Please see Disclaimer in Chapter One
The events in Idiot Beloved take place shortly after the Dark Tournament; Firebird Sweet directly follows that timeline. I strongly suggest you read those fics in order, THEN take a look at the sidefics!
Title: Peace, Love, Hiei, C2: Ambrosia, Interrupted
Author: JaganshiKenshin
Genre: Action/Adventure, Humor
Rating: T
Summary: What begins as a simple cookout turns into a social fiasco.
A/N: As always, thanks for reading this, and I appreciate your reviews! Character sketches up on my LJ homepagey.
"Don't you even CARE about the rain forest?"
Peace, Love Hiei (C2: Ambrosia, Interrupted)
by
Kenshin
One hour after the awkward introduction to Hiei's new neighbor, I was gratefully forking down cole slaw, potato salad, and the delicious roasted flesh of a dead, rain-forest-destroying bird, all washed down with iced green tea.
We sat in the neat little yard at an old but still sturdy picnic table Shay-san had rescued from someone's trash. The yard itself was surrounded by tall picket fencing that somewhat shielded it from the neighboring houses. An arched picket gateway stood to the right, opening onto the narrow side yard.
The three of us sat enjoying the afternoon breeze, on which ebbed and flowed a soothing symphony of birdsong. The rest of the air was heavy and fragrant with the fruits of barbecue.
Whenever I was fortunate enough to show up on barbecue day, I was treated to a succession of American-style char-grilled burgers, slow-smoked pork ribs, and, inevitably, some form of chicken.
Beer can chicken is my favorite. The bird's skin crisps to an almost unbearable succulence, and actually crackles when you bite into it, due to its impalement on a half-empty can of Sapporo's finest, which also ensures the flesh remains tender and juicy. Accompanying the chicken is always a creamy potato salad or tangy cole slaw, or sometimes, like today's bounty, both.
I suppose that's worth a few hours of shoveling dirt.
Hiei sat facing the house, devouring his chicken, cracking the bones in his strong white teeth and sucking out the marrow. Shay-san had her back to the fence, nibbling delicately on a wing. I sat opposite her, with the best view of the grill.
"You're spoiling me," I murmured to Shay-san around a mouthful of chicken breast and crunchy skin.
"I'm subverting you," she corrected.
"To American food?" I blinked in puzzlement.
"To the fact that work always precedes food," interjected Hiei. "She's training you. Like Pavlov's dog."
"Mnf. As long as you include some ambrosia for dessert, I don't mind." I cleared my palate with a long swallow of icy green tea. "Much."
"You're getting off easy," griped Hiei.
We were having a wonderful time. Much too good to last.
"Crap," said Hiei, turning a crimson glare toward the open gate. I lifted my head to follow his gaze.
"Crap," echoed Shay-san, under her breath. "Well. I did invite her."
"You invited her," Hiei pointed out. "Not them."
Shay-san shrugged. The birds fell silent.
Miss Rainbow Chakra Freedom clumped across the grass in her ugly sandals. At her side slunk a tall, lanky male who seemed oddly familiar, though I did not recognize him. His long, grizzled hair was partially tamed by a beaded headband, which I was certain did not conceal a Jagan such as Hiei's. He had an unhealthy-looking pallor, and seemed to suck all the oxygen from the yard by the mere act of standing still.
It made me want to crawl indoors for a nap.
His round eyeglasses featured heavily tinted lenses, perhaps to mask his drug-addled gaze. His ensemble was completed by a pink paisley shirt, dirty buckskin pants with fringe running down the outside of each leg, and a powerful odor of unwashed skin.
The smell wasn't quite thick enough to create a gag reflex, but you might still be able to build a house on it. Maybe his towering magnitude of personal miasma was the reason the girl did not notice her own.
The male being no one you would want to look at for long, I studied the girl as I struggled to shake off my torpor.
A normal person would be looking around in curiosity at the yard, but Miss Rainbow Chakra Freedom kept her gaze riveted to the food.
"We're being invaded by hippies," hissed Hiei.
The male hippie made no introductions, and neither did Miss Chakra. That was fine with me.
"Won't you sit down," offered Shay-san, between the clenched teeth of a frozen smile.
Miss Chakra sniffed in derision. "We don't eat meat."
"This isn't meat," I corrected. "It's chicken."
"With a beer can up its butt," enthused Hiei.
Buckskin Boy stood in malodorous silence. It was impossible to tell, given those tinted lenses, whether he was contemplating us, or his own navel.
"How about you, Mr...?" Shay-san trailed off, lifting a graceful hand. The Tumbleweed Kid remained silent. Not so his companion.
"The environment is the most important issue facing the planet," stated Miss Chakra, reaching into her bag.
"I thought it was rogue demons," muttered Hiei, so softly only I could hear. While I stifled laughter, the girl placed a sheaf of pamphlets on the picnic table.
"Won't you have some potato salad, or perhaps some cole slaw?" persisted Shay-san. The girl brightened. I am confident that Shay-san's side dishes were the best-smelling things Miss Chakra had encountered in quite some time.
"But they're made with mayonnaise," I said, turning a who-me gaze to Shay-san as she kicked me under the table. "Mayonnaise contains egg. Egg production exploits the chicken underclass."
The girl stepped back, the corners of her mouth drawing down. "I--I'd better not," she concluded.
Then, she cast a furtive glance at Buckskin Bob and I narrowed my eyes, watching. Was this the person who'd taught her to second-guess her every move?
"What about--" Biting on her lower lip, Miss Chakra pointed hesitantly to a gleaming yellow serving dish filled to bursting with ambrosia. Shay-san's version of this southern classic consists of orange segments and pineapple chunks, maraschino cherries, miniature marshmallows, and pecans, all bound in a sour cream dressing, with coconut flakes on top.
"Full of toxic chemicals," Hiei said.
"Oh, it is not." Shay-san was already scooping out a portion into a little plate and handing it to the girl. "Nothing more toxic than fluffy little marshmallows."
The female hippie grasped the plate of ambrosia, took a hesitant spoonful. A delighted grin spread across her features, infusing them with a child's eager charm, transforming her from determinedly unwashed boho into something quite touching.
Perhaps the ambrosia had reminded her of the person she used to be.
But then Buckskin Bob jerked his head in her direction. She wilted under his gaze, reluctantly put the partly-eaten dessert back on the picnic table.
I do so hate waste.
Meanwhile, Shay-san and Hiei leafed through the pamphlets, which had such titles as Poison In Our Shampoo, Meat Is Murder, and Every Time You Drive Your Car, The Rain Forest Cries.
I'd seen such pamphlets before. Poorly-researched and often fraudulent appeals to raw emotion aside...
I am as big a fan of the rain forest as anyone. Much of my arsenal originates from there. Still.
These gung-ho types--as opposed to, perhaps, genuine conservationists, see only one side of 'nature,' and that through rose-tinted lens. Gleaming parks, towering mountain peaks, and sparkling seashore may indeed be beautiful, but nature also creates tsunami, forest fires, and typhoons.
Not to mention a wide variety of venomous snakes, poisonous plants, biting insects, and large carnivores that would rather consume you than faster, more challenging prey.
Anyone who has spent a significant portion of his life sleeping in the trees--oh, say, Hiei--sees a different story. He is aware that nature is cruel, capricious and adamant, and very often the enemy. Get careless, and die at her hands.
This girl simply had fervor. She could have just as easily been handing out 'Repent-the-end-is-nigh' tracts.
Hiei rose. He scooped the pamphlets into one hand, then strolled to the rear of the yard where there was a metal garbage can in which he burns trash. He kept his back to us so that for all the neighbors knew, he had used a match to ignite the fire. I knew better.
When Hiei was certain he had everyone's attention, he loosed a surprisingly sweet smile, then dropped the pamphlets into the blaze one by one.
Miss Chakra cried out in dismay. "Don't you even care about the environment?"
"No."
"But you're adding to our air pollution," she insisted, glancing toward Buffalo Bill before squinting at the minute puff of smoke that rose from the can.
Hiei folded his arms." Don't you even care that it's arrogant to believe paltry humanity, with its pathetic, sometimes misguided interventions, can influence the climate of this great big planet one way or another?"
The girl's smooth brow puckered. But before she could launch any counter-measures, her companion slid up behind her, silent and boneless and menacing. "I really think you should--" she began. Her buckskin shadow didn't exactly shove her, but he came awfully close, and Miss Chakra hastily closed her mouth.
Such actions do not sit kindly with me.
"O-okay, then ... uhm, er, peace." Casting a last, wistful glance at her half-eaten ambrosia, Miss Chakra accompanied the male hippie out of the yard and back to their cave.
The birds were free to sing once again.
"That went well," Shay-san commented, accompanied by a roll of her eyes.
"Freaking hippies," muttered Hiei, his fiery gaze following the duo, as if to make sure we really had seen the last of them.
"I thought hippies were extinct," I murmured, watching the picket gate for signs of their return.
"They're like cockroaches," said Hiei. "They'll never die out."
"Maybe they're just faux hippies." Shay-san started to gather up the leftovers. "In it for the fashion statement."
"Come on, woman!" Hiei snatched back a last chicken bone, bit it in half. "Let me kill them. It would be just like burning those unwanted pamphlets."
"Hiei!" Shay-san fixed him with a basilisk stare. "You can NOT kill unarmed neighbors who have in no way threatened you, your family, or humanity in general, even if they are hippies."
"You never let me have any fun," Hiei grumbled, then turned to me, all sullen indignation. "She never lets me have any fun."
"In this case, I happen to agree with Shay-san," I murmured, blinking away the last vestiges of that peculiar lassitude. Scooping up a healthy portion of ambrosia for myself, I added, "You can't simply go around killing people who annoy you, no matter how much you want to."
With a tremendous show of ill grace, Hiei subsided, and I took a second helping of ambrosia while Shay-san went inside to make coffee.
We finished the ambrosia al fresco, accompanied by deep mugs of steaming, milk-laced coffee, and then I went inside to assist my friends with the clean-up.
It is really no effort to rinse off a few dishes and stick them into a drainer, then receive a foil-wrapped packet of delicious leftovers that said friends (the female half of them, at any rate) press into your eager hands.
If only all life were that simple.
(To be continued: Midnight is the witching hour!)
-30-
