Chapter Text
“What did you manage to do to your poor oven?”
The photo Zelda had sent was of her oven door open, with some unidentifiable pile of something burnt and smoking all over the rack and dripping into the bottom. Also partially splattered on the oven door. Given Zelda’s habit of combining unusual ingredients just to see what happened, he wasn’t sure it was worth hazarding a guess of what was in there but it might have been some kind of casserole given the oozing consistency of the parts that hadn’t burned yet.
The message that went with the messy oven photo said, “Can I call you? I need hands-free emotional support while I clean.” Link had called her immediately.
Zelda answered his question. “Cookie baking accident. I sneezed at exactly the wrong moment and dropped most of a sheet of raw cookie dough in there. I feel so stupid. I’m scraping off what I can so it doesn’t burn more while the oven cools down but I have to wait for it to fully cool before I can clean it properly.”
Link could hear her scraping at the mess as she continued with a huge sigh, “I wanted these done today but I just know I won’t get it clean enough and I’m going to set off the apartment fire alarm when I turn the oven back on. Just wanted to complain at someone. How’s your day been going?”
“Better than yours, apparently. Did you want to come use my oven?” Link wondered if he seemed too eager the moment the words tumbled out of his mouth. Zelda had a giant mess and she probably just wanted to clean up. But hearing her voice always made him want to see her, and now that she’d finally moved back to the city, that was an option again. There was no harm in offering, was there?
“And leave Impa with an unusable oven that smells like burning? I’m not that cruel a housemate.”
Link realized he actually had an answer for that. “Doesn’t she owe you for that time she exploded that fish soup in the microwave and then had to run to catch her bus?“
“Hah, you know, she actually does. I had to clean that up because it smelled so bad and it was so cold I couldn’t even open a window!” He could practically hear her wrinkling her nose. “This mess shouldn’t be as bad at all that. If I scrape a bit more off so the oven door closes properly and turn the fan on, she might not even notice. But I’ll leave her a note so she knows not to turn the oven on until it’s cleaned better.”
“See, you’re a very considerate housemate. You deserve to come over here and enjoy my nice clean oven.”
Zelda laughed, “If it wasn’t you saying it, I’d assume that was some kind of pickup line.”
Link kind of wished it was a pickup line. He’d had a crush on Zelda for ages, but then she’d gone away for grad school and got a doctorate and now she ran in a completely different intellectual crowd than he did. To his relief she’d managed to land a job in the city where he still lived, and they were still tentatively figuring out how to be in-person friends again and if they even still had much in common. But apparently they could be friends who borrowed each other’s ovens in an emergency, and that was good enough for today.
=+❄️+=
The roads were icy underneath with new snow falling on top and everyone was going slow. Zelda found herself zoning out on the bus ride towards Link’s place pretty quickly, watching the snow fall outside, thinking about seeing Link. He'd been the one to help her develop this cookie recipe in the first place, and she wondered what he'd have to say about today's experimental additions.
Zelda fondly remembered the afternoon they’d figured out the recipe. She was not a natural when it came to making food, but Link had suggested that she'd do better with baking since it was more like following lab instructions. And he was right: with a good cookbook she was able to make cookies and pies and cakes pretty consistently once she learned to spoon-and-level her flour (again, thanks to Link) and a few other tips. But once she'd been thinking about it in terms of laboratory experiments it was only natural that she'd want to form some hypotheses and try changing some variables.
The first few attempts on this particular recipe had been dreadful, so she'd begged Link to come over and help her figure out how to fix the it. The man had a gifted palate and natural talent for combining ingredients: where for her food was chemistry, for him food was art, and he’d always been generous with his skills and time while Zelda was learning. Sure enough, Link when walked into that kitchen to find batch after batch of failed cookies with notes under each plate detailing the changes she'd made to each, he’d jokingly given her a hard time, but then he'd sat down and tried a cookie from every single batch and carefully written down his tasting notes beside hers. The cookies where she’d tried substituting maple syrup for some of the sugar had baked particularly poorly, but that hadn’t stopped him from trying one and chewing the soggy mass thoughtfully. Link was the one who figured out that she needed another spice to blend the flavours rather than what she’d been trying with adjusting ratios and ingredient substitutions. He’d pulled out all the spices he thought were worth trying and started writing out more recipe-experiment cards for her.
She'd been gaping at him, wondering why she'd never noticed how easily he fit into her kitchen, her experimental design, her life. How beautiful he was when his face lit up like that as he talked about spices and flavours. Zelda must have been silent for too long because he'd leaned over and wiped some flour off her nose and she'd almost kissed him. She would have, if the flour hadn't made her sneeze and have to run to get a tissue.
In the time it had taken her to grab the tissue box from the next room and deal with her nose, Zelda’s brain had caught up with her. It didn't matter how he'd been willing to bus across the city to try 14 batches of mediocre cookies. She was leaving for grad school so soon and this just couldn't happen. She couldn't let it happen. He deserved someone who would stay. Someone he could start a family with. Not someone planning to dedicate her childbearing years to a getting a doctorate.
So she'd walked back and made cookies all night and laughed and pretended she'd never noticed the way his eyes had flicked for a moment to her lips. They couldn't be more than friends. But they'd made a delicious if unusual recipe together that night. Bacon chocolate chip cookies with cinnamon to make the flavours come together. She was so thrilled that they’d actually made the idea work, especially since their version was so much better than the recipes she’d found online.
Zelda left for grad school a few months later. And then she’d spent 7 years of grad school making this recipe every time she felt like giving up. In some ways, the hard part of grad school was less about the intellectual side of things, but through the sheer amount of politics and bureaucracy and petty anonymous reviewers who wouldn’t accept your paper unless you happened to have cited them. She’d made it through with friends and cookies and spite, spirit dented but not broken. Link himself had cheered her up via phone call a lot of times, but often she needed to think to herself rather than talk, so it was just cookies and remembering that it was worth doing experiments over and over even when it was frustrating and hard.
She utterly lost in her thoughts that she nearly knocked her head on the seat in front of her when the driver hit the brakes hard. The bus fishtailed, the back end wiggling back and forth before they came to a halt with a scrape along the side and a dull thud.
“Everyone okay back there?” came the voice of the bus driver. A chorus of affirmations came from the passengers as they all turned to look at each other and make sure no one needed help. But from what Zelda could see, everyone was fine, just surprised.
The bus driver must have thought the same because she said, “Okay. So the bad news is that we bumped a parked car and I have to take this bus out of service because of the accident. The next bus will be by in twenty minutes or so, but since it's cold and everyone seems okay you can stay on the bus if you want while you wait. I'll give you a bit to decide while I radio this in but then if you're going to leave the bus it would be good if you all got off at once so everyone staying can stay a bit warmer.”
Zelda squinted out the windows. They weren't that far; even in the snow it would take less than 20 minutes to walk. She texted Link.
“Minor bus accident. I'm going to walk the last stretch.” Then she sent him her location and got in line to get out. The bus hadn't been stopped in a good spot, but they managed to clamber over the snowbank to find a very unplowed sidewalk and more clumps of snow falling every second.
Zelda headed off, enjoying the quiet of the snowfall and the sight of the bigger clusters of falling snow lit up in the rapidly dwindling afternoon light. Winter days were just so short as the solstice approached. It was slow going and she was glad for her boots and the warm hat that covered her ears. Her fellow bus passengers eventually veered off leaving her alone in the snowy evening.
She squinted ahead of her. Wait, there was one person coming towards her… on skis? Hah, there was always someone willing to take advantage of the fresh snow on the sidewalks before the plows had been by. She wished she had skis as she trudged forwards, breaking her own small path in the heavy snow. She wished her backpack wasn’t so heavy as she broke through every bit of crust immediately.
The skier approached rapidly and waved at her. She dutifully pulled herself to the side so they could go by before she recognized Link’s blue eyes peering out between a woollen hat and hand knit scarf.
“I don't suppose you have another pair of skis for me?” she said to him with a smile. She could tell he didn’t; his short stature meant hiding skis was not among his skills.
Link shrugged off his backpack and flipped it around. “I don't have spare skis, but I do have snowshoes.”
Zelda clapped her mitts together. “My hero!” She moved to take the snowshoes, tripped on a clump of ice on the sidewalk, and careened right into Link, nearly toppling them both into the snow bank. Her face was suddenly buried into the scarf at his neck. “Oof. My hero twice. Mmm, that's a nice scarf.”
Link laughed. He was wearing a scarf she'd knit during class back at the beginning of grad school when she was still taking classes rather than doing research. “Thanks, it's my favourite. Very warm.”
Zelda could feel herself growing warm, thinking about a gift from her keeping him warm every winter. Thinking that he’d managed not to lose this gift in all that time. Did he think about her every time he put it on, the same way she thought about him every time she baked? She wondered what it would feel like if she pulled both of their scarves down and pressed her lips against his jaw. Cool cheeks against his warm neck, the contrast as startling as the action. Would he pull away and yelp about the cold, or would he lean into her and…
She gently disentangled herself from him, a feat made harder with bulky winter clothes and the awkward weight of her backpack full of unbaked cookie dough, plus her sudden startling awareness of where her hands touched his chest, even through all their layers. She needed to get control of herself. They’d managed to stay friends through the years she was away for grad school, but they were just friends all that time, nothing more. Even if baking cookies had made her think about what might have been, he’d long since moved on. He’d dated plenty after she left, maybe he’d never even felt that way about her and it was all her wishful thinking that they’d nearly had a moment.
Oblivious to her inner turmoil, Link smiled at her. “Let me give you a hug before you get those on. I'm so glad to see you!”
One all-too brief hug later, Link helped her strap the snowshoes on. They were modern ones, not wood and rawhide. Instead of having a traditional old teardrop shape with a long tail, they were kind of a long, rounded rectangle of metal with synthetic material replacing the webbing and harness.
“Oh, these are nice! They're so light!” she said, taking a few wobbly steps
“They're great. Closest thing I could get to the little bear paw style ones I learned to use as a kid. You can even run in them but without the heavy back end they kind of kick up snow...” he looked at her back and trailed his eyes down to the hem of her long white coat.
“Ahem,” said Zelda. “Do you have a problem with my butt?”
“What? No!” Even with the scarf covering most of his face, Zelda could see colour rising to Link’s cheeks. “I was trying to figure out if your coat would protect you from snow kickback!”
Zelda laughed at the expression on his face. “Don't worry, I know you would never. Thanks for looking out for my sorry ass tonight, even if you're doing it bit more literally than I expected.” She winked at him, enjoying his flustered reaction as she started to move more confidently on the snowshoes.“And thank you, this will be so much easier than breaking trail in my boots.”
Link led her to take the shortcut through a trail in the park to his apartment, since they had the gear to cross the snow without trying to stick to the sidewalks. He told her about innovations in snowshoes and she told him about the bus accident, and with the snow muffling the sounds around them and most people staying inside, it felt like the two of them were alone in the world instead of walking through a normally busy city park.
=+❄️+=
“Let me put the snowy stuff in the bathtub to drip dry. The kitchen is on the right if you want to get started,” said Link, suddenly nervous to let her see his apartment. He’d done a quick tidying while she was on the bus and somehow he hadn’t had time to think about the fact that this was the first time she’d come over to his place. What if she didn’t like it? What if she didn’t like his kitchen? What if it was weird that it was just the two of them here and it wasn’t a group hangout with their other mutual friends?
By the time he was done balancing snowshoes and skis in his bathtub and hanging up their scarves and mitts and hats, Zelda was pulling big containers of dough out of her backpack and setting them on his counter. She looked up as he entered and gestured, “3 batches of spicy cookies with different spice levels. Well, minus the one sheet that is burned all over my oven.”
“Spicy cookies?”
“It's for a prank. It was Revali's idea!”
Ugh, Revali, thought Link. Revali was Zelda's new coworker, and she talked about him all the time. They'd apparently hit it off when he interviewed her and they’d become solid work friends. He was an engineer just like her, smart as anything. It sounded like they bounced ideas off each other constantly, traded movie recommendations, ate lunch together...
Link wasn't jealous. He wasn't.
“Anyhow, remember how I told you what a sweetheart Revali was the other day, shutting Dave down for yet another clueless sexist comment?”
Link nodded.
Purah was the one who had recommended Zelda for this job, and from what Purah had told Link, Revali was absolutely not known for being a sweetheart. Purah had described him as brilliant with the ego to match, and unwilling to suffer anyone who didn’t meet his high standards. Of course he liked Zelda because she was also brilliant, but the Rito had not only taken her under his wing but also taken to low-key protecting her from the occasional jerk at work who couldn’t believe the little blonde new hire could code circles around them. Zelda handled a lot of it herself, but it was clear how much she appreciated Revali’s support. Link was glad she had a work ally but he missed the days when she relied on him as a sounding board when people wore her down.
Zelda hadn’t stopped talking. “Apparently the guy keeps trying to one-up Revali ever since Revali stuck up for me and it’s getting annoying. Revali said he wanted a way to stop these asinine games, so when he found out microaggression Dave has no spice tolerance, he asked me if I could bake something unexpectedly spicy for the potluck. Rito can’t taste capsaicin so he’s planning to goad the guy into challenging him to a cookie eating contest, then he’s gonna demolish the guy’s taste buds for a week because he does not know how to back down.”
Link let out a startled laugh. “Okay, that is a hilarious plan.” No matter how he felt about Revali, he had to admit that was funny. And since this wasn’t the first time Zelda had complained about microaggression Dave, it sounded like half the office would be cheering for Revali and Zelda’s side. Purah had had choice words about the guy even before Zelda started at the company, and Purah was less of a target because the guy’s racism meant he assumed Sheikah girls were good at engineering more than Hylian girls.
Zelda started pulling out containers of cookie dough, and this time since it wasn’t burned all over the oven, Link recognized the unusual mix of things in the dough. “You poisoned your bacon chocolate chip cookie recipe?” he said, appalled. They'd worked so hard to perfect that recipe!
“Our bacon chocolate chip cookie recipe,” corrected Zelda absently. Link’s heart jumped a bit in his chest. She thought of it as their recipe?
“And it’s not poisoned!” continued Zelda. “Well, not all of it. The ghost pepper batch for Revali’s challenge may be inedible to anyone who’s not a Rito. But it’s really good with regular spicy peppers in it! I tried it last winter when we had that cold snap and walking across campus without some spicy effects was miserable. Gave some out to the kids in the algorithms class I was teaching. So one super-spicy ghost pepper batch for Revali’s challenge, one regular spicy pepper batch for most of us, and a no-spice version for people who are willing to admit they have zero tolerance for spice. Although there won’t be quite as many of those since the first tray was the disaster one.”
“Hah, I remember when you thought all the batches were disaster ones,” smiled Link, the memory of baking together lingering in his mind.
Zelda finished placing the last container on his counter and bumped her shoulder against his. “They were all disasters until my culinary hero stopped by to save the day.” She turned to face him and fluttered her eyelashes, and he knew she was teasing. He knew it. But the traitorous muscle in his chest sped up anyhow.
He wasn’t sure what expression was on his face and he had a feeling all that extra blood would hit his cheeks any second, so he ducked his head down and started pulling out baking sheets for her and called out “You should probably start pre-heating the oven.”
Link could hear Zelda moving to the other side of his kitchen and he heard the oven beep as she figured out the controls. “I was thinking we should start with the least spicy batch so we don’t have to clean everything to avoid contamination? Though I didn’t have enough space in my backpack for containers for the finished cookies so I’ll have to clean the dough containers as we go to re-use them.”
They soon fell into a rhythm, scooping out the chilled dough onto the baking sheets. Link had chosen this apartment because of the slightly larger and nicer kitchen, but he’d seldom had anyone else in the space with him to bake or cook. Zelda grinned at him as she swayed her hips to the side to move past him to the sink to wash the first container, and Link grinned back.
They met when they were randomly assigned as lab partners on the first day of class, but they’d really become friends the day she admitted she had no idea how to cook. After hearing how much kitchen equipment she’d damaged in her last attempt, he’d impulsively offered to teach her. Honestly, he’d expected her to laugh and say no since they had hardly interacted outside of class, but instead she turned those big eyes of hers on him and said, “Would you really?” like no one had ever offered to help in her life, and he’d scheduled their first lesson the spot. She hadn’t been a natural in the kitchen, but she’d been so determined to learn. He’d been enchanted: he’d spent so much of his life doing things that came easily to him, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d just gravitated towards the easy stuff until he watched Zelda and developed a new appreciation for the power of practice and stubbornness. Plus her determination to turn the kitchen into a science lab. They’d been good lab partners and already knew how to work together in a small space, but they’d been better lab partners and better friends by the end of the semester.
And here she was now, able to figure out an oven she’d never seen before, making new tweaks to her cookie recipe, confident enough to let her students eat the results, sashaying around his kitchen like she belonged there.
Zelda finished cleaning the container and came back to stand beside him, bumping his hip and flashing him a smile. “I love your kitchen, by the way. It’s surprisingly big for an apartment, great space for two people to work in tandem. Bet you’ve had good times cooking in here with your girlfriend.”
Link sighed, “Ex-girlfriend now. And no, she liked me cooking for her but she didn’t help much, though sometimes she watched. And my boyfriend before that was, uh, too distracting. We didn’t get much actual cooking done.”
Zelda gave him a mock scandalized look as she opened the extra spicy container and started scooping out balls of cookie dough on the the sheet. “Well I’m glad you got to enjoy the kitchen somehow, but it seems a shame that you haven’t had a significant other cooking in here with you.”
He bumped his hip into hers, mirroring her gesture from earlier. “I’ve got you now!”
She turned her face to him, looking strangely flushed. “What do you mean?”
Link gave her a curious look,“You’re welcome over to use the kitchen any time. Even when you haven’t tried to paint your oven with cookie dough.”
Something flickered across her face. “Oh, you’re inviting me to use your kitchen.” Her shoulders drooped a little, and Link’s brain was overheating. Wait... Had she thought he was inviting her to be more than a cooking buddy? His heart went “Yes, yes!” but his tongue was too tied to voice something before her face fell further and she reached up to rub her eyes.
With the hand that she’d just used to form a ball of cookie dough.
Extremely spicy cookie dough.
The reaction wasn’t quite immediate. She had a moment where she realized what she’d done. Then there were tears streaming down her face, and Link was guiding her to the sink with all thoughts of being more than baking buddies gone.