Chapter Text
Varian was proud to consider himself one of the smartest minds in the country.
While it sounded like his arrogance talking (and admittedly, part of it was–he certainly had bragged about his brilliance countless times before), it had now been proven too.
He had single-handedly answered the final question for his team during the national decathlon. Though there wasn’t any exercise involved, everyone’s breaths were lost in their throats the moment Varian hit the buzzer with such confidence.
And for a brief moment, there was silence.
Xavier–the advisor of the Midtown academic decathlon team–tried to encourage Varian from afar, but the color was lost in his kindly face. Hugo, who had been sitting next to his friend, not-so-subtly kicked Varian from underneath the table, hard enough that the surface shook.
As the clock ticked down and everyone’s anxiety could only grow, Varian simply rolled his shoulders back with a self-satisfied smirk. He took a deep breath and exhaled, letting it slink off his tongue with total composure before meeting the judge’s steely eyes with a glare.
“Easy. It's a synthesis reaction.”
More silence followed.
Thick, suffocating silence.
The judge checked the sheet before him, the one that held not only the correct answer, but their fate.
Everyone hung off the cliff of their seat, the anticipation building tension sharp enough to cut.
Varian still recalled with perfect accuracy the smile that then spread across the judge's face.
“Correct.”
Then everything erupted into chaos, and everything after that was a blur. Varian knew they had won, but the blood rushing in his ears from the pure thrill made it hard to process much of anything else.
One thing he did know, however, was that there had truly been no greater feeling than being lifted to his teammates’ shoulders; Varian held their newly-earned trophy like the glittering star atop a Christmas tree. Even more so, he was nearly vibrating with excitement, having knowledge that he would get to run into his father’s arms tomorrow and tell Quirin the news.
Now, even hours after the original exhilaration of their victory, Varian and his eight other team members still practically shouted their various goodnights as they resorted to respective hotel rooms, unable to keep their glee from their voices. Their youthful energy had even begun to rub off on Xavier, whose face was split into a grin as he proudly carried their trophy.
“Goodnight, kids. I’m proud of you,” he muttered before gingerly closing the door to his own room–one that he had to himself, rather than his students, who had to room with a fellow teammate.
Varian’s heart seemed to explode with the admiration from a man whom he looked up to so much, but even Xavier’s compliments failed to hold a flame to ones from Varian’s own father, and he found himself desperately wishing Quirin had come along on the trip. He imagined Quirin’s brown eyes filled with only the love a parent can have from the audience as Varian answered the final question.
Whatever, screw it. Whatever his father’s reaction and however Varian would introduce the subject would have to wait till tomorrow.
Minutes later, he began to ready himself for bed, ignoring the snarky but affectionate calls from Hugo, his temporary roommate. Though Varian had to admit, one or two of them (and certainly no more) got his lips to twitch into a mindless smile.
Hugo lay on his bed, watching Varian get ready through the open bathroom door as he tossed a pillow in the air. “So, does this mean we’re like–ultra nerds?” He sat up and threw the cushion at Varian with a smirk. “You especially.”
Varian grunted as the pillow made contact, though his sly smile never wavered as he tossed it back with twice the enthusiasm as Hugo. “Shut up. You answered just as many questions as I did. I just happened to know the last one.”
“Good God, you never miss an opportunity to gloat, do you?”
“Nope,” Varian teased, voice muffled by the toothbrush in his mouth.
Their light-hearted banter fell into silence, except for the various noises from the bathroom and the consistent thump as the pillow returned to Hugo’s hands. Varian soon returned to his disheveled bed, beside Hugo’s equally disturbed one.
With a content sigh and the sounds of the city as white noise, he allowed his eyelids to close, covering up the beautiful blue of his eyes.
They were then opened mere moments later, startled to find Hugo’s unnerving green eyes staring back at him rather than a blank ceiling.
“You’re telling me you can actually manage to sleep right now?” he asked with a tilt of his head. Hugo’s nose crinkled with amusement at the other’s exhausted face below.
Varian had always loved the little quirk; the small crease lines that masked Hugo’s face whenever he showed excitement. Despite his endearment, he groaned and pushed the blond away.
“Yeah. I’m absolutely beat. Aren’t you tired?”
Hugo scoffed, as if the meager thought of being fatigued was unimaginable. “Freckles, we’re in a whole new state for tonight only. Sure, everyone else is fine with letting this opportunity go to waste, but not me. Not us.”
Varian watched with a curious look as Hugo made his way toward the open window. A cold breeze steadily swept through, moving the curtains and filling the room with a comfortable chill. The wind rustled the blond’s unkept hair, down from its usual ponytail, as it framed his stupidly perfect face and his even more stupid expression. A quirked eyebrow, the one with a slit from an unknown accident, and Hugo’s lips in the most aggravating smirk.
An expression that Varian knew so well, and it never meant anything good.
And just like every time before, he just couldn’t help himself from going along with whatever plot Hugo had curated this time; the two of them silently moved out the window and found themselves to be immensely grateful to have a room on the first floor of the hotel.
⭑🕸️๋࣭ ⭑🕷🕸️๋࣭ ⭑
“Jesus, do you have to stop every two seconds to take a picture?”
Varian turned away from the graffiti-covered wall to face an impatient Hugo and smiled at the blond’s thumping foot and wet-cat expression. “You said it yourself. We’re only here for a night, right?”
Hugo rolled his eyes. “It’s spray paint on a wall done by an immature teenager who wanted to piss authority off,” he muttered, pushing himself from the withered brick wall his tall frame had been leaning against. “I would know.”
“It’s still cool,” Varian muttered, turning away from Hugo to hide his flustered face and returning his phone vigorously to his pocket.
They emerged together from the isolated alleyway. For it being almost eleven at night, the streets of this new city were surprisingly alive. Varian was used to bustling evenings; he grew up in New York, for God’s sake. It wasn’t exactly anything new.
But it was such a different kind of alive, and Varian couldn’t quite explain the taste it left behind. Everything in him sparked, kindling and popping beneath his skin. There were still people crowding everywhere, laughing and conversing with friends. There weren’t any stars to be seen in the sky, but the amount of city lights almost made up for the lack of a natural view.
It was amazing. And Varian was stuck admiring it all from afar.
Hugo, who had traveled quite a bit in his early teen years and had seen areas such as this before, was more appreciative of the awe-struck look on his friend’s face than the crowded city streets that were rather underwhelming.
He followed around a practically hyperventilating Varian, who was passionately leading Hugo through the streets as if the blond had never seen anything like it. For his sake, Hugo pretended he hadn’t, as it made Varian’s grin widen just enough. It was the way that put his front teeth on full display–in the way Hugo had always loved.
Moments passed before he realized that Varian’s lips had been moving, and Hugo was awkwardly staring in a trance.
The blond cleared his throat, praying that it was dark enough to shadow his flushed face. “What?” Hugo asked.
It felt like bugs had burrowed into his skin, skittering and chirping, enough to drive him mad. He wasn’t entirely certain why, but Hugo tried his hardest to focus on anything but the blue eyes beside him.
Varian couldn’t help but find the spacey response adorable, making the roll of his eyes nothing but affectionate. “We need to start heading back to the hotel, or someone will notice, and we’ll get in trouble.”
Hugo checked his watch in confusion, then just about choked upon seeing it was nearing midnight. “That’s impossible. We haven’t even been out here for that long, have we?” he questioned, though he intended it as more of a statement.
“Almost three hours,” Varian confirmed.
Beats of silence passed as Hugo’s eyes began to dart back and forth. His friend sighed in anticipation, having known the subtle facial flickers well enough after knowing the blond for nearly two years.
“Fine,” Hugo muttered, and for a moment, nothing came afterwards. But then his lips flipped lopsided, and Varian internally groaned.
“I’ll race you back.”
And before the other could protest, the blond ran off toward the direction of the hotel, leaving Varian and his short legs behind.
“Bitch!”
“Asshole!” Hugo’s voice called, a joyous smile resonating in the word. The taunt echoed off the towering city heights, and Varian took a minute to catch his breath before forcing himself forward.
⭑🕸️๋࣭ ⭑🕷🕸️๋࣭ ⭑
Hugo had already made it back to the hotel–no doubt thanks to his freakishly long stride. Varian had always been a more-than-decent sprinter, but even his physical ability couldn't make up for his five-foot-four height. A comical part of his appearance, considering his father was a sturdy, absolute mountain of a man.
He paused to recollect himself for a moment, heaving heavy gasps of air into his agonizing lungs, when his blue eyes fell upon something that made his heart ache with sudden homesickness. A bittersweet smile, faint as a morning mist, twitched at his lips as Varian brought out his phone to take a picture of the raccoon in front of him, foraging for scraps in a trash can.
Just like Ruddiger.
Varian knelt to be face-to-face with the critter, though still keeping his distance with fear of the possible diseases the raccoon held. While he wanted to believe that all raccoons were as friendly as his pet, he knew Ruddiger himself was to be barely considered a raccoon anymore, what with the fact that he was just as nocturnal as Varian himself and his meals consisted of anything but lousy trash.
“Hey, buddy,” he whispered, cautious as not to scare the raccoon away before he had enough time to snap a photo. The animal was focused on the day-old bagel it had in its paws and had yet to notice Varian, so he took his chance.
However, the flash of his camera Varian had failed to turn off obviously frightened the raccoon, as its back arched and it soon skittered away, leaving behind a slightly disheartened Varian and a half-eaten bagel. When he went to check the result, all that was now in his camera roll was a blur of gray and black with red, glowing eyes.
He sighed, deleted the photo, and prepared to head back to the hotel when he jolted to a sudden stop. The subtle feeling of a plant brushing across his palm made his whole body twitch, as if impaled with thin needles everywhere at once. Varian glanced down and wanted to shed his skin like a snake the moment he made eye contact with an oddly-colored spider and its millions of beady, glossy eyes, all locked onto him.
A yelp clawed its way out from his teeth, one that Hugo no doubt would have made fun of for being shamefully high-pitched, and Varian slapped it away with impressive reflexes. The spider fell to the ground, its legs shriveling inwards as a sure sign of death. Though, of course, not before it left a red and swollen spider bite behind, embedded deep within his skin.
Varian groaned, silently hoping it hadn’t been venomous or anything of the sort, as he refused to take another glance at the spider and try to identify it. He wasn’t even sure he could; its unfamiliar markings made for something he had truly never seen before.
Either way, he simply shrugged the topic away and attempted to push it from his mind, though the dull pain from the bite made it difficult to ignore. Varian made a promise to himself that he would put medication over it in the morning with the help of Xavier before quickly sprinting back to the hotel, entering silently through the window Hugo had left open.
“Took you long enough,” was all the blond had to offer after Varian finally returned fifteen minutes after Hugo had. Still, Varian’s chest burned with a sense of smug knowing, noting that if Hugo hadn’t felt any concern at all for his whereabouts, he would have been long asleep.
“Shut up,” Varian shot back, rubbing over his spider bite once more before soon falling blissfully asleep.
⭑🕸️๋࣭ ⭑🕷🕸️๋࣭ ⭑
Good news: the spider bite wasn’t poisonous or venomous, and Varian didn’t wake up to immense pain or a burning fever. In fact, the inflamed spider bite practically disappeared overnight.
Bad news: the bite had disappeared overnight, and that wasn’t, by any means, natural.
While the eight-legged creature hadn’t been deadly, it definitely wasn’t a regular arachnid. Varian would swear on his life that there wasn’t any textbook spider out there where the symptoms of its bite entailed suddenly having the ability to stick to everything.
That morning when he first woke up, something was already wrong.
Varian’s eyesight had never been immaculate, but he never wore glasses in claiming that he didn’t need them. His goggles helped a bit, and the only time he truly needed clear eyesight was during his experiments, so he had learned to live with narrowing his eyes to see blurry things better.
When he awoke, Varian thought he was dreaming. He could read the time on the digital clock beside him, and while he never knew what people with perfect vision saw, Varian knew it couldn’t have been as coherent as what he was seeing. Each of the pixels stood out to such a vivid degree, it was almost too much.
It wasn’t just his eyesight either. His head was pulsing from all the input his senses were receiving; the sockets behind his eyes gnawed with a deep agony. The big city suddenly wasn’t leaving him all that awe-struck, as the loud car horns and various screams were amplified several decibels.
After going pale and feeling as if he were about to double over, he slammed his hand on the mattress to ground himself. His head started to spin like a carousel on steroids. Varian figured a frigid splash of water to the face would regulate everything, and so he went to stand up.
And got tangled in his bedsheets the moment he attempted to pry them away.
He rolled off the bed and hit the floor with a thunderous noise, trying to get the fabric to unstick. It clung to him like ultra-strength glue, creating a problematic trap Varian failed to free himself from.
“Damn. You good, freckles?”
Varian’s face flushed.
Perfect.
With his legs above his head in a position that shouldn’t have been possible, Varian’s attempt to act casual was easily doomed from the start. Still, he made solid eye contact with Hugo and let out a sheepish laugh.
“I’m–fine. Just got a little stuck,” he said with a grunt, using momentum to bring himself to his feet. Thank the maker for that; Varian wasn’t sure what little of his dignity was left could handle Hugo having to assist him.
Without another word, and therefore leaving Hugo with a deeply puzzled look, Varian dragged himself to the bathroom–his blue blanket attached to his bare heel, trailing behind him.
“I’m fucked,” he muttered.
Despite the stubborn bedcover persisting and holding fast, Varian continued to aggressively shake his foot as he made his way to the large mirror. He went to douse himself with water from the sink in hopes to clear his head, only for the handle to pop clean off, adding itself to Varian’s wonderful display of random-ass-objects-sticking-to-his-skin.
He did indeed get a bitter splash of water to his face, though it wasn’t as refreshing as Varian had hoped. After the handle broke off, a personal fountain erupted in the hotel sink, and it seemed to aim directly at his face. Varian suddenly felt strangled as water flooded through his nose and mouth, making it difficult to see or breathe.
Panicking, Varian began stuttering around aimlessly for a towel or something to plug the source. In his tunnel-thought mindset, being only able to focus on the freakin’ geyser exploding before him, Varian neglected the fact that his skin was currently deciding to stick to everything in his grasp.
He gripped the flawless cream towel from the rack and yanked with all the might he could summon from his small frame. Varian’s black hair obscured his vision, but he didn’t need sight to hear the unmistakable blow of the tower rack ripping itself from the wall with impressive strength; the sound of it intensified in his hypersensitive ears enough to cause Varian to stumble backwards, bringing the metal rod with him.
He struggled to catch himself, only to get caught in the spider-web Varian had weaved himself and entirely lost his balance; of course, not before smacking the back of his skull on the sharp corner of the bathroom counter with a wincing crack.
“I’m so majorly fucked!” Varian could only scream out of frustration. He was certain his limbs were going in entirely separate directions, but it hadn’t started burning enough for him to care. The back of his head stung ever so slightly from where Varian had hit it, but not as much as it should have. The lack of pain raised some alarm, but honestly, it was the least of his worries.
“Hairstripe! What the actual hell?!” Hugo yelled, a voice crack dripping with anxiety to punctuate the call. He pounded on the door, and it only made Varian’s ears want to turn themselves inside out.
“I’m”-Varian spat a load of water from his mouth-“fine!”
“You know, you say that a lot when you just don’t want help. I think it’s a safe bet to assume you’re not fine.”
Hugo rolled his eyes and plucked a hairpin from his hair, already up in its infamous ponytail. He swiftly bent it out of shape and inserted it into the bathroom keyhole. Mere moments after he started to jiggle it, the door clicked with ease, and Hugo kicked it open.
Out of all the illustrations Hugo had painted up in his head in just a minute, none of them had truthfully prepared him for the horror of a scene his friend had created.
Varian was sprawled out across the bathroom floor, his face and form barely visible over the bedsheets, towels, and shower curtain. Despite it, Hugo knew for a damn fact that whatever alien yoga pose Varian was attempting couldn’t have been humanly possible, no matter how flexible. The metal rods from the two former clattered whenever Varian jerked or trembled, and water steadily poured upwards from the broken sink.
“The hell, freckles?” Hugo repeated, and all Varian managed in return was an innocent smile that both infuriated the blond and made his heart annoyingly start to beat a little faster.
“Hey, Hugo. Mind helping a friend out?”
In heavy silence–also known as Hugo’s way of trying to remain calm and not absolutely lose it–he offered a hand for Varian to grab. The latter complied, interlocking their hands together and allowing Hugo to hoist him up with quiet huffs from both. To Varian’s relief, as he didn’t need Hugo thinking him any more of a freak than he already did, the objects that previously stuck to him remained on the floor.
As the water continued to gush forth, Hugo pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to collect enough thoughts to form a sentence. “What happened, Varian?”
“Varian?” He flinched at hearing Hugo speak anything other than a nickname when in reference to him, but Varian forcefully swallowed his spit and continued. “I…I was brushing my teeth, and the handle just popped off. I started panicking and tried to grab a towel, but I couldn’t see anything, and everything spiraled from there.”
He looked up to meet Hugo’s emerald eyes, forcing the contact and hopefully convincing the blond of his terribly obvious lie.
Hugo searched Varian for a moment, then moved his gaze to the destruction. He wanted to let his temper boil over; he wanted to stomp his feet out of irritation and resentment–channel all the energy that he usually did with his fights with Donella. But the second he looked at Varian and at those damn puppy eyes, the anger drained out of him like steam through a teapot, and he deflated.
“Xavier will be by to do a room check before we leave. Keep him away from the bathroom, and maybe we can distract him long enough to fix it up.”
Varian let out a scoff of disbelief. “How are we supposed to–”
“Do you want my help or not, freckles?” Hugo bit, then watched as Varian recoiled. He allowed a shaky inhale pass through before attempting again. “We’ll clean up as much of the water as we can, prop up the shower curtain, and shove the tower rack back into the wall.”
The sheer impossibility of the task hung over the two like ceramic wrap sticking to their skin, only more dismal than annoying. Silence passed through like a heavy wind before one of them spoke.
“And?” Varian asked, sensing there was more to the sentence and assuming correctly.
“And we pray to whatever higher power is willing to listen.”