RD16, log + orb!

[dailybread]

Characters: Peeta Mellark and you.
Open? Yes.
Where: Market quarter of Schwanheim, in a previously vacant storefront.
When: Early afternoon, RD 16
What: Peeta is opening a bakery and needs some taste-testers.
Warnings: None. Schmoopyness?

[Peeta's got flour in his hair, arms covered in dough, and a smile on his face. The crackling of a stove can be heard, if you listen closely; the locale itself is bright and sunny.]

Rue, you wanted cake, didn't you? And anyone else can come by, if you want. There's plenty to go around.



The castle dressmakers were...pushy. No worse than the stylists at the capital, but Faolan was right--they wouldn't give him pants. What he got wasn't so bad, though, if he rolled up the sleeves, although the shoes weren't very comfortable.

Buying a building with some of his gold (the amount of which was staggering; his jaw dropped when the treasurer had opened his vault in the castle) was easy. The shop was spacious, clean and well-lit with large windows to allow sun to spill in over the floor. The stove was nice, too; an old one, fed with wood. Peeta would have chopped the logs himself, but he hadn't been able to get his hands on an axe; the townspeople had insisted it was unbecoming of a princess to do manual labor.

So he'd bought some of those, too, along with three sacks of flour, raw cocoa, milk, butter, sugar, and a myriad of other ingredients he'd only read about. Currently in the oven was a batch of sweet buns--Katniss liked them; the smell called to mind her dark braid and bright, calculating eyes--and he was whisking together batter for a chocolate cake while he waited.


[[OOC: Just let me know in your subject line whether you're talking back to him on the orb or physically showing up. :3]]

Comments

[shiromadoushi]

"District twelve?" Bakura blinked, curious.

[dailybread]

"Where I'm from. The mining district."

He put down the bowl and made for the oven, pulling open the door. The glaze on the buns crackled and the smell wafted towards his nose. He looked back at Bakura with a quick smile and grabbed a towel from his baking surface, using it to shield his hands from the heat as he pulled the buns free. "Want one?"

[shiromadoushi]

Not any place Bakura had heard of, but he was very easily distracted by the sight of the sweet buns. "Sure! They smell really good!"

[dailybread]

"Careful, they're hot." He plucked one from the tray and dropped it, steaming, onto a plate, shaking the sting out of his fingertips before setting it in front of Bakura. "My--"

He paused. Friend. Wife. Partner. Lover. He didn't know what Katniss was to him--didn't know what he was to her. Managed to keep his smile up, anyway. "My friend really likes these. I bake them for her whenever I get a chance."

[shiromadoushi]

Bakura nodded, shifting the plate a little and waving his hand back and forth over it to help the bun cool. "I'm sure she must appreciate it."

His smile was a little wistful, expression distant as he thought of the kitchen in Hell Towers and of all the baking he'd done there for his family of friends.

[dailybread]

"She certainly eats enough of them." It was lightly teasing, but a little melancholy, a little longing; he recognized the expression of someone who was far away and empathized with it.

He sat, and took one of the buns for himself.

[shiromadoushi]

"A sure sign of it, ne?" Bakura smiled. "Or just of someone with a bottomless stomach. One of my friends back home was like that, only he also had the problem that sometimes, if he saw food, he had to eat it, like a compulsion. It was a side effect of something else. It was a big problem until he explained it!" he laughed fondly.

[dailybread]

Peeta never had to go hungry, not like so many others in the Seam. Sometimes he had to eat blackened heels, or stale pies, but he'd never known the true gnawing of starvation. He knew what it could do, though, and remembered the way Katniss ate their first time in the capitol. Like a compulsion.

"Yeah, I've seen that," he said, taking a bite of the bun. Warmth flooded his mouth and nose, sweet and soothing. "I think Katniss is still afraid that it's going to be the last time she sees food, so she tries to stockpile as much as she can."

[shiromadoushi]

Bakura blinked a few times. "Oh... she's from a place that doesn't have much...?"

A little rich boy in a modern city to a not so rich boy in a superhero City with a stipend to the operator and then owner of a store to a Mage with high demand skills... Bakura really had no idea anything about true hunger.

[dailybread]

"None of the districts have much, but Twelve is the poorest, and she comes from the poorest part of town," Peeta explained. "The Seam, where the coal miners work. Although neither of us has to worry about food anymore, since we won the games."

He'd gladly take starvation over the memories of the arena, but he wondered which Katniss would pick, if she could.

[shiromadoushi]

"Games...?" Bakura asked, without any of his usual enthusiasm on his favorite topic. He had gotten better at picking up when it was a game for fun or a game like a Yami no Game...

[dailybread]

"The Hunger Games. The Capitol's punishment to the districts for rebelling. Two children between the ages of twelve and eighteen are picked from each district, a boy and a girl, and they're brought to the Arena to fight to the death. Last one standing is the winner."

The images were painfully vivid in his head. "Katniss and I won last time, but only because we tried to commit double suicide and the Capitol declared us both winners rather than see us both die and have none."

[shiromadoushi]

Bakura blinked, mouth opening to ask something before quickly closing. No matter how curious he was, it was clearly not something he should prod.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to bring up something like that..."

[dailybread]

Peeta shook his head. "It's not your fault. And this is better than pretending it didn't happen, right?"

[shiromadoushi]

There was an awkward moment as Bakura scratched at his cheek a little. Pretending that things didn't happen was...sort of his main defense against things. "I guess so..."

...Topic switch!

"So you just arrived right? Just today?"

[dailybread]

The subject change was obvious, but not unexpected. The Games were hard to think about, harder still to live through--and here was peaceful. He felt at ease, somehow. So he followed the tide of conversation, breaking off another piece of the sweet bun.

"Just today," he confirmed. "How long have you been here?"

[shiromadoushi]

"Two months," Bakura carefully tugged at his own bun, checking to see if it was cool enough. "Aa-- two of the months they measure here. So... 40 days I think it is?" he corrected with a soft laugh. "It's easy to confuse it all, really."

[dailybread]

"That will take some getting used to." Peeta frowned, watching the steam rise from Bakura's bun. He was used to eating hot pastry; forgot other people weren't. "Do they have a calender or anything?"

[shiromadoushi]

"They have months and things like that, but I haven't seen one written out... Maybe at the monastery they'd have one..." Bakura reasoned before taking a small bite. "Aaaa, this is good!" he exclaimed happily.

[dailybread]

Peeta had no idea what a Monastery was; he'd ask later. For now, he shot Bakura a smile as he exclaimed over the rolls, face heating in just a hint of a blush.

"I'm glad you like them. I've had a lot of practice."

[shiromadoushi]

"Do a lot of baking back home, eh?" Bakura smiled, pulling off another small piece.

[dailybread]

"Yeah." Damn. Speaking of--there was still cake to be put in the oven. He popped the last of the roll into his own mouth and went to attend to the batter, pouring it into a deep clay dish he'd found in a market stall. "I used to do all the decorative frosting on the cakes we sold to the peacekeepers. They liked my flowers."

[shiromadoushi]

"Heeeeh, really? I never did that sort of frosting before, just sometimes lettering for birthday cakes or boarders. That's really cool, making actual decorations out of it!"

[dailybread]

"I could teach you if you want." The same cloth as before around his fingers, Peeta slipped the cake into the oven. "It's not hard."

[shiromadoushi]

"That'd be great! I could teach you something else in return, maybe? Do you know how to make pastry or Japanese deserts?"