Merry Christmas, londonwayne!
This fic is dedicated to the wonderful @londonwayne, who requested fluff+bookshops. I really hope that I did your prompt justice! I absolutely loved everything else you requested and wanted to find a way to draw on as many tropes as possible, but quickly realized that would have left me with like 45k more words than intended xDStill, I had a BLAST writing this and I really hope that you enjoy it!!Merry Christmas :’) ❤️
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Hale’s Bookish Tales
Derek finds the man in the lower level of his bookshop, poured over a corner desk there like some modern-day Auguste Rodin sculpture.
His chin is digging into the palm propped up on his elbow, long fingers gripping the lower half of his face in concentration. Loose tufts of tawny brown hair pull in a hundred directions away from his face, as though it had taken the brunt of the man’s visible agitation.
The man (who Derek had taken to calling ‘Bambi’ in his head) had arrived at Hale’s Bookish Tales painfully early that morning. Normally when he came in he would sprawl out in the desk under the large bay window up front, but today he’d made a bee-line for the lower level and hadn’t returned to the surface since.
Not even after the mass blizzard alert hit, and all the other customers had fled.
Continue on AO3
