Work Text:
The night Eduardo arrives in Palo Alto, tired and wet and irritable; he argues with Mark for a while then crashes on the couch.
Sean is outside with the girls in the pool doing a little night swimming but sees him through the glass door as the dark head slowly inches downwards and the stiff and stressed body becomes boneless and limp. He thinks to himself that ‘Wardo’ is far too trusting.
Sean has set up something really good for himself here and he’ll be damned if he’ll let a self-righteous doe-eyed CFO-wannabe walk into his den and shit all over it. Eduardo’s left himself wide open for a little power play, and needs to be taught a lesson about stepping on Sean Parker’s toes.
He hustles the girls out of the pool, as a scheme takes form. “Who’s got the munchies?”
----
Wardo stirs awake to the taste of something creamy and cold in his mouth, and something warm and wet on his collarbone. He shifts tiredly, licking his lips and trying to swallow the strange taste away.
A hand is unbuttoning his shirt and rubbing something on his chest. “Christy.” He groans and tries to shift away; he’s too tired to deal with a needy psycho right now.
Instead of her usual put-upon outburst he hears a burst of giggling, two people giggling. He rubs his eyes, trying to get sleep encrusted eyelids to open. “What?”
A spoon of something is pushed between his lips and he’s forced to swallow it down or choke on it.
“What, what?” He stutters, eyes open now, to find he’s looking at a giggling brunette kneeling on the couch beside him, wielding a teaspoon with vigour.
“Good morning, sleepy head.” She smiles warmly.
“Good morning…?” Wardo rubs his face and runs a hand through his hair, he really doesn’t have a lot of patience right now for Sean’s potentially underage party-girls but he’s far too wiped to do much about it. He should probably see if there’s a bed free as his neck is stiff and sore from holding his aching head up all day.
He squeezes his shoulder, and is surprised to find his shirt collars been pulled open and his skin is greasy with lotion.
“Let me give you a massage.” There’s another girl, a blonde on his left and before he can protest she settles into his lap and starts rubbing oily hands along his neck and shoulders.
“Here comes the aeroplane!” The other girl with the spoon swoops in take advantage of Wardo’s gaping mouth. This time it’s overloaded and some of the goo drips down his chin.
The massaging girl giggles and licks it off. “Mmmm, yummy.”
She rubs him more firmly, working down his chest pinching his nipples as she goes.
He grabs her wrists. “Ok, you can stop there.” He tried to manoeuvre her off his lap when he gets another spoonful of what he believes is yogurt or possibly melted ice-cream.
He lets go of one wrist to wipe his mouth, and glares at the brunette. “Stop that.”
With her hand freed the blonde continues her massage, spreading lotion up Wardo’s neck, onto his cheek and into his hair, moaning and cooing all the way.
He grabs her wrist again and gets a whiff of what she was rubbing on him. “Would you stop please? What is that stuff?”
“Body cream.” She shrugs.
He rubs his chest, the skin is little flushed.
“What kind of body cr..." The other girl has shoved a mouthful of goo at him and gives a triumphant cheer of “Touchdown!” just as the other girl starts babbling about the lotion and how she got it.
He swallows it down in order to yell, “Stop that!”
He’s flushed and sweaty now and needs to get away from these two idiots. He heaves himself to his feet but is hit with a sudden head-swimming sensation of vertigo, and stumbles back down to the couch.
The girls giggle even louder, but Wardo just sits there panting and sweating. He’d really like a glass of water, or something cold right now.
“Aw, baby, you just need to relax.” The blonde is back in his lap unbuttoning his shirt all the way down. “Like I was saying, I got this really nice almond milk stuff that just smell so good and will make you feel sooo good…”
He grabs her hand before she can touch him again. “Almonds.” He looks down at his chest and can see and feel the flush beginning to throb and tingle.
“What are you allergic or something?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” The brunette with the spoon squeals and leaps away from him, hopping to her feet as she frantically scans the label on her ice-cream tub. “Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.”
Wardo doesn’t need to ask, the panting has turned into a wheeze and he feels faint.
The two girls panic and wonder loudly what to do.
Wardo cringes, and mentally scream at himself for spending so much of his young life surrounded by smart people only to end up choking in the company of two complete bimbos. He has such terribly luck with women, it really is time he gave men a chance.
He looks around for his jacket, where he keeps his Epi-Pen. It’s over near his bags, behind the couch somewhere, but he’ll have to get past the girls first.
He shifts over to the side of the couch, dragging himself along with clawed hands.
“What is it, what should we do?” The blonde grabs him, pushing him to peer into his eyes. His chest starts heaving and he knows he’s not going to have the strength to get over there.
“Get... Mark!” He hisses.
They both run off, and he hears pounding on Mark’s bedroom door.
He’s left alone in the messy living room, surrounded by empty beer bottles, dirty glasses and take-out containers. There’s a little vindictive part of him that thinks it would be really satisfying if he died here and Mark never got the opportunity to ‘leave him behind’. That thought makes him feel sad too because it would mean he never got the opportunity to fix things with Mark, never got to see them really make a success of Facebook together and he’s upset with himself for letting it get like this but annoyed at Mark for that too, and for taking so damned long to wake up and come help him breathe again.
Mark stumbles out of bed as the two girls - he can’t remember their names, he’s sure they have them - keep pulling him towards the living room babbling about someone not breathing. He wonders where the hell Sean is, ‘cos he should be doing damage control on whatever mess his stoner friends have made.
He jumps and gives a yelp of fright a little when he sees that it’s Wardo, pale, stiff and wide-eyed like a corpse on the couch.
He runs over to check for a pulse, yelling for Dustin and the interns to come help and generally for everyone to wake the hell up.
Wardo is glassy-eyed, chest heaving like there’s someone sitting on it. His lips are turning blue and Mark is struck by how sad Wardo looks rather than frightened.
“Where the fuck’s your Epi-Pen?!” He pats Wardo and finds nothing. Wardo’s concentrating too much on trying to inflate his lungs to even mouth the words so Mark goes over to his coat and bags. Joy! It’s there in the inside pocket.
Meanwhile Dustin and some others have started to gather. “Holy shit!” The girls are screeching and wailing, which is not helping.
Mark rushes back with the Epi-Pen and uncaps it. He sees Wardo close his eyes in relief.
“Do you know how to use that?” Sean suddenly asks.
It makes Mark think for a second, trying to remember if Wardo told him, or what he’s seen in movies and the first thing that comes to mind is that scene in Pulp Fiction when Uma Thurman gets a shot of adrenalin in the chest. But this is indecision Wardo can’t afford.
“Not the chest.” He stabs it down on Wardo’s thigh with bruising force.
Wardo gasps like he’s been held underwater and groans loudly.
He flops onto his side and Dustin catches him, laying him down as he trembles and pants. Dustin looks up at Mark. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
Mark nods and then realise he’ll have to get the car keys, but has to drag himself away from watching Wardo’s take breath after breath.
He marches back to the bedroom, but not before he notices one of the girls sobbing against Sean’s shoulder.
“I didn’t know he was allergic, you just said to have fun with him, I didn’t know he would get sick. You like the almond lotion so much I thought he would it too.”
“It’s ok, you couldn’t have known.”
“I’m so sorry, Sean”.
Mark doesn’t have time to dwell on it but he is struck by the memory of their first meeting with Sean in the sushi place in New York when Wardo got annoyed at him for ordering for everyone and explained that he had a nut allergy. Mark had scoffed that he was only allergic to almonds and it was pretty rare for sushi to be made with those. It set the tone for the evening though as Wardo never brought it up again but held firmly to his belief that Sean was an asshole.
Mark returns to the living room, where Dustin is trying to get Wardo onto his feet.
“You good to go?” He asks, though up close Wardo looks only a little less like a corpse than his did before the shot of adrenalin.
It takes him a while to focus on Mark but he eventually croaks, “Get me the fuck out of here.”
---
A few hours later Mark is dozing in the ER waiting room, close to Dustin, but emphatically not sleeping on him, when Wardo limps out with a paper bag of medicine, looking completely beaten down.
“I need to sleep somewhere safe.” He mumbles.
Mark nods and eagerly drives them back to the house. He’s feeling a little disconnected as the fright of seeing his best friend go into anaphylactic shock is starting to wear off, so when they get back to the house and Sean is entirely up in his face about the meeting with Peter Thiel this afternoon he can only nod and say yes. He puts Wardo in his bedroom and firmly closes the door.
He’s relieved to find the girls have gone home but he warns the rest of the house that no one but Dustin is allowed anywhere near Wardo under threat of complete excommunication from Facebook, but he’s looking at Sean when he says it.
They have their meeting with Thiel, it seems to go well but they still have to review some details. It leads to dinner and then drinks and it’s pre-dawn by the time he stumbles drunkenly to his room and worms his way under the covers beside Wardo invitingly warm self.
“You had a meeting with that guy, Thiel?” Wardo asks.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I spent the day sick as a dog and you were taking meetings and partying with Sean’s buddy, or maybe just swimming in a vat of Jack Daniels by the smell of it.”
“You sound fine.” He grumbles into his pillow, wishing Wardo would go back to own dorm-room sometimes.
“Mark, I nearly died today because your pal Sean has booby-trapped this whole place with almond products.”
“I think you’re exaggerating.” He mumbles. “I want to tell you about the meeting but all I can do right now is sleep. We’ll talk in the morning ‘kay.”
“Mark, I’m flying back in the morning.”
“I really don’t think you should do that, Wardo.” He also doesn’t think Wardo should be preventing him from sleep.
“I have to. I have to get out of here before he finds another way to kill me off.”
“Sean’s not trying to kill you off. I’ll speak to him in the morning.”
“Right.” Wardo sighs, that relenting sigh he’s always made when he thinks he’s letting Mark have his way against his better judgement, when really he’s just succumbing to Mark’s superior intellect.
“Glad you’re not dead, Wardo. I won’t let anyone kill you off.”
“Thanks.”
The next morning, or late afternoon, when Mark’s head stops pounded he realises Wardo has gone and vaguely remembers some mention of getting a flight.
He’s pissed that Wardo didn’t stay and a little annoyed at himself for not making more of an effort to convince him, but soon enough he’s dealing with the simultaneous news that that the investor Sean brought in is giving them half a million, and the first thing Wardo did when he hit the tarmac was to freeze their account.
He’s hoping that it’s a nut allergy-induced hysteria.