My song is made of dust
Title: My song is made of dust
Author:
alles_luege
Pairing: Gerard/Patrick
Rating: PG
Summary: Patrick really isn’t sure how much longer he can hold on to his sanity on this label.
Warning(s): none
Author’s Notes: This should have been a Pete/Patrick story…it’s not. (I don’t know how this happened…) Also, this was inspired by Gabriel which is brilliant!
Word Count: 2.045
Beta: tygermine
Disclaimer: Don’t know, don’t own, not real.
~1~
Gabe has an episode. And of course he’s trying to fix him, to help, to do something. Gabe shouts at him.
Through a car window.
A fucking car window.
Sitting in the backseat and being all sulky and…whatever. Patrick should be pissed, but he knows how to deal with shit like this. He has experience. He has Pete. Maybe Gabe will sort out his mess alone, if he doesn’t he knows Patrick will be there. On speed dial. Because that’s what Patrick does since he met Pete, or maybe since he met Joe in Borders that day?
Doesn’t matter - same difference.
Joe led to Pete and Pete led to this…his life.
Whatever.
William Beckett is too pretty to be true. Really, Patrick thinks.
“And no one takes me seriously…I mean, it’s like I’m just pretty…made of legs and hipbones. Am I just pretty, Patrick?” he asks turning from his coffee to look at Patrick.
“No, of course not. You’re talented as well.” Patrick reassures him. William smiles, but Patrick isn’t sure he believes him. “Listen, Pete wouldn’t sign you just because you’re pretty…”
William laughs. “Pete so would! Why do you think Panic is on this label?” His voice sounds bitter. He doesn’t look at Patrick; he stares out of the window. Patrick follows his gaze. The cold, grey autumn day seems to stare back at him.
It might be true…just a bit. Then Pete kind of just knows the pretty kids…maybe…Patrick doesn’t want to think about this right now. He needs to focus on TAI’s singer, who apparently has a crisis. Nothing new here. On this label everyone has a crisis sooner or later. And it’s up to Patrick to sort it out.
Ryan is wearing black. That is a major clue that something is wrong. Spencer sits on the sofa and keeps silent. And Jon and Brendon are nowhere to be found. Maybe for the best.
“I have chocolate and coffee…” Patrick begins; Ryan looks up from the book he was reading. (Fight club -again.)
“I don’t want it! What the hell are you doing here?” Ryan asks, his voice malicious. Patrick sighs. “He called you!?!” Ryan has a fit. He throws the book at the nearest wall and stands up. He doesn’t go far, just paces the room for a few minutes before he sits down again. Patrick hands him the chocolate.
“You just want me to be fat…” Ryan sulks, but eats the chocolate. Patrick doesn’t sigh.
Spence sends him a grateful look. How come it’s always him who has to deal with things like this? When did he become the Mommy? When did his life change to be this?
“Better?” he asks. Ryan nods. Patrick still doesn’t know what caused the fit, the sulking, the shouting and throwing things. (Calling Pete, who called Patrick…) But it seems that all is good now in Ryan-land. So he gets up, smiles at Spencer, then leaves the room.
He takes a deep breath once he’s outside. Autumn is cold and windy. Rainy. Grey.
“What the fuck, Patrick?!” Pete is shouting again. Patrick just waits. He has patience. He has…he needs to have it. “I said that we will keep this line! I…it’s good. How can you leave it out?! Without asking me?!” He rages on.
“It’s crap and it will ruin the whole song.” Patrick’s voice is a low drawl. Maybe he picked that up from Gabe. It suits his purpose.
“It’s not, it’s brilliant! Everything I write is brilliant!” Pete says. Here we go again - Time Lord Complex, Patrick thinks. Great. He just…no, it’s okay, he can do that. He thinks.
“Of course…” Patrick says with a sigh.
Travis is stoned out of his mind and Patrick wishes he were too. It would be so much easier to deal with the whole problem if he were stoned. But Travis being stoned IS the problem. So maybe not. He drags Travis’ ass out of the bar and into a taxi. The buildings they pass are grey like everything else, like dust he thinks. Patrick pinches the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up at the same time. I’m a goddamned nurse. A babysitter for this whole label.
~2~
“I think I’m in love.” Pete announces.
Great, Patrick thinks, because that is always the first thing he thinks when Pete says something like that. The second is: It will end in disaster. And the third is: Maybe we will get a few good songs out of this mess. It’s cynical and he can’t pinpoint the day when it became normal. It worries him sometimes.
Ryan isn’t wearing black anymore, but William is.
“I know he thinks I’m just a pretty front man.” William is clutching his mug of coffee so hard his knuckles are white. A strange contrast to his summer tan. He reminds Patrick of a scratched CD, repeating the same line over and over.
“Are we talking about Gabe or Pete?” Patrick asks gently. William sighs. Doesn’t look at him, just stares into his mug.
“I don’t know?” he mumbles.
Patrick thinks all of them are just thinking too much. Gabe, Ryan, William, Pete, even Travis…he sees a pattern here. An obsessive compulsive need to over analyse every little thing. Damn lyricists.
“Patrick?” William’s voice is strangely weak.
“Yeah?”
“You are the only one who understands…” William says. Patrick doesn’t really know what he means.
“Do I?”
“Yes, because you aren’t that messed up.”
Patrick stares out of the window. The sky is a grey blanket, stretching endlessly above him.
“The hell Travis!” Patrick says.
“Sometimes I just can’t take it…” Travis answers.
“Take what?”
“The silence. When nothing, really nothing is in there.” He says pointing at his head, joint held between index and middle finger. “It’s like walking through a forest, but there is no forest. You know there should be one but there is nothing…just dust.”
“You aren’t making sense.” Patrick answers. “And you need to get yourself together, because you need to be on stage in five!”
“Patrick?”
“Yes?”
”Are you never afraid?”
“Of what?”
“The Forest. The nothing. The grey nothingness…” Travis whispers. Patrick shivers.
“No, because that’s not real.”
“But it is,” Travis answers getting up from the couch. Patrick hopes he will get to the stage in one piece.
“You are saving lives, Patrick.” Gerard’s voice is distant. He is miles away. Patrick closes his eyes; he doesn’t even know why he called Gerard of all people. Because Patrick is sure that Gerard needs saving too. The singer, the artist, the songwriter. With his notebook. Like Pete, like Gabe, William…
“Sometimes I wonder who will save you, though.” Gerard says softly.
“You think I need saving? Sometimes I think I’m the only sane person around here.” Patrick smiles into the phone.
“Everyone needs saving from time to time, even the sane ones.” Gerard answers. “Especially them.” Patrick can hear him light a cigarette in the background.
Maybe, Patrick thinks. But he hasn’t time for that, there are people who need him. Need him to be there for them. Day and night. To sing them to sleep and tell them lies that everything will turn out okay.
“Are you okay, Patrick?” Gerard asks to Patrick’s silence.
Patrick laughs. He thinks he’s not.
“Yes,” he says. He hears Gerard take a deep breath…he knows what will come next. “Good night, Gerard.” He says and disconnects the call.
His cell is ringing at four in the morning. Patrick is a genius but it doesn’t need one to figure out who that would be.
“Pete…”
Pete cuts him off. “I know it’s late…or early…it always depends.”
“What is it?” Patrick asks sitting up in his bed. He wasn’t going back to sleep for a while and Pete tends to get pissed when people fall asleep on him during his dawn rants.
“You sound awake…” Pete says surprised.
“Yeah?”
“Yes. Did you sleep, Patrick?” Pete asks. He sounds worried and a small voice in Patrick’s head thinks: Fucking finally! The truth is, although he’s tried, Patrick doesn’t sleep, can’t sleep, for the last few nights he was mostly awake. Thinking.
“Yes.” He lies. It’s not a problem at all for him. He lies all the time to make people feel better.
“Don’t give me that!”
“What is it now?” Patrick wants Pete to know he is already irritated. He never gets irritated that easily with Pete. They barely spoke two words. Maybe three. - This doesn’t make sense.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, why would I not be okay?”
“I…” Pete is silent on the other end of the line. Patrick waits. The silence stretches.
“Pete…”
“Patrick, you would tell me if you weren’t alright?”
“Of course.” Patrick lies.
“Okay.”
~3~
It might be a trick of the light. It might be. It might be insanity. Maybe you must be insane to be on this label, but he’s sure Joe isn’t, but Joe is high more often than not. So it’s hard to tell, really.
His reflection stares back at him, and his eyes are grey. Just grey. There is nothing else. It’s like they were covered with dust. They aren’t. He can still see. Maybe it’s just a smudge on his glasses.
“So, what do you think it feels like when you’re losing it?” he asks, his voice just above a whisper.
“Do you think you’re losing it, Patrick?” Gerard asks. His voice is velvet around Patrick, like the night. He likes it.
“Maybe?” he shrugs. “How should I know?”
“So?”
“So what?”
“What is the problem?”
“I think…I just can’t deal with their shit anymore. I just can’t be…”
“Their saviour?”
“Maybe…how do you do it?” Patrick wonders.
“I have someone who saves me.”
Patrick sighs. He doesn’t have anyone to save him, because his friends are all insane. How can one nutcase save another?
“Hey Patrick?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want me to sing you something?”
Patrick laughs, but says yes.
“So… you and Gerard?” Pete asks, he tries for nonchalant but fails.
“What?” Patrick asks distracted, not looking up from his laptop. He just needs to pin this one tune down, and then it will sound so amazing. He knows it will.
“You and Gerard?” Pete pokes him on the shoulder.
“And again: What?!” Patrick turns to him. His focus on Pete. Because what is he babbling about now?
“He calls you, you call him in the middle of the night. So. You and Gerard.” His voice sounds firm like he is so sure this is what it’s all about.
“Were you messing with my phone again?” Patrick asks. Pete waves his hand, as if to say: Whatever.
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, you and Gerard fucking Way?”
“It’s Mikey fucking Way and no.”
“No?”
“No.”
“So why are you calling him?”
“To talk.”
“You can talk with me!”
“No, I can’t.” Patrick says. Pete looks at him, really looks at him. Stands up and drapes himself all over Patrick. Patrick sighs in relief. He’s surprised how much he missed that. Missed the warmth, the smell, the sheer comfort.
“I didn’t mean to.” Pete says.
“You never do…” Patrick answers, because it’s true. They all don’t mean to, but it happens anyway. And he deals with it because he can. Because they would do something stupid and reckless if he wasn’t there to stop them, to make them think for a minute.
“I’m sorry.” Pete says, muffled in Patrick’s neck.
“You always are.”
Pete burrows his nose in Patrick’s shirt. “So, you and Gerard…”
“Yeah…” Patrick says.
“You are my saviour.” Patrick whispers late at night.
“I’m everyone’s saviour.”
“Who saves you?” Patrick wants to know. Gerard laughs softly. Patrick shivers in the dark.
“Don’t you know?”
“Maybe…”
He can hear Gerard smile on the other end of the line.
“Hey Patrick?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think of this: Your song is made of dust.”
“What does it mean?” Patrick wants to know.
“Who knows? Everything? Nothing?” Pete waves his pen around in the air.
“It sounds good…did you steal it from Ryan?”
“Of course not…I won it from Gabe, who stole it from William…”
“Sounds like Ryan to me…”
“Sounds like an MCR song to me.” Pete says with a grin.
Patrick smiles. “Maybe,” he answers.
~end~