Catch
Title: Catch
Pairing: Pete/Patrick
POV: Third person
Rating: PG
Length: 500 words
Author's Note: For we_are_cities 01/16/07 prompt
Disclaimer: Fiction!
Pete has spent his life in places he can’t wait to be rid of. Every town, every place he’s ever called home is only temporary because there’s always (and somehow never) been something better.
So he flits around as though trying to catch the wind and he never stops, just keeps flying. He knows if he slows down that someone will catch him and he can’t have that, oh no. He’s scared to know what it means to be caught.
What he doesn’t know is that Patrick is scared to know what it means to do the catching.
Each relocation means new clothes, new words, new man. Chicago sees a Pete entirely different from the Pete in Atlanta the next week and his band members don’t know what to believe. Patrick breathes a little slower and realizes that he has finally stopped trying to keep up.
San Diego is Pete’s last straw. He looks into the crowd and doesn’t see a single person worth his time. After the show, he changes his clothes, brushes his hair and then he’s gone.
He rents a car under a fake name and drives from one coast to the other, Pacific to Atlantic, straight across the country. Maybe, he thinks, maybe this is what freedom is supposed to feel like. But this freedom feels like asphyxiation and he’s not quite sure that’s right. Still, he keeps moving because at least movement almost feels like progress.
The car becomes everything else that Pete has ever tried to escape so he leaves it on the shoulder of a road somewhere just a little north of Absolutely Nowhere. He walks for hours, waiting for anyone to drive by and take him just a little farther in some direction that leads away from here. It’s been weeks but it doesn’t really matter. There’s time to kill; he’s young and, to the young, time is something than can be stopped and started at will.
Pete sleeps in the bathrooms of truck stops and dive bars. The men in these places buy him drinks and he tells them pretty things in the words he’s almost forgotten how to use. It is in these men that he sees what he is not supposed to be. He’s not supposed to be scared or lonely or here.
He hitches his way back to California and lets himself into his house. Every light in the whole place is on and Patrick is curled up on Pete’s bed, one of Pete’s shirts held tightly in his fingers. Pete sits beside him and strokes his hair.
Patrick blinks awake and looks questioningly at Pete, who smiles.
“You came back.” Patrick isn’t sure if this is the right thing to say.
“You waited.”
Patrick’s eyes close. “I had to.”
“So did I,” and he folds Patrick into his arms and they lie there, in silence.
Pete realizes later that he is Orpheus and Patrick Eurydice - only Pete is smarter than Orpheus. He knew he couldn’t look back.
---------------------------------
So I fell off the face of the earth for a bit. I apologize. I should be back now, though. Or, at least, I shall try.
Pairing: Pete/Patrick
POV: Third person
Rating: PG
Length: 500 words
Author's Note: For we_are_cities 01/16/07 prompt
Disclaimer: Fiction!
Pete has spent his life in places he can’t wait to be rid of. Every town, every place he’s ever called home is only temporary because there’s always (and somehow never) been something better.
So he flits around as though trying to catch the wind and he never stops, just keeps flying. He knows if he slows down that someone will catch him and he can’t have that, oh no. He’s scared to know what it means to be caught.
What he doesn’t know is that Patrick is scared to know what it means to do the catching.
Each relocation means new clothes, new words, new man. Chicago sees a Pete entirely different from the Pete in Atlanta the next week and his band members don’t know what to believe. Patrick breathes a little slower and realizes that he has finally stopped trying to keep up.
San Diego is Pete’s last straw. He looks into the crowd and doesn’t see a single person worth his time. After the show, he changes his clothes, brushes his hair and then he’s gone.
He rents a car under a fake name and drives from one coast to the other, Pacific to Atlantic, straight across the country. Maybe, he thinks, maybe this is what freedom is supposed to feel like. But this freedom feels like asphyxiation and he’s not quite sure that’s right. Still, he keeps moving because at least movement almost feels like progress.
The car becomes everything else that Pete has ever tried to escape so he leaves it on the shoulder of a road somewhere just a little north of Absolutely Nowhere. He walks for hours, waiting for anyone to drive by and take him just a little farther in some direction that leads away from here. It’s been weeks but it doesn’t really matter. There’s time to kill; he’s young and, to the young, time is something than can be stopped and started at will.
Pete sleeps in the bathrooms of truck stops and dive bars. The men in these places buy him drinks and he tells them pretty things in the words he’s almost forgotten how to use. It is in these men that he sees what he is not supposed to be. He’s not supposed to be scared or lonely or here.
He hitches his way back to California and lets himself into his house. Every light in the whole place is on and Patrick is curled up on Pete’s bed, one of Pete’s shirts held tightly in his fingers. Pete sits beside him and strokes his hair.
Patrick blinks awake and looks questioningly at Pete, who smiles.
“You came back.” Patrick isn’t sure if this is the right thing to say.
“You waited.”
Patrick’s eyes close. “I had to.”
“So did I,” and he folds Patrick into his arms and they lie there, in silence.
Pete realizes later that he is Orpheus and Patrick Eurydice - only Pete is smarter than Orpheus. He knew he couldn’t look back.
---------------------------------
So I fell off the face of the earth for a bit. I apologize. I should be back now, though. Or, at least, I shall try.