Work Text:
It was cold before Pearl… yeah, let’s call it moved here. It was cool with the dying breaths of autumn, with the first whispers of snow on the mountaintops that felt like they inched closer to the grass with every passing day she spent alone. It was cold when she pushed herself to the limit every night, staying up too late and letting Tilly play rough and never quite caring enough about the damage she was taking.
Things are better now.
The winter is over. Spring crept shyly in, sprinklings of cherry blossoms floating through the Archipearlago as she slowly built it from the world’s shittiest base (literally) in the side of a mountain to an actual collection of pretty builds on chaining islands. And then spring turned itself to summer, April warming into May, the empires coming alive with blooms and beauty like Pearl’s never seen before, at least as far as she remembers. The water has been getting warm enough to swim in, even, which Pearl has taken advantage of more than once while Scott sits judging on the rocks, attempting not to get sand in between his toes, or in his fur - he says it’s impossible to wash it out in one go, and he doesn’t like getting wet in the first place.
Summer also brings with it another wonderful thing.
(“We missed your birthday,” Scott had pointed out over sushi in Animalia one afternoon.
“Did we?”
“Yes! It’s in November.”
“Ah, shit,” she’d shrugged, “I guess there’s always next year. When’s yours?”
“Mine is in Pride Month,” Scott had said, grin audible under his mask (they were in public, after all, and as far as his citizens were concerned, Scott was a perfectly normal human man). “Sausage’s I think we also missed, but we were kind of… busy at the time.”
“Right,” she’d nodded, “we’ll get him next year as well.”
“I should ask Katherine about h-”
“Don’t, fucking don’t,” Pearl had interrupted, trying to slap a hand over his mouth and failing due to the aforementioned mask, “I’ll kill you again.”
“Katherine, my good friend Katherine who I’ve never been scared of, I wonder when her birthday is,” he’d insisted, pulling out his communicator.
“You suck, you suck!”
“Hello… Katherine… I was just… wondering…”
“What about Jimmy, huh? When’s Jimmy’s birthday?”
“That doesn’t work on me, I know that one, it’s in May. Unless it’s different now because he’s not technically the same guy I married.”
“Should I ask?”
“Shut up!”)
Summer brings with it the knowledge that Princess Katherine, the acting Monarch of Dawn, will be celebrating her birthday on the summer solstice, on the twenty-first of June. Pearl’s not sure if every sunborn is… born on the day with the most sun… or if it’s just a really fortunate coincidence.
Either way, she has to do something to celebrate it. For normal reasons.
This is what brings her to Gem’s kitchen, which the Princess of Glimmer Grove has so graciously offered Pearl the use of while she’s taking Thimble and Tuba for a walk around the empire grounds. Pearl stands in front of an assembled selection of flour, sugar, milk and eggs, with a basket of fresh-picked strawberries sitting to the side with the jam and the buttercream icing.
She does not have the first clue what the hell she’s doing here.
But Pearl is nothing if not one to commit to something, and so she’s gonna make the damn cake and she’s gonna give it to Katherine and Katherine’s gonna like it.
The recipe that Gem has left her with is easy enough. Portion out the wets and the drys in separate bowls, mix together with the spoon, portion into two cake tins and then check with a skewer to make sure it’s cooked - that seems alright. Gem even helped her find the ingredients, just so she was certain she wasn’t going to fill the thing with salt instead of sugar and send Katherine to the doctors’ instead of giving her a birthday treat. (Well, she’s been told a pinch of salt will do the mixture good, but she’s erring on the side of not doing that, because she doesn’t really know why you’d add salt to a sweet thing.)
It’s fine. It’s cool. Pearl knows how to mix things. It’s not exactly brain surgery, is it? How much can she possibly fuck it up?
So she uses the cup measure she’s been given to put the flour and the sugar in equal amounts together, and gives it a bit of a spin with her finger to make sure it’s… going to mix. Or something. Next, she cracks the egg (Gem had asked her if she knew how to do that, which was kind of a stupid question, because who can’t crack an egg?) and pours in a generous helping of milk. The traditional recipe calls for a bucketful, but Gem’s informed her that cooking in the oven means you don’t need nearly as much liquid content as you would for a furnace, so she’s pretty sure that this will be enough.
The wets and the drys combine in the bigger bowl, Pearl attacks it with the wooden spoon until it looks smooth enough, and then she pours that into the two cake tins so she can…
Ah shit. Gem mentioned something about “preheating the oven”, didn’t she?
Eh, Pearl decides, it can’t be that important.
Once she’s turned on the heat and put the two tins in the oven, she allows herself to just take a few minutes to sit back and evaluate. It seems like everything’s going alright; she can even use the time while the cake is baking to start chopping up the strawberries for the topping, right?
Gem even has this cool block she keeps her knives in, from which Pearl pulls the sharpest-looking one (it has kind of a curve to the end) and starts halving the strawberries. She’s careful not to get her fingers in the way of the blade. It’s a nice day out - warm, bright, sunny - and Pearl would hate to ruin that with a sudden injury and, at worst, an unexpected need to respawn.
She’s not quite sure how many strawberries go on top of a cake, so she does the whole basket just to be safe, and when that looks like a few too many, she allows herself the luxury of eating one or two.
It’s amazing. Gem’s crops are sweet and decadent and satisfying like nothing she had the chance to eat before she got here, before she spent the spring ferrying herself from kingdom to kingdom in the hopes of escaping Scott’s curiosity. Which, ironically, literally did kill the cat in the end - but that was kind of what they both needed at that point. Nothing quite like an impromptu explosion to remind you that you’ve gone through much worse things together, and that you’re not gonna be able to get rid of one another after this much back-and-forth and stressing and awkwardly pretending that you don’t feel the soulbond from your past life drawing you back together in this one. Or something like that - Pearl’s been doing her best to forget all that, to put as much of it behind her as she can with the new world and with the turn of the seasons. Scott tells her that he prefers to remember, that he would rather have as many memories as possible of her even if a lot of them kinda really suck. Pearl can’t exactly relate, but she’s glad that if that’s what he wants then he gets to know how things used to be, and how much better they’ve become in comparison.
… Pearl catches herself getting lost in the repetition. She looks down. There’s only about four strawberries left; she’s eaten the rest absent-mindedly.
Oh well. Cake’s a cake, toppings or no toppings, and she’s sure Katherine will still enjoy it.
She checks on the trays in the oven and figures that they look about -
ah, shit, was she supposed to wash the strawberries?
She takes a quick detour to cup the remaining pieces in one hand and run them under the sink for a couple of seconds, and then she gets around to pulling the cakes out of the oven. They sit on the counter to cool; Pearl doesn’t wanna be messing around with the tins while they’re still hot enough that she needs a cloth wrapped around her hand to do it. Once they're safe enough that she can touch them without wincing away reflexively, she turns the tins over to try and get the cakes out, and when they don't come out immediately she bangs them against the counter once or twice to encourage it a little.
The results are... questionable. They're cake, sure, but they're also pretty much one big crater. She hadn't realised cake was capable of collapsing in on itself like this.
Still, nothing that a little icing can't fix! Pearl grabs the spreading tool that Gem had shown her and starts spreading jam across one and buttercream across the other, just like she was told. It does all start to migrate down towards the middle of the dip, but that's fine; if she adds a little more then it will fill the gap and be like nothing ever happened. Pearl lifts the finished product of her coverup and sticks one atop the other, ignoring the way it lists a little to the side.
From there it's smooth sailing - a little more on the top, a little on the sides, what remains of the pile of strawberries, and Pearl has made cake!
Satisfied, she pulls out her comm and goes to text -
Ah.
<katherineeliz> I'm here!
<katherineeliz> Are you here?
<katherineeliz> I don't see anyone
<katherineeliz> I am just gonna wait in the courtyard I guess
<katherineeliz> Hope things are going well!
Maybe she should have been checking in a little more often; the surprise she'd promised Katherine is now about twenty minutes overdue.
<PearlescentMoon> sorry!!! coming
Okay, so - cake on tray, which takes a little scooping, because she forgot she'd need to move the icing-ed cake off the counter, and makes it tilt a little further - tray with cake serving tool thingy - no time for refreshments, if Katherine needs any water or tea or anything she can get it herself - apron off - out the door and down the hall towards the "conservatory" that faces off of Gem's courtyard, where the Princess awaits. Pearl lets out a deep breath once she's seen her; they're cool, they're good, everything is fine.
"Hello!"
Katherine jolts, just a little, and turns to face the door. "Oh! Cake! Oh, thank you so much, that's so lovely! Hello, how are you doing?"
"Bit of a struggle, not gonna lie, but I'm sure it's edible," Pearl grins.
"I'm sure it will be wonderful," says Katherine, and Pearl averts her eyes rather than take the compliment.
She sets the cake down in front of Katherine, where she's sitting at the wooden garden table that's hot with the afternoon sun. "Bon appetit! Here's the little knifey thing. First slice for the birthday girl, of course." And then, after a beat, "Oh, shit, happy birthday!"
"Thank you, Pearl," Katherine chuckles.
She screws her eyes shut tightly as she makes the first incision - Pearl's not really sure why. Maybe it's to avoid watching the disaster if it does spontaneously combust in front of her. Either way, it's fine, but when she removes the slice and hesitates a second before picking it up with her fingers, Pearl becomes blindingly aware that she should've brought out some napkins or something. "D'you need a tissue?"
"No, no, I'll be fine!"
Katherine takes a bite from the edge of the slice. Her face immediately scrunches small again, but this time it looks less like concentration and more like confused disgust. She hates it.
"It's, uh. Crunchy?"
Oh. "What?"
"I don't know what that would be," she says, mouth still half-full, putting the piece back down - and then she pauses and pulls something out of her mouth to study. "Oh, right! Oh, that's alright, I was - you've just left a little bit of the eggshell in, that's all."
Pearl freezes. "You're supposed to leave that out?"
"... Yes?"
"Oh, fuck," she sighs, letting her forehead knock down flat on the table.
Beside her, Katherine's voice is full of laughter. "Pearl, you left the whole eggshell in the mixture? What did you think would happen?"
"I thought it would - I dunno - dissolve? I thought you put it in and then it would go away while the cake was cooking."
"No," she giggles, "it does not do that. So there are shell pieces in the whole thing?"
"Yeah," Pearl groans.
There's a second or two more of quiet. She finally picks herself up from the table, just to see if Katherine's walking away from her idiocy, but sees instead the Princess pulling the slice apart, plucking little bits of shell from between the bubbles of the actual cake.
"Okay, now d'you want a tissue, because I can go back and -"
"It's fine," says Katherine, studious in her efforts, frosting all over her fingers. "You put in all that work - the least I can do is find a way to appreciate it."
Pearl sighs and lets her head rest in her hand. It's too hot out to put in all this effort - the longest day of the year is impossibly sunny - and yet here Katherine is, faced with Pearl's failure of a cake, still trying to make the most of it. She's the impossibly sunny one, to be honest, filled with a relentless determination for optimism that Pearl doesn't quite understand.
Katherine takes a small bite of what must be shell-less cake, cocks her head, and then - unbelievably - hums approval. Must be alright, then. Not a total failure? Pearl will absolutely take that.
And then she studies the mess she's made of her fingers, and -
"Argh! What the hell!"
Katherine's wiped a fingerful of frosting all across Pearl's nose. She giggles even harder at the sight. "Because you're so sweet," she explains through a smile that splits her whole face open, and it's fucking gorgeous, and Pearl gets totally lost in it for long enough that the moment is probably gone, but she really doesn't care.
So lost, in fact, that she barely notices Katherine shifting her chair down towards her side of the table. When she checks back into reality, Katherine is a lot closer to Pearl, and still sporting that smile.
"May I?"
Pearl's not quite sure what she's asking, but she assumes it's probably something to do with the cake - and yeah, sure, Katherine can do whatever she wants with her own birthday cake. "You may?"
Instead of moving back towards the cake, though, Katherine leans forward, quick and careful, and she kisses Pearl's frosted nose clean.
Pearl feels the chill of it run through every inch of her.
She must look shellshocked as anything, because Katherine's smile drops. "Oh - sorry, did I not -?"
"No! No, fucking, no," Pearl reaches out to grab Katherine's hands in hers, and now they're both covered in frosting, "it's fine, it's - just - was not expecting that."
"You're so cold," Katherine murmurs.
"Yeah, blame Scott," she replies.
"Um. I am seriously sorry if I - if that was overstepping a boundary, or -"
"No, fine, very fine, extremely fine," I'm extremely fucking gay, I honestly can't believe you haven't caught on by now.
"Good!"
"Good."
They both sit awkward, hands entwined, about an inch of space between them.
And some kind of - of fucking lesbian spirit of confidence must enter Pearl, because she makes a choice. "May I?"
"Hm? You, uh..." Katherine's eyes dart down to their hands, and then back up to where Pearl's looking squarely at her face. "You - yes, you may, yes, please."
It's maybe two or three minutes later that Gem gets back, two dogs in tow, one of which is very excited to see his owner again, and barks more than loud enough to show it.
The cake sits long forgotten in the middle of the table, sunlight melting its frosting and making it look even more lopsided and shoddy than it already did. The cake slice reflects a brighter ray right across it, slowly melting a straight line out of the coverage and on to the tray. And Pearl and Katherine, caught in the act, having left buttercream stains all across each other's waists and backs and shoulders, can do nothing but laugh into each other's mouths at the situation in which they've found themselves.
It really isn't all that bad of a cake, Pearl finds, when she gets around to trying some. But, to be honest, she doesn't really give a shit about the cake now that she's had a taste of something far sweeter.
