Inception Fic: Recipe for Disaster (Arthur/Eames) (1 of 7)
Title: Recipe for Disaster
Type: Slash + ensemble, AU (culinary school).
Word Count: ~55k
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames and Ariadne, plus Yusuf, Mal Cobb, Dom Cobb, Saito, and Fischer
Warnings some swearing (in multiple languages), eventual sexual relationship (see characters & pairings), including oral sex.
Summary: Arthur's known since he was young that he has a knack for cooking and baking, and beginning culinary school only makes him more certain. But no matter how good he is, it seems Eames is better - which does not endear him to Arthur in the slightest. Eames, however, is quite determined to get Arthur to open up and stop being so uptight and prickly by any means necessary. While each hones his skill in the culinary arts (and Arthur desperately tries to convince Ariadne that the desired structural integrity of her cakes violates basic laws of physics), they increasingly find themselves drawn together, inside the classroom and out. Given such close quarters in the kitchen, and the amount of sensory stimulation involved with preparing all manner of food, it starts to become difficult for Arthur to retain his customary level of distance and detachment. And, as Arthur will find, when it comes to unsatisfied appetites, hunger is often the best sauce of all.
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There was something about standing in a kitchen, dressed in chef's whites, apron, dark pants, and non-slip shoes, that made Arthur feel as if he was finally somewhere along the path he'd been meant to follow. Being surrounded by nearly two dozen other similarly-attired people only reinforced the feeling.
But even though these people might believe they were also destined for culinary greatness, Arthur knew that he was one of the few that would actually make something of themselves within the field.The majority of the poor bastards would be stuck working in an Applebee's or some other similar culinary hellhole of the gastronomically mediocre. He wondered if any of them realized that yet.
"You, you, you, and you," the man at the head of the kitchen said, pointing to a handful of students in turn. "Over to that station. Turkey stock today, soup tomorrow. Recipe's on the table. You two," he said, gesturing to Arthur and another student, "work on preparing the mirepoix. The other two, preparing the carcass for browning. Remove as much of the meat as you can and set it aside for tomorrow's lesson. Go.”
Arthur made his way over to the table on the far end of the kitchen with a quick, “Yes, chef,” not even waiting for his other group members to follow. A week of nothing but lecture and tours of the kitchens to become acquainted with the kitchen equipment had only made him more eager to get to this point.
By the time the other three members of his group had gathered around the rectangular stainless steel table, Arthur had already scanned the recipe. Nothing exciting, really. Mirepoix, herbs, the turkey carcasses, a bit of tomato paste...what you’d expect for your basic, everyday stock and soup. Still, it was working with food, and a chance to show that he had a better idea of what he was doing than a lot of his fellow students would. Some people got into the culinary arts on a whim, after seeing love stories set in the kitchens of fancy restaurants, or cute little family films about rodents who could cook. Arthur, however, had wanted this for a long time.
“So, how’s everyone?” the guy across the table asked after a moment of silence during which Arthur had already arranged his vegetables at his left side and the other two students had donned gloves, looking less than thrilled with the prospect of stripping the flesh from the turkey carcass. “New acquaintances, all?”
Arthur didn’t even bother to look up. He wasn’t here to chat. “Yeah,” was his only real contribution. The guy already working to rip apart the turkey gave a similarly non-committal response. Arthur could appreciate that.
The lone girl in the group made more of an effort. “I’m Ariadne,” she said, pulling one of the turkeys closer to her, twisting and pulling one of the legs until it came loose with a wet crunching sound that was the bone coming free of the socket.
“Well, if that’s not an unusual name,” the guy said in a voice that was probably supposed to be charming, aided by his British accent. “But quite lovely. Fits you, I’d say. And you two are?”
“Jefferson,” the other person replied. “Nice to meet you.”
“Excellent,” the Brit said, still sounding ridiculously jovial, as if he’d been personally appointed social coordinator for the group. “And you are?”
Trying to dice this celery, Arthur wanted to say. Instead, he bent his head a bit more and slid his knife down another stalk, working to give himself strips that would make a good quarter-inch dice and tossing the unusable bits into the stock bucket in the center of the table . “Arthur.”
“Arthur. I’m Eames. Nice to meet you all.” He pulled a handful of the celery stalks Arthur had already divested of their leaves and ends onto his cutting board, and Arthur gritted his teeth. He couldn’t prep one of the bunches that hadn’t been touched yet? “Jefferson! I noticed your bag in the lecture the other day. Are you really a fan of the Red Devils?”
“The who?”
Eames sighed. “I’ll take that as a no. Pity. I’ve seen no less than four Man United logos since the term began, but not one person has been able to name a player other than David Beckham, and he hasn’t played for them since 2003. Wayne Rooney? Ryan Giggs? Rio Ferdinand? Ring any bells?”
“No, sorry, man. Bag was a gift from my wife, anyway.”
“Oh, well, I suppose that explains it,” the Brit said, sounding only slightly less cheerful. “What about you, Arthur? Football fan? Or soccer, I suppose I should say?”
“No.” He’d played briefly until the age of eight, but had given it up once his parents had started relying upon his babysitter to be there for his games and fill them in later. He hadn’t been very good at it, anyway.
“Ariadne?”
“I’ve never seen a soccer game,” the girl - who had to be the youngest of them all by at least five years - said apologetically. “I’m not really big on sports.”
“Ah, well, disappointed in you all I may be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along just fine,” Eames said brightly.
Arthur thought that might be the end of things, but it appeared Eames had no shortage of conversation topics at hand. He ignored most of them completely, preferring to focus on the job they were supposed to be doing. He’d finished with two bunches of celery and was three onions into the bucket between them when he couldn’t really take the idle chatter anymore. While it was nice to get some practice in on his knife skills, he’d be damned if he did all of the dicing on his own. “Eames, listen,” he finally sighed, looking up at the guy across the table. “Why don’t you stop for a second and...”
“And what, Arthur?” Eames asked, eyebrows arched expressively. He had a face for that, Arthur noticed briefly - one that displayed amusement rather well. “What should I stop?” His right hand, wrapped easily around the handle of his knife while his thumb and index finger rested on either side of the blade, stilled.
Arthur blinked. Eames had somehow managed to get through the rest of the celery, nearly all the carrots, and had just started on his second onion. He’d chopped nearly half again what Arthur had, even though he’d been non-stop chattering since they’d hit the table. And what was more, each and every diced bit of vegetable in his container seemed to be as close to a quarter-inch dice as you could get without a ruler.
It was then that Arthur decided he didn’t like Eames.
x X x
It was somewhere around the point when Chef Cobb - who did not like jokes or questions about his feelings on the cobb salad, as it happened - assigned the bloke with slicked-back hair, nice chin, and sharp cheekbones that made him look more serious than he should be to Eames’s group when Eames decided that culinary school might fit him perfectly well.
It wasn’t as if he had been dreading culinary school in the first place, really. He’d wandered into it, much the same as he’d wandered most places in his life - because it seemed like the next place to try, some new thing to explore and learn from. And after a decade or so of work in more kitchens than he could easily recall, Eames wasn’t worried about the challenge. He expected to work, yes. But he expected things to just sort of ...work out. They always had, at least to his way of thinking. Others might take a look at his life from a more objective viewpoint and disagree, but what did that matter to Eames? It was his life, wasn’t it? No other opinion on the matter was necessary.
It was a bit disappointing to learn that none of his groupmates knew a thing about football, but not really unexpected. Eames had been in America far too long to be surprised by the stunning lack of knowledge the average American had of the sport. What was more disappointing, however, was how unsuccessful each and every attempt to get Arthur to engage in conversation had been.
When Arthur had interrupted Eames’s conversation with Ariadne on her interest in building custom cakes, only to trail off and never actually say what he’d interrupted for, Eames got a glimpse of the hard line of Arthur’s shoulders, his thinned lips, and his narrowed eyes and made a decision.
Gay, straight, or somewhere in between, Eames was going to impress him in any damned way he could. Someone needed to wipe that uptight look off Arthur’s face. And Eames was fairly certain he was just the man for the job.
After a moment of actual silence, in which all that could be heard was the chopping of vegetables and the soft squelching sounds of cooled, cooked turkey being pulled off the carcass, Eames tossed the final handful of his onion into the container between him and Arthur, scooped up between hand and knife blade, and came around the other side of the table. “You know, I can show you a better way to dice that onion,” Eames offered, flashing a wide smile.
“This is the way Cobb showed us,” was Arthur’s curt response. Everything about the man was curt. Eames wouldn’t be surprised if that was his bloody middle name.
“Yes, I know, but there’s a quicker way-” Eames said, starting to move around to the spot immediately at Arthur’s side and reaching for the other half of the onion sitting on the chopping board. “Look, you just-”
“I said no thank you,” Arthur snapped.
“You didn’t, actually,” Eames pointed out, but he stepped back towards his side of the table. “If you’re ever curious, feel free to ask. I’d be happy to show you.”
Ariadne cleared her throat. “Would you show me?”
Eames beamed at her. Nice girl, really. A bit quiet and timid, but she seemed clever enough. Whether or not she was as timid with a knife as she appeared to be about most other things would be seen in due course. “Absolutely, love. Here.” He snagged the other half of the onion before Arthur could become too protective of it, and laid it on his chopping board. “See, this way, you don’t have to cut towards your fingers. You let the natural rings of the onion do some of your work for you.” He made a series of slices perpendicular to the grain of the onion, then turned them ninety degrees. “Like this.”
Eames sneaked a quick glance up at Arthur as he made another series of slices. He couldn’t quite tell from this angle whether the other man was watching at all. Oh well. He finished showing the technique to Ariadne, flamboyantly scooping the diced bits of onion between knife and hand and dumping them into the bucket. “Just like that.”
“Why doesn’t Cobb teach us that way?” Jefferson asked, and Eames shrugged. He hadn’t realised he’d had everyone’s attention but Arthur’s.
“Damned if I know,” Eames replied. You’d think that a chef instructor would teach the easiest methods available, but then again, what did he know?
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Ariadne asked, stripping off her gloves and stepping over to the nearby hand sink.
“Some Greek cafe in London.” Eames grinned. He’d learned a lot of things in a lot of places, and it pleased him to pass some - but not all - of them on. The onion trick, he could afford to give up. Other techniques, however, were his alone.
Unless, of course, the person asking was five foot ten or eleven, slim-built, brunet, with dark brown eyes and a serious disposition. Then, perhaps, Eames could be persuaded to give up some secrets.
“Ooh, you’ve worked in food service before?” Ariadne asked, wide-eyed. “I could never get a second interview anywhere. Everywhere I looked wanted you to have experience first, but no one would give you that first shot at experience. How’d you manage that?”
That was a long story, really, and one Eames didn’t really feel up to sharing today. He looked at Arthur for a long moment, watching the way he wrung out the rag over the sanitizer bucket and scrubbed his working surface in a manner that was somehow both brusque and loving, and shrugged. “Fell into it, really.”
Across the table, Arthur snorted. “Fell into it,” he muttered, apparently unaware (or just uncaring) that he was speaking aloud.
Grabbing the rag back from the bucket where Arthur had tossed it and wiping down his own work station, Eames made a solemn vow to himself. If it took all term, all year, or even the entirety of his formal culinary education, he was going to get that bloke to drop the barriers, give him a smile, and say something friendly. He’d never met anyone so resistant to pleasantries or getting along. Somewhere along the way, he would impress Arthur enough to get a positive reaction out of him.
And if it never happened, Eames was going to die trying.
x X x
Though Arthur had never seen the Brit before the lab in Chef Cobb’s class the day before, he suddenly appeared to be everywhere.
He had been there, chatting with their instructor for Contemporary Cuisine the day after they'd first gotten to do kitchen work. He'd been standing nearby in Introduction to Wines later that same day, grinning at Arthur as if they shared some sort of secret, or were friends of some sort. So when Arthur walked into the lecture portion of Chef Cobb's Culinary Fundamentals and didn't see Eames anywhere, he shrugged, chided himself for being paranoid about whatever he was being paranoid about, and sat in a desk a third of the way back from the front of the lecture hall, lining up his pen and binder atop the flip top of his desk chair.
"My, my," a very British voice murmured in Arthur's ear moments after he'd gotten situated. "Aren't we organized? Tell me, Arthur, are you this fastidious in everything you do?"
Arthur froze at the voice, then sighed deeply. He did not, however, acknowledge the man behind him. That would be giving in (giving in to what, however, he didn't know. But he was pretty sure he didn't want to do it).
Eames didn’t seem deterred in the slightest by Arthur’s lack of response. Instead, he leaned forward, violating Arthur’s bubble of personal space. “You know,” he said, breath tickling just slightly at Arthur’s right ear, “an organized mind is a complex mind. The more organized you are, the more you can fit in it. Do you agree?”
Arthur would have liked to respond back with something snappy, perhaps regarding Eames’s own lack of organization (not that Arthur’d noticed one way or the other, really, since Chef Cobb had had their stations set up before their arrival the other day). Unfortunately, just before he could come up with something clever and harsh enough to regain his semblance of personal space, he’d caught a whiff of something warm and woody and sweet that made nearly all higher brain function cease. Arthur had been cooking long enough in an amateur capacity that he had a better-than-fair sense of scent and taste components. He could pinpoint faint amounts of cinnamon in his favorite chocolate icing from the bakery across town, or celery seed in the rub his college roommate used on his pork ribs, or even the top note of lavender in the tea his old babysitter liked to drink. But this...
This was warm nights in the tropics, jeans rolled up to mid-calf as you walked along the shore at night, drinks and desserts in the dark booth of an exclusive restaurant, and something lower and darker besides. He wanted to say there was citrus and vanilla, but honestly, he couldn’t quite identify it. All he really knew was that, in other circumstances, Arthur might be very willing to grab whoever wore this fragrance by the collar and drag him close, wanting little more than to infuse himself with the scent and the feeling it provided.
“Arthur? I know you can hear me. I suppose, if you really are so intent on watching Cobb down there, diagramming the different styles of knives, I’ll leave you to it.” Eames chuckled softly, voice disturbingly rich in timbre and breathy when he spoke again. “Forgive me for interrupting when you’re learning.”
“I don’t care about kinds of knives,” Arthur finally managed, recovering just the slightest bit of brain function when Eames pulled back, taking his voice and his cologne with him. “Besides, he hasn’t even started the lecture yet.”
“True enough.” And just like that, Eames was close again, and Arthur wanted to kick himself for opening the door like that. He didn’t like this guy, sultry voice and charming - oh God, did he really just admit it was charming? - accent and unbelievable cologne not withstanding. “So I suppose that means I can bother you just a little bit more? Tell me, have you had any ideas for the report Cobb wants at midterm yet? I was thinking something on Escoffier, you know, since we do seem to owe so much of the method to him. What do you think?”
In truth, Arthur thought very little, but it had nothing to do with Eames’s chosen essay topic. It was much more a product of his voice, and feeling his breath on Arthur’s neck, and that scent that was warm-woody-sweet-spicy going straight to Arthur’s brain and shutting it down. If he ever found a suitable boyfriend, Arthur thought vaguely, he was going to have to track down that cologne and give it as a gift, with the warning that if it was used, there would be very little chance they would remain clothed while not out and about in public.
Or even in public, depending on how concealed an area was with alcoves or shrubbery.
“I, uh...” He knew how to use words, really, he did. Normally, he’d have a good, solid, and possibly disparaging remark at ready, likely regarding how one couldn’t pick a more obvious subject for their essay, and how Cobb was probably going to have to read through a hundred such essays during midterm week. “Yeah. That.”
It was at that very moment, as Eames was once again laughing softly in Arthur’s ear and Arthur was still struggling for coherent thought - or even the ability to name all the damn components of the cologne, though he was almost certain both vanilla and lime might be in the profile somewhere - that Ariadne chose to drop her rather heavy-looking backpack onto the floor at Arthur’s feet and flop into the chair next to his. “Arthur, right? Is it okay to sit here? I forgot my glasses, and I lost a contact back in Asian Cuisine two hours ago, so I can’t sit in the back where I’m used to.”
“What?” Arthur said, suddenly snapping out of it. Oh thank God. This girl probably didn’t know it, but she had just saved him from...well, not from Eames, exactly, but from himself at the very least. No, on second thought, she had definitely saved him from Eames, who was now leaning back in his own seat and fiddling with his pen, tapping out a light rhythm that only he could appreciate. “Yeah, go ahead. Sit. It’s Ariadne, right?”
The girl beamed at him. “No one ever remembers it the first time. Yeah. I’m in your Cakes and Confections class too, I think. With Chef Yusuf?”
Arthur had vague recollections of seeing a pale, petite girl with dark hair and big eyes lingering towards the back of the bakery classroom. “Oh, yeah, I think you’re right.”
He was saved any further awkward small talk (which, admittedly, was a hell of a lot less awkward than whatever he’d been having with Eames) when Chef Cobb turned around and dove straight into the lecture, not even bothering to tell everyone to shut up first. For the next two hours, there was nothing but notes on the five mother sauces and some of their best-known variations. As he gathered up his things and bid a goodbye to Ariadne, all he could think was “bechamel, espagnole, veloute, hollandaise, tomato-and-don’t-ever-let-me-catch-you-saying-vinaigrette-in-this-context-I-don’t-care-what-any-other-chef-tells-you”, repeating rapidly until the words all ran together and Arthur was quite sure that whatever he had for lunch or dinner that day would not be including a sauce of any kind. He’d have white rice with steamed broccoli, or even cold cereal, if it came to that.
In fact, so invested was he in the whirling list of mother sauces that he almost didn’t notice when Eames squeezed by him in the aisle, a heady cloud of that scent wafting up as he moved past, and tossed Arthur a little wave and accompanying grin.
Almost didn’t notice.
x X x
Some people, when met with a challenge that seemed to be insurmountable, simply gave up any attempt to overcome it. Some took a step back and reevaluated whether or not the result was worth the expenditure. And still others considered whether or not what they were trying to accomplish was even what they wanted in the first place. Eames, having done the third point and a bit of the second on the little information he had, had chosen the remaining option.
He had simply decided to work harder at it and approach the challenge from whatever angle necessary.
And Arthur certainly was a challenge. Eames had no idea what the hell had made the other man so prickly and closed-off, but he was certain there was a way around it. It was likely Arthur had friends of some sort, which meant that there was actually a chance he opened up and willingly interacted with other people. What Eames needed to find, then, was where the weak spot in that barrier might be, where the opening in that wall might be hidden.
Because it had to be there. Eames wouldn’t accept the alternative.
He had tried general small talk, but all efforts in that vein had failed, although he had met a handful of other students who seemed perfectly nice people. In fact, the young girl Eames had shown the onion trick - Ariel or Adrienne or something like that - was quite nice. If Eames had had a younger brother, he might even nudge him in that direction. Sweet girl. Rather inquisitive disposition, too.
After general small talk, he’d tried slightly-less-small talk. And while Arthur hadn’t quite been so terse when Eames had brought up the topic of their essays for Cobb’s course, he certainly hadn’t been responsive to anything Eames had said. A similar attempt at discussing Arthur’s opinion on hollandaise and other emulsions hadn’t got him any further. He’d got not a single glimmer of insight into the man in the two weeks he’d been trying to coax a civil response from him.
A lesser man would give up, go out for a pint, and think about snogging the bloke sitting next to him at the bar, who did appear to enjoy the nuances of back-and-forth conversation. Tempting though it was, Eames had no intention of doing so.
Besides, said bloke had said he favored Manchester City, of all teams.
Eames considered a new plan of attack as he unloaded his car that evening, arms laden with bags of groceries. He’d managed to get used to calling a courgette a zucchini, but he didn’t think he’d ever be used to American chocolate, which accounted for the twenty dollars in mint and milk chocolate varieties of Aero Bar he’d managed to find this evening. He wasn’t much of one for stress eating nothing but junk food, but he’d never deny his ever-present sweet tooth. What he needed to do, he reasoned, unwrapping the first bar of chocolate even before putting the milk in the fridge, was to learn something about Arthur and use that to begin a conversation. How he was going to do that, however, was still a bit of a mystery. He hadn’t seen Arthur converse with a single soul in any of their courses.
Well, wait. There was always Adelaide, wasn’t there? Granted, he’d never overheard or even seen the two of them have a full, lengthy conversation, but she seemed the most likely person to actually know something about Arthur. He shrugged to himself as he tossed the empty chocolate wrapper into the bin. Well, as a last resort, perhaps. Maybe he just needed to be more clever in his tactics. There had to be something he and Arthur had in common. Eventually, he’d find it. It might take a while, but that was fine by Eames. He had plenty of time. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere for a while.
x X x
There were few things, Arthur believed, that were as pointless as cakes that looked delectable, but were virtually inedible. Or in this particular case, actually inedible.
Beside him, Ariadne was looking similarly troubled. “Is this...Is this going to be our final exam?” she asked timidly, hand in the air. “A wedding cake?”
Chef Yusuf laughed. “Not for this course. This is merely an example I was showing to one of the Advanced Cake Design students. You’ll be doing cakes, obviously, but nothing quite so elaborate this term. First I’ll show you the basics of decorating - borders and flowers and combing, in addition to the actual cake and filling recipes. Your final practical exam will, however, be a cake of your own design.”
Ariadne still looked wary. “Are we going to have to use fondant?”
“We can discuss that later,” Chef Yusuf said in a way that almost certainly meant “yes”. Ariadne turned to Arthur, rolled her eyes, and mimed sticking her finger down her throat.
Arthur smirked. He couldn’t really blame her. It might look nice, but fondant wasn’t exactly the best-tasting option. At least good cake wasn’t going to waste - Arthur could see a very thin gap between the fondant and cake board that revealed the styrofoam cake forms inside. “Practically the same stuff outside as in,” he muttered to her when the chef’s back was turned. She giggled behind her hand, then faked a cough to cover it when Chef Yusuf looked over in their direction.
An hour and a half later, Arthur had streaks of green icing on the inside of his right wrist, just below the spot where his vinyl gloves ended. Ariadne had red food coloring along the heel of her palm and soaking the outside of her left little finger, so that it now looked like her hand was a bloody mess underneath her own glove. They had a large bowl of uncolored vanilla buttercream icing at the far corner of their shared table, four smaller stainless steel bowls of colored icing pushed to the edge of their work area, plastic icing couplers and a variety of stainless steel tips haphazardly tossed into a small plastic box, and a sheet tray of nearly three dozen icing roses on small squares of parchment between them.
They also had a solid dusting of confectioner’s sugar everywhere, but Arthur had somehow managed to put that out of his mind, concentrating instead on making a goddamned cone of buttercream that stayed upright and did not fucking lean when he went to pipe the first circle of petals around the top.
“Um, Arthur?”
Arthur squinted even harder, turning the flower nail in his left hand slowly - so very slowly - while trying to use enough pressure on the piping bag in his right hand to get an actual full petal to emerge instead of some half-assed thin strip of icing with no curve or thick end. “Better be good, Ariadne.”
“You, um...” she trailed off, and Arthur would bet money she was biting her lower lip. They hadn’t known each other long, but he’d been working with her long enough in the bakery (and even a bit in the kitchen, when it came to Chef Cobb’s class) to know which troubled expression went with that tone of voice. “You sort of just leaned into that puddle of rose-pink food coloring I spilled.”
“What?” He looked down, managing to nudge the first row of petals with the tip of the pastry bag and completely ruining his rose in the process. His apron was now nearly hot-pink, and, in addition to the smear of color that covered the material, there was an even darker spot just above his waist. Arthur realized with dismay that he could feel damp fabric up against his stomach. Giving up any possibility at salvaging the flower he’d been working on - because, really, it was a slim fucking possibility anyway - he put the flower nail and bag of icing on the table and stepped back. “Aw, shit.” He untied his apron, saw the dark stain on his chef’s whites, undid the last button, and pulled that aside. Even his undershirt was pink. Which meant, likely, so was his skin. “Really?”
Ariadne looked torn between laughing and hiding back in the pantry. “I’m sorry,” she said warily, as if afraid he was going to shout at her. “I thought you knew it was there. I just went to get new rags-” she held up a folded towel, already soaked in fresh, uncolored sanitizer solution, and clutched a dry one in her other hand "-and before I could say anything, you’d leaned into it.”
Arthur sighed heavily. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t exactly ideal, but it was hardly as if she’d burned him or cut him or anything. “Remind me to buy a black chef’s coat for days we’re in the bakery, though.” He looked her up and down, noticing the green icing smeared across her apron, transferred from the lip of one of the small bowls to the spot just below her chest. He had a vague recollection of watching her cradle the bowl as she gave up on mixing the color into the small amount of icing with a bowl scraper, in favor of just using a plastic spoon. “Actually, why they don’t tell us that in the first place is beyond me.”
“I’m not sure why they do a lot of things,” Ariadne said, shooing Arthur aside to clean up what remained of the puddle. “Like why we can’t use a meringue buttercream for decorating instead of a basic buttercream. My hands are so warm, I had to keep adding powdered sugar to make it thicker and keep it from melting. Why would he make us use this stuff?”
“I do it,” Chef Yusuf suddenly said from a place right behind them both, causing Ariadne to yelp, “because it’s the cheapest option. Consider it a bonus that I’ve let you do colors for this project to help you see the details - when I first learned, we were only allowed to use white icing. Also, I don’t feel like turning all thirty of you loose on the stove for Italian or Swiss buttercream just yet. We’ll have plenty of time for icing and filling recipes. Learn the basics of making things look attractive first, Ariadne, and then we’ll move on to making them taste good.” There was a slight commotion from another area of the room, stainless steel bowls clattering to the floor and people bickering loudly, and Yusuf sighed. “Just keep working. You have another twenty minutes before it’s time to clean up.”
Once he had gone, Arthur shrugged and handed over their only remaining bag of red icing. “Your turn. You need more practice than I do, anyway.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ariadne said with a flair of sarcasm. “At least my first four roses didn’t look like artichokes.”
“Yeah, but my tenth was almost perfect, and you couldn’t get your bottom level of petals to line up with the base until at least your fifteenth.”
“You’re such a pain in my ass,” she muttered, squinting as she piped a cone of icing onto the flower nail. “There,” she said after a moment, twirling the completed flower right in front of his nose. “Take that. Screw ‘almost’ perfect. That could have come straight from the garden of some witch’s gingerbread cottage.”
“If you say so.”
Ariadne stuck out her tongue. “You’re going to go home tonight and practice until two in the morning, just so you can come back on Friday and show me how much better you are than I am, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, right,” Arthur scoffed, nudging her out of the way of the bench scraper he wanted with a grin. “Like I need practice to prove that.”
Besides, he couldn’t. He didn’t own piping tips.
x X x
No matter how long his shower this evening was going to be, Eames was still fairly certain that by the time he crawled into bed, he would still smell of cheese.
After a week of listening to Chef Mallorie Cobb (who warmly insisted upon being called “Chef Mal”, unlike her husband’s rather harsher mandate he only be addressed as “Chef Cobb”) lecture on the characteristics of cheeses, the process behind their making, and the regional variations of such, the word “cheese” had started to lose any meaning whatsoever. That was, of course, until they actually were presented with an assortment of cheeses - dozens, in fact - and told that for the next two hours, their concern was to taste each one, take notes, and consider foods to pair them with. There was no shortage of options, as evidenced by the plates of crackers, nuts, sliced fruits, jams, and other assorted complements, carefully arranged on the work stations around the class kitchen.
Eames took a moment to thank the good lord he wasn’t lactose intolerant, and another to wonder how Chef Lefevre, one of the first to allow Eames into his kitchen and also a man determined to break him of his refusal to eat anything other than Cheddar, was fairing, and then he made his way to the front of the class with the other students to gather a hand-held wooden tray that resembled a very thin chopping board.
Instead of fighting through the knot of students at the first table of cheeses, Eames headed for the back of the room where the other tables held assortments that were just as inviting. And he wasn’t alone. As Eames reached for a tiny plastic sample cup of pomegranate molasses, Arthur’s arm nearly knocked into him as he stabbed a few small cubes of Gruyere onto a plastic toothpick.
“Watch out, would you?” Arthur said testily, and Eames tsked inside his own head. Always so wound up, this one.
“Pardon me, Arthur,” he replied easily instead. “I will try to jump out of your way next time.” He gave a little wink and moved around the other side of the table, making certain not to leave to much room as he scooted between Arthur and the other table behind them.
"Whatever," Arthur muttered, popping a small chunk of Emmental into his mouth and closing his eyes. Eames watched with fascination as Arthur's jaw worked slightly and he seemed to savor the taste. After a moment, he opened his eyes, set down his tray, and made a few little notes on the stapled packet of half-sized sheets of paper Chef Mal had handed out.
Unable to help himself, Eames leaned over and glanced at Arthur's paper. In small, neat handwriting were the words "nutty" and "grassy", followed by a small arrow and "pepper crackers" and "sweet/tangy fruit?" Really? Well, he couldn't really fault Arthur's notes as inaccurate. But pepper crackers and some sort of sweet or tangy fruit? Really?
"Where's your sense of imagination?" Eames asked, unable to help the smirk that crept across his face. "Isn't the point of the exercise to explore creative pairings?
"The point of this exercise," Arthur said, voice hard, "is to familiarize ourselves with the different cheeses and keep an open mind regarding which other flavors would complement the cheeses on offer."
For just a moment, Eames wondered how far the stick might be up Arthur's arse, and just how long it had been wedged there. "Well, someone's been reading the syllabus," he said lightly, reaching for the platter of blue cheeses at the next table and taking a small sampling of each. Unlike Arthur, who was busy arranging his cheese samples in a very orderly fashion and then actually diagramming their positions on his tray in the margins of his papers, Eames had very little need for organization of that sort. "She can't really expect us to stick with the complementary items on each table, can she?" he asked after a moment of frustrated inventory over the table's contents.
Arthur gave a little grunt, not bothering to look up from his note-making. "And what exactly would you do, otherwise?"
Eames looked around and spotted something promising at a far table. He wove his way through the other students, who were now starting to scatter away from the tables at the very front of the room, wooden trays already nearly full of items, and picked up a small paper cup from the far corner table in the classroom. After a second's thought, he picked up a second cup and headed back to his tray. "This," he said, dropping a few blue cheese crumbles into the cup, tilting his head back, and closing his eyes as both flavors hit his palate.
"What on earth are you doing to that chocolate?"
Arthur sounded absolutely horrified, which was sort of adorable, in a ridiculous way. Eames took a minute to let the tastes mingle on his tongue a bit longer before chewing and swallowing. After another moment of appreciating the interaction between the two wildly different flavors, he opened his eyes and raised his eyebrows. Picking up another chunk of dark chocolate along with another bit of cheese, he stuffed both items into Arthur's slightly agape mouth. "This."
Arthur looked torn between punching Eames in the face, shouting that he'd been accosted, and just simply going into shock. But then he chewed, and his eyes, which had been narrowed so far that Eames rather thought he was going to give himself a tension headache, widened comically.
"Good, isn't it?"
Swallowing his small mouthful, Arthur glared at him. "That still doesn't give you the right to shove something into my mouth. My God, are your hands even clean? What makes you-"
"So it was good," Eames interrupted before Arthur could really get going. "The dark chocolate tempers the saltiness and the pungent sting, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, fine, I guess," Arthur snapped. But still, he bent his head and jotted something in his notes. Eames considered that a victory, though not a large one. He wandered over to another table, this one full of soft-ripened cheeses, and helped himself to a small serving of each, though it appeared many of their classmates had not limited themselves when it came to the Brie. Eames watched him take small bits of the accompaniments, taste everything with a thoughtful look on his face, eyes often closed, and jot notes. It was...well, it was sort of charming, how seriously Arthur took everything. He appeared to have some experience with cheeses, given the pairings Eames watched him make, but there was very little sense of adventure to his choices.
"What's your cheese background?" Eames asked over a picked-over plate of Asiago, after taking pains to appear to aimlessly wander around the other tables. "You have to have some background knowledge - you don't look nearly as afraid as some of these other students."
Arthur looked up at him, swallowing whatever he'd just sampled. "My parents had a lot of parties when I was growing up."
"Ah, invited you in to show off to their friends, I imagine. Sort of a 'look at our precious little boy and let him tell you about his studies' thing?"
"Hardly," Arthur said curtly. "I wasn't allowed to wander around the adults. But the caterers didn't seem to mind me hanging around the kitchen, so long as I stayed out of the way. I think they fed me to keep me quiet."
"Not that you wouldn't have been anyway," Eames said with a little grin.
"Not that I wouldn't have been anyway," Arthur agreed with a little huff that might have been a laugh, covered up. And without any sort of excuse or transition, he walked away, leaving Eames there to stare after him and wonder just how on earth he was supposed to get Arthur to open up more than giving one single fact about his childhood.
Hell, it was a start.
x X x
Though he had essentially abandoned his original career in order to attend culinary school and pursue that path, Arthur's study habits hadn't changed much in the years between his college days and his schooling now. Ten o'clock on a Saturday evening still found him at home, lounging on his couch, television on for background noise as he re-read the recent chapters of his culinary texts and reviewed his own notes. Unfortunately, it was a bit hard to focus when his phone kept chiming at him. Finally giving up on ignoring it, he picked it up and saw four new text messages, all from Ariadne.
The first was a simple you're home, aren't you? Not much later, she'd sent omg, are you watching this?? An hour ago, there had been wonder wen we get 2 do coolstuf like that. And just now, the enlightening missive on his screen read YOUSHOUSDN'T BE ABLE TO TO TAHT WIH CAEK ARTHUR. ISNRT RITE. CAEK SHOLDU BECAE KNOT STRYOPHOM.
Arthur sighed and put down his highlighter in order to respond, because heaven knew she'd pester him until he did. Ariadne, are you DRUNK TEXTING me while watching Ace of Cakes again? There was a slight pause, and then his phone chimed again, bearing only a ...mabey.
He was halfway through the chapter on sauces when his phone rang. Looking at the caller ID, Arthur sighed, accepted the call, and braced himself. "Hello?"
"Seriously, what kinda kitchen has a band saw in it?" was the indignant, slightly slurred greeting. "That belongs in someone's grandpa's workshop, or someone's garage. Not a bakery. Charge hundreds of dollars for cakes, and it's half styrofoam and wood. And it's all fondant. Can't anyone just use buttercream for God's sakes?"
"Ariadne," Arthur said, pinching the bridge of his nose but unable to help smiling just a bit. "Turn. Off. Food. Network."
"But I love this show. I want my cakes to look like that. I just want them to be, you know, actual cake."
"I've seen some of your cake design sketches," Arthur said with a laugh. "You violate the rules of physics. You can't have them that shape without having some sort of support structure. You cannot twist the world to your dimensions. Keep dreaming, Ariadne."
"Buzz kill," she muttered, and Arthur heard the faint sound of glass clinking against glass. "What're you doing, anyway? Studying again?"
"Reviewing."
"You are such a nerd. At least tell me you have porn or something interesting on while you do it."
"Porn?" Arthur gaped at his phone. Had he been eating or drinking, he might have choked. He was finding there were some social and personal boundaries Ariadne just didn't see as off-limits. "You know what, I don't think I want to know about your study habits. But to satisfy your curiosity, I've got Alton Brown on, okay?"
"DVR again? I swear to God, Arthur, you fangirl him more than my mother does."
"I do not 'fangirl' anything, you drunkard."
Ariadne laughed at him. "If you say so."
"I don't! I simply appreciate his conversational yet informative style and the recipes and techniques he presents."
"Sounds like someone's trying to rationalize their crush," she sing-songed.
Arthur sighed deeply. "Just shut up, okay?"
"What? Not like there's anything wrong with it. It's not as bad as you having a crush on Paula Deen."
"That woman is older than my mother. Also, she's kind of frightening." Not to mention that he wasn't particularly interested in women.
"Does make good use of butter and bacon, though."
Arthur paused. "I'll allow that."
Ariadne giggled again. "I win. Oh, they're doing a Firefly cake. Did you watch Firefly, Arthur?"
"I'm hanging up now," he said deliberately. He had a very strong feeling that if he didn't end this conversation now, he'd end up watching right along with her, listening to her alternately gush over designs and rage over the use of non-cake materials. It had happened before, after all.
"Never let me have any fun," she sighed. "Fine. Go back to being a nerd and crushing on Alton. Some day, I'm going to drag you over here for wine and cake shows. Mark my words."
"Marked. Good night, Ariadne."
"Night, Arthur. Give Alton a kiss for me, would you?"
Arthur hung up, worried that if he rolled his eyes any harder, they'd get stuck in the back of his head. But the call from Ariadne had killed his motivation for studying. Perhaps that wasn't the worst thing, anyway. He knew the material. He'd been over it backwards and forwards and could instruct someone how to make roux in his sleep. With a sigh, he closed his book and binder, picked up the notebook that always sat on his coffee table, and turned to a fresh page in the back, replaying the current episode of Alton Brown from the beginning.
He didn't have a crush on Alton Brown.
At least, not much of one.
An hour and a half later, Arthur had three new recipes in his notebook, two empty bottles of beer on the floor, a half bottle sitting on a coaster on the table, and a craving for goat cheese, red pepper, and shrimp pizza that couldn't be satisfied, because there were no places around that delivered that sort of thing, and Arthur didn't feel like taking his increasingly temperamental car across Los Angeles just for pizza. He settled for a grilled cheese with buffalo mozzarella and another episode of Alton Brown, where he could at least watch things being made with assorted peppers.
But as much as Arthur appreciated Alton's culinary venturesomeness, Arthur had to draw the line somewhere. There were inspired flavor combinations, and then there was exploration for exploration's sake, like...like..blue cheese and dark chocolate. "Mango pepper sorbet?" Arthur muttered at his television, taking a sip of his third beer. "Ugh. Why, Alton? That is so something Eames would do."
And now he was thinking about Eames. Great. He was going to need another beer.
He couldn't specify exactly why the other man irritated him so much, but he truly did get under Arthur's skin. It might have been the way he always seemed to be around, wherever Arthur turned. It might be the way he seemed so casual about everything, or the way he grinned whenever Arthur responded to him in any way. It might be the fact that, every once in a while, he smelled good enough that Arthur forgot to be irritated with him. It might be the easy way he moved in a kitchen, calling out warnings and even the occasional command, as if it were second nature.
And then again, it might just be that he might actually be better at everything than Arthur was. Only he wasn't. Not really.
Yeah. It was definitely time for a fourth beer. And maybe turning off the DVR in favor of the Ace of Cakes marathon, to take a page out of Ariadne's book.
x X x
Though he knew the lectures were a necessary part of culinary school, Eames found them exceptionally boring. Other than the history of the brigade kitchen system and the history of some of the base recipes they used in many dishes they were attempting to make this term, Eames wasn't sure he was getting much out of them at all. It seemed everything interesting and worth knowing happened in the actual kitchen itself, much as it had been for the last several years of his life.
"What exactly are you doodling?" a voice whispered next to him, much closer than he expected.
Eames jumped, quickly moving to cover his notebook with his text. "Don't do that," he hissed. "What the hell, Ariadne, didn't anyone ever tell you it wasn't nice to spy on someone's private affairs?"
Ariadne shrugged. "Oh, ai gamisou," she murmured, giving him a cheeky grin and nudging his hand away.
Eames blinked. Well, two could play at that game. "Gamo tin mana sou." He yanked his notebook back and smirked. He would not let some little twenty-year-old best him, whether it be at insults in a foreign language, or wrestling for a look at his mindless doodling.
"You leave my mother out of this," Ariadne said, giving one final tug at the notebook. She was stronger than she looked, because somehow, whether because she had better leverage or because Eames was trying not to get caught at this little tug-of-war at the very back of the classroom, she ended up with the now slightly-mangled spiral notebook in her hands. "How do you even know what I said? I mean, I know this class is Mediterranean Cuisine, but come on."
Eames watched with a mixture of embarrassment and slight dismay as Ariadne turned the notebook this way and that, in order to get a full look at what was scrawled in the margins. "I thought I told you, I worked in a Greek cafe back in London. I learned to say 'fuck you' before I learned how to make proper tirokeftedes. How does a little thing like you know those words?"
Ariadne arched one eyebrow. "With a name like mine, you don't think there might be some Greek in the background? Come on, where's your knowledge of Greek mythology? Minotaur? Sword and ball of thread?" She rolled her eyes when he just stared at her. "Nothing, huh? Fine. Let's move on to the more important question, shall we? Why, exactly, is it you've been doodling Arthur's name in the margins of your notebook like some lovesick schoolgirl?"
For the life of him, as quickly as he could normally think on his feet to get out of an unpleasant situation, Eames had nothing. "Who says it's our Arthur?" he finally muttered, making one last attempt to get the notebook back.
"Our Arthur? You're claiming him, now? You totally have a thing for him, don't you? I knew it."
"Oh, fine," Eames said as soon as Chef Fischer resumed his lecture, having finally looked up to see what the small disruption had been. "So either shut up about it, or help."
Ariadne's pleased smirk widened. "Oh, Eames," she whispered out of the side of her mouth, writing down whatever Fischer had just listed on the blackboard. "'Help' isn't a strong enough word for what I am going to do."
For the first time in his life, Eames found he was afraid of a girl.
x X x
Continue to Part Two
Type: Slash + ensemble, AU (culinary school).
Word Count: ~55k
Rating: R
Characters/Pairings: Arthur/Eames and Ariadne, plus Yusuf, Mal Cobb, Dom Cobb, Saito, and Fischer
Warnings some swearing (in multiple languages), eventual sexual relationship (see characters & pairings), including oral sex.
Summary: Arthur's known since he was young that he has a knack for cooking and baking, and beginning culinary school only makes him more certain. But no matter how good he is, it seems Eames is better - which does not endear him to Arthur in the slightest. Eames, however, is quite determined to get Arthur to open up and stop being so uptight and prickly by any means necessary. While each hones his skill in the culinary arts (and Arthur desperately tries to convince Ariadne that the desired structural integrity of her cakes violates basic laws of physics), they increasingly find themselves drawn together, inside the classroom and out. Given such close quarters in the kitchen, and the amount of sensory stimulation involved with preparing all manner of food, it starts to become difficult for Arthur to retain his customary level of distance and detachment. And, as Arthur will find, when it comes to unsatisfied appetites, hunger is often the best sauce of all.
View the Master Post
There was something about standing in a kitchen, dressed in chef's whites, apron, dark pants, and non-slip shoes, that made Arthur feel as if he was finally somewhere along the path he'd been meant to follow. Being surrounded by nearly two dozen other similarly-attired people only reinforced the feeling.
But even though these people might believe they were also destined for culinary greatness, Arthur knew that he was one of the few that would actually make something of themselves within the field.The majority of the poor bastards would be stuck working in an Applebee's or some other similar culinary hellhole of the gastronomically mediocre. He wondered if any of them realized that yet.
"You, you, you, and you," the man at the head of the kitchen said, pointing to a handful of students in turn. "Over to that station. Turkey stock today, soup tomorrow. Recipe's on the table. You two," he said, gesturing to Arthur and another student, "work on preparing the mirepoix. The other two, preparing the carcass for browning. Remove as much of the meat as you can and set it aside for tomorrow's lesson. Go.”
Arthur made his way over to the table on the far end of the kitchen with a quick, “Yes, chef,” not even waiting for his other group members to follow. A week of nothing but lecture and tours of the kitchens to become acquainted with the kitchen equipment had only made him more eager to get to this point.
By the time the other three members of his group had gathered around the rectangular stainless steel table, Arthur had already scanned the recipe. Nothing exciting, really. Mirepoix, herbs, the turkey carcasses, a bit of tomato paste...what you’d expect for your basic, everyday stock and soup. Still, it was working with food, and a chance to show that he had a better idea of what he was doing than a lot of his fellow students would. Some people got into the culinary arts on a whim, after seeing love stories set in the kitchens of fancy restaurants, or cute little family films about rodents who could cook. Arthur, however, had wanted this for a long time.
“So, how’s everyone?” the guy across the table asked after a moment of silence during which Arthur had already arranged his vegetables at his left side and the other two students had donned gloves, looking less than thrilled with the prospect of stripping the flesh from the turkey carcass. “New acquaintances, all?”
Arthur didn’t even bother to look up. He wasn’t here to chat. “Yeah,” was his only real contribution. The guy already working to rip apart the turkey gave a similarly non-committal response. Arthur could appreciate that.
The lone girl in the group made more of an effort. “I’m Ariadne,” she said, pulling one of the turkeys closer to her, twisting and pulling one of the legs until it came loose with a wet crunching sound that was the bone coming free of the socket.
“Well, if that’s not an unusual name,” the guy said in a voice that was probably supposed to be charming, aided by his British accent. “But quite lovely. Fits you, I’d say. And you two are?”
“Jefferson,” the other person replied. “Nice to meet you.”
“Excellent,” the Brit said, still sounding ridiculously jovial, as if he’d been personally appointed social coordinator for the group. “And you are?”
Trying to dice this celery, Arthur wanted to say. Instead, he bent his head a bit more and slid his knife down another stalk, working to give himself strips that would make a good quarter-inch dice and tossing the unusable bits into the stock bucket in the center of the table . “Arthur.”
“Arthur. I’m Eames. Nice to meet you all.” He pulled a handful of the celery stalks Arthur had already divested of their leaves and ends onto his cutting board, and Arthur gritted his teeth. He couldn’t prep one of the bunches that hadn’t been touched yet? “Jefferson! I noticed your bag in the lecture the other day. Are you really a fan of the Red Devils?”
“The who?”
Eames sighed. “I’ll take that as a no. Pity. I’ve seen no less than four Man United logos since the term began, but not one person has been able to name a player other than David Beckham, and he hasn’t played for them since 2003. Wayne Rooney? Ryan Giggs? Rio Ferdinand? Ring any bells?”
“No, sorry, man. Bag was a gift from my wife, anyway.”
“Oh, well, I suppose that explains it,” the Brit said, sounding only slightly less cheerful. “What about you, Arthur? Football fan? Or soccer, I suppose I should say?”
“No.” He’d played briefly until the age of eight, but had given it up once his parents had started relying upon his babysitter to be there for his games and fill them in later. He hadn’t been very good at it, anyway.
“Ariadne?”
“I’ve never seen a soccer game,” the girl - who had to be the youngest of them all by at least five years - said apologetically. “I’m not really big on sports.”
“Ah, well, disappointed in you all I may be, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all get along just fine,” Eames said brightly.
Arthur thought that might be the end of things, but it appeared Eames had no shortage of conversation topics at hand. He ignored most of them completely, preferring to focus on the job they were supposed to be doing. He’d finished with two bunches of celery and was three onions into the bucket between them when he couldn’t really take the idle chatter anymore. While it was nice to get some practice in on his knife skills, he’d be damned if he did all of the dicing on his own. “Eames, listen,” he finally sighed, looking up at the guy across the table. “Why don’t you stop for a second and...”
“And what, Arthur?” Eames asked, eyebrows arched expressively. He had a face for that, Arthur noticed briefly - one that displayed amusement rather well. “What should I stop?” His right hand, wrapped easily around the handle of his knife while his thumb and index finger rested on either side of the blade, stilled.
Arthur blinked. Eames had somehow managed to get through the rest of the celery, nearly all the carrots, and had just started on his second onion. He’d chopped nearly half again what Arthur had, even though he’d been non-stop chattering since they’d hit the table. And what was more, each and every diced bit of vegetable in his container seemed to be as close to a quarter-inch dice as you could get without a ruler.
It was then that Arthur decided he didn’t like Eames.
x X x
It was somewhere around the point when Chef Cobb - who did not like jokes or questions about his feelings on the cobb salad, as it happened - assigned the bloke with slicked-back hair, nice chin, and sharp cheekbones that made him look more serious than he should be to Eames’s group when Eames decided that culinary school might fit him perfectly well.
It wasn’t as if he had been dreading culinary school in the first place, really. He’d wandered into it, much the same as he’d wandered most places in his life - because it seemed like the next place to try, some new thing to explore and learn from. And after a decade or so of work in more kitchens than he could easily recall, Eames wasn’t worried about the challenge. He expected to work, yes. But he expected things to just sort of ...work out. They always had, at least to his way of thinking. Others might take a look at his life from a more objective viewpoint and disagree, but what did that matter to Eames? It was his life, wasn’t it? No other opinion on the matter was necessary.
It was a bit disappointing to learn that none of his groupmates knew a thing about football, but not really unexpected. Eames had been in America far too long to be surprised by the stunning lack of knowledge the average American had of the sport. What was more disappointing, however, was how unsuccessful each and every attempt to get Arthur to engage in conversation had been.
When Arthur had interrupted Eames’s conversation with Ariadne on her interest in building custom cakes, only to trail off and never actually say what he’d interrupted for, Eames got a glimpse of the hard line of Arthur’s shoulders, his thinned lips, and his narrowed eyes and made a decision.
Gay, straight, or somewhere in between, Eames was going to impress him in any damned way he could. Someone needed to wipe that uptight look off Arthur’s face. And Eames was fairly certain he was just the man for the job.
After a moment of actual silence, in which all that could be heard was the chopping of vegetables and the soft squelching sounds of cooled, cooked turkey being pulled off the carcass, Eames tossed the final handful of his onion into the container between him and Arthur, scooped up between hand and knife blade, and came around the other side of the table. “You know, I can show you a better way to dice that onion,” Eames offered, flashing a wide smile.
“This is the way Cobb showed us,” was Arthur’s curt response. Everything about the man was curt. Eames wouldn’t be surprised if that was his bloody middle name.
“Yes, I know, but there’s a quicker way-” Eames said, starting to move around to the spot immediately at Arthur’s side and reaching for the other half of the onion sitting on the chopping board. “Look, you just-”
“I said no thank you,” Arthur snapped.
“You didn’t, actually,” Eames pointed out, but he stepped back towards his side of the table. “If you’re ever curious, feel free to ask. I’d be happy to show you.”
Ariadne cleared her throat. “Would you show me?”
Eames beamed at her. Nice girl, really. A bit quiet and timid, but she seemed clever enough. Whether or not she was as timid with a knife as she appeared to be about most other things would be seen in due course. “Absolutely, love. Here.” He snagged the other half of the onion before Arthur could become too protective of it, and laid it on his chopping board. “See, this way, you don’t have to cut towards your fingers. You let the natural rings of the onion do some of your work for you.” He made a series of slices perpendicular to the grain of the onion, then turned them ninety degrees. “Like this.”
Eames sneaked a quick glance up at Arthur as he made another series of slices. He couldn’t quite tell from this angle whether the other man was watching at all. Oh well. He finished showing the technique to Ariadne, flamboyantly scooping the diced bits of onion between knife and hand and dumping them into the bucket. “Just like that.”
“Why doesn’t Cobb teach us that way?” Jefferson asked, and Eames shrugged. He hadn’t realised he’d had everyone’s attention but Arthur’s.
“Damned if I know,” Eames replied. You’d think that a chef instructor would teach the easiest methods available, but then again, what did he know?
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Ariadne asked, stripping off her gloves and stepping over to the nearby hand sink.
“Some Greek cafe in London.” Eames grinned. He’d learned a lot of things in a lot of places, and it pleased him to pass some - but not all - of them on. The onion trick, he could afford to give up. Other techniques, however, were his alone.
Unless, of course, the person asking was five foot ten or eleven, slim-built, brunet, with dark brown eyes and a serious disposition. Then, perhaps, Eames could be persuaded to give up some secrets.
“Ooh, you’ve worked in food service before?” Ariadne asked, wide-eyed. “I could never get a second interview anywhere. Everywhere I looked wanted you to have experience first, but no one would give you that first shot at experience. How’d you manage that?”
That was a long story, really, and one Eames didn’t really feel up to sharing today. He looked at Arthur for a long moment, watching the way he wrung out the rag over the sanitizer bucket and scrubbed his working surface in a manner that was somehow both brusque and loving, and shrugged. “Fell into it, really.”
Across the table, Arthur snorted. “Fell into it,” he muttered, apparently unaware (or just uncaring) that he was speaking aloud.
Grabbing the rag back from the bucket where Arthur had tossed it and wiping down his own work station, Eames made a solemn vow to himself. If it took all term, all year, or even the entirety of his formal culinary education, he was going to get that bloke to drop the barriers, give him a smile, and say something friendly. He’d never met anyone so resistant to pleasantries or getting along. Somewhere along the way, he would impress Arthur enough to get a positive reaction out of him.
And if it never happened, Eames was going to die trying.
x X x
Though Arthur had never seen the Brit before the lab in Chef Cobb’s class the day before, he suddenly appeared to be everywhere.
He had been there, chatting with their instructor for Contemporary Cuisine the day after they'd first gotten to do kitchen work. He'd been standing nearby in Introduction to Wines later that same day, grinning at Arthur as if they shared some sort of secret, or were friends of some sort. So when Arthur walked into the lecture portion of Chef Cobb's Culinary Fundamentals and didn't see Eames anywhere, he shrugged, chided himself for being paranoid about whatever he was being paranoid about, and sat in a desk a third of the way back from the front of the lecture hall, lining up his pen and binder atop the flip top of his desk chair.
"My, my," a very British voice murmured in Arthur's ear moments after he'd gotten situated. "Aren't we organized? Tell me, Arthur, are you this fastidious in everything you do?"
Arthur froze at the voice, then sighed deeply. He did not, however, acknowledge the man behind him. That would be giving in (giving in to what, however, he didn't know. But he was pretty sure he didn't want to do it).
Eames didn’t seem deterred in the slightest by Arthur’s lack of response. Instead, he leaned forward, violating Arthur’s bubble of personal space. “You know,” he said, breath tickling just slightly at Arthur’s right ear, “an organized mind is a complex mind. The more organized you are, the more you can fit in it. Do you agree?”
Arthur would have liked to respond back with something snappy, perhaps regarding Eames’s own lack of organization (not that Arthur’d noticed one way or the other, really, since Chef Cobb had had their stations set up before their arrival the other day). Unfortunately, just before he could come up with something clever and harsh enough to regain his semblance of personal space, he’d caught a whiff of something warm and woody and sweet that made nearly all higher brain function cease. Arthur had been cooking long enough in an amateur capacity that he had a better-than-fair sense of scent and taste components. He could pinpoint faint amounts of cinnamon in his favorite chocolate icing from the bakery across town, or celery seed in the rub his college roommate used on his pork ribs, or even the top note of lavender in the tea his old babysitter liked to drink. But this...
This was warm nights in the tropics, jeans rolled up to mid-calf as you walked along the shore at night, drinks and desserts in the dark booth of an exclusive restaurant, and something lower and darker besides. He wanted to say there was citrus and vanilla, but honestly, he couldn’t quite identify it. All he really knew was that, in other circumstances, Arthur might be very willing to grab whoever wore this fragrance by the collar and drag him close, wanting little more than to infuse himself with the scent and the feeling it provided.
“Arthur? I know you can hear me. I suppose, if you really are so intent on watching Cobb down there, diagramming the different styles of knives, I’ll leave you to it.” Eames chuckled softly, voice disturbingly rich in timbre and breathy when he spoke again. “Forgive me for interrupting when you’re learning.”
“I don’t care about kinds of knives,” Arthur finally managed, recovering just the slightest bit of brain function when Eames pulled back, taking his voice and his cologne with him. “Besides, he hasn’t even started the lecture yet.”
“True enough.” And just like that, Eames was close again, and Arthur wanted to kick himself for opening the door like that. He didn’t like this guy, sultry voice and charming - oh God, did he really just admit it was charming? - accent and unbelievable cologne not withstanding. “So I suppose that means I can bother you just a little bit more? Tell me, have you had any ideas for the report Cobb wants at midterm yet? I was thinking something on Escoffier, you know, since we do seem to owe so much of the method to him. What do you think?”
In truth, Arthur thought very little, but it had nothing to do with Eames’s chosen essay topic. It was much more a product of his voice, and feeling his breath on Arthur’s neck, and that scent that was warm-woody-sweet-spicy going straight to Arthur’s brain and shutting it down. If he ever found a suitable boyfriend, Arthur thought vaguely, he was going to have to track down that cologne and give it as a gift, with the warning that if it was used, there would be very little chance they would remain clothed while not out and about in public.
Or even in public, depending on how concealed an area was with alcoves or shrubbery.
“I, uh...” He knew how to use words, really, he did. Normally, he’d have a good, solid, and possibly disparaging remark at ready, likely regarding how one couldn’t pick a more obvious subject for their essay, and how Cobb was probably going to have to read through a hundred such essays during midterm week. “Yeah. That.”
It was at that very moment, as Eames was once again laughing softly in Arthur’s ear and Arthur was still struggling for coherent thought - or even the ability to name all the damn components of the cologne, though he was almost certain both vanilla and lime might be in the profile somewhere - that Ariadne chose to drop her rather heavy-looking backpack onto the floor at Arthur’s feet and flop into the chair next to his. “Arthur, right? Is it okay to sit here? I forgot my glasses, and I lost a contact back in Asian Cuisine two hours ago, so I can’t sit in the back where I’m used to.”
“What?” Arthur said, suddenly snapping out of it. Oh thank God. This girl probably didn’t know it, but she had just saved him from...well, not from Eames, exactly, but from himself at the very least. No, on second thought, she had definitely saved him from Eames, who was now leaning back in his own seat and fiddling with his pen, tapping out a light rhythm that only he could appreciate. “Yeah, go ahead. Sit. It’s Ariadne, right?”
The girl beamed at him. “No one ever remembers it the first time. Yeah. I’m in your Cakes and Confections class too, I think. With Chef Yusuf?”
Arthur had vague recollections of seeing a pale, petite girl with dark hair and big eyes lingering towards the back of the bakery classroom. “Oh, yeah, I think you’re right.”
He was saved any further awkward small talk (which, admittedly, was a hell of a lot less awkward than whatever he’d been having with Eames) when Chef Cobb turned around and dove straight into the lecture, not even bothering to tell everyone to shut up first. For the next two hours, there was nothing but notes on the five mother sauces and some of their best-known variations. As he gathered up his things and bid a goodbye to Ariadne, all he could think was “bechamel, espagnole, veloute, hollandaise, tomato-and-don’t-ever-let-me-catch-you-saying-vinaigrette-in-this-context-I-don’t-care-what-any-other-chef-tells-you”, repeating rapidly until the words all ran together and Arthur was quite sure that whatever he had for lunch or dinner that day would not be including a sauce of any kind. He’d have white rice with steamed broccoli, or even cold cereal, if it came to that.
In fact, so invested was he in the whirling list of mother sauces that he almost didn’t notice when Eames squeezed by him in the aisle, a heady cloud of that scent wafting up as he moved past, and tossed Arthur a little wave and accompanying grin.
Almost didn’t notice.
x X x
Some people, when met with a challenge that seemed to be insurmountable, simply gave up any attempt to overcome it. Some took a step back and reevaluated whether or not the result was worth the expenditure. And still others considered whether or not what they were trying to accomplish was even what they wanted in the first place. Eames, having done the third point and a bit of the second on the little information he had, had chosen the remaining option.
He had simply decided to work harder at it and approach the challenge from whatever angle necessary.
And Arthur certainly was a challenge. Eames had no idea what the hell had made the other man so prickly and closed-off, but he was certain there was a way around it. It was likely Arthur had friends of some sort, which meant that there was actually a chance he opened up and willingly interacted with other people. What Eames needed to find, then, was where the weak spot in that barrier might be, where the opening in that wall might be hidden.
Because it had to be there. Eames wouldn’t accept the alternative.
He had tried general small talk, but all efforts in that vein had failed, although he had met a handful of other students who seemed perfectly nice people. In fact, the young girl Eames had shown the onion trick - Ariel or Adrienne or something like that - was quite nice. If Eames had had a younger brother, he might even nudge him in that direction. Sweet girl. Rather inquisitive disposition, too.
After general small talk, he’d tried slightly-less-small talk. And while Arthur hadn’t quite been so terse when Eames had brought up the topic of their essays for Cobb’s course, he certainly hadn’t been responsive to anything Eames had said. A similar attempt at discussing Arthur’s opinion on hollandaise and other emulsions hadn’t got him any further. He’d got not a single glimmer of insight into the man in the two weeks he’d been trying to coax a civil response from him.
A lesser man would give up, go out for a pint, and think about snogging the bloke sitting next to him at the bar, who did appear to enjoy the nuances of back-and-forth conversation. Tempting though it was, Eames had no intention of doing so.
Besides, said bloke had said he favored Manchester City, of all teams.
Eames considered a new plan of attack as he unloaded his car that evening, arms laden with bags of groceries. He’d managed to get used to calling a courgette a zucchini, but he didn’t think he’d ever be used to American chocolate, which accounted for the twenty dollars in mint and milk chocolate varieties of Aero Bar he’d managed to find this evening. He wasn’t much of one for stress eating nothing but junk food, but he’d never deny his ever-present sweet tooth. What he needed to do, he reasoned, unwrapping the first bar of chocolate even before putting the milk in the fridge, was to learn something about Arthur and use that to begin a conversation. How he was going to do that, however, was still a bit of a mystery. He hadn’t seen Arthur converse with a single soul in any of their courses.
Well, wait. There was always Adelaide, wasn’t there? Granted, he’d never overheard or even seen the two of them have a full, lengthy conversation, but she seemed the most likely person to actually know something about Arthur. He shrugged to himself as he tossed the empty chocolate wrapper into the bin. Well, as a last resort, perhaps. Maybe he just needed to be more clever in his tactics. There had to be something he and Arthur had in common. Eventually, he’d find it. It might take a while, but that was fine by Eames. He had plenty of time. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere for a while.
x X x
There were few things, Arthur believed, that were as pointless as cakes that looked delectable, but were virtually inedible. Or in this particular case, actually inedible.
Beside him, Ariadne was looking similarly troubled. “Is this...Is this going to be our final exam?” she asked timidly, hand in the air. “A wedding cake?”
Chef Yusuf laughed. “Not for this course. This is merely an example I was showing to one of the Advanced Cake Design students. You’ll be doing cakes, obviously, but nothing quite so elaborate this term. First I’ll show you the basics of decorating - borders and flowers and combing, in addition to the actual cake and filling recipes. Your final practical exam will, however, be a cake of your own design.”
Ariadne still looked wary. “Are we going to have to use fondant?”
“We can discuss that later,” Chef Yusuf said in a way that almost certainly meant “yes”. Ariadne turned to Arthur, rolled her eyes, and mimed sticking her finger down her throat.
Arthur smirked. He couldn’t really blame her. It might look nice, but fondant wasn’t exactly the best-tasting option. At least good cake wasn’t going to waste - Arthur could see a very thin gap between the fondant and cake board that revealed the styrofoam cake forms inside. “Practically the same stuff outside as in,” he muttered to her when the chef’s back was turned. She giggled behind her hand, then faked a cough to cover it when Chef Yusuf looked over in their direction.
An hour and a half later, Arthur had streaks of green icing on the inside of his right wrist, just below the spot where his vinyl gloves ended. Ariadne had red food coloring along the heel of her palm and soaking the outside of her left little finger, so that it now looked like her hand was a bloody mess underneath her own glove. They had a large bowl of uncolored vanilla buttercream icing at the far corner of their shared table, four smaller stainless steel bowls of colored icing pushed to the edge of their work area, plastic icing couplers and a variety of stainless steel tips haphazardly tossed into a small plastic box, and a sheet tray of nearly three dozen icing roses on small squares of parchment between them.
They also had a solid dusting of confectioner’s sugar everywhere, but Arthur had somehow managed to put that out of his mind, concentrating instead on making a goddamned cone of buttercream that stayed upright and did not fucking lean when he went to pipe the first circle of petals around the top.
“Um, Arthur?”
Arthur squinted even harder, turning the flower nail in his left hand slowly - so very slowly - while trying to use enough pressure on the piping bag in his right hand to get an actual full petal to emerge instead of some half-assed thin strip of icing with no curve or thick end. “Better be good, Ariadne.”
“You, um...” she trailed off, and Arthur would bet money she was biting her lower lip. They hadn’t known each other long, but he’d been working with her long enough in the bakery (and even a bit in the kitchen, when it came to Chef Cobb’s class) to know which troubled expression went with that tone of voice. “You sort of just leaned into that puddle of rose-pink food coloring I spilled.”
“What?” He looked down, managing to nudge the first row of petals with the tip of the pastry bag and completely ruining his rose in the process. His apron was now nearly hot-pink, and, in addition to the smear of color that covered the material, there was an even darker spot just above his waist. Arthur realized with dismay that he could feel damp fabric up against his stomach. Giving up any possibility at salvaging the flower he’d been working on - because, really, it was a slim fucking possibility anyway - he put the flower nail and bag of icing on the table and stepped back. “Aw, shit.” He untied his apron, saw the dark stain on his chef’s whites, undid the last button, and pulled that aside. Even his undershirt was pink. Which meant, likely, so was his skin. “Really?”
Ariadne looked torn between laughing and hiding back in the pantry. “I’m sorry,” she said warily, as if afraid he was going to shout at her. “I thought you knew it was there. I just went to get new rags-” she held up a folded towel, already soaked in fresh, uncolored sanitizer solution, and clutched a dry one in her other hand "-and before I could say anything, you’d leaned into it.”
Arthur sighed heavily. “No, it’s fine.” It wasn’t exactly ideal, but it was hardly as if she’d burned him or cut him or anything. “Remind me to buy a black chef’s coat for days we’re in the bakery, though.” He looked her up and down, noticing the green icing smeared across her apron, transferred from the lip of one of the small bowls to the spot just below her chest. He had a vague recollection of watching her cradle the bowl as she gave up on mixing the color into the small amount of icing with a bowl scraper, in favor of just using a plastic spoon. “Actually, why they don’t tell us that in the first place is beyond me.”
“I’m not sure why they do a lot of things,” Ariadne said, shooing Arthur aside to clean up what remained of the puddle. “Like why we can’t use a meringue buttercream for decorating instead of a basic buttercream. My hands are so warm, I had to keep adding powdered sugar to make it thicker and keep it from melting. Why would he make us use this stuff?”
“I do it,” Chef Yusuf suddenly said from a place right behind them both, causing Ariadne to yelp, “because it’s the cheapest option. Consider it a bonus that I’ve let you do colors for this project to help you see the details - when I first learned, we were only allowed to use white icing. Also, I don’t feel like turning all thirty of you loose on the stove for Italian or Swiss buttercream just yet. We’ll have plenty of time for icing and filling recipes. Learn the basics of making things look attractive first, Ariadne, and then we’ll move on to making them taste good.” There was a slight commotion from another area of the room, stainless steel bowls clattering to the floor and people bickering loudly, and Yusuf sighed. “Just keep working. You have another twenty minutes before it’s time to clean up.”
Once he had gone, Arthur shrugged and handed over their only remaining bag of red icing. “Your turn. You need more practice than I do, anyway.”
“Gee, thanks,” Ariadne said with a flair of sarcasm. “At least my first four roses didn’t look like artichokes.”
“Yeah, but my tenth was almost perfect, and you couldn’t get your bottom level of petals to line up with the base until at least your fifteenth.”
“You’re such a pain in my ass,” she muttered, squinting as she piped a cone of icing onto the flower nail. “There,” she said after a moment, twirling the completed flower right in front of his nose. “Take that. Screw ‘almost’ perfect. That could have come straight from the garden of some witch’s gingerbread cottage.”
“If you say so.”
Ariadne stuck out her tongue. “You’re going to go home tonight and practice until two in the morning, just so you can come back on Friday and show me how much better you are than I am, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, right,” Arthur scoffed, nudging her out of the way of the bench scraper he wanted with a grin. “Like I need practice to prove that.”
Besides, he couldn’t. He didn’t own piping tips.
x X x
No matter how long his shower this evening was going to be, Eames was still fairly certain that by the time he crawled into bed, he would still smell of cheese.
After a week of listening to Chef Mallorie Cobb (who warmly insisted upon being called “Chef Mal”, unlike her husband’s rather harsher mandate he only be addressed as “Chef Cobb”) lecture on the characteristics of cheeses, the process behind their making, and the regional variations of such, the word “cheese” had started to lose any meaning whatsoever. That was, of course, until they actually were presented with an assortment of cheeses - dozens, in fact - and told that for the next two hours, their concern was to taste each one, take notes, and consider foods to pair them with. There was no shortage of options, as evidenced by the plates of crackers, nuts, sliced fruits, jams, and other assorted complements, carefully arranged on the work stations around the class kitchen.
Eames took a moment to thank the good lord he wasn’t lactose intolerant, and another to wonder how Chef Lefevre, one of the first to allow Eames into his kitchen and also a man determined to break him of his refusal to eat anything other than Cheddar, was fairing, and then he made his way to the front of the class with the other students to gather a hand-held wooden tray that resembled a very thin chopping board.
Instead of fighting through the knot of students at the first table of cheeses, Eames headed for the back of the room where the other tables held assortments that were just as inviting. And he wasn’t alone. As Eames reached for a tiny plastic sample cup of pomegranate molasses, Arthur’s arm nearly knocked into him as he stabbed a few small cubes of Gruyere onto a plastic toothpick.
“Watch out, would you?” Arthur said testily, and Eames tsked inside his own head. Always so wound up, this one.
“Pardon me, Arthur,” he replied easily instead. “I will try to jump out of your way next time.” He gave a little wink and moved around the other side of the table, making certain not to leave to much room as he scooted between Arthur and the other table behind them.
"Whatever," Arthur muttered, popping a small chunk of Emmental into his mouth and closing his eyes. Eames watched with fascination as Arthur's jaw worked slightly and he seemed to savor the taste. After a moment, he opened his eyes, set down his tray, and made a few little notes on the stapled packet of half-sized sheets of paper Chef Mal had handed out.
Unable to help himself, Eames leaned over and glanced at Arthur's paper. In small, neat handwriting were the words "nutty" and "grassy", followed by a small arrow and "pepper crackers" and "sweet/tangy fruit?" Really? Well, he couldn't really fault Arthur's notes as inaccurate. But pepper crackers and some sort of sweet or tangy fruit? Really?
"Where's your sense of imagination?" Eames asked, unable to help the smirk that crept across his face. "Isn't the point of the exercise to explore creative pairings?
"The point of this exercise," Arthur said, voice hard, "is to familiarize ourselves with the different cheeses and keep an open mind regarding which other flavors would complement the cheeses on offer."
For just a moment, Eames wondered how far the stick might be up Arthur's arse, and just how long it had been wedged there. "Well, someone's been reading the syllabus," he said lightly, reaching for the platter of blue cheeses at the next table and taking a small sampling of each. Unlike Arthur, who was busy arranging his cheese samples in a very orderly fashion and then actually diagramming their positions on his tray in the margins of his papers, Eames had very little need for organization of that sort. "She can't really expect us to stick with the complementary items on each table, can she?" he asked after a moment of frustrated inventory over the table's contents.
Arthur gave a little grunt, not bothering to look up from his note-making. "And what exactly would you do, otherwise?"
Eames looked around and spotted something promising at a far table. He wove his way through the other students, who were now starting to scatter away from the tables at the very front of the room, wooden trays already nearly full of items, and picked up a small paper cup from the far corner table in the classroom. After a second's thought, he picked up a second cup and headed back to his tray. "This," he said, dropping a few blue cheese crumbles into the cup, tilting his head back, and closing his eyes as both flavors hit his palate.
"What on earth are you doing to that chocolate?"
Arthur sounded absolutely horrified, which was sort of adorable, in a ridiculous way. Eames took a minute to let the tastes mingle on his tongue a bit longer before chewing and swallowing. After another moment of appreciating the interaction between the two wildly different flavors, he opened his eyes and raised his eyebrows. Picking up another chunk of dark chocolate along with another bit of cheese, he stuffed both items into Arthur's slightly agape mouth. "This."
Arthur looked torn between punching Eames in the face, shouting that he'd been accosted, and just simply going into shock. But then he chewed, and his eyes, which had been narrowed so far that Eames rather thought he was going to give himself a tension headache, widened comically.
"Good, isn't it?"
Swallowing his small mouthful, Arthur glared at him. "That still doesn't give you the right to shove something into my mouth. My God, are your hands even clean? What makes you-"
"So it was good," Eames interrupted before Arthur could really get going. "The dark chocolate tempers the saltiness and the pungent sting, doesn't it?"
"Yeah, fine, I guess," Arthur snapped. But still, he bent his head and jotted something in his notes. Eames considered that a victory, though not a large one. He wandered over to another table, this one full of soft-ripened cheeses, and helped himself to a small serving of each, though it appeared many of their classmates had not limited themselves when it came to the Brie. Eames watched him take small bits of the accompaniments, taste everything with a thoughtful look on his face, eyes often closed, and jot notes. It was...well, it was sort of charming, how seriously Arthur took everything. He appeared to have some experience with cheeses, given the pairings Eames watched him make, but there was very little sense of adventure to his choices.
"What's your cheese background?" Eames asked over a picked-over plate of Asiago, after taking pains to appear to aimlessly wander around the other tables. "You have to have some background knowledge - you don't look nearly as afraid as some of these other students."
Arthur looked up at him, swallowing whatever he'd just sampled. "My parents had a lot of parties when I was growing up."
"Ah, invited you in to show off to their friends, I imagine. Sort of a 'look at our precious little boy and let him tell you about his studies' thing?"
"Hardly," Arthur said curtly. "I wasn't allowed to wander around the adults. But the caterers didn't seem to mind me hanging around the kitchen, so long as I stayed out of the way. I think they fed me to keep me quiet."
"Not that you wouldn't have been anyway," Eames said with a little grin.
"Not that I wouldn't have been anyway," Arthur agreed with a little huff that might have been a laugh, covered up. And without any sort of excuse or transition, he walked away, leaving Eames there to stare after him and wonder just how on earth he was supposed to get Arthur to open up more than giving one single fact about his childhood.
Hell, it was a start.
x X x
Though he had essentially abandoned his original career in order to attend culinary school and pursue that path, Arthur's study habits hadn't changed much in the years between his college days and his schooling now. Ten o'clock on a Saturday evening still found him at home, lounging on his couch, television on for background noise as he re-read the recent chapters of his culinary texts and reviewed his own notes. Unfortunately, it was a bit hard to focus when his phone kept chiming at him. Finally giving up on ignoring it, he picked it up and saw four new text messages, all from Ariadne.
The first was a simple you're home, aren't you? Not much later, she'd sent omg, are you watching this?? An hour ago, there had been wonder wen we get 2 do coolstuf like that. And just now, the enlightening missive on his screen read YOUSHOUSDN'T BE ABLE TO TO TAHT WIH CAEK ARTHUR. ISNRT RITE. CAEK SHOLDU BECAE KNOT STRYOPHOM.
Arthur sighed and put down his highlighter in order to respond, because heaven knew she'd pester him until he did. Ariadne, are you DRUNK TEXTING me while watching Ace of Cakes again? There was a slight pause, and then his phone chimed again, bearing only a ...mabey.
He was halfway through the chapter on sauces when his phone rang. Looking at the caller ID, Arthur sighed, accepted the call, and braced himself. "Hello?"
"Seriously, what kinda kitchen has a band saw in it?" was the indignant, slightly slurred greeting. "That belongs in someone's grandpa's workshop, or someone's garage. Not a bakery. Charge hundreds of dollars for cakes, and it's half styrofoam and wood. And it's all fondant. Can't anyone just use buttercream for God's sakes?"
"Ariadne," Arthur said, pinching the bridge of his nose but unable to help smiling just a bit. "Turn. Off. Food. Network."
"But I love this show. I want my cakes to look like that. I just want them to be, you know, actual cake."
"I've seen some of your cake design sketches," Arthur said with a laugh. "You violate the rules of physics. You can't have them that shape without having some sort of support structure. You cannot twist the world to your dimensions. Keep dreaming, Ariadne."
"Buzz kill," she muttered, and Arthur heard the faint sound of glass clinking against glass. "What're you doing, anyway? Studying again?"
"Reviewing."
"You are such a nerd. At least tell me you have porn or something interesting on while you do it."
"Porn?" Arthur gaped at his phone. Had he been eating or drinking, he might have choked. He was finding there were some social and personal boundaries Ariadne just didn't see as off-limits. "You know what, I don't think I want to know about your study habits. But to satisfy your curiosity, I've got Alton Brown on, okay?"
"DVR again? I swear to God, Arthur, you fangirl him more than my mother does."
"I do not 'fangirl' anything, you drunkard."
Ariadne laughed at him. "If you say so."
"I don't! I simply appreciate his conversational yet informative style and the recipes and techniques he presents."
"Sounds like someone's trying to rationalize their crush," she sing-songed.
Arthur sighed deeply. "Just shut up, okay?"
"What? Not like there's anything wrong with it. It's not as bad as you having a crush on Paula Deen."
"That woman is older than my mother. Also, she's kind of frightening." Not to mention that he wasn't particularly interested in women.
"Does make good use of butter and bacon, though."
Arthur paused. "I'll allow that."
Ariadne giggled again. "I win. Oh, they're doing a Firefly cake. Did you watch Firefly, Arthur?"
"I'm hanging up now," he said deliberately. He had a very strong feeling that if he didn't end this conversation now, he'd end up watching right along with her, listening to her alternately gush over designs and rage over the use of non-cake materials. It had happened before, after all.
"Never let me have any fun," she sighed. "Fine. Go back to being a nerd and crushing on Alton. Some day, I'm going to drag you over here for wine and cake shows. Mark my words."
"Marked. Good night, Ariadne."
"Night, Arthur. Give Alton a kiss for me, would you?"
Arthur hung up, worried that if he rolled his eyes any harder, they'd get stuck in the back of his head. But the call from Ariadne had killed his motivation for studying. Perhaps that wasn't the worst thing, anyway. He knew the material. He'd been over it backwards and forwards and could instruct someone how to make roux in his sleep. With a sigh, he closed his book and binder, picked up the notebook that always sat on his coffee table, and turned to a fresh page in the back, replaying the current episode of Alton Brown from the beginning.
He didn't have a crush on Alton Brown.
At least, not much of one.
An hour and a half later, Arthur had three new recipes in his notebook, two empty bottles of beer on the floor, a half bottle sitting on a coaster on the table, and a craving for goat cheese, red pepper, and shrimp pizza that couldn't be satisfied, because there were no places around that delivered that sort of thing, and Arthur didn't feel like taking his increasingly temperamental car across Los Angeles just for pizza. He settled for a grilled cheese with buffalo mozzarella and another episode of Alton Brown, where he could at least watch things being made with assorted peppers.
But as much as Arthur appreciated Alton's culinary venturesomeness, Arthur had to draw the line somewhere. There were inspired flavor combinations, and then there was exploration for exploration's sake, like...like..blue cheese and dark chocolate. "Mango pepper sorbet?" Arthur muttered at his television, taking a sip of his third beer. "Ugh. Why, Alton? That is so something Eames would do."
And now he was thinking about Eames. Great. He was going to need another beer.
He couldn't specify exactly why the other man irritated him so much, but he truly did get under Arthur's skin. It might have been the way he always seemed to be around, wherever Arthur turned. It might be the way he seemed so casual about everything, or the way he grinned whenever Arthur responded to him in any way. It might be the fact that, every once in a while, he smelled good enough that Arthur forgot to be irritated with him. It might be the easy way he moved in a kitchen, calling out warnings and even the occasional command, as if it were second nature.
And then again, it might just be that he might actually be better at everything than Arthur was. Only he wasn't. Not really.
Yeah. It was definitely time for a fourth beer. And maybe turning off the DVR in favor of the Ace of Cakes marathon, to take a page out of Ariadne's book.
x X x
Though he knew the lectures were a necessary part of culinary school, Eames found them exceptionally boring. Other than the history of the brigade kitchen system and the history of some of the base recipes they used in many dishes they were attempting to make this term, Eames wasn't sure he was getting much out of them at all. It seemed everything interesting and worth knowing happened in the actual kitchen itself, much as it had been for the last several years of his life.
"What exactly are you doodling?" a voice whispered next to him, much closer than he expected.
Eames jumped, quickly moving to cover his notebook with his text. "Don't do that," he hissed. "What the hell, Ariadne, didn't anyone ever tell you it wasn't nice to spy on someone's private affairs?"
Ariadne shrugged. "Oh, ai gamisou," she murmured, giving him a cheeky grin and nudging his hand away.
Eames blinked. Well, two could play at that game. "Gamo tin mana sou." He yanked his notebook back and smirked. He would not let some little twenty-year-old best him, whether it be at insults in a foreign language, or wrestling for a look at his mindless doodling.
"You leave my mother out of this," Ariadne said, giving one final tug at the notebook. She was stronger than she looked, because somehow, whether because she had better leverage or because Eames was trying not to get caught at this little tug-of-war at the very back of the classroom, she ended up with the now slightly-mangled spiral notebook in her hands. "How do you even know what I said? I mean, I know this class is Mediterranean Cuisine, but come on."
Eames watched with a mixture of embarrassment and slight dismay as Ariadne turned the notebook this way and that, in order to get a full look at what was scrawled in the margins. "I thought I told you, I worked in a Greek cafe back in London. I learned to say 'fuck you' before I learned how to make proper tirokeftedes. How does a little thing like you know those words?"
Ariadne arched one eyebrow. "With a name like mine, you don't think there might be some Greek in the background? Come on, where's your knowledge of Greek mythology? Minotaur? Sword and ball of thread?" She rolled her eyes when he just stared at her. "Nothing, huh? Fine. Let's move on to the more important question, shall we? Why, exactly, is it you've been doodling Arthur's name in the margins of your notebook like some lovesick schoolgirl?"
For the life of him, as quickly as he could normally think on his feet to get out of an unpleasant situation, Eames had nothing. "Who says it's our Arthur?" he finally muttered, making one last attempt to get the notebook back.
"Our Arthur? You're claiming him, now? You totally have a thing for him, don't you? I knew it."
"Oh, fine," Eames said as soon as Chef Fischer resumed his lecture, having finally looked up to see what the small disruption had been. "So either shut up about it, or help."
Ariadne's pleased smirk widened. "Oh, Eames," she whispered out of the side of her mouth, writing down whatever Fischer had just listed on the blackboard. "'Help' isn't a strong enough word for what I am going to do."
For the first time in his life, Eames found he was afraid of a girl.
x X x
Continue to Part Two