Terra plants tomatoes now. She doesn't know how they grow or when to plunge her fingers in and thrust the ripe fruit free, but still. Sometimes, even in winter, she feels herself stare at the ground, a slight sheen of yellow to her eyes, and she feels darkness bunch against her senses. Feels the coil of worms nearby and nudges them away with a slight shift of her fingers. Mole tunnels she redirects to Mr Bungo's garden down the street, a subtle revenge for when he threw poisoned meat over the fence and left Tommy to cry over a dog that shook and frothed at the mouth.
But when summer comes, even before she digs down and sets the fruit free, she knows without seeing that the skins will eventually run red.
Terra learns to cook. Or rather she always knew how to cook - if by cook you mean letting a tin of beans heat over a makeshift fire. But this time, her kitchen is not comprised of a heap of logs under a sky spilled over with stars. Because the only stars she now sees are in the gleam of the counter as she runs a knife down between the flaunting bulges in the tomatoes' flesh. She chooses to slice them lengthways, her focus on the recipe stretched out in front of her.
Cut as though you are in a rage, it reads, cut as though you are angry, as though you are filled with spite, instead of love. Cut, slice and divide.
Really, Terra thinks, it is more poetry than instructions. And once, she would have sneered at it, laughing at the way it speaks through a filter that sounds all Starfire instead of simple cookbook.
Except. Except she came here to be a different girl. To learn the value of words on paper, instead of those that travel through air. She has always misinterpreted those, so she wants to start from the bottom up, focus on her reading, before she re-learns how to talk. How to talk as Tara, instead of Terra.
And Tara wouldn't joke. Tara would just...do.
Grate a carrot, the recipe says. Slice off its skin and chop, chop down into squares, like a log that needs to be harvested of its bark. Transform into cubes and building blocks, little toys that splinter unless you warm them in a pot, the tomatoes nestled underneath. Prepare as a necessity, as though there is a chill brushing over your skin, if you do not.
And divide an onion of its rings, rake over their lines with the knife and realise that this is the perfect time to cry. Lace them in; sprinkle them like flowers over a bride. Heat and stew for ten minutes, before littering over with basil like graffiti. Pretend this is a joyous occasion.
Tara turns on the gas rings. And pretends.
The spaghetti, when she dips it in, is delicious. She thrusts it through with her fork, spearing the stray clumps of tomato she could not run through with a blender and decides she has done well. She makes a second batch of the sauce and leaves it in a pot next to Titans Tower. Beside it, she places a note, a typed one, reading, from someone who isn't a fan. I think you should cut down on the pizza. Try this with spaghetti, I think it tastes great.
It is something, she feels, that Tara would say.
Two weeks later, Starfire is in her kitchen, something green and bubbling within the pan Tara has spent of all ten minutes rinsing out yesterday. Tara grits her teeth and waits.
'It is gobudsterk,' Starfire informs her, the very end of her sentence joined, at the tip of the 'k', by a smile.
'Great,' says Tara, 'why are you here?'
'On my planet, though we have no word for kindness, we have room enough in our language for gratitude,' says Starfire gently. 'And when someone arises from the battlefield, someone we believed to be dead...well, we cook gobudsterk, to welcome them home.' And before Tara can protest, Starfire waves a hand through the air, her fingers, in their brief flash of movement, seeming to encompass the whole kitchen. 'This is your home now, yes?'
Tara shuts her mouth, swallows, and nods.
The gobudsterk, when Starfire arranges it on her plate before her, wiggles as though there is a beating heart contained within. Tara chucks a spoon in its middle, sieving out the strange blue herbs swirling at its corners, and then after hesitating, puts it in her mouth. But it does not taste of sushi mixed with ice-cream. It tastes of peppermint roasted over lamb-fat along with pizza-crust staining its edge.
Something strange must twist its way over her face, because Starfire's cheeks turn red and Tara is reminded of her tomatoes.
'I could not...ah, the brined flank of a Cubris is hard to find. So I made do with our leftover pizza in it's place. It has a familiar substance that is most pleasing to the tongue.'
'Um,' says Tara, 'that's great, Star.'
The nickname falls from her lips without thought and she curses herself at the look of rapture it places on Starfire's face at the sound.
'Tastes great too,' she adds more nonchalantly, but her lack of enthusiasm does not remove the new light from Starfire's face, not one jolt.
'You plant tomatoes?' asks Starfire. She leans over, fingers clamped delicately over her knees as a stray lock of hair falls over into the dirt. The strands fold like paper, so much darker than the skins Tara had nursed into being, out here, among the beetles and black soil.
'Yep,' says Tara. 'And I even managed not to kill them. How about that?'
Starfire's head swivels round and her eyes, so green and yet so much lighter than Beastboy's skin, pierce Ter-no, Tara, to the core.
'We were always stronger than tomatoes, friend Tara,' she says quietly. 'And you...you have created beauty, life where none was before.' Her head sweeps back round to inspect the green spurs poking up through the soil. Tenacious, for all Tara could crush them with more than simply her hands or a shovel.
'You gave us beauty too, while you were with us,' Starfire says thoughtfully. 'We would not have loved you so dearly, if you did not. And I choose to believe that not everything you said to us during those months was a lie.'
She stands up, brushing out the black flecks in her skirt with a few gentle pats. Terra watches her with a wobbling lip and turns away.
Next month she leaves a basket of tomatoes at the doorstep of Titans Tower instead. And, as if on cue, the next day Starfire is in her kitchen, sweeping at least half of her crop into a saucepan.
'Teach me to make the sauce please, friend Tara,' she asks with shining eyes.
And Tara yields. If only because Starfire respects her enough to understand what she is doing. She does not wait at her elbow like Beastboy asking every five minutes exactly what she is cutting or throwing into the pot. And that is alright. Because as Tara chooses and divides, Starfire's eyes get rounder and rounder, her finger budding at her lip in thought.
Starfire has changed, Tara reflects. She wants to ask but now holds herself back. Perhaps it is something Raven taught her. Or perhaps whatever new adventures the Titans have been on without her have sparked this change, allowing a weary wisdom to slot into place.
Then again, of course, both Starfire and Beastboy have always been far wiser than her.
'Here's the recipe,' she says afterwards, practically shoving it into Starfire's arms. And Starfire's eyes flicker over it, her expression smoothing over into this new thoughtfulness as she reads the words of 'anger' and 'spite' and 'love'.
'This is a most strange recipe,' she says finally.
'Good though,' says Tara, 'perfect in fact, for someone like me.'
During the final summer months, Starfire flutters over her garden, the wide open brim of her straw-hat casting shadows over the places where the furrows of Tara's fingers do not reach. They make grey bubbles appear over the red of the tomato skins, make them bruise and burnish under the golden glow of sun, instead of simply shimmering away with a cut of light. Tara does not miss the white glare as much as she thought she would. The plants seem less plastic this way, less like dolls on a sill.
It's funny as well, because Starfire doesn't need a hat. She never has. You could dip her head in fire and Tara is half convinced she would come out with nothing less than a yellow burn, hair flaming but intact.
'Please, I can pick this one?' Starfire asks, fingers pointing tentatively at a small, slightly stubborn stalk.
'Sure. Just remember, squeeze and then pull.'
Starfire squeezes. And juice comes sputtering out, straight into the centre of Tara's staring eyes.
Starfire squeals a sorry out into the air and Tara laughs and laughs, the earth letting out a friendly rumble beneath her. Her eyes open and inside them is a healthy glow, more blue than yellow.
But still. She is Tara. And she does not need to be a titan in order to keep a friend. Perhaps one day she will see the others, manage to arrange a cookery class with them all. But for now, under the sun, her hands close over Starfire's. And she teaches her to twist and pull, a little at a time, and not all at once. Just enough, perhaps, to start to get the juices to flow.
Funny story. I actually learnt to make pasta sauce from raw tomatoes by following a recipe from a work of fiction, that was similarly poetic in nature. And much to my surrise, it worked. I still use it to this day. As for the recipe I have crafted here, it is...well, less a full recipe and more just all the stuff I do before running it through the blender while it's still warm. I also tend to add a bit more water than I've written here.