(no subject)
Ever Endeavor.
Pairing: Pete/Ryan Brendon/Audrey references to past Ryan/Spencer.
Rating: R.
Word Count: 3k.
Disclaimer: Didn't happen.
Summary: "Pete laughs against his mouth and Ryan arches into it".
Notes: Yuck. I've been working on this for roughly 5 months now. I don't feel like I'm finished with it, but I guess I probably should be. I'm letting it go before it becomes something that no-one but me will want to read.
Pete pushes Ryan harder against the wall, fingers biting bruises into his hips and Ryan arches into it. His teeth graze the length of Ryan's neck, pulling the blood to the surface of Ryan’s pale skin when he pauses. A whimper escapes Ryan's throat, manages to get past the breaths that are constantly hitching and getting lost somewhere between his lungs and his lips and Pete laughs against his mouth. He winds a hand into Ryan’s hair and pulls his head back, angling Ryan’s mouth beneath his regardless of the height difference. Ryan slumps further down, hips pushing forward into Pete’s and skull thumping brick when the hand in his hair tightens and twists again.
Pete laughs against his mouth and Ryan arches into it.
*
Pete and Patrick are soulmates. They were born for one another, each created with the other in mind. There’s no other way to explain the way they fall into sync. They are two halves separated, a whole - an entire; united.
Patrick saved Pete and continues to do so on a daily basis. He makes sense of Pete’s words, makes songs from Pete’s thoughts. He makes something out of Pete’s nothing.
“It was never like that, Pete” is what he’ll say when he breaks up with Anna.
“Never like that”. Regardless of anything else.
He says it in what Pete assumes is meant to be a soothing tone, but it comes out harsh, a mocking caricature of concern made ugly by the harsh and contradicting glare of softly humming fluorescent lights.
“never”.
It’s strange, Pete knows, that Patrick is the one making separations, clarifying divides when he’s in the very center of this ugly knot. But Patrick tugs gently and the threads pull free of one another. Still irrevocably connected, just laid out plainly now, a simple crossing of lines that had so long ago blurred together in Pete’s mind, ceased to be separate at all.
“Never”.
Not “Can’t be”.
Not “Won’t be”.
“Was Never”, with a capital letter.
Pete feels robbed.
He could feel sorry for himself in receipt of a “can’t” or “won’t”, but “Never” and he mourns the loss of something that he never even had. Something he thought he was waiting for. But he doesn’t have to wait now. It was never his. It was never going to be his. And he has nothing left to wait for at all.
*
Ryan Ross doesn’t know the meaning of the word “wait”. He knows “want”, “need”, “deserve” probably best of all.
He needs, and Spencer gives.
It’s purely coincidence that these facts collide to give Spencer what he wants.
Spencer’s not a good friend, he’s not a good person. He gives away what he needs, finds creative ways to get rid of what he thinks he doesn’t deserve. He’s twisted into knots and Ryan is tangled inside out. The situation is less than ideal. Ryan strips himself down to start again and Spencer just tears himself apart but Spencer doesn’t think to protest. Whether he does or not is really irrelevant to the issue.
Spencer gives, Ryan takes and you can’t expect questions that aren’t asked to ever get answered.
Getting what he wants doesn’t fix Ryan because what he wants is never what he needs. And giving doesn’t fix Spencer, because when you give away the bad you’re left with the worst. He’s not broken like Ryan but for as true as that might be, he’s very good at hurting.
Ryan shows up at his door in the middle of the night, blood and resolve still sinking into the cracked and swollen skin of his knuckles. Spencer cleans the wounds by making new ones.
Spencer gives and Ryan takes but ironically it’s Brendon’s mouth that bears the bad taste of their mistakes.
*
Brendon disagrees with the concept of 'PeteandRyan' because it’s not PeteandRyan. No matter how many times they say it that way. It’s Pete. And it’s Ryan.
But Brendon is smarter than anyone gives him credit for. He knows that Pete is their chance. He knows that if Spencer and Ryan continue down the path they’re on that only one of them will reach the end.
He knows that Spencer isn’t too far gone yet, hopes that if they cut out the rot maybe they can save the organ. He’ll be bruised and he’ll be battered, but he’ll be better for it in the long run.
And Ryan? Brendon loves Ryan. Brendon knows Ryan. And Brendon knows that maybe it’s time for Ryan to find out what it feels like to be dispensable. To be a product, not a process.
*
The interesting thing about Audrey is that for all the complications that define her, she simplifies for Brendon.
Whether it’s that she really just doesn’t give a fuck or not he can never tell, but for whatever reason being with her is just simple. It just makes sense, without making any sense whatsoever.
Ryan hates her, but not for any reason you could anticipate.
Ryan spends his life trying to translate and transcribe himself. His goals focus mainly around the seemingly impossible tasks of firstly figuring out just who he is and more importantly - putting that together to form something. He doesn’t know what it will become yet, but it won’t be anything. It has to be something. It has to be everything.
Some days he thinks that he doesn’t want to ever find that he amounts to something. He doesn’t want to be anything more or less than the exact sum of himself.
But if Ryan is an equation, the numerical exploration of who you might be, then Audrey is the tragic corpse of who you know you want to be.
She’s the decomposition of something that was never as beautiful a creation as it is in it's destruction.
Ryan sees her like glass, like mirror. Sometimes she’s a reflection of you, sometimes she’s the only truth you’ll ever see. She could shatter and smash at any moment and Ryan's seen it happen. What’s even more remarkable than witnessing her detonate is picking out the shards that she leaves in her wake. Weeks, months later. Countless days after she’s pieced herself back together you’ll still see traces of her undoing. They follow her path through life, through friends and casualties alike. They glitter in the sunlight and lodge themselves between the sheets of your skin, but at least she’ll never get lost when she has your pain to call home.
She’s stunning in every form she fakes and overwhelming to every form she takes.
All that glitters is not gold, but sometimes that’s not that point. Sometimes the proof is in the distraction and that’s really all that Brendon needs right now.
*
Pete pushes Ryan like he wishes he could push Patrick. He pushes and shoves and bites and scratches and kicks and screams and Ryan takes it. Ryan swallows his downfall and begs for more and as much as Pete hates him for that, he hates himself more for the way that’s not enough to make him stop.
It’s enough to make him question his actions.
He knows what they’re doing couldn’t ever be described as anything other than fucked up. It can never be cleaned up or honed down to form any semblance of healthy or productive. Neither of them need this, and Ryan certainly doesn’t deserve it but he wants it anyway.
Ryan knows he’s not what Pete needs, he’s not even what Pete wants. But as twisted and misguided as it may sound and as twisted and misguided as it is, Ryan sees this as a sick sort of penance. Punishment for how he treated Spencer. Wholly inadequate reparation for letting his best friend fuck himself over in his name. And the part that makes it really probably more than ‘sick’ can even begin to describe?
That’s not even why Ryan does it.
*
Brendon digs his fingers into the curves of Audrey's hips, using his grip on her bones to hold her in place and not caring if he leaves bruises. Her head falls back against the wall and her eyes slip shut as her muscles tighten around him. It’s not important that she see him, no more than it’s important for him to pretend he’s here right now with her. He fucks her harder, pulling her down onto his cock now. She takes it and gives back less than she can afford to lose, letting the hand that was in his hair slide down his neck to clutch at his chest.
He thinks for a second that she’s going to push him away, is almost relieved that she won’t let him abuse her body like this any longer. But her palm comes to rest over his heart and the tension holding her features relaxes for a split second. She digs her fingernails into his skin, almostnotquite breaking the surface. Her thighs tighten at his sides and she begs. Pleads for it with still closed eyes. He doesn’t think he can, doesn’t think it’s possible. But somehow he does and it’s so much now. It’s hard and frantic to the point of near violence, and when he realises how much that thrills him, how that knowledge swells in his stomach like too sweet heat, he feels nauseous.
He fucks her like it’s a punishment and she accepts it like a reward. He pushes up into her one last time, their skin pulled so tight together that it feels like their boundaries are going to break. He closes his teeth around the tense line of her jaw bone, and doesn’t think about how he wishes it was another cock he could feel pressed against the flat of his stomach, instead of the sharp, cold fingers that are biting into his skin.
He stifles his words against her throat as he comes and if she hears any name besides her own she doesn’t mention it.
*
The mess that Ryan and Spencer made started easily. They slipped into it and had to fight their way out, tooth and nail. Neither of them survived the journey unscathed but Spencer bears the brunt of the scar tissue. It might not be visible right away, but witness the way he flinches when Ryan walks into a room or says Pete’s name and you’ll see he’s disfigured.
Spencer wasn’t what Ryan needed. Ryan needed something and Spencer was on offer. Ryan just didn’t pause to think about how it might feel to be enough instead of everything.
But Ryan is what Spencer needed. He’s what Spencer still needs. Ryan was more than enough for Spencer. He was surplus. His presence in Spencer’s life always made it feel like more; but when that core shifted and twisted into something more - he overflowed.
Ryan still makes Spencer feel that overwhelmed, but now it’s different. Now he’s drowning in it.
*
“could be” is what Patrick says.
“could”.
Not “should”.
It’s cruel. To tell Pete that something he thought of as a process hadn’t even begun, and then to dangle the prospect in front of him just when he thinks it’s the last thing he deserves.
But maybe it’s not a case of deserving.
When it’s presented to him as a reality, Pete almost doesn’t catch himself in time. He’s almost too caught up in that sudden wave of relief and gratitude to question it. It being timing and motive, mostly.
The thing is; Patrick honestly never thought of him and Pete as a him&Pete. Seeing him with Ryan makes something ugly unfurl in his gut. Watching their fingers fit together acts like a whisper of pixels that twist to form a much bigger picture in Patrick’s mind.
But the hint is in the fact that Patrick didn’t realize until it was too late. Maybe Patrick only realizes because it’s too late.
And that’s not enough for Pete.
Pete knows that he and Ryan don’t collide like they should. They’re magnetic in the worst possible sense. They’re the same. Unless they’re satisfied to rest against one another in an off center sprawl, they repel. They only hold one way and even then it’s not enough to hold them together in any sort of solid or permanent sense.
But Patrick's uncertainty changes that.
Walking away from something that he's always seen as his future gives Pete what he needs to deserve his present.
Ryan is no longer filling a gap. He doesn’t have to be an imitation of something real, he doesn’t have a part to play or a standard to never live up to.
Pete doesn’t see Ryan in a different light, but the angle of the image has been shifted.
*
Sometimes the nausea gets to be too much for Ryan. It’s not just a feeling that hurtles through his insides, pulling his blood cells and nerve endings into a mass of tangled guilt and something else he can’t name.
It’s not uncertainty.
Ryan always knew what he what this was and what he would be.
He thought it would be enough to be that, if it meant being that for Pete.
If circumstance can impact article, result can alter the definition of the original act even after it has been committed. If circumstances define the thing; if circumstances can come to define the original manifestation even after it has been set in motion, then Ryan couldn’t have known what this would come to be.
It’s not a simple case of hero worship, regardless of what dated livejournal entries would lead you to believe.
Pete isn’t Pete Wentz to Ryan. He’s Pete. Pete that he respects, Pete that he admires, Pete that Ryan shouldn’t love.
Ryan wants it to work. He doesn’t want to be the one to put the pieces of Pete back into place because he likes the pieces as they lay. He likes the pieces where they lay; when they lay. Pete divided is Pete multiplied to Ryan. He can be everyone for Ryan.
For Ryan, Pete is the answer to the questions he didn’t think to ask of himself. Maybe one day Pete will see that. Maybe when he does he’ll see that they don’t need to fit together as PeteandRyan, because they’re not Pete and Ryan. They’re a million different people, a million different feelings from a million different places spread out in a million different ways and said with a million different words.
When Pete tries to simplify that, he complicates everything. Ryan can see the million different ways they reach out for something to keep and find one another. He sees it every day, hears it in every syllable that falls from Pete’s mouth.
Right now Pete catches glimpses of it. He feels something familiar when they touch but he can’t yet understand the message that the cells of his skin are trying to communicate to him.
Not yet.
*
When Brendon breaks up with Audrey he doesn’t even spare a passing thought for their relationship's end. It doesn’t feel like an end so much as a conclusion. She puts up a fight during and after and he wouldn’t expect anything less from her, than her.
Without her; he doesn’t have the superficial surface to skate on.
When she goes, he doesn’t even notice how the ice begins to crack.
Ryan and Pete are falling closer, toppling further into the blinding brightness. It will mean the end of some things.
(things like Brendon+Audrey)
(things like Spencer+Ryan)
(things like Pete+Patrick)
But it’s just the beginning really. Brendon knows there’s much worse to come.
He’s drowning now, just like Spencer.
It must be worse for Spencer, he thinks. Spencer was already saved. Spencer knows what it’s like to be given a second chance at life. To have that and then lose it must be worse than never knowing that it's real to begin with, Brendon thinks.
It’s still something Brendon can hope for.
Now that Audrey isn’t there to blind him past distraction, he’s done waiting.
*
The absolution of Forever is so much better than the obligation and promise infused with Always.
Pairing: Pete/Ryan Brendon/Audrey references to past Ryan/Spencer.
Rating: R.
Word Count: 3k.
Disclaimer: Didn't happen.
Summary: "Pete laughs against his mouth and Ryan arches into it".
Notes: Yuck. I've been working on this for roughly 5 months now. I don't feel like I'm finished with it, but I guess I probably should be. I'm letting it go before it becomes something that no-one but me will want to read.
Pete pushes Ryan harder against the wall, fingers biting bruises into his hips and Ryan arches into it. His teeth graze the length of Ryan's neck, pulling the blood to the surface of Ryan’s pale skin when he pauses. A whimper escapes Ryan's throat, manages to get past the breaths that are constantly hitching and getting lost somewhere between his lungs and his lips and Pete laughs against his mouth. He winds a hand into Ryan’s hair and pulls his head back, angling Ryan’s mouth beneath his regardless of the height difference. Ryan slumps further down, hips pushing forward into Pete’s and skull thumping brick when the hand in his hair tightens and twists again.
Pete laughs against his mouth and Ryan arches into it.
*
Pete and Patrick are soulmates. They were born for one another, each created with the other in mind. There’s no other way to explain the way they fall into sync. They are two halves separated, a whole - an entire; united.
Patrick saved Pete and continues to do so on a daily basis. He makes sense of Pete’s words, makes songs from Pete’s thoughts. He makes something out of Pete’s nothing.
“It was never like that, Pete” is what he’ll say when he breaks up with Anna.
“Never like that”. Regardless of anything else.
He says it in what Pete assumes is meant to be a soothing tone, but it comes out harsh, a mocking caricature of concern made ugly by the harsh and contradicting glare of softly humming fluorescent lights.
“never”.
It’s strange, Pete knows, that Patrick is the one making separations, clarifying divides when he’s in the very center of this ugly knot. But Patrick tugs gently and the threads pull free of one another. Still irrevocably connected, just laid out plainly now, a simple crossing of lines that had so long ago blurred together in Pete’s mind, ceased to be separate at all.
“Never”.
Not “Can’t be”.
Not “Won’t be”.
“Was Never”, with a capital letter.
Pete feels robbed.
He could feel sorry for himself in receipt of a “can’t” or “won’t”, but “Never” and he mourns the loss of something that he never even had. Something he thought he was waiting for. But he doesn’t have to wait now. It was never his. It was never going to be his. And he has nothing left to wait for at all.
*
Ryan Ross doesn’t know the meaning of the word “wait”. He knows “want”, “need”, “deserve” probably best of all.
He needs, and Spencer gives.
It’s purely coincidence that these facts collide to give Spencer what he wants.
Spencer’s not a good friend, he’s not a good person. He gives away what he needs, finds creative ways to get rid of what he thinks he doesn’t deserve. He’s twisted into knots and Ryan is tangled inside out. The situation is less than ideal. Ryan strips himself down to start again and Spencer just tears himself apart but Spencer doesn’t think to protest. Whether he does or not is really irrelevant to the issue.
Spencer gives, Ryan takes and you can’t expect questions that aren’t asked to ever get answered.
Getting what he wants doesn’t fix Ryan because what he wants is never what he needs. And giving doesn’t fix Spencer, because when you give away the bad you’re left with the worst. He’s not broken like Ryan but for as true as that might be, he’s very good at hurting.
Ryan shows up at his door in the middle of the night, blood and resolve still sinking into the cracked and swollen skin of his knuckles. Spencer cleans the wounds by making new ones.
Spencer gives and Ryan takes but ironically it’s Brendon’s mouth that bears the bad taste of their mistakes.
*
Brendon disagrees with the concept of 'PeteandRyan' because it’s not PeteandRyan. No matter how many times they say it that way. It’s Pete. And it’s Ryan.
But Brendon is smarter than anyone gives him credit for. He knows that Pete is their chance. He knows that if Spencer and Ryan continue down the path they’re on that only one of them will reach the end.
He knows that Spencer isn’t too far gone yet, hopes that if they cut out the rot maybe they can save the organ. He’ll be bruised and he’ll be battered, but he’ll be better for it in the long run.
And Ryan? Brendon loves Ryan. Brendon knows Ryan. And Brendon knows that maybe it’s time for Ryan to find out what it feels like to be dispensable. To be a product, not a process.
*
The interesting thing about Audrey is that for all the complications that define her, she simplifies for Brendon.
Whether it’s that she really just doesn’t give a fuck or not he can never tell, but for whatever reason being with her is just simple. It just makes sense, without making any sense whatsoever.
Ryan hates her, but not for any reason you could anticipate.
Ryan spends his life trying to translate and transcribe himself. His goals focus mainly around the seemingly impossible tasks of firstly figuring out just who he is and more importantly - putting that together to form something. He doesn’t know what it will become yet, but it won’t be anything. It has to be something. It has to be everything.
Some days he thinks that he doesn’t want to ever find that he amounts to something. He doesn’t want to be anything more or less than the exact sum of himself.
But if Ryan is an equation, the numerical exploration of who you might be, then Audrey is the tragic corpse of who you know you want to be.
She’s the decomposition of something that was never as beautiful a creation as it is in it's destruction.
Ryan sees her like glass, like mirror. Sometimes she’s a reflection of you, sometimes she’s the only truth you’ll ever see. She could shatter and smash at any moment and Ryan's seen it happen. What’s even more remarkable than witnessing her detonate is picking out the shards that she leaves in her wake. Weeks, months later. Countless days after she’s pieced herself back together you’ll still see traces of her undoing. They follow her path through life, through friends and casualties alike. They glitter in the sunlight and lodge themselves between the sheets of your skin, but at least she’ll never get lost when she has your pain to call home.
She’s stunning in every form she fakes and overwhelming to every form she takes.
All that glitters is not gold, but sometimes that’s not that point. Sometimes the proof is in the distraction and that’s really all that Brendon needs right now.
*
Pete pushes Ryan like he wishes he could push Patrick. He pushes and shoves and bites and scratches and kicks and screams and Ryan takes it. Ryan swallows his downfall and begs for more and as much as Pete hates him for that, he hates himself more for the way that’s not enough to make him stop.
It’s enough to make him question his actions.
He knows what they’re doing couldn’t ever be described as anything other than fucked up. It can never be cleaned up or honed down to form any semblance of healthy or productive. Neither of them need this, and Ryan certainly doesn’t deserve it but he wants it anyway.
Ryan knows he’s not what Pete needs, he’s not even what Pete wants. But as twisted and misguided as it may sound and as twisted and misguided as it is, Ryan sees this as a sick sort of penance. Punishment for how he treated Spencer. Wholly inadequate reparation for letting his best friend fuck himself over in his name. And the part that makes it really probably more than ‘sick’ can even begin to describe?
That’s not even why Ryan does it.
*
Brendon digs his fingers into the curves of Audrey's hips, using his grip on her bones to hold her in place and not caring if he leaves bruises. Her head falls back against the wall and her eyes slip shut as her muscles tighten around him. It’s not important that she see him, no more than it’s important for him to pretend he’s here right now with her. He fucks her harder, pulling her down onto his cock now. She takes it and gives back less than she can afford to lose, letting the hand that was in his hair slide down his neck to clutch at his chest.
He thinks for a second that she’s going to push him away, is almost relieved that she won’t let him abuse her body like this any longer. But her palm comes to rest over his heart and the tension holding her features relaxes for a split second. She digs her fingernails into his skin, almostnotquite breaking the surface. Her thighs tighten at his sides and she begs. Pleads for it with still closed eyes. He doesn’t think he can, doesn’t think it’s possible. But somehow he does and it’s so much now. It’s hard and frantic to the point of near violence, and when he realises how much that thrills him, how that knowledge swells in his stomach like too sweet heat, he feels nauseous.
He fucks her like it’s a punishment and she accepts it like a reward. He pushes up into her one last time, their skin pulled so tight together that it feels like their boundaries are going to break. He closes his teeth around the tense line of her jaw bone, and doesn’t think about how he wishes it was another cock he could feel pressed against the flat of his stomach, instead of the sharp, cold fingers that are biting into his skin.
He stifles his words against her throat as he comes and if she hears any name besides her own she doesn’t mention it.
*
The mess that Ryan and Spencer made started easily. They slipped into it and had to fight their way out, tooth and nail. Neither of them survived the journey unscathed but Spencer bears the brunt of the scar tissue. It might not be visible right away, but witness the way he flinches when Ryan walks into a room or says Pete’s name and you’ll see he’s disfigured.
Spencer wasn’t what Ryan needed. Ryan needed something and Spencer was on offer. Ryan just didn’t pause to think about how it might feel to be enough instead of everything.
But Ryan is what Spencer needed. He’s what Spencer still needs. Ryan was more than enough for Spencer. He was surplus. His presence in Spencer’s life always made it feel like more; but when that core shifted and twisted into something more - he overflowed.
Ryan still makes Spencer feel that overwhelmed, but now it’s different. Now he’s drowning in it.
*
“could be” is what Patrick says.
“could”.
Not “should”.
It’s cruel. To tell Pete that something he thought of as a process hadn’t even begun, and then to dangle the prospect in front of him just when he thinks it’s the last thing he deserves.
But maybe it’s not a case of deserving.
When it’s presented to him as a reality, Pete almost doesn’t catch himself in time. He’s almost too caught up in that sudden wave of relief and gratitude to question it. It being timing and motive, mostly.
The thing is; Patrick honestly never thought of him and Pete as a him&Pete. Seeing him with Ryan makes something ugly unfurl in his gut. Watching their fingers fit together acts like a whisper of pixels that twist to form a much bigger picture in Patrick’s mind.
But the hint is in the fact that Patrick didn’t realize until it was too late. Maybe Patrick only realizes because it’s too late.
And that’s not enough for Pete.
Pete knows that he and Ryan don’t collide like they should. They’re magnetic in the worst possible sense. They’re the same. Unless they’re satisfied to rest against one another in an off center sprawl, they repel. They only hold one way and even then it’s not enough to hold them together in any sort of solid or permanent sense.
But Patrick's uncertainty changes that.
Walking away from something that he's always seen as his future gives Pete what he needs to deserve his present.
Ryan is no longer filling a gap. He doesn’t have to be an imitation of something real, he doesn’t have a part to play or a standard to never live up to.
Pete doesn’t see Ryan in a different light, but the angle of the image has been shifted.
*
Sometimes the nausea gets to be too much for Ryan. It’s not just a feeling that hurtles through his insides, pulling his blood cells and nerve endings into a mass of tangled guilt and something else he can’t name.
It’s not uncertainty.
Ryan always knew what he what this was and what he would be.
He thought it would be enough to be that, if it meant being that for Pete.
If circumstance can impact article, result can alter the definition of the original act even after it has been committed. If circumstances define the thing; if circumstances can come to define the original manifestation even after it has been set in motion, then Ryan couldn’t have known what this would come to be.
It’s not a simple case of hero worship, regardless of what dated livejournal entries would lead you to believe.
Pete isn’t Pete Wentz to Ryan. He’s Pete. Pete that he respects, Pete that he admires, Pete that Ryan shouldn’t love.
Ryan wants it to work. He doesn’t want to be the one to put the pieces of Pete back into place because he likes the pieces as they lay. He likes the pieces where they lay; when they lay. Pete divided is Pete multiplied to Ryan. He can be everyone for Ryan.
For Ryan, Pete is the answer to the questions he didn’t think to ask of himself. Maybe one day Pete will see that. Maybe when he does he’ll see that they don’t need to fit together as PeteandRyan, because they’re not Pete and Ryan. They’re a million different people, a million different feelings from a million different places spread out in a million different ways and said with a million different words.
When Pete tries to simplify that, he complicates everything. Ryan can see the million different ways they reach out for something to keep and find one another. He sees it every day, hears it in every syllable that falls from Pete’s mouth.
Right now Pete catches glimpses of it. He feels something familiar when they touch but he can’t yet understand the message that the cells of his skin are trying to communicate to him.
Not yet.
*
When Brendon breaks up with Audrey he doesn’t even spare a passing thought for their relationship's end. It doesn’t feel like an end so much as a conclusion. She puts up a fight during and after and he wouldn’t expect anything less from her, than her.
Without her; he doesn’t have the superficial surface to skate on.
When she goes, he doesn’t even notice how the ice begins to crack.
Ryan and Pete are falling closer, toppling further into the blinding brightness. It will mean the end of some things.
(things like Brendon+Audrey)
(things like Spencer+Ryan)
(things like Pete+Patrick)
But it’s just the beginning really. Brendon knows there’s much worse to come.
He’s drowning now, just like Spencer.
It must be worse for Spencer, he thinks. Spencer was already saved. Spencer knows what it’s like to be given a second chance at life. To have that and then lose it must be worse than never knowing that it's real to begin with, Brendon thinks.
It’s still something Brendon can hope for.
Now that Audrey isn’t there to blind him past distraction, he’s done waiting.
*
The absolution of Forever is so much better than the obligation and promise infused with Always.