Who: Ren and Nora What: Ren tries to study while Nora has an epic crisis on her hands. Where: Their place When: Recently Ratings/Warnings: Low/None Status: Complete
The apartment was quiet. A little too quiet. And Nora was hunting for wild pints of ice cream. She hit the freezer with reckless abandon, discovering that the only things left in there were a small bag of peas and two packs of frozen juice concentrate. Bummer. Now that Nora had a pretty good job working for Kanan, they weren’t living solely off of ramen noodles and peanut butter. But because Nora stood in front of a mostly empty freezer, she came to realize how long it’d been since she’d been grocery shopping.
Nora closed the freezer and bounced from the kitchen into the living room, looking for Ren. Something would have to be done about the lack of ice cream in their house!
Ren had never minded Nora’s chatter. In fact, most of the time he found it rather endearing, and he'd take comfort in her, oftentimes random, pontifications. Even still, with midterms looming on the horizon, he was glad that she was giving him some peace and quiet to study in. Her new job as Kanan’s assistant meant that he had been able to cut back his hours at the dojo, but it sometimes still felt as though he never had enough time to study everything.
He'd tucked himself in a corner of their small living room, back against the wall, with an open textbook on his lap. He was reading it carefully, occasionally jotting information he thought might be on the midterm into his notebook.
Nora took one look around the living room before spotting him over in the corner. “Ren!” She cried out, then bounced across the carpet like a gymnast headed for a series of handsprings or something. “Ren! We’ve got a serious problem. Serious! I don’t know how you’re not. freaking. out.! This is a disaster of magnitude proportions!” Of course, it was no such thing. But in Nora’s mind, the absence of ice cream was a national catastrophe.
And, there it was. He probably should have known that the apartment was a little too quiet. He looked up from his textbook as Nora bounded toward him. Even though she claimed that there was a serious problem, he was about 98% sure that it was a minor problem at best. The corner of his lip pulled upward just slightly, and he waited for her to get to the crux of the problem.
Nora bounced over and crouched down in front of Ren. She hugged her knees, grinning as she looked straight into Ren’s eyes. “Don’t you realize the severity of the problem??” Of course, the grin on her face was probably counter intuitive when she was talking about dire situations. “There’s no ice cream, Ren! None!”
Ren couldn't stop the small smile that crossed his features. Yep, it was certainly endearing. Confident now that there was no major catastrophe looming in the future, he turned his attention back to his textbook. “I don’t think I’d consider that a ‘disaster,’” he said as he began to read again.
Nora was caught absolutely speechless for a moment. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish, and she flailed her hands in the air in disbelief. Finally, she found her voice again. “HOWcanyounotconsiderthistheBIGGESTdisastersincetheHINDENBURG??”
“For there to be none left, wouldn’t you have had to eat it?” Ren asked calmly, turning the page. “That doesn’t seem so bad.”
“Ye~eeah, of course I ate it! That’s not the point! The point is that it’s gone now!” Nora pouted, folding her arms across her chest and sitting back, but on her heels. “And I wanted vanilla. I know other people might think it’s boring, but it’s absolutely the best.”
“Vanilla is a fine flavour,” Ren agreed. Out of the common ice cream flavours, he has to agree that vanilla was the best though he'd always been partial to green tea ice cream if they were getting fancy flavours.
He thought over their finances for a moment. With Nora’s new income things weren't nearly as tight as they had once been, and if he skipped buying tea at the University for a couple of days then a tub of ice cream wouldn't put them over budget. “You could always just buy more.”
It was as if Nora hadn’t even considered going out and buying more. She was more than willing to just sit around and whine about it until something else came along and distracted her. But when Ren brought up the idea of buying more? Her whole life brightened. “Really??”
Ren gave a slight nod of his head, happy that the “crisis” was already solved. With that out of the way, maybe he’d get some quiet so he could finish doing his readings. He frowned a little at his textbook, then jotted down a note on something he decided he probably needed to do more reading about.
Nora bounced up to her feet and danced around the apartment, seeming to disappear and reappear in different places, different positions. She was really good at the pop and lock thing, even though she was never classically trained at… well… anything. She found shoes and a purse, and a jacket, then paused by the front door. She leaned way back to look into the living room around the angle of the wall and cleared her throat.
“WELL??”
There was a part of Ren that really would have rather stayed at home reading. But he knew that there was no arguing with Nora. Most of the time it was just easier to go along. He finished reading his paragraph, and then closed the textbook.