Written for Hunk Ship Week ’18 and posted very late because this week was crazy.
home is wherever i’m with you (Hunk/Pidge, theme: sugar/spice)
Pidge sat on the counter, legs swinging idly as she watched him. It was a leftover habit from their days in the Castle of Lions, when she used to wander over to the kitchen to pick his brain over some new idea she’d had then wait for him to finish experimenting with his latest alien food find so they could head down to the lab together. Man, did he miss that lab. There had been other ships, and other castles, but they had never found anything else quite like it.
Technically, Pidge wasn’t supposed to be up on the counter at all. Even though her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she wasn’t actually touching the food, it was probably a health code violation. But he wasn’t about to start telling her off now. Besides, what was the point of owning your own restaurant if you didn’t get to make the rules?
The kitchen timer buzzed, interrupting his train of thought. Hunk stopped mixing and looked down at the bowl. The egg whites had peaked, just like they were supposed to. Earth eggs were predictable like that. Was it bad that he kind of missed when eggs weren’t so predictable?
He grabbed the other bowl and carefully folded the egg whites into the batter.
“Remember those weird Talwar eggs?” Pidge said abruptly. “If you stirred them counterclockwise, they turned everything green, but if you went clockwise they dissolved?”
He did remember those. He pretended to shudder. “You know, I never thought I’d say this, but I actually got really tired of eating green eggs and space ham.”
“And here I was thinking you might like a souvenir,” Pidge teased. “I’m sure there’s still a produce section at the swap moon near Kepler Base. They might have some in stock.”
“Well, if you’re offering to pick some things up, I wouldn’t say no to more of those carrot-y things the Gulgans grew.”
“Eww! No, no way. Those were so slimy!”
“They were not! They were just a little… chewy, maybe?”
Talking like this made it easy to forget that tomorrow everything was going to change. Pidge would be headed into space on her first official Galaxy Garrison mission, while he would be staying on Earth, officially retired from military service.
He put the mixing bowl down to grab the last ingredients. Wordlessly, Pidge slid an open jar of peanut butter over to him across the counter. He nodded in thanks, scooping out what he needed and adding it to the batter. On second thought, he tossed in a little extra spice, just for good measure.
Pidge sniffed the air appreciatively, her heels knocking against the side of the counter. Cinnamon and peanut butter were a pretty good mix, but the scent tended to linger.
“The smell’s probably going to stick,” Hunk warned her, gesturing to her new uniform.
She shrugged, the shoulders of the grey jacket bunching up strangely on her small frame. “That’s okay. Just means I’ll smell like home.”
That was a nice way of putting it. It made his chest feel all warm. He grinned. “Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Pidge watched him drop the batter onto a cookie sheet in careful, even rows before putting it into the oven. On the outside it looked like a standard commercial oven, but Coran had insisted on adding something he’d dubbed ‘targeting convection’, a modification of the Castle’s former weapons systems that would pinpoint the location of any organic matter and hit it with exactly the right temperature. Technically, it meant that Hunk didn’t really have to worry about evenly spacing anything out ever again, but old habits died hard.
He shut the oven door and reset the timer. Nine doboshes sounded about right for this batch. He’d kept the Castle’s timer out of nostalgia. It suddenly hit him that if he ever hired any employees, he’d have to get a regular kitchen timer, unless he wanted to teach them to read Altean. Or he could hire an alien employee–
He looked over at Pidge, about to ask her to send him any potential job candidates who were out of this world, but she didn’t seem to be in the mood for joking around anymore. Her legs had finally stilled. She was staring down at her knees, hands twisting in her lap.
“I’m going to miss your peanut butter cookies,” Pidge said to her knees. “I really love them.”
Something told Hunk this wasn’t just about cookies.
He took a few minutes to mull it over. He put the mixing bowls in the sink to soak, wiped down the countertops, grabbed two clean spoons from a drawer. Pidge talked a lot, but he knew better than anyone that there were some things she would never be able to say. Not directly, anyway.
He eyed the counter. Rules were rules, but then again, he was the boss. So Hunk pushed himself up on the counter to sit next to her, their legs pressed together, and gently nudged her foot with his own until she looked up at him.
“Hey. Pidge.”
“Mmm.”
Hunk offered her a spoon and the jar of peanut butter. He helped himself to his own spoonful while he was at it. The smell of peanut butter cookies baking wafted through the kitchen.
“I really love you, too, y’know,” he said. “And I’ll be waiting for you to come back home.”