Lockwood & Co. SMUT SMOOTHIES!

SMUTEMBER 2019 - CUBBLYLE - Day 3 No Regrets

Cooking hadn't always been an activity that Lucy enjoyed. Her mother was always too busy working or scolding one of her sisters to teach her properly, and all her sisters were always too occupied with homework from the school or doing house chores to take the time to teach her how to do anything other than toast and tea, and had thus from a young age been unable to prepare a decent meal and had been deemed unsafe to leave her alone in a kitchen without somebody's, or anybody's, specially an adult's supervision. When she came to Lockwood and Co. some time later, that didn't change much for a while - there wasn't a real need for her to be able to cook since the kitchen was George's territory - until the first time the researcher left her and Lockwood on they own for a week while he visited his mother and none of them had known how to do anything other than toast.

Lockwood's case was different than hers however; the idiot knew many recipes of food George had cooked by heart but no matter how hard he tried he simply seemed not able to follow them correctly. She on the other hand just needed a patient teacher. What she got instead was a demanding, demeaning, high-standardized ass to instruct her, but it was decent enough.

It took a long time, lots of effort, all her self control and even anger management techniques for her to manage to master cooking.

When it came to the culinary creations, George was as ambitious as he was perfectionist, with an critique as hard as a rock and an opinion heavy like a mountain, hard to digest and crushing to hear. Even the simplest of foods were a challenge to manage correctly when under his scrutinizing eye; he could tell when there was too much salt and when there was not enough oil, where something was undercooked and where it was burnt, when the ingredients weren't fresh and when they hadn't been sifted enough, how high or low it had been cooked and for how much time, and made sure to bark about the imperfections at her face.

It was true that the relationship between them had always been rocky at best, but when they entered the dietary territory - legend said it was like entering an endless, unceasing battleground. At least in Lockwood's words it was.

As much as it was hard to admit, Lucy had grown used to getting away to the kitchen whenever her drawing wasn't enough for her to vent her feelings, and after a particularly rough case she would always need more than just her sketchbook and colored pencils to emote. There were a couple of recipes that she liked to do whenever she was that stressed, particularly of sweets and baked goods, that she knew to perfection by heart. One of those was for sugar cookies.

As a kid, she'd always found them to be the perfect treat to go with a steaming mug of tea whenever she came back home late at night, when her mother and sisters were deeply asleep, too tired to tell her off for putting her rapier on the table, or for accidentally having some salt or lavender fall out of her belt, or any reason and she could just calm down from the hustle and left over dread from ghost haunting.

Now days she'd always bake them to calm down and vent any excessive anger. Like presently.

Cases were always stressing, no matter how small or easy they ended up being - most of the times they didn't end up like that and only went from hard to harder. As if if wasn't enough that she worried how they would come out from them, her boss' antics and stunts were never any help to her nerves. She was used to his every-night bullshit; the shameless theatrics at work, his overconfidence, the superfluous trust in their skills and superiority over any and all other agencies. All these always led to them getting in more trouble than they honestly needed, and lately that had landed them some bad outcomes on cases, many serious close calls and more than one complain from clients. She could only put up with his flimflam for so long.

Her arms were stiff, her shoulders tense and her stomach fidgety inside her as she preheated the oven and poured the cream butter and sugar into a bowl, beating them more forcefully than was necessary. She stopped when the batter got to the right density, ignoring the shuffling that closed in close to her.