Please imagine with me, raau ranchers finding some silly kids Valentines in a shop and both of them spending like an hour scribbling and placing stickers and making a gift for each other for valentines
Day ???: The ranchers haul up in a grocery store for the evening...
First day of mcyt aspec week! I chose... all three prompts for today. queerplatonic, rings, and zombie au. Short story down below
Life had been hard after leaving Gem’s place. Nothing Jimmy could say or do would convince Tango to rest his newly amputated arm. Not if he knew, at least. But Jimmy was in charge of tracking their supplies, so if they spent an easy day or two skimming a mall that was already raided for stuff they didn’t really need, Tango didn’t have to know. The blazeborn was pretty good at that, if given something else to think about.
Among the many hidden treasures they found in the already-ransacked superstore, the last thing Jimmy thought he would get excited for was a box of red velvet cake mix and a bundt pan. The moment he plucked them off the shelf, plans formed easily in his mind. While Tango insisted on a third attempt to get the generators going, Jimmy slipped away. First to the van, and then to the bakery.
Before the world ended Joel would absolutely gut him if he dared buy a box of cake mix. It didn’t taste good, or his recipe was better. All those sorts of complaints from someone who learned how to poach an egg and never shut up about it. Jimmy was not that person. He couldn’t even fry an egg without crisping the edges, and the raw baking supplies like flour and yeast had all been taken by someone with foresight. But he did have a source of eggs and there was oil to spare.
There wasn’t enough power to turn on the ovens. Instead, it was more about convenience that he bothered with the bakery. Whisks, mitts, pans, all right there and cleaned. And it just felt right. Tango had noticed first while retreating to the office of a house they’d stayed in just to mess with a laptop. There was something grounding about it. For a moment, while they tucked into a bed instead of their sleeping bags, Jimmy could pretend the owners’ distant undead groans couldn’t be heard. So, Jimmy went to the trouble of clearing a space to make an oven out of an oven.
Jimmy was in the middle of filling the bundt pan when there was a click. His ears pinned back as the intercom screeched to life, but a smile replaced his grimace soon enough. “Attention, attention, customers.” Tango’s scratchy drawl echoed, the closest thing to a professional voice he could muster. “The store will be closing in ten months ago, so would the pretty birdy in aisle four make his way to the tills to, as the kids say, ‘get this party started’, please?”
Feathers fluffed up, tickling the nape of Jimmy’s neck as he doubled over in a fit of muffled giggles. “You absolute buffoon!” He barked to himself. Pulling himself together long enough to put the cake in the oven was made difficult by Tango continued harassment over the intercom.
“Cleanup at the uuuh, tills. Someone’s left the world’s most charming and handsome blazeborn all alone on the floor. Get your feathery butt over here!”
“Stop it, stop it, I’m here!” Jimmy shouted, stumbling out of the bakery to flutter over. By the time he reached the tills he was gasping for air, holding his tubes as if pushing them further into his nose would increase their output.
Tango was splayed out on the conveyor belt, staring up at the ceiling and completely relaxed. In his hand was a microphone. Two shopping carts worth of stuff sat beside him. The moment he spotted Jimmy he scrambled to his feet “Well, hello there, good sir.” His sharp teeth flashed in a grin. “Nice of you to finally join me on this lovely evening.”
“I’m trying to make dinner! What do you want?” Squawked the avian, hands on his hips.
There wasn’t much of a chance to be grumpy. Tango was at his side before he could blink, wrapping his one arm around Jimmy’s shoulders. “Psh, unimportant. Looky what I figured out.” The words echoed over the intercom, mic button held down tight before Tango suddenly released it. It clicked off and slow another sound faded in. Trumpets and a grizzled voice singing a simple tune, strikingly familiar though not something Jimmy’s heard much of since before they stopped at Gem’s. So that was where the Johnny Cash album went.
A happy little chirp escaped him unwillingly, but thankfully Tango didn’t laugh. His tail had instead curled with delight before he tossed the mic aside to pull Jimmy closer. It started as a silly hum, one Jimmy joined in on. As soon as the chorus began, though, the blazborn couldn’t help begin to belt, “I fell into a burning ring of fire! I went down, down, down, and the flame went higher!”
Jimmy burst out laughing, leaning into his rancher for support. It was off key, his voice was breaking trying to mimic Cash’s voice, and he stumbled over his words. “Dreadful!” Jimmy managed to breathe out between his fits. It hardly stopped Tango, whose singing only lilted slightly with a smile. Soon, Jimmy couldn’t help join in as well. “And burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, in the ring of fire!”
Most certainly a zombie or two across the enormous parking lot had heard their awful tune, but if they had they weren’t close enough to locate it. They continued to sing, a few poor attempts at dancing sprinkled in. The songs weren’t quite the dancing type, but damned if Tango could sit still.
Half a dozen songs in Jimmy remembered he was cooking. He let out a shriek, bolting across the store with a confused Tango in tow. The oven was yanked open, and out came a blast of smoke. Tango had to drag the coughing avian away. His lungs had suffered more than enough. Instead, Tango reached in and pulled the pan out himself. He blinked. Maybe not surprising. Jimmy probably should have thought to cook up some real food at the same time. In his defence, he was swept away by a very persuasive man before he could.
As all bundt pans are wont to do no matter what precautions are taken, it refused to release the cake without a fight. By the end there was a cake of an off-red colour, blackened at the bottom, and crumbled at the top. Ten minutes later it was hidden by a jar of cherries and a box of frosting mix that was definitely not whipped hard enough.
“What’s the occasion?” Tango chuckled as he plopped down a pot of pasta next to the cake. A lucky find in its own right.
Jimmy shrugged, “Finding it.” He concluded, giving his rancher a soft smile. “Every day alive’s a worthwhile occasion, innit?”
A little hum was all the response he got, accompanied by the blazeborn’s head bumping into his shoulder for just a moment before he dragged over a chair and sat down. Music in the air, warm food in front of them, Tango lifted his water bottle in the air in cheer. “To many more days, alive and together, then.” And Jimmy couldn’t agree more.
