Kyou Kara Maou, Half-Baked

Title: Half-Baked [Yuuri/Wolfram]
Rating/Warnings: PG, but only cause of the comment about the maids really.
Summary: “A world without chocolate chip cookies?! This is not right! As Maou, I must fix this!”
AN: I’m not sure if they have chocolate chip cookies in Japan, or if they have ovens in New Makoku (did i spell that right?), but i had a bit of a baking disaster last night, and ended up with this ficlet about insomnia and cookies.

Half-Baked

“Wolfram?”

“Huhn?”

“Are you awake?”

“Uhn.”

“Me too.”

Sprawled on his back as usual, Yuuri turned his head on the pillow to see Wolfram hunched into an irritated ball with his back to Yuuri. He had scrunched most of the blankets around his body so that only some unruly tufts of blond hair were sticking out of the bundle.

“Wolfram?”

“Huhn.”

“Why can’t you sleep?”

The Wolfram-bundle emitted a growl and twisted itself around. Bright green eyes glared while hands scrunched the covers even tighter, and Yuuri wondered how someone who could shoot fire out his fingers could be so cold all the time.

“Because you keep talking, wimp!” Wolfram retorted, indignance muffled because he had the covers pulled up to his nose. Yuuri turned his head back to staring at the canopy over the bed.

“I wonder what my family’s doing?” Yuuri heard the disgruntled shifting and didn’t have to look to know that Wolfram was scowling.

“Sleeping!” Wolfram snapped. “Why, you getting ready to run back to them?”

“No. I just miss them, is all,” Yuuri replied, resisting the urge to remind Wolfram for the thousandth time that he had nothing to do with when he went back and forth. He thought he felt Wolfram relax a little, but he might have just been shifting position. “I don’t even know what time it is there. What if they’re in a different time zone?”

“What are you talking about, wimp?” Wolfram yawned.

“Maybe it’s already morning at home!” Yuuri continued thoughtfully. “And my mom’s already making my favorite breakfast, and my broth…”

Yuuri tried to catch himself, but it was too late, and he felt Wolfram go stiff beside him. He turned his head to see green eyes frozen wide open.

“Wolf,” Yuuri said quietly. “I…”

“Shut up!” Wolfram barked, throwing himself onto his other side, back to Yuuri. “Just shut up, you don’t know anything!” Wolfram’s shoulders were trembling, and Yuuri thought about reaching out to touch him, but his hand stayed where it was.

“I miss him too,” Yuuri tried again, but Wolfram didn’t respond. The silence dragged out for a few long minutes, but Yuuri was no closer to sleep than he had been before.

“At home,” he said eventually, “my mom bakes me cookies when I’m worried about something. Chocolate chip.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Wolfram said, voice a little thick. Yuuri sat bolt upright.

“You don’t know what chocolate chip cookies are?!” he demanded. Wolfram made a derisive noise. “A world without chocolate chip cookies! This is not right! As Maou, I must fix this at once!”

“Shut up and go to sl—yah!” Wolfram shouted as Yuuri threw back the covers dramatically. “What are you doing, you’re letting cold air in!”

“Come on, Wolfram,” Yuuri coaxed, trying to tug the blankets away from him, “you aren’t sleeping anyway. Laying in bed when you can’t sleep is not helpful at all, you must get up and tire yourself out, that is the way it works.”

“Stop that, it’s cold!” Wolfram yelped, slapping at Yuuri’s hands, but it was definitely a losing battle to struggle against Yuuri’s enthusiasm.

“Take the blanket with you then,” Yuuri finally announced, getting a disgruntled Wolfram out of bed at last and tucking the blanket around his shoulders, adding in an undertone, “it will keep people from seeing that ridiculous nightgown.”

“What was that?” Wolfram demanded, but Yuuri merely smiled and offered him some slippers.

Wolfram grumbled about drafty castles and pneumonia the whole way down to the kitchens, and Yuuri had to admit, not out loud of course, that the freezing stone wasn’t doing much for him either. He shivered in relief when the warmth of the kitchen washed over them, the banked fireplace glowing softly.

While Yuuri poked around in cabinets to see if he could find the necessary ingredients, Wolfram perched on a stool and watched him with grudging curiosity.

“There are servants that do this sort of thing,” he said, pulling the edges of the blanket in tight around him. “We could just wake somebody up.”

“That’s no fun!” Yuuri said derisively, setting an armful of containers and a bowl down on the counter with a thunk. “The point is to make them yourself. That’s what makes you feel better. Now we just need a really big spoon.”

Reaching over half-heartedly, Wolfram pulled open the closest drawer without getting off his stool and smirked when it contained just such a spoon among a jumble of implements. He pulled it out and dropped it on the counter.

“There,” he said, “I helped. I don’t feel any better.”

Yuuri was occupied opening several of the containers and sniffing the contents. Having selected three of them, he poured a bit of stuff from each into the bowl, then shoved the bowl over to Wolfram.

“Here, stir these together while I find eggs.”

“Yuuri,” Wolfram started to whine, “I just want to…”

“Stir!” Yuuri commanded in his best Who’s the Maou Now voice, and Wolfram had picked up the spoon and started stirring before he even realized he was obeying. He glared at Yuuri’s back for appearance’ sake, wondering how you were even supposed to tell when the stuff was mixed because they were all white powders.

Meanwhile, Yuuri had turned up two eggs, a stick of butter, and a plate of chocolate truffles from dinner the other night.

“Good thing I found these!” Yuuri announced proudly as he set them down, then turned to rummage through the cabinets for another bowl. “Otherwise we would have had chocolate chipless chocolate chip cookies…don’t you dare eat that, Wolfram!”

Wolfram drew back the hand that had been nearing the truffles, scowling. Clearly he had been spending too much time with Yuuri lately.

“If you eat them all now, there’ll just be less in the cookies,” Yuuri admonished, turning back around with the bowl and grinning at Wolfram’s caught-red-handed blush. “Can I trust you cut them up into bits without eating them all?”

“I’m not a child!” Wolfram flushed harder under Yuuri’s teasing as he yanked open the utensil drawer again and pulled out a knife this time.

They worked in silence for a few minutes, except for Wolfram calling Yuuri a wimp several times while Yuuri struggled to get the cold butter to mix with the other ingredients. Finally everything but the chocolate was mixed thoroughly, and Yuuri rubbed his arm as he reached over for a victory truffle. He yelped in surprise when Wolfram rapped his knuckles with the flat of the knife.

“If you eat them now there’ll be less in the cookies,” Wolfram imitated him in a high-pitched, childish voice, but Yuuri only scowled for a second before he laughed, and the corner of Wolfram’s mouth twitched just a little.

And then the truffle bits were mixed in and the batter was spooned onto some tray thing that Yuuri supposed would work like a cookie sheet, and they were left with nothing to do for 9-12 minutes while the first batch of cookies baked. Unfortunately, they had made the spoonfuls just a little too big and the cookies all baked into one huge square, so the outsides were burnt and the inside wouldn’t bake through and Yuuri had to explain through giggles that this was not really what cookies were like.

While the rest of the cookies, made of much smaller spoonfuls, baked, Yuuri and Wolfram tried out the ruined batch. Wolfram quickly announced the crisped edges as his favorite part, while Yuuri preferred the squishy middle pieces.

“There’s raw egg in that!” Wolfram stuck out his tongue in disgust as Yuuri slid another gooey chunk into his mouth.

“It baked long enough,” Yuuri scoffed. He wrinkled his nose at Wolfram’s char fetish as he crunched another burnt piece and licked some squished cookie from his hand. “The second batch should be almost done.”

“Leave it in longer,” Wolfram advised, as though he’d been making cookies his whole life instead of the last half-hour.

“You just want them to be all crispy!” Yuuri accused, sliding off his stool. He made a move for the oven door, but Wolfram reached out and snagged him by grabbing a fistful of his pajama shirt, turning him back around.

“You’ve got a…” Yuuri froze as Wolfram reached out and pressed his thumb to the skin right to the left of Yuuri’s mouth. He was still standing stupidly when Wolfram pulled his hand back, although he noticed the smear of chocolate on Wolfram’s thumb, and he felt his mouth drop into a silent ‘O’ when Wolfram brought his thumb up to his lips to lick the chocolate off.

Wolfram seemed to realize what he was doing halfway through a lick, and he dropped Yuuri’s shirt like he’d been burned, a stunning blush sweeping across his nose. Yuuri was still gathering his wits when the scent of singing cookies hit his nose, and he dove for the oven with a curse. When he set the tray of slightly-crisped cookies on the counter, Wolfram smirked as though it had all been part of his plan.

“I told you it would make you feel better,” Yuuri said through a mouthful of cookie. He bit the rest of the chewy part out of the middle of his cookie and handed the crunchy edge to Wolfram, who grunted noncommitally before popping it in his mouth. Suddenly, he gave a huge yawn, and Yuuri laughed as Wolfram had to clap a hand over his mouth to keep half-chewed cookie from tumbling out.

Yuuri swallowed the rest of his cookie and slid off his stool. Stifling another yawn, Wolfram allowed himself to be pulled down off his stool and led towards the door.

“What about this mess?” he asked, waving a hand towards the jumble of containers, bowls, tray, and half-eaten cookie batches. Yuuri looked over his shoulder, then shrugged with a smirk.

“There are servants to do that sort of thing,” he replied, making Wolfram snort, then smile just a little as they headed back to bed.

In the morning, the maids who not-so-secretly inspected Wolfram and Yuuri’s sheets every morning puzzled over the meaning of the little brown crumbs scattered throughout the bed.