[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Pudding for Two

Genre: Humour/Romance

Length: 1879 words

B/D: I wanted to do some quick little shorter stories for friends before I start working on the Christmas/New Year's event stories. Here's one for Yoshister, aka Dino! (It's been a while since I wrote a QP/Aru story...)

QP was a girl of many talents, and one of them was that she could smash ‘pudding’ into any other word to create a new and bizarre entity. She was Captain Picard at the bridge of the Enterprise, shouting ‘make it so!’; according to her whims, the world now knew the wonder of being pudding-shy, of taking pudding baths, and of course, the majesty of the puddingphone, which was much like a phone of the xylo variety but with a pleasing wobble applied to all the notes.

She earnestly believed that the reason all these ideas flourished organically into things that existed was that adding pudding to any given idea automagically made it better. Aru, on the other hand, thought it was likely up to the fact that she was a magical pudding god with a history of beating up whatever obstacles life placed in her path; the laws of reality had obviously been taking notes, and were just submitting to save themselves the manhandling.

The newest chimera brought into the world had been the Pudding Parlour, a business that existed only to purvey the most prestigious puddings to the puerile palates of the proletariat. As a hard-nosed business bunny, Aru had been almost certain that not enough people shared QP’s pudding fetish to support a wholly pudding based diner, but they thrived as if to spite her; perhaps, she thought, QP’s control of all pudding-related laws of reality also extended to the laws of pudding economics.

“So? What are you going to order?” QP asked, peering over the top of her menu.

There was an obvious answer as to what you order in a restaurant that serves exclusively pudding, but Aru chose not to say it. In all honesty, she was trying to find her tongue. Something was off in the way that QP was acting. There were no grass stains on her skirt, for one. QP attracted grass stains like lightbulbs attract moths; Aru had often theorised that QP’s education must consist entirely of rolling down the grass verge leading up to the school, over and over and over again; this was not so very far from the truth, although there was also a certain amount of hole-digging on the dog-girl’s ideal curriculum.

She also smelled very strongly of perfume, which was not within her normal olfactory repertoire. On good days, she smelled like caramel and vanilla; on a bad day she smelled, well, exactly as you would expect from a girl who insisted on running everywhere at full speed, regardless of how hot it was. Every day she smelled of wet dog for hours after she’d had her morning shower. But never of perfume.

Her hair had been brushed, her ears were immaculately fluffy, and her tail, ever-wagging, had been groomed to perfection. It all struck Aru as being ominously over-the-top for going to lunch with a friend. Maybe she was imagining it. Or maybe fate had just decided that her friend was going to look fantastic, like how sometimes your toast wasn’t that good and then sometimes it was just a sublime harmony of bread and butter substitute. Maybe QP was just a particularly well turned-out slice of toast today. Or perhaps – and this was the third, tantalising possibility that made Aru’s little cotton-tail quiver just thinking about it – QP was trying to impress her.

“Aruuuu! I know picking the right pudding is super important, and there’s a whole bunch of options, but don’t ignore me, okay? Here, I’ll help you pick.”

There were not, in fact, a whole bunch of options. The menu was just pudding listed thirteen times in thirteen different languages, with cute little blurbs implying but never quite stating that this pudding had a particular quality that somehow set it apart from the others. But before she could relay this salient point, QP had already dragged her chair to Aru’s side of the table and smooshed herself in next to her.

“I like this one, because it has a simple but refined flavour and a perfect puddingy texture. But this one, down here, this one’s also good because it has a really exotic wobble. This one I don’t like, because it just tries too hard, you know? Pudding shouldn’t need to try hard. Pudding should just be effortlessly perfect.”

If Aru had had a magic marker upon her person, she would have taken it out, apologised profusely in advance, and written the words ‘placebo effect’ on QP’s forehead. But every time she touched a magic marker she became drunk on the sheer power of it. Once Arthur had bought her a can of spray paint, ostensibly so they could make a sign for the shop, and she had spent the rest of the day daubing ‘YOU ARE A WONDERFUL PERSON’ and ‘PLEASE HAVE A NICE DAY’ on various walls around the city. If she were given the opportunity to write on QP, well… The temptation to put ‘Property of Aru’ somewhere nice and noticeable might be too much.

“I’ll, um… Let you pick for me. You are the expert, after all,” she said at last, pretending to be absorbed in the menu.

A waiter was summoned, and QP ordered two puddings with pronunciations so enthusiastically mangled that they might as well have been a totally new genus of cuisine. She seemed more than happy to step into the role of pudding gastronomer, and pleased at being deferred to; there was a distinct ‘thump’ from her wagging tail smacking against the back of the chairs. As the waiter retreated to the safety of the counter, she turned to Aru and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Um, actually, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

There were certain things in the world that just ought to be. Christmas ought to be happy, a tower ought to be tall, and QP ought to be loud, so she could stand atop the tower and evangelise about pudding for all to hear. Her whispering was like a foreign concept, and one that struck fear into a bunny like Aru. (She was, as she liked to maintain, quite brave for a bunny, but they were on the whole inclined to nervousness, which helped with the not-being-eaten agenda that bunny rabbits seemed to have).

As if sensing Aru’s nervousness, QP lowered her voice even further. “I just wanna say beforehand that you don’t have to decide right now, and I won’t be offended even if you say no, alright?”

Being Santa was not an especially warm job. Snow was plentiful, and the ice treacherous; between them, Aru had quickly become a begrudging expert on cleated boots and thermal underwear, neither of which were exactly for the fashion-conscious. Despite all that, she had never frozen quite so thoroughly as she did now.

The perfume, the grooming, the dancing-around-the-topic finger twiddling that was so unlike her: it all added up. QP, the Bermuda Triangle of romantic relations, the girl with a head as thick as a dreadnought’s hull, had finally awoken from her slumber and was about to launch her first-ever assault on somebody else’s heart.

As she reeled in shock, the question fluttered dully through Aru’s brain: why? The me was only implied after the fact, although she had some confidence in her long legs, well-kept hair and approachable personality. But why now, of all times? Certainly, they had been having lunch together a lot more often, but that said more about QP’s love of food than her love of rabbits. She personally hadn’t made any romantic overtures, because the only overture the dog-girl was interested in had 1812 in the name and gave her an excuse to fire wildly as an accompaniment.

Perhaps, she thought, it was all down to her special talent. Although QP’s love for pudding remained her primary attribute in the hearts of the masses, she had another, more subtle talent: an innate understanding of the hearts of rabbits. It usually didn’t work on Aru, since she was a girl and a Santa as well as a bunny, but what if it had? It was true that she, hellbent on keeping her yuletide profession secret and walled up in a shop that had only one regular customer, was lonesome among bunnies. Maybe that had gone through to QP on some subconscious level.

After all, it wasn’t like she wasn’t… well, interested. QP was such a bright, peppy girl, apt to charge in when Aru tended to fall back. She seemed to defy gravity with her spirit, and there was something very beautiful, very loveable, in that. But it was different to how she had imagined it going. Not to say that she sometimes just laid in bed and daydreamed about it, of course. That would be silly. She had just always thought that she’d made the first move. She’d never considered the idea that she would be chased. But it stood to reason, didn’t it? QP was a dog, and what did dogs do when they saw something they wanted?

She swallowed back the lump in her throat, steadied her shaking hands. Her friend – her potentially more than friend – needed some kind of answer. “Y… Yes. What did you want to ask?”

There was the faintest of blushes on QP’s cheeks. The very smallest hint of dew on her eyelashes. “Um, so… I was thinking that… well, maybe… Next Christmas, I could help you out with the deliveries? Pretty please? I want to be a Rudolph!”

Aru felt a huge weight fall from her shoulders, and was incredibly disappointed that it had. “A… you… ah. You mean you want to be a reindeer?”

“No, I wanna be a Rudolph! I wanna go at the very front of the sleigh and have a glow in the dark nose! You know how useful that would be? I’m always stubbing my toe when I get up for my midnight pudding snack!” QP hissed, still in her stage whisper.

“Mm… Maybe try flying instead of walking, then?” Aru sighed. “I can’t give you a glow in the dark nose, QP. I’m sorry. It’s not within my power.”

“Not even if I put it on my list to Santa?”

“You don’t get presents from Santa anymore. It’s a conflict of interests. If you really want, you can help me with the delivery. I don’t have a sleigh, though. I don’t even have jingle bells.”

“You don’t?” the dog-girl asked, with the pleading eyes of a disappointed child. “Aww… Well, if Batman smells, I’ll let you know. Even if my nose doesn’t glow, it’s the best at sniffing!”

“Right. Your nose is more than cute enough as it is,” she replied, and gave said nose a little boop.

QP’s ears flopped down. “…Aru? Are you mad? You seem mad.”

“I just had a heart attack. Nothing big.”

That, of course, was a lie. She’d raked through all her thoughts and her feelings, and god help her, she’d done it in the middle of a parlour selling nothing but pudding. And it all turned out to be a big, fat, false alarm. She felt exhausted, relieved, extremely disappointed. But not angry. Never angry.

Although she did have a heart attack when she saw the size of the bill.

A/N: Short and goofy. I've been writing a lot of longer things lately, so going back a little more towards a more comfortable length is good. (It also means I don't get stuck working on the same story for a month!) Hope you enjoyed it, Yoshister.