I looked at him from beneath the hair that got lose from my ponytail and hung over my forehead from time to time.

While I had swept the floors, cleaned the counters, chopped the vegetables (quickly but not too much so; I didn't want to raise any suspicion), I had sneaked glances at him.

Something was up with Madara.

It was my second Monday, and he'd been cold and dismissive the entirety of last week, always sprinkled with some flakes of anger. But not today.

Madara seemed sullen. Not sulking, but something else, something deeper, more closed within himself than I was used to seeing him and I wondered what he'd been doing yesterday on our day off (or, not really my day off; I had come here to cook, with the permission of Tobirama, of course).

I started doing some dishes that was truly the job of the dish washer of the kitchen, a girl who had not yet reached twenty who was kind but very quiet, but I'd always found doing the dishes soothing, a way to cool down in the midst of cooking. And it allowed me to think, letting my thoughts wander to wherever they wanted to, and of course they wandered to him. What if I didn't know people even half as well as I thought I did? What if this actually was, well and truly, Madara's personality, something he had been born with, that had followed him all his life just like his shadow had? But I didn't believe it. How could you be so emotional, so angry without having a good heart at the bottom of it? Maybe it was wishful thinking; maybe I wanted Madara to have a good heart deep down because it benefited me. I bit my lip; it wasn't like me to be selfish like that.

I looked back at my dishes and decided it didn't matter. And it certainly didn't change the fact that something must have happened that made him so sad today, no matter what his baseline was.

I also noticed that Tobirama had noticed. More than once, I saw him stand dead still, arms crossed, looking at the black-haired man with a concerned expression. His fingers twitched of desire to go talk to him, but he didn't.

I finished the dishes.

On the Thursday, something changed. Madara had gone from unpleasant to avoiding to straight-up evil. He was harsh in his words, and got two colleagues to cry. He said such horrible things to them, I just stared in shock. Tobirama, to my great surprise, didn't do anything about it; something seemed to be up between the two.

In the afternoon, Madara directed all of his anger at me. I just dismissed it at first, but then I felt I'd had enough.

"Madara, please leave the problems you have at home where they belong. Don't bring them in here. Don't bring them to me. What if I also have a bad day?"

He'd taken a knife then, shoved it into a wooden cutting board that was, without a doubt, worth hundreds of euros. I jerked, suddenly frightened.

"Madara!!" Tobirama said, not raising his voice but saying it so sternly that if anyone wrote it down, it would be in Italics. I had never heard him speak like that before.  He took one step closer, ready to protect me. "How dare you threaten my staff?"

In the madness of it all I felt touched by the fact Tobirama actively tried to keep me safe. I worked hard to keep my face steady, but inside, my heart was pounding in shock.

But Madara was looking straight at me.

"You think you will be able to climb the ranks here." Oh honey, no, I thought sarcastically. I'm already of a calibre you cannot imagine. "But you can't. You will never surpass me. Spare yourself and don't try because you will break."

The flashback of that sentence was so strong, it pushed me back into the wall as if I'd been hit by a tsunami, drowning me, pressing the air out of my lungs.

Merlin...

I slid down along the wall, hid my face in my hands. Not sad. Just a deep, deep shock.

Madara became quiet, and I wondered if he suddenly realised that he'd said something that had an effect on me he had not at all expected.

"You're fucking pathetic. Stand out of my way", he said and all thoughts about him perhaps feeling regret was pulled out through the open window and onto the streets of Paris.

Madara left for a break and I was ashamed. I should be tougher than this. But how could I, when what he'd said took me straight back to those years of my life...

"You okay?"

I looked up. Tobirama had sat down next to me. I appreciated that about him. That he never stood above me. Always made certain we were equal. I remembered he knew how good I was. But then again, I believed he would've behaved the same even if I was a simple kitchen boy.

"Yes", I said shortly.

I looked out through the open window, where the positive thoughts about Madara had gone. 

I needed a hot shower.

I planned on staying behind to cook today. I'd walked past an Indian grocery shop on my way to work this morning, when I was early and thus could take a detour, so I planned on going there to buy ingredients and even making a dessert in the form of macaroons, a Parisian desert but with a lot of spices to match the dinner. But I couldn't. Not now. First, I needed to wash Madara's harsh words away.

The water in the shower in the changing rooms was pleasant against my sticky skin, and horrible once I walked out and it used my body heat to evaporate. I dried myself, put on silky Adidas sweatpants and a hoodie, brushed my hair to let it self-dry.

I walked out to get my shoes to go grocery shopping, but as I went out of the changing room that opened to the back off the he kitchen, I heard someone was still there, in the kitchen.

I stopped dead. Slowly, very slowly as not to be noticed, I walked forth. I didn't know why I didn't want to make myself known. Perhaps it was because I didn't want to raise any questions as to why I was still there (I'm actually a master chef about to cook foods your mother couldn't even dream of). But no. That wasn't it. I could just say I wanted a shower before going home, and that would be that.

No, I believed I knew, deep down, who it was, and I was curious.

His hair was braided and slung over his shoulder, which was not allowed even if he was cooking for himself, but I didn't blame him since I knew the strains a bun put on your scalp after twelve hours. His back was straight, his shoulders pushed back in a way that made his chef's robe strain even more than usual over his chest; he had definitely grown since he first got that robe, however long ago that was. The sleeves were rolled up over his elbows, showing off strong underarms with muscles rippling like the keys of a piano moving in a complicated melody. I couldn't see his face, so I moved slightly to the side and saw it was focussed, stern, but not at all angry. Madara's anger seemed to be solely directed at people; cooking had never hurt him, so his demeanour while cooking was soft, not requiring the facade that other living and breathing beings did.

I had never seen him cook like that. He was an excellent sashimi chef, and he could handle that raw fish without blinking. But I had never seen him cook. He had four things going on simultaneously. He chopped excellently, made the pan light up in a fire that he had burning for a few seconds before expertly capturing it with the lid, keeping the smoke hostage so it would give whatever he had in there a smoked flavour. He whisked something by hand, spiced things up without even tasting; he felt the flavour it would create on his tongue without tasting the same way an artist saw in her head the colour she would make if she mixed a few others together. He did manoeuvres so complicated, I suspected nobody but him could do them, and I figured some of the ways in which he cooked was created by him, perhaps revealed to the world at some stage, perhaps about to be revealed but, more likely, kept secret to himself, a world he had created where only he was allowed, where he could relax and be entirely himself.

Seeing him doing those manoeuvres felt more intimate than seeing him naked.

I should leave, I thought without leaving.

I should stop looking, I said without even blinking.

I just couldn't. It was mesmerising and I just couldn't tear myself away.

Couldn't tear myself away from Madara being... Happy, I think.

And as I watched him dish up something so delicious-looking in the most beautiful plating I had ever seen, I couldn't help but think how much it saddened me that the one thing that seemed to be able to make this man happy lay outside of the irresistible spectrums of human interaction.

"I made your favourite food", he said suddenly, and for a fraction of a second I became terrified; had he seen me? Did he know I was there?

Then I realised that didn't make sense, that he couldn't know my favourite food. I didn't even understand what he had made!

I realised he was talking not to himself, but to someone who wasn't there.

This is the reason you are the way you are, I thought.

Then, Madara lifted the plate and threw it into the wall.

I jerked. The plate broke into a thousand little pieces. The food ran down the wall.

I watched from my hiding place as Madara cleaned up the kitchen while he cried.