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[ADREA DARRYN]

For the stupidest reason, Adrea felt extremely disturbed--she was very self-conscious of how polite she had to be. It was very nice of Sven to be nice and polite to her, after all, it was just common courtesy, but growing up, Adrea was never really a nice kid. She didn't like to interact with people she thought were below her, and neither did she beat around the bush. In other words, she had grown up to be rude. 'This isn't going to work,' she told herself. She couldn't dare to hurt Sven, after all he had done for her, but she couldn't willingly make herself nice either. Even trying didn't help--no matter how cautiously she tried to think about what she was going to say before she said it. Adrea could only hope that Sven would find a place in his heart to forgive her, or just ignore what she said completely.

Adrea sat down uneasily, wondering if she should say thank you or something. 'Actually, haven't I said enough 'thank you's for the day. No, wait, would it be rude not to. Shit, I'm really not used to all this talk-to-other-people stuff.' She tilted her head up and smiled at him hesitantly, as he sat down across from her. Already she had to follow her first impressions...if he knew what a dirty person she was, she was sure that he wouldn't want anything to do with her.

Now that the lure of food was really, really close, Adrea felt saliva fill her mouth. She gripped her hands under the table in close anticipation, excited to be ordering a decent meal. The last couple days were harsh, and fortune has finally decided to smile at her. She giddily bounced her knee up and down, stopping only when she remembered that the more energy she burned, the more she'd need to eat later on. Finally, the waitress arrived with menus, and her excitement deflated. Right. She needed to order.

Grudgingly, Adrea took hold of the menu and glanced down at the food items. Never mind--her excitement came back, her mind reverted to one of a five year old's. There were so many good things to eat on the menu, so many that Adrea couldn't decide by herself. "I wonder what I should eat..." She couldn't resist drooling over every option. They all sounded so delicious--hunger really was the best cook. The old Adrea may have glanced down nonchalantly and chosen something that sounded decent, but the newer Adrea took every option into account. After all, she didn't know when she would be able to eat next. She realized that this is what starvation really was...she now understood how people could be so desperate as to rely on cannibalism, or eating from the trash. Like money, hunger itself was a driving force.

"Sven, what are you getting? Everything sounds so delicious. Ohhh, I really want the cake..."

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[SVEN OLEANDER]

Sven didn’t really notice that he tended to have better manners than most other people living in Detroit. It was true that the accepted level of courtesy was generally higher in the South (not the least of which, the idea of ‘Southern hospitality’), but it wasn’t something that Sven consciously thought about. Everyone was just fine how they were, to him; as long as they weren’t overtly rude – like, shoving him out of the way or something like that and then not apologizing – he was fine with whatever manners they had. After all, it wasn’t like a nod was any worse than actually saying ‘thank you’ out loud, and a lot of the time thanks left unspoken, but implied, were just as good as ones said out loud. Maybe it was just his gentle, nonjudgmental nature, but he didn’t judge people just on their outside manners.

He could tell Adrea was still excited at the thought of food, which made him smile a little to himself. He liked making people happy; it was part of the reason he was a musician, apart from just liking to play his music for his own enjoyment. Music made people happy; even sad songs were enjoyable ones. Usually. Even when they were so sad they made people cry, there was an oddly contradictory sort of happiness in that. And Adrea had seemed to enjoy his music, at least a little bit, but even so Sven was more than happy to share some food with her if it would make her even more happy. That was just the way he was.

Sven gave a shy and bobbed his head slightly in thanks to the waitress as she brought her menus, figuring she didn’t really have time to wait for him to stutter out a verbal thanks. Apparently the unspoken one was enough, because she returned the smile, handing menus to each of them before bustling off to take care of some of the many other patrons in the café. Sven opened his menu, laying it flat on the table in front of him, and looked it over. He wasn’t in any big rush; he didn’t have to be anywhere in particular anytime soon, and though he was hungry, a couple of minutes didn’t make that much of a difference, really. He could get a sandwich, which would be cheap and pretty filling, or maybe something sweet… It was hard to decide when you were limited to the small amount of money Sven had to spend.

Apparently Adrea was having the same difficulty deciding as he was, for after a moment she looked up at him and asked what he was planning on getting. Sven hadn’t actually decided yet, so he told her so: ”U-um, I d-don’t know quite y-yet… I h-have about s-seven dollars for each o-o-of us, s-so if you w-want to get c-cake and something e-else, you p-probably can.” He flushed slightly, embarrassed that he had to put a limit on it, but reality was reality. He only had so much money, and she deserved to know that before she got her heart set on something more expensive. He still didn’t like having to say it, though.

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