A family recipe

Summary: Rad makes the countess pie, a favorite meal, and thinks about the one person it hates to think about: you.

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Every so often, Rad Red gets a craving for the countess pie. It’s been enough of a recurring event that eventually, it has had to look for the recipe, and these days, it’s become so easy that Rad can practically bake it with its eyes closed. Unfortunately, that leaves Rad with a lot of time to think while baking, and unfortunately, when Rad bakes the countess pie, it always inevitably ends up thinking about you.

It starts with separating the eggs, as the yolks are used for the dough while the whites are used for the filling. It’s a little tricky to do with paws, but any Xero that bakes knows that if you have fur on your paws, it will get a little gross during the process. Rad washes its hands right after.

(You never had any such trouble, what with your claws. You always only needed one to open an ORB when you showed them to Rad, it distinctly remembers. Like it was a magic trick!)

The yolks get mixed with sugar and butter, and Rad does technically have a stand mixer, but also, Rad lives in a cave. The stand mixer is simply another find from the desert, so it does have to do all the mixing manually, not that Rad minds much, it’s not easy to exhaust. But it does leave a bit too much time for thinking.

(It’s because a Xero can adapt to and handle almost anything, as you explained, and so whatever conditions Rad finds itself in, it will easily adapt to handle them. How else would Rad know that it could handle the desert when it had nowhere else to go?)

Flour, baking powder and milk are next, and the dough thickens enough that it needs to be kneaded by hand rather than whisk. This is maybe the only part of the process that Rad genuinely likes, pressing pawprints into the soft, malleable material, putting its full weight on it, shaping it however it likes. Its paws are going to be so gross by the end of it, but that’s just part of the fun.

(It’s alright, you would say, brushing dry mud out of its paws while it whined in protest. You just shouldn’t let it dry next time, you need to wash your paws right after!)

Rad washes its paws again, right after, and pulls out a baking pan to cover in flour.

Over the course of its life out in the Kubai desert, Rad has collected a wide variety of trinkets, and among them, it has chosen a favorite baking pan. It has barely any rust, and flowers decorate its sides, painted on thick enough that they protrude a little bit and create a fun texture. Rad isn’t exactly sure if it’s real flowers, but that doesn’t stop it from enjoying the feeling of running its paw pads over the protruding bumps of each ring of petals.

(Any and all of your knowledge of biology that wasn’t about Rad’s own body seemed to be lost on it. It would simply forget the next day, or change the topic abruptly to ask about its ears, or its eyes, or its tail. Most often it was about its tail.)

Two thirds of the dough have to be flattened and laid out at the bottom and sides of the pan, with the remaining third being put aside, and a tiny slice stolen for a taste test. The taste test is not a necessary step, but by this point, can you blame a critter for getting a little hungry?

(You’re the one who brought a piece of the pie for it to taste in the first place, in those early days of its proper life, and it was love at first taste. Any time you were the one to examine that particular batch afterwards, you made sure to bring treats, but none were such a hit with it as this. You’d joke with your colleagues that if it could, the little thing would bite your entire hand off.)

After all this, the next step is the arduous and horrible and boring labor of shredding a bunch of apples. More than one might think. No, even more than that. Rad has learned the hard way that it’s always more apples than it thinks it would be, so it always tries to have a stash, but it’s hard to keep them for long out in the desert, even down in a cave. It’s hard to get very many of them in the first place, it’s not like foraging alone is always the most profitable work.

Every so often, it sips on the juice leaking from the growing pile of shredded apples. It’s a little gross and sticky but also tasty and refreshing enough to be worth it. And it’s not a big deal, anyways. Rad washes its paws right after.

Apparently, most of the proper recipes also add shredded nuts and raisins, but you never did that, so Rad forgoes them as well. They seem like they would suck anyways. Crunchy bitter nuts and chewy raisins in a soft and sweet pie? Who would do that? Obviously your way is the right way.

(You were always right about everything, back when it was little. What everything was called, what food it would like, where it would feel comfortable, which of the other doctors it wouldn’t want to listen to. Then again, you also thought it would stay.)

Rad spreads the shredded apples on top of the dough, and dusts the whole thing with a pinch of cinnamon and vanilla sugar. There’s supposed to be more of it, but Rad can never buy enough for it to last very long, and it’s mostly there for the smell anyways.

(The smell would always permeate the room the moment you opened the box. The pie would be as warm as your hugs, the kind that made it want to hide in your lab coat forever…)

With a pinch of salt, Rad whisks the egg whites and mixes in sugar and starch, making a thick white cream that, when spread on top of the layer of apples, always makes it think of snow.

(It was winter when it climbed the fence.)

(It was winter when it ran.)

(It was winter, that’s how you lost it – in the snow.)

Almost done, now, and then Rad can go back to thinking about other things. The final third of the dough gets shredded on top of the cream, and then, the only thing left is to bake!

(“It is a process not unlike making you, X-564,” you’d tell it. “Depending on the ingredients, we achieve different results. With common ingredients, you may get a good pie, and with special, harder to find ingredients, you may get a rare delicacy!” And it would look over at its batchmates, like X-569, who would glow in the dark, or X-544, experiencing the world around them with two extra pairs of ears, and it would think about those words, about what being special meant to you.)

Rad Red does not have an electric oven for the same reasons it doesn’t have a functional stand mixer, but it does have something better: a brick oven it has built itself! After smuggling bricks from construction sites around B’Haddu! The library there has certainly proven useful again and again, teaching it anything and everything it needed to truly set up a comfortable life out here in the desert, in a cavern with sandstone walls, living off of scraps.

(Is that the life you intended for it? Certainly not. Not with the way you tried so very hard to teach it so many things, especially about your work. Would it have been an assistant to you, one day? You did speak of showing it more of your work, once it was officially up for adoption, once it could leave and go home with you. Would it have been special then? Or would it have simply lived in your shadow?)

The oven is warm, and heats up the entire cave – it’s not that big of a space. For the forty five minutes of baking, Rad curls up on top of it, content to soak in the warmth. Still, you refuse to leave its thoughts.

(It was only ever properly warm with you – first in the artificial pouch, then in your arms, and hiding in your lab coat. And since then, it has only been the heat of the desert.)

When the pie is done, Rad pulls the baking pan out with impatience, or perhaps with compulsion, but it does take a moment to look it over, make sure the bricks hadn’t crumbled into it – it got a nasty surprise when it first used the oven, biting down on a piece of broken brick. A hard-earned lesson.

When you’d make it, it would look different. The egg whites would create a thick layer of soft foam that would melt on the tongue. Rad’s pie doesn’t have a thick layer of foam. The egg whites are barely visible, and the pie looks somewhat deflated.

It doesn’t taste the way yours would, either, it never does, and when Rad takes a bite, it scowls. Rad doesn’t want to think of you, it doesn’t want to care. How dare you invade its thoughts, still?

How dare you to have baked delicious pies and offered warm hugs? How dare you to have smiled, and talked ever so softly, how dare you to have been there in so many ways that didn’t help, and how dare you to have said so many things that ruined everything?

How dare you still take up space in its mind, years after it last saw you. How dare you have frowned in such clear disappointment when it left?

Rad remembers it with such clarity, even though many other things from its early life are a blur. You didn’t even look surprised, did you, just disappointed. Like Rad could’ve done better than this, than running, than getting away from you. Like you hadn’t made it inevitable.

Like you hadn’t been the one to raise it in the first place.