Shrek hadn't planned to spend his afternoon this way, splitting shingles off of cedar rounds halfway across the swamp from his cottage. He had planned to spend it relaxing in the mudhole, maybe reading a book, a hearty afternoon of nothing. As luck would have it, a vigorous squall passed overhead this morning, just when Fiona was taking care of business in the outhouse. That squall revealed a failure of the hydraulic seal in the roofing system, which saturated his wife, as well the entire roll of water-soluble facility supplies, at a particularly inconvenient moment.
Consequently, a few minutes later, a dour ogress had come marching through the front door. Shrek was just putting away a pot of dried cattails from breakfast when turned to see his soaked spouse making her way to the bedroom to clean up.
"Aaah, can ah help ye?" he asked, a bit timidly.
"Nope, thank you for asking," she said through gritted teeth. "However, I'd be so very grateful if you could mend the privy before the next storm comes around."
And that is how Shrek came to be swinging a not-particularly sharp hatchet at a cedar round not-particularly-well-balanced on a stump a short walk from his house. The wood was not cooperating with the project. It was too green; Shrek hadn't expected to need it until spring. The result was crummy splits that made crummy shingles.
They had been a couple for eight months now, since that fateful week when Shrek's quiet, solitary life had been utterly upended by a thoroughly unexpected creature. He absolutely adored her, but the transition from solitude to partnership had been challenging for the introverted ogre. Take today, for example: if the rain had dumped on him while he was dumping alone in an isolated swamp, who would have cared? What would be the rush to fix it?
He'd worked through half a dozen log rounds already, and for his trouble, had made barely more shingles than that. At least not many that were good, wide, and flat.
On the next swing, the log round teetered a bit towards him, so the axehead fell beyond the wood and continued down the other side, until the handle connected with the top of the round, buffered only by Shrek's big green sausage fingers.
"Mother'an incontinent squid!" Shrek spouted, letting the axe topple and stuffing all four fingers into his mouth. He danced around angrily, sucking on his hand, muttering more muffled oaths.
Once the pain subsided, Shrek went around behind the stump and retrieved his hatchet. As he picked it up, it gave a little "clunk" sensation. He shook it a bit, and sure enough, the lashing that secured the head had stretched, and now the axehead wobbled. "Noxious putrid hencocks!" he spluttered furiously, "What's it gonna be next?" He turned his face to the sky filtering through the tree limbs and shook his fists, one clutching the vexing axe. He roared in frustration. The birds and insects in a half-mile radius ceased their chirping for a good ten seconds before an intrepid bullfrog risked a croak to restart the chorus. Shrek turned towards his house and started walking, footsteps heavier than strictly required even for a big ogre.
Shrek stamped across the cracked mud, stomped one great foot onto the deck boards, banged open the front door, and stormed into his house.
Fiona was slicing roots into the great cast iron kettle. She had turned upon hearing him approach; she watched him storm in, paused in place with a truncated tuber in her left hand and the knife in her right.
Shrek dragged a half-barrel out from under a table. "Fargin bleedy toadskins," he ranted, tossing an empty spool, a rusty hammer, and half a candle carelessly out of the junk bin. "Gretel's gritty gullet!" he swore, upending the bin all over the hard dirt floor.
"Can I help you find something?" Fiona asked gently, setting down the knife.
Shrek had advanced to a box of odds and ends under the bookshelf, casting singleton socks and lonely lids left and right. "Where's mah blasted twine?" he hollered, as much at the bin as at his wife.
"Oh! I tidied that up yesterday; it's in with the sewing," Fiona said brightly.
"Oh that's just great!" Shrek complained. "Who would even do that? Ah need an axe, not a lovely scarf!" Shrek swiveled around the dining table and stomped three steps across the room, not even facing Fiona as her face crumpled in hurt from the insult he'd just dealt. Shrek lofted the sewing basket with one big green hand and dumped it out over the table, creating a mound of fabric scraps, scissors and thread spools. He fished around in the pile until he produced a bundle of twine spooled around a scrap of bark.
"You know, it's not entirely the craziest place to put twine. It's kind of like yarn," Fiona said softly.
"Well that's not where AH keep it!" he snarled, flopping down into a chair to work at the twine.
"Just trying to help," Fiona said, just a hint of frustration coloring her voice.
"Well ye didn't!" Shrek growled, focused on untangling the twine that had fallen off the end of the coil. His big fingers always made this sort of task frustrating, even when he wasn't already in a bad mood.
Fiona took a tentative step towards him and held out one hand, palm up. "Can I...?"
"NO YE CAN'T!" Shrek thundered, facing his lap. His outburst made the hatchet, which had been balanced on his left knee, fall off his leg, where it snagged a stray loop of twine, yanking the coiled bark out of his hand. The whole mess fell, and the blunt end of the metal wedge bounced hard off his foot.
ROOOOOAAAR! Shrek lifted his head and unleashed the bellow of fury, rattling the pots hung over the sink.
Fiona's ears drooped and her expression wilted. She sidestepped carefully around Shrek's chair the few steps to the open bedroom curtain. "That hurts, Shrek," she said, flatly. She backed up to the bed and climbed up to sit against the headboard.
Fiona bit her lip and watched the back of Shrek's head. His ears had become orange-hot; she could hear his teeth grinding.
Shrek's frustration addled mind was turning over all the inputs. Hurt? Me!? zipped by one side of his brain. Another part justified It's not exactly UNREASONABLE t'think that twine, fer TOOLS, doesn't go in the SEWING. The nerves in his foot re-transmitted their reminder message about throbbing pain, which overlapped other fragments of thought: It's not exactly UNREASONABLE t'think that twine, fer TOOLS, doesn't go in the SEWING.
Chin dipped low, Shrek turned his head just far enough to peer at Fiona's shadow on the bed.
Look at her. She looks really upset. He felt her anger, her sadness, her disappointment; emotions announcing themselves from one lobe while another fielded the "hot ache" message from his swelling knuckles. Wha' kind'a ass would make mah beautiful wife feel all those bad things? zipped by his frontal lobe. His thoughts weren't coherent sentences, or even in words; more like dream imagery and emotion, mixed together haphazardly, cause unconnected to effect. His fight reflex supplied a visual of himself throttling whichever cretin dared dismay his wife.
Adrenaline decayed, making room for coherent thoughts to form, entire sentences. Rationality finally arrived like a dim candle illuminating the murky cavern of anger in his mind. He turned back to look at his feet, wanting to hide his churning emotions. Fiona watched his ears cool down to a dark green and droop almost to his cheeks.
It's me, he thought.
Ah'm the problem.
She deserves everything, t'be treated perfectly, and now some jerk is mistreating her, and she's married to 'im.
Shrek looked into his open palms, head sinking between his shoulders.
What a loser. Ahdon'tdeserve her.
And she didn't even express her disappointment until ah almost roared 'er head off. How can ah even show meh face t'er?
He still felt the heat, the irrational anger inside him. He still wanted to feel angry, but the rational part of his mind knew that couldn't possibly be correct, because it was directed at the nicest, kindest, truest person he'd ever met, who was being true to him right now, while he didn't deserve it.
A wave of remorse washed over his mind, emotion once again eclipsing coherent thought for a few breaths.
What could he possibly do to rectify the situation?
He sighed.
He remembered Donkey being ridiculously patient with him last summer. "That's what friends do. They forgive each other!" At the time, it had taken Shrek two tries to muster a sincere apology, and that was only under duress, because the opportunity to love Fiona was on the line.
Well? Isn't it? RIGHT NOW!? He could finally hear the little voice inside his head, telling him what the right thing to do was; the one he couldn't hear until now because the angry feelings - the blood thumping in his ears - drowned it out.
He squeaked out the quietest, hoarsest "Ah'm sorry." His back slumped a little rounder, his head dipped forward a little farther. He stared at his big toes.
It was silent for a dozen heartbeats.
Fiona replied simply, "I forgive you."
Shrek took some more deep, long breaths. He had no idea what to do now.
Maybe a minute passed in silence.
Finally, Shrek stood up and turned to his right, towards the front door, so to avoid eye contact with Fiona.
"Oh no you don't," Fiona said, soft in volume but firm with intent.
"Ah can't stay here after how I jus' treated ye", Shrek mumbled, head down, eyes raised only enough to see her tough soles on the bed.
"I already forgave you. Now's not the time to leave; now's the time to come over here and make things better."
Shrek stood planted in place. His entire life experience told him that things only ever got better when he was alone; on the other hand, that's because he'd spent pretty much his entire life alone. He was terrified of making something worse, of hurting Fiona more, of even acknowledging the wonderful creature he'd just hurt.
He sure wasn't going to reject her obscenely kind invitation, but he couldn't find it in him to make eye contact, much less ask her to accept his touch. He shuffled slowly into the bedroom and made a place to sit at the foot of the bed, his head propped on his wrist. His gaze pointed right through her belly, through the pillows behind, and out the rough wall behind; that was as close as he could get to meeting her gaze just yet.
"Ah don't ever wanna do that agen," he murmured.
"You're probably going to. But I'd be glad if you tried not to." The patience and kindness in her voice was a gentle invitation. Shrek bit his lip and looked up into her saturated blue eyes. Her cheeks were still flushed: it was clear that anger had washed through her; the difference was that she had hers under control. Shrek felt ... small and weak.
In the past, when some cruel villager was vandalizing his latrine or trampling his pickerelweed garden, his anger fueled him. It made him feel huge, strong, roooaaarr! It made him the scariest thing in these woods. But as he looked into Fiona's eyes, he saw his lover, whom he had just hurt, still meeting his gaze, patiently, waiting for him. Waiting for something in him that she valued.
His brow sagged in defeat. He looked down at the bedsheets. "Ah don't deserve ye, princess."
Fiona's lower lip creased. She leaned forward and lifted his chin with her bent forefinger, drawing his gaze up from the bed back to her face. "You're the knight in shining armor I waited for, Shrek."
They sat quietly, just exchanging gazes. Shrek felt his body slow, anger and confusion and frustration draining away gradually, giving way to those perfect, patient eyes. Her tears had dried, but he could see the tracks of flushed skin on her cheeks, and he hated the person that would make her cry. He felt his blood warm. He wanted to pound them into a ... oh. Not again. He bit down on his folded index finger to drown the new sprout of anger in a little puddle of pain.
Fiona watched Shrek's emotions churn; her lip pushed up into a lopsided pout of sympathy. She reached a hand out and pulled on his shoulder, toppling him towards her on the bed. "C'mere, you." Shrek let her roll him until his head landed in her lap, nose buried in the crook of her knee, and he heaved a great sigh.
Fiona let a few minutes pass in silence, a hand on Shrek's shoulder, feeling him breathe. She tilted her head thoughtfully, analyzing the situation, trying to figure out why this ogre would act like such a monster over something so trivial.
"You know," she broke the quiet, "I don't think you were angry at me, really, were you?" Shrek shook his head. "You seemed just generally testy today. I read once that men have hormones that make them feel aggressive and angry and sometimes violent. Maybe ogres have some related plumbing."
"Maybe," Shrek mumbled into her folded knee. "But it's no excuse for me treatin' ye like tha'."
"No, it's not." Fiona said, firmly but gently. She was relieved that her venture was righting the ship. "I'm grateful to you for saying so. I get in moods too. You were testy all day, and I wonder if you just had a bit too much...", she waved her hand in a circle around his spotted green dome, "...ogre sauce in the soup today."
Shrek chuckled. "ROOAR!" he whispered into the soft velvet of her dress skirt.
"You know what else I've noticed, my big green ogre? You're almost never testy the day after we ... you know ..." she said with a smirk, one eyebrow raised coyly, finger spinning around the tail of her braid.
Shrek rolled his eyes up to look at her face, and chuckled again. "If ahm not mistaken, tha' sounded a wee bit like a proposal."
"Maybe," she replied, a little twinkle in her eye.
His brow furrowed. He was twisted awkwardly at the hips, legs dangling awkwardly off the bed. "Ah really don't deserve yeh. What's a princess like ye doin' with an ogre like me?" he said, burying his face in her belly and clasping his arms around her hips to squeeze her tight.