Short AU Jerza drabble. Written for a tumblr prompt!
"There he is again," Cana scoffed, throwing her dish rag over her right shoulder.
"What is his problem?" Lucy relayed, in the same disdain, holding the dirty dishes over the sink.
"Oh my," Mirajane added, her broom frozen in her dual-handed grip.
Erza looked up in the same direction as her other fellow waitresses, seeing an all too familiar blue-haired man walk through the glass doors of Café Fairy Tail. He took a suspicious glance at the pastries on displays before raising his head up to look up at the overhanging coffee and drinks menu.
And, just like he had done every day that week, he dismissed everything the café had to offer and took a seat at one of the square tables exactly in the center of the café, splaying himself over a chair, placing his dirty backpack onto another chair, and kicking his feet up—right and left foot occupying their own chairs. Each.
Erza's eyebrows narrowed.
"Is it that guy again?" Levy inquisitively asked, making her way toward the front of the shop to see what had caused the sudden silence behind the counter.
With upturned noses and slightly resentful eyes, the five women watched the man make himself comfortable, taking up the space of four people despite the fact that he hadn't even bought anything from the café for one.
The guy always did this. At precisely eight in the morning, during one of their peak periods at the café, the self-serving man would lumber into the café and sit down without so much as a considerate purchase of one of their town-famous croissants or critically-acclaimed cappuccinos. He would then proceed to take sugar packets (the highly-demanded brown sugar ones, no less) from the table—slowly and one by one, as if he didn't think that the five pairs of eyes behind the café counter would ever notice his theft.
On Monday, Levy had been the first of them that had attempted to give the sugar-stealing man a talk. She was the gentlest and used the most reason in her everyday conversations, so the five of them had thought that sending Levy would result in the most polite and effective way to get rid of their ant problem.
However, on Tuesday, they had found themselves turning to Mirajane, who turned up the sternness a notch for the second day of the week. ("You'll regret it if you keep coming back," she told him, with bright eyes.) However, even Mira's ironic and frighteningly wide smile hadn't prevented the freeloader for coming back on hump day.
On Wednesday, Lucy had tried implementing anger into their demands, explicitly laying out the qualitative and quantitative data—from the number of grams of brown sugar he had stolen to count to the appeal of the other customers that were drinking their morning brew and needed a place to sit their touche—of how much trouble the man had been causing them.
Despite Lucy's best effort to present the wrongdoings of the glucose parasite, on Thursday, he had returned, and Cana had decided right then and there that she was going to handle things her way, swinging her dish towel behind her shoulder and confronting the man. She had stomped her high-heeled boot onto the seat space between the guy's spread legs (his feet, after all, were taking up two different seats). She had leaned forward, letting the odor of her very old dish towel tickle his nose, growling that she had better not see him again.
Yet, even after a direct threat to his very masculinity, here he was again.
Today was Friday. And today was Erza's turn. And Erza was not happy.
She crossed her arms and stormed her way past the counter and to the persistent and stubborn patron. She would shame him in front of the rest of the customers without shame. She would force him to pack up his things in that second and to leave the café for the very last time. She would scare him enough to send him crying back to his mother's womb.
"Hey, you," she called out to him before she had even gotten within ten feet of him.
Everyone in the café turned their heads, surrendering their coffee and croissants to give their full attention to the sharp interjection by the scarlet-haired waitress.
Everyone, of course, except him.
He kept his eyes trained on the book he was fake-reading, completely passive and unreactive.
This wouldn't bode well him for him.
She swooped into his scene, grabbing the spine of his book and slapping the hardcover book back down onto the table, so hard that the salt and pepper shakers toppled over, crying white and black tears.
"You," she snarled.
"And to what do I owe the pleasure of meeting such a beautiful woman?" he said, before finally looking up to meet her eyes.
"All the sugar packets that you have stolen this past week," she pressed, almost spitting into the horrendous symbol tattooed over his face.
"Oh, was this what this was all about?" he asked, feigning a calm ignorance that sent furious goosebumps up the back of her neck.
"Hand them over," she said, putting out her right hand.
He looked at her (was that smugness?) for a brief moment, before he looked at the front pocket of his backpack.
Erza glanced at the filthy excuse for a bag, deciding that she would take the sugar packets back only for show. There was no way in hell she was going to put the sugar packets back onto the sweetener rack to re-offer her loyal customers whatever had come out of this man's mess.
He scooped deep into the backpack, both hands coming out with a large tumbleweed of sugar packets. He certainly didn't just steal those all in one day, did he? Some of the sugar packets in his bag must have dated back all the way from Monday!
The man dropped his two-handed load onto Erza's outstretched hand, giving her a mischievous smile. She watched as the sugar packets fell all over the table, only five packets actually landing in her open palm—a disheveled pile of the café-branded sugar, an assortment of crumbs from god knew what or when, and a couple of black lint balls of aged backpack fabric.
She shot him a dirty glare.
"Why are you taking our sugar?" she hissed.
"I was looking for something sweet," he replied, leaning back into his chair.
"You can get sugar anywhere else," she stiffly retorted.
"Right, but I can only get you here," he said, giving her a wink.
And that was she threw the disheveled pile of the café-branded sugar, an assortment of crumbs from god knew what or when, and a couple of black lint balls of aged backpack fabric into his face.
Not sure if this is going to become a cookie jar of Jerza, but let me know what you think and if I should continue with more little shorts!
...actually, okay, let's not kid myself. I'm probably going to write more Jerza. The ship has set sail. I shall continue.
thir13enth
(In other notes, I realize that all the café workers are female, which is pretty genderized for me to have done, but for some reason my writing self decided that this was the way I wanted it to be. I know, terrible. Maybe a self-internalized patriarchy. Alas.)