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Ashes O’reilly has been banned from the kitchen for at least a century.
They are very good at one thing, and that is lighting fires. Lighting fires everywhere, including when they try to cook. The mechanisms don’t need to eat per se, but it’s fun and tastes good and now they have a child who does need food. Tim had to rob someone for the cash.
Ashes woke up to the smell of smoke. They had fallen asleep in the hallway at some point, probably no more than a day ago, they weren’t sure. It might have been longer. But what mattered was the smell of smoke and the realization that they couldn’t hear Jonny singing to Lily anymore.
“Lily?” Ashes stood up, leaning against the wall. “Raph? Are you lighting fires?”
They glanced around, the light from under the kitchen door catching their attention.
“Is someone cooking?” they opened the door and looked in. Lily was standing on top of a stool, wearing one of Tim’s massive shirts (they hadn’t gotten her any new clothes yet) and mixing up something in a bowl.
“Lily, what are you doing?”
Lily looked up. She had a smear of chocolate across her lips. At least half of the food Tim had bought was only useful for baking or sweets. Also, none of them were very good cooks.
On the table next to the bowl Lily was mixing was a box. Ashes picked it up and read the words emblazoned across it: MUFFIN MIX.
“Can you read the instructions?” Ashes set the box down. “Nevermind that, what's burning?”
“I can read! I’m eight!” Lily set down her spoon. “I just pre heated the oven like the box said!”
Ashes opened the oven and looked inside, only to get a face full of smoke. There was a pan of scorched something from the last cooking attempt, by Ivy. they pulled out the pan and set it on the top of the stove, ignoring the small burns on their hands.
Suddenly, from the other side of the ship, the two of them heard a loud crash and the sound of Jonny yelling at the top of his lungs.
“LILY?”
Ashed glanced at Lily, who stuck out her tongue at them.
“I was hungry,” she said.
“How about we play a game.” Ashes grabbed another spoon as Lily’s face lit up. “Let’s try to finish making the muffins and put them in the oven before Jonny finds us.”
Lily instantly started mixing as fast as she could, while Ashes clattered through the cabinets looking for a muffin tin and baking spray.
“You gotta add more chocolate chips!” Ashes told her, pulling out a pan and tossing it onto the table.
“I put a whole bag in!” Lily said.
“Add more!”
Ashes pulled out a bottle of cooking spray from under a bag of chips and dashed over to the table, where they started wildly spraying the pan while Lily dumped another bag of chocolate chips into the bowl.
“Go go go!” Lily chanted while ashes scooped batter into the cups.
They could hear Jonny slamming doors and calling Lily’s name. After Ashes scooped the batter, Lily placed a single chocolate chip on top of every one of the dozen cupcakes. As soon as the last one was carefully placed, the two of them stepped back for a fraction of a second to admire their work, before Ashes rushed it into the oven.
They closed the oven door just as Jonny ran in, still wearing the same crumpled outfit as he had been the day before and looking livid.
“ASHES!” he yelled. “YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED IN THE KITCHEN! Oh, Lily, there you are!” he ran forwards and swept her into a hug, while glaring at Ashes as they set a timer on the stove for twenty minutes.
“Jonny, it’s four in the morning.”
Jonny turned around, still holding Lily, to see Nastya standing in the doorway with her hair down and without her glasses on. Behind her was a disheveled Tim, who was trying to untangle his goggles from his hair and the toy soldier, quietly watching with its head slightly tipped to the side.
“We’re making muffins!” Lily announced.
At that point the fire alarm, which Ashes thought they had disabled ages ago, went off and water showered from overhead sprinklers.
Jonny looked up at the ceiling, covered Lily’s ears, and said very slowly and deliberately spoke.
“Fuck.”
They were all sitting in the least wet room, now joined by the whole crew. A soaking wet Raph was telling Nastya how the sprinklers ruined her latest experiment, while a equally wet Ivy nervously fanned a book with damp pages.
Lily pressed a muffin into the Toy Soldier’s hands, who stared at it smiling as Lily ate her own. The Toy Soldier didn’t eat, but it liked to be included. Tim had half of a muffin in his mouth and the rest on the floor. Marius was talking to his. Jonny was asleep again, now that Lily was back on his lap.
Ashes lifted their muffin and winked at Lily as the two of them tapped their muffins together and each took a bite.