Work Text:
"What the fuck is happening in this pan," Chuck says.
Raleigh snaps his wrist a little, so that the vegetables bounce a bit and distribute more evenly. It's a practiced, smooth motion, muscle memory taking over, so he's completely unable to explain why a good third of his chopped vegetables bounce all the way outside the pan, and the sauce does... something, a stretching-wrinkling thing, he doesn't really know, but it's thoroughly unappetizing.
He very carefully sets the whole thing down again, stretches a hand to turn off the heating rig under it, then stands there staring down at whatever the fuck is happening inside the pan.
"I know how to cook," he says. "I've cooked my whole life."
Mako, leaning against the opposite counter with her arms crossed and watching the proceedings with a sort of muted curiosity, makes a small doubtful noise. "You lived on a base your whole life."
Which is a fair point; his and Yancy's room didn't have any kind of set-up for actual cooking, just a water heater, coffee supplies, some packaged stuff. Actual food was something that happened in the mess, where experts made you highly nutritional, well-balanced meals that were mostly edible, and usually very tasty every second Tuesday.
The five years after that were spent on the Wall and other things like the Wall, eating the kind of rations that you didn't do anything to because nothing you could possibly do would help. So.
He rallies, though, not even sure why he's bothering: "I wasn't born on a base. I was always the one who cooked once we were, you know, on our own. Yancy was absolute shit at it."
"Must have been," Chuck mutters, still staring at the mess inside the pan. "If this was the better option."
Raleigh tears himself away from the ruins to give him a penetrating look. "I'm sorry, did you want to volunteer?"
"Oh no," Chuck says, raising an eyebrow. "I was born on a base, I'm absolutely fine with having no idea about this. I just don't tell myself I know how to do things when --" he waves an eloquent hand at the stove top.
"Really," Raleigh says, turning back to scrape the sad, sad experiment into the garbage disposal. "Because I could have sworn you used to claim you knew how to pilot a Jaeger."
"Yes, all right," Mako says, instead of telling him off for baiting the toddler. Because Raleigh doesn't even really care about this -- he's just a bit thrown, that's all, seriously, it can't have been that long -- whereas Chuck has no such setting as 'doesn't really care', especially when it comes to Jaegers. "I'm going to drive down to that Mexican place and get some take out, so if anyone wants me to bring anything back --"
Driving is another thing Raleigh hasn't really gotten back into the habit of. That one he was at least aware of.
"Really?" Chuck says. "You don't want to stand around and watch Becket try to remember how food works some more?"
Mako ends up going for food by herself, and with no intention of bringing back anything. Raleigh ends up eating the suspicious leftovers hiding behind the empty milk carton in the fridge. Chuck, on the other hand, ends up eating the even more suspicious possibly-leftovers from behind the not-quite-empty orange juice bottle, and he does it in a shirt that's soaking wet where Raleigh got him with the kitchen tap. All in all, he counts it a win.