Who: Ned and OPEN.
What: the Piemaker has interesting coping mechanisms.
Where: kitchen
When: the night of his arrival
Warnings: multi-thread me!

Ned was stress baking.

It was much harder to stress bake in the kitchen of a prison ship. He was used to the Pie Hole - cheerful, neat, and fully stocked with all sorts of gizmos and gadgets. Ned had crust-crimpers. He had strawberry-hullers and pie weights. He had fluted removable-bottom tart pans, and he had cases upon cases of fruit. The Barge kitchen, though it had all of the basics, did not have these things, and it certainly did not have a dog named Digby and a dead girl who was not dead named Chuck. These discrepancies made Ned's stress baking only more stressful.

He found himself at a long, metal, industrial-grade counter, with an apron tied around his waist, his hair disheveled, and a smudge of flour across his cheek, elbow deep in a pile of stony, stubborn nectarines. He was scraping away at them, trying to remove the pits. He already had two pies in the oven - one a pecan, one custard, and yet he did not yet feel calm. In his own kitchen, he would have gone at it all afternoon, baking dozens upon dozens of pies in strange combinations: blueberry-kiwi, blackberry-peach, cherry-plum, until he felt calm. But that was not an option here, and so Ned did the best he could with the flimsy aluminum pie tins and battered rolling-pin which looked like it might have been used as a weapon at some point.

He leaned against the giant refrigerator, thrumming his fingers atop its surface in a rapid, anxious patter and staring at the kitchen timer placed on the oven opposite. Pie will make things better, he reasoned. All we need is more pie.