Home Sweet Home

Pairing: Hanna/...
In my ongoing quest to rot people's teeth with fluff, I present the following.
Because for a pairing involving a dead guy and a cursed dude whose stomach has seemingly been cut open at some point, it is so, so cute.

He spares a glance to the clock nailed haphazardly in the corner of the kitchen, mentally adding an hour or three to make up for the too-slow hands. Hanna should be home now, and dinner isn't done yet. He feels a twinge of unnecessary guilt that it won't be on the table by the time the smaller man arrives. Orange eyes fall back down to the limp, yellowing vegetables on the chopping board, and his chest clenches in a way it shouldn't still be able to. He'd buy Hanna dinner from five star restaurants every night, if he could. Hell, just something fresh would do at this point.

He has no money – nobody hires dead men except Hanna, it seems. With the measly income earned from their paranormal cases and the red-head's department store job, it's a miracle they can even afford the rent. Glowing eyes flick up to the stained, leaky ceiling, the cracks in the walls, the tiny window, the uneven floorboards, the sound of the neighbors screaming at each other…

His hands tighten on the knife. With a grunt of frustration, he hacks violently at the broccoli on the counter, irritation only rising when he realizes half of it is too old to cook. It's all he can get.

At night, while Hanna sleeps and he walks, he stops at the back of supermarkets where they drag crates of food too close to use-by-dates to sell, and takes whatever he can use. He worries constantly, even as he dances with the danger of the use-by date, that he'll make Hanna sick one day.

Green hands tremble, and he puts down the knife, sighing deeply. It's no good thinking about it; Hanna must eat (and thank god the dead don't need to, or things would be even worse). And he'll do the best he damn well can to feed him, and his heart will swell and break all at once every time he sees the pure joy on Hanna's face at the sight of anything edible.

Willing himself calm, he places a potato in the oven, the vegetables in a pot, and waits with his head in his hands.

Hanna sighs deeply, hands in his pockets, shuffling his way home. The bags under his eyes get bigger every day. He rubs at them tiredly, the shouts of his manager still echoing around his head.

Today they'd put him on the information desk. What was he supposed to do when those women asked him where the nursery was? The department store was too damn cheap for something like that. He couldn't just turn them away! And there was space behind the information desk for a few prams, he supposed, it wouldn't be too much trouble, sure, just leave it to me, ma'am.

And somehow, it was his fault that these women had quite happily entrusted their babies to someone with absolutely no knowledge of childcare whatsoever. He'd tried to get that lady from the perfume department with five kids to help, he really had! Especially when he realized that babies were, apparently, more sensitive to cursed, magically-tainted individuals such as himself, and they all cried and wailed for an hour straight until the supervisor came to chew him out, forcing him to call the mothers back over the loudspeaker to collect their children.

He'd apologized to all of them, every word heartfelt – he just wanted to help. Pfft. Story of his life. 'He just wanted to help' – and look where it got him. Every damn time! Thankfully, they all seemed a hell of a lot less irritated than his manager, who continued to shout at him for a good hour after every baby was removed from behind the information desk, guilt-tripping him into working overtime to make up for it.

Useless, useless, useless. He sighs again, slouching lower than he thought was humanly possible. The sight of the apartment block does nothing to raise his spirits – there's a homeless man screaming something about the end of the world outside, while the guy with the dog on the first floor yells back and threatens to call the police. The door to the building is falling off its hinges, and he narrowly avoids falling right through the stairs as he climbs up to his floor. He tries to ignore the woman crying in the flat next door to his as he fumbles for the key in his pockets, gently pushing it open.

Hanna smells it before he sees it.

Baked potato. Melted cheese. Broccoli, under that, but for once he doesn't mind.

The dusty smell of a zombie, sitting in the other chair at the tiny, wobbly table with his head in his hands. Geoffrey looks up hopefully, weary orange eyes resting on Hanna's wide blue ones where the small man stays frozen in the doorway.

"Oh thank god," breathes James, and he stands. There's a moment of silence, as Hanna searches his face for an explanation. "You're so late. I thought… something had happened."

And then Hanna bursts into tears.

Instantly he's rushing over, gathering the small red-head in his long, lanky arms with soft words and whispers, as the smaller man sobs and hiccups pathetically. Stupid, childish, being such a girl, Hanna thinks, even as he clings to Robert like his life depends on it.

"What's wrong? Did something happen? Did somebody hurt you?" the deep dead voice is panicked, and he nudges his nose against Hanna's wet cheeks in desperate search of answers, green hands gripping bony shoulders tight enough to leave marks.

Hanna laughs suddenly, even as the tears continue to stream down his face, nose the same shade of red as his hair. "I-I'm just…s-so happy," he sniffles with a wobbly smile, and the zombie raises an eyebrow in the closest to a 'what the hell' expression he has ever made. "It was such a stupid day and everything sucked and th-then I came home and you're here and you made me potato and there's cheese and I think I can smell broccoli but I don't mind, really, I promise I'll eat the vegetables too today, cause you made it and you…you…"

He leans up on his toes to frantically kiss cold, green lips, then falls back onto his heels to bury his face against the familiar orange shirt.

"I love you…you're amazing," Hanna whispers, voice muffled.

"I love you too," the dead man murmurs back, too confused to say anything more (it's a pretty good reply, he supposes absently, because he means it - really, really means it).

And the ceiling is leaking again, the broccoli is the furthest thing from fresh you can get without reaching rotten, the crack in the wall is an inch longer than it was yesterday and the neighbors are threatening each other with divorce, but Hanna is in Galahad's arms, and everything is okay.