Work Text:
Okay, look. You couldn’t really blame Honami. How was she supposed to know the recipe would make this many cookies?! The website didn’t give a count, or anything!
And sure, maybe she could’ve estimated based on the volume of the ingredients, but… but…!
…she had no excuse for that one, honestly.
And now wasn’t the time to be making excuses, either. She had five minutes left before the cookies in the oven were done, and she had to finish cutting out her second-to-last batch before that timer went off.
Not only that, but she had to prepare the icing in advance so that she could start decorating the first batch, which would certainly be cooled by the time her final batch went in, and…
Honami let out a sigh, which quickly morphed into a groan.
How in the world could she make such a mistake…?
It’s not like she was ashamed, or embarrassed, or anything… mostly not, at least. No, she just… really had no idea what to do with all these cookies now.
Initially, she had planned to make just enough for her family and the rest of Leo/need to enjoy. Enough for everyone to have a few, and some extra for anyone who wanted them. She suspected Haru and Saki would appreciate it.
This many, though?!
There were already thirty cookies cooling, ten more in the oven, and another batch or two on the way. Altogether, that would make… oh lord, that would give her more than fifty cookies to decorate… and, arguably more horrifying, over fifty cookies to eat.
…oh goodness, and what were her parents going to say?! She had considered it before, but now that she fully understood just how many cookies she was up against, she suddenly found herself overcome with anxiety.
Obviously, there was nothing inherently wrong with baking over fifty cookies, but… well, what would you say if you came home to find that your daughter filled the kitchen with half a hundred sugar cookies?! A full hundred, if you round up! It was just… kind of a really weird, awkward situation that she’d rather not get herself into.
Plus, she’d probably get hit with a short lecture about always double-checking, or whatever. She wasn’t too thrilled about that one.
Just as she balled up the remaining scraps of dough, the oven timer went off.
Hurriedly, she removed the tray in the oven with a kitchen towel to shield her hands from the burning hot metal and swapped it for her new tray before the oven could cool. She set the hot tray down, added ten more minutes, then worked on getting the cookies onto a cooling tray. Ideally, they would cool on the baking tray for a while first, but the sheer volume of cookies she was working with just made it impractical.
Now, just as she had done for all the batches before this, she sprinkled flour on her working surface, rolled out the dough, and…
Honami sighed, hands aching, as she set another cookie down on the plate.
That’s four plates full of decorated cookies… though, the word decorated was being used pretty lightly here. The Christmas tree shaped ones were flooded with green icing, and the same in yellow goes for the stars. The snowmen simply got white icing and a few chocolate chips, but she told herself she’d go back to improve those ones later.
Honami left to grab a fifth, glad to finally be able to move her joints a little after standing still for so long.
She tried her best with the snowflake ones at first, piping crystalline patterns carefully with her trembling hands, but in the end, they succumbed to the same fate of icing-flooding.
How in the world was she expected to decorate this many cookies?! She should just make a few good ones for her friends, and try to get the rest of them over with…
…oh no, but what if her friends end up taking one of the bad ones? It wouldn’t affect their taste, obviously, and they would definitely assure her that it was okay, and maybe they’d even laugh about it.
But even so, she wanted nothing less than the best for them. After all the love and support they showed for her, after everything they’ve been through together, after all the hardships they’ve all endured, the least she could offer them was a plate of nice-looking cookies, right?
At the rate she was going, far too many of these cookies were going to end up looking like a mess. There was no way she could present them like this. Honami had to lock in.
She took a deep breath, shook the tension out of her hands, and scraped the icing off of the messier ones.
A little extra work was worth it… it was all going to be worth it in the end, as long as she could see her friends smile.
…
Honami’s eyebrows furrowed. Was it just her, or had there been an awfully high amount of steam in the kitchen?
And what was that smell? Some kind of meat, vegetables that she couldn’t quite place… where was it coming from? Towards the stovetop?
…wait--
She screamed when she realized she had left the stove on.
“THE SOUP!”
You:
mom?
promise you wont be mad
Mom:
oh dear
is there a problem?
You:
i uhh
may or may not have
ACCIDENTALLY
baked and decorated 58 cookies
Mom:
goodness
how do you do this accidentally
You:
I DONT KNOW
Mom:
well, to be honest, extra cookies sounds like the opposite of a problem :)
im sure our neighbors would like some, and haru can give some to his friends too
You:
you’re not mad?
Mom:
nope!
You:
phew
okay
promise you won’t be mad at this next part either
Mom:
haha i promise
You:
so i may have possibly maybe left the soup unattended while i was making the cookies
Mom:
im sorry?
You:
and it’s uhhh
kind of
Mom:
show me the soup
You:
haha
well
[sent an image]
Mom:
we’ll sort this out when i get home.
You:
i’m sorryyy :(
Well… that could have gone better.
After having forgotten to turn down the heat… and forgetting to turn off the heat… and forgetting to stir the soup every once in a while… and forgetting to add a few vital ingredients… and just forgetting about the soup in general…
…yeah, needless to say, they were going to have to make a new soup.
She wished she could blame the cookies for this, but really, it was her own fault. If she hadn’t made so many cookies in the first place, she would’ve been done with decorating by now.
At least she found the courage to tell her mom in advance so that she wouldn’t have to find out herself. It was a small task, but one still worthy of even just a little recognition.
To congratulate herself, she took a nice bite out of a deformed cookie, messily shaped out of the last few scraps of dough.
…
…
…
Her eyes widened.
…oh.
Oh shoot, this was good.
Not good enough to be able to eat like, eight of them, but still pretty good nonetheless. If nothing else, it brought her a touch of relief. Getting rid of these might be easier than she thought it would be.
A smile came upon her face, and a surge of energy shot through her at light speed.
Okay. Okay! She was going to decorate all of these cookies for her friends, and she was going to get rid of them all. She was sure of it!
With newfound motivation, she grabbed her piping bag. She could do this!
There’s a strange sense of pride that comes with gazing in earnest wonder at an array of lovingly decorated sugar cookies.
Something she had created with her own hands, to be enjoyed by those she cared about.
Despite having done similar things for her friends in the past, this feeling had never gone away. Rather, as their bonds grew stronger, so too did the intensity swell.
She could picture it now. Her friends’ smiling faces as they take a bite, the warmth strewn into their laughter, the fluttering of her heart as they gather together on this special day… she giggled to herself, wishing it could all come sooner.
…but, of course, there’s also the issue of all the extra cookies.
She had saved six for her neighbors, and ten for the rest of her family-- two for each of her parents, and six for Haru and any friends he might want to share with. Plus, there was that one cookie she had eaten earlier. That leaves her with… fifty-eight minus seventeen, which would be… thirty-one cookies.
…in other words, just about eight per person. Her previous estimate was surprisingly spot-on, but also incredibly unreasonable at the same time.
She supposed she could just bring out seven at first, two per person, to avoid overwhelming them. Of course, she’d only take one, due to that cookie she had earlier. Then, she’d tell them about her cookie problem, and they could discuss who to give all this to… yes, that sounded good!
Phew. And with that, all she had left to do was wait.
“Hona! These are soooo good,” Saki cried, munching down at a speed that would surely land her in an accident if replicated on the highway. After she had taken what must’ve been a million pictures, she had finally allowed the others to start eating, though Honami couldn’t help but suspect Saki herself was the most impatient out of all of them.
“You really put a lot of time into decorating them,” Shiho murmured, gazing at a cookie for a good five to ten seconds before even taking her first bite. Honami would be lying if she said the compliment didn’t make her blush just a little. “I can tell how much care you put into making these for us.”
“It’s really the least I could do for all of you,” she chuckled, fidgeting with the hem of her sweater. “You’ve all been so supportive of me, and I just… had to do something nice for you guys.”
“But you’ve been supportive of us as well,” Ichika insisted. “Even if you wanted to pay us back, you’re already doing that just by being our friend.”
“...she’s right,” Shiho agreed. “I’m glad to have you as a drummer, and as a friend. Don’t feel like you have to do these things for us, because you really don’t.”
“Yeah! We’d be so lost without you, Hona. If anything, we should be thanking you right now…! If you ever need help with anything at all, I promise we’ll be there!”
…
Oh…
…
Honami sniffled.
She didn’t really mean anything by what she said, and she already knew her friends appreciated her and everything, and yet, for some reason, she…
…why was she tearing up?
Why was her heart pounding like that?
Why did she feel so…
…
Surrounded by her closest friends, Honami let out a laugh.
She wiped her tears, her indisputably joyful tears, and grinned at the three who had stayed by her side for so long.
“You guys… I love you all, so much,” she told them, voice brimming with conviction. “I’m… so glad we’re friends.”
Saki’s expression shifted for a second before returning to an even brighter smile. “Yeah… me too!”
“...you know what,” Honami said, suddenly sitting up. “Didn’t you say you’d help me with anything?”
“Y… yeeeah?” Saki chuckled, suddenly looking a little unsure.
“Oh, no, it’s nothing bad!” Honami insisted. She must’ve scared her a little with her delivery. “I just have, ah… a little problem in the kitchen. Can you guys follow me…?”
Honami picked up the now-empty plate as she stood. Out of curiosity, concern, or who knows what else, the three girls accompanied her as she sheepishly revealed the motherlode of cookies sitting on her kitchen counter.
Saki’s eyes sparkled, though she was visibly holding herself back. “O- oh no…! Hona, do you need me to help you eat all of these cookies…?! I mean, I’ll do it if I have to, I guess…!”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Saki.” Shiho kept her in check with a friendly-yet-firm pat on the back. “I’m assuming the problem has to do with the cookies.”
“I can eat them,” Saki begged, with a considerably more obvious request than last time.
“I… don’t think you can finish all that,” Honami confessed, stifling a laugh, “but you’re right, Shiho. I do need to get rid of all these, if anyone is up to the challenge? And I also need to make a new soup; I messed up the other one.”
“How about we help you make the soup? We can discuss the cookie problem while we do that,” Ichika suggested.
“Ah, you don’t have to! That soup was my mistake, so…”
“It’s okay, Hona. We’re paying you back for the cookies! Plus… I really wanna cook something with you.” Saki gazed expectantly at her.
…Honami wished she could’ve said no.
Rather, she wished she wished she could’ve said no.
But she just couldn’t deny that feeling deep in her heart-- no, not even deep-- that feeling enveloping her whole heart, inside and out, begging to spend time with them this way.
“...okay,” she said with a smile, and something inside her burst with joy. She set the empty plate down in the sink. “Then, in that case, someone get the broth bones and radish from the fridge while I prepare the pot. Oh, and wash the radish!”
“On it.” As Shiho gathered the ingredients, she spoke. “I could get rid of at least four of those cookies. Shizuku and her friends might want some.”
Saki gasped. “Oh, and Tsukasa and Toya might like some, too! And Tsukasa could give some to his friends, and so could Toya, so that’s eight more gone. And I can take all the rest, so don’t worry about--”
“You might want to give some to Kanade and her friends,” Ichika interrupted while scrubbing a radish, eliciting a cry of despair from Saki. The other three laughed a little at her greatly exaggerated misery. “That’s at least sixteen gone in total. We can just share the rest of them, right?”
“Oh, you guys are right…! Thank you so much, I was really worried about how I’d get rid of all this.” Honami thanked them while holding the pot, overcome with relief at the solution to her issue, though she was afflicted with a new anxiety. She eyed the busy sink, wondering how in the world she was going to clear out this pot without them seeing the ruined contents.
Shiho seemed to notice her hesitation. “Do you need to fill the pot? I can add water if you want.”
“W- wait, hold on--”
“Hold on, Shiho, let someone taller handle the task. You gotta be able to reach the sink, after all.” Saki took the pot from her with a teasing smirk, then jumped. “Woah, there’s something in here. Did you already prepare everything, Hona?”
“Uh… no, that’s my old soup, but I kinda messed it up so--”
“Your old soup? I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” Ichika said with a smile, lifting the lid and oh god oh no close the pot CLOSE THE POT--
…
…
The three of them glared at her with the same horrified expression.
Honami hid her face.
…
“...Honami.”
“...yyyeees, Shiho…?”
“Why is the ‘soup’ a wet lump of beige solids”
Saki stammered. “No offense, but… I think I’d take hospital food over this.”
Ichika hesitated for a long time before sighing. “I’m really trying to think of something nice to say, but… are you sure that was supposed to be soup?”
…
On second thought, maybe she should just choke on all the cookies and die.
That sounded nice.
…wait, couldn’t she just have refrigerated some of the dough for later?