Exactly 43.52 minutes later the chicken was cooked, the vegetables and noodles had simmered in the broth, and they were ready to move on to the next step. Wufei looked at the recipe book and read absently as he tested to make sure the cooling chicken was not to hot to hold.
"Bone chicken and cut up meat into bite-sized pieces."
"...What was that?"
"Bone chicken and cut...into..." Wufei blinked and looked at the book. Then he looked at Duo. Duo looked at Wufei. They both looked at the chicken. The chicken tried to hide behind cooked peanut butter and celery leaves.
"Er...I think they mean REMOVE the bones..."
"Right. Of course they do. What else would that mean?"
"Right."
The two pilots hastily set about pulling bones out of meat and meat off of bones with a vigor that would have made any ravenous pack of wild dogs proud. That is, until Wufei came across a very odd piece of something sticking out of one end of the bird.
"What's this?" He pulled on what looked like a piece of a plastic bag assuming that something had accidentally fallen in the pot. It didn't come up right away, however, and he soon realized the small piece of plastic bag was still attached to the rest of the plastic bag.
"What the..." As he continued to pull the dark haired boy looked increasingly confused and not a little disturbed. He finally pulled out a bag of what could only be called mush from the inside of the chicken.
"Shit, Maxwell! What the hell were you doing to this thing before we cooked it?!"
The American started and looked up from where he had been relieving a chicken wing of its meat and scrunched up his nose.
"Ew! What is that?"
"You don't know?"
"No. That's really gross, Fei. Where'd it come from?"
Wufei pointed into the end of the chicken, "In there. You mean you didn't put it there?"
The scrunch of Duos nose extended to his mouth and one eye as he came to inspect first the mush and then the back end of the chicken more closely.
"I didn't put anything in there. I'm not so hard up I get off from stuffing bags of...stuff into dead chickens."
"Well how'd it get in there then?"
"Well, if you and I didn't do it," Duo looked thoughtful, "and I just brought the chicken home today, so it couldn't have been Trowa because he's been too sick to move since last evening. So it must be either..."
"Yuy hasn't been downstairs today. His room is across the hall from mine and I would have seen or heard him get up. So it must have been..." He trailed off, looking up at the ceiling in the direction of Quatre's room.
"Its always the quiet ones."