(no subject)
"penises are for boys, vaginas are for girls, unless of course, something crazy happens. then anything's game."
Brendon Urie / Ryan Ross ( Panic! At The Disco )
NC-17
For wtf27 prompt 1: Genderswap. I worked on this fic so damned long that I had a dream the other night that Ryan Ross was a girl. I’m not sure whether that’s dedication, or me losing my mind. Either way. Yeah. Dubious thanks to Kathy for the title. Sorry it got so epic. There's even deleted scenes, but that's pretty much porn. :P
Ryan was sulking.
Some little tiny voice in the back of Brendon’s head helpfully adds ‘again’, but he’s more than sure that Ryan has not stopped sulking since he woke up that morning. And then the same tiny little voice reminds him: ‘you can’t really use the masculine pronoun to refer to Ryan anymore now that he’s a girl’.
“Go talk to him-her. Go talk to her.” Spencer was saying. Brendon looked back at him, and shook his head.
“No way,” Brendon said. “What if he-she-freaks out again?”
“Well, then she freaks out,” Spencer said. He and Brendon entered into a staring contest that was only stopped when Ryan actually spoke.
“I’m not going to freak out again,” he said, reaching one hand up and pushing his hair out of his face. “And I can hear every word you’re saying. Stop referring to me as a she, because this is not permanent. This had better not be permanent.”
***
Brendon had woken up that morning to screaming.
Not just screaming, but flat out shrieking and he thought briefly that he’d died and woken up in hell and all he was going to hear for the rest of eternity was rabid fangirls. His second thought was something along the lines of “holy shit, that is coming from THIS ROOM” and the third thought was “where the fuck is Ryan?” when he saw the tangled empty sheets on the other bed.
He stumbled out of bed, catching himself on the wall when the pesky sheets decided to tangle around his ankle and not let him go. He swore under his breath and made his way to the bathroom to the source of the screaming, which had, in the minute it took for Brendon to get from the bed ( and out of the damn sheets ) and into the bathroom doorway, had changed from shrieking to dejected sobbing.
“Ryan?” he said sleepily, rubbing at his eyes. The dark haired, dark eyed girl sitting on the edge of the bathtub wearing Ryan’s boxers promptly screeched and fell backward into the tub.
“Get out!” she yelled at him, and Brendon, after he recovered from the shock, moved out of the doorway.
“Um,” Brendon said, a little nervous, because Ryan was gone from the room and had been replaced with some strange girl who was screaming in the bathroom. He was considering calling hotel security.
“Can you bring me um. A t-shirt?” Her voice sounded tearful and shockingly familiar, though Brendon couldn’t manage to place it.
“Do you have a t-shirt?” he asked her, because obviously this girl wasn’t going to be wandering around in a pair of boxers ( which happened to be the ones Ryan had had on when they’d gone to bed the night before, so when had this girl come in? ).
“Just grab one, please,” she said. Brendon shrugged and picked up his t-shirt from the night before, sticking his arm around the door and handing it to her.
Then she appeared in the doorway, the t-shirt too tight across her ( admittedly rather small ) breasts. Her eyes were red and her face was streaked with tears, and Brendon figured that this girl looked like what Ryan would look like if Ryan were a girl.
“Where’s Ryan?” Brendon asked her, because it was important that he know. Otherwise, he was definitely calling security.
“I am Ryan, asshole,” the girl said, and the look on her face was definitely all Ryan Ross, because Brendon had been on the receiving end of that look more than a few times.
“You’re a girl,” Brendon said, suddenly losing all higher brain function. This was ridiculous.
“No shit,” the girl-Ryan said, pushing past Brendon ( she was still just as tall as boy-Ryan had been, still all bony shoulders and elbows, but now with breasts ). Ryan walked back over to the bed and sat down. Brendon noted that his - her, he supposed - legs had come through the transformation clean shaven. And they were nice. ( Stop looking, said a small voice inside his head. )
“What do we do?” Brendon asked, because normally Ryan would know what to do. But she was sitting there on the edge of the bed chewing on her fingernails.
“Go get Spence,” Ryan said. “And… and I don’t know. Find me something to wear.”
***
That was how Ryan had ended up sitting on the sofa in the back lounge of the bus wearing jeans and the biggest, baggiest sweatshirt she could find. Brendon noted that it really didn’t do anything to hide the fact that she really actually had, you know, breasts. But she was trying damned hard, with her arms crossed and her legs pulled up on the couch, staring at Brendon and Spencer from over her knees.
“So what do we do?” Spencer asked, and Ryan made a tiny noise of frustration, which sounded odd, coming out in her girl-voice. She pushed her fingers through her hair ( still short, but just as attractive as when she was a boy, surprisingly enough ) and chewed nervously on her lip.
“Figure out a way to change me back,” Ryan said stubbornly. She’d already told them both that she was not leaving the bus until she was a boy again.
“We don’t know how,” Brendon said, exasperated, because they’d already had this conversation five times and counting.
“Then figure it out!” Ryan yelled at him, and Spencer moved over, wrapping his arms around Ryan and hugging her. Ryan tensed up before she relaxed against Spencer, taking a deep breath. She didn’t really mean to yell, but she couldn’t deal with this. “I just don’t want to be a girl forever.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Spencer said, and Ryan nodded. Brendon started to feel a little left out. “Until then… you’re a girl. How are we going to explain that um. Ryan Ross has disappeared and we’ve replaced him with a girl?”
Ryan burst into tears.
***
Turns out, that if she stayed away from the majority of people, Ryan could actually pretend that he was still a him, and not, you know, girl-him. But he knew that it would only work for so long, and they still hadn’t figured out a way to turn her back.
And God, he hoped it happened soon, because he hated his girl-body. It was awkward and emphatically not his, and bras were uncomfortable as hell. Not to mention that he had some kind of serious hormone imbalance, apparently, because even though he would sometimes claim that he was “such a girl”, being one was a completely different story.
***
Brendon and Spencer were sleeping. At least, Ryan sincerely hoped they were sleeping. ( Spencer was, at least, because he could hear snoring, and he was pretty sure Brendon was as well, because he heard the murmuring that he was one day going to record and play for Brendon just to prove that he talked in his sleep. And kicked. And stole the blankets. ) He hoped they were sleeping, because he’d finally gotten the courage to, well, check things out.
The real story was, he suddenly had different anatomy, and he was dying to know how it felt. ( He promised himself that if he learned anything about female anatomy from this, he’d use everything he knew to make his next relationship that much better. ) He was stretched out on his back in his bunk with the curtains closed, listening hard for anyone moving around in the hallway or their own bunks ( although he definitely attributed any movement from Brendon’s bunk to the fact that Brendon was a mover ).
He slid his hand slowly down his stomach, over his bare skin. Even this part was different, because the line of hair leading down from his navel was gone. He hesitated just at the top of his pajama bottoms, before just breathing in and going for it, sliding his fingers down over his skin, over coarse hair covering something new and different and - God.
He stopped, listening hard, hoping that no one had woken up. When he didn’t hear anything different from what he’d heard before, he relaxed, bending one knee and moving his legs farther apart. He moved his hand until he was - fuck - cupping himself. His lips were parted and he was trying to breathe normal and fuck, fuck, he couldn’t fucking. get himself off in the bunks with the other guys sleeping now that he was a fucking girl.
He hesitated, not sure if he should keep going, if he should really do this, or if he should wait until he was in a hotel room, locked away from everyone else. Then he realized, he wanted to do this. He shifted his hand, trying to figure out how to even begin. Finally, he decided, if he was going to do it, then he’d do it, and shifted his hand, sliding one finger between and -
Fuck.
It was exactly like touching a girl, only he could fucking feel everything, and certain things made him want to arch his hips up off the mattress. But he couldn’t do that, and he had to be silent. He still didn’t have the courage to do much more than touch, not brave enough to slide his fingers inside, but brave enough to keep massaging that one spot that made his entire body ache, made his hips jerk and made him have to cover his mouth to keep from making any kind of noise.
It was hot, it was wet, and it felt fucking good. He felt like a slut when he spread his legs farther, making it easier. He was going to have to stop. He couldn’t do this in the bunk, because the more he touched, the more he wanted to moan, to cry out. And he couldn’t. He swallowed hard, and kept his hand over his mouth because he couldn’t stop.
Having an orgasm as a girl was not quite the same thing as having one as a boy. His body tightened and his fingers stopped moving, and he was shaking, and the whole thing left him wet and exhausted lying on the mattress breathing hard. Shit, he thought, lying there dazed with his hand still inside his pants, his fingers still against himself.
He had to stop himself from imagining what it would feel like to have someone else do that to him.
***
After a week and a half, they realized that they would have to get someone else involved. Someone who knew about weird shit like this. Or at least, someone they hoped knew about weird shit like this.
Ryan called Pete.
They were locked in Ryan’s hotel room, with the door to the adjoining room propped open and the sound of some cartoon carrying through into their room as Ryan pushed the speaker button and listened to the phone ringing. Spencer was sitting close enough that Ryan could feel him breathing, and Brendon was picking at a loose thread on the seam of his pants, his legs hanging off the end of the bed. Pete’s voicemail picked up and Ryan groaned.
“You better not have hit the ignore button, asshole,” Ryan snarled into the phone. Both Brendon and Spencer looked at her in surprise. “This is Ryan. It’s important. Call me back like. And when I say important, I mean fucking important.”
Then she hung up.
“He’s going to call and he’s going to be freaking out,” Brendon pointed out. "That message is going to make him freak out." Ryan looked at him silently. "Yeah okay. I get it."
They sat in silence, waiting to see if Pete would actually call them back. Five minutes later, the phone rang, and Ryan answered, hitting the button for speakerphone.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," Ryan said tensely. "But we have a serious problem."
"You haven't kicked out any more members of the band have you?" Pete asked, and he actually sounded genuinely concerned. "And you sound really odd."
“Yeah, that's one way to put it," Ryan told him sarcastically. "Look, when I say we've got a problem, I really mean it, Pete."
"I think I figured that part out," Pete said, and Ryan could tell he was getting frustrated, but she was trying to think of a way to just break the news. "So just spill it already."
"I'm a girl," Ryan blurted out. Silence on the other end of the line.
“No seriously," Pete said. "What's the problem?"
“I am a fucking girl, Peter,” Ryan yelled, making Spencer and Brendon jump. “I have turned into a girl. I have girl parts. And I want to know if you know how to change me back.”
“Oh,” Pete said, and was quiet for a moment. “Are you a hot girl?”
Spencer started laughing and Ryan was sure that Brendon was as well by the way his shoulders were shaking. Ryan made a noise of righteous indignation.
“Answer my question, Wentz,” Ryan said. Pete laughed.
“So does that mean you’re not a hot girl, Ryan?” Pete asked, still laughing, and Ryan reached out to end the call, flustered, but Spencer stopped her by grabbing hold of her wrist.
“Do you know a way to change her back?” Spencer asked.
“Him,” Ryan said. “I’m a fucking dude, Spence.”
“Actually, you’re technically a girl, for now,” Pete said. “And no, as far as I know there’s no way to change you back. It happened to Andy a couple years ago, and he just had to wait it out. Turned back after about a month and a half.”
Ryan let out a horrified little whimper. “But there has to be a way to make me turn back faster,” she said. “Because I can’t do this. I can’t be a girl. I have to go on tour. And they’re expecting me. Not. Whatever I am now.”
“I think that you’re going to need to postpone dates due to illness,” Pete said. “Or get a temp.”
Ryan looked helplessly at Brendon and Spencer, and both of them shrugged. “Okay,” Ryan said. “We’ll… figure something out.”
“Don’t freak out, Ryan,” Pete advised. “I mean, you’ll change back. Until then, things’ll be okay. Just make sure that you um. Make the best of things.”
Pete disconnected the call before Ryan could ask what he meant. She looked up at Spencer. “What the fuck does that mean?”
***
When two weeks passed and Ryan still hadn’t turned back into a boy, he decided it was time to go shopping. The only problem was, he was used to going with his friends, and suddenly, the only friends he had who knew what had happened were all boys. And Ryan really didn’t want to go shopping with Brendon or Spencer.
“You shouldn’t go by yourself,” Spencer said. “I mean. Because.” He looked at Ryan for a moment. “Because you’re a girl.” Ryan put his hands on his hips and stared at Spencer, because obviously, the boy had gotten it in the head and now his brain was rattled because he wasn’t making any sense.
“If you’re implying that I can’t go to a mall by myself to shop, I can punch you and show you just how well I can take care of myself,” Ryan said, glaring at Spencer.
“No!” Spencer said, stepping back. “I’m not saying that. Well, I am saying that, kind of. But wouldn’t you rather one of us went with you? Or anyone, really.”
“Spencer, if you want to go shopping for bras and shit with me, you’re more than welcome to,” Ryan said sweetly.
“Only if I get to watch you try them on,” Spencer said, and Ryan took a swing at him, but Spencer caught Ryan’s wrist before his fist could do any serious damage to Spencer’s arm. Ryan stuck his tongue out at Spencer in lieu of his thwarted attempt at smacking his friend. He pulled away and wandered off to finish getting dressed.
“Are we all going?” Brendon asked, clicking through the channels on the television, looking for something, anything to watch.
“We could,” Ryan said, shrugging, looking up from tying his shoes. “I mean, I’m going to buy girl’s underwear, guys. So do you really want to tag along on this venture?”
“We’re moral support,” Spencer said, plopping down onto the edge of the bed and untying one of his sneakers. Ryan turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s bras. How much moral support could I need?” Ryan asked.
It turned out, there were really two answers to the question. Ryan really thought the first mistake was going into, you know, a women’s underwear store with two of his best friends who happened to still possess their Y chromosomes. His second mistake was his choice of underwear store, because the saleslady swooped down on him immediately, and asked if she could help, and all he could manage to get out was “bras,” and she was looking at him funny because he was dressed like a boy. ( It didn’t help that Brendon and Spencer were having a laugh at his expense. He made a mental note to kill them in their sleep. )
So the answer, in part, was a hell of a lot of support that he was not getting from his so called friends as he looked at the massive racks of bras and didn’t have a clue what size he actually was. Not that they would have known either, but if the other two could have stopped snickering at him for thirty seconds, they might have been able to put their brains together and figure something out.
Finally, he just grabbed some that looked like they might have been close to the right size and asked the saleslady to let him into a dressing room. “Your boyfriend is welcome to come with you,” she said, and Ryan was baffled as to the reason she had such a thick southern accent when they were nowhere near the south.
Ryan froze, and turned to look at Brendon and Spencer, before speed walking back to them. “She said um. That my boyfriend can come with me.”
“Not it,” Spencer said quickly. He wasn’t interested in pretending to be Ryan’s boyfriend. Brendon’s eyes got a bit wide.
“I’m not pretending to be your boyfriend,” Brendon said. “I mean. No offense or anything, but no.”
“One of you come with me,” Ryan said. “I know how to take these things off of someone else, but I’m pretty sure putting one on myself is going to be an entirely different story.”
“And you think that I’m going to be able to help?” Brendon asked. Ryan just looked at him silently for a moment.
“Yes,” he finally said, and grabbed Brendon’s wrist, dragging him toward where the saleslady was waiting, holding the handful of bras. Brendon stumbled after him, not quite ready for the force with which Ryan pulled him. The saleslady just smiled at him and didn’t say anything about the way Ryan was holding onto Brendon’s wrist, not his hand.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Ryan muttered, once inside the dressing room. He’d taken his t-shirt off but he was fumbling just trying to get the damn bra unclasped to put it on. Brendon was studiously not looking, because this was a naked girl, a gorgeous naked girl, regardless of the fact that two weeks before said girl had been a boy.
“I don’t know how to put a bra on,” Brendon said. “I’ve never been a girl.” Ryan slapped him hard and open handed on the arm, and it echoed in the dressing room. It gave Brendon an excuse to lock eyes with Ryan so that he wasn’t tempted to look at Ryan’s chest.
“Fuck you,” Ryan said. He slid his arms into the bra and tried clasping it, but couldn’t quite make his fingers work to do it. In theory, if he could undo it, he could do it, but in practice it was actually different. He sighed. “Brendon,” he whispered, and turned around. “Help?”
Fuck, Brendon thought, but clasped the bra for Ryan anyway. Ryan squirmed, because Brendon was tickling him a little bit, but once it was done, he turned around to look at Brendon.
“It doesn’t fit,” he said sadly. Brendon nodded, and now he was definitely looking at Ryan’s breasts. He really, really couldn’t do this.
“Do you want me to go get someone else who might. Um. Actually know what’s going on?” Brendon asked. “Or Spencer? Because he’s suave and shit and probably knows how to do this better than me.”
“Please?” Ryan asked, realizing that Brendon was really uncomfortable with the situation, but not quite understanding why. So what if Ryan was a girl now. Brendon had seen tits before. But Brendon nodded and left the dressing room, going and finding Spencer who was standing around awkwardly, pretending to be invisible.
“Go help her?” Brendon said. “Because seriously, what do I know about bra fitting?”
“And… you think I… do?” Spencer asked, looking at Brendon with both eyebrows raised and his eyes wide. He reached up and pushed his hair out of his face.
“You’ll be more helpful than me,” Brendon said, pushing Spencer toward the dressing rooms. “At least you won’t be looking at her tits instead of, you know, helping.”
“It’s Ryan, why would you look at her tits?” Spencer asked. “I mean, not that they’re not nice, but seriously. Ryan.” He paused. “Unless this has something to do with That Time.”
“I was drunk,” Brendon said, gritting his teeth a little and pushing Spencer harder. Spencer laughed at him.
“Ryan wasn’t,” he said, but disappeared into the dressing area before Brendon could say anything else.
***
“So what are we doing about the tour?” Brendon asked. They were back in the hotel room, where they’d holed up after the first couple of days. They couldn’t go home, because it would have been interesting to try to explain to Ryan’s dad why he suddenly had a daughter.
“Let’s do it anyway,” Ryan said. She was lying on her back on the bed, her head hanging over the edge, legs stretched out alongside Spencer’s. Brendon was sitting on the dresser, looking at Ryan looking at him upside down.
“And… we explain why you’re a girl… how?” Brendon said skeptically. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it, but Ryan was, well, a girl.
“Do I really look that much different?” Ryan asked, sitting up and turning around, looking in the mirror mounted to the dresser behind Brendon.
“Aside from your tits?” Spencer asked, nudging Ryan’s back with his foot. Ryan reached behind her and slapped Spencer’s leg.
“Fuck off,” she said. “I mean, so what, I have tits. They’re not that big. We could squash them down or something.” She pushed at her chest, and Brendon just stared at her. “And I don’t know. I could. Not sing, because obviously my voice is different. And I can wear… I don’t know. high collars or something.”
“What happens when someone’s like, wow, Ryan looks awfully like a chick these days,” Spencer asked. “Or when they say, hey, that’s not Ryan, who the hell is that?”
“Don’t be so positive, Spencer, jeez,” Ryan said, rolling her eyes. “If that happens, then we say we got a really attractive temp because Ryan is deathly ill.”
“And what happens when they ask if we kicked you out of the band, too?” Spencer all but whispered. The entire room went silent, and Spencer watched Ryan’s back as she held her breath.
“We didn’t,” Ryan said in a rush of breath. “We didn’t, because this is not that thing. This has nothing to do with that. This is something beyond my control and if anyone asks, I am sick. That’s it.”
“What are you sick with?” Brendon asked, not even wanting to touch the other subject, considering Ryan’s anger about it. It was all a sore subject, and they tried to avoid talking about it whenever possible.
“Mono. Fuck. I don’t know,” Ryan said, pulling her legs up on the bed and sighing, hands in lap. “We’ll think of something. I can’t not do this. I have to do this.”
Brendon looked at Spencer over Ryan’s head, and Spencer shrugged.
***
Ryan felt guilty that he couldn’t go out and meet and talk to people. He felt guilty that they were lying to so many people on such a consistent basis. That was why he was sitting on the bus hiding out. He hated to keep telling people that he wasn’t feeling well - all the lying was actually making him sick.
It wasn’t hard to keep up the lie. They said that he didn’t feel well. He couldn’t sing backups, and being onstage was hard, sometimes ( but that was because of the fucking binding squishing down his boobs, because it was seriously killing him ). But he couldn’t not do it.
Brendon kept saying that they could just postpone the dates until Ryan changed back. They’d had the conversation five times in the past week and every time they had it it had ended with Ryan banishing Brendon from his room and slamming the door until Spencer came in to try and smooth things over, explaining that Brendon was just trying to be helpful. ( “He’s being a dick,” Ryan had informed Spencer, before pulling off his t-shirt and struggling out of the damn vice they wrapped around him to squish his breasts. )
“We have got to figure out a way to change me back,” Ryan said, scrutinizing himself in the mirror. He made faces at himself for a moment before turning back to Spencer. “Before I go crazy. From lying and Brendon and being a girl in general. Because it sucks.”
“I just hope it’s not contagious,” Spencer said, leaning back on his arms, looking at Ryan. “Because I doubt my boobs would look half as great as yours.”
“Oh, get the fuck out,” Ryan said, and pointed at the door. Spencer laughed as he walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.
***
“What the hell?” Brendon asked, when the door to the back lounge was slammed in his face for at least the third time that day. He made his way to the front lounge and flopped into a seat beside Spencer, sulking.
“What’d you do this time,” Spencer asked, not looking up from the computer screen. “Exist?”
“Pretty much. Everything that comes out of my mouth is wrong,” Brendon said, and his pouting and sulking was completely lost on Spencer.
“Yeah, that pretty much happens with girls sometimes,” Spencer said. “I think it’s the estrogen. Or it could just be Ryan, you know.” He still didn’t look up from the computer, and knew that it was driving Brendon crazy that he wasn’t paying attention to Brendon’s sulking.
“Yeah, but I’m actually trying, you know?” Brendon said. This time, Spencer really did look up and look over at him.
“Why not just treat her like normal? She’s still Ryan,” Spencer said. “Unless, you know, the girl thing is a real problem for you.”
“Uh. Yeah,” Brendon said. “Maybe a little.”
Spencer was silent, looking at Brendon for a moment. “Please tell me that you’re not having some sudden epiphany and you like Ryan, now.”
“Um.”
“Jesus, Brendon.”
They were silent for a moment, Spencer looking back at his computer screen and Brendon fidgeting nervously with the edge of his shirt, buttoning and unbuttoning the last button.
“Is it because Ryan’s a girl now?” Spencer asked after a long time. “Or because it’s Ryan?”
“I don’t know,” Brendon admitted.
“You’d better not ever let Ryan find out about that,” Spencer said. Brendon nodded, and they both let it drop.
***
Twenty minutes later, Brendon walked back into the back lounge. Ryan was stretched out on her stomach, one leg kicking back and forth through the air as she read the book spread open on the couch in front of her. Brendon walked over and sat down on the floor beside her.
“What?” she asked him, not looking away from her book. Brendon noticed that the pages were dog eared and messy and wondered where the book had come from.
“What do I do wrong?” Brendon asked. “I mean, it seems like Spencer does everything right, and everything that comes out of my mouth makes you hate me. Is this a weird girl thing? Because I swear it wasn’t like this before.”
Ryan dog-eared the page and closed the book, looking over at Brendon, silent for a moment. “Do you remember that time,” she said, “when we first got signed. And we were recording. And you were fucking plastered. And you started kissing me, and we just.”
“But why are you mad at me for that now?” Brendon asked. “It’s not like you’ve never kissed boys.”
“Maybe it’s my extra girl hormones,” Ryan said, and Brendon knew that there was about to be another fight, just by the way Ryan’s voice got tight. “Or maybe it’s because of the way you look at me now.”
“I was drunk, Ryan,” Brendon said. “And you’re a hot girl now. Are you going to hold that against me?”
Some part of that ( maybe all of it ) was the wrong thing for Brendon to say, and Ryan twisted around and sat up with lightning speed and Brendon wasn’t sure that he wasn’t about to get slapped, and he flinched back. But Ryan didn’t slap him, and didn’t even raise her voice.
“I wasn’t,” she said, her voice low, and angry. “I wasn’t, Brendon. So yes, I am going to hold this against you.” She got up and walked out. Brendon watched her make her way into the hall and lift herself up into her bunk, jerking the curtain shut.
Fuck, Brendon thought. That sucked. He sat there, thinking, leaning against the edge of the couch. He didn’t understand what it meant.
And then it hit him. Maybe it was the slap that Ryan didn’t give him. Ryan hadn’t been drunk. Ryan had made out with Brendon. Ryan was pissed off that Brendon kept checking her out.
Oh, Brendon thought, and couldn’t believe that he’d been that big of an idiot, all this time. Shit.
***
Spencer was laughing at him, because Spencer, Brendon was suddenly figuring out, was a jerk. Brendon frowned and stuck his arm out of the bathroom for flip the other boy off.
“Stop fucking laughing at me, okay?” Brendon said. He was trying to get dressed. He was trying to make himself look presentable.
“You’re so nervous about it though,” Spencer said, snickering, sitting on the bed reading his e-mail. “Like you’ve never been on a date before. And really, it’s just Ryan. It’s not like it’s even really a date.”
“Oh no,” Brendon said. “It is totally a date. Trust me when I say it’s a date, because if there’s one thing that I know about girls, it’s if you tell them you’re going to take them out and they like you? It’s automatically a date.”
“Could you possibly be more conceited?” Spencer asked. “I mean seriously. Do you really think Ryan’s just going to assume it’s a date? Because Ryan’s not stupid, Brendon.”
“Um,” Brendon said. “Ryan probably thinks it’s a date because that’s how I approached the subject.”
“What?” Spencer asked, getting up and going to the bathroom door, looking at Brendon, who was standing in front of the mirror wearing his pants and socks. “What does that mean?”
“It means I screwed up and said ‘let’s go on a date!’ because I’m an idiot,” Brendon said. Spencer just stared at him like he’d grown a third eyeball in the middle of his forehead. And then Spencer made a mental note to draw one there for his own personal amusement the next time Brendon fell asleep anywhere that wasn’t his bunk.
“Ryan laughed at you,” Spencer said. It wasn’t a question.
“So hard she snorted,” Brendon said. He made a face at himself in the mirror, because it had easily been the least smooth thing he’d ever done.
“So how did you end up deciding to go on a … date,” Spencer asked. He didn’t even want to call it a date, because how bizarre was that? Brendon and Ryan, on a date?
“We just… I don’t even know,” Brendon said, pushing past Spencer back into the room. Spencer followed him, walking back over and sprawling out on the bed. Brendon pulled his shirt on then sat down on the edge of the other bed to pull on socks. There was a knock on the connecting door, then it opened and Ryan walked in.
Ryan was most definitely a girl. Startlingly, completely a girl, and Spencer found himself staring, embarrassingly, at his best friend’s new cleavage. ( He wasn’t the only one staring, it was just that Brendon’s eyes had focused on the very, very long length of leg visible beneath the skirt Ryan was wearing. )
“Stop staring,” Ryan said nervously. “Stop looking at me like that, Spencer, I can kick your ass.” Spencer snorted, and Brendon managed to look away long enough to finish putting on his shoes.
“I guess you’re ready to go?” Brendon asked, looking up at Ryan as he finished tying his shoes. Ryan nodded, and Brendon stood up.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Spencer said, and Brendon laughed as he led Ryan out of the room. The progress down the hall was slow, because, well, Ryan was walking really slowly.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered to Brendon. Brendon stopped and turned to her.
“Just relax, okay?” Brendon said. “You’re a girl. Girls go out with boys. It happens. No one’s going to think twice. Unless they recognize us. Which. You know, okay, then we might have a problem, but -“
“You’re not making me less nervous,” Ryan pointed out.
“I know, but, you don’t. You’ve got on an awfully lot of makeup, you know? No one’s going to think anything. Hopefully,” Brendon said. Ryan made a face. “Just relax. If anything happens, we’ll deal, okay?”
“Okay,” Ryan said, and sighed as they stepped into the elevator.
***
“Spencer would so not do this.”
The elevator was slowly making it’s way back up to the tenth floor, and Brendon had Ryan shoved against the wall, his hand sliding underneath the edge of Ryan’s skirt. Ryan’s lip-gloss tasted like cherry cola and her body was warm against Brendon’s.
“Spencer has never been through a spontaneous sex change,” Ryan said, before pushing her lips against Brendon’s again. Somewhere in the back of Brendon’s mind, he thought, Spencer also doesn’t want to sleep with me, as far as I know, but he said nothing.
“I was just pointing out that he told us not to do anything he wouldn’t do,” Brendon teased, his fingers moving along the smooth skin of the inside of Ryan’s thigh. “And he wouldn’t do this.”
“Since when do you even care what Spencer tells you to do?” Ryan asked. The elevator doors dinged and started to slide open and Brendon and Ryan walked out, much faster this time, to a startled look from a middleaged woman about to board.
Sometime on the ride back to the hotel, Ryan had casually mentioned that she’d read on the internet that spontaneous changes in gender were sometimes fixed by simply having sex. After almost a month as a girl, Ryan had had all she could take, and was willing to try anything, and Brendon just happened to be available ( and willing ).
“Excuse us,” Ryan said sweetly to the woman that they walked past, giggling as she tugged on Brendon’s hand and pulled him quickly down the hallway. At least the woman would have a good story to tell about the two teenagers she’d met getting off the elevator where the boy had lipstick smeared all over his mouth and one side of the girl’s skirt was pushed awkwardly up her hip.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Brendon asked, even as he was laying Ryan back on the bed, clothes discarded on the floor and the other bed and the dresser and everywhere that they’d landed when thrown.
“I don’t want to be a girl anymore,” Ryan said, shifting underneath Brendon, pulling him close. “And if this works things can go back to normal.”
That was all the reassurance that Brendon needed.
It wasn’t that Ryan was easy, really, it was just that she was ready to do this, to get this over with. Well, partly that, and partly that Ryan still thought of sex like a boy. She was ready, and could Brendon please skip over all of this foreplay shit? He snorted with laughter when she said as much, and told her that it was a real mood killer to be told that.
“It doesn’t have to be romantic,” Ryan said. Brendon stopped and looked at her for a moment. Then he shook his head.
“Look, this will hopefully be the only time you have sex as a girl,” Brendon said. “You should, you know, enjoy it.”
“I would much rather be having sex as a boy,” Ryan said, frowning at him. Brendon’s fingers were stroking down her skin, across her stomach. The action made her bite her lip, made her body arch up against Brendon’s fingers.
“With me?” Brendon asked, raising an eyebrow, seemingly unfazed, sliding his hand lower
“With anyone,” Ryan said, then gasped when Brendon’s fingers touched places she’d previously only touched herself.
“That makes you sound like a slut, Ry,” Brendon whispered. It even sort of made him sad, to hear Ryan say things like that.
“I don’t care,” Ryan whimpered out, because fuck, what the hell was Brendon doing with his fingers down there anyway?
“I care,” Brendon said, and kissed her, and then realized that he sort of wanted Ryan to stay a girl. So he could be with her. The thought just made him kiss her harder, because he shouldn’t want that. He should want Ryan to be happy, and being a girl made Ryan unhappy. Right?
He couldn’t stop hoping that it wouldn’t work.
***
Spencer was still awake waiting for Brendon to come back, so he could ask about their “date”. He couldn’t help grinning at just the idea of it, because it was ridiculous. A date. Seriously.
He was half asleep when he heard the barely-audible cry from the next room, the distinct sound of someone getting off. From Ryan’s room. Ryan.
So much for not doing anything he wouldn’t do, he thought with a laugh, and finally decided to go to bed.
***
Ryan was still a girl.
He woke up with Brendon sprawled half on top of him, too warm and feeling disgusting, and most emphatically still a girl. He wanted to cry. He pushed at Brendon, frustrated at still being a girl, trying to get up.
“It didn’t work,” he said in a shaky voice. “It didn’t work. Brendon. Wake the fuck up and let me up. It didn’t work.”
“Huh?” Brendon said, not really awake or aware of anything Ryan was actually saying. Ryan pushed hard on his shoulders and managed to force him to roll over. He woke up only when he almost slid off the bed. “Hey, you’re still a girl,” he observed, dazed.
“No shit,” Ryan said, and got up, storming into the bathroom and slamming the door.
***
“I guess she was just desperate for something to work,” Brendon said, turning his cup around and around in his hands. He had gone into the other room and talked Spencer out of bed to go for coffee. Mostly because he couldn’t stand to hear Ryan crying in the bathroom for any longer, and she wouldn’t talk to him or let him in. “You know? Like she read that, and that would be the answer, and things would go back to normal.”
“You’d be desperate too,” Spencer said, watching Brendon. Even with the huge dark sunglasses Brendon was wearing, he knew that the other boy wasn’t looking at him. They were quiet for a moment, and Brendon continued playing with his cup. “You didn’t want it to work,” Spencer all but whispered.
Brendon looked up sharply, and Spencer knew he was right just by the look on what he could see of Brendon’s face. “No,” Brendon said, but he was lying, and Spencer knew he was lying. And Brendon knew that Spencer knew he was lying. “Yes. I didn’t want it to work.” He sighed. “I … “ He wanted to keep her, was the plain and simple truth.
“She’s miserable like this,” Spencer said. “And you know it. That’s why we left her crying in the bathroom.”
“We left her crying in the bathroom because she wouldn’t open the door,” Brendon pointed out. “But I… I don’t know. I want … “
“You’re in love with her as a girl,” Spencer whispered, mostly so that they wouldn’t get weird looks. Brendon shook his head, almost knocking over his cup of coffee, cursing when the liquid sloshed over his hands. Spencer went to grab napkins, handing them to Brendon, who was frowning.
“I’m not,” Brendon said. “Spencer, I can’t be. I want her to stay like this but she’s unhappy and I don’t know what the hell I - we’re supposed to do about it.”
Spencer stopped wiping up the coffee spilled on the table and looked up at Brendon, looking at him for a long time before saying anything. “We’re not supposed to do anything about it,” Spencer said. “Other than hope Ryan goes back to normal. You just have to figure out how to deal with that on your own.”
“But I-“ Brendon started, and Spencer cut him off.
“Look at it as like, Ryan’s not any different, except for physically,” Spencer said. “So who are you even really in love with?”
Brendon didn’t have anything to say to that.
***
They didn’t see Ryan again until that evening, when they all finally walked down to the bus to head off to the next city. She came out of her room carrying her suitcase and wouldn’t look at either one of them as she walked past them toward the elevator. Spencer looked at Brendon for a moment before hurrying to catch up with Ryan, his suitcase banging awkwardly against him as he went. Brendon just slowed down, figuring he’d give Spencer a chance to try and help Ryan.
“Are you okay?” Spencer asked, even though he knew she wasn’t just by looking at her. Her hair was a mess and she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that Spencer thought that Ryan might have had since the beginning of time.
“No,” was all Ryan said, but she looked up at him. Her voice sounded stuffy and tired, and her eyes were red from crying.
“Ryan,” Spencer said, dropping his suitcase on the floor beside them and reaching out, grabbing Ryan’s arm and forcing her to stop as well. “Did you cry all day?”
“Most of it,” Ryan said, sniffling pathetically and rubbing at her cheeks. “When I wasn’t hitting things.”
Spencer couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that, but reached out and hugged Ryan tightly. Ryan wrapped her arms around Spencer and hugged back just as tightly.
“I fucking hate this,” she muttered. “I just want to be fucking normal again.”
“It’ll happen, Ry,” Spencer said. “You just have to, you know, wait it out.”
Three days later, it did.
***
Spencer woke up to the bed dipping down as someone literally jumped into it, landing half on top of him. He grunted and pushed, using knees and elbows and everything he had to get the offending body out of the bed.
“Spencer,” said a voice that he hadn’t heard in a while. “Wake the fuck up.”
Spencer cracked an eye open to see Ryan hovering less than an inch from his face. “This better be good, because I think you broke something.”
“This is good,” Ryan said. “This is better than good.” He poked Spencer hard in the ribs. “This is the best.”
Spencer opened his eyes and took a good look at Ryan. At shirtless Ryan, sitting there on his bed in a pair of boxer shorts.
“You’re a real boy now,” Spencer said with a bit of a snort, and Ryan smiled at him.
“I am,” he said, before getting out of Spencer’s bed. Spencer noticed that he didn’t wake Brendon up before going back into the other room.
***
“Ryan’s a boy again,” Spencer told Brendon. He was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, brushing his hair while Brendon was brushing his teeth. Brendon almost choked on his toothpaste.
“What?” he asked after he finally managed to stop coughing. Spencer was frowning at him.
“Ryan’s a boy again,” Spencer repeated. “And he’s happy about it, Brendon, so please for the love of God try not to ruin that, okay?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Brendon said, not looking at Spencer. What did Spencer think he was going to do? “How do you know that Ryan’s a boy again?”
“Because he jumped in the middle of my bed this morning in his boxers,” Spencer said, moving into the bathroom so that he could look at his hair in the mirror.
“Why didn’t he tell me,” Brendon asked.
“I don’t know, but I bet that you can guess if you think about it long enough,” Spencer said, before walking out of the bathroom.
***
Spence was sitting in the front lounge, checking his email. Brendon looked to see if Ryan was up front with him, but he wasn’t. Brendon peeked into Ryan’s bunk. Not there either, though if he had been, the only thing that would have kept Brendon from talking to him would have been if Ryan was sleeping. Ryan wasn’t. At least, not in his bunk.
He made his way back to the back lounge, where Ryan was busy concentrating on a videogame, on his knees on the couch, his eyes fixed on the television. Right as Brendon walked in, Ryan started frantically smashing buttons, then tossed the controller down, falling back on the couch, defeated.
“Can I talk to you?” Brendon asked, suddenly nervous. Ryan looked at him for a long moment, before nodding, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair. “About… look. I don’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about what we did,” Ryan said quietly. “So if you want to pretend it didn’t happen, then that’s fine.”
“No, Ryan, that’s not what I’m saying,” Brendon said, frowning. “I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen, just like I don’t want to pretend the other thing didn’t happen.”
“You were drunk,” Ryan said, narrowing his eyes at Brendon. “I don’t actually think I want to have this conversation with you, okay?” He started to get up, but Brendon stopped him.
“I was drunk. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Brendon said. “And I realize that I… fucked everything up.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, and Brendon was a little bit surprised.
“Okay look,” Brendon said, suddenly too frustrated to keep being nice about it. “I realized that I didn’t want you to go back to being a boy because I was in love with you.”
Ryan stared at him for a minute, his eyes wide and startled. Then he started to get up again. Brendon went to stop him, and this time he put up a fight, struggling to get away from Brendon. He went to push past the other boy, but Brendon grabbed him. “Let me go,” Ryan said, his voice tight.
“Listen to me, okay?” Brendon said. “Just fucking hear me out!”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” Ryan yelled at him. “You wanted me to be miserable. Thanks a fucking lot, Brendon.”
He tried to jerk away, but Brendon held on, going with him. “Ryan. Listen to me. Please? Spencer said something that really made me feel like a dumbass for all of this.”
“Oh yeah,” Ryan said, jerking his wrists away from Brendon, still glaring at him.
“Yeah,” Brendon said, and suddenly he didn’t know what to say, and he knew that if he didn’t think of something fast, Ryan was going to walk away and they’d end up not speaking for a week. “He said. He asked me what I was really in love with because you were the same person, just physically different. So I… I thought about it.”
“And?” Ryan asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boy or a girl,” Brendon said. “I don’t think.”
“You’d better make sure,” Ryan said, then turned around and walked to his bunk, closing the curtain between himself and Brendon.
Brendon sighed and sank down on the couch.
***
Ryan hadn’t said a word to him in almost two days. Spencer had said many, and apparently Ryan had said a great many things to Spencer to be passed on to Brendon, but most of those things would have gotten a movie a higher rating than R. Spencer wasn’t blaming everything completely on Brendon, thankfully, because, he said “at least you were honest.”
He knocked on the door to the room that Ryan was sharing with Spencer and Spencer answered. “Ryan’s not here,” he said, and Brendon sighed. “I think he went down to the pool.”
Brendon nodded, and went downstairs.
Ryan was the only person in the pool area, because it was early. He was sitting on the edge with his feet dangling in the water. He obviously hadn’t intended to go swimming, since he was dressed and had his jeans tugged up to his knees. His shoes and socks were sitting on the cement behind him. Brendon walked over and took his own off, sitting down beside Ryan and dangling his feet in the water. Ryan didn’t look at him, and didn’t say anything.
Brendon leaned his head over on Ryan’s shoulder. “I don’t want this to ruin everything,” Brendon said.
“I think it’s a little late for that,” Ryan said. Brendon wrapped an arm around him, and Ryan made to pull away, but seemed to think better of it and leaned against Brendon instead.
“No,” Brendon said firmly. “Because I am going to… I don’t know, not be dumb anymore, if you promise not to be a bitchy girl all the time.”
“If this is your way of apologizing, it’s not working,” Ryan said, annoyed, looking at his reflection in the water. “It’s making you sound like a dick.”
“It’s a compromise,” Brendon said. “I’m not an idiot, and you’re not a bitch. It’ll work out.” Ryan thought seriously about shoving Brendon in the water, but realized that he’d probably go in too, and his sidekick was in his back pocket. “Ryan, seriously? I’m sorry that I was an idiot before.”
“You’re an idiot right now,” Ryan said. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Lots of things have changed. We’ve slept together now, right? You were a girl, but that doesn’t make it not have happened.”
“Are you going to shut up? Or just keep going and make me hate you?”
“Ryan, look at me.”
Ryan turned his head, and Brendon kissed him.
Ryan started to jerk away, started to say, “don’t fuck with me,” but Brendon had his arm around Ryan’s waist and wouldn’t let him go. Finally, Ryan just gave in and let Brendon kiss him.
Brendon stopped and pulled back with a laugh, ducking his head, kicking his feet a bit in the water, before looking back up at Ryan.
“I’m not making any promises,” Ryan said, but he actually managed to crack a little bit of a smile. Brendon smiled back at him.
“But you smiled, so I’m counting that as a win,” Brendon said.
Ryan grinned at him, then shoved him in the pool before jumping up and grabbing his shoes and running inside, his pants still pulled up around his knees.
Brendon Urie / Ryan Ross ( Panic! At The Disco )
NC-17
For wtf27 prompt 1: Genderswap. I worked on this fic so damned long that I had a dream the other night that Ryan Ross was a girl. I’m not sure whether that’s dedication, or me losing my mind. Either way. Yeah. Dubious thanks to Kathy for the title. Sorry it got so epic. There's even deleted scenes, but that's pretty much porn. :P
Ryan was sulking.
Some little tiny voice in the back of Brendon’s head helpfully adds ‘again’, but he’s more than sure that Ryan has not stopped sulking since he woke up that morning. And then the same tiny little voice reminds him: ‘you can’t really use the masculine pronoun to refer to Ryan anymore now that he’s a girl’.
“Go talk to him-her. Go talk to her.” Spencer was saying. Brendon looked back at him, and shook his head.
“No way,” Brendon said. “What if he-she-freaks out again?”
“Well, then she freaks out,” Spencer said. He and Brendon entered into a staring contest that was only stopped when Ryan actually spoke.
“I’m not going to freak out again,” he said, reaching one hand up and pushing his hair out of his face. “And I can hear every word you’re saying. Stop referring to me as a she, because this is not permanent. This had better not be permanent.”
***
Brendon had woken up that morning to screaming.
Not just screaming, but flat out shrieking and he thought briefly that he’d died and woken up in hell and all he was going to hear for the rest of eternity was rabid fangirls. His second thought was something along the lines of “holy shit, that is coming from THIS ROOM” and the third thought was “where the fuck is Ryan?” when he saw the tangled empty sheets on the other bed.
He stumbled out of bed, catching himself on the wall when the pesky sheets decided to tangle around his ankle and not let him go. He swore under his breath and made his way to the bathroom to the source of the screaming, which had, in the minute it took for Brendon to get from the bed ( and out of the damn sheets ) and into the bathroom doorway, had changed from shrieking to dejected sobbing.
“Ryan?” he said sleepily, rubbing at his eyes. The dark haired, dark eyed girl sitting on the edge of the bathtub wearing Ryan’s boxers promptly screeched and fell backward into the tub.
“Get out!” she yelled at him, and Brendon, after he recovered from the shock, moved out of the doorway.
“Um,” Brendon said, a little nervous, because Ryan was gone from the room and had been replaced with some strange girl who was screaming in the bathroom. He was considering calling hotel security.
“Can you bring me um. A t-shirt?” Her voice sounded tearful and shockingly familiar, though Brendon couldn’t manage to place it.
“Do you have a t-shirt?” he asked her, because obviously this girl wasn’t going to be wandering around in a pair of boxers ( which happened to be the ones Ryan had had on when they’d gone to bed the night before, so when had this girl come in? ).
“Just grab one, please,” she said. Brendon shrugged and picked up his t-shirt from the night before, sticking his arm around the door and handing it to her.
Then she appeared in the doorway, the t-shirt too tight across her ( admittedly rather small ) breasts. Her eyes were red and her face was streaked with tears, and Brendon figured that this girl looked like what Ryan would look like if Ryan were a girl.
“Where’s Ryan?” Brendon asked her, because it was important that he know. Otherwise, he was definitely calling security.
“I am Ryan, asshole,” the girl said, and the look on her face was definitely all Ryan Ross, because Brendon had been on the receiving end of that look more than a few times.
“You’re a girl,” Brendon said, suddenly losing all higher brain function. This was ridiculous.
“No shit,” the girl-Ryan said, pushing past Brendon ( she was still just as tall as boy-Ryan had been, still all bony shoulders and elbows, but now with breasts ). Ryan walked back over to the bed and sat down. Brendon noted that his - her, he supposed - legs had come through the transformation clean shaven. And they were nice. ( Stop looking, said a small voice inside his head. )
“What do we do?” Brendon asked, because normally Ryan would know what to do. But she was sitting there on the edge of the bed chewing on her fingernails.
“Go get Spence,” Ryan said. “And… and I don’t know. Find me something to wear.”
***
That was how Ryan had ended up sitting on the sofa in the back lounge of the bus wearing jeans and the biggest, baggiest sweatshirt she could find. Brendon noted that it really didn’t do anything to hide the fact that she really actually had, you know, breasts. But she was trying damned hard, with her arms crossed and her legs pulled up on the couch, staring at Brendon and Spencer from over her knees.
“So what do we do?” Spencer asked, and Ryan made a tiny noise of frustration, which sounded odd, coming out in her girl-voice. She pushed her fingers through her hair ( still short, but just as attractive as when she was a boy, surprisingly enough ) and chewed nervously on her lip.
“Figure out a way to change me back,” Ryan said stubbornly. She’d already told them both that she was not leaving the bus until she was a boy again.
“We don’t know how,” Brendon said, exasperated, because they’d already had this conversation five times and counting.
“Then figure it out!” Ryan yelled at him, and Spencer moved over, wrapping his arms around Ryan and hugging her. Ryan tensed up before she relaxed against Spencer, taking a deep breath. She didn’t really mean to yell, but she couldn’t deal with this. “I just don’t want to be a girl forever.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Spencer said, and Ryan nodded. Brendon started to feel a little left out. “Until then… you’re a girl. How are we going to explain that um. Ryan Ross has disappeared and we’ve replaced him with a girl?”
Ryan burst into tears.
***
Turns out, that if she stayed away from the majority of people, Ryan could actually pretend that he was still a him, and not, you know, girl-him. But he knew that it would only work for so long, and they still hadn’t figured out a way to turn her back.
And God, he hoped it happened soon, because he hated his girl-body. It was awkward and emphatically not his, and bras were uncomfortable as hell. Not to mention that he had some kind of serious hormone imbalance, apparently, because even though he would sometimes claim that he was “such a girl”, being one was a completely different story.
***
Brendon and Spencer were sleeping. At least, Ryan sincerely hoped they were sleeping. ( Spencer was, at least, because he could hear snoring, and he was pretty sure Brendon was as well, because he heard the murmuring that he was one day going to record and play for Brendon just to prove that he talked in his sleep. And kicked. And stole the blankets. ) He hoped they were sleeping, because he’d finally gotten the courage to, well, check things out.
The real story was, he suddenly had different anatomy, and he was dying to know how it felt. ( He promised himself that if he learned anything about female anatomy from this, he’d use everything he knew to make his next relationship that much better. ) He was stretched out on his back in his bunk with the curtains closed, listening hard for anyone moving around in the hallway or their own bunks ( although he definitely attributed any movement from Brendon’s bunk to the fact that Brendon was a mover ).
He slid his hand slowly down his stomach, over his bare skin. Even this part was different, because the line of hair leading down from his navel was gone. He hesitated just at the top of his pajama bottoms, before just breathing in and going for it, sliding his fingers down over his skin, over coarse hair covering something new and different and - God.
He stopped, listening hard, hoping that no one had woken up. When he didn’t hear anything different from what he’d heard before, he relaxed, bending one knee and moving his legs farther apart. He moved his hand until he was - fuck - cupping himself. His lips were parted and he was trying to breathe normal and fuck, fuck, he couldn’t fucking. get himself off in the bunks with the other guys sleeping now that he was a fucking girl.
He hesitated, not sure if he should keep going, if he should really do this, or if he should wait until he was in a hotel room, locked away from everyone else. Then he realized, he wanted to do this. He shifted his hand, trying to figure out how to even begin. Finally, he decided, if he was going to do it, then he’d do it, and shifted his hand, sliding one finger between and -
Fuck.
It was exactly like touching a girl, only he could fucking feel everything, and certain things made him want to arch his hips up off the mattress. But he couldn’t do that, and he had to be silent. He still didn’t have the courage to do much more than touch, not brave enough to slide his fingers inside, but brave enough to keep massaging that one spot that made his entire body ache, made his hips jerk and made him have to cover his mouth to keep from making any kind of noise.
It was hot, it was wet, and it felt fucking good. He felt like a slut when he spread his legs farther, making it easier. He was going to have to stop. He couldn’t do this in the bunk, because the more he touched, the more he wanted to moan, to cry out. And he couldn’t. He swallowed hard, and kept his hand over his mouth because he couldn’t stop.
Having an orgasm as a girl was not quite the same thing as having one as a boy. His body tightened and his fingers stopped moving, and he was shaking, and the whole thing left him wet and exhausted lying on the mattress breathing hard. Shit, he thought, lying there dazed with his hand still inside his pants, his fingers still against himself.
He had to stop himself from imagining what it would feel like to have someone else do that to him.
***
After a week and a half, they realized that they would have to get someone else involved. Someone who knew about weird shit like this. Or at least, someone they hoped knew about weird shit like this.
Ryan called Pete.
They were locked in Ryan’s hotel room, with the door to the adjoining room propped open and the sound of some cartoon carrying through into their room as Ryan pushed the speaker button and listened to the phone ringing. Spencer was sitting close enough that Ryan could feel him breathing, and Brendon was picking at a loose thread on the seam of his pants, his legs hanging off the end of the bed. Pete’s voicemail picked up and Ryan groaned.
“You better not have hit the ignore button, asshole,” Ryan snarled into the phone. Both Brendon and Spencer looked at her in surprise. “This is Ryan. It’s important. Call me back like. And when I say important, I mean fucking important.”
Then she hung up.
“He’s going to call and he’s going to be freaking out,” Brendon pointed out. "That message is going to make him freak out." Ryan looked at him silently. "Yeah okay. I get it."
They sat in silence, waiting to see if Pete would actually call them back. Five minutes later, the phone rang, and Ryan answered, hitting the button for speakerphone.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," Ryan said tensely. "But we have a serious problem."
"You haven't kicked out any more members of the band have you?" Pete asked, and he actually sounded genuinely concerned. "And you sound really odd."
“Yeah, that's one way to put it," Ryan told him sarcastically. "Look, when I say we've got a problem, I really mean it, Pete."
"I think I figured that part out," Pete said, and Ryan could tell he was getting frustrated, but she was trying to think of a way to just break the news. "So just spill it already."
"I'm a girl," Ryan blurted out. Silence on the other end of the line.
“No seriously," Pete said. "What's the problem?"
“I am a fucking girl, Peter,” Ryan yelled, making Spencer and Brendon jump. “I have turned into a girl. I have girl parts. And I want to know if you know how to change me back.”
“Oh,” Pete said, and was quiet for a moment. “Are you a hot girl?”
Spencer started laughing and Ryan was sure that Brendon was as well by the way his shoulders were shaking. Ryan made a noise of righteous indignation.
“Answer my question, Wentz,” Ryan said. Pete laughed.
“So does that mean you’re not a hot girl, Ryan?” Pete asked, still laughing, and Ryan reached out to end the call, flustered, but Spencer stopped her by grabbing hold of her wrist.
“Do you know a way to change her back?” Spencer asked.
“Him,” Ryan said. “I’m a fucking dude, Spence.”
“Actually, you’re technically a girl, for now,” Pete said. “And no, as far as I know there’s no way to change you back. It happened to Andy a couple years ago, and he just had to wait it out. Turned back after about a month and a half.”
Ryan let out a horrified little whimper. “But there has to be a way to make me turn back faster,” she said. “Because I can’t do this. I can’t be a girl. I have to go on tour. And they’re expecting me. Not. Whatever I am now.”
“I think that you’re going to need to postpone dates due to illness,” Pete said. “Or get a temp.”
Ryan looked helplessly at Brendon and Spencer, and both of them shrugged. “Okay,” Ryan said. “We’ll… figure something out.”
“Don’t freak out, Ryan,” Pete advised. “I mean, you’ll change back. Until then, things’ll be okay. Just make sure that you um. Make the best of things.”
Pete disconnected the call before Ryan could ask what he meant. She looked up at Spencer. “What the fuck does that mean?”
***
When two weeks passed and Ryan still hadn’t turned back into a boy, he decided it was time to go shopping. The only problem was, he was used to going with his friends, and suddenly, the only friends he had who knew what had happened were all boys. And Ryan really didn’t want to go shopping with Brendon or Spencer.
“You shouldn’t go by yourself,” Spencer said. “I mean. Because.” He looked at Ryan for a moment. “Because you’re a girl.” Ryan put his hands on his hips and stared at Spencer, because obviously, the boy had gotten it in the head and now his brain was rattled because he wasn’t making any sense.
“If you’re implying that I can’t go to a mall by myself to shop, I can punch you and show you just how well I can take care of myself,” Ryan said, glaring at Spencer.
“No!” Spencer said, stepping back. “I’m not saying that. Well, I am saying that, kind of. But wouldn’t you rather one of us went with you? Or anyone, really.”
“Spencer, if you want to go shopping for bras and shit with me, you’re more than welcome to,” Ryan said sweetly.
“Only if I get to watch you try them on,” Spencer said, and Ryan took a swing at him, but Spencer caught Ryan’s wrist before his fist could do any serious damage to Spencer’s arm. Ryan stuck his tongue out at Spencer in lieu of his thwarted attempt at smacking his friend. He pulled away and wandered off to finish getting dressed.
“Are we all going?” Brendon asked, clicking through the channels on the television, looking for something, anything to watch.
“We could,” Ryan said, shrugging, looking up from tying his shoes. “I mean, I’m going to buy girl’s underwear, guys. So do you really want to tag along on this venture?”
“We’re moral support,” Spencer said, plopping down onto the edge of the bed and untying one of his sneakers. Ryan turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow.
“It’s bras. How much moral support could I need?” Ryan asked.
It turned out, there were really two answers to the question. Ryan really thought the first mistake was going into, you know, a women’s underwear store with two of his best friends who happened to still possess their Y chromosomes. His second mistake was his choice of underwear store, because the saleslady swooped down on him immediately, and asked if she could help, and all he could manage to get out was “bras,” and she was looking at him funny because he was dressed like a boy. ( It didn’t help that Brendon and Spencer were having a laugh at his expense. He made a mental note to kill them in their sleep. )
So the answer, in part, was a hell of a lot of support that he was not getting from his so called friends as he looked at the massive racks of bras and didn’t have a clue what size he actually was. Not that they would have known either, but if the other two could have stopped snickering at him for thirty seconds, they might have been able to put their brains together and figure something out.
Finally, he just grabbed some that looked like they might have been close to the right size and asked the saleslady to let him into a dressing room. “Your boyfriend is welcome to come with you,” she said, and Ryan was baffled as to the reason she had such a thick southern accent when they were nowhere near the south.
Ryan froze, and turned to look at Brendon and Spencer, before speed walking back to them. “She said um. That my boyfriend can come with me.”
“Not it,” Spencer said quickly. He wasn’t interested in pretending to be Ryan’s boyfriend. Brendon’s eyes got a bit wide.
“I’m not pretending to be your boyfriend,” Brendon said. “I mean. No offense or anything, but no.”
“One of you come with me,” Ryan said. “I know how to take these things off of someone else, but I’m pretty sure putting one on myself is going to be an entirely different story.”
“And you think that I’m going to be able to help?” Brendon asked. Ryan just looked at him silently for a moment.
“Yes,” he finally said, and grabbed Brendon’s wrist, dragging him toward where the saleslady was waiting, holding the handful of bras. Brendon stumbled after him, not quite ready for the force with which Ryan pulled him. The saleslady just smiled at him and didn’t say anything about the way Ryan was holding onto Brendon’s wrist, not his hand.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Ryan muttered, once inside the dressing room. He’d taken his t-shirt off but he was fumbling just trying to get the damn bra unclasped to put it on. Brendon was studiously not looking, because this was a naked girl, a gorgeous naked girl, regardless of the fact that two weeks before said girl had been a boy.
“I don’t know how to put a bra on,” Brendon said. “I’ve never been a girl.” Ryan slapped him hard and open handed on the arm, and it echoed in the dressing room. It gave Brendon an excuse to lock eyes with Ryan so that he wasn’t tempted to look at Ryan’s chest.
“Fuck you,” Ryan said. He slid his arms into the bra and tried clasping it, but couldn’t quite make his fingers work to do it. In theory, if he could undo it, he could do it, but in practice it was actually different. He sighed. “Brendon,” he whispered, and turned around. “Help?”
Fuck, Brendon thought, but clasped the bra for Ryan anyway. Ryan squirmed, because Brendon was tickling him a little bit, but once it was done, he turned around to look at Brendon.
“It doesn’t fit,” he said sadly. Brendon nodded, and now he was definitely looking at Ryan’s breasts. He really, really couldn’t do this.
“Do you want me to go get someone else who might. Um. Actually know what’s going on?” Brendon asked. “Or Spencer? Because he’s suave and shit and probably knows how to do this better than me.”
“Please?” Ryan asked, realizing that Brendon was really uncomfortable with the situation, but not quite understanding why. So what if Ryan was a girl now. Brendon had seen tits before. But Brendon nodded and left the dressing room, going and finding Spencer who was standing around awkwardly, pretending to be invisible.
“Go help her?” Brendon said. “Because seriously, what do I know about bra fitting?”
“And… you think I… do?” Spencer asked, looking at Brendon with both eyebrows raised and his eyes wide. He reached up and pushed his hair out of his face.
“You’ll be more helpful than me,” Brendon said, pushing Spencer toward the dressing rooms. “At least you won’t be looking at her tits instead of, you know, helping.”
“It’s Ryan, why would you look at her tits?” Spencer asked. “I mean, not that they’re not nice, but seriously. Ryan.” He paused. “Unless this has something to do with That Time.”
“I was drunk,” Brendon said, gritting his teeth a little and pushing Spencer harder. Spencer laughed at him.
“Ryan wasn’t,” he said, but disappeared into the dressing area before Brendon could say anything else.
***
“So what are we doing about the tour?” Brendon asked. They were back in the hotel room, where they’d holed up after the first couple of days. They couldn’t go home, because it would have been interesting to try to explain to Ryan’s dad why he suddenly had a daughter.
“Let’s do it anyway,” Ryan said. She was lying on her back on the bed, her head hanging over the edge, legs stretched out alongside Spencer’s. Brendon was sitting on the dresser, looking at Ryan looking at him upside down.
“And… we explain why you’re a girl… how?” Brendon said skeptically. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it, but Ryan was, well, a girl.
“Do I really look that much different?” Ryan asked, sitting up and turning around, looking in the mirror mounted to the dresser behind Brendon.
“Aside from your tits?” Spencer asked, nudging Ryan’s back with his foot. Ryan reached behind her and slapped Spencer’s leg.
“Fuck off,” she said. “I mean, so what, I have tits. They’re not that big. We could squash them down or something.” She pushed at her chest, and Brendon just stared at her. “And I don’t know. I could. Not sing, because obviously my voice is different. And I can wear… I don’t know. high collars or something.”
“What happens when someone’s like, wow, Ryan looks awfully like a chick these days,” Spencer asked. “Or when they say, hey, that’s not Ryan, who the hell is that?”
“Don’t be so positive, Spencer, jeez,” Ryan said, rolling her eyes. “If that happens, then we say we got a really attractive temp because Ryan is deathly ill.”
“And what happens when they ask if we kicked you out of the band, too?” Spencer all but whispered. The entire room went silent, and Spencer watched Ryan’s back as she held her breath.
“We didn’t,” Ryan said in a rush of breath. “We didn’t, because this is not that thing. This has nothing to do with that. This is something beyond my control and if anyone asks, I am sick. That’s it.”
“What are you sick with?” Brendon asked, not even wanting to touch the other subject, considering Ryan’s anger about it. It was all a sore subject, and they tried to avoid talking about it whenever possible.
“Mono. Fuck. I don’t know,” Ryan said, pulling her legs up on the bed and sighing, hands in lap. “We’ll think of something. I can’t not do this. I have to do this.”
Brendon looked at Spencer over Ryan’s head, and Spencer shrugged.
***
Ryan felt guilty that he couldn’t go out and meet and talk to people. He felt guilty that they were lying to so many people on such a consistent basis. That was why he was sitting on the bus hiding out. He hated to keep telling people that he wasn’t feeling well - all the lying was actually making him sick.
It wasn’t hard to keep up the lie. They said that he didn’t feel well. He couldn’t sing backups, and being onstage was hard, sometimes ( but that was because of the fucking binding squishing down his boobs, because it was seriously killing him ). But he couldn’t not do it.
Brendon kept saying that they could just postpone the dates until Ryan changed back. They’d had the conversation five times in the past week and every time they had it it had ended with Ryan banishing Brendon from his room and slamming the door until Spencer came in to try and smooth things over, explaining that Brendon was just trying to be helpful. ( “He’s being a dick,” Ryan had informed Spencer, before pulling off his t-shirt and struggling out of the damn vice they wrapped around him to squish his breasts. )
“We have got to figure out a way to change me back,” Ryan said, scrutinizing himself in the mirror. He made faces at himself for a moment before turning back to Spencer. “Before I go crazy. From lying and Brendon and being a girl in general. Because it sucks.”
“I just hope it’s not contagious,” Spencer said, leaning back on his arms, looking at Ryan. “Because I doubt my boobs would look half as great as yours.”
“Oh, get the fuck out,” Ryan said, and pointed at the door. Spencer laughed as he walked out, pulling the door shut behind him.
***
“What the hell?” Brendon asked, when the door to the back lounge was slammed in his face for at least the third time that day. He made his way to the front lounge and flopped into a seat beside Spencer, sulking.
“What’d you do this time,” Spencer asked, not looking up from the computer screen. “Exist?”
“Pretty much. Everything that comes out of my mouth is wrong,” Brendon said, and his pouting and sulking was completely lost on Spencer.
“Yeah, that pretty much happens with girls sometimes,” Spencer said. “I think it’s the estrogen. Or it could just be Ryan, you know.” He still didn’t look up from the computer, and knew that it was driving Brendon crazy that he wasn’t paying attention to Brendon’s sulking.
“Yeah, but I’m actually trying, you know?” Brendon said. This time, Spencer really did look up and look over at him.
“Why not just treat her like normal? She’s still Ryan,” Spencer said. “Unless, you know, the girl thing is a real problem for you.”
“Uh. Yeah,” Brendon said. “Maybe a little.”
Spencer was silent, looking at Brendon for a moment. “Please tell me that you’re not having some sudden epiphany and you like Ryan, now.”
“Um.”
“Jesus, Brendon.”
They were silent for a moment, Spencer looking back at his computer screen and Brendon fidgeting nervously with the edge of his shirt, buttoning and unbuttoning the last button.
“Is it because Ryan’s a girl now?” Spencer asked after a long time. “Or because it’s Ryan?”
“I don’t know,” Brendon admitted.
“You’d better not ever let Ryan find out about that,” Spencer said. Brendon nodded, and they both let it drop.
***
Twenty minutes later, Brendon walked back into the back lounge. Ryan was stretched out on her stomach, one leg kicking back and forth through the air as she read the book spread open on the couch in front of her. Brendon walked over and sat down on the floor beside her.
“What?” she asked him, not looking away from her book. Brendon noticed that the pages were dog eared and messy and wondered where the book had come from.
“What do I do wrong?” Brendon asked. “I mean, it seems like Spencer does everything right, and everything that comes out of my mouth makes you hate me. Is this a weird girl thing? Because I swear it wasn’t like this before.”
Ryan dog-eared the page and closed the book, looking over at Brendon, silent for a moment. “Do you remember that time,” she said, “when we first got signed. And we were recording. And you were fucking plastered. And you started kissing me, and we just.”
“But why are you mad at me for that now?” Brendon asked. “It’s not like you’ve never kissed boys.”
“Maybe it’s my extra girl hormones,” Ryan said, and Brendon knew that there was about to be another fight, just by the way Ryan’s voice got tight. “Or maybe it’s because of the way you look at me now.”
“I was drunk, Ryan,” Brendon said. “And you’re a hot girl now. Are you going to hold that against me?”
Some part of that ( maybe all of it ) was the wrong thing for Brendon to say, and Ryan twisted around and sat up with lightning speed and Brendon wasn’t sure that he wasn’t about to get slapped, and he flinched back. But Ryan didn’t slap him, and didn’t even raise her voice.
“I wasn’t,” she said, her voice low, and angry. “I wasn’t, Brendon. So yes, I am going to hold this against you.” She got up and walked out. Brendon watched her make her way into the hall and lift herself up into her bunk, jerking the curtain shut.
Fuck, Brendon thought. That sucked. He sat there, thinking, leaning against the edge of the couch. He didn’t understand what it meant.
And then it hit him. Maybe it was the slap that Ryan didn’t give him. Ryan hadn’t been drunk. Ryan had made out with Brendon. Ryan was pissed off that Brendon kept checking her out.
Oh, Brendon thought, and couldn’t believe that he’d been that big of an idiot, all this time. Shit.
***
Spencer was laughing at him, because Spencer, Brendon was suddenly figuring out, was a jerk. Brendon frowned and stuck his arm out of the bathroom for flip the other boy off.
“Stop fucking laughing at me, okay?” Brendon said. He was trying to get dressed. He was trying to make himself look presentable.
“You’re so nervous about it though,” Spencer said, snickering, sitting on the bed reading his e-mail. “Like you’ve never been on a date before. And really, it’s just Ryan. It’s not like it’s even really a date.”
“Oh no,” Brendon said. “It is totally a date. Trust me when I say it’s a date, because if there’s one thing that I know about girls, it’s if you tell them you’re going to take them out and they like you? It’s automatically a date.”
“Could you possibly be more conceited?” Spencer asked. “I mean seriously. Do you really think Ryan’s just going to assume it’s a date? Because Ryan’s not stupid, Brendon.”
“Um,” Brendon said. “Ryan probably thinks it’s a date because that’s how I approached the subject.”
“What?” Spencer asked, getting up and going to the bathroom door, looking at Brendon, who was standing in front of the mirror wearing his pants and socks. “What does that mean?”
“It means I screwed up and said ‘let’s go on a date!’ because I’m an idiot,” Brendon said. Spencer just stared at him like he’d grown a third eyeball in the middle of his forehead. And then Spencer made a mental note to draw one there for his own personal amusement the next time Brendon fell asleep anywhere that wasn’t his bunk.
“Ryan laughed at you,” Spencer said. It wasn’t a question.
“So hard she snorted,” Brendon said. He made a face at himself in the mirror, because it had easily been the least smooth thing he’d ever done.
“So how did you end up deciding to go on a … date,” Spencer asked. He didn’t even want to call it a date, because how bizarre was that? Brendon and Ryan, on a date?
“We just… I don’t even know,” Brendon said, pushing past Spencer back into the room. Spencer followed him, walking back over and sprawling out on the bed. Brendon pulled his shirt on then sat down on the edge of the other bed to pull on socks. There was a knock on the connecting door, then it opened and Ryan walked in.
Ryan was most definitely a girl. Startlingly, completely a girl, and Spencer found himself staring, embarrassingly, at his best friend’s new cleavage. ( He wasn’t the only one staring, it was just that Brendon’s eyes had focused on the very, very long length of leg visible beneath the skirt Ryan was wearing. )
“Stop staring,” Ryan said nervously. “Stop looking at me like that, Spencer, I can kick your ass.” Spencer snorted, and Brendon managed to look away long enough to finish putting on his shoes.
“I guess you’re ready to go?” Brendon asked, looking up at Ryan as he finished tying his shoes. Ryan nodded, and Brendon stood up.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” Spencer said, and Brendon laughed as he led Ryan out of the room. The progress down the hall was slow, because, well, Ryan was walking really slowly.
“I don’t think I can do this,” she whispered to Brendon. Brendon stopped and turned to her.
“Just relax, okay?” Brendon said. “You’re a girl. Girls go out with boys. It happens. No one’s going to think twice. Unless they recognize us. Which. You know, okay, then we might have a problem, but -“
“You’re not making me less nervous,” Ryan pointed out.
“I know, but, you don’t. You’ve got on an awfully lot of makeup, you know? No one’s going to think anything. Hopefully,” Brendon said. Ryan made a face. “Just relax. If anything happens, we’ll deal, okay?”
“Okay,” Ryan said, and sighed as they stepped into the elevator.
***
“Spencer would so not do this.”
The elevator was slowly making it’s way back up to the tenth floor, and Brendon had Ryan shoved against the wall, his hand sliding underneath the edge of Ryan’s skirt. Ryan’s lip-gloss tasted like cherry cola and her body was warm against Brendon’s.
“Spencer has never been through a spontaneous sex change,” Ryan said, before pushing her lips against Brendon’s again. Somewhere in the back of Brendon’s mind, he thought, Spencer also doesn’t want to sleep with me, as far as I know, but he said nothing.
“I was just pointing out that he told us not to do anything he wouldn’t do,” Brendon teased, his fingers moving along the smooth skin of the inside of Ryan’s thigh. “And he wouldn’t do this.”
“Since when do you even care what Spencer tells you to do?” Ryan asked. The elevator doors dinged and started to slide open and Brendon and Ryan walked out, much faster this time, to a startled look from a middleaged woman about to board.
Sometime on the ride back to the hotel, Ryan had casually mentioned that she’d read on the internet that spontaneous changes in gender were sometimes fixed by simply having sex. After almost a month as a girl, Ryan had had all she could take, and was willing to try anything, and Brendon just happened to be available ( and willing ).
“Excuse us,” Ryan said sweetly to the woman that they walked past, giggling as she tugged on Brendon’s hand and pulled him quickly down the hallway. At least the woman would have a good story to tell about the two teenagers she’d met getting off the elevator where the boy had lipstick smeared all over his mouth and one side of the girl’s skirt was pushed awkwardly up her hip.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Brendon asked, even as he was laying Ryan back on the bed, clothes discarded on the floor and the other bed and the dresser and everywhere that they’d landed when thrown.
“I don’t want to be a girl anymore,” Ryan said, shifting underneath Brendon, pulling him close. “And if this works things can go back to normal.”
That was all the reassurance that Brendon needed.
It wasn’t that Ryan was easy, really, it was just that she was ready to do this, to get this over with. Well, partly that, and partly that Ryan still thought of sex like a boy. She was ready, and could Brendon please skip over all of this foreplay shit? He snorted with laughter when she said as much, and told her that it was a real mood killer to be told that.
“It doesn’t have to be romantic,” Ryan said. Brendon stopped and looked at her for a moment. Then he shook his head.
“Look, this will hopefully be the only time you have sex as a girl,” Brendon said. “You should, you know, enjoy it.”
“I would much rather be having sex as a boy,” Ryan said, frowning at him. Brendon’s fingers were stroking down her skin, across her stomach. The action made her bite her lip, made her body arch up against Brendon’s fingers.
“With me?” Brendon asked, raising an eyebrow, seemingly unfazed, sliding his hand lower
“With anyone,” Ryan said, then gasped when Brendon’s fingers touched places she’d previously only touched herself.
“That makes you sound like a slut, Ry,” Brendon whispered. It even sort of made him sad, to hear Ryan say things like that.
“I don’t care,” Ryan whimpered out, because fuck, what the hell was Brendon doing with his fingers down there anyway?
“I care,” Brendon said, and kissed her, and then realized that he sort of wanted Ryan to stay a girl. So he could be with her. The thought just made him kiss her harder, because he shouldn’t want that. He should want Ryan to be happy, and being a girl made Ryan unhappy. Right?
He couldn’t stop hoping that it wouldn’t work.
***
Spencer was still awake waiting for Brendon to come back, so he could ask about their “date”. He couldn’t help grinning at just the idea of it, because it was ridiculous. A date. Seriously.
He was half asleep when he heard the barely-audible cry from the next room, the distinct sound of someone getting off. From Ryan’s room. Ryan.
So much for not doing anything he wouldn’t do, he thought with a laugh, and finally decided to go to bed.
***
Ryan was still a girl.
He woke up with Brendon sprawled half on top of him, too warm and feeling disgusting, and most emphatically still a girl. He wanted to cry. He pushed at Brendon, frustrated at still being a girl, trying to get up.
“It didn’t work,” he said in a shaky voice. “It didn’t work. Brendon. Wake the fuck up and let me up. It didn’t work.”
“Huh?” Brendon said, not really awake or aware of anything Ryan was actually saying. Ryan pushed hard on his shoulders and managed to force him to roll over. He woke up only when he almost slid off the bed. “Hey, you’re still a girl,” he observed, dazed.
“No shit,” Ryan said, and got up, storming into the bathroom and slamming the door.
***
“I guess she was just desperate for something to work,” Brendon said, turning his cup around and around in his hands. He had gone into the other room and talked Spencer out of bed to go for coffee. Mostly because he couldn’t stand to hear Ryan crying in the bathroom for any longer, and she wouldn’t talk to him or let him in. “You know? Like she read that, and that would be the answer, and things would go back to normal.”
“You’d be desperate too,” Spencer said, watching Brendon. Even with the huge dark sunglasses Brendon was wearing, he knew that the other boy wasn’t looking at him. They were quiet for a moment, and Brendon continued playing with his cup. “You didn’t want it to work,” Spencer all but whispered.
Brendon looked up sharply, and Spencer knew he was right just by the look on what he could see of Brendon’s face. “No,” Brendon said, but he was lying, and Spencer knew he was lying. And Brendon knew that Spencer knew he was lying. “Yes. I didn’t want it to work.” He sighed. “I … “ He wanted to keep her, was the plain and simple truth.
“She’s miserable like this,” Spencer said. “And you know it. That’s why we left her crying in the bathroom.”
“We left her crying in the bathroom because she wouldn’t open the door,” Brendon pointed out. “But I… I don’t know. I want … “
“You’re in love with her as a girl,” Spencer whispered, mostly so that they wouldn’t get weird looks. Brendon shook his head, almost knocking over his cup of coffee, cursing when the liquid sloshed over his hands. Spencer went to grab napkins, handing them to Brendon, who was frowning.
“I’m not,” Brendon said. “Spencer, I can’t be. I want her to stay like this but she’s unhappy and I don’t know what the hell I - we’re supposed to do about it.”
Spencer stopped wiping up the coffee spilled on the table and looked up at Brendon, looking at him for a long time before saying anything. “We’re not supposed to do anything about it,” Spencer said. “Other than hope Ryan goes back to normal. You just have to figure out how to deal with that on your own.”
“But I-“ Brendon started, and Spencer cut him off.
“Look at it as like, Ryan’s not any different, except for physically,” Spencer said. “So who are you even really in love with?”
Brendon didn’t have anything to say to that.
***
They didn’t see Ryan again until that evening, when they all finally walked down to the bus to head off to the next city. She came out of her room carrying her suitcase and wouldn’t look at either one of them as she walked past them toward the elevator. Spencer looked at Brendon for a moment before hurrying to catch up with Ryan, his suitcase banging awkwardly against him as he went. Brendon just slowed down, figuring he’d give Spencer a chance to try and help Ryan.
“Are you okay?” Spencer asked, even though he knew she wasn’t just by looking at her. Her hair was a mess and she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that Spencer thought that Ryan might have had since the beginning of time.
“No,” was all Ryan said, but she looked up at him. Her voice sounded stuffy and tired, and her eyes were red from crying.
“Ryan,” Spencer said, dropping his suitcase on the floor beside them and reaching out, grabbing Ryan’s arm and forcing her to stop as well. “Did you cry all day?”
“Most of it,” Ryan said, sniffling pathetically and rubbing at her cheeks. “When I wasn’t hitting things.”
Spencer couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that, but reached out and hugged Ryan tightly. Ryan wrapped her arms around Spencer and hugged back just as tightly.
“I fucking hate this,” she muttered. “I just want to be fucking normal again.”
“It’ll happen, Ry,” Spencer said. “You just have to, you know, wait it out.”
Three days later, it did.
***
Spencer woke up to the bed dipping down as someone literally jumped into it, landing half on top of him. He grunted and pushed, using knees and elbows and everything he had to get the offending body out of the bed.
“Spencer,” said a voice that he hadn’t heard in a while. “Wake the fuck up.”
Spencer cracked an eye open to see Ryan hovering less than an inch from his face. “This better be good, because I think you broke something.”
“This is good,” Ryan said. “This is better than good.” He poked Spencer hard in the ribs. “This is the best.”
Spencer opened his eyes and took a good look at Ryan. At shirtless Ryan, sitting there on his bed in a pair of boxer shorts.
“You’re a real boy now,” Spencer said with a bit of a snort, and Ryan smiled at him.
“I am,” he said, before getting out of Spencer’s bed. Spencer noticed that he didn’t wake Brendon up before going back into the other room.
***
“Ryan’s a boy again,” Spencer told Brendon. He was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, brushing his hair while Brendon was brushing his teeth. Brendon almost choked on his toothpaste.
“What?” he asked after he finally managed to stop coughing. Spencer was frowning at him.
“Ryan’s a boy again,” Spencer repeated. “And he’s happy about it, Brendon, so please for the love of God try not to ruin that, okay?”
“I wasn’t going to,” Brendon said, not looking at Spencer. What did Spencer think he was going to do? “How do you know that Ryan’s a boy again?”
“Because he jumped in the middle of my bed this morning in his boxers,” Spencer said, moving into the bathroom so that he could look at his hair in the mirror.
“Why didn’t he tell me,” Brendon asked.
“I don’t know, but I bet that you can guess if you think about it long enough,” Spencer said, before walking out of the bathroom.
***
Spence was sitting in the front lounge, checking his email. Brendon looked to see if Ryan was up front with him, but he wasn’t. Brendon peeked into Ryan’s bunk. Not there either, though if he had been, the only thing that would have kept Brendon from talking to him would have been if Ryan was sleeping. Ryan wasn’t. At least, not in his bunk.
He made his way back to the back lounge, where Ryan was busy concentrating on a videogame, on his knees on the couch, his eyes fixed on the television. Right as Brendon walked in, Ryan started frantically smashing buttons, then tossed the controller down, falling back on the couch, defeated.
“Can I talk to you?” Brendon asked, suddenly nervous. Ryan looked at him for a long moment, before nodding, reaching up to run his fingers through his hair. “About… look. I don’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about what we did,” Ryan said quietly. “So if you want to pretend it didn’t happen, then that’s fine.”
“No, Ryan, that’s not what I’m saying,” Brendon said, frowning. “I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen, just like I don’t want to pretend the other thing didn’t happen.”
“You were drunk,” Ryan said, narrowing his eyes at Brendon. “I don’t actually think I want to have this conversation with you, okay?” He started to get up, but Brendon stopped him.
“I was drunk. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Brendon said. “And I realize that I… fucked everything up.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said, and Brendon was a little bit surprised.
“Okay look,” Brendon said, suddenly too frustrated to keep being nice about it. “I realized that I didn’t want you to go back to being a boy because I was in love with you.”
Ryan stared at him for a minute, his eyes wide and startled. Then he started to get up again. Brendon went to stop him, and this time he put up a fight, struggling to get away from Brendon. He went to push past the other boy, but Brendon grabbed him. “Let me go,” Ryan said, his voice tight.
“Listen to me, okay?” Brendon said. “Just fucking hear me out!”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” Ryan yelled at him. “You wanted me to be miserable. Thanks a fucking lot, Brendon.”
He tried to jerk away, but Brendon held on, going with him. “Ryan. Listen to me. Please? Spencer said something that really made me feel like a dumbass for all of this.”
“Oh yeah,” Ryan said, jerking his wrists away from Brendon, still glaring at him.
“Yeah,” Brendon said, and suddenly he didn’t know what to say, and he knew that if he didn’t think of something fast, Ryan was going to walk away and they’d end up not speaking for a week. “He said. He asked me what I was really in love with because you were the same person, just physically different. So I… I thought about it.”
“And?” Ryan asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a boy or a girl,” Brendon said. “I don’t think.”
“You’d better make sure,” Ryan said, then turned around and walked to his bunk, closing the curtain between himself and Brendon.
Brendon sighed and sank down on the couch.
***
Ryan hadn’t said a word to him in almost two days. Spencer had said many, and apparently Ryan had said a great many things to Spencer to be passed on to Brendon, but most of those things would have gotten a movie a higher rating than R. Spencer wasn’t blaming everything completely on Brendon, thankfully, because, he said “at least you were honest.”
He knocked on the door to the room that Ryan was sharing with Spencer and Spencer answered. “Ryan’s not here,” he said, and Brendon sighed. “I think he went down to the pool.”
Brendon nodded, and went downstairs.
Ryan was the only person in the pool area, because it was early. He was sitting on the edge with his feet dangling in the water. He obviously hadn’t intended to go swimming, since he was dressed and had his jeans tugged up to his knees. His shoes and socks were sitting on the cement behind him. Brendon walked over and took his own off, sitting down beside Ryan and dangling his feet in the water. Ryan didn’t look at him, and didn’t say anything.
Brendon leaned his head over on Ryan’s shoulder. “I don’t want this to ruin everything,” Brendon said.
“I think it’s a little late for that,” Ryan said. Brendon wrapped an arm around him, and Ryan made to pull away, but seemed to think better of it and leaned against Brendon instead.
“No,” Brendon said firmly. “Because I am going to… I don’t know, not be dumb anymore, if you promise not to be a bitchy girl all the time.”
“If this is your way of apologizing, it’s not working,” Ryan said, annoyed, looking at his reflection in the water. “It’s making you sound like a dick.”
“It’s a compromise,” Brendon said. “I’m not an idiot, and you’re not a bitch. It’ll work out.” Ryan thought seriously about shoving Brendon in the water, but realized that he’d probably go in too, and his sidekick was in his back pocket. “Ryan, seriously? I’m sorry that I was an idiot before.”
“You’re an idiot right now,” Ryan said. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Lots of things have changed. We’ve slept together now, right? You were a girl, but that doesn’t make it not have happened.”
“Are you going to shut up? Or just keep going and make me hate you?”
“Ryan, look at me.”
Ryan turned his head, and Brendon kissed him.
Ryan started to jerk away, started to say, “don’t fuck with me,” but Brendon had his arm around Ryan’s waist and wouldn’t let him go. Finally, Ryan just gave in and let Brendon kiss him.
Brendon stopped and pulled back with a laugh, ducking his head, kicking his feet a bit in the water, before looking back up at Ryan.
“I’m not making any promises,” Ryan said, but he actually managed to crack a little bit of a smile. Brendon smiled back at him.
“But you smiled, so I’m counting that as a win,” Brendon said.
Ryan grinned at him, then shoved him in the pool before jumping up and grabbing his shoes and running inside, his pants still pulled up around his knees.