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It’s snowing again.
It’s becoming something of a recurring joke between Harry and Jean at this point. Every time it snows, Kim is at the window, frowning, furious in his usual understated way. ‘Maybe he thinks if he glares at it enough, the snow will melt away’, Jean had offered. Harry’s not one to join in when it’s at Kim’s expense, but it is, genuinely, so funny how angry he gets. About snow, of all things.
Much of the municipality workers are on strike, emboldened by other labour action this year throughout the city. No one has officially ploughed the roads for 2 weeks now, but the locals have given it a good shot alone, salting and digging so at least the pavements are useable. The more it snows, the longer the Kineema sits unused in the 41st’s garage. The wheels are different to the old model 40s, apparently, and CMC had little to no interest in making snow treads for it. So she sits unused since the drifts started building up and Harry wonders if Kim might be about to give himself a hernia.
“He holdin’ council with the snowflakes again?” Chester whispers conspiratorially into Harry’s ear, as they observe the Lieutenant in the break room for the 3rd time that week. God knows how this kid made it up the ranks, he’s a terrible sneak, but only Harry sees the pink at the tips of Kim’s ears. He decides to save him a little face.
“Who brought in the gingerbread?”
“Dunno…Judit? She’s the mom here—ow!” He’s also not quick enough to avoid a swift box around the ears from aforementioned Mom—Judit moves to sit awkwardly on the other side of Harry, sipping her coffee like nothing happened.
“Not me. I don’t have the time for any of this,” She gestures at the rustic woven basket piled with ginger biscuits vaguely, then squints at Chester. “Too busy being a mom,”
“Probably Consultant Heidelstam then,” Kim offers from the window. Chester makes a face.
“Ugh, I don’t want anything that guy’s offering. Can’t enjoy crap that comes with a lecture ‘bout shit no one cares about,” He gestures with his mug. “Like some ancient Vespertine ritual about gift giving, or some bull,”
He grins suddenly, and leans in to Harry, as if to say you’ll like this Mullen, you always used to—“Probably just means he jerked off in the flour,”
For fuck’s sake. “Hey, shithead; why don’t you go find something useful to do for once?” And Harry shoves him unceremoniously off the desk. Chester sticks out his tongue and leaves. Judit rolls her eyes. Kim, characteristically, says nothing.
“You tried one, then, Jude?”
“No—this is the first time I’ve been able to take a break all day. I might now, though…,” She leans and dips a hand into the basket, pulling away with a small, thick slab of gingerbread. “God, I love these sorts of biscuits; they make me feel so excited for Thousand Lights,” She titters. Delicately, she nibbles the corner, eyes closed and makes a small sound of pleasure. “These are good,”
Harry has already taken a large bite from his piece, and is mid-way through dunking the rest of it into his lukewarm coffee. “Very good,” he mumbles with a mouthful of it. Judit has the good manners to hide her laugh behind one hand.
“I hope these aren’t poisoned or something,” he adds afterwards, cookie demolished. “We probably should have checked that first, huh…,”
Judit scoffs. “How exactly? And why?”
“Moralintern plot,” Harry says sagely. Judit seems unconvinced.
“Well; If you are both unavailable tomorrow, we’ll know why and who to blame,” Kim has decided against the eating route, but he does give them a long look. A longing look, Harry thinks, like he’s deeply sad about the basket’s contents.
The usual mind project delivers next to no results all afternoon, so instead he just asks later, as he and Kim trundle awkwardly on foot towards their respective apartments in the dark; two lumbering, middle aged men, bundled up like children against the biting cold and snow.
“Hey, Kim, why do holiday treats make you sad?”
Lucky for Harry that Kim is used to it by now. They manoeuvre around a older man, taking it slow in the treacherous slush with dog and cane, and Kim answers with a barely concealed huff of laughter.
“Holiday treats do not make me ‘sad’, Detective,” The ‘Detective’ here is almost a gentle rib. Fair. You couldn’t figure this one out at all.
“Ok, not sad, then—but I’ve never seen anyone consider a biscuit so intently and then not actually eat the fuckin’ thing,”
“Harry,” Is all he gets for a while, until they reach the fork where their respective routes split: the worst part of every night. Under the yellow glare of the streetlights Kim removes his glasses to clean them, the soft insistent snow gathering on his eyelashes. Harry manages to say nothing, despite suddenly wanting to say everything.
“If you must know…I’ve been trying to remember something I had as a child. Something I was given once for Thousand Lights,” He replaces his glasses carefully and looks back at his partner. “I’ve no idea what it was called. I was hoping Consultant Heidelstam’s offering might have been it, but unfortunately not,”
He sighs, disgruntled and illuminated, and Harry can’t help himself.
“Well, shit—Kim, let’s find out! Let’s find your biscuit!” He arcs his arms wildly above his head, in typical Harry fashion. “The library must have some reference or cookbooks or something, we could go this weekend—Last chance before the holidays!” He grabs his partner by the arms and shakes him briefly, something in his eyes like god, Kim, please say yes, please let me help.
And Kim can’t really say no to that.
“How about this one?”
Harry holds up another book, only eyes and unruly hair visible above the spine break. On the one side is a colourful tableau of artistically arranged biscuits and festive table-wear, the other adjacent page a complicated looking recipe. Kim smiles briefly and shakes his head.
“No; I don’t remember them being round—I cannot imagine I was given something with such an extensive ingredient list either…,”
Harry has turned the book around to look at it again, disappointment creeping into the crevices of his face as he thumbs the edges of the pages. “You’re right, seems a bit much…think this might be a biscuit for someone several pay grades above us,”
“And then some,”
He clunks the book firmly on the discard pile and picks up another. Kim returns to slowly working his way through his own book, admittedly, no longer looking for the recipe—it’s warm in the library, quiet, and Harry is (as usual) good company; surprisingly, also quiet and well behaved in their nook between the stacks.
He’s still feeling a little guilty for thinking Harry would be anything but quiet—as it turns out, Harry has been frequenting the library for some time now, attempting to relearn the world by devouring as many books as possible on a wide-ranging plethora of subjects. The small contingent of librarians know him well by now, like him significantly and joke with him as with an old friend—because of course they do; he charmed them all in his usual uncanny fashion. He knows all the best spots, every private space tucked away out of sight, where he spends many of his unaccompanied off hours reading everything from early Entroponetics to Vespertine detective fiction.
There are no windows here, in their current section, and the overhead lights are only just bright enough to read by. Both men are seated in old, low, padded chairs, no arms—so Harry has his legs crossed, an ankle across the opposite knee, unencumbered, and Kim is reminded just how ridiculously long they are. Between them is a small table, loaded with every book Harry thought looked promising and then some, the discard pile on the floor. Kim is comfortable enough to bring both legs up onto the cushion, book against the knees, a small thermos of coffee between the thighs. If he’s not careful, there’s a very real chance he’ll fall asleep here, metaphorically blanketed by the warm smell of old books and his partner’s gentle turning of pages.
As it turns out, the people of Revachol have no intention of letting this happen.
They cannot all be as well behaved as Harry in this instance, Kim supposes, his attention spilt from his book by a glimpse of bright fabric between the book shelves—a girl, late teens if that, and her equally silly, fresh-faced boyfriend, tittering to each other. They are certainly not here to read.
He can ignore it for only so long, steadfastly rereading the same sentence in a vain effort to absorb any of it. What starts as foolish teenage giggling quickly becomes something more, and Kim wonders how anyone can be so painfully unaware of their surroundings. They’re kids; to them they’re the only people in the world—you know this, his subconscious chastises. You’ve gone soft in homicide, Kimball.
At one point, the shelves next to them shake, as if suddenly carrying a little more weight—and their new friends are decidedly not giggling anymore. Next to him, Harry looks up from his book, then glances at Kim, who is resolutely still not looking at anyone.
Harry gives it until it hits a higher decibel before he snaps his new book shut, a smile on his face when Kim flinches and meets his eyes.
“D’you know, I swear Clarice had some shortbread next to her at the desk; maybe I’ll go and ask her if she’ll spare a few pieces?” He makes a noisy show of standing up, stretching and popping joints like an old man, complete with running commentary. Whatever was causing the adjacent shelf to sag suddenly leaves—a rush of pink, green and faux fur just visible along one row of long forgotten books.
Harry turns back to Kim, apparently sufficiently limbered with eyebrows raised. It’s silent, save for the bubbling of Harry’s gently lilting chuckle. Kim puts a fist to his mouth and smiles.
“On second thoughts, I’m not really hungry,”
“Funny how hunger strikes you like that sometimes,” Kim responds.
Harry expels a rasping noise from between his lips and sits again, recovering his previously discard book, still laughing quietly to himself.
Kim can’t help himself. “Is this something you encounter frequently?”
“Oh yeah; you know how horny kids are for books. They just can’t get enough of them,”
“Yes, that was often my observation in Juvie, you’re quite right,”
Harry laughs a little louder this time, flicking through the pages. He looks good like this, Kim thinks, relaxed and occupied, a smile on his lips. Somewhere he should be. Comfortable in his own space.
Kim returns once more to his own book, but this time he finally sees the words, the occasional step by step illustrations—the rectangular biscuits imprinted with a depiction of the Franconigerian Knights, imposing despite being squashed into such a small pattern with their equally furious horse. Two sides sandwiched together with apricot jam. It’s right here! He’d been looking at it the whole time—
“—Harry,”
“Hmm?”
“I found it,”
He glances up. “Wh…you found the recipe?!” Harry drops his own book to lean over the table. “Really? This is it??”
“Yes—this is it—the drawings are a little crude, but even so….I’m sure of it. It’s this one,” He cradles the edges of his book, the precious pages facing his heart. It’s a little overwhelming, after all these years—he was never really searching, but the smallest, most sentimental part of him had hoped…
A strong hand grasps the top of the open book and gently eases it out of his grasp. He smiles at Kim. “I’ll take this one to the desk, then. We’ll borrow it,”
“I could just copy the recipe out—,”
“—No, c’mon, where’s the fun in that?”
Kim huffs. “I need to copy the ingredients out, at least,”
“Ah—all right, you do that, I’ll put the rest of these away…,”
When Harry returns, Kim is strumming the edge of his ballpoint against his notebook, a small crease between the brows. He glances up at his partner and sighs.
“There’s cardamom in these,”
“Oh?”
“And mace. No wonder I haven’t had one since I was a child…how did I even have one then? I’ve never even seen either of those spices for sale…,” He trails off, frowning angrily at the pages. Harry considers him for a beat, obviously confused as to why this would even be a problem.
“I’ve seen both recently,”
“What?”
“Yeah—the bodega off Benoit has things like that; I forget where the family’s from…they’re Iilmaraan, I think? They sell some pretty amazing pastries at the moment —little round things with sugar nuggets on top—,”
“Harry—,”
“We can drop by on the way back—all this stuff’ll keep long enough for Thousand Lights, right?”
“Y-yes, I imagine so,”
Another smile. “Great! Let’s do that, then,”
Yet again, Kim finds he cannot refuse.
He watches as Harry slides down a narrow aisle before him, disappearing into the next—stomach grazing an overhang of bright plastic snack packets, threaded together in neat rows between the shelves. Whatever you cannot see in here, you can most definitely smell; a heady concoction of promised meals Kim has never eaten, never an adventurous man when it came to food. Trailing through this Iilmaraan grocery now, he feels a strange sort of shame that he isn’t.
Harry is standing in the centre of the next aisle, hands on hips, before a wall of red-capped miniature bottles. Upon noticing Kim has caught up, he draws him close, and waves a hand before them as if unveiling a long hidden ancient treasure.
“I have seen spice jars before, Harry,” Though not all of these, he doesn’t add.
“Not like this!” True. “Here, they’ve got cardamom…,” He pries the bottle from its little plastic dispenser row and pushes it into Kim’s hands. “Can’t see Mace though…,”
“…Is it possible it has a different name?” He offers.
“Well—I mean…there’s nutmeg? They both come from the same tree, but whilst nutmeg is the seed, mace is the membrane that surrounds it. It’s the only tree that gives us two spices,”
“So…no, then,”
Harry looks at him like he’s just noticed the other man is there. “Uh, well…not to my knowledge, no,” A sheepish grin. Kim scoffs and trails the shelves himself, squinting.
“Wait…Macis? Is this it?” He pulls another jar from a lower shelf and inspects it. There’s something in smaller type at the base of the label. “I can’t make it out so well…,”
“Yes—yes, you’re right, this is it!”
Kim cradles the two bottles together in his palms as Harry waffles on next to him. A simple hoard, but no less precious. This is an unfamiliar experience, but for once it doesn’t invoke anything but pleasure. Maybe Harry was unveiling a secret treasure before—a treasure better suited to a run-of-the-mill Vacholier, anyway.
“Do we need anything else from here?”
Kim shakes his head. “Not that I don’t already have, or can’t get easily enough later. This should do just fine,”
“Grand,” Harry beams. “I want to have a little look around, but you go ahead—I’ll meet you outside,”
And he trundles off.
There’s one other person in the queue before him, so Kim takes the time to privately catalogue the little shop as best he can; feeling for some reason like he ought to. They’ve closed the door against the cold, and what little glass in it that isn’t covered in stickers or commercial signage is dripping condensate into the wooden frame. Above it, a small alert bell, which has been draped in colourful streamers for the holidays—whenever the door opens the tinkle is now muted by crepe paper. From the door, you can see almost the whole shop, a meagre 3 aisles; but everything is pilled so high it creates hiding places between the vegetables and dried goods, the tins and gently humming refrigeration units. A young woman, a scarf tied neatly around her hair, unloads a small box on the floor by one aisle before pulling another to the counter where she shuffles behind the server, an older woman in deeper colours. It’s impossible to tell how long this place has existed here. Kim can’t imagine it was ever anything else.
When he reaches the counter, he notes the small display unit adjacent, filled with freshly baked pastries of all shapes and sizes, haphazardly piled. It gives off it’s own heat, humming it’s own little electronic tune and fills the air with sugar and cinnamon. Kim is not at all tempted. Not one bit. The woman wraps his jars in brown paper, rings him up and smiles and nods, but says very little outside of a thank you. As Kim pushes on the door to leave, she turns to the younger woman sitting behind her, now warming her hands on the pastry unit, and they speak animatedly in a language Kim can’t understand. The door snaps shut against their laughter.
He notes, with some minor annoyance, that it’s bloody snowing again.
Harry is nowhere to be seen, so Kim perches on a nearby shelter railing and waits. The streets here are reasonably narrow, even more so in the poorly ploughed snow, but they stretch on impossibly, a long parallel row of hodge-podge shops and eateries. He must have driven down this road a hundred times in his life, but this is the first time he’s really paid attention to what lines the streets—who lives here. He feels for the outline of his single cigarette with one gloved hand, nestled in his breast pocket, and reconsiders his routine.
There’s a metallic clunk; enough to break him out of his reverie—a small child, probably no older than 8 years old, is shaking one of the small capsule machines lining the outside of the store. He pulls at the dial of one of them again, to no avail, and slumps, defeated. Kim spends a little too long second-guessing himself before he clears his throat.
“Khm…is everything all right?”
The child looks at him balefully. His face greatly resembles that of the women inside, Kim notes—what little of it he can see through his winter ensemble, at least. His mittens dangle haphazardly from his sleeves, a small embroidered tag on one of them: Marco—his name, presumably. When Kim crouches down at the capsule machine next to him he lets out a sigh that belongs to a much older boy.
“It took my penny and now I can’t get it back—it didn’t even give me the prize,” He scrubs again at the dial with little red-raw hands, but it refuses to budge. His machine of choice is mostly snowed over, but someone has rubbed the advertisement panel clean—3 tiny replicas of last season’s TipTop MCs hang suspended in motion, bombastic text declaring ‘Collect all 8!’.
The kid has good taste, you gotta hand it to him, says a voice in Kim’s head that sounds suspiciously like Harry.
“May I?” He asks. The little boy gives him a solemn nod, moving to one side so Kim can take a look. It’s soon evident what the problem is—the dial is frozen on one side, just underneath, and he can’t reach it either.
“They always get stuck, but sometimes the rain loosens them up…I thought maybe the snow would too…,” Marco sniffs. Kim gives him a rare encouraging smile, roots about in his coat pocket and produces a small pen knife—it’s a long shot, but just maybe, it might work. Maybe when Harry returns he can brute force it; he’s good at that.
He stabs haphazardly around the back of the dial unit, blindly attempting to find purchase in the ice behind—luckily for him, it is only so thick, coming away in a single piece after the 3rd of 4th stab. Marco squeaks, twisting the dial once Kim removes his knife, and after a series of clunks, a fat plastic sphere pops out from the bottom section into his eager tiny fingers.
“There we go,”
“Thank you! Thank you, mister!”
Kim stands and dusts the snow from one knee, unable to hide his satisfaction. As Marco prises open the capsule beside him, Harry finally pushes his way out of the shop and into the snow, tucking something into his inside pocket and cradling a paper bag with the other hand. The telltale signs of winter are written all over his face, pink on the extremities: You can’t tell he’s a recovering alcoholic in the cold.
“All good?” He winks. That would have been the end of it—Kim would have rolled his eyes and they would have left—had it not been for a small noise of discontent from his newest friend.
“Oh…,”
“Hmm?”
Marco startles, caught off guard. “Oh—nothing! It’s nothing…just, I…I already have this one,”
He holds up the small yellow MC between pink fingers for Kim to see, and for some reason now Kim feels disappointment, though for who he’s not sure.
“Well, you could build a little fleet of ‘em,” Harry offers. The boy gives him an obliging smile, but says nothing, still a little despondent. He really wanted that one model in particular…
Kim begins rooting around in his pockets for something once more.
“Here…let’s try again,” He says, and produces a few centims in one gloved hand, squats with the boy by the machine and feeds it. It goes through the same plodding squeaks and clunks, and spits out a different coloured capsule this time—which Kim carefully twists open, revealing the prize within. Marco makes another, different noise this time.
“That’s it! That’s the one I’m missing!” —Before he catches himself—“I-I mean…that’s a rare one, you…you have some good luck, mister…,”
“Trade you,” Kim offers—pops the capsule together and holds it out to him. The boy looks like Thousand Lights has come early.
“You mean it?”
“Of course,”
Harry is very quiet, his brain offers, whilst he makes the switch with his new acquaintance (friend, maybe? You can make friends, Kitsuragi). He continues to say nothing as they walk back, the bulge of the capsule in Kim’s jacket pocket evident. But he’s smiling, smiling in a way that Kim finds terribly concerning.
“…What?”
“Hmm?”
“What are you smiling at?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all,” Liar—shit-eating grinner! “Just…that was very wholesome of you. What a lovely festive experience,”
“Ugh,”
“I’m gonna tell Judit,”
“You absolutely will not,”
He laughs, uproariously, unaffected. He won’t tell her. But it’s fun to tease him all the same. Kim plays his role as faultlessly as always; stick in the mud, spoilsport. Displeased but not really. Not with Harry. Harry knows.
Wordlessly he shoves the paper bag he’s been cradling since leaving the shop in front of Kim’s nose, an offering of sorts. Inside are small, round golden pastries, studded with nuggets of sugar.
There’s a pattern forming here, Kim thinks, as he obliges.
As is customary each year, there is a draw in C Wing to decide who gets the day off for Revachol’s New Year celebration: Thousand Lights. To both men’s mutual delight, Kim and Harry both manage to pull for the eve off. Jean is also successful, but instead he sheepishly gives his draw to Judit, much to Mack and Torso’s delight. All insistence on his part that Judit deserves to spend the holidays with her children fall on deaf ears, and Jean ostensibly spends the week prior red-faced and avoidant of just about everybody. When Harry bids him goodnight for the last time that year, he just glowers and stalks out of the room without a word. Ridiculous.
Kim is the one to tentatively remind Harry about the biscuits on their last evening. He stands in their shared office doorway as Harry clears up for the night, lights off within, but the warm glow of the C Wing framing him from behind—like that, with his hands nervously held behind him, he greatly resembles a memory Harry holds very dear. He smiles reassuringly, agrees to turn up at Kim’s the next morning, notes all the minute ways his partner’s form softens in relief.
He doesn’t say all the words he means to, not yet.
What he does do is turn up at the agreed time on the dot, laden down with all the necessary bits and bobs to produce a little makeshift eve feast; a crumpled and ruffled delight for Kim on his doorstep.
They start, after coffee, with the biscuits. Kim has approached this task (as he does every task) with a sort of military precision—the prized recipe propped open against the backsplash; tools, makeshift as they are, laid out at the side. In a fit of nervous energy this morning he has already measured out the ingredients meticulously using a neighbour’s borrowed scale. Harry fails to hold his tongue, watching him stand in front of it all on the counters, arms folded and brows furrowed.
“From what I’ve been able to piece together, I think this is supposed to be an enjoyable activity, Kim,”
He gets an elbow for that one.
Kim gets there, eventually. There’s really nothing for him to be nervous about—Harry is the last person to judge, and even if these don’t quite turn out the way he wanted, no one will ever know but them. Even so, the smallest voice within him wants this to work—would be devastated if this wasn’t what he’d been looking for all this time. Harry, in his usual way, somehow knows this. The bulk of him, as they stand side by side at the counter, manages to quiet the internal naysaying.
He’s not talking again, just smiling to himself as he works. Kim gave him the task of creaming together the butter and sugar, perfectly suited to him—he holds the slightly-too-small bowl with one hand and pulls the wooden spoon through the contents with the other, his sleeves rolled to the bicep, muscles flexing and cording beneath the skin. Kim notes the fading tide marks across the other man’s inner arms and is struck suddenly by an overwhelming gratitude; a relieved affection. How good it is that he’s still here. How good it is that he chose to continue on. For you, for himself. His face feels hot.
Eventually, the butter-sugar mix is good enough to fold with the flour and spices, which they do together—Kim steadily adding the dry mix as Harry folds. Pretty soon Harry has a large ball of dough to show for their efforts; golden brown and studded with spice. He drops it into the larger plastic bowl with a satisfying plop, and Kim covers the rim with a clean tea towel, unable to stop the smile teasing the edges of his lips.
“Now what?”
“Now: we leave it to rest for a couple of hours, before rolling and cutting,” Kim punctuates this by holding up his stopgap rolling pin—a sawn-short metal tubing that Harry is certain came from the motor pool.
“Groovy! I’ll get the hot pot going then,”
Kim doesn’t ask where Harry found the electric hotpot he brought with him—he doesn’t want to know, in all honesty. He doesn’t remember seeing it when they cleaned out his rooms post-Martinaise, but it appears to be clean and in good working order, so that’s really all he can ask for. He stands over Harry as the other man sits crosslegged on the living room floor, decanting tin after tin onto the coffee table where the pot sits, gently warming—some sort of beef stew, a tiny tin of preserved garlic; mostly pickled vegetables with expiry dates too far into the future for either man to plan for. Kim’s relieved to see a few fresher vegetables make their way onto the table too.
“I’ve only really got canned for the main players,” Harry mumbles, mostly to himself. “—hopefully that’ll be all right,”
“It will be perfect,” He can’t give this kindness to himself but he can give it to Harry. He leaves to fill the proffered jug with shop-bought cube stock and misses the expression on Harry’s face.
The radio is on, humming soft holiday classics. Two men sit on the floor and chop ingredients in silence beside a quietly bubbling pot. The winter sun is already too low to hit the windows, burning brightly behind another tenement— the fallen snow reflects what little it can get back into the room, a wash of muted white light that illuminates every little mark on the face of the opposite man. Harry is still smiling.
A golden vista spreads out before him, freshly rolled on the counter. Behind him, Harry hums appreciatively, now holding the tubing. Kim has his hands on his hips, searching the shelf above for something, anything, that would work as a cutter. Somehow, despite all his prep, he’d forgotten to find something appropriate. The book remains open before him, the next step in the process almost like a taunt, the illustration of a wooden decorative biscuit press wielded by a disembodied hand especially infuriating.
A coffee cup, maybe? The biscuits won’t be as you remembered them, but it’s the taste you’re after, surely? What’s the harm? The smallest of the voices answers: It won’t be right.
He sighs. “…It’s a shame it won’t be in the traditional shape,”
“Hold that thought,” Harry replies, and the older man leaves. Kim can hear him in the hallway, fussing about in the pockets of his coat, and then he returns, hands behind his back.
“I know you weren’t hot on the old giving-presents-routine, but...well, not sure this really counts,” He holds out his secret—a small rectangle of brown paper tied with red string. Kim frowns at it.
“Harry—,”
“Look, it’s not all that special—please, just…please open it?”
The pattern repeats again—how many times have you failed to refuse him now? Kim doesn’t listen to that one. He takes the gift, pulls the string free, and tumbles a small plastic rectangle into his palm.
A biscuit press. In the design of a Franconigerian knight on horseback.
“You know…to make it real,” Harry says quietly.
Kim could kiss him. “Harry…,”
“Is—is it all right? You’re not mad?”
“No, goodness, Harry, I’m not mad,” How could you be? “Thank you, really,” He rolls the press front to back in his hands. “…Thank you,”
The warmth of Harry’s smile is enough to light up the whole kitchen, replacing the fading afternoon glow. Gradually, Kim’s battered old baking sheet fills up with rows of rectangular knights, like lines ready for battle. Harry even gives them a salute as they slide into the waiting oven. He waffles again, as they clear up the debris, but Kim is too engaged in tracing the patterns of his new gadget to really take it in—too scared to assess his feelings, lest it overwhelm him.
He also fails to spend even a full minute in one settled position as they bake; he moves between the shelves, monitors Harry’s bubbling stew, makes tea but drinks none of it. By the time the little kitchen timer goes off, Harry has given up on maintaining a straight face.
“If you’re going to be like that, I shall keep them to myself,”
“Oh, c’mon, Kim; you’ve got to admit, it’s fuckin’ funny—I never get to enjoy this kind of role reversal, let me have this!”
“It is hardly a ‘role reversal’,” He’s stalling, you know. How long is he going to leave them in there with the oven off, d’you think?
“…are you not going to take them out?” Harry offers—Kim is definitely stalling, oven gloves on but making no effort to retrieve his anxiety inducing biscuits. Harry shrugs at the warning shot of Kim’s raised brow, instead reaching to open the oven door.
“Harry—,”
“I’m not touching! Just getting the door for you,”
Huff. “I’m quite capable, thank you,”
“Oh, I know. I know,”
It’s a beat longer before Kim moves to extract the two trays—one decorative, one plain, so as to sandwich the two together. He places them gingerly on the side, and Harry joins him, and together they survey the results.
“Kim…Kim, this looks fantastic! They came out perfect,”
“…They did,” Yes, they did. Perfect, neat little rows of cavalry men—all exactly as they should be, not a single one merging outwards into his brethren. Kim finally lets go of a breath he feels he’s been holding all day.
“Can we try one?”
He gives Harry a wry smile, no longer annoyed. “Not yet; once they’re cool, we can sandwich them together. Then you can try one,”
“God, this is unbearable. I mean, have you smelled this? Fuck,” Kim has indeed smelled this—not now, but a lifetime ago, before he really knew how the world fit together; so early that he’s not even sure where the memory itself fits. Sentiment rather than clarity.
He struggles as much as Harry (though he will not admit it) to wait until they’re cool enough to start the next step. With a butter knife—the only implement he had to hand—he spreads a thin layer of apricot jam, reduced in a small saucepan, over the flat edge of the plain biscuit—before gently pressing the knight layer on top. The jam has reduced down so well it’s almost like glue, tacky on his fingertips as he sets each biscuit down, one by one.
Eventually, a plate of them sits on the countertop, in a kitchen filled with the scent of spice and the tang of fruit. And wordlessly, Kim hands Harry one—in unison, they finally try it.
And it is perfect.
All of it—the sudden blossoming in full colour of the memory that started it all, details he missed before: scuffs on his bare knees, feet not quite touching the ground as he sits in the kitchen, away from the other boys—somebody kind blotting the tears from his face. A gentle voice—“just one, keep it secret,”—as they press the biscuit into his hands. The warmth of the radiator behind the chair as he finishes it enraptured. Cared for, when normally you were so alone.
He doesn’t realise his eyes are closed until Harry gently speaks.
“Kim…?”
Now, some 40-odd years later, there is comfort, when so often you are alone. Somewhere, a half formed parallel surfaces—before, a Franconigerian knight, now a man you’re far too old and too sensible to call your knight in shining armor. He’s not, not really. He’s just another man like you, clinging to whatever affection he can find. But it doesn’t matter any less for it.
There are crumbs in Harry’s beard when Kim kisses him. He tastes of apricot and spice, nicotine and coffee. Despite the cold, he still sweats, and there’s a tinge of it standing so close, cotton and skin and everything in between, made manifest by Kim’s initial rough grab of the other man’s collar. He holds him there, runs hands through Harry’s unruly hair and bumps foreheads with him in the middle of the kitchen; the scent of him a metallic comfort of old men.
Harry doesn’t question it. They don’t say anything. Now would finally be the perfect time to say everything, but he doesn’t need to after all. He buries his face into Kim’s shoulder and stays there.
After an age, Kim speaks, muffled into Harry’s shirt: “…Even with the apricot?”
“I…it doesn’t bother me so much anymore,” And then a beat, for him to consider his words. It feels like it lasts an age. “I made a better memory,”
Later, they’ll pull together the makeshift feast of holiday food—thankfully, not every tin decanted into the stew, instead some in mismatched bowls dotted along the coffee table, including the pickled garlic. Kim’s little gas heater belches warmth, the two of them under one blanket. The pilot light is enough to see by. The radio continues to hum. On the shelf behind them, a little yellow MC sits in pride of place.
When it snows this time, Kim doesn’t even notice.