fic: Leverage -- Doughnuts
Though the idea of a leverage story being "The Caper Caper" is so amusing that I may actually have to write that one.
Okay, a story, but not really, since it's really just a scene, written for beadslut, but posted for the_stowaway.
From email:
beadslut: Who eats doughnuts for breakfast for real?
jenna_thorn: Even when my mother drags us out for doughnuts, she insists that we eat actual food as well. ... Peeps are also revolting. She and the boy eat them and nom at one another, grinning with marshmallow smiles. I try to silence my gagging noises.)
But Alec eats doughnuts for breakfast for real, and worse, they are two days old and kind of crunchy, but he’s learned to take a bite, then a swig of soda, so they soften up and moosh on the way down, rather than scratching his gums. And Eliot catches him and is appalled. He can’t even speak, is just struck silent, and Alec, who learned the hard way and has reflective surfaces everywhere, glances up and sees him, standing still in the center of the room, with the whites of his eyes showing. “’S’up, man? You got fighting face on.” Alec thinks to himself that he probably shouldn’t have admitted out loud that he knows what Eliot’s fighting face looks like.
“Fighting nausea is all. Aren’t those from Wednesday?”
“Dude, there’s nothing in them to go bad. Like Cheetos.” Alec turns back to his keyboard. “Five hundred years from now, the radioactive roaches’ll be chowing down on Twinkies and Cheetos.”
“I am not your personal chef.”
“Hunh?” He finishes the line before turning around. “I know that. You … .” the room behind him is empty. He can’t even tell what door Eliot went through. Personal chef, hunh. As if. So long as there’s a microwave and a 7-11 freezer on every corner, there’s no need for chefs.
He’s got the brunt of this job on his shoulders and the security code is so outdated that it’s actually safer, since he’s having to move code around by hand and it’s so layered and kludgey that he’s tempted to just wipe it clean. Granted, only wusses and corporate types document, but this thing’s got subroutines within sections that duplicate one another and he could sweep the whole damn thing, rebuild it from scratch, do it right, shave minutes of every login and verification procedure, not an exaggeration, like multiple minutes on every single one and make the whole damn thing fit seamlessly into the system. Except he’s really there to bring the system down, so no one had any sympathy at all for his pain. He’d tried to explain that it offended him on an aesthetic level, but Sophie’d tried to discuss art and Eliot’d brought up the doughnuts and what the hell does office grazing have to do with code anyway? But that got him another cold glare and clearly Eliot’d gotten up on the wrong side of the lesbian bar this morning, so he pulls another Jones from the office fridge and goes back to outguessing the original programmer who is probably cackling into his oatmeal at the nursing home by now. He auto-archives a copy under “Phyllis Diller” since the file for ancient stuff that’s aged gracefully is “Lauren Bacall.” Of course he keeps a copy of everything, storage space is cheap and you never know what’ll come in handy someday. He stretches his back and hears his spine grind and wonders, briefly, what time it is. His stomach is sour from too much carbonation and not enough carbs, but the doughnut box is empty.
So he wanders into the hallway and follows his nose to food. Nate’s standing in the doorway to the little kitchenette, both hands wrapped around a sandwich and no glass in sight. Alec’s stomach growls and Nate looks back at him, surprised. “How’s your project?” Nate asks, but Alec waves him aside. He hadn’t really noticed, but the windows facing the outside are dark and Parker’s sitting crosslegged on the far counter, which is the only counter she’s allowed to sit on, on penalty of arm-wrestling with Spencer again and why can’t the girl sit in a chair, but the table is spread edge to edge with plastic bags of deli-sliced meat and three different loaves of bread and white and yellow cheese with multicolored specks in it and nothing orange in the room.
“Okay, what is this?” he asks.
“Food,” Eliot answers, then looks at him like there’s some other question he’s supposed to be asking, but Alec’s stomach growls again and he reaches for the bread.
“Wash your damned hands,” Eliot growls. “What do you want?”
Alec turns to the sink. “There is nothing on my keyboard that I can’t eat, asshole.” But this isn’t Parker’s food run, since there’s no poptarts on the table, and the Ramen-inna-cup doesn’t seem particularly appetizing, though he’s thinking about just pulling it out to be an asshole, since Eliot’s standing there with a knife in one hand a piece of bread in the other. “What’re my options?”
Sophie laughs, the low one when she’s actually laughing, not the high one, pitched for restaurants and marks. “Eliot,” she says, grinning at Alec, “Do the country thing again.”
Eliot rolls his eyes, but he says, “Pick a country.”
Alec’s stomach growls. This is getting embarassing. “How about just putting something on the bread, Iron Chef?” He reaches for the closest bag of cheese and gets a smack to the back of the hand with the flat of the blade.
Eliot says again, “Pick a country.”
“Greece! And you’d best not have cut me.”
“When I do, you’ll know. Greece is too easy. Tapenade, hummus, feta, falafel.”
“Oh, you brought falafel?” Sophie starts moving stuff on the table.
“Nah, didn’t want to mess with frying it on short notice,” Eliot says to her, then turns to Alec, guarding the table with his tiny sword. “Pick a country.”
“If I say France, do I get to eat?”
“Fine, whatever.” Eliot sets the knife down and that’s when Alec realizes he’d been playing. Normally people smile when they play. Apparently, Eliot waves knives around. Who knew?
He scrambles to cover. “Fine, France is too easy, too, which okay, I’ll grant, them being French and all, so I’ll tell you what. Denmark.”
That earns him a glance from under all that hair hanging in Eliot’s face and a quirk of the lips that isn’t really a smile, at least not on anyone normal. “Good.” Eliot drops the slice of bread, ignoring Alec’s pained “hey!” and pulls a bread so dark it makes the butter he spreads on it look white. Except it’s about an inch square.
“Is that butter?”
“No.”
“Is that fish?”
“Yes.”
“Dude, I like my fish crispy and with hushpuppies on the side.”
“Expand your horizons.” Eliot rubs something plantlike between his fingers and hands him the tiny piece of bread. Alec looks at the fish. The fish looks back at him. Alec looks up. Eliot’s pretending not to watch, Sophie’s laughing at him, Parker’s licking something off her fingers, ignoring all of them, and Nate’s in the doorway, looking smug. “You didn’t get fish, did you?” Alec asks.
Eliot growls “Eat the damn herring.”
Alec’s stomach rumbles again and he chomps the half sandwich down. It’s…actually really good. Salty, rather than fishy and way too small, but Eliot’s holding up another one, still a quarter slice of bread, but white bread this time and a cheese with speckles in it and a slice of something pink and that one tastes fishy, but …” smoked salmon?”
“You aren’t the philistine you pretend to be.” Nate salutes him with his glass.
“Yes, he is,” Eliot says.
“You’re still mad about the doughnuts, aren’t you? What’s next? We doing France yet?”
“Still on Denmark, how do you feel about capers?”
“Brined or oil-pack?” Alec pops back because there’s been a dull afternoon or two where he started out on Amazon and wandered around the William’s Sonoma online order system while he compiled but Eliot looked up and him and smiled and okay, whatever, capers were salty and honestly kind of weirdly crunchy, but crunchy in layers, but he crunched anyway and watched Eliot slice and fan out a cornochon.
“You buy into that whole body is a temple thing, don’t you?” Alec asks and Eliot shakes his hair out of his eyes to give him a look instead of actually answering. “Yeah, well, whatever. Fuel, man. Whatever works. But, you could, you know, if you want, you could do the herring thing again.”
Okay, a story, but not really, since it's really just a scene, written for beadslut, but posted for the_stowaway.
From email:
beadslut: Who eats doughnuts for breakfast for real?
jenna_thorn: Even when my mother drags us out for doughnuts, she insists that we eat actual food as well. ... Peeps are also revolting. She and the boy eat them and nom at one another, grinning with marshmallow smiles. I try to silence my gagging noises.)
But Alec eats doughnuts for breakfast for real, and worse, they are two days old and kind of crunchy, but he’s learned to take a bite, then a swig of soda, so they soften up and moosh on the way down, rather than scratching his gums. And Eliot catches him and is appalled. He can’t even speak, is just struck silent, and Alec, who learned the hard way and has reflective surfaces everywhere, glances up and sees him, standing still in the center of the room, with the whites of his eyes showing. “’S’up, man? You got fighting face on.” Alec thinks to himself that he probably shouldn’t have admitted out loud that he knows what Eliot’s fighting face looks like.
“Fighting nausea is all. Aren’t those from Wednesday?”
“Dude, there’s nothing in them to go bad. Like Cheetos.” Alec turns back to his keyboard. “Five hundred years from now, the radioactive roaches’ll be chowing down on Twinkies and Cheetos.”
“I am not your personal chef.”
“Hunh?” He finishes the line before turning around. “I know that. You … .” the room behind him is empty. He can’t even tell what door Eliot went through. Personal chef, hunh. As if. So long as there’s a microwave and a 7-11 freezer on every corner, there’s no need for chefs.
He’s got the brunt of this job on his shoulders and the security code is so outdated that it’s actually safer, since he’s having to move code around by hand and it’s so layered and kludgey that he’s tempted to just wipe it clean. Granted, only wusses and corporate types document, but this thing’s got subroutines within sections that duplicate one another and he could sweep the whole damn thing, rebuild it from scratch, do it right, shave minutes of every login and verification procedure, not an exaggeration, like multiple minutes on every single one and make the whole damn thing fit seamlessly into the system. Except he’s really there to bring the system down, so no one had any sympathy at all for his pain. He’d tried to explain that it offended him on an aesthetic level, but Sophie’d tried to discuss art and Eliot’d brought up the doughnuts and what the hell does office grazing have to do with code anyway? But that got him another cold glare and clearly Eliot’d gotten up on the wrong side of the lesbian bar this morning, so he pulls another Jones from the office fridge and goes back to outguessing the original programmer who is probably cackling into his oatmeal at the nursing home by now. He auto-archives a copy under “Phyllis Diller” since the file for ancient stuff that’s aged gracefully is “Lauren Bacall.” Of course he keeps a copy of everything, storage space is cheap and you never know what’ll come in handy someday. He stretches his back and hears his spine grind and wonders, briefly, what time it is. His stomach is sour from too much carbonation and not enough carbs, but the doughnut box is empty.
So he wanders into the hallway and follows his nose to food. Nate’s standing in the doorway to the little kitchenette, both hands wrapped around a sandwich and no glass in sight. Alec’s stomach growls and Nate looks back at him, surprised. “How’s your project?” Nate asks, but Alec waves him aside. He hadn’t really noticed, but the windows facing the outside are dark and Parker’s sitting crosslegged on the far counter, which is the only counter she’s allowed to sit on, on penalty of arm-wrestling with Spencer again and why can’t the girl sit in a chair, but the table is spread edge to edge with plastic bags of deli-sliced meat and three different loaves of bread and white and yellow cheese with multicolored specks in it and nothing orange in the room.
“Okay, what is this?” he asks.
“Food,” Eliot answers, then looks at him like there’s some other question he’s supposed to be asking, but Alec’s stomach growls again and he reaches for the bread.
“Wash your damned hands,” Eliot growls. “What do you want?”
Alec turns to the sink. “There is nothing on my keyboard that I can’t eat, asshole.” But this isn’t Parker’s food run, since there’s no poptarts on the table, and the Ramen-inna-cup doesn’t seem particularly appetizing, though he’s thinking about just pulling it out to be an asshole, since Eliot’s standing there with a knife in one hand a piece of bread in the other. “What’re my options?”
Sophie laughs, the low one when she’s actually laughing, not the high one, pitched for restaurants and marks. “Eliot,” she says, grinning at Alec, “Do the country thing again.”
Eliot rolls his eyes, but he says, “Pick a country.”
Alec’s stomach growls. This is getting embarassing. “How about just putting something on the bread, Iron Chef?” He reaches for the closest bag of cheese and gets a smack to the back of the hand with the flat of the blade.
Eliot says again, “Pick a country.”
“Greece! And you’d best not have cut me.”
“When I do, you’ll know. Greece is too easy. Tapenade, hummus, feta, falafel.”
“Oh, you brought falafel?” Sophie starts moving stuff on the table.
“Nah, didn’t want to mess with frying it on short notice,” Eliot says to her, then turns to Alec, guarding the table with his tiny sword. “Pick a country.”
“If I say France, do I get to eat?”
“Fine, whatever.” Eliot sets the knife down and that’s when Alec realizes he’d been playing. Normally people smile when they play. Apparently, Eliot waves knives around. Who knew?
He scrambles to cover. “Fine, France is too easy, too, which okay, I’ll grant, them being French and all, so I’ll tell you what. Denmark.”
That earns him a glance from under all that hair hanging in Eliot’s face and a quirk of the lips that isn’t really a smile, at least not on anyone normal. “Good.” Eliot drops the slice of bread, ignoring Alec’s pained “hey!” and pulls a bread so dark it makes the butter he spreads on it look white. Except it’s about an inch square.
“Is that butter?”
“No.”
“Is that fish?”
“Yes.”
“Dude, I like my fish crispy and with hushpuppies on the side.”
“Expand your horizons.” Eliot rubs something plantlike between his fingers and hands him the tiny piece of bread. Alec looks at the fish. The fish looks back at him. Alec looks up. Eliot’s pretending not to watch, Sophie’s laughing at him, Parker’s licking something off her fingers, ignoring all of them, and Nate’s in the doorway, looking smug. “You didn’t get fish, did you?” Alec asks.
Eliot growls “Eat the damn herring.”
Alec’s stomach rumbles again and he chomps the half sandwich down. It’s…actually really good. Salty, rather than fishy and way too small, but Eliot’s holding up another one, still a quarter slice of bread, but white bread this time and a cheese with speckles in it and a slice of something pink and that one tastes fishy, but …” smoked salmon?”
“You aren’t the philistine you pretend to be.” Nate salutes him with his glass.
“Yes, he is,” Eliot says.
“You’re still mad about the doughnuts, aren’t you? What’s next? We doing France yet?”
“Still on Denmark, how do you feel about capers?”
“Brined or oil-pack?” Alec pops back because there’s been a dull afternoon or two where he started out on Amazon and wandered around the William’s Sonoma online order system while he compiled but Eliot looked up and him and smiled and okay, whatever, capers were salty and honestly kind of weirdly crunchy, but crunchy in layers, but he crunched anyway and watched Eliot slice and fan out a cornochon.
“You buy into that whole body is a temple thing, don’t you?” Alec asks and Eliot shakes his hair out of his eyes to give him a look instead of actually answering. “Yeah, well, whatever. Fuel, man. Whatever works. But, you could, you know, if you want, you could do the herring thing again.”