The X-Project

Kyle makes dinner and Jean-Paul finds himself making rice.


Jean-Paul paused when he saw Kyle in the kitchen, then said without any preamble at all, "You did not happen to pick up the television that fell to the lawn, did you? It did not happen recently, but I thought you were injured at the time. It was just after India, oui? Only it was there and then it was not. I did not have a chance to clean it myself and so I wondered." Then he bit into the apple he'd taken from the refrigerator and chewed contemplatively while he waited to see if his question had made any sort of sense to the younger man.

"Not me, I was still either coma'd or busted." Kyle said, barely pausing in chopping several bell peppers to think about his answer. "Might've been Fred or Cal, or Yvette. A bunch of people were picking up my slack while I was out, they're the most likely. But if they did, nobody told me." Nobody had, to Kyle's knowledge put a work ticket in, but hell, half the time he didn't do the paperwork for stuff he was fixing, so that didn't tell him much. "Hell, it could've been Logan too. He spends enough time out there."

"Mm..." Jean-Paul nodded and swallowed the bite of apple he'd taken, then said, "Merci. I will try to see if it was one of them." Then he looked toward the peppers Kyle was cutting up and asked, "What are you making?"

"Dinner." Kyle said, obviously amused. "Probably chicken and peppers and rice and maybe some other stuff. I'm making it up." Cooking in his own suite was boring. Then he couldn't eat with people or talk to them or bribe people into doing the parts he didn't like like washing dishes. "So, out of you know, curiosity, why was there a TV on the lawn while I was in a coma that someone might've picked up?"

"I fell asleep on Kevin's couch and his windows were not the shatterproof kind that you put in my room," Jean-Paul replied, since that was the truth. The nightmares didn't bear mentioning. "I do not think it would have been in working condition, though. The television, I mean. It fell from the third floor. The crash was very loud."

"Yeah, I must've been in my coma. I would've heard it otherwise." Kyle wasn't going to pry about why a television had gone out of Kevin's window, that'd be rude. Also it wasn't all that hard to guess. Kyle had destroyed enough pillows and sheets to guess at why someone else might've destroyed something. "It's probably in the junk pile behind the toolshed then, if you wanna go looking for it."

"I am not so interested in getting it back," Jean-Paul said, eating another large bite of apple before he continued, "More I thought to thank whoever had removed it." Then he tipped his head to the side and asked, "You are much better now, oui?" He supposed he could have offered to help cook, but that would probably have gone poorly, since it seemed that Kyle had all the easy parts mostly finished.

"Almost totally, yeah. Still have to do some PT to get muscle back but everything's healed anyway." Kyle answered. "I'm pretty sure that they'll throw me in the MRI tube thing at least one more time, just to make sure, but I think that's just cause they like giving me a chance to take a nap." Technically it was a short-duration psionically induced REM state, because putting Kyle in starkly white enclosed spaces was the fastest way to get him to go postal on someone, but it amounted to about the same thing to Kyle - a 45 minute nap.

"Très bien," Jean-Paul said with a nod. He considered the changes of getting away with stealing a piece of pepper without getting smacked or stabbed at. Considering his speed, he was fairly certain he could manage it. And the peppers were very enticing. But he wasn't sure Kyle would appreciate that. "The MRI tube, it is not so fun." It didn't cause him to have a panic attack, but between the noise and the confining space... Jean-Paul wasn't particularly fond of them, to be sure. Of course, he didn't like hospitals in general, so perhaps that had more to do with his opinion of medical machinery than anything else. "I am glad I did not have the kinds of injuries that needed so much treatment."

He was still eying the peppers. "May I?"

"Go for it. If you'll make rice, I'll just double up what I'm making. Win-win situation. I don't have to do boring stuff I hate like making rice, and you get free dinner!" Kyle was all about sharing food, and had been halfway to offering anyway. "And yeah, it's .. I got issues with small enclosed white spaces, so they just knock me out. Lots easier than ... well, you know how cats are when you give them a bath? That's me in the MRI tube."

"Merci," Jean-Paul said, stealing a pepper and then picking up the bag of rice to read the directions. He should probably point out that having him do something involving a stove and food was unwise, but as long as he actually followed the directions, he thought he might be alright. Probably. It was only rice, after all. "I do not like cars," he offered. "Or planes. Things that move that I do not control." Just thinking about being in a car had him wrinkling his nose even as he began measuring water into a pot."

Are you gonna freak if I eat raw chicken in front of you?" Kyle was never quite sure who that bothered and who didn't care. It wasn't like it mattered to him if the chicken was cooked, except in taste. And not like it entirely mattered if Jean-Paul was bothered, if he was, Kyle'd just be more circumspect than usual. "Cars don't bug me too much, but planes, ugh, cramped, stinky and full of loud noises."

"I do not mind how you eat your chicken," Jean-Paul answered, putting the water on to boil and finding a bit of butter in the refrigerator to put in with the salt that the rice package told him he could use. "It is... too easy to be killed in a car. Also, why should I use one of those when it is easier to fly?" Unless it was truly an emergency, as India had been, Jean-Paul saw no reason to confine himself to a vehicle made of metal, plastic, and rubber.

"Dude, I have a motorcycle. I'm not really the, you know, authority on safe transportation." Kyle said, grinning. The risk of road rash or breaking limbs was just so much less when you knew you'd grow your stuff back. He dumped the pile of now-sliced peppers into a bowl and started slicing chicken into long strips. "And yeah, if I could fly, I'd pretty much do that always. Crystal's the same way. She flies everywhere, unless she really really can't."

"Oui, this makes sense," Jean-Paul said, pouring in the rice with the salt and butter, just like the directions told him to. Then he tipped his head to the side and said, "With the motorcycle, at least you have a chance to be thrown from the accident. A better chance to survive, since you may not be crushed." He didn't remember the accident that had killed his biological parents, nor the one that had killed his second family. Not with any real clarity, anyway. Putting the top on the pot, he turned the heat down, then double checked the bag of rice to make sure he hadn't skipped a step or ingredient.

"You're good on the rice. Worst thing you can do to rice is undercook it and that's not gonna happen." Jean-Paul double checking each step hadn't gone unnoticed by Kyle. "Or burn it but that's really -really- not gonna happen." He continued to slice the chicken, occasionally dropping it into a bowl with the flat of the knife. "Burned rice smells pretty bad. Not a fan. Also I was kind of an asshole to you and probably owe you an apology..." Which was not nearly as an abrupt conversation jump in Kyle's head, but it wasn't like Jean-Paul was telepathic.

"Pardon?" Jean-Paul asked, blinking as he folded the empty bag from the rice into quarters. He wasn't sure how they'd gotten to the apology bit. Maybe he'd missed a bit of conversation - that was just what he needed, his mind slicing and dicing current time in addition to most of the past twenty years.

Kyle backtracked through his own thoughts. "Sorry, right, I skipped about six steps there. In my head, it totally went burned rice, people apologizing for burning rice around me because it makes my nose itch, people doing it on purpose because they're assholes." He considered that briefly. "But that's only John and Shiro and they don't live here anymore. And then I remembered that I was an asshole to you, and yeah, this whole conversation would've made a lot more sense if I'd explained that in the first place..."

"Ah," Jean-Paul said, nodding as though he'd followed all of that without trouble. "It is no trouble." He remembered being vaguely annoyed at Kyle on the journals, but nothing as bad as all that. Perhaps he was getting better at repressing negative memories.

Kyle flashed a grin. "Awesome and thanks for not like, holding a grudge or something. I was kind of a dick. But. You are still totally gonna let me feed you, right? I mean, I'm not Laurie or anything, with her compulsion to feed everyone, but hey, I can at least make up for my total asshatitude." Ass-hat-i-tude was totally a word, by Kyle's reckoning.

"I will not turn down food," Jean-Paul said, quirking a smile. "Especially when I am required to do mostly nothing for it."