Prompt 27: "Try some." (Neelix & Tal Celes, Season 6)

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Whose bright idea was this again? thought Tal Celes, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and shuffling along the corridor at 0500 hours. Oh, right. Mine.

She'd been half joking when she'd made that comment about Neelix needing a waitress in the mess hall, but Captain Janeway had taken it seriously. According to her, catering was important work and Mr. Neelix would be grateful for the help. In reality, Celes suspected, the Captain was probably just tired of the Talaxian's cooking, and at her wit's end about what to do with an incompetent engineer.

This is my last chance to prove I have a place here. Please, Prophets, please, don't let me screw this up.

The mess hall was mostly dark when she walked in, but the galley at the back was bright enough to light up the entire room. Neelix was already there, humming tunelessly and scrubbing his hands under the blue light of the sterilizer. As soon as he saw her, he came bustling out from behind the counter, smiling from ear to ear, more wide awake than anyone should be at this hour.

"Good morning, my new assistant! Delighted to see you!" He clapped her on the shoulder with a heartiness that made her stagger. "Welcome to the mess hall! Now put these on, keep your hands under there for thirty seconds – thirty seconds precisely, mind you – and let's get cracking!"

He plopped a hair net on her head and a yellow tie-dyed apron over her shoulders, waved her over to the sterilizer, and one of the hardest days of her life began.

Cooking for a ship's crew was fast-paced, relentless, physical work. To spare energy for the replicators, a lot of it had to be done from scratch, which meant pounding bread dough until her arms ached, running in and out of Aeroponics with heavy crates of vegetables, and more chopping, scrubbing and peeling than she must have done for years, if ever. It wasn't the first time she had worked like this, but old habits were taking their time to come back.

As for Neelix, she was getting to know a whole new side of him. The cheerful, easygoing Morale Officer turned out to be as exacting as Seven of Nine herself when it came to food.

It started with the fruit bowls they set out for breakfast, when he whipped out two medical tricorders identical to the Doctor's, handed her one, and told her to start scanning.

"Check the acid content. If it's above this much - " He waved the instrument over a yellow ball of spikes and showed her the number, "Only the Bolians can eat it, so you put it in the blue bowl on the right."

"Bolians. Blue bowl. Got it."

"Whoa, that's not a fruit, that's a nut." He snatched something brown, glossy and teardrop-shaped out of her hands. "We've got twelve people with nut allergies, so it goes in the red bowl."

"Understood."

"And whatever you do, don't let Crewman Dalby have more than one, because he's been using them to brew liquor on Deck Fifteen and the Captain forbid it."

"Seriously?! … I mean, yes, sir."

And here I thought the Grade Three sensor analyses in Engineering were complicated.

The first "customers" started trickling in around 0600: insomniacs getting an early start (including a sleepy-eyed Captain Janeway, who lifted her coffee cup with a smile of approval), night shift crewman having dinner at the same time as the day shift was having breakfast. Neelix reheated leftovers from the stasis units at the back of the galley, circulated with a pot of coffee, and had a kind word to say to everyone, even if they only grunted in reply. They ate their own breakfast standing – yesterday's iced buns and a cup of coffee – by which time she was so hungry, it was one of the best meals she'd ever had.

Neelix's patience, though, were not inexhaustible. As the midday deadline approached, he revealed a shortness of temper she'd never guessed at from the opposite side of the galley counter.

"Keep those tubers coming, Crewman, while we're still young!" he shouted over the sizzling stir-fry pan.

"I'm trying, I just … this knife is really freaking sharp."

"Medkit's in the back, now come on! There'll be mutiny if we don't serve lunch on time."

He beckoned sharply for her to finish chopping and peeling and drop the finished slices into the pan. Celes would almost rather have approached another dark matter centipede than that stove with its hissing open flame, but she did.

Neelix's hand, she couldn't help but notice, bore several scars that could have been knife or burn marks as well as his Talaxian spots. He wasn't asking any more of her than he'd ask of himself.

At 1200, the lunchtime rush began. As overwhelmed as she was, Celes couldn't help being at least a little bit intrigued by how different it felt, seeing all the senior officers from her new perspective. Who knew that Commander Chakotay, for example – stoic, formidable ex-Maquis that he was – was so picky about his food?

"Does it have carrots in it?" he said, frowning at his stir fry as Neelix ladled it onto his plate.

"No, sir. Local ingredients only, fresh off the Delta Flyer."

"Oh, good," he said, in the most unconvincing tone she'd ever heard.

Lieutenant Paris, the next in line, was even less diplomatic. "Holy crap, Neelix, what's in this stuff? Wait, let me guess, I don't wanna know."

"Come on, Tom," said Ensign Kim next to him. "We all know you'd eat a gel pack with enough ketchup on it. Oh hey, Celes, how's the new job?"

"Fine, Ensign, thank you," squeaked Celes, adjusting her hairnet, self-conscious and irritated at the same time.

"Thank God, Neelix finally got a sous-chef!" Paris clasped his hands melodramatically. "Please tell me you're here to spare me and the Doc from treating endless heartburn cases."

"Ah, but my dear Lieutenant," Neelix shook his ladle in Paris' face. "You'd be so bored in Sickbay otherwise!"

The three of them burst out laughing, Neelix included, but Celes gritted her teeth. She'd heard her shipmates joke about the food for years, she'd done it herself even, but that was before she'd known how hard he worked. When the two bridge officers asked for sausages, she dumped them on their plates in tight-lipped silence.

By the time the last empty plate had been returned, Celes slumped into the galley table in a state of utter exhaustion. Her feet were sore, her hairnet itched, and worst of all, she was just as incompetent here as she'd ever been in Engineering. She couldn't blame Neelix for being short with her; she'd been getting in his way all day. He probably hadn't wanted an assistant in the first place.

"Eat up," he said, scraping the last bits of stir fry out of the pan onto the last two clean plates. "Thirty minutes, then we need to start on cleanup."

Cleanup? The stacks of used plates and piles of dirty cutlery loomed in her vision like a greasy, sticky mountain range. Then there was still dinner to prepare, and more cleanup after that, and … What in the galaxy was I thinking?

"Hey now, why the long face? You're doing great so far."

"You don't have to be so nice, Mr. Neelix," she mumbled into her plate. "If you want me to go back to Astrometrics, I'll understand."

"No, no, I mean it. You've done this before, haven't you?"

"At my parents' restaurant, yes."

"Did you like it?"

"Sometimes."

She was homesick. Working in a kitchen again had been bringing up memories all day; part of her clumsiness had been due to the effort of pushing them away. The moment of quiet, however, had them all crowding back again: Mother singing quietly as she stirred a pot of hasperat, the warm spicy smell all over the kitchen; Father pouring sweet purple jumja sap into molds the night before the Gratitude Festival. She'd wanted to help, but they'd laugh and shoo her out, telling her that schoolwork came first.

She'd told herself she didn't miss the restaurant, dirty dishes and all, but by the Prophets, she'd been wrong.

"When I was a little girl, I was always hanging around the kitchen," she confessed, "But my parents … they were service caste on Bajor, and then they barely made it out when the Cardassians came … they cooked because it was all they knew, but they wanted better things for me. That's why I joined Starfleet."

She side-eyed Neelix to see how he'd react. Her human friends were sometimes offended on her behalf when they heard this story (But Celes, what about your right to choose?), but the Talaxian only nodded, the briefest of shadow passing over his sunny face. Perhaps he, too, was thinking of his family.

"Well," he said, between shoveling down his food with remarkable speed. "Personally, I do believe that cooking is one of the noblest professions in the galaxy."

He patted her hand, leaving a streak of sauce on her uniform sleeve, and they both smiled.

"Um … actually, sir, I do have an idea. The spices in this, they're kind of … "

"Yes?"

"Let me just ... "

Thinking of hasperat had shaken something loose in her brain. Spices need to be subtle, her mother always said. Every flavor must complement the other. Neelix's stir fry was spicy enough to make her eyes water, but it needed something. She jumped up, ran to the spice rack, and came back with a jar of Bajoran redroot powder that must have been sitting there since the beginning of Voyager's mission.

She took the tiniest pinch – just a few grains, really – and sprinkled it over Neelix's plate.

" … Try some," she finished. "Please."

He nibbled on a forkful, tilted his head this way and that, hummed thoughtfully …

… and beamed.

"Tal Celes," he said grandly. "Don't even think about going back to Astrometrics. We'll make a chef out of you yet."