Chapter Text
Daud was not a morning person. Yet every single day he was up before sunrise. He hated it, but he was never able to sleep more even when he did try.
When he was home, there was always something to do, someone to talk to, some business to take care of. Whenever he stayed over at Corvo’s house, however, it was always very quiet at this time of day. Both Corvo and Emily would sleep in given the chance, which left Daud the full run of the house.
Generally speaking, he would go make himself coffee first thing. His coffeemaker was stained and dirty from overuse. Corvo’s, however, was well maintained and spotless, probably costing two or three times as much as the one Daud had. In combination with a moderately pricey Serkonan brand coffee, it worked magic. If Daud was honest one of the main reasons he stayed over was for that damn coffee. He had been tempted to take it with him several times.
The cupboards had an assortment of goofy mugs chosen by Emily and in Daud’s half-awake half-asleep state, he just grabbed whatever one he found first. He didn’t care enough to find his designated mug.
The living room had a nice view overlooking the sea, which was only a five to ten minute walk away. In the distance, the foggy Dunwall lighthouse was also visible. Daud ended up looking out at the scenery in a brief moment of contentment. If only the peace and quiet would last forever.
It didn’t. Not even five minute later, he heard movement upstairs. He glanced up. It wasn’t Corvo, definitely not. Corvo was obscenely quiet. Which meant that it was Emily. And, sure enough, Corvo’s little daughter appeared in the living room. She was still dressed in her yellow and white cat pajamas, and was rubbing at her eyes sleepily.
“Good morning, Daud,” she greeted. Daud grunted in response.
“It’s not even six o’clock. What are you doing awake?” Daud said.
“I had a bad dream and then I couldn’t go back to sleep,” she said. “I didn’t want to bother my Dad cause he was really tired when he came home last night.” She smiled. “That’s when I remembered that you were probably up!”
Emily went and sat down in one of the recliners in the living room. She hummed a familiar tune off key to break the silence. She didn’t say anything to Daud for a while, and he was glad for it. Daud said nothing in return. What was he supposed to do? Talk to her? He didn’t have any words of encouragement. He looked back out the window. He wasn’t a babysitter--or at least, he wasn’t supposed to be one. It wasn’t his job to comfort someone else’s kid.
Not that he even knew how.
“Hey Daud?” Emily said.
“What?” Daud replied, trying not to sound snappy. It was still too early for conversations.
“Do you know how to make pancakes?”
He did indeed.
“Is that your way of asking me to make you some?” he asked.
Emily shrugged. “Well, I could probably make them myself if I tried,” she said, “but Dad says that I have to be with an adult if I’m cooking something over the fire. And you’re an adult. So you could help me make them.”
Daud probably could have made up an excuse to escape the situation, gone elsewhere, avoided interacting with Emily, but he didn’t. Instead he nodded. “Alright,” he said. “I can supervise until Corvo wakes up.”
Emily’s face brightened up with a gleeful smile, and she hurried away into the kitchen. Daud followed after her. He didn’t know where anything in the kitchen was located--outside of the coffee supplies, of course, which were the only things that mattered--so he let Emily go about her business. He settled down in one of the three chairs at the table and watched her. She pushed one of the chairs to the counter, climbed on it, and retrieved a worn-out cookbook.
“Dad has the best pancake recipe!” Emily said. “He used to make them all the time for me--every single Sunday, we’d have pancakes with strawberries and cream on top.” She propped up the book against the heavy ceramic mixing bowl. “He’s too busy to do that now, though. But it’s okay. We can surprise him instead!”
She didn’t seem to expect a response from Daud, as she immediately went about retrieving the ingredients. She put the flour, milk, eggs, sugar, and a neat stack of measuring cups on the little island in the center of the kitchen. As she went about adding ingredients, she would squint at the directions again and again before adding something. Probably due to her excitement, Emily was a little less than graceful with cooking, and managed to spill flour, sugar, and milk on the counter.
Daud, meanwhile, sipped on his coffee and had almost finished it when Emily called him over to help with cooking the pancakes. Emily set out a medium sized frying pan for him while he moved the bowl closer to the stove.
“Can you make animal shaped ones?” Emily asked. “Like, cat and bunny shaped ones? And maybe some whales?”
Daud didn’t make pancakes often, only when he had a reason to, and he never made them shaped. So he simply shrugged and said, “I’ll try.”
The batter that Emily had mixed up was thick enough to retain a decent shape, which made creating lopsided cat heads, extra-round whales, and rabbits with too-long ears not very difficult. Emily seemed pleased with his handiwork and marveled at each perfectly cooked pancake. She piled six of them onto her plate, and set to covering the pile with whipped cream and sliced strawberries with sugar. She ate them quietly and with unprecedented manners.
Daud set to using the rest of the batter to create regular, uninteresting round pancakes. These were much easier to flip in the air. And when Daud flipped the pancakes into the air and caught it in the pan with ease, Emily gasped.
“Wow!” she said, in awe. “That’s so cool!”
“Is it?” Daud said.
“Yeah! Dad doesn’t do that at all ever!” She hovered on his left, watching the pancake in the pan. “Can you teach me how to do that?”
Daud looked at her. “If you want to know,” he began, “first, you need to take hold of the pan.”
Emily wriggled her way in front of Daud and grabbed the handle of the pan. “Okay, I’ve got it. What do I do now?”
“You need to push the pan forward, and then pull it back, but it needs to be quick enough that the pancake will flip over and not out,” Daud explained. “Got it?”
“Mhm!”
Emily lifted the pan from the hot stovetop and jerked it forward. The pancake slid over the edge. She breathed in sharply and tried to make the pancake go back into the pan and not onto the burning hot surface of the stove. She pulled back, and pushed it forward, and back again, and eventually the pancake settled back into the pan. She huffed.
“That didn’t work at all,” she grumbled.
“You weren’t quick enough,” Daud said. He put his hands over Emily’s and steadied the pan. “Here, like this…”
Daud repeated the swift motions, and the pancake flipped over perfectly. It was a little overdone on one side, but it didn’t matter. Emily studied the motions seriously. Daud removed the pancake from the pan and set it aside on a plate with several other pancakes.
“Could you do it one more time?” she asked. “I wanna be super sure I know what to do.”
And he did, two more times with a fresh pancake just to be sure. Soon after, Emily tried it again. She pushed the pan forward and pulled back, and the pancake flopped over on the reverse side. She cried out, “Look! Did you see that? I did it! It was perfect!”
“Good work,” Daud said. “Do you think you can handle making some more by yourself?” She looked at him skeptically. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll watch you.”
“Hmm. Okay!” Emily nodded confidently. “I’ll make a huuuuuge stack of pancakes, just for Dad!”
There was more than enough batter to feed three people, and they ended up with four plates of pancakes. Sometime between six-thirty and seven o’clock, Corvo appeared without either of them noticing. He caught the two of them off guard with a yawn. Emily perked up when she saw him. He looked at the stacks of pancakes covering the table and blinked.
What is all this about? he signed.
“Daud helped me make breakfast!” Emily announced. Corvo looked at Daud, who shrugged.
It was then that Corvo noticed that the kitchen was a mess; flour on the counter, the floor, sugar spread around, and little drops of spilled milk. But then Emily showed him his plate of pancakes; a stack of five with a whipped cream smiley face that had a strawberry nose. Instead of getting cross, Corvo smiled a little at her.
Thank you, he signed, and he accepted them.
Emily, having finished her own stack, excused herself from the table to go and clean herself up. She was probably going to go back to sleep after that, Daud figured. This left him alone with Corvo, who was looking at him with a small, amused smile.
You can cook?
Daud huffed. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. Corvo shrugged, that same amused smile still there. “Just because I never had the opportunity to cook for you doesn’t mean that I can’t.”
You could have fooled me, Corvo responded.
Daud mumbled something inaudible to himself. Corvo approached him slowly, and Daud could hear him chuckling in the quiet, airy sort of way that he did. He leaned down to Daud’s height and nuzzled him just a bit. Daud didn’t pull away.
Corvo set his plate down on the counter and fished out a mug from the cupboard--a mug that used to say “#1 Dad” but Emily had drawn a “U” in permanent marker between the “A” and the second “D”. That’s the mug Daud would have used had he been fully conscious when he picked through the mugs. Corvo filled it with the still-warm coffee leftover from earlier.
I really appreciate you helping her, he signed to Daud. She seemed happy.
“It’s your rule,” Daud said. “She wasn’t allowed to do it herself. I happened to be awake.”
It’s still very much appreciated. Then, Corvo noticed the mug in Daud’s hand. That’s a fitting mug for you, by the way.
Daud looked down at his chosen mug and made a face that wasn’t unlike the Grumpy Cat faces on it.
“Shut up,” he said. “It’s still too early.”