Not for big people

Mid-afternoon was an outrageously annoying time to have to storm out of one's house in a fury, I ruminated angrily as I kept my head down, trying to conceal the fact from passersby that I was outright gasping with the gale **** of my babyishly hurt, frantic sobs. This was a pathetic way to live, I thought, scrubbing irritably at my burning eyes—sharing a home with a person who thought it was funny that the fact of how hard I had struggled to keep him alive made somebody mistake me for his wife!

After I'd been walking and crying for probably twenty minutes I turned a corner and saw a small sign next to the door of a south Mivian restaurant that was constantly changing its name and menu, which had almost definitely given Chakrabarti food poisoning last year: FLAT FOR LET.

I marched inside and asked the teenage halfling behind the bakery case, “How much for the flat?”

“Da!” she called, and a paunchy halfling man came out and looked up at me, and then at her. “She wants to know how much for the flat.”

He looked me up and down. “It’s not for big people.”

“How much?” I asked again, and he gave me another unenthusiastic look over.

He cleared his throat, pointedly. “I guess what I meant actually is, it’s not for deranged big people who haven’t had a bath in a week.”

“What about deranged big people who don’t call the city inspector on you for sourcing all your meat from the Shantytown slop yard?” I asked, not even bothering to lower my voice for whatever customer had just walked in behind me, because now he was just being shitty and rude.

His face darkened.

“Beg your pardon, sir, my sister is not well,” Baggett cut in smoothly from behind me, ignoring the halfling’s perplexed look as he attempted to parse the racial mechanics of that statement. Baggett deftly seized my momentary confusion and took me firmly by the arm and straight to the door. When we were outside and not blocking foot traffic he parked me against the wall and said, “Please tell me you are not trying to bully your way into letting a third floor shitshow flat in Littletown on impulse, just because Magnus made some stupid fucking misstep and you’ve only slept ten minutes or something in the last three days. That’s just embarrassing.”

I made a face.

“All I’m saying is, neighborhood-wise, you can do a hell of a lot better than Littletown if your only requirement out of the residence is to make a wildly stupid dramatic gesture on angry impulse.”

This knocked the remaining bluster out of me. “He laughed at me,” I said in a smaller voice than I meant to. “I thought he understood, but then he laughed.”

“Ah.” Baggett slipped his arm around my shoulders and leaned with me against the side of the building. “So that’s why you’re marching around sobbing and unwashed, half-assedly asking after shitty bedsits? To punish him for some wrong-headed idiot thing he said right after he almost died?”

I began to cry again.

“Ah, Bersk. Sorry you’re stuck with me,” he said, sounding genuinely kind of sorry about it. “Do you want to go back? Really Yerg is the one you want for this kind of heart-to-heart.”

I shook my head vehemently.

Baggett turned his head and studied me a moment, as if considering his next move if I couldn’t be passed off to Yergen. “Well, at least tell me what the hell he even said, to make you fly into such a temper. Obviously I’m dying to know.”

“It was barely anything. It was stupid,” I said, then glared at a passing man who thought it was fine to stare at people just for crying in public. “The priest called me his wife. And Mag thought that was so funny he about died all over again laughing about it. Which, I know saying this aloud I sound irrational—I know that. But it just suddenly seems like I’ve built my whole stupid life around somebody whose reaction to a stranger acknowledging him as the most important person in my life was to laugh at how hilariously wrong it was. And I feel so embarrassed, Bag,” I admitted. “What kind of idiot is this heartbroken, over something so stupid? Because I am—I’m heartbroken right now.” I scrubbed at my eyes for about the fiftieth time.

Baggett listened, then gave me a hard squeeze around the shoulders. “This is where Yergen would have constructive, sympathetic advice that won’t ruin all your most important relationships.”

There was a pause. “And?” I demanded, when he didn’t say anything else. “Is that it?”

“All I can do is guess whether you’re being an idiot based on my own limited perspective.”

“Well, do that then,” I said, because nitpicking shit Baggett said was a lot more enjoyable than public crying.

“Fine, fine. Well—obviously for a start, everything you said is absolutely deranged. I imagine I’ll find it all highly relatable once you get into the weeds with it,” Baggett said, then cut me a half grin when this made me roll my eyes.

I shook my head. “I don’t want constructive Yergen. I want the relatable fellow idiot.”

“Clearly you’re out of your head right now, so I’m going to let that insult slide.” But he kept his arm around me. “Want to walk a while?”

“Yeah.”

Baggett nodded and linked arms with me the way Curry usually did. It was nice, while also feeling rather weird.

“Would you buy me something to eat?” I asked after a while, having reflected on my empty belly as probable contributing factor to my current lack of composure. “I’m just cribbing from what I think the Yergen playbook might say,” I added.

Baggett took his arm back so he could check if he had money on him. “I have enough on me for cart food that won’t kill us like that Littletown dump. When I saw you open the door to that place I thought, she’s lost it for sure this time.”

“Let’s get something fried. By the harbor,” I said.

We walked in silence a while after that, mostly through alleys since I was still intermittently sniffling, until we were almost to the second ward and I finally worked up my nerve enough to ask, “Can I tell you a maybe-pretty-big secret Curry doesn’t know?”

“You have secrets Curry doesn’t know?” Baggett glanced down at me.

“Well… he knows part of it.”

Baggett made a little hm sound. “I see. That kind of secret. You’d better have out with it.”