#a bit messy but my brain is mush so imma just leave this here

[weretoad-writer]

Breakfast

Fictober - Day 25 Prompt: “I could really eat something.” Fandom: Enderal Warnings: brief language

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The morning caught them both by surprise. When the conversation had begun, slouched between the joint peaks of the bank’s roof, the stars had been bright overhead, and the next time they looked up, it was the pale grey of early morning. 

Well, shit.

The crisp scent of the night air was tinged with damp and woodsmoke, faint at first, but growing stronger. Across the skyline they could watch as, one by one, small trails of smoke began to rise into the air, mixing with the mist off the water in the South Quarter. The city was waking up.

Eska stretched, stifling a yawn. “You hungry?” 

Tharaêl’s brow knit, tugging at the still healing scar between his eyes. He wasn’t used to these sorts of questions. You didn’t eat because you were hungry. You were always hungry. You ate to stay alive. It was like asking if someone enjoyed breathing. Ultimately irrelevant. 

He knew it was less a question of what he was and more what he wanted. But he wasn’t used to being asked that either. What the fuck do you care? The kneejerk response was always on the tip of his tongue. What do you get out of it? He’d gotten…...better at biting it back, at waiting that half a heartbeat for his thoughts to catch up. He knew the answer; he even half believed it. But the instinctive bristle still remained. 

He compromised. “Why?”

Eska raised a quizzical brow, his eyes only half open. “I’m just going to start taking that as a ‘yes’.” He had pushed himself up and begun to scramble lazily up the pitch. “I’ll be right back.”

Tharaêl opened his mouth, then shut it again, glaring after him with more irritation than he felt. It was a simple bloody question. With a soft exhale, he sagged back against the roof, listening to the scrape of boots against shingle growing fainter until they disappeared. 

He tilted his head back. The sky had changed from grey to a pale blue, the clouds warming to a faded purple, tinged pink in places, but the city itself was still blanketed in the soft shadows of early morning. It would be hours yet before the sun made it over the peak where the temple sat. 

Just as he was beginning to wonder exactly how loose Eska’s definition of “right back” was, he heard footsteps on the roof once more and a moment later Eska came scrabbling over the peak. His scarf had been turned into a miniature sack and as he set it down between them, Tharaêl could see that it was overflowing with--

“What the fuck is that?”

“Alright, so I might have got a little carried away.”

“This is a week’s worth of food!”

“I was hungry, I couldn’t decide! And you wouldn’t say what you wanted.”

“You didn’t ask me that!”

Eska’s response was to pick up what looked like a sausage wrapped in some kind of flaky bread and toss it at his head. 

Tharaêl caught it reflexively, realized that he had effectively been maneuvered into taking a piece, and flipped Eska the rudest gesture he could manage with one hand. 

The offending pastry was still warm; he could smell the grease and butter and -- Damnit. Fine. With a scowl, he shoved half of whatever the fuck it was in his mouth. 

It…. was good. Better than good. It was gone. Inhaled in two mouthfuls. Not entirely intentionally.  

When he glanced up, Eska was looking at him with chipmunk round cheeks and an intolerably smug grin on his face. 

“Fuck off,” he grumbled and reached for another. 

Between the two of them, the “week’s worth” of food was gone within ten minutes.