My first piece for the Glimbow Week Countdown! I’m running a Glimbow Week over at @glimbow-week-2020 in a couple of weeks, check out the account for more information!
Written for the Glimbow Week Countdown Prompt “cooking”, based off of a prompt request from @amozon28 that I got a while ago. She requested the prompt “The tea tastes weird.” “Might be because that's coffee.” for Glimbow. Sorry this took so long, hope you enjoy!
Summary: Bow and Glimmer have breakfast together on a calm morning after the war.
[Takes place a bit after the show.]
Heads up, there’s one or two very minor sex references, but nothing explicit, in general the fic is completely sfw.
Also, the fact that Glimmer gets eggs for breakfast is purely coincidental and has nothing in the slightest to do with @tippenfunkaport and the fact that her fic for this prompt made me sad and I had to cope with it somehow (seriously though go read her fic it’s really good)!
It was a calm morning in Bright Moon. The soft morning light shone through the curtains of the private kitchen that was attached to Glimmer’s bedroom but that she’d rarely ever used for a very long time.
Glimmer stood there, in the middle of the kitchen, taking in both the breath of fresh air from the window that Bow had apparently opened before he’d left the room to do – she wasn’t sure what he was doing, exactly, but at least he wasn’t in here anymore at the moment –, and the wonderful odor of the breakfast he’d made... warm pancakes, scrambled eggs and her favorite fruit juice were all waiting on the dining table for her. The smell alone was enough to made her mouth water.
‘Moons, how did I get so lucky?’
For a bit, Glimmer just stood at the window and took in the view of the world outside the castle that was slowly waking up. People were laughing, kids were playing in the fields and at the water, some even going for a morning swim. When looking at the world from up here, you could barely tell that there had been a war going on until very recently.
Sometimes Glimmer couldn’t help but think that an entire lifetime had passed between the end of the war and this morning, when I’m reality, it had barely been a few weeks.
There had been more peaceful mornings since the war was over. It felt weird... but the good kind of weird.
Sure, there was still work to do, but almost everyone seemed to sleep easier these days, and everyone deserved a couple of lazy mornings every now and again after everything they’d went through.
Heck, even Adora managed to sleep most nights now that Catra was with her. She even managed to sleep in, which was possibly the weirdest thing about this situation. ‘Adora’ and ‘sleeping in’ were about the last two words any of them would have ever put in the same sentence up until a couple of weeks ago.
...but she did now. And it made Bow and Glimmer incredibly happy to see that their friend was doing so much better after seeing her inability to relax in action for years prior.
As for the Queen of Bright Moon and her future King... they maybe didn’t get as much sleep as they used to since their first official date, but for good reasons only.
Bow had wanted their first kiss to be special, so he’d taken his girlfriend – she was his girlfriend now, the thought still made Glimmer feel all mushy inside – out on a starlight picnic as soon as they had the time.
That evening, everything had fallen into place.
Glimmer smiled at the memory.
And they’d done much more that night, and since then, and she couldn’t remember if she’d ever felt quite as happy in her life as she was feeling right now. Things were still far from perfect, of course... her mother’s absence had left a burning hole in her heart that she didn’t think anything would ever be able to make whole again, and there was also the looming guilt of the mistake she’d made that she would never be entirely able to forget... and trying to form a normal father-daughter-relationship with Micah after loosing him at such a young age and after she’d long come to terms with his supposed death wasn’t the easiest thing either – but as long as Bow was with her, she felt like she could take on the world, or maybe even the entire galaxy.
When she’d been younger, before discovering her powers and learning to control them, she’d envied her mother’s wings, her ability to fly. She’d long worked past these feelings... but now, when she was around Bow, she felt like she finally understood what it felt like to fly. She didn’t think she’d ever grow tired of the way his hand felt in hers or the way her heart skipped a beat every time he looked at her.
Sometimes she still had nightmares... but she was slowly starting to get them under control. Talking about it got easier as time went by – even though she knew it was never going to be easy –, and even when she wasn’t alright, Bow was there to hold her and kiss her and tell her she was safe with him.
“Morning, Love.” He hugged her from behind and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she turned around. “I hope I didn’t wake you when I got up earlier, but I felt like doing something special for you today.”
“Don’t worry.” She grinned. “I slept pretty well after our... exercise yesterday.“
Glimmer winked and kissed her boyfriend as his cheeks heated up.
For a moment, they just stood there, happily making out in the middle of the kitchen.
“We really can’t keep our hands off each other, huh?” He asked softly with the usual sweet smile in his face when they broke apart, and all she wanted to do was immediately pull him into another kiss because nope she definitely did not want to keep her hands off him, but he’d made breakfast and it was getting cold, so making out further would have to wait, because if they continued on like that, they’d be in the bedroom rather than the kitchen in what Glimmer guessed was approximately five minutes from now.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to, or the food you put so much effort into will end up being cold.” She chuckled and winked at him. “We‘ll continue this later.”
“As you wish.” He gave her another quick peck on the cheek, then pulled back a chair and gestured for her to sit down on it. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you alone with all the food, I thought you were still asleep and wanted to take the opportunity to go outside and collect some of these before I woke you up.”
He sat down next to her and held a small bowl of strawberries in her direction. Her face lit up even more.
“Oh stars, I love you so much. You’re amazing. How did I get so lucky?”
Bow felt his heart flutter in his chest at the way her eyes lit up when she looked at him. Every morning that he woke up next to her, he wondered how exactly he’d taken so long to realize what Glimmer really meant to him when it was so blatantly obvious now that nobody in the galaxy could ever compare to her.
He’d missed her every second they’d been apart, and now that he’d found her again, he was planning on holding onto her for the rest of his life – if she’d let him.
“I love you, too,” He whispered softly, still every bit as mesmerized by how she looked as he had been the first time. Her hair sparkled brightly in the soft morning light, and Bow couldn’t help but think that his girlfriend was visibly as much of an angel as her mother had been. “We’re both incredibly lucky, Glim.”
She smiled softly at him, and her heart melted from the way he smiled back at her.
Gosh, how much she’d longed for him to look at her like this over the last couple of years, despite refusing to admit it. And now they were a couple, and she couldn’t be happier.
The food tasted heavenly, and they had a really nice breakfast... for the most part.
Everything was really good – except for the coffee Glimmer had made while Bow had been outside gathering strawberries.
Bow winced a bit as he took the first sip, despite his best efforts to hide it out of politeness.
“Huh. This tea tastes a bit weird.”
He put the mug down. All his politeness wasn’t enough to get him to have another sip.
“Might be because that's coffee,” Glimmer replied and chuckled a bit.
“That’s coffee?” He stared at her blankly for a moment when she nodded. “Glimmer, honey, I love you, but we really need to work on your cooking skills.”
He gave her a polite smile, already feeling bad because he didn’t like criticizing her when it came to stuff like that. She was trying, and he found it very sweet that she was, and a lot of the time, what she made came out fine – sometimes great, even – but this wasn’t one of those times.
It was weird, actually. She’d made coffee before. It wasn’t the greatest, but it wasn’t that terrible usually...
“Come on, it can’t be that ba-” Glimmer took a sip herself and oh by Etheria’s moons did she stand corrected. She had a hard time not spitting the ‘coffee’ – honestly whatever this really was had no right to be called that – across the table. She decided to just spit it back into the mug instead, and then spent several seconds wiping her tongue with a napkin. Anything to get the taste out of her mouth. “You swallowed that? I’m so sorry.” Glimmer winced and gave her boyfriend an apologetic look. “What did I do to that? Moons, this tastes...” She grimaced. “Okay, note to self, no more making coffee when I’m too tired to function.”
Bow chuckled and smiled at his girlfriend.
“So... before you’ve had coffee?”
He really should have known it was that. Glimmer had never been a morning person, after all.
‘Her sleepiness explains it, alright.’
She shrugged and then joined in on the laughing.
“Huh, yeah, I guess. Can’t make coffee if I’m tired, and can’t stop being tired without having coffee. Eternal coffee paradox,” She joked, making her boyfriend chuckle.
Sometimes she wondered if laughing at even your friend’s dumbest jokes should have been a dead giveaway that they were in love with each other.
“How about we stick to me making coffee in the morning in that case, then? Paradox solved,” Bow added, kissing her cheek.
“That... might be a good idea.”
Glimmer had gone back to her delicious pancakes
He didn’t mind. At all. To be quite honest, he actually loved spoiling his girlfriend. The way her face lit up over little things (like him bringing her coffee in the morning) was adorable, and if it made her happy, he would gladly keep doing it for the rest of their lives.
“In all seriousness, though... if you want to, I can show you a couple tricks when it comes to cooking? Just an idea, of course. Your usual cooking when you’re not sleep deprived is fine. I just thought cooking together might be nice.“
“I mean, it does sound nice...“ She took another bite of the scrambled egg, which was the only thing left on her plate. It had been a while since they’d done stuff as normal as cooking together. “But we don’t have time for that right now. There’s more important-” Glimmer started, then stopped herself mid-sentence.
Actually... there wasn’t. Sure, there was still towns in need of rebuilding, but most Etherians were doing a pretty good job taking care of their homes themselves, and while that of course didn’t mean the princesses didn’t still help wherever they could... it did mean that occasionally, they were able to take some time to themselves and do stuff like cooking together, or going on dates, or going for a swim in Mystacor, without half of Etheria falling back apart or getting attacked while they were gone.
“Huh... actually, I guess we could do that.” She put her hand on his, fingers intertwining in the middle of the table as she sighed softly. “I’m... still not used to not going to battle constantly.”
He ran his thumb over the palm of her hand gently and smiled at her softly.
“Takes some time getting used to, doesn’t it?” Bow sighed. “I think all of our heads are still in the war half the time, despite the fact that it ended. But it will get better, eventually. I just know it will. And until then, we’ll go every step of the way together, yeah?”
She squeezed his hand a little tighter and smiled at him.
“Yeah. Every step of the way.”
She’d come to figure out that she loved cooking with her boyfriend very soon.