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Pike’s always been an early riser, or at least on the days when she hasn’t been out the night before. It keeps well with the bakery. There really is something about getting up to bake bread and maybe muffins, and maybe some little cake things too, and having done that before a good half the city of Whitestone is awake. She already has bread in the oven by the time the first of her co-owners shows up, but Pike supposes it might be harder to get up earlier with a cuddly boyfriend in bed with you.
“Welcome to the Slayer’s Cake!” she says, pitching her voice up and smiling as if she doesn’t recognize Keyleth. “You’re a little early for anything fancy but we should have…fresh bread and unfrosted cake for you in just a few minutes?”
Keyleth does laugh. “What else are we making today?” She holds up a small bag weighed down with fruit. “I brought currants, I thought maybe scones?”
“Aw, I’d love to try scones!” Pike says, peeking inside the bag at the currants, all red and ripe and perfect, the way that only druid-grown fruit is perfect.
“What have things been like here? I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get away for a bit.”
“I mean, you know Voice of the Tempest is still way more important than being one-fourth of a bakery, but it has been quite a week.”
“Why, what happened?” Keyleth says, her eyes immediately going wide with worry.
“Not like that, not like that. I mean, we had some kid come in and sneeze all over everything last Horisal, that kind of sucked because then we had to close early and give the leftovers to Trinket and Grog. Oh, and you remember that creature that grew out of Tary’s yeast experiment? I think that might still be around somewhere. But also…” Pike returns to the facts as she’s been thinking about them, which are not a lot all laid out. She’s spent a lot of time considering letting Keyleth in on the secret. Pike loves her with all the wholeness of her heart, but she is familiar with what it looks like when Keyleth tries to lie, especially to one of their friends. But she’s arrived at the fact that it is always better having someone to gossip with, especially when they’re equally invested in the drama. She takes a breath.
“Okay, so. Whatever happens, you didn’t hear it from me.” Keyleth nods vigorously. “But I went into the bakery really early in the day last week when I was trying to get the rise on some rolls right, right? But it was so early that it was actually just late at night, and I saw Percy leaving Vex’s place.”
Keyleth laughs. “Yeah, but Percy and Vex have been together for…well, I guess it’s really not that long if you really think about it, but it feels like they’ve been together forever already. That’s not new.”
“Buuuut. Vex and Tary were there saying goodbye. And they’ve been weird. It’s been weird, here, just us three. I think they’re not telling us something.”
Keyleth’s eyes go wide and her tone dips conspiratorially. “You think they’re —” she makes a vague but contextually suggestive motion with her hand “— all three of them?”
Pike puts up her hands in a noncommittal gesture. “Who’s to say, who’s to say,” she smiles.
“Wow. Good for them, I guess?”
“Guess so.” She does feel better, having told someone about it. For a few months the bakery has felt like a place to get away from other people’s drama, where she can have Vex without Percy and Keyleth without Vax, and where she can do new things without thinking about where Scanlan might be. Now she’s been trying to make noise every time she goes through a door or around a corner, in case she finds Vex and Tary in the middle of something. “Well. Scones?”
“Scones! Yes!” Keyleth’s eyes flit back towards the kitchen. “Is that smoke?”
Pike is off her stool and running back to the kitchen before she can even look. “The cakes!”
Later in the morning, after a decent trickle of customers have come through (and some of them even bought bread!) Keyleth peeks back into the kitchen to find Vex in front of a mixing bowl and a pile of ingredients, staring at a leaf of paper in her hand. She turns to Keyleth and smiles.
“Oh, good. Keyleth, have you ever made —” Vex looks at the paper. again “— choux pastry?”
“No, what’s that for?”
“You use it for cream puffs and things…it didn’t set up right when I tried it yesterday. It went all soupy.”
“Is it a yeasted dough?”
Vex shakes her head. “Just enriched, I think I’m mixing the eggs in wrong. You watch me do it and make sure I’m following the recipe.”
It’s a dangerous invitation, when Keyleth is trying really hard not to stare at Vex right now, and not make it weird and think about whether or not Tary has gotten involved with her and Percy. Or think about how she has noticed Vex and Tary becoming friends rather quickly. And wondering about things changing, about how it’s different when she can’t get to see everyone as often as they’re seeing each other — or seeing each other, as the case seems to be.
She’s staring in a normal way. Definitely. Probably. She watches Vex add water, and flour, and —
“It’s supposed to just be one at a time. For the eggs, I mean. Not for anything else.”
Vex nods, and does not seem to react to Keyleth staring weird. They chat on as Vex continues to work, finishing the mixing and piping the pastry into little blobs on the baking sheets. Vax is well, she assures Vex, hadn’t come today because he’d promised her father some sort of male-bonding excursion. He’ll come with her next time, of course.
She doesn’t think she’s imagining the little tightness in Vex’s chin as she nods, listening to Keyleth. It seems so abrupt, how comfortable the twins have suddenly become being apart for days or weeks on end. It’s not as though Keyleth is keeping him in Zephrah, though it does make her happy to see how well he gets on there. How at home he seems to be getting.
“So you’ll be staying for dinner tonight?” Vex asks. “Percy said he’d wanted your eye on something with the Crisis Orb plans.”
“Dinner!” Keyleth exclaims a bit loudly. Probably too loud. “With you and Percy?”
“And anyone else who’s around — Pike, probably, maybe Grog, certainly Tary.”
“Certainly,” she repeats, thinking about how to not say anything all dinner.
Gods, and she’s going to have to tell Vax too.
“Now those do smell lovely,” Tary says, managing to come into the kitchen just as Vex has finished laying out everything for piping. Probably just as well; accidents seem to follow whenever Tary is too heavily involved with the actual baking process, but she wouldn’t have minded having the extra help a half hour ago. She’s hardly one to talk, as she usually spends her early mornings running the Parchwood with Trinket rather than getting the bread started for the day, but for all of Tary’s useful abilities in the bakery, actually being around for the difficult parts of baking is not usually one of them.
“They’ll be a lot better once we get them filled,” she replies, pushing a piping bag of pastry cream into Tary’s hands. “You can do the custard and I’ll do the chocolate.”
He startles, then recovers, grinning and brandishing it like one of Percy’s guns. “Cream puffs?”
“Well, in the west they apparently call them profiteroles, but seeing as this is Whitestone…”
“Profiterolos!” He exclaims, following her train of thought exactly. It’s one of the things she likes about him. Once they’re on a wavelength, they can be there for a good long time — working on her armor, decorating new rooms as they’re finished. He understands her ideas and then goes and does Tary things with them — not always the original vision but always interesting.
What does it say about her, that she loves men who make things?
It’s different between them than it is with her and Percy, and different from how it is with him and Percy. There are things in Tary that Percy has lost to the Briarwoods and the death of his family, and things in Percy that Tary never had, and she loves the way they are together, bookish and exuberantly boyish.
When this had started properly happening a few weeks ago, she’d thought she would wait to tell Vax the next time he came with Keyleth for a visit. And then Keyleth had been away longer than usual, and she’d come today without Vax. Which is…allowed. But he’ll be sore if he finds out from Keyleth and not from her.
For all Tary’s mishaps with mixing and baking, his piping is quite precise. He hands her the piped puffs and she dips them in the chocolate and they begin to form neat little rows on the tray. Hopefully they can sell a few out before closing, but it won’t be a hardship to finish the rest off with dinner. She can call it another practice batch.
“I think they’ll be a good one to add to our arsenal.”
Not for the first time and probably not for the last, Taryon Darrington sends out an idle prayer that perhaps soon the Slayer’s Cake will start making enough money to hire someone to help with dishes. Vex has quashed the idea until they’re more than just covering the cost of supplies, and while he does admit it’s a sound business decision, he’s looking forward to being able to maintain a proper manicure again. He had high hopes for Doty 2.0, but for all his tinkering the construct just doesn’t have the grip strength to not break things. Still, the sprayer he added does come in handy for rinsing.
He did try getting up early enough to help with the real work of the baking, so he could trade off dishes more regularly, but baking just does not allow for improvisation in the same way that writing and magic do. Cake decorating, yes, but icing and piping does not seem to count against dish duty in the same way.
Pike passes through the kitchen when Tary’s about halfway through the pile and he can feel his fingertips softening up in the worst way in the water. She usually goes off on her own business for the afternoon — something with her temple, perhaps? — but sometimes she comes back later in the day to help with cleaning up.
“Pike! Do you want to take over for a little bit, while I start drying?” The key thing, he’s been learning, to getting people to help you with things, is to frame it like you’re helping them with something instead of ordering them to do it or even asking straight-out.
She cocks an eyebrow and smiles. “No, but I’ll dry,” she says, and pulls out the stepstool and a fresh towel from underneath the sink.
Tary It unsettles him a bit how thoroughly Pike is always onto him. She reads people’s faces remarkably well from a distance of several feet down.
“How did the cream puffs come out?”
“Perfectly! We’re calling them profiterolos.”
She laughs, with a delicate little snort. “Of course we are. Who came up with that?”
“We arrived at it mutually — though it was Vex first.”
“She’s pretty clever that way.”
“She is.”
“She’s clever enough to know what she’s doing.” Pike’s voice has dipped into something that he identifies as both polite and dangerous. “So’s Percy. So are you.”
“Thank you,” he says, cautiously.
“You’re welcome,” she smiles. “Don’t fuck it up.”
“I hope not to.” Every day since he joined Vox Machina, and every time in the last few weeks that he’s gotten a kiss or an embrace from Vex and Percy — books are very heavy on the idea of first loves, but there’s something to be said for second loves and new leaves.
“I’d really hate to have to partition out your share of the bakery, and you’re getting pretty good at dishes.” She holds up a dried mixing bowl, gleaming in a way that, admittedly, he would not have been able to wash a dish not that long ago.
“Well, you needn’t fear that.” He hands her another bowl scrubbed clean. “I think we’re building something worth staying for here.”