Work Text:
The greatest thing about cooking is that every ingredient has its purpose.
Take any body and pick it apart. See just how many pieces there are in a fish, a cow, a deer; bones for stock, flank to smoke, eyes to savor whole. Intestines become sausage casing. Liver and kidneys can be ground to paste. Discover that a heart is made of thick, solid meat, the reddest red, and bite in like soft fruit -- beasts are not so picky as men, so we know in confidence that every part can be eaten. We find out how to eat it. We become enamored with the jubilance of skin, because it holds inside every vein we roast to bubbling; every strip of muscle we dry and marinate.
The body is useful. The body becomes succulent and sweet, or thick with gamey musk, or bloody and richly savory, with the influence of a skilled hand. The body cannot be discarded meaninglessly.
Gregor has begun counting the knuckles in his hands, wondering what their uses are. A spot of marrow, not enough to scrape away without hungering for more. He can imagine a small pile of discarded bones piling up like pistachio shells or honeysuckle blossoms, a child's gluttonous palate demanding pearls of sweetness at the expense of mountains of rot. The bones, properly weakened, would snap between teeth to free their prize. On another hand, the bones are small, easy enough to soften -- they could be jellied like tapioca. The worrying ball of the tongue and teeth, meant to be rolled between nervous lips until it slides frogspawn-slick down the throat.
Both imaginations are insidious. The consumption is mindless, almost robotically compelled. His bones could litter the ground in shards, sought after with insatiable hunger only to be discarded and ignored, or they could sit heavy as stones in the stomach -- a terrible mistake they will make again, as they pop another into their mouths and promise not to swallow. Gregor counts his knuckles and wants to be loved as a worthless being. Coveted, useful, dead.
Inside his skin, those objects of desire, the knuckles, become objects of an anger which is only held at bay by his knowledge of the body. His hands don't obey him and his fingers slip. The digits are shaky or sluggish, the knuckles are sore or swelling or bubble with some unknown acid. His hands are too bony, soft, small, calloused, or he just can't stand to look at them long enough to decide. He would crush each offending joint himself, but he can't burst the blood vessels in his hands, he can't release the fluid of the bone into the flesh. He can't spoil the feast this hand will someday become.
It does not make living in a body of meat any more bearable. He can look at himself, useful, meaningful, not to be blemished, and be gentle with those deplorable hands, but he is gentle to an end. The end is that he will die. He must find a way to be gentle with himself so that he can die with a berry-sweet taste -- so he needs something to live for, too. That's why Gregor becomes a chef.
It happens incidentally, on a passing whim, all at once. He's always been interested in food, consumption, his own body, fascinated by the taste of his own skin and the way he can feel his own blood pulse sluggishly through his body. Fascinated by what's wrong with it. He's never understood others instinctually. The City is more slaughterhouse than residence to him -- so many people, moving through this strange, small space like cattle being slowly, gently pushed through each processing zone, mindless and easy enough that they don't have time to get spooked until seconds before their end. Sweaty, undesirable bodies, always more than there should be in any given room, building, street, District. Undesirable until their deaths.
It's externalizing what he's already internalized -- he can see the problem in himself, a body of fatty meat, and the similarity copies and pastes his desire to re-imagine his body and his sense of worthlessness onto any human form in his path. Gregor doesn't have an identity, and neither do his ingredients.
The first time he kills someone isn't accidental, but it is self-defense. And once the meat is killed, he can't bear to waste it, so he cuts off a piece, sears it with his lighter, burns his fingers doing it, pops it in his mouth. Too bloody. When you cook steaks, from the store, they've already been drained -- the bloodiest they get is red meat, not the thick iron taste coating this piece. He wishes he had somewhere to store the body, so that he can let the meat dry and then try again. Somewhere in that equation, he decides that there will be an 'again'; he feels more strongly about the taste of this meat than he has about anything in some time. But he'll need more than a lighter and a stolen knife to do it.
So he starts making plans, charting out the course of months and years ahead of him. From the first taste of burnt and bloody flesh, the foundations of a life begin to take shape. He lights a cigarette and scrawls the things he needs on a bloody alleyway wall, and he starts to finally think of his hands as the hands of an artisan.
--
It's not like he learns nothing in the pie shop. He didn't know anything, really, when he started, and now he can at least turn a fresh ingredient into a finished dish. No more blood-thick scraps -- now, the intoxicating musk of the shop keeps him fattened and lazy, all blood tang and smoke haze and savory heat. He makes decent money, he eats well, he buys a meat cleaver and pays rent on a shitty apartment.
He smokes a lot and thinks little, and lets his body carry him around like it's the real master of its own fate and he's only a passenger. But in the moments between, Gregor feels all his flesh weighing on his body again, and he thinks he isn't making anything that matters, that other people should be eating, and he wants to cut off his hand again to boil it and serve it to a hundred ravenous Rats. He's living a real life now, he's not hungry or desperate anymore, and he still hates his body. Hates it even more now. In the nights, he shakes and writhes unsleeping with phantom pain from a limb he's never even lost. In the days, he can look at a man on the street and see all the cuts he needs to make to kill him and the cuts he needs to make to separate the arm from the shoulder and the cuts he needs to make to separate the leg from the hip, and still have to bludgeon him half to death with a blunt blade, ruining half the meat.
His boss ignores him most of the time. He doesn't prepare any of the final dishes, he just stores the meat and prepares the cuts to go under her thin knife. She seems to only care that he takes half the work out of the business, and the customers never see him, anyway. He steals from her stash to smoke. She hasn't noticed yet, or doesn't think he's important enough to admonish. She's the one who will become one of the Eight Chefs, and he's her procurer. He wants to hate her. It doesn't turn out that way.
It's the way she treats him like a nothing, just another pound of flesh that'll perform its job until it doesn't anymore, that's the meat -- don't laugh, we're building a metaphor -- of their working relationship. When she hires him, it feels flippant. Gregor doesn't know if he's the only one chomping at the bit to work with her or if she just doesn't care to tell him what she sees in him, but he arrives at her doorstep one slow morning with a bowl of smoked brisket and she doesn't take a bite, just asks what he wants and lets him take an apron. She's never eaten anything he's cooked. He sneaks into the kitchen proper to practice on his own after they close, or would, if she seemed to care that he's been there at all. The feeling of going unnoticed is intoxicating, nauseating, pearly-slick as raw tongue.
He begins to leave more evidence of his thefts, his sneaking around the shop. It starts with soy sauce left on the counter. It escalates to blood. He realizes one day that he would destroy this shop, smash all the windows and burn the upholstery, for a woman that has never regarded him with more than a passive glance. Maybe he wants a reason to ruin his life. Maybe he needs a reason to die again -- maybe this narrative he's begun to weave in his head, where Ryōshū is a wealthy artist with salaries to spare who will never grow tired of him and he is a parasite gorging himself on her passive generosity, is going to end with him back in that alleyway again, and that's what he wants. She'll never be in the alleyway. He wants to burn in her, orbiting closer and closer to her steady candlelight until he's nothing but ashes again.
It gets worse when she starts to look him in the eye.
Every day, he's been becoming more convinced that he's not only worthless, not only nothing, but also wrong somehow -- and that it doesn't matter. That all these feelings that twist up inside him and curl towards the chef at the front counter are fine, right even, because he'll be punished for them in time. Maybe once he's steeped himself in that enormous desire long enough, then he'll be able to cut himself up so everyone can taste the thick, oily fantasies inside. He'll leave it to propagate. Fester. Ferment, or maybe simply dissolve, like no matter what he tries he'll simply never be there.
One day, he comes in late, and she actually takes a pause from working front of house when she hears the back door open. She's already in the doorway by the time he's wiped off his boots. They lock eyes. He can't handle it, so he looks away, and sees a cut he'd hung last night is on the table now, evidence she'd taken over his post while he was gone. She blows fragrant smoke in his face to get his attention, and then puts out her ash on the meat. "You burst the blood vessels in this shoulder," she says, slowly, with an acid bubbling not quite at the forefront of her tone. "Don't F.U. again. I won't say so much next time."
She actually stares him in the eyes, sanguine red to dull brown, until he swallows the lump in his throat and nods. The stub of her blunt sits on the fatty flesh long after she leaves. He can't stop looking at it. She doesn't come in again, but he barely does any work except to check the cuts that are still drying and package a few for the kitchen. He doesn't touch the bruised shoulder, doesn't turn on the air conditioning, doesn't even smoke anything himself. That stub of marijuana and tobacco on a cut of meat he couldn't carve right feels like art -- he sees himself in it somehow -- he understands Ryōshū's vision for the first time, in that defaced carcass -- maybe it's the first part of the end of his life -- when he comes in the next day, early, she's come in earlier and the shoulder is gone.
After that, she critiques his work in shorter and shorter words. Starts calling him a roach, tells him how she should never have let him into her shop, but never fires him. A new year rolls around and he gets a raise, it makes him feel dizzy and lightheaded, the dissonance in every moment with her. Somewhere in the haze of smoke and barbs, the way she sees him becomes more important than how he sees himself -- finally, finally, he's going to sleep with thoughts of something other than his death approaching -- and he starts trying to please her instead of trying to upset her. He cares about his work. She still hasn't eaten it. He wants her to eat it, thinks -- thinks it'll decide something. The moment she eats his cooking, it'll decide whether he needs someone to swallow his knuckles. Whether he's ruined her, and can only go on to ruin whatever he touches. Or something else. Something he's not ready for.
--
Gregor's right arm hurts again. He's never known where the pain comes from, only that it comes in waves that leave him sweating, panting, helpless. It hurts, and he goes to work anyway. He meets someone along the way and ends up late, dragging in a bloody body hacked to hell with the cleaver he still refuses to sharpen. Ryōshū waits for him again when he opens the door. She lets him drag the man's corpse across the threshold, and waits for him to haul the carcass on the table. He drops it halfway through lifting, another searing flash weakening all the muscle in his arm, and she's on him in an instant.
She wrestles him effortlessly to the ground, leaving him heaving with hitching breaths right next to the body. His head is beside its, his chest level with its, their arms cross like brothers. She has that thin carving knife pressed to his right shoulder, and her eyes are heavy on it, not sparing a thought for his face.
"You could be so G.F.M., couldn't you," she purrs, leaning in catlike to stare at the offending flesh. Good For Me. "Ultimately, the problem is in the brain, which means the meat is still good. You'd be better that way, V.F. Wouldn't leave fragile stock on the ground like this, would you?" She rolls up his sleeve, and begins to trace the blade -- sharp, so sharp, so unlike his own -- against his Vermin Flesh.
He can smell the iron seeping into the air. It could be the corpse or it could be his bleeding arm. He can't breathe, still gulping down breath from the attack of phantom pain and from all the sensations that his boss is inflicting upon him now, but the smell settles on his tongue anyway. It's inescapable. He's meat, he's really meat -- not even that, he's dead. A dead thing on the floor of the shop. He'll have to be disposed of. Please, God, now is when it happens. She's been haunting his life from the moment he walked in the door -- it was her, he insists now, how else could she know it all? She knows when he'll be late, she knows every procurement mistake he's ever made, she knows -- god, she knows about the arm.
But she eases off of him, leaving only a thin line of blood on his shoulder down to his arm socket, and that hungry look becomes almost pity as she turns her gaze to his face. "Toss it out. It's worthless," she commands with finality, and then she's smoothly striding out the door as though there's no fresh blood on her crisp white shirt. Leaving him there on the cold stone floor with the body.
In a moment of hysteria, he thinks about giving the apron to the corpse and leaving himself out on the curb. But he still wants to live, and he doesn't see her face again until closing that day.
--
Ryōshū finds him, weeks later, when the iron smell has seeped so far and so strong out of his workspace that it almost overpowers the thick smoke that billows out like theatrical haze around her feet as she hefts open the heavy iron door.
There are no customers today, and she flipped the sign closed the moment she suspected Gregor was up to something. So when she sees him, cleaver in one hand and the other hand battered to bloody pieces, she can let the door close behind her without worry. Its heavy thud could be a death toll. If she were kinder, it would be, but it isn't, and she's not. She breathes in the smoke that languidly flows around her body, the only moving thing in this room of stagnant air. Her strides are anything but languid and sensual -- she is like a starving animal, and he has literally presented himself as some kind of bird with a broken wing -- no, like a horse with a broken leg.
She likes to call him an insect, but she never feels more like rending his flesh with mandibles than when she crouches next to his mangled hand and drags her knife through the carnage. It's desperate work. A fox chewing off its own leg to escape the trap -- but he isn't trying to escape, is he? Nor did he succeed, clearly. The muscle is crushed, but certainly not severed. If he was trying to free himself from his own pain, that's one thing, but she turns to look him in his cloudy eyes. But he wanted her to come and finish him off, she knows, plucking the joint from his lips to place between her own. This will be better with a little mania. He doesn't want this to feel real, so she won't make it.
She lifts the hand with the flat of her blade, inspecting it like she would with any of her clumsy sous-chef's work. "Unbelievable," she mutters in a puff of smoke, and she thinks she hears Gregor chuckle. Ryōshū snaps her eyes to him, vicious. "I should fire you for this," she seethes, with more real passion and bared fangs than she's ever shown him. "You're M.M. And you're better off strung up on a hook than alive if you're going to mutilate yourself when I look away."
"Your... masterpiece?" Gregor slurs, with a tasteless grin. So much sass, suddenly, when he's been too afraid to speak a word to her since he was hired. More willing to leave smears of his own blood on her countertops than to speak to her. And suddenly, as mouthy as if he'd known her all their lives. She slaps him.
"My meat," she corrects, and returns her attention to the hand. As much fun as she'd like to have, high cuisine comes first, so she severs the cords of tendon that still keep it in the same bodily system as its previous owner before she begins to thoroughly inspect it.
There are things a meat cleaver, much less a chronically dull one, simply cannot do to prepare meat. He's never truly seen her work, so she lets him get a full show now -- removing the fingernails, skinning the piece. The callouses of the palms, the thin scars along the knuckles, all the definition which makes one's body what it is melt away -- she is left with meat on the bone, oozing blood. She can feel Gregor's eyes, highly lucid for the amount of smoke in the room and the amount of blood he continues to lose, tracking her every movement as she inspects the muscles to expose the largest veins. It's good meat, albeit heavily bruised.
Ryōshū can't use it, of course. But she pops a knuckle from its socket and puts it in her mouth, the copper blood exploding across her tongue as she sucks it for marrow. She hears Gregor's breath hitch, and sets the hand aside. She crawls to him on her knees, knuckle cracking between her teeth as she does, and grips him by the neck and forearm to get a good look at that shoulder cut she'd been teasing weeks ago. She cuts a bit of his shirt off, too, to look -- it's already ruined, hardly matters. Still, he laughs his coughing laugh again, and quips, "Desperate."
"S.T.F.U.," she returns smoothly. From the shoulder to the elbow is still good, though she needs to get the meat quickly, before any kind of infection or blood poisoning could taint it. It's not as though she wasn't expecting him to do this. Nevertheless, she won't let their fun upset the art. She never has.
"Shut the fuck up... gah, you're aggravated. Really, thought you'd be nicer... Ah, but it's over anyway, can't ask for an angel... Better it's you," he rambles, looking somewhere out in the middle distance, away from her own inspection.
"Strong Words For Ungezeifer, actually," she replies, lifting her knife to begin cutting the shoulder. It's remarkably near his neck, and he naturally flinches away from it. She lets him. The first cut is smooth, soft, effortless -- a far cry from the tearful hacking that mars the hand. She catches just between each major muscle group, as she always does. Gregor's eyes track her own shoulder, its lean muscles moving under the skin of her back and the pristine white of her top. "When it comes to separating the joint, I'll wish I had your M.C. I need it sometimes, you know. You need to take better care of it for me," she says conversationally as she spins his body towards her to carry on removing the muscles of his back from his body. Absentmindedly, she takes another knuckle of the discarded hand and bites down on it to taste the marrow, then tosses the bone shards into the corner of the room. "This all needs to be cleaned, too."
"My meat cleaver...? Ah, you know... You can have it, take it..." Gregor slurs. Ryōshū narrows her eyes.
"You know why I'm doing this, don't you?"
That gets his attention. "Ahh... hate, maybe? Pity? I've never known, I don't think. You never tell me. Ryōshū, you never tell me... Ah, Shū, tell me..."
She cuts through the joint in a heavy, weighty push that makes him choke on whatever he meant to say next. Flicking unfortunate bits of gore off her knife from the unsuited motion, she responds, "You came to me; I know good meat; ergo, you should die W.M.N.W.M. And you would die." She crushes a knuckle loudly between her teeth. She thinks he might be looking at her in awe. "Doesn't this prove it, V.F.?"
"With... with you not... without you not... I can't understand you, ah, my arm, please, I don't..." Incoherent again. The pain returning, maybe. She takes another long drag of the joint before letting him have it back -- he briefly tries to reach for it with the dead arm, and she shoves the moving shoulder back down before he can ruin her careful handiwork. Instead, she pries his lips open as if he were an animal whose teeth she had to inspect, and places it in herself.
"With Me, Not Without Me. We'll get you a new arm, though, once I'm done. And a new uniform. You can't die until I'm ready." She's nearly done carving now -- another hack at the elbow to sever it, a less choked noise this time, and the forearm drops dead to the ground at the same time that she's able to lift a beautiful cut of meat from her bleeding coworker's body. She stands, places it on the table, leaves Gregor alone on the floor for a moment.
"Why?" is all he asks, breathlessly.
She turns to him, and then sets the knife on the counter to turn her whole body so she's leaning against the table, standing over him, full attention on him.
"Even you deserve to live to see yourself become A.R.T. Especially you, maybe."
A Real Treat. She's not sure if she'll serve this one to him or eat it herself -- the reminder of the pain he was trying to escape is too much, perhaps. But even that can be beautiful, in the end. Is he ready to understand that yet...?
Based on his eyes, stunned, almost betrayed that she ate his forbidden fruit and determined he had earned redemption: no. It would take longer years until he was ready to die for all the right reasons. But she is nothing but patient, and she can keep him close and fed until then, after all.
For now, there is meat to prepare.