A/N: Oh look! Another WIP when there are literally dozens of other WIPs I could be writing. I'm sorry. Writing is a fickle, mercurial thing for me and I struggle to stay motivated. So, when an idea hits me, I feel the need to pursue it.

A/N2: Not all theatres are created equal. This theatre is entirely fictional, cobbled together from my experiences working in regional theatre around the country. Regional theatre itself is an interesting term, technically it should only refer to a theatre belonging to the League of Resident Theatres (LORT A-D), but a lot of LOA theatres, who have a Letter of Agreement with Actor's Equity and LORT, call themselves regional theatres and this has been going on for at least a decade and a half. In the hierarchy of theatre, if you want to assign one, in the US you have Broadway, and below that on equal(ish) footing you have LORT and large Off-Broadway theatres like the Public (where Hamilton premiered as did A Chorus Line), then you have other Off-Broadway theatres, then "regional" theatres (of which summer theatres might qualify, if they have LOAs), then you have professional theatres (they pay people and the goal is to be a business), community theatre (people just there to put on a play, they might get a stipend but this is not the main source of income for MOST of the people working there. I also want to note that community theatre, while at the bottom of this hierarchy, is not BAD. Community theatres can be INCREDIBLE and I will defend their right to exist and to be considered as fantastic to my death). Academic theatres exist on a different track, I don't like to lump them into this hierarchy.

The theatre I am creating here is an LOA regional theatre: I will explain their season in more detail as the story progresses, but essentially they have a mixed season: four Equity shows that are rehearsed and produced in-house, a youth theatre ensemble that produces four shows a year, and then a summer and winter concert series with musicians being invited in to perform, as well as a spring and fall dance concert where dance companies come in and perform. It's a busy schedule, but I've worked at busier places. I might change their season up depending on how I feel or based on reader feedback.

A/N3: I will try to explain as much as I can as we go, dropping in information in a way that isn't boring or painful to read or giant author's notes like the above, but if you have specific questions, please, please do not hesitate to ask them!

A/N4: As always, a special thanks to Ro for support, beta reading, and general amazingness. I also want to thank Amberly and Maeve, for encouraging me and for being lovely, lovely friends. And Amberly in particular, for helping me tweak Solo and Duo's relationship to a much better idea than my original.

A/N5: Reviews, I have to say, make my day. They make me smile and float and sigh in delight and are truly an inspiration.

A/N6: Not a Wilmington native. Have never even been there except to drive through. I have spent a fair amount of time in Southport, which I am aware is super different. But I wanted a southern beach location and North Carolina is… well. Near if not dear to my heart. I am also basing the theatre itself a little on Thalian Hall and a LOT on the dozens of theatres I have worked in over the years. The theatre I am describing doesn't really exist - it's a combination of them all.

Warnings: angst, language, sex, drugs, rock n' roll (sorry I had to)

Pairings: will change. I will try to update as we go. The MAIN pairing will be 2x3, but that doesn't mean we won't have 2x? And 3x? In fact, this fic starts out as 2 x Solo. If there is a pairing you are really jonesing for, let me know and I will see if I can work it in.

Other People

Chapter One

The smell was the first thing that hit him.

The theatre was already dark, only the faint, warm glow of the ghost light on stage casting a thin gold haze over the first rows of the audience and barely illuminating the edge of the stage and the drop down into the orchestra pit.

Even so, he closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath.

It was the same. The faintest whiff of mildew, of age and decay being beaten back by lemon-scented carpet cleaner, and he could smell the sawdust and ozone, barely there, but still discernable.

"How's it feel to be home?"

He opened his eyes and looked at the outline of the woman beside him. The woman who was the closest thing he had ever had to a family. Who had called him two days ago and begged a favor from him. The kind of favor that required him to move across the country and walk through memories with every step he took.

It was an effort to bite back all of the things he wanted to say.

"Weird," was what he settled on as being close to the truth without being offensive.

She smiled and nudged his shoulder with her own.

"It's really good to have you. It's… I appreciate this. So does Howard. I know it's asking a lot and-"

"No, it's not asking a lot," he cut her off. "I'm… glad I could help out."

She smiled at him again.

"C'mon, I'll take you to your office and let you get settled."

He followed her down the outside aisle on the right side of the audience. At the very front, on either side of the orchestra pit, were two sets of stairs that led up to the stage. He followed her up those, using memory to judge the rise, and then they were on the stage.

He risked a glance over his shoulder, out into the darkness, and he felt the creep of nausea again working its way through his belly. The same feeling he had been fighting for the last two days, ever since he got the call.

"Hey, Trowa? It's Cathy, from Wilmington - from The Algonquin Theatre? I know it's been a long time. I hope you've been doing well - you never update your Facebook page! All that's on there are photos or things other people tag you in. It makes you very hard to stalk! Anyway, I'm calling because I need to ask you a work question. Please call me back when you can."

He hadn't returned the call. He hadn't answered the phone when it rang, when he saw the Wilmington area code and felt dread curl through him. Even after listening to the message, even after feeling himself smile at the sound of Cathy's warm voice, Trowa hadn't been able to bring himself to return the call. It was from a different lifetime, a different world, and he had done everything he could in the last ten years to put it behind him.

But it was Cathy. So of course she called again, the day after she had left the message, and Trowa had been on a ladder, a knife clamped between his teeth, one hand holding onto the sign that was refusing to light up no matter how many times they rewired the damn thing, and his other hand fumbling for his multi-tool. And of course Matt, who should have been just minding the ladder and not reaching into Trowa's back pocket for anything unless it was a prelude to them fucking, pulled out his phone and answered it.

And Trowa had to listen to Matt, with his casual, California drawl, making small talk with Cathy while Trowa did his level best to fix the fucking sign, and eventually Matt had told him to come down from the ladder and answer the phone and let him have a go.

Trowa had glared and scowled and mentally called Matt every explicative he could think of because the only reason Trowa was on the ladder in the first place trying to fix it was because Matt had said he had tried everything he could think of and could Trowa please just look at it?

But he had climbed down, had put away his tools and taken the phone away from Matt's ear even though the other man was mid-sentence, was in the middle of telling some embarrassing and depressingly unembellished story about Trowa that no one, especially Cathy, needed to hear.

Matt had arched an eyebrow at Trowa's glare, but had relinquished the phone and then called for a hand while Trowa took the phone and walked off the stage and into the house so he could sit down in relative privacy.

He hoped Cathy hung up before he made it to the mezzanine balcony.

"Cathy?"

She didn't.

"Trowa! Oh, it's so good to hear your voice! How have you been? How do you like Phoenix? How is the tour? It sounds like you have so many friends there! And Matt seems really fantastic!"

It was a flood - Cathy's words and her enthusiasm and Trowa's memories.

Trowa looked down to the stage, to where Matt was busy calling the sign a lousy piece of shit and- Trowa hadn't realized Matt knew German.

"I'm good. Phoenix is hot - we head to Sacramento in three days. The tour is good, almost over. Matt is… fine."

Matt, a carpenter on the show who was a few years younger than Trowa and seemed to lack all understanding of personal boundaries, was okay to work with but undemanding and enthusiastic in bed. He and Trowa had been fucking since the tour stop in Atlanta two months ago.

There was a moment of awkward silence, and Trowa wondered why she had called, wondered what question she wanted to ask him, wondered what-

"How have you been?" He felt like an idiot, like a rude, selfish idiot for not thinking to ask the question right away.

Cathy had been there for him during some of the worst times in his life, and Trowa was too much of an asshole to even think to ask her how she was.

Her voice broke through his mental haranguing.

"I've been good - still working at the Algonquin, obviously. I'm the general manager now."

"You aren't doing the Youth Ensemble anymore?" For some reason, the thought of Cathy, who had given him a mask and pushed him onto the stage for the first time, no longer working with children was depressing.

"I'm not, the Algonquin is - we have a wonderful director for the Youth Ensemble now - Relena Darlian. Really, really amazing. You'd like her, I think."

Trowa arched an eyebrow at that. Considering the fact that Trowa notoriously - then and now - liked almost no one - he wondered what made her think he would like her replacement.

"In your message, you said you had a work question for me?"

"Oh. Yeah. Yes." He could hear her draw in a deep breath and he felt a weight settle in his gut.

Fuck.

"Our technical director just took a job in Dubai. He, well, he left yesterday morning, and we're… we're in the middle of the season and we open Metamorphoses in less than a month and we have a full slate of concerts this summer, the Youth Ensemble performances and then the fall programs, and we… Well, Howard and I are desperate."

Howard, the scruffy, Hawaiian shirt-wearing Artistic Director who looked better suited to spending his days with a metal detector and a Pina Colada searching for treasure on the beach than running a professional theatre, had been just as instrumental in changing Trowa's life as Cathy had.

"What do you need?" he asked.

He knew more than a few technicians who had gone to work in Macau or Dubai - the two hot spots for insanely well-paying theatre work these days. But he didn't know any who left suddenly in the middle of a season.

"We need a new Technical Director - one who knows the space and can get us through the next few months, at least, and I was hoping-"

Trowa tried to rack his brain for people he knew, people who wouldn't mind leaving behind substantially better-paying jobs in NYC or LA to go work at a mid-level professional theatre in the relative obscurity of Wilmington, North Carolina.

"I don't really know anyone who's available. But I can make a few calls and-"

"Trowa, we were… Howard and I were hoping you could come back."

"Me?"

He said it too loudly, and a few of the stagehands looked up at him.

Cathy drew in another deep breath, and he knew she was preparing to launch into a Talk.

"I know it's asking a lot, Trowa, I do. I know you've got your tour, and your entire, amazing life that you've built and I- we just need someone who knows the space, who cares about the Algonquin, and who can help us get through Metamorphoses and the summer concerts at least. And you- you know the space, you know the quality we expect, and you are so talented and- and your tour wraps up in three weeks. Is there any way you could take a leave?"

Trowa leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

Why? Why was this happening to him now?

Now, when he was only three weeks from the end of a tour, when he had only just yesterday received an email from the NYC scene shop manager saying that she wanted to meet with Trowa when he got back to town to talk about some opportunities for him. When he hadn't been back to Wilmington in ten years and felt perfectly happy to never go back.

But Cathy and Howard - they had raised him, more or less, had shown him that people could be decent and good and that he could make something of himself, could be happy, could escape.

He owed them.

"HA! Take that, you filthy little fuck!"

Onstage, Matt had managed to make the sign work again.

"I need to think about it," Trowa told Cathy. "Can I call you back tomorrow?"

"Of course. I- I really appreciate this, Trowa. I appreciate you thinking about it. I know- I know Wilmington isn't your favorite place in the world. But the Algonquin-"

Is home.

She didn't need to say it, and he couldn't bring himself to.

-o-

He followed Cathy across the dark stage, reached past her to yank open the stage door that still, ten years later, caught on the slightly rusted metal frame, and he stepped into the cavernous scene shop.

How many hours had Trowa spent in this shop?

He had started off just lurking near the theatre, desperate to avoid going home, and Cathy had been the one to drag him to the Youth Ensemble, had been the one to teach him improv and win a smile from him. But once Trowa had met the carpenters, the painters and electricians, once he had seen the magic of turning a flat piece of wood into marble, he had drifted from onstage to off, spending every moment he could shadowing the foul-mouthed technicians, learning everything he could. There was magic in stagecraft, in transforming the ordinary into a new world.

It looked so different, and so achingly familiar at the same time.

There was new equipment - a new table saw thankfully replacing the one that Trowa used to think had been made during the Civil War - new chop saws, a panel saw, welding equipment and a scroll saw. But there were also the same old workhouses that Trowa had learned on - the drill press, the bench grinder and sander, the radial arm saw. The tool cage had been expanded, the work tables rebuilt, the walls repainted. A few dozen new layers of glue, paint and grime added to the shop floor.

The Technical Director's office was the same, more or less. It had, at some point maybe twenty or thirty years ago, been built into the wall of the shop, extending out to create an eight by eight foot cubicle, complete with door and a huge window. Above the office was storage - stacks and stacks of chairs - and when the door was closed, all sound from the shop floor was amazingly blocked off.

Trowa had spent the night in that office a few times, had snuck out of his own bed when things were too awful and slipped through the door by the loading dock that had the shitty lock that was easy to pick.

The office was just big enough to accommodate an enormous desk, several filing cabinets, and a lumpy couch that had felt like heaven to curl into.

When Cathy led him over to the office and unlocked it before dropping a bulging ring of keys into Trowa's hand, Trowa looked over her shoulder and couldn't help but feel disappointed to see that the couch had been replaced with something new and relatively stain-free.

"Well, here you are - I'll let you get settled in?"

Trowa moved past her and set down his backpack by the desk.

It was an absolute mess. It looked like Solo had left so suddenly that he hadn't even bothered to properly shutdown the desktop computer or put any of the dozens of plans and sketches on his desk into any folders or order of any kind.

"Thanks."

Trowa wondered what would happen if he just lit the desk on fire. Wondered if Cathy or Howard would ever forgive him.

"We've got a production meeting scheduled for this afternoon - four o'clock. I'll come find you a little before then and take you over?"

"Take me over?" he echoed, confused. "I know where the conference room is. Unless you've moved it?"

The theatre had definitely undergone some renovations in the last ten years. He hadn't thought it was anything major, aside from the addition of a second and third performance spaces attached to the main building.

"No, no - that's still in the same place. But we always do Friday production meetings at Sir Ed's. It's a block and a half away. It's a bar."

That was, Trowa thought bitterly, the first good news he had heard in days.

-o-

It had taken almost twenty minutes for Trowa to put the desk to rights - or at least, to shove enough things out of the way or off of it to actually work.

He had his Mac open on one side of the desk, the ancient desktop chugging away on the other side, and a battered, coffee-stained set of architectural drawings of the theatre spread out in between. He had the design package open on his computer, and the meager drafting that Solo had embarked on open on the desktop.

What the fuck have I gotten myself into?

This was a disaster, a nightmare of epic proportions - this was worse than the time that the tour truck had been hijacked in El Paso and half of the moving lights stolen.

Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad - then again, no. It was worse. Insurance had covered that.

There was no insurance to cover this.

In fact, insurance might be part of the problem.

Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses was a good play, a great show with a strong narrative and enough spectacle to make audiences ooh and ahh even as they dabbed tears from their eyes. The 'spectacle' being the fact that the play required a giant pool of water in which there was a battle, sex, a few deaths and the most depressing happy ever after ending Trowa had ever seen.

Trowa had seen the play performed before, actually liked the play, and the designs for this production looked interesting and challenging as hell.

Because you couldn't just plop down a twenty by twenty foot, three feet deep pool of water on a stage that was sixty years old and pray that the stage deck didn't collapse under the weight.

First, you needed to figure out if the deck could hold the weight. Which meant finding the plans for the theatre and doing a hell of a lot of math.

Of course, the only set of plans Trowa had been able to find so far looked to be as old as he was - and while that wasn't exactly a bad sign, they were nearly impossible to read between the stains and faded ink.

Trowa was in the middle of opening up every single file on the desktop, praying for an updated set of drawings of the theatre so he could even begin to calculate the load that the stage deck could hold, when he heard whistling.

On tour, and at University before that, Trowa had worked with enough old-timers and enough superstitious techs, that hearing someone whistle in a theatre was novel, bizarre and irritating. It was one of those things you just didn't do.

Already frustrated by the seeming disorder that Solo had worked in, by the fact that the files on the computer were in no way logically named or organized, by the lack of basic R&D that Solo had done on a show that was opening in a month, and confronted by the reality that he might really be in way, way over his head - Trowa looked up from the computer and glared through the large window in the TD office that overlooked the scene shop.

Swaggering through the shop, whistling, twirling a key ring in one hand and holding an industrial-sized coffee thermos in the other, was a lean, black-clad figure. Trowa couldn't immediately tell if it was a man or a woman - the shoulder-length braid of brown hair and messy bangs could just as easily belong to a man or a woman, and they were still too far away for Trowa to make out their features. He could make out the red bandana tied around their neck and the batman logo on the black t-shirt that clung to a trim torso.

The figure walked past the window, past the open door of Trowa's office, and out of sight.

Before Trowa had even tried to focus on the mess in front of him, the figure was back, features drawn together in a scowl.

"Who the fuck are you?"

Male, Trowa decided, taking in the baritone voice and the firm jaw-line that anchored otherwise androgynous features. His eyes were a dark blue and absolutely furious.

Trowa arched an eyebrow, baffled by the rage being directed at him.

"Trowa."

His name did nothing to alleviate the other man's anger or confusion.

"Are you the welcoming committee?" he asked, probably too snarky, but his anxiety and frustrations - combined with the fucking whistling - getting the better of him.

The man stared, Trowa's sarcasm clearly unsettling him.

"I'm Duo."

Duo.

Trowa mentally reviewed the staff list that Cathy had emailed him yesterday.

Duo Maxwell. The master electrician.

What was it Cathy had said about him?

We're still teaching him how to play well with others.

There was definitely a lot of room for improvement, Trowa couldn't help but think.

"We should probably sit down and talk about the schedule today," Trowa forced himself to be neutral and professional. "There's a film in the black box tomorrow night, and then we have strike on Sunday and then-"

Duo held up a hand to forestall Trowa.

"I know what we have coming up. Zechs, Solo and I populated the calendar last week. But who the fuck are you?"

Duo seemed genuinely confused, as if seeing someone, anyone, in this office was unexpected.

"I'm the new Technical Director."

"You- you're the- So he took the fucking job, then, huh? Fucking-" Duo turned away, shaking his head and muttering. He once again left the office and, a moment later, Trowa heard the distinctive sound of metal clanging on concrete.

Reluctantly, Trowa got to his feet and leaned out of the door to look.

At the other end of the shop he could see Duo, shoulders hunched, standing in a pool of coffee, the huge thermos on the ground by his feet.

-o-

End note: Hey! Help me figure out what the season should be. Tell me your favorite play or musical, or any suggestion of bands, dance companies, etc. I will try to work them in!