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When Ace arrived in his kitchen, the doubts began to roll in. Honestly, Thatch wasn't so sure about this genius idea of his now that it was a reality instead of something to muse over as he sliced vegetables.
It had started just a few days ago. During dinner, when he had finished serving the starving masses and taken up his seat beside Ace, he'd unknowingly settled himself into a conversation that would make for interesting listening on a professional lesson.
Ace and Deuce - the good boys that they were - had waited to keep him company rather than let him eat alone in the back of the galley. While Thatch highly suspected this sudden ability to not try to inhale food the second the kitchens opened was more down to Deuce than it was Ace, he appreciated it immensely.
Their conversation had been going as thus: Ace, thoroughly enjoying tonight's curry, was telling Deuce that cooking had to be magic. That somehow, wizards (chefs) came up with spells (recipes) and created the most unbelievably incredible food out there. “I mean, we never had anything like this on the Spadille,” Ace had been saying, “and yet we tried everything we could think of, didn't we? So it must be magic. Must be.”
What had bothered Thatch wasn't Ace's rampant imagination, but the disconcertingly thoughtful expression on Deuce's face, apparently fast being taken in by this nonsense.
“It's not magic,” Thatch had said with fond exasperation, “it's just a case of knowing what ingredients do what, and how to put them all together.”
They had looked at him with interest, perhaps trying to come to terms with the fact that a wizard had joined their table.
“Like, say, for example, this curry,” Thatch had continued, holding up a spoonful of his own. “It's got aniseed in it, but only a little; too much is overpowering and would make the dish taste awful, right?”
“Would it?” Ace had asked tentatively, demonstrating the kind of blissful ignorance that few people ever truly saw in Ace.
“And it's got cream in it, which complements the spices and gives it that fullness you like. Too much of it would throw the whole thing off, and...” Thatch had trailed off there, struggling not to laugh at Ace and Deuce's combined looks of discomfort. “Didn't expect the cream?”
“Cream goes in coffee,” Deuce had said uncertainly, backed up by Ace's enthusiastic nodding.
“Sure it does, but it’s super versatile and used in all sorts of cooking as well.” When they hadn't looked convinced, Thatch tried a different angle, words muffled by his mouthful of dinner. “What did you think it was made out of?”
Ace had shrugged, plainly having never really given it any thought until that moment. “Water?”
The situation was more desperate than Thatch had imagined. No wonder the majority of the Spades had cried when they found out the Whitebeards had dedicated chefs, led by someone who sported a formal education in it and all. Thatch dreaded to think what kind of rot they had lived off for a year before adopting them, but it clearly hadn't been anything to a standard that he would have approved of.
“Come by the kitchens tomorrow afternoon,” Thatch had said, “and I'll teach you to make something. Something dead simple.”
“You know I can cook, right?” Ace had said in a would-be-casual way, offense clearly having been taken. “How else would I have survived until now?”
“You can make things edible, yeah, but if you think making a basic curry is sorcery, then no, you can't cook,” Thatch had said with a snort, appreciating how Deuce shrugged in agreement, much to Ace's chagrin.
Which was how Thatch found himself slinging a pink apron over Ace's head the following day, having plucked off his hat and hung it on the back of the kitchen door already. Really, when he had suggested the cooking lesson, he had meant for both Ace and Deuce to attend, seeing as they were both as tragically useless as one another. However, Deuce had been detained by Marco on their way here, according to Ace, and was now deep in a lesson that he had missed earlier in the week by accidentally napping with Ace instead.
Well, that was okay, then. Deuce could join next time.
“I thought we'd make a standard sponge cake today,” Thatch announced, clapping his hands together and sliding into Teacher Mode. “It's not a meal, I know, but when I think of combining ingredients I immediately think of cake. Nice and easy. It's as good a place as any to get you started on the wonders of not boiling random shit you find or torching it to cinders.”
The glee that had spread across Ace's face at the mention of cake was wiped away, replaced with a frown and pout that probably wasn't supposed to be cute.
“So, let's get to work!” Thatch exclaimed, tying up his own apron behind his back. “First, we'll look at the ingredients list; then, I want you to gather said ingredients.”
This task - the easiest one of the lot - proved to be far more difficult than Thatch had anticipated.
First, Ace proudly placed a block of cheese on the counter instead of the butter, turning away for his next item before Thatch could even laugh. Fair enough though, honestly, because the cheese and butter at least looked similar to the unfamiliar, and Ace had most likely not seen the word Cheese printed on the side of the block due to how he had picked it up.
Next, the eggs. Three were needed, and three were dropped, the last of which went through a whole charade of juggling before it finally hit the floor. Quite how he managed that was beyond Thatch's imagination, Ace not clumsy by nature, and yet he made quite the spectacular show of it.
The flour. Self-raising was needed, and plain was plonked on the counter, Ace having no excuse with the label this time. Salt was heaved out of a floor cupboard, the sugar in the wall cupboard going unnoticed. The milk was 'sampled' straight from the carton (“just in case it’s gone off, honestly Thatch”), and the baking powder didn't even get a look-in, Ace just pulling a face at Thatch when he listed it off for him to collect.
Not as bad as that task could have been, really.
Actually, no. That was a lie. Thatch wanted to lie down and weep already, except he couldn't thanks to the floor still being sticky with egg. Right, yes, that had to be cleaned.
Handing Ace a cloth and cleaning spray (the mop was long gone, having been brandished as a weapon in a Fourth Division-wide playfight, never to return), Thatch leaned against the side and folded his arms. “Okay, so, let's go through what went wrong and see how we can fix it,” he started, but Ace cut in with a scandalized sound, gaping up at Thatch from the floor.
“I said I was sorry about the eggs!” He protested at once, scrubbing the floor with more force than necessary.
To his credit, though, Ace did actually listen once he got over the indignation, and righted all of the wrongs he had made when carefully directed. Except, of course, the whole matter of breaking off a handful of cheese and stuffing it in his mouth before putting it back in the fridge—at least he had the good grace to look guilty when he caught Thatch's eye.
Honestly, Thatch was probably at fault so far. Ace didn’t know the layout of the kitchen – or any kitchen, probably – and Thatch had expected too much too soon.
Maybe. Or not. Actually, no, fuck Ace for being this annoying.
“The next step is weighing out each individual ingredient,” Thatch said patiently, keeping a hand pressed to the fridge door for good measure, all too familiar with that keen glint in Ace’s eye. “And no more cheese.”
First up was the flour. Under Thatch’s careful direction, Ace sourced a large mixing bowl from a cupboard and collected the small scales also, setting them both down in front of his mentor. The bowl was put on the scales, the scales adjusted to 0, and the flour grabbed up and torn open before Thatch could do anything more than begin to point out that Ace needed a hand sifter.
Flour exploded into the air under Ace’s heavy-handed tearing, clouding up around him and making him disappear. For a solid second Thatch only gaped at the cloud, then, when Ace sneezed loudly from somewhere inside it, he exclaimed, “What’re you doing, tearing my bag open?! It’s already been opened before, you idiot – there’s tape on one side, didn’t you see?!”
Clearly not, and now the bag was beyond salvaging, though at least Ace seemed to find it funny, laughing about something to do with ‘dry shampoo’ that was apparently a thing from back on Deuce’s home island. Thatch couldn’t keep up, and decided not to try, lifting the ruined bag out of Ace’s hands before more good flour could be wasted.
“Here, watch what I’m doing,” he said roughly, grabbing Ace by the upper arm and drawing him in, refusing to laugh at how ridiculous he looked with white hair and a ghostly pale face. “In one hand you hold your sifter—” he demonstrated, holding it above the mixing bowl, “—and in the other you pour out the flour little by little. Got that bit? Little by little.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Ace said, brushing flour out of his eyebrows, “you don’t have to repeat yourself like that.”
Oh, Thatch thoroughly begged to differ.
Once the flour was in the bowl, the next step was the butter.
“First, reset the scales to zero again,” Thatch said, pointing to the little dial. “Since we’re weighing as we go, we have to start from zero with every new ingredient. Does that make sense?” Ace nodded, so Thatch continued: “Using a knife, cut off pieces of the butter little by little and drop them into the mixing bowl. You want to have the same amount of butter as you do flour, so this time, that’s two hundred grams. For your standard sponge cake, you want the flour, butter, and sugar to be equal in amounts, which is handy for us because that condenses remembering three ingredient quantities into one.”
The weight of the eggs had to be equal as well, but Thatch left that out for now, not wanting to give Ace the opportunity to confuse weight with quantity and find him cracking two hundred eggs into the bowl.
“Right,” Ace said, “and why’s that?”
He hadn’t expected that question. “Because balance is key in cooking,” was his cryptic answer. Ace looked satisfied by it at least, so Thatch moved on, glad that he didn’t have to reveal that he had known that fact once upon a time, but could no longer recall it. “Okay, you do the butter then, Ace.”
Luckily, the butter somehow managed to avoid incident, going straight from the packet to the bowl in nice, even chunks that were not torn up by Ace’s bare hands. Plonk, plonk, plonk went each small piece cut from the main block, with Ace keeping an eye on the weight needle the whole time.
“I thought butter came in small sticks?” Ace asked as the last piece patted softly onto the mound of sifted flour. “This thing—” he gave the block of butter a prod, leaving a fingertip-shaped indent in the side, “—is a rectangle, and huge.”
“More cost-effective than having a bunch of little individually wrapped sticks,” Thatch grunted, wrapping up the block before it could endure any further harm from the man literally made of fire. “You should see the stuff in the holding pantries; we only bring up enough to fit in the fridges here. Nah, sticks wouldn’t last two minutes on this ship. It’s only fancy rich people on land who get that stuff.”
Ace mulled this over for a minute before saying, “Makes sense. Deu’s the one who said butter came in sticks… and I said ‘no, butter comes in buckets, duh,’ and he just laughed at me, said there was no way butter was sold in buckets.”
Thatch quickly decided that prying into their clearly strange conversation topics wasn’t something that was within his best interests… not if he wanted to continue to think of them as reasonably intelligent people, at any rate.
The next task to tackle was the sugar. Sure enough, without needing Thatch’s prompting, Ace reset the dial to zero again and carefully – thank the gods – prised open the bag of caster sugar, lifting it and looking to Thatch for a nod before beginning to tip it in. This didn’t need sifting, Thatch confirmed when asked, and soon two hundred grams sat in the bowl also. Only a sprinkling of sugar scattered over the counter when Ace dumped the bag down, and Thatch could have easily forgiven this if Ace hadn’t then licked his finger and dragged it through the sugar before popping it in his mouth.
“Bzzt, you just failed your first cooking class,” Thatch said, “for the fifth time.”
“For eating the sugar?” Ace asked, repeating the finger-in-sugar misdemeanor and sweeping more up off the worktop.
“You don’t put your fingers in your mouth when cooking,” Thatch said with a long-suffering sigh. “C’mon Ace, don’t look at me like that, you must have heard that rule before; you’ll now spread your mouth germs to the next thing you touch if you don’t wash your hands, and you’ve just added your saliva to the worktop you’re dealing with food on.”
“That was never a problem where I came from,” Ace said with a laugh, although he did at least go to wash his hands and grab up the spray and a new cloth anyway. “We just sorta got on with it and tested food with our hands and whatever.”
“On the Spadille, too?”
Ace grimaced, hurling the cloth into the sink. “We tried not to eat Banshee’s cooking if we could help it, so…”
Ah.
Next, the eggs were carefully cracked against the side of the mixing bowl and tipped in. One, two, three, and none shattered in Ace's hands or blew up like grenades thanks to his powers, a vision that had incapacitated Thatch for a second there as Ace had swung the first through the air towards its doom.
When Thatch shook himself free of this thought and Ace looked up with the expectant air of one awaiting instructions, the first thing Thatch registered was the flour still clouding his usually dark hair and eyebrows. The second was the fact that he was licking his lips, forefinger still extended, and there was a neat little indent in the—
“Butter?” Thatch asked incredulously, eyeballing Ace with disgust. “What're you doing sticking your fingers in the butter?”
Ace thought for a moment, probably trying to come up with a way to get himself out of trouble. “Deuce won't mind,” he said at length, seeming confident in his abysmal response.
“What's Deuce got to do with you sticking your fingers in places they don't belong?” Thatch snapped, snatching up Ace's hand and running it under the water in the sink.
A filthy, evil smirk spread across Ace's lips at once, his eyes narrowing wickedly. “Well, I do stick my fingers in all of Deuce's no-no places.”
Thatch wished with his entire being that he had seen that coming. That was on him for walking right into that one.
A smack to the back of the head, a yelp of pain, and a profuse apology from Ace later, Ace tried again. “I was thinkin' that since Deu missed out on all the fun, the least I could do is give him this as a 'sorry you had to listen to Marco drone on and on about the pharyngeal plexus and all associated wonders or whatever it was he was bitching about' gift. Cute, right?”
“Much cuter than the mental image you forced me to see,” Thatch grunted, raising a threatening hand again when Ace's eyes glinted. “Don't even go there, kid. Just don’t.”
But Ace's kindness had softened Thatch's heart—so much so that when Ace was overly liberal with the vanilla extract, he didn't even complain about the cost that Ace was dumping into the mixing bowl.
“Easy does it,” was Thatch's murmured instruction, gingerly sliding the little bottle out of Ace's grasp and putting it away out of his reach. “You ready to get mixing?”
Ace's eyes lit up, taking the wooden spoon that Thatch offered as if receiving Poseidon's trident itself.
Back on land – back before the Whitebeards had claimed Thatch as their own – his kitchen had been stocked to the gills with state-of-the-art cooking devices. In those days no one would have mixed up batter with a spoon, they would have had an automatic hand-held contraption with too many buttons and dials to churn the ingredients into a smooth paste.
But this wasn't land, and this wasn't a professional kitchen in one of the finest establishments in the whole of North Blue. Ace was not an assistant chef, and Thatch was still Thatch, only older and far more prone to making mistakes when it came to crewmates who he loved almost like they were his own sons.
Quite forgetting himself in light of Ace's enthusiasm, Thatch did not specify that Ace had to once again handle this task gently. This was not the gutting and skewering of some animal carcass over a fire, a task where brute strength and a total lack of finesse were not only necessary but applauded. No, this was a task that required delicacy, which Ace did not naturally wield when not actively attempting to do so.
Thus, when Ace skipped the slow, methodical stirring of flour into sugar into butter into eggs and instead bulldozed straight into whisking the ingredients with the aggression required for a merengue mixture, he once again found himself inhaling a cloud of flour, coughing and sneezing as chunks of butter and sprays of flour and sugar flung through the air.
“God fuck it all, Ace!” Thatch cried, slapping a palm to his forehead before grabbing Ace's wrist, forcing him still. “Carefully. Slowly. Cream the ingredients together gently; run your spoon around and around, stirring through a bit at a time. Gah, I should have made that clear, I keep forgetting you're such a novice as to—”
“Well excuse me for not becoming a cake sorcerer in the depths of the jungle!” Ace snapped back, wounded by his friend turning on him. “I don't know what you do with this sort of—”
“—But you do know that the food stays in the bowl, yeah?”
Ace only stared at Thatch, clearly trying to think of a clever comeback, perhaps trying to conjure some way of pulling on an old sob story to help his case.
“Maybe Floor Cake would be good, and I'm doing you a favor,” Ace said defensively... then snorted, biting his lip.
Ahh, he wasn't really angry at Ace. Well, maybe just a little—it should be common sense to use a delicate hand with these things, no? But no, he wasn't mad. Just a little exasperated.
“Shall I give you a demonstration first, then you take over?” Thatch offered, holding out his hands for the bowl, which Ace passed over with a smile, all forgiven.
For all his overenthusiasm and general mishaps, Ace was undeniably an attentive student. Watching Thatch work with plain interest and full focus, Ace listened closely to the instructions that Thatch dished out in time with his movements, narrating what was obvious to him but brand new to his friend.
“The mixing motion should be in the elbow, not the wrist, as much as possible,” Thatch explained, stirring slowly. “Big circles like so, then when the ingredients start to combine a little, you can go a little faster. Or, if you like getting your hands dirty and aren't made of fire, you could always leave out the spoon entirely and squish it all up in your hands. That's what I usually do when making things with drier combinations—way more fun and so much quicker than this.”
Ace nodded, then asked, “Why not the wrist?”
“More likely to strain something there if you do this regularly... which, granted, you're not.”
Thatch glanced sideways at Ace, taking in his concentration, his relaxed body language. It was always such a pleasure to see him so unguarded, calm and present within the moment rather than haunted by things long past; things that he wouldn't tell Thatch despite how Thatch yearned to better understand his young friend, keeping his secrets hidden between Deuce and Pops alone. “Unless you'd like to swing by from time to time, that is.”
Ace shrugged. Thatch had to physically stop himself from rolling his eyes.
Within a minute or so the ingredients had been smoothly combined into a perfect batter, and so, under Thatch's directions, Ace rifled through yet another cupboard in the vast kitchen before reemerging with a metal cake tin.
There were no shenanigans throughout the greasing process (Thatch teaching Ace how to rub butter around the tin to stop the cake sticking to it), something which came as a relief to Thatch and his frazzled nerves. Ace did, however, stick a finger in the batter when he thought Thatch's back was turned, popping it in his mouth and pulling a face that clearly said he didn't think much of the uncooked cake. Well, good, thought Thatch, served him right.
“Here's the timer,” Thatch said, plonking the little gadget in Ace's palm. “Set it to 20 minutes, and at around the halfway mark you'll want to turn the cake 180 degrees to make sure it cooks evenly.”
Ace gave a dramatic flourish of a salute before twisting the dial to the 20 mark, and then set the timer on the counter. Then, before Thatch could do much more than open his mouth, Ace hopped up onto the counter also, swinging his legs over the side and beaming at Thatch's frown.
“What?”
“Take a wild guess,” Thatch grunted, folding his arms. “We've got several perfectly good chairs for you to park your ass, y'know.”
Ace cocked his head to one side, his grin spreading. “D'you often hand out baking lessons to crewmates?” He asked, veering so far off topic that Thatch was sure he was doing it to avoid being scolded yet again.
“Only when I'm forced to hear with my own ears that they think chefs are magicians,” Thatch said, meeting Ace's grin, still reeling from that particular display of dumbassery. “Cooking and baking are easy, which I hope I've just demonstrated. I'd be more than happy to give you boys proper lessons if it's something that actually interests you; yeah, you're in a crew with dedicated chefs right now, but either one of you might one day end up in a situation where you have to take care of yourselves for one reason or another. You're never too old to learn a new skill.”
“I'll ask Deu,” Ace said, seeming to actually consider the offer. “He said the same thing one time when Banshee gave us all food poisoning. Actually, he said he needed to learn then, but it was kinda rough in the Spades, we didn't get a whole lot of free time for cookery classes.”
Thatch snorted, raising an eyebrow. “And yet somehow you all found the time to party constantly, and you and Deuce successfully started and carried on a relationship. That there requires a lot of time and work.”
“Some things are worth the sacrifice of other ventures,” Ace said primly, giving Thatch a vaguely haughty little look.
“Now there's a line you're just repeating from your boyfriend,” Thatch grinned, making Ace snort. “Personally, I can't imagine picking fucking over learning how not to get poisoned by my crewmate, but whatever makes you both happy I guess.”
Ace snickered, looking for a moment like he was going to argue or challenge Thatch, perhaps say that his perception of them was wrong, that it wasn't just physical between them, that it was more and more and more to the point where it had been a running joke in the Spade crew that Ace and Deuce were telepathically connected.
Ahh, but Thatch knew that, and Ace wasn't oblivious enough to not have noticed how Thatch looked at them together sometimes, the wistfulness for a love like that lingering about his expression and voice regardless of how hard he tried to scrub them out.
Take this whole cake-related venture, for example. While having fun and learning something new, Ace's end goal was to make Deuce happy. Was that not just so damn adorable? So selfless? It was just cake, but it wasn't: it was that natural nature of Ace's, the one where he gave and he gave and he gave to those he loved – to Deuce in particular, always – to the point where he left nothing in reserve for himself.
That was Deuce's job, Thatch supposed. Ace pours his love and affection into Deuce; Deuce reciprocates, giving his everything back to Ace.
And wouldn't that be nice to share with someone?
The halfway mark approached them far too quickly once they got onto the topic of what the ever-loving hell was up with Marco's hair, something that usually made for a fun drinking game rather than sober discussion. Without being prompted, Ace scooted off the counter and turned the tin in the oven carefully—and Thatch winced as he did so, gritting his teeth to stop himself from saying something. Again, his fault: he really should have specified that Ace was to put on the oven mits hanging nearby, rather than using his bare hands.
“You doin' okay?” Ace asked, looking at Thatch's face carefully once he had resettled on the counter, concern obvious. “You look lost in your thoughts. Please don't tell me you're tryin' to get creative in how you're gonna next tell me off.”
He considered coming out with it then, if only for a moment; opening up the floodgates and spilling how the lesson had turned abstract in his mind, pivoting on a fact and dredging up the deeper feelings associated, loving Ace a little bit more than before because of it.
His boy.
His cherished friend; this young man who bordered the boundary between a son and a friend in Thatch's heart. Someone so impossibly important to him, and yet someone who, whenever told this, shook his head and let his gaze go far, not believing a damn word of it whatever Thatch said or did.
Deuce didn't make Ace look like that, though. Not ever.
Thatch heaved a sigh, holding Ace's gaze a beat longer than necessary.
“I'm thinking up a schedule for the two of you,” Thatch said, hoping it came out as easily as he hoped. “And how about this for a title: 'Cookery Classes for the Two Fools Most Likely to Kill Themselves: Teaching Those Who Somehow Convinced Themselves That Cooking is Magic'.”
“Oh my god, I love it,” Ace drawled sarcastically, leaning heavily into his East Blue accent. “You've gotta, you've just gotta, baby.”
With a snort of laughter, Thatch nodded at the oven, feeling both heavy and light simultaneously, happy with the sour tang of bittersweet underlying it.
“Consider it done! Before we go drawing up timetables and whatnot, let's get the cake out. You wanna see how we turn the frosting blue while we wait for it to cool?”
When Ace's eyes lit up, something he could only describe as fatherly swelled deep in Thatch's heart.
“Good. Get a new bowl out from the same cupboard as before, and this time, you're taking the mixing very. Very. Slowly.”