[Wild Roses] Alternate Earths
Title: your walking clean up crew, atcher service
'Verse/characters: Alternate Earths; Yasha, Aodh
Prompt: darthneko: "fish sauce, on something fish sauce really isn't supposed to go on"
Word Count: 641
Notes: Yasha's probably around 14.
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Yasha caught up with Aodh roughly seven point six minutes after Aodh had arrived where he'd been heading, and just barely too late to catch the full extent of the 'Oh, Freia's knickers, what did I just smell?' expression, but the aftermath was pretty spectacular.
"I think," Aodh said, after some amount of deliberation and unscrunching his nose a section at a time, "that that was not meant to have fish sauce on it."
"There are many things fish sauce doesn't belong on," Yasha agreed. "Beer, for instance. Candy bars. It makes cheetos dissolve . . ."
Aodh's face scrunched up again. Yasha restrained himself from Victory Dance Three (I have broken my teacher's brain enough that THEY need a break), and tried his very hardest to pretend to be Glass right after she'd snuck a zinger in on someone.
The attempt failed, because after fifteen clicks Aodh started laughing, the crinkles switching from by the bridge of his nose to the outer corners of his eyes as he did. "Nicely played, Kid," he said when he could talk again, and Yasha bowed.
Then looked around, as he'd been distracted by presence as opposed to surroundings--which was something he really needed to watch because that was a bad trend in a Door--and realised just what sort of mess they were standing in.
He carefully moved his sneaker off the fish tail, setting it down on a slippery bit of glossy newspaper insert instead. He tried not to squelch his toes to get rid of any lingering oils, but if the way Aodh's head tilted slightly towards him without looking kind of implied he hadn't managed it.
Foxes--and wolves, and just about anyone who answered to any sort of wolf-name, excepting the doormen and the mages because they got distracted by patterns and explosions--tended to be attracted to sound. That conclusion assumed his samples were any good, and he kind of figured they were; he'd met Aodh's cousin Conall, after all, and he was even more so about the 'that made a noise, what's going on?' than Aodh was.
The glossy skidded under the rubber treads of his shoe when he shifted weight, and he flailed, doored twice in quick succession, and wound up on Aodh's other side instead of falling on his ass into fish heads and chewed-over pork rib bones and a small sea of crumpled newsprint and whatever the upper layers were hiding.
Something crunched under his shoe.
He deliberately decided not to look down.
"Why are we here?" he asked instead, and Aodh churred under his breath for a second, sifting through a few layers without touching them--and wow did Yasha envy him that, ew, ew, ew--then looked up, looked over at Yasha.
"Because this place shouldn't look like this," he said, and Yasha bit his tongue on the 'Why?'.
"How can I help?" he asked instead, and Aodh froze for a second, one of his boots crunching something in the layers hiding the floor.
"I think that was a murex snail shell," he muttered absently, then chirped a couple of times in the way that meant 'I could really use a few doors, Kid'.
Yasha sighed, opened three, oriented at forty-five degrees to where he assumed the floor was, pointed at them in turn. "Paper, organics, metal."
"Merci," Aodh told him sincerely as small whirlwinds started skirling around their knees, capturing newspaper as they went and tossing them into the correct door. "Out of direct processing?"
"You're never going to let me live that down, are you?"
"It's not every day evidence of industrial espionage gets turned into fish-wrappers," Aodh agreed, grinning, with just enough points on to be plain truth, inviting Yasha to smile, too.
So he did. It was hard not to, anyway, when a fox was grinning like that, even if you knew better.
'Verse/characters: Alternate Earths; Yasha, Aodh
Prompt: darthneko: "fish sauce, on something fish sauce really isn't supposed to go on"
Word Count: 641
Notes: Yasha's probably around 14.
---------
Yasha caught up with Aodh roughly seven point six minutes after Aodh had arrived where he'd been heading, and just barely too late to catch the full extent of the 'Oh, Freia's knickers, what did I just smell?' expression, but the aftermath was pretty spectacular.
"I think," Aodh said, after some amount of deliberation and unscrunching his nose a section at a time, "that that was not meant to have fish sauce on it."
"There are many things fish sauce doesn't belong on," Yasha agreed. "Beer, for instance. Candy bars. It makes cheetos dissolve . . ."
Aodh's face scrunched up again. Yasha restrained himself from Victory Dance Three (I have broken my teacher's brain enough that THEY need a break), and tried his very hardest to pretend to be Glass right after she'd snuck a zinger in on someone.
The attempt failed, because after fifteen clicks Aodh started laughing, the crinkles switching from by the bridge of his nose to the outer corners of his eyes as he did. "Nicely played, Kid," he said when he could talk again, and Yasha bowed.
Then looked around, as he'd been distracted by presence as opposed to surroundings--which was something he really needed to watch because that was a bad trend in a Door--and realised just what sort of mess they were standing in.
He carefully moved his sneaker off the fish tail, setting it down on a slippery bit of glossy newspaper insert instead. He tried not to squelch his toes to get rid of any lingering oils, but if the way Aodh's head tilted slightly towards him without looking kind of implied he hadn't managed it.
Foxes--and wolves, and just about anyone who answered to any sort of wolf-name, excepting the doormen and the mages because they got distracted by patterns and explosions--tended to be attracted to sound. That conclusion assumed his samples were any good, and he kind of figured they were; he'd met Aodh's cousin Conall, after all, and he was even more so about the 'that made a noise, what's going on?' than Aodh was.
The glossy skidded under the rubber treads of his shoe when he shifted weight, and he flailed, doored twice in quick succession, and wound up on Aodh's other side instead of falling on his ass into fish heads and chewed-over pork rib bones and a small sea of crumpled newsprint and whatever the upper layers were hiding.
Something crunched under his shoe.
He deliberately decided not to look down.
"Why are we here?" he asked instead, and Aodh churred under his breath for a second, sifting through a few layers without touching them--and wow did Yasha envy him that, ew, ew, ew--then looked up, looked over at Yasha.
"Because this place shouldn't look like this," he said, and Yasha bit his tongue on the 'Why?'.
"How can I help?" he asked instead, and Aodh froze for a second, one of his boots crunching something in the layers hiding the floor.
"I think that was a murex snail shell," he muttered absently, then chirped a couple of times in the way that meant 'I could really use a few doors, Kid'.
Yasha sighed, opened three, oriented at forty-five degrees to where he assumed the floor was, pointed at them in turn. "Paper, organics, metal."
"Merci," Aodh told him sincerely as small whirlwinds started skirling around their knees, capturing newspaper as they went and tossing them into the correct door. "Out of direct processing?"
"You're never going to let me live that down, are you?"
"It's not every day evidence of industrial espionage gets turned into fish-wrappers," Aodh agreed, grinning, with just enough points on to be plain truth, inviting Yasha to smile, too.
So he did. It was hard not to, anyway, when a fox was grinning like that, even if you knew better.