xp_logs | Log: [Lorna, Haller] Sushi, the home game

Lorna and Haller have dinner to no great effect other than to prove there's a fine line between relaxation and borderline cognitive impairment.

The steel moved back and forth, hypnotic. Blade separated flesh into quivering, translucent strips that peeled away from the main mass like discarded petals. Jim watched Lorna work from his place at the table, one cheek resting on his crossed forearms.

"Your fish is poetic," he commented.

"Mm, yeah, this one used to be Yeats. No one knows he was actually a tuna. The glasses and the consumption threw everyone off," Lorna replied absently, her attention on her task. Her specialty was French cuisine but she enjoyed trying her hand at all sorts of different things. Sushi was surprisingly tricky for all of its elegantly simple construction and it appealed to her sense of style: colorful but minimalist, geometric with plenty of room for whimsy.

Jim's mind was listing today, though not in a particularly unpleasant way. The good part about Lorna renting a house of her own was that there was no possibility of inconvenient interruption from, say, a student emergency. The bad part was that there may have been such a thing as too mellow.

"I meant aesthetically," Jim clarified. "You know. Pretty." Not rising from the tabletop, one of his hands stealthily detached itself from the fold and began to walk towards what Jim called Davey Bait: in this case, a mug bearing a bouquet of crayons. Lorna had definitely left it there on purpose. "What color is the outside of a tuna?"

"Depends on the kind of tuna. Silver and white mostly, I think. Yellow fins." She finished with the deep red fish and moved on to the bright orange salmon. There was very little fat to it since she preferred wild salmon. When she wasn't actually slicing anything, her attention wandered, allowing her to look up at him, face thoughtful, "They're huge fish, really. Big as a man. I remember being shocked when I learned that. I mean, such little cans, right?"

"Tricky fish. Got it." Jim's head lolled a little farther to the side as he extracted three crayons from the mug. Of course, the paper that had been set out was white, so a white crayon didn't make much sense. Jim decided on a more logical color. Like neon orange. It'd be fine. Whatever Lorna was cutting now proved it was a color found in nature. For his third he picked purple, feeling the contrasting color would justify the selection.

"We saw a fish the size of a Volkswagon once," Jim said, propping his chin on his forearm as he positioned the orange crayon over a fresh sheet of paper. "It was called a Mola mola. They called it a fish, anyway. I think they were lying. Fish are supposed to have tails." He paused, flicking the crayon in light hatch-strokes to fill in the ribs of the fins. "And I'm pretty sure it didn't have consumption."

"Only the poetic ones have consumption. It's a disguise," Lorna explained calmly. She rolled the two fish with some cucumbers and avocado that she'd sliced earlier and deftly wielded the knife to recreate a perfectly portioned roll. "I've never heard of mola mola. Is it edible?"

"I think so, but it would be sad. The aquarium had to hang a net around the tank to keep it from swimming into the glass. I don't think fish like that should go to another tier in the circle of life." The ever-moving hand lay down the orange and moved to the purple crayon. Jim's mind wandered similarly as a rather disturbing thought crossed the currently nonexistent filter. "Consumption. Respiratory issues were supposed to make you attractive. Guess Nathan chose the wrong time period."

"Nathan had ghosts in his head from the future. Everything about that man is out of his time." It should have been harder to follow Jim's mental meanderings than it was. And that fact should have been somewhat disturbing, but it wasn't. Lorna was far too used to Jim, and far too unhinged herself, to really be bothered. "I wonder what it's like to live in a net."

"Annoying. Whenever someone at the far end tries to claw their way out you end up with the rope-burns." Jim raised his head, one eyebrow quirk. "Oh, wait. That's just my brain. You meant literally."

"Metaphorically works too. But yeah, literally. I know what a metaphorical cage is like but not a net." Her focus was back on her hands, arranging the ginger into a rosette and shaping the wasabi into a leaf. "If it was big enough, you could climb it like a monkey. It might be like living on a ship, up in the rigging. You could hang out."

"Well, some of us already did the cage, but if you want we could try trading metaphorical prisons. Like an empathy exercise. Just don't move anything in mine. It took forever to get it sorted out." Then, contemplating his picture Jim added, "Although maybe not as well as it should be, since I don't usually go for orange waves. I think Davey's leaking."

Lorna looked up, blinked rapidly and for a moment, looked utterly innocent. Then she tilted her head to the side to study the picture he'd drawn, "I like it. It's fun. It's okay for you to have fun and get in touch with your inner child without actually being your inner child." It was fondly said; Lorna adored Davey and they all knew it--Davey most of all.

"Yeah. It's a big step. And if my inner child draws on your fancy napkins, remember you're the one who put out the crayons." Jim pulled his head from his forearms and set the crayon down, rubbing his fingers against his palm to scrub at the wax-smell. "Hey, do lobsters really scream when you cook them? My inner child's really concerned about that."

"No, it's just the steam inside the shells escaping. Like a teapot that's boiling. But I still kill them first, I don't think I'd appreciate being boiled." Done with her prep, Lorna arranged the plates of sushi prettily and set them out. "What did you want to drink?"

Jim assessed his current mental state. "Um . . . something without caffeine or sugar of any kind," he replied quickly. Coasting on Davey had a lot in common with having a concussion. He didn't want to exacerbate it with a sugarhigh. The telepath scratched his head as Lorna set a colorful dish in front of him. "How do you kill a lobster? Hit it with a tiny hammer?"

"Do you really want to know the answer to that?" Lorna asked skeptically as she pulled a bottle of sparkling water from the refrigerator. She poured a glass each and carried them both to the table, taking a seat opposite Jim.

Jim picked up a pair of lacquered chopsticks and positioned them with the confidence acquired from time spent with a significant other who harbored a deep commitment to certain kinds of Asian cuisine. He thought for a moment, then nodded. "Since I now have lobster-hammers in my brain, yeah, I think so."

"Knife, actually. You chop their heads in half. It's more precise and it ruins less of the meat." There was a debatable amount psychosis needed to be a chef. Lorna of course, had it in spades. "I really don't like to see them suffer. Some people say that it doesn't taste the same as if you keep them alive. Those people are insane and pretentious."

Jim's chopsticks, supporting something pink and nicely-sliced, paused half-way to his mouth. He thought about his own experiences in the kitchen with Lorna. "You know," he said after a moment, "I think that approach explains a lot about your teaching methods."

She wrinkled her nose at him, "I'm going to choose to take that as a compliment and you can't do anything to stop me." She popped a bit of salmon in her mouth. "Mmm, fishes."

The telepath held aloft a neatly-bisected shrimp, its little fins hanging forlornly over the edge of the rice. "Did you know they feed the leftover shrimpheads to the living shrimp? They make some kind of hormone, so it's supposed to be a feed and an aphrodisiac." He raised an eyebrow at his friend. "Is it still technically the circle of life if it all stays within the same species?"

"Why do you know more weird things than me? That's not fair." Lorna complained good naturedly. "It's still a circle of life. Like that snake that eats its own tail. Nice neat closed loop, just happens to be a little bit smaller than most. It could be worse, I'm sure. I...just don't know how."

Jim shrugged. "I know weird because I live in weird. Also watch a lot of National Geographic. Besides, I wasn't the one talking about lobster-euthanization with cleavers. That's inappropriate. You could've scarred my inner child for life."

"You asked! I warned you and you asked anyway. It's not my fault. You started it with your whole 'do they really scream?' questions and then you brought up the tiny hammers." She punctuated this with an emphatic gesture from her chopsticks. She wasn't nearly so practiced with them as Jim but she got by. The lack of expertise was intentional, it took longer to eat that way.

"Sorry, too late. Irreparably traumatized." Jim gazed at the far-wall, his expression thoughtful. "I think I need to draw my feelings. Then I can show them to the professor. I can make it metaphorical." He nodded to himself and then seized on a neat oval of tamago. "The lobster will be my brain."

She made a noise that was almost a hiss, "Cheater. He'll know you're faking. He's the great and powerful Oz. Also, I'll tell." She popped a slice of yellowfin into her mouth with a firm nod.

"That you what? Talked about lobstercide? Go ahead. I'll tell him that you did it while you were feeding me the remains of your other victims." Jim dipped one of his sushi into a small dish of soy sauce experimentally. "Also, I can play the illegitimate son card. You've only got a fake-daughter-of-Magneto card. By the way, the tuna's really good."

"That you're claiming fake trauma out of lobster-cide. And that it's causing me real trauma. And that you just told me you were going to play the illegitimate son card to get sympathy." She picked out a piece of tuna for herself, testing it, "I tried a new fish market. I think I'll keep them, they had a really good selection and it's all pretty good."

Jim fished a ribbon of ginger from the corner of the tray. "My inner child brings out your inner tattletale. It's kind of reassuring to know that even at 24 and 25 and 32 we still combine to form the functional age of seven. You know how to make dishes with tongue. I'm not buying shrimphead trauma."

"I," Lorna said loftily, "have trauma about inducing trauma in others. It's even in my files. So you're exacerbating existing trauma knowingly which makes you even worse. What are we doing after dinner? Did you bring a movie?"

"Cop-out. You can't throw a sock without hitting preexisting trauma. But okay." Jim lay the ginger in delicate folds across another slice of tuna. "I liberated Lilo and Stitch from the kids' DVD library. You'll like it. It's about a domineering sister who rules over her blameless sibling with a fist of iron."

"Aw, that's set in Hawaii, you're going to make me all nostalgic and weepy." She made a face at his adulterating of the fish with ginger. She preferred that they be tasted separately. "And I find your interpretation of the core of that film highly suspect. It's clearly the tale of a long-suffering and noble older sibling forced to care for her unruly and rambunctious younger sister."

Jim nodded solemnly. "You got us. It's part of my master plan to plunge you into an existence of unending misery via animated movies. Oh well. Clearly one of us is going to be right about the theme." He lifted the profaned piece of sushi to his mouth. "And the other one will be you."