"Gold?" asked the university student wrinkling up her pierced nose. "Is that your real name?"

"It's what it says on the tin innit?" he said, tight lipped as he rang her up, not caring if he let his irritation show.

"What were your parents—like hippies or something?" Her friend beside her gave a giggle.

Gold just ignored her and handed her the change as they whispered and giggled some more.

"Have a nice day ye doss cunts," he said under his breath and resumed pouring himself his fourth free coffee of the day.

The new girl, Mary Margaret's mouth fell open. "You shouldn't say that!" she whispered breathily.

"Say what?"

"You—what you said—"

"And why the feck not?"

She bristled at the profanity. "Because it's rude and if the manager hears you going on like that you'll get a reprimand," she said primly.

Gold snorted at Mary Margaret, his new trainee, another fresh faced first year university student, she insisted on everyone calling her by her full name and seemed to think they were giving away GPA for being the world's perkiest barista to boot. How she could be that cheery at 6 in the morning, Gold had no idea, but she was the current bane of his existence. Current, because in seven months time, when she went back to whatever little hick town had spawned her for the summer, there'd be someone new and probably even more irritating to fill her shoes, Gold thought. It went without saying that Gold would still be there. The other barristas tended to move on to bigger and better things, but Gold remained year after year, like the gray stone of the old university buildings, only pausing to grow a little grayer and more worn looking with each passing year.

How he kept his job, none of the other employees of Storybrooke Coffee had a clue. He was absolutely shit at his work; perpetually late, didn't seem to even own a standard uniform, never bothered covering up a blurry tattoo on his forearm despite repeated mentions of the Storybrooke Coffee employee manual, was surly as hell to his coworkers, rude to the customers and famous for never budging from his stool behind the counter for anything short of a coffee related apocalypse. His lazy job performance might have been forgiven by his coworkers if he was the sort of person who was very funny, kind or just a nice guy to work with. You could overlook deficiencies in productivity if made up for by a pleasant personality. But Gold wasn't exactly popular with his peers at the shop, who were all at least twenty years younger than him anyway. They shared nothing in common other than a feeling of mutual resentment and that was fine with him.

He was the only one in the shop who had his own stool. He perched on it like some malevolent bird of prey behind the counter. He always wore a black apron which had been part of the old uniform two years ago, instead of a regulation one in friendly green like everyone else. No one knew why, if it was because he'd lost the green one or whether he was just trying to make a statement. Outside his hearing they'd nicknamed him the Dark One, until Ursula, who was working on a double major in African American studies and post colonial literature told them the term had racist overtones and they stopped.

The things they called him when out of earshot now were quite a bit ruder.

No one currently working there had actually given him the stool or said he could sit on it during business hours, but when David, the current manager, had come in the first time to get the lay of the land, there was Gold, sitting on the swivel stool pouring the coffee and he seemed to manage alright, so he figured he might as well leave him there.

Standing Gold was clearly at a disadvantage and it wasn't just because he was shorter than everyone else who worked there. There was something wrong with his right leg. The foot dragged and it pained him badly in inclement weather, making him extra surly, especially in winter. Outside the shop he walked with a cane which he kept locked up in his storage locker in the backroom with a double padlock as if it were precious gold. When on her first day of job training Mary Margaret made the rookie mistake of innocently asking him what happened to him, he smiled sweetly and said he'd hurt it kicking in a trainee's arse for asking too many questions. Mary Margaret was silent the rest of the day as he showed her how to clean the percolator.

"How the hell is that jackass still employed here?" she groused to her friend Ruby, that evening during clean-up. But Ruby was preoccupied, watching her pet pre-med student, still nursing the same cup of coffee he'd been at for three hours, still scanning his textbook until he was forcibly ejected by Storybrooke Coffee's staff.

"His dorm is freezing, poor thing," murmured Ruby a she watched an extremely p.o'ed looking Gold get off his precious stool to whisk Victor away with a broom.

"I swear, that's the first time I've seen Gold touch that thing since I started working here," muttered Graeme the criminology student.

Only David, their manager and part-time agriculture student, looking on knew the truth, but he remained silent. And so the secret of Gold's inexplicably continuing employment at Storybrooke Coffee remained.