Pairing: #30 - Damian/Lian
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 900+
Prompt: Christmas cookies
For: theotakuprincessofgotham
... ...
He doesn't really know how he got sucked into this.
(Well, no. He knows exactly how he got sucked into this. No matter how hard he tries, he can't refuse her. Whether it's because he's known her for so long and knows better than to say no to her or because he just doesn't want to say no to her, he hasn't quite figured out yet.)
But when Lian asked if he wanted to help her bake cookies for the Christmas party this year, he sort of figured that they'd just be asking Alfred to help and then sort of hang out in the kitchen while the guy bakes (since Alfred refuses to let them eat those pre-made kinds where you just break off the squares and place them out on the tray).
He should've known better.
"How many more do we have to make?" he grumbles, looking around. Literally almost every surface in the kitchen is covered with a plate of cookies – the left half of the kitchen are the ones that are totally finished and the right half are the ones that still need to be decorated.
She looks up from the gingerbread man she's putting M&M eyes on. "The entire Team and League will be at the party."
"You're insane for doing this, you know that, right?"
She shrugs, handing him the plate of finished gingerbread men. Which, she told him, aren't even gingerbread cookies; they're cinnamon and sugar cookies that are shaped and frosted to look like gingerbread men.
She's seriously insane.
There must've made a few hundred cookies already, and judging by the bulky amount of ingredients that she'd asked Alfred (who does anything for her because she loves being in the kitchen so much) to buy, they're probably not even halfway done.
Pretty much every Christmas thing you could think of, she's turned into a cookie – mistletoe, snowmen, reindeer, Mr. and Mrs. Claus, presents, candy cane, snowflakes, Christmas trees, twinkling light bulbs, mittens, stars. They're all made without any cookie cutters, too. He knows. She taught him now to make every single silhouette so that he could help her mass produce them. And they're all hand-decorated. He frosted a few dozen, but she makes it look so much better than he does, so eventually he just stopped trying.
He glances at the clock on the oven. Her dad's picking her up in two hours, and since they started baking as soon as she got here this morning, they've pretty much spent their whole day in the kitchen.
He feels like he should be annoyed, or at least exhausted, but strangely, he's not. He spent his whole day trapped with her in the kitchen, doing pretty much everything she told him to without much resistance (well, he complained, but she ignored him every time he did), and he actually had fun the entire time.
"Hey, we should probably start wrapping these up," he tells her. She's piping light blue frosting onto asterisk-shaped cookies to make them look like snowflakes. He frowns. "Hey."
"Okay," she finally replies, still not stopping.
He sighs and walks over to her, snatching the frosting bag from her hand and holding it out of her reach despite her protest. "You need to take a break," he tells her, and she looks like she's about to protest before she meets his eyes and sees that he's being serious.
"Fine," she exhales. "Can you finish this last batch, then? I'll start moving the rest of them into boxes."
"Lian—"
"It'll be mindless work, Damian," she interrupts. "It'll be just like taking a break, just a little more productive."
He rolls his eyes. "You don't even know what it means to take a break."
She blinks. "What do you mean by that?"
"I don't know," he shrugs, but she gives him a look. He rolls his eyes again. "You're so… It's just that you get really passionate about everything you try, and there's all this intenseness to you that makes it pretty much impossible for you to not give something your all and make it perfect, or something."
"You say that like it's a bad thing," she says, though she's laughing.
"It's not," he tells her simply. "It's one of the things that I love about you." Her eyes widen a little and he turns away, scowling at himself. Did he really just say that? Damn. "I meant admire. It's one of the things I admire about you."
"No, you said love," she corrects stubbornly, and he misses the giggle in her voice. "Do you really mean that?"
"Well, yeah, but—"
But she practically runs into him from his side, throwing her arms around him, and he has to brace a hand against the island to keep them upright. "I knew you loved me!"
He feels heat spread across his cheeks. "You're such a pain. Did you know that?"
"But I'm your pain," she laughs. He (unsuccessfully) fights off a smile. "And you probably love how much of a pain I am to you, huh?"
"You're never letting the love thing go, are you?"
"Nope. You love me," she declares, and then says louder, "You love me!" He shakes his head, amused. "Damian loves me," she exclaims. He's pretty sure that the exhaustion she feels and amount of sugar she thought he didn't see her eat is probably making her act like this.
Then she tilts her head up, meeting his eyes. "I love you, too, you know," she tells him, and leans up a little to kiss the corner of his lips. "Thank you for helping me today."
This time he doesn't even try to keep from smiling. "Sure thing, Little Red."
