[PRP] Something Soup (Evan/Gnat)

[Inle-roo]

Evan had been disappointed, but not surprised, by the lack of food in the kitchen following the cruise fiasco. He hadn't been feeling much like going out himself, so he could hardly blame anyone else for not doing the grocery shopping. He really wanted some soup, but there wasn't really a whole lot to make it with.

Well, he would just have to make do.

He managed to find some long-abandoned cans of tomato sauce, tomato paste, and, wonder of wonders, canned tomatoes. Fortunately, they had enough dried herbs and seasonings that he could make do without fresh stuff, but they were out of chicken stock and butter. He improvised by using water and creamer instead, and the result was an off-color--though still edible--tomato soup. It may have tasted a little off, but Evan's sense of taste was messed up from his stuffy nose anyway.

After pouring a pair of bowls as full as he could manage without spilling anything, he left the remainder for whoever happened to wander in next and headed back to the dorms. He stopped in front of room 159 and knocked on the door by kicking it lightly with the toe of one boot.  

[Ravvlet]

"I am not going runnin', Tuck."

There was a pause, after a perhaps slightly aggrandized fit of coughing.

"I'm dyin'."  

[Inle-roo]

Evan chuckled at the door. "It's not Tuck," he replied, his voice hoarse from coughing and sneezing and the general exhaustion that came with being sick and completely ignoring it. "It's the Soup Fairy."

And then, just in case the prospect of soup wasn't enough to get Gnat to answer the door, "And I'm naked." He was, in fact, fully clothed, but he was also holding two hot bowls of soup that he really wanted to put down.  

[Ravvlet]

It was amazing, how fast one could move with the proper motivation. A scant few seconds passed before the door was opened -

Squint.

Gnat pretended to glance around the hallway. She was wearing an oversized hot pink glittery NSYNC shirt that hit her somewhere around the knees, and her hair was pulled back into an unruly ponytail.

"Aight, where's the naked one?" she drawled, helping herself to a bowl before moving aside to let him in. Her nose and eyes were red, and the bin next to her typically messy bed was overflowing with tissues.

She nudged it behind her nightstand with a foot.

"Er. I was about to clean."

She wasn't.

Inle-roo

 

[Inle-roo]

Evan had to fight the urge to laugh as the door quickly opened, mostly so he didn't start coughing again but partly because if he did, he'd probably never stop. That shirt. Evan had come to accept Gnat's strange shirts as part of her charm, but this one was particularly...well, it was very Gnat.

"Aw, you just missed him. Lots of sick people to visit, and all that. Guess you're stuck with me," Evan replied, grinning as he shook his head in mock sadness.

He wasn't sure what he expected the inside of Gnat's room to look like, but messy was probably a good start. Evan didn't much care one way or the other about the mess; mostly he was more disturbed by the posters. "It's okay," he said. "How are you holding up?"

Ravvlet

 

[Ravvlet]

"Sometimes a girl's jus' gotta settle," she replied cheekily. She kicked away a few stray bits of laundry to clear a space on the floor before sitting down.

At the last minute she remembered not to cross her legs.

She sniffed the soup experimentally. "I ain't dead yet, although I think I'm workin' on it." She squinted up at him. "You look..."

Roguishly handsome. A paragon of his kind. The soup savior.

"Good."

"You sound like hell, though," she added.  

[Inle-roo]

Evan wheezed a chuckle that turned into a cough as he half-slid down the wall to sit on a relatively clean patch of floor across from Gnat. At any other time he would have appreciated the sight of her in nothing but a terrible t-shirt. Now he just hoped she didn't spill the hot soup on herself; he didn't think he had it in him to carry her to the infirmary right now. That in itself was an indication that he really was sick.

"Nah, you'll be fine. Bed rest and plenty of fluids and over the counter medications and you'll be running around again in no time," he replied with a grim smile. Fact was, they all could have died on that mission, and they were damn lucky to have just gotten sick, instead.

It wasn't something he wanted to consider. "I'm okay," he lied, blowing on a spoonful of soup before putting it in his mouth. He swallowed it with a wince. It tasted less good now than it had in the kitchen.

"Kind of a shame how things turned out, though," he said. "The other night was pretty fun, before the giant monsters happened."

Ravvlet

 

[Ravvlet]

Inle-roo

Gnat slurped her soup greedily, apparently unbothered by its flavor or lack thereof.

"Yeah, was a real fancy vacation til things got outta hand," she replied after swallowing a mouthful without pausing to chew. She'd been avoiding public places, not out of a concern for making others ill, but because being sick made her prickly and irritable. Unfortunately, that meant she'd mostly been surviving on bottled water and saltines - and she was all out of saltines.

"Kind of a weird job we have though, yeah? ******** ghost ships an' s**t. Like a movie. Hey, maybe it's like the Truman show or whatever, maybe we're just actors." She squinted at him over the edge of her bowl. "Maybe you was scripted in here, an' I'm the only one that don't know it."

Jesse Natasha Ross, star of her own show. Cool.  

[Inle-roo]

After seeing how much Gnat apparently liked the soup, Evan held his bowl out for her to take if she wanted it. He'd have hated for it to go to waste, and Gnat didn't look like she was wasting any of it.

He huffed a laugh at Gnat's theory. "That could be," he allowed. "If you find the way out someday, you should let the rest of us know. Or maybe we're still in the pods, just dreaming all this up like it's some kind of crazy video game. A live-action World of Warcraft, or something."  

[Ravvlet]

"As if. I think th' only way outta this place is, well." She stuck her tongue out, and dragged her finger across her neck.

"An' I like bein' tall, thanks all the same. Though I'm sure my folks miss me now." She frowned, jovial mood suddenly dampened.

She gave the bowl of soup a questioning glance. "You not hungry?" Gnat accepted it anyway, poking at it with her spoon.

"You got anybody to go home to?"  

[Inle-roo]

And just like that, all of the lighthearted silliness in the conversation withered and died as it took a more serious turn, Gnat's observation a sobering reminder that they were lucky to still be here at all. He shook his head as he passed her his bowl, lacing his fingers over his stomach as she took it.

He tilted his head to the side as he considered her question. His mom probably missed him; his dad almost definitely didn't. The last time he had seen his sister, she'd had tears rolling down her cheeks as he packed his duffel to leave home for good. His friends...he didn't want to think about it. It was better for everyone that he was here. "Nah," he replied eventually. "It's just me, myself, and the voice in my head."

He yawned and stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. "How about you?" Evan asked. "What would you be doing right now this second if you hadn't joined Deus?"