Work Text:
“I want a little flower bed! With a lot of red flowers. I love red”, said Nar.
“And I want a bench, right here!”, added Mahk. “Nice view.”
They turned to the third member of the company. Gnarlug was sitting in the grass, a few feet away, spinning around a cloverleaf between his big pale fingers. Nar had to throw some bork at his head for him to look up.
“What?”
“What do you want?”, asked Nar.
“I want a bed!”
“We’re all getting beds. Pick something else!”, said Mahk.
“No! I want a bed!”
Mahk snorted and crossed his arms.
“You’re not doing it right. You need to choose something we don’t get”, he explained.
“Wait!”, said Nar. “I won’t get to sit on your bench?”
“No. You can sit on my bench. You just don’t get to ask for the same bench.”
“Oh, alright.”
“I don’t get it”, said Gnarlug.
Mahk's snorting turned into hissing, his fists clenched, ready to beat some sense into his companion. Nar grabbed him by the arm.
“You can have a bed, Gnarlug”, he said.
“Hm”, said Gnarlug and threw the cloverleaf away. “And I want dinner!”
Mahk shook off Nar’s hand.
“Finally, you’re saying something sensible!”
---
The hut they had moved in was very small. A kitchen, a bedroom, and a few patches for vegetables and herbs, surrounded by nothing but woods and meadows as far as the eye could see. It used to be the home of an old farmer and his seven cats, but they had gone away ages ago when the farmer had met a very nice lumberjack and followed him to his village where they now lived with twelve cats and a deaf dog. The hut hadn’t been needed anymore. Just like Nar, Mahk and Gnarlug.
The three orcs barely fit through the front door, let alone into the kitchen.
Mahk got Nar’s nose with his elbow, Gnarlug stepped on Mahk’s toes and both Mahk and Nar tried to shove Gnarlug out of the room several times because he wouldn’t stop licking the oak table. But finally, they managed to open the cabinets.
Three pairs of black eyes stared into dusty darkness. A spider started back and then decided to hide in an empty jar.
“There’s no food”, Nar finally said.
Gnarlug spat out a chair leg that was made out of beech and wasn’t nearly as nice as the rich sour flavour of the table.
“But I’m hungry”, he said. “Maybe I can-”
Mahk slammed shut the door of the cabinet hard enough to knock over the jar and hurl the poor spider into the sticky part of her own web.
“I will hunt us food!”
“But we don’t do that anymore. We don’t kill, remember?”, Nar reminded his friend, not for the first time today.
They had already gotten acquainted with their neighbour, a small grey squirrel who had politely taken some of the nuts Mahk had offered him from the tree in their garden and then not so politely bitten him in the finger. The nuts were now forbidden from passing the fenceborder, even for private snacks.
“Stupid rule”, muttered Mahk. But he stayed.
Nar said down on the other chair.
“We can plant something tomorrow. Then we can eat that”, he suggested.
“But it will take a long time to grow”, Mahk protested. “We will be starved by then. I’m not eating nuts for the rest of my life.”
“How do elves do it?”, asked Nar. “They eat all that green shit all the time and they’re fine.”
That was followed by silence as the orcs contemplated the eating habits of their pointy-eared former foes. They all came to the same conclusion.
“I’m not eating green shit either”, summarised Mahk for all of them.
Nar and Gnarlug nodded solemnly. Whatever they would be planting, no green shit would be eaten in the hut, now or ever. Now they had found another way to starve but still no solution for their dinner problem.
“I could-”, Gnarlug started but Mahk interrupted him.
“The squirrel took our nuts. It’s only fair if we get some of his dinner.”
“And think the nuts were his dinner”, Nar interfered sadly. He had also had that idea but soon realized that he had never seen squirrels eat potatoes or fish or onions or anything other than nuts.
“Then we’ll eat the squirrel!”, shouted Mahk, raising his voice to drown out his growling stomach.
“You won’t touch the squirrel!”, Nar shouted back.
“Oh really? Well-”
“Shut up! Both of you!”
Mahk and Nar turned around, stunned into silence.
Gnarlug, surprised more than anyone else by his success, put down the pot he had tried to wear as a hat and laughed experimentally. Mahk growled.
“I have something”, said Gnarlug. “Follow me!”
He hopped out of the kitchen and back into the garden. Nar and Mahk looked at each other, shrugged, and followed him outside.
Gnarlug was already kneeling on the ground in front of one of the patches. He held a little seed in his hand. He carefully pressed it deep into the soil, formed a little mudhill above it as a roof, and then brought one of his fingers to his lips and bit into his skin. Thick black blood dropped down onto the patch and seeped into the soil. He looked up to Nar and Mahk, grinning.
“You’re planting something”, said Mahk with the resignation of a cynic who had finally decided to believe in something for once in his life just to realise that he had been on the right path all along.
“Not something”, said Gnarlug proudly. “This!”
As if the seed had heard its master calling it chose that moment to break through the soil as a tiny green stem. Nar and Mahk watched in wonder as the stem grew into a plant and the plant blossomed and the blossoms turned into big red tomatoes, all within the matter of a breath.
“The last of its kind”, Gnarlug whispered and poked one of the leaves. “I found it on the battlefield.”
“How does it work?”, asked Nar.
Gnarlug smiled.
“Just a little bit of dark magic”, he said. “For old time’s sake.”
Mahk shrugged.
“Dinner!”, he said, grabbed a tomato, and headed inside.
But not without patting Gnarlug’s shoulder as he passed him. Hard enough to shove to smaller orc head first into the patch, but that was probably by accident.