[SO2][Fic] No Taste At All (Dias, SFW)

[wallwalker]

Title: No Taste At All
Fandom: Star Ocean 2
Character: Dias
Rating: SFW
Warning: Canon character death

Dias and chicken skewers. Written some time ago at fic_promptly.

---

When Dias had been younger and more shameless, he had spent hours at Rena's house, begging her mother to make him chicken teriyaki skewers. They were his favorite food, and he would have happily eaten them for dinner, lunch and even breakfast, if only anyone had made them for him.

It wasn't that his own mother wouldn't have made them for him if he'd asked, once in a while. She'd made them for him before, and they were good; he'd happily eaten them. But if he had ever been forced to say who he thought the best cook in the village was, he would have had to have said that it was Westa; her cooking was fantastic. He didn't know what she did to make it that good, but whatever it was, she cooked the best meals that he'd ever tasted. And her teriyaki was always perfect, cooked just right, with just the perfect amount of spice... he'd never say that to his mother's face, of course, but that didn't mean it wasn't true.

When Dias had grown older, he'd tried to learn to cook himself. He had assumed that once he was old enough to take odd jobs around the village, he could buy the makings for the skewers and cook them himself whenever he wanted. But he had rapidly learned that cooking was harder for him than swordplay. He followed his mother's directions and Westa's suggestions perfectly, but no matter what he did - even if one of them was watching him and correcting him constantly - his skewers never came out right. They tasted odd, or they were burnt or undercooked, or they fell off of the wooden sticks and into the fire before he could stop them. After a while he'd given up, and it had always fallen to someone else to do the cooking - his mother or Westa, or Rena and Cecille, once they'd grown old enough. Rena had always joked that Dias simply had no taste at all, and in all frankness, Dias thought that she was right.

That was before his mother had been killed, of course. After that, having chicken skewers didn't really matter as much anymore, except that he kept wishing over and over that he could have had his mother's cooking again. Even if it wasn't as good as Westa's, it was still his mother's, and now he'd never be able to eat them again. Sometimes, when he'd managed to deal with the larger pains of losing his family, it was the small things like that one that would come back to him, and make him hide somewhere to cry.