sugar sugar, honey honey | Selfie | Henry Higgs & Eliza Dooley
t: sugar sugar, honey honey
f: Selfie
p: pre Henry/Eliza
ch: trope_bingo at dreamwith - food and cooking
r/wc: G/1450
s: [Bakery AU] “I don’t think people are leaving you crack-laced muffins, Henry,” Sam says.
n: [Title from The Archies] I offered to write AU ficlets for people on twitter, and the first to come in from teaboytoaliens was a Henry/Eliza bakery AU. This wasn’t as Henry/Eliza as I meant it to be, but I enjoyed myself a lot (and got to mention a thing from the show that I think about far too much). And if you think I wasn’t listening to Suga Mama by Beyonce while writing like 2/3 of this, you would be wrong.
“I need a job,” the girl says.
Henry looks at her, all six-foot-something in those heels, dress made of some kind of fringing and nails manicured with little fake diamonds, loose red hair tumbling around her shoulders, and thinks about what a health-and-safety nightmare she would undoubtedly be.
“…I don’t need the help,” he replies, even though there’s definitely a sign in the window that disagrees with that. Henry spent half an hour picking out an appropriately sombre font and taking out all the exclamation marks Sam insisted he needed, and is disappointed that this is apparently the calibre of would-be bakers for his shop that said sign has attracted. She would probably want to make cupcakes, for god’s sake.
“You’re kind of a dick for a guy who spends his whole day surrounded by sugar,” the woman informs him, spins on a sparkly pink heel, and stomps out.
Larry said pretty much the same thing last week, so Henry can’t exactly hold it against the random stranger. When he squints, he can see where her shoes have left sparkles on the pristine linoleum.
-
When Henry arrives at the bakery the next morning, there’s a white cardboard box waiting outside the door, tied with a ludicrously ostentatious pink silk ribbon.
He squints suspiciously at it, tries to work out if people giftwrap bombs in anything other than cartoons, and then carefully steps over it as he goes inside. He’ll deal with it… at some point, possibly after a lot of coffee and a call to Julia, who seems like she’d know how to cope with unexpected packages.
Henry is feeling much more cheerful when he’s making the frosting for his blue velvet cakes, said cakes themselves already in the oven, and he figures he’ll just shove the mysterious box into a garbage bag and put it in a dumpster and never think about it again. Everything’s going to be fine.
“These are amazing,” Sam’s voice comes though, somewhat indistinctly.
Sam’s been Henry’s friend for so long he can’t even really remember how or why they met, and Henry is getting used to Sam dropping in unannounced to “see how your new enterprise is getting on”. It’s about thirty percent concern and friendship, and about seventy percent the desire for free baked goods.
He looks away from his mixer to see Sam has the white box under one arm, the pink ribbon trailing, and is face-deep in what appears to be some kind of muffin.
“Sam!” he says, moving to tug the box away. “You can’t eat that! Someone left them on the doorstep, they could be laced with anything! Poison! Or-or crack!”
Sam doesn’t appear overly worried about this, and takes another bite of the muffin he’s still holding. “I don’t think people are leaving you crack-laced muffins, Henry,” he says with his mouth full. There’s icing sugar dusted across his chin.
Henry sets the box on a table and even remembers to turn the mixer with the frosting off before it’s over-beaten and useless to him. Inside the box are five muffins - with an empty slot where Sam helped himself - looking golden and delicious and smelling wonderful, Henry has to admit. There’s also a label written in curling script, informing him that these are salted caramel oat bran muffins. The label is sparkly pink; Henry narrows his eyes.
“I think these may have been left by someone I refused to hire yesterday,” he says. “So I really think you should stop eating them, Sam.”
“There’s liquid caramel in the centre,” Sam moans, completely ignoring him.
Henry is still tempted to dump the rest in the trash, but he has the horrible suspicion that Sam would just fish them back out again.
-
The baked goods do not stop appearing.
The boxes are getting ever fancier and the ribbon bows ever larger, and Henry is starting to feel increasingly stalked. The girl he refused to hire hasn’t come back, and he has no idea how she’s getting the cakes to him before he gets there - he tried coming in an hour early and the box was already there, full of still-slightly-warm gooey gluten-free brownies - or what she’s trying to achieve.
Henry still isn’t stupid enough to eat cake left for him by someone who may or may not have some kind of weird vendetta against him, but apparently he is the only one with this viewpoint. Sam drops in regularly to see what’s arrived, and he let the cat out of the bag because Raj and Larry keep looking expectantly at Henry when they come in until he sighs and waves a hand at wherever he’s dumped the package today. Even Julia arrives after a week to help herself to a slice of rocky road cheesecake out of the paisley-print box and to tell Henry that he she can probably get the lab to analyse the cake and prove once and for all that it’s not been laced with anything.
Henry declines her kind offer, and firmly ignores how good the cheesecake looks.
-
Finally, after almost a month of constant gifts - and for someone unemployed, his cake stalker sure seems to have a lot of money to spend on increasingly obscure ingredients - there’s nothing waiting for Henry one morning.
He can’t tell if there’s a tinge of disappointment behind all the relief; if there is, it definitely fades into irritation by the time everyone he knows has dropped by the bakery to be disappointed that there isn’t any free mystery cake, and to demand what he did wrong. And then help themselves to things Henry has baked for actual paying customers like they need compensation.
It’s Julia’s birthday; she comes by the bakery to meet him and the others so they can all make dinner on time, and Henry’s just about to lock up and turn all the lights out when he sees movement outside and jumps for the door.
“Hey!” he says, and the tall leggy redhead looks at him with wide, caught eyes.
-
“This is the most alarming cake I have ever seen in my entire life,” Henry says.
His cake stalker turns out to be called Eliza, and she has brought Julia a birthday cake. A very specific and detailed birthday cake.
“This is delightful!” Julia says, leaning in to take a look at the intricate tangle of presumably important organs that make up the scale decoration of the human urinary tract on top of this cake.
“It’s horrifying,” Henry replies, but none of his friends are listening to him; they’re clustered around Eliza’s cake, poking at the fondant kidneys and sniggering and being generally ridiculous.
“How did you know it was my birthday?” Julia asks Eliza.
Eliza shrugs. “Well, Henry here is an internet ghost - except for this website of course - but the rest of you are around here a bunch so I did some googling and I found you easily enough, and here we are.”
Everyone makes understanding noises. Henry looks amongst the people crowded into his little bakery and wonders if there was something in all those cakes after all, because none of his friends seem particularly disturbed by all this stalking.
“I just wanted you to give me a chance,” Eliza says, turning those big eyes on him. Her shoes are impractical and her dress has sequins that will undoubtedly shed and her clothes leave very little to the imagination and she’s not anything he was expecting when he advertised for an assistant.
(He still hasn’t hired anyone. There were a couple of interviews, but. Well. Whatever.)
Everyone looks expectantly at Henry, and he sighs.
“You can start Monday,” he says.
-
Eliza is wearing ballet flats on Monday, which still make her taller than Henry, but not too much so, and her hair is braided neatly back and her nails at least don’t have external gems to escape into the food and get them sued.
She starts mixing up a batch of the salted caramel oat bran muffins and Henry gets started on the first layer of the rainbow cake that’s rapidly becoming the bakery’s signature, and they work in companionable silence for all of about a minute and a half.
“Stop thinking about how much you’re going to regret this,” Eliza orders, and before Henry can say anything, she’s wiped a blob of whipped cream onto the tip of his nose.
Neither of their recipes require whipped cream and Henry has no idea where she even got it from, but she’s giggling, warm and bright, and he has been very alone in this quiet pristine white kitchen.
Henry honestly tries to fight it, but, after a moment, he lets himself laugh as well.
-
f: Selfie
p: pre Henry/Eliza
ch: trope_bingo at dreamwith - food and cooking
r/wc: G/1450
s: [Bakery AU] “I don’t think people are leaving you crack-laced muffins, Henry,” Sam says.
n: [Title from The Archies] I offered to write AU ficlets for people on twitter, and the first to come in from teaboytoaliens was a Henry/Eliza bakery AU. This wasn’t as Henry/Eliza as I meant it to be, but I enjoyed myself a lot (and got to mention a thing from the show that I think about far too much). And if you think I wasn’t listening to Suga Mama by Beyonce while writing like 2/3 of this, you would be wrong.
“I need a job,” the girl says.
Henry looks at her, all six-foot-something in those heels, dress made of some kind of fringing and nails manicured with little fake diamonds, loose red hair tumbling around her shoulders, and thinks about what a health-and-safety nightmare she would undoubtedly be.
“…I don’t need the help,” he replies, even though there’s definitely a sign in the window that disagrees with that. Henry spent half an hour picking out an appropriately sombre font and taking out all the exclamation marks Sam insisted he needed, and is disappointed that this is apparently the calibre of would-be bakers for his shop that said sign has attracted. She would probably want to make cupcakes, for god’s sake.
“You’re kind of a dick for a guy who spends his whole day surrounded by sugar,” the woman informs him, spins on a sparkly pink heel, and stomps out.
Larry said pretty much the same thing last week, so Henry can’t exactly hold it against the random stranger. When he squints, he can see where her shoes have left sparkles on the pristine linoleum.
-
When Henry arrives at the bakery the next morning, there’s a white cardboard box waiting outside the door, tied with a ludicrously ostentatious pink silk ribbon.
He squints suspiciously at it, tries to work out if people giftwrap bombs in anything other than cartoons, and then carefully steps over it as he goes inside. He’ll deal with it… at some point, possibly after a lot of coffee and a call to Julia, who seems like she’d know how to cope with unexpected packages.
Henry is feeling much more cheerful when he’s making the frosting for his blue velvet cakes, said cakes themselves already in the oven, and he figures he’ll just shove the mysterious box into a garbage bag and put it in a dumpster and never think about it again. Everything’s going to be fine.
“These are amazing,” Sam’s voice comes though, somewhat indistinctly.
Sam’s been Henry’s friend for so long he can’t even really remember how or why they met, and Henry is getting used to Sam dropping in unannounced to “see how your new enterprise is getting on”. It’s about thirty percent concern and friendship, and about seventy percent the desire for free baked goods.
He looks away from his mixer to see Sam has the white box under one arm, the pink ribbon trailing, and is face-deep in what appears to be some kind of muffin.
“Sam!” he says, moving to tug the box away. “You can’t eat that! Someone left them on the doorstep, they could be laced with anything! Poison! Or-or crack!”
Sam doesn’t appear overly worried about this, and takes another bite of the muffin he’s still holding. “I don’t think people are leaving you crack-laced muffins, Henry,” he says with his mouth full. There’s icing sugar dusted across his chin.
Henry sets the box on a table and even remembers to turn the mixer with the frosting off before it’s over-beaten and useless to him. Inside the box are five muffins - with an empty slot where Sam helped himself - looking golden and delicious and smelling wonderful, Henry has to admit. There’s also a label written in curling script, informing him that these are salted caramel oat bran muffins. The label is sparkly pink; Henry narrows his eyes.
“I think these may have been left by someone I refused to hire yesterday,” he says. “So I really think you should stop eating them, Sam.”
“There’s liquid caramel in the centre,” Sam moans, completely ignoring him.
Henry is still tempted to dump the rest in the trash, but he has the horrible suspicion that Sam would just fish them back out again.
-
The baked goods do not stop appearing.
The boxes are getting ever fancier and the ribbon bows ever larger, and Henry is starting to feel increasingly stalked. The girl he refused to hire hasn’t come back, and he has no idea how she’s getting the cakes to him before he gets there - he tried coming in an hour early and the box was already there, full of still-slightly-warm gooey gluten-free brownies - or what she’s trying to achieve.
Henry still isn’t stupid enough to eat cake left for him by someone who may or may not have some kind of weird vendetta against him, but apparently he is the only one with this viewpoint. Sam drops in regularly to see what’s arrived, and he let the cat out of the bag because Raj and Larry keep looking expectantly at Henry when they come in until he sighs and waves a hand at wherever he’s dumped the package today. Even Julia arrives after a week to help herself to a slice of rocky road cheesecake out of the paisley-print box and to tell Henry that he she can probably get the lab to analyse the cake and prove once and for all that it’s not been laced with anything.
Henry declines her kind offer, and firmly ignores how good the cheesecake looks.
-
Finally, after almost a month of constant gifts - and for someone unemployed, his cake stalker sure seems to have a lot of money to spend on increasingly obscure ingredients - there’s nothing waiting for Henry one morning.
He can’t tell if there’s a tinge of disappointment behind all the relief; if there is, it definitely fades into irritation by the time everyone he knows has dropped by the bakery to be disappointed that there isn’t any free mystery cake, and to demand what he did wrong. And then help themselves to things Henry has baked for actual paying customers like they need compensation.
It’s Julia’s birthday; she comes by the bakery to meet him and the others so they can all make dinner on time, and Henry’s just about to lock up and turn all the lights out when he sees movement outside and jumps for the door.
“Hey!” he says, and the tall leggy redhead looks at him with wide, caught eyes.
-
“This is the most alarming cake I have ever seen in my entire life,” Henry says.
His cake stalker turns out to be called Eliza, and she has brought Julia a birthday cake. A very specific and detailed birthday cake.
“This is delightful!” Julia says, leaning in to take a look at the intricate tangle of presumably important organs that make up the scale decoration of the human urinary tract on top of this cake.
“It’s horrifying,” Henry replies, but none of his friends are listening to him; they’re clustered around Eliza’s cake, poking at the fondant kidneys and sniggering and being generally ridiculous.
“How did you know it was my birthday?” Julia asks Eliza.
Eliza shrugs. “Well, Henry here is an internet ghost - except for this website of course - but the rest of you are around here a bunch so I did some googling and I found you easily enough, and here we are.”
Everyone makes understanding noises. Henry looks amongst the people crowded into his little bakery and wonders if there was something in all those cakes after all, because none of his friends seem particularly disturbed by all this stalking.
“I just wanted you to give me a chance,” Eliza says, turning those big eyes on him. Her shoes are impractical and her dress has sequins that will undoubtedly shed and her clothes leave very little to the imagination and she’s not anything he was expecting when he advertised for an assistant.
(He still hasn’t hired anyone. There were a couple of interviews, but. Well. Whatever.)
Everyone looks expectantly at Henry, and he sighs.
“You can start Monday,” he says.
-
Eliza is wearing ballet flats on Monday, which still make her taller than Henry, but not too much so, and her hair is braided neatly back and her nails at least don’t have external gems to escape into the food and get them sued.
She starts mixing up a batch of the salted caramel oat bran muffins and Henry gets started on the first layer of the rainbow cake that’s rapidly becoming the bakery’s signature, and they work in companionable silence for all of about a minute and a half.
“Stop thinking about how much you’re going to regret this,” Eliza orders, and before Henry can say anything, she’s wiped a blob of whipped cream onto the tip of his nose.
Neither of their recipes require whipped cream and Henry has no idea where she even got it from, but she’s giggling, warm and bright, and he has been very alone in this quiet pristine white kitchen.
Henry honestly tries to fight it, but, after a moment, he lets himself laugh as well.
-