[Making Friends] Chrysanthemum Clash

Finn had always believed Patalum was too quiet for thunder.

The village hummed with wind through wheat, water through irrigation trenches, ladles in pumpkin soup. But thunder belonged to the coast or the mountains, not a town that smelled like warm dirt and drying herbs. Still, on that sticky afternoon when the sun lay on the fields like a wool blanket, there was thunder anyway.

It came from the abandoned grain shed at the edge of Fleur’s garden.

Fleur, composed of yellows and rose-pink ears, paused mid–flower wrap and cocked their head. "Your ‘practice’ is rattling my vases," they called through the back door, voice mild but carrying.

Finn stood on a crate outside, jacket bristling with hand-set studs, orange coat bright as an orange rind. He grinned while he used his drumstick to hammer a crooked nail into the shed’s doorframe, an improvised signpost made from a sheet of sailcloth he’d scrawled on in paint: LOOKING FOR NOISE-MAKERS. PUNKS ONLY. MUST LOVE MAKING THINGS LOUD.

"My soul needs it loud," he called back.

Fleur stepped into the doorway, tucking a curl of hair behind one striped horn. "Your soul may love loud, Finnegan, but the chrysanthemums prefer a gentler tempo. Close that door when you’re done, and try not to frighten the Bowroo’s lambs."

"The lambs adore me," Finn said. Clutching the drumstick into one paw, swung his legs down, and hopped off the crate. "Besides, if I don’t find bandmates, I’ll keep practicing alone and that’s far worse for the chrysanthemums."

Fleur’s mouth tipped into a smile that pretended to agree. "Fair point. I made lemonade. If anyone answers your banner and survives your audition, offer them some."

"Bribery," Finn said, approving. "You are a wise elder."

Fleur rolled their eyes. "I’m not that much older than you and prefer ‘shop owner.’"

Thunder rolled again when Finn kicked the shed door shut. In truth it wasn’t thunder, just the echo of a stomped-on kick drum he’d found in a sale crate at the market and coaxed back to life with leather patches and twine. The shed’s plank walls were a splash of color, sprinkled with his pasted zines and hand-drawn flyers for bands that existed only in his head.

He took a breath, let all the jitter in his chest go electric, and began to play the loudest beat he knew.

The lemonade warmed in the sun. The wheat bent. The sign flapped. And eventually, the noise lured company.

The first to appear was a Leloko with a flowered tail full of velvet-orange blossoms. They hopped the garden fence without so much as displacing a leaf, landed lightly on their toe-pads, and peered into the shed with eyes the color of unripe plums.

"Is this the place to be a problem?" they asked, breathless and cheerful. "Your sign suggests trouble."

Finn stopped on a cymbal crash so violent it shook dust from the rafters. He flipped his fringe, strands dyed the exact blue of the Patalum sky at noon and attempted a scowl that would say I am the sort of mantibab who does not need friends but will accept them as an audience. "Depends," he said. "Are you loud?"

The Leloko shrugged their shoulders, and the flowers on their tails ruffled. "I can be. I play a big instrument."

"What kind?"

The Leloko’s grin went sly. "Bass. Name’s Clover."

Finn tried not to smile and failed. "Finn. You’re in until you’re out."

Which was very punk and also very meaningless, but Clover brightened anyway. "Great. Also your lemonade sign said ‘PUNKS ONLY,’ which is the funniest thing I’ve read, so I brought a jar of pickled beets as a peace offering to your neighbors. Where do you want me?"

"Wherever you want," Finn said, audacious to hide the flush prickling his ears. Friends were a part of childhood for many, Fleur often said. For Finn, wanting them felt like standing at a cliff’s edge, the drop hidden by grass. Fun and terrifying all at once.

Clover stepped into the shed and thumped the heel of one paw against the floorboards. Dust twinkled. "Here."

They unpacked the contraption from a cloth sack and when Clover plucked a string, it made a sound like a barn door growling against its hinges in a storm. Low, lush, alive.

Finn’s stomach did a quick flip that might have been joy.

They jammed until the lemonade turned warm in the heat. Children tiptoed past, giggling. Somewhere in the square, a pot of pumpkin soup started its evening simmer, scent drifting out to meet them. By the time they fell apart laughing on the shed floor, ears ringing, Finn had written three song titles in chalk on the wall. "Steal the Scarecrow," "Wheatfield Riot," and "Lambs Adore Me". And Clover had invited him to climb the windmill sometime because the view from the top made the world look moshable.

He pretended not to care how quickly that invitation warmed the cold corners under his ribs.

The second to answer the sign came when the sky turned pink. A pawbird landed with a hop on the fence post by the shed, head tilted, eyes bright and old. They were the glossy blue-black of ink just dried and their face split into a quick clever grin. They wore a harness hung with pouches and what looked like an entire library’s worth of small folded papers.

"Hello," the pawbird said. "Your sign is very you."

Finn bristled, flattered and affronted. "You don’t know me."

"I knew the sign," the pawbird said mildly. "And a sign tells on its maker. May I come in?"

"Sure," Finn muttered, then remembered to be a menace. "What do you play?"

"Instruments," they said, which was either a joke or the most arrogant answer possible. They hopped off the post, shouldered through the shed door, and unfurled a roll of cloth on the floor. Inside lay a modest treasure: a battered melodica, a tiny wind-up music box with exposed teeth, two flutes of different lengths, and a pocket-sized box with glowing crystals that responded to a fingertip like pond water to a pebble.

Clover slid forward, reverent. "Who are you?"

"Rook," they said. "From the library-that-is-wherever." They answered evasively and wiggled a shoulder so the pouches chimed. "I travel and collect noises."

Finn’s throat did something un-punk. "I have noises," he blurted.

"I’ve noticed," Rook said, perfectly serious. "May I?"

They set the box with the crystals on a crate and tapped it softly. A wash of sound bloomed and Clover looked transfixed. Finn, determined not to appear transfixed, banged the snare. Rook adjusted a dial, and suddenly the snare throbbed, pulsing with its own echo in a way that made Finn laugh. Sharp, delighted, boyish.

"Okay," he said, flipping a drumstick between his claws. "You’re in."

Rook gave a little bow that could have been theatrical or simply deeply polite. "I brought a song," they added, squinting at a folded paper. "It’s about an irrigation ditch that runs away to become a river, and then decides to come home again."

"That’s not punk," Finn said automatically.

Rook peered at him. "I think leaving and coming back is very punk."

He pretended to relent grudgingly. Inside, the cliff he always felt himself standing on shifted and for a moment there was a sturdy ledge.

They needed one more. In Finn’s head, the place where ideas for zines sprouted, his ideal band had four members. Drums, bass, crystals, and… something that made a crowd lean forward.

Word had already trickled through Patalum, as it does in villages that trade gossip alongside produce and wool. Many came to try, a mantibab who sang but had no interest in rehearsal, a Bowroo who could whistle harmony like a songbird, and a toll who had fashioned a trumpet from irrigation pipe and blew it with such gusto that the flowers in the shop recoiled in alarm and Fleur had put his paw down before Finn could say yes. Finn loved them all and said no to each with inappropriate honesty and then an apology, his moods sloshing like the irrigation channels after a heavy rain.

"Maybe we don’t need a fourth," he told Clover that night, prickly with failure. "Maybe it’s punk to be lopsided."

Clover flicked him with their flowered tail. "Maybe it’s silly to give up on the picture in your head."

Fleur came out onto the stoop with bowls of soup. "If the picture in your head keeps tugging at your mane, it’s not done," they said, serious and kind. "Tomorrow will be a new day. You can try something different with it."

He slurped soup, grumbling loud enough to disturb a moth. Then he drew a fourth name space on the shed wall and left it blank, the chalk line deliberate. He liked daring the world.

The world answered.

Morning found the fields washed gold, the sky lark-blue, the village stretching itself awake for market day. Finn, almost shaking with anticipation, dragged his broken-amp-turned-bench onto the shed's threshold and started pounding a four-on-the-floor that he was certain scared the crows off freshly planted lettuce.

The mantibab who wandered up the lane paused as if the beat had snagged them by the scruff. They were pale, long-limbed, with lavender undertones and a mane like smoke. Their horns were short at the tips, their velvety patches at elbows and ankles dusky violets. Their eyes were careful, not shy and they carried something wrapped in cloth.

Finn stopped mid-thunder and flared his nostrils. "Band’s full."

Clover winced. Rook made the warning hum of a teacher behind a library shelf.

The stranger stepped up to the shed without flinching at Finn’s temper. "Then I’ll only bother you for five minutes," they said, unwrapping the bundle. Inside lay a compact, handmade guitar. Its body carved in soft spirals, neck inlaid with pale wood, strings new enough to gleam. "I heard you yesterday from the footbridge," they added. "The beat went through my bones like it was searching for something. I thought, maybe it was searching for me."

Finn’s heart did an awkward flip. "What’s your name?" he said gruffly.

"Mallow," they replied. "I help carve toys and apprentice under Windan when I’m not practicing."

Finn shifted on his crate. "Five minutes," he said, and thudded the count-in.

Mallow’s paws moved over the guitar with a soft surety that made Finn blush because he realized he’d been trying to impress them and had instead been given an answer. The notes they played threaded under and over his beat. Where his sticks shouted, theirs spoke. Where he jabbed, they swayed. Where he stomped, they leapt into a bright riff that made Clover grin and Rook lift the crystals into a shimmering rhythm. The four of them became the square Finn had imagined, only it wasn’t square. It was a field with a stone in its middle and paths leading to it, and everything they played circled that stone and created a harmony.

After three minutes, Finn threw his sticks upward and yelped. "Okay! Okay. You’re in. Obviously."

Mallow’s mouth shaped into a smile. "Thank you," they said, and then sat on the floorboards, tuning a string by ear. "Do you have a band name?"

Finn had a dozen. He’d been scribbling them in the margins of Fleur’s old order books for months. But somehow none of them felt right.

Clover lay back, flowers tickling their own nose. "Pumpkin Riot?"

"Wheat Thieves," Rook offered, polite mischief in their tone.

"Chrysanthemums Prefer a Gentler Tempo," Finn said promptly, and when they all groaned he cackled.

Mallow tapped a slow rhythm on the drum. "How about Chrysanthemum Clash?"

Finn wrinkled his nose. "That sounds… pretty."

"It is," Mallow said. "And punk can be pretty."

Finn, infuriatingly moved, turned it over in his mouth. "Chrysanthemum Clash," he tried. It fit like a patch stitched over a rip. "Chrysanthemum Clash," he said again, louder, and then shouted toward the shop, "Fleur! We named something after you!"

From inside, Fleur’s voice wafted out, bone-dry and pleased. "I assume it’s your band, not the shed."

"Both," Finn yelled back, dizzy with triumph.

Then came the part no sign warned about. The fidgety days of becoming not just bandmates but friends. Making friends had always struck Finn as a scam, everyone so sure it was easy but the truth felt like building a boat from a wreck. Patience, splinters, hurts, and a lot of gently applied force.

He was rambunctious. It was his engine and his weapon. He threw himself at songs and people. When the momentum faltered, his mood turned as quickly as summer squalls, leaving him prickling and defensive. That first week, when Rook suggested a softer intro to "Steal the Scarecrow," he snapped, "Why do you have to have an opinion about everything?" and then blushed with shame when he saw Rook’s arms lower, dignified and hurt.

Clover, who solved conflicts by pointing at something worth climbing, clapped their paws. "Band break. Windmill."

They dragged Finn up the ladder. At the top, Patalum spread under them. Wheat like fields of gold, ditches like silver threads, Leloko tails blooming along the lanes as the village readied for the next delivery to Castle Lothain. The air smelled green and warm.

“Look,” Clover said, pointing toward Fleur’s shop. “They keep the door open when it’s not too hot. That’s so customers feel welcome, yeah? But there’s still a bell on the handle. You don’t slam through the door just because you can. Maybe practice doesn’t need you to slam through people, either.”

Finn’s ears flicked back. “I don’t slam through people,” he muttered, then caught himself. Because the last few days, he had. “Okay. Sometimes I do.”

“You’ve got a temper,” Clover said, not unkindly. “Use it for the music, not the people playing it with you.”

Finn frowned at the horizon, wrestling with it. The breeze tugged at his mane, cooling the heat in his chest. “Fine,” he said at last. “I’ll work on it.”

Clover smiled, flowers brushing his shoulder. “That’s punk too. Choosing not to snap.”

Back on the ground, Finn offered Rook lemonade and a thick apology. Rook, who played instruments and had a long memory, accepted both with grace. "I like that you care," they said. "It makes my job easier. It’s just… I also care."

He nodded until it felt sincere.

With Mallow, the difficulty was silence. They would fall into it contentedly for whole afternoons. Finn often mistook that for judgment and filled the quiet with explanations no one had asked him for. Finally, ambling home from practice on the irrigation path, Mallow lifted one paw to stop him and then simply held it out.

Finn stared at the offered paw like it was a fish that had decided to recite poetry. "What."

"Touch," Mallow said.

He pressed his own paw to theirs. The velvety patch at Mallow’s wrist was cool.

"Friends don’t always speak," they said. "They can, but they can also share warmth."

Finn swallowed. "Gross," he said automatically, and didn’t let go for a dozen steps.

The days fell into a new rhythm. Morning practice at first light, work and errands. Clover’s deliveries from the hilly orchards, Rook’s consultations at the caravan market, Mallow’s part-time job shaping toy joints for Windan and Finn’s courier route that he ran faster than anyone because he cut across fields like a bright fox. In the evenings, they wrote. Songs about Lelokos who ate sunlight and got sugar-high enough to fly, a marching chant based on the names of the Bowroo sheep and a ballad Rook insisted on where Finn only pounded the snare with brushes because it sounded new.

They met at Fleur’s for soup because punk or not, everyone had to eat. Fleur listened from behind the counter, expression polite, while Finn dramatized their creative disagreements like battle epics. Rook bought chamomile tea. Clover brought armfuls of windfallen apples. Mallow’s paws, after hours of toy work, smelled like cedar shavings and sweetness; they lifted the garland-in-progress on Fleur’s table to look at the pressed violets inside.

"Your band has chemistry," Fleur said once.

Finn puffed. "Obviously." And he shrugged hard enough to jingle his studs.

They needed a first show to turn practice into the kind of story people tell when they’re trying to remember where they were when something began. Clover bribed the barn’s owner with a bouquet from Fleur and a promise to sweep afterward, and they were allowed the use of the hayloft for one night.

“Everyone’s going to love us,” Finn said enthusiastically.

They invited everyone, and the barn filled with Lelokos, Bowroo shepherds, a trio of Poffees whose aprons still held stray flour, and even Windan showed up. The smells filling the air were bread, sweat, hay, and anticipation. Above them, the tin roof pinged softly as it cooled from the day’s heat.

Finn’s stomach was a bucket of bees.

Fleur climbed the ladder at the last moment with a crate of paper cones full of eelgrass and marigold petals. "For throwing," they said and fixed Finn’s collar. "You’re allowed to want this," they added, very softly.

He made a face so he wouldn’t cry. "I want it like fire wants oxygen."

"Then go breathe," Fleur said.

And they did.

The first song lived in Finn’s foot before it leapt to his sticks. Clover’s bass was the ground, Rook’s glassy synth lifted the sounds into the sky, and Mallow’s guitar braided the beat into something bright enough to spark. Finn screamed the words he and Rook had written in chalk: WE ARE SMALL / WE ARE LOUD / WE ARE CHRYSANTHEMUM CLASH / WE ARE PROUD. Lelokos laughed and ate up the sound. Petals flew. Even the barn’s owner, leaning against a post downstairs, tapped a boot in time with the songs.

Halfway through, during the song about the irrigation ditch that decided to return home, Finn’s old fear flared. This cliff again, the drop, all those eyes. He missed a note. The beat hiccuped. He threw a look at Mallow, wild and apologetic.

Mallow caught his gaze and gave him not words but the tiniest nod, a steady motion like paw to paw. Rook slipped a note through the stumble and turned it into a flourish. Clover, bless every flower on their tail, shouted, "Solo!" and made a face so ridiculous that Finn burst into laughter even as he played. He leaned into the miss and turned it into a run, and the crowd whooped.

By the end, his body felt like a field after rain. Wrung out and brave. They tumbled down the ladder one after another, and Fleur caught Finn by the shoulders in the shadow of the tin roof’s overhang.

"You looked like yourself," they said.

He barked a laugh. "I’m always myself."

"Tonight you were yourself for real."

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he affectionately headbutted their shoulder and bolted into the hay in embarrassment to hide from the praise and teasing by people who would, in the morning, go back to irrigating and delivering bread and mending fences and mention, casually, the thunder they’d heard under the barn’s tin roof.

Weeks later, after Castle Lothain’s steward had walked through market humming Chrysanthemum Clash’s hook under his breath and Patalum’s children had begun to slap rhythms on fence posts, Finn sat behind the shed in the long evening light and thought about the sign.

The sailcloth banner had gone soft from weather, letters dulled by grit and sun. He’d saved it anyway. It felt like the skin he’d molted to become this new thing with his friends.

The four of them sprawled in the grass. Rook braiding long wheat stalks together, Clover using their tail as a pillow, Mallow whittling a toy boat for Windan’s youngest clients with careful, clever strokes. Fleur watered the chrysanthemums and pretended not to listen to their chatter.

"How did you do it?" Rook asked Finn after a while. "Make friends here."

He flipped a drumstick idly. Honesty was hard. But he had learned slowly, stubbornly, that it was fiercer than posturing.

"I made a loud sign because I was scared," he said. Clover looked over, fond. Mallow’s carving slowed. "It felt easier to be obnoxious than to say I wanted to be known. I thought I was auditioning you. Turns out I was auditioning whether I could make friends and be real."

Rook smiled. "You passed."

"Barely," Finn muttered.

"Barely is still passing," Mallow said, carving knife flashing in the light. They held up the toy boat. "Real things take time."

Fleur approached then, paws damp, and set four cups of lemonade in the grass. "To real things," they said with quiet congratulation.

They toasted to friendship. From the road, a gaggle of Lelokos singing with full bellies drifted past.

Finn leaned back on his elbows, letting the earth hold his weight. He thought of the cliff he’d always felt he stood on and how the band had not moved it so much as built a railing. A messy, glorious railing made of friends who would thump him back toward safety when he stumbled and laugh about it later. He would always be rambunctious. He would always have moods like fast weather. He would also, now, have somewhere to put the thunder.

"Tomorrow," he said into the sky, "let’s write something for the Lelokos coming out of hibernation. A feast song."

Clover whooped. Rook tapped a rhythm on their crystal box and Mallow nodded. Fleur, from the stoop, smiled and went back inside to wrap a bouquet for a customer.

Finn yanked the old sign over his face and laughed up at the sky. It smelled like paint, sun, and the first time he’d dared to say what he wanted.

He’d put it back up tomorrow, not because they needed auditions anymore, but because somewhere in Patalum a baby crederian, mantibab or Leloko or even a pawbird resting their traveling bones, would hear thunder from a grain shed and wonder if the noise was an invitation. He wanted there to be a sign when they came close, flapping and foolish and welcoming:

LOOKING FOR NOISE-MAKERS. PUNKS ONLY. MUST LOVE MAKING THINGS LOUD.

He would add a line, though, Rook’s idea, Clover’s penmanship, Mallow’s patience smoothing the paint:

AND BEING KIND.

Then he would go back inside, pick up his sticks, and make the kind of racket you can make only when your ribs hold not just your own heart, but the echo of three others beating with it.