Work Text:
It had started with a simple enough idea.
The place where Mila was staying for Skate America was more of a mini-condo than a hotel room and there was a little kitchenette with a tiny oven in her room. It seemed like a simple enough thing—everywhere outside there were all kinds of pumpkin everything and fake bats and ghosts and she's not really sure she gets Halloween, not like it's expressed here, but she gets things like harvests and the feasts that come with them, baking and cooking and family.
Here, she has Yakov. Yakov is in many ways a better father to her than her own and in many ways she is completely alone in America, even with him the next room over. She feels both tonight, keenly, hot on the heels of disappointment, and so the cute window display of cookie cutters and icing seem like a perfectly reasonable way to not think about coming in fourth in her short program because she fell on her double like a moron.
Her mother always told her to never cook angry, that it was the quickest way to ruin anything she made and maybe that's where it all goes wrong, because she's definitely not calm before she's covering the tiny counter with more flour than is probably necessary and trying to use English skills that seemed perfectly reasonable and good two minutes ago to decipher a recipe that suddenly seems completely incomprehensible.
Sara's text is a reminder that she is not alone in America and cuts through the self-pity like nothing else can. She's not sure what Sara and her are, exactly, but they're… something. Or at least the beginnings of something. Most days, she likes that. They can't exactly date in their situations. But it's a little strange to not have a designation, a name for what they are, at competitions, where emotions are high and they're competitors.
Regardless, Sara's text is a welcome distraction.
Soon, so is Sara, who speaks perfectly good English when she's calm and so is yelling mostly in Italian. She's in second, but she's mad about it, and Mila catches a word that she's pretty sure is "triple" and something that is likely about rotations. Mila knows skating terminology in several languages and is comfortable enough with Sara's accent to pick up that she really doesn't think she was under-rotated on one of the jumps—enough of a difference to have put her in first. Sara, apparently, also has no problems cooking while upset, cracking eggs into the bowl with a fervor that says she's probably imagining judges' heads as she does it.
She's mostly back to English by the time they're trying to use the cookie cutters, but neither one of them really have the patience needed to pull the cookies. Mila ruins a cat, stretching out it's tail too far and Sara loses the wings off a bat. The pumpkin cutter seems to work the best, but the lumps it makes just look like normal cookies by the time they get them to the cookie sheet. By the time the cookies are in the oven, misshapen though they are, Mila is no closer to feeling like anything has gone right with the day, company excluded. She sighs a little, hands on hips, surveying the ruins of the process in the tiny kitchen. The whole thing has been fun (Sara makes almost anything fun) and kind of hilarious, actually, so why is she feeling such a profound sense of failure?
Sara's arm snaking around her waist brings her back to herself and Mila laughs a not-quite-real laugh at the questioning look and leans into her just a bit,
"My mother. She'd be so disappointed in me. We don't celebrate like this," she gestures to the cookie cutters, not sure if it's something they do in Italy or not, "but she would start baking for the deep winter around now. Her cookies are always perfect." Sara tilts her head to the side, hand on her chin for a moment as she considers,
"I bet her triple lutz is shit, though." Mila blinks and then laughs for real and it feels so good that it almost makes up for all of it, all on it's own. "My mother cooks around now too," Sara adds, after a moment, "and her cookies are always perfect, too. I suppose we are not made for those kinds of things, any more than they are made to be great figure skaters."
"I… suppose it is a little unfair, isn't it?"
"Yes, for us!" Sara quips, grinning. "If your mother is anything like mine, she probably still expects you to bake everything from scratch, doesn't she?" she takes on a voice that is clearly supposed to be an impression of her mother, "Sara, no man will ever want you if you cannot bake. How will you ever get married?" Mila laughs again, her smile going crooked and she puts a flour-covered finger on the tip of Sara's nose, leaving a little white spot on it,
"No man, hm? Well… if she's right, I suppose that does keep the competition away." Sara blinks at that, slightly cross-eyed as she tries to look at the finger, and then looks back up at Mila, blushing.
Mila gets flour in Sara's hair when she kisses her, warm, grateful, but neither one of them really care.