This is the first new chapter, so if you were reading it before when it was on AO3, you haven’t seen anything going forward. Though I do still recommend reading the previous stuff back anyway, because I’ve edited it all up, and there’s quite a bit of new stuff added. This is the longest chapter yet, and we’ve got Alex in a bad mood right off the bat. When Alex is in a bad mood, nothing good ever happens, so here we are, dealing with that. He’s set Kieran a terrible task, and is being an all-round pain in the ass about it. What else is new?
To start this off, I want you to know I baked Kieran’s horrible cake that was more like a weird Yorkshire pudding, and I hated it. My husband, on the other hand, ate the whole damn thing and loved it. Then again, we also tried the super sour sweets Greg made Alex eat in series 9, and I ate five at once and thought they were no big deal, while my husband wound up fighting for his life over just one of them, so I don’t know what to make of any of this. I’m saying the sweets are lame, and the cake described in this fic is gross, and that’s what I’m sticking to. All I could taste was sugar, and it was nasty and it really did stick to my teeth. 0/10.
We get to Alex getting very jealous of Greg having friends over, because ultimately all he wants is to have Greg to himself. Instead, he’s having to share, and that’s really getting up his nose. A cycle is referenced, and they’re at the tail end of it, and now Alex expects things to be getting better where they aren’t. In his mind, this should be his time with Greg, so when he comes home to find that he’s going to spend the evening either ignored or on display, it takes the mood he’s been in all day and sours it further. Oddly, this scene had me waffling more on something than nearly any other part of this fic, and it was the joint being passed around. What had me waffling in the first place is that it’s not something I see a lot of in this fandom in general, so I wasn’t sure if it’s something that’s widely accepted as a concept. But he’s mentioned smoking weed on the show, and has bits about it in his stand up, and Wicky smokes a joint in the Cleaner, so fuck it. It seemed worth including. And for Greg’s list of sins in this fic, smoking a joint with his mates is low on the ladder, let’s be real.
Another thing that happens in this chapter is that it’s the first time it’s referenced that Alex doesn’t always cook meals. That’s a thing that only happens when it’s just Greg. There is a proper staff, and when there are guests, that staff is utilised. Mostly I think the kitchen staff are employed to cook for the rest of the house staff, and probably for the guests who are there to entertain Greg like trained monkeys, but they’re probably also aware that there will be times when being told to suddenly prepare a meal for a group is expected. Anyone who works for this man has likely got to get used to a certain amount of instability very quickly.
For the flashback, we get to the first big reveal, and to the point where the plot finally starts to pick up. I loved the idea of making Rhod a solicitor, because he’s wholly unfit for it. The man is distilled chaos, and because of that he’d be your worst nightmare. Like, he’s definitely got a reputation as someone who wins cases, but through absolutely insane tactics. And it was for scenes like this that made me decide to make it be Rhod. It could have been literally anybody, and nothing about the story would have changed. But I wanted it to be Rhod because I wanted his mad, intense energy in these scenes. I wanted the jeopardy that because it’s Rhod, he’s going to fuck it up. It’s Rhod, and he still could. If I had gone with Mike, the calm, cool, collected man who was a doctor in a past life, that jeopardy wouldn’t be there. But as well as Rhod being here to bring chaos, we also have the elephant in the room finally out in the open. We now know what Greg’s fucking problem is; why he’s so goddamn weird with meals and why he doesn’t seem to trust Alex. And Alex knows it as well, and then some. He knows a much wider part of the story than he did when he made that decision to stay on. He did not replace a personal assistant. He replaced a former lover in a very kinky relationship that seems to have gone very, very sour to the point of attempted murder that ended with the wrong person dead. There’s obviously more to it than Alex knows still, but Alex knows enough to have a more or less clear picture of what he’s got himself involved in. It’s enough to know that he definitely needs to leave. And yet, he makes the choice to stay anyway. Because he spent three days alone with Greg, without distractions, being told what to do and he liked it just a little too much. He doesn’t realise that, and he doesn’t understand it, but that’s definitely what happened, and now he wants more of it. And he wants it enough to make decisions that will lead to him getting locked in cupboards and slapped around twelve years later.
But this is a chapter of big reveals, because we have two more after we find out what happened to the guy Alex replaced. Basically, we’re six chapters and about 40,000 words in, and the plot is finally kicking off. That’s what’s happened. It’s final judgement day, and these people are fighting for their prizes, or to not be murdered as someone in the discord speculated. There’s no murder, though. Because as was pointed out at the time, that would mean I’d have to kill off some of the best people, and I don’t think I can do that in this fandom. The failpeople are my favourites. I can’t kill Nish. So, spoilers for that, I guess. Nish survives this mess. I love him too much. But somehow it manages to be more sinister than that at the same time. Kieran’s come last, and he still takes home a substantial prize because I do actually have a formula to convert points to cash, and the exact number he took home was about £860,000. I think that number was in an earlier draft, but it felt better to leave it vague in the end. But if you’re wondering, they all made out like bandits. This will not exactly be the case for the idiots in the series 5 group, because of the wider spread of points. But these people have just spent ten weeks of hell, and in order to do anything with this money, they can either pick greed and keep it all by staying attached to the guy who made their lives hell, which probably won’t be very good for them in the long run given how we all know how Greg feels about people who don’t pay their tax, or they can report this money and try to explain it. Given Alex has a stack of business cards at the ready, it’s probably apparent which option most people pick.
I have also changed the rules on who gets to come back. It’s not just the winners, because I’m counting Edinburgh as canon for plot reasons. And at that point, anybody can come back, so I had to establish some new rules that don’t really mesh with Champion of Champions, but whatever. Greg is luring desperate people, and desperate people are probably not going to be amazing with money in the first place. Alex has probably seen a terrifying amount of people blow through their prize money and wind up worse off than they were the first time. And when they do come back, they’ll be even more eager to please the Taskmaster. Obviously, Bob throwing CoC doesn’t mesh with this, but Bob doesn’t mesh with reality in general. But that’s how Greg keeps them silent after he’s just psychologically tortured them for ten weeks. People will do anything for money, and when you tell them they can come back for more, they’ll continue to play your game.
And all that leads directly onto the final reveal of the chapter. The one that I was most looking forward to writing, because we finally get to meet Tim and Mark, and the shed incident pays off at last. Remember when Alex first applied, and Greg said he’d have Saturdays off? That’s never really stopped being a thing. He’s spent previous Saturdays at home, doing nothing, and being weird about it. But after he sees to the guests and gets them out of the house, Greg gives him £50 and tells him to go enjoy himself. There’s a routine in play, and Alex immediately falls into it, because it’s one that’s been in place for quite some time. But what he doesn’t count on is that routine getting disrupted by Tim being observant. At the same time, he doesn’t do anything about what he knows is clearly going on, other than loudly complain. It’s not a surprise to him that Alex gets smacked around, or that he has no desire to leave this situation. Nor that he has no money outside of what little Greg gives him for the evening. Tim and Mark are both totally aware and acclimatised to this situation, even if they clearly hate it. Tim wants Alex to come to his senses, but he’s still willing to play along with curfews, and even at the end of the night when Alex is too drunk to get himself home, Tim sees that he gets into a cab safely, rather than doing what someone else might do and removing Alex from the situation.
Now why on Earth might that be?