Work Text:
He'd ended up telling a version of the story, anyway, when the proprietor, barker, waiter, whatever he was, took the time to ask which fallen city-state Aventurine hailed from, what their food was like.
"My tribe were… desert nomads," he demurs, dragging his spoon slowly through the broth to look for stray pieces of yam. "I guess you could say we learned to work with anything we could? Like, there were these grasses that spread out like big spider webs laying on the ground, and they were super tough and woody…? The sunshine kept it dry as bones, except for this really really tiiiiiiny speck of green you can see if you snap a stalk open. But, y'know, if it was alive, if it had in it some nutrition, our ancestors had already figured out how to eat it before—"
He catches himself. Skips over some details.
"So, this stuff. You could beat out the grit, roll it up, and fry it in oil and then you just crunch it in your teeth like it was no big deal. But it was pretty hard to get a hold of that much oil, haha, sort of wasteful — so, or what we usually did, was grind it up into powder, sift it, and then make that into dough, with, a little, little water or with the liquid you could crush out of the fleshy, flowering part… we, uh, we did a lot of things, but there's only so many things I ever saw the step-by-step process of."
The words simply pour out of him, the longer he goes. Something about the situation — this isn't fulfilling the pitying curiosity of someone probing the mind of The Last Avgin. In the few days he'd been here, he'd figured out real quick you couldn't so much spit in Okhema without hitting somebody who'd lost everything, their family, their land, their traditions… part of him aches with a bitter jealousy at the nature of the melange. The planet called "Sigonia-IV" on the universal stage had its own desperate coalition of tribes aiding one another, too. His own people had just happened to be the coalition's chosen sacrifice for the sake of the 'common good.'
The larger part of him — is feeling candid and chatty, as he dutifully mops up a honey-based sauce with a chunk of apple on the restauranteur's command. "You probably won't get a whole lot of sales out of any recipe I could give you." He hums. "But… I wouldn't mind watching you try, anyway."