the haves and have-nots
the haves and have-nots
bandom, ~1700 words, R for language, Vicky-T-centric, hints of Vicky-T/Travie, lots of Panic boys
Thanks to kissingchaos9 and secrethappiness for the betas and to The Dresden Dolls for the title. Expanded from what was previously known as the “Lonely!Vicky-T AU,” this is just a snippet of a universe, but I think it stands alone as a ficlet, too.
Posted for 14valentines. [Day 2] Hunger
Victoria isn’t looking for anyone.
It’s not like she’s some kind of shut-in like that guy down the hall, Brian or Ryan or whatever. She sees people. She sees people all the time, every fucking day, handing them their lunches and serving them their coffee and smiling big for the bullshit dollar tips they give for a ten dollar lunch. No smiles means no tips and no tips means no rent. Victoria figured this equation out her first week in New York.
She sees people in the evenings, too. She sees men attached to grabby hands at shows in Brooklyn, their leers and sweat mingling together and smudging her fun. She sees gallery managers in Manhattan who stare at her tits and ignore her portfolio.
Admittedly, Victoria doesn’t get a lot of quality conversation or intense connection from any of it but she’s fine with that.
She’s fine.
And, yeah, maybe sometimes she ends up in the elevator with one of the two guys from 4b and can’t think of anything to say. But it’s not because she wants to or because she is longing for something or because she sees the way that they touch each other, small and public and easy and feels something ache.
It’s not.
*
Victoria would never admit it, but there are times that she might, maybe, tear up a little while on the phone with her mom. It’s not every time, it’s not even often. But sometimes, when her mom calls her “Vicky T” (a leftover from when she spent an entire summer making everyone call her Vicky The Great and her mom called her Vicky The Terrible), Victoria can’t help it.
It’s not because she’s some kind of loser who can’t live without her mom, though. It’s just that … well, sometimes her weekly call with her mom coincides with the day that her next door neighbor actually cooks a real dinner. There’s something about nicknames and the smell of spaghetti sauce that prickles at the corners of Victoria’s eyes. It feels familiar, like every Sunday meal her mom's ever made, but wrong because it’s not her mom cooking next door.
Still, sometimes she sits on her couch and leaves the windows closed, breathing in the smell of oregano and company and home, even if it’s not meant for her.
*
It’s another evening after another long day, and the only thing Victoria can think about is getting into her apartment and taking off her goddamn boots. She has a big night ahead of her, a date with Gizmo, her pajamas, Season 3 of Buffy and a glass of wine.
It’s one of the nights that the elevator is working, thank god, because she didn’t really want to walk up the five flights of stairs to her tiny studio apartment on already-aching feet. She’s not new to New York, not anymore, and she knows that the 3 inch heeled boots aren’t the most pedestrian-friendly shoes, but she also knows that she has to work the bullshit art community to get anywhere. And she has nice legs.
Right as the elevator doors are closing, a guy that Victora vaguely recognizes from somewhere on the fifth floor seriously fucking beams at her in the elevator and says, “Hey, I’m Brendon.”
God. Victoria doesn’t have it in her to do this tonight.
She narrows her eyes a little, waiting for the inevitable bullshit. Not that he really looks the bullshit part with his pink hoodie and girl jeans and red-framed glasses, but experience has taught her that the little kinda-fey looking ones are the hardest ones to get rid of.
She’s a little surprised, but definitely mostly relieved when the next thing out of his mouth is: “Do you play Scrabble?”
Vicky loves Scrabble.
*
“Qis,” Victoria crows. “And it’s on a triple-word score and I lined the ‘i’ up with the ‘x’ and the ‘s’ up with the ‘a’. 53 points!”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” Ryan scowls. Ryan, Victoria has learned quickly, is not a very good loser. “What does that even mean?”
Brendon, apparently, knows the rest of the entire world, or at least a significant portion of Manhattan. Or maybe it only seems like that because Victoria’s life has been less than hopping since she moved to the building. Brendon has managed shove ten people into the small apartment he shares with Jon, who is kind of chill and smiley and bearded. The story of how they met depends on who you ask - they either met in while Brendon was busking in the subway or in the bookstore where Jon works. Brendon even knows Brian or Ryan (who is apparently Ryan), the guy Victoria previously thought was a shut-in. Ryan, apparently, even has friends, though not friends that he’s all that nice to.
Ryan’s eyes had widened just-barely-perceptively when Victoria had walked and that's when she realized that they might think that she’s a shut-in, too. Which. No.
So, Jon, Victoria, and Ryan have been playing a cutthroat game of Scrabble after the first few rounds declared the three of them semi-finalists in Brendon’s Smartest Scrabble Dude (or Girl) I Know contest.
Seriously. He even showed Victoria the button that the winner would receive, complete with the Sharpie addition in honor of Victoria’s arrival.
She will never admit how much she wants that button.
“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “The rules aren’t that I have to be able to define it, just that it’s in the Scrabble dictionary. Which it is. But you can challenge me and lose your turn if you’d like.”
Ryan mumbles something indistinct that sounds something like “fixing the dictionary.” Jon just smiles and takes another drink of his beer. “Dude, we should have known we were being played when she offered to go get the Scrabble dictionary from her apartment. Face it, man. We’re outclassed.”
Victoria beams at Jon. She loves Jon. Jon can stay.
Victoria is certain that she wouldn’t normally be thinking loving thoughts about guys she met two hours ago were it not for the wine. She had planned on only having one glass of wine (to be polite!) but she's now worked her way through most of a bottle.
Not that these guys aren’t awesome. They really are. They’re kind of dorky and funny and they really do have Scrabble tournaments that some people (Ryan) take incredibly seriously and some people (Pete and Patrick, the couple from 4b who Victoria has finally confirmed are actually a couple) do not. Well, that’s more Pete than Patrick, but Patrick does look indulgently amused every time Pete tries to steal Ryan’s tiles.
Still, Victoria is schooling them. And, maybe just as important, she’s actually having fun doing it.
Fun. Voluntarily hanging out with strangers.
Seriously, she barely knows herself anymore.
*
They play Scrabble and Victoria kicks their collective asses. After the game is over, they sit around laughing and Victoria tries to leave a few times, but she keeps getting waylaid by questions from Pete or taunts from Ryan or Brendon just full-on begging her to stay for just five more minutes. She's sitting on the floor in Brendon’s living room, laughing at some ridiculous story that she is pretty sure Pete is making up, when a tall guy with impressive hair and tattoos all over his neck and arms walks in, his smile splitting his face.
“TRAVIE!” Pete interrupts his own story with a gleeful yell, throwing himself into the guy’s body. “Travie, Travie, we made a friend!”
“Yeah?” The guy, Travie, is still smiling, his hands smoothing Pete’s hair and god, he’s like a foot fucking taller than Pete. His eyes run across the room until they snag on Victoria. “Hey, I’m Travie.”
“Yeah, I got that.” The smiling guy is pretty fucking hot, but also completely and totally stoned. His eyes are shot through with red and he kind of looks like a character in an After School Special from when she was a kid. But his smile is nice. “I’m Victoria. I live …”
“Downstairs,” Travie says, nodding. “I know.”
“You know?”
*
Brendon is a sneaky little shit. It turns out the whole party was a setup. Apparently, the guys in the building thought that Victoria looked lonely and they didn’t know how else to meet her. And maybe she guesses that maybe she sometimes looks a little unfriendly when it comes to strangers (but, to be fair, Ryan totally looks like he’s leering until you know that’s just how his face is set). So they totally put together a party like they had them all the time, just so they could invite her.
Victoria knows that she should be pissed off, but mostly she’s just glad that they made the effort. And, yeah, maybe she’s a little flattered and happy about it. After all, she wouldn't have predicted this afternoon that she'd end the night at Yaffa but here she is, eating (no-shit) an entire avocado on top of bread with melted brie. Pete’s friend Andy has met them because “Yaffa has the best hummus in the city, dude” and everyone is still laughing. Travie is leaning toward Victoria and she knows an opening when she sees it, but mostly she sees the opening of everyone else at the table.
“Vicky!” Brendon yells from the foot of the table, throwing a piece of his pita at her to get her attention. “We have a very important thing to tell you!”
“Don’t call me Vicky,” she says automatically. “And don’t throw pita, asshole. Someone has to clean up after you.”
Travie snickers and leans a little closer.
Sure, she could go home with Travie tonight and she might (his hands). But, more importantly, she has seven phone numbers in her cell phone that she didn’t have five hours ago, she has a lunch date with Pete tomorrow to talk about some art gallery owners he knows, and Ryan has made her promise a Scrabble rematch.
Brendon grins, unrepentantly. “You know you love us.”
Maybe.
bandom, ~1700 words, R for language, Vicky-T-centric, hints of Vicky-T/Travie, lots of Panic boys
Thanks to kissingchaos9 and secrethappiness for the betas and to The Dresden Dolls for the title. Expanded from what was previously known as the “Lonely!Vicky-T AU,” this is just a snippet of a universe, but I think it stands alone as a ficlet, too.
Posted for 14valentines. [Day 2] Hunger
Victoria isn’t looking for anyone.
It’s not like she’s some kind of shut-in like that guy down the hall, Brian or Ryan or whatever. She sees people. She sees people all the time, every fucking day, handing them their lunches and serving them their coffee and smiling big for the bullshit dollar tips they give for a ten dollar lunch. No smiles means no tips and no tips means no rent. Victoria figured this equation out her first week in New York.
She sees people in the evenings, too. She sees men attached to grabby hands at shows in Brooklyn, their leers and sweat mingling together and smudging her fun. She sees gallery managers in Manhattan who stare at her tits and ignore her portfolio.
Admittedly, Victoria doesn’t get a lot of quality conversation or intense connection from any of it but she’s fine with that.
She’s fine.
And, yeah, maybe sometimes she ends up in the elevator with one of the two guys from 4b and can’t think of anything to say. But it’s not because she wants to or because she is longing for something or because she sees the way that they touch each other, small and public and easy and feels something ache.
It’s not.
*
Victoria would never admit it, but there are times that she might, maybe, tear up a little while on the phone with her mom. It’s not every time, it’s not even often. But sometimes, when her mom calls her “Vicky T” (a leftover from when she spent an entire summer making everyone call her Vicky The Great and her mom called her Vicky The Terrible), Victoria can’t help it.
It’s not because she’s some kind of loser who can’t live without her mom, though. It’s just that … well, sometimes her weekly call with her mom coincides with the day that her next door neighbor actually cooks a real dinner. There’s something about nicknames and the smell of spaghetti sauce that prickles at the corners of Victoria’s eyes. It feels familiar, like every Sunday meal her mom's ever made, but wrong because it’s not her mom cooking next door.
Still, sometimes she sits on her couch and leaves the windows closed, breathing in the smell of oregano and company and home, even if it’s not meant for her.
*
It’s another evening after another long day, and the only thing Victoria can think about is getting into her apartment and taking off her goddamn boots. She has a big night ahead of her, a date with Gizmo, her pajamas, Season 3 of Buffy and a glass of wine.
It’s one of the nights that the elevator is working, thank god, because she didn’t really want to walk up the five flights of stairs to her tiny studio apartment on already-aching feet. She’s not new to New York, not anymore, and she knows that the 3 inch heeled boots aren’t the most pedestrian-friendly shoes, but she also knows that she has to work the bullshit art community to get anywhere. And she has nice legs.
Right as the elevator doors are closing, a guy that Victora vaguely recognizes from somewhere on the fifth floor seriously fucking beams at her in the elevator and says, “Hey, I’m Brendon.”
God. Victoria doesn’t have it in her to do this tonight.
She narrows her eyes a little, waiting for the inevitable bullshit. Not that he really looks the bullshit part with his pink hoodie and girl jeans and red-framed glasses, but experience has taught her that the little kinda-fey looking ones are the hardest ones to get rid of.
She’s a little surprised, but definitely mostly relieved when the next thing out of his mouth is: “Do you play Scrabble?”
Vicky loves Scrabble.
*
“Qis,” Victoria crows. “And it’s on a triple-word score and I lined the ‘i’ up with the ‘x’ and the ‘s’ up with the ‘a’. 53 points!”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” Ryan scowls. Ryan, Victoria has learned quickly, is not a very good loser. “What does that even mean?”
Brendon, apparently, knows the rest of the entire world, or at least a significant portion of Manhattan. Or maybe it only seems like that because Victoria’s life has been less than hopping since she moved to the building. Brendon has managed shove ten people into the small apartment he shares with Jon, who is kind of chill and smiley and bearded. The story of how they met depends on who you ask - they either met in while Brendon was busking in the subway or in the bookstore where Jon works. Brendon even knows Brian or Ryan (who is apparently Ryan), the guy Victoria previously thought was a shut-in. Ryan, apparently, even has friends, though not friends that he’s all that nice to.
Ryan’s eyes had widened just-barely-perceptively when Victoria had walked and that's when she realized that they might think that she’s a shut-in, too. Which. No.
So, Jon, Victoria, and Ryan have been playing a cutthroat game of Scrabble after the first few rounds declared the three of them semi-finalists in Brendon’s Smartest Scrabble Dude (or Girl) I Know contest.
Seriously. He even showed Victoria the button that the winner would receive, complete with the Sharpie addition in honor of Victoria’s arrival.
She will never admit how much she wants that button.
“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “The rules aren’t that I have to be able to define it, just that it’s in the Scrabble dictionary. Which it is. But you can challenge me and lose your turn if you’d like.”
Ryan mumbles something indistinct that sounds something like “fixing the dictionary.” Jon just smiles and takes another drink of his beer. “Dude, we should have known we were being played when she offered to go get the Scrabble dictionary from her apartment. Face it, man. We’re outclassed.”
Victoria beams at Jon. She loves Jon. Jon can stay.
Victoria is certain that she wouldn’t normally be thinking loving thoughts about guys she met two hours ago were it not for the wine. She had planned on only having one glass of wine (to be polite!) but she's now worked her way through most of a bottle.
Not that these guys aren’t awesome. They really are. They’re kind of dorky and funny and they really do have Scrabble tournaments that some people (Ryan) take incredibly seriously and some people (Pete and Patrick, the couple from 4b who Victoria has finally confirmed are actually a couple) do not. Well, that’s more Pete than Patrick, but Patrick does look indulgently amused every time Pete tries to steal Ryan’s tiles.
Still, Victoria is schooling them. And, maybe just as important, she’s actually having fun doing it.
Fun. Voluntarily hanging out with strangers.
Seriously, she barely knows herself anymore.
*
They play Scrabble and Victoria kicks their collective asses. After the game is over, they sit around laughing and Victoria tries to leave a few times, but she keeps getting waylaid by questions from Pete or taunts from Ryan or Brendon just full-on begging her to stay for just five more minutes. She's sitting on the floor in Brendon’s living room, laughing at some ridiculous story that she is pretty sure Pete is making up, when a tall guy with impressive hair and tattoos all over his neck and arms walks in, his smile splitting his face.
“TRAVIE!” Pete interrupts his own story with a gleeful yell, throwing himself into the guy’s body. “Travie, Travie, we made a friend!”
“Yeah?” The guy, Travie, is still smiling, his hands smoothing Pete’s hair and god, he’s like a foot fucking taller than Pete. His eyes run across the room until they snag on Victoria. “Hey, I’m Travie.”
“Yeah, I got that.” The smiling guy is pretty fucking hot, but also completely and totally stoned. His eyes are shot through with red and he kind of looks like a character in an After School Special from when she was a kid. But his smile is nice. “I’m Victoria. I live …”
“Downstairs,” Travie says, nodding. “I know.”
“You know?”
*
Brendon is a sneaky little shit. It turns out the whole party was a setup. Apparently, the guys in the building thought that Victoria looked lonely and they didn’t know how else to meet her. And maybe she guesses that maybe she sometimes looks a little unfriendly when it comes to strangers (but, to be fair, Ryan totally looks like he’s leering until you know that’s just how his face is set). So they totally put together a party like they had them all the time, just so they could invite her.
Victoria knows that she should be pissed off, but mostly she’s just glad that they made the effort. And, yeah, maybe she’s a little flattered and happy about it. After all, she wouldn't have predicted this afternoon that she'd end the night at Yaffa but here she is, eating (no-shit) an entire avocado on top of bread with melted brie. Pete’s friend Andy has met them because “Yaffa has the best hummus in the city, dude” and everyone is still laughing. Travie is leaning toward Victoria and she knows an opening when she sees it, but mostly she sees the opening of everyone else at the table.
“Vicky!” Brendon yells from the foot of the table, throwing a piece of his pita at her to get her attention. “We have a very important thing to tell you!”
“Don’t call me Vicky,” she says automatically. “And don’t throw pita, asshole. Someone has to clean up after you.”
Travie snickers and leans a little closer.
Sure, she could go home with Travie tonight and she might (his hands). But, more importantly, she has seven phone numbers in her cell phone that she didn’t have five hours ago, she has a lunch date with Pete tomorrow to talk about some art gallery owners he knows, and Ryan has made her promise a Scrabble rematch.
Brendon grins, unrepentantly. “You know you love us.”
Maybe.