Title: In Need or In Plenty
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: Shelter
Bingo prompt: Breakfast
Rating: G
Length: 300
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Zhie for encouragement & sanity-checking. This ended up rather more fraught than I intended.
Summary: The breaking of a fast: more fraught and complicated than one might think.




Breakfast: to break one’s fast, to eat after a period of not eating, generally of some several hours or more, in common parlance, the first meal of the day. But one could fast from things other than food and drink that nourished the body, by one's own intent or that of others, by circumstance or misfortune or durance unyielding. Light. Warmth. A sense of safety. A place to sleep. Other abstract, necessary things.

Rising from a night of watch or rest or work and then partaking of honeyed grain boiled to softness required grain and water and honey, a pot to cook it in, a fire to cook it on, time in which to prepare and eat it, a sufficiently safe and sheltered place for all this to occur: resources available more often than not, even here on this hither shore, this Middle Earth, this orc-infested, Morgoth-smothered land, though by no means guaranteed.

Breaking a fast of less tangible sustenance was nothing like so simple. And the longer the lack, the dearth, the unfilled need, the less simple the relief, the breaking of those interwoven emptinesses. It was just as well, Kanafinwë Fëanorion thought, looking at the people who had crossed the Ice against all expectation, under conditions of nigh unimaginable hardship and privation, physical and metaphysical and everything else; looking at his brother, rescued beyond any hope from deeper darkness, fouler durance, chains more pitiless than ice — ice merely is, cruel by physics, not intent — by the malice of them; (and what had he done, Regent of the Noldor, for either in all that span of time? Mostly warm and mostly safe and mostly fed;) seeing them blinking and wincing in the brilliant light, that the Moon, the softer, gentler light, had risen first, before the refulgent, blazing Sun.