jianhuo | [AU - Locked to Kaine]

It's been a long time since I've had a home cooked meal this good. I'm not sure if I've ever had one before, actually, so maybe that's not a good comparison. The meal is excellent though and so is the company. Whatever Helen is (because she's not a normal person, I know that much) she doesn't seem put off by my lack of manners and social skills in general.

"Sure," I say, sliding over my glass. At first I had wondered if it might be drugged, but I had seen her pour both glass from the bottle and drink her own without any problem.

"The meal was good."

"I'm glad you liked it," Saffron replies with a smile. She takes the dirty dishes in to the sink, then returns with the wine bottle, pouring more into both of their glasses.

Kicking off her sandals, she nods in the direction of her couch. "Why don't we move into the living room?" she suggests, hoping he's not in a hurry to go swinging away now that the meal is over.

I shrug and head over to the couch, not really particular about where we sit. This is still all relatively new territory to me and I figure I'll just take my social cues from her. It could be a great learning experience except I'm pretty sure that this situation won't ever come up again.

"Where did you learn to cook like that?"

She sits on the couch next to him, turned towards him, and tucks her legs up beneath her, the green dress she has on slipping upward just a little on her thighs.

"I learned the basics from my mother, but I'm mostly self-taught," she says, after a sip of her wine. "Years and years of practice."

"I see," I say, although I really don't.

It makes me wonder what that would be like though, learning a skill from a parent. The only thing I learned from my "father" was a twisted version of "the world sucks."

"I've... never really tried to cook like that. There's a lot of stuff I haven't done."

"I could teach you a little, if you're interested in learning," Saffron replies. "Or we could just make this a regular thing. I enjoy cooking, and it would give you a break from pizza and Chinese takeout." She smiles to show she's teasing, just a little.

"What's something else you haven't done that you'd want to learn to do?" she aks, curious.

"Cant really miss what you haven't done," I say, ignoring her first comment about making it a regular thing. I'll have to think on that. It would be nice to have a regular meal and even learn how to cook but I'm not really crazy about the regular contact.

"Consider the sum of my worldly experiences as if... as if I've been this age forever, living essentially like this."

She considers that for a moment, considers the implications of what he's saying. "That makes it sound like you were never young," she says. "Weren't you ever a child? Or a teenager? Didn't you ever do any of the silly, crazy things teenagers do?"

"Never did any of those things," I say, shaking my head.

I was never a child or teenager either, but admitting that would raise too many questions, ones that I'd rather not answer right now. Even if I had all of Peter's memories, I doubted that he did many of the silly, crazy things that she was talking about.

"What did I miss out on?"

"Oh, lots of things, I hardly know where to start," Saffron says, thinking back. "Well, silly party games, for one thing, like Spin the Bottle, Seven Minutes in Heaven - oh, and Truth or Dare, tell me you've at least played that."

"No idea what the hell that is," I say.

It sounds stupid. How do you make a game out of telling the truth and doing stupid stuff? That sounds pretty much like every day life.

"It's fun. Well, for a given value of fun, at least. When you get older, it's much more fun if you're drunk when you play it," Saffron replies. "It's easy to play. When it's your turn, you get asked 'truth or dare?' If you pick truth, the other person gets to ask you something and you have to answer honestly. If you pick dare, the other person challenges you to do something crazy or weird and you have to do it."

"A given value of fun," I repeat.

I'm not sure how fun that could be and I'm sure my skepticism shows because it sounds dumb. It also sounds like it could be a lot of trouble. What the hell would I dare her to do?

"The level of fun generally depends on the attitude of the people playing," she clarifies. "That's why it helps to be drunk."

She lifts her wine glass, as if to prove her point, and takes a drink. "You have to be willing to make a fool of yourself a little bit. Of course, that's harder when you're in a big group of folks playing the game. It's a little easier when it's just two people - say, you and me, right now."

"Is that so?" I ask, taking a drink of my own.

I can imagine there are all sorts of stupid things you could ask someone to do but I suppose there's always the caution that you don't want to raise the stakes to a level you're not willing to go to. The fact that there's a strategy to it somehow makes it that much more stupid in my mind.

"Alright," I decide. "Show me how."

"Okay," Saffron says, taking another drink of her wine before she turns slightly more towards Kaine, so that she's sitting sideways on the couch with her legs tucked up beneath her, close enough that her knees are gently touching the side of his leg. "Truth or dare?"

"Dare," I say.

That far more safe for me right now. There are a lot of things that I don't want to say about myself and she's far too curious for me to feel safe starting off with 'truth'.

She thinks for a second. "Okay, I'll start you off with something simple, so you can get a feel for how this works. I dare you to...cluck like a chicken."

"Bock bock," I say in a slightly more than half-hearted attempt at clucking like a chicken. I wasn't quite sure if that was good enough or not for the dare. She didn't say I had to be enthusiastic about it.

"Truth or dare?"

It was true, she hadn't specified what kind of cluck, just that he do it, and Saffron smiles. "See? Not too difficult. Okay, I choose truth."

I already hate this game. It's not that I don't want to do the things she's going to suggest, but that I can't come up with any good questions on the fly. I feel like this sort of game should be given some prep time to think of questions, especially if you haven't played it before.

"What's the most ridiculous dare you've ever had to do?"

"Oh lord," Saffron says, laughing. "The last time I played this was with a bunch of girls at the Companion Academy when I was...fifteen or sixteen, I think? I was dared to streak down the hall and back. It was lucky for me it was a warm night."

She smiles, remembering. The girls at the Academy had been decent, for the most part. It hadn't been them she'd had a problem with. "Your turn. Truth or dare?"

That sounded... incredibly tame to me. Apparently these other girls weren't all that creative with their dares. Maybe I won't have to come up with something all that crazy after all. Animal sounds seem pretty easy to match to me.

"Truth," I say, feeling a bit bold. Maybe it's the wine or the reassurance that this game isn't as intense as I thought.

There are so many things she wants to ask, but Saffron doesn't want to scare him off of this game right out of the gate, so she picks something relatively non-threatening for her first question. "How often do you swing around looking for criminals to bust?"

Again, it's another tame question and I figure that this isn't going to be bad after all. Not all that fun, necessarily, but it's not that bad. Either way, Helen is nice enough company, especially to look at.

"Every day," I say. "Amount of time varies. Truth or dare?"

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