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Noctis stares blankly at the woman yelling at him, feeling faintly concerned about her blood pressure. Her face is red, like, redder than he’s ever even seen Prompto get. He doesn’t even know what her problem is. All he’d done was tell her what he’d been told the issue was, and she’d just started going off on him. And, oh, now she’s insulting him. Awesome. Does she even realize who she’s yelling at?
“Do you want to talk to the pharmacist or something?” Noctis asks when she finally pauses to take a breath. “I’m just a cashier. Ma’am.”
The woman’s face starts turning purple. That can’t be healthy. “You’re the prince!” she screeches, pointing at his name tag. “Why don’t you just fix this?”
Damn, she does know who he is. “Uh, I don’t control the insurance companies?” Noctis tries hopefully. “I can’t make them do anything. I don’t even know how they work.”
“Oh, typical royalty. You’re completely useless!” And she goes off into another long diatribe about something or other that Noctis can’t be bothered to pay attention to. He’s not getting paid enough for this. He doubts anybody gets paid enough.
At least the pharmacist finally takes pity on him and comes up to the counter, trying to get the lady to move to another window so Noctis can take care of the rest of the line. Not that she’ll move, of course, because how dare she have to get out of line and something, something, he doesn’t care. The pharmacist shoos him away and Noctis sidles silently over to the other register, wary of catching her attention again. He smiles at the next customer in line, and the old man shakes his head as he limps up.
“No satisfying some people, eh?” the guy says, leaning his cane against the counter. “You know, in my day we respected the Crown, not like these kids, eh?”
Noctis forces his smile to stay out of sheer force of will as the man continues rambling in between giving his identifying information. It’d be a quick transaction if the guy could just figure out how to work a debit machine, but instead he’s writing out a check and complaining about computers. It takes forever, or at least it feels like forever.
The next lady comes up with a baby in her cart. Noct feels relieved for about a half a second before the baby turns big, curious eyes on him. And immediately starts bawling.
“I didn’t even do anything,” Noctis whines to himself.
“Oh, she’s always like this,” the lady says over her kid’s screaming, then proceeds to ignore the baby entirely to give Noctis her information. Noctis grits his teeth and grabs the bag as fast as possible, but the lady doesn’t start looking for her card until after he’s rung everything up. Of course she can’t find it, laughing and saying that she’d just used it at some other store and where could she possibly have put it? She empties her entire purse on the counter before pulling it out of “the wrong pocket” in her wallet, swipes the card, and then starts reorganizing her purse. Right there. On his counter. With three people in line behind her. And the baby doesn’t stop screaming the entire time.
Noctis officially hates all retail jobs ever. He’d rather be in school. He’d rather be in a meeting. Maybe if he was in a meeting he could try his hand at convincing people the minimum wage needs to be raised to something sensible. Like, at least twice as much as it is now. It’d almost be worth getting yelled at all day for.
“Hey, Steve’s finally shown up. You can go ahead and take a break when you’re done with her,” the pharmacist tells him as the woman crumples a couple of receipts and leaves them on the counter. “But make sure you’re back in exactly fifteen this time, okay?”
“Sure, thanks,” Noctis says, sweeping the receipts into his trash can. When he looks up, Steve is greeting the next customer with a much nicer smiler than Noctis will ever be able to manage again. Noctis pats Steve’s shoulder on his way out. “Good luck.”