Larry Stylinson ao3 one shots.

a chance of overtime, say, my place at nine

Written by:folkloricfeel

Summary:Louis' found his soulmate, and everything's splendid except for a few small issues: he's never met him, only spoken to him once, and only knows him by the sound of his voice, which he'll probably never hear again. But other than that, everything's working out just fine.

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Louis hates his job.
Hates it, hates it, hatesithatesithatesit with a burning passion. Positively loathes it. So much so that he'd make a voodoo doll for it and spend his shifts sticking pushpins from the supply drawer into it in the most painful manner possible, if he could figure out how to make voodoo dolls in the shape of places of employment, which he can't, which means he'll have to just suffice with the ones for all of his coworkers, sadly. He's doing almost-exactly what he wants to be doing with his life, nearly-close to utilizing his college education, in a just-this-far-from-perfect place, and he is utterly, one-hundred-percent miserable every damn day of it.
Because, the problem is, he's one elevator ride and one small flight of stairs up from the lobby away from what he wants to be doing. On one end of that elevator and those stairs, there is a stage, a beautiful, glorious, Broadway-regulation stage with spotlights that filter in every color of the rainbow and microphones that blend perfectly into your hairline and skin tone, and on his end, there is a fucking boring little gray room with a telephone and an outdated computer that gets grumpy when you try to run any programs alongside Excel or Access. He went through four years of school to have a piece of paper in his hand that says he's BFA-certified in musical theater, and all he's got to show for it thus far is a ticket-taking job. Ticket-taking.
(All right, his official title is "box office manager," but it's a lie, because he doesn't actually get to manage anything but the phone lines and the will call box. He does, however, get to show up at nine every morning and eat his lunch out of a bag or a box in the tackily-painted kitchenette in the break room at precisely twelve o'clock and stay until the clock clicks over from 4:59. He does get to sacrifice at least half of his weekends standing in an even smaller little box of a room in between the two sets of doors at the theater's main entrance, often freezing his ass off from all of the people coming through and letting the draft in, asking elderly arts patrons for their last names and handing them little while envelopes in return. He does get to shuffle through that will call box for last names that don't exist and occasionally get yelled at for it when he pulls a superior and finds out that the temp who works with him on Thursday afternoons spelled things wrong by one letter off, of course.
Perhaps that's why they call it a box office.
Because his entire life has become a series of events shuffling him from one tiny little gray box into the next, until the boxes shrink so much he might die of claustrophobia.
He tries to explain the misery of all of this to Niall sometimes after work, tries to elaborate on the aptness of his witty metaphor and convey the scope of his frustration, but Niall usually just gives him a confused look from his place on their living room couch and asks him to pass the remote.)
In summary: his job sucks, and his life sucks, and he has no clue how the rest of the world's population does this "proper work" business because he could not feel more suffocated sitting in the little room he calls his home thirty-two hours a week.
He doesn't get paid enough for all this grayness. Not enough at all, if you ask him.
Louis sighs exasperatedly as he sinks into his swivel chair, not that there's anyone actually around to benefit from the sound of it, given that most of his coworkers don't bother to show up until at least ten or eleven o'clock—arts people—and that his office is isolated enough from the rest of the offices to sufficiently starve him of human contact, but it's still worth the gesture, thought-that-counts and all. He rolls up to his desk, yells at his voicemail light to stop blinking because he can, and then puts the phone on speaker to clear the thing off. Nine messages greet him: three ticket inquiries for the touring production of Miss Saigon that goes up Wednesday, two hangups, one question about if it's too late to refund season tickets (considering that they've only got one more show on the bill left after this, the answer is probably yes), an angry patron who wants their money back for the Rat Pack tribute show because no one told them that the handicapped seating would have an obstructed view, a misdirected call for the youth theater program producer, and an inquiry from his boss about whether he can pick up the Thursday night performances for the run of said Miss Saigon. Why, of course he can, he grumbles as he scrawls down phone numbers, it's not like he's got anything better to do with the Thursday nights in October or for the rest of his life other than to sell his soul and firstborn child to this place, after all.
He's in the middle of leaving a voicemail for the season ticket refund person when his second line lights up.
He finishes up giving the person his supervisor's number and clicks over with a sigh.
"Hello, you've reached the Cowell Center for Performing Arts box office association, this is Louis, how can I help you?" he recites on instinct, probably sounding too dry and annoyed for a customer service job like his, but he cannot actually bring himself to care.
"Um, hello, is this where you get the tickets and stuff?" The voice on the other end of the line piques his attention, because said voice sounds young, male, and with a low rasp in it that piques other things to attention in him, too.
"It is," Louis says, swiveling to put his feet up on the desk, since he's all alone, "what show were you interested in?"
"I haven't got any idea," the voice says, and that's a little unexpected, given all the arts patron and stage mom types he usually talks to on the phone, "what ones've you got?"
"Miss Saigon and Phantom, if you're looking at this season," he says, pulling up the Access database for the current season bill, "but our 2013 season bill just went on sale to the general public last week, so I can run you down the list of those, too, if you want."
"Um," the voice says again, sounding adorably clueless and confused, "Phantom, is that the one with the French Revolution? Where they sing in the tavern? Or what one is that," the voice trails off, and Louis wonders if he's as cute in person as he sounds over the phone.
"Ah, so close," Louis says, crossing one leg over the other and twirling his phone cord around his index finger, "I think you're thinking of Les Miserables." The voice makes a little sound of recognition. "Phantom's the one with the chandelier and the funny-looking fellow in the mask, think of me, think of me fondly, that one?"
"Oh," the voice says, then pauses. "You've got a pretty swell voice." Another pause. "I mean."
"Thanks," Louis says, biting back the your voice makes me swell, too that he'd offer if he weren't at work, where flirting with the clientele would probably be frowned upon by Paul for some odd reason. "Did you want me to pull up a particular night for Phantom to look at seating? We're selling pretty fast for that show, but I can probably accommodate you."
"Oh," the voice says, and all of its one-syllable soundbytes are like delicious little nuggets that Louis wants more and more of, like those fun-size candy bars you can't stop eating until you've run straight through the whole bag. "When is that, anyway?"
"Well," Louis says, grabbing for the season brochure on his desk even though knows these things by heart by now, "it opens the first of November and runs every night but Monday for two and a half weeks," he starts flipping through the pages to give himself something to do with his hands, "plus there's matinees on Saturday, Sunday, and the last Wednesday if you've got a group of more than twenty students with you, but I doubt someone like yourself has that many kids on hand, unless you've been a busy, busy boy."
Another pause, and when the voice comes back in, Louis thinks it's what a blush must sound like through a phone cord. "No, I don't have any—it's for my friends, the tickets aren't even for me," the voice says.
"Very generous of you," Louis nods. "I'm sure they'll enjoy appreciate whatever you decide on, we bring in the top national touring circuits for our season bill." It's a bullshitted lie, because they're B-list enough they haven't been able to get Wicked the past five times it's been through their district area and half their season lineup gets rounded out with tribute concerts and Cirque du Soleil knockoffs, but it's a bullshitted lie he gets paid thirteen bucks an hour to say, so he'll take it.
"It's for their anniversary?" the voice says, like the young man's trying to ask Louis' opinion if that's a good gift or not, and Louis thinks he damn well wishes he had friends who would go to such lengths for a gift for him. It's all he can do to get Niall to write on his Facebook wall every December when he's back home seeing his parents and Louis can't stand over his shoulder and dictate the message.
"How sweet," Louis says, "how long have they been together?" He figures he can justify the call time on this inquiry as 'taking a personal investment in the customer and making them feel important' and not 'listening to your dreamy voice ramble about any and all possible extended topics of conversation,' yeah, that's good.
"Three years?" the voice tells him, and there's with the questioning again.
"That seems like a good three-year anniversary present to me," Louis responds, looping the phone cord around his wrist and over again just because.
"Yeah," the voice says, "Liam likes music sorts of things, generally, I think? And Zayn likes what Liam likes, or likes it when Liam likes things, anyway, so that's good." Louis files away that piece information in his brain as a very vital one, because this voice having friends named Liam and Zayn who have been dating for three years is at least one step closer to this voice murmuring in his ear from over top of him on a couch with apartment lights dimmed and a champagne bottle uncorked, which is quite the pretty picture in Louis' brain, even if he hasn't got the slightest clue exactly who to picture.
"Then I think they'd love Phantom tickets," Louis proclaims. He'd love it if a boy with as good of a voice as this would buy him Phantom tickets, anyway.
"What about the other one?"
"Miss Saigon?" Louis asks, and the voice answers in the affirmative. "That one opens next week and runs through the weekend before Halloween."
"Oh," and Louis wants to nibble on the nougaty syllable, roll it around on his tongue and suck on it until every last bit of it dissolves away. "All right, then."
"All right?"
"Yeah," the voice says, "I'll think about that, I guess." Louis' hopes fall a little bit, because a ticket purchase would've at least gotten him a name, and possibly a phone number he'd put into his cell contacts for a week or two and stare at creepily until he convinced himself using his job to stalk cute-sounding boys violated some code of ethics in the contracts he signed at the beginning of the year, but most of his inquiries that end in I'll think about it must take a lot of consideration, because he's still yet to hear back from a lot of them, including the ones who missed their shows in the process of all of that thinking.
"Feel free to call us back whenever you're ready to make a decision," Louis says, "I'm here every day but Tuesday. We can get your friends set up with their anniversary gift in just a few minutes."
"That sounds good," the voice says, then adds, "oh, hey, can I get your name? So I know who to talk to, I suppose. I mean." The last syllables come out all gooey and flustered, which Louis takes as a sign the guy must be as positively smitten with him as he is on his end.
"Louis," Louis tells him, sending him a wink through the phone line even if he can't see it, "Louis Tomlinson."
"It was nice to talk to you, Louis," the voice says in return, and Louis wonders if they wiretap these things, if there's any way Paul can pull that for him, because he'd very much like to listen to that voice say Louis again.
Or maybe on loop for hours.
Or the rest of his life.
Mostly in the privacy of his own bedroom.
"Nice to talk to you, too," Louis says, "have a great day, and I'll look forward to hearing your choice soon, then."
"Yeah," the voice says, and Louis savors every last morsel of it that reaches his ears, "soon. I mean. Goodbye?"
"Bye now," Louis says, and there's silence for a moment where Louis almost gets his hopes up he's going to say something else, but instead, there's shuffling and a click to silence that Louis lets linger in his ear for just a moment longer, the sound of that voice saying Louis echoing in his ears over and over again.