milliways_bar | (no subject)

"I read the list, you check the stuff? Ot the other way round, though I'm likely to say 'funny green tin with white writing' instead of what it is? Or any other way I can help?"

Behind Gil, a small violet deity turned up, taking a detour through the kitchen on his way to his quarters ~~in order to pinch lebkuchens~~.

"Tea," Gil said shortly. "NOT coffee. Coffee makes me twitchy. Tea please with lots of sugar. And the sacrificial lambs - I mean - lebkuchens - are in the orange tin marked 'For the Attention of Sooty'."

"And you can tell all that without even looking at me; your magical skills are admirable - ot is it what Eska calls headology?" Asar-Suti said, a bit nonplussed, but inwardly just charmed.

He conjured a nice mug of tea with lots of sugar in it; out of a whim, he made it a tartan mug.

"And thanks for those lebkuchens; I much prefer them to sacrificial lambs. What would I do with them? Get all the fluff in my mouth?"

Gil rolled an amused eye. "Sacrificial lebkuchens," he said. "I've hidden the rest where you won't find them. Those are yours."

He supped the tea. "Mmmmmm thanks Soots."

"Well, I don't know that I can't find those others - what will happen to me if I do?" Asar-Suti said, but his tone of voice suggested he wasn't really serious.

Gil might threaten something drastic - perhaps not 'no sex' as he'd be harming himself as well, but something almost as scary.

"If you find them and scoff them," Gil says with a pleasant grin. "I'll be forced to cover you in sherry-soaked sponge, custard and cream to teach you not to trifle with me."

Asar-Suti giggled, poking Gil in the ribs.

"Oooh, what a nice pun! And what a nice cake, too."

He leaned in and gave Gil a little kiss on the cheek to make up for the rib-poke.

Gil turns his head, horns smoothing over Sooty's hair, and gives him a short hug.

"I adore lebkuchen," he says. "so it's just as well most of them are hidden away, or I'd be stuffing myself silly."

"We'd both would," Asar-Suti said, "and then you might get sacked, and we'd be homeless!"

His grin said he didn't really fear that, but still.

He touched his nose to Gil's, happy at how his lover would always make time for him.

"No, we wouldn't," Gil scoffed, putting down his mug and turning back to the cupboard. "You're the gardener - staff member ergo entitled to staff quarters. If YOU got the sack - started growing something dubious behind the bikesheds - then we'd be in trouble."

"Oh, I think I was growing dubious things behind the shed," Asar-Suti grinned. "Should I better not plant them again next spring?"

He watched Gil sort through the cupboard for a while. "What are those?"

"Dried cranberries," Gil says. "They are really good in stuffing and look like little glistening rubies so they look pretty as well as tasting good AND they cut the fat in greasy meat. Bloody useful little things AND I haven't got enough."

He makes a note on his notepad. "I hope you will grown those things again," he said softly.

"I will," Asar-Suti said, with a little smile. "We just go and get new seeds from that place in, where was it, Cheltenham, next spring. And we can grow cranberries, if they can be cultivated."

"I don't see why not," Gil said. "it's amazing the stuff you can grow if you set up a localised plant-foolery charm to make it think it's at home."

"Our very own bananas?" Asar-Suti suggested, grinning brightly.

"Hmmmmm, bananas - dried and chipped - three pounds," Gil says peering into the cupboard, grateful for sooty's presence but with his mind already back on work.

Adric is quite helpful, at least nine times out of ten, and he's even more helpful when he's got instructions.

He's also finished with the dishes, at least for the afternoon, which leaves him rather at loose ends, so it should be no surprise really that there's a cheery, "Hello! Anything I can do to help?" From over by the sink.

"Dishes all done, dried and put away?" Gil asks. "Yep, brilliant. Well you can come and help me with the spice cupboard then. We get through a hellacious lot over Christmas what with all the mulling."

Adric grinned then, nodding, "Been done for about five minutes." He tilted his head then, "Which one's the spice cupboard? And what are we doing with it?"

"This one," Gil says, pointing to the next one along. "I've almost finished the one with the dried goods. Which would you sooner do? Write down or count?"

"Er... I can write things down." He nodded once decisively because really, counting wasn't something he did without getting distracted trying to turn it all into math.

"Oooohkay," Gil said, finishing his last notes on the final shelf of dried fruit.

It looked like they'd need more prunes and dried apple rings.

He fetched a stool and gestured for Adric to sit on it and passed him the notebook and pencil.

"Ready?" he asked, sitting on his heels in front of the cupboard.

Adric nodded once, scribbling 'spice cupboard' at the top of the page, "Ready."

Gil took a deep breath.

"Allspice," he said and lifted out the sealed bags, weighing them in his hands. "Pound and a half. Anise - half a pound. Arrowroot - oh lor' there's only a bit of that left. Put four ounces by that one and a big star. I'll need to reorder."

Adric nodded with each one, scribbling it down, handwriting surprisingly neat, likely due to being more used to dealing with numbers that all had to be in the correct columns to work right.

The letters matched, but the numbers were a slightly different shape, some of them at a right angle to what most people used, "Next?"

"Basil - dried - seven ounces, bay leaves - dried - four. Don't need so many of those because we've got a couple of trees in the garden and can pull fresh ones. Barberry and bayberry - three ounces of each. And black pepper - fourteen ounces ground, two pounds whole."

he looked at Adric. "How are you doing? I'm not too fast for you, am I?"

He smiled, flicking his bangs out of his eyes and marking off the black pepper, adding the amounts, "No, doing fine so far, I'll tell you if I need you to slow down."

His hair had fallen right back over his eyes as soon as he wasn't paying attention to it, it had the habit of doing that, "What next?"

"We're on the 'C's now," Gil warns, "and there are masses of those.
Caraway Seed - eight ounces. Cardamom - pound and a quarter. Celery Seed - six ounces. Chervil, dried, six ounces. Chile - hot - two pounds. Chives - dried - four ounces plus a couple of pots of fresh on the windowsill. Cilantro - three ounces. Cinnamon - stick - three pounds, ground - eight ounces. Cloves - two pounds. Coriander - half a pound ground plus a bush in the greenhouse."

He sighed. "getting a dry throat here, pal. Shall we knock off for a mo' and get a drink."

He rubbed his nose on his wrist and sneezed.

He managed, amazingly, to catch up, or at least to keep the right numbers with the right spices in his head so he could write them down even as Gil continued.

Another smile at the suggestion, nodding, "Sounds like a plan. Though, is there at least one sort of spice for every letter of the alphabet? Because if there is we could be at this a while."

"I'm only doing the regularly used Muggle World ones," Gil warns. "The Pan-universal cupboard is in a little space-time anomaly at the back of the pantry. Luckily Christmas is fairly localised and these will serve. We're about half done. Bung the kettle on, eh? There's a good lad."

He really had no idea what that last one meant, but he made an educated guess and within moments the kettle was on the stove and he was standing on a chair to get mugs down, "How do the rats do it?"

He'd been curious about that for a while, as he'd seen them taking loaded dishes away, and sometimes bringing empty ones back, but he'd never seen them getting the clean ones down to fill.

"Most of the stuff in regular use in in reachable cupboards," Gil pointed out. "It's only the crockery that the human staff members use that's on high shelves."

Pencil flying across the page as he wrote, "Star Anise - seven ounces" he smiled reminiscently.

"Time was there was just me and Ratty doing the cooking," he said. "We coped but then the bar was a quarter the size. There was only one barman too - Sirius Black. It was a laugh - hard work - but a laugh."

"Oh." He said, "That makes sense."

He smiled then, "'nother question, why would the rats want houses made of gingerbread?" Because he was still fairly certain that they'd wanted the houses for themselves, since they'd been the ones to show him the pictures.

There were two finished ones on an out of the way counter, as well as pieces for at least three more.

"Lazy buggers want to be able to have breakfast in bed?" Gil suggested with a laugh. "Really I have no idea. Everard! Why do some of your lot want gingerbread houses?"

Everard paused in passing, balancing his tea-tray easily and embarked on a long squeaked explanation and Gil listened nodding then thanked him.

"Well there you are then," he said to Adric. "That was plain enough."

He had smiled, crookedly, at the first statment, but his brow furrowed at the rat's explanation, "Er... I don't actually speak rat, most of the time they have to show me pictures."