Chapter Text
It was a toss up on who to blame, reflected Alexsandr Kallus as he entered the tent for the first time. Oh, it had surely been Din fucking Djarin’s brilliant idea, half-mumbled around a cookie and calling it that show Cobb likes, soon to be bullied into it by the rest of his coworkers and friends; but it had been Alexsandr’s therapist who’d suggested he take up baking — a better outlet for his anger and anxiety, Doctor Allie had said wryly and with no little genuine worry, than his tendency towards punching mirrors and chasing his illicitly obtained klonopin with whisky — and it had been Bodhi Erso, after all, who had gently suggested therapy in the first place.
Alexsandr had been twenty-three when he’d left Her Majesty’s Royal Marines with a state of the art titanium femur and a sense of self that wasn’t so much shattered as it was non-existent. Before, the court-ordered therapist that saw the few kids pulled from the Farm hadn’t exactly been concerned with making sure they all escaped the nightmare as functioning humans, especially Alexsandr, the oldest and admittedly angriest and most volatile of them all — only that they weren’t too visibly feral and said the right things on the witness stand. Doctor Allie would tell him much later he’d simply just traded one manufactured personality for another: the good fundamentalist child for the good honorable soldier, and when being the good honorable soldier couldn’t happen anymore, it was only a matter of time before he self-destructed.
It took time, of course, for him to harden and crack beneath the weight of what he’d seen and done, like an ill-formed diamond. He was lucky that he’d found some semblance of structure before it had happened, and truly it had only been luck that ended up with him on the fast track for his civil engineering degree under the tutelage of Lyra Erso. She’d taken one look at him — too thin, a limp that it would take him years to shake, and the rattle of unprescribed pills in his jacket pocket — and had pulled him, subtly, beneath her wing.
It was lucky too that he’d ended up with kind, practical Lyra. Her husband, Galen, had taken a sabbatical from the department the year Alexsandr started at Imperial College London, and Jyn and Bodhi repeatedly assured him that had Galen, dangerously brilliant and prone to leaps in logic and flights of fancy and too big-hearted to a fault, been the first one to see him, he would’ve been handed formal adoption papers and moved into the family home within a week — that Alexsandr would’ve been swept up into the madness of the Erso home and given no time to begin to learn who he was, out of context.
They’d told him that it wasn’t so much that Galen wasn’t observant or that he was too self-absorbed to miss the obvious: it was that he loved his children, and those who he deemed to be his children, so much he would ignore the warning signs. He’d want to believe the best, and he would subsequently ignore the worst. He’d refuse to believe something could ever go wrong, believing that the love and care of he and his wife could move mountains — he’d buoy you up until your crash became sudden, unexpected; whereas Lyra was more watchful and often saw the writing on the wall. She knew it was going to happen, and she’d done her best to cushion Alexsandr so his fall wouldn’t be too hard — unluckily for them all, Alexsandr was uniquely stubborn and crashed and burned quite spectacularly.
“Together they make one perfect parent,” Bodhi had said that day in the hospital as he’d played gin rummy with Jyn over Alexsandr’s cot. Nineteen, then, Bodhi had a drier wit than anyone Alexsandr had ever met and more compassion to boot.
After Jyn had ducked out to head to her own afternoon lectures, Bodhi had lingered behind and Alexsandr had tried to tell him that he’d be fine on his own — he always had been, you see — but Bodhi had only shook his head.
“You don’t have to do this alone,” he’d said. “I’m here. Mom’s here, and Dad and Jyn. We know you’ve been through a lot, and we know you're strong, and it doesn’t have to be us you talk to but you have to talk to someone. What if you hadn’t been in the shower? What if the floor hadn’t flooded? If your super hadn’t found you, Sasha — ”
Until the Ersos, Alexsandr hadn’t gone by Sasha since his mother was alive. It had been Galen, ambiguously Scandinavian as he was, who’d called him that absently one day as they’d chatted in Lyra’s office about how Galen’s book was going — he’d gone off on a half an hour extemporaneous lecture on environmental determinism and community consciousness that, while fascinating, did not lead Alexsandr to believe the book writing was in fact going altogether well — and since Alexsandr never corrected him, all the Ersos began to call him that, despite his noted preference for Alex.
And there, in a hospital cot with a freshly pumped stomach and a narrowly avoided case of hypothermia from an accidental Klonopin overdose in his shower, stitches on his left knuckles where he’d put his fist through the mirror just before he’d swallowed too many pills, his thesis advisor bustling through the door with a bag of Thai takeaway and her youngest starting up a line of solitaire, Alexsandr had realized that perhaps Bodhi was right.
Still, he thought, arms behind his back as he tied on his apron and put on a smile for the cameras that felt more like a grimace. That little shit — and Doc Allie and Din, and Cassian and Ahsoka who’d joined forces with Cobb to submit his name behind his back, and all the rest — were in for an earful when he eventually got sent home after just the one weekend in the Bake Off tent.
MEL, narrating: On the opposite end of the spectrum is civil engineer Alexsandr. Born and raised in London, he began to bake after he left the Royal Marines on the advice of a friend, who suggested it as a possible new hobby. Precise by both vocation and nature, Alexsandr’s carrot cake sponge and horchata flavored swiss meringue buttercream is an homage to the childhood flavours of his best friend.
SUE: So just how long have you been baking, Alexsandr?
ALEXSANDR: Six, seven years now, I suppose. I don’t believe I baked anything edible for the first year or two.
SUE: But you’ve gotten quite good, to be here. Or we’ve completely bummed up the vetting process this time around, and we’re all in two straight months of food poisoning every weekend!
ALEXSANDR: I hope not. At the very least, I promise everything I make will be completely cooked.
PAUL: Now your flavors are interesting. I’ve not heard of baking with horchata before. And it’s not exactly a traditional British flavor.
ALEXSANDR: Most of my coworkers and friends are ex-pats, or people I met in the course of the service, and I suppose we none of us have an attachment to that — those British flavors and styles. I learned baking mostly around requests from them — Middle Eastern and Lantinx mostly, some Danish recipes. Mainly traditional Mexican, though, I’ve been passed on a lot of recipes from my friend Cassian’s abuela.
PAUL: Then the horchata is homemade?
ALEXSANDR: Yes. Would you like to try some?
MARY: Oh, I’ve never had horchata before! Please.
Alexsandr lifts a Mason jar of creamy looking liquid and pours out a few small glasses for everyone. Paul, Mary, and Sue all drink.
MARY: That’s lovely!
PAUL: Yes, I’m quite looking forward to trying a buttercream made from it. Thank you, Alexsandr.
They move on. Sue ducks back into frame almost immediately and pours herself another cup, cheersing Alexsandr, who shakes his head. She ducks back out with her prize.
MEL, narrating: In line with Alexsandr for this week’s Star Facial Hair is Zeb — short for Garazeb — Bake Off’s first Australian to grace the tent. Zeb, a firefighter now living and working in South London, was taught to bake by his great aunt back home in Alice Springs. His swiss roll is a nod to one of those childhood bakes: the Tasmanian Apple Cake. The delicately spiced cinnamon and lemon sponge will be filled with vanilla buttercream, apple jam, and walnuts and sultanas. The sponge will then be dusted with icing sugar in the shape of Tasmania.
PAUL: You know, that’s one I’ve never had before.
ZEB: It's a simple bake, but traditional. It’s a proper apple cake, though, baked with the apples in it. Mine’s got no apples in the sponge, so’s it can be rolled — twisted it by doing the jam instead.
PAUL: I love the idea of it. I’m excited to see how it comes out.
MARY: Indeed. Very traditional, classic flavors, but the twist will be exciting. How will you do the Tasmania outline?
ZEB: One of my mates at the station, Sabine, she’s an artist. Made me this nice little stencil.
Zeb holds up an acetate stencil in the shape of Tasmania.
ZEB, con’t: Thought about trying to get it in the sponge itself, but never nailed it in practice. This comes out nice, though.
SUE: I have a fun fact about Tasmania.
ZEB: Yeah?
SUE: Tasmania used to be the apple capital of the world. For a long time that’s where most of the world’s apple supply came from, and it was nicknamed the Isle of Apples!
ZEB: So I suppose there’s American as apple pie, and Tasmanian as apple cake.
Sue points at him.
SUE: I’m leaving now. He’s trying to steal my job!
ZEB: Listen. I’m just keeping my options open if I get sent home!
Despite his private, dire predictions, Alexsandr left the tent after the first week with an invitation to return and the challenges for signature and showstopper for the next round. It was going to be biscuit week, and, while he was still a bit overwhelmed with the reality of the situation, he was already starting to plan out what he’d like to do — and how he needed to improve. He was a planner, at heart, and perhaps just a little too competitive for his own good.
He’d done well enough, he thought. His Swiss roll flavors had gone over incredibly well, and he’d come in first in the technical — Jaffa cakes, for which he owed a debt of gratitude to Ahsoka; they were her favorite midday snack, so Alexsandr had grown quite familiar with them. And he didn’t know what all the others complained about: the recipe was sparse, yes, but with a little deductive reasoning and the knowledge of how a recipe was usually constructed — well, it all just made sense to him. It had felt as easy and as instinctive as following a blue print, which, in a way, he supposed he was.
It was his showstopper where he’d stumbled, he thought, watching the idyllic English countryside pass by the train window. They’d been asked to construct a chocolate cake as a showstopper: a two layer minimum, chocolate as the hero, and something that harkened back to childhood. Alexsandr knew perhaps he’d cheated a bit, as he’d used not his childhood but Jyn’s — she’d said if he was giving her husband a bake she wanted one too, and so he’d opted for a take on a traditional Scandinavian bake called the rye bread layer cake. He didn’t think anyone would be impressed with an adaptation of the MRE based diet he’d had most his life.
And his flavors had been good, he knew; it was hard to go wrong with a chocolate cake, after all, and he’d cut the sweetness of the chocolate and rye bread cake with the traditional red currant jam smeared between the layers. But it had lack visual flair, Paul and Mary had said. It had been too simple, lovely and clean as it was with it’s perfect layers of cake, jam, and whipped heavy cream, the spill of bright red berries and tempered chocolate shards across the top. But other bakers had gone for more stylized cakes, more experimentally towers of sponge that perhaps weren’t as tasty as Alexsandr’s but certainly more impressive.
He stared out the window, frowning. He would need to really think about his showstopper for next week, which he was feeling tentatively confident about — they were being asked to create three dimensional biscuit sculptures, and Alexsandr rathe thought it was quite in his wheelhouse, with his background as an engineer. He’d need to decided the perfect biscuit base. Gingerbread was traditional, of course, sturdy as well as delicious, but he wondered if he could find something more special. And then there’d need to be the design, and that in particular needed to be something truly show-stopping —
Alexsandr was startled from his thoughts when someone dropped into one of the seats across from him with a grunt and a huffed laugh. He looked up blinking to see the Australian from the tent was sat there, stretching with his hands behind his head.
The man — Garazeb, he thought — grinned at him. “Fancy running into you here, mate. Heard you lived in London too, but didn’t think you’d be going my way!”
“Hmm,” he said.
He was a big man, the Australian. He hadn’t noticed, in the tent, their benches on opposite sides of the space. He was taller and broader than even Alexsandr, who was used to being the biggest person in most rooms — only Ahsoka and Din gave him a run for his money, Din shorter but more muscular given his profession and Ahsoka would be the first to proudly tell you she was built like an Amazonian brick shithouse — and it made something stir strangely, uncomfortably in his gut.
He had tattoos, thick black chunks of color, almost stripe-like, perhaps traditional to his culture, spilling out from the cuffs of his tight short-sleeved tee and an easy, waiting smile under his beard. Alexsandr remembered Mel making a joke about both their facial hair at one point, both unusual but striking nonetheless. He wondered if it would make it into the show; he hoped not.
Garazeb was still staring at him, one eyebrow slowly raising. Apparently his hum hadn’t cut it as a response.
“Yes,” he said after a moment. After another moment and a glance at his hands, somewhat white knuckled on his own knees, he offered, “Dulwich.”
“I know Dulwich. I’m in Brixton,” said Garazeb, “I live at the station, but the captain has a flat in Dulwich when she’s not on call.”
“Hmm,” Alexsandr said again.
“You’re military, right?” he asked.
“Royal Marines,” he said. “I was.”
“I was Australian Air Force,” Garazeb said, “back in the day. Two tours in Iraq, one in Afghanistan before I retired. You?”
“Afghanistan,” he said shortly.
“Maybe we ran into each other,” he offered.
Alexsandr stared.”I doubt it.”
The smile on Garazeb’s face took on a bit of a strained quality but it hung on. He wasn’t good at this, he knew, making conversation. He barely knew how to talk about regular things, let alone his military service. He really only spoke about it in any detail in his therapy sessions: he found that he didn’t need to really tell anyone else, as the Ersos had seen him in the aftermath of his great fuck-up, and he’d explained it haltingly to Bodhi one quiet afternoon, who’d offered to disseminate the information to the rest of the family. Din and Ahsoka had always known, by virtue of Alexsandr waking up in a bed between them in the German hospital ward where he’d been airlifted after the roadside bombing and going through rehab with both the American soldiers. Cassian had always just seemed to know, though he suspected Jyn probably had told him, or maybe Ahsoka.
His life was so tangled up with people who knew and would never push him and treated him so gently despite the fact that he’d been made to take a certain amount of abuse. He didn’t like talking about life before twenty-three, before Lyra Erso and his degree, and he hated that it still defined him so, more than a decade later.
How was he supposed to explain that to a total stranger who he’d spent one weekend peripherally with, and probably only one more? Should he try to talk about baking instead? Make conversation about that? Ask him about why he wanted to go to the tent? Tell him that he got tricked by a trio of mean ex-pats into submitting his name?
Garazeb’s smile finally fell away. Alexsandr had been silent too long, and that careful smile was gone now and Garazeb sort of nodded at him, pulled out his phone, and, after a moment, seemed to start playing a game on it.
Fuck, he thought, and went back to looking out the window.