Ambrosia & Amaryllis: Chapter One

Having succubuns tend to the ambrosia flowers, as opposed to leaving it to Dove and Beany and Primrose and any other fallen friends for eternity, was not Primrose’s idea. Juno can tell in the way he looks down at her, almost sneering, arms folded, somehow more irritation in his face than usual, as though her very presence here is a blight on his gardens. He must revel in the height difference. Her size makes her good for picking up into a hug and spinning around, for fondly ruffling her hair, for digging hands into her flesh and maneuvering her position. It’s also good for condescension, she’s realizing with some distaste.

But Juno keeps her chin lifted and expression bright and steady. She’s not here by mistake. She knows that. Her presence here is worth pride, and she won’t let Primrose, of all people, diminish that.

“These seeds are precious, you realize,” Primrose tells her, tone pressing down on the word like she doesn’t realize its meaning. “There are only so many of them, and so few ways to get more.”

“So we have to tend to them right,” Juno confirms, all big eyes and bright smiles. In the twitch of his brow and the hesitation before he continues, Primrose displays that she disarms him. He picks the weapon up just as soon, settling back into his armor, and returns to his resting scowl, which does nothing to freeze Juno’s exuberance. It started when she arrived with a bag full of her equipment, ears and hair already tied back, and took her thick and dirt-stained gardening gloves out and put them on first thing even as Primrose began explaining her role to her.

“There’s this term I learned a little while ago,” Juno says while she removes trowels, trimmers, rakes, a hoe from her bag and arranges them into a tidy row on the dirt of the greenhouse, “called mansplaining. It’s when a man explains something a woman already knows to her because he thinks he’s better than her.” Satisfied with her arrangement of tools, she hops up to her feet and looks up, up, up at Primrose’s glower with a shiny grin. “Of course, I’ve never dealt with these flowers before, so I’ll follow your lead this time, ‘kay?”

When Primrose gathers his composure again, he says, “You’d better. They’re—”

“Precious,” Juno says in unison with him, and he stutters over the continued, “so there’s no room to,” then clears his throat, and tries again: “There isn’t any room to make mistakes with these.”

“Good thing you’ve got me working on this, then, yeah?” she says.

Primrose glares down at her. “Take this seriously.”

“I am!” she says. The mighty pout she displays does not appear to convince him. Under his glare, she stands up a little straighter and sets her hands on her hips, but her expression softens nad steadies. “I am,” she repeats, more insistently.

He looks at her for a long moment, studying her. Despite the soft tch he gives, he redirects his gaze to her spread of tools, surveying them now instead.

“Think of it this way,” Juno says. “You got told that I could help because I’m as good at gardening as it gets, right?” She puffs out her chest. “You can take advantage of my pride easy peasy. I’m not gonna risk getting it wrong, right?”

Instead of acknowledging her (very fair, thank you!) point, Primrose asks, “What’s all this for?”

“Oh, I wasn’t sure what you might have here, so I brought my travel tools,” she says, and crouches back down towards them. “I like to be prepared, you know? But if you have specialized tools for this kind of thing, we can use those.”

“We do,” Primrose says, “Come with me,” and he turns to start walking deeper into the greenhouse without even giving Juno the opportunity to shove all her things back into her bag.

The tools he offers her are…fine. She taps a trowel against the edge of a pot and ignores the way Primrose winces at the noise it makes and she says, “Once I figure out the method, I should be able to use mine just fine, right? The difference in function isn’t really…” But she trails off under Primrose’s glower. He hasn’t put the seeds in her hands yet, so she decides to relent just on this point—and then again, a little later, as Primrose talks through the instructions first. Juno takes notes; she brought her own notebook, the pages littered with enough pressed flowers that she struggles to find an empty page for a moment. She shows off one of them, and asks, “Do you think we could save a flower to press?” and receives so sharp a, “No,” that she doesn’t push the point, just hums and twirls her pen with its giant paper sunflower on the end back and forth and starts to write down Primrose’s instruction. He does not appreciate her occasional interruptions; “Oh, so like a daisy,” or, “That’s the same way we’d treat a rose.”

“It’s not a rose,” he says, “It’s ambrosia. And it’s pre—”

“Precious,” she singsongs, leaving poor Primrose all furiously flushed in the face. “Don’t look at me like that. I obviously know my stuff, right?”

He must agree, because after entirely too long of theoretical talk, he finally hands her the precious seeds. Juno holds them in one cupped, gloved hand, with a touch so tender that even Primrose has next to nothing to say as she goes through the motions of planting. Her notebook lies open on the counter next to the pot she’s been instructed to plant in, and she stains dirt across the pages when she goes to turn them.

“A little more dirt,” Primrose says while Juno tamps down the soil over the planted seed with one empty palm.

“I know. I’m not done yet,” she says, harrumphing and pouting up at him. She shuffles the dirt around appropriately, ever-careful, and looks Primrose in the eye as she once again pats it down. “And, done!”

“Don’t look so satisfied,” Primrose says, “It hasn’t even started growing. It’s going to take a lot more work to be done.”

“I know how flowers work,” Juno says. She hums, and smiles, and says, “You remember that mansplaining thing I was telling you about earlier?”

Primrose huffs, his discontent unmoving stone against Juno’s sunshiney beam. She tilts her head, just so, and then her expression settles into a sort of casual contentedness instead of her usual over-the-top delight.

“I’m not worried about it,” she says, shrugging, “The way I see it, pride and diligence go hand in hand.”

Primrose narrows his eyes. A long silence follows as the two stare each other down, but Juno breaks first.

“It’s like,” she starts, and hums, “I work at a gym, you know? And, like, I’m sooo so proud of my body.” She does a little twirl to accentuate it, pops out a hip to the side, folds her hands under her chin so she can bat her eyelashes oh so sweetly up at Primrose in her pose. His face turns the faintest shade of pink and he looks away from the way she leans forward. Juno winks regardless, and as she settles, she says, “It’s the same body that lets me hug my friends and go on hikes and get elbows deep in the dirt so I can plant all the flowers I want. But that stuff doesn’t just happen! I gotta work for it. I work at a gym, you know? I gotta put in lots of effort to keep in shape!” She hops up in place and slides easily into a few zumba moves, one after the other; leg up, kick, fist in the air, arm arching, the other lifting an ankle, hop, skip, spin. “Gotta have strong arms for huggin’! Gotta keep that stamina up so I can spend as long in the garden as I need!” She rocks up and down on her toes and grins up at Primrose. “It takes diligence to stick with all that, right?”

Primrose scoffs, but it’s light, more on instinct than anything.

“Aaaand,” Juno goes on, eyes sparkling, sensing an in, “What’s the point of all that hard work, all that diligence if you aren’t willing to be proud of it and what it does? What you do?”

“You’re missing the point,” Primrose mumbles.

“Oh, yeah?” Juno says. She can’t help that she still smiles, satisfied with how she’s broken him down, just a little. “What’s the point, then?”

Primrose doesn’t answer right away. The silence lasts long enough that Juno almost fills it, but the half-second before she does, Primrose looks down at her, looks her in the eye. For the first time since they’ve met, Juno notes a lack of—well, that bitchface of his maybe never goes away, but there’s something sharp in his eyes that doesn’t point towards her. If there are daggers in his glare, it’s almost as if he’s passing her the handle.

“Get the ambrosia flowers to bloom,” he says, “and make use of all their parts, and then we’ll talk about the point.”

“Easy,” Juno says so automatically that it makes Primrose’s expression turn annoyed again.

And the quiet comes back, this time almost comfortably—almost. A decision reached, in some ways. An agreement, an acknowledgment. Juno looks away from Primrose without any sense of force; she just wants to look over their work, the disturbed dirt under which lies a perfectly settled seed.

“So,” says Juno finally, “Now what?”

“Now,” says Primrose, “Patience.”

Juno pouts, looks down at the tilled dirt, glances out past the glass greenhouse walls towards the blooming flowers out in the garden, then shrugs. She looks up at Primrose and, smiling, says, “I think I can learn that one just fine, too.”