Work Text:
Mihawk breaks the date—shriveled, salt crusted, unseemly, like refuse—down the center with his kogatana. It spreads in fine grained paste down the acrylic surface of the board, obscuring the blue, glistening threads that weave delicately in the creases of the petrified Alabastan ironwood, its ostentatious stamp discolored.
The translucent skin, veins shrunken to pinworms of blackness in the suggestion of leather flattens against the blade, the salt crystals pebbling off its surface. There is a dull, strange awe lighting below his sternum, even now. He thumbs at the substance, taking it into his mouth.
His eyes close, his body loosens. No active cognition, no placement of word or fallacy, all necessary reification on the tongue and through the body in effervescing vapors of sense memory. No, one thought comes to mind: there's a wine pairing for this.
Eyes cracking, he turns the leather cover of the thin folio set upon the desk with that thumb:
Lamb navarin. Any red will do. [Simmered in white: East Polestar makes a decent red.]
lamb shoulder, one inch cubes
two carrots, sliced into inch-thick rings
two potatoes, quartered [thin-skinned]
three turnips, quartered
shallots, handful…
The woman is half-through butchering a lamb when he tells her that he has killed her son. She doesn’t talk to him, but that steel bar of a blade falls with a resounding intensity as she severs the neck. It’s more of a smack than a knife-stroke, but the meat falls apart just the same. The affair is entirely bloodless, but there’s a blackened puddling somewhere on the long, soft-footed walk to the stone worktop, and the hook against the barn wall is entirely eloquent.
She takes up the saw and halves the spine; he doesn’t repeat himself.
Another blade, thinner and defter, but her hands are the real instrument. She works it around the connective tissue, and he watches with a slow cock of the head, absorbed in the movement, before frowning deeply, sharply, unliking of the spark of impulse it’s struck in him.
He leaves with a lamb shoulder, a sack of pilfered vegetables, and with strange urgency animating him.
“What do I do with this?” he asks, and his hand pinkens with those fluids not-blood, the leak of intracellular and interstitial fluids, myoglobin hued insubstantialities.
He knows himself to be precise, thorough and unneeding of the kind of appraisal that coaxes flaw, but somehow his serenity is disrupted. With each pass of the blade, each severed, unbleeding thing becomes strange to him. It is as if a livewire is run through his collar bone: heat, fritz, the unliving scent of scalded flesh, though he doesn’t shake.
“What do I do with this ?” she echoes, wiping her hands, wiping them into redness against the terrycloth. Real blood beneath, forced to the surface by abrasion, and her elbow makes a vague gesture towards the blade he’s unbuckling from his hip.
The pour of the wine is loud and ugly, glopping as it goes, and it makes his fingers stagger; what a waste , he thinks, then, with detachment, wonders why it was that he thought so. He strains at himself, the boundaries of his own cognition, but still he doesn’t shake.
“It’s a good cut of meat,” she says, something self-evident in it, some kernel of truth that Mihawk can intuit, but cannot make any personal linkage to.
Lid closed. Opened again. He inhales the rising vapor, watching the flame flicker about the sides of the deep skillet. Thinks again of singed flesh and electric current. Hits his head on the low, unfamiliar cabinet of the inn, shoulders stuck between the slats in search of tomato paste. Frowning gently all the while.
“He was a good swordsman.” He doesn’t know why he’s trying, especially when he’s not partial to failure.
Lid closed. Opened again. Burns his tongue with untrembling hand, and takes up a facefull of damp, fragrant steam that make his cheek dewy. His frown ebbs, and he smiles, if wanly, and with his brow corrugated.
“Sure. But what about the rest?” He meets her eyes for a brief moment before he flickers away, not in submission nor in deference, but with the subliminal sense that he has yielded from the contact what he can. He mutters something, something affirmative or dismissive, uncaring to which, and strides past her.
The kinesthetic sense presides; the taste is, of course, perfectly manageable, and perfectly to heel, but it’s the heat and the sensation that he cannot interfere with. The texture and sense of ill-maintained shape as he masticates the softened cubes into indistinction. The bite, the give, the tensile in the flesh-once-living.
He can’t remember having eaten quite so much in his life, but still he looks down into a skillet overfull. His stomach gurgles oddly. He looks down into the speckled blackness of the cast iron, the perfect innocence in that null between, and it makes his head heavy with heat. With sensation.
The dead man’s sword rests unsheathed on the worktop, the woman’s saw laid beside it in tableau. Something sticky seeps from the surface to speckle the floor.
Boiled lobster. Dressrosan red.
lobster, whole, fresh.
water, 3L per.
salt, 50ml per.
cream, 150ml.
vanilla bean, whole, dried, to taste…
"You worked hard today." Mihawk plants his heels at either side of Shanks’ hips and crooks his body to offer him a hand. His breath is even, though somewhat grating through the hoarseness of exertion; Shanks pants like a dog, but he quiets quickly.
Shanks, with singular intensity, takes that hand first. Only after does he smile and tilt his head winsomely, “…Am I concussed?”
Mihawk offers a punishing yank, and his body snaps to standing. Shanks is wiping his brow when Mihawk’s voice rises beyond the veil of his loose hair.
“I know what you're going to ask—your body could use better than the swill you fill it with.” Shanks looks up to meet that bare scowl with his eyes. “You'll accompany me for a meal.”
Shanks counters that inapparent veiling with a complication of his own, an irritatingly unreadable turn of the countenance that proves again to Mihawk he is well met. Then, as if with a deliberate flourish of the hand, a pouring of glaze, he clears it away.
“You care what I put in my body, eh?” He grins, the sparkle of it larger than anything else he could be projecting. Mihawk—already cleared of his scowl—makes something of a scanning motion with his eyes, complete indifference there.
“The body you use to duel me. Yes.”
Shanks’ lips flatten in chagrin, but he takes the loss lightly, and follows Mihawk some way down towards the little port town.
Mihawk begins to cook right there on the sandbar, just beyond where his little raft is staked. He slaps away Shanks’ hands when he attempts to interfere, and so he sits and melts, feeling the sand crease into his sweat-drying clothes. His mouth waters as he watches him swing the metronome, and the seawind carries all manner of scent.
Steel buckets in shoddy ditches right there in the sand, crouching by the growing fire and letting the unclean smoke sift through his hat’s feathers. The lobsters, live and squirming and unbeautiful in their insect-like form, fresh off an incoming trawl-boat, scrabbling at the blackening rim of those dented buckets, and his unsympathetic shoving with some rummaged tree branch until they become inert.
Hands still blackened from tending the fire, coaxing long, spiraling form from herbs with liquid, graceful motion. Watching with furrowed brow as the butter colors and tempering its hue with precise applications of cream. Arranging salts in quartet of color, speaking quietly about their home seas and particular compositions as he passes the tray into Shanks’ waiting, restless hands.
The theory doesn’t surprise him—it’s totally Mihawk’s style to cook—but the execution of it does, the fact of seeing it, and that pleasurable shock warms him all the way through, precursive along with the savory rise of vapors. He cracks a claw, the little sawteeth tempting blood at his careless gesture, and Mihawk ladles warmth over the morsel, the helping dripping down between his fingers.
For a moment, there’s rapture. His eyes, when they open, boggle and he looks at where the sauce has speckled the ground and feels an entirely earnest pulse of mourning. He swallows hastily, realizing he’s got his mouth ajar; he makes an odd noise, one he’s never produced, and when Mihawk smiles he makes another one. It’s so good .
By the look on Mihawk’s face, he knows it.
Shanks laughs, returning to reality. He helps himself to more servings, Mihawk eating quietly alongside him. He sucks his fingers; his saliva is duller than the grease of the lobster. They recede from his mouth with a pop, and his smile becomes wan, stunningly breakable. "You planned this, right?”
The porcelain serving dishes, the little split tray of sampling salts—pink and black, like exotic sands—the remaining lengths of tarragon that had been unpacked from the deceptively small saltbox beneath Hitsugibune’s seat. The jar of butter, cold enough to hiss as it touched the pan, and the quart of fresh milk, there in that dark, sea-battered place.
It’s certainty over hope, but that certainty does nothing to undermine the vulnerability in his voice. The sweet cream countenance of Mihawk’s face becomes sour, curdled. Shank’s own face falls, but his mouth is still a smiling one, “Was I not supposed to say it?"
Mihawk sighs, his body sinking, as if setting down some burdensome weight. He pours a glass of wine, dark-labelled and deep fuschia, swilling with a plasma-tinge and smelling like honey as it glugs from the bottle, then hands it off.
His mouth opens and closes silently. His tone is faintly, sweetly strangled when he manages to speak, "You… are a worthy rival."
It lacks precision—lacks ruthlessness, and a slow smolder of frustration singes his occiput. Still, it’s true.
Shanks is quiet. His smile now shields nothing, shining all down, all through. “Thank you, Mihawk,” he says, in that kingly voice of his, with that kingly bearing, and still perfect sincerity in it. All truth.
“You're a good friend. Don't waste it all on me, okay?”
He's broken from his reverie by shrill girlishness, so pure he could believe it to be broken from the form of abstract. Curls spill over his shoulder.
"Eewww, what are those?!"
He presses his hands flat to either of his ears, though he doesn’t go so far as to wince. She dodges his rising elbow with a familiar, barely-affectionate smile. "Cured dates. From the West Blue. They're half your age."
She appears at his other shoulder, that little smile twisted into exaggerated disgust—he doesn’t turn to look, and so her impeccable performance goes unapplauded. "And you're eating them?"
"It's what they're for." His hands slide slowly from the sides of his head with a somewhat effeminate motion—a flutter of the fingers, a lingering by the jaw—and again her expression flickers, warping with humor.
"Don't tell me you're going to ask me to eat them."
She’s insincere, but his reply is thoroughly serious. "Don't, then. They're mine."
She scowls at him; he’s already tidying his mise en place.
Black forest cake. Kirsch.
6 large eggs
100 grams flour
kirschwasser
cherries [brined, check pantry…]
When he turns to mix batter, he catches a flighty motion in his periphery. Perona’s eyes widen, then close in a numinous ecstasy. A shred of date leather catches upon her pink mouth.