Work Text:
The facts were these: the piemaker ran a busy little shop in the middle of a city, and business was rarely slow, so he had to hire help in order to keep things functioning.
Minho was first, an old friend from boarding school who couldn’t bake worth a damn—he was too rough on the pie crusts, made them wilt in a way that the piemaker’s gentle touch made them sing—but he made the fastest deliveries that the city had ever seen. The second, Gally, hired to be a waiter, who proved himself well spoken despite his often gruff attitude, because the piemaker saw a lot of himself in the way he had to put on his social niceties to interact with other people.
The third was perhaps the most important of all: Newt, a spry blonde with a thick British accent, who proved himself to have a hand for the pies not at all unlike the piemaker himself. Alby, owner and proprietor of his mother’s restaurant, Pienstein, named for their namesake in a punny way that drove Alby crazy most days he looked at the sign, was very picky and protective of his recipes; he could make a lattice crust practically crumble in someone’s mouth, personally hand picked his ingredients and made sure that no one touched them but him, until Newt came along. Newt, with his beautiful voice and his messy hair, who rolled into Alby’s life like the very pin he used to push dough flat, who babytalked the dough into cooperating and swore at it when it didn’t, who picked ingredients from Alby’s garden without having him cause a fuss.
Being in love was a troubling thing for the piemaker, it seemed, because it was something he’d never really cared for, until Newt walked into his life. He wasn’t very good at wooing—no, he wasn’t very good at being kind, at all—but Newt brought out a side of the piemaker like sugar brought out the crust of his famous three-berry pie.
The two of them baked together every night in preparation for the sales the next morning, and it quickly became Alby’s favorite part of the day. At eight PM on the dot, he’d close the shop, and they’d work in companionable silence, or Newt would chat with him in his dulcet voice about his best friend or his work outside of the pie shop, and the tones of his voice colored Alby’s world like an artist on a blank canvas. For you see, the gruff piemaker loved his pies, but there was little more that he loved more than his lovely assistant, who caught his hand as they cleaned the kitchen late one evening and told him the very same. When Newt kissed him for the first time, it tasted like strawberry rhubarb—shank’d been sampling the filling, again, was his first dizzy thought before he lost anything that might be ticking around in his head to the soft, sweet mouth pressed onto his.
That would be the first time they kissed, but also, it would be the last. That very night, Isaac Newton, at twenty one years, two weeks and six days old, found himself disenchanted with the world and most everything in it, save for the piemaker and his pies, and so, he leapt from his apartment complex window, and met his unfortunate end approximately sixteen seconds of fresh air later, on the top of a now-ruined car.
When Newt didn’t answer when Alby texted him that night, still feeling the faint tingle of his lips against his own, Alby grew worried, and when Newt’s best friend called the piemaker in tears, Alby felt the very world break apart underneath his feet.
He thought of Newt’s smile just hours before, the sweet tang of rhubarb on his red lips, flour dusting his rosy cheeks as if it were a cloud from the very heavens itself, and Alb knew that he simply could not let this stand.
For the piemaker was no ordinary piemaker at all.
So he drove to the morgue just minutes later, Minho silent in the front seat beside him, then parked outside and walked in without even a word to the coroner, walking straight into the back until he found a silver drawer labeled “NEWTON, ISAACS” and pulling it open with little care or reason for who might judge. Alby reached forward and gingerly, tenderly almost, pulled the sheet away from Newt’s body. Though his leg was clearly mangled, his face had hardly taken any bruising at all, and Alby felt his breath catch in his chest—in death, Newt looked peaceful, as the piemaker never saw him in life, though the color to his cheeks had all drained away. Alby stared down at Newt’s face, and his heart ached with all of the memories, his voice ringing in his ears and his mouth still tingling from a kiss, and the piemaker had to make a choice right there.
Reaching forward, he admired the contrast between them for just a second, pale skin versus dark, heart skipping a beat in his chest as he glanced at his watch, the second hand ticking by. As it touched the 12 on the top of his watch face, Alby leaned over and brought his fingertips up to caress Newt’s pale cheek.
The color flooded his face all at once, and Newt gasped, jerking up into a sitting position so fast Alby had to push backwards in order to avoid getting hit, or worse. He looked from left to right for a moment, brown eyes wide and enchanting and then made contact with the piemaker, staring at him. “I—oh bloody—Alby?”
The piemaker thought his heart might burst as Newt’s mouth formed his name, something he never thought he’d hear again—a great twin beast of sadness and joy growled angrily at his stomach as he glanced at his watch. Sixty seconds.
"Am I dead?" was Newt’s first question, an astute one. "Are you?" His second.
Alby shook his head in response; he might have half smiled, had the lump in his throat not grown three sizes as Newt spoke. “It’s a long story.”
"Oh." Newt said, and then his brow crumpled and Alby felt his heart break for the third time that day. "Alby—I’m sorry, I had to."
Forty five seconds, and he felt angry. “No, you didn’t .”
"I did." but Newt didn’t seem angry at all, and that just made Alby hurt even more, the way he instantly changed the subject. "How am I talking to—"
"You got one minute left alive."
Thirty seconds, actually. “Oh.” Newt looked contemplative, seeming to accept that. “And then?”
"Then I touch ya again, and you die."
"Is that right." Alby nodded, mutely, and the sorrow began to build up behind his eyelids, as if it might burst forth into tears in any second. Newt stayed quiet for a second, then looked up at Alby with a strange, soft assuredness—it occurred to the piemaker that perhaps he'd wanted to die, that this could be hurting him further, and it made him ache in a way that nothing ever truly had before. Newt's brown eyes locked onto Alby’s, and he felt himself fall a little further, to depression and love in twain. "Kiss me, then."
Fifteen seconds. “Wait, what?”
"Since you gotta touch me, yeah? Kiss me. Lot better than how I died the first time. Send me off to Paradise with a bloody story. Or Hell, I guess, whichever's more likely."
Alby’s throat clicked, and he stared at Newt, watching the earnest look on his face, his flippant commentary, and all Alby could do was nod. “Yeah. Yeah, alright. Whatever you want, Newt.”
Ten seconds.
"Make it a good one." And with that, Newt closed his eyes, lips slightly parted, and Alby started to lean over him, gingerly placing his hand on the sheet between them so he wouldn’t touch his bare skin, heart pounding madly in his chest as he considered their first and last kiss, and the poetic injustice of it all.
Five seconds.
At 22 years, two months, one week, four days and three hours old, the piemaker made a foolish, selfish decision, for he realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t send Newt back to death, at all.
His watch beeped three times—outside, there was a loud thump, but Alby didn’t notice. He kept hovering, an inch above Newt’s still breathing mouth.
"Alby." came Newt’s voice, then, sounding a little annoyed, and the piemaker could nearly cry with joy. "You waited two bloody years to kiss me, least you could do is do it again, now."
He wanted to say something in return, wanted to weep, to kiss Newt—though that was certainly forbidden, now wasn’t it?—but Alby leaned away, just in time for Minho to burst through the door. His gaze jerked from Alby to the living, sitting up Newt, and back to Alby, and breathlessly, he asked the piemaker—“What did you do?”
—
"Flour."
"Flour."
"Baking powder."
"Baking powder."
A sigh.
"Newt."
"Alby."
The piemaker stared down at the bowl in his arms, trying to hide the way he wanted to smile down into it and forming his mouth into an impressive scowl, instead, as he looked up. Isaac Newton, twenty one years, one month, two weeks and six days old, smiled crookedly at him from across the room, masking his grin into a serious frown, and failing to hide it in a much more obvious way than Alby himself, who failed at sounding as gruff as he wanted to, “It’s a pie, it’s not open heart surgery.”
Newt had bought glasses for a disguise, and they rose up his nose when he truly smiled, and laughed as he did then, and Alby couldn’t help but notice that there was flour on the black rims—his heart did a backflip and he turned away with a low snort, shaking his head. “You’re—”
But the piemaker barely had time to say a thing, to chide the assistant for his foolishness, because there was something touching his mouth. His first thought was Newt, no, but it occurred to him, with his breath held that it was plastic wrap, and the warmth he felt was Newt’s mouth, kissing him softly through the film. He had to resist the urge to reach out and grab him, and Alby patted around blindly for a moment before he came up with an oven mitt—this time, it seemed to be Newt that was startled when he cupped his cheek.
"I thought we had a no touching rule!" Minho yelled in response from behind the counter, and Alby turned over to shoot him a withering glare, but Newt’s small fingers brushed the top of the oven mitt to hold his hand there, and the piemaker thought that maybe he’d let him get away with the commentary just this once.
(Minho ended up being the middle man for many an occasion; though he often had to hold Alby’s hand and Newt’s hand at the same time, he never once complained, and the piemaker and his assistant broke the no touching rule with every creative solution they could think of, happily ever after.)