'Changing the Recipe' for hostilecrayon
Title: Changing the Recipe
Recipient: hostilecrayon
Rating: PG
Warnings: Duo POV, language
Summary: Duo decides to learn to cook.
Author’s Note: My prompt was the word “formula”, and somehow, this is what I came up with.
Author: scacao
One day, I got sick of eating take-out pizza and decided I was going to learn to cook. Now, this day had been a long time coming, a long time. In fact, I had never cooked a real thing for myself once in my entire life.
Some people learn to cook by watching their parents when they’re little. Well, I didn’t exactly get that opportunity growing up, and the guy who took care of me was just a kid himself. He taught me how to steal things that I could eat on the run back home, not how to fix a four-course goddamn meal. And the nuns at Maxwell’s Church, they were patient to a fault, but even they couldn’t abide a kid running around the kitchen trying to catch a peek.
Come to think of it, I probably would have just stolen a bite of something anyway.
And I suppose someone was cooking on Howard’s ship, if you want to call the slop they fed the salvage boys “cooking”. I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to learn how to recreate that particular culinary experiment.
So somehow, I managed to live my whole life, survive two wars, and become the first full-fledged Preventers agent who lacked a high school education, all without ever having managed to sit the hell down sometime and learn how to make my own damn food.
But I stood in the kitchen of my Preventers-provided apartment, chewing the crust of a slice of leftover pepperoni-and-onion, when I realized I was sick of eating pizza, sick of all the take-out I had been ordering ever since I moved to Earth, and I ought to do something about it. I ought to learn to cook something. And wouldn’t it be something for a former kid off the street to do a thing like that?
It hit me in the pasta aisle in the supermarket that I didn’t have a damn clue what to buy. Funny, you can put a case of bolts and screws in my hands and I’ll have a submachine gun built for you in thirty minutes, but I was as lost as could be among the thousands of ingredients available to me. I picked a box of spaghetti off the shelf and inspected it.
“Directions for Fettuccine Alfredo,” it said. Well, guess I was eating that tonight, since it was going out of its way to tell me how to cook it. Hell, it even included a little shopping list. This wasn’t hard at all!
I was a man on a mission through the store, locating the items I needed with single-minded determination. Parsley, cream, butter, garlic, parmesan cheese. I had no idea what a “parmesan” was but it was probably better not to mess with the formula until I had a handle on these sorts of things.
I was so emboldened by my newfound confidence that I decided I ought to call someone to share in this momentous occasion. Not that any normal person would think cooking a damn meal was an incredible accomplishment, but I don’t know, I was just feeling like... like this was some major step for me. Like I was doing something the old me, the me from my past, could never have done. I was now the kind of man who cooked for himself, who had a job that people respected, who did good for the world instead of just blowing things up all the time. And dammit, someone should come celebrate with me.
As soon as I pulled out my phone, though, I felt a little embarrassed. Who was I kidding? No one was going to care about this. People in the office made cracks about my L-2 upbringing all the time-- I mean, the way I reacted in front of them, you’d think I thought they were hilarious. But I didn’t think I could handle jokes about how I tried to poison someone with my pathetic attempt at food on top of that. I didn’t know anyone who I could call who wouldn’t turn it into a giant joke at my expense.
Well, no. That wasn’t true. I did know one guy.
“Hello?”
“Heero! Hey buddy. You up to anything fun?”
“I’m writing a mission report. What do you want?”
“Well, I, uh...”
I looked down at my basket full of ingredients, and felt that embarrassment begin to creep up again. But hell, I had him on the phone already. Worst he could do was tell me no, right?
“I’m making fettuccine alfredo for dinner, and I was, uh, wondering if you wanted to come over and have some.”
There was a long, excruciating silence on the other end of the line.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just thought I would give it a shot, you know. I haven’t really ever done it before, but how hard can it be, right? It’s probably not going to be any good though, so--”
“No, I mean, you really want me to come?”
“Oh. Well, yeah, sure I do.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding shocked. “Okay, I will.”
Now I was surprised. He really wanted to come! “Really? Cool, great, I’ll see you soon.” I laughed into the phone. “I promise not to poison you or anything. I mean, I’ll do my best not to.”
“Yeah...” he muttered, then cleared his throat, back to his normal, monotone self. “You better not.”
I hung up the phone feeling like a million bucks. It was strange, actually, to feel so good about something so small. I guess I really had been expecting him to just laugh in my face. But we were friends, right? We were buddies, even though we hadn’t seen a lot of each other since I’d come to Earth. We’d been through things together that made people friends even if they never saw each other again.
Well, hell, we were seeing each other tonight! I had to get back to the apartment and start getting things together.
Whoever had furnished my apartment had obviously expected a different sort of man to end up living in it. My kitchen had come with all sorts of gadgets that I had had a really great time taking apart, but had never actually figured out what they were meant for. The cabinets were full of gleaming, never-used pots and pans and silverware and other shit you didn’t need when everything you ate came in a cardboard box. I occasionally took a coffee mug out to pour my beer into. You know, when I was feeling really fancy.
I took just about every damn pot off the shelf and spread them on the counter, waiting for the correct ones to leap out at me. How much pasta could two guys eat? Should I throw the whole box’s worth in and go to town?
I consulted my user’s guide, the fettuccine alfredo recipe. “Boil four liters of lightly salted water in a large pot. Add contents of box,” it read.
“What would I do without you?” I said, grabbing the biggest damn pot I had. Eyeballing the liters was no problem; back in the day, I needed to be pretty damn accurate when fueling up my Gundam, when even a little extra weight made a big difference in your speed in the air. So it was going to get the exact damn four liters it was asking for.
“Lightly salted” proved to be more of a problem. What the hell kind of a measurement was “lightly”? What if I used too much? Too little? I mean, I knew a thing or two about measuring grams of powder, but it was kind of powder you used to blow things up. Explosives were not the kind of thing you measured in vague terms, not if you wanted to take out just a house instead of a damn city block. Who knew what the consequences could be for my cooking if I used a heavy hand here?
I felt kind of stupid thinking in those terms. After all, ruining my food was not exactly as serious as blowing up the wrong people. But the stakes felt high to me. I had made them high, inviting Heero over, and maybe he didn’t know what this dinner was symbolizing to me, but hell, I wanted to impress him. And something about how surprised he sounded on the phone, that I was inviting him over, it made it seem like maybe this was a little important to him, too.
So shit, yeah, the stakes were kind of high.
I ended up giving the pot a good once-over with the salt shaker, and decided that was going to have to do. I turned the burner on high, and seeing the flame shoot out and curl up under my pot was strangely satisfying. Confident that I hadn’t ruined anything yet, I turned to the rest of my ingredients, collected haphazardly on the kitchen counter.
“What do I do now?”
There was a sudden, firm knock on my door. I stared at my pile of groceries for a second, realizing how much I still needed to do. Hell, he wasn’t supposed to come over yet! I didn’t think I was going to be cooking with an audience.
Still, I went to let him in, because no matter how much I may have wanted to, it wouldn’t be nice to leave him out there while I cooked dinner.
“Hey buddy,” I said, then cocked a grin after a once-over. “Pretty fancy, man.”
Heero must have come from the office, he had on a nice shirt and tie. I, meanwhile, was in my usual day-off attire: a faded tee shirt with a nice big hole in the collar and an old pair of jeans. We looked hilariously mismatched, and I suddenly felt a little underdressed, standing in my own damn apartment.
“Hi, Duo.”
“Hot date?”
“Shut up,” Heero said, coming inside. I let the door close behind him.
“I just started, so, uh, have a seat. I have some beer if you want.”
Heero nodded and took a seat at the table. “All right.”
I fished a bottle out of the fridge and popped the cap for him. When I handed it over he said, “Sorry, I’m too early.”
It was a little weird to hear Heero say sorry for something so small. “It’s all right, man.” I shrugged, heading back into the kitchen, where my ingredients were still waiting to be tackled. “I just thought you were gonna come over after you finished writing your report.”
Heero sipped his beer thoughtfully.
“I couldn’t concentrate.”
“Oh,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. “Well, it’s no problem. You’re just going to have to wait a while to eat, so I hope you’re not starved.”
“I’m fine.”
He was quiet after that, and for once, I was too focused on the task at hand to fill the silence. My directions had taken a turn for the confusing again.
“Brown two cloves of garlic, minced, in a saucepan with butter,” I muttered aloud. “What the hell is a ‘mince’?”
“It means finely chopped,” Heero said, and I glanced up to see he had joined me in the kitchen, his beer left, barely drunk, on the table.
“May...” He cleared his throat. “May I help?”
Two strange, conflicting emotions hit me at his words. Part of me didn’t want him to help. I had built this whole thing up in my head as something I was going to do, by myself, for myself, and part of me was determined to see that through.
And the other part, even more strangely, was thrilled that he was offering. That maybe it would be nice to have a partner in this undertaking.
And hell, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, didn’t he?”
“All right,” I said, and he smiled a little, which really took me by surprise. “You can start by, uh, mincing the garlic,” I mumbled.
Heero nodded, opening a few cabinets, looking for something I had apparently missed when I pulled all the pots out. He found a long, flat board and set it on the counter, then located my set of shining, never-used knives that had also come with the apartment and picked one that I could only guess was optimized for garlic chopping, or something. I watched him peel the garlic, set it on the board, and slice it into finer and finer pieces. Halfway through, he noticed I hadn’t moved and glanced at me.
“You don’t mind me watching, right?” I asked. “I’m, you know, trying to learn.”
He coughed, and turned back to the garlic. “Oh... no. I don’t mind.”
I didn’t miss the fact that he went much slower this time around.
“If you hold the blade steady with your hand like this, you have more control,” he said.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“A few times,” he replied.
“Oh yeah? How come you never invited me over?” I joked.
The knife stilled on the board.
“I didn’t think you were interested,” he muttered.
I didn’t know what to say in response, and after a moment the knife continued its movements.
“There’s two cloves,” he said finally, when he had reduced the garlic into a pile of teeny little bits. “Want to put any more in?”
“What? But the recipe says to only put in two.”
A tiny smirk appeared on Heero’s face.
“Cooking is not an exact formula. It’s not like mixing explosives,” he said, and I almost laughed at just how sharp he was. “If you want more garlic, we can put in more.”
“Well, hell, I don’t know,” I said, thrown by this new revelation. Heero, of all people, telling me to be more liberal with the guidelines? Never thought I’d see the day.
Finally I shrugged. “I’ve never had this before. What do you want?”
Heero seemed to be considering his options. Finally, he set another clove on the board and minced it up. Then, he turned to me.
“Okay, melt some butter in a pan, then put the garlic in and cook it for a couple of minutes. Don’t let it burn. I’ll grate the cheese.”
“Roger that.”
I put a pan on a free burner and took a big dollop of butter from my newly bought tub. As the flame curled beneath it, I watched the butter soften and melt into a puddle. Then, I took the board with its little pile of garlic pieces and very carefully shook it into the pan. Almost immediately, an incredible aroma started to fill the kitchen, indicating I was doing something right.
“Now, you want to add the cream in, and lower the heat,” Heero said, glancing over.
I opened the carton of cream, pouring its contents into the pan, and twisted the knob for the burner until the flame was a gentle, small spurt.
“Oh shit, the water’s boiling!” I said, reaching past Heero for the box of pasta.
We maneuvered easily around each other in the narrow confines of my kitchen, Heero shifting behind me as I poured the spaghetti into the pot to add more butter to the sauce, then back to the cheese he had already mostly reduced to a towering bowl of shavings. It reminded me, suddenly, of the times we had worked together in the wars, working around each other in the cramped cockpits of stolen airplanes, wordlessly passing tools back and forth as we fiddled with our Gundams’ innards in Peacemillion’s hangar. We were always good at this, reading each other’s movements, naturally understanding where the other would need to be, but we had barely worked together since making our ways separately to Preventers, and chances to behave like this had become few and far between. I had missed it, I realized, our partnership. Our mutual understanding.
And maybe it was the ease of sliding into those old habits, the familiarity of Heero’s quiet focus on his task beside me, but I wasn’t nervous about screwing up dinner anymore. I wasn’t worried I was going to fail, was going to prove myself unworthy of this life that had been handed to me as a matter of course. And it was because... because I wasn’t doing it alone.
When Heero had the cheese in shreds, he had me stir it into the cream and butter until it melted, the sauce coming up thick and soupy when I ran through it with the spoon. It smelled delicious, rich and fragrant, and I realized I was starving.
Heero peered into the roiling pot of spaghetti, fishing out a long noodle with a fork. He let it cool in the air a moment before tasting it.
“It’s ready.”
He found a strainer in a cabinet and drained the pasta, before dumping it back into the pot so I could toss it in the sauce. I could barely wait to set bowls and forks down. We put the pot on the table between us, then glanced at each other.
Heero nodded.
“Let’s eat.”
I doled out some pasta to each of us, then sat down, fork in hand, almost apprehensive to try it despite my hunger. Instead, I watched Heero gracefully twirl some onto his fork and stick it in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.
“Well?”
He looked at me.
“Best fettuccine alfredo I’ve ever had.”
I laughed, but he looked completely serious.
“I mean it, Duo.”
Oh, hell. Somehow, he knew what this was for me, without me even having to say. Though I could feel my face grow a little warm, I gave him a smile, a real one.
“Thanks, Heero.”
And, apprehension gone, I took a forkful of my own fettuccine and tried it.
“Hey, this is pretty good!”
Heero just smirked and continued eating.
I’ve been literally starving before, when a stolen, half-ripe apple can taste like the freshest, juiciest thing on earth, and I’ve tried unbelievably decadent chocolates and multi-layer cakes created by Quatre’s esteemed personal chefs, but this was the most delicious meal I had ever had. The food was simple, sure, but it was good and filling, and I had made it all with Heero, and that had made it special.
And, somehow, I knew Heero felt the same.
“I would have come, you know,” I said suddenly, thinking of him cooking alone in his apartment, a thought that, for the first time since I had considered doing it myself, struck me as really lonely. “I would have come.”
Heero paused, fork poised halfway to his mouth, and looked at me.
“I know,” he said softly.
After the meal, we washed and dried the plates, falling into easy silence together. It was only when they were all put away, the table pristine and the kitchen bare, that I realized that it meant Heero was going to leave.
“I guess you still gotta finish that report,” I said with a shrug, implying an indifference I certainly didn’t feel.
He nodded. I led him to the door, because I couldn’t think of how to make him stay any longer, how to say what I wanted to say, when I wasn’t even sure what that was.
I opened the door halfway and he turned to me.
“Thank you for dinner.”
“Yeah, thanks for coming,” I replied, though that wasn’t what I meant.
“Duo...” he said, and with a look of intense concentration on his face, curled his hand around mine on the doorknob.
“Would you... like to come over for dinner tomorrow?” he asked softly.
The warmth of his hand on mine was new and yet strangely familiar, like it had been there the whole time, through all those moments working so perfectly well together. Unexpected, but so fitting; changing everything, but somehow, not really changing anything at all.
“Of course,” I said.
He smiled, and we looked at each other for one long, wonderful moment, and then he slipped through the door, his hand slowly leaving mine. I watched him disappear out of view down the hallway, still feeling the warmth of his hand long after I had closed the door behind me.
Friendships, like recipes, were never set in stone. They could be tweaked, amended, adjusted to taste. The results could never be known until you tried it, but if the ingredients were right, you could create something more, something incredible. You just had to be willing to try.
And, knowing Heero would be there with me, I couldn’t wait to give it a shot.
Recipient: hostilecrayon
Rating: PG
Warnings: Duo POV, language
Summary: Duo decides to learn to cook.
Author’s Note: My prompt was the word “formula”, and somehow, this is what I came up with.
Author: scacao
One day, I got sick of eating take-out pizza and decided I was going to learn to cook. Now, this day had been a long time coming, a long time. In fact, I had never cooked a real thing for myself once in my entire life.
Some people learn to cook by watching their parents when they’re little. Well, I didn’t exactly get that opportunity growing up, and the guy who took care of me was just a kid himself. He taught me how to steal things that I could eat on the run back home, not how to fix a four-course goddamn meal. And the nuns at Maxwell’s Church, they were patient to a fault, but even they couldn’t abide a kid running around the kitchen trying to catch a peek.
Come to think of it, I probably would have just stolen a bite of something anyway.
And I suppose someone was cooking on Howard’s ship, if you want to call the slop they fed the salvage boys “cooking”. I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to learn how to recreate that particular culinary experiment.
So somehow, I managed to live my whole life, survive two wars, and become the first full-fledged Preventers agent who lacked a high school education, all without ever having managed to sit the hell down sometime and learn how to make my own damn food.
But I stood in the kitchen of my Preventers-provided apartment, chewing the crust of a slice of leftover pepperoni-and-onion, when I realized I was sick of eating pizza, sick of all the take-out I had been ordering ever since I moved to Earth, and I ought to do something about it. I ought to learn to cook something. And wouldn’t it be something for a former kid off the street to do a thing like that?
It hit me in the pasta aisle in the supermarket that I didn’t have a damn clue what to buy. Funny, you can put a case of bolts and screws in my hands and I’ll have a submachine gun built for you in thirty minutes, but I was as lost as could be among the thousands of ingredients available to me. I picked a box of spaghetti off the shelf and inspected it.
“Directions for Fettuccine Alfredo,” it said. Well, guess I was eating that tonight, since it was going out of its way to tell me how to cook it. Hell, it even included a little shopping list. This wasn’t hard at all!
I was a man on a mission through the store, locating the items I needed with single-minded determination. Parsley, cream, butter, garlic, parmesan cheese. I had no idea what a “parmesan” was but it was probably better not to mess with the formula until I had a handle on these sorts of things.
I was so emboldened by my newfound confidence that I decided I ought to call someone to share in this momentous occasion. Not that any normal person would think cooking a damn meal was an incredible accomplishment, but I don’t know, I was just feeling like... like this was some major step for me. Like I was doing something the old me, the me from my past, could never have done. I was now the kind of man who cooked for himself, who had a job that people respected, who did good for the world instead of just blowing things up all the time. And dammit, someone should come celebrate with me.
As soon as I pulled out my phone, though, I felt a little embarrassed. Who was I kidding? No one was going to care about this. People in the office made cracks about my L-2 upbringing all the time-- I mean, the way I reacted in front of them, you’d think I thought they were hilarious. But I didn’t think I could handle jokes about how I tried to poison someone with my pathetic attempt at food on top of that. I didn’t know anyone who I could call who wouldn’t turn it into a giant joke at my expense.
Well, no. That wasn’t true. I did know one guy.
“Hello?”
“Heero! Hey buddy. You up to anything fun?”
“I’m writing a mission report. What do you want?”
“Well, I, uh...”
I looked down at my basket full of ingredients, and felt that embarrassment begin to creep up again. But hell, I had him on the phone already. Worst he could do was tell me no, right?
“I’m making fettuccine alfredo for dinner, and I was, uh, wondering if you wanted to come over and have some.”
There was a long, excruciating silence on the other end of the line.
“Really?”
“Yeah, I just thought I would give it a shot, you know. I haven’t really ever done it before, but how hard can it be, right? It’s probably not going to be any good though, so--”
“No, I mean, you really want me to come?”
“Oh. Well, yeah, sure I do.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding shocked. “Okay, I will.”
Now I was surprised. He really wanted to come! “Really? Cool, great, I’ll see you soon.” I laughed into the phone. “I promise not to poison you or anything. I mean, I’ll do my best not to.”
“Yeah...” he muttered, then cleared his throat, back to his normal, monotone self. “You better not.”
I hung up the phone feeling like a million bucks. It was strange, actually, to feel so good about something so small. I guess I really had been expecting him to just laugh in my face. But we were friends, right? We were buddies, even though we hadn’t seen a lot of each other since I’d come to Earth. We’d been through things together that made people friends even if they never saw each other again.
Well, hell, we were seeing each other tonight! I had to get back to the apartment and start getting things together.
Whoever had furnished my apartment had obviously expected a different sort of man to end up living in it. My kitchen had come with all sorts of gadgets that I had had a really great time taking apart, but had never actually figured out what they were meant for. The cabinets were full of gleaming, never-used pots and pans and silverware and other shit you didn’t need when everything you ate came in a cardboard box. I occasionally took a coffee mug out to pour my beer into. You know, when I was feeling really fancy.
I took just about every damn pot off the shelf and spread them on the counter, waiting for the correct ones to leap out at me. How much pasta could two guys eat? Should I throw the whole box’s worth in and go to town?
I consulted my user’s guide, the fettuccine alfredo recipe. “Boil four liters of lightly salted water in a large pot. Add contents of box,” it read.
“What would I do without you?” I said, grabbing the biggest damn pot I had. Eyeballing the liters was no problem; back in the day, I needed to be pretty damn accurate when fueling up my Gundam, when even a little extra weight made a big difference in your speed in the air. So it was going to get the exact damn four liters it was asking for.
“Lightly salted” proved to be more of a problem. What the hell kind of a measurement was “lightly”? What if I used too much? Too little? I mean, I knew a thing or two about measuring grams of powder, but it was kind of powder you used to blow things up. Explosives were not the kind of thing you measured in vague terms, not if you wanted to take out just a house instead of a damn city block. Who knew what the consequences could be for my cooking if I used a heavy hand here?
I felt kind of stupid thinking in those terms. After all, ruining my food was not exactly as serious as blowing up the wrong people. But the stakes felt high to me. I had made them high, inviting Heero over, and maybe he didn’t know what this dinner was symbolizing to me, but hell, I wanted to impress him. And something about how surprised he sounded on the phone, that I was inviting him over, it made it seem like maybe this was a little important to him, too.
So shit, yeah, the stakes were kind of high.
I ended up giving the pot a good once-over with the salt shaker, and decided that was going to have to do. I turned the burner on high, and seeing the flame shoot out and curl up under my pot was strangely satisfying. Confident that I hadn’t ruined anything yet, I turned to the rest of my ingredients, collected haphazardly on the kitchen counter.
“What do I do now?”
There was a sudden, firm knock on my door. I stared at my pile of groceries for a second, realizing how much I still needed to do. Hell, he wasn’t supposed to come over yet! I didn’t think I was going to be cooking with an audience.
Still, I went to let him in, because no matter how much I may have wanted to, it wouldn’t be nice to leave him out there while I cooked dinner.
“Hey buddy,” I said, then cocked a grin after a once-over. “Pretty fancy, man.”
Heero must have come from the office, he had on a nice shirt and tie. I, meanwhile, was in my usual day-off attire: a faded tee shirt with a nice big hole in the collar and an old pair of jeans. We looked hilariously mismatched, and I suddenly felt a little underdressed, standing in my own damn apartment.
“Hi, Duo.”
“Hot date?”
“Shut up,” Heero said, coming inside. I let the door close behind him.
“I just started, so, uh, have a seat. I have some beer if you want.”
Heero nodded and took a seat at the table. “All right.”
I fished a bottle out of the fridge and popped the cap for him. When I handed it over he said, “Sorry, I’m too early.”
It was a little weird to hear Heero say sorry for something so small. “It’s all right, man.” I shrugged, heading back into the kitchen, where my ingredients were still waiting to be tackled. “I just thought you were gonna come over after you finished writing your report.”
Heero sipped his beer thoughtfully.
“I couldn’t concentrate.”
“Oh,” I said, because I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean. “Well, it’s no problem. You’re just going to have to wait a while to eat, so I hope you’re not starved.”
“I’m fine.”
He was quiet after that, and for once, I was too focused on the task at hand to fill the silence. My directions had taken a turn for the confusing again.
“Brown two cloves of garlic, minced, in a saucepan with butter,” I muttered aloud. “What the hell is a ‘mince’?”
“It means finely chopped,” Heero said, and I glanced up to see he had joined me in the kitchen, his beer left, barely drunk, on the table.
“May...” He cleared his throat. “May I help?”
Two strange, conflicting emotions hit me at his words. Part of me didn’t want him to help. I had built this whole thing up in my head as something I was going to do, by myself, for myself, and part of me was determined to see that through.
And the other part, even more strangely, was thrilled that he was offering. That maybe it would be nice to have a partner in this undertaking.
And hell, he sounded like he knew what he was talking about, didn’t he?”
“All right,” I said, and he smiled a little, which really took me by surprise. “You can start by, uh, mincing the garlic,” I mumbled.
Heero nodded, opening a few cabinets, looking for something I had apparently missed when I pulled all the pots out. He found a long, flat board and set it on the counter, then located my set of shining, never-used knives that had also come with the apartment and picked one that I could only guess was optimized for garlic chopping, or something. I watched him peel the garlic, set it on the board, and slice it into finer and finer pieces. Halfway through, he noticed I hadn’t moved and glanced at me.
“You don’t mind me watching, right?” I asked. “I’m, you know, trying to learn.”
He coughed, and turned back to the garlic. “Oh... no. I don’t mind.”
I didn’t miss the fact that he went much slower this time around.
“If you hold the blade steady with your hand like this, you have more control,” he said.
“You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”
“A few times,” he replied.
“Oh yeah? How come you never invited me over?” I joked.
The knife stilled on the board.
“I didn’t think you were interested,” he muttered.
I didn’t know what to say in response, and after a moment the knife continued its movements.
“There’s two cloves,” he said finally, when he had reduced the garlic into a pile of teeny little bits. “Want to put any more in?”
“What? But the recipe says to only put in two.”
A tiny smirk appeared on Heero’s face.
“Cooking is not an exact formula. It’s not like mixing explosives,” he said, and I almost laughed at just how sharp he was. “If you want more garlic, we can put in more.”
“Well, hell, I don’t know,” I said, thrown by this new revelation. Heero, of all people, telling me to be more liberal with the guidelines? Never thought I’d see the day.
Finally I shrugged. “I’ve never had this before. What do you want?”
Heero seemed to be considering his options. Finally, he set another clove on the board and minced it up. Then, he turned to me.
“Okay, melt some butter in a pan, then put the garlic in and cook it for a couple of minutes. Don’t let it burn. I’ll grate the cheese.”
“Roger that.”
I put a pan on a free burner and took a big dollop of butter from my newly bought tub. As the flame curled beneath it, I watched the butter soften and melt into a puddle. Then, I took the board with its little pile of garlic pieces and very carefully shook it into the pan. Almost immediately, an incredible aroma started to fill the kitchen, indicating I was doing something right.
“Now, you want to add the cream in, and lower the heat,” Heero said, glancing over.
I opened the carton of cream, pouring its contents into the pan, and twisted the knob for the burner until the flame was a gentle, small spurt.
“Oh shit, the water’s boiling!” I said, reaching past Heero for the box of pasta.
We maneuvered easily around each other in the narrow confines of my kitchen, Heero shifting behind me as I poured the spaghetti into the pot to add more butter to the sauce, then back to the cheese he had already mostly reduced to a towering bowl of shavings. It reminded me, suddenly, of the times we had worked together in the wars, working around each other in the cramped cockpits of stolen airplanes, wordlessly passing tools back and forth as we fiddled with our Gundams’ innards in Peacemillion’s hangar. We were always good at this, reading each other’s movements, naturally understanding where the other would need to be, but we had barely worked together since making our ways separately to Preventers, and chances to behave like this had become few and far between. I had missed it, I realized, our partnership. Our mutual understanding.
And maybe it was the ease of sliding into those old habits, the familiarity of Heero’s quiet focus on his task beside me, but I wasn’t nervous about screwing up dinner anymore. I wasn’t worried I was going to fail, was going to prove myself unworthy of this life that had been handed to me as a matter of course. And it was because... because I wasn’t doing it alone.
When Heero had the cheese in shreds, he had me stir it into the cream and butter until it melted, the sauce coming up thick and soupy when I ran through it with the spoon. It smelled delicious, rich and fragrant, and I realized I was starving.
Heero peered into the roiling pot of spaghetti, fishing out a long noodle with a fork. He let it cool in the air a moment before tasting it.
“It’s ready.”
He found a strainer in a cabinet and drained the pasta, before dumping it back into the pot so I could toss it in the sauce. I could barely wait to set bowls and forks down. We put the pot on the table between us, then glanced at each other.
Heero nodded.
“Let’s eat.”
I doled out some pasta to each of us, then sat down, fork in hand, almost apprehensive to try it despite my hunger. Instead, I watched Heero gracefully twirl some onto his fork and stick it in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.
“Well?”
He looked at me.
“Best fettuccine alfredo I’ve ever had.”
I laughed, but he looked completely serious.
“I mean it, Duo.”
Oh, hell. Somehow, he knew what this was for me, without me even having to say. Though I could feel my face grow a little warm, I gave him a smile, a real one.
“Thanks, Heero.”
And, apprehension gone, I took a forkful of my own fettuccine and tried it.
“Hey, this is pretty good!”
Heero just smirked and continued eating.
I’ve been literally starving before, when a stolen, half-ripe apple can taste like the freshest, juiciest thing on earth, and I’ve tried unbelievably decadent chocolates and multi-layer cakes created by Quatre’s esteemed personal chefs, but this was the most delicious meal I had ever had. The food was simple, sure, but it was good and filling, and I had made it all with Heero, and that had made it special.
And, somehow, I knew Heero felt the same.
“I would have come, you know,” I said suddenly, thinking of him cooking alone in his apartment, a thought that, for the first time since I had considered doing it myself, struck me as really lonely. “I would have come.”
Heero paused, fork poised halfway to his mouth, and looked at me.
“I know,” he said softly.
After the meal, we washed and dried the plates, falling into easy silence together. It was only when they were all put away, the table pristine and the kitchen bare, that I realized that it meant Heero was going to leave.
“I guess you still gotta finish that report,” I said with a shrug, implying an indifference I certainly didn’t feel.
He nodded. I led him to the door, because I couldn’t think of how to make him stay any longer, how to say what I wanted to say, when I wasn’t even sure what that was.
I opened the door halfway and he turned to me.
“Thank you for dinner.”
“Yeah, thanks for coming,” I replied, though that wasn’t what I meant.
“Duo...” he said, and with a look of intense concentration on his face, curled his hand around mine on the doorknob.
“Would you... like to come over for dinner tomorrow?” he asked softly.
The warmth of his hand on mine was new and yet strangely familiar, like it had been there the whole time, through all those moments working so perfectly well together. Unexpected, but so fitting; changing everything, but somehow, not really changing anything at all.
“Of course,” I said.
He smiled, and we looked at each other for one long, wonderful moment, and then he slipped through the door, his hand slowly leaving mine. I watched him disappear out of view down the hallway, still feeling the warmth of his hand long after I had closed the door behind me.
Friendships, like recipes, were never set in stone. They could be tweaked, amended, adjusted to taste. The results could never be known until you tried it, but if the ingredients were right, you could create something more, something incredible. You just had to be willing to try.
And, knowing Heero would be there with me, I couldn’t wait to give it a shot.