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“Wait, what the fuck?” Chris says, catching something impossible under Vigilante’s profile, as it flashes across the screen. He reaches out and snatches the mouse from the side of the table, leaning in closer to the screen. “Go back.”
Economos yelps a bit, trying to shove Chris away from the keyboard. “Hey, stop –”
“Adrian is married?” Chris says, shocked enough that Economos gets his mouse back from under his hand.
“Oh, that,” Harcourt says, passing the table with a pair of folders in her hands and seeming entirely unconcerned.
“Who’s he – ?” Chris shoves Economos’ chair across the floor, then grabs the mouse again to click at the link under the relationship status.
“Wait, don’t – ”
“What the fuck?” Chris says, clicking back to the Vigilante profile a second time, then the link again, but it still goes to Peacemaker. “Is this broken?”
“No,” Harcourt interrupts, now from across the room, unfolding her manila folder and frowning down at whatever is inside it. “We thought it’d be easier to cut it off at the root, if he ever had to testify against you.”
“Easier?” Chris repeats, sputtering out a weak laugh, then gesturing harshly at the computer with a deepening scowl. “Like, you can’t just marry me to a dude and expect me to be that cool with it?”
“Uh,” Economos coughs harshly into a fist, then mumbles from the corner of his mouth. “I told them what your dad said.”
“Jesus Christ, dye-beard,” Chris says, briefly feeling a hideous ripple in his stomach, then forcing it back down through the power of not giving a shit, because there’s somehow a bigger pile of shit sitting on the table in front of him. “That’s just fucking – fine, whatever, you can’t marry me to Vigilante and expect me to be cool with it. Or him!”
Economos hums from the other side of the push-together-table desk. “Actually, I think he’d be –”
“I know!” Chris interrupts, sweeping his hands out back and forth in front of him with a brief cross together at the middle. “He can never know about this.”
“Hey,” Chris says, glancing back and forth between the door and Adebayo’s tiny makeshift desk, then reaching out and yanking a chair closer to sit in it next to her while she types into her laptop. “Are you doing both of ours?”
Adebayo blinks to him then back to the screen, mouth twisting, then reaches out to grab her coffee.
“The taxes,” Chris clarifies, pointing with a swirling finger at the screen and a narrow peer between it and the papers with Adrian’s name all over them. “You’re forging Vigilante’s taxes, right? Can you do ours the married way, so we get money back?”
Adebayo finishes sipping her latte a bit too slowly, then coughs slightly after an evident swallow. “What? And I am doing his taxes, not forging them – his job is real.”
“Right, but… so?”
“I can’t forge a marriage for taxes,” Adebayo says, lips twisting, then looks back at the screen with a short tip of her head. “I mean I could, but – ”
“Economos and Harcourt did it,” Chris says, pointing over at them with a thumb. “For court reasons. They even got me this like official paper to put with my like birth certificate stuff.”
Adebayo blinks narrowly while glancing in the same direction. “They didn’t tell me,” she says, lifting a hand and holding it flat to her chest, then leaning back in her chair with a pinched, skeptical line across her mouth. “I can’t believe Vigilante didn’t say anything, honestly – he seems like he’d make it a big fucking deal.”
“Yeah, yeah. He doesn’t know and that doesn’t matter,” Chris says, dismissively, waving with a hand while glancing at the door, then behind them, wary that Adrian might pop up, since he has that freakish ability to creep.
Adebayo stares for a beat, raising an eyebrow, then the other in quick succession. “Aren’t you two kind of – ” She lifts both her hands to gesture, one finger inside the circle formed of the opposite hand. “Now?”
“And?” Chris says, dismissively, peeking to the screen of confusing fill-in the blank government forms. “We’re not defining shit. He’ll get too clingy. He’ll definitely get clingy if he finds out about this.”
“Right,” Adebayo says, exhaling a deep breath, as her eyes roll back to the screen. “Sure. Well. I guess… if you’re actually married, I can definitely put that on here. If anyone asks, you in particular are like really unemployed.”
“I don’t get paid for the work I do.”
Adebayo wags a finger. “Exactly.”
“Hey, do we want beer or shots, or mixed drinks? Chris probably wants a margarita.”
Chris drops his head in a nod.
Adrian turns to Adebayo with both brows raised.
“Uh – ”
“They do a mean Mermaid Lemonade,” Adrian offers, then lifts a hand, counting off on each of his fingers, as he continues to offer his options: “Or a Purple People Eater or a Unicorn Kisses or a Purple Haze – ”
“Any of those sounds good,” Adebayo interrupts in a pitchy rush, then drops her head in a nod while her voice lowers to something almost entirely inaudible. “I guess.”
“Be right back,” Adrian says, turning on his heel with a bright grin and a wink over his shoulder.
Adebayo hums a low note. “So am I like third-wheeling you two right now?”
“There is nothing to third-wheel,” Chris says, briefly looking down at his phone when Adrian sends him a series of emoji denoting various drinks from across the room. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Uh-huh,” Adebayo says, quiet for a beat, then clicks her tongue while suddenly sounding wistful. “I should’ve brought Keeya. We could do a double date.”
“That sounds super dumb,” Chris says, sending back a pair of little bombs to Adrian, then peeking up to watch him laugh when he gets them. “What would we do?”
“Eat?” Adebayo says, fingers tapping a beat on the table. “She really likes fried catfish, but I haven’t been able to find it here.”
Chris grunts lowly, offering a shrug. “Halibut?”
“Haven’t tried it, but… uh, hello?”
Chris looks up to see what caused the slip-up, just in time to catch a petit, vaguely familiar woman lean in close to the table, then blinks rapidly when she all but sets her pushup bra on the raised table. “Hi?”
“Hi, there – this might be kind of weird, but remember me?”
“Uh,” Chris glances to Adebayo, who raises an eyebrow, then back to the woman while he forces a smirk. “Guessing we… hooked up?”
“Yeah, baby. So…” The woman winks, then points toward Adrian bent over at the bar. “I was wondering, if it wouldn’t be too crazy, could you introduce me to your friend?”
Chris glances between Adrian and her for a few seconds, pretty sure this has never happened, though he has also kind of just started going into normal places with actual Adrian rather than an unwaveringly masked Vigilante. He’s also decided, abruptly, he doesn’t like it and doesn’t know why he ever wanted to do it. “He’s spoken for.”
Adebayo makes a noise that could be qualified as a muted squawk.
“Okay, but…?” The woman says, offering a thin little smirk and flipping her teased hair over her shoulder. “I think I could show him a real good time, if you just introduce us. Both of you, if you want?”
Chris turns and hooks an arm across the back of his chair, pretending to more seriously look her up and down, then offers a flat scoff. “You got a dick the size of a baby leg hiding in those hot pants I don’t remember? Because not a chance in hell you fucking could, actually.”
The woman stares for a pair of beats, then exhales a stuttering, disbelieving laugh. She leans back, eyes now sweeping up and down Chris with a new recognition behind them.
“Yeah.”
The woman shifts her jaw, nodding stiffly, then scampers back wherever she came from with an appropriate air of humiliation.
Adebayo clears her throat with a cough into a closed fist. “I thought you weren’t defined?”
Chris shakes his head. “Not by me, but in the eyes of God and the state of Washington, it is.”
Adebayo clears her throat, reaching up and scratching under her nose, then drops her head and covers her mouth to silence what had better not be laughter. She’s just contemplating and accepting his totally awesome argument.
“Hey!” Adrian chirps, dropping a tray of shots, glasses, and a pitcher of beer onto the table. “I couldn’t decide if I wanted shots or beer, so I got both, and then there’s some chips coming, because fuck, man, don’t nachos sound great? Also, the bartender was being a total jackoff – I had to convince him my card was good? And like – hey, what’s wrong with Neota?”
“She’s just psyching herself up to get totally wasted tonight because her little dog wouldn’t wear one of its stupid vests.”
“No, not Emerson!” Adrian says, as his eyes get big behind his glasses. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Adebayo says, putting up her other hand to wave him off with a deep breath. “He’s just being… a little difficult.”
“We don’t want you here,” DuBois greets, as friendly a fuck as ever, though Chris welcomes it compared to the expected bullet to the temple.
“I’m not exactly happy to be here, either,” Chris says, refusing to look back over at DuBois and crossing his arms, keeping his eyes on Vigilante trying to speak to Sebastian the rat. They should’ve brought Eagly – that would’ve been fucking funny. “But I don’t want my head to get blown sky high.”
DuBois grunts with a rather pointed commiseration. “I didn’t know you had a sidekick,” he says, and he shifts from the corner of Chris’ eye to stare across the warehouse. “Or is that part of your supposed change of heart?”
“Have since…” Chris takes a deep breath, briefly adjusting his timeline from since Vigilante showed up to back when Adrian started creeping on him. He turns to look at DuBois with a brief click of his tongue, then shrugging a bit, “Shit. He’s been following me around since high school. Technically, he’s my partner, I got a license even – What?”
DuBois nods over his shoulder, mouth setting a bit flat with disbelief.
Chris looks over his shoulder and blinks, staring for a few blank seconds at Adrian’s head in King Shark’s actual open mouth. He looked away for literally one fucking second. “Vig! What the fuck!?”
Adrian flinches backward and puts his hands up, pointing hastily at Ratcatcher. “She said I should try?”
“To get eaten, you dumbass!?”
“For the vine, man!” Adrian argues, putting his hands on his hips, then shrugging with a short glance sideways and a shake of his head. “Or I guess, the TikTok – ? Wow, that really doesn’t flow as well.”
“No!” Chris yells, then jerks his thumb for him to move a few more feet away from the giant shark.
Adrian pouts with his shoulders slumped forward, but it’s in that put upon fake way. “Aw, man –”
“Just no!” Chris repeats, then points to the other side of the warehouse with a sweep of his hand. “Go try to punch Harley.”
“Yay!” Harley crows, clapping rapidly and jumping from her stack of crates.
DuBois scoffs, flatly, “You sure that’s smart?”
“Yeah, he’ll love it.”
Adrian, in typical fashion, goes straight for the suggested punch and gets thrown onto his back across over Harley’s shoulder by consequence. He breaks out into a thrilled laugh, then flips back up and hook kicks Harley back, resulting in her shrieking of giggles while returning the favor.
“Oh, great, now we got two of them,” DuBois says, then frowns and looks over, head tilting almost all the way across his shoulder. “What the hell did you mean you got a license?”
Chris nearly stumbles over a drunk sitting on the stoop outside the bar, looking down and ready to tell them to fuck off, only to find a startlingly familiar figure with two halves of his own glasses clutched together in his hands. “Adrian?”
“Oh, hey, P,” Adrian wheezes, curling up further, releases one hand from clutching his glasses to go up and cover his eyes. “You guys’re late, haha.”
Chris stares while something like glass breaks behind his sternum, spiky and brittle, and knows better than to do anything like reach out to touch Adrian, though the urge is startlingly strong. It’d make it worse all around when he cringed away. “What the fuck is wrong?”
Adrian shakes his head, still covering his face. “Nothing, hah. Gut just is here to visit.”
“Oh?” Chris says, looking up past him and at the bar entrance with a thick swallow.
“He’s gotten a lot like Mom, you know,” Adrian says, forcefully cheery through his tight breaths, still looking down at his feet curled up on the step. “I can’t really hit him back because he’s just drunk, right? It’s not his fault I was being so annoying.”
Chris feels his jaw clench, staring at the sparkling halves of Adrian’s glasses in his hands. “I can though?”
Adrian looks up with unfocused, red-rimmed eyes, blinking rapidly at the question.
“I can hit him,” Chris says, looking away from Adrian and through the door to glance across the tables. He catches Dorian in the far corner, laughing over a couple of beers with some familiar guys from high school. “He’s annoying me.”
“Um,” Adrian intones, seeming to really be contemplating the question. “I guess?”
Harcourt’s quiet steps can be heard behind Chris, light on the concrete sidewalk, but markedly pausing where Adrian is on the stoop. “What’s going on?”
“I dunno,” Adrian says, somewhat jaunty, if still pretty godawfully stuffy on every outward breath. “I think Chris is going to hit my brother?”
“What, why – ?” Economos pauses, “What happened to your glasses?”
“Oh, hah – uh, I was being annoying so Gut broke them.”
Harcourt takes a deep breath. “Oh.”
Chris takes a few steps until he’s fully in the bar, remembering that Dorian, and him, could be pretty damned shitty to Adrian when they were kids, but no one ever broke his glasses. No one could afford it, for one thing and so what that he can now – could get ten pairs of dorky retro frames – but it’s the principle of the thing, not to mention Adrian got all weirdly pacifist excusy by comparing Gut to their shitty mom. She was half the reason Gut was ever friends with Chris, since they talked about how shitty they could get it at home.
It also doesn’t settle all that well because Adrian is his – his partner. In crime fighting. And just, in general, a guy who doesn’t typically give an emotional shit about anything; it’s just the way he is, the way he’s wired, so seeing Adrian trying to hide himself halfway to actually crying on that stoop is probably the worst thing Chris has seen in recent memory, and that whole quote unquote totally not a cow thing was fucking disgusting dialed up to eleven.
He marches up to the table, taking a deep breath and crossing his arms over his chest in that way he knows makes him look extra big. He briefly glances around the poker game, then drops his head in a nod when he makes eye contact with Dorian. “Hey, Gut.”
Dorian offers a tense nod, not quite making eye contact. “Hey, Chris!”
“Did you –” Chris forces a laugh, “Did you seriously break Adrian’s glasses, man?”
“Sort of?” Dorian laughs, too, looking up now while he glances between the now-snickering members of the rest of the table. “They broke when I smacked him around, yeah. Weren’t like… the target, you know.”
“Uh, why?” Chris asks, wetting his lips while tilting his head.
“He was just getting on my nerves, man,” Dorian says, dismissively, absently picking through his cards, like admitting that he just disabled Adrian for no real reason isn’t a big deal. “Like he always does.”
Chris takes a deep breath, lifting his chin, and is a bit satisfied to notice that the others at the table are uneasily scooting away from Dorian. “We’re like adults, dude,” he says, injecting a bit of fake friendliness into his tone, “Shouldn’t we fight like adults?”
“Are you really telling me to use my words, Smith?” Dorian exhales a scoff, shaking his head while looking up under his brows with a sneer. “Don’t you like shoot people for doing graffiti?”
“No, man,” Chris says, raising his voice all at once, then yanks Dorian up from the table by the shirt collar and shoves him so hard enough that he ends up gasping and wriggling on the ground. “Do I look like I give a shit about graffiti right now?!”
“He was being annoying – he was – ” Dorian scoffs, weak and winded, but still enough energy to roll his eyes while his hands raise and he stumbles up from the ground “It’s Adrian, man, who cares? It’s just Adrian.”
“I care,” Chris says, hearing his voice raise now to a roar. He reaches out and grabs Dorian around the shoulder, his thumb tightening against the delicate and tempting hidden curve of Dorian’s collarbone. “He’s your brother, man – you don’t fucking hit your brother! Do you know what you could’ve done!?”
“O-okay, sorry, man. I heard you two was buddies now, but – ” Dorian takes a sharp breath and winces, head turning away, as if that might make a difference, when Chris shifts his hand down his arm to wrap around his wrist. “I – I didn’t know it got that serious.”
“Oh, it’s serious,” Chris says, lowly, gradually tightening his grip on Gut’s arm, squeezing harder and harder with every next word. “It’s fucking in-law serious. So if you don’t apologize, I’m going to turn your wrist into a whole new kind of snap bracelet, brother.”
Dorian stumbles backward when Chris lets him go, smacking straight into the wall with a satisfying whimper.
Chris looks over his shoulder, checking that Adrian hasn’t heard, but he’s over near the far corner of the bar with Economos. He’s instead got the dubious team of Harcourt and Adebayo at his back, who both nod at him, then relax from where they’ve halfway been covering his old friends. It wasn’t really essential – all these guys are fuckups and drunks.
“Okay,” Chris says, slapping Adrian lightly across the face. “Look at me, idiot.”
Adrian lolls his head against the back of the chair. “…Looking.” His eyes close a seconds later, though, as he spasms in the chair while clutching at his stomach.
Chris takes a deep breath, turning around while shaking his hands up near his head, “I’m like officially freaking out! Someone better start throwing out ideas or I’m pulling Eagly in here for some eyeballs.”
“You need to calm down,” Adebayo says, unhelpfully, but at least she’s keeping Adrian upright in the chair, so she’s lower on the shitlist than the other two.
“You don’t even know what was in that shit!” Chris yells, ignoring the suggestion in favor of pointing hard in Economos’ face, then down at the jar of Butterfly goo. “You knew he’d eat it if you dared him!”
“Chris?” A voice breaks weakly through the room.
“Hey, hey,” Chris says, kneeling down to look at Adrian in the face, trying to gauge if he’s exaggerating or if he’s really about to die. It’s like super stressful letting himself care about anything, but especially this guy who fucking blows himself up and eats goo.
“Are my eyes a different color?”
Chris takes a beat to make sure, reaching out and turning Adrian’s head gently at the jaw. “No?”
“They… feel like they should be,” Adrian says, his words slightly slurring, “I’m like – like really high right now?”
“Anything else?” Chris asks, pitching his voice up and realizing he sounds like some kind of shitty school nurse. “Like your insides are melting?”
“Um? It’s more like the Gravitron…” Adrian says, head lolling again across the back of his chair to look up at the ceiling with a worried furrow behind his glasses. “Am I going to throw up when this ends?”
Chris tilts his head, pressing his mouth in a flat line. “Maybe.” He startles when Adrian abruptly slaps a hand across his cheek, and reaches up to grab it, just as it falls, “What the hell was that, dumbass?”
“Mappin’ your face,” Adrian mumbles, tapping his trapped fingers against the inside of Chris’ palm. “If I go blind.”
“You’re not going blind,” Chris says, trying to sound assured, despite realizing uncomfortably that he has absolutely no clue if Adrian meant that in earnest or he just wanted to touch because he was feeling that bad. “You got those new dork aviator frames, remember?”
Adebayo hums pitchy, anxious agreement. “Make you look like a real Unabomber.”
“We can take him to the vet?” Economos offers, shoving his hands under his pits while he paces around after he did this to Adrian.
Harcourt hums a low agreement. “It would be the safest – ”
“No! I get an automatic veto on that shit since I’m his fucking husband, alright! So he’s going to a fucking people doctor, not the vet.”
Adrian peeks open bleary eyes, “M’what?”
And then that, of course, is when he starts choking up blood.
~
“I didn’t get a wedding,” Adrian sulks, arms crossed over his middle and pouting at his feet.
Chris rolls his eyes, kicking his feet up onto the cot. “Yeah, figures that’s what you’d be upset about.”
“I had thoughts!” Adrian says, eyes big and mouth demonstrably pouty, turning his head to make sure that Chris gets the full effect of it; he was so much easier to deal with when he wore the mask twenty-four seven. “Eagly would be the ring bearer. And it’d be in the woods, because we love the woods.”
“Well, yeah,” Chris says, then gestures behind them to the trees outside the window. “It’s mostly woods around here.”
“It is!” Adrian says, nodding as if Chris had actually just agreed. “And they’re great.”
Chris raises a brow, as silence gradually and surprisingly easily settles between them. “That’s it?”
Adrian exhales a big huff and a shrug. “And then someone would attack it and there’d be a big fight? But that’s not really part of the ceremony.”
“Who attacks it?”
Adrian rolls his lips together, eyes sweeping to the side while he pushes his glasses up his nose. “I dunno. I used to imagine it was your dad.”
Chris immediately grimaces, dragging his teeth down across his lip.
“…Why didn’t you tell me, man?” Adrian asks, his tone dropping and undeniably put out.
“I didn’t know if you’d be cool with it,” Chris lies, as if it hasn’t been him that’s gotten all torn up inside recently about shit like feelings and how some people may or may not matter in his life. He doesn’t know how Adrian really processes anything, really, and that it’s often either a lot or absolutely nothing, but he’s pretty sure in this case he definitely would’ve shrieked like a girl finding a Mustang in the driveway on her Sweet Sixteen.
“But like, everyone knew?” Adrian says, his voice going low, eyes briefly flinty and markedly uncool about that angle. “Dorian?”
Chris clears his throat with a reluctant, if forceful nod. “I let it slip while I was telling him to fuck off, maybe.”
Adrian is silent for a few minutes, looking down at his hands while scratching at something on his thumbnail, drawing out the silence into something thick. “…Are you cool with it?”
Chris drops his feet to the floor and lets a heel jump against the tile once, then twice, and clears his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
Adrian makes a startlingly inhuman noise.
Chris really should’ve expected the abrupt 170lbs of pure, wriggling muscle in his lap, but it’s still kind of a surprise. “Ade – ” He tries to interrupt between aggressive kisses. “Your stomach – “ Fuck, he should not be thinking about that gown being so thin. He pushes Adrian away, reluctantly holding him inches above with a palm carefully across his sternum. “You just got your stomach abraded, dude.”
“I feel great,” Adrian insists, grinning brightly, his hands tight around Chris’ face and his thumbs sweeping up and down his cheeks.
Chris raises his brows high up his forehead. “Do you?”
Adrian’s expression collapses and twists into a grimace. “Maybe not physically.”
“Alright, so no,” Chris says, as he picks Adrian up from his lap and forces him back onto the bed. “I’m not going anywhere. I just said I was cool.”