Maria stood at the counter, wiping it down, making sure its smooth surface was spotless. That's the way Nick, her manager, liked it and also the way she liked it; that's the reason they got along so well. They were both unyielding perfectionists. Nick was rearranging the cups, lids, and straws into a more visibly appealing display. Every couple of days he would build something new out of them, each more complex than the next. Just last week he had built what looked like a giant aircraft carrier- he had even propped it on straws to make it look like it was flying. Customers were always telling him he had a good eye for that kind of thing, and he would laugh and say:
"That's good! Because its the only one I have!"
He got mixed reactions with that joke. Some customers laughed with him, and some chuckled uneasily and quickly walked away, uncomfortable with the fact that Nick was referencing that he only had one good eye. Which made Nick chuckle all the more - once the customer was out of earshot, of course - because he greatly enjoyed making people uncomfortable. If you were going to be around Nick for any extended period of time, you had to have a pretty thick skin.
It was a very early Tuesday morning, the daily pre-work/school coffee rush yet to happen, and the shop sat quietly, the calm before the storm. For now, it was just her, Nick, the bakery staff, and the regulars. As she looked out at them now, she was certain she could name each of them, having been filling their orders for the last couple of months. Most of them ordered the exact same thing every day for all those months, too. And even after all this time, she still got confused by some of the orders. Not because they were complicated, but because they didn't quite make sense.
Steve, for instance.
He came in early every day, his cropped blonde hair usually wet, probably fresh out of the shower because - if his muscle tone was any indicator - Steve was fresh out of a weight room. His towering height and piercingly blue eyes should have made him a daunting figure, except he had one of the kindest faces Maria had ever seen. He always smiled a 'good morning' to her whenever she took his order, something she appreciated as the majority of her clientele were cranky before their morning dose of caffeine. As she would enter his order into the cash register (two cups of coffee, black), he would always seem to be trying to see into the back, where the bakery was, but as soon as she looked up he would snap his attention back to her and smile, making some joke about the weather or traffic. She would chuckle at it, all the while noting that his eyes looked a little sadder and his smile a little less bright than when he had first entered.
His order was confusing because he asked for two cups of coffee, yet sat alone every morning. He drank one cup while reading a newspaper, and the other sat across the table from him at an empty seat, untouched until Steve finally left late in the morning and Maria had to clean off the table.
Maria stared at Steve now, his attention on the paper in front of him, quietly sipping his coffee. It was obvious he was waiting for someone. It was equally obvious that they weren't planning on coming. He'd been doing this for weeks, after all. Maria shook her head, saddened, thinking about Steve's hope being crushed every morning by some unknown person. Who was he waiting for?
A small laugh caught Maria's attention, originating a couple booths down from Steve's. Another regular - two, actually - were hunched over the table, their attentions both focused on the phone situated directly between them. Probably a cat video, Maria thought to herself. That's what is usually was. The two were obviously some sort of couple, though she wasn't sure if they'd admit to it. They came into the cafe at the end of their day, both having finished working the night shift somewhere. Every day the woman, Natasha, would walk up to the counter first, either ordering a decaf coffee or a hot chocolate. Maria used to try and guess in her head which Natasha would order that day, but she literally always got it wrong and finally decided to give up. Natasha had a stern face that usually read, "I can and will kill you in your sleep", her deep red hair seeming to angrily match the sentiment. Maria would have worried that she had offended her, but she was pretty sure Natasha just looked at everyone like that. Well, everyone except Clint.
After Natasha got her order - today it had been decaf coffee - she went and sat down at their usual booth. Clint would walk up to the counter, his face hard and stony; that is, until he cracked his lopsided grin and asked the same question that he asked everyday.
"Hey. You guys start selling bacon yet?"
The first day she had worked here, she had panicked about this question, worried that they would lose a costumer soon if they didn't up grade their menu. She suggested to Nick that maybe they could start frying bacon in the mornings and Nick just laughed.
"You don't need to worry about that, Hill. Clint just likes being an ass."
Now she just smiled.
"Not today, Clint. But I heard a rumor we might be getting scrambled eggs soon."
He made a face.
"Gross. You can keep those to yourself."
She rolled her eyes at this, doubting he would ever actually be satisfied with much of anything.
"What can I get you today, Clint?" she asked, already knowing the answer.
"Blueberry muffin. Biggest one you've got."
He slapped down the prescribed $1.67 without having to be told the price. He ordered it every day, after all.
Nick bustled behind her, selecting the biggest blueberry muffin (they were all basically the same size) and putting in a bag.
Maria divvied his money into the register.
"You a big fan of blueberry muffins, Clint?"
He shrugged.
"Eh."
Maria raised an eyebrow.
"Then why would you order one every morning?"
She took the baggie from Nick and handed it off to Clint.
He grabbed it from her, looked at Natasha, then back at her, smiling lopsidedly.
"Well, they're okay, I guess."
Clint walked with a bounce in his step and plopped down at their table, sitting across from Natasha. He put the muffin out on the table and Natasha absently pinched a piece of it off while looking at her phone. She laughed at something, then leaned forward, putting her phone on the table to show Clint. He laughed at it too, leaning forward and subtly pushing the muffin slightly closer to Natasha as he did, so she didn't have to reach as far to get it.
"Hey! Can I get another latte over here? Oh, and two more chocolate chip cookies while you're at it!"
The loud shout abruptly shattered the quiet of the cafe and Maria smiled a pained smile at Tony Stark who was waving his empty latte cup in the air. He gave her an overly enthusiastic smile back. He was fully aware of how loud and annoying he was.
Tony was another customer she was pretty sure didn't wake up early to eat here, but rather had been up and came by before the end of his day. But if rumors were true, she didn't know what he would have been doing; she'd heard that he was the heir of some great inventor and was rich enough to live off the royalties - no job required.
But even if he had needed a job, it was doubtful he'd have been able to keep one, she thought to herself as she began making the latte. Sure, he was a genius; the gadgets he would tinker with at his table every morning looked liked they were years beyond technology of today. She was pretty sure she had seen him working on a miniature hover car at some point. It had actually worked too. He was incredibly smart and innovative, sure. But he had the personality of black coffee sweetened with hot pepper sauce, something very few people could stand, and even fewer would actually enjoy. He came on extremely strong, cocky, arrogant, self-righteous, and she highly doubted he was a very motivated worker. An employer's nightmare.
Maria grabbed two cookies and put them in a baggie, Nick busy prepping a to-go order for another customer, then picked up the latte and walked over to Stark's table. She didn't have to worry about getting his card, walking back to the register to swipe it and walking back; he actually had a running tab. She would say that having a tab at a coffee place was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard except 1) Stark ate and drank enough while he was there to warrant it, and 2) it saved her a lot of time and energy walking back and forth from his table to the counter and back.
She placed Tony's order down next to his arm on the table.
"Thanks, dear," he said offhandedly, grabbing the latte and taking a sip, his eyes not leaving the bright touch screen tablet in front of him.
Maria rolled her eyes and shook her head before looking over at Tony's table companion, who gave her a sympathetic smile. She smiled genuinely at him.
"Can I get you anything, Dr. Banner?"
"No, I'm fine, Maria. Thanks for asking."
She looked around the cafe to see if there was anyone else that needed her attention, and seeing that there wasn't, resumed her post behind the counter.
When she fist started working here, Tony and Dr. Banner had never met. Dr. Banner liked to sit at the counter with his order, unsweetened chai tea, quietly reading the news on his phone until he left for his job at the local community college. She knew he worked there not because he told her - Dr. Banner was the definition of a man who kept to himself - but because she occasionally took classes at the college and he had subbed for a chemistry class of hers one time. He was vastly overqualified to be working there; the fact that he had graduated from multiple Ivy League universities put him way above their heads, not to mention the break throughs he'd made in medical research - something involving radiation, apparently. Logically, he should be able to have his pick of any prestigious research institution that he wanted. Yet here he was. Maria had heard that he had some sort of degenerative mood disorder that made the universities he was actually qualified for uninterested, though she couldn't for the life of her understand how that could be true. Dr. Banner was the most outwardly calm person she had ever met. He had to be; he sat with Tony every morning, had even started working with him, apparently, and hadn't killed him yet. No one less than a saint could stand to do that.
Dr. Banner had sat alone at the counter to drink his tea, that is, until Tony hacked into his phone through the wifi. Tony actually had a record or hacking into their internet connection and fiddling around with it. It was something that Nick wasn't happy about, but tolerated because Tony was their highest paying costumer. On extreme mornings, he spent over $100 on coffees alone. That was a kind of business they could not afford to lose. He had also made their internet speed faster on a couple occasions. So, as long as he didn't do anything too outrageous, he was allowed to tinker with it.
Tony got close to crossing a line when he started pulling up pictures of ducks on Dr. Banner's phone while seated at a table a couple meters away. The first two mornings the mallards appeared on his phone and refused to go away, Dr. Banner sighed discontentedly at his phone, blaming it for the malfunction, and slipped it into his pocket, giving up on it. However, on the third morning, right around the time Maria realized what was going on, Dr. Banner came to the conclusion that it wasn't actually his phone that was the issue and he glanced around the cafe to see if he could find a source, only for his eyes to land on Tony grinning gleefully at him. Dr. Banner stood to address him. Maria was about to intervene, realizing that it was really the cafe's responsibility to keep this from happening, when the offending party boldly made a statement:
"Tony Stark. You are?"
Dr. Banner and Maria both paused where they were; Dr. Banner standing in front of Tony and Maria behind the counter, deciding she would see how this played out.
"I'm Dr. Banner." He held out his hand in introduction. "I teach at-"
"Bruce, I'm not interested in your sob story. What I want to know is if you will take that big brain of yours and join my company, work with the most modern technology in the best equipped labs you've ever seen, do ground-breaking research, and get paid a very large paycheck with many zeros."
Dr. Banner dropped his hand limply to his side, jaw slightly slack.
"H-how do you know about me and-"
"Google, my friend. Also, the innate ability to hack into any and all databases that I want to. So what do you say? We can get started right after I finish my cappuccino." He took a sip from the cup in front of him to emphasize his point.
Dr. Banner blinked at him in bewilderment.
"I… have class… I can't just-"
"Oh, please. You know that three-fourths of your class isn't going to even to show up until the exam. Just get a sub for the rest of the semester and then quit."
To this day, that was the strangest way she had ever seen someone land a job. And she was sure that he had indeed taken the job. Dr. Banner and Tony now sat together every morning with their respective orders, discussing scientific theories more complex than anything Maria could even pretend to understand. Perhaps they sat talking as employer to employee, but from the outside it looked much more like scientist to scientist or, maybe less believably but more apparently, friend to friend.
Nick nudged her with his elbow, drawing her out of her reverie.
"We're running low on bagels. I'm going to go back to the bakery and-"
But he was interrupted by someone else coming out of the bakery. They both looked up. There were two main bakers that worked at the cafe. The one they might have expected to see, Thor, was a Norwegian guy who loved baking almost as much as he loved drinking and laughing uproariously. He often popped into the front of the cafe between batches to talk to anyone who would listen. Nick would have been concerned that he wasn't getting his work done due to the frequency of his visits, except that they never ran out of bread or pastries, and quite honestly his baked goods were probably the best anyone had ever tasted. Maria was fairly certain he had some sort of secret ingredient brought from his home country that made them so amazing.
Surprisingly, though, it wasn't Thor that came through the doors; it was the other baker, a quiet man who they never saw much of. He wasn't a very social person.
Bucky closed the door quietly behind him with his foot, the one arm that he had holding a pan of bagels. His dark hair, tied out of his face, had streaks of flour in it and the smell of freshly baked bread hovered around him.
"Figured you guys would be running low about now."
Bucky talked quietly, as if they were standing in a library, not a coffee shop.
Maria took the pan from him, pretending that talking with him wasn't a novel occasion for her.
"We were! Thanks, Bucky."
He nodded to her as if he was a little confused by this social interaction too. He turned to Nick.
"We're running ahead of schedule. I'm gonna take a ten minute break."
Nick raised an eyebrow at this, not because it was out of line - the bakers were entitled to their ten minute breaks just like everyone else - but in all the months that Maria had worked here, and she was pretty sure in all the months that Nick had worked here too, Bucky had never actually taken a break. Nick was just as surprised as she was.
"Sure thing, Barnes. Can I get you a cup of anything?"
Bucky glanced furtively at the tables at the back of the cafe and then quickly back to Nick.
"No." Then, as if an afterthought, "Thank you."
He then moved almost hesitantly away from the counter, probably to sit at one of the many empty booths in the back. Except, Maria double takes, he didn't sit at an empty booth, but Steve's. Steve's booth. The booth where Steve was right now reading his newspaper.
As Bucky settled himself in the seat across from him, Steve put down his newspaper and smiled a 'hello' at Bucky, as if this was all totally normal and expected.
Maria looked over at Nick, utterly confused, and he just shrugged, took the pan of bagels from her, and started shifting them into their proper baskets.
"Apparently they're old war buddies."
Maria, eyebrows still bunched in confusion, looked back at the table, neither one it its occupants looking aged enough to be 'old' anything.
As she watched, Steve looked like he was in the middle of an involved story, his face full of expression as he gesticulated animatedly with his hands. But more notable than him was Bucky, holding the second coffee cup in his one hand, shaking his head and chuckling lightly as he watched Steve with a soft look in his eyes.
Maria had never seen him with any sort of facial expression. Let alone a smile.
They were about to hit the morning coffee run rush and Maria stood ready at the cash register. The regulars would probably all leave soon after the rush started, their quiet disrupted once it started.
Tony caught her attention, elbowing Dr. Banner's arm and pointing at something on his tablet screen, trying to muffle his laughter. A tiny warning went off in the back of her mind, telling her that a snickering Tony Stark was not a good sign of things to come; the warning was validated when all at once Dr. Banner looked up from the screen in alarm at Tony, Maria heard the faint sound of quacking ducks coming from one of the booths, and Natasha, having previously been on her phone, slammed her fist down on her table and stood violently.
"Damn it, Stark! You are not starting this again!"
Tony burst out in full-on laughter, grabbing Bruce's sleeve, and standing up quickly. He walked briskly towards the cafe doors, practically dragging Dr. Banner who was stumbling to keep up with him, and shouted to Maria as he strode past:
"Hey, gotta go! Put Bruce's leaf water on my tab!"
And he burst out of the doors without slowing down.
Maria wasn't sure if she should say something to either Tony's retreating figure or Natasha's fading exasperation as she sat back down, but right then a new customer walked into the cafe, the bell tinkling merrily to announce their presence, and she didn't have time.
She smiled brightly.
"Welcome to the Tower Cafe! What can I get you this morning?"
End.