Work Text:
Sin Cara hadn't even known that it was possible to rent out an entire Outback Steakhouse after hours. But apparently Bo Dallas had connections.
“No rules.” Bo had smiled, when Sin Cara had asked him. “Just right.”
This was not Sin Cara's idea of a good time. He didn't particularly care for Dallas, had no inclination to waste his night at a grown man's weird Outback Steakhouse birthday party. But Sin Cara had shown up anyway, and from the looks of it so had most of the roster. Even Brock Lesnar was there, having staked out his territory in the corner, his beady eyes glaring vacantly as he huffed into a blooming onion like a witless beast.
Bo must have been more popular than Sin Cara realized. Either that, or the open bar appealed to the rest of them just as much as it appealed to Sin Cara.
The only downside was that Sin Cara couldn't drink through his mask. So he took the drinks he ordered around the corner into the little hallway by the bathroom. There, he could pull his mask up far enough that he could quickly chug whatever overly sweet mixed drink the Outback bartenders had seen fit to serve him.
When he didn't feel the effects at first, he drank more. And more. And then it all hit him at once.
When Sin Cara wandered back out of the hallway his co-workers were still milling awkwardly around the tables and booths, but for the first time he noticed that Rhyno was sitting at one end of the bar by himself, holding it down under a couple of brightly painted boomerangs that had been hung on the wall behind him. Rhyno was one of those guys that annoyed the shit out of Sin Cara, so no one was more surprised than Sin Cara himself when he plopped down on the barstool next to Rhyno, spun to face him.
“How's it goin’?” Sin Cara had to raise his voice a little bit to be heard over the chorus of ‘ Tie Me Kangaroo Down ’ that was blasting through the overhead speakers.
Rhyno glanced over his shoulder, looked back at Sin Cara “Me?”
“Yeah, you. Where's your boyfriend?”
Rhyno sputtered, and Sin Cara worried that the guy might do an actual spit take. But Rhyno got it together after couple of seconds, or at least together enough to ask “Heath?”
“Slater, yeah.” Sin Cara wanted another drink, but when he looked around the bartender was nowhere to be found.
Maybe for the best. He already had that buzzing feeling in his fingertips, was warm all over, not caring about what a bad idea this was.
“That's not - It isn't - We're not -” Rhyno took a deep breath before he managed to say “We're partners.”
Sin Cara rolled his eyes behind the mask. “Boyfriends, partners, same thing."
“No!” Rhyno insisted, a little too vehemently. “Not partners like that, we’re just. Tag team partners.”
“O-kay.” Sin Cara drawled. His tongue felt heavy, clumsy on the word. “Where's your tag partner.”
“Oh. He couldn't come, he has the kids this week. I can let him know you need to talk to him the next time I see him.”
“Nah.” Sin Cara shook his head, all the lights in the bar smearing. Out of the corner of his peripheral vision he saw Bo Dallas, who almost looked like he glowing. Fuck, Sin Cara was wasted. “Just wanted to talk to you.”
“Um. Really? About what?”
It took Sin Cara a few seconds to dredge up a fact about Rhyno from the recesses of his brain. “How's the campaign?”
“Huh?”
“Your political campaign? Weren't you running for something?”
“Oh. Uh, yeah.” Rhyno looked down at his glass of water “I lost… almost a year ago now.”
“Hmm.” Sin Cara realized that he probably should have offered condolences or something, but he didn't really care.
“It's okay.” Rhyno continued, more to himself than to Sin Cara. “I've been thinking more about the importance of civic -”
Sin Cara put his hand on Rhyno’s knee under the bar, and Rhyno stopped talking. That was much better.
“So.” Sin Cara said, in the sudden silence between them “You want to get out of here?”
“Uh.” Rhyno glanced back and forth. “Are you sure your brother won't miss you?”
“Kalisto’s fine.” Sin Cara shrugged, only slurring a little bit. Kalisto was always fine. But Sin Cara was here, talking to Rhyno, trying not to wobble too much on the stool as even more of the alcohol in his stomach hit his bloodstream.“So -”
“Do you, uh.” Rhyno faltered. “Do you drink coffee? Um, we could. Go somewhere more quiet so we can talk?”
“No.”
“Oh. Sorry. Sorry, I thought that you were -”
Sin Cara looked away, at the line of liquor bottles on the back of the bar. There was no mirror back there, thankfully. He slid his hand up, squeezed Rhyno's thigh.
“No. No talking. Let's -”
Sin Cara tilted his head towards the door. Stood up. Rhyno followed. Sin Cara saw Kalisto staring at them as they left, but he was honestly too drunk to care, and it wasn't even a minute later that Sin Cara had Rhyno backed up against the cinderblock wall behind the Outback Steakhouse.
The ‘ No rules, just right ’ jingle ran loops in Sin Cara's head. He had one hand braced flat against the wall next to Rhyno's head.
Rhyno's eyes glanced back and forth across the mask, like he wasn't sure where to look, before his gaze settled on the part that covered Sin Cara's mouth, which. No. No way was Sin Cara going to take his mask off around Rhyno of all people. His general disdain for Rhyno should have been enough to make Sin Cara realize that this was a terrible idea, but it seemed much less terrible through the haze of alcohol.
In fact, maybe it was actually a good idea. Yeah. Rhyno wasn't really that bad. And even if he was, who said you had to actually like the people you fucked? Sin Cara figured that he could at least count on Rhyno to keep his mouth shut about it afterwards.
“Uh.” Rhyno said, hands useless at his sides
“What. Do you not want to do this?”
“No, I mean, I do. It's just -” Rhyno broke off again when Sin Cara put a hand on his hip. “I was just thinking.”
Sin Cara closed his eyes behind the mask. His head was fuzzy, and Rhyno's nervous chatter wasn't doing anything to help with that. Sin Cara didn't want to know what Rhyno was thinking. He really just wanted Rhyno to shut up, and his drunk brain had a pretty good idea of the best way to make that happen.
“Yeah?” Sin Cara slid his hand along Rhyno’s waistline, fumbled at the belt buckle with clumsy fingers.
Then Rhyno went stock still and blurted out “Did you know that Gerald Ford was the longest lived president?
Sin Cara leaned back, snatched his hand away from Rhyno as if he had been burned.
“What.”
“Gerald Ford. He lived for 93 years and 165 days.”
“What the fuck.” Sin Cara said, as much to himself as to Rhyno. The bizarre outburst had snapped him back to his senses enough so that Sin Cara actually realized what he was doing for the first time since he had chugged his last drink.
“I'm sorry, um. I don't know why I said that. Sorry.” Rhyno stammered “We can, if you still want, I mean -”
“No.”
“Sorry. I'll, uh. I'll just go…”
Sin Cara nodded, eyes closed, which set off a crazy case of the spins. He leaned forward against the wall to keep his balance, lost in the comforting blackness behind his eyelids. Rhyno must have left at some point, and Sin Cara had no idea how long he had been standing there, but laying down on the ground had started to seem like a real good idea when he heard footsteps approaching him.
Drunk or sober, Sin Cara always recognized the sound of his brother silently judging him. And when he cracked open his eye, peering put through the mask, Kalisto was there.
“You okay?” Kalisto asked. Sin Cara just thumped his head against the cinderblock and groaned. Kalisto patted him on the shoulder, started to lead him back to the car. “At least take the mask off of you're gonna puke.”
---
Sin Cara felt like he was dying when he woke up to the sun piercing through the blinds. Never again. Outback Steakhouse was dead to him.
At least he hadn't blacked out. Sin Cara was relieved to remember that he had come to his senses before he had done anything that he really would have regretted. What the fuck had he been thinking. He heaved himself up from the bed, paused against the doorframe of his room for a second to get his head together before he made his way down the hall.
“Are you still drunk?” Kalisto asked, as soon as he saw Sin Cara standing there and holding his head
“It's too bright out here.” Sin Cara groaned, a clearer ‘ yes ’ than if he had actually said the word.
He stumbled down the hall, splashed some water on his face in the bathroom. With the faint sound of Kalisto singing to himself in the kitchen drifting in through the door, Sin Cara drank a couple of big cupped handfuls to try and get the stale taste out of his mouth and starwd at himself in the mirror for a while before he wandered back out to sit at the bar.
Kalisto was busy cracking eggs into the pan when Sin Cara sat down, tossing the shells underhanded into the trash as he looked at Sin Cara.
“Got a little wild at the Outback Steakhouse, huh?”
“Fuck off.”
“You fuck off.”
“You first.”
Kalisto huffed, turned his back on Sin Cara to attend to the eggs that were sizzling in the frying pan. Sin Cara had been expecting him to say something else, to hit him with a comeback like whipping someone into a turnbuckle, but Kalisto kept quiet as he cooked.
“I'm pretty sure that Enzo is fucking the Big Show.” Sin Cara said, After a while, sick of the silence between them throbbing in his head. “Or. Getting fucked by the Big Show, more likely.”
His brother still didn't turn around, didn't say anything. Kalisto just hummed a little under his breath and flipped an egg. Sin Cara felt his fingernails digging into the palm of his hand, knew that if he looked down he would see the harsh white half moons standing out in sharp contrast. But he didn't look down, just kept staring at the back of his brother’s head when he added
“And everyone knows that Sami Zayn just keeps pissing off Braun Strowman ‘cause he gets off on big guys hurting him.”
Kalisto turned around at that, spatula still in hand, unfooled. “So, you and Rhyno huh? I didn't even know you liked him ”
Sin Cara bristled, shook his head. “Christ, Kalisto. No. I do not. Like. Rhyno. You know I can't stand that guy.”
He stopped talking when Kalisto slid a plate of eggs and breakfast potatos across the bar to rest in front of him. Sin Cara realized then, perhaps belatedly, that he had been looking down at the counter instead of having to actually look at his brother when he spoke. When Sin Cara looked up, Kalisto was staring right back at him, the all too familiar look of concern clear in his eyes.
“I don't know what the fuck I was thinking.” Sin Cara muttered
“You know that I love you no matter what, right? I just want you to be happy.”
“I'm not talking about this.”
“And it's fine, if you like Rhyno you should-”
“I said I'm not talking about this.”
Sin Cara shook his head, stabbed the fork into his egg to spill the runny yolk. It had been a mistake. It wasn't going to happen again.
---
Sin Cara didn't have a drinking problem. He fucking didn't, alright? What he did have was a career problem. Namely, that it is going nowhere.
He hadn't had a match in three weeks when he went to the Outback Steakhouse. He wasn't on the card the next week either and, fed up, he prowled through the backstage corridors until he found a producer.
“What is the point.” He bit out, glaring down at Jamie Noble even though he knew that the effect would be lost through the mask and his body language was more defeated than he would have liked. “What is the point of me even being here if I don't have anything to do?”
Noble shrugged, looked up from his clipboard. “What do you want me to tell you? There are a lot of good feuds going on right now. Maybe you could talk to Titus, or - no, wait, he said his brand is full. I dunno. Just hang in there, alright?”
Noble reached out and clapped Sin Cara on the shoulder, probably trying for reassuring. It didn't help. Sin Cara slapped his hand away.
“That's bullshit.”
“Nature of the business. You should definitely stick around tonight though! There might be a brawl later, might need some of the guys to break it up.” Noble paused, put his hand up to his headset, eyes far away as he listened to whoever was on the other end. “Sorry, Sin Cara, I gotta go talk to Braun. Hopefully I'll see you out there later, huh?”
It wasn't much, but the seed of hope had been planted. Sin Cara stuck around. He stayed in his gear, at the ready.
There was no brawl. There was no call for him.
What there was, however, was a match two weeks later that he lost to Mike Kanelis. There was also a late night bus that picked up a couple of blocks from Rhyno's apartment complex and went right by where Sin Cara lived. He was not proud of himself for knowing that fact. He was also not proud of any of the other facts that he had learned recently.
Theodore Roosevelt ‘discovered’ the a river in the Amazon. John Quincy Adams watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from his front porch. Calvin Coolidge had two pet raccoons.
---
Night had fallen and Sin Cara had already been slowly building up his buzz for a good five hours by the time he ended up at the karaoke bar with Byron Saxton. Day drinking on his days off was a well honed skill, one that Sin Cara had been getting a lot of mileage out of recently.
Sin Cara liked Byron well enough to go maskless around him outside of work, which was a good fucking thing because he needed to eat some damn food. Needed to soak up at least a little of the alcohol in his blood before he just floated away or passed the fuck out on the sticky table.
It was a Wednesday. Other than the two of them, there were maybe three other tables of people watching Byron’s rendition of ‘Shake It Off’.
Byron was practically beaming as he slid back into the chair across from Sin Cara. The table between them was a forest of empty glass beer bottles, and the labels of the ones closest to Sin Cara had all been peeled off and shredded and stuffed back down the open necks. Sin Cara had been trying to do something to keep his hands busy, away from his phone. But after the last couple of beers he had stopped trying.
“Oh man, I totally killed it up there. Karaoke is the best!”
Sin Cara shoved another greasy mozzarella stick in his mouth, wiped his fingers off before he picked up his phone again. “Yeah.”
“I can't believe none of the other guys wanted to come.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you invite your brother?”
Sin Cara had not, but instead of saying so he just shrugged “Kalisto’s too cool for us.”
“Aww, come on, that's not true!” Byron said, stealing one of Sin Cara's mozzarella sticks. “We're cool!”
“Sure.”
Up on the stage, a couple in matching jean jackets started singing ‘Islands In The Stream.’ Byron had started to nod along with the best, swaying back and forth a little bit. Sin Cara looked back down at his phone.
“I'm gonna go look through the song book some more.” Byron said as he got up from the table, chair screeching back across the floor. “You wanna do a duet? We could do ‘Summer Nights’. You know, that song from Grease? Have you ever seen Grease?”
“Yeah.”
“Cara, are you even listening to me? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I'm.” Sin Cara's phone buzzed in his hand. “Fine.”
“Okay…” Byron didn't sound convinced. “Who are you texting?”
“No one.”
Byron stepped around the table, leaned to look over Sin Cara's shoulder before he could think to hide his phone. “Rhyno?”
“No one.”
Byron smiled. Sin Cara had no idea why.
“So... I didn't want to be weird and bring it up out of nowhere, but are you two -”
Sin Cara felt nauseous and unsettled that Byron of all people, oblivious Byron, had noticed that something was going on with him and Rhyno. That meant that other people had probably noticed too, and that he definitely needed to cut this shit out. How anyone would have caught on was a mystery to Sin Cara's alcohol infused mind. After all, he and Rhyno hardly even looked at each other, not unless it was late and Sin Cara was drunk and feeling sorry for himself.
“I need at least three more drinks.” Sin Cara cut Byron off, and stood so quickly that he almost bumped into Byron, stumbled a little bit as he almost tripped over his own chair.
“Yeah!” Byron trailed behind him to the bar.
An hour later Sin Cara was ditching Byron outside of a Burger King, slurring out some excuse about why he couldn't keep hanging out like planned. It didn't make sense, even to Sin Cara, but Byron just nodded along as he picked the lettuce off his Whopper.
“That's okay.” Byron said brightly. “I can call my mom to come pick me up.”
---
“Ulysses S Grant hadn't ever held an elected office before he became president.”
“Do you want me to blow you or not?”
Sin Cara sat back on his heels. He still had his mask on even though the room was completely dark, had barely had a chance to get down on his knees before whatever nervous wires were crossed in Rhyno's brain caused him to start spewing weird facts about dead presidents.
“Uh. Yeah. Yeah, of course, it's just…”
“What.”
“The ‘S’ in his name didn't stand for anything? It was added on accident. When he was nominated for West Point.”
“Okay, you know what, fuck this. I'm leaving.”
It was a shock, like salt in the wound, every time. The only good thing about it was that no matter how drunk Sin Cara was, he always came to his senses when Rhyno started talking. All delusions about whether or not this was a good idea flew out of his head and he felt like he sobered up instantly. Able to remember that he had at least some self respect left, better than he had at any other point in the evening.
Early morning.
Whatever.
---
The weird tint of the light inside of the bus always made everything seem sharp edged and hyperrealistic. Which was honestly the last thing that Sin Cara wanted out of a late night bus ride across town. He would have much rather pretended that he didn't exist so that he didn't have to wonder what the fuck he was doing with his life.
Usually he had the bus to himself. But that night another passenger climbed on only a few stops after Sin Cara had slumped into the seat that he had started to think of as his own, only a couple of rows from the back of the bus.
“Oh, hey, you like wrestling? Me too, man!” The guy sat down right across the aisle from Sin Cara. He sounded, and smelled, just about as wasted as Sin Cara felt.
Sin Cara had tilted his head to the side, not understanding why someone on public transportation would ever -
“I could tell because of the mask.” The guy said. “You must be a big fan of Sin Cara, huh?”
Sin Cara had not, in all honesty, realized that he still had his mask on. But he sure as hell wasn't going to take it off now, not as the other guy rambled on.
“Me? I think that lucha shit is a little overrated. I'd much rather take a trip to suplex city than - oh.”
The guy stood up, and for one whole second Sin Cara thought that maybe the guy had realized who he was talking to. His hands curled, furious, but then he realized that the bus had begun to slow down.
“Oh, shit, this is my stop. Nice talking to ya dude. Lu-cha, lu-cha, right? Ha ha!” He weaved away towards the door, doing the hand motion until he stumbled down the steps and out into the black night.
The air brakes hissed, and then the bus was moving again.
Sin Cara leaned his head against the window, let the vibrations of of it travel down his neck and onto where his shoulders were pressed uncomfortably against the hard blue plastic of the backrest. It made his eyes shiver in their sockets, made the interior of the bus look liquid, bright yellow grab bars quivering like a heat mirage. Like everything in his life was about to melt.