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“Nikon,” Varro slurred. “Nikon, you’re… you’re really pretty.”
Nikon leaned back on the VIP couch, hands over his face, wondering at every decision in his life that had led to him being called pretty by a crown prince. “I’m not shit,” he grumbled.
“You are .” Varro was sprawled next to him; he’d originally been deposited a couple feet away, but he was slowly creeping over as he became more and more horizontal. He was currently at about a 45 degree angle. “You’re - your hair is awful - “ ( “Hey ”) but these marks are…” Even with how close he was, Nikon nearly jumped out of his skin at the feeling of Varro’s clammy fingers pressing at the marks on his face.
“What the fuck? Don’t, don’t touch me.” He looked over to try to glare at Varro, but the idiot was so close, just a blur of pink hair. He shoved him back to the side blindly and ignored his heart pounding weirdly. “How’d I get stuck with prince-sitting duty? Thought this shit was my brother's job.”
“Hmmm. I like Olympus,” Varro said, thoughtfully. “But I - Nikon,” and he was leaning back in, way too far into his personal space again, and clinging on to Nikon so that another shove didn’t do anything to knock him back. “Nikon,” Varro whispered, upsettingly close to his face. “Do you wanna know a secret?”
“Uh,” Nikon said, panicking a little. His hand was caught between Varro and the couch, and yeah he could just shove him off with brute force but that felt like a really rude thing to do to someone that he maybe wasn’t actively fighting with anymore, and also was too drunk to sit up straight. “No?”
Varro completely ignored his response, instead just nuzzling in, until his mouth was right against Nikon’s ear. He said, so soft that it got lost in the space between them, soft like a true secret: “I like you.”
Nikon jerked back so far that he nearly fell off the side of the massive couch, frantically putting space between them, clamping a hand to his ear and then removing it just as quickly when it was a little wet and that was kind of disgusting and kind of, not disgusting, and he hated all of it. “What are you - you’re drunk,” he said, firmly. “You’re drunk and you should just sit there until your retainers come back to retrieve you.”
Varro pouted dramatically, fluttering his eyelashes in a way that looked ridiculous. “You’re not being very nice about my secret.”
“It was a shitty secret,” Nikon said, faintly.
“Was not. You’re just jealous.”
Nikon sat back against the couch, finally beginning to relax, though his blood pressure remained unhealthily high. He had to stop hanging around this moron. He was going to drag him into an early grave, one way or another. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Does so.” They passed a minute in silence, so long that Nikon began hoping that maybe his temporary charge had managed to pass out and leave him in peace, when Varro said, very suddenly, “Hey, want to make out?”
Again with the blood pressure. He didn’t have to breathe but for a second he also couldn’t , words frozen in his throat, mouth gaping open. He started wondering about how much alcohol he’d had - not as much as the prince by a long shot but not nothing , either. Enough to trigger some really weird dreams nightmares? He finally managed a strangled, “What?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Varro said, moving back into his space with such fluid intensity it was kind of like being accosted by an octopus. There was suddenly a mouth against his neck, a hand in his hair, another hand that he worryingly had lost track of and the beginnings of a leg swinging over him, which he managed to block because no, nope, absolutely no. Fuck that. No. “I make out with people at clubs all the time. ‘S not weird.”
“You’re…” his thoughts were all scrambled. He tried to jerk his head away, but the hand in his hair was holding him in place, and the feeling of fingers on his scalp sent tingles all the way down his spine. “I’m not… just some person at a club.”
“No,” Varro agreed. He kissed Nikon’s neck, and Nikon made a noise like he was being stepped on and scrambled to free his hands. He jerked again when he found Varro’s other hand; it had wound around his waist and was finding its way under his jumpsuit, getting just far enough to press onto bare skin and holy shit, holy shit, abort, emergency shutdown, everything stop -
“You’re going to regret this,” Nikon said, which wasn’t what he’d meant to say. His filter was entirely short-circuited. He’d only managed to get a hand onto Varro’s chest to push him back, but he wasn’t pushing him any further. For some reason. “You’re going to wake up and hate me. You’re drunk .”
Varro blinked at him, from too close. His eyes were a little red and unfocussed. It honestly wasn’t a good look on him. “Does that matter?”
“ Yes ,” Nikon snapped, strangled, “ yes what the fuck that matters .”
“Oh.” Finally, finally , Varro drew back, leaving the parts he’d been touching cold. Nikon shivered as fingertips trailed over his skin and finally parted from him. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s - hell.” He ran both his hands over his face, which was burning hot. “I just, I don’t want to, to hurt you.” He dug his palms into his eye sockets, thinking longingly of being literally anywhere but here. At the bottom of the ocean. In hell. Literally anywhere.
After another weirdly long silence, there was a telltale, horrible sniffle.
Nikon yanked his hands off his eyes, staring over incredulously. “What the fuck?” Sure enough, Varro was silently crying, head leaned back against the couch, looking at Nikon with, some kind of expression on his face.”What’s wrong now ?”
“You’re really nice,” Varro said, sounding stuffed up and like a moron.
“No, I’m not,” Nikon said, reflexively.
“You just said you don’t want to hurt me.”
Nikon’s eyebrows drew together. “That’s a really low bar.”
Varro sniffled. “Oh.”
Now faintly worried, but feeling like the danger had probably past, Nikon let his arms relax back down to his sides. He hadn’t signed up for taking care of a crying prince, either, but this was easier to handle than a weirdly horny one. At least this Varro seemed mostly interested in staring at Nikon and getting his face more and more awkwardly disgusting. “Are you… ok?”
“Yeah,” Varro said, faintly, and then moved forward - slowly, as though trying to telegraph his actions - and fell onto Nikon’s shoulder again. Nikon tensed, ready for another onslaught of limbs, but he seemed content to just stay there, leaning.
Nikon stayed tense, like he was touching a machine that might blow up at any minute, but as time passed and nothing more exciting happened than Varro leaning a little more weight on him and his hitching breaths evening out, he began to relax, just slightly. Making sure that it definitely wouldn’t be visible to anyone coming into the room, he moved the arm that was trapped behind Varro until he could rub, in what he hoped was a slightly comforting way, at Varro’s back. He got a contented sigh in return.
"Can I stay here?" Varro said, voice fading away into nothing.
"... Till Olympus gets back," Nikon muttered. He was causing less trouble this way, anyways. "Sure."
Varro didn't say anything to that, but there was a sad quality to his silence, as though that wasn't quite the answer he'd wanted. But Nikon couldn't imagine what the fuck else he could want. They couldn't stay in the back of this club forever.
A small eternity passed before the door to the room finally opened, and Olympus came striding in, a look of concern turning into relief at finding his charge relatively safe and sound on the couch. “One of those nights, huh,” he said, cryptically, and then reached down and just hefted Varro’s weight entirely off the couch, leaving Nikon to rapidly retract his arm and try not to gape openly. “Sorry about that. Thanks for watching him.”
“It was - “ no problem , except it definitely was and he definitely never, ever wanted to go through that ever again. “Yeah.”
Olympus laughed a little. “Yeah. Go enjoy the rest of your night.”
Yeah, no chance in hell. He had no energy left in him after all that shit, he was going straight home. “Sure.”
He watched Varro get carted out of the room like a (now slightly giggly) sack of potatoes, and then used the privacy of the empty VIP booth to lean back and drag both hands over his face. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.