Work Text:
The night before their flight leaves, Alexis sends an SOS text.
Its accompanied by a picture of a DVD case with slightly pixelated box art bearing pink bubble letters and a high contrast photo of Alexis herself, over a decade younger, doe eyed like she’s just stepped in front of the headlights of her shipping heir boyfriend’s Ferrari, complete with a bit of hair stuck in her pale lip gloss.
A Little Bit Alexis, Episodes 1-7.
He texts back.
[ David: Oh my god kill it. Kill it with fire.]
[ Alexis: It was in the bottom of the closet under Shane Kippel’s unreleased rap demo.]
He can see the state of the room right now in his mind’s eye. It’s not surprising she isn’t finished packing yet, twelve hours before the flight. Clothes are probably everywhere, hanging half out of drawers and draped over chairs. She’s packing her makeup case by now; which really means everything’s strewn across the table, a sane person’s lifetime supply of highlight and false lashes.
Though he’d always kept his side of the room neat as a pin, he’s nice and settled in Patrick’s apartment—their apartment—and that side of the motel room is now definitively bleak. No wonder she’s out of here.
[ Alexis: Bring wine coolers and whatever else you want and let’s have a watch party. For old time’s sake!]
[ David: Are you well?]
He’s been married a little over seventy-two hours, and here he is padding into the kitchen—their kitchen?—already in his Uggs and sleep pants, phone clutched in both hands while Patrick stirs twin mugs of hot chocolate, and if he hasn’t fled yet, well…
“What’s up, babe?” his husband asks, lips pursing to blow over the rim of his mug.
His husband. David smiles, tight.
“You look worried.”
“Um. I am? A little bit. Alexis found the DVD copy of her reality show in the bottom of our closet.”
“Oh my,” Patrick says, and it's a carbon copy of Marci Brewer that makes the knot at the pit of his stomach loosen just a little.
“Um. And I think we should go watch it.”
Patrick gives pause, does that little conceding pout that says he’s listening, considering, processing, affectionately shocked by whatever new nuttiness the Rose family has revealed.
“Right now? Are we still driving them to the airport in the morning?”
“I assume.” He looks down at his phone, pulls up the text conversation. “She wants wine coolers. We should pick up Stevie, too. I’ll tell her to bring vodka. We’ll need it.”
He’s texting away, but Patrick doesn’t move a muscle.
“You’re sure you want to see that? You want to share that? With us? Right now?”
David looks up, sees those beautiful brown eyes that know and have known. That gaze that held his just three days ago in the sulfur glow of the motel parking lot when they couldn’t follow through on the tradition of not seeing each other the night before, watching him bright and endearing, like he could look forever.
He reaches up, loops his arms around Patrick’s neck, and God he’s so thankful…
“I don’t care. I don’t… know those people anymore. We aren’t them. Well maybe we are, we’re just better.”
Patrick smiles, traces a hand over the plush shoulder of his sleep-shirt. “If you’re sure,” he says.
David nods. Fuck it. They’re leaving. His mom, his dad, his sister. Stevie follows in a week after taking care of some logistical stuff. He needs just a few more hours. Just a nice epilogue to this whole saga.
Patrick, the blessing he is, transfers their hot chocolate to the brand new travel mugs his cousin from Winnipeg bought them as a wedding present. They don’t change out of their pajamas, and David texts Stevie the appropriate dress code requirements, which don’t look much different from her everyday clothes.
The room is in the exact state he had predicted, pastel pink aluminum suitcases on the floor looking like overstuffed macarons and a mind-boggling amount of clothes still in drawers and hung over the chairs. He hooks his finger under a lacy blue bralette thrown over his old bed post and sling-shots it at her before settling on the original motel bedspread that’s replaced his old black and white one, sitting crossed legged next to Stevie. She twists the cap off the vodka with a snap. He grabs for it as soon as she’s had her first sip.
“OK, so you should know before we start,” Alexis addresses the room. “This was the early 2000s, the era of babydoll dresses, chain belts, and gauchos, and while that’s all coming back and I’m pulling it off just as effortlessly as I did back then, silhouettes change and it isn’t really the same as…”
“Oh my God, Alexis! Start the thing!” David says, shrill, and she groans back, flips her curls in his direction, and plops the disc into the tray.
The ancient combination VHS/DVD player wheezes to life, and the startlingly familiar bass beat of the theme song crackles through the speakers of the old tube TV and David… feels faint.
Are you ready, Alexis’s breathy, fake-baby voice whispers, and God, no he’s fucking not.
She pushes play and scrambles up onto her bed, against the pillows. Patrick lays sideways across the foot of her bed, and David laments the amount of space between them that prevents hand holding, though he isn’t sure if he’d be able to do that right now.
The first episode opens with Alexis at a photo shoot for Girl Crush magazine, a teen rag he now knows is out of publication and thank heavens. She meets her friends Prairie and Serenity for frappuccinos, and there’s an extended sequence of discussion about her upcoming twenty first birthday party, which spells disaster already. They go back and forth about inviting Prairie’s ex-boyfriend’s current girlfriend, and David feels his brain oozing from his ears.
Stevie and Patrick are frozen in their spots, and there’s no way of reading their reactions from his angle. Hot agitation burns in David’s ears and he really wants to ask her to turn it off, forget this whole thing, do something else, but then the Alexis on TV is testing driving a cobalt blue Mercedes, and his dad is on screen now, eighty percent less gray hair and just as outwitted.
“Awwww,” Stevie croons. “I’m here for this,” she says, even though TV Alexis is now bargaining and debating her list of reasons why this is definitely a car fit for a young driver with a propensity for parties. That DUI was just a one time thing, I already promised you!
Alexis in real life, in her little motel bed, laughs, a quiet little giggle, with her thumb nail stuck behind her front teeth. David looks over. She looks at him and smiles.
That was the Mercedes that had been planted with Stavros’s molly. Alexis’s twenty-four hour jail sentence was the reason why there was a month gap between the filming of pilot and the second episode.
Alexis reaches over the little nightstand, waggles her fingers at him, reaches for his hand. He lets her hold it. Lets himself be grounded by it, just a little.
And then he’s on the screen. He. Himself. David. Thirty pounds thinner and beardless and wearing the ugliest sunglasses he’s ever seen. Indoors. In their kitchen.
“Oh fuck,” he whispers under his breath, and Stevie and Patrick both perk up with delight, shoulders to their ears and matching smiles.
TV him is bickering with his dad over the decision to lease a twenty-one year old party girl a Mercedes, and honestly, he turned out to be right, though, so…
“Wow,” he hears Patrick say, all dreamy and listless, and no, no, nope.
“Oh my God, I was barely 24 when this was filmed,” he informs them.
“You look so handsome,” Patrick says earnestly and Stevie laughs.
“In an LA realtor kind of way, I guess,” she counters.
“Oh my God,” David stands up to pace, rounds the twin beds to the table where the chips and licorice are precariously placed amongst a forest of every haircare product Alexis owns.
“No no no, David, you can’t leave in the middle of an episode,” Stevie says, backed up by a chorus of yeah David don’t be a spoilsport and it’s ok David.
Is it though?
He groans and deposits himself next to Alexis with a fistful of Twizzlers. He bites into four of them at once.
TV him goes away, inexplicably, with a wave of his hand and shouting through the kitchen I’m not jealous Alexis, don’t flatter yourself. He tries to remember if he flew out of town that night or where he’d gone off to, but he can’t. The only family member yet to make an appearance is his mother, and he assumes they’re probably in similar boats. He was hardly sober enough most days—at least between the hours of 10pm and 10am—to function. The other hours, he was oscillating between completely detached and self-absorbed.
He doesn’t remember this day, but he remembers this period in time. He was smoking his way through art school, dating a sculptor called Jennipher McScher, who he later worked with at the gallery long after they’d broken things off. After she’d broken things off, saying he took up too much of her “creative plane.”
He ducks so that Patrick’s shoulder blocks half his view of the screen but no one can yell at him for not watching.
The rest of the episode is meaningless fluff, with no more cameos from any other member of the Rose family, and this particular fact, in the year 2020, is apparently a fault, because it is exactly and only what seventy-five percent of this crowd wants to see.
“Next!” Stevie declares, diving for the remote.
“Oh my god, we were assholes!” David explodes.
“Ok, speak for yourself, David,” Alexis bites.
“Of course you were assholes,” Stevie says.
Patrick says nothing but looks on, fond, lips in a contented smile. David’s sinuses sting.
“This is the cutest shit I’ve ever seen,” Stevie says, and turns back to the TV, pushes play.
The theme song zips through the room again, electronic and poppy, and Patrick leans over to press a hand to his knee.
He’s checking in. His eyes are all big and soft and warm and David wants to drown in them as always.
He nods, silently, and Patrick nods in return before turning back to the screen.
David lifts a hand, swipes a few fingers at his under-eye.
The next episode was, yes, shot a month after Alexis’s arrest for the molly, when the producers on the show—Dad’s friends—wanted to present a cleaner image, do a little damage control, so there’s less partying and more giggling friends (even if they’re still talking about boys and describing the unseen partying).
There’s also more David. Which, at the time and still to this day, baffles him as to why they thought he would be a fun, friendly pairing. But family and all that, and David remembers now that this was also the time Rose Video was downsizing quite a bit and his mom went viral for essentially “falling asleep with her eyes open at the Daytime Emmy’s”, blacked out and mouth agape at the mic next to Kelly Rippa.
The second episode revolves significantly around the great chest hair fiasco of 2007.
He absolutely remembers this part.
Basically, the guy he saw after Jennipher hated body hair. Like a serious aversion. A phobia, possibly. Needless to say that hadn’t lasted long, but long enough to give David a complex for a brief period of time. Maybe it still reared its ugly head from time to time, but he’d grown to embrace his body. The things that used to bother him had been sufficiently erased by Patrick’s frequent and eager praise.
Patrick.
Said husband reaches back, grips at his ankle over the soft cotton of his Tom Ford sleep pants and says, “I can’t believe you let her do this to you…”
His eyes tick up to the screen where TV him is asking for a reference to her salon.
“Oh, I taught myself to do it at home, David. It's super easy. Just a little.” She pats her cupid’s bow. “Boop. And done.”
He looks on incredulously. Shakes his head. “Ok.”
“I was naive, not to mention, cajoled by the producers,” David says.
Then they’re in the kitchen, the kitchen of all places, like this is Family Ties or Full House, and Alexis is applying wax that hardly looks properly prepared to a patch of hair on his chest.
“Oh my god no wait wait! Wait a second!”
Alexis globs on a dollop, spreads it with the tiny stick. Tries to spread it.
He squeaks, panicked.
“You didn’t do it right!”
“Yes I did, I do this for myself all the time, David! I know how!”
“Oh my god,” he says under his breath, behind his hand, trying to smother his smile. Its too much. His baby face and his baby voice and his horrible sunglasses he had no business wearing and he knew they’d never been normal but seeing it now… “What were we even on?”
He hadn’t meant to be heard, but Alexis leans over anyways. “Um pretty sure we were stone cold sober, David.”
She pats the cloth into place, grips the end and rips.
There’s stunned silence for an extended period, a close up of the bald, reddening patch of skin just under David’s left pec.
Then they’re both screaming.
They take turns screaming. Screaming in contagion.
Alexis flails the cloth in her hand, now covered in David’s actual body hair. David clutches a hand over the bald spot.
David snorts, then giggles. A soft little hiccup behind his hand.
Patrick turns to look, that troll grin already on his face.
Alexis laughs beside him. Stevie’s smiling too.
Then he can’t take it anymore. He looks around, at all of their faces, the screaming still chorusing in the background, and he laughs out loud.
Patrick follows, his old man chuckle, with his shoulders scrunching towards his ears and David doubles over the edge of the bed, half hanging off, cackling at the dingy carpet.
“David!” Alexis squeals.
He just keeps laughing. He hears Stevie’s dry, honking snort and that cute, actually girly almost-giggle she does when she’s really tickled and that triggers a totally new wave, He falls back again, against Alexis’s headboard.
“So that’s what that spot is?” Patrick says through his own laughter. He and Alexis laugh in unison and David blinks up to see them smiling at each other. She shoves his shoulder, sister-like.
“Ew Patrick!”
But they keep laughing, and Stevie’s smiling from her spot on his old bed. He catches her eye and then…
Then the laughing turns into tears. Big bubbly tears spilling down his cheeks while he chokes and lifts his hands to wipe them away but stops when he has the grace to remember his under eyes.
He covers his face instead, as if he can hide any of this now, sobs into his hands.
“Oh David, honey…”
Patrick scoots closer, touches his knee.
Alexis’s fingers cup his chin, touch his shoulder. He reaches out, puts his hand over hers.
He nods at her, trying for some sibling telepathic communication, pats her hand.
They just let him cry, big sobs in his chest with the outro music playing in the background.
The room is uneasy and still and when he can finally open his eyes, he looks up at Stevie who’s moved closer now, one knee on the bed next to him with a worried, knowing frown. Patrick at his feet, Alexis at his side.
He lets out a pathetic whine, wishing he could stop the tightness in his chest, wishing he could stop the time from moving forward and all of this changing, even though it's ok. It's ok. He knows it's going to be ok.
They’re all ok. Better than ok. Thriving.
It’s good.
Alexis leans her head on his shoulder, and it's a few more quiet, extended seconds before he can find his voice.
“Let’s watch the next one,” he says.
“Are you sure David?” Patrick’s eyes are soft as ever.
“We don’t have to,” Alexis says.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure. I want to.” His voice is all wet and stuffy and he boops his head against Alexis’s before straightening up.
Stevie elbows in beside him on his opposite side. Patrick, still across the foot of the bed, props himself on his elbow, reaches his free hand out so he can stroke David’s shin. The little bed is crowded, and it's probably not physically possible that they all fit, but they do.
A merry band, his mom would say.
He thinks about inviting them over, calling through the woefully thin walls and watching them walk through that ugly door one more time, but he just wants to be with these people for a minute.
Patrick reaches with stunning—though, between the two of them, not so secret—flexibility to grab the licorice and cheese puffs and their mugs of hot chocolate from the table. Stevie hits play on the remote. Alexis hugs him tight around his middle.
If he cries a few more tears while they giggle and joke their way through Alexis’s internship at his gallery, no one says anything. They just keep close, right by his side like they’ve always been.
When the series is over, they all take turns hugging Alexis goodnight. He holds on for an extra few seconds before reminding her of their gracious 8am arrival to take the three of them to the airport. He squeezes her hand before turning for the door.
Outside, he looks down the line of ugly, cracked, stained concrete, the new fixtures his dad had just put in that replaced the horrible yellow bulbs. The stupid plastic bowl chairs, the plants in their pots that his mom placed here.
God, that was an eternity ago.
He turns, locks eyes with Stevie where she’s standing beside him.
“You ok?” she asks.
“I’m gonna start the car,” Patrick says, glances between the two of them, and David hates that there’s actually three people on this earth who know him this well.
He stands there next to her, rises up onto the balls of his feet and back down. She’s quiet too, and they’re just there, on the patch of cement, in the warm summer air, crickets chirping around them, side by side.
Blindly he reaches out to take her hand.
She holds tight.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”