Ashley didn't need to sleep anymore, but that didn't stop her from laying on one of the pallets we'd set up and taking a nap.

I sat with Yuri by the fire and watched her, curled up on her side in the fetal position.

"Is... Is that something we should be worried about?" I asked. I still wasn't sure if that was normal.

"No, that's fine. She's always done that," Yuri replied with a smile. "If she can't curl up with someone she curls in on herself. The only times she ever slept lying flat on her back was when she'd fall asleep on the couch watching movies."

"Okay." That was a bit of a relief.

A few moments later, Ashley started mumbling in her sleep. "No, no, cow brains would be almost as bad..."

I blinked. "I'm never going to understand her tastes. Sometimes she eats normal food and other times it's these weird combinations of flavors and... Honestly, she'd probably like cow brain." Based on what I'd heard and the things Ashley'd eaten. "I mean, people eat cow brains, right?"

"Well, not since the Mad Cow outbreak," Yuri deadpanned.

"The what now?"

"...So you know how prion diseases work? You eat certain kinds of proteins and something breaks and your proteins start folding wrong and it fuck up your brain? Often caused by cannibalism?" Yuri started academically.

"I was vaguely aware of that. It sounds horrifying," I admitted.

"Well, a while back some farmers tried to save money by recycling some of their beef product back into cow feed. Some of the cows developed a prion disease from eating cow brain and eating their flesh caused other people to develop an incredibly nasty disease and..." Yuri waved her hand back and forth "Well, among other things, nobody eats cow brain anymore."

"...When did this happen?" I was starting back to think of if I'd ever heard anything about that happening.

"Uh, I think the first outbreak was in 2003?" Yuri replied with a shrug.

I nodded. I would have been seven. I'd look up to see if that happened when I got home.

"But, if cow brain tastes like rabbit brain it probably does taste pretty good."

I blinked. "What?"

"Oh, when I was Ashley's age my mother made Yuki and I kill, skin, gut, butcher, cook, and eat a rabbit each just so that we'd be able to. I'm not sure what exactly that has to do with being a ninja, but..." The older woman trailed off when she noticed my look of slack-jawed horror. She rolled her eyes. "They were game rabbits. Mother knew a guy who knew a guy who bred rabbits to stock private hunting grounds. It's not like she made us eat someone's pets."

"Yeah, but still..."

"Look, I'm over whatever harm that did to me, and while I will admit that getting rabbit blood all over myself was far from pleasant, I'm not going to lie about how the finished product tasted."

"...Well, okay then," I said flatly.

"I will admit that strange tastes seem to run in my family," she admitted. "Father had a bit of a thing for horse meat." I almost gagged. "And then there's this one," she said with a gesture to Ashley. "When Ashley was five she came down with anemia," Yuri explained. "It wasn't related to her powers, not directly, and it eventually went away. It was just, she had some deficiencies and with her already frail system every little thing was a big deal. But, because of her condition, we couldn't just give her medicine or supplements for it and... Well, the most efficient change to her diet to treat it...

"Raw liver. We had to convince a five-year-old girl to eat raw liver." Yuri finished bluntly. "Not a lot of raw liver, just a small piece with dinner three nights a week. It was the... It had iron, it had b vitamins, it had enzymes to help absorb the b vitamins. It was the best choice. So we sat her down, and spent a couple of hours explaining why it was very important that she at least try it, and she didn't say anything the entire time until the end when she agreed to try it." Yuri pinched the bridge of her nose. "And she ate a small piece of it, looked thoughtful... And ate up the whole bit of it she needed to eat that night. And asked for more."

"...You're shitting me."

"I wish I was," Yuri said with a wide-eyed stare. "She licked the juice from her plate. And kept asking for it long after the anemia cleared up. I'd finally convinced her to eat it cooked... Then she got kidnapped and I got shot."

"Well, I'm never going to look at her the same way again... I thought the anchovy pizza was weird and..."

I noticed that Ashley had gotten out of bed and had walked up to us without making a sound. "I heard you talking about liver," she said.

AN: This is canon and occurs sometime in the current arc.

I'm a bit blocked on my major stores but wanted to get something out and the idea of discussing Ashley's dietary choices popped into my head.

Ashley liking raw liver is a relatively new concept to this story. It's not one of her favorite foods per see, but...