Broken Pieces - Crk Fanfiction

🫐 1- delivery hunt

The tower smelled like parchment and burnt lavender again.

Moonberry Cookie scrunched his nose as he climbed the spiral staircase, clutching a bundle of sealed scrolls to his chest. The wax was still warm on one of them-he may have left it a little too close to the brazier downstairs. Again.

"Just letters," he muttered to himself. "Deliver the letters, and maybe sneak out the back for a bit of-adventure. Yes. A walk. A long, scenic, completely unsupervised walk."

He reached the top landing and paused, glancing over his shoulder at the wide, arched window behind him. The Blueberry Kingdom's spires glittered in the afternoon light. The wind smelled like wildflowers. Freedom.

Then came the unmistakable creak of the study door opening ahead.

"Moonberry."

Her voice was always calm, like a lake before a storm. Lavender Cookie stood in the doorway, arms folded, the hem of her robe swirling with magic that hadn't quite settled from whatever spell she'd been weaving.

"I trust those are the missives for the palace courier?" she asked, her eyes narrowing slightly.

Moonberry gave a half-hearted smile. "Most of them. Probably."

"Mm." Lavender stepped aside to let him in. "Then perhaps we can finally have that talk you've been avoiding all week."

Moonberry stopped cold.

There it was. The conversation. The one about responsibility and discipline and what it means to be a wizard under royal tutelage. He considered pretending he hadn't heard her, or that he'd just remembered something extremely urgent downstairs.

But Lavender Cookie was already seated, and the letters had slipped from his arms to the desk with a soft thump.

And so, the door clicked shut behind him.

Moonberry Cookie shifted his weight from one foot to the other, eyeing the chair across from Lavender like it might bite him. The parchment-scented air felt thicker now, pressing down with the weight of expectations he had no interest in meeting.

Lavender didn't speak right away. She was good at that-using silence like a spell, letting it stretch until it snapped something loose in your chest.

"I saw your last report," she said finally, tapping one long finger on the side of a scroll case. "It was... imaginative."

"That's a good thing, right?" Moonberry tried, flashing a hopeful grin. "Innovation is a pillar of magical study, you said so yourself!"

"'The flora in the castle greenhouse have developed a secret monarchy and are plotting rebellion' is not a proper field observation," she replied dryly.

He winced. "Okay, yeah. That one might've gotten away from me."

Lavender sighed, though not unkindly. "Moonberry, you're not without talent. You're clever. Intuitive. But wizardry is not just stargazing and spontaneous combustion. You've been entrusted with a legacy. With duty."

There it was again. Duty.

Moonberry dropped into the chair with a soft flump, arms crossed. "I didn't ask for a legacy."

"No," she agreed, her voice softening. "But it chose you. And one day, the crown will too."

He looked away, out the tall window where the wind tugged at the trees like a child pulling on a sleeve. Somewhere out there were forests, caves, ruins unexplored-places that didn't ask him to be something, just to discover.

"I'm not sure I want to be chosen," he said at last.

Lavender studied him for a moment, then stood and walked to the window, her silhouette outlined in the fading light.