Work Text:
She doesn’t startle when he asks her. She just freezes for a millisecond, somewhere inside herself. A near-imperceptible interruption in her carefully crafted rhythms. She answers, “You know I don’t celebrate Christmas, right?”
“‘Course I do.” She’s sprawled in the seat behind him and all she can see are his eyes, squinting skeptically. “But it’s not about Christmas. I’m askin’ you to dinner, not mass.”
Hard to decide which of those sounds more excruciating: Catholic mass or dinner at Fusco’s. No singing at Fusco’s, so that’s a point in his favor. But she bets that if she wore sunglasses to mass and sat in the back row, she could sleep through the whole thing and nobody would notice. Tough to get away with at the dinner table.
Shaw adjusts her jacket, pulls it closer around her shoulders. “I’m busy that night.”
“Bullshit,” Fusco answers, firmly but not angrily. His eyes are on the road again. “You don’t have to come, but turn down my dinner invitation like a goddamn adult if you feel that way.”
She hesitates. “I don't do...festive.”
Fusco snorts. “If I was looking for somebody to be the life of the party, you think I would’ve invited you?”
She cracks a thin, tiny smile. “I party. Just…”
“Not that kinda party. I know. It’s OK.” His voice takes on a kind of softness that it isn’t really built to handle. “It’s dinner with me and my kid, Sameen. That’s all.”
Because there’s nobody else to come, she thinks. John’s gone. Harold’s gone. Root’s gone. Joss is gone. Nobody else gets close.
“...Are you cooking?”
“Yeah. Me and my kid.”
Shaw drags her duffle bag out from the footwell, unzips it roughly. “Pass. This time of year’s bad enough without food poisoning.”
“ Food poisoning, ” he scoffs. “You’ve never even tried my cooking.”
“I’ve seen your fridge.”
“You saw my fridge two years ago. In the middle of the week. Sorry if it wasn’t pristine.” He sighs a little. “Listen. How about you bring a dish? Show me up in my own home; I don’t give a shit. I just want you to come by, if you’re not doing anything.”
She’d rather die than admit it, but she’s not doing anything. Not that night. “Guess I could throw something together.” And then, “This is me.”
His eyebrows jump a little as he pulls flush with the curb and disables the child safety lock on the doors. “You cook? Kinda figured you’d order something. That’s allowed, you know.”
“How am I supposed to shame you if I don’t bring something I made?” She opens the car door.
“That’s the spirit,” he says. “Hey, you need any help in there?”
She pulls the grenade launcher out of the bag and hefts it on her shoulder. “Get out of here, Lionel. I’ll find my own ride back.”
“Suit yourself,” Lionel says. “See you Christmas!”
“Not if I see you first,” she answers out of habit, but she says it as she’s shutting the door and maybe he didn’t hear her.
Shaw can cook, by the way. You don’t appreciate food the way she does - ferociously, exuberantly, indiscriminately - without learning a couple of tricks. Her parents saw early on that she could be depended upon, that she could soak up information like a sponge. Before the crash, there was a period of time where she cooked every dinner at her father’s elbow, watching his hands, listening to his voice, noting down everything.
Sitting up in bed, Shaw asks herself when she last cooked.
She’s been busy. Most of her life, she’s been busy. She lived on protein bars in med school, MREs in combat. She’s in New York now, and she can eat whatever she wants whenever she wants. Shaw doesn’t have to cook. It’s a waste of her energy, her time.
“You should sleep,” the voice in her ear reminds her. “You have an early morning tomorrow.”
Shaw breathes deep, and for a second, she thinks about this Number she worked a couple months back. She was a yoga instructor in Tribeca and Shaw took a class just to get close enough to clone her phone. The pastel lycra, too-soft voices, and sugary platitudes made Shaw consider leaving this one up to fate, but there was this moment when, during a deep stretch, the yoga instructor told her to breathe into the point of tension, of pain.
Which is bullshit, by the way. She was stretching her hamstring.
But she thinks of that, when The Machine speaks to her. How hearing it use Root’s voice brings her pain, and how never hearing Root’s voice again would bring her pain, and about how that point of pain gets smaller the more she breathes into it.
“Just give me five minutes,” she says, reaching for her phone.
She spends the next hour googling recipes.
She has these stuffed dates at a bar. It’s a work thing - the owner’s thinking about offing an unhappy investor - but the stuffed dates are what catch her attention.
Shaw remembers that when she was young, her parents threw a party. Some people her mom needed to impress. She wasn’t interested at the time. What interested her were the dates on the coffee table in front of her, bursting with walnut and cardamom and pistachios, garnished with dried rose petals. Her trick was to wait for the moments, the breaths where there were no eyes on her and no eyes on the table, where she could snatch up one of the dates and pop it into her mouth, unseen.
Half the platter must have disappeared into her stomach that night.
Tonight, there are no such limitations.
The dates are different too: stuffed with goat cheese, wrapped in a curl of bacon, slathered obscenely in rosemary honey. They’re abominations, little Frankenstein’s monsters, everything her parents’ dates were not. They’re salty and sweet and hot and they leave her fingers sticky. They make her want to be sick. They make her want to eat the whole plate.
Lionel would like these, she catches herself thinking.
Because he would, the little yokel. She’s seen what he eats. Fusco’s like her a little, with food. Like her, if she had more guilt and lower standards. He’s not above trash, not above hot dogs from a street cart, not above dingy little food trucks with suspect health department ratings. And this - this is fancy trash. He’ll love it.
She has this idea that if she’s trapped there long enough, she’ll threaten the chef into giving her the recipe, but things with the restaurant owner escalate and what with one thing and another, she doesn’t have the time.
So now she’s at home, trying to figure it out on her own.
“It’s a good choice,” The Machine remarks as a date pit pops loose and falls into a bowl with a clatter. “Lionel will like them.”
Shaw shoves creamy goat cheese into the hollow left behind by the pit. “Since you don’t eat, what are you basing that on?”
Very simply, she says, “Salt content.”
Solid guess. “Anyway,” Shaw says, “that’s not the point. I don’t care if he likes it. I care about showing him up.”
“Is this a competitive event?” the Machine asks.
“I don’t know if it’s supposed to be,” Shaw acknowledges, “but it is.”
“Given that Lionel is unlikely to be critical of your work in the event of a failure and even more likely to be pleased in the event of a success, it’s difficult to determine your objective.”
“What are you trying to ask me?”
“What are you trying to prove, Sameen?”
They’re close, the stuffed dates. Close to what she had in the bar. Maybe better. Still that salty, greasy, ferociously edible mess.
They sit in her stomach like a rock.
“What’re you making?” she asks, innocently.
It takes him a second to lift his head from the crime scene he’s bent over. Lost in thought, insofar as Shaw can admit that Fusco has thoughts. “Making for what?”
“Dinner. The dinner you invited me to.”
His eyebrows lift very slightly. “You hungry, Shaw?”
“I’m bracing myself.”
He breaks character just for a second, just long enough for a grin to flash across his face. “I’m makin’ a tenderloin. My kid’s making mac and cheese. Even a couple green vegetables thrown in there. Not a bad spread.”
“So,” she says and it’s too long a so , too cautious. “No potatoes?”
“No potatoes,” he says. “You know it’s not a big deal if you don’t make something, right?”
“I said I would.”
“I know. But you don’t have to. It’ll be OK if you don’t.”
"You think I can't handle it, Lionel?"
That shuts him up.
At home, on the internet, she shoves all the ingredients she remembers into Google and Google spits out the potatoes her dad used to make with dinner most weekday nights. She learns their real name is sib zamini ba hel and that's what she'll call them if she wants to remind Lionel that he doesn't know shit about her. If she wants him to understand what she's talking about, she'll call them cardamom potatoes.
Her dad would give her a knife, small and shiny, and let her chop the celery and the onions that get fried up alongside the potatoes. The recipe blogger lady says they're better with leeks and she's right, but Shaw regrets the leeks intensely.
It doesn't taste how she remembers it.
Lionel's fine, she tells herself as she sprints up the hospital corridors. Lionel's like Teflon, like rubber, like a bomb shelter, like a roach. He gets hurt all the time, but he never stays hurt. Not for long.
About four doors down from his room, she makes herself slow to a deliberate, nonchalant walk. No sense in letting him notice that she's sweaty or short of breath. No sense in worrying the guy.
She finds him in that sterile room, that thin little bed. He's awake. He's on his phone. He's fine. Totally fine.
"So, how'd it go?" he asks, taking a little too long to bother lifting his head.
"Number's fine. Left the perp cuffed in a warehouse surrounded by bath salts, so that'll be fun for him to explain later. Were you gonna...text me? Let me know you weren't dead?"
He sets the phone aside with a clatter. "You were gonna figure it out on your own. I had to make sure somebody was gonna pick up my kid from hockey practice. And before that, I was unconscious, so...not really up to the job. And I'm fine, by the way. They want me to spend the night 'cause my eggs got a little scrambled, but I'm alright."
"You know,” she says, stepping forward so she can see his eyes, if his pupils are the right size, “you can only have your eggs scrambled so many times before you end up with an omelet for a frontal lobe."
Lionel sighs deeply. "Something to look forward to, I guess."
He's the only one left, she suddenly thinks.
John is gone. Harold is gone. Joss is gone. Root is gone. It's just her and Lionel now, and she can take care of herself, of course, but Lionel's this guy who walks into deadly situations like he doesn't know he's just some dumb cop with graying temples and knees that creak when he stands, and that's not sustainable .
She taps him hard on the arm. "Let me know when you're allowed to leave. I'll drive you."
"You got a car?" Lionel asks.
She answers, "I'll pick something up."
When her dad died, people brought food. She remembers that. People don't know what to say about something like that, a loss so big it can't be fixed. They especially don't know what to say to the kid in the corner, the kid who can't cry and doesn't have any use for sympathy.
They cook instead. It's easier. It's something warm and real you can press into somebody's hands instead of saying, "I'm so fucking sorry that happened to you."
This old lady from down the street made a pumpkin soup. Google says it's called asheh kadoo tanbal. The blogger lady serves it in a hollowed-out pumpkin, because she's an over-achiever. Shaw uses a pot. She’s not trying to prove anything.
The recipe is easy: it's lentils simmering with garlic and turmeric and onion and pumpkin that's so soft, it's practically melting. It's a warm weight in Shaw's stomach, and the warmth travels outward and all through her. All the way to her skin.
She kicks the door with the toe of her boot. Not trying to break it down or anything; just trying to get some attention. She can't knock. Her hands are full.
Lionel's son gets the door, that warm-faced, sandy-haired kid. She's only met him maybe three times. One time she was saving his life and the kid mainly cried. The other two times, he looked at her like she was a superhero or maybe a god, and she didn't like that at all. Shaw's never liked being somebody's role model.
When he sees her, his eyes get big for a different reason.
"Can I, uh…” He stares up and down the stack of pots and plates in her arms. “...Take something?" he asks.
She grunts, "Just show me to the table, kid."
The table is mostly bare, a tablecloth over Formica. Lionel’s leaning against the kitchen counter, a dishtowel slung over his shoulder.
“Holy shit,” he says. “Are you catering this?”
“I am now,” she answers. “Where’s your stuff?”
“In the oven.” He gives the door a gentle kick for emphasis. “I’m just down to sauces and salad.”
“Anything I can do?” Shaw asks as she shrugs out of her jacket and kicks the slush out of her boots.
“Sure,” he says, “if you got the time.”
Fusco assigns her the sauce for the tenderloin. His recipe is written in cramped hand on a faded recipe card with foxed edges. The letters are small and curly. Shaw’s faked Lionel’s handwriting on a document or two, and this isn’t it.
“My mother’s,” he explains when she runs a fingernail along a deep crease in the paper. “And I think she was copying down something from her mother.”
She pours a cup of white wine into the pot. “You saved all that shit, huh?”
“Well, stuff got distributed,” Lionel says with a shrug. “Some stuff got thrown away. Some stuff went to my brothers. Some stuff went to me. This was just a little box of cards in the kitchen; it wasn’t too much trouble to take on.”
Shaw thinks about that. Her father, dead. Her mother…
She hasn’t seen her mother. Not for a long time. Hasn’t needed to. Still doesn’t.
She’s aching for something adjacent to home. She’s aching to be the kind of person who saves recipes. “You need this wine for anything else?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “All yours, champ.”
She tips the bottle back, drinks deep. She stirs butter into the bubbling wine. She asks him if his mom’s shitty handwriting says two teaspoons or two tablespoons of thyme. She watches Lionel boil a small saucepan of honey and red pepper flakes for his own mysterious reasons.
She drinks again.
The air in Lionel’s kitchen feels breathable.
A phone timer chirps and suddenly Lee’s in the kitchen. “Mac’s done,” he announces.
Shaw and Lionel stand aside so he can open the oven and take out a bubbling dish of macaroni.
“How old is he?” she asks, under her breath as Lee carries his dish off to the table.
“Fourteen,” Lionel answers, also under his breath.
That would make him - Shaw does the math - eleven when she saved him. When he almost died.
She feels suddenly paralyzed under the weight of three whole years.
Lionel nudges her with an elbow. “Not all at once with the heavy cream, pal.”
“Right,” Shaw says. “I’m on it,” she says.
They’re both busy with the sauces, so Lee makes the salad. “It’s easy,” he explains, clattering around at the opposite counter. “It’s just putting stuff together.”
It is, she reflects, just putting stuff together.
The timers go off and the food comes out of the oven and Lee scampers around underfoot, setting the table with plates and bowls, because he noticed the soup.
And.
Well.
It’s a meal.
Not a free meal. She paid a hefty price in multiple test runs, in ingredients, in time. But that’s not Lionel’s fault, even though it would be fun to blame him. And he’s paying her back, in his way, with a beef tenderloin that’s perfectly pink in the center, with mac and cheese that’s creamy on the inside and blanketed with a surface of meticulously crushed Ritz crackers.
There’s pomegranates on the brussels sprouts, pomegranates in the salad, and she wonders where Lionel gets off exactly. She pushes one jewel-bright seed around her plate with a fork and looks to him for an answer.
He becomes shy, suddenly. “Pomegranates are a thing, right? In Persian food?”
They are.
He likes the dates, like she knew he would. But he likes everything else, too. He asks where she learned to cook like that, and she thinks about saying, “Well, Lionel, there’s this thing called Google,” but instead, she says, “My dad.”
That’s the kind of thing they talk about, there at the table. About stuff they remember. People they learned from.
They’re all really good cooks, it turns out.
As they’re clearing up the plates, Shaw thinks she should probably start to shuffle her feet, that she should probably wash out her soup pot, that she should make sure Lionel and Lee have a stockpile of soup and potatoes (the dates are long gone) and take whatever food Lionel insists on giving her, but leave, definitely leave.
Except by the time she gets to the sink, Lee is already making hot cocoa at the stove while his father watches, sidelong and cautious and impressed. Lee pours out three mugs. When Lee’s not looking, Lionel pulls down a bottle of Maker’s Mark with a red ribbon tied around the neck from a cabinet. “To pep it up,” he says.
“For me?” Shaw asks.
“Well, it’s not for me.”
She pours a few glugs of whiskey into her cocoa. “You sap,” she murmurs.
Lionel just grins to himself.
In the living room, Lee flips through channels until there are Muppets on the TV. Lionel flops onto the couch with his kid nestled against his side. Shaw leans heavy on the arm. She thinks about how the cocoa is rich, about how she probably didn’t need to drink this much to make it through this dinner, about how this couch is both the most comfortable couch in the world and a total piece of shit, about how weird-looking Muppets are.
She’s not sure when she falls asleep.
When she wakes up, the TV is flat and dark, the lights are out, and there’s a gentle clattering from the kitchen. She twists around, peers over the couch, and sees Lionel under the light in the kitchen, diligently scrubbing the last of the dishes.
“I fell asleep,” she announces.
He chuckles a little. “Yeah, pal, you did.”
“Shit.” Shaw struggles to sit upright. “Sorry. I’ll go.”
“Nah,” Fusco insists, drying his hands. “Think you should stay ‘til you sober up.”
“I can handle myself,” she grumbles.
“Don’t you think I know that? I just worry about the rest of the city handling you.”
“‘M not gonna drive.”
He ignores her. “I’ll get you some blankets.”
“You should stay, Sameen,” says Root’s voice in her ear. “He won’t mind.”
“ I mind.”
“You won’t mind either,” she insists.
Defeated, she kicks off her boots, tilts over to rest her head on the arm of the couch. Lionel comes back and throws a thick, heavy blanket over her shoulders. It smells like sweat and beer, like it’s survived a thousand hockey games. He wedges a pillow between her head and the arm of the couch. It smells clean and cottony, like recent laundry. “You need anything?” Lionel asks as he kneels next to the couch on his creaky knees, pulling the blanket down so it covers her feet. “Glass of water, maybe?”
“Go parent your own kid, Lionel.”
“My own kid made a third of tonight’s dinner and is now in his room, setting up the...video game...thing I got for him. On his own, emphatically without my help. I think I did OK with him. Hey,” he says and his eyes go crinkly and soft and awful for a second. “Thanks for showing up tonight, OK? I know it’s not your thing, but it meant something.”
The funny thing about Lionel is that he’s uncomfortably sharp and insightful in some ways, but he almost never sees her coming. Like now, when she throws her arm around his neck and catches him in a tight headlock and presses him tight to her shoulder, head against her head.
“Merry Christmas, you loser,” she growls in his ear.
He makes this funny noise that might be laughing or might be crying or might be choking, but when she finally lets him go, it’s hard to tell what. All she knows is that his face is red.
He pats her hard on the shoulder as he stands with a wince. “Thanks, pal. Thanks a lot.”
And then he goes, and she thinks to herself, “Now’s my chance to leave without hurting his feelings,” but she also thinks about how the blanket is warm and the couch is comfortable and she should wait until she’s sure Lionel’s asleep before she makes her move.
When she wakes up, there’s daylight streaming through the window, a glass of water and an aspirin waiting on the coffee table.