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“What are you preparing?”
Rosa has been with them, thoroughly installed in Natasha and Bruce's home, for a few weeks now.
“Just some vegetables,” Natasha says, dicing onions. Rosa still spends a good portion of the day interfaced with the Tower, being tutored by JARVIS – basically undergoing an apprenticeship in how to independently exist – and doesn't always project herself visibly even when she's “home”, but her appearance in the kitchen at mealtimes is becoming a pattern.
Rosa doesn't respond, though she tilts her head and assumes an expression of thoughtful consideration. Natasha finishes with the onions while Rosa is still considering. She keeps considering through the orzo boiling to completion and the shredding of the spinach and red cabbage. Natasha continues with the meal preparation and doesn't push, remembering how comforting she found it to observe Clint in mundane endeavors, when he first brought her in. It re-inforced the reality of him, of her, of the world continuing to spin.
Finally, Rosa asks, “What's it like?”
“Going to have to be more specific,” Natasha says, but tosses an encouraging smile over her shoulder as she pours the onions and the cabbage into the pan where the olive oil has been simmering on a low heat with the capers and the garlic.
“Ingestion,” Rosa says, then amends, “Eating.”
“Hrmmm.” Now Natasha considers, raising the temperature and stirring. “It's like . . scent, but more actively participatory, and with more texture. Imagine choosing to smell things.”
“I do choose to smell things,” Rosa says doubtfully.
“Right,” Natasha says, tilting her head in acknowledgment. “Sorry. It's . . . engaging an apparatus to collect and format a substance for sensory input, which can be pleasurable or offensive both in . . . scent, and texture.”
“Can you perceive your intake of nutrients?” Rosa tilts her head. “It seems like you should.”
“We perceive sugars as pleasurable intakes, for the most part,” Natasha answers after a moment of thought, “which are the most readily available calories, so we are programmed for recognition of energy sources, though there's no sensory correlation between the intake and the increase in available biochemical power. The actual increase in energy is delayed, occurs after digestion, so our bodies evolved a more immediate reward process to encourage the eating of good energy sources. Nutrients . . . those may have no pleasant sensory association at all, aside from the feeling of health. Proper functioning. And that's very delayed. You have to learn that association.”
“That doesn't seem very efficient.” Rosa frowns.
“It's not,” Natasha agrees. “And the ingestion of some substances produces sensory effects that have no correlation with their nutritional or caloric content at all.”
“Spices,” Rosa says.
“Yes.”
Rosa considers this.
“I enjoy the smell of copper,” she offers. “Copper wire supplies much of my electrical power.”
“That makes sense.” Natasha adds the spinach to the now well-reduced combination of other ingredients. She likes the spinach still a little crisp.
There is a quiet; Rosa makes none of the sounds that a biological being would at Natasha's back. Then one of her mobile sensors skitters closer, along the upper edge of the wall – Bruce calls them her wandering eyeballs, at which Rosa laughs, though not, Natasha thinks, for the same reason Bruce finds it funny.
Natasha and Rosa are in accord in having very little sense of the macabre – an ability to recognize it, but a sort of tone-deafness towards it. To Rosa, the association is amusing because of its illogical anthropomorphism, because of how Bruce enjoys its quirky morbidity – because he is calling her something that she knows ought to be off-putting, frightening, even, and he's saying it with affection.
Rosa has learned to laugh when she is happy, and when she is uncomfortable, and especially when she is both. It's not quite the natural expression of a felt emotion, but it's learning to match situation and response with reference to emotion, at least, even if Rosa still tends to choose reactions that make her seem harmless, younger and less intelligent than she is.
Natasha wouldn't want to rid her of that ability – for Rosa to lose her instinct for vulnerability as a defense mechanism would be for Rosa to be more actually vulnerable – but she'd like it to be a choice. Something Rosa can opt to turn off. They're getting there.
The wandering eyeball is hovering over the stove.
“I also like the scent of olive oil, when heated,” Rosa admits carefully.
“I like ghost chilis dipped in chocolate,” Natasha offers back, taking the pan off the heating element and setting it aside. She gets a shot glass out of the cabinet and pours a little of the oil off into it before she dumps the veggies in with the orzo and starts mixing. Rosa is . . . again contemplative.
Natasha's back is to Rosa's holographic projection, the wandering eye is doing nothing any different than it was a moment ago, and Rosa still makes none of the sounds of a human body in clothes. There is literally no sensory evidence from which Natasha can draw that conclusion.
She still knows it's not wrong. Her daughter is thinking about what she's said.
Her daughter. It remains a dizzying thought, warm and sharp and terrifying and fierce.
“I've acquired a chemical analysis of ghost chili peppers,” Rosa says, a moment later – she was researching what Natasha said, apparently. “Contact with mucous membrain would produce pain.”
“Yep,” Natasha agrees, getting herself a bowl and utensils and serving herself a portion, then putting tin foil over the rest and putting it in the refrigerator for Bruce, for whenever he emerges from whatever he's doing over at the Tower with Tony. She puts her bowl on the kitchen table. “But they're tasty. Be right back.”
Natasha goes into the nearest bathroom, finds a fragrance oil warmer that currently bears lingering dregs of cedar and sandalwood, and takes it back into the kitchen. Rosa watches curiously as Natasha washes out the warming tray where the oil goes, sets it down on the kitchen table across from her own bowl of food, gets a match, and lights the tea light underneath.
Then she pours the oil she'd saved from the pan into the warming tray.
“Oh.” Rosa's face is entirely devoid of expression – which is still the most honest expression she makes. Then she giggles a little, her brows doing a funny little dance, and Natasha thinks that – that thing with her eyebrows – that may be real. That may not be a thing she knows she's doing.
“Should have thought of it before,” Natasha says. “I noticed you hung around whenever we cooked, and I knew you could smell things. You like coffee, too, don't you? You get close to the pot when Bruce makes coffee, especially if it's one the Middle Eastern blends.”
“Yes,” Rosa says, then, “He watches all of my . . eyes . . . very closely. Like he thinks one might fall in and be damaged.”
“He'll calm down with the hypervigilence with time.” Natasha takes a bite and thinks – how would I describe this, this specific thing, if I couldn't taste?
And she realizes that there must be half a dozen things Rosa experiences in ways humans don't – electric current and magnetism and wavelengths of energy outside the realm of human perception – and she never talks about them. Occasionally she'll mention that this or that device is limiting in the data it gives her, but she doesn't say that a certain frequency of current is delicious, or bright, or that it tickles.
Maybe because there aren't human words for these inhuman things. Natasha makes a mental note to talk to JARVIS.
Rosa's wandering eyes have wandered to gather around the oil warmer, some jumping to the table, some clustered on the wall nearby. Her hologram is still standing, hands folded, oriented towards the flame in an attitude of bland, polite attention.
“I don't need you to do that right now, if you don't want to.” Natasha makes a shooing motion with her hand. “You can relax. Allocate more memory to olfactory perception.”
“O-oh,” Rosa says again, gives her a faintly nervous look, and then . . . vanishes. Or rather, the hologram of her does. But her voice, projected from half a dozen speakers in her half a dozen “eyes”, makes a pleased, satisfied little hum – like someone falling back into a comfortable chair. The eyes jostle and shimmy and then settle.
“This is really nice,” Rosa says, and Natasha doesn't need to see a face to know that she means the simmering oil, and the thought behind it, and just – this. Natasha's starting to get good at reading the collective body language of the eyes.
“It is,” Natasha agrees, and makes a conscious effort not to hide the faint bewilderment in her tone – because that is how this will work, with honesty on both their parts. Rosa won't be hurt by it, anyway – in that much, regardless of the origin of her constituent parts, Rosa is the daughter of Natasha's very bones. They are the same manner of creature.
“I enjoy the sound that fluorescent bulbs make as they're first turned on,” Rosa ventures. “Sometimes they harmonize.”
And Natasha answers, “I like the smell of gasoline.”