NEVER LET ME WRITE NOTFIC AGAIN.
ALL RIGHT SO a little while ago (like two days, holy shit) Eggo and I were talking, something you should never let us do.
And Eggo came to the conclusion that Fever is actually a musical about Ryan Ross' life.
And somehow my brain took this as "PETE WENTZ IS A TORTURED AUTHOR AND EVERYONE IN DECAYDANCE IS FICTIONAL."
But this is not that fic. This is, in fact, that not!fic. This is 6000 words of self-indulgent bullshit about self-indulgent bullshit. There is tragedy and handwaving of the creative process and tragedy and word vomit and thrown-in ideas and emoticons. I'm rather proud of it.
I Write Tragedies (or, PETE WENTZ AND HIS ANGST)
RATED PG-13, UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN WHO DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH PETE'S TRAGIC FACE.
Pairing: Pete/fictional!Patrick?
Warnings: Angst, angst, angst angst angst, ignoring timelines, tragedy, constant switches between Actual Writing and "UHHHH THEN THIS SHOULD HAPPEN! \o/!", terrible pacing, I wrote this in two days and never looked back and I just want it to be done, sappy happy deus ex machina ending that EGGO MADE ME WRITE BECAUSE TOO MUCH TRAGEDY WOULD OFFEND HER DELICATE SOUL. You're lucky I love you, braintwin.
Disclaimer: Oh my god please don't tell me this happened, because if everyone I love is just Pete Wentz's fever dream I might just die.
Summary: Pete Wentz writes about boys in bands. Tragedy ensues.
Pete is just your regular tried-to-start-a-band-but-failed, working-in-an-office-and-hates-his-life, constantly-struggling-with-mental-issues kind of guy. He’s miserable and lost and the only thing that keeps him sane is writing. Not anything specific, but everything-lyrics, stories, a blog or two, anything that lets him get words from his brain to a screen or paper. He never publishes any of his fiction, but he probably does some freelance journalism when he has the time. If he actually wrote everything on paper, his apartment would be totally full of it, pages everywhere, but as it is he just has a few notebooks lying around and a hard drive full of Word documents.
Eventually, Pete loses his job, and he has no idea where he could go next. He mopes a lot, lives on Chinese food, and then finally when he’s starting to realize that unemployment won’t pay for rent, he decides to try publishing one of his short stories, The Sacrifice of Life. It’s not much, just a story about a bunch of boys who start a band, but the publishers like his protagonist, Gabe Saporta. He’s edgy, kind of an asshole, and comes from a difficult childhood as an immigrant from Uruguay but is a Jersey boy at heart. He’ll catch the teen demographic.
The magazine Pete’s talking to takes the story, on the condition that he expands it into a full-fledged novel. He gets a contract, an advance, everything. He can pay rent for a while. Life is pretty great.
While he’s working on the novel, he offers some of his other short stories, …For the Kids and Almost Here. The magazine gobbles them up-who knew boys-in-bands could be its own genre? But Pete writes it well; tragic but beautiful William Beckett and goofball-with-issues Travis McCoy and their interactions with the rest of their bands are interesting and real. Pete knows how to write realistic characters, even buried under piles of metaphors.
~~~
Sometime during the first draft of his currently unnamed novel (which is basically getting nowhere), Pete ends up doing the novelization for Snakes On A Plane. It’s stupid, and he kind of hates it, but his publisher rejected Living In America on the grounds of “too foreign,” so he needs something to do that doesn’t involve thinking too much.
The night he finishes the novelization, he actually manages to sleep (something he has a lot of trouble doing normally, but it’s even worse when he’s writing). It hits him in a dream: his old character Gabe, wandering through the desert, having a vision about a cobra from the future.
He wakes up, flies to his laptop, and can’t get the words out fast enough. This is how he can expand The Sacrifice of Life into While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets. Gabe starts out with William and Travis and Maja, his character from Living In America, and it’s the first time he’s ever included characters from more than one other story in the same work. He comes up with the characters of Nate, Ryland, Alex, and Victoria as he’s writing about the concerts with the original four, and the fivesome become the focus of the novel for the rest of the story, though the other three still cross paths with Gabe a lot.
The publishers look at the draft, and are a bit skeptical (“It’s a bit too DC Comics, you’re creating a single world to work in”) but they love the new characters and Cobra Starship’s cracktacular origin story, so they start putting it through editing.
~~~
By now, Pete’s short stories have gotten popular enough that his publisher is starting to ask for an anthology. You know, all of his previously published stories with a few extra, never-been-published exclusives. It’d be a great way to get his name out there before While the City Sleeps hits shelves. Pete agrees and starts looking through his files for old stories he’s been meaning to give to the publisher.
He offers up Santi, the sequel to Almost Here that everyone’s been asking for (somehow I can imagine William reaching ~EDWARD CULLEN~ levels of teenage girl love), and So Sudden, a cute little piece that included one of his new favorite characters, Greta Salpeter.
He’s scrolling through his documents folder, looking for one more thing to add to the anthology, when he sees a file he doesn’t recognize the name of. It’s not that surprising, seeing as he has a million and one documents he wrote and never looked back at, but he opens it anyway.
It’s a story he wrote after one of his dreams, about two kids who meet in Borders and end up starting a band after the shy, insecure one who just wanted to be a drummer turns out to have the voice of an angel. It’s nice, but it’s sort of empty, even after he added the drummer character. Three just doesn’t seem like the right number of people to be in a band.
He keeps the document open, but looks for something else to send in.
The anthology comes out a few months later, and gets rave reviews. It’s good publicity for While the City Sleeps, and he’s already getting hints from his publisher that thinking about another novel might be a grand idea.
He doesn’t have anything in particular planned, so he goes back to that unfinished document just to have something to work on. He needs another character, he knows it, but no one he creates seems to fit.
Eventually Pete’s just like fuck it and starts blatantly breaking writer rule number one: don’t write yourself as a character. He can’t help it; he can see himself getting along with the other three perfectly, especially the kid with the angel voice. It’s just self-indulgent bullshit in his head after that, and he decides to not ever publish it. It’ll just be something to work on when he doesn’t have anything else to do, a secret side project no one will ever see.
~~~
While the City Sleeps finally gets printed, and it sells pretty well, for his first novel. A good part of his book is made up of lyrics (think Tolkien but with fewer elves and more Gabriel), and “It’s Warmer In The Basement” gets quoted in all the reviews, positive or negative. It’s the biggest joke in the small fanbase he’s acquired over the years. Pete’s just proud to have a fanbase.
He does a few interviews once the book’s released, and one of the interviewers asks, “I noticed you have a talent at writing lyrics, have you ever considered going into music instead of writing?” Pete just shrugs and explains that he’d tried the band thing already, and while he sort of knows what all the songs sound like in his head, he’s not really musically inclined enough to make anything out of them.
“Besides,” he says, “no one could play the songs better than the characters themselves.”
But now that the idea’s been put in his head, he can’t stop thinking about going back to music. Only problem is, he doesn’t have anyone to put melodies to his lyrics.
And then he meets the Ways.
He meets Mikey in a bar in New York, they hit it off right away, and when they get to the “So what do you do for a living?” question, Mikey says he’s in a musical.
Pete raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t sing, I’m just in the pit, on bass guitar. The Black Parade, have you heard of it? Off-Broadway, kind of depressing.” Mikey smiles a bit. “My brother wrote it.”
Now Pete’s interested. He mentions offhand that he’d like to meet him sometime, but doesn’t push it, and they go back to normal bar chatter. They get each other’s numbers and agree that they should hang out sometime again.
Pete was only in New York for an interview, but he decides to stay for another week. For research.
He gets tickets to The Black Parade, and texts Mikey which night he’s going to be there. Mikey texts back to tell him to stay after the show so he can meet his brother, Gerard. Pete texts back with a couple of less than threes.
The show starts at eight, and Pete’s got some pretty good orchestra seats, about ten rows from the front and almost in the center. The theater’s small and mostly full, and when Pete glances around, he sees that most of the audience is made up of teenagers. Not just normal-looking theater kids, but the kids with too much eye makeup and too many Myspace pictures, the kids who hardly leave their houses, let alone go to musicals. It’s weird, but interesting, and Pete’s already speculating on what the show will be about before the curtain goes up (he didn’t look up a synopsis on the internet or anything, he wanted it to be a surprise).
Then the overture starts, the curtain goes up, and it’s a barebones hospital scene-a single cot, some machines, and a lone patient in a gown, sitting on the cot and looking out at the audience with sunken (and heavily made up) eyes.
Then a voice comes from offstage: “Now come one, come all, to this tragic affair…”
It’s almost more of a rock concert than a rock opera, and the kids love it. Pete hears girls practically screeching after the end of each number, and sees boys mouthing the lyrics like prayers. The actor playing the leader of the Black Parade has more stage presence than any rock star Pete’s ever known, possibly more than any of his own characters.
He goes to the lobby after the show, and there’s a huge crowd waiting in line to buy the cast album. Pete can imagine the kids going home and blasting it through the house, listening to it on their iPods on the train, memorizing lyrics and waiting for a chance to see the show again.
Pete’s not quite sure where he’s supposed to go to find Mikey, so he just hangs around in the lobby for a while, buys his own copy of the album, and chats up the guy selling the CDs. The lobby’s about empty when Mikey comes out the door (nobody in the remaining crowd recognizes him, he’s only a pit musician after all) and motions for Pete to follow him.
They go back stage, and a few of the crew and cast have already gone home, but there’s still a few people struggling out of their costumes when they go to the big dressing room. Mikey takes Pete to see the rock star guy, wiping off his makeup in the mirror, and says, “Pete, meet Gerard.”
Gerard looks up, face still mostly white and the black around his eyes smeared a bit, and grins. “You must be Pete Wentz!” And Gerard proceeds to get kind of fangirly because omg, Pete Wentz, the guy who writes all those amazing stories about ~music~ and Mikey jumps in to say he knew he’d heard Pete’s name before, and he looked him up on Facebook the day after they met and found his fan club instead, so they’ve been looking forward to seeing him again ever since.
Pete grins at the praise but then interrupts to say how impressed he is by the show, and did Gerard seriously write all the music and the lyrics and play the star? Because that’s impressive.
So Pete and Gerard babble about music and lyrics and Gerard’s all “I want to ~save lives~, you know?” and Pete doesn’t really know, he just writes because it keeps him sane and lets him pay for shit. But Gerard’s just so earnest in his message, it gets Pete thinking.
Then he mentions that he’s been thinking about getting into real music instead of just the fictional kind, and Gerard is super excited at the idea of collaborating (with Pete Wentz!). So they exchange emails and Pete agrees to send some of the lyrics he’s had lying in his notebooks for ages but didn’t know what to do with.
~~~
Months pass, and Pete finishes ¡Viva La Cobra!, the sequel to While the City Sleeps. It’s different, more focused, with a lot of (not always subtle) commentary on the entertainment industry and a lot of Gabe being a smartass. It flies off the shelves.
Gerard and Pete have been emailing back and forth constantly, sending each other lyric-music ideas and combinations, until they’ve figured out their general theme for what they hope will be the next Broadway hit. It’s about boys in bands, of course, but they’re younger than Pete’s usual protagonists, and there are a lot of theatrics (because one, it’s theater, duh, and two, GERARD). Circuses! Lap dances! Electric lights, machinery!
It’s almost a coming-of-age story, with a kid growing up after dealing with an alcoholic father, and another kid leaving his Mormon family to pursue music. (Gerard wanted it to be their epic love story, but Pete didn’t want the reviewers to think the play was just an excuse to watch nearly-underage boys making out. Gerard tried to argue with lots of big words about gender roles or something but Pete promised they’d address heteronormativity in their next collab, okay, can we just deal with a few issues at a time).
So they start going through the process of getting A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out on stage. Which I’m sure is very complicated and involves lots of agents and money and blowjobs. And this is why I’m writing notfic about it instead of real fic because I get to bullshit both the publishing process and the stageplaygettingonstage process. \o/
THE POINT IS, Fever goes Off-Broadway and they find the best underage boys they can find to play these tragic characters. And Pete’s back in New York and sitting in the best seats in the house opening night, watching it all play out, and it’s weird, because he’s never seen his characters say their lines or sing their songs except in his head, and now it’s almost like what he wrote on paper is actually real.
When he goes home that night, after the big opening night afterparty that may or may not have involved makeouts with Mikey, he’s a little drunk and a lot inspired (okay, maybe the opposite), and goes straight to that self-indulgent story about his own imaginary band for himself. He spends about an hour on a ridiculously long paragraph full of run-on sentences, all about the kid with the angel voice-Patrick, he’s finally named him.
Pete wakes up the next morning after about three hours of sleep, wondering why his mouth tastes like Coke Zero and why there’s a hurricane of metaphors about some underage kid’s mouth on his laptop screen.
He doesn’t delete the paragraph-it’s not like he’s going to publish it anyway.
Fever gets pretty popular through word of mouth, with Pete’s fans combined with Gerard’s, and gets pretty rave reviews. They love the tragic artist Ryan Ross, Spencer Smith the childhood friend, and the quirky, talented Brendon Urie. Jon Walker, who doesn’t show up until Act 2, is a fan favorite, and the merchandise desk starts carrying flip-flops with the logo on them.
There are more parties, and Pete’s habit of making out with Mikey at them turns into a habit of inviting him to his hotel room. He’s kind of reluctant to go back to Chicago, but he knows he has to, eventually. Might as well make the best of his time here. (Summer Stock of Like jokes go here)
~~~
Pete stays in New York for about a month longer than he should have, and he comes home to find a big pile of angry letters from his publisher, some angry emails from his editor, and one phone message from Gerard that starts off with congratulations on the show, and ends with “…Oh, wait, shit, I just totally dialed your home phone, didn’t I.”
Pete flips through the letters and emails, then decides that he doesn’t need to start working again until tomorrow and opens up his default writing-but-not-really-writing document to start another five pages about Patrick.
He texts Mikey a lot between paragraphs, and it’s pretty clear that they miss each other. Pete just wishes their relationship didn’t consist entirely of drunken sex, and promises himself that they’ll go on actual dates the next time he’s in the city.
Without really noticing, he starts writing his character and Patrick being ridiculously close, on stage and off.
He starts answering the emails and glaring at the letters properly the next morning, and he ends up having to work all day on things he owes people. Glitz and Glamour is his newest novel (his characters just keep getting younger, it’s kind of creepy), something that’ll catch the teenage girls but will still be different and interesting enough for everyone else. There’s just something about Vegas boys that’s fun to write.
It becomes a routine: work all day until he’s spent, write about Patrick all night until (if) he falls asleep. It’s a lot of word vomit, a lot of not even trying to dumb down his opaque metaphors to make them easier to understand, like he has to for most of his work to make it more marketable. Joe and Andy, the other two members of his (his, he thinks now, possessive, like Pete’s actually in the band instead of just pretending he is) band are just as important, plot-wise, but Patrick is the leading man, the star, the light of Pete’s life.
Mikey texts Pete one night to inform him that he hasn’t texted him in like, a whole day, is he dead.
Pete just quickly types out sry writng gimme an hour and goes back to describing the “Dance, Dance” video.
Mikey texts back two hours later, u alive?
Pete looks at his Sidekick, then back to his screen, then finally shuts his laptop and sits on the bed with his phone. yeah, barely.
They text back and forth until Pete finally falls asleep, thinking about Mikey.
He dreams about Patrick.
~~~
It’s another few months and another anthology (Fast Times at Barrington High gets leaked on the internet and Pete is really starting to get sick of all these fangirls, okay, William is a deep character with lots of art and feelings, agh) before Patrick takes a look at his self-indulgent document and realizes it’s longer than any of his other novels. Sure, it makes sense, seeing as he never had to edit anything out, but still. That’s a lot of words about a band he only wishes existed.
He tries to keep the file closed, take a break from it, concentrate more on what he’s actually getting paid for, what actually gets read by other people, but he ends up going back to it, every night without fail.
He actually blows Mikey off some nights, if he’s in the middle of a very important chapter, and he feels awful but he just can’t tear himself away. Mikey’s texts start slowing.
Pete finishes up a short story one day, sends it off, and decides not to work on anything else for the rest of the day, so he texts Mikey. Maybe he can apologize for the past few nights.
Mikey texts back, on date, txt u back l8r.
Pete decides to start his evening writing early.
Mikey doesn’t text back until the next day, while Pete’s celebrating the completion of the last story he has to worry about for a while by playing mindless games on his iPhone. He apologizes for not getting back to him last night, Pete says it’s totally okay dude he was writing anyway, and Mikey starts telling him about this lovely girl Alicia, one of the chorus girls in The Black Parade, and Pete is so happy for him, seriously, but he can’t help feeling all ;o; now that his plans to go back to New York and sweep Mikey off his feet are shot.
Mikey goes off on another date, and Pete sulks in front of the TV for a while. It doesn’t help. He goes off to write another twelve pages about Fall Out Boy-he finally named his band, and had to go find+replace all the spots where he just wrote “BAND NAME???” every time. He adds a little origin story for the name near the beginning, and then just stares at the screen for a while. It feels a bit more real, now. It’s kind of unsettling.
Then he goes back to describing fan reactions to Pete kissing Patrick on stage.
~~~
Pete gets a call from Gerard one day: “The Black Parade is dead.”
Gerard’s out of work, Pete doesn’t have any angry editors on his back at the moment, and both of them could use a change of pace, so Pete flies back out to New York to start working with him on another collaboration.
Gerard starts talking about a sequel to Fever, which Pete is entirely against, because dude, seriously? Who write sequels to musicals? Andrew Lloyd Webber writes sequels to musicals, and they are not going to be fucking Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webber is the enemy.
Gerard agrees that he has a point, Andrew Lloyd Webber is a horrible person who made Sarah Brightman play a very demeaning role, but he’s got all these ideas! Listen to these ideas!
Pete listens to these ideas, and they’re kind of awesome. They’re also completely different from Fever, so he still doesn’t see how they could possibly be connected. They get into a big long discussion about plot and characters, and Gerard starts talking about adding leitmotifs from Fever and Pete is hit by an idea of how the boys in the band all suddenly changed direction (love, loss, and marijuana) and there’s a very long and in-depth discussion about exclamation points and Pretty. Odd. starts happening.
It’s different, for both of them; Gerard writing hippytastic music and Pete writing lyrics that aren’t depressing as hell. But it’s nice, and it takes Pete’s mind off of Mikey (and Patrick) for a while. Even if he does actually see Mikey in person a lot, now.
But Mikey’s all ~Alicia~ all the time, and Pete is just SOB I WANTED TO START SOMETHING REAL WITH YOU but he doesn’t say anything and smiles at Alicia when he meets her, and she’s a sweetheart and awesome so it’s not like he can hate her, and she and Mikey are so happy together, but aaaaagh.
Pete just kind of buries himself in the Fall Out Boy story when he goes back to his hotel room every night, just like at home, and his fictional self is kind of going downhill. He never sugar-coats anything, like you’re supposed to in self-indulgent bullshit, he just writes what he honestly thinks would happen based on past events, with as little wish-fulfillment as possible. So fiction-Pete is struggling with the same insomnia and anxiety and issue-piles as real-Pete, and Patrick gets pissy at him a lot, even if Pete doesn’t want him to.
Sometimes he feels like he’s not actually controlling the characters at this point, like it’s actually happening, and he’s just the vehicle through which the other world shows itself.
But that’d be crazy.
~~~
Pretty. Odd. gets finished up and they start recording demos a few months later (I’m…not sure who would sing on said demos, because while Gerard singing “Nine In the Afternoon” is a hilarious concept, it probably wouldn’t sell the show, and Pete just. No. Maybe they kidnapped the kid who played Brendon in Fever), by which time Mikey and Alicia are stupid in love and Pete so done with writing sappy happy lyrics.
The producers are a little critical (“Do they really have to break up in the end? It’s such a sweet show the whole way through.” “Yeah, well, that’s life,” Pete says, “And it’s not a real Broadway show if you don’t cry at the end, anyway.”) but after some tweaking (Gerard never did get to address heteronormativity like he wanted) it starts going into production.
Pete spends the weeks before opening night in New York, partying a lot and writing drunk a lot. He should be working on Whisper War, the sequel to Glitz and Glamour, like he’d promised his editor he would, but he doesn’t trust himself to write drunk unless it’s about Fall Out Boy, because it’s okay if he’s not going to publish it!
Aaaand since he gets drunk a lot, he spends a lot of time writing about Patrick.
Opening night goes pretty well, there are plenty of fans of Fever as well as some curious newcomers. The newcomers seem to like it a lot more than the Fever fans, who blast it in reviews. Nobody likes the breakup, even those who understand its necessity to the plot. Pete really doesn’t care at this point. He gets absolutely hammered at the opening night party, makes out with at least three girls (one right in front of Mikey, and damn he’s going to have to apologize for that in the morning because even Pete has douche limits), and nearly throws up on his laptop when he gets home.
Fiction-Pete overdoses outside a Best Buy. Real-Pete has to get up and rush to the bathroom to vomit after writing that paragraph.
He wakes up with the worst hangover in recorded history, like he knew he would, and he has a pissy voicemail from his editor reminding him that he had better have started fucking working on Whisper War because his deadline’s coming up and blah blah blah Pete can’t handle this right now. He fumbles a text to Mikey, sry, was kinda a dick lst nighrt.
Mikey doesn’t text back. He’s probably fucking Alicia.
He thinks about calling Gerard, but Gerard would probably just give him a lecture about his hangover that would be even worse to listen to due to said hangover and when did Pete stop having a proper circle of friends? Oh yeah, when he started investing all his time into the lives of fake people. Fuck his life.
He wishes he could talk to Patrick. He settles for writing about him instead.
He doesn’t delete the overdose. He could, he could have himself go on tour as normal, he could avoid fucking up his relationships with everyone in his imaginary circle, but he doesn’t. It feels like cheating.
Now Patrick’s pissed at him, Joe and Andy are trying to understand, and he really should just walk away from the laptop and wonder what his life has become, but wallowing in angst and tragedy is kind of Pete’s specialty. (No seriously, only Pete Wentz could harbor this much angst after writing fucking Pretty. Odd.)
There are more parties, and more making out, and maybe a few girls brought back to his hotel room, but not a lot, because he can’t fuck girls and type at the same time, and that’s kind of obnoxious.
Pete finally drags himself from Patrick long enough to churn out about half of Whisper War in a week, and sends a few chapters to his editor just to prove he’s working. Then he goes to another party.
Mikey is not entirely blinded by love, and points out that Pete is kind of a massive hermit.
“What? I get out plenty often,” Pete scoffs, “Where do you think I am now? Not at home, that’s where.”
“Yeah, but even at these parties you’re always looking like you want to go home,” Mikey says, “And you told me you didn’t have much of a workload, lately.”
“I don’t. There’s just not much for me to do here.”
“…It’s fucking New York, dude.”
Then Mikey gets distracted by an Alicia and Pete sulks for a while. He’s mostly gotten over Mikey by now, but he still has every right to sulk. It’s just what he does.
Pete makes a bit more of an effort to get out beyond eating food and partying, but it just reminds him how much Real Life kind of sucks. At least when he’s writing about Fall Out Boy he has some form of control over what’s going on, no angry editors or picky theater critics or Ways. He ends up bouncing back to his hotel room earlier every night, and sometimes he works on Whisper War when he first gets there, so he has an excuse for being home so early, but really, he’s just hooked on pretending to be a rock star with his Patrick.
Fiction-Pete mumbles an I love you while Patrick’s sleeping in his bunk. Real-Pete isn’t quite sure how pathetic he would look to someone else right now, but he guesses very.
~~~
Pete doesn’t stay in New York as long this time, and leaves once the yay-the-show-made-it parties start to die down. Once he’s out of the city (and into another city but the city is not NEW YORK) he just kind of stays inside almost all the time. He finally finishes Whisper War (it helps that he’s not getting drunk every night so he’s running out of excuses not to write it) and it gets a lot more love than Glitz and Glamour. Pete states in interviews that working on Pretty. Odd. helped a lot in getting himself motivated and that Gerard’s creative genius rubbed off on him. This is a damn dirty lie (except for the Gerard being a creative genius part).
He doesn’t have any projects planned for the near future, and he has enough money to coast along for a while without working, but instead of going to all the Chicago clubs he knows and loves he spends way too much time writing about Fall Out Boy. Mikey barely ever texts him anymore. Pete only answers him half the time anyway.
Pretty. Odd. actually goes under after only a few months, and Gerard’s out of work again. He tries to contact Pete, but Pete never answers his phone unless it’s his editor (and even then only after the fourth time), emails are too much of a bother to answer, and nobody gets texts back from him but Mikey, and that’s a rare occurrence. Eventually Gerard just bugs Mikey into flooding his phone with increasingly worried messages, until Pete finally realizes he’s been writing about a single song in a single performance for eight pages straight, and that is one ridiculous wall of text about the little details of Patrick singing. He picks up his phone and texts back: busy.
Mikey responds, oh thank god ur alive.
Before Pete can reply, Mikey texts again: uve been busy 4 weeks, have u left the house.
yeah.
besides food?
…no.
Mikey calls him. Pete thinks about not answering, but if he doesn’t, Mikey will probably just fly out to Chicago and bang on his door. Actually, that sounds like a great idea.
He picks up anyway.
Pete tries to explain to Mikey that he’s working on something, he’s very busy and he’ll get back to him later, but Gerard grabs the phone away from Mikey. “You need to stop.”
“What? Stop writing?”
“Just stop writing whatever it is you’re working on. It’s eating you up. I’ve been there, I know what it looks like.”
Gerard goes on to tell Pete about one of his earlier works, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, and how he’d spent months locked in his shitty apartment, surrounded by paper and ink and empty beer bottles, popping pills to stay awake “just long enough to finish the chapter,” and it wasn’t until Mikey managed to pick the lock and found Gerard curled up in a ball on his bed, mumbling about his work and his dead grandmother and anything through a haze of some horrible drug cocktail, that he finally realized he had to stop. Just give it an ending and leave it.
Pete just says it’s not like that, that this is important, he’s just getting a little caught up.
“Are you even under contract for this? Is there a deadline?”
“…Well, no, I’m.” Not planning on letting it ever see the light of day, but if he tells Gerard that, it’ll only prove his point.
“You’re what?”
“I wasn’t. Just. I’ll be fine, Gerard, calm down. It’ll wrap itself up eventually.” He doesn’t have an ending in sight, at all. Honestly, if he could just write about Patrick forever, keep him alive and in motion, he’d be totally fine with that.
“So you don’t have the end planned already?”
“I don’t usually plan my endings too far in advance.”
“How long do you think it’ll be in the end? Page-wise.”
“…I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”
“Pete.”
Pete hangs up. Mikey calls back, and he turns his phone off.
He falls asleep at five in the morning, and dreams about Patrick. But not fiction-Patrick, the guy who helped Fall Out Boy reach fame and fortune with his angelic voice, but real-Patrick, just a guy who likes music and has a real job and goes out to dinner with Pete and snuggles with him on the couch late at night while they watch bad movies together.
Pete wakes up clinging to a pillow tight enough that if it really were real-Patrick, he’d probably be making choking noises and telling him to get the fuck off, Pete, seriously.
He has to take a long shower and tell himself over and over again that there is no real-Patrick.
His money’s starting to run out, and after Gerard’s tragic tale and his minor (well, he tells himself it’s minor) freakout Pete finally starts working on something that doesn’t involve Fall Out Boy at all. ¡Viva La Cobra! needs a sequel. He turns his phone back on, sends a few reassuring texts to Mikey, and manages to stay away from Patrick for a whole day.
This doesn’t last. The next day, he’s barely written a page of Hot Mess before he decides “Oh, I stopped in the middle of a paragraph, I should at least finish that,” and opens the Fall Out Boy document again. Naturally this snowballs into writing until three in the morning about all the new things Patrick wants to do with their latest album.
Gerard calls him right as he’s about to fall asleep, which makes Pete supremely pissed but making Gerard worry wouldn’t help anything.
“You realize it’s almost four in the morning,” Pete mumbles into the phone.
“Oh, is it?” Gerard kind of forgets about NORMAL HUMAN HOURS sometimes.
They talk for a while, Gerard tries to convince him to stop everything but Pete says it’s okay, he has a new project to distract him, it’s no big deal. Gerard calls bullshit. Then he says, “Who is it?”
“…What?”
“It’s one of your characters, isn’t it.”
“What are you talking-“
“The reason you can’t stop. Is it because of a character?”
Pete doesn’t answer for a while. Gerard sighs. “It is, isn’t it.”
“…Yeah.”
Pete tells him that he’s just got this side project, something he was never ever planning on publishing, and he started just writing in it whenever he had nothing to do but this Patrick kid is kind of taking over his soul. He doesn’t tell him about his fictional alter ego, though.
Gerard just says he understands, and how the reason he couldn’t end Three Cheers was because he was sort of in love with Frank, one of his main characters.
“I just couldn’t end it. It felt like I’d be killing him, you know?”
Pete knows.
“But after, y’know, the thing, I had to take a look at it and realized everything has to end. It never did go anywhere, no one’s seen it but Mikey and my therapist, and I’m fine with that. I met my wife-have you met Lyn?-and stopped drinking and I’m auditioning for La Cage next weekend. I’m lucky. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to you, and I don’t know if you could pick yourself up the way I did.”
Pete wants to argue that he can handle himself just fine, but that’s. Kind of a massive lie.
“Finish it tonight. Or as soon as possible. Please?” Gerard speaks carefully, like he’s trying to talk Pete out of jumping off a building.
“…Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Pete hangs up.
Any chance he had of sleeping is gone, so he clacks away at his computer until dawn, trying his hardest to just complete the damn thing.
Eventually he realizes that no happy ending in the world could satisfy him, so he tears it all apart. Fall Out Boy breaks up, Joe and Andy form their own band, Patrick goes solo, fiction-Pete drowns himself in side projects that aren’t even related to music, his fans call him a giant sellout, and to top it all off, he dies in one of their last music videos before the breakup.
“The fucking end.” He hits save, closes the window, and collapses on his bed.
~~~
He texts Mikey when he gets up in the morning. its over.
Mikey texts back, thank god.
Gerard calls him and asks if he needs any help, because he knows a guy, but Pete just waves him off and says he needs to just recover for a while. Gerard seems to understand and lets him go.
Pete works on his new novel for a little while, maybe Gabe Saporta’s antics will distract him, but it’s just weird, not writing about Patrick. Hot Mess is going to suck.
He decides to brave the outside world instead. Starbucks, that’s the place to go. He can laugh at hipsters and then feel like a hipster for feeling superior to hipsters and maybe drink some expensive coffee while he’s at it. It’ll be great.
It’s Chicago, so Starbucks is kind of crowded, and he gets some of his hipster-watching done while in line. Half of them are staring intently at their Macbooks through their ironic glasses, one of them has a newsboy cap and a fucking silk scarf, wow, but one of them is just sitting at his little table, eyes closed, tapping his fingers on the tabletop to some complicated rhythm. He’s nodding his head a little bit, probably humming something quietly but Pete can’t hear anything from where he’s standing.
Then the barista calls, “Patrick?” and the guy looks up. Pete watches as the guy stands up, adjusts his hat, and goes over to the counter to pay for his drink.
Maybe he should actually try interacting with the hipsters today.
AND IT’S ALL VERY VAGUE AND OPEN TO INTERPRETATION EXCEPT HOW IT’S TOTALLY NOT, WOOOO DEUS EX SAPPYNA \o/
AND THERE'S A BUNCH OF OTHER THINGS THAT PROBABLY HAPPEN AFTER LIKE MIKEY AND ALICIA GETTING MARRIED AND CLANDESTINE PUBLISHING AND GERARD BEING THE BEST FUCKING ZAZA YOU EVER DID SEE, BUT I'M NOT WRITING ANY MORE OF THIS, OH MY GOD.
THE END.
And Eggo came to the conclusion that Fever is actually a musical about Ryan Ross' life.
And somehow my brain took this as "PETE WENTZ IS A TORTURED AUTHOR AND EVERYONE IN DECAYDANCE IS FICTIONAL."
But this is not that fic. This is, in fact, that not!fic. This is 6000 words of self-indulgent bullshit about self-indulgent bullshit. There is tragedy and handwaving of the creative process and tragedy and word vomit and thrown-in ideas and emoticons. I'm rather proud of it.
I Write Tragedies (or, PETE WENTZ AND HIS ANGST)
RATED PG-13, UNSUITABLE FOR CHILDREN WHO DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH PETE'S TRAGIC FACE.
Pairing: Pete/fictional!Patrick?
Warnings: Angst, angst, angst angst angst, ignoring timelines, tragedy, constant switches between Actual Writing and "UHHHH THEN THIS SHOULD HAPPEN! \o/!", terrible pacing, I wrote this in two days and never looked back and I just want it to be done, sappy happy deus ex machina ending that EGGO MADE ME WRITE BECAUSE TOO MUCH TRAGEDY WOULD OFFEND HER DELICATE SOUL. You're lucky I love you, braintwin.
Disclaimer: Oh my god please don't tell me this happened, because if everyone I love is just Pete Wentz's fever dream I might just die.
Summary: Pete Wentz writes about boys in bands. Tragedy ensues.
Pete is just your regular tried-to-start-a-band-but-failed, working-in-an-office-and-hates-his-life, constantly-struggling-with-mental-issues kind of guy. He’s miserable and lost and the only thing that keeps him sane is writing. Not anything specific, but everything-lyrics, stories, a blog or two, anything that lets him get words from his brain to a screen or paper. He never publishes any of his fiction, but he probably does some freelance journalism when he has the time. If he actually wrote everything on paper, his apartment would be totally full of it, pages everywhere, but as it is he just has a few notebooks lying around and a hard drive full of Word documents.
Eventually, Pete loses his job, and he has no idea where he could go next. He mopes a lot, lives on Chinese food, and then finally when he’s starting to realize that unemployment won’t pay for rent, he decides to try publishing one of his short stories, The Sacrifice of Life. It’s not much, just a story about a bunch of boys who start a band, but the publishers like his protagonist, Gabe Saporta. He’s edgy, kind of an asshole, and comes from a difficult childhood as an immigrant from Uruguay but is a Jersey boy at heart. He’ll catch the teen demographic.
The magazine Pete’s talking to takes the story, on the condition that he expands it into a full-fledged novel. He gets a contract, an advance, everything. He can pay rent for a while. Life is pretty great.
While he’s working on the novel, he offers some of his other short stories, …For the Kids and Almost Here. The magazine gobbles them up-who knew boys-in-bands could be its own genre? But Pete writes it well; tragic but beautiful William Beckett and goofball-with-issues Travis McCoy and their interactions with the rest of their bands are interesting and real. Pete knows how to write realistic characters, even buried under piles of metaphors.
~~~
Sometime during the first draft of his currently unnamed novel (which is basically getting nowhere), Pete ends up doing the novelization for Snakes On A Plane. It’s stupid, and he kind of hates it, but his publisher rejected Living In America on the grounds of “too foreign,” so he needs something to do that doesn’t involve thinking too much.
The night he finishes the novelization, he actually manages to sleep (something he has a lot of trouble doing normally, but it’s even worse when he’s writing). It hits him in a dream: his old character Gabe, wandering through the desert, having a vision about a cobra from the future.
He wakes up, flies to his laptop, and can’t get the words out fast enough. This is how he can expand The Sacrifice of Life into While the City Sleeps, We Rule the Streets. Gabe starts out with William and Travis and Maja, his character from Living In America, and it’s the first time he’s ever included characters from more than one other story in the same work. He comes up with the characters of Nate, Ryland, Alex, and Victoria as he’s writing about the concerts with the original four, and the fivesome become the focus of the novel for the rest of the story, though the other three still cross paths with Gabe a lot.
The publishers look at the draft, and are a bit skeptical (“It’s a bit too DC Comics, you’re creating a single world to work in”) but they love the new characters and Cobra Starship’s cracktacular origin story, so they start putting it through editing.
~~~
By now, Pete’s short stories have gotten popular enough that his publisher is starting to ask for an anthology. You know, all of his previously published stories with a few extra, never-been-published exclusives. It’d be a great way to get his name out there before While the City Sleeps hits shelves. Pete agrees and starts looking through his files for old stories he’s been meaning to give to the publisher.
He offers up Santi, the sequel to Almost Here that everyone’s been asking for (somehow I can imagine William reaching ~EDWARD CULLEN~ levels of teenage girl love), and So Sudden, a cute little piece that included one of his new favorite characters, Greta Salpeter.
He’s scrolling through his documents folder, looking for one more thing to add to the anthology, when he sees a file he doesn’t recognize the name of. It’s not that surprising, seeing as he has a million and one documents he wrote and never looked back at, but he opens it anyway.
It’s a story he wrote after one of his dreams, about two kids who meet in Borders and end up starting a band after the shy, insecure one who just wanted to be a drummer turns out to have the voice of an angel. It’s nice, but it’s sort of empty, even after he added the drummer character. Three just doesn’t seem like the right number of people to be in a band.
He keeps the document open, but looks for something else to send in.
The anthology comes out a few months later, and gets rave reviews. It’s good publicity for While the City Sleeps, and he’s already getting hints from his publisher that thinking about another novel might be a grand idea.
He doesn’t have anything in particular planned, so he goes back to that unfinished document just to have something to work on. He needs another character, he knows it, but no one he creates seems to fit.
Eventually Pete’s just like fuck it and starts blatantly breaking writer rule number one: don’t write yourself as a character. He can’t help it; he can see himself getting along with the other three perfectly, especially the kid with the angel voice. It’s just self-indulgent bullshit in his head after that, and he decides to not ever publish it. It’ll just be something to work on when he doesn’t have anything else to do, a secret side project no one will ever see.
~~~
While the City Sleeps finally gets printed, and it sells pretty well, for his first novel. A good part of his book is made up of lyrics (think Tolkien but with fewer elves and more Gabriel), and “It’s Warmer In The Basement” gets quoted in all the reviews, positive or negative. It’s the biggest joke in the small fanbase he’s acquired over the years. Pete’s just proud to have a fanbase.
He does a few interviews once the book’s released, and one of the interviewers asks, “I noticed you have a talent at writing lyrics, have you ever considered going into music instead of writing?” Pete just shrugs and explains that he’d tried the band thing already, and while he sort of knows what all the songs sound like in his head, he’s not really musically inclined enough to make anything out of them.
“Besides,” he says, “no one could play the songs better than the characters themselves.”
But now that the idea’s been put in his head, he can’t stop thinking about going back to music. Only problem is, he doesn’t have anyone to put melodies to his lyrics.
And then he meets the Ways.
He meets Mikey in a bar in New York, they hit it off right away, and when they get to the “So what do you do for a living?” question, Mikey says he’s in a musical.
Pete raises an eyebrow.
“I don’t sing, I’m just in the pit, on bass guitar. The Black Parade, have you heard of it? Off-Broadway, kind of depressing.” Mikey smiles a bit. “My brother wrote it.”
Now Pete’s interested. He mentions offhand that he’d like to meet him sometime, but doesn’t push it, and they go back to normal bar chatter. They get each other’s numbers and agree that they should hang out sometime again.
Pete was only in New York for an interview, but he decides to stay for another week. For research.
He gets tickets to The Black Parade, and texts Mikey which night he’s going to be there. Mikey texts back to tell him to stay after the show so he can meet his brother, Gerard. Pete texts back with a couple of less than threes.
The show starts at eight, and Pete’s got some pretty good orchestra seats, about ten rows from the front and almost in the center. The theater’s small and mostly full, and when Pete glances around, he sees that most of the audience is made up of teenagers. Not just normal-looking theater kids, but the kids with too much eye makeup and too many Myspace pictures, the kids who hardly leave their houses, let alone go to musicals. It’s weird, but interesting, and Pete’s already speculating on what the show will be about before the curtain goes up (he didn’t look up a synopsis on the internet or anything, he wanted it to be a surprise).
Then the overture starts, the curtain goes up, and it’s a barebones hospital scene-a single cot, some machines, and a lone patient in a gown, sitting on the cot and looking out at the audience with sunken (and heavily made up) eyes.
Then a voice comes from offstage: “Now come one, come all, to this tragic affair…”
It’s almost more of a rock concert than a rock opera, and the kids love it. Pete hears girls practically screeching after the end of each number, and sees boys mouthing the lyrics like prayers. The actor playing the leader of the Black Parade has more stage presence than any rock star Pete’s ever known, possibly more than any of his own characters.
He goes to the lobby after the show, and there’s a huge crowd waiting in line to buy the cast album. Pete can imagine the kids going home and blasting it through the house, listening to it on their iPods on the train, memorizing lyrics and waiting for a chance to see the show again.
Pete’s not quite sure where he’s supposed to go to find Mikey, so he just hangs around in the lobby for a while, buys his own copy of the album, and chats up the guy selling the CDs. The lobby’s about empty when Mikey comes out the door (nobody in the remaining crowd recognizes him, he’s only a pit musician after all) and motions for Pete to follow him.
They go back stage, and a few of the crew and cast have already gone home, but there’s still a few people struggling out of their costumes when they go to the big dressing room. Mikey takes Pete to see the rock star guy, wiping off his makeup in the mirror, and says, “Pete, meet Gerard.”
Gerard looks up, face still mostly white and the black around his eyes smeared a bit, and grins. “You must be Pete Wentz!” And Gerard proceeds to get kind of fangirly because omg, Pete Wentz, the guy who writes all those amazing stories about ~music~ and Mikey jumps in to say he knew he’d heard Pete’s name before, and he looked him up on Facebook the day after they met and found his fan club instead, so they’ve been looking forward to seeing him again ever since.
Pete grins at the praise but then interrupts to say how impressed he is by the show, and did Gerard seriously write all the music and the lyrics and play the star? Because that’s impressive.
So Pete and Gerard babble about music and lyrics and Gerard’s all “I want to ~save lives~, you know?” and Pete doesn’t really know, he just writes because it keeps him sane and lets him pay for shit. But Gerard’s just so earnest in his message, it gets Pete thinking.
Then he mentions that he’s been thinking about getting into real music instead of just the fictional kind, and Gerard is super excited at the idea of collaborating (with Pete Wentz!). So they exchange emails and Pete agrees to send some of the lyrics he’s had lying in his notebooks for ages but didn’t know what to do with.
~~~
Months pass, and Pete finishes ¡Viva La Cobra!, the sequel to While the City Sleeps. It’s different, more focused, with a lot of (not always subtle) commentary on the entertainment industry and a lot of Gabe being a smartass. It flies off the shelves.
Gerard and Pete have been emailing back and forth constantly, sending each other lyric-music ideas and combinations, until they’ve figured out their general theme for what they hope will be the next Broadway hit. It’s about boys in bands, of course, but they’re younger than Pete’s usual protagonists, and there are a lot of theatrics (because one, it’s theater, duh, and two, GERARD). Circuses! Lap dances! Electric lights, machinery!
It’s almost a coming-of-age story, with a kid growing up after dealing with an alcoholic father, and another kid leaving his Mormon family to pursue music. (Gerard wanted it to be their epic love story, but Pete didn’t want the reviewers to think the play was just an excuse to watch nearly-underage boys making out. Gerard tried to argue with lots of big words about gender roles or something but Pete promised they’d address heteronormativity in their next collab, okay, can we just deal with a few issues at a time).
So they start going through the process of getting A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out on stage. Which I’m sure is very complicated and involves lots of agents and money and blowjobs. And this is why I’m writing notfic about it instead of real fic because I get to bullshit both the publishing process and the stageplaygettingonstage process. \o/
THE POINT IS, Fever goes Off-Broadway and they find the best underage boys they can find to play these tragic characters. And Pete’s back in New York and sitting in the best seats in the house opening night, watching it all play out, and it’s weird, because he’s never seen his characters say their lines or sing their songs except in his head, and now it’s almost like what he wrote on paper is actually real.
When he goes home that night, after the big opening night afterparty that may or may not have involved makeouts with Mikey, he’s a little drunk and a lot inspired (okay, maybe the opposite), and goes straight to that self-indulgent story about his own imaginary band for himself. He spends about an hour on a ridiculously long paragraph full of run-on sentences, all about the kid with the angel voice-Patrick, he’s finally named him.
Pete wakes up the next morning after about three hours of sleep, wondering why his mouth tastes like Coke Zero and why there’s a hurricane of metaphors about some underage kid’s mouth on his laptop screen.
He doesn’t delete the paragraph-it’s not like he’s going to publish it anyway.
Fever gets pretty popular through word of mouth, with Pete’s fans combined with Gerard’s, and gets pretty rave reviews. They love the tragic artist Ryan Ross, Spencer Smith the childhood friend, and the quirky, talented Brendon Urie. Jon Walker, who doesn’t show up until Act 2, is a fan favorite, and the merchandise desk starts carrying flip-flops with the logo on them.
There are more parties, and Pete’s habit of making out with Mikey at them turns into a habit of inviting him to his hotel room. He’s kind of reluctant to go back to Chicago, but he knows he has to, eventually. Might as well make the best of his time here. (Summer Stock of Like jokes go here)
~~~
Pete stays in New York for about a month longer than he should have, and he comes home to find a big pile of angry letters from his publisher, some angry emails from his editor, and one phone message from Gerard that starts off with congratulations on the show, and ends with “…Oh, wait, shit, I just totally dialed your home phone, didn’t I.”
Pete flips through the letters and emails, then decides that he doesn’t need to start working again until tomorrow and opens up his default writing-but-not-really-writing document to start another five pages about Patrick.
He texts Mikey a lot between paragraphs, and it’s pretty clear that they miss each other. Pete just wishes their relationship didn’t consist entirely of drunken sex, and promises himself that they’ll go on actual dates the next time he’s in the city.
Without really noticing, he starts writing his character and Patrick being ridiculously close, on stage and off.
He starts answering the emails and glaring at the letters properly the next morning, and he ends up having to work all day on things he owes people. Glitz and Glamour is his newest novel (his characters just keep getting younger, it’s kind of creepy), something that’ll catch the teenage girls but will still be different and interesting enough for everyone else. There’s just something about Vegas boys that’s fun to write.
It becomes a routine: work all day until he’s spent, write about Patrick all night until (if) he falls asleep. It’s a lot of word vomit, a lot of not even trying to dumb down his opaque metaphors to make them easier to understand, like he has to for most of his work to make it more marketable. Joe and Andy, the other two members of his (his, he thinks now, possessive, like Pete’s actually in the band instead of just pretending he is) band are just as important, plot-wise, but Patrick is the leading man, the star, the light of Pete’s life.
Mikey texts Pete one night to inform him that he hasn’t texted him in like, a whole day, is he dead.
Pete just quickly types out sry writng gimme an hour and goes back to describing the “Dance, Dance” video.
Mikey texts back two hours later, u alive?
Pete looks at his Sidekick, then back to his screen, then finally shuts his laptop and sits on the bed with his phone. yeah, barely.
They text back and forth until Pete finally falls asleep, thinking about Mikey.
He dreams about Patrick.
~~~
It’s another few months and another anthology (Fast Times at Barrington High gets leaked on the internet and Pete is really starting to get sick of all these fangirls, okay, William is a deep character with lots of art and feelings, agh) before Patrick takes a look at his self-indulgent document and realizes it’s longer than any of his other novels. Sure, it makes sense, seeing as he never had to edit anything out, but still. That’s a lot of words about a band he only wishes existed.
He tries to keep the file closed, take a break from it, concentrate more on what he’s actually getting paid for, what actually gets read by other people, but he ends up going back to it, every night without fail.
He actually blows Mikey off some nights, if he’s in the middle of a very important chapter, and he feels awful but he just can’t tear himself away. Mikey’s texts start slowing.
Pete finishes up a short story one day, sends it off, and decides not to work on anything else for the rest of the day, so he texts Mikey. Maybe he can apologize for the past few nights.
Mikey texts back, on date, txt u back l8r.
Pete decides to start his evening writing early.
Mikey doesn’t text back until the next day, while Pete’s celebrating the completion of the last story he has to worry about for a while by playing mindless games on his iPhone. He apologizes for not getting back to him last night, Pete says it’s totally okay dude he was writing anyway, and Mikey starts telling him about this lovely girl Alicia, one of the chorus girls in The Black Parade, and Pete is so happy for him, seriously, but he can’t help feeling all ;o; now that his plans to go back to New York and sweep Mikey off his feet are shot.
Mikey goes off on another date, and Pete sulks in front of the TV for a while. It doesn’t help. He goes off to write another twelve pages about Fall Out Boy-he finally named his band, and had to go find+replace all the spots where he just wrote “BAND NAME???” every time. He adds a little origin story for the name near the beginning, and then just stares at the screen for a while. It feels a bit more real, now. It’s kind of unsettling.
Then he goes back to describing fan reactions to Pete kissing Patrick on stage.
~~~
Pete gets a call from Gerard one day: “The Black Parade is dead.”
Gerard’s out of work, Pete doesn’t have any angry editors on his back at the moment, and both of them could use a change of pace, so Pete flies back out to New York to start working with him on another collaboration.
Gerard starts talking about a sequel to Fever, which Pete is entirely against, because dude, seriously? Who write sequels to musicals? Andrew Lloyd Webber writes sequels to musicals, and they are not going to be fucking Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webber is the enemy.
Gerard agrees that he has a point, Andrew Lloyd Webber is a horrible person who made Sarah Brightman play a very demeaning role, but he’s got all these ideas! Listen to these ideas!
Pete listens to these ideas, and they’re kind of awesome. They’re also completely different from Fever, so he still doesn’t see how they could possibly be connected. They get into a big long discussion about plot and characters, and Gerard starts talking about adding leitmotifs from Fever and Pete is hit by an idea of how the boys in the band all suddenly changed direction (love, loss, and marijuana) and there’s a very long and in-depth discussion about exclamation points and Pretty. Odd. starts happening.
It’s different, for both of them; Gerard writing hippytastic music and Pete writing lyrics that aren’t depressing as hell. But it’s nice, and it takes Pete’s mind off of Mikey (and Patrick) for a while. Even if he does actually see Mikey in person a lot, now.
But Mikey’s all ~Alicia~ all the time, and Pete is just SOB I WANTED TO START SOMETHING REAL WITH YOU but he doesn’t say anything and smiles at Alicia when he meets her, and she’s a sweetheart and awesome so it’s not like he can hate her, and she and Mikey are so happy together, but aaaaagh.
Pete just kind of buries himself in the Fall Out Boy story when he goes back to his hotel room every night, just like at home, and his fictional self is kind of going downhill. He never sugar-coats anything, like you’re supposed to in self-indulgent bullshit, he just writes what he honestly thinks would happen based on past events, with as little wish-fulfillment as possible. So fiction-Pete is struggling with the same insomnia and anxiety and issue-piles as real-Pete, and Patrick gets pissy at him a lot, even if Pete doesn’t want him to.
Sometimes he feels like he’s not actually controlling the characters at this point, like it’s actually happening, and he’s just the vehicle through which the other world shows itself.
But that’d be crazy.
~~~
Pretty. Odd. gets finished up and they start recording demos a few months later (I’m…not sure who would sing on said demos, because while Gerard singing “Nine In the Afternoon” is a hilarious concept, it probably wouldn’t sell the show, and Pete just. No. Maybe they kidnapped the kid who played Brendon in Fever), by which time Mikey and Alicia are stupid in love and Pete so done with writing sappy happy lyrics.
The producers are a little critical (“Do they really have to break up in the end? It’s such a sweet show the whole way through.” “Yeah, well, that’s life,” Pete says, “And it’s not a real Broadway show if you don’t cry at the end, anyway.”) but after some tweaking (Gerard never did get to address heteronormativity like he wanted) it starts going into production.
Pete spends the weeks before opening night in New York, partying a lot and writing drunk a lot. He should be working on Whisper War, the sequel to Glitz and Glamour, like he’d promised his editor he would, but he doesn’t trust himself to write drunk unless it’s about Fall Out Boy, because it’s okay if he’s not going to publish it!
Aaaand since he gets drunk a lot, he spends a lot of time writing about Patrick.
Opening night goes pretty well, there are plenty of fans of Fever as well as some curious newcomers. The newcomers seem to like it a lot more than the Fever fans, who blast it in reviews. Nobody likes the breakup, even those who understand its necessity to the plot. Pete really doesn’t care at this point. He gets absolutely hammered at the opening night party, makes out with at least three girls (one right in front of Mikey, and damn he’s going to have to apologize for that in the morning because even Pete has douche limits), and nearly throws up on his laptop when he gets home.
Fiction-Pete overdoses outside a Best Buy. Real-Pete has to get up and rush to the bathroom to vomit after writing that paragraph.
He wakes up with the worst hangover in recorded history, like he knew he would, and he has a pissy voicemail from his editor reminding him that he had better have started fucking working on Whisper War because his deadline’s coming up and blah blah blah Pete can’t handle this right now. He fumbles a text to Mikey, sry, was kinda a dick lst nighrt.
Mikey doesn’t text back. He’s probably fucking Alicia.
He thinks about calling Gerard, but Gerard would probably just give him a lecture about his hangover that would be even worse to listen to due to said hangover and when did Pete stop having a proper circle of friends? Oh yeah, when he started investing all his time into the lives of fake people. Fuck his life.
He wishes he could talk to Patrick. He settles for writing about him instead.
He doesn’t delete the overdose. He could, he could have himself go on tour as normal, he could avoid fucking up his relationships with everyone in his imaginary circle, but he doesn’t. It feels like cheating.
Now Patrick’s pissed at him, Joe and Andy are trying to understand, and he really should just walk away from the laptop and wonder what his life has become, but wallowing in angst and tragedy is kind of Pete’s specialty. (No seriously, only Pete Wentz could harbor this much angst after writing fucking Pretty. Odd.)
There are more parties, and more making out, and maybe a few girls brought back to his hotel room, but not a lot, because he can’t fuck girls and type at the same time, and that’s kind of obnoxious.
Pete finally drags himself from Patrick long enough to churn out about half of Whisper War in a week, and sends a few chapters to his editor just to prove he’s working. Then he goes to another party.
Mikey is not entirely blinded by love, and points out that Pete is kind of a massive hermit.
“What? I get out plenty often,” Pete scoffs, “Where do you think I am now? Not at home, that’s where.”
“Yeah, but even at these parties you’re always looking like you want to go home,” Mikey says, “And you told me you didn’t have much of a workload, lately.”
“I don’t. There’s just not much for me to do here.”
“…It’s fucking New York, dude.”
Then Mikey gets distracted by an Alicia and Pete sulks for a while. He’s mostly gotten over Mikey by now, but he still has every right to sulk. It’s just what he does.
Pete makes a bit more of an effort to get out beyond eating food and partying, but it just reminds him how much Real Life kind of sucks. At least when he’s writing about Fall Out Boy he has some form of control over what’s going on, no angry editors or picky theater critics or Ways. He ends up bouncing back to his hotel room earlier every night, and sometimes he works on Whisper War when he first gets there, so he has an excuse for being home so early, but really, he’s just hooked on pretending to be a rock star with his Patrick.
Fiction-Pete mumbles an I love you while Patrick’s sleeping in his bunk. Real-Pete isn’t quite sure how pathetic he would look to someone else right now, but he guesses very.
~~~
Pete doesn’t stay in New York as long this time, and leaves once the yay-the-show-made-it parties start to die down. Once he’s out of the city (and into another city but the city is not NEW YORK) he just kind of stays inside almost all the time. He finally finishes Whisper War (it helps that he’s not getting drunk every night so he’s running out of excuses not to write it) and it gets a lot more love than Glitz and Glamour. Pete states in interviews that working on Pretty. Odd. helped a lot in getting himself motivated and that Gerard’s creative genius rubbed off on him. This is a damn dirty lie (except for the Gerard being a creative genius part).
He doesn’t have any projects planned for the near future, and he has enough money to coast along for a while without working, but instead of going to all the Chicago clubs he knows and loves he spends way too much time writing about Fall Out Boy. Mikey barely ever texts him anymore. Pete only answers him half the time anyway.
Pretty. Odd. actually goes under after only a few months, and Gerard’s out of work again. He tries to contact Pete, but Pete never answers his phone unless it’s his editor (and even then only after the fourth time), emails are too much of a bother to answer, and nobody gets texts back from him but Mikey, and that’s a rare occurrence. Eventually Gerard just bugs Mikey into flooding his phone with increasingly worried messages, until Pete finally realizes he’s been writing about a single song in a single performance for eight pages straight, and that is one ridiculous wall of text about the little details of Patrick singing. He picks up his phone and texts back: busy.
Mikey responds, oh thank god ur alive.
Before Pete can reply, Mikey texts again: uve been busy 4 weeks, have u left the house.
yeah.
besides food?
…no.
Mikey calls him. Pete thinks about not answering, but if he doesn’t, Mikey will probably just fly out to Chicago and bang on his door. Actually, that sounds like a great idea.
He picks up anyway.
Pete tries to explain to Mikey that he’s working on something, he’s very busy and he’ll get back to him later, but Gerard grabs the phone away from Mikey. “You need to stop.”
“What? Stop writing?”
“Just stop writing whatever it is you’re working on. It’s eating you up. I’ve been there, I know what it looks like.”
Gerard goes on to tell Pete about one of his earlier works, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, and how he’d spent months locked in his shitty apartment, surrounded by paper and ink and empty beer bottles, popping pills to stay awake “just long enough to finish the chapter,” and it wasn’t until Mikey managed to pick the lock and found Gerard curled up in a ball on his bed, mumbling about his work and his dead grandmother and anything through a haze of some horrible drug cocktail, that he finally realized he had to stop. Just give it an ending and leave it.
Pete just says it’s not like that, that this is important, he’s just getting a little caught up.
“Are you even under contract for this? Is there a deadline?”
“…Well, no, I’m.” Not planning on letting it ever see the light of day, but if he tells Gerard that, it’ll only prove his point.
“You’re what?”
“I wasn’t. Just. I’ll be fine, Gerard, calm down. It’ll wrap itself up eventually.” He doesn’t have an ending in sight, at all. Honestly, if he could just write about Patrick forever, keep him alive and in motion, he’d be totally fine with that.
“So you don’t have the end planned already?”
“I don’t usually plan my endings too far in advance.”
“How long do you think it’ll be in the end? Page-wise.”
“…I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”
“Pete.”
Pete hangs up. Mikey calls back, and he turns his phone off.
He falls asleep at five in the morning, and dreams about Patrick. But not fiction-Patrick, the guy who helped Fall Out Boy reach fame and fortune with his angelic voice, but real-Patrick, just a guy who likes music and has a real job and goes out to dinner with Pete and snuggles with him on the couch late at night while they watch bad movies together.
Pete wakes up clinging to a pillow tight enough that if it really were real-Patrick, he’d probably be making choking noises and telling him to get the fuck off, Pete, seriously.
He has to take a long shower and tell himself over and over again that there is no real-Patrick.
His money’s starting to run out, and after Gerard’s tragic tale and his minor (well, he tells himself it’s minor) freakout Pete finally starts working on something that doesn’t involve Fall Out Boy at all. ¡Viva La Cobra! needs a sequel. He turns his phone back on, sends a few reassuring texts to Mikey, and manages to stay away from Patrick for a whole day.
This doesn’t last. The next day, he’s barely written a page of Hot Mess before he decides “Oh, I stopped in the middle of a paragraph, I should at least finish that,” and opens the Fall Out Boy document again. Naturally this snowballs into writing until three in the morning about all the new things Patrick wants to do with their latest album.
Gerard calls him right as he’s about to fall asleep, which makes Pete supremely pissed but making Gerard worry wouldn’t help anything.
“You realize it’s almost four in the morning,” Pete mumbles into the phone.
“Oh, is it?” Gerard kind of forgets about NORMAL HUMAN HOURS sometimes.
They talk for a while, Gerard tries to convince him to stop everything but Pete says it’s okay, he has a new project to distract him, it’s no big deal. Gerard calls bullshit. Then he says, “Who is it?”
“…What?”
“It’s one of your characters, isn’t it.”
“What are you talking-“
“The reason you can’t stop. Is it because of a character?”
Pete doesn’t answer for a while. Gerard sighs. “It is, isn’t it.”
“…Yeah.”
Pete tells him that he’s just got this side project, something he was never ever planning on publishing, and he started just writing in it whenever he had nothing to do but this Patrick kid is kind of taking over his soul. He doesn’t tell him about his fictional alter ego, though.
Gerard just says he understands, and how the reason he couldn’t end Three Cheers was because he was sort of in love with Frank, one of his main characters.
“I just couldn’t end it. It felt like I’d be killing him, you know?”
Pete knows.
“But after, y’know, the thing, I had to take a look at it and realized everything has to end. It never did go anywhere, no one’s seen it but Mikey and my therapist, and I’m fine with that. I met my wife-have you met Lyn?-and stopped drinking and I’m auditioning for La Cage next weekend. I’m lucky. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to you, and I don’t know if you could pick yourself up the way I did.”
Pete wants to argue that he can handle himself just fine, but that’s. Kind of a massive lie.
“Finish it tonight. Or as soon as possible. Please?” Gerard speaks carefully, like he’s trying to talk Pete out of jumping off a building.
“…Yeah. Yeah, all right.” Pete hangs up.
Any chance he had of sleeping is gone, so he clacks away at his computer until dawn, trying his hardest to just complete the damn thing.
Eventually he realizes that no happy ending in the world could satisfy him, so he tears it all apart. Fall Out Boy breaks up, Joe and Andy form their own band, Patrick goes solo, fiction-Pete drowns himself in side projects that aren’t even related to music, his fans call him a giant sellout, and to top it all off, he dies in one of their last music videos before the breakup.
“The fucking end.” He hits save, closes the window, and collapses on his bed.
~~~
He texts Mikey when he gets up in the morning. its over.
Mikey texts back, thank god.
Gerard calls him and asks if he needs any help, because he knows a guy, but Pete just waves him off and says he needs to just recover for a while. Gerard seems to understand and lets him go.
Pete works on his new novel for a little while, maybe Gabe Saporta’s antics will distract him, but it’s just weird, not writing about Patrick. Hot Mess is going to suck.
He decides to brave the outside world instead. Starbucks, that’s the place to go. He can laugh at hipsters and then feel like a hipster for feeling superior to hipsters and maybe drink some expensive coffee while he’s at it. It’ll be great.
It’s Chicago, so Starbucks is kind of crowded, and he gets some of his hipster-watching done while in line. Half of them are staring intently at their Macbooks through their ironic glasses, one of them has a newsboy cap and a fucking silk scarf, wow, but one of them is just sitting at his little table, eyes closed, tapping his fingers on the tabletop to some complicated rhythm. He’s nodding his head a little bit, probably humming something quietly but Pete can’t hear anything from where he’s standing.
Then the barista calls, “Patrick?” and the guy looks up. Pete watches as the guy stands up, adjusts his hat, and goes over to the counter to pay for his drink.
Maybe he should actually try interacting with the hipsters today.
AND IT’S ALL VERY VAGUE AND OPEN TO INTERPRETATION EXCEPT HOW IT’S TOTALLY NOT, WOOOO DEUS EX SAPPYNA \o/
AND THERE'S A BUNCH OF OTHER THINGS THAT PROBABLY HAPPEN AFTER LIKE MIKEY AND ALICIA GETTING MARRIED AND CLANDESTINE PUBLISHING AND GERARD BEING THE BEST FUCKING ZAZA YOU EVER DID SEE, BUT I'M NOT WRITING ANY MORE OF THIS, OH MY GOD.
THE END.