Chapter Text
“It’s Taco Tuesday!” Exclaimed the one in Red to her girlfriends.
“... Taco Tuesday?” The girl in White pondered.
“Taco Tuesday!” The Skulled one proclaimed.
“It’s a Tuesday where you eat tacos!” Ruby explained.
“...Just tacos? And that’s it? What exactly warrants dedicating an entire day of the week towards one specific food item?” Weiss questioned.
“Well, why wouldn’t you dedicate an entire day towards tacos? They’re pretty special, after all. They’re more exciting and convenient sandwiches: Crunchy or soft shelled, packed full of your favourite protein, lettuce and/or avocado, plus some sour cream or cheese if you’re feeling it!” By a certain point, Maria had, somehow, managed to pull out a chalkboard on wheels with a drawing of a taco with several arrows attached to it… neither Ruby nor Weiss actually knew where it came from, “they’ve got all of the essential nutrients that a person would need on top of being delicious.”
“Wait… did you just call a taco a sandwich, earlier?”
“Well, yeah, why wouldn’t they be sandwiches? You’ve got a filling squashed between something that you can use your hands to eat portably.”
“... That…feels as though it doesn’t sound correct, a taco is a taco, and a sandwich is a sandwich, they are two separate forms of food, a taco should not belong under the classification of a sandwich… in the first place, a sandwich has two slices of bread”
“Alright, lemme break it down; say you spread some jam on one slice of bread, it’d just be a slice of bread with some jam on it, right? Well, then, say you fold the bread in half, now, it’s a sandwich that’s in the shape of a taco, basically, a taco.”
“While your statement is technically true, though, your example offers itself towards a slippery slope, does it not? For instance…” Weiss took a chalk to the board, “would your example not also mean that the act of folding a slice of pizza turns it into a taco?” A rather intricate sequence of a pizza slice being folded was added to the board by this point.
“No, that’s still a pizza”
“...Pardon?”
“A pizza is still a pizza no matter how you shape or eat it”
“But folding a slice of pizza would compartmentalise the toppings between the crust, thereby, matching your definition of a sandwich!”
“Yeah, but a pizza is a pizza while a taco is a sandwich.”
“Why do tacos get the special treatment?”
“Because tacos are special”
“That is your only argument?”
“Well, why shouldn’t it be? After all, it’s Taco Tuesday.”
...
With heavy reluctance, Weiss decided to just give up on the argument, “...Let’s just find a taco restaurant for this, oh so special, ‘Taco Tuesday’”
—
Their first attempt was at, “Mictlantecuhtli’s,” famed for their… somewhat(?) legal use of Fire Dust within their special 51 spices blend. Symbols of fire and salamanders decorated the logo whilst the building itself was decorated with flamboyantly bedazzled oranges and yellows with light turquoise zig-zags all around.
Their entry into the restaurant was met with an intense miasma and wave, Ruby scrunched her nose a little bit while Maria felt completely fine, in fact, it felt like she could recognize most of the spices that they used from the smell alone. However, as for Weiss… for Weiss, the pure potent punch of the spices was enough to send her tumbling and spiralling to the floor. She was practically twitching on the ground and gasping for breath within the minute that she collapsed, her aura constantly shining and active, yet no damage seemed to have actually been sustained according to their scrolls.
“Uh… maybe we’ll get take-out instead, Ruby, could you escort Weiss out? I’ll be out in a bit with our order,” and just as quickly as the two were in, they were immediately out.
As Weiss was brought out, she gasped for what felt like the cleanest air that she had breathed in years despite having only breathed the exact same air just minutes ago. “I… do not… understand how either of you two could stand being in there… I have never been to Vacuo in my life but I would be willing to bet my own tiara that the climate there wouldn’t even be a fraction of what it was like back there ,” a drawn out shudder followed the end of her hyperbolic exclamation.
“Yeah, I’ll admit that it was pretty intense in there, probably all of their spices, at least we know that it’ll be flavorful, right?”
“Right…”
…
After a moderate amount of time, Maria stepped out of the blazing restaurant, she held a bag that seemed to emanate an essence of pure spice, if one had asked Weiss, it would have almost seemed as if the bag had its own Aura, an Aura of pure palpable pain. She feared what lay hidden inside that bag made of mashed up trees.
“Alright, I got us some soft shells, a pair of milds for you two and one of their extra Super Spiced Splattering Specials for me,” just about half of the words that came out of Maria’s mouth should never be used when describing a taco, thankfully for Weiss, she wasn’t going to be the one consuming that fatal sounding piece of sustenance.
From how they appeared when Maria pulled them out of the bag, they appeared like normal individually wrapped fast food items, Maria’s having a flaming exclamated sticker… it was quite obvious which one would lead to a death by consumption.
Upon unwrapping them, the mild ones didn’t appear to be any different than the standard taco with the works and all, actually, the smell was quite lovely, actually, on the other hand, Maria’s appeared to be Death incarnate wrapped in a corn flour tortilla, the meat appeared to be a blaringly deep red colour with little sparkling sprinklings of what seemed to be their acclaimed fire dust, one could barely even tell that it was beef.
In fact, the tortilla itself was an alarming shade of red, everything about the taco was just… red .
Was…
Was that even edible?
Which called into question: was her and Ruby’s even edible?
“Maria, these… these are edible, right?
“What? Oh, yeahhh, totally! They just needed me to sign a waiver when I bought mine.”
“WHA-?!”
“But only mine, you two should be totally fine.” The seeming italicization of Maria’s words did not improve her feelings towards whatever was inside these tacos.
“Well, let’s eat!” The ever fearlessness of Ruby and Maria was something that Weiss both loved and worried about them, their bold and excited declaration of consumption was something that astounded her, despite all of them being aware that a waiver needed to be signed.
Well… nothing ventured, nothing gained, she supposed.
…
How did the saying go for junk and fast food go, again…?
‘The first bite will taste like Heaven”
‘The second will send you there’
As it turned out, it only took the first bite.
She was at the pearlescent white gates of whatever lay beyond for her.
She looked side to side…
Her Reapers were with her, holding each hand.
Ah .
She really was dead, wasn't she? With her own lovers acting as personal escorts for her.
Their touch was a soothing warmth, a soft gentleness that was firm enough to let her know that they wouldn't let go.
A peer off into the distance found Grandpa Nicholas waving to her. Beckoning for her to step forwards…
This was… a nice death and after-death, she was perfectly happy.
The fear of death comes from the fear of loneliness, to be in the pitch blackness of the abyss with nothing but one's own thoughts, and eventually, nothing at all.
But… she wasn't alone.
She had her two most precious beloveds with her. She was the opposite of alone. She was… aloved.
Truly, this was a nice death.
—
In all honesty, Maria thought that these tacos need just a bit more real spice to taste good. The redness from her taco seemed to have just been the fire dust dying the overall pigment of the shell wrapped sandwich or just immense uses of Red-40.
On top of that, none of the spices used within the taco actually complimented each other, to the point of, basically, just cancelling each other's flavour profiles and even spiciness out. The chefs seemed to have been so focused on the scoville units of each spice that they forgot how to actually make a genuinely good tasting taco.
Overall, the taco was just kinda… Mid.
Unfortunately for Weiss, it appeared that the Atlesian ‘refined’ tongue, aka, ‘never having experienced anything spicy above trace amounts of black pepper’ was not equipped to handle anything above the spice levels of a RcJester’s lemon lime soda.
So, to say that she didn't handle her mild taco well was… way below what could be considered an understatement.
Both her and Ruby having witnessed Weiss’s aura literally crackle and smackle before shattering, then leaving her completely catatonic on the ground…
The two of them held onto each of her hands as they sat in the ambulance heading towards the nearest hospital.
They knew that she was going to be fine but… man …
This was a pretty Terrible Taco Tuesday.