Private Finished [Solo] Baked Bads

Fenn’s tiny kitchen was a mess. Much more of a mess than in normally was, and a much more confectionary-smelling mess at that.

Fumbling through his gloves — he didn’t need no frozen batter on his hands again — Fenn sorted through the ingredients crowding his narrow counters. He was still blown away by how many ingredients had to be mashed together to make one singular batch of goodies. Butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, cocoa powder, flour, salt, baking powder, honey — and that wasn’t even counting the ingredients that went into the icing.

His last few days had been spent reeling through a brownie recipe pulled out of the local library, and despairing at the outcome.

Baking was a little like making drugs. Fuck up the recipe, and what you got wasn’t anything anyone would want to put in their body. Fenn… wasn’t familiar with the recipe. He’d variously burned, frozen, over-salted, forgot-to-apply-antipanstick’d, and… otherwise ruined them with ingredients he was disappointed didn’t bake well. It was his own stubborn pride that kept him from giving up. He had an odd sense of logic; a few days ago, he’d a conversation that he barely remembered (with one of the demonfolk he saw regularly at the Community Center) that’d ended with a vague assertion that he could bake brownies. If he wanted to.

Which he kinda did, because brownies were delicious, and he’d heard wisdom that baking was cheaper than buying.

The last batch was nearly edible. At least, it was edible enough that he’d elected to thrust it off on the Community Center instead of the apartment building’s shared dumpster. His neighbors were giving him funny looks whenever he hopped out to chuck them.

“Fuck ‘em,” he muttered absently to himself as he buttered-up a pan.

Eager to prevent another incident of brownies being caked stuck to the bottom of his pan, Fenn sprinkled flour over the butter he’d laid down. How much flour? He wasn’t sure. This recipe didn’t put down an amount for him to follow, just went like, “sprinkle that shit”. Same “pinch of salt” bullshit he’d encountered trying to cook other things. The inside of the pan whitened significantly.

He’d also learned from experience that mixing ingredients in the same pan you cooked them in was usually a no-no for baked goods, so he grabbed a halved milkjug and started lopping in the initial ingredients he needed — sugar, eggwhite, vanilla. Cautiously, he put in a pinch of coffee grounds too. He’d heard of coffee-flavored cake before, he was pretty sure. The butter was already melting over his rarely-used stove. For once, he felt ahead of the game.

Until seven, certain knocks sounded at the door. A distressingly familiar one. Fenn groaned, held his breath, and fluttered over to look outside. He didn’t need a confirmation of who was there, but he wanted it all the same. Maybe he’d be lucky this time.

Maybe.

Pressed against the cold brass of his door’s peephole, Fenn’s sight was greeted by a middle-aged looking fae with grumpy blue eyes and a snowflake pendant sticking out of his chest hair. His heart slipped up into his throat a little, until he remembered that he couldn’t be seen in turn, at which point it settled back down in his chest. Yep. That was his old Courtfather.

“Fuck you,” Fenn gritted out through his pointed teeth.

“I heard that,” Snowflake replied from the other side. “You gonna let me in, or what?”

The little moth smirked to himself. The good thing about faerie folk; near all of them had rules or bindings of one kind or another. Snow couldn’t enter anywhere private without being invited over the threshold. If he couldn’t come in, he couldn’t smack Fenn around. The bad thing was that it wouldn’t stop Snow from smacking him around later while he was out-and-about if he didn’t bow to his old better’s demands. He didn’t need to know what measures the Courtfather was willing to take. “You stay out there” he replied. “I’ll slip the money under the door.”

“What, you got things to hide from me?”

The baking ingredients laid out beckoned Fenn’s gaze. He left his answer as fuck-all-vague as humanly (faerily?) possible; “Eh.”

An impatient noise arose from the other side of the keyhole. “Kid, I already know you don’t clean house, and that you certainly ain’t out a your jammies yet. And I damn well know about the drugs.”

“Yeah? I like my privacy.” Tossing aside his baking gloves, Fenn sifted through some of the papers scattered on his living room floor. He knew he’d prepped an emergency money envelope around here somewhere. “And I don’t like you barging in to ruin it.”

A long-suffering sigh wheezed from behind the door.

“See, this is why I hate dealing with you,” the Courtfather chastised him from behind the door. Fenn rolled his eyes, pawing through his trash — a couple unpaid bills, a few forgotten bookmarks, some receipts. “You flake, and you don’t trust nobody.”

“I don’t trust nobody who takes my money.”

“You owe me, though. You promised your loyalty to me.”

“Told you,” Fenn snapped back, sticking his head under the couch. Oh! There was the envelope. “The folk who brought us in said that the shit we did before hopping on the wet rock’s all void.”

“Is it?” A deep chuckle followed the question, full of disbelief and irritation. “This’d be the payment for the last two months you’re handing over, right? Didn’t answer the door the last few times I’ve been about. What’s been up with that?”

A small snort escaped Fenn as he strained to grab the thick fold of paper. That’s what he wanted to know, too. Somewhere near the tail end of December, he’d went to bed. Next thing he knew, he’d woken up mid-afternoon in February— missing Yule (little regret there) and New Years (fuck).

Knowing that Snowflake would show up again at some point — the Courtfather always did — he’d stuffed the extra money in the prep envelope in a blind panic shortly after waking up. He’d tried not to let on too much of his feelings about the incident since. Maybe he slipped up once or twice in letting folks know where he’d gone, but that was it, It frightened him, slightly, realizing that two months had flitted past — that he’d missed out on so much. That he was actually getting a little attached to the little bit of life he’s built for himself on this wet rock.

A sneeze rose out of Fenn as he brushed frosted dust bunnies off of him, clutching the envelope triumphantly. “Guess I must’ve slept in so bad, I never heard you knock,” he replied, thrusting a bit of cheek into the last word. Technically, it was a truth.

“You better be awake the next time I show up, else I’m knocking your door down. Promise me that.”

How could he, when he didn’t know why that coma had happened — or if it might possibly happen again? He tried to, but the words burned in the back of his head before they ever came out his mouth. He shook his head instead. “Mmmm… no. Nope. Uh-uh. Sorry. Don’t think so. Like, I ain’t one to raise a fuss about ‘honor’, but I do gotta keep my word. Don’t push me into making pacts I can’t hold true to. It’ll hurt me, and that’ll make me wanna hurt you.” It was easier to be brave when hiding behind his apartment's threshold. Easier to say tough things. Fenn didn’t exactly mean for the last bit to pop out of his mouth, but pop out it did.

“Some dumb little punk you are, making threats like that.”

Fenn bit down on his tongue in an nervous wince. Hopefully, Snowy didn’t mean than in an “I’ll have to kick your impudent ass later” kind of way. Well, what was said, was said. “Shaddup and take the money,” he muttered, stuffing the envelope under the door.

Its edge was snatched out from under his very fingertips. Another low chuckle followed suit. “I’ll be seeing you next month.”

“Fuck off until then.”

Fenn braced himself against his door a minute, un-holding his breath. His fingers shook like leaves. Now that Snowflake was gone, he could safely fall apart a little, and no-one’d be the wiser.

Except that the butter he was melting for the brownies — left unattended on the stove — was hissing. He was pretty sure it was not supposed to do that.

Snatching up his gloves again, Fenn zipped over to check on it. The butter was a browning, grainy mess. That was not going to work in a brownie. Grinding his sharp teeth together, he scraped it all into the sink and grabbed another half-cup of butter from the fridge. Dumb Snowflake. Dumb debt-that-should’ve-been-resolved. Dumb him for not getting the police involved. But didn’t they have, like, drug-sniffing dogs? Or maybe werewolves here. No way he was going to risk them poking around his place all suspicious-like.

“Hrmm. I could get a guard dog,” he muttered, stirring the new butter as it melted. “But then, the coma-thing…” Who’d take care of it if that happened again? He sure as hell didn’t trust his neighbors.

All he was seeing was a lot of dead-ends, and not enough solutions to his—

Slung over the couch, Fenn’s coat vibrated, his Nokia ringing loudly from the pocket he’d last shoved it into. “Damnit!” He pulled the butter off the heat and rushed over, almost knocking the cocoa powder off the counter as he went. What was it this time?

Pressing his phone up between his ear and shoulder, and letting off enough cold to leave frost on every surface he brushed against, Fenn returned to the kitchen. ”Who this? ‘S one Fennik Glenwey you’re talking to.”

“Good. We are calling to remind you that—“

“Look,” he snapped, dumping sugar, eggwhite, and vanilla into his butter with one hand. He tried real hard to keep an iciness from creeping into his voice. It wasn’t quite working. “I’m on an off day. If you’s some telemarketer, I’m hanging up, ‘cause I don’t got patience for bullshit right now. Who’s “we”, and whaddya want?”

The voice on the other end sighed deeply, and remained composed. “Starlight Academy. This is your friendly reminder that since you missed several weeks of class and the final for ‘Common Baselines for Societal Integration’, that you need to schedule a make-up seminar for the summer semester.”

His antennae twitched up as he stared down at his stirring. “Oh. That all?”

“Not quite. You reported your failure to complete last semester’s course as a due to a medical emergency, correct?” the secretarial voice asked.

“Yeahhh, and..?” Fenn didn’t know where this was going, but he wasn’t sure he was going to like it.

“We don’t seem to have it on record. The emergency, that is.”

This whole passed-out-for-two-months-straight thing was getting more and more nerve-wracking. ”Don’t… got any record of it?” he repeated nervously as he poured the rest of the ingredients into his batter and stirred the fuck out of them. Noticing the frost streaking the flour bag — even through his gloves — he took a cautious step away from his dubious proto-brownies. And a deep breath. A very deep breath. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that Manta Carlos has no record of any hospitalization for a “Fennik Glenwey” between December and now,” the Academy person continued neutrally, “which is moderately concerning. Now, we can’t draw any conclusions about why this is, but it seemed worth looking into. Were you hospitalized under a different name?”

“No.”

“Were you hospitalized at all?”

Fenn groaned as he lowered his brownie pan into the oven, wondering if there was some easy way to insinuate that maybe the papers or whatever it was regarding a hospitalization were lost or something. Nothing came to mind. So, the truth it was. “...No.”

“So you did not have a medical emergency.”

“Look, you don’t gotta question me like this, I wasn’t lying about that bit. Lying hurts me. There was definitely an emergency of a kind, and I’m pretty sure it was some kinda medical in nature.” Or maybe magical. Maybe he just fell into some faerie-tale magical sleep of some kind. It was almost a reassuring thought; that perhaps something enchanted happened without him noticing, and it was a one-time thing, and he shouldn’t really pay it any heed. Whatever was going on, Fenn was very glad he’d invested in a waterproof phone. The device wouldn’t have looked out of place in an icy cavern, at this point.

“Mmm-hmmm,” buzzed uncertainly over the phoneline. Fenn’s ears flicked up as he thought he caught a rustling of papers on the other side. It sounded as if the Academy-secretary person was at a loss. “You had a medical emergency, and you didn’t go to a hospital for it. Did you seek alternative treatment?”

“Nuh-uh. I handle shit on my own, okay?”

The voice was starting to get curious. “Have you been to see a doctor yet? At all? Of any kind?”

Before Fenn could answer, another knock sounded at the door. It was all he could do not to swear straight into the phone’s receiver.

”Do I gotta see a doctor?” he asked quietly as he flittered over — yet again — to take a gander outside his door’s peephole.

“Well…”

As the Academy lady rattled off some rehearsed bullshit about how it would be “wise to seek a professional”, though technically “not legally obligatory”, he squinted outside. His antennae sagged in relief. Not Snowflake. Thank every god in Manta Carlos and then some, it wasn’t Snowflake. It was just a guy in a trenchcoat, who could be charitably described as the result of a one-night stand between Big Bird and Cousin It — that was Bob. Bob was chill. Fenn gave Bob his Spirit Mint, and Bob gave Fenn money. That was pretty much all that Fenn knew about Bob. It was a good, clean, comprehensible, sensible relationship of mutual benefit. Those were few and far in-between these days.

A shame that he wasn’t in the mood for visitors today.

Cautiously, he unlocked the door and cracked it open. “In a minute,” the fae mouthed desperately, pointing to his phone.

Bob shrugged and remained where he stood.

“Are you still there?” the Academy lady asked.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Look, I ain’t needing or trusting no doctor, I think. I’ll be fine.”

“Are you certain?”

“Oh, like it’s any a your business. You know what, I’ll keep all my troubles right here, and then one day, I’ll die! That’ll be the day. You’ll hear the awful, indignant screeching all the way from Hong Kong.”

“...are you okay?”

He glanced at the shaggy behemoth in the doorway. Bob gave a polite cough. “No! I’m stressed! And unable to do any a my baking! And wanting to be left alone!”

“Should I put you up for counseling?”

“Didja even hear me? I ain’t broken, I’m stressed, and it’s fine, it’s all fine.”

“I’ll notify counseling about scheduling a starter session.”

Damn this helpful, helpful voice and her terrifyingly effective meddling. “Fuck off. I’ll get signed up for the replacement seminar in a week or something. Merry fucking part. My regrets, but I don’t wanna merry meet you ever again if I don’t have to.”

“B—“

Fenn hung up the phone. Not three seconds later, he found it — of his own will, but not of much thought at all — sailing out of his hands. It landed with a dull thud on the other side of his apartment, accompanied by the thump of a plant hitting the floor, and a spilling of soil.

Luckily, because it was a Nokia, the phone was probably fine. Unluckily, Fenn was not.

From where he was patiently waiting, Bob sadly shook his shaggy head. “Was this a bad time to drop by?” he asked in his slow, sleepy, heavy voice.

“VERY.”

Leaving his phone where it lay, Fenn reluctantly smoothed back his angrily twitching antennae, dragged himself over to his coat again, and pulled out a little baggie filled with earthy green crystals. ”You know you’re not supposeda show up here without warning me first, eh?”

“Wanted the stuff,” Bob uttered reverently. “Badly.”

As if he hadn’t heard that excuse a thousand times before. This was why Fenn didn’t really like it when his clients figured out where he lived — it made the boundary between his privacy and his “work” unnervingly thin. He was just luck Bob was a relatively decent sort. You know what? He could work with this. It’d help cover the ninety bucks he just handed over to Snowflake, and something was better than nothing.

His wings dragging tiredly against the floor as he marched over to Bob and handed over the Spirit Mint. The shaggy creature tilted his head cheerfully as be pocketed the stuff, and handed over a wad of cash in return.

Fenn counted the money, felt his antennae twist together anxiously, then counted it again. Ten… dollars. “Bob, buddy…” he said through an unhappy squeak, “y’know this stuff costs thirty, minimum?”

Bob gave an idle shrug. Again. “Ten is what I have.”

Fenn’s mind blanked out. Shorted out entirely. Without another word, he slammed the door in Bob’s face.

The fae’s ears listened sharply at the door’s crack. He heard Bob’s sheepish shuffling, and the thud of the shag-creature’s feet on the carpet, getting farther and farther away from the apartment. As soon as his client was out of earshot, he wandered over to the couch, grabbed a pillow, and screeched into it. His last nerve had frayed. Maybe that’d be another noise complaint, or maybe he’d be lucky. Probably not, knowing his spiraling fortune.

Today was enough to make him reevaluate his life choices.