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ehlnofay · 6 months

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There is a pie on the table.

Not part of one – a whole pie, its crust flaky and steaming, one of its sides beginning to split, leaking its innards onto the serving plate. A whole pie. On a table set for eight. And Torr doesn’t think that Babette even eats.

A whole pie. And sliced turnips, baked with melted cheese, also hot enough to steam; a dish of them. Torr briefly considers stealing it – stupid idea, where would he even take it? What would he do with it? It would be difficult to explain later. Right now his main goal is to not do anything difficult, at least until he’s got more of a sense of the place, of its boundaries. What’s expected. What to expect.

And they’re immediately cocking up that goal, because when invited to a friendly welcome lunch they stopped dead in the middle of the floor to stare wide-eyed at the table.

Veezara, standing behind them, raps politely on their arm with his knuckles. “Do you want to sit?” he asks; Torr has no bloody clue what they want right now – shovel turnips into their face, face stuck into the dish like a pig eating from a trough, maybe, or alternatively to steal the pie and hide it somewhere it will be safe to come back to on a rainy day – but people are sitting (that is generally what is done at lunch tables) so Torr casts a quick glance over the lot of them and sits too.

(He doesn't want to make them wait.)

His chair is one of the ones closest to the doors. It’s quite far down the table from Astrid, who is smiling encouragingly; but Veezara sits next to him seemingly without a thought and sitting directly opposite him is Babette, and Torr's spoken a little to them both. He can't make any claim as to knowing either of them well, but Veezara seems even-keeled and open enough as to be a little reassuring, and Babette, at least has made him laugh.

Next to Babette is Gabriella, her dark hood pulled low over her forehead. She has a perpetually secretive look about her face – one brow slightly raised, lips slightly curled – as if she knows something no-one else does, and the way she looks at Torr makes him think of the way people look at bugs. Not in a bad way – she looks at him in the way people fascinated by bugs look at bugs – but still, he’d rather not be a bug. She catches their eye, half-smiles. “You brought your bag to the table,” she observes.

Torr glances at the floor, where his pack spills out from under his seat where he’s stowed it. Shit. They probably should have left it on the bed Veezara said was theirs, but they honestly didn’t think to; they don’t really want to leave it behind, besides.

“Yeah,” he replies, and nudges it further under his chair with his foot. He feels painfully and awkwardly observed.

(They're all watching; Torr's been here for less than a day, and he's trying to get a sense of the place, and until he understands how it works he needs to keep his head down.)

A tall man wrapped in red readies a gleam-edged knife over the pie platter. At the other end of the table, Astrid smiles. It’s a scimitar of a thing. “You’ve all met our newest Sibling, then?” she asks, in her molasses-rich voice, and the knife sinks into the flesh of the pie in a way that makes Torr want to wince. His stomach feels shaky.

There are various noises of assent from around the table. Torr’s met most everyone by now, all but the white-blonde man sitting silent and displeased by the head of the table, though he hasn’t spoken with most of them for more than a few minutes. Gabriella reaches across the table and levers a slice of pie onto her plate with the carving knife, already sticky with the juices leeched from the meat, torn-up flakes of pastry clinging to the side of the blade. It smells nice.

(It is, Torr tells themself, a normal-sized slice of pie. The same kind of portion sizing they’ve always seen in taverns busy enough not to kick them out. And realistically – based on the numbers Astrid showed them earlier – there’s plenty of room in the Brotherhood’s budget, for, what even are the ingredients of that, flour and meat? Water? It can stretch to cover the turnips no problem.)

“We’ve spoken,” says the man from the kitchen – Nazir, that was it. The tall one, with the gold in his beard. He sounds unimpressed. He does not seem like someone who is often impressed. Gabriella passes on the knife; Torr's eyes track its movement. It's an unconscious effort, but they're stuck – in this moment, breaking bread with a close-knit household of people whose only commonality is a predilection for violence, they cannot stop paying attention.

“Lovely,” Astrid says. Her eyes flash in the torchlight as she turns to face Torr. “Torr, do you feel like you’re getting to know everyone? Settling in?”

Torr manages a quick glance around the table, the room as a whole. They’ve learned most everyone’s names and feel reasonably confident nobody’s going to start screaming at them or start doing blood rituals or something; nobody's going to do anything unprovoked, which is enough of a comfort. They’ve mostly learned the layout of the Sanctuary, too – this bit of the cave opens into the dormitory sort of space just up above, and the big room a bit to the left, the kitchen tucked away in the corner. As cave rooms go, the dining space is quite nice; warm light, lots of room, a relatively even floor. It’s not damp in here like it is in the big room with the little pond. It’s nice and dry. Torr could probably do without a bed – they could kip under the dining table and be fine. (They’ll still take the bed if it’s offered, though.)

“Mostly, yeah.” Torr watches the sticky-dark knife getting passed around the table, the beautiful enormous pie disappearing at a rate that isn’t alarming and is in fact a normal speed for things to be eaten. His throat is dry. “Uh, Veezara showed me the beds and everything. It’s a nice place.”

The old man sitting up the other end of the table pauses, his fork stuck into a slice of turnip. “I hope you don’t think you’re being smart, boy.”

Like Torr’s fool enough to try to be snarky about this. Like they'd try to act smart now, of all times, when he's still feeling out the limits.

“Nah,” he says, tapping narrow fingers against the edge of the table. The ends of them are flushed red; scars from old chilblains, an irritated colour that never goes away. He is breathing evenly; a scraping breath in, one, two, three, a steady breath out. Cave or not – “It’s got a roof, hasn’t it?”

It’s warm – almost stiflingly so – and dry in parts. The rain and snow and wind can’t get in. There’s a whole pie served at the lunch table. Hundreds in gold if he does his job right. What the hell is he going to complain about?

There’s a nudge against his shoulder that is too surprising to make him flinch; when he looks, Veezara is holding out the knife, handle-first. “Oh,” he says; he takes it, because what else is he going to do?

There’s one slice left on the platter, rich and dripping, and plenty of the turnip dish. Torr’s stomach is folding in on itself. They ask Babette, “Are you going to have any?”

“Oh,” she says, “goodness, no,” and she smiles wide, vicious teeth pressing into her lower lip. “No offense to Nazir’s cooking, of course. But my appetites are a tad more discerning.”

Torr replies, “Well, that’s disturbing,” and Babette laughs, and Torr is left gripping the knife hard enough to turn red-flushed knuckles white and staring at the food on the plate. Clumsily sliced pastry, the meat and juices spilling out, running down the sides. Still steaming, just a little. There’s no one else to eat it – most everyone else already served and waiting for them. There’s no-one near who needs it more. But Torr doesn’t quite need it, do they? Not yet. But everyone’s waiting. And good first impressions and all that. And Torr really wants some pie – they just also want to shove it all away, or lock it in a box to save for later.

“Are you not hungry?” Nazir asks, something not unlike challenge in his voice, and Torr is supposed to be keeping his head down. He can't be pushing it already.

It takes Torr a few seconds to even realise that they were spoken to at all. They’re very busy staring at the platter, knife dripping onto their knuckles.

“No,” he says, “I am,” and then Veezara’s cold-scaled fingers are on his hand and he’s taking the carving knife from him, and Torr's shoulders lock in place, breath catching in the base of his lungs – he dithered too long and now they're taking it away – but Veezara lifts the last of the pie on the flat of the blade and drops it, rather squishily and without ceremony, onto Torr’s plate.

Staring at it, Torr says, “Thanks.”

Veezara shrugs and takes up his fork.

The pie is nice, though it takes Torr several seconds to work up to having a bite. He doesn’t know much about cooking, so he can’t pick out each individual taste – but the meat might be veal, or at least pretty similar to how he assumes veal tastes, and it’s good. It sticks in his throat when he swallows. He can hear all the clinking of cutlery around him, twitching at every sound.

Babette, the only one without a plate, leans eagerly over the table, fine dark hair puddling on the wood below her chin. “Astrid told us she pulled the old choose a victim gambit with you,” she says. “I love that one.”

Torr presses their lips together, digs their fork into the misshapen lid of their pastry. “The three innocents in the shack? I didn’t.”

“Innocents?” Gabriella echoes, tilting her head. Her hood slides back from her brow just enough that Torr can see the light playing off the ridge of her forehead; she takes a neat bite and adds, “Wasn’t part of that game that they weren’t?”

Nasty game. An unnecessary piece of showmanship. Torr doesn’t say so, of course. “I think the game was that it didn’t matter,” he says instead, and shrugs, fingers playing at the fork stuck in the pastry lid. His pie slice is warping, spilling its insides over the pottery of his plate. The conversation twists his stomach into knots. “It probably doesn’t matter much now. They’re dead, right?”

He’d specifically suggested that Astrid let the ones left alive stay that way, but she hadn’t seemed all too amenable to it. And from a practical perspective – well, letting them go would just be a liability.

Up the other end of the table, Astrid nods once, vague amusement pulling at the corner of her mouth. Torr feels, strongly, that he has made some very bad life decisions.

(But they’re very bad life decisions that have led to ledgers that record payouts of over a thousand septims and a whole pie at the lunch table. He’ll live.)

Torr looks back at their plate. “It was supposed to be about readiness to follow orders more than about who was and wasn’t meant to die. I think. But all it really proved was the lengths I’d go to to get out of a locked room.” The tines of their fork scrape against a chunk of meat. “And, really, that’s not surprising. I’ve probably done worse for less.”

They immediately regret saying it. Babette’s eyes light up, and they know they’ve opened up an uncomfortable topic. “Have you?” she asks brightly, and sits up straight, shaking out her hair. “For what?"

It’s not an easy line of questioning from anyone, but it’s particularly uncomfortable asked by a girl in a grass-stained kirtle, sitting in a chair too high for her feet to touch the ground. Torr sticks his tongue into his cheek, asks, “Is this dinner-table talk?”

“It’s shop talk,” Gabriella replies.

Babette smiles with all her teeth.

Torr doesn't want to talk about this. Torr's not a snivelling child, or some moralising grundy who assumes that they're in danger of being gutted like the game for the pie at a moment's notice – the worst anyone has been so far is taciturn, it would be absurd to extrapolate so hugely – but it would be equally absurd not to be wary, and Torr is well used to keeping a watch when an unfamiliar situation could begin to turn sour. They want to keep to safer topics, easier things to talk about; they also don't want to say no.

“It’s not exciting,” he hedges, twisting his fork between his fingers; Babette stares until he continues. “Guards, more often than anything else, when I got arrested or – or other people did. People who would've hurt us, or we just needed out of the way." It's as close to a non-answer as he can give while still complying, staring into the smooth filling of the pie.

“How pragmatic,” Veezara says, focused steadily on his meal.

“Well, yeah. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t need to.” The pastry lid of Torr’s pie slice is slowly shredding into little pieces scattered around their plate.

Babette tuts. "I suppose I can understand that," she says, fingers pressing into the table; the rest of them watch with unsettling attention. "I wonder – you're young. You must have started about when I did."

Torr shrugs, noncommital; makes a pitiful attempt at changing the subject. “This pie is really good – Nazir, right?”

Nazir does not blink. “That compliment would carry more weight if you’d actually eaten any.”

Torr presses his lips together; manages to scoop some filling onto his fork and spend several seconds chewing. Babette keeps staring at him, unblinking; when he swallows, he says, "Ten years old with a beard knife," because he doesn't want to say no directly and he hopes there won't be any follow-up questions.

Babette’s face lights up. “Oh, really? I was almost ten years old with teeth.” The torchlight is flashing off the points of her fangs. “What a delightful coincidence.”

Torr shrugs and turns his attention back to his plate.

“If we’re talking business,” Astrid says silkily, a much smoother subject change than Torr’s earlier half-hearted attempt, “then I should ask – Nazir, do we have any smaller contracts open that might suit our dear new Sibling?”

The torchlight flashes off the gold in Nazir’s beard as he tips his head, considering. “I’m sure we do,” he says, “though I’d have to check our records. There are a few that I don’t think anyone requested I assign them lingering.”

Babette knocks her foot into Torr’s shin under the table (with considerable effort; she has to slide down so far in her chair to reach them that they can’t see her chin.) “You’re getting the dregs,” she says sympathetically. Her gleaming eyes don’t look particularly pitying.

Nazir tuts at her, slicing off a bite of his pie. “It’s only fair. He’ll have to be here longer than half a morning if he wants the glamorous jobs.”

“I’m fine without the glamour.” They’re not particularly confident in their ability to kill with the stereotypical panache that may be expected with whatever jobs qualify as glamorous. They’ll take the simple work.

“Good,” Astrid says definitively. “You’d be surprised at how much of our work is correspondence. Cutting deals. You know, the boring parts. Not that you’d be assigned to do any of that just yet.” Her head snaps up, blonde hair rippling over her shoulder. “Oh, that reminds me – I got word from our contact in the Three Coins. New intel, hopefully. Any takers?”

Torr, who barely knows what she’s talking about, stays silent, pushing his fork around his plate and gathering a third bite of almost all pastry. It’s the white-blonde man in the seat next to Astrid who speaks up (bit of a surprise, that – Torr doesn’t think he’s even heard him talk yet), saying gruffly, “I’ll go. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Nottov.”

Babette grins, fingers pressing against the table. “How sweet. Reconnecting with your little friend.”

The man bristles; Astrid, smiling, says, “Don’t be mean, Babette.”

“Me?” Torr’s only known her for an hour and change but even so they’re already beginning to tell when she’s playing it up – leaning into the rounded, girlish bubble of her voice, opening her eyes as wide and childlike as they’ll go. “I would never!”

“She would never, Astrid,” Gabriella agrees solemnly.

The old man almost audibly rolls his eyes. The white-blonde one is glaring so hard he seems to be trying to set fire to the table with the sheer power of his unrestrained rage. Torr takes a fourth bite to stifle a laugh.

Then, as they all keep chattering, shifting from shop talk to inside jokes and strange banter, Torr released slowly from the vice of their attention, they take a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. At the tenth, they stop counting.

It’s not neat. Their slice of pie was a bit lopsided to begin with, and it’s spent a while cooling on their plate, slowly spilling its innards out onto the ceramic. They managed to shred most of the pastry lid with the tines of their fork. And it isn’t that Torr doesn’t know how to eat with utensils – it’s just that they’re a tad out of practice, let’s say. Even in the short time they spent living in Aventus’ house they never brought themself to eating off a plate. It felt too easy.

Torr’s a bit out of practice, and he rips the pie apart as he eats it, crumbs and sauce strewn over the plate and a little over the table space between the dish and the edge where he sits. A little over his lap. He eats it bite after bite after bite after bite, each one begun before he’s even fully swallowed the last, and when he’s done he runs a sticky finger around edge of the plate, collecting the scraps, licking them off. His throat aches. Veezara, who is at the time in the middle of the sentence, reaches out for the platter of sliced turnip without breaking the thread of his conversation and slides it all onto Torr’s now empty plate. Their teeth are stained with gravy; there's a lump growing abruptly in their throat. They dig in to that, too. They wouldn't want to be rude.

It's so warm down here, the fires in the braziers ever-flickering, the food fresh-cooked. Torr is left in surplus and in silence to watch the rest of them chatter and laugh. It's nothing like a house in frozen Windhelm, clutter-full of waifs and strays; but Torr's stomach isn't so tight, his lungs relaxing enough to take in a full breath. He could be in any bunkhouse, dining with any unfamiliar clan. His throat aches. He could be okay.

(An hour and a half later, Gabriella finds him throwing up into the dank, mossy corner of a dark hallway.

“Oh,” she says, her voice shaded with distaste. “Okay.”

Torr wants to reply – to beg some sort of pardon, keep his head down, soothe the anxiety twisting in the hollow of his chest – but he’s a bit preoccupied by retching up his entire intestines into the dirt. His vomit tastes of rancid veal. It’s not nice; he’d forgotten how gross this was. The last few times he was sick like this he hadn’t eaten enough for it to taste of much of anything.

He hopes this doesn’t put him off the pie. It was really good.

He catches his breath – yuck – wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, gasps out, “Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” Gabriella says, satin-smooth.

It’s not fine, though; this is a shit first impression. Or second, third. Whatever. “Sorry,” Torr repeats. They twist their head to try to take a breath that doesn’t smell of half-digested meat. “Didn’t mean to make a mess. Just – ate too much.” They haven’t gorged themself like that since – who even knows, actually? It was more at once than they’d normally have in a day. Even when they had that much food – well, there was always someone who needed it more, wasn’t there?

They’re about to apologise again, but their stomach spasms and they lean over their nasty little puddle again, gagging.

“Okay,” Gabriella says. She has a soothing voice. Her hand, placed calmly on the ridge of Torr’s back, is cool to the touch. “Maybe you should slow down at dinnertime, then?”

She says it like it’s an inside joke, but it grabs Torr by the throat. More food. More food again, today; more food any time they want it. It’s a concept understood only in the abstract. “Dinnertime,” he repeats distantly, half wonderstruck; and then he’s sick again.)

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