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Barry has a bad habit when he’s working, and this bad habit as led to more than one...incident. The thing is, he likes to munch as he’s working, and sometimes, he’ll put something down, like a cup of coffee, engrossed in his note taking, and pick it back up, and no, that’s the two-day old coffee, and now he needs to go throw up and rinse out his mouth. Very inconvenient, because he was onto something and now he's going to lose his train of thought. Once, during the IPRE years, he accidentally ate a poisonous mushroom he’d been studying, and ended up spending the rest of the year in Lich form. It’s not fun, or productive.
And now, well. Theoretically he and Lup have corporeal bodies forever, thanks to the tanks. But he’s kind of done with dying, so he’s trying to be more careful, at least when he’s in their lab.
In the kitchen, though, things are fair game, for the most part. So when he walks into the kitchen to run something by Lup before he starts helping her cook dinner, he pauses, mid-sentence, and picks up one of the uncut mini sweet peppers and pops it in his mouth.
“Babe, no- Oh, gods.”
“What?” Barry says, around the pepper, but he’s starting to rapidly figure out what. Because this thing is not sweet, no, it’s...starting to burn his mouth. “What-” He chokes, swallowing a little, trying to spit the rest out.
“Oh, Barry, babe, that was a habanero.” She looks amused, which is totally unfair in Barry’s opinion - who makes a pepper that looks like a sweet pepper - although, oh, maybe that’s why they’re called sweet peppers. Barry’s never really thought of it. It would be interesting to look up the origin, and talk to Merle about process of breeding the sweet into peppers, or the spicy, or-
Gods my mouth is on fire.
“My mouf is on fie,” he manages.
“Yeah, I’d bet.” She rubs over his back on the way to the fridge, then pours a tall glass of milk. “Here, drink, it’ll make it feel better.”
It could hardly feel worse. His eyes - and nose - are streaming, and his brain feels like it's being attacked by tiny clawed beasts. His tongue - he thinks it might be going numb, but it feels swollen enough that he's not even sure how he's supposed to drink.
He does, though, sheepishly, eyes looking away from Lup. He's embarrassed, and he takes a towel and wipes his face before the scene can get even worse. The milk is helping, though, soothing, and so is Lup's hand, rubbing over his back. When he's through the worst of it, she slides a few slices of sourdough in front of him. “Bread helps, too.” She kisses his cheek, then goes back to chopping veggies while he recovers.
Barry lets himself recover, though he's still embarrassed. When he's able to speak normally, for the most part, again, he starts, “You know, if we didn’t have powerful arcane energy basically binding our souls to each other-”
Lup interrupts, flashing her ring. “And, you know, the law of the land and all.”
He grins, because yeah, they belong to each other in more ways than one. “If we didn’t, then maybe I’d wonder why a brilliant, intelligent, beautiful woman like you was wasting time with a major dork like me.”
“Mmm. Well, good thing we are bound together, huh?” She smiles at him wryly, then sets down her knife and leans over for a kiss. “You’re my major dork, and never forget it.”
Barry feels himself blush, but maybe it’s lost in the sweaty, teary mess that his face is already because of the pepper. “Are you, uh, feeding us that for dinner?”
“Kind of. I’m doing the prep for the five-alarm chili you love. You know, the one that cooks overnight?”
“Those things are in the five-alarm chili?”
“Well, yeah, but they mellow out a little when you take out the seeds and cook them, and, uh, you know, don’t eat them whole.” Her eyes have that teasing glint that Barry fell in love with over one hundred years ago.
“That - makes sense,” he admits begrudgingly.
“I was thinking steak salad, for tonight, if you want to get that started?”
As he walks by to start getting ingredients ready, he slips a hand on her waist and brushes a kiss over her cheek. “Love you.”
“Love you right back.” With that same twinkle in her eye, she takes one of the other habanero peppers and pops it in her mouth whole, then winks at him.
“What-”
She shrugs. “Immolation wizard, babe. The heat never bothered me anyway.”