Dizzy Land

"That," Dean said, pointing a finger at her, "is not information that needs to be shared." It wasn't his fault--he didn't exactly have much experience with cooking.

He was starting to prove Sam's point about being grumpy when hungry, though, so he went in search of a spoon without further complaint.

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Starbuck shaped her mouth into an 'o' at the scolding as though she were very caught and felt very bad about it. Then she leaned toward Sam and mumbled (so that Dean could hear her perfectly well), "Got a fragile ego, doesn't he? Good thing he's not one of my pilots...." She motioned with her head. "Toppings are over there."

She set the crust out on the counter and went to preheat the oven.

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"Focaccia an Italian bread," Sam told his brother. "Like, a flat bread kinda similar to pizza that usually has olive oil and herbs and cheese and sometimes meat or olives baked into it. It's really good."

The fact that he was pretty much just as bad a cook as his brother didn't stop Sam from laughing at Starbuck's comment about the ovens or at Dean's response.

"Very fragile," he told Starbuck in the same not-really-hushed tone, his face overly-serious. "Be careful with him. He might cry."

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...There really wasn't any way he was going to get out of this one, was there?

Steadfastly ignoring them, he rummaged around until he found both a (giant) container of pizza sauce and a large spoon, which he carried over to where Sam and Starbuck were standing. "Here you go," he said, setting the sauce down on a counter and handing Sam the spoon. "What now?"

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Starbuck had her bottom lip stuck out an ~~sort of~~ apology. Grumpy it was, then. "Well, what do you want on your pizza? That guy John was showing me the ingredients last time I was here, and they pretty much have everything under the sun." Including pineapple, which she didn't get. "Looks like Sam's in charge of the sauce, so... oh, and we need cheese. Where's the cheese?" She glanced around.

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“Got it.” Spoon in one hand, Sam opened one of the larger fridges and grabbed a large bag of mozzarella he found inside. Starbuck being in charge of the pizza making was kind of funny, but the weird fit of laughter seemed to have abated, leaving Sam with that breathless feeling you got when you laughed too hard. He hefted it onto the counter.

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Dean shrugged at the question of toppings, looking at the assortment and pulling most of them onto the counter. Extra toppings never hurt.

"Do they even have pizza on--uh, where you're from?" he asked Starbuck. He had meant to say 'on your planet,' but maybe that wasn't the best idea. He didn't want Sam to think he'd completely lost his mind, after all.

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"Nope," she answered, impressed with how efficiently they took direction. Almost like they were used to it. Like soldiers. "But when I got here I was kind of delirious from running a fifteen hour rotation and getting no sleep in the past couple of days. And I hadn't eaten in gods knows how long, and probably looked like I was ready to deck someone. Because I kind of was. So James brought me pizza at the gates during my little interview, probably to make sure that I didn't fall over."

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Just when he thought he’d gotten himself under control, Dean’s mid-sentence switch-up nearly set Sam off again. She must have told him something about herself, where she was from. And he had no idea…

Sam didn’t really trust himself to speak at that moment, so he got busy opening the jar of sauce.

Which took all of about six seconds.

So he just stood there staring into the open jar and holding his breath.

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Dean was busy laying out all the toppings he could find (including a few things he wasn't sure were meant for the pizzas, like the giant meatballs he found in a refrigerator), but he soon noticed Sam and gave him a look. Was he missing something again? Sam was... staring at a jar of sauce.

He tapped Sam on the arm, hoping to knock him out of whatever kind of daze he was in, then turned to Starbuck. "Are there any toppings you don't like?" he asked. He'd eat just about anything.

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Now that she wasn't quite sure about. "Uh, no fruit," she decided. "If I find anything else I don't like I can just take it off, I guess."

She glanced over at Same, noticing the constant pauses. Maybe he was having a slight nervous breakdown with all of this? She couldn't exactly blame him. She was kind of surprised that no one had yet. "I think after he's done eating you better put him to bed," she told Dean.

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Sam poked back at Dean with the spoon when his brother tapped his arm.

“Watch out what you give him license to do,” he told Starbuck with a small grin. “Dean’ll eat just about anything.” His face screwed up a bit at her last comment though.

“He doesn’t need to put me to bed,” he said, eyebrows drawn in. “I’m fine.”

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Dean grinned. "Okay, no pineapple, then," he agreed. That was just as well--pineapple on pizza was a little weird.

"You were staring at a jar of sauce for like a minute," Dean said, exaggerating only slightly. "And you still haven't gotten any of the sauce on the pizza." He gestured toward it in a go on, then motion.

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Sam gave his brother a petulant look and huffed once, before turning back to the counter and scooping some sauce onto the laid-out crust.

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She rolled her eyes a little at Sam's insistance that his brother would eat anything. "Little boy, I was living solid off of rations for nearly two years before I got here. Anything tastes better than that, no matter how weird the combination."

He stifled a laugh at the younger brother's petulance about bedtime and being told what to do. Yeah, very familiar. She fought a twinge of memory at it and picked up a pair of oven mitts from one of the counters. "Thank the gods they don't have that frakking mouse on them," she said, flipping them over in her hands. "Seems like everything else around here does."

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Somehow the bit about two years worth of rations hit Sam in a way that the mention of fifteen hour rotations hadn’t and he paused with the spoon in the jar, suddenly reminded of how much Starbuck’s life sucked. A lot more than his and Dean’s, actually.

It was weird, this sudden surge of real, stomach churning sympathy for someone who until today had been only a TV character. It was weird too as he fully realized how much he knew about Starbuck that she would certainly not want him to know; personal things, things about her past, her relationships.

He forced himself to lift the spoon back out of the jar and continue putting sauce carefully on the pizza, gripping the spoon maybe a bit too tightly.

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...Speaking of things in the shape of the Mouse, the first thing Dean found when he went in search of plates (since Sam didn't seem like he was in a hurry with the sauce) were plastic, mouse-shaped plates that he quickly tossed aside. Giant plastic cups... Plastic forks... Aha. He finally came across a stack of plates--real plates, and pulled three out.

When Starbuck mentioned gods, he turned to face her. "I meant to ask you--that lady who came when you were sick... Her name's Psyche?" He paused, wondering if there was a polite way of phrasing this, but finally just asked, "Is she one of your gods, or something?" He couldn't figure out why a Greek god would be one of Starbuck's gods, but hey, what the hell--nothing else here made sense.

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She kept her horrified look at the first set of plates as slight as she could manage, but she was more than a little relieved that he found normal ones.

The question threw her a bit. Kind of a difficult to talk about in any precise way; worship was such a personal thing for her. "Yeah," she said simply. "That's why she came - she heard me praying. She came to help."

She put the oven mitts on her hands and clapped them together in a 'chop-chop' sort of way.

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“I met Psyche when I arrived,” Sam said quietly without turning from his oh-so-involved task of spreading tomato sauce on dough. “She was the first person who came to talk to me. We talked about spirits and zombies and she told me I wasn’t dreaming.”

He smoothed the sauce carefully on the pizza, trying to see how even he could make the sauceless stripe all the way around the edge.

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"Oh," said Dean, not really sure how he was supposed to respond to that. Spirits were one thing, but gods, even Greek gods... It was hard to wrap his mind around, so he stopped trying.

"Hurry it up with that sauce, Sam," Dean complained, lifting the bag of cheese and holding it over the pizza. "It doesn't have to be perfect! We're going to eat it!"

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While she hadn't really expected any life-changing reply from Dean on that, Sam's surprised her. Mainly because he didn't sound like he knew what to think of it, good or bad. "She came at my arrival too. I probably would still be convinced that everyone here was an evil cylon if she hadn't." She wondered if Psyche came to certain arrivals for any specific reasons, if she looked for something in the person's mind, of if she had her whims just like everyone else.

She was inclined to agree about the pace of the pizza-making, though. "Yeah, if I have to keep these oven mitts on for much longer, I'm going to start use them as boxing gloves."

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“It’s not that strange Dean,” Sam told his brother. “Remember the scarecrow god in Burkitsville? Or even the tulpa in the Hell House, like you said before. All in all I’d say Psyche being here is one of the least weird things so far.”

To Starbuck he could only nod solemnly before throwing up a hand in surrender at both their impatience. “Okay, okay!” he said, grinning again, and sloshed one more spoonful onto the crust before getting the spoon out of the way of Dean and the cheese.

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It was pretty strange, really. Dean thought so, at least--the scarecrow god was just some local legend with a cult following, but Psyche?

Then again, he'd seen some pretty strange stuff.

As soon as the spoon was out of the way, Dean sprinkled the pizza liberally with cheese, then moved on to toppings, adding some of pretty much everything (meatballs included). "Alright, I think that's it," he said, once he'd used up everything he'd collected.

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"I thought most people on your planet only believed in one god," she said quizzically at all Sam's talk about scarecrows and tulpas, whatever the hell that meant.

Starbuck picked up the pizza with her oven mitts on, circled round to the oven, opened the door with one hand and popped the thing in. "Now we wait something like fifteen or twenty minutes, I think." She took off the oven mitts and thwaped them down hard on the counter. "And don't think that just because I can use the oven for that means I'm gonna be feeding anyone on a regular basis." She actually could cook - she'd lived on her own at certain points in her life in her apartment - it's just that the food was completely tasteless.

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