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laniew1So I was PMSing a couple of weeks ago and was randomly clicking on links to Panic!slash and clicked on one that I could have sworn was tagged Ryan/Brendon and instead turned out to be Brendon/Spencer to which then I had to listen to the Ryan that lives in my head whine:
Ryan: What about me?
Me: Not everything is about you.
Ryan: *laughs* No really, what about me??
Me: Look, will it make you feel better if I write something?
Ryan: Will I get Brendon?
Me: No, I'm thinking Gen!Ryan with maybe Ryan/Pete subtext.
Ryan: Hmm, there can never be enough Ryan/Pete... write me fic.
So I did, I think Ryan thinks he is now the boss of me.
Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such… Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
TITLE: A Life Alone
RATING: PG (for language)
PAIRING: Ryan POV / Ryan/Pete subtext, Spencer/Brendon in the background
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such… Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened and will never happen quite like this.
A Life Alone
They corner Ryan in his room, his sanctuary from the fans and the noise and being ‘Ryan Ross’.
Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such…
Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
It was a new tour, for a new album. They have two buses and everyone has their own room and Ryan will only realize after that when Spencer had spent time on the other bus it wasn’t to give Ryan the solitude that he craved and that he and Jon were the only ones taking advantage of having separate rooms.
They corner him in his room and they all sit down and Spencer does all the talking, Brendon intercutting here and there and Jon giving his two cents worth and what choice does Ryan have but to agree with the decision that has, obviously, already been made without him.
He didn’t understand, and he didn’t want to agree. But he doesn’t think they even notice. They’re too busy looking at each other and talking without talking and he and Spencer used to be able to do that, and Brendon and him and Jon and him to a small degree.
He wonders at what point he’d been cut off, he hadn’t thought that he was that oblivious to the happenings around him.
He wonders why he’d been cut off.
“Just a little break,” Spencer says again and he looks at Ryan and Ryan pastes a fake small smile on his face and Spencer, who has known him forever and a day and can tell when he’s going to utter a lie by the change in his breathing, he doesn’t notice.
So Ryan nods, mouth firmly shut because if he opens it he’ll ask ‘why, why, why’? And maybe there is no explanation they could give him that will make things make sense.
Make things less like he’d been cut out of his own band and that his thoughts on the matter hadn’t mattered in the least.
These are his best friends, his brothers and they hadn’t even asked for his thoughts on the matter before they’d made the decision for him.
He wonders what he’s supposed to do with all the words in his head now that there isn’t a voice to sing them or a band to play them.
******************************************************************************
They dissolve easily, he doesn’t throw fits left and right like they’d most likely expected, he wishes he could, because he still doesn’t understand and he wants to.
The album hadn’t done that badly, not as well as they’d hoped but not as horribly as he’d feared, so he doesn’t understand why taking a break right now is so important.
But he doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t throw fits, he doesn’t really say anything at all because he’s afraid of the ‘why, why, why’s’ that are just barely tied up behind his closed mouth.
Towards the end, he thinks, they maybe see something isn’t totally right. Because Spencer starts shooting him looks of concern and Brendon stares at him like he thinks Ryan is something fragile that he’s dropped and broken and hasn’t figured out where all the pieces were so he could make Jon glue it back together.
He spends a lot of time in his bunk, because once the decision was made and Ryan had been told, well Spencer and Brendon and Jon obviously felt there was no need to hide in the other bus where they’d made all their decisions and they’d subsequently had it sent away.
So they could be one big happy family again. That plan probably doesn’t go the way they want it to, because Ryan still doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want to scream and yell the not-understanding to the sky… so he hides.
“Why don’t you come play with us?” Jon asks, hand pressed to his shoulder and there is always concern there but Ryan doesn’t know if it is real concern or if Jon is maybe the best actor of all them and besides…
“Writing,” Ryan says, waves his journal and he walks away, closing himself in his bunk and writing words that no one will see, that Brendon won’t sing and he puts his headphones on and doesn’t listen to the low murmurs that are probably about him.
******************************************************************************
He finds the little cottage a month before the end of the tour (before the end of them).
He can’t go back to Vegas, to him Vegas means him and Spencer and Brendon (and Brent) and being young and ambitious and ready to take on the world. (It also means pain and suffering and never being good enough for his father but he’s buried those feelings in words and music that he’ll never play live again.)
Chicago was out because he was pretty sure that was where Jon was going, Spencer and Brendon in tow.
And not LA because of Pete and the rest of Fall Out Boy and that’s where he’s expected to go and it hurts that Pete had to have known about this, okayed this decision because Pete is their boss for the most part and taking a ‘break’ isn’t something that can be just decided on a whim.
At the next rest stop he stays on the bus while the others get off to get junk food (and talk about him) and he makes the call and an offer.
The cottage is tiny, secluded, quaint.
It is perfect.
******************************************************************************
Keltie laughs at him when he tells her his plans. She doesn’t think that Spencer and Brendon and Jon are going to let him go that easily and Ryan doesn’t tell her that he gets talked at more then he gets talked to.
At their last stop, their very last concert, Spencer sits down with him the night before and talks at him for hours.
About their past and their childhood and reminding him that it was just for a little while, to allow everyone to regroup and Ryan wonders the whole time at what point they’ll call and tell him it is over.
He thinks that this might be how a lot of bands break up.
They took breaks and then just never came back from them.
******************************************************************************
They say goodbye at the airport, Brendon’s arm over Spencer’s shoulder and Ryan thinks it telling that Spencer isn’t shrugging it off. Just raises an eyebrow and glares at him, Brendon grins and doesn’t move.
He is hugged by all of them, even Brendon lets go of Spencer long enough to wrap his arms around him and Ryan can’t make out what is being murmured against his neck but he thinks that he isn’t supposed to anyway.
“Come back when you’re done,” Jon says, like Ryan is just going out of town to run errands or something.
Jon is the last hug (Spencer used to be, but now Spencer and Brendon are wrapped up in one another) and Ryan just nods, better to agree with whatever they said then run the risk of ‘why, why, why’ spewing forth in greater numbers then he would like.
He figures that it is a moot point anyways, by the time he would (hypothetically) be ready to come back to Chicago they will call him and tell him that they think the break should be permanent.
They think he is going to Vegas or L.A. He hasn’t shown anyone his plane ticket because no one has asked to see it and the minute that he goes through security they won’t care where he went anyway.
His heart hurts and his throat burns and the words rush through his mind, he taps his fingers against Jon’s back before pulling away.
He has his notebook in his bag and he knows that the words in his mind are melancholy and sad and it is probably a good thing that Brendon will never sing them because they would have to offer boxes of Kleenex’s free of charge at the door.
He smiles one last time and settles his bag on his shoulder, he takes a step away and watches the three of them reform themselves into one unit, without him.
They won’t miss him, Ryan decides, they already fit together like they know they aren’t missing any pieces.
It still hurts.
******************************************************************************
“I’m not living here,” Keltie says, raised eyebrow and crossed arms.
“I didn’t ask you to,” Ryan says absently. He is watching the movers unload boxes into the living room and he can’t wait for everyone to leave so he can start sorting through his life and putting things where they belong.
“I know,” she says softly, he looks over at her and she looks back at him with distant resignation and sadness.
“I’m sorry,” he says. And he is. Keltie is the closest thing to a best friend he has since Spencer decided that he no longer wanted the position and vacated it without naming his substitute.
******************************************************************************
Pete is maybe the only one who figures out that Ryan isn’t where he’s supposed to be at the beginning.
Ryan realizes this when Pete e-mails him within three days of his moving into the cottage and asks him where he is.
Ryan responds by describing the sunset he’s looking at.
They communicate that way and only twice does Pete write: pick up your damn kick
Ryan’s sidekick is buried in a box in the top of the hall closet and he only reaches for it twice a day now instead of the half a dozen times that he’d gone for it the first day, he instead sends him a list of strange and unusual things he’d seen during a walk into town.
It takes another two weeks before he starts getting multiple e-mails a day. He thinks that might be about the point when Pete went to the others and they all realized that nobody knew where he was.
Which was probably a feat unto itself as he wasn’t exactly a nobody.
But he hasn’t put makeup on in a month; and he doesn’t dress like ‘Ryan Ross, emo rock star’ anymore.
He dresses like a normal twenty-something in blue jeans and t-shirts, he leaves his makeup bag under the bathroom sink and he leaves off all the embellishments that he would normally affix to himself, so he was, almost, entirely anonymous.
Pete threatens and cajoles, though he never gives out his e-mail to any of the others. Ryan thinks that he likes being the only one that has any sort of contact with Ryan.
ill hire a pd
where are you?
are you ok?
ill sic spencer on you
theyre worried about you
The last one causes Ryan to avoid his e-mail for a week. Because of all the people he thinks would lie to him Pete isn’t one of them.
He’s seen the pictures, he picks up the check-out magazines when he gets groceries and he’s seen the pictures of Pete and Brendon at a club opening, arms over one another’s shoulders, seen the pictures of Brendon and Spencer and Jon with big grins, all wrapped up in another.
They don’t miss him; he knows Spencer well enough that, even in pictures, he can read only happiness in Spencer’s eyes.
When he turns his computer back on there are twenty-seven e-mails of varying degrees of worry from Pete waiting, he reads them, then deletes them all without responding to them and then opens word and starts typing.
He has words in his head and if he can’t make them into a song maybe he can make them into something else.
Besides if he waits long enough Pete will get bored and move on and he won’t have to worry about e-mails wondering where he is.
He likes that there is exactly one person (besides the bank people and the real estate people and the lawyers and the guys that had moved his belongings from Vegas to the little cottage) that knows where he is.
If they haven’t figured out to talk to Keltie yet that isn’t his fault.
Though, he reminds himself, Keltie was sworn to secrecy and Keltie took her promises seriously.
******************************************************************************
He might not be writing lyrics anymore and he might not have the three of them and their instruments of choice ringing in his ear but he doesn’t stop writing.
He can’t.
He still has all the words and when Keltie calls him on Sunday to check in (she always calls on a Sunday and he wants to tell her that she doesn’t need to but it is nice to hear a voice that knows him so he doesn’t) he tells her, “I’m writing a book.”
And waits for her to tell him that it is a stupid idea and that he is an idiot.
“What’s it about?” she asks instead.
And he tells her about the convoluted plot, about best friends since childhood that drift apart when they both fall in love the same guy, about how the hero goes away to allow them to be together without having to feel guilty. How he finds himself in a small town, where the neighbors are friendly and always have a welcome smile and how he comes to accept that being alone is not always that bad.
Keltie is silent on the other end for a long enough time that Ryan thinks that she’s hung up on him instead of telling him that his idea sucks.
“You deserve to be happy,” she says.
Ryan hmms at her and they talk for a few more minutes about the weather and a premiere that she’d gone to before they hang up.
******************************************************************************
Despite his best efforts he makes friends.
Colleen at the book store sets aside paperbacks that she thinks would interest him after they have an hour long discussion on modern day poets and the difficulties of getting published in that genre.
Sandy at the grocery store pulls the weekly magazines down if they look like they’re going to run out before he gets into town for his groceries, because she’s seen him pout when the US Weekly was sold out.
Just because he’s not living the Hollywood life any longer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to keep up with those people that he knew that were still there.
Mark at the coffee shop remembers his caffeine of choice after his first visit and sometimes Ryan threatens to change his order just to shake things up.
“You like things to be the same,” Mark just says, taking his money and smiling at him.
One day he presses a flyer into his hand along with Ryan’s change.
“I’m having my first gallery opening thing,” Mark shrugs and Ryan glances down at it. “Be nice to see some familiar faces there.” Ryan nods and walks away to get his coffee, he folds the flyer up and shoves it into his pocket. He finds it when he’s sorting clothes for laundry.
He goes because he thinks it would be rude not to.
Besides he thinks that Mark has been undercharging him for his coffee for the last two weeks and Ryan doesn’t think it’s bribery but he likes to return his favors.
******************************************************************************
The gallery opening is well underway by the time Ryan arrives. Wearing the one suit that he can piece together, and there isn’t a rosette or a piece of lace to be found.
He almost went for the eyeliner in the bathroom when he was getting ready and his hand had stopped over it, hovering as he’d stared at himself in the mirror. He almost didn’t recognize the young man staring back at him.
And that is who is there now, a young man not the femme boy that he’d played like a role for so many years.
It had been a month and a half since the last time he’d put anything on his face other then cleaners and moisturizers.
He had put the liner back and closed his makeup bag, stowed it under the sink and left, grabbing his keys on the way out.
Mark is pleased to see him; they exchange a manly hug and big smiles. He introduces him to his fiancé who is a small vivacious red head with a wide, white smile. Her name is Maria and she shakes his hand and kisses him on the cheek and thanks him profusely for coming.
The gallery is packed and he waves at Sandy and is accosted by Colleen when she wraps her arms around his waist.
“I don’t know a single person here with the exception of three,” Ryan admits, Colleen laughs and links arms with him, dragging him from group to group for introductions and there is only one instance that scares him.
The mayors’ sixteen year old daughter opens her mouth and closes it when Colleen introduces him and Ryan just pleads with his eyes for her to not say anything and she doesn’t.
Though she does find him later when he’s going from painting to painting and demands an autograph in exchange for her silence, she has several pictures to choose from and she’ll even allow him to choose the one that he’ll sign and personalize.
Ryan agrees, because anything that keeps the others from finding him any quicker is a good thing, he’s not foolish enough to think he can hide forever. But he hopes that he can pull it off for longer then a couple of months.
He buys two paintings at the end of the night, one he’ll send to Pete because he thinks that the colors and the mood are things that Pete will appreciate, the other is for himself.
Mark’s jaw drops when he pulls his checkbook out.
“I just wanted a few people that I knew here,” he blusters, Ryan just nods and makes out the check.
He’s buying the pieces because they spoke to him, like the words in his mind do sometimes; and he’s buying them because Mark didn’t invite him because he saw a prospective sale.
******************************************************************************
It’s almost midnight when he gets back to the cottage, he stopped for coffee on the way and he’s hoping to get a chapter written before he goes to sleep.
He left a light on in the kitchen and he curses himself for not leaving the porch light on, he hadn’t thought he’d be gone for so long.
He almost stumbles over a bag when he goes up the steps and he hears the voice before he sees anyone.
“Ryan Ross.”
Ryan squints and takes a step back.
Because that’s Pete sitting on his swing, one leg drawn up to his chest and staring at him like he’s a ghost or a mirage. Hemingway sitting next to him, giving him what Ryan is pretty sure is a disapproving look from where his head is resting on his paws.
“Pete.”
******************************************************************************
It’s surreal moving around his cottage with Pete there.
With anyone there.
Ryan hasn’t had anyone in his home since Keltie had left and where before there had seemed to be so much space, now Ryan feels caged in, trapped.
If Pete has found him, it is only a matter of time before the others land on his doorstep.
His flight or fight reflex is being triggered and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Pete watches him in the kitchen, he’s leaning against one counter and Ryan is moving just to move. He feels almost like Brendon right then, all hyperactive energy, but he thinks if he stops moving then it’ll sink in that his peace and quiet are a thing of the past.
“Are you going to ignore me all night?” Pete asks, bemused tone and Ryan wants to say he isn’t ignoring him.
He couldn’t ignore him, his body is almost hard wired to respond to Pete’s presence and he’s not a seventeen year old fan boy anymore, but that boy is still in there and mumbling ‘Pete Wentz is standing in my kitchen’, complete with dreamy sighs and heart shaped eyes.
Besides, he doesn’t think that anyone could ignore Pete.
He’s just choosing, to attempt, to not respond to his presence, which means not looking at him.
“I’m not ignoring you,” Ryan mumbles, Hemmy brushes up against his leg and Ryan glances down to see him glaring up at him reproachfully. “I can’t believe you brought him with you.”
“Well it wasn’t like I was going to leave him behind was it, besides I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to get your head screwed back on straight and I wasn’t willing to leave him with Joe for that long.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way my head is screwed on,” Ryan mutters.
“No? You just go off and buy cottages in the middle of the ass end of nowhere because things in Ryan-land are all hunky dory.”
“Ryan-land?” Ryan scrubs at a spot on his counter. “And this isn’t nowhere; we have a Wal-Mart you know.”
Pete snorts and Ryan knows that if he turns he’ll see Pete rolling his eyes at him.
“And that’s your sure fire sign of civilization, that the town has a Wal-Mart? And Ryan-land is that space in your head that you seem to reside mostly in and make stupid decisions based on, Brendon named it and we voted on it as a group.”
“Why are you here?” Ryan asks softly, maybe they’ve sent Pete to tell him that things are over.
He feels Pete’s arms go around his chest, locking his arms at his side and he stiffens. He could break free if he needed to, but Pete is strong and there would be a fight and most likely bruises and injuries.
“I only found you because of Keltie you know, she’s worried about you. She thought that you would have broke by now and called Spencer or me or someone to let us know where you were and that you were okay.”
“I told you that I was fine,” Ryan mutters.
“No you’re not, trust me, if anyone can tell if someone is not okay it’s me,” Pete rushes on when Ryan goes to disagree. “If you were okay you would have gone to Vegas for a couple of days, maybe did some gambling, possibly come out to L.A. and stayed with me while you figured out how to confront Spencer and Brendon about the fact that they’re super-gay for each other and neither one told you. And then you would have gone to Chicago and done it, you would have fought and maybe not talked for a few days and you would have wrote a song or two about your best friends not being able to trust you with their hearts or something about unrequited love. You would have all made up and gone back into the studio and started working on the third album and things would be okay then.”
Ryan breathes, hangs his head. Maybe Pete doesn’t know about the break, about the break-up that is sure to follow before to long.
“You wouldn’t have run off to the ass end of nowhere, because Wal-Mart or no, this is nowhere. I wouldn’t have Spencer and Brendon and Jon calling me five times a day asking for updates on you because apparently I’m the only one that knew that you had seven e-mails and then tried every single one of them until I got a response.”
“They wanted to take a break,” Ryan whispers. And it still hurts, the decision made without him. “They wanted to take a break and they told me we were doing it. They never asked my input or talked about it with me; they decided that we were doing it so we did.”
“A break means a break, no concerts, no singing. A break means taking a vacation and maybe going to an amusement park or a couple of parties or something,” Pete squeezes him, rocks him slightly back and forth, like he’s a child that needed to be soothed.
“It’s just a matter of time before it becomes a break up,” Ryan says morosely, because he’d seen the writing on the wall, he hadn’t needed anyone to spell things out for him.
Pete just sighs, like Ryan is disappointing him somehow and he feels like he’s missing something crucial.
“Taking a break means taking a break, it doesn’t have to mean anything more then that Ryan.”
******************************************************************************
Pete has brought two bags with him besides Hemmy’s carrier. Ryan sees them and wonders how long he plans on staying.
“I don’t have a guestroom,” Ryan shakes his head.
He does, but there is no bed in there. Just his desk and chair and computer and he doesn’t want Pete Wentz anywhere near his computer.
At least not unsupervised.
Unsupervised he would find the rough draft for the book that Ryan is writing and Ryan doesn’t feel that it is in anyway ready to be read by anyone besides him.
It’s a work in progress and he’d like an opportunity to read it and reread it and be his own worst critic before he lets other eyes gaze upon it.
“We’ve shared a bed before,” Pete rolls his eyes at him like he’s an idiot.
“I have a couch,” Ryan says ignoring him. “I’ve napped on it once or twice, it seems comfortable.”
Because when they’d shared a bed they’d been something more then the friends that they were now, before Pete decided that playing it straight was the best thing for his career and his band and ended that part of their relationship.
“Are you afraid I’m going to sully your virtue?” Pete leers at him and Ryan wonders, suddenly, if he’s being handled. If Pete is being light and friendly and leering and smirking to put him at ease and keep him from being depressed and maudlin about his band breaking up without him.
“I don’t have any virtue left to be sullied, you made sure of that,” Ryan mutters. By the time Pete had ended their relationship (and Ryan wonders why he’s always being the one told that things are over, instead of having the opportunity to be the one to end things) there were very few things that they hadn’t done together in Pete’s bed.
Ryan misses that sometimes. The closeness and togetherness and having someone who was just his. Keltie had been that before she’d slipped into Spencer’s role of best friend.
He wonders if he should be honored that he is one of the handful of people that Pete Wentz has actually, completely, slept with. That he can’t be brushed under the rug and when (if) Pete ever finally settles down with someone, his name (along with Mikey and Jeanae and Ashlee) is going to be listed off to his wife-to-be as those that have shared his bed and his life, if even for a short time.
******************************************************************************
He wakes and feels as if he is clinging to his bed with his fingernails, half of his body is sweating, the other half is freezing.
He feels a hand twitching against his stomach and puffs of breath against his shoulder. He twists his head and sees Hemmy’s head sharing his pillow and Pete taking up a good 7/8 of the bed along with all the blankets.
He knows that he’s skinny, but he doesn’t understand why, when he shares his bed with someone, that translates to ‘I only need 4 inches to sleep on, feel free to sprawl to your hearts content’.
The three times that he was forced to share a bed with Brendon because of ‘Hotel issues’, Brendon had managed to kick him off the bed while he was sleeping, the fourth time a Hotel had screwed up he’d just slept in the tub.
Because as much as he wanted to share a bed with Brendon, falling off the bed in the middle of the night - was not a repercussion he was willing to deal with. He wonders, idly, if Spencer has curbed Brendon’s ‘kicking people off the bed’ tendency or if Brendon only kicks people out of his bed if he doesn’t really want them there in the first place.
He doesn’t know why Pete is in bed with him, when he closed himself in his bedroom Pete was still grumbling about being forced to sleep on the couch and Ryan would have given up the bed and slept on the couch himself; if only Pete hadn’t acted like getting Ryan’s bed was something he was owed.
“Pete,” he hisses and Pete twitches and kicks out with one leg. Ryan traps it with one of his and manages to not fall off the bed. He silently congratulates himself and stares at Pete until his eyes snap open.
He knows that Pete hates that.
“Dude,” his eyes close almost immediately, it’s still dark outside.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on the couch?” Ryan says pointedly, he goes to pluck Pete’s hand off his stomach and instead lays his on top of it. He thinks his fingers are stupid and wonders when they got a mind of their own.
Pete’s hand flexes under his, then he links their fingers together and a small smile appears on his face. Ryan looks away because that expression has always meant that Pete has got something he wanted and Ryan stopped being that thing that Pete wanted a year and a half ago.
“Your couch is in no way comfortable, Hemmy insisted that your bed would be plenty big enough,” Pete’s voice sounds tired and Ryan almost doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know what Pete’s been dealing with since he left.
“Pete,” he starts, when he makes a motion like he’s going to get out of the bed and go sleep on the couch himself, Pete squeezes his fingers and manages to haul Ryan closer without actually using any force.
Hemmy opens one eye and glares, then stands, shakes and moves to the bottom of the bed where he pointedly faces away from them.
Pete laughs and manages to get Ryan all cuddled up against him, arms and legs wrapped tightly around him and Ryan would think it meant something, if he didn’t also think that Pete was attempting to trap him.
“Go back to sleep Ryan,” Pete says softly, he kisses his cheek and his forehead and then closes his eyes.
Ryan sighs and does just that.
******************************************************************************
Pete is on the phone in his backyard; Ryan thinks that he’s talking to the others. He’s sure that he heard Spencer’s name at least once.
There’s a knock at the door and he sees Pete glance inside and Ryan frowns at him before he goes to answer it.
Mark stands there, two wrapped paintings at his feet and a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Since when do you deliver?” Ryan asks when Mark hands him the cup; he pops the lid off and takes a deep breath, eyes closing.
He had to forego his coffee that morning because he didn’t dare leave Pete alone in his house, he might come back and find it had been sold out from under him.
“Only to friends that spend a couple of grand buying paintings at a show I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to sell anything at,” Mark grins at him. “I was going to give them to you this morning but you never showed up.”
“Had a friend appear in town last night,” Ryan props the door open and lets Mark brush past him, paintings in hand.
He’s already thinking about the perfect place for his painting, he’ll force Pete to take his with him when he leaves, when he notices Mark looking at the pictures on the wall.
His pictures, his life. He’s in a lot of them because they’re shots of the guys.
He’s not hidden who he is, not in his home, he’s just not had any visitors enter since he got everything just right and he can see the way that Mark’s eyes are darting from him to the pictures and back again, that the other man has put two and two together and come up with four.
He opens and closes his mouth like he wants to say something and instead shakes his head.
Mark’s eyes move past him and Ryan knows that Pete has walked in. A quick glance back confirms that Pete is standing there, phone still pressed to his ear, eyes narrowed at Mark.
“Coffee tomorrow? Normal time?” Mark says, Ryan nods. He’s waiting for Mark to say something and Mark doesn’t, just smiles brightly, friendly as always. He inclines his head at Pete and leaves.
Ryan stands there, clutching his coffee between two hands and wonders if he’s going to get assaulted when he goes into town next and if he could call and beg Zack to come be his bodyguard again.
******************************************************************************
“Jon’s getting married,” Pete says at dinner. They’ve ordered in because Ryan doesn’t trust Pete in his kitchen and Ryan hadn’t wanted to cook for two people.
“You’ll have to send me pictures,” Ryan says.
“I’ve assured him and Cassie that you’ll be in Chicago for the Bachelor party and the wedding, I’m supposed to get your measurements for your tux,” Ryan doesn’t look up because he knows that Pete will be leering at him and he’s never been able to say no to a leering Pete.
Let alone a leering Pete who had cuddled with him on the couch when he went to take an afternoon catnap in the sunlight. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask if Ashlee knows where he is and then to remind Pete that he’s been the one cheated on in the past and will not do that to anyone else.
But Pete hasn’t made any moves towards him besides the kisses on cheeks and the cuddling, though for Pete that’s pretty much a declaration of intent.
“I’m not going,” Ryan says stubbornly. “If Jon and Cassie wanted me there they would have sent me an invitation.”
Pete snorts. “They did, you left no forwarding address and it got returned to sender. Let me tell you that was fun to deal with, hysterical phone calls from Cassie wanting to know if you were alive and what was she supposed to tell Jon if you weren’t and what the hell is going on and then Spencer showing up on my doorstep with Brendon and Jon in tow demanding that I bring you home right fucking now, screw giving you space to figure out what was going on in your head.”
Ryan pushes his noodles around his plate, suddenly his appetite is gone and he can vividly picture Cassie on the phone worried, Spencer in a fury, demanding that Pete do something now, because Ryan was only communicating with him, not them and that wasn’t right or fair.
He can imagine the hurt and pain that he’s caused. He doesn’t like it, this pit in his stomach that tells him that did something wrong, when all he wanted was someplace that was his, someplace that he could go to when they didn’t want him anymore.
“They don’t want me,” he says softly. He watched them reform into a threesome and he’s seen the pictures. They’re happy.
“Oh my god. You’re killing me here Ross,” Pete sounds upset and Ryan looks up and can see that he is, and maybe a little pissed off and Ryan doesn’t like thinking that he, maybe, caused that.
“These are your best friends; you’ve called them your brothers and your family. They love you and they miss you and they have been steadily going crazy wondering what the hell is going on in your head and how to combat it, especially since they haven’t the first clue what caused you to freak out and run away in the first place.”
“Pete…”
“I’ll go with you, you won’t be alone though. Not with them and if they ever let you leave their sight again you can come back here for peace and quiet if you want, though I’m pretty sure that you should probably put a bed in the spare bedroom, unless you want to be sharing a bed with the three of them together.”
Ryan swallows around the lump in his throat and nods.
******************************************************************************
He goes for coffee the next morning alone, Pete is wandering his house with a phone glued to his ear and he’d already been on it when Ryan got up that morning.
“You’re staying with me at a hotel,” Pete tells him as he’s leaving and he nods, silent. “Bring me back coffee.”
Mark is at the front counter and they eye each other, no one has jumped him since he got into town. He’s picked up groceries and Sandy had just handed him magazines from under the counter and asked what paintings he’d bought and then reminded him that the chips that he liked would only be on sale until Saturday so to make sure he came back and stocked up.
Colleen had a book put aside for him that he’d special ordered and they chatted for a few minutes about the show and Mark’s pleasure at it having gone so well.
He doesn’t get jumped by teen fans (or adult fans), no one treats him any different and he finds it hard to believe that Mark hadn’t gone directly home and called everyone he knew to tell them who Ryan was.
“I thought you looked familiar,” Mark says, he’s writing on his cup and setting it off to the side for the order to be filled. “But you never dressed the way that I saw in the magazines and you never put on any makeup and you didn’t act like a diva or anything, like you expected us all to bow down to you because you’d deigned to buy property in our town. So I thought, you know, everyone has a twin somewhere out there, maybe you were just one that had the same exact name or something.”
“I didn’t want people to know who I was; I just wanted to be left alone.”
Mark smiles, “I didn’t tell anyone, it’s not really any of their business if they haven’t figured it out for themselves, right?”
Ryan’s smile barely curves his lips, it’s tentative he’s sure, but he thinks that maybe Mark is telling him that he’s not going to be ratted out to the magazines or the internet.
That he’s still safe here.
“I’ll need two coffees,” he says and Mark’s grin widens.
“For Pete right? That was Pete Wentz? Same as yours?”
“Yeah,” Ryan fidgets slightly. “I’ll be leaving town for a few weeks, a friend of mine is getting married and…”
Mark’s smile doesn’t dim. “Stop in and see us when you get back, we’ll want to see pictures.”
Ryan nods. “I will.”
******************************************************************************
Pete has them booked in first class for the direct flight and he gives Ryan the window, though Ryan thinks that it’s to keep him trapped in his seat and not any act of generosity.
“We’ll check in at the hotel and then you’ll call your guys and let them know you’re okay and not off slitting your wrists somewhere…” Pete is saying, he’s got one hand laying on top of Ryan’s on the arm rests.
Ryan looks out the window and thinks that he can see his cottage far off in the distance and starts counting down the days until he can come home.
******************************************************************************
Ryan: What about me?
Me: Not everything is about you.
Ryan: *laughs* No really, what about me??
Me: Look, will it make you feel better if I write something?
Ryan: Will I get Brendon?
Me: No, I'm thinking Gen!Ryan with maybe Ryan/Pete subtext.
Ryan: Hmm, there can never be enough Ryan/Pete... write me fic.
So I did, I think Ryan thinks he is now the boss of me.
Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such… Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
TITLE: A Life Alone
RATING: PG (for language)
PAIRING: Ryan POV / Ryan/Pete subtext, Spencer/Brendon in the background
AUTHOR: Melanie
SUMMARY: Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such… Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of these boys and I’m pretty sure that this has never happened and will never happen quite like this.
A Life Alone
They corner Ryan in his room, his sanctuary from the fans and the noise and being ‘Ryan Ross’.
Ryan thinks that when its time for their ‘Behind The Music’ that Panic! At The Disco could be summed as such…
Four came, four sang, four laughed, three made the decision to ‘take a break’.
It was a new tour, for a new album. They have two buses and everyone has their own room and Ryan will only realize after that when Spencer had spent time on the other bus it wasn’t to give Ryan the solitude that he craved and that he and Jon were the only ones taking advantage of having separate rooms.
They corner him in his room and they all sit down and Spencer does all the talking, Brendon intercutting here and there and Jon giving his two cents worth and what choice does Ryan have but to agree with the decision that has, obviously, already been made without him.
He didn’t understand, and he didn’t want to agree. But he doesn’t think they even notice. They’re too busy looking at each other and talking without talking and he and Spencer used to be able to do that, and Brendon and him and Jon and him to a small degree.
He wonders at what point he’d been cut off, he hadn’t thought that he was that oblivious to the happenings around him.
He wonders why he’d been cut off.
“Just a little break,” Spencer says again and he looks at Ryan and Ryan pastes a fake small smile on his face and Spencer, who has known him forever and a day and can tell when he’s going to utter a lie by the change in his breathing, he doesn’t notice.
So Ryan nods, mouth firmly shut because if he opens it he’ll ask ‘why, why, why’? And maybe there is no explanation they could give him that will make things make sense.
Make things less like he’d been cut out of his own band and that his thoughts on the matter hadn’t mattered in the least.
These are his best friends, his brothers and they hadn’t even asked for his thoughts on the matter before they’d made the decision for him.
He wonders what he’s supposed to do with all the words in his head now that there isn’t a voice to sing them or a band to play them.
They dissolve easily, he doesn’t throw fits left and right like they’d most likely expected, he wishes he could, because he still doesn’t understand and he wants to.
The album hadn’t done that badly, not as well as they’d hoped but not as horribly as he’d feared, so he doesn’t understand why taking a break right now is so important.
But he doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t throw fits, he doesn’t really say anything at all because he’s afraid of the ‘why, why, why’s’ that are just barely tied up behind his closed mouth.
Towards the end, he thinks, they maybe see something isn’t totally right. Because Spencer starts shooting him looks of concern and Brendon stares at him like he thinks Ryan is something fragile that he’s dropped and broken and hasn’t figured out where all the pieces were so he could make Jon glue it back together.
He spends a lot of time in his bunk, because once the decision was made and Ryan had been told, well Spencer and Brendon and Jon obviously felt there was no need to hide in the other bus where they’d made all their decisions and they’d subsequently had it sent away.
So they could be one big happy family again. That plan probably doesn’t go the way they want it to, because Ryan still doesn’t understand and he doesn’t want to scream and yell the not-understanding to the sky… so he hides.
“Why don’t you come play with us?” Jon asks, hand pressed to his shoulder and there is always concern there but Ryan doesn’t know if it is real concern or if Jon is maybe the best actor of all them and besides…
“Writing,” Ryan says, waves his journal and he walks away, closing himself in his bunk and writing words that no one will see, that Brendon won’t sing and he puts his headphones on and doesn’t listen to the low murmurs that are probably about him.
He finds the little cottage a month before the end of the tour (before the end of them).
He can’t go back to Vegas, to him Vegas means him and Spencer and Brendon (and Brent) and being young and ambitious and ready to take on the world. (It also means pain and suffering and never being good enough for his father but he’s buried those feelings in words and music that he’ll never play live again.)
Chicago was out because he was pretty sure that was where Jon was going, Spencer and Brendon in tow.
And not LA because of Pete and the rest of Fall Out Boy and that’s where he’s expected to go and it hurts that Pete had to have known about this, okayed this decision because Pete is their boss for the most part and taking a ‘break’ isn’t something that can be just decided on a whim.
At the next rest stop he stays on the bus while the others get off to get junk food (and talk about him) and he makes the call and an offer.
The cottage is tiny, secluded, quaint.
It is perfect.
Keltie laughs at him when he tells her his plans. She doesn’t think that Spencer and Brendon and Jon are going to let him go that easily and Ryan doesn’t tell her that he gets talked at more then he gets talked to.
At their last stop, their very last concert, Spencer sits down with him the night before and talks at him for hours.
About their past and their childhood and reminding him that it was just for a little while, to allow everyone to regroup and Ryan wonders the whole time at what point they’ll call and tell him it is over.
He thinks that this might be how a lot of bands break up.
They took breaks and then just never came back from them.
They say goodbye at the airport, Brendon’s arm over Spencer’s shoulder and Ryan thinks it telling that Spencer isn’t shrugging it off. Just raises an eyebrow and glares at him, Brendon grins and doesn’t move.
He is hugged by all of them, even Brendon lets go of Spencer long enough to wrap his arms around him and Ryan can’t make out what is being murmured against his neck but he thinks that he isn’t supposed to anyway.
“Come back when you’re done,” Jon says, like Ryan is just going out of town to run errands or something.
Jon is the last hug (Spencer used to be, but now Spencer and Brendon are wrapped up in one another) and Ryan just nods, better to agree with whatever they said then run the risk of ‘why, why, why’ spewing forth in greater numbers then he would like.
He figures that it is a moot point anyways, by the time he would (hypothetically) be ready to come back to Chicago they will call him and tell him that they think the break should be permanent.
They think he is going to Vegas or L.A. He hasn’t shown anyone his plane ticket because no one has asked to see it and the minute that he goes through security they won’t care where he went anyway.
His heart hurts and his throat burns and the words rush through his mind, he taps his fingers against Jon’s back before pulling away.
He has his notebook in his bag and he knows that the words in his mind are melancholy and sad and it is probably a good thing that Brendon will never sing them because they would have to offer boxes of Kleenex’s free of charge at the door.
He smiles one last time and settles his bag on his shoulder, he takes a step away and watches the three of them reform themselves into one unit, without him.
They won’t miss him, Ryan decides, they already fit together like they know they aren’t missing any pieces.
It still hurts.
“I’m not living here,” Keltie says, raised eyebrow and crossed arms.
“I didn’t ask you to,” Ryan says absently. He is watching the movers unload boxes into the living room and he can’t wait for everyone to leave so he can start sorting through his life and putting things where they belong.
“I know,” she says softly, he looks over at her and she looks back at him with distant resignation and sadness.
“I’m sorry,” he says. And he is. Keltie is the closest thing to a best friend he has since Spencer decided that he no longer wanted the position and vacated it without naming his substitute.
Pete is maybe the only one who figures out that Ryan isn’t where he’s supposed to be at the beginning.
Ryan realizes this when Pete e-mails him within three days of his moving into the cottage and asks him where he is.
Ryan responds by describing the sunset he’s looking at.
They communicate that way and only twice does Pete write: pick up your damn kick
Ryan’s sidekick is buried in a box in the top of the hall closet and he only reaches for it twice a day now instead of the half a dozen times that he’d gone for it the first day, he instead sends him a list of strange and unusual things he’d seen during a walk into town.
It takes another two weeks before he starts getting multiple e-mails a day. He thinks that might be about the point when Pete went to the others and they all realized that nobody knew where he was.
Which was probably a feat unto itself as he wasn’t exactly a nobody.
But he hasn’t put makeup on in a month; and he doesn’t dress like ‘Ryan Ross, emo rock star’ anymore.
He dresses like a normal twenty-something in blue jeans and t-shirts, he leaves his makeup bag under the bathroom sink and he leaves off all the embellishments that he would normally affix to himself, so he was, almost, entirely anonymous.
Pete threatens and cajoles, though he never gives out his e-mail to any of the others. Ryan thinks that he likes being the only one that has any sort of contact with Ryan.
ill hire a pd
where are you?
are you ok?
ill sic spencer on you
theyre worried about you
The last one causes Ryan to avoid his e-mail for a week. Because of all the people he thinks would lie to him Pete isn’t one of them.
He’s seen the pictures, he picks up the check-out magazines when he gets groceries and he’s seen the pictures of Pete and Brendon at a club opening, arms over one another’s shoulders, seen the pictures of Brendon and Spencer and Jon with big grins, all wrapped up in another.
They don’t miss him; he knows Spencer well enough that, even in pictures, he can read only happiness in Spencer’s eyes.
When he turns his computer back on there are twenty-seven e-mails of varying degrees of worry from Pete waiting, he reads them, then deletes them all without responding to them and then opens word and starts typing.
He has words in his head and if he can’t make them into a song maybe he can make them into something else.
Besides if he waits long enough Pete will get bored and move on and he won’t have to worry about e-mails wondering where he is.
He likes that there is exactly one person (besides the bank people and the real estate people and the lawyers and the guys that had moved his belongings from Vegas to the little cottage) that knows where he is.
If they haven’t figured out to talk to Keltie yet that isn’t his fault.
Though, he reminds himself, Keltie was sworn to secrecy and Keltie took her promises seriously.
He might not be writing lyrics anymore and he might not have the three of them and their instruments of choice ringing in his ear but he doesn’t stop writing.
He can’t.
He still has all the words and when Keltie calls him on Sunday to check in (she always calls on a Sunday and he wants to tell her that she doesn’t need to but it is nice to hear a voice that knows him so he doesn’t) he tells her, “I’m writing a book.”
And waits for her to tell him that it is a stupid idea and that he is an idiot.
“What’s it about?” she asks instead.
And he tells her about the convoluted plot, about best friends since childhood that drift apart when they both fall in love the same guy, about how the hero goes away to allow them to be together without having to feel guilty. How he finds himself in a small town, where the neighbors are friendly and always have a welcome smile and how he comes to accept that being alone is not always that bad.
Keltie is silent on the other end for a long enough time that Ryan thinks that she’s hung up on him instead of telling him that his idea sucks.
“You deserve to be happy,” she says.
Ryan hmms at her and they talk for a few more minutes about the weather and a premiere that she’d gone to before they hang up.
Despite his best efforts he makes friends.
Colleen at the book store sets aside paperbacks that she thinks would interest him after they have an hour long discussion on modern day poets and the difficulties of getting published in that genre.
Sandy at the grocery store pulls the weekly magazines down if they look like they’re going to run out before he gets into town for his groceries, because she’s seen him pout when the US Weekly was sold out.
Just because he’s not living the Hollywood life any longer doesn’t mean that he doesn’t like to keep up with those people that he knew that were still there.
Mark at the coffee shop remembers his caffeine of choice after his first visit and sometimes Ryan threatens to change his order just to shake things up.
“You like things to be the same,” Mark just says, taking his money and smiling at him.
One day he presses a flyer into his hand along with Ryan’s change.
“I’m having my first gallery opening thing,” Mark shrugs and Ryan glances down at it. “Be nice to see some familiar faces there.” Ryan nods and walks away to get his coffee, he folds the flyer up and shoves it into his pocket. He finds it when he’s sorting clothes for laundry.
He goes because he thinks it would be rude not to.
Besides he thinks that Mark has been undercharging him for his coffee for the last two weeks and Ryan doesn’t think it’s bribery but he likes to return his favors.
The gallery opening is well underway by the time Ryan arrives. Wearing the one suit that he can piece together, and there isn’t a rosette or a piece of lace to be found.
He almost went for the eyeliner in the bathroom when he was getting ready and his hand had stopped over it, hovering as he’d stared at himself in the mirror. He almost didn’t recognize the young man staring back at him.
And that is who is there now, a young man not the femme boy that he’d played like a role for so many years.
It had been a month and a half since the last time he’d put anything on his face other then cleaners and moisturizers.
He had put the liner back and closed his makeup bag, stowed it under the sink and left, grabbing his keys on the way out.
Mark is pleased to see him; they exchange a manly hug and big smiles. He introduces him to his fiancé who is a small vivacious red head with a wide, white smile. Her name is Maria and she shakes his hand and kisses him on the cheek and thanks him profusely for coming.
The gallery is packed and he waves at Sandy and is accosted by Colleen when she wraps her arms around his waist.
“I don’t know a single person here with the exception of three,” Ryan admits, Colleen laughs and links arms with him, dragging him from group to group for introductions and there is only one instance that scares him.
The mayors’ sixteen year old daughter opens her mouth and closes it when Colleen introduces him and Ryan just pleads with his eyes for her to not say anything and she doesn’t.
Though she does find him later when he’s going from painting to painting and demands an autograph in exchange for her silence, she has several pictures to choose from and she’ll even allow him to choose the one that he’ll sign and personalize.
Ryan agrees, because anything that keeps the others from finding him any quicker is a good thing, he’s not foolish enough to think he can hide forever. But he hopes that he can pull it off for longer then a couple of months.
He buys two paintings at the end of the night, one he’ll send to Pete because he thinks that the colors and the mood are things that Pete will appreciate, the other is for himself.
Mark’s jaw drops when he pulls his checkbook out.
“I just wanted a few people that I knew here,” he blusters, Ryan just nods and makes out the check.
He’s buying the pieces because they spoke to him, like the words in his mind do sometimes; and he’s buying them because Mark didn’t invite him because he saw a prospective sale.
It’s almost midnight when he gets back to the cottage, he stopped for coffee on the way and he’s hoping to get a chapter written before he goes to sleep.
He left a light on in the kitchen and he curses himself for not leaving the porch light on, he hadn’t thought he’d be gone for so long.
He almost stumbles over a bag when he goes up the steps and he hears the voice before he sees anyone.
“Ryan Ross.”
Ryan squints and takes a step back.
Because that’s Pete sitting on his swing, one leg drawn up to his chest and staring at him like he’s a ghost or a mirage. Hemingway sitting next to him, giving him what Ryan is pretty sure is a disapproving look from where his head is resting on his paws.
“Pete.”
It’s surreal moving around his cottage with Pete there.
With anyone there.
Ryan hasn’t had anyone in his home since Keltie had left and where before there had seemed to be so much space, now Ryan feels caged in, trapped.
If Pete has found him, it is only a matter of time before the others land on his doorstep.
His flight or fight reflex is being triggered and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Pete watches him in the kitchen, he’s leaning against one counter and Ryan is moving just to move. He feels almost like Brendon right then, all hyperactive energy, but he thinks if he stops moving then it’ll sink in that his peace and quiet are a thing of the past.
“Are you going to ignore me all night?” Pete asks, bemused tone and Ryan wants to say he isn’t ignoring him.
He couldn’t ignore him, his body is almost hard wired to respond to Pete’s presence and he’s not a seventeen year old fan boy anymore, but that boy is still in there and mumbling ‘Pete Wentz is standing in my kitchen’, complete with dreamy sighs and heart shaped eyes.
Besides, he doesn’t think that anyone could ignore Pete.
He’s just choosing, to attempt, to not respond to his presence, which means not looking at him.
“I’m not ignoring you,” Ryan mumbles, Hemmy brushes up against his leg and Ryan glances down to see him glaring up at him reproachfully. “I can’t believe you brought him with you.”
“Well it wasn’t like I was going to leave him behind was it, besides I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take to get your head screwed back on straight and I wasn’t willing to leave him with Joe for that long.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the way my head is screwed on,” Ryan mutters.
“No? You just go off and buy cottages in the middle of the ass end of nowhere because things in Ryan-land are all hunky dory.”
“Ryan-land?” Ryan scrubs at a spot on his counter. “And this isn’t nowhere; we have a Wal-Mart you know.”
Pete snorts and Ryan knows that if he turns he’ll see Pete rolling his eyes at him.
“And that’s your sure fire sign of civilization, that the town has a Wal-Mart? And Ryan-land is that space in your head that you seem to reside mostly in and make stupid decisions based on, Brendon named it and we voted on it as a group.”
“Why are you here?” Ryan asks softly, maybe they’ve sent Pete to tell him that things are over.
He feels Pete’s arms go around his chest, locking his arms at his side and he stiffens. He could break free if he needed to, but Pete is strong and there would be a fight and most likely bruises and injuries.
“I only found you because of Keltie you know, she’s worried about you. She thought that you would have broke by now and called Spencer or me or someone to let us know where you were and that you were okay.”
“I told you that I was fine,” Ryan mutters.
“No you’re not, trust me, if anyone can tell if someone is not okay it’s me,” Pete rushes on when Ryan goes to disagree. “If you were okay you would have gone to Vegas for a couple of days, maybe did some gambling, possibly come out to L.A. and stayed with me while you figured out how to confront Spencer and Brendon about the fact that they’re super-gay for each other and neither one told you. And then you would have gone to Chicago and done it, you would have fought and maybe not talked for a few days and you would have wrote a song or two about your best friends not being able to trust you with their hearts or something about unrequited love. You would have all made up and gone back into the studio and started working on the third album and things would be okay then.”
Ryan breathes, hangs his head. Maybe Pete doesn’t know about the break, about the break-up that is sure to follow before to long.
“You wouldn’t have run off to the ass end of nowhere, because Wal-Mart or no, this is nowhere. I wouldn’t have Spencer and Brendon and Jon calling me five times a day asking for updates on you because apparently I’m the only one that knew that you had seven e-mails and then tried every single one of them until I got a response.”
“They wanted to take a break,” Ryan whispers. And it still hurts, the decision made without him. “They wanted to take a break and they told me we were doing it. They never asked my input or talked about it with me; they decided that we were doing it so we did.”
“A break means a break, no concerts, no singing. A break means taking a vacation and maybe going to an amusement park or a couple of parties or something,” Pete squeezes him, rocks him slightly back and forth, like he’s a child that needed to be soothed.
“It’s just a matter of time before it becomes a break up,” Ryan says morosely, because he’d seen the writing on the wall, he hadn’t needed anyone to spell things out for him.
Pete just sighs, like Ryan is disappointing him somehow and he feels like he’s missing something crucial.
“Taking a break means taking a break, it doesn’t have to mean anything more then that Ryan.”
Pete has brought two bags with him besides Hemmy’s carrier. Ryan sees them and wonders how long he plans on staying.
“I don’t have a guestroom,” Ryan shakes his head.
He does, but there is no bed in there. Just his desk and chair and computer and he doesn’t want Pete Wentz anywhere near his computer.
At least not unsupervised.
Unsupervised he would find the rough draft for the book that Ryan is writing and Ryan doesn’t feel that it is in anyway ready to be read by anyone besides him.
It’s a work in progress and he’d like an opportunity to read it and reread it and be his own worst critic before he lets other eyes gaze upon it.
“We’ve shared a bed before,” Pete rolls his eyes at him like he’s an idiot.
“I have a couch,” Ryan says ignoring him. “I’ve napped on it once or twice, it seems comfortable.”
Because when they’d shared a bed they’d been something more then the friends that they were now, before Pete decided that playing it straight was the best thing for his career and his band and ended that part of their relationship.
“Are you afraid I’m going to sully your virtue?” Pete leers at him and Ryan wonders, suddenly, if he’s being handled. If Pete is being light and friendly and leering and smirking to put him at ease and keep him from being depressed and maudlin about his band breaking up without him.
“I don’t have any virtue left to be sullied, you made sure of that,” Ryan mutters. By the time Pete had ended their relationship (and Ryan wonders why he’s always being the one told that things are over, instead of having the opportunity to be the one to end things) there were very few things that they hadn’t done together in Pete’s bed.
Ryan misses that sometimes. The closeness and togetherness and having someone who was just his. Keltie had been that before she’d slipped into Spencer’s role of best friend.
He wonders if he should be honored that he is one of the handful of people that Pete Wentz has actually, completely, slept with. That he can’t be brushed under the rug and when (if) Pete ever finally settles down with someone, his name (along with Mikey and Jeanae and Ashlee) is going to be listed off to his wife-to-be as those that have shared his bed and his life, if even for a short time.
He wakes and feels as if he is clinging to his bed with his fingernails, half of his body is sweating, the other half is freezing.
He feels a hand twitching against his stomach and puffs of breath against his shoulder. He twists his head and sees Hemmy’s head sharing his pillow and Pete taking up a good 7/8 of the bed along with all the blankets.
He knows that he’s skinny, but he doesn’t understand why, when he shares his bed with someone, that translates to ‘I only need 4 inches to sleep on, feel free to sprawl to your hearts content’.
The three times that he was forced to share a bed with Brendon because of ‘Hotel issues’, Brendon had managed to kick him off the bed while he was sleeping, the fourth time a Hotel had screwed up he’d just slept in the tub.
Because as much as he wanted to share a bed with Brendon, falling off the bed in the middle of the night - was not a repercussion he was willing to deal with. He wonders, idly, if Spencer has curbed Brendon’s ‘kicking people off the bed’ tendency or if Brendon only kicks people out of his bed if he doesn’t really want them there in the first place.
He doesn’t know why Pete is in bed with him, when he closed himself in his bedroom Pete was still grumbling about being forced to sleep on the couch and Ryan would have given up the bed and slept on the couch himself; if only Pete hadn’t acted like getting Ryan’s bed was something he was owed.
“Pete,” he hisses and Pete twitches and kicks out with one leg. Ryan traps it with one of his and manages to not fall off the bed. He silently congratulates himself and stares at Pete until his eyes snap open.
He knows that Pete hates that.
“Dude,” his eyes close almost immediately, it’s still dark outside.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on the couch?” Ryan says pointedly, he goes to pluck Pete’s hand off his stomach and instead lays his on top of it. He thinks his fingers are stupid and wonders when they got a mind of their own.
Pete’s hand flexes under his, then he links their fingers together and a small smile appears on his face. Ryan looks away because that expression has always meant that Pete has got something he wanted and Ryan stopped being that thing that Pete wanted a year and a half ago.
“Your couch is in no way comfortable, Hemmy insisted that your bed would be plenty big enough,” Pete’s voice sounds tired and Ryan almost doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know what Pete’s been dealing with since he left.
“Pete,” he starts, when he makes a motion like he’s going to get out of the bed and go sleep on the couch himself, Pete squeezes his fingers and manages to haul Ryan closer without actually using any force.
Hemmy opens one eye and glares, then stands, shakes and moves to the bottom of the bed where he pointedly faces away from them.
Pete laughs and manages to get Ryan all cuddled up against him, arms and legs wrapped tightly around him and Ryan would think it meant something, if he didn’t also think that Pete was attempting to trap him.
“Go back to sleep Ryan,” Pete says softly, he kisses his cheek and his forehead and then closes his eyes.
Ryan sighs and does just that.
Pete is on the phone in his backyard; Ryan thinks that he’s talking to the others. He’s sure that he heard Spencer’s name at least once.
There’s a knock at the door and he sees Pete glance inside and Ryan frowns at him before he goes to answer it.
Mark stands there, two wrapped paintings at his feet and a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Since when do you deliver?” Ryan asks when Mark hands him the cup; he pops the lid off and takes a deep breath, eyes closing.
He had to forego his coffee that morning because he didn’t dare leave Pete alone in his house, he might come back and find it had been sold out from under him.
“Only to friends that spend a couple of grand buying paintings at a show I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to sell anything at,” Mark grins at him. “I was going to give them to you this morning but you never showed up.”
“Had a friend appear in town last night,” Ryan props the door open and lets Mark brush past him, paintings in hand.
He’s already thinking about the perfect place for his painting, he’ll force Pete to take his with him when he leaves, when he notices Mark looking at the pictures on the wall.
His pictures, his life. He’s in a lot of them because they’re shots of the guys.
He’s not hidden who he is, not in his home, he’s just not had any visitors enter since he got everything just right and he can see the way that Mark’s eyes are darting from him to the pictures and back again, that the other man has put two and two together and come up with four.
He opens and closes his mouth like he wants to say something and instead shakes his head.
Mark’s eyes move past him and Ryan knows that Pete has walked in. A quick glance back confirms that Pete is standing there, phone still pressed to his ear, eyes narrowed at Mark.
“Coffee tomorrow? Normal time?” Mark says, Ryan nods. He’s waiting for Mark to say something and Mark doesn’t, just smiles brightly, friendly as always. He inclines his head at Pete and leaves.
Ryan stands there, clutching his coffee between two hands and wonders if he’s going to get assaulted when he goes into town next and if he could call and beg Zack to come be his bodyguard again.
“Jon’s getting married,” Pete says at dinner. They’ve ordered in because Ryan doesn’t trust Pete in his kitchen and Ryan hadn’t wanted to cook for two people.
“You’ll have to send me pictures,” Ryan says.
“I’ve assured him and Cassie that you’ll be in Chicago for the Bachelor party and the wedding, I’m supposed to get your measurements for your tux,” Ryan doesn’t look up because he knows that Pete will be leering at him and he’s never been able to say no to a leering Pete.
Let alone a leering Pete who had cuddled with him on the couch when he went to take an afternoon catnap in the sunlight. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask if Ashlee knows where he is and then to remind Pete that he’s been the one cheated on in the past and will not do that to anyone else.
But Pete hasn’t made any moves towards him besides the kisses on cheeks and the cuddling, though for Pete that’s pretty much a declaration of intent.
“I’m not going,” Ryan says stubbornly. “If Jon and Cassie wanted me there they would have sent me an invitation.”
Pete snorts. “They did, you left no forwarding address and it got returned to sender. Let me tell you that was fun to deal with, hysterical phone calls from Cassie wanting to know if you were alive and what was she supposed to tell Jon if you weren’t and what the hell is going on and then Spencer showing up on my doorstep with Brendon and Jon in tow demanding that I bring you home right fucking now, screw giving you space to figure out what was going on in your head.”
Ryan pushes his noodles around his plate, suddenly his appetite is gone and he can vividly picture Cassie on the phone worried, Spencer in a fury, demanding that Pete do something now, because Ryan was only communicating with him, not them and that wasn’t right or fair.
He can imagine the hurt and pain that he’s caused. He doesn’t like it, this pit in his stomach that tells him that did something wrong, when all he wanted was someplace that was his, someplace that he could go to when they didn’t want him anymore.
“They don’t want me,” he says softly. He watched them reform into a threesome and he’s seen the pictures. They’re happy.
“Oh my god. You’re killing me here Ross,” Pete sounds upset and Ryan looks up and can see that he is, and maybe a little pissed off and Ryan doesn’t like thinking that he, maybe, caused that.
“These are your best friends; you’ve called them your brothers and your family. They love you and they miss you and they have been steadily going crazy wondering what the hell is going on in your head and how to combat it, especially since they haven’t the first clue what caused you to freak out and run away in the first place.”
“Pete…”
“I’ll go with you, you won’t be alone though. Not with them and if they ever let you leave their sight again you can come back here for peace and quiet if you want, though I’m pretty sure that you should probably put a bed in the spare bedroom, unless you want to be sharing a bed with the three of them together.”
Ryan swallows around the lump in his throat and nods.
He goes for coffee the next morning alone, Pete is wandering his house with a phone glued to his ear and he’d already been on it when Ryan got up that morning.
“You’re staying with me at a hotel,” Pete tells him as he’s leaving and he nods, silent. “Bring me back coffee.”
Mark is at the front counter and they eye each other, no one has jumped him since he got into town. He’s picked up groceries and Sandy had just handed him magazines from under the counter and asked what paintings he’d bought and then reminded him that the chips that he liked would only be on sale until Saturday so to make sure he came back and stocked up.
Colleen had a book put aside for him that he’d special ordered and they chatted for a few minutes about the show and Mark’s pleasure at it having gone so well.
He doesn’t get jumped by teen fans (or adult fans), no one treats him any different and he finds it hard to believe that Mark hadn’t gone directly home and called everyone he knew to tell them who Ryan was.
“I thought you looked familiar,” Mark says, he’s writing on his cup and setting it off to the side for the order to be filled. “But you never dressed the way that I saw in the magazines and you never put on any makeup and you didn’t act like a diva or anything, like you expected us all to bow down to you because you’d deigned to buy property in our town. So I thought, you know, everyone has a twin somewhere out there, maybe you were just one that had the same exact name or something.”
“I didn’t want people to know who I was; I just wanted to be left alone.”
Mark smiles, “I didn’t tell anyone, it’s not really any of their business if they haven’t figured it out for themselves, right?”
Ryan’s smile barely curves his lips, it’s tentative he’s sure, but he thinks that maybe Mark is telling him that he’s not going to be ratted out to the magazines or the internet.
That he’s still safe here.
“I’ll need two coffees,” he says and Mark’s grin widens.
“For Pete right? That was Pete Wentz? Same as yours?”
“Yeah,” Ryan fidgets slightly. “I’ll be leaving town for a few weeks, a friend of mine is getting married and…”
Mark’s smile doesn’t dim. “Stop in and see us when you get back, we’ll want to see pictures.”
Ryan nods. “I will.”
Pete has them booked in first class for the direct flight and he gives Ryan the window, though Ryan thinks that it’s to keep him trapped in his seat and not any act of generosity.
“We’ll check in at the hotel and then you’ll call your guys and let them know you’re okay and not off slitting your wrists somewhere…” Pete is saying, he’s got one hand laying on top of Ryan’s on the arm rests.
Ryan looks out the window and thinks that he can see his cottage far off in the distance and starts counting down the days until he can come home.