If this looks familiar, it has been previously posted to my AO3 account under the same name.

"No, no, no," Noctis groaned, staring at the stainless steel counter beside him. He was already dreanched from head to toe in water, dish soap, and grease (maybe a little gravy, bits of food, soda in his shoes, he'd lost track of what he was surely covered in)

"Sorry," the waitress on the other side of the counter said insincerely, setting down her (seemingly) 4,568th pile of plates and adding a metric crap-ton of silverware to the tub of no-longer-hot-and-soapy water. What was her name again? Kelly? Kimy? Something cute with a K.

"No you're not..." Noctis re-read her name tag for the fifth time that shift, "...Kelsey."

"You're right. You need to change out that water." Kelsey waived her hand at the tub of silverware and practically skipped away.

Guess it wasn't every day a waitress got to boss around the crown prince.

Why was he doing this again, he wondered as he began loading another trey of dishes. Right. Civilian integration. A king must understand his people, blah, blah, blah.

Noctis laughed a little at the though of his father as a teenage dish-boy at a restaurant he would never want to eat at much less WORK at. He sprayed the plates that stood upright in between the pegs of the dish tray. Soapy water and disgusting food particles splashed off the ceramic onto the counter and onto Noctis. Suds went in his eye and something…

Something went in his MOUTH!

Noctis recoiled and gagged, spitting whatever it was onto the wet tiled floor. He looked down, then cringed and shuttered.

It was a pea. A single wet, soapy piece of VEGETABLE off of some STRANGER'S dirty dinner plate had just. Been. In. His. MOUTH!

"Well, well. He felt the pea, he must really be a prince!"

Noctis turned around to see Xander, a coworker whos name Noctis actually remembered. "You know, people like you who do this every day to make a living should be paid more than my crownsguard."

Xander laughed. "Nice to hear. Change out the silverware water and then you can go."

"It's seriously already seven?"

"Quarter after, actually. Sorry, got stuck at a train crossing."

"Gods have mercy!" Noctis exclaimed. He dumped the silverware tub into a dish trey and refilled it with clean hot water and more soap. "She's all yours," Noctis said on his way out and clapped Xander on the shoulder.

"Same time tomorrow?"

"Uh, hu."

Ignis was already parked in the employee parking zone when Noctis left through the back kitchen doors of the restaurant where he had been working for almost a week. When Noctis got in the car, Ignis raised a curious eyebrow.

"I thought you were supposed to put the dishes in the sink, not yourself."

"Ha. Ha. Ha," he laughed humorlessly. "Drive."

"Tomorrow's your last day. How do you feel, Noct?"

"Sticky and gross."

Ignis let the car fall silent just long enough for Noctis to think he was safe.

"Next week you get to work retail."

The agonized scream from the front passenger seat of the Star of Lucis should have been powerful enough to call down the Astrals and force THEM to wash plates and fold shirts, but alas the fate of the prince was unchanged.

He hated civilian integration.