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Breakfast was a relative term. Breakfast meant whatever food they could scrounge upon waking from the fitful sleep traveling afforded them. Breakfast could come in the middle of the night should they need to get moving, or it could come well past noon. Still, Cullen was a stickler for making sure they ate something before leaving whatever place they’d managed to take refuge in. That was his mother’s doing, after all. She’d grown up with parents who still prescribed to the Old Days proverb of breakfast being the most important meal of whatever eighteen hours they were awake.
The house they’d holed up in for the last two nights was actually in decent condition. The walls were standing with only minimal damage, aside from the inevitable strain of time and weather, and it had doors that locked and real beds. Beds that weren’t their bedrolls stacked together while they shivered pressed up against each other. Privacy and something mostly comfortable? It was going to be hard to leave. Honestly, there was a part of Cullen that almost asked Dorian if maybe this wasn’t a good place to settle for a while. There was enough space to maybe get a garden going and he had enough experience with farming and animals that he could probably figure something out.
A nice dream.
Dorian pushed open the front door, hinges creaking in the relative silence, and stepped inside. He’d done a perimeter check, as was their custom every two hours, and the calm look on his face was enough of an answer for the question on Cullen’s lips. All clear. That was good. Calm was something they didn’t get too much of, and Cullen would take seeing that expression on Dorian’s face whenever he could get it.
“Storm’s on the way,” Dorian stated as he crossed into the front room from the still mostly-in tact foyer. Broken tile crunched under his boots, kicked up a bit of dust, but the sound was almost comforting. Cullen knew the sound of Dorian’s footfalls at fifty paces after so long, and just the sound of them calmed the general unease that seemed to always be in his chest. Knowing the man was close, close enough for him to hear him, made him feel safer than anything else.
A storm didn’t make him feel safe, though. A storm meant noise and kicking up all the wildlife in the area. At least they had a decent shelter, though. They wouldn’t be disturbed so long as they stayed put.
Cullen nodded and pulled a couple of cans from his pack. They’d come across a good cache not long ago, which had padded out their diet of whatever Cullen could manage to hunt without drawing too much attention. It wasn’t much beyond some canned meat and veggies, but at least it would fill their bellies. Having the house meant they could cook, too, which at least made things feel a little less bleak. Warm canned carrots eaten with a fork was better than eating them on the go with fingers. Small luxuries.
He smiled then, “Ham and green beans sound alright to you?” Cullen asked as Dorian dropped himself on the rotting barstool that was beside the one he was sitting on.
“Bit early for something like that, isn’t it?” Dorian asked, though he leaned over and kissed Cullen’s shoulder.
Cullen shrugged, “breakfast of champions, right?” he teased, “besides…we could be celebrating.”
One of Dorian’s eyebrows arched. Despite a lack of very clean water, soap, places to get clean or even sleep properly, Dorian’s facial hair always looked immaculate. He’d been the most handsome man Cullen had ever seen, and even in the months they’d taken up traveling together he was still completely floored by the man’s ability to take care of himself despite the rough conditions.
“And what are we celebrating?”
Again Cullen shrugged, but popped the cans open enough to vent the stem before he got up to put them down on the low cooking fire they’d set up the night before below a broken window. If a storm truly was coming they should eat before the weather got bad. “Just…finding somewhere nice,” he answered, and moved to lean against the counter they were sitting at, “been a while since we have.”
Under his mustache, the edges of Dorian’s mouth tipped upward in a smile. “Your optimism astounds me,” he teased, “Maker knows it must be my lot to travel with the sunniest man in Thedas.”
Cullen wasn’t, and Dorian knew that, but he so often called the man his sunlight. With all those curls, tied into a bun at the nape of his neck now, and amber eyes Dorian loved to tell him that he was the living embodiment of something warm and good. Now, months later, Cullen found it made something hot and prickly stick in his chest. He liked that feeling.
“You love it,” Cullen teased him, and stretched out a hand to take one of Dorian’s across the scratched and weather and time worn counter top. He was dressed down, out of the cobbled together armor he usually wore, as a direct contrast to how geared up Dorian was for his perimeter check. They made quite the picture.
Dorian smiled. For a long time they just stayed like that, with their fingers linked, and listened to the soft kissing and spitting of the food on the fire. It was a comforting type of sound. It was a home in the middle of the hostile world. It was…nice. He’d never known what it was like to feel like he was home until he met Cullen. Amazing that he could find his home in a person as opposed to a place. Places were so important to people anymore, had been to Dorian for a long time, but he was so much happier with a who instead of a where. The where mattered very little anymore.
Well, aside from where they were right now. That kitchen counter. Table. Whatever it was. It was the most important place in the world to him. Dorian squeezed Cullen’s hand, rubbed his gloved thumb over the other man’s knuckles, and he couldn’t help but smile.
“I love you.” he murmured.
Cullen’s expression warmed even further, if that was even possible, and he leaned over the counter to kiss Dorian’s lips, “let’s stay for a while longer. We can ride the storm out here and head for Denerim after.”
A few days of mutual domesticity? Actual domesticity? In a house?
Maker, yes.
“Twist my arm,” Dorian chuckled and nipped at Cullen’s lower lip.
So they had their breakfast of champions, eaten with actual cutlery and shared between them at the counter. As the sky grew dark and thunder started to roll in they lit a few candles, just enough to see by, and then that kitchen counter became the most important place to Dorian for several different reasons.