Spindle Wood (COMPLETED)

Chapter 56

"Hey, little man." Pat looked up from the fire.

"Hi, Dada." He smiled before looking back down at the stick he was burning.

"What're you doing?" Roman asked, leaning his axe against a tree.

"What're you?" Pat asked curiously.

"I was going to get some wood." Roman said. "There, I've come clean." Pat giggled. "What about you?"

"Making a pencil." Pat lifted the stick out of the dying flames to inspect the burnt end. "Someone told me how to. Think it coulda been Uncle Remus but I dunno."

"You're making charcoal." Roman pointed out. "Not a pencil."

"Same thing, though, innit?" Pat asked, glancing up at his dad.

"Not really." Roman sat down beside him. "And you've got smoke on your nose." Pat rubbed at his nose furiously. "Charcoals all wood and easily smudged. Pencils... well, I mean, you've got pencils, they use lead and stuff. Why d'you need to do this?"

Pat shrugged and stuck the 'charcoal' back in the fire. "I'm trying to write something special. A pencil just didn't seem to cut it."

"What're you writing?" Pat's eyes widened.

"It's, um, it's a secret." He lied quickly. Well, it wasn't a lie exactly. He just wasn't telling his dad what he was writing (a letter) and who he was writing it for (Logan). That wasn't a lie... right?

"Oh, alright." Roman's tone sounded like he didn't believe Pat. "Anyway, special, huh?" Pat nodded. "So if, say, someone were to go and borrow your father's special fountain pen and then someone were to return it after it was used, then that would be helpful?"

Pat stared up at Roman and grinned. "You'd do that?!"

"Sure, why not?" Roman had barely gotten the word 'not' out of his mouth before Pat tackled him, shrieking and hugging him tight. Roman laughed in surprise and hugged Pat back.

"Okay, okay, you're welcome!" He yelled over Pat's excited squeals and laughter. "Just make sure it doesn't run out. Or Vee'll have both our heads."

Pat groaned and scratched out something else on the paper. "This is so bad!" He whined. "How did Lo write it so easily?"

"Maybe I'm just not good with words." He thought. That was probably it. Language wasn't his strong suit, not like it was for Logan. Logan knew what words like 'insurmountable' meant, Pat couldn't even begin to spell that.

Pat capped Papa's special pen and stared down at what he was trying to write. Did he really want to write this? Absolutely. If he was going to see less of Logan, he wanted Logan to have something to show he hadn't forgotten him.

Pat had a little piece of Logan's soul, he should probably give something back.

"I'm not good with words, I've said I'm not good with words," he muttered to himself, reading the paper over, "where do I go from there?"

The thing was, he couldn't describe it. Logan meant a lot to him - Logan meant the whole world and then some to Pat - but he couldn't find any words important enough to say so without coming off as just plain weird.

"Gah, why is this so difficult?" Pat sighed and pushed his glasses up his nose. "Writing is easy! It's putting words on paper! It's not like... story-making or anything. So," he uncapped the pen and picked it up, "let's go."

Nothing happened.

Words didn't magically appear on the paper. Pat's vocabulary didn't magically get better. If this had been a fairy-tale, maybe it might've?

Logan was important to him. So why didn't he just put that? He was Pat's best friend in the whole world, as well as being his lover. So why couldn't he just put that too?

Logan wasn't going to judge. He hoped. He really hoped. Because if Logan was going to judge, Lord help Pat.

Pat sighed and started to write again.

Is this based on my feelings about a letter I wrote for a friend? Yes. Except I wrote mine while very tired so I had less of a filter.
Bye,
Blaize