The Blonde Princess

Elijah cooks

Elijah cooks. It's not that his siblings are unable, simply that he is more talented than they. And he enjoys it. It always made him feel lighter, younger, even. His siblings do not object much to his cooking; they haven't needed to eat in a millennium, but they do so anyway, to humour him, and because his meals are quite possibly the best they've ever had. 

Make no mistake, the Mikaelson siblings fancied themselves connoisseurs of most earthly things, culinary ones included, and had been exposed to the finest foods concocted by the finest chefs in the world, but nothing ever compared to Elijah. He had a millennium on  them,  to be fair. As children, they lived in an ancient society based on gender roles. The men hunted, the women prepared the food. 

Traditionally, when they were young, Esther cooked for them. She always seasoned the meat Miakel brought home as best she could and made sure to spare some for the boys to eat the next day before their father took them out for hunting lessons. However, when Mikael fell into particularly rowdy company and frequented the village tavern more often than not, he began to get rougher and rougher with Esther. He would push her around at first, but soon, it turned from manhandling her to blatantly assaulting her. He was an angry drunk, and his wife bore the brunt of it. She uttered a word to the children, but they knew. Finn and Elijah especially. Finn took to accompanying their mother to Ayanna's hut for healing herbs, and staying up waiting for Mikael with her so when he got home, his  mother would be spared a beating. 

Mikael refrained from hitting  Esther in front of the children, lest their loose lips recount the happenings of their household to the other children and it became village gossip. Elijah helped his mother by performing  her motherly duties and taking over any tasks that were particularly difficult after being beaten within an inch of consciousness. So he cared for Rebekah as an infant, did his younger siblings' laundry, cleaned the hut, and cooked. They were difficult roles to manage along with his own, but he planned his time efficiently so that when he got home, and his father went to find happiness at the bottom of several bottles, he would start the furnace for the meat,  do the laundry before Rebekah awoke from her afternoon nap, and hang it up to dry overnight. He cleaned their hut every other day; it was the easiest of his chores, for it only had two rooms; one small one for his parents and a larger one for the children. It certainly was not easy, but he made do. It was what he always did; he took care of his family.

When they became vampires, Elijah no longer had to break his back caring for them. They were grown and reckless and often made it abundantly clear how unwelcome his guidance was. Of course, he looked after them anyway, and tried to protect them from themselves. But it was apparent; cooking and cleaning for them was not going to be enough anymore. They did not need him. He had nobody left to take care of.

He began cooking again a little after his two hundredth birthday. Niklaus had shunned him again, they had had a disagreement over his feeding habits, and his brother had requested some distance between them.Elijah had been hurt, and he was terribly lonely; a healer with no wounds to treat. He was a fixer with nothing that needed to be fixed. He felt empty. So he began to cook. It started because he was spending his days in some Italian manor, wallowing alone in his despair, and the lady of the house had scraped together a meal that smelled delicious enough to drag him out of his chambers for the first time in six days. It was osso buco alla Milanese, if he was not mistaken. He had sat down to eat with her, when he suddenly realised that he had not had a meal in over a century.  There had been no point to it. Vampires did not need to consume human nutrients to keep them alive, and the thought of sitting by his lonesome at a table built for twelve never much appealed to him. However, sitting beside the chatty Italian woman and warming his stomach with her delicacies, he decided that he would start cooking again, as he did for his family lifetimes ago. Not because he needed it to survive, and certainly not because he had to. Because it reminded him of simpler times, when all he needed to do was fix them a meal so they would forget the troubles of their home. Because when he was but a boy, with no way to stop the terrible things happening around him, and all he could do was cook in the place of his mother, it made a world of difference.