(Note: Written for Lazulisong for Yuletide Madness 2012.)
Worry Never Solved
by: EstiRose
Everything has something to say, something different. The animals, the trees, the butterflies, the barnacles.
Toru stops, listens to them all, sometimes throws questioning glances at his friend Yoshihiro. His friend makes notes about what everything says, in order to make sense of what’s going on. Toru doesn’t even try. He’s not curious like Yoshihiro, he prefers to make things with his hand. Wood, metal, you name it, he likes to make it.
Yoshihiro prefers meditating, cooking, tending livestock. He makes the foods that Toru eats when his energy flags, and Toru makes him furniture and repairs his gardens. Yoshihiro’s gardens constantly need mending, because he uses them so much.
Toru’s street is full of machines and gas plants, peat bogs and other things. He got tired of having to spend energy teleporting to the community machine rooms.
“Transmission Ends. Click,” the shrine of Zille says, and he realizes he hasn’t been paying attention to it. But Yoshihiro has been dutifully been noting it down. He’ll ask his friend about it later.
Nobody knows where new Glitches come from. They’re not hatched like butterflies or chickens or pigs. They just appear one day, their street with them. He and Yoshihiro appeared at the same time a long time ago, looking for the same things, and he feels like they’ve been together forever. His skin is green and Yoshihiro’s is charcoal grey, and Yoshihiro’s clothes are prim compared to Toru’s wild. But that doesn’t matter. Glitches come in all colors, after all, and their wardrobe changes wildly and randomly sometimes. What matters is collecting and making, growing and making.
“Let’s go to my home and carve pumpkins,” Yoshihiro says. Toru nods, because carving pumpkins is something he can do. He’ll help Yoshihiro harvest, and then a while later, they’ll rest, snack on the seeds, and head out. Toru wants to go see a sloth and get some more Snails for his wall panels.
But they have time. Between the two of them, they can do anything. He high-fives a passing Glitch, smiles at Yoshihiro, and hopes that this will never end.
(Author’s end note: I miss Glitch so much.)