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A warm spring morning was searching for its way through the blinds, eager to slip inside the apartment that, according to it, lacked warmth and light. So now it brushed softly over the faces of the two young men sitting at their kitchen table, sipping their coffee. Each spending the morning differently, yet still together.
“These dumplings look fantastic, don’t they?”
Henry firmly placed his coffee mug down on the table so he could show Hans the picture of the dish. He turned his phone toward him and leaned in slightly so he could take another look himself.
“They do look good… maybe I could try making them sometime,” Hans laughed.
A little ironically, with the knowledge that neither of them could cook and that coffee and tea were pretty much the only things they knew how to make without needing to call the fire department. He would swear he was worse at it than Henry.
“No one has ever cooked anything for me just because, so why not.” he added casually, with the same laugh that had followed his words.
It was said like one of those things people mention in passing and then collectively forget. Something both of them could laugh about, because neither of them was capable of it anyway.
But Hans didn’t forget.
He took it literally.
So now he stood at the kitchen counter, holding the old recipe notebook that had belonged to his mother, desperately looking for something that might not only help him avoid burning the kitchen down but also make his partner happy. Carefully, he flipped through the pages filled with all sorts of recipes, ranging from - at least at first glance - sweet desserts to more complicated dishes like svíčková.
Only now did he wonder how, in the three months they had been living together, they hadn’t starved to death yet. Most of the time they were rescued by Henry’s mom, or simply by ordering food.
The thought alone made his shoulders slump, his head following as he shook it in disbelief.
Maybe today he would discover that he was actually good at cooking. Maybe, somehow, he had miraculously gained the ability in the past year he hadn't tried.
With renewed enthusiasm, he headed for the fridge to grab some butter.
The recipe claimed the first step was to start by frying onions in it. Hans didn’t have the time - or the mental capacity - to question why, but he trusted his mother and her cooking, which he would never refuse.
Cutting the onion earned him a few restless tears from his irritated eyes, which already felt like they might stop belonging to him entirely. With the last bit of vision he still had, he added it to the slightly melted butter and lowered the heat of the stove a little, just so he wouldn’t accidentally burn it while seasoning the ground meat.
There was no way he could mess that up.
He had reassured himself of that so many times that he was starting to believe it.
Salt.
Pepper.
Some spices that looked convincing enough.
Hans paused over the recipe for a moment before adding garlic too, simply because it was written there and he had decided that he would be the kind of person who actually takes recipes literally.
The same recipe also stated that starting to boil water for the pasta at this point would be the best decision. To Hans, however, it seemed like the worst possible moment to focus on anything other than the single thing already happening on the stove. He was barely managing to watch the onions as it was, and now he was supposed to keep an eye on the moment when the water would start boiling too?
Another set of restless tears - this time not caused by the onion but by his own mind - almost pushed their way out of his eyes. He quickly blinked them away, giving them no space.
He felt overwhelmed with emotion, yet the one thing that kept pushing him forward was the image of his beloved.
Unfortunately, the onion clearly had no emotions of its own — and certainly not romantic ones.
Its edges were slowly turning a suspicious shade of dark.
Hans panicked.
That wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the recipe.
He quickly stirred it in a desperate attempt to save it. Improvisation was important, after all, and he wasn’t about to let his chance slip away. Every recipe had to be invented by someone at some point.
Hans stirred the onions for a while longer, as if he could convince himself he still had everything under control. Meanwhile, the pan was producing a sound that was roughly within acceptable limits.
He decided to believe that.
The ground meat in the bowl waited more patiently than it deserved. Hans picked it up and tried to work all the spices he had added earlier into it. Under his fingers it felt cold and slightly stubborn, but little by little it began to hold together the way the recipe had promised. This was starting to look like real cooking.
That optimism lasted exactly until a loud hiss came from the pot beside him.
Hans froze.
He turned toward the stove just as the pasta water began to bubble in a way that very quickly revealed one crucial problem.
There was far too little of it.
The pasta stuck out of the water like the wreckage of a sinking ship.
He stared at it for a moment.
Then he grabbed a wooden spoon and tried to push them deeper into the water, as if that might somehow solve the situation.
It didn’t.
Instead, it created an even bigger disaster, one that nobody could possibly keep under control. He let out a loud sigh and dumped all the meat into the pan, breaking it apart with the spoon while the pot continued filling the kitchen with a strange, unsettling sound.
Hans tried to ignore it. He would argue that dealing with one problem at a time was a much more reasonable strategy than panicking over three at once.
The pan hissed as the raw meat touched the hot surface. The onion, which had seemed merely suspicious a moment ago, was now very openly burned.
Behind him, the pot hissed again, louder this time.
Hans froze and slowly turned around.
There was almost no water left.
The pasta had begun sticking to each other and to the sides of the pot, and steam was rising from it in a way that definitely didn’t look like something that should be part of normal cooking.
“Okay,” Hans said after a moment, defeated.
The first salty tears searched for their way out, pressing painfully against his eyes, begging for permission. His mind was everywhere at once, cursing him in all the places where it knew it would hurt the most.
He fought them stubbornly as he slowly turned off the stove and opened the windows, trying to air out the smell so Henry wouldn’t suspect anything.
The failed cooking slowly turned into quiet self-blame and thoughts about every single thing that had ever gone wrong for him.
Defeated, with his head buried in his hands and his mind full of thoughts, he sat on the small kitchen stool. He had no idea what to do with the mess he had created.
He had hoped that at least with good intentions, the cooking would work out. That at least once, his own hands and mind wouldn’t work against him.
The sound of keys in the lock was impossible to miss.
Too loud.
So loud it drowned out the sound of pressure building near his heart. It thickened with worry about what Henry would say and what he himself should do.
For a moment he considered simply staying where he was and pretending he had never been in this kitchen at all. He could cover his eyes and stop breathing so he wouldn’t even be heard.
If he couldn’t see Henry, then Henry wouldn’t see him.
The door opened.
The heavy steps of his exhausted other half echoed through the apartment. They seemed louder than ever before, perhaps because Hans had never feared his arrival home. On the contrary, he had always looked forward to it.
Today, however, he would gladly postpone it indefinitely.
His conscience didn’t let him, and instinctively he lifted his head just as Henry appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.
He stopped mid-step, his gaze sweeping across the kitchen in undisguised shock.
First to the open window beside which the clearly miserable Hans was sitting.
The smell of burnt cookware and food forced his eyes to drift toward the stove, where a pan with burnt onions and raw meat still proudly remained. A pot without water, filled with pasta that might once have been actual pasta - something someone had created with the intention of being eaten.
These were far from that.
His eyes returned to those teary blue ones, silently begging for forgiveness, hand in hand with embarrassment.
For a moment, there was silence.
“You're…cooking?” Henry asked carefully.
Hans rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and nodded shortly.
“I tried.” he admitted quietly.
Henry’s gaze swept over the kitchen again.
“And?” he asked after a moment.
“It didn’t go well,” Hans sighed. “But I guess that’s pretty obvious.”
Henry studied him silently for a moment.
Then he took a few steps deeper into the kitchen. The floor creaked softly under his shoes, and for a moment Hans felt like a judge was approaching him, ready to deliver a verdict
Instead, he stopped by the stove. He leaned over the pan as if considering whether whatever was inside still belonged in the category of food.
“Hm.” he murmured.
Hans quickly lowered his gaze back to his hands. He had the sudden urge to cover his ears, to force his brain to forget that he had ever learned how to listen, recognize words, and understand them. He expected a remark. A joke. Or at least that familiar amused huff, that easy superiority over the whole situation.
But nothing like that came.
“Why?” Henry asked after a moment.
Hans lifted his head. He looked into those deep blue eyes that held nothing but overflowing concern and softness.
“What do you mean, why?”
Henry shrugged and nodded toward the stove.
“Why are you cooking?”
The last syllable echoed in Hans’s ears. It gathered weight, trying to understand the strange lightness of the situation they were in. Words were impossible to find, so he stayed silent, lips pressed together as he studied every crease in his palms again.
“I…” he began.
He looked down at his hands again, as if they might help him find an answer.
“You once said,” he finally murmured, “that no one had ever cooked for you just because.”
The silence grew heavy - almost unbearable. It clung to the walls the same way the pasta had clung to the sides of the pot and simply stayed there. It didn’t echo back. It just waited for what would come next.
“So I thought…” he swallowed hard against the weight of his tears, “that I could try. I wanted to make you happy.”
Henry turned his head toward the miserable little pile of a man that was his lover, still sitting by the window feeling sorry for everyone involved. His expression softened, and his legs moved before he even had time to take a breath. He stopped right in front of him and knelt down, his hands gently cupping Hans’s flushed cheeks.
“You idiot,” he said, smiling in disbelief.
The cold fingers that had only recently been gripped by the raging wind outside now brushed against those soft, warm cheeks. Blue eyes searched the other pair - slightly reddened ones - with an offer of the deepest kind of affection.
Hans avoided them for a moment, as if afraid he would find disappointment there, the same disappointment he had already imagined himself. His mind kept betraying him, and he kept giving in to it.
But there was only quiet amusement.
And something much softer.
“You know,” Henry murmured, gently wiping away a tear with his thumb, “when I said that no one had ever cooked dinner for me just because,”
He glanced briefly over his shoulder toward the stove.
“I didn’t mean you had to destroy the kitchen.”
Hans immediately rubbed his eyes.
“I didn’t destroy it,” he mumbled defensively.
Pause.
“Just… a little.”
Henry laughed softly. The sound was short but warmly tender, and something in Hans’s chest tightened dangerously when he heard it.
“Hey,” he added after a moment, tilting his head slightly so Hans would look up again.
“The result doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that you tried, and that it came from you.”
He smiled warmly, still brushing away the new tears that kept appearing. For a moment the kitchen fell silent again. This time the silence was lighter, softer, the kind that soothes the soul instead of draining it.
“I’d love to taste your effort,” he added, “but that very raw meat is honestly terrifying me.”
The first crack in the catastrophe inside Hans’s head finally appeared. A light, effortless laugh escaped from deep in his lungs, calming the storm that had been swirling inside him.
“Well, obviously.”
Henry smiled and ran his thumb along the same path on his cheeks one last time before slowly withdrawing his hands. For a moment he looked into Hans’s eyes again, as if making sure the laughter was real.
Then he slowly stood up from the floor, his fingers catching Hans’s chin and gently lifting it so he could press a soft, sincere kiss to his forehead.
He turned back to the stove and silently examined the burnt pan and the pot that looked as if they had long since given up any fight.
“Alright,” he declared at last. “Plan B.”
Henry reached for his hand and gave it a short, reassuring squeeze, making sure his Hans was still there.
“You stay right there,” he said calmly. “I’ll order something to eat.”
“I could’ve done that from the start.”
Henry looked back at him again, amusement glinting in his eyes.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But then I’d never have discovered that you’re willing to destroy the kitchen - and yourself - just to make me happy.”
Hans laughed again, more quietly this time. Warmth spread through his lungs, filling them too quickly, and he found himself getting used to the lightness with surprising ease.
“You know what?” Henry said thoughtfully.
Hans turned his head toward him, studying his calm posture.
“Next time we’ll start with something simpler.”
“Like what?”
Henry turned and answered without hesitation:
“Tea.”
Another tireless laugh escaped Hans’s lungs, softly echoing between them as he gathered the courage to stand up from the stool. His steps closed the short distance between them, and his arms wrapped around Henry, pulling him into the most sincere embrace.
Maybe this wasn’t dinner, but it was a first attempt.
In the end, they might discover that tea is exactly the kind of complicated recipe they can both manage. And the kitchen, which had looked like a disaster just moments ago, suddenly felt a little more like home.
And that was worth more than any recipe.