Rating: General Audiences
Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Category: Multi
Fandom: Red vs. Blue
Relationships: Franklin Delano Donut/Lavernius Tucker, Michael J. Caboose & Lavernius Tucker
Characters: Lavernius Tucker, Franklin Delano Donut, Michael J. Caboose
Additional Tags: Epsilon (mentioned), Post-Season/Series 13, Pre-Season/Series 15, Coping Mechanisms, Off-screen Character Death, the title is referring to the pancakes and not the feels, RvB Rarepair Week 2018, GFY
Additional Notes: aerefyr over on tumblr asked for sweet tucker/donut fluff and unfortunately for him, i'm a bit of a smartass sometimes.
"Tucker, do you ever want to talk about your feelings?"
"No."
"I do!"
"We know, Caboose."
"I am sad!"
"We know, Caboose."
Tucker flips the last pancake and focuses very intently on making sure it doesn't burn. Last week, he'd burned the last ones and had to give up his so that the Freelancers would actually eat breakfast; they liked to pretend they didn't love his pancakes, but inside them beat the hearts of pancake gluttons. He could've made more, but he only knew the right ratios of cinnamon and vanilla to put into a full batch of batter, so most of a batch would've gone to waste if he had. And his mama had always said, you do not make pancakes without planning to eat them.
"So, Tucker—"
"No, Donut, I don't want to talk about my feelings." Tucker doesn't slam the last pancake on the top of the stack—'do not abuse the pancakes, they don't deserve that shit' was another of Mama's rules—but it's a close thing. "I want to finish making the pancakes, I want to eat the pancakes, and then I want to go train."
Wash and Carolina are still adjusting to their new living quarters on Iris and were compensating by training outside as much as they could. "I am a manly man," Tucker adds, when Donut and Caboose don't say anything behind him. He grabs two plates from the cupboard labeled 'Blue' and one plate from the cupboard labeled 'Red' and gets to work assembling their breakfast. "And manly men don't talk about their feelings."
Tucker slathers peanut butter on his trio of pancakes and ignores Donut as he goes into a high-pitched rant about toxic masculinity, liberally sprinkled with innuendos. He plops the cyan plate down in front of his chair and moves onto the regulation-blue one.
"I am still sad," Caboose eventually says, soft and quiet. When Tucker glances over his shoulder, his sleep-rumpled disaster teammate is staring morosely at the scratched-up kitchen table, and Donut is looking at him for help. Caboose's shoulders are closer to his ears than usual, and Tucker dumps more of the blueberry syrup over his stack than Wash normally allowed. The shoulder thing usually means that Caboose had had a nightmare. "And I would like to talk about it."
"That's—" Tucker's throat closes up for a second, because they all have the same nightmares as Caboose but they've all hammered out their own coping mechanisms, re: pancakes and training and poking one's fuckbuddy who is in charge of the food. "That's fine, Caboose," he coughs out, carefully placing the honeyed and blueberried stack in front of his teammate. "You can talk about how you feel, if you need to."
Caboose takes a deep breath and starts shoving food into his mouth. "I am very sad about Church," he announces while Tucker studiously piles Donut's food with butter and powdered sugar and quartered strawberries, and Tucker flinches. "But…" Caboose trails off, watching Tucker drop Donut's dry monstrosity in front of the Red and press a quick kiss to his temple before sitting down between them and covering his stack in regular syrup. "But I think that is okay. I think we will be okay."
He stops talking and goes back to his pancakes and Tucker exchanges looks with Donut as they eat. But, hey, the pancakes are all made and Wash says Carolina is making noise about putting a pause on the training and Carolina says Wash is making noise about growing a beard and. Well. They'll make it through.
They always do.