Bandslash Fic: And The Night Shall Be Filled With Music (Symphony AU)
Approximately 2400 words of Jon/Spencer and Brendon/Ryan in a Panic! in an orchestra AU.
Thanks to lordessrenegade for beta-ing this and making it so much better.
Title from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done."
"I," said Ryan, "hate atonalism."
Spencer snorted.
Jon shrugged.
Ryan rolled his eyes and kicked at the pavement. "Seriously, you guys," he said. "If they make us do another so-called 'modern' concert before next season, I'm putting Pete's head on a stick and mounting it in front of the organ."
Spencer snorted again. "You know Pete doesn't actually pick the programs, right?" he asked.
"Yeah," Ryan said, "but Patrick's been so stressed recently that I'm scared of getting close enough to behead him."
Jon adjusted the double-bass case on his back, considering. "Cut them some slack. They have something to prove."
"So do I," said Ryan.
Spencer sighed. "Next concert's with the solo baritone, you know that."
Ryan groaned. "I hate solo vocalists."
He just barely managed to get his violin case out of the way before Spencer rolled his eyes and pushed him off the curb.
They lived in downtown Vegas, away from the lights of the Strip but still in view of them so that when Ryan couldn't sleep, he sat by the window and watched the parted curtains turn blue, red, purple, yellow, and imagined how his face looked in color.
It was a little weird, sometimes, living with Spencer and Jon, but it meant that Ryan got his own bedroom, and he did love them. And if the headboard-thumping ever got too loud, he could just hit the wall by his bed, and they'd quiet down. Usually.
The three of them tended to stick together, being the only musicians in the orchestra under the age of - "approximately dead," Spencer had said once - fifty or so. Pete and Patrick weren't the only ones with something to prove.
When Ryan went to the conservatory to study after high school, Spencer had known there was nowhere else for him to be but there with him. And when Ryan got accepted to the Las Vegas Philharmonic his first year out of school, Spencer just worked harder to get in. It was the two of them against the world, just like always. Just like it always had been.
Until Jon. Jon, the transplant from Chicago that Ryan had been determined to hate and Spencer had been determined to befriend. Pete had guest-conducted for the Chicago Symphony and heard Jon play, and that had been it. The story went that he came back, begged Patrick on his knees - at this point, Ryan always snorted, and Spencer always hit him but didn't deny the implication - and flew back to Chicago the next day. Jon couldn't refuse.
Very few people could refuse Pete.
Ryan distrusted Jon for months, up until the night of the percussion concerto. Spencer threw up three times and Ryan was too sick with the flu to do much more than concentrate on not dropping his violin. Slumped over in the warm-up room with a cloth on his forehead, he foggily saw Jon come up behind Spencer and place a hand on his shoulder. Spencer's back relaxed a little, and he almost smiled at whatever Jon said.
After the concert, Ryan stepped in front of Jon on the way out the door and opened his mouth. And then shut it, not knowing what to say.
Jon just grinned at him. "Go home and sleep," he said.
Ryan nodded at his retreating back.
Ryan wasn't joking: he really did hate solo vocalists. They were shrill, boring, and thought that vibrato equalled emotion.
This guy didn't appear to be any different. His smile said, "Love me," and his hair said, "I'm gayer than Gerard-in-the-choir," (which was saying a considerable amount), and his charm was due entirely to ego.
"I," said Ryan, "hate solo vocalists."
His stand-partner, who - to his credit - generally had the patience of a saint, picked up his music folder and smacked Ryan over the head.
Pete had introduced the soloist as Brendon Urie, a young musician from the area.
"Hometown boy," agreed Urie, nodding and smiling.
Ryan glared.
The kid was good, to give him credit. It wasn't like he opened his mouth and Ryan's jaw dropped open, but he was pleasantly surprised at the richness of tone that Urie was able to command, and the breath control with which he was able to do it. He was also willing to listen to Pete's suggestions, which gave him a point up on most other soloists Ryan had worked with.
But only a point.
Usually, rehearsals were in the afternoon, but the concert hall had been booked off for a theatre matinee, so the rehearsal started in the morning and stretched over lunch. They broke for an hour, and Ryan packed up quickly and met Spencer and Jon outside the stage doors to walk to the deli down the street.
They had barely gotten three steps in when the stage door opened again and Urie stepped out. "Um," he said.
Ryan smirked. "Pretty charismatic for a singer, Urie."
A sharp elbow to his ribs stole his breath for a moment and Ryan looked at Spencer, hurt. "Be nice," Spencer whispered, then turned to Urie. "What do you need?"
Urie gave an awkward smile and shuffled his feet. "Um, I was just wondering if you knew any good places to eat within walking distance," he said. "I would have asked that oboe player -"
"Dude, no," said Jon. "Do not talk to him. He's a creep."
Urie smiled a little fuller this time. "Yeah, that's kind of the vibe I got."
Spencer shrugged. "We're just heading down the street. Want to come?" Ryan turned to him, open-mouthed.
Urie grinned brightly and shuffled his feet. "Sure!"
"Spencer," Ryan hissed as they started walking again, "How could you?"
Spencer patted his shoulder. "It'll be good for you," he said.
And it was possible - just possible, mind you - that Urie wasn't as bad as Ryan had thought. He was funny, for one, and random, for another, and charming. And maybe his ego wasn't quite as inflated as most soloists'. Plus, he ordered a gigantic strawberry milkshake with chocolate whipped cream and a maraschino cherry, which was Ryan's favorite.
Spencer smirked in vindication.
Ryan kicked him under the table.
When they got back, Pete was in a foul mood. "He and Patrick probably had a fight," Jon whispered to Ryan as they brushed past each other backstage.
Ryan frowned. Patrick was the president of the Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestra, and the LVPO had never been so desperate to keep its president happy. Patrick was a genius - both in music and in business. He was a published composer, had been commercially successful with several movie scores, and had managed - alongside Pete - to not only bring the Orchestra out of a debt of well over a hundred thousand dollars, but to make it a byword worldwide. World-renowned conductors were practically banging on their front door, begging to guest-conduct.
Usually, he and Pete fought about little things (Ryan had once overheard Patrick complaining about how Pete left his "sweaty, gross socks everywhere. On the couch, seriously," but had wisely refrained from ever mentioning it) and their arguments tended to blow over quickly. If it was a music- or business-related disagreement, they sequestered themselves in an office and discussed it. Those discussions had helped shape the course of the LVPO's rise on more than one occasion.
If Pete and Patrick had a real fight, it couldn't end well.
Though he was a fiery kind of guy, with a lot of energy and charisma, Pete generally didn't get angry at the musicians. So when he threw down his baton and started ripping into the second horn players, the entire orchestra jumped.
By the time he was finished, the two horn players were red-faced and ashamed, and every musician was on edge. It was perfectly, lucidly, horrifically silent.
"Okay, let's try it again," said Pete, red in the face himself.
Noticing movement at the edge of his vision, Ryan looked up in time to see a shadow on one of the balconies turn and disappear into the hallway beyond.
Three days later, the situation hadn't much improved. Pete showed up every day haggard and stubbly, with circles under his eyes like the need for sleep had pulled itself from his body and slugged him in the face. His mouth was permanently slanted sideways, but he hadn't gone off on anyone since that first day.
They had less than a week until the concert.
Nodding along in time with his baton's flicks, Pete gestured to the first violins to bring out their melody, cued Brendon, then waved to call them all off as the crash cymbals highlighted the peak of a crescendo.
"Spencer," Pete said, and Spencer winced. "I know you're not showy, but could you bring the cymbals up and face them towards the audience? I need the visual as well as the aural."
Ryan sniggered. His three-hundred-year-old stand partner looked at him with disdain.
They had plans to go out for dinner after rehearsal, with a stop at the apartment to drop off the instruments. Ryan fell out of the stage door, finally able to laugh.
"What's so funny?" asked Spencer.
" 'I need the visual as well as the aural,' " Ryan said. "That doesn't strike anyone else as dirty?"
Spencer cracked a smile and Jon chuckled, but a hearty guffaw trickled onto the street from the open stage door.
"I caught it, too," said Urie, appearing little by little from the gloom of backstage and onto the twilit street as if detaching himself from the comfort of a blanket in winter.
Spencer smiled to see him, Jon clapped his shoulder, and even Ryan gave a little nod.
"Busy tonight?" he found himself asking.
Spencer stared at him in shock. Ryan was feeling a little that way himself.
"Uh," said Urie, obviously confused. "No?"
"Want to come to dinner with us?"
Brendon grinned, a bright, lasting grin that burned like an afterimage in Ryan's eyes. "Sure!" he said, and Ryan smiled back.
The concert approached. The orchestra came together, as it always did, but Ryan was sure he'd never get tired of hearing it do so.
Pete was still withdrawn and touchy, and he seemed to slump over constantly, like the weight of his baton was pulling him down.
Ryan went up to him as he was opening the case for his concert baton. His fingers stroked the varnished rosewood, and Ryan paused. It seemed like a quiet, intimate moment, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to interrupt. He cleared his throat, and Pete looked up, the transparent ghost of his usual smile quickly flitting across his face.
"It's going to be good," said Ryan.
Pete nodded. "Yes. It is." He looked over in the vague direction of the administrative offices, frowning. "It will be."
Ryan clapped him on the shoulder, once, and then went back to Spencer and Jon.
Brendon had gotten himself into a bit of a state. He was breathing deeply and trying to calm the tremors in his fingers.
"It's going to be great," Ryan said, and wondered in a vague sort of way when he had taken on the role of morale booster and general encourager.
A quick grin plastered itself onto Brendon's pale face. "I know," he said. "But this doesn't seem to get any easier."
Ryan nodded, leaned into him a little, and stayed with him until it was time for Ryan to go onstage and warm up.
The crowd applauded enthusiastically when Brendon was introduced. He walked onstage with a huge smile and a jaunty little wave, and Ryan grinned a little into his stand. Brendon's nerves had disappeared with his first sight of the audience.
And when he opened his mouth to sing, it was like a breath Ryan had been holding was suddenly released. This was what he had been waiting for. Why had Brendon been holding back? When his voice dropped low, he imparted a secret to his listeners and tugged their hearts down to their feet. When his voice rose in time to the swirling melodies of the instrumental music, he drew the audience with him, somewhere into the rafters, where lights burned into the stage and perfectly-shaped wood panels drew sound along their length, sliding the notes back into the audience and depositing them directly into waiting ears.
Ryan found tears on his face, which was not an uncommon occurrence for him on concert nights, but never failed to make him feel more a part of the music, of its history, of the warm wood of his violin under his callused fingertips. Everything was on tonight - Spencer's snare drum lining up perfectly with Jon's baseline, and Ryan's melody humming and slitting above it, all drawn up into the warm tone of Brendon's soaring voice.
Brendon looked back briefly between movements and smiled at him.
Ryan smiled back.
After the concert, he saw Pete pack his good baton away again, slowly and deliberately, frowning as he ran his fingertips over the wood of the case.
Patrick came up beside him, hands locked securely behind his back. They spoke quietly for a few minutes, and then Pete dropped his forehead onto Patrick's shoulder, and Patrick's hands unlocked and wrapped around Pete's shoulders.
Ryan smiled into his music.
Later, he packed up his violin slowly, rubbing a soft cloth over the strings and below the fingerboard. He was the last one in the warm-up room, dark and cool without all the bodies and talk and instruments to keep it alive. A warm body pressed up lightly against his back.
"Hi," said Brendon.
Ryan turned. "Hi," he said.
Brendon leaned down and kissed him.
Ryan's hand slid along Brendon's shoulder to the back of his neck. Brendon's cupped the side of his jaw, thumb pressing into the side of his face just in front of his ear.
Ryan broke their contact to breathe, and rested his forehead against Brendon's. "Hi," he said again, breathlessly.
Brendon chuckled, rich and deep in his chest. "Hi," he whispered against Ryan's lips, and leaned in to kiss him again.
Ryan slid his violin case sideways and smiled against Brendon's lips.
Thanks to lordessrenegade for beta-ing this and making it so much better.
Title from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Day Is Done."
"I," said Ryan, "hate atonalism."
Spencer snorted.
Jon shrugged.
Ryan rolled his eyes and kicked at the pavement. "Seriously, you guys," he said. "If they make us do another so-called 'modern' concert before next season, I'm putting Pete's head on a stick and mounting it in front of the organ."
Spencer snorted again. "You know Pete doesn't actually pick the programs, right?" he asked.
"Yeah," Ryan said, "but Patrick's been so stressed recently that I'm scared of getting close enough to behead him."
Jon adjusted the double-bass case on his back, considering. "Cut them some slack. They have something to prove."
"So do I," said Ryan.
Spencer sighed. "Next concert's with the solo baritone, you know that."
Ryan groaned. "I hate solo vocalists."
He just barely managed to get his violin case out of the way before Spencer rolled his eyes and pushed him off the curb.
They lived in downtown Vegas, away from the lights of the Strip but still in view of them so that when Ryan couldn't sleep, he sat by the window and watched the parted curtains turn blue, red, purple, yellow, and imagined how his face looked in color.
It was a little weird, sometimes, living with Spencer and Jon, but it meant that Ryan got his own bedroom, and he did love them. And if the headboard-thumping ever got too loud, he could just hit the wall by his bed, and they'd quiet down. Usually.
The three of them tended to stick together, being the only musicians in the orchestra under the age of - "approximately dead," Spencer had said once - fifty or so. Pete and Patrick weren't the only ones with something to prove.
When Ryan went to the conservatory to study after high school, Spencer had known there was nowhere else for him to be but there with him. And when Ryan got accepted to the Las Vegas Philharmonic his first year out of school, Spencer just worked harder to get in. It was the two of them against the world, just like always. Just like it always had been.
Until Jon. Jon, the transplant from Chicago that Ryan had been determined to hate and Spencer had been determined to befriend. Pete had guest-conducted for the Chicago Symphony and heard Jon play, and that had been it. The story went that he came back, begged Patrick on his knees - at this point, Ryan always snorted, and Spencer always hit him but didn't deny the implication - and flew back to Chicago the next day. Jon couldn't refuse.
Very few people could refuse Pete.
Ryan distrusted Jon for months, up until the night of the percussion concerto. Spencer threw up three times and Ryan was too sick with the flu to do much more than concentrate on not dropping his violin. Slumped over in the warm-up room with a cloth on his forehead, he foggily saw Jon come up behind Spencer and place a hand on his shoulder. Spencer's back relaxed a little, and he almost smiled at whatever Jon said.
After the concert, Ryan stepped in front of Jon on the way out the door and opened his mouth. And then shut it, not knowing what to say.
Jon just grinned at him. "Go home and sleep," he said.
Ryan nodded at his retreating back.
Ryan wasn't joking: he really did hate solo vocalists. They were shrill, boring, and thought that vibrato equalled emotion.
This guy didn't appear to be any different. His smile said, "Love me," and his hair said, "I'm gayer than Gerard-in-the-choir," (which was saying a considerable amount), and his charm was due entirely to ego.
"I," said Ryan, "hate solo vocalists."
His stand-partner, who - to his credit - generally had the patience of a saint, picked up his music folder and smacked Ryan over the head.
Pete had introduced the soloist as Brendon Urie, a young musician from the area.
"Hometown boy," agreed Urie, nodding and smiling.
Ryan glared.
The kid was good, to give him credit. It wasn't like he opened his mouth and Ryan's jaw dropped open, but he was pleasantly surprised at the richness of tone that Urie was able to command, and the breath control with which he was able to do it. He was also willing to listen to Pete's suggestions, which gave him a point up on most other soloists Ryan had worked with.
But only a point.
Usually, rehearsals were in the afternoon, but the concert hall had been booked off for a theatre matinee, so the rehearsal started in the morning and stretched over lunch. They broke for an hour, and Ryan packed up quickly and met Spencer and Jon outside the stage doors to walk to the deli down the street.
They had barely gotten three steps in when the stage door opened again and Urie stepped out. "Um," he said.
Ryan smirked. "Pretty charismatic for a singer, Urie."
A sharp elbow to his ribs stole his breath for a moment and Ryan looked at Spencer, hurt. "Be nice," Spencer whispered, then turned to Urie. "What do you need?"
Urie gave an awkward smile and shuffled his feet. "Um, I was just wondering if you knew any good places to eat within walking distance," he said. "I would have asked that oboe player -"
"Dude, no," said Jon. "Do not talk to him. He's a creep."
Urie smiled a little fuller this time. "Yeah, that's kind of the vibe I got."
Spencer shrugged. "We're just heading down the street. Want to come?" Ryan turned to him, open-mouthed.
Urie grinned brightly and shuffled his feet. "Sure!"
"Spencer," Ryan hissed as they started walking again, "How could you?"
Spencer patted his shoulder. "It'll be good for you," he said.
And it was possible - just possible, mind you - that Urie wasn't as bad as Ryan had thought. He was funny, for one, and random, for another, and charming. And maybe his ego wasn't quite as inflated as most soloists'. Plus, he ordered a gigantic strawberry milkshake with chocolate whipped cream and a maraschino cherry, which was Ryan's favorite.
Spencer smirked in vindication.
Ryan kicked him under the table.
When they got back, Pete was in a foul mood. "He and Patrick probably had a fight," Jon whispered to Ryan as they brushed past each other backstage.
Ryan frowned. Patrick was the president of the Las Vegas Philharmonic Orchestra, and the LVPO had never been so desperate to keep its president happy. Patrick was a genius - both in music and in business. He was a published composer, had been commercially successful with several movie scores, and had managed - alongside Pete - to not only bring the Orchestra out of a debt of well over a hundred thousand dollars, but to make it a byword worldwide. World-renowned conductors were practically banging on their front door, begging to guest-conduct.
Usually, he and Pete fought about little things (Ryan had once overheard Patrick complaining about how Pete left his "sweaty, gross socks everywhere. On the couch, seriously," but had wisely refrained from ever mentioning it) and their arguments tended to blow over quickly. If it was a music- or business-related disagreement, they sequestered themselves in an office and discussed it. Those discussions had helped shape the course of the LVPO's rise on more than one occasion.
If Pete and Patrick had a real fight, it couldn't end well.
Though he was a fiery kind of guy, with a lot of energy and charisma, Pete generally didn't get angry at the musicians. So when he threw down his baton and started ripping into the second horn players, the entire orchestra jumped.
By the time he was finished, the two horn players were red-faced and ashamed, and every musician was on edge. It was perfectly, lucidly, horrifically silent.
"Okay, let's try it again," said Pete, red in the face himself.
Noticing movement at the edge of his vision, Ryan looked up in time to see a shadow on one of the balconies turn and disappear into the hallway beyond.
Three days later, the situation hadn't much improved. Pete showed up every day haggard and stubbly, with circles under his eyes like the need for sleep had pulled itself from his body and slugged him in the face. His mouth was permanently slanted sideways, but he hadn't gone off on anyone since that first day.
They had less than a week until the concert.
Nodding along in time with his baton's flicks, Pete gestured to the first violins to bring out their melody, cued Brendon, then waved to call them all off as the crash cymbals highlighted the peak of a crescendo.
"Spencer," Pete said, and Spencer winced. "I know you're not showy, but could you bring the cymbals up and face them towards the audience? I need the visual as well as the aural."
Ryan sniggered. His three-hundred-year-old stand partner looked at him with disdain.
They had plans to go out for dinner after rehearsal, with a stop at the apartment to drop off the instruments. Ryan fell out of the stage door, finally able to laugh.
"What's so funny?" asked Spencer.
" 'I need the visual as well as the aural,' " Ryan said. "That doesn't strike anyone else as dirty?"
Spencer cracked a smile and Jon chuckled, but a hearty guffaw trickled onto the street from the open stage door.
"I caught it, too," said Urie, appearing little by little from the gloom of backstage and onto the twilit street as if detaching himself from the comfort of a blanket in winter.
Spencer smiled to see him, Jon clapped his shoulder, and even Ryan gave a little nod.
"Busy tonight?" he found himself asking.
Spencer stared at him in shock. Ryan was feeling a little that way himself.
"Uh," said Urie, obviously confused. "No?"
"Want to come to dinner with us?"
Brendon grinned, a bright, lasting grin that burned like an afterimage in Ryan's eyes. "Sure!" he said, and Ryan smiled back.
The concert approached. The orchestra came together, as it always did, but Ryan was sure he'd never get tired of hearing it do so.
Pete was still withdrawn and touchy, and he seemed to slump over constantly, like the weight of his baton was pulling him down.
Ryan went up to him as he was opening the case for his concert baton. His fingers stroked the varnished rosewood, and Ryan paused. It seemed like a quiet, intimate moment, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to interrupt. He cleared his throat, and Pete looked up, the transparent ghost of his usual smile quickly flitting across his face.
"It's going to be good," said Ryan.
Pete nodded. "Yes. It is." He looked over in the vague direction of the administrative offices, frowning. "It will be."
Ryan clapped him on the shoulder, once, and then went back to Spencer and Jon.
Brendon had gotten himself into a bit of a state. He was breathing deeply and trying to calm the tremors in his fingers.
"It's going to be great," Ryan said, and wondered in a vague sort of way when he had taken on the role of morale booster and general encourager.
A quick grin plastered itself onto Brendon's pale face. "I know," he said. "But this doesn't seem to get any easier."
Ryan nodded, leaned into him a little, and stayed with him until it was time for Ryan to go onstage and warm up.
The crowd applauded enthusiastically when Brendon was introduced. He walked onstage with a huge smile and a jaunty little wave, and Ryan grinned a little into his stand. Brendon's nerves had disappeared with his first sight of the audience.
And when he opened his mouth to sing, it was like a breath Ryan had been holding was suddenly released. This was what he had been waiting for. Why had Brendon been holding back? When his voice dropped low, he imparted a secret to his listeners and tugged their hearts down to their feet. When his voice rose in time to the swirling melodies of the instrumental music, he drew the audience with him, somewhere into the rafters, where lights burned into the stage and perfectly-shaped wood panels drew sound along their length, sliding the notes back into the audience and depositing them directly into waiting ears.
Ryan found tears on his face, which was not an uncommon occurrence for him on concert nights, but never failed to make him feel more a part of the music, of its history, of the warm wood of his violin under his callused fingertips. Everything was on tonight - Spencer's snare drum lining up perfectly with Jon's baseline, and Ryan's melody humming and slitting above it, all drawn up into the warm tone of Brendon's soaring voice.
Brendon looked back briefly between movements and smiled at him.
Ryan smiled back.
After the concert, he saw Pete pack his good baton away again, slowly and deliberately, frowning as he ran his fingertips over the wood of the case.
Patrick came up beside him, hands locked securely behind his back. They spoke quietly for a few minutes, and then Pete dropped his forehead onto Patrick's shoulder, and Patrick's hands unlocked and wrapped around Pete's shoulders.
Ryan smiled into his music.
Later, he packed up his violin slowly, rubbing a soft cloth over the strings and below the fingerboard. He was the last one in the warm-up room, dark and cool without all the bodies and talk and instruments to keep it alive. A warm body pressed up lightly against his back.
"Hi," said Brendon.
Ryan turned. "Hi," he said.
Brendon leaned down and kissed him.
Ryan's hand slid along Brendon's shoulder to the back of his neck. Brendon's cupped the side of his jaw, thumb pressing into the side of his face just in front of his ear.
Ryan broke their contact to breathe, and rested his forehead against Brendon's. "Hi," he said again, breathlessly.
Brendon chuckled, rich and deep in his chest. "Hi," he whispered against Ryan's lips, and leaned in to kiss him again.
Ryan slid his violin case sideways and smiled against Brendon's lips.