"Arafinwë."
Finarfin was so startled he dropped his spoon on the floor. But it was nobody to be frightened of - it was his uncle Palcë, standing in the doorway of the kitchen.
"Hi!" Finarfin's face lit up. "Hi! Hi! Hi!" He hadn't seen Palcë in a long time.
Palcë cleared his throat, managing a smile for the young boy - Palcë frowned a lot, so Finarfin knew that smile was special indeed. "I have somebody here who wants to meet you."
Before Finarfin could say whether or not he was in the mood to meet a new person - he'd been eating cake, and that was important - Palcë stepped aside and a very pretty lady took a cautious step into the kitchen. She had long, wavy red hair and green eyes. Finarfin hadn't seen many Eldar with red hair - there was that Nerdanel, but Finarfin didn't like her. This lady was prettier than Nerdanel.
"This is your sister, Náriel," Palcë said.
"I... have a sister?" Finarfin was confused.
"She is Fëanáro's twin. She... had been sent away." Palcë frowned.
People thought Finarfin didn't know anything, that he was just a dumb kid, but Finarfin felt other people's emotions and sometimes even saw pictures inside their heads. He knew that Fëanor's birth was a sore spot for Finwë - Fëanor himself was a sore spot for Finwë. Finarfin didn't like that nobody had told him he had a sister but he knew it was bound up in all those bad reasons why Finwë didn't like to talk about Fëanor's mother and didn't like Fëanor.
As far as the pretty lady - Náriel - he could sense anxiety from her. She was expecting to be rejected, to be seen as some sort of pretender or usurper.
Finarfin didn't want her to feel bad. He was happy he had a sister. Fëanor was his favorite person in the whole world, Fingolfin was a close second, so if this was Fëanor's twin, then he was sure this Náriel was great.
Finarfin got up and went right over to her. "Yay! I have a sister! Hi! Hi! Hi hi hi! Hi!"
He threw his arms around her and she didn't hug him back - in his excitement he hadn't realized she was holding something, wrapped in a cloth. "I have a gift for you," she explained.
"Oh!"
Náriel unwrapped the cloth - there was a silver dish, finely carved with a vine of flowers around the edge - and when she uncovered the dish, Finarfin saw a lemon cake, just like the one he had been eating. Náriel sighed, glancing over at Finarfin's dish of half-eaten cake at the table. "My apologies. I was told you love cake. If I had known you already were having cake, I would have brought something else -"
Finarfin hugged her tighter, overjoyed. "YAYYYYY! YAY! I GET TWO CAKES! AND A SISTER! THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!"
_
June 2020
Indiana
Anthony sighed and rubbed his face. The memories were getting more frequent now, and more intense each time. Anthony teared up a little, remembering the exuberant boy Finarfin had been - the same exuberance he'd once had as a child, before it was bullied out of him in school.
"You OK?" Sören asked.
"Yeah." Anthony nodded. "Just... remembering."
"Ah."
"I think I'm going to do a little extra something for Yeyette for her birthday tomorrow, besides the gift I'd bought for her." Anthony glanced over at Nicholas. "I know you were going to bake her birthday cake but I'd... like to do it."
Nicholas raised an eyebrow. "As you know, you don't bake."
"I know. There's a first time for everything, innit?" Anthony got up and stretched. "Sören can provide adult supervision."
Sören snorted.
Nicholas tutted, but nodded. "All right. If you need my assistance, I'll be in the study -"
"It should be fine. How hard can it be?" Anthony knew that of course, it was harder than it looked, which was precisely why he didn't bake. Nicholas elevated cooking and baking to an art form - if Nicholas hadn't become a professor he should have become a chef - and it was a high bar, but he didn't have to be Nicholas good, he just needed to be Nicholas "passable".
It wasn't just to prove to himself he could do it, but Nicholas baked all the time. If he made the effort to try something new, Anthony knew Yeyette would understand how special that was, a show of acceptance of their bond as family. And it was a callback to that memory of when they'd first met long ago - Anthony wondered if Yeyette remembered, too.
Sören helped him assemble ingredients, and find a recipe for lemon lavender cake online. Yeyette had recipes in a recipe box, but they were all in French, and while Anthony could speak French, he didn't feel like trying to translate and tax his brain further. As it was, Sören had found a recipe with American measurements and he was going to have to convert to metric. And it was June eighteenth and a hot, humid day, so the heat of the kitchen made Anthony's brain feel like it was melting.
As Anthony started going through the recipe, putting it together step by step, he said, "I hope I'm converting right. It's rather important to cook by the book."
Sören started laughing, and Anthony paused.
Sören explained, "Remember that meme? The song from LazyTown and the Lil Jon remix?"
Of course Sören was familiar with LazyTown, being one of the more well-known exports from his home country of Iceland. Anthony hadn't thought of that viral video in years, but now it came to him like he'd just heard the song five minutes ago.
Sören started dancing around the kitchen. "It's a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake..."
"WHAT!" Anthony yelled.
"If the way is hazy," they sang together.
"You gotta do the cooking by the book," Sören sang.
"YEAH!" Anthony yelled.
"You know you can't be lazy," they sang together.
Sören sang on, "Never use a messy recipe, the cake will end up crazy. If you do the cooking by the book, then you'll have a..."
Anthony couldn't believe he was doing this. In his best impression of Lil Jon - not so good, with his London accent, he yelled:
Break it down bitch,
let me see you back it up
drop that ass down low then
pick that motherfucker up
Eugène happened to walk in at that moment and Sören picked him up just in time for Anthony to yell:
Now back that pussy
tease a motherfucker
Sören started moonwalking, carrying Eugène and gently bouncing him, as Anthony went on:
Now back that pussy
tease a motherfucker
Now back that pussy
tease a motherfucker
Eugène meowed to get down, and Sören put him down on the floor and gave him a pat.
"The two of you are very strange," Eugène said in his thick French accent, and sauntered over to his food bowl.
"Sören, a talking cat just called us strange." Anthony cocked his head to one side; sometimes he felt like he was living in a fever dream.
"Well, we are," Sören said.
Things were about to get stranger.
When the cake was in the oven, Anthony needed to get some air, so he and Sören stepped out. Jolie, the dainty girl goat Yeyette had named, was wearing a new flower crown of daisies and had pale pink ribbons in her hair. Goatafinwë, the goat Sören had named, was once again approaching to court her, and after some bleating back and forth, as if they were communicating something in a private goat language, Jolie walked away, nose in the air in a clear rebuff. Goatafinwë hung his head as if in shame, and Anthony thought that was an unusually human response from a goat.
Anthony and Sören walked around the farm, hand in hand, admiring the growing crops under the blue sky. After awhile Jolie came up to them, and she had a brush in her mouth. They stopped to take turns brushing her, and when Jolie had enough she took the brush back in her mouth and walked away.
Just before the cake was ready to come out, Anthony went to the bathroom to wash his hands, since he'd been brushing and petting a goat and though Jolie was very clean for a goat - especially when contrasted with Goatafinwë, who stank as billy goats did - he still smelled like goat and wanted to have clean hands for frosting the cake. The bathroom door was open and he thought nothing of walking inside. But the shower was running.
A deep, bleating voice came from the shower. "Do you mind? I'm trying to take a ba-a-a-a-a-aaath."
Inside the shower was Goatafinwë, looking wet and annoyed. The sight was so comical Anthony started to laugh - and then he backed up, trembling, making inhuman noises in shock. It was one thing for them to have a talking cat, a talking dog, who were both Force-sensitive. But this? Goatafinwë could talk? And had figured out how to use the shower?
"You look like you've seen a ghost," Sören said as Anthony strolled into the kitchen, still badly shaken up, trying to pull himself together.
"Goat," Anthony muttered. "Seen a goat."
"WHAT?" Sören yelled in a Lil Jon voice.
"Goatafinwë can talk and use the shower."
"OKAY," Sören yelled. When he saw Anthony's puzzlement at how nonchalant he was about it, Sören said, "Jæja, I knew that. Well, the talking part. I didn't know the shower part, but I guess Jolie told him she won't be his mate till he takes a bath or something, because seriously, he stinks. He stanky."
Anthony washed his hands at the kitchen sink. "I feel like my brain is broken. Hopefully I had enough of a brain before this started that the cake came out all right."
To Anthony's dismay, the cake had fallen in the middle. It wasn't a huge crater, but it was quite noticeable.
Sören tested the cake with toothpicks. "It's just that one part that isn't done. We could probably scoop it out and use extra frosting, nobody would know the difference -"
"Well, they would know the difference if they got that piece and had a mouthful of frosting."
"Some people like that. I like frosting." Sören gave Anthony a pointed look, that sentence loaded with innuendo.
Anthony chuckled a little, and gave Sören a kiss, knowing Sören was trying to make him feel better. "I know you do. But if anyone gets that piece who has more baking expertise - Nicholas, Yeyette, even Dara..." Anthony looked down at his brogues and sighed.
"I really don't think it would be a huge issue."
"I... just. I need to make another cake. Hopefully I won't fuck this one up."
"Oh, elskan." Sören put an arm around him. "You followed the recipe to the letter. I saw you."
"I had to do some conversion. What if I calculated wrong -"
"I doubt that."
Then Goatafinwë trotted past, dripping wet. His hooves on the kitchen floor were loud, and it felt like a small stampede was going by. Sören's eyebrows shot up. "That's probably why the cake fell."
Out of the corner of his eye, Anthony saw Eugène follow Goatafinwë outside, like they were having a private conversation via telepathy - that was probably in fact exactly what they were doing. Anthony still couldn't believe it. He definitely needed to distract himself with baking this damn cake.
While Sören was sure the goat running through the kitchen on his way to the bathroom to shower was why the cake fell, Anthony still wasn't taking any chances, so this time they used a metric recipe for a lemon lavender cake. The irony of using a metric recipe in a kitchen in Indiana wasn't lost on him - and it didn't seem like the Americans were going to adopt metric anytime in his lifetime - but it was still easier for him.
The second cake came out perfectly - so much so that Anthony had to stop himself from cutting out a tiny piece that would never be missed to taste-test - and as Anthony began to decorate the cake, Eugène came back and hopped up on the kitchen counter, heading for the bowl of buttercream frosting. Sören put him down on the floor. "You know better," Sören said. He leaned against the kitchen counter, back obscuring the cake that had fallen. Now Noodles, the other cat, that had been found on the farm and adopted earlier in the year, was hovering too, like he thought they were making hard food, and let out a little whine. Without thinking about it, Anthony moved the works over to the space by the sink, less space for Noodles to try to tag-team with Eugène.
The cake was frosted just in time for Yeyette's car to pull in. Anthony quickly hid the finished cake in the fridge, and as Yeyette's footsteps approached, he and Sören went out to the living room to pretend to be casual, with lemonade waiting for Yeyette on the coffee table.
Of course, Yeyette was having none of it. "What's going on?"
"Oh, nothing. Same shit, different day. Life during COVID lockdown, amirite? Hahaha," Anthony said.
Yeyette put a hand on her hip. "OK, what are you two up to?"
"It's not like she doesn't know her birthday is tomorrow," Sören said, pouring Yeyette a glass of lemonade and using the Force to pass it over.
"As you know," Yeyette said in an imitation of Nicholas's basso.
Anthony snorted. Yes, it was useless to try to hide it, even if Yeyette wasn't Force-sensitive, she dealt with enough drug addicts bullshitting her at her toxicologist job that she knew how to spot people hiding things. "OK. I. Ah. Baked you a cake."
"Oh!" Yeyette looked genuinely surprised. "You did?"
Anthony nodded. "I wanted to do it instead of have Nicholas bake like usual because, well." Anthony sighed. He didn't know how to bring up the memories, even though they all had them and had talked about them. This one felt too emotional.
Yeyette came over and hugged him like he'd hugged her once upon a time - he had a feeling she remembered that particular memory of their first meeting, too. "That was very thoughtful of you."
"He actually baked two cakes," Sören said.
Anthony facepalmed. "I baked two cakes but only one of them is 'passable'. One fell." Anthony hung his head.
"Oh... if it didn't fall too much, we could still eat it," Yeyette said.
"I told him that," Sören said. "I said we could use extra frosting to cover the big gaping hole." He took a swig of lemonade.
"Leave Juniper out of this," Yeyette said, and Sören spat his lemonade. Anthony snickered. Yeyette turned back to Anthony, smirking. "If you don't want to use extra frosting, we could use berries."
"I love strawberries," Sören said.
"Oh. Well... that's creative, I guess." Trying not to think about the ways he and Sören had enjoyed strawberries together, Anthony stood up and led them in the kitchen. But the ruined cake wasn't on the counter, where he'd left it by accident in the mad rush to get the finished cake put away in the fridge. "What..."
"Where did it go?" Sören asked.
Yeyette's eyes narrowed.
They went outside, and Goatafinwë was sharing the ruined cake with Jolie, eating out of the pan together. Eugène looked smug, preening himself. "I am a good wingman, right, Maman?" the cat purred.