Hmm, I worked for far too long on this to get it ready in time for jaegercon~
Beta'd by the lovely hard-working paradorx
"Yancy. Yancy. Yancy. Wake up."
Yancy, his face crushed into the dent in his pillow that he spent an unholy amount of time the night before shaping into perfection, cast his groggy mind around for a suitable reply.
"Fuck you," he moaned into his pillow.
He could almost hear Raleigh's smirk, the bastard. "Come on, big bro, we've got to get the shop open."
Again, Yancy waded through the swamps of his mind for a response. After a long moment, he stumbled upon one.
"Fuck you," he said, "with a shovel."
With an exaggerated sigh, Raleigh moved around to the foot of his brother's bed, took a firm grasp on the sheets, and pulled. The obscenities flying out of Yancy's mouth as he clung desperately to his pillow, body recoiling from the brisk morning air, did nothing to diminish the shit-eating grin on Raleigh's face.
"Did you kiss our mother with that mouth?" he asked.
Yancy, finally sitting upright, his hair pointing in all directions, gave his younger brother a withering glare and halfheartedly threw his crushed pillow. It missed. "Hey, your prom date didn't complain."
Snickering, Raleigh beat a retreat from Yancy's cramped room and slid down the stairs banister, hopping to a stop at the back door, which had a shadow in the frosted glass window. Someone knocked tiredly on the door, and Raleigh threw it open.
"Asshole!" he heralded.
Chuck Hansen winced at Raleigh's upbeat tone and shuffled inside the cramped space, dragging a dolly of stacked pink boxes along behind him, wheels banging over the sill in a familiar way. "I swear one of these days you're going to say that when opening the door and it's gonna be my dad on the steps," he said, Australian accent thick with sleep, "and he's gonna put your lights out."
Raleigh walked in front of Chuck, flipping on lights as they entered the coffee shop behind the front counter. The sunlight was dim and cold. The door that banged shut behind them had, at one point had a sign that read "EMPLOYEES ONLY" but at some point along the way of their ownership had a piece of paper tacked over it that read "BECKETS ONLY".
"Well, I'm comforted that you're not your dad."
"Heh, that makes two of us." Chuck dragged one hand down his face and waved a clipboard in Raleigh's direction. "Sign for the delivery. And get me a coffee. Dick."
Raleigh scribbled his name on the dotted line and turned to fiddle with the row of machines against the wall, steering clear of where Chuck kneeled to deposit the baked goods from the boxes into the display case. As they readied the shop for opening, there was a loud rapping at the glass door.
"Hey! Hey!"
Raleigh checked over his shoulder and then jerked his head towards the door. "Let him in, will you?"
Chuck gave an exaggerated sigh and vaulted over the counter. "Anything for you, fuck-face."
"Pencil-dick!" Raleigh returned, and then held his tongue as Chuck unlocked and opened the door for a short man in a wrinkled white shirt and crooked tie. He wore a leather jacket, tight jeans, and thick-rimmed Ray-Ban glasses. He also carried a suitcase in one hand a faculty ID badge for the local college clipped onto his belt.
"Thanks, Smaller Becket," he said to Chuck as he hustled inside.
"Don't insult me," Chuck huffed, and pointed at Raleigh, rolling his eyes behind the counter. "That's a Becket."
For a moment Newt Geiszler looked back and forth between the two young men, opening and closing his mouth. Raleigh decided to help him out.
"What can I get you, Dr. Geiszler?" he asked. "You're in early today." He placed Chuck's to-go cup on the counter and the young man leaned around Newt to get to it, taking a long and relieved drink. He then slumped back behind Newt to watch the show.
"I have an early meeting with the Bio department. Can you imagine? On a Friday and everything," he replied, shuddering, and walked up to the counter, "And how many times to I have to tell you to call me Newt?"
"Yancy's policy," Raleigh said with an eyeroll that told exactly what he thought about the older brother hopping around upstairs making loud noises as he struggled into his clothes.
"Anyways I need my usual, and Hermann's got an early morning study… thing set up with his students, so I'll get whatever gross water thing he normally gets too." He sounded utterly confused as to why someone would exert energy over their students instead of their personal studies. He himself never held study sessions and even cut the occasional class for the purpose of bettering his own research.
"You mean Earl Grey?" Raleigh suppressed a smile and Chuck made kissing faces behind Newt's back.
"Sure, that."
"It'll take a few minutes; I only just got the machines going. It'll take them a moment to warm up."
Newt let out a loud breath. "Alright. I'll also have… what is that?" he squinted at the glass confection case. Raleigh jerked his chin towards Chuck, signaling his entrance to the conversation before turning his back to beat the coffee machine into submission.
"Strawberry tart," Chuck pointed at the case with his free hand, naming the goodies one at a time. "Banana bread. Pound cake. Blueberry muffin, cranberry muffin, cinnamon muffin."
Newt thought deeply, moving his weight back and forth from foot to foot. The man, even without his coffee, seemed to run on a different energy system than most humans, keeping him in a constant state of existence that Chuck once perfectly described as "Billy Mays-like". "I'll have one tart, too, Smaller Becket."
Raleigh good-naturedly took one out and placed it on the counter, where a to-go cup of Earl Grey with a dash of cream was waiting and then went to work on a caramel macchiato with double vanilla and an extra shot of espresso for Newt.
"Want me to put in on your tab?" Raleigh asked over his shoulder.
Newt opened his mouth to answer, paused, and then smiled. "Put it on Hermann's tab," he said, and then added, "And add a cinnamon muffin."
Raleigh cracked a smile. "Sure."
Chuck slipped behind the counter once more to finish emptying his packages of fresh baked goods. While they worked, Newt chattered aimlessly about things that neither young man paid any attention to, filling up the air with sounds of his own voice, which acted almost like a lullaby to him, calming down his physical motions.
He stuttered to a stop, making both Raleigh and Chuck look up.
Standing at the door, peering inside through the glass, was a man with a sharp, knife-like jaw and a well-tailored gray suit. He cast his eyes about the small shop, in a way that made the hairs rise up on the back of Raleigh's neck. It was almost as if he was measuring the store's interior floor.
The man saw that he had an audience of two young men behind the counter and one stunned-looking grunge professor, and left with a final calculated look.
"The fuck was that," Raleigh said bluntly. Chuck shrugged.
Raleigh handed Newt his order, and then was nearly pitched over the counter by the empty jug of orange juice chucked at his head by Yancy, finally emerging from the upstairs apartment, his hair still damp from the shower.
"Language," he chided, trying and failing to look less pleased with himself at catching his younger brother unawares.
"Some guy just came around, checking the place out like it was a car dealership," Raleigh snapped, rubbing at the back of his head. "Wearing a nice suit."
"Frankly I'm not interested in his suit. Morning, Dr. Geiszler."
"Newt!" Newt muttered as he walked out. "It's Newt!"
Chuck looked at his watch. "I should get going," he said.
"Tell Herc I said hey," Yancy called out as Chuck dragged the now empty dolly behind himself towards the back entrance. Chuck responded with a grunt and a raised hand over his shoulder.
For as long as the Becket Brothers had the coffee shop Gipsy Danger Café (it came with the sign and they didn't have the heart to change it), the Hansens had the bakery next door, Striker Eureka Bakery (they shrugged when asked about the name), and they formed a symbiotic relationship that worked perfectly for both of them. They sold the Becket brothers a selection of baked goods that they didn't sell from their own store, and on afternoons, a menu for the Becket's drinks was placed on the counter for the bakery, urging the customers to go over one storefront while their order was being prepared or heated up.
Raleigh and Yancy busied themselves with setting up the shop in the dim early morning light, taking down chairs from tables, polishing fixtures, and setting out their hand-drawn specials board on the sidewalk outside. Raleigh leaned against it after he had propped it up, squinting through the morning haze as the street woke up around him. A park was directly across the street, with the row of shops on either side of him. He waved to a terrifyingly large man with a dark beard and blond hair, just on the other side of the Hansen's bakery, which was still shuttered up, presumably with both father and son in the kitchen, working to set up their displays.
Aleksis Kaidanovsky waved back to Raleigh, propping the door of his and his wife's music store open with a fragment of brick that Raleigh could believe he had broken himself.
"Becket!" He turned at the call, and saw one of the three Wei triplets standing in the doorway to their gym, which took up three complete storefronts next to the coffee shop. He judged by the sunglasses propped on his shaved head that it was Hu.
"Morning!" Raleigh replied.
"When your brother stops riding your ass, you come by and sign up for the basketball tournament next month!" It was not a request.
Raleigh laughed. "Sure thing, Hu!"
The Wei triplet laughed and shouted inside a long string of Chinese into the gym, which was met with a loud and angry crashing of equipment. Loud exclamations of what could only be Chinese expletives followed. The Wei triplet laughed in response. He then smiled at Raleigh.
"I bet Hu that if I wore his sunglasses you'd think I was him!" he explained with a cheeky grin. "I just won twenty bucks!"
Raleigh winced. "Sorry, man!" he called out. The Wei triplets had owned the gym for as long as Raleigh could remember, and he had learned how to play basketball at a young age on their indoor court. And yet he still could not tell them apart physically. Chuck liked to joke that they themselves probably didn't even know who was who.
The Wei triplet laughed. "It's cool. I'm Jin, by the way. The short one." And with that and a final wave, he laughed his way back inside, the CLOSED sign now flipped to OPEN. Raleigh gave a small huff, stirring a few hairs on his forehead. He always walked away from conversations with any of the Wei triplets feeling like he had been used. Even when bets weren't involved, the triplets all had an eerie level of understanding between them that made a conversation with more than one at a time seem superfluous.
Shaking himself a bit, Raleigh went back inside, and Yancy was behind the counter, thumbing through their mail. Raleigh vaulted over the counter, settling on top of it comfortably. He attempted to sneak a look at their mail and Yancy made a noise, holding the papers out of view.
"People's food goes there," he said, and gave his brother a sudden but gentle push to get his butt off of the counter. Raleigh slid to his feet, reading the mail over Yancy's shoulder.
"Bills?" he asked, with a bit of trepidation, seeing how his older brother's eyebrows were drawn together, his mouth in a tight line.
Yancy shook his head. "Nothing we can't handle." With a few taps, he straightened the pile of mail and moved to put it in the back room.
Raleigh watched him go, eyeing his face when he returned. "… You're lying to me!" He sounded scandalized and Yancy sighed.
"I hate it when you do that thing," he said, although his voice was fond. "It's like you're in my head."
"What's wrong, Yancy?" Raleigh pressed.
Yancy opened his mouth. Closed it. He wouldn't look at his younger brother. He took in a great big breath, and as he began to make a sound, the bell above the door jingled loudly. The smell of bad cologne, sweat, and leather filled the air, and both brothers turned to see Tendo Choi standing in the doorway, panting and looking harassed.
"Beckets, I need your Wi-Fi password, STAT." He scrambled for his usual table, shoved in the corner and not visible from the street.
"Um," Yancy said, deciding better not to question, avoiding Raleigh's intense look currently settled on his face. He cast his hands around near the cash register in search of the week's list of passwords.
Raleigh gave up on making his older brother talk and turned instead to the newcomer to his territory, making a mental note to harass Yancy later, in private, when his brother was more likely to crack.
"You have to buy something first," Raleigh chirped with a shit-eating grin. Tendo shot him a look in response that was more surprised than it should have been, considering that they had the same nearly identical conversation each time Tendo entered the store and demanded Wi-Fi.
"Black coffee, Becket-boy, with a side of password." He had his laptop—he claimed to have built it himself—open on the table in anticipation.
"And the password for today is…" Yancy dragged one finger down the chart of the month, with lists of hand-scrawled combinations. Their router was set up on a randomizer with a different pre-set password each day, with the passwords chosen at the beginning of a thirty-day cycle. He stopped at that day's date.
Yancy squinted at the paper. "Raleigh!" he shouted. "This is the last goddamn time I let you set the passwords." Raleigh struggled not to laugh as he set down a mug of coffee on Tendo's table. The man caught his eye and raised an amused eyebrow, questioning. Raleigh shrugged with a baiting smile.
"What is it?" Tendo demanded, shifting his attention from one brother to the next.
Yancy looked like he would like nothing better than a hole to open up underneath him and swallow him. Raleigh's grin got bigger.
"It's… 'Yancy got a booty'. No spaces, all caps." He shot a withering glare to first his brother and then Tendo as they both dissolved into immature giggles.
"Well, he's not lying," Tendo said, "And frankly with your lackluster track record you could use a bit of advertisement." He typed in the password and immediately pulled up a command screen, fingers flying across the keyboard.
"That's great, coming from the one guy I know to actually be addicted to casual sex," Yancy sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "It is too early for this."
"Dude, it's like, seven in the morning," Tendo said, and took his mug with his right hand, his left still typing readily away. Frankly, whenever Tendo would show off how he was ambidextrous all it did was creep Raleigh out. He began to sneak behind the counter.
"And have you slept at all since yesterday?"
"That's not the point." Tendo made a visible effort not to reach for his coffee.
The two continued to bicker pettily, poking fun at each other in the casual way that they had, and Raleigh, feeling his stomach rumble, took that as an invitation to drift slowly into the background, eventually disappearing through the back door.
The alleyway behind the row of shops was clean, and large enough for a car to pass through it. Raleigh strolled along until he came to the back door of the Hansens' bakery, which was propped open to let out some of the heat from the great hulking ovens that were always going. The smell of sugar and baking bread burst out in an almost physical barrier when Raleigh first entered, and he stood in the open doorway with his eyes half-closed. He breathed in heavily and almost began to drool.
"God, I hate it when you do that," Chuck said, breaking Raleigh out of his reverie. "It's like I need to leave you alone with a tube sock or something," he shuddered and continued his walk from the kitchen into the shop floor, a tray of croissants in one hand, held above his head. He slid the tray into their display rack and Raleigh followed like a trained dog.
Max, who was a trained dog, lifted his head when Raleigh entered and wagged his short stump of a tail. The English bulldog was sitting in his place of honor by the front door, on his small padded bed, with a bowl and water and of food within easy reach.
"Morning, Raleigh," Herc Hansen appeared at his elbow, wiping flour from his hands on his apron.
"Sir," Raleigh nodded in response. There was something about the ex-Air Force pilot that demanded respect, even when he had a bit of green food dye splattered on his face and his apron had 'kiss the cook' written on it in swirly script. Like now.
"Stopped by for breakfast, eh?" Herc watched as Raleigh's eyes flickered hungrily towards the croissant tray. He chuckled. "Go on. We can spare you a free snack this once."
Raleigh wasted no time in attacking the croissants, nearly knocking Chuck over in the process. He bit back his cursing, eyes on his father, and Raleigh was struck with the sensation that his presence had interrupted something he shouldn't have been involved in.
"Wow," Raleigh mouthed to Chuck, and his face twitched into a mask that confirmed everything. He moved past the front counter—not hopping over it like he usually would, since Herc was right there-and patted Max on the head. The bulldog gave a happy wiggle to be getting so much attention.
The morning was slow and lazy in the normal way, and Raleigh was intent on enjoying it, until he looked up from the slobbering adoration of the bulldog and saw an expensive car rolling slowly down the road, like a shark at sea. The windows were dark and tinted and he couldn't see inside, but something told him exactly who it was.
"Hey," Raleigh called out, and heard the sounds from the kitchen dying down as the Hansens gave him their attention, "I think that guy in the suit is driving around."
"What guy in a suit?" Herc's voice was gruff.
"Exy suit," Chuck grunted, and it was only from five years of living next door to them that Raleigh could know he meant expensive. "He took a look 'round the coffee shop like he was going out to buy curtains and needed the measurements."
"Huh," was all Herc said as he considered the car through the store windows. It was now nearing the Wei Triplet's gym on the corner. Once it was past it sped up considerable until it was out of sight. "You ought to get going," he said to Raleigh. "Your brother's probably missed you."
Raleigh couldn't suppress a small sigh and he stood, brushing off his hands on his jeans. He left via the front door with a half-wave towards Chuck, who wasn't even paying full attention, too intent on going through the mail. He removed a rather wide envelope and looked over his shoulder at his father, who was moving a rag around on the countertop, polishing it, and folded the envelope in half. Raleigh hesitated, looking in the window as he walked down the sidewalk, and saw Chuck lift his shirt and tuck the envelope into the waistband of his pants, dropping the shirt back in place to cover it. He then turned to his father, saying something, and Herc nodded. Chuck disappeared into the kitchen, probably to the apartments over the shop.
Shrugging it off as an internal strife, Raleigh kept moving, and pushed his way into the coffee shop, where Tendo was already on his third cup and arguing with Yancy colorfully about the morals behind not exclusively dating women in committed relationships. Tendo was for, Yancy was against.
"What about Alison?" Raleigh asked, jumping in headfirst.
Yancy shot him a glare while Tendo pointed at him excitedly. "Yes, exactly. Alison is a prime-o example of what I'm talking about."
The comfort of old arguments with familiar faces surrounded Raleigh, and he prepared for another day of work.
More chapters to come~
Review, please?