Mysterious Black Coffee Dude (One-Shot) (Coffee Shop AU) (Zoethian)

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Every day he came in at the same time, ordered a black coffee in as few words as possible and sat in the same seat, staring out the window silently. Occasionally he would get out a notepad and write for a while, but most of the time he just sat and stared out the window. Zoeya often tried to imagine what he was thinking about, and what it was that he wrote. It helped pass the long shifts.

She was curious about all of the customers, but this man in particular had caught her attention. He didn't have the kind of face that blended into a crowd. He always came in to the cafe with some sort of scarf over the bottom half of his face, and he would lower it slightly to take sips of his drink. Zoeya got the sense that, ideally, he would find some way to drink through the scarf. In the atmospheric light of the cafe, his face was hard to make out, so she didn't know what the scarf was hiding, if anything. But his purple eyes were unimissable. The almost seemed to glow, which Zoeya knew was ridiculous. It all just added the his aura of mystery. All sorts of ideas had crossed her mind in the months that he'd been coming in, always at the same time, always the same place. Maybe he was some sort of magician, or maybe he was some sort of magical being. Or maybe he was just really emo, as Lomadia said. She'd jokingly dubbed him "Mysterious Black Coffe Dude" and it had stuck, as neither of them knew anything else to call him.

Lomadia had noticed Zoeya's fascination with the man not too long after his daily visits began, when ideas and theories about him started coming up more frequently in her daily imagination dump on the bus ride home. Zoeya was taking a writing class, and she'd always had a wild imagination, so Lomadia had suggested that she use the customers for inspiration. But this, Lomadia knew, was different. Zoeya wasn't just using him for inspiration. It was more than that. And if Zoeya didn't do something about it soon, Lomadia was going to get involved for her.

It was a frosty January day and the cafe was open for the first time that year. Zoeya and Lomadia had had to grab onto each others arms several times on the short walk from the bus stop to the small cafe on one of the side streets of the town to stop themselves from slipping on the icy pavement. As they took their coats off in the staffroom and tied on their aprons, both girls shivered at the cold air of the empty cafe that would soon be warmed by a steady flow of people.

Having worked at the cafe for several years, pretty much as soon as she was old enough to get a job, Zoeya knew many of the regular customers and would chat to them as she served them. Often towards the end of their shifts, her and Lomadia's friends would come in to have a drink while they wait for them so they could go out together.

Once everything was ready for the day, Lomadia flipped over the sign in the window to tell passers by that they were open. Within a few minutes, a couple of women hurried in from the cold and approached the counter, where the two girls stood chatting. A woman with sleek dark hair in a neat bob and piercing blue eyes started to talk to Lomadia, and the other woman approached Zoeya.

"Hello Zoeya!" A chubby middle aged woman with ginger curls beamed at her "How are you? Its rather cold isn't it?"

"Oh gosh Mrs Dew, it is freezing out there! I'm glad to not have to go out for a few hours at least. Gingerbread hot chocolate as usual?" Zoeya tilted her head slightly as she asked, and her fringe fell into her eyes. Mrs Dew gave an affirmative murmur and Zoeya turned away to make the drink.

If she had bothered to push her hair back behind her ear at that moment she may have noticed that a man wearing a dark coat with a wooly purple scarf covering his face had entered, which on a cold day like that seemed almost reasonable. It could almost have been a normal day, but a quick glance at the large clock on the wall would tell you that the time was 9:14, and this specific man was not normally there until 11:00. Adding to the unusual nature of this day was the fact that when Lomadia noticed his early arrival she handed the tall woman she had been serving her drink and promptly span around and disappeared into the staffroom even though she wasn't due a break for another two hours.