Chapter Text
Ashton stared at the cabinet, eyes narrowing in anger as he saw how it was organized.
'This is ridiculous' He thought as he stared at some of the most basic ingredients oh so obviously placed at slightly below his own quite high eye level.
Glancing back towards the competition tables, he couldn’t help but look at the small cook pushed all the way to the side. One of the final competitors, Orym, had been making waves as an excellent baker, and was someone who Ashton found actually somewhat decent, someone who had earned his place among the rest of the people here, just as worthy as Ashton himself to try at the $50,000 reward for winning this stupid bake-off.
Ashton growled once more, trying to ignore the camera man following them around, and instead grabbed his ingredients, and stomped towards his own table. They wanted to get started right away, knowing they only had so much time left, knowing that no matter what skills they had, if he didn’t get started, there wouldn’t be enough time to get it all done, but all they could do was stare at their own ingredients.
‘...fuck’ . They breathed deeply and clutched their fists together. Finally making up his mind, Ashton walked towards Orym’s station instead, trying to ignore the commentary from the judges and other contestants. Orym himself had just turned and widened his eyes in surprise at the approaching opponent.
“Ashton, did you nee-”
“What do you need” Ashton said, cutting the other off.
Orym seemed to not understand, which Ashton just didn’t get. He had been glancing at the cabinet too, he still needed a ton of stuff, they were both just wasting time now. “What do you need from the fucking cabinet?”
The other looked back at the ingredients, then at Ashton, gaze softening. “Oh… It’s fine, really.”
“The FUCK it’s not. Tell me what you need, and we can actually start competing instead of what ever this bullshit is.” Ashton didn’t care that they had been explicitly told not to use that kind of language, but fuck them. What do they expect with this kind of ableist bullshit?
There was a moment of silence, both from each other and from the entire room, but Ashton just kept staring at Orym, while the other smiled at him in a way that brought thoughts that Ashton didn’t want to deal with right now.
“Okay” The smaller man finally said, and listed off his required list. Ashton quickly turned and gathered it all up for him, and returned to his own station, ready to finally get this started.
The others in the room began talking and working again, the producers wanting to retain some sort of normalcy for their show, but Ashton didn’t care. His feelings towards this entire situation shot straight into the ground. What they needed to do now was finish their dessert, walk straight passed the judges and give a taste to the the only person who deserved to have their cooking.
Maybe Orym would be willing to return the favor.