Work Text:
Sarah watches the water as it just starts to jostle with heat.
“Watched pots,” she says with a wry smile.
“Inaccurate,” Cameron says in the entrance to the kitchen, leaning against the wall.
“What?”
“The saying. ‘A watched pot never boils.’ It’s not accurate. Watched pots boil at the same rate as non-watched pots.”
“It’s a saying about patience. Which I don’t have a lot of today,” Sarah answers with a raised eyebrow.
“Several references indicate that it’s about controlling your hopes for the future.”
Sarah sighs, turns her back on Cameron and puts the noodles in the pot, too early. She's not in the mood to be provoked, if that's what Cameron is trying to do, and even less in the mood to be informed.
She tries to focus on cooking, the coziness of it. The normalcy.
Sometimes, when she cooks, she thinks about what a luxury it is. About if any mothers in the future will have a stove, running water, a room just to prepare food. Boxes of carbohydrates ready to buy a few blocks away.
She knows they won’t.
She looks back at Cameron. “In the future, does John ever cook?”
Cameron pauses before she answers. “Once a year, he cooks for his soldiers, the ones who report to him directly.”
Sarah finds this comforting, for some reason. She stirs the noodles. “What does he cook?”
“Spaghetti.”
Sarah glances up to see if Cameron is kidding. She narrows her eyes at the machine and decides she’s not.
“It’s a practical choice,” Sarah says. “And, it was John’s favorite when he was young.”
Sarah puts another pan on the range to warm up the sauce. At first she intends to stir both with the same wooden spoon, but then she gets another spoon out of the drawer.
Another luxury that won’t always be there: spoons, plural.
She watches the noodles swirl around the pot as she stirs more than she needs to. She likes the feel as they grow more limber, more yielding, with time.
A few minutes later, she asks Cameron, “Is it on Christmas?”
“Is what on Christmas?”
“When he cooks spaghetti once a year for his troops?”
“No.”
Sarah pauses. “Is it any particular day? Arbor Day, maybe? Pi Day?” she asks archly.
“He makes them spaghetti on your birthday.”
At Sarah’s surprise, Cameron adds, “It’s an important day for the human resistance.”
Sarah exhales. Her jaw tightens.
This might be the hardest part of waiting for the future. Knowing that future John’s grief will be so devastatingly large that all of humanity will hear about it.
She stares down at the noodles.
Minutes must pass, because Cameron tells her that the spaghetti is overcooked.
The sauce has started to burn too, the tomatoes filling the scent of char with a caramel sweetness.
The watched pot has boiled.
She asks Cameron to put dinner on two plates and goes to lie down. Her heart won’t stop racing and and she hopes it’s just anger.