Stella had never been good at cooking.
She's not going to admit that within twelve miles earshot of Jesse, of course, since Jesse can whip up the simplest food without even paying full attention to the food and have it turn out really yummy, but she's always had this bad habit of burning everything to a crisp.
It's not because of her furnace. She'd gone through three before deciding it wasn't the furnace's fault; every time she attempted cooking ANYTHING in the furnace it ended up burnt to a crisp.
It's not because of improvisation. Stella had a few cookbooks, and she'd once followed the directions EXACTLY to the last period on the page. What she'd pulled out was a set of very much burned food items,
It's not even because she's not paying attention. Once, she literally watched a pot of water boil very carefully for an hour before it randomly erupted into flames. (She'd been trying to boil carrots, for those of you who might be curious.)
Another time she'd literally watched something in the furnace with such carefulness that it was a little unnerving, and when she'd pulled it out it had been burnt to a crisp.
Stella had since stopped cooking food.
Until the Admin Romeo comes along.
When Stella noticed that he'd gotten to the point where his body was getting to the thinness of a thick stick, she put her foot down.
Yes, she hated the guy. Yes, she was pissed at him for destroying her city. Yes, she wouldn't have let the guy in her house unless she wanted to destroy something.
But no, she wasn't trying to kill the guy.
Well, not through starvation, anyway.
"You know, I can't cook for you every day. Not unless you want to consistently be eating burned food." Stella pulls out a pan of (burnt) muffins and tossed it onto the counter with a little more force than necessary, inspecting the charred things. She knew she was doing everything right, she triple-checked everything, so why were these stupid things burnt?
Romeo snagged one of the earlier attempts at burned muffins, shrugging. "Well, I can't cook at all. So burned is better than nothing." He put the whole thing in his mouth and then crunched down, grinding on the muffin which at this point wasn't much more than burned ingredients solidified into a tiny rock of a muffin.
Stella froze part of the way of shutting the furnace door again, gears in her head turning.
She actually knew what she was doing but just couldn't get anything to turn out right, right?
And she actually had a decent furnace, right?
And there was nothing saying that Romeo couldn't learn to cook himself, right?
"Okay, I'm teaching you how to cook."
Romeo swallows in his surprise, coughs, and then spends the next ten minutes trying to hack out the tiny lump of burned muffin embedded in the back of his throat while Stella tries to keep him from choking to death on that muffin.
Stella finds a very simple recipe for baked potatoes. VERY simple. It's something even a total novice couldn't mess up.
She's DEFINITELY not touching any of the ingredients or the furnace, though– it's all going to be Romeo except for her talking.
"Okay, here are the potatoes." She sets the bag on the counter, opens it, and lets Romeo poke through the potatoes.
He gets rather quiet when he does, staring down into the bag, but doesn't say anything and simply sets the potatoes on the counter. One nearly rolls into the trash can before Stella rescues it.
"Okay, now you have to wash the potatoes." Stella points at the cauldron that she filled with water.
It's almost funny to see Romeo staring at the potatoes, at a complete loss. She finally takes pity on him, puts them in the water, and then tells him to just rub the dirt off of them before drying them.
He does that. So far so good.
"You done with that?"
A quiet nod. This is so extremely different from the previous Romeo, who would sneer at Stella and ignore the fact that she looked more and more tired and just tell her to 'go do her job'.
"Alright, so now you have to poke some holes in them so they don't explode."
Romeo's eyes widen to the size of saucers. "Potatoes can explode?!"
"Yeah, the holes keep them from exploding. I'm not sure why. They just do." Stella says this absentmindedly, having learned this lesson the hard way a few years ago. This was the one time her bad cooking skills could be blamed on her– she hadn't read the instructions properly.
That was the incident in which she started triple-reading the instructions after receiving them.
(Stella has to rescue a few potatoes from being stabbed so frantically that they fall apart altogether. However, a few potatoes sacrifice their existences as a solid potato to the worthy cause of teaching Romeo how to cook.)
After Romeo finishes poking the holes in the potatoes (read: stabbing them in a panic so that they wouldn't blow up in his face), Stella told him, "Okay, now you can just stick them in the furnace."
Romeo does this very carefully, setting some coal in underneath before placing the potatoes in, shutting the door, and then lighting the furnace. He looks almost terrified that the furnace is just going to explode in his face.
"Alright, now we just w–"
A popping sound, and then a shocking BANG that makes Romeo flinch away from the furnace straight into the wall. Several more banging sounds as the furnace literally trembles from the vibrations.
Long story short, Romeo might just be worse at cooking than Stella is. At least Stella doesn't make things explode when she cooks.
I should probably mention, all of these are based off of headcanons that people request. The smoking one was the only independent fic on Tumblr I've written so far.
