A PILLOWCASE CORRESPONDENCE: UNLUCKY 13
Title: A Pillowcase Correspondence
Authors: megyal and lesinnocents
Pairing: Patrick/Peter
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dear Patrick...
Disclaimer: 100% Disclaimed.
Author's Note: SORRY IT'S BEEN FOREVER. I KNOW, I SUCK.
Letter One
Letter Two
Letter Three
Letter Four
Letter Five
Letter Six
Letter Seven
Letter Eight
Letter Nine
Letter Ten
Letter Eleven
Letter Twelve
Why do you have to say things like that to me? Why? You tell me that you need me, that you care so much about me, you spin words of love into your letters that sound like the high, clear voices of young romances but yet you… you don’t want me. You turn me away. God, I… I don’t know what type of treacherous trap I’m luring myself into here, but these questions are boiling beneath my skin and steam’s squealing out of my pores and I can’t hold it back any longer.
Do you have any idea what it does to me to have you beneath my hands and between my thighs in the hot, dark, secret places of the night? Do you know how my stomach coils and leaps and floods with wet, aching heat every time a shuddery moan rolls off your tongue and past your lips? Do you know how shivers chase each other down the backs of my arms and down my spine when your breath strokes down my skin or how, when I see any piece of your skin exposed - the soft, inviting curves of your hips and the smooth angles of your pale shoulder blades - I feel as though the bones in my fingers will crack and split beneath the pressure of resisting a touch?
Patrick. Oh, you’re the only solid thing I’ve got left to my name now and I need you so desperately. I feel as though I’m begging you to be so much and it’s unfair, but I can’t stop myself from selfishly wanting, wanting, wanting you. It’s inscrutable. You constantly surround me - your voice in my head, singing my words and strumming your fingers over the melodies that match my heartbeats - but I’m just grabbing at your ankles and you’re dancing in circles. You dizzy me, blur the rest of the world around you and distort shapes and faces so that you’re the only channel coming in clear, but I won’t lie and say I mind.
I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t ask, I have no answers for you. I know, I know there’s her and so many other specters with icy fingers filling up the space between you and I, but I really, really can’t handle this anymore. I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve injected you and you’re within me now, all around and locked inside, threading through my arteries and perfuming the air I breathe.
Pete tried to talk to Patrick.
He paced the length of the hallway dozens of times over, chewing on the defenseless, soft tissue at the corners of his mouth and wringing his hands anxiously. Words were tumbling over themselves frantically in his head in their hurry to form the perfect phrases, just to be quickly erased and kicked over by those following them. He stood in front of Patrick’s door and all of the words fled before he could work up the courage to knock.
Instead, he turned back to his own room, collected his little plastic pill bottles, and drove off to an empty parking lot, where he could cure all his ailments in a single dose.
* * *
Patrick was furious when he got the phone call. He let out a roaring bellow and kicked his nightstand, sending it toppling over and all of the items upon it flying. He stood, hands balled into fists by his sides, chest heaving with deep, angry breaths, and surveyed the minor scene of wreckage he’d created with slit eyes behind strands of tawny hair.
Fuck Pete! Fuck him for being so impulsive, so selfish! What the hell had he been thinking? Didn’t he get it? Didn’t he understand in the slightest? When he just threw in the towel and decided that living life was too trying a task for him, was he honestly conceited enough to think that by shoveling poison down his throat and waiting for the last lights to blink out, he was the only one going to be hurt by it? Did he just not give a shit about the band, about his friends, his mother? Did he not consider how his loss would resonate through the hearts of all those who surrounded him like deaf, dumb flies buzzing around a beacon - did he not even notice that he was the sun, the center of everything, and the way that lips stilled when he spoke and eyes followed him hypnotically as he moved?
Did he never once think about Patrick?
He could feel his chest caving in and the bones of his ribcage compressing, milking the blood from his heart and the air from his lungs. Patrick sat back on the bed, legs too limp now to carry him, and buried his face deep in the darkness of his hands. It was all too much. Pete, nearly gone and lost forever - it made Patrick choke on his own breath to think on it. What if he… what if he had succeeded?
No, Patrick shook his head, swallowing hard and lifting his chin to face the sunlight that snuck in between the heavy curtains defiantly, he wouldn’t even imagine that. Pete had, despite his best efforts, survived. Patrick would see more mornings with Pete’s face flattened into the pillow in the opposite bunk and he would most definitely suffer more of his friend’s uproarious disturbances to the peaceful, organized life he tried to maintain. He couldn’t help but smile softly at the thought, the tiniest of grins tugging at the corners of his mouth in spite of the heavy weights upon his shoulders that made him stagger when he rose to his feet.
He had no choice but to go to Pete.
At the hospital, Patrick stalked the white halls, overtaken by the painfully bright lights and the cloying scent of sterilization as he searched for Pete’s room. The door that he knew would lead to Pete in a sickbed and a world of troubles loomed ominously before him, but with a deep breath Patrick summoned his tremulous nerve and pushed inside.
Pete looked far worse than he had imagined - somehow, Patrick had pictured him surrounded by admirers and easing their concerns with his gaudy grins and lewd jokes about the whole silly ordeal. What he found instead was a sallow, lifeless imitation of the usually radiant Pete Wentz that he so helplessly adored. Pete’s olive skin was jaundiced and seemed to lie limply over his bones. His lips were pale and his face sunken, and as Patrick took in the I.V. in his arm, the shallow heaving of his thin chest beneath the cheap fabric of the hospital gown, the deep shadows encircling his dull eyes, the ache in his chest tripled, seizing at his heart.
Patrick fell into the seat behind him. “Pete… god, are you okay?”
* * *
Pete wanted to laugh at that, but all he could muster was a curl at one corner of his lips. “Is that supposed to be the punch line, Patrick?” He said, speaking lowly like the walls were listening.
Patrick sighed in frustration at the foot of the bed and Pete watched him sedately through half-lidded eyes. “I meant your health,” said Patrick tersely, and Pete could almost see the inner battle waging behind glaring blue eyes to rein in the redhead’s temper, in lieu of the circumstances. It would have amused him if it also didn’t settle a suffocating weight upon his sternum that his heart squirmed uncomfortably beneath. Patrick’s eyes were dark and accusing, clouded and confused, and the scrutiny made Pete’s feeble body feel stripped bare and put on display to show off his agonizing weakness. His limbs sunk shamefully into the unsympathetic mattress.
“How could you do this, Pete?” Patrick broke the frail silence trembling in the air between them, his voice soft and rasping and heartbroken and Pete went up in flames to hear it, biting on his lips to hold back the screams as fire devoured him beneath his skin. He could feel his organs cripple and curl in on themselves as they charred.
“I wanted to d-”
“Don’t you dare say that!” Patrick cried. “I don’t believe you.”
Pete twisted the sheets around his fingers and worried his lips with his teeth, gaze fixed anywhere but on Patrick’s face.
“Pete,” he sighed, brows drawing together beneath the brim of his hat in an expression to match the desperation hanging on the edges of his words. “I just… I don’t understand. How? How could you do this to the band, your family, yourself… me?”
He was burning. His heart had caught like kindling and it spit and seared in his chest. He balled the sheets in his bleached fists and pulled a corner from the mattress, dragging his knees up. The anguish in Patrick’s voice flooded into his ears like white, hot light straight to the brain as it tortured and terrorized him. He writhed beneath the unbearable scrutiny of Patrick’s summer blue gaze soaking in his wanton misery and glaring weakness, illuminated by the unforgiving fluorescent lighting to accentuate every last flaw.
“Everything I do just makes it worse and worse,” Pete groaned, pressing his face into the pillow. “I should kill myself.”
“Shut the hell up!” Patrick snapped, face flushing with anger. “I don’t want to hear any of that melodramatic crap, okay? You’re not a terrible person, you’re not doomed, and you’re not going to kill yourself!”
“But… I’ve just gone and fucked everything up even more by -”
“I said shut the hell up!” He cried. Pete retreated deeper into the mattress and bit his lips shut. “And thank god you fucked up! Because if you’d succeeded, I don’t know what I would have done! I don’t know what any of us would have done without you.”
Pete dug his teeth into the sensitive skin of his lips even harder, determined to draw blood. Patrick took a deep breath and released it in a heavy sigh. “Regardless of whatever stupid thing you do that annoys me, or however times you hurt me, or,” he swallowed, “whatever it is that’s been going on between us… I’ll always love you, Pete. You’ll always be my best friend and even though sometimes you really, really test me, I’ll never be able to stop caring about you.”
Silence.
“Pete, would you at least look at me?”
He swallowed hard, tongue sticking to the dry roof of his mouth slimily, and thought he might just break his neck with the effort of forcing his head to turn until the hollowed-out darks of his eyes rested insipidly upon Patrick’s.
“Why?”
Silence.
* * *
When Patrick met with the rest of the band later to discuss the suddenly pressing issue of what they were going to do about a bassist for the tour that kicked off the next day, he got his answer.
“I think this is for you,” their manager said quietly, pressing a folded paper into Patrick’s hand as they stood in the parking lot, the radiant California sunshine and cloudless sky mocking the mood of the day.
Patrick’s mouth went dry at the thought of a letter in the hands of an outsider, someone beyond the little world of inkwells and paper trails that he and Pete had built for themselves through their clandestine correspondence. His chest tightened at the thought of Pete’s words reflected in the eyes of another.
“They found it in the car.”
I think I’ve always known, but now I’m starting to really, really believe. And it’s so wonderful because it’s you and you’ve always got this lovely light coming from your skin and sometimes I can feel it in my chest. It swells inside me and light fills up my lungs with each breath I take that smells like you, but when it’s gone the darkness it leaves behind invites in the worst of things. It’s so, so bad and it shouldn’t be because this is the first time for me, I swear. Maybe I’ve thought I’d seen it a thousand times before, but it’s never been like this and now I know what I’ve been missing all this time. Only I wish I hadn’t, because I am so selfish and now I want you all for myself, for all of time. I want never to die - for eternity to be mine, with you and this forever because it’s the way it should be.
But it won’t. And everything else seems useless. I just thought you should know that it’s real and I feel it, but I never could bring myself to say so. Now I’ve said it and it’s so fucking hilarious, because you’ll never even know.
I love you.
Pete
Authors: megyal and lesinnocents
Pairing: Patrick/Peter
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dear Patrick...
Disclaimer: 100% Disclaimed.
Author's Note: SORRY IT'S BEEN FOREVER. I KNOW, I SUCK.
Letter One
Letter Two
Letter Three
Letter Four
Letter Five
Letter Six
Letter Seven
Letter Eight
Letter Nine
Letter Ten
Letter Eleven
Letter Twelve
Why do you have to say things like that to me? Why? You tell me that you need me, that you care so much about me, you spin words of love into your letters that sound like the high, clear voices of young romances but yet you… you don’t want me. You turn me away. God, I… I don’t know what type of treacherous trap I’m luring myself into here, but these questions are boiling beneath my skin and steam’s squealing out of my pores and I can’t hold it back any longer.
Do you have any idea what it does to me to have you beneath my hands and between my thighs in the hot, dark, secret places of the night? Do you know how my stomach coils and leaps and floods with wet, aching heat every time a shuddery moan rolls off your tongue and past your lips? Do you know how shivers chase each other down the backs of my arms and down my spine when your breath strokes down my skin or how, when I see any piece of your skin exposed - the soft, inviting curves of your hips and the smooth angles of your pale shoulder blades - I feel as though the bones in my fingers will crack and split beneath the pressure of resisting a touch?
Patrick. Oh, you’re the only solid thing I’ve got left to my name now and I need you so desperately. I feel as though I’m begging you to be so much and it’s unfair, but I can’t stop myself from selfishly wanting, wanting, wanting you. It’s inscrutable. You constantly surround me - your voice in my head, singing my words and strumming your fingers over the melodies that match my heartbeats - but I’m just grabbing at your ankles and you’re dancing in circles. You dizzy me, blur the rest of the world around you and distort shapes and faces so that you’re the only channel coming in clear, but I won’t lie and say I mind.
I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what I’m doing. Don’t ask, I have no answers for you. I know, I know there’s her and so many other specters with icy fingers filling up the space between you and I, but I really, really can’t handle this anymore. I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve injected you and you’re within me now, all around and locked inside, threading through my arteries and perfuming the air I breathe.
Pete tried to talk to Patrick.
He paced the length of the hallway dozens of times over, chewing on the defenseless, soft tissue at the corners of his mouth and wringing his hands anxiously. Words were tumbling over themselves frantically in his head in their hurry to form the perfect phrases, just to be quickly erased and kicked over by those following them. He stood in front of Patrick’s door and all of the words fled before he could work up the courage to knock.
Instead, he turned back to his own room, collected his little plastic pill bottles, and drove off to an empty parking lot, where he could cure all his ailments in a single dose.
* * *
Patrick was furious when he got the phone call. He let out a roaring bellow and kicked his nightstand, sending it toppling over and all of the items upon it flying. He stood, hands balled into fists by his sides, chest heaving with deep, angry breaths, and surveyed the minor scene of wreckage he’d created with slit eyes behind strands of tawny hair.
Fuck Pete! Fuck him for being so impulsive, so selfish! What the hell had he been thinking? Didn’t he get it? Didn’t he understand in the slightest? When he just threw in the towel and decided that living life was too trying a task for him, was he honestly conceited enough to think that by shoveling poison down his throat and waiting for the last lights to blink out, he was the only one going to be hurt by it? Did he just not give a shit about the band, about his friends, his mother? Did he not consider how his loss would resonate through the hearts of all those who surrounded him like deaf, dumb flies buzzing around a beacon - did he not even notice that he was the sun, the center of everything, and the way that lips stilled when he spoke and eyes followed him hypnotically as he moved?
Did he never once think about Patrick?
He could feel his chest caving in and the bones of his ribcage compressing, milking the blood from his heart and the air from his lungs. Patrick sat back on the bed, legs too limp now to carry him, and buried his face deep in the darkness of his hands. It was all too much. Pete, nearly gone and lost forever - it made Patrick choke on his own breath to think on it. What if he… what if he had succeeded?
No, Patrick shook his head, swallowing hard and lifting his chin to face the sunlight that snuck in between the heavy curtains defiantly, he wouldn’t even imagine that. Pete had, despite his best efforts, survived. Patrick would see more mornings with Pete’s face flattened into the pillow in the opposite bunk and he would most definitely suffer more of his friend’s uproarious disturbances to the peaceful, organized life he tried to maintain. He couldn’t help but smile softly at the thought, the tiniest of grins tugging at the corners of his mouth in spite of the heavy weights upon his shoulders that made him stagger when he rose to his feet.
He had no choice but to go to Pete.
At the hospital, Patrick stalked the white halls, overtaken by the painfully bright lights and the cloying scent of sterilization as he searched for Pete’s room. The door that he knew would lead to Pete in a sickbed and a world of troubles loomed ominously before him, but with a deep breath Patrick summoned his tremulous nerve and pushed inside.
Pete looked far worse than he had imagined - somehow, Patrick had pictured him surrounded by admirers and easing their concerns with his gaudy grins and lewd jokes about the whole silly ordeal. What he found instead was a sallow, lifeless imitation of the usually radiant Pete Wentz that he so helplessly adored. Pete’s olive skin was jaundiced and seemed to lie limply over his bones. His lips were pale and his face sunken, and as Patrick took in the I.V. in his arm, the shallow heaving of his thin chest beneath the cheap fabric of the hospital gown, the deep shadows encircling his dull eyes, the ache in his chest tripled, seizing at his heart.
Patrick fell into the seat behind him. “Pete… god, are you okay?”
* * *
Pete wanted to laugh at that, but all he could muster was a curl at one corner of his lips. “Is that supposed to be the punch line, Patrick?” He said, speaking lowly like the walls were listening.
Patrick sighed in frustration at the foot of the bed and Pete watched him sedately through half-lidded eyes. “I meant your health,” said Patrick tersely, and Pete could almost see the inner battle waging behind glaring blue eyes to rein in the redhead’s temper, in lieu of the circumstances. It would have amused him if it also didn’t settle a suffocating weight upon his sternum that his heart squirmed uncomfortably beneath. Patrick’s eyes were dark and accusing, clouded and confused, and the scrutiny made Pete’s feeble body feel stripped bare and put on display to show off his agonizing weakness. His limbs sunk shamefully into the unsympathetic mattress.
“How could you do this, Pete?” Patrick broke the frail silence trembling in the air between them, his voice soft and rasping and heartbroken and Pete went up in flames to hear it, biting on his lips to hold back the screams as fire devoured him beneath his skin. He could feel his organs cripple and curl in on themselves as they charred.
“I wanted to d-”
“Don’t you dare say that!” Patrick cried. “I don’t believe you.”
Pete twisted the sheets around his fingers and worried his lips with his teeth, gaze fixed anywhere but on Patrick’s face.
“Pete,” he sighed, brows drawing together beneath the brim of his hat in an expression to match the desperation hanging on the edges of his words. “I just… I don’t understand. How? How could you do this to the band, your family, yourself… me?”
He was burning. His heart had caught like kindling and it spit and seared in his chest. He balled the sheets in his bleached fists and pulled a corner from the mattress, dragging his knees up. The anguish in Patrick’s voice flooded into his ears like white, hot light straight to the brain as it tortured and terrorized him. He writhed beneath the unbearable scrutiny of Patrick’s summer blue gaze soaking in his wanton misery and glaring weakness, illuminated by the unforgiving fluorescent lighting to accentuate every last flaw.
“Everything I do just makes it worse and worse,” Pete groaned, pressing his face into the pillow. “I should kill myself.”
“Shut the hell up!” Patrick snapped, face flushing with anger. “I don’t want to hear any of that melodramatic crap, okay? You’re not a terrible person, you’re not doomed, and you’re not going to kill yourself!”
“But… I’ve just gone and fucked everything up even more by -”
“I said shut the hell up!” He cried. Pete retreated deeper into the mattress and bit his lips shut. “And thank god you fucked up! Because if you’d succeeded, I don’t know what I would have done! I don’t know what any of us would have done without you.”
Pete dug his teeth into the sensitive skin of his lips even harder, determined to draw blood. Patrick took a deep breath and released it in a heavy sigh. “Regardless of whatever stupid thing you do that annoys me, or however times you hurt me, or,” he swallowed, “whatever it is that’s been going on between us… I’ll always love you, Pete. You’ll always be my best friend and even though sometimes you really, really test me, I’ll never be able to stop caring about you.”
Silence.
“Pete, would you at least look at me?”
He swallowed hard, tongue sticking to the dry roof of his mouth slimily, and thought he might just break his neck with the effort of forcing his head to turn until the hollowed-out darks of his eyes rested insipidly upon Patrick’s.
“Why?”
Silence.
* * *
When Patrick met with the rest of the band later to discuss the suddenly pressing issue of what they were going to do about a bassist for the tour that kicked off the next day, he got his answer.
“I think this is for you,” their manager said quietly, pressing a folded paper into Patrick’s hand as they stood in the parking lot, the radiant California sunshine and cloudless sky mocking the mood of the day.
Patrick’s mouth went dry at the thought of a letter in the hands of an outsider, someone beyond the little world of inkwells and paper trails that he and Pete had built for themselves through their clandestine correspondence. His chest tightened at the thought of Pete’s words reflected in the eyes of another.
“They found it in the car.”
I think I’ve always known, but now I’m starting to really, really believe. And it’s so wonderful because it’s you and you’ve always got this lovely light coming from your skin and sometimes I can feel it in my chest. It swells inside me and light fills up my lungs with each breath I take that smells like you, but when it’s gone the darkness it leaves behind invites in the worst of things. It’s so, so bad and it shouldn’t be because this is the first time for me, I swear. Maybe I’ve thought I’d seen it a thousand times before, but it’s never been like this and now I know what I’ve been missing all this time. Only I wish I hadn’t, because I am so selfish and now I want you all for myself, for all of time. I want never to die - for eternity to be mine, with you and this forever because it’s the way it should be.
But it won’t. And everything else seems useless. I just thought you should know that it’s real and I feel it, but I never could bring myself to say so. Now I’ve said it and it’s so fucking hilarious, because you’ll never even know.
I love you.
Pete