[Fic] "Who Contract the Habit of Eating" -- Homestuck
gracefularchitect said: Characters: Rose, Jade, Word: Favourite, Scenario: 'Rose & Jade have very different ideas on favourite food. They try to find something of mutual delight.' Oh, forgot to add: Could be in the same universe as Leaf & Letter, but it's so general it doesn't matter x)
Note: This wound up somewhat diagonal to the prompt and took an unexpected detour through angst on its way to the mostly happy ending. Oops? As per the secondary part of the prompt, this is another installment of the Leaf and Letter AU, wherein Rose is an author and Jade owns a plant shop. It falls between the two [2,450 words]
(Content note: Rose talks about her mother's alcoholism and its effects on her childhood.)
[ETA: The ever-so-slightly revised final version is now up on AO3!]
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Who Contract the Habit of Eating
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Rose's phone bleeped halfway through her attempt to choreograph yet another chess game (she really should have picked a different structural theme, regardless of the lovely, useful symbolic baggage chess invoked in readers' minds) and she gratefully abandoned her work to check the flurry of incoming messages.
J: omg rose, i have had the worst day in the history of the universe
J: the worst!!!
J: customers suppliers and employees all suck
J: humans suck in general
J: and i dont want to deal with them anymore
J: can we cancel the date part of our date and just eat comfort food and watch nature documentaries instead?
J: the siren song of my couch is very strong
J: but!
J: it would be even comfier with you there to cuddle <3<3<3
J: (argh wait, is it too early in this relationship for sweatpants and grumpyface???)
J: (if so we can just raincheck until tomorrow)
J: (ill probably be up for actual romancey romance again by then)
Rose found herself smiling helplessly at her phone, which felt as though it ought to have been embarrassing but somehow wasn't quite. It was oddly difficult to be embarrassed around Jade, or when thinking about Jade, or even when talking about Jade to her mother (which she'd finally done, grudgingly, when they'd lasted for two months and she started to think ahead to the marathon obstacle course of Thanksgiving).
Besides, if she and Jade couldn't handle each other dressed down, stressed out, and in need of recharging, it was probably better to learn that now before they got in too deep.
...And she'd kept Jade waiting too long, again. One day she really had to train herself out of getting lost in her thoughts.
R: I'm slightly confused to discover that I don't count as human, at least when it comes to your newly discovered hatred of the species.
R: But questions of my biological classification aside, I adore nature documentaries, and I believe I could be persuaded into a session of cuddling on your admittedly very comfortable couch. :)
R: Am I also expected to wear sweatpants, or will my writing clothes be acceptable?
J: obviously you are a mysterious and alluring creature of pure narrativium!
J: which is much better than a human ;)
J: anyway, wear whatever! except not lace, lace is itchy and evil and must be shunned
J: see you in an hour <3
R: <3 to you too.
She set down her phone, looked at the seventeen open research tabs on her laptop and the pages of badly-sketched chess games strewn across her kitchen table, and decided she might as well give herself a break. She jumped ahead a chapter to pick up the subplot with Frigglish, Ockite, and Meander investigating the break-in at the Library of Zorn. They were currently sparring with Senior Librarian Nalyx (an overworked woman with a gift for superficially polite snark) and Rose indulged herself with several hundred words of oblique insults. She had just about decided it would be worth tweaking her outline for volumes three and onward in order to promote Nalyx to recurring tertiary character -- if only because when Calmasis and Zazzerpan each tried to recruit her in later volumes, the conversations would be things of terrible, sparkling beauty -- when her alarm dinged and it was time to get ready for her date.
"Infinite maledictions upon the concept of linear time," she muttered, because of course she had to set aside one of her favorite activities in order to go see one of her favorite people.
(Perhaps one day she and Jade would reach the kind of relationship where she could set up her laptop in a corner of What Pumpkin Botanical Emporium and write while Jade built floral arrangements and sold geraniums and azaleas to amateur gardeners. But not quite yet. And she wasn't the one currently in need of indulgences.)
Rose brushed her teeth because that was only good manners, and slipped on a pair of silver octopus earrings because she'd reached the point where leaving home with bare ears felt oddly like walking around naked, but didn't bother with makeup or fancy shoes. Her jeans probably weren't the best clothing choice for cuddles, but they were old and well-worn and her personal sartorial equivalent of comfort food. If Jade couldn't accept them, well... to be perfectly honest, Rose wouldn't be terribly put-out at having to change for future cuddle sessions. That was not a dangerous type of compromise.
She texted Jade to let her know she was en route, then started her car and headed across town. Jade lived on the hill near Mann University, in in the bottom half of a slightly rundown duplex, and her pickup truck left no extra room in the driveway. Fortunately there was adequate street parking.
They hadn't exchanged keys yet. Rose knocked rather than ring the doorbell.
"Ten seconds!" Jade shouted over Becquerel's single warning bark. "Bec, in the kitchen."
"I'm counting!" Rose called back. "Ten-mississippi, nine-mississippi, eight-mississippi, seven-mississippi, six-mississippi, five-mississippi, four--"
"Okay, eight seconds," Jade corrected as she threw the deadbolt and swung the door inward. "You had really good traffic karma; I wasn't expecting you for another five minutes."
She was, as advertised, wearing gray sweatpants with slightly ratty cuffs. She was also wearing an oversized black t-shirt with a picture of the Earth from space and the words 'a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam' painted on the chest, a pair of fuzzy wolf-paw slippers, and the sloppiest French braid known to humankind.
"I suppose I did," Rose said; and then, for lack of better words, "Um. Hi."
It wasn't as if she'd never seen Jade dressed down before -- working in a plant shop meant practical clothes and a tendency to end the day with streaks of dirt in implausible places -- but not all forms of dressing down were created equal, and this version, in this place, was intimate in a way Rose hadn't quite expected: like turning a corner into a garden nook that Jade kept sheltered from public view.
She'd never dared to be similarly open with her previous girlfriends -- at least not since college, which was its own universe and hardly counted. She hadn't even wanted to be so open (which, in retrospect, made the transient nature of those relationships unsurprising). And yet, she suddenly wanted to let Jade see her in the nightshirt and flannel bathrobe she kept for her grimdark days, wanted to know that she could curl up on her own sofa and brood and Jade wouldn't push, might just walk past and comb her fingers through Rose's hair now and then and refill her tea when it got cold. She wanted to learn Jade's bad day bulwarks in turn.
She had no idea how to express those thoughts in coherent English. Her tongue simply wouldn't form the syllables.
Apparently her expression was equally uncommunicative, since Jade only shrugged and said, with a wry twist of her lips, "Yeah, I know, I'm a mess. Come on in. The mac and cheese is almost ready; I'll pour you a bowl."
"I think we have slightly different definitions of mess," Rose managed as she shut and locked the door behind her. "What do you put in your macaroni? Mine tends to be too solid to pour."
"That's because yours is gourmet three-cheese homemade stuff with spinach and chicken, or something equally fancypants," Jade said from the kitchen. "I just use Kraft. It'll probably give me cancer someday, but I grew up on delicious, potentially radioactive orange gloop and it's nice to go back to basics after a bad day. Plus, everybody knows you're supposed to eat junk while watching movies. I am pretty sure there's a law."
She popped back into the living room, two plastic bowls filled with cheap noodles and terrifyingly bright cheese sauce in her hands and Bec trailing hopefully at her heels. "Fork or spoon?"
Rose, caught halfway through unlacing her sneakers, stared at the bowls in visceral horror. "No."
Jade blinked. "I think you're missing an antecedent. No, there isn't a law about junk food and movies? Or no, you don't want utensils and you'll eat dinner with your fingers?"
Bile surged in Rose's throat at the memory of half-burnt cheese coating her palms, the taste of shame and resentment on her tongue. No. Never again. No matter how bad Jade's day had been.
"No, it's not nice to go back to basics when those basics don't count as actual food," Rose snapped. "Throw it out. Now. I'll buy you something else, I don't care what, just not that."
Jade looked down at the so-called macaroni and cheese, looked back over toward Rose, and scowled. "Really? This is what you pick for our first fight? My choice of comfort food? Because it offends your delicate palate? Because I have seen--"
Shit. Fuckity fucking shit on a lightly toasted sesame roll. "That's not what--"
"--seen you eat waffle and fried chicken sandwiches at that cutesy all-day brunch place downtown," Jade plowed onward, "and you can't honestly tell me you think that's any healthier than this. Especially since Kraft stopped using artificial ingredients in 2015! If you don't want to eat it, fine, that's more for me, but the least you can do is sit the hell down, shut the fuck up, and respect my right to eat trash instead of rabbit food for dinner!"
So much for intimacy, Rose thought as Bec picked up his owner's tension and growled at her.
She held up her hands, one still clutching a sneaker. "I'm sorry. That was shitty of me. I just-- my mother is very house-proud."
"Yeah, no shit! And she's fashionable and she does computer security consulting. Those are the only things I know about her and you've told me each of them a dozen times," Jade said, nudging her dog back into the kitchen with her foot. "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?"
"It means she can't bear to order takeout. I think she'd consider it an indictment of her ability to be a functional adult, which is of course ridiculous and untrue, but isn't something I can argue her out of now, let alone when I was a child. And that might have stayed a harmless quirk except that-- except--"
Rose tightened her fingers around her shoe in some bizarre parody of comfort-seeking through touch. (Thank you so much, adolescent obsession with psychotherapy.) Then she made herself say the words: "Except that she can only cook real food when she's sober."
"Well that's nice but I don't--" Jade started, only to snap her mouth shut as the meaning behind Rose's words made itself clear. "Oh. Fuck."
Bec's continued growl seemed very loud in the awkward pause.
"It's not as bad as it could be. The current label for people like her is 'high-functioning alcoholic,'" Rose said, in as clinical a tone as she could manage. "She has a very successful career, she's never had a drunk-driving incident, and she never physically abused me. But she has a lot of bad days. And when she had a bad day, I had to play happy families with burnt macaroni or half-melted microwave dinners and pretend nothing was wrong. Even if she'd been too out of it to wash any dishes for a week so we had to eat straight from the pot with our bare hands. I have, let's say, bad associations with that combination of food and phrase."
Bec's growl faded into a confused whine as Jade deflated. "Oh. Yeah. Wow, okay, that is like the exact opposite of my childhood. Kraft macaroni on Friday nights was the one meal Grandpa didn't get all survivalist health-nut grow-and-kill-your-own about. Which is why it's relaxing for me. But I guess I should've asked your definition of comfort food instead of just assuming you'd share mine." She looked down at the bowls again and bit her lip. "Uh, will you be okay if I eat this? Or do you need me to chuck it all down the disposal?"
Rose prodded gently at the thought of sitting next to Jade while she ate that noxious orange mess, of smelling it and perhaps tasting the residue on Jade's lips later on. After a moment, she shrugged. "I think I'll be all right now that I've had time to process. Just brush your teeth once you're done?"
"Pretend I'm eating ghost peppers or the dreaded wasabi, got it," Jade said. "Right. Give me a minute to stick your bowl in the fridge -- no, whoops, I meant my second bowl, which will be tomorrow's dinner. Um. And we can make you some... uh... instant oatmeal? Or I could throw together a salad."
"Actually, I was thinking ice cream," Rose said. "Much less prep time, and I wouldn't mind some comfort food of my own." She dropped the sneaker and wiggled her left foot out of her other shoe.
Jade's smile looked equal parts relief and genuine pleasure. "Sweet. I have a new tub of Cherry Garcia and about half an open box of Neapolitan. Your choice."
"And what a delicious choice it is," Rose said, walking toward the kitchen doorway. She knelt to scruff Bec behind his ears -- both because she liked the giant ambulatory rug, and because sometimes it was easier to talk without having to see the immediate impact of her words -- and added, "I'm sorry I flipped out like that. That's never happened to me before, and this night was supposed to be about me taking care of you, not you catering to my old hangups."
Jade set the bowls on the counter by her sink and crouched down by Rose's side. "I accept your apology if you accept mine for jumping to conclusions and yelling before I knew the whole story. And don't guilt yourself, because that won't actually help me feel any better. Okay?" At Rose's nod, she continued: "Okay. So now that we've had our first fight and talked it out like rational adults, yay us, I say we get back to the original mission objective of cuddles and David Attenborough explaining spiders, which we clearly both need more than ever. Vote yes, fuck yes, or hell fucking yes."
Rose smiled into Bec's fur. "Well, when you put it that way, what can I possibly say but 'aye'?"
"My hero in shining sarcasm," Jade said, a thread of laughter surfacing in her voice. "Now come give me a hug before I get jealous of my dog."
"Cthulhu forfend," Rose said, and leaned into her girlfriend's embrace.
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End of Fic
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Random fact: it is actually true that Kraft stopped using artificial colors and flavors in their mac and cheese. I know this because articles about that fill most of the first page of Google results when you look up 'kraft mac and cheese' in an attempt to check what is actually printed on the blue boxes (which I then ended up not describing at all in the ficlet at all, because that's how my life works).
Another random fact: I had instant Kraft mac and cheese for dinner tonight. One little-mentioned hazard of writing is that occasionally one incepts oneself with some really annoying and/or ridiculous cravings. *headdesk*
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