Work Text:
يا صغيرة (oh, little one)
أنت مدبرة (you're down on your luck)
قمبري عندنا (stay with us)
أين عاتسيري من هانا؟ (where will you go from here?)
Joe offered to take her out to eat. Nile would pick the time, the city, and the restaurant – claiming he needs to learn what she likes. Oddly enough, she agreed.
She couldn't go back to Chicago, not yet. Her absolute favorite restaurant in the world was a little Greek restaurant her mother took Nile and her sister to whenever they wanted to celebrate. The air conditioning broke every summer, so they sat in the heat, hoarded ice cubes into their water glasses and used their paper menus as fans. The kitchen would come alive with noises of sizzling meat and knifes repeatedly hitting wooden cutting boards, her mother would talk about her day at work and her little sister would constantly interrupt her and ask when will their food be ready.
When she was nineteen, her then-girlfriend got accepted into a university in Paris and offered Nile to come along for a few weeks. She took Joe there, to Rue de Belleville, where tables were placed outside the building itself, but inside the borders of see-through plastic panels. A restaurant owned by a family of Jewish immigrants from Tunis, with three hamsas hanging on the wall and a barely functioning radio that coughed old French songs. A son/waiter took their order, well, her order, Joe asked that she'll order for them both. She ordered the same dish Esti ordered for her during their teenage liaison, and asked the waiter to give them the dish he likes best as well. The waiter smiled when Nile asked for his opinion, so used to costumers knowing exactly what they want in as an attempt to recreate childhood memories or resurrect forgotten tastes of their mothers' cooking.
Her French was mostly theoretical – she read and listened to the language, but barely had any chance to practice it, which resulted in a heavy American accent that shone whenever she expressed herself.
Joe thoughtlessly twirled his spoon around his t'becha, beef that was cooked for long with potatoes and cowpeas, served over a layer of couscous. She watched him, his curls framed his face like a dark halo, his weather-inappropriate leather jacket was covered with patches – she wondered how often he had to go shopping for clothes, considering the unseemly amount of blood that seemed to follow them wherever they went.
"There weren't any potatoes when I grew up. These days they use them all the time, can you believe?" Joe said when the waiter reentered the kitchen, leaving the two of them alone in otherwise empty restaurant. Not that the restaurant was often overwhelmed with costumers, but especially at this time of day, too late for lunch and too early for dinner for the French, the restaurant provided the two with privacy.
Nile didn't realize she took Joe to a restaurant that served his homeland's cuisine. She struggled for a moment, desperate to find a response that will at least somewhat fit the situation. "Really, it's that different?" She examined the three, four, five salads placed on the table, from grilled peppers and tomatoes to seasoned carrots and simple boiled beets.
He chuckled. "Trust me, Nicky has it worse. He hasn't recovered from the tomato's violent entrance to the Italian kitchen." Joe sighed, his wide smile turning bittersweet. "This is where it gets lonely, you know?"
"The constant changing." She furrowed her eyebrows and looked away. What happens when she returns to Chicago in ten, fifty, a hundred years? Her mother's home will no longer be there, perhaps the entire building will perish too. What if she returns only to see how her entire neighborhood was destroyed and rebuilt completely different?
His gaze was warm, caring and compassionate, with those brown eyes held so much kindness within them. "My childhood home is now a cemetery." He disclosed after a few silent moments. "Awfully symbolic, but true."
Nile's thought-out management was incredibly graceful. Her self-composure was one of a trained warrior, or a ballerina.
Her straightened back, her cornrows which were now tied back into a bun, her sharp, educated movements, reminded Joe of the first ballet he ever saw.
At that time, he was so used to seeing most things as lines and colors, to squint his eyes at the sight of an unfamiliar fabric and consider which colors he'd need to mix to capture it. He and Nicolò once snuck into the Bolshoi Theatre in a bone-trembling frigid February in 1895. He tightened a wool shawl over his coat, desperately trying to avoid the cold that he knew would not kill him. They sat at the front of the balcony, they found two seats in the far-right side that happened to be unoccupied and waited for the show to start. At first, he dreaded the darkness that kept him from pulling out his sketchbook and illustrating the figures that were getting prepared to appear before him. His frustration faded when his Nicolò removed one of Joe's gloves to lace their fingers together, discreetly placing a soft kiss to the back of Joe's hand.
The show itself was breathtaking. He was always a fan of dance and music, but those dancers, those artists, using their bodies to weave a tale of longing and pain presented by the orchestra, they were different. He loved so many dances, he loved his mother when she tied a scarf around her hips and twirled with incredible passion, he loved the dances he found in sword fighting, but this performance felt unbelievably raw. But when thinking of ballet, he mostly remembered how later that night he drunkenly sang one of the waltzes from Swan Lake as he held equally drunk Nicolò in close embrace, both giggling as they danced around their hotel room. 'Not now, eyes o' mine, I'm too tired.' his Nicolò whispered back then. 'You deserve to be loved assiduously.'
The same serene elegance he saw in Odette all those years ago, he saw in Nile.
"That’s why I want to know what you like to eat, so you could have at least-" He paused. "At least something that remains somewhat the same."