Page 134 of Legacy Ascended

"That's teaching. I've been doing it for nineteen years and it looks exactly like this."

We cook. Or he cooks and I hand him things and eat two of the thirteen ingredients before they reach the pan, and he catches me at it twice and says nothing either time.

At the point where the recipe demands that everything sit and do nothing for forty minutes, Jon puts the lid on, steps back, and looks at the clock with genuine hostility.

"Forty minutes."

"You said you'd fill it complaining."

"I intend to." He turns the burner down. "This is the part I object to on principle. Forty minutes in which the only correct action is to not act. It's absurd."

"It's resting."

"Toast was resting," Jon says, "according to Torres, and it was carbon."

Pickles is supervising, very judgmentally. I give him an extra cricket anyway.

We eat at the table with the plates on a stack of journals. The food is genuinely good. I tell him so twice and he goes faintly pink both times and pretends to be interested in the pepper.

Halfway down my plate I put my fork down.

"I thought about your homework."

"I'm sorry."

"You're not."

"No," Jon says.

"I don't have all of it." I turn my glass. "I know I want the name. It's in the record and it's staying in the record, and I want it on the wall in Faris's hall where the blank space is, and I want the history corrected everywhere we can prove it's wrong. I want the records — not just access, I want them to stop being somebody else's collection about my family."

"Those are four things and they're all answerable," Jon says. "What about the rest?"

"I don't know about the land. There are people living on it. Some of them have been on it for generations and it isn't their fault what somebody did with a blade in a records office." I look at him. "And I don't know about a Council seat. Everybody keeps saying it like it's the prize, and every time I try to imagine sitting in that room for the next forty years, I—"

I stop.

"You don't want it," Jon says.

"I don't know if I want it."

"They are." He puts his own fork down. "For what it's worth, and I want to be clear I'm not answering it for you — the fact that you've separated them at all puts you ahead of where most claimants start. Most of them arrive wanting everything and work out later which parts they actually intended."

"Is that the historian talking?"

“That's the man who sat through nineteen years of faculty reviews watching people ask for things they hadn't thought through.” He picks his fork back up. "Eat. It's better hot and it'll be even better tomorrow."

"Quit teasing me about staying for tomorrow."

Afterward, we end up on the two-seat sofa with the fire down and nothing on the low table, and he's got one arm along the back of it and I'm half across him, and the kissing has stopped being careful.

His hand is under the hem of my sweater flat against my back and his mouth is at the base of my throat, and I have practically crawled into his lap and both hands in his hair, and he says something against my collarbone I don't catch.

"What?"

"I said you've ruined my evening."

"Your evening was a complicated recipe."