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They say when you’re telling a story, you should always show and not tell.
This is good advice; it’s more fun for a reader when they can put two-and-two together by themselves, when they can piece the world into place with hints. Showing is, on the whole, more effective than telling.
That being said: Flamefrags is a selfish man.
Selfish down to the bones. And as his best friend disappears into the rain there is nothing more that he wants than to chase after him and drag him back; tell him that maybe he should wait until the rain has stopped, or maybe that he’s worried about bandits attacking on the way, or maybe to tell him that Flame doesn’t know how to be solo anymore.
A drop of water lands on his nose. It sizzles. He steams in the rain and looks down at his boots.
Where, Flamefrags wonders, did my voice go?
He makes chocolate-chip pancakes for dinner.
The chocolate is dark chocolate; wrapped up in gold paper foil and tied with a red ribbon. Special rations gifted to him personally for “slaughtering one-hundred-and-fifty new players at the battle of Steampunk City.”
He braces the slab of candy on the counter and chops it up ragged with Fragger. First horizontally, and then vertically, and then diagonally; sweeps it all into his mixing bowl with his hand.
Flour dust in the bowl. Two eggs, a bit of milk, levain from the jar Lomedy forgot to take. Sugar. Salt. The kitchen looks massacred when he’s done.
A pancake sizzles on his palm. To flip it, he just plops the thing over onto his other hand. Then Flame eats it out of his hand while sitting criss-cross on the stone floors. There’s chocolate all over his hands and mouth.
Then Flame drops his head into his hands and cries and gets chocolate all over his face and it fucking sucks. He spends an hour cleaning the kitchen and when he’s done he makes a bowl of vegetables and cut-up fruit just the way Lomedy likes and eats it alone underneath Lomedy’s favorite, ruined bonsai.
That night he gets ready for bed the same way he always does. He puts on his pajamas. He has good pajamas: an old tiger-striped t-shirt whose origin he doesn’t remember, his bright orange bonnet, and gray sweatpants that definitely used to be Mane’s before Flame made the executive decision that they fit him better. Then he washes his face and brushes his teeth and stands outside of the door to their bedroom for fifteen minutes.
Flame sleeps on the couch, that first day.
The sound of birds singing wakes him up. He hates it.
On the second night, Flame opens the door to their bedroom and finds a bed much too big for him. He crawls in between the sheets and the red-and-yellow quilt and discovers that his side of the bed has become hellishly cold and sickeningly hard. So he rolls over and breathes in. It smells like citrus. He cries into Lomedy’s pillow instead of the couch.
The rain wakes him. It sounds like somebody gently tapping on the window. He spends the day wandering around his own griefed base like a lost child.
Let it be said again: Flamefrags is a selfish man.
It’s not enough for Lomedy to be happy and safe. It’s not enough for Lomedy to be doing what he wants in his life. Flame needs him here.
There’s something sick and small in him that has spent every second since Lomedy walked away screaming for him to run after him and bring him back; to tie him up and make him set sixteen stasis chambers and put him in a box with six-thick obby walls and chunkbanning and just anything to make him stay. Anything to make him stay.
The problem there being that Lomedy would hate that and hate him and all Flame has ever wanted was to be loved.
And there’s something in his chest deep down, light and sad and whispery, that says Flame, you could be a great farmer. Something in him that makes him want to stick Fragger and The Flame in a hill somewhere and put on a pair of rubber boots and a sun hat and spend every day weeding the rows. It wouldn’t be hard, either. All he’d have to do is follow Lomedy and go to his farm and kneel down and say I give up, I give it all up, I give up everything, all I want to be is your teammate. Not the best, not the strongest, not the most skilled. Just your teammate. Let me be your teammate.
On the third night, Flame stays out all night hunting down bandit camps. He finds them and kills their sentries except for one so that one can alert the rest that he’s here. Slaughtering them in their sleep isn’t as fun. He comes home stinking of copper and slick with blood and he tracks viscera all over the stone floors and falls into bed.
The sunlight wakes him up, slanting cold and cool over his face. Flame discovers he’s accidentally stained Lomedy’s side of the bed deep, unforgiving crimson red.
On the fourth night he writes a letter.
Dear Lomedy
Yo, Loms
hello bro
Hi
Hope things are good with the farm
Did you make it there safe? If there are bandits let me know
I miss you a lot
I miss you a lot.
I’m gonna be moving around a lot. Send me a letter back please
– Flame
On the fifth night, in the frayed hour after a nightmare about mist and snow and rabbits slaughtered in dead-end burrows, Flame sits on the edge of the roof of his ruined base.
He stares up at the sky, which, at this time of the night, is bluish-black and specked with stars, thousands of them, sprayed across the world like seafoam does when the ocean crests and spits into the air; white and blue and gold-yellow, pale yellow, bright yellow.
It’s such a lonely life, he thinks. What a lonely, lonely life.
Once more: Flamefrags is a selfish man.
But then he gets a letter back and that letter starts with I miss you too.
It starts with I miss you too and then goes into it's weird not putting my bed next to yours and then it's safe I'm safe and then, at last--the farm is nice. It feels good. I wish you were here.
On the sixth morning, Flamefrags holds his best friend’s letter to his heart and he laughs and laughs and laughs.
Sorry, writes Lomedy, in his stupid awful handwriting. I guess that's pretty selfish of me.