Brick by brick, you build your self worth on what shaky ground you can find. Sometimes it's easier than others-- your uncle has been gone long enough that the soldiers flitting their way to the shop ask for you, see your face and the bright orange of your crest and look at you with a startling sort of clarity that you'd never experienced before. Sometimes you take their order-- a dented breastplace, a new spear head, detailing on gauntlets or quivers or (rarely) bags-- and it fills you with some of that old sense of knowing, more than you know almost anything else, that this is you: Hugo Arkwright, the Maker.r

This is one of those days.

You are humming away at your counter, carefully tooling leather to pass the time. You peel off one thin, tan ribbon at a time, watching the outline of a cobra, scales and all, surface from the brown mire of the panel. Outside the cold autumn sun is high and the wind is blowing crisp red and brown leaves down the street. Inside it is warm and dark, as it always is.

In between, where you often find yourself, there is you: tall, black and gray and white and orange, and singing, loud enough that heads turn as you pass. You try not to imagine they're looking because you sing so rarely, anymore. You pretend it's because it's bad--which it still might be--and not because it is shocking.

Truth be told, it's a little of both.
As the the last curve of the last beveled scale falls away, the little blue girl wanders her way toward the shop.

You've seen her before; you've seen everyone before, you think with a hint of resentment, it is just that they never quite remember you. Everyone remembers Rickard. They don't think of little Hugo, Charlie's age when he was in the back of the shop, hammering steel. They don't remember your careful attention to detail, your heart that would swell as you passed a new dagger to the front and watch it practically sparkle in the shaft of light through the doorway.

You wonder where that Hugo went. 
Today you are as close to that Hugo as you get.

"You're... Charlie, right?" You smile at her. It looks genuine. It feels genuine. It sort of catches you off guard. "What are you up to?"