For her to have a grudge would be the natural response, yes, and he is honestly, on some level, surprised that she’s flowing so naturally into this ‘nothing ever happened’ scene they’ve got going on, but at the same time he’s… Grateful? Would that be the appropriate word to use here? Either way, if she wants to kick his shins in later, that would be fine.
He knows he won’t fight back. It’s only fair, and oh, how bittersweet it is that he’d be caring about what’s fair.
Regardless, all this deep philosophical nonsense is going to put a damper on their conversation if he gets lost in it. It’s best he stay focused on what he truly cares about, which is actually enjoying himself for the first time in so long.
“‘Course I do! It’s not an allowance, it’s payment for goods and services,” he says with complete sincerity, making a mock grab for her bowl again. “After all, technically speaking, who is taking who’s food here?”
He knows her to be smart enough to pick out when he’s joking, to not have that instinct to second guess herself. She’s good at reading people. Good at reading him, most of all. He’s not nearly as skilled at picking up on things as he thinks, but he’s fairly confident he can get a read on her too, now.
“To be fair, you did steal my candy when you could’ve just asked,” he begins, offering a shrug and an innocent side-eye away from her, only to burst out laughing before he can fit in another bite. “Oh yeah? You gonna knock out my teeth and make me get spares?”
The thought amuses him, like he really wants to see her try. Again, he won’t fight back, but he is curious to see just how much bodily harm she could get away with if she just went all out on him.
(There is a brief moment in which he entertains the notion of seriously training her to fight, no holds barred.)
“Hmm,” he lets his spoon dangle from his mouth for a moment as he processes her words, letting it rest within his emptying bowl once he decides to respond. “I should, but I always end up buying other things first, and don’t have any money left over for it. Should just consider making my own, with the help of my creepy creations.”
Maybe he shouldn’t be joking about such a thing. Maybe he’s getting a little too comfortable. Regardless, there are no creepy things lurking about, and if there are, they’re certainly not there because of him this time, but it’s not as fun to say that, is it?
He’s sticking to his promise not to wallow until she’s gone again. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be racing her to finish his food. If they get stomachaches from this, she’ll just need to stay for longer. Oh well! A little stomachache never killed anyone.
That’s what he hopes, anyhow. If he actually leads her to getting hurt within the hour of seeing her again, he can’t promise he won’t do something drastic.
He taps his bowl triumphantly the moment it’s empty, leaning back in his seat with a wide grin and a satisfied smile. He’s going to act like he won, even if he didn’t.
“Aah… Looks like you owe me a meal,” he jokes. Absolutely nothing of meal-owing, or any rules and conditions, had been brought up at all. “Hope you’ve learned how to cook!”
There is, admittedly, a small part of her, too, that is just as shocked as he is (or would be, if she knew) about the whole thing, but there’s also a part of her that isn’t surprised at all. Unsurprised for herself as well as for him. And really, if it means the two of them can act how they once were—actually, maybe even better than they were once were—then she’s willing to keep on. There’s a part of her that feels like he almost wants for her to keep up with it, even if he’s not admitting to it (or just straight up wouldn’t).
It’s not like she can blame him, as she wouldn’t either if the roles were reversed, but even if he did, she wouldn’t mind. She wants to keep up with this, this act of avoiding their past, as for her, it’s less thinking of it as nothing ever happened and more things happened, but it’s not something that I’m mad about anymore. That surely counted for something, as she feels it does.
(She resists the urge to sigh; she knows there’s a chance that it could all come up. She knows that. But, if nothing else, she just hopes that moment doesn’t come for a good while yet.)
She can’t help but to scoff at his words as she has before; he really is such a scoundrel! A no good, bad-mannered, absolute scoundrel!
“It’s not the bad kind of taking if you gave it to me!” She shoots back at him, petulant, as she points her spoon at him. “And you offered to give it to me, and you know that when you offer something, you say up-front if you expect payment. What a sly trick, it really is, but I won’t fall for it; you’ll get nothing outta me!”
As much as she’s speaking just as much in a bad-manner as she’d been accusing him of being in her head, she’s still not serious at all. She knows he’s not being serious, so there’s little reason to get worked up. If she had more than a few coins, she might be willing to part with some of them, but she wants to save them. Just in case things turn for the worse.
“‘Could have asked,’ you say, yet every time I might have tried, you’d surely hold it above my head and not let me grab it.” She recalls with a harrumph, growing ever-more stubborn. “Besides, what’s the fun in asking? It’s a better game if you go looking for it.”
Half the time he wouldn’t have found anything, surely, as she ate the candy instead of just hiding it, but he doesn’t have to know that. And if he does, she doesn’t have to admit to it.
She can’t help but to laugh alongside him at her own words, proud of the fact that she’s managed to cause it again. It’s when he laughs that she feels like there’s a chance for them to…perhaps not heal, but for sure get along. She’s not sure what he wants out of everything, but she’s positive that getting along is close enough. It’s one of those things where he’s not making it obvious that that’s what he wants, but rather, it’s one of the things she just can tell.
“Hmm,” she hums in mock-thought, hesitating to sell the idea that she’s thinking harder about her response than she really is. “I think I’d take that as payment; call that a payment for goods and services.”
The joke is, perhaps, a bit too on the nose, but she’s sure he’ll let it slide. Surely he can tell when she’s joking and not. Besides, she’s not sure she could knock anything out, anyway—she could probably cause a black eye or two with little effort, but hurting him enough to knock out teeth? And it’s less a matter a strength and more a lack of will to do that, too, so there’s that.
“Bad with money, it’s somehow not surprising.” She muses to herself as she continues to hear him out, tapping her fingers on the table. “But it’d be way more work to make it yourself, wouldn’t it? If your ‘creations’ can help, maybe they can just make it all themselves.”
Because why do all the work yourself when others can do it for you? Besides, he at least knows about the thing that brought the creepy things around, so she feels there’s not really anything she has to worry about. She doubts it’d be of much of one, anyway, even if she did know they weren’t around because of him. She decides not to give much more thought to it, though, because she sees how little food he has left—she refuses to lose here, so she’s got to get a move-on with her own!
It’s a bit hard to say who’s won in the end, though; she’s fairly sure they finish at the same time, with him tapping his spoon against his bowl and her all but throwing it in, a triumphant laugh leaving her as she does. It’s quickly cut off, though, at his exclamation; first the “payment”, and now he wants a meal out of her?! Once again, Xue Yang proves himself a scoundrel of the highest degree!
“And why would I cook anything for you when I’ve never cooked in this house at all?” She argues with him, not even bothering to point out how they definitely didn’t discuss that. And how, again, it’s hard to say who even won. “You and Daozhang, you’d barely let me even boil water! You’d think I had no skills at all, with the way you two took over the kitchen. Always so rude to me, it really was; you ought to just teach me, maybe I’d cook something for you then.”
It’s not that she can’t cook, in some way—with constantly being on the streets, never really in a home, she had to learn how to cook things over an open flame pretty early on, for the times when she wasn’t given food—but whatever manages to let her stay here in the coffin-home alongside him, then she’s willing to try to use it.