Work Text:
Vanya sees Diego at a diner, on a cold, rain-lashed night in September, 2011. Entirely accidentally, of course.
Or, the world does not end.
The truth of the matter is, Vanya is wholly miserable. Vanya, in fact, has not been anything except miserable for quite a while - if she has, she hasn’t noticed. She thinks she may be depressed, but to use a label like that feels overbearing and horrifying, so she doesn’t. As far as Vanya is concerned, she’s just been having a particularly dry spell emotions-wise for the past couple of years, and it’ll lighten eventually. That, or it won’t, and, well, by then she’ll have done something about it.
She’s sitting in a particularly skeevy diner near the outer edges of the city, the kind that’s backed into a gas station and is only visited by one of three demographics: truckers, murderers, and sad people. The waitress is tapping her cigarette into the ashtray, looking glazed from probably a long shift, and Vanya makes a mental note to tip well. She probably doesn’t have the means to tip as well as she does, but sometimes she likes to imagine those faceless waitresses and baristas and Red Lobster servers thinking she’s better than the rest of the customers there. That she, and she alone, is one of the few good customers left: quiet, doesn’t demand attention, tips well without prompting. It makes her, embarrassingly, heat up with pride, at even the thought of being admired.
She has a cup of coffee in her hands. There’s a light stain of lipstick at the rim, but Vanya doesn’t truly mind, because she’s not going to drink it. Truth be told, Vanya hates coffee - but she orders it because that’s what adults do.
She’s feeling a bit lost in her head. The world fuzzes around her, playing up like static roaring from a TV, and Vanya has to blink to actually notice him.
He’s sitting at the booth nearest to the door, hunched over a book of some sort. Vanya squints.
Is that… Diego?
She runs a mental catalogue of Diego, her brother - her last memories of him feel stale and faraway, but are still pretty clear when she tries to picture them. Seventeen, fresh-faced, the handle to his rollaway suitcase for abroad missions tucked tightly in his grip, a knife in the other. Yelling at Dad, yelling , without stuttering once. Vanya, at that moment, felt inexplicably proud of him - despite the fact they weren’t close, despite the fact Diego made it desperately clear he hated her their entire childhood, despite the fact Vanya, when she imagined beautiful futures for herself, deliberately left him out - solely because it was the first time she’d ever seen anyone other than Five get mad at their father.
Then the door had closed, and her siblings and her were left to look around at themselves, Allison weakly saying “he’ll be back in a week”, while Klaus giggled deliriously.
And - he’s older, now, certainly, by years , but it’s him , and suddenly Vanya feels crushingly nervous. She debates on what to do, for about a minute or so, her head feeling suddenly very crowded, before she sighs, in a way she hopes feels put-upon and exasperated, scrounging a ten and a five from her wallet and dropping it next to her untouched coffee. She then gets her way up out of the booth, feeling, quite desperately, like she’s doing the biggest cop-out of the century, as she makes her way towards the door.
She stops at “ Vanya? ”
Vanya swivels on her toes, turns to face Diego, whose expression is something of a mix of shock and pure horror.
“Hi.” Vanya says, weakly, raising up a hand like she’s in a class.
Diego’s eyebrows furrow. “Hi.”
She notices, belatedly, that he’s got a still fresh cut running down his palm. He doesn’t look particularly bothered by this. He jerks a thumb to the windows, still looking completely doubtful she’s here. “Wait, you’re planning on walking home at this time of night?”
Vanya shrugs, also weakly. “It’s only ten or so blocks.”
Diego, for a moment, stares at her. Then, he grabs the bridge of his nose and heaves a sigh that sounds so deeply frustrated Vanya’s surprised he doesn’t bang his fist on the table. Hefting out his wallet, he grabs a ten and puts it down, before sliding out of the booth and pushing the heavy door of the diner open.
He glances back at her, surprised to see her standing still. “I’m driving you home.” He says, firmly.
Vanya swallows. “No, that’s okay.”
“Vanya, it’s freezing cold, it’s nighttime, and you clearly don’t have a purse to put mace in. I think it’d be considered accessory to murder to let you walk home now.” He says it like it’s an obligation, which actively makes it worse. She sighs, takes a pill, and follows, hurrying for the door before it swings back shut.
His car looks like it’s only running out of sheer willpower. It’s impressive, honestly, that it even still runs. Diego gets in the driver's seat wordlessly, leaving her unsure if she goes in the back or the front. Exhaust sputters thickly when he revs the engine.
Vanya, finally, opts to get in the back, on leather seating. She coughs, for no particular reason, feeling awkward and out-of-place. There’s a first aid kit next to her, opened, gauze unraveling from the edge slightly, and she tamps down the need to be worried. She says her address, clearly and loudly, because she doesn’t think she can take the embarrassment of saying it a second time.
Diego drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he drives. The radio is not on. The car is disconcertingly silent.
Vanya, because she is a mess under pressure, decides to fill it. “Uh, so - how are you doing, nowadays? I guess.”
Diego clears his throat. “I’m working at Red Lobster.”
“Oh shit,
the
Red Lobster?” Vanya asks, before realising, belatedly, that it sounds like she’s making fun of him. “Sorry, it’s just - it’s in my neighbourhood. The Red Lobster in this city.”
Before Diego can respond to that, Vanya babbles on, “I’m taking my girlfriend there, actually, next week.”
“You have a
girlfriend?
” Diego asks, his eyes wide.
Vanya draws herself up to her fullest height, which is not much. “People are gay, Diego-”
Diego frowns. “What? No. What? Jeez, Vanya, I’m bi. No, I mean, like -
you
have a girlfriend. Vanya Hargreeves.”
“Why are you surprised by that?” Vanya forces offense into her voice, and comes up woefully short. She sounds, unfortunately, like she’s genuinely invested in the answer.
Diego frowns harder. “Not surprised that you specifically have a girlfriend. Like, just the Hargreeves name in general being able to nab a steady partner.”
Vanya, in turn, also frowns. “Why?”
“I mean, we’re Hargreeves’. We’re kind of screw-ups.” He says it casually, like it’s common knowledge, and something about it throws Vanya off track. She doesn’t respond to it, just thinks, sitting in the back of her brother’s shitty car with the information that her brother insisted on driving her home, something she’s not sure how to react to or what to feel about. Eventually, he turns off the exhaust, and gestures to the door.
Vanya nods, once, twice, and opens the door, her apartment block towering in front of her.
She considers something. She sighs, knowing she’s gonna regret it. Before Diego speeds off, she keeps her hand on the top, and gestures up to her apartment. “Stay for dinner.”
Diego looks, for a moment, utterly bewildered. He clears his throat, uncomfortably. “I have plans.”
“If you don’t, I swear to God I’ll go on a lap of the block. And you’re right about me not having pepper spray.”
Diego looks at her. She looks back at him. They stay like that for a moment. She recognises something in his eyes, this dawning of something, this realisation: that Vanya has changed, and that he has changed. That maybe, just maybe, the Hargreeves, despite verifiably being screw-ups, don’t have to be screw-ups alone. Abruptly, he groans, throwing his hands up, and opens the door, scooting out.
“Christ.” He grumbles, jamming his hands into his pockets, clicking his car keys. “You know, you should really get on that.”
Vanya, riding on a swell of validation, and, somehow, profound joy, grins at him. The anxiety that frequently stirs in her chest feels lesser, somehow, and not masked with that heavy haze of blankness following her pills. It’s… nice.
Diego doesn’t grin back, but he doesn’t frown, not even when the elevator’s out of order and they have to walk the six flights. In fact, he smiles, the maniac, because he likes the walk.
---
Somehow, it becomes a weekly thing.
Vanya and her girlfriend break up a couple months later. Over the phone. And, thus, Diego calls in a favour for his shift and lets her show him every biographical movie of a composer that has ever existed, despite the fact it’s intensely obvious he’s bored the entire time. Then, when they’ve run out of movies, she lets him show her his stupid romcoms, because who thought Diego’d like romcoms , and they watch soaps until the sun goes down and Vanya’s stopped spontaneously sobbing at the thought of Steph. It’s the first time Vanya realises that they’re friends as well as siblings, now, and these hangouts are no longer obligatory.
In the next month, Diego gets fired from Red Lobster. The “Chicago Office”, whatever that is, decides, for the benefit of the company, the place needs to be shut down, and thus thirty jobs are lost in the process. Diego takes it on with a stoic “they’re all fuckers”, and Vanya lets him cathartically make pasta in her kitchen until he’s calmed down, before offering up some shit Jackie Chan movie that they watch in comfortable silence. Diego, at the end of the night, sighs, and smiles, wearily, and thanks her. Vanya nods, and says something along the lines of “any time, man”, except heavily muffled by the abundance of pasta in her mouth.
And that’s how they live, after that. The weekly hangouts expand into “dropping into the other’s apartment unannounced”, and then expand into texting each other regularly. They share important life details with one another. Vanya finally meets Patch. Diego and her are friends, it seems - and Vanya’s glad, actually , genuinely, glad. Glad for her brother.
They’re screw-ups, but they’re trying.
Vanya goes through the tumultuous errors of dating, and it’s… well, it’s a little disastrous, but she’s trying.
And, when Vanya fields the book, Diego doesn’t get mad. He just blinks, slowly, and says, “Kinda like a Fuck Reggie thing?”
And Vanya nods. In another universe, the book would’ve been not that at all, but then again, that universe is very different. She grins, widely. “Wanna help?”
And Diego cracks one of the largest smiles she’s ever seen him make. “Sure.”
A lot of things happen. A lot of media coverage, for one. A lot of confused phone calls. A lot of Reggie-refuting, and interviews, and a lot of high-fives. Because, and Vanya means this with her whole chest,
fuck
Reginald Hargreeves.
They carpool to the house when they hear about Reggie’s death. And they don’t argue at the funeral, and Diego doesn’t joke about Allison’s marriage. And when Diego says that he doesn’t trust Leonard Peabody, not with his entire heart, when he says, in that casual way of his, that maybe, just maybe, she should let Allison in, Vanya listens.
(And when Vanya can’t find her pills, and the lamppost bends, the room in the basement goes unvisited, and Allison does not need stitches for her throat.)
The world does not end, and Five Hargreeves, on April 2nd, 2019, does not travel to an apocalypse.