Chapter Text
Agent Stone's mouth opened slightly in disbelief as he watched the starburst explosion in the sky above him.
"No," he whispered.
Tears began to trickle from his eyes: absolute sadness in the midst of the awe and fear of the crowd around him. The only other person crying was a small child, startled by the light and sound of the otherworldly explosion. The child's tears were brought by fear, not grief. Stone's tears rolled slowly down his slackened face as he looked away from the explosion in the sky, its light still fading out above him. Detached legs carried him down the familiar path to Mean Bean, the coffee shop he started the first time he lost the Doctor. As he walked, his mind numbly replayed his boss's final message.
"You are more than a sycophant to me," it echoed, "you are... a syco-friend."
The words continued to bounce around Stone's brain as he stepped through the door into Mean Bean. The shop was almost shut down by the government after the failed attack with the Master Emerald, but when they returned after the battle all evidence of a secret base had disappeared. With Stone undercover among them for a short time, he was able to... convince many agents that the Mean Bean wasn't the shop they remembered. Still, he'd been too busy taking care of the Doctor since then, so despite the shop's survival, it had remained "temporarily closed" for about a year. Depending on who you asked, it was shut down by the government and the temporarily closed sign was just to deter people from trying to buy the property. As a result, the building was reassuringly silent after the bustling streets outside. Stone moved swiftly to the back room, letting the wall mounted camera scan his eye as he stepped through the door.
"The only person that had ever cared about me," the Doctor's voice rang in his ears.
"I did care. I cared," Stone said brokenly, sliding to his knees as the door slid shut behind him. "I care. I care!" his voice rose and tears fell heavily down his face. "It can't be real. I'm dreaming. He got out, he had a shield, SOMETHING!" he cried.
He stood back up and wobbled over to the temporary living space he'd included in the hideout. He collapsed on the small bed, crying.
"The Doctor can't be gone. He can't be.."
Stone's ramblings continued long into the night. Tears soaked his pillow by the time he fell asleep, and they continued to fall in his dreams.
---
As always, Stone awoke the next morning at 5:00am. Compulsively, he changed into his barista uniform and slipped out of the room. He deftly picked up a mug, shifting it into his workspace to prepare the Doctor's latte. When he shifted his attention to the espresso machine, he caught sight of his reflection. Puffy eyes and a tear-stained face started back at him, and he carefully avoided catching another glimpse of himself. He didn't want to remember whatever it was right now. He needed to finish the Doctor's latte. He steamed the Austrian goat's milk to the perfect temperature and poured it in gently. As soon as the last drop of milk dripped gently into the mug, memories came rushing back to Stone. His hands shook as he picked up the mug. The perfect latte. The one thing the Doctor told him he could never trust a robot to do. The one thing he actually needed me for.
Stone took a deep breath and picked his latte art needles up in one hand, the mug in the other. His shaking hands managed not to spill the whole latte, but more than a few drops escaped the mug as he returned to the back room.
He took longer than usual to sketch the Doctor's face into the froth, but he was thinking. If he was going to open the Mean Bean today, he needed to act a normal level of weird. Sure, anyone who came to the shop fairly often in the past knew him only as "freak" or "oddball", but his name tag listed him as "Lee Stone". Ever since he became an agent, he'd hardly heard the name "Lee", but now that the Doctor had announced his last name to the world, he might have to return to it. He dreaded trying to respond to Lee again, but the idea of someone approaching him to ask if he was the "Stone" in the broadcast was far worse.
He pursed his lips, wondering if he should even open today as he looked down at his Doctor's face in the latte. A single tear fell slowly from his eye and into the mug, disturbing the bubbles and effectively destroying the art piece. Stone sighed and lifted the cup to his lips. There was no use wasting the coffee, though it would never taste as good without the Doctor.
"Today, I am just Lee the barista," he told himself sternly, setting his face and flipping the sign on the door to "Open" for the first time since the Doctor's return.
"Don't think about it."
——
By the end of the day, he'd only told two groups of excitable teenagers that he was not, in fact, the same Agent Stone from last night's broadcast, and he only cried once listening to a small group celebrating the Doctor's death. But he made his coffee relatively calmly until closing time, collapsing on his bed in tears at the end of the day.
"I can't live like this," he whispered, "he has to come back to me."