Welcome to Gaia! ::

When Sukku had called up Quick (with a bit of a mental battle with an ox to get the number), there had been a sense of urgency in her voice, the kind of urgency that was brought on by piled up stress:

“He’s baking,” she had said with a sort of hysterical giggle. “Has been baking for the past two days, there is no counter space left because there are mountains of mess, and the house smells like burnt dough and melting hair. I swear to St. Pete, Quick, if I leave him here today without supervision, he’s going to burn down the apartment and I know it‘s not worth a nickel, but I like having a roof over my head, you know?”

She had cast an edgy glance into the kitchen, before cupping the receiver, “I mean, have you ever eaten charcoal? One of the reasons I left Gehenna… food was not exactly choice, and hint of brimstone is so last year.”

Sukku could have called anyone. She could have phoned one of her kids, one of her old charges, but she hadn’t the heart to stick the unprepared with the tour de force that was Hugo. There would be more than a pile of ash to come home to in that case; who would win first? A feline-obsessed demon or a rainbow-colored Yuniko? She honestly didn’t know who to place her bet on.

So after coercing Quick to send Krishna early that Monday morning (the only friend that Sukku could really remember Hugo had spoken of. he didn’t talk to her much when it came to his dalliances), the she-devil waited in the foyer, staring impatiently at her watch. She was going to be late to work, but this was a necessity. She would much rather prefer that this Krishna-character got here before she left.

Aekea was the kind of place that was out of the way for anyone, even for the people unfortunate enough to live there. But it was cheap, cheap as hell considering the groundwater was polluted by the fumes and chemical spills from nearby plants. Sukku was used to that. She could deal with it. She only prayed that Krishna could deal with it enough to get to the flat. Had she not been accustomed to such things, she probably would have run in the other direction. And if he was anything like Hugo….

The familiar sound of a fire extinguisher went off somewhere behind her. Pressing her fingers to her eyelids, the she-devil prayed for deliverance.

Halfway through that second, glorious knock, the door burst open. Had Sukku put any more force behind it, she would have torn the sad thing from its hinges. A smell to rival the outside billowed past the doorway, a mixture of burnt goods and butter, and standing in the midst of it was the she-devil. There was a wide, tooth-filled split on her face, not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, but a b*****d hybrid of the two.

“The cavalry has arrived!” she said in a loud whisper, orange eyes round saucers of wonder. She stared at Krishna for a beat, reveling in the sole fact that he was here and her home was saved. He was like a rainbow-y beacon on the stain that was Aekea. She ushered him inside.

The inside of the apartment reflected nothing of what the city offered. It was warm to Aekea’s cold, wood to its metal. It was everything her old home outside of Barton used to be, small and miniaturized for her sake. Photographs in mismatched, but charming frames, lined the walls, everything from large family Christmases to sabotaged birthdays, calm days out, and even one of a church and a priest… bizarre in the house of a she-devil. Warm hardwood, happy wall-paints, cushy rugs… the only thing out of place was that smell.

“I didn’t think my savior would be so colorful! Are all Yuniko like this or are you and Hugo some of the luckier ones?” Sukku’s clasped hands belied her edginess; she kept peeking over her shoulder.

“He said he was experimenting. Has been all weekend. I really have no idea what he’s doing, but sometimes I walk in there and it’s like he’s trying to find the missing link.” Her lips stretched into a long, froglike line, “I don’t think it’s stress, or worry, or whatever-what-have-you. It’s probably cabin-fever.”

She grabbed onto her horns with a look of desperation, “But Heavens to Betsy, if he keeps going on like this, I’m going to scream.” A clatter of metal on metal emphasized her complaints. She turned to look down the hall. As she turned back to Krishna, she began to creep past him, ducking down stealthily to grab her briefcase.

“He’s, uh, well, you can just follow the sound. And the smell. Thank you so much, but I really have to jet, if you can just….” Sukku was out of the door before she finished, though she popped her head back in with a shrill giggle, “Happy trails!”

The kitchen had been a kitchen once. In fact, midday Friday it had been a kitchen, but now it resembled something of a war zone, battle fought mostly with eggs and flour. The counters were truly a nightmare, pans stacked atop one another, all carrying something that looked suspiciously like coal. Because that’s what it was. No one in their right mind could have claimed that they had been cookies once….

Mixing bowls, measuring cups, a sink full of dirty, dough-y dishes (as though soap suds were the answer to cleanliness. Just drop something in and it was clean!) - it was a nightmare. Bubbles attempted to escape their duty, floating half-heartedly into the air and popping against the smoky screen filming the entire room. It was a wonder the smoke detector didn’t go off. Had Krishna looked up upon entering, he would have noticed it had been gutted and hung from the ceiling like a dead fish on a hook.

And stretched languidly across the island, a space equally as cluttered as the rest of the kitchen, but surprisingly unnoticing of the chaos, was Hugo, hair piled on top of his head and speckled arms spread across the cool tiles, book in hand. Said book snapped shut with a pouf of flour.

“Krishna!” Glee darkened into confusion, “Wait. Oh my. How did you get in here? Are you breaking in? My bonded already left-- how...?”

He slid from the island with a dainty click of his hooves against the hard floors. This could possibly be a hallucination from lack of sleep. He’d read about something like that happening before. Maybe watched it on T.V. - didn’t mirages only happen in the desert and stuff?

With powdered hands, Hugo pinched either side of Krishna’s face. Hallucinations weren’t solid.

“Did she?” he asked, eyes widening marginally. He cast a look towards the coffee pot, which flashed an incessant number indiscernible behind the smudge of flour. His ears swept back, though silence did fall across the kitchen, silence of a curious sort; if one listened hard enough, they could hear Hugo’s thoughts whizzing past one another, a mile a minute. Sukkubus, worried about him? Now that was bizarre, and the Light fixed his friend with a dark-eyed, scrutinizing gaze. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Krishna - though Hugo’s face was difficult to read - it was that he didn’t quite believe his bonded cared that much.

The fixtures above fizzed, and an idea loped into Hugo’s head; Krishna’s presence seemed to wake him up, “Impossible. She sent you over to house sit. How rude.”

He spun on his hoof and marched back to his island, picking up a rolling pin. He turned and waved it at the Kirin, “I'm making cookies. What does it look like?”

To any passerby with all screws intact, it looked like chunks of a collective unhappiness. It looked like it could grill up a nice steak. Hugo crushed a coal-hard chunk of cookie beneath the rolling pin, grabbed it, and stuck it in his mouth.

He immediately spit it back out.

“Do you know how to make cookies?”

“That's better than me by far. I get bored reading recipes halfway through,” Hugo admitted with a flippant shrug. It explained their… less than appealing appearance. With his fists propped against his narrow hips, he seemed to lord over his misshapen pile of cookies. There was a stack of them near the edge of the counter that resembled something of a castle; Hugo had obviously gotten bored waiting for the cookies to finish up in the oven.

He looked at Krishna sharply, brows furrowing in incredulity, “What? Do what?”

The mountainous pile of dishes gleamed like a beacon just across the island. His skin crawled. Did Krishna really expect him to do them? To… to stick his hands in that? Dish wash soap was ever so hard on his skin, though! Dried his pelt up like grass in the summertime. Hugo half expected a hulking, gray Kurai come to his rescue, but -- He stared defiantly at the Kirin, lips puckered in petulance. He was not!

“I'll try and find another bowl.” He wandered towards the tall cabinets, balanced himself on the edges of his hooves, and felt around one of the middle shelves. He couldn’t reach any higher. Most of the bowls were actually at ground level, but he had use all of those… he was praying he didn’t have to do dishes. Cookies be damned, in that case!

The question caught him by surprise, “I... have no idea.” He pulled down a rocking horse cookie cutter, and squinted at it.

“I felt compelled to. Missed them, I suppose.” He galloped the plastic horse-shape across the counter.

“Why not bother?” he flung back. There was no method to Hugo’s madness, at least not something yet proven. Mostly just now-defunct theories by people who had given up on the lost cause that was the dappled Light. There was just no point trying to figure out what he ran on - he was like a rubix cube, only not as smart. Maybe a Chinese finger trap: frustrating, trivial, impossible.

He stared into the sink, twisting a loose piece of hair around his finger. There wasn’t much room to maneuver the cookie sheets around, and the bowls jammed everything else against the sides of the stainless steel tub. His hand outlined the form of the mess, before gingerly dislodging a ladle and setting it aside. He began the slow and tedious process of picking around the junk, tugging out pieces and lying them out next to the sink.

“Oh, there's a very different taste between store bought and homemade, darling,” Hugo explained slowly. He considered the end of a spoon before setting it aside. “See, store cookies... well, a machine probably made them, so they don't taste as good. Naturally.”

He reached over and turned on the faucet, grabbing the soap and turning it bottoms-up to squeeze globs of soap into the steel basin. He set it aside and stared dejectedly at a large bowl, before shoving it into the sink with a heaved sigh. He hated washing dishes. He hated chores. He hated work.

“When someone else makes them, you can tell. Like when a painter paints, or a writer writes... or whatever. They put more than just paint on a canvas and what have you.” He scrubbed hard at the inner belly of the bowl, whining against the hot water splashing against his hands. He withdrew them momentarily to shake them against the cooler air.

“Oh, I never make cookies. Ever. No, no, no, but Sterling does it a lot. I just like eating them.”

Hugo collected water in the bowl and sloshed it around, splashing away suds before he dumped it all down the drain - which was a slowly rotating pool of greasy, gray water. Gross. He poked dough chunks down the hole and turned on the disposal.

It was strange, he thought, dredging up all those memories. He had never forgotten them, but he had never really entertained them after the fact. It was kind of funny, especially Krishna’s description; a smile slipped. The loud whirring of the disposal died, and he rinsed the bowl one last time before drying it. Every action he did was reminiscent of kitchen time at the Yuniko compound. He twisted his lips and turned, clipping the top of the island counter with the bottom of the clean bowl.

“Oh, yes, that one,” he said with a vague smile. He could have said something like ‘give him a little credit’, but the old echo of a fight between the two Yuniko told him to that Krishna had already tried. What a shame that the two couldn’t get along. Hugo’s narrow shoulders lifted and dropped in response to his own thoughts.

“Is it so bad? Sharing something more than a platonic relationship with someone like me?” he teased, leaning towards Krishna, feigning innocence with widened eyes and a higher-pitch; he was pretty good at it. He flipped loose strands of hair back with a loud sigh, resigned in the game, “Picky-choosy, picky-choosy.”

“I thought so too when I first saw them, but... you would be surprised. Wonderful gingerbread amongst other things, but don't tell him I said that.” Hugo picked up a rock hard chunk of baked failure and stared at it, “Makes me a little jealous sometimes.”

He bounced the burnt cookie across the tile.

Pooh. No fun. Oh well! Hugo certainly would have been flattered if someone had made the assumption that he had been with himself. If that were possible. Well, it certainly made sense in Hugo-land, which was the only place worth being when you had no one else to entertain you.

Hugo rested his elbows on the counter, cheek squashed against his palm. The Light never had time to feel envious, but when someone was better than him at something… it was not some evil, diabolical need to be superior he felt. No, it was a genuine sort of want for competence in their presence. It was hard to tell whether Hugo actually cared, even for Hugo. And the desire to want someone, need someone to be proud of him--

The Light shoved himself away from the counter and walked back to the sink.

“Sterling, Krishna, Sterling.” He flicked a bubble resting on the curved lip of a spoon. Ugh, the last thing he wanted to do was continue washing dishes, but he refused to face the Kirin right now.

“Not so much jealous of him, just jealous of what he can do. And not so much jealousy as, well, I don't think there's a word for it,” he said, monotonous voice becoming irritable; mostly at himself, though he liked to blame Krishna for it too. It made him feel better. He shoved a pile of dirty silverware - with a loud clatter - back into the sink for washing.