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It's a little weird to ask your ex-boyfriend what to make your current…what to make Alec for dinner on his birthday. Boyfriend makes it sound like they're fifteen and stupid. Alec isn't anybody's boyfriend. They just, you know, see a lot of each other. Like, enough that Max's place is more like a storage unit than a place where she actually lives. Enough that she's making him dinner on his birthday. With, like, candles and shit. In the romantic sense, not in the we-live-in-Terminal-City-and-power-is-even-dicier-than-it-was-before sense.

Logan very graciously gives her recipes for two kinds of pasta and a risotto. She has to ask him what a risotto is. He tells her like this kind of conversation isn't awkward at all, and then he tells her what black markets will have all the ingredients. And then they chat about random stuff, because it's been a while since they've talked.

Whatever. She's known for a long time that her life isn't normal.

+||+||+

 

Since she's met Alec before, it's not much of a surprise when his first words aren't "thank you" or "you look beautiful," but instead "You cooked?"

"Fuck you, I cook."

"Maxie, Maxie, swearing at the birthday boy?"

She rolls her eyes and takes the wine he brought. He's not a complete savage; he just tries to act like one a lot of the time.

 

+||+||+

 

Buying somebody a present has never been as easy as it apparently was before the Pulse, and the whole tenuous Terminal-City-versus-the-rest-of-the-world thing only made it more difficult. Fortunately, some gifts come for free. No pun intended. So they're in bed after Max has bestowed one of those gifts (or several of them, depending on how you want to look at it) on Alec, and Alec's lying with his head on her belly and she's running her fingers through his hair and down the nape of his neck, and Alec says, "I didn't know you knew how to make risotto."

"You never asked," Max tells him primly, and he snorts.

"I'd ask what else you can do that I don't know about, but I'm thinking that's probably better as a surprise."

This time, she snorts. But, after a moment, she admits, "Logan gave me the recipe."

It's dark, and the angle's not really right for her to see his face anyway, but she's morally certain that Alec is raising one eyebrow. "Logan Logan? Eyes Only, used-to-be-your-platonic-studpuppy?" Max thwacks him. "Ow! That Logan?"

"Yes, that Logan. He's an excellent cook."

Alec mutters something she chooses to ignore.

"I tried looking on the Net," Max says, "but I didn't know what kind of recipe would be good, and what I'd be able to find the ingredients for, and there were so many of them. And Joshua didn't really know anything, and Original Cindy could burn water, and Mole was no help."

"You asked Mole for cooking advice?"

"People have hidden talents!"

"Mole?"

"OK, so it turned out that cooking wasn't one of his," Max concedes.

Alec picks his head up and moves so that he can kiss her, one eyelid, then the other, then her lips. "It was really good," he says. "Thank you."