The Ambiguous Colour of Saffron

by evelili

Rating: everyone
Tags: Saffron Masala, Equestria Girls, Coriander Cumin, Sunset Shimmer, Slice of Life
Length: 3630

Sunset Shimmer has been away from home for thirty-one moons. Saffron Masala hasn't seen hers for two hundred and seventy-six.

Community service isn't exactly fun. Sunset Shimmer is learning that the hard way—especially when Saffron Masala keeps cooking extra meals that their soup kitchen couldn't pay people to eat. It's not fun, it's not worth it, and it's never ever ever going to change. And... for some reason, it seems Saffron's okay with that.

Now, six Wednesday nights out from the disastrous Fall Formal, Sunset decides that she might as well ask Saffron why.

Tied for second in the May Pairings 2024 contest. Special thanks to my editors Octavia Harmony and Monochromatic, and to all of my wonderful prereaders. Reviewed by PaulAsaran. Art by me!

Published 2024-05-23 01:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2024-05-23 01:20:00 UTC

All Your Red Bleeds Gold

“You know they just want to eat, Saffron.”

Sunset winced at the exhaustion in Coriander’s voice and scrubbed at the frying pan with her sponge a little harder. She didn’t need to turn around to see him and Saffron in her mind’s eye—him with his coat half on and his body half out the kitchen door, about to head to his night shift; and her with her back to the wall beside the doorframe, her hands buried in her apron pockets and her gaze pointedly perpendicular to his pleading eyes.

Not again.

The water in the sink had turned lukewarm; Sunset’s fingers were starting to prune. She squeezed the sponge in her fist until it bled soap. Her feet ached. Her elbow kept bumping the shrinking pile of dishes to her right.

The church kitchen was still too small, like always.

“I know, father.”

Saffron didn’t sound at all like she was sorry. Like always.

“You know things aren’t the same here as they are back home. We’ve talked about this.”

The frying pan clanked when Sunset flipped it onto the drying rack. Cutlery rattled underneath it like a prisoner’s chains.

“I know.”

A prisoner? Sunset resisted the urge to sneer. How much more on the nose could she get? But by the time she’d finished rolling her internal eyes the urge had passed, and a familiar guilt soon came galloping in its wake.

I’m lucky to have only gotten community service for what I did.

“A soup kitchen’s job is to send people home with stomachs fuller than when they arrived.” Coriander may have been tired, but his words were as firm as ever. “And we can’t do that if they don’t want to eat what we put out.”

“And you?”

Saffron’s voice wasn’t angry—it never was, and was so unlike the angry words Sunset was used to and used to expect she’d face if she messed up. Her voice carried anger without sounding angry. And without curse words or threats of violence or stolen crowns and broken schools, her anger sounded good. Justified.

Righteous, even.

Coriander exhaled a noise halfway between a sigh and a cough. “Saffron—“

“Did you even try it, father?”

“Of course I did.” He answered before her last word had left her mouth. “And of course it was delicious. It always is.” His voice softened from firm to something gentler; something tortured. “I’d have you serve it every evening if I could.” A pause. “But…”

“But people don’t want that.” Saffron finished his sentence in the same flat tones Sunset had heard every Wednesday evening since the Fall Formal: People don’t want this. People don’t want that. People won’t ever want that.

They both fell silent for a moment. Slowly, Sunset slid a plate beneath the water and wished that washing dishes weren’t so loud.

Time passed, and the mountain of dishes soon eroded back to none. When it did, Sunset shut off the faucet for the final time and ventured, “At least it looks like somebody went for the rice.”

(There wasn’t much left for them to do that evening. Coriander had put away the tables and chairs before he’d left—which Sunset was very thankful for—but without him the silence between her and Saffron had surpassed awkward in an instant, and she couldn’t stand it.

Silence was meant to be broken, see, and Sunset figured it was time she took a swing at it. There weren’t any downsides to trying: if she hit, she’d get to talk again. And if she missed, it wasn’t like Saffron was a stranger to Sunset putting her metaphorical foot in her mouth.)

Thankfully, she saw a smile when she turned around. “You could use a towel, you know,” Saffron pointed out.

“I could,” Sunset agreed. She finished wiping her hands on the sides of her jeans out of principle. “How many days of leftovers d’you have this time?”

The corner of Saffron’s lip curled to let an amused snort slip free. “Six,” she grumbled, and tore a sheet of aluminum foil from the roll with an exaggerated huff. “The next time I see you will be the next time I get to eat something other than dal tadka.”

Sunset didn’t recognize the name of the dish, but nodded along anyway as if she did. “My condolences.”

“Thank you. I will surely need them.”

“And you’re sure you don’t want to pitch it?”

“I would not want to teach wastefulness to such an impressionable youth.”

They both had to stifle a laugh at that. Sunset Shimmer, impressionable? When humans fly, maybe. Then Saffron tore off another sheet of foil, and the sound drew Sunset’s gaze down to the table between them where the last of the leftovers sat.

When humans fly, or… whenever we give out more ‘dal tadka’ than sloppy joes.

They’d started the night with a dozen trays. Eight of them sat sparkling by the sink. Exactly eight; Sunset had counted each one of them as she’d washed—six for the sloppy joe filling, and two for the buns she’d spent half the evening shuttling from the toaster oven to the main hall and back to refill. The remaining four trays sat in a row on the table. Two held all but a spoonful of the basmati rice they’d set out at the start of the evening.

The other two were filled with untouched dal tadka.

Saffron tore off a third sheet. “Oh, don’t worry too much about it, Sunset,” she said, her voice light. “It has always been like this. From before you started here, and I suspect still after you finish as well.” She tore the fourth and final sheet of foil away and closed the cardboard lid overtop of the roll. “I am quite familiar with leftovers at this point.”

Right. Sunset shifted her weight uncomfortably between her aching feet. She was just an outsider. Less so than when she’d started, sure, but her six-and-counting Wednesday nights of community service were nothing compared to the years Saffron had already served.

The first tray disappeared beneath foil like a corpse beneath a sheet—a grave of still-warm lentils and tempered spices.

“Aren’t you tired?” Sunset blurted out.

Saffron raised her eyebrows. “Of course.” She folded the edges of the foil down to flatten the top. “We have worked hard. I would be quite surprised if you were not.”

“No, I didn’t mean— Not right now; in general.” She glanced away from Saffron and back to the table. “Tired of doing this, I mean.”

Tired of cooking; tired of coming in early to prepare trays of food no one ever took; tired of buying extra ingredients with her own money and tired of hearing her father’s hollow reprimands in response to each tiring attempt.

Tired of packing leftovers. Tired of eating the same unwanted food for a week or longer.

Tired of nothing changing.

“Hm,” Saffron hummed beneath her breath. She took a moment to smooth the remaining sheets of foil atop the table, running her palm from corner-to-corner on each in turn. “I wouldn’t say I’m tired, no,” she said carefully. “Perhaps physically, at times. But not of the task.”

An odd feeling twisted its way into Sunset’s guts at that. “Then why do you keep trying?” she pressed. “Why do you want to cook this stuff so badly?”

“Hm,” Saffron repeated, though that time with the brighter lilt of recognition within her tone.

The two of them were quiet for a moment. Then—

“I suppose,” she finally answered, “that I just miss home that much.”

The knot in Sunset’s stomach turned to knives. Her heartbeat knocked staccato at her throat—but she swallowed it down, and tried her best to focus on the rest of Saffron’s explanation; on her voice. So, instead of interrupting, she tugged the ties of her apron free to ‘no matter how similar things may feel’ and pulled the apron over her head to ‘what I miss most here in Canterlot’ and folded it into a wrinkled, water-stained square to ‘is the food I had at home’.

She placed her handiwork beside Saffron’s trays like the world’s sorriest excuse for a napkin and sat herself down at the table like Equestria’s sorriest excuse for a mare.

“Because as much as I enjoy providing the less fortunate with meals more substantial than canned soups,” Saffron continued, “I am perhaps indulging my own selfishness inside this kitchen more than I properly should.” She nodded her chin toward her leftovers and smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “There is nothing selfless about cooking food that no one likes, after all.”

“But you like it,” Sunset argued. “And I don’t think doing something for yourself automatically makes you selfish.”

“When I misuse the goodwill and charity of others, it does.”

“Misuse?”

“It’s a bit silly, though, is it not?” Aluminum crinkled between Saffron’s fingers as she laid the other tray of dal tadka to rest. “This selfish desperation to know that I haven’t lost my connection to my home.”

Sunset felt her stomach squeeze. There it was again: that word; that feeling of other-ness and un-belonging.

Home.

Thirty-one moons away didn’t stop it from cutting as deep as the day she’d left.

“Does that make sense?”

No. Maybe. I don’t know.

“…Yeah,” Sunset lied, and nodded in a way she hoped came off as empathetic. “I kinda get it.” And, before she could stop herself, she tacked on a near-inaudible, “I really miss my home too.”

(It wasn’t like she and Saffron were close. How could they have been, when they’d only just met six-and-counting Wednesday nights ago? But the way that Saffron treated her; the way she saw her and saw through her and saw her as an equal in a way that most adults never did—it felt like something and someone familiar.)

Saffron slowed her leftover-packing to a stop and quirked her head. “Oh? You are also…?”

“Not from here? Yeah.” In a way.

“I could not tell.” Her statement almost sounded like a compliment. “Would you mind me asking when?”

Thirty-one moons, Sunset thought at the same time her mouth said, “Two and a half years ago.”

She didn’t know why it was so easy to answer. Before, she’d have happily pulled out the tried-and-true none of your business for anyone who’d pried into her private life.

What’s different now?

“Ah, that’s not too long ago,” Saffron said with a small smile. “Myself, I have been here in Canterlot longer than I’ve been home.”

“Oh. That’s…” Sunset hesitated. She knew Saffron was older than her, sure, but she was nowhere near familiar enough with humans to guess by how much.

Thankfully, though, Saffron noticed her dilemma—was it rude to guess too high or too low?—and finished, “We moved here about twenty-three years ago.” Her eyes then softened to something slightly sad. “I was eight. The opportunity fell to our table, and though my father wanted to refuse it, my mother insisted that he and I…” Her voice trailed off. “Ah. Forgive me. I do not want to bore you with the details.”

“Eh,” Sunset said, and shrugged her shoulders in an attempt to appear more nonchalant than she actually felt. “You’d know if I was bored. Trust me.”

Saffron sighed a heavy breath. “Thank you.” Her shoulders sagged briefly, then straightened. “Truly.”

They were adrift upon an uncomfortable sea, then, with uncertainty both on and overboard. Whether it was better to ask for more details, or change the subject, or simply just wait it out, Sunset wasn’t sure—the only thing she knew for certain was that if she ever wanted an easy out, it only took a few well-placed holes to sink a ship.

Silence again stretched thin throughout the kitchen. Then, having finally decided where she wanted to steer the conversation, Saffron asked with gentle words, “Did your family move here with you as well?”

Family.

Another word. Another knife to the gut.

“No. Just me.”

“Your parents were willing to send you here all on your own?”

“I—” Sunset exhaled sharply between her teeth. “Yeah. All on my own.”

(Saffron didn’t know what she’d done, of course—she couldn’t know, and wouldn’t ever know more than the half-truths necessary for community service’s paperwork.)

“My… mom and I didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms.”

(Though, half-truths looked a lot better with a few lies to fill the gaps.)

“I see,” Saffron said slowly. An unspoken question echoed beneath her short response—Do you want to talk about it?—not as an offer to listen, but as a way out.

A lifeboat, maybe.

“It’s fine,” Sunset replied. “That’s for me to deal with. Like…” The edge of her words pressed against the ropes holding the last lifeboat to the ship until they frayed. “…I’m not gonna get all upset if you wanted to talk about your mom, or something.”

“You are sure?”

“You’re the one who wanted to bore me with details, right?”

“Only if you insist,” Saffron chuckled, and with the silent sound of snapping ropes their lifeboat fell away beneath the waves. “Though truly, it is not that complicated of a tale; my grandparents just could not make such a move at their age.” Her lips pursed. “Of course, my father thought that made the decision for us—either we all go, or none of us go—but my mother put her foot down, and, well…”

Sunset caught the end of her sentence and ventured, “She offered to stay behind?”

“She called my father a cowardly husband and an even more wretched father for daring to suggest we turn down the offer,” Saffron corrected, the corners of her eyes crinkling fondly. “Then she told him she would be staying behind.”

“Ah.”

“And… I cannot thank her enough for making such a choice.”

Homesickness came in all sorts of shapes and sounds, but on Saffron it looked and sounded startlingly familiar—a defeated glance down to four trays on a table; an uncharacteristic tiredness sticking to her voice; the self-proclaimed selfishness of cooking food no one wanted—

“Is she the one who taught you how to cook?” Sunset asked quietly.

Stillness.

Then, a nod.

So the reason she keeps doing this—

“I have not seen her since I left,” Saffron explained with a calmness that did not match her words. “In person, at least. Video calls make things easier, but it is not the same, and never enough.”

An image popped into Sunset’s head at that—one of Saffron in the kitchen, with her cellphone propped up between two cookbooks so the camera could watch her as she worked. Even in her imagination she could so clearly picture the unbearable distance between a cellphone and the person on the other end.

“So, when I see her again”—and she so confidently used when, not if—“I want to cook for her, and prove to her that she is a part of my life I will never forget.” Her gaze lifted away from the table; away from foil graves. “That is why I cannot lose this last connection to my home.”

Saffron spoke with a clear determination that Sunset wished she had. How nice would it have been to leave home with the hope of returning? How awful would it be to miss a mother for twenty-three years?

(How horrible would someone who’d willingly abandoned their mother’s teachings be?)

“I don’t know if I’ll ever see mine again,” Sunset mumbled. “My mom, I mean.”

“I am sure that someday you will—”

“It’s not that I’m worried I won’t get the chance,” she added quickly, “but that when she learns what I’ve done with my time here, and when she remembers how easy it was for me to leave, she’s the one who’s not going to want to see me.”

Saffron frowned, her lips a thin and worried line across her face. “Sunset…”

“And I… I actually did lose my”—magic her heart wanted to say, but couldn’t—“connection to home. Something that my mom taught me, too. And I recently got the chance to... ‘remember’ it.”

Fiery hair and leathery wings and pitch black scleras and a body neither human nor unicorn—

And crowns and claws and fangs and fear and light and pain and—

“It wasn’t the same at all.”

How badly she’d wanted to go back before that point. How long she’d spent plotting out the details of her return. Perhaps if she’d just stayed that night for good, instead of sneaking through crystal hallways in a failed attempt to swap that coincidentally-shaped tiara, she might have been able to remember an untainted picture of home.

But now? After what her once-beloved magic had done to her?

Sunset cast her gaze downward to where her hands laid limp and aimless, and interlaced her fingers to stop them from trembling. “I think if I went back now,” she managed, “she’d be even more disappointed in me than the day I left.”

No, not just disappointed; worse. She was the shell of the prodigious student she’d once been, doomed to crawl back through the mirror a prodigal daughter—and no home would ever welcome such a daughter with open arms.

Words alone couldn’t convey her feelings, but the silence she couldn’t stand spoke the unsaid part out loud:

When you don’t belong anywhere anymore, where is home?

That silence lingered longer than was comfortable. Saffron let it flourish freely for a moment, then gently uprooted it with the low thunk of a cupboard and the clink of a plate pulled from its ceramic stack.

“Here,” she said matter-of-factly.

And the silence broke.

Sunset lifted her head in time to catch a glimpse of the silverware drawer rolling shut, and then suddenly aluminum crinkled and the lid of a coffin rolled back and the untouched dal tadka wasn’t quite so untouched and the spoon left a red-orange smear when it scooped out the second serving of rice that evening—

A plate bumped against her still-clasped hands like the answer to an unspoken prayer.

“It should still be warm,” Saffron added.

Sunset blinked. Then her brain caught up to her eyes. “I really can’t,” she protested weakly. “I’m supposed to be helping, not… mooching off of you guys for a free meal, or something.”

“You would be helping me with these leftovers.”

“But—”

“No buts. Just listen to me for a moment, alright?” She nudged the plate forward again. Reluctantly, Sunset uncoupled her fingers and picked up the spoon, if only to stop Saffron from beating a dent into the back of her hand. “I do not know why you have left your home, Sunset—and I do not need to know.”

The border of dal tadka slowly bled into basmati. Sunset placed the tip of her spoon at the center of the boundary and imagined what it’d be like to squish the portal’s statue flat.

“Because I know that home is not just a place, or a cuisine, or a culture, but also people. The people who you live for and who you love,” Saffron said, her voice gentle. “It is the people who love you, and the people who find their home within you in return.”

Sunset blinked again. Suddenly, her spoon felt heavier than a crown. “Maybe,” she mumbled.

Saffron ignored her remark and continued, “If your heart has lost its home, then the people you love will also have lost their home when they lost you. And,” she said with softer words, “while I do not know everything about you or your situation...”

She tapped a finger against the edge of the plate. This time, Sunset allowed herself to scoop an even mix of rice and dal tadka from the centre.

“…I do know that if I were your mother, I would be waiting to welcome you home.”

A lump pressed against the back of Sunset’s throat at that—a different sort of unpleasant pressure than the knot in her gut, but not one that felt entirely negative. Rather, it was more like the sour taste of bile after a successful workout, or the productive exhaustion of a Wednesday evening spent scrubbing dishes in a too-small kitchen’s sink: a well-deserved awfulness, and the price of being better.

…Though, that price did make it hard to respond to Saffron without sounding a bit pathetic. So instead of risking words, Sunset dipped her head in a choked-up nod and lifted the spoon to her mouth to take the first bite of her impromptu meal.

It took a moment for the flavours to register. At first the only thought Sunset could think was yeah, it’s definitely still warm, but then—

Oh.

The dal tadka tasted rich; heavy on the tongue and thick with the flavours of ginger and onions and lentils and oil and a half-dozen spices her amateur tastebuds couldn’t hope to name. It would have been tempting to call the texture of it soup-like if not for the extra body the rice provided—stew-like, maybe. Or gravy-like. But probably not a curry. Saffron had never called it that, and Sunset didn’t think she knew enough about curries to decide what was or wasn’t one in that regard.

“Good?” Saffron asked.

She swallowed slowly. It was like nothing she’d ever tasted before, and no home she’d ever known.

Her eyes watered.

For some reason, she didn’t think it was the food.

“...Yeah,” Sunset managed. She dipped her spoon back into her plate for another bite. “It’s good.”

Author's Note

saf·fron
1. an orange-yellow flavouring, food colouring, and dye made from the dried stigmas of a crocus
2. an autumn-flowering crocus with reddish-purple flowers [...] enormous numbers of flowers are required to produce a small quantity of the large red stigmas used for the spice