“What do you mean you’ve never celebrated Easter?” Scout asked, looking up from the comic book they’d been reading together – it had the ‘Easter Bunny’ in it which is how the topic had come up – to give Pyro an incredulous look.
Pyro shrugged. “I never celebrated it.” Everything he’d heard about it said it was a religious holiday. “I’m not uh… religious.”
“Well you don’t got to be religious to celebrate Easter. I guess it is technically a religious holiday but like… that’s not why most people celebrate it. It’s about candy and decorating eggs.”
“Oh?” Candy and decorating eggs sounded fun. Why someone would think to decorate an egg was beyond him but it didn’t matter.
“Yeah. Easter’s like a week away so sometime in the next few days we’ll head to town and get everything we need to decorate some eggs from the store and then we’ll celebrate Easter. Sound like fun?”
“Yes.” Pyro nodded. That sounded like tons of fun.
-
Going to the store in town always either very fun or very not fun, never anywhere in between. This time it was the former. Pretty pastel decorations, presumably for Easter were everywhere. A whole little section of the store was dedicated to Easter stuff too which was they headed to.
“All right so, what colours do we want to use?” Scout asked as they surveyed the shelves full of Easter candy and egg dying kits.
“All the colours,” Pyro said, speaking loud to make sure he’d be understood through his gasmask because this was an important thing. More colours was always better. Unless they were ugly colours but he’d never seen an ugly food dye colour before so it probably didn’t exist.
“All the colours it is then,” Scout agreed.
-
There were just enough clean bowls in the base’s kitchen to hold every colour of food dye. Pyro clapped at the sight of all of them laid out on the dining room table. Under Pyro’s insistence they’d been ordered to match the colours of the rainbow, red on one end of the table, blue on the other end.
“Let’s start,” he said, practically vibrating with excitement. “What do we do?” He’d neglected to read the instructions that had come with the food dye kits they’d bought; it’d be easier for Scout to just explain it to him.
“Now we get the eggs,” Scout said.
They’d also bought several cartons of eggs from the store the other day, all of which they’d hard boiled last night before putting them back in the fridge. They went to kitchen to retrieve them.
“Now you just put them in the dye bowls and let them soak,” Scout explained. “It’s not exactly super exciting or anything but the end result is always pretty, especially when you put a bunch of them next to each other. And once they’re dry, we can put on the little stickers.”
-
Scout was right it wasn’t super exciting but it was fun. Anything that involved making things pretty colours was fun. They could even dye the eggs multiple different colours by holding part of the egg in the dye for a while. It took only a small amount of experimentation before Pyro figured out how to make the best rainbow eggs.
They’d been at it for a little while before Engie came in. “What you two up to?” he asked.
“Decorating eggs for Easter,” Scout replied. “Want to join us?”
Engie thought about it for a few seconds before shrugging. “Sure, why not? I could use a break anyways.”
And so Engie joined them. One by one the rest of the team wondered in and accepted Scout’s invitation to help. Spy was the last one to wonder into the dining room.
“Nope you’re joining us too Spy,” Scout said when he tried to turn around and leave.
“Do I have to?” he complained.
“Yes, you have to so get over here.”
Spy sighed and muttered something – probably a French swear – under his breath but came over and joined them.
Pyro would’ve clapped with joy if his hands were already occupied. The whole team was decorating eggs now, that was awesome. It was the best Easter ever, also the first one he’d ever celebrated so therefore by default it was the best. That didn’t matter though as long as it was super fun.
