Work Text:
Eridan has been teaching you to cook. At first you’d protested volubly, really, it wasn’t worth his time, you were quite happy countertop-microwave-excitation-devicing frozen things, also you tended to break things when you tried to help him in the kitchen; but as Eridan does, he had worn you down and you’d started with really basic things like a white sauce, a simple stir-fry, soups, and moved on to more complicated stuff involving marinades. “‘s fuckin easy, Eq,” he’d said. “You’re thinkin a it in all the wrong terms like chemistry or some shit, this is more like intuitive, okay? Look, I just put in some tarragon. Doesn’t matter if it was like a quarter teaspoon or point six fucking eight over that, just some. You just gotta learn this shit as you go, okay? It’s all practice.”
When he’d taught you to make bread, though. That was a revelation. Even he’d said so, blinking up at you with that adorably artless look you’re pretty sure he doesn’t mean to do. “This is fuckin astonishin’, you know that?” he’d said with his mouth full, and when you went to take away the rest of the slice his hand darted out and captured it before you could. “Fuck no I am eatin’ all of this, jegus fuck, Eq, some people can bake and some people can fuckin’ bake, you have a fuckin’ terrible gift.”
(He’d been right.)
Baking soothes you the way breaking things does, with less soft-tissue injury to clean up afterward: there’s something deeply satisfying in the way the dough responds to you punching the heck out of it, the way it rises again in great hollow bubbles again and again. And it goes into the inferno of the oven you’d hastily rebuilt and returns crisp and rewarding and all the better for the pummeling you’d given it.
Even Karkat thinks you’re kind of good at it. Nepeta has dragged him over here several times since the…events you aren’t really ready to think about right now…and you have to give the man credit, he has been as well-behaved as you think it is physically possible for him to be, even in the early days when you hadn’t quite got how a roux was supposed to go. Once you’d started with the bread, he’d become more of a habitual visitor, and now it’s a surprise to go more than two or three days without him showing up accompanying Nepeta on her visits to your hive.
Tonight, though, he’s off doing something or other with Captor, and Eridan’s off doing something nautical, and Nepeta has you entirely to herself—or vice versa. You have just finished dinner. Eridan would probably be kindly encouraging about your attempts at wild-hoofbeast stew, especially as Nepeta had brought the main ingredient over herself, but it’s…you have to admit it’s sort of nice to just be with your moirail, right now.
“That was amazing,” she says happily, licking her fingers with a deplorable and characteristic lack of manners. “Absolutely amazing, Equius, you are fur serious the best cook.”
“Chef,” you say. “It sounds better.”
“Chef,” she repeats, nodding. “It’s…Equius, this is going to sound kind of stupid but it’s really nice to see you, um, expanding your interests?”
You lean against the counter, a dishtowel over your shoulder, and chuckle. “You mean it’s nice to see me doing something other than building or breaking robots? I suppose it would be, yes.”
She rolls her eyes and slithers off the chair, coming over to wrap her arms around you and press her face against your chest. The gesture is so familiar, so utterly welcome, and you so-carefully let your hands creep around her, let your fingers stroke her hair. She shivers a little against you, and you curl around her, your hair falling around the both of you in a curtain.
After a moment or two she rubs her cheek against your shirt. “Come to the pile with me?”
“I’ve got to wash the dishes, it’s—”
“We can do them later. Purrlease?”
You can’t possibly deny a Purrlease from Nepeta. “All right. I took the liberty of making it a little more comfortable, by the way. Fewer broken bits of robot and more cushion.”
It is in fact very comfortable, and you sink back into the cushions only now realizing how much your back and neck have stiffened after the evening’s workout and the subsequent time spent hunched over a stove. Nepeta curls up against you, one hand working through your hair, and you cuddle her close. She lives so fast, you think. Every moment for you is a hundred for her. She’s not asking to play with your hair, though, which means she really is tired, and you stroke her shoulders, her back, tiny kittenbones under your fingers, vicious, precious, vulnerable.
When she finally speaks it’s almost amusingly sleep-slurred, and her fingers bunched in your shirt, in your hair, are loosening. “Karkitty thinks you’re good for me,” she says.
“I am good for you. I always have been.” You nuzzle the top of her head.
“Mrr. You always have been. But he sees it now, Equius. Befur he was always like ‘he’s holding you back’ and now he sees you purroperly.”
You don’t reply at once, just cupping your hand at the back of her head, holding her. “Well. Perhaps it’s mutual. I believe he is good for you, as well, which is not a statement I think I would have made two or three perigees ago. I…appreciate, a great deal, what Vantas did in organizing Eridan’s rescue. And he is…not without bravery, or strength.”
Nepeta wriggles a little under your hand, enough to look up at you with enormous sleepy olive-gold eyes. “You mean that?”
“I don’t say things I do not mean.”
Those great-big-olive-gold-eyes meet yours, searchingly, and then she socks you in the jaw with the top of her head, narrowly avoiding bonking her horns into you, and clings. You wrap her up tight—carefully, always so carefully—in your arms and you hold her, you stroke her hair, you talk to her in that low rumble that always calms her down. There really aren’t words for just how pale you are for Nepeta Leijon, or—you perhaps flatter yourself—how pale she is for you; you have read the annals of great moirallegiances through the ages, always with an eye to measuring your own against such a standard, and every time, every single time, they have been found wanting.
Your moirail is the best of everything you are not, and she fits so perfectly into your arms, and just now you would not change any single thing in the whole universe; just now you are at peace.