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Sigurd yawned, turning over in bed. He was preparing for a lazy morning — no work, no errands, just a nice day with Deirdre. No disasters—
Downstairs, something crashed. Deirdre shouted.
He leaped from bed, grabbed the sword from the wall, and charged down the stairs. Had someone broken in? He tumbled into the kitchen, blade brandished in front of him, and found a tragedy.
Well. Something like that.
Deirdre stood over a shattered mixing bowl, glaring at it like it’d personally wronged her. Eggs oozed out from beneath the glass shards. They looked like they’d broken in the fall, bits of shell scattered across the floor. She muttered something under her breath. Knowing her, she was casting curses on the bowl and all of its descendants.
She looked up at him, and her brow furrowed. “Good morning?”
Sigurd blinked, then looked down at himself. He wore Hello Kitty pyjamas. The sword was real, bought for several hundred dollars years back. His hair was still messy from sleep. He was twenty-six. He had a goddamn mortgage.
“Good morning,” he said, casually as possible. He tried to covertly set the sword down. Unfortunately, it was as long as his arm, and impossible to be discreet with. It clattered down on the counter. He cleared his throat. “Um. What are you baking?”
Deirdre raised a hand to her mouth, but her eyes crinkled with laughter. “Well, I was trying to make cinnamon rolls.” She glanced at the bowl. “Emphasis on trying .”
“...did you have whole eggs in there?”
“Yes? It called for two of them.”
“Deirdre, love…you’re supposed to crack them.”
“Oh.” She sighed. “Well, they’re cracked now .”
Sigurd smiled and came to help clean. He picked up the glass shards as Deirdre mopped up the eggs. As much as he loved her, she was hopeless at baking. That was what living in the woods most of your life did to you. She could identify a hundred types of mushroom, but when it came to things like eggs you didn’t have to fight a bird for , she was lost. He saw his laptop on the counter, open to a cinnamon roll recipe. If he had to guess, she’d searched something like “Hello, Google! My name is Deirdre. Can you please tell me how to make cinnamon rolls? Thank you!” to find it.
She washed her hands as Sigurd took out another mixing bowl. He skimmed the recipe. “Do you want help?” he asked.
“ Please .”
So he set to work activating the yeast, putting it in warm milk. Deirdre mixed the dry ingredients, and Sigurd dealt with the eggs and sugar. Working together, they made a competent dough fairly quickly.
“Now it has to rise,” he said, and Deirdre tilted her head. “Let it sit out for an hour,” he clarified. “It makes it fluffy.”
She narrowed her eyes at the bowl, covered in a tea towel. “I swear, you all think herbs are witchcraft,” she muttered, “and yet you agree that this is normal.”
Sigurd laughed and kissed her on the cheek. They went to sit on the couch. Before they settled, though, a vague sense of danger washed over him. A premonition of disaster.
“Have you seen the beast this morning?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “No. Oh, what is he doing?”
As if on cue, a black kitten rounded the corner.
Chulainn said it was “weird” to name your kitten after the dark god in your long-running D&D campaign. Sigurd and Deirdre wholeheartedly disagreed. Loptous was sixteen ounces of pure evil. To prove this, he jumped on the counter, looked Sigurd directly in the eyes, and swatted over the bag of flour.
“No! Sir!” Sigurd got to his feet and scooped up Loptous. He meowed in protest at being grabbed, but settled once Sigurd pet his head. Sigurd returned to the couch, and Deirdre leaned over to scratch the kitten’s chin. He immediately abandoned Sigurd in favor of sitting on her lap. Sigurd sighed, Deirdre laughed, and they snuggled together and chatted until the dough had risen.
Deirdre cleaned the flour as Sigurd put the rolls in the oven. Loptous helped, which was to say that he was too distracted by birds outside to knock things off counters.
Once they had finished, Deirdre opened the back door, letting in a warm breeze. “I’m going out,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
He didn’t ask why; every morning, Deirdre went to check on her herb garden. It didn’t stop him from wanting to trail after her like a lost puppy. Loptous seemed to feel the same. He stopped plotting against birds to stare pitifully at the door.
Sigurd picked him up and looked him in the eyes. “We’re down bad, aren’t we?”
He heard Quan’s voice in his head, asking, you just figured that out ?
He sighed, put the kitten down, and tidied the kitchen. The rolls came out of the oven, and he spent far too long fiddling with them, arranging two neatly on a plate.
When Deirdre returned, he ran over and kissed her soundly. She laughed, hands tangling in his hair. “You’d think I’d been gone for years.”
It took all his willpower not to say something cheesy, like every minute you’re gone feels like an eternity . The sentiment must have showed on his face, though, because Deirdre shook her head and kissed him again.
Then, looking at the counter, she noticed the cinnamon rolls. “They’re done?”
“Oh! Right! Yeah, they’re done. I plated some for you.”
She smiled. “Thanks, love.” She took the plate on the counter. He’d laid the two cinnamon rolls out a perfect distance apart, and placed a sprig of lavender near the edge. This was, quite frankly, too much thought put into early morning cinnamon roll aesthetics, but she didn’t comment on it. He took two for himself, throwing them haphazardly in a bowl, and joined her at the table.
Deirdre took a bite, and her face lit up. “‘s good!” she said around a mouthful of pastry.
Sigurd grinned. Loptous jumped up onto the table, laying down in a beam of sunlight. The air smelled of lavender and cinnamon, and the oven had left the kitchen pleasantly warm. He took Deirdre’s hand. The birds sung, the flowers blossomed, and all was well.