Flare taught Dawdlepot how to walk the next day. It was not so much walking as it was remembering what walking might be like if you were very tired and the ground was made of dreams.

“Left,” Flare said.

 “Leeeeeeft,” Dawdlepot agreed, and moved its right leg.

“No,” Flare said gently. “The other.”

“The other is…far,” Dawdlepot observed. It tried again and succeeded, eventually. This achievement was worthy of a nap.

Gula, peeking over Dawdlepot’s rim, was aghast. “We will never get anywhere.”

“We are somewhere,” Dawdlepot murmured philosophically, half-asleep. “Where we are is…here.”

“That’s not anywhere, that’s nowhere,” Gula snapped, then, unable to help itself, nestled deeper into the warm soil.

Flare hid a smile and adjusted Dawdlepot’s inner glow. It responded obediently, radiating warmth like a small sun with good manners. Gula’s petals unfurled by instinct, catching the light, greed calmed, if only by degrees.

Days took on a rhythm. Flare tended the garden, shaped new soil, and learned the art of making winds where winds do not belong. Gula, snug in Dawdlepot’s belly, offered constant commentary on danger, distance, and the exact percentage by which Flare’s glow had diminished since breakfast. Dawdlepot gave occasional, unhurried opinions, many of which began as sentences and ended as dreams.

“Per…haps,” Dawdlepot would say sagely, “we should put the bright plant…near the rock that looks like…mmmmm.”

“What does it look like?” Flare prompted.

“Nap,” Dawdlepot finished, and proceeded to do so.

Gula protested loudly, and then, traitorously, drifted off as well, soothed by the metal-soft thrum of Dawdlepot’s warmth. Silence fell, but it wasn’t the old silence anymore. It was a companionable kind, full of breathing, full of with.

Companionship is mostly ordinary, with sparkle threaded through. Gula and Dawdlepot were ordinary in a way R Land had never been before: they bickered.

Once, when Flare crossed a ridge to coax a stubborn sprout, and Gula, unable to bear the distance, shouted, “After them!”

And so Dawdlepot began to walk. “Aft… er… them,” it agreed, as if the syllables were stepping-stones on a very sleepy river.

“Faster,” Gula urged.

“Fasssster,” Dawdlepot repeated in an identical tone, which would have been progress if it hadn’t been four syllables longer and two steps slower.

“That’s slower,” Gula cried. “You’re doing slower. Flare is three pebbles away, do you want us to starve?”

“Mm,” Dawdlepot said, which is the laziest syllable in all languages. “We will…arrive.”

“When?”

“Before we…aren’t here,” Dawdlepot said, pleased with the circularity.

Then, Dawdlepot stoped. Its eyes closed. Gula shrieked, “Don’t you dare!” And Dawdlepot insisted, without moving its mouth, that it was merely thinking with its eyes shut. And it snored.

Flare, who was now two pebbles away, turned and brightened a fraction. “You won’t starve. Dawdlepot’s holding you. And I am here.”

“I need you closer,” Gula said, because anxiety is an expert at ignoring facts. “Closer than close.”

“Some things,” Flare said, “you can learn from far away. Trust is one.”

Gula made a sound like a snapped stem. “Fine. But if I fade, I will haunt you by listing all the times I asked you to come back and you didn’t.”

“Terrifying,” Flare said gravely. “I shall never sleep again.”

Dawdlepot, who had indeed been sleeping, woke with a start and offered, “We could…stop here. It’s very…here. I like here.” It slumped with gentle finality.

“Up,” Gula hissed.

“Up is…later,” Dawdlepot murmured.

Flare laughed and drifted to them, setting a warm hand on the vessel’s rim. “Later is fine,” Flare said. “Later is how gardens grow.”

Gula’s petals trembled, then settled. “I suppose,” it admitted, quiet as a secret. 

Under the bickering, something kinder was sewing itself between them. Gula discovered that fear tires more quickly when it has a soft place to sit. Dawdlepot discovered that it liked being nagged; it made the naps sweeter. And Flare discovered it was possible to be wanted by two different hungers in two different ways and still be enough.

These were the days Flare liked best: a tiny world practicing love by means of impatience.

One night, when the Moon turned her darker cheek, and R Land swam in a deeper dusk, and the garden was a scatter of dim, patient lanterns across the ridge, something extraordinary happened.

“Flare?” Gula’s voice came thin and small, a child calling across aisles of tall shelves.

“I’m here,” Flare called back softly, and brightened.

The brightening was slight, but Dawdlepot caught it like a whisper catches a memory. Its inner light swelled a fraction more than usual, then held. Something in its belly clicked, and the warmth it kept began, for the first time, to pulse on its own.

Gula started. “You, did you, was that…” It pressed itself into the soil, stunned. “You warmed without Flare.”

Dawdlepot, astonished at itself, considered the event at the speed of molasses contemplating a hill. “Mm. I…did. I can…do that, when they are…away.”

Gula trembled, not from hunger but from the realisation that of the thousand small strings that hold worry together, some could be untied.

“You can do that,” Gula repeated, softly. Then, louder, calling, “Flare! Dawdlepot warmed me without you.”

“Did they now?” Flare asked, delighted. “Clever pot.”

“Slow pot,” Gula corrected on reflex, then, catching itself, added, “Clever and slow.”

Dawdlepot, who had fallen asleep during the compliment, woke just in time to hear the and, which is the best part of any sentence. “Mm,” it agreed.

The three of them sat there a while, doing the only work that matters on certain nights: nothing at all. Flare’s glow hummed. Dawdlepot’s warmth breathed. Gula’s petals opened and opened, until all the worry had somewhere else to be.

Of course, the next morning Gula was back to shouting.

“Left!”

“Leeeeeeft,” Dawdlepot echoed, moving its right.

“OTHER LEFT.”

“Mmm. The other is… later.”

Flare laughed from a short distance away. “You two sound like a comet learning to argue with its tail.”

“We are very good at it,” Gula said, not without pride.

“Practice,” Dawdlepot contributed, and sat down mid-step.

Gula threw up its leaves. “You sat! You can’t sit between steps.”

“Between is…comfortable,” Dawdlepot said, eyes already closing.

And yet, in the pauses between protest and nap, between far and near Gula began to keep a secret ledger. On one side: too slow, too dim, too sleepy, too far behind. On the other: warm, steady, present, mine, and this second list never stopped growing.

Sometimes, when Flare roamed at the edges of vision and the Moon’s light thinned to lace, Gula would lay its face against the soil inside Dawdlepot and whisper, “Don’t let me fade.” Dawdlepot would not answer with words, but the heat would rise, patient as bread, and Gula would realise that alone was now a place it could leave.

Flare watched them on those nights. Gula dreaming anxiously, Dawdlepot dreaming inevitably, and felt something unclench. Love, it turned out, did not require Flare to be everywhere at once. It only asked for a world where warmth could be kept and shared even in Flare’s absence.

So Flare wandered a little farther. And each time Flare returned, Gula scolded and basked in the same breath. Dawdlepot would fall asleep two steps into greeting Flare and finish it later, which is a talent rare even among furniture.

“You’re late,” Gula would say.

“I brought wind,” Flare would reply.

Dawdlepot would murmur, “Wind is…later.”

And they would laugh, which on R Land sounded like three different kinds of light agreeing.

One night, Flare stood on the ridge and looked down at the garden. At Gula, curled inside Dawdlepot, awake and pretending not to be, counting seconds until Flare came close enough to taste. At Dawdlepot, keeping the kind of warmth that makes hours gentle.

“You did it,” Flare said to itself. “You made here into home.” 

Returning to the garden, Flare knelt, placing a palm on Dawdlepot’s rim, and another in the soil near Gula’s roots. The three lights inside Flare, fire, water, earth, rose together, not into a creation this time, but into a blessing.

“Rest,” Flare said. “Grow. Stay.”

Gula’s petals loosened. Dawdlepot’s glow deepened. 

Gula did not say Don’t go. It thought it, and felt silly, and did not say it. Because it knew, now, that absence is not the same as vanishing. Because it had a pot that kept warmth the way a story keeps truth: slowly, steadily, long after the teller has gone to make tea.

“Goodnight, Dawdlepot,” Gula murmured.

“Gooood… night,” Dawdlepot replied, falling asleep on the ‘good.’

Flare rose, turned toward the far side of R Land, and paused to look back. From Earth, no one saw it. And from the Moon, it was a rumor of warmth. But for R Land, it was everything. And Flare smiled, because the world was learning to hold what Flare could not always carry.

Tomorrow, there would be air enough for whispers, songs that didn’t need a mouth. Tomorrow, perhaps, there would be the first brave seed that learned to sleep and wake on its own.

But tonight, there was Flare, a flower in a pot, and the knowledge that none was alone.