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bookstore au!
Here's a bunch (and some non-bookstore prompt fills too). I want to make longer fics of some of them maybe? Maybe.
Roman Holiday
After hours of wandering the wrong streets around what he's sure is the same square and fountain, Joe finds the shop at last, a single stone-walled room only steps from the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. He ducks inside, where the sticky heat of the Roman summer heightens the smell of old books, of hundreds of years of dusty bindings, marbled flyleafs, and gilded-edged maps, and somewhere in the midst of all this: his novel—his novel—a slim volume of uninspired, pedestrian prose, wrung out of him through a haze of grappa and sweet tobacco. When his eyes adjust, he sees he's only inches from knocking down a precarious stack of paper-wrapped bundles and reels backward, arms windmilling, until someone grasps his elbow to still him and says in a voice bright enough to rival the campanile outside, "I know our inventory is impressive, but this seems a bit overdone!"
Psych: Jules, Lassiter, first day of partnership, last day of partnership
It's ridiculous how naked he feels without the shield in his pocket and the holster under his coat. Well, the holster is still there, of course, he'd rather lose an leg than it, but the weight of his personal revolver is strange and new, and it will be days before he feels like it's not making him walk sideways and tilt out of chairs.
"I just don't see why I had to retire. I'm perfectly capable of doing the same job I've done for the last thirty years—"
Juliet doesn't sigh; she's heard this far too many times already to react to it. But she does cap her pen and tap the end of it against the ring around his finger. "Carlton, we made a deal. It's practically the same job, just a few different rules! You'll catch just as many bad guys. More, maybe."
"I know," he grumbles. "But I don't have to like it."
Her hair is still as bright as the day they met. Her smile, too. "But you will."
MANNINGS (NFL RPF)
Eli's first memory is of standing next to his father's recliner on a Sunday afternoon. He was smacking his pudgy fist against the leather and laughing, while his brothers wrestled in front of the big, black-lacquered bookcase and red-faced men in too-tight polo shirts waved brown bottles and shouted incoherent encouragement.
"C'mon, Coop," Archie yelled, "that's a genuine Bowdler! How you ever gonna run my store if you can't keep your little brother from getting a Shakespeare off the shelf?"
Mindy Project
As a general rule, Shulman & Sons & Daughter-in-law does pretty well for itself: inventory well-balanced against demand, prices not so high they drive away the casual browsers but not so low they don't make a tidy profit on the occasional first edition or rare book.
But Danny's been fighting a losing battle for years: to keep the ambiance the same he remembers from his first day as a bookseller, hushed and respectful and definitely not involving anything made from shiny plastic or candy-colored vinyl or....
God, sparkles.
30 Rock
Halfway through the Celebrity MILF Island signing, one of the cougars gets loose. Not one of the feral ones—they're all still smiling widely and shaking bleached extensions away from their faces—but one of the actual cougars, the four-legged kind, with a jeweled collar and miserable face, who somehow slips away from its minder and goes wandering up and down aisles until it curls up in a beanbag in the children's section.
It's Kenneth who finds it, of course, practically sits right on it during his break; his high-pitched screams will probably still be ringing off the shelves when the Earth falls into the sun.
30 Rock
"Okay, no," Liz says, pushing her hair back from her face (who ever decided a perm needed to be so floofy anyway?) and huffing out just the tiniest fraction of her irritation, "no, there is no way we're stocking that and I could not care less why you think we should."
Wesley takes a deep breath, straining the buttons on his narrow shirt and stirring the fuzz of new growth just starting to darken his upper lip. "Elizabeth, it's a classic, it will sell like, like ... griddlebreads!"
Star Wars
They get raided after-hours twice in the first week Han works in the store: once, by the Imperial censor, who claims she was tipped to all manner of regs-breaking subversive content that, somehow, mysteriously, disappears from the shelves before her polished boot hits the anti-static mat; and, second, by a handful of Rodians, who sneer at Leia and poke around the registers until Han finally gives in and pulls a bundle of credits from his coat and hands them over.
"Librarians," he says with a smirk when she locks the door after them and turns to glare. "I'm not so good with due dates."
Castle
Kate had only had the store open for twenty minutes when a man pushed the door open and smiled at her with something approaching delight, while he fought his way through the opening with with a duffel bag full of hardcover books and a box tucked haphazardly under his arm.
"Hi, Rick Castle, I called about doing an impromptu signing today" he said, seemingly oblivious to the box slowly tilting out of his grip and pouring forth a cascade of … furry handcuffs? "Where should I set up, right over here?"
Roman Holiday
After hours of wandering the wrong streets around what he's sure is the same square and fountain, Joe finds the shop at last, a single stone-walled room only steps from the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. He ducks inside, where the sticky heat of the Roman summer heightens the smell of old books, of hundreds of years of dusty bindings, marbled flyleafs, and gilded-edged maps, and somewhere in the midst of all this: his novel—his novel—a slim volume of uninspired, pedestrian prose, wrung out of him through a haze of grappa and sweet tobacco. When his eyes adjust, he sees he's only inches from knocking down a precarious stack of paper-wrapped bundles and reels backward, arms windmilling, until someone grasps his elbow to still him and says in a voice bright enough to rival the campanile outside, "I know our inventory is impressive, but this seems a bit overdone!"
Psych: Jules, Lassiter, first day of partnership, last day of partnership
It's ridiculous how naked he feels without the shield in his pocket and the holster under his coat. Well, the holster is still there, of course, he'd rather lose an leg than it, but the weight of his personal revolver is strange and new, and it will be days before he feels like it's not making him walk sideways and tilt out of chairs.
"I just don't see why I had to retire. I'm perfectly capable of doing the same job I've done for the last thirty years—"
Juliet doesn't sigh; she's heard this far too many times already to react to it. But she does cap her pen and tap the end of it against the ring around his finger. "Carlton, we made a deal. It's practically the same job, just a few different rules! You'll catch just as many bad guys. More, maybe."
"I know," he grumbles. "But I don't have to like it."
Her hair is still as bright as the day they met. Her smile, too. "But you will."
MANNINGS (NFL RPF)
Eli's first memory is of standing next to his father's recliner on a Sunday afternoon. He was smacking his pudgy fist against the leather and laughing, while his brothers wrestled in front of the big, black-lacquered bookcase and red-faced men in too-tight polo shirts waved brown bottles and shouted incoherent encouragement.
"C'mon, Coop," Archie yelled, "that's a genuine Bowdler! How you ever gonna run my store if you can't keep your little brother from getting a Shakespeare off the shelf?"
Mindy Project
As a general rule, Shulman & Sons & Daughter-in-law does pretty well for itself: inventory well-balanced against demand, prices not so high they drive away the casual browsers but not so low they don't make a tidy profit on the occasional first edition or rare book.
But Danny's been fighting a losing battle for years: to keep the ambiance the same he remembers from his first day as a bookseller, hushed and respectful and definitely not involving anything made from shiny plastic or candy-colored vinyl or....
God, sparkles.
30 Rock
Halfway through the Celebrity MILF Island signing, one of the cougars gets loose. Not one of the feral ones—they're all still smiling widely and shaking bleached extensions away from their faces—but one of the actual cougars, the four-legged kind, with a jeweled collar and miserable face, who somehow slips away from its minder and goes wandering up and down aisles until it curls up in a beanbag in the children's section.
It's Kenneth who finds it, of course, practically sits right on it during his break; his high-pitched screams will probably still be ringing off the shelves when the Earth falls into the sun.
30 Rock
"Okay, no," Liz says, pushing her hair back from her face (who ever decided a perm needed to be so floofy anyway?) and huffing out just the tiniest fraction of her irritation, "no, there is no way we're stocking that and I could not care less why you think we should."
Wesley takes a deep breath, straining the buttons on his narrow shirt and stirring the fuzz of new growth just starting to darken his upper lip. "Elizabeth, it's a classic, it will sell like, like ... griddlebreads!"
Star Wars
They get raided after-hours twice in the first week Han works in the store: once, by the Imperial censor, who claims she was tipped to all manner of regs-breaking subversive content that, somehow, mysteriously, disappears from the shelves before her polished boot hits the anti-static mat; and, second, by a handful of Rodians, who sneer at Leia and poke around the registers until Han finally gives in and pulls a bundle of credits from his coat and hands them over.
"Librarians," he says with a smirk when she locks the door after them and turns to glare. "I'm not so good with due dates."
Castle
Kate had only had the store open for twenty minutes when a man pushed the door open and smiled at her with something approaching delight, while he fought his way through the opening with with a duffel bag full of hardcover books and a box tucked haphazardly under his arm.
"Hi, Rick Castle, I called about doing an impromptu signing today" he said, seemingly oblivious to the box slowly tilting out of his grip and pouring forth a cascade of … furry handcuffs? "Where should I set up, right over here?"