i’m absolutely in love with how you depict purecacao, they’re so soft with each other. old man yaoi ftw <33 also i was wondering if you mind fanfics based on/inspired from your art? your blog has really filled me with motivation recently :)
Thank you very much! I would not mind fics inspired by my art at all, the sentiment itself is very appreciated 🥹 I would love to read what you come up with
Summary: somewhere along the way, dark cacao realises something has gone terribly wrong in his friendship with pure vanilla.
ao3 link:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/63970171
In an increasingly rare moment of freedom between the two of them, Dark Cacao sets out to Pure Vanilla’s cottage on a journey to knock some common sense into him.
Given his abilities, it was the general consensus that Pure Vanilla would be able to avoid the illnesses that plagued the common folk. After all, it is the most natural and most sensible conclusion to arrive at when beholding his extensive experience. And it was true enough to some degree—but most cookies also could not account for Pure Vanilla’s deceptively vehement mulishness when it came to actually applying those skills to himself, or, oven-forbid, willingly accepting help from others.
It never ceases to amaze him how someone so brilliant, an unanimous magical prodigy even amidst prodigies, can manage to be so foolish. Harsh? Perhaps. Incorrect? Certainly not.
So, when a letter comes from White Lily the night that his battalion was set to return anyhow, he doesn’t hesitate to change his course upon ensuring his soldiers were settled. Would you be so kind as to ensure our dear, endearingly idiotic friend has not dropped dead in his own home, he has not responded to any of our messages in a month, has a certain sway to it, as it turns out.
The weather is brisk on the outskirts of the Biscotti Village; a spring cold lingers in the breeze and tinges the air with an earthy, verdant scent. With every step Dark Cacao takes comes the drip of dew, the soft, longing shape of the clouds for a thunderstorm, a siren song from a distant passerine. He drifts past honeysuckle florets and sugared clovers and rounds the corner where the forest and fog break upon the afternoon sun.
The plains of his homeland are indisputably more frigid than this; and yet, Dark Cacao suppresses a shiver nonetheless.
Dark Cacao arrives at the cottage with little fanfare and lifts his knuckles to the door, before considering the situation. In all technicality, there really was no need to do such a thing, as—
A salient, heavy weight within his pocket cries out yet again to be noticed, acknowledged. And Dark Cacao, for the first time since it has been passed into his possession, indulges the urge.
He fishes out a bronze key from his cloak, an ineffable emotion passing over him as he looks down at it. It is as lustrous as the day he received it, two years ago at Pure Vanilla’s housewarming party. He’d never had precedent to use it before, after all.
The peculiarity persists, as Dark Cacao unlocks Pure Vanilla’s door with suitable mundanity. Scattered slips of parchment and hastily dog-eared books dominated nearly every surface of the cottage that wasn’t taken up with a potted plant, but in a distinctly Pure Vanilla sort of fashion, where Dark Cacao can almost recognise the organisation of it all. In a distinctly Pure Vanilla sort of manner, he finds himself thinking with a startling amount of indulgence, that is as familiar as always. Still though, amidst the pale orchids and twisting vines, there is no Pure Vanilla himself.
Dark Cacao wanders about the first floor for a moment, glancing into open rooms and cracked doors before he turns, catches a glimpse out into the backyard, and heaves a great, heavy sigh.
“What are you doing,“ Dark Cacao says, flat, as he strides out to Pure Vanilla’s crouched form, hovering over his sheep.
Pure Vanilla does not so much as jump as he stands and searches for the source of his voice, smiling as he beckons him forward. Obligingly, Dark Cacao steps closer with purposeful weight placed into his steps. “Dark Cacao!” Pure Vanilla greets as soon as he is near enough, despite how his voice is as brittle as wizened maple leaves. “My friend, it’s been too long! It’s good to hear from you again.”
“I wish I could say the same,” Dark Cacao grumbles, nonetheless vaguely reassured that Pure Vanilla had not, indeed, keeled over and dropped dead in his own backyard. He takes in his appearance, now that he was close enough to properly observe him, and is promptly filled with the urge to sigh once more, even greater and heavier than the last. “You should be resting.” He pauses before elaborating, “Inside. It’s far too cold outside for your condition.”
Pure Vanilla laughs at him. Truly. The audacity. “There’s no need to worry so much! Really, I can hardly even feel it.”
Dark Cacao scoffs, staring at him in his creased, clearly thin sleep robes, and deadpans, “Pure Vanilla, you are shaking.”
“I‘m fine, Dark Cacao,” Pure Vanilla protests between chattering teeth, and swaying like a willow tree.
Dark Cacao laments, not for the first time, the stubbornness that all his friends seem to share, for better or for worse.
Dark Cacao shrugs off his cloak and wraps it around Pure Vanilla’s shoulders, fastening the clasp with a muttered, “If you are going to stay out here, at least attempt to keep yourself warm.”
Pure Vanilla shoots him an indignant look, but the effect is lessened by the way he immediately buries his face into the thick fur ruff.
“Fine, fine. …Thank you,” he murmurs, the tips of his ears pink. Dark Cacao stifles an exasperated furrow of his brows. He was cold all along.
“You never answered my question. Why are you out here? You’re ill.”
“It’s merely a mild head-cold,” Pure Vanilla counters, pinching his index and thumb together. “Besides. I need to water my flowers and feed my sheep. It’ll be quick, I swear it.”
Dark Cacao blinks. “Then allow me,” he says simply.
Pure Vanilla looks nothing short of appalled. “Absolutely not!“ he hisses, rasp more pronounced now in his vehemence. “I won’t have one of my dearest friends doing chores in my own home.”
“But you said it yourself. Two years ago.” Dark Cacao tips his head, flushes, suddenly grateful for his dark dough. “…Your home is as much mine as it is yours. So it would only be fair for me to contribute, no?”
“Ah. Well,” Pure Vanilla says eloquently, in an uncharacteristic stumble over his words. He stares at Dark Cacao with an inscrutable expression for a long, long pause, before he shakes his head, and judging from his wince, immediately regrets how it jostles it.
“Pure Vanilla,” Dark Cacao says with a frown.
“Dark Cacao,” he says back, leaning heavily on his staff. “While the sentiment remains the same, I still can’t allow it. Because—because…” Pure Vanilla looks suddenly triumphant, and blurts, “You’ve never watered flowers before, right? So I could not possibly place that sort of responsibility on you.”
“True enough,” Dark Cacao acquiesces. “But I am more than capable of learning. Tell me, Pure Vanilla,” he continues, voice softened, “is it that you do not trust my abilities?”
“No, no, of course I do!” Pure Vanilla sighs, will visibly weaker. “But my sheep…” he retorts feebly.
“Tolerate me,” Dark Cacao interrupts, quiet, and one of the ewes headbutts against his side in apparent agreement. “Rest, Pure Vanilla. I will return your duties to you the moment you recover.”
An indigo zephyr washes over the garden, saturating the silence with the halcyon promise of rain. The indelible deluge of sun-warmed fruits and transient ether. Then, with the now late afternoon humming, teeming with pollen-stars, Pure Vanilla at last accepts his arm.
“Must you be so stubborn, Cacao?” Pure Vanilla asks, eyes crinkled with laughter.
“Pot, kettle,” Dark Cacao replies, guiding him forward and rolling his eyes despite the lightness filling his chest to the brim, incandescent and gossamer, threatening to spill over into—into—
The thought vanishes into a puff of smoke, a forbidden, unsettling realm of mist, as Pure Vanilla turns to him, weariness apparent now that he was no longer concealing it. Yet his gaze is gentle nonetheless as he draws his fingers away from the crook of Dark Cacao’s elbow and returns the cloak to its place around his shoulders.
A murmur, “Hurry back, alright? I don’t want you to become ill as well on my behalf.”
Dark Cacao hardly hears his own muffled response as he watches Pure Vanilla disappear from view, then reappear but a moment later through the windowpane.
His cloak is still warm, he thinks, belated and feeling, abruptly, a little bereft. Dark Cacao pulls it taut and sets to work, brushing away the dawning sense that something has gone terribly, horribly awry.
The days drift by, honeyed, amorphous reveries. Spring arrives in full, with the blackberry blossoms shedding their thin, papery petals and exposing the delicate fruit underneath. Dark Cacao brings the ripest ones he can find the day that they finally bloom to Pure Vanilla, hands sticky and nearly overflowing with them. They share them, at Pure Vanilla’s insistence, right there in the living room with the doors and windows propped open; though at Dark Cacao’s, he remains bundled in several blankets and a certain cloak.
True to his word, it really was just a minor head-cold—exacerbated by Pure Vanilla’s refusal to actually rest, that is. Thus, it takes a few more days than it really should have for the coughing to subside and the fever to calm to almost normal levels. All throughout it, Dark Cacao stays.
He had expected growing restless within the first day; Dark Cacao has never been idle for this long, watering plants and minding the sheep and cooking light meals, all the while tending to Pure Vanilla, despite the other’s reluctance. But they are already nearing the end of the week, and Dark Cacao is feeling rather restless about the lack of urgency plaguing him. It is all terribly mundane, terribly domestic. He isn’t sure what to think about it.
But Dark Cacao is sure that if it were not for his presence, Pure Vanilla would have already crawled out of bed and into his garden with the lambs and blackberry bushes and subsequently have succumbed to either his illness or the rain. So he stays, for his sake and the sake of their friends who rightfully worry about Pure Vanilla. As they say, healers often make the worst patients.
This particular morning, it is quiet yet again, but it is a quiet that does not stifle or choke. It is the first where Pure Vanilla has felt well enough to accompany Dark Cacao in the fledgling moments before dawn breaks; soon, he will not need Dark Cacao at all.
“I have been doing little but resting this entire week,” Pure Vanilla tells him, though not unkindly. “Allow me to at least rest in your presence?”
There he sits now, head in his arms and listening to the sounds of Dark Cacao puttering about in his kitchen. The remnants of moonlight continue to stubbornly cling to the horizon, so Dark Cacao works by way of that, unwilling to disturb the dimness with a candle. But again, there is that strangeness looming in the back of his mind, a nascent feeling that something within his dough has shifted. It unsettles him—yet he does not mind the emotion itself. Only the matter that he cannot understand it, cannot yet comprehend it.
Somewhere along the way, lost in his thoughts, Dark Cacao must have wandered by a particular cabinet, stepped on a particular tile, as Pure Vanilla stirs from his doze, and mumbles, “The lavender tea is in the cupboard underneath.”
Dark Cacao goes very still. “I thought you did not like the taste of it?”
Pure Vanilla lifts his shoulders in a shrug, and then, he says like the most natural thing in the world, “But you like it.”
The sun isn’t quite up yet, the slowly fading stars keeping it company for just a while longer. Muted sunbeams and starlight scatter across Pure Vanilla’s face, haloing him in a golden peach glow. It makes the slope of his nose soft, his cheekbones softer, and his slight, stained-glass smile even more luminescent. The normal, healthy Pure Vanilla would hardly look out of place, Dark Cacao thinks, off-kilter, residing in the crystalline-sugarwork windows of the cathedral, all honeyed, pale topaz and sapphire catching the light. And yet, here, fever-flushed and rumpled with sleep, Pure Vanilla looks nothing short of a little tired, a little perfect.
It has never been in Dark Cacao’s nature to want. He has never desired riches, or the glory of a great hero, or the fame of becoming king. But when he looks at Pure Vanilla—
The fog begins to dissipate, replaced with the beginnings of a knowing that is far more ruinous. Reveals that he is already standing at the precipice, that there is an understanding still lying beyond his grasp.
Dark Cacao turns away, white-knuckled grip against the countertop. “…Thank you. I will have some after I finish making breakfast,” he murmurs.
“Cacao. My beloved,” Pure Vanilla says fondly, and for a lingering, infinitesimal moment, Dark Cacao almost believes it’ll stop there. My beloved. Beloved. “My beloved companion. What would I do without you?”
“Have crumbled already,” Dark Cacao replies, absent, trembling. He exhales—one final shuddering breath—before releasing it into the misty daybreak. “Come. Sit at the table. I’m nearly done.”
Through the windowpane, the sun creeps up on the horizon, a blackberry dawn in its wake, pricked bruise-purple and rot-grey, fever-flushed—
(He was right, Dark Cacao thinks later, wry, as he brews his lavender and Pure Vanilla’s chamomile tea. Something terrible has happened.)
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