Disclaimer: I do not own Harvest Moon or anything associated with it.

Author's Note: To be honest, this is mostly an experimental piece. I'm currently enrolled in a fiction writing class, and after reading the first chapter of my textbook a prompt suggested following the rules outlined so far and I figured what the hell, why not. The entire point of the first chapter is ensuring you are surprising yet convincing and that what you write has a lot of sentiment, but does not rely on sentimental stereotypes. So, here's my crack at that! I adore Claire and Gray and had some fun with this piece, and I hope you all enjoy it.

It was a quarter to eight when Claire slid into the seat beside Gray, her blonde hair far more disheveled than usual and her fair skin littered with patches of dirt that clung to her cheeks even when the blacksmith rubbed his thumb against it. Her typically cheerful eyes were subdued with the weight of an entire day in the mines, and Gray didn't waste any time telling her that.

"You look awful."

"Thank you, Gray," Claire replied, smacking his hand when he attempted to scratch at a bit of dirt stuck on her nose. It became rapidly evident that Claire was not in the mood to exchange pleasantries – or whatever it was she liked to call the fierce banter she exchanged nightly with her redheaded companion – so Gray turned a bored expression to his still untouched glass of water. It was shivering in a pool of its own condensation, and with a tap he sent it gliding in front of her.

Her questioning look was answered with, "Drink up." She did not hesitate to do just that. Whatever Claire had been slaving away for had clearly been important enough to withstand the humiliation of entering the local inn coated in grime and horribly exhausted. Gray shrugged to himself and turned his careful gaze back to the splintering wood of the counter. Claire could do whatever she wanted. She always did, anyways.

"Aren't you even a little bit curious?" she finally asked, wrinkling her nose up at the bitter taste of tap water. Ann liked to fetch the filtered water for Claire's fine dining experiences, but as a resident Gray was treated to the luxuries of indoor plumbing that provided the water he showered with and the water he drank. He was sure he did plenty of other things with the water, but didn't bother dwelling on that. Claire was watching him as if to say you should be a little bit curious, and he didn't want to waste any time in telling her that he couldn't really care less what she did or why she did it or why she felt the need to tell him either.

"No," he answered thoughtfully, picking at a slip of wood he had been silently working to rise from the counter for the past three years of his life. One day it would break away from its wooden hold and he would have a souvenir of the blasé town in which days passed by without really amounting to anything. When that day came he would probably impale himself with it or do something to break up the monotony of Mineral Town, where his daily excitement came from his grandfather's criticisms.

And Claire. He had to admit, as much as the blonde spitfire got on his nerves with her antics, she was intriguing. The residents of Mineral Town were perfectly predictable. Ann was always going to mask her sadness with frustration and pep that he'd rather not deal with. Cliff was forever going to mope about at the church or the winery until Ann accidentally slipped out during one of her outbursts that she loved him as much as he loved her, which likely wasn't going to happen. Popuri would continue to pine away for a sailor who spent his time with her pining for the sea, and Rick would entertain his infatuation with the girl Gray watched get into drunken bar fights with Duke every Tuesday. He could very easily write down a rough schedule of every single villager's daily life and impress everyone except Claire with his knowledge. She would laugh at the stupidity of such a task and then do something. He wasn't sure what something that would be, and that was why he didn't mind that the one thing he could expect from Claire was that she would sit beside him if he waited at the inn's counter long enough. That's why he spent some nights all the way until eleven o' clock sitting before that splinter, tearing it centimeter by centimeter from its strip of pine until she sat down and scolded him for whatever he had done wrong in her eyes.

"You're as boring as ever," she mumbled, rubbing her sleepy eyes. Gray frowned at her, looking from the half-empty inn to the slip of wood. Ann was doing her best to entertain customers who came for the bar's treats to escape life's miserable entertainment, and Claire was doing her best to stay awake for…what? Him? He didn't want to flatter himself so much – and, truth be told, having a blunt and oftentimes harsh girl like Claire passing time with him wasn't an enormous accomplishment – but it seemed to be the unavoidable truth. Every night Claire would come into the inn and sit beside him no matter how exhausted or miserable or frustrated she was with the trials of her daily life. She just did it. It didn't make any sense.

"I'll humor you," he decided, scratching away at the wood. "Tell me why you look so awful."

"I meant aren't you curious about what I've been doing."

"Isn't it the same thing?"

Claire looked fully prepared to grab a fistful of the red hair he hid beneath his cap and slam his face into the wood he was so fascinated with. He had guessed that she wasn't interested in exchanging pleasantries and he had quite clearly guessed correctly. He mumbled a hasty apology meant solely to appease the beast, and she seemed satisfied with it. Perhaps she had come to expect no better from him. That left a hollow feeling in his stomach that led him to ignore the wood for a moment and turn to the condensation trail his now emptied glass of water had left. He dragged the water along the wood with his fingertip in an attempt to spell his name, but the g had already faded by the time he was onto the a.

"I was mining," Claire finally told him, tapping her fingers restlessly against the empty glass. For someone who was so obviously tired, she definitely had a strangely incessant need to fidget with anything around her. "I'm trying to raise money, you know."

Gray's interest was piqued, and she knew it. Claire lived a meager live within the confined walls of her tiny house, surrounding herself with arguably less luxuries than his own pathetic room hosted. He had never seen her want for anything more than the tools necessary to farm with, and that was one of his favorite things about her. A person who didn't want any more than they needed often proved to be surprisingly more interesting than a person such as Sasha or Manna, who liked to gossip about all of the worthless items they had cajoled their husbands into purchasing. "What are you trying to raise money for?" he asked, unable to prevent condescension from leaking into his voice.

Luckily Claire expected nothing more from him, which came as another strike to his already wounded feelings. She skirted over his reply as though it had been posed with the perfect dose of honest curiosity and genuine intrigue. "Well," she began, letting the pause that filtered between her words lure Gray into leaning closer to her. His nervous fingers began to chip away at the wood again, tugging mercilessly at the bit he was hoping to pry lose someday soon. She smiled, satisfied with his response, and continued when the ticking of the clock was beginning to get almost as annoying as Ann's voice in the background as she forced Harris into small talk. "I want to buy a cow."

This was a delightfully dull answer. Gray leaned back in his seat, disappointed. "Don't you already have a cow?"

"No, Gray."

"You've lived here for over a year – this is going to be your second summer – and you still don't have a cow? Didn't you come here to run a ranch? Because you're not doing such a great job."

Once again he had the uncomfortable feeling of Claire's desire to use violence to mend his tactless ways, and he quickly tacked on another apology. It didn't do as much to lessen her anger as the first had, but that suited him perfectly. To say something that genuinely bothered Claire meant that she was a little less unpredictable – she too had things she was sensitive about. He was curious about what those were, though he wasn't sure he wanted to discover them firsthand. Her fingers drummed without rhythm against her water and she abruptly declared, "I want a cow so I can get milk for the doctor."

"…For the doctor."

"For Trent, yes."

Silence filtered into their conversation. Gray looked down at the wood, amazed to find that the chip had somehow freed itself from its tortuously long hold and was sitting before him, and the tip of his finger was beginning to bleed from the force he had used to tear it out. He thought of something intelligible to answer the blonde beside him with, and finally settled on a puzzled, "Why?"

"Because he likes milk."

The ominous look Gray gazed at Claire with did not have any effect on her whatsoever. She continued to stare unflinchingly back at him, either wholly oblivious to the rage she had invoked in him or perfectly aware and happy with it. Once again, he couldn't be too sure. Her mysterious ways seemed to have suddenly lost their charm, however. Like a child who had just found out the secret to a magic trick, Gray was no longer interested in seeing it performed again. If the magic was for Trent, the doctor who seemed to bewitch every girl with his poison giveaways and dismal conversation, then he didn't want to partake in it anymore.

"I think I'm going to head up to sleep."

"You're right, it's getting late. Eight o' clock is a completely respectable bedtime."

Gray lowered himself back into the seat he had only managed to rise an inch from before her biting remark hit him. Claire had a knack for stopping anyone in their tracks. She had done it to him, in fact, several times throughout the conversation. He didn't appreciate any of those times. "Are you trying to court him or something?"

"Are you trying to quote Jane Austen? It's milk, not a bouquet of flowers and chocolates."

"You've never gone out of your way to raise money to buy my favorite thing."

"Your favorite thing does not come from an animal, therefore it does not benefit my ranch." Claire shrugged as though that ended the conversation, and perhaps it did, for Gray felt no further inclination to reply. The implication that he was not the slightest bit beneficial to her happy farm life was an assault he hadn't expected to wound him. He replied with a mumbled, "Whatever."

Claire had plenty of choice replies to that, he was sure, but didn't bother with them. She gestured to his finger and said, "You're bleeding."

"I noticed."

"Shouldn't you do something about it then?"

"Shouldn't you go marry the doctor or something?"

Claire laughed, and he couldn't exactly blame her. In his head the comment had sounded much more innocuous, but now it seemed like he had handed her a dangerous weapon. In those words his feelings had escaped as well, and she could use them against him. She had never done something so low, but he wouldn't count her out for it. He had never expected her to be interested in somebody who nearly killed her during their first meeting, and she had gone and proved him wrong on that account.

"Would you like to know a secret, Gray?"

"Sure," he answered in hopes that it meant she was going to shift the conversation into something that did not embarrass him. Claire had the potential to humiliate him in front of Mineral Town's assortment of uninteresting characters, and that didn't bother him too much. It was her potential to get up and leave and not show up the next night that truly troubled him. Her potential to humiliate him in a much more private manner, in which he would spend the rest of his life hoping he didn't have to see her awkward expression as she paraded through town with a bottle of milk in hand.

Claire smiled at him, her eyes mischievous and fractionally brighter than they had been when she first entered. Gray wasn't sure if it was the cold water or the conversation that had woken her up, but he was no longer sitting next to a living zombie. Something in her had awoken, and he hoped it wasn't the cruelly teasing girl she had in her, much like the cruelly teasing boy he had in him. The next words however, left him wondering whether she was teasing or not. He was stumped as she said, "I'm a liar."

The chip of wood spun between his fingers, rubbing into the jagged cut that had already stopped bleeding. Harris had sent Ann to fetch another glass of what they liked to call "juice," and she grinned at the pair as she fished around for a bottle beneath the counter and then returned to the back of the room. The chip slipped from his fingers and flung itself over the edge of the counter, landing somewhere beside aisles of alcohol that was left for late night reminiscing. "What?" he asked, staring blankly at the blonde, still twisting his fingers as though there were something between them.

"I wasn't going to use that money to buy a cow for the doctor. I do have a cow. I have four of them. You should come by and see them sometime."

She was still wearing a very smug smile that suggested she had planned every inch of their conversation before she had met him. Had he too fallen fatal to the predictability of his fellow townspeople? That horrified him almost as much as the previous suggestion that she was raising money to take Elli's place of faithful devotee to the doctor. "What?" he repeated, glancing at his hands and wondering where the slip of wood had gone.

Claire grinned, rubbing a hand across her face and smearing some of the dirt along her cheekbones in an attempt to wipe it off. "I was just teasing you," she answered. "Since you teased me I decided to do the same. But I really was mining all day to try and earn money, that wasn't a lie."

Harris finally laughed at something Ann said, and the resulting titter of the redhead's response jolted Gray and Claire from their staring contest. Their eyes darted to the other visitors and back to each other as Gray said, "Can I go see the cows now?"

He didn't say anything when Claire bid Ann a farewell, and he didn't say much else when they exited the building and were hit with a wave of air almost as stagnant as the air inside. With summer on their heels the breeze had already become uncomfortable at best, and Claire seemed to feel this as well, for she was beginning to roll her plaid sleeves up, revealing arms that had become impressively strong since she had arrived a year ago and introduced herself to Gray, who had been considerably bored by her at first and later increasingly fascinated by the way she seamlessly fit into Mineral Town life while simultaneously sticking out like a sore thumb.

"Now do you want to hear the truth?" Claire asked as they walked along the dirt path towards her farm, which he had visited only a handful of times. He considered it on plenty of occasions, but his mind strayed to what exactly he would do there. At the inn their conversations were distant surprises but at least he knew they would be there and that they would talk. He couldn't guarantee if he would manage to say a single word if the setting shifted to her farm.

He took advantage of the fact that they were still in town territory, several feet away from her home, and answered, "I guess."

"You're not talkative at all today. It's disheartening." She grimaced at a patch of dirt on the collar of her shirt, doing her best to pick off every single fleck of grime. It was a white collar, however, and Gray knew she wasn't getting anywhere with the process.

"Just tell me," Gray answered, staring disapprovingly at the girl he found incredibly bright at times and amazingly dumb at others. How was someone who was able to trick him, the most skeptical resident of Mineral Town, and yet unable to recognize that attempting to pry a stain from a shirt was a futile attempt?

Claire sensed his disdain and made a face. "I'm just trying to look nice," she snapped, licking her finger and rubbing it furiously across the fabric. "I don't want a visitor to come over when I look a mess. So stop looking at me like I'm stupid!"

Claire also had the impressive tendency to perfectly read either Gray's mind or his face. He liked to believe it was a combination of the two, for even in that she had to keep him guessing. "Sorry," he muttered, rolling his eyes. "I don't care how you look."

"Charming."

"I didn't mean it like that, Claire."

"Enlighten me."

Gray met her accusatory eyes and sensed that he had somehow managed to stumble into another offensive area – twice in one day was a record he had hoped to never breach. It was typically impossible to insult Claire with even the most unpleasant comment, so he could at least claim that he hadn't expected to delve into hurtful territory. "You always look nice," he managed, feigning a glare from the artificial streetlights as he pulled his hat down over his eyes. "So just forget about the stupid stain and get on with the story, alright?"

He sensed a fleeting approval in Claire's eyes when she slapped his hat upright to reveal his hesitantly bashful expression, but she hid it well and left him wondering if it had been the same trick of light that led him to shield his face in the absence of the sun. She led him towards her farm but not towards the barn where undoubtedly her cows were settled into rest for the night. She veered to the right instead and towards her house, and he followed without question.

"I was raising money to grow corn," she told him as she plopped into a seat at her miniscule dining table, barely big enough for two.

Gray sat opposite her, their knees brushing against each others beneath the surface he rested his hands upon. "Corn," he repeated, his voice flat.

"Well, it is almost summertime, and corn is a summer crop."

"Dully noted."

"And I needed money for an oven."

"An oven…and corn…" Gray felt his stomach lurch, threatening to leave further reasons to humiliate himself. An oven and corn. This, paired with the unfamiliar blush on Claire's cheeks…

She cleared her throat, lowering her eyes to the pink diamond painted across her table's surface. "I wanted to make you baked corn, actually. Your favorite item. Not the doctor's. He can just go next door and buy milk."

"And I can't just buy baked corn from Kai's summer shack?"

"It's expensive," she muttered.

Gray smiled, glancing around her house. He had seen it plenty of times before – enough to assume she was a girl of little luxury – and found that he did not feel as uncomfortable as he had anticipated. The magic was no longer missing from her trick – instead it seemed she had learned a few new things he had plenty of time to see unfold before his eyes. Everything was as it should be. They might as well have been sitting at the counter in the inn having the same conversation, or standing in his room, or sprawled across the dock watching the sunset at the beach.

"What's your favorite thing?" he asked, attempting to cover his cheek with a cleverly spread hand that made him look as though he was withholding vomit. He did not mind their feelings matching, but their blushes corresponding was unnecessary.

Claire smiled down at the table, murmuring, "I like ice cream, I suppose."

They caught each others eyes for a moment and then looked hastily away. Gray's eyes landed on the clock. It was a quarter past eight when he said, "Then I'll do my best to make you ice cream."

"It'll probably be awful," Claire replied, but Gray did not necessarily take it as an insult. The fact that Claire was clearly capable of much harsher comments suggested she was either too unstable to think clearly or going easy on him, and he didn't mind not knowing which of the two it was this time. The magic of Claire was not knowing what she was going to say next, and she was one magic trick he didn't mind watching over and over and over again. "Probably," he murmured in reply, wiping the dirt from her cheeks. This time Claire did not slap his hand away.