#i'm soft for benverly tbh this fandom needs more of them

[skeletonscribbles]

26 from the prompt list for Ben/bev!!

my friend, I genuinely think getting to write this Benverly ficlet cleared my skin, watered my crops, improved my lifestyle, etc. etc. etc.

I wanted to give them a nice little coffeeshop AU moment, because it’s what they Deserve, so here they are in Face The Music, with the prompt “maybe not” :)

(and if you’d rather, you can read it on Ao3!)

Some days, Ben Hanscom felt like he was out of his mind for choosing architecture.

Sure, he was good at it - he always had been. The minute he’d stepped into his drafting elective in high school, he’d known that he had a talent for clean lines and physics and the necessary vision to design something beautiful, tasteful, and in synch with its surroundings. He was an architect. That was what he was going to do.

From there, his life followed a prescribed course of actions: down to hot, sweaty Texas to study at Rice University, then up to cold, meticulous MIT for graduate school so he could, at last, land a low-ranking job at a top-ranking firm in New York City. Ben wasn’t sure that he liked New York - he sure as shit didn’t belong there, coming in from ass-nowhere Kansas - but it was where he was supposed to be, career-wise, so…okay.

Well…not quite okay. It would be easier to ignore the parts of New York that grated on him if he actually felt like he was going somewhere with his career, but all of the big projects the firm took on seemed to be going to people (if Ben was to be bluntly honest) much less capable than he; Emma from New Hampshire, for example had been hired just after him, had put forward mediocre blueprints for a standard corporate building as the key piece in her portfolio, and had, within a month of being on the job, been pulled for the major midtown renovation that the firm had been commissioned to do. Ben was left to his paperwork and his resentment, and resolved to work harder, push himself further – but how much further could he go? He barely made it home most nights as it was. Last night, he’d been at work until 3:30 a.m., filing and sketching and re-sketching and thinking, and now, at 7 a.m., he was back to do it all again.

This is rewarding, he reminded himself as he shuffled his way down the sidewalk. This is what you’re good at.

Fuck. No pep-talk was going to be worth anything if he didn’t have coffee. He should have thought about that sooner, because at this point in the trek he’d passed most of his usual java joints - there was only the new place left between him and work, and it wasn’t a chain, it was an independently owned little corner market.

He wasn’t big on going out of his comfort zone, particularly where coffee was concerned, but…it was going to have to do for now. He hoped to God they’d grant him the extra espresso he so desperately needed.

“Hi, welcome to Maturin Coffee–” the barista began as he walked in (prescribed, he thought), and then they made eye contact and all of what was left of Ben’s coherent thought (which wasn’t much, to be fair, after about an hour and a half of sleep) went out the window.

There was a lot that could be said about the young woman before him - things that Ben could probably infer about her personality and the store as a whole based on her green turtle knit cap, mint green button-down with lavender stripes, and rainbow apron (that clashed with her red, red hair), but none of that mattered at all, because he was trapped in the pull of her jungle green eyes.

Shit, shit, shit. He didn’t have time for this. There was too much work on his plate for him to be falling in love with every manic pixie dream barista on the block. Shaking his head a little bit to knock himself out of his funk, he approached the counter.

“I need something with at least four shots of espresso in it.”

The woman raised an eyebrow at him, clearly somewhat bemused. “Four shots, huh? No rest for the weary?”

“Slept for an hour and a half last night,” Ben told her honestly, hoping the truth would make her speed up her work. “Not out of the ordinary for me. Espresso’s gonna keep me alive.”

The woman whistled, raking her eyes over Ben’s face with something akin to concern. Instead of asking questions about his personal life, though, as he’d feared she might do, she moved to grab a large cup.

“Any particular flavors you like?” she asked him, bringing his cup towards a disorganized jumble of what looked like flavorings and creamers. “Allergies, things I should know, etcetera?”

He racked his brain, trying to come up with something on the fly. Most of the baristas he’d  encountered would have just served him four straight shots of espresso in the bottom half of a paper cup, and he found himself almost grateful that this girl was trying to make things nicer for him. Very few people did that, these days (or ever, really, if he was being honest with himself).

“I like almond,” he told her, allowing himself one thin, quiet smile. “No allergies.”

Her returned grin was a revelation - it stretched her face so brilliantly that his heart couldn’t help but throw itself against the front of his chest like it was trying to get out and reach her and holy shit, did he have absolutely no self control whatsoever?

“Coming right up,” she told him, and busied herself with his concoction while he tried to pull himself the fuck together. Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to focus on the residential project he was building a model for for that day, but found his mind was now completely devoid of anything that didn’t have to do with the spread of freckles across barista girl’s cheeks. Damn it, damn it, damn it. He’d have to try a new strategy for clearing his mind - what was that New Kids on the Block song that had been stuck in his head a couple of weeks ago? Said all that I wanted was you….you made all my dreams come true…..

He was so busy humming softly to himself, he almost didn’t notice her come back with his drink.

“Try this,” she said, and he flinched away from her, startled by her sudden reappearance. When he looked back down, she was holding a cardboard cup of coffee up to him with a knowing grin. “I think you’ll find that it has the right stuff.”

Ben bit back a groan. “Oh, jeez…”

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” she assured him, although the effort she was obviously putting into not laughing suggested otherwise. “We’ve all got a secret crush on Donnie Wahlberg, it’s fine. Take a sip.”

Not wanting to embarrass himself further, he took the cup and blew softly on the liquid to cool it down. He sipped slowly…and then sipped again and again and again as fervently as he could without burning the roof of his mouth.

The coffee she’d made him was INCREDIBLE.

“What’s in this?” he asked, wide-eyed, and the girl’s grin grew wider.

“It’s a secret,” she told him, eyes twinkling merrily.

He let out a surprised laugh at that, and promptly clapped a hand over his mouth in wonder - how long had it been since he’d laughed?

“Anyways, thank you,” he said, sounding more sincere to his own ears than he had in the past five years at his firm. “This is the best coffee I’ve ever had. How much do I owe you for it, because I’ll pay you twice that, it’s that good–”

“Maybe not,” she interrupted him gently, and he spluttered, staring down at her. Didn’t she need the business?

“Not…pay you?” he asked, dumbfounded.

She shook her head. “You look like you need that coffee more than I need your money. Do me a favor, though?”

“Anything,” he said, not realizing until the word was already out of his mouth how absolutely pathetic he sounded. God, she was going to think he was the biggest creep in the world.

“Well, two favors, actually,” she amended, and Ben steeled himself, waiting for her to drop the anvil: she had a boyfriend, she never wanted to see him in this shop again, she was filing a restraining order….

“Take a vacation or quit your job,” she said instead, and Ben couldn’t help the little gasp of surprise that escaped his lips.

“Wh…why?” he asked once he’d regained his bearings, frowning a little bit as he registered that her expression was sincere. She didn’t know what he did, or how hard he’d worked to get there. How could she ask such a thing?

“I’ve lived in New York for years, now,” she said, “and before that, I was in small town Maine, so I’m sort of an expert on groups of people that are really, really unhappy with their lives.”

“And?” he asked, cataloguing the personal information she’d just shared and wondering what her point was.

“You are without a doubt the most miserable looking person I’ve ever seen,” she said, and Ben felt an embarrassed blush sweep its way across his face, ears, and neck.

“Oh,” he said, not sure what else there was to say.

“And I don’t mean that you’re not attractive or anything,” she quickly backpedaled, mirroring his flushed face, “I just mean that you don’t seem….”

“Happy?” he asked, thinking quietly about his time at the firm and all the work he’d put in. He’d been trying for such a long time to convince himself that he liked what he was doing…but was he happy? Was convincing himself that he was happy something that happy people did?

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking at her hands. “Sorry if I overstepped, but.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her, still sort of reeling a little bit from all of the new thinking he now knew that he was going to have to do. “What was the second favor, quickly? I’m running late.”

“Oh,” the girl said, expression revealing that she’d forgotten that she’d asked for two favors. “Oh, it’s nothing. I was just going to ask you for your name.”

Ben’s heart did a quick backflip, and he couldn’t help but let that thin, quiet smile from earlier sneak back on to his face.

“Ben,” he told her. “Ben Hanscom.”

She seemed to weigh his response in her mind, as if assessing him anew based on his name…and then she smiled, letting him know that he’d come out favorably.

“I’m sorry for making you late, Ben Handsome.”

“Hanscom,” he corrected quickly, collecting his coffee and willing his blush not to reappear.

“I stand by what I said,” she told him with a wink. “I’ll see you around.”

Flustered, he stumbled over his own feet and almost spilled his coffee on the way out. He could hear her laughter echoing through the coffeeshop as he tripped his way out the door.

It took him another block’s worth of walking to realize that he hadn’t gotten her name in return.

He had half a mind to turn around, and he went so far as to stop in the middle of the sidewalk, frantically searching the cup for some sort of contact information.

It turned out that she’d been a step ahead of him the whole time. There was a note scrawled in Sharpie on the side of the cup that Ben had been holding.

-coffee’s on me whenever you need it. hang tough. love, Bev Marsh, aka the new (coffee) kid on the block-

She’d put a phone number (presumably her own) under where she’d signed her name, and Ben took a moment to stare at it, mentally committing it to memory.

Bev Marsh, he whispered to himself, and smiled quietly at how well the name seemed to match the girl he’d just met - the multicolored, coffee magician that saw right through him with her green, green eyes.

For once in his life, he had something to look forward to.