Work Text:
Stephen the PR wizard was in a catastrophic predicament. He was sitting in a hotel suite living room at 7:00 AM, aggressively stress-eating glazed donuts and praying for the sweet release of death while waiting for his number-one client to wake up.
"Are you eating my fucking donuts, Stephen?"
Oh, goodie. The bisexual gremlin was awake.
"Don’t get on my case, Finn. You know I consume my body weight in refined sugar when you ignore my advice."
"Remind me again what the advice was."
Stephen could hear the monumental, soul-deep eye-roll in Finn’s voice, even if he couldn’t physically see it because Finn fucking Wolfhard was currently framed by the morning light, stretching like a feral house cat looking out the window.
"Well, for one, I explicitly told you to stop letting Noah sneak into your hotel room to spend the night. Hotel staff have mouths, Finn. And those mouths tweet."
Two dark eyes narrowed into threatening slits through Finn’s messy curls. Stephen could practically feel the dairy and gluten making a panicked, synchronized run straight for his lower intestines.
"Listen, we talked about this," Stephen huffed, clutching a half-eaten raisin bread like a crucifix. "Your entire management team is riding my ass because you refuse to take a single piece of PR advice the second Noah Schnapp enters your line of sight."
"I told you, my personal time belongs to me and him," Finn replied, his face settling into a stony, terrifyingly intense glare that honestly scared the absolute shit out of Stephen. "As long as we’re not on the red carpet, at an event, or doing an interview, you have zero say over what we do."
"I have a say when the entire internet starts clocking your relationship because you look at the boy like you want to unhinge your jaw and swallow him whole, much like I just did with these five glazed donuts!"
"Reminding me that you stole my breakfast is not the flex you think it is," Finn said.
Finn fucking Wolfhard in a petty tizzy was worse for Stephen’s digestive tract than a gallon of expired milk. Cramp-inducing little dweeb… he muttered under his breath.
"What did you just call me?" Finn asked incredulously.
"I said these little donuts gave me cramps!" And he wasn’t lying. The bathroom gods had officially cursed him, and he needed to schedule an emergency meeting with the porcelain throne immediately.
Stephen made a desperate, undignified waddle for the en-suite bathroom, while Finn made theatrical gagging noises in the background.
Oh, please, Stephen thought, slamming the door. He wasn’t making those gagging noises when he was sucking Noah’s dick in the back of the town car, I’d bet my annual salary on it. The driver had snitched on the horny little twerps via text at midnight, and Stephen’s mental imagery would never recover.
Today was a grueling twelve-hour press day, and he had two rabid, horny gay raccoons to collar. His sole objective was to convince them to look slightly less like two teenagers who had just escaped a cult and discovered horniness for the first time.
His intestines were still raging war while Stephen tried to multitask on his phone. That's when a notification popped up on his burner Twitter account, the one he strictly used to spy on the local lunatics in the foah fandom.
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan: Hi. Are you still doing PR for Finn Wolfhard? Why is his PR not doing anything about this crazy RPF discourse? Are you aware they are shipping him with Noah Schnapp? It is detrimental to Noah’s career.
Stephen rolled his eyes in perfect, rhythmic sync with a horrific rumble from his colon. Who did this absolute weirdo think he was?
StephenF: And what exactly do you suggest?
He usually didn’t reply to the loony bin patients, but this morning his blood pressure was entirely powered by spite.
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan: A surefire way to shut it down is to have Noah hard launch a boyfriend.
StephenF: How exactly would we do that if Noah doesn’t have a boyfriend?
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan: Oh. He really doesn’t? 😉
StephenF: Now you’re fishing. Who are you?
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan: I’m just someone who wants the best for Noah since he was a child. I became his number one fan when he was eleven and I was 31.
Wow. Okay, holy Pedo Santa Claus, that is incredibly creepy, Stephen thought. Normally, he would block, report, and throw his phone into the ocean, but he was still profoundly annoyed by the way Noah had shoulder-checked him on the red carpet yesterday with that bratty little diva huff.
StephenF: Hypothetically... how do you suggest we do it?
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan: I have a full folder. I’ll DM you the link. All you need to do is set up the venue, and I’ll take care of the rest.
Stephen stepped out of the bathroom ten minutes later in a thick, suffocating mist of rose-scented Febreze. The sight that greeted him in the living room immediately vaporized any lingering professional guilt about the sabotage he had just agreed to.
Noah was currently draped sideways across Finn’s lap like a lazy housecat, and they were aggressively making out right over the top of the remaining donut box.
"Excuse me! Can we not swap saliva over the pastries?!" Stephen shrieked, making them jump. Finn immediately fixed him with a dark, demonic stare that froze the air in the room.
Finn’s glare could have melted glacial ice, but Noah just wiped his mouth, looked at Stephen like he was a particularly bothersome mosquito, and went right back to tangling his fingers in Finn’s curls.
"Stephen, please," Noah sighed, not even breaking physical contact. "It’s seven in the morning. We are practicing emotional grounding."
"You're practicing public relations suicide," Stephen snapped, aggressively waving his phone. "And you're doing it over the corpse of my glazed donuts. Do you two have any idea what the internet is doing right now? The foah shippers are going at it on Twitter, louder and more aggressively than you’re going at it every damned night. They are analyzing the curvature of your spine from yesterday's red carpet photos, Noah, to prove you were leaning three degrees closer to Finn than legally allowed for 'just friends. There’s this group chat who call themselves the FOAH Oldies who are doing analysis threads on your timeline and Finn’s lyrics. Those women scare the lactose intolerance out of me, they are too close to the truth!”
Finn snorted, resting his chin on Noah’s shoulder. "Let them talk. It keeps the engagement up."
"It keeps my IBS up!" Stephen yelled, his stomach giving an ominous, high-pitched squeak to emphasize the point. "I just had a digital encounter with a forty-two year old man whose username is NoahSchnapp_no1_fan. He’s out there. He’s plotting. He thinks he’s the mastermind of your entire image, Noah."
Noah rolled his eyes so hard Stephen feared they might get stuck. "Oh, him? He’s harmless. Just block him."
Stephen’s thumb hovered over his Twitter DMs. The notification light flashed. NoahSchnapp_no1_fan had sent the promised "folder."
Stephen opened the message. It was a fully formatted, sixteen-page Google Doc titled: OPERATION: THE REAL BOYFRIEND (A Tactical Guide to Saving Noah’s Career and Finn’s Heterosexuality).
The plan was absolute, unadulterated madness. It involved hiring a generic TikTok influencer named Jose or Chandler, staging a spontaneous paparazzi photo shoot at a juice bar in West Hollywood, and orchestrating a fake Twitter drama where Finn would publicly congratulate Noah to obliterate the gay rumors once and for all. The fan had even included a script for the paparazzi to shout.
A dark, vengeful thought bloomed in Stephen’s lactose-intolerant, sugar-crashing brain.
If these two little horny raccoons refuse to listen to me... why shouldn't I let the universe punish them?
"You know what?" Stephen said, his voice dropping into a terrifyingly sweet pitch. "You guys are right. Your personal time is yours. In fact, I’m going to go handle the press schedule right now. Take all the time you need. Melt into each other. Become one singular, PR-destroying organism."
Finn looked up, squinting suspiciously. "Why are you smiling like that? You look like the Grinch before he stole Christmas."
"I am merely embracing growth, Finn," Stephen said, typing back to the creepy super-fan with lightning speed: I’m in. Send me the influencer’s contact info. Let's hard launch this fake boyfriend tomorrow.
"I'm going to the lobby," Stephen announced, pocketing his phone. "Try not to leave DNA on the upholstery."
The next twenty-four hours were a blur of absolute, catastrophic peak-PR comedy. Stephen, fueled entirely by spite and Imodium, coordinated with NoahSchnapp_no1_fan behind the scenes like a rogue CIA agent.
The execution was a disaster of biblical proportions. The fake boyfriend influencer showed up to the staged juice-bar date three hours late, accidentally tagged the wrong Noah in his Instagram story, and Finn, who was supposed to be hiding in a getaway car, got out to yell at the fake boyfriend for "breathing too close to Noah’s personal space." A fan caught the whole shouting match on TikTok. The caption read: FINN WOLFHARD FIGHTS NOAH SCHNAPP’S NEW BOYFRIEND IN PUBLIC?! (REAL) (GONE WRONG) #FOAHISREAL.
The internet shattered into a million pieces. Management was now crawling up Stephen’s ass, deeper than his biggest dildo.
By the next morning, the agency boardroom looked like a war zone.
"You're incompetent, Stephen!" the head of the agency roared, slamming a printout of the TikTok trends on the desk. "You let a forty-two-year-old Twitter stan run a multi-million dollar publicity campaign! The stocks are fluctuating! Finn and Noah are currently locked in a trailer refusing to come out until we provide them with 'emotional sanctuary'!"
"I was fostering organic fan engagement," Stephen said weakly, holding a cup of peppermint tea like a shield.
"You're fired."
***
The mall was buzzing with activity and Stephen was people watching, contemplating his next move.
He felt the presence before he saw him. A heavy, distinct aura smelling faintly of stale Cheetos and unwashed desperation drifted into his personal space.
NoahSchnapp_no1_fan sat down next to him on the food court bench, letting out a heavy, tragic sigh that sounded like a deflating balloon.
“So. They fired you.”
“Yup,” Stephen replied, popping the 'p' with maximum apathy.
A long, excruciating moment of silence stretched between them. The fountain in the distance gurgled.
”I fucking hate Noah Schnapp,” says Stephen.
“I fucking love Noah Schnapp,” comes the reply from his left.
“Just tell me truth,” NoahSchnapp_no1_fan says in a trembling voice. “I was right all along, foah is not real, Noah hates that man, right?”
Stephen turns to look at him, really look at this guy who calls himself Noah’s number one fan. He was kind of pathetic, if Stephen did say so himself. Telling him the truth would be his pleasure.
“Nah, they fucking.”
Stephen watches the guy’s already thin lips thinning even more and his skin going deathly pale underneath his patchy beard.
“But, but…” he cuts himself off and wrenches his gaze away like he couldn’t even stand looking at Stephen anymore.
Stephen sighs and rolls his eyes. “Well, I gotta go, I need to see someone about a job.”
He gets up and leaves, never looking back, leaving NoahSchnapp_no1_fan fighting tears in the mall.
The End