if you could stay then i'd show you the way.
Day four. More kink.
The Thing About A Service
Pete, Patrick/OC, Patrick/Pete | R | 7131 words
Disclaimer: Not real, sorry.
Summary: A touching story of love between a rock star and his roadie best friend.
Contains: d/s dynamics, both negotiated and non-; cutting, both self-injurious and non-; Pete not being melodramatic about self-injury; the author's relative lack of judging people for self-injuring. These things take up less than 1500 words of the story.
Notes: AKA leatherdaddy!Patrick. I'm finding myself re-amused by this idea, so.
*
Nobody notices it for the longest time.
Well, except for Andy. Andy notices, because Andy shares a bus with Patrick, so Andy is naturally going to notice when some roadie named Josh starts basically living on their bus instead of just hanging around whenever Patrick is there. He's always bringing Patrick coffee and answering Patrick's bedroom door while Patrick's working and carrying Patrick's stuff for him and--
"--and being, just, really solicitous," Andy finishes, head in his hands, sitting across from Pete at the kitchen table on Joe and Pete's bus.
"Why would Patrick want a roadie living on his bus?" Joe asks no one in particular.
"Why does Patrick get his own fucking roadie?" Pete counters.
"Guys," Andy says. "Seriously. I had to tell him I'm on a cleanse so he'd stop trying to cook for me. It's been a week, okay, I'm starving to death." He does look a little peaky, but Pete saw him eating grapes and crackers in the green room last night, so he's not too worried.
Joe rolls his eyes. "Dude, I gave you like a bucket of hummus two days ago, you are not starving."
"There's a principle here," Andy says. "A principle of Patrick didn't fucking ask to keep his roadie on our bus, okay."
Pete smacks his open hand down on the table. "Something must be done," he says.
At the beginning of tour, Josh had seemed like a pretty normal guy, for a roadie. Skinny, curly brown hair tied back in a bandana, always friendly, always picking up the slack when somebody threw out their back or pulled a muscle, always dressed in jeans and boots and t-shirts, a well-loved green handkerchief in his back pocket, always clean--for a roadie. Pete had liked him. Or, Pete would have liked him, if Pete had ever thought about him before he saw Patrick talking to him out behind a venue three weeks into the tour--Josh's hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the ground. He looked small, even though he must be six feet tall, and Patrick, standing mostly turned away from Pete, had looked somehow more solid than usual--legs braced apart like he was on stage, hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders back.
Pete had watched them for a minute--Patrick speaking too quietly for him to hear, Josh nodding once in a while. He shook his head once, and raised his eyes enough to look at Patrick, and Patrick deflated a bit, fell back into his usual posture: shoulders slumped, feet together. Josh said something, and smiled, and Patrick laughed, Pete could hear it. Patrick leaned forward a bit and rested his head on Josh's chest.
Pete frowned. He'd stolen a golf cart from a maintenance guy and wanted Patrick to do wheelies with him--or, you know, keep a look-out on the curb while Pete did wheelies--but apparently Patrick was busy.
Pete walked away and drove the cart in moody circles through the parking lot. Alone.
Patrick is sitting on the couch in the front lounge when they show up: one foot on the seat, MacBook in his lap, headphones over his ears. His other foot is on the floor. Josh is leaning against his shin, putting glow-in-the-dark gaffer's tape on some cables.
Josh smiles pleasantly at them. "Hey," he says.
"Hi, Josh," Joe and Andy say.
"Hi, Patrick," Pete says loudly.
"Oh, hey guys," Patrick says absently. He slides one ear free. "What's up?"
"Band meeting," Pete says.
Patrick frowns a little and types something. "It's Tuesday. Band meetings are Thursdays."
"Special band meeting," Pete says.
Patrick makes a squinty, displeased face, still looking at his computer screen. "I'm kind of busy, man--"
"Extra-special, super important, emergency band meeting," Pete says through gritted teeth.
"Yeah," Andy says.
Patrick raises his eyebrows and settles his headphones around his neck. "Okay, fine. What?"
"Uh," Joe says, "Josh--"
Josh looks up. "Yeah, Joe?"
"Closed band meeting!" Pete shouts. "Jesus Christ! We're not a fucking five-piece!"
Patrick shoves his MacBook off his lap and stands up, glaring at Pete with a thunderous expression. "Don't yell at him," he says, quietly but firmly, the voice he learned to use instead of screaming when he was twenty. Josh's eyes flick up towards Patrick.
Pete blinks and says, "What the fuck."
"You can go, Joshua," Patrick says. He doesn't look away from Pete.
Josh gathers his cords and tape and ducks out around Joe and Andy where they're standing behind Pete. When the door bangs shut behind him, Patrick relaxes a little, but his face stays hard and angry.
"Let's sit down," Andy says.
Patrick takes his seat. Andy and Joe sit on the second couch, leaving the other end of Patrick's couch for Pete. Pete sits as far back in the corner as he can. Whatever Patrick was working on leaks tinnily from his abandoned headphones. He hits a key on his MacBook and the bus is silent.
"Are you guys fucking or something?" Pete asks, completely failing at sounding casual.
Patrick makes a 'fuck you, Pete' face. "None of your business," he says.
"Totally," Andy says, frowning at Pete. "But Patrick, dude, he's like living here by default, and you never actually talked to me about it, so."
Patrick's eyes go wide and he slaps a hand on top of his head. After a minute, he says, "Holy shit, Andy, I'm sorry."
Andy nods and smiles calmly. "It's not a problem, I figured you didn't realise, I just was like--"
Pete frowns. "Ten minutes ago, you were starving to death."
"What?" Patrick asks.
"Never mind," Andy says.
Patrick leans forward, elbows on his thighs, hands loosely clasped, all earnest and hopeful. "Is it okay if Josh stays on the bus?" he asks Andy.
"Sure," Andy says. "Just--could you tell him to, like, not do shit for me? He should treat me like a roommate or something, you know?"
"Yeah, man," Patrick says, smiling. "I'll let him know what's appropriate."
Andy tilts his head, nods thoughtfully, and says, "Yeah, appropriate. Cool. Okay." He and Patrick sit there smiling at each other and Joe sits there looking relieved, and Pete might be getting a little pissed off.
"But," he says, and everybody looks at him. "Why does Patrick get his own roadie?"
Patrick rolls his eyes. "He's not my goddamn roadie."
"He's a roadie," Pete says, "and he keeps doing shit for you. Thus, your roadie."
"That's not," Patrick sighs. "It's not his job, Pete. It's just." He shrugs and looks uncomfortable. "Something we're doing. Trying out. I didn't, like--not that it's any of your business--" he glares at Pete "--but it's only been a couple of weeks and I don't even know if it's going to work out. I mean, I would've talked to you guys. Eventually."
Andy nods. "That's cool, Patrick. No worries."
Joe's forehead scrunches up. "I don't even understand what you're talking about, dude," he says. "I'm totally fucking confused. What are you trying?"
"Josh is, uh," Patrick says. He scratches the back of his neck and adjusts his hat. "We're. I ask him to do things, he does them, and stuff. He's--in service. To me."
Joe squints at Patrick. "Like Pippin in Return of the King?"
"Um," Patrick says. "Kind of, yeah."
"Except less creepy, right," Joe says.
"Yeah," Patrick says, and smiles. "Way less creepy. More like a samurai, I guess. Or a knight."
Joe looks impressed. "Awesome," he says. "Building your kingdom, one vassal at a time."
Patrick and Andy laugh and Patrick says, "Something like that."
Pete crosses his arms and narrows his eyes at Patrick and doesn't say anything at all.
On the last tour before FUCT, there was a large, bald, quiet security guard named Rudy. He was in his forties, and got the job because he'd been in the Marines with Charlie's dad.
In Pete's memory, Rudy has a big beer gut, and deep, oily wrinkles in his face, and thick hair growing out of his ears, and liked to drop kids on their heads instead of setting them on their feet after pulling them out of the crushing crowd, but he knows those things are false. He only wants to think Rudy was ugly and mean because Patrick thought Rudy was like God or something, always following him around and--Rudy had this creaky old leather jacket, crusty with zippers and snaps, a chain across the left shoulder. Patrick wore it a few times, out late after shows, walking in the cold with their prototype entourage. The cuffs went way past the tips of his fingers; the shoulders hung halfway to his elbows. If anyone gave him crap for how it made him look about nine years old, or if anyone asked how his edge was doing under all that animal flesh, he'd get the old shitkicking expression on his face, but as soon as he moved, felt the weight of the leather on him, he'd stop. He'd smile and thank the person with sickly sweetness and touch the hem of the coat, almost at his knees.
Pete remembers walking in to a green room, the night of the last show, and Patrick jumping up from the floor beside the chair where Rudy was sitting. Rudy had his leather jacket in his lap and a green handkerchief in his hand, crisply folded in a square, like it just came out of the package.
"Hey Pete," Patrick said nervously. "I'm just. Saying goodbye to Rudy. He's leaving right after the show."
"Hey," Pete said, and nodded at Rudy. "Good luck, man."
Rudy tilted his head and squinted at Pete and nodded back. "It's been a pleasure working with you boys," he said.
"I bet," Pete said, and looked straight at Patrick, and left.
He remembers expecting Patrick to come screaming after him, punch him in the face or in the nuts, give him a tangible reason to feel so hurt. Which wasn't even how he felt. He just felt confused, really. He felt like Patrick, in the space of a few months, had taken a whole new lexicon of symbolism into his life, and Pete didn't understand any of it. He didn't understand a jacket. He didn't understand a handkerchief. These things didn't fit what he knew of musicians fucking tour staff.
But Patrick didn't fling the green room door open so hard it bounced off the wall. Patrick didn't ignore Pete during the show or dump anything on him at the afterparty. Patrick was just--Patrick, except maybe a little quiet for a few weeks, maybe less prone to rages until they got back in the studio. He was just Patrick, except sometimes, he'd stuff a green handkerchief in one pocket or another, and Pete never asked what it meant.
One time, years later, Pete caught a sliver of a reflection in a mirror--Patrick trying on a leather coat at a boutique in LA. Patrick stuck his tongue out at himself and touched the zipper-free lapels and sleeves and the bare left shoulder and when they left, he only bought a yellow trucker hat with the logo for a fake brand of beer.
Ashlee comes out for a couple of weeks around Pete's birthday. The first night, she drags him back to the bus after the show and firmly locks the bedroom door.
"I missed you," she says with a little half-smile.
"I missed you too," he says, and tries to think of a way to explain that he's really, really not interested in having sex at the moment. In the dressing room, Josh had brought Patrick a plate of snacks. Patrick had looked at it for a moment and gently turned Josh back towards the table with a whispered instruction. Four times.
Ashlee takes his hands and tries to pull him down on the bed. "Let's play casting couch," she says. Pete resists her tugging, so she crosses her arms and adds, "I'm a big producer, you know. I can make or break you in this town."
"Ash," he says, maybe whining a little.
"Peter," she says firmly, and he sits on the edge of the bed.
He puts his head in his hands and says, "I really need this part, Miss Simpson." He sounds wooden and forced.
She tucks his hair behind his ear. "You're such a shitty actor," she says, and puts her arms around his shoulders. "What's wrong?"
"Patrick has a boyfriend," he says, unwillingly, only saying anything at all because he knows by now that talking is better than not talking, and Ashlee always listens and always takes his side.
She laughs at him, but stops when he frowns at her and shakes his head. Her eyes go wide. "Seriously?"
"For fucking real," he says. "He's a fucking roadie."
"Wow," Ashlee says. She sits up straight and folds her hands in her lap. "Wow, Pete."
"I know, right?" Pete says, getting mad about it again.
"Is it Dirty? Are they getting married at the Vegas show?" she asks, nose wrinkling, but her eyes are smiling.
"Thanks for taking this so seriously," he says, revising that whole 'always takes his side' thing. "I'm having a nervous breakdown and my best friend has a fucking boyfriend and you're making jokes."
She sighs and rolls her eyes and hugs him again. "So Patrick has a boyfriend," she says. "That's pretty crazy. What's he like?"
"Fucking creepy," Pete says. "He's always doing shit for Patrick, and Patrick is always telling him to do shit, and the guy keeps trying to cook for Andy, and Patrick's just like, 'oh, he's in service, it's not creepy like Lord of the Rings.' It's just--fucking creepy."
"Oh!" Ashlee says. "Oh, hey, yeah, I saw a movie about that once."
"Single White Female?" Pete asks.
"No, doofus, Secretary," she says. "Haven't you seen it?"
"I can't watch James Spader movies, you know that," Pete says.
"Oh right," she says. "Well. Patrick and his roadie--it's not creepy, it's really beautiful."
"You haven't seen them," Pete says, a little grumpily.
She leans her head on his shoulder, smiling. "Is he cute?"
"He's not Maggie Gyllenhaal," Pete says.
A few days after Pete's birthday, they have an actual night off, and everybody gets in a bunch of rented vans and they head for a club the local promoter recommended.
"This is going to be amazing," Joe says excitedly. "They have karaoke. They have new country karaoke, and super hits of the nineties."
"If you talk about karaoke all the way there, you're sitting in the van for the rest of the night," Pete tells him.
Josh and Patrick and Dan are sitting next to each other on the first bench seat. Pete and Ashlee and Joe are right behind them; Ashlee's hand is thin and warm in Pete's. Ashlee is texting with one friend or another and Pete is reading over her shoulder and also making sure Josh doesn't do anything creepy. Josh is looking out the window at the passing city, lit half by streetlights and half by an iridescent pink and violet sunset. Patrick is arguing with Joe and Dan about the broader implications of a new Indiana Jones movie and a new Rocky movie and the Terminator TV series.
"The commodification of my childhood, like I'm gonna fucking fall for that, like I'm a fucking baby boomer or some shit," Patrick is saying, and Joe is waving his hand and shaking his head.
"The special effects are going to be so much cooler," he says. "Indiana Jones with real motion CGI, fuck."
The van takes a corner a little too fast and Ashlee leans into Pete's side just as Patrick is bumped over into Josh. Pete automatically puts his arm around Ashlee's shoulder and Josh does the same to Patrick. Patrick elbows Josh off of him, laughing, saying something about where was Josh when the van crashed and Josh rolls his eyes and smiles and he has fucking dimples, how did Pete never notice that before?
"Oh my god," Ashlee says quietly, in Pete's ear. "He's totally Maggie Gyllenhaal."
"Shut up, he is not," Pete says. "It's my fucking birthday, could I have a little support here?"
"I wonder if they have the New Kids on the Block happy birthday song," Joe muses on Ashlee's other side.
"I'll sing it with you if they do," Ashlee says.
"Patrick, Patrick, hey," Pete says kicking the back of the seat, right where Patrick's tailbone should be. Patrick looks over his shoulder with an irritated expression, and Josh frowns a little at Pete.
"Fucking--what?" Patrick asks.
"Will you sing 'Happy Birthday' at the karaoke bar?" Joe asks.
"I already sang him 'Happy Birthday,'" Patrick says. "In front of like ten thousand teenage girls, so--"
"That was a shitty present; you totally got it at the last minute and it wasn't even wrapped," Pete says. Ashlee laughs and agrees and so do Dan and Joe.
"He has a point," Josh says, and Patrick punches him in the arm, not hard.
"What about if they have the New Kids one?" Joe says.
"We'll help," Ashlee says, leaning her head on Joe's shoulder for a moment.
Patrick rolls his eyes. Pete kicks the back of his seat a few more times, everybody else laughing and Josh smiling down at Patrick's increasingly furrowed brow.
"Okay, okay, I'll do it," Patrick says finally. "But I'm only doing the New Kids one, and I'm only doing it once. Stop fucking kicking my seat, this a fucking rental."
Pete, Joe, Ashlee, and Dan throw their arms in the air, Vs for victory, Dan's left arm knocking Patrick's hat slightly askew, and Patrick adds, "No Tom Jones this time, either."
"Aw, come on," Joe whines. "That's not a fair trade--"
Pete watches as Josh tugs Patrick's hat down in the back and Patrick briefly, probably not even realizing he's doing it, leans his head back into Josh's hand, trusting.
Ashlee keeps sighing and staring gooily at Patrick and Josh, even when they're not even doing anything together, even when they're not even in the same room.
Pete finally has to tell her to quit it, because it's supposed to be a secret, and if people stare, everyone will know.
She rolls her eyes and ignores him.
In Denver, Joe and Patrick disappear with a camera crew for four hours and return with several bags of shoes.
"It was funny at the time," Patrick says, sorting through a mountain of violently fluorescent sneakers.
"Funny," Pete says. Josh is sitting beside Patrick holding a pair of black engineer boots with a contemplative look on his face.
"It was classic," Joe says. He ties his new pair of chucks with a flourish and sits back in his seat on the bus.
"Okay," Pete says. He really doesn't get it. Josh runs the fingers of his right hand over the ankle strap of the right boot.
"I'm not keeping them all," Patrick says. "I'll leave some of them at a thrift store when we leave town." Josh cracks a little smile and looks over at Patrick.
"Thrift store," Pete says.
Patrick shrugs and waves a blue plaid Puma. "Homeless shelter, whatever."
"Do they have homeless people in Denver?" Joe asks.
"There are homeless people everywhere," Andy pipes up from the kitchenette, where he's hunched over his cell phone.
"I was going to say that," Pete says. It's just--Josh was carefully touching a bright nickle buckle, still with that small smile, and Pete was distracted, wondering why Patrick would buy Josh a pair of boots. He was wondering about the fact that the boots look way too small for Josh anyway, and lastly about how, if the boots are actually Patrick's, Patrick doesn't even like wearing boots--
"They have a lot of IHOPs for a town with homeless people," Joe is saying, and Andy is throwing something at him, and Patrick is quietly asking Josh, "Do you like them?"
Pete ducks the dirty socks Joe throws back at Andy and watches while Josh nods, his smile widening, and Patrick smiles back.
Two hours before Ashlee is supposed to head back to LA, she breaks up with Pete.
Or--no, it's more mutual than that.
Ashlee takes Pete's hand and makes him sit down on his bed with her and he remembers twelve days ago when she first arrived and how he didn't want to have sex and how they've only actually done it four times since she's been out, and--Ashlee clears her throat and takes a deep breath.
"We should talk," she says, at the same time Pete says, "So, okay, look--" and they laugh at each other, exchange a look of shared understanding, and put their foreheads together.
"I just--" she says, and sighs. "You're my best friend, and I've had a lot of fun the last couple of weeks, but."
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
And they smile at each other and kiss pretty chastely and Pete says he's going to borrow a golf cart so she can ride to the airport in style and she laughs and smacks him and Pete thinks, I have never been written on you and you have never been written on me.
When Ashlee's left, in a cab, with her nineteen bags and all the clean towels she could find, Pete slowly climbs the stairs into Patrick's apparently empty bus. He stands in the front lounge with his hands in his pockets for about fifteen minutes before Patrick comes out of the back room and puts one hand on his chest, startled, and says, "What the fuck, man, how long have you been here?"
"A few minutes," Pete says. He's watching the muted TV; a program about how pencil erasers are made is playing.
"Okay," Patrick says, sounding confused, and then he snaps his fingers. "Oh. Right. Ashlee left this afternoon."
"Yeah," Pete says. He doesn't add that they broke up and he feels fine. Mostly he doesn't say anything because Patrick is washing his hands in the tiny kitchen sink, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, or because Josh is standing in the doorway to Patrick's room, holding a damp washcloth to his bare chest, pink bleeding through the white fabric, yellow boxers peeking above the waist of his jeans.
"Oh," Josh says. He blushes. He's not wearing his customary bandana and his curly hair is in his face a bit. "Hi, Pete."
"Hey, Josh," Pete says, forgetting to be an asshole.
Patrick turns from the sink and rolls his eyes at Josh. "Get back in there, I'll be back in a minute."
"I can't find the band-aids; they're not in the bag you said--" Josh says, and Patrick glances at Pete and puts his wet hands on Josh's shoulders and pushes him back into the bedroom.
"I got it, I got it," Patrick says. "Relax."
"And I wanted some more water," Josh adds.
"I got it, Joshua," Patrick says firmly, and closes the door. He glances at Pete again and then goes about drying his hands and pulling a bag down from one of the unused bunks and fishing a box of band-aids out and getting a bottle of water from the fridge. "I'll just be a second," he says to Pete, "he, I--he rolled over on something, I don't even know, it was an accident--"
"Dude, it's okay," Pete says.
"I know, I just," Patrick says. He closes his eyes and presses the bottle of water to his forehead. "He didn't--it wasn't an accident," he sighs.
"I know," Pete says, and smiles when Patrick gives him a sceptical look. "Dude, I have done shit that's so weird it's not even on the internet," Pete says, which isn't really true, but whatever it is Patrick does, it's probably not weirder than anything Pete's ever done.
Patrick smiles back a little and gestures at his room. "I have to finish this, but wait here, okay? I'll be back in a minute and you can be emo all over my bus and I'll tell you you'll be in LA in a month and in the meantime there's always good old phone sex." He grins enthusiastically about the last bit, thumbs up around the water bottle and band-aids, and Pete laughs at him and still doesn't tell him.
The bus is quiet again when Patrick closes the door between them. Pete turns around in a circle a few times, looking at all Patrick and Andy and Matt and Kyle and Josh's crap spread all over everything. After a few minutes, a high-pitched yelp comes from Patrick's room and Pete jumps. The sound is followed by Patrick's familiar chuckle and Pete stares at the door, thinking--things.
When Pete was a teenager, he wrote--sometimes cut--his girlfriends' names on his body in places no one could see. And then Judy spontaneously pulled down his jeans in her well-lit room one day during junior year and found "judith ann moore" scabbing on the inside of his left thigh.
She didn't think it was sweet, or romantic, or even compellingly dark. Just weird. So he quit doing it, for years. He wrote and cut lyrics and dates and important words all over, though, even in the places people could see during school. He managed to convince himself he didn't want Morgan's name or initials on him, anywhere; he made her stupid t-shirts and helped her draw her first tattoo instead.
The first time he wrote his name on Jeanae, she was still sweaty and heaving from their first fuck. He dragged his jeans up from her bedroom floor and pulled the Sharpie from his pocket, and wrote "peter" in tiny letters on the thin skin of her inner arm, above her elbow.
She laughed, a little breathlessly, and took the marker from him. She pushed him over on his back and wrote "JEANAE" in giant bubble letters across his stomach.
They fooled around some more, and he pressed his thumb into his name on her arm hard enough to bruise. He tried to apologize, but she told him that every time it hurt, she'd think of him.
Idly, later, as he fell asleep, she filled in the letters on his stomach in a rainbow of Magic Marker.
"I'm fine," Pete says, and he means it as he says it, but Patrick just looks at him, squinting a little, and Patrick has someone and is happy and Pete has no one now. Pete is stealing this time from Patrick's happiness, because Pete can't be okay, can't be fine, not when he has no one, nothing, not when Patrick--Patrick, Patrick, Patrick of all people--is making something surprising and new, something Pete can't ever get a glimpse at.
Pete feels his face fall, crumbling. His eyes do not well with tears, because he doesn't cry anymore, but his sinuses feel heavy in his face, and he knows he's not fine. He puts his hand on his forehead, shoulders bowing, and Patrick nods.
"So," he says. "You're staying here tonight."
"Okay," Pete says. He looks over at one of Josh's bandanas on the kitchen counter and doesn't make any remarks about it being kind of crowded.
Patrick puts his arm around Pete's shoulders and tugs and Pete goes down easily, closing his eyes as his cheek is cushioned on Patrick's denim-covered thigh. Patrick's fingers pat his head a little awkwardly, a lot comfortingly.
When Pete gets back to Patrick's bus with his stuff, Josh is shouldering an overflowing backpack and almost tripping down the stairs, the laces of his beaten steel-toed boots untied and trailing.
"Would you be--oh hey, Pete," Patrick says, leaning out above Josh, whose face is ducked, who won't meet Pete's eyes.
"Yo," Pete says. "Hey, Josh."
Josh looks up at that, mouth tight, eyes narrow. "Hi, Pete," he says.
"Tie your goddamn laces before you trip and break your neck," Patrick tells Josh.
Josh's jaw clenches, but he leaves off untwisting his backpack straps and drops to one knee.
Patrick thumps down the stairs and picks up a t-shirt that fell out of Josh's pack. "It's only for a couple of days," he tells Josh. "You said you were missing the crew trailer anyway."
"I know," Josh says, eyes flicking up to Pete and back to his fingers. "It's okay."
Pete realizes what's going on. Patrick pushes the t-shirt into Josh's pack and doesn't say anything else.
"I brought Dogma," Pete says.
"Oh cool," Patrick says, but he doesn't sound excited.
"I deleted her number from my phone," Pete says, but he totally didn't need to do that--he's not going to call her at three in the morning, full of pills and recriminations and misery.
"Awesome," Patrick says, giving Pete thumbs up. "It only took, what, nineteen break ups for you to learn that one?"
Josh stands and glances at Patrick. Patrick glances at Pete. Pete turns away and watches from the corner of his eye as Josh steps closer to Patrick and Patrick briefly presses his hand to Josh's cheek and murmurs something. Pete looks away for real and doesn't feel any of the triumph he thought he would.
At four in the morning, after Pete has let Patrick hide his phones and make him eat a couple of Pop Tarts, just before Pete lets Patrick get some sleep, Pete asks something that prompts Patrick to relate his super-amazing d/s analogy about bricks and mortar.
Josh crouches to make his run at the Slip'n'Slide and Pete yells, "Yo, yo, hold up, you can't do it with your shirt on," and Charlie and Dan and everybody agree loudly and Josh raises his eyebrows at Pete, silent and speculative. They're both remembering the scene in Patrick's bus the other day; Pete sneers at him. Josh doesn't know him; Josh doesn't know shit. "Take it off, you fucking pussy," Pete says.
Josh rolls his eyes and smiles a little as he pulls his shirt over his head, exposing his pale, freckled torso--the bad tribal armband on his left bicep, the black and blue nautical star on his right shoulder, the scabbing interlocking lines over his heart. Pete squints at the design as Josh tucks his shirt in the back of his shorts and runs for the Slip'n'Slide. As he hits the plastic and skids down the slope, yelling to the echoing yells of the crew, Pete thinks: brick wall. Bricks and mortar.
Patrick cut his shitty analogy into Josh's chest.
Josh picks himself up at the bottom of the hill, staggering a little, laughing and wiping at his face with his shirt. Dirty offers him a red plastic cup. Josh takes it and drinks deeply.
Patrick totally cut his shitty analogy into Josh's chest. Over Josh's heart. This is more serious than Pete thought.
A few weeks before the end of tour, Patrick gets quiet--except for when he's yelling. He yells at Charlie and Dre, he yells at Dirty, he yells at Dan; Pete doesn't mind any of that, because those guys work for Fall Out Boy and they get paid, in part, as compensation for Patrick yelling at them.
Patrick yells at Gabe and Ryland a few times too--not just when they're working, but in the dressing room in Phoenix, partially because Gabe is eating all of the Stoned Wheat Thins Patrick specifically and especially put on the rider, and the other problem, which Pete hadn't really noticed, is that apparently Ryland keeps giving Josh things to do.
"He's not your fucking roadie; he doesn't fucking work for you; let him do his fucking job," he shouts, and slams the door on his way out of the room.
Josh puts down the guitar Ryland had asked him to fetch from the Cobra bus and goes after Patrick, a pinched look on his face.
"Well then," Gabe says, and offers Ryland the sleeve of Stoned Wheat Thins.
"Indeed," Ryland says, and takes two.
"I've had just about enough of this shit," Pete mutters.
"Enough of what?" Joe asks, scooping guacamole out of the container with a Wheat Thin.
"Did you not--where have you been the last fifteen minutes? Don't fucking eat Patrick's fucking crackers," Pete says, taking one sleeve from Joe and the other from Gabe. He finds the box wedged under the couch and pulls it free.
"The thing is," Gabe says to the room in general. "I'm wheaty, and I'm thin, so. It's like the crackers are my people, okay."
"Also, you're stoned," Ryland adds.
Gabe points at him with a cracker. "This is what I'm saying. Fucking brain twins over here."
"Seriously," Pete says. He shoves the crackers back into their box and leaves the room. Outside, Patrick is coming down the hall. The peevish flush in his forehead and cheeks has gone down, and he's not wearing his hoodie anymore.
"'Sup," Pete says, arranging himself against the wall and getting his phone out, like he wasn't going looking for Patrick.
Patrick takes his hat off and combs his hair off his forehead a little. "I was just--I was going to apologize to Gabe and Ryland for being an asshole. Are those my crackers?" He reaches over and takes the box from under Pete's arm. "Thanks," he says, and smiles at Pete.
"Don't apologize, it's a sign of weakness," Pete says. He wants to ask what's up with Josh, and what happened to Patrick's hoodie. "Also, they're fucking stoned."
"Yeah," Patrick says. "But I'm not really mad at them, so."
"What'd Josh do now?" Pete asks, and when he hears the words come out of his mouth, he thinks: shit; I am a fucking idiot.
Patrick's mouth tightens and he walks away. Halfway down the hall, he turns back. Pete is about to say he's sorry when Patrick grimaces and says, "I'm not mad at anybody. Tour's almost over, and Josh is going back to school in Florida, so."
"Oh," Pete says, suddenly recognizing Patrick's recent quiet and temper and retreat into double-thick hoodies. It's been a while, but this is Patrick breaking up with someone when it's mutual and amicable but not what Patrick really wants.
Patrick nods, turning the box of crackers over and over in his hands. "It's just a tour thing, we both knew that. It's fine." He shrugs and meets Pete's eyes. Pete swallows. Patrick's mouth tilts in a rueful half smile. "But I'm going to miss him. A lot."
"So don't break up with him," Pete says, his mouth and lungs working without his brain's input again.
Patrick shakes his head. "Long-distance, really? Been there, done that, it's a bad scene and I'm not into it," he says.
"Yeah," Pete says. He knew that.
"Besides, Josh and I, it's not--it's really, ridiculously hard to do long-distance," Patrick adds. "He's starting his last year of an engineering degree, and I work about two hundred hours a week." He shrugs again, looking pained and displeased by logic. "It just wouldn't work."
"I'm sorry," Pete says, and he means it. Maybe he thinks it's all a little weird and maybe he doesn't understand and maybe Josh is a fucking creep who doesn't deserve to attend one of Patrick's shows, let alone rig the lighting for it, but. Patrick is going to miss him. "I'm sorry for that."
Patrick smiles. "You don't actually run the entire universe," he says. "You don't have to apologize because my--because Josh goes to school on the other side of the country."
"And you're a workaholic," Pete adds.
"I'm dedicated," Patrick corrects.
"You're a control freak," Pete says.
"You say that like your business doesn't depend on my megalomania," Patrick says, and cuffs Pete in the head with the box of Stoned Wheat Thins.
HCT ends, YWT begins.
"Do you miss Josh?" Pete asks finally, quietly, mostly into his hands.
Patrick blinks and looks up from his sudoku book. "What? Yeah."
"A lot?"
Patrick shrugs, looking vaguely uncomfortable. "We e-mail. I mean. It's fine. We're friends."
Pete shakes his head, his hair falling in his eyes. He shoves it back and says, "No, do you miss--the thing, Patrick. Your thing, with Josh. Do you miss that."
Patrick's hand, which had been teasing his pencil over the empty boxes in his puzzle, goes still. He says, studiously nonchalant, "I guess. No more than I usually do. Which is--it's not something I do a lot, so. I miss having someone around all the time. But I'm used to being on tour without--" he frowns and looks down and writes a number "--without it. I'm used to being without it period."
In Bakersfield, Pete is on stage with the band, playing, and he feels on. He's getting almost all the notes, mostly in the right places, and he remembers the setlist, and he can see that Joe and Andy feel the same way, and Patrick is working his fucking mic stand like the fucking rock star he is.
Pete finds himself approaching Patrick, skipping to the beat, letting his feet go out from under him, sliding to his knees at Patrick's feet. He plays up at Patrick for a couple of bars, hoping with a strange, sweet expectancy that Patrick will look down at him and see. See what Pete would do for him, what Pete would be for him, where Pete would put himself, if only Patrick would give him a chance--praying for Patrick to look down and see everything.
Patrick finishes singing the chorus and looks down at his hand on the neck of his guitar and sees Pete and blinks, his cheeks shining with sweat and his eyes mostly hidden by the brim of his hat. He shakes his head, and--turns away. He walks over to play the intro to the bridge with Joe and leaves Pete kneeling downstage, kneeling beside an abandoned mic stand, and doesn't miss a fucking beat.
"You don't really," Patrick says, and sighs. "You don't really want to. You're freaking out because a) I like guys, and b) I like doing--things. To guys."
"You like hurting them," Pete corrects flatly. He is so, so tired of people thinking they know him better than he knows himself.
"I hurt myself because I hate myself," Pete says. "Because I love people who don't love me. I want to know--I think it would be different, if it was because someone did love me. I think it would be different if it was out of love, instead of hate. I want to know if I'm right. I want to know if being hurt can make me feel loved instead of--nothing. Instead of like I'm nothing."
"You are loved," Patrick says. "You are something. And you mean the world to everyone who loves you and the people who don't are not fucking worth your time, and you know that. I don't--I am not a therapist, okay--"
Pete shakes his head, frowning frustratedly. He jumps up and unzips and pulls his jeans down and pulls the leg of his boxer briefs up to show Patrick a faint, long string of scars on his inner thigh.
"What--" Patrick leans forward a bit, reaches out a bit, eyebrows drawn together, but he doesn't touch.
"Judith Ann Moore," Pete declares. "I wanted her so much. I wanted her to be mine, I wanted to belong to her, so I put her name on me. She thought it was pretty sick and she dumped me."
"Oh," Patrick says. His outstretched hand drops to his thigh and he looks up at Pete, comprehending.
Pete tugs his jeans back up and sits down again, a little farther away from Patrick. "I want someone to love how I hurt for them," he says, slow, stiff, raw. "Instead of--instead of thinking it's gross."
"Okay," Patrick says.
"Okay?" It can't possibly be that easy.
"Well," Patrick says. "Not okay, but. I'll--we--I'll think about it."
Pete wants to fall on his knees and press his face to Patrick's thigh, Patrick's stomach, but he doesn't. He looks down at his fingers knotted in his lap and says, "Thank you."
"I am not here to entertain you," Patrick says, eyes hard and face naked without his glasses. "I am here to hurt you. I am here to control you when you can't fucking control yourself. I am here because you asked me to be here. I am not fucking around, Pete."
Pete blinks at him, thinking, I am so completely in over my head.
Patrick shoves at Pete's shoulders, even though Pete is already against the wall. "I am not here to entertain you," Patrick says again.
"Okay," Pete says, voice raspy. "I get it."
"I don't care what you want to hide from me," Patrick says quietly, and Pete shudders, his shoulders shaking against Patrick's hands. "I care," Patrick says, "that you'll give it to me anyway."
*
This is a DW-origin crospost, oh noes. Feel free to comment on LJ or the original post here.
The Thing About A Service
Pete, Patrick/OC, Patrick/Pete | R | 7131 words
Disclaimer: Not real, sorry.
Summary: A touching story of love between a rock star and his roadie best friend.
Contains: d/s dynamics, both negotiated and non-; cutting, both self-injurious and non-; Pete not being melodramatic about self-injury; the author's relative lack of judging people for self-injuring. These things take up less than 1500 words of the story.
Notes: AKA leatherdaddy!Patrick. I'm finding myself re-amused by this idea, so.
*
Nobody notices it for the longest time.
Well, except for Andy. Andy notices, because Andy shares a bus with Patrick, so Andy is naturally going to notice when some roadie named Josh starts basically living on their bus instead of just hanging around whenever Patrick is there. He's always bringing Patrick coffee and answering Patrick's bedroom door while Patrick's working and carrying Patrick's stuff for him and--
"--and being, just, really solicitous," Andy finishes, head in his hands, sitting across from Pete at the kitchen table on Joe and Pete's bus.
"Why would Patrick want a roadie living on his bus?" Joe asks no one in particular.
"Why does Patrick get his own fucking roadie?" Pete counters.
"Guys," Andy says. "Seriously. I had to tell him I'm on a cleanse so he'd stop trying to cook for me. It's been a week, okay, I'm starving to death." He does look a little peaky, but Pete saw him eating grapes and crackers in the green room last night, so he's not too worried.
Joe rolls his eyes. "Dude, I gave you like a bucket of hummus two days ago, you are not starving."
"There's a principle here," Andy says. "A principle of Patrick didn't fucking ask to keep his roadie on our bus, okay."
Pete smacks his open hand down on the table. "Something must be done," he says.
At the beginning of tour, Josh had seemed like a pretty normal guy, for a roadie. Skinny, curly brown hair tied back in a bandana, always friendly, always picking up the slack when somebody threw out their back or pulled a muscle, always dressed in jeans and boots and t-shirts, a well-loved green handkerchief in his back pocket, always clean--for a roadie. Pete had liked him. Or, Pete would have liked him, if Pete had ever thought about him before he saw Patrick talking to him out behind a venue three weeks into the tour--Josh's hands clasped behind his back, eyes on the ground. He looked small, even though he must be six feet tall, and Patrick, standing mostly turned away from Pete, had looked somehow more solid than usual--legs braced apart like he was on stage, hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders back.
Pete had watched them for a minute--Patrick speaking too quietly for him to hear, Josh nodding once in a while. He shook his head once, and raised his eyes enough to look at Patrick, and Patrick deflated a bit, fell back into his usual posture: shoulders slumped, feet together. Josh said something, and smiled, and Patrick laughed, Pete could hear it. Patrick leaned forward a bit and rested his head on Josh's chest.
Pete frowned. He'd stolen a golf cart from a maintenance guy and wanted Patrick to do wheelies with him--or, you know, keep a look-out on the curb while Pete did wheelies--but apparently Patrick was busy.
Pete walked away and drove the cart in moody circles through the parking lot. Alone.
Patrick is sitting on the couch in the front lounge when they show up: one foot on the seat, MacBook in his lap, headphones over his ears. His other foot is on the floor. Josh is leaning against his shin, putting glow-in-the-dark gaffer's tape on some cables.
Josh smiles pleasantly at them. "Hey," he says.
"Hi, Josh," Joe and Andy say.
"Hi, Patrick," Pete says loudly.
"Oh, hey guys," Patrick says absently. He slides one ear free. "What's up?"
"Band meeting," Pete says.
Patrick frowns a little and types something. "It's Tuesday. Band meetings are Thursdays."
"Special band meeting," Pete says.
Patrick makes a squinty, displeased face, still looking at his computer screen. "I'm kind of busy, man--"
"Extra-special, super important, emergency band meeting," Pete says through gritted teeth.
"Yeah," Andy says.
Patrick raises his eyebrows and settles his headphones around his neck. "Okay, fine. What?"
"Uh," Joe says, "Josh--"
Josh looks up. "Yeah, Joe?"
"Closed band meeting!" Pete shouts. "Jesus Christ! We're not a fucking five-piece!"
Patrick shoves his MacBook off his lap and stands up, glaring at Pete with a thunderous expression. "Don't yell at him," he says, quietly but firmly, the voice he learned to use instead of screaming when he was twenty. Josh's eyes flick up towards Patrick.
Pete blinks and says, "What the fuck."
"You can go, Joshua," Patrick says. He doesn't look away from Pete.
Josh gathers his cords and tape and ducks out around Joe and Andy where they're standing behind Pete. When the door bangs shut behind him, Patrick relaxes a little, but his face stays hard and angry.
"Let's sit down," Andy says.
Patrick takes his seat. Andy and Joe sit on the second couch, leaving the other end of Patrick's couch for Pete. Pete sits as far back in the corner as he can. Whatever Patrick was working on leaks tinnily from his abandoned headphones. He hits a key on his MacBook and the bus is silent.
"Are you guys fucking or something?" Pete asks, completely failing at sounding casual.
Patrick makes a 'fuck you, Pete' face. "None of your business," he says.
"Totally," Andy says, frowning at Pete. "But Patrick, dude, he's like living here by default, and you never actually talked to me about it, so."
Patrick's eyes go wide and he slaps a hand on top of his head. After a minute, he says, "Holy shit, Andy, I'm sorry."
Andy nods and smiles calmly. "It's not a problem, I figured you didn't realise, I just was like--"
Pete frowns. "Ten minutes ago, you were starving to death."
"What?" Patrick asks.
"Never mind," Andy says.
Patrick leans forward, elbows on his thighs, hands loosely clasped, all earnest and hopeful. "Is it okay if Josh stays on the bus?" he asks Andy.
"Sure," Andy says. "Just--could you tell him to, like, not do shit for me? He should treat me like a roommate or something, you know?"
"Yeah, man," Patrick says, smiling. "I'll let him know what's appropriate."
Andy tilts his head, nods thoughtfully, and says, "Yeah, appropriate. Cool. Okay." He and Patrick sit there smiling at each other and Joe sits there looking relieved, and Pete might be getting a little pissed off.
"But," he says, and everybody looks at him. "Why does Patrick get his own roadie?"
Patrick rolls his eyes. "He's not my goddamn roadie."
"He's a roadie," Pete says, "and he keeps doing shit for you. Thus, your roadie."
"That's not," Patrick sighs. "It's not his job, Pete. It's just." He shrugs and looks uncomfortable. "Something we're doing. Trying out. I didn't, like--not that it's any of your business--" he glares at Pete "--but it's only been a couple of weeks and I don't even know if it's going to work out. I mean, I would've talked to you guys. Eventually."
Andy nods. "That's cool, Patrick. No worries."
Joe's forehead scrunches up. "I don't even understand what you're talking about, dude," he says. "I'm totally fucking confused. What are you trying?"
"Josh is, uh," Patrick says. He scratches the back of his neck and adjusts his hat. "We're. I ask him to do things, he does them, and stuff. He's--in service. To me."
Joe squints at Patrick. "Like Pippin in Return of the King?"
"Um," Patrick says. "Kind of, yeah."
"Except less creepy, right," Joe says.
"Yeah," Patrick says, and smiles. "Way less creepy. More like a samurai, I guess. Or a knight."
Joe looks impressed. "Awesome," he says. "Building your kingdom, one vassal at a time."
Patrick and Andy laugh and Patrick says, "Something like that."
Pete crosses his arms and narrows his eyes at Patrick and doesn't say anything at all.
On the last tour before FUCT, there was a large, bald, quiet security guard named Rudy. He was in his forties, and got the job because he'd been in the Marines with Charlie's dad.
In Pete's memory, Rudy has a big beer gut, and deep, oily wrinkles in his face, and thick hair growing out of his ears, and liked to drop kids on their heads instead of setting them on their feet after pulling them out of the crushing crowd, but he knows those things are false. He only wants to think Rudy was ugly and mean because Patrick thought Rudy was like God or something, always following him around and--Rudy had this creaky old leather jacket, crusty with zippers and snaps, a chain across the left shoulder. Patrick wore it a few times, out late after shows, walking in the cold with their prototype entourage. The cuffs went way past the tips of his fingers; the shoulders hung halfway to his elbows. If anyone gave him crap for how it made him look about nine years old, or if anyone asked how his edge was doing under all that animal flesh, he'd get the old shitkicking expression on his face, but as soon as he moved, felt the weight of the leather on him, he'd stop. He'd smile and thank the person with sickly sweetness and touch the hem of the coat, almost at his knees.
Pete remembers walking in to a green room, the night of the last show, and Patrick jumping up from the floor beside the chair where Rudy was sitting. Rudy had his leather jacket in his lap and a green handkerchief in his hand, crisply folded in a square, like it just came out of the package.
"Hey Pete," Patrick said nervously. "I'm just. Saying goodbye to Rudy. He's leaving right after the show."
"Hey," Pete said, and nodded at Rudy. "Good luck, man."
Rudy tilted his head and squinted at Pete and nodded back. "It's been a pleasure working with you boys," he said.
"I bet," Pete said, and looked straight at Patrick, and left.
He remembers expecting Patrick to come screaming after him, punch him in the face or in the nuts, give him a tangible reason to feel so hurt. Which wasn't even how he felt. He just felt confused, really. He felt like Patrick, in the space of a few months, had taken a whole new lexicon of symbolism into his life, and Pete didn't understand any of it. He didn't understand a jacket. He didn't understand a handkerchief. These things didn't fit what he knew of musicians fucking tour staff.
But Patrick didn't fling the green room door open so hard it bounced off the wall. Patrick didn't ignore Pete during the show or dump anything on him at the afterparty. Patrick was just--Patrick, except maybe a little quiet for a few weeks, maybe less prone to rages until they got back in the studio. He was just Patrick, except sometimes, he'd stuff a green handkerchief in one pocket or another, and Pete never asked what it meant.
One time, years later, Pete caught a sliver of a reflection in a mirror--Patrick trying on a leather coat at a boutique in LA. Patrick stuck his tongue out at himself and touched the zipper-free lapels and sleeves and the bare left shoulder and when they left, he only bought a yellow trucker hat with the logo for a fake brand of beer.
Ashlee comes out for a couple of weeks around Pete's birthday. The first night, she drags him back to the bus after the show and firmly locks the bedroom door.
"I missed you," she says with a little half-smile.
"I missed you too," he says, and tries to think of a way to explain that he's really, really not interested in having sex at the moment. In the dressing room, Josh had brought Patrick a plate of snacks. Patrick had looked at it for a moment and gently turned Josh back towards the table with a whispered instruction. Four times.
Ashlee takes his hands and tries to pull him down on the bed. "Let's play casting couch," she says. Pete resists her tugging, so she crosses her arms and adds, "I'm a big producer, you know. I can make or break you in this town."
"Ash," he says, maybe whining a little.
"Peter," she says firmly, and he sits on the edge of the bed.
He puts his head in his hands and says, "I really need this part, Miss Simpson." He sounds wooden and forced.
She tucks his hair behind his ear. "You're such a shitty actor," she says, and puts her arms around his shoulders. "What's wrong?"
"Patrick has a boyfriend," he says, unwillingly, only saying anything at all because he knows by now that talking is better than not talking, and Ashlee always listens and always takes his side.
She laughs at him, but stops when he frowns at her and shakes his head. Her eyes go wide. "Seriously?"
"For fucking real," he says. "He's a fucking roadie."
"Wow," Ashlee says. She sits up straight and folds her hands in her lap. "Wow, Pete."
"I know, right?" Pete says, getting mad about it again.
"Is it Dirty? Are they getting married at the Vegas show?" she asks, nose wrinkling, but her eyes are smiling.
"Thanks for taking this so seriously," he says, revising that whole 'always takes his side' thing. "I'm having a nervous breakdown and my best friend has a fucking boyfriend and you're making jokes."
She sighs and rolls her eyes and hugs him again. "So Patrick has a boyfriend," she says. "That's pretty crazy. What's he like?"
"Fucking creepy," Pete says. "He's always doing shit for Patrick, and Patrick is always telling him to do shit, and the guy keeps trying to cook for Andy, and Patrick's just like, 'oh, he's in service, it's not creepy like Lord of the Rings.' It's just--fucking creepy."
"Oh!" Ashlee says. "Oh, hey, yeah, I saw a movie about that once."
"Single White Female?" Pete asks.
"No, doofus, Secretary," she says. "Haven't you seen it?"
"I can't watch James Spader movies, you know that," Pete says.
"Oh right," she says. "Well. Patrick and his roadie--it's not creepy, it's really beautiful."
"You haven't seen them," Pete says, a little grumpily.
She leans her head on his shoulder, smiling. "Is he cute?"
"He's not Maggie Gyllenhaal," Pete says.
A few days after Pete's birthday, they have an actual night off, and everybody gets in a bunch of rented vans and they head for a club the local promoter recommended.
"This is going to be amazing," Joe says excitedly. "They have karaoke. They have new country karaoke, and super hits of the nineties."
"If you talk about karaoke all the way there, you're sitting in the van for the rest of the night," Pete tells him.
Josh and Patrick and Dan are sitting next to each other on the first bench seat. Pete and Ashlee and Joe are right behind them; Ashlee's hand is thin and warm in Pete's. Ashlee is texting with one friend or another and Pete is reading over her shoulder and also making sure Josh doesn't do anything creepy. Josh is looking out the window at the passing city, lit half by streetlights and half by an iridescent pink and violet sunset. Patrick is arguing with Joe and Dan about the broader implications of a new Indiana Jones movie and a new Rocky movie and the Terminator TV series.
"The commodification of my childhood, like I'm gonna fucking fall for that, like I'm a fucking baby boomer or some shit," Patrick is saying, and Joe is waving his hand and shaking his head.
"The special effects are going to be so much cooler," he says. "Indiana Jones with real motion CGI, fuck."
The van takes a corner a little too fast and Ashlee leans into Pete's side just as Patrick is bumped over into Josh. Pete automatically puts his arm around Ashlee's shoulder and Josh does the same to Patrick. Patrick elbows Josh off of him, laughing, saying something about where was Josh when the van crashed and Josh rolls his eyes and smiles and he has fucking dimples, how did Pete never notice that before?
"Oh my god," Ashlee says quietly, in Pete's ear. "He's totally Maggie Gyllenhaal."
"Shut up, he is not," Pete says. "It's my fucking birthday, could I have a little support here?"
"I wonder if they have the New Kids on the Block happy birthday song," Joe muses on Ashlee's other side.
"I'll sing it with you if they do," Ashlee says.
"Patrick, Patrick, hey," Pete says kicking the back of the seat, right where Patrick's tailbone should be. Patrick looks over his shoulder with an irritated expression, and Josh frowns a little at Pete.
"Fucking--what?" Patrick asks.
"Will you sing 'Happy Birthday' at the karaoke bar?" Joe asks.
"I already sang him 'Happy Birthday,'" Patrick says. "In front of like ten thousand teenage girls, so--"
"That was a shitty present; you totally got it at the last minute and it wasn't even wrapped," Pete says. Ashlee laughs and agrees and so do Dan and Joe.
"He has a point," Josh says, and Patrick punches him in the arm, not hard.
"What about if they have the New Kids one?" Joe says.
"We'll help," Ashlee says, leaning her head on Joe's shoulder for a moment.
Patrick rolls his eyes. Pete kicks the back of his seat a few more times, everybody else laughing and Josh smiling down at Patrick's increasingly furrowed brow.
"Okay, okay, I'll do it," Patrick says finally. "But I'm only doing the New Kids one, and I'm only doing it once. Stop fucking kicking my seat, this a fucking rental."
Pete, Joe, Ashlee, and Dan throw their arms in the air, Vs for victory, Dan's left arm knocking Patrick's hat slightly askew, and Patrick adds, "No Tom Jones this time, either."
"Aw, come on," Joe whines. "That's not a fair trade--"
Pete watches as Josh tugs Patrick's hat down in the back and Patrick briefly, probably not even realizing he's doing it, leans his head back into Josh's hand, trusting.
Ashlee keeps sighing and staring gooily at Patrick and Josh, even when they're not even doing anything together, even when they're not even in the same room.
Pete finally has to tell her to quit it, because it's supposed to be a secret, and if people stare, everyone will know.
She rolls her eyes and ignores him.
In Denver, Joe and Patrick disappear with a camera crew for four hours and return with several bags of shoes.
"It was funny at the time," Patrick says, sorting through a mountain of violently fluorescent sneakers.
"Funny," Pete says. Josh is sitting beside Patrick holding a pair of black engineer boots with a contemplative look on his face.
"It was classic," Joe says. He ties his new pair of chucks with a flourish and sits back in his seat on the bus.
"Okay," Pete says. He really doesn't get it. Josh runs the fingers of his right hand over the ankle strap of the right boot.
"I'm not keeping them all," Patrick says. "I'll leave some of them at a thrift store when we leave town." Josh cracks a little smile and looks over at Patrick.
"Thrift store," Pete says.
Patrick shrugs and waves a blue plaid Puma. "Homeless shelter, whatever."
"Do they have homeless people in Denver?" Joe asks.
"There are homeless people everywhere," Andy pipes up from the kitchenette, where he's hunched over his cell phone.
"I was going to say that," Pete says. It's just--Josh was carefully touching a bright nickle buckle, still with that small smile, and Pete was distracted, wondering why Patrick would buy Josh a pair of boots. He was wondering about the fact that the boots look way too small for Josh anyway, and lastly about how, if the boots are actually Patrick's, Patrick doesn't even like wearing boots--
"They have a lot of IHOPs for a town with homeless people," Joe is saying, and Andy is throwing something at him, and Patrick is quietly asking Josh, "Do you like them?"
Pete ducks the dirty socks Joe throws back at Andy and watches while Josh nods, his smile widening, and Patrick smiles back.
Two hours before Ashlee is supposed to head back to LA, she breaks up with Pete.
Or--no, it's more mutual than that.
Ashlee takes Pete's hand and makes him sit down on his bed with her and he remembers twelve days ago when she first arrived and how he didn't want to have sex and how they've only actually done it four times since she's been out, and--Ashlee clears her throat and takes a deep breath.
"We should talk," she says, at the same time Pete says, "So, okay, look--" and they laugh at each other, exchange a look of shared understanding, and put their foreheads together.
"I just--" she says, and sighs. "You're my best friend, and I've had a lot of fun the last couple of weeks, but."
"Yeah," he says. "Me too."
And they smile at each other and kiss pretty chastely and Pete says he's going to borrow a golf cart so she can ride to the airport in style and she laughs and smacks him and Pete thinks, I have never been written on you and you have never been written on me.
When Ashlee's left, in a cab, with her nineteen bags and all the clean towels she could find, Pete slowly climbs the stairs into Patrick's apparently empty bus. He stands in the front lounge with his hands in his pockets for about fifteen minutes before Patrick comes out of the back room and puts one hand on his chest, startled, and says, "What the fuck, man, how long have you been here?"
"A few minutes," Pete says. He's watching the muted TV; a program about how pencil erasers are made is playing.
"Okay," Patrick says, sounding confused, and then he snaps his fingers. "Oh. Right. Ashlee left this afternoon."
"Yeah," Pete says. He doesn't add that they broke up and he feels fine. Mostly he doesn't say anything because Patrick is washing his hands in the tiny kitchen sink, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, or because Josh is standing in the doorway to Patrick's room, holding a damp washcloth to his bare chest, pink bleeding through the white fabric, yellow boxers peeking above the waist of his jeans.
"Oh," Josh says. He blushes. He's not wearing his customary bandana and his curly hair is in his face a bit. "Hi, Pete."
"Hey, Josh," Pete says, forgetting to be an asshole.
Patrick turns from the sink and rolls his eyes at Josh. "Get back in there, I'll be back in a minute."
"I can't find the band-aids; they're not in the bag you said--" Josh says, and Patrick glances at Pete and puts his wet hands on Josh's shoulders and pushes him back into the bedroom.
"I got it, I got it," Patrick says. "Relax."
"And I wanted some more water," Josh adds.
"I got it, Joshua," Patrick says firmly, and closes the door. He glances at Pete again and then goes about drying his hands and pulling a bag down from one of the unused bunks and fishing a box of band-aids out and getting a bottle of water from the fridge. "I'll just be a second," he says to Pete, "he, I--he rolled over on something, I don't even know, it was an accident--"
"Dude, it's okay," Pete says.
"I know, I just," Patrick says. He closes his eyes and presses the bottle of water to his forehead. "He didn't--it wasn't an accident," he sighs.
"I know," Pete says, and smiles when Patrick gives him a sceptical look. "Dude, I have done shit that's so weird it's not even on the internet," Pete says, which isn't really true, but whatever it is Patrick does, it's probably not weirder than anything Pete's ever done.
Patrick smiles back a little and gestures at his room. "I have to finish this, but wait here, okay? I'll be back in a minute and you can be emo all over my bus and I'll tell you you'll be in LA in a month and in the meantime there's always good old phone sex." He grins enthusiastically about the last bit, thumbs up around the water bottle and band-aids, and Pete laughs at him and still doesn't tell him.
The bus is quiet again when Patrick closes the door between them. Pete turns around in a circle a few times, looking at all Patrick and Andy and Matt and Kyle and Josh's crap spread all over everything. After a few minutes, a high-pitched yelp comes from Patrick's room and Pete jumps. The sound is followed by Patrick's familiar chuckle and Pete stares at the door, thinking--things.
When Pete was a teenager, he wrote--sometimes cut--his girlfriends' names on his body in places no one could see. And then Judy spontaneously pulled down his jeans in her well-lit room one day during junior year and found "judith ann moore" scabbing on the inside of his left thigh.
She didn't think it was sweet, or romantic, or even compellingly dark. Just weird. So he quit doing it, for years. He wrote and cut lyrics and dates and important words all over, though, even in the places people could see during school. He managed to convince himself he didn't want Morgan's name or initials on him, anywhere; he made her stupid t-shirts and helped her draw her first tattoo instead.
The first time he wrote his name on Jeanae, she was still sweaty and heaving from their first fuck. He dragged his jeans up from her bedroom floor and pulled the Sharpie from his pocket, and wrote "peter" in tiny letters on the thin skin of her inner arm, above her elbow.
She laughed, a little breathlessly, and took the marker from him. She pushed him over on his back and wrote "JEANAE" in giant bubble letters across his stomach.
They fooled around some more, and he pressed his thumb into his name on her arm hard enough to bruise. He tried to apologize, but she told him that every time it hurt, she'd think of him.
Idly, later, as he fell asleep, she filled in the letters on his stomach in a rainbow of Magic Marker.
"I'm fine," Pete says, and he means it as he says it, but Patrick just looks at him, squinting a little, and Patrick has someone and is happy and Pete has no one now. Pete is stealing this time from Patrick's happiness, because Pete can't be okay, can't be fine, not when he has no one, nothing, not when Patrick--Patrick, Patrick, Patrick of all people--is making something surprising and new, something Pete can't ever get a glimpse at.
Pete feels his face fall, crumbling. His eyes do not well with tears, because he doesn't cry anymore, but his sinuses feel heavy in his face, and he knows he's not fine. He puts his hand on his forehead, shoulders bowing, and Patrick nods.
"So," he says. "You're staying here tonight."
"Okay," Pete says. He looks over at one of Josh's bandanas on the kitchen counter and doesn't make any remarks about it being kind of crowded.
Patrick puts his arm around Pete's shoulders and tugs and Pete goes down easily, closing his eyes as his cheek is cushioned on Patrick's denim-covered thigh. Patrick's fingers pat his head a little awkwardly, a lot comfortingly.
When Pete gets back to Patrick's bus with his stuff, Josh is shouldering an overflowing backpack and almost tripping down the stairs, the laces of his beaten steel-toed boots untied and trailing.
"Would you be--oh hey, Pete," Patrick says, leaning out above Josh, whose face is ducked, who won't meet Pete's eyes.
"Yo," Pete says. "Hey, Josh."
Josh looks up at that, mouth tight, eyes narrow. "Hi, Pete," he says.
"Tie your goddamn laces before you trip and break your neck," Patrick tells Josh.
Josh's jaw clenches, but he leaves off untwisting his backpack straps and drops to one knee.
Patrick thumps down the stairs and picks up a t-shirt that fell out of Josh's pack. "It's only for a couple of days," he tells Josh. "You said you were missing the crew trailer anyway."
"I know," Josh says, eyes flicking up to Pete and back to his fingers. "It's okay."
Pete realizes what's going on. Patrick pushes the t-shirt into Josh's pack and doesn't say anything else.
"I brought Dogma," Pete says.
"Oh cool," Patrick says, but he doesn't sound excited.
"I deleted her number from my phone," Pete says, but he totally didn't need to do that--he's not going to call her at three in the morning, full of pills and recriminations and misery.
"Awesome," Patrick says, giving Pete thumbs up. "It only took, what, nineteen break ups for you to learn that one?"
Josh stands and glances at Patrick. Patrick glances at Pete. Pete turns away and watches from the corner of his eye as Josh steps closer to Patrick and Patrick briefly presses his hand to Josh's cheek and murmurs something. Pete looks away for real and doesn't feel any of the triumph he thought he would.
At four in the morning, after Pete has let Patrick hide his phones and make him eat a couple of Pop Tarts, just before Pete lets Patrick get some sleep, Pete asks something that prompts Patrick to relate his super-amazing d/s analogy about bricks and mortar.
Josh crouches to make his run at the Slip'n'Slide and Pete yells, "Yo, yo, hold up, you can't do it with your shirt on," and Charlie and Dan and everybody agree loudly and Josh raises his eyebrows at Pete, silent and speculative. They're both remembering the scene in Patrick's bus the other day; Pete sneers at him. Josh doesn't know him; Josh doesn't know shit. "Take it off, you fucking pussy," Pete says.
Josh rolls his eyes and smiles a little as he pulls his shirt over his head, exposing his pale, freckled torso--the bad tribal armband on his left bicep, the black and blue nautical star on his right shoulder, the scabbing interlocking lines over his heart. Pete squints at the design as Josh tucks his shirt in the back of his shorts and runs for the Slip'n'Slide. As he hits the plastic and skids down the slope, yelling to the echoing yells of the crew, Pete thinks: brick wall. Bricks and mortar.
Patrick cut his shitty analogy into Josh's chest.
Josh picks himself up at the bottom of the hill, staggering a little, laughing and wiping at his face with his shirt. Dirty offers him a red plastic cup. Josh takes it and drinks deeply.
Patrick totally cut his shitty analogy into Josh's chest. Over Josh's heart. This is more serious than Pete thought.
A few weeks before the end of tour, Patrick gets quiet--except for when he's yelling. He yells at Charlie and Dre, he yells at Dirty, he yells at Dan; Pete doesn't mind any of that, because those guys work for Fall Out Boy and they get paid, in part, as compensation for Patrick yelling at them.
Patrick yells at Gabe and Ryland a few times too--not just when they're working, but in the dressing room in Phoenix, partially because Gabe is eating all of the Stoned Wheat Thins Patrick specifically and especially put on the rider, and the other problem, which Pete hadn't really noticed, is that apparently Ryland keeps giving Josh things to do.
"He's not your fucking roadie; he doesn't fucking work for you; let him do his fucking job," he shouts, and slams the door on his way out of the room.
Josh puts down the guitar Ryland had asked him to fetch from the Cobra bus and goes after Patrick, a pinched look on his face.
"Well then," Gabe says, and offers Ryland the sleeve of Stoned Wheat Thins.
"Indeed," Ryland says, and takes two.
"I've had just about enough of this shit," Pete mutters.
"Enough of what?" Joe asks, scooping guacamole out of the container with a Wheat Thin.
"Did you not--where have you been the last fifteen minutes? Don't fucking eat Patrick's fucking crackers," Pete says, taking one sleeve from Joe and the other from Gabe. He finds the box wedged under the couch and pulls it free.
"The thing is," Gabe says to the room in general. "I'm wheaty, and I'm thin, so. It's like the crackers are my people, okay."
"Also, you're stoned," Ryland adds.
Gabe points at him with a cracker. "This is what I'm saying. Fucking brain twins over here."
"Seriously," Pete says. He shoves the crackers back into their box and leaves the room. Outside, Patrick is coming down the hall. The peevish flush in his forehead and cheeks has gone down, and he's not wearing his hoodie anymore.
"'Sup," Pete says, arranging himself against the wall and getting his phone out, like he wasn't going looking for Patrick.
Patrick takes his hat off and combs his hair off his forehead a little. "I was just--I was going to apologize to Gabe and Ryland for being an asshole. Are those my crackers?" He reaches over and takes the box from under Pete's arm. "Thanks," he says, and smiles at Pete.
"Don't apologize, it's a sign of weakness," Pete says. He wants to ask what's up with Josh, and what happened to Patrick's hoodie. "Also, they're fucking stoned."
"Yeah," Patrick says. "But I'm not really mad at them, so."
"What'd Josh do now?" Pete asks, and when he hears the words come out of his mouth, he thinks: shit; I am a fucking idiot.
Patrick's mouth tightens and he walks away. Halfway down the hall, he turns back. Pete is about to say he's sorry when Patrick grimaces and says, "I'm not mad at anybody. Tour's almost over, and Josh is going back to school in Florida, so."
"Oh," Pete says, suddenly recognizing Patrick's recent quiet and temper and retreat into double-thick hoodies. It's been a while, but this is Patrick breaking up with someone when it's mutual and amicable but not what Patrick really wants.
Patrick nods, turning the box of crackers over and over in his hands. "It's just a tour thing, we both knew that. It's fine." He shrugs and meets Pete's eyes. Pete swallows. Patrick's mouth tilts in a rueful half smile. "But I'm going to miss him. A lot."
"So don't break up with him," Pete says, his mouth and lungs working without his brain's input again.
Patrick shakes his head. "Long-distance, really? Been there, done that, it's a bad scene and I'm not into it," he says.
"Yeah," Pete says. He knew that.
"Besides, Josh and I, it's not--it's really, ridiculously hard to do long-distance," Patrick adds. "He's starting his last year of an engineering degree, and I work about two hundred hours a week." He shrugs again, looking pained and displeased by logic. "It just wouldn't work."
"I'm sorry," Pete says, and he means it. Maybe he thinks it's all a little weird and maybe he doesn't understand and maybe Josh is a fucking creep who doesn't deserve to attend one of Patrick's shows, let alone rig the lighting for it, but. Patrick is going to miss him. "I'm sorry for that."
Patrick smiles. "You don't actually run the entire universe," he says. "You don't have to apologize because my--because Josh goes to school on the other side of the country."
"And you're a workaholic," Pete adds.
"I'm dedicated," Patrick corrects.
"You're a control freak," Pete says.
"You say that like your business doesn't depend on my megalomania," Patrick says, and cuffs Pete in the head with the box of Stoned Wheat Thins.
HCT ends, YWT begins.
"Do you miss Josh?" Pete asks finally, quietly, mostly into his hands.
Patrick blinks and looks up from his sudoku book. "What? Yeah."
"A lot?"
Patrick shrugs, looking vaguely uncomfortable. "We e-mail. I mean. It's fine. We're friends."
Pete shakes his head, his hair falling in his eyes. He shoves it back and says, "No, do you miss--the thing, Patrick. Your thing, with Josh. Do you miss that."
Patrick's hand, which had been teasing his pencil over the empty boxes in his puzzle, goes still. He says, studiously nonchalant, "I guess. No more than I usually do. Which is--it's not something I do a lot, so. I miss having someone around all the time. But I'm used to being on tour without--" he frowns and looks down and writes a number "--without it. I'm used to being without it period."
In Bakersfield, Pete is on stage with the band, playing, and he feels on. He's getting almost all the notes, mostly in the right places, and he remembers the setlist, and he can see that Joe and Andy feel the same way, and Patrick is working his fucking mic stand like the fucking rock star he is.
Pete finds himself approaching Patrick, skipping to the beat, letting his feet go out from under him, sliding to his knees at Patrick's feet. He plays up at Patrick for a couple of bars, hoping with a strange, sweet expectancy that Patrick will look down at him and see. See what Pete would do for him, what Pete would be for him, where Pete would put himself, if only Patrick would give him a chance--praying for Patrick to look down and see everything.
Patrick finishes singing the chorus and looks down at his hand on the neck of his guitar and sees Pete and blinks, his cheeks shining with sweat and his eyes mostly hidden by the brim of his hat. He shakes his head, and--turns away. He walks over to play the intro to the bridge with Joe and leaves Pete kneeling downstage, kneeling beside an abandoned mic stand, and doesn't miss a fucking beat.
"You don't really," Patrick says, and sighs. "You don't really want to. You're freaking out because a) I like guys, and b) I like doing--things. To guys."
"You like hurting them," Pete corrects flatly. He is so, so tired of people thinking they know him better than he knows himself.
"I hurt myself because I hate myself," Pete says. "Because I love people who don't love me. I want to know--I think it would be different, if it was because someone did love me. I think it would be different if it was out of love, instead of hate. I want to know if I'm right. I want to know if being hurt can make me feel loved instead of--nothing. Instead of like I'm nothing."
"You are loved," Patrick says. "You are something. And you mean the world to everyone who loves you and the people who don't are not fucking worth your time, and you know that. I don't--I am not a therapist, okay--"
Pete shakes his head, frowning frustratedly. He jumps up and unzips and pulls his jeans down and pulls the leg of his boxer briefs up to show Patrick a faint, long string of scars on his inner thigh.
"What--" Patrick leans forward a bit, reaches out a bit, eyebrows drawn together, but he doesn't touch.
"Judith Ann Moore," Pete declares. "I wanted her so much. I wanted her to be mine, I wanted to belong to her, so I put her name on me. She thought it was pretty sick and she dumped me."
"Oh," Patrick says. His outstretched hand drops to his thigh and he looks up at Pete, comprehending.
Pete tugs his jeans back up and sits down again, a little farther away from Patrick. "I want someone to love how I hurt for them," he says, slow, stiff, raw. "Instead of--instead of thinking it's gross."
"Okay," Patrick says.
"Okay?" It can't possibly be that easy.
"Well," Patrick says. "Not okay, but. I'll--we--I'll think about it."
Pete wants to fall on his knees and press his face to Patrick's thigh, Patrick's stomach, but he doesn't. He looks down at his fingers knotted in his lap and says, "Thank you."
"I am not here to entertain you," Patrick says, eyes hard and face naked without his glasses. "I am here to hurt you. I am here to control you when you can't fucking control yourself. I am here because you asked me to be here. I am not fucking around, Pete."
Pete blinks at him, thinking, I am so completely in over my head.
Patrick shoves at Pete's shoulders, even though Pete is already against the wall. "I am not here to entertain you," Patrick says again.
"Okay," Pete says, voice raspy. "I get it."
"I don't care what you want to hide from me," Patrick says quietly, and Pete shudders, his shoulders shaking against Patrick's hands. "I care," Patrick says, "that you'll give it to me anyway."
*
This is a DW-origin crospost, oh noes. Feel free to comment on LJ or the original post here.