"Are you sure it's alright for me to be here? Shouldn't the poverty goddess be finished extorting Takemikazuchi by now? It's been days," Nora—there were few left who would call her anything else now—asked.

Yukine, seated across from her at the kotatsu, waved her off.

"It's fine—apparently she's having so much fun going through his antiques that we shouldn't expect them back until tomorrow at the earliest. Daikoku sent a note," he said, tossing the last corner of his toast toward the bescarved pigeon on the porch.

She eyed the bird with suspicion as she delicately polished off her own breakfast. How had the thing gotten to Takamagahara? It looked like a normal pigeon. Well, perhaps "normal" was going too far, but still…

"Anyway, I was thinking that today, we could bake a cake!" Yukine interrupted her train of thought with his characteristic zeal for proposing activities that, to her, bordered on the absurd.

"A…cake."

"Yeah. It's almost Christmas eve and all, so let's make a Christmas cake."

She couldn't recall ever having done a single thing that might give him the impression that she was the sort of person who baked cakes. Though perhaps that was why he suggested it. He was forever catching her on the wrong foot like that. She had long hated it—had spent more time than she cared to admit trying to understand what she had once assumed to be his boundless naivete, in fact. But now...well, it no longer bothered her as much. That was all.

"Very well."

"Great!" Acting as if she had responded with great enthusiasm, he dragged her toward the kitchen. She proceeded to stand around feeling useless as he pulled the cookbook and assorted utensils from their homes.

"They should be here somewhere…" Yukine muttered, crawling halfway into the cupboard below the sink. Soon after, a series of bangs ending in a loud clatter emanated from said cabinet.

"Do you...need help?"

"No, it's just really disorganize—OW!" Yukine exclaimed, whacking his skull against the top edge. He emerged wincing and holding bowls of several sizes. "Okay, maybe," he admitted, sitting down on the floor and closing his eyes for a moment.

"You can order these things from the convenience store. It's a lot easier," she reminded him. That's what Father always did—that or get an extravagantly expensive one from the department store, if he had forgotten until the last minute.

"Yeah, but this way is more fun. At least, that's…that's what Yato says." Yukine ended his statement brightly, springing up from the floor as he did so, but Nora marked his pause.

He generally hid it well, but she knew Yukine was worried about Yato. Nor could she say much to comfort him. She had never been so in the dark about what Father was planning—another thing she disliked profoundly—but she hardly needed the specifics to know that Yukine should be worried. She frowned, but remained silent.

Placing the bowls on the counter, Yukine opened the cookbook to a marked recipe. She could see that someone had written "CAKE!" and drawn several smiling faces wearing Santa hats on the note sticking to edge of the page.

"Okay," Yukine consulted the ingredient list, "we just need the butter, eggs, and milk from the fridge for now. I'll put the flour and sugar in some bowls."

Nora did as he asked. She noticed that the fridge contained both cream and strawberries as well—had Yukine gone out to get them before she had woken up?

"We blend the eggs and sugar first," he said, cracking an egg into the bowl with a flourish.

Aha. Two could play at that game, and she had at least one hundred years of egg-related experience on him. She grabbed her own egg, smoothly splitting it in half on the edge of the countertop before depositing the contents cleanly atop the hill of sugar in the bowl. Yukine gave no indication that she had done anything of note, turning back to the recipe as he took the last egg.

"Can you pour some water in that pan and get it started boiling, too? I forgot how annoying this next part is." And with that, he cracked the final egg. One-handed.

How very irritating.

"Uh...so basically, we put this bowl in the hot water and stir slowly until everything gets to room temperature!" Yukine said hastily, brandishing a whisk at her. Her glare had gotten the message across, then. Good.

She watched as he stirred. When he took the bowl out of the water and began to whisk the contents faster, she put her palms on the counter and lifted herself up to get a better look.

"Do you not have an electric mixer here?" she asked, tapping her toes against a cabinet. "This seems...complicated."

"No...apparently Daikoku banned those after 'the frosting incident of '89'."

"What?"

"No idea," Yukine shrugged, "Every time I ask, he just shudders." As he scraped the sides of the bowl with a spatula, Nora lowered her feet back to the floor and consulted the recipe again.

"It looks like the rest of the ingredients are added as you stir."

"Can you pour them in while I keep mixing it, then?"

"Sure."

"Okay, flour first."

"Flour," she repeated, dumping a good deal of it in quickly just to annoy him, though powder from the resulting plume settled on her clothes just as much as his. He coughed into his sleeve, but didn't retaliate.

From there, the rest of the baking process went fairly well, with only the occasional competitive perfectionism.

"Wow, it actually looks way nicer than last year's already," Yukine marveled, inspecting the cooling sponge cake.

Imagining the poverty goddess, Yato, and Heaven knew who else flailing about the kitchen while Yukine tried to bake, Nora couldn't say she was surprised.

"Now we cut it in half, right?"

Perhaps due to the sight of her wielding a knife the size of her head, Yukine took a step back.

"Er, yes. Yes, we do. You...do that. I'll just be getting out the ingredients for decorating. Over here."

Once the cake was cleanly severed, Nora turned to Yukine, who had just finished pouring the heavy cream and more sugar into a bowl.

"I can stir it this time. You did the whole cake."

"Sure," he said, handing her the necessary tools. "Just whisk as fast as you can. It might take a while, though."

It felt like it took more than a while. She had forgotten how painfully slow this sort of task could be. Yukine finished halving the strawberries before the cream was nearly thick enough, and began adding jam between the layers.

"We can switch off, if you want. Your arms are probably getting tired by now, right?"

"I'm fine."

Her arms were tired, in fact, but Nora was not about to be defeated by a bowl of whipped cream. Especially not at Yukine's house, in front of Yukine, right when she was just about to surpass the number of stirs that Yukine had put in earlier! Perish the thought.

Gritting her teeth, and clamping one arm even more tightly around the bowl, she stirred with renewed vigor.

Surely it wouldn't be much longer now. It did seem to be thickening, finally. Alas, her fingers were also beginning to go numb. She hunched over the bowl, whipping the cream almost viciously.

Maybe I should switch hands, she thought—unfortunately too late, for at that very moment the whisk slipped from her fingers, its business end smacking her right in the middle of the face before the whole thing landed back into the bowl with a soft 'thunk.'

"GACK!"

It was a most undignified exclamation. And she was pretty sure that she had cream all over her nose. She sighed, and turned to look at Yukine. Of course he had been watching.

"Don't. You. Dare!" she hissed, aware that her cream-face was probably not as threatening as she would have liked.

To his credit, Yukine did at least try to heed her. He bit his lip, puffed out his cheeks, clapped his hands over his mouth...and burst out laughing anyway.

So, without a moment's hesitation, Nora grabbed the whisk once again, scooped a hefty portion of cream up with it, and flicked it at him.

"WAUGH!" he yelled as the fluffy missile found its destination. "My eyes! Who aims for the eyes!?"

"You were warned," Nora replied primly. And then she did something that surprised even herself.

She giggled.

Amidst his dairy-based mask, Yukine's eyes opened wide in surprise. Of course, that only made her laugh harder.

"Ahahahaha...you look...hahahahaha...so stupi—eep!"

Halting mid-insult, Nora became very quiet and still. She met Yukine's curious gaze with a deathly serious expression.

"Yukine."

"Er...yes?"

"It went up my nose," she said, as mournfully as possible.

"Pfffffft," began Yukine, before collapsing into hysterics. Nora too dropped her straight face, grinning at his reaction and then dissolving into peals of laughter once again. She crouched down, head bent over the bowl on her knees, shaking with mirth.

From the place on the floor where he had come to reside after sliding down against the wall in a fit of giggles, Yukine reached for a dish towel hanging off the cabinet. He took a few deep breaths to steady himself as he attempted to wipe some of the dessert from his face.

"Oh...okay…" he wheezed, "there are some tissues by the bathroom sink, if you want to do something about that before you snort it up into your brain." He crawled over to her and took the bowl from her lap. "I'll try to salvage the rest of this in the meantime."

"I do not snort," she said, getting to her feet and taking his suggestion nevertheless.

She returned from washing her face to discover that he had managed to cover the cake with a thin layer of cream. He seemed deep in concentration as he piped some onto the bottom edge with a plastic bag, tongue sticking out slightly, eyes nearly crossed as he focused. She laughed again at this.

"Why are you trying so hard?"

"Well," he said, straightening up, "I'm just making sure we won't run out before we finish. After all, someone turned half our batch into projectile weaponry."

"Oh, shut up," she replied, grabbing the bag from him and swiftly ringing the top of the cake with scalloped cream, "There's always too much on these things anyway. You can hardly taste the cake half the time."

"So...you don't want to lick the bowl then?"

In reply, she merely put down the piping bag and retrieved the cake knife. Yukine seemed to think this his cue to exit, shouting something about washing his own face while summarily fleeing the room. Clever boy.

Alone in the kitchen, Nora took it upon herself to decorate the cake with the strawberries Yukine had cut, delicately placing the halves against the ring of cream on the top, and sticking the whole one he had put aside squarely in the middle. It did look rather nice, didn't it?

"A shame I won't get to taste it…" she muttered to herself.

"What? Of course you will," said Yukine from the doorway. Blast. Every time. How did he do that?

"Don't be ridiculous. There's no way you're sneaking out of here unnoticed, let alone with a piece of cake, on Christmas Eve."

"I'll manage it. Worst comes to worst, I just wait for everyone to get really drunk and pass out! Happens every time." He must have seen that she still didn't share his confidence, for he stepped closer, lifting her right hand. He then grabbed her little finger with his own. "See? I promise."

"You do know what happens if you break a promise, right?" she replied, resuming her usual caustic tone. "I have needles and I'm not afraid to use them."

"Yeah, I figured," he said, smiling at her as he bobbed their linked hands up and down.

Not for the first or last time, she found herself smiling back.