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He shouldn't be up this late, not with a case load that's as full as the one he's got waiting for him in the morning, but the blinking cursor and the bright blue light from the screen – the numbers and angry red boxes – all of it left him tossing and turning and unable to properly sleep.
Now that everything's been finalized – the divorce, the custody agreement, the… child support payments – he's staring at a reality where he's seeing less and less of his public defender's salary than he realized he would.
And the house is uncomfortably quiet and empty.
It makes him ache, just a bit, when he finally sits with it.
Oscar tries to push the reality of his home situation into the back of his mind during the day, as he polishes off a third, fourth… sixth cup of coffee and tries to blink the gritty feeling out of his eyes. He's got a client to represent and the prosecutor he's dealing with is a fucking shark on the best days, so he has to be on his A game.
It'd be easier to bring it if he didn't feel like his head was going to explode.
His fingers are trembling.
He's usually better at keeping his shit together.
One fact about his line of work that used to look a lot like a blessing in disguise is that long hours are practically the norm. If he’s at his desk ten, eleven hours a day, no one questions it because they’re doing the exact same thing.
He doesn't realize how many more he's been putting in until Maisie – usually the first one in and the last one out of the office – starts looking at him sideways.
“Closing time, Díaz. Don't gotta go home but you can't stay here.”
Oscar inadvertently pushes the frames of his glasses upward and rubs his eyes, trying to dispel the gritty, stinging feeling. “You sure about that, Maise?”
She’s not too impressed with the retort, which is fair. It’s definitely not one of his most convincing ones. “It’s been months of this, man. I know I’m one to talk, but you gotta pump the brakes at some point.”
He can't.
There's a gaping chasm in his gut that gets bigger and bigger the longer he spends in the silence of that damn house and longer hours don't make it smaller but they at least push the problem down the line for future Oscar to deal with and if he's too exhausted to really think about anything then he never actually has to deal with them so.
Net positive. Or something.
Maisie tuts at him, the way his mom used to do when he got a little too lost in his own head. “Come to dinner, then. I know you saw that potluck invitation. You never turned your read receipts off.”
“Fine.” He deflates. “I, uh. I didn't exactly make anything though.”
Maisie shrugs. “Denise likes a good Cabernet. Pretty sure a decent enough bottle could count as your contribution. Now git.”
He takes the order for what it is and ends up staring down a massive row of wines in a shop in Little Italy, wondering what the hell the difference is between labels and where he can find the damn Cabernet.
Glancing at the price tag makes him wince a bit. It’s definitely not two-buck Chuck.
He grabs a white wine from Sonoma and a relatively cheap rosé as well, pretty much blindly, just to be extra sure he’s covered his bases.
Before he even gets a chance to knock on the door, it swings open. He doesn’t know how, but he swears Maisie has some weird kind of extra-sensory perception shit going on. “ ‘Bout time you showed up, man. Everyone’s already in the kitchen, come on.”
There’s a low hum of overlapping chatter pouring into the hallway. The few distinct voices he can hear above the rest are definitely people he knows from work already, but there’s one –
“Oscar!” Denise calls out to him from across the kitchen, and in a flash she’s pulling him into the kind of hug that’s threatening to crack his ribs. “It’s so wonderful to see you! Oooh I’ve missed you so much.”
“Denise, you just saw me –” it’s not the hug that makes him wince just then. It’s definitely been longer than he’d like to acknowledge. “Anyway, where do you want me to put these?”
She glances in Maisie’s direction and then back to him, deftly swiping the bottles from his hands. “Pretty sure the red needs to breathe. I’ll go take care of that and Maisie can prove that she wasn’t raised in a barn by introducing you to the people you haven’t met yet.”
Denise gives Maisie a very pointed look and Maisie almost jumps. “Oh! Right.”
All the introductions go by in a blur of names and faces even though there really aren’t many people here... and then–
“Oscar, this genius-ass wunderkind is one of Denise’s.” He’s gonna assume she means grad students, for his own sanity. Not least of all because he’s saluting with a bottle of beer in his hand. “Raf, this is the absolute bane of the DA office’s existence, the man, the myth, the workplace hermit who is determined to figure out how to legally marry his desk.”
“Hey!”
“There, you’ve met all the new people. Play nice now, I’m gonna get everything set up.”
Raf shakes his head only once Maisie turns away, an easy grin tugging at the corners of his lips. “I know this is their house but I swear you can’t take them anywhere.” He interrupts himself by taking a sip of his drink. “Could definitely take you a couple places, though.”
“Shit, man, at least buy me dinner first.” Fuck. Wait. Did he actually just. “Um… I mean–”
Something on his face makes Raf bust out laughing, so he definitely hasn’t fucked up, but also… where did that come from?
Conversation flows easily after that, and if he has maybe a bit more wine than he normally would, that’s nobody else’s business.
Oscar ends up sitting next to Denise and across from Raf at the table, and yeah, he might be one of her grad students, but she really does treat him like she’s one of his more long-suffering tias or something. It’s … It’s nice.
“ – I’m too old to be living in a damn frat house, you know? No disrespect to twenty-year-olds. I just don’t wanna live with five of them while I’m trying to get ready for the MSW exam.”
Denise makes a thoughtful noise. “There’ve gotta be other options.”
“Well, sure, but rent in San Diego is still… rent in San Diego.” Oscar can’t help but wince. It really fucking is.
That’s when it hits him.
Other options.
He has a fully finished fucking basement.
“You’re at SDSU, right?”
Raf cocks his head, and honestly, Oscar is also wondering where the fuck he’s going with this but whatever. “Yeah, bouncing between that and Cal Western. Why?”
“I’ve got space, and I’m pretty much never home.” Denise snorts, which, rude. “You good with a basement apartment?”
When he looks back on it later, it’ll be obvious to him what it means that he’s leaving the office in the middle of the day to haul boxes halfway across San Diego, but right now he doesn’t even think twice about it. Maisie waves him off with a call to “drive safe and don’t do anything I wouldn’t”. He goes through the list of everything that’s been set up and the things he still has to get done. It’s surprisingly little, and he feels… settled. Like he can breathe.
He beats the U-Haul back to his house by minutes and gets the doors propped open to make hauling in boxes and furniture easier.
It didn’t take long to work out details, even with the chaos of dual degree programs and trial schedules, and so here they are, trying not to drop a mattress when one or the other of them attempts a bad impression of David Schwimmer shouting “PIVOT” for laughs.
The second the mattress is in place, Oscar collapses into it without thinking, already feeling aches that he's definitely going to regret more in the morning. Raf just laughs and sits on the edge, near enough that Oscar might feel things about it. “Hey,” Raf says, softly enough that it sets off tingles down his spine. “What happened to buying you dinner first?”