flashback nineteen eighty-four

[dysmorphics]

 

 

 

 

I'll sink into the night
And I'm turning off the lights
’Cause the future is here
This is how I disappear
( 🎶 )

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bad timeline ↺

[dysmorphics]

◜after this◞

It was the perfect time to bake a birthday cake, if only because it was Bucky's turn to keep watch and he wasn't going to be back for a couple more hours. Steph still worried, of course. Night was closing in and Wyatt's lackeys favored the cover of darkness, and their recent kills -- Sam and Natasha -- had only emboldened them.

Steph could see through Wyatt's game. He was trying to force her hand, backing her into a corner until she had no choice but to give him what he wanted: Chris. With every passing day, he was getting closer, and as loathe as Steph was to admit it, she was running out of options.

She shook her head and pushed the thought away for the time being, just enough to concentrate on the task at hand. She was a decent cook, but she'd never been much of a baker. Baking needed accuracy and actually following instructions; she didn't have the patience for the former and the inclination for the latter.

But even Chris was trying, so she had to try, too.

"Do we have anything for icing? I could add some flowers or something." That was at least art-adjacent, so she had some skill there.

[notthetwiceblessed]

Why was he baking a cake? Why did he even offer? Beyond some weird sense of obligation, 'cause, well... Steph and Bucky have been helping him. Not that he needed, or wanted, the help but... he owed them. Making a cake to try to repay some of them felt like the very least that he could do for them.

(That being in a kitchen, working around food, reminded him of long ago better times with his Mom, that wasn't the point. This was an attempt at paying back kindness.)

Having lost Natasha and Sam so recently made it worse. It felt like Wyatt was getting closer every day. Chris had been arguing in favour of just... going with him. Working from the inside. It wasn't much liked, as a plan.

There was one other, he'd spoken to Aunt Prue on it. On the rare times she'd answered his summons. She thought it could work. He just didn't know how Steph and Bucky would take it, so he hadn't brought it up, yet.

"It'll be a really simple icing, but we do," pointing to the sugar and milk that could be put together to make the most basic of icings. "... We'll be without eggs for a while if we do this."