Work Text:
When Pied Piper imploded, Richard could not have been happier. They were back in the incubator, in familiar surroundings. The smell of weed, sweat, semen, and constantly boiling ramen was heaven to him.
It was about having control of his company back.
The thing was getting away from him, and it was turning into something he hated. Richard was struggling now, because he wanted Pied Piper to be successful, he wanted it to be his, but the framework for what he wanted couldn’t possibly exist.
When Richard said that he didn’t want to become Gavin Belson and he didn’t want his company to turn into Hooli, he meant it with all his heart. It wasn’t something he said so it could return as an ironic echo. Hooli was Richard’s conception of hell, and if his company became like that he could never forgive himself. Richard still hadn’t forgotten crying in his sleep, vomiting at work, being bullied—actually bullied—as a grown adult. He couldn’t sign off on a waffle bar and a pool table. He knew that those were created to erode your life more and more until nothing existed but work.
He was realizing now that he wanted the wealth and the satisfaction and the power, but getting it required becoming a monster. He was offended when Laurie accused him of letting his male ego control him, but she was right. He had this idea that he wanted to change the way everything worked in this fucking Valley, but it was impossible. Everything had already happened, and what was he going to do, anyway? Make his company a facsimile of a garage? Take away all the perks that made people want to work in this industry in the first place? Instead, he eventually wanted to be the typical Valley CEO, and everyone was telling him that and he couldn’t believe it. When he finally did realize it, he spent an entire night in the bathroom, vomiting and making tiny cuts on his arms, adding to the thousands that were already there.
The way things were going, somebody might think that Richard was sabotaging his own company on purpose. Maybe that was the only way he could make his life work. But he didn’t want to accept this feeling that he was dragging everyone else down.
One night he tried to give what his dad called a “kick-ass Patton speech”. “Look, guys,” he said, pacing at the head of the table as if a massive American flag was behind him. “We’re not sellouts. We don’t want to be sellouts. Right?”
Dinesh half-raised his hand and said, “Yeah, absolutely. But…it’s just that when we did try to sell out,” he paused to see Richard silently attempt to protest, “I mean. We had surprise waffles, Richard.”
“Dinesh, could you please get over the fucking waffles? It’s not about the waffles. It’s never been about the waffles. It’s not about fucking perks and company culture.” Richard was yelling now.
“It’s about you,” Dinesh said under his breath. That shut Richard up. He went into his room.
In the living room, Richard could hear Gilfoyle, weirdly, supporting him. He was saying, “Fuck you, we’re Black Flag.” He could also hear Dinesh saying “Yeah, I looked them up and apparently they were signed to MCA Records and it just went bad for them, so I don’t know how heroic they really were.”
Richard locked the door. The cutting thing was something that he just always did, and he was swift in his routine after years of fine-tuning. He kept iodine in his desk drawer. He carried a pocket-sized case with him, one of his mother’s old manicure kits, which held a dispenser of razor blades, a lighter, nail scissors, alcohol pads, and band-aids. It was pretty stupid, and he knew it was stupid, but sometimes the house was too loud or he had realizations like this, that he was becoming someone he didn’t recognize, or he was ruining his friends’ lives just to prove a point, and he just needed to do it. It didn’t change anything, but he felt better. He’d stop fucking twitching for two minutes and he’d be calm. Honestly, it was better than alcohol. Nobody else knew about it. He had no idea how to talk about it even if he wanted to. So he just wore hoodies, even in the Palo Alto summer and left it alone.
As he was cleaning himself up, applying just enough pressure for just long enough to be able to apply the large-size band-aids without creating a huge mess, Jared knocked on the door. Richard could identify everybody in the house by their footsteps, and Jared, unsurprisingly, had the softest gait of anyone.
“Richard? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just a second.” Richard kicked everything under the desk, stuck on the band-aids, rolled down his sleeves, and was rubbing hand sanitizer over his hands when he unlocked the door. Jared walked in and shut the door behind him. He always did that and it made Richard feel just a little weird. Like he was going to start kissing him or something. But what didn’t make Richard feel weird?
Richard sat back down on the floor and Jared followed.
When Jared really wanted Richard to talk to him, he’d say “hey buddy” in this light, lilting tone that was casual in an over-studied way. And that’s what he did. Richard liked that Jared was predictable, because nobody else was. Richard observed people deeply, but he felt like he never got any closer to understanding what it was to be a person. Because he felt on some level that he wasn’t one. It was a miracle that he’d made it to 26. Because he was sure that being trapped in a world he never made would have killed him much sooner, and the threat of death was always present in his head. But Jared calibrated his every movement to be comfortable. Richard could tell when he was imitating somebody else, he could tell when Jared was uncomfortable or sad. He could read Jared. He was horrified at the idea that Jared could read him too.
“Richard, are you okay?” Jared asked again, insistent this time.
Richard said, “I had a vision of myself as Gavin Belson.”
Jared thought for a moment and said, “Well, I know Gavin Belson more than anyone else in this house, and I can’t really think of any similarities between you. For one thing, you’re amazingly talented at building tech, which Gavin could never do. You’ve fostered an environment of honesty, I can be myself around you, you’ve never threatened me.” He glanced at Richard, who wasn’t buying it.
“No, but Jared, you saw me. I wanted…I wanted people to be afraid of me. I wanted to be the guy on top. It was about me. And I don’t know what I can do to keep myself from being that guy other than…”
He didn’t want to say what he was really thinking because he didn’t want to scare Jared. Jared said that he would follow him anywhere, and he thought of some archetypical mother figure asking If Richard jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? He didn’t want to lay that on him.
He cleared his throat and kept going. “That’s what this place fucking does to people. There’s no way to keep control over your work without becoming evil. And I don’t know if being evil is worse than seeing people get rich off of me.”
He could see that Jared was trying to come up with something comforting to say and that he was coming up short. This was just too big.
Jared went with his instinct, which was to hold Richard in his arms. But Richard wrestled away.
“I’m sorry!” Jared said. He braced himself for Richard yelling at him and kicking him out.
“I’m not worth it,” Richard said. “Don’t say I am. Just…don’t do it, okay?”
Jared nodded and picked at pieces of the carpet. He was determined to sit there until Richard would talk to him. Richard was determined to sit there until Jared left.
It got dark. It got dark enough so that Richard didn’t have to see Jared and that Jared didn’t have to see him.
“When I was a kid, I used to bang my head into walls.” Richard said. His mouth needed to crack open for the words to escape.
“Hmm?” Jared said. But Richard didn’t care if he was listening or not.
“Yeah. I did it until seventh grade. I would get overwhelmed, like, sensory overload? At school. So I had to go home and bang my head against the wall until I felt like all the extra stuff came out. It’s uh…if you go to my parents’ house, you’ll see the part I used to use. They never fixed it. I don’t do it anymore, though. But, y’know. Everything here is so loud and so much and I can’t be alone and then when I am alone I have to deal with all this shit, so it’s like…”
He knew that Jared couldn’t see him, and that’s why he felt like it was okay to take off his hoodie and his buttonup shirt.
“And I’m just thinking, like, n-not that I want to be a coward or anything but…if I was dead, then it wouldn’t matter whether Pied Piper became something I hated because I wouldn’t be around to see it anyway.”
He could hear Jared rustling, coming closer to him.
“Don’t touch me, just let me do this.”
Jared went back to wherever he was.
“Like, I could just sketch out the platform so everybody would have something to work with and then it wouldn’t matter and like, there could be an image of me that was good and I wouldn’t fuck it up because I wouldn’t exist to fuck it up.”
He could hear Jared breathing. It would just be so much easier if Jared hated him.
Jared was trying to regulate his breathing so that Richard wouldn’t know that he was crying. He understood these kinds of feelings, but the fact that it was Richard saying these things, believing those things about himself, destroyed him.
RichardILoveYouRichardIloveyouIloveyouRichardIloveyou
They sat in silence for a while longer before Richard decided to turn the light on. He didn’t say anything, he just waited for their eyes to adjust and for Jared to see what he was trying to show him. Jared put his hand over his mouth and tears gushed from his eyes. It was exactly what Richard was afraid of, and exactly why he had never shown anyone in 13 years. In a way, he was angry. He couldn’t believe Jared was being so dramatic about something that wasn’t even really a big deal.
But he still put it on himself. He didn’t need to show him. He didn’t need to say anything. So he had to be prepared for whatever the outcome was going to be. And of course it was going to be bad. Jared cried when Richard was nice to him, of course he was going to cry at this.
“Ohhh, god,” Richard said. He ran his hand over his face. “Please don’t cry. I’m sorry. I just don’t know what I’m gonna do, Jared.”
He let Jared hug him.
“Richard, you can just leave.” Jared near-whispered.
Richard pulled away.
“You said that this place makes people evil. It’s okay to leave. Sort it out later.”
“I can’t stay”, Richard whispered as he burrowed into Jared’s chest.
“I know. That’s what I’m saying. You don’t have to.” Jared stopped crying slowly. “Just go. Just go somewhere else.”
“Jared, will you come with me?” Richard asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“Yes.”