. The thing with that is happiness never factored into it. My job at Joja Corp hadn't paid well but it had paid the bills. It made my dad proud of me.

He took a deep breath and downed the liquid in his glass. He hadn't finished speaking.

"Like you're stuck in some miserable abyss and you're so deep you can't even see the light of day?"

He has no idea… no idea what it was like in the city. No idea what working at Joja Corp was like. He's lucky. He lives on a farm, in a valley so removed from civilization they don't know what internet is. What does he have to feel sorry about?

I stared down into the water below. It looked like a black hole, both inviting and terrifying. I wasn't quite ready to jump. I'd been wondering for a while, what it would feel like to give up on everything and take a leap into darkness.

Then I looked at Shane. He stared down too, like avoiding my eyes was his mission. In the orange glow from his lamp, his skin looked warm. His obsidian eyes still glittered, but not angrily. He looked contemplative. Like he was wondering the same thing as me.

"I just feel like no matter how hard I try…" He stopped when his voice cracked, and then he persevered. "I'm not strong enough to climb out of that hole."

That did it.

I tipped my head back and started gulping. Beer wasn't my drink of choice, but his words cut to my core. I would have done anything to drown them out.

"Heh..." He looked at me, sufficiently distracted. "Fast drinker, huh? Woman after my own heart." He paused. I slammed the can down, empty. "Just don't make it a habit. You got a future ahead of you still."

"What future?" I croaked, my throat raw after downing beer so quickly

Never again, I swore to myself. Beer is too harsh to drink quickly.

He shook his head. A thick lock of purple hair fell over his eye. He didn't attempt to remove it.

"I left a comfortable job in the city to move here. I barely make enough money to survive from hard physical labor, and most of this town appears to hate me because I'm new."

As the words left my lips, I realised I'd been holding them back for a while. Ever since I moved here, really.

"Don't talk to me about hard jobs and people hating you," Shane muttered so quietly I wondered if I hadn't imagined it. He held out another beer, and I took it.

"Why are you talking to me?" I changed track, laser-focused on drawing out his answer. "You've made it clear you hate me."

"I don't…" He tipped back the rest of the liquid in his glass. He was a strange man; bringing both a bottle of tequila and a pack of beers to the pier, also bringing a glass to drink from instead of the bottle. I was sure he hadn't come here with the intention of staying sober. Yet he drank as if he savoured each sip. "I don't hate you," he whispered, his voice raw and guttural. He looked at me suddenly, his eyes burning brightly. "I treat you the same as everyone else. They way they all treat me, anyway."

I could have argued. I could have told him people avoided him because he was always drunk and he was always telling them to leave him alone.

Instead, I chugged my second beer.

"Welp… My liver's beggin' me to stop. Better call it a night," he muttered, looking away from me to stare over the black lake. "See you around, Farmer."

He was standing, holding the half-full tequila bottle and remaining two beers in the six-pack before I gathered my wits.

"My name's not Farmer," I said.

He looked down at me, unimpressed.

Everyone called me Farmer, like it was some kind of cute nickname. Like they didn't want to learn my real name because they didn't think I'd last long enough to justify learning it. City girls don't last long in farming valleys.

I hesitated so long that Shane turned away, and started walking back down the pier.

I called my final words after him, trying to pierce the darkness, trying to find the light of his oil lamp.

"My name is-"

I stopped.

He was too far gone.