Apple Pie

 

The pie had been trouble from the very start, he remembered as he watched his sister interact with her active, clever friends. Even the ingredients had been cursed; it had taken him days to find the right apples to suit his specifications, and the last straw had almost come when a massive storm had knocked out power all over the city the evening he’d chosen to do a trial run. The generator he had bought during the war had sputtered to life, giving enough juice to cook his experimental pie. His roommate had devoured half during that same evening, leaving the other half for his sister’s scrutiny. It had held up. She’d loved it.

Thus leading to this very moment when he watched the women speculating his second pie.

He could only shake his head in disbelief. It was a pie. It wasn’t Leonardo daVinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. It wasn’t the wheel, or the printing press, or the airplane. Hell, it wasn’t even that annoying little vacuum thing that moved around on the floor on its own (what was that stupid thing called again?). It was a bleeding pastry in a pan with some fruit in it. Hardly anything to get excited over.

“Are they gonna get a piece or what?” asked Duo Maxwell as he eyed the females beside his friend and roommate. “They’re over there staring at it like it’s gonna jump up and do the Lambada.”

Heero Yuy said nothing. He didn’t have an answer for the question, so why waste words in a non-answer? The other members of the intimate dinner party initiated by his little sister—his comrades, minus Quatre Winner, the master of the house—found themselves clustered around him. The room had suddenly become divided like they were at some adolescent school dance—girls on one side, boys on the other. Most of the noise in the room came from the female side, which was no surprise. They tended to make more noise than they did anyway, with their chattering and laughter.

“I’m telling you the truth,” Crystilline Yuy, better known as Crys, insisted as she received dubious looks from her friends. “My brother made that pie with his own two hands.”

Jessica Thomas, a tall young woman with curly auburn hair, guffawed at the statement. “Come on. Really, Crys? From what I heard about your brother, he probably wouldn’t know which side of the whisk is the right one.”

“Heero is capable of more than glaring at people and pissing them off,” Crys told her friends. “I’m telling you, he made the pie with his own two hands.”

Beside Crys, blonde and blue-eyed Jennifer Dunne shrugged. She looked hungrily at the pie—she hadn’t eaten much that day—and sighed as its aroma filled the room with a familiar warmth that reminded her of home. “How much do we know about him, Jess? We can’t jump to conclusions just because of second- or even third-hand information.”

“I’m just saying,” Jessica said. “I don’t believe he made it, and I won’t until I see him do it with my own two eyes.” She glanced down at her watch. “And what are we waiting for again?”

As if on cue, Quatre Winner walked into the dining room at that moment, his gentle presence drawing comfort and ease into the room. It continually became easy for the newcomers—Crys’s friends—to see how he was at the helm of the Winner Corporation at such a young age. Everyone turned to him instinctively, waiting for him to speak.

“That was Miss Danie on the telephone,” Quatre announced. “She is going to be a little bit late, so she assured me that we could start dinner without her.” He gestured to the beautifully made table as servants came in with dinner. “Make yourselves at home, everyone.”

After the meal was set on the table, the nine took their seats at the far end closest to the entrance. Quatre was rightfully at the head with Crys to his left and Heero to his right. The table was made to comfortably seat fifty; however, since there were only ten of them (counting the tardy Daniella Thomas), they only needed a small portion of the grand space. Beside Heero were Duo, then the silent Trowa Barton, and finally the sullen Wufei Chang. Sitting beside Crys were Gretchen Thomas, Jessica’s pigtailed little sister, then Jennifer, and finally Jessica herself.

As food was being passed around, Gretchen started off the dinner dialogue by looking at Heero and asking conversationally, “So, Heero—how did you learn how to cook?”

Duo barely resisted choking on his food and swallowed the roast beef quickly. Heero did not know Gretchen very well nor had he any conversation with her until this moment because he had deemed the Thomas sisters and their cousin Jennifer a bad influence on his twin sister. As the youngest in the room, Gretchen was a little less intimidated by Heero than everyone else, her youth giving her a sort of innocent oblivion.

Quatre admired her for the act. The other guys thought she was crazy.

“It was mostly trial and error,” Heero finally responded after a deep silence.

“Yeah, probably more error than trial,” Crys teased, earning a glare from her brother. She wasn’t afraid of him—really—but unlike Gretchen, she knew full well what and who he was. “I remember that time you made me hot chocolate with the baking chocolate. Or the time you accidentally put cinnamon in the chili.”

Duo made a face. “Please don’t remind me about that. I tasted that for weeks.”

“But after that, Heero became a very awesome cook,” Crys revealed to her friends. “He makes a mean manicotti that you would positively die after tasting.”

Jessica chuckled. “Okay, now you’re telling jokes. I’m going to choke with laughter imagining Heero Yuy in an apron brandishing a spatula and stuffing pasta.”

“Kiss the cook,” Jennifer supplied. “His apron’s definitely gotta say Kiss the cook.”

“Who the hell would kiss him?” Jessica asked her cousin. “Julia Child?”

“After tasting his manicotti, probably,” Crys replied, making the other girls laugh. Duo pursed his lips together to conceal his smile as Heero eyed him and speared a baby carrot with his fork. Trowa and Wufei said nothing at this point and kept eating.

“Do you cook, Miss Jessica?” Quatre inquired, wanting to get the subject off of Heero before someone got hurt.

 “Do I?” Jessica slanted him a smug look. “I tell you, Quatre, you haven’t lived till you’ve tasted my crab cakes. Simply divine. I’ll have to make them and bring them next time.”

Duo gave her a wide-eyed stare. “Jessica? You cook? You? I’m shocked. I thought you’d have someone to do it for you, some lowly Hobbit-looking dude from the Lord of the Rings.”

“Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I need to know how to cook,” Jessica told him. “But yes, Duo, I do know how to cook. I studied a little culinary arts in college as a diversion and found I liked it. There is something very methodical about cooking. You have to have a strategy, the proper utensils—”

“You’re a woman,” Wufei commented, interrupting her. “Of course you need to know how to cook.”

It was the girls’ turn to be afraid that one of their own was about to deliver violence upon one of the members of the other side. Jessica leveled a deep-aqua-eyed glare upon the younger Chinese man. Duo squirmed slightly in his seat. “So you think cooking is for women? I hope not, because that would make Heero a woman.”

Jennifer let out a snort and immediately covered her mouth. Gretchen nudged her while Crys glared at Wufei.

“You better not answer that,” Crys snapped. “You don’t want to see me lose my temper.”

“You have a weak woman temper, Yuy,” Wufei told her.

Crys rose to her feet and glared down at Wufei, Prussian blue eyes flashing. It became quite apparent once again that she and Heero were related. “You’re about to see me pissed off, Wufei, and I assure you there’s nothing weak or woman about my temper.”

“Don’t mess with my sister, Chang,” Heero warned from his end of the table before Wufei could respond. It was then that Wufei went quiet and concentrated on his meal. Quatre placed a hand on Crys’s forearm, a gentle, firm gesture that did not go unnoticed by everyone else at the table. Crys battled back her anger and sat back down in her chair.

Crys sucked in a breath and said, “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

Quatre nodded. “I agree, Crys.” He looked to Gretchen who was nibbling on a snap pea. “Crys tells me that you dance very well, Miss Gretchen.”

“Huh?” It took a second for the remark and the fact that he was talking to her to sink in. Being the youngest at the table also made her the most susceptible to Quatre’s kind-hearted manner, so she had a little bit of a crush on him—one she wouldn’t dare act upon. Especially after seeing Crys almost laying the smackdown on Wufei. “Oh!” She laughed nervously. “Yes, Jessica taught me to dance when we were all little.”

“All? You mean that there are more of you?” This came from Duo.

“Well,” Jessica began, “there’s me, then there’s Claudia-Michelle, the twins, and Gretchen over there. When you have that many sisters, you have to keep them occupied somehow. So I taught them how to dance ballet. It stuck with Gretchen while the other three went off and did their own thing.”

“So what is it that Danie does anyway?” Crys wanted to know. “She’s pretty secretive about what she does for a living.”

“She’s a first-level admin at Arashi Corp,” Jennifer explained. “She ends up coming home late and going off to strange places at the drop of a hat.” She frowned at a roll. “I don’t like it.”

“It’s better than the alternative,” Jessica reminded her cousin cryptically. She looked to Trowa. “Could you pass the potatoes, please?”

After that they talked of more entertaining subjects, ranging from the fluffiness of animated movies to the gravity of politics. As Jessica was having an energetic but good-natured debate with Quatre about total pacifism after the dinner dishes had been cleared away and they were seated in the den, A Maganac entered the room with a dark-haired young woman in black slacks and blouse following behind. Everyone paused, attention diverted as the tall Arabic man said, “Master Quatre, Miss Daniella has arrived.”

“Thank you very much, Aiseem,” Quatre told him with genuine gratitude as he rose to his feet. Aiseem disappeared, revealing the woman that had been standing behind him. Quatre walked up and greeted her. “Good evening, Miss Danie. I take it work ran a little late tonight?”

“There were some complications,” affirmed a tired but sociable Danie Thomas. “I apologize for my lateness, Quatre.”

“It is quite all right. Have a seat, please?”

“I will, thank you.” She walked around the room, leaving her freesia scent in her wake. Crys patted the empty space beside her and Danie lowered herself to it. “So what did I miss?” She chuckled then. “Well, other than dinner of course.”

“You’re just in time for dessert,” Crys announced. “We’re about to have warm apple pie and vanilla ice cream.”

“Ooh—sounds like I did come just in…” Danie paused then, taking in her relatives’ faces. They suddenly appeared uneasy about dessert, and, since Danie had missed dinner, she didn’t know why. “Um, what’s the matter with you guys?”

“They’re afraid of the pie,” Duo answered instead.

Danie let out a snorting giggle. “No, seriously, Duo. What’s going on? My sisters wouldn’t be afraid of a silly pie unless it was mincemeat—or Marilyn Manson made it.” Silence. Danie’s brows furrowed as she mused over this. “Wait. Marilyn Manson made us a pie?”

Jessica shook her head. She would’ve said something about having a blonde moment but Jennifer would have kicked her ass. “Dee—don’t think too hard right now. You’ll burst a blood vessel.”

“Whatever, Jessica.” Danie turned to Crys. “So who made this pie that’s got my sisters all worried? It wasn’t Wufei was it?”

Wufei opened his mouth, but Crys silenced him with a glare. “Heero made it, actually.”

Pause. Danie burst out into hysterical laughter.

This time Heero spoke. “Is it really so astonishing that I could bake a mere pie?”

Danie answered after her laughter trailed off. “Truthfully, it is, a little.” She looked at everyone else for commiseration. “I mean, don’t you all agree?” Jessica, Jennifer, and Gretchen chimed in with similar sentiments. Wufei shrugged.

“We are all capable of amazing things others wouldn’t believe,” Quatre said. “Heero just so happens to be good at cooking.” Quatre paused as Aiseem entered the room with the dessert cart. “Thank you for setting this up, Aiseem.” Aiseem nodded, disappearing again. Quatre rose and portioned the pie and ice cream out for his guests and Crys passed them along. After everyone had gotten a portion, he turned around and watched.

Crys and Duo, who had tasted the first apple pie, watched everyone else, but they watched them right back, waiting for someone to take the first bite.

“Well?” Quatre prompted. “Everyone, don’t hesitate to dig in. I’m sure it tastes fine.”

Nobody moved.

“If no one eats this, Heero will kill us all,” Duo reminded everyone, earning an indignation glare from Heero. The others, save him and Crys, scrambled for their plates and tried to force themselves to eat. And Heero himself wasn’t going to touch it until he got the others’ opinions.

“Eat some, Jessica!” Danie said in a loud whisper.

“I’ll eat some when you eat some!” Jessica shot back. “Unless you’re too chicken to do it.”

With a toss of her hair, Danie quickly shoved the forkful of the pie into her mouth as if she’d been double-dog dared to eat cow manure. She chewed for a few moments before her face changed. Her eyes filled with astonishment, and as she swallowed, she seemed to be processing this in her tired, overworked brain. Then an expression of incredulity graced her features.

Pause.

“Um, so, how is it, Danie?” Jennifer prodded.

“Are you okay?” Gretchen asked.

“Are you experiencing any kind of food poisoning symptoms?” Jessica inquired. Gretchen nudged her pointedly.

Danie did nothing for a long moment before she stood and strode to the dessert cart, fork in hand like as if she were arming herself for some sort of war. With her back to the others, she stuck her fork into the un-portioned pie and came away with a big chunk. The flavors of the baked apples, sugar, and spices melded on her tongue and sent a shiver of enjoyment. As she chewed, she emitted a low, passionate moan that was a bit…awkward to hear, to say in the least.

“Holy shit,” Duo breathed. “She’s having an orgasm like that chick from that movie.”

“Yuy—what the hell did you put in that damned pie?” Wufei demanded in a stage whisper.

“If she starts singing ‘Genie in a Bottle’ I’m calling Poison Control,” Jessica muttered.

Danie let out another moan as she took another bite. Gretchen and Jennifer both blushed red and looked away.

“Quatre—do something!” Crys hissed in a stage whisper.

Shaking himself out of bafflement, Quatre loudly cleared his throat. Danie whirled around, and everyone looked at her in wonder. Even Trowa and Wufei had their mouths open wide.

“What?” Danie gazed at their bemused faces, fork poised a few inches away from her unpainted mouth and a crumb resting on its left side. She looked down at her crumby shirtfront and quickly discarded the fork. “Oh. Oops,” she said sheepishly. “Sorry.” She cleared her throat and wiped her mouth. “Um…yeah…nice pie, Heero. You’ll have to make it again…sometime.”

Eight pairs of eyes slid in Heero’s direction, watching him for his reaction.

“Thank you,” he said simply. The pie had been worth some of the trouble, after all…

Feeling chastised, Jennifer, Gretchen, and Jessica started on their pie and didn’t doubt Heero’s cooking skills ever again. Thankfully, they didn’t reach… Well, never mind.