• Location: My Desk
• Mood: tired

FAKE Triple Drabble: Teatime

Title: Teatime
Fandom: FAKE
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Dee, Ryo, Others.
Rating: G
Setting: After the manga.
Summary: Dee and Ryo’s British vacation is proving quite an eye-opener.
Written Using: The dw100 prompt ‘Foreign Customs’.
Disclaimer: I don’t own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.
A/N: Triple drabble and a half, 350 words.




Tea; to the British it’s not just a hot drink but a whole meal. What they call teatime isn’t merely the designated hour for their favourite drink; it’s time to bring out the sandwiches and cakes as well as the teapot, or in the case of cream teas, scones with jam and the decadently rich, thick gooiness of clotted cream. In some places, teatime even refers to the hot evening meal.


British customs are weird.


If they’re just making the drink, they’ll say something like, “Time for a cuppa.” They’ll drink tea at any time of the day or night, but from what Dee has observed teatime, as in the meal, is late afternoon for sandwiches and cakes, or sometime after 6pm if the meal involves cooking.


Still, when in Rome, or in this case the south coast of England, it’s best to observe the local customs, and if that means stuffing himself with way too many cakes and scones, well, they’re on vacation. They can eat healthily, or at least less unhealthily, when they get home.


It hasn’t escaped Dee’s notice that everywhere they go Ryo is buying little cookbooks, collections of regional recipes published by local women’s groups and charities. He’s swapping recipes with people they meet as well, the proprietors of the tearooms they visit, the people running the small hotels and guesthouses where they stay. Part of visiting different places, he says, is sampling the local foods, and Dee is on board with that one hundred percent; he’s always ready to eat.


They’ll probably incur an excess baggage charge on the way home, what with all the recipe books, souvenirs, and gifts for their friends Ryo is accumulating. If he keeps it up for the rest of their time here they might need to buy another suitcase to hold it all. Not that Dee is complaining, far from it; he intends to take a few things home himself, mostly British chocolate, maybe some scones.


The English may have some seriously weird ideas about tea, but they sure as hell know how to put on a spread.



The End