Chapter Text
One more hour til the theater closes. Just one more hour until Alex can go home and see her dog and drink some wine and go to sleep. She’s backstage doing all of her backstage manager stuff when the green room door bangs open, and she jumps. She turns to look as the guy with lime green hair who’d been centerstage just ten minutes earlier starts to yell.
She flinches in fear at first, but after a mere few seconds, she realizes that she’s not in danger. He doesn’t even know that she’s there. He’s yelling at the hot guy that Alex learned a few hours ago was the tour manager.
“-and I can’t do this anymore, Lucas!” the singer is shouting. “Fuck! Fuck!”
“Okay, calm down,” the hot guy - Lucas, apparently - placates.
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“No, fuck you!”
Alex tenses again, but the pair still hasn’t noticed her. She stays silent and still.
“Awsten,” hot tour manager says calmly, “I know you don’t feel good right now, but-”
“But what?! But what! It’s only gonna get worse! You don't fucking know how I feel!”
“That’s not-”
“I need a break!” the singer explodes, but Alex can tell from his voice that this isn’t a diva meltdown. This is desperation. “I’m so tired I feel fucking sick! I’m so tired, Lucas, I’m so fucking tired, okay, I can’t take one more day of this-”
“I know. Okay. I know. I hear you, man.”
“Help me,” the singer pleads, and he steps forward and half-collapses onto his tour manager.
Alex is so glad that she has minimal interaction with band dudes. She used to want to be a roadie. Ha.
The tour manager looks caught off-guard by the hug, but he’s quick to return it, even giving the guy a little rub on the back.
“I wanna go home,” the singer confesses, his voice small.
“No,” the tour manager replies warningly.
“I wanna sleep in my bed. I want my keyboard back. I want my stupid gold silverware and the Thai place down the block. Don’t you wanna see Kay and Harvey?”
Hot guy sighs. “Awsten, we’re contracted to-”
The singer roughly pulls back and yells, “I don’t give a fuck about the contract! I wanna go home!”
(Okay, now he kinda sounds like a diva, Alex thinks.)
“I can get you a break,” the tour manager tells him quietly. “I can’t promise we can stop the tour; I think that would be a really, really bad move. But what if I could get you a break?”
“Please,” the green-haired guy begs.
“Two nights in a hotel.”
The singer literally starts to weakly cry. “Yeah," he nods. "Yes. God, fuck, Lucas, thank you.”
“Okay, stop. Stop. You’re killing me.” Hot guy sighs and turns his head, and Alex freezes completely when he makes eye contact with her. He spends a moment looking surprised but then just shrugs. Normally she’d give him a knowing smile, but this whole situation is unbearably awkward.
Sorry, he mouths. Then he pats the singer on the shoulder and says, “You ready to go? I’ll have Aaron grab your stuff so you and me can just get out of here.”
“The fans-” he protests.
“Are all either at the front exit or the bus. We’ll go out the side.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. And if anybody’s there, you know the drill.”
The green-haired guy nods.
“Okay. Hang on, let me get an Uber.”
He sags against the wall and closes his eyes. “What would I do without you?” he asks rhetorically, but the tour manager, who’s busy tapping away on his phone, has an answer ready for him.
“Die, probably. There’s one outside. Let’s go.”
"Did you tell him to go to the side door?"
"Yep. Come on." The tour manager shoots an apologetic glance to Alex, and they disappear out the door.
Wow. She hopes both of them get through the night okay, but the whole incident is quickly forgotten. There’s too much stuff left to do before closing.