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Someone walks into the shop.
The point of the shop is for people to walk into it, so Kakashi doesn’t look up when the bell dings. It’s only when someone walks into the shop, and the proceeds to walk right up to the counter, that he realizes something is wrong.
Aside from the first few months of the shop opening—quietly, overnight, appearing as though it had always been there—the citizens of Brooklyn had more or less accepted that Hound and Hearth wasn’t a well-maintained store. Nor, really, was it very inclined to serve customers.
The man at the counter seems to have missed the memo. Kakashi looks up from his book only when he feels eyes on him. Though, come to think of it, he doesn’t really look like he’s from around here. Curious.
“Can I… help you?” Kakashi drawls.
“Coffee,” Says the man, tall and lanky under the sweats he’s wearing. His voice is like boulders rubbing off together.
“Well.” A look to the available boxes of tea across the counter. “I’m British, so, we’ve got tea.”
He makes no move to get up from his very comfortable chair.
It would probably be a good idea to have at least one customer this week, after all.
“Please.” The man’s eyes are tired. “I will pay you obscene amounts of money for one, one, coffee.”
“Why did you repeat the ‘one’? And what are you doing in this neighborhood at this time of night?”
Kakashi set Icha Icha aside.
It was after nine. Hound and Hearth wouldn’t be open—as open as it ever gets—except it’s actually nine in the morning in Singapore.
It’s three in the afternoon in Rome, which means there’s two reasons to stay open. It’s not like Kakashi was planning on sleeping. Plus, there are benefits to working in a café/bookstore. Half of it has normal, popular literature and he can special order their stocks to have all his favorite niche porn series.
Under Kakashi’s inspection, the man sighs. He’s got short brown hair, artfully styled into spikes, and looks like he plays rugby for a living—nice, long reach, an economy of motion that suggests he’s all muscle under the fabric—forearms confirm—and the kind of shoulders Kakashi wouldn’t mind hanging onto as he came screaming.
It’s possible niche porn isn’t the best thing to read during a dry spell, short as it may be; or maybe, more likely, random muggles should have better sense than to interrupt his reading.
“I spent four hours staking out a gang banger’s crack den, arrested four prostitutes and two dealers, and chased said gang banger through five blocks of alleys before the stupid fucker tripped and brained himself on a dumpster. I can expect at least another hour and a half dealing with the ambulance and the written reports and debriefing, and I will seriously give you cash money twenty dollars for a single cup of coffee.”
The man—police officer, apparently, and Kakashi sat up straighter in interest before he could stop himself—looked tired just explaining.
“This is the only place within miles that’s open this late. Ther nearest Starbucks closes at ten, which--" He checks his watch, "--would be ten minutes before I can get there, even if I jog.”
Kakashi did not, in fact, have any coffee in the building.
“I’ll see if we have any in the back.” He eye-smiled cheerfully.
So saying, the silver haired man got up from behind the counter and walked through the door. The room behind the counter was, of course, at one point a bakery's kitchen. They'd piled up most of the equipment into the storage closet, unplugged the rest, and expanded the room to three or four times its regular size. Fireplaces wider than most doorways took up half the wall space to the east and west, facing each other and sharing what little wall-space remained with tables, pushed roughly against said walls, and covered with paraphernalia.
Kakashi spent several long moments looking around. He pursed his lips.
Spotting Obito's ridiculously heavy travel cloak spread over one such table, stitching open and halfway-to-mended among potion bottles and haphazardly strown ingredients—with no small amount of scales among them—Kakashi was struck by the perfect solution.
Owl orders took days, apparition was dangerous in his current condition, and Kakashi would rather be stabbed to actual-death with a poisoned blade than visit a muggle supermarket, which would take too long anyway, so Kakashi took some powder and threw it gleefully into the more ornate of the two fireplaces.
He stepped through blue fire and exited the same, into a rather similar room six-thousand miles away. It was as smooth as international Floo trips ever got and he grimaced only slightly at the pulling to his stitches.
Obito was sitting somewhat frumpily on the couch and holding—yes, perfect.
"Late night?" Kakashi approached.
"Shouldn't you be in Brooklyn?" Obito was almost curled around his mug, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. Dark eyes regarded him with casual scrutiny, lingering along his midriff.
"I'm really just stopping by for a quick visit."
Obito did not look amused—except for how he did, a huff of reluctantly-fond air sliding from his nose no matter what his unimpressed eyebrows said. Still, he'd put Kakashi down in a heartbeat if he had to.
"What are you doing here, Kakashi?"
Kakashi was within range and Obito was wary—of the wrong thing. Kakashi let his eyes linger over his shoulder, on one of the workbenches and the various implements being enchanted and explored. Evidence was saved for the main offices, not the waystations, but it was enough to make Obito squint with suspicion.
Quick as a snake, he darted back with Obito's mug in his hands.
"I need this, bye!"
He barely got the handful of powder he'd reserved into the fire before he was, shouting "Hound and Hearth, Brooklyn!"
Obito was halfway across the room and snarling as the Floo activated, roughly depositing Kakashi out on the other side. Fuck.
The coffee, mercifully, barely splashed against the white porcelain edges of the mug. Unfortunately, with the unexpected lunges and less-than-graceful exit from the fireplace, he now felt particularly achy.
Why had Icha Icha tricked him into all this effort, for a probably-exaggerated-by-his-memory pretty face? One he’d never see again after this?
Kakashi shuffled slowly over to a table and summoned two of the extra café mugs from the supply closet. They were dusty.
He cast a cleaning charm, grimaced, and cast it again just to be thorough. Had they ever actually served anything here? Not so long as Kakashi was manning the counter, at least.
(SOP during the first two months and change of service had been to conveniently forget mugs, the tea itself, or even-- a few times-- blandly claimed to have run out of water. They advised customers to try coming back some other time, which got old fast, and the wards gently discouraged them from coming in, to begin with.)
He transfigured one cup into a glass carafe and banished the other to the front of the store. He poured in Obito's coffee and kept up the refilling charm until the whole thing was full. It was still warm, but he threw on a heating charm just in case.
He walked back out, gingerly in deference to the sloshing liquid and his injury.
Horrifically, the customer was both leaning against the counter and much more attractive than Kakashi remembered.
It's fall, so Kakashi prefers to keep the building unseasonably warm. He almost regrets that, now: while before the customer had been sporting a hoodie pushed up to the elbows, now the pale flesh of his forearms stretches up into biceps that should be illegal, neither obscenely bulging nor too slight, hoodie tossed carefully over his shoulder.
Also, his hair was mussed.
Tall, dark and handsome looked up at him, brown eyes fairly listless in a plain, if attractively-shaped face. They lit up as soon as they saw what he was holding, transforming the whole face situation into something stunning. From the average dead-inside New Yorker to startlingly gorgeous.
Fuck.
"Found some in the back of the pantry. No idea what kind, must be my flatmate's, but--" He proffered the carafe. The aroma of dark coffee saturated the air between them.
"I would give a lung." Said the man, though he made no move. Tension seemed to leak from his shoulders, though he hasn't even had a sip.
His gaze moved from the pot to Kakashi, blinking, and some of the longing disappeared. He settled himself, shaking off the misery of his evening as hope warmed his bones, as anticipation licked up his spine, already much more agreeable at the prospect of slaking his thirst—
Kakashi needed to stop reading so much. Probably. His head was dizzy with adjectives he just didn’t use in real life. Somewhere in Rome, Rin was laughing her ass off in the middle of a stake-out, and probably had a good idea why.
"Would be a damn shame if Coffey Street had a coffee shop with no coffee." He said, quirking a smile.
Kakashi’s heart beat faster in his chest.
"The street name's why we set up shop here," Kakashi lied easily, agreeing. "Here, I won't even charge you the full twenty."
He whipped the clean mug—quite large-- from under the counter and filled it to the top. "Sorry to say we don't have to-go cups, though."
The detective grimaced briefly. Kakashi slid the cup and saucer over. The customer’s frown smoothed out as he got both hands around the cup and brought it reverently up to his mouth. For a moment he didn't even sip, just let the moist air and caffeinated smell assault his face.
“I’m Kakashi.” He finds himself saying, like an idiot. He didn’t even use a fake name.
“You don’t have a nametag,” The customer points out, some sort of detective training peaking through. Kakashi hums, wondering if it’s any kind of similar to the hit-wizard training they received. Surely there’d be some level of overlap in the deductive reasoning, if nothing else?
“We’re not usually open this late.” He deflects, then smiles wide. “And the owner doesn’t put much stock in that kind of thing.”
The man accepts that easily enough, dipping his mouth to the cup in complete obliviousness to Kakashi’s mounting dread.
He was already grasping at straws to connect them, and he didn’t even know the guy’s name. The long line of his throat moves in a long, deliberate swallow as he takes his first sip. A soft, involuntary moan sounds and Kakashi has to triple check that it wasn't him being thirsty out loud.
No, just the customer. He finished swallowing but Kakashi could see his pulse work at his throat, the little thump-thump-thump of healthy blood, and had to quickly shove down the inconvenient instincts of the warm-blooded reptile he turns into.
“Momochi.” A gruff voice interrupts his insanity. Kakashi’s head whips back to him. “Momochi Zabuza.”
Zabuza.
It’s like the world stutters and reorients. Zabuza’s hair is dark with the misting, half-ass rain outside; Zabuza’s biceps draw Kakashi’s eye like a steak to the starving man; Zabuza lifts warm, amused brown eyes to watch him from across the counter.
Obito has a meeting with the Singapore MLE in fifteen minutes—likely the only reason he hadn’t stumbled through the Floo after him shouting “BakashI!” at the top of his lungs—and Rin’s going to be busy watching her prey for at least six more hours.
He can’t—as much as he wants to—offer Momochi Zabuza hours of conversation, picking apart the details of his life until Kakashi feels like he’s known him for days, months, years. It feels like he knows less than nothing about him and for some reason the thought is infuriating. He can’t invite the man to his apartment in the building, even if the wards allowed him to see the steps going up in the first place; he can’t even offer to walk Zabuza back to the police station for some casual conversation—or to share an umbrella, given the sudden turn of the weather?—so the man can have a brief respite from his shitty day before he is buried under the aforementioned paperwork.
He’s got to stay right here, nursing a healing bite wound from last week’s manticore-trafficking bust, and man the headquarters.
And also possibly renew the very-slight muggle repelling wards, but then—well, it’s not like he could just owl Zabuza.
For a moment he entertains a hair-brained scheme of figuring out how to work a muggle mobile phone, but that makes a voice in his head—sounding eerily like Ibiki—sit up and start cussing about OPSEC and exploding muggle tech.
He chases solutions around like a dog, frustratingly coming up empty, as Zabuza drinks his cup down in quick, yet clearly appreciative, sips.
“Ah, fuck—I needed that.” His dark eyes lift up to Kakashi’s. “You sure you don’t need the lung?”
His lips quirk up into a broad, crooked grin and Kakashi might, actually, need a lung because the ones he has are clearly deficient, breath catching somewhere south of his throat.
“Nah.” Kakashi leans forward on the counter with an ease he doesn’t feel. “It’s on the house.”
Zabuza’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Then he snorts. “Really wasn’t on your menu, huh? You sure? I can definitely pay.”
“The company was worth it.” Kakashi finds himself saying, much more honestly than he’d expected to admit. Fuck.
Zabuza’s brows do a little twitch at that, a much more subtle sign of how unexpected he found the admission. Kakashi buries a wince, but Zabuza’s lips part a little and he licks the bottom one, and suddenly that’s all Kakashi can pay attention to.
Brown eyes take in Kakashi as if in a whole new light.
“Huh.” The man huffs. “Well, my shift ends—god, fuck, sometimetonight, if I’m lucky—” A brief grimace—“And then I’m sleeping for twelve hours, but after that…”
Don’t offer your number, don’t offer your number, Kakashi chants internally, already girding his loins to march down to a phone shop and confound his way through it.
Some inherent career-related wariness to hand out his personal number to a stranger must strike, robbing the idea from Zabuza’s head before it can fully form. Kakashi leans forward on his elbows, helplessly eager.
“When’s your next shift?” Zabuza asks, hesitant and a touch awkward. Kakashi’s entire spine melts. “I can meet you here at the end of it and we can go for a walk, or something. I’d say ‘a cup of coffee’ but—”
“Like I said, I’m a brit.” Kakashi grins at him, delighted at the way his tan skin darkens in a blush. “Not really my choice of poison.”
He inclines his head toward the carafe, then picks it up in offer. Zabuza makes a truly pained expression, looking brokenly at his empty mug.
“Fuck it.” He says, holding out the porcelain. Kakashi fills it. Somehow it feels intimate, connected, the weight of the carafe decreasing as Zabuza keeps the cup balanced in midair. Something zings through Kakashi.
He imagines Zabuza is full of sparks, and zings, and he’s wide awake but already dreaming of the man’s lips touching his muscles in erotic, sensual ways, trailing electricity in their wake.
This is ridiculous.
“We’ll be here.” He says, belatedly. “That is—I’ll be here. Every day this week. We’re open weird hours this week because. Reasons. I should get off, um—”
What day is it?
“Wednesday, at around eleven.”
“PM?” Zabuza asks.
Kakashi does a quick mental calculation. Rin, at least, will have finished her assignment for good or ill by that time.
“In the morning.” He’s quick to reassure. “It’s a half shift.”
Zabuza’s ear-tips blush red like a house elf’s and Kakashi is oddly charmed.
“I’ll be here.” He confirms.
He checks his watch, almost unconsciously, and then startles when the time registers. He cusses harshly, eyes whipping up a second later back to Kakashi.
“It’s a date.” He confirms, firmly, and then almost apologetically chugs his fresh cup. Kakashi once more watches the line of his throat, head tipped back to facilitate the rapid swallowing. He rests his chin on his hand and enjoys the site of it.
It’s illegal in twelve different ways but Kakashi contemplates sticking a tracking charm on his shoes, or something. He’s never been so affected by someone in his first minutes meeting them. Part of his brain—the greedy, dragon part—is saying damn all their responsibilities in favor of following him home like a stray dog.
To Kakashi, who’s comprised mostly of a loyalty, stubbornness and a frankly impressive-if-he-does-say-so-himself work ethic, it’s a stunning thought. He frequently works such dedicated hours that Obito has to threaten to stun him to leave work for the day, so the odd compulsion to abandon everything for one man is incredibly unusual.
It’s so interesting.
“Until Wednesday,” He finds himself saying, in a parody of a goodbye, as Zabuza sets the cup down on the counter.
Zabuza offers him a quick, relieved grin.
“Yeah. See you then.” He gathers himself, steels his shoulders, and turns to leave the shop. Kakashi is met with his first glimpse of the man’s ass and has to grip the counter harshly to avoid embarrassing himself by vaulting over it or something equally as foolish.
His mind paints a vivid image of grabbing the man and dipping him for a dramatic, fairy-tail kiss. What is going on? Scales curl over themselves rhythmically as his animagus spirit shifts in his soul, possessive and close to the surface.
Mine, thinks the dragon in him. Mine!
He takes a deep breath, allowing his white-knuckled grip to ease. This bears looking into, clearly. He watches Zabuza leave the shop with baited breath, until—right as his hand touches the door—he looks back and offers a parting smile.
Kakashi smiles back, helpless, and offers a dim-witted little wave.
As soon as the door closes behind him, Kakashi collapses onto the counter. His stitches ache. He feels like he got run over by a Pegasus. His pulse is racing, heart thudding in his chest, and his face feels so warm he could be feverish.
Or stupidly, improbably attracted to someone he just met, well beyond the bounds of reason. He looks forward to his teammate’s return, if only so he can go on this date and nail down whatever was possessing him—or let Zabuza nail him down, repeatedly, until Kakashi gets this out of his system.
Now able to think, he realizes with some dismay that it’s only Monday.
He has entire days to waste thinking of this, anticipating, and working himself up about it. He resolves to spend as much time as physically possible absorbed in the Icha Icha series so he doesn’t have to think about anything, at all, except the plot.
He eyes fall to the cheerfully steaming coffee pot and the used mug, cleaning both of them with an absent flick and sending them back to storage.
But first-- Kakashi whips some parchment out of his dimensional store and summons a fresh quill to write with-- he sets about ordering some of the fanciest, most expensive coffee the magical world has to offer.