Chapter Text
Roman stared at the clock at the hands inched towards 5 PM.
"I can just take myself home, you know," he said, cutting through the tepid silence of the office. "They don't keep me locked in a hamster ball, I have the ability to do that."
The broad tasked with minding him – a rail-thin, dark-haired woman in her late twenties that Roman could easily imagine sucking his father's dick – gave him only a cursory glance before she returned to her paperwork. "Your father told us he is coming to get you."
"I've been here for nearly three hours. I think he's pretty clearly not coming to get me. Why would he come get me? It's insane to think he would come get me. Did you even actually talk to him? Do you know for sure it wasn't my brother who answered the phone? I'm not four years old, I can survive a 25 minute walk across Central Park."
"We can't just set you loose onto the street after your legal guardian explicitly instructed us to keep you here until he arrives," the long-suffering woman replied, keeping an admirably neutral tone in the face of Roman's mounting agitation.
"Aren't you closing soon?" Roman huffed, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "What are you gonna do if he doesn't show? Have the cops take me home?"
The secretary – sorry, "administrative assistant" – raised her eyebrows in amusement. "Yes, that is literally what we'll do."
"Ugh, come the fuck on –"
"Would you like to upgrade that suspension to an expulsion, Mr. Roy?"
"Can I call someone else? Look, my dad is not fucking coming, he was never gonna come. I told you that three hours ago, and what do you fucking know, I was right. Can you just call my brother? The other one, the older one. He should be authorized to pick me up too."
The sour cunt with the ugly bangs could've easily just asked Roman for the number. Instead, she got up and went for the filing cabinets, taking her sweet time to unearth the folder containing Roman's personal documentation. Then, she set the manilla file open on her desk and leafed through it until she found the right sheet of paper. "Your brother is Connor Roy?" she asked, as if she and everyone else this far north of the poverty line didn't already have every shriveled twig on his family tree memorized better than their A-B-Cs.
"Yeah, yeah, that's him. Let me call him. He'll have time, he doesn't do anything anyway."
The secretary did not let Roman operate the phone. She dialed the number herself. For reasons unclear, Roman sat with his heart in his throat for the half eternity it took for the call to go through.
"Hello, is this Mr. Connor Roy?" asked the secretary, slipping into a gratingly affected phone voice. "Yes, hi! This is Miss Finnegan calling from Trinity, I'm terribly sorry to bother you. Your brother Roman – no, no, nothing like that has –"
Roman felt his jaw clench as the wretched Miss Finnegan fell silent for several seconds.
"No, no," she said. "Roman is just in a bit of trouble for saying a few inappropriate things during – no, he wasn't –" A sharp breath and another long pause. "The matter was already discussed with his parents, so – no, no, we just need someone to –" Then, she made eye contact with Roman. "Mr. Roy, why don't you just come and pick your brother up and he can tell you what he did."
***
Roman didn't like Connor.
It was probably fair to say that no one liked Connor. There was something about his face that activated the prey drive in just about everyone, even a little runt like Roman, who would freely situate himself on the food chain somewhere between a worm and organic detritus. But whenever he got a level look at Connor, not even the foot and near two decades between them did anything to curb his overwhelming compulsion to shove his brother into a locker. Connor would let him, too, if he got it into his head that it might make Roman like him any better.
So it was no small indignity to get walked out of the head office by this tremendous gaylord. Roman had to count himself lucky that none of his friends were around to see it. He still kept his head down and walked out to the car quickly enough that Connor practically had to jog to keep up, an affect that had Roman's teenage neuroses screaming for mercy. He imagined this had to be what normal kids felt about their normal dads, unlike what he felt about his actual dad, which was probably closer to how one might feel about Hitler, or perhaps Saddam Hussein.
"So what's the situation, tiger? Why am I picking you up on this fine Thursday afternoon?" Connor asked.
Roman cringed as he slid into the back seat of the car behind Connor. He buckled his seatbelt at the driver's curt reminder, and waited for the car to get out onto the road before he answered properly.
"It's nothing," Roman insisted. "Normally the au pair would get me but she got deported and it's obviously kind of impossible to hire another one right now, and do we even need a fucking au pair anymore? This is so fucking gay. Shiv is like 12, or 14, or however old she is already, can we not just walk home? Like any self-respecting pedophile is going to see her on the street and want a piece of her pubescent, pepperoni pizza naked mole rat-ass, fat-ass, tomatoes in a clear plastic bag looking ass."
"Whoa," Connor said, holding up his hands. "Okay."
The driver, carefully chosen for his lack of the English proficiency required to understand business negotiations or the bountiful cornucopia of epithets perpetually descending from the mouths of Logan Roy's young children, could nevertheless perceive the awkwardness of the silence fogging the car. He helpfully punctuated it with a light cough.
"So I heard you got in trouble," Connor said.
"Yeah."
"You want to tell me what happened?"
"I mean, if I have the option not to, then absolutely no I don't want to," Roman said.
"Aw, c'mon, buddy. I'm not Dad. I promise I won't get mad at you, whatever it was."
Roman thought about it for a good while. He would have loved to finish out the day without having to explain this for the fifteenth time, but Dad knew what the school told him, and Mum knew what he told her, so it was only a matter of time until the most unflattering version of this sloppy story trickled down into the piggie troughs of the lower reaches of the family. Better to take the opportunity to cushion the blow however he could with whomever he could, and least this was a nominally sympathetic ear.
"They made us do a presentation in class," Roman said. "A history thing. I made a few jokes in mine that people didn't like. I mean, everybody's a critic, but this got out of hand."
"You got suspended for a week over a joke!?" Connor interjected, a bit overzealous in his incredulity. "You know, I really thought the 90s would be as far as all this 'political correctness' baloney would go, but it only gets worse and worse every year! Schools now, too!? Where will it end? The academy should be a place of fearless discovery!" Then he threw Roman a sidelong glance. "What was the joke?"
"I said Dad made all Osama's wives suck him off, and that's why he sent the planes, to get my dad. But they hit the wrong building," Roman said. "So maybe it wasn't a very good joke, big fucking deal! It was just like this one little crack I made, seriously, then I let it go and moved on. But I guess one of the girls in my class, uh. Her dad died in the attacks. So, like, it wasn't a big deal, and then she made it a big deal. And I got mad she kept interrupting me trying to talk about the moon landing or Napoleon or whatever, so I was like, my dad wasn't down in the financial district that day because he was busy uptown schlonging her mom, and maybe if her dad wasn't a dickless fag he'd still be alive, et cetera."
It was difficult to describe the expression on Connor's face.
"Then I said I hoped her dog got into a big letter full of anthrax and died," Roman added.
"... Okay," Connor eventually replied.
Roman could hear the gears churning in Connor's head. "You literally promised me you wouldn't get mad at me, whatever it was."
Connor nodded, scratching at his chin as if in nervous compulsion. "Yes, I did say that... I did just say that."
"It was literally just a joke," Roman mumbled. "We live here, everybody knows somebody who died, she's not fucking special. People die every fucking day. I don't get why it has to be a federal fucking issue."
Connor looked as if he were about to say something, but thought better of it after opening his mouth. This was what Roman found most contemptible and vile about Connor: he was utterly ruled by his pathetic desperation to be liked.
"... And Dad knows this? All this stuff you said, he knows about it?"
"Yeah. They called him at work, and he said he would pick me up, but obviously he was never gonna pick me up. So that's why I had them call you. I knew you were the only one who would actually show up. So."
Connor was starting to put together the pieces of the puzzle. "Am I going to be the one in trouble for coming to get you?" he said, grimacing.
"I mean, if Dad can muster up the energy to remember you exist long enough to be mad at you, maybe, but I kind of doubt that given how pissed he's going to be at me for the rest of my life. We're gonna have to get married, he's gonna want to beat my ass so bad."
"A neutral observer might think you were lashing out from the stress of the divorce," Connor ventured.
"A neutral observer should throat me. My parents were horrible together. I'm very pro-my-parents-divorcing."
"I'm just saying... I've been through this before too, you know. So if you ever need to talk about it, just want someone who gets it to listen, I'm here for you, little man."
"Well, I don't, but thanks. I guess."
***
Roman rode the elevator with Connor in silence.
The inside of the Fifth Avenue flat was even more eerily quiet. Everything was quieter now with Mum moved out, but Roman still wasn't quite used to it. The stillness felt particularly heavy now. It was like Roman could hear his own blood coursing through his veins, hyper-aware of the slightest creak of the floor beneath his feet. To his credit, Connor knew to keep his mouth shut.
It still wasn't long past five, so the chances of Dad actually being home already were pretty slim. Shiv was probably out with her friends, or sucking cock for slap bracelets at the mall, or whatever it was little girls did. If Roman was lucky, he could creep back to his room, crawl under his bed and wait to die like a rat with a bowel obstruction.
"Romulus!"
Of course, when had Roman ever been lucky? His father's booming voice erupted from the direction of the study, sending a visceral jolt of fear through his body that turned all his blood to ice. "Is that you? Get in here!"
When Roman glanced to Connor, he saw his brother seemed to have the same instinctual reaction: frozen all over, face as white as a sheet. He wasn't even the one in trouble, but sure as hell, he was feeling that dread.
"Sorry, kiddo," Connor mumbled with an apologetic wince.
Roman drew a shallow breath and hauled his frigid corpse to the pyre.
"So it seems you've embarrassed me yet again," said Logan Roy.
Roman stood in the doorway to his father's study with all the confidence of a six year old who'd just wet the bed. He felt every inch of his stature in that moment: while his father was objectively not a tall man, neither did he ever register as short, a fact that had baffled and rankled Roman since the onset of puberty. He couldn't understand how he had inherited his father's height, but not the X factor that stopped anyone from noticing.
It was a grim prospect, staring down the barrel of a whole life lived at 5'6" tops. "Even Shiv is taller than you now," Kendall observed last Christmas, an off-hand comment that managed to be an even worse gift than the literal coal he received from his father.
"Well?" his father demanded. "You got anything to say for yourself, boy?"
Some kids had it in them to lie to their parents. Roman wasn't sure why he found it so difficult. "No," he admitted.
"Do you understand the repercussions it could have for me if it gets out into the media that my teenage son has been disrespecting the American patriots who tragically perished in the September 11th terrorists attacks?"
"Yes," Roman mumbled.
"And what would you say is an appropriate punishment for something as horrible as what you did?"
"... I got suspended from school for a week."
"Suspension? You think a week away from school is a punishment? They gave you a fucking vacation! Do you think that's how the real world works, kid? It's my time and money getting pissed away arranging another fucking god damn babysitter for you now that you're banned from daycare! Do you think it's fair that you fucked up and I'm the one being fucking punished?" Logan spat. "What did I do to deserve that, huh? Answer me."
"Nothing."
"That's right. So how should I punish you?"
Roman didn't have a thought in his head. "You can hit me," he blurted out, totally automatic.
Logan scoffed with so much disdain it made Roman's skin crawl. "I wouldn't want to dirty my hand," he laughed. "Oh, man the fuck up. Don't you dare fucking cry."
"I'm not gonna cry," Roman said, clearly about to cry.
"Get out of here if you're going to do that. I don't want to see it," Logan said. "Whatever. I don't even care what you do. Figure yourself out."
Roman took the opportunity to leave with grateful haste.
He found Connor lingering in the hallway, which shouldn't have been that surprising, but something about his brother's soft sympathetic eyes really put him over the edge.
"Hey, Rome –"
"Fuck off," Roman spat through his teeth, shoulder checking Connor on the way to his room. He heard but did not see his brother noisily – and painfully, Roman hoped – colliding with the wall.