#matt attempting to swallow a mountain of food dye all for you benefit

[pastafossa]

“And The Holly Cookies Too” (Matt Murdock x F!Reader, Fic)

Right I had to go out to shovel the furnace pipes again so while I’m waiting to warm up and go back to bed, I figured I’d finish editing and drop this little bit of TRT Christmas fluff, too, as a bonus! Summary: Matt is determined to support you in your experimental Christmas cookie bake-a-thon, even if it kills him. Warnings: none really, just Matt and his senses and cookies and humor. Wordcount: 1,481 Ship: Matt Murdock x F!Reader. This is technically TRT’s reader again, but TRT is not required reading. 

“Right.” You put your hands on your hips, narrowing your eyes at the messy sea of ingredients on the counter and the containers stacked high on the kitchen table. “So we’ve done… cranberry shortbread—”

“Mhm,” Matt said behind you, his voice muffled.

“Gingerbread. Italian rainbow cookies. Ciro’s Christmas pizzelles. Your dad’s seven-layer cookies.”

“Mhm.”

“Christmas fudge. Snowball cookies.” You glanced back, then did a double take. “Matt.”

“Mmm?” he said, dusting his fingers off on his shirt.

 “Stop eating the snowballs.”

 “I wasn’t,” he said around a mouthful of snowball, blinking innocently at you.

“Then why is there powdered sugar on your face?”

“I can’t see them,” he said mournfully, abruptly shifting his argument. He tipped his head, licking the powdered sugar off his lips, and only Matt Murdock could manage a look so tragic after he’d just been caught red-handed… or sugar-handed, rather, with the evidence literally written across his face. “How was I supposed to know these were the snowballs?”

You snatched another snowball out of his hand, and he pulled a sad face until you leaned in and smacked a kiss against his lips. “Don’t eat them until after I pick the ones that we can give away. I want to make sure we have enough.”

 At that, he chuckled, leaning in to touch his forehead to yours. “Sweetheart, we’ve been baking all day. We’ve got hundreds of cookies.”

 “Some might be bad. I want to make sure I have good ones to give away,” you fretted, turning back around to stare at your latest project: a tray of sticky, marshmallow-y holly cookies. It had amazed you how much food coloring you’d needed to dump in to achieve the bright-green color, but damned if it hadn’t worked. Each little clump of cornflakes, held together by a sticky green mass of melted marshmallow, looked just like a holly leaf, complete with bright red cinnamon candies set in like berries. Or… or did they look like holly leaves? Were they too crooked? “Everyone else has gotten way more practice than me. I’m behind. I don’t want to be…”

“Be what?” He set his head over your shoulder as you morosely nudged at one of the holly cookies.

“Bad at Christmas,” you admitted.

“You can’t be bad at Christmas,” he told you gently. “That’s not how it works, sweetheart.”

“But what if I am!?” you howled, throwing your sticky hands up in the air. “Jesus—”

“Close,” Matt said with a straight face. “He’s on Christmas eve.”

“You know what I mean!” You turned, pulling away to pace wildly in the kitchen, baring your teeth at the holly cookies as if they were an enemy that needed defeating. “They look crooked.”

Matt closed his mouth, turning his head with a furrowed brow to consider the cookies.

“What are you doing?” you asked him curiously.

“They don’t…” He narrowed his eyes in focus. “They don’t… sound crooked? And even if they were, isn’t nature crooked? I’m sure they’re fine.”

You let out a huff, abruptly circling around, soothed a little by the sheer determination Matt had aimed towards your holly cookies. You let out a sigh as you stepped back up beside him, staring down at the cookies silently.

Maybe… maybe they didn’t look… all that bad.

“You think they’re ok?” you asked him nervously.

“I think they sound and feel amazing.” He leaned over to kiss your temple, and—you had a feeling—left some powdered sugar in your hair from the snowballs he’d been stealing. “For obvious reasons, I’m a poor judge of looks, and there’s a lot of sugar and cinnamon in the air from the last batch so I can’t quite separate the taste, but I’m sure they’re perfect.”

“I guess they look alright,” you mumbled, reaching forward to nudge one with another sigh. “Besides, it’s half taste anyway.”

“Let me try one, then.”

You threw him a baffled look. “What, these?”

“Yeah.”

“You hate green.”

He made a noise of protest. “I don’t hate green.”

“The last time you had something with green food coloring, you pulled a level ten stinky cat face. These have way more green food coloring than that.”

“It’s different when it’s a cookie,” he said stubbornly.

“Are you lying?”

“No,” he lied, licking his lips just once.

You narrowed your eyes. “You are lying! Matt—”

But it was too late. Before you could blink he’d snatched up one of the holly cookies and darted out of the kitchen. “They’re fine,” he told you, backing away. “I can smell the green. There’s not too much.”

You quickly came around the corner, pointing a finger as Matt boldly lifted the cookie. “Matt, don’t you dare.”

He got that look in his eye—the one that spelled trouble, the one that ended in gunshot wounds and legal cases best avoided, the one that meant he was about to do something absolutely ridiculous.

He took a confident, massive bite.

And froze.

Silence.

His lips and nose twitched, and you swore you could see the momentary flash of regret sweep through his eyes.

“You’re trying not to make the face, aren’t you?” You stepped in closer, mildly amused now. “The stinky cat face.”

“No,” he said, very, very carefully, his voice hoarse behind a mouthful of green food coloring and processed marshmallow. His nose and mouth wrinkled briefly before he forced it down, struggling with himself as he tried to chew. You swore his eye twitched. “These are… delicious.”

“You’re ridiculous,” you said fondly, your lips curling up into a grin at just how determined he was to carry on the lie for your sake. “Please stop suffering for me.”

“I’m just… enjoying it,” he said roughly, and oh, this time his eyes did twitch as he swallowed with great reluctance. It looked like it went down like acid, his body shivering as if to punish him for what he’d just knowingly ingested. Even so, he twisted his face into an approximation of contentment. “That… was one of the best cookies you’ve ever made. I didn’t… taste the green at all. People will love it.”

You held out a hand for the rest of the cookie. “I appreciate your attempts to lie to me about my terrible holly cookies, but—”

He shot you a look, something like absolute fire in his dark eyes.

Shit.

You shouldn’t have said that.

“Matt, give me the cookie,” you said quickly. He tipped his head and took one slow step back.

“Matt—”

“...No,” he said hotly, clenching his jaw. “I want to eat it. It’s mine.”

You darted after him, and he took off, vaulting over the couch with one hand, your holly cookie in his other. You, unfortunately, had to go around and by the time you circled the couch, he’d already hit the first landing on the stairs, and goddamit, normally you loved his level of athleticism, but not when you were trying to take something back from him like he was a dog who’d run off with the remote.

 “Matt!” you shouted from the bottom of the stairs as he spun, now on the second level. “Don’t fucking eat that, I appreciate it, but you don’t—”

Which was when Matt—somehow managing the appearance of direct, aggressive eye contact��promptly shoved the entire goddamn cookie into his mouth.

“Are you serious?” you barked. “Matt—”

Matt stubbornly closed his mouth and chewed, once.

Then abruptly spun around, his back to you.

There was a choked noise, and you snorted as you came up the stairs. “Matt, spit it out.”

Another, more stubborn choked noise, and this time he shuddered. You were pretty sure he was just trying to get it down as fast as possible at this point, and you didn’t blame him.

“You goddamn masochist,” you said affectionately as you reached him, rubbing your hand softly down his shuddering back. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I love you,” he said hoarsely, fervent determination lying beneath, and you managed to spin him just in time to watch him work his throat, forcing down the rest of the holly cookie. He groaned as he did, though he tried to make it sound more like a moan of delight. “It… was amazing, sweetheart.”

And now that you got a better look at him, you slapped a hand over your mouth, holding back your laughter. “Oh God, Matt.”

His lips and tongue were now a bright, vibrant shade of emerald green.

Something he seemed to notice the second you did.

He lurched, his mouth falling open, his hand rising for just a moment as if in instinct to scratch at his tongue. He made a strange, ragged noise, then, one somehow full of both regret and apology.

You caught his chin, leaning in to kiss his cheek in sympathy. “I love you. Thank you for trying. It was a wonderful Christmas gift.”

“I’m sorry,” he grit out, groaning and leaning in to bury his face against your neck, his words garbled as if he hated the taste of his own tongue. “I-I tried. God, I hate green.”

“I know you did.” You kissed his hair beneath the glow of the Christmas tree, and somehow the Christmas lights were even less green than his mouth. And, well, even if your cookies didn’t ever turn out perfect, you’d still come out ahead as long as you had Matt here to try them with you. The reminder made you... a lot less nervous about the whole thing, even if you were hoping to prevent something like this from happening again. “No more holly cookies for either of us.”

“No more holly cookies.”