The Beginner's Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Title: The Beginner's Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Author: Telis (theaerosolkid)
Rating: NC-17/Hard R
Pairing: Brendon/Ryan
Summary: "We would get in fights all the time, just. Just out of frustration." Recording and growing up, sometimes at the same time.
Word Count: 3258
Disclaimer: Fake, fake, fake.
A/N: Title modified from the movie of a similar name. Thanks to notshybutsly for the awesome beta, as usual; also disarm_d, thank you lots!
*
"Sometimes," Brendon answers. The question is Do you ever regret, and it's a typical Ryan Ross question. Big, grand, and sweeping. Ryan doesn't do things in one go; it takes him a long time to get things right. He does things in an iterative fashion. His first draft is rarely ever anything to be captivated by.
"Well, when?" he presses on. Brendon has no idea from whence he summons the patience to deal with Ryan's lack of finesse.
"Do you know what you're asking?" Brendon finally says. Right now he's not thinking about the answer to either question, he's remembering something his mother said once, on the way to BYU to watch his sister dance. She said that there was nothing more philosophically enabling than driving in utter silence in the middle of the night. She liked leaving on long trips at around ten at night, if they were very long, or at around three in the morning, if they weren't. Either way, she liked driving through the dark, into the emerging dawn, arriving in the morning. Brendon likes this. He's the only one of the four of them whose internal clock doesn't default to "get up when I absolutely have to". He's used to getting up early, six or earlier without even thinking about it. He's used to juggling things, to analyzing stories and thoughts written thousands of years ago. It's easier for him to understand Ryan's lyrics and thought patterns than it should be, really.
When you get right down to it, if you've been singing psalms all your life, singing lonely teenage anthems isn't really all that difficult. It doesn't require him to think much, which is nice, in its own way. Right now he's just so tired, tired of studying of singing lessons of playing guitar of teaching piano to Ryan of blending smoothies of driving a purple minivan of waiting for everything to come together of saving change for Laudromats and pay phones of not knowing how to shop for groceries of thinking this is better despite it all of feeling guilty.
"You have to be more specific," Brendon says tiredly.
"Do you regret leaving home?"
"Depends," Brendon says, and glances at the dashboard. They've been driving less than ten hours, they're in New Mexico. We could be hunting wabbits, Brendon thinks. "Get off at the next exit. We need gas. I'll drive, after."
"I can handle it," Ryan says immediately.
"Whatever," Brendon says, and props his feet up on the dashboard, drifts off to sleep.
*
"What are you doing?" At the moment, Brendon wants to punch Ryan. Right in the fucking throat, to make that goddamn monotone go away. It's dry, and harsh, and mocking, and it ruins the flow of his fingers on the keys.
"Scoring some stuff," he tells the camera, pointedly ignoring Ryan. Ryan shrugs and swivels the camera away. Brendon slips the noise-canceling headphones back over his ears and goes back to playing furiously.
He'd (probably) never tell Ryan, but his favourite thing that they've done is the Intermission. The techno bits at the start are nice, but he's especially proud of the piano. He thinks that it's probably the most meaningful thing they've done, anyway. He really doesn't like Ryan's lyrics all that much. They're strictly first-draft words. Every now and again he hits upon something nice, a clever turn of phrase, but he's kidding himself when he slides notebook papers over to Brendon, stupidly, arrogantly proud of his toils. He's not done. They need revisions, they need guidance, they need some restraint. A lack of self-absorption. He does things in drafts, true, but his work never really seems to hit that "final draft" stage.
Anything is better than before, though. Brendon has no illusions about that. He's grateful, in a sort of awkward way. Awkward because when he started working with them on the first few songs, he thought that maybe -- maybe they'd re-do them a bit. Work on the lyrics. Get the words right. Brendon's no writer, but he's got a sharp editor's eye. He knows how much better Ryan's lyrics could be, and nobody's saying it to him, and it's pissing Brendon off.
Better twelve hours in the studio, singing stories he doesn't give a shit about than two years preaching truths he doubts.
*
"Stop," Ryan calls out, and violently, Brendon throws the headphones down and kicks the music stand away.
"What?" he screams, furious. "What, Ryan, what isn't perfect now, you fucking stupid asshole?"
"It would be helpful," Ryan says, slowly, entering the recording booth, "if you could possibly sing with a little feeling. And, I don't know, stay on key when you do it."
"Ohh, fuck you," Brendon says, bending down to pick up the music stand. He glances at the divide, sees Squidge calmly sitting there, strumming a guitar and ignoring them. Asshole, hack, never-has-been, he thinks. Spencer and Brent aren't there. Fine.
"It's just, the line's 'desperate for attention'. You mostly just sound bored," Ryan says, not bothering to help him.
"The song's about wanting to be a big fucking rockstar," Brendon says. "There's not a whole lot of depth of feeling, there."
Ryan stays perfectly still, and for half a second which Brendon refuses to acknowledge, he feels viciously, hideously guilty, sick and full of cheap contrition. "You fucking -- I."
Brendon pushes forward, smells weakness, abandons Christian sensibilities. "You know." He pauses, smirks at Ryan, sing-songs, "Still so young, desperate for attention. Fuck. Could you be any more transparent? Do you have any subtlety in your fucking lofty aesthetic, at all?" His voice is rising again and there's inversely proportional dread sinking in his belly. This is one of those moments that you know you're going to be pissed off that you didn't just walk away and sit down, he thinks.
"You don't even know what you're talking about, you moron," Ryan yells back. There are spots of colour high on his cheeks, and he's practically spitting with fury. "Let's see you try and write something original, instead of just sitting around and criticizing."
"Like you'd let me," Brendon fires back. "You've made it very clear that this may as well be the goddamn Ryan Ross Project, we're just the back-up players. You're self-taught, and you're badly self-taught but you're still lead guitar because you just can't let go of the fact that you're nothing more than a dreamy little boy who listened to too much pop-punk and still thinks he's gonna hit the big time and it'll make everybody like you best, just like you always wanted."
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Ryan's closer to him, pressed up tight to his chest. Brendon can practically taste his pulse, hammering away. "What would you even know about being able to do anything, you fucking loser? You're always so fucking pleased with yourself, like you're so far above us because you had it hard when you decided to go along with this. You're not the only one who's made sacrifices, you know --"
"Oh yes, that's right," Brendon interrupts. "I keep forgetting that you gave up that fabulous scholarship that they gave you because you're so fucking smart, because you're such a tortured little genius. Did that make Daddy cry, Ryan, or did he finally get up the balls to actually hit you like you deserve, give you something else to make me whine about on a backdrop of lame recycled syth lines?" Ryan recoils as though he's been slapped.
"Shut the fuck up," Ryan says quietly, calmly. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Brendon says anyway. "I know how fucking hard it is for you with an flake for a mother and a drunk for a father. It's so fucking hard, it hurts so bad, here, let me write some boring lyrics using stupid metaphors to talk about how sad I am instead of fucking doing something about it.
"Doing something like leaving home, like making everything hard on purpose?" Ryan snaps. "Yeah, that was a real smart plan, Brendon, wanna remind me how far in debt you are?"
"You were right there with me, picking out apartments," Brendon says. "And, hey, you know, even though you were practically fucking living with me, I never charged you rent. So if we work it out retroactively, how far in debt are you? And don't let's forget about that tiny little thing where I'm in debt because I was paying for the practice space. Even though you're the ones who need the fucking practice, not me." He turns to walk away, half thinking that Ryan's going to stop him.
He doesn't.
*
"Jesus Christ!" Brendon explodes. "Brent, learn to play your fucking instrument!"
Spencer shoots him a glare and Brendon wants to slap his stupid pudgy face. "Take it easy, Brendon. We still have two weeks."
"Whatever," Brendon says, and heads outside. It's painful, listening to Brent mangle the simplified basslines. Ryan's outside, sitting at the curb silently, and Brendon contemplates turning around. The first fight wasn't the worst, but they're not losing steam, and they're getting farther and farther behind on tracking vocals because almost everything's getting labeled with an ugly orange REDO sticker on the whiteboard.
"Hey," he says carefully.
"Bite me," comes the easy reply.
"Fine," Brendon says, and slumps down. "Fuck. I'm tired."
"I bet you are," Ryan says easily. "Not easy being pissed off twenty-four seven."
"Fuck you," Brendon says, but there's no venom.
"You think you're so above all this," Ryan says softly. "And you aren't." Brendon sighs. "I know we're not making the next great album of our generation, okay? I know that this is just a starting point. I know that it's probably not going to do very well, and we probably have, like, five years ahead of us before it gets any easier, before we start picking up steam. But maybe if you treat this like it is the next great album, then it'll be better in sound than it is on paper, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, sure," Brendon says, but he sleeps a little better that night than he has in a long time.
*
Brendon wakes up in the middle of the night and steals Ryan's notebook. In obnoxiously jagged Burtonesque script the words 'THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS & FAKES' are inscribed on the inside back cover. Brendon rips out a page and starts doodling his own version. Ryan comes and curls up next to him on the sagging couch, watching his fingers clumsily trace the out the words, roughly. First draft, he tells himself.
"How many saints are there?" Brendon asks him.
"Dunno," Ryan says. "Too many."
"LDS says that anyone who's a follower of Christ is a saint," Brendon says. There's a pang somewhere to the left of his spine that he's ignoring. Unsuccessfully.
"Oh, yeah? I didn't know that."
"Name of the religion," Brendon says. "Latter-day saints. We're living in the latter days."
"Feels like it," Ryan says. "So, no patron saints?"
"Not really, no."
"When I was a kid, I really liked the idea of patron saints," Ryan says. "You know. Somebody official to help you. Patron saint of teenagers, lost items, fire, all that. But then, there's this whole big thing about anointing as a blessed something or other, kind of like a pre-saint, and canonizing a saint, and it takes forever and it's probably really bureaucratic. Stupid. I kind of like that concept that everybody's a saint, though."
"So if Pete's the patron saint of liars and fakes, how about you?" Brendon asks him, and Ryan laughs.
"Self-important post-adolescent angst, probably," Ryan says. He's sleepy; always more honest when he's not really awake. Brendon's feeling the same, right now, sort of raw and open. Ryan tilts his head to the side and kisses Brendon's half-open mouth, softly, just.
Brendon kisses him back. It's no big deal, not really, just the slow slide of their lips together. Gentle. Comfort. Comfort is what it is, he thinks, and ignores the feel of his uneasy heartbeat rubbing an anxious tattoo on his insides. It's as though he expects to be caught at any moment, though who would care enough to stop them -- that's beyond his comprehension at this point. They break apart and Ryan presses his mouth to Brendon's again, lightly, not giving him a chance to react before dropping his forehead to Brendon's shoulder.
It takes him a while; Brendon sort of loses himself in the repetitive motions of tracing the words over and over and over and over again. And again. "And me?" He asks, voice barely above a whisper.
It takes him longer to realize Ryan's asleep. He always breathes so quietly.
*
They're screaming again.
There's a section on the whiteboard with sticker residue where they've pulled nearly all of the REDO stickers away. When he's not doing anything, which amounts to something like twenty minutes a day, it feels like, Brendon rubs at it, tries to erase the reminder of the failures.
"Don't be such a fucking baby," Ryan's yelling.
"Don't be in such a goddamn hurry to grow up," Brendon yells back. "We don't need a song about you fucking your ex-girlfriend, you idiot!"
"What, are you afraid of offending someone?" Ryan snorts.
"Are you afraid of not offending someone?" Brendon says, biting off the words. "I don't want to sing this fucking song, Ryan. I hate it."
"Do it anyway," Ryan tells him. Squidge gets up and leaves. They're alone. Brent and Spencer are tired of dealing with their patterns, now, the way they fight all day long and reconcile in the middle of the night when they're sleepy and truthful. They don't talk about it, the way Ryan's wrists fit into the warm cages of Brendon's fingers, the way his body lines up with Brendon's so nicely, the way he smells and tastes, the way they just lie together and kiss softly as though sometimes running blunt fingernails through unwashed hair will cure what ails them.
It doesn't, not really, but it makes the lump in Brendon's throat a little smaller, a little easier to swallow around.
"I'm so sick of this," Ryan says angrily. "Your stupid refusal to mature. Asshole."
"Shut up," Brendon says, rubbing at his eyes. "Shut up shut up shut up shut up."
"Make me," Ryan says, and Brendon's hand drops away from his face, incredulous.
"Ohh my God," he laughs, a little hysterical. "Oh, my God, my God, you did not just say that. Holy shit, you're like a fucking kindergartener."
"Fuck you," Ryan says dismissively, but he's flushed and embarrassed.
"Yeah, whatever," Brendon says, and goes to leave. Ryan doesn't let him. "Hey, what the fuck?"
Ryan's staring at him. It looks like he thinks that if he glares at Brendon long enough he'll know how to make him give in. Nice try, Brendon thinks, and steels himself. "Do you even care?" Ryan asks.
"About what?" Brendon asks, aiming for bravado and landing at petulance. Ouch.
"About all of this!" Ryan cries out, and Brendon can see that he's on the edge of tears. Brendon falls apart, then, slumps down against the wall and laughs and cries, shaking his head.
"I don't know, okay!" he screams, as loud as he can. It feels like he's ripping his throat open. Maybe he is. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't fucking know!!!"
Ryan drops to his knees in front of Brendon and slams his palms to the wall on either side of his head, trapping him, "Figure it out," he shouts, and it's too loud, but Brendon just screams back at him, a broken wordless cry and he doesn't know what he's trying to say until Ryan's mouth catches him and he surges forward, shoves him off. Ryan stays there for half a blink and furiously rises back to meet him a second time, and this time they're kissing like they're fighting and Brendon's pinning him to the cold hard tile floor and rutting down against him, viciously gripping Ryan's wrists and pushing them down against the floor and Ryan's hitching long thin legs up around his waist and grinding up into it, throwing his head back and trying to escape Brendon and failing, moaning harsh and low while Brendon's panting above him.
"Fuck, ohh, fuck," Ryan gasps below him, pushing upwards, and Brendon just pushes him harder against the floor, rocks his hips, feels Ryan's cock hard through his stupid filthy basketball shorts, lining up too fucking perfectly along Brendon's and he's not sorry, he's not and he's not contrite and he will not do penance for this and he will not regret and he does want to be caught, he wants to flaunt this and
do it again and again and again and follow the repetitive patterns of his mind and his body moving with and against Ryan's, he wants to memorize the feel of Ryan against him, breathing hard and whimpering, writhing up to meet him, and he wants to put this into the song, the fasterfasterfaster movement of their bodies together.
He wants, he wants, he wants to stop thinking, to just do and be and finish and maybe take a breath or stop or slow down and everything's happening too fast for him to figure out what it means and too slowly for him to have a chance to even see it properly and he's getting closer, closer to something --
-- and that's when Ryan moans into his mouth and comes between them, wet and hot and Brendon lets go, too, gives up and gives in and gives Ryan everything he's got.
Afterwards, they say less but Brendon sings enough to make up for it.
*
"You're addicted to catharsis," Ryan tells him one night, the night before they leave on the first tour. Their very first. It's exciting, even though Brendon's unused to musical performances that don't include a glut of family members.
"What?"
"Catharsis," Ryan recites, more clearly. "The purging of emotion through art."
"I know what it means, dickweed. And it's not limited to art," Brendon says, rolling over on his stomach. "And you're full of shit."
"You are," Ryan insists. Brendon admits, internally, that he might be onto something. Big sweeping gestures. Ritualistic things have always appealed to him.
"Well, you have no subtlety," he says halfheartedly. Ryan snorts.
"Coming from you."
"Shut up." Ryan kisses him before he's even done with the words.
They haven't done this in a while. The day they almost finished the vocals for "Lying" wasn't the last time, but close enough.
The first few takes, the ones they did that afternoon, were useless. Brendon's voice was worn from all the shouting. But he'd gone back to the apartment and sucked on lemon wedges and drank warm tea and swallowed honey and took a long steamy shower, and even though they stayed up all night talking, by some miracle, his voice was better in the morning, and he managed to do it right. He managed to sing Ryan's song for himself and satisfy them both.
Ryan doesn't believe in miracles anymore (if he ever did), and Brendon only believes in them privately, but then, the way he sees it, he only sings privately, so he supposes it all works out.
*
It gets easier, every time they get together to conceptualize. Every time they have to re-do something, it gets easier. More reconciliation, less fighting.
For New Year's, in New York, Ryan gives him a small charm. It's a St. Jude pocket charm, and there's a card that goes with it, explaining how to ask the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases for help. On the back of the card Ryan has written in the same spiky hand, for the Patron Saint of Doing Everything the Hard Way, and Brendon laughs probably harder than he should.
When he tucks his bare hand into his pocket, he feels the warm metal against the bite of the DecemberJanuary New York chill.
*
http://theaerosolkid.livejournal.com/91998.html
Author: Telis (theaerosolkid)
Rating: NC-17/Hard R
Pairing: Brendon/Ryan
Summary: "We would get in fights all the time, just. Just out of frustration." Recording and growing up, sometimes at the same time.
Word Count: 3258
Disclaimer: Fake, fake, fake.
A/N: Title modified from the movie of a similar name. Thanks to notshybutsly for the awesome beta, as usual; also disarm_d, thank you lots!
*
"Sometimes," Brendon answers. The question is Do you ever regret, and it's a typical Ryan Ross question. Big, grand, and sweeping. Ryan doesn't do things in one go; it takes him a long time to get things right. He does things in an iterative fashion. His first draft is rarely ever anything to be captivated by.
"Well, when?" he presses on. Brendon has no idea from whence he summons the patience to deal with Ryan's lack of finesse.
"Do you know what you're asking?" Brendon finally says. Right now he's not thinking about the answer to either question, he's remembering something his mother said once, on the way to BYU to watch his sister dance. She said that there was nothing more philosophically enabling than driving in utter silence in the middle of the night. She liked leaving on long trips at around ten at night, if they were very long, or at around three in the morning, if they weren't. Either way, she liked driving through the dark, into the emerging dawn, arriving in the morning. Brendon likes this. He's the only one of the four of them whose internal clock doesn't default to "get up when I absolutely have to". He's used to getting up early, six or earlier without even thinking about it. He's used to juggling things, to analyzing stories and thoughts written thousands of years ago. It's easier for him to understand Ryan's lyrics and thought patterns than it should be, really.
When you get right down to it, if you've been singing psalms all your life, singing lonely teenage anthems isn't really all that difficult. It doesn't require him to think much, which is nice, in its own way. Right now he's just so tired, tired of studying of singing lessons of playing guitar of teaching piano to Ryan of blending smoothies of driving a purple minivan of waiting for everything to come together of saving change for Laudromats and pay phones of not knowing how to shop for groceries of thinking this is better despite it all of feeling guilty.
"You have to be more specific," Brendon says tiredly.
"Do you regret leaving home?"
"Depends," Brendon says, and glances at the dashboard. They've been driving less than ten hours, they're in New Mexico. We could be hunting wabbits, Brendon thinks. "Get off at the next exit. We need gas. I'll drive, after."
"I can handle it," Ryan says immediately.
"Whatever," Brendon says, and props his feet up on the dashboard, drifts off to sleep.
*
"What are you doing?" At the moment, Brendon wants to punch Ryan. Right in the fucking throat, to make that goddamn monotone go away. It's dry, and harsh, and mocking, and it ruins the flow of his fingers on the keys.
"Scoring some stuff," he tells the camera, pointedly ignoring Ryan. Ryan shrugs and swivels the camera away. Brendon slips the noise-canceling headphones back over his ears and goes back to playing furiously.
He'd (probably) never tell Ryan, but his favourite thing that they've done is the Intermission. The techno bits at the start are nice, but he's especially proud of the piano. He thinks that it's probably the most meaningful thing they've done, anyway. He really doesn't like Ryan's lyrics all that much. They're strictly first-draft words. Every now and again he hits upon something nice, a clever turn of phrase, but he's kidding himself when he slides notebook papers over to Brendon, stupidly, arrogantly proud of his toils. He's not done. They need revisions, they need guidance, they need some restraint. A lack of self-absorption. He does things in drafts, true, but his work never really seems to hit that "final draft" stage.
Anything is better than before, though. Brendon has no illusions about that. He's grateful, in a sort of awkward way. Awkward because when he started working with them on the first few songs, he thought that maybe -- maybe they'd re-do them a bit. Work on the lyrics. Get the words right. Brendon's no writer, but he's got a sharp editor's eye. He knows how much better Ryan's lyrics could be, and nobody's saying it to him, and it's pissing Brendon off.
Better twelve hours in the studio, singing stories he doesn't give a shit about than two years preaching truths he doubts.
*
"Stop," Ryan calls out, and violently, Brendon throws the headphones down and kicks the music stand away.
"What?" he screams, furious. "What, Ryan, what isn't perfect now, you fucking stupid asshole?"
"It would be helpful," Ryan says, slowly, entering the recording booth, "if you could possibly sing with a little feeling. And, I don't know, stay on key when you do it."
"Ohh, fuck you," Brendon says, bending down to pick up the music stand. He glances at the divide, sees Squidge calmly sitting there, strumming a guitar and ignoring them. Asshole, hack, never-has-been, he thinks. Spencer and Brent aren't there. Fine.
"It's just, the line's 'desperate for attention'. You mostly just sound bored," Ryan says, not bothering to help him.
"The song's about wanting to be a big fucking rockstar," Brendon says. "There's not a whole lot of depth of feeling, there."
Ryan stays perfectly still, and for half a second which Brendon refuses to acknowledge, he feels viciously, hideously guilty, sick and full of cheap contrition. "You fucking -- I."
Brendon pushes forward, smells weakness, abandons Christian sensibilities. "You know." He pauses, smirks at Ryan, sing-songs, "Still so young, desperate for attention. Fuck. Could you be any more transparent? Do you have any subtlety in your fucking lofty aesthetic, at all?" His voice is rising again and there's inversely proportional dread sinking in his belly. This is one of those moments that you know you're going to be pissed off that you didn't just walk away and sit down, he thinks.
"You don't even know what you're talking about, you moron," Ryan yells back. There are spots of colour high on his cheeks, and he's practically spitting with fury. "Let's see you try and write something original, instead of just sitting around and criticizing."
"Like you'd let me," Brendon fires back. "You've made it very clear that this may as well be the goddamn Ryan Ross Project, we're just the back-up players. You're self-taught, and you're badly self-taught but you're still lead guitar because you just can't let go of the fact that you're nothing more than a dreamy little boy who listened to too much pop-punk and still thinks he's gonna hit the big time and it'll make everybody like you best, just like you always wanted."
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Ryan's closer to him, pressed up tight to his chest. Brendon can practically taste his pulse, hammering away. "What would you even know about being able to do anything, you fucking loser? You're always so fucking pleased with yourself, like you're so far above us because you had it hard when you decided to go along with this. You're not the only one who's made sacrifices, you know --"
"Oh yes, that's right," Brendon interrupts. "I keep forgetting that you gave up that fabulous scholarship that they gave you because you're so fucking smart, because you're such a tortured little genius. Did that make Daddy cry, Ryan, or did he finally get up the balls to actually hit you like you deserve, give you something else to make me whine about on a backdrop of lame recycled syth lines?" Ryan recoils as though he's been slapped.
"Shut the fuck up," Ryan says quietly, calmly. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Brendon says anyway. "I know how fucking hard it is for you with an flake for a mother and a drunk for a father. It's so fucking hard, it hurts so bad, here, let me write some boring lyrics using stupid metaphors to talk about how sad I am instead of fucking doing something about it.
"Doing something like leaving home, like making everything hard on purpose?" Ryan snaps. "Yeah, that was a real smart plan, Brendon, wanna remind me how far in debt you are?"
"You were right there with me, picking out apartments," Brendon says. "And, hey, you know, even though you were practically fucking living with me, I never charged you rent. So if we work it out retroactively, how far in debt are you? And don't let's forget about that tiny little thing where I'm in debt because I was paying for the practice space. Even though you're the ones who need the fucking practice, not me." He turns to walk away, half thinking that Ryan's going to stop him.
He doesn't.
*
"Jesus Christ!" Brendon explodes. "Brent, learn to play your fucking instrument!"
Spencer shoots him a glare and Brendon wants to slap his stupid pudgy face. "Take it easy, Brendon. We still have two weeks."
"Whatever," Brendon says, and heads outside. It's painful, listening to Brent mangle the simplified basslines. Ryan's outside, sitting at the curb silently, and Brendon contemplates turning around. The first fight wasn't the worst, but they're not losing steam, and they're getting farther and farther behind on tracking vocals because almost everything's getting labeled with an ugly orange REDO sticker on the whiteboard.
"Hey," he says carefully.
"Bite me," comes the easy reply.
"Fine," Brendon says, and slumps down. "Fuck. I'm tired."
"I bet you are," Ryan says easily. "Not easy being pissed off twenty-four seven."
"Fuck you," Brendon says, but there's no venom.
"You think you're so above all this," Ryan says softly. "And you aren't." Brendon sighs. "I know we're not making the next great album of our generation, okay? I know that this is just a starting point. I know that it's probably not going to do very well, and we probably have, like, five years ahead of us before it gets any easier, before we start picking up steam. But maybe if you treat this like it is the next great album, then it'll be better in sound than it is on paper, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, sure," Brendon says, but he sleeps a little better that night than he has in a long time.
*
Brendon wakes up in the middle of the night and steals Ryan's notebook. In obnoxiously jagged Burtonesque script the words 'THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS & FAKES' are inscribed on the inside back cover. Brendon rips out a page and starts doodling his own version. Ryan comes and curls up next to him on the sagging couch, watching his fingers clumsily trace the out the words, roughly. First draft, he tells himself.
"How many saints are there?" Brendon asks him.
"Dunno," Ryan says. "Too many."
"LDS says that anyone who's a follower of Christ is a saint," Brendon says. There's a pang somewhere to the left of his spine that he's ignoring. Unsuccessfully.
"Oh, yeah? I didn't know that."
"Name of the religion," Brendon says. "Latter-day saints. We're living in the latter days."
"Feels like it," Ryan says. "So, no patron saints?"
"Not really, no."
"When I was a kid, I really liked the idea of patron saints," Ryan says. "You know. Somebody official to help you. Patron saint of teenagers, lost items, fire, all that. But then, there's this whole big thing about anointing as a blessed something or other, kind of like a pre-saint, and canonizing a saint, and it takes forever and it's probably really bureaucratic. Stupid. I kind of like that concept that everybody's a saint, though."
"So if Pete's the patron saint of liars and fakes, how about you?" Brendon asks him, and Ryan laughs.
"Self-important post-adolescent angst, probably," Ryan says. He's sleepy; always more honest when he's not really awake. Brendon's feeling the same, right now, sort of raw and open. Ryan tilts his head to the side and kisses Brendon's half-open mouth, softly, just.
Brendon kisses him back. It's no big deal, not really, just the slow slide of their lips together. Gentle. Comfort. Comfort is what it is, he thinks, and ignores the feel of his uneasy heartbeat rubbing an anxious tattoo on his insides. It's as though he expects to be caught at any moment, though who would care enough to stop them -- that's beyond his comprehension at this point. They break apart and Ryan presses his mouth to Brendon's again, lightly, not giving him a chance to react before dropping his forehead to Brendon's shoulder.
It takes him a while; Brendon sort of loses himself in the repetitive motions of tracing the words over and over and over and over again. And again. "And me?" He asks, voice barely above a whisper.
It takes him longer to realize Ryan's asleep. He always breathes so quietly.
*
They're screaming again.
There's a section on the whiteboard with sticker residue where they've pulled nearly all of the REDO stickers away. When he's not doing anything, which amounts to something like twenty minutes a day, it feels like, Brendon rubs at it, tries to erase the reminder of the failures.
"Don't be such a fucking baby," Ryan's yelling.
"Don't be in such a goddamn hurry to grow up," Brendon yells back. "We don't need a song about you fucking your ex-girlfriend, you idiot!"
"What, are you afraid of offending someone?" Ryan snorts.
"Are you afraid of not offending someone?" Brendon says, biting off the words. "I don't want to sing this fucking song, Ryan. I hate it."
"Do it anyway," Ryan tells him. Squidge gets up and leaves. They're alone. Brent and Spencer are tired of dealing with their patterns, now, the way they fight all day long and reconcile in the middle of the night when they're sleepy and truthful. They don't talk about it, the way Ryan's wrists fit into the warm cages of Brendon's fingers, the way his body lines up with Brendon's so nicely, the way he smells and tastes, the way they just lie together and kiss softly as though sometimes running blunt fingernails through unwashed hair will cure what ails them.
It doesn't, not really, but it makes the lump in Brendon's throat a little smaller, a little easier to swallow around.
"I'm so sick of this," Ryan says angrily. "Your stupid refusal to mature. Asshole."
"Shut up," Brendon says, rubbing at his eyes. "Shut up shut up shut up shut up."
"Make me," Ryan says, and Brendon's hand drops away from his face, incredulous.
"Ohh my God," he laughs, a little hysterical. "Oh, my God, my God, you did not just say that. Holy shit, you're like a fucking kindergartener."
"Fuck you," Ryan says dismissively, but he's flushed and embarrassed.
"Yeah, whatever," Brendon says, and goes to leave. Ryan doesn't let him. "Hey, what the fuck?"
Ryan's staring at him. It looks like he thinks that if he glares at Brendon long enough he'll know how to make him give in. Nice try, Brendon thinks, and steels himself. "Do you even care?" Ryan asks.
"About what?" Brendon asks, aiming for bravado and landing at petulance. Ouch.
"About all of this!" Ryan cries out, and Brendon can see that he's on the edge of tears. Brendon falls apart, then, slumps down against the wall and laughs and cries, shaking his head.
"I don't know, okay!" he screams, as loud as he can. It feels like he's ripping his throat open. Maybe he is. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't fucking know!!!"
Ryan drops to his knees in front of Brendon and slams his palms to the wall on either side of his head, trapping him, "Figure it out," he shouts, and it's too loud, but Brendon just screams back at him, a broken wordless cry and he doesn't know what he's trying to say until Ryan's mouth catches him and he surges forward, shoves him off. Ryan stays there for half a blink and furiously rises back to meet him a second time, and this time they're kissing like they're fighting and Brendon's pinning him to the cold hard tile floor and rutting down against him, viciously gripping Ryan's wrists and pushing them down against the floor and Ryan's hitching long thin legs up around his waist and grinding up into it, throwing his head back and trying to escape Brendon and failing, moaning harsh and low while Brendon's panting above him.
"Fuck, ohh, fuck," Ryan gasps below him, pushing upwards, and Brendon just pushes him harder against the floor, rocks his hips, feels Ryan's cock hard through his stupid filthy basketball shorts, lining up too fucking perfectly along Brendon's and he's not sorry, he's not and he's not contrite and he will not do penance for this and he will not regret and he does want to be caught, he wants to flaunt this and
do it again and again and again and follow the repetitive patterns of his mind and his body moving with and against Ryan's, he wants to memorize the feel of Ryan against him, breathing hard and whimpering, writhing up to meet him, and he wants to put this into the song, the fasterfasterfaster movement of their bodies together.
He wants, he wants, he wants to stop thinking, to just do and be and finish and maybe take a breath or stop or slow down and everything's happening too fast for him to figure out what it means and too slowly for him to have a chance to even see it properly and he's getting closer, closer to something --
-- and that's when Ryan moans into his mouth and comes between them, wet and hot and Brendon lets go, too, gives up and gives in and gives Ryan everything he's got.
Afterwards, they say less but Brendon sings enough to make up for it.
*
"You're addicted to catharsis," Ryan tells him one night, the night before they leave on the first tour. Their very first. It's exciting, even though Brendon's unused to musical performances that don't include a glut of family members.
"What?"
"Catharsis," Ryan recites, more clearly. "The purging of emotion through art."
"I know what it means, dickweed. And it's not limited to art," Brendon says, rolling over on his stomach. "And you're full of shit."
"You are," Ryan insists. Brendon admits, internally, that he might be onto something. Big sweeping gestures. Ritualistic things have always appealed to him.
"Well, you have no subtlety," he says halfheartedly. Ryan snorts.
"Coming from you."
"Shut up." Ryan kisses him before he's even done with the words.
They haven't done this in a while. The day they almost finished the vocals for "Lying" wasn't the last time, but close enough.
The first few takes, the ones they did that afternoon, were useless. Brendon's voice was worn from all the shouting. But he'd gone back to the apartment and sucked on lemon wedges and drank warm tea and swallowed honey and took a long steamy shower, and even though they stayed up all night talking, by some miracle, his voice was better in the morning, and he managed to do it right. He managed to sing Ryan's song for himself and satisfy them both.
Ryan doesn't believe in miracles anymore (if he ever did), and Brendon only believes in them privately, but then, the way he sees it, he only sings privately, so he supposes it all works out.
*
It gets easier, every time they get together to conceptualize. Every time they have to re-do something, it gets easier. More reconciliation, less fighting.
For New Year's, in New York, Ryan gives him a small charm. It's a St. Jude pocket charm, and there's a card that goes with it, explaining how to ask the Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases for help. On the back of the card Ryan has written in the same spiky hand, for the Patron Saint of Doing Everything the Hard Way, and Brendon laughs probably harder than he should.
When he tucks his bare hand into his pocket, he feels the warm metal against the bite of the DecemberJanuary New York chill.
*
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