Your name is Dave Strider, and it is hot as hell out here.

Well, okay, that's an exaggeration. Kinda. It's pretty warm but not too hot, like a nice moderate temperature, being mid-autumn and all, but you're just hot because you've been doing yardwork and the heavy lifting part of that, like moving fallen logs and shit around out of the garden. Jade said she could use magic to do it herself, but you figure you can do it without that, so why bother making her use spells and tire herself out, right?

With a grunt you pick up a thick limb that fell into the herb garden during the storm last night and heft it over your shoulder, carrying it with only a little difficulty over to the pile of wood that you'll chop up for firewood later. It's heavy, but not so heavy that you can't lift it.

You throw it down into the pile and dust your hands, breathing hard for a second as you roll your shoulders. Just about done with all this shit. Sweet.

"Dave!" Jade's voice rings out, clear and cheerful, and you turn to see her leaning out of the doorway to the house and waving. "Come inside and take a break, silly! You'll tire yourself out!"

You immediately start trotting to the shade of the porch and the coolness inside. Hell yes, breaks. You like breaks. You'll come back out and finish all this soon enough. It's a chore, but honestly you don't mind too much. Doing work around the house is like paying Jade back for mooching off her food and house and everything, and if you pay her back you don't feel like you owe her as much, which is good, because you hate feeling indebted to people.

"Well, sure, if you really gotta insist like that," you tell her as the blissful feeling of cool air washes over you. Ahhh, yes, good. "Did you miss me that much? C'mon, Jade, I was only outside."

Jade laughs as she leads you inside to the kitchen table, where there's a bowl of washed berries awaiting the two of you. "Oh, yes, totally! I was just so overcome with loneliness in here," she teases, eyes sparkling like diamonds, if diamonds are full of mischief and are also bright green. Maybe emeralds are better here. "What was I supposed to do without you, Dave? Live life like I did five months ago?"

"Well, shit, I could never you to do something like that," you shake your head solemnly, popping a raspberry into your mouth and then wincing. Tart. Not quite ripe, that one. Oh shit, that's sour. "I guess taking a break is what I've gotta do. It's the noble thing, you know. Knights can't leave ladies waiting on them or anything. It's not courteous."

"Not courteous," Jade repeats, her eyebrows raised and her hands on her hips before she breaks that stance to reach over and grab a strawberry for herself. "Is courteous what you would call eating every last cookie the 'lady' bakes in one day when they're supposed to last the whole week?"

"The lady didn't tell me the cookies were supposed to last the week," you protest. Come the fuck on! She's still on your case about that? That was almost a month ago!

"The lady thought that such a big jar of them would have implied they were meant for more than one day," she teases, her eyes dancing as she leans forward and playfully boops your nose to accentuate the words one day. "Or in Derse do you make that many cookies for one sitting?"

"It wasn't in one sitting," you correct, catching her hand and pushing it away from your face. "It was over the course of an entire day, thank you. And yeah, in Derse, we're used to eating an actual sensible amount of cookies in one day, not rationing them to like a crumb a day til they're gone."

"What's a sensible amount of cookies for a day?" she asks as she nibbles on her strawberry. "I feel like it's got to be less than twenty."

"Less than twenty?" Okay. Uh, it probably is less than twenty for most people, but for a kid who grew up third in line for the throne? Hell, you got all the cookies you damn well wanted and none of the responsibilities that came with being an heir. Fuckin' perfect, man. Too bad your family was like Dave stop dicking around and go be a knight and your past self was like cool lemme go do that. There are no unlimited cookies in the army.

There's also a lot of killing people and doing shit you don't want to do but have to do, noble's son or not. The army is not a nice place. You don't regret leaving.

Jade's looking at you a bit quizzically, and belatedly you realize that you sort of dropped the ball on conversation and were staring over her shoulder, zoned out for a minute. "Dave? Helloooo, you in there?"

"Huh—oh, yeah, totally. One hundred percent absolutely in here. I'm more in here than water is wet, which you might think is a whole fuckin' lot, but then—"

"Are you sure about that?" Jade questions, her eyes twinkling with mischief. She's perched on the edge of the countertop, legs dangling and swinging back and forth as she selects another strawberry from the bowl. "Because I just mentioned the contents of that pitcher over there and you didn't even blink!"

You blink now, twisting around to see what pitcher she's pointing at. It's opaque, sitting innocuously on the cluttered table behind you. "What's in it?"

"Apple juice," she answers cheerfully, and like she's just uttered the magic words you whip around faster than an arrow fired from a longbow to eye the pitcher. Seriously, the army is a fucking terrible place. They deprive everyone of delicacies and basic amenities, apple juice being both of those things, and you're already getting up to grab a glass from the cabinet.

"Jade English-Harley," you say as you pour some of that delicious, golden and beautiful elixir into your glass, "you are a fucking angel. Have I ever mentioned that?" Apple juice after a long afternoon of doing work and heavy lifting and shit. She's a godsend.

She giggles, hiding her face in her hands for a second before she pushes her hair back and tucs it behind her ears, looking at you. "I think you could stand to mention it more often," she quips merrily. When you turn around to face her, sipping this glass of heaven, her cheeks are a bit pink, but that's probably just from laughing or it being warm, and you're just reading into things.

You mean, she's cute, but you've only known her around four or five months. And you do like her a bit, you guess, but there's no way she's just blushing because you called her an angel because of the fact that she has apple juice. And—

Okay, you are thinking way too much into this. Just stop. It's hot and she's laughing and you're seeing things and you just need to stop.

You sit back down on the stool next to the countertop and sip your juice to make your brain shut up. Well, it doesn't shut up, it just stops focusing on Jade because god damn you really love apple juice. It's so good. Not too sweet, not too bland, just fucking perfect. You love apple juice. Apple juice is—

"Enjoying your time with your girlfriend?" Jade teases, drawing you out of your reverie. You give her an offended look.

"Girlfriend? Jade, are you telling me you haven't been paying attention to either of us? Seriously? Come on, I thought we were friends, but apparently not. If you were really in the loop with the two of us you'd know I proposed last week and I'm going to marry the apple juice in spring."

She tosses her head back and laughs brightly. "Oh my gosh, Dave. You're so silly!"

"You think I'm not serious," you shake your head with affected sadness. Looking soulfully into your glass, which is like half empty at this point, you say, "I'm sorry, babe. She just doesn't understand our love."

Jade is giggling again. You glance at her and flash her a quick grin before you shrug and down the rest of the juice with an air of "oh well, who gives a fuck".

"Dave!" she chastises. "Did you just drink your fiancée? She's gone now! What did you do that for? I thought you loved her!"

"Yeah, I do," you say. Then you get a terribly brilliant idea for an awful joke and smirk up at Jade, sitting on the edge of the counter. "I love her a lot. But Jade, she's not gone, she's just inside me, that's all. ... Feels nice, too—"

"Nooo, gross!" Jade cuts you off with a playful smack to the shoulder, squeezing her eyes shut as if to physically block out your gross joke. "Shut up and eat some fruit and stop that, you dork!"

You grin and reach over behind her to the bowl of raspberries, hoping to get a sweet one this time. Placing your new selection in your mouth, you're met with the satisfying flavor of a ripe berry, much better than that horribly sour one a minute ago. "As you wish, my lady," you say with a straight face. You called her your lady once out of habit a few weeks ago and she smacked you with a ladle and said that she was a witch, not a lady. Ever since then, you've made a point of calling her your lady. She seems to have given up on correcting you. Also, there's no ladle in her hand this time.

"Good," she shakes her head reproachfully at you, but there's a look of fond exasperation on her face. You grin disarmingly, turning on the charm.

"C'mon, though, Jade, it was kinda funny, you've gotta admit."

"I don't have to admit anything!" she contradicts, laughing. "Except that you're gross!"

"I didn't ask you to admit that."

"No," she agrees, "you didn't. I'm just helpful like that and admit things anyway!"

"That's not what I'd call helpful," you frown at her. She gives you a bright smile, which is kind of disarmingly cute (your grin, by contrast, is disarmingly handsome and roguish and charming or something like that) and just shrugs.

"So," she changes the subject then. "How's the yard work going? Do you need any help, or—"

"Actually," you say, before she can offer to go throw spells at the logs again, which she keeps doing, despite your repeated attempts to tell her that no you do not need her to throw spells at them when you can just pick them up off the ground and put them wherever they need to go, "I'm almost done with the wood. I can chop it up this evening or tomorrow, whichever works, too."

"Oh, wow, really?" she asks, her eyes widening a little bit. "You sure went and got that finished quickly!"

"Yeah," you drawl. "It's because when you just pick shit up instead of flinging magic around, you don't tire yourself out and need to just sit there and rest for the rest of the day. Moral of the story: you shouldn't—"

"Moral of the story," she interrupts, leaning over to ruffle your hair, "is that life is better when you hire a knight to do your housework for you!"

You duck away and frown at her as you toss your head to get your goddamn hair out of your face—you kind of need to cut it, honestly, it's getting long and annoying as fuck. "Oh, come on."

"What, come on?" she asks innocently. "It's true! You do all that for me, so I get to spend more time working on potionmaking and doing more fun things like spellcrafting and enchanting! The better the enchantments are, the better the prices we get for the stuff, too." A thought strikes her then, and she sits up a bit straighter as she looks at you. "You know," she says, "I was planning to go to market this weekend. But you're always asleep when I leave, so I never really asked if you want to come, but ... do you want to? In three days?"

You blink. Then you shrug. She goes to market like every other week or so to buy stuff that would be hard to get on your own out in the woods, like flour and sugar and whatever, but you haven't actually ever gone with her in all these five months. "Sure, why the hell not. How far is it, anyway?"

"About two hours at a brisk walk," she says with a dainty little shrug. "If we leave around dawn, we get there just as most shops start to open. That's the best time. No really long lines, and no tired angry buyers who yell at you. Also, the officers don't check things as hard in the mornings because they're half asleep, so it's more likely that we can sell enchanted goods!"

"Yeah, I was wondering about that," you comment. "The whole selling enchanted goods thing. Like, how does that work? Do these people know they're buying enchanted shit, or what?" Not that it'd really bother you if they didn't, because money in your pocket is money in your pocket and that money can go towards getting you and Jade food and paying to send letters back home to Derse—something you really need to do. You just ... keep putting it off, the same way you kept putting off leaving Jade's place, until you decided that fuck it all you weren't leaving. After all, it wasn't like you had anywhere else to be. May as well live with a new friend.

"Oh, of course!" Jade looks scandalized at the thought that they might not know. "They all know me. Most of the people who buy my stuff are people who owe me favors, anyway. I heal their sick kids and all that. Most people in town like me, and I can always pay off regulator officers to look the other way because they don't hate me enough to arrest me because they usually owe me favors too, or someone in their families does."

"Wow," you say, impressed, because she sure has this place under her thumb. "You've got this all figured out, huh?"

"Mostly," she shrugs nonchalantly, like it's no big deal. "Still, that's the extent of interacting with people I ever get," she adds quickly, as if she's anticipating the question you're about to ask—namely, if you've got it all covered why do we live out in the middle of nowhere? "I mean... I don't know, it just seems safer to stay out here, with misdirection spells and things on the outside of the path so that when people leave they can't remember the way back. That way no one can lead anyone else straight to me—to us. Call me paranoid, but..."

She glances aside, at the portrait hanging over the fireplace. She does that a lot, you've noticed, whenever she trails off after talking about being paranoid or not wanting to be nearer to town or avoiding people in general. The portrait, she's told you, is of her brother Jake and herself and their grandfather. Gramps and Jake are both dead. But you don't know how they died, because Jade has never offered that story up and you've never really thought it was appropriate to ask. You can't deny your curiosity, though.

"Nah, it's cool," you shake your head and wave a hand dismissively. Yeah, you can't deny your curiosity, but you're not going to be a fucking dick about it. If she wants to tell you, she'll tell you. Otherwise, you'll only ask if it directly comes up or if some weird situation arises where you need to know. That's unlikely and probably will never happen, but until it does you're not gonna be like "oh hey Jade by the way this is a topic change but why is your family dead?" because you're not a goddamn asshole. ...At least not that much of one. "So, this weekend, we leave here around dawn or so and walk ... somewhere, I'll just follow you, and sell shit, and come home by dinnertime?"

"We should be home way before dinnertime," she says. "We can eat lunch in town and then walk back. But yes, that's the schedule! Think you'll be able to wake up before dawn?" She's looking at you again, not the portrait, and her eyes are sparkling with suppressed laughter. That's better than sad looks at dead family members. You approve of this change.

"Maybe," you shrug. It's true. Getting up early has never really been one of your strong points. "Maybe I'll just ... stay up all night instead."

"Oh no you won't!" she shoots that idea down immediately. "You do that and you'll be super tired by the time we even get into the market and set up our stall, never mind the actual selling and buying part! And then we'll go out to lunch and you'll fall asleep on the table or on me or something and that'll just be the saddest most pathetic thing a knight could do."

"You wound me, my lady," you immediately trot out the nickname again. "Obviouly the worst shit a knight can do is desert."

Jade opens her mouth, then closes it again. "Well," she starts, then stops, then shakes her head. "Okay, fine. Falling asleep at lunch with his 'lady' is the second-worst thing, then. Because then," she suddenly gains confidence, as though she's bringing this conversation back to familiar territory, rather than the suddenly shaky ground you'd veered onto, "you'd be deserting her at dessert-time."

... Wow.

"Jade."

"Yes?"

You level your most unimpressed look ever at her. "That was like the shittiest pun you have ever made at me, I'm pretty sure."

She giggles as she takes a raspberry too, completely unabashed and shameless about her shitty-pun-making skills. "I'll have to try hard to outdo it later, then, won't I?"

"No," you say quickly. "It's fine. That can just be the height of your pun career. You're on the way back down now, no worries. You don't have to try to outdo it because you just can't. That'll never happen. That was the shittiest pun in all existence."

Jade narrows her eyes at you. "Was that a challenge?"

"Oh god," you groan. "God, no."

"I think it was a challenge!" she crows. You have a bad feeling about this, and shaking your head you grab a handful of strawberries and start to stand and walk out of the kitchen.

"Where are you going?" Jade calls after you, leaning forward so precariously that for a second you worry she might fall and hit her head or something, except that you remember she'd just do the witchy thing where there's extra furniture wherever she needs it. Or whatever. You're not really clear on how it works. But you keep walking.

"To finish chopping firewood before you make another shitty pun at me," you call over your shoulder.

"Oh, no!" she cries, and you can hear the stupid grin in her voice that means there's a shitty pun coming, all right. Better walk faster. "My noble knight is deserting me! Whatever shall I do?"

"Fuck off, my lady!"

As the door swings shut behind you and you step out into the hazy autumn sunshine, the sound of her bright and clear laughter echoes pleasantly in your ears.

AN: so... can I tell you guys a secret?

... I haven't started writing chapter four.

[This surprises ABSOLUTELY NO ONE probably.]

I'm still on vacation oops, I just found a spare moment to publish this one. Not sure when the next will be done, but I'm gonna tryyyy for next Friday and keep consistency sort of. (Emphasis on try.) It'll either be their market trip or a timeskip again, depending on whether I give up on trying to keep this story short ahahahaha... ._.

Anyway, thanks for reading and please drop a review! They make a sad author happier! :)