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“You’re still here.”
It’s probably intended as a question, but Marc has always suffered from a bit of a flat affect, so as it stands he could easily have just been stating facts. “I am.”
“What about your hair appointment?”
“I mean, that’s not for a couple of hours yet.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. It’s -” she checks her phone “- it’s ten o’clock. Which means you’re up early. Aren’t you supposed to be nocturnal or whatever?”
“That was a Khonshu thing, actually.” Marc brings a hand to the back of his neck and starts half-pacing, like he wants to take a lap of the room but can’t find the confidence, so he’s just tracing the same four steps on Layla’s left. “Because of the whole coming back to life deal, we didn’t actually need to sleep, per se; we just switched out, and when we died of exhaustion we died, and Khonshu took care of it.”
Layla blinks. “Jesus. Don’t let me sit still long enough to do the math on that one.”
“But now he’s gone, we’re… still not actually sure what our sleep schedules are supposed to look like. I’m pretty sure Steven is an oversleeper. Like, no matter what time he’s meant to be awake, he’ll miss it by fifteen minutes.”
“And you’re an early bird?”
“Military. I used to keep pretty good hours.”
“I guess that makes sense. What about the other guy?”
“Still pretty radio silent. I get the sense he’ll talk when he talks.” The question of the Knight who’d almost killed Harrow is still an unanswered one, although it’s still pretty early days. Once they’d come to the realisation that there was at least one more person in that brain that none of them had met, things became a little more tense. For now, they’re hiding out at Layla’s until they’re sure that neither of them is going to be arrested for any property damage or ostensible terrorist acts they committed. (Or, worse, identified and obliged to start acting under the guidelines of the Sokovia Accords. Which would be bullshit, because they’re not enhanced individuals, they’re godly avatars, but Layla has no faith in the British government to see that nuance. Maybe they should just move to New York - they’d be a lot harder to notice over there.)
“Okay. So you’re not busy today?”
“Nothing on the schedule. Steven’s not here right now, which he probably would be if he had something in mind.”
“So we’ve got a quiet morning, just the two of us?”
“I guess we do.”
“Gosh, it’s almost like we’re married or something.”
“Almost.”
Layla grins, stands up, and slings a hand around her husband’s waist. He smiles right back as he’s pulled in. “So what do you think we should do, with all that free time alone?”
“I’m sure you have plenty of good ideas, beautiful, but it’s a little early…”
“Alright, if you’re not up for it, we can find something else to - hey, what if we made something for breakfast?”
“Something fancy?”
“No, just something fun. Do you wanna learn to make Egyptian food?”
“What, all of it?”
“I can think of a couple of easy recipes on the spot. I’ve got some leftover croissants in the cupboard, we could make a batch of Umm Ali and leave the rest for later.”
“Ali?”
“No, the Umm is - it means, like, mother, there’s a whole folk tale behind it.”
“Well, I would be happy to hear it if you wanna teach me.”
Layla pats his arm in parting, strides across her tiny flat towards the kitchen, preheats the oven (of course), and begins pulling spices off the rack. “This will be cute! It’s like a bonding experience.”
“Because we weren’t already bonded. You know, husband and wife of several years, they’ve all still got a lot of bonding to do by this point.”
“You’re the one who didn’t tell me about Steven for a decade!”
“You never complained, and Steven didn’t mind -”
“We didn’t know, Marc,” she pauses in the middle of putting down the cinnamon sticks to glare at him good-naturedly. “So rude of you, depriving me of a poetry friend like that for years.”
“You know he only likes the same poetry as you because we like you?”
“Maybe so, but it’s still nice to have somebody to talk to about my interests. I haven’t connected with somebody over Desbordes-Valmore like that since I was twenty-two.”
“And I’m sure Steven is very happy to be breaking your streak. At least you never signed off on the divorce, ey? That would’ve been a very different story.”
“Speaking of stories about divorce,” she pulls out the bag of croissants and bumps the cupboard door closed with her hip, “that’s actually how the Umm Ali story starts: with a divorce.”
“Really?”
“Can you get the milk out?” she asks instead. As Marc obliges, she continues. “Yeah, it all started roughly 800 years ago, and the King of Egypt had just divorced his wife, Umm Ali, who was the Prince‘s mom (Prince Ali). But, of course, she sticks around, because it’s her son who’s first in line for the throne, so she’s still in the royal family even if she’s not married to the king. And the can opener?”
“Where’s the can opener?”
“Second drawer down over there, under the cutlery. Anyway, now that the King’s divorced, he can marry somebody new, so he does - this is a woman called Shagaret El Durr, which means tree of pearls, which isn’t entirely relevant but I do think it’s a nice name, and now if you can open this -” she holds out a can of condensed milk, which he takes “- I’m gonna turn the stove on and we can start mixing the milk and spices, okay?”
“Sure, baby,” Marc frowns, attaching the can opener to the edge of the tin. “This is gonna be a lot of milk.”
“I haven’t even mentioned the cream yet!”
“Some breakfast.”
She pours milk into the pan, eyeballing it, and begins to grate cinnamon - just a little - while Marc is still opening the tin. “I said it was easy, not that it was healthy. Anyway, the King and Shagaret El Durr stay married for a couple of years, and it all seems fine, except Umm Ali has a bad feeling about her. Really doesn’t trust her.”
“I assume she’s proven right?”
“She is, because eventually, Umm Ali wakes up to find that her ex-husband is dead, and that Shagaret El Durr has taken the throne for herself, instead of letting Ali, the prince, have it.”
“Now that’s corruption.”
“Yep! Are you done opening the can?”
“Mhm,” and she sets the grater aside to receive the condensed milk from outside her periphery. “I still don’t know why you don’t just buy the cinnamon already ground up.”
“It’s my one sticking point. I’m gonna use cardamom powder and vanilla extract,” she gestures to where they’re sitting on the counter before beginning to pour, “but I like to be hands-on with the little things, if I can.”
Marc’s footsteps sound behind her, and then he’s pushing the bottle and the shaker towards her side of the counter - which is sweet. “So what happened next in the story?”
“Okay, so Ali has just been usurped,” she reiterates, punctuating the word with the clank of the empty condensed milk tin landing on the wooden countertop, “and Umm Ali is not happy about it. Obviously, because it’s not her claim to the throne, right? She has no blood in the equation. She married in and then she killed off her one connection to royalty - it’s not fair.”
“Yep. Do you want help with the other -?”
“If you could get a teaspoon out, that would be great. So Umm Ali hatches a plan with her servants - thank you - and they wait until Shagaret El Durr is asleep.” A generous pinch of cardamom, a teaspoon or two of vanilla, and stir the mixture until it comes to a boil.
“Let me guess, this lady’s totally dead.”
“I never said the story had a twist! Yeah, they, uh, they beat her to death with their wooden clogs.”
Marc’s breath halts for a second, and when she looks over he’s raising his eyebrows at her. “Clogs? I thought this was Egypt, not the Netherlands.”
“Wooden shoes are universal! Would you start breaking up the croissants for me? Maybe into five or six pieces per, they’re pretty big; and then put about half of them in the pan.”
He obliges, and she grabs a dish from the side cupboard, returning to the pot just in time to add the cream, to stir it up again, to keep the liquid moving. “And that’s it?”
“Well, we can add other stuff - nuts, raisins, desiccated coconut, if I have any.”
“No, I mean the story.”
“Oh!” She chuckles and turns the heat down, pausing for a second to watch Marc rip off chunks of pastry and place them on the tray. He's got an even hand, if a little shaky. Steven's steady hand genuinely amazes her sometimes, the straightness of the lines he can draw entirely on the fly - Marc's skill level feels much more achievable. He's strong, too, and of course Layla likes that about him, because how could she not? "So, obviously, since the queen was dead, Ali ended up taking the throne as the new King."
"As he was supposed to in the first place."
"Exactly! And Umm Ali was so proud of her plot that she ordered the palace cooks to make something sweet to celebrate."
"And they named it after her!"
"They did! Okay, stand back." She pours half the spiced milk and cream mix into the pan, watches the pieces of pastry settle, checks the cupboard again for fun things to add. "You like almonds, right?"
"Yyyy… yes. I think… somebody doesn't?"
"But Marc does."
"I'm pretty sure Marc likes almonds, yeah. And Marc is me." (Moments like these will forever fascinate her, not least of all because they're always over so quickly. How jarring must it be, to fleetingly lose track like that, to trip up over something so trivial and have to take stock of the facts about yourself before you can be sure of your own opinions? But then, of course, she's reminded that it's probably nowhere near so poetic in the Knights' head as it is in hers - for them, it's just Tuesday, and Marc is pretty sure that he's the one who likes almonds.)
They spread a few handfuls of extra ingredients over the first layer of croissants, and then make a second layer the same as the first. "And then the cooks' creation spread across the land, and everybody loved it, and now we all eat Umm Ali in celebration of a madwoman killing her son's stepmother with a wooden shoe."
"Who knew dessert could be so violent?"
"You've never met my little cousins when they see a fresh plate of mamool."
"Which are?"
"Soft cookies, basically."
"Can we do that next?"
"Baby steps, babe."
The tray slides neatly into her tiny oven, and once she's bumped it closed with her elbow she turns around to see Marc, leaning against the back counter, smile wide across his face. "We did it."
"We did it!"
"So how long till we can eat it?"
"Twenty, twenty-five minutes in the oven, and then we're clear."
"It'll be lunchtime by then."
"You eat lunch at half past eleven?"
"It'll be close to lunchtime," Marc amends. "What, you wanna ruin my eating habits now, too?"
"You're so weird. Just eat when you eat. We can have dinner at midnight, we're grown-ups."
"You underestimate our ability to make everything happen exactly the same way every day for months at a time."
"Congratulations, you're very predictable."
"So was that story."
"You saw the clogs coming?"
Marc shakes his head and smiles. "No. No, I did not expect the clogs."
"Exactly. Put some respect on my heritage."
They eat well, approximately twenty-five minutes later, and Layla heads out to get her hair done when it's time. While she's on the bus, she thinks about it - about how nice it was to share a little bit of her culture with Marc, story and food alike. It feels like one less secret between the two of them, and they don't have many more to cross off the list now. It feels like bonding. It feels sweet.