Chapter Text
Alex turns twenty-two that September. It’s a night at the pub with Tim and Mark that runs into the early hours of the morning, pineapple themed drinks making his stomach turn about half way through it all.
“I’m not gonna be able to go in tomorrow, am I?” Alex slurs. The blurry glow of the pub’s wall clock comes into focus as he tries to read the time: quarter to four. Jesus. Where did the time go?
“Again?” Tim says, leaning back against the counter as he sways. “I told you not to call out the other day. You gotta plan your sick days in advance. Save ’em for the hangovers you can see coming.”
He taps his temple, as if that somehow makes him clever, and Alex can’t help but scoff.
Tim wouldn’t know, he thinks bitterly. He works at a call centre, the most movement he gets being a flick of his wrist as he dials and hangs up the phone a hundred times a day. He doesn’t lug pallets, doesn’t receive freight where the skid wrap’s always tearing and the heaviest shit is always being stacked on the top. Seriously, who stacks twenty kilos of potatoes on top of eggs? The people who work in the distribution centres must be sadists.
Alex just shrugs. It’s not the pinnacle of responsibility—he knows that. It’ll probably reflect poorly on him, and his manager will be pissed off, but being under the fluorescent lights of that godforsaken supermarket for eight and a half hours straight already makes him feel sick on a good day. If he went in tomorrow, there’s a decent enough chance that he’ll just throw up in the dairy cooler and have to go home half-way through his shift anyway. And that wouldn’t paint him in the best light either.
“It’ll be fine,” he tells him, but he doesn’t exactly believe it. “It’s my birthday.”
It’s a phrase he repeats all night. It’s my birthday, so I might as well have another pint. It’s my birthday, so Mark should pay for this round.
He waits until five minutes after opening before he calls, giving whoever’s on morning shift enough time to settle in—switch the lights on, key in the security code, stop the alarms from shrieking. He hopes one of the regular associates picks up instead of management. Maybe the heavens will align and Greg will be off today, because so far Greg has been the only one to answer when he calls out. Literally every time. It’s just his luck.
That’s why his stomach drops when he hears a familiar voice answer the phone. Shit. It looks as though luck is decidedly not on his side, then. Already flustered, he stutters through his mentally prepared script, trying to exaggerate the hoarseness in his voice.
“Greg. Hi. It’s Alex. I can’t come in today. I’ve got a horrible migraine.”
“Right,” Greg says immediately, and he waits for him to continue, but that’s it. Just a stern, unfazed right that crushes him from above like a 16-ton weight in Monty Python.
“I’m sorry,” he adds, rather pathetically.
“Mm,” Greg hums. “Goodbye, Alex.”
He hears the clatter of the store’s wall-mounted phone as Greg fumbles to hang it up.
Well, that went terribly.
Alex stares up at the ceiling, phone still pressed to his ear as he listens to the dial tone. His head is throbbing from the long night out, and he watches the room as it spins in slow, sickening circles. He probably should’ve just gone in and tried to work through the nausea. He could’ve stacked a few crates for appearance before slipping away and hiding in the freezer. Now Greg hates him even more than he already likely does.
“Damn,” he says to no one.
He dreads going to work the next day. He knows he can’t get sacked without notice—he’d have to get written up first, unless he really screwed up, which is unlikely—but Tim wasn’t wrong, either. His attendance has been shit recently. It would help if he actually liked his job, but shelf stocking during another gap year feels like it could actively be taking years off his life, and a part of him fears that he might actually keel over in the stockroom before he hits thirty.
There’s no point to his job, that’s the whole thing. He’s not a teacher or a nurse or a first responder or anything even remotely important. Who cares if he forgets to pull the expired milk off the shelves? It’s not like someone could die. Well, they could get quite ill, actually—maybe need to see a doctor. And if he was a healthcare professional, then calling out might be an actual problem, because he wouldn’t be able to treat all the people sick from the shop’s bad milk that he didn’t bin as the head of the dairy department.
It would be difficult to juggle both those titles. Please, Doctor Horne was my father. Call me Doctor Head-of-Dairy Horne.
Greg is the opening manager when he clocks in that following morning, because again, his luck has really been off the charts lately. Truly just phenomenal levels of chance. His birthday took enough of a toll on him that his hangover’s still lingering with the slight tremor in his hands acting up worse than usual, and he should really cut out the drinking, but that’s a passing thought like all the others of that realm.
He spends the first part of his shift dodging Greg and the supervisor team. He avoids everyone, really—still nauseous, mouth unpleasantly dry and mind too foggy for any small talk or so, how was your birthday, mate? catch-ups.
He manages to successfully stay out of sight until he comes back from lunch, which takes considerable talent. He’s halfway through unloading a pallet of milk crates when he catches Greg standing at the end of the aisle with his arms folded. He’s watching him with a scrutinizing sort of glare that makes Alex feel even queasier than he already does. He tries to pretend he doesn’t notice him, but that tactic only works until the shakiness in his hands betrays him and he drops one of the empty crates, cursing under his breath.
Greg is suddenly right in front of him, shoes tapping against the polished concrete. The floors are caked with streaks of spilled milk and other mysterious liquids that have never really washed off, no matter how many times someone gets shouted at to grab a mop, and it’s disgusting, really.
“Morning,” Alex mutters, petrified to look up at him, feeling absurdly small.
“Alex.” Greg already sounds unimpressed. It’s not a good start. “How’s the head?”
His head is terrible. “My head is good. Better now, thanks.”
Greg runs a hand over his stubble, and Alex is fairly certain he’s debating whether he should sack him right then and there, fire him in front of his peers and take what little dignity he has left with him.
”Okay,” he says after a moment of thought. “My office. Shall we?”
His stomach sinks, stupid hand tremor as prominent as ever, and he swears he’s never drinking again. “Yeah.”
Greg walks in front of him and he follows like some sort of sad dog, navigating the narrow aisles of produce and clearance cookware with his head down. The second the metallic hinges of the office door click shut behind them, he’s already scrambling to explain himself.
“If it’s about my attendance—listen, I’m really sorry.”
“Mmhm.”
Greg is towering over him, not sitting, just hovering by his desk, and that somehow makes this whole ordeal significantly worse. Alex feels uneasy. He has no idea what the etiquette is for this called-into-the-office nonsense. Is he meant to sit? Wait until Greg tells him to? Stand at attention like he’s in trouble at school? He feels awkward and inept and stupid. Emphasis on stupid.
”I know it hasn’t been great lately—“
Greg doesn’t look happy. Why would he be? Alex isn’t even sure if he’s ever seen the man properly smile. Greg jokes with the other managers out on the floor, sure, but Alex has never been on the receiving end of that version of him. He doesn’t know why that makes him feel a small, pathetic pang of disappointment, so he chalks it up to his own odd fixation on favouritism and authority. That must have something to do with it.
“I try to call out as soon as I can,” he continues, deciding that he wants this whole thing to just be over with, to make it quick and preferably painless, if that’s even possible. “To give adequate notice and everything. But, you know, I can’t predict feeling unwell and—“
He takes a breath. Tim was right. He needs to ration his sick days.
“Is there something going on, Alex?”
The question catches him completely off guard. “Sorry?”
Greg isn’t breaking eye contact, and Alex hates that with his entire being. He’s never been good at this sort of thing and has no idea where he’s supposed to look, so he settles on Greg’s shoes as a safe enough bet.
“Is there anything going on?” Greg repeats, articulating the words like he’s inconvenienced by having to say them twice. “In your life, I mean. Anything I should know about?”
“I—“ Alex flails, because that’s a rather loaded question with an answer that’s technically yes, but not really, but maybe a little, but not quite. Nothing serious. Nothing beyond the fact that twenty-two feels exactly the same as twenty-one, that he still has no idea what he’s doing and it’s hard to drag himself out of bed most mornings when he’d rather be… anywhere else, really. In a classroom or on a stage. Hell, even on an operating table, if that was his only other option. Pretty much anywhere but here with Greg, in this office that’s too small with the corporate posters about company hotlines and merchandise shrink prevention plastered over the walls like the loo in some dingy dive.
“No? Not really,” he manages, because he has to say something. He can’t lie and say he’s great, just calling out for the fun of it. That’s not what’s happening here, no matter what Greg may think. He really does feel bad about all of this. “I’ve just been—I guess I’ve been having a rough month.”
“Listen, Alex,” Greg begins, finally taking a seat as he gestures for Alex to do the same, and he feels absurdly relieved to have cracked the code to that social protocol. Right, so that’s how it works. You wait for your boss with unreasonably large hands to tell you that you’re allowed to sit.
And ideally, you don’t think about his hands.
“I don’t really give much of a shit. About explaining yourself, I mean,” he says with a careless wave of his hand. “It’s retail, mate. I’m not expecting perfection from some twenty-something dairy stocker. I know it’s not your passion—hell, it’s not mine either. It’s nobody’s, really, is it? You’d have to be properly mad, maybe even a bit masochistic, to actually enjoy it.”
Alex swallows, because he sometimes worries that he could very well be both of those things.
“I get it. Stuff happens, and you seem…” Greg looks him up and down. “Pretty knackered, to be honest. But if you’re going to be head of department, I need consistency. I need you showing up, yeah? Because I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to adjust the rota for you, and I’m starting to lose my patience.”
His face burns. It’s like he had forgotten responsibility is a real concept, and the kind of embarrassment he’s feeling right now isn’t that nice, floaty surge he sometimes gets when he does something stupid and somebody notices. This is… it’s awful.
“No, of—of course. I’ll do better. I’m sorry.”
“Good lad.”
And that’s all it takes. Two stupid words. If Greg hadn’t said them, maybe Alex could have continued living his life normally. But the moment he hears them, they resonate with something deep and traitorous within him, despite the fact that he is, technically, being told off. He can only hope he hasn’t reacted visibly.
“Well then,” Greg says once it’s clear that their chat has set in, already turning to redirect his attention towards whatever tedious report is glowing on the screen of his desktop. “Off you go.”
Alex stands up a little too quickly, the chair scraping, and escapes the office before he can humiliate himself any further.
That went… well, he thinks. Maybe. At least he still has his job, but he feels dizzy in a way he knows he can’t attribute to the looming haze of his hangover.
He’s never seen a side of Greg that suggests he’s anything other than manager first, human second. It sounds unfair, but the truth is that Greg has always put him off a bit. He knows he can be funny, sure, but serious about operations, always on task, always firm. Alex had to once joke to a coworker about how it’s not the navy just to make them feel better after Greg had chewed them out over an inventory miscount.
And on top of it all, he’s certainly never gotten the impression that Greg actually likes him. He seems to merely tolerate him more than anything else.
But despite everything, good lad is still echoing in his head long after his shift ends, taunting him like some bad joke between Mark and Tim that they won’t let him in on. He can’t get it out of his head for days.
Greg tries to remember what he was like at twenty-two, but all he can recall is a series of poor decisions: bailing on uni before he could qualify to teach, spending his weekends pissed with mates, cycling through a handful of failed relationships. He’s hardly in a position to be judging Alex.
Still, he’s getting sick of rewriting the rota.
He wipes the smudges off his glasses and looks at his monitor, trying to re-focus on the inventory report he’d been half-heartedly working on before Alex had called out. He knew the moment he heard his voice on the phone—the croak so forced that it bordered on comical, his obvious hesitation—that it wasn’t a migraine. It was the particular brand of stupidity you indulge on your birthday, the kind Greg doesn’t get to participate in anymore unless he wants to spend the next three days feeling like he’s been hit by a bus and then resurrected from the dead once he’s had a good curry.
He’d been annoyed, sure. He still is. But watching Alex lug those crates in the aisle, pale and sweating? He remembers that, too.
Greg pinches the bridge of his nose, words on the screen blurring into nothingness. He shouldn’t have said “good lad.” He didn’t mean it in the patronizing way it must’ve sounded. Things like that—they just slip out of him, especially when he’s tired. Or when he’s talking to Alex, apparently.
But the look Alex gave him afterwards… Christ. Like he’d been slapped in the face and snogged at the same time.
On the bright side, his conversation with him seems to have made a legitimate difference, which is a relief because Greg really didn’t feel much like writing him up. He doesn’t care for discipline—not in this context, at least—and especially not when it requires him to do any extra work. He couldn’t be fucked to do it unless it was absolutely necessary, and he’s glad that it isn’t, because Alex makes it well into October without missing any shifts. He steps up at work significantly, actually, and Greg doesn’t need to concern himself with why.
It’s enough that he lets himself off Greg’s radar for a while, and that’s probably best for both of them, he figures. Alex shouldn’t be on Greg’s radar at all—not unless he’s checking in on him to make sure he’s done the temp checks in the coolers, or whatever it is that Greg’s supposed to be ordering these people to be doing. Half of the time, he doesn’t even know.
And besides, he doesn’t have time to think about Alex even if he wanted to. He’s too consumed by the upcoming renovations in the shop and the mind-numbing monotony of managerial bollocks he couldn’t be bothered to properly care about even if he were married to it. And some days, he might as well be—although it’s not a very happy relationship. Or healthy, for that matter.
The two of them don’t have another real conversation until they’re in a meeting. It’s Greg with Alex and a couple of other blokes from varying departments discussing potential plans to work around the renovations. Greg’s grateful for it—the building’s like, a hundred or a thousand years old at this point, with mouldy corners that are probably a health and safety risk and a heating system that hisses rather than does anything to actually keep the stockroom warm. It’s about time someone fixed the place up before it gets foreclosed on and he has to find some other chain to slowly wilt away at.
He adjusts the stack of papers on the table so he has something to look at other than the four men sitting around him, slumped in their plastic chairs like they’re in detention and Greg is their discontented headmaster. Alex is drumming his pen on his clipboard in a restless, distracted rhythm, and Greg has to clear his throat to hint at him to cut it out. He doesn’t know why he’s so tense.
“So for these renos,” he starts, grabbing the page with the floorplan so he can follow it along with a finger while he talks through it. “We’re going to need to move everything off the fixtures so they can be swapped out with the new ones, which should be arriving by Friday. While we’re changing everything on the sales floor, the warehouse is also being expanded, so we’re not going to constantly be tripping over our backstock and equipment. We’ll be grateful for it in the long run, but still, it’s going to be—” he searches for a polite word “—a mess.”
There’s a few groans. Understandable.
He wets his thumb and flicks to the next page. “With that being said, I’m assigning tasks to keep things from falling apart. So, Tom, you’ll start by clearing the gondolas. And Alex—“
He glances up to find Alex already looking at him, wide-eyed and expectant.
For a second, Greg thinks, fucking hell, he’s keen. Why is he suddenly so keen? He couldn’t even be bothered to show up just a couple of weeks ago.
It’s subtle, but Greg clocks it instantly; he’s been in management for what feels like a lifetime, and he’s developed a decent grasp on reading people as a result. Years of overcompensating socially hasn’t hurt either. He sees it in how Alex sits a bit straighter than everyone else, his pen hovering and face alert in a way that absolutely does not match the enthusiasm levels of the rest of the room. There’s… something there. He just needs to pinpoint what, exactly.
He looks back down at the papers before he can think too hard. Best not to dwell on it, whatever it may be.
“Right,” he says, clearing his throat and hoping nobody paid much mind to his little slip. He didn’t mean to get sidetracked by something so ridiculous—something he knows he’s likely overthinking, or maybe even imagining entirely. “Alex, you’re on warehouse. We need the backstock cleared and reorganized before the contractors show up. Anything that’s seasonal or unsalvageable, get it logged and binned. The rest needs to be worked out to the floor. Make the room, yeah?”
“Yes,” he nods dutifully. “I’ll get it sorted.”
“Very good.”
And Alex’s reaction to that—his short inhale, the way his mouth goes a little slack—Greg’s pretty sure he can't be imagining things now, but he moves on to addressing the next person before he can make it worse. These renos are going to be a bitch, and he can’t afford any distractions. Especially not Alex.