Notes:

When you leave me alone in a room for long enough I WILL begin writing in this style. Inspired by the Kakashi spotlight filler episode where he cooks for his genin team. Title from Dungeon Meshi, which was also an inspiration, albeit differently.

When Kakashi was too young to remember, although he knows it must be true, he had eaten well. There had been simple food, in quantity, prepared by a father who liked to make it in bulk. Neighbors recalled that ever since his wife died, there was always something to share at Sakumo's house. Soup on the pot, pickles on the shelves. Enough for two, and visitors, and babysitters, and friends.

Then there had been less. Then he'd eaten nothing. After a week of that, Kakashi learned how to reach the stove. He learned how to boil the rice, cut the greens wilting in the fridge, stir in salt and spices enough to taste. Moving around the slumped figure of his father, so still for hours at a time that he looked like statuary in the gloom, Kakashi made meals with small hands. His father ate when he was prompted to, although not much—he drifted, sometimes staring at his chopsticks, sometimes head bowed over the plate so that no part of his face could be seen.

Kakashi had been six, he thought. Or seven. He wasn't sure. His earliest memories are of climbing the chair up to the stove, squinting at the dials, with the unwieldy weight of a steel pot in his arms.

It was good when his father would eat. He felt accomplished, powerful, self-assured. He had always been precocious—he hadn't spoken until he was three, he'd been told, but he could hold a kunai knife and even throw it by the time he was two. They started young, in shinobi families. This had never seemed strange to him.

After he found his father's body, he hadn't known what to do. He could light the stove, peel an orange, hit a target with a knife from five meters, but he couldn't lift the weight of his father's empty body off the floor. He stood there for a long time in the flash of lightning, until the anger was too big for his shaking chest, and then he ran.

Blood congealed. The storm poured rain. Kakashi couldn't remember what happened next, but he supposed he must have called someone. Eventually.

While the police came and went, glaring at his home with their spinning red eyes and hard mouths, Kakashi cooked dinner. He cooked everything in the fridge. Leeks and duck and basil and rice and dough and peppers and all of it, all of it, dish after dish, bowl after bowl. The kitchen table sprouted steaming dumplings in a perfect ring, all around the edges, which was the part that he could reach.

Come and eat something, he said to the captain of the squad, who was conversing in quiet tense tones with a neighbor at the door.

Come and eat something, he said again, when the captain and his neighbor exchanged uncertain glances.

Your work is very important. I'll feed you.

When Kakashi was old enough to have been assigned to a four man squad—maybe eight, or maybe nine—he caught fish in the river that ran behind the estate, let garlic grow rampant in the yard, and pickled peaches from the trees that bloomed in the orchard full of weeds. It was important, he understood, to eat well. A strong body was a strong weapon; one had a responsibility to care for oneself. Responsibility, he understood. He would not fall short, like others.

He made dinner for his squadmates, when they followed him home. They were curious, impressed, even jealous—they were older than him, but they had never spent an evening at home without adults nearby, and the novelty left them giggling. He fed them fish and basil and felt, with relief, that everything was as it should be. He felt again that confidence, the power, the accomplishment he had felt while he kept his father alive. Everything, he was sure, lay entirely within his control.

After Obito, Kakashi did not fish. He did not forage. He did not pick peaches in the grove.

When he did go home, he wasn't there for long. He ate field rations with his teammates in the dark, or porridge from great steaming pots in camps where the fire was always going. Rings of folded knees and shoulders leaning against shoulders, on stumps or logs. Quick mouthfuls. Hands that squeezed and then released. They slept and ate and died occasionally, and filtered mud from their canteens, trading drinks of the freshest water like little silent gifts.

After Rin, he ate hospital food. He was eating hospital food when the news came that the war was over; a nurse brought him sugared persimmons in her excitement, tucking them into his hands like a secret, so full of joy she could barely stand still. A week. That's all it was. A week sooner, and Rin would still be alive. He bit one persimmon and couldn't swallow. His hacking cough was lost in the mounting cheers.

After that, Kakashi ate cold takeout.

He bought take out. He brought it home. He sat like statuary in the gloom, chopsticks forgotten in his hand, thinking of how he should die.

You already know about the dreams. We'll say no more about them.

When Minato asked him to join ANBU, he went. There was certainty in this: to have a task, to have a goal. To be needed by someone. To be useful, to someone.

For nine months he perched on the gable of a house at meal times and ate food pills, while inside a woman with red hair made soups and filled the house with laughter. It was good. He watched the sunrise, and left with the sunset. Peaches blossomed, fell, and were eaten in a world he guarded, far below.

Sometimes he allowed himself to be found by those who knew him, and dragged away to dinner. Might Gai also lived in a fatherless home, in that world after the war, and cooked for himself. Very often, Might Gai swore—while brandishing his fists—that if he could run/fight/climb/dance/play/race well enough to win, he would feed them both in celebration. Strong body, strong heart, well-fed, he would proclaim, in the thunderous voice of his father.

Ah well, Kakashi said each time, who am I to turn down a free meal?

Sometimes Gai lost, and did his absurd quota of lifts or laps in penance. But more and more, the victory of his booming laughter ended with curries, green and yellow and fragrant, on the old kotatsu in his shack. It was warm there, even in the autumn.

Nine months of soups and laughter. And then that too was gone.

Elsewhere in the world, teenagers ate sweet fruit and dumplings under street stalls. At age fifteen Kakashi ate like the war had never ended.

Kakashi! Come have a bite with us! Come have dango with us! Kakashi, come catch up, come talk to us, come talk to me, come tell me something, rival, you're so cold now, don't you care at all?

Despite all shouts, he kept on walking. If he bit into that fruit, he thought that he might choke.

The first time he cooked for himself since the war ended, he was with a boy who really had no name. Today it was Tenzo. At one time, it had been Kinoe. Probably he would be something else, tomorrow.

I've never eaten anything like this, Tenzo said, peering down at the orange sauce that Kakashi barely remembered how to make. They don't have all this—I mean, they don't do so much, at the commissary. Are you sure you want to give it to me, senpai?

Eat it if you want, Kakashi said. It'll only go to waste if you don't.

Sweet and sharp and flecked with pepper, the way that he had watched Might Gai once make it, perfect for dark and fatty meat—Tenzo blossomed around his mouthful, glowing with wonder, and Kakashi felt for the first time in so, so long, that he had done something right.

He left ANBU, after that. Or really, ANBU left him. It was unclear if that relinquishment was kindness or condemnation. But there was work, there was always work, and there was Gai—there was always Gai—and these children that the Hokage kept thrusting upon him, who never lasted a day. It was reassuring, in a way, to know where exactly those children were. Back at the academy, safe from their own stupidity, far from the world that wanted so badly to kill them. And far, as well, from Kakashi.

Gai said, will you ever forgive me? For making you leave it?

Kakashi said, buy me dinner. I'll think about it.

Night by night, coffee break by coffee break, he began to let old faces slide into his life. Asuma, fresh back from the Lord of Fire's vanguard, grumbled to him in meetings when the bureaucrats went on for too long. Kurenai, newly promoted, finding him in the Jonin lounge, asked him about his book this week. And more, new faces too, and Gai—there's always Gai—filled in the edges of his life until it dawned on him one day that he felt almost like a person, and wasn't that strange?

He'd been a regular jonin for years when the Hokage laid out the last three photos in front of him. The girl he didn't know, but the boys… well, he could tell this was going to be troublesome. The Hokage took him for a walk.

He stood in the apartment of the orphan he wasn't supposed to know, whose father he wasn't supposed to talk about, and grimaced as it dawned on him for the first time that someone was going to need to teach this kid how to eat. He had half a mind to throw everything in the fridge out himself. It wasn't good that he was already writing a grocery list in his head. He could buy green onions, for the ramen at least, and carrots. But that would be admitting that he was invested, and he couldn't be, not now, not after all these years, not him.

It wasn't until he watched the Uchiha brat lift the first bite of rice from his bento to Naruto's lips, that an unexpected affection for all of them ripped through him like the blades of a hurricane.

They could make it, he thought.

Sakura hesitated, and then lifted a bite.

I could at least let them try.

"Here, look, they're fresh. You need greens. Just try them."

"You know, most people use doors, Kakashi-sensei."

In the Land of Waves, poor and destitute though they were, their clients fed a trio of growing kids with seconds. Thirds if necessary. The bridge builder's daughter, although her shoulders were tired and her smile was thin, laid slices of egg on every bowl. She'd say, if it's a meal worth having it's a life worth living.

And they do. They live.

After this final war, Kakashi came back home.

Graves that had been empty were full, and graves that had been dug were filled in, empty. Why not unearth the old place, or what remained of it, and close it up for good? Beyond the city walls, without a caretaker, moss and vines had taken stone, while patches of broken ceiling scattered the sun.

The recipe cards he'd made a lifetime ago were cracked and fragile when he unboxed them. The cabinet had not been opened in a decade, not since his hands had memorized their ongoing work and needed no more help. Now the memory was all but gone, lost in the way that normal memories are, fuzzing and fading when you don't look for too long. Was it one cup, or two? Was it nutmeg, or cloves?

His handwriting looked so strange, pencil pale on the warped and stain-blotched cards. He hadn't known the characters for half the words, and his marks were all so large, too large for tiny hands.

I was young, he thought. I had no idea I was so young…

The peach trees had gone wild. The onions and garlic were gone, but the river ran the same. He stood on the little stone bridge that still survived, and wondered if he should mourn. But the peaches were still growing, and the dragonflies still perched in the grass, and the fish went on the same, although he hadn't known it.

A shade in the doorway. Peeking faces, curious, sheepish. After all these years, they were still so nosy. His father would have liked them.

He lifted his face, and closed both eyes.

Salt, fat, eggs, oil – red beans, green tea, white rice – all this and more, with endless dishes to wash and peas to snap, and he's lazy yes but he likes to watch when others do it, and maybe lend a hand when the complaints are funny enough, because the kids drive him crazy but he'll admit they're his, now, come what may. The only cure for losing love is to go on loving.

The only way through grief is to go on living.

"Tell you what. Let's all get dinner."