another ballad for heavy lids; ryan/brendon
Ryan/Brendon(Audrey/Jac, Pete/Patrick); PG13 ; au ; 2,069 words ; I disclaim
another ballad for heavy lids
"My room is a mess," Ryan says. He rolls onto his back and stretches his arms out as far as they go, and they look like they can reach as far as he can see. “So messy,” he continues. “Flowers are growing out of the ground.”
"Go fish," Brendon says. He looks like he is concentrating very hard. Ryan does not want to throw off his game. He decides that he will talk about flowers later, and he goes fish.
"Do you have any Fs?" Brendon questions, looking up at Ryan hopefully. His eyes are moon-sized. They are big and brown and they do not change color. Ryan's eyes don't change color either, but Audrey's do.
"F for four or F for five?" Ryan responds. He smiles because those are the only cards he has. (There are six of them, and all Fs! Ridiculous!) Brendon is poking out his lip, thinking, shuffling his cards again and again as if it will change them at all. (And maybe it will! Ryan hasn't tried it). Brendon's silence is an invitation, and Ryan continues, "Or...or F for fish? Or fire," he says, grinning. "Or finches, or films, or French fries?"
"Or flowers," Brendon says. He too is grinning. Ryan cuts his eyes in a friendly way, but he has an atrocious poker face and a very low tolerance for giggles, and explodes into fits of them nearly immediately. Brendon is not far behind.
Their laughter floats up, up into the sky and doesn't stop until it reaches the stars.
-
Audrey is on the stairs, lying prostrate and playing games on a small, hand-held device. She calls it Jac. Audrey is not very good at games, electronic or otherwise, and Jac makes beeping noises every time she gives up and presses all of the buttons at once instead of learning the actual controls. Ryan assumes this is Jac's way of arguing. He finds it endlessly amusing.
"You're still in your pajamas," Brendon says. He is staring, expressionless, and Ryan's blush is as spectral as the rainbow. His pajamas are comfortable! They are his favorite shade of green. He wonders why Brendon doesn't criticize Audrey, then, who is wearing only a plain white t-shirt and black underwear. Ryan really wishes she would get dressed sometimes and stop embarrassing him like she does.
"They're very nice pajamas," Brendon continues. He smiles a bit and leans across a haphazard pile of red playing-cards to smooth down the front of the shirt. His palm is warm and flat as it slides down Ryan’s chest and Ryan blushes like a strobe-light, red-purple-green-pink-blue-white-red.
“There,” Brendon says. He smiles again and presses his mouth softly to the corner of Ryan’s own. Ryan is almost sure his entire face is flashing colors, now. Maybe his entire body. The whole room!
Jac beeps wildly and Audrey grunts, kicking the backs of her bare feet against the stairs.
-
Ryan has never been to the top of the stairs.
He isn't sure what's up there, or what it will do to him. He often has dreams that the stairs just never end. He dreams that there is a door, sometimes, and when he opens it it sucks him inside. Thirdly, he dreams they end before he notices and he falls right off the edge and into nothing.
Ryan does not want to risk it. He likes the place that he is. Even when the flowers grow.
Maybe especially then.
-
The day that Patrick appears is the same day that Jac stops beeping and starts saying real words. It’s true!
“Green alphabet waves general vampires!” Jac shouts in her tinny, electronic voice. Audrey frowns at the screen.
Shut up. The words are real! I did not promise that they made any sense.
-
Patrick does not understand this world. He says he is from a different place than here.
“Your flower-pots have eyes,” he says. He is looking around the room, wide-eyed, baffled, and the ferns are blinking at him. Brendon is blinking at him. Ryan is just as confused.
“What are flower-pots?” Ryan asks. Brendon is frowning in confusion, also, no help at all. “Besides, those are ferns, not flowers.”
Patrick doesn't understand why Brendon’s shirt changes colors. He doesn't understand why the roof is made of outer-space, and he does not understand why Ryan has never been up his own staircase. He wants to know why the clock keeps going around without stopping, and what happens to everything when it rains. Ryan cannot answer. He does not know.
He feels completely helpless. “I don't know what rain is,” he confesses. He feels sad and not-so-smart, and Brendon hugs him from behind. Ryan leans into him, spent.
“Do you...” Brendon begins, speaking to Patrick but nuzzling Ryan’s neck. “Do you play Go Fish?”
“I do!” Patrick says, breathless and suddenly elated. He seems to be grasping onto what he finds familiar. Brendon leads him over to a clear spot on the floor, sweeping all of the cards into a pile and asking Patrick quietly to help him shuffle them up. Ryan stays where he's been, looking up, wondering if he should lock the door under the stairs to prevent more visitors like Patrick from wandering in.
-
“Friday hypnosis!” Jac shouts. “Intelligent monkey fungus sleeping blueberry!”
“Nobody fucking understands you!” Audrey shouts, angered.
Patrick has been in the corner for three days. He sits under the tree eats the toast as it is made, without cinnamon or butter! It makes Ryan very uncomfortable. He thinks that it should also make Brendon uncomfortable, but Brendon keeps playing with Gabe the snake and rolling him around the banister of the stairs.
“He misses his friends back home,” Brendon says when ran asks what's wrong with Patrick. Gabe the snake seems irritated by Brendon’s constant wrapping him around the stairs, but Brendon seems to find it very entertaining. He does not seem at all worried about the possibility of being bitten.
“Friends back home?” Ryan questions. He wraps his hand around Brendon’s wrist and tries to pull it away from the increasingly angry reptile. Gabe has cold blood. He has a cold heart. Ryan does not want Brendon’s blood anywhere but in his body.
Brendon’s body.
“Patrick misses Pete especially,” Brendon says, yanking away from Ryan’s grasp. When Ryan reaches for it again, unfazed, Brendon asks, “do you want to hold my hand?”
Ryan’s blush flickers as he furiously nods. “I do,” he says, and Brendon grabs his hand. Their fingers lace together, and Brendon holds them up like a trophy. Like this is something he's won.
-
Jac starts to understand words, and her sentences become less and less ridiculous. She starts saying things like 'this day is good' instead of ‘yellow raccoon trash party'. Audrey says that she and Jac are in love.
“We’re going to move to Mexico,” Audrey says. Jac says “Yesly!”
“It is good that you are in love,” says Patrick. Ryan can tell that their new friend is very sad. It makes him uncomfortable.
“We should move to Mexico,” Brendon says, weaving a four-strand braid into Ryan’s short hair. Ryan wiggles his toes.
“You'll never get to Mexico,” he says. “It simply does not exist.”
-
When they wake the next morning, Audrey and Jac are gone.
They look all over the place for them. Ryan looks in the cupboards and in the bushes. Brendon looks in the stairway closet and, when Patrick refuses to get too close to them, the ferns. Patrick stays sitting under the tree, too tired to move.
Ryan looks up at the stairs, and sighs, wondering. Brendon comes up behind him and lays his chin on Ryan’s shoulder.
“I keep forgetting what we're afraid of,” he says.
-
“I want to find my friend,” Patrick says, tapping a baseball bat against the floor. Ryan is almost positive that is not what they are used for, but he doesn't know what to do with them otherwise, so he doesn't argue. Patrick says, “I want to find my way back home.”
“Then find your way back home,” Ryan says.
“Maybe you should try the stairs,” Brendon says. Ryan gets that itchy feeling under his skin.
“Why are you so obsessed with the stairs!?” he shouts. His anger burns red on his face. He shouts, “Why is everyone!? It is perfectly okay to be here. I like where we are. I thought you liked it, too.”
(It just really hurts Ryan’s feelings. This is Ryan’s favorite place in the world. any world. He likes the flowers and the ferns. He likes that time never stops and he likes the vibrancy of things, like blushes or touches or colors or laughter. He likes the spill-canvas of the outer-space ceiling and he likes that dreams are so real and beautiful. Most of all, he likes Brendon Urie. He likes that Brendon likes him, too. It's never happened like that, been so easy anywhere else.)
Ryan huffs, and he is sad and tired. His face is still bright red, pained, and Patrick looks shaken. Brendon looks confused. He says, “I don't think you understand.”
“I don't,” Ryan sighs. His voice is very soft, like silk and air combined.
Brendon crawls across the whole room to where Ryan has collapsed in a heap. He uncrosses Ryan’s arms and puts them on his face. He says, “It's not here that I like.” he looks right into Ryan’s eyes and says, “It’s you.”
He nuzzles his face into Ryan’s hand, and Ryan’s mouth is open, dumb-founded. Brendon pushes forward and bites his nose.
“I would like it anywhere as long as you were there too.”
-
“You’re all dressed up,” Brendon says. Ryan looks down at his pajamas. They are the same as they always are, if not a bit more crinkled, and he frowns. Brendon giggles a bit and reaches up, pulling on the brim of Ryan’s hat. “It’s a very nice hat,” he says.
“Thank you,” Ryan says. Brendon makes him feel like a foolish girl. It’s embarrassing.
“Are you going to tell me why you are all dressed up?” he asks, curious.
Ryan straightens the fedora on his head, a determined set to his mouth. “We are going to help Patrick find the things he's lost,” he says. “We are going to find his Pete, and his home.”
“I don't think Pete belongs to him,” Brendon laughs, poking Ryan’s shoulder affectionately.
Ryan thinks about it. He thinks about everything Patrick has said about the other man over the past few days, and he is decidedly sure of himself when he says, “I think he actually does.”
-
Ryan pats Gabe on the head before he leaves. He tells the snake, “I know we have never been very good friends.” he isn't sure that the animal can even understand what he's saying, but he says it still. “I will still miss you. I would miss you if our positions were reversed.”
The snake tongues the air, unresponsive, and Ryan slips away. Patrick and Brendon are at the bottom of the stairs already, waiting. He takes a deep breath and heads in their direction.
Gabe hisses almost inaudibly, like wind on a wind-less day. “I will miss you too."
-
Ryan has never been to the top of the stairs.
He isn't sure what's up there, or what it will do to him. He often dreams of what will happen if he makes it to the top. Sometimes there is a door, and sometimes there is nothing. Ryan has never felt particularly compelled to figure out the truth, but Brendon has, and Patrick is lost, and all of this time Ryan has been worried about absolutely nothing.
When they reach the top, there is a door. Ryan does not think that they will be sucked into it. They do not count to three before they open it, and the door does not lead to Mexico. (And I found that to be a vital detail, because I know it is what you may have been thinking all along).
“Were we afraid of losing ourselves?” Brendon asks, laying his head on Ryan’s shoulder before they step through the door.
“We were afraid of losing each other,” Ryan corrects him. His bare feet hit the grass and it is warm. It is such a beautiful day, and it has been dark for so long.
END
Completely self-indulgent. Thanks always to sundance_kid_67.
another ballad for heavy lids
"My room is a mess," Ryan says. He rolls onto his back and stretches his arms out as far as they go, and they look like they can reach as far as he can see. “So messy,” he continues. “Flowers are growing out of the ground.”
"Go fish," Brendon says. He looks like he is concentrating very hard. Ryan does not want to throw off his game. He decides that he will talk about flowers later, and he goes fish.
"Do you have any Fs?" Brendon questions, looking up at Ryan hopefully. His eyes are moon-sized. They are big and brown and they do not change color. Ryan's eyes don't change color either, but Audrey's do.
"F for four or F for five?" Ryan responds. He smiles because those are the only cards he has. (There are six of them, and all Fs! Ridiculous!) Brendon is poking out his lip, thinking, shuffling his cards again and again as if it will change them at all. (And maybe it will! Ryan hasn't tried it). Brendon's silence is an invitation, and Ryan continues, "Or...or F for fish? Or fire," he says, grinning. "Or finches, or films, or French fries?"
"Or flowers," Brendon says. He too is grinning. Ryan cuts his eyes in a friendly way, but he has an atrocious poker face and a very low tolerance for giggles, and explodes into fits of them nearly immediately. Brendon is not far behind.
Their laughter floats up, up into the sky and doesn't stop until it reaches the stars.
-
Audrey is on the stairs, lying prostrate and playing games on a small, hand-held device. She calls it Jac. Audrey is not very good at games, electronic or otherwise, and Jac makes beeping noises every time she gives up and presses all of the buttons at once instead of learning the actual controls. Ryan assumes this is Jac's way of arguing. He finds it endlessly amusing.
"You're still in your pajamas," Brendon says. He is staring, expressionless, and Ryan's blush is as spectral as the rainbow. His pajamas are comfortable! They are his favorite shade of green. He wonders why Brendon doesn't criticize Audrey, then, who is wearing only a plain white t-shirt and black underwear. Ryan really wishes she would get dressed sometimes and stop embarrassing him like she does.
"They're very nice pajamas," Brendon continues. He smiles a bit and leans across a haphazard pile of red playing-cards to smooth down the front of the shirt. His palm is warm and flat as it slides down Ryan’s chest and Ryan blushes like a strobe-light, red-purple-green-pink-blue-white-red.
“There,” Brendon says. He smiles again and presses his mouth softly to the corner of Ryan’s own. Ryan is almost sure his entire face is flashing colors, now. Maybe his entire body. The whole room!
Jac beeps wildly and Audrey grunts, kicking the backs of her bare feet against the stairs.
-
Ryan has never been to the top of the stairs.
He isn't sure what's up there, or what it will do to him. He often has dreams that the stairs just never end. He dreams that there is a door, sometimes, and when he opens it it sucks him inside. Thirdly, he dreams they end before he notices and he falls right off the edge and into nothing.
Ryan does not want to risk it. He likes the place that he is. Even when the flowers grow.
Maybe especially then.
-
The day that Patrick appears is the same day that Jac stops beeping and starts saying real words. It’s true!
“Green alphabet waves general vampires!” Jac shouts in her tinny, electronic voice. Audrey frowns at the screen.
Shut up. The words are real! I did not promise that they made any sense.
-
Patrick does not understand this world. He says he is from a different place than here.
“Your flower-pots have eyes,” he says. He is looking around the room, wide-eyed, baffled, and the ferns are blinking at him. Brendon is blinking at him. Ryan is just as confused.
“What are flower-pots?” Ryan asks. Brendon is frowning in confusion, also, no help at all. “Besides, those are ferns, not flowers.”
Patrick doesn't understand why Brendon’s shirt changes colors. He doesn't understand why the roof is made of outer-space, and he does not understand why Ryan has never been up his own staircase. He wants to know why the clock keeps going around without stopping, and what happens to everything when it rains. Ryan cannot answer. He does not know.
He feels completely helpless. “I don't know what rain is,” he confesses. He feels sad and not-so-smart, and Brendon hugs him from behind. Ryan leans into him, spent.
“Do you...” Brendon begins, speaking to Patrick but nuzzling Ryan’s neck. “Do you play Go Fish?”
“I do!” Patrick says, breathless and suddenly elated. He seems to be grasping onto what he finds familiar. Brendon leads him over to a clear spot on the floor, sweeping all of the cards into a pile and asking Patrick quietly to help him shuffle them up. Ryan stays where he's been, looking up, wondering if he should lock the door under the stairs to prevent more visitors like Patrick from wandering in.
-
“Friday hypnosis!” Jac shouts. “Intelligent monkey fungus sleeping blueberry!”
“Nobody fucking understands you!” Audrey shouts, angered.
Patrick has been in the corner for three days. He sits under the tree eats the toast as it is made, without cinnamon or butter! It makes Ryan very uncomfortable. He thinks that it should also make Brendon uncomfortable, but Brendon keeps playing with Gabe the snake and rolling him around the banister of the stairs.
“He misses his friends back home,” Brendon says when ran asks what's wrong with Patrick. Gabe the snake seems irritated by Brendon’s constant wrapping him around the stairs, but Brendon seems to find it very entertaining. He does not seem at all worried about the possibility of being bitten.
“Friends back home?” Ryan questions. He wraps his hand around Brendon’s wrist and tries to pull it away from the increasingly angry reptile. Gabe has cold blood. He has a cold heart. Ryan does not want Brendon’s blood anywhere but in his body.
Brendon’s body.
“Patrick misses Pete especially,” Brendon says, yanking away from Ryan’s grasp. When Ryan reaches for it again, unfazed, Brendon asks, “do you want to hold my hand?”
Ryan’s blush flickers as he furiously nods. “I do,” he says, and Brendon grabs his hand. Their fingers lace together, and Brendon holds them up like a trophy. Like this is something he's won.
-
Jac starts to understand words, and her sentences become less and less ridiculous. She starts saying things like 'this day is good' instead of ‘yellow raccoon trash party'. Audrey says that she and Jac are in love.
“We’re going to move to Mexico,” Audrey says. Jac says “Yesly!”
“It is good that you are in love,” says Patrick. Ryan can tell that their new friend is very sad. It makes him uncomfortable.
“We should move to Mexico,” Brendon says, weaving a four-strand braid into Ryan’s short hair. Ryan wiggles his toes.
“You'll never get to Mexico,” he says. “It simply does not exist.”
-
When they wake the next morning, Audrey and Jac are gone.
They look all over the place for them. Ryan looks in the cupboards and in the bushes. Brendon looks in the stairway closet and, when Patrick refuses to get too close to them, the ferns. Patrick stays sitting under the tree, too tired to move.
Ryan looks up at the stairs, and sighs, wondering. Brendon comes up behind him and lays his chin on Ryan’s shoulder.
“I keep forgetting what we're afraid of,” he says.
-
“I want to find my friend,” Patrick says, tapping a baseball bat against the floor. Ryan is almost positive that is not what they are used for, but he doesn't know what to do with them otherwise, so he doesn't argue. Patrick says, “I want to find my way back home.”
“Then find your way back home,” Ryan says.
“Maybe you should try the stairs,” Brendon says. Ryan gets that itchy feeling under his skin.
“Why are you so obsessed with the stairs!?” he shouts. His anger burns red on his face. He shouts, “Why is everyone!? It is perfectly okay to be here. I like where we are. I thought you liked it, too.”
(It just really hurts Ryan’s feelings. This is Ryan’s favorite place in the world. any world. He likes the flowers and the ferns. He likes that time never stops and he likes the vibrancy of things, like blushes or touches or colors or laughter. He likes the spill-canvas of the outer-space ceiling and he likes that dreams are so real and beautiful. Most of all, he likes Brendon Urie. He likes that Brendon likes him, too. It's never happened like that, been so easy anywhere else.)
Ryan huffs, and he is sad and tired. His face is still bright red, pained, and Patrick looks shaken. Brendon looks confused. He says, “I don't think you understand.”
“I don't,” Ryan sighs. His voice is very soft, like silk and air combined.
Brendon crawls across the whole room to where Ryan has collapsed in a heap. He uncrosses Ryan’s arms and puts them on his face. He says, “It's not here that I like.” he looks right into Ryan’s eyes and says, “It’s you.”
He nuzzles his face into Ryan’s hand, and Ryan’s mouth is open, dumb-founded. Brendon pushes forward and bites his nose.
“I would like it anywhere as long as you were there too.”
-
“You’re all dressed up,” Brendon says. Ryan looks down at his pajamas. They are the same as they always are, if not a bit more crinkled, and he frowns. Brendon giggles a bit and reaches up, pulling on the brim of Ryan’s hat. “It’s a very nice hat,” he says.
“Thank you,” Ryan says. Brendon makes him feel like a foolish girl. It’s embarrassing.
“Are you going to tell me why you are all dressed up?” he asks, curious.
Ryan straightens the fedora on his head, a determined set to his mouth. “We are going to help Patrick find the things he's lost,” he says. “We are going to find his Pete, and his home.”
“I don't think Pete belongs to him,” Brendon laughs, poking Ryan’s shoulder affectionately.
Ryan thinks about it. He thinks about everything Patrick has said about the other man over the past few days, and he is decidedly sure of himself when he says, “I think he actually does.”
-
Ryan pats Gabe on the head before he leaves. He tells the snake, “I know we have never been very good friends.” he isn't sure that the animal can even understand what he's saying, but he says it still. “I will still miss you. I would miss you if our positions were reversed.”
The snake tongues the air, unresponsive, and Ryan slips away. Patrick and Brendon are at the bottom of the stairs already, waiting. He takes a deep breath and heads in their direction.
Gabe hisses almost inaudibly, like wind on a wind-less day. “I will miss you too."
-
Ryan has never been to the top of the stairs.
He isn't sure what's up there, or what it will do to him. He often dreams of what will happen if he makes it to the top. Sometimes there is a door, and sometimes there is nothing. Ryan has never felt particularly compelled to figure out the truth, but Brendon has, and Patrick is lost, and all of this time Ryan has been worried about absolutely nothing.
When they reach the top, there is a door. Ryan does not think that they will be sucked into it. They do not count to three before they open it, and the door does not lead to Mexico. (And I found that to be a vital detail, because I know it is what you may have been thinking all along).
“Were we afraid of losing ourselves?” Brendon asks, laying his head on Ryan’s shoulder before they step through the door.
“We were afraid of losing each other,” Ryan corrects him. His bare feet hit the grass and it is warm. It is such a beautiful day, and it has been dark for so long.
END
Completely self-indulgent. Thanks always to sundance_kid_67.