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Once he’s well out of range of Zangyack sensors or patrols, out in a less-charted corner of space, Marvelous puts the Galleon on auto-pilot with no course entered other than “don’t run into anything,” goes into his cabin, lies down on the bed on top of the covers, and doesn’t get up. Sometimes he sleeps. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes Navi flies in and drops a protein pack on his face and he eats, not tasting anything. Occasionally he drags himself over to the head to relieve himself. Mostly, though, he does nothing, just stares at the ceiling, too numb even for anger.
Eventually Navi flies in again, but instead of dropping something on him, she lands on his chest herself and says, irritably, “Protein packs aren’t designed for long-term sustenance.”
“Long-term…?”
“You’ve been in here for five days.” She shuffle-steps over and pinches his bicep with a metal claw. “You’re losing weight. You need to eat food.”
“What’s the point?”
There’s a pause, and then a ticking noise that Marvelous hasn’t heard Navi make before, and then she shrieks, shrill and painful, “AkaRed didn’t get you out of there so you could starve yourself!”
“Ow, fuck, bird—”
“Not a bird! Get out of bed!” She pinches his arm again. “Go take a shower! Eat hot food!” Angry hopping on his chest, her claws digging through the fabric into his skin every time she lands. “Get up get up get up, are you a pirate or not?” He lunges for her, and she leaps up and back into the air with a triumphant, “Hah! There you go! Get angry! You can’t catch me!”
Suddenly furious, Marvelous leaps out of bed and chases her in circles around the cabin for—two minutes, at which point he gets winded and realizes how hungry he actually is, and then, after another moment, how bad he smells. Still furious, but now also disgusted, he strips off his filthy clothes, hurls them into a corner, and stalks out into the empty hall and down to the shower.
Bathing does, unexpectedly, help. Navi drops a hairbrush on his head, so he brushes his hair, and that helps even more. By the time he’s put on clean clothes he feels halfway alive again, at least enough to throw the hairbrush back at Navi, and roaringly hungry.
He stops outside the galley door, though. “I can’t go in there.”
“What, because that was Basco’s place? If you starve, he wins! Get in get in get in! Eat! Eat!”
Swatting angrily at Navi as she darts around his head, Marvelous goes into the galley.
They’d gotten groceries right before…before Zangyack had showed up; the food supplies are excellent. He pulls together a sandwich and eats it standing in front of the sink, so quickly that he barely tastes it. The second sandwich he takes a little more time on, both making and eating, and by the time he’s finished that one, Navi’s gone back to her perch. He has a third sandwich and some juice, resolves to figure out where Basco stashed the rum, goes into the cabinets to see if he can find something sweet, and then freezes at the sight of a mostly-demolished container of cupcakes.
Right.
The cupcakes.
“What are you making?”
Basco looks up from the bowl in his hands. “Lemon frosting. It's for cupcakes, they're in the oven. To celebrate you and AkaRed finding the last of those little keys you’ve been hunting for.”
Marvelous takes a deep sniff of the air. He’d noticed something sweet baking, obviously, that’s why he’d come over here in the first place, but now, closer, he can also catch the sharp citrus bite, the smell of sugar and butter and whatever else Basco is working with. His mouth is actually watering a bit. “Smells good, when will they be ready?”
Raised eyebrow. “Mm? No, ‘thank you, Basco,’ for me?”
“Thank you for making cupcakes, Basco, when will they be ready?”
“In a bit, they’re nearly done baking but they’ll need to cool before I can frost them.” Basco lifts the mixing spoon to his mouth and licks it, the gesture accompanied by a flirtatious wink that makes Marvelous blush despite himself. “This is done, though. Would you like a taste?”
Marvelous nods energetically. “Sure, please.”
He’s expecting to be handed the spoon, but instead—Basco puts down the mixing bowl and steps towards him, reaching out and trailing fingertips down the side of his face, leaning in as if for a kiss and saying, very softly, “Open up.”
Wide-eyed, Marvelous opens his mouth, and Basco’s thumb slides between his lips, covered in lemon frosting from where it had been gripping the side of the mixing bowl. His entire body flushes with heat as the sharp-sweet flavor coats his tongue. His knees feel weak.
“There you go,” Basco says, still in that low, intimate murmur, as Marvelous licks the frosting from his thumb. “What do you think, Marvy-chan?”
“It’s.” Marvelous feels a bit like he’s floating, and even now that the frosting’s gone Basco’s thumb is still resting on his lower lip, very lightly, hand cupping his face. “It’s delicious, I could. Eat the whole bowl just like that.”
Basco’s smiling at him, that crooked, teasing smile, the one that he can’t possibly know Marvelous thinks about sometimes in the middle of the night. “Well, we can’t have that, there wouldn’t be any left for the cupcakes. Now, what do you say?”
“Thank you, Basco.”
He’d betrayed them to the Zangyack two days later. They hadn’t even gotten to finish the cupcakes.
Marvelous stares at the last three, still in their container. His face is definitely flushed, and he feels a little shaky, which can’t possibly from hunger given how much he just ate. Basco had always been doing that sort of thing, flirting in ways that left him dizzy while Basco apparently remained cheerfully unmoved. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly hopeful or stupid, he’d nursed the secret hope that it was all leading up to Basco showing up naked in his bed sometime, but that only happened to heroes in pulp novels, and mostly he’d just put it down to the man being an awful tease.
Or trying to distract him, to keep him from having AkaRed’s back so consistently and make it easier to betray them.
Suddenly furious, Marvelous pulls the container from the cabinet and throws it into the trash wholesale before stalking back out into the common area. “Navi,” he grits out, using anger to push down the wave of remembered arousal, “we’re out of Ranger Keys to find, yeah?”
“You got all of ‘em!”
“Then set a course for somewhere fun. If I’m the captain now, I’m going to need a new crew.”
Marvelous comes out of the shower to the smell of something baking and has to stop in the hallway for a moment just to bask in the aroma before he can even bother to go get dressed. Then it hits him that if he just stands there, he won’t find out what’s going on, so he hurries to his cabin and throws on some clothes before heading for the galley, where he finds Joe at the counter with a kerchief tied around his hair, mixing something vigorously. “What are you making? I didn’t know you could cook.”
“I don’t cook much, I just bake. Making cake.”
“What’s the occasion?”
Joe shrugs. “Felt like having cake, it’s been a while. Working on the frosting right now. It’s a yellow cake, so I was thinking maybe lemon, but it tastes decent already, you want to try—you all right?” He goes still in the act of holding out a fingerful of frosting. “You’ve kind of gone pale.”
Marvelous stares at Joe’s outstretched hand for a moment, tamping down competing waves of fury and panic before he manages to get out, “I’m. Not a big fan of lemon.”
Joe’s eyebrows go up. “You’re expecting me to believe that you look like you want to bolt because you don’t like lemon?”
“It’s…it’s complicated. And stupid. And I really don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“Ok, sure.” Joe shrugs. “Vanilla ok, then?”
“Yeah. Yeah, vanilla’s fine, thank you.” Marvelous pauses and then, because Joe’s still holding his hand out, leans forward and licks the frosting from his fingertips with an eyebrow wiggle that’s probably more pathetic than suggestive with how shaken he is. “Thank you, Joe.”
Joe’s ears go slightly red under his kerchief despite how pathetic Marvelous is sure he looks. “Don’t thank me until the cake’s done.”
Doc's not much of a baker, all things considered--he does ok, but he doesn't enjoy it the way Joe does, he gets anxious about the precise measurements and timing required. Also, for some reason, when he bakes it always gets messy, and he's mostly such a neat cook.
When he offers Marvelous a taste of the frosting for the very fussy roll cake he's making, Marvelous only freezes for a moment. Doc's not Basco. Doc is pretty much the farthest thing from Basco currently living on the Galleon. He blushes and sputters when Marvelous decides to ignore the spoon he's holding out in favor of grabbing the hand that accidentally went in the bowl and licking it from his fingers instead.
"Do me a favor," he murmurs into Doc's palm, "and don't make this lemon-flavored, yeah?"
Doc, still red in the face, says, "I was. Uh. Well, it was going to be strawberry. You know, for Ahim. Is lemon bad?"
"I don't like it."
"I'll, I'll add that to my notes. Can...I have my hand back, please?"
Gai, again, loves to bake, and this time Marvelous is too late to do anything about it when he says, "Hey, I'm making lemon frosting for these cupcakes, do you want to try some?"
Joe watches carefully from his sit-up board, clearly waiting to see if Marvelous is going to get upset about this, and part of Marvelous wants to, but--it's a small part, now, dull and distant, the angry, blushing teenager buried so many built-up layers of other feelings. Weirdly, it helps knowing that Basco's around again and can be fought directly. And it was years ago. Years, and light-years traveled, and friends and lovers found.
He says, "Sure, sounds good," and leans forward to swipe a fingerful from the bowl himself over Gai's yelp of protest, and it's sharp and sweet and the lemon just tastes like lemon.
Of all the places he might have expected to run into Basco alone, he would never have thought of the grocery store.
They're staring at each other, Marvelous dropping the tin of cookies he was buying for Luka into his basket while Basco stands frozen with his hand on a package of crackers, and then Marvelous reaches for his gun and Basco says, "Come on, Marvy-chan, don't be like that, we all need groceries once in a while."
“What, you don’t just make the monkey shop for you?”
“She can’t count past three, and in any case I do need to eat something besides bananas.” Basco takes a step closer, and Marvelous takes an involuntarily step back and bumps into the shelf. “You’ve still got a sweet tooth, I see. Do you still like lemon?”
Marvelous isn’t sure why he lets Basco reach out and trail fingertips down the side of his face—maybe it’s the familiarity of the gesture, or maybe it’s inertia, or maybe he’s so infuriated by the man’s mere presence that he’s just frozen. Whatever it is that lets him allow it initially, as soon as he feels Basco’s fingers on his skin it’s like he’s seventeen again and struck dumb by the fact that someone so attractive is paying attention to him at all.
“You know, sometimes I regret not keeping you.” Basco’s got that same smug, teasing look he always used to get when he made Marvelous blush, voice dropping into a familiar register of suggestive intimacy. “You’re always so cute when you turn all pink like this.” His thumb traces the seam of Marvelous’ lips, and Marvelous opens his mouth involuntarily, dizzy with proximity and the memory of lemon frosting. “I bet you would have come with me, if I’d asked the right way. Wouldn’t you, Marvy-chan?”
The pet name hits him like a punch to the midsection, and the sudden fury flushes every trace of hesitation and awkwardness from his body, and he bites.
Basco jolts backward, cursing. It’s a little disappointing to see that he’s not actually bleeding, but he’s definitely upset about it, and that’s just fine. Marvelous grins at him, broad and feral and angry, and says, “Sure, keep telling yourself that.”