Spice Agony || Kitty & Toadie
It would've been nice to have the kind of life where after that blow up in the kitchen, Toadie wouldn't have ever had to see Dr. Patil again. But a lot of things would've been nice. Several different kinds of life, really. His arm being loose, or Fish not having gotten hurt, or Dr. Patil not having been there in the galley in the first place. Or her not having been on the ship. ...Or Toadie not having thrown the kulcha when he'd thrown the pan.
He hadn't been about to clean the kitchen, so after cursing a blue streak down on the ship itself, the scientists, the medical staff, the Director for finalizing the crew roster, and the Director again for assigning the away teams that had left Toadie behind and that Fish had nearly died on, that no-good Australian bastard, Toadie'd headed back out to the mess to see what else he could do to get his energy out. It was better than dwelling further, at least. Fuck fuckin' Marlow and fuck thinking about the war. Fish was alive. Toadie was alive. Dr. Patil had left. But there wasn't much there; the tables had been, predictably, bolted down, and Toadie was at a level of anger that required more physical exertion and property damage than food pranks would have let him get out of his system. Instead, he crammed chairs as tightly as he could into Tetris-like formations under tables, stacking the rest into an impossibly tangled heap grazing the ceiling wedged into the corner, blocking the coffeemakers and kettles, and threw a few across the room for good measure before his bound arm began to protest. He also threw all the cutlery behind the chair mountain as well, just because.
But Toadie'd been looking for more to do and been hungry when he doubled back into the cooking space, so, yeah, he'd picked the bread up off of the now-flour-dusted floor and began eating it (the galley floor was probably cleaner than most surfaces he'd eaten off of in his life, he figured), but he still had to grumble under his breath about how fucking stupid it had been tossing food like that in the fucking first place on this fucking ship with no real fucking grub on it making MREs seem like fucking luxury five-star level shit what the fuck, you motherfucking shit-for-brains asshole and now you're eating cold bread out the fucking ground. And he still wasn't cleaning the kitchen.
Even though Dr. Patil had left all her shit behind.
Toadie had to stop and think about what he was going to do with that. Mostly, he wanted to walk away and leave them as they were. He certainly wasn't inclined to smash her bottles of herbs and seasonings and seeds the way he'd smashed everything else. For one, he didn't really have the energy, and he was slightly mollified by the food, which she had made. For another, it was different to smash Weyland's shit than to smash a real, individual person's shit in particular. That was vicious. Spiteful. Which Toadie knew he could be. And it wasn't that he didn't care about it enough-- he'd been nastier to people over less, with more opportunity to walk away. He just... didn't like to. Not at Dr. Patil. She'd pissed him right the fuck off, but even though he got an annoying feeling that there was something more to it than the obvious, Toadie was secure enough that the anger was rooted firmly in India for both of them, and India in the past, that he didn't take it too personally. (Except for the fuckin' kids' names he was supposed to remember. That was annoying. But there had been chai. It evened out, sorta.)
Still... if he left the spices there, with everything else pretty obviously tampered with, the whole thing would fall back on Dr. Patil. Convenient, but-- very much not Toadie's style, even on his worst days.
...Fuck it.
He'd scooped all the bottles and jars up, struggling to balance them one-handed, and carried them back to the dormitories, stuffing them into his bedding to hide them. Toadie hadn't really been sure what he was going to do with them after that point, and had, in fact, forgotten them for several days until Robin had caught him sleeping in her bunk and he had to make his way back to his own that night; he'd cackled after realizing the reason his bed was so lumpy and making him sneeze had less to do with the bizarre cat that he occasionally woke up with staring him down and more to do with the uncomfortable glassware between himself and the mattress. It occurred to Toadie then that he ought to make sure Dr. Patil got her seasonings back, and finish the job while he was thinking about it; and now that his bed was pretty thoroughly scented with garam masala, he wasn't going to be able to pass out as easily as he thought, anyway. At least he had two arms free this time. Where would she even be? Well, Toadie had Fish's access codes memorized, and a CO could get into anyone's office and drop off any kind of package they wanted, and that meant so could he. Being brothers with your boss was a pain in the ass most of the time, but it had its perks.
Barefoot, pajama-clad, and still smirking, Toadie took the lift up a floor to the labs, not bothering with stealth, and narrowed his eyes challengingly at anyone whose gaze lingered too long on his unkempt appearance or the packages in his arms. It took him several minutes of irritable pacing, but once he found Dr. Patil's office (he'd scowled at all the signs pointing him towards various lab purposes-- what the fuck kind of research did she even do? Luckily, she'd been on the first branch of halls he'd prowled, jerking his head back and forth at each doorways' nameplate), Toadie jabbed in his Fish's codes without hesitation and made it several steps into the room before really processing that not only were the lights on and music playing through the lab's speakers, Dr. Patil was in there as well.
"Oh-- uh..." He cleared his throat to announce his presence, trying to shake off his own surprise. "You forgot your shit, ah, your stuff, in the fuckin', ah--" What was she not wearing? "...In the fuckin' kitchen."
