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Words choke up in Alex’s throat as he sits. A small plate of sliced apples is in front of him. He feels almost seven again, minus the slight scent of rot from the fruit, but that is not what is closing his throat up. Neither is it his mother—Nadia, the name has not left his mind and only continues to plague his every thought—sat atop the counter of the kitchenette, slicing another apple in the air.
The slices fall into the precariously balanced bowl on her thigh. If one fell too hard, Alex imagines the bowl would fall, shatter on the ground. Yet, she somehow manages to keep it in place. Meghan had once joked that mothers seemed to have some sort of superpower when it came to… anything, really.
The thought of Meghan, though painful, loosens his throat up a bit. Alex imagines that if she were here, he would have confided to her about this, and she would have marched him up to the door of Nadia’s room to ask her the question.
It isn’t even a serious question, not by a long shot, so Alex has absolutely no idea why he’s so scared to ask. He was more comfortable asking Sky to kiss him, for crying out loud!
“…is something wrong?”
Alex’s head snaps up at the sound. Nadia frowns at him.
“Ah? No—no, of course not, I just…” He tapers off, humming. His fingers fidget with his necklace, a map of some sort of jaggedly-shaped island. He imagines to the unfamiliar eye, he’d look quite insane. Despite growing up in a home where Nadia would bat at his hands if he did anything like this, she seems to not say anything this time. Is that more care, or less? Alex, honestly, doesn’t fancy knowing.
“Just what?” She asks. Alex is torn between regret and pride at this, the idea that his mother would talk back to someone, even if it really shouldn’t be considered talking back if it’s her own child. Good, yes, that she’s seemingly creating her own identity, because god knows he had trouble with that when he first got here, forget dealing with two toddlers on top of it all. Bad, yes, because she’s seemingly gained the power of pressing into Alex’s weak points like he’s a rotting peach and she’s figuring out what parts she needs to cut off to serve it.
That’s probably dramatic. She has no ulterior motive. Alex needs to calm down.
Now or never, right? That is, admittedly, also dramatic, it’s not as if he couldn’t ask her this anyday, anytime, anywhere, but if he doesn’t dramatize it, he fears he’ll never ask.
Slowly and steadily, he crafts his sentences. “Do you remember that summer that there was an unexpected amount of rainfall, and we received bigger food cartons the whole month?” Alex prompts. Nadia nods. He continues. “Well, do you recall those… ah… crunchy little things you made? They had meat in them, and I imagine they’re similar to spring rolls, but I ordered those up from the kitchen a bit ago and they were stuffed with something completely different.”
His question gets lost in the vague description, but luckily for him, Nadia’s eyes glimmer a bit in recognition.
“Oh… they aren’t spring rolls. It was stuffed with keema.”
“What’s that?”
“Ah… how do you say? Minced meat?”
“Oh…”
Yeah, that tells him absolutely nothing. The taste of them has been lingering at the edges of his mouth for ages, and he thinks he might be going a bit insane over it. Keema rolls? Would the kitchen understand that? Would it even end up like his mother’s, filled with flavours he never experienced anywhere else in Quill?
“Do you want them?” She asks between a bite of apple. The knife clatters where she tossed it into the sink.
“Um, well—”
“I can show you how to make them.” Nadia cuts him off.
She looks almost surprised, whether that's at her suggestion or her cutting into his sentence.
Alex pauses for a moment.
“It’s almost… 10:30.” He reads off his clock.
“So? I’m awake, you’re awake, the girls are with Carina. What, you want my recipes to die with me? Hah?”
Alex stares at her for a few moments, enough for the slight twitch of her lips to falter. Her words are framed like a joke, her slightly airy tone sounds like a joke, but the idea of Nadia making a joke is so wildly out of place that he simply cannot comprehend it.
“…was that a joke?” He asks, voice failing him.
“It won’t be if I don’t teach someone how to cook.” She mutters pointedly under her breath, but Alex still hears her. Is this really the same woman who poked him in the back whenever he mumbled growing up?
She sets the bowl on the counter she sat upon, hopping down and drawing over towards the tube, pressing a few buttons. Was she calling up ingredients? Could she do that? Alex had honestly only ever used the kitchenette for coffee or tea or maybe to warm up some jam for Fifer when she inevitably waddled into the secret hallway again. Thisbe, it seems, had not discovered it just yet, though the matter of it being that she doesn’t fit the magical criteria or that she can see it and she just simply hasn’t bothered to explore it just yet is unconfirmed. Point being, aside from ready made meals, he’d never played around with what the kitchen could send up.
Nadia walks over to the kitchenette, setting a huge black pan-like item on the stovetop. Where she got that from, Alex isn’t particularly. It looks as though it could have fit in through the tube. It’s not exactly shaped like a pan, nor a pot—it’s as if one had taken a hammer to a comically large pan until it was rounded on the inside. Nadia clicks on the flame, setting it to the number four on the dial.
Oh. So she’s actually doing it.
Ridiculous, is what it is, and a tad bit of a poor idea, seeing as he feels awkward even being around his mother ever since the itsy-bitsy not-from-Quill bombshell. Nevertheless, as Nadia carries an armful of items up from the tube to the counter, Alex finds himself offering to help carry them as he did when he was younger.
He regrets it immediately. By the stars, whatever it was was heavy. After a moment of just standing there, he kneels down and lets it all clatter to the floor. At the sound, Nadia turns away from the countertop on which she spreads her slightly-smaller armful out just in time to see Alex whisper the transport spell. She jumps a little at the magical appearance of the items, but quickly regains her composure and raises an eyebrow at Alex.
“Really? It’s half a room.”
“It’s heavy.”
Nadia makes a sound that’s oddly like the clicking of a tongue, then gestures for Alex to stand next to her.
Sidling up next to her, in between the island and counter, Alex looks to Nadia for instructions. She picks up a heavy looking bottle of what Alex assumes is purified oil, yellow and transparent. She turns slightly, looking Alex up and down, before wrinkling her nose and pouring a slight bit of oil into the not-pot herself.
“You don’t need a lot, just enough to cover the bottom.”
She switches the oil bottle for a smaller jar of yellow paste. She presses that into Alex’s hands. “Ginger garlic paste. Put… three? four? spoons in.”
Alex fishes a spoon out of his drawer, following Nadia’s instructions—four full spoons, carefully dropped into the bubbling oil. Nadia grabs the spoon when he’s done and rinses it in the sink next to her, then hands it back. She sorts through the mess of jars and bags, moving about six brightly colored jars to the front—red, brown, yellow, white. She goes down the line, naming the contents.
“Red pepper, red pepper powder, salt, cumin, fenugreek powder, and turmeric.” She taps the silvery lids along with the name. Alex has heard of maybe two of the whole lot, and one of the two is salt.
“That… where did you get these from in Quill?”
“We got red peppers, so I made the powder myself. No turmeric or cumin but… this is how I learned how to make it.” Alex isn’t particularly sure if he’s ever heard her speak this much in one conversation, minus the fluke three weeks ago at night. Cinderella was a ridiculous story, so perhaps other ridiculous things occurred at the stroke of midnight?
“Who taught you?”
It feels almost like Nadia is crafting a mysterious story for him, one that he can’t help but get lost in—like Lani’s tales, or Samheed’s scripts. Treating her as if she were a character from a storybook—dehumanizing? Maybe. Does it help him from begging her for the whole story, from blowing up at her again for not telling him before, from scaring her away like a frightened deer and he’s a trespasser in her woods? Certainly.
“My mother hired caretakers for me when I was young, but I never particularly liked any of them. I recall biting one of them in the arm once, I believe?” Alex chokes on air as Nadia half-measures, half-eyeballs the amount of salt—about a spoonful—and dumps it into a bowl she’d taken from his cabinet. “Well, anyhow,” Anyhow, did she pick that up from him? Or did she always speak the same way he did, and he just never knew? “I would make distractions for the ayahs then sneak out of the house when they weren’t looking. I had a friend that lived, perhaps a half mile from home? I’d walk over to her home and spend the rest of the day there. Drove those poor women insane.”
Her mouth quirks into an uncharacteristic half-smile, moving on to the red pepper powder. “One spoon of salt, half of the red pepper.” She hands the spoon over to Alex.
She keeps talking as Alex measures out the powder. “Her mother would corral us into the kitchen once we’d exhausted all other sources of entertainment—fill the spoon!” She mutters something Alex can’t understand, putting her hand over his and filling the spoon completely, shaking it off until it was her ideal half-spoon. “This is one of the only recipes I remember—mainly because my friend loved them quite a lot. I had the ingredients to make it that year, so… a coincidence you ended up liking them, I suppose.” Nadia’s way of speaking is an odd mixture of stiff formal speech and casual talk. It’s comforting, in a way—making her seem wiser.
Alex dumps the half-spoon into the bowl. “Quarter spoon.” She says, capping the red powder and switching it for the yellow one—turmeric, she had said. She falls silent as Alex copies what she had done before, a smattering of yellow filling the bowl.
“Full,” Nadia passes him the red pepper—not crushed. The flakes and yellow-y seeds spill into the powder already in the bowl.
Alex pours in each measurement she states as she begins pulling things in and around the kitchen. The powders, the minced meat, the chopped onions, the chili peppers, all of it ends up in the oddly shaped pan eventually. All of it sizzles under oil and fire, and all of it is wrapped into a separate bowl, shoved into Alex’s mini-fridge.
Nadia sighs once she closes the door, leaning against the countertop and blowing out a breath. “It’s hot in here,” she mutters, fanning herself with her hand.
Alex leans backwards against the island counter, hands braced against the edge. “Are we gonna talk about it?”
Nadia looks back, tilting her head in inquiry. The beginnings of wrinkles curve her face, and she has acne scars near the side of her right cheek. “About?”
“About… you, I mean. What we were talking about last time. With Aaron.” Alex’s words are the slightest bit stilted. He doesn’t think he’s ever been this nervous… ever. He doesn’t even have that big a reason to be nervous.
“Do you want to?” Nadia asks, simply.
Alex blinks in surprise, then glances down, mulling over the question. Does he want to? He wants to know more, of course, but is that because he needs to justify her to himself or just find another thing to blame her for?
“…No.”
“Hm.” Nadia pushes off the counter, rinsing her hands and flicking them back into the sink. “Well, it’s well past your bedtime. Shoo.”
Alex chokes on a laugh. “I am a full grown adult? I don’t have a bedtime?”
“What, does that make me not your mother?” She yawns a bit. “If I need to sleep, so do you.”
Alex, after a few moments, bursts into giggles. Nadia cracks a small smile, then walks herself out of Alex’s hallway/apartment.
Once she’s gone, it's almost like she takes a bit of moonlight with her—shocking, because Alex wouldn’t ever describe her as someone who lights up a room.
Staring at the hallway for a moment, five, ten, he turns on his heel and walks to his bedroom. He can clean up in the morning.