Category: Romance
Rating: PG
Spoilers: None
Feedback: Oh, yes please. Send all feedback to
reinert@tir.com
Warnings: None, unless you have a problem with too
much sugar, or can't stand being in the kitchen
Time: 6 years before TPM, one year after
'Forbidden Fruit'
Disclaimers: All characters and settings
belonging to George Lucas are regarded as his property.
Same goes for Jude Watson. The rest are products of my own
imagination. Nothing has been earned from this work, other than a
lot of butt-time in front of the computer.
Author's note: All right, I've seen several
'Qui-Gon in the kitchen' fan-fics out there. Here is my
slightly gooey offerings.
The cake looked no different than it had five minutes
before. Except for a slight bubbling on the left
side. It was higher on that side now, he was sure of
it. Would it be level, he wondered with some
apprehension. He would have to do some trimming if it
wasn't. He told himself to not worry about a problem that
didn't exist. Yet. The heat radiating through the
view window of the baking unit warmed the end of his nose, nearly
pressed to the transparent surface. He imagined the comic
picture he must make, hunkered down in the small apartment
kitchen to watch a fascinating chemical drama taking place inside
a kitchen appliance. He was going to singe his mustache if
he got any closer. He sighed and stood up.
An exercise in patience, he reminded himself, drumming his
fingers on the compact work surface, which was dusted with
flour. Any task could be turned into an exercise. But
this wasn't supposed to be an exercise. Just once, he could
do something for pleasure. If not his own, then at least
for someone else.
The pleasure aspect was up for debate. Cooking was
definitely not his strong point, something Valia good-naturedly
teased him about. Especially when it was done in her
apartment. His searches for ingredients often resulted in
his lady friend laughing at him and eventually taking over the
task, sending him off to set the table, or more likely something
completely unrelated to the meal. And some of the
instructions simply made no sense to him. All these archaic
terms, a vocabulary that made sense only to someone who had spent
a lifetime in kitchens and near those that cooked on a regular
basis. Thank the Force for the unfeeling patience of
utility droids, who would display translations and idiot-proof
instructions on their data screens when it was obvious the user
needed them.
He had gotten this far without too much of a mess, he thought
gratefully. He would have this cleaned up before she got home
from work. He glanced around. If he started cleaning
now, he might stand a chance of having it done. Flour was
treacherous stuff to measure, as he had discovered. White
spots dusted the floor and countertops, and there were assorted
comet-tails of it streaking his pants. Eggs were a subject
all their own when it came to the topic of messes. He had
seen Valia deftly cracking them with one hand several times
before. With bravado worthy only of a first-year Padawan,
and encouraged by the fact that he was alone, he had tried it
himself. Practice made perfect, he reminded himself, as he
regarded the drying egg white trail and scattering of shell where
it had slithered down the outside of the bowl. Not to
mention the egg itself, which was already congealing into a
wrinkled yellow amoeba on the work surface. The spattering
of egg that had gone up his sleeve was already dry, but there
were still a few bits of shell clinging to the fabric. He
picked them off. Qui-Gon threw them into the waste bin, where
they joined the remains of two other eggs, which had more or less
ended up on the floor.
Clean as you go, Valia was fond of saying. But didn't it
make more sense to make all the mess there was to be made, and
then clean it all at once afterwards? He thought this way
was more logical. He still had fruit to prepare, and glaze
to mix with it, and frosting and those things sounded potentially
messy. Normally he would consider himself and neat and tidy
man, but there were times, like now, when the learning experience
asked for a little leeway.
Make her a cake, he recalled her friend Ravi Brillion crowing
with the joy of what he thought was the perfect idea for her
birthday. Make her a cake indeed, thought Qui-Gon with the
beginnings of grumbling irritation at himself for listening to
her friend. But Ravi had been insistent, even providing the
recipe for him and offering to go with him to purchase the
ingredients in the market. He'd gone out of his way to make
it easy for him. Qui-Gon had found himself agreeing, more to
quiet the boisterous young man. It was her favorite, he
promised, her absolute favorite cake. The Jedi Master had
found himself in the depths of the produce stalls in a local
marketplace, dryly marveling at how much finesse someone could
put into squeezing each and every mareon to find the perfectly
ripe ones. He had patiently stood by while Ravi had nearly
pranced from stall to stall selecting, poking, sniffing,
exulting, tasting, and flirting. Male or female seller, it
had apparently made no difference to Ravi. Qui-Gon reminded
himself to ask Valia, just out of curiosity, what Ravi's
preference actually was.
Here he was, speculating about someone else's sexual orientation,
and there was an alarming smell in the air. Smoke, he
thought with the thready beginnings of fear. Oh, Sith,
there was a rivulet of batter running over the side of the pan in
the unit and dripping into the bottom. He watched
helplessly as the gooey stuff bubbled and smoked, all the while
merrily overflowing. He glanced at the timer, and hoped not
too much more would run over before the baking time was up.
It was actually beginning to get hazy in the kitchen. He had
wanted to attempt this task without any use of the Force, but
this was getting serious. Qui-Gon willed the batter to stop
flowing. A crusty dam formed at the edge of the pan.
He sighed with relief, and walked into the sitting room to open a
window. He went back to the kitchen and consulted the
recipe for what had to be the thirtieth time. Yes, he had
added the right amounts of everything to the feed tube, he had
not added too much.
When the baking cycle ended and the chime sounded from the unit,
he carefully removed the cake with oven-mitts, which were too
small for his hands. He eyed it as he set the hot pan on
the work surface. Now all he needed was the patience to
wait while the thing cooled. Was it supposed to be sinking
like that? Worried, he watched the top collapse.
Quickly he scrolled through the information on the baking unit's
data screen. Yes, this was normal. He sighed with
relief.
He was getting downright fretful over this whole thing, he
thought with irritation. Break it down into smaller tasks,
take each one at a time. All right, then: fruit or frosting
first? He consulted the recipe again, leaving another
sticky finger streak down the front of the datapad's smooth
screen. Something else to clean up afterwards.
The recipe told him to prepare the frosting next, since that had
to chill. Finding what he needed in the grocery sack on the
floor, he carefully measured the right ingredients into a
mixer. He'd seen Valia use this dozens of times, watch her
flick it on and walk away to tackle some other job. He
activated it and finely powdered sugar spewed forth in a perfect
imitation of a small white volcano. Lumps arced through the
air to leave interesting white spatter marks on the floor.
Qui-Gon calmly turned off the device and scowled at it, hands on
his hips. No problem, he could estimate how much sugar he
had lost. He added some in and took note of the power
level, which had been left on high from the last use. He
turned it to its lowest setting and activated it again. No
eruptions this time. He looked down at his tunic and
brushed the white powder off in clouds. An apron probably
would have helped, he thought, remembering Valia had several
cast-offs from her fruit and juice bar hanging in a nearby
closet.
Was this stuff supposed to be lumpy, he wondered, after mixing
for the instructed amount of time. He cautiously probed at
the contents of the bowl with a spoon. It didn't look
right.
In the end it was brute strength that resulted in a perfectly
smooth and creamy frosting. He picked up bowl and spoon,
and making a gruff noise, began beating it by hand. He
paced around the apartment, to the sitting room and back to the
kitchen to occupy himself while he did it.
With that in the refrigerator, he began sorting through the rest
of the contents of the bag. He arranged the fruits in
separate piles by type, and wondered if he was supposed to cut
all this up. What was he doing, making fruit salad or a
cake? He checked the holo depicting the finished cake and
decided it looked like a lot of fruit piled on the top.
Ravi had been quite insistent on using extra fruit besides, as
she liked a lot. Qui-Gon rolled his sleeves past his elbows
and methodically went about rinsing and slicing fruit.
This wasn't so bad, he thought, as he fell into a rhythm.
The berries didn't need to be cut, so he dumped them all into a
bowl. He touched a control on a wall panel with his elbow
and turned on some music. Today Valia was thirty-one
Standard years old. If she was so inclined, she could
celebrate another birthday based on the years of her
homeworld Nyme'. She would be a few years younger, if
measured by those years. Her planet took more days to
circle its sun than Coruscant, on which Standard years were
based. Her world took a little longer to get around.
'You've got that right!' would be the disparaging snort Qui-Gon
could imagine she might make in response to that, a response that
would neatly sum up her attitude toward the slow, quaint, and
sometimes backwater ways of her birthplace.
Ahh, you could take the lady out of the country, but you couldn't
take the country out of the lady, he thought fondly. Deep
down she preferred the slow and the quaint, and however she might
claim to love her adopted home, the fast paced city-planet of
Coruscant, her roots in the natural and simple ran deep.
He had quite a lot of fruit now. Was it enough for his
sweet country lady? He thought so. It was quite a
colorful mixture, he admitted. Now to add the glaze, which
would give it that shine in the holo picture, and the recipe
background data cheerfully informed him would keep the fruit from
turning an unsightly brown and sweeten it.
He picked the grocery sack from the floor and upended the last of
its contents on the kitchen table. There it was, fruit
glaze. He ripped the top off the packet and squeezed it
over the full bowl of fruit. It was thick, gluey
stuff. He frowned at it, hoping it really lived up to its
claims. It was stubbornly refusing to leave its protective
package. He tightened his hand, squeezing a formidable fist
around the package until all that remained was a subdued,
crackling, empty husk of a package. Satisfied, he started
mixing. He snitched a piece of mareon out of the bowl and
popped it into his mouth. This whole thing was going to be
tasty. Maybe Ravi's overdone choosiness had been worth
it. He ate another piece, and then remembered the time he
had heard Valia cautioning her employees against snitching, as it
was a prime source of mouth-to-hand contamination. If she
had seen him, she probably would have given him a friendly
warning pat on the wrist for doing it. Actually if she had
seen him right at the moment, that probably was the last thing
she would have noticed in her surprise. To his knowledge,
she had never seen him cook anything all by himself.
Now came the tricky part: assembling all this into something that
resembled the holo. The instructions told him to scoop out
part of the top of the cake. Scoop it out?? After all
that trouble of making it level? He did so, as neatly as he
could. Now what to do with this little pile of cake pieces
and crumbs? He popped a piece into his mouth. Not
bad, he thought. In fact, he was surprised to find it good.
He put the crumbs aside, not wanting to throw out any part of all
this effort. Valia would surely find a practical use for
them.
Sith, he had forgotten to split the cake horizontally. Now
what? Not to worry, he told himself. That could still
be done. As soon as he found the right tool to do it with,
he thought, searching through drawers and cubby-holes. A
knife, a very long, thin knife is what he needed. His
search was getting longer and more fruitless, and time was
wasting. She would be home soon.
Qui-Gon consulted the recipe one more time, and began following
the instructions. The cheery artificial voice from the data
pad was obnoxious, and it was annoying him. He had thought
to listen while he worked, but he shut the audio off and read the
words instead. Enough of that obsequious voice.
Were all these crumbs supposed to be getting mixed in with the
frosting? He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure how to
prevent it from happening. Something else to ask Lia later.
Now the cake was getting alarmingly high, towering under a mound
of fruit. By the time he had filled between the layers,
covered the sides and top, and filled in the depression in the
top with fruit, it looked on the verge of collapse. Well,
this is what happened when you followed the advice of a half-wit,
he thought. No, this was not happening! One of the
sides was cracking. His creation was imploding before his
eyes and sliding sideways. Without deliberating about it,
he used the Force to shore up the side and hold it there.
A couple more touch-ups here and there, and he was done.
Now the trick would be to keep enough concentration on that side
to prevent it from collapsing while he cleaned up the
kitchen. He still had time, unless she came home
early. He licked an errant dab of frosting off his thumb
and glanced at the chrono.
He was just putting his newly cleaned shirt back on when he heard
her at the door. Every speck of flour and sugar had been
cleaned up and every utensil and dish had been washed and put
away. The cake was sitting on the end of the counter-top
where she would see it.
"Happy birthday," he said, pulling her into a hug.
"Thank you!" Valia wrapped her arms around him
and squeezed. "Oh, cake!" She noticed the
dessert. She shamelessly swiped a fingertip through the
thick white frosting on the side and licked it.
"Mmmmmmm. How very sweet of you. Where did you
find a bakery that made one of these?" She plucked a
dark red berry off the top and enjoyed that, too.
"I didn't. I made it."
Valia stared at the cake, and then back at him in
disbelief. Her eyes narrowed teasingly and she partially
turned her head to give him that sideways look of hers.
"Then who helped you?"
"Ravi helped with the supplies, but after that I was on my
own." Perhaps he should have left all the mess in her
kitchen after all, to prove to her he'd made it.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at it again.
"Ha! Well, look at that," she said, stepping
forward to admire it more closely. "Look at that..."
she said more softly. "You're a man of many unexpected
talents." Qui-Gon bowed, and allowed himself to savor a
moment of pride in his accomplishment. She apparently
didn't notice the frosting was speckled with crumbs and the whole
creation was a little lopsided. She grinned. "You and
Ravi actually went shopping together?" she laughed,
imagining the sight of her flamboyant friend and a probably
scowling Jedi Master towering behind him the entire time.
"Yes. Had it not been for all the flirting, the trip
would have taken half the time, I'm sure."
"Flirting? Oh, that's just Ravi," she waved a
hand as if to say she didn't even notice it any more.
"Did he make a pass at you, that naughty boy?"
"Actually, everyone but me," Qui-Gon's brow
wrinkled. Thank the Force for that. "And this is
the second time I've heard him mention he thinks Obi-Wan is
cute."
Valia laughed. "Well, he is." She shrugged
off her cloak and stooped to pull off her boots. "Oh,
don't get all bothered about it," she said at the look on
his face that was a mixture of worry and protectiveness.
"Lia, which way does he...ahhSpurely out of curiosity, I'm
asking..."
"It depends." She laughed at the puzzled look on
his face. "He, ummm, goes either way. He doesn't
see gender when he's attracted to someone." Qui-Gon simply
nodded, brows raised. She laughed again, and moved to put
her arms around him again. "I know what I see right
now," she said.
"Hmm. What do you see?" he asked into the hair at
the top of her head.
"I see the makings of a very, very happy birthday," she
said, contentedly leaning her cheek against his chest. She
went still as though looking closely at something. She
leaned to the side. "I see frosting on the
wall." She leaned over and wiped it off with a
finger. Qui-Gon smiled and shrugged in her arms. She
stood on tip-toe to kiss him. No quick one for all the
effort he had gone to making that cake for her, she
thought. Valia put all the thanks she could into it.
Sometime in the middle of the kiss, Qui-Gon heard a very small,
wet sliding noise behind them, and knew the side of the cake had
collapsed. So much for concentration, he thought, sliding
his arms more tightly around Valia.
