3 sentence ficathon fills no. 2
New batch of fills over the last week for Three Sentence Ficathon.
6. any, any, *jeopardy theme song* (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny, 200 wds)
".... swear to God, Danny, if you don't stop humming that, I will open the window of this tram car and throw you into that valley myself. What is it, like 2000 feet down? So shut up."
"I didn't even realize I was," Danny whispered back. "Look, when I was in-"
"Are you seriously pulling the trapped-in-a-mystic-city card with me right now? Really?"
"-K'un-Lun, all I had to entertain myself with was the contents of an iPod and the commercial jingles I could remember. I taught a bunch of them to Davos too."
That was a fun thought. "Well, we're not there now," Ward hissed between his teeth, "and I've had to listen to Final Jeopardy for the last half hour, and if you don't shut up, I will literally murder you."
There was a brief silence, during which time the other riders in the tram car stopped giving them disapproving looks and went back to photographing the terrifying but admittedly scenic drop into the valley below. Then Danny starting humming again, very quietly.
"... Is that the Golden Girls theme song?"
7. Any, any number of characters, trapped in a closet together (Agent Carter, Peggy et al, 500 wds)
"Will you all please stop moving, I am trying to concentrate on this lock!"
"Sorry, Peggy," and "My apologies, Miss Carter," came a pair of voices from the stifling darkness in the closet around her.
"Howard," she said between her teeth, as she struggled to work the lock picks through the narrow gap in the closet door, "if that is your hand-"
"It was Jarvis," Howard said promptly.
There was sputtering from her other side. "I would never!"
Peggy firmly and abruptly adjusted the position of her elbow backwards and felt it connect solidly with some part of Howard. There was a pained huff of breath and a thump, somewhere among the fur coats that were crowding the closet and making it hard to breathe.
"I don't suppose you have a handy lock-picking device anywhere about," she said.
"Well, not on me," Howard wheezed. "I don't normally expect to be locked in closets in my own house."
"I can't imagine why not," Peggy muttered under her breath.
She was starting to sweat as the atmosphere in the closet grew thicker. This was not pleasant.
"This puts me in mind of a game we used to play as schoolchildren," Jarvis said reminiscently, a moment later. "It was called Sardines, and-"
"I played it too, Mr. Jarvis," Peggy said. She leaned a shoulder against the closet door, trying to get a better angle. "I was a schoolchild also."
"Yes, of course. I was just thinking of the difference between playing the game as the rather thin specimen I was then, one might almost say weedy-"
"Is there a point to this anecdote, Jarvis?" Howard asked, still sounding like he was in pain. Whatever part of him Peggy had managed to connect with had left her elbow aching slightly. Bones had been involved.
"Not really," Jarvis said. "Just passing the time."
"Oh, hell with it," Peggy murmured. She drew back a leg, to the extent that she could, and delivered the door a hard kick. The second try finally snapped the lock; the door flew open, and the three of them tumbled out onto the thickly carpeted floor.
There was a throat-clearing sound from across the room. Peggy looked up and saw Daniel standing in the door opposite, staring at them.
"There is an explanation, Chief Sousa," Jarvis said from where he was trying to extricate himself from being tangled up in her legs, without touching anything.
"I'm sure there is," Daniel said. "Which I really don't want to hear. Car's outside, Peggy. I'll just be ..." He waved a hand vaguely. "... there." And he crutched hastily off.
Peggy twisted around to glare at Howard.
"You're looking at me like it's my fault."
"Because it is," she said, picking herself up and running a hand through her hair. "The next time that you have any bright ideas for riddling your house with secret tunnels, Howard, please leave me out of it."
8. Stranger Things, Steve Harrington, red
There's just so much of it; it doesn't seem real, and he doesn't even really mind-it's like paint splashed around both of them, like the time he was helping his uncle paint the house and lost control of the sprayer, except the paint was tan, end-of-cul-de-sac-beige, and this is red, redder than red ...
"It's okay, didn't mean to make a mess," Steve mumbles, and he's not sure why Jonathan's face twists in that way, or why Jonathan turns to snap over his shoulder, "Can't you hurry-where's that ambulance? Damn it, Steve, don't-can't you just-Nancy!"
9. Any, any, "Wait, you're my soulmate?!" (Torchwood, Jack/Ianto + OT5 or OT6+, 600 wds)
Ianto has always been a romantic, somewhere deep down. He always wanted Lisa to be his soulmate, yearned for her. They both used to hold onto the stories that occasionally showed up (in papers, in magazines, in relatives' stories of a friend of a friend) about people who didn't know their soulmate at first, or who were able to bring it about by wishing, by wanting.
Ianto is a romantic, of sorts: enough to admit that he is one, and perhaps too much to accept that any chance of Lisa being that one slipped away in metal and fire. But he's still shocked down to his core when he feels the flutter of connection, right down to the bottom of his soul, when he first sees the stranger (a stranger he knows from Torchwood One files) in the woods. The stranger is woodsmoke and metal and incandescent joy, and he is part of Ianto right down to his bones.
And Ianto is shocked even more when Jack turns away.
"You're-you-wait!" He stumbles after, a foot catching on a root in the dark, dazed from that initial shock of connection. He can't understand how Jack isn't equally dazed. "You feel it too, don't you? You can't walk away from this!"
"Watch me," Jack says, and does.
*
Ianto finds him again. And again. And with the same persistence that earned him a high placement at Torchwood One, he finally gets the answer he needs: for himself, for Lisa, for ... he doesn't even know, anymore.
He's a little dazed, going back with Jack to the Hub for the first time. Back in his Torchwood One days, he read every case file that Torchwood One had on the place, only now able to recognize why he was so fascinated with it. He still isn't sure exactly how he's going to handle the Lisa situation (his mind is whirling, making plans: he won't leave her, he hasn't stopped loving her just because of the electric snap as soon as his skin touched Jack's on the floor of that warehouse, he doesn't know exactly how this works but it isn't that-) and then he walks into the Hub and his entire world of certainty falls apart.
Again.
Because that electric flash of recognition that skates across his nerve ending is the same he felt in the woods with Jack. Except multiplied.
He staggers back against the wall. He's only vaguely aware of Jack steadying him. He's too busy trying to sort out the dizzying impressions.
"Oy! Harkness!" someone yells, and despite the physical separation, all the way down on the floor of the Hub, this one tastes/smells/feels like salt and whiskey and the soft touch of gentle hands that soothe all pain away. "You brought back another one? Sod it, you bastard! How many do you think we can handle around here?"
"Don't mind Owen." A woman's voice. Gentle. Her hand brushes the back of his, and that's the same electric shock that he felt when he touched Jack, unmistakable. She is hot wire and clean soap and endless forgiveness. "It's all right. You're going to be all right."
The third one hasn't said anything, but he still knows her. Steel and fire and unbending strength, that's what he feels from her. The gentleness he feels in the others (deeply buried in Owen's case, but still there) isn't present in her, but she is the steel spine around which they all bend. She doesn't speak, just bends back to working on her welding. And he knows her name is Suzie.
"You can't," he gasps out, pulling away from the other woman-Tosh, her name is Tosh. "You only get one."
"It's Torchwood, mate," says Owen, and Ianto can't help feeling the upwelling of sympathy underneath the sandpaper-rough edges. "We're different."
10. Any, any, botanical garden (Torchwood, alien plants, 600 wds)
Owen can't remember exactly how the alien plant garden in the Hub got started. All he remembers is that it started out in one of the unused server closets, over Tosh's objection, and sort of spread out from there, until it occupies a significant portion of one of the balconies.
They keep getting alien plants through the Rift, is the thing, and they can't exactly plant them outside where they're going to either wreak havoc on the ecosystem, or die (best-case scenario). The worst-case scenario, obviously, is a plant turning out to have spores that send people into a murderous rage or producing fruits that explode and take out half of Cardiff.
They could just throw the plants in the trash, it's true, but it feels kind of weird, and anyway ... science! Alien plants! ALIEN PLANTS!
Owen can't quite understand why most of the others aren't also excited about it. Alien plants! The only person who ever halfway understood his interest in them was Suzie, who also used to have a tendency towards taking biological things apart to see how they worked (something that Owen tries hard not to think about, some nights). It's true that most of the plants don't seem particularly alien. Although every once in a while they get a really weird one, and in fact there are a few plants that are caged just in case they turn out to be capable of independent movement. Also, there have been a couple of times that Jack has taken one look at a new specimen and promptly ordered it incinerated. Mostly, though, they might be funny colors or have weird-looking blossoms, but otherwise they're just plants. Every now and then, one of them is clearly an Earth plant, like the perfectly ordinary potted daisy that they only know is of Rift origin - aside from the Rift energy signature - because it turned up potted in what Jack says is the phase coupling armature for a 47th-century photon drive. (Whatever that means.) Sometimes they even get extinct ones, like the weird little pasty-looking Cooksonia, one of the earliest known vascular plants, which Owen has given a particularly nice place on a well-protected shelf where it's unlikely to get knocked over, crushed, eaten, set on fire, have its personal chronology reversed, or any of the other usual hazards of the Hub.
He's not the only person who takes care of them. Actually, Ianto probably does more of the day-to-day watering, due to Owen's tendency to, well, forget. But Owen is the one who spends more actual time with the plants, measuring leaves and repotting them, exploring their response to different wavelengths of light, trying to figure out what soil pH is most agreeable to the weirder specimens (or if they need soil at all), whether they react to electrical fields and sound, if the vibrations of the leaves of the one Tosh calls Trembling Rose are actually reacting to the emotional states of the people around them (Owen has tried glaring at it and talking nicely to it on alternate days, trying to figure out if there's a difference, though he feels weirdly guilty about the glaring) ...
"I can't figure out if you're nurturing those things or torturing them," Jack says, watching him while leaning against the wall with arms crossed.
"Neither. I'm doing science. If you're going to stand there anyway, hand me that pH meter."
(After he dies, it takes him a while to feel entirely comfortable being in the greenhouse area. It's like he thinks the plants will sense something different. They don't, of course. Because they're fucking plants. Eventually he starts to find it comforting up there, surrounded by life that doesn't find him weird or wrong because he isn't alive.)
11. Any, any/any, chocolate (Alliance-Union, Hellburners, chocolate, 700 wds)
Sal isn't quite sure what to expect when Meg comes running back after lagging behind, during leave on Pell, with a look like a Belt miner who just tagged a dozen unknown rocks waving around the tickets on Helldeck. Par-tic-ularly since Meg is guarding a package like it's her life, won't even let inspectors look at it, just a word in ears and something passed under the table and they just wave her off toward quarters ...
No time to ask about it, not with push-off, but once they can unstrap on the long boost toward jump outside of trafficked Pell space, there's time to ask, and Meg opens a box and spreads the contents out on the fold-down table in their quarters.
"It's chocolate," she says. "Real stuff. They're growing it now, Downbelow, believe it or not. Who's had the real stuff before? Sal? Dek?"
Dekker goes absolutely bright and reaches for one. Been looks like he thinks it's a trap. Sal, aware of Meg's eager gaze on her, picks up one of the little brown squares. She's had the ersatz stuff, not quite sure how this is different, but insystemers get weird about that authentic planet stuff. She touches her tongue to it cautiously.
"Bitter," she says.
"That's because it's the good stuff." Meg rolls her eyes and picks up a square. "I tasted it in the shop. It's real. Just about takes off the top of your skull. Go on, try it."
"Is this made from animals?" Ben says, ever suspicious of new insystem foods being inflicted on him.
"Yes," Dekker says promptly, mouth half full of chocolate.
"Fuck you, Dek."
"It's not, is it?" Sal asks, about to take a bite.
"Of fucking course not, totally poisoning the bunch of you, tres mental, Sal, what's wrong with you."
So Sal goes ahead and puts the brown square on her tongue, because she trusts Meg and she's curious what's different about this stuff. For all Meg's level-headed sense, she still has that planetborn thing (even if Meg never stepped foot on a planet, it's still an open question) about how you can never quite replicate, in space, the originals of all the things they have their own versions of now.
But, letting the square melt on her tongue, she has to admit that Meg is kind of right. It's not cloying like the chocolate you can get pretty cheap on most stations these days, flavoring agents and sweetener and a binder on a fungus base. This is rich and deep. There's a lot more to it, a layered stack of flavors that seems to yield up new tastes every time she moves her tongue around. It's like the ersatz version was just a holo recording, and now she's getting the full sight-smell-sound physical experience for herself.
Not all of it is entirely pleasant. This is something she never can quite explain to Meg about planetary food. It's discordant. Chaotic. There are flavors in there that nobody put there, and she will never stop finding that a little too weird to fully enjoy.
But it really isn't bad. It's interesting. She's glad she got to try it.
Ben declares it "not awful." Meg looks at him like there's something wrong with him and promptly claims most of the rest for herself, then finds out that she's going to have to fight Dekker for it. There's a scuffle.
Ben and Sal share the look that means "insystem, right?" There is just something about that much proximity to a star and gravity that makes people insane.
But later on, sprawled in pleasant sweaty lassitude in their bunk, with tranq and juice and all the other goodies all nice and set in a bag for whenever they get the klaxon for jump, Ben abruptly squirms around and reaches down under the bunk.
"Stole some," he says, and presses something onto her lips that's bitter and sweet and full of layers, all the complex and contradictory tastes of the old homeworld.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1371715.html with
comments.
6. any, any, *jeopardy theme song* (Iron Fist, Ward & Danny, 200 wds)
".... swear to God, Danny, if you don't stop humming that, I will open the window of this tram car and throw you into that valley myself. What is it, like 2000 feet down? So shut up."
"I didn't even realize I was," Danny whispered back. "Look, when I was in-"
"Are you seriously pulling the trapped-in-a-mystic-city card with me right now? Really?"
"-K'un-Lun, all I had to entertain myself with was the contents of an iPod and the commercial jingles I could remember. I taught a bunch of them to Davos too."
That was a fun thought. "Well, we're not there now," Ward hissed between his teeth, "and I've had to listen to Final Jeopardy for the last half hour, and if you don't shut up, I will literally murder you."
There was a brief silence, during which time the other riders in the tram car stopped giving them disapproving looks and went back to photographing the terrifying but admittedly scenic drop into the valley below. Then Danny starting humming again, very quietly.
"... Is that the Golden Girls theme song?"
7. Any, any number of characters, trapped in a closet together (Agent Carter, Peggy et al, 500 wds)
"Will you all please stop moving, I am trying to concentrate on this lock!"
"Sorry, Peggy," and "My apologies, Miss Carter," came a pair of voices from the stifling darkness in the closet around her.
"Howard," she said between her teeth, as she struggled to work the lock picks through the narrow gap in the closet door, "if that is your hand-"
"It was Jarvis," Howard said promptly.
There was sputtering from her other side. "I would never!"
Peggy firmly and abruptly adjusted the position of her elbow backwards and felt it connect solidly with some part of Howard. There was a pained huff of breath and a thump, somewhere among the fur coats that were crowding the closet and making it hard to breathe.
"I don't suppose you have a handy lock-picking device anywhere about," she said.
"Well, not on me," Howard wheezed. "I don't normally expect to be locked in closets in my own house."
"I can't imagine why not," Peggy muttered under her breath.
She was starting to sweat as the atmosphere in the closet grew thicker. This was not pleasant.
"This puts me in mind of a game we used to play as schoolchildren," Jarvis said reminiscently, a moment later. "It was called Sardines, and-"
"I played it too, Mr. Jarvis," Peggy said. She leaned a shoulder against the closet door, trying to get a better angle. "I was a schoolchild also."
"Yes, of course. I was just thinking of the difference between playing the game as the rather thin specimen I was then, one might almost say weedy-"
"Is there a point to this anecdote, Jarvis?" Howard asked, still sounding like he was in pain. Whatever part of him Peggy had managed to connect with had left her elbow aching slightly. Bones had been involved.
"Not really," Jarvis said. "Just passing the time."
"Oh, hell with it," Peggy murmured. She drew back a leg, to the extent that she could, and delivered the door a hard kick. The second try finally snapped the lock; the door flew open, and the three of them tumbled out onto the thickly carpeted floor.
There was a throat-clearing sound from across the room. Peggy looked up and saw Daniel standing in the door opposite, staring at them.
"There is an explanation, Chief Sousa," Jarvis said from where he was trying to extricate himself from being tangled up in her legs, without touching anything.
"I'm sure there is," Daniel said. "Which I really don't want to hear. Car's outside, Peggy. I'll just be ..." He waved a hand vaguely. "... there." And he crutched hastily off.
Peggy twisted around to glare at Howard.
"You're looking at me like it's my fault."
"Because it is," she said, picking herself up and running a hand through her hair. "The next time that you have any bright ideas for riddling your house with secret tunnels, Howard, please leave me out of it."
8. Stranger Things, Steve Harrington, red
There's just so much of it; it doesn't seem real, and he doesn't even really mind-it's like paint splashed around both of them, like the time he was helping his uncle paint the house and lost control of the sprayer, except the paint was tan, end-of-cul-de-sac-beige, and this is red, redder than red ...
"It's okay, didn't mean to make a mess," Steve mumbles, and he's not sure why Jonathan's face twists in that way, or why Jonathan turns to snap over his shoulder, "Can't you hurry-where's that ambulance? Damn it, Steve, don't-can't you just-Nancy!"
9. Any, any, "Wait, you're my soulmate?!" (Torchwood, Jack/Ianto + OT5 or OT6+, 600 wds)
Ianto has always been a romantic, somewhere deep down. He always wanted Lisa to be his soulmate, yearned for her. They both used to hold onto the stories that occasionally showed up (in papers, in magazines, in relatives' stories of a friend of a friend) about people who didn't know their soulmate at first, or who were able to bring it about by wishing, by wanting.
Ianto is a romantic, of sorts: enough to admit that he is one, and perhaps too much to accept that any chance of Lisa being that one slipped away in metal and fire. But he's still shocked down to his core when he feels the flutter of connection, right down to the bottom of his soul, when he first sees the stranger (a stranger he knows from Torchwood One files) in the woods. The stranger is woodsmoke and metal and incandescent joy, and he is part of Ianto right down to his bones.
And Ianto is shocked even more when Jack turns away.
"You're-you-wait!" He stumbles after, a foot catching on a root in the dark, dazed from that initial shock of connection. He can't understand how Jack isn't equally dazed. "You feel it too, don't you? You can't walk away from this!"
"Watch me," Jack says, and does.
*
Ianto finds him again. And again. And with the same persistence that earned him a high placement at Torchwood One, he finally gets the answer he needs: for himself, for Lisa, for ... he doesn't even know, anymore.
He's a little dazed, going back with Jack to the Hub for the first time. Back in his Torchwood One days, he read every case file that Torchwood One had on the place, only now able to recognize why he was so fascinated with it. He still isn't sure exactly how he's going to handle the Lisa situation (his mind is whirling, making plans: he won't leave her, he hasn't stopped loving her just because of the electric snap as soon as his skin touched Jack's on the floor of that warehouse, he doesn't know exactly how this works but it isn't that-) and then he walks into the Hub and his entire world of certainty falls apart.
Again.
Because that electric flash of recognition that skates across his nerve ending is the same he felt in the woods with Jack. Except multiplied.
He staggers back against the wall. He's only vaguely aware of Jack steadying him. He's too busy trying to sort out the dizzying impressions.
"Oy! Harkness!" someone yells, and despite the physical separation, all the way down on the floor of the Hub, this one tastes/smells/feels like salt and whiskey and the soft touch of gentle hands that soothe all pain away. "You brought back another one? Sod it, you bastard! How many do you think we can handle around here?"
"Don't mind Owen." A woman's voice. Gentle. Her hand brushes the back of his, and that's the same electric shock that he felt when he touched Jack, unmistakable. She is hot wire and clean soap and endless forgiveness. "It's all right. You're going to be all right."
The third one hasn't said anything, but he still knows her. Steel and fire and unbending strength, that's what he feels from her. The gentleness he feels in the others (deeply buried in Owen's case, but still there) isn't present in her, but she is the steel spine around which they all bend. She doesn't speak, just bends back to working on her welding. And he knows her name is Suzie.
"You can't," he gasps out, pulling away from the other woman-Tosh, her name is Tosh. "You only get one."
"It's Torchwood, mate," says Owen, and Ianto can't help feeling the upwelling of sympathy underneath the sandpaper-rough edges. "We're different."
10. Any, any, botanical garden (Torchwood, alien plants, 600 wds)
Owen can't remember exactly how the alien plant garden in the Hub got started. All he remembers is that it started out in one of the unused server closets, over Tosh's objection, and sort of spread out from there, until it occupies a significant portion of one of the balconies.
They keep getting alien plants through the Rift, is the thing, and they can't exactly plant them outside where they're going to either wreak havoc on the ecosystem, or die (best-case scenario). The worst-case scenario, obviously, is a plant turning out to have spores that send people into a murderous rage or producing fruits that explode and take out half of Cardiff.
They could just throw the plants in the trash, it's true, but it feels kind of weird, and anyway ... science! Alien plants! ALIEN PLANTS!
Owen can't quite understand why most of the others aren't also excited about it. Alien plants! The only person who ever halfway understood his interest in them was Suzie, who also used to have a tendency towards taking biological things apart to see how they worked (something that Owen tries hard not to think about, some nights). It's true that most of the plants don't seem particularly alien. Although every once in a while they get a really weird one, and in fact there are a few plants that are caged just in case they turn out to be capable of independent movement. Also, there have been a couple of times that Jack has taken one look at a new specimen and promptly ordered it incinerated. Mostly, though, they might be funny colors or have weird-looking blossoms, but otherwise they're just plants. Every now and then, one of them is clearly an Earth plant, like the perfectly ordinary potted daisy that they only know is of Rift origin - aside from the Rift energy signature - because it turned up potted in what Jack says is the phase coupling armature for a 47th-century photon drive. (Whatever that means.) Sometimes they even get extinct ones, like the weird little pasty-looking Cooksonia, one of the earliest known vascular plants, which Owen has given a particularly nice place on a well-protected shelf where it's unlikely to get knocked over, crushed, eaten, set on fire, have its personal chronology reversed, or any of the other usual hazards of the Hub.
He's not the only person who takes care of them. Actually, Ianto probably does more of the day-to-day watering, due to Owen's tendency to, well, forget. But Owen is the one who spends more actual time with the plants, measuring leaves and repotting them, exploring their response to different wavelengths of light, trying to figure out what soil pH is most agreeable to the weirder specimens (or if they need soil at all), whether they react to electrical fields and sound, if the vibrations of the leaves of the one Tosh calls Trembling Rose are actually reacting to the emotional states of the people around them (Owen has tried glaring at it and talking nicely to it on alternate days, trying to figure out if there's a difference, though he feels weirdly guilty about the glaring) ...
"I can't figure out if you're nurturing those things or torturing them," Jack says, watching him while leaning against the wall with arms crossed.
"Neither. I'm doing science. If you're going to stand there anyway, hand me that pH meter."
(After he dies, it takes him a while to feel entirely comfortable being in the greenhouse area. It's like he thinks the plants will sense something different. They don't, of course. Because they're fucking plants. Eventually he starts to find it comforting up there, surrounded by life that doesn't find him weird or wrong because he isn't alive.)
11. Any, any/any, chocolate (Alliance-Union, Hellburners, chocolate, 700 wds)
Sal isn't quite sure what to expect when Meg comes running back after lagging behind, during leave on Pell, with a look like a Belt miner who just tagged a dozen unknown rocks waving around the tickets on Helldeck. Par-tic-ularly since Meg is guarding a package like it's her life, won't even let inspectors look at it, just a word in ears and something passed under the table and they just wave her off toward quarters ...
No time to ask about it, not with push-off, but once they can unstrap on the long boost toward jump outside of trafficked Pell space, there's time to ask, and Meg opens a box and spreads the contents out on the fold-down table in their quarters.
"It's chocolate," she says. "Real stuff. They're growing it now, Downbelow, believe it or not. Who's had the real stuff before? Sal? Dek?"
Dekker goes absolutely bright and reaches for one. Been looks like he thinks it's a trap. Sal, aware of Meg's eager gaze on her, picks up one of the little brown squares. She's had the ersatz stuff, not quite sure how this is different, but insystemers get weird about that authentic planet stuff. She touches her tongue to it cautiously.
"Bitter," she says.
"That's because it's the good stuff." Meg rolls her eyes and picks up a square. "I tasted it in the shop. It's real. Just about takes off the top of your skull. Go on, try it."
"Is this made from animals?" Ben says, ever suspicious of new insystem foods being inflicted on him.
"Yes," Dekker says promptly, mouth half full of chocolate.
"Fuck you, Dek."
"It's not, is it?" Sal asks, about to take a bite.
"Of fucking course not, totally poisoning the bunch of you, tres mental, Sal, what's wrong with you."
So Sal goes ahead and puts the brown square on her tongue, because she trusts Meg and she's curious what's different about this stuff. For all Meg's level-headed sense, she still has that planetborn thing (even if Meg never stepped foot on a planet, it's still an open question) about how you can never quite replicate, in space, the originals of all the things they have their own versions of now.
But, letting the square melt on her tongue, she has to admit that Meg is kind of right. It's not cloying like the chocolate you can get pretty cheap on most stations these days, flavoring agents and sweetener and a binder on a fungus base. This is rich and deep. There's a lot more to it, a layered stack of flavors that seems to yield up new tastes every time she moves her tongue around. It's like the ersatz version was just a holo recording, and now she's getting the full sight-smell-sound physical experience for herself.
Not all of it is entirely pleasant. This is something she never can quite explain to Meg about planetary food. It's discordant. Chaotic. There are flavors in there that nobody put there, and she will never stop finding that a little too weird to fully enjoy.
But it really isn't bad. It's interesting. She's glad she got to try it.
Ben declares it "not awful." Meg looks at him like there's something wrong with him and promptly claims most of the rest for herself, then finds out that she's going to have to fight Dekker for it. There's a scuffle.
Ben and Sal share the look that means "insystem, right?" There is just something about that much proximity to a star and gravity that makes people insane.
But later on, sprawled in pleasant sweaty lassitude in their bunk, with tranq and juice and all the other goodies all nice and set in a bag for whenever they get the klaxon for jump, Ben abruptly squirms around and reaches down under the bunk.
"Stole some," he says, and presses something onto her lips that's bitter and sweet and full of layers, all the complex and contradictory tastes of the old homeworld.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1371715.html with
comments.