Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Here,” I said. I extended my fork to Jessie. “Try a bite of this.”

Jessie squinted, perturbed. She set her knife down and leaned closer, as if to see better. “What in the dickens is it?” she asked.

“I haven’t the faintest earthly idea.”

The little red-purple spiral squirmed on the fork. It was helical, broadest in the middle, drawing to tips on the bottom and top. It was dripping…something.

“Why is it–” Jessie paused. She cleared her throat.

“Are we thinking the same thing?” I murmured, keeping the conversation from the next table.

“It, well. Is that a mollusc? I can’t tell what phylum that is. Wait, is it a fungus? Am I in the wrong kingdom?”

“No idea. But that’s not what I was thinking.”

“Why does it look like it’s covered in…” she trailed off. Almost as an afterthought, she picked up another piece of her blood apple with her fork, twirling it to collect the cheesy stuffing. She stuck it in her mouth and chewed, still staring thoughtfully at the thing I was holding up.

“Why does it look like the chef may have added his own special sauce,” I finished.

Jessie choked on her apple.

“No? Just me?”

Eyes watering, she picked up her napkin and tried to quietly cough into it, avoiding a disturbance. I stole a bite of her fractal vegetables while she worked to clear her throat. Not bad. It tasted like asparagus, but a little nuttier.

She set the napkin back down and took a spoonful of her broth. “I’m still not used to you being able to say things like that,” she said, voice a little hoarse from choking.

“Am I wrong, though?” I waved the thing around a little in the air. It pulsed.

“No,” she replied. “You’re definitely not wrong.”

I nodded in satisfaction with our shared assessment. “Try it,” I said.

“Why do I have to be the one who tries it?”

“You’re the one who likes that sort of thing.”

She stared at me. “Wow,” she said. “That’s really something.”

I wiggled the fork.

“I can’t say I care. That much. About that.”

“But a little bit?” I asked.

“Let’s not get into all that here,” she said, which meant that the answer was yes. I noted that down mentally.

I mused aloud, “Thinking about the other day, you did very firmly tell me to–”

“We are at dinner,” she hissed. She kicked me hard under the table.

I winced and held up my free hand in a placating gesture. “Alright, alright. Back to the matter at hand.”

She shot me a suspicious glare, but then carried on. “You’re the one who tests potential poisons. You should try it.”

“Are you scared?”

“Are you scared? Did we finally find something you won’t eat?”

“I will eat anything. So I want to see your reaction. It will be funnier.”

She scooped up some of her vegetables and ate them with a bite of the blood apple and stuffing. “You first.”

I set the fork back down. The thing on it fell off the tines, rolling down the plate as it squirmed. “How about we play scalpel, paper, stone?”

“Three rounds,” she said. She kicked me under the table again, that time more gently, and then wrapped her feet around my leg. “Loser has to try it first. And give the winner a compliment.”

I kicked right back, and then held her legs back, sort of caressing with my foot. “Alright,” I said. I held out my hand over the table. She took a last bite of her food, and then held out her own hand.

I made sure to speak first, dictating the rhythm. “Scalpel, paper, stone,” I said, and as I spoke I ever-so-faintly emphasized stone. I pumped my fist without allowing the slightest twitch of my fingers, as if I were certain to throw stone.

At the last instant, I threw scalpel.

Jessie threw stone.

Our eyes met. She raised her eyebrows. I gave her a lopsided grin, running my foot up her calf again.

Too obvious. The hand alone might have sold it, but the subtle emphasis was too much.

She squeezed my finger in her fist, like she was breaking the scalpel. I took her hand as she released, intertwining our fingers for an affectionate squeeze back. Beneath the table, I felt her extend her legs farther, increasing the contact between us.

“Round two,” I said.

“Round two.”

This time, I ceded the announcing to her. She waited for me to speak, and I gestured at her. Reading any tells she gave would be more advantageous than speaking myself. Judging by her faintly quirked eyebrow, she knew that.

“Scalpel, paper, stone,” she said, not giving any tells.

Most people would repeat a winning play and switch on a losing play, often panicking and going for whatever would beat what their opponent had just played. It worked well enough, given that people did often repeat winning plays. But Jessie would know that I was aware of that, and might even imagine me intentionally deviating from it by sticking with my losing play. Hoping for her to throw paper in anticipation of smothering my stone, when in reality I would be throwing scalpel again to beat her switch to paper. And if she saw that coming, she would stay stone to smash my scalpel.

So instead I did something that was unpredictable, for me, and played predictably. I threw out paper.

In the same instant, Jessie threw scalpel.

I stared. That was a convoluted chain of thought for her to work through in only the seconds she spoke. It was also possible she had found some mental method of throwing at complete random, throwing a wrench in my plans by refusing to engage with them at all, taking the odds of beating me that way.

“I’m going to have to ask, after,” I said.

She dragged her finger down my hand, mimicking cutting it. “Sure, I’ll tell you.” She rested her hand over mine for a moment, taking another spoonful of her broth with the other. Stealing a moment to strategize? I laced our fingers together again, thinking myself.

If it was random, it didn’t matter what I ended up doing, because I had a one-in-three chance either way. So assuming that she had called my plan, my options were either to stick with the strategy, or to deviate from the strategy. She knew that the plan was to play stupid. I knew that she knew. She knew that I knew that she knew. And she would know that I knew that she knew that I knew that she knew, too.

And so on.

So all in all, knowing Jessie, would she expect me to make the ultimately stupid move and keep with the plan? Or would she expect me to deviate to paper or scalpel? And what would she expect me to expect her to think?

Jessie extricated her hand, caressing her fingers along mine as she did, and held it out again.

If I got too far into thinking, I would only be playing against myself. In the end, if I did lose, doing the same strategy three times in a row and it never working would look more ridiculous than switching and losing. That would have been a good reason to switch, keeping in mind that it was ultimately some bit up to luck.

“Scalpel, paper, stone,” she said.

Jessie would also know that if I wasn’t sure I could win, the next priority would be minimizing damages to my ego. Or so one would think.

I threw stone.

Jessie threw paper.

Again, I stared. I whistled, low and long.

She didn’t look too pleased with herself, which made me suspicious. She set her hand down over mine again, resuming eating her meal.

“Alright,” I said. “Kindly explain.”

“Uh-uh,” she said around her bite of food. “Try the thing first.”

“I should give you your compliment first. I might be feeling less inclined, if I eat this and it tastes terrible.”

“Sure. Whatever order you prefer.”

I stood out of my chair and walked around to her, turning sideways to scoot past a stitched waiter going by. I leaned down and hugged her from behind, pressing a kiss to her cheek. I had to come up with something sweet and specific that I hadn’t said already. And then I had to say it, and sound like I meant it.

“What genre would you like your compliment in?” I asked.

She leaned back and rested her head on me. “It sounds like you’re asking for help.”

“Custom-ordered things are always nicer than manufacturer-designed. I’m only tailoring the winner’s prize for her.”

She poked at her food with her fork, considering. “Appearance-related.”

“Very good, miss. Level of indecency?”

“How does the scale work?”

“Let’s say ranging from ‘perfectly chaste’ to ‘I’ll have to whisper.’”

She twirled up more of the blood apple filling. “Again, we're at dinner. I actually think I’ll take twee.”

“Oh, really? Sappy. Very cute.” I kissed her cheek again. “You’ve got a beautiful smile. Quiet, but it can light a room up like a ray of–”

“Please,” she interrupted firmly. “Do not try to be poetic.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Do. Not.” she repeated. “Do not.”

“Geez,” I muttered. “It’s a nice smile. I’m liking seeing it this much. And your hair looks very pretty put up like this, very elegant.” I ran my fingers over the coils of the braids. “I could get smug about having dinner out with a girl this pretty and this smart. Everyone should be jealous.”

“Thank you,” she said. She bumped her cheek against mine. “Go try that ‘special sauce.’”

“No kiss before I’m condemned?”

“I haven’t wiped my mouth off.”

“So wipe it.”

“We’re in public, and I’m eating–”

She was cut off by me grabbing her napkin and scrubbing her lips with it. Then she said something that was muffled, but I was pretty sure was extremely rude.

I tossed the napkin back down on her lap and kissed her, bracing against the back of her chair as I leaned down. Then I took exaggerated, arms-swaying, overly cheerful steps back to my side of the table. I spun on my heel and sat back down.

“You also have soft, pretty lips,” I said.

She made a waving-me-on gesture with one hand, resting her chin in the other and rolling her eyes. I could see by the sparkle of them that she was happy. Actually, the moments where she smiled without her mouth were just as nice as the moments where she smiled with.

I picked my fork back up. “By the way,” I added. “I did not forget that you’re supposed to tell me how you won that.”

“I would have reminded you.”

“Oh really? It’s not a secret?” I set the spiral thing in my mouth, carefully biting it and rolling it around on my tongue. It tensed up for a moment, and then went into limp pieces as I chewed

“I’ve played scalpel, paper, stone with you one too many times, Sy.”

I stopped chewing for a moment, then chewed faster, annoyed. “Darn it to heck. That’s all? I’m repeating myself?”

She shrugged. “It worked the first few times. How is it?”

I swallowed. “Quite good, actually. Still no danged idea what it is. It’s…” I rubbed my fingertips and thumb together. “Slightly rubbery, in a way that could be mushroom, or could be some sort of meat like clam? But it’s not a bad texture.”

“Come on, tell me about the taste.”

“Glaze is good. Kind of like a white sauce, but with a cut of acidity? None of it is sweet at all. I think there’s some kind of chemical additive to the spiral. It tastes like it’s got more substance than it should have.”

She reached over to spear one on her fork, and brought it to her face, but then stopped right before she put it in her mouth. “Are you lying?”

“No.”

“Does this actually taste atrocious?”

I waved my whole arm broadly at the rest of the restaurant. “They serve aristocrats! Why would they have a dish that tastes horrid?”

“There’s no accounting for taste. You certainly can’t compliment their visual culinary decisions.” But she stuck it in her mouth.

“Well?”

“Not bad,” she admitted.

“Do you recognize it? Does it remind you of anything?” I broke off one of the remaining pieces of bread from earlier in the meal, and dipped it in the blood-colored oil. We were more or less finished with our main dishes.

“Not enough to say what it is,” she said. “Don’t fill up on bread, Sy. I want to see what they do for dessert here.”

“You don’t have to tell me. Who do you take me for?”

She smiled wryly and slid the little paper menu towards my side of the table. “Fair point.”

I picked it up, rereading the dessert section while I munched my bread. “Golden canary cake,” I said. “How much do you bet it comes with a real bird?”

“Live or dead?”

“Who’s to say. Lady Ester’s charlotte russe?”

“Sy, I already read all this.”

“I know that. I’m making conversation. How do we feel about trying the chef’s choice for this, too?”

“I’m in the mood for something simple. Maybe chocolate?” she suggested. “But in terms of the experience and the memory, I’m not opposed to trying for something bizarre.”

I brought my heels up onto the chair, sitting with my knees tucked to my chest as I considered. “We could get the chocolate pudding and the chef’s choice,” I offered.

“This is good timing. The waiter should be back around in a minute or two. I don’t see him, though.”

I scanned around the immense room like she was. “Hey,” I said. “What’s that commotion over there?”

“Commotion?”

“Take a look at the northwest corner. The energy is different.” It wasn’t a commotion in the way people would traditionally call it, but it was what I sensed to be a commotion relative to the environment. A fractionally larger group of staff members, moving more quickly than they should have been, with people at tables turning their heads for quick peeks. Because they were noting on a gut level that something was off.

And the staff were moving circuitously towards our table.

“That’s the host who sat us,” Jessie said.

“He seems to have two very large men with him,” I said. Sort of like brunos, but far better crafted.

“And they don’t appear to be stitched,” Jessie observed, unclasping her bag. “They appear to be live men.”

That, of course, had the implication that they were for the serious troublemakers. “Why, they even appear to look a tad angry,” I said.

Jessie pulled a spool of sticky medical tape from her bag. She put the lid on the soup tureen, and then started to wrap the tape around it, binding the lid on.

“Moving pretty fast,” I commented, already searching routes to the exits. I stuffed a last bit of bread in my mouth, speaking rather impolitely as I chewed. “Large room, though. It would not be pretty if people started hurtling through tables.”

Jessie finished wrapping the lid and stashed the tape. She put the entire tureen in her bag.

“You are gonna feel so dumb if that spills or breaks.”

“It’s good soup. I want to finish it later. It won’t break.”

I casually stood up, resting my hand on the back of my chair. I blindly ignored the men coming towards us, looking like I might have only been telling Jessie I was going to pop to the gent’s room. “Want to head through the kitchen on the way out? I’m kind of disappointed about no dessert.”

“Sounds good to me. We can take an exit through where they receive shipping.”

I gestured the gist of my plan. She noted a few helpful observations back.

The men were fifty paces away.

“I’d just like to say,” I added. I started to unbutton my suit jacket. “This has been a lovely dinner with you, miss.”

Jessie surreptitiously reached under her skirt and retrieved a pistol. “I guess you’re not terrible company,” she said. She casually cocked the hammer, sound well-muffled by the din of conversation around us.

Forty paces. I started to bounce on my feet, excited.

Jessie stood, and calmly strode in the opposite direction of me. She placed herself between rows of tables, close to the edge of the room. The gun was concealed on her left side and tucked up in her drapey sleeve. I watched as the staff started to adjust their course, veering towards her. The people around us were still oblivious. Hoity-toity couples whispering over their candles. Some lady with towering blonde hair whinging about the cook of her chicken while the other three people at her table nodded, one of the men twisting around to look for someone to complain to.

I moved. I took a running leap and vaulted right on top of their table with a thump, kicking the candelabra over and landing with my shoe just to the left of her chicken. Not on it. Food residue would make me slippier. She shrieked. “What in God’s name!” one of the men hollered.

“Can’t say that!” I called, already leaping to the next, causing the people at it to scramble back and unseat themselves in shock. Behind me, one of the women shrieked “Thomas!” and poor treasonous Thomas said “Nora, settle down–”

I kicked another candelabra, sending it arcing through the air, hot wax flying out and raining down on people. More shrieks and yelps rang out. I quickly vaulted across eight or nine more tables, sowing chaos, kicking all the candles as I went. I had places to be in time.

Not so quickly that I couldn't pause for a second, though. I bent down to take a macaron off a man’s plate while he gawped, and crammed it in my mouth.

Chocolate something-berry. Yum.

The men that had been going for Jessie were now urgently making for me.

I set a second macaron in my shirt pocket, careful not to crush it, and kicked the candle off and at a nearby woman like I was line-dancing to the upbeat music.

I leapt before I could even see if it had landed, sprinting doubly fast to make up for lost time.

Ten-odd more tables down, candles flying, some plates crashing too. An absolutely glorious cacophony, and it mixed with the sound of the band deciding that the show had to go on.

I spun cheerfully into a landing onto the next table, waggling my hands like a showman. It had a portable heater, with some bubbling pot of still-crawling food on top. Heater meant gas and lots of flame. One of Jessie’s ideas. I kicked the pot hard, whanging it a few times to knock the heavy container of boiling liquid and critters over. I very kindly tipped it in a direction away from the laps of the women staring shell-shocked at me, not even thinking to get out of the way. It spilled everywhere, hitting the floor with a sizzle.

I grabbed the heater and turned it right over, pressing the hot metal into the tablecloth, jetting flames at it.

“Ta-da!” I said.

Now the women gasped, stumbling back away from the table, bumping into the people behind them. One tried to get up and failed, just tipping right over in her chair, hitting the floor.

The cloth didn’t burst into dramatic flames like it would have in a dime novel, or anything. That would have been nice, but no one was stupid enough to keep candles on easily flammable tablecloths. It did start smoking and smelling of burning, though.

Something that wasn’t fireproof was my suit jacket. I shucked it off, tucking it under the heater. It caught solidly alight, sending even more smoke up. The flames fwoomed higher as I splashed some of the lighting fluid I kept in my pocket on it.

“Fire!” I shrieked, sounding panicked. My voice echoed.

People all across the room were starting to stand, step away, or at least turn to look. Only those at the far edges of the room seemed less frantic over the spectacle–I wasn’t close enough to jump on their tables, so they could gawp all they wanted. But at that one, beautiful word, worry started to really ripple through the room.

I leaped more tables, making a straight beeline for the righthand exit. The staff were clamoring right for me, held back by having to weave through people standing and fretting, people they couldn’t just take a gamble on shoving aside.

So much fuss over nothing. People even seemed afraid. As if they were really threatened by any of this. The type of people who had never known true fear a day in their lives.

Really. It wasn’t like anyone was even firing guns, or anything.

I leapt one more table. The people at it had already thoroughly cleared out of the way, seeing me coming. I kicked the candles anyway, sending them in the direction of the nearest people. One man, looking bewildered, yelled “I’m writing my lawyer!”

I quickly hopped down from the table. I needed to be unseen by most of the crowd.

Crack. A gunshot rang out. There it was.

Jessie’s shot, perfectly placed, shattered through a huge glass centerpiece and pinged off the thick window behind me, chipping it, bouncing back twenty or thirty feet as it lost all momentum. It hadn’t hit or even grazed a single person.

I pulled everything off the table behind me by the tablecloth, plates clattering and crashing, and banshee-wailed like a dying man.

Then I pointed into the thickest part of the crowd, face contorting in agony, as if I was seeing something truly terrible. Somehow it worked, and at least half of the people staring at me reflexively turned to look.

I made a mad dash, bolting past them and ducking into a separate segment of the crowd. I crawled beneath tables. From somewhere that sounded close to her exit, Jessie fired two more bullets. The first I heard produce an alarmingly loud shattering sound. Then she screamed, putting less effect into it than I had, but still managing to sound darn well like someone being shot. The second produced no further output, probably having been pointed at the ceiling.

Shrieking and yelling and clamoring began again in earnest.

Oh, wait, no. That wasn't right. The second bullet had done something after all. A loud crash echoed in the space. An alarm started to blare. Or was that the fire’s fault? No matter.

I popped out a few tables down, finding water beginning to patter down on everyone. As I looked up, I saw rapid-release rain clouds starting to coalesce at the ceiling. I held a hand over my shirt pocket. My exit was close, and I couldn’t see the staff members, which meant they definitely couldn’t see me. People were all but stampeding out, and with my height, I blended in easily. The crowd slowed things down, but it also meant that there was no locating me.

Jessie fired one last time. Again, I shrieked, although it was hardly necessary, or even audible with everyone hollering and the alarm sounding, and then I let out a longer gurgling rattle of pain. Just because I was having fun.

The crowd expedited its pace even faster in response to the shot. I was almost being trampled, nearly a full foot of height below all of the men. Taking a bit of initiative, I elbowed a guy in the nads, and then when that sent him gasping and stumbling, it caused a domino effect of people stumbling around him. I shouldered past everyone and ducked beneath some legs, pushing to the front of the rush.

One woman with a particularly fancy dress was carrying her bright yellow drink with her, still sipping it as she made her way out. I could respect the priorities, so I grabbed the ankles of the woman next to her instead, yanking her feet out beneath her so she fell flat on her face. She shrieked. So much shrieking. I loved all the shrieking.

The people around her each made their own decisions to stop and help, or to push onwards like assholes, mainly skewing towards the asshole side of things. As expected for this type of crowd. But the stumbling block gave me enough breathing room while leaving even more of a mess behind for the staff, and I burst out from the exit.

The central hall was a broad rectangle, absolutely dripping in glamour–gold decor and massive, polished mirrors everywhere. An overwhelming amount of flowers wider than I was tall, in all the most elegant colors, were growing in every space the mirrors didn’t cover. The cocktail party was thoroughly interrupted by those crowds of panicked people streaming out, rumors and warnings already spreading across the room. By now, I was invisible. People weren’t looking down at the frazzled-seeming boy, they were looking to their friends, their acquaintances, saying this or that about why they had to leave, and how could this happen here.

I ran for the wall and jumped, clinging onto one of the draping vines, and then clambered to a sturdy flower stem. I didn’t go high, just a few feet up, easier for seeing.

There. Across the hall, by the opposite exit. Jessie waiting for me near a wall, hiding herself in plain sight. She’d taken her braids down, the sort of slight change that could stop someone from scanning a person in a crowd, and was hunched over as if anxious and lost. She trailed vaguely towards the other end of the hall. I looked closer, and I spotted the service door she was aiming for. It was embedded into the wall, hidden by one of those flowers growing from it. On an examination, you could note it wasn’t continuous with the other greenery, leaving the door able to be opened.

I grabbed onto a petal of the white flower I was clinging to the stem of, and then dropped back to the ground, tearing the petal off with my weight.

One journey across the room later, weaving through an increasingly large mass of people evacuating the dining room we’d been in, I reached Jessie. “Hello!” I grinned.

With me there, we moved more rapidly towards the service door. “You look like you’re having fun,” she said.

“Barrels of it!” I reached up and set the petal down on her pretty head like a very big hat. She looked cute with the braids dangling. “I brought you part of a flower,” I said.

It drifted off behind her. “Charming,” she said.

I gave her sad eyes. “Your head rejected my gift.” Then I pulled the macaron from my shirt pocket. “I also brought you a preliminary dessert.”

She looked unimpressed. “Sy, where has that macaron been?”

“It was just on a serving plate. Very clean.”

“I'm not eating someone else's table scraps.”

“It's not scraps! They hadn't started dessert yet.” I had no idea whether or not that was true.

“You can have it.”

I held it between my teeth, careful not to bite down, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “C’mon,” I said. I stood on tippy toes, sticking my face up towards her. “‘S good. Try.”

“No, Sy, I'm not doing that,” she said.

But I noted she had let me bend her down to bring our faces closer.

“C’mon,” I repeated, managing fairly good clarity around the macaron. “It’s romantic. You hafta. Or we get caught.”

“You have some really strange ideas about romance,” Jessie said. She reached up with one hand and set her fingers on one side of my jaw, thumb on the others, tilting my head up.

“Ah?” I said hopefully.

She squeezed, hard, digging slim fingers into my flesh, mercilessly forcing my mouth open.

“Ah!” I protested.

But with her other index, face unsympathetic, she popped the macaron right down into my mouth. Then she casually took my hand and resumed walking to the door.

I chewed, and laced my fingers with those mean, slender ones. My face might have been a tad hot. “It's good,” I said. “You missed out.”

“I don't think I did,” she said. We strolled a few more feet. “By the way, rating?”

I swallowed the macaron, clearing my throat. “Ten out of ten for conception and execution!” I proclaimed. “Beautiful in its simplicity. A fantastic little chaser to cap off our meal. And you even screamed. You ham.”

She shot me a look. “I act all the time. I'm not a bad screamer.”

“No, no, not at all. I just appreciated that you were willing to get involved, even if it wasn't strictly necessary. Good caterwauling.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Womanly caterwauling?”

“Indeed. Finest dying lady I've ever heard.”

“How womanly?” she asked. “Give me an honest answer, not what you think I want to hear,” she added, cutting me off as I opened my mouth.

I paused the conversation while I thought. Jessie had many traits that weren't womanly in the same way as how you might point at, say, Helen or Mary, and call them womanly. But with regards to the particular way that she was electing to be a woman, she was womanly.

And I was aware that telling a girl whether or not she was womanly was already sensitive territory, especially once she'd hit you with the insistence for honesty. It seemed like it would be even touchier territory with Jessie, because she had only decided to be a girl as of recently. That was the sort of thing that could lead to insecurity.

“Relative to…?” I led.

“Relative to a born woman,” she elaborated.

I tried to remember her scream right. We navigated around a cluster of people. “Somewhat?” I truthfully, but tentatively ventured.

“Okay,” she said.

Her tone caught me off guard. “That's good?” I asked.

“That's good,” she said, and didn't elaborate. “You asked ‘relative to.’ What would the other relativity point be?”

“I dunno,” I trailed, shrugging. Her arm shrugged with me from how we held hands. “Relative to yyyou? Deciding to do all this? I like your voice.”

“You sound nervous,” she observed.

“No shit, Jess. You can't just ask a fella if he thinks you're girly or what have you, and tell him to be honest. That scares the piss out of people.” I tugged her arm for emphasis.

“Now you sound sulky,” she said, sounding like it amused her.

“Scares the piss, Jessie!”

“You should always be honest with me,” she said as we drew near the door. I could tell from her tone it was a bit of a joke.

“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck with that.”

We reached the door, and she opened it. A waitress stood on the other side, holding a plate of appetizers. Stitched like the rest, judging by the look in her eyes and the pallor of her skin. “Excuse me,” she said.

We stepped out of the way. She stepped out, we stepped in, and then she stopped and looked uncertain. “You’re not in uniform,” she said.

“Plainclothes security,” I said.

“Oh.” She frowned, struggling to think about why that wasn’t right.

“Those dishes are going to get cold,” Jessie said politely.

“Oh. Yes. Um.” She hurried off with it.

We shut the door behind her and hustled down the tunnel, not quite at a run. It was fast enough that we breezed by several more stitched without them catching enough of a glimpse to realize something was wrong.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Stitched, or people?”

“I don’t like that phrasing,” Jessie said. “Don’t you think they’re people, when they can talk, and think?”

“But can they feel?”

“Confusion is a feeling, isn’t it? And to answer, given that this is high-end…”

“...stitched on the menial work, one human for every five stitched or so overseeing,” I finished. Because stitched could be set on cooking, but they couldn’t make it an art without guidance like a living person could.

“Agreed.”

“I guess confusion is an emotion. But they seem so shallow.”

Unlike everything in the dining area of the building, the service passages were cold stone and plain wood. There was sparse voltaic lighting lining the walls, and we walked past a sleek mousing-cat that was making its way down the hall without concern, but this wasn’t an area designed for beauty. “You’ve known a stitched with more depth before,” Jessie said.

The hallway branched to the left and to the right, and terminated in the middle at a series of elevators and a flight of stairs. The elevators were where the stitched were coming from. We took the stairs down.

“I have?” I asked, taking the stairs two at a time.

“Wendy,” Jessie said.

“Not familiar.”

“Genevieve Fray’s stitched companion?”

I thought for a few seconds. “Oh. Yeah. I vaguely remember her having more personality to her. You never met her, did you?”

“Jamie wrote about her. He was disconcerted by how human she was. But I think even a shallow person is a person. Does someone stop being a person if they, for example, get a bad concussion? Or find themselves lobotomized?”

“Dying is one heck of a head injury.”

“It sure is. But do you see my point?”

“Gee,” I said. I hopped to the bottom of a landing and waited for Jessie. “If you look at it that way, it almost seems like society is somewhat fucked up.”

“Isn’t that a wild thought,” she deadpanned. “Point being, I’m asking you to be more considerate. I don’t think it’s right.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough.”

“Good,” she said, satisfied.

I wasn't much more sympathetic to the stitched than to anyone else, but I found that politics never spurred the fun kind of argument with Jessie. She said she was asking, but if I didn’t agree, she would hound me over the course of days, weeks, or months until I did.

Although, if I thought about it, I could see her point. I had been experimented on. I had lost years of my life in one direction, decades in the other. I'd been leashed. I may have been separated from stitched by my mind, but it wasn't impossible for me to think of them in the same way I did mice. Kindred enough people.

The flights of stairs were long. I started taking the steps one at a time so I could reach over and hold Jessie’s hand again. I had lots of energy, but I liked holding her hand more than I wanted to hop around. I squeezed, smiling up at her.

She reached down and poked my nose, except gravity made it more of a jab.

“Owie.”

“‘Oops.’”

“I swear.” I pointed at her with my free hand. “You have a sadistic streak.”

“It’s not like that. You’re a good punching bag because you’re durable.”

“Uh-huh. When are you going to ask to break out the whips and chains?”

“Never. It’s not like that.”

“Whatever you say, miss Jessica. I’m onto you.”

She let go of my hand, but I was already leaping down the stairs myself before she could shove me down them. She started taking the stairs more rapidly to follow me, boots tapping a quick rhythm.

I promptly leaped down the entire next flight.

“You come back here!” she called, chasing.

“What do you have planned for me, you sick woman?!” I yelled back, hearing her tap down after me as fast as she could.

“I am friendly and have no intent to hurt you,” she said, a little too calmly, at a dead run. “I have no bullets left.”

“Get away!” I shrieked. I sprinted and jumped down the rest of the flights of stairs, her pursuing me, me cackling.

As I reached the bottom, Jessie following about one flight of stairs behind me, I stopped and peeked around the exit of the stairwell. Noise from the kitchen echoed down the hall, all kinds of yelling and the clattering of dishes. It smelled delicious.

Jessie stepped up behind me, clamping her hands onto my shoulders. “Got you,” she said.

I forced an exaggerated full-body shiver. She snorted. In reality, I probably would have been happy if she had kept her hands there the entire time we made our escape. It felt just pure soul-scratching good when she touched me. It might have been a fun challenge to see if we could make our way out of somewhere while holding hands the entire time.

She bent down and smooched my cheek. Then she kissed my neck. The heat of her breath got a more genuine tension from me.

She pulled back, resting her chin on my head, draping her arms over my shoulders. I took her hands, lacing our fingers together. “Was it hard for you not to do this while we were out in public all day?” I asked. I was forming a delightful conclusion that Jessie really liked touching me, and really didn’t like being overly affectionate in front of people. That was so easy to tease with.

Jessie didn’t answer, but she did hold my hands tighter, absentmindedly swinging them, and snuzzled me up in a hug from behind. I leaned back into her. Everywhere we had contact, I wanted to squirm up closer to her, making the touch we already had firmer and adding more on top of it. “You smell nice,” I said.

“I tried that new lotion I bought,” she said.

“Vanilla,” I said.

“Vanilla and honey.”

“You’re my honey.”

She moved her face so that I could see she looked unimpressed. “Ugh,” she said. It wasn’t a noise. She actually enunciated it. That made me laugh.

“Maybe you’re not sweet enough to be my honey,” I said. “Maybe you’re my darling vinegar.”

“Ugh,” she repeated. She dug her fingernails into the skin on the back of my hands, with clear intent to hurt. “Moratorium on pet names.”

“You have pretty fingernails,” I said. “Would you ever varnish your nails?”

“That’s something you like?”

I thought about Jessie’s hands doing unspecified things. Then I thought about Jessie’s hands doing unspecified things with white varnish on. “I guess I would like it on a girl it suited. I’m not sure if it seems like your thing. I was just curious.”

She shrugged. “Probably not my thing.”

“You’re very au naturel, huh?”

“Yes.” She poked at my cheek. “Do you still want pudding, or are you full on macarons?”

“Of course I still want pudding. But we’re also going to grab the queerest thing we see and taste-test it.”

She leaned down. I turned to face her and stood on my toes. Still not enough.

“Little lower,” I said.

Jessie sighed, and braced her back against the wall. She sank down even lower with the wall as support. I stepped up to her, lightly setting one hand under her jaw, supporting–and possibly shamelessly squeezing–her ass with the other, and we had a real kiss while we weren't in front of everyone. When I pulled back, she gave me a smirk.

Then, with that, we approached the kitchen. It was a hectic mess, stitched going back and forth carrying prep and dishes in progress, lines of them sauteing and stirring and butchering. They were so busy that no one noticed as we slipped in amongst the fragrant steam, casually surveying the kitchen from near the entrance. It was a gigantic room, with almost too many walls in the way of stations to properly see everything. At one wall that looked more like a lab, people in combination labcoats and aprons worked. I watched one inject something into a tiny pig, and it went still, paralytic. And there were other living chefs, mainly those arranging things on plates to serve.

As for exits, there were two nearby–one broad double-door into what could have been a meat freezer, and one long gap in the wall where dishes were handed through to waiters and waitresses, who would ferry them off to where they needed to go.

“Through the storage, and then out through a gate there, where they take in deliveries?” I guessed.

Jessie nodded.

“I’m pretty sure the oddest thing here is whatever they’re doing to that pig,” I said. The pig in question was now turning a variety of colors a pig was never supposed to be. “But I don’t know about eating that.”

“I’m guessing it will be a roast when it’s done,” Jessie said. “The strangest thing that isn’t in progress is that.” She pointed at something on the line of done dishes.

I stood on tippy-toes, trying to get a better look. It appeared to be a frog-sized hexapodal animal, flayed out as if in a lab dissection, its innards turned into various bite-sized appetizers alongside it. There was something piled up in the chest cavity, too.

“Very, uh. Very artistic,” I said. “The Academy special, huh?”

“I don’t see how we take that to go,” she said, clearly not very interested in trying it either.

“Let’s focus on desserts. Do you see any interesting desserts?”

“You see the one with the tower of whipped cream in multiple colors?”

“That’s something. I’ve never seen fruits like those before.” Neither of us were massive fans of fruit-only desserts, though. We were both of the mindset that dessert should be something rich, a bit of decadence that you wouldn’t normally have other times.

Jessie shared my feelings there, as well, with an ambivalent Hmm.

“Is that one a dessert?” I asked. I pointed in the direction. “Those little thingies.”

She peered over. “Describe it?”

“The little bouquet of the reddish-white things. They look like they could be sweet. Like marshmallows.”

Jessie was silent for an oddly long second. “Are you making a joke I’m missing?” she asked.

“No. About what?”

“Sy,” she said slowly. “Those are shrimp. Can't you see from here?”

“I can see fine. But am I supposed to know what that is?”

“I–yes, Sy.” She blinked again, looking rather dumbfounded. “Sylvester, it’s shrimp.”

“Is it common?”

“Sy! It’s shrimp!”

“I’m not going to suddenly know what it is just because you keep saying the same thing!”

Suddenly, one of the chefs plating a dish happened to look our way. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard us, or if it was plain bad luck. Either way, he looked confused, and then miffed, setting down the bag of green sauce he was piping out.

“You're the one who started yelling about this ‘shrimp’ business,” I accused.

“It’s not a dessert,” Jessie concluded, still sounding a tinge out of sorts.

The chef approached us. We stood patiently.

“Hi,” I said once he neared, cutting him off right before he would want to speak. “Can we have a chocolate pudding?”

“Can you–” he looked doubly confused about this intrusion. “Are you guests? You are not supposed to be here,” he clarified, as if somehow we might be horribly lost.

“I know,” I said. “We’re just about to leave. But can we have some chocolate pudding first? We were supposed to be served a full-course meal, but we didn’t get any dessert.”

He was so baffled at the oddity of our presence, and our complete lack of guilt in it, that he almost wasn’t parsing that it was wrong. He looked increasingly less mad, and mainly just bewildered. “So then you would speak to your waiter about it,” he said slowly, in that dry ‘wow, you’re stupid’ sort of voice. “The kitchen is entirely off-limits to guests. You could be charged for this, and–”

“No, we can’t,” Jessie interrupted. Electing to play the vague, ominous power card. The place was just high-brow enough that he might second-guess himself and wonder if he’d stumbled into offending someone he shouldn’t have.

It did produce a momentary pause, as he seemed to consider it. We didn’t look remotely noble, or even very aristocratic. I was missing part of my suit. Jessie was without makeup but for a bit of lip shine, some of which might’ve been transferred to me, and not dressed according to any sort of high-status fashions.

But at the same time, there was always that tiny risk that we were someone.

“You,” he indicated to me, “know you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Well, no,” I said. “Guests aren’t really supposed to be in the kitchen. But we can be here. It’s allowed. I wanted her to have a fresh dessert.”

“Who,” he asked. “Says it’s allowed.” He was starting to become miffed again, clearly wanting to get back to his job. This would end in either us peacefully obtaining our pudding, or security being called, in which case we would take the pudding and run.

“His father,” Jessie said. It was perfect that she’d answered. Next he would ask–

“And who’s his father.”

And I wouldn’t know what to say, making it odd if Jessie had to cut in with my own father’s name for me, but since Jessie had been the one to say it–

“Edward Adkins,” Jessie said, like she’d known it her whole life.

That got a frown from him. “I didn’t know he had a son,” he said.

Which was less confident than ‘He doesn’t have a son.’

“He has a son,” Jessie pushed, putting on that tone she could do where whatever she was saying sounded so obvious. “And his son has a girl who wanted to come get the dessert she was promised.”

She finished by crossing her arms, and then looking at me, and very obviously flicking her eyes between me and the chef like she was saying Do something about him, baby, or I’m about to get into a snit.

I almost made myself laugh imagining Jessie saying ‘baby,’ but I kept my face perfectly straight and a little concerned. I put an arm around her waist, as if trying to appease her. “Pudding,” I reiterated, hammering it home plain and simple.

The chef shot a look back over his shoulder. Sure, he could phone in, find out if the guy Jessie had mentioned actually had a son. Risk making other customers wait too long. Risk having an important kid mad at him. Or he could take the path of least resistance and give us the pudding.

And, as both of us had been able to tell, he wasn’t the sort to react to oddities or intrusions with aggression. He was pragmatic, caring mainly about his task at hand, uninterested in power-playing. It wasn’t necessarily usual for a chef, but I could see it for someone successful in this environment.

“Chocolate pudding?” he asked, exasperated.

“One chocolate pudding to share,” I said. “And whatever your chef’s choice of the day for dessert is. In a container we can take on the go.”

He shot us a truly displeased look, but he hustled over to the counter.

Good act, I gestured. Fun night.

Jessie smiled, showing me a bit of teeth. “I like being able to do that,” she whispered. “It's fun.”

The chef returned a few moments later with one tall glass of chocolate pudding layered with delicious-looking brownies, and one vividly, alarmingly purple gelatin mold in an elaborate, swirling shape. I could see something inside of it, but I couldn’t tell what. It was set into a bowl that clearly wasn’t meant for it, with whipped cream piped around the edges with less than perfect care. The cream was crowned with little gold, shimmering orbs. He’d stuck two long pudding spoons into it.

Somehow, I got a bizarrely distinct whiff of disinfectant.

Jessie and I gave each other a look. There was a lot conveyed in that look.

I held the pudding, and she took the gelatin. It wibble-wobbled.

“Good,” I said. “Thank you.”

Then, before he could ask any further questions, we trotted right past him and out the double doors, into the big storage area. There were only stitched there, retrieving items from shelves, carving up hybrid meat livestock that had been killed over red indoors-grass, that sort of thing. There was a closed roll-down gate to the outdoors on the far side, and a normal door next to it. We took that door, me holding it open for Jessie while she carried the gelatin with both hands. It took us out into the street.

I looked up at the sky. Cloudy and dim, and a bit misty, but not about to rain on our treats. There was a nice, cool late-evening breeze. “We should be out of here before he actually realizes that guy doesn’t have a son,” I said. “Or before security expands the sweep to the outside the premises.”

“Our hotel is a half-hour’s walk. There’s a park two blocks away if you want to eat outside.”

“Sounds good,” I said. I linked my non-pudding arm through the crook of Jessie’s arm.

“I’m a little worried you’re going to move out of step, I’ll trip, and this will go flying and whack some old lady in the face, or something.”

I laughed at the mental image. “That would be a good use of it!” I said.

“No. No getting out of it. We’re trying it. It will probably even be good,” she said reasonably.

I wrapped my arm around her waist, instead, and lifted the pudding up towards her face. “First bite before we walk?” I asked.

“Why do you keep trying to feed me things?” she asked. “What do you want me to do, lick it?”

“So she says,” I said. “So she says.”

She scrunched her eyes shut. “I walked into that. Quit. You’re giving me ideas.”

“It really wasn’t a set-up. I wanted to offer you the first bite.” Because I was feeling all affectionate, but I couldn’t squeeze her properly while she was carrying a gelatin bowl with two hands. I tipped my head with very exaggerated curiosity, except it actually wasn’t exaggerated at all from how I felt. “What ideas are those, perchance?”

She ignored me, and licked a tiny bite off the top of the pudding. It was such a funny little lick, all stiff, moving her head more than her tongue and then retracting her tongue into her mouth. Like eating it without a spoon was some great indignity.

“It’s very good,” she commented.

“Have I ever told you you are so adorable?”

“No.”

We started walking, my arm still around her waist, her leading the way down a cobbled street to wherever the park was.

“You are. You are so adorable.”

She looked at me like I was insane. “Okay, Sy,” she said. Then, diverging completely, she said “Try a bite.”

I licked, too, picking the same spot where she had licked. In honor of my recently found appreciation for Jessie spit. It was absolutely delicious chocolate. “Mm,” I said. “Helen would be having the time of her life, if she could be here right now.”

“More for us,” Jessie said. “Please try not to summon Helen on our date, though.”

“I’m not. I’m not. What were your ideas, miss Jessie?”

“No,” she said. “Save it.”

“What were they? What were you envisioning doing?”

“Save it.”

“Is this related to our dinner conversation topic?”

“How do you even remember that?”

“I have a memory for the important things. Like your ideas.”

“Put the pudding down for a second so I can hit you.”

“Your hands are tied.”

“I could kill you with this,” she said.

Alright. So a heavy glass bowl did make a good impromptu weapon. “You won’t endanger our dessert,” I said.

“It’s tempting,” she said.

I gave her a big grin. “I tempt you in lots of ways, don’t I? The feeling's mutual.”

Stone-faced, but actually sort of red, she lifted the bowl up and mostly-gently brought it down to tap my head.

“Agh,” I said. “Oww. No. Who’m I…where am I?” I pretended, making my voice woozy without really putting any effort into sounding pained. “No…the agony. My split skull.” I wobbled back and forth as I walked, dragging an annoyed Jessie with me in a swaying path. The gelatin wobbled with me.

“Sy,” Jessie said as I dragged her. “You know how me saying ‘save it’ implies that there’s a later I’m saving it for, at which point you get to find out? Like, say, tonight?”

I instantly stopped, perking up. “Yeah?”

“Keep that up, and you’re not finding out.”

“I doubt that,” I muttered, although I didn’t resume wobbling. I wasn’t actually sure if Jessie’s enthusiasm, to put the tendencies I’d discovered politely, or her obstinacy, would win out.

At my words, she threateningly raised the bowl again.

“Okay,” I said. I held my free hand up in a placating gesture. “Sorry miss, sorry.”

She lowered the bowl, and shot me a sidelong glance as we kept walking along the cobbled path. Carriages trundled by. I set my arm back around her waist, feeling awfully pleased about the state of affairs.

“About shrimp,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Shrimp? Saltwater crustaceans?”

“What, like crabs?”

“Popular finger food at parties? Pink? Curled? Usually served over ice, with cocktail sauce? This isn't ringing any bells?”

“How would I know any of this? We’ve never gone to a party.”

“You are so bizarre,” she said. “You are such a bizarre, fascinating creature.”

“I do fascinate you, don't I?” I said cheerfully.

“That’s a way to put it,” she said, giving me a very, very sidelong glance.

“And I do make your heart pound, don't I, Jessie?” I said, walking a little more on my toes to lean up towards her face.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Generally for horrible reasons.”

“And I do make your loins burn, don't I, Jessie?”

“Oh–” she said. She fought me away, shoving out of my grip. “That's terrible, Sy, that's awful. Never, ever say ‘loins’ again. I'm banning it.”

I jogged to keep up with her. “You didn’t answer the question! You didn’t deny they burn!”

“Not–”

I got my arm back around her, hugging her tight.

“–after that, they don’t.”

“But you’re admitting that at some point tonight, or historically, your loins have been set aflame–”

She threateningly raised the bowl a third time, even redder than before. “I'm going to do it,” she said. “I'm really going to do it.”

“You will not, you don't want to squander your opportunities with me.”

And we carried on like that for all the way to the park, teasing and prodding while I kept my arm around her waist.