The playwright that brought them together ought to have kept writing. His eyes would widen in surprise. She would glow with pride, and yet, restrain herself. Offering, without demanding. He’d answer with place settings for two. She’d make a quiet joke of serving him, for a change. Old songs, set to older rhythms swell after a long silence. Aphrodite would stand guard at the kitchen door, and he will suffer no one to pass.
But the script ends here. They are alone, together, on the stage, with no one but each other for an audience. He suggests he should leave three times over, and asks her if she’s sure six times more. She can’t focus on him and her lesson at once. She can’t explain he’s not the reason her words come out too curt, too rough. They reach the table, with food enough for them both, and pasta is so much easier to enjoy than words have been, but neither can forget that speaking is as necessary as eating, if this is to survive.
But he waits, out of habit. She waits, out of need.
“Not bad.” Hestia eats, unhurried, and unwilling to encroach on Aphrodite’s domain. “Next time, do one thing a little differently, and see if you like it better.”
A topic. Any topic at all. Safety in a storm. “I didn’t know you were learning to cook.” He didn’t know she wanted to learn, either. Never held much interest in the kitchens, if he wasn’t in them. Had he missed something, all this time?
“‘Cook’ may be a strong word. Let’s start with ‘feeding myself’, and see where it goes.”
He sits for longer than he should, pulled between expectations. Praise her efforts, and risk seeming like empty flattery? Give her company in her amateur state, and risk bruising her pride? “You...have a good teacher,” he hedges.
“Mmm?” She blinks. ”Ah, yes, of course. Indeed, she’s quite good. Would that I had called on her sooner.”
Silence. Forks hunt down noodles too small to matter. Perhaps neither were the right answer. Perhaps he chose wrong when he blundered into the kitchens, and no more answers were right.
“She’s brought to my attention,” she continues. “Other, aspects of my life that I’ve left...deficient. Too deficient. In desperate need of personal attention.”
“Oh?”
She lingers on a meager bite, staring into the empty, oily plate before her. She hears the intent, hiding behind the question. A sneaking thoughtfulness, standing ready to catch any responsibility, and keep it from landing squarely on her shoulders. “Yes, and I suspect it will take a great deal of my attention.” Nothing to clue him in. She knows he will wait up tonight, wondering. She still says nothing. “More than I can usually spare. Between that, and, other, considerations: I have to ask:”
She sets down her fork. Her knife rests against it at the proper angle. She dabs at her mouth with a napkin, before folding it beside her plate, and now she can’t pick up any of them again. Nothing else to delay with. “Dolce, I am stepping down from Captainship for some time. Would you care to take it in my place?”
The news knocks the thoughts clean out of his head. She sees his mouth hang slack, before a mask of duty latches shut over his heart. “Of course, I would gladly take charge for you-”
“No. No, I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry, but that can’t be how it is. I’m not going to be Captain for some time, but that doesn’t mean you have to.” No one had to do anything. No one but her. “If you don’t want it, there are other qualified people on board. Give it a few days, and the Alced will have a Captain from their ranks, favored by the gods.” Unlike her. An Alced Captain on the rise, and she on yet another step down. A long, slow spiral of compromise and tragedy, ever-downwards, from her first breath to an awkward conversation in an empty kitchen on a doomed voyage. But now she could make mediocre pasta, and everything will be different.
She gathers up the dishes - as a proper domestic person should - and one by one sets to washing them in the sink. Needed one more job to hide behind, after all. “You’re my second, Dolce. My second,” she says, filling her vision with chores instead of wool. “It’s your right to take it up or refuse. Whatever seems best to you.”
“And you’re...okay with this?”
“I don’t have much choice in the matter. Not really.” Not anymore. “Zeus has taken issue with me, and if I were to press on like this, it would only end badly for everyone.” She turns, mustering up the remnants of a smile. “But. I think I’ll be alright.”
“Ehhhhh, ‘alright’ may be a strong word for it.” Hestia waves her hand uncertainly. “Let’s start with ‘resigned acceptance’ and see where we go from there.”
As it turns out, being the goddess of hearth and home did not render one exempt from the frustrated pouting of a deeply injured soul. But it did allow Hestia to deflect all consequence via an honest shrug.
He is not so lucky. Finally, questions with words to answer, and nothing less than the fate of the voyage hangs in the balance. The literal fate, of course, but probabilities of dying horribly in a space fire speak quieter than he might’ve feared. He had served under many Captains. Mission mattered, crew mattered, but who decided the tenor of a voyage more than they who stood at the helm? What manner of voyage would Captain Dolce run? What manner of voyage did he want to run? No one had ever asked him before. Least of all himself. “I, hrmm. That is. A lot to consider.” Already, one could hear the considerations tumbling around in his head. “But I will give it some thought.”
“You don’t need to give an answer right away. No one will know, until you’ve made your decision.” The dishes seen to, the meal done, the news given, she makes to leave. And there she pauses at the doorway. This is it. This is the time. The most honesty they’d exchanged since...well, since honesty had demanded they walk this road in the first place. Three little words. Words she’d told him a hundred thousand times over, and the pressure of not saying them threatened to burst out of her chest. Hadn’t she waited long enough? Hadn’t she suffered enough?
He’s still sitting there. Watching her. All the way from the other side of the kitchen.
“Be...” She bites her lip. And waits some more. “Be well, Dolce.”
He watches her go from his seat at the table. A hundred hundred paths trace their way through his heart. None reach an ending in time. “Be well,” his little voice vanishes into the dark after her. “Vasilia.”
He hopes it is not a wrong answer.
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