Work Text:
“Welcome to Cloud Nine!”
The perky, pre-recorded voice came over the intercom every fifteen minutes. Dan used it as a way to tell how many hours he still had left in his shift-at this point, he had six more greetings to go before he could clock out and leave this stupid place.
As the announcement rattled on about in-store coupons for everything from toilet cleaner to cucumbers, he tried to debate with himself which was worse-hearing the same stupid recordings every fifteen minutes or the same twenty pop songs on loop?
“Wind’s really picking up, huh?”
He glanced up from where he was stocking the shelves to see Phil standing over him, a gentle smile on his face as he watched the snow fall ever-faster out the windows.
Phil had been Dan’s floor supervisor for the six months since he started working there. He was tall, good at his job while only being somewhat obnoxious about it, and was still the only one in the store who Dan thought could pull off the tacky blue polyester vests.
“Yeah. Think we’ll be able to get home safe?” Dan managed to get out, trying to hide how Phil’s profile against the fluorescent lighting made his breath catch in his throat.
“Hope so.” A glimpse of worry flashed over his face suddenly, and Dan felt himself kicking himself. He shouldn't have worried Phil. He should go shovel his car out, or better yet, carry him home himself, where the two of them could warm up by the fireside and-
“But I wouldn’t put it past corporate to keep us here in the middle of a blizzard. Better to make five dollars off the one person that’ll come in and make us freeze to death than to let us go home at a reasonable time, huh?” Dan laughed awkwardly at his comment, pulling himself out of his fantasies. “Not the first time they’d screw us over.”
Phil snorted at that, checking his clipboard. “Yes, Dan, I know. We all hate corporate and you’re going to lead us into some sort of socialist future where we can all live on a commune-” He started to tease.
“Wanting to get a union started isn’t socialism!” Dan protested. “It just ensures that we all have a say in the decisions that are made about our employment, and…”
But he could tell Phil’s eyes were starting to glaze over, so he sighed. “Fine. I’ll just go back to stocking the shelves in the middle of this natural disaster, caused largely by large megacorporations like Cloud Nine’s carbon emissions.”
“And doing it with a smile!” Phil beamed brightly at him, scribbling something down on his clipboard before walking off, humming along to whatever outdated pop song was playing at the moment.
☁︎
Four more greetings later, and Dan was getting worried. No customers had come in for ages, which almost never happened, and the snow kept piling up outside the frosted sliding doors.
He was pulled away suddenly from the go-back cart by Louise, who was waddling as quickly as she could for being eight months pregnant.
“Emergency meeting.” she hissed. “They’re going to keep us here overnight, I’m calling it now.”
Dread pooled in Dan’s gut as he followed her towards the electronics section, where the TV anchor was speaking in low volume about all the roads that were closed due to the weather.
“-With our main road out of here being shut down, and the exit mechanisms being blocked by the snow, we have no choice but to stay here.” Phil called out over the groans and grumbles of all his co-workers.
“Trust me, I’m not pleased about this either, and I’ll be calling corporate to try to make sure you get paid for the time you’re here. Now, we can use some of this time to do some leftover warehouse duties-”
“We’re not doing any work!” One of the employees shouted, to a chorus of cheers.
“Yeah! Screw Cloud Nine, I’m not doing that!” Another called out, pumping his fist in the air. “No work!”
“No work! No work! No work!”
Phil looked overwhelmed at the chanting for a few moments before dropping his clipboard to his side.
“You know what? Fine. Fine! ” He called over the group, waiting for them to settle down. “Forget it. Hook up one of the Switches to the TV, play some games, steal some snacks. I don't care. I need to make some phone calls.”
As the group erupts into cheers, he side-steps them all, instead walking straight to Dan.
“Would a union help with this?” He asked, voice low and conspiratorial.
Dan nods quickly, a little flushed by how close Phil is standing to him now. “Yeah-Definitely. We could fight for more hazard pay, or for the right to go home-”
Phil claps him on the shoulder, cutting him off. “Right, well, that can be your job right now. Figuring out how to get all that started.”
At that, he walks off towards the break rooms, hand pushing through his already messy hair.
“Poor guy. Bet he's worried about not getting home to his kid.” Louise said from behind him, leaning against the counter and clutching her bump with a grunt.
Now that's news. “Kid?” He asks, turning to face her.
Behind them, people run around, setting up the camping equipment in seats and grabbing bottles of alcohol from the locked shelves.
“Yeah, you didn't know he had a kid?”
Dan thinks about that. What does he know about Phil?
He's hot. He wears blue vests. He smiles at people. He's coming around on unions.
How could he be so smitten for this guy and barely know who he was?
“How old is it?”
Louise gives him an amused look. “How old is she? She's fourteen. Came to the store once, I don't think you were working that day.”
Dan's brain scrambles to do the mental math to figure out when Phil must have had her, but it's disrupted by the fact that he realizes he has no clue how old Phil is.
“He seems to be a great dad. It's why he's so supportive of me-says he's going to suspend me with pay the month after I give birth for ‘bringing my kid to work’ so I don't have to worry about coming in.”
“They don't give you maternity leave?!” All thoughts of Phil go out the window, staring in horror at his coworker who probably shouldn't even be walking by now. “That's it. I'm going online and I'm figuring out how to get union cards going.”
Louise snorted. “Sure, Dan.”
“Why are you guys all so against-”
“I need to go pee. You get your cards going or whatever. I'll talk to you in a bit.”
☁︎
About an hour later, Dan’s hunched in a bean-bag chair and tapping away at one of the demo computers while his co-workers around him get more and more wasted.
“Looks like you need a drink!” A voice slurred from behind him, and he’s about to wave him off when he realizes he recognizes who it belongs to.
“Phil, hey!” Dan squeaks out, taking the bottle from him. The way Phil’s smirking down at him makes his face grow hot, and when the older man lets out a stream of uncontrollable giggles, he can’t help but smile as well.
“Are you workin’ on the-the commune thing?”
Dan snorts at that, but he knows he’s blushing as Phil drops next to him. “I don’t know where you got this commune idea from, but yes-hey!”
Phil shuts the laptop lid, nearly on his fingers, and watches a couple of the warehouse guys pushing one of the girls from customer service around in the cart.
“They should really treat us better, Phil.” He tries again. “You can’t honestly want to be here right now. Don’t you have…”
He doesn’t know how to say that Phil has a family at home, and that he knows that, and he also wants to ask who’s waiting for you at home and how old even are you and do you think you’d ever want to hold my hand?
“Do you think there’s still beauty in the world?”
Dan turns towards him, but Phil’s tipped his head back, the music from Mario Kart blasting through the store and covering up the never-ending hits from 2013.
“Uh-”
“I wanna think there’s still beauty.” He says, a smile playing at his list. “And there is. Like, my daughter. She shows me there’s still good in the world. And the people here-”
At that moment, there’s the shatter of something glass, and Phil cringes. “Well. Most of the people here. Like
you
.”
Dan’s staring at him now, turned a little to face him. “Like me?” He blurts out, and he knows it’s selfish to be focusing on that right now, but it still hits him in the chest.
“Yeah.” Phil nodded, like he didn’t just make Dan’s pulse rise about twenty beats a minute. “But, sometimes, there’s not. Like, sometimes you look up and you realize you work for a corporation that really doesn’t care if you live or die.”
“Hey, don’t-you’re good at this job, come on-”
“Yeah, well, sometimes being good at a job isn’t everything. Sometimes, you just want to go crazy, like when you hear Happy by that Will Ferrell guy for the millionth time that day and you just wanna take a baseball bat to the speakers.”
Dan’s wise enough not to correct Phil now that’s he’s rambling, nudging him on.
“Sometimes you realize you took a job when you got somebody pregnant while trying to prove you’re not gay in high school, and now you're thirty and you still work in this hideous shoebox of a store where every day is the same, and you wonder if this is all you'll ever know, even though you know you're lucky to have it-” He’s breathing a bit heavier now, panic flashing across his face.
“Oh, Phil.” He frowns at that, reaching down and taking his hand gently. “Your life isn’t just these walls.” What it
is
, he’s not sure, but the way Phil lights up the room-he knows it can’t just be this horrible place. “And, for the record, you make this place better every day. You bring a beauty to it that nobody else can.”
The fact that the compliment could address both his looks and his personality doesn’t hit him until just a moment after he says it, but by the way the older man is looking at him, he doesn’t regret it much. “Really?” He whispers, eyes shining under the fluorescent lights.
Dan nods once, his mouth going dry. “Really.” He whispers back, and suddenly Phil’s leaning forward, his cupids-bow lips parting…
“You’re the bessssst.” He groaned out as he buried his face in the other’s shoulder, arm slung over him. “Best ever , ever, ever. ”
“Oh.” Dan huffs out a small laugh. “Ah-thank you?”
He waits for a response, but all he gets is a small noise that he recognizes as a snore. He’s out cold, just like that.
Louise makes eye contact with him across the way, where she’s been digging into a quart of ice cream with a few other girls. She looks between them, and all the girls giggle, but Dan can’t bring himself to care.
It’s a moment of beauty-to sit in a lumpy bean bag, full of people partying like their kids, with Phil in his arms.
☁︎
At some point sheer exhaustion took over him, and he fell into an uncomfortable half-sleep for a few hours. By the time he wakes up, though, Phil’s already up. He hears someone gathering cleaning supplies from the back, and running the math in his head quickly, he figures he has about a couple hours to complete his plan. So, as quickly and as quietly as he can, he makes his way to the kids’ room decor section.
☁︎
“Phil!” He calls out as he emerges, a bit stunned at what he sees.
Everyone is either hungover or barely awake, but Phil’s got them all cleaning up. Even he’s got a push-mop, wiping over the linoleum tile. “Just half an hour until we can all go home, people!” His voice is cheery, even if his eyes have bags under them and his smile is more like a grimace. “Clear roads means the morning crew will take over!”
“Phil!” He calls again, and a few people turn to watch them, shooting Dan a few knowing looks.
“Dan, perfect, you can start to-”
He shakes his head. “I have to show you something. It’s really important.”
Phil’s eyebrows raise at that, but the other’s expression must tell him it’s not worth arguing, so he sets the mop against a counter.
Resisting the urge to take Phil's hand, he leads the other back towards the photo lab.
“Okay, so.” He takes a deep breath, reciting the speech he'd been working on half the night. “Francis Bacon once said ‘The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.’ When he wrote that in his collection Complete Essays-”
“Dan.’ Phil interrupted gently, his face still clinging on to a smile that didn't reach his eyes. “Whatever this is-can you just tell me if someone broke the printer or not?”
He sucked in a breath before nodding, finally building up the courage to open the door and nudge the other man inside.
“I…You said you didn't see much beauty here. So I wanted to change that.”
He watches Phil's face closely in the pale green glow of the stick-on stars, 600 of them to be exact, covering nearly every other inch of the walls and ceiling.
“You deserve to feel like there's beauty here. Because you make this place better every day.”
The other man's smile drops, mouth falling open for a moment, before his eyes well up slightly.
“You did all this?” He whispers, and it's like he's not Dan's supervisor anymore, or his co-worker. His vest seems to disappear. Now he's just Phil, who became a dad too young but is trying his best and snuggled with him last night on a bean bag chair.
Dan gives a weak nod. “This morning. I paid for them too, don't worry!” He adds quickly, and Phil huffs out a laugh before taking Dan's hand.
“You…” He starts, glancing over at him. “You're…Dan. Thank you.”
The stars seem to make Phil's eyes glow as he leans in, kissing the other man slowly.
☁︎
“So. The cards will be passed out during my next shift-”
“And I'll turn a blind eye so I don't have to report union activity to corporate, right.” Phil nods seriously at Dan, leaning on the hood of his car.
Dan rolls his eyes. “Which you shouldn't have to do, mind you, it's well within our rights-”
But then Phil's smiling at him, kicking a little of the piled-up snow onto his shoe. “Okay, commune-boy.”
“You're insufferable.”
“True. You really were suffering back there in the photo lab, huh?”
A strangled noise leaves Dan's throat, only growing louder as Phil glanced around before pressing a quick kiss to his cheek.
“Text me, okay?” He asks softly, and Dan finds that outside of the walls of the store, with Phil giggling brightly at him, that he can't stay frustrated for very long.