fandomhigh | Home Ec, Tuesday, Period 1

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Home Ec, Tuesday, Period 1

"Right." Eliot clapped his hands. Too much had happened in too short an amount of time -- again -- and he was full of tightly controlled manic energy. "Today's project takes for freaking ever, so we're going to jump right in." He dropped a box onto the teacher's desk and pulled out a sack of flour, a canister of salt, a packet of yeast, a bowl, and a mug. "We're makin' bread."

He looked over the ingredients and rolled his eyes, then picked up the mug, spun it once around on his finger, and tore open the flour. "Nevermind that this process is so goddamn time consuming that almost no one in the modern era bothers doin' it themselves unless they got a machine or they get paid for it." He scooped out two and a half mugs full of flour and tossed them into the bowl. "At least the recipe we're workin' with is dead simple. It's also real specific that this ain't the kind of bread you punch and slam around when you're kneadin' it, but if that's what you're feelin' today -- I ain't gonna blame you a bit." He added the salt, yeast, and water and stuck his hands in. "You can use a spoon for the mixing if you like, but honestly, this stuff is gonna get all over your hands later anyway. Might as well dive right in the deep end right away." He looked up from the dough and around at the students. "The ingredients are on your tables, guys, get to it. Sooner you get it mixed, sooner you can goof off half the class while we let it rise. Then maybe I'll show y'all how to whip up a nice bruschetta to put on this stuff once it's all done."

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Hyacinthe never shied away from getting his hands dirty and happily spent the first part of class stretching and pulling the dough, losing himself in the muscle memory of it.

Lucille glanced at Hyacinthe, who clearly knew how to do this, while her own dough just stuck to her fingers.

And perhaps she could be forgiven for thinking about other things too when she watched his hands.

Hyacinthe felt someone watching him and glanced up. He grinned when he saw it was Lucille--and then that grin deepened into a smirk when he saw how intently she was watching his hands. "Enjoying the assignment, cherie?" he asked, his fingers massaging the dough in his hand.

Lucille blushed a little, embarrassed that he had noticed. She quickly shifted her gaze to her own dough, holding up a sticky hand.

"I'm not sure I do."

"Would you care for some assistance?" he offered, setting his dough aside to rise. His favorite part of making bread was the part where he could ignore it for awhile to do more interesting things instead. "As a gentleman, 'tis my duty to help a lady out of whatever I can."

Like, say...clothing, for example. But difficulty with bread could also count.

Lucille felt she had an excuse, because she actually did need assistance. "Please," she said, smiling a little at Hyacinthe. "The dough refuses to be anything but sticky."

"It just needs a bit more warmth and attention," he said, joining Lucille at her station. "And then you'll find it is quite willing to do as requested. May I?"

He held his hands over the bowl, not wanting to plunge right in.

Lucille nodded towards the bowl. "Of course." She added: "Warmth and attention?"

"Of course," Hyacinthe said. "'Tis what brings out the best in all things. Now, do not be afraid to get your hands dirty. You'd be surprised how easily they wash off."

He slid his hands into the dough and struck up a rhythm. "And do not just use your hands, or they will get tired very quickly. Use your whole body if you need."

Lucille dug her fingers into the dough again, her knuckles accidentally nudging Hyacinthe's as she tried to copy his rhythm. She was quite unaware that she had flour in her hair.

Smiling a little, she said: "Have you done this often then?"

Hyacinthe thought it was incredibly charming. She appeared too often the proper miss; she needed someone to muss her from time to time.

He linked his fingers with hers as they brushed past, shifting closer so he could wrap an arm around her and place his hands atop hers, did she allow it. All the better to show her how it was done, of course!

"Many times," he agreed. "Usually in the winter. In summer and fall, the harvest is good and bread is cheap. But in the winter, the price of flour becomes dear and baked bread is dearer still. Becomes cheaper to make the bread ourselves and bake it in our own oven."

Hyacinthe was very welcome to wrap his arms around her. Had she thought about it perhaps Lucille would have been surprised how relaxed she had become around him. Perhaps sh was beginning to occasionally notice kindness, at least when it was to her advantage.

Such as when he helped her to make bread in this way.

"At home snow storms sometimes make roads hard to travel during the winter. Making bread might prove useful." Lucille blushed a little, realizing that she had more or less told him they would not be able to afford servants when she returned home.

If he noticed the slip, he didn't react to it. Of course, having servants wasn't his first assumption anyway.

"Ah, then you get a lot of snow then?" he asked, his arms warm around her. His hands slipped over hers, guiding her into the rhythm of kneading the dough to make sure it was properly mixed before stretching. ~~Somewhere, Unchained Melody started playing~~ "Not so in the City of Elua. We get some snow each winter, though it lasts maybe a week at the coldest before melting away again."

Re: Make bread!

crimson_sister - 2017-01-26 18:10 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Make bread!

vrajna_kralis - 2017-01-27 14:12 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Make bread!

crimson_sister - 2017-01-27 18:03 (UTC) - Expand

Eliot made his way over during a quieter moment of the class period, under the auspices of checking out Hyacinthe's bread progress.

. . . That was some fine looking bread, actually.

"So, uh. I owe you an apology."

He was better with flatbreads, actually, but a loaf of peasant loaf was well within the skills he'd learned from his mother.

"Oh?" Hyacinthe asked, turning towards Eliot, though he kept one eye on his dough to make sure he didn't over-knead it. "Then you realized that I am not a liar." Beat. "About the dromonde."

It was an important distinction.

Very important.

"We rescued the bird," Eliot confirmed. "Or, you know, the girl named after a bird. Which was a little bit cryptic."

Eliot, you're apologizing. Don't get technical.

Hyacinthe was going to raise an eyebrow at that. Because, c'mon, Eliot. You could apologize better than that.
'
"I'd say 'twas less cryptic and more...not immediately obvious," he observed. "And I never promised the dromonde to be easy. Sometimes 'tis even misleading."

It wasn't his part to explain, only see.

Eliot reminded himself that he was not here to argue semantics. "Anyway. Thanks. We managed to get her back, and I ain't seen Hardison so happy in months."

That was fine. Next time, Hyacinthe would charge him double for it.

"I'm glad then, 'twas useful," he said. "Your friend was in trouble?"

Double nothing was still nothing, kid.

"She got herself stuck in a bad situation, yeah. We'd all but given up on her."

He had. Hardison had refused to. Words couldn't express how glad Eliot was to be wrong. Even if part of him wished it was Kathy who'd been on the other end of that portal instead.

And a tiny part of Hardison resenting Kathy for putting Raven into that situation in the first place.

"I'm glad she's made it home now," Hyacinthe said. "And that the dromonde could help, even in some small way in making that happen."

"Me too. I'm sorry I assumed you were scamming me."

There. That was a proper apology.

. . . He really wanted to throw 'but we had just been talking about scamming people' on the end of it. Because even when you were forty, sometimes you ended up a little bit twelve.

Which made it a terrible time to launch into a scam! At least without knowing the mark better first.

"'Tis of no consequence," Hyacinthe said. "Not an unusual conclusion to come to when dealing with a Tsingano."

"I ain't --" Eliot hauled back on the knee-jerk 'I'm not racist' response. "One of my partners got hurt by a guy doin' a cold read on her, while back. It's . . . a little bit of a sore spot sometimes."

"A charlatan." Hyacinthe's lip curled. "There are many tricks we will play on the gadje to part them from coin, but no Tsingani would debase the dromonde so. We have little enough to call our own as it is."

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