How to Bake an Advantage

Authors Note: This was a story I had originally planned seven years ago, when I first became enamored with the worlds of Ouran High School Host Club and fanfiction. I posted a "preview first chapter" on an account that I am now embarrassed about, and never touched it again. Afterwards, I dropped the idea of writing Fanfiction altogether to focus on school. Now, my reignited interest in anime and the world's obsession with a certain British competitive baking show have reminded me of this story idea. While my original idea was an approximately 10-15-chapter story, this one is designed as a two-shot. Depending on how well this goes I might further explore the Ouran/Kwon Bakery world beyond this story, but at this point it's a 15% chance. I hope you enjoy!

Yelim Kwon was piping the final touches on one of the gaudiest cakes imaginable. The monstrosity was for a bachelorette party and blindingly pink, covered in what had to be pounds of fondant. Why was it that fondant was always the preferable icing with these kinds of cakes when the much tastier buttercream could easily do the trick? Ah, well. Yelim was in the middle of adding another red heart onto the top tier of the cake when her mother called, "Yelim! That Ootori boy is here to see you!"

Out of her control, Yelim's heart picked up its pace the slightest bit, and a buzz of adrenaline ran through her body before quickly being dampened by a sense of dread. She hadn't seen Kyoya in a week. More accurately, she had been avoiding Kyoya for a week. Texts and calls from him went unanswered. She faked an illness and stayed home on Wednesday, the day Kyoya usually came into the bakery. Thank God they didn't go to the same school.

How did I get here? Yelim thought. Her memory took her back a year and a half ago, when Ootori Fuyumi had waltzed in and inquired whether Yelim's family's bakery could cater her wedding, a week before the wedding was to occur. Yelim refused politely, but adamantly. Fuyumi walked out and Yelim had thought that was the end of it. However, the next day, Kyoya walked in like he owned the place, and coolly communicated a list of demands for his older sister's wedding. Yelim fumed and fought as hard as she could, but, mysteriously, the clients for the rest of the week had dropped their catering reservations, and the Kwon Bakery had no choice but to accept the Ootori family as clients.

The more she learned about the Ootori family, the more she hated everything they stood for. They had virtually forced the Kwons to work for them – who were they to have that sense of entitlement? Learning of the family's reputation and their combined net worth only fueled her internal rage. Kyoya hadn't helped at all. He was in the bakery every day after school, watching over every process like a hawk that somehow needed glasses. When he wasn't clacking away at that laptop of his, he would be breathing down Yelim's neck about cake recipes and decoration precision, about the quality of ingredients used in the food, about anything and everything. Yelim took each comment as a personal criticism. How dare he act like he knew everything there was to know about something that had been a part of her life since the day she was born? Her mother liked to say that she could pipe before she walked. How dare he intrude and ruin the one thing that had given her peace and joy her entire life? They clashed and bickered every day as they approached Fuyumi's wedding day, until finally, two days before the wedding, her mother forbade her from talking back. The Ootori's were the best clients the bakery had ever served, she said, and serving them successfully would give the struggling bakery a good reputation. There was a plea in her mother's eyes that Yelim couldn't ignore, something that took root at the very depths of her heart. So, Yelim fell silent to Kyoya's constant criticism and turned the other cheek.

Kyoya must have sensed something had been pushed too far, and started to become more silent himself. He began to spend more time in the booth he had set up for himself, typing away on what looked like several spreadsheets, whenever she stole a glance. Strangely, Yelim found herself missing something as she obediently worked on each tier of Fuyumi's cake. She brushed it off by telling herself that she missed Kyoya's voice because it was like white noise- a constant hum of incisive chatter and back-and-forth that simply relaxed her and sharpened her focus.

Then, the day of the wedding came. As Fuyumi walked down the aisle and said her vows, Yelim was busy transferring the cake tiers out of the refrigerated truck onto the elaborately decorated tables at the reception location. With the help of her fellow bakery workers, she deliberately placed each tier on top of the other, using a small step ladder to place the final decorations. Instead of the corny and traditional wedding figurines, Fuyumi opted for a piped rose and chrysanthemum, to represent her husband and herself, respectively. Yelim, somewhat reluctantly, had to admire Fuyumi's taste. Plus, it gave Yelim an artistic challenge. After finishing the final touches of the cake, Yelim stepped back to admire her creation from afar. Then, he felt a familiar presence standing behind her, a little to the left, casting a bit of a shadow on the cake.

"Shouldn't you be watching your sister get married?" Yelim asked, without taking her eyes off the cake.

"I have greater utility as a brother who makes sure the reception is set up properly than as a brother who passively sits and watches his sister enter an arranged marriage." Kyoya remarked with an even tone.

"How pragmatic." Neither of them said a word for a couple of moments. Yelim continued appraising her cake, finally deeming herself satisfied with it. She almost made a motion to leave before hearing Kyoya.

"It's beautiful." It was an olive branch, a peace offering. With each cake Yelim created, she gave a piece of herself, so she couldn't help but imagine that Kyoya's compliment to the cake was a compliment to herself as a person dedicated to her craft.

She paused a bit before replying. "Thank you. You're a good brother."

Kyoya quipped, "Perhaps… a little too good." She had understood what he was trying to say. While there was an inherent part of Kyoya's personality that made him objective and utilitarian to a fault, that made him distant and stern, and perhaps a little cold, these traits were magnified thousands of times over in the stress of trying to create a perfect experience for his older sister. It was sweet, in a way, and Yelim understood. After all, many of her blow-ups towards Kyoya had also stemmed from familial devotion.

After the Ootori wedding, the following months passed by in a flurry. As her mother predicted, the infamous Ootori influence sent the Kwon bakery into overdrive. Her family's bakery was sought after all over Tokyo, and even in some outlying prefectures. The bakery had even once catered the wedding of some distant member of royalty in China.

Oh, and Kyoya stuck around, too. He'd visit at least once a week, remarking that the bakery was a good place for him to work, since nobody he knew would be around to bother him (this comment irked Yelim, actually, since it implied that nobody of importance would be around her bakery to bother him). In any case, he started to become a tolerated, if not welcome presence in the Kwon family bakery. There was an understanding between Yelim and Kyoya after the wedding. Additionally, when the bakery started to rise in popularity, Kyoya helped streamline their catering process so everything worked more efficiently. He helped install a software system that would keep track of scheduling clients, and while Yelim missed the huge pen-and-paper calendar that used to hang on the wall to keep track of events, she agreed the software was the better option.

Upon being asked why he was doing so much to help the bakery, Kyoya simply answered, "Your bakery's continued success is advantageous to me". Yelim rolled her eyes a bit, but she figured that's the way he saw the world. With these changes, Kwon Bakery would continue to be a useful work space for him. Not to mention, her family gave him free food as a token of their immense gratitude. Yelim understood the sentiment, but she ultimately thought it was a waste. Kyoya was so rich, the cost of the food wouldn't affect him at all and the bakery would just be losing money.

Kyoya eventually started bringing his friends over about once a month or so, a troop of them actually, all of whom would insist on squeezing into the small booth and a couple of chairs, even though there were 7 of them and the booth was designed to fit four. The small one would often sit on the quiet one's lap, though, so they were able to save some space. As the year went on, Yelim would often overhear their rather loud conversations, and learned as much as she wanted to know about their strange "host club". Her family often catered their events, which the Host Club did pay for, at Kyoya's insistence and the Kwon family's protest.

Even though the group overwhelmed her, and she didn't spend too much time with the group, serving the charismatic club over the year gave her a certain rapport with them. She started to look forward to overhearing all of their wacky adventures and the entertaining club themes, and getting to know each member a bit. It took her a bit of time, but she eventually noticed that one them was not who "he" appeared to be. She also noticed that the rest of the club were all at least a little bit in love with her: Fujioka Haruhi. Even Kyoya, maybe. Yelim especially favored the small one, who was effusive about how delicious "Ye-chan's" cakes were. She thought for three straight months that the club was lying when they stated he was one of their oldest members. Hani finally showed her his school ID card and then Yelim just thought he was a forger. She didn't get extremely close to the group, however. Their combined energies and overall flirty attitudes made her anxious. She couldn't tell who was who between the twins. She doubted she and the Morinozuka Takashi ever exchanged a word.

The deeper connection she made during that time was with Kyoya, whose weekly visits made him a more familiar person, and whose solitary presence made Yelim more comfortable – more "whelmed", she supposed. They discussed business ideas together and she often inquired about his work and those mysterious spreadsheets. Their banter was still on the edge of aggression, but in a friendly, joking way. She hated herself for it because he was still an entitled bastard, but she started looking forward to his visits.

The year ended and to Yelim's surprisingly deep sadness, Hani left for university. The seven members became five, better spread around the table. Kyoya entered his final year at Ouran Academy, starting to apply to university himself in his diligent way (Yelim was always envious of his natural repulsion to procrastination), and Yelim entered her second year at Ouran Public.

Yelim and Kyoya's relationship grew stronger and stronger. Yelim learned to look through his cold exterior and "purely objective" reasoning for the underlying warmth she knew was there at times. She liked to call his way of speaking "Ootor-ese": that overly formal and mechanic way he strung his sentences together. She knew his order by heart, and trusted him to accurately judge any new recipes she was testing. He gave a "yes" to the Earl Grey shortbread cookies, and a hard "no" to her almond flour pound cake.

One day Yelim was washing her hands at the bakery, and while she looked up at her reflection in the mirror, flour dusting her black hair (which was bunched up very attractively in a hair net), she realized she was falling in love. Immediately, she gave herself a light slap, soap bubbles making her cheek sticky, and she vigorously scrubbed between her fingers and splashed her face with the icy water. This couldn't happen, she told herself, for so, so many reasons. Too many reasons. She pushed her feelings down somewhere deep inside herself, stuffing them into a chest, locking the key, and throwing it into the part of her brain where she would forget everything: in the same area her calculus antiderivative formulas seemed to go.

She maintained her friendship normally, she hoped, praying that he wouldn't notice anything with those incisive powers of observation he wielded. Thankfully, it seemed, those skills didn't seem to transfer in the world of feelings. If her heart panged a little bit whenever he mentioned a girl he was hosting, or Haruhi, she did her best to not let it show, internally chastising herself along the way. This went on for months.

It almost came crashing down one day at the end of January during her second year at Ouran Public. Her family was preparing food for the Host Club's Cherry Blossom Ball, scheduled to happen in a couple of days. Yelim took a break from food prep to top off Kyoya's almost-oversteeped Earl Grey tea, just the way he liked it: strong and slightly bitter. He looked hard at work, so Yelim poured the tea silently. Then, without looking away from his computer screen, while continuing to type, Kyoya said, "Come with me to the Cherry Blossom Ball." Yelim thought she misheard him.

"I don't think I heard you correctly."

"And here I thought you spoke Japanese. I think you heard me correctly." He smirked. Yelim rolled her eyes. She considered that most of the time she spent talking with Kyoya, her eyes were staring at the ceiling. She turned away from the wall to look at the interior of the bakery, sure that an embarrassing blush was rising to her cheeks. Her heart started beating a little faster. She was at a loss for words.

"Why? And you could ask me like a person, you know, instead of commanding me like a dog." She found herself surprised at how angry she sounded.

Kyoya seemed unfazed. To Yelim's frustration, he even seemed entertained. "Come, now, Yelim, why do I do anything? Your presence at the ball would be advantageous to me." It suddenly made sense to Yelim, which made her feel relieved, but perhaps the slightest bit disappointed. The Cherry Blossom Ball was one of the Club's largest events, and the one that gave them school-wide recognition if only for its sheer beauty. Almost everybody in the school would come, and Yelim's presence would make sure everything on the food-side of the event ran smoothly.

Yelim considered how painful and degrading it would be to go to the ball not as Kyoya's date, but as his servant. However, Kyoya had done so much for the bakery, including getting this gig, that it would be ridiculous to refuse. Not to mention, against her better judgement, there was the pathetic part of her that was pining to go to an event like this with Kyoya, even if it was all just a guise.

She gave her answer with a sigh. "I suppose. I'll do it since I'm your friend. I'll have to be there anyway to set up the food, so all I have to do be nicely dressed." She picked up the tea pot and walked back to the kitchen before remarking, "By the way, in the future, I will never say 'yes' to a command."

Over the next few months, Kyoya would ask, yes, ask, her more frequently to attend these sorts of functions. She even went to the Host Club a couple of times, and while each event brought the same underlying pangs, she felt she was being useful and a good friend. She also enjoyed herself, especially when she first saw Kyoya acting in a "host" capacity. It took everything she had to keep herself from bursting from laughter. She liked seeing him entertain, in the few times he did so. He added a touch of grace to every word and action in his hosting, and even though she knew it was all an act, it also seemed like he was able to express some parts of himself he normally kept underneath his ever-present mask. But then again, who was she to know? If she subconsciously considered the idea that Kyoya was starting to favor her beyond the category of "useful friend", she would shut it down before letting those ideas enter her conscious thought. She remembered a moment when she suggested off-hand that the food could be personalized and themed to each host, beyond the specificity of day's theme. Hikaru and Kaoru's desserts could be flavored around cinnamon and cardamom themes, for example, reflecting their spicy and loud personalities, and the similar but distinct flavors of their personalities. Tamaki's cakes would be flavored with lemon and vanilla, bright and light, etc. Kyoya had actually stopped typing, turning away to look at Yelim without speaking, almost to the point that it became uncomfortable. Finally, he asked, with a strange tone, "And what would my flavor be?"

Yelim answered without a moment of hesitation, "Dark chocolate. It's not for everyone, but it's complex. Slightly bitter, but that only serves to bring out the rich intensity of the flavor. Besides, they don't call you the Shadow King for nothing." Kyoya listened to the answer in silence, before returning to work on his laptop. Next week's bakery order for the Host Club came in with a request for themed flavors. It brought a smile to Yelim, and the desserts ended up becoming very popular with the customers.

Meanwhile, the chest she kept under lock-and-key was undergoing a lot of pressure. She felt it was at risk of explosion, and it took almost all of her energy to keep it under control. But last week, it all went to pieces.

There she was, at the host club again at Ouran Academy, replacing the last petite madeleine, since the first batch that had run out with the first wave of customers. She took the time to watch what was happening with a curious eye from the back corner. The Club was chugging along, the twins doing their strange act in one area, Haruhi at another. Tamaki had just finished hosting a client when he bounced up to Kyoya, "Kyoya! You don't have any treasured customers today?"

"It appears not, Tamaki." Kyoya replied in that even tone of his, reflecting a patience he reserved only for Tamaki.

"Kyoya, you need to spend less time away from that screen. It's bad for your eyes, you know. WAIT. I have an idea!" Yelim felt a sudden sense of foreboding; Tamaki's epiphanies rarely turned out well. "You should host Ye-chan! She's worked so hard and she's never experienced the famous Ouran Host Club experience before!" Yelim was frozen in time and space. A flurry of words came out of her mouth somehow, without her conscious direction, "Oh, oh no – I shouldn't… wouldn't… um. I don't want to disturb his work, and I'm busy here, Um…"

Kyoya interrupted, turning from his computer, and sliding the glasses up the bridge of his nose. "On the contrary, you just finished replenishing the food on the table, and coincidentally, I just finished calculating this week's budget. And it would be useful for you to understand the Club's business from the client side." It took Yelim a couple of moments to understand what he was saying, and when she finally did, she could do only one thing. She turned away, picked up her things, and rapidly made her way out of the room, muttering, "I have to go" when she remembered to.

So it was that. That was how she got here. In the bakery. With her hands stained with pink frosting. On a Friday, when Kyoya rarely ever came. Yet there he was. She could see him through the glass window separating the bakery from the customer dining area- standing in front of the cash register. And there she was, with no place to hide, because when she spotted him, it was clear that he had already spotted her, and was waiting for their eyes to meet.