Dad may not be here but there's a bag of chocolate chips in the cabinet, there's milk in the fridge and cinnamon on the island. You can still melt it all together sitting on the kitchen counter, your favorite mug set beside you as you stir.

You take your time mixing in the chocolate, almost forgetting to add the cinnamon altogether, and though the process is slow and sluggish it feels like no time has passed at all once it's done.

Thin wisps of steam waft up as you sip at it, both hands wrapped around your mug, ignoring the burn.

It tastes almost exactly the way it did when dad used to make it. Just by watching him all those years you've managed to get it right.

Stupidly, selfishly, you wish that you'd screwed it up instead. You wish that you'd burnt it, or made it far too sweet or too bitter, or that you'd dropped the pot and ruined the whole thing.

But you didn't mess it up. It's practically perfect. It tastes just like home.

You make sure to set your mug aside before you start to cry.

RENNNNNNNNNNNNNNN you are far too fucking good to me i swear.

i actually wasnt initially sure whether i wanted her to make it well or COMPLETELY screw it up. i figured itd be one of the two, either near perfect or absolutely horrible, it was just a matter of what would hit harder. i think my first thought WAS that it would go badly, and she'd be frustrated to have screwed it up and not have even a single reminder of home? but i figured the reminder would actually be worse. she already feels very disconnected from home, shes already isolated, she already feels like shes screwed up enough. more of that wouldnt change very much at all. but to finally get something right? to have a direct connection to home, a reminder of a time where she felt safe and confident and loved, only to feel like she can never reach that point again? its her first time making it alone. its the first good thing shes had in months and she has no one to share it with, no real comfort to take from it. it feels so hopeless. which is why i decided that she'd get it right instead of fucking it up.

the whole thing with her WISHING she'd fucked it up was part of that- shes used to disappointment and failure and things going wrong, itd be so easy to add another thing to the list. she makes it perfectly and immediately regrets it because its a reminder of everything shes lost.

this is also honestly a LOT of projection on my part, because while it was actually a very important friend who ended up showing me how to make hot chocolate like that, i LOVE hot chocolate and i love my dad and it was just. easiest to use those things to give her a connection to something outside of the dsmp, because i could draw from my own love to make it more impactful. i could TRY to go into the reason i wanted to give her an important outside connection in the first place but honestly i dont know enough about my own reasoning to describe why it felt so important ajhfgjksdg. something to miss? something to lose? Something.

I WISH I COULD GIVE MORE COMMENTARY i dont remember most of why i wrote what i wrote tbh. it just kind of spawned in my brain and i went haha cool that works! smile. i think this was one of the middle scenes in terms of me figuring out what i wanted to write? i didnt have it in mind at the beginning, but fairly early on i decided i wanted her to have something to miss.