#i've accepted that i'll never be over these two and their relationsihp

[journalofimprobablethings]

a recipe for home

Author: journalofimprobablethings

Fandom: The Adventure Zone: Balance

Summary: 

Taako tries to cook for the first time since Glamour Springs. When things go awry, Lucretia is there to lend a hand.

Full fic under the cut, but this you can also find me on AO3!

Preview:

Living in the headquarters of the Bureau of Balance makes Taako nervous.

It’s not just the giant brainwashing jellyfish, or the weapons of mass destruction they're hunting, or the fact that it’s a literal moon base floating in the sky--that’s all weird, sure, but he’s Taako. He can deal with weird.

It’s the sense of deja vu he gets just walking around the place, the feeling that he’s been somewhere like this before. It’s the fact that so many things about it feel so damn familiar. The details of the place that feel right in a way he can’t explain. 

The deja vu is constant and sometimes overwhelming. He knows he's never lived anywhere like this--he’s pretty sure he would remember living in the sky--but he still can’t shake the feeling. If he tries to think about it too hard, his head buzzes like the beginning of a hangover and the thin needle of a headache starts to pierce his skull. So he doesn’t look at the feeling straight on. But he worries the edges of it sometimes, as he’s lying in his bunk listening to Magnus and Merle’s snores. 

He’s never had a place like this, never been part of a team like this. He’s always been alone. So why does this place--why do these people, Magnus and Merle and the Director and even, weirdly, Davenport--why do they feel so much like home?

-

The kitchen in the residential wing is the worst--or the best, depending on how you look at it. It’s small, just a tiny galley kitchen for the Bureau members to use if they don’t feel like going to the mess hall, and everything about it feels right. He’s never felt so immediately comfortable in a new kitchen before. He finds himself reaching for a spoon or a pan without thinking, and there it is, exactly where he expected. It’s as if somehow his body already has muscle memory for this place he’s never been. It’s the strangest thing.

Maybe that’s what makes him decide to actually try cooking again.

He hasn’t made anything more complicated than a peanut butter sandwich since Glamour Springs. Every time he thinks about trying, about cutting and assembling ingredients, about transmuting anything, his hands begin to shake, and the echo of forty people choking and gasping for breath sounds through his head. Before he came here, he’d barely set foot in a kitchen in six years.

But for some reason, this damn kitchen calms his fears, at least enough to pull out a pot and prepare himself a packet of instant ramen. Even he, he reasons, can’t mess up noodles and a flavor packet. He only ever cooks for himself, though, never for the others. He plays it off as selfishness-- get your own food, homie, I gave Garfield good elf hair for this shit --and hopes that Merle just thinks he’s an asshole for knocking the spoon out of his hand when he tries to steal a bite. Even he can’t mess up noodles and a flavor packet--but he had thought garlic chicken was a simple enough recipe, too.

--

Now, he’s standing at the stove, testing the waters in his mind. It’s late, Merle and Magnus long asleep, but after hours of lying in his bunk staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about all the questions this place raises in him, he’d given up on sleeping himself and made his way down to the kitchen. If he’s going to try, the middle of the night is a good time: no one around to disturb him, or ask for a taste.

Taako pulls a pot from the cabinet to the right of the stove, just where he thought it would be, and sets it on the burner. His heart is pounding in his ears, but his hands are steady, the ghosts of Glamour Springs so far silent.

Rice, he thinks. Rice is simple, easy. He’ll start with rice.

After a quick survey of the food stores he's found bacon in the fridge, pigeon peas and capers in the pantry, a container of cubes in the freezer labeled “sofrito” -- who in the Bureau cooks enough to make and freeze sofrito? he thinks. But he’s not complaining, because now he knows what he’s making: arroz con gandules, Tía Elsa’s recipe, a recipe engrained in his bones. There are enough spices in the cabinet to approximate sazón--no banana leaves to cover the pot, but Titi Elsa only did that half the time anyway, maybe if we had a banana tree in the front yard, mijo, but I’m not making a special trip just for leaves. Foil’s fine.

He assembles the ingredients on the tiny square of counter next to the stove, pulls out a cutting board and a knife. Takes a deep breath. 

And begins.

He heats the pot, cuts the bacon into thick dice and adds it in. The motions are easy, practiced, the tension in his shoulders relaxing as he falls into the familiar recipe. While the bacon crisps he turns his attention to the army of spice bottles he’s pulled from the rack. He starts mixing them in a small bowl, measuring them by eye in his hand. Garlic powder, onion powder, cumin, coriander. He’s missing annatto seeds, but there’s paprika, easy enough to transmute one to the other--

He stops, staring into the bowl, his hand smudged with red powder.

He did the magic without thinking, a simple shift in flavors, but now he’s staring at the bowl and the smudge on his hand and he’s thinking of elderberry and nightshade and the sound of a town choking to death on his mistakes--

“Taako?”

The voice is distant, he can barely hear it over the ghosts crowding his head.

“Taako, are you alright?”

A hand touches his shoulder, tentatively, and he flinches away from the touch but it pulls him into the present enough for him to open his eyes and see who's talking to him.

The Director is standing in front of him, a blue shawl wrapped around her shoulders and concern in her eyes.

Of all the people to find him like this, it had to be her.

“Peachy keen, jelly bean,” he says, trying for nonchalance, but he can’t stop his voice from shaking. “No worries here, Taako’s good--”

He reaches out to steady himself on the counter, but he misses and catches the edge of the spice bowl, tipping it over the edge. It shatters at their feet, spilling its contents across the floor in an aromatic slash of orange and red and brown.

"Shit," Taako says. "Fucking shit."

He reaches down to clear up the mess, and the world tilts and he almost falls over. Then the Director’s hands are on his shoulders, no longer tentative, catching him before he can fall. She steers him to the table at one end of the narrow kitchen, and guides him, gently but firmly, into a chair.

“Sit.” 

He does, and the world tilts again.

“Breathe,” the Director says, and yes, that’s why the world is tilting, because he’s not breathing, but how does he do that? He leans forward and puts his head between his knees, and manages to suck in a shaky breath.

“That’s it,” she says, “Just breathe.” She’s somewhere nearby but now that he’s seated she’s no longer touching him. He can hear her breathing, though, slow and even, and he tries to focus on that, to match his breath to hers.

It takes a few minutes to even out his breathing, and another few to silence the ghosts whispering in his ears. But finally he lifts his head and looks up at the Director. She’s crouched next to him, a small furrow of concern between her brows, and Taako has the strange urge to reach up and smooth the furrow away. He clenches his hands into fists.

He should probably say thank you, but he's angry with himself and embarrassed that she's seen him this way and so what comes out instead is,

“What are you doing down here?”

It’s a rude question for an employee to ask their boss, but she doesn’t seem to mind. 

“I was working late and came down to make some tea." She studies him. “You were cooking.” She says it so carefully, and not for the first time, Taako wonders just how much the Director knows about their pasts.

He’s afraid she’ll ask what set him off, ask if he wants to talk about it , and he doesn’t think he could handle that. He’s had enough of being vulnerable in front of her for the moment. So he straightens in his chair, pulls his nonchalance back over himself like armor.

“Yeah, you know, sometimes you just need something better than the crap we get in the dining hall.”

He waits for his words to provoke her, for her to stand and say something kind but brusque and leave. But she doesn’t. Instead she just sighs and looks back at the kitchen, surveys the ingredients on the counter, the spilled bowl of spices on the floor. "Gandules?" she asks, and Taako raises his eyebrows in surprise.

"Yeah."

She hesitates, and then says the most remarkable thing.

“Would you like some help?” 

He stares at her. Of all the things he might have expected her to say, that wasn’t on the list. She sounds different, somehow--less distant, less lofty. She sounds younger. 

“Listen, not that I don’t appreciate the offer, but don’t you have important Director-y things to do? Or you know, sleep to catch?”

She smiles thinly. “Sleep is a lost cause tonight, I think,” she says. “And even administrators have to eat sometimes.”

Maybe it's because of that change in her voice, or the fact that she didn’t try to make him talk about the spell he just had. Maybe it's because, against all odds, the Director's presence in this kitchen is strangely comforting. Whatever the reason, he doesn't push away her help the way he normally would. Instead he just shrugs and waves a hand.

"Sure. Knock yourself out."

The Director smiles, drapes her shawl over a chair out of the way, and gets to work. She clears up the spilled spices and shards of bowl, removes the now overly-crisped bacon from the pot, drops in cubes of sofrito to melt and fry in the drippings, and soon the kitchen is full of the mouthwatering smell of cooking onion and pepper and cilantro. It smells like Titi Elsa and home, and the band of anxiety around Taako’s chest begins to loosen.  

Taako watches the Director as she measures out the rice and adds it to the pot to toast, then mixes the spices in a new bowl, measuring them in her hand just as he had. She cooks slowly, like she’s having to remind herself of what comes next, but she goes through the steps of making the arroz exactly as he would.

Deja vu, he thinks.

“Where’d you learn to cook this?” he asks. “You spend some time in New Elfington or something?”

The Director doesn’t answer right away. Her hand pauses in its stirring, as though she’s considering what to say, and when she does answer her eyes are far away.

“My brother taught me,” she says quietly.

The answer surprises him. The Director is one of those people who is so private, so self-contained, that it’s hard to imagine her with a family, a life outside the Bureau. Taako tries to picture the Director younger, more carefree perhaps, standing side by side with her brother in the kitchen. But something about the image makes his head hurt, so he stops.

He wonders what her brother was like, and where he is now.

He thinks it must be nice, to have a sibling, someone to teach you to cook, to be at your side through good times and bad. Someone who would miss and mourn you if you were gone. The thought makes his chest ache with something like longing and something like grief.

So much of this place and these people make him feel this way, this confusing mix of longing and sorrow and comfort. He hates it, because he doesn't understand it, doesn’t know why it’s happening at all. These people mean nothing to him. He just met them. He doesn't care about them, he certainly doesn’t need them. He has never needed anyone.

This is what he tells himself, but as he leans back in his chair and watches the Director cook, he can't help but admit that it's the most at home he's felt in a long time.

---

Lucretia knows that this is a stupid risk.

She's supposed to be keeping her distance. She's supposed to be the Director: professional, dignified, distant . She's not supposed to let them catch her wandering to the kitchen late at night, and she's certainly not supposed to be in said kitchen cooking one of Taako's aunt's recipes for him--one of the ones that he absolutely forbade her to ever write down. (She'd watched him make it until she'd memorized the steps well enough to make it on her own. She's tried it a few times, since the redaction, and it has come out fine, but never as good as his.)

She's breaking all the rules she's set for herself, all the boundaries she's put up to keep her story in place, to keep them safe. She's putting everything at risk.

But when she came into the kitchen and saw Taako staring blankly at that bowl of spices, the smudge of paprika on his palm, helping him wasn’t even a question. She knows what happened at Glamour Springs, and she knows how hard cooking is for him now. She'd hoped the kitchen might help. It's modeled after the one on the Starblaster, laid out just the same, one of the places she couldn't bring herself to let go of.

And now it seems it's just made everything worse.

Maybe it's the guilt that makes her offer to finish the dish, so at least Taako can have a taste of home, even if it's not as good as his or his aunt's. Or maybe, she admits to herself, it's pure selfishness. Standing here in this kitchen with Taako, surrounded by the smells of his cooking, she can almost pretend that nothing has changed.

Until Taako speaks.

"Where'd you learn to cook this?" he asks, and her heart constricts in her chest.

She considers, and when she finally responds, it feels like the closest thing to truth she’s given him in weeks.

She remembers the first time she watched him make this dish, in that tiny galley kitchen on the Starblaster. They had lost Lup early that cycle, a venomous snakebite that acted too fast for Merle to be able to help. Taako retreated into himself the way he always did when Lup was gone, but when she offered to help out preparing the meals, he didn’t say no. He was prickly and short, and half the time he would take the knife out of her hand to finish chopping something himself if she was moving too slow. But he let her stay, and watch, and she soaked up everything he was doing as well as she could.

The last day of the cycle, she and Taako were in the kitchen early, and Taako made his aunt’s arroz con gandules, one of the dishes she had always made for Candlenights. He wouldn’t let Lucretia help at all. She stayed with him anyway, as the sky darkened with the coming Hunger and the light dimmed, and by the time Davenport flew them out of that plane and the threads of light pulled them apart, the pot sat covered and ready on the stove. Lup returned to a tackling hug from Taako, and a bowl of rice that tasted like home.

It was several cycles before he actually taught her how to make it, and several more before she cooked it on her own. Of all the things that he taught her to make, it was always one of her favorites, and she made it at the Bureau because it reminded her of that day, that feeling of reunion.

She only hopes they'll get there again, one day.

Gods, she misses him. She misses all of them. She hadn’t realized how peculiar a grief it was, to miss someone who is sitting right in front of you. To look in the eyes of someone who you’ve known for a century and see nothing but wariness and disinterest.

Every time she thinks she's become accustomed to it, something new appears; they do or say something that leaves her shattered.

Every time, it feels a little harder to put herself back together.

--

“Your rice is burning,” Taako says from the table.

Lucretia comes back to herself and realizes he’s right: the nutty smell of the toasting rice is now tinged with bitterness, and when she stirs there are dark flecks of the grains that have caught at the bottom of the pan.

She curses softly and grabs for the tomato sauce, which hisses and bubbles immediately as she adds it.

It’s been a long time since she let herself wander down those back paths of her memories. She’s avoided it for good reason: it hurts too much, and no good can come of it. For a moment, here, seduced by the familiarity, she allowed herself to drop her guard. 

And worse, she let Taako see.

The empty tomato sauce can clatters as she drops it too quickly onto the counter.

“You all right, there, Madam Director?”

She shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous, for him, for her, for the plan. She’s supposed to keep them at arm’s length so that they don’t ask questions, don’t try to follow her down those back paths to places their minds can’t go right now. She’d seen Taako wince when she’d mentioned her brother, because of course that would make him try to think of things that the voidfish has erased, and yet she'd continued on, losing herself in the comfort of the moment and ignoring the danger.

How could she have been so stupid?

She'll finish the dish, because she said she would. What comes next? Toast the rice, tomato sauce and then--what? She stares into the bubbling pot, trying to tamp down the panic clawing at her throat as it always does when she forgets something from the century. She knows this, it's--

"Here."

Taako's voice cuts into her thoughts. She blinks and he is standing next to her, holding the bowl of spices. She hadn't even noticed him get up.

He doesn't ask what's wrong, doesn't even tease her for forgetting what comes next. He just holds out the bowl to her. She takes it, and he doesn't comment on the fact that now it is her hands that are shaking.

"Thank you."

She pours the spices in, and by the time she's done he already has the next ingredient in hand.

They finish the rest of the recipe like that, together, Taako handing her each ingredient in turn. Then she adds just enough water to cover the rice up to her knuckle, and the heat is turned high to bring it to a boil. She and Taako tidy the kitchen without discussion while the water heats, and Lucretia wonders if Taako notices how easily they move around each other in this space, how familiar the dance of dishes and drying and putting away.

The water boils, and they reduce it to a simmer and cover the pot with foil, nesting the lid on top. And then it's done, nothing left to do but wait while the pot bubbles quietly away.

“I should go,” she says quietly. “It’s late.”

"I thought sleep was for the weak, or whatever," Taako says.

"There's always work to do," she replies. She picks up her shawl from the chair and surveys him. "Will you be alright?" 

He flashes a peace sign at her. "I think I know how to tell when rice is done. I'm golden."

"You know what I mean."

Their eyes meet, and for a moment there is a connection there, an understanding. It's not what they had before, of course, not even close. But it's not nothing, either.

"I'm good," he says.

She nods and turns to go, but his voice stops her before she gets to the door.

"Hey, Director?"

She turns. "Yes?"

He starts to say something, then stops, and his shoulders go up in a sort of helpless half-shrug. 

“Thanks.”

She smiles at that.

"You're welcome, Taako."

--

The next morning, Lucretia comes into her office to find a covered bowl sitting on her desk. Next to it is a note, and she recognizes the looping scrawl instantly.

Not bad, Madam D.

She smiles and uncovers the bowl. Even though it must have been hours since he placed it there, the rice is still steaming.