Break of Dawn
A/N: You should actually thank a guest reviewer for this chapter, not me! That reviewer got me to see how many favorites and follows I have on this, and I realized it wasn't right for me to just give up on this so quickly. So, here's the next chapter. I'm sorry if it's dumb, but I kind of like it.
Aster had come a long way from the eighteen-year-old boy who burned everything he put in the stove. He was reasonably confident that his rather small meal of fish and chips was quite up to snuff, but Jack sort of poked at it with his fork, evidently in deep thought.
"You okay, kid?" Aster ventured quietly, unsure how to speak to a teenager, much less one like Jack Frost.
Jack nodded and then raised his head to look Aster in the eye, his blue gaze unusually serious. "Can I ask you a question?"
Unsure what to expect, Aster nodded hesitantly.
Jack leaned forward, as if this question was a matter of utmost importance, and said, "In Australia, do they really say 'g'day, mate'?" The boy put on an accent, but to Aster, it sounded more like he came from the deep South.
For a moment, Aster blinked, confused.
And then he snapped, "Why does everyone think we go around saying that?! I've never even said those words in my life!"
"Alright, calm down!" A grin tugged at Jack's lips as he regarded Aster, and his blue eyes sparkled with mirth. "You look like you're about to blow a gasket!"
"Maybe I am!" Aster snapped, aggrieved. "And I'm glad one of us is seeing the humor in this!" He threw Jack a dark look to emphasize that he was definitely not that one.
There was a few moments of silence between them, and then Jack laughed. Not one of those small, awkward, crap-what-do-we-talk-about-now laughs, but a real one, one Aster had never heard before. He laughed so hard, he actually dropped his fork with a clang, and, after a few minutes, his laughter turned into wheezy gasps as he attempted to stop. "I'm…I'm sorry," he apologized quickly, wiping a tear from his eye when he noticed Aster's glare. "I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to laugh, it was just…your expression! You looked so…"
And then this set him off again.
"Yuk it up," Aster snapped, picking up his fork and returning to his meal, deeming this the best route for preserving some dignity. "One day, you'll be begging me to hear all about it."
"Uh-huh." Jack wasn't as repentant as Aster would have liked, but he decided to take it, for now. At least the boy had stopped laughing, after all. "Sure."
"Hmph." Aster's grunt was quiet, but Jack still heard it.
He smiled a little to himself, taking a bite of food. Despite the fact that they'd been sitting at the table for only fifteen minutes, and he was hungry, this was the first bite he'd taken since they'd sat down. He had been too preoccupied first with his thoughts of how things at his new school were going, which was just how he had expected them to, and then had been too busy laughing at Aster's complete overreaction to a simple question. His eyes widened in surprise when he tasted the food; he would never have guessed that the twenty-year-old was that good of a cook just by looking at him. "This is good."
"You sound surprised," Aster grumped, still not quite ready to forgive that last laughing fit. "What, did you think I was going to be serving frozen TV dinners?"
"Something like that," Jack admitted. "Can't blame me, though, can you? I mean, you don't look like much of a chef to me." He took another bite.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Aster demanded, raising one eyebrow.
Jack grinned and shook his head. "Nothing! Boy, you take a lot of things personally, don't you?"
"I take insults personally," Aster corrected. "And you use a lot of them."
"I'm not insulting you," Jack replied. "I'm being honest – I can't exactly see you wearing a bright pink apron with 'Kiss the Cook' on it, can you?"
"Not everybody who cooks wears that," Aster huffed in response. "You watch too much television, kid. First g'day mate, and now this."
Aster could hear the floor creaking above him until late into the night, the constant pounding of feet across the polished hardwood floor. He stared at the ceiling, bars of moonlight making silvery stripes across the room, and he couldn't figure out why Jack was still awake. He sat up, listening to the little creak, creak. Creak, creak.
There was normally so much else to listen to that Aster loved about his house at night: the crickets chirping in the summer, the wolves howling in the winter. But tonight, the only thing he could hear was that incessant creaking. He needed to get up and get to the carnival tomorrow, because they'd be short a worker, but that wasn't what was bothering him. He just couldn't help but wonder what Jack was doing up there. He sighed and glanced out the window at the moon, a yawn forcing his lips open. He decided he would just ask the kid what was wrong tomorrow. He didn't like feeling like he should rush upstairs and demand to know immediately. He didn't even know what the big deal was about a bit of creaking from the floorboards. When the house was empty, he always chalked it up to the fact that the house was just settling.
Something might be bothering Jack, and the thought sort of bothered him. He didn't want Ms. Bennett finding out he had done a two-star job of taking care of the kid, after all. Even so, he hadn't realized how late it had gotten until he awoke the next morning and realized he had fallen asleep, right in the middle of his thinking and worrying about Jack and the creaking and Ms. Bennett.
The floor wasn't creaking when he got up that morning and began to make breakfast. The coffeepot hummed soothingly, and the pancakes sizzling on the stove were a familiar sound for Aster's alien feeling. He heard footsteps on the stairs and he turned to greet Jack, the spatula in one hand, a plate in the other. He flicked a few pancakes onto the plate as he spoke. "Morning."
"Morning," Jack mumbled, hitching his backpack higher on his shoulder.
"How'd you sleep?"
"Fine."
"You know, I heard some noises from upstairs last night." Aster set the pancakes down in front of Jack and tossed him a stick of butter and some syrup. He thought it best to be doing something as he spoke, to make his concern appear casual. Concern, of course, for Ms. Bennett's benefit, he insisted to himself. "Were you moving around up there or something?"
Jack had been drowsily drowning his poor pancakes in syrup, but at these words, he shrugged. "Yeah, I just have trouble sleeping sometimes. Thanks for the breakfast, it was great." He shoved two huge bites in his mouth, adjusted his backpack and was out of the kitchen in the time it took Aster to hear what he had said.
"Wait, you didn't even eat," Aster protested, leaning around the sunny yellow kitchen wall to see the white-haired boy fumbling with the front door's locks.
"I'll be fine, lunch isn't far off," he shrugged, succeeding in opening the first lock and then the screen. "Bye!"
The screen swung shut behind him and Aster was left standing alone with a rapidly burning pancake.