In retrospect, Arthur had probably not been the ideal candidate for pizza delivery.

Then again, Antonio was an amazingly bad judge of character. The pizzeria's only other employee was a young man named Romano. Short build, shorter temper, gayer than a tree full of monkeys. According to Antonio, Romano's pizzas were to die for when he could be bothered to make the damned things properly, but Arthur was pretty sure the guy only had a job because he was fucking the boss. As it was, for the most part Pomodoro Pizzas remained tacky, cheap, and had a bad reputation.

Much like Arthur himself, really.

He wrinkled his nose at the plastic bag in his hand. Extra large pepperoni pizza (extra cheese, extra pepperoni, stuffed crust), six piece chicken tenders, basket of wings, jalapeno pepper poppers, potato wedges, baked cheese pasta and an side of meatballs.

Oh, and a Diet Coke.

He rapped his knuckles on the door of the dilapidated-looking apartment in front of him. This building, although Arthur had never been in it before, was famous in town for being home almost exclusively to broke students and the occasional druggie. "Pizza!" he called, not trying very hard not to sound bored. It took all of seven seconds before he got tired of waiting and knocked harder, shifting his weight from foot to foot. "Bizarrely large order! Enough cholesterol to kill a horse! I've got your bloody death-in-a-box right here, come out and get it already!"

Footsteps thudded towards him and he heard a muffled "hold your horses, I'm coming" before the door creaked open and a boy greeted him, adjusting his glasses.

He was very blond. Arthur blinked.

"An unholy amount of food for Alfred James," he said, intentionally getting the name wrong just to be annoying. He lifted the bag and eyed the fat yellow dog that poked its head out from behind the customer's legs.

"Jones, not James." The boy –Alfred- took the bag and smiled. "You sure do have a lot of metal in your face."

"I find that funny coming from a bloke still wearing retainers."

Alfred, surprisingly, laughed. "How much do I owe you?"

"I don't know. Check the receipt."

"You're not very helpful."

"Pity, I've had my eye on 'Employee of the Month' for a while now." Nevermind the fact that he only had one other co-worker besides his boss.

"Good luck with that!"

"I was being sarcastic."

"Whatever. Here you go!" Alfred chirruped, handing him exact change. Arthur took the money and leered, half because he was in a bad mood and half because Alfred didn't seem like the brightest bulb in the box. He only got a beaming smile in return. For some reason this was almost as irritating as the dog trying to stick its nose into his pockets for treats, so Arthur decided to cut his losses and leave. He had two orders to drop off before he could go home for the night.

"Enjoy your heart attack."

"Thanks! I will!"

Arthur snorted and turned on his heel. He was irritable at the best of times, but the unholy waves of happy coming off of Alfred Jones made his hands itch to throw a punch. The small mercy was, he supposed, that Pomodoro was so half-assed about its food that most people tended not to be recurring customers.

Naturally, of course, Alfred was different.

"I'm actually rather impressed. This is the first time anyone's ever wanted us again."

Alfred signed the receipt stuck to Arthur's clipboard. "I'm not too fussy about food, as long as it fills me up," he said. "Besides, it's the cheapest stuff I could get without having to cook anything myself." He laughed, although Arthur wasn't quite sure why. The noise was loud and had a hint of a snort to it. "You have a lot of piercings."

"Yes, I know. You told me the last time." And he'd spent the rest of the night staring at himself in the mirror, wondering if perhaps it was a bit too much to have metal in his ears, lip, tongue and eyebrow.

"That's because it still surprises me."

"It's really not all that strange."

"Sure it is! I'm a little shocked your brains don't come leaking out through all the holes in your face like soup."

"I highly doubt that-"

"I like them though," Alfred cut him off with another one of his big goofy grins.

"Are you hitting on me?"

"Maybe."

Arthur laughed at him and left.

That door. That same blue door with the rusty hinges and flaking paint. Arthur knew what he'd find behind it; a cheerful buffoon and a mutt of dubious origins.

He knocked twice and waited. Five seconds stretched into fifteen. He knocked again. No one came.

He rolled his eyes and then glanced into the bag. Another absurdly large order, probably enough to last Arthur a week. It was a wonder that Alfred wasn't roughly the size of a whale. It wouldn't hurt to lessen his intake. So much junk food was bad for you, after all. Plus, Arthur was hungry. Mum had always said to give to the needy.

He opened the box. Eating pizza that wasn't yours right in front of a customer's house has oddly satisfying.

He was about halfway through his slice when the dog barked and Alfred finally opened the door. "Sorry, sorry, I was in the shower and- are you eating my pizza?"

"I got hungry."

"Dude. Not cool."

Arthur chewed at him impassively. Alfred sighed and took a slice.

They stood there in the hallway like a couple of idiots, eating pizza at each other. "You're really something else, you know that?" Alfred said with his mouth full.

"Is that good?"

"It's weird."

"You're weird."

"Am not!"

"Are too. You're too damned happy all the time."

"You're grumpy enough for the both of us."

"That's true." Arthur licked the crumbs off his fingers. "See you, then. Thanks for the nosh."

He went back to the restaurant. Romano verbally abused him for a while, but then Antonio forgot to put the cover on the blender before turning it on and the result was a hideously angry Romano and a tomato-coloured paint job for 67% of the kitchen. Antonio thought red was a cute colour on Romano. Romano threw a knife at him.

It was a good day.

"You look terrible."

"Got into a fight on the way here." Arthur scratched some dried blood from his nose casually. "You've ordered more than usual this week. Having a party?"

Alfred shook his head. "Not a party, but this time it's not just me eating."

"Did your brother come to visit, then?"

"Nope, that was last week." A little bit of digging through his food and he pulled out a box. "One small cheese. For you."

Arthur took the box and blinked. "Is this because I ate your food the last time?"

"Nope. Thought you might like it, though. Trying to hit on you, remember? It's on me."

Arthur snorted. "You didn't have to."

"Already did."

Mixing up Alfred's orders turned out to be surprisingly fun.

Today, Arthur had decided, Alfred would be sampling their dodgiest pizza; cream sauce and bits of seafood Arthur wasn't brave enough to try to identify.

"Good evening!"

Alfred looked at him suspiciously. "You're awful chipper."

"It's a nice night," Arthur grinned maniacally and shoved the box into Alfred's hands. "The boss said to give this to you for free, since you're such a loyal customer."

This earned him a bright smile. "Really? Thanks!"

Arthur's grin cracked slightly around the edges. "Right, well, best be off, then, see you." He waved goodbye and turned away as Alfred shut the door.

He was already setting up his motorcycle before a window opened somewhere above him and Alfred yelled at him to get his ass back there with the right pizza. Arthur cackled and sped off.

Alfred called the shop to inform Arthur that the pizza he'd received was actually quite good. Arthur was surprised, but thought that perhaps he had been wrong in judging Antonio's pizza inspirations.

A quick test, however, had affirmed that Arthur's concerns were entirely valid, and while trying to scrape the taste off his tongue with a toothpick, he thought that perhaps he'd deserved it.

Antonio was not around to whine at him that day (something about needing to pay the rent to the angry Swizz bloke) so Arthur decided to get deviate from what he'd learnt in his two-hour employee training session when he answered the phone.

"Toni's Roadkill Takeaway: you kill it, we grill it. How can I help you?"

"That name suits you a lot better than Pokodomo."

Arthur glanced behind him to see if Romano was eavesdropping. Romano sneered; Arthur fliped him the bird. "It's Pomodoro, Alfred. Pokodomo sounds like one of those Japanese Magical Cat-Girls."

"I actually have a Japanese friend who would probably object to that. What are the specials?"

"You've ordered from here so often I'd have thought you'd have memorized the menu by now."

"I'm not very bright, sorry."

"No, I suppose you can't help it can you?" Arthur gave him a mock sigh and started reciting the day's specials, putting special emphasis on the Seafood Pizza. Alfred pointedly refused this, and instead started putting together random items from the menu just to make Arthur count the bill.

"I'm a pizza delivery boy, what makes you think I'm any good at maths?" Arthur complained. Alfred sighed and he could almost hear the smirk in his voice, the bloody bastard.

"Sometimes I forget we can't all be engineering students, but you have to do what the customer wants, you know."

Arthur ended up calculating the cost of at least twelve different combinations of side orders, and by the end of it Alfred didn't even order anything. He did, however, ask a lot of inane questions about Arthur's hobbies, which Arthur answered absentmindedly until Antonio came back and Arthur was forced to hang up and stop wasting company time.

"You should really just fuck him already," was Romano's unwelcome advice.

Arthur inspected his nails idly. "I don't, contrary to popular belief, sleep with everyone I meet."

"Maybe, but you sure do attract a lot of weirdoes. Remember the guy who tipped you in roses?"

"That one actually turned out to be quite a good lay. He fed me, too, although I never heard from him again after that. Your food probably poisoned him to death." He ducked to dodge the bit of elderly pizza crust that Romano flicked at him.

"All I'm saying is that he calls here all the time. He's into you. You should probably do something about it."

Arthur grinned.

"One large pepperoni pizza," Arthur drawled as the blue apartment door creaked open. Alfred frowned.

"I didn't order a pizza," he said.

"I know." Arthur pushed past him and invited himself into Alfred's home. "Thought we'd have dinner together, seeing as you're sad and alone with naught but the company of a dog."

Alfred took a minute to process this, and then beamed. "Well I was planning on studying, but sure. I've got a few beers. Make yourself at home."

He did.

Dog noses, it turned out, were the coldest fucking things in the world at seven o'clock in the morning.

Arthur grumbled and pushed the offending thing away with a foot and tried to clamber onto Alfred to gain some warmth. Alfred managed to sleep through this, but Arthur's attempts to go back to sleep proved futile when that goddamned mutt started wagging its tail, hitting Alfred's bedside table with a muffled thump every two seconds. Arthur felt around on the floor, and then threw his shirt at it.

Alfred shifted under him. "Morning," he croaked, morning breath strong but strangely not that much of a turn off. Arthur buried his face in his neck.

"I'm off today."

"Really." The hand carding through Arthur's hair ruffled it up even further and made it stick up at odd angles. "In that case I think maybe you should take a bit of a break. Spend the day with someone special."

"Would that special someone be you?"

Alfred chuckled and rested a hand on the small of Arthur's back. "Duh."

The bed creaked slightly as Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows to make eye contact. "Alright, then. What did you have in mind?"

A moment of silence as Alfred considered this deeply. His face broke into a grin. The dog wagged its tail some more.

"I know this great place just downtown. The pizza's pretty shit, but I hear the customer service is great."

Studying for finals? NOPE! Here, have a stupid fanfic instead!