Chapter Text
Maya doesn’t feel much better in the morning. She showers to wake herself up, gets dressed in the nicest outfit she can come up with that she doesn’t mind getting grubby without resorting to her old clothes (most of which are shoved, forgotten, down to one end of the wardrobe), and then leaves a note on the bench for Priya just in case Priya comes home and wonders where she is. She emails Gablehauser and says that she won’t be in, and then she hits the road.
The coffee shop is open and serving breakfast. Maya gets the biggest coffees that they sell, packets of creamer and sugar, and two chocolate muffins bursting with chocolate chips and, therefore, more sugar.
She hopes Stuart isn’t diabetic.
The Superman sign still says “Closed”, but Maya ignores it and pushes the door open anyway. A couple of the display stands have been righted, but mostly the store is still a mess. Stuart’s asleep on the floor, curled up on a pile of old Jugheads that nobody ever wants out of one of the dollar boxes. Maya sets their breakfast down on the counter and then kneels beside him.
“Stuart?”
He startles awake and once again she’s apologizing for scaring him. At least this time he doesn’t have a box cutter handy.
“I thought I told you to get out,” he mumbles, still half asleep.
“You did. Last night. Now I’m back to fix this.”
The smell of coffee gets his attention, and Stuart stumbles to his feet, following his nose over to the counter. He dumps two sugars into one of the cups and stirs it briefly before sipping, his eyes drifting closed again. “You brought me coffee.”
“Yes. And a muffin.”
“Coffee and a muffin. That’s great, Maya. That really compensates for the loss of my livelihood.”
Maya ignores the way a little shiver goes through her when he says her name, and pokes his shoulder. “It’s not lost. It’s all right here. We just have to fix it up.”
She leaves Stuart to wake up a little more and walks amongst the mess. It’s not as bad as it initially looks, she thinks; most of the tables can just be lifted back up, and the plushie display needs dusting, but to be honest it sort of needed dusting anyway.
“Just needs a woman’s touch,” she says lightly, returning to the counter to drink some of her own coffee.
“Mmmmhmmm.” Stuart still doesn’t sound fully awake and Maya wonders how late he was up last night.
She starts moving things back into place on her own, starting off with getting the trestle tables and folding chairs out of the way by stacking them near the front of the store. By the time she’s got half the comic tables upright Stuart comes out from his huddle and starts helping her.
“You really didn’t have to do this, you know,” he says an extended uncomfortable silence later, putting the last dollar comics box back in its place.
Maya shrugs and starts putting the spilled comics back. It’s surprisingly easy; they’re all alphabetized and, thanks to their plastic covers, all slid out in order. “I feel like it’s my fault, in a—”
Stuart grabs her wrist and yanks her around to face him. “Don’t you dare say that,” he snaps, and although his tone is the same as last night when he was telling her to get out, his facial expression is quite different. “Just because one transphobic asshole had to speak his stupid damn mind does not make it your fault.”
“But if I hadn’t been here he wouldn’t have said it in the first place.”
“But if you hadn’t been here, the tournament would have been unbalanced.”
“But you would have found someone else.”
Stuart lets go of her wrist and takes a step closer, and Maya feels his hands on her shoulders. They’re shaking. Or she’s shaking. Or both. “But I didn’t want someone else,” he says, and kisses her.
Oh.
She isn’t expecting this the way she was expecting it from Howard, but on the other hand this isn’t breaking any self-imposed code of ethics, and so Maya kisses him back without fear and without shame. Oh, sure, her head’s whirling with questions, some of which she’s going to have to ask Stuart and some she’s going to have to direct towards her therapist instead, but she’s thoroughly caught up in the moment. Stuart’s not as sure of himself as Howard was, so Maya slides her hands around his waist and pulls him a little closer and tries her best to make him understand that this is a good thing.
They finally break apart after a dizzying who knows how long. Time flows differently when you’re kissing. Stuart laughs nervously, which makes Maya giggle.
“I feel like I’m in a romantic comedy,” she says.
Stuart wrinkles his nose. “Please. Can’t we at least be the Doctor and Rose?”
Maya is hard pressed not to giggle again at the thoughts that conjures up. “I thought you were more of a Fourth Doctor man.”
“Really? How’d you know?”
“Your New Year’s party.”
“You noticed?”
Maya tactfully does not say it was because of the six-yard-long scarf that she nearly tripped over thanks to not being able to see her own feet past the stupid Aquaman costume and just nods, which earns her a bright smile and another kiss and for that she’d tell him she noticed anything, like how he peels the paper off his muffin to eat the bottom first, and how he’s got exactly the right sort of fingers to be an artist, and all sorts of things that would land them right back in romantic comedy territory.
They hurry to finish getting the comics back into place, and in the end the only casualties of the night before (aside from whatever damage Penny inflicted before her victim escaped) are a handful of comics either ripped or covered in hummus, and one pathetic little plushie that Maya doesn’t recognize, a little black pig with a tear down his snout. She holds it up and raises an inquisitive eyebrow at Stuart, who laughs a little more confidently.
“You should keep that one as a memento.”
“What’s it from?”
“Ranma ½. Have you seen it?”
“No,” Maya says, although the name does ring a bell, and a fairly loud one at that.
“We’ll have to watch it together sometime.”
“It’s a date.”
“Oh God, now we’re back to being in a romantic comedy.”
Maya catches his hand and pulls him closer. “So? Would you rather be in a horror movie? Because I promise you, we’d both be dead by the end of the first act.” She snags her bag off the counter and puts her little black pig into it.
“Fair point,” Stuart concedes. “Where are we going?”
“Lunch.”
“We just had breakfast.”
“That was two hours and about a zillion comics ago.” Maya bounces on her toes. “Come on, let’s go.”
“This really is a date.”
“You catch on fast.”
“So, if we’re in a romantic comedy, what tropes do we have to watch out for? I’m not all that familiar with the genre,” Stuart says as they step out of the store and into the cool sunlight.
Maya knows that she says something in response, but in all honesty, she has no idea what she’s saying. Her prose is probably so purple it’s lavender, but Stuart’s hand is warm, and he’s curled those artist’s fingers around hers, and right now?
Right now, she’s so happy she could die.