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Franziska, admittedly, had limited experiences when it came to the full spectrum of food. Years of childhood spent with a bit too much responsibility and too few adults around to tell her that she should diversify her palate, for the sake of balanced meals and proper nutrition, had given her a tendency to choose the same thing over and over again. There was a perfection in unmarred sameness, in a strict regimen of routine, that made up for her failure to prioritize health. Her required studies gave no necessity to vitamins, minerals, healthy carbohydrates, or proteins, allowing her to avoid any offending textures or overwhelming smells. The food of her youth was predictable and simple, and left her altogether unprepared for the dreadful amalgam of ancient Fifth, pre-Templar Eighth, and obnoxiously modern Third cuisine her fellow saints subjected her to.
Of course, there was always the option to approach a simulacra of her preferred meals with the aftertastes of station stores, but it would betray a weakness worse than that of blood, emesis, and unexplainable grief: homesickness was the child’s ailment. To display such a humiliating desire in a system of power already greatly stacked against her was unthinkable. So, out of an unfounded duty to save face, she shut her eyes and swallowed down the bowls of repulsive liquid.
Soup was not a friendly companion to a Ninth stomach. It slimed down her throat with unpleasant chunks, or it contained too much dairy and made her reach for glass after glass of recyc water, or, worst of all, it was cold, vibrant, and vegetal, assaulting every sense except her hearing, which was already enduring the attack of polite conversation. She did not speak to anyone at these holy dinner parties except to answer questions asked by God, as blasphemy was not at all aligned with perfection, and on occasion to give a short, whispered reply to the Hand closest in age to her.
Who was, to put things as lightly as possible, an evil murderous power-hungry crown-princess bitch. Vriska had the unlined face of a girl brought up being given all of the boot-licking respect of a scion and none of the burden of authority. In fairness, this had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the heir-related politics of a planet positively drowning in candidates, and she certainly wasn’t favored by anyone, but whatever small tragedies her cushy Third life contained could not excuse real-life fucking cannibalism. On the few nights Vriska cooked, Franziska genuinely considered resigning herself to making her own meal.
But she was the only person in hundreds of empty rooms who felt any wry sympathy for Franziska without condescending to her, and to be so weak as to be patronized was a shame Franziska could not bear. And she seemed to be the only person who could really laugh at a situation– the survivors of a myriad were removed from the present by their age, with only superficial responses, and Franziska could not remember a time when it was considered appropriate for her to laugh wholeheartedly. But Vriska’s dry jokes and slightly cruel laughter gave an air of normalcy to the whole performance, and she treated Franziska like a person (a mad, silly invalid, surely, but still a body with a brain and robust neurons). Their companionship was inevitable simply because there was no one else. Two broken Lyctors could not make a whole, but they could forge a connection.
It was a relationship out of necessity. There was no real obligation to the other involved, beyond oaths sworn by now-dead selves, and Franziska’s notes contained no rules applying to casual conversation. So she had no real obligation to give Vriska any response the night the other girl knocked on the door to her rooms, strode in without listening for a response, and said, quite bluntly:
“What the fuck do they feed 8a8ies in your weird cult that you won’t even eat chicken soup?”
Franziska had no duty to respond, so, for a very long second, she stared at the girl in her doorway. She did not blink; instead, she analyzed. Had she been too indiscreet in the slight wince she allowed herself at every swallow? Had she coughed too noticeably, or avoided too many of the vibrant chunks? None of these could be asked aloud. She met one dark eye and said, “leeks.”
The other girl bared her teeth in an expression Franziska was worn too thin to parse. It could have been a grimace or a smile or a simple, animal threat, but whatever it was, it was sharp and unafraid. With the fluorescent lights beating down on them, it seemed almost clinical, reemphasizing Franziska’s single word: Leeks? Is that really all you have knowledge of, you poor pitiful child? It is no wonder you are broken while I am just one step away from being whole. Vriska was not one to verbalize comments so explicitly; Franziska was always left with raised eyebrows, glinting fangs, and little flinches toward her metal arm.
Vriska let out a laugh that rasped, and despite its sting Franziska knew it was a blessing, here, in God’s house, a gift holier than anything she had touched in days. Clarity was rare in a place that remained standing due to ten thousand years of clouded memory, and the girl with yellow eyes and a cruel smile could leave subtlety behind and laugh at her.
She was looking at Vriska’s teeth again, but this time she understood the mirth held in her mouth, the slight creasing at the corners of her eyes, the high blue tint spreading across her face. A smile from Vriska could mean a host of things, most of them trouble, but trouble from a girl who remembered home soil and trident knives was worth more than sterile space and distant saints. Never mind that Vriska knew nothing of longswords, she remembered last names and religious sects and had probably at least some knowledge of leeks that were not necromantically stabilized.
“Let’s make something with root vegeta8les, then. Come on, Franny, you pathetic little wraith– I can’t remember the last time you 8 something without, like, looking like you want to hurl and then make a vow to construct a new organ for yourself to create every nutrient necessary to sustain a 8ody.” She pulled at Franziska without giving her a chance to answer, walking the both of them to the door. After a few seconds, she halted on her feet, jolting Franziska in the process, and frowned, adding: “I don’t think even Joy could do something like that for you, 8y the way, so don’t 8other. She’s the 8etter chemist, but if anyone can synthesize sodium from oxygen it’s the Emperor himself. Eat real food.”
Franziska bristled at the implication that she would be so foolish as to give the Saint of Joy full access to her livelihood. If the woman’s sheer power was not already so blatant that only an idiot would give her the chance to touch them and subsequently rip them apart, her perfection at anatomy gave Franziska such shame at her own inadequacies that she could barely stand to be in the same room as God’s second Hand. But, already steeped in self-loathing and the cool awareness it cast on everything, she could admit silently that she had been considering constructing something within herself to take in nutrients without the grueling task of moving a spoon to her mouth.
Ruminating on this, she allowed Vriska to pull her through the concentric hallways of their floating home, shuffling mindlessly until the troll came to a stop and turned around, hands proudly resting on her hips and an easily readable grin stretching her mouth. Franziska pulled her eyes off of Vriska’s fangs to take in their new surroundings: a long room, with circular electric lights studded across the ceiling and the gleam of stainless steel everywhere. Pots and pans were hung haphazardly, but clean, and the stoves and sinks were so devoid of dishes that Franziska’s neurons struggled a bit to connect this spotless room to the place her companions made their meals. But there was no mistaking a kitchen, even when Franziska had never before entered one, even while two girls who had grown up being served were the only ones occupying it.
Franziska could be silent no more when Vriska swung open the metal doors built into the wall at the end of the corridor, blasting a chill that raised the hair on the back of her neck even from five feet away, and began hauling out unrecognizable vegetables to set them at the counter in front of Franziska. With her voice tightened and strained, she gasped out, “and– what do you expect me to do here? I do not cook. You have not even brought out a recipe. I will admit I have never eaten soup I enjoy, but why not simply laugh from afar? Why do you insist on pushing this dead end?”
Vriska was infernal in her smugness. “We are here, Franny, 8ecause if you can’t even eat the meal kn8wn to be soothing on st8machs, you won’t last two seconds in the real fighting!!!!!!!! And also I have 8absically soup superpowers. I’m great at it. You won’t find me 8ragging about much that isn’t necromancy, 8ut I swear I can de-cringe you.” At Franziska’s answering frown, she rolled her eyes. “Look, you don’t even eat what I cook, so how could you know? Really, Franny, it’s kind of a 8itch move to knock things 8efore you try them.”
Franziska knew Vriska was the bitch here, and she knew it was probably her ESTJ wild confidence mixing with her Enneagram 3w4 need to be superior, but Franziska was also an ESTJ 3w4 and she understood the eternal need to prove oneself. Vriska was an unstoppable force, and Franziska found herself not wanting to be an immovable object, to see just how far the other girl could throw her.
She stood at the counter. She made soup.
Really, Vriska was the one to make the soup, as she was the one who had, if not a recipe, a set of rules for soup: burn up an onion at the bottom of the pot (Franziska worried it could still sting her eyes, Vriska told her it would cook for hours), toss in an unspecified amount of unspecified root vegetables (Franziska stuck to leeks, parsnips, and potatoes, but Vriska snuck in the occasional carrot), then add broth (Vriska insisted on stock, Franziska nearly begged for water). Franziska found a calm in the repeated motions of slicing, the sound of a knife on her synth wood board carrying her panic away.
And Vriska, despite her carrying on about the importance of fat and salt and flavor, was surprisingly tender in her ministrations to their shared vat. She sampled the mass of vegetables from time to time, licking her lips even after complaining that blandness would ruin their creation. She tied Franziska’s hair back (it really was getting too long) before handing her each vegetable, and she conceded on the topics of meat and body. She was in her element in that shadowy kitchen, and the eyes that were not quite hers shone without malice. Once again, Franziska was thankful for the normalcy of it all, the mundanity: she was in deep space, and she was immortal, and a girl was making fun of her and touching her face.
When the pot was covered and left to soften, Franziska moved to walk back to her room. She felt like a mouse under the Mithraeum lights, left to skitter, exposed, into the walled nest she had chewed out for herself. She began to hunch instinctively, drawing her hood over her eyes in anticipation of the harsh shift of hallway fluorescence–
A girl far taller than her blocked the door, and her wild hair was limned with the outside light as she clung to Franziska’s forearm.
“Stay,” she rasped, and something inside Franziska shivered as she took in the rawness of Vriska’s single word. It didn’t last as Vriska launched into speech, but the pain was there; Vriska Serket still felt pain. “It won’t take that long, silly, and 8esides, you look like an evil turtle going out like that. I won’t 8ite.” Franziska knew this was a lie– she had seen Vriska bite chunks of her cavalier’s hair, watched her tear the meat from her own palms, but Franziska was not one to underestimate fresh vulnerability. Vriska asked something from her, despite her attempts to disguise it with pejorative simile, and Franziska would grasp at any chance to be needed.
“I am not- a turtle ,” she hissed in some futile, throwaway attempt at conventional obstinacy, but she let Vriska guide her back towards the shining counters. The other girl hopped up on one of them in an impossibly fluid motion that left Franziska calculating trajectories of emulation with her sharp-jointed mass of a body. She found no path that would not make a fool out of herself, and allowed herself one transactional moment of weakness– she looked at Vriska with a clear confusion on her face.
And Vriska, damn her to hell, laughed, a now-familiar sound that still unsettled Franziska. “I forgot about your classic necro 8uild, no muscle on you Ninth creeps! Come on, turtle.”
And Vriska held out her arms, one of meat, one of metal-plated bone panels.
And Franziska held on to them– she held on to them, she felt their warmth, she let them brace her, lift her, and an evil cannibal grabbed her and hoisted her to sit beside her, and it was gentle, and something in Franziska’s brain stretched. Her throat went dry, and she opened it in a wordless stutter, but somehow Vriska took away her ability, her need to speak. It was all wordless and shining as she gathered her skirts and stared with all the composure she had left at the girl next to her– lightly muscled, she could now see.
Vriska motioned to the bubbling pot across the room from them, then snapped her eyes to Franziska’s, her eyes that were stolen but still lit up her face. “You know what, Franny? You want to know a secret?” It sounded conspiratorial and mean-spirited when she said it, and Franziska could only nod at the girl who cooked for her, because her eyes were bright and incensed.
“I h8d that shit when I was a wiggler. Soup, I mean. I just couldn’t stomach it. Like, ick!!!!!!!! Gr8ss!!!!!!!!” She fake-retched. “I mean, floating chunks of whatever was left around mixed with 8one marrow isn’t really like, peak kid cuisine.” Franziska felt her near-eternal frown return. More mocking, perhaps. Vriska thought her a child, and Franziska had spent her entire life running from childhood, and she couldn’t stop looking at Vriska!
When she found the words, she spat them out of her mouth like a bad taste. “Then why? Why serve what you hated? Why claim to have…” She rummaged through her memory. “‘Basically soup superpowers?’ Why not turn your back on it?” All Franziska knew was running away from things, leaving what she loathed behind to carry only her own hatred. Vriska’s eyes were like topaz and she loved what she once hated, and it was making little cracks all through Franziska’s being.
Vriska shrugged. “Can’t let it get the 8etter of you, right? Nolite te 8astardes car8orumdorum, or whatever that old nonsense means. I don’t know a8out you, but I prefer to fight things, and win, then never try at all.”
The words were darts homing in at the core of her stolen souls. The cracks widened. Franziska shattered.
Fight things, and win. Franziska shrugged off turtledom and fluorescent lights, mouse’s nests and dinner parties. Fight things, and win. She took her ungloved hand and placed it feather-lightly on Vriska’s cheek. Tiger’s-eye sclerae filled her gaze. Fight. Win. Vriska’s metal hand was a weight on her shoulder. Win.
A high-pitched beep cut through the air between them, and Franziska coiled in on herself. The refrain of Vriska’s words in her mind was replaced with ringing in her ears. Vriska pulled away and hopped down from the table, away from Franziska, looking more smug than Franziska had seen her since she owned her eyes.
“Timer’s up,” she called, with a lilt to her voice. She tugged at Franziska, and once again she was changing in height with Vriska’s arms on her. “Your soup’s done. Eat up, Franny.”
There was some quiet commotion before the spoon was filled. Vriska took out a terrifying-looking blade attached to a metal tube she called an “immersion blender” and insisted it would make the texture better if Franziska would just press it to the potatoes, and then decided to humiliate Franziska further by guiding her hands as she grimaced and stuck it in the pot. There were bowls of many sizes in the kitchen’s sliding cabinets, and Vriska picked out a veritable tureen while Franziska sought a teacup. But in their tense, irascible quiet, they ended up with a dish of potato-leek soup between them, and Vriska laid a spoon in Franziska’s hand.
Franziska announced, “I truly do not see what makes this any different from anything else I have been served,” but Vriska nudged her then, and she was warm, so Franziska dipped her spoon into the liquid.
As she lifted it towards her mouth, her thoughts began to race, to spin; weeks’ worth of slime in her throat and glasses of water and the pain of bright flavors constricting her throat. But Vriska was eyeing her (fight, and win) and Franziska would not choose weakness, so she placed it in her mouth and battled the urge to swallow immediately. The girl across from her raised an eyebrow, and Franziska’s eyes widened in surprise.
It- wasn’t bad, it… Franziska did not trust it, but it tasted warm and smooth. There was no mush in her mouth, just a simple umami liquid with gentle bursts of onion or carrot. Despite herself, a smile spread on her cracked lips, and Vriska’s blue lips widened in tandem as Franziska set the spoon down and blinked very hard.
And Vriska was snatching up the spoon that had just been in Franziska’s mouth, and she was scooping her own sample from their soup, and smiling, and that spoon had just been in Franziska’s mouth and her spit was in Vriska’s mouth and that’s a thing middle schoolers make a big deal out of, isn’t it.
And she was still smiling, and she opened her mouth to rasp, “I toooooooold you so, Franny,” and then her meat thumb was at Franziska’s jaw and her metal thumb was cold on Franziska’s arms and her lips were very blue and very hot on Franziska’s own. Vriska was rough around the edges, but she held Franziska like she would break and continue to break, and they both probably tasted of soup and it didn’t matter. Fight things, and win– they had fought and come out winning, a victory on both sides, like in a children’s storybook.
When they pulled apart, there were no words, just a bowl of soup between them, and they alternated the spoon in a way that was frankly a little awkward and certainly not the easiest way of doing things, but neither wanted to take another utensil from the kitchen’s sprawling stores. Franziska ate a bowl of soup very slowly, and she kissed a girl she did not trust.