In the college town of Garreg Mach, there were only a few things that the residents were terrified of. Spring Break was always chaotic, given that the majority of students at all of the schools were of drinking age and could enjoy themselves however and whenever they pleased. Summertime was a dull season where shops and restaurants struggled to stay in business for whenever the droves of students came back. And then, for the students themselves, the class known as Practical Business was easily the most dreaded course needed for any degree program. It was a year-long class that took up more time than any other course ever thought to do, and it was a test of mental, physical, and social strength to get through it unscathed and with a passing grade.
The course was rather simple on paper: a group of students, usually junior- or senior-year students within a business program, were given a shop to manage and run for the entire school year, getting their grade based on attendance and how well the store was taken care of. It was some of these students' first experience in retail and service positions, and for those who weren't serious about their business aspirations it was a dream-killer. Yet it was oddly popular with the students in terms of enrollment at the start of the year, but the weak were quickly weeded out and only the strong made it to the end when they handed back the keys to the professor.
It was a breezy morning during the Verdant Moon when the assignments were given out and the groups of brand-new coworkers got to meet each other for the first time outside their new business. The Golden Perk was the name of the coffee shop that several students met outside of, a couple of them looking through the windows at the dusty tabletops inside, while others stood around on their phones or glancing at everyone else, wondering if they were in the right place. "Does anyone here have the keys to this place?" a woman leaning against the locked door asked, annoyance in her voice as she brushed through one of her pink pigtails with her fingers, catching a knot or two along the way. "This wind is really starting to mess with my hair."
"We're still missing someone, so it's gotta be whoever that is that has the key," a bigger man replied, flexing his shoulders back and forth to stretch them. "I counted how many of us there are, so I know I've gotta be right."
Tucking his phone into the pocket of his jacket, embroidered with his name on the front and back, a purple-haired man looked at the muscular one with disgust across his face. "My apologies, but if you are choosing to speak like that now, I may have to drop the course. No esteemed son of Gloucester will have to put up with—"
"Sorry I'm late! Traffic was crazy over on campus!" Huffing as he jumped off the back of his motorcycle, which he parked messily against the curb, Claude von Riegan held up the key to the coffee shop that would change his life—and the lives of everyone there with him—forever. "Couldn't get through a light without someone running across the street, school is definitely back in session, my friends."
"It's about time, we've only been waiting here forever!" the pink-haired one whined, pushing herself up off the door as Claude went to unlock it. "I even made sure I'd get here on time today, only for you to fail us like that. Who do you think you are, making everyone else wait for you?"
"Oh, sorry, next time I'll create a mess of lawsuits by running everyone over, that'll be great. You're willing to pay my legal bills, aren't you?" Claude winked at the woman, making her roll her eyes as she pushed past him and the now-open door, he and everyone else entering in after her. First impressions were everything, and while his hadn't been the greatest, neither had hers, and neither had the coffee shop's overall.
It was dingy and dusty, showing its age and the fact that no one had been inside of it since the last session of Practical Business had ended. "This is going to need some real elbow grease to get back in working order," another one of the women said, fiddling with her side-swept ponytail as she looked around. "You ready to help with that, big guy?"
"Definitely! I'll scrub everything so hard, you'll be able to see yourself in it!" His clap was booming, echoing against the walls and causing everyone's ears to rattle. "Uh, before we get to that, shouldn't we go around introducing ourselves? Might make working together a lot more fun, since we're all strangers and stuff."
"That's a great idea!" Jumping up onto the countertop, the woman stopped playing with her hair as she looked down at everyone with a determined smile on her face. "My name's Leonie Pinelli, I'm here because I need to get certified to run a freelancer's guild and it was either this or three classes of accounting." She nodded towards her fast friend, hoping to get him to introduce himself next.
He took the bait, giving another booming clap and earning the ire of the purple-haired one who already hated his guts. "The name's Raphael. Raphael Kirsten, if we're being formal. I need to know how to run my parents' place when they retire and I thought this class'd do it for me."
"I'd be better off if this was a store, not a coffee shop," the pink-haired woman told them, giving the two a dismissive look before flipping both of her pigtails over her shoulders and giving them (as well as her chest) a bounce. "I'm Hilda Goneril, I'm planning on owning a jewelry shop when I'm done here, and I don't want to have to pay someone else to run it for me so there's that."
"All of you with your 'grand' aspirations that will get you absolutely nowhere in life." The self-proclaimed son of Gloucester shook his head, his asymmetrical undercut bobbing as he did. "I, the noble Lorenz Hellman Gloucester, am only in your presence because this is the last course required for me to attain my full inheritance from my family. No degree required for my goals in life."
There was a lull after his introduction, while Leonie got down from the counter and went behind it, Raphael following her, as they searched for things to clean the thick layer of grime off of everything around them. They came back from behind the counter with towels in their hands, more than they could use on their own, and a mousey-looking woman with blue hair stepped up to take some from them. "I-I'm Marianne von Edmund," she stated, avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room, even the one she was grabbing towels from. "I'm not really sure why I'm here…"
"Great, we've already got one person who's going to bail on us," a small, young-looking woman remarked, giving Marianne a glare. "I'm hoping I can graduate early and start helping my family earn their fortune back, and someone like you is not going to help me manage that."
"I-I didn't mean to make you think I'm not going to help."
"Whatever, I'm sure you're not the only one." The woman glanced pointedly at Lorenz, who was more than happy to return the favor, before she ran behind the counter. "You can call me Lysithea von Ordelia, and my place will be in the kitchen, making fancy sweets and treats for everyone to buy. My cakes are to die for, according to everyone who's had one."
Claude looked around the room, seeing everyone's reaction to Lysithea's most humble of brags. "I'd be down to try that for myself," he said, before clearing his throat. "At any rate, it's nice to meet you all. The name's Claude von Riegan, and no, I'm not interested in dating any of you, no matter what my profiles might tell you. Single, ready to mingle, not interested in classmates."
"Don't you sound rather cocky there?" Hilda asked, batting her eyelashes a single time before motioning to her mouth as if she was putting a gun against her lips. "Thankfully I've got no time for guys like you, I've already got a boyfriend, thanks."
"That's cool, didn't ask." To play off of her gun motion, Claude put both of his hands into the position and fired them both at her a few times, before turning to see who all was left. "Let's take this from the top, we've gotten to know just about everyone now, yeah?"
A smaller man standing in Raphael's shadow at the moment (which, to be fair, would've made anyone look smaller) raised his hand. "Just me left, actually. I'm Ignatz Victor and, well, Raphael knows why I'm here. I live with him and his sister and we took this class together, so that we make sure he passes."
"That's right, we sure did," Raphael agreed, a goofy grin coming alight across his face. "Maya and I want Ignatz here to help us take over, but not to work. He's an artist, but he doesn't want everyone knowing that for some reason."
"An artist, eh?" Leonie repeated, giving Ignatz a once-over with an impressed glint in her eyes. "How much will it cost to get you to decorate this place?"
Seeming like he was being put on the spot, Ignatz raised his hands defensively, stammering, "I'm not an interior decorator, I don't know how great of a job I'd be able to do if that's what you want from me! I was thinking I could do more of the money, or a back-office job, since that's what I'll end up doing when Raphael's parents pass him their place."
"Darn, I was really looking forward to spending some good money on getting someone to spruce up this dingy, dark shop and make it as inviting as its name makes it sound." Snapping her fingers like she was genuinely bummed out, Leonie happened to glance to the side to see Hilda's eyes going wide at the idea of money being thrown around for decoration. "What, do you think you're up for the job?"
"Can't say I really know professional decorating myself, but I can definitely see brightening up this place. All it'll cost is the price of the gems and the fabrics, and maybe a couple of new conversation pieces!" Her entire attitude having changed since her spat with Claude, Hilda seemed enthused to do Leonie's bidding when it came to decorating, although Leonie was clearly beginning to have second thoughts about how much money she could use on the job.
Thankfully, someone else noticed the apprehension in her gaze and stepped right in. "Whatever you cannot cover, I will wholeheartedly borrow from the family coffers to make this place functional," Lorenz said, the snooty air to his words putting everyone off despite him making a kind offer. "It would be a shame, after all, if everyone failed due to a lack of business because of how downtrodden this establishment is."
Lysithea scoffed, not caring about Lorenz's kindness in the moment. "Maybe you can speak less like you've deepthroated a dictionary and more like a normal person. You're irritating me every time you open your mouth."
Now voices were beginning to raise, as Lorenz started to argue with Lysithea, Leonie tried to steer them back to talking about money, Raphael and Ignatz began having their own conversation, Marianne had disappeared from everyone's line of sight, and Hilda was standing almost in the middle of things, trying to escape the crosshairs of anyone's wayward statements. Thinking fast on his feet, Claude did what he'd seen get done before, except choosing to hop onto a table rather than the counter. "Hey, numbskulls, are we really about to make us all hate each other before we've even seen the ugliness of the service industry?" he asked them all, cupping his mouth to amplify his voice to a level over theirs. "Can you all please just shut up and act like grown adults, rather than a bunch of chi—"
He cut himself off with a scream, as the table underneath his feet lurched backward, two of the legs simultaneously snapping off and sending him crashing to the floor. He landed flat on his back, the whole world around him spinning and turning as he realized what had just happened to him, and soon he had everyone else hovering over him, looking down to make sure he was okay. "I noticed there are termites in the kitchen," Marianne's quiet voice said in the silence after the fall, "so that makes sense that it happened. Should someone call an exterminator to get rid of them?"
"I think you're going to be chipping in a lot more than you anticipated for this place there, Gloucester," Leonie remarked, taking her eyes off Claude and his stunned position on the floor to look at Lorenz, who had paled at the mention of termites in the building. "This place is going to need all-new tables and chairs so this doesn't happen again, you know."
"I…am aware," he replied, swallowing down any other words he may have wanted to say.
"Ew, if there are bugs in here, I'm out," Hilda told everyone, flouncing her hair as she turned away from the group to head for the door. "Someone let me know when that problem's taken care of, I'll get right to decorating once it's not critter-infested around here." She seemed all-too-eager to get out of there, and it wasn't hard for just about everyone else to follow, heading their separate ways for the day until it was just Claude, Leonie, and Marianne still outside, one of them on the phone with a pest-control company against her will (since she'd seen the infestation herself) and the other two chatting about what had gone down.
"You never really said why you're taking this class, did you Claude?" Leonie asked him, after she watched him lock up the shop and tuck the key into his pocket. "Is there some secret reason you don't want everyone knowing? Or did you just want to crack a joke instead of share that about yourself?"
"Little bit of both, if we're being honest. I'm really here at the request of the professor herself, I might been in a bit of debt to her for reasons you're not allowed to know, and this was her way of clearing the slate." Closing his eyes, Claude thought about what he'd done to owe the professor (not in a monetary sense, but in terms of other favors), grimacing when he realized what kind of game he'd been playing. "But that's in the past, I'm here now and I promise you, I'm not going to be a weak link in this crew."
"That's great! Because I'm not exactly confident that everyone else is going to pull their weight, not after those first impressions. Do they think they're just going to get to coast by without doing their own work?" Leonie sounded unimpressed, and while she was refraining from naming names, Claude knew who she was speaking about.
Thankfully, one of the people being referred to was not the one standing a few paces away, finishing up the conversation with pest control. "They said they'll be here this evening, but it doesn't come as a surprise that bugs got in," Marianne told them both once she'd hung up the call, her face reddened from the whole endeavor. "I guess there was a bad case of termites in the building next door a couple months back."
"As long as it gets taken care of, that's all that matters. Thanks for taking one for the team and making the call, Marianne," Leonie said, giving a genuine smile in her direction and watching as she panicked, nodding and coughing out a welcome statement before running down the street towards the main body of the campus. "I'm not really sure about her, she seems like she wants to work but I don't know if she's cut out for it…"
"Look at you, sounding like some cutthroat manager! Glad to have you on the team, Leonie, you're going to make this a breeze. Now if you'll excuse me," Claude cracked his knuckles and climbed onto his bike, which he revved up the moment he could, "I have somewhere I need to be."
"What, you got a hot date that you were going to skip out on our work for?"
He revved the bike again, lifting the kickstand and slowly rolling off the sidewalk and into the street. "Nah, I'm a devoted employee if it gets the class credit. I'm headed home to chill and get caught up on my other classes, can't let myself get behind just because I'm working in a coffee shop." He watched Leonie laugh, giving her a wave before speeding off down the road in the opposite direction of where Marianne had disappeared to moments before. Claude had no intention of going to the heart of the campus, not when he had better places he could go to pass the time.
Places such as his single-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Garreg Mach, where he lived with his motorcycle stored on the balcony and all of his class materials strewn across the floor. When he'd said he was single and ready to mingle, he'd been lying; as much as he would've loved to have a date in his life, he knew that his bachelor lifestyle was too comfortable to be moved past quite yet, and he wasn't going to give it up just because he fell in love with someone. But he'd been telling the truth when he'd said he had no interest in dating a classmate, especially not one he'd be seeing on the regular there at the coffee shop, and he hoped that he wouldn't end up getting prodded further about that claim.
But, based on how that first day had gone, he was fairly confident that if he was going to find someone to sweep him off his feet and make him consider changing his ways, it wasn't going to be any of those people he'd had the (mis)fortune of meeting that day.
Claude parked his motorcycle in the designated parking outside of the college building where the classroom for Practical Business would have been located, if there was ever a physical class to take. It was a few days after the termite fumigation at the coffee shop had taken place, and he'd been the unlucky soul who'd been given the bill to take to the professor to get it paid for, since that was the one thing that they as the new "owners" of the shop were not liable for. He'd tried to push the task onto someone else, but none of them wanted to do it and no matter how much he said that he really did not want to go, he was given the bill and told to get it taken care of as soon as he could.
His footsteps echoed through the quiet building, there seemingly no classes going on around him as he walked down the hall, but when he ascended the stairs up towards where the offices were he could hear voices of instructors and students alike beginning to fill the silence. "Sometimes wish you would've told me I could take a sit-down class instead," he grumbled, catching his reflection in the windows on every door as he passed. "It would've made my life so much easier, and yours as well."
At the end of the hallway was a second staircase, up to the third floor, but he ducked past it and continued down a narrower side hallway, which found its end at a single door, a faded nameplate sitting on it. Steeling himself with a deep breath and a steady hand, Claude gave a solid knock on the door before pushing it open, finding the office to be empty. "Huh, thought you said you'd be here," he remarked, stepping in and pulling the bill out of his pocket to throw it onto the desk. "Guess not having to see you is better for me, though."
"Oh, you're not who I'm looking for," a female voice said from the doorway, and Claude turned around to see that a different professor, one he'd seen around on campus a few times but hadn't actually met before, was staring at him. "For a moment I thought I was possibly still drunk and was seeing things, but you're definitely not who belongs here."
"Nope, just here to drop something off," he said, ducking past her to leave the office before she could say anything else. "Hope he comes back soon for you!" He could hear her muttering something but couldn't make out the words as he headed down the narrow hallway, checking over his shoulder to see her still standing there where he'd left her. "I'll go out on a limb and guess she's here to talk to him about a student's performance in something, but what that could be…not the slightest idea. Classes have been going for a few days!"
When he got back down to the empty lower floor of the building, he picked up his pace and got outside as fast as he possibly could, making his entire time spent inside last a matter of minutes. His bike was right where he'd left it, and he hopped on and set off like a rocket, wanting to get away from the building and any potential run-ins with the professor as fast as he could; besides, he had somewhere more important he needed to be right then. It was well within work hours at the shop, even though it was closed as they worked on remodeling it to fit their group's tastes, and he could only use the excuse of having to drop the bill off for so long before someone called him out on it.
When he got down to the main street in town where the shop was located, he could see that a large, unsightly moving truck was sitting outside the front door, taking up the spot where he'd been parking whenever he showed up. That meant he had to park on the side of the building in the alleyway, which wasn't a huge concern when the biggest threat in the town was wild animals causing havoc, not anyone hellbent on stealing someone's custom-designed motorcycle. "It's about time you show up," Leonie chided when Claude came around the corner after parking. "Me and Raphael have done just about all the work ourselves so far, it'll be great having a third pair of hands to help."
"Don't mind me if I'm wrong, but don't you already have a third, fourth, even fifth pair of hands around here?" he replied, knowing that he could see several heads that belonged to people not mentioned inside the shop. "Why aren't they doing the work?"
"Lorenz insists that what he's done financially is enough to get him out of doing physical labor, which, sure, we'll let him think that. Ignatz is directing where things go, according to his designs, and Hilda is 'helping' him with that, but all I've seen her do is send texts to someone and take some selfies." Looking into the window herself, Leonie counted off everyone she'd named so far, taking a moment before continuing with, "Marianne and Lysithea are working in the kitchen, Lysithea brought her recipe book for some sweets and wanted to try them out."
"And that leaves poor, old Claude to do the rest of the hard work?" he asked, an unamused tone to his voice, and Leonie nodded. "Of course it does. Well, no sense in standing around griping about it, if I want to pass the class it's going to be because I do my part. What do you need me to do?"
She flashed him a grin, motioning to the truck with her head. "Raphael's in there, he'll pass you furniture and you take it inside to put it wherever Ignatz, and Hilda I guess, tell you to put it. I'll be doing the same."
Based on that, and that alone, Claude assumed they'd be carrying tables and chairs into the coffee shop, because they were the necessary tools to have a successful business going. He was not expecting to approach the back of the truck and have Raphael standing there with a large shelf with glass panels held in his arms. "I don't think I'm carrying this one on my own," he said, trying to catch Leonie's attention before it was shoved at him. "Might be a two-person job this time. Or a Raphael one."
"Sorry, can't get out of the truck holding this," Raphael told him, setting it down and pushing the edge of it to where Claude was waiting for it. "You can carry it yourself, though, it's not as heavy as it looks."
"I'm also not built like the truck you're standing in, so maybe you should rethink trusting me with this one." Yes, the moment Claude's hands gripped the bottom of the shelf and he tried moving it on his own he knew that he was not going to be getting anywhere with it on his lonesome, and having Leonie help him might not have even been enough at that point. She did come around the truck as well to pick up the other side, and while they were plenty capable together, Raphael still ended up jumping out of the back of the truck and assisting them getting the cabinet through the door of the shop and into its permanent position against the wall.
It was a nightmare to get inside and situated, and the moment they stepped away from where it had been set down, Hilda was eyeing it with a bright expression. "I have just the things to put in there," she told everyone with a smile. "We're working at the Golden Perk, so I'm going to fill all of those shelves with golden things! Bangles and bracelets and jewelry I've made myself, I'll be making so much when people window shop while they sip!"
"Hold on there, I have a better idea, although your wishes for making some extra money on the side are a great backup plan." Ignatz looked at the shelf, then around the top of the walls in the shop, looking at how overall bare the upper part of the building was in terms of decoration. "We need to have a theme. Has anyone asked Professor Hanneman what themes students in previous years have used?"
At once, every eye in the room who'd heard the question was looking at Claude, who knew that they were all thinking the same thing. "No, I haven't asked, and no, I don't know what the answer is off the top of my head. Just because I'm here because of him doesn't mean I know all of his motives here."
"That's fine, if you aren't aware then we can assume he doesn't have a theme he prefers students to stick with." Tapping his chin, Ignatz continued to look around for a few seconds longer before his eyes settled back on the shelves they'd just brought inside. "I think I have an idea for what direction we can go in. Hilda, care to discuss this with me?"
"I guess I can do that," she replied with a flippant shrug, clearly unhappy that her original suggestion had been demoted to second-best. While they stepped aside, out of the way, to have their conversation, the moving crew went back outside to bring the rest of the furnishing into the building. There wasn't anything else quite as heavy as that cabinet had been, for which Claude was thankful, but by the time the back of the truck was empty and the store had been refilled with furniture, his arms and legs ached from the extent of the work he'd just put in.
On the other hand, Raphael and Leonie both seemed unfazed by the work, coming back inside laughing and joking around. "Since this shop has its belongings, I assume we are good to leave?" Lorenz asked, having been sitting in a chair since the moment one was there for him to sit in. "I feel there is zero reason for my presence to be required here."
"Sure, you can go," Leonie said to him with a smug smile, "but don't expect to get any credit for helping today. Doing the bare minimum isn't doing enough."
"Excuse me? I purchased everything that was in that truck! All of these chairs and tables are property of the Gloucester family, and you will credit me for that!" His angered voice bounced against the walls as he got to his feet, trying to storm towards Leonie, but she stared blankly back at him and he withdrew, not wanting to start more of a confrontation with someone he knew he couldn't take in a fight. "Very well. Make note that I at least contributed in some manner."
"Geez, why are you so loud out here?" Lysithea came out of the kitchen with a plate of baked pastries, Marianne following behind with another of the same. "I thought you were making this place operational, not starting a fight club."
Raphael took in a long, deep breath, inhaling the scent of the pastries as deeply as he could while trying not to look too ravenous. "Those smell delicious, Lysithea!" he announced, rubbing at his stomach with a hand that still showed marks from some of the furniture he'd had to lift. "Mind if I have one? I think my stomach's about to start chewing itself open."
"Go ahead, these will definitely be on the menu if they taste good, so having people try them is kind of needed." She couldn't even set the plate down before he'd taken one, and by the time the plate was on a table it was half-empty, just about everyone having grabbed something. Within two minutes everything was gone, seconds and thirds long since claimed and eaten, the general consensus being that they were delicious and were worth selling, provided that they weren't too expensive to make; Lysithea was adamant that they were relatively cheap to produce, especially if name-brand ingredients could be substituted for ones a little less trustworthy.
"Don't take this wrong," Claude said, finishing off his second pastry and resisting the temptation to rib the closest person to him who'd grabbed a third, "but I'm pretty sure you could make those with sawdust and glue and they'd still be delicious. Are you a culinary student or something?"
Lysithea's face grew red as she turned her head so that she wasn't facing the crowd. "N-no, I've just done some baking on the side since I was young. Thanks for the vote of confidence though, I very much appreciate it." He winked at her, just as she was looking back over in his direction, which caused her to let out a shriek and duck back into the kitchen, yelling something about the flattery, while Marianne grabbed the now-empty plates and followed her back without a word.
"Are you sure you're not here to pick up girls?" Leonie asked him, having watched what just went down. "Because that looked like a textbook attempt to pick someone up."
"No harm in being friendly, I wouldn't think." Stretching his aching shoulders and knowing that he was going to be in pain come morning, Claude began to shuffle his way towards the door. "And with that, I'm calling it a day. Same time tomorrow morning, I assume?" No one had an answer for him, but he could see everyone else starting to follow him out (minus the two who'd gone into the kitchen), so he figured that he was being the leader and they were all bravely following him, despite him having no clue what was going on.
When he got around the building to where he'd parked his motorcycle, he saw it laying on its side with a blue-haired man standing over it, looking down on it with a hanging jaw and his phone in his hand. Stunned at what he was seeing, Claude cleared his throat to get the man's attention, but someone who'd just followed him around the building did the job better than he could. "Caspar, I thought I told you to meet me out front!" Hilda screeched, cupping her cheeks as she ran towards the man, narrowly avoiding tripping over the fallen motorcycle. "What are you doing back here?"
"Looking for your car, since I know you didn't walk over here. I, er, didn't mean to knock this bike down when I passed it." Caspar, as he'd been called, looked up from the scene he'd caused to see Claude standing there, eyes as open as they could be in disbelief as he looked at the damage he could see from above. "Guessing this is yours? Sorry, dude."
"It's whatever," Claude replied, forcing the words out with a faked smile. "It needed to go to the shop to get repairs anyway, we'll just add this in on the bill."
"You wouldn't have broken Claude's bike if you'd listened to me in the first place." Playfully stomping her foot onto the asphalt beneath them, Hilda seemed to be performatively angry at the man, but when he opened his arms for her she ran right into them, peppering his face with kisses. "I'm so glad you came over here to pick me up, though, I'm so tired of having to drive myself everywhere!"
As adorable as their display was supposed to have been, Claude was not enjoying it and he made that very clear by picking his bike up, seeing the long scratches on the side that hadn't been there earlier in the day, and turning it on without any regard to who was standing nearby. He jumped on and sped out of the parking lot, narrowly missing the moving truck as it was pulling off from in front of the building, and despite whoever was driving it honking at him, he continued on his way without a care. He hadn't been lying when he said he needed to take it into the shop—it related right back to why he was in the class in the first place, as luck would have it—but he knew that it was going to be a thorn in his side getting it repaired on the limited budget he currently had.
Instead of going straight to his apartment, he headed back onto campus and went to the building he'd gone to earlier in the day, seeing many more vehicles outside than had been there before. "Great, now Hanneman's going to be here and I'll be able to discuss everything with him," he said to himself as he repeated the routine from before, starting with parking the bike out front and ending with him knocking on the office door a minute later. This time, instead of being met with silence, he received a muffled answer, permission to open the door, and he took in a deep breath before doing so.
"Ah, yes, are you here to discuss your terms of enrollment?" Professor Hanneman asked, giving Claude a glance up from the book he was reading. "I know that you were here earlier, Manuela was kind enough to give me your description when I spoke with her, but all I came in to was a bill from your class. Where is, ahem, the documentation we need to discuss?"
Claude's mouth scrunched from side to side as he thought about how to answer the question, taking the seat across from Hanneman's with zero hesitation. "Not in Garreg Mach, that's all I can tell you. I'm taking your class and paying for repairing my bike after you ran into it, isn't that enough for you?"
"And now with this bill for termite control, the scales are once again tipped against you, so I would say it is not. I need those papers, Claude, or unfortunately I will have to go to the headmaster and dean to discuss the legality of you being a student here." Hanneman set his book down and gave Claude a stern look, which he met with an unflinching one of his own. "This class will go on with or without you, but if you want to remain a citizen—"
"Don't hold my citizenship against me here!" Bringing his hands to the sides of his head, fingers massaging his temples as he thought about how boneheaded that argument was, Claude's look did not waver despite his frustration. "I'm asking you, what else is there you want from me? I don't have much else."
"You are well aware of what else you have, and yet you continue to refuse providing me with it, always claiming that the papers are not here. The choice is yours." The smile that appeared on Hanneman's face was very smug, which only irritated Claude further, but he knew that he was up against a wall. "Anyway, you know where my office is, you can bring them by any chance you get."
Standing back up and keeping his face as still as he could, Claude said, "Sure do, you'll see me around again, that's for sure," and he was walking out of the office, stopping in the doorway and reaching into his pocket before he walked further. "I'll just leave this here, while I'm at it, as a reminder of what you owe me." He pulled his hand out and threw a wadded-up ball of papers behind him, having it land squarely in the open book Hanneman had been reading.
His irritation had mostly subsided by the time he was back out to his bike, only for it to resurface once he saw the scratches Caspar had inflicted on the motorcycle. "Of course, if it's not one thing here it's another," he grumbled, jumping on the bike and heading home, ignoring the sound of his phone blaring in his pocket as he rode. There was an inkling in his mind of who was possibly trying to call him, and he did not want to have a continuation of that conversation anytime soon.
There was quite the story about the history between Claude and Hanneman, starting with when the professor had initially ran into his bike with his car and crumpled several crucial parts of it; he'd been convinced to pretend like it was his own fault to save the professor from legal action, which wasn't too problematic when the repairs weren't expected to be too expensive. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, because no sooner had Claude given him his insurance information had Hanneman noticed something rather peculiar about something on it and had demanded to know more, lest he let the head of the college know a key fact about Claude von Riegan that he'd successfully kept under wraps his entire college career thus far.
He hadn't been lying when he'd said that he was taking Practical Business to clear a debt he owed to the professor—but he certainly hadn't told the whole truth. His debt was in keeping a major secret out from everyone's ears, and it was one that he didn't want to have go into collections if he could help it.
When he got back to his apartment and got his bike into its nightly resting spot, he went inside and collapsed on his bed, finally pulling his phone out to see several missed calls from Hanneman's number, all of which he ignored without a second thought. He also noticed a message from a number he wasn't familiar with, asking him to dress professionally when he went into the store the next day, and he could only assume that was one of his classmates trying to prepare him for a day running the shop.
"Almost makes me wish he'd just tell everyone what he knows," Claude said after reading the message over a few times. "I'd get out of this mess and be able to go home with my bike mostly intact and my sanity fully together. But life's not fair, is it?" He threw his arms back and took in a deep breath, not sure what else there was that he could say or do to save himself from what was going on around him. This school year was going to be the death of him, of that he was certain.
The next morning they all gathered inside the Golden Perk, which was still relatively barren of anything giving it personality, although the new tables, chairs, and booth seats nestled in two corners definitely gave it a new lease on life. "We're opening in exactly one week," Leonie excitedly told everyone once they were all gathered, feeling like she was the manager of the place and therefore was the one designated to share that sort of news. "It's been tricky to work out the logistics of that, but I think we can be skilled coffee-slingers by that time. What say you all?"
"I'm not doing any drinks, my place is the baked goods," Lysithea reminded her, her hands sporting gloves that were caked in powder. "Marianne too, she's my assistant." To prove the point, Marianne gave a small, silent nod and a smile in Leonie's direction, and the orange-haired woman stared at them both before nodding in return. "Now can we get back to work? We're working on perfecting a crumble cake for when we do open."
"Crumble cake sounds like it'll be a best-seller," said Hilda, her eyes watching as the pair went back to the kitchen without actually being told they could. "It'll need some cute name, of course, but we'll be able to sell a million of them if they're as good as those pastries were yesterday. And since the only work in selling them will be plating them or whatever, I think I can handle that."
"You'll also be able to handle making drinks, and that's final." Punching a fist into her other, open hand, Leonie's look of determination was one that couldn't be argued with, no matter how much anyone wanted to. She was really taking running the place seriously, which was fine if no one else wanted to do it. "I'll pull up some tutorial videos for how to make the drinks. Raphael, Ignatz, and I spent a while last night finding the ones we want for our menu and they're going to be delicious."
Claude, noticing very quickly that he was one of the people being talked to about needing training and not wanting to be the one to pick a fight about it, took a seat at one of the tables and waited for further direction. When Lorenz sat down next to him with a grimace on his snooty face, he expected to hear the worst griping he'd ever be blessed with listening to, but Lorenz's mouth stayed shut even as everyone else crowded around the table. "This is going to be so good," Raphael said, humming to himself as he stood behind everyone sitting down, able to easily see over them as Leonie set her phone and its videos on the table in front of them. "When I saw these drinks last night, I couldn't believe that we're gonna be making those for people in town. But we are!"
"That's right, we sure are, and we're going to be the best team to ever run this shop. Professor Hanneman is going to regret having to replace us next year!" Leonie pressed play on the first video and stepped around so that she could see it as well, and together the six people there were introduced to the world of coffee-making, starting with the brewing and the perking and ending with the ingredient-adding and design-creating. There were so many different tricks and tips that were thrown at them in the recipe tutorials that no one fully grasped the entire task they were being given, but the gist was received by the majority of them by the time they'd gone through the playlist.
The moment the last video finished, Leonie was jumping back behind the counter to pull out all of the machines they'd need for the job, while Ignatz began talking to everyone (but mostly Hilda) about his design plans he'd come up with. "It's going to be a deer theme, something about the idea of 'golden deer' has been sticking with me and I just can't shake it. If you have any contributions to that theme, I'll gladly accept them."
A chill went down Claude's spine when he heard Ignatz say his idea, but he made sure to keep his frigid reaction to himself. He wasn't sure what it was about that suggestion that he didn't care for, but as everyone else started to voice their agreement, he decided to swallow down any bad feelings and try to be as supportive as the rest of them. "We could put antlers up over the door, make it a hunting deal," he threw out into the din, everyone shutting their mouths to listen to what he had to say. "Or we could skip the hunting thing and just do horns everywhere. There's a lot of potential here."
"I agree, we can make use of this idea without too much hassle," Lorenz didn't sound pleased with it either, but the fact that he was down for it was a good sign that it would go through. "I assume that I will be the one financing this as well?"
Surprised by the fact that his idea had been accepted, Ignatz meekly nodded. "I-if you don't mind it, I'm sure if we go the antlers-only route—although the idea of hunting busts is clever, Claude—it won't be too expensive." He bowed his head in Lorenz's direction as the purple-haired man sighed and pulled out his phone to start checking his account. "We can get this ready for opening day if you're paying for it."
"All right, we're getting things in motion!" Clasping her hands excitedly as she leaned over on the espresso machine she'd procured, Leonie's smile was easily the brightest thing in the room at the moment, even brighter than the screen of Lorenz's phone and the lights above their heads. "You two, go out and get shopping for the décor. The rest of us, we're making drinks until we can't make drinks anymore."
Her excitement was not contagious, not even for the two who'd been told to leave and escape the practice session. The pair in the kitchen were exempt from making the drinks, if only because they were providing baked goods for them to snack on while they tested the drinks they'd only just learned the recipes for, but that still meant four people standing around an espresso machine, a bottom-brewing coffee maker, and a couple of blenders, almost exclusively making drinks that tasted like they'd been sitting in the fridge for weeks before they drank them. By the time Ignatz and Lorenz came back from their shopping trip hours later, only Hilda had managed to make one drink that was decent enough to be replicated, and she was not thrilled with having the title of barista thrown onto her shoulders.
"I'm not working here to make drinks," she asserted, eyeing the piles of fake antlers that had been carted into the shop. "I'm here to look cute, talk to customers to get them to buy more, and help decorate. This is not what I signed up for when I took this class."
"Uh, yeah, it kind of is," Raphael corrected, earning a glare from Hilda as she did not appreciate his comment. "I mean, why else did you sign up for the class?"
She huffed, "To get placed in the jewelry shop Professor Hanneman has students run, duh. I told everyone this when we first met." The way she let her bottom lip jut out to make herself look more pitiful was slightly hilarious to see as an outsider to the conversation, but it was not doing her any favors, especially not when she chose to flounce her way out and over to the antler pile.
Raphael looked at Claude and Leonie with a confused expression prominent on his face, as if he didn't fully understand why what had just happened went like it did. "Don't worry about her, if she doesn't want to help then that's her grade that suffers, not ours," Leonie said to him, while Claude turned his attention to the scribbled-down recipe that they'd been trying to follow. She noticed that he was getting back to figuring out why they weren't being successful in their drink preparation and nodded, joining him at once, and so the practicing continued for a little while longer, as the shop around them began to take its final form.
Even with all of their work that day, the Golden Perk wasn't fully ready to be opened until right before they unlocked their doors for business on their first day of business. But the place had changed dramatically from their first meeting to the first shift, and it was something to be respected and admired at that point, all of the elbow grease and extra time spent getting everything in order paying off when they had their first customers entering the building within minutes of the yellow-neon open sign in the window being flicked on. Ever the self-proclaimed manager of the business, Leonie took it upon herself to greet everyone at the door with a smile and a direction to head up to the register, where Claude was leaning on the counter, ready to take orders and hand them off to anyone with free hands. For the first day everyone was present, but they had drafted a schedule that would go into effect starting day two.
To call the employees of the shop a well-oiled machine that first day would have been grossly incorrect, as there was much disconnect between them all as workers despite how much they'd already put into the store. Claude found quickly that he couldn't hand drink orders to anyone but Raphael or Hilda (or else they'd never get done), and orders for some of the baked goods had to touch Ignatz's hand (or else it would never be brought out). Lorenz was doing nothing except giving judgmental glares at anyone who dared to approach the counter, and the snappish comments he'd make if Claude's order found its way into his grasp made giving him anything just not worth it.
Back in the kitchen, Lysithea and Marianne were keeping up well enough with the orders to start, but as the shift went on they found that their pace wasn't quite fast enough to get everyone what they wanted in a reasonable amount of time. It ultimately ended in Lysithea demanding someone go out and get her more pans for baking, so that she could make more at once, and Lorenz was more than eager to volunteer himself for that job. Him being gone meant just a bit more space available behind the counter, as everyone else hustled and bustled to get the waves of orders taken care of. At one point, around lunchtime, Leonie gave up her post at the door to jump behind the counter and help make drinks, because Hilda had given up and allotted herself a bit of a break time, that conveniently happened when Caspar and his friends came in, so that she could sit at his table with him and chat instead of work.
The work was long and surprisingly difficult, but as the afternoon wound down, so did the flow of business, and they were able to finally catch their breath. There'd been so little time for conversation between one another that it was during that lull that Leonie started talking to everyone about how they felt things were going. She'd picked the ladies in the kitchen to talk to first, which meant she wasn't focused on what was happening up in the front of the store for a few minutes.
"I'm going to tell her when she gets back up here that she's steering a sinking ship," Claude told himself with a chuckle, looking at the screen on the register he'd been incredibly familiar with all morning and seeing his sweat-covered reflection in its screen. "I don't see any of us making it to the end of the year if that's what we're working with." He glanced up right as the front door opened, and a slender woman walked in, her arms full of textbooks that looked to be on the verge of slipping. Without thinking too much about where he was and how he should be acting, he hoist himself over the countertop and rushed to help her, bending down in front of her stack of books and offering an arm. "Looks like you're about to lose some of your light reading materials."
"Funny, but thank you," she said, not looking at whoever was helping her due to the size of what she was holding. "I'll take the closest table, if you can help me there." Together they were able to get her and her books to a low table right by the door, and the moment Claude pulled his hand away the entire pile fell with many thuds onto the wooden surface, him cringing at what he'd seemed to have caused before realizing that he needed to be back in his position. The woman didn't even look in his direction when she could have, until he was back behind the counter and staring at her with a smile. "Oh, you work here. I didn't realize you weren't just some kind gentleman."
"Sorry about that," he apologized, keeping his smile on his lips as she turned towards him and he saw how cute she was. He might not have had any interest in his coworkers, but customers were fair game. "What can I get for you to drink? Or eat, either's an option."
"Just a cup of water for now, thanks." As she approached the counter she was patting down the pockets of her casual dress pants, looking concerned. "I'll have to run back to the office to get my wallet if I want anything else, seems I forgot it."
Claude punched in the order for a cup of water and watched as the ticket printed, no cost but a drink still needing to be made. "If you need to, I can watch your stuff, bet you're just right down the road with how much you were carrying," he said, as he handed the ticket to Hilda, her rolling her eyes until she saw how simple the request was. "Do you want to do that now, or later?"
"I'm not up for going back on campus quite yet," the woman replied, her voice flat as she waited to get her cup of water, Claude's eyes narrowing as he tried to make sense of what that meant. After Hilda handed her the drink with a forced grin, the woman gave Claude a thankful nod and went back to her table, setting the drink on the edge as she began reorganizing the pile of books she'd brought with her.
He couldn't take his eyes off of her as she worked, getting the books into some semblance of an organized stack before she pulled out a journal from inside the lone binder she had with her and began writing in it. There was something about this woman that he wasn't sure of, and he wanted answers. Before he could leave his post again to talk to her, Leonie came out of the kitchen and motioned for him to follow her, which he did with his eyes constantly flickering over to the woman at her table. "How would you say today went? Someone has to let Hanneman know how things are going and I figured as acting manager that I'd do it today, so no one else has to."
"It went fine." His entire rehearsed response to that question had evaporated into thin air, the mysterious woman taking too much of his focus for him to be able to think about how rough the day had actually been. Leonie, noticing that Claude's attention was elsewhere, turned her head to see where his eyes were focusing, and when she saw the woman she was right back to looking at him, displeasure in her gaze. "W-what's that look for, Leonie? Just because I'm not ordering off the menu doesn't mean I can't browse, does it?"
"Sure it doesn't, but that's not the problem here. Do you know who that is?"
It was a question that Claude was not prepared to hear, and his answer proved it. "Our newest regular, some book-loving lady from the college?"
"She's not just 'some lady', Claude, she's Byleth Eisner, the daughter of former freelancer supreme Jeralt Eisner and one of the newest professors at the College of Arts and Education here in Garreg Mach. How do you not know who she is?" Just to check herself, Leonie gave the woman a second look, and confident in her read on who she was she gently punched Claude's shoulder. "You don't mess with her, she's not like her father but she could still destroy you in one word."
"I don't think she's going to need any words to destroy me, if we're being honest," Claude said with a sly smile, earning another punch from Leonie's dagger-like fist. "Okay, okay, I'll leave her alone, if only because you seem to have a thing for her father and I don't want to become your stepson-in-law."
Her face becoming bright red, Leonie sputtered, "Her dad's dead, Claude. He was my mentor before he passed."
Having completely misunderstood why Leonie was so passionate there, Claude felt bad, but what was done was done and he couldn't take back his words. "Sorry about that, didn't have any idea he had that role to you. I'll leave Byleth alone for you, though, promise."
"I didn't say you have to leave her alone, I just said don't mess with her." Winking, Leonie backed away from him and started back towards the kitchen. "I'm going to be talking about today with everyone else now, don't do anything stupid while I'm gone."
He gave her two thumbs up as she walked away, and now without her distracting him he was able to slip back to his other distraction and headed right over to Byleth's table, where she had propped open one of her textbooks and was writing notes from it. "So, uh, heard from a friend that you're a new professor here? How'd you manage that?"
"Not really sure, I was student teaching at a different school last year and then the headmaster personally invited me to teach here." Not looking up from her note-taking, Byleth continued, "Why are you asking me this? Interested in taking one of my classes?"
"Can't really say that I am," Claude replied after actually looking at the books and seeing that they were all on different theories of writing and literature. "Never was a reading sort of guy, my degree's in public speaking and how to command large groups."
"And yet you work in a coffee shop?" Byleth asked, finally looking up from the notebook to see Claude drawing a chair next to her. "How interesting. Those degrees really don't take you anywhere, do they?"
He couldn't help but laugh at her dry humor and the way she asked her questions so flatly, as if they meant nothing to her at all. "I'll be finishing it next year, this is the last class I've got to take for it." Cue Byleth looking at him with uncertainty, and he realized that she was a new professor and wouldn't be familiar with the horrors of the class known as Practical Business. "I work here for a business course. Not my choice, the professor who runs it wanted me and pulled some strings to get it to count as my big, daunting senior seminar, but I'd rather be working in here than sitting in a stuffy classroom all day."
"I can understand that, my formal education happened outside of classrooms as well." Now that she was clued in to why this man was where he was (although it didn't explain why he was sitting right next to her), she went back to focusing on her notes. "I have a lot of work to do, getting prepared for my class tomorrow, so if you don't mind, I would like to be left alone now. Thank you."
The politeness was appreciated, but being told to leave was not, although Claude did it without a hint of considering any other options. "I'll leave you to it, Professor Eisner," he told her as he got to his feet, seeing her whole body stiffen up at the title. "Feel free to take me up on my offer, though. I'll watch your stuff if you want more than some water."
She didn't reply, but he didn't expect her to when she was already engrossed in whatever she was taking notes about. Slightly defeated, but incredibly curious to know more about this woman, Claude went back behind the counter and took his position at the register just in time for another customer to come in, and for a while he was able to get back into the working mindset. However, every time the place cleared out and he could stare over at Byleth and her mountain of work, he had to resist trying to make his move with her again. It was bizarre, he'd come into Practical Business expecting it to be nothing but work and paying off the favor of being enrolled without papers stating his citizenship in Fódlan or elsewhere, and now he was focused on one blue-haired professor who seemed friendly enough, but too busy to talk too much.
How he hoped that the next time their paths crossed, it would be with less books in between his hand and her heart.
A/N: this is written for the FE3H AU Big Bang! I'll be posting more of it this weekend! C:
also please do not question my major breaking with canon, I have a reason I swear.
