cw: nikghost fluffy sweetness. simon attempts to bake a pie. just realized upon editing that the voice I use in this is very fluffy and passive :// not gonna change it though it's cute. Been reading cute dreamy poetic things lately
Simon's latest leave had not been voluntary.
Nikolai had appeared in the doorway of the lieutenant's quarters on base—Simon's still not sure how the man got there—with his arms crossed and that particular set to his jaw. He'd made a decision and was only picking him up personally, and he had looked at Simon and said, "You are coming with me," and Simon had said, "I've got work," and Nikolai had said, "You have had work for eleven months. Now you have leave."
"I did not ask what you need. Get your bag."
Simon had gotten his bag.
That was how he ended up in a small village two hours outside of Samara, in one of Nikolai's safehouses that was too warm and too comfortable and too far from any town to be called a safehouse.
It had a wood stove. It had a garden that had mostly gone to seed for the season but was still trying. There was a plum tree at the back of it, old and a little gnarled, and in the low October light it looked like something out of a painting Simon might have called beautiful.
He was happy, in a way that felt almost too good to be true. But it was true.
He was happy in the quiet, uncomplicated way he was only ever happy near Nikolai, sitting on the steps in the cold morning with coffee, walking the edge of the village in the afternoon while Nikolai talked to people because Nikolai seemed to know people everywhere.
Simon didn't need to speak. He just needed to be there, and there was something in that he hadn't known he was hungry for until he was eating right out of the palm of Nik's hand.
Nikolai had to leave for "business" around the second week.
He kissed Simon firmly at the door.
He said, "Stay," the way he might say it to something he was fond of and didn't entirely trust to listen. Like a consistently fed stray cat that had no other obligation to do so.
And then he was gone, and Simon was alone in the warm house with the wood stove and the gnarled plum tree.
In his wanderings and musings, as much as time he'd ever gotten to wander and muse, he thought about the look Nikolai had gotten at a kitchen table in eastern Europe, and he thought about grandmothers and autumns and houses that smelled of something good.
Nikolai had been warm from sweet vodka. Telling some story.
Simon went to find flour.
And a few stubborn hours later... the first pie was inedible.
Simon stood over it with his hands on his hips and looked down at the burnt, sunken thing like it had failed him personally, like he had not been the one to make it. He had followed the recipe. He had been following the recipe.
He was a man who could fieldstrip a weapon in the dark, who could hold a position for eighteen hours without complaint, who had once navigated forty miles of hostile terrain with a bad ankle, who'd come back from the dead enough times it probably contributes to Price's grey hairs, and yet he could not explain what had gone wrong with the pie except that something clearly had gone very very wrong.
He stood over it for a long moment, six-foot-four of trained soldier, completely defeated by a pastry, and then trudged out to the compost bin before anyone could witness it and started again.
The second had been structurally unsound. The crust had simply collapsed. He'd stared at it with his jaw tight.
He'd written down what he'd done differently from the recipe and tried to identify the difference. He'd gone back to the old plum tree and picked more fruit... he'd have to buy some from the locals at this rate.
He found an old cookbook in the house, written in Russian of course, half the pages soft with use.
He couldn't read most of it. He photographed the relevant pages and ran them through a translation app on his phone and stood in the kitchen at eleven at night reading off the screen in the dark while the oven preheated, frowning at the text.
Don't overwork the dough, it said.
He had been, apparently, overworking the dough.
He adjusted. The third and fourth pies became experiments in pastry, one too thick and dense, sitting heavy and wrong; one so thin it crumbled the moment he tried to transfer it. He drove into the village and bought more flour. The shop owner knows his name.
He called Price at one point out of something close to desperation, and Price had squinted at him through the screen for a long, assessing moment and asked what exactly he was after, and Simon had said "research." Price had sent him his mother's recipe. It hadn't helped, but Simon kept it.
The fifth pie was better. He ate a slice standing at the counter at midnight, the house dark and quiet around him, and decided it was edible but not right.
Too sweet. He adjusted the sugar, adjusted the lemon, let himself sit with the memory of Nikolai's voice saying the whole house smelled of it when talking about his grandmother's pie until he thought he understood what he was actually trying to make.
He lost count of the pies after that. The village shop had long since stopped looking surprised to see him.
The morning Nikolai was due back, Simon woke before five and lay still in the dark for a moment before he got up. He didn't let himself think too much about it. He went to the kitchen, turned on the light, and started.
His hands knew what to do by now. He worked the butter into the flour until it looked right, not too little, not too much, until it had the texture the book described in those terms he'd had to look up.
He rolled the dough out with careful attention. He mixed the filling and tasted it and adjusted and tasted again. He crimped the edges the way the book had described, though imperfectly, the lines uneven in the way that his hands did.
He made two. They came out of the oven golden-brown and slightly lopsided.
The crimping on one side of the second had gone crooked. There was a small crack across the top of the first where the crust. He stood over them with his arms crossed and looked at them and they looked back up at him, handmade and obviously so, the product of something... attempted, and he thought about pulling them apart and trying again, and then he didn't. He left them on the counter to cool and made coffee and did not have to wait long.
He heard the car, then the door, then the familiar pace of Nikolai's footsteps. He heard the bag go down. He heard Nikolai move through the front of the house, and then the footsteps slowed, and then stopped.
Simon turned from where he was standing in the kitchen.
Nikolai was in the doorway, still in his coat, not moving. He was looking at the pies on the counter and his face... well... Simon couldn't immediately read, it was complicated, quiet, and Simon's chest did the slow airless tightening it sometimes did when he thought he'd read a situation wrong.
He'd miscalculated. He'd picked the wrong thing. Or the wrong day. He was wrong. He didn't know how, but he had.
He watched Nikolai's face and waited.
"You made pie," Nikolai said.
His voice was strange, like speaking through something thick.
"Attempted pie." Simon corrected evenly. "Might just be fruit with dough."
Nikolai looked at him, and something crossed his face that was slow and too many things at once for Simon to name. Grief maybe. Joy maybe.
He crossed the kitchen, picked up the knife Simon had left out, and cut a small slice. Simon stood very still and watched him lift the fork.
And then Nikolai paused. He reached out and took Simon's hand instead, warm and unhurried, and then he picked the fork back up and tried the pie.
He was quiet for a moment. He chewed slowly, with careful attention, and his brow was slightly furrowed, and Simon was doing an extremely poor job of appearing unbothered by any of this.
Something lit up behind Simon's ribs like a struck match. He felt it move into his face before he could do anything about it, warmth and relief and joy, the kind of feeling he had almost no practice hiding because he'd never expected to need to. His cheeks were warm. He couldn't entirely stop it.
Nikolai looked at him. His eyes were soft, the way he sometimes looked at Simon after long days or soft nights.
He cut another small piece, lifted it on the fork, and turned it toward Simon. Simon opened his mouth on instinct, and tasted it and—Oh
It was right. It was finally, actually right, the pastry short and buttery, the plums sweet and sharp, the whole thing warm and tasting of the kind of autumn that existed in a memory and that he had spent weeks trying to find his way toward.
He must have looked surprised because Nikolai laughed warm and low. He set the fork down and brought his hand up to cup the back of Simon's head and drew him in.
He kissed him thoroughly and without hurry. His thumb moved in a small idle arc against Simon's nape.
"Still needs to cool," he said. He looked at Simon's mouth, then his eyes.
"Yeah," Simon said, a little breathless.
"We have time." His hand tightened slightly at the back of Simon's head. "Other things first."
Simon reached up and took his lapel and walked him backwards out of the kitchen and down the hall.
The pies cooled on the counter. There were other things to do. The pies were worth waiting for, eventually, when they got to them.
