A curt nod, executed with something like a grimace, sealed her victory.
Make that one bet down. One more to go.
With her belly full and the day’s exhaustion settling onto her bones like an especially rotund cat clambering onto its favorite armchair, Pansy decided it was time for bed.
The cottage, thankfully, was not without one. It sat at the center of the master bedroom – the onlyrealbedroom, given the cottage’s barely furnished state – an immense, towering structure of cast iron and ornate brass, polished to a near-blinding sheen. Though the craftsmanship was halfling in origin, with each whorl of brass fashioned into a budding bloom, it, like much of the cottage, had suffered a level of… call it encroachment. The four posts that would have once supported a canopy of fabric were draped in long trails of ivy, and instead of a down mattress there was a flat expanse of strange, spongy material.
Pressing a hand against it, Pansy conceded that it was not uncomfortable; though she did wonder whether her form would be forever etched into its surface once she’d laid upon it. An unnecessary concern, it turned out. The material sprang back into place the moment she removed her hand, leaving no evidence that she’d ever touched it.
Either way, this mattress, peculiar though it was, was preferable to sleeping on the floor, which Pansy had been a touch worried about during her initial tour of the cottage. Clearly the “necessities”, as Ren had put it, included a bed – even if it didn’t come with any sheets.
Thankfully, Pansy had plenty of those. She selected a set in soft, buttery yellow – one of her favorites by far – and spread them across the mattress with practiced ease. A horde of blankets, each woven from nearly a dozen different shades of yarn, soon followed, along with far more pillows than any one person could conceivably use, as demonstrated by the fact that most of them would migrate to the floor come morning. By the time she was finished, the bed looked almost exactly like the one she’d left behind in her parents’ burrow. The ivy, of course, being the one key difference.
Pleased with her efforts, Pansy headed into the adjoining bathroom to finish getting ready for bed. She shivered as she crossed the threshold, the terracotta tiles cool against the soles of her feet, bare of socks for the first time since the start of the “dirt invasion”. Thankfully, Ren had left the bathroom alone in that respect. Her slippers, hard-soled and warm, would protect her from the rest.
While she waited for the bath, a slate-gray tub crammed beneath the room’s frosted window, Pansy organized her sizable collection of toiletries into the shallow cubbies that had been carved into the wall by the sink. Considering this was to be a permanent arrangement, she figured she might as well get things set up as she liked them. Certainly, before Ren had a chance to take over.
In a way, it was like a race. The goal? To infuse as much of herself into this cottage before Ren could do the same for themself. It reminded her of Pioneers of Plainsborough, a game she’d once played as a child, where each player sought to capture the most tiles on the wooden board in a bid to expand their respective “farms”. Much to her peers’ frustration (and her own delight), she’d taken to it like a duck to water, thoroughly sweeping the board every time she played. This situation with the cottage, she resolved, would be no different. She had already claimed the kitchen for herself, and now the master bed and bath too. A big win for the Pansy Dominion by anyone’s standards, even with the added dirt.
And yet, somehow, Ren hadn’t gotten the memo.
Pansy’s eyes bulged as she padded back into the bedroom, the damp ends of her curls frizzing in the lingering steam. Because there was Ren, shoving aside her carefully manicured bedspread in favor of – you guessed it! – more moss.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, rushing over in a flurry of staccato slaps of slippers against hardwood; not even the shock of Ren’s invasion could make her forget about her all-too-necessary footwear. “This is my bed!”
Ren paused just long enough to give her a withering, sidelong look, their long, pointed ears flattening against their skull in naked displeasure. “Just because you’ve thrown your stuff all over it doesn’t make it yours.” A point they punctuated by tossing one of Pansy’s many pillows – a heavily embroidered sham with scalloped edges – at her face.
Pansy caught the pillow easily, setting it back onto the bed with a scowl. “We agreed not to destroy each other’s things.”
“How am I destroying anything? I’m just making some room.”
Room. It was then that Pansy noticed Ren’s clothing: a loose beige tunic that came down to their knees; far more like her own orange nightgown than the clothing she’d seen them wearing earlier. Her eyes widened anew, cold shock lancing through her nervous system.
“Oh, no. No, no,no,” she said, shaking her head again and again. “You’renotsleeping here.”
“Then where am I supposed to sleep exactly?” Ren asked, eyebrows arching. “This is the only bed in the entire house.”
“I—” Pansy snapped her mouth shut. It was the only bed, wasn’t it? But even so, did it really matter?
Definitely not, she decided after barely a second’s worth of consideration. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe on the floor? Looks pretty cozy with all that dirt. Just like home, right?”
Ren scowled at her. “I’m not sleeping on the floor.”
“If you put that moss… pad… thing”– she gestured towards the sheet of moss that had supplanted her pristinebedspread – “down, you can sleep on it instead.”
“It’s a blanket,” they retorted, their tone as flat as the line of their mouth.
“Whatever,” Pansy said with a shrug. “Call it what you want. All I know is that I’ll be sleeping on the bed.Alone.” And to prove it, she shoved the same blankets Ren had so rudely cast aside back into their rightful place. That sheet of moss be damned!
“Hey!” Ren shouted, barely managing to claw their mossy blanket into the safety of their arms before it fell to the floor.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Pansy chided, once again the subject of the goblin’s venomous stare. “It’s just a bit of dirt. And youlovedirt, don’t you? That’s why you covered the whole house in it, right?”
“You’re acting like a child,” they spat, yellow eyes blazing. “No. Worse than a child. At least a child knows how to share!”
“Maybe if there was someone worth sharing with, I would!”
“What if I just make you instead?”
