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Alastor’s memories of childhood sweets were of rare penny candies, tootsie rolls and necco wafers and Mary Janes, bought from the Woolworth and their tiny sweetness savored as it melted on his tongue. It wasn’t a treat he had often, there wasn’t usually much left from whatever money he could scrounge. He’d spent his days shining shoes, delivering groceries, selling papers and whatnot. More often than not after a hard days’ labor there wouldn’t be enough to buy supper much less sweets and he never developed a particular taste for them in life.
That trend continued in death, and his cravings were for meat between his teeth, the briny taste of blood on his tongue and the mealy crunch of bone. His meals were a carnivore’s diet and cooking was not only optional, it was an anathema.
His preferences didn’t make him incapable of cooking, of course, nor of making sweets. He was perfectly capable of following a recipe and embellishing it, so few recipes weren’t made better by a little tinkering, browning the butter, for example, adding a touch more vanilla, toying with the ratios of the sugars. His mother’s recipes were the only ones Alastor didn’t attempt to improve and this was no exception.
Chocolate chip cookies were a little out of his wheelhouse, true, for more than one reason. The blasted things hadn’t even existed before he landed in Hell and now that he was here, the ingredients weren’t easy to come by. But Alastor was not an amateur, not in cooking nor in dealmaking and his experience in both was serving him well.
Or so he’d expected.
The first batch of the disgusting blobs spread too much on the pan and ended not in cookies but one enormous cookie. Unacceptable and it met its fate in the trash bin.
The second batch were odd and flat, too brown and breaking, and they joined the grave of the first.
The third batch were oddly dry and crumbling, and only when Alastor checked the clutter of his work area did he discover the eggs he’d forgotten to add.
Another victim to join his count and by now Alastor was sweating in the heat of the kitchen. There was flour in his hair and dough stuck under his fingernails and he grimly began another batch. He was the Radio Demon, he would not be bested by a simple cookie.
The last batch was perfect. He knew it the second he slid the tray from the oven. Perfect golden-brown rounds, bumpy with chocolate bits, and the edges crisped to perfection. He left them on the tray for exactly two minutes before sliding them to the cooling rack.
Then he stacked them still warm on a plate, adding it and two glasses of milk to a tray, and started out of the kitchen, only to hastily return and strip off his apron, clean his face, turn off the oven, and then head out a second time, repeats seemed to be on theme today.
He carried the tray to the parlor and neither of the two occupying it looked up when he came in. Charlie and Lucifer were going over plans for their newest guests; their issues were multiple and dull, far too boring to waste a day on. Both of them wore expressions of frustration in their nest of papers and clipboards.
Lucifer didn’t look away from the mess of paperwork until Alastor was next to him, and that exhausted irritation melted away into pleasure before he even saw the tray in Alastor’s hands.
Utterly ridiculous, really, for a flutter of warmth to rise in Alastor’s chest simply from having Lucifer happy to see him. A Sin of Pride shouldn’t be so easily pleased and an Overlord shouldn’t be so pathetically keen to see it.
The speech he’d mentally rehearsed wittered out of his mind, a bit of delightfully snarky commentary on the childish desire for sweets, milk and cookies treats to match his height.
Instead, Alastor set down the tray with enough force to slosh a little milk from the glasses.
“Here,” Alastor said abruptly.
“Cookies!” Lucifer said happily, with all the childlike delight Alastor expected to see. He snatched one up and devoured it, moaning through chocolate-stained teeth in a manner that was highly inappropriate in the presence of his daughter. “Chocolate chip! My favorite!”
I know, Alastor did not say. Charlie ate one with nearly the same enthusiasm, and her moan was equally disturbing in an entirely different fashion.
“Did you make these?” Lucifer demanded, already reaching for another.
“Of course,” Alastor said, waving off the uncomfortably starry-eyed adoration two sets of eyes were casting his way. “They’re only cookies, hardly a challenge for someone of my—mmph!”
A sudden chocolate-sweetened kiss cut him off, Lucifer lunging up to capture his mouth and that enthusiasm was difficult to ignore when it was practically climbing him, a tongue darting against his own sharing the combination rich butter and sugary darkness.
His inability to ignore Lucifer was a weakness that he couldn’t afford, and yet here he was, paying out his pennies for a brief taste of sweetness.
Lucifer drew away far too quickly for Alastor’s tastes. He nearly took a kiss of his own when a flicker of pink tongue licked away a smear of chocolate from Lucifer’s lips, Charlie’s presence be damned.
Then he caught himself, stepped back, offering a bright smile. “Such an overreaction for cookies,” he scolded lightly. “Be sure to bring the plate back to the kitchen.”
“We will, love,” Lucifer said, absently. His attention was already back on the page in front of him with the occasional cookie interruption. He didn’t see the way Alastor caught his breath, his eyes briefly closing.
He turned on his heel and back out, to the kitchen and the mess he’d left before anyone else noticed it. His penny was spent, that sweetness dissolved away but the memory would linger for some time to come.
-finis