Work Text:
At Valentine, Ardent passes time steadily, continuously. Their good days pass like honey poured over bread (sweet, golden, steady), their bad ones like rue (bitter, rough, and lingering). The days start to run together. The nightmares too. Still, Ardent keeps their time in moments, to make preserves and put on the shelf for later. To remember the important parts.
Every night, Ardent goes back to the book. They never get any farther. They still can’t even tell if it’s a cipher or a proper language. It’s nothing like anything they’ve seen before.
Recall the myth of Penelope. The faithful who every day wove a shroud, and every night unraveled it, buying time for the people who were the closest to her. Who are you buying time for? Who are you faithful to?
How long can you keep it up?
Who are you really deceiving?
Ardent doesn’t remember much of that night past Fost pulling out the whiskey they’d found in the back of the pantry. They don’t know how long it was there, but it must have been long enough. They started in the dining room after the dishes were put away and woke up far into the afternoon, collapsed on the pantry stairs. There were salt tracks on Ardent’s face and imprints from the stairs along their leg. Fost had already gotten up by the time Ardent opened their eyes.
They started breakfast in an uneasy silence. Ardent broke it.
“If it helps, I don’t remember anything past the first glass. It’s been a while for me.”
“Oh, thank god. Me neither.”
They laughed over breakfast and never addressed it again.
The nightmares aren’t every night. Ardent’s benefactor keeps them on edge by choosing to elude schedule. Drowning never gets any less easy.
It gets a little more urgent every time. Ardent knows they can’t do this forever. She has made that clear at the very least.
Someone has to go to market every other week. The garden is alright, but it’s all herbs, some of them magical, half of them poisons. Which is all good fun, but a person’s got to eat. A tiefling too.
They trade weeks. Ardent’s weeks involve trying to track down disguise scrolls, fresh fruit, books, and produce. They don’t know what Fost’s weeks are like. It’s a silent agreement: living with you is all well and good, but there are things that we don’t know about each other, there are things we need to do and be and handle out of each other’s sight.
Their relationship is perfectly affable, all fun and lively over meals and drinks, but there are undercurrents and long silences that neither of them are willing to breach.
It’s late fall. Ardent buys parsnips, beets, lettuce, carrots, and one hefty pumpkin. Late fall means apples come down from out west— halfling country. Halfling cider is always the best. Elf cider has no kick to it.
The bright days of summer have faded, leaving behind the brisk, gray skies that always wake Ardent up in the morning but leave them kind of hazy by the afternoon. The silences grow longer.
Ardent opens the front door of Valentyne Manor, trying not to drop the pumpkin wedged under their arm or the cider hooked on their tail.
“Hey! Fost! Do you wanna make pumpkin pie?”
Fost all but runs into the parlor. “Of COURSE I do!”
The disguise scroll Ardent bought off a traveling wizard stays shoved in the back of their jacket where it belongs.
The satchel where Ardent keeps their things stays packed, the dresser in the bedroom of Valentyne Manor stays empty. Fost never notices, or at least doesn’t ask why. Ardent doesn’t pry either. Sometimes they think Fost might be doing the same thing.
Ardent’s benefactor never lets them forget that this home is not something to get used to. That these incredible people are not people to rely on. That nobody is.
Ardent stokes the fire in the kitchen while Fost mixes batter. There’s some chocolate Fost spent a pretty penny on, and the last of this month’s butter. Ardent notices the fire getting low, and Noodle breathes on it from their position on Ardent’s shoulder.
They spend a little too long upstairs in the board game room after Fost puts the cookies in the oven, and Ardent is startled when mid-round Fost suddenly curses, drops their cards, and sprints for the pantry stairs, still cursing. Ardent realizes a full second later and jumps over the pool table.
Fost beats Ardent to the kitchen, but Ardent beats him to the cookies. He’s a little startled when Ardent just sticks a hand straight into the fire to take the tray out, and gets really confused when they a) don’t flinch and b) manage to get out with no burns.
Ardent grins at him, extremely hot metal tray still in their hands. “Tiefling perk.”
“Right.”
Ardent laughs at his expression.
Things that go undiscussed:
- Ardent’s class
- Fost’s past
- The book
- Why exactly they hate Dean Keravin Sylithar
- Why Ardent wakes up in a cold sweat some nights and ends up drinking tea to stay awake through the entire night, and Fost comes down to see Ardent at the table with a mug in hands that are shaking
- The persistent feeling that this place is too good to be true
- Where they’re going
Things that are discussed:
- How cool magic is
- The weather
- New recipes they want to try
- The food scene in the Northern Elvish territory
- Class tierlist
- Piss, probably
- Dean Keravin Sylithar’s status as a rat bastard man
- Ardent being bad at singing
- Aza
It’s not a game of tension. It’s a game of patience. The trick is in being able to enjoy yourself when you know you can’t stay too long. The trick is that no matter what’s going on in your head, whatever dire obligations you still have, there’s still gonna be flour and fresh berries and half a pumpkin pie in the pantry tomorrow.
Ardent takes the moments as they come, and puts them on the shelf to return to when they’re inevitably on the road again.