fandomhigh | Black Magic Cookery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! | Tuesday

Nina was exhausted.

She'd made it back just in time for Summer's class and, like, that had left her not much time to work with her own class.

Ugh.

Sure, she could've skipped Summer's class but then she'd have felt bad about it and she enjoyed the ranting even if she was conflicted on the things Summer was ranting about…

On the bright side, there wasn't much to set up. No one else really seemed to be using this room, so it was a matter of sticking the spices at each station and checking the fridge to see what they were going to make today.

"Gooooooooooooooooood moooooooooooooorning!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" she said cheerfully, turning away from the fridge as her class showed up, with a bowlful of tomatoes and another of shellfish. Nina beamed at them as she wandered from station to station, leaving a few tomatoes and a few fish at each place. "Today we're branching off from eggs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

She was already predicting a few comments on this day, oh yes she was.

Nina took her spot at the front of the class with the left over tomatoes and shellfish.

"I'm starving!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" she announced, grinning at them. "So, like, I want you to look at what I've given you and guess what we're making today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Were they likely to get it right?

Probably not. But that was part of the fun.

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This was venturing a bit beyond the oppressive hand of patriarchal expectations right about now, causing Summer to bite her lip a little and think maybe this was being a little more than she could chew.

"Owe them for what?" she finally asked. "Being decent human beings?"

Sorry, Summer?

"They didn't have to," she repeated. "It would be nice if, like, everyone always did the decent thing but even if everyone did--they didn't have to. They could've just gotten rid of me."

Summer was quiet for another moment.

"I get that," she said. "I really do, Nina. The only reason I'm even here is because my parents' car broke down on the way to the clinic. They tried to get rid of me, but they messed it up. And my mom will never let me forget it, either, because I basically ruined her life."

She shrugged, as if it was nothing, as if it was fine, but everything else about it suggested otherwise.

"How are you going to even pay a debt like that back? You can't
Not really..."

She gave Nina another melted ice cream smile.

"They could have just gotten rid of you," she said. "But they didn't. And that's something to be grateful for, but you don't owe them for choices that they made. Especially if that debt is something that can't ever be paid back. It's not like you could agree to it, right?"

"Well, no..........," she admitted, part of her desperately sorry for Summer and part of her just...

Conflicted.

She was really tired of feeling conflicted all the time and, like, lately that seemed to be all she was.

"But, like, I feel like I'm obligated to do something about my debt anyway?"

"Of course you do," said Summer, quickly, easily, because boy, had she been there before. "And that's great, it really is, but if that debt means always having to be the smiling, pretty girl when literally no one can be that all the time, then you're always going to feel like you owe them, you'll never be able to free yourself from something like that. You can still be grateful, and pay them back, and also be, you know, flawed and imperfect and have messy hair sometimes and want to be more than an accessory. Love shouldn't be conditional, Nina, it's not a contract. That's really the whole point in all of this."

Edited 2020-05-26 23:15 (UTC)

Nina slanted a sideways glance at her.

"The only reason my adoptive parents adopted me was so they wouldn't have to look out for my brother any more," she said, abruptly. "That's my job."

She didn't think Prompto had realized that part of it all. She didn't want to know if he knew, honestly, and hadn't gone looking about that. Some things, really, it was better off not knowing.

But, like. Love was kind of a contract.

And Summer was going to slide that sideways glance right back at her.

"Do you love your parents?" she asked.

"I've met them once," she said, shrugging. "We talk a fair bit but it's all......... work-related.

"I admire them. I like them. I don't know them well enough to love them."

And she didn't expect them to love her either, though she did hope they liked, if not her, the work she did.

"I'm too old to expect parents to come out of nowhere to love me anyway."

"You don't need them, anyway," said Summer. "You know getting adopted didn't give you worth, right? You had that already..."

Summer sighed, stopping a bit to rub her eyes before looking at Nina again. "Can I tell you something? It might be a little morbid and dark, but it's something my brother told me once when I was having a really hard time dealing with my own sense of self-worth, and I think about it a lot, whenever I start to feel worthless or crappy or lost..."

"It gave me things I didn't have," she said softly.

A family. A last name. A room in a home that was just hers.

"What is it?"

"Okay," said Summer, who took a deep breath, because she was pretty sure the only other person she talked to about this before was BDG, "so, some context: my brother is not really my brother. I mean, he is, but not the same version of my brother I grew up with. This version of my brother came to my world because his world was pretty much destroyed, and he and my grampa died in my world, a d so they took their places without telling anyone, and they're buried in the backyard and my parents don't even know, but anyway, when he told me that, he also told me this: that, you know, nobody actually exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere, everyone's going to die, so...come have some ice cream."

She let that linger a moment.

"Actually," she amended, "he said, 'come watch TV,' but I changed it a little, because, you know..."

She gestured toward their nearing destination. "Ta-dahhhh. Ice cream."

Yaaay.

"I............."

Why was your world so very, very strange, Summer?

"I can see why he'd........ say that?" she said doubtfully, even as they approached Ice Cream. "But, like, what if you want to belong somewhere?"

She DID warn you, Nina!

"Then make a place for yourself," said Summer, shrugging as she reached for the door. "Like my brother did. Like I did when I went to go help Kanan. Like any of us do whenever we want to belong somewhere. The point is, everything in our lives is such a colossal crapshoot, Nina. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. In the end, who is even going to care if you weren't always the smiling, pretty girl? We're all just lucky not to be worm food yet."

"There's more to living than not being dead yet," she protested.

"There is," Summer agreed. "And there more to it than being the smiling, pretty girl, too."

Black Magic Cookery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! | Tuesday | Period 3

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