FicWad

In his time he had faced down monsters, an evil cult, and even a god. He had lost his wife and his daughter, and chosen to raise another girl who might well have been the reincarnation of the young woman who'd stolen his Cheryl away to begin with. In short, he'd been through more than most people could imagine experiencing in a lifetime.

So, you would think he could handle something as simple as cooking a decent meal.

"Daddy, is my chicken s'posed to me cold in the middle?" Cheryl asked doubtfully. She hadn't taken a single bite of her meal yet, still carefully picking apart the various components of it as she judged its edibility.

"Huh? No! Here, honey, switch with me." He quickly took her undercooked piece of chicken and replaced it with his own, which was burnt black on the outside but at least cooked all the way through. He'd been sure that turning down the heat and shortening the cooking time some when making her piece would make it turn out better than his, but he guessed he must have over done it a little.

She finally apparently decided that the salad looked the most appetizing. He started to relax, glad that she'd found something she was willing to try, then he looked a little more closely at the forkful she was raising to her mouth. "No! Don't bite that!"

She dropped her fork, startled, and stared at him, her dark eyes wide. "...Daddy?" she asked hesitantly.

"Da...arn organic food sellers," he said, just catching himself before swearing in front of her. He shook the salad off her fork, revealing a slug caught on its tines.

"Ew! Ewwww, Daddy, that's /gross/."

"Sorry." He pushed both of their salads to the other end of the table. "Daddy should have washed the lettuce before using it. Then he would've seen them. Here, try the string beans. I didn't have any butter to cook them in, so I used a little peanut butter instead. I thought it would be kind of like--"

Her scrunched-up expression of disgust told him clearly that she didn't really care what he'd thought it would be like. This had been so much easier when she was still a baby, and he could just feed her canned food from the store. He couldn't remember his other Cheryl ever complaining about the meals he made her, she just complacently ate whatever he gave her and-- No. No, he couldn't let himself compare the two of them. It wasn't right.

"Okay, okay," he said, after she'd at least taken one bite of the beans and swallowed it in spite of looking more disgusted than ever. "How about we go to Happy Burger?" As she jumped out of her seat, immediately looking happy again, he swore to himself that /tomorrow/, tomorrow would be the day that he finally went out an found a cooking class he could take and stop raising her on restaurant foods.

He just ignored the voice in the back of his brain reminding him that he'd been swearing the same thing almost every night for the past five years.