Chapter Text
Wednesday was fond of rituals. New semesters always made her feel on edge and off balance. This year was even more of a disruption. Her roommate Enid - well, now she should say her former roommate Enid, was a dorm resident advisor this year. This meant Enid got a single room.
When they were first assigned together, Wednesday might have been looking forward to such a change. She was everything Wednesday thought she despised; colorful, immersed in social media, and tactile in her affection.
But Enid had tunneled her way into her life like a persistent tapeworm over the past two years. She understood what it was like to live in her mother's shadow, and she knew what it was like to feel like everyone else's brain operated on a different wavelength than yours.
Enid had broken the news that she would not be rooming with Wednesday after a morning of odd behavior- handing her a Starbucks coffee (barely ingestible), asking her how she slept, shifting from foot to foot looking like a guilty child. When it started with "Please don't be mad," Wednesday had been expecting to hear she had appeared on Enid's gossip blog again, but no.
"Don't be angry! I thought you'd appreciate more of your own space." Because of course the assumption was if Wednesday wasn't rooming with Enid, she would room with no one. This was true, but. The change felt unnecessary.
"RAs get a pretty big stipend and with my little brother starting college this year, we kind of need it." Wednesday's family had plenty of money.
"I'm not accepting your charity, Wednesday. Besides, I want to be an RA. But you're not going to be able to get rid of me just because we aren't living together! I'm going to write BFF Enid time into your planner every week for the whole year."
Enid had kept her promise so far, to the point where her boyfriend Ajax had commented that Wednesday got more dates with Enid than he did.
Nonetheless, her absence made Wednesday's own one-bedroom apartment too quiet and still. She had grown too accustomed to a low level of background noise. Where before she required total silence to make the words flow out of her fingertips, now it gave her writer's block.
The broken espresso machine delayed her consumption of her daily caffeine dosage, two weeks into the new semester. The barista rose from the cloud of steam, or smoke, and huffed with enough force to make a curl resting on his forehead bounce.
The barista learned three things about her that day: he learned that she had a very low opinion of drip coffee when he suggested it as an alternative. He learned that she could read Italian, because that's what language the espresso machine's instructions were written in. He learned her name was Wednesday.
Correspondingly, she learned that his name was Tyler, and she learned he could make a decent quad on ice once the equipment was working again. She could probably have learned much more about him, in that first encounter. She did not particularly care to.
But the Weathervane was a quiet space for her to write. It was just a couple blocks farther from campus than the much more popular Starbucks, which explained the slower pace. It was dimly lit as well. Old incandescent bulbs glowed faintly from poorly-spaced fixtures on the walls painted a dark maroon color, which chipped in places to reveal white underneath. This made it less than ideal for reading anything that wasn't a backlit screen.
The general atmosphere resembled a dive bar more than it did a coffee shop. The poor lighting, a partially obstructed drink menu, and the fact that there was only ever one barista working at a time were all reasons this particular coffeeshop was hardly bustling even during peak hours, not when there were two other chains closer to campus. It made a bad environment for studying textbooks, and the temperamental espresso machine meant a longer wait for any students rushing to get a coffee on their way to an 8am class. All of these factors meant it was the perfect place for Wednesday to work on her novel.
She found herself frequenting the Weathervane twice a week, sometimes more often. Tyler wasn't the only barista that worked there - usually he would take over for another guy who looked a bit older, possibly the owner, a few hours after she would typically stop in on Tuesdays right after lunch.
She found herself waiting to order her drink until Tyler arrived, on those days. Eventually, he came to sit across the table from her when he took his breaks, or when it was slow (and it almost always was.)
Tyler only blinked once, that first day, at her impassive cold stare. After that, he settled into it. Too quickly, he acclimated and learned to translate her atypical body language and micro-expressions. He plainly stated what he was feeling, and he laughed at her jokes. No one laughed at her jokes. People always mistook them for threats.
Sometimes they were threats, granted.
It was… weird, having someone understand her. Alien. Foreign. Peculiar. Even Enid, after two years, still had to do advanced calculations to communicate with her sometimes- but that's why Enid was still around, because she tried so hard.
Wednesday didn't try very hard to understand people, and to fit their ideas of how she should speak and act. Probably, if Wednesday cared about other people's opinions of her, she might consider this lack of effort a character flaw. On the contrary, she thought it was a strength.
And yet, she found herself starting to notice what made Tyler smile, what made him frown. She started to pay attention to his opinions. It was an entirely new experience. Despite her aversion to change, the break from routine actually felt… good.