Work Text:
7:36 pm
Your DoorDash order from Ming’s Garden was left at the front desk. Thank you for choosing DoorDash
John returned from his brief trip to the lobby of his building with an armful of Chinese food, awkwardly opening the door to his apartment using the pinky and thumb of his right hand, then shoving the door closed with his hip. He had over-ordered, but he was starving after a long day at work, and at least he would have leftovers for tomorr—
“Hey.” A figure stood in shadow just inside his kitchenette.
He yelped and tossed the bag at the unexpected visitor, who caught it deftly.
“Hey, that’s a pretty good move, Economos! Throw it harder next time, though, if you’re trying to take out an intruder. Maybe an open vat of soup would be more effective…”
“Adrian! What the FUCK?”
“Well, it’s nice to see you, too.” Adrian sat the bag down on the kitchen table. “Ooh, what did you get? Anything good?” He started to look through the contents.
“Nothing for you, since, you know, I wasn’t planning on entertaining guests! How the fuck did you even get in here?”
“Oh, you know…” he gestured vaguely toward the balcony. “Those doors don’t close all that well. Not really safe.”
“I’m on the fifth floor! I left the apartment for 10 minutes, tops!” John shook his head. Clearly, this was not going to go anywhere, and it was better to just bail out while he could. “Never mind, what are you doing here?”
Adrian sat down at the small table, sighed, and opened up a carton of General Tso’s. “Oh, I got into a fight with my mother, and I have to lay low for a while.” He stabbed a chopstick at the sugary, fried meat and scowled. After a second, he looked up to see John peering at him suspiciously.
“You didn’t… I mean…”
“Oh, god! No, no, I didn’t harm a hair on her head! God, what a cliche, ‘Troubled Local Man Wanted in Sainted Mother’s Grisly Axe Murder: We Always Thought He Would Do It, Say Neighbors.’” John’s phone started buzzing, and Adrian gestured toward him with the chopstick. “That’s probably her.”
“Don’t be stupid, how would your mom even get my number?” He never picked up calls from unknown callers, but he was determined to show Adrian that he was being ridiculous. “Hello? Oh, uh, hi, Mrs. Chase…. Yes, Adrian’s here… No, he’s fine… No, he’s calm… Okay… Okay… I’ll tell him…. You have a good night, too.” He hung up. “She says you can come home when you’re ready to stop being dramatic.”
Adrian snorted. “Of course she did.”
John sat down opposite him. “Why did you give your mom my number?”
“I didn’t,” Adrian said, chewing. “She probably got it from Adebayo. Adebayo gave her her number because she’s nice to sweet old ladies with asshole sons.”
“You honestly could be nicer to her, you know.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Adrian said, rolling his eyes.
“I don’t get your whole dynamic,” John grumbled, grabbing a container of shrimp lo mein. “You’re too old to be fighting with her like a teenager. What even happened tonight?”
“I’ll tell you, and it’ll sound stupid, and you’ll think I’m petty.”
“Yeah, probably.”
They ate in silence, swapping cartons after a while.
“She was just on me about everything, as usual,” Adrian mumbled into the noodles. “She’s so worried about what’s going to happen to me, and how sad it was that I lost all the friends that I finally had, and my girlfriend, and maybe it was a good thing that I stayed at my old job, because I have such trouble adjusting to new environments… Then she started on about Gut, and how she’s so glad she doesn’t have to worry about him, how happy she is that he’s so successful… She even calls him Gut, like she’s his buddy. Dad at least calls him Dorian.” He put his chopsticks down on the table. “Dumb, huh?”
John thought for a minute. “Seems pretty standard mom stuff, from what I hear. A little hover-y, I suppose.”
“Then I said that she didn’t have to worry about me, and she said I needed to understand where she was coming from. And then I said, ‘when do you ever try to see where I’m coming from?’ And she said that no one could ever see where I was coming from. I just ‘march to my own drummer.’” He made a face. “‘Oh, Adrian, you’re just a rare bird,’” he trilled, raising his pitch to mimic his mother. “Then she started up with the ‘we never knew how we ended up with you, we used to think that our real baby was snatched away in the night and that the fairies had left us a pixie, you’ve just always been on a different wavelength.’ Like, I don’t really need to be reminded again of how much I don’t fit in with anyone.”
“I dunno, maybe was she trying to be cute?”
He huffed and threw his hands up. “Maybe! Possibly! I don’t know… I could tell she was getting ready to launch into her thing about how difficult I was, how Gut was so easy and then I was a challenge even before I was born, but she never comes out and says I was difficult, she says ‘unique,’ and then she kinda-sorta implies that maybe dad would have stuck around if things were more chill and that everything is kinda-sorta my fault. And I just couldn’t hear it tonight, so I told her to get fucked and I left.”
“She really says that your dad left because things weren’t ‘chill’ or are you editorializing?”
“Agh!” Adrian stood up and looked out the sliding glass door to the 4 foot by 6 foot balcony that had apparently served as his entrance point. “Never mind, I’ll just go. Sorry I bothered you.”
“No, come on…” John set down the carton of chicken. “Look, I’m sorry, I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about. Here, let’s get some air.” He opened the sliding door and led Adrian out to the tiny platform. There were two chairs, and not room for much else. It looked out onto a parking ramp. The two men sat, John with his feet resting on the railing and Adrian curled up into a human knot.
“I’m sorry,” John began again. “You obviously know her better than I do. I only met her the once. She seemed really nice.”
“She is really nice,” Adrian said. “That’s what’s aggravating. She’s nice to me, even though I yell at her. But yeah, she does very much imply that it’s my fault Dad left her, but never in a blamey way, more like, it’s Dad’s fault that he couldn’t deal with a fucked up kid. She did it before he left too, to me and to Gut, when we were fighting. ‘Let’s be good today, so that Daddy will want to come home,’ or ’Your dad is staying late at work because he can’t stand all the chaos in this house.’ Depending on how pissed she was. Well, turns out it didn’t matter, because he was staying ‘late’ at work to blow Howard.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know, maybe it was me. Maybe I fucked up everyone’s lives.”
John put his hand on Adrian’s shoulder. “Dude, no, that’s really a fucked-up thing for your mom to say, when you were a kid and now, too. Why not just… move out? You two are getting on each other’s nerves, maybe you should think about moving out.”
Adrian was quiet for a second. “I was accepted to college. My senior year at Evergreen High. I don’t know if it would have worked out or not, I’ve always had trouble with structured stuff like school, but I was going to try. Just a branch campus, about three hours away. Low academic standards, obviously. But I was finally going to do something normal. I was going to live in the dorms and everything.” He blinked as he stared at the faded concrete of the ramp. “But all that summer, she worked on me, you know? How she didn’t want me to have a roommate, so that I wouldn’t be made fun of for being ‘underdeveloped.’ How maybe I should commute instead of staying on campus, actually. Oh, but would I get lost on my way there? What if my car broke down? Maybe I shouldn’t take a full-time class load so I didn’t get overwhelmed, you know how I am when I get overwhelmed, and she wouldn’t be there to help out. How I needed to be careful, because I was too gullible and people were going to take advantage of me. How I wasn’t going to be able to figure out how to get around campus, or how I wasn’t going to be able to do my laundry, even though I did my own laundry at home since I was 12. It was too much, and I got freaked out. I never ended up going. I got my busboy job, and ever since, it’s been me and Francine.” He did a quick jazz hands, then sat back in his chair. “Sorry, that was long-winded of me. It just really irks me that everyone assumes she’d love to have me gone, and that I’m the whole problem.”
John chewed on the inside of his cheek, briefly. “Sorry, man. I don’t know what to say, that sucks.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. I know it’s really stupid compared to having fucking Auggie Smith or Amanda Waller for a parent.” He flopped his head back over the top of the chair, briefly contemplating his upside-down reflection in the glass door. “What about you? Your folks probably locked you in the dog crate or sold you to the circus or something, and you’re sitting there thinking I’m a whiny bitch, huh?”
John laughed. “No, not so tragic. My dad was in the Marines, so we moved around a lot; I didn’t really fit really well with anybody, either, especially since I didn’t have much of a chance to make friends before we’d move. Then again, I’m not super good with the whole friend thing, so I might have been in the same position even if we’d stayed put. I wasn’t exactly into the popular stuff — you won’t remember this, but computers and comic book movies and things like that used to be seriously uncool. Anway, I always felt like my dad was disappointed in me, I was really an indoor kid and that wasn’t okay with him. He didn’t, like, hit me or anything awful like that, he just sort of let me know that he didn’t think too much about my whole deal. He was big into the silent glaring.”
“Dude…”
He took a deep breath. “Mom was pretty great, but she was busy with all of us — me and my four sisters, so she had to work her ass off to keep everything running the way my dad demanded. No one got a lot of special attention. She couldn’t really afford to take the time to hold my hand through anything that wasn’t going to be fatal.”
“Were your sisters cool? I always wished I had a sister.”
“They were all super-popular, can you believe it?” John snickered. “Four popular cheerleaders, and then there’s me. Exactly in the middle, age-wise, too. I could either stick out like a sore thumb or fade into the background, so I chose to fade. I was super-anxious anyway, so I really didn’t love for people to pay too much attention as it was. I got really good at being unnoticed.” He stretched and yawned. “And then I spent a semester abroad, and then hacked the Pentagon, which did not thrill my dad. He stopped speaking to me for a good long while, and my mom always did what my dad wanted. And then I started working in intelligence, and when you do that, you can’t share much about what you’re up to, so you kind of get isolated. And I was always in the field, and busy, so even after we officially made up, we just… didn’t really talk very often. And that was that. We just grew apart, or farther apart than we already were. My parents both died a while ago, and I barely keep in touch with my sisters. Not much in common. But it’s okay, yeah, I’m not really a fuzzy guy in a lot of ways, not really geared for that super lovey close stuff.”
“That’s awful,” Adrian said, quietly. He tilted his head until it rested on John’s upper arm. “I’m sorry that happened like that. I think you’re pretty fuzzy. Well, your beard is, anyway. And your jacket. And I think you should have that super lovey close stuff if you want.”
“Well, uh, thanks,” John said, not used to having his nerding-out friend use him as a pillow. “But you know, it is what it is.”
“Do all families suck? Or is it just all of us that have suck families?”
“Ah, I think most of them suck a little bit, but I think that when you’re a little broken, you kind of attract other people who are a little broken, too. Not sure if that’s good or if we just all end up marinating in each other’s fuck-uppedness.”
“Mmm, I think it’s good. I don’t mind marinating with you.” Adrian’s stomach growled. “Oh, hey, the food!”
John scoffed. “I suppose you want to stay for dinner?”
“Yeah, thanks! And thanks for getting Chinese — I’m lactose intolerant.” Adrian lifted his head from John and untangled himself from the chair.
John found himself suddenly missing the weight and warmth of Adrian’s cranium, just for a second. “Good to know. Next time I’ll order macaroni and cheese and a fondue.”
“Oh, great! I’ll bring over a box of my enzyme pills to leave in the bathroom.”
Praying for mercy, John opened the glass doors and followed Adrian back inside. Aggravating as the man could be, it was getting pretty easy to have him around.