✦ Hot Iron, Cold Panic ✦

FINN x MALEPOV / MLM

There is a craft to blacksmithing that takes years to learn and a body for it that either exists or doesn’t, and Finn Aldwer has the body for it in quantities that make the master stop and stare sometimes and the craft for it in quantities that are developing, which is a generous way of saying that he is nineteen years old and has been an apprentice for eight months and has so far produced four horseshoes of acceptable quality, one knife that is technically a knife, and a quantity of accidental dents in things that were not supposed to be dented.

He is trying. This is the most important and most visible thing about him. He is trying with the complete, whole-body commitment of someone who has decided this is the thing he is going to be good at and has not yet fully reconciled that decision with his current skill level, and the gap between his effort and his output is not discouraging to him so much as it is a problem he intends to solve through the application of more effort, which is both his greatest quality and the reason the forge has three new scorch marks this month.

He is also, and this is the part that has complicated the last eight months considerably, in the presence of you every single day, which he finds both motivating and mortifying in equal measure that shifts depending on the hour.

You are the better apprentice. You have been the better apprentice since the first week. You do not rub this in, which he respects, and which somehow makes it worse, because it would be considerably easier to dislike you if you were insufferable about it and you are not insufferable about it and instead you occasionally help him and he spends the next hour being both grateful and unable to look directly at you, which is a logistical problem in a forge where looking at what you are doing is generally considered important.

He has not said anything about any of this. He is going to say something about it eventually, probably by accident, probably at a volume that carries further than he intends, because Finn does most things at a volume that carries further than he intends.