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Crosshair had just wanted to ask Wrecker if he wanted to go to the shooting range or practice handball with him. Not listen to a two-hour monologue about plants.
It was hard to believe, but Pabu was halfway through its dry season. It was around this time last year Crosshair had inadvertently gone with Omega and Phee to Boracho.
Pabu’s weather had been gorgeous all week, with a nice breeze and relatively low humidity. Crosshair felt it would be a shame to waste the day. When he finished selling the day’s catches around mid-afternoon, he planned to ask Wrecker if he wanted to visit the handball court or go down to the cove for a little target practice. He and Wrecker hadn’t done either in several weeks, but today felt like the perfect opportunity.
Over the last year, Hunter had progressed so much in his woodworking skills, Shep and Pabu’s elders had not only hired him for town projects, but were now recommending him to other islands.
Hunter had gone up to the Hazards’ to meet with Shep and a few other officials about a project on Cohak’ku — an island like Pabu with a once-small village that was growing rapidly. And, of course, Omega had gone with him, partly to hang out with Lyana and partly to help Hunter and the others if she could.
Wrecker usually worked right until it was time to make dinner, but Crosshair knew Wrecker had started work earlier than usual today, so he’d be home by mid-afternoon as well.
Thankfully, Crosshair made it home about 10 minutes before his brother did. Batcher didn’t greet him at the door. She must’ve gone with Hunter and Omega to the Hazards’. All alone, Crosshair took the intervening minutes to put away his gear and change into less smelly clothes before Wrecker returned.
Through his open bedroom window, which looked out onto the stony street, Crosshair first heard and then saw Wrecker walking home, his arms loaded with something. AZI-3 was floating alongside Wrecker, holding the same kind of “something” in each of his hands that Wrecker was carrying.
Crosshair didn’t need to see them to know what they were:
Plants.
Six of them, going by the look of it.
Wrecker had one in each hand and one tucked into each arm, while AZI was carrying the other two.
The plants looked roughly the same, with large waxy leaves hanging off branches so thin, they looked like vines. But Crosshair, with his enhanced vision, could see the differences between them even from 10 meters.
None of the plants’ leaves were the same shade of green nor the same shape as each other; on some plants, the leaves were clustered together much closer, while for others, the leaves were more spread out; and some of them seemed to have tiny flowers mixed in, while others didn’t.
Crosshair met Wrecker and AZI at the front door.
“Crosshair,” his brother said, as the door opened and he crossed the threshold, “looky what I got!”
“Some plants.” It wasn’t a question, but his unenthused tone almost sounded inquisitive.
“Not just any plants. These are joyyas!”
“Alright,” Crosshair said with an eye roll and shrug. “Hey, would you want to—”
“Here,” Wrecker called, shoving the two plants in his hands into Crosshair’s arms. “Help me put these away real quick.”
But the process was anything but “real quick.”
With plants in each hand, Crosshair and AZI followed Wrecker onto and around the back patio and then back into the house, to his bedroom.
Wrecker deliberated for several minutes where exactly he should put them, partly to ensure they got the amount of sunlight they needed, but also partly because he was starting to run out of room.
Wrecker had a garden.
Or what could be called a garden.
If anything, it was more like a greenhouse spread across the entire property, inside and outside, on all three levels. In total, he now had 73 species of plants. Well, 74 with the new joyyas.
And that wasn’t counting the multiples he had of several species.
Wrecker himself wasn’t sure exactly how many individual plants he had, but as Crosshair already figured but knew all too well by the end of that afternoon, it numbered in the hundreds.
*****
Wrecker had never planned to be a gardener. He’d kind of fallen into it.
It had all started with one of their neighbors, Mbuma.
Mbuma had hired Wrecker to help her move from her rebuilt home in Lower Pabu to a newly vacated one in Upper Pabu. Wrecker had done a fine job, and Mbuma had offered Wrecker all the fruit she had, but it still didn’t feel sufficient payment. Wrecker had told her not to worry about it, but Mbuma insisted on giving him something else. Something she knew he’d like.
So, she’d offered him a fruit plant, telling Wrecker if he took care of it, it’d bear large, juicy fruits in a few weeks.
Wrecker had followed her instructions — taking hers and other neighbors’ advice on how to ensure the largest, juiciest fruit possible — and his efforts paid off. He and his siblings were eating that fruit for weeks, to the point Crosshair complained about it repeatedly and even Omega and Hunter were giving their pieces to Batcher under the table.
After that, though, word had gotten out that Wrecker would accept fruit and vegetable plants as payment in lieu of food. So, for the next few months, he’d received about a dozen more saplings and the like. Some only needed a few weeks’ care before bearing produce, but others would need several years’.
Wrecker didn’t mind either way. Food was food, and he’d be happy to eat it whenever it was ready.
Of course, that required learning more about the plants he’d received and taking care of them, making sure they had the right soil, got enough water and sunlight, and so forth.
Then, people started paying him with non-produce plants, but ones where the leaves could be plucked and added to dishes to enhance the taste. So, he learned how to care for those too.
Finally, now that everyone on Pabu believed Wrecker was a “green hand” — as the people of Aoturoa called it — they started offering any plants as payment, regardless of their edible qualities.
Tall, small, thin, bulky, blossoming, prickly. It didn’t matter. By this point, Wrecker would take all comers.
Even if he couldn’t eat it, he simply enjoyed seeing them grow, watching their leaves come in and their flowers bloom.
He also reveled in naming them. He’d initially named the plants after the people he’d received them from, but he eventually got more creative. He named them after animals, planets, people he knew, fictional characters from holo-programs he watched and so forth.
Now, there were several kinds of trees and bushes growing all around the house. Some of them were in planters on the hard-surface front, back and side patio areas, but Wrecker had managed to plant a few in the soil near the property lines.
These plants he mostly left to their own devices, only checking occasionally to ensure they were free of bugs and disease.
He also had a set of floatable gardening beds on the back patio, just outside his bedroom window. These required the most attention of his outdoor plants, as many of them were small and finnicky. The beds took up most of the back patio, but because they were floatable, Wrecker could easily stack or move them anytime the family wanted to play yard games.
For the plants that needed little or indirect sunlight, Wrecker had scattered them throughout the house’s main floor, mostly in the living room. These didn’t need much attention beyond watering them a few times a week.
Wrecker kept the fussiest indoor plants in his room. It had only been a few initially, but now it looked like his Big Lula tooka doll was retreating to Wrecker’s giant bed because it was the only place where she was safe from the plants.
Most plants in his room, along with a few others scattered around the property, were from other planets.
After the food-producing plants, off-world ones were undoubtedly Wrecker’s favorite. Sure, many required very close, almost daily attention, but Wrecker felt that made them more exciting.
There was a nightfern from Umbara Wrecker kept in his closet and had to water under special red light. He remarked how cool its bioluminescent leaves were so often, his siblings knew without question it was his favorite plant of the hundreds he owned. He was always inviting them into his bedroom closet to admire it whenever there was the slightest change.
The Umbaran nightfern — which he’d named Nighty — and many other off-world plants were courtesy of Mosali and Elanga, a couple from the island Songo.
The two ran a greenhouse of exotic plants, and every few weeks, one or both of them would visit Pabu’s market in the colonnade. When they did, they’d hire Wrecker to help them unload their plants for the market and pay him with one or more of their wares.
These six new joyyas were the latest from Mosali and Elanga, who’d arrived on Pabu that morning for the week’s market. As Crosshair had guessed, each joyya was a different subspecies.
Wrecker started telling his brother all about them while rearranging the plants in his room to make space for the new arrivals. That took a good 15 minutes. At some point, AZI had wisely disappeared, but Crosshair unfortunately couldn’t do the same. Wrecker kept handing him things, telling him to water this, move that and so forth, and Crosshair never had the chance or energy to interrupt Wrecker or disappear too.
*****
Once the joyyas and other plants in Wrecker’s room were settled, they peeked into the closet to check on nightfern and admire its light blue bioluminescent leaves. Then the brothers migrated all over the main floor and patio checking on Wrecker’s plants.
Crosshair had long given up on the idea of handball or target practice, and while all this work wasn’t ideal, it was still nice to spend one-on-one time with Wrecker. Crosshair couldn’t think of the last time they’d hung out like this. Maybe a month ago?
Finally, they ended up back in Wrecker’s room, as he’d found a few bags of high-quality soil next to the utility shed on the back patio. According to Wrecker, these joyyas were from Spira. While Mosali and Elanga expected they’d do well in Pabu’s tropical climate, they told Wrecker they’d probably be sensitive and needy when it came to soil quality.
Wrecker picked up each joyya one by one, checking the quality of its current soil, the state of its branches, stems and leaves, and pointing out the peduncles. Meanwhile, Crosshair was leaning against the wall, playing with a toothpick, doing his best to help by staying out of the way unless asked.
Wrecker floated out possible names for each plant based on their subspecies’ names. When he got to the errithrostema joyya, which had a cluster of pink star-shaped peduncles, he held it aloft with a bemused expression on his face.
“Look, Crosshair! Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yeah. It’s nice.”
“It kinda reminds me of you.”
“What?” Crosshair said, stifling a snort to stop himself from being rude. “How?”
“I don’t know. It just does. It’s hearty and … happy.”
“Do I look hearty or happy to you?” Crosshair asked, easily donning a bored and displeased expression.
Wrecker shrugged.
“Not on the outside. But I know you are.”
Crosshair rolled his eyes, but the second Wrecker looked away, he smirked slightly too.
“No, if anything,” Crosshair said, pointing at the errithrostema, “that’d be Omega.”
“No, this one would be Omega,” Wrecker replied, picking up another one with a smattering of small white peduncles among its leaves. “It’s smaller than the others, but it’s growing quickly.”
Crosshair shook his head, and the two started debating which of the six plants matched their family members’ respective personalities. In the end, they assigned one plant each to Omega, Hunter, Tech, Echo and Batcher. The only one left was the errithrostema, which Crosshair insisted was Wrecker, and vice versa.
“It’s you, Crosshair. Just admit it.”
“No.”
“Ah, c’mon.”
“No. It’s nothing like me,” Crosshair replied and then added under his breath, “all dainty and pink.”
“Well, then, if you’re not going to admit it … here.”
Wrecker held the plant out to him.
“What am I supposed to do with it?” Crosshair asked.
“Take care of it. Duh. It’s yours now. Either I can raise your plant, or you can raise mine. You pick.”
This time, Wrecker was the one smirking.
Crosshair narrowed his eyes. Dank ferrik.
“Fine,” he said, uncrossing his arms. “I’ll take it then.”
“Good. It can be your ‘thank you’ present for helping me today. I bet you hadn’t planned on that. Haha!”
“No, I hadn’t,” Crosshair muttered.
Wrecker handed him the plant and then gave Crosshair a gentle slap on the back.
“Just don’t let it die,” Wrecker added.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Crosshair took the plant to his own room. Wrecker followed, giving him all sorts of instructions. Crosshair only heard about half of it, realizing Wrecker had basically tricked him into accepting a plant as a present.
Crosshair didn’t mind helping Wrecker with his plants occasionally, but he wasn’t about to start a garden of his own. Hunter might kill him if he did. They didn’t need any more green hands in the family.
*****
That night, Crosshair kept tossing and turning in his bed, occasionally glancing over at the errithrostema joyya, which he’d put on a stand next to the window.
He’d already accepted that he was now in charge of this thing. He didn’t exactly like it, but for now, he didn’t mind it either. Maybe that sentiment would change if this thing proved to be a pain in the choobies.
No, what was bothering him was that Wrecker had been right: This plant was nothing like Wrecker.
Crosshair still didn’t accept it was more like him, or if it was, it was only by default. But it didn’t seem right that Wrecker didn’t have a plant that was him, the way Crosshair and the others now did. Maybe Crosshair could get it for him? As payback.
He tried to think of all the plants he’d ever encountered on Pabu. None of them really seemed to fit, and Wrecker already owned most of them anyway.
Maybe there was something on another island that would fit, but how would Crosshair even begin to search for it?
Maybe he could ask Mosali and Elanga. They’d be at the Pabu market for the rest of the week.
But how would he ask them about it? “Do you have a plant that’s like Wrecker?” Sure, they knew Wrecker pretty well by now, but Crosshair figured it’d be an awkward conversation even if they had an answer.
He decided he’d only go up to the market tomorrow and ask if he didn’t think of anything better by then.
He scanned his bedroom for ideas. Inside his open closet, his eyes landed on the foot locker containing armor. That’s when he remembered: He’d last worn his armor when he’d gone with Omega and Phee to Boracho. Wait. Hadn’t there been some prominent flowers there? What had Phee called them? Kaava? Kaaza? Something like that. Kaasa. That’s right. The Kaasa. The prairie sunflowers. They’d been so bright and friendly, practically waving to him and the others in the Boracho breeze.
Crosshair remembered what Phee had told him and Omega: The Kaasa only bloomed for a few weeks every year. It should be around now, he thought. They’d gone there about this time last year — at least going by the Galactic Standard Calendar.
He decided it’d be worth asking Phee in the morning, and feeling satisfied, he rolled over and went to sleep.
Crosshair woke early, before everyone else, to start his day spearfishing. Hunter and Wrecker had fallen asleep in the living room last night, and Wrecker was still there. Hunter had apparently woken up and decided to spend the rest of the night in his room.
Crosshair couldn’t use the long-range comms in the living room without waking Wrecker, so he went downstairs to use their secondary comms unit. They kept it there in case Rex, Echo or their other guests ever needed to use it.
He turned all the necessary dials and knobs, and pressed the button to send Phee a transmission. He didn’t expect her to pick up, as he had no idea what time it was for her, but amazingly, she did.
“Hey … Crosshair,” Phee said, scanning around, a bit surprised he was by himself. “What’s up?”
“Phee. Are you going to Boracho anytime soon?”
“Maybe. I’m in a neighboring sector right now, and I’ve been thinking about stopping in. Say ‘hi’ to Li-lee and Flori. Score some credits. Pick up some byon meat. Why? You wanna go too?”
“No thanks. Not after last time.”
Phee folded her arms and shifted her weight, obviously offended at his ingratitude. She had helped save his life after all.
Crosshair responded with a harsh look. She had endangered him in the first place.
“Well then,” Phee asked, “why are you asking?”
“I was wondering about the Kaasa. If they’d be blooming around this time.”
“Yeah. I think so. Why?”
Crosshair cocked his head and asked, “Think you could grab a few for me?”
*****
After a lot of vague explanations — “They’re a gift for Wrecker”, “I want to surprise him”, etc. — and promises to repay Phee for her troubles, she arrived on Pabu a few days later with the Kaasa in tow.
Per Crosshair’s instructions, she’d brought both seeds and live plants. She’d sourced them from her friends’ property, the Silver Palace Saloon, which had a mix of both wild and cultivated specimens. She and Crosshair had decided four live plants would be sufficient considering their size.
They also had coordinated which varieties to get. Crosshair had insisted on one almost 3 meters tall, with a head larger than Wrecker’s, with equally large leaves.
Phee had insisted on additional payment for bringing that one back to Pabu, but Crosshair knew it’d be worth it, because of the four Kaasa varieties she’d shown him, this one was the most Wrecker-like.
Crosshair knew it the way Wrecker had known the errithrostema joyya was him. Instant. Intuitive.
After ensuring Wrecker would be distracted and out of the house, they secretly unloaded the Kaasa from Phee’s ship and brought them to the back patio so Wrecker wouldn’t see them until dinnertime.
But when Wrecker returned, he happened to spot the Kaasa through his bedroom window.
“Crosshair!” he called, his voice passing through the open bedroom doorway and down the hall.
“What?” Crosshair answered.
“What’s that?” Wrecker asked, pointing out the window.
“Dank ferrik. You weren’t supposed to see them yet.”
“See what?”
“Well, too late now. C’mon.”
Omega, Hunter and Phee were all out. Crosshair felt bad they’d missed the big reveal, but if the war and all their adventures afterward had proven anything, it was that Wrecker was a juggernaut. There was no stopping him once he’d started something.
Crosshair led his brother to the back patio. Wrecker practically jogged from the door to the Kaasa, which Crosshair and Phee had placed near the handrail overlooking the ocean. It was a nice spot with plenty of sun.
The dark brown heads crowned with golden petals moved to and fro in the breeze. The smaller Kaasa specimens were particularly bouncy while the giant one merely nodded. Its head was so large, it was about to sag. They all seemed so friendly and cheerful, almost like they were smiling.
“Wow,” Wrecker said, examining each one in turn. “What are they?”
“They’re Kaasa. Prairie sunflowers. I asked Phee to bring them from Boracho.”
“Boracho? That place on Wes’ternn you and Omega ran into Cad Bane?”
“Uh-huh. These were blooming when we went there. Apparently, they only bloom for a few weeks every year. Seeing an entire field of them was … quite something.”
“I bet.”
“Maybe we can go another time. But I thought you should have a few here. For your collection.”
“It’s called a garden when they’re plants.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, thank you, Crosshair. These are awesome!”
Crosshair shrugged and said, “It seemed only fair. Everyone else got a joyya, except you. So, you needed your own plant.”
Crosshair went up to the giant Kaasa and mimed putting his arm around its stem like it was his brother’s shoulder.
“What do you think?” he asked Wrecker. “Can you see the resemblance?”
At that moment, the wind picked up, and all the Kaasa moved to varying degrees. The giant one, though, decided to be especially unruly. A leaf smacked Crosshair in the shoulder and chest, while its bulbous head bowed so much that its huge petals scratched the top of Crosshair’s bald head.
Crosshair waved his arm as if to push the giant flower off him, stepping away from it with a scrunched nose and a furrowed brow.
“Haha, sure does,” Wrecker chuckled. “Look, Crosshair. It likes you!”
Just like the giant flower, Wrecker came over and put his left arm around his brother, smacking him hard on the opposite shoulder. Then, he curled his right hand into a fist and used his knuckles to scrape Crosshair’s head repeatedly — not enough to be painful, but certainly enough to annoy him.
“Just like I do!” Wrecker said, applying a little more pressure.
Crosshair managed to wrangle free — pushing his brother off him like he had the giant Kaasa — and said in a half-friendly, half-annoyed tone, “Pfft. Grow up, Wrecker.”
*****
When the others returned, Phee gave Wrecker the rundown on caring for the Kaasa. She warned him that, no matter how well he looked after them, the blooms wouldn’t last more than a week or two.
Wrecker decided to keep them outside but arranged them in different spots around the house. The big one was undoubtedly his favorite. He called it Little Wrecker, arguing that, even though it was taller than him, it was also thinner. Plus, it was younger too.
While the other three varieties were perennials, Little Wrecker was one of the annual Kaasa. Wrecker kept it alive as long as he could, but its giant head sank lower and lower every day, until it was eye-level with Omega.
Wrecker made sure Crosshair was with him when he finally said goodbye to Little Wrecker. He’d harvested the seeds, at least, telling Crosshair how excited he was to grow to a new generation of Little Wreckers next year.
“You really think they’ll grow here?” Crosshair asked.
“I know they will.”
The two brothers scanned all the plants on the patio and the ones in Wrecker’s bedroom they could see through the open window. Crosshair thought of his errithrostema joyya, which was not only still alive, but seemed to be thriving next to his bedroom window. He’d now found a new peduncle among its waxy green leaves almost every week.
“After all,” Wrecker continued, “Pabu is a good place to grow.”