fic: Centenarian
Title: Centenarian
Author: adellyna
Pairings: Pete/Gabe, Pete/Ryland, Pete/William, Pete/Ryan/Spencer, Pete/Patrick, Pete/Mikey
Rating: Hard R - NC-17ish
Word Count: 10,000
Warnings: Strongly implied character death.
Summary: In the winter of 1917, Pete Wentz realized that he was never going to die.
Disclaimer: Very clearly fictional.
Author's Notes: I don't even know. This is the cruelest thing I have ever done to Pete Wentz. Thanks to gobsmackit and cupiscent for their life-saving beta work, and to tabbyola, maleyka, and buildyourwalls for their hand-holding and cheerleading. Please forgive any historical inaccuracies if you happen to be an expert on the era in question.
In the summer of 1902, Pete Wentz lay down with another man so vigorously and so often and with such devotion that the other man died from it.
Perhaps not as a direct result, but however winding the path between the cause and the effect, Pete knew that if you walked long enough and kept your eyes firmly trained on the horizon, you would certainly find your way back to him.
The summer was warm, and the crops were particularly fruitful, and the air was heavy with pollen and sunlight, so that you could walk and hold your palms up and feel gilded. Pete felt blessed to fall in love in a summer this perfect, with the night sky so clear you could count the stars from one side of the horizon to the other, and just enough of a breeze during the hot midday hours that if you threw the shutters open and undressed, the air would catch the sweat on your skin. He spent many days with his eyes closed and his back arched, hot skin pressed to his stomach and cooler air rushing under his spine.
Pete didn't much believe in the devil. He certainly didn't see the devil's work in tangled fingers and hushed kisses in the moonlight and two people joining in such pleasure that words, and eventually breath, were snatched from them. It seemed God's work. Blessed. The word was always blessed.
He was young, and foolish, and it was not necessary for Pete to see the devil in himself. Others were happy enough to find it, and to rip it out of him. He survived the process. The other man did not.
In the winter of 1917, Pete Wentz realized that he was never going to die.
Or, perhaps, that he was cursed. He could die of violence, he supposed. He could bleed and break, maybe, but he would never grow old. "You look just the same as you did when you were a boy," his Mam said, feeble with age. Her skin was thin and wrinkled with, her hair brittle, her bones weak and easily snapped. Pete was still as sound as when he was a child half his age. He never wrinkled or fell ill.
In 1925, he had to leave his village and go to the city where no one would recognize him. Pete knew what whispers about the devil meant, and he'd no urge to walk that path again.
Chicago. 1925
Pete first stepped foot in Chicago on a murky day in June. It was very hot, and there were more people walking the same street than Pete thought lived in his whole village. There were buildings taller than any tree he'd ever seen towering above him, making him feel smaller than usual. Insignificant.
He liked it.
On the street corner, a madman screamed about the devil, but no one paid any mind. Pete liked that, too. "This is the devil's day!" the madman ranted, shaking his fist at any close passerby. "The devil! You'll all be sorry!"
Pete walked very close to him on the way by, but the madman did not pay much attention to him, did not reach out and seize his arm and condemn him as a demon or spit the name of his old, ill-fated lover in his face. "The devil!" the madman screamed at Pete. "He will come for you! He will come for us all!"
The devil had long ago come for Pete. The proof was in his unlined face and easy step, in the unmarred black of his hair, in the strength of his spine and the straight line of his shoulders. He would turn forty-two the next day, and still looked not a day over twenty.
"The devil came for me long ago, sir," Pete said to the air in front of him, as he lacked the courage to say it to the man on the corner.
Pete gave the devil his own lead and soon found himself at a building with a red door, following a man in a dashing coat the likes of which Pete had never seen. Inside it was dark, and smoky. Inside there was a small stage with a woman as close to naked as Pete had ever seen, with a large feather in her hair and shoes with stacked heels on her feet.
There was also a man behind a polished length of wood, with bottles lining the wall behind him, and that was a sight Pete was more than familiar with.
"Small town?" the bartender asked. He flipped a glass in his hands and gave it a final, unnecessary polish, then slid it onto the bar in front of Pete. "You have that look."
"Very small," Pete said. "But never again."
"City's better," the bartender agreed, nodding. "What can I get you?"
Pete ordered a whiskey, and he did not complain when the bartender filled the glass three-quarters full instead of just half.
"Welcome wagon," the bartender said, "I'm Gabriel, by the bye. Gabe. Saporta."
"Pete," Pete said, lifting his glass before sipping the whiskey. Whiskey tasted the same no matter how tall the buildings loomed around you. "Wentz."
It took another three too-full glasses of whiskey before Pete admitted he'd no family in the city and nowhere to stay, and another two before he accepted Gabe's offer of a corner in which to curl up. The floor was not comfortable, but there was a roof and thick walls to keep out the foreign noise of the city. Gabe himself was never still and always laughing.
Two nights after the first Pete spent in Gabe's apartment, he found himself on his back again. The last time he'd been thus-arching and pushing up desperately, clumsily unfastening buttons that came easily when he wasn't drunk on the taste of someone else's mouth-he'd been young and in love, and the summer had been blessed.
He didn't fancy himself in love now, but his dick was heavy and thick with blood, and his head was spinning nearly to the ceiling, and Gabe's hands were sure and soft-Pete had only ever lain with a farmer's son, he was used to calluses and the kind of dirt under his nails you could never scrub out-and his mouth was hot and clean and tasted of licorice, like a child's treat.
"The last time I did this," he gasped, coming off the bed when Gabe twisted a finger into him, "they tried to kill me."
"Small towns," Gabe said, nodding. Pete could feel Gabe's hair scrape his jaw. "Shhh."
It was different with Gabe than it had been with the first boy. He wasn't in love, for one thing, and for another, Gabe clearly didn't require it. He did things with his hands and his mouth that made Pete think maybe you didn't need to be blessed to feel God.
He spent the whole of the summer of 1925 learning to read, sweeping the floor at the speakeasy where Gabe tended bar, and twisting beneath Gabe at night, holding tightly to something so no one could rip this out of his hands a second time. Gabe's sheets were rough, and sometimes when Pete gripped them they would rub his palms raw, so that it hurt to hold the broom the next night, and hurt more to grasp the cloth again later, but when Pete took himself in hand, stroked until he came gasping and alone, the roughness of his healed-over skin reminded him of that first boy, so many years ago.
Sometimes he would pass a madman on a street corner. He never knew if it was the same as it had been that first day, or if it even mattered, or if of the two of them the other man was the mad one, but the message was so often the same.
"God loves you," one such man told him, his eyes burning intently, inhumanly blue. "Does the devil? Can the devil love a man?"
"He can," Pete said firmly, and dropped a coin at the madman's feet. "He does."
All Pete knew of the devil was what he knew of himself. He did not go to church. His temple was Gabe's bed, under an open window but in the shadow of the factory next door. His gospel was Gabe's skin under his hands and the taste of Gabe's sweat on his tongue. "You're so young," Gabe said, tracing the smooth skin at the corners of Pete's eyes, his mouth. "Pretty boy."
"Old enough," Pete muttered, and kissed Gabe before he could ask for dates and times and places. Pete was not sure what his birthday was, anyway, if it was the day he was born of a woman or the day he was born of blood and the devil's will.
In the summer of 1930, he turned forty-seven. Gabe's skin was rougher than it used to be, less even, and he had lines that fanned out from his eyes when he laughed. Pete had to stand on his toes to kiss them, or wait until Gabe was on his back and at Pete's mercy.
"Someday you'll get these too," Gabe grumbled, fanning his hands out on Pete's back as was his habit. Pete thought maybe he would get grooves from Gabe's fingers there, as though if he touched that exact spot often enough, the skin would make way. He knew that was foolishness, though. Nothing on Pete ever changed. "Someday. And then people won't ask if you're my son."
Pete still did not look a day over twenty. He wasn't sure how much longer he could go undetected. "I come from good stock," he said, and kissed the thin scar that ran down the line of Gabe's jaw. "Small towns are good for some things."
By the summer of 1931, people had started looking at him strangely. Even if he'd been merely twenty when he came to Chicago, by that summer he would be twenty-seven. By then he should look twenty-seven, and not look like a man having just barely escaped boyhood.
"Pretty boy," Gabe called him still, but now with a little furrow between his brows.
It was the cruelest irony that Pete was likely to live forever, but that his time would always be limited.
He wished he could die. Dying would be easier. He sometimes sat and watched the streetcars, wondering if he could throw himself in front of one, be cut in half and spare himself the pain of leaving. He wasn't even sure it would work, though, or if he would remain bisected and alive, still talking even when he was bloodless and blue and the people had gathered around him and recognized him as the devil.
In the end, he was too much of a coward to try for death. He was too much of a coward, too, to try to explain. I love you, he wrote on a torn-off piece of paper. Words in ink that he'd never said out loud. But I have to go. I'm sorry.
Boston. 1946
Pete lived in a small town in Vermont for fifteen years, until the children grew to vanity and sin and started to whisper. They whispered "Vampire" or "Warlock," and it wasn't quite "Demon," but it was close enough that he packed and moved in the night.
His heart had almost healed, anyway. He was almost used to the bed being cold and empty beside him, and he had almost completely stopped writing Gabe's name at the top of letters he would never send. Gabe would be nearly fifty, by now. Gabe would surely have forgotten him.
He moved to Boston, and resolved that he would not get close enough to anyone in the city that his body's stubborn refusal to age would draw notice.
The city swallowed him as soon as he parked his car. A child passed him on the street and didn't look at him strangely, and he walked right by a church without the women standing outside edging closer to the door.
"Small towns," he said under his breath, hefting another of his bags out of his car and onto the pavement. "City's better."
Pete's apartment in Boston was far smaller than his house in Vermont had been, and the white walls were far more anonymous. He could stare out of his window for hours and not see a single person he knew.
In June, he would turn sixty-three.
He had learned to read from Gabe, and learned to write from the books that served as sole company through his years in Vermont. By the time he moved to Boston, he had published twenty short stories and two full-length novels; most of them followed the theme of loss, of being burdened beyond tolerance and refusing to fight it, of giving in to your demons.
The only problem is your endings, his agent was prone to writing. Pete dealt only in letters. Finding a new home every decade or so was hard enough, he didn't want to find new business associates, too. People like happy endings. However you were going to end the book, do the opposite.
So Pete wrote under a fake name about fake people who somehow overcame, which was as fake an ending as any he could conceive of, but he made real, baffling amounts of money, so he kept doing it. He just kept the actual endings for himself, hand-written, tucked in the back of the first-run copies his publisher always sent him.
In Boston, it was not to be a red door that would be his downfall, but rather a red hat. It was winter again, and though he did not look a day older than he'd been when his neighbors had beaten him until he stained the earth red, and though he hadn't been sick even once since, nor did he seem to need sleep like other people did, he still got cold in the winter. Boston was a sea of black and gray, people bundled in layers of wool and knit scarves, and amidst them, a single red fedora.
He followed the hat. From the few clear glimpses Pete got, he could tell that the owner of the red hat was a male, that he was small, but very solid, and that he moved with an apologetic sort of lack of grace. He followed the hat while it went to a cafe, and then to a bookstore, and then to a small park to feed ducks, and then, ultimately, to a large, elaborate building that informed Pete in bold lettering that it was the Symphony Hall.
Pete was a fool. Pete had been a fool his whole life, and he would continue to be a fool until the world crumbled and died around him. Because of this foolishness, and because he had the devil in him without a doubt, he followed the man in the red hat to the door he had gone in. It was brown, and nondescript, but it was locked. The devil in him told him to go around front, to fool the good people into letting him in, and so he did.
"Excuse me," he said, and he smiled his devil's smile at the young woman in the box office. "There was a man who just came by here in a red hat? I believe he dropped this." Pete pulled the largest bill currently in his billfold out and waved it at the girl. "He went in that side door, but it's locked. I couldn't follow him."
"That's Patrick," the girl said, and propped her chin on her hands so she could smile at him. "He plays piano."
"Piano," Pete said thoughtfully. "Tell me. How much are tickets?"
Pete had long been the devil's fool, but he was also a coward, and he watched Patrick play three times before he mustered the courage to approach him. It was not difficult, once he put his mind to it; the orchestra was not staffed with celebrities, and it took only one long lean across the street to discover where they went when they finished playing.
The bar had a red door, and Pete knew he was doomed.
"Patrick," Pete said, pushing in between Patrick and the girl next to him. "Let me buy you a drink."
"Do I know you?" Patrick asked. He had pale, perfect skin, and ginger-colored hair, and though his hat was black today, the band was made of myriad colors, and the fibers shimmered. Best of all, Patrick had an ageless quality to him; Pete could not easily determine if he was fifteen or twenty-five.
"No, but I am all-knowing," Pete said solemnly, then grinned and waved for the bartender's attention. "Or maybe I asked someone who the genius on the piano was."
Patrick blushed, and Pete, fool that he was and would always be, let the devil have his head again.
Pete could not have found someone more different than Gabe if he had tried. Where Gabe was long and restless, Patrick was compact, solid, and so still sometimes that Pete had to put his head over Patrick's heart to make sure it was still beating. Where Gabe was loud and gathered people around him, Patrick was quiet, prone to hiding in the shadows and wringing his hands when Pete tried to drag him out. Where Gabe had backed Pete against the dresser and slid his hands under Pete's shirt, licked at his mouth and mumbled, "Tell me you want this, too," Patrick ducked and fled every time Pete tried to kiss him.
It was three months before Patrick paused in Pete's doorway, blushed, and lunged for his mouth.
"I've never done this before," he confessed, with their lips still pressed clumsily together, too tight.
"With a man?" Pete asked.
"With anyone," Patrick said.
Pete let the devil lead his hands, and cupped them around Patrick's face, dragging their mouths together like a whisper. "I have," he said, skimming his thumbs over Patrick's cheekbones, over his incredible, angelic skin. "I'll show you."
It was another month before Pete got Patrick in bed. "You can fuck me," he said, touching Patrick hesitantly, with wonder. "If it's less scary."
Moments later, or hours, maybe, Pete watched his hands move on Patrick's skin, watched Patrick's hips stutter haltingly against his, and thought of how they looked like heaven and hell together: Pete, with his dark skin and dark hair and the devil in him, Patrick as pale as any angel any artist ever dreamed of.
"Is it?" Patrick asked, pushing in too hard again and stilling, shaking. "Am I?"
"You're perfect," Pete said, and rolled his hips up smoothly. Once Patrick figured out it was just rhythm, he knew it would be easy. "It's good."
Patrick's hands were rough on Pete's skin, callused and unschooled, and Pete wondered if it would be cyclical, if the next time he fell in love it would be with someone whose hands were as smooth as milk. Someone whose hands only ever touched skin. Maybe next time he would fall in love with a whore.
After the first year with Patrick, Pete wrote a book about God and redemption that no one wanted to read.
It's beautiful, his agent wrote, but no one believes it.
Pete wrote a book about a mountain, instead, about people on a mountain, and how the only man who came back alive didn't want to be anymore.
He'd been with Patrick for nearly two years when Patrick said, hesitantly, "Maybe we should...move in. We could be roommates. No one would know."
"I can't," Pete said. He hated saying no to Patrick, hated it more than anything, but. "I'm sorry. I just can't."
Patrick didn't ask again. Pete wrote a book about a man who was driven beyond all reason to find God, but who failed and, instead, went slowly mad until he couldn't tell his dreams from reality.
"I'm not a nightmare," Patrick said, and tossed the book on Pete's bed. "And I will still be here when you wake up."
Pete said yes. After a few more years, when Patrick's hair was thinning around the top of head and Pete's skin was still smooth and unlined, he put their house in Patrick's name. "Tax reasons," he said, signing the papers with a flourish, like he wasn't already worrying about Patrick in the wake of Pete's inevitable disappearance. "It's better this way."
It was five more years before Patrick's eyesight was so terrible he had to wear bottle-thick glasses, and he'd gone nearly bald, and his stomach had the droop of a man past his prime. Pete still looked twenty.
"How do you do it?" Patrick asked, running his fingers over the untouched skin at the corners of Pete's eyes, like Gabe had done more than twenty years ago. "It's like you're blessed."
"That's not the word I'd use," Pete said lightly.
He wrote a book about a man who left his wife and spent the rest of his life in Japan because his nightmares were slowly coming to life and he was afraid one day she would suffer for it. He dedicated it: To Patrick, who knows I would never do well on a diet of raw fish, and then he wrote his agent and told her he would be writing under a new name.
In the summer of 1955, a week after he left Boston, he turned seventy-two.
New York City. 1963
Pete hadn't written a word since the note he left on his and Patrick's bed before he left. He thought it fitting that I love you, I'm sorry be his last, anyway. Nothing he could write could be truer.
It took him a year to speak again, but no one noticed; there was no one to notice. New York felt like the biggest city in the world, completely anonymous, like there were so many people that there wasn't actually any single person.
All around him, people were doing the devil's bidding and calling it peace, love, and harmony. All around him, people were fornicating, drinking, swallowing pills that made them speak in tongues. "Free love," they said, and lifted their hands, spreading their fingers until they resembled the devil's horns.
He made it eight years in New York before the devil whispered to him.
"Hello," the devil's temptation said, and slid into the chair next to Pete. It was the last empty chair in the bar, but the air was so thick with smoke that Pete wasn't sure how anyone had seen it; it was next to Pete, and he'd hardly been aware of its existence. "Do you mind?"
The devil's temptation was named George Ross. "Call me Ryan," he said. "My father is George, and he's totally square."
Ryan had a messy, sloppy haircut that made him look seventeen, though he claimed he was nearly twenty-one. Ryan said, "Come meet my boyfriend, Spencer," and took Pete to a cramped apartment above a deli in an area of the city Pete hadn't even known about, despite having wandered it for eight years.
They gave Pete food-something rice-based and cheap, overly spiced to make up for it-and weed. "It's groovy, right?" Ryan asked. He had a guitar in his lap, and his bangs were pulled back with a paisley headband that did not even remotely match his paisley shirt.
"It's something," Pete agreed, and took the pill they handed him next. He never got sick, after all, and he didn't seem to need more than four hours of sleep a night, and if eighty weren't the age to experiment with unfamiliar substances given to you by strangers, he didn't know what was.
He took the pill, and nothing much happened.
"Do you feel it?" Spencer asked, climbing half into Pete's lap with his bright eyes and his ill-advised beard. "Do you feel it?"
"I feel it," Pete said, even though he didn't.
"I knew you would," Ryan said from across the room, and started playing some lazy, soulful song while Spencer licked at Pete's mouth until it opened.
"Um," Pete said, sliding his hands up Spencer's thighs and onto his hips. "Ryan?"
"Doesn't mind," Spencer said. He nuzzled, and bit at Pete's bottom lip. His mouth tasted stale, like he hadn't brushed his teeth all day, but Pete didn't care that much. "He'll join later."
Later turned out to be when Spencer had managed to get Pete on his knees and his pants down around his thighs, when he'd fingered Pete open for fifteen minutes, absently humming the chorus of the song Ryan was singing into the back of Pete's neck. Spencer pulled his fingers out and pushed his dick in, breathing out hard and long, like he'd just taken his first piss of the day.
Pete was just adjusting to the rhythm, to Spencer's lazy, self-indulgent thrusts, when Ryan dragged his long, careful fingers down Pete's cheek. It wasn't until then that Pete realized the music had stopped.
"Ryan," he said, surprised.
Ryan grinned and said, "Hello." He slid down over the arm of the couch and lifted his hips up, unbuttoning his bell bottoms and wiggling until they were low enough for his dick to bob freely above his stomach.
"You know how to do this?" he asked, wrapping his fingers around the back of Pete's neck and letting his hand weigh heavily there, so it felt natural for Pete to drop his head and mouth at Ryan's dick.
He licked at the head instead of answering, and let Spencer's thrusts set the pace-he sucked at Ryan's dick leisurely, licking until he was wet enough to swallow down almost all the way and moaning every time Spencer rocked up hard enough to make Pete's vision go fuzzy.
Ryan's hand never pulled at him, never insisted. He just left it there, warm and a little damp, thumb stroking over the nape of Pete's neck until everyone got off.
The drugs never worked on Pete. He thought it would be easier if they did; he'd seen enough people out of their heads on acid or whatever, people forgetting who they were, even, and he coveted it. No matter how much he took, though, it never did work.
By the summer of the next year, when Pete quietly turned eighty-one, he'd become the unspoken third in Spencer and Ryan's relationship. There was usually a fourth, and sometimes a fifth, but those came and went, while Pete seemed to stick.
In July, when Pete should rightfully be dead and was, instead, beautiful, Ryan handed him one of his own books. "You have to read this," he said, with the solemnity that came from him doing pot and only pot. "It's amazing. It makes me feel like I could live forever."
Pete felt like he wouldn't mind living forever, if he could live like this. He forgot about the devil working in him. He lost himself in tangles of limbs, in beds so full of hands and mouths and moans that he couldn't even tell if any of the fingertips on his skin were his own.
He never officially moved into their apartment, but for the first time in his eight decades, he was never alone. If he and Ryan weren't drinking free coffee at the coffee shop where Spencer worked, then he and Spencer were thumbing through protest literature in the bookstore where Ryan worked. Neither Spencer nor Ryan had stayed in college longer than a year, and the only thing they'd been successful at for any length of time was each other.
Ryan said "I love you," freely. He said it to their fourths and their fifths, and he said it to Pete at least five times a day. He said it when Pete drank the last of the coffee ("I love you anyway"), or when Pete was moving slowly inside of him ("God, I fucking love you"), or when Pete finally went stir-crazy after a week in an apartment that didn't know the meaning of a locked door or a stocked fridge and had to go back to his own ("Love you, Pete.")
With Spencer it was more carefully rationed, and Pete only heard him say it to one person other than Ryan and himself, though that was more in the tone of his voice and less in what he actually said: "Brendon," miserably, and with the doorknob held fast and hidden behind him.
Then, in 1966, Ryan was drafted. It was fall in New York, but Pete was always forgetting; the buildings never changed colors. "I just won't go," Ryan said, folding the letter back on its seams and sliding it neatly back into its envelope. "They can't make me."
"They can take you to jail," Spencer said unhappily. "Ryan."
"Better jail than Vietnam," Ryan said, dropping the envelope to slide his hands up Spencer's arms, skimming the curve of his neck, pushing his fingers into Spencer's hair. "Spencer."
Ryan went to war, of course. Spencer, who had not been drafted, signed up to go with him.
"Stay here," Spencer urged Pete. "They didn't send you a letter. Stay here and speak loudly and you can make a difference."
They would die, Pete knew. They would go and they would die of something and they would never come back. He loved them both, loved every inch of imperfect skin, but he stood on the corner outside of their now empty apartment and watched them drive away and felt mostly sick, hollow relief.
For once, Pete was not the one who had to leave. For once, he loved someone who would remember him well.
He turned eighty-three, and then eighty-four, and Ryan and Spencer did not come home.
Miami. 1975
Pete wrote a book about two boys who went to war and died. He published it as P. Spencer Ross, and wrote, simply, I loved you, as a dedication.
He wrote another book, this one about two boys who were not called to war, but who stayed home and watched the ones who had been called come back in cheap wooden boxes. He published that one as Ryan P. Smith, and then he moved to Miami and bought a very large house on the beach.
His house was white, with large windows lining the back wall, and deep green carpet that was tall enough to cover his toes if he stood in it barefoot.
The devil whispered to him almost constantly. Glory in yourself, the devil whispered. Look what I have given you, you will be beautiful forever.
Miami was bright by day; ceaseless sun that baked the beaches and made the grass too hot to walk on without shoes. There were some hours of the day when you couldn't look at the ocean without being blinded by the sunlight-the water was like a mirror, fracturing the light and beaming it crazily in every direction.
Pete had never lived anywhere like Miami before.
His bell-bottoms and headbands went out of fashion more quickly than he was willing to part with them; he kept Spencer's favorite one tucked in his pocket longer than it was fashionable to do so, and he had to stare at himself in the mirror for several minutes every day trying to convince himself that the pattern on his shirt was no worse than the tie-dye Ryan had made him.
In June of 1975, Pete turned ninety-two. He'd long since stopped celebrating birthdays, but he couldn't bear sitting alone in his empty house and watching the moonlight waver on the surface of the water, so he put on his very best polyester suit and went out.
The city was almost brighter at night, if you knew the right places to go. He went to a disco, one that had been something else in a former life, so it still had a patio that spilled out onto the beach. Inside, there were booths and loud music and bright, flashing lights. He got a drink, and he found a tall chair with orange velvet fabric that caught uncomfortably on his slick white pants, and he let his guard down enough for the devil in him to point its dirty finger at a corner of the dance floor. Look, the devil whispered.
He looked, and what he saw was so familiar that Pete nearly dropped his glass. The boy was lean, with sharp angles and knobby joints like Ryan, but he moved more like Spencer. He had longish hair that might be Ryan's color if it weren't so lightened by the sun, and he had a bandanna tied above his knee, though that was not the fashion of the time.
The boy was neither Ryan nor Spencer, of course, but Pete drained his glass and let the devil guide his feet.
"I'm Pete," he said, and stuck his hand out.
"William," William said, and took it. He was taller than Pete had assumed on first sight, and more delicate than skinny. "Do you disco?"
"I do not," Pete said, grinning at him. "Do you?"
"Sometimes," William said. He let go of Pete's hand far later than was the custom. "Not tonight."
Pete was never able to figure out what it was about William that had reminded him of anyone else at first; William was always unmistakably William.
William was a poet, though not a very skilled one. His intentions were good, but he lacked the ability to step back from his emotions enough to make them appeal to other people. Because poetry didn't pay the bills, William also worked at a funeral home.
"It's cool," William said, tapping a cigarette out of its carton and handing it to Pete. "Quiet. I just don't like talking to the families."
"I want to see," Pete said. He could feel the dampness from the sand beneath him seeping through his pants, and the insides of his shiny shoes felt gritty under his socks. "Can we go there?"
The funeral home was not within walking distance, but William claimed he was sober enough to drive, and Pete was not sure he'd mind if they died in a twisted mess anyway, so he went. It was a low, sedate building, with some haphazard ornamentation tacked on like a well-intentioned afterthought.
"What's your best coffin?" Pete asked when they snuck inside. His clothes were still stiff from the salt in the air, and his feet were sliding in his shoes, bumping painfully against the toe. The funeral home smelled clean, if a little stale, and he could see that great pains had been taken to make sure it was as neutral as possible.
William led him into the proper room and flicked switches on the wall until he found the right one; a light overhead came on and flooded a dark wood coffin with elaborate carvings on the side. "It's top of the line," William said, putting his hands on Pete's back and pushing him towards it. "Almost no one buys it."
"I want to get in," Pete said. He wanted to touch it, too, but couldn't make his hand drop that final half-inch to make contact. "Can I get in?"
"That's kind of creepy," William said, expertly flipping the lid open one half at a time. "But sure. It's satin, though, so make sure you don't get sand in it."
Pete stripped off his jacket and his shoes, peeled off his damp, sandy socks, unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor. He climbed into the coffin with William's help and lay there in his buttoned shirt and his underwear. "Close the lid," he said. "Please."
It was dark with the lid closed. Pete could feel the ruched satin that covered the inside of the lid brushing his nose. He wiggled his bare toes and crossed his arms over his chest, and he closed his eyes and willed himself to die. Painlessly, to be sure, but he'd earned his death by now.
Later, when he and William had showered the sand off of themselves, and William was under him in his bed, with his pale arms wide and his hair spread messily around him, Pete stopped moving at the arc of a thrust. His hips were flush against William's, and William's mouth open so he could pant.
"Do you find me terribly wicked?" he asked, pressing his palm hesitantly to William's sternum. "Too much so?"
"I do not," William said, and rolled up so that his hips rocked against Pete's hips and then away, and Pete slid out of him a few inches. He pushed back in, hard, the way he'd discerned William liked it. Pete dragged William's knee higher on his hip and fucked him. He refused the devil's urging to bite at William's throat, even though the noises William made were so similar to Patrick's that it made Pete's shoulders shake.
William was the type to come and go. He would sometimes spend a week in Pete's bed, smoking and scribbling bits of things on any convenient piece of paper. Some of it was brilliant, but he didn't always know where to start or, worse, where to end.
Then there were times when Pete would not see William for two weeks, three weeks, a month. Pete loved him anyway. He loved how William was very serious and earnest, how he was beautiful but not terribly vain, and how patiently he tried to teach Pete to play guitar, even though Pete's fingers were too slow on the strings. "Stop worrying about the chord you just played," William would chide, touching Pete's knuckles where they bent around the neck of the guitar. "It's done. Play the next one."
In the unbearable heat of Miami in the summer, Pete turned ninety-three. It seemed too old, like he was painfully aged, though his joints protested nothing. "It's my birthday," he said, when he woke and William was unexpectedly in his bed. "Today, it's my birthday."
"How old are you?" William asked. He was fully, if haphazardly, clothed. "Did you ever tell me?"
"I didn't," Pete said, frowning out the window at the water and the white stretch of sand disappearing under it. "Too old."
"Please," William said, and tugged at Pete's hip so he'd roll to face him. "You're either a baby or blessed with good genes."
It grew cold and William disappeared for six weeks. He came back with a battered passport and a vaguely European clip to his syllables.
"I missed you," William said, dropping his suitcase just inside Pete's door and pressing his hands to his back to stretch his spine. "But it's just like I never left. It's weird."
Hours later, once William had been fed and dragged Pete out into the water, claiming the oceans in Europe didn't feel quite right, William rolled Pete onto his stomach and said "Let me try something." His mouth was against the base of Pete's spine and his fingers were careful on Pete's hips.
Pete nearly came apart with the first pass of William's tongue, twisting his fingers into the sheet beneath him and making noises no God would approve of. "I can't," he mumbled, pushing his face into the pillow, "Oh, fuck." William kept licking, twisting his clever tongue until Pete's body gave way and William could lick into him, hot and wet and better than anything the devil had ever given him.
"Told you," William said smugly, when Pete was hazy and stuck to the mattress with sweat and his own seed. He pushed Pete's thighs further apart and braced his hands to either side of Pete's shoulders, dropping his head to kiss the back of Pete's neck. He pushed in slowly, by feel, with only spit for lube. It hurt, a little, but his skin was still stiff with saltwater, so he closed his eyes and pretended William was the tide.
Pete turned ninety-four. On a gloomy day in September of that year, William rolled over in the morning and said, "I think I'm going to San Francisco."
"San Francisco?" Pete asked, because William wasn't in the habit of warning Pete before he disappeared for weeks.
"Yeah," William said. He propped up on an elbow and squinted out the window at the ocean, squinting at the dim early-morning light. "I think I'm done with Miami."
"Okay," Pete said, blinking. He had figured he would be the one to leave, this time. That he would pack up during one of William's absences, sell the house and move somewhere far away, and then William would come back and knock on the door and things would be different for once. It would be like William had left, like things had changed while he was gone.
Seattle. 1991
Pete was used to Miami thunderstorms: quick, insolent flurries of rain that soaked you through and then abruptly stopped.
If Miami weather was adolescent in its whims, then Seattle weather was very nearly geriatric. It crept in, settled itself, and then wore you down with its incessant dampness. It seemed constantly gray in contrast to the bright, bleached heat of Miami.
He bought a split-level house in a quiet neighborhood just outside of the city. It was terribly outdated, dripping with avocado-colored appliances and dark, laminate wood paneling, but Pete had been born into much more modest surroundings, so he didn't think much of it.
He'd mostly bought the house for its weathered red door, anyway.
In Seattle, the devil brought Pete's downfall to him.
"Hey," the boy on the other side of Pete's door said. His face would be beautiful in a few years, Pete knew, but now it was too young. His jaw was too sharp and his nose too defined and his cheeks too thin.
"Hello," Pete said.
"You have a garage," the boy said. He held out a plate in front of him with both hands cupped beneath it, like a temple offering. "Here are some cookies."
Pete agreed to let Mikey's band practice in his garage because he was still a fool and he'd never learned to deny himself the things he wanted, even when the things he wanted were ninety-one years his junior and already had sad, cautious eyes.
Mikey was very nearly seventeen. He asked few questions, which Pete found refreshing after William's drive to question everything. Mikey was somber much of the time, and still, in stark contrast to his brother's jittery, coffee-driven urge to create.
Pete was inexplicably drawn to everything about Mikey. He was young-painfully young to someone who remembered roughly sewn shirts made of homespun cotton and tilling fields by hand-but carried himself with none of the awkwardness and uncertainty of youth.
He was obsessed with the bands to whom Pete had spend the last twenty years listening.
"Here," Mikey said, blowing the dust off the record player Pete kept in the corner of his garage. "You have to understand. They were magic."
He put on a live recording of the New York Dolls and sank his sharp, stiff body onto the couch Pete had bought so that his band would have a place to sit while they practiced. "Magic," Mikey repeated, pushing his glasses up his nose in a gesture that looked nothing like the one Patrick used to use.
Pete couldn't say that he knew how magical this band was, or that he had been at this performance when it was recorded, or that he remembers that the girl who screamed "I love you!" in the middle of 'Human Being' had later wandered into the men's room while Pete was relieving himself and offered him things to snort. Instead, he grabbed two beers from his fridge and flipped the lights in the garage off on the way back to the sofa.
The only illumination came from the meager sunlight leaking in around Pete's rickety garage door and the lava lamp in the corner. Mikey rolled his head to the side and blinked at Pete in the way Pete had learned meant, "Do you understand?"
"It's good," Pete said, and he turned his head, too, so that he had to do little more than lean forward an inch to kiss Mikey.
It was a bit like kissing Patrick: slow and cautious, with Mikey's breath catching and Pete trying not to rush. It was a lot like kissing Patrick in that Mikey lifted his hand to Pete's shoulder and touched him there. Too light, at first, and then too hard when Pete pushed closer and licked at Mikey's tongue.
The next time, it was Mikey who kissed Pete first. Weeks later, once they'd graduated from kissing with hips held carefully still and apart to bodies rubbing together greedily, it was Mikey who pushed at Pete's shirt first. It was Pete who slid down Mikey's skinny, pale body, though, and Pete who unbuttoned his jeans, and Pete who dragged his mouth over the head of Mikey's dick and sucked him off until he was twisting against the mattress.
He liked Mikey with his clothes off. He seemed less guarded that way. He liked that Mikey in bed was not nearly as quiet as Mikey out of bed, and that Mikey, who would never push or insist out in public, was pushy and left marks in private.
"Gerard doesn't know," Mikey said, pulling his jeans on, his t-shirt, then a plaid flannel shirt in shades of red and black. "He thinks I'm a baby."
"Big brothers," Pete said easily. He hadn't bothered with clothes yet. There was nothing he had to hide that Mikey hadn't seen before. "Is that all?"
"He might be jealous," Mikey admitted. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his glasses back on. With them came the blank, placid Mikey-standard expression. "He hasn't, yet."
In 1994, before Pete turned one hundred and eleven and Mikey turned nineteen, Kurt Cobain killed himself. It was the first time Pete ever saw Mikey cry.
"Did you hear?" he asked, stumbling into Pete's kitchen like a drunkard. "Did you hear what happened?"
Pete had not, and he held Mikey while he wept, shaking, on his shoulder, but he felt no grief. "Maybe he wanted to die," he said quietly, nuzzling Mikey's hair away from his ear with his nose. "Maybe he wanted it."
Days later, Pete bought a shotgun and laid it neatly at the foot of his bed. He sat and stared at it for hours, and then he laid it just as neatly on the top shelf of his closet. He had the devil's tongue and the devil's hands and the devil's own cowardice. He didn't know if he would die, if he could die, but he felt certain that he would be damned if he did. He stripped, instead, lay on his back and put "Lithium" on repeat. He twisted his fingers into himself until he had four in, spread wide and slicked with just enough lube that he would hurt but not bleed. He didn't stop until he came, gasping and digging his heels into his mattress.
"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" Mikey asked, one night after he'd turned twenty and Pete was creeping up on one hundred and thirteen. "What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you?"
"Why?" Pete asked. He rolled onto his stomach; when he thought too hard about the worst thing that had ever happened to him, about the whip slicing his skin open, it hurt too much to lie on his back. "Who have you been talking to?"
"Gerard's obsessed," Mikey said, frowning. "He wants a comic of people's worst stories. A page per story."
"I loved a man, once," Pete said slowly.
"That was bad?"
"He died," Pete said shortly. They'd all died. Maybe William was still alive somewhere, but the boy he'd loved had died in front of him, and Gabe was surely long dead. Patrick was probably dead, too, and Ryan and Spencer were sacrificed to something they didn't even believe in.
"People die," Mikey said. He settled his hand between Pete's shoulder blades and spread his fingers, rolling so he could kiss between them. "That's not your fault."
Pete wanted to tell Mikey that he was wrong, that people didn't always die. Sometimes people lived, even if they didn't want to. Instead, he said, "It should have been me," and rolled out of bed so he could scrub at his back until he didn't feel the blood drying there anymore.
In 1999, when Mikey was turning twenty-five in the fall, and the world was going mad over the certain downfall of computerized society, bars stopped carding Mikey.
"It's about time," he said, pushing a soft old bill across the bar while Pete pulled out his extremely expensive driver's license.
"Twenty-nine?" the bartender said, eying Pete skeptically. "What year were you born?"
"1970," Pete said.
"What's your sign?" the bartender asked. He turned Pete's license over in his hand and tapped it against the bar. Next to him, Mikey was pushing his glasses up in the way that meant he was trying not to laugh.
"Gemini," Pete said impatiently. "Look, I'm just short, okay?"
"Someday," Mikey said, once the bartender had given them their drinks. It had been years, so Pete knew the rest of that sentence without Mikey having to speak it.
He knew something else, too, though he wasn't ready to admit it yet.
In the end, he left another note. It was 2000, April, months into the continued existence of modern society, and Pete would soon be one hundred and seventeen. Soon, it would be one hundred years since the day his neighbors found the devil in him.
I love you, he wrote. But I won't come back. I'm sorry.
Los Angeles. 2001
Pete was in love with Los Angeles from the moment he set foot in it.
The city was as big a liar as he was, and full of people who would kill to have his curse. If Pete thought it would work, he would gladly lie still and let them take it from him.
In Los Angeles, Pete could be young as long as he wanted. He wouldn't stand out if he looked twenty long past when he should be greying and going wrinkly around the corners.
He'd been the devil's fool for 99 years, and L.A. was rife with scandal and violence. Pete had the money to buy his way into parties full of drugs and sex and liars. It was winter. Soon, too soon, it would be summer.
The devil led him to a condo with towering ceilings that made him feel as small as he had that first day in Chicago, and the devil led him to parties, to cocktails and to flirting with emaciated actresses so close to naked that you could see sin hiding in every shadow on their bodies.
On New Year's Eve, when he was half-blinded by the glitter and the cameras flashing, the devil dropped Ryland into his lap. Or, more accurately, Ryland dropped a glass of something that smelled strongly of coconut into Pete's lap.
"Oh shit," Ryland said, with the lackluster dismay of someone genuinely apologetic but too drunk to convey sincerity. "Shit, I'm sorry."
"Cold," Pete said, standing gingerly and brushing ice off of his crotch. "That's really fucking cold."
"New Year's Resolution," Ryland said, slurring but solemn. "No more dumping drinks on hot guys."
"As moves go, it's pretty lame," Pete agreed. He looked kind of like he'd pissed his pants, and everything from dick to ass was numb and tingling when his too-tight jeans rubbed against his skin.
"There's a bathroom this way," Ryland said, gesturing vaguely off to the side with his empty glass. "Come on. I'll help dry you off and show you some different moves."
They kissed in the bathroom when the clock struck midnight. Pete was sitting on the counter, his jeans undone and half dry, and Ryland still had the blow dryer he'd found under the sink to dry them hanging loosely from one hand. They were still kissing when the clock ticked around to five after midnight, except the blow dryer was on the floor by then and people were pounding on the door to get in.
By ten after one, on the first day of 2002, Pete was unlocking his condo and letting Ryland in.
"You move fast," Pete said, tossing his keys into the bowl on the hall table.
"Yeah, well. Life's short."
The moon was big that night, and amber, washing every smooth, sparse corner of Pete's apartment with gold. Later, with Ryland's hands on his ass holding him up and only his shoulder blades still on the mattress, Pete opened his eyes and tried to figure out when he'd been here before. "Pete," Ryland whispered, digging his fingers in tighter and pushing in so hard that Pete arched higher, trying to get closer. "You feel amazing."
Pete was so close it almost hurt. His fingers were numb, they were twisted so tightly in his sheet, and Ryland wouldn't jerk him off no matter how hard he begged. "Like this," Ryland said, and leaned forward more, nearly bending Pete in half. "I know you can."
He could, and he did.
"What do you do?" Ryland asked in the morning, gesturing around with his spoon. "I mean, to afford this place."
"I'm a writer," Pete said. He could barely sit still, he was so sore. It felt like Ryland had taken something out of him, rather than put something in.
"Anything I'd know?"
"Technical shit," Pete said. He still had the devil's tongue, and the lie came easily. "Boring. Nothing exciting."
Ryland was an actor and a musician, and he was far too tall for Pete, none of which held any real surprise. Pete had been falling in love with Ryland in one form or another for a hundred years. The only difference was that this time, like the first time, he felt blessed. His hands were his own to touch Ryland with, and his mouth his own with which to kiss Ryland, and the devil had nothing to do with it at all. It was even gold again; Pete's condo was high enough that they left the curtains wide open when they fucked, and the light would come in bright and pure, bathing Ryland's pale skin in gold, and Pete's in bronze.
He said "I love you," too soon, like he had many years ago, before the crops were ripe and the air had warmed enough to be summer. He said "I love you," when Ryland was above him and Ryland's mouth was on his neck and Ryland was in him so deeply that Pete swore he could feel him in his fingertips, in the back of his throat.
"Jesus," Ryland gasped, biting down and pushing in hard enough to lift Pete's hips off the mattress. "I love you, too."
It was always the first step to the end, but Pete couldn't help himself.
They spent the anniversary of the day Pete should have died mundanely. Pete was quiet in the morning; he made Ryland scrub his back free of the blood that was not there until his skin was angry and raw. "There's nothing there," Ryland said, kissing the nape of Pete's neck and reaching around him to turn the water cooler. "I promise."
They ate lunch. They took a nap. They watched some show Ryland was wild about, but Pete couldn't focus. "Swim with me," he said, standing abruptly and trying to drag Ryland with him. "Fuck me in the ocean, come on."
In the water, he buried his face in Ryland's neck and wrapped his legs around Ryland's waist and let the water move them.
He would turn one hundred and nineteen in June.
"I think I want to write a book," he said. "I mean, sorry. 'Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?'"
"Fuck the lines," Ryland said, tossing his script on the floor and pulling Pete's feet into his lap. "Tell me about this book."
Pete wrote a book. He wrote about a man who fell in love and was cursed for it, a man who couldn't stop falling in love, no matter how much it hurt to walk away. He wrote a book about a man who would never grow old, no matter how desperately he wished to.
He finished in December, four days shy of a year from the day he met Ryland.
"Pete," Ryland said, putting the manuscript in his lap and smoothing the curled-up edges of the top page flat. "This is really good."
"Yeah?"
"Fucking depressing," Ryland laughed, and moved the manuscript onto the couch so he could pull Pete into his lap and nuzzle. "But good. Really good."
This one he published under his own name: Peter L.K. Wentz.
"No 'The Third?'" Ryland teased.
"Fuck it," Pete said, and sank his teeth into Ryland's upper arm. "I'm my own man."
He'd given himself the Jr. and then the III, anyway. His father's name had been Robert.
Ryland moved into Pete's apartment in February, or at least made his prolonged lodging there official by throwing away the toothbrush at his own apartment. His roommate was getting married. "Be my date," Ryland said, though he was lessening his chances of acceptance by cruelly compressing Pete's hoodies into less than half of the closet space. "We can point out all the shit we won't have at our wedding."
Pete reminded himself that this was L.A., and that he could look twenty for twenty years if he wanted, as long as he kept dropping the name of a talented plastic surgeon.
"No white," he said, kicking a stack of Ryland's old-man cardigans off the bed in mute retribution. "And no lace, for the love of fuck."
In May, when summer was looming and most of the actresses in town had deemed it seasonally appropriate to once more leave the house without underwear on, Pete woke and found that the devil had seated himself upon his nose. He would not budge.
"I can't breathe," Pete moaned, poking viciously at Ryland's side until he grumbled and woke up. "Oh God, what's happening to me? Everything hurts."
Ryland pressed his palm to Pete's forehead and frowned, then flipped his hand over and pressed the cool back of it to the same spot. "You're warm," he said, and crawled out of bed. "Let me get you some ibuprofen."
"I think I'm dying," Pete said, panicked. "I thought I wanted to, but I was wrong. Not like this."
"Easy, baby." Ryland wandered back into the room, lazy and unconcerned, and flipped Pete's palm over so he could dump a few pills into it. "It's just a cold."
Pete hadn't had a cold since the winter of 1901. "A cold," he echoed, squinting up at Ryland through eyes that felt too hot and too wet. "I'm not dying?"
"It could be close," Ryland said solemnly. He bent to kiss Pete's forehead and then, further, to grab his jeans off the floor. "But I think if I get some soup into you soon enough, you'll have a 76.3% chance of recovery."
He'd forgotten how hard it was to sleep when he was sick, how cold he would get even with a pile of covers on him, and he spent most of that night and the next trying to get his feverish brain to understand the devil's will. God may have pardoned him, he supposed, but that seemed unlikely. "Maybe the world is as wicked as I am now," he told Ryland, glassy-eyed and grasping at him. "Maybe we're all fools."
"Maybe you should get some sleep," Ryland said, tugging the blankets up around Pete's chin again. "I think your fever is breaking."
"Do you think I'll get taller?" he asked, worming his hands out from under the covers to reach for Ryland again. "I always wondered if I was supposed to be taller."
"Shhh," Ryland said. He put his hand on Pete's forehead again and hummed, satisfied. "Let me get you Nyquil. And don't get taller. I like you like this."
In the morning, when Pete blinked his eyes and they didn't itch, cleared his throat and didn't wince, and sat up without feeling dizzy, he thought maybe the fever had purged the devil from him. He had sweated out the wickedness, maybe.
"Ryland," he said, and climbed on him until he woke, grumbling. "Ryland, I think we should get very, very old together."
"No white," Ryland mumbled drowsily, patting Pete absently on the head but refusing to open his eyes. "And no lace. Just say when. But sleep now."
Author: adellyna
Pairings: Pete/Gabe, Pete/Ryland, Pete/William, Pete/Ryan/Spencer, Pete/Patrick, Pete/Mikey
Rating: Hard R - NC-17ish
Word Count: 10,000
Warnings: Strongly implied character death.
Summary: In the winter of 1917, Pete Wentz realized that he was never going to die.
Disclaimer: Very clearly fictional.
Author's Notes: I don't even know. This is the cruelest thing I have ever done to Pete Wentz. Thanks to gobsmackit and cupiscent for their life-saving beta work, and to tabbyola, maleyka, and buildyourwalls for their hand-holding and cheerleading. Please forgive any historical inaccuracies if you happen to be an expert on the era in question.
In the summer of 1902, Pete Wentz lay down with another man so vigorously and so often and with such devotion that the other man died from it.
Perhaps not as a direct result, but however winding the path between the cause and the effect, Pete knew that if you walked long enough and kept your eyes firmly trained on the horizon, you would certainly find your way back to him.
The summer was warm, and the crops were particularly fruitful, and the air was heavy with pollen and sunlight, so that you could walk and hold your palms up and feel gilded. Pete felt blessed to fall in love in a summer this perfect, with the night sky so clear you could count the stars from one side of the horizon to the other, and just enough of a breeze during the hot midday hours that if you threw the shutters open and undressed, the air would catch the sweat on your skin. He spent many days with his eyes closed and his back arched, hot skin pressed to his stomach and cooler air rushing under his spine.
Pete didn't much believe in the devil. He certainly didn't see the devil's work in tangled fingers and hushed kisses in the moonlight and two people joining in such pleasure that words, and eventually breath, were snatched from them. It seemed God's work. Blessed. The word was always blessed.
He was young, and foolish, and it was not necessary for Pete to see the devil in himself. Others were happy enough to find it, and to rip it out of him. He survived the process. The other man did not.
In the winter of 1917, Pete Wentz realized that he was never going to die.
Or, perhaps, that he was cursed. He could die of violence, he supposed. He could bleed and break, maybe, but he would never grow old. "You look just the same as you did when you were a boy," his Mam said, feeble with age. Her skin was thin and wrinkled with, her hair brittle, her bones weak and easily snapped. Pete was still as sound as when he was a child half his age. He never wrinkled or fell ill.
In 1925, he had to leave his village and go to the city where no one would recognize him. Pete knew what whispers about the devil meant, and he'd no urge to walk that path again.
Chicago. 1925
Pete first stepped foot in Chicago on a murky day in June. It was very hot, and there were more people walking the same street than Pete thought lived in his whole village. There were buildings taller than any tree he'd ever seen towering above him, making him feel smaller than usual. Insignificant.
He liked it.
On the street corner, a madman screamed about the devil, but no one paid any mind. Pete liked that, too. "This is the devil's day!" the madman ranted, shaking his fist at any close passerby. "The devil! You'll all be sorry!"
Pete walked very close to him on the way by, but the madman did not pay much attention to him, did not reach out and seize his arm and condemn him as a demon or spit the name of his old, ill-fated lover in his face. "The devil!" the madman screamed at Pete. "He will come for you! He will come for us all!"
The devil had long ago come for Pete. The proof was in his unlined face and easy step, in the unmarred black of his hair, in the strength of his spine and the straight line of his shoulders. He would turn forty-two the next day, and still looked not a day over twenty.
"The devil came for me long ago, sir," Pete said to the air in front of him, as he lacked the courage to say it to the man on the corner.
Pete gave the devil his own lead and soon found himself at a building with a red door, following a man in a dashing coat the likes of which Pete had never seen. Inside it was dark, and smoky. Inside there was a small stage with a woman as close to naked as Pete had ever seen, with a large feather in her hair and shoes with stacked heels on her feet.
There was also a man behind a polished length of wood, with bottles lining the wall behind him, and that was a sight Pete was more than familiar with.
"Small town?" the bartender asked. He flipped a glass in his hands and gave it a final, unnecessary polish, then slid it onto the bar in front of Pete. "You have that look."
"Very small," Pete said. "But never again."
"City's better," the bartender agreed, nodding. "What can I get you?"
Pete ordered a whiskey, and he did not complain when the bartender filled the glass three-quarters full instead of just half.
"Welcome wagon," the bartender said, "I'm Gabriel, by the bye. Gabe. Saporta."
"Pete," Pete said, lifting his glass before sipping the whiskey. Whiskey tasted the same no matter how tall the buildings loomed around you. "Wentz."
It took another three too-full glasses of whiskey before Pete admitted he'd no family in the city and nowhere to stay, and another two before he accepted Gabe's offer of a corner in which to curl up. The floor was not comfortable, but there was a roof and thick walls to keep out the foreign noise of the city. Gabe himself was never still and always laughing.
Two nights after the first Pete spent in Gabe's apartment, he found himself on his back again. The last time he'd been thus-arching and pushing up desperately, clumsily unfastening buttons that came easily when he wasn't drunk on the taste of someone else's mouth-he'd been young and in love, and the summer had been blessed.
He didn't fancy himself in love now, but his dick was heavy and thick with blood, and his head was spinning nearly to the ceiling, and Gabe's hands were sure and soft-Pete had only ever lain with a farmer's son, he was used to calluses and the kind of dirt under his nails you could never scrub out-and his mouth was hot and clean and tasted of licorice, like a child's treat.
"The last time I did this," he gasped, coming off the bed when Gabe twisted a finger into him, "they tried to kill me."
"Small towns," Gabe said, nodding. Pete could feel Gabe's hair scrape his jaw. "Shhh."
It was different with Gabe than it had been with the first boy. He wasn't in love, for one thing, and for another, Gabe clearly didn't require it. He did things with his hands and his mouth that made Pete think maybe you didn't need to be blessed to feel God.
He spent the whole of the summer of 1925 learning to read, sweeping the floor at the speakeasy where Gabe tended bar, and twisting beneath Gabe at night, holding tightly to something so no one could rip this out of his hands a second time. Gabe's sheets were rough, and sometimes when Pete gripped them they would rub his palms raw, so that it hurt to hold the broom the next night, and hurt more to grasp the cloth again later, but when Pete took himself in hand, stroked until he came gasping and alone, the roughness of his healed-over skin reminded him of that first boy, so many years ago.
Sometimes he would pass a madman on a street corner. He never knew if it was the same as it had been that first day, or if it even mattered, or if of the two of them the other man was the mad one, but the message was so often the same.
"God loves you," one such man told him, his eyes burning intently, inhumanly blue. "Does the devil? Can the devil love a man?"
"He can," Pete said firmly, and dropped a coin at the madman's feet. "He does."
All Pete knew of the devil was what he knew of himself. He did not go to church. His temple was Gabe's bed, under an open window but in the shadow of the factory next door. His gospel was Gabe's skin under his hands and the taste of Gabe's sweat on his tongue. "You're so young," Gabe said, tracing the smooth skin at the corners of Pete's eyes, his mouth. "Pretty boy."
"Old enough," Pete muttered, and kissed Gabe before he could ask for dates and times and places. Pete was not sure what his birthday was, anyway, if it was the day he was born of a woman or the day he was born of blood and the devil's will.
In the summer of 1930, he turned forty-seven. Gabe's skin was rougher than it used to be, less even, and he had lines that fanned out from his eyes when he laughed. Pete had to stand on his toes to kiss them, or wait until Gabe was on his back and at Pete's mercy.
"Someday you'll get these too," Gabe grumbled, fanning his hands out on Pete's back as was his habit. Pete thought maybe he would get grooves from Gabe's fingers there, as though if he touched that exact spot often enough, the skin would make way. He knew that was foolishness, though. Nothing on Pete ever changed. "Someday. And then people won't ask if you're my son."
Pete still did not look a day over twenty. He wasn't sure how much longer he could go undetected. "I come from good stock," he said, and kissed the thin scar that ran down the line of Gabe's jaw. "Small towns are good for some things."
By the summer of 1931, people had started looking at him strangely. Even if he'd been merely twenty when he came to Chicago, by that summer he would be twenty-seven. By then he should look twenty-seven, and not look like a man having just barely escaped boyhood.
"Pretty boy," Gabe called him still, but now with a little furrow between his brows.
It was the cruelest irony that Pete was likely to live forever, but that his time would always be limited.
He wished he could die. Dying would be easier. He sometimes sat and watched the streetcars, wondering if he could throw himself in front of one, be cut in half and spare himself the pain of leaving. He wasn't even sure it would work, though, or if he would remain bisected and alive, still talking even when he was bloodless and blue and the people had gathered around him and recognized him as the devil.
In the end, he was too much of a coward to try for death. He was too much of a coward, too, to try to explain. I love you, he wrote on a torn-off piece of paper. Words in ink that he'd never said out loud. But I have to go. I'm sorry.
Boston. 1946
Pete lived in a small town in Vermont for fifteen years, until the children grew to vanity and sin and started to whisper. They whispered "Vampire" or "Warlock," and it wasn't quite "Demon," but it was close enough that he packed and moved in the night.
His heart had almost healed, anyway. He was almost used to the bed being cold and empty beside him, and he had almost completely stopped writing Gabe's name at the top of letters he would never send. Gabe would be nearly fifty, by now. Gabe would surely have forgotten him.
He moved to Boston, and resolved that he would not get close enough to anyone in the city that his body's stubborn refusal to age would draw notice.
The city swallowed him as soon as he parked his car. A child passed him on the street and didn't look at him strangely, and he walked right by a church without the women standing outside edging closer to the door.
"Small towns," he said under his breath, hefting another of his bags out of his car and onto the pavement. "City's better."
Pete's apartment in Boston was far smaller than his house in Vermont had been, and the white walls were far more anonymous. He could stare out of his window for hours and not see a single person he knew.
In June, he would turn sixty-three.
He had learned to read from Gabe, and learned to write from the books that served as sole company through his years in Vermont. By the time he moved to Boston, he had published twenty short stories and two full-length novels; most of them followed the theme of loss, of being burdened beyond tolerance and refusing to fight it, of giving in to your demons.
The only problem is your endings, his agent was prone to writing. Pete dealt only in letters. Finding a new home every decade or so was hard enough, he didn't want to find new business associates, too. People like happy endings. However you were going to end the book, do the opposite.
So Pete wrote under a fake name about fake people who somehow overcame, which was as fake an ending as any he could conceive of, but he made real, baffling amounts of money, so he kept doing it. He just kept the actual endings for himself, hand-written, tucked in the back of the first-run copies his publisher always sent him.
In Boston, it was not to be a red door that would be his downfall, but rather a red hat. It was winter again, and though he did not look a day older than he'd been when his neighbors had beaten him until he stained the earth red, and though he hadn't been sick even once since, nor did he seem to need sleep like other people did, he still got cold in the winter. Boston was a sea of black and gray, people bundled in layers of wool and knit scarves, and amidst them, a single red fedora.
He followed the hat. From the few clear glimpses Pete got, he could tell that the owner of the red hat was a male, that he was small, but very solid, and that he moved with an apologetic sort of lack of grace. He followed the hat while it went to a cafe, and then to a bookstore, and then to a small park to feed ducks, and then, ultimately, to a large, elaborate building that informed Pete in bold lettering that it was the Symphony Hall.
Pete was a fool. Pete had been a fool his whole life, and he would continue to be a fool until the world crumbled and died around him. Because of this foolishness, and because he had the devil in him without a doubt, he followed the man in the red hat to the door he had gone in. It was brown, and nondescript, but it was locked. The devil in him told him to go around front, to fool the good people into letting him in, and so he did.
"Excuse me," he said, and he smiled his devil's smile at the young woman in the box office. "There was a man who just came by here in a red hat? I believe he dropped this." Pete pulled the largest bill currently in his billfold out and waved it at the girl. "He went in that side door, but it's locked. I couldn't follow him."
"That's Patrick," the girl said, and propped her chin on her hands so she could smile at him. "He plays piano."
"Piano," Pete said thoughtfully. "Tell me. How much are tickets?"
Pete had long been the devil's fool, but he was also a coward, and he watched Patrick play three times before he mustered the courage to approach him. It was not difficult, once he put his mind to it; the orchestra was not staffed with celebrities, and it took only one long lean across the street to discover where they went when they finished playing.
The bar had a red door, and Pete knew he was doomed.
"Patrick," Pete said, pushing in between Patrick and the girl next to him. "Let me buy you a drink."
"Do I know you?" Patrick asked. He had pale, perfect skin, and ginger-colored hair, and though his hat was black today, the band was made of myriad colors, and the fibers shimmered. Best of all, Patrick had an ageless quality to him; Pete could not easily determine if he was fifteen or twenty-five.
"No, but I am all-knowing," Pete said solemnly, then grinned and waved for the bartender's attention. "Or maybe I asked someone who the genius on the piano was."
Patrick blushed, and Pete, fool that he was and would always be, let the devil have his head again.
Pete could not have found someone more different than Gabe if he had tried. Where Gabe was long and restless, Patrick was compact, solid, and so still sometimes that Pete had to put his head over Patrick's heart to make sure it was still beating. Where Gabe was loud and gathered people around him, Patrick was quiet, prone to hiding in the shadows and wringing his hands when Pete tried to drag him out. Where Gabe had backed Pete against the dresser and slid his hands under Pete's shirt, licked at his mouth and mumbled, "Tell me you want this, too," Patrick ducked and fled every time Pete tried to kiss him.
It was three months before Patrick paused in Pete's doorway, blushed, and lunged for his mouth.
"I've never done this before," he confessed, with their lips still pressed clumsily together, too tight.
"With a man?" Pete asked.
"With anyone," Patrick said.
Pete let the devil lead his hands, and cupped them around Patrick's face, dragging their mouths together like a whisper. "I have," he said, skimming his thumbs over Patrick's cheekbones, over his incredible, angelic skin. "I'll show you."
It was another month before Pete got Patrick in bed. "You can fuck me," he said, touching Patrick hesitantly, with wonder. "If it's less scary."
Moments later, or hours, maybe, Pete watched his hands move on Patrick's skin, watched Patrick's hips stutter haltingly against his, and thought of how they looked like heaven and hell together: Pete, with his dark skin and dark hair and the devil in him, Patrick as pale as any angel any artist ever dreamed of.
"Is it?" Patrick asked, pushing in too hard again and stilling, shaking. "Am I?"
"You're perfect," Pete said, and rolled his hips up smoothly. Once Patrick figured out it was just rhythm, he knew it would be easy. "It's good."
Patrick's hands were rough on Pete's skin, callused and unschooled, and Pete wondered if it would be cyclical, if the next time he fell in love it would be with someone whose hands were as smooth as milk. Someone whose hands only ever touched skin. Maybe next time he would fall in love with a whore.
After the first year with Patrick, Pete wrote a book about God and redemption that no one wanted to read.
It's beautiful, his agent wrote, but no one believes it.
Pete wrote a book about a mountain, instead, about people on a mountain, and how the only man who came back alive didn't want to be anymore.
He'd been with Patrick for nearly two years when Patrick said, hesitantly, "Maybe we should...move in. We could be roommates. No one would know."
"I can't," Pete said. He hated saying no to Patrick, hated it more than anything, but. "I'm sorry. I just can't."
Patrick didn't ask again. Pete wrote a book about a man who was driven beyond all reason to find God, but who failed and, instead, went slowly mad until he couldn't tell his dreams from reality.
"I'm not a nightmare," Patrick said, and tossed the book on Pete's bed. "And I will still be here when you wake up."
Pete said yes. After a few more years, when Patrick's hair was thinning around the top of head and Pete's skin was still smooth and unlined, he put their house in Patrick's name. "Tax reasons," he said, signing the papers with a flourish, like he wasn't already worrying about Patrick in the wake of Pete's inevitable disappearance. "It's better this way."
It was five more years before Patrick's eyesight was so terrible he had to wear bottle-thick glasses, and he'd gone nearly bald, and his stomach had the droop of a man past his prime. Pete still looked twenty.
"How do you do it?" Patrick asked, running his fingers over the untouched skin at the corners of Pete's eyes, like Gabe had done more than twenty years ago. "It's like you're blessed."
"That's not the word I'd use," Pete said lightly.
He wrote a book about a man who left his wife and spent the rest of his life in Japan because his nightmares were slowly coming to life and he was afraid one day she would suffer for it. He dedicated it: To Patrick, who knows I would never do well on a diet of raw fish, and then he wrote his agent and told her he would be writing under a new name.
In the summer of 1955, a week after he left Boston, he turned seventy-two.
New York City. 1963
Pete hadn't written a word since the note he left on his and Patrick's bed before he left. He thought it fitting that I love you, I'm sorry be his last, anyway. Nothing he could write could be truer.
It took him a year to speak again, but no one noticed; there was no one to notice. New York felt like the biggest city in the world, completely anonymous, like there were so many people that there wasn't actually any single person.
All around him, people were doing the devil's bidding and calling it peace, love, and harmony. All around him, people were fornicating, drinking, swallowing pills that made them speak in tongues. "Free love," they said, and lifted their hands, spreading their fingers until they resembled the devil's horns.
He made it eight years in New York before the devil whispered to him.
"Hello," the devil's temptation said, and slid into the chair next to Pete. It was the last empty chair in the bar, but the air was so thick with smoke that Pete wasn't sure how anyone had seen it; it was next to Pete, and he'd hardly been aware of its existence. "Do you mind?"
The devil's temptation was named George Ross. "Call me Ryan," he said. "My father is George, and he's totally square."
Ryan had a messy, sloppy haircut that made him look seventeen, though he claimed he was nearly twenty-one. Ryan said, "Come meet my boyfriend, Spencer," and took Pete to a cramped apartment above a deli in an area of the city Pete hadn't even known about, despite having wandered it for eight years.
They gave Pete food-something rice-based and cheap, overly spiced to make up for it-and weed. "It's groovy, right?" Ryan asked. He had a guitar in his lap, and his bangs were pulled back with a paisley headband that did not even remotely match his paisley shirt.
"It's something," Pete agreed, and took the pill they handed him next. He never got sick, after all, and he didn't seem to need more than four hours of sleep a night, and if eighty weren't the age to experiment with unfamiliar substances given to you by strangers, he didn't know what was.
He took the pill, and nothing much happened.
"Do you feel it?" Spencer asked, climbing half into Pete's lap with his bright eyes and his ill-advised beard. "Do you feel it?"
"I feel it," Pete said, even though he didn't.
"I knew you would," Ryan said from across the room, and started playing some lazy, soulful song while Spencer licked at Pete's mouth until it opened.
"Um," Pete said, sliding his hands up Spencer's thighs and onto his hips. "Ryan?"
"Doesn't mind," Spencer said. He nuzzled, and bit at Pete's bottom lip. His mouth tasted stale, like he hadn't brushed his teeth all day, but Pete didn't care that much. "He'll join later."
Later turned out to be when Spencer had managed to get Pete on his knees and his pants down around his thighs, when he'd fingered Pete open for fifteen minutes, absently humming the chorus of the song Ryan was singing into the back of Pete's neck. Spencer pulled his fingers out and pushed his dick in, breathing out hard and long, like he'd just taken his first piss of the day.
Pete was just adjusting to the rhythm, to Spencer's lazy, self-indulgent thrusts, when Ryan dragged his long, careful fingers down Pete's cheek. It wasn't until then that Pete realized the music had stopped.
"Ryan," he said, surprised.
Ryan grinned and said, "Hello." He slid down over the arm of the couch and lifted his hips up, unbuttoning his bell bottoms and wiggling until they were low enough for his dick to bob freely above his stomach.
"You know how to do this?" he asked, wrapping his fingers around the back of Pete's neck and letting his hand weigh heavily there, so it felt natural for Pete to drop his head and mouth at Ryan's dick.
He licked at the head instead of answering, and let Spencer's thrusts set the pace-he sucked at Ryan's dick leisurely, licking until he was wet enough to swallow down almost all the way and moaning every time Spencer rocked up hard enough to make Pete's vision go fuzzy.
Ryan's hand never pulled at him, never insisted. He just left it there, warm and a little damp, thumb stroking over the nape of Pete's neck until everyone got off.
The drugs never worked on Pete. He thought it would be easier if they did; he'd seen enough people out of their heads on acid or whatever, people forgetting who they were, even, and he coveted it. No matter how much he took, though, it never did work.
By the summer of the next year, when Pete quietly turned eighty-one, he'd become the unspoken third in Spencer and Ryan's relationship. There was usually a fourth, and sometimes a fifth, but those came and went, while Pete seemed to stick.
In July, when Pete should rightfully be dead and was, instead, beautiful, Ryan handed him one of his own books. "You have to read this," he said, with the solemnity that came from him doing pot and only pot. "It's amazing. It makes me feel like I could live forever."
Pete felt like he wouldn't mind living forever, if he could live like this. He forgot about the devil working in him. He lost himself in tangles of limbs, in beds so full of hands and mouths and moans that he couldn't even tell if any of the fingertips on his skin were his own.
He never officially moved into their apartment, but for the first time in his eight decades, he was never alone. If he and Ryan weren't drinking free coffee at the coffee shop where Spencer worked, then he and Spencer were thumbing through protest literature in the bookstore where Ryan worked. Neither Spencer nor Ryan had stayed in college longer than a year, and the only thing they'd been successful at for any length of time was each other.
Ryan said "I love you," freely. He said it to their fourths and their fifths, and he said it to Pete at least five times a day. He said it when Pete drank the last of the coffee ("I love you anyway"), or when Pete was moving slowly inside of him ("God, I fucking love you"), or when Pete finally went stir-crazy after a week in an apartment that didn't know the meaning of a locked door or a stocked fridge and had to go back to his own ("Love you, Pete.")
With Spencer it was more carefully rationed, and Pete only heard him say it to one person other than Ryan and himself, though that was more in the tone of his voice and less in what he actually said: "Brendon," miserably, and with the doorknob held fast and hidden behind him.
Then, in 1966, Ryan was drafted. It was fall in New York, but Pete was always forgetting; the buildings never changed colors. "I just won't go," Ryan said, folding the letter back on its seams and sliding it neatly back into its envelope. "They can't make me."
"They can take you to jail," Spencer said unhappily. "Ryan."
"Better jail than Vietnam," Ryan said, dropping the envelope to slide his hands up Spencer's arms, skimming the curve of his neck, pushing his fingers into Spencer's hair. "Spencer."
Ryan went to war, of course. Spencer, who had not been drafted, signed up to go with him.
"Stay here," Spencer urged Pete. "They didn't send you a letter. Stay here and speak loudly and you can make a difference."
They would die, Pete knew. They would go and they would die of something and they would never come back. He loved them both, loved every inch of imperfect skin, but he stood on the corner outside of their now empty apartment and watched them drive away and felt mostly sick, hollow relief.
For once, Pete was not the one who had to leave. For once, he loved someone who would remember him well.
He turned eighty-three, and then eighty-four, and Ryan and Spencer did not come home.
Miami. 1975
Pete wrote a book about two boys who went to war and died. He published it as P. Spencer Ross, and wrote, simply, I loved you, as a dedication.
He wrote another book, this one about two boys who were not called to war, but who stayed home and watched the ones who had been called come back in cheap wooden boxes. He published that one as Ryan P. Smith, and then he moved to Miami and bought a very large house on the beach.
His house was white, with large windows lining the back wall, and deep green carpet that was tall enough to cover his toes if he stood in it barefoot.
The devil whispered to him almost constantly. Glory in yourself, the devil whispered. Look what I have given you, you will be beautiful forever.
Miami was bright by day; ceaseless sun that baked the beaches and made the grass too hot to walk on without shoes. There were some hours of the day when you couldn't look at the ocean without being blinded by the sunlight-the water was like a mirror, fracturing the light and beaming it crazily in every direction.
Pete had never lived anywhere like Miami before.
His bell-bottoms and headbands went out of fashion more quickly than he was willing to part with them; he kept Spencer's favorite one tucked in his pocket longer than it was fashionable to do so, and he had to stare at himself in the mirror for several minutes every day trying to convince himself that the pattern on his shirt was no worse than the tie-dye Ryan had made him.
In June of 1975, Pete turned ninety-two. He'd long since stopped celebrating birthdays, but he couldn't bear sitting alone in his empty house and watching the moonlight waver on the surface of the water, so he put on his very best polyester suit and went out.
The city was almost brighter at night, if you knew the right places to go. He went to a disco, one that had been something else in a former life, so it still had a patio that spilled out onto the beach. Inside, there were booths and loud music and bright, flashing lights. He got a drink, and he found a tall chair with orange velvet fabric that caught uncomfortably on his slick white pants, and he let his guard down enough for the devil in him to point its dirty finger at a corner of the dance floor. Look, the devil whispered.
He looked, and what he saw was so familiar that Pete nearly dropped his glass. The boy was lean, with sharp angles and knobby joints like Ryan, but he moved more like Spencer. He had longish hair that might be Ryan's color if it weren't so lightened by the sun, and he had a bandanna tied above his knee, though that was not the fashion of the time.
The boy was neither Ryan nor Spencer, of course, but Pete drained his glass and let the devil guide his feet.
"I'm Pete," he said, and stuck his hand out.
"William," William said, and took it. He was taller than Pete had assumed on first sight, and more delicate than skinny. "Do you disco?"
"I do not," Pete said, grinning at him. "Do you?"
"Sometimes," William said. He let go of Pete's hand far later than was the custom. "Not tonight."
Pete was never able to figure out what it was about William that had reminded him of anyone else at first; William was always unmistakably William.
William was a poet, though not a very skilled one. His intentions were good, but he lacked the ability to step back from his emotions enough to make them appeal to other people. Because poetry didn't pay the bills, William also worked at a funeral home.
"It's cool," William said, tapping a cigarette out of its carton and handing it to Pete. "Quiet. I just don't like talking to the families."
"I want to see," Pete said. He could feel the dampness from the sand beneath him seeping through his pants, and the insides of his shiny shoes felt gritty under his socks. "Can we go there?"
The funeral home was not within walking distance, but William claimed he was sober enough to drive, and Pete was not sure he'd mind if they died in a twisted mess anyway, so he went. It was a low, sedate building, with some haphazard ornamentation tacked on like a well-intentioned afterthought.
"What's your best coffin?" Pete asked when they snuck inside. His clothes were still stiff from the salt in the air, and his feet were sliding in his shoes, bumping painfully against the toe. The funeral home smelled clean, if a little stale, and he could see that great pains had been taken to make sure it was as neutral as possible.
William led him into the proper room and flicked switches on the wall until he found the right one; a light overhead came on and flooded a dark wood coffin with elaborate carvings on the side. "It's top of the line," William said, putting his hands on Pete's back and pushing him towards it. "Almost no one buys it."
"I want to get in," Pete said. He wanted to touch it, too, but couldn't make his hand drop that final half-inch to make contact. "Can I get in?"
"That's kind of creepy," William said, expertly flipping the lid open one half at a time. "But sure. It's satin, though, so make sure you don't get sand in it."
Pete stripped off his jacket and his shoes, peeled off his damp, sandy socks, unbuttoned his pants and let them fall to the floor. He climbed into the coffin with William's help and lay there in his buttoned shirt and his underwear. "Close the lid," he said. "Please."
It was dark with the lid closed. Pete could feel the ruched satin that covered the inside of the lid brushing his nose. He wiggled his bare toes and crossed his arms over his chest, and he closed his eyes and willed himself to die. Painlessly, to be sure, but he'd earned his death by now.
Later, when he and William had showered the sand off of themselves, and William was under him in his bed, with his pale arms wide and his hair spread messily around him, Pete stopped moving at the arc of a thrust. His hips were flush against William's, and William's mouth open so he could pant.
"Do you find me terribly wicked?" he asked, pressing his palm hesitantly to William's sternum. "Too much so?"
"I do not," William said, and rolled up so that his hips rocked against Pete's hips and then away, and Pete slid out of him a few inches. He pushed back in, hard, the way he'd discerned William liked it. Pete dragged William's knee higher on his hip and fucked him. He refused the devil's urging to bite at William's throat, even though the noises William made were so similar to Patrick's that it made Pete's shoulders shake.
William was the type to come and go. He would sometimes spend a week in Pete's bed, smoking and scribbling bits of things on any convenient piece of paper. Some of it was brilliant, but he didn't always know where to start or, worse, where to end.
Then there were times when Pete would not see William for two weeks, three weeks, a month. Pete loved him anyway. He loved how William was very serious and earnest, how he was beautiful but not terribly vain, and how patiently he tried to teach Pete to play guitar, even though Pete's fingers were too slow on the strings. "Stop worrying about the chord you just played," William would chide, touching Pete's knuckles where they bent around the neck of the guitar. "It's done. Play the next one."
In the unbearable heat of Miami in the summer, Pete turned ninety-three. It seemed too old, like he was painfully aged, though his joints protested nothing. "It's my birthday," he said, when he woke and William was unexpectedly in his bed. "Today, it's my birthday."
"How old are you?" William asked. He was fully, if haphazardly, clothed. "Did you ever tell me?"
"I didn't," Pete said, frowning out the window at the water and the white stretch of sand disappearing under it. "Too old."
"Please," William said, and tugged at Pete's hip so he'd roll to face him. "You're either a baby or blessed with good genes."
It grew cold and William disappeared for six weeks. He came back with a battered passport and a vaguely European clip to his syllables.
"I missed you," William said, dropping his suitcase just inside Pete's door and pressing his hands to his back to stretch his spine. "But it's just like I never left. It's weird."
Hours later, once William had been fed and dragged Pete out into the water, claiming the oceans in Europe didn't feel quite right, William rolled Pete onto his stomach and said "Let me try something." His mouth was against the base of Pete's spine and his fingers were careful on Pete's hips.
Pete nearly came apart with the first pass of William's tongue, twisting his fingers into the sheet beneath him and making noises no God would approve of. "I can't," he mumbled, pushing his face into the pillow, "Oh, fuck." William kept licking, twisting his clever tongue until Pete's body gave way and William could lick into him, hot and wet and better than anything the devil had ever given him.
"Told you," William said smugly, when Pete was hazy and stuck to the mattress with sweat and his own seed. He pushed Pete's thighs further apart and braced his hands to either side of Pete's shoulders, dropping his head to kiss the back of Pete's neck. He pushed in slowly, by feel, with only spit for lube. It hurt, a little, but his skin was still stiff with saltwater, so he closed his eyes and pretended William was the tide.
Pete turned ninety-four. On a gloomy day in September of that year, William rolled over in the morning and said, "I think I'm going to San Francisco."
"San Francisco?" Pete asked, because William wasn't in the habit of warning Pete before he disappeared for weeks.
"Yeah," William said. He propped up on an elbow and squinted out the window at the ocean, squinting at the dim early-morning light. "I think I'm done with Miami."
"Okay," Pete said, blinking. He had figured he would be the one to leave, this time. That he would pack up during one of William's absences, sell the house and move somewhere far away, and then William would come back and knock on the door and things would be different for once. It would be like William had left, like things had changed while he was gone.
Seattle. 1991
Pete was used to Miami thunderstorms: quick, insolent flurries of rain that soaked you through and then abruptly stopped.
If Miami weather was adolescent in its whims, then Seattle weather was very nearly geriatric. It crept in, settled itself, and then wore you down with its incessant dampness. It seemed constantly gray in contrast to the bright, bleached heat of Miami.
He bought a split-level house in a quiet neighborhood just outside of the city. It was terribly outdated, dripping with avocado-colored appliances and dark, laminate wood paneling, but Pete had been born into much more modest surroundings, so he didn't think much of it.
He'd mostly bought the house for its weathered red door, anyway.
In Seattle, the devil brought Pete's downfall to him.
"Hey," the boy on the other side of Pete's door said. His face would be beautiful in a few years, Pete knew, but now it was too young. His jaw was too sharp and his nose too defined and his cheeks too thin.
"Hello," Pete said.
"You have a garage," the boy said. He held out a plate in front of him with both hands cupped beneath it, like a temple offering. "Here are some cookies."
Pete agreed to let Mikey's band practice in his garage because he was still a fool and he'd never learned to deny himself the things he wanted, even when the things he wanted were ninety-one years his junior and already had sad, cautious eyes.
Mikey was very nearly seventeen. He asked few questions, which Pete found refreshing after William's drive to question everything. Mikey was somber much of the time, and still, in stark contrast to his brother's jittery, coffee-driven urge to create.
Pete was inexplicably drawn to everything about Mikey. He was young-painfully young to someone who remembered roughly sewn shirts made of homespun cotton and tilling fields by hand-but carried himself with none of the awkwardness and uncertainty of youth.
He was obsessed with the bands to whom Pete had spend the last twenty years listening.
"Here," Mikey said, blowing the dust off the record player Pete kept in the corner of his garage. "You have to understand. They were magic."
He put on a live recording of the New York Dolls and sank his sharp, stiff body onto the couch Pete had bought so that his band would have a place to sit while they practiced. "Magic," Mikey repeated, pushing his glasses up his nose in a gesture that looked nothing like the one Patrick used to use.
Pete couldn't say that he knew how magical this band was, or that he had been at this performance when it was recorded, or that he remembers that the girl who screamed "I love you!" in the middle of 'Human Being' had later wandered into the men's room while Pete was relieving himself and offered him things to snort. Instead, he grabbed two beers from his fridge and flipped the lights in the garage off on the way back to the sofa.
The only illumination came from the meager sunlight leaking in around Pete's rickety garage door and the lava lamp in the corner. Mikey rolled his head to the side and blinked at Pete in the way Pete had learned meant, "Do you understand?"
"It's good," Pete said, and he turned his head, too, so that he had to do little more than lean forward an inch to kiss Mikey.
It was a bit like kissing Patrick: slow and cautious, with Mikey's breath catching and Pete trying not to rush. It was a lot like kissing Patrick in that Mikey lifted his hand to Pete's shoulder and touched him there. Too light, at first, and then too hard when Pete pushed closer and licked at Mikey's tongue.
The next time, it was Mikey who kissed Pete first. Weeks later, once they'd graduated from kissing with hips held carefully still and apart to bodies rubbing together greedily, it was Mikey who pushed at Pete's shirt first. It was Pete who slid down Mikey's skinny, pale body, though, and Pete who unbuttoned his jeans, and Pete who dragged his mouth over the head of Mikey's dick and sucked him off until he was twisting against the mattress.
He liked Mikey with his clothes off. He seemed less guarded that way. He liked that Mikey in bed was not nearly as quiet as Mikey out of bed, and that Mikey, who would never push or insist out in public, was pushy and left marks in private.
"Gerard doesn't know," Mikey said, pulling his jeans on, his t-shirt, then a plaid flannel shirt in shades of red and black. "He thinks I'm a baby."
"Big brothers," Pete said easily. He hadn't bothered with clothes yet. There was nothing he had to hide that Mikey hadn't seen before. "Is that all?"
"He might be jealous," Mikey admitted. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his glasses back on. With them came the blank, placid Mikey-standard expression. "He hasn't, yet."
In 1994, before Pete turned one hundred and eleven and Mikey turned nineteen, Kurt Cobain killed himself. It was the first time Pete ever saw Mikey cry.
"Did you hear?" he asked, stumbling into Pete's kitchen like a drunkard. "Did you hear what happened?"
Pete had not, and he held Mikey while he wept, shaking, on his shoulder, but he felt no grief. "Maybe he wanted to die," he said quietly, nuzzling Mikey's hair away from his ear with his nose. "Maybe he wanted it."
Days later, Pete bought a shotgun and laid it neatly at the foot of his bed. He sat and stared at it for hours, and then he laid it just as neatly on the top shelf of his closet. He had the devil's tongue and the devil's hands and the devil's own cowardice. He didn't know if he would die, if he could die, but he felt certain that he would be damned if he did. He stripped, instead, lay on his back and put "Lithium" on repeat. He twisted his fingers into himself until he had four in, spread wide and slicked with just enough lube that he would hurt but not bleed. He didn't stop until he came, gasping and digging his heels into his mattress.
"What's the worst thing you've ever done?" Mikey asked, one night after he'd turned twenty and Pete was creeping up on one hundred and thirteen. "What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you?"
"Why?" Pete asked. He rolled onto his stomach; when he thought too hard about the worst thing that had ever happened to him, about the whip slicing his skin open, it hurt too much to lie on his back. "Who have you been talking to?"
"Gerard's obsessed," Mikey said, frowning. "He wants a comic of people's worst stories. A page per story."
"I loved a man, once," Pete said slowly.
"That was bad?"
"He died," Pete said shortly. They'd all died. Maybe William was still alive somewhere, but the boy he'd loved had died in front of him, and Gabe was surely long dead. Patrick was probably dead, too, and Ryan and Spencer were sacrificed to something they didn't even believe in.
"People die," Mikey said. He settled his hand between Pete's shoulder blades and spread his fingers, rolling so he could kiss between them. "That's not your fault."
Pete wanted to tell Mikey that he was wrong, that people didn't always die. Sometimes people lived, even if they didn't want to. Instead, he said, "It should have been me," and rolled out of bed so he could scrub at his back until he didn't feel the blood drying there anymore.
In 1999, when Mikey was turning twenty-five in the fall, and the world was going mad over the certain downfall of computerized society, bars stopped carding Mikey.
"It's about time," he said, pushing a soft old bill across the bar while Pete pulled out his extremely expensive driver's license.
"Twenty-nine?" the bartender said, eying Pete skeptically. "What year were you born?"
"1970," Pete said.
"What's your sign?" the bartender asked. He turned Pete's license over in his hand and tapped it against the bar. Next to him, Mikey was pushing his glasses up in the way that meant he was trying not to laugh.
"Gemini," Pete said impatiently. "Look, I'm just short, okay?"
"Someday," Mikey said, once the bartender had given them their drinks. It had been years, so Pete knew the rest of that sentence without Mikey having to speak it.
He knew something else, too, though he wasn't ready to admit it yet.
In the end, he left another note. It was 2000, April, months into the continued existence of modern society, and Pete would soon be one hundred and seventeen. Soon, it would be one hundred years since the day his neighbors found the devil in him.
I love you, he wrote. But I won't come back. I'm sorry.
Los Angeles. 2001
Pete was in love with Los Angeles from the moment he set foot in it.
The city was as big a liar as he was, and full of people who would kill to have his curse. If Pete thought it would work, he would gladly lie still and let them take it from him.
In Los Angeles, Pete could be young as long as he wanted. He wouldn't stand out if he looked twenty long past when he should be greying and going wrinkly around the corners.
He'd been the devil's fool for 99 years, and L.A. was rife with scandal and violence. Pete had the money to buy his way into parties full of drugs and sex and liars. It was winter. Soon, too soon, it would be summer.
The devil led him to a condo with towering ceilings that made him feel as small as he had that first day in Chicago, and the devil led him to parties, to cocktails and to flirting with emaciated actresses so close to naked that you could see sin hiding in every shadow on their bodies.
On New Year's Eve, when he was half-blinded by the glitter and the cameras flashing, the devil dropped Ryland into his lap. Or, more accurately, Ryland dropped a glass of something that smelled strongly of coconut into Pete's lap.
"Oh shit," Ryland said, with the lackluster dismay of someone genuinely apologetic but too drunk to convey sincerity. "Shit, I'm sorry."
"Cold," Pete said, standing gingerly and brushing ice off of his crotch. "That's really fucking cold."
"New Year's Resolution," Ryland said, slurring but solemn. "No more dumping drinks on hot guys."
"As moves go, it's pretty lame," Pete agreed. He looked kind of like he'd pissed his pants, and everything from dick to ass was numb and tingling when his too-tight jeans rubbed against his skin.
"There's a bathroom this way," Ryland said, gesturing vaguely off to the side with his empty glass. "Come on. I'll help dry you off and show you some different moves."
They kissed in the bathroom when the clock struck midnight. Pete was sitting on the counter, his jeans undone and half dry, and Ryland still had the blow dryer he'd found under the sink to dry them hanging loosely from one hand. They were still kissing when the clock ticked around to five after midnight, except the blow dryer was on the floor by then and people were pounding on the door to get in.
By ten after one, on the first day of 2002, Pete was unlocking his condo and letting Ryland in.
"You move fast," Pete said, tossing his keys into the bowl on the hall table.
"Yeah, well. Life's short."
The moon was big that night, and amber, washing every smooth, sparse corner of Pete's apartment with gold. Later, with Ryland's hands on his ass holding him up and only his shoulder blades still on the mattress, Pete opened his eyes and tried to figure out when he'd been here before. "Pete," Ryland whispered, digging his fingers in tighter and pushing in so hard that Pete arched higher, trying to get closer. "You feel amazing."
Pete was so close it almost hurt. His fingers were numb, they were twisted so tightly in his sheet, and Ryland wouldn't jerk him off no matter how hard he begged. "Like this," Ryland said, and leaned forward more, nearly bending Pete in half. "I know you can."
He could, and he did.
"What do you do?" Ryland asked in the morning, gesturing around with his spoon. "I mean, to afford this place."
"I'm a writer," Pete said. He could barely sit still, he was so sore. It felt like Ryland had taken something out of him, rather than put something in.
"Anything I'd know?"
"Technical shit," Pete said. He still had the devil's tongue, and the lie came easily. "Boring. Nothing exciting."
Ryland was an actor and a musician, and he was far too tall for Pete, none of which held any real surprise. Pete had been falling in love with Ryland in one form or another for a hundred years. The only difference was that this time, like the first time, he felt blessed. His hands were his own to touch Ryland with, and his mouth his own with which to kiss Ryland, and the devil had nothing to do with it at all. It was even gold again; Pete's condo was high enough that they left the curtains wide open when they fucked, and the light would come in bright and pure, bathing Ryland's pale skin in gold, and Pete's in bronze.
He said "I love you," too soon, like he had many years ago, before the crops were ripe and the air had warmed enough to be summer. He said "I love you," when Ryland was above him and Ryland's mouth was on his neck and Ryland was in him so deeply that Pete swore he could feel him in his fingertips, in the back of his throat.
"Jesus," Ryland gasped, biting down and pushing in hard enough to lift Pete's hips off the mattress. "I love you, too."
It was always the first step to the end, but Pete couldn't help himself.
They spent the anniversary of the day Pete should have died mundanely. Pete was quiet in the morning; he made Ryland scrub his back free of the blood that was not there until his skin was angry and raw. "There's nothing there," Ryland said, kissing the nape of Pete's neck and reaching around him to turn the water cooler. "I promise."
They ate lunch. They took a nap. They watched some show Ryland was wild about, but Pete couldn't focus. "Swim with me," he said, standing abruptly and trying to drag Ryland with him. "Fuck me in the ocean, come on."
In the water, he buried his face in Ryland's neck and wrapped his legs around Ryland's waist and let the water move them.
He would turn one hundred and nineteen in June.
"I think I want to write a book," he said. "I mean, sorry. 'Romeo, oh Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?'"
"Fuck the lines," Ryland said, tossing his script on the floor and pulling Pete's feet into his lap. "Tell me about this book."
Pete wrote a book. He wrote about a man who fell in love and was cursed for it, a man who couldn't stop falling in love, no matter how much it hurt to walk away. He wrote a book about a man who would never grow old, no matter how desperately he wished to.
He finished in December, four days shy of a year from the day he met Ryland.
"Pete," Ryland said, putting the manuscript in his lap and smoothing the curled-up edges of the top page flat. "This is really good."
"Yeah?"
"Fucking depressing," Ryland laughed, and moved the manuscript onto the couch so he could pull Pete into his lap and nuzzle. "But good. Really good."
This one he published under his own name: Peter L.K. Wentz.
"No 'The Third?'" Ryland teased.
"Fuck it," Pete said, and sank his teeth into Ryland's upper arm. "I'm my own man."
He'd given himself the Jr. and then the III, anyway. His father's name had been Robert.
Ryland moved into Pete's apartment in February, or at least made his prolonged lodging there official by throwing away the toothbrush at his own apartment. His roommate was getting married. "Be my date," Ryland said, though he was lessening his chances of acceptance by cruelly compressing Pete's hoodies into less than half of the closet space. "We can point out all the shit we won't have at our wedding."
Pete reminded himself that this was L.A., and that he could look twenty for twenty years if he wanted, as long as he kept dropping the name of a talented plastic surgeon.
"No white," he said, kicking a stack of Ryland's old-man cardigans off the bed in mute retribution. "And no lace, for the love of fuck."
In May, when summer was looming and most of the actresses in town had deemed it seasonally appropriate to once more leave the house without underwear on, Pete woke and found that the devil had seated himself upon his nose. He would not budge.
"I can't breathe," Pete moaned, poking viciously at Ryland's side until he grumbled and woke up. "Oh God, what's happening to me? Everything hurts."
Ryland pressed his palm to Pete's forehead and frowned, then flipped his hand over and pressed the cool back of it to the same spot. "You're warm," he said, and crawled out of bed. "Let me get you some ibuprofen."
"I think I'm dying," Pete said, panicked. "I thought I wanted to, but I was wrong. Not like this."
"Easy, baby." Ryland wandered back into the room, lazy and unconcerned, and flipped Pete's palm over so he could dump a few pills into it. "It's just a cold."
Pete hadn't had a cold since the winter of 1901. "A cold," he echoed, squinting up at Ryland through eyes that felt too hot and too wet. "I'm not dying?"
"It could be close," Ryland said solemnly. He bent to kiss Pete's forehead and then, further, to grab his jeans off the floor. "But I think if I get some soup into you soon enough, you'll have a 76.3% chance of recovery."
He'd forgotten how hard it was to sleep when he was sick, how cold he would get even with a pile of covers on him, and he spent most of that night and the next trying to get his feverish brain to understand the devil's will. God may have pardoned him, he supposed, but that seemed unlikely. "Maybe the world is as wicked as I am now," he told Ryland, glassy-eyed and grasping at him. "Maybe we're all fools."
"Maybe you should get some sleep," Ryland said, tugging the blankets up around Pete's chin again. "I think your fever is breaking."
"Do you think I'll get taller?" he asked, worming his hands out from under the covers to reach for Ryland again. "I always wondered if I was supposed to be taller."
"Shhh," Ryland said. He put his hand on Pete's forehead again and hummed, satisfied. "Let me get you Nyquil. And don't get taller. I like you like this."
In the morning, when Pete blinked his eyes and they didn't itch, cleared his throat and didn't wince, and sat up without feeling dizzy, he thought maybe the fever had purged the devil from him. He had sweated out the wickedness, maybe.
"Ryland," he said, and climbed on him until he woke, grumbling. "Ryland, I think we should get very, very old together."
"No white," Ryland mumbled drowsily, patting Pete absently on the head but refusing to open his eyes. "And no lace. Just say when. But sleep now."