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Baking Day was a calendar staple in the Green-Smith-Emrys household.
Though it had no fixed position on the calendar, it was still a regular occurrence and if they happened to go slightly longer than normal without having one, that was soon realised and amended following one of them wishfully thinking of mountains of baked goods piled high on the kitchen table or one of their friends or colleagues at the dragon sanctuary mentioning that it had been a while since there had been cupcakes/pies/biscuits laid out on paper plates with instructions that they needed To Be Eaten Soon Please due to an accidental glut.
Sometimes it was one of the talking dragons who prompted them to have a baking day. The dragons, particularly the talking dragons, had something of an infatuation with the Dragon Bread that Merlin had invented a few years ago when a supply of oats had been mixed up in a sack with a supply of dragon biscuits by the supplier and he’d needed to transform it to make it edible and not leave the dragons starving.
Baking Day was not only wonderful because it ended with large quantities of cake, muffins or bread, but also because it was a wonderful activity to do together. It was something that Gwen and Gwaine had started doing together on quieter days at the sanctuary, or at each other’s houses, early on in their relationship as a triad. It had taken a few attempts to get Merlin to join in with them- sharing a kitchen while cooking had not initially been something he was particularly keen on. He had learned to cook by himself at uni after leaving home and it had taken him quite a long time to get used to sharing kitchen space.
A little bit of bribery with suitable amounts of sugar combined with the time when he came home early and saw Gwen and Gwaine giggling together in the kitchen with bowls full of rainbow coloured buttercream dotted across the kitchen, with icing sugar all over the worktops and cake mix splattered across a wall, was all it took to make Merlin realise that sharing a kitchen while cooking could be quite nice after all. From then on, he joined in with Baking Day whenever he could and whenever he was allowed to be near the stand mixer.
(There'd been a misunderstanding with some dragon medicine, a bucket of paint and some water balloons that had caused quite the kerfuffle with the stand mixer and Merlin had afterwards been subjected to a 17 minute PowerPoint on how to appropriately use it and what it was for.)
They had their first Baking Day as a co-habitating triad about a month after they’d moved in together. Though they had experienced life sharing a kitchen between three people and all manner of cats and dogs before, when Gwaine stayed over for a few days at a time, doing it day after day after day had been a bit of a learning curve for them. They had to have extra counter space if they wanted to all be working on things in there at the same time and making breakfast on the mornings when none of them were up early dealing with dragons could get quite messy. After about a week of bumped elbows and split tea after crashing into someone, it was decided that there needed to be a limit on the number of cats that could be in the kitchen at the same time. Three cats if there no dogs present, two cats if one of the dogs was in there as well. On Baking Day, no animals were allowed in the kitchen at all. The dogs were put in the garden or the living room and any cats that had been in the kitchen went off to sulk in the barn because they were upset about not being allowed to sit in inconvenient places like in front of the fridge or on top of Gwen’s shoulder.
-
“What are we making?” Merlin asked as Gwaine took piles and piles of ingredients out of the fridge and the cupboards.
“Scones.” Gwen said. “I want scones. Let’s make scones.”
“I want to make a giant pasty.” Gwaine said. “Like instead of being a bit bigger than your hand, I want to try making one that’s the size of a pizza.”
“Isn’t that a type of pizza?” Merlin asked. “A pizza that’s made in the shape of a pasty and is enormous. It’s got some Spanish name beginning with ‘c’.”
“Calzone.” Gwen said. “It’s nice.”
“But then that’s a giant pizza thing, not a pasty.” Gwaine said. “I want a pasty.”
“Calzone’s gonna have a lot less vegetables in it than pastries do.” Merlin pointed out.
“Let’s make a calzone then.” Gwaine went through phases of adoring vegetables and eating them all the time, along with phases of absolutely despising anything to do with them. They were currently in a phase of Gwaine not eating vegetables.
Gwen found a recipe for calzone.
Flour was pulled out of a cupboard by the sackful. Butter was taken out of the fridge and Gwen went out to the garden to get tomatoes for the sauce and bacon was dug out of the freezer where it had been jammed between a bag of peas and a box of vegan sausages from when Morgana had been house-sitting for them.
There was a long conversation about what to do about cheese. Cheese was something Gwaine was quite passionate about and he was reluctant to follow the recipe’s instructions to only use Cheddar.
“I think we should use all the types of cheese we have in the fridge.” he said, taking them out and piling them in his arms one by one.
“I- do you really want to put blue cheese in it?”
“Yes.”
“Will blue cheese taste nice with mozzarella?” Merlin took a packet of mozzarella off the stack in Gwaine’s arms and waved it in front of his face.
“I guess we’ll find out.” Gwaine grinned.
There was a scratching on the kitchen door leading out to the garden and Merlin went to see what it was. “Aithusa wants to come in.” he said.
Aithusa, who was now about a year old and the size of a large Alsatian, was looking eagerly up at the window in the kitchen door. Her tail started wagging when she saw Merlin looking back at her.
“Should I let her in?” Merlin asked, waving at Aithusa.
“No. She’ll knock everything over, trip us all up and eat all the food.” Gwaine said sternly. “Little blighter.”
“She’s your favourite dragon at the sanctuary!” Merlin admonished.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t change that she’s still a little blighter when she wants to be. Give her a carrot to eat or something but she needs to stay in the garden.” Gwaine went to the fridge and pulled out a carrot for Merlin to give to Aithusa.
“Do you think she can smell the cheese?” Gwen wondered. “It seems a bit strange that she’s just suddenly come running up to the door.”
“Maybe she can smell the cheese.” Merlin opened the kitchen window and leaned out with the carrot dangling from his fingertips. “I’m not opening the back door for you, Aithusa, because you’ll just come running in!”
Aithusa bounded over to the kitchen window and craned her neck up to take the carrot from Merlin’s outstretched hand. The carrot was gulped down in two bites and then she started licking up the specks of carrot that had fallen onto the grass due to her over-enthusiastic chomping.
“Now go and play somewhere.” Merlin told her. “You can’t come in and you can’t have any more food. It’s not good for you to just get fed by us all the time. You’re supposed to be big enough to find food for yourself by now.”
Aithusa made no move to go anywhere. She carried on wagging her tail and grinning at Merlin with her tongue dangling out of the side of her mouth.
“You’re going to get very bored in a minute because I’m going to close the window and go away and then there will be nothing to entertain you.” Merlin told Aithusa dryly. She still didn’t move so he shut the window and returned his attention to the food.
Gwaine started to get out the ingredients for the pizza dough. Gwen was reading her way through the recipe.
“Will we have to leave the dough to rise for ages or something?” Merlin asked.
They all stopped what they were doing.
“I really, really hate waiting for stuff in cooking.” Gwaine said.
“We know.” Gwen and Merlin chorused.
“I’ll see if I can find a recipe that doesn’t have waiting in.” Gwen said.
She couldn’t.
They came up with an alternate plan. The pizza dough would be made and then while it was resting, or rising, or whatever the technical term was (they’d given up on Bake Off when it moved to Channel 4), they would make cupcakes.
No more was heard from Aithusa until Gwen was almost finished with the pizza dough. Gwaine and Merlin were standing at the oven, making tomato sauce.
A squawking noise came from the back garden.
“Is Aithusa still out there?” Merlin asked.
“You’re too tall for me to see past you.” Gwaine muttered. He leaned backwards to see past Merlin and out of the window; what he saw made him take a stumbling step backwards that almost had him crashing into the table.
“Did you slip?” Gwen whisked the bowl of dough off the table and into her arms to protect it.
“Look outside.” Gwaine said, righting himself and walking out of the kitchen to the garden.
Gwen and Merlin both went to the window. “Oh.”
“Oh dear.”
“What is that?”
“What is she doing?”
“Should we go out and help him?”
“Has she got-”
“I think she has.”
“Is that the one from the main barn?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t the doors supposed to be locked?”
“Uh oh.”
“You finish making the sauce and I’ll go and check that the doors are locked. Gwaine can manage Aithusa by himself.” Gwen said. She darted out of the room, leaving Merlin standing at the window holding a wooden spoon slowly dripping tomato juice onto the floor while he stared at Gwaine standing at the foot of the eucalyptus tree staring at Aithusa prancing around on a branch of the elderberry tree that grew next to it as she appeared to be making herself a blanket den.
Some of the tomato juice dripped onto Merlin’s foot, which was cold and warm and sticky and slimy and overall unpleasant. It jolted him back into his reality, albeit his reality was a lot stranger than most. He put the spoon into the saucepan and left his partners to it while he concentrated on finishing the sauce.
-
“Aithusa!” Gwaine called up to her, hands on his hips. “Aithusa, what are you doing up there?”
Aithusa had dragged rags, blankets, towels and what appeared to be a piece of old carpet up into the tree. She was arranging them into either a nest or a den across several of the branches.
This behaviour was very confusing, but not particularly alarming given how pleased she seemed to be with herself.
“Aithusa, you’re not a tree dragon. Why are you building whatever it is that is?”
Aithusa was hopping from branch to branch, wagging her tail and grinning. Some of the branches were making alarming creaking sounds, but if one of them snapped she’d fall with all the grace of a winged cat and be fine again.
“Where have you got all these from? And the idea for doing it?”
The elderberry tree had finished flowering about a month earlier, but the berries on it were still green and hard rather than purple and plump as they would become over the coming weeks. That didn’t stop them from detaching from the stalks and raining down onto Gwaine’s head every time Aithusa thwacked them with her tail.
“You’re making a really massive mess, Aithusa! I don’t want to be the one who has to climb up the tree to try and haul soaking wet carpet down from there!” Gwaine sighed and ran a hand over his face. “I wish I would remember that even though you’ll probably start talking back one day, we haven’t reached that day yet and that’s probably a good thing for all of us.”
Gwen came jogging up to the garden fence. “Did you use any of those towels or blankets with her when she was a baby?”
“I think I might have.” Gwaine said. “Why?”
“I’ve just been to the barn; she ate her way through part of the door and got into a cupboard. The place is a mess because she’s pulled out loads of towels and things getting those particular ones.”
“How on earth does she remember which ones I used with her when she was a baby?” Gwaine wondered.
“She probably recognises the smell or something. She must have imprinted on them as well as on you.” Gwen said. “Is she building a nest, do you think?”
“It looks like it but I’ve got no idea why she’s doing that. She’s supposed to sleep on the floor or in caves, not up trees.”
“Maybe she’s been hanging out with the tree dragons since we let her into the woods and now she sleeps in trees.”
“That’s not going to last forever. She’ll get too big for sleeping in trees in the next few years. Tree dragons don’t make nests out of fabric; they make them out of sticks and moss and leaves. Once we’ve dealt with this we need to go to the woods to see if we can find any clues.” Gwaine decided.
They carried on watching Aithusa, who was still rearranging the different materials to her liking.
“Could she be making something other than a nest?” Gwaine asked Gwen.
Gwen shrugged.
Aithusa started to hop down the branches of the trees and then leaped off onto the edge of the fence. She looked over her shoulder to give Gwen and Gwaine a mischievous look, then leaped up and started flying away from the cottage.
“Aithusa! You get back here right now young lady and clear up the mess you’ve made!” Gwaine shouted after her.
“One day she’s going to turn around and swear at you when you say that to her.” Gwen told him. “You’ll get the fright of your life.”
Aithusa didn’t turn around and carried on flying into the distance.
“I’ll go and clear up the barn and find something to do makeshift repairs.” Gwen said.
“I’ll go inside to wait in case she comes back again.”
-
Gwaine went back into the kitchen. Merlin was putting a tray of cupcakes into the oven. “What’s Aithusa doing out there?”
“Something weird. She broke into the barn to get those blankets and now she’s flown off. Can I lick the bowl out for the cupcake mixture?”
“Yes, you can.”
-
By the time Aithusa came back, the cupcakes were cooling on the counter, the calzone was in the oven, Gwen had done makeshift repairs and sorted out the chaotic cupboard.
“Has she got a shoe in her mouth?” Merlin asked, going to stand at the window again.
Gwaine groaned. “Arthur’s going to eat us alive if it turns out she’s been stealing from charity bags or something.” he got up from his chair to go back to the garden.
“That’s not a shoe.” Merlin decided.
Gwaine paused.
“That’s a squirrel.” Merlin said firmly.
Gwaine rushed out to the garden.
Aithusa landed in the elderberry tree and wagged her tail at Gwaine. There was a very live, but also very compliant, squirrel being held gently in her mouth.
“Aithusa what on EARTH are you doing?” Gwaine shouted.
Aithusa ignored him and put the squirrel inside the nest thing she had been making. Then she flew away again.
Gwen and Merlin came out to watch as Aithusa came back another two times with another squirrel, both smaller than the first, in her mouth each time.
The squirrels seemed very happy in the blanket-towel-carpet nest.
After the third squirrel, Aithusa came down to the lawn to see them and be stroked.
Gwaine stared at the nest. “She’s built a drey. She’s built a drey for the squirrels and the second and third ones are the babies of the first one. That’s why she used the blankets and stuff from when she was a baby.”
“You are the strangest little dragon I have ever met.” Merlin told Aithusa. She licked his hand and took advantage of their distraction to dart past them and through the open back door to the kitchen.
“AITHUSA!”
It was a very memorable Baking Day.
(The cupcakes and the calzone were lovely. The squirrels stayed in the drey Aithusa had made for them until the babies were big enough to live by themselves and bound away to find their own trees. Gwaine spent a very long September afternoon throwing the fabric out of the tree for Percival to catch; Aithusa watched them from the edge of the fence and refused to help, clearly enjoying watching far too much.)