Rosario took a sip of lukewarm coffee, and grimaced.
She'd have killed for a real cafecito right now. All the cafes on campus served weak crap, watery and flavourless, and what was worse, they charged an obnoxious amount for it. But there were some days when a girl just needed a caffeine hit, no matter what half-assed form it came in, and today, today was definitely was that kinda day.
There was something wrong with her telescope.
It wasn't technically her biggest problem (that would be her impending anatomy class and the prospect of another stomach-turning semester of cutting into decomposing hunks of human tissue; or else the ongoing mystery of her asshole bio-dad who didn't even have the decency to leave a proper paper trail behind him; or possibly just the general passage of time as a concept) but it was the one that had kept her up till 3am this morning and it was the one that was right now annoying the ever-loving shit out of her.
It'd been a crappy month for stargazing, overcast and stormy. Monday, though, the sun had set on a perfect cloudless sky, and as Rosario had moved through the usual routine of setting up the telescope, she'd felt a kind of ease come over her, one she hadn't realised she'd been missing.
Until she'd peered into the finder and been half-dazzled by a lens flare, as though she'd trained the telescope on a powerful ray of sunlight by mistake.
The main eyepiece had had the same problem. She'd moved it to the other side of the roof, tried adjusting the focus and magnification, switched out eyepieces— didn't matter. Every time she'd looked, brilliant golden light had flooded her vision.
She'd wasted an hour on Google that night trying to find an answer and failing even to find a single other person who'd experienced such an anomaly, before finally – reluctantly – writing it off as Not Her Damn Night and packing it in.
Then the next night, it had happened again.
This time, she'd taken apart the entire telescope in her frustration. She'd disassembled it piece by piece, carefully methodical, finding nothing at all suspect, and then she'd put it back together and set up the tripod on the roof and—
Fucking. Sunlight.
So she'd taken it apart again. It was still fine. Every single component of it was fine, it should be working fine, but it wasn't, and Rosario had spent so long chasing her own tail that before she'd known it, it had been 3am and she still hadn't finished the assigned reading for Wednesday's classes.
Hence the book, and hence the coffee, and hence the expression of deep annoyance burrowing between her brows.
She heard the scrape of the chair opposite being pulled out from the table, caught the movement in her periphery and looked up sharply, irritation flaring. Flaring, then faltering when she found herself staring straight into the eyes of Archer Goldenhawk III. (Her first thought: Oh fuck, does he know? Followed closely by: Don't be stupid, how would he know? Then: Well, what the fuck is he doing here, then?!)
Still, she managed to firm her jaw and ask, coolly as she could muster, "Can I help you?"