The pan scrapes clean, and there's no plate for himself—just coffee, black, same as me.
So last night got to you too, big guy.
"Thank you." I take a bite of bacon. "For staying."
"Couldn't sleep anyway."
"Liar."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Then he turns and puts the pan in the sink.
We don't talk about the nightmare. We don't talk about his name. We don't talk about any of it.
He doesn't sit, just takes his coffee and stands between the kitchen and the window, looking out at the tree line—not quite in the room, not quite gone.
I push eggs around my plate and watch him lift the mug to his mouth. His forearms flex with the movement. Tattoos that look tribal—sharp angles, thick lines, patterns I don't recognize. Scars layered over and under the ink, some thin and silvery, some thick and raised.
And burns. Patches of darker green where the skin healed wrong.
Ravgor. Fire-touched.
I wonder which came first—the name or the scars.
"The burns," I say. "Were those from before the rift?"
He doesn't look away from the window or tense—just takes another sip of coffee.
"I didn't have a single scar when I crossed."
He crossed the rift clean.
Every cut, every burn, every thick rope of scar tissue on his knuckles—we did that. Humans did all of that.
I want to ask more, want to know who did that to him, and why, and whether they're still breathing.
But I have my own demons. I know better than to poke at someone else's.
East of Eden sits in the stack by the armchair. I settle into the corner of the couch with it.
An hour passes. Maybe more. I read the same paragraph over and over without absorbing a single sentence.
I'm not thinking about Steinbeck. I'm thinking about his arm heavy across my belly in the dark. The way his breathing slowed when he finally let himself sleep.
By noon, I'm crawling out of my skin.
"I'm making us a meal," I announce.
"It's noon."
"A late lunch then. A real one this time."
Something crosses his face—doubt, maybe, or amusement, or some orc emotion I don't have the vocabulary for. But he just shrugs those massive shoulders and turns back to the window.
I head for the kitchen before I can talk myself out of it.
The freezer is stocked—wrapped packages labeled in handwriting that's surprisingly neat for hands that size. Ground elk. Pork chops. Something labeled "backstrap." All frozen solid.
The refrigerator has better options. A beef tenderloin sits on the bottom shelf, deep red and marbled. That'll work.
