Ficlets: London's Vegas and The Sofa
This is, essentially, for archiving purposes. These were my responses for the comment-fic requests.
Title: London's Vegas
Rating: PG
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Prompt: kthxrawr: Stargazing and awkward kissing.
Today they are in London.
He thinks. To be fair, he isn’t quite sure, these towns, these cities, these countries, they blur together too quickly, haze into a merry-go-round of colour and lights and faces, and Ryan, the conductor won’t let him off the ride. He’s stuck on the back of some acrylic horse, the paint chipping off its face and saddle, the pole, the spindly thing that impales it, it’s sweaty from where Ryan’s hands hold on too tight.
London (wherever they are), it’s nothing like home, nothing like Vegas, and each time Ryan closes his eyes, it’s a little harder to remember the blinding lights and the parks and that place that Spencer used to live. Each time, his head has to strain a little harder, and his heart lurches, falls, cracks. It shouldn’t hurt this much, Ryan’s sure, Vegas, she was never much of a home.
The window on the bus is some transparent raincoat, an umbrella, the raindrops are rebounding too quickly, splattering onto the road beneath the bus’ tired wheels. The sky, it’s darker than dark, darker than Ryan’s black-ink-pen and it spills on forever, stars dapple across, glow and try their hand at dancing, but Ryan, it just, all of it makes him nostalgic.
There’s a warm breath on the back of his neck, and Brendon’s fingers draw patterns on that fog that stretches across the window. He’s just woken up, and Ryan, he can see him rub fingers across his eyes, across his cheeks. Brendon’s in a pair of boxers and a large fleecy jacket.
Its freezing cold and Ryan can breathe ice.
“Second star to the right,” Brendon whispers, but he’s all smiles and sleepy eyes, “and straight on till morning.”
“To Neverland?” Ryan asks, and his fingers clutch at the cup of coffee on his leg, try too hard to steal some of the warmth.
“To Vegas,” Brendon says, and he throws himself onto the seat next to Ryan, leans a head on the older boy’s shoulder.
“Wasn’t thinking about Vegas,” Ryan whispers, and he shifts beneath Brendon’s heavy heart, takes a draining gulp from the coffee in his hands.
“What were you thinking about then, Ryan Ross?” And Brendon, he’s grinning to himself, rubbing his hands together as if he’s trying to start a fire, and it’s Brendon, so maybe he is.
“Do you regret this?” Ryan asks, “Do you regret the road and the band and all of this?”
Brendon moves his head so that he can stare Ryan straight in the eye, “why would I?”
“I dunno,” Ryan says, “your family, your old friends, your…everything.”
“If it wasn’t for this band,” Brendon says, and he purses his lips, rolls his eyes and lets loose a wild grin. “If it wasn’t for this band, then I’d only have one family, and I’d only have old friends.”
Ryan stares, shifts a little in his seat, and all Ryan would have would be a Spencer and a dead Dad. “So?”
“So now I have two families,” Brendon says, “and new friends. I’m also famous and hot, so I’m pretty sure I win.”
Ryan, he laughs a little, turns his gaze back out the window and smiles back at the night-time.
“I wouldn’t have you either, would I?” Brendon says, and Ryan spins in his seat, stares at a Brendon who is suddenly all wide eyes and pale skin and legs that stick out of the jumper like chopsticks.
Before he can even mutter a response, Brendon, his lips are on Ryan’s, and all Ryan can taste is toothpaste trying to stifle morning breath, and maybe a bit of lip-gloss, maybe a bit of last night’s dinner still. This is nothing really, just lips on lips, but Ryan’s eyes are watering and his mouth is dry, and he pulls away too quickly.
Brendon’s head drops to his knees, and he huddles in on himself a little, pulls at the fleecy jumper that has to be Jon’s because really, it’s too big for him.
No, Ryan thinks.
“No,” Ryan says.
“You’d have me,” he says, “You always have me.”
*
Title: The Sofa
Rating: PG
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Prompt:
mandy_croyance: Ryan. Brendon. An atlas. A breakup? For better, for worse, but not for you.
There are too many good things about this sofa, and Ryan rather fears that he suddenly has a rather firm emotional attachment to the old thing. Something that ties up his stomach, and drops slices of paper-weights between his toes, all of this, it roots him to the spot.
“So,” Brendon says, and he runs a hand through his hair, leans further into the stiff dining-chair that is placed on the other side of the living room, on the other side of their world. “So…”
What Ryan perhaps likes most about this sofa is how easy it is to get lost in it. Ryan, he can slide down between the cushions and the armrests and imagine himself a world where this old girl, where she was brand new and custom made for a family in the early 1920’s, where she keeps newborn baby saliva, the muddy footprints and snotty fingertips of little children and the locket that the husband gave his wife, the one she lost when she found out about the affair.
Brendon can’t meet his eye, so he stands up instead, pulls a large world map from the corner of the bookshelf, slides onto the floor and rests his back on the striped wallpaper. He opens the book, and it really is a distraction for him, so Ryan, he preoccupies himself with the sofa, with the way the zipper on the pillow digs into his hipbone.
“One day I’ll go to Rome,” Brendon says, “one day I’ll go to Nigeria.”
“But not with me,” Ryan mumbles, and really, he didn’t mean to say it out loud, the sofa clucks her tongue, and Ryan strokes tired fingers across her arm.
Brendon is too quiet, but he manages to murmur a “not with you,” which, for some reason, sends Ryan’s heart and chest plummeting to his feet, it shares a spot with the paper-weights.
“It’s not like I don’t love you,” Brendon says, and he runs fingers across the map in front of him, skirts around oceans and runs races across the deserts.
“Just you’re not in love with me anymore,” Ryan replies, and right now, now he can’t meet Brendon’s eyes, he fixes his gaze on his fingertips, on the sofa, on the floor.
Brendon doesn’t say anything, his fingers still crossing the world, that great wide somewhere, “One day I’ll go to Thailand.”
“Right,” Ryan says, “right.”