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“What the hell dude!” Reki coughed, big clouds of flour being released into the air every time he wheezed.
“That’s payback for cracking an egg on my head,” Langa smirked, his hand still covered in the flour that he slapped on Reki’s face.
“Miya’s been a bad influence on you,” Reki pointed at Langa before softly whining, “I’m gonna have flour coming out of my nose for days,” while wiping his face off with a paper towel.
Somewhere from the living room, Reki could hear Miya shouting, “I’m the only good influence you slimes have!”
This was all Langa’s fault, really. Or at least Reki wanted to pretend it was. Reki had mentioned, once , that he wanted to learn how to bake cookies. One time. And now, here they were at Cherry and Joe’s apartment, his face covered in flour, Miya yelling at them while absolutely refusing to help bake, and Joe only occasionally glancing away from the TV long enough to tell Reki what he did wrong after he already did it. Apparently, whatever shitty Christmas rom-com Cherry had picked to watch was much more important than helping Reki bake.
Well. He didn’t exactly promise to help Reki. Rather, Langa had apparently begged Joe to let him and Reki use his apartment, since Langa didn’t want to risk ruining his or Reki’s kitchen in the process. The fact that Joe knew how to bake was just an added bonus. Or would be, if he was helping at all.
But no. Apparently Reki and Langa were supposed to do all of the baking, and everyone else just planned on doing the actually fun part— decorating.
And the baking part wasn’t going well at all. With the first cookie dough, Reki had added too many eggs. With the second dough, Langa had accidentally poured in the entire bag of flour. Thankfully, the third dough had gone relatively well (Reki hoped, anyway), and now they just had to wait for it to actually bake to find out how the cookies would taste.
“I hope you guys know, just because this is my kitchen doesn’t mean I’ll be the one cleaning it up,” Joe swiped his finger along the countertop and held it up to his face for inspection.
“You can blame this one on Langa. He’s the one who smacked me in the face with flour,” Reki huffed, opening the cupboard below the sink to look for disinfecting wipes.
“You cracked an egg on my head, you deserved it!” Langa stated indignantly, crossing his arms and pouting.
“I don’t particularly care who did it, I still want it cleaned up,” Cherry pointedly raised his eyebrows at both Reki and Langa, wrapping his arms around Joe’s waist.
Reki could hear Miya retching from the living room. Usually Reki hated that Miya would do that whenever he and Langa were being affectionate, but with Joe and Cherry, well.. Reki didn’t quite want to see that either. It still perplexed him that Joe and Cherry were together in the first place, considering that they were constantly arguing, but to each their own he guessed.
The oven timer went off and Reki hurried over, opening the oven door, and as he started to reach in, Langa smacked him on the arm.
“Ow! What the hell?”
“Idiot, you forgot to put on oven mitts,” Langa grabbed his hands and shoved on the mitts that Joe apparently used for the holiday season, considering they looked like giant gingerbread men.
“Oh, thanks,” Reki smiled sheepishly and pulled the cookie tray out of the oven, his hands now actually protected from the scorching heat.
Well, the cookies looked normal at least. The taste was a different story, but he’d have to wait until after everyone decorated to find out if they actually ended up tasting alright. He was going for them at least being edible, but was hopeful that maybe they’d actually taste good.
Reki gently placed all of the cookies onto the cooling rack and into the fridge before deciding to take a break. He had nothing to do while the cookies cooled after all, so he of course decided to bother Miya by sitting next to him on the couch and stealing his switch right out of his hands.
“Give it back, slime!” Miya shouted, jamming his hand into Reki’s side and making him wheeze. Reki, however, still managed to keep his grip on the switch and tossed it quickly to Langa. Langa’s eyes widened in shock when he caught it, and then fear made his eyes widen even further when Miya started charging at him from across the living room. Miya tackled Langa to the floor, but not before Langa could toss the switch back in Reki’s direction.
“Will you three please quit it?!” Cherry snapped, smacking Reki on the back of his head with his fan.
“Geeze,” Reki mumbled, rubbing his head where Cherry had smacked him, “Sorry, mom.”
“Call me mom again and I will call your actual mother.”
Reki remained quiet after that. Cherry knew far too many incriminating things about him to risk him actually calling his mom.
After sitting in relative peace for a while, Reki checked the time on his phone and determined the cookies had probably cooled long enough to begin icing and decorating them. He pulled the cooling rack out of his fridge and gently poked a few of the cookies, deciding that they were, in fact, cool enough.
Joe had cleared off enough space on their island counter for them to all be able to decorate their cookies there. Apparently, he had decided this would be less risky than Miya, Reki, and Langa all decorating in his living room, which Reki couldn’t quite disagree with. After Reki placed the cookies down on the island and everyone had gathered around the island, they began decorating.
Reki, while he loved painting and drawing and creating all sorts of art, had never decorated a cookie or worked with frosting before. And that was becoming exceedingly clear the more he got frustrated while he was working.
“Shit! Why is this icing going everywhere?!” He pouted, while wiping off the side of his cookie with a paper towel for the millionth time.
“Because it’s royal icing, not regular, and you’re supposed to do it like this,” Cherry ushered Reki to his side and demonstrated how to outline the cookie first, before flooding the inside of it with the rest of the icing. The end result was perfectly even and smooth, and Reki managed to replicate a similar result on one of his cookies.
After the royal icing had settled and hardened slightly, Reki got to work on what he had already planned on for this cookie. He was decorating it specifically for Langa, and had forced Langa to sit on the opposite side of the table from him so that he couldn’t peek at what Reki was doing, much to Langa’s dismay.
Glancing up at him, Reki could see that Langa was concentrating extremely hard on decorating his cookie, something he didn’t do very often. Reki looked around at everyone else at the table to see what they were doing— Joe was currently laughing to himself while doing whatever it was he was doing to that poor cookie, Miya had icing all over his face and seemed exceedingly frustrated, and Cherry was.. holding a calligraphy brush? Weird, but whatever. Reki got back to work, and soon enough, he had three different cookies decorated.
“Is everyone done?” Joe asked, still laughing a little bit to himself while glancing repeatedly down at his cookies.
“I guess,” Miya sighed, even more icing on his face than the last time Reki looked at him.
“Yup!” Langa nodded excitedly, looking back and forth between his cookies and Reki while smiling.
“All done!” Reki chirped, and Cherry simply nodded his agreement.
“Alright, Kaoru, show us yours first!” Joe smirked.
Cherry placed his cookies in the center of the table, and everyone began oohing and aahing at them. They were, Reki admitted, beautiful. He had used his calligraphy brush and an edible ink to create beautiful kanji on the cookies. Reki could pick out the words for holiday, joy, and family among them.
Next, Joe placed down his cookies and Reki could absolutely not help the laugh he let out when he saw them. He had turned his three cookies into, what Reki could only assume, was supposed to be himself. The two cookies on the left and the right each had a flexing arm painted onto them, and the cookie in the middle looked like eight-pack abs. Langa snickered when he saw them as well, meanwhile Miya let out a noise of disgust and Cherry just pretended like he didn’t see them at all.
Miya’s cookies were… well, colorful was one way to put it. Apparently he had tried to recreate some of his favorite video game characters and failed spectacularly at it. Icing was dripping off of all of the cookies, and the colors had smeared together into an amalgamation that nearly turned brown. Reki, being who he was, still pointed out the parts of the decorations he really liked in an effort to cheer Miya up.
Reki was next to reveal his cookies, and he couldn’t help but jitter with excitement as he placed them down for everyone to see. He had done something similar to Joe, where all of his cookies pieced together to make one picture. Except the picture, instead of being his own body (because he absolutely would not be doing that), was a recreation of the yeti on Langa’s board.
“Reki!” Langa’s eyes were sparkling with excitement as he stood up to get a closer look at the cookies, “It looks just like my board! That’s amazing!”
Reki puffed his chest out with pride as his cheeks reddened from Langa’s praise. Langa complimented him way more than he probably deserved, but damn if it didn’t feel good.
Langa seemed a little nervous when Joe told him to reveal his cookies, wringing his hands and picking at his cuticles. Gently, he set the cookies down in the middle of the island, and Reki’s heart jumped into his throat.
Langa had painted them .
“I-I hope you like it Reki! I tried my best.” Langa smiled sheepishly.
The cookies looked adorable. While Langa was.. rather lacking in artistic ability, Reki could still clearly tell what everything was supposed to be. The left cookie was Reki on his skateboard, doing an ollie. Langa had even remembered to paint in Reki’s headband and his yellow hoodie. The cookie on the right was Langa, doing a flip mid-air off of a vert ramp. And the cookie in the middle, while by far being the most simple, was Reki’s favorite out of all of the cookies. It was an infinity symbol painted half red and half blue.
“I love them, Langa.”