InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "rocks don't taste like dispair"

ciɳɗy (ciɳɗɛʀɛʆʆɑ) ѵɑkɑʀiɑɳ (silvershoes) wrote in valarlogs,
@ 2015-07-15 10:21:00

Entry tags:

!complete, cindy cendrillon (cinderella), garrus vakarian

Who: Cinderbrations (Garrus & Cindy)
What: Wedding planning is interrupted by the end of the world
When: Backdated to Sunday
Where: Their house
Rating/Warnings: Pretty low, for it being the apocalypse and all
Status: Complete

When it came to the wedding, things were moving along nicely. They had picked a date and time (October 18th, cards had been sent out), colors (which had changed and were now blue, ivory, and gold to compliment the fall season), a venue (you didn’t get much better than the Normandy, there in the cargo bay with a twinkling blanket of stars as a black velvet backdrop), and Cindy planned to have Rogue cater the event - she wanted good, southern food anyway (comfort food, as it were) and she trusted her friend to include delicious vegetarian-friendly items as well. Not to mention it’d be a nice chunk of change earned for the girl with the white stripes, so she could finally use the extra cash and take a damn vacation. Ha, they’d all dream big.

But what sparked Cindy’s interest now was what would hopefully be a whole buffet of cookies, in addition to the standard cake. Because really, what a great idea that was - people could munch on them in between dances, or they could be used as a ‘thank you’ treat for guests to take with them. She’d heard about the gal who was responsible for this deliciousness, cookies baked soft and fresh the morning of the wedding, and wanted to order a box for a taste since there wasn’t a walk-in store yet; it was a small business run by one woman and her husband. So placing that order was exactly what she did, but she’d gotten a mix - chocolate chip, caramel sea salt, and figs and bacon for her carnivore, nothing with nuts - and they made her practically drool with joy.

“Garrus,” she called, untying the ribbon on the cute box. “Come here, I need you for a second.” Oh man, this was going to be good. “We also need milk, lots of it.”

Milk was an odd request, but alright. He’d been stuck on the phone with his father about particular wedding details (military uniform versus traditional tuxedos) and then this whole venue issue that he didn’t quite understand (which had to be expected), but it brought Garrus a headache he’d rather not deal with. “We’ll talk later,” he grumbled into the cellphone, trapped between his shoulder and ear as he rummaged the fridge for the milk carton. “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll explain - tomorrow, I’ll call you tomorrow.” Some other chatter. Some more exasperation that made him exhale a sigh with a growl.

Cups and milk on the way, he set them on the counter to finally grab the phone. “Tomorrow. Yeah, gotta go. Bye.”

Garrus didn’t really remember what the ‘cute box’ was about. He rubbed his brow, like it’d do away with the hammering feeling of his head. “Sorry. What’s that again? Cookies?”

“Passion. Sugar. Butter,” Cindy explained, giving the name of the company. Reading it right from the business card that came with the box, actually. She hoisted herself up onto a stool at the island in the kitchen, glass of milk sliding toward her. Completely casual in her jeans and her ‘Leave Britney Alone’ tanktop. “This woman does cookie buffets for weddings and stuff, I wanted to give it a test run. That way we’ll have dessert covered, besides the cake.” The regular wedding cake and the groom’s cake - which she would just let Garrus handle, despite Solana’s quips that it should be Grumpy Cat-themed.

She took a sip of milk, and also a caramel sea salt cookie, eyebrows lifting. “Everything okay with your dad?” They didn’t always get along like peas and carrots, but at least they were speaking - which was important when planning a wedding. Cindy couldn’t wait for the in-laws to meet, really. Talk about headaches of doom.

Oh, right. Garrus remembered now. He’d grab at a cookie in a second, appetite for anything in the backburner now that the parental unit had him riled with some grump. Now behind her, he wrapped his arms around his waist to trap her so he could attack the crook of her neck with his lips - a raspberry, blown against her skin.

“It’s fine,” he insisted. Sourly. “Or it will be.” Okay, what the fuck did caramel sea salt even taste like? Cindy had a thing for shit he never even heard of, so he picked one up to examine it with skepticism. “His inner control freak is shining through. Instead of letting it escalate to verbal blows I’m doing my best to respectively shove him off the topic.” Sniffsniff. The smell was acceptable. “Then he’s questioning the Normandy. I’m ready to eat a bullet.”

His father had pull, but not that much pull to figure out where the Normandy came from, what kind of vessel it was, or how Garrus was so intricately connected to it. Him and Shepard were the only ‘crew’ it had, so they split up responsibilities for regular ship maintenance, made sure the baby was safe to fly high outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

Cindy squirmed, laughing, swatting at Garrus from her vantage point on the stool - but she’d been raspberry-attacked from behind, oh no. “That’s all you can do, respectfully divert...and try the caring approach too, rather than the verbal blows,” she grinned. “Because you know when he and my stepmother meet, it’s going to be like Hiroshima all over again.” Not something she was looking forward to, but there was a chance she’d be pleasantly surprised - the southern royal and the military man could find a kinship in their love of rules and domination.

But she’d also be here to ensure her fiance did not eat a bullet before the big day. Or after. “Maybe there will be a miracle and he’ll just say ‘okay, son, I trust you’ and then enjoy the atmosphere.” A fig-and-bacon cookie was selected, and she offered it instead of the sea salt and caramel variety - or in addition to. They needed to eat all these cookies. “Here, try this one, it’s manlier.”

Good thing he also trusted Cindy to buy something that would not kill him. Even his extensive list of allergies had pinned to the fridge to serve as a friendly reminder (and to answer any doubts). Smooth with a gun and faced a throng of gangs mostly unscathed, yet he almost met his death at the hands of mangos. Garrus was sure his life was filled with troll gags and whatever Powers To Be that may exist likely looked down at him in maniacal laughter.

“Thank you, the size of my penis appreciates it,” he smirked, though he also wasn’t entirely sure about including bacon in baked goods but what the fuck did he know, he wasn’t Betty Crocker. So he bit into this fig-bacon-thing with doubts cast aside. “He’s also atheist. Not sure if I want to sit in and eavesdrop on whatever possible conversation they’d have or avoid the eruption of violence in the form of word wars.” Solana was probably better at quelling those flames than his own mother - daddy’s little girl and such. He’d put her on ‘father duty.’

Dropping a purposefully sloppy kiss of bacon and cookies into her cheek, he took the stool beside her. “We just got to remember - we’re in space, we can’t exactly kick anyone out if battle begins. Maybe we can have a timeout room.”

For adults.

Right, space. Sometimes Cindy could hardly believe her good luck - getting married on something like the Normandy was basically the coolest thing ever, and put her first wedding to shame by far. But she hardly counted that travesty, considering it wasn’t even really her choice anyway and had been a miserable ceremony in a church with far too much flowery shit. “I’m thinking a timeout room would be beneficial, but let’s not call it that exactly,” she chuckled. “Maybe just have the cookies in there to serve as kind of a peacemaking thing, and a place where our friends and family - mostly family - can calm their tits.”

Because, really? There would need to be a lot of that. The southern hotheads didn’t really have explosive tempers, but Cindy’s stepmother had perfected the art of passive aggressive responses. Likely she’d just fan herself and judge, but her stare cut like lasers - and could melt diamonds. Which was why she decided, “I’ll tell my dad to keep the talk of prayer before breakfast, lunch, and dinner to a minimum, especially at the rehearsal,” she promised, because she at least trusted the good doctor to listen to his daughter and reel in the Wicked Witch when necessary, especially if it involved atheism. He was tickled pink about getting to walk Cindy-Lou down the aisle, he wouldn’t ruin that.

Walk her down the aisle in space, mind you.

She took another cookie, and politely wiped her milk mustache. Ahem. “Though I haven’t mentioned the rehearsal dinner is at Oktoberfest to them yet. Beer should mellow everyone though, right?”

Garrus never catered to anything religious, and it wasn’t he didn’t believe in anything (living here made it impossible to), but his father was grotesquely stubborn. And her stepmother was a piece of work on her own - to handle her properly was to play some sort of mindgame. Murder her with kindness, she’d essentially have nothing to complain about aside from their whole ‘living in sin’ situation.

But he also had faith that neither of them would spark something in each other so furiously that they’d ruin the Big Day. Spirits help them if they did.

“I’m hoping everyone’s going to be too drunk and merry to not give a damn about anything otherwise,” he snorted, reaching for a classic chocolate chip cookie. “I think it’ll be fine. Ultimately. Just need to be strategic. On both ends. They can bicker among themselves after it’s all said and done.”

It’d been so early the sunlight had been lighting the inside of their house, but then something began doing away with the light - almost too quickly. One of his brows rose, and Garrus rose from the stool to take a glance. “I thought it was all sun today?”

Except he’d never seen storm clouds this black before. A thick darkness, rolling out like a carpet.

“There will be enough booze, they should be,” Cindy noted, and she too was hoping for a smooth, easy, and alcohol-infused time between the two families. At the very heart of it, the more stubborn ones knew how important this day would be - they weren’t so cold-hearted as to ruin that. Then the Bridezilla really would rear her ugly head, and no one wanted that.

Munching on her cookies, she swallowed, dusting crumbs, and then went to go follow Garrus, moving close to the window. Their house had many of them, tall windows, and French doors - Cindy liked an open, airy space with lots of light. But right now? There wasn’t a lot of that.

Instead, it looked like black asphalt, a stretch of it, fit and ready to swallow the world whole. Murkiness permeated every inch of the sky. Impenetrable.

“The forecast said all sun,” she frowned, and then went to one of the French doors to open them and step out onto the patio. “Jesus, it’s cold all of a sudden.”

It didn’t take anyone with ‘special powers’ to deduct that something was definitely amiss. It always was here, whether it be the laws of this place bending to allow them to become what they were dressed as during Halloween, or the definition of disaster. And lately it’d been just that - the opening of a hellmouth, a creature of massive proportions emerging from the sea and making the entire area it’s stomping grounds, and now…

Well, Garrus didn’t really know what this was.

Time to flip on the outdoor lights, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to see shit. Blues and sunrays were being chased away now, in the distance - soon eaten away by all this. And it was cold, like ice hitting him right in the bones. He actually pulled Cindy against his side, hands rubbing up and down her arm. “Hm.” A frown. “Don’t they say bad things tend to come in threes?”

Not to be negative about this situation, but...

The chilliness of it all was...different. Not just a typical shivering type of sensation, due to temperature, but it was more a feeling of glacial dread that settled in Cindy’s stomach in a brick. Needless to say, she didn’t exactly like it. Something was wrong. Or would be going wrong. Shit was going to hit the fan, again, and by now she liked to think that she was well attuned to the mood swings and foreboding nature of Orange County.

She slid her arm around Garrus, attempting body heat since obviously her current choice of clothing didn’t provide much warmth. Or prevent goosebumps from breaking out all along her arms. “That’s what they say,” she spoke with dry amusement. “Guess it’s happening. Or...something is.”

A sigh escaped her. Whatever this evil was, the hum of it in the air was nearly electric. “Better check the network. Someone has to know something.”

Someone always knew something, in that he had faith in - he skimmed the network the other day and heard a chatter or two about a premonition, a bad feeling, but wasn’t that the norm around this place? On the bright side he hadn’t heard screaming, or things being crushed under a voluminous amount of mass - but soon the silence broke, gusts of wind whistling a haunting tune that rooted that inevitable feeling of dread. It was heavy in the air, as present as the freeze it carried.

Garrus could even see his breath. The temperature had dropped that quick, that drastically. Oh, fuck this. “It’s time to go inside,” he decided, a kiss pressed against her temple before ushering her inside. Doors and latches, locked. “I’m going to guess the network’s been spammed already, people announcing premonitions left and right. The usual. Like hell this is normal.”

It never got this cold in southern California. Not cold enough for frozen breath, frigid air, icicles of doom. Nope. Just didn’t happen. Cindy gladly retreated back into the safety and serenity of the warm, cozy house - and she was already working out a plan to batten down the hatches. Because this was definitely going to get hairy.

“I forgot what normal even was,” she smirked. “Guess we better ready ourselves for something like a hurricane, just in case.” If that’s even what this was, but it was something to go by - and better safe than sorry. “Let’s board up some windows to start with?”

And clearly toast to the end of the world. No way was she losing this house to OC fuckery too.

The same thought had crossed his mind, about losing this place. The first one had fallen victim to the enormous wave of vengeance plotting that’d descended for him alone (he blamed that on OC fuckery, hands down, that was Omega all over him). It’d almost blown him to pieces with it. Garrus wasn’t prepared to lose his home a second goddamn time because this place didn’t know how to keep its shit together.

“I’ve got emergency supplies in the shed,” he sighed, both amused and exasperated. Preparing for inevitable disaster was the way of life here. Especially since it was their masochistic choice to stay, but he couldn’t imagine them making any other place their home. He pushed some hair from her face, leaning down to her height to take a nibble out of those lips. “Including an impressive amount of alcoholic supplies. Something tells me we’re not properly equipped to help deal with whatever the hell this is, so we’re sitting out. Unless duty calls.”

“Unless duty calls,” Cindy agreed, and after she grabbed Garrus again for another kiss-with-teeth she opened the fridge to grab a beer for the road. Before the power inevitably went out or something, and they had to eat and drink all the things anyway to prevent them wastefully going bad. Top plinked off, she took a long and unladylike swig from the bottle. “I’ll get in touch with Sharon, see what’s going on at the Agency. Because they’ve probably been notified, radar up and such.”

Alright. To the shed they would go. “Board up the windows, cars in the garage, stash the firepit supplies, um...well, the carriage is still in Trabuco Canyon and locked away so it should be safe...” She was trying to think of everything else they might need to do in preparation. “Gather candles and flashlights. We’ve got this.”

Yeah, all that sounded reasonable - with a drink of his hand, excuse him while he fished in the fridge for his own beer. “Someone’s baggage bleeding over,” Garrus reasonably assumed, as it seemed to the occurrence lately. All of it coming in threes; they’d have to vote on their least favorite when everything was said and done.

His first sip was leisurely, leaning against the frame of the doors to take another look (this time less ‘haha, OC, you’re crazy’ and with more genuine concern) outside. He couldn’t detect a break in the clouds, not even a peek of light. Like this thing had sucked up the sun while it invaded. It wasn’t like the freak snow storm, the curse of Halloween, the Truth Serum that leaked in the air. “Calm before the storm - things seem tame before they get worse. Happened with the demons, happened with the spider.” It all seemed to follow a predictable formula. Shit hit the fan, qualified people banded together to solve it, the people win, the end. There was comfort in predictability. “So if this is the beginning, I have to wonder what the end’s going to look like.”

“Like hell on earth?” Cindy suggested, because really, if this could be considered tame? Threatening and taunting their county with a black hole of death and destruction, eating up any trace of light? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what ‘red alert’ would look like at the end. Still, they’d be prepared as best they could be.

Gotta get through the beginning and middle before you could get to the end though, and she was plenty concerned about the state of the union here. But, nerves steeled, she was of the mindset that the best way out was always through. Someone had said that, somewhere. It rang many truth bells.

Truths that were all the new normal, but hey. It could be worse.