Beating Holidays, Part 5
Dec. 26th, 2009 03:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mayachainTitle: Beating Holidays
Characters: John/Rodney, Jeannie/Kaleb, David, Madison
Rating: PG-13, tame swearing
Word Count: ~400
Summary: Baking and Bonding.
Notes: This is the Christmas sequel to Beating Hearts, to be concluded within the next 8 days.
I met Kaleb at the University of Toronto, Jeannie says, digging into the dough with both hands. That's not where I was getting my education, obviously, I had just finished my second semester at Cal Tech. I was so proud of myself, valued by my professors independently of Meredith for the first time. It was my first visit home that year, to celebrate my grandma turning eighty-one.
There I was, in a place where I barely knew anyone anymore, alone among relatives who could get... intense, needing to get away with no chance of going very far, and there was this... fair, you could call it, I think.
In a motion almost too quick for David's eyes, she adds various different-colored spices to the dough and pounds the lump into the table. I was wandering around the stands, trying to see if I'd recognize anyone among the seniors, any of the people I'd gone to school with, and trying to see if I could get something to eat that had no resemblance to cake, because damned if grandma allowed anything on her table that wasn't sugary and sweet. The next thing I knew, I was eating the most delicious cucumber salad and discussing Poul Anderson.
Switching the oven to 95 °F, David screws up his face. It's distant, but he recognizes the name. People suddenly suffering from an increase of intelligence, he murmurs, and Jeannie beams at him, Yes, exactly. I couldn't get John to shut up about it for a months, he divulges, remembering a scrawny fifteen-year old talking a mile a minute, almost tripping over his words in excitement.
Chuckling to themselves, they form the dough into scones and arrange them on baking trays for leavening. The service was... different, David says, reeling slightly from the intimacy of what Jeannie just told him. I didn't want to go on the 24th, when all but the most adamant atheists turn into believers, Rodney's sister replies, and David hears what she doesn't say, Mer doesn't like it when it's too crowded.
So what about you, Jeannie asks, unwilling to give in to David's segue, face just that short of sympathetic so as not to make his fists curl; compassionate enough to make him remember that she opened her home to Rodney and John and himself, make him help her put the trays in the oven and answer, It just never happened, instead.
onwards
Characters: John/Rodney, Jeannie/Kaleb, David, Madison
Rating: PG-13, tame swearing
Word Count: ~400
Summary: Baking and Bonding.
Notes: This is the Christmas sequel to Beating Hearts, to be concluded within the next 8 days.
I met Kaleb at the University of Toronto, Jeannie says, digging into the dough with both hands. That's not where I was getting my education, obviously, I had just finished my second semester at Cal Tech. I was so proud of myself, valued by my professors independently of Meredith for the first time. It was my first visit home that year, to celebrate my grandma turning eighty-one.
There I was, in a place where I barely knew anyone anymore, alone among relatives who could get... intense, needing to get away with no chance of going very far, and there was this... fair, you could call it, I think.
In a motion almost too quick for David's eyes, she adds various different-colored spices to the dough and pounds the lump into the table. I was wandering around the stands, trying to see if I'd recognize anyone among the seniors, any of the people I'd gone to school with, and trying to see if I could get something to eat that had no resemblance to cake, because damned if grandma allowed anything on her table that wasn't sugary and sweet. The next thing I knew, I was eating the most delicious cucumber salad and discussing Poul Anderson.
Switching the oven to 95 °F, David screws up his face. It's distant, but he recognizes the name. People suddenly suffering from an increase of intelligence, he murmurs, and Jeannie beams at him, Yes, exactly. I couldn't get John to shut up about it for a months, he divulges, remembering a scrawny fifteen-year old talking a mile a minute, almost tripping over his words in excitement.
Chuckling to themselves, they form the dough into scones and arrange them on baking trays for leavening. The service was... different, David says, reeling slightly from the intimacy of what Jeannie just told him. I didn't want to go on the 24th, when all but the most adamant atheists turn into believers, Rodney's sister replies, and David hears what she doesn't say, Mer doesn't like it when it's too crowded.
So what about you, Jeannie asks, unwilling to give in to David's segue, face just that short of sympathetic so as not to make his fists curl; compassionate enough to make him remember that she opened her home to Rodney and John and himself, make him help her put the trays in the oven and answer, It just never happened, instead.
onwards
