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Moving back home had been the right choice. Her mother had needed support through her rough patch with Chad and Aunt Regina’s bar needed help after Remy quit, and if Robin was honest with herself, she was a little exhausted after three years straight of traveling. It was comforting to come home to the same place every night.
It had become clear pretty quickly, however, that place couldn’t be her mom’s place. She didn’t need to put the whole world between her and Zelena anymore, but she did need her own space.
So she found a small one bedroom that was a ten minute walk from Regina’s and a fifteen minute walk from her mom’s apartment. And she found that she liked having a routine of walking to work. It gave her a reason to explore the parts of her neighborhood that she hadn’t been to in a while, see the new places that had opened since she moved away. About three weeks in, she stopped at one of them for breakfast - a café called Tiana’s.
There were only two people in the café, which wasn't surprising. Robin's regular shift didn't start until eleven thirty, so she usually ate breakfast somewhere between ten and ten thirty, right around most places mid-morning lull. In the corner was a man reading his newspaper and breaking off pieces of a croissant bit-by-bit, and then at the register there was a woman who looked about Robin’s age. She had wavy blonde hair and bright blue eyes and was wearing a green army jacket under her apron. When she saw Robin, she pasted on a smile and said a little too loudly, “Hello, and welcome Tiana’s, home of the best coffee and bonuts - I mean, beignets and donuts, in Seattle! How can I help you?”
“That’s quite a claim,” Robin said as she walked up to the counter. “I’ve been to New Orleans, so I’ve had some pretty top tier beignets,” she paused and looked at the woman’s name tag, “Alice."
“Tiana’s are still the best, I swear,” Alice said earnestly and even louder. She had a British accent like Robin's mom, but warmer, less precise. “They’re absolutely amazing, I promise.”
“I’m just teasing. I’m sure they’re great - they definitely look great,” Robin said, looking at the ones arranged neatly behind the glass.
Alice laughed, her shoulders lowering an inch or two like she’d been holding them too stiff. “It’s my first shift on my own, I’m a little nervous,” she admitted at a more normal volume. “And if you want to come back later, they’ll be even better when Tiana’s back for the lunch rush when she makes ‘em hot.”
“I’ll have to do that sometime, but I have to be there for the lunch crowd at my aunt’s bar. Just to serve, though, I can’t cook at all."
“I’m not great at it either,” Alice confided. “We had a bit of a trial run. Tiana says I’m great with sales and customers and I make an excellent cup of tea if I do say so myself, but I’m not allowed near the oven or the fryers without supervision. But I did make this.” She pointed at a beignet at the back of the display. “It’s heart shaped.”
“Like a real heart. Cool.” Robin smiled helplessly when Alice beamed at her. “That’s what I want, then, the heart shaped beignet. And one of those ham and cheese croissants and a small chai tea, please.”
“Coming right up!” Alice turned and started back towards the coffee machines, then spun back around and said, “Oh, wait, I’m s’posed to ask your name for the tea.”
“It’s, uh, Robin,” she said a bit awkwardly and slurred together, thrown by Alice’s sudden spin.
“Got it!” Alice said, practically skipping off to fill her order. Robin tried not to find it adorable, and failed.
A minute or two later, Alice slid the bag with the beignet and croissant over the counter to Robin, then the cup with her tea. Robin picked it up without paying much attention, then did a double take.
“Nobin,” she read, turning a confused look at Alice.
“Did I spell it wrong?” Alice asked, peering at the cup anxiously.
And Robin was going tell her yes, that she had of course spelled her name wrong, because who was named Nobin - but then Alice turned her big blue eyes filled with worry up at Robin and she found herself saying, “No, no you didn’t. It's perfect.”
Which would have been fine, if she hadn't kept coming back.
*
Robin did try to explain the mix-up a few times to Alice, as she came into Tiana’s more and more, and as Alice seemed increasingly comfortable with her job. But there was always some reason not to, like too many other customers being around or Alice would start talking about something she was passionate about, art or reading or her favorite bookshop or the troll under the bridge, and Robin was too enchanted to interrupt. And the longer it went, the more awkward it was, and the more she worried Alice would be upset about the whole thing when she finally did tell her.
There was also the glaring problem that she couldn’t ask Alice out until the name thing had been cleared up, and she definitely wanted to do that.
Almost three months later, she walked into the café to find it completely empty except for a long ladder stretched up to the top of the ceiling. She looked up to see Alice standing in the middle of it, painting the wall with a look of serious concentration on her face. The painting was of a tower that ran from the bottom of the floor to the top of the ceiling; Alice was painting a girl who was standing on the balcony of the tower, staring out into the distance. It wasn’t the only new thing on the walls, either - there was a princess and a frog on the opposite wall, and what looked like the beginnings of a woman holding an apple next to one of the windows.
“Hello up there!” Robin called when it was clear Alice hadn’t noticed her come in.
She looked down and smiled at Robin, waving her paintbrush at her. “Hey, you.”
Robin smiled back and nodded at the new decorations. “What’s all this?”
“Well, Tiana let me do the signs outside for the last couple weeks and I guess people liked them, so she asked me to do a few things in here. A fairy tale theme, since so many of us have fairy tale names. I’ve mostly been doing it during off hours, but there’s been a lull for ‘bout an hour now, so I thought I’d work on it some.”
“That’s awesome. Think you’ll do something with Robin Hood? He’s my favorite, since we have the same -“ She cut herself off and cleared her throat. “I mean, ‘cause our names are so similar.”
“I think I could find a place for him. Hold on, let me come down and I’ll get your tea.”
Alice only made it two steps before the ladder began to wobble precariously. Robin was scooting around the counter, hopping over the little gate at the end, and grabbing the ladder to hold it steady before Alice had a chance to try a third. “I’ve got it.”
“Thanks,” Alice said as she made her way down carefully. “This thing's pretty old, might not be the most stable.”
Robin held out a hand as she got to the last rung, and Alice took it and hopped off the ladder. She smiled shyly at Robin. “You saved me.”
Robin grinned. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. Although you may want to wait until someone’s around before you try that again, just in case.”
She realized she was still holding Alice’s hand, and she let herself squeeze it once before letting it go.
Alice cleared her throat and took a step back. “The usual?”
“Yeah. You know,” Robin offered, “I don’t actually have work for a couple more hours. I could stay here and spot you, if you want.”
“Really? You don’t mind?”
“Sure. I want to see a creative genius at work.”
Alice ducked her head shyly and scuffed her shoe on the floor. “Come off it.”
“I'm serious. This already looks amazing.” Robin nodded at the tower and the girl on the balcony. “So that’s supposed to be Rapunzel?”
“Mm-hmm. I always felt bad for her, y’know. I used to be isolated a lot when I was a kid. My dad was sick for a long time, never knew my mum, and I had some mental health stuff I had to work through. I’d have … bad days,” she said, looking at Robin out of the corner of her eye wearily, "and Papa didn’t know what to do, so he’d keep me in the house as much as possible so he could keep an eye on me. It was probably for the best until he was able to get me real help, but it was -“
“Lonely,” Robin finished her sentence when she didn’t seem able to. “I’m sorry, Alice.”
She shrugged uncomfortably. “It was a long time ago.”
“I didn’t know my dad either, he died when I was a baby. My mom was pretty overprotective, too, so … I know it’s not the same thing, but I get it.” She adjusted her jacket, not used to talking about this kind of personal stuff with people. Alice just brought it out in her, apparently.
Alice also seemed to understand that she needed a moment for herself. “You want a beignet today?” she asked, heading to the glass case of pastries.
“Yes, please,” Robin said gratefully.
Alice pulled one out with her tongs and held it out for Robin to take. She took a bite and moaned. “So good.” She grinned at Alice. “Thanks, Tower Girl.”
“No problem, Robin Hood.”
She thought about telling Alice to make the name change permanent, but she couldn't quite bring herself to break the lovely moment they were having, so she just took another bite of her beignet.
*
Things came to a head a few weeks later when Zelena stayed over at Robin's place while her apartment was painted. She decided to walk Robin to work since the gym she worked at wasn’t far from the bar, and as they walked, Tiana’s caught her eye.
“I’ve always to try this place,” she said, hurrying towards it before Robin could think of anything to dissuade her. “Hurry up, there’s a crowd and you don’t want to be late.”
There was a crowd, and as soon as Robin walked in she could see why. Tiana had started covering up Alice’s half-finished art not long after she started painting the walls of the café, deciding she wanted a big reveal when it was all finished. And it was absolutely worth the wait. Alice had created a fantasy land, with beautiful castles, magical creatures, and a forest that looked like it was somehow three dimensional all around the counter. As they waited in line, Robin, took it all in, awestruck.
“Hello,” Alice greeted when they finally got to the register. “What can I get you?”
“Two chai teas and a half dozen of those beignets, please," Zelena said briskly.
“Coming right up,” Alice said, ringing up her mom while sneaking glances at Robin.
Zelena pointed at a figure in the painted woods. They had a green cloak, their hood pulled up over their head, a bow in their hand and a quiver of arrows on their back. “Is that Robin Hood? Oh, you used to love him,” Zelena cooed; then she looked closer at the mural. “Wait, who’s that next to him?”
“Oh, it’s, uh … it’s Alice in Wonderland,” Alice said, fidgeting with her apron.
“Huh,” Zelena said, smirking, her eyes dipping briefly to Alice’s name tag, then sliding over to Robin. “How interesting.”
“It’s beautiful,” Robin finally managed to say, because it was. And if she wasn’t seeing things, it looked like painted Robin and Alice were holding hands.
“Yeah?” Alice asked, her face lighting up.
“It’s amazing. It’s like a storybook come to life.”
A throat cleared behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to see that the line had double while she was admiring Alice’s work. She flushed, unused to her interactions with Alice being observed much at all, let alone by a crowd and her mother. “I guess we better move.”
“Guess so.” Dru slid two cups onto the counter and Alice picked one up and held it out for Robin. “Here you go, Nobin.”
“I’m sorry, what?” her mom said flatly.
She avoided her gaze as she said weakly, “Thanks, Alice,” taking the tea and turning on her heel, hoping her mom would follow her out and not ask any more questions.
“Nice meeting you!” she heard Alice say to her mom before she rushed out of the café.
Zelena fell in step with her as she walked down the street. She allowed a few seconds of tense silence before asking, “So … Nobin?”
“Can we please not talk about it?”
Her mom laughed, and Robin braced for more teasing, but all she said was, “Alice seems like a lovely girl.”
She smiled, tracing Alice’s writing on her cup fondly. “She really is.”
*
Her mom was kind enough not to mention Alice again. Unfortunately, she wasn’t kind enough to not tell the rest of her family about the ‘Nobin’ thing, and pretty soon it had spread like wildfire to everyone she knew. And most of them decided the new name was better and refused to call her anything else.
If there was a sign that it was time to put an end to this whole Nobin thing, that was it.
So a little over a week after her mom had gone to Tiana’s with her, she marched into the fortunately mostly empty café with purpose and right up to Alice. “I have two things to say. I’m hoping after I tell you the first one you’ll still say yes to the second, but I will totally understand if you don’t.”
“Oh,” Alice said, blinking rapidly, “um, sure? What’s the first thing, then?”
“My name ... it's not Nobin. It’s Robin.”
Alice’s face did something complicated, realization and confusion and maybe a little embarrassment. “That makes so much more sense,” she said with a groan. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You were so nervous that first day, and I didn’t want to make it worse. And then it kept going and I didn’t know how to stop it. But I should have said something much earlier and I'm sorry that I didn't.” Robin smiled awkwardly. “Are you mad?”
“No. I feel a bit silly, but no, I’m not mad.”
“You shouldn’t feel silly, either,” Robin said sadly. “I’m the one who made things weird, not telling you all this time."
"Maybe you did, but it was for a nice reason." Alice frowned. “Wait, so what’s the second thing?”
“Something I wanted to ask you since I met you, but I didn’t want to do it until I figured out how to tell you about the Nobin thing.” She took a fortifying breath. “Do you want to go out with me?”
Alice smiled widely. “Yeah, I really do.”
Robin let out her breath in a relieved huff. “Good. That’s … that’s good.”
Alice laughed, her expression turning teasing. “I’m not gonna stop calling you Nobin, though.”
“Fair enough, Tower Girl.”
*
They’d been dating for six weeks when Robin noticed something new on her morning visit to Tiana’s. Up on the ceiling was another painting of Robin Hood and Alice in Wonderland. This time Robin’s hood was down enough so it was clear she was a woman, and she was staring into Alice's eyes while Alice brought her hand to her lips in a reverent kiss.
And written in flowing script underneath was, "Tower Girl and Nobin."
Robin found she didn't mind. It felt like they part of their own fairy tale, and she could handle being Nobin as long as Alice was part of her story.