Café Prompt. “Once in a Blue Moon”
Hi! This is my first RWBY fanfic! It is a RosePine cafe prompt from @izupie I hope you guys like it. I wanted to contribute with the rosepine love! So this is the first of many (hopefully) to come. Any criticisms is well received!
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It really had been the worst week for Ruby at the Blue Moon Café. First, Pyrrha Nikos, the manager of the café, had to leave for Mistral, something about her sister getting married. Obviously, she took her second in command, Jaune, to the wedding. Jaune was the most patient barista in the whole wide world. Not only was he able to subdue the more rowdy patrons, but also was willing to keep up with the weird orders from their most frequent client. Weiss Schnee was known for having a schedule of Monday through Saturdays of different drinks each day of the week. And no matter how cold it was on Vale, even if a snowstorm was raging outside, she would order her drinks with ice. She was an absolute madwoman under her impeccable white suit and long white hair tied in a high side ponytail. With no Jaune to scribble patiently her order, Ruby was left scrambling with the permanent marker, making quick note of her demanding orders. A triple chocolate, single caramel, with ten expresso shots, a spoonful of almond milk and five seconds pressing the whipped cream container made up her order on Monday.
“Iced, if you would, Ruby.” The heiress said, tone cool and calm, smiling at the black haired girl behind the counter. While Weiss seemed like a prim and proper terrible client, over the years of loyal patronage, the employees at the Blue Moon Café learned to read her expressions, and found that she is actually being quite kind. The days that she had ample time to cross the street into her office building, she spent it chatting with the staff, and had grown specially fond of Ruby and Yang. While Ruby was the 6pm to 12 am cashier, Yang covered 8 am to 2 pm, leaving their temp waitress Velvet to cover the missing hours, the three of them being able to interact with Weiss during the day, depending on the weekday, and whatever strange coffee cravings the heiress had that day.
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In the middle of the week, their master baker, Lie Ren, had to take a leave of absence, having caught the influenza virus his girlfriend Nora had had the past week. This left poor Ruby Rose, mechanical engineer major, with a very understaffed café, with only her sister and Velvet to help her during the day, and Blake, the late night barista, to take over. While Blake could follow the recipes and instructions diligently left by Ren, Ruby was a complete mess; her only true gifts in the café were to make exceptionally great latte and hot chocolate and being able to carry a large tray of hot beverages with one hand. It was no surprise then, that the worst day for her had to be Friday night, as a sudden downpour was beating the windowpanes and roof so strongly that even the ambient music was not enough to drown the thunder. Perhaps, that was why Blake had called sick and the lack of any patrons since she took her shift could also be attributed to it. Ruby believed it had something to do with being a cat faunus, and not really liking the rain, but saying something of the sort outwardly left her feeling uncomfortable.
Ruby sat behind the counter, looking at the waterfall of a downpour, and at the people running with newspapers covering their heads. It was raining so hard, that even Weiss had avoided coming down herself, and instead had asked her secretary Klein to pick up her insane order of two vanilla, three chocolate syrup, one caramel, seven shots of expresso, a squirt of lactose free milk and a huge cloud of whipped cream on top, garnished with salty caramel flakes. Ruby sometimes worried for the heiress’ sugar and caffeine daily intake, and weighed the possibility of maybe giving her a diabetes pamphlet, but quickly discarded the idea. It would do no good at all to tell her something that she probably already knows about. Hopefully.
During her idle hours, she watched as a young man holding a green umbrella with his cheek and shoulder struggled against the wind and a map. ‘ Who uses paper maps nowadays…’ Ruby wondered, feeling sympathy for the poor man, he was getting buffeted hard by the rain, and the wind was wildly tearing at his clothes. That was when the whistling howl of flurry hit him the worst and the poor umbrella as pushed and flipped, leaving the young man an image of tragedy under the pouring rain. Feeling brave, she made her way to the door and opened it, waving at the guy to gain his attention.
“Hey, won´t you come inside? The way the rain is hitting you can’t be right.” She said with a smile at the sigh of relief the guy let out when he saw her act of kindness. Propping the door open, she let him in the café, shivering a little due to the gusts of wind lapping at his heels.
“Thanks.” He said in earnest, and just then Ruby had a proper look at his face, his tanned face and countless freckles across his cheeks, his wet hair sticking in odd places gave him a look of a very cute wet puppy. The water was dripping from his dark hair and into his eyelashes, long and luscious, and his eyes. ‘Gosh, his eyes!’ a tremulous thought crossed her mind, his eyes were a unique ocean of gold and jade, wide and innocent. ‘He’s very pretty…’ her heart stammered inside her chest, almost painfully, yet so very sweetly. A nervous smile made its way to her lips.
“Do you need help with something? It seemed you were lost back there”, she asked him, turning around and coming behind the counter, hands nervously tugging on her apron. Her guest smiled sheepishly, a hand scratching the back of his head.
“Heh, I’m new in town, visiting my godfather. The train left me at the station just before it began to rain, so it was no good trying to read the map. Plus, I am terrible with directions.” He laughed a little, his voice was so very pleasant to hear, Ruby thought, and soft like hot chocolate in a day as stormy as that day. The thought made her clear her throat.
“I’m Ruby” she began, drumming her fingers to the counter, “this is the Blue Moon Café, and I know how it feels to be the new kid in town… so, welcome to Beacon. This is my third term here, college of engineering, so if you need any help, I’m here.” He looked down when he heard her tone, tanned cheeks becoming ruddy with color. He played with a strand of hair near his temple.
“I’m Oscar. Next term I begin art school here. I stay with my uncle… he is head of the college of music at Beacon’s.” he shifted his weight in his waterlogged shoes. “Say…wouldn’t you have a towel?”
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Ruby’s hands trembled as she fumbled with the steam wand, foaming up milk for the hot chocolate she had promised Oscar. He was sitting on the lounge of the café, wearing a spare uniform she managed to snag from the employee’s changing room. The thought of the slightly fit uniform on his body making her heart beat at such an alarming rate that she could already read her eulogy in her mind: “here lies Ruby Rose, also known as the Madonna of hot chocolate. On a rainy night she succumbed from exhaustion and now has left behind her older sister Yang and her orphaned corgi Zwei. Like Don Quixote, she was determined to fight the good fight, but the war was too big and bloody. Her heart succumbed to the sight of a boy wearing tight work pants, and now millions of patrons are gathered to send her off to eternal bliss.” Ruby’s eyes glazed a little, the image of a funeral parade surrounding an open coffin, with herself inside of it, surrounded by a bed of wildflowers, in her hands she was holding her favorite soldering gun, Crescent Rose. A trail of past and future clients of the Blue Moon Café holding a banner with the male uniform that has offended her soul so greatly emblazoned, while her coworkers were seen sobbing, Pyrrha beating her chest in regret of leaving her alone to fend off beautiful costumers drenched in rain. The milk in the metal cup she was steaming had reached an incredible degree of bubbliness, and it was threatening to spill and scald her hand, something yet unnoticed by her.
Oscar had noticed that the barista had been standing in front of the expresso machine for far too long, and the smell of burnt milk (if such a thing was even possible!) made him look over the counter and see his savior in a maroon apron looking off into the front windows, with such a lost look on her face, he worried she had fallen asleep.
“Miss Ruby?”, he poked her arm. She merely looked at his eyes, as if she was looking through him, and muttered softly,
“…Deceased.” A stretch of silence overcame the café, even the radio seemed to had gone into interference, because the only sound was the huffing of the steaming wand over burnt milk.
“…” Oscar’s eyebrows went almost to his hairline, confused beyond relief, while Ruby set the metal cup down softly.
“Excuse me for a second.” She offered him a smile and went to the employee’s bathroom. The door closed with a soft thud.
Oscar was not sure if it had been his imagination or not. But he could almost swear that he heard a muffled shriek from somewhere in the café. But he just chalked it up to the roaring thunder and rain outside, and not one Ruby Rose a bunch of paper towels cushioning the sounds of her angry shrieking.
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Thank you so much for reading! It’s been a while since I wrote something in English that was not a lab report. It was very hard to keep it in English but I think I will dabble into some bilingual shenanigans soon with Oscar, who has been my Latino Bebi (Óscar Pinos!? I’m so funny, pls ignore me) ever since I learned of his name. You can blame my grandmother for making me listen to Óscar de León for most of my childhood, now I can’t separate the name from the artist.
I want to say thank you to @izupie @littlemisssquiggles @ma-lemons because they inspire me a lot to write this. 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
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