Come on, don't be chicken!

Sighs...you wanted it, here it is.

Lora was a picky eater. Somehow, with all her charms and quirks and endearing facets of an adorably facile, nascent personality, Lora had come out of a dirty, unloving, abusive home and decided that she was going to be a picky eater. And more power to her, right?

Now, Jin, for his part and for whatever reason, was an excellent cook. Perhaps that's why he was the Paragon, truly - not only did he feel in his bones-not-bones the will to be a pacifist, he also had an alternative occupation towards which he could turn his talents for efficiency and precision, to support that predilection.

(Had the military ever cared, do you think? Had Ornelia ever had or made a gushing appraisal thereof? There was nothing about cooking in his old journal. Apparently, it was all cerebral. Fair enough.)

Julienning vegetables, from the simple, bulbous cabbage to the complex, knobbly carrot, came easily, swiftly, to him. He could taste anything and know immediately how much additional seasoning, even a miniscule measure of something unexpected like ground-up Star Maple leaves or Bladed Holly root, would be necessary to transform, nay render, an incoherent mélange of ingredients into something filling, warming, homey. He'd never burned the skin off of a freshly caught Tornan Trout (he enjoyed the crispiness, when it was cooked right, and he always cooked it right), and he wasn't about to start in this lifetime or any yet to come.

Jin was perfect, and everything he made was perfect, even as it managed to be not half so stiff and awkward as he could sometimes be. Not much of a primer for fluid socialization, was it, to be the caretaker for a not-yet-teenage child who herself was completely indistinct, but who by being bonded to him, as a result of her well-taken curiosity and fear, had committed arguable treason against the nation, the Titan, she loved so much.

Lora was not fully Tornan - her golden eyes served the most immediate indicator of that ever-so-slightly uncomfortable fact - but oh, how she loved Torna. Of course she did - her mother had loved Torna, and had been Tornan through and through even with the chance incidence of hair more reddish than tended jet black. Lora was proud to call Rynea her mother. On the other hand...

Gort was a bad-dog mutt (that is to say, personality-wise) from some cocktail of Ardainian and Urayan ancestors - perhaps fitting that he should be so combative, considering his very genetic makeup carried the implicit mutual distrust of its dichotomized halves. That made it rather dirtier, didn't it, that Jin hadn't even been stolen by someone who deserved to reclaim him, someone who was of and for the same people to whom he most truly belonged? Only right, then, that Lora should have made off with him, in the end.

All this that they did, in storied sync and literary liaison, but still...Lora was a picky eater. She was only ten years old, so she had a right to be, certainly, but what did that mean for the incipient fruits of Jin's long-storied labours?

All this...all for naught. For Lora quickly (so quickly, too quickly, where did she even dream up these confoundingly marketable things?) made up her stout little, proud little mind that she would only ever eat chicken nuggets, thank you very much! Because they were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside and that was the only way Jin would ever get her to eat vegetables.

(The ultimate process by which he coerced ketchup out of Barbed Tomatoes was certainly not traditional, was certainly not culinarily esteemed, but it got the job done, and the same could be said of the way in which he manipulated water from Lasaria's ponds to freeze extra portions of the hastily-breaded roughly Sauros-shaped fowl-breast pucks for transportation within their ratty rucksacks over the coming weeks.)

To note here a technicality: only the rich actually had chickens, and they certainly didn't need that new Gogol on their backs all for the lack of a pristine 'pecimen of poultry to pulverize. Jin made do, most of the time, with the far cheaper and far commoner Rhogul meat; it was left unspoken and unconfirmed for many, many years if Lora ever really noticed the difference.

The verdict, in time, came down that she'd known something was off, but would have felt too guilty asking about it, especially given how fondly she looked back on those days and how silly she'd been - and how sweet he'd been, indeed. By the time her teenage years were rounding off, her favorite was most definitely Ruby-Stew Buloofo, and what a sigh of relief Jin had let out knowing that he'd actually get to flex his atrophying mental muscles, after all that time.

Still, Lora knew exactly how much power she held. Had always known. What one might call "normal" Drivers with "normal" Blades would never experience half this much fuss and muss over the politics of dinnertime coups, but Lora was not normal, and neither was Jin.

Lora was not a fighting partner, Lora was a child, and Jin was her duly-appointed guardian. That's...well, that's a heady thing, isn't it? Or perhaps it's more weighty. Perhaps, again, both.

Rynea had been a good mother, despite all the times she had almost definitely been overwrought from the stresses of her less-than-kind profession, and can you blame a child for wanting to have fun as they muddle through the opaque aftermath of loss and tragedy? Chicken nuggets, then, would dear little Lora eat, and strictly nothing else.

So years later, when Lora was all good and grown, and they met Mikhail in the bombed-out Porton Village, and Jin stewed up Trout Stralu for dinner...well, you can just imagine that splendid soul's quiet fury at hearing his Driver's low and rough yet still mild and lilted voice call out, cheerful and impune as anything, "Just try it, I know you'll like it - Jin's an excellent cook. Come on, don't be chicken!"

If we'll pardon the gruesome, painfully ironic morbidity for a moment, Lora's corpse wasn't the only thing Jin kept frozen aboard the Monoceros. He'd had (enjoyed, even?) his fair share of dino-patty snacks on the many beaten trails of Torna, now sunken forever, and the habit just wouldn't leave him. Preparing food, stocking up supplies for literally anything at all? Make sure you've got the birdmeat, from whatever classification, and the ketchup. Because Lora wouldn't eat anything else.

That's not...no, Jin, you couldn't possibly be convincing yourself, trying to convince yourself, that you're condemned to processed protein for every meal for the rest of your life...are you?

No, of course not. Not that Jin trusted himself to keep strictly above such maudlin considerations. And, not that he had to eat them all himself.

Once he and Malos had scrapped together, up and out of that dark, dank alley in Alba Cavanich, and had made the rounds of Leftheria and Indol alike to see what was doing with any other survivors, for rendezvous both genial and grudging, they settled into their holding pattern of, basically, waiting for Mikhail to grow up. After all, co-parenting and murder don't quite go hand in hand, do they?

Mikhail did in fact grow up to be willing to eat just about anything (one might consider that his time in Indol had had something to do with that, but we would digress, and depressingly so, if we explored that avenue - so we won't!), and of course Jin knew Lora would have been...oh, so proud.

Lora also, then, would have been perhaps rather proud to know that Mikhail instrumented the bargaining chip of proper nutrition all too often, and particularly any time that Jin had to leave him alone with Malos. The fact still did remain that Malos had been to blame for the death of his first real friend (and did he regret how he'd reflected his anger onto Mythra, in that moment...? indeed he did), even though he'd been absent during the bulk of Jin's self-reconciliation with his own new alignment.

The other reconciliation that had to happen, unfortunately, was that of Malos with any sort of kitchen implement. In this respect if not in others, Jin saw that the sibling Aegises resembled each other entirely too wholly, too completely. They were practical supercomputers, so why on earth were they so bad at following a damn recipe?

Jin swore, this time, that he wouldn't let the opportunity slip out of his hands. If it took him five hundred years, well, that would just have to be how long it took, for him to teach Malos how not to burn water. Not even with his black flame, was he doing it! Merely with the stove's favorite front-left burner, and oh, weren't the Master Blades a marvel? A feat of ancient-modern engineering, surely. So surely.

But back to Mikhail: it had been an untameable whirlwind, after the fall, and he wasn't much older than Lora had been, nine to ten to perhaps eleven, by the time he'd been whisked out of Indol with the fan-shaped Core Crystal jammed unceremoniously into his pale and previously unmarred chest. So let the child eat chicken nuggets, right? A welcome, if whimsical, refrain, no?

No. Not if it was going to cause Malos to burn them all into hell and back again by turning on the oven. No, not if it would have to come to that. So Jin waited, ever-patient, still so long-suffering, while the oven preheated, and then as the nuggets warmed, and then he slipped on his mask and said to Malos and Mikhail with sternest stare, "Don't eat those nuggets until they're almost cold. If you burn your tongue while I'm away, I won't be able to adminster proper first-aid." (Apparently, neither would Malos.)

Out Jin walked, and as soon as he'd gone Malos idly nudged the lip of the sheet tray with the back of one armored hand. "Eh, they're fine now."

"No!" Mikhail blurted out as the same hand moved to hover over the top of the tray.

"What?" Malos snapped.

"...Jin said not to."

"Look, kid..." Away went the hand, regardless. "Who are you more afraid of, me or Jin? Come on, don't be chicken. Eat the damn nuggets."

Of course, by the time they'd finished arguing, about war and blame and influence and exfluence, the nuggets had long gone cold, and any and all danger of burns had vanished, to be replaced by the icky, salmonella-esque haunt of chewy, room-temperature chicken guts.

"Ugh. Looks like we'll have to heat 'em up again. Whaddya say, Mik? How hard could it be?"

(Luckily, the Monoceros was well-equipped with fire extinguishers, though doubtless...not for exactly this purpose. No, not at all.)

I am easily bribed into writing fic by the concept of people liking it. So I hope you liked it. :)