The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have miles to go before I...
I think slipsandtangles is kind of an enabler.
Title: In Somnia
Author: RiseAgainPhoenix, aka matchsticks_p
Pairing: Pete/Patrick (FOB rps)
Summary: The less Pete sleeps, the more Patrick does. And then things start going to hell.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: It’s an extended metaphor.
~ ~ ~
It probably started with that observation from Joe.
Joe hadn’t even meant anything by it-he was playing a video game, and was only half paying attention when he threw it out there. “You’ve sure been sleeping a lot lately,” was what he had said, to Patrick, who had just stumbled out of his bunk late that morning. It was a random, casual observation: Joe hadn’t even bothered taking his eyes off his game screen to look at Patrick when he said it. But it managed to make Patrick think, as he yawned blearily, that he had indeed been sleeping a lot lately.
* * *
Pete was having one of those weeks.
He had been doing just fine with the new sleep medication, and then it just suddenly…stopped. Nothing had changed, but his pills just stopped working one Monday, with no warning. He found himself staring at the top of his bunk for increasingly long stretches at night, and the skin beneath his eyes began to get darker and darker. By Friday, he was looking once again like pre-regulated-sleep-drugs-and-therapy Pete. It was not a good look for him.
His bandmates told him he looked like crap, even though he already knew it. He laughed it off and said that he was only having a little bit of trouble sleeping these past few days, nothing to worry about. “Not that Patrick would know anything about it,” he added jokingly, punching Patrick’s shoulder. “He sleeps like a baby every night.”
So yeah, it probably started with that observation from Joe, but if it didn’t, then Pete’s comment would definitely have done the trick.
* * *
Three late sound-checks and two missed radio appearances later, the guys were starting to get rather concerned about Patrick.
“Hey, are you sick or something?” Pete asked him one day, catching his arm as he passed by in the narrow confines of the bus. “You’ve been sleeping in a lot.”
Patrick lifted his hat a little, enough for him to run his hand through his hair before firmly settling the hat back onto his head. He sighed. “I don’t know-I’ve been really tired lately, for, like, no reason.”
“Maybe you have mono,” Pete teased. He was still gripping Patrick’s elbow.
“Maybe I’m contagious, because you don’t look so hot either.”
“Yeah. I sort of have the opposite problem,” Pete admitted. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? You can’t seem to stay awake, and I can’t sleep to save my life.”
“It is kind of weird-” Patrick stopped, and Pete could physically tell that something had just dawned on Patrick. He looked like he’d been struck by something, in both senses of the word.
“What? What is it?”
Patrick looked at him with a hint of horror. “I have to go,” he said, yanking his arm away from Pete and hurrying to his bunk.
* * *
The lack of sleep made Pete even more self-absorbed than usual, so it took him a little while to notice what Patrick was doing.
Patrick was not the partying type. He liked tranquility and solitude and books about music theory. He wasn’t adverse to going out and having a good time with a few friends every now and then, but most of the time he preferred to stay in. Lately, though, Patrick went out. A lot. Almost every night, and if he wasn’t already invited to a party then he would go out and find one. He stayed out as late as possible, avoiding his bed like it was something to be afraid of. But he just ended up waking later and later the next day.
It took Pete a while to notice, but once he started noticing, it didn’t take him very long to worry about it. He spent the next few sleepless nights telling himself that Patrick was just going through some sort of wild phase. It was perfectly normal and harmless. Patrick was at that age when he should go out and have some fun, and he was old enough to take care of himself. It wasn’t like Pete was the authority on health and fitness anyway, so he had no business telling Patrick how much he’s allowed to party and when to go to bed.
Pete was sure he had made the right decision, not calling Patrick on it, because just a few weeks later the problem solved itself. Patrick stopped going out so much, and he started turning in earlier. Pete figured he had worked all the rowdiness or whatever out of his system, and was settling down again. He figured everything was fine and back to normal.
* * *
Sleeping in a hotel was nicer than sleeping on the bus all the time, if only because it broke the monotony of the road. At least it gave Pete a different ceiling to stare at as he tried to convince his brain to just turn the fuck off already.
Pete groaned and struggled with the nice, soft comforter for a few minutes. This was getting ridiculous. The whole insomnia thing was starting to be as bad as it was before he got help. He was getting an average of one or two hours of sleep per night; three if he was lucky. Some nights, he wouldn’t get any at all.
The most annoying thing about insomnia was that it made you think about it. Sleeping was supposed to be a totally natural process that happened without any conscious effort, but insomnia made people focus on trying to sleep, focus so hard and with so much determination that they ended up being even more awake than they were before they tried to sleep. It could easily drive one crazy. It was starting to drive Pete crazy.
“Crazier, dude,” he muttered to himself in his nice, soft hotel bed. “You mean it’s driving you even crazier.”
Rapid, nervous knocks at the door broke him out of his personal debate over his own sanity. “Hang on,” he called out, stubbing his toe on the bedside table as he rolled out of bed. “Shit. Hang on, I’m coming.”
He opened the door and wasn’t entirely surprised to find Patrick on the other side. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Pete, listen, this is really important,” Patrick said, pushing his way in. “I have to tell you something. You have got to listen to me. You’re gonna think I’m crazy or something, but you have to believe me, because this is seriously happening, I know it is. You have to believe me.”
“Okay, whoa, slow down.” Patrick was talking really fast, the words tripping off his tongue stiltedly, interrupted by quick gasps of breaths in between. He had Pete by the shoulders, and was looking at him intently, still going on about something, but his speech had gotten so short of breath and he was stuttering so much that Pete couldn’t understand a single word. Pete led him over to the bed and sat him down. “Just take a deep breath and calm down, okay?”
“No Pete, you gotta listen! I can’t calm down! Have you heard, like, a single word I’ve been saying? This is serious. I mean, I thought I could fix it myself-I thought I could control it, but it’s just too strong for me! It’s gonna kill us both. It’s hurting you, Pete. Are you listening? We have to do something!”
“Okay, and we will do something, I promise,” Pete said soothingly, sitting down next to Patrick. He had no idea what he just promised to do, but Patrick was so far beyond hysterical that he had to do something to calm him down first. “Hey, have you been drinking?”
Patrick paused his frantic litany long enough to shoot Pete a sharp, exasperated look. “No, Peter, I have not been drinking.” He took a deep breath and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Jesus, Pete, you need to listen to me,” he said, pleadingly.
Pete put his arm around his shoulders. “I am listening, I swear. Come here.” He pulled Patrick into his blankets, arranging the two of them so that they lay propped up by the headboard. He held Patrick close and made him put his head onto his shoulder. Patrick was shaking. “Okay, so tell me again, from the beginning, what the problem is,” he murmured into Patrick’s hair.
Patrick started his story again. It was mostly incoherent, but the general gist of it was that Patrick was somehow hurting Pete, causing him to be sick or something, and he couldn’t control it even though he had tried. Pete made reassuring noises against the top of Patrick’s head, repaying him for all the kind nights he had spent holding Pete in the exact same way, back when he was at his worst. He had been paranoid and scared the way Patrick was, and Patrick had never judged. So he tried hard to just be there for Patrick, not patronising him or dismissing his fears, not prying for a reason or trying to figure out what brought this on-he just listened, until Patrick eventually ran out of steam and fell asleep.
Pete held Patrick in his arms. The position he was in was starting to get uncomfortable, and he was developing a crick between his shoulder blades, but he didn’t want to shift and risk waking Patrick. He sighed. It looked like one of those nights when he wouldn’t be getting any. “Sleep,” his mind added hurriedly. “You won’t be getting any sleep. Not…anything else.” Even thinking innuendos with a sleeping Patrick in his arms made him feel dirty and wrong.
The back of his head dropped hard against the bed’s headboard and Pete braced himself for a long night.
* * *
Patrick ran away the second he woke up the next morning. He avoided Pete like the plague for the rest of the day. Pete thought maybe he was embarrassed about the night before, or just needed some space to sort out his thoughts, so he left him alone.
Pete had ended up holding Patrick for the entire night, not sleeping. He was drained. They didn’t have an interview or appearance or meeting or pressing social engagement to go to, so Pete crashed on the couch in the front of the bus. He found himself being shaken awake before he even knew he fell asleep.
“Pete. Pete, it’s important.”
“What? What is?” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Patrick? What’s wrong?”
“Pete, I’ve figured it out,” he said urgently. For some reason, he was whispering.
“What? Figured what out?” He moved over to make room on the couch, but Patrick wouldn’t sit down.
“Last night, what I was telling you. I figured it out.”
Pete wracked his mind for some sort of clue. None was forthcoming. “Um…”
“It’s me. I thought it was something else, something causing me to sleep. But it’s actually me. I’m doing it. I swear never meant to, Pete, I’m sorry!”
“Hey, no, it’s okay-” Pete reached for his hand, but Patrick jerked away.
“No, you don’t get it! You can’t touch me! You shouldn’t even be talking to me! We can’t be in the same room, Pete. It’s not safe.”
The really scary part was, Patrick looked and sounded like he believed every word. Like he actually thought that people, that Pete, could get hurt from being in the same room as him. He knew that Patrick’s self-esteem had never been the greatest, but this. How had he missed this? How had Pete missed signs that his own best friend was spiralling toward self-destruction? “Patrick, listen to me. It’s okay. You’re not hurting me. You’re not hurting anyone. Trust me.”
Patrick laughed a strangled little laugh that sounded more like a sob than anything else. “Jesus. You seriously don’t understand. I’m stealing your sleep, Pete.”
“What? That doesn’t even make sense!” Pete reached over, forcibly grabbing his shoulders before he had the chance to pull away. “Listen to yourself,” he said, using the most rational and soothing tone he could muster up. “Stealing my sleep? Come on. I know you, and you’re no thief-the only thing you know how to steal is hearts.”
No amount of Pete’s flippant teasing could jolt Patrick out of his conclusion. “It makes perfect sense,” he insisted, his eyes and his voice burning. “When did your insomnia start up again, about a month ago? Yeah? Well that’s when I started sleeping a lot. The less you slept, the more I did. I tried to stop it by forcing myself to stay awake, but there’s nothing I can do! It’s gotten to the point now where you’re sleeping once every two days and I’m sleeping like fifteen hours per day. It’s not normal, Pete, and it sure as fuck can’t just be a coincidence.”
He sounded so convinced, so convincing, that for just half a second Pete believed him, like it wasn’t a completely ridiculous idea. “People can’t just steal sleep from other people,” Pete reasoned. “Look, I agree with you that something weird is going on, but don’t you think there’s a more logical explanation?”
“The more sleep you lose, the more I gain,” Patrick said with a strange, feverish conviction. “What could be more logical than an inversely proportional relationship?”
Pete sank back down onto the couch heavily. “You seriously believe this,” he asked, looking up at him with the futile hope that it was just one long, unfunny joke.
“I know it,” Patrick affirmed. He paused to yawn deeply, as though to bolster his argument. “I just don’t know how to fix it. Until we figure it out, we need to stay away from each other. We have to cancel all the shows next week, tell everyone we’re sick, and just not see each other at all, okay? Maybe we can get different hotels, really far away from each other. We shouldn’t call or e-mail or anything, either. You need to minimize all contact with me, and then-”
“Hold on,” Pete interrupted as he began to babble nervously again. “Isn’t this a bit drastic? I mean, cancelling shows? Getting different hotels? Can’t we just take a day off and try to figure it out together?”
“No, we can’t,” he replied with a fervency that was starting to scare Pete a little. “You promised last night, remember? You promised we’d do something. You promised, Pete.”
Patrick looked like he was seconds away from some sort of hysterical breakdown, and fuck, Pete did remember that he had promised. He didn’t really have much of a choice. “Fine, okay, we’ll do it. Everything you said. We’ll do it.”
* * *
Three days later, and Pete was literally crawling up and down the walls of his hotel room. The separation thing wasn’t going so well for him. He hadn’t slept at all since they put Patrick’s idea into motion, and he could physically feel his brain sliding inexorably into hair-ripping, face-clawing crazy.
No amount of medicine was going to help him this time.
He wondered if this was how he was going to die.
The stinging in his eyes and the aching in his tired, tired bones was torture he wouldn’t have endured for anyone else. But he had promised Patrick, and Patrick had looked so scared… Maybe if he just stuck it out for the rest of the week, things would get better.
* * *
On the fifth day, Pete got a phone call.
All the days were blurring into just one long, excruciating day for Pete, and the only reason he knew it was the fifth one was because he had begun to take an almost obsessive-compulsive notice of all time-tracking devices. Each sleepless night was carefully marked in his calendar, each sweep of the hour hand intensely noted, each blinking second scrutinized. The shrill ringing of the hotel phone broke his focussed monotony.
“Pete, shit, you gotta get your ass over here...” Andy’s voice, on the other end, had never sounded so unhinged before.
“What? Why?”
“It’s Patrick. You need to get here right now.”
No syllables had ever made his heartbeat recoil quite like that before. “What is it?” he asked, already pulling his shoes on.
“Fuck. Pete. He won’t wake up.”
* * *
Pete had fairly good intuitions. He knew which trends were worth following and which ones wouldn’t last long enough to be of significance; he knew which new bands he should sign ten minutes into seeing them play for the first time; he knew how the rest of his life was gonna go the second he laid eyes on Patrick. So when his brain, heart, and gut combined all told him that he could somehow fix this situation by just getting close to Patrick again, he was inclined to believe them.
He shoved past Joe, who had opened Patrick’s room door for him, and made straight for the bed.
“Hang on,” Andy said, for some reason thinking it was a good idea to get in his way. “Dammit Pete, hang on. What the fuck is going on here? All Patrick told us was that you two were on some sort of quarantine, that you couldn’t see each other for at least a week. We figured it was some song-writing thing, or maybe you had a fight. But then we didn’t hear from you for like five days, so we decided to check on you, and we find Patrick in a fucking coma,” he gestured frantically at the bed, “or something. And you look like total shit. I just need to know what’s going on because I am freaking the fuck out.”
Pete explained the whole sleep thing to them as quickly as he could, while the entire time his instincts screamed at him to go to Patrick, touch Patrick, save Patrick.
Joe and Andy were giving him matching unconvinced looks, and for the first time in his life, Pete was finding the situation hard to put into words. “Look, I know, okay? But Patrick’s explanation made sense at the time, and now…I don’t know. I have this weird feeling that I’m supposed to be having a revelation here, but the only thing occurring to me right now is that I really hate not being there for Patrick. I don’t know what’s happening, but I know I have to be here for it.”
He stepped past Andy and sat down on the edge of Patrick’s bed. Patrick’s breathing was slow and even, the skin of his eyelids the most unbelievable shade of pale, and suddenly snatches of the Snow White story randomly flashed through Pete’s brain. Maybe this was his revelation.
“The problem isn’t you being close, it’s you being not close enough,” he muttered to himself, leaning down to-what, kiss him? He wasn’t sure. But his lips hovered close enough to Patrick’s face that he could feel their breaths mingle. He leaned in further.
And then Patrick opened his eyes.
~ ~ ~
end.
That wasn’t too weird, was it? I’ve been reading a lot of Rimbaud lately, so if it read like crack-yet-serious!fic, you can attribute it to this fact.
Title: In Somnia
Author: RiseAgainPhoenix, aka matchsticks_p
Pairing: Pete/Patrick (FOB rps)
Summary: The less Pete sleeps, the more Patrick does. And then things start going to hell.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: It’s an extended metaphor.
~ ~ ~
It probably started with that observation from Joe.
Joe hadn’t even meant anything by it-he was playing a video game, and was only half paying attention when he threw it out there. “You’ve sure been sleeping a lot lately,” was what he had said, to Patrick, who had just stumbled out of his bunk late that morning. It was a random, casual observation: Joe hadn’t even bothered taking his eyes off his game screen to look at Patrick when he said it. But it managed to make Patrick think, as he yawned blearily, that he had indeed been sleeping a lot lately.
* * *
Pete was having one of those weeks.
He had been doing just fine with the new sleep medication, and then it just suddenly…stopped. Nothing had changed, but his pills just stopped working one Monday, with no warning. He found himself staring at the top of his bunk for increasingly long stretches at night, and the skin beneath his eyes began to get darker and darker. By Friday, he was looking once again like pre-regulated-sleep-drugs-and-therapy Pete. It was not a good look for him.
His bandmates told him he looked like crap, even though he already knew it. He laughed it off and said that he was only having a little bit of trouble sleeping these past few days, nothing to worry about. “Not that Patrick would know anything about it,” he added jokingly, punching Patrick’s shoulder. “He sleeps like a baby every night.”
So yeah, it probably started with that observation from Joe, but if it didn’t, then Pete’s comment would definitely have done the trick.
* * *
Three late sound-checks and two missed radio appearances later, the guys were starting to get rather concerned about Patrick.
“Hey, are you sick or something?” Pete asked him one day, catching his arm as he passed by in the narrow confines of the bus. “You’ve been sleeping in a lot.”
Patrick lifted his hat a little, enough for him to run his hand through his hair before firmly settling the hat back onto his head. He sighed. “I don’t know-I’ve been really tired lately, for, like, no reason.”
“Maybe you have mono,” Pete teased. He was still gripping Patrick’s elbow.
“Maybe I’m contagious, because you don’t look so hot either.”
“Yeah. I sort of have the opposite problem,” Pete admitted. “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? You can’t seem to stay awake, and I can’t sleep to save my life.”
“It is kind of weird-” Patrick stopped, and Pete could physically tell that something had just dawned on Patrick. He looked like he’d been struck by something, in both senses of the word.
“What? What is it?”
Patrick looked at him with a hint of horror. “I have to go,” he said, yanking his arm away from Pete and hurrying to his bunk.
* * *
The lack of sleep made Pete even more self-absorbed than usual, so it took him a little while to notice what Patrick was doing.
Patrick was not the partying type. He liked tranquility and solitude and books about music theory. He wasn’t adverse to going out and having a good time with a few friends every now and then, but most of the time he preferred to stay in. Lately, though, Patrick went out. A lot. Almost every night, and if he wasn’t already invited to a party then he would go out and find one. He stayed out as late as possible, avoiding his bed like it was something to be afraid of. But he just ended up waking later and later the next day.
It took Pete a while to notice, but once he started noticing, it didn’t take him very long to worry about it. He spent the next few sleepless nights telling himself that Patrick was just going through some sort of wild phase. It was perfectly normal and harmless. Patrick was at that age when he should go out and have some fun, and he was old enough to take care of himself. It wasn’t like Pete was the authority on health and fitness anyway, so he had no business telling Patrick how much he’s allowed to party and when to go to bed.
Pete was sure he had made the right decision, not calling Patrick on it, because just a few weeks later the problem solved itself. Patrick stopped going out so much, and he started turning in earlier. Pete figured he had worked all the rowdiness or whatever out of his system, and was settling down again. He figured everything was fine and back to normal.
* * *
Sleeping in a hotel was nicer than sleeping on the bus all the time, if only because it broke the monotony of the road. At least it gave Pete a different ceiling to stare at as he tried to convince his brain to just turn the fuck off already.
Pete groaned and struggled with the nice, soft comforter for a few minutes. This was getting ridiculous. The whole insomnia thing was starting to be as bad as it was before he got help. He was getting an average of one or two hours of sleep per night; three if he was lucky. Some nights, he wouldn’t get any at all.
The most annoying thing about insomnia was that it made you think about it. Sleeping was supposed to be a totally natural process that happened without any conscious effort, but insomnia made people focus on trying to sleep, focus so hard and with so much determination that they ended up being even more awake than they were before they tried to sleep. It could easily drive one crazy. It was starting to drive Pete crazy.
“Crazier, dude,” he muttered to himself in his nice, soft hotel bed. “You mean it’s driving you even crazier.”
Rapid, nervous knocks at the door broke him out of his personal debate over his own sanity. “Hang on,” he called out, stubbing his toe on the bedside table as he rolled out of bed. “Shit. Hang on, I’m coming.”
He opened the door and wasn’t entirely surprised to find Patrick on the other side. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Pete, listen, this is really important,” Patrick said, pushing his way in. “I have to tell you something. You have got to listen to me. You’re gonna think I’m crazy or something, but you have to believe me, because this is seriously happening, I know it is. You have to believe me.”
“Okay, whoa, slow down.” Patrick was talking really fast, the words tripping off his tongue stiltedly, interrupted by quick gasps of breaths in between. He had Pete by the shoulders, and was looking at him intently, still going on about something, but his speech had gotten so short of breath and he was stuttering so much that Pete couldn’t understand a single word. Pete led him over to the bed and sat him down. “Just take a deep breath and calm down, okay?”
“No Pete, you gotta listen! I can’t calm down! Have you heard, like, a single word I’ve been saying? This is serious. I mean, I thought I could fix it myself-I thought I could control it, but it’s just too strong for me! It’s gonna kill us both. It’s hurting you, Pete. Are you listening? We have to do something!”
“Okay, and we will do something, I promise,” Pete said soothingly, sitting down next to Patrick. He had no idea what he just promised to do, but Patrick was so far beyond hysterical that he had to do something to calm him down first. “Hey, have you been drinking?”
Patrick paused his frantic litany long enough to shoot Pete a sharp, exasperated look. “No, Peter, I have not been drinking.” He took a deep breath and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Jesus, Pete, you need to listen to me,” he said, pleadingly.
Pete put his arm around his shoulders. “I am listening, I swear. Come here.” He pulled Patrick into his blankets, arranging the two of them so that they lay propped up by the headboard. He held Patrick close and made him put his head onto his shoulder. Patrick was shaking. “Okay, so tell me again, from the beginning, what the problem is,” he murmured into Patrick’s hair.
Patrick started his story again. It was mostly incoherent, but the general gist of it was that Patrick was somehow hurting Pete, causing him to be sick or something, and he couldn’t control it even though he had tried. Pete made reassuring noises against the top of Patrick’s head, repaying him for all the kind nights he had spent holding Pete in the exact same way, back when he was at his worst. He had been paranoid and scared the way Patrick was, and Patrick had never judged. So he tried hard to just be there for Patrick, not patronising him or dismissing his fears, not prying for a reason or trying to figure out what brought this on-he just listened, until Patrick eventually ran out of steam and fell asleep.
Pete held Patrick in his arms. The position he was in was starting to get uncomfortable, and he was developing a crick between his shoulder blades, but he didn’t want to shift and risk waking Patrick. He sighed. It looked like one of those nights when he wouldn’t be getting any. “Sleep,” his mind added hurriedly. “You won’t be getting any sleep. Not…anything else.” Even thinking innuendos with a sleeping Patrick in his arms made him feel dirty and wrong.
The back of his head dropped hard against the bed’s headboard and Pete braced himself for a long night.
* * *
Patrick ran away the second he woke up the next morning. He avoided Pete like the plague for the rest of the day. Pete thought maybe he was embarrassed about the night before, or just needed some space to sort out his thoughts, so he left him alone.
Pete had ended up holding Patrick for the entire night, not sleeping. He was drained. They didn’t have an interview or appearance or meeting or pressing social engagement to go to, so Pete crashed on the couch in the front of the bus. He found himself being shaken awake before he even knew he fell asleep.
“Pete. Pete, it’s important.”
“What? What is?” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Patrick? What’s wrong?”
“Pete, I’ve figured it out,” he said urgently. For some reason, he was whispering.
“What? Figured what out?” He moved over to make room on the couch, but Patrick wouldn’t sit down.
“Last night, what I was telling you. I figured it out.”
Pete wracked his mind for some sort of clue. None was forthcoming. “Um…”
“It’s me. I thought it was something else, something causing me to sleep. But it’s actually me. I’m doing it. I swear never meant to, Pete, I’m sorry!”
“Hey, no, it’s okay-” Pete reached for his hand, but Patrick jerked away.
“No, you don’t get it! You can’t touch me! You shouldn’t even be talking to me! We can’t be in the same room, Pete. It’s not safe.”
The really scary part was, Patrick looked and sounded like he believed every word. Like he actually thought that people, that Pete, could get hurt from being in the same room as him. He knew that Patrick’s self-esteem had never been the greatest, but this. How had he missed this? How had Pete missed signs that his own best friend was spiralling toward self-destruction? “Patrick, listen to me. It’s okay. You’re not hurting me. You’re not hurting anyone. Trust me.”
Patrick laughed a strangled little laugh that sounded more like a sob than anything else. “Jesus. You seriously don’t understand. I’m stealing your sleep, Pete.”
“What? That doesn’t even make sense!” Pete reached over, forcibly grabbing his shoulders before he had the chance to pull away. “Listen to yourself,” he said, using the most rational and soothing tone he could muster up. “Stealing my sleep? Come on. I know you, and you’re no thief-the only thing you know how to steal is hearts.”
No amount of Pete’s flippant teasing could jolt Patrick out of his conclusion. “It makes perfect sense,” he insisted, his eyes and his voice burning. “When did your insomnia start up again, about a month ago? Yeah? Well that’s when I started sleeping a lot. The less you slept, the more I did. I tried to stop it by forcing myself to stay awake, but there’s nothing I can do! It’s gotten to the point now where you’re sleeping once every two days and I’m sleeping like fifteen hours per day. It’s not normal, Pete, and it sure as fuck can’t just be a coincidence.”
He sounded so convinced, so convincing, that for just half a second Pete believed him, like it wasn’t a completely ridiculous idea. “People can’t just steal sleep from other people,” Pete reasoned. “Look, I agree with you that something weird is going on, but don’t you think there’s a more logical explanation?”
“The more sleep you lose, the more I gain,” Patrick said with a strange, feverish conviction. “What could be more logical than an inversely proportional relationship?”
Pete sank back down onto the couch heavily. “You seriously believe this,” he asked, looking up at him with the futile hope that it was just one long, unfunny joke.
“I know it,” Patrick affirmed. He paused to yawn deeply, as though to bolster his argument. “I just don’t know how to fix it. Until we figure it out, we need to stay away from each other. We have to cancel all the shows next week, tell everyone we’re sick, and just not see each other at all, okay? Maybe we can get different hotels, really far away from each other. We shouldn’t call or e-mail or anything, either. You need to minimize all contact with me, and then-”
“Hold on,” Pete interrupted as he began to babble nervously again. “Isn’t this a bit drastic? I mean, cancelling shows? Getting different hotels? Can’t we just take a day off and try to figure it out together?”
“No, we can’t,” he replied with a fervency that was starting to scare Pete a little. “You promised last night, remember? You promised we’d do something. You promised, Pete.”
Patrick looked like he was seconds away from some sort of hysterical breakdown, and fuck, Pete did remember that he had promised. He didn’t really have much of a choice. “Fine, okay, we’ll do it. Everything you said. We’ll do it.”
* * *
Three days later, and Pete was literally crawling up and down the walls of his hotel room. The separation thing wasn’t going so well for him. He hadn’t slept at all since they put Patrick’s idea into motion, and he could physically feel his brain sliding inexorably into hair-ripping, face-clawing crazy.
No amount of medicine was going to help him this time.
He wondered if this was how he was going to die.
The stinging in his eyes and the aching in his tired, tired bones was torture he wouldn’t have endured for anyone else. But he had promised Patrick, and Patrick had looked so scared… Maybe if he just stuck it out for the rest of the week, things would get better.
* * *
On the fifth day, Pete got a phone call.
All the days were blurring into just one long, excruciating day for Pete, and the only reason he knew it was the fifth one was because he had begun to take an almost obsessive-compulsive notice of all time-tracking devices. Each sleepless night was carefully marked in his calendar, each sweep of the hour hand intensely noted, each blinking second scrutinized. The shrill ringing of the hotel phone broke his focussed monotony.
“Pete, shit, you gotta get your ass over here...” Andy’s voice, on the other end, had never sounded so unhinged before.
“What? Why?”
“It’s Patrick. You need to get here right now.”
No syllables had ever made his heartbeat recoil quite like that before. “What is it?” he asked, already pulling his shoes on.
“Fuck. Pete. He won’t wake up.”
* * *
Pete had fairly good intuitions. He knew which trends were worth following and which ones wouldn’t last long enough to be of significance; he knew which new bands he should sign ten minutes into seeing them play for the first time; he knew how the rest of his life was gonna go the second he laid eyes on Patrick. So when his brain, heart, and gut combined all told him that he could somehow fix this situation by just getting close to Patrick again, he was inclined to believe them.
He shoved past Joe, who had opened Patrick’s room door for him, and made straight for the bed.
“Hang on,” Andy said, for some reason thinking it was a good idea to get in his way. “Dammit Pete, hang on. What the fuck is going on here? All Patrick told us was that you two were on some sort of quarantine, that you couldn’t see each other for at least a week. We figured it was some song-writing thing, or maybe you had a fight. But then we didn’t hear from you for like five days, so we decided to check on you, and we find Patrick in a fucking coma,” he gestured frantically at the bed, “or something. And you look like total shit. I just need to know what’s going on because I am freaking the fuck out.”
Pete explained the whole sleep thing to them as quickly as he could, while the entire time his instincts screamed at him to go to Patrick, touch Patrick, save Patrick.
Joe and Andy were giving him matching unconvinced looks, and for the first time in his life, Pete was finding the situation hard to put into words. “Look, I know, okay? But Patrick’s explanation made sense at the time, and now…I don’t know. I have this weird feeling that I’m supposed to be having a revelation here, but the only thing occurring to me right now is that I really hate not being there for Patrick. I don’t know what’s happening, but I know I have to be here for it.”
He stepped past Andy and sat down on the edge of Patrick’s bed. Patrick’s breathing was slow and even, the skin of his eyelids the most unbelievable shade of pale, and suddenly snatches of the Snow White story randomly flashed through Pete’s brain. Maybe this was his revelation.
“The problem isn’t you being close, it’s you being not close enough,” he muttered to himself, leaning down to-what, kiss him? He wasn’t sure. But his lips hovered close enough to Patrick’s face that he could feel their breaths mingle. He leaned in further.
And then Patrick opened his eyes.
~ ~ ~
end.
That wasn’t too weird, was it? I’ve been reading a lot of Rimbaud lately, so if it read like crack-yet-serious!fic, you can attribute it to this fact.