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Taako had found himself in a lot of, erm, well, situations throughout his life. Sometimes he knew how he got into them, and other times it was a not-so-happy accident that led to his misery.
This particular situation happened to be the latter of the two.
He stood over a kitchen counter. His kitchen, his personal kitchen counter in his own personal home-- a counter which was littered with toppled bowls and bags and flour and bits of dough and candy and frosting and sprinkles and gumdrops and--
“Fuck! God-- dammit, Shadow! Shoo! Take your mooching somewhere else!” He slapped his hand on the counter and in a dramatic show, a large, bright-eyed raven scrambled and flew away from him, squawking indignantly.
“Hee hee--”
Taako whipped his head toward the sound of a small, boyish giggle.
There, at his side, nose and clothes covered in powdered sugar, was Angus Mcdonald. And in his hands were a pile of crumbs with which he coaxed Shadow on the floor to hop closer and closer, head cocked to the side, this way and that.
“No! Absolutely not! An- Listen, don’t encourage the liitle mooch! No!”
“Moocher! Moocher!” Shadow croaked in an eerily loud voice, hopping from side to side.
“Don’t-- you-- Don’t you dare mock me in my own home! You go to your room-- go, go to your room right now you heathen!”
Angus, looking a might dejected, quietly interjected, “Sir-- maybe he’d leave us alone if we gave him just a little a bite to eat--”
“He’s not Tiny Tim! He needs no charity!!”
“Awe, but--”
“No!” Exasperated, Taako moved toward Shadow and waved his hands at him violently, prompting the raven to flutter out of the kitchen indignantly.
“Alright, Mr. Scrooge--” Angus muttered.
“What was tha--”
“Nothing, Sir!”
Taako cleared his throat, smoothing down the messy apron covering his much-too-nice to be in the kitchen outfit. He took a deep breath and then smiled, a tight lipped smile, but a smile all the same, “What say we get back to the business at hand here, hm?”
The business at hand that was the mixing and stirring and baking and assembling of gingerbread houses at the Candlenights request of one Angus McDonald.
A Scrooge. How dare he call him a Scrooge-- Why, he was being the most charitable and hospitable host possible! He’d arranged this little meeting just for the rugrat, and he had the nerve to call him a Scrooge in his own home.
Why, he’d spent all of forty-five minutes scrambling and slaving to put this together! Right when he got the call from Ren kindly reminding him that Angus was on the train to Neverwinter to visit for the occasion and she was sure that he hadn’t forgotten that he agreed to this weeks ago during a visit to the school and that this was Angus’s special Candlenights wish to make Gingerbread Houses just like he did with his Grandfather before he passed away.
Forget. The Nerve. Of course he didn’t forget Ren talking at him while he casually went over their expenses and revenue for the month. He certainly didn’t dismissively wave over his shoulder with a ‘yeah, yeah, for sure, sounds good, put it on the schedule.’
And yet, in this moment of stress, an ‘I bet you’re wondering how I got here’ record screeching flashback was all that Taako could think about.
“S… Sir, are you in there?”
Taako lifted a hand, checked to make sure it was clean, and then dramatically pushed it through the front of his hair.
“Okay… um… I guess so?”
“Oh, Agnes, dear sweet Agnes, I’m fine. Certainly not evaluating all of my life choices and compartmentalizing my terrible decisions.”
“Wh--”
“Nothing! Nothing at all, um, so, as I was saying-- now that these little morsels are cooled, you can-- knock yourself out, kiddo! Build away! Construct Ginger atrocities to your little heart’s content!”
“Um, weeeeell--” Angus scuffed his foot and drummed his fingertips on the counter.
See, Taako wasn’t crazy about that reaction. The tell-tale small voice of a boy who was going to pile more obligations into his lap… who was going to look at him with those bespectacled, sad, small animal eyes and say that “there’s much more to it than that, sir!”
“-- there’s much more to it than that, sir!”
“Of course there is.” Taako said flatly.
“I-I mean--”
Taako grit his teeth and then smiled again.
“I mean, of course there is! What fun is assembling a gingerbread chateaux alone, hm? No-- not, um, not any fun at all, really, is it…”
“Well, it’s there’s actually even much more to it than just a chateaux! When Grandfather and I did it, we always made gingerbread mock-ups of entire crime scenes from Caleb Cleveland: Kid Cop, which as I’m sure you remember is my very favorite series of books! And I’m sure you read all of it when I gave you the first copy of the series the very first Candlenights that we knew each other!” Angus was practically standing on his tip toes, exuding kid-like energy and joy and… ugh.
“I-- erm, might have glossed over it, yeah-- um… sure… wouldn’t um… call it a super thorough-- read, let’s, you know, you might have to refresh my memory just a smidge, pumpkin.”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that at all, I’ve got it under control!”
“Of course you do.” Taako, once again, said flatly.
Unphased, Angus adjusted his glasses and ducked over to beside the counter to rummage through his bag, and out he pulled a very well-loved copy of Caleb Cleveland.
“I’ll just go over some of the important passages here, and we can get to work building the most delicious murder mystery of all time!”
“Yes,” Taako drawled, “a real holly-jolly homicide.”
“That’s the spirit, Sir!”
Spirit. Sure. Theoretically, Taako had one of those. A soul, as it were. And he hadn’t sold it to black magic or necromancy so, technically it was still there… but something told Taako, and that something was context clues, that that sort of Spirit wasn’t what Angus was talking about.
Begrudgingly, he rolled up his sleeves and drug over the finished cookies.
“I suppose, erm… it does sort of explain the vastness of the cookies you forc- um,” he drummed his fingers together, “insisted upon us forming.”
“Well, yeah! We’ve got to build the whole set!” Angus reached for a perfectly square cookie.
Therein began what was easily one of the most arduous and frustrating and mind-numblingly pointless endeavors Taako had ever embarked upon. The fun-ish part was over, the part where he got to teach Angus the ins and outs of the finery of Gingerbread-- and it was a finery-- and one that was easily botched… to-- this. This frosting everywhere… this… Angus reading page after page of his little book out loud and checking to see if Taako was still listening. This… chore.
Now, Taako was no stranger to dramatics. Decorating cookies and cakes was a cathartic sort of artform for Taako, but this was… downright… Obnoxious. Even for him. Down to the last fuckin’ brick, Angus demanded that the scenes be laid out in perfect alignment to the text he kept reading over and over with that small, very boyish and not at all grating voice.
“No no-- not like that, you gotta-- um, the body, Sir, you gotta align it more to the left!”
“Um-- sorry, again, but that clue actually needs to be underneath the lamp post! It’ll mess with the continuity of the story if it’s not!”
“Not that I’m accusing you of not paying attention or anything, because I know you wouldn’t do that, but… I did say that Caleb Cleveland’s first crime scene was very formative in his growing years and that seeing the man in the black coat escaping the scene is important imagery that we can’t leave out!”
And Taako was infinitely patient. The patience of a Saint, honestly. No, his twitching brow and slightly grit teeth and quivering lip didn’t mean anything at all! Not at all.
Taako hardly looked up as he and Angus arranged gingerbread, though Taako did most of the work, and by the end, there was actually a bead of sweat on his brow, his fingers were covered in frosting, and his nerves were on edge, but it was done. A meticulously crafted crime scene, complete with a street of buildings, witnesses, a woefully decorated Caleb Cleveland: Kid Cop made by Angus, complete with a licorice gumdrop as a hat… a murdered gingerbread victim, a retreating gingerbread suspect.
Dusting his hands off, Taako leaned back and then flourished toward the scene, “Aaaaaand, how is this for a Candlenights gift, hm?”
Angus, who was in the process of closing his book, gave Taako a sunshiney smile that might have melted the hearts of someone, somewhere, “Why, I don’t think even my Grandfather could have ever done something as great as this!”
“Well, not everyone can be a culinary genius and, you know, sort of a cultivator of the art of cooking.” Taako stated quite humbly, actually.
“Oh, well, actually it’s because he didn’t… do this.”
“... Come again?” Taako’s voice had dropped flat.
Angus’s expression had went from one of stomach sickeningly sweet boyish delight to the sort of delight one might see in a cat that finally caught a mouse it had been chasing.
“You… you gotta admit, it was a pretty good one. I’m just pulling your leg, Sir! My Grandfather and I didn’t make Gingerbread crime scenes! I was just doing a little bit of a goof on you, you know, um, since you guys get me with them all the time! I actually think mine was pretty nice, like, comparatively…”
Taako was having some, well… mixed emotions. See, he wanted to be mad. Perhaps, deep down, he was a little angry. A lot angry? Nuances. Whatever. But then, also, as he stared down the sly face of his little prodigy, who beamed at him over a sprawling gingerbread crime scene that he had somehow weaseled Taako into building from scratch over the course of probably several hours, he couldn’t help but feel, like, maybe a little proud. Maybe.
Not a lot proud. He was not happy about deceit and lies happening under his own roof, but… ah, hmm, it was tough. He was gritting his teeth but he was smiling. Bamboozled. Tricked in his own home.
Right before he opened his mouth to speak, a loud squawk and the beat of large wings roused the both of them from their tense stalemate.
Shadow, who took the opportunity to strike, swooped in and snatched the Caleb Cleveland gingerbread boy right out of the crime scene and with a squawk of pleasure retreated.
“HEY!!” Taako bellowed after.
“That’s not how it goes in the story, Mr. Shadow!!” Angus woefully watched as Shadow darted out of the room.
Taako turned back to face Angus, who looked up at him with at first a look of coy mischief, but quickly became more sheepish, “It… It was just a little fun at your expense, Sir.”
“Oh, no no no, it’s fine-- Not like-- Not as if I’ve been embarrassed in my own home, or anything like that-- No, it was good, a well thought out sort of jape, really… really got me, Agnes, I’m proud of your commitment to the follow through.”
Angus seemed pleased enough, smile so big his eyes squinted shut behind his much-too-large spectacles, “I learned from the best!”
“In all fronts, I suppose, yes.” Taako yawned and glanced at the Gingerbread monstrosity he’d been duped into spending hours of his precious little free time in creating, “So, sort of a -- a waste, all of that--”
“Oh, well,” Angus moved back toward the counter, “I’ll admit, I wasn’t totally lying to you when I said that my Grandfather and I made gingerbread cookies together.”
“Uh-huh.” Taako noncommittally hummed. What now?
“We, we sort of made more like… cookies that represent the important people in our lives, mostly each other, sometimes characters from the books we read together in his library, but…” And from behind his closed book, Angus revealed a plate… and on that plate was a single gingerbread cookie.
A gingerbread man- erm, elf? It was decorated with a sleek, purple, pointed hat, with bright candies for eyes and a swoopy purple cape. The decorations weren’t particularly well done, obviously shaky, messy, but they were done with care and attention to detail. Little star shaped candies lined the buttons of the gingerbread elf’s shirt, and a small, noncommittal smile had been delicately drawn on his sweet, cookie face.
“I did it while you were busy making this,” Angus scuffed his foot on the floor, “I don’t have to really look at the Caleb Cleveland books, you know, Sir, I have them memorized. So-- here! It wasn’t a total loss! I really had fun, and I appreciate you gritting your teeth and doing it even though you were super-not into it!”
Taako didn’t say anything. He reached for the plate, gathering it in his hands to inspect his cookie-likeness.
There was a weird mixture of feelings happening in him all at the same time, and he couldn’t say he particularly cared for any of them. It was hard to compartmentalize, but he thought he might be a little… mollified by the sight, and by the grinning boy who was packing his bag up nearby.
“Ah-- well--” Taako finally spoke, “Your… erm, your workmanship needs a little, um… finessing, sure, it’s got sort of an abstract likeness at best-- though, hard-- it’s hard to turn a masterpiece into a cookie, but, it’s--” He cleared his throat, “A good effort. It’s-- yes, certainly a good effort.”
“I’m glad you think so. That’s high praise, sir.” Angus began taking it upon himself to steal pieces of cookie to put in a satchel, and without a lot of thought, Taako began to do the same.
---
“Don’t knock yourself into a sugar coma on the choo-choo~” Taako was languidly waving to a retreating Angus on the street some time later.
“I won’t! These are for study-times later! Happy Candlenights, sir! And… thank you! I won’t goof on you next time, promise!” Angus waved merrily and then turned to head back off toward the station.
Taako let his hand fall and grumbled, glaring at Angus’s retreating back before heading back into his home. What a wonderful use of his time, really. Really. He had to tell himself it was. He was a busy elf, and this had cut right into his schedule. What was that schedule? Who cares. But it cut right into it, anyway!
He stopped as he stepped back into the kitchen.
Kravitz was leaned on the counter, a sly smile on his face. That… fucking sly smile that said, ‘oh, I know exactly what just happened.’
“Come off it,” Taako huffed.
“Got you good, didn’t he?” Kravitz mused, eyeing the mess on the counter, “Can’t say you didn’t deserve it, right?”
“Oh, here he is, Mr. Morality, giving me a lecture on my karmic energies.” Taako rolled his eyes and began to grab bowls off the messy work spaces, “You know, I never said you were un-banned from the kitchen, by the way.”
“Did you not?” Kravitz looked up, “Huh, funny, here I am. So I guess I must be.” And he lifted his hand and took a deliberate bite off of a small cookie boy-- one gingerbread boy cop, Caleb Cleveland.
Taako’s eyes darted from the cookie to Kravitz’s face and then back to the cookie, “You absolute shithead.”
“Yeah?” Kravitz chewed slowly, “You banned me, not the bird.”
“You were sicking your familiar on me.” Taako huffed, “Here I am, slaving over a Candlenights Miracle for a dear, sweet boy, and all Augustus Gloop over here can think about is sneaking a bite of the goods--”
Kravitz’s eyes had drifted down to the counter, where now he reached out and picked up the Taako cookie that Angus had left him, “Would like t’have a bite of this one, if we’re being honest.”
Before he could get far, Taako’s hand caught his wrist, and with all the care and force combined he could muster he retrieved the cookie defensively from his husband’s hand.
“Absolutely not.”
Kravitz was grinning. Taako wasn’t a fan of that.
He didn’t comment, but the smug look on his face spoke volumes about the unspoken language Taako had just used as he carefully cupped the cookie in his hands like it were some sort of delicate treasure and turned to walk out of the room.
“Go on, eat your fill, but this one-- look, the kid’s not an artist but, it’s sort of like, you can’t take flash photos of The Mona Lisa, right? So, this-- this one’s just gonna hang out for a while.” Taako was rambling as he retreated.
“Whatever you say, Dove,” Kravitz leaned on the counter again, watching Taako’s back fondly as he headed through the dining room and away.
Shadow landed on his shoulder with a ruffle of feathers. He crooned, preening Kravitz’s hair a bit with soft motions of his beak.
“Yeah, I know, here,” he offered up a gingerboy arm, “payment is due for all your hard work.”
Shadow snatched up the offering gratefully, fluffing against his shoulder.
---
A few days later, Agnus received a package in the mail.
It wasn’t hard to tell who this particular package was from, but it was odd to see it, as he didn’t think Taako had ever sent him any kind of correspondence before.
A box sat on his step, covered in dark blue paper. Shimmering, iridescent stars decorated the inky color… and inside the box was a smaller box, a parchment paper box with twine wrapped all around it.
Angus sat down at his desk and opened it, twine strings in his fingers as he pulled the paper away and revealed a meticulously decorated cookie.
Of himself.
The Angus cookie sat in a bed of shimmering paper, bright, boyish gumdrop eyes gazing up at him through licorice spectacles. The detailing was obviously professional, even down to the stitches on his hat and the argyle of his sweater.
A small note was fastened with a bit of frosting and a thin string to the arm. It read in loopy, purple writing, ‘Thought I should show you how a real professional does it.’
Angus smiled, and pulled the cookie box closer to himself.
It was a happy Candlenights, indeed.