Chapter Text
It was hot inside the tent. Neil tapped his fingers on his countertop and tried to ignore the cameras. He had made his decision and he stood by it. It had been a risk to apply, and maybe suicide to show up, but Stuart had promised protection and Neil was so tired of simply trying to survive. No, he wanted to do something fulfilling, he deserved to do something that made him happy.
And being in the tent made him happy. Neil had already given his entrance interview, so he idly examined the other contestants and ran through his recipes in his head. The tent was warm and stuffy and butterflies fought to the death in his stomach. It’s a sandwich cake, he reminded himself. He could make a sandwich cake in his sleep. He had practiced this one so many times that even his uncle’s men were getting tired of it.
Neil chewed his lip and forced himself to look around. He was in the back of the tent, so he had a good view of everyone. The camera-men were interviewing Kevin Day outside, so the only person in the tent Neil had met before was Riko Moriyama, who he’d had a rather unpleasant exchange with at the train station. Spoiled little shit. Who yelled at the snack bar attendant when they ran out of Mars bars? Not even Neil’s father did that, and he was a literal serial killer. It was classless and entitled and Neil had told him so to his face. The interaction had gone downhill from there, but it was the most fun Neil had had in weeks.
Even now, Riko Moriyama shot poisonous glares in Neil’s direction. Neil thought that being ignored would be good for Riko’s temperament, and promptly turned his back on him. Across the tent two identical looking short blondes glared at each other. Well, one of them glared at the other one, who stared passively back at him like he was no more irritating or important than a small insect. A taller, darker skinned man grinned at them a little desperately, seemingly trying to draw them into conversation. They both ignored him with the ease of long familiarity.
At the counter behind the hispanic man’s, a tall, spiky haired black man leaned next to his stand mixer to flirt with the woman across from him. She was mocha skinned and strong, who somehow managed to look down her nose at him despite being several feet shorter. Even so, every time he turned that bright smile on someone else, she couldn’t take her eyes off of him.
Behind her, a tall blonde woman, made even taller by a pair of ridiculous heels, rapped her acrylic nails against her counter top, painted lips curled into a smile as she tilted her head to hear whatever the man next to her was whispering in her ear.
Neil shook his head and looked away. Most of the people in this tent would be strangers, he didn’t understand how some of them could already be looking at each other that way. They didn’t even know each other!
Across the room, two of the remaining contestants and the hosts laughed loudly, while a sallow-faced man with dark hair looked at them sadly, as if he were freezing and they were sunshine. Neil felt a pang of empathy as Kevin came back into the tent and returned to his counter.
As if that was a cue, Laila and Alvarez, the two hosts, smiled at the rainbow haired girl and scruffy blonde and jogged up the center aisle as the camera’s repositioned and David Wymack and Betsy Dobson entered the tent.
Across the room, several bakers pulled on their aprons, and Neil hurriedly followed suit. “Bakers!” Laila said, clapping her hands together as if all eyes weren’t already on her. “Welcome to the tent. You may have noticed that there are thirteen of you this year-”
“Would that be a baker’s dozen, babe?” Alvarez cut in, elbowing her girlfriend.
“Yes, Alvarez,” Laila replied, “were there any other jokes of mine you wanted to steal?” A couple of the bakers laughed at the gentle ribbing and even Neil felt slightly more at ease. These are normal people, he reminded himself, not gangsters or serial killers.
“Buuuuut,” Alvarez said slowly, rocking on her heels, “that means at any point, from this week to the semi-finals, David and Betsy could send two of you home. But that’s a problem for tomorrow at the very earliest. For now, it’s time for your first signature challenge!”
“David and Betsy are looking for something deceptively simple this week… a sandwich cake! Your filling is your choice, pâte anyone?” Neil wrinkled his nose in disgust at the idea, a sentiment reflected across the room. “But you have two hours. Alvarez, you want to do the honors?”
“Absolutely! On your mark, get set… bake!” Alvarez cried gleefully, clapping her hands. The room exploded into action as the bakers pulled out mixing bowls and started measuring ingredients. The judges joined Alvarez and Laila at the front of the room to begin asking the bakers what they planned on making. Neil didn’t relish the idea of being on television, but he understood that it was the cost of being in the tent, so he accepted it.
Neil started his timer, cracked his neck, and began mixing his dry ingredients. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the judges and hosts moved from one workstation to another, stealing sips of liquor and cracking jokes with the contestants as they, and the cameras, heard about flavor profiles and inspirations. “How does it feel to be in the tent?” One of the interviewers asked Jeremy, the scruffy blond, who looked up from his batter with flour on his face.
“It’s bigger than I expected,” he said, face warm and open and relaxed. “But so exciting! I thought I’d be nervous when it came down to it, but I just couldn’t be happier to be here.”
Smells began to fill the tent, the excited hum settling into a busy murmur of conversations with the interviewers, electric mixers and the exclamations as bakes went (or didn’t) to plan.
Neil put his cakes into the oven, set his pot to boil water for his creme pat and glanced around the tent, at odds for the moment. One of the blondes, the one in black, reached up to rub his eye and his sleeve slipped down, for one moment revealing something that made Neil’s blood go cold. He would recognise sheathed knives anywhere, even cleverly concealed within armbands.
But it was hard to fear a man who seemed to be baking with grapefruit. It was a strange taste put in a sponge cake, but the man moved with such surety and competency that Neil couldn’t dismiss him. The man stilled to a stop, turning to look at Neil with a single raised eyebrow.
Sudden heat rose across Neil’s face and he glanced at his oven to make sure it was closed correctly. He frowned and closed it again, but when he looked back up, the man was back to ignoring him.
Unable to resist, Neil glanced to his left, checking out what Kevin was doing. And blinked with surprise. Kevin was pouring his batter into a cake mold shaped like a sandwich. It was imaginative and whimsical and Neil wished he had thought of it.
But that was what made Kevin Day great. He was going to be famous one day, Neil could tell. He hadn’t seen the other man in years, not since before his mother took him and ran to her family in England, but even then he had been a gifted baker.
Neil blinked, looked down at his creme pat and swore. It was curdling. Laila caught his eye and shook her head, warning him to mind his language. Neil scowled and pulled the pan off of the fire, stirring the chunky mess as if that would help. He glanced at his timer and felt his stomach drop. He didn’t have enough time to re-make it. His first challenge, and he’d have to serve Wymack and Betsy a curdled filling. They were going to send him home. They were going to send him home.
“Are you okay, Neil?” Alvarez said, appearing at Neil’s shoulder. He shoved the offending pot away from him and stalked to the wall of the tent, peering out through the plastic window at the lawn outside.
“It’s curdled,” he said, frustration bleeding into his tone. “My creme pat.”
Alvarez blinked at him. “That's bad, right?” she asked. Neil smiled wryly, Alvarez and Laila were funny and easy to talk to, but they knew next to nothing about baking.
“It’s not good,” he said, “but it’s not poison either, so.” He shrugged, took a deep breath and walked back to his counter. It was almost time to check on his cakes.
--
“One minute, Bakers!” Laila trilled, standing next to her girlfriend at the front of the tent. Betsy and Wymack wandered over, leaving the nervous bakers they were observing to plate their cakes.
Neil scowled one last time and slid it onto a plate, garnishing it with a few passion fruit seeds. The texture was all wrong, of course but at least it tasted okay.
“Five, four, three, two, one…. Hands up!” the hosts cried, and Neil stepped back and glanced around curiously. Everyone seemed to have made a sandwich cake at least, but some definitely looked better than others.
“Hi,” a stranger said, appearing at Neil’s shoulder. The man was about six feet tall and hispanic, white teeth shiny against his tan smile. “I’m Nicky,” he continued, “and you’re cute.”
“I’m Neil, actually,” Neil replied blandly. The matching blondes were lingering a few steps back.
One of them snorted and the other rolled his eyes. “You literally put off your honeymoon to come here, Nicky.”
Nicky waved that away, although his eyes sparkled with joy. “Erik know’s he owns my heart, I just wanted to see if this one wanted to borrow my body.”
On the other side of the room, the judges had begun their critiques. Neil wanted to hear what was going on. “I don’t,” Neil told him, already losing interest as the judges move on. “Want to borrow your body.”
“Are we interrupting something?” Wymack demanded, waiting impatiently at one of the blonde’s tables. “Oh, god, there are two of you. Which one of you made this one?”
“The one armed man?” the blonde in black suggested wryly, unhurriedly walking over. “It’s two cakes on top of each other. They taste like grapefruit and there's some icing between them.” He said it so carelessly that Neil nearly fell over. He looked at the man in shock, and over at his cake, expecting to see a mess.
But the cake looked… good. It was rustic, sure, but the sponge was golden and even, the icing was pure white and evenly spread, and there was even freshly candied grapefruit peel on top. Wymack clearly wanted nothing more than to hate it. He looked the blonde in the eye and cut a piece. Dobson elbowed him out of the way to snag the first bite, winking at the blonde as she did so. Laila and Alvarez lingered behind the judges, clutching their forks tightly, waiting their turn.
Wymack chewed thoughtfully, glaring at the baker. He swallowed loudly and paused for a long moment before sighing in frustration. “It’s great,” he grumbled, “I love it. I really wanted to hate it.”
The blonde blinked at Wymack as if he were no more interesting than a crack in the wall. Then he reached over, picked up the knife and cut himself a large piece of the cake and ate it, as if the judges were just in the way.
Neil shook his head and looked away. Why was he here if he didn’t care? There were other shows if he was after money or fame, but Bake Off wasn’t like that. Neil thought he might hate him.
The judges moved on to Kevin, exclaiming over the beauty of his cake, which really did look like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made on white bread, half out of a paper bag. Kevin preened under their praise. Across the room, Riko glared at Kevin viciously. Neil frowned. He had thought that the two of them were friends, but there was nothing friendly about Riko’s gaze. Finally, Wymack and Dobson appeared in front of Neil, looking curiously at his cake. “It’s rhubarb,” he said stupidly, stomach clenching with nerves as they sliced into his cake to taste it. “And custard.”
“It’s not the neatest,” Dobson observed, tilting her head to examine the cake closely. Wymack snorted and cut into it, handing the other judge and the hosts each a piece. “But the sponge is really quite delightful,” Dobson continued.
“Not the creme pat,” Wymack said gruffly, “it's awful.”
“Well, obviously,” Neil snapped, “that tends to happen when it curdles.” The hosts froze for a moment, obviously taken aback by Neil’s mouthiness. Across the room, the careless blonde, the one with the grapefruit cake, snorted loudly. Neil bit his lip and tried to smile apologetically for his outburst.
“Punk,” Wymack grumbled, but there was no aggression behind his tone.
They moved on and Neil stopped paying attention. He poked his disappointing cake with a spatula. “Cut!” Rheman, the director, called when the judges finished tasting the well-heeled blonde’s cake. “That’s lunch, everyone. Craft is set up outside, see you in two hours for the technical.”
Neil sighed in relief as the cameras clicked off. He was happy he was here and Stuart had told him it was safe, but he still wasn’t used to being seen, much less being featured on a popular television show.
Leaving his mess, Neil walked out of the tent and over to the lunch spread. He wasn’t hungry, so he grabbed a bottle of water and an apple and ducked away from the crowd. Most of the contestants seemed very friendly and nosy and talkative, and Neil didn’t want to get pulled into that, so he wandered down to the edge of the woods and leaned against a tree to eat his fruit. The air was warm and still and fragrant. Neil closed his eyes and listened to the cicadas and birds and slight breeze in the leaves.
Neil inhaled, eyes cracking open as he detected the smell of smoke. The careless blonde stood a few yards away from him, smoking and watching Neil through hooded eyes. Neil remembered the knives and wondered for one moment if he had been sent by the butcher’s men to kill him, but his heart rate refused to pick up.
Neil stared back at him, taking an obnoxiously loud bite of his apple. If the blonde wasn’t going to talk, he wasn’t either. He finished his lunch the same time that the blonde stubbed out his cigarette. The blonde tilted his head back towards the tent and Neil shrugged, falling in step with him as they made their way back to the others.
“Oh my god,” Nicky gasped when they approached. He reached out and smacked the other blonde man’s arm. “Aaron! Did Andrew make a friend?”
Aaron scowled and rubbed his arm, looking over at Neil appraisingly. “Shut up, Nicky.”
“Bakers!” Alvarez called, “the technical starts in two minutes! We need you in the tent immediately!”
Neil tilted his head in Andrew’s direction and walked towards the tent. His first bake had been atrocious, he couldn’t afford any mistakes or distractions, and in his life, that’s all friends were.
“Welcome back, bakers!” Alvarez said, as soon as all thirteen of them were back at their stations and the red eyes of the camara’s blinked on. “Technical’s are blind bakes so I’m going to have to ask the judges to-”
“Get the heck out!” Laila cut her girlfriend off gleefully, skipping neatly out of range of her swatting hands. Most of the bakers laughed and Neil understood. He wasn’t used to having all that much fun, but it was easy to see that the hosts were amusing.
Even Dobson cracked a smile, although Wymack looked around him like he couldn’t believe he had somehow ended up in this mess. Contractual obligations, probably.
Laila and Alvarez waited until the judges were well out of earshot to turn back to the bakers. “This afternoon’s bake is devilishly difficult-”
“Beezlebub’s nightmare,” Laila cut it.
“Angel food cake!” Alvarez finished. “It’s a light and airy sponge topped with homemade whipped cream and lemon and passionfruit curd.”
Great, Neil thought, more passionfruit. The bakers weren’t told what each technical bake was going to be, so they couldn’t practice, but that wasn’t all that new to Neil, who found most of his time taken up with helping Uncle Stuart with the family business, severely limiting his time to bake.
But Neil had always been an instinctive baker, and it usually didn’t take him too long to master new recipes and techniques. The rules of baking had always just made sense to him. Neil picked up the recipe and read through the cursory directions. There were no measurements or timing or temperatures, but Neil felt cautiously optimistic. This felt like something he could do.
Grinning, he pulled out his mixer and began to sort through his ingredients. Angel food cakes had no fat in them, and the only rising agent was egg whites, beaten until they formed peaks that would then be gently mixed into the dry ingredients.
It wasn’t until he was staring from his bowl full of aerated egg whites to the one full of flour that he frowned and looked up to see what everyone else was doing. The egg whites were the only rising agent, and Neil didn’t see a way to introduce them to the heavy flour without flattening them completely. Kevin used a third bowl to slowly fold them together, somehow managing not to lose any volume.
Across the room, Neil watched in horror as Andrew just dumped the heavy flour into the egg whites and stirred them together carelessly. Defying logic, it didn’t ruin his mix. Neil couldn’t watch him anymore, and he didn’t care enough about anyone else in the room to check on them. He couldn’t completely ignore Nicky though, who danced around his table with Laila and Alvarez singing in Spanish, stirring his dough every few beats.
Neil glanced down at his bowl and swore at how flat his eggs had gone. There was no time to start over so he gritted his teeth and spooned it into the bundt pan, comforting himself that at least he knew better than to grease it, unlike a few of the contestants, who put butter and sugar around the edges.
Neil put his cake into the oven and took out his frustration on his whipped cream.
--
Twelfth, Neil thought to himself, a little hysterically. He wasn’t as bad as Seth Gordon, who seemed to be on the show exclusively to flirt with pretty girls, but he was definitely at risk of going home. First, the creme pat curdles and now this!
He hadn’t risked everything to come here only to be sent home first. At least Andrew hadn’t done all that much better, coming in eighth, but he was still safe! Somehow, Nicky had won, proving to everyone that his cheer, flirtiness and general air of obliviousness hid a real talent for baking.
Neil splash water on his face and avoided meeting his eyes in the mirror. All the bakers were staying at the beautiful manor where the tent was set up, and he had been placed in a room with Kevin and Andrew.
Kevin was already sleeping when Neil left the bathroom, and Andrew was tucked into his bed, curled around a book. His eyes were flat when they met Neil’s. “It’s just a stupid cake,” he said, “it’s not worth having a panic attack over.”
Neil gritted his teeth into a snarl, ignoring the thunder of his heart. “I’m not having a panic attack!” not yet, at least.
“Give it a minute,” Andrew murmured. Neil, who generally preferred flight to fight, wanted to punch him. He vividly imagined swiping Andrew’s book to the floor and shaking him.
“Fuck you,” Neil snapped, “Just because you don’t give a shit about it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter!” Fury burned up his throat and mixed with desperation as he spoke, trying to keep his voice low enough not to wake Kevin.
“My, my,” Andrew’s voice turned taunting as he flipped a page of his book, looking for all the world like he couldn’t even see Neil. “So desperate to be famous. You’re nearly as bad as Gordon.”
“It’s not about fame!” Neil insisted, “It’s freedom! Victory! Proof that I’m - Never mind. Fuck you.” He didn’t want to explain to Andrew what the show meant, what the chance to compete represented to him. Andrew had probably been handed everything he had ever wanted, how else couldn’t he care about something so precious?
The unfairness burned him down to his core.
“Proof that you’re what?” Andrew asked, closing his book, looking interested for the first time.
“Fuck you,” Neil said for the third time. He turned out the light and crawled into his bed, too angry to give in to his panic.
--
“We want dark chocolate!” Laila said.
“We want milk chocolate!” Alvarez cut in.
“We want white chocolate!” Laila finished.
“And we want all of them in one spectacular cake! Give us your ganache, give us your black forests and molten centers.”
“If I do not drop dead of diabetes by this afternoon, I will be very disappointed in all of you.”
Neil tuned them out, running through his recipe for the millionth time. Last night, he had dreamed of this cake, fantasized that it was so delicious that he won star baker and sent Andrew home, regardless of his piss poor performance the day before.
But that was just a dream. In reality, he was baking just to survive. He tried to push Andrew from his mind and focused on the batter in his bowl. It was hard, when the man in question sat on his station and ate his way through his supply of chocolate.
He didn’t seem to be even trying!
At least Kevin was focused, seemingly oblivious to the murderous glares Riko Moriyama was throwing his way as he put his cakes in the oven.
Neil’s idea was a simple one. A two tiered cake, the bottom layer milk chocolate, the top dark chocolate, sprinkled with white chocolate stars. Freedom, peace, time, all the things he had ever wanted and was just now starting to enjoy.
He told himself that it didn’t matter if he went home first, this moment would be worth it, but he wanted so much more he could barely breathe.
The cakes were fragrant and moist when he pulled them out of the oven. He held his breath as he stacked them and layered them with deep green and blue icing. He finished with three minutes to spare.
Unable to resist any longer, Neil glanced back at Andrew’s station. Although he hadn’t seen the other man bake, a stunning monstrosity sat in front of him, darkest brown, dripping with kirsch soaked cherries.
“That’s time, bakers!” Alvarez called. “Hands up! Lemme see those hands! Wonderful jazz hands Nicky, you are an inspiration to us all!”
The judging passed quickly. On the director’s cue, each baker carefully carried their cake to the front of the room where the camera could capture it from every angle. Then Dobson and Wymack tasted and critiqued it and sent the baker and the remains of their cake back down the aisle to their station.
By the time his name was called, all Neil could hear was the pounding of his own heart in his chest. His cake was clean and beautiful and well baked. He couldn’t have done a better job. It had to be enough to save him, it had to.
“Oh, that’s lovely,” Dobson sighed, “did you really form the white chocolate starts into actual constellations?”
“Yes,” Neil said, but he didn’t explain that those were the stars he could see from the tiny square of window he was allowed down in his father’s abattoir of a basement.
“Very impressive,” Wymack admitted, “but let's see how it tastes.”
The cake parted smoothly beneath his knife, releasing a whiff of rich sweetness. Neil didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but even he had to admit that it smelled wonderful.
“I see that you have a milk chocolate and a dark chocolate layer,” Dobson noted, “they are both rich, moist and quite delicious.”
Wymack took a few more moments to decide. “That’s a good cake,” he finally said. “A damn good cake.”
Neil nodded, tasting his heart in the back of his throat. The camera zoomed into his face with a little grinding noise. Neil barely managed to suppress the urge to shove it away from him. His legs were weak as he walked back to his place, smiling tightly at Matt Boyd, the baker with the spiked hair, who gave him a thumbs up and wink as he passed.
Neil was done. He thought that judging had gone about as well as it could have, but he couldn’t do anything else about it. He tried to pay attention to the other critiques, but he couldn’t focus. He knew that Andrew had done well, despite presenting the judges a cake with a sizable chunk missing, cherry syrup dripping from the stand to the floor as he carried it. So had Kevin.
Unfortunately, so had Riko.
Neil didn’t care much about the rest of them.
After a short break, they were gathered in line to wait for judgement. Andrew, somehow, found his way to the seat next to Neil’s, who was the farthest to the right. “Are you here just to eat cake?” Neil asked, unable to help himself when he spotted traces of chocolate around the blonde's mouth.
Andrew hummed. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Rabbit. Why Andromeda?”
Neil didn’t know when Andrew had gotten close enough to his cake to see which constellation he had used, and he didn’t know why he cared. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” he parroted back.
Something flashed in Andrew’s eyes, there and gone again. He tilted his head to the side, opened his mouth to say something-
But before he could, the judges entered the tent. Neil wondered what Andrew had been about to say and hoped he’d get the chance to find out.
“This baker really puts the ‘star’ in ‘star baker’,” Laila said, “Call them Micheal because he’s the king of the Angel food cakes, this week's star baker is…. Nicky!” Laila sang, timing her announcement to Alvarez’s beat boxing.
Most of the bakers whistled and clapped. Neil smiled, and hollered his approval when he noticed Riko leaning in to mutter something snide into Seth’s ear. Even Andrew looked at his cousin with something that could have been pride.
Nicky himself nearly fell off his chair in surprise. “Really?” he gasped. “You guys!” he turned immediately to the twins, a watery grin in place.
“Unfortunately, this means that it’s my duty to inform you who will not be joining us next week.” Alvarez genuinely looked distressed as she faced them, eyes wide and sad. Neil couldn’t breathe, his fists clenched so tightly that one of his knuckles popped. “I’m so sorry, but the baker leaving us this week is… Seth.”
Neil’s breath left him in a relieved whoosh. Maybe he should have felt bad for Gordon, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. The hosts immediately pulled Seth into a group hug, which Neil neatly dodged. He needed the sky. He needed the fresh air and scent of sunshine.
He ran into Andrew on his way out. The blonde lingered at the back of the tent, tapping an unlit cigarette on one of his black armbands. “Don’t run too far,” the man advised him, not taking his eyes off his brother or cousin. “You’re needed back here next weekend.”
“I’ll be back for bread week, but I’m not sure you will. Where’s the sugary motivation in baking bread?” Neil asked, forcing his eyes away from the knives in Andrew’s sheathes. “Or is this about family bonding to you?”
He wasn’t expecting an answer, and he didn’t get one. Apparently deciding that Aaron and Nicky were safe enough, he shoved off from the side of the tent and walked into the garden, his only goodbye to Neil a mocking salute.