Erwin comes in a few days later on a Monday morning, right at seven on the dot, as Levi is still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and halfheartedly tucking in his shirt and creasing his collar. His toaster had given him a particular bad burn, and he'd grumbled the whole subway ride over, cradling his burnt thumb in his other hand and scowling at anybody who happened to look at him in just the slightest off way.

Levi, however, does find his day brightening marginally when Erwin bursts through the coffee shop's front door, sending the bells jingling violently. He looks worse than Levi currently feels, minus the homicidal toaster, his dress shirt untucked and wrinkled, the collar falling down on one side, and the buttons done up wrong. Levi almost laughed at the way Erwin looked at him despairingly as he approached the counter, his hair messy and falling over one eye, and he had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from giggling at how absurd he looked.

"I want whatever the strongest thing you have is," Erwin said, fumbling in his pocket and extracting a rather crumpled $5. "And then make two of them."

Levi arched a questioning eyebrow at him, and Erwin huffed a sigh and rolled his blue eyes at Levi before reaching out and pressing his palms against the bill, frowning as he smoothed out the wrinkles and creases. Levi had to fight back a smile as he plucked the now relatively smooth bill from beneath Erwin's palms and tucked it into the cash register before turning to the espresso machine and sliding a white porcelain cup beneath the drip. Erwin's footsteps clacked away, and he turned to watch him practically fling himself into a seat in the corner before pulling his black messenger bag onto his lap and rifling through it, pulling out a mess of papers and slapping them on the black granite tabletop. Levi watched as he ran his hands through his hair, tugging at the strands in the back - why were they a slightly darker colour than the rest? Levi wondered - in despair, making them stick straight out from his head and making him look like a rather distressed chicken. Levi snickered to himself as he pulled the first cup out from under the drip and stuck another one in.

Levi set Erwin's two espresso doppios to the side before taking a small shot from the machine and pouring it into a cup with a healthy amount of milk. Carefully balancing the three items in his hands, he wandered over to the table where Erwin sat, tugging at his hair with one hand while the other frantically scribbled through the papers, leaving smatterings of red ink all over the sleeves of his shirt and the backs of his hands.

"My God, my God, I can't even read this, what does it say, it's like reading Arabic," Erwin was muttering under his breath. He jumped as Levi sat down in the seat across from him, his wrist jerking and setting red streaking all the way through a paragraph. Levi set his espresso doppios in front of him with two satisfying, solid thunks before resting his chin in one hand and cradling his coffee milk with the other, his gaze wandering over the handwritten papers.

"Grading?" he asked, as Erwin picked up a white porcelain cup - but my God his hands really were huge, or maybe espresso cups had just gotten tinier from the day before - and drained the glass in one swallow.

"Oh my God," Erwin spluttered, choking and coughing. "What the hell is that?" he asked, looking up at Levi. "My heart just skipped about ten beats."

Levi shrugged, taking another sip of his coffee milk. "You wanted the strongest thing we offered, so I made you doppios." Levi looked at the other, still-full porcelain cup by Erwin's hand. "You're probably okay to drink that. I don't know how much caffeine is needed to send a person into cardiac arrest, but a quadruple shot probably won't do you in. I know CPR, though, in that unlikely event. At any rate, you'd better drink that. I'm sure as hell not going to, it's way too disgusting. It's worse cold, too."

Erwin glared at the cup as though it were completely to blame for his current misery before reaching out and tipping it into his mouth. Levi watched the smooth lines of his throat with fascination, the Adam's apple bobbing up and down. Erwin grimaced as he set the cup down, shuddering at the bitter taste, and returned to rifling through the papers and scrawling across them in red ink. Levi sighed and curled up in his armchair, closing his eyes and breathing in the soft, sweet scent of his coffee milk, listening to Erwin mumbling under his breath and trying to get himself mentally motivated for the morning rush, which was due to start any minute now.

"This is either the best allegory I've ever read or the worst one," Erwin muttered. "Hey, do you know anything about Norse mythology?"

Levi plucked the paper out from under Erwin's pen, squinting at the writing - it really was like trying to read Arabic - and taking a few moments to read through the paragraph where Erwin's markings ended. He took a sip of his coffee milk, read the next sentence, and then almost spat it out all over the page with a laugh.

"Are you all right?" Erwin asked, concerned. "Are you choking?" When Levi didn't reply, coughing, Erwin reached over the table, grasping him by the shoulders and shaking. "Blink twice if you're dying," Erwin said frantically, "I don't know CPR so if you need an ambulance I'm going to need to know right now."

Levi pushed him away, still gasping for breath, his eyes filled with merry tears and his cup of coffee milk dangerously close to spilling all over the floor. Once he'd got his breath back, he looked across the table at Erwin, who still looked terribly worried about Levi's close brush with death, and dissolved into laughter all over again.

"Oh, God," he said, still giggling a bit as he wiped his eyes and handed the paper back to Erwin. "You're not very in tune with the times, are you?"

Erwin arched a thick eyebrow at him in confusion. It was rather quite interesting how his eyebrows were brown, Levi thought to himself, considering that his hair was mostly blonde...or maybe he dyed it, and his roots just happened to be showing? Levi too had gone through that phase in his life before he realised that bleaching black hair more often than not turned it a hideous shade of orange. "I wouldn't consider Norse mythology part of 'the times,'" Erwin said, making air quotation marks with his fingers.

Levi bit his tongue to stop himself from having another laughing fit.

"Well, your student there," he said, snorting, "wrote a lovely synopsis of Thor: The Dark World." At his confused look, Levi elaborated: "It's a superhero movie that came out last year."

Erwin looked positively distraught, and tangled his fingers in his hair, tugging on it some more and making even more strands stick up in disarray. It took all of Levi's willpower to keep from laughing at him, or from taking out his mobile and snapping a picture to post on Instagram under the tag #badhairday.

"Oh my God," Erwin whispered, looking off into the distance, "oh my God," he breathed, burying his face in his hands, "I stayed up all night researching obscure Norse gods and goddesses for this?" When he pulled his hands away, Levi had to look away, nearly biting through his lip to stave off his laugh; the streaks of ink on Erwin's hands had managed to smudge all over his cheeks like blush gone wrong, and Levi was seriously contemplating doing an under-the-table candid shot to post on Instagram under the tag #badmakeover, but the man looked so much like a kicked puppy that he decided against it.

The bell behind them rang, and Levi looked over to find the first of the suited executives spilling through the doorway to get their morning lattes before work. He stretched, lounging in his armchair for a few more luxurious moments, before taking Erwin's empty cups and standing up.

"I can't honestly say I know too much about Norse mythology," he said, and Erwin looked up at him, "but the Roman demigod of coffee is named Levi."

"How interesting," Erwin replied, "but I guess it would make sense for you to know that, being that you work here and all..." He trailed off, looked forlornly down at his papers again, and Levi resisted the urge to pat down his hair before he turned on his heel and walked back to the counter to start his day.