The Eyes of Fate (Currently in Rewrite)

Chapter 48

"Vyper, you don't have to." Sentinel said, staring at his teammate. "I just did it to show that I trust you guys."

"I know I don't, that's kind of the point." Vyper grinned at him, then shifted to look at Fang. "We need to show the boss man how monsters really are, don't we?"

"You sure?" Ranger said, putting his hand on his brother's shoulder. "You gonna tell them everything?"

"Everything." Vyper nodded as he looked around at the rest of them. "I want to. Maybe it'll help to talk about it. Besides, I've already told you."

Sentinel nodded along with the others. Oracle reached behind where she was sitting and pulled out drinks that she started handing out. Sentinel cracked his and took a drink, then looked back at Vyper. He had set his aside and was staring at his hands.

"So my real name is Ashton Caisfar, and back before all of this, before I got my eyes, I wanted to be a chef."

"Go figure," Chesyr joked, getting a small chuckle from all of them.

"Anyway," Vyper continued, "After I got out of high school, when Ranger went off to the army, I went to a culinary college. I had plans to be a big name chef, open a restaurant, and make money doing what I loved. I wanted to be the first Chef with a three Michelin star restaurant in my state. I loved cooking, still do, and I'm good at it. 

"College was great. It was tough being a small town kid with no real culinary schooling before the college classes, but I had a knack for it. I was excelling in all my classes, near the top of the class, learning more and more each day. I even found a boyfriend who was in a different class, and we were doing great.

"Unfortunately, not everyone was doing great. There was a boy, Kevin, in my class who was just awful. He was failing a lot of his classes, and his cooking was awful. The teachers were constantly calling him out for doing something incorrectly, using his dishes as examples for what not to do. My friends and I figured that he must have been the kid of somebody important to have even made it into our class. We all dreaded the days that he cooked for all of us."

"Did that happen a lot?" Fang broke in.

"Not often, the teachers made sure of that. There were 'cooking weeks' where each student cooked lunch for all of the culinary classes. There weren't too many of us, but it was enough so that we understood the kind of pressure a chef could be under during busy times. It always felt so frantic, you cooked for like an hour or more straight sometimes. It was supposed to be for every student, but we only had a certain number of days, so some students got skipped over. Kevin, on the other hand, got skipped over constantly. He only cooked maybe every third cooking week, just often enough that he got a grade.

"Well, we had finally hit a day where he was cooking. My table was his first customers, after the teachers, and it still took us almost half an hour to get our food. We could see that it was all either burnt or undercooked, or sometimes both. We all knew it was going to be awful, but we ate it anyway. We had to, to give it a proper judging. So, amid the smell of burning fish and the noise of our teachers and classmates, we ate. It took us until everyone had eaten and were giving Kevin our judging to realize what was wrong."

Vyper paused, looking down at his hands. They were shaking, and he clenched them. It didn't help. Sentinel reached over and slowly laid one hand on Vyper's fist. The shaking slowly stopped, he opened his hand instead. Sentinel interlaced their fingers, and when Vyper looked at him he nodded encouragement. Vyper took a deep breath, and continued talking.

"One of our teachers was yelling about how awful his cooking was. Kevin usually cringed away, or sometimes cried, when he was being yelled at. Instead, he was just smiling all wide. It was a weird smile, showing too many teeth. It almost looked like his lips were going to split open."