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stillaneWell. I have written bandslash, and not just bandslash, even. Bandslash in scifi underwear.
This is entirely Pete Wentz’s fault. It was his idea. No, really. I can prove it, and will at the end. Just take my word for it for now, though. Otherwise it kind of gives away the game.
If you are Pete Wentz... please don't point and mock too strenuously, yes?
For the record, I adore Jimmy Stewart. No offense is intended to him. I am less sanguine about cockroaches.
Fandom: FOB
Pairing: Pete/Patrick
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: Will be hugged like a puppy. Even if it bites.
Notes: Thank you to
terribilita, who kindly stepped up to beta the crazy ramblings about pretty boys. Summary: Pete goes looking.
… But I Digress
It takes him three days to notice. That’s exhibit one in the People vs. Pete Wentz.
*******
On the first day, he blinks awake to early afternoon sunshine and the feel of phantom miles sliding back into sleep. He crawls downstairs for freezer-fresh waffles and orange juice. Hemingway wanders around his fenced kingdom and presses his nose to the glass when he wants in, and Pete lets him lick the extra syrup. He posts a few lines of random, but he’s too at peace for the crapshoot of comment reading. He finds an acoustic and a patch of ottoman and strums around the words in his head. He writes a few down, watches a movie he’s seen at least once for every year he’s been alive, and eventually falls asleep without meaning to.
That’s Sunday.
Monday and Tuesday are washrinserepeat, except he has Fruit Loops on Monday and does not keep any of Tuesday’s words.
On Wednesday, he tries to call Patrick.
His phone is a minion of evil, however, and has other ideas. It’s eaten Patrick’s numbers - all of them – like a zombie after brains, and it’s already gotten Pete’s because the cell number he dials from memory gets him a tinny recorded ‘We’re sorry…’ eight times.
He calls Andy for a refresher because Andy will give him less hell than Joe, and won’t be stoned. He says, Hey, what’s Patrick’s cell? and Andy says, Patrick who?
*******
By the time he hangs up, he’s got Andy almost convinced that Pete isn’t crazy, and himself almost convinced that he is.
*******
It’s all easy enough to find, when he looks. The internet is an amazing place.
He starts with his own name, and that’s educational. Apparently some things are inevitable; one of these is that the entire known universe will have seen his dick. That’s a little disappointing.
Eventually, he winds up on Youtube. There are 27,532 results for the band name alone. He looks for concert footage first. He wants the live version, not the Memorex.
It’s them. Almost.
The guy is better than good. He’s got the voice, more range than Montana and velvet underneath, and he works the crowd like he knows them all and their grandmas, too. (Provided their grandmas have piercings and ink.) He ducks Joe without obvious thought, and never rides over Andy.
David Halfield has slim shoulders and great hair. He wears black boots. Pete hates him instantly.
The songs are different. They’re good, still. Every word is Pete’s own, he knows, and some of them he even recognizes. They’re the ones they didn’t use, the ones that didn’t fit. They aren’t out of place here, though.
And all of this he can almost understand. It’s strange, and it makes him feel like he’s looking at the world through the wrong prescription, but none of it is impossible. If he tilts his head just right, he can pretend they’re only touring with friends and having a bandcest moment.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds into “I’ll Have What She’s Having (With A Side Of Beef)”, the Pete on his screen trips his way across the stage and into David Halfied’s personal space. He leans his forehead against David Halfied’s dark hair and sings into David Halfied’s blue cotton t-shirt, and David Halfied laughs around the chorus.
The Pete on his screen pulls away and keeps playing like the world hasn’t just ended.
*******
Exhibit two is a man he doesn’t know singing words Pete has given him freely.
*******
The easy answer, of course, is to go the fuck back to sleep. He’s dreaming, or he’s insane, and in his experience, both of these can be cured by simply waking the hell up.
Which is what he’ll do. As soon as he falls asleep.
He’s had enough mornings at the end of the day to know that rest is the best player of hide-and-seek ever. He’s got patience on his side, though. He does.
Better, he’s got sedatives.
Take two of these and... He closes his fingers around his cell and his eyes over his thoughts.
He wakes to another morning and the knowledge that he is monumentally fucked.
*******
He turns to Kafka and Capra for the answers, but the bastards are both unhelpful and dead. He’d take being a cockroach or Jimmy Stewart over this any day.
*******
New plan: Patrick isn’t here. Ergo, Patrick is somewhere else.
It’s harder than it should be to find someone in an age when he can get pictures of his house from space in five minutes. He does research, though, because he’s not going to Patrick’s house and not finding Patrick. He will do this right.
Or maybe he won’t. There is no Patrick Martin Stump(h) in all of the greater land of Google. There is a Patricia Marie Strum who gives Pete a bad moment, until a click reveals a 57-year-old realtor from Nebraska with grey hair and three children. Pete doesn’t think there is a connection.
An hour later, Pete’s just at the point of reevaluating that theory — and all its terrifying implications — when suddenly, there he is. The picture is grainy, and he’s just a head behind a drum set, and he’s credited as P. Stupm, but he’s Patrick.
He’s in Chicago. He’s in a band. Some things are inevitable.
Step one down. Moving on.
The plane ride is fairly normal, for the given value of normal that has been his life these last few years. He doesn’t wait in any lines, the flight crews all call him by his father’s name (Would you like a drink, Mr. Wentz? Fuck yes, but no.), and first class still has more leg room than three of him could use.
There are crowds of loud, manic smiles with waving hands attached at every landing, and he wants to tell them to stop. He’s not who they want. He’s not who they see.
They are not his, and he is not theirs.
Instead, he smiles and waves and doesn’t let them touch him.
*******
Fate’s a bitch, and she wears an irony-studded collar.
*******
Losing the attention is easy enough. He puts on a hat, and suddenly he doesn’t exist.
He’s never been inside this store. He picked Patrick up exactly four times on the way to early gigs before the music won and the steady paycheck lost, and every time was a rolling stop. Joe, who has been inside, never bothered with any details but Patrick.
Patrick, who is five feet and six years away from Pete. His hair is too short and uncovered. His pants and his shirt are both black and average, probably store-standard, but his shoes have Technicolor tongues.
He helps a woman with a purse like a small, sequined continent find Barry Manilow, and does not say an impolite word. There are whole paragraphs written in his eyebrows and fidgets, though, and Pete still has the secret decoder ring.
There’s some freakish suburban version of “world” echoing off the shiny, shiny rows of waiting music. That the soundtrack of this mess is an unholy marriage of saxophone and accordion should really be more surprising.
He waits until Purse Woman is happily making off with Manilow, and then he clears his throat. He had ten good opening lines worked up on the plane, but as usual, he misplaces them in the moment.
“Hi.”
Patrick recognizes him instantly.
He does an honest-to-god double take with his eyes alone, and then blinks. He looks around, carefully. “Uh… hi. Not that I want to blow your cover, or anything, but… well, hi. Can I help you?”
And a little bit more of Pete crashes and burns all the way down. Because Patrick isn’t looking at him like he’s That Guy Who Sleeps On My Couch Sometimes, or That Guy Who Fought Me For That Pedal On The Bridge, or even That Asshole Who Eats My Cheerios. He’s looking at Pete like he’s That Guy From That Band.
“Just passing through.”
*******
For a very long time, somewhere below conscious thought, this was what mattered: he knows Patrick. Always. Anywhere.
Right nouns, wrong order.
*******
He walks out into a flat grey sky and the passing of flat grey people. There’s a corner in front of him and a lamppost, old fashioned like something from a lost Paris movie with lovers and dancing. He walks forward until his head rests against it, tightens his arms around cold metal until his hands can reach back to himself.
He’s giving in and going under. He shouldn’t, he knows, but that’s never stopped him before.
And very quietly he hears, “Hey.”
Every part of him goes independently still. After a moment, his head slips lower against the lamp, and he can feel his shoulders shaking although he tells them not to.
“You asshole.”
“I know.”
“Motherfucking prick.”
A hand comes to rest on his right shoulder blade, thumb wandering over and between vertebrae. “I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t mean to, but still. No, just… Sorry. Granted, I didn’t know what I was doing… But I still didn’t mean to.”
“How the fuck do you not mean to not exist?”
Patrick stays very carefully silent, and Pete feels the water open up under him. There’s a snowglobe full of glass houses in that question. The palm on his back stays warm, though, and the thumb strokes in waltz time.
“Can we go with, ‘I’m here, therefore I am?’ ”
Pete can’t help it. It’s a conditioned response. He laughs, maybe not all there, and rolls himself until the post is at his back. Patrick’s fingers ride over the crest of his shoulder and rest on his collarbone.
And it all makes a bizarre kind of sense. This may be Pete’s nightmare, but it’s not his dream.
Patrick’s been in Pete’s head for six years now, the line between his thoughts and his voice. His very own singing telegram. There’s no reason Pete shouldn’t be in Patrick’s head right back. He’s a little more physical about it, maybe, but then he always is.
A world in which he is too close to Patrick beats the shit out of the alternative, anyway.
And of course Patrick dreams in the fifties.
He’s the lovechild of Sinatra and Bacall, all smoke and pinstripes. His left hand is in his pocket and his hat is at an angle between charm and obstruction, probably an accident, and fuck if that isn’t Patrick all over.
Pete leans into the hand on his chest, wraps his own grip around that wrist. Patrick keeps his eyes on Pete’s face, and his expression can’t seem to choose whether to live in embarrassment or worry. His bottom lip is going pale under his teeth.
He’s Patrick, and he’s here, and he knows Pete.
Pete watches his eyes until he’s too close, until it’s too dark under the hat brim.
Cinderella kissed a fella…
*******
Later on, he’ll have time to wonder how he could have been so stupid for so long. There’s only one person in the world who could believe anything would be normal without Patrick.
*******
He opens his eyes to darkness and the slide of miles and miles of solid pavement. Above him, Joe is snoring in harmonics.
He pulls the curtain aside slowly. Patrick’s is already open, and he watches Pete across two feet of aisle and a thousand acres of indecision.
“Hey.”
Pete doesn’t stop to think. He slides from one bunk to the next and straight through pretense. Patrick doesn’t pull away to make space for him, just rests a hand on Pete’s ribs to keep him from falling.
“So.”
“Yeah.”
“That was…”
Patrick nods, a rustle against his pillow. “Apparently.”
“See, this is what happens when you have pizza and existential angst before bed.”
It’s lame, but Patrick’s teeth glint at him in the dark. Slowly, Pete leans forward and brushes his lips against that smile.
And Patrick does not pull away.
His t-shirt is old and worn under Pete’s fingers, nothing like elegant. There is no rain-clean street smell here, just a hint of sleep sweat and warmth. Pete lays his head on the pillow and lets all of it wrap around him. He keeps his eyes closed.
“That wasn’t… That was… like your naked-in-front-of-the-class, right?”
Patrick snorts, quietly. “Nah. I have actual naked-in-front-of-the-class dreams, too. It’s always my third grade, mostly because I think Mrs. Jordan was creepy as all hell. Seriously. She had crossed eyes. No matter where you were, she was watching you.”
Pete doesn’t follow his script and laugh. His hand tightens on Patrick’s shirt. “No bullshit. You don’t… Tell me you don’t think…”
And as usual, Patrick knows what words fill in the blanks. He hesitates, and then he doesn’t. All it takes is a tilt of his chin, and Pete feels the careful press of lips against his own. “Not for long.”
Maybe it’s just because Patrick is Patrick. Maybe there is no changing that. Maybe Pete will try anyway.
Not right now, though. Pete’s eyes don’t open when he asks, and Patrick’s breathing is evening out. His arm is heavy over Pete’s waist.
He wonders what Patrick’s other dreams are.
*******
As for why this is Pete Wentz's fault:
Hypothetically asking, Ok, what if one day you woke up and Patrick was not there. Would you be worried?
Asked by I Didnt Do It on 2005-06-14 19:59:00
it would make me want to disappear to wherever he was.
Answered by pete on 2005-06-14
Seriously. How can you expect me to resist that?
It takes him three days to notice. That’s exhibit one in the People vs. Pete Wentz.
On the first day, he blinks awake to early afternoon sunshine and the feel of phantom miles sliding back into sleep. He crawls downstairs for freezer-fresh waffles and orange juice. Hemingway wanders around his fenced kingdom and presses his nose to the glass when he wants in, and Pete lets him lick the extra syrup. He posts a few lines of random, but he’s too at peace for the crapshoot of comment reading. He finds an acoustic and a patch of ottoman and strums around the words in his head. He writes a few down, watches a movie he’s seen at least once for every year he’s been alive, and eventually falls asleep without meaning to.
That’s Sunday.
Monday and Tuesday are washrinserepeat, except he has Fruit Loops on Monday and does not keep any of Tuesday’s words.
On Wednesday, he tries to call Patrick.
His phone is a minion of evil, however, and has other ideas. It’s eaten Patrick’s numbers - all of them – like a zombie after brains, and it’s already gotten Pete’s because the cell number he dials from memory gets him a tinny recorded ‘We’re sorry…’ eight times.
He calls Andy for a refresher because Andy will give him less hell than Joe, and won’t be stoned. He says, Hey, what’s Patrick’s cell? and Andy says, Patrick who?
By the time he hangs up, he’s got Andy almost convinced that Pete isn’t crazy, and himself almost convinced that he is.
It’s all easy enough to find, when he looks. The internet is an amazing place.
He starts with his own name, and that’s educational. Apparently some things are inevitable; one of these is that the entire known universe will have seen his dick. That’s a little disappointing.
Eventually, he winds up on Youtube. There are 27,532 results for the band name alone. He looks for concert footage first. He wants the live version, not the Memorex.
It’s them. Almost.
The guy is better than good. He’s got the voice, more range than Montana and velvet underneath, and he works the crowd like he knows them all and their grandmas, too. (Provided their grandmas have piercings and ink.) He ducks Joe without obvious thought, and never rides over Andy.
David Halfield has slim shoulders and great hair. He wears black boots. Pete hates him instantly.
The songs are different. They’re good, still. Every word is Pete’s own, he knows, and some of them he even recognizes. They’re the ones they didn’t use, the ones that didn’t fit. They aren’t out of place here, though.
And all of this he can almost understand. It’s strange, and it makes him feel like he’s looking at the world through the wrong prescription, but none of it is impossible. If he tilts his head just right, he can pretend they’re only touring with friends and having a bandcest moment.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds into “I’ll Have What She’s Having (With A Side Of Beef)”, the Pete on his screen trips his way across the stage and into David Halfied’s personal space. He leans his forehead against David Halfied’s dark hair and sings into David Halfied’s blue cotton t-shirt, and David Halfied laughs around the chorus.
The Pete on his screen pulls away and keeps playing like the world hasn’t just ended.
Exhibit two is a man he doesn’t know singing words Pete has given him freely.
The easy answer, of course, is to go the fuck back to sleep. He’s dreaming, or he’s insane, and in his experience, both of these can be cured by simply waking the hell up.
Which is what he’ll do. As soon as he falls asleep.
He’s had enough mornings at the end of the day to know that rest is the best player of hide-and-seek ever. He’s got patience on his side, though. He does.
Better, he’s got sedatives.
Take two of these and... He closes his fingers around his cell and his eyes over his thoughts.
He wakes to another morning and the knowledge that he is monumentally fucked.
He turns to Kafka and Capra for the answers, but the bastards are both unhelpful and dead. He’d take being a cockroach or Jimmy Stewart over this any day.
New plan: Patrick isn’t here. Ergo, Patrick is somewhere else.
It’s harder than it should be to find someone in an age when he can get pictures of his house from space in five minutes. He does research, though, because he’s not going to Patrick’s house and not finding Patrick. He will do this right.
Or maybe he won’t. There is no Patrick Martin Stump(h) in all of the greater land of Google. There is a Patricia Marie Strum who gives Pete a bad moment, until a click reveals a 57-year-old realtor from Nebraska with grey hair and three children. Pete doesn’t think there is a connection.
An hour later, Pete’s just at the point of reevaluating that theory — and all its terrifying implications — when suddenly, there he is. The picture is grainy, and he’s just a head behind a drum set, and he’s credited as P. Stupm, but he’s Patrick.
He’s in Chicago. He’s in a band. Some things are inevitable.
Step one down. Moving on.
The plane ride is fairly normal, for the given value of normal that has been his life these last few years. He doesn’t wait in any lines, the flight crews all call him by his father’s name (Would you like a drink, Mr. Wentz? Fuck yes, but no.), and first class still has more leg room than three of him could use.
There are crowds of loud, manic smiles with waving hands attached at every landing, and he wants to tell them to stop. He’s not who they want. He’s not who they see.
They are not his, and he is not theirs.
Instead, he smiles and waves and doesn’t let them touch him.
Fate’s a bitch, and she wears an irony-studded collar.
Losing the attention is easy enough. He puts on a hat, and suddenly he doesn’t exist.
He’s never been inside this store. He picked Patrick up exactly four times on the way to early gigs before the music won and the steady paycheck lost, and every time was a rolling stop. Joe, who has been inside, never bothered with any details but Patrick.
Patrick, who is five feet and six years away from Pete. His hair is too short and uncovered. His pants and his shirt are both black and average, probably store-standard, but his shoes have Technicolor tongues.
He helps a woman with a purse like a small, sequined continent find Barry Manilow, and does not say an impolite word. There are whole paragraphs written in his eyebrows and fidgets, though, and Pete still has the secret decoder ring.
There’s some freakish suburban version of “world” echoing off the shiny, shiny rows of waiting music. That the soundtrack of this mess is an unholy marriage of saxophone and accordion should really be more surprising.
He waits until Purse Woman is happily making off with Manilow, and then he clears his throat. He had ten good opening lines worked up on the plane, but as usual, he misplaces them in the moment.
“Hi.”
Patrick recognizes him instantly.
He does an honest-to-god double take with his eyes alone, and then blinks. He looks around, carefully. “Uh… hi. Not that I want to blow your cover, or anything, but… well, hi. Can I help you?”
And a little bit more of Pete crashes and burns all the way down. Because Patrick isn’t looking at him like he’s That Guy Who Sleeps On My Couch Sometimes, or That Guy Who Fought Me For That Pedal On The Bridge, or even That Asshole Who Eats My Cheerios. He’s looking at Pete like he’s That Guy From That Band.
“Just passing through.”
For a very long time, somewhere below conscious thought, this was what mattered: he knows Patrick. Always. Anywhere.
Right nouns, wrong order.
He walks out into a flat grey sky and the passing of flat grey people. There’s a corner in front of him and a lamppost, old fashioned like something from a lost Paris movie with lovers and dancing. He walks forward until his head rests against it, tightens his arms around cold metal until his hands can reach back to himself.
He’s giving in and going under. He shouldn’t, he knows, but that’s never stopped him before.
And very quietly he hears, “Hey.”
Every part of him goes independently still. After a moment, his head slips lower against the lamp, and he can feel his shoulders shaking although he tells them not to.
“You asshole.”
“I know.”
“Motherfucking prick.”
A hand comes to rest on his right shoulder blade, thumb wandering over and between vertebrae. “I know. I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t mean to, but still. No, just… Sorry. Granted, I didn’t know what I was doing… But I still didn’t mean to.”
“How the fuck do you not mean to not exist?”
Patrick stays very carefully silent, and Pete feels the water open up under him. There’s a snowglobe full of glass houses in that question. The palm on his back stays warm, though, and the thumb strokes in waltz time.
“Can we go with, ‘I’m here, therefore I am?’ ”
Pete can’t help it. It’s a conditioned response. He laughs, maybe not all there, and rolls himself until the post is at his back. Patrick’s fingers ride over the crest of his shoulder and rest on his collarbone.
And it all makes a bizarre kind of sense. This may be Pete’s nightmare, but it’s not his dream.
Patrick’s been in Pete’s head for six years now, the line between his thoughts and his voice. His very own singing telegram. There’s no reason Pete shouldn’t be in Patrick’s head right back. He’s a little more physical about it, maybe, but then he always is.
A world in which he is too close to Patrick beats the shit out of the alternative, anyway.
And of course Patrick dreams in the fifties.
He’s the lovechild of Sinatra and Bacall, all smoke and pinstripes. His left hand is in his pocket and his hat is at an angle between charm and obstruction, probably an accident, and fuck if that isn’t Patrick all over.
Pete leans into the hand on his chest, wraps his own grip around that wrist. Patrick keeps his eyes on Pete’s face, and his expression can’t seem to choose whether to live in embarrassment or worry. His bottom lip is going pale under his teeth.
He’s Patrick, and he’s here, and he knows Pete.
Pete watches his eyes until he’s too close, until it’s too dark under the hat brim.
Cinderella kissed a fella…
Later on, he’ll have time to wonder how he could have been so stupid for so long. There’s only one person in the world who could believe anything would be normal without Patrick.
He opens his eyes to darkness and the slide of miles and miles of solid pavement. Above him, Joe is snoring in harmonics.
He pulls the curtain aside slowly. Patrick’s is already open, and he watches Pete across two feet of aisle and a thousand acres of indecision.
“Hey.”
Pete doesn’t stop to think. He slides from one bunk to the next and straight through pretense. Patrick doesn’t pull away to make space for him, just rests a hand on Pete’s ribs to keep him from falling.
“So.”
“Yeah.”
“That was…”
Patrick nods, a rustle against his pillow. “Apparently.”
“See, this is what happens when you have pizza and existential angst before bed.”
It’s lame, but Patrick’s teeth glint at him in the dark. Slowly, Pete leans forward and brushes his lips against that smile.
And Patrick does not pull away.
His t-shirt is old and worn under Pete’s fingers, nothing like elegant. There is no rain-clean street smell here, just a hint of sleep sweat and warmth. Pete lays his head on the pillow and lets all of it wrap around him. He keeps his eyes closed.
“That wasn’t… That was… like your naked-in-front-of-the-class, right?”
Patrick snorts, quietly. “Nah. I have actual naked-in-front-of-the-class dreams, too. It’s always my third grade, mostly because I think Mrs. Jordan was creepy as all hell. Seriously. She had crossed eyes. No matter where you were, she was watching you.”
Pete doesn’t follow his script and laugh. His hand tightens on Patrick’s shirt. “No bullshit. You don’t… Tell me you don’t think…”
And as usual, Patrick knows what words fill in the blanks. He hesitates, and then he doesn’t. All it takes is a tilt of his chin, and Pete feels the careful press of lips against his own. “Not for long.”
Maybe it’s just because Patrick is Patrick. Maybe there is no changing that. Maybe Pete will try anyway.
Not right now, though. Pete’s eyes don’t open when he asks, and Patrick’s breathing is evening out. His arm is heavy over Pete’s waist.
He wonders what Patrick’s other dreams are.
*******
As for why this is Pete Wentz's fault:
Hypothetically asking, Ok, what if one day you woke up and Patrick was not there. Would you be worried?
Asked by I Didnt Do It on 2005-06-14 19:59:00
it would make me want to disappear to wherever he was.
Answered by pete on 2005-06-14
Seriously. How can you expect me to resist that?
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Date: 2007-06-15 02:30 am (UTC)I'm... kind of secretly pleased with that line, actually. It was one of those that I wasn't paying that much attention to, and then it snuck up on me. Thank you for liking it, too.