@polyfacetious big ass Christmas Drabble Extravagaza: Day Eleven
Asexual and aromantic.
Those were the words Five found for himself when he looked up his “symptoms” on the internet. The scientific terms for someone who didn’t have any desire for sexual interaction, or romantic entanglements. And while it didn’t feel exactly like it fit him (Five liked to jerk off as much as the next 17 year old guy, he just didn’t find anyone sexually attractive), it was closer than he’d ever been before.
And Five liked titles. He liked being able to put things in neat little boxes. The world was massive, and confusing, and full of shitty people who would manipulate you and use you under the guise of caring about you. If you knew your place and you knew what to look out for, you could keep it from happening.
The best thing you could do was look after yourself. As long as you didn’t rely on anyone, they couldn’t hurt you. It was a lesson hard learned.
That’s why Five turned in his completed, signed and notarized emancipation forms the day he turned sixteen. Relying on his dad was like dropping through a sheet of ice and hoping you’d come out the other side as an acorn. You couldn’t change the fundamentals, be it time and space or a person’s nature. They were who they were, and no amount of bellyaching was going to change that.
Hell, if it wasn’t for seeing Sir Reginald’s name on his completed form that got mailed back to him, Five wouldn’t even have been sure that the old man knew he was gone. But it was there, stamped, because the old man signed too many forms to do it by hand, and it felt like a burden lifted and a new one hung around his neck in equal measure.
For a reactive, petulant teenager who wanted nothing more than to be acknowledged, it had been a swift kick in the ass to actually be acknowledged. Wasn’t that just karma rearing her ugly head?
That day, five days after the papers were filed, was the last day that Adrian Christopher Hargreeves ever existed outside of legal documents. That was the day he decided that his name was Five. Not for any real reason, there was nothing monumental or thoughtful behind the choice. It had been the first thing to come to mind and Five let it be his choice, fueled by spite.
He was no heir apparent to an aeronautical empire. He was just another number.
Living in a hostel wasn’t ideal, but it was better than trying to pay for a hotel every night, or deal with landlords who didn’t want a teenager on their lease. It gave him a shower to use every night without having to go to a gym and a safe place to keep his things, as long as he didn’t leave anything expensive lying around in plain sight. His laptop came with him wherever he went, always in his backpack. Just in case.
Sometimes, he thinks about asking Peter and Eddie if he can crash on their couch. He knows they’d say yes if he did. But as accommodating as they were, there were always limits to people’s kindness, and Five didn’t work his ass off to get out of being beholden to one man’s whims so he could find himself at the mercy of another.
(Peter isn’t like Sir Reginald. He actually listens when Five talks. But he won’t take the risk, not when things were going so good for him.)
Head Chef.
That was another title, another little box. But where the other ones were titles and boxes that Five could wrap his hands around and declare with a decision, this one was one that was going to take some work.
Five spent days mooching off of the wifi at the hotel near the beach, moving from bench to bench so they wouldn’t ask him to leave. It was how he figured out exactly what he was going to need to get from sixteen year old with no experience to head chef. And it was going to be a long, hard road.
Getting the job at Tony’s place seemed like the best way to start down that road. A Michelin star restaurant on his resume would look good when he applied for culinary school. But what Five didn’t account for was how much he’d hate the damn job. If he had to shuck another oyster again, it would be too soon.
Why anyone would eat those things was beyond him. They were disgusting. And if you needed a slimy mussel to get your dick hard, then maybe you needed to see a doctor, not spend hard earned money sucking down disgusting sea creatures.
And no matter how much he told himself to suck it up and power through, Five spent most of his time miserable for those few months he worked at Tony’s restaurant. To the point that he’d even started considering giving up on it altogether. What was the point of going to culinary school if he was going to hate it? What was the point of all his hard work if it wasn’t going to make him happy?
The whole point of this endeavor was to not end up like his father. If Five was going to go home every night miserable, he would have kept the money and the business. At least then he would have been miserable on silk sheets. Or miserable driving a Maserati.
That’s when Peter stepped in. With his idiot grin and his unending well of optimism and bottomless pit of a stomach. He was the one to tell Five that he should follow his dreams. That there were plenty of chefs out there who didn’t have degrees but still made some of the best food on the planet.
‘I think there’s a fryer in the back of the bar’ sounded like the best escape plan that Five had ever heard. Not that he was going to tell Peter Parker that. He’d bite off his own tongue before he told Peter just how much he needed him. (How much he loved him. Like family.)
So head chef became owner in Five’s head, all the plans he’d built around himself shifting to accommodate. Now the focus was on making money, saving up what he could, learning what would make people go out of their way to try.
Shifting a title and a box in his head turned out to be easier than Five thought it was going to be. And in a way, he should be glad that he figured it out with head chef because Eleanor Crain walked into his life and blew up two other boxes that Five was content with.
Asexual and aromantic no more. Nell was beautiful in a brushed clean kind of way. Like she’d never worn make up in her life. Five knew women went for that look, that they carefully cultivated the kind of make up that made them look like they weren’t wearing any at all. But Nell’s face wasn’t like that. It was simple, and clean, and beautiful.
She had a laugh that was light and bright and effervescent, a smile that lit up a room. She was the kind of girl that Five would have been convinced was an unattainable creation of the media if he hadn’t met her for himself.
But he did, and now he was in too deep, right off of the diving board and into the deep end. Because now all of his decisions had a Nell Crain shaped question mark at the end. Would she still like him if he did this? That had given him pause a time or two.
Of course, it didn’t stop him from decking a drunk in an alley behind the bar, but he took the time to think about it and that was a whole new kettle of fish for him. (Sometimes, Five got so angry that he couldn’t breathe. He never wanted Nell to see that. And if it took back alley bar brawls to keep it away from the surface and from her, then so be it.)
It even started affecting his cooking.
Not in a bad way, not exactly. But for the first time in his admittedly short but stellar cooking career, Five found himself thinking about what someone else wanted. About what she would think of each item, whether she would savor it on her tongue or pretend and smile her way through something she had to choke down.
He learns about her life in between small tasting plates of chicken wings and mozzarella sticks. She tells him about her father giving up on her and her brother and Five says fuck him with a vitriol that makes Nell laugh.
She tells him about her mother, dead when she was six years old. Nell pushes a mozzarella stick around in a puddle of marinara when she does, making abstract designs. Nell says she doesn’t remember her mother, and Five admits the same. It’s not the kind of bonding that anyone wants to do, but it’s knotted between them all the same.
Five doesn’t know how it happens, but he tells her about Sir Reginald. About emancipation. He dances around the part about living in a hostel, because he doesn’t know if he can turn down kindness from her.
By the time they make it through the bar’s short menu, she’s given him sweet but solid advice on all of it. (Better than Peter, who licked the plate when Five first made parmesan and garlic chicken wings.) Five has notes written down in a small notebook he keeps in the breast pocket of his apron, and he fully intends to adjust and adapt his recipes.
But he can’t stop thinking about Nell. About how nothing he made really sparked any joy in her. And he wanted that. Hell, he could be honest with himself, he needed that. He needed her approval, and it was a big, bright red flag flapping in the wind, but Five was too far gone to do anything about it.
Which is how he ends up in the bar’s kitchen on a Sunday morning, tossing his third sandwich in a frustrated heap. But the fourth, oh the fourth is a thing of beauty, just the right amount of crisp on the edges and golden brown all over, the cheese starting to seep out of the sides of the sandwich. It was purely aesthetic, but it was perfect.
He brings the bowl and the plate out of the kitchen and up to where Nell sits, the lone body at the bar. Peter and Eddie wouldn’t come downstairs for hours. This was the closest to privacy that Five had these days. (He wasn’t stupid, he knew they slept in on Sundays for this very reason. Eddie Brock the lapsed Catholic had started going to Mass at night on Sundays.)
“Grilled cheese and tomato bisque for the lady.” Grudgingly, the bisque was Tony’s recipe. But it was a damn good one, and Five wasn’t going to spit in the wind. Just because it wasn’t his idea didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea.
Nell laughs, but the sound falls away to something more appreciative as she breaks the two triangles of the sandwich apart, watching the golden cheese stretch between the two halves. It’s only when she bites down on the edge of the sandwich, the crisp bread crackling that Five realizes he’s holding his breath.
And it’s released in a whoosh of laughter when Nell fans her mouth. “It’s good! Really good. Really hot, but really good!”
Being in love was not a box or a title that Five had expected to ever have. But now that he found himself in that box, he wasn’t in a hurry to get out. And there was maybe a few more box’s and titles he’d like to get his hands on now that he knew about it.
Nell Crain’s boyfriend would be a good one to start with.