Canon: Remove if not applicable.Deciding that they were friends didn’t really change anything between them. Not beyond the fact that Gralat had stopped being angry, which was good.
And then there was the part where they thought it was justifiable that they secretly went to each others room in the middle of the night, too. Astolphe had often ended up staying up late by accident before, back home, when he got too caught up in reading something, but that was different. Now it was intentional, and in the company of another.
They had only been seen once, and that by Gralat’s other older brother. At least Astolphe assumed that it was Gralat’s other older brother, because the man was unfamiliar, and looked like Gralat, as far as Astolphe could tell in the darkness. Nothing had happened, and nobody had mentioned it, so he must have not told anyone about it.
Gralat was the type of person who sometimes kept his hands busy by whittling things out of pieces of wood. He did so indoors, close to a fireplace, at least during the colder months. He told Astolphe that when the weather permitted it, he would do it outside. He was technically not allowed to whittle indoors, but if he did it close to a fire, he could easily get rid of all the pieces that he had carved off by throwing them into the fire.
He had shown Astolphe the things that he had carved, and some of them were really nice, particularly his newer ones, though some of the rough ones, made with poor skill, was nice too. Gralat had given him one that looked like a wolf; they had a lot of wolves in Ellvaldez, which was another reason why it was difficult to keep livestock there, and Gralat had seen a fair amount of them and had whittled more than one wolf out of wood. It had been unexpected, but it was a nice gesture. Astolphe vowed to himself that he would send him a gift in return, when he had returned home again.
It was one of those nights, when they sat in front of the fire, Gralat with a piece of wood and a knife, and Astolphe with a book, that the topic of their fathers came up unexpectedly. It was because something that Astolphe read had reminded him.
“Your father calls mine by name,” he said. Gralat looked up from the carving of an animal of some sort; Astolphe couldn’t tell what it was yet. “So? I call you by name.”
“Yes, but we’re friends.”
“Doesn’t that mean that our fathers are friends, then?”
Astolphe frowned thoughtfully. “I guess so… But I had never heard of him before. And father talks about the friends that he has back home. And the ones from other regions.” Gralat shrugged. “Maybe it’s embarrassing to have a friend from a poor place like this,” he suggested.
“Father isn’t that sort of person,” Astolphe protested. “And besides, the one time I met him, your father seemed like a decent enough person.” Though it was the strangest first impression he had ever had of a person.
“My father is a ridiculous person,” Gralat said, emphasising ridiculous as if correcting Astolphe. “It would make sense to be embarrassed of him.”
“I don’t know him well enough to be able to judge accurately,” Astolphe said. He closed the book. “I need to get another one.”
Gralat turned a blank look at him. “You read those way too fast. You have read more books than days you have been here already.”
“And? You said I could read them.”
Gralat shook his head. “I wouldn’t even have been done with one book,” he said. “But I guess that’s because I prioritize training, and not reading. And I don’t think all that many books are interesting.”
“You don’t?”
“Don’t give me that wide-eyed, ‘how could you,’ kind of look. It won’t change a thing. It’s not like I dislike reading, I just prefer to train whenever I have spare time.”
Astolphe sucked his lips into his mouth and let out an amused breath of air through his nose. “So what books do you like?”
Gralat grimaced at him - and that made him look so much like his father that it was almost unbelievable - and he shook his head. “I’ll show you, that’s easier.”