Lucretia blushed furiously and closed her journal. She'd placed herself on a stool in the kitchen's corner in the hopes of remaining unnoticed, but Taako's ears were perked in her direction.
"I was writing down your recipe. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imp--"
He didn't turn on her direction when he responded, "'S all right."
When it was obvious he wasn't going to say anything more, she stood. "I can go if you want."
"You can stay. Whaddya got written down so far?"
Lucretia paused. The Starblaster had been going for eight years, yet she and Taako rarely worked together; he and Lup explored each world together while she often volunteered to stay aboard the ship. When they did talk, he was so aloof she sometimes wondered if he even liked her.
"C'mon, I don't bite. I'm not Magnus," Taako said.
She ignored anxiety's clench in her stomach, walked to the counter, and handed him the open journal. "Here."
Taako examined it for a few seconds and then shook his head. She thought she'd done something horribly wrong, but he merely said, "It's jimeres, not teaspoons."
"Beg pardon?"
"Every single world has a different measuring system. Kinda annoying, learning them all, but it's no biggie for me, because I'm Taako-- from TV."
She never knew how to react to that declaration, so she settled for a simple, "It sounds tedious."
"But one of our teaspoons is two and a half jimeres, so you should probs change that."
After she rewrote her notes, Taako grinned down at her. "Okay, so next we're gonna add some ginger, aight? Two jimeres, jot that down. And pull up a stool."
Lucretia smiled and began to write.
"That's half a cup of beef broth. Now grab those herbs, bubbelah"
Lucretia held out bunches of rosemary and sage, which Taako grabbed without looking."Cups?" she asked. "This world don't have their own measurements?"
"Nah, this is one of mine. Now listen, here's the secret-- you gotta chop up the herbs to get all that good planty flavor."
"Chop...herbs...vigorously..." Lucretia looked up from her journal. "Taako, where did you learn to cook?"
Taako didn't answer questions about his personal life; he brushed them off with a laugh and a wink, but today he replied, "My aunt, at first. And then it was just me 'nd Lup for a while, so we learned to make do, ya know?"
"How old were you?"
"46."
Lucretia knew enough about elven life spans to know how young that was. "Taako, I'm so sorry."
"You should be. Half the caravans we caught rides with had awful taste in fashion. I don't know how I survived when they didn't even know the difference between a fantasy-french braid and a fantasy-dutch braid." He flashed her a smile that didn't exactly cover up his discomfort, and immediately turned back to the saucepan. "Kay, now we stir that shit in and add some garlic."
The change of subject was utterly apparent, but Lucretia knew better than to pry. Instead, she told him, "I've been thinking of making a recipe book."
"Hell yeah, my man. Just don't forget to pay me royalty, aight?"
"Of course. You're going to be on the front cover. 'Across the Multiverse: Cooking With Taako, from TV'".
Taako let out a surprised laugh.
Whenever someone knocked on Lucretia's door, she flinched and hid her journal beneath a pile of papers. The door was locked, but after 100 years, she knew how little her teammates cared for that sort of privacy. And for what she was about to do, the things she was about to erase, she needed all the secrecy she could get.
On her desk sat an inkwell, a quill, and her notebook, which was open to the first recipe of Taako's she'd ever written down.
Her quill hovered over the page. She'd already transcribed the recipes for herself in a separate book. Now she had to decide whether or not to let Fisher take the memories of those dishes. It was cruel, she knew that; how many nights had she spent pacing a groove into the carpet of her bedroom floor, silently crying and berating herself? Cooking was so much of who Taako was, so who was she to take it from him?
But then, even a single memory of Tesseralia cuisine could bring her whole mission to an end.
With a sigh, she went through the recipe section again and began to strike out every one that Taako had known before the trip. If he couldn't keep anything from their journey, he could at least keep everything from before.
"Elderflower macaroons!" Taako held one out to Lucretia, who accepted it with a pang. This was the first time she'd seen or heard of him baking since she lost track of him.
She swallowed back her smile and says, "I'll take a run at it." He must have learned the recipe sometime during those past ten years, because he'd never made it with Lucretia or Lup. That change, as trivial as it was, sent an ache through her stomach. He'd changed in the last decade. They'd all changed in the last decade.
Her spiral of thoughts was cut short by the burst of almond and sugar and vanilla. "Hot diggity shit," she said, and immediately regretted it. Lucretia had tried to stop with all of Lup's mannerisms, which she'd adopted aboard the Starblaster, but it was hard keeping her guard up around Taako. Thankfully, he didn't seem to notice anything odd.
"That's what we do," he bragged. "That's how we do it."
"This is a baller cookie." Then, because she just couldn't help herself, Lucretia added, "How did you even do this?"
Taako smiled and leaned forward conspiratorially. "The secret is to get the almonds ground down really fine before you try to uh, make the cookie. And also the filling should be thick enough so that the cookie can stand on its side and stay together."
Even after all this time, it still felt natural to whip out a notebook and furiously jot down his tips, and to Lucretia, that was a Candlenights miracle.
