“Double-shot espresso café mocha guy.” Lance says without missing a beat, clenching his hand in a fist and glaring down the door.

“Who?” Pidge repeats, bored. There’s still no one there. She turns back to sorting the sweets in the display case.

“Any minute now.” Lance assures her, eyes never leaving the door. “He’ll come through the door and order his hipster drink like he’s done every day this semester.”

“Failing to see the point here.” Pidge says, more in an effort to try and get Lance to shut up sooner rather than actually listening to him.

“You wouldn’t understand, Pidge.” Lance throws his hands up in the air. “He always orders the same thing every time. You’d think he’d ever mix it up, but noooo, it’s always. The. Same. Order.”

“Well, I think you shouldn’t be criticizing someone’s coffee order when you have ordered the same thing since you’ve started too.” Pidge snipes back. The bell chimes overhead, and she greets the new customer. “Welcome to Defenders of Coffee, how may we help you?”

“Can I have a double-shot espresso café mocha?” Lance mocks under his breath as the guy orders the drink.

“No problem Keith.” Pidge tells him.

Ah, yes, Keith. Mister Double-Shot Espresso Café Mocha. Really, Pidge doesn’t understand why Lance acts like he hates Keith so much or like he doesn’t know his name. She’s fairly certain that they’re dating, or at least hooking up every now and then – Pidge saw them making out in the backroom the other week, and Hunk told her about how he saw them making out at the movies the week before that when he was out with Shay.

“Here’s your stupid dumb drink, Keith.” Lance drops the to-go cup in front of Keith when the drink’s finished with no lack of malice in his voice. “Your stupid double espresso whatever.”

“He has your order memorized.” Pidge informs Keith. She doesn’t even bother with a conspiratorial stage-whisper or anything. Just tells him flatly, with a twinge of annoyance evident in her voice. “He was complaining about it just before you came in.”

Keith looks over at Lance, and raises his eyebrow at the other man.

“I don’t see how you have room to talk.” Keith says to Lance. “Don’t you order the same drink every time you come here off duty too?”

“W-What?” Lance sputters. “No, I don’t!”

Pidge is at his side, shaking her head in disagreement.

“He does.” She says to Keith just as traitorously as she did when spilling that Lance knew Keith’s drink order.

“Pidge!” Lance whines, expression conveying how betrayed she feels. “You’re not helping!”

“I’m not?” She delivers flatly, knowing full well that she isn’t helping Lance’s situation. “I couldn’t tell.”

“It is not true!” Lance insists, looking between Keith and Pidge. “I order the seasonal items. The pumpkin spice cappuccino! The peppermint white hot chocolate! The St. Patrick’s Mint latte coffee whatever that Allura manages to turn green by acts of witchcraft!”

“I thought you were allergic to pumpkin.” Keith asks with some hint of confusion. “Don’t you swell up?”

Lance starts sputtering, a red flush forming on his face, while Pidge agrees with Keith.

“I think it’s hives, more than swelling up, but yeah that’s right.” She says. “He never really drinks them anyways, he more gets them for promotional purposes and lies and says he drinks them.”

“I’m going to go restock the coffee or something!” Lance shouts, throwing his hands up and storming off through the door behind the counter. “Let me know when you guys are done badmouthing me!”

“Okay then…” Keith draws out as he and Pidge watch Lance stalk off in fury. “Well, I’ll catch you later then.”

“You too,” Pidge tells him. “Good luck with finals coming up.”

“Right back atcha.” Keith responds in kind, not turning to look back at Pidge as he swings open the door and heads back out into the chilly afternoon.

Pidge turns and looks to the door where Lance just disappeared through, and decided to wait before retrieving him. She could use the break from Lance’s coffee drama.

----

Mercifully for Pidge, the next few visits from Keith while she’s sharing duty with Lance is mercifully coffee-bitching free. Whether this means he’s complaining to Shiro or Allura remains to be seen, but regardless, she’s just happy she doesn’t have to hear any more about Keith always getting the same drink.

Or, maybe, she thinks that fateful day right at the start of finals week, Lance has been complaining about it, and she was just lucky enough to avoid it until then.

Be as it may, Pidge has the luck to walk into Defenders of Coffee at the most inopportune moment.

She’s maybe two steps behind Keith as he heads into the shop. Pidge at first thinks that maybe she can convince him to sit down for a bit – she wants to pick his brain about the Engineering I final she just finished and how it may or may not have differed from when he took the class. However, as she enters the café, it becomes quickly apparent that that’s not going to occur.

“Of course you’re ordering the same drink again!” Lance snaps loud enough at Keith that Pidge can hear it all the way from the entrance. “You always get the same damn drink! Don’t you think you should, oh, I don’t know, spice it up every now and then?”

“Oh yeah?” Keith snaps back, and makes it evident to Pidge that he’s gotten fed up with Lance’s complaining. "Well maybe it’s not a bad thing to have the same thing all the time! It means you know what you like and how you like it!”

“Of course it’s a bad thing!” Lance yells back. Pidge shoots a sympathetic look back to Shiro, who’s standing there awkwardly while the argument escalates. “It means that you’ve gotten too scared to try something new because you’re afraid you won’t like it!”

“Hi Pidge!” Shiro shouts between the two guys, hoping the announcement of someone else in the café will get them to shut up. “How was the Engineering final?” Keith and Lance keep arguing.

“Well you’re just as scared as me then to try new things!” Keith tells Lance. “Mister ‘The Only New Things I Try Are Seasonal Items I’m Allergic To’!”

“One time! That was one time!”

“It sucked!” Pidge cheerily responds to Shiro, and debates the pros and cons of cutting in front of Keith to order her coffee. She had pulled an all-nighter the night before in order to finish the final project for her coding class, and could use the coffee pick me up before her communications final in an hour.

“Yeah, a difference in routine one time, and look how it turned out!”

“One bad occurrence does not a coincidence make, or something like that!”

“Exactly, which is why ‘spicing things up’ should be something done with careful consideration, and not just be a throw-away decision!”

It does not take much longer for Pidge’s equally short fuse to burn out and, even though there are way more cons on her list than pros, she forces her way in front of Keith in line. It is quite a feat, considering that at this point Keith and Lance are in each other’s face so closely that their noses are touching and they’re practically kissing. And, well, if she kicks Keith in the shin in the process, that’s his just desserts for causing a scene in the café and preventing her from getting coffee.

“I want!” Pidge interjects very, very, loudly, raising a finger for emphasis. “A dark roast large coffee with 5 shots of espresso and three scoops of sugar and then! And then I also want a large Oolong Tea, for Keith!”

She turns then and shouts at both the guys,

“There! I made the decision for you! Now will you stop arguing about your stupid coffee orders like children and just try something new every once in a millennium!”

Pidge stands there fuming until Shiro’s done with her coffee, while Keith and Lance just stare at her. When Shiro brings her coffee to the counter, she slams both her employee ID and debit card down onto the counter and takes the coffee.

“I’ll pick them up later!” She can’t help but snarl as she turns on her heel and storms out of the café, wanting nothing but to get out of there. Pidge doesn’t slam the café door as she leaves though. She’s not a heathen like some people.

----

Of course, looking back, one might say that it was all Pidge’s fault. That she had ‘encouraged’ them or something. But really, Pidge will insist that she had nothing to do with it. And she didn’t have anything to do with it! She was just the one who was unfortunate enough to stumble upon a compromising situation, and was smart enough to take advantage of the situation…

Finals have officially ended the Friday prior, and most of the college students that make up the majority of Defenders of Coffee’s customers have left for the winter break to celebrate at home or with friends. The café’s few customers now are professors who have to get grades in by Wednesday, or the students who live out of the country and either can’t afford or don’t want to spend the cash for a flight back home for the holidays.

It’s Shiro and Pidge on duty, and Pidge is the ‘lucky’ one who has to go clean up a drink that someone accidentally spilled on the ground. Shiro is dealing with the altercation that came about from (or what caused, Pidge hadn’t really been paying attention) the spilled drink, so Pidge heads to the back room. There’s a supply closet where the mop and bucket are kept, and that’s where Pidge is headed.

As Pidge enters the back room, she hears muffled thumping coming from the back wall. With trepidation, she creeps towards the supply closet, which as it would be is located along the back wall. The thumping gets louder as she approaches the supply closet, and starts to be accompanied by low, muffled moans and… other sounds.

Sighing, Pidge braces herself and slams open the door to the supply closet.

Predictably, it is as she expected it to be behind the supply closet door. Keith and Lance are… Well, to put it bluntly, Pidge never knew how much she did not want an up-close definition of what it meant to be “balls-deep” in someone until now. Especially when it was two people she thought of as friends, at the place she worked.

“I am assuming this is what the coffee argument from last week was about.” She is completely and wholly unsurprised at this development. Still, she very pointedly looks above Keith and Lance’s faces, and nowhere near where both of their pants are lying on the floor of the supply closet.

“P-Pidge!” Lance doesn’t quite shriek, but gets very close, sounding a mix of surprised and embarrassed. “H-Hey! What are you doing here?”

“I told you this was a bad idea.” Keith hisses at Lance, which earns him a “Shut up!” from Lance.

“I work here.” Pidge replies flatly. “This is my shift. Unlike you, might I add, who is not scheduled and therefore should not be here at the moment.”

“Yeah, about that!” Lance looks like he’s attempting to come up with an excuse as to why, exactly, he’s having sex with the person he’s been complaining about for the past two weeks and is failing dismally.

“I hope you realize you are violating several health code violations right now.” Pidge says when Lance fails to come up with an excuse.

“We’re in the supply closet!” Lance protests.

“Several health code violations.” She insists, adjusting her glasses and rocking on her heels. She still does not look anywhere below Lance or Keith’s eyes.

“All right, what do you want Pidge?” Keith asks.

“Keith!”

“What?” Keith defends himself. “You know she’s going to ask for something to keep this quiet. Might as well bite the bullet and ask upfront instead of letting her blackmail us.”

“Oh, I’ll make you bite something alright.” Lance mutters, and Pidge gives a fake cough, more to draw attention back to her than any real need to clear her throat.

“I want,” She says, “For you both to come out. To the Defenders of Coffee staff, as well as Hunk and Shay, about your relationship. After break. You’ll call a meeting, and come in – holding hands or not, that’s your decision – and announce that you’re dating. Don’t give me that look Lance, everyone knows that something’s going on between you two.”

Lance slowly shuts his mouth and chooses to grimace instead.

“You’ll tell everyone you realized your true feelings for one another around New Years and decided that you had to confess. You don’t have to say you shared a New Year’s kiss at midnight, but that would be highly preferable.”

“You drive a hard bargain.” Lance grumbles.

“Is that all?” Keith asks.

“I would also like you to pass the mop and bucket to me.” Pidge says. “There’s a spill out on the floor that I need to clean up.”

The mop and bucket reluctantly get passed to Pidge.

“Thank you.” Pidge tells them. “You can continue with your sexual relations now.”

And fumbling, she grabs the door knob and swings the door shut behind her.

Filling the bucket, Pidge hauls it back out to clean up the spilled coffee. Shiro is done handling the situation at this point, and both customers are gone, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

The café is empty at this point, and no one around to hear Shiro as he starts talking while Pidge cleans up the spill.

“So.” Amusement is high in Shiro’s voice as he leans on the countertop. “Were they in the supply closet?”

“Unfortunately.” Pidge sighs as she all but throws the mop back into the bucket. “I think I’m going to need brain bleach after what I saw though.” Shiro laughs, and she knows she can’t complain because she’d be doing the same thing if their situations were reversed. Still. He shouldn’t be laughing.

“What did you hit them for?”

“Reveal after break,” She informs him, grinning like she just earned a boon. “Gave them heavy implication to share it was a New Year’s realization, with a kiss included.”

Shiro laughs again.

“That’s a nice even split.”

“Damn straight it is.”

And three weeks later, they collect their winnings, and bask in the glory that is being two hundred dollars richer.