FIc: I'll Walk You Up [1/1]
So, forever and a day ago, xxdance asked for fic featuring Patrick and acoustic levitation. This...features both acoustics and levitation, but does not combine them in a scientifically accurate way.
I'll Walk You Up
Pete/Patrick
PG-13
~1,800 words
Sometimes, Pete likes to believe he’s living the Lifetime movie. He’ll say, with the utmost sincerity, things like “Have I ever given you any reason not to trust me?”
Patrick, who has no romance in his soul, will let his eyes drift toward the video camera charging in the corner of Pete’s room.
“Dude,” says Pete, who is not as in character as he’d like to believe, “that was totally different.”
-
The last night of the tour, they roll up to the venue and Pete sort of wants to die. He’s fairly sure he has, like, SARS or something, he hasn’t slept properly in weeks, he’s flat broke, their equipment is held together by duct tape and sounds like it, and if he pushes the speed limit a little he can be home in forty minutes.
He eyes the exit longingly.
“Don’t even think it,” Andy calls.
Sometimes Pete hates how well his band know him.
-
The last song of the last show is a fucking free-for-all. The crowd start bleeding through onto the stage during the intro and by the first chorus whatever barrier there had been has crumpled and whatever security there was has fled. Joe and Patrick have been absorbed into the pulsing mass of kids; Andy is still playing, but it’s nothing even remotely resembling any of their songs, and there are awkward pauses every now and then when he stops in order to wrestle an over-enthusiastic fan off of his kit.
Pete is torn between watching Patrick flounder back towards the stage, hampered by fans who don’t quite recognise him and think he’s just trying to steal their spot, and climbing the stack and launching himself into the crowd.
Clearly, the only sane course of action is to climb the stack and launch himself into Patrick.
Sometimes Pete is dazzled by the blinding light of his own genius.
-
Sadly, Patrick makes it back to the relative high ground of the stage before Pete can get the drop on him. His guitar is emitting ear-splitting noises which go beyond feedback and into the realms of pure aural agony.
Andy’s valiant defence of his drum kit ends in a high-pitched clatter and a guttural yell.
Pete jumps and forgets to land.
He doesn’t notice at first. Pete has spent more of his young life tempting fate than he’d like to admit, and is intimately acquainted with the stomach-churning moment at the start of a fall when you feel like you’re defying gravity, the second when the faces below you seem to be staring up at you in awe, shocked still, not getting any closer. And then he realises that, hey, the faces below him are staring up in awe, and they’re really not getting any closer.
“Holy fuck,” someone shouts, and Pete doesn’t know whether they’ve noticed him or not but he breathes, “Yeah,” an echo of an agreement, and then he spreads his arms wide and falls.
-
“I’m a superhero.”
“You’re mentally ill.”
“Fuck you, I am a paragon of sanity. Paradigm. Whatever, the point is I can fly.”
Patrick raises an eyebrow. “Has someone taken the brown acid?”
Pete heaves a sigh. “Oh ye of little faith,” he says, and jumps.
-
The doctor assures him that it’s just a hairline fracture and that he should be playing bass again in no time.
Patrick writes “mentally ill” in block capitals on his cast and underlines it twice.
Joe asks if anyone managed to film it.
Andy fails to have any discernible reaction. “You’re not even worried?” Pete asks. “You’ve been my friend for almost a decade, and you’re not even going ask after my health?”
“I’ve been your friend for almost a decade,” Andy explains.
Pete has to admit that he has a point.
-
They’re renting a practice space not too far from Pete’s place. It’s all theirs all the time, and Pete finds himself falling into the habit of going back when he can’t sleep, setting up what equipment they have stored there, creating as much feedback as humanly possible and then jumping around like a jackrabbit, because he may not be a superhero but he is not mentally ill.
He doesn’t fly, but the exercise does help him sleep more.
-
“Why are you here?”
“I didn’t leave.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
Patrick gestures vaguely at the pages of scrawled tableture scattered round him, and the guitar he is in the process of restringing. “I’m keeping you out of a day job,” he says. “Why are you here?”
“I’m…helping?” Apparently, Pete sucks at lying to Patrick.
“Try again.”
“I’mtryingtofly.”
Patrick blinks a couple of times, slowly, then dives at Pete, grappling him to the ground and pinning him.
“What the fuck?” Pete manages to yelp, twisting his knee into Patrick’s side. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Keeping myself out of a day job,” Patrick says, twisting Pete’s unbroken arm behind his back. “Please stop trying to get yourself killed.”
“I’m not!” Pete is indignant. He flew, goddamnit. “I’m, Patrick, I…” and at some point Pete must have got his voice to sound normal because Patrick is backing away warily, allowing him to get up. Pete takes a deep, hopeful breath. “At that last show we played? I went to take a dive and just…didn’t fall. For like, fifteen seconds, I swear. I am not making this up. I made science my bitch, and I want to find a way to do it again.”
Patrick sighs a suspiciously Andy-esque sigh and props the guitar he’s shoved aside up against an amp. It emits a burst of feedback.
Patrick swears.
Pete swears.
Patrick swears again.
Pete is somewhere near the ceiling, hovering in mid-air and grinning like a maniac.
“Fucking hell,” Patrick says, just as Pete crows “I fucking told you. Behold the cleverness of me.”
“How’re you doing that?” he asks, while Pete shouts, “I am a genius.”
“Pete - ” he begins, stepping away from the amp, guitar still in hand, just as the noise stops and Pete falls, still grinning, to the ground.
-
“Seriously,” Joe says, “you still didn’t manage to get it on film?”
Pete wishes he still had a hand he could punch with.
-
Pete finds a stereo with a mic in and an ancient, cassette-playing walkman in the back of his closet.
He shuffles to the practice space with them balanced in his arms, and spends the night elbowing equipment into place.
He has a plan.
-
“Hey, hey, asshole, no.” In Pete’s plan, he’d swooped to the window and greeted Patrick in a perfectly calm, super-suave, possibly slightly British-accented tone of voice.
Apparently, Patrick enjoys screwing up Pete’s plans. With a baseball bat.
“Will you stop swinging that thing at me, Stump? Jesus.”
Patrick pauses in his spirited defence of his bedroom window for a moment and actually looks up. “Pete?”
“Hi.”
“How - oh. Oh.”
Pete holds out a hand. He takes out one of his headphones. “Wanna ride?” he asks, grinning his suavest, most 007 grin.
Patrick, who, as stated previously, has no romance in his soul, asks: “What’s with your accent?”
-
“That’s my house.”
“Your house, yes.”
“My house several dozen feet below me.”
“Looks like.”
“My house which we are flying above.”
“Is stating the obvious your superpower or something? Do we all have them and you somehow forgot to mention it?”
“I’m mentally ill.”
Pete smiles against Patrick’s shoulder. “You are in awesome company.”
-
Patrick doesn’t fly. Pete can never be sure of he can’t or won’t, because every second he’s in the air is spent tucked against Pete’s side, one arm looped round his neck and the other hooked under his shoulder. Patrick doesn’t feel as heavy as a person should, but then every time Pete lets go he flails and plummets toward the earth, so.
-
Seriously, every second.
-
It’s not that Pete doesn’t like having Patrick this close.
It’s just that he thinks he’s more likely to get through this whole flying thing with his band and his eyesight in tact if he spends fewer of his nights pressed flush against him.
-
Patrick yelps, falls, and plasters himself against Pete.
Pete tries to think of…anything not Patrick, and resigns himself to going blind before he hits thirty.
-
“It’s not that hard,” Pete assures him, holding one hand out. “You just have to jump and let it…you know. Ride the sound, Stump.”
Patrick takes his hand - Pete can feel him shaking, just a little - and steps up, up, up and down. Hard.
-
“You didn’t even break an arm,” Pete points out. “I can’t believe you’re pussying out of this.”
Patrick rolls his eyes and tightens his arms round Pete’s waist.
Pete attempts to alphabetise the state capitals.
-
They’re at the practice space because Pete has decided that Patrick’s problem is that he hasn’t had the live experience. He’s only tried flying to pre-recorded white noise and really, what way is that to start off? So they’re at the practice space, and Patrick’s standing nervously on top of an amp as Pete rests a guitar against it and kicks off, up.
Patrick takes a deep, deep breath and jumps, eyes screwed tight shut.
“Patrick,” Pete coos. “Patrick. Paaaatrick.”
Very slowly, Patrick opens his eyes. He’s roughly six feet off the ground. Pete grins. Patrick’s hands tighten like vices on his forearms.
“Hey, hey,” Pete says, employing his most soothing, least Bond-like tone. “It’s okay.”
Patrick stares at him, eyes wide, mouth open, breath coming in short spurts, and then he realises that he’s…he’s. He’s fucking flying. He breaks into a grin so wide he swears he can feel his face splitting.
Pete decides he doesn’t like the band that much any way.
-
The thing is, the first time you kiss Patrick, the first time you suck on his bottom lip and then lick up into his mouth, he makes these tiny, tight noises at the back of his throat that are just… Yeah.
And then? Then he pulls back, and he’s not shaking exactly, but Pete can feel the tension stored under Patrick’s skin as he slips away, until they’re floating, fingertip to fingertip, heads brushing the ceiling. “Woah,” Patrick breathes. His voice is a little hoarse and his mouth is red and wet and Pete thinks this whole Fall Out Boy thing is totally overrated and was probably doomed from the outset anyway, so why not?
“You’re mentally ill,” Patrick informs him and yeah, there is that, Pete supposes, but then Patrick kisses him back and suddenly it’s hard to find anything else important.
-
“The next thing,” Pete says, “is I take you to see stars.”
I'll Walk You Up
Pete/Patrick
PG-13
~1,800 words
Sometimes, Pete likes to believe he’s living the Lifetime movie. He’ll say, with the utmost sincerity, things like “Have I ever given you any reason not to trust me?”
Patrick, who has no romance in his soul, will let his eyes drift toward the video camera charging in the corner of Pete’s room.
“Dude,” says Pete, who is not as in character as he’d like to believe, “that was totally different.”
-
The last night of the tour, they roll up to the venue and Pete sort of wants to die. He’s fairly sure he has, like, SARS or something, he hasn’t slept properly in weeks, he’s flat broke, their equipment is held together by duct tape and sounds like it, and if he pushes the speed limit a little he can be home in forty minutes.
He eyes the exit longingly.
“Don’t even think it,” Andy calls.
Sometimes Pete hates how well his band know him.
-
The last song of the last show is a fucking free-for-all. The crowd start bleeding through onto the stage during the intro and by the first chorus whatever barrier there had been has crumpled and whatever security there was has fled. Joe and Patrick have been absorbed into the pulsing mass of kids; Andy is still playing, but it’s nothing even remotely resembling any of their songs, and there are awkward pauses every now and then when he stops in order to wrestle an over-enthusiastic fan off of his kit.
Pete is torn between watching Patrick flounder back towards the stage, hampered by fans who don’t quite recognise him and think he’s just trying to steal their spot, and climbing the stack and launching himself into the crowd.
Clearly, the only sane course of action is to climb the stack and launch himself into Patrick.
Sometimes Pete is dazzled by the blinding light of his own genius.
-
Sadly, Patrick makes it back to the relative high ground of the stage before Pete can get the drop on him. His guitar is emitting ear-splitting noises which go beyond feedback and into the realms of pure aural agony.
Andy’s valiant defence of his drum kit ends in a high-pitched clatter and a guttural yell.
Pete jumps and forgets to land.
He doesn’t notice at first. Pete has spent more of his young life tempting fate than he’d like to admit, and is intimately acquainted with the stomach-churning moment at the start of a fall when you feel like you’re defying gravity, the second when the faces below you seem to be staring up at you in awe, shocked still, not getting any closer. And then he realises that, hey, the faces below him are staring up in awe, and they’re really not getting any closer.
“Holy fuck,” someone shouts, and Pete doesn’t know whether they’ve noticed him or not but he breathes, “Yeah,” an echo of an agreement, and then he spreads his arms wide and falls.
-
“I’m a superhero.”
“You’re mentally ill.”
“Fuck you, I am a paragon of sanity. Paradigm. Whatever, the point is I can fly.”
Patrick raises an eyebrow. “Has someone taken the brown acid?”
Pete heaves a sigh. “Oh ye of little faith,” he says, and jumps.
-
The doctor assures him that it’s just a hairline fracture and that he should be playing bass again in no time.
Patrick writes “mentally ill” in block capitals on his cast and underlines it twice.
Joe asks if anyone managed to film it.
Andy fails to have any discernible reaction. “You’re not even worried?” Pete asks. “You’ve been my friend for almost a decade, and you’re not even going ask after my health?”
“I’ve been your friend for almost a decade,” Andy explains.
Pete has to admit that he has a point.
-
They’re renting a practice space not too far from Pete’s place. It’s all theirs all the time, and Pete finds himself falling into the habit of going back when he can’t sleep, setting up what equipment they have stored there, creating as much feedback as humanly possible and then jumping around like a jackrabbit, because he may not be a superhero but he is not mentally ill.
He doesn’t fly, but the exercise does help him sleep more.
-
“Why are you here?”
“I didn’t leave.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
Patrick gestures vaguely at the pages of scrawled tableture scattered round him, and the guitar he is in the process of restringing. “I’m keeping you out of a day job,” he says. “Why are you here?”
“I’m…helping?” Apparently, Pete sucks at lying to Patrick.
“Try again.”
“I’mtryingtofly.”
Patrick blinks a couple of times, slowly, then dives at Pete, grappling him to the ground and pinning him.
“What the fuck?” Pete manages to yelp, twisting his knee into Patrick’s side. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Keeping myself out of a day job,” Patrick says, twisting Pete’s unbroken arm behind his back. “Please stop trying to get yourself killed.”
“I’m not!” Pete is indignant. He flew, goddamnit. “I’m, Patrick, I…” and at some point Pete must have got his voice to sound normal because Patrick is backing away warily, allowing him to get up. Pete takes a deep, hopeful breath. “At that last show we played? I went to take a dive and just…didn’t fall. For like, fifteen seconds, I swear. I am not making this up. I made science my bitch, and I want to find a way to do it again.”
Patrick sighs a suspiciously Andy-esque sigh and props the guitar he’s shoved aside up against an amp. It emits a burst of feedback.
Patrick swears.
Pete swears.
Patrick swears again.
Pete is somewhere near the ceiling, hovering in mid-air and grinning like a maniac.
“Fucking hell,” Patrick says, just as Pete crows “I fucking told you. Behold the cleverness of me.”
“How’re you doing that?” he asks, while Pete shouts, “I am a genius.”
“Pete - ” he begins, stepping away from the amp, guitar still in hand, just as the noise stops and Pete falls, still grinning, to the ground.
-
“Seriously,” Joe says, “you still didn’t manage to get it on film?”
Pete wishes he still had a hand he could punch with.
-
Pete finds a stereo with a mic in and an ancient, cassette-playing walkman in the back of his closet.
He shuffles to the practice space with them balanced in his arms, and spends the night elbowing equipment into place.
He has a plan.
-
“Hey, hey, asshole, no.” In Pete’s plan, he’d swooped to the window and greeted Patrick in a perfectly calm, super-suave, possibly slightly British-accented tone of voice.
Apparently, Patrick enjoys screwing up Pete’s plans. With a baseball bat.
“Will you stop swinging that thing at me, Stump? Jesus.”
Patrick pauses in his spirited defence of his bedroom window for a moment and actually looks up. “Pete?”
“Hi.”
“How - oh. Oh.”
Pete holds out a hand. He takes out one of his headphones. “Wanna ride?” he asks, grinning his suavest, most 007 grin.
Patrick, who, as stated previously, has no romance in his soul, asks: “What’s with your accent?”
-
“That’s my house.”
“Your house, yes.”
“My house several dozen feet below me.”
“Looks like.”
“My house which we are flying above.”
“Is stating the obvious your superpower or something? Do we all have them and you somehow forgot to mention it?”
“I’m mentally ill.”
Pete smiles against Patrick’s shoulder. “You are in awesome company.”
-
Patrick doesn’t fly. Pete can never be sure of he can’t or won’t, because every second he’s in the air is spent tucked against Pete’s side, one arm looped round his neck and the other hooked under his shoulder. Patrick doesn’t feel as heavy as a person should, but then every time Pete lets go he flails and plummets toward the earth, so.
-
Seriously, every second.
-
It’s not that Pete doesn’t like having Patrick this close.
It’s just that he thinks he’s more likely to get through this whole flying thing with his band and his eyesight in tact if he spends fewer of his nights pressed flush against him.
-
Patrick yelps, falls, and plasters himself against Pete.
Pete tries to think of…anything not Patrick, and resigns himself to going blind before he hits thirty.
-
“It’s not that hard,” Pete assures him, holding one hand out. “You just have to jump and let it…you know. Ride the sound, Stump.”
Patrick takes his hand - Pete can feel him shaking, just a little - and steps up, up, up and down. Hard.
-
“You didn’t even break an arm,” Pete points out. “I can’t believe you’re pussying out of this.”
Patrick rolls his eyes and tightens his arms round Pete’s waist.
Pete attempts to alphabetise the state capitals.
-
They’re at the practice space because Pete has decided that Patrick’s problem is that he hasn’t had the live experience. He’s only tried flying to pre-recorded white noise and really, what way is that to start off? So they’re at the practice space, and Patrick’s standing nervously on top of an amp as Pete rests a guitar against it and kicks off, up.
Patrick takes a deep, deep breath and jumps, eyes screwed tight shut.
“Patrick,” Pete coos. “Patrick. Paaaatrick.”
Very slowly, Patrick opens his eyes. He’s roughly six feet off the ground. Pete grins. Patrick’s hands tighten like vices on his forearms.
“Hey, hey,” Pete says, employing his most soothing, least Bond-like tone. “It’s okay.”
Patrick stares at him, eyes wide, mouth open, breath coming in short spurts, and then he realises that he’s…he’s. He’s fucking flying. He breaks into a grin so wide he swears he can feel his face splitting.
Pete decides he doesn’t like the band that much any way.
-
The thing is, the first time you kiss Patrick, the first time you suck on his bottom lip and then lick up into his mouth, he makes these tiny, tight noises at the back of his throat that are just… Yeah.
And then? Then he pulls back, and he’s not shaking exactly, but Pete can feel the tension stored under Patrick’s skin as he slips away, until they’re floating, fingertip to fingertip, heads brushing the ceiling. “Woah,” Patrick breathes. His voice is a little hoarse and his mouth is red and wet and Pete thinks this whole Fall Out Boy thing is totally overrated and was probably doomed from the outset anyway, so why not?
“You’re mentally ill,” Patrick informs him and yeah, there is that, Pete supposes, but then Patrick kisses him back and suddenly it’s hard to find anything else important.
-
“The next thing,” Pete says, “is I take you to see stars.”