sixthiterationlogs | we all scream (but this time, for ice cream)

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we all scream (but this time, for ice cream)

WHO: Ravi Chakrabarti
WHERE: Inn, near the Kitchen
WHEN: June 3rd
OPEN TO: All! Mingle post!
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Open

There's another one of those strange boxes sitting on the porch of their home when Ravi gets up to another scorching, awful day. He's not sure what switch they hit to get this sort of weather, but he wants them to take it back, seeing as he's been sweating so much that he has to do laundry practically every day to cope with the ridiculousness of it. He can't go shirtless because he has absolutely no will to show everyone the out of shape disappointment that it his torso.

He bends to pick up the box and bring it inside, but hisses when his fingers contact something frosty cold at the bottom of the box. Opening it in a hurry, his eyes widen and he tugs the box to his chest as best as he can, taking off in a completely ungraceful run, heading straight for the inn and shouting as he goes. "Ice cream!" he says, like the world's skeeviest ice cream truck on legs, luring children in after him. "Ice cream, there's ice cream, it's going to melt," he warns, because there are six tubs of it, but he fears that in this heat, it's not going to last very long at all. Scientifically, he knows that it's just going to be calories that generate heat, but science can go take a backseat.

He unloads the toppings and the various six flavours (ranging from vanilla to chocolate, cookie dough, mint chocolate chip, butter pecan, and even a treasured cherry garcia), the sprinkles and peanuts going with the caramel and hot fudge sauces. He could weep because there are even serving spades, bowls, and spoons. He knows he ought to be wary about food after the whole chocolate poisoning incident (if it really was the chocolate), but it's just so hot and he's just so hungry.

He'll chance it, because if he doesn't, he just gets some delicious flavoured ice cream soup soon.

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"Sometimes," is her reply, giving him an amused look seeing as if she's the one who gets to explain vanilla sex to Bodhi, she might just laugh herself a little bit sore. "It means you're boring, without imagination. Vanilla, no personality. Vanilla sex, no creativity," she says with a wink, because if there's anything that Johanna would be labelled, it's the kind of spicy that damages your tongue when you try to eat it.

She's a thing not made for consumption. "If it's your favorite, don't let me stop you," she insists. "You can be as vanilla as you like, Bodhi boy."

Sometimes Johanna really has no effect on him, or he fails to notice she's even trying. Other times he has to watch his composure. It's a conscious choice to only reply to certain aspects of her commentary this time, the heat making it so much easier for strain to build up to the point where it shows in the set of his jaw and shoulders. "It's not my favorite. It's heavy and too sweet and if you're not careful it fights the other flavors. I just don't think vanilla tastes boring." It'd be more natural to say vanilla is boring if he believed he'd be allowed to talk just about food.

She plays with the strap of her bra when it slips down (because of more sweat, ugh, god, why couldn't she have gotten a modification that stopped that) and thinks of all the vanilla bean and french vanilla and the various delicacies the Capitol stuffed in their faces. "Okay, enlighten me," she allows, poking at him with her toes.

"If vanilla is plain and doesn't overwhelm, what goes best with it, hmm?" she demands. "You've clearly thought about this, at least enough to have a clear pick of flavors."

His mood melts faster than the ice cream. She's never really mean to him, even if everyone's touchy right now. "You might be surprised. Cinnamon, good. Cloves, no point. Anise overpowers everything, but never had it, so I don't know... Maybe. Lavender, actually, it's such a flat taste on its own it really only works with other things." He can't remember now if he wanted to take over the tea house or not when he was young enough for it to be possible. Either he learned to dream of flying instead or he'd always dreamed of flying but agreed to his parents' clear expectations. Either way, he knows his flavor compounds.

"Back where I come from, people gorge themselves on fancy flavours, because they could." She had money too, but she had no one to spend it on and she rarely had an appetite. Still, he's not wrong that vanilla would sound good with all those things, but admitting she might have to concede something isn't something that Johanna does.

"Fine, vanilla isn't the most awful thing in the world," she allows, because she's sure there's some mutated version of vanilla in the Capitol that's actively worse. There always is. Digging her spoon in melting ice cream, she curls her tongue around it without blinking or taking her eyes off Bodhi for a second.

"Don't let it melt," she warns. "It might get all over and someone will have to help clean you up."

Sometimes he pretends not to get it, sometimes he honestly misses it, and sometimes he's aware there's something but he can't immediately figure out what. It only takes a second, but the second spent being confused is one he can't use to school his expression into Johanna-proof calm. That just sounds unpleasant. And sticky. Flustered and irritated by being flustered, he opts to just raise his eyebrows at her and apply himself to his own bowl. Hopefully the inspiration to steer the conversation somewhere else will come soon.

Every time she gets him flustered, she feels like she deserves a little star sticker or some other reward to give her the benefit of actually getting under his skin enough to get a rise out of him. Shivering as she eats her own, she reaches for her pants to slide back into them, though she leaves just the bra up top.

"Don't worry, I meant with a cloth," she finally says, when she decides to put him out of his misery. "You're not fun enough to let anyone get near you with their tongue. Or if you are, it's not me. Shame, really, I've got a good tongue," she notes absently, proud of her skills.

Bodhi looks quite relieved by the information that he's too dull to bother with. He still spends a little longer on his last bite than he needs to, because it's hard to decide what to actually say in response that isn't going to encourage her. She may be relenting for now, but she could be bored again in five minutes. Ultimately he doesn't come up with anything and the silence draws on too long. "I'm sure you'll find some way to keep busy," he finally mutters just to say something. He's not even sure that made sense. Definitely not going to get him out of the next Johanna-sim.

"I'm sure someone will come along and help," she agrees, flashing him a bat of her eyelashes that makes her look young and innocent, all of a sudden, an impressive feat considering she's been teasing him endlessly so far. "I'm too happy eating this and gaining two pounds in a day," she admits, as if she hasn't got plenty of space to put the food. It's been ages since she'd had real meals, after all.

"So, they have a lot of this back on that moon-planet of yours? Whatever you called it?" She vaguely remembers, but it's easier to just get him to tell her again.

That's weird. Innocent Johanna is weird. He's not going to look at her for a bit and hope it stops.

"Jedha," he says softly, quickly, letting it ghost over his tongue without catching at any memories that would take this conversation from mildly awkward to really unpleasant, and not just for him. He doesn't have the same sort of protective impulses toward Johanna that he does someone like Credence, but he does firmly believe his baggage is his business. "No, I don't even know what this is. It's cold, so I don't care."

"Right, Jedha." She doesn't feel guilty about not remembering, not totally, but maybe there's just the tiniest flicker on her face that implies that she actually forgot on purpose, not just because she enjoys fucking with people. "It's ice cream," she tells him. "It's rich and sugary and awful for you, but so good that you can't help but want more," she says, curling her tongue around the spoon as she eats it.

"What kind of desserts did they have, there, then? You must have had some kind of favorite," she insists.

It's about as harmless a reminiscence as is possible, and given the tea incident, he's had this sort of conversation with a few people now. "When I was really little, well, um, candy, like every kid. I wish I'd eaten more--they got hard to find and then disappeared after a while because occupied cities don't, um, have the most... The spice and pastry trade is only so robust when things blow up all the time. But there were these little pastry layers with nuts that alternated with, well, it's a local fruit, and, um, complicated. To put together, I mean. I barely remember the taste now." Bodhi on a dessert jag is almost as bad as Bodhi versus a hypothetical volcano.

"What, you don't bake?" she says, because it's one thing to not have them in a while, but that just means either he hasn't got the recipe or he just doesn't care enough to put some time and effort into baking. "Or is this one of those things that little boys never bothered to learn?" Which is crap, really, seeing as Peeta could bake well enough to put them all to shame.

And it's not like Johanna ever sat down and watched recipes being made, she was too busy in the trees. "What did you do, when you were a moon-kid?"

He has no idea what being a boy has to do with it, but he does have a defense. "I was six when the occupation started. Fancy cooking... stopped. Even helping in the kitchen, well, um, my parents didn't--I wasn't really considered trustworthy around knives. Or hot things." He'd been no more coordinated back then. It was a fair assessment. "What I did know, I mostly, well, I've been... Mess hall, cantina, ration bars if neither is open. I'm very out of practice." More than one person has offered him cooking lessons. He's sort of inclined to take them up.

"Our occupation started fifty years before I was born, people still cooked and baked," she says, but maybe his isn't like hers and vice-versa. Maybe they took all the things they needed, took all the things they would have used, and made it impossible to do.

"If you want practice, I'm terrible at it, not to mention feeding myself. I'm more than selfishly happy to let you practice on me," she offers, trying to secure herself some steady meals as a result of this. "Who knows, maybe you've been secretly hiding a great talent for it this whole time?"

"Sure, cooked enough nutrients to get through the day, and whatever you could improvise," he agrees with a shrug. "Tiny, fiddly pastries with different fillings to sell to tourists? No." He shrugs and summons up a hint of a particularly crooked smile in defiance of the heat. "Kira actually cooks most of the time. Not that, um, I don't always mean to. I can manage plain stuff, but, well, keeping... normal human times for things..." Not that he expects Kira would mind her loitering around the house and mooching. Taking care of people tends to be a compulsion for the man, Bodhi's only explanation for the kindness he's been shown.

"Kira cooks, huh?" Johanna echoes, her lips twisting up with the desire of a woman who desperately wants to make a rude retort or four, but the only thing that stops her is that she kind of tolerates Bodhi enough that she might (might) go so far as to call him a friend. God, she wishes he weren't, she's got a few good comments she'd love to make.

"He any good?" she asks, instead. "I could use someone to cook for me, maybe I'll just drop by unannounced, see if he feeds me."

"I doubt he'd mind," Bodhi begins automatically, but glancing at her distracts him from finishing the thought. He's terrible at reading people, but he's known Johanna long enough, or she's obvious enough. It'd be hard to miss that canary-that-ate-the-cat quirk that he wouldn't dare suggest is just a smile, albeit a slightly evil one. She likes to feel unique. "You might as well go ahead and say whatever it is. Um, get it out of your system." He has no idea what witticism it is she's trying to keep buried. Nothing suggests itself. But she'll probably be happier is she lets it escape, and he'll be confused or blase or flustered as the occasion calls for. It's their dynamic, and he doesn't see any need to change it.

"I'm just saying, I haven't exactly done anything that's earned me regular meals, you two must be very close," she says, and she's actually proud of herself for the fact that she's being both lewd and sincere in the same breath, depending on how Bodhi decides to take it.

"Most men I know don't make you food like that until you've been very good to them, first, but I also come from a place where favors are the currency of the day," she says, arching a brow. "Does he ask you how you like your eggs in the morning, at least?" she quips, unable to let one of them out without any gentleness to mask it.

It takes a minute, because of course it does. Some of the references go right over his head, especially. Eggs? But she's not exactly subtle and he gets there eventually, at which point he snorts contemptuously as though she's just being ridiculous. She felt the need to bite her tongue on that? "You're slipping. Better get out of the sun." He does resist the urge to flick melted ice cream at her. It might be the last of his maturity reserves.

She lets out a bark of a laugh, eyes wide. "Bodhi, was that you teasing me?" she challenges, curling her tongue around her spoon in a way that absolutely can't be mistaken for anything other than the flirtatious tease that it is, mainly because if he's going to up his game, then so's she. "I'm proud," she says, like she's actually surprised by how proud she is that Bodhi is getting to that point.

"Look, I'm just saying, where I come from, if you're not fucking someone, then there's no real reason for them to cook for you, unless they want to fuck you," she adds bluntly, digging into the ice cream to eat it faster, with less insinuations.

Flirt-teasing is just white noise when it comes from Johanna, but it does at least let him know she's escalating, not letting him off as he sort of hoped. Trying not to be rattled has never actually worked out for him. "Restaurants must be really weird," he says, because if that's how she's gonna play it, so's he. He spent his adult life around pilots and cantina rats. He's not actually that easy to scandalize.

"Trust me, in the Capitol, they are," she says flatly, because he might be joking, but being a victor and being treated to a fancy meal usually has a long list of requirements attached, which is why she always resisted getting dolled up by an idiot stylist to get trotted around in front of people who wanted to sleep with her.

"I like this side of you," she says with a wink, not really flirting so much as genuinely encouraging. "Where've you been hiding him this whole time?"

He's sure he's backsassed her before on more than one occasion, but maybe the heat's effecting his internal snark-o-meter. As is often the case, he's played himself into a bit of a corner again, as he can't come up with a witty response for either remark. He just can't sustain it.

(Well, that and Johanna's first comment feels a little off, even for her, and he lets himself elide past it like he does some of what Credence says. He hopes it's not cowardice, just respecting the fact that everyone here's a bit damaged and no one wants to talk about it.)

"You'd fit right in at a table of drunk pilots on illegal stims and whatever the cantina's letting go cheap, let's say that."

"That's the sweetest thing you've ever said to me," she says, without any sincerity in the words, but it is a bit of faint praise. At home, Seven was full of people who didn't pay much attention to primness and manners. No one had time for that, when you would rather be out in the woods. Of course, it was better to be out there of your own volition and not the Capitol's double-triple shift requirements, but still, there's no table for sipping tea with your pinkies up, not in her District.

"Tell me more about the illegal stims," she prods, leaning forward to add a few more scoops to her bowl when it starts to go empty. "Those sound fun."

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