Disclaimer - Harvest Moon is not mine.

Author's note - I just recently found this on my computer. I think I may have been writing it for some sort of challenge at one point, but I can't think what. Anyway, I needed to write something and, while this is short and silly and pointless, finishing it off proved to be a nice solution. (Although, with hindsight, finishing off - and in fact starting - my English coursework probably would have been an even better one...).

Cake

Jack felt as though he'd landed on another planet. The second he stepped into his farmhouse and slammed the door, the dewy scent of Fall grass vanished from his nostrils to be replaced by a stronger, much more bewitching aroma. It took him a moment to realise what had caused it; as a general rule, his house never smelt of anything particularly interesting. He soon remembered why that had changed.

"Hey Jack," came the cheery call from his kitchen... Wait! Jack's brown eyes widened immeasurably, as they absorbed the scene of destruction. Oh Goddess... his poor pristine kitchen...

Midway through whisking some eggs with unnecessary vigour, Ann glanced up at her bemused husband. "You okay?" she asked, laughing heartily at his expression. "I'm just experimenting with a few recipes," she continued, when he failed to reply. "Y'know, if you were wondering or anything."

"Yeah, er, that's okay..." Jack mumbled. His kitchen was usually very small, but suddenly seemed to have expanded by several feet. Huge bags of flour were dumped at the perimeter, overflowing steadily, and a few bottles of cooking oil had rolled across the wooden floor.

Ann herself looked utterly eccentric in her enthusiasm. Her face was daubed liberally with flour, making her vivid red hair seem even brighter by comparison. There was even what seemed to be egg yolk splattered across one of her skinny elbows. "Guess what," she exclaimed excitedly, and, when Jack did so, announced proudly, "I got all of this cooking stuff from the supermarket at a discount price!"

Comprehension dawned on Jack, as the manic cooking-fest finally made sense. "Oh!" he said smiling a little nervously. "But, um... why?"

"Why what?" It seemed as though Ann was barely paying attention to her husband. And it was true that he, too, was becoming slightly distracted. Try as he might, Jack simply couldn't stop blushing at the adorable way Ann stuck her tongue out when she was concentrating. He shook his head forcefully.

"I meant, why did you get them cheaper?"

Ann shrugged. She poured yet more flour into a ridiculously large bowl, resulting in a plume of white powder which filled the air. "Some special discount for newly-weds, according to Karen," she explained. Then she glanced at Jack, a fiery look glimmering in her blue eyes. "I knew there was a reason I married you."

Embarrassingly, Jack found himself hopelessly red-faced again. Once his cheeks had returned to normal, he thought about what Ann had told him. Newly-wed's special discount... was that even real? It certainly didn't sound like it. Doctor Tim and Elli married a few seasons ago and he didn't remember them splurging on cooking utensils.

"So Karen gave you lots of cheap flour, then?"

"Yep." Ann had now whipped out a rolling pin Jack vaguely remembered buying, but never using, and began kneading at some dough.

"For how much?" he asked tentatively, remembering, of all things, the fact that his chickens were down to their few last few bushels of feed. And that Winter was mere weeks away...

Ann paused briefly in her kneading to shrug, "Oh, only 6,000G."

"Six...?" Jack began, only to gasp and choke; it was as though the air in his farmhouse had been drained of oxygen. As always in panic-stricken moments such as this, his thoughts would not arrange themselves in sensible order.

I could buy a cow for that money, he kept reminding himself, I could buy cow... or a sheep. Two, in fact!

But suddenly Jack noticed the bewildered look on his wife's face, and felt inexplicably obliged to turn his horrified gasp into a not-so-convincing, but very violent cough.

Ann, now frowning in bemusement, jabbed at Jack with the rolling pin. "What's wrong?" she demanded, gaining a small smile from her husband. Her rampant curiousity and desire to be kept up to date with absolutely everything, was one of things that had attracted him in the first place - bizarre though it was.

"I think it's, maybe, that the, erm, flour has caught in my throat," Jack explained, inventing wildly and adding one last cough for good measure.

"Flour inhalation? How odd... and made-up," she muttered, just loud enough for him to catch, adding more clearly, "You should probably get that checked out, you know. Could be dangerous."

"...Yeah." But Jack's mind was wandering again - and not, this time, to the cows he'd never buy, the chickens that were soon to be starving or even how gorgeous his wife looked with pieces of egg shell in her hair. "Ann," he asked, stepping gingerly into the kitchen, "how exactly did you get the 6,000G to pay for this stuff?"

That same familiar sense of dread washed over Jack as he awaited her answer. As long as it wasn't, "By selling your racehorse", he thought he could cope... just. "Karen said she'd put it on our tab," Ann explained, and Jack breathed a very temporary sigh of relief. Up until that revelation, he'd been banking on paying a visit to the supermarket owners' daughter. Now it looked more likely to be a case of seeing who caught up with the other first. Sadly, Karen was notorious for getting people to cough up her parents' money.

"She said we could pay it back in installments," Ann insisted, as though this made everything perfectly alright.

"How very generous," Jack murmured, so quietly that he may as well not have said it at all. He was certainly thinking it, though. Constantly.

Well, along with wondering just how such a sharp girl could be so easily duped. Clearly, it was her father, Doug, that dealt with the financial side of things at the Inn.

Normally, he'd be fuming - marching right back to that supermarket now, in fact. Instead, he simply sighed and slipped his arms around his wife's waist. Ann squirmed a little as she still wasn't used to such casual intimacy, but she soon relaxed into his embrace.

"Here." She twisted around and thrust a spoonful of raw cake mixture under his nose. "Try it!"

"But... it's not cooked... "

Judging by the acidic look Ann sent him, you'd think Jack had just confessed to an undying hatred for puppies. Ann rolled those big blue eyes of her's and sampled the cake mix herself. "Mmm. You'd better get used to this you know," she warned him.

"Huh? Why?"

"You don't think, that after spending all that money, we'll be shopping there for a while, do you?"

"Course not!" she laughed, as he struggled for an answer. "No, this stuff'll last us 'til next Fall!"

Yeah, and so will the debts, Jack thought. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He didn't even like cake. Not really. In the end, he merely smiled and kissed her cheek, earning only flour-coated lips for his trouble.

He didn't know where this frivolous attitude had suddenly come from - how were the chickens going to cope for Goddess sake? How?! - but maybe it wasn't such a mystery.

With Ann, he was now coming to realise, everything was simply different.