Chapter Text
Fuck eight AMs. Whoever invented eight AMs deserved to burn in hell. Nico should not have been expected to be awake before the clock hit double digits, and he especially shouldn’t have been expected to sit through a lecture - let alone pay attention! - for three straight hours. It was taking him, on average, five cups of coffee to make it through each day.
Thank fuck for Three of Cups.
If Rachel hadn’t opened up the little coffee shop during Nico’s senior year of high school, he probably wouldn’t have graduated, let alone made it to college, or survived his first two years. The shop catered to Rachel’s need for her life to be filled with weird, artsy, witchy aesthetics while at the same time catering to exhausted college students who needed help staying awake through all hours of the day and night.
Nico had the staying up all night part covered all on his own, thanks to his insomnia. But being awake at the fucking ass crack of dawn for a whole semester was really going to do him in. The good news was that Rachel gave him the loyal customer punch card (as well as the I’ve known you since you were thirteen and have accidentally gotten you high before, yes you can sleep in the back room between classes treatment) which meant that sometimes he could get free coffee before class and a free pastry when he came back around lunch time.
The downside was that he had to put up with being harassed by Rachel and her employees.
Rachel tended to baby him, just a little bit - always asking if he got any sleep the night before, and if he’d ever considered eating one of the fruit-filled pastries instead of just the chocolate ones. (So at least she wasn’t trying to cut sugar from his diet altogether, not that she could even if she wanted to.) Piper always tried to sweet talk him into writing her history papers for her, and had been trying to do so even back when Nico was still in high school. Leo just tended to sit across from Nico whenever he was on break and ramble about whatever project he had in progress, whether it be for school or for fun - though Leo had chosen to bombard Jason with his nonsense words ever since the two of them had started dating, at least whenever Jason was in the shop. Sometimes - only if Nico was really lucky (not) - Jason would sit with Nico to study with him (and what the fuck did that mean, to study with someone when you weren’t even taking the same classes? Was he trying to be friends or something?) and then Leo would bother both of them until his fifteen-to-thirty minutes were up.
It was the first day of the semester - second, technically, but Nico’s first - and he was already exhausted. He’d gotten maybe an hour of sleep before he had to be up for that fucking lecture, and he’d moved too slow to grab a coffee beforehand, so he was really dragging by the time he reached his usual booth.
He was lucky that every employee at Three of Cups treated him so kindly, and that one of them was thoughtful enough to set a cup off coffee next to where he’d laid his head down on the table - he should consider being nice back to them for a change.
He knew that whoever had dropped off the coffee had also taken a seat across from him at the booth, though they hadn’t spoken a word - another mercy on his tired brain; they all knew how much any amount of social interaction drained him. It was only when the smell of coffee had woken him up enough that he could lift his head again and reach for the cup that the person across from him said a simple, “Good morning.”
That wasn’t Rachel. Or Leo, or Piper, or even Jason.
Nico froze with the mug raised halfway to his mouth, and briefly weighed the pros and cons of if his coffee had been drugged or poisoned before he finally lifted his gaze.
The first thing he saw were the arms - tan and freckled, one laid across the edge of the table while the other was propped up on an elbow. Behind the arms, Nico could see the plain black Three of Cups uniform apron over a pale blue t-shirt. The freckles continued all the way up the person’s neck and decorated his pretty face, framed by curly blond hair and accented by bright blue eyes and a smile that seemed almost too friendly. His chin was propped up on his hand, and he was watching Nico like he was endlessly amusing, and, yeah, he definitely put something in Nico’s drink.
Nico set the mug down, his eyes narrowing into a glare as he stared the other guy down.
The blond’s smile flipped into a pout. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling alright? Are your sisters okay? Or is it the coffee - did I not make it right?” He reached for the abandoned mug and quickly took a sip, his nose instantly scrunching up at the taste. “Oh, god, why did I do that? I hate espresso. But I thought you liked espresso on lecture days?”
He was aiming that pout at Nico again, and Nico was half tempted to start looking around for the hidden cameras. But one glance over this guy’s shoulder at the front counter showed that Piper wasn’t paying them any mind, which must have meant that at least she hadn’t put this guy up to anything.
“Who the hell are you?” Nico demanded, and if he hadn’t been so tired, he might’ve thrown the coffee in the guy’s face just for being such a weirdo.
He started to laugh. “What do you mean, Neeks?”
Okay, nobody called him Neeks and walked away in one piece.
“I’m--” The guy cut himself off, finally seeming to realize that Nico wasn’t somebody he could fuck around with, though rather than trying to laugh it off and apologize, he looked kind of…confused. “Oh. Oh, no, I’m-- I must be early days-- I mean, I must be confusing you for somebody else! Sorry, let me get you a new drink - on the house! Uh, no espresso this time, right?”
Nico frowned. “No, I-- Espresso would be good. But a cup that you didn’t drink out of would be great, too.”
As he scrambled out of his seat, he started to laugh, though Nico didn’t miss the way his face slowly turned pink. “Right, yeah, of course. I’ll have that right out for you.”
He nearly spilled coffee all over the table in his attempt to quickly grab the cup and take off toward the front counter. Nico kept an eye on him the entire time that he worked, checking to make sure that he grabbed a clean cup and used all the machines that Nico knew were necessary for his usual drink - and, hang on, how did this guy know Nico’s usual if Nico had never seen him around before? - and mostly to make sure that Piper didn’t flip out on him for being a stranger behind the bar.
She didn’t. It looked as though she had asked if he was okay, commenting on his suddenly flustered state, and left it at that. She went right back to serving customers.
Nico ducked his head as soon as he realized the guy was coming back with his new drink, trying to make it seem like he hadn’t been watching his every move, but mentally cursed himself for giving this dude the perfect chance to spit in his drink at the last second.
“Sorry about that,” he said as he set the drink in front of Nico. Nico glanced up at him, but now it was like the guy was incapable of meeting his eyes, though he tried to smile apologetically down at Nico. “You know how it is, right? New, uh… Yeah, new job, plus I can be kind of scatterbrained, so, uh-- Right. I’ll leave you alone now.”
Nico waited until the blond was all the way across the cafe, standing behind the counter beside Piper once more before he finally took a sip of his drink. It was made perfectly - exactly how he liked it.
How did he know how Nico liked his coffee?
And when the fuck did Rachel hire a new guy?
Nico hung around for a while longer, killing time before he would have to leave for his evening class. After three coffees, he was feeling much more awake and prepared to take on the day - though the strange encounter with the new barista had certainly been an interesting change to his early morning routine.
When he was starting to feel jittery from the caffeine and decided he’d been sitting down too long, Nico sneaked into the back room when nobody was watching and knocked on the office door. Considering Nico hadn’t seen Rachel on the floor at all yet that day, he figured she was stuck in the back doing paperwork and…running numbers, or whatever the fuck business owners did.
He heard a call of yeah? from inside and pushed the door open before he stepped inside and made sure the door latched shut behind him. Like he suspected, Rachel was sitting behind a desk with papers spread out in front of her, though Nico didn’t even bother trying to parse what any of it was.
Nico dropped down into the empty chair across from her desk - the other chair being used as a coat rack and bag holder, of course.
“Are you aware that there’s some crazy blond guy running around in your kitchen right now, acting like he’s been working here for years?”
Rachel winced, but tried to play it off as a grin. “Oh, uh, yeah! That’s Will. He’s… eccentric!”
“He sure fuckin’ is,” Nico scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “He sat down at my table and started drinking my coffee. Who the fuck does that? And why would you even hire him? Since when did you need another employee?”
“I didn’t-- I mean--” Rachel sighed, and ran her hands over her face. “Okay, did I ever tell you about my weird Uncle Lester, who may or may not actually be my uncle, and might be more like…an unofficial godfather figure, or something like that? He’s basically the guy that I always went to when I was a kid whenever my parents told me no, and he would always convince them to let me do whatever I wanted because he… saw it in a dream, or whatever.”
Nico frowned. “Okay? And what does that have to do with this Will guy?”
“Will is Lester’s son,” she answered. “I’ve known him for, like, ever, but in that way you only know your weird cousin who you only see at family reunions, you know? But Will just transferred schools, and he needed a job, and Lester called me to hook him up, and-- I mean, after everything he’s done for me, I figured, what’s one little favor? And Will can be…pretty convincing when he wants to be.”
Nico shot forward in his seat, his hands gripping the arms of the chairs. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Did he threaten you?”
Rachel shook her head quickly. “No, no, that’s not what I meant. He’s not violent - like, seriously, I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body. But he’s…very set in his ways, and…” Her eyebrows knit together as she frowned, her gaze focused on one tiny spot on her desk. “Sometimes, when you tell him things like, hey, we don’t actually have room on staff for another server right now, he gets a little confused and comes back the next day and gets right to work, even though…you never trained him on any of the machines.”
Nico leaned back in his seat, though he didn’t let himself relax fully. “Okay, so he probably used to work at a Starbucks, and already knows how everything works, and he’s…trying to prove to you that he’s a good worker. And he’s just doing it in the most insane way imaginable.”
That got a smile out of Rachel, though she didn’t seem any less frustrated than before. “Something like that, I guess. But anyway, was there something you needed, or are you just hyperfocusing on my male staff members again?”
“It’s not like that,” Nico said quickly, feeling himself start to blush. “I just-- I figured you should know that your weird new guy sat down at my table, drank my coffee, and--” He frowned as he replayed the memory in his head. “I think he asked about my sisters. How the fuck would he know about my sisters?”
Rachel buried her face in her hands. “Oh, god. Okay, I’m sorry, I’ll talk to him about it. I’ll make sure he doesn’t do anything like that again, okay?”
Nico shook his head and stood up from his seat. “No, you know what? Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it was a one-time thing - and he said he confused me for somebody else, so… I’m sure it was nothing.”
She frowned, her head tipping to the side, confused. “Are you sure? It’s not that big of a deal for me to pull him aside for a second - you know I had to do it all the time when Leo was getting a little too flirty with Jason while he was on the clock.”
“No, really,” Nico assured her, “it’s fine. Don’t stress about it. If it happens again, I’ll let you know.”
Rachel shrugged. “If you say so. Are you heading out?”
Nico slipped his phone out of his pocket to check the time. “Not yet - I probably have time for another drink before my next class.”
“Cool,” she replied, “maybe if I get this payroll stuff figured out in time, I’ll come hang out with you for a few minutes.”
“Get Leo on it,” Nico told her as he made for the door, “he’s good with numbers.”
He left the office, closing the door behind himself, and started back toward his table, where his backpack sat unbothered. He swung by the front counter on his way and ordered another drink - in a takeout cup, this time, just in case he didn’t finish it before he had to leave - and went to sit at his table while he waited for it to be ready.
He’d already been assigned homework after his very first class of the semester, which sounded illegal, but he didn’t think complaining about it would get him anywhere, so he opened up his backpack and took out his textbook to start the assigned reading. He flipped the book open and laid it out on the table, propping his chin up on one hand while the other arm was laid out across the table, his fingers rhythmically fanning through the corners of the remaining pages in the book while he read.
Nico got so caught up in his reading that he’d finished two pages before remembering that he’d ordered a drink, though he didn’t recall hearing his name. He tried glancing up at the counter to see if any cups were waiting at pickup, though right as he lifted his head, he saw Will stepping out from behind the counter with a bussing tray in his hands, about to make rounds to the abandoned tables.
Nico ducked his head to avoid eye contact with him, though he couldn’t focus enough to go back to his reading. He stared blankly down at the page, forcing his breathing to remain even as he waited for Will to pass him by.
Something was placed on the table just in front of Nico’s textbook, and he lifted his gaze to find a takeout cup with his name written on the side. Before he could react, he felt something graze his arm - featherlight, like fingertips trailing from his wrist to his elbow before disappearing altogether, but not before raising goosebumps all down Nico’s arm.
His head snapped up, and he turned to look over his shoulder. Will was already a few tables behind him, his tray resting on the edge of the table as he piled mugs and plates inside to carry back to the kitchen.
Just before he stepped away from the table, his eyes flickered toward Nico, and the corner of his mouth quirked up into a gentle smile.
Nico felt like that same featherlight touch had traveled down his spine, and he forced his eyes back to his textbook.
He was not allowed to start crushing on Rachel’s new weirdo.