Chapter Text
"Anyone down here?" Lucas called from somewhere down the hallway.
"We're both in the kitchen, dear," Charlotte called back, dunking a bag of her favorite peach tea mix in a mug of hot water. Behind her, at the kitchen table, her partner was relaxing with his own tea and a book from the library.
"Did you find him, lad?" The old engineer raised his voice enough for Lucas to hear from his approach, but didn't quite look away from his reading material. Lucas appeared in the doorway for the first time since he'd set off to locate Knack, and he was suspiciously happy.
Charlotte felt her eyes widen of their own volition. In the last few months since she'd been back, she'd learned that whenever Lucas showed up grinning like the cat that had gotten the cream, it meant that he'd done something, and the consequences of that something in question could range from a clever solution for a years-long problem sitting in the bowels of the lab to an electrical fire in the front garden.
Dr. V looked up from his book, perturbed by the silence, and pulled his glasses off to massage his forehead immediately upon clocking the expression on his apprentice's face.
"It's something really good this time, I promise," Lucas insisted. "I found him." He ducked just barely into the room and pressed himself against the wall.
Knack rounded the corner, and Charlotte set her mug down on the counter, completely forgotten. He stood somewhere between six and seven feet tall and had the absolute gall to look self-conscious about it. Dumbfounded and no small amount of impressed, Charlotte analyzed the placement of each new relic, how it created the shape of a rib, or the palm of a hand, or something vaguely resembling a pectoral muscle. She hurried over (with only the slightest limp, though she was a little too focused to notice how Lucas' whole face lit up) and ordered Knack into the room proper to turn around.
He was making full use of the bright red relics acquired from the last dig. The coloration was no longer confined to his head and fingertips; it also crept down his back, across what seemed to be a shoulder blade, and stripes of red relics adorned the backs of his arms and legs. The way that every piece was packed tightly into the shape of his new body made him seem stronger, denser, and more present now that the see-through holes were limited to around his neck and the junction between his legs and lower torso. Charlotte gently touched his upper arm and spun him back around to face her. His expression was more worried than before despite his poor efforts to hide that negative emotion. Charlotte's heart clenched and it took all her restraint not to pull him into her arms, height disadvantage be damned.
"You look incredible, dear," she said fervently, and while Lucas' enthusiastic nodding was just on the edge of her field of vision, she was quite capable of hearing him pipe up with,
"That's what I told him, too!"
"Is that where those boxes from the last shipment disappeared to once we were done with them?" Dr. V added on, squinting at the three of them from where he was sitting. He'd put his glasses back on by now.
"Maybe," Knack admitted, sounding much less on edge and hovering close to Charlotte as she made her way back to her abandoned tea.
"Well," the Doctor said, setting his book aside after marking the page, "Come here, it's my turn to get a close look at you."
As he went, Charlotte locked eyes with Lucas over a sip of tea. He was recording the interaction with a small handheld camera. She eyed the camera and raised her eyebrows at him. All she got in return was a smirk.
"Are those ribs?" Dr. V asked, evidently having finished his silent analysis of Knack's new form and moved on to asking all his accumulated questions.
"Yeah, I modeled as much as I could after human skeletomuscular structure. There were a few books on that stuff in the library," he added before the Doctor could inevitably ask where the golem had learned anything about internal human anatomy. "I didn't have enough room in my chest cavity for all ten pairs of ribs plus the floating ones, but I got some of them."
"Well, when you translate this structure upwards with more relics, you'll gain that extra space for details. You could achieve some quite intricate shapes resembling corded muscle on a larger scale."
Knack's agreement was so delayed and so strained that it shook Charlotte right out of her just-barely-not-weeping-with-motherly-pride. She whipped around so fast that the twinge rippled all the way down her spine and her bad leg. She almost dropped her mug entirely, and a pained hiss escaped before she could clamp down on it. Lucas was already at her side, taking the hot tea out of her hands and letting her lean on the counter.
"I'm alright," she protested weakly over the sound of Knack's quickly approaching footsteps. "Just moved a little too quickly. Help me over to the table so I can sit down?"
"Good idea," her partner agreed, already adjusting the chairs. Without waiting for an invitation, because he looked like he was second-guessing himself, Charlotte pushed off the counter and took hold of Knack's arm before her leg could buckle under her weight. To his credit, he automatically looped that hand around her, so that the now solid palm was steady against her upper back and the last two joints of his fingers curled under her other arm. With the patience of a trained medic or perhaps a saint, he helped her slowly limp over to the waiting chair. Lucas followed on her other side with the forgotten tea.
"Okay?" the teen asked once she was settled.
"I'm fine, honey, just a bad twinge from a bad movement." She offered Lucas, who looked concerned but not particularly worried, a small smile and turned to Knack, who seemed to have taken a couple steps backwards once he was no longer being her crutch. He looked very worried, but he'd already admitted in the months past that her chronic injury scared him. Charlotte looked to her partner next, and he was watching the adopted golem thoughtfully.
"Knack, do you not want to translate the new body structure upwards?" He asked in a surprising moment of awareness for someone else's emotions.
While Knack managed to not tense up all over, the way his ears pulled back and his eyes drifted to stare at the floor said it all.
Lucas made a confused little noise in the back of his throat. "Why?" he asked.
There was a long, awkward silence that reigned following, but eventually Knack couldn't bear it anymore and he mumbled at the ground, "The reason's stupid."
"Your opinion isn't 'stupid' to any of us," Dr. V said immediately. "It's actually rather important. Please tell us so that we might be able to help you."
Knack's eyes darted towards him and then away again, but his shoulders slumped. "It hurts," he said simply.
"It hurts?" Charlotte repeated, feeling slightly faint.
The golem nodded. "The more relics I add on… I feel all that weight. It gets harder and harder to concentrate on important things, like fighting or… just. Staying intact. And it takes time to recover from that, which is why Viktor managed to get the drop on Lucas back at the goblin village. I was still all… woozy." He waved his hand around as if to demonstrate.
"I hadn't realized," Dr. V mumbled after a moment of dumbfounded silence. "I'm-- I'm sorry it hadn't been addressed yet. I suspected your lethargy immediately after the upheaval at Trogdo Mine had something to do with the giant relics, but I hadn't considered that an extensive number of the regular ones would also have an effect." He lifted his head and looked Knack, who had turned towards the old engineer during his musings, right in the eyes. "I'm sorry it's been a source of discomfort that we haven't done anything about."
"I-- It's fine, I don't know if there's anything that can be done about it."
"It's not fine, and it's also not your fault Viktor jumped me," Lucas piped up, tying up an important thread that probably would've otherwise gotten lost.
"Yes, fantastic point Lucas, thank you," Dr. V agreed, before turning back to his other adoptee. "Knack, we have found a solution to every challenge we've faced in the last two months regarding your settling into our home. We can find a solution to this, not only because you're a remarkably clever and resilient creature but also because you have us. We will help however you need. I think if we start right here at, what do you think your current height is, six and a half feet? If we start there and add just another few dozen relics every other day or so, I think you'll find that you will be able to carry every last relic on the property without giving it a second thought in another two months."
"What he's trying to say," Charlotte interrupted, because her partner was fantastic at practical encouragement but sort of terrible at emotional encouragement, and right now Knack needed both, "is that nobody expects you to take on everything at once. This is a safe place. Allow yourself time to practice and learn, and allow yourself to fall back on us when you need to. You're not indestructible, sweetheart, and that's okay. We wouldn't have you any other way."
Knack's stony expression crumpled in a way that made Charlotte think that if he'd been able, he would've started crying.
She gave into the urge to hug him.
He was still tall and broad, obviously, and her arms didn't make it all the way around his middle, but he was solid in a way he hadn't been before. His new arms wrapped around her and then some, allowing her to stand without putting any weight on the still-achy leg and focus on rubbing soothing little circles into one of his new vertebrae. A shuddering sigh swept through his body and he relaxed. Charlotte almost expected him to start purring, like Lucas insisted he could do, but he didn't. Just kept breathing.
"I like hugging this new you," she whispered. "There's more to hold."
"...Lucas said something like that," Knack murmured, at the same time Lucas said in a stage whisper, "That's what I said."
"He was very correct," Charlotte chuckled. From above her head, Knack huffed a laugh, and then gently pulled away from the hug. Charlotte eased herself back down to her seat and picked her tea back up. It was still hot enough to warm her hands through the mug.
"Any thoughts on the game plan?" Lucas asked. Knack visibly thought about it.
"Can we… can we start working on all that tomorrow? I kind of just want to spend the rest of today getting used to how it is now."
"Absolutely," Charlotte said.
"I think the best possible course of action would be spending today to get yourself used to how it is now," the Doctor added. "We'll be moving at your pace the whole time. Just let us know if anything needs to change. We've got you."
Whether he knew it or not, Charlotte thought their son had never looked more beautiful than right now, redesign or not, when he looked safe and happy among his strange little patchwork family.