Piece of Cake
Notes: Everything else I'm working on it heavy, so I decided to kill a little time filling this for the fallout kinkmeme.
I looked at so many pictures of pie before I wrote this and now I'm starving. In lieu of reviews, please send virtual sweets.
The first time she goes into the Dugout, she's so overwhelmed by the newness of everything that she misses a solid seventy percent of what's happening around her. A bar - or is it a hotel? - in the old dugout at Fenway is weird enough, and there's so many new people to meet and things to try to understand, and Piper's explaining things to her in a low, fast voice. She talks to Vadim, gets a beer, and drinks it. She talks to Yefim, buys a room, and blacks out for something like eleven hours. Then she's gone again, for weeks or maybe longer.
It's hard to keep track of time in the wasteland.
The next time she returns to the Dugout Inn, she's older and wiser. This time she knows to catalog as many things as possible the moment she steps into a new place, the better to catch potential threats before they manifest.
It's on this visit that she sees the Port-a-Diner.
At first she's revolted - how can they keep 200 year-old food in here? That can't possibly be sanitary. The thought makes her cringe, then laugh at her own prissiness. Maybe she could afford to be so easily disgusted before, but once you've eaten a few irradiated centuries-old Salibury steaks, even roasted radroach starts to look enticing.
Indeed, the plates in there are pretty revolting, a horrorshow of decay and mold, each one more frightening than the last, even to her greatly-reduced standards.
All but one. And oh, is it beautiful.
The plate itself is pale blue, the same color as a robin's egg, with white scalloped edges. It reminds her of her wedding china, with the pale stripe around the rim. Not a chip, not a smudge; it's as perfect and pristine as if it just came out of the box.
Atop the plate sits a piece of pie, a blissfully creamy cheesecake with a crushed graham cracker crust. It's blanketed in strawberry sauce in that signature pink that tells you it was made from real strawberry, not some goopy, overly sweet imitation but the real deal. When she leans forward against the glass, she can see the small dark seeds from the skin of the berry. The pie is topped with a fluff of whipped cream that somehow has retained its shape despite the bombs, despite the destruction, despite the drunks who probably pound on the glass every night, trying to free it from its glass case.
It makes her think of Sleeping Beauty, locked away in her castle, with a thicket between her and the rest of the world. Safe, tucked away, and so enticing she licks her lips without even realizing it.
She's never seen anything so beautiful.
Hoping against hope, she presses the button on the Port-a-Diner. It's jammed or something - it doesn't depress under her finger, and a whine escapes her lips; really? It's so hard to have something so beautiful and pure dangled before you - with just a flimsy pane of glass between them - and not be able to reach it.
"You want pie? Too bad," Vadim chuckles from his place behind the bar, ripping her back to reality. She walks over to him, gives him a few caps and takes the warm beer he hands her gratefully.
It's amazing the things you get used to, the longer you have to deal with them. She doesn't even wince at the temperature of it as she sips it.
Across the room, the pie calls to her. She can feel it, deep in the pit of her stomach, a primal, clawing hunger.
"A lot of people try to get it out?" She asks Vadim, aiming for casual and failing.
"Hah! Only everybody who walks through the door," the Russian laughs. "Everybody hit button, but nothing happen. That pie be here long after the rest of us dead and buried."
She nods, not really listening. Under the twinkling lights of the Port-a-Diner, it glows. She sets her beer down and walks back, putting both her hands on the glass to stare at it again, like a kid at Christmas staring through a store window at the present she wants most in the world. Again, unconsciously, she licks her lips.
It probably tastes terrible by now, she thinks to herself. The crust is probably woody and the filling hard. The whipped cream has to be revolting.
She wants nothing more in the world than to find out.
Against her better judgment and to snickers from the other patrons, the ones she didn't even realize were watching, she presses the button again. This time it depresses easily, the red button clicking back into place immediately. The claw extends, adjusts its position, and lowers over the plate.
When it comes back up, the plate is held precariously in its grasp. It shuttles over to the drop and then, moments later, she's holding the plate in her hands. Around her, the room is silent. If she looked up, she'd see the whole inn staring, but she can't, she can't take her eyes off the exquisite prize in her hands.
"I can't believe she did it," a whisper comes from the crowd.
"All I did was press the button," she murmurs back. "It was a piece of cake."
"I think is pie, yes?" Yefim's voice this time. She doesn't answer because Scarlett appears at her elbow, a fork in hand. She takes it, gratefully, and finds a place to sit.
The whole world seems to narrow to a pinprick: just her, and her perfectly-preserved pie.
Her fork slides in easily - the filling isn't crumbly or stiff at all, but smooth, supple. She dabs a bit of whipped cream from the top of the pie onto the fork with this first bite, and when she tastes it, she thinks that if she dies tonight, at least she'll die satisfied.
The crust has the right amount of crunchy sweetness to balance the tart creaminess in the filling. The second bite includes some of the strawberry sauce and she can't help herself; she closes her eyes in ecstasy, a soft moan slipping out of her mouth at the familiar pleasure of it.
She eats the pie slowly to make it last; she'll likely never get anything like this again, anything this lusciously yummy in her life. The strawberry seeds she crunches between her teeth, relishing the way they pop. She saves a tiny blob of whipped cream for her last bite, the unadulterated sweetness causing her eyes to roll back in her head.
For a moment, when she's finished it, she sits quietly on the couch, still and breathing softly. It's only when her companion speaks that she cracks an eye open and realizes everyone in the place is speaking to her.
"Couldn't even share one bite, huh?" MacCready grouses, ducking the perfect plate she chucks at him.