Ours poetica

and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends/my beautiful, credible friends.

The only TW  is for internalized ableism regarding Tubbo's dyslexia in his section, but nothing too intense! Just a heads up!

Kinoko's Coffee was nestled between a Subway and CITI Bank in the outskirts of their town's historic district. Kinoko's was a pocket of magic in the bustling world around them; the little coffee shop with a yellow-painted door that radiated warmth even when closed, its eaves dripping with garlands and dotted with fairy lights that cast a soft glow on the patio. The small red-brick pathway was dotted with bushes of irises and lavenders perched amongst porcelain mushroom sculptures and pots housing succulents, a brushstroke of color amongst canvases of sidewalk pavement. To any onlooker, the coffee shop seemed like any cottage-core fantasy created by millennial entrepreneurs, but to those with a keen eye, there were hidden secrets: scattered amongst the brush and in the nooks of the eaves were countless gnome statues, all with carefully painted smiles or frowns, always doing something out of the ordinary. There were some wrestling each other, others dancing a jig amongst themselves, and some (those of which being Tommy's favorite) were sharpening little plastic knives with red paint splattered on their front. Now that was fucking cool.

But most of all, Tommy loved the front door garden. When poetry practice ran long and he couldn't stand to sit and talk rhyme schemes a moment longer, the garden had become his place of respite. He would crouch by the hydrangeas and watch as moths circled the fairy-lights above like predators drawn to prey, their thin wings obscuring the light as it danced upon the pavement below; it was as if nothing existed but him and the cyclone of insects hovering above his head, as if he was the sole inheritor of a little universe constructed just for him to observe. This, the quaint coffee shop with its garden and little mysteries, was a place where he could finally catch a breath from life's chaos.

(Sometimes, it felt like it was the only place he could breathe)

Tommy pushed the yellow door open to the giggling of a window chime above him, alerting the shop owners of a new customer. Instantly the aroma of freshly ground coffee and frothing milk washed over him, alleviating the tension in his shoulders from the car-ride here. God, he loved this place. He grinned as he made eye contact with the owner across the room, giving the man a little wave and shuffling inside.

"Hey! T-Man! Nice to see you back," the brunette cheered, his large bifocals threatening to slip off his nose as he practically jumped onto the counter to greet him. If Tommy had to explain Karl Jacobs in one word, owner and best barista of Kinoko's Coffee, he would have to say 'peculiar'. The man was honest-to-God one of the wackiest people Tommy had met (and he was friends with Tubbo for Christ's sake); he was a mess of clumsy hands and run-on sentences, words always getting away from him as he chattered a customer's ear off, or told tales of impossible places and even more impossible people. When he wasn't rambling, his head was in the clouds, staring off at odd spaces and muttering to himself about books and doppelgängers. It was strange, but no one paid any mind to the strange things about Karl—there was enough to last a life-time.

(Like how no one knew where the dude had come from, not really. It was like one day the shop had just popped up with owner in tow, replacing the beloved seafood restaurant the town had grown to love. No explanation, no preface, just a new spark of magic laid amongst city buildings like a firefly on grass—unassuming)

"Hey Karl! How's the fiancé holding up?" Tommy leaned against the counter, sincerely curious as to how Sapnap was doing; the man had an incident with some fireworks (which were definitely not illegal, the man was totally not a pyromaniac or anything) in Dream's backyard. "I heard that the burns weren't too bad?"

Karl hummed, already a flurry of cups and tea-bags as he began to make Tommy his usual order, "he's fine, just a bit grumpy that George and I banned him from illicit activities for the foreseeable future. Driving him absolutely crazy out of boredom."