Chapter Text
Then:
Rapunzel’s face is a shade of grey that matches the stormy, evening sky when Varian barrels into the hospital. She’s sitting on one of those stupid, hard plastic chairs that leaves everyone’s ass cold and fucked after about five minutes, but stands when she catches sight of him.
Her eyes are red rimmed.
“I—what—is he—”
“Whoa, maybe you should sit down kiddo.”
Eugene. Coming around the corner with a paper cup of coffee that he hands to Rapunzel. The two of them exchange a look over Varian’s head that he doesn’t appreciate.
“He’s okay, right?” His voice is shrill in the quiet hospital. “You said over the phone that he—that he was stable, which means—he’s going to be okay—”
“Varian,” Rapunzel says, very very softly.
She has the same face that Cass had that day, five years ago, when she sat Rapunzel down at told her that—that—
I’m so sorry. None of them made it.
“Rapunzel,” Varian’s voice cracks painfully. He thinks she’s kneeling down in front of him, but his vision is blurred.
There’s a cracked thumbdrive in her palm when he scrubs the tears away from his face. She presses it into his hand. “He wanted me to give you this.”
Now:
Varian buries his face in the pillow, trying to ignore the alarm clock blaring loudly in the early morning.
His apartment isn’t far enough in the city for there to be that much noise at six am. but his roommate by far made up for that deficit. Even now, he can hear Nuru in their kitchenette—a small space made up of, like, three cabinets, a stove and what they were generously a “mini fridge”—humming to herself while she ran fruit through the blender.
The air is cold on his toes as they hit the thin carpet. He pads around the room gangly for a moment, before finding a sweatshirt to throw over his shivering shoulders. His jeans are still probably in the laundry, so he ducks out of his tiny, box shaped bedroom and into the shared common space of the apartment.
Nuru waves at him, looking far too awake for someone who had been awake all night. “MORNING,” she shouts over blender sounds.
Varian winced. Three more noise complaints and their landlord was going to do something awful, like send a disappointed emoji or throw them out.
“What’s a disappointed emoji,” Nuru asks, when Varian mutters this into his overnight oats. “Are we talking like the crying emoji or the one where it scrunches its face like it’s constipated.” She does something with her face that Varian assumes is supposed to imitate that last description and promptly decides he didn’t like it.
“Aren’t you just getting in?” he yelps as she accidentally elbows him reaching across the counter to grab a spoon for her smoothie. “How are you so…active?”
“Caffeine, baby.” Nuru takes drag of her drink like a 1940s detective taking a slug of hard liquor. When she grins it’s bright pink like the strawberries she’d mashed into tiny pieces with their meat grinder before throwing it into the blender they’d gotten off Facebook Market Place. “You don’t want to know how many red bulls I’ve consumed in the past six hours.”
Varian really doesn’t. He salutes her with the mason jar filled with left over overnight oats as she passes by. “See you on the flip side.”
“Don’t let the jaws of capitalism consume you,” she waves him off before disappearing into her bedroom.
As if her words were an omen of things to come—and considering what Varian knew about the woman, they probably were—his phone begins ringing.
Savannah Work with no contact photo glasses up the lockscreen of the shifty eyed raccoon he’d made his background after catching the critter fucking up his neighbors bins. It was funny because he hates his neighbors.
Varian takes a bite of his breakfast, waiting for the tiny ping notif that he had missed a call. It’s soon followed by the ping of a voicemail being delivered, which is when he decides to unlock his phone.
“Hey dumbass,” the familiar voice of his least favorite coworker, but one of his best friends drones from the shitty phone speaker. “Astrid quit this morning with no notice so we need someone to come cover—”
Varian deletes the voicemail.
___
The Hugo situation is going to be a problem.
November goes something like this:
“So, I hear you got penetrated last week,” Hugo says unprompted as they're shutting down the register.
They’ve been working in what’s been almost amiable silence for the past few hours, despite Varian’s adverse reaction upon seeing Hugo here that morning. To be fair, there hadn’t been much opportunity for Varian to interrogate that guy.
And honestly he’d just been kinda hoping they could get off on the right foot of a new normal. AKA, one where they don’t acknowledge their connection outside of the four wall confines of overpriced capitalist coffee.
Varian almost drops the till. “WHAT,” he shouts loud enough to be heard three blocks down, probably.
“You know,” Hugo makes a hand gesture that he probably thinks imitates stabbing toward Varian’s almost healed wound. In reality it looks like he’s jerking off. “The stabbing,” he whispers. Except it's not a whisper and Lydia- one of the other new hires- is squinting at them across the room from where she's sweeping.
Varian gapes at him. “ Why would- just say stabbing- what the fuck-”
“Everything okay, kids?” Xavier asks, head poking out of his office.
Varian puts on his best customer service face. “Yep! Just showing Hugo how to count the till. Actually, now that you mention it, I should show Hugo how to clean the bathrooms.”
Savannah glances up from where she's putting chairs up. Varian dreads to think that she’s been listening. “Good idea, Varian,” she says, eyes bright. “I'll take it from here.”
She snatches the till out of his hands, grin pasted on her face. Xavier gives them one last suspicious look before disappearing again.
“Go get 'im, tiger,” Savannah says, eyebrows bouncing.
Varian doesn't have time to unpack that, so he ignores it, grabbing Hugo harshly by the wrist and dragging him off to the gender neutral bathroom. His blonde tormentor doesn’t even protest.
He stays silent, infuriating grin slapped across his stupid pointy face, all the way to the bathroom. Varian shoves Hugo into the small room, slams the door shut, clicks the lock.
“What is your problem?” he hisses the moment he turns to the blonde.
Hugo, to his credit, doesn’t falter. “You, mostly.” His eyebrows bounce suggestively. Arms folded, black polo unbuttoned, he looks entirely at ease in the yellow, flickering light of the bathroom.
Varian resists the urge to bang his head against the concrete wall, if only because he’s known Hugo for far to long to give into his violent desires.
Most of the time anyway.
“I need you to stop.” Varian rubs his forehead. “You can’t pretend not to know me for one minute and-”
“Whaaaa, we know each other?” Hugo bats his eyelashes obnoxiously like a coked up hummingbird.
“W-Hugo-”
“Sorry I remember everyone I’ve slept with.”
“Oh, because you can count that on one hand?”
Hugo visibly catches himself mid snort, face smoothing out just a second too late. “Projection is never a mature choice, Stripes.”
“I—listen. If we’re gonna do this you need to cooperate.”
Raised eyebrows. “Do what?” Hugo leans in, one hand bracing on the wall next to Varian’s head. He only gets away with the move because of those fricking two inches he has him, Varian thinks resentfully.
It takes all of Varian’s willpower not to kick Hugo in the shin. “Make a deal.” His voice is even.
This gets Hugo’s attention. He withdraws (slightly) from Varian’s space, considering. “A deal? What kind of deal?”
“The kind where we keep our night and day jobs separate.”
“And you seriously think we can do that?” Hugo’s face scrunches skeptically. His glasses reflect the yellow, flickering bathroom light and Varian squints against it. “We just clock in every day and pretend that we don’t know each other?”
Its not like Varian can turn Hugo in.
“You have a better idea?” he bites out.
“Nooo,” Hugo says slowly. His eyes are sweeping over Varian considering. “I don’t.”
“We have a deal then?”
“Depends. Are we gonna kiss on it?”
Varian yanks the bathroom door open. Predictably, Savannah and Yong are on the other side, both leaning on the door enough that there’s a frantic scramble for balance. “How much of that did you both hear?”
“Nothing—!”
“Are you exes?”
“Okay, not gonna lie, I’m pretty sure you’re both rival drug dealers—”
“Or secret boyfriends—”
Varian shoulders past them. “Clean the bathroom,” he says over his shoulder.