It was a mistake to come here. After such a long time haunting Birmingham's grave she'd started to believe the world really had gone muted. Sometimes instead she told herself that swimming as deeply as she had in the Song had damaged her permanently, cutting her off from all the power she'd been bred and trained to wield. Either way, she'd been wrong. Either way, she wasn't prepared for the assault she's experiencing now. 

There's too much color, for one thing. In the glow of Apollo's light this kitchen is more of a painting than anything that should properly exist. The greens are so vibrant she has to squint to look at them. Waves of golden wheat shimmer like a treasure hoard, bending and revealing bursts of red and purple berries more potent and radiant than starlight. She glances at a flowering plant so blue that it pulls the word 'ocean' out of some long buried ancestral memory and buries it on her lips. 

She lifts a hand to cover her eye, but there's no escape. Every breath is choked with scents: nutty tangs and floral bursts, whirlwinds of spices that tingle in her nose, cascading saccharine sweetness from a dozen different syrups, earthen notes and pine, grasses and even a savory richness that starts her mouth watering in spite of how irritatingly full her body still feels. One breath she swims in cinnamon. The next, hibiscus. She turns her head away from a sirocco of chili powders, and when she waves it away the next wrinkle of her nose washes it away in a tide of strawberries and vanilla pods. At her feet, a great black-and-brown fruit drops to the floor and bursts open with a rush of something like a fresh cream. 

Even the sounds are overwhelming. Swishing and rustling and constant sloughing and snapping and scraping and popping fight with the gurgling of the water supply and the shuffle-stomping of her own useless feet and the the flicking of her tail and there's a can rolling across a metal counter and it's hit the separation rods andeverythingisringingringingclangingbumpingroaringSTOPIT!

She is vaguely aware of her arms slashing wildly through the air. She is extremely aware of the way they crash into everything in front of her. Some of it parts with barely a brush of her knuckles, but some of it is the gear of the Yakanov, and it fights and cuts and hurts like an animal defending itself from her. Her head is pounding with hangover fierceness, and hangover nausea. Her eyes are squeezed shut. Her lungs have shrunk so small she can't hold enough of the confusing smell-soaked air to keep standing. Her knees scream fire when they hit the floor. Compared with the Anemoi, everything here is a hundred times too stiff. And loud.

When she opens her eyes, she expects to see carnage and destruction again. That's the only thing she's good for, after all. So it is... surprising, to see a spotless prep counter instead. To her right, a line of pans sit so pristinely she'd almost think they'd been put there to wait just for her. Her eyes slide automatically over the harvesting tools scattered around her on the floor to the figure of Apollo seated in the garden. He smiles, the same as ever, and offers no insight. The girl shakes her head. Gingerly. Her head is still basically soup.

She sits there, with her throbbing knees tucked together and her legs splayed uselessly to either side, doing nothing at all. Breathing without smelling. Looking without seeing. Her tail curls softly, and flicks at nothing. It takes a long minute after that, but when she stirs she begins by searching about for the pair of gloves she knows will be somewhere nearby. A pair of pairs, in fact: one for the harvest and one for the act of creation that follows. A proper cook protects herself. A proper cook never risks contamination between the ingredients, except where she is being an artist. 

She loses an hour sampling the bounty around her. Somehow after everything else she's still unprepared for how rich, full, and vibrant everything tastes compared to what she remembers. The creams taste thicker, the honeys sweeter. There are bitter herbs and biting mint that makes her ears do silly wiggles until she elbows herself in the stomach to make them stop. The thick, meaty mushrooms growing nearer to the floor take a full minute of chewing just by themselves. Every fruit seems to explode in her mouth when she bites it, and many of them have flavors she can't describe in words, but instead flash images in her head of things like fires crackling inside a cozy bedroom, or an untamed breeze rippling through an endless field of flowers. Sunlight streaming through a bed of infinite, briny water. And things even more impossible than that. Things she has no concept of. Things she can't imagine just seconds after she spits out her palate-cleansing sips of water. So why? Why can she picture it so clearly while she's eating?

The sickest part is that even now, while she's stuck reaching through a tiny, shrinking window into a world too beautiful to fit her in it, with all the feeling of loss and longing choking away her insides, she still can't find it in herself to cry. Not so much as a single dramatic tear to make any of it feel real. Shit. As if that matters now. As if anything matters now. She spots a white apron hanging on a pole, and loses another moment watching for it to grow teeth and eat her. Instead she shrugs and, on pure instinct, grabs it and ties it around her waist and neck. There's no engine grease to worry about getting in the food. And no princess to worry about eating it. But that doesn't make it feel less important. Or less like armor. 

The Servitor disappears into the drudgery and the long work of turning food into a meal. She gathers herbs, leaves, flowers, and peppers. She harvests mushrooms and lays them neatly in thick, meaty stacks. Nuts, honeys, those cream-seed-things, and dozens and dozens of fruits. She gathers wheat by the armful and sets it in stone bowls before fishing out a wheel to grind it all down into flour. Her feet step into the motion as she torques the grindwheel with every ounce of her depleted strength. Her hips push power into her back, up her shoulders and through her arms. Her tuneless humming adds to the chorus of sounds flitting about the kitchen, soothing her overworked ears.

Heaps of flour form into wells, and water turns them to doughs. She glances around. Something is missing. She frowns, shrugs, and adds her yeasts before chucking the resulting lumps back into the bowls and leaving them to rise. Plenty of time to figure it out. More flour mixes with a beer she found underneath a counter to make batter, while berry juices thicken in a row of pans into rich, sugary sauces and syrups. She crushes the heat pellets as she needs them with her bare hands. Always a risk of burning the palms that way, but it's faster than using the rod. Cleaner that way, too, less wasted product. These are the risks you learn to take when your life depended on getting everything done before your mistress woke up.

An idle Servitor was a mistreated Servitor. But you could never let them see you doing it.

She mixes nuts and berries into her doughs and shapes them by hand into loaves almost ready for baking. Seeds make the foundation of flavor for her cakes. A hundred different kinds of knife sit unused on the opposite counter behind her, but she carefully dips her claws in water each time before she uses them to carve and cut the next centerpiece. Mushroom steaks grill and fry, sauté and fricassee, and gently bake in juices and oils until they are indistinguishable from the livestock and hunting meats that populate tables in Tellurian homes. The ones that matter, anyway. She plates each kind on beds of greens and carefully drips the berry sauces around and over each to compliment their flavors. Honeys for the breads, now. Creams whipped into great fluffy clots to decorate her cakes. She carves up fat eggplants and dips them in her batters to fry them in hot oils. And even still she shows no signs of stopping.

With every plat she finishes, she carries carefully, reverently across the room to a long table filled with broken or worn down chairs, except for the empty places where somebody must have snatched it while they fled the station. She sets each plate in turn in specific spots around the table, and returns often in her moments of downtime to fidget and fuss and rearrange them. By color, by primary flavor mixture, by course. Nothing ever satisfies. Nothing ever seems right. 

She clicks her tongue after her dozenth failed attempt, and freezes with the shock of sudden insight. She trudges through the waves of fruits and vegetation to the pools of water feeding into pipes that run throughout the station. She goes waist-deep into the water without pausing to think about what it would do to her pants or what was left of her boots; all of her clothes were ugly, useless scraps at this point anyway. She holds still, not even breathing for long periods at a time until... there! She snatches at the water with feline precision, and after several attempts comes up with a pair of juicy, shiny-scaled fish. There. Fucking finally. 

She drags them back to her counter space, and clears a place to clean, scale, and bone them. All by hand, just like always. She carves four large fillets, marinates two for searing, and coats the other two with batter and fresh breading to be fried. A set of potatoes slice up just as quickly to join them, in thin, even slices. Salt, and salt, and salt. Her nose twitches as they cook. Her lips curl into a wide smile with nothing hiding behind it. For once. 

She catches herself and forces the expression off her face immediately. Fucking moron, what are you doing? She squeezes her tail to keep it from swishing behind her, and paces impatiently waiting for her work to finally finish. She re-scales her fish in the potatoes and lays them gently on plates of fresh herbs and a dusting of spices. These, she carries to the table just like all the others, and sets them at four places without chairs. She rearranges the other plates to match, such that a person seeking her fish couldn't think to eat it without starting at the salad and the soup, and moving to a mushroom platter, nor can they touch the breads or cakes and fruit skewers till after the fish is gone. 

Everything perfect. Her work would make a feast if everyone she'd ever known was here beside her. She carefully removes and folds her apron before setting it to one side. Her claws dig into her palms as she watches the table intently. Like she's waiting for something to happen. Her legs tremble from the effort. Her arms burn with the cost of her labor. Her head squeezes her sick again, and a dizzy spell obligates her to sit down. 

She does it on the floor. And doesn't touch a thing she's made.