Kyle, Yvette, fish. Backdated allll the way to December

[x-wildchild.livejournal.com]

Backdated due to log delay due to acts of real life totally destroying me for 25 days in a row. While Julio recovers in the hospital, Kyle and Yvette go get sushi. Because raw fish absolutly serves as a distraction for people worried about their friends.



Kyle had slept, but only because he'd found the hotel's gym and pool, had a swim and then spent the better part of an hour getting friendly with a weight machine. At least no one could say he was neglecting any physical training he needed to do. He'd gotten up, had breakfast, showered, found a Real American Newspaper and read the sports pages, and then was very very bored. And twitchy.

Julio was resting, he couldn't' go bug him anymore, and pacing in the hotel was making people give him the funny looks again. And if one more teenaged Japanese girl said "Neko!" or "Kitsune!" at him, he was going to start beating his head against the wall.

Coming back up from another walk down to the pool, through the lobby, outside the building, back inside and back up to his room he stopped at the hotel room that Yvette was sharing with some of the other girls and knocked. "Anyone home?" He said, resting his head on the door. "Soooo boreeed."

The door popped open so suddenly that he might have fallen inside. "Kyle!" Yvette exclaimed, sounding relieved. She seemed about to hug him, but remembered herself. "Are you being okay? With the ground shaking? I do not know what was happening, but I have not seen Laurie for much time."

"I'm fine. Nobody told you guys what happened?" Kyle asked. "The CNN webpage said it was just a some tremors." He looked around the hallway to make sure nobody was there. "Julio kinda ate it. The earthquake. There's some other stuff but I dunno how much I'm allowed to tell anyone. Nothing X-men-y but, you know, people are weird about medical stuff." He'd certainly heard it enough from Forge. "Laurie and Nori took him to the hospital, and I think they're still there. Or sleeping it off. "

"I think they were being too busy to tell us all this," Yvette said slowly, trying to assimilate Kyle's infodump. "Julio was using his powers to stop the... earth quake, yes?" She stumbled over the unfamiliar term. "And it hurt him so he had to go to the hospital? Will he be all right? And Laurie and Noriko?"

"Yep. Earthquake." Kyle said, nodding. "I didn't get a whole lot of, you know, info myself, but yeah, he stopped a big earthquake. I think. And I think Laurie and Nori .. helped, or something. It didn't sound like they were in the hospital though. Just kind of busted tired. Knowing Laurie, she's probably trying to nurse Julio back to health all by herself though."

"Laurie, she likes to take care of the people." Yvette seemed to sag a little. "This... it is all very hard to be understanding. When the ground started shaking, I was afraid." Certainly there was an element of extra spikiness about her today. "But I am glad everyone is being okay."

"Dude, I was kinda freaked myself. Nobody's gonna give you any grief for being scared of an earthquake." He'd definitely noticed the Sonic-the-Hedgehog-ness. "But yeah, Julio's okay... ish. He wants to break out of the hospital. Laurie and Nori are okay. Japan is okay, so we're all okay." His stomach gurgled quietly, and Kyle snickered. "I think the only thing not okay is my gut. Have you been... " He paused, scratched his head, and looked once again at Yvette. Nervous. Extra-spiky. Crowded city. The odds of her having gone out to get food weren't great. "Have you had anything to eat besides room service?"

Yvette hung her head, a little ashamed. "No. The room service people, they do not understand my accent, so I was not able to order anything."

Kyle crossed his arms and frowned at Yvette. "Okay, we're gonna fix that. Lorna fed me cause I was her package mule, so I've got spare cash." And he'd been saving anyway, and this was important besides. He looked Yvette over, noted the gloves and socks to himself and shrugged. "I gotta go get my Tevas, cause sidewalks are cold, and while I do that, you get whatever you need to get to go out?"

"Yes, please!" Yvette's eyes brightened at the thought of a) food, and b) going somewhere with Kyle - he was definitely on her Favourite People list. "I have some money also. We could be, how they say, going duke?"

"Dutch. Which I have no idea where that came from." Kyle did not laugh, but it was a near thing, and he did grin. "Psst. English makes no sense, even to me, and it's all I speak." He said in a stage whisper. "Maybe we stole it from somebody else's language. We do that all the time."

"Shame on you!" Yvette whispered back in the same tone, before her stomach growled and she giggled. "Shoo, yes! Be getting the shoes!"

---

Kyle had gotten reasonably familiar with the smaller restaurants within walking distance of the hotel. Between his need to eat on a regular basis and his need to have some kind of protein, and his total and complete inability to say anything in Japanese except to order food, and even that with a horrible accent, knowing the tourist places was all he really wanted or needed.

Besides, he could be pretty sure they weren't going to serve live tentacles. Angel could eat those all she wanted, he was not putting anything like that in his mouth.

At the corner at the end of the block that the hotel was on, Kyle paused, waiting for Yvette to catch up. Even with trying to walk as slow as he could, he was still a few steps ahead. "So has anyone talked you into trying sushi yet?"

Yvette was wishing she could use her hands to keep up with Kyle, the same as they did in the woods, but people stared at her enough and this was a city. "Not yet," she admitted, not mentioning she hadn't been that brave yet. "But if you are wanting to have some, I could be trying too?" Since if Kyle would, she could try.

"There's a okay place just down the ... are they blocks in Japan?" Kyle said, interrupting himself with the question. "Menus in Japanese and English and they have stuff with normal fish. Nothing weird, like, I dunno, sea urchins or those wiggly sea plant things that clown fish live in." He wiggled his fingers in the air to demonstrate. "I think it's probably for tourists, but hey, we -are- tourists!"
>
"And it is our last day to be the tourists, so it is only right, yes?" Yvette agreed, giggling a little at Kyle's randomness. He was much easier to follow after a year. "Apart from the earthquaking, it has been the very fun trip." With no kidnappings, which was an added bonus. "Did you have the fun too, Kyle?"

"It was pretty fun. Disney was pretty cool, but, you know, I could do Disney in America if I wanted. But the rest was pretty awesome. Lots of history stuff, which was awesome." He thought he might even turn in the extra-credit essays. Without titles that made Dr. Farouk make the Face. "And no kidnappings and not crazy evil dudes, and good food, which is always awesome." Even if natto was gross. Red bean ice cream made up for it, totally.

"There were schoolgirls at Disney who were thinking Mr. Sefton and I were the cartoon characters," she confided. "It was very strange. Mr. Sefton did not know what to think!"

"You do kinda have the Sonic thing going for you." Kyle said, reaching to hold the door open for Yvette. "I just got a couple of weird looks and questions. And I learned that the Japanese word for cat is neko. Because about every fourth question had something to do with cats."

The hostess of the restaurant had obviously been well-trained in dealing with tourists, even unusual ones. While she did react with some surprise at the sight of one tiny red-all-over girl and one very tall blond so-very-obviously American boy, beyond the initial surprise at their appearance, she simply walked them to a table and handed them a pair of english-language menus.

Yvette's eyes flared slightly brighter as she walked past Kyle, and she settled into her customary perch on the chair with a shy thanks to the waitress. Not having to answer questions was a relief, and she was pleased Kyle had managed to find a place gaijin were expected, rather than an oddity. Visiting a foreign place was interesting and fun, but very tiring sometimes. "I think you are looking more like the cat than the dog," she replied to Kyle's earlier statement. "But I think you look most like a Kyle."

Kyle nodded in agreement. "I could live with the cat thing. The dog thing bugs me though. Doc Hank said once that it was because people needed to make things that are different more familiar. So that it's not as alien or something." He half-shrugged, and opened his menu. "Kind of like eating new stuff.. You start with some that's not totally off in left field. Which is why no weird urchins. Or tentacles. Bleh." He remembered eating sushi the first time himself and sticking to fish he'd heard of.

Yvette nodded, opening her own menu. Fortunately, they had the English as well as the Japanese, and she moved a gloved finger down the page, looking for things that she at least knew what they were. Tuna, salmon, crab, rice... There was one of those bento boxes, with several of those things plus some others she didn't recognise straight away. "Perhaps, one of these?" she suggested, pointing at it.

Kyle already knew what he wanted, and ordered, and if he'd switched a few of his normal items for things that were a little tamer, and less on the raw side, he figured Yvette wouldn't know, and it was best to have something that if her food was too unusual for her, might be a little less scary. Sushi took getting used to, and she didn't have the benefit of having Logan and then Shiro explain what things were. "Those are a good idea. Lots of stuff, that way if you hate something, you still have plenty to eat, and since I'm not getting the same thing, if you want to try something else, we can overlap."

She smiled at him, face still a little stiff, but much softer than it had been. "It is kind of you, to be sharing the meal with me," she offered shyly as the waitress approached again. "Because I could not be leaving Japan without trying the food properly, no?"

"Yep." Kyle agreed. "Although, seriously? I'm -so- writing Lorna a paper on some of the weird stuff they eat here. I mean, squid ice cream. Squid!" He spread his hands in a gesture to emphasis just how ridiculous and gross the idea of mollusks in his ice cream was. "I am down with red bean ice cream. I could even do lychee. But there are just lines to be drawn. Lines!"

"Squid? The wriggly... how you say... tentacle animal?" Yvette poked out her tongue, wrinkling her nose slightly in disgust. "That is not the flavour for ice cream, even for the people who like the seafood. I do remember reading in the journals that there was the pastrami ice cream, for the cat-girl, yes? But that is not as icky as squid."

"Squid." Kyle repeated. "I can't make this stuff up. It wouldn't be half as weird if I did." He paused for a few moments while their food arrived and he was distracted by disposable chopsticks, napkins and delicately removing the wasabi from anywhere near his food. "That? Is -not- avocado. And yeah, but the pastrami ice cream wasn't sweet. It was more like just frozen cream and pastrami. It wasn't awful."

Yvette looked at her chopsticks and then surreptitiously removed a glove - it was so much easier to eat with her fingers, especially with Mr. Haller's help in her control training. Delicately, she dipped a long finger-tip into the wasabi with her own meal, taking enough just for a taste. She grinned after a moment. "It is the horseradish!" she exclaimed. "We have this at my home!"

Kyle's eyebrows went up in an expression of surprise. "Dude, seriously?" He hadn't expected Yvette to like spicy food at all, and obviously his perceptions of his friend's taste in food were entirely and totally wrong. "It hurts my face if I eat a lot of it. And by a lot I mean like more then a teeny tiny bit."

Enthusiastically, Yvette nodded. Not many asked her about her home country's habits and customs. "We cook with the garlic and the spices, like the cinnamon, very much. Mostly the..." She paused, trying to remember the word. "Stews, yes? With all the meat and the vegetables and the sauces together? And the soup. There is one soup, it is made with the cow brain." As she spoke, she was trying to decide which of the sushi pieces she wanted to try. They all looked... weird.

Kyle raised a finger, set his hand on the table, raised it again and blinked several times. "Okay, um, not to knock like, your native cuisine because hey, raw fish right in front of us, and I'm from Montana. We're close enough to Canada that poutine's actually on the menu in some places. But... cow brains? Brains? Of cows?"

"Brains, yes. It is good for the breakfast." There was perhaps a glimmer of amusement in her voice as she picked up one of the sushi pieces and popped it in her mouth, as she saw Kyle doing. She chewed for a moment, and then an odd expression crossed her face. It wasn't bad, just... not very tasty. Bland, really.

"For -zombies-!" Kyle screwed up his face in an expression that was nothing less then "Ew, ew, oh God, ew." with an added dose of trying not to laugh. He ate another piece of sushi, and was carefully removing wasabi from a third when he noticed Yvette's expression. It did not look like raw fish was impressing Yvette, if he was guessing right. "Not lighting your fire with the sushi, huh?" He asked.

Chewing a few more times, Yvette swallowed. "Not so much," she admitted. "It is not tasting bad, it is not tasting much like anything. The flavour is..." She waved her hand around vaguely, trying to encompass it. "I think I am used to the food with more spices and herbs. I am tasting only the rice."

"Huh." Kyle ate another piece of sushi with an expression of concentration on his face. "I mean, it makes sense. I can taste more because, I guess the mutation maybe. Something to do with my taste buds. But lots of people who don't have crazy senses like sushi. Cultural thing, I guess, and all. And what you're used to." He mostly just liked that the fish tasted like fish. "So if you're like, not used to it, it'd be kind of .. bland. Tasteless, I guess."

"This is the case, yes, I think." Then an idea struck her. "Oh, I can be doing this!" she exclaimed, and using her index finger, spread a layer of wasabi on her next piece of sushi, before popping it in her mouth. Her eyes brightened, and she nodded. "Yes, that is much better!"

Kyle's eyebrows attempted to migrate to the top of his skull, and he made a visible effort not to screw up his face in an expression of pain. "Oh, man. Whatever floats your little red boat, but dude, that much wasabi and my face would hurt for hours." He reached across the table to the set of disposable chopsticks that Yvette had no need of, and used them to remove the blob of wasabi from his place and transfer it to hers. "All you. There's soy sauce too, which Shiro told me once that only Americans dunk their sushi in wasabi and soy, but I don't use it anyway. Too salty. But it's all yours if you want it."

She beamed at him. "Thank you! I think the sushi will very good, this way."