Chapter Text
As Todd lifts a glass of bubbling champagne to his mouth, the ring on his left hand catches the light. The diamond sparkles where it clinks lightly against the glass, and he has to knock back the rest of his glass to stop himself from staring at it. He doesn’t know if he could ever get used to wearing it. It’s too…
He pushes the thought down before he can finish it.
Instead, he thinks about how a bottle of this champagne, sweet and shimmering against his tongue, probably costs more than an entire year’s worth of his rent. Dirk had hummed and described it as having “subtle notes of citrus” or whatever before throwing back the rest of his glass like he was taking a shot and scurrying off to find something else for them to try.
Across the room, leaning against the open bar, Dirk’s chatting up the bartender while he pours something probably just as ludicrously expensive as the champagne into two crystal wine glasses. It’s hard to ignore him, how clean his silhouette is in his suit against the blue velvet curtains and decorations. Already loosened by the little alcohol he’s had, Todd can feel himself staring, but doesn’t make an effort to pull his eyes away. He doesn’t have to.
Eventually, Dirk catches him watching and throws a smile over his shoulder, accompanied by a tiny wave. Todd can see the way the matching ring on Dirk’s left hand catches the light as well, from all the way across the room. That tiny, innocuous sparkle makes his stomach flip, its significance like an invisible two-ton weight suspended above his head.
Todd takes a deep breath to steady his nerves and walks himself back through the situation.
He’s at a fancy event, somewhere he’d never been able to picture himself, but he belongs here. He was invited . He’s eating good food and drinking good wine, and he can appreciate the flavors and how the menu’s been handpicked. He feels comfortable in his skin and the clothes on his back. And his husband’s at the bar. Soon he’ll slide right back to Todd’s side, where he belongs. Where they both belong.
For a second, Todd loses himself in the fantasy, and lets himself believe this is all real.
Of course, in comes the inevitable sobering thought: his fantasy wouldn’t include being trapped in a conversation with two rich assholes. Especially a conversation with two rich assholes he can’t get out of because they might be important to the case.
Dirk’s left him to fend for himself against two of the worst people Todd’s ever had the misfortune of meeting in his thirty-four years on planet Earth, a borderline unforgivable offense. He was barely keeping it together when Dirk was with him, but now he’s treading water for his life. His only reprieve, besides stray smiles sent from across the room, is that the couple seems perfectly content talking at him and not to him.
Todd doesn’t know their names, doesn’t remember if they even bothered to introduce themselves or if they’d just assumed they were infamous enough in these circles not to need to. They’re a married couple, he can tell from the gaudy wedding rings– flashier than the understated and, more importantly, temporary wedding band on his own hand– and the way the woman’s hanging off the man’s arm like one of the ballroom’s many bejeweled chandeliers. She’s certainly wearing enough jewelry to rival them.
Todd’s changed sheets and hauled suitcases for pretentious assholes just like these a thousand times. Even though that feels like a lifetime ago, he remembers how much it sucked in vivid, visceral detail, with all their snobbery and the sneering, if they even bothered to acknowledge him in the first place.
“It was just gorgeous! I’ve never been on such an avant-garde yacht, even if it was a little small for my tastes. My cousin’s always been more interested in pushing artistic boundaries than budgets, though,” the woman drones on, blissfully unaware that Todd’s only half listening.
He figures that both of their faces might be more plastic than flesh and bone at this point; everything about them gives Todd that foreboding uncanny valley feeling that only egregious plastic surgery can. The woman’s nose is unnaturally ultrafine, her cheekbones too high, her lips too full, and Todd’s making a point not to follow the plunging neckline of her dress down to her exposed cleavage to see if she’s had work done elsewhere.
Likewise, her partner’s had some work done too. The skin around his forehead looks too tight for his skull, pulled taut and shiny. The Botox sticks out like a sore thumb against the tasteful graying at his temples– what is he? Like, thirty years older than his wife? Forty? And as far as his forehead’s concerned, they’re the same age.
“What about you?” says the man, finally addressing Todd. “Would you buy a Bennitti, or are you more of a Carver man?”
His wife giggles again, and Todd gets the distinct impression he’s missed some sort of joke. He feels small somehow, even though the wife is about an inch shorter than him, even in her towering heels.
He obviously doesn’t know what a Bennitti is, or a Carver for that matter. Based on the context of this seemingly never-ending conversation, they’ve probably got something to do with yachts, but that’s as much as he can discern. There's definitely a right answer here, but he has no clue which one it is.
Todd’s about to open his mouth and just guess when a waiter thankfully cuts in.
“Squab confit?” the waiter says, presenting a silver platter. It’s adorned with tiny plates of what looks like filets of light pink meat topped with some kind of round, red vegetable, maybe a beetroot. The whole thing looks wholly unappetizing, arranged to look like some kind of towered, tenderly roasted, octopus-like alien creature.
Vaguely unsettled by its appearance, Todd turns it down on principle, not sure if his undercover abilities extend to choking down whatever the hell a squab or a confit are with a convincing smile. He’s pretty sure those are both made up words, not food.
The woman, on the other hand, practically coos over her little plate as her husband passes it to her, exchanging her empty wine glass for it. The little food tower starts to trickle out a pinkish liquid when he cuts into it with her fork. Todd averts his gaze.
Her husband proceeds to pull out his wallet, an almost comically overstuffed, thick, leather thing that barely fits in his front pocket and makes Todd wonder if this guy’s trying to compensate for something. He makes a big show of tucking a couple bills into the inside of the waiter’s blue velvet blazer. Like the two others that came before him, this waiter doesn’t react, doesn’t even blink, just wanders off to the next gaggle of overdressed, jewel-encrusted guests.
Todd doesn’t think he would be able to keep a straight face if it was him, but maybe the waiter is used to this kind of treatment. If someone had tried to do that to him at the Perryman Grand– tucked a wad of cash into his uniform like they were stuffing cash inside a piece of furniture instead of tipping a human employee– he thinks he would have started throwing suitcases off of the penthouse balcony. The people on the sidewalk below were lucky it never got that bad.
The couple keeps chattering on at him about their most recent vacation to Morocco or Monaco or the Maldives or whatever fancy country starting with M that had fancy yachts and an even fancier five-star resort that Todd’s never been to and probably never will. He couldn’t care less. Still no clues, but even worse, there’s still no hint of a name from either of them.
It doesn’t matter. Todd doesn’t want to learn their names. He’s decided to call them Pointy and the Wallet.
The Wallet takes a deep drink of his wine. “Now, what was I talking about?” he asks, turning to his wife.
Dirk chooses that moment to swoop to Todd’s rescue, two wine glasses in hand, both sloshing dangerously in his hands. Pointy and the Wallet both back away from where they were closing in on Todd, and he feels like he can breathe a bit better with Dirk by his side, like he has a bright, flailing human shield in a room full of vipers.
“The Maldives!” he says, re-inserting himself into the conversation with a blind confidence Todd can only envy. “Hopefully I haven’t missed hearing too much about that.”
“No, but you just missed the squab confit,” Pointy says, pointedly placing her empty plate onto the nearest table.
“And you didn’t save me one?” Dirk says, turning to Todd, scandalized.
“I didn’t think you’d want one,” Todd mumbles to Dirk’s bow tie, conveniently at eye-level.
He tries not to think about how he’d had to help him put it on before they’d left for the wedding; how Dirk had fumbled with it and Todd had taken over, promising that he’d had plenty of experience with bow ties at his old job; how he had to focus to keep his hands steady, not sure when standing this close had gotten this hard.
“All’s forgiven,” Dirk says, sweetly, passing him one of the wine glasses. He drops a kiss on Todd’s cheek and winds his free arm around Todd’s waist. Todd’s brain throws up an error screen that he hopes doesn’t show on his face and just lets it all happen.
“Now,” Dirk turns to Pointy and the Wallet without missing a beat. “What was your hotel like? I have to say, if I had to pick, my favorite part of any vacation is probably the hotel.”
The plastic in both their faces is pulled into two of the fakest smiles Todd’s ever seen as the Wallet dives back into their vacation story.
“Beautiful islands, the Maldives, but not the nicest we’ve been to, and not the nicest resort by far either. Don’t let the price tag fool you. The service there was an absolute disaster,” says the Wallet. “We booked a deluxe suite with an ocean view– there’s no point staying at a hotel on the beach if you can’t see the ocean from your bed, if you know what I mean. Well, we got there, they stuck us in the corner room on the top floor, where you can only see the ocean from one of the windows.”
“Only one window?” Todd mumbles into his glass, sarcastic. The alcohol must have loosened his tongue, because it comes out much louder than he’d intended. Dirk doesn’t say anything, but he grips Tod’s hip a little tighter, still smiling across at the other two serenely.
“So,” The Wallet continues on, as if he hadn’t heard. “We had them move us to another room. This one was only on the second-to-top floor, but at least it had a full ocean view.”
“But then,” Pointy cuts in, “the front desk sent up the worst concierge I’ve ever met to help us move our things.”
“It’s so difficult to find good service these days. Can you imagine it? A five star hotel and it took so long for the staff to do one basic task,” comments Pointy in a voice so nasally it almost justifies the extreme shape of her nose. “I mean, I can’t believe that stupid bellhop expected a tip after that. It took him thirty minutes to get around to moving eight suitcases. And the attitude when he finally did– ugh– I couldn’t stand it.”
Todd wishes he could smother his grimace behind another mouthful of wine, but his glass is already empty. He’d been steadily sipping at it to keep from snapping, but that line of defense is gone now.
Pointy and the Wallet are both looking at him and Dirk like they're waiting for them to agree, and Todd should come up with something vaguely agreeable to say. He wishes he could be more helpful, knows he should probably try to think of something to say other than, “I used to spit in the room service deliveries of people like you,” but he’s drawing a total blank.
“Well, I don’t think we’ll be going there any time soon,” Dirk observes, tone perfectly neutral. Todd knows a strategic half-truth when he hears one; they won’t be going to this Maldives resort because it’s a resort in the Maldives , not because of any perceived issues with their customer service.
Another blue velvet waiter passes by, this time with a tray full of wine, and Dirk swaps out Todd’s empty glass for a full one. Todd glances down at their matching rings as they exchange glasses, and feels something swoop low in his stomach when the diamond on Dirk’s brushes against his hand.
Yet another identically-dressed waiter sweeps through with a silver platter covered in toothpick impaled appetizers. These ones look less like a precarious stack of uncooked meat and more like perfectly spherical, deep-fried, breaded balls.
“Oh, you have to try this,” Pointy says. “Their chef is known for his croquettes. He used to work at L’Ostinato.”
Todd thought croquette was a sport that only rich snobs played. Turns out it’s also a food that probably only rich snobs eat.
Dirk passes him a toothpick of his own and drops a, “One for you, darling,” in passing. It’s nothing compared to the kiss from before, but Todd feels himself flush hopelessly in response and nearly fumbles with the toothpick. In his defense, the toothpicks are made of some kind of blue tinted metal, slipperier than the wooden ones he’s used to, and thank God he can blame the red flush staining his face on the wine.
This ruse might be the death of him if the sheer frustration of being trapped in this conversation doesn’t accomplish that first.
“Enough about us, we should hear a little bit more about you,” says the Wallet.
“What was your wedding like?” asks Pointy, smiling over a glass of champagne, flashing her blinding white teeth– definitely also artificially enhanced. “Let me guess, a cute little ceremony somewhere in the Pacific NorthWest for this one’s family,” she gestures to Todd with her champagne glass, “followed by a whirlwind honeymoon in Ibiza.”
Feeling once again out of his depth, Todd stuffs the appetizer into his mouth to avoid having to answer. Dirk gives him a side-long glance, corrects Pointy with their pre-prepared cover story, and carries on with fielding personal questions while Todd tries not to accidentally choke on his croquette and embarrass them both. In hindsight, he really should have taken a smaller bite instead of trying to swallow it whole in desperation.
While he chews, Todd keeps waiting for Dirk to slip up, to stumble conversationally somehow, say something bizarre or unintentionally asinine, but he just doesn’t. That isn’t to say Dirk’s not still one hundred percent, certifiably himself the entire time. At one point, he starts waving the toothpick from his own appetizer around wildly as he explains his theory on the interconnectedness of all things, but Pointy and the Wallet just laugh along like he’s made some hilarious joke.
Maybe, Todd thinks, once you hit a certain tax bracket, a little bit of eccentricity is welcomed, or maybe just tolerated. On the other hand, Todd gets the distinct feeling that, at best, he’s barely being tolerated and, at worst, is actively being mocked in a language he doesn’t speak, and the only reason he isn’t doing something about it now that he’s swallowed his appetizer is that Dirk is silently driving him insane.
It’s subtle at first. Pointy or the Wallet will ask them both a question about something contrived, pretentious, overly personal, or a sly combination of the three. Todd inevitably fumbles when it’s his turn to answer; Pointy titters a shrill, nasal laugh; the Wallet looks smug; and Dirk… Dirk starts getting… well, for lack of a better word, possessive. Every time Todd’s lost for words or on the verge of snarking, he grips Todd’s waist tighter and pulls him closer.
The cycle continues until there’s no way Dirk can pull him any further into his side unless he somehow manages to shake the atoms between their bodies apart and start merging Todd and himself into a single being. It might be the wine talking, but Todd wouldn’t mind that right now.
And that’s when Dirk’s hand starts moving lower.
Todd has to hide the unwanted flush behind another sip of his drink each time Dirk’s hand shifts minutely against the fabric of his jacket and then, eventually, his pants. At first, it lingers over his side at a respectable height, but it dips lower as he gets more involved in the conversation. It slides to his hip, slipping under his suit jacket before Dirk tangles his fingers in Todd’s belt loop. That’s a brief pitstop on his hand’s journey to drop dangerously towards Todd’s ass.
Inevitably, it finds its way there, his thumb hooking into Todd’s back pocket and just resting there. He can feel it, like an iron brand through his clothes, directly against his skin.
Todd is pretty sure he’s forgotten how to breathe. He goes to take another sip, but finds that his glass is empty.
“What’s your alma mater?” the Wallet asks Dirk. “Somewhere overseas? I was at Columbia myself.”
“Oh, yes, it must have been, especially with that accent,” says Pointy.
“Cambridge,” says Dirk, with surprisingly little fanfare.
Todd didn’t know that Dirk had ever been to any school ever, let alone a university. Not just any university either. Cambridge. That’s a good school. Like a really good school. Expensive as shit and equally as prestigious, from what Todd’s seen in movies.
“What about you?” All eyes turn to Todd when the Wallet directs the same question at him, and he grips the stem of his wineglass a little tighter.
He should lie, say something impressive and ingratiate himself to these people, squeeze them for all the information they’re worth. But he can’t help himself, he’s keyed up and cornered and wants to bite back.
“I didn’t.” He bares his teeth over his wine glass and hopes they’re stained red.
Pointy and the Wallet both look at him down their noses with thinly-veiled disdain. The cornered feeling intensifies, like they’re both predators backing a prey animal against a wall– except the wall is his best friend's hand on his ass.
“That’s a shame,” Pointy hums, running her fingernails down her necklace like a hawk tracing its talons over its dinner.
Todd narrows his eyes and opens his mouth to retort, but Dirk’s hand fucking squeezes and he’s suddenly at a complete loss for words, too busy trying not to react.
“Rather a lot of blue involved in this theming, isn’t there?” Dirk says, breaking the tension. Todd glances up at him, and he’s looking around the room as if he’s absentmindedly admiring the interior decorating.
“It’s the bride and grooms’ favorite color. I heard a rumor they’re going to serve blue knight lobster with a Hungarian blue pumpkin créme soufflé during dinner,” says Pointy.
Leave it to Dirk to play the “this is fine” card to deflect from Todd nearly blowing up and have it actually work. And he’s not just talking around Todd’s faux pas or ignoring him. No, Todd’s being handled. It should feel like a blow to his ego, but it doesn’t, and it’s infuriating. Forget being prey, he feels like a dog on a tight leash, and he’s hyper aware of exactly where that leash is: making its way back up from his ass to his belt, securing itself there. The leather looped around his waist might as well be a collar at his neck, the way it makes him want to choke.
He needs. He needs–
“Water,” says Todd. “I’m going to get water.”
He shrugs off Dirk’s arm and makes his escape, or at least makes a decent attempt to. Midstep, someone catches him by the wrist, making him turn back.
It’s Dirk, trying to reel him back in gently.
“I’ll come with you.” He’s got this look in his eyes– half-concerned, half-wary–, that makes Todd stall when he wants to snap.
“No, it’s–” Todd carefully peels Dirk’s hand from around his wrist, trying to compose himself. He doesn’t know how to communicate that he needs space, just for a minute, without using those exact words. “I’ll be fine.”
The walk to the bar is much longer than it looks, or at least it feels that way to Todd. He’s stumbling a bit. All the stupid blue tables and chairs and groups of guests are way too close together, and it’s very possible the three drinks he’s downed in the last hour are partially to blame, hitting him much harder than he thought they would. He’s no heavyweight, but barely being able to walk straight after champagne and wine? He’d felt mostly fine– or as fine as he could be given the circumstances– while he was standing still, but now that he’s moving...
Todd leans heavily on the bar when he gets there, bracing his hands against it. It’s good to get something solid underneath his fingers to support him, but it’s nothing compared to that grounded feeling he had before. The heavy, dizzy influence of alcohol isn’t doing anything to make the atmosphere more bearable. If anything, he feels more stifled. There’s a low-grade buzzing all along his arms and legs and his palms are sweaty. He doesn’t really get it, but he has a sinking suspicion that it’s got something to do with being untethered from Dirk’s side.
Or maybe it’s just the wine, he tries to rationalize to himself. Maybe that’s what makes good wine good. Some kind of higher alcohol content thing… or something.
God, even he knows that’s bullshit.
Todd waves down the bartender for two glasses of water and catches sight of himself in the mirrored walls behind the bar. Between bottles of luxury alcohol, a pale, tense face stares back at him, eyes too wide. He doesn’t know why he thought he could pull this off, the whole undercover thing, doesn’t know why he let Dirk cajole him into it.
Well, no, that’s a lie. He knows exactly why, and it has almost entirely to do with the fake wedding ring on his finger. But besides that, he doesn’t know who he’s kidding.
The suit he’s wearing looks wrong somehow. It’s nearly identical to the one Dirk picked out– the same brand from the same store with the right alterations so they’d have a chance at blending in with the rest of the wedding’s legitimate guests, but something about how it sits on Todd’s body makes him feel… less.
Maybe it’s the bow tie. He fucking hates bow ties. They remind him of his stupid, ill-fitting uniform from when he worked at the Perryman Grand. Todd reaches up to loosen it, but that just makes him look worse, like he’s some idiot that doesn’t know how to tie one properly.
Maybe it’s the stubble. He knows he’s not as clean-cut as the rest of the guests, and had considered shaving it off while getting ready, but he hadn’t. If he’s being honest, he didn’t want to. He doesn’t like how he looks without it: softer, less like the version of himself he wants to be. It wasn’t a sacrifice he was willing to make, and now it’s screwing with the case.
They’re all little things, but they add up to one crystal clear solution, as transparent as the twin glasses of water the bartender has just placed in front of him: the person staring back at him from the mirror doesn’t belong here and everyone knows it.
Todd can’t stand to look at himself any longer, so he looks back at Dirk, which is probably a mistake. In a weird mirror of earlier in the evening, Dirk’s once again blissfully unaware of Todd staring, this time from the bar, as he plows through his conversation with Pointy and the Wallet. He looks strangely at home in his suit, comfortable in this world in a way that doesn’t add up in Todd’s brain. If he was more rational or less enraptured by it, he would feel jealous, but he doesn’t. He just wants.
Turning away, Todd rolls his shoulder and shakes out his arms, trying to release some of the tension in his body. No more distractions, no more self-pity. He needs to get his head back in the game. He’s going to be the most charming fake husband these rich idiots have ever seen and then, as a reward, he’s going to go home and get so wasted he won’t be able to hate himself for it.
He grabs the two glasses of water with renewed determination and stalks back towards Dirk, this time taking a less crowded path through the tables so that he’s approaching from behind Pointy and the Wallet.
“It’s not too late, you know,” Todd hears Pointy say as he approaches. He can’t see her face, but he can hear the sneer in her voice. It makes him freeze.
“Late? Too late for what?” Dirk laughs, taking another sip of his wine.
“Your partner.” She spits the word like it’s something dirty, like it’s something she can’t stand to try and swallow.
“I’m sorry, I’m not quite following–” Dirk’s still smiling, but Todd can tell it’s fake now. The muscle in his jaw is jumping ever-so-slightly– a sign that he’s getting annoyed that Todd’s overly familiar with at this point in their friendship.
“Don’t be coy,” Pointy cuts in. “I can see plain as day you two are hardly a good match. I really think you could do better. I know there’s more than one high profile divorce lawyer in attendance tonight, if you want one. I’ll introduce you. If it’s assets your worried about, I can promise you they’ll bleed him–”
Dirk’s eyes flicker over Pointy’s shoulder to meet Todd’s and Todd can practically see him making the decision to cut Pointy off. That doesn’t come as a surprise at all.
What Todd hadn’t been expecting, however, was that, in lieu of words, Dirk would toss his drink in her face. The deep red droplets look much less appetizing dripping down the sharp point of her nose and the harsh jut of her cheekbones.
“I don’t recall asking,” Dirk says loftily, and sets his now empty glass down. The words are deafening in the crowded ballroom, especially now that most of the other guests have turned to join Todd in staring at the scandalous scene in startled silence.
Of course, it isn’t entirely unexpected either when, after the initial shock passes, the Wallet winds back his free arm and decks Dirk squarely across the face in return and all hell breaks loose.
Several people start screaming or calling for security, and that’s what pushes Todd back into action. The Wallet makes towards where Dirk’s collapsed against the table behind him, one hand clutched to where the Wallet’s fist had met his cheek and the other brandishing his stupid blue toothpick like it’s a deadly weapon in self-defense.
Todd throws both of the water glasses in his hand down towards the Wallet’s feet. It’s a split second decision, but it stalls the Wallet and gives Todd time to dodge around the mess and pull Dirk back onto his feet.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” he yells, yanking Dirk through the crowd and towards the ballroom’s double doors by his hand. That plan is immediately foiled when two massive security guards shove the doors open from the outside, and they both have to scramble back to avoid getting hit by them.
“The kitchen!” Dirk yells, and turns around to push through the crowds towards the door the waiters have been entering and exiting through all evening, dragging Todd along with him by the hand. They fight their way, admittedly easily, through frightened women in frighteningly tall high heels, men who don’t want to soil their expensive suits, and finally a door that offers no resistance.
The kitchen is another obstacle altogether, full of dumbfounded kitchen staff and waiters completely unaware of the scene Dirk and Todd had caused outside in the ballroom. Together, they weave towards the emergency exit through staff members trying to shield their dinner preparations from the two madmen who’ve just burst into their workspace. The fire alarm blares the moment Dirk shoves the door, but he doesn’t look back.
Todd halts for a brief moment, eyeing up a cart of expensive wine bottles by the door, and, casting a glance over his shoulder at the chaos he’s created, grabs a bottle as one final “fuck you” to the whole evening and takes off into the night after Dirk.