Bright Moon Coffee Co.

pt.1

(A/N: coffeeshop AU. Adora's in Uni, Catra's a college dropout. Everyone looks how they do in the show. Catra's a magicat, Scorpia's got pincers etc. CW for swearing.)

Goddamn it.

Despite the god-awful weather, the thundering rain battering on the windows, the rush of people forcing their way in through the poor automatic doors as the storm hit, Catra found herself frozen to the spot once again staring at the most radiant smile she's ever seen. That blonde was standing across the counter, once again ordering the same black coffee she's been ordering for the past month, and once again making Catra weak at the knees by doing nothing but smiling at her. It's a normal thing to do. Innocent, even. It's not her fault that every time she smiles Catra's heart does a summersault and tries to run off, taking all common sense with it.

It's completely normal that Catra knows she comes in every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. It's also normal to know that she always comes in just after 1pm, avoiding the initial 12pm rush to get out of work, grab lunch, and get back as soon as possible. The whole mad rush around lunch perplexes Catra, all these people desperate to get a coffee and a little sandwich or cake seemingly before their bosses realise they've gone.

But for the past month, almost as a reward for putting up with it three times a week, Catra breathes a sigh of relief whenever she sees the familiar swaying of a blond ponytail passing by the floor-to-ceiling windows in front of the café. Sometimes the blonde hugs the wall a bit too close, managing not to pass under the sensor for the door to open, and has to step back and wave up at it for the doors to let her in. Sometimes she manages to catch the doors just as they're about to close and almost walks into them. Every time, Catra suppresses a laugh, covering her mouth with a closed fist as she coughs into it. Every time, she watches with keen interest while pretending to focus on the drink some other customer had ordered.

'Excuse me?'

Crap! Catra quickly ran her hand down the length of her tail, flattening it down after the shock of being broken from her trance.

'S- Sorry!' Shitshitshit. She'd been staring too long. What was the order again? Probably the same as usual. Black coffee. Gross. Every time she ordered that, Catra would slip in something else, something to make it decidedly less gross. Almost as if presenting a fine artist with a blank canvas as declaring to have at it and paint whatever they like on it. Although in this case, it was more like she was ordering a canvas painted completely black, but Catra still painted something else on it anyway. Something subtle. Maybe a colour underneath the black, so it's not quite pure black. Or maybe a little doodle in the corner. Recently, she's been getting more brave, painting swirling patterns across the black canvas in steadily brighter colours just to see if she could get a reaction out of her unwilling test-dummy.

Losing her job had never occurred to her. Catra really shouldn't be messing with customer's drinks, but when the manager is your best friend you can get away with a lot more. Even though sometimes customers would just order "whatever" and it would be up to her to decide by judging them on the spot and making a complete guess as to what they might like. That was part of the Bright Moon Coffee Co. menu, it wasn't made up. Luck of the draw kind of thing. Almost like gambling, in a way. The main rule is that the customer isn't allowed to complain afterwards, because they knew full-well what they were signing up for.

This isn't like that though. The blonde purposefully orders her coffee black every time and Catra messes with it anyway. Doing anything to it to make it seem even a degree more interesting, more deserving of being drunk by the absolute radiance of the girl that orders it.

Radiance is something the rain doesn't help, Catra decided as she picked a cup off the stack and prepared to fill it with a black coffee base while considering what else to put into it. Her usually bright blond hair had been dulled by the rain and plastered to her forehead. While Catra turned away to see to the order, she started ringing out her ponytail like a soaked towel, dripping water all over the floor. Whatever - the floor was ruined by now anyway. Tons of people had forced their way in once the impromptu storm started, dragging in mud and water and making Catra's mopping skills from the night before completely redundant. The storm, it would later turn out, was not random. The Met Office had been saying for weeks that storm Kyle would be hitting shores soon, but no one really ever pays attention to the Met Office and proceeds to complain about the weather anyway.