Five at His Fingertips [2/2]
Title: Five at His Fingertips
Author: corpsematerial (Jane)
Rating: Dimming it to a PG-13 for NAUGHTY WORDS.
Pairing: Rydon, Joncer, only not so much anymore...
POV: Third-person varying
Summary: Two is company. Four is a band. But five is a homicidal maniac. So five? Meet four.
Disclaimer: GOD.
Author Notes: An unspecified apology, maybe...?
Part One
There's a yellow sign out the front. It reads, "Laughterhouse," puntuated with a crudely-sketched smiley face.
"Should say, 'Caution, long drop'," Brendon joked feebly, because there's obviously no road anymore. Once upon a time he would have gone digging for a Sharpie. But there was something weird about that sign, like scribbling on it would be just be asking for trouble.
Ryan thought it was a warning, a sick warning that wouldn't make any sense until it was too late. Ryan wondered where the person who wrote it had gone. Ryan wondered if they'd gone anywhere at all, or just gone crazy, gone crazy and died the way he doesn't want to think that they're going to.
"Whoever wrote that has a dumb sense of humour," Spencer said, kicking the stupid sign with its stupid writing.
And then he died.
___________________________________
"It came out of the hole, didn't it?" Jon whispers.
White-wig demands to know what's going on as Navy-suit shushes Jon again, and Jon wants to scream.
Why are these people so stupid?
___________________________________
Brendon regains his mobility in time to intercept Ryan on his way to throttle Jon.
"What did you do, you son of a bitch?" Ryan screams, his face as white as etiolated linen, and as Brendon catches him Ryan stabs a finger of accusation over his shoulder. "It has to have been you! It has to have been you! You were the only one in here! What did you do, you motherfucker?"
"I didn't - I didn't do anything!" Jon cries, his face crumpling like burning paper. "I swear, I didn't! I wouldn't! He was just... lying there, oh Jesus, oh fuck!" Jon draws his legs up and moans into his knees.
Brendon's thoughts tick-tock steadily like a metronome counting common-time. He's filled with a numb sort of calm, a tranquil kind of solemnity, gravity, and he's thinking inside his own make-believe bubble of rationality while Ryan wets his shirt with snot and tears.
Rigor makes Spencer look like a mannequin, pale and plastic, like his blood-soaked clothes are the only real thing about the tableau, like he's a display. The whites of his eyes look sticky like albumen where Brendon can see slivers of them peeking from beneath lowered lashes. Brendon knows what dead looks like now, and dead looks fake, contrived and artificial. Brendon thinks he can deal with that.
"I think we need," he says at length, and the walls are quiet, "to get the fuck out of here."
__________________________________
"It's never that simple," Ryan says tiredly.
"You will get your turn to speak," someone says, and Ryan replies quite calmly, "Aren't you listening? We're going to die. We're going to die and you're telling me to wait my turn to tell you? Wouldn't you want me to give a shit if you were going to die?"
Ryan's already gone when a voice whispers, "Who's we...?"
__________________________________
The outside lights have flickered on autonomously, and in the gloaming they look like ingots of incandescent uranium, poisonous and radioactive. The lights glow in the dark, but they don't dispel it, and it's getting darker by the second.
Ryan is crouching in the cieling, crouching in a coverlet of dust and dead bugs, trying to stifle his sobs.
Brendon found the man-hole and pushed Ryan up there, motioned for him to be silent with the gentle press of a finger to his tear-soaked lips, and then Brendon disappeared. Ryan hasn't covered the hole completely, and looks down at the twilight-grey floor hopefully, waiting so quietly for Brendon. He doesn't know where Jon is. He wishes Brendon would come back. He can't even remember what happened between here and there, that room where Spencer is still lying in that sea of cold congealing blood because no-one had the heart to move him, but common sense tells Ryan to be still, so he is. He is so very still, staring down into the room below, not even jumping at every scuffle and squeak and glint of lambent eyes in the stale darkness around him although his nerves are jangling like unsettled bangles and there's a desperate scream pushing against his vocal chords.
He thinks he hears footsteps, maybe: heavy and dragging, up and down outside the rooms.
He thinks he doesn't want to hide anymore, maybe, and swallows his bone-quaking terror, all but tumbling gracelessly out of the man-hole and crashing down onto the chair below.
_________________________________
"What was that?" Brendon wonders aloud. He looks to the man on his left, the man in the navy suit.
"Have some water and please, please be quiet," the man says coldly, thin-voiced, all but thrusting a glass into Brendon's face.
Brendon obligingly takes a sip and thinks that this is an impressive room, but either the sun is very confused, or the moon is very bright.
_________________________________
Brendon skulks around the perimeter, and there is definately a chill in the air now as night comes creeping in like some kind of sick augury, smothering the place in deepest silence. Spencer's dead and Brendon should have stayed inside, should have found Jon and held Ryan and waited. Brendon feels like crying. Brendon doesn't even know what he's doing, except that he's floating on adrenaline and hysterical bravado and feels like he has to do something.
_________________________________
"Where are you?" Jon shouts.
_________________________________
Something is rumbling like an engine, a gigantic engine grunting and rolling under the skin of the world, such as it is. Maybe there's a phantom flicker in the corner of the room like television static, and maybe there isn't, but Jon's not much concerned with the periphery.
He's holding a grim staring-contest with the hole in the wall, the hole that started it all, but the hole is not an eye and it does not blink and at some point, Jon will have to. "You came out of there, didn't you, you bastard," Jon mutter-murmurs, and the gaping gap leers at him like he should have figured that out a long time ago.
Jon blinks, and maybe that was a mistake.
_________________________________
"Help me!" Ryan bleats, his upper lip moist with sweat and slick with nose-run, except that it's not, and the chair underneath him is solid and whole.
"Would someone please calm him down?" an irascible voices booms, sending the last of Ryan's wits running scared, and cool glass chinks against his chattering teeth as someone tries to offer him a drink.
_________________________________
Ryan hurts. A lot.
He winces and drags himself off the splintered wreckage of the chair, and a sudden wave of pain stabs his diaphragm with paralysis, so that he gapes breathlessly like a fish drowning in air. When his lungs finally inflate, it's only to waste the breath on a muffled scream because fuck fuck fuck it's agony.
He spends a long moment just moderating his air intake and trying not to pass out. Long fingers twitch, curl into slender palms like the legs of dying spiders, and Ryan breathes quietly on the floor of the crepuscular room until his eyes stop jittering around in his skull like unsettled amber beads.
He drags a splintered chair leg out from under a bruised hip and staggers for the bathroom.
_________________________________
“Where are you?” Jon mutters a split-second later, and the hole swallows his voice.
“Right behind you,” is the answer.
Jon gurgles.
_________________________________
Brendon trips and scrapes his palms raw.
Brendon looks down at unharmed hands and is struck by a strange sense of deja vu when he wishes he wasn't tied down.
_________________________________
Brendon trips and scrapes his palms raw and hisses when the carpet hungrily kisses the skin off his cheek. He smells damp and dust and clamps down on a sneeze, hoping he didn't just fall with a rapport like a tonne of bricks - it's hard to tell around the roaring in his ears.
Jon looks surprised.
But Brendon doesn't really feel any reciprocal surprise when he realises what he tripped over.
He was almost expecting it.
_________________________________
Ryan curls up in the bathtub with only a chair leg and the flimsy mildew-maculated shower curtain between him and whatever's out there. He doesn't want to speculate, would rather huddle here and pretend that he's safe.
Ryan doesn't scream when the shadow of a hand wavers across the mouldering acrylic mantle, because he's pretending so hard that he believes it. Maybe his fingers tighten reflexively around his chair leg when the metal rings holding the curtain up start to chime together like a tocsin, zinging across the steel bar, but Ryan is still pretending.
He stops when the decaying screen folds to the side and lets the grinning nightmare in.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Ryan sobs, but his face is still as an odd sort of glacial chill freezes his heart to quiescence.
He thinks maybe he can hear it chanting, chanting something like pretty pretty with an affectionate lilt, up and down and up and down and hypnotising in its monotony.
Ryan raises the chair leg just a fraction of a second too late.
_________________________________
“I guess it's my turn now, huh?” Brendon says numbly, because there's no-one else. There was only ever so far to go. It feels like he always knew it was going to come to this.
“I always liked you best,” the strangerloverfatherbrother replies. “You had more perception. A better character. A friendlier face. It was fun while it lasted.”
, Brendon grimaces, but there's a fatalistic courage in him now and he's not scared.
“Why?” he wants to know.
“Because you never existed,” is the reply, and Brendon laughs.
“We were all as real as you made us,” he says.
In retrospect, he was always expecting it.
_________________________________
Order! Order!
“Might I have the pleasure of knowing whom I am addressing at this present moment?” the judge inquires querulously, as if this has progressed far beyond the furthest reaches of mildest amusement, and his jowls quiver comically in his frustration like the wattle of a strutting turkey.
The man in the chair, the only man retrained in that chair, rolls his head casually until his neck gives a satisfying crack. There's an expectant hush as he moistens his lips.
“Just me,” he says, and one corner of his mouth quirks up into a lopsided grin. “Just Pete.”
_________________________________
Pete crunches his way across the gravel of the parking lot, and markers in the missing "S" on the nonsensical sign.
Always just me.
_________________________________
A/N: So this would have been posted about three days ago but real life invaded my happy-space and smacked me around the head with the angst-bat xDD. And then there was uni n__n. Sorry for the delay. And thank you for reading~! In conclusion: PANIC AT THE DISCO IS TOTALLY A FIGMENT OF PETE WENTZ'S IMAGINATION. I would have put that in the disclaimer for the lulz but that might have been a plot-breaker, inasmuch as there is a plot...
Author: corpsematerial (Jane)
Rating: Dimming it to a PG-13 for NAUGHTY WORDS.
Pairing: Rydon, Joncer, only not so much anymore...
POV: Third-person varying
Summary: Two is company. Four is a band. But five is a homicidal maniac. So five? Meet four.
Disclaimer: GOD.
Author Notes: An unspecified apology, maybe...?
Part One
There's a yellow sign out the front. It reads, "Laughterhouse," puntuated with a crudely-sketched smiley face.
"Should say, 'Caution, long drop'," Brendon joked feebly, because there's obviously no road anymore. Once upon a time he would have gone digging for a Sharpie. But there was something weird about that sign, like scribbling on it would be just be asking for trouble.
Ryan thought it was a warning, a sick warning that wouldn't make any sense until it was too late. Ryan wondered where the person who wrote it had gone. Ryan wondered if they'd gone anywhere at all, or just gone crazy, gone crazy and died the way he doesn't want to think that they're going to.
"Whoever wrote that has a dumb sense of humour," Spencer said, kicking the stupid sign with its stupid writing.
And then he died.
___________________________________
"It came out of the hole, didn't it?" Jon whispers.
White-wig demands to know what's going on as Navy-suit shushes Jon again, and Jon wants to scream.
Why are these people so stupid?
___________________________________
Brendon regains his mobility in time to intercept Ryan on his way to throttle Jon.
"What did you do, you son of a bitch?" Ryan screams, his face as white as etiolated linen, and as Brendon catches him Ryan stabs a finger of accusation over his shoulder. "It has to have been you! It has to have been you! You were the only one in here! What did you do, you motherfucker?"
"I didn't - I didn't do anything!" Jon cries, his face crumpling like burning paper. "I swear, I didn't! I wouldn't! He was just... lying there, oh Jesus, oh fuck!" Jon draws his legs up and moans into his knees.
Brendon's thoughts tick-tock steadily like a metronome counting common-time. He's filled with a numb sort of calm, a tranquil kind of solemnity, gravity, and he's thinking inside his own make-believe bubble of rationality while Ryan wets his shirt with snot and tears.
Rigor makes Spencer look like a mannequin, pale and plastic, like his blood-soaked clothes are the only real thing about the tableau, like he's a display. The whites of his eyes look sticky like albumen where Brendon can see slivers of them peeking from beneath lowered lashes. Brendon knows what dead looks like now, and dead looks fake, contrived and artificial. Brendon thinks he can deal with that.
"I think we need," he says at length, and the walls are quiet, "to get the fuck out of here."
__________________________________
"It's never that simple," Ryan says tiredly.
"You will get your turn to speak," someone says, and Ryan replies quite calmly, "Aren't you listening? We're going to die. We're going to die and you're telling me to wait my turn to tell you? Wouldn't you want me to give a shit if you were going to die?"
Ryan's already gone when a voice whispers, "Who's we...?"
__________________________________
The outside lights have flickered on autonomously, and in the gloaming they look like ingots of incandescent uranium, poisonous and radioactive. The lights glow in the dark, but they don't dispel it, and it's getting darker by the second.
Ryan is crouching in the cieling, crouching in a coverlet of dust and dead bugs, trying to stifle his sobs.
Brendon found the man-hole and pushed Ryan up there, motioned for him to be silent with the gentle press of a finger to his tear-soaked lips, and then Brendon disappeared. Ryan hasn't covered the hole completely, and looks down at the twilight-grey floor hopefully, waiting so quietly for Brendon. He doesn't know where Jon is. He wishes Brendon would come back. He can't even remember what happened between here and there, that room where Spencer is still lying in that sea of cold congealing blood because no-one had the heart to move him, but common sense tells Ryan to be still, so he is. He is so very still, staring down into the room below, not even jumping at every scuffle and squeak and glint of lambent eyes in the stale darkness around him although his nerves are jangling like unsettled bangles and there's a desperate scream pushing against his vocal chords.
He thinks he hears footsteps, maybe: heavy and dragging, up and down outside the rooms.
He thinks he doesn't want to hide anymore, maybe, and swallows his bone-quaking terror, all but tumbling gracelessly out of the man-hole and crashing down onto the chair below.
_________________________________
"What was that?" Brendon wonders aloud. He looks to the man on his left, the man in the navy suit.
"Have some water and please, please be quiet," the man says coldly, thin-voiced, all but thrusting a glass into Brendon's face.
Brendon obligingly takes a sip and thinks that this is an impressive room, but either the sun is very confused, or the moon is very bright.
_________________________________
Brendon skulks around the perimeter, and there is definately a chill in the air now as night comes creeping in like some kind of sick augury, smothering the place in deepest silence. Spencer's dead and Brendon should have stayed inside, should have found Jon and held Ryan and waited. Brendon feels like crying. Brendon doesn't even know what he's doing, except that he's floating on adrenaline and hysterical bravado and feels like he has to do something.
_________________________________
"Where are you?" Jon shouts.
_________________________________
Something is rumbling like an engine, a gigantic engine grunting and rolling under the skin of the world, such as it is. Maybe there's a phantom flicker in the corner of the room like television static, and maybe there isn't, but Jon's not much concerned with the periphery.
He's holding a grim staring-contest with the hole in the wall, the hole that started it all, but the hole is not an eye and it does not blink and at some point, Jon will have to. "You came out of there, didn't you, you bastard," Jon mutter-murmurs, and the gaping gap leers at him like he should have figured that out a long time ago.
Jon blinks, and maybe that was a mistake.
_________________________________
"Help me!" Ryan bleats, his upper lip moist with sweat and slick with nose-run, except that it's not, and the chair underneath him is solid and whole.
"Would someone please calm him down?" an irascible voices booms, sending the last of Ryan's wits running scared, and cool glass chinks against his chattering teeth as someone tries to offer him a drink.
_________________________________
Ryan hurts. A lot.
He winces and drags himself off the splintered wreckage of the chair, and a sudden wave of pain stabs his diaphragm with paralysis, so that he gapes breathlessly like a fish drowning in air. When his lungs finally inflate, it's only to waste the breath on a muffled scream because fuck fuck fuck it's agony.
He spends a long moment just moderating his air intake and trying not to pass out. Long fingers twitch, curl into slender palms like the legs of dying spiders, and Ryan breathes quietly on the floor of the crepuscular room until his eyes stop jittering around in his skull like unsettled amber beads.
He drags a splintered chair leg out from under a bruised hip and staggers for the bathroom.
_________________________________
“Where are you?” Jon mutters a split-second later, and the hole swallows his voice.
“Right behind you,” is the answer.
Jon gurgles.
_________________________________
Brendon trips and scrapes his palms raw.
Brendon looks down at unharmed hands and is struck by a strange sense of deja vu when he wishes he wasn't tied down.
_________________________________
Brendon trips and scrapes his palms raw and hisses when the carpet hungrily kisses the skin off his cheek. He smells damp and dust and clamps down on a sneeze, hoping he didn't just fall with a rapport like a tonne of bricks - it's hard to tell around the roaring in his ears.
Jon looks surprised.
But Brendon doesn't really feel any reciprocal surprise when he realises what he tripped over.
He was almost expecting it.
_________________________________
Ryan curls up in the bathtub with only a chair leg and the flimsy mildew-maculated shower curtain between him and whatever's out there. He doesn't want to speculate, would rather huddle here and pretend that he's safe.
Ryan doesn't scream when the shadow of a hand wavers across the mouldering acrylic mantle, because he's pretending so hard that he believes it. Maybe his fingers tighten reflexively around his chair leg when the metal rings holding the curtain up start to chime together like a tocsin, zinging across the steel bar, but Ryan is still pretending.
He stops when the decaying screen folds to the side and lets the grinning nightmare in.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Ryan sobs, but his face is still as an odd sort of glacial chill freezes his heart to quiescence.
He thinks maybe he can hear it chanting, chanting something like pretty pretty with an affectionate lilt, up and down and up and down and hypnotising in its monotony.
Ryan raises the chair leg just a fraction of a second too late.
_________________________________
“I guess it's my turn now, huh?” Brendon says numbly, because there's no-one else. There was only ever so far to go. It feels like he always knew it was going to come to this.
“I always liked you best,” the strangerloverfatherbrother replies. “You had more perception. A better character. A friendlier face. It was fun while it lasted.”
, Brendon grimaces, but there's a fatalistic courage in him now and he's not scared.
“Why?” he wants to know.
“Because you never existed,” is the reply, and Brendon laughs.
“We were all as real as you made us,” he says.
In retrospect, he was always expecting it.
_________________________________
Order! Order!
“Might I have the pleasure of knowing whom I am addressing at this present moment?” the judge inquires querulously, as if this has progressed far beyond the furthest reaches of mildest amusement, and his jowls quiver comically in his frustration like the wattle of a strutting turkey.
The man in the chair, the only man retrained in that chair, rolls his head casually until his neck gives a satisfying crack. There's an expectant hush as he moistens his lips.
“Just me,” he says, and one corner of his mouth quirks up into a lopsided grin. “Just Pete.”
_________________________________
Pete crunches his way across the gravel of the parking lot, and markers in the missing "S" on the nonsensical sign.
Always just me.
_________________________________
A/N: So this would have been posted about three days ago but real life invaded my happy-space and smacked me around the head with the angst-bat xDD. And then there was uni n__n. Sorry for the delay. And thank you for reading~! In conclusion: PANIC AT THE DISCO IS TOTALLY A FIGMENT OF PETE WENTZ'S IMAGINATION. I would have put that in the disclaimer for the lulz but that might have been a plot-breaker, inasmuch as there is a plot...