A/N: Update 2014

I have finally grown as a writer to where I don't hunger for concrit as much as I used to. Feel free to review if you'd like, but that's entirely up to you. :)

Tomatoes

By Baby Kat Snophlake

There were a lot of things that Kratos was good at. Sword-fighting was a specialty. It was easy to fly with his pearlescent blue wings. His wit came naturally to him. Any passerby wouldn't be able to tell just from looking at him what he was thinking, or how he was feeling. He could keep calm under pressure and think quickly when he had to. His patience was long lasting, almost as long as his life, but even having lived for hundreds of years there was one thing that Kratos never could perfect.

The skillet had long ago traded its title as a cooking pan for the home of something that might've been edible if it wasn't for the red rings of mush and seeds that Yuan insisted on adding to his fried sandwich. As it was, the sandwich was almost breathing, spitting bubbles from beneath it. The lettuce wilted at the edges and the tomato juice mixed with the oil in the pan, successfully bathing the bottom slice of bread into a soggy paste. Never before had Kratos screwed up making a fried sandwich before, but then, he hadn't put tomatoes on his before either.

That's right. The tomatoes were the reason he couldn't perfect cooking. He made risottos, stews, ramen, and steaks, cabbage rolls, curry, and rice balls, and everything had come out simply delicious. Well, most of the time. But anything with tomatoes had been ruined far before the campfire had even been lit. It had to be the tomatoes. There was no other explanation.

"What the-?" Yuan glanced down into the skillet before turning his nose up to Kratos. "What did you do?"

"Exactly what you told me to." Kratos said, pointing to the red ring of death. "I put a tomato on your sandwich. Now how it turns out isn't my fault."

Yuan sighed. "I should've known. You won't even touch the things. Give me that fork, I'm making my own." Kratos let him have it and watched as Yuan tipped the skillet to dump the contents into the fire. He thought he heard the fire hissing as if complaining about the new food it was given. Even campfires hated tomatoes. Why did such things exist?

This time, though, Yuan had placed the sliced bread into the skillet and once they were toasted, he removed them and placed the lettuce, tomato, and what was left of the bacon onto the two pieces forming a nice warm sandwich that seemed to laugh at Kratos with its perfection. Unfortunately, Yuan noticed Kratos's glaring while he was preparing for the first bite.

"Why do you hate tomatoes anyway? It's not like they look or taste anything like liver."

Yet Kratos preferred the liver. "I hated them since I was a kid, when that was all that my mother would make. Fried tomatoes and rice. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner and if I was lucky, I'd get some extra for dessert."

"Why don't you hate rice too then?" Yuan asked, taking another bite of his lunch.

"Rice could be made into anything. We had butter we could put on it, we could fry it, mix it with herbs, but tomatoes… they are always the same. You could add a spice to the tomatoes, but usually that didn't improve their flavor. You could cook it however you wanted to or eat it raw if you wanted, and the only thing that changed was its texture or maybe the strength of its flavor. I finally got so tired of them, I'd rather eat dirt. At least that was something else mom could afford besides the rice and tomatoes."

Yuan rolled his eyes. "You're just being picky. How long has it been? A couple thousand years? I'd think the tomatoes would improve in flavor by now."

"Well, they are nasty still, but that's only half the issue. I can't cook them into something worthy of giving to starving orphans. You just saw how that sandwich turned out. What? Quit laughing at me!"

Yuan struggled not to choke on his last bite, and wound up having to set his lunch down before beating himself in the chest to cough it up again. Then he frowned at Kratos who glared back. "Thanks for letting me die from choking."

"You would've died from tomato poisoning."

"And you are just lacking in practice. If you keep tossing tomato pieces into food here and there, you'll get the hang of it."

Years later…

"Yeah, I'll get the hang of it, Yuan…" Kratos muttered to himself. He fished a piece of chopped tomato from his omelet and tossed it into the grass nearby, but it was too late. The omelet was far too runny for a plate, and the eggs seemed to sizzle from the acid. He glanced over to Raine who was stirring a pot of something else. Perhaps hers might be a better choice for breakfast this time. Against a tomato-cursed omelet, Raine's "dwarven surprise" porridge seemed far more edible. As impossible as that sounds.

Mew! I wrote this for our collaboration test thingy. Yeah, yeah, I know, tomatoes and Kratos are used a lot, but it was all I could think of for a last minute piece of writing. And I thought it was kinda scary that Kratos would prefer Raine's cooking over his own...

-Kat