Fic: Symphony - Chapter One
Title: Symphony - Chapter One
Author: beccaforever
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Pairing: Brendon/Ryan. Bow to my originality. Hah.
POV: Second. ‘You’ is Ryan this time, however.
Summary: “Tell me about your first lover.”
“He was a musician.”
Disclaimer: Christmas is coming up soon…but for now, it is not mine.
Dedication: Everyone that commented. You guys rock!
Author Notes: Wow. Thanks so much for all the wonderful comments on the prologue. You guys are awesome. This chapter is set five years before the prologue.
Prologue
You’d always been of the opinion that a person should be either liked or hated. There was no in between. None of this ambivalence, none of this love-at-first-sight crap. Mainly because that was how it had always been for you. Well, not you personally - people didn’t always like or hate you. In fact, you were pretty sure that there were plenty of people out there that held no opinion of you whatsoever. But, like, when you met people, you either liked them on their first impression or you didn’t.
That was, of course, until you met Brendon.
You didn’t really know what to think of him.
You had kind of thought that you were going to like him. Brent had told you a bit about him, given you the low-down (God, you hated that phrase), and he sounded cool enough. Not, like, the most amazing person ever, but cool enough. Good enough to be the guitarist in your band.
But then you met him.
That was one shock to the system that you could’ve lived without.
You’d been curled up in the corner of Spencer’s couch (writing lyrics, probably. It was all you did those days) when he walked into the room.
And it wasn’t like one of those cheesy scenes, you know, like in the movies, where all this stupid shit like rainbows appearing and choirs singing happens. In fact, nothing of consequence really happened at all. Well, not really.
You did drop your notebook.
Now, that might sound kind of stupid and all (really, it’s just a notebook and all that), but back then it was a big deal for you. Back then, you never dropped your notebook. You were pretty paranoid about anyone reading what you wrote. Which was kind of stupid for an aspiring songwriter, but still. They were private thoughts. You wanted to make them less personal, make them mean less, before anyone else saw them.
So yeah, you dropped your notebook.
Brent and Spencer, being well, Brent and Spencer, immediately leaned over to try and get a look. Curiosity was irrepressible, you supposed, especially when you’d hidden something for so long. They just had to get a look at it.
And Brendon? He walked over, picked up your notebook, and handed back to you. “You dropped this.”
Well.
That pretty much boggled you.
You supposed, looking back, that it could be easily explained away as him simply not knowing what was in the notebook. And being exceptionally unobservant of the fact that it must be at least somewhat interesting, seeing how Brent and Spence were so eager to get a look at it and all. But still. He didn’t even glance at it.
That was, you guessed, your first step on the way to utter confusion about all things Brendon Urie.
You just didn’t get him.
So, as you presumed most people did when confused (not that you had much experience with what other people did when confused - it was mostly you feeling that way), you stared at the object of your confusion.
He grinned at you, and stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Brendon.”
Being polite was something you could deal with, at least. So you took his hand “Ryan.”
Apparently this was some sort of signal. You had never been good with signals, but it seemed to you that since you and Brendon had been introduced, suddenly it was alright for everyone else to introduce themselves as well. Well, he already knew Brent (school and all), but not Spence.
So they introduced themselves.
Thrilling, right?
No.
Anyway. Introductions over, you went back to your notebook. This was (still is) a fairly normal thing for you to do, but obviously Brendon didn’t know that back then. And besides, even if he had known that, it’s not like it would’ve made any difference. Brendon doesn’t do space. He’s always there, in your bubble, all the time. And sometimes it’s cute, but mostly it’s just annoying.
You could feel him staring at you, obviously puzzled, and you figured that was the first sign that not only did Brendon confuse you; you pretty much boggled him as well.
Which was cool.
Better than nothing.
***
And that was pretty much the status quo for the next three months or so. Band practice? You’d confuse each other. Parties? You’d confuse each other. Anywhere and everywhere? You’d confuse each other.
Well. It probably wasn’t that bad. Most of the time you got along fine. It’s just, every so often, one of you would do something that the other considered completely off the wall.
You kinda thought it would wear off after a few months of knowing each other, but it didn’t. Every time you did something weird (actually, every time you did anything), you’d catch him staring at you.
And it made you nervous.
Not that you weren’t a generally nervous person anyway. He just made you more nervous.
But at least you got better at not showing how nervous you were. He just kept on staring.
You probably should have realised at the time that he was staring at you for reasons other than thinking you were weird. But, along with being an extremely anxious person, you were also, to put it bluntly, an extremely dense person. You didn’t tend to notice these things.
Besides, you had a girlfriend at the time. So it wasn’t like you were interested.
And, now that you think back, he had a girlfriend too.
Not that you ever met her.
Actually, in your defence as well as his, you’re not entirely sure he knew why he stared at you so much either. At least, not then. Understanding came later. Much later.
But one immediate effect of the staring was that you began to spend more time in his company. Which does sound kind of strange, considering it was you. Normally when people stared at you, you shied away, but not this time. This time you embraced it, as such, coming to depend more and more on him for almost everything.
So that was how you found yourself sitting on his doorstep at three am, waiting for either A) him to somehow telepathically sense that you were there and let you in, or B) you to actually gather the courage to knock on the door.
Because, despite the fact that you were spending more time in his company as of late, you weren’t sure whether that extended to turning up on his doorstep at three am with a black eye, among other things.
Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Ordinarily you would’ve gone to Spencer’s, knocked on his door at three am. And they would’ve let you in, because they were used to it. Horrible words to use in conjunction with what happened to you, ordinarily and used to, but that was how it was.
But Spencer and his family were out of town for the weekend, visiting cousins or some such thing, and Brent wasn’t really ever an option. So Brendon’s house it was.
Well, Brendon’s doorstep, actually.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tapitty. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tapitty. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap - “Ryan?”
Needless to say, you jumped about three feet in the air.
“What?” You hissed.
“Why are you tapping on my doorstep? At three am?”
You turned to face him, clutching your left wrist to your chest, and let him see the bruises you were sure had formed on your face.
“Jesus, Ryan…”
You scuttled backward, away from him and his hand, reaching out toward you.
“What happened to you?”
You knew then that you shouldn’t have come. Shouldn’t have set yourself up for all the inevitable questions. Questions that Brendon wouldn’t stop asking until he had the answers. You knew him, you knew what would happen. That was why you preferred going to Spencer’s. He never asked what had happened. And you never told him.
“It’s nothing.” You mumbled, scrambling to your feet. “I shouldn’t have come.”
But he wasn’t having any of that. You felt rather than saw his hand shoot out and grab your shoulder, stopping you in your tracks. You winced, and he spun you to face him again. “Ryan,” he said, “Ryan, stop being so stupid.”
So you did.
You let him pull you into a hug (Brendon gave the best hugs), and then let him lead you inside. And, when he murmured to you “it’s okay Ry, it’s gonna be okay,” you wanted to believe him.
You really did.
***
After that you pretty much went to Brendon for everything. You lost count of the times you ran to his house at three am, collapsing on his doorstep. And no matter what it was, from bruises to break-ups, he was always there for you.
And you felt that you did a pretty good job of being there for him.
Although, saying that, you were probably the only one that could be there for him. Brendon with issues was something that required endless patience to deal with. And endless patience was something you had in abundance. It was also a quality that none of his other friends seemed to possess at all.
So it was you that got stuck with him that fateful Saturday afternoon. The day his first girlfriend broke up with him.
You really didn’t want to be there. As nice as Brendon was, and as good as he was to you, when he got upset over something, he didn’t hold back. He was perfectly comfortable whinging on and on about it for hours. And you, as his best friend, pretty much got stuck listening to it.
He’d called you up on the phone about two pm. This wasn’t unusual. If you weren’t with him on the weekends, you usually talked on the phone, sometimes for hours.
And the phone call itself wasn’t too unusual, either. It rang, you picked up, and Brendon began blabbering on about something or other. Nothing new.
Only this time, the blabbering began with something like “I thought I was going to marry her!”
Naturally, this made you pay attention.
Brendon continued on. “Honestly, Ry, I had it all planned out. I thought she loved me!”
You were a bit mystified at this point, but you made reassuring noises nonetheless, and let Brendon carry on.
At this point, however, it seemed that Brendon was beyond words, and had lapsed into meaningless noises.
This was where the calm part of you came into action. “Bren? What happened?”
Noises.
“Start from the beginning Bren.”
“She dumped me!”
Okay, so now you understood what he was talking about. She (as far as you knew), was Jess, Brendon’s (ex)girlfriend. The one you never met.
The one that was apparently causing him to sniffle at you over the phone.
“Brendon, are you crying?”
A sniffle. “No.”
You smiled at this. “Do you want to come over?”
“To your house?”
You glanced over at the sofa, or, more specifically, at the man passed out there. “Umm, you know that park down the road from my place? I’ll meet you there.”
He sighed. “Alright, Ry. I’ll see you there.”
And so, twenty minutes later, you found yourself sitting opposite Brendon on a see saw as he poured his heart out to you.
Only, as bad as it sounds, you weren’t really listening to him. You managed to catch the occasional word, to nod in all the right places, to make sympathetic sounds, but you never actually caught all of what he said that day.
And maybe when you met there hadn’t been any choirs singing, and rainbows, but you sure felt like there should be some now. Maybe a few rain clouds too, on account of the whole break up thing, but mostly rainbows and sunshine and cheesy orchestral pieces.
Because you were starting to realise that maybe you were kind of happy that his girlfriend dumped him. Maybe you were kind of happy that he was single. Obviously heartbroken, but still single. Maybe you were kind of happy that hey, there was no one in the way now. That you could make a move on him. Or something.
Not that you ever would. But the option was still available.
So, while he was pouring out his heart to you, telling you all about how he was going to marry this girl (although you learnt soon enough that he said this about every girl he dated), you were busy fantasizing, well, inappropriate things.
And you were starting to realise that you’d never been this attracted to anyone ever - at least as far as you could recall. You’d never wanted to spend every waking moment with them. You’d never, well, fantasized this much about someone before.
You’d also never liked a boy before. Especially not one that was your best friend.
So basically, you figured, you were pretty much screwed.
Author: beccaforever
Rating: PG-13 for now.
Pairing: Brendon/Ryan. Bow to my originality. Hah.
POV: Second. ‘You’ is Ryan this time, however.
Summary: “Tell me about your first lover.”
“He was a musician.”
Disclaimer: Christmas is coming up soon…but for now, it is not mine.
Dedication: Everyone that commented. You guys rock!
Author Notes: Wow. Thanks so much for all the wonderful comments on the prologue. You guys are awesome. This chapter is set five years before the prologue.
Prologue
You’d always been of the opinion that a person should be either liked or hated. There was no in between. None of this ambivalence, none of this love-at-first-sight crap. Mainly because that was how it had always been for you. Well, not you personally - people didn’t always like or hate you. In fact, you were pretty sure that there were plenty of people out there that held no opinion of you whatsoever. But, like, when you met people, you either liked them on their first impression or you didn’t.
That was, of course, until you met Brendon.
You didn’t really know what to think of him.
You had kind of thought that you were going to like him. Brent had told you a bit about him, given you the low-down (God, you hated that phrase), and he sounded cool enough. Not, like, the most amazing person ever, but cool enough. Good enough to be the guitarist in your band.
But then you met him.
That was one shock to the system that you could’ve lived without.
You’d been curled up in the corner of Spencer’s couch (writing lyrics, probably. It was all you did those days) when he walked into the room.
And it wasn’t like one of those cheesy scenes, you know, like in the movies, where all this stupid shit like rainbows appearing and choirs singing happens. In fact, nothing of consequence really happened at all. Well, not really.
You did drop your notebook.
Now, that might sound kind of stupid and all (really, it’s just a notebook and all that), but back then it was a big deal for you. Back then, you never dropped your notebook. You were pretty paranoid about anyone reading what you wrote. Which was kind of stupid for an aspiring songwriter, but still. They were private thoughts. You wanted to make them less personal, make them mean less, before anyone else saw them.
So yeah, you dropped your notebook.
Brent and Spencer, being well, Brent and Spencer, immediately leaned over to try and get a look. Curiosity was irrepressible, you supposed, especially when you’d hidden something for so long. They just had to get a look at it.
And Brendon? He walked over, picked up your notebook, and handed back to you. “You dropped this.”
Well.
That pretty much boggled you.
You supposed, looking back, that it could be easily explained away as him simply not knowing what was in the notebook. And being exceptionally unobservant of the fact that it must be at least somewhat interesting, seeing how Brent and Spence were so eager to get a look at it and all. But still. He didn’t even glance at it.
That was, you guessed, your first step on the way to utter confusion about all things Brendon Urie.
You just didn’t get him.
So, as you presumed most people did when confused (not that you had much experience with what other people did when confused - it was mostly you feeling that way), you stared at the object of your confusion.
He grinned at you, and stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Brendon.”
Being polite was something you could deal with, at least. So you took his hand “Ryan.”
Apparently this was some sort of signal. You had never been good with signals, but it seemed to you that since you and Brendon had been introduced, suddenly it was alright for everyone else to introduce themselves as well. Well, he already knew Brent (school and all), but not Spence.
So they introduced themselves.
Thrilling, right?
No.
Anyway. Introductions over, you went back to your notebook. This was (still is) a fairly normal thing for you to do, but obviously Brendon didn’t know that back then. And besides, even if he had known that, it’s not like it would’ve made any difference. Brendon doesn’t do space. He’s always there, in your bubble, all the time. And sometimes it’s cute, but mostly it’s just annoying.
You could feel him staring at you, obviously puzzled, and you figured that was the first sign that not only did Brendon confuse you; you pretty much boggled him as well.
Which was cool.
Better than nothing.
***
And that was pretty much the status quo for the next three months or so. Band practice? You’d confuse each other. Parties? You’d confuse each other. Anywhere and everywhere? You’d confuse each other.
Well. It probably wasn’t that bad. Most of the time you got along fine. It’s just, every so often, one of you would do something that the other considered completely off the wall.
You kinda thought it would wear off after a few months of knowing each other, but it didn’t. Every time you did something weird (actually, every time you did anything), you’d catch him staring at you.
And it made you nervous.
Not that you weren’t a generally nervous person anyway. He just made you more nervous.
But at least you got better at not showing how nervous you were. He just kept on staring.
You probably should have realised at the time that he was staring at you for reasons other than thinking you were weird. But, along with being an extremely anxious person, you were also, to put it bluntly, an extremely dense person. You didn’t tend to notice these things.
Besides, you had a girlfriend at the time. So it wasn’t like you were interested.
And, now that you think back, he had a girlfriend too.
Not that you ever met her.
Actually, in your defence as well as his, you’re not entirely sure he knew why he stared at you so much either. At least, not then. Understanding came later. Much later.
But one immediate effect of the staring was that you began to spend more time in his company. Which does sound kind of strange, considering it was you. Normally when people stared at you, you shied away, but not this time. This time you embraced it, as such, coming to depend more and more on him for almost everything.
So that was how you found yourself sitting on his doorstep at three am, waiting for either A) him to somehow telepathically sense that you were there and let you in, or B) you to actually gather the courage to knock on the door.
Because, despite the fact that you were spending more time in his company as of late, you weren’t sure whether that extended to turning up on his doorstep at three am with a black eye, among other things.
Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have been an issue. Ordinarily you would’ve gone to Spencer’s, knocked on his door at three am. And they would’ve let you in, because they were used to it. Horrible words to use in conjunction with what happened to you, ordinarily and used to, but that was how it was.
But Spencer and his family were out of town for the weekend, visiting cousins or some such thing, and Brent wasn’t really ever an option. So Brendon’s house it was.
Well, Brendon’s doorstep, actually.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tapitty. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tapitty. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. Tap - “Ryan?”
Needless to say, you jumped about three feet in the air.
“What?” You hissed.
“Why are you tapping on my doorstep? At three am?”
You turned to face him, clutching your left wrist to your chest, and let him see the bruises you were sure had formed on your face.
“Jesus, Ryan…”
You scuttled backward, away from him and his hand, reaching out toward you.
“What happened to you?”
You knew then that you shouldn’t have come. Shouldn’t have set yourself up for all the inevitable questions. Questions that Brendon wouldn’t stop asking until he had the answers. You knew him, you knew what would happen. That was why you preferred going to Spencer’s. He never asked what had happened. And you never told him.
“It’s nothing.” You mumbled, scrambling to your feet. “I shouldn’t have come.”
But he wasn’t having any of that. You felt rather than saw his hand shoot out and grab your shoulder, stopping you in your tracks. You winced, and he spun you to face him again. “Ryan,” he said, “Ryan, stop being so stupid.”
So you did.
You let him pull you into a hug (Brendon gave the best hugs), and then let him lead you inside. And, when he murmured to you “it’s okay Ry, it’s gonna be okay,” you wanted to believe him.
You really did.
***
After that you pretty much went to Brendon for everything. You lost count of the times you ran to his house at three am, collapsing on his doorstep. And no matter what it was, from bruises to break-ups, he was always there for you.
And you felt that you did a pretty good job of being there for him.
Although, saying that, you were probably the only one that could be there for him. Brendon with issues was something that required endless patience to deal with. And endless patience was something you had in abundance. It was also a quality that none of his other friends seemed to possess at all.
So it was you that got stuck with him that fateful Saturday afternoon. The day his first girlfriend broke up with him.
You really didn’t want to be there. As nice as Brendon was, and as good as he was to you, when he got upset over something, he didn’t hold back. He was perfectly comfortable whinging on and on about it for hours. And you, as his best friend, pretty much got stuck listening to it.
He’d called you up on the phone about two pm. This wasn’t unusual. If you weren’t with him on the weekends, you usually talked on the phone, sometimes for hours.
And the phone call itself wasn’t too unusual, either. It rang, you picked up, and Brendon began blabbering on about something or other. Nothing new.
Only this time, the blabbering began with something like “I thought I was going to marry her!”
Naturally, this made you pay attention.
Brendon continued on. “Honestly, Ry, I had it all planned out. I thought she loved me!”
You were a bit mystified at this point, but you made reassuring noises nonetheless, and let Brendon carry on.
At this point, however, it seemed that Brendon was beyond words, and had lapsed into meaningless noises.
This was where the calm part of you came into action. “Bren? What happened?”
Noises.
“Start from the beginning Bren.”
“She dumped me!”
Okay, so now you understood what he was talking about. She (as far as you knew), was Jess, Brendon’s (ex)girlfriend. The one you never met.
The one that was apparently causing him to sniffle at you over the phone.
“Brendon, are you crying?”
A sniffle. “No.”
You smiled at this. “Do you want to come over?”
“To your house?”
You glanced over at the sofa, or, more specifically, at the man passed out there. “Umm, you know that park down the road from my place? I’ll meet you there.”
He sighed. “Alright, Ry. I’ll see you there.”
And so, twenty minutes later, you found yourself sitting opposite Brendon on a see saw as he poured his heart out to you.
Only, as bad as it sounds, you weren’t really listening to him. You managed to catch the occasional word, to nod in all the right places, to make sympathetic sounds, but you never actually caught all of what he said that day.
And maybe when you met there hadn’t been any choirs singing, and rainbows, but you sure felt like there should be some now. Maybe a few rain clouds too, on account of the whole break up thing, but mostly rainbows and sunshine and cheesy orchestral pieces.
Because you were starting to realise that maybe you were kind of happy that his girlfriend dumped him. Maybe you were kind of happy that he was single. Obviously heartbroken, but still single. Maybe you were kind of happy that hey, there was no one in the way now. That you could make a move on him. Or something.
Not that you ever would. But the option was still available.
So, while he was pouring out his heart to you, telling you all about how he was going to marry this girl (although you learnt soon enough that he said this about every girl he dated), you were busy fantasizing, well, inappropriate things.
And you were starting to realise that you’d never been this attracted to anyone ever - at least as far as you could recall. You’d never wanted to spend every waking moment with them. You’d never, well, fantasized this much about someone before.
You’d also never liked a boy before. Especially not one that was your best friend.
So basically, you figured, you were pretty much screwed.