Title: Pizza
Fandom: Get Backers
Characters: Midou Ban x Kudo Himiko
Prompt: #017 Pizza
Word Count: 991
Rating: G. Through and through. XD
Author's Notes: AU, and there's a fair amount of Ginji x Natsumi too. : ) Drabble.
Pizza is a staple of the Get Backers household. The kids know it as the most delicious food on earth, served every Friday night, made sometimes by the Amano mother, sometimes all together, and sometimes, on very special days, by Paul-san. Pizza is just the thing to make a day happy again; for their parents, pizza is something that is scattered unobtrusively through their memories, over and over and over.
Natsumi's very first memory (and many of her fondest memories since) of two certain incorrigible, inseparable men--that formed the most excellent retrieval duo--involves pizza. Pizza being fought over, torn apart, flying all over the place, and ending up crammed into the brown-haired, blue-eyed half's big mouth while the blond-haired, dark-eyed half sulked. She giggles sometimes when she makes pizza, always remembering what a funny sight her husband and Ban-san would make.
Ginji loves pizza for pizza's sake, but he has at least one very favorite memory involving the food: making a pan of it with a pretty, bubbly young waitress. In this memory there is flour and sauce and dough and cheese all over the place, twinkling eyes half-hidden by mussed black bangs, bell-like laughter and stolen glances and gentle accidental touches, and a sweet first kiss.
Ban likes pizza because it's good, it's cheap, and he can always wheedle and whine until Natsumi makes one for free. Squabbling with Ginji over it is no memory; he still does it everyday, more out of faithful tradition than anything else. However, there are two memories that would stand out in his mind, if you pressed him to recall some of the best and worst moments of his life. One is of a young woman with green hair and red-rimmed eyes standing awkwardly in the doorframe of a long-ago apartment, apology all over her face for something that had been his fault, and a pizza to patch up their fight in her hands. The second is shredding a pizza slice into bits, eternity crawling by before the same young woman places trembling hands over his (to save the pizza and stop the mutilation, she always claimed) and says yes.
And Himiko laughs at pizza, and stands it only because her family loves it. She is not as fond of it as everyone else. She thinks perhaps she makes up for it every time she is pregnant, and it is the only thing she craves for. (And perhaps she gets a kick out of the fact that this is the only time her husband ever willingly gives up his share of said pizza.)
They are all seated around the dinner table, a motley assortment of dark-and-light-colored heads, two men and one woman and six or seven children laughing and chatting and shouting and scolding, but one family, nevertheless. And there's the ding of the oven and the smell of cheese and tomato sauce and pepperoni (for tonight) as Natsumi's voice rings out clear, and a small sigh of appreciation runs around the table.
Yes, pizza is a staple—the staple, of the Get Backers household.
--EnD--