Chapter Text
Sarah-Jane opened Blue Box Tea and Cake ten years ago, painted the police-box-blue front door herself with youth-soft hands and slightly tired eyes. Ten years on, her hands are larger and stained slightly with tea and her crisp white boss-shirts are lightly streaked with batter, but the Blue Box is as lovely and living as ever.
It’s a quaint place, a tiny shop bursting with anachronisms and light. There are soft squishy armchairs and metal-and-glass benches, tan leather jumpseats and an always-full cake bar, all brass and crystal and confection, sitting on an actual glass floor.
It’s solid, the shop, a fact of Sarah’s life. It’s spunky and homey and warm and unconventional, a vibrant, breathing being. Just like her.
(She’d never wanted to own a tea shop. When she was young she’d thought she would be someone, a journalist, an explorer. Someone who travelled. Someone who heard and saw and did. She would become someone who collected stories, someone who would go somewhere new and make them for herself. All she needed was somebody to take her there.
In time, she’d grown tired of waiting.
She collects stories, still, hears them over the rims of teacups and reads them in chocolate-crumb patterns on her grandmother’s china. She collects stories and stays where she is and makes tea, and swallows the dreams that were never her life anyway.)
***
Rose is a waitress, only nineteen and already the best Sarah’s ever had. She serves tea like an artist, hands deft on the pots, whipping hot milk into foam roses for the lattes with a gentle smile and a roguish wink.Her eyes are soft.
She smiles like a whipcord when she quips with the customers and her laugh is loud and bright, and once, just once, she caught a man striking his date across a table dark with spilled Darjeeling and threw him out with a whisper like an oncoming storm, but her eyes are soft. They’re always soft.
(Sarah-Jane tried to promote her, once, wanted her to run the front-of-house, but Rose had refused.
“I can’t,” she’d said, and laughed, her eyes warm and sorrowful. “I don’t even have any A-levels. I wouldn’t know how.”
Sarah knows it isn’t true, thinks it as she watches Rose had a steaming mug to a man in black leather with eyes like the grave. He’s a regular, comes in every day but Sunday and always orders a single cup of Earl Grey. He takes it without sugar, without cream, as if bitter tea could be an appropriate penance for anything.
Rose saves a special smile for him, tongue caught between her teeth as she grins, and he takes his mug from her with a beaming smile to her soft eyes.
He never used to smile at Sarah, when she served it.)
***
Martha runs the till, a part-time stint to pay her way through medical school. She’s quiet and clever, always composed, always respectful, with a glint in her eye that had made Sarah hire her on the spot. She keeps her distance while she works, but on her breaks she puts her hair up, curls up in a corner with a cup of tea, and talks.
She tells the other girls long, rolling stories, tells them about her classes and her professors and her dreams. She loves her family, they learn, and she wants to take care of them. She wants to give her sister a passion, to give her father a reason to settle, to give her mother a trip to the therapist. She wants impossible things. One day, she says, eyes bright over her mug, she’s going to save the world.
(Rose had grinned at Martha on her first day, sitting next to her on her first break, laughed and called her “Doctor”. Martha remembers how that had felt, like the weight of expectations and the terror of failure and the tantalizing electric burden of capability.
It had felt like a mission, like ‘first do no harm’, like being enough. It had felt uncomfortable. It itched against her skin, the title like a mantle she longed for and could never hope to fit. Martha Jones, the doctor. Martha Jones, the good.
She had taken another sip of tea. Winked at Rose. “Not yet.”)
***
Donna is the General Manager. Sarah-Jane had hired her two years back from the Chiswick Temp Agency and could never find it in herself to return her. She blows through the kitchen and the tearoom like a whirlwind of red hair and sharp wit and loud voice, and behind her things lift and fly and settle, all in their proper places. Sarah’s never seen anything like it. She would suspect that she never will again, but then Donna comes and does it every day.
The other girls salute her, call her General Noble, Rose and Martha with laughing affectionate smiles and Amy with a knowing smirk and Mels with an almost-mutinous grin. Donna laughs, every time they do it, and she stand straighter and plants her hand on her hip and barks her orders like a drill sergeant, but sometimes her voice falls, just a little, and her eyes go a bit dark and longing, like she’s looking at something wonderful that’s about to fly away.
(Martha had hugged her, right after the catering job – Blue Box’s first and last and only, the wedding of Donna’s ex and a woman that she only ever called The Spider – when they were both high on sneaked espresso and thirty-six hours of cupcakes and no sleep. Donna had held things together, then, snarling at the wedding planner and scrubbing the kitchen with her own hands and storming through six different Tescos for five kilos of Emergency Cake Flour. When it was over Donna had bags under her eyes and chocolate streaks in her red hair and Martha’s arms wrapped around her waist.
“Donna Noble,” Martha had said, pulling back for a tired-happy salute, “You’re a marvel, you are.”
Donna had smiled, tired from more than the hours. “Nah,” she said, “I’m just a temp from Chiswick.”
“Not anymore,” with a teasing grin. “You’re officially on the payroll now, remember.”
And Donna had looked at her with the smile of the disbelieving, and said nothing.)
***
Amy and Mels make the cupcakes. They stay in the kitchen, for the most part, and they fly around each other with a kind of clockwork madness, baking and icing and laughing into each others’ batter. They’ve come up with fifteen different cupcake flavours in the nine months they’ve been here, and a line of special cupcakes for the regulars, ten of them so far. There’s a fluffy vanilla one filled with miniature jelly babies and iced with a broad brown-and-orange stripe that Sarah-Jane just loves, and a black-coffee flavoured one iced shiny black that makes Rose blush, and a blue-and-brown pinstriped one stuffed with blueberries and bananas that Martha always buys.
Amy is fiery, bright and bold like her hair, and she bakes with the methodical determination of one possessed. Her eyes are lit from the inside, like candles in a window, and sometimes she stares into space with the tiredness of someone weary of waiting and unwilling to stop, and sometimes only the shrilling of her oven timers can make her blink, smile, move. She doesn’t need a timer, really, bakes by instinct and experience. She always sets them anyway.
Mels is quieter, darker in colouring and in the eyes. She bakes like a hurricane, wild and unstoppable, dancing circles around Amy’s calm. Her eyes are shadowed, bristling with the thrumming electricity of the restless, and the hair she refuses to tie back whips across her shoulders as she stirs and whisks and ices. She never uses electric mixers. She needs something to do with her hands while the cakes bake.
They fit together, Amy and Mels, like two halves of a whole. They’re best friends and partners and complimentary pieces, Amy the light to Mels’ shadow, Mels the energy to Amy’s patience. Amy shops with Rose on their lunch hour, and Mels loves giving Donna hell, and both of them love Martha’s stories and Sarah’s smiles, but they’re always them, Amy-and-Mels, and when they drink tea they only ever drink with each other.
(There was a question of nametags, back when they were first hired. All the staff were getting them, but neither Amy nor Mels knew what theirs should say. Amy was always Amelia, when she was little, grew up and grew tired grew out of her home as Amelia Pond. She used to think, when she was small, that someday someone would see her and think her special and amazing, would say to her, “Amelia Pond, come away with me and I’ll take you somewhere new.”
She waited, for the longest time, and one day she snapped and moved out all on her own and changed her name to Amy. She’ll never admit that, somewhere in her child’s mind, she always assumed that it was her name that was the problem, that it was too long or too hard to say, too hard to call from the stars. She’ll never admit that being Amelia makes her shiver now.
Mels was christened River Song, and it’s not a name she answers to. Her parents and their love are things she never speaks of, things that make her dark eyes darker and her brisk smile sharp enough to cut. She named herself, when she first went to school. Melody was close enough to Song, and far enough away for her to hide in, to let her change her face and herself.
After she met Amy she started signing her forms as Melody Pond instead of Song, River, and they never stopped thinking it was funny. They’re Mels and Amy more than they’re River and Pond, and Mels is as far from a sister as Amy will ever meet, but it fits, somehow. Melody Pond is a wild, brilliant girl, and River Song is someone her parents knew, someone she is and isn’t and will never, she thinks, stop running from.
Mels runs. Amy waits. In the end, it was decided that kitchen staff don’t need nametags.
Neither of them complained.)