Carl/Katie - Beta theme set
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#01 – Walking
This time, she's sure her cake is good – she even left out the bright red herbs to turn it that pretty pink colour, just because he suggested it – so when he takes a cautiously tiny little nibble and then bolts for a glass of water to wash the taste out, she has to go for a long walk to cool down before she can even think of working again.
#02 – Waltz
"Um, Katie," he calls nervously when he finds her waltzing all over the back room with a mop, letting the piping hot desserts get cold while their hungry customers stay hungry, "what are you doing?"
#03 – Wishes
"I wish Ellen was here to try some," Carl sighs wistfully after producing a particularly good strawberry shortcake, and Katie sulks at him, because she just told him it was fantastic, and her opinion should be enough; so, just to spite him, she eats the rest of the cake and spends a miserable night of tummyache wishing she hadn't.
#04 – Wonder
"Please come watch with me," she begs, trying to drag him over to the window to watch a severe summer storm with her; "I promise it won't hurt you in here, and it's really amazing when you stop being afraid of it!"
#05 – Worry
"You think about things too much," Katie informs him gently when his long list of worries and woes has finally trickled to a stop; "Let's go to the Moonlight Cafe and have fun!"
#06 – Whimsy
Both of them are well acquainted with fairytales, so when they see a white rabbit hopping past in a terrible hurry, they both collapse into giggles that make passers by look at them with amused, indulgent, or adoring smiles.
#07 – Waste/Wasteland
Carl tries to make sure that the Callaway Cafe operates on a strict principle of "waste not, want not"; Katie thinks that this is what running your own successful business is really about: being able to throw out a whole apple because it had a rotten spot, instead of trying to save the good and discard only the bad.
#08 - Whiskey and rum
"I bet you're even more of a lightweight than I am," Katie announces airily, which leads to a drinking contest, the results of which remain unknown, with both of them passed out sometime around the bottom of the whiskey bottle and the cracking open of the rum bottle.
#09 – War
She finds it somehow refreshing that Carl isn't obsessed with war and shooting and killing like most other boys his age.
#10 – Weddings
He finds it somehow endearing that she's even more obsessed with weddings and flowers and pretty dresses than most girls his age.
#11 – Birthday
It wasn't until she came downstairs on the morning of her birthday to find a big, prettily wrapped box containing a beautiful baby blue and soft yellow and lacy white frock that he hadn't even had to snoop through her closet to pick out, that she started to think that maybe tall, dark, handsome, and brooding wasn't her taste after all.
#12 – Blessing
Katie's help, he thinks with a long-suffering sigh when he finds a kitchen full of dirty dishes waiting for him because she was practicing today and was too annoyed from failure after failure to bother with clean-up, is sometimes a mixed blessing.
#13 – Bias
"Carl's cakes aren't that great," Katie announces airily in the cozy little kitchen of the Blue Sky Ranch farmhouse as she starts on a second piece of the cocoa cake Ellen made for the little Girl's Night; and Ellen giggles; "I think you're just biased because you're mad at him."
#14 – Burning
He knows she doesn't want to get spots on it at work, but he's still glad she's finally wearing the dress, even when he finds himself staring as she prances around the cafe, giggling and blushing at all the compliments, until a cloud of thick black smoke billows up from the oven and no one ever finds out why there was no apple pie that day.
#15 – Breathing
Most girls would be annoyed if their one-room-over house mate suddenly started snoring one night, but instead Katie drags him to the Clinic to be interrogated by Alex and Gina and Martha in turn about the trouble he's been having lately, growing dizzy and panicky in addition to the shortness of breath.
#16 – Breaking
"They're only things, Katie," he reminds her gently when he comes back in from a run to the Blue Sky Ranch for milk and eggs, to find her sifting tearfully through the fragments of one of his best cup-and-saucer sets.
#17 – Belief
Sometimes, Carl wishes he could be more like Katie and hold stubbornly to whatever he's believing this week, instead of being swayed by every carefully thought out argument he hears.
#18 – Balloon
"If I keep eating like this, I'm going to look like a big balloon by the end of the year," Katie laments, looking down at the remnants of her blueberry tart, and then pinching her waist; and even though Carl thinks Katie probably burns off most of those calories just by being Katie, he makes a point to keep yogurt and apple sauce and plenty of fruit on hand after that.
#19 – Balcony
"Oh, I got it falling off the balcony at Mom and Dad's house," she shrugs casually, glancing absently down at the scar, long since faded, extending over her knee, and he's almost afraid to ask what she was doing.
#20 – Bane
"You know, lots of people have it worse," she reminds him delicately when he laments, yet again, that he was only charged half-price on the ferry.
#21 – Quiet
Carl isn't generally as...well, noisy as Katie, but he still agrees that Kurt and Dia, who are solemn and silent all the time, even when they're together, are a little unnerving.
#22 – Quirks
"Like you don't have your fair share of quirks," Katie huffs when Carl asks timidly why she always skips the last four stairs on the way down in the morning, to land at the bottom with a huge, jarring thud.
#23 – Question
"So, what do you think you're going to say?" Carl asks, suddenly very attentive, when it comes back around to Katie that Joe over at the workshop means to ask her to the Full Moon Festival.
#24 – Quarrel
Carl grew up believing that angry words and slamming doors couldn't be undone without at least a week of healing time apart, so when Katie waltzes back in less than an hour after a bitter quarrel and gives him a big hug and an apple in reconciliation, it takes him some time to get used to the idea.
#25 – Quitting
"I'm sorry, Carl, I know you put a lot of trust in me, but I can't stay here forever," she tells him softly through tears the same day she heard from Joe who heard from Eve who heard from Dan who heard from Thomas that Carl had recently acquired a Blue Feather, because she really doesn't want to stick around to help Carl and Ellen celebrate their wedding.
#26 – Jump
She jumps about a foot in the air when the slam of a door wrenches her attention from packing, because she knows Carl's the only other person in the house right now, and he just doesn't slam doors.
#27 – Jester
"Dan doesn't know anything, he's just a goof," Carl interrupts as impatiently as she's ever seen him when she tries to yell at him for not telling her he was proposing to Ellen; "The feather was for...um, someone else."
#28 – Jousting
He always seems to end up in strange places when Katie's nearby, so it's no real surprise when they find themselves in a Medieval Faire banquet hall, watching a jousting tournament on the first evening of their honeymoon in the city; he tells Katie regretfully that he doesn't think he'd be able to do that for his lady's honour, and she just giggles and says that she'll do it for his honour, then.
#29 – Jewel
It's not really the custom around here, but he just didn't feel like they were married until he did it, slipped a beautiful diamond ring onto her finger...and got knocked backwards onto the floor by an ecstatic, squealing Katie-comet.
#30 – Just
"It's not fair, to keep me just a waitress when we're married," she huffs; "We should be business partners."
#31 – Smirk
"To tell you the truth," he says with a little smile that would be a smirk on anyone else, "I think we already have been for a while now—it's really hard to ignore your invaluable advice."
#32 – Sorrow
"This is why I didn't want a pet," she mutters, sniffling heroically, as they heap the soft earth over the grave of the stray kitten he adopted over the winter; making no attempt to hide his tears, he gives her hand a comforting squeeze.
#33 – Stupidity
"Or maybe it's because he's just stupid," Katie snorts, rubbing Carl's shoulders, stiff and aching from an afternoon of serving that Gourmet who ultimately left unimpressed.
#34 – Serenade
He thinks Katie would probably be a pretty good singer, if she didn't only do it when she drank too much.
#35 – Sarcasm
It always amazes people that such an adorable, curly-headed little guy can be so sarcastic; Katie always takes a fiendish delight in their stunned, rather foolish expressions when they realize that they've just been insulted.
#36 – Sordid
"Katie, are you sure that's really the sort of book you should be reading?" he asks timidly, peeking over her shoulder, and when she grins impishly up at him before reading her favourite passages aloud, he begins to think that maybe there's a place in every decent person's life for a little smut.
#37 – Soliloquy
"So, what's a soliloquy, anyway?" Katie asks, grumpily curious, and Carl giggles a little at the fact that she exemplifies the meaning of the word so well in her almost daily rants and stories and ponderings of the love-lives of others, without any idea of its meaning.
#38 – Sojourn
"This was kind of nice for a change, wasn't it?" she decides, and he nods happily as they pack up the remainder of their lunch and clear away their clutter from the beautiful picnic spot they found up in the mountains.
#39 – Share
Ellen watches, giggling silently in delight, when she slips quietly into the Callaway Cafe one afternoon to find the owner and his pretty wife sharing a milkshake through twin twisty-straws.
#40 – Solitary
Neither of them are particularly reliant on alone-time to keep them sane, so it's a little difficult to know when the other is starting to feel the occasional need.
#41 – Nowhere
"Oh; nowhere," she replies innocently when he asks where she's off to at this hour, before scurrying away to Ellen's house for an early-morning cake-baking tutorial, because she's become to realize, reluctantly, that he's right and she probably won't improve if she won't let someone help her.
#42 – Neutral
She tries to keep a blank, indifferent expression when he gives her compliment after lavish compliment on her first really good attempt at cheesecake, but that huge grin just came out of nowhere.
#43 – Nuance
He doesn't tell her when things are bothering him, so she eventually picks up the ability to read his moods from the little things.
#44 – Near
He's always heard that you're not supposed to work with your spouse or lover, because time apart is important to every relationship, but he thinks that's silly, because he loves having Katie near him all the time.
#45 – Natural
"I think Nature was playing some kind of joke on us," she sighs, mussing up his naturally curly hair and shaking her head at the fine, spidery shadows his naturally long eyelashes cast over his cheeks when he's asleep, before hopping off the bed and returning to the mirror to fight with hair-curlers and mascara.
#46 – Horizon
"You're not going to make me stand at the window and watch again, are you?" Carl asks nervously when Katie comes bounding in, flushed and excited, announcing that Terry told her that the formation of the clouds means there's going to be a huge storm before nightfall.
#47 – Valiant
"I'd rather have you smart and alive than a dead hero," she snaps, still trembling and upset from the experience, when he laments that he should have tried to stop the robber who stripped them at gunpoint of money and valuables on the way back from a live theatre event in the city.
#48 – Virtuous
"Of course not; and anyway, I'm glad you're not a saint," he assures her with a half-shy, half suggestive smile, when she asks him despondently if he thinks she's a bad person.
#49 – Victory
"I win again!" she announces delightedly, and spends a few minutes dancing around the room and gloating rather obnoxiously that her sudden and inexplicable winning streak in their mini chess tournament hasn't come to an end yet.
#50 – Defeat
When she trips over her own foot in mid-dance, he tries and fails to hold back a burst of laughter at the adorably undignified heap she lands in on the floor, and she tries and fails to be annoyed at him for laughing, and ends up giggling too.
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End Notes: Hee! I think these two would be adorable together. I was so disappointed to find out they weren't a default pairing, even though Joe/Katie and Carl/Ellen are fiendishly adorable, too. :)