Chapter Text
The morning after the staff and assorted customers of Lionheart Coffee Co. had vanquished the ill tides of rent-paying, a newcomer arrived at the shop. She spent several moments staring at the signs pasted onto the door— an assortment of show flyers, tutoring ads, and friendly pictures of the workers and clientele— and then squinted at a piece of paper in her hand. Only Perceval was awake and un-hungover enough to notice her. Because he was Perceval, he didn’t say anything.
She swung the door open. A few customers, mainly those who had elected to simply stay the night and avail themselves of ready coffee in the morning, glanced up at her, but all in all she was unobtrusive. Gripping her slip of paper in one hand, she marched up to the counter. “Hi,” she said, “is this the coffeeshop owned by Arthur Pendragon?”
Perceval considered this. “I think so,” he said eventually. “Can I sell you a coffee?”
“That’d be great,” she said, tapping her fingers on the counter. She cast her eyes around the shop, considering. It wasn’t a particularly flattering sight; there were bedraggled party streamers hanging from the rafters and, interestingly, a chessboard placed reverentially in the middle of the floor like an altarpiece. “Did you guys have an event here yesterday or something?” “Yep!” said Perceval, grinning.
“Looks like it got a bit crazy,” she commented.
Perceval nodded seriously. “A cautionary tale not to partake in the water and fruit of the Devil.”
This was a lot for 9 in the morning. After taking a second to parse the sentence, she decided she did not want to know exactly what it meant, or indeed if it was delivered in seriousness. “That sounds fun,” she said instead. “Can I-- can I get something sweet? What’s a sweet coffee?” Perking up at that, Perceval gestured enthusiastically to the blackboard behind him. On it, in a handwriting that vascillated between epitaph and introductory job training manager named Brandy, were written the specials of the week.
“Could I get a hazelnut one?” she said. It seemed the least threatening.
“Could I get money?” said Perceval, holding out a hand.
She passed him a few bills. “Are you a student?”
“I’m trying,” said Perceval, with a certain measure of pathetic peppiness. “I’m Perceval. What’s your name?” “I’m Claire. Distant family of the owner’s, trying to reconnect, you know how it is. No better time to track down relatives than a gap year, right?” “Right,” said Perceval, who only had family in the sense that a stray puppy adopted by a group of very angry baristas might. Giving her a confused but friendly smile, he turned and began to fiddle with various items that presumably could produce something resembling coffee.
Claire leant on the counter. “So do you know how I could track down Arthur? I’ve never met him and he doesn’t have any social media I can find.”
“He’s out hiking,” said Perceval. This was, it seemed, always the case. “His wife should be in sometime this week, I think she was coming back early for a conference. How long are you staying?” Then, before waiting for her to answer: “You seem nice. I think you should stay a long time.”
Claire took this disarmingly friendly statement with considerable grace considering she had never before had a Perceval encounter. “That’s sweet of you. The town seems lovely, I might stick around a couple weeks. Especially if I can reconnect with Arthur. Oh, thanks.” This last was for the coffee, which he handed to her at a worrying temperature. She barely managed to avoid spilling it on her button-up. “What are you studying?”
“Astrophysics,” Perceval said, trying to balance the tip jar on top of one of the counter’s multiple mini pride flags and failing, sending coins and bills cascading over the floor. “Oh, no. Oh no, oh no, oh no. I am a gerbil in the eyes of God.”
Unsure how to respond to this, Claire helped him gather up the spare change, resisting the inexplicable urge to pocket some. “What happened here?” she asked. The cafe looked like a very sparkly whirlwind had passed through it. Most of the sparkles appeared to be from decorations and the like, but there were several items of glittery clothing discarded in unobtrusive locations around the room. Claire elected not to mention this; it would probably be considered rude to show up at a distant relative’s shop unannounced and then point out their FDA violations.
“A celebratory occasion of merriment,” said Perceval solemnly. “We successfully staged a--”
“--absolutely smashing neighbourhood get-together!” a voice cut in from just behind her. It was the sort of voice one might hear on an overly peppy 6 AM talk show. Claire spun around out of shock and saw a face that, for all its charms, looked less like a sunny radio personality and more like a warning poster for the dangers of higher academia. The man’s curly hair was wild, his eye bags were so dark that it was unclear whether he was sleep deprived or had been punched in each eye, and his smile was disconcertingly wide.
“Oh-- sorry,” she said, moving aside to let him order. He looked like he needed the coffee.
“No worries, no worries,” he said, stepping up to the counter. “Hey, Perce. Twenty shots of vanilla and six things of sweetener, fifteen shots of espresso. Nothing else.”
Both Perceval and Claire gaped in horror. “If Kay finds out I gave that to you, he’ll kill me,” said Perceval.
“Ten shots of hazelnut and extra caramel, and a big fuck you to Kay,” said the man, grinning even wider. He looked moderately unhinged, and Claire felt an instantaneous liking towards him.
“Pulled an all-nighter?” she guessed.
The man laughed and, fingers jittering over the counter, nodded. “Studied all night for a physiology practical,” he said, and before Claire could process any of those words, stuck out his hand. “Gawain. I haven’t seen you around here before. Welcome to Lionheart, just ignore the coffee.”
“Claire,” she said, shaking his hand and tucking the name away. She risked a sip out of her cup. It was the right temperature, at least.
Perceval glanced at the door behind the counter. “Gawain?”
“Mm?”
“Do you know where Aggravaine is?”
“Mm, no.”
“Only it’s his shift too,” said Perceval belligerently, “and he’s never late.”
“‘M sure he’s fine.”
“He’s never late,” Perceval repeated.
Figuring the conversation had turned to matters that did not include her, Claire drifted over to a barstool at the side of the room and, clutching her mediocre coffee, surveyed the clientele. They were an odd lot. At the table by the window, a well-dressed young man with a menacingly formal haircut sat sipping his tea and reading a book. Across from him, there was a man who, despite the winter morning chill, was wearing only a tanktop with the words “I <3 ROMA” and what appeared to be a pair of cargo shorts with handcuffs hanging from the waistband. Occasionally the ostensible police officer would lean over and peer at the other man’s book, but mainly he was doodling senselessly on a spare napkin.
They were not the only odd duo. Two girls sat on the couch, one of whom was probably asleep, and the other of whom was knitting what looked like an entire tapestry. Somehow she had gotten herself tangled in the yarn, but as the other was leaning on her shoulder, she seemed to have decided freedom was not an option. The click-clack of her needles stood out sharply over the faint ambient noise.
There was also, she noticed, someone passed out on the floor by the far wall. She decided not to comment on this or to question it.
So she sat, nursing Perceval’s attempt at a coffee, breathing in the morning and people watching. There was no better place to do it. Just as the tired-looking man-- Gawain-- stumbled over to the table next to hers and collapsed in a bedraggled heap, the door swung in to admit two others. One of them had the general air of a disgruntled Hot Topic employee, and he leaned over the shoulder of the tank top man to peer at the book his friend was reading. “The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England,” she heard him say from across the room. “How’s that, then?”
His friend perked up. “Wonderful,” he said, “Mayr-Harting is a leading voice in the field.”
“What field is that, then? Nerd Studies?” Raising an eyebrow, Claire snorted into her coffee. Her gap year adventures were already promising much amusement; even if she needed to lurk in Arthur Pendragon’s coffeeshop until he returned from his hike, she would at least be entertained.
“New in town?”
She turned her head. The man at the table beside her, Gawain, had resurfaced from the land of the dead and was regarding her with a questioning gaze. She chuckled. “That obvious? Do I not look like a nice college kid?”
“You look like a nice high school kid,” he said, giving her a quirk of a smile to mitigate the words. “But I know everyone here, and I don’t know you.”
Ah, thought Claire, a character. “I’m from out of town,” she said. “On my gap year. Thought I’d take some time to wander.”
“Wish I’d done that,” he said. “The academic life is certainly best appreciated with a buffer of unstructured chaos. You thinking of coming here?”
“Considering it,” she said, shrugging. “Apps aren’t due for another couple months. Do you like it?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He ran a hand through his hair and only succeeded in making it more distressed. “It’s a great environment, very supportive, you can really do whatever you want. I’m an IR major, econ minor, but I take a lot of classes in all sorts of departments. What are you thinking of studying?”
“Not sure yet,” she said. It was the truth. “I might go into bio, or maybe neuroscience, something like that. Do you know anything about those programs here?”
“Ach, STEM.” He laughed. “I took calc and bio freshman year and vowed never to repeat the experience. I swear, the only people who suffered more than me were my poor professors and anyone who had to sit next to me. The things you do to pass a class…”
This was hardly a rousing endorsement of her interests, and Claire squirmed. “Is university really that hard?”
“Eh, it’s like standardized test classes. But you give less of a fuck and you can send your professors memes.”
“I’ve… never taken a standardized class,” she admitted.
Gawain raised a finger and placed it very carefully in the air as though it was keeping him from falling over. It might have been. He looked like a very tired raccoon. “And you are better off for that,” he pronounced. “I took ten and look how I turned out.” He gestured at himself with one hand. “I think I can taste my thoughts, actually. Can you taste your thoughts? That’s not normal, is it?”
“I don’t have any thoughts to taste,” said Claire. Talking to him was strangely magnetic; she felt an impulse to match his humour. “I chased them out with a broom several years ago.”
He gave her a happy look. “You’re great,” he said, “I hope you stick around. I’d love to chat later but I’m going to take the test for what we in the adult world call Sleeping 301. See you on the other side.” And with that he slammed his head back onto the jacket placed on the table and, to all appearances, exited the realm of consciousness.
Interesting, thought Claire. You try to track down a relative and find all sorts of odd friends along the way. She felt a frisson of excitement: she was on her own again, and the world was hers to explore. Taking another sip of coffee, she closed her eyes and listened to the noises of the morning. The faint burble of conversation from inside the store. Outside, the dry rumble of traffic. Music over the stereo system which upon closer inspection would have proved to be a 12-hour remix of Ra Ra Rasputin-- unbeknownst to Claire, the reason Perceval did so many dishes was that there was an unspoken rule that the dish-washer got to pick the music.
A few patrons entered, ordered and left with their coffee as Claire finished her drink and went to the counter for a refill. Percival took her cup, looking regretful.
“I wanted to refill it for free, since you're new, but Kay would get mad and banish me to the kitchen again. I'm actually not supposed to work the register but-” he leaned slightly over the counter and looked at her, his expression grave.
“You won't tell Kay will you?”
She promised not to tell whoever Kay was, and was handed her refilled cup. As she was going to pay, swearing erupted from behind her, causing her to drop the change as she jumped and whirled around.
Gawain was now awake, and soaking wet. Hot Topic Boy was standing next to him with a now empty glass of water, from which one final drop spilled to land on the table.
“Mordred,” Gawain began slowly, “picture me with a fucking fire hose at 3 am tonight when youre asleep.”
“Aha,” said the man, Mordred, “But that was a decoy. The real me was behind you with a knife.”
Claire laughed, standing at the counter watching this exchange.
“That was a body double. I was outside, locking the door and lighting the gasoline to burn the apartment down around you.”
“Wow, God. Don't be a freak, it's just water.”
Mordred placed the glass on the table, as if implying that this, too, was Gawiains responsibility to clean up.
“Don't worry,” Percival noted cheerily, “he's not really mad.”
“If you actually want to see him mad, ask him about Glencoe,” Mordred noted. Claire, unsure what to do with all this sudden attention, merely nodded thoughtfully. This was apparently sufficient.
“Look, the Campbells are murdering bastards, and I'm supposed to just let it go?” Gawain asked, rising from the table to start blearily cleaning up the remains of whatever had happened the previous night.
“It was 400 years ago, so yes,” Mordred said, returning to where he had been hard at work irritating the student of Nerd Studies in the corner.
“That's nothing. I'm still mad about shit from 500 AD.”
“That's pretty impressive,” Claire said, returning to her seat, change back in her purse.
Gawain bowed like an actor on stage before setting to taking down streamers. She settled in to watch and wait.
The morning progressed in a peaceful manner: Claire sipped her coffee, made small talk with various patrons, listened to the chatter. She had nothing much to do, and it was glorious. There was no schoolwork, no housework, and for once no one yelling at her. Her time was her own.
“What happened to your pants, Priamus?” someone said from across the room. She looked up. It was the man who had until recently been passed out by the far wall. He didn’t look much more alive upright than he had when horizontal.
The man in the tanktop laughed and pulled at the hem of his shorts. “Well, Gawain was gone, so I-- I don’t know, I thought it would look cool? Does it?”
“You look like a harlot,” his friend with the book commented. “I told you this. Yet you did it anyway.”
“You didn’t stop me,” the tank top man pointed out. “You were too caught up in your theologically untenable opinions on the Council of Nicaea.”
“They’re not theologically untenable, you were just too busy turning your pants into a stripper’s outfit to fully appreciate that heresy is--”
“What the fuck did you guys do last night?” cut in the hungover man.
Silence. The man who was maybe named Priamus rubbed the back of his neck. “We had a sleepover,” he said.
“You-- Galahad? Galahad, aren’t-- aren’t you ace?” Galahad’s lips thinned. “Not that kind of sleepover,” he said testily. “He beat me at chess and then we got to talking and he had some unorthodox opinions about the Problem of Evil, and anyway his-- that is-- we couldn’t find Gawain, and his apartment was very far, so we decided to continue our conversation at my place.”
“He gave me a sleeping bag and I turned my pants into shorts and we listened to Heinrich Schütz together,” finished Priamus.
For a moment it looked as if the man who had so valiantly pulled himself from unconsciousness would make a return to it, but then he staggered forward and clasped Priamus on the shoulder. “Right,” he said. “Congrats on, uh, friendship? Whatever deeply weird friendship you guys have formed. Congrats.”
Then he took a step back and half sat, half stumbled into the nearest chair, putting his head in his hands.
“Mordred…. Coffee? Please? Please Mordred coffee?”
Mordred, who had been reluctantly cajoled into sort of helping with the cleanup, did not spare a glance or acknowledgement of this request.
“For your favorite brother?”
“You aren't my favorite brother. Agravaine is my favorite brother, but only by virtue of being not annoying me currently.”
“How's the ranking go?” Gawain asked, ducking behind the counter to get a cup of coffee for the sufferer.
“Agravaine until the moment he enters a room I am also in, Percival,” Mordred ticked them off on his fingers as he went, “Gawain, Gaheris, Gareth. Am I forgetting one? Whatever.”
Gawain nodded, “Alright. Could be worse.”
“Wait, you guys are all brothers?” Claire blurted out.
“Yes,” Gawain said at the same time Mordred said “No,” and Percival said, “Sort of.”
“Me, Agravaine, Gaheris,” Gawain handed the hungover man a cup and gestured to him, “Mordred and Gareth are brothers, and Percival is an honorary addition, but he's not related to us.”
Mordred pointed to himself, “half brother.”
“Where is Agravaine?” Percival wondered aloud again. The rest ignored him, and business went on, Claire only slightly less confused.
While Perceval was wondering where he was and the rest of the world didn’t much care, Aggravaine was asleep. He had drifted into fitful half-dreams sometime past midnight, restless and still wearing his clothes. He was asleep while Gawain was very definitely not going home, he was asleep while Gaheris stumbled around the cafe kitchen looking for a glass of water, he was asleep while Mordred played Detroit in his bedroom far too early in the morning. He was fortunately asleep while Gareth and Lynette had their own party involving far less chess and far more stripping. Most importantly, he was asleep when his alarm rang.
It rang for thirty seconds with a shrill, blaring sound. Just before it set itself to snooze, he flung out a hand and turned it off. Perhaps he thought he was dreaming. Perhaps he didn’t think at all.
The alarm went silent. Aggravaine slept.
Lancelot was in an odd sort of mood that wasn't quite sad and also wasn't quite happy or relieved. It most closely but still inaccurately may be described as an awkward catharsis, a feeling of waking up from something he couldn't put a name to.
Vivian had left early to open the shop, so he was alone in the apartment, and spent a fruitless hour in it wandering back and forth between various rooms, occasionally picking up objects and putting them back down again and opening and closing windows.
But, faced with two equally viable choices- move to the woods, forget human language and become a feral animal, or talk to another actual human being, Lancelot eventually and with some reluctance opted for the second. This was derailed by ten odd minutes of scrolling listlessly through his contacts and being thrown by the existence of other people.
Finally he dialed a number, leaning against the windowsill and looking out on the street below. It rang for several seconds before being picked up, and a voice, thick with disturbed sleep, answered.
“Heya Lance. What’s up? You okay?”
“Uh…” Outside the window, the birds chirped. He took a deep breath. “Yeah. I am. Hey, Cerise-- are you free right now?”