March Prompt: The Coffee Shop AU

Back in January, earlgreytea68 had a guest post up at the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) reflecting on her involvement in fandom. Among other things, she described the trope of the coffee shop AU:

Once I had to explain coffee shop AUs to someone, and I said, “You take the characters and you put them in a coffee shop, so they’re, like, baristas and regular customers and maybe bakers and stuff.” They blinked at me and said, “And that’s a whole story?” And I was like, “That is TONS of stories and THEY ARE THE BEST.” But I guess, in the abstract, never having read a coffee shop AU, it might sound weird.

My wife and I agree with EGT that coffee shop AUs are “THE BEST” and we have a running joke about how no fandom has truly arrived until it generates “the” coffee shop AU.

What is it about coffee shops? They’re ubiquitous. They’re social. They provide you with food and drink. They’re third spaces – not quite home, not quite impersonally public – to which people feel intensely attached, encountering strangers who nevertheless are familiar as regular customers or staff members you see every day as you get your caffeine fix. Even if you never know the name of that customer or the barista who pulls the best shots you start developing head!canon based on your daily interactions. Thus, you can take virtually any cast of characters and place them in such a space and magical things happen.

So the prompt for March is to write a coffee shop-themed fic. It can be a full-blown coffee shop AU, set in a pre-existing coffee shop AU, or simply have a scene set in a coffee shop. Do your protagonists run the coffee shop? frequent the coffee shop? stumble upon a new coffee shop – and perhaps one another? – one day? is their favorite coffee shop in trouble? do they get a little over-excited and end up making out madly in a coffee shop to the delight of the customers … or perhaps after-hours when accidentally locked inside? do they get engaged or married in a coffee shop? have a fight (and hopefully later make up) in a coffee shop? perhaps a character tells a story about a coffee shop AU, or has a dream about being in a coffee shop AU.

As in previous months, this challenge will be accepting contributions from all fandoms and at any length. Smut is not mandatory, although it appears that most of you are flinging yourselves whole-heartedly in the smut direction. In which case: have at it!

The goal for the #TwelveInTwelve2016 challenge is to keep our creative juices flowing throughout the year whether that means a 500 word ficlet or a 50,000 word epic (although if you have the time and energy for 50k words per month I will be madly jealous of your generative capacity!).

HAVE A PROMPT IDEA FOR THE YEAR? SEND US AN ASK! WE ARE CURRENTLY COLLECTING IDEAS FOR THE REST OF 2016.