fic: and the moon in their net (bandslash, FOB, Pete/Patrick, 1/2)
You know how sometimes you get a story idea, and it’s vaguely cracked out, and you tell yourself, “Oh my God, this is *awesome*, but I’m never writing it down because - seriously, cracked out”; and then you look up one morning and you’re listening to MCR and October Fall and you’re, like, sixteen pages into writing the damned thing?
It’s a long one. Bring some snacks.
and the moon in their net
by Gale
SUMMARY: In which it is proven that there’s a perfectly valid reason for Pete to be such a total freak, and hey, all those Emma Bull novels? Totally true.
Patrick always knew there was something different about Pete, from the first moment they met.
He was weirdly charismatic, for a start, but it didn't seem like he liked it very much. Give him a camcorder and let him film other people and he was perfectly happy, but as soon as the camera was pointed at *him*, forget it. He - the closest Patrick had ever come to an appropriate metaphor was it was like watching someone who was diabetic but hated insulin. Pete loved attention, *craved* it, but every once in a while he'd go off in his own head and no one else was invited. It didn't make even a little sense.
He could be weirdly formal about things, too. That first afternoon, when he'd showed up at Patrick's house, he'd stood in the doorway and waited to be invited in. After that, over the next five years, Pete never so much as knocked before he barged in, but that first afternoon stayed with Patrick: Pete standing there, looking nervous in a way he'd had never seen since, asking "May I come in?"
Patrick's mom had been very impressed by that; even now, she still remembered him as "that very nice young man who asked to come in that first afternoon." Of course, it was tempered by the knowledge that Pete peed in his bunk, once - "he did WHAT?" - but the first impression remained.
Pete affected people that way; you loved him or you hated him, but it was hard to come away without having an opinion one way or another. The few people who'd managed to stay neutral, to one degree or another, were the ones Pete kept close, or became fascinated by; Mikey hadn't seemed terribly impressed by him at all, the first time they met, and Pete had practically had himself surgically attached. Men or women, it didn't matter; neither did numbers, occasionally, and Patrick spent those nights sleeping on the bus, when they had one, or crashed in Andy and Joe's room otherwise.
It wasn't the sort of thing he could easily put into words. He'd tried, once, out loud to himself in the bathroom, but it had sounded disjointed and strangely paranoid, like he was looking for something or someone to blame Pete on, and that wasn't it at all. It was just...weird.
Patrick hated weird.
*
Everything was fine, right up until the morning Chris had walked into the studio - just walked in, like he wasn't intruding or anything - and told Pete, "We need to talk."
Patrick didn't look up from his guitar. He didn’t bother wondering why Chris was in Los Angeles; Pete would either toss him out or ask him to wait outside for a couple of minutes. You didn't fuck with studio time.
"Um," he heard Pete say. "Okay. Five minutes, guys?"
Patrick looked up at him, shocked and startled, and lowered his head before Pete could see his expression.
As soon as the door closed, Joe looked around and asked, "Okay, what the fuck was that?"
"I have no idea," Andy said. He squinted and tilted his head, trying to look out the window and into the studio. "I see Pete and Chris," he added, "but I think Chris chased off Nick." Nick was the sound engineer. He was not even remotely impressed that they'd been up for a Grammy. They'd liked him immediately.
Patrick didn't say anything, just kept tweaking arrangements in his head. He absently played some chords, but made himself stop when he realized he was starting off Joy Division. He shook his head a little, tried to focus.
And apparently it worked, because the next thing he knew, Pete was standing in front of him, looking...on anyone else, Patrick would have called it upset. "I need to talk to you," he said.
Patrick glanced up from the notebook. "Everything okay back home?" he asked.
"I - what? Yeah." Pete shook his head. "No, everything's fine."
Patrick nodded and looked back down, went back to the arrangement.
Pete made a noise and yanked on his elbow. "*Patrick*," he said, sounding irritated. "I need to talk to you."
"Fine," Patrick said. He rolled his head on his shoulders, working out the kinks, and looked at Pete. "About what?"
Pete shook his head again. "Not here. Someplace private."
Patrick narrowed his eyes. "Pete-"
"I need to talk to you," Pete said quietly. "It's important, but it can wait until tonight if it has to."
"Look, if this is about what Chris said-" Patrick looked around. "Where's Chris?"
"He left," Pete said. "He told me what he had to, and he left."
Patrick blinked. "And he couldn't make a phone call? Because that Chicago-to-Los-Angeles drive is a nightmare, in rush hour."
Pete just looked at him.
Patrick looked up at him, then sighed. "Okay, we're not getting anything done right now," he said, taking his glasses off and rubbing at his eyes. "You want to call it quits for today and pick it back up tomorrow?"
"That's probably a good idea," Pete said. He looked tired; tired, and suddenly very young.
"Okay," Patrick said, and started unplugging his guitar.
*
"Look," Patrick found himself saying an hour later back at the hotel, "just tell me what it is. It can't be that bad. It's not-" He blinked, suddenly alarmed. "Your parents are okay, right?" He'd asked that back in the studio, he knew, but maybe it was just the kind of bad you didn't want to say in front of strangers you didn't know who were working on your album.
"What?" Pete looked at him, then shook his head. "No, they're fine. Everyone's fine. It's just." He stood up from his seat on the other side of the tiny hotel table, started pacing back and forth. He'd been doing it for the last ten minutes, and it was starting to get annoying.
"Okay, so." Pete hesitated. "There really isn't any good way to say this, is there? So I'll just say it." He took a deep breath. "I'm a faerie."
"Yeah, I know," Patrick said. "I've seen the guys you sneak into club bathrooms with, man." How was this news?
"No, not--" Pete shook his head. "Not that kind of faerie," he said. "The kind from Shakespeare. You know, with the magical powers and Oberon and Titania and, you know. Whatever." He looked faintly embarrassed.
And he totally should, Patrick thought, because pulling this shit *now* was such a dick move he couldn't actually explain it in words.
He stared at Pete in disbelief for maybe a minute before he managed to ask, "How fucking stupid do you think I am?"
"What?" Now Pete looked startled. "What -- you think I'm--"
"You've done worse," Patrick said. His voice sounded way too tight even for his own ears, which meant in reality it probably sounded worse. "You usually don't do it to *me*, but that's because I don't fall for this shit anymore. So I can't figure why you'd be trying it now, unless you think I've gotten stupider over time."
"Patrick," Pete started, "this is. I'm not kidding, here. I'm serious."
"Yes," Patrick said. "Of course you are. I can tell, too, because you're three feet high and have pointed ears. And the giant wings coming out of your back were a dead giveaway. I thought I maybe should have said something about the fact that you sneeze glitter, or that time you went out and got high with a bunch of unicorns--"
"Look!" Pete snapped, so suddenly it shut Patrick up. "I am not lying to you about this, okay? I wouldn't lie about this -- I *can't* lie about it, actually, which is part of a much longer story -- but I sure as shit wouldn't lie to *you* about this. And if you don't know that already, you have not been paying attention the last five fucking years, but if means so much to you, fine." He slammed his hand down on top of Patrick's. "I swear by the stars in the four corners and the moon in their net that I will tell you the truth and nothing else. If I break this vow, may fire burn me, water drown me, air leave my lungs, and earth swallow me whole."
There was a rush of - something between them. Pete clenched his hand around Patrick's almost-but-not-quite painfully, then let go and slumped back down in the other chair.
"There," he said. He sounded out of breath. "That's binding. And please don't ask me to do it again, because it takes a lot out of me and it really, really fucking sucks."
Patrick looked at him for a long moment.
"You weren't kidding, were you?" he asked quietly. "You're--" He paused. "--not human."
Now Pete looked insulted. Winded, but insulted. "Of course I'm human," he said. "You've shared either a bus, a van, or a hotel room with me for almost six years now, dumbass."
Which - well, he *had*. It wasn't like Pete went around levitating things or communing with trees or cursing people. Cursing *at* people, most of the time, but that wasn't the same thing.
"But you're." Patrick stopped and made a vague hand gesture. "Not entirely," he finished.
Pete shook his head.
"Wait." Patrick sat up in the chair. "I've met your family. They all seem perfectly normal." Of course, so had Pete until a minute ago, but still.
"They are," Pete said heavily. "I didn't find out until, like, a year ago. Someone told me."
Patrick stared at him. "Who?"
"I was at a club," Pete said, "and there was this guy--"
Patrick held up a hand. "Okay, you know what? Don't tell me."
Pete smiled for a second. "That part isn't important," he said. The smile fell away. "But he told me...a couple things, and it's like knowing your parents had sex, dude: you can't *un*know stuff. And once you know, you can. Do things. Sometimes. Not a lot," he warned, "and not even consciously, usually, but. Still." He pulled one knee up to his chest. "I don't know if it's on my mom's side or my dad's, and it kind of doesn't matter, because they don't know."
"And Andrew and Hilary-"
"--are never going to know," Pete said, "if I have anything to say about it." He caught Patrick's expression. "It sort of sucks," he explained. "It's not - I haven't found a lot of benefits, so far, except it's really good for helping me get laid."
"Not that you need a lot of help there," Patrick muttered. He paused, thinking back. "Wait. A year ago?"
"About a year, yeah," Pete said. He must have seen where Patrick was heading with that, because he shrugged one shoulder and said, "When I went to Best Buy. Yeah."
That was what they called it: That Time Pete Went to Best Buy. Not that they talked about it a lot, but they used euphemisms when they did, as if saying that instead of "that time you accidentally sort of on purpose not really took a fistful of Ativan and had a nervous breakdown" made it easier, somehow.
"So," Patrick said, "when you said you were hearing voices--"
“I was hearing voices," Pete said simply. "And I didn't want to believe it, because - seriously, a fucking faerie? What the fuck? That's crazy. You say that shit, you get Baker Acted.” He shrugged again. "It took a while for me to process."
"Yeah," Patrick said, trying to keep his voice steady, "I'd say so."
They were silent for a long time.
"Like I said, it isn't useful," Pete finally said. "I'm, like, one-sixteenth or something. I have more Hawaiian in me than I do faerie, but it balances out, because most people don't have any." He started ticking things off on his fingers. "I can't make shit appear out of thin air. I can't change history, which is a shame because I'd love to get that fucking pipe bomb off my record. I don't get twitchy around metal-"
"Wait," Patrick said, "*metal*?" He was starting to think he should have started writing things down.
"Faeries hate metal," Pete said dismissively. "It's like you in a Fuddrucker's, dude."
Patrick threw a pen at him. Pete caught it and spun it between the fingers of his other hand, grinning at him.
"My ears aren't pointed," he added, "all my fingers and toes are the lengths they're supposed to be, alcohol and drugs work on me the same way they do everyone else, and I can't make myself look different than I do just by thinking about it, because if I could I'd save a small fortune on eyeliner and hair dye." He put his hand down. "And that's it, really."
"Uh huh," Patrick said dryly.
Pete scratched behind his ear. "I mean, there's *some* things," he said. "But most of it's unconscious. There's. um. An increased sexual appetite-"
"Oh my God," Patrick said, horrified, "you got *worse*?"
Pete threw the pen back at him. "--I can nudge people to make them do what I want, though I can't force them-"
Which explained most of his friends, actually.
"--and I'm. um. Goodwithwords." Pete said the last part just like that, all one word. "It's - I don't know, it's something to do with the rhythm and the cadence they're written or spoken in. You see it a lot in history, artists and musicians having faerie blood in them. It seems to help."
Patrick mentally played it back. Good with-
"...Oh," he finally said. He raised his eyebrows. "Well. That explains the first album, anyway."
"No it doesn't," Pete said. "It really - okay, I'm going to come back to this, because now that I've gotten the backstory out of the way, I should explain *why* I'm telling you this right now." He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath.
Then he reopened them and said, "Um. I sort of kind of accidentally mouthed off around people I shouldn't have, and now we have to win over the Queen of the Elflands. Through song. In, like, a week."
Patrick looked at him. Pete had the nervous face on again.
Twice in one day. This wasn't even remotely going to be good.
Carefully, Patrick asked, "Or what?"
"Or she'll kill us," Pete said.
Patrick just gaped at him.
*
"You're shitting me," Joe said.
Pete shook his head.
Joe turned to Patrick. "Please tell me he's shitting me."
Patrick shook his head.
"Fuck," Joe muttered, and collapsed on Pete's bed.
There was a very long pause.
"You know," Andy said thoughtfully, "it kind of makes sense."
"No it doesn’t," Joe said, turning on him. "I can handle a lot of things, man, but a faerie? I can’t even - seriously, one of you please tell me you’re fucking kidding."
Pete and Patrick just looked at him.
"Yeah, okay, you're totally not kidding," Joe said. "*Fuck*." He let his head drop back against the mattress.
"You have a lot of sex," Andy said thoughtfully. "Like, a *lot*. And it's gotten worse in the last - what, year?" He paused. "But, what, you knew and just didn't tell us?"
"No!" Pete said. "I didn't - look, I only found out a while ago, okay? And I wasn't going to say anything, but now I sort of have to."
"Have to?" Andy said, the same time Joe said, "Sort of?"
"Um." Pete let out a long breath and looked at Patrick stared back at him, expressionless.
"Ohh, no," he said, holding up his hands. "I'm staying out of this."
Pete glared at him, then looked back at Joe and Andy. "Okay, long story short: couple months ago, I was at a club, and I ran into this guy-"
"Ohhh, here we go," Joe said. Pete kept talking.
"--and I said some things I shouldn't have said in mixed company, and he overheard me and told. A few people."
"Define 'a few people'," Andy said.
"Um," Pete said again. "Queen Titania." He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, "By the grace of the light, an' it please thee." He looked around at the three of them. "Sorry. You sort of have to. I mean, I do."
"He does," Patrick said. "He mentioned it earlier, anyway. There's some stuff he can say, some stuff he can't. It's a - what did you call it?"
"A geas," Pete said. He dropped to the ground and sat with his back flat against the dresser, started picking at stray threads in the knee of his jeans. "It's kind of a spell, kind of a genetic compulsion. It's not as strong in me, because the Blood isn't as strong, but I'm still beholden to the basics."
"Like saying She Who Will Not Be Named," Andy said, "instead of-" He made a vague hand gesture. “You know. What’s-her-name.”
"Yeah, basically." Pete looked thoughtful. "That's pretty close, actually."
"Okay," Joe said, pushing himself up on his elbows. "Let me get this all straight in my head. You mouthed off in a club about some chick you shouldn't have been talking smack about - and by the way, *that's* the most reasonable part of the whole goddamn story - and someone overheard you and told her. And normally she'd just show up and talk shit about you on the internet, but because she's the queen of a completely different *species* she's going to kill you."
"Ohhh, no," Patrick said. "That's not the best part. Go on, tell them."
Pete glared at him. "I was getting to it." He paused again. "So," he said, "because you guys are like my brothers, I. um. Your names came up, and." He scratched his arm. "So when I say she'll kill *me*, I really mean 'she'll kill *us*'."
No one said anything for a minute.
Finally, Joe said, "I really, really hope you mean that metaphorically."
"Oh, yeah," Pete said. "If by 'metaphorically', you mean 'like, with knives and shit.'"
"Oh my God," Joe yelled, "are you fucking kidding me?"
"I think we already covered that, man," Andy said. He started for the bathroom, dragging Joe after him. "Come on. You can yell and freak out in here, okay?"
"I am totally not stoned enough for this,” Joe started, but Andy closed the door when they got inside, and it muffled the rest.
Pete thunked his head back against the dresser and closed his eyes.
Patrick let him sit like that for a minute, then asked, "So I don't suppose you could, like, kiss her ass and apologize? Tell her you'll thank her when we win a Grammy?"
Pete snorted and didn't open his eyes. "No. Believe me, I would if I could." He was quiet for a minute, then rolled his head to the side and looked at Patrick. "Do you think he hates me?" he asked quietly.
"No," Patrick said. "Although if we wind up getting killed, I reserve the right to change my answer." Off Pete's look, he added, "What do you want me to say, Pete? It's not bad enough you tell us you're basically, like, one-sixteenth unicorn-"
"I'm not -- do you see anything even remotely virginal about me?" Pete yelled. "Have you *ever*?"
"--but now you've managed to piss off extra-dimensional royalty, and there's a very good chance we'll all be dead in a week." Patrick clutched at the back of his head and tried not to yank on his hair. The last thing he needed right now was to lose any more before nature intended. "What do you want him to say? Christ, what do you want *me* to say?"
"I don't know!" Pete yelled.
They looked at each other for a couple of seconds.
"I don't know," Pete said again. He looked the way he had back at the studio, tired and very young and a little miserable. "It's not like I had a plan, dude. I wasn't going to say anything. Ever. And it wasn't -- I mean, I wasn't doing it to be a dick, or to shut you guys out or anything. I just...God, I don't know. I didn't want anyone thinking differently of me."
"You," Patrick said flatly, "are an idiot."
Pete looked at him.
Patrick slid to the ground and sat next to him, legs stretched out in front of him in roughly the same way Pete was sitting. "I've known you for five years now," Patrick said. "I know every stupid thing you've ever done in your entire life. I have lied to your mother, your father, and a bunch of girls - and, for the record, more than a few guys - who tried calling you after you had sex with them and never called them back. I have bailed you out of jail. Short of killing a guy, or possibly having sex with my mom, there is nothing you could do to make me look at you differently." He paused. "Please don't go do either of those things to test me," he added.
Pete almost smiled. "Have you seen your mom lately, dude? She's h--"
"Asshole," Patrick said, and tackled him.
By the time Joe and Andy came out of the bathroom two minutes later, Pete's shoes had been kicked on top of the headboard and he'd managed to flip Patrick over and pin his wrists down. "You're totally going to be my bitch if we go to prison," Pete laughed. "You know that, right?"
"Oh, come on," Patrick said, trying to buck him off. It would have worked great, except Pete was a wiry bastard, all planes and angles. "Which one of us is wearing eyeliner right now?"
"HEY!" Joe shouted.
Pete and Patrick turned to look at them.
"Okay," Andy said, "So, you mentioned something about us all being dead in a week?"
*
"A week," Patrick said. "That's pretty arbitrary, considering she's - what, immortal?"
He kept his voice low. Joe and Andy were passed out in Patrick's bed, half-slumped over each other; Joe was snoring. It had been a very long day, and that was before Pete dropped the F-bomb. Patrick was lying on Pete's bed, shoes already kicked off, and Pete was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. His feet were on Patrick's shins.
"That's all the guy told me," Pete said, keeping his voice just as low. "A week." He glanced at his watch. "Six days, now. At the stroke of midnight we're supposed to be in Exposition Park, ready to play."
Which was the other scary part. "Play *what*, exactly? Are we gonna get sheet music, or is it time to fly by the seat of our pants again? Because I hate that. You *know* I hate that."
"I know," Pete said, "but it's not - there isn't a science to this, Trick. It's magic." He raised one hand, wiggled the fingers a little.
"So Chris dropping by-"
"--was to tell me the challenge had been issued, yeah." He turned his head enough so he could look at Patrick. "And before you ask, no, Chris wasn't the one who told me, but he's..." He wiggled his fingers again. "About as much as I am. Maybe less."
"Did you tell him?"
"No," Pete said. "I just - it's like gaydar, kind of. I knew, and the first time we went home and I went over to his place to hang out, he took one look at me and said, 'So someone fucking told you.'"
"He wouldn't have?" Patrick asked.
Pete shook his head. "I told you," he said quietly, "it messes with your head, man. A lot of kids think it's cool when they find out, but it fucking *sucks*. You start looking back and wondering if every friend you've ever had, every person you've dated or fucked, actually liked *you*, or if it was just a genetic compulsion or something." He snorted. "It's not like I'm going to live to be three hundred years old or something." He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at Patrick. "I can't even levitate shit, dude. That would be awesome."
Patrick looked at him for a long minute. "And they'd really kill us?"
"They'd kill us," Pete said. He stared off for a second. "And our friends, and our parents, and brothers and sisters. And the ones they couldn't kill, they'd drive nuts or ruin their lives." He looked bleak. "They're older than dirt - *literally* - and have magical powers like something out of a Charles de Lint novel, and no real moral authority or conscience." He met Patrick’s eyes. "And they get bored even easier than I do, so that should tell you something about how much shit we're in."
"No, I pretty much got that already," Patrick said.
This whole thing was ridiculous. He was in a hotel in Los Angeles with his best friends, having a serious conversation with his best friend about how said best friend was part-otherworldly being, because he'd pissed off the Queen of All Faerie and if they didn't play some kind of weird-ass charity show in six days' time they'd all be horribly killed. He was pretty sure Joe hadn't mentioned any of that when Patrick had started talking to him that day in Borders.
But he was here now, and he was in this, so what the hell. Might as well start realizing it was really happening and trying to find a way *not* to be killed in six days. Dying before he'd had a chance to perform at the Grammys was just stupid.
"Patrick,” Pete said quietly. Patrick looked at him. "I'm sorry I got you guys into this. I can't - I'm sorry."
"Moron," Patrick said. He poked Pete in the side with his foot. "Apologize to me a week from now when we're not dead."
He'd meant that to sound rude and sort of snotty, he really had; but Pete was smiling at him, so he was pretty sure that hadn't been how it sounded at all. "Okay."
"Okay." Patrick nodded. "So what do we have to do, exactly? Besides not die."
*
Patrick didn't know if it was just a fluke or whatever half-assed "magic" Pete could call claim to (and he said it that way, too, with the air quotes and rolled eyes), but they didn't have to be anywhere until a week from Friday, which gave them plenty of time to panic and update their wills and sit around the studio, wondering which VJ on MTV would have to break the news. Patrick was holding out for Kurt Loder.
"Dead people always get Kurt Loder," he argued. "Aaliyah, 2pac, Left-Eye--"
"*Famous* dead people," Pete said. "Ten bucks says we maybe get John Norris. *Maybe*."
"What's wrong with John Norris?" Andy said, looking up from his drum kit. "I like him."
"I cannot believe you guys are not freaking out more," Joe said into his hands. He lifted his head. "And it depends on the day of the week and what else is going on. If it's a slow week, we get Norris, but if somebody premieres a video, forget it, we're getting Gideon Yago."
*
Also, as it turned out, there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do to prepare.
"It's like the SATs," Pete explained Friday morning, looking up from where he and Patrick were sprawled across the studio floor. They'd decided to go ahead with recording the album; what the hell, maybe they'd get a posthumous sales boom out of it if they got killed, and if they lived, they were still on schedule. "You can sort of prep, like, basic stuff, but you can't know what's going to happen until you get there."
"Okay," Joe said, "so start talking basic stuff."
Pete sighed and pushed himself up onto his elbows. "I don't even know why you're getting so panicked, man. We're not gonna be doing most of the heavy lifting anyway. It's mostly on--" He glanced at Patrick. "Um."
"I really, really hope that wasn't a pointed glance," Patrick said slowly.
Pete winced. "It's not as bad as it sounds."
Patrick just goggled at him.
"I'll tell you about it tonight, okay?"
Patrick kept goggling.
"Okay," Pete said, "you cannot - Patrick, you cannot freak out now, okay? We do not have time to nurse you back from a nervous breakdown. You're not me." He reached out and took hold of Patrick’s wrists. “Patrick,” he said again. "We can't, okay? Trust me on this."
Patrick looked at him for a long time.
"Okay," he said evenly, and Pete let go of his wrists.
*
A couple of hours later:
Pete opened the bathroom door. "You okay?"
Patrick looked up at him from where he was sitting in the bathtub, headphones blaring Bowie as loud as they could as he breathed into a paper bag.
He pointed at the door and glared at Pete.
"Okay," Pete said, "I'll try back in a little bit."
*
It was not, Patrick had decided, a nervous breakdown.
Just because Pete had told him that all of their lives were, essentially, in his hands come next Wednesday night, and it wasn't anything he could even remotely prepare for, and no, apologizing profusely was not even an option - that didn't mean he was going crazy in a hotel bathroom, did it? No. Of course not.
But.
He'd started playing when he was a kid because he loved the music, not the fame. He was okay with it, he'd made peace with it, and hell, parts of it were even *fun*. But he wasn't ever going to be the guy who liked ripping his chest open and exposing himself on stage like it was some sort of ritual; he wasn't the guy who stood out in front, as much as that made people at Spin and Rolling Stone blink in confusion, because they'd never seen a lead singer who *liked* hanging back in pictures. He wasn't ever going to be Pete.
And now he had to be, sort of, or they were all dead.
Patrick shut the CD player off and took the bag away from his mouth. He rested his forehead against his thighs.
He stayed that way for a long time.
*
"Okay," Patrick said when he finally came out of the bathroom. He sat on the foot of Pete's bed and looked at him. "Tell me why *I* have to do this, when *you're* the one who pissed her off. And if you start giving me twee bullshit answers, I am quitting this band."
Pete looked at him. "I'll cut the twee bullshit answers down," he said. "I can't promise to eliminate them entirely."
Patrick let out a long breath. "Okay," he said, nodding.
Pete was quiet for a while.
"You've never thought it was weird," he finally said, flopping onto his stomach on the bed. His head rested next to Patrick's knee. "I didn't either, actually, until this all came up. It was just - it was just how we worked." Pete shrugged. "You wrote before, right? With PDI?"
"Yeah," Patrick said. He had, a little. Public Display of Infection seemed like it had been a hundred years ago, now. "Not a lot. We did a lot of covers."
Pete made a thoughtful noise. "I never thought it was weird," he said again. "I just - we were in my basement, remember? We were on the floor, and you sang something - not a cover, just *something* - and I picked out a couple of chords, and it just." He made a vague hand gesture. "Clicked."
It had. They hadn't even been lyrics; he'd just been dicking around with something in history and let it come out of his mouth that night because he'd been too wiped to stop it, and Pete had had his guitar out, and he'd played a few chords; and they'd locked eyes and grinned, and something had. Fallen into place, sort of, even though that wasn't it. It had been more like waking up after being asleep for a very long time.
"Yeah," Patrick said. Almost without thinking, he started drumming out the bass line on Dead on Arrival. Pete grinned.
"It isn't a magical thing," he said quietly. "Not exactly, anyway. It's-" He moved a little closer, rested his cheek against Patrick's knee. "That's how it's always worked, you know? They're my words, but I can't say them. I can write them, but I can't say them. I can't even sing them. That's your job. You're my voice." He looked up at Patrick. "I'm trying very hard not to make a Little Mermaid joke here," he admitted.
"I appreciate it," Patrick said gravely, but he was trying not to smile. "So when you said I have to do all the heavy lifting--"
"It's like being on stage," Pete said, and he wasn't lying, exactly, but his eyes were - shuttered. "I get to go up on stage and talk shit for a couple minutes, then you get to save my ass." He tried to sound cheerful. "It's like a normal show, except if the amps fail I'm pretty sure they won't finish the song for us."
"No," Patrick said. "They'll kill us."
Pete sat up and moved closer, practically situating himself in Patrick's lap. "I can't do this alone," he said, resting his forehead against Patrick's. "You know that, right?"
It was exactly like Pete to say something like that a time like this. Times like this, best friend or not, Patrick sort of wanted to punch him, tell him that no, in fact, this was *not* all about Pete Wentz.
Except it was, this time, sort of.
"You won't be," he said, closing his eyes. "You never have been before, right?"
*
Patrick hadn't realized, before, how fast a week could go.
Friday afternoon became Friday night became Saturday morning, which - between the album and not letting himself think about what the hell they were going to do Wednesday night - snowballed *way* too fast; and before knew it, it was Tuesday afternoon.
Patrick waited until after dinner to call his mom.
"No, no, everything's fine," he said, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he was writing. He wasn't entirely sure half-legible handwriting on a piece of college-ruled notebook paper would be legally binding as a will without a notary handy to witness and sign it, but he figured it was worth a shot. "Just wanted to make sure you were okay."
"I'm fine, honey," his mom said. She sounded the way she always did, fond and a little bemused. "Is everything okay with you? It's not like you to just call out of the blue like this."
Patrick hesitated for a second, then shook his head. "No," he said quietly, and lifted his voice a little: "No, I'm good. Just a little tired, I guess. You forget how tiring recording an album is when you're not doing it."
"Uh huh." More than a little bemused, that time. "I'm going to take your word on that."
Patrick looked across the parking lot. He could see Pete standing in roughly the same position, hat tugged down on his head, fairly expressionless. No way of telling who he was talking to.
It was Pete. It could be anyone.
*
About the hundredth time Patrick flipped over in his bed, he heard Pete say, "If you don't get some sleep, I'm coming over there and knocking you unconscious."
"That doesn't count as sleep," Patrick shot back. His face was pressed against the spare pillow, though, so it sounded muffled.
"No," Pete said, "but *you'll* stop moving around, and *I* can get some sleep."
Patrick didn't say anything.
It had started to kick in when he'd gotten off the phone with his mom: this time tomorrow -- or, technically, very early Thursday -- they could all be dead. Tiny news items on the E! half-hour crawl, a Breaking News blurb on MTV. Not broken up, as a band; not "well, we're moving on without Insert Name Here, but it's like Insert Other Name Here's been here forever". Dead. People would be shocked and horried, but most of them wouldn't know the truth. The ones who did, like Chris, would use them as a warning sign: "Don't say shit about the Queen of All Faerie, or you'll end up dead too." They'd be a cautionary tale told to kids with magic in their veins, however diluted it was.
And then there was Pete, who was just cranky Patrick was moving around too much to let *him* sleep. Patrick would be more disgusted, but five years' exposure had left him weirdly jaded to Pete's thought process.
Patrick closed his eyes and took deep, even breaths. In, out, in, out. Tense your whole body, relax it in stages: toes, relax; feet, relax; ankles-
His bed dipped. Patrick opened his eyes and blinked at what he saw.
"You know," he said, "I'm not *actually* seven. I don't need you to climb into bed with me to make sure I get some sleep."
"Shut up," Pete said, but there wasn't any heat in it. He yanked the covers back and scooted under them, pulled them back up over them both. Patrick just watched him.
Pete waited 'til he got everything settled into place, or what he thought was in place, before he said, "So are you freaked about tomorrow?"
"I'm trying not to think about it more than I absolutely have to," Patrick said honestly. He wasn't having a hell of a lot of luck at it.
"Yeah," Pete said, "me too."
Whether he meant he was trying not to think about it or he was just as freaked out as Patrick was, Patrick wasn't sure. It was sort of the same thing, really.
"I keep thinking you'll be different," he admitted. "Or that I'll - I don't know, see something I missed before. Pointed ears, a tendency to mock Tolkien books for inconsistencies, *something*." From the little light coming in the hotel curtains, Patrick couldn't see points on Pete's ears, or even particularly weird eyebrows. He was the same guy he'd been two weeks ago.
"Nothing to see," Pete said, shrugging. "I'm still the same guy I always was. You just know something new about me, that's all. It's like that time I told you I dated guys, too-"
"You didn't *tell* me," Patrick said. "Sometimes you brought girls to practice to impress them, and sometimes you brought boys, and I just happen to be very good at context clues."
Pete flicked him in the forehead. "But I was still the same guy, wasn't I?"
"Yeah," Patrick said instantly, because he was. Gay, straight, bi, try-sexual, faerie, human, skateboarder, soccer player, guy in a unicorn shirt -- he was just *Pete*, the biggest pain in the ass in the history of the universe and the other half of Patrick’s brain.
"But," Patrick added, "now I have to wonder if you talking shit about someone will end in a duel to the death or something. Not, like, a drive-by; an actual duel. With swords."
"Dueling's been out of fashion since, what, the mid-1800s," Pete said.
"Okay, not the point."
"Patrick," Pete said, suddenly serious. "We -- you can't think of it like it's anything but another performance. It's like the VMAs all over again, or Leno, or Letterman. The second you start thinking otherwise, we're dead."
Oh, Jesus. No pressure. "You couldn't have said this a week ago?" Patrick said.
"No," Pete said. "I couldn't have." He reached out and took Patrick's glasses off, then rolled over to put them on the nightstand. "Now get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a big day."
And really, Patrick still had a whole host of arguments, not to mention complaints, but he was warm and finally, *finally* sleepy; and right now, keeping his eyes open seemed more trouble than it was worth.
"I reserve the right to yell at you tomorrow," he murmured, closing his eyes. "Just so you know."
If Pete said anything back to him, he was asleep before it could register.
*
Part Two
It’s a long one. Bring some snacks.
and the moon in their net
by Gale
SUMMARY: In which it is proven that there’s a perfectly valid reason for Pete to be such a total freak, and hey, all those Emma Bull novels? Totally true.
Patrick always knew there was something different about Pete, from the first moment they met.
He was weirdly charismatic, for a start, but it didn't seem like he liked it very much. Give him a camcorder and let him film other people and he was perfectly happy, but as soon as the camera was pointed at *him*, forget it. He - the closest Patrick had ever come to an appropriate metaphor was it was like watching someone who was diabetic but hated insulin. Pete loved attention, *craved* it, but every once in a while he'd go off in his own head and no one else was invited. It didn't make even a little sense.
He could be weirdly formal about things, too. That first afternoon, when he'd showed up at Patrick's house, he'd stood in the doorway and waited to be invited in. After that, over the next five years, Pete never so much as knocked before he barged in, but that first afternoon stayed with Patrick: Pete standing there, looking nervous in a way he'd had never seen since, asking "May I come in?"
Patrick's mom had been very impressed by that; even now, she still remembered him as "that very nice young man who asked to come in that first afternoon." Of course, it was tempered by the knowledge that Pete peed in his bunk, once - "he did WHAT?" - but the first impression remained.
Pete affected people that way; you loved him or you hated him, but it was hard to come away without having an opinion one way or another. The few people who'd managed to stay neutral, to one degree or another, were the ones Pete kept close, or became fascinated by; Mikey hadn't seemed terribly impressed by him at all, the first time they met, and Pete had practically had himself surgically attached. Men or women, it didn't matter; neither did numbers, occasionally, and Patrick spent those nights sleeping on the bus, when they had one, or crashed in Andy and Joe's room otherwise.
It wasn't the sort of thing he could easily put into words. He'd tried, once, out loud to himself in the bathroom, but it had sounded disjointed and strangely paranoid, like he was looking for something or someone to blame Pete on, and that wasn't it at all. It was just...weird.
Patrick hated weird.
*
Everything was fine, right up until the morning Chris had walked into the studio - just walked in, like he wasn't intruding or anything - and told Pete, "We need to talk."
Patrick didn't look up from his guitar. He didn’t bother wondering why Chris was in Los Angeles; Pete would either toss him out or ask him to wait outside for a couple of minutes. You didn't fuck with studio time.
"Um," he heard Pete say. "Okay. Five minutes, guys?"
Patrick looked up at him, shocked and startled, and lowered his head before Pete could see his expression.
As soon as the door closed, Joe looked around and asked, "Okay, what the fuck was that?"
"I have no idea," Andy said. He squinted and tilted his head, trying to look out the window and into the studio. "I see Pete and Chris," he added, "but I think Chris chased off Nick." Nick was the sound engineer. He was not even remotely impressed that they'd been up for a Grammy. They'd liked him immediately.
Patrick didn't say anything, just kept tweaking arrangements in his head. He absently played some chords, but made himself stop when he realized he was starting off Joy Division. He shook his head a little, tried to focus.
And apparently it worked, because the next thing he knew, Pete was standing in front of him, looking...on anyone else, Patrick would have called it upset. "I need to talk to you," he said.
Patrick glanced up from the notebook. "Everything okay back home?" he asked.
"I - what? Yeah." Pete shook his head. "No, everything's fine."
Patrick nodded and looked back down, went back to the arrangement.
Pete made a noise and yanked on his elbow. "*Patrick*," he said, sounding irritated. "I need to talk to you."
"Fine," Patrick said. He rolled his head on his shoulders, working out the kinks, and looked at Pete. "About what?"
Pete shook his head again. "Not here. Someplace private."
Patrick narrowed his eyes. "Pete-"
"I need to talk to you," Pete said quietly. "It's important, but it can wait until tonight if it has to."
"Look, if this is about what Chris said-" Patrick looked around. "Where's Chris?"
"He left," Pete said. "He told me what he had to, and he left."
Patrick blinked. "And he couldn't make a phone call? Because that Chicago-to-Los-Angeles drive is a nightmare, in rush hour."
Pete just looked at him.
Patrick looked up at him, then sighed. "Okay, we're not getting anything done right now," he said, taking his glasses off and rubbing at his eyes. "You want to call it quits for today and pick it back up tomorrow?"
"That's probably a good idea," Pete said. He looked tired; tired, and suddenly very young.
"Okay," Patrick said, and started unplugging his guitar.
*
"Look," Patrick found himself saying an hour later back at the hotel, "just tell me what it is. It can't be that bad. It's not-" He blinked, suddenly alarmed. "Your parents are okay, right?" He'd asked that back in the studio, he knew, but maybe it was just the kind of bad you didn't want to say in front of strangers you didn't know who were working on your album.
"What?" Pete looked at him, then shook his head. "No, they're fine. Everyone's fine. It's just." He stood up from his seat on the other side of the tiny hotel table, started pacing back and forth. He'd been doing it for the last ten minutes, and it was starting to get annoying.
"Okay, so." Pete hesitated. "There really isn't any good way to say this, is there? So I'll just say it." He took a deep breath. "I'm a faerie."
"Yeah, I know," Patrick said. "I've seen the guys you sneak into club bathrooms with, man." How was this news?
"No, not--" Pete shook his head. "Not that kind of faerie," he said. "The kind from Shakespeare. You know, with the magical powers and Oberon and Titania and, you know. Whatever." He looked faintly embarrassed.
And he totally should, Patrick thought, because pulling this shit *now* was such a dick move he couldn't actually explain it in words.
He stared at Pete in disbelief for maybe a minute before he managed to ask, "How fucking stupid do you think I am?"
"What?" Now Pete looked startled. "What -- you think I'm--"
"You've done worse," Patrick said. His voice sounded way too tight even for his own ears, which meant in reality it probably sounded worse. "You usually don't do it to *me*, but that's because I don't fall for this shit anymore. So I can't figure why you'd be trying it now, unless you think I've gotten stupider over time."
"Patrick," Pete started, "this is. I'm not kidding, here. I'm serious."
"Yes," Patrick said. "Of course you are. I can tell, too, because you're three feet high and have pointed ears. And the giant wings coming out of your back were a dead giveaway. I thought I maybe should have said something about the fact that you sneeze glitter, or that time you went out and got high with a bunch of unicorns--"
"Look!" Pete snapped, so suddenly it shut Patrick up. "I am not lying to you about this, okay? I wouldn't lie about this -- I *can't* lie about it, actually, which is part of a much longer story -- but I sure as shit wouldn't lie to *you* about this. And if you don't know that already, you have not been paying attention the last five fucking years, but if means so much to you, fine." He slammed his hand down on top of Patrick's. "I swear by the stars in the four corners and the moon in their net that I will tell you the truth and nothing else. If I break this vow, may fire burn me, water drown me, air leave my lungs, and earth swallow me whole."
There was a rush of - something between them. Pete clenched his hand around Patrick's almost-but-not-quite painfully, then let go and slumped back down in the other chair.
"There," he said. He sounded out of breath. "That's binding. And please don't ask me to do it again, because it takes a lot out of me and it really, really fucking sucks."
Patrick looked at him for a long moment.
"You weren't kidding, were you?" he asked quietly. "You're--" He paused. "--not human."
Now Pete looked insulted. Winded, but insulted. "Of course I'm human," he said. "You've shared either a bus, a van, or a hotel room with me for almost six years now, dumbass."
Which - well, he *had*. It wasn't like Pete went around levitating things or communing with trees or cursing people. Cursing *at* people, most of the time, but that wasn't the same thing.
"But you're." Patrick stopped and made a vague hand gesture. "Not entirely," he finished.
Pete shook his head.
"Wait." Patrick sat up in the chair. "I've met your family. They all seem perfectly normal." Of course, so had Pete until a minute ago, but still.
"They are," Pete said heavily. "I didn't find out until, like, a year ago. Someone told me."
Patrick stared at him. "Who?"
"I was at a club," Pete said, "and there was this guy--"
Patrick held up a hand. "Okay, you know what? Don't tell me."
Pete smiled for a second. "That part isn't important," he said. The smile fell away. "But he told me...a couple things, and it's like knowing your parents had sex, dude: you can't *un*know stuff. And once you know, you can. Do things. Sometimes. Not a lot," he warned, "and not even consciously, usually, but. Still." He pulled one knee up to his chest. "I don't know if it's on my mom's side or my dad's, and it kind of doesn't matter, because they don't know."
"And Andrew and Hilary-"
"--are never going to know," Pete said, "if I have anything to say about it." He caught Patrick's expression. "It sort of sucks," he explained. "It's not - I haven't found a lot of benefits, so far, except it's really good for helping me get laid."
"Not that you need a lot of help there," Patrick muttered. He paused, thinking back. "Wait. A year ago?"
"About a year, yeah," Pete said. He must have seen where Patrick was heading with that, because he shrugged one shoulder and said, "When I went to Best Buy. Yeah."
That was what they called it: That Time Pete Went to Best Buy. Not that they talked about it a lot, but they used euphemisms when they did, as if saying that instead of "that time you accidentally sort of on purpose not really took a fistful of Ativan and had a nervous breakdown" made it easier, somehow.
"So," Patrick said, "when you said you were hearing voices--"
“I was hearing voices," Pete said simply. "And I didn't want to believe it, because - seriously, a fucking faerie? What the fuck? That's crazy. You say that shit, you get Baker Acted.” He shrugged again. "It took a while for me to process."
"Yeah," Patrick said, trying to keep his voice steady, "I'd say so."
They were silent for a long time.
"Like I said, it isn't useful," Pete finally said. "I'm, like, one-sixteenth or something. I have more Hawaiian in me than I do faerie, but it balances out, because most people don't have any." He started ticking things off on his fingers. "I can't make shit appear out of thin air. I can't change history, which is a shame because I'd love to get that fucking pipe bomb off my record. I don't get twitchy around metal-"
"Wait," Patrick said, "*metal*?" He was starting to think he should have started writing things down.
"Faeries hate metal," Pete said dismissively. "It's like you in a Fuddrucker's, dude."
Patrick threw a pen at him. Pete caught it and spun it between the fingers of his other hand, grinning at him.
"My ears aren't pointed," he added, "all my fingers and toes are the lengths they're supposed to be, alcohol and drugs work on me the same way they do everyone else, and I can't make myself look different than I do just by thinking about it, because if I could I'd save a small fortune on eyeliner and hair dye." He put his hand down. "And that's it, really."
"Uh huh," Patrick said dryly.
Pete scratched behind his ear. "I mean, there's *some* things," he said. "But most of it's unconscious. There's. um. An increased sexual appetite-"
"Oh my God," Patrick said, horrified, "you got *worse*?"
Pete threw the pen back at him. "--I can nudge people to make them do what I want, though I can't force them-"
Which explained most of his friends, actually.
"--and I'm. um. Goodwithwords." Pete said the last part just like that, all one word. "It's - I don't know, it's something to do with the rhythm and the cadence they're written or spoken in. You see it a lot in history, artists and musicians having faerie blood in them. It seems to help."
Patrick mentally played it back. Good with-
"...Oh," he finally said. He raised his eyebrows. "Well. That explains the first album, anyway."
"No it doesn't," Pete said. "It really - okay, I'm going to come back to this, because now that I've gotten the backstory out of the way, I should explain *why* I'm telling you this right now." He closed his eyes for a second, took a deep breath.
Then he reopened them and said, "Um. I sort of kind of accidentally mouthed off around people I shouldn't have, and now we have to win over the Queen of the Elflands. Through song. In, like, a week."
Patrick looked at him. Pete had the nervous face on again.
Twice in one day. This wasn't even remotely going to be good.
Carefully, Patrick asked, "Or what?"
"Or she'll kill us," Pete said.
Patrick just gaped at him.
*
"You're shitting me," Joe said.
Pete shook his head.
Joe turned to Patrick. "Please tell me he's shitting me."
Patrick shook his head.
"Fuck," Joe muttered, and collapsed on Pete's bed.
There was a very long pause.
"You know," Andy said thoughtfully, "it kind of makes sense."
"No it doesn’t," Joe said, turning on him. "I can handle a lot of things, man, but a faerie? I can’t even - seriously, one of you please tell me you’re fucking kidding."
Pete and Patrick just looked at him.
"Yeah, okay, you're totally not kidding," Joe said. "*Fuck*." He let his head drop back against the mattress.
"You have a lot of sex," Andy said thoughtfully. "Like, a *lot*. And it's gotten worse in the last - what, year?" He paused. "But, what, you knew and just didn't tell us?"
"No!" Pete said. "I didn't - look, I only found out a while ago, okay? And I wasn't going to say anything, but now I sort of have to."
"Have to?" Andy said, the same time Joe said, "Sort of?"
"Um." Pete let out a long breath and looked at Patrick stared back at him, expressionless.
"Ohh, no," he said, holding up his hands. "I'm staying out of this."
Pete glared at him, then looked back at Joe and Andy. "Okay, long story short: couple months ago, I was at a club, and I ran into this guy-"
"Ohhh, here we go," Joe said. Pete kept talking.
"--and I said some things I shouldn't have said in mixed company, and he overheard me and told. A few people."
"Define 'a few people'," Andy said.
"Um," Pete said again. "Queen Titania." He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, "By the grace of the light, an' it please thee." He looked around at the three of them. "Sorry. You sort of have to. I mean, I do."
"He does," Patrick said. "He mentioned it earlier, anyway. There's some stuff he can say, some stuff he can't. It's a - what did you call it?"
"A geas," Pete said. He dropped to the ground and sat with his back flat against the dresser, started picking at stray threads in the knee of his jeans. "It's kind of a spell, kind of a genetic compulsion. It's not as strong in me, because the Blood isn't as strong, but I'm still beholden to the basics."
"Like saying She Who Will Not Be Named," Andy said, "instead of-" He made a vague hand gesture. “You know. What’s-her-name.”
"Yeah, basically." Pete looked thoughtful. "That's pretty close, actually."
"Okay," Joe said, pushing himself up on his elbows. "Let me get this all straight in my head. You mouthed off in a club about some chick you shouldn't have been talking smack about - and by the way, *that's* the most reasonable part of the whole goddamn story - and someone overheard you and told her. And normally she'd just show up and talk shit about you on the internet, but because she's the queen of a completely different *species* she's going to kill you."
"Ohhh, no," Patrick said. "That's not the best part. Go on, tell them."
Pete glared at him. "I was getting to it." He paused again. "So," he said, "because you guys are like my brothers, I. um. Your names came up, and." He scratched his arm. "So when I say she'll kill *me*, I really mean 'she'll kill *us*'."
No one said anything for a minute.
Finally, Joe said, "I really, really hope you mean that metaphorically."
"Oh, yeah," Pete said. "If by 'metaphorically', you mean 'like, with knives and shit.'"
"Oh my God," Joe yelled, "are you fucking kidding me?"
"I think we already covered that, man," Andy said. He started for the bathroom, dragging Joe after him. "Come on. You can yell and freak out in here, okay?"
"I am totally not stoned enough for this,” Joe started, but Andy closed the door when they got inside, and it muffled the rest.
Pete thunked his head back against the dresser and closed his eyes.
Patrick let him sit like that for a minute, then asked, "So I don't suppose you could, like, kiss her ass and apologize? Tell her you'll thank her when we win a Grammy?"
Pete snorted and didn't open his eyes. "No. Believe me, I would if I could." He was quiet for a minute, then rolled his head to the side and looked at Patrick. "Do you think he hates me?" he asked quietly.
"No," Patrick said. "Although if we wind up getting killed, I reserve the right to change my answer." Off Pete's look, he added, "What do you want me to say, Pete? It's not bad enough you tell us you're basically, like, one-sixteenth unicorn-"
"I'm not -- do you see anything even remotely virginal about me?" Pete yelled. "Have you *ever*?"
"--but now you've managed to piss off extra-dimensional royalty, and there's a very good chance we'll all be dead in a week." Patrick clutched at the back of his head and tried not to yank on his hair. The last thing he needed right now was to lose any more before nature intended. "What do you want him to say? Christ, what do you want *me* to say?"
"I don't know!" Pete yelled.
They looked at each other for a couple of seconds.
"I don't know," Pete said again. He looked the way he had back at the studio, tired and very young and a little miserable. "It's not like I had a plan, dude. I wasn't going to say anything. Ever. And it wasn't -- I mean, I wasn't doing it to be a dick, or to shut you guys out or anything. I just...God, I don't know. I didn't want anyone thinking differently of me."
"You," Patrick said flatly, "are an idiot."
Pete looked at him.
Patrick slid to the ground and sat next to him, legs stretched out in front of him in roughly the same way Pete was sitting. "I've known you for five years now," Patrick said. "I know every stupid thing you've ever done in your entire life. I have lied to your mother, your father, and a bunch of girls - and, for the record, more than a few guys - who tried calling you after you had sex with them and never called them back. I have bailed you out of jail. Short of killing a guy, or possibly having sex with my mom, there is nothing you could do to make me look at you differently." He paused. "Please don't go do either of those things to test me," he added.
Pete almost smiled. "Have you seen your mom lately, dude? She's h--"
"Asshole," Patrick said, and tackled him.
By the time Joe and Andy came out of the bathroom two minutes later, Pete's shoes had been kicked on top of the headboard and he'd managed to flip Patrick over and pin his wrists down. "You're totally going to be my bitch if we go to prison," Pete laughed. "You know that, right?"
"Oh, come on," Patrick said, trying to buck him off. It would have worked great, except Pete was a wiry bastard, all planes and angles. "Which one of us is wearing eyeliner right now?"
"HEY!" Joe shouted.
Pete and Patrick turned to look at them.
"Okay," Andy said, "So, you mentioned something about us all being dead in a week?"
*
"A week," Patrick said. "That's pretty arbitrary, considering she's - what, immortal?"
He kept his voice low. Joe and Andy were passed out in Patrick's bed, half-slumped over each other; Joe was snoring. It had been a very long day, and that was before Pete dropped the F-bomb. Patrick was lying on Pete's bed, shoes already kicked off, and Pete was lying with his head at the foot of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. His feet were on Patrick's shins.
"That's all the guy told me," Pete said, keeping his voice just as low. "A week." He glanced at his watch. "Six days, now. At the stroke of midnight we're supposed to be in Exposition Park, ready to play."
Which was the other scary part. "Play *what*, exactly? Are we gonna get sheet music, or is it time to fly by the seat of our pants again? Because I hate that. You *know* I hate that."
"I know," Pete said, "but it's not - there isn't a science to this, Trick. It's magic." He raised one hand, wiggled the fingers a little.
"So Chris dropping by-"
"--was to tell me the challenge had been issued, yeah." He turned his head enough so he could look at Patrick. "And before you ask, no, Chris wasn't the one who told me, but he's..." He wiggled his fingers again. "About as much as I am. Maybe less."
"Did you tell him?"
"No," Pete said. "I just - it's like gaydar, kind of. I knew, and the first time we went home and I went over to his place to hang out, he took one look at me and said, 'So someone fucking told you.'"
"He wouldn't have?" Patrick asked.
Pete shook his head. "I told you," he said quietly, "it messes with your head, man. A lot of kids think it's cool when they find out, but it fucking *sucks*. You start looking back and wondering if every friend you've ever had, every person you've dated or fucked, actually liked *you*, or if it was just a genetic compulsion or something." He snorted. "It's not like I'm going to live to be three hundred years old or something." He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at Patrick. "I can't even levitate shit, dude. That would be awesome."
Patrick looked at him for a long minute. "And they'd really kill us?"
"They'd kill us," Pete said. He stared off for a second. "And our friends, and our parents, and brothers and sisters. And the ones they couldn't kill, they'd drive nuts or ruin their lives." He looked bleak. "They're older than dirt - *literally* - and have magical powers like something out of a Charles de Lint novel, and no real moral authority or conscience." He met Patrick’s eyes. "And they get bored even easier than I do, so that should tell you something about how much shit we're in."
"No, I pretty much got that already," Patrick said.
This whole thing was ridiculous. He was in a hotel in Los Angeles with his best friends, having a serious conversation with his best friend about how said best friend was part-otherworldly being, because he'd pissed off the Queen of All Faerie and if they didn't play some kind of weird-ass charity show in six days' time they'd all be horribly killed. He was pretty sure Joe hadn't mentioned any of that when Patrick had started talking to him that day in Borders.
But he was here now, and he was in this, so what the hell. Might as well start realizing it was really happening and trying to find a way *not* to be killed in six days. Dying before he'd had a chance to perform at the Grammys was just stupid.
"Patrick,” Pete said quietly. Patrick looked at him. "I'm sorry I got you guys into this. I can't - I'm sorry."
"Moron," Patrick said. He poked Pete in the side with his foot. "Apologize to me a week from now when we're not dead."
He'd meant that to sound rude and sort of snotty, he really had; but Pete was smiling at him, so he was pretty sure that hadn't been how it sounded at all. "Okay."
"Okay." Patrick nodded. "So what do we have to do, exactly? Besides not die."
*
Patrick didn't know if it was just a fluke or whatever half-assed "magic" Pete could call claim to (and he said it that way, too, with the air quotes and rolled eyes), but they didn't have to be anywhere until a week from Friday, which gave them plenty of time to panic and update their wills and sit around the studio, wondering which VJ on MTV would have to break the news. Patrick was holding out for Kurt Loder.
"Dead people always get Kurt Loder," he argued. "Aaliyah, 2pac, Left-Eye--"
"*Famous* dead people," Pete said. "Ten bucks says we maybe get John Norris. *Maybe*."
"What's wrong with John Norris?" Andy said, looking up from his drum kit. "I like him."
"I cannot believe you guys are not freaking out more," Joe said into his hands. He lifted his head. "And it depends on the day of the week and what else is going on. If it's a slow week, we get Norris, but if somebody premieres a video, forget it, we're getting Gideon Yago."
*
Also, as it turned out, there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do to prepare.
"It's like the SATs," Pete explained Friday morning, looking up from where he and Patrick were sprawled across the studio floor. They'd decided to go ahead with recording the album; what the hell, maybe they'd get a posthumous sales boom out of it if they got killed, and if they lived, they were still on schedule. "You can sort of prep, like, basic stuff, but you can't know what's going to happen until you get there."
"Okay," Joe said, "so start talking basic stuff."
Pete sighed and pushed himself up onto his elbows. "I don't even know why you're getting so panicked, man. We're not gonna be doing most of the heavy lifting anyway. It's mostly on--" He glanced at Patrick. "Um."
"I really, really hope that wasn't a pointed glance," Patrick said slowly.
Pete winced. "It's not as bad as it sounds."
Patrick just goggled at him.
"I'll tell you about it tonight, okay?"
Patrick kept goggling.
"Okay," Pete said, "you cannot - Patrick, you cannot freak out now, okay? We do not have time to nurse you back from a nervous breakdown. You're not me." He reached out and took hold of Patrick’s wrists. “Patrick,” he said again. "We can't, okay? Trust me on this."
Patrick looked at him for a long time.
"Okay," he said evenly, and Pete let go of his wrists.
*
A couple of hours later:
Pete opened the bathroom door. "You okay?"
Patrick looked up at him from where he was sitting in the bathtub, headphones blaring Bowie as loud as they could as he breathed into a paper bag.
He pointed at the door and glared at Pete.
"Okay," Pete said, "I'll try back in a little bit."
*
It was not, Patrick had decided, a nervous breakdown.
Just because Pete had told him that all of their lives were, essentially, in his hands come next Wednesday night, and it wasn't anything he could even remotely prepare for, and no, apologizing profusely was not even an option - that didn't mean he was going crazy in a hotel bathroom, did it? No. Of course not.
But.
He'd started playing when he was a kid because he loved the music, not the fame. He was okay with it, he'd made peace with it, and hell, parts of it were even *fun*. But he wasn't ever going to be the guy who liked ripping his chest open and exposing himself on stage like it was some sort of ritual; he wasn't the guy who stood out in front, as much as that made people at Spin and Rolling Stone blink in confusion, because they'd never seen a lead singer who *liked* hanging back in pictures. He wasn't ever going to be Pete.
And now he had to be, sort of, or they were all dead.
Patrick shut the CD player off and took the bag away from his mouth. He rested his forehead against his thighs.
He stayed that way for a long time.
*
"Okay," Patrick said when he finally came out of the bathroom. He sat on the foot of Pete's bed and looked at him. "Tell me why *I* have to do this, when *you're* the one who pissed her off. And if you start giving me twee bullshit answers, I am quitting this band."
Pete looked at him. "I'll cut the twee bullshit answers down," he said. "I can't promise to eliminate them entirely."
Patrick let out a long breath. "Okay," he said, nodding.
Pete was quiet for a while.
"You've never thought it was weird," he finally said, flopping onto his stomach on the bed. His head rested next to Patrick's knee. "I didn't either, actually, until this all came up. It was just - it was just how we worked." Pete shrugged. "You wrote before, right? With PDI?"
"Yeah," Patrick said. He had, a little. Public Display of Infection seemed like it had been a hundred years ago, now. "Not a lot. We did a lot of covers."
Pete made a thoughtful noise. "I never thought it was weird," he said again. "I just - we were in my basement, remember? We were on the floor, and you sang something - not a cover, just *something* - and I picked out a couple of chords, and it just." He made a vague hand gesture. "Clicked."
It had. They hadn't even been lyrics; he'd just been dicking around with something in history and let it come out of his mouth that night because he'd been too wiped to stop it, and Pete had had his guitar out, and he'd played a few chords; and they'd locked eyes and grinned, and something had. Fallen into place, sort of, even though that wasn't it. It had been more like waking up after being asleep for a very long time.
"Yeah," Patrick said. Almost without thinking, he started drumming out the bass line on Dead on Arrival. Pete grinned.
"It isn't a magical thing," he said quietly. "Not exactly, anyway. It's-" He moved a little closer, rested his cheek against Patrick's knee. "That's how it's always worked, you know? They're my words, but I can't say them. I can write them, but I can't say them. I can't even sing them. That's your job. You're my voice." He looked up at Patrick. "I'm trying very hard not to make a Little Mermaid joke here," he admitted.
"I appreciate it," Patrick said gravely, but he was trying not to smile. "So when you said I have to do all the heavy lifting--"
"It's like being on stage," Pete said, and he wasn't lying, exactly, but his eyes were - shuttered. "I get to go up on stage and talk shit for a couple minutes, then you get to save my ass." He tried to sound cheerful. "It's like a normal show, except if the amps fail I'm pretty sure they won't finish the song for us."
"No," Patrick said. "They'll kill us."
Pete sat up and moved closer, practically situating himself in Patrick's lap. "I can't do this alone," he said, resting his forehead against Patrick's. "You know that, right?"
It was exactly like Pete to say something like that a time like this. Times like this, best friend or not, Patrick sort of wanted to punch him, tell him that no, in fact, this was *not* all about Pete Wentz.
Except it was, this time, sort of.
"You won't be," he said, closing his eyes. "You never have been before, right?"
*
Patrick hadn't realized, before, how fast a week could go.
Friday afternoon became Friday night became Saturday morning, which - between the album and not letting himself think about what the hell they were going to do Wednesday night - snowballed *way* too fast; and before knew it, it was Tuesday afternoon.
Patrick waited until after dinner to call his mom.
"No, no, everything's fine," he said, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he was writing. He wasn't entirely sure half-legible handwriting on a piece of college-ruled notebook paper would be legally binding as a will without a notary handy to witness and sign it, but he figured it was worth a shot. "Just wanted to make sure you were okay."
"I'm fine, honey," his mom said. She sounded the way she always did, fond and a little bemused. "Is everything okay with you? It's not like you to just call out of the blue like this."
Patrick hesitated for a second, then shook his head. "No," he said quietly, and lifted his voice a little: "No, I'm good. Just a little tired, I guess. You forget how tiring recording an album is when you're not doing it."
"Uh huh." More than a little bemused, that time. "I'm going to take your word on that."
Patrick looked across the parking lot. He could see Pete standing in roughly the same position, hat tugged down on his head, fairly expressionless. No way of telling who he was talking to.
It was Pete. It could be anyone.
*
About the hundredth time Patrick flipped over in his bed, he heard Pete say, "If you don't get some sleep, I'm coming over there and knocking you unconscious."
"That doesn't count as sleep," Patrick shot back. His face was pressed against the spare pillow, though, so it sounded muffled.
"No," Pete said, "but *you'll* stop moving around, and *I* can get some sleep."
Patrick didn't say anything.
It had started to kick in when he'd gotten off the phone with his mom: this time tomorrow -- or, technically, very early Thursday -- they could all be dead. Tiny news items on the E! half-hour crawl, a Breaking News blurb on MTV. Not broken up, as a band; not "well, we're moving on without Insert Name Here, but it's like Insert Other Name Here's been here forever". Dead. People would be shocked and horried, but most of them wouldn't know the truth. The ones who did, like Chris, would use them as a warning sign: "Don't say shit about the Queen of All Faerie, or you'll end up dead too." They'd be a cautionary tale told to kids with magic in their veins, however diluted it was.
And then there was Pete, who was just cranky Patrick was moving around too much to let *him* sleep. Patrick would be more disgusted, but five years' exposure had left him weirdly jaded to Pete's thought process.
Patrick closed his eyes and took deep, even breaths. In, out, in, out. Tense your whole body, relax it in stages: toes, relax; feet, relax; ankles-
His bed dipped. Patrick opened his eyes and blinked at what he saw.
"You know," he said, "I'm not *actually* seven. I don't need you to climb into bed with me to make sure I get some sleep."
"Shut up," Pete said, but there wasn't any heat in it. He yanked the covers back and scooted under them, pulled them back up over them both. Patrick just watched him.
Pete waited 'til he got everything settled into place, or what he thought was in place, before he said, "So are you freaked about tomorrow?"
"I'm trying not to think about it more than I absolutely have to," Patrick said honestly. He wasn't having a hell of a lot of luck at it.
"Yeah," Pete said, "me too."
Whether he meant he was trying not to think about it or he was just as freaked out as Patrick was, Patrick wasn't sure. It was sort of the same thing, really.
"I keep thinking you'll be different," he admitted. "Or that I'll - I don't know, see something I missed before. Pointed ears, a tendency to mock Tolkien books for inconsistencies, *something*." From the little light coming in the hotel curtains, Patrick couldn't see points on Pete's ears, or even particularly weird eyebrows. He was the same guy he'd been two weeks ago.
"Nothing to see," Pete said, shrugging. "I'm still the same guy I always was. You just know something new about me, that's all. It's like that time I told you I dated guys, too-"
"You didn't *tell* me," Patrick said. "Sometimes you brought girls to practice to impress them, and sometimes you brought boys, and I just happen to be very good at context clues."
Pete flicked him in the forehead. "But I was still the same guy, wasn't I?"
"Yeah," Patrick said instantly, because he was. Gay, straight, bi, try-sexual, faerie, human, skateboarder, soccer player, guy in a unicorn shirt -- he was just *Pete*, the biggest pain in the ass in the history of the universe and the other half of Patrick’s brain.
"But," Patrick added, "now I have to wonder if you talking shit about someone will end in a duel to the death or something. Not, like, a drive-by; an actual duel. With swords."
"Dueling's been out of fashion since, what, the mid-1800s," Pete said.
"Okay, not the point."
"Patrick," Pete said, suddenly serious. "We -- you can't think of it like it's anything but another performance. It's like the VMAs all over again, or Leno, or Letterman. The second you start thinking otherwise, we're dead."
Oh, Jesus. No pressure. "You couldn't have said this a week ago?" Patrick said.
"No," Pete said. "I couldn't have." He reached out and took Patrick's glasses off, then rolled over to put them on the nightstand. "Now get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a big day."
And really, Patrick still had a whole host of arguments, not to mention complaints, but he was warm and finally, *finally* sleepy; and right now, keeping his eyes open seemed more trouble than it was worth.
"I reserve the right to yell at you tomorrow," he murmured, closing his eyes. "Just so you know."
If Pete said anything back to him, he was asleep before it could register.
*
Part Two