Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Ilya loves texting bathroom vandals.

It’s a bad habit, Ilya knows it, but at the end of the day he figures that it’s a fairly low stakes one. So what if he texts random numbers he finds in bathroom stalls? He doesn’t actually meet up with them, he just messes with them a little and moves on with his day.

It’s harmless, really. On the spectrum of bad habits, it hardly registers. Some people smoke crack. He trolls bathroom graffitiers. If he’s twenty-six and his worst habit is texting people who vandalize public bathrooms, he’s doing okay, actually.

Svetlana always yells at him about it, convinced he’s going to somehow end up on a murderer’s hit list, but Cliff thinks it’s funny. Troy seems on the fence, which makes Ilya’s impeccable gaydar suggest there is bathroom graffiti in Troy’s past, before Harris came around and locked him down.

The men’s bathroom at Cruise Control is his personal favorite. The gay club’s heavy bass, bright lights, and suggestive name create an intoxicating cocktail that somehow gets people just desperate enough to pull a Sharpie out and vandalize the bathroom stall.

roger sucks toes. xxx-xxx-xxxx

Dirty Mike’s has some good graffiti too, but dive bar bathrooms are better for finding fellow trolls than horny people to mess with, Ilya has found. That or plugs, and Ilya isn’t interested in getting added to any sort of list that could endanger his citizenship application.

Ciel occasionally has something good, but it usually lacks the desperation of the messages in the Cruise Control bathroom. Still, he’s had a couple good runs there, too. Plus, it’s the one and only place Ilya has written his own bathroom graffiti. Or, well. It’d be more accurate to say he modified someone else’s.

For a good time, call Cathy. xxx-xxx-xxxx

The decision to go back to Ciel and cross off Cathy’s phone number was easy. She seemed like a nice enough girl, and she didn’t deserve that. Really, Ilya could’ve ended it there and walked away a good samaritan and a hero.

Except, Ilya isn’t a good samaritan or a hero. He’s more like Batman, or Robin Hood, or that Luigi guy. Fighting nefarious deeds through nefarious means. So yeah, he crossed out Cathy’s phone number. He just also happened to write a different phone number above it instead…

It’s the desperation that fascinates him most, Ilya thinks. How low do you have to be to write your number on a bathroom stall, rather than try to pick people up yourself?

Then again, maybe Ilya’s perspective is skewed. He has never once struggled to find bed partners. Any club or bar, he can find someone. Hell, he does find someone, regularly. But maybe that’s also why he’s drawn to the graffiti too. As crazy as it sounds, the whole go to a bar, chat up a hot stranger, take them home, see them off in the morning thing is getting old. No, it’s gotten old. It’s been old for so long that scientists are trying to carbon date it.

Every once in a while, he gets the idea in his head that maybe he should try to date again. He hasn’t seriously dated since Sasha, and they broke up four years ago. And it’s not like the breakup was messy, or painful. They just wanted different things—agreed to go their separate ways and move on. He still gets a Christmas card from Sasha every January.

It’s more that every person he meets, whether through dating apps, bars, or mutual friends, is just so… boring. If he has to explain to another person what the Canadian naturalization process is like, or why he left Moscow, or what exactly a sports analyst does, he’s going to maybe rip his hair out.

So yeah, maybe he has too much fun messing with people who write bathroom graffiti. It really could be worse. He could be bald (either from the aforementioned ripping his hair out, or just bad genetics. He’s rooting against both).

When Svetlana invites Ilya along to Cruise Control Saturday night, he is coming off a hookup the previous night so boring that he agrees before she can even finish asking the question.

It’s a little sad, really, how quickly Ilya beelines to the bathroom. He’s glad Svetlana immediately sidled up to the cute bartender she likes, because she would tease him relentlessly if she saw.

It’s Cruise Control, so Ilya is expecting the best of the best when he goes into the stall. There’s some silly graffiti that’s been added since the last time they repainted the door, and notably one in a familiar handwriting that says I suck them sexy toes only. Ilya mentally pats Roger on the back for getting more specific with his messaging.

But on the same stall, in neat and polite handwriting, is another new message.

Seeking experienced sexual partner (male) to take my virginity (also male). I know a lot about sex, I just haven’t had it. 514-555-1410

It’s the craziest piece of bathroom graffiti Ilya has ever seen. It’s so formal, for one, written like someone hoping to hire a plumber rather than looking for a hookup. (There’s a joke in there about laying pipe, Ilya thinks, and if he weren’t so baffled by this graffiti, he could maybe articulate it to himself better).

And it’s so wordy. I know a lot about sex, I just haven’t had it. Why include that part? Obviously, despite what this person thinks, they don’t actually know that much about sex. You can read a book about how to ride a bike, but that doesn’t mean you know how to ride a bike. Let alone ride a cock.

There’s an earnestness to it though that makes Ilya second guess messing with this guy. While the other graffiti seems desperate and weird, this one just seems—wholesome? If you’d asked him yesterday, he would have said it wasn’t possible for bathroom graffiti about wanting gay sex to be wholesome, but this person somehow found a way.

He pulls out his phone, drafts a text. Deletes it. Drafts another, deletes it again. None of it feels right. Eventually, he just snaps a picture of the graffiti and goes back out to the bar.

Svetlana is sitting at the corner of the bar, leaning her chin on one hand as she chats up the bartender, a pretty redhead who Ilya has ordered drinks from before. He’s pretty sure she has some sort of flower name? Iris, maybe? Daisy?

He really doesn’t want to harsh Svetlana’s flirting, so he scans the club for someone to chat with. At first it seems like more of the same, bodies writhing on the dance floor, drunk people trying to pretend they’re more sober than they are.

But then he spots a man sitting by himself at one of the tables towards the back, nursing a can of beer and looking uncomfortable. It’s far away, and the lights are flashing, but Ilya can already tell that this is one of, if not the, most beautiful person he’s ever seen.

He takes one more look as Svetlana, who is laughing way too hard at a joke the bartender made (Lily? Jasmine?), before he begins making his way across the club to the booth in the back.

Ilya is no stranger to putting on the charm, so when he sits down at the booth, he directs the full power of his suggestive smirk at the man on the other side. The man looks surprised, his eyes growing wide with confusion as he grips his—not a beer, then—ginger ale. A can of ginger ale at a gay club? Who is this man?

“What’s a beautiful man like you doing all alone in the corner?” Ilya asks, winking suggestively as he spreads his arms out across the back of the seat behind him, acutely aware of how it makes his half-buttoned shirt fall open. The pretty man’s eyes catch the movement, and Ilya feels satisfaction burn through him. Target locked.

“Sitting by myself,” the man answers. “Or at least I was.” His words are clipped, like he wants nothing to do with Ilya, and yet the way his eyes greedily track over his chest tell a different story.

“Most people do not come to Cruise Control to sit by themselves,” Ilya counters, biting his bottom lip in an attempt to get the other man to look at his mouth. It works. Hook, line, and drowning. Or whatever the stupid English phrase is.

“Well, most people aren’t waiting for their best friend to finish her shift,” the man replies, chuckling to himself like he’s just told a funny joke.

“Your best friend, she works here?” Ilya asks, shifting so that his arms are clasped in front of him on the table, showing off his forearms. The other man watches him with hungry eyes.

“Yeah, Rose. She’s a bartender.” The man juts out his chin in the direction of the bar, where Svetlana and the bartender are still laughing together. Rose! That’s her name, Rose. This beautiful man is best friends with Rose, which can only be a green flag if Svetlana’s raging crush is anything to go by.

“Ah, Rose. I was trying to remember her name,” Ilya smiles. The man’s expression falters for a moment, subtle but there discomfort, before returning to a pleasantly neutral smile. Ilya realizes as the club’s lights flash over them that he has freckles sprinkled across his nose and cheekbones.

Fuck.

“I think I’m going home now,” the man says, placing his empty can on the table and getting up before Ilya can so much as ask for his name. He moves to stop him, ask for his number, anything, but the man elbows through the dance floor with shocking speed, like he’s an Olympic pro at escaping crowds. Ilya finds it oddly sexy.

He looks down at the table, where the man’s finished can of ginger ale sits. There’s some liquid still on the top of the can, right where the opening meets the metal lip. From this angle, Ilya can’t tell if it’s ginger ale or the man’s spit. It’s probably a mix of both.

A crazy part of him wants to pick up the can and lick it off.

Ilya leaves soon after that, not really interested in chatting up someone new after he already fumbled the prettiest person in the club. He tells Svetlana, but he’s not sure she hears him over the sound of the bass, or the sapphic yearning.

As he lays in bed, he opens his phone, checking his social feeds before pulling up his Photos app. Right there, the photo of the bathroom graffiti stares at him, practically begging to be reopened.

Seeking experienced sexual partner (male) to take my virginity (also male). I know a lot about sex, I just haven’t had it. 514-555-1410

He stares at the message again, as if something else will jump out at him this time. Some hidden meaning that tells him who or what is going on. He should delete the picture, really. Forget about the graffiti and move on. It’s just another silly bathroom message.

He opens Hinge instead, checks his messages. Maybe he just needs to chat with someone, remind himself that he doesn’t need to be as desperate as a bathroom vandal, even though he struck out with the most beautiful man he’d ever seen.

Ilya isn’t even sure what that means, and he doesn’t actually want to find out.

Been there, done that. One of the two spouses always ends up catching feelings for him, so it’s really not worth it.

This is the worst one. Kip seems perfectly nice, very cute (and very ripped for a man whose job is listed as smoothie maker), but Ilya can’t bring himself to message back. He knows how this is going to go.

They’ll go on a date, maybe hook up, but there won’t be a connection beyond the physical. They’ll maybe have good sex, and then Ilya will make him breakfast in the morning before they go their separate ways. The only difference here is that maybe Kip will make him a smoothie instead.

He drafts a message. Are you lonely, too?

He hits send. The message goes through, the little delivered underneath confirming its receipt. The message is risky, honest in a way he usually isn’t. But this is a stranger, so it shouldn’t matter. How could it matter, when he doesn’t even know this person’s name?

Because he didn’t message Kip, or the married couple, or even one of his own friends. He messaged the number that was written on the bathroom stall at Cruise Control. The gay virgin, which feels like a mean thing to call someone, if not for the fact that he had self-identified that way.

Ilya stares at the ceiling, wondering how he got to this point. Sad enough to message a stranger who was just looking for sex. Who was the pathetic one now?

Yeah, all the time.
Also, who is this?

Ilya tried to ignore the way his stomach jumped in excitement at the messages.