(fic) Deli & Grill, Hot & Entres (oneshot)

Aug 31, 2009 16:13

Deli & Grill, Hot & Entres
A Gundam Wing fanfiction written by Masamune Reforged
Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam Wing or the characters.
Rating/Warning: Older audiences. Dash of adult language here, lightly referenced 3x4 there. Pretty tame and mostly mindless attempt at humor.
Characters: All the G-boys and Lucrezia
Setting/Type: In-series (episode 45~46ish), slice of life, humor
Words: 2100 or so

The last entry in gw_dark 's monthly theme, "Blast from the Future". Also the character of the month, my favorite gal, Noin!



Yes, the typo in the title is intentional.

Deli & Grill, Hot & Entres

Lucrezia sighed in exhausted frustration. Head low, shoulders rounded, body coated in cooling sweat, she stood before the metal screens like a cadaver propped on a taxidermist's pole, awkwardly stiff and teetering. Lucrezia blinked. The metal sheets gleamed dully back at her. The backlit displays hummed noiselessly. She embodied a small miracle, staying on her feet at all. They'd survived the fight, eliminated the enemy, but the mobile dolls had kicked their asses.

Her stomach growled. The Peacemillion deli machine whirred loudly for a moment, then was silent. It was almost as though it had read her mind. Or her stomach. But, no. She'd had sandwiches the past four days in a row. Venus-vine Pesto chicken three times, a Lunar Lunch Lite-Long twice. It wasn't like the sandwiches were great... The bread was always too chewy, and it wasn't like the chicken was real. Lucrezia also had qualms with how manufactured and artificially engineered foodstuffs could possibly require even more tinkering to be labeled 'lite', but... No, no more sandwiches. She waited and listened to her stomach growl until the beverage stall began to gurgle impatiently. Lucrezia was shocked and almost amused at the crude simplicity of the human body. Even when all there was to eat was shit, the human body craved it like a Saturn Dust addict.

Lucrezia looked forlornly at the assortment of unappetizing options and finally muttered to herself, “How in the Milky Way do people up here eat this stuff?”

“'Cuz it's a hell of a lot better than starvin',” a voice directly behind her answered.

Lucrezia jumped only a little bit, but with no gravity that was all it took to lose contact with the floor and send her body slowly inching up towards the ceiling. She reassembled her composure and spun in mid-air, looked down, and saw her feet and a mischievous, smirking face.

“You enjoy sneaking up on people, don't you?” she growled. Famished and fatigued, she was feeling cranky enough to match Wufei.

“Yup!” Duo smiled wide. He deftly sidestepped around her ankles and threw himself at the food dispensers. “And hungry targets are easy targets.” Lucrezia turned and watched him catch himself on the top ridge of the Grill machine. “Now let's see... What to feast on tonight?”

Lucrezia suppressed a groan and willed herself to float faster towards the ceiling. Duo listed the tasteless options aloud, muttering some and slathering lavish trills on the fancy names that were like fuzzy dice hanging from a Moon cobra. “Bean Potato Grah~teen~. Chicken allah-rhanghe~. Vegetable Mehdoe-ray-me-fah-soh-la-tee-doe-ly~.” Duo talked to his food the same way he added Ketchonnaise to his food, with sickening gusto. Lucrezia reached the ceiling in time to hear Duo push several buttons and the various dispensers and machinery behind them whir and shake accordingly. She pushed herself down towards the floor. Duo was stacking the trays, a carefully hasty balancing act.

Duo always ordered some of everything. A sandwich of this, an entree of that. He would have a salad and a rice dish and a pudding dessert, all three of which Lucrezia thought tasted EXACTLY the same. That was depressing, when you couldn't tell the difference between something green and something that supposedly had chocolate in it. Duo sometimes ordered more than Lucrezia would eat in a week. He consistently finished it all. When his metabolism gave out, he'd be popping mass-slimmer pills like he was an L1 hooker.

Duo saw the way Lucrezia looked at his trays as he stacked them to his nose. She hated the way the stuff was ready in less time than it took to walk across the mess hall. “What?” Duo asked accusingly. “I might order a lot, but I'll finish it! All of it! Wasting food is one of the worst things you can do, ya know.”

“Gluttony is as wasteful as thriftlessness.” Both Lucrezia and Duo turned to see Wufei push off from his smug position against the entranceway and float towards them. Duo snorted and rolled his eyes. Noin shook her head. Maxims were Wufei's entrance anthems. Sometimes Lucrezia suspected the black haired boy stood outside of rooms and listened in until he found a crack in the conversation he could wedge a derisive piece of sagacity into. As he approached them, Wufei smiled a thin snake of a smile and said to Duo, “Besides, with what you eat, I'm not sure what good it's doing.”

“Oh, says the guy who eats fried food at every meal!” Duo shot back quickly. Wufei's face became his patented blend of offended superiority and peeking scorn.

Lucrezia turned and faced the machines, dragging up the will power to choose something. This conversation happened how many times a week? Someone-no, scratch that-Duo would remark about the fact that Wufei ate the same meal every day, three times a day, and it became the subject of one of Wufei's rants about “I'll decide what's right in this breakfast” and vague sayings about how an ancient Earth word for deep-fried, artificial pork was the same as an ancient Earth word for “victory” and was therefore...

“...a most fitting meal for a warrior striving for victory.”

Wufei pushed the button for his selection and grabbed his tray as it came out from the Peacemillion's bowels like the recycled, mineral enriched waste it was. Lucrezia still had no idea what she wanted to eat. It was one thing that food in space was so... awful... but she knew she had to have some kind of variety in her life.

Wufei took his usual selection to his usual seat and continued the recycled conversation with Duo. Duo responded loudly around a mouth full of half-chewed food. Ketchonyassise filled the air with its tomato-mayo aroma. It was weird how Duo and Wufei spent so much time together, but it all made sense. They both loved talking and their own voices. Duo was consistently random and Wufei was consistently unvarying. Duo ate his food like it was fleeing from him on a lunar speeder. Wufei ate his food at the rate sand eroded on Jupiter.

Duo stopped the argument for the briefest respite to holler a greeting at Heero, who ignored it and went to the deli dispenser without any kind of acknowledgement. Heero came to the mess hall to eat, not to gab or philosophize. He came for bodily sustenance and he didn't look at, speak to, and probably didn't hear anyone or anything that wasn't directly involved in that process. Heero came into the mess hall, went to the machines, got his food, sat down, ate it, and sat there and stared at the walls while he fucking DIGESTED it.

“I can FEEL him digesting it!” Duo would remark, waving a hand in front of Heero's face. “Like the guy is controlling his stomach muscles one at a time or something.” If Wufei didn't engage him in a biology lesson about major and minor intestines, Duo would add something like, “I'll bet that freaky Zero System told him to do it like this...”

Everyday Heero ate seven portions of grains, five vegetables, three fruits, two dairies (almost always eggs), two beans (because, thank whatever was holy, they didn't even try to imitate seafood in space) and one and exactly one and no more than one sweet. The Perfect Food Pyramid. Lucrezia always wondered what guided Heero's selection between a vegetable drink and a salad, neither of which, of course, contained actual vegetables. That added even more layers to the mystery. Today, Heero selected the egg pasta and bean-stuffed-apples. He'd had a sundae at lunch.

Lucrezia found herself ordering the same as Heero, but with the sundae. She also got the only outer-space-exclusive food product that she knew to be actually good, Jumbo Corn. Pieces of fake corn like some kind of obesely fat , yellow fingers. How they could improve one of the best vegetables and mangle something as simple as rice was beyond Lucrezia. She hesitated at the beverage machine before ordering her customary grape flavored drink. There was some strange, fine line between ingesting your own recycled, vitamin-enriched urine in an extended mobile suit training exercise, and ingesting your own recycled, vitamin-enriched urine as part of a cocktail along with everyone else's recycled, vitamin-enriched urine. Lucrezia constantly told herself that this is what grossed her out, but she'd hated Mech Survival Training as much as everyone at Victoria had...

Lucrezia sat at a table on her own and ate what was supposed to be egg, might have been beans if they weren't so busy being apples, and that delicious corn. If the gods had existed, that corn was what they'd have with their resource-satellite-sized steaks. She savored the corn and sipped on her piss.

Soon, hunger took over and awful cuisine was vanquished yet again. Lucrezia was feeling quite groggy, the fatigue really setting in, and her sundae wasn't even touched yet. A shower and her bed were seeming like the best pair in the Earth Sphere when Trowa and Quatre walked in.

The two had been talking to each other quietly, but a crass remark from Duo ended that quickly. The Deathscythe pilot was absolutely right though. Who did take that long to get changed in the air lock locker room? Quatre went red like the things people beyond the troposphere called beets. Trowa did a remarkable job of delivering an unbelievable excuse about cockpit maintenance. Duo whooped and elbowed Wufei.

“So THAT's what they're calling it nowadays!”

Trowa offered to 'fix' a certain leaky orifice in the lower middle of Duo's face, but Quatre ended everything with a hand on the lanky boy's arm and a hopelessly honest and sheepish smile directed at everyone else. They separated quickly and floated toward opposite food dispensers. Quatre preferred the Deli and Trowa the Entres. They made their selections, gathered their trays, and, without any visible communication, converged on two seats next to each other. Lucrezia could tell it was Quatre's turn to pick because they sat at the same table as everyone else, not the corner table Trowa had taken a shine to. Sally was absolutely right. They made quite the couple.

A ruckus of teenage-male conversation filled the large mess hall.

“...isn't really an appropriate subject while someone's eating...”

“It's all right, Wufei. Really...”

“Just how long you planning on torturing that Victory Pig stuff anyway?”

“...we don't mind...”

“It's called 'Katsu' and it means...”

“...eat so, so, so damn slow...”

“...but thank you...”

“...which means 'victory' in...”

“...Warrior Porky Pig there is gonna grow a beard...”

“Arguing again. Without listening.”

“I AM listening, Barton!”

It was amazing that for as little as Trowa said during meals, everyone always paid attention to him.

“Besides, what's an appropriate dinner subject anyway?” The currency for Duo's attention couldn't buy a peanut's worth of credits.

“It certainly isn't...”

“...we're eating our own recycled poop, after all!”

“...Duo, we just got our food...”

“...exactly what I'm talking about...”

“Please! On L2...”

“It's fine, Trowa....”

“...inappropriate, unrefined...”

“...ate it fresh off the sidewalks...”

“...not a big deal, really...”

“...even think before you speak, Maxwell?”

“...sure?”

“...hotter the poop, fresher the meal...”

“...sure...”

“...barbaric, foul...”

“...order a salad today?”

“...poop eating contests. The whole block would...”

“...Nataku, give me strength...”

“...saw you got one a few weeks ago...”

For the most part, Trowa and Quatre were complete opposites in the mess hall. Trowa ate incredibly little, while Quatre had an appetite that would be surprising if it wasn't for Duo's daily binges. Lucrezia finally understood why Trowa was so skinny. One day he'd turn sideways at some kind of angle and disappear completely. Quatre was the only one of the five with anything fifty re-entry markers near to 'chubby'. Trowa was a somewhat sloppy eater, and Quatre ate with years of ingrained manners that he dutifully tried not to pompously exhibit. You could always tell where Trowa had eaten; Quatre sometimes let a grape-lettuce leaf drop from his fork on purpose. Trowa preferred sugary drinks, Quatre liked the unsweetened swill they called tea. Quatre liked to mix his food together and took minutes to choose it. Trowa would always choose quickly and dispatch the articles on his plate as though he were cataloguing them, one thing at a time, one kind of thing at a time. Twelve pieces of lettuce, check. Three pink-tomato slices, chewed. He shot them with his spork one at a time, one food stuff or ingredient at a time. He even dissected the Ice Cream Candy Bar Mash. Lucrezia sometimes wondered if the universe wouldn't explode if somebody ever served Trowa Barton a bowl of Alphabet Soup.

For the most part, Trowa took no particular interest in what he ate. But sometimes he'd try what he'd seen Quatre eat. Never during the same meal, always a few days afterwards. Quatre always noticed.

“How is it?”

“...whole piles of poop, just steaming on the concrete...”

“Maxwell, I hate you...”

“The one from Tuesday was better.”

“...poop eating champion of the universe...”

-end Deli and Grill, Hot and Entres

Note:
In episode 44, we see for the first time the “mess hall” on the Peacemillion where the absolute overwhelming majority of face-to-face, non-combat-centric, main character group interaction takes place. The title here is the actual written text visible during the episode (12:09 timestamp for the subtitled version I had) In all honesty, it seems to be identical to any 20th century cafeteria I've ever seen, and I had to add in the futuristic machine dispensers because it is never really shown how the hell people in space in the future get food. Can't imagine it's very good though.

(The second most prevalent hotbed of G-boy interaction? The Lunar Base prison cells...)

I know it's silly for anyone to go by the archaic food pyramid in the future, but I just couldn't help Heero having a perfectly balanced meal. (The scene where he is totally zoning out at the tables comes before the battle in episode 45, also The Chess Scene.)

I am just about fresh out of made-up terms / phrases they might use in the future... Did get a bit lazy, as I did this in one sitting and just worked an 11-hour day and am feeling the cold clutches of growing sickness weakening me. Plus, I'd never get this thing out otherwise. Wanted to pay more attention to Quatre and Trowa. Haven't written them as a couple in a very long time... You gen-ficcers are perverting me!

The word is 'katsu' and in Japanese it's fried (almost always pork) and also the verb 'to win'.

This is the fourth or fifth fic I've written that references 'lunar speeders' and I still have zero idea what the hell they might be...

author: masa_reforged, challenge: noin / future, noin, 3x4, oneshot, gundam pilots

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