Chapter Text
Hanamaki stands in his kitchen, fiddling with a recording camera to make sure his entire work space is in the shot. After taking a deep breath, he sets it to start recording in 30 seconds and moves to stand behind the counter. He sends a thumbs up to Matsukawa, standing off to the side, and counts to 10 before he grins bright and cheerful, ready to get started! The light on the camera turns green.
“Helloooo, and welcome to my channel! I’m BambooFox and this is… Intoxi-bake-ed! The show where I, and a friend, put our livers and lives in danger by drinking whilst baking! Today, we’ll be making Raspberry Buns. And who might my guest be, you ask?” He holds his hands out dramatically as Matsukawa jumps into the shot with a ‘hup!’ and holds a hand up casually in greeting.
“Yo.”
“That’s right, it’s my best friend, one of my boyfriends, and next door neighbour, InkyDragon! Remember to check out his calligraphy channel as soon as we’ve finished here, the link is in the description below!”
“So, Fox, what are these ludicrous Raspberry buns and how do we make them?”
“Well, Inky, they’re a traditional British sweet bun that coincidentally, has raspberry in them.” Matsukawa gasps in fake shock, leaning away from Hanamaki like he’s said something deeply offensive. The huge smile on his face gives away his excitement at their target baking product though.
“Well I never! What do we do first, my fair foxy friend?”
“First…” There’s a dramatic pause as Hanamaki reaches under the counter, grabbing the bottlenecks of what he placed there early and putting them on the countertop firmly with a deadpan gaze into the blinking recording light on the camera.
“We get slaughtered.”
Two bottles of wine and half a bottle of vodka each later, both of them are undeniably wobbly on their feet but still sober enough to keep their thoughts straight. Hanamaki picks up a printed piece of paper, his words slightly slurring as he reads through it.
“So we need… We need… Are you ready Inky?”
“M’ready as the day I was birthed… Born. Day I was born.” Hanamaki pauses, narrowing his eyes at his thick browed friend.
“Wait, does that mean you’re ready, or you’re not?”
“M’READY.” Okay, maybe Matsukawa is a little more sensitive to vodka than Hanamaki is, so Hanamaki slides him a glass of water to drink between cut-scenes. He’ll sober up as they go along anyways, always the quicker one to recover from their drinking escapades. Luckily, Hanamaki has already measured out everything they need between cut-scenes of the chugging the alcohol and cheering each other on.
“We need our 200g of flour and a pinch of salt mixed in the bowl. Actually, I’m going to add cinnamon instead, because cinnamon is better.” He chucks the salt over his shoulder, not knowing he’ll regret it in the morning when it’s clean up time. Instead, he rummages in the cupboards until he finds the cinnamon shaker.
“Inky! Release the flour!” Matsukawa turns the small bowl containing the flour upside down into their mixing bowl with a cloud of white.
“Done! Where’s the Cinnannamonomon?” Hamaki flips the lid open and shakes twice. Not enough. He shakes again. Hmm… Could still use more… He shakes a third time.
The entire lid falls off and all the cinnamon left in the shaker falls into the flour.
“NooooOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!” Matsukawa blinks as Hanamaki drops his head onto the counter with a fake sob.
“We-... Fox, I gotta say, this is the earliest we’ve fucked up yet.”
“I know.”
“We weren’t even mixing yet.”
“I know!”
“... Are we still gonna carry on with this?” Hanamaki straightens up, wiping away his tears of mourning for the lost cinnamon. Technically, it’s not lost… It’s just… Going to taste really strong...
“Yes, yes we are. Next! We need to get messy.” In a sarcastic tone, Matsukawa shrugs to the camera.
“Oh boy, what could go wrong here?”
“Oh shh, it’ll be fine. This is 100g of butter, and we’re gonna rub it in with our fingertips.” Matsukawa brightens up with glee, and there’s a cut-scene to where they’re washing their hands, blowing bubbles at each other like it’s war. Another cut-scene takes them to having both hands in the bowl, leaning away from the bowl because it feels gross!
“Ew ew ew ew…”
“Yuuuuuuuck.” They pull their hands out with the mix sticking to their fingers and basically not in the bowl anymore.
“It’s stickier than… Than sticks.”
“Inky, sticks aren’t actually sticky.”
“It’s the thought that counts.” Hanamaki stares at Matsukawa as if expecting him to take it back, but he simply shrugs and gestures for them to carry on as they use a spoon to scrape the mix from their hands back into the bowl.
“We’d better wash our hands again.”
“I second that.” They scrub off, a cut-scene between drying off their hands and downing more drinks, since they’ve stepped backwards from drunk to tipsy. Hanamaki knows he’ll be stammering and sputtering more often now, but at least he won’t be falling asleep on the countertop like Matsukawa.
“Okay! Wakey, wakey, let’s get bakey!”
“Are we puttin’ them in th’ oven yet?”
“Not yet, just a little more to-... Oh Heck.”
“What?”
“The oven. I forgot to preheat the oven.” Matsukawa snickers and just waves his friend towards the posh-looking oven.
“Do it now. Won’t make much difference, since you already fucked it up.”
“Uh, excuse you, cinnamon is a blessing and these raspberry buns will be the best buns ever.” As Hanamaki cranks up the oven to gas mark 7, he doesn’t notice Matsukawa deadpan shaking his head at the camera. He’ll find it when editing later.
“Can you stir in the 100g of caster sugar?”
“Sure thing.” Matsukawa ‘carefully’ pours in the sugar from its measured out plastic bowl, but… It doesn’t really look enough, amongst the crumbly red mixture full of cinnamon.
Glancing over his shoulder to make sure Hanamaki isn’t paying attention - he’s gone from turning on the oven to looking for the eggs in the fridge - he picks up the nearby bag of sugar and dumps almost a quarter of the package in the bowl. Surely Hanamaki won’t notice that…
He stirs it in with a wooden spoon, whistling innocently. Hanamaki side-eyes him suspiciously, then returns to hunting in the fridge for the egg box. His eyes light up when he spots it behind the slab of cheddar cheese, for some reason out of its packet. Oh well. It’s still in the fridge. He picks out the egg box, and as he glances at Matsukawa, his drunken mind comes to a hilarious conclusion.
“... Inky, catch!” He throws the smallest egg with a strong flick of the wrist, knowing full well what’s about to happen and-
SPLAT.
Spotting the egg coming towards him at about waist height, Matsukawa automatically sank into a receiving position and went to bounce it off his forearms like a volleyball. Eggs, however, do not quite bounce like volleyballs. At the velocity Hanamaki launched it, eggs tend to break instead of bounce.
Matsukawa stares blankly at his egg-covered arms, the shell dripping to the floor with most of the egg white. When it finally registers through his inebriated mind, he glances up at Hanamaki in mock anger and betrayal.
“FOX!”
“Yes, my sweet InkyDragon~?” Hanamaki flutters his eyelashes teasingly, but the arrow striking through Matsukawa’s heart is definitely not fake. He can’t stay mad with Hanamaki like this, not even drunk or pretend-furious.
“...Nothing. Just put the damn egg in the batter.” Hanamaki grins and takes out the biggest egg, placing the others safely away in the fridge. He cracks it on the edge of the bowl and the egg plops into the centre of the mix, where Matsukawa has shaped a little nest for it to sit in.
“Really, I should have whisked it first, but I’ll take the whisk and- Wait, no! Not take the whisk! Take the risk!” Matsukawa is doubled over laughing, and as Hanamaki steps forwards to stop him laughing, his prank from earlier backfires on him.
The egg on the floor means his foot slides on the tiled surface and he does the splits, disappearing behind the counter from the point of view of the recording camera.
“I hate eggs!” When Hanamaki edits it, he’ll add a timestamp and speed up the video to show the good ten minutes passing before Matsukawa finally stops wheezing and weeping and howling with laughter as Hanamaki sits in a chair off to the side, only just in the frame of the camera.
“Glad that’s over. Now, one tablespoon of milk makes sure our mixture binds and once it’s a nice little clump-” The video skips to a point where Hanamaki is holding the bowl right up to camera to show the viewers the almost perfectly round ball of red-tinted dough. He skips back to Matsukawa and turns the bowl upside down, letting the dough thwump onto a floured board.
“- We need to knead it!” They start to knead the dough, heel of the hands working into the mixture with ease. They’re strong, young boys used to baking. The same muscles they use for volleyball are incredibly suitable in this situation. Hanamaki pauses to take a shot of tequila, offering Matsukawa a sip of vodka.
“Time to separate it! This particular recipe makes 12 buns, so you can always double it for twenty four, or mega quadruple it for a billion.” Matsukawa chuckles warmly at his enthusiastic friend.
“I’m not sure that’s how maths works, Fox.”
“Fuck your maths, I’m using common sense.” Hanamaki tears his share of the dough into six parts, not at all equal because his vision is blurring just a little. Of the two of them, Matsukawa is now the more sober one, and he waits until Hanamaki turns away to check the oven temperature to quickly re-size Hanamaki’s portions so they look slightly more equal, and rounded. He then does his own.
“What do we do now?” He picks up the printed pages, eyes scanning the words and finding their current step. Hanamaki obviously took the opportunity to add a few written comments on the side and Matsukawa snorts.
“Finger your buns? Wow, Fox, not sure if that’s safe to do in the kitchen.” Hanamaki swats at his cheeky smirk through laughter as Matsukawa wriggles his eyebrows suggestively.
“Not like that, you pervert! You have to- You have to make a hollow in the centre of each bun! So it looks like a tiny little nest!”
“Ohhh, I see~...” They set to work, Hanamaki slurring the words to Anaconda as he sways side to side whilst shaping the buns, making sure to nudge Matsukawa off to the side each time. It’s very distracting and Matsukawa knows his buns won’t be perfect shape.
“Let me see the instruction sheet… Okay, so, this is where the printed instructions are too faded to read, and you’ve just written ’jam it’ in huge, bubbly text.” Hanamaki snickers.
“Cus you gotta jam it.”
“... Jam what? How? As far as I know, that’s slang for dancing to music.”
“You gotta jam it!” He proudly holds up a jar of raspberry jam, pointing to the buns. Matsukawa clocks on almost immediately.
“Oh. Put the jam in the holes, I gotcha now.” Matsukawa fetches a spoon and starts to scoop out the jam and stuff the bun holes full, almost overspilling.
“Time to bake!” The buns are slid into the oven, and Matsukawa moves round to turn the recording off. For the ten minutes whilst the buns are rising and cooking, he and Hanamaki will sit down, drink water, and sober up for taste testing.
“Takahiro, come and sit down.” Tipsy as he is, Hanamaki is a well-behaved drunk and only whines as he comes over to the sofa, flopping over the arm and landing face down in the cushions. Matsukawa eases him up and sits down, letting Hanamaki’s head fall back into his lap.
“Did’ya set the timer?”
“Yup. Got you some water too.” He holds up a glass of water and Hanamaki wriggles upwards to take it into his hands and sip at it. He pulls his laptop out from a special drawer in the cupboard just within arms-reach.
“Shall we go through the comments on Friday’s video?”
“Last week? Oh yeah, you did that one alone. What’d you make?”
“A neopolitan birthday cake. Since you guys were decorating the party venue, I thought I’d make the cake to bring… Then realised it was update day and ta-da, my own intoxi-bake-ed birthday cake.” Matsukawa pets his hair softly, knowing that Hanamaki tends to get emotional whilst he’s sobering up, and will probably end up crying over the “wonderful, amazing birthday party” they surprised him with on Friday past.
“22 years old and you drunk-baked your own birthday cake… What a life we lead.”
“Technically I was still 21 then. I turned 22 at a couple minutes to midnight.”
“That makes all the difference.” Hanamaki wriggles in closer to rest his head on Matsukawa’s shoulder, huffing in amusement as he scrolls through the received comments on his last video. With over 10,000 views and 4,000 comments, it’s hard to look at them all, so he just glances through for the names of loyal watchers and people he knows.
“Oh look, there’s Yahaba… Ah, Watari commented just a few seconds later.”
“They must have watched it together. Anything from Kyoutani?”
“Nah, you know he only comments on Yahaba and Watari’s channels.”
“Good point. What about the kids?” Hanamaki laughs again, his warm breath ghosting over Matsukawa’s collarbone.
“We really shouldn’t call them kids anymore. They’re twenty. They have jobs, Issei.” Matsukawa humms into Hanamaki’s hair, remembering the day they went to the monthly ex-team meet up and Kindaichi and Kunimi both revealed they had jobs. Kindaichi works as a guide dog trainer, and Kunimi found his place in the graphic design industry.
“They’ll always be kids to us.”
“True, true. Oh look, there’s their comment.” Kindaichi and Kunimi shared an account, but it easy from reading the comments to tell who had written it. Lots of exclamation marks, no capitalization, and a lengthy paragraph. Matsukawa and Hanamaki merely looked at each other with grins before speaking in unison.
“Kindaichi wrote that.” Hanamaki finishes off the glass of water and scrolls all the way through to the first few comments. Of course, there’s the annoying ‘first’ comments as always, about 26 of them, but he ignores them in favour of finding the comments from Oikawa and Iwaizumi.
“Aha! Oi-Kirin Tori!”
“... I still can’t believe he called himself Oi-Giraffe Bird.”
“What did you expect, all his videos are animal based.” Matsukawa shrugs and hums. Oikawa runs a game play channel, and every single game he plays is based on animals or non-human entities. His currently on-going games are Niche, Spore, and Warriors: Untold Tales. With his charisma, humour, and surprising innocence, Oikawa makes for a really popular channel. Unfortunately he does get more hate along with that, a lot of people commenting on his gameplay and his personality.
“He said the Neapolitan was a good idea but it probably didn’t bake right because I poured a whole bottle of rum and and a touch of gin in it. And I quote; it should be a soggy bottom, not a drippy bottom; end quote.”
“He complains an awful lot for someone who tried to cook rice without water.” At Matsukawa’s deadpan interjection, Hanamaki can’t hold back his laughter any longer. The laptop almost drops to the floor as he slaps a hand across his stomach and guffaws until it hurts. Matsukawa has salvaged the laptop, reading through the rest of the comments on the page and waiting until Hanamaki calms down.
“He’d like to be a guest again, since you haven’t collabed with him recently.”
“Urgh, fine. If anything, the viewers liked watching him ruin everything and fail. He confused flour for washing powder! Washing powder! Why do you think I measure everything out beforehand now?!” Matsukawa snorts as he chokes on a laugh, passing the laptop back over.
“Still, maybe you should? It does make for an interesting video. I can always help you clean up in the morning.”
“... Alright, I can agree to it on those terms, but I’m putting the fire station on speed dial.” He replies to Oikawa’s comment with such, and is pleasantly surprised when there’s an instant response.
“.. Tooru sent me that emoji that means trouble. Should I lock the doors and windows?”
“Nah, but you should add the ambulance service to speed dial too. And maybe cook something simple. Nothing he can kill you with.”
“Issei, he almost killed me with bagels. And I only let him put the filling in!” Before Matsukawa can come up with a response, Hanamaki’s phone dings.
“That’s the two minutes warning! Let’s get the camera back on and oven gloves ready.” They hurry back into position, turning the camera on so Hanamaki won’t miss the oven pinging. He can edit out the unnecessary wait beforehand. After lingering for a while, and passing time by flicking little bits of kitchen roll at each other, the oven finally dings and Hanamaki straightens up with a little bounce, pep in his step and grin in place.
“They’re done!”
“Let’s hope they’re edible.”
“Excuse you, Inky! They look great!” He holds the tray out to proudly display the raspberry buns to the camera, and whilst they look a little flat, with jam spilling out of it’s usual nest, they’re baked all the way through. Hanamaki’s not so sure they should be pink-ish though.
“Give me a bite then.” Putting the tray down on a cooling rack, Hanamaki picks out one of buns and holds it out for Matsukawa to take a bite. He blows it to cool it down, then takes a bite big enough to cover the bun and the jam in the centre.
“... Ohmygod, feed me more, Fox, feed me.” Hanamaki cackled in victory as he shoved the raspberry bun into Matsukawa’s face, and flashed a peace sign to the camera. He takes a bite of his own and moans at the heavenly light and fluffy, sweet and cinnamon-y taste.
“And that just goes to show that even fuck ups are good inside! That’s all for today, and remember to check out InkyDragon, and subscribe to this channel to get notifications for every BambooFox video! The next episode of Intoxi-Bake-ed will be out this Friday, so keep an eye out because I’ll have a special guest returning. Until next time!” He and Matsukawa wave at the camera, although Matsukawa seems more interested in scoffing down the raspberry buns, to which Hanamaki snatches one he’s about to grab and biting into it.
As if life hates him, when he turns on his heel to go and turn the camera off, he slips again on that patch of egg. His hand hits the cooling rack as he goes down and raspberry buns can suddenly fly. Matsukawa bursts into warm, bright laughter.
“I fucking hate eggs!”