Archive of Our Own ^beta

The smell of baking is cloyingly sweet, its overbearing domesticity practically smothering you with a corporate fabrication of what home is supposed to be like. It coats the back of your throat in a way that makes it both easier and harder to swallow, and if it weren't for the heavy feeling in the depths of your chest distracting you, you’d probably have puked by now, all over the pretty little apron that was tied tight around your waist with dubious consent.

Your workspace is littered with bowls and half-filled pans instead of spare parts and half-finished projects, flour and broken eggs instead of oil and nuts and bolts, whisks and spoons instead of wrenches and wires. Everything that’s comfortable to you, that’s home to you, has been pushed aside and stashed away in favor of...This.
Messes you’re used to, but this is something else entirely. Even your work clothes, which you keep stock of in all black to mitigate the mechanical melee you expose them to, seem now to be irreparably saturated with a stubborn, stiff white powder. Maybe it’s sugar, or maybe it’s flour, or maybe it’s both; honestly you're not even sure anymore--nor, says that ever persistent, ever repetitive frequency running in the background processes of your mind, does it really matter, anyway. It's been hours, or at least it feels like it has; at this point anything and everything is just about relative in the face of your quietly creeping apathy, and you’re beginning to wonder why you agreed to this in the first place.

You're exhausted. It seems pretty silly, objectively speaking; after all, you've done barely anything worth note. Most of this haphazard, half-cooked disaster has been all Jane’s doing, with a few sluggish movements being the most you’ve managed so far: helping her sort out her supplies as she dumped them from her sylladex, handing her spoons and ingredients like an overworked nurse attending to an overzealous surgeon. And yet, here you are: exhausted to your core; you can feel it all through your bones and your nerves like faulty wiring, an incomplete circuit, an inefficient current, leaking energy all over the place with barely enough to spare for the most basic of your life functions.
This worn-out realization only serves to weigh you down further, and if it weren't for feeling so tired of it all, you'd feel guilty for being such a poor sport.

But then you pause, shifting your thoughts around languidly for a few minutes before deciding, oh, nevermind, yes of course there's just enough energy left over to spare for guilt, so long as you cut out what you've budgeted for keeping your eyes all the way open and standing up straight. Not like she can see behind your shades anyway, and isn’t slouching supposed to be part and parcel for the whole aloof, cool-kid package that seems to be just about all you’ve got going for yourself?
You’re an island, after all. Right? Better to be an island than a sinkhole.
So you surrender to the impulse and slump back against the counter, slack-jawed and swallowed by self-loathing; exactly the kind of failure you’ve always tried--and failed--not to be. How’s that for irony. Good thing your Bro can’t see you now.

Lost in your own thoughts, it almost escapes your notice when a dainty set of fingers laces its way through yours, soft yet firm, to press an electric mixer into your palm. You look up from that distant spot on the wall and find yourself rewarded with a pair of concerned but distinctly no-nonsense-blue eyes, one brow arched in gentle reprimand.

"Goodness gracious Dirk, if we don't get this heavy cream whipped up before the cakes cool, there won't be any filling set up by the time Jake and Roxy get here."

She pulls you away from the counter and pushes you, hands at the small of your back towards a couple of bowls and cartons that've been waiting for who knows how long. It's not bad, though. She doesn't judge you for your unintentional indolence, simply reminds you, pulls you up and out and guides you, and it's...nice. Not to be avoided, but not put on the spot, either.

You chew your lip, hesitant, but when your thumb presses down against the button and activates the soft-shrill whirring of the whisks attached to the hand-held beater, a certain steadiness enters your brain, a comfort zone: tools. Technology. Yes, good, okay. You know this. You can handle this. This is easy, this is right. The certainty of familiarity takes over, an autopilot which has yet to be infected by the sticky swamp of chemicals that bog down the rest of your system on an hourly basis.

She hovers around you, looking over your shoulders on tip-toes, arms folded primly behind her back and expression schooled, reserved, only ever so slightly apprehensive--it's caught in the corner of her mouth, slightly tucked downward, and the rustling of her shifting fingers against her sleeves, against the ties of her apron. You can almost hear the hitch in her voice when she goes to tell you not to over-mix it, even as you're already pulling the beater back from the bowl, soft-stiff peaks curling gently from the tip of the twin whisks and standing at sleepy attention in the bowl itself. In your current state, you can’t help but read into them as weirdly analogous to yourself. Sad stalagmites that want to be stone, instead of sugar and cream and flavoring for kick.
Tenuous.
Temporary.
But tasty, you suppose, sticking the end of one of the whisks in your mouth before she has time to smack your arm in complaint.

"You see, I knew you'd be good at this."

There's that same overarching firmness in her voice, self-assured from a life of optimistic complacency and privilege. The kind of assumed authority and positivity of unchallenged queens living in times of plenty and pleasure. A wry smirk pulls at your lips when you think about it, and you suddenly want to be cruel. Want to cut her to the bone, burn her with bitter fires and saccharine sweet truths. Look at what your kingdom has wrought, dear heiress--you can feel the words knocking on the backs of your teeth--and it's almost an irony you can appreciate: baking with the batterwitch's protege.

But when she snatches the mixer out of your hand and stomps off towards the sink to rinse it off so it can be used again, you catch her surreptitiously licking the remaining cream, and the cruelty spidering out from your own core engine of despair folds in on itself, cracks and shatters into little pieces of uselessness and self-loathing, barbs of emotion digging into the back of your brain already over-littered with guilt. She catches the fall in your face, glancing over her shoulder, and frowns.

And it looks, for the longest time, in the hunch of her shoulders that've been progressively tensing worse and worse since she arrived, like she wants to say something, but she doesn't--she can't. What would she say, anyway? What could she say--how could she know what it's like, this dragging of internal oil spills over misfiring mainframes? How could she understand the desire to bite her tongue for every word she ever said, and twice for every phrase left unspoken? And as you sink into your thoughts again, you feel more and more isolated within yourself.

But then her arms wrap around you and the knot catches in your throat and you almost choke on a sob you didn't realize you'd been holding back. Flour and batter and aprons and all, standing in a weirdly lit tool room on top of a rickety set up on a half-toxic planet and you nearly crumple into her, folding on contact like a poorly designed collapsible chair.

And she doesn't let go. She still has nothing to say--nothing she knows how to say, maybe, or nothing she can say, any more than you could really tell her what's wrong--but she buries her face against your chest and you can feel her glasses digging into your ribs, as determined and steadfast as the rest of her resolve. Like hugging would fix it, any more than baking could cook away the pain. Because depression's definitely exactly like salmonella, right, princess?

But when you free one hand to pull the pointed, painful frames loose from where they’ve been lodged in your solar plexus, your own shades knocked askew, you feel the wetness of her cheek, and, curling your arms around her shoulders, you notice that she’s shaking.
So you you hug her back, hard, regretting harsh words you never even said, pressing your cheek into her hair as your knees buckle and the two of you end up a pile of fabric and flour and underage angst, curled up in a heap against the counter and silently crying.

Because sometimes there's nothing you can say.
Sometimes all you can do is hold each other, and sometimes, when every word you've ever said is inevitably the wrong one, sometimes silence gives the best sense of solidarity, the best expression of understanding that you could ever ask for.

Even when you can’t bring yourself to ask.