Archive of Our Own

Getting laser blasted into a new dimension a few months after getting stranded on Earth was a surprise, though.

One moment he'd been in a quarry fighting aliens, the next moment he'd been in a weird, quarry-like planet staring at different aliens.  At least on Earth he'd had the rest of the Sekaigers to look to for some sort of familiarity or reason in this bizarre new alien world they'd found themselves on.  The dimension he'd found himself in after exiting his entry crater was... strange.

More than strange.  Handsome still had no idea what a "dalek" was or why the new friends he'd made shortly after being stranded in this brave new world were all so terrified of them since the ones they'd encountered had been so easy to outrun, nor did he know what a "TARDiS" was or why it was such a game changer that the ship that had effectively kidnapped all of them was one—but he did know that this place was dangerous, and with no way to get back home and rejoin the rest of the Sekaiger team, that meant he needed to do his absolute best to finish whatever business this weird ship wanted them all alive for so he could find a way.

Preferably before they found his secret curry stash and decided to loot it, the gluttonous bastards.

But staying alive meant keeping his energy up for all the running and jumping and shooting aliens and weird robots in the face.  And that was why Handsome was once again in the ship's galley, peering through the refrigerator, gathering ingredients to make dinner with.

The ship hummed softly in the background as he examined all the ingredients one by one.  Only about half of them were things he recognized.  And that included staples like rice or salt.

He picked up a container that looked like squid and gave it a whiff.  There was a strong astringent smell, but he couldn't tell if it was pickled or if it was just naturally like that.  Handsome could potentially ask the ship for a clarification since he was fairly certain it was just making the food out of nothing.  To his knowledge, none of them had ever gone out to buy groceries since it had abducted them—

But with his luck it was probably going to just start playing that one god damned Judoon pop song it liked so much just to spite him.

So that wasn't an option.

He bit off a chunk of tentacle to give it a taste and yeah this thing was definitely pickled.  What could he make with pickled squid...?  Probably not something with a lot of strong flavors unless he wanted to completely overpower the squid taste, so that cut out a lot of things.  There were the weird flesh egg things that tasted kinda like quail, and the blue stuff that tasted like lettuce, and the apparently straight up regular carrots that were just purple for some reason...

He could just give up and make a weird seafood bibimbap or something.  The others probably wouldn't complain, especially Sathra since he'd seen her eat a variety of odd things, probably owing to whatever tragic backstory it was that forged her.  Or just being one of those shapeshifting kinds of aliens.

Or both.

Rex and Cathy were a lizard person and a cat person respectively, so were probably both some form of obligate carnivore, but they'd also been able to eat the weird meat fruit on that one cyberplanet just fine, so what did Handsome know?  Not much, honestly, he was always so confused about everything.

But it did help him with dinner planning so at least there was that.

Handsome just shrugged and pulled out some random vegetables to go with the squid.  Anything new he'd taste test while he was putting it all together.  That was how it had been with his old crew, anyways; space is a big, big place, and that means that there's always gonna be strange and exciting new things to stick in your face hole.

How very convenient that most of them pair well with white rice.

He rapped his knuckles against the countertop while he ducked into a cabinet to get a cutting board.  "Hey ship, can I get a steamer or something?"

No reply, but when his head came back up over the counter, the microwave had indeed been replaced with a steamer.

"Thanks, ship."

The engine seemed to hum just a little bit louder for a moment as he started slicing the vegetables into thin ribbons.

Handsome filled a pot up in the sink and went about polishing his rice, chewing on a sliver of weird carrot thing to gauge the flavor.  A bit more peppery than a regular carrot, with a stiffer texture.  Maybe steam it with the rice so it cooks more, or also coat in some honey-based glaze to give it some sweetness?  Or throw in some red pepper flakes to add more complexity to the flavor?

Something.  He'd figure it out.

Maybe he'd just make a bunch of smaller dishes like a dim sum instead of one big dish?  Yeah, that sounded good.

Can't go wrong with dim sum and curry, that's what Mama Blackbird never said once before in her whole life.

The key to good dim sum was time management: if you want to eat everything at the same time, you need to juggle a bunch of things all happening at once to make sure everything gets finished cooking at around the same time.  If you want your spring rolls and your dumplings to be ready at the same time, then your dumplings better be in the steamer way before you start wetting your wrapping sheets, to say nothing of the sweet and sour pork filling.

Handsome slammed a knife down on the cutting board and cracked his knuckles.  Time to get to work.

Over the course of the next hour, he sliced, diced, cubed, rondelle'd, and even chiffonaded an endless variety of weird meats and vegetables that kept popping out of the fridge like magic every time he stuck his head in and looked for something new to help round out the meal with.  If this wasn't confirmation that the ship was just making up new food whenever they got low, then Handsome was going to eat his sword.

He taste-tested everything before trying to cook with it first.  Always gotta test drive a new ingredient, even if it's just a weird onion.

Which might be why the ship generated at least like four weird onions in a row, but.

Who was he kidding, the ship was absolutely petty enough to do that, especially to him.

Handsome swore that it made the lights in his bunk blink in rainbow colors sometimes when he slept.

That said, he had a collection of various vegetables in a variety of sauces, sauteed or steamed or tempura'd for funsies, he had spring rolls, he had tamagoyaki, he had the weird pickled squid in spicy sauce to help ramp up the flavors, he had a sense of accomplishment, and he had all the steamed white rice in the star system.

Probably, anyways.  Corollary to space being very, very, big, it was also usually very, very empty.  Having like, one molecule of white rice was probably as much steamed white rice as there was in the star system.

But the serious scientific approach was for losers, and so Handsome chose to believe that there were bands of roaming rice pirates out there in the galaxy, doing dastardly deeds in the dark of the moons.  It helped that he'd actually fought a crew of dastardly rice pirates once.

Handsome pulled a big platter from one of the counters, loaded all the tiny little dim sum dishes onto it along with a pitcher of water, a pitcher of tea, and a generous helping of rice, and headed out the galley, balancing the tray on his shoulder like a real chef.  The hallway was small, quiet, and cramped, with doors only leading to the crew quarters, the medbay, and the bridge.  The engine room was secret.

Stepping out to the bridge would take just a second, but the dimension-traveler had one stop to make before heading out to the bridge.

Handsome rapped his knuckles against the wall of the ship.

"Hey.  Open up a door to your firebox or whatever you have, I made dinner."

The ship was silent. A door did not appear.

Handsome rapped his knuckles harder.  "Look, I promise I'm not trying to get you to let your guard down so I can crack open your delicious engine meats.  I already apologized for that one.  But if you're alive like you say you are, that means you can get hungry, and that means you get dinner like the rest of us.  Now open up."

His sekaicellular buzzed in his jacket pocket, a few brief notes of traitorous Judoon pop playing as the device went straight to voicemail.  Handsome narrowed his eyes.

"How dare you defile the sanctity of my morpher.  I demand access to the engine as recompense for this slight."

The lights in the hallway began to flicker.  Probably in code.

Luckily, Handsome was too stupid and from a different dimension to know what that code was.

"You are going to have to land eventually to take us to the next weird little adventure you want us to go on," he said, staring intimidatingly at the wall, "and when that time comes, I am going to put the leftovers in your thrusters so that they burn up the moment you take us back up into space.  You will have dinner.  This is not negotiable."

The lights went out in the hallway.

An empty dumbwaiter was situated in the wall when they came back on.

"Okay, but does that go to the engine or is it just an airlock in disguise so you can vent all my hard work like a picky four year old?"

Judoon pop buzzed from his jacket pocket again, louder this time.

"Fine.  Be that way.  But don't think this is over."

He rested the platter on his knee and gingerly placed an assortment of items (and rice) into the dumbwaiter before returning it to his shoulders, sliding the door shut when he was done and heading down the hall.

A faint burning smell met his nose just before Handsome stepped through the door to the bridge.

What sounded like a movie met his ears just after.

As Handsome stepped into the bridge, he quickly spotted the rest of their little crew of ship hostages" Cathy, a cat woman from the year five billion; Sathra, a different sort of cat woman from a year that apparently didn't exist anymore; and Rex, a Silurian lizardman from the dawn of time itself or something.

Adding in Handsome himself, a sentai warrior from the current year that just happened to be in a different dimension at the moment, it was a weird and varied enough group that sometimes he almost felt like they were in one of those cheap, sci-fi adventure shows for kids, with rubber-suited actors all mucking about on an alien planet that was totally not just a random patch of land the studio owned with a weird filter on it.  All they were missing was some everyman human from Kyoto or something to react to all the wild and crazy things they'd stumble across every week.

Handsome himself didn't count, of course.  Anyone caught mistaking him for a human would be in for a rude awakening.

The sound of the door opening must've been covered up by the sounds of the movie playing on the ship's main computer screen, because none of them seemed to notice his entrance.  He watched for a few seconds, trying to place what the near-pitch black action sequence on the screen was, even knowing that there was probably no way that he'd recognize whatever movies existed in this dimension.

Then by sheer chance Handsome saw a stylized bat emblem on the hero's chest and it finally clicked.

"Oh, is that one of the Wayne documentaries?" he asked.

Three heads turned to face him as he approached the table, with three different greetings.

"Oh, hi Sekaiyellow," Sathra said politely, her gaze nonetheless quickly shifting to the food to see if it might turn out to be spiders again.

"Hey, Handsome," Cathy said cheerfully, because she was hardly the type to pass up casual flirting with friends, even if in this case it was less flirting and more that being his actual name.

Rex, meanwhile, just gave a wave and a long, tired sigh, rubbing at their eyes with the pad of a thumb.

"Yeah.  Sure.  It's... a documentary," they said in exactly the manner of someone who has given up trying to explain the same point to a group of idiots over and over again.

Handsome kind of wondered who those idiots were in this case.  "Well, yeah, what else would it be?  Historical fiction?"

"It's... Definitely fiction."

"Look, hon, I get what you're saying," Cathy butted in, "but I really think that if Batman weren't real, we'd know that by now.  Like, tens of thousands of years of historians can't have just made up a guy that radically changed the history of Old New York."

"Okay, Cathy, but if that were the case then why are all the 'documentaries' we have about his life in different eras?" Rex said.

"I don't know, why are all the ones about Sherlock Holmes like that?"

"Why—" Rex clamped their mouth shut, breathing deeply through their nose.

Handsome looked over to Sathra to get her insight.  The shapeshifter held up her hands.

"I didn't really get much exposure to history before going through time.  I can't really say anything for or against because I just don't know anything about it," she explained.

Handsome nodded his head.  Fair enough.

He bounced his shoulder, directing attention to the platter of delicious rice and space vegetables he was carrying before setting it down on the table.  He passed around the serving dishes and chopsticks one by one as he spoke.  "I made dinner; couldn't think of what to fix, so I just made a bunch of smaller stuff to go with rice."

Cathy made a raspberry noise that sounded odd coming through her cat lips.  "Hey, it's better than what I could'a made.  I pretty much lived on bad coffee and instant noodles in New New York."

"Do hairdressers not make a lot of money?" Sathra asked, curious.

"I mean yeah that was part of it, but also I just never learned how to use the stove."

"Thank you for dinner, Sekaiyellow," Rex said, reaching for their chopsticks and snapping them apart.  Their eyes flicked up at him from under their ever-present newsboy cap.  "Do you need help with the dishes afterwards?"

Handsome waved him off, pulling up a seat at the table and reaching for his own chopsticks.  "Nah.  When I first started cooking for the crew, I learned pretty quick how to clean as I went or else I'd get stuck scrubbing everything hours after it'd already stuck to the pans.  Everything's all washed and dried already."

"You said they were called the Sekaigers, right?" Sathra asked, plucking morsels onto her plate with her fingers (did she know how to use chopsticks?) after having evidently determined that it was not, in fact, spiders again.  "You don't talk about them much.  Did you cook for them often?"

"Sometimes yeah, but this was before I got roped into the Sekaigers, this was back when I was still a pirate."

"Wait, you were what?" Cathy said, delighted, her hairdresser's sense for gossip perking up as she poured her tea.

"You were what." Rex said, significantly less delighted, their reporter's sense for nonsense quickly putting a variety of pieces together.

"Oooh," Sathra said, not really having any applicable senses to use here aside from maybe the common one.  "Is that where your sword comes from?"

"No that's standard issue sentai equipment, same with the gun."

"I've been wondering, we didn't have a lot of swords in the future."

"Does this make us accomplices?" Rex muttered.

"I mean we're all already kidnapping victims, I don't think it really matters," Cathy said, putting a supportive hand on their shoulder.

"Nope," Handsome agreed, "Probably not."

He popped a dumpling in his mouth without another word and enjoyed the taste of a meal shared between friends.