Commentfic, plotted by emilyray and ignipes: Broken Bird
So last night emilyray and ignipes wrote another chatfic about Panic as slaves. It's a fabulous plotline, as all their fics are, but my imagination was caught by the bit in the middle, where Jon teaches Ryan to be happy again.
Posted here so I can find it when I want it.
The first time they meet, Jon brushes against Ryan's shoulder in his favorite dingy bar, and Ryan falls off his barstool.
Jon can't help but laugh a little as he apologises and reaches down to help Ryan to his feet, and Ryan sort of lights up a little. "Spencer?" Because Spencer always laughed at Ryan when he fell down, he said it was something about the angles of his elbows.
"No, man, sorry," Jon says, heaving him up, and Ryan lands heavily against Jon's shoulder, taking a deep breath of...of varnish and guitar strings and if it isn't Spencer, then--the only other person who laughed sometimes when Ryan fell down--and smelled of music and--
Ryan moans and leans his cheek on top of thick, dark hair, wrapping his arms around a slim back, holding close. He leans down and nips at an earlobe, which never failed to make Brendon gasp, and murmurs, "Brendon, god, Brendon, please--"
"Whooooooah," Jon says, pushing a couple of inches away, gently. "No, man, I'm sorry, I'm not who you're looking for."
Ryan looks down at him blearily, and yeah, no, this guy has a beard. Brendon could never have aspired to this guy's beard. Ryan's face crumples and he sways on his feet.
"No--not--not Brendon. Not Spencer. Not."
Jon reaches to steady him. "Hey. Hey, it's okay, we'll find your friends."
Ryan looks down at him like he's just promised they'll go drown some kittens. "They went away," he says petulantly, and throws up all over Jon's shoes, falling to his knees.
Jon drops, too, rubs Ryan's back as he heaves, and looks around a little desperately for someone, anyone, who knows this dude and can take him home and take care of him, but nobody's paying any attention to them.
Jon bites his lip and looks down at Ryan, who's started trembling. There's no help for it. If the bastards who left him to get this drunk come looking, they'll just have to worry.
"Come on now," he murmurs, easing Ryan back to his feet, wrapping Ryan's arm around his neck and putting his own hands on either side of Ryan's waist. "Come on, let's get you out of here."
Fortunately it's only about a block to his tiny attic over the shop, and Ryan still seems able to walk, although he's having a little trouble with the idea that Jon isn't either of the fuckers who left him alone, and Jon has to keep saying, over and over again, that Spencer isn't here now and that while having his neck licked is nice, he's pretty sure Ryan isn't meaning to lick him.
He eases Ryan into his bed, and soothes him into sleep, half-singing something, he hardly knows what, and sits on his knees for a long time after Ryan finally mumbles his way into sleep, just watching this beautiful man breathe.
He's tempted to crawl in beside him--especially because it certainly isn't as though he has another bed or even a couch--but the thought of Ryan waking still drunk and trying to seduce him with the tricks he learned for another man's body is too terrible to contemplate, and he sighs and bundles his jacket beneath his head instead.
*~*~*~*~*
Ryan's eyes crack open against his will late in the morning, when the light falling through the skylight is harsh and white. He winces and shuts them again, trying to determine where he is through his other senses, instead.
The air is hot and stuffy, like he's in a small, closed space, and everywhere is the sticky scent of varnish, threaded with the thin, biting smell of wire. The headache and uneasy stomach are all too familiar, no help there, but the ache in his ass--bruised cheeks, not a well-fucked hole--is new. He has no idea when or how he fell down.
The strangest thing in this place, though, is the soft, bare plucking of guitar strings, quiet enough it hadn't been what had woken him, quiet enough not to pain his head now. The music plays a few measures, stops, and repeats, this time a little faster or slower or with a different chord halfway through, and Ryan tilts his head a little to better hear it. He listens to a variation, two, three, four--and then, as it starts to repeat again, he croaks, "Wait. Wait, I liked that one."
The guitar strings still instead of repeating. "Yeah?" a voice says, lightly. "I think it's a little too slow, still."
"Yeah, maybe," Ryan says, thinking about it, still trying to avoid the moment when he's going to have to face reality, open his eyes, apologize for...collapsing, wherever the hell he's collapsed...and go back to the awful gilded hotel room where the landlady's pretty daughter will bring him water to wash and flirt with him and he'll have to resist the temptation, because she has Brendon's mouth and tilts her hips like Spencer used to and it will hurt too much and do no good besides. "What are the words?"
"It doesn't have any, yet," the voice says, sounding amused. "I'm not much of a lyricist."
"Oh," Ryan says. He doesn't have an answer to that--he never knew what to say when Brendon said it, either.
He can hear the guitar clunk softly down. "I'm Jon, by the way," the voice says, and Ryan sighs and opens his eyes, lifts his hand against the light as he sits up politely.
"Ryan," he offers, and squints at the--wow, the oddly hot guy holding out his hand to shake. He takes it cautiously. "I'm--I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure how I got here."
"Walked," the guy--Jon--says, and flashes a grin. "Leaning rather heavily on my shoulder. But you walked. We--ah, we met in the bar last night, you didn't really seem like you could make it home."
"I usually don't," Ryan says, ruefully, letting go of Jon's hand. "Very kind of you."
"You mean they--you were out on your own last night? You don't have somebody supposed to look after you when you drink like that?"
"Nobody to do it," Ryan says, and it comes out a little more bitterly than he intended. He grimaces and tries to focus enough to put on a decent public imitation of self-control.
*~*~*~*~*
The beautiful guy-Ryan, Ryan, Ryan-stops and stiffens, his face stilling to a mask, and Jon casts about for a change of subject before he touches a sore spot and frightens--Ryan away. He has spent all morning wishing that the beautiful guy would wake up, and he isn't going to get his wish only to lose it to poor tact ten minutes later.
"You seem like you know music, are you any good at lyrics?"
Ryan tilts his head a little. "I write poetry. I've never set it to music-I know what I like, you know, but I can't play."
Jon can feel the smile widening on his face. "It's easy-I can show you. We'll grab a guitar from downstairs."
Ryan looks uncertain. "I-I wouldn't want to impose--"
"Oh, it's no trouble," Jon assures him, already standing up and looking for his shirt. "There's a zillion of them down there, Tom lets me use whatever I need so long as I keep the students coming in to buy."
"-Tom?" Ryan asks, bewilderment in his voice.
"Oh, sorry," Jon says, spotting the wayward garment and pulling it over his head. "Tom's the landlord, he owns the shop downstairs-I teach to pay the bills, and he and I and a few others play around town every once in a while."
"So, you're in a band."
Jon grins at him, slipping his sandals onto his feet-his boots still smell of Ryan's vomit from the night before. "Not really. Don't make enough money to call it a band. Come on, we'll go down and get you a guitar, I'll teach you."
Ryan smiles back, hesitantly. "I-okay. Just--"
"What?"
"Any chance you'll let me buy breakfast, first?"
*~*~*~*~*
And then there is guitar teaching, with lots of hands on wrists and fingers stroking palms and wrapping around backs, and they work really late into the night, and Ryan stays so late he passes out on Jon's bed, and the next morning it happens again, and again; Ryan has words for the song Jon's writing, and Jon is totally excited for the way their minds click when it comes to the music, and they get a lot of lovely music written, but the thing is it isn't good for Jon to sleep on the floor all the time, and one morning when he rolls over to get up his back gives a loud CRACK, and all of a sudden Ryan REALISES that he's been there for like, a week, and Jon's been sleeping on the floor all this time.
And he gets all panic-stricken and guilty and stuff, and he tries to hide it, but Jon is familiar with Ryan's covering face from when Ryan suggests lyrics about gilding cages by hand, and he knows something is wrong, and he knows it isn't what's usually wrong because instead of avoiding his eyes, Ryan keeps sneaking him little stone-faced looks.
And he asks Ryan about it, because it seems to be Jon-related this time, and Ryan blurts out, "I think--I think I should--" and he chokes on, "go back to my hotel." Because in the hotel is the pretty landlady's daughter who makes him think of what he's lost, and the bed he laid in to jerk off, hot and miserable and guilty, thinking about Brendon sucking Spencer's cock, and the stain on the wall from when he had to throw the wine bottle to keep himself from just giving up on what makes Spencer happy and going back to beg them to come back to him.
Jon stills. "What? Why?"
Ryan glances involuntarily at Jon's jacket, still bundled into a pillow on the floor beside the bed, and Jon laughs. "Ryan, don't be ridiculous. I'm glad to have you here."
"It isn't good for you," Ryan mutters, stubborn, but thinking miserably of that hotel.
Jon rolls his eyes. "So share with me."
And somehow it's just that ridiculously simple. They go back to the hotel just once, to pay Ryan's tab and get his papers and clothes, and then they buy an extra pillow, and from then on, they share the bed. Ryan pays half the tiny rent Tom charges Jon and buys the groceries every other week, and sometimes they fight over who should cook or wash the dishes, but it all winds up an equal division of labour.
That first night, Jon asks if he can see what Ryan's written already, on his own, and Ryan hesitates before he nods yes. He shoves the papers at Jon and mumbles that he's going to bed. He throws off his shirt and crawls over to the wall side of the bed, collapsing onto his new pillow. He just barely misses opening his eyes in time to see Jon breathlessly watching the lamplight dance over his skin.
By the time he does open them to say his locked-down goodnight, Jon has looked down at the papers instead. He answers Ryan absently, then takes a deep breath and starts to read.
The words are beautiful. The words are rich with images and metaphors and a hurt loss so strong it practically bleeds off the page. Jon knew Ryan was sad, was left behind, was lonely, but this-this is beyond anybody's ability to heal, he thinks, and it quietly breaks his heart, too, because Ryan isn't only beautiful, he's funny and talented and clever, and he understands Jon, understands what his music is saying.
He had been hoping that, maybe, eventually, when Ryan had time-but yeah, no, this isn't going to be something Ryan gets over, not ever. He flicks a tear off the edge of the page before it can smudge the ink too badly, and gets ready for bed.
He crawls in beside Ryan. At first it hurts too much to think about touching him, but as he watches Ryan stir a little in his sleep he thinks about the broken bird and the fast horse who was too wonderful to keep racing the track when he could be racing the wind, and even if he can't fix Ryan, he can give him this, so he lays a hand on Ryan's back and snuggles close to him to sleep.
Posted here so I can find it when I want it.
The first time they meet, Jon brushes against Ryan's shoulder in his favorite dingy bar, and Ryan falls off his barstool.
Jon can't help but laugh a little as he apologises and reaches down to help Ryan to his feet, and Ryan sort of lights up a little. "Spencer?" Because Spencer always laughed at Ryan when he fell down, he said it was something about the angles of his elbows.
"No, man, sorry," Jon says, heaving him up, and Ryan lands heavily against Jon's shoulder, taking a deep breath of...of varnish and guitar strings and if it isn't Spencer, then--the only other person who laughed sometimes when Ryan fell down--and smelled of music and--
Ryan moans and leans his cheek on top of thick, dark hair, wrapping his arms around a slim back, holding close. He leans down and nips at an earlobe, which never failed to make Brendon gasp, and murmurs, "Brendon, god, Brendon, please--"
"Whooooooah," Jon says, pushing a couple of inches away, gently. "No, man, I'm sorry, I'm not who you're looking for."
Ryan looks down at him blearily, and yeah, no, this guy has a beard. Brendon could never have aspired to this guy's beard. Ryan's face crumples and he sways on his feet.
"No--not--not Brendon. Not Spencer. Not."
Jon reaches to steady him. "Hey. Hey, it's okay, we'll find your friends."
Ryan looks down at him like he's just promised they'll go drown some kittens. "They went away," he says petulantly, and throws up all over Jon's shoes, falling to his knees.
Jon drops, too, rubs Ryan's back as he heaves, and looks around a little desperately for someone, anyone, who knows this dude and can take him home and take care of him, but nobody's paying any attention to them.
Jon bites his lip and looks down at Ryan, who's started trembling. There's no help for it. If the bastards who left him to get this drunk come looking, they'll just have to worry.
"Come on now," he murmurs, easing Ryan back to his feet, wrapping Ryan's arm around his neck and putting his own hands on either side of Ryan's waist. "Come on, let's get you out of here."
Fortunately it's only about a block to his tiny attic over the shop, and Ryan still seems able to walk, although he's having a little trouble with the idea that Jon isn't either of the fuckers who left him alone, and Jon has to keep saying, over and over again, that Spencer isn't here now and that while having his neck licked is nice, he's pretty sure Ryan isn't meaning to lick him.
He eases Ryan into his bed, and soothes him into sleep, half-singing something, he hardly knows what, and sits on his knees for a long time after Ryan finally mumbles his way into sleep, just watching this beautiful man breathe.
He's tempted to crawl in beside him--especially because it certainly isn't as though he has another bed or even a couch--but the thought of Ryan waking still drunk and trying to seduce him with the tricks he learned for another man's body is too terrible to contemplate, and he sighs and bundles his jacket beneath his head instead.
*~*~*~*~*
Ryan's eyes crack open against his will late in the morning, when the light falling through the skylight is harsh and white. He winces and shuts them again, trying to determine where he is through his other senses, instead.
The air is hot and stuffy, like he's in a small, closed space, and everywhere is the sticky scent of varnish, threaded with the thin, biting smell of wire. The headache and uneasy stomach are all too familiar, no help there, but the ache in his ass--bruised cheeks, not a well-fucked hole--is new. He has no idea when or how he fell down.
The strangest thing in this place, though, is the soft, bare plucking of guitar strings, quiet enough it hadn't been what had woken him, quiet enough not to pain his head now. The music plays a few measures, stops, and repeats, this time a little faster or slower or with a different chord halfway through, and Ryan tilts his head a little to better hear it. He listens to a variation, two, three, four--and then, as it starts to repeat again, he croaks, "Wait. Wait, I liked that one."
The guitar strings still instead of repeating. "Yeah?" a voice says, lightly. "I think it's a little too slow, still."
"Yeah, maybe," Ryan says, thinking about it, still trying to avoid the moment when he's going to have to face reality, open his eyes, apologize for...collapsing, wherever the hell he's collapsed...and go back to the awful gilded hotel room where the landlady's pretty daughter will bring him water to wash and flirt with him and he'll have to resist the temptation, because she has Brendon's mouth and tilts her hips like Spencer used to and it will hurt too much and do no good besides. "What are the words?"
"It doesn't have any, yet," the voice says, sounding amused. "I'm not much of a lyricist."
"Oh," Ryan says. He doesn't have an answer to that--he never knew what to say when Brendon said it, either.
He can hear the guitar clunk softly down. "I'm Jon, by the way," the voice says, and Ryan sighs and opens his eyes, lifts his hand against the light as he sits up politely.
"Ryan," he offers, and squints at the--wow, the oddly hot guy holding out his hand to shake. He takes it cautiously. "I'm--I'm sorry, I'm not quite sure how I got here."
"Walked," the guy--Jon--says, and flashes a grin. "Leaning rather heavily on my shoulder. But you walked. We--ah, we met in the bar last night, you didn't really seem like you could make it home."
"I usually don't," Ryan says, ruefully, letting go of Jon's hand. "Very kind of you."
"You mean they--you were out on your own last night? You don't have somebody supposed to look after you when you drink like that?"
"Nobody to do it," Ryan says, and it comes out a little more bitterly than he intended. He grimaces and tries to focus enough to put on a decent public imitation of self-control.
*~*~*~*~*
The beautiful guy-Ryan, Ryan, Ryan-stops and stiffens, his face stilling to a mask, and Jon casts about for a change of subject before he touches a sore spot and frightens--Ryan away. He has spent all morning wishing that the beautiful guy would wake up, and he isn't going to get his wish only to lose it to poor tact ten minutes later.
"You seem like you know music, are you any good at lyrics?"
Ryan tilts his head a little. "I write poetry. I've never set it to music-I know what I like, you know, but I can't play."
Jon can feel the smile widening on his face. "It's easy-I can show you. We'll grab a guitar from downstairs."
Ryan looks uncertain. "I-I wouldn't want to impose--"
"Oh, it's no trouble," Jon assures him, already standing up and looking for his shirt. "There's a zillion of them down there, Tom lets me use whatever I need so long as I keep the students coming in to buy."
"-Tom?" Ryan asks, bewilderment in his voice.
"Oh, sorry," Jon says, spotting the wayward garment and pulling it over his head. "Tom's the landlord, he owns the shop downstairs-I teach to pay the bills, and he and I and a few others play around town every once in a while."
"So, you're in a band."
Jon grins at him, slipping his sandals onto his feet-his boots still smell of Ryan's vomit from the night before. "Not really. Don't make enough money to call it a band. Come on, we'll go down and get you a guitar, I'll teach you."
Ryan smiles back, hesitantly. "I-okay. Just--"
"What?"
"Any chance you'll let me buy breakfast, first?"
*~*~*~*~*
And then there is guitar teaching, with lots of hands on wrists and fingers stroking palms and wrapping around backs, and they work really late into the night, and Ryan stays so late he passes out on Jon's bed, and the next morning it happens again, and again; Ryan has words for the song Jon's writing, and Jon is totally excited for the way their minds click when it comes to the music, and they get a lot of lovely music written, but the thing is it isn't good for Jon to sleep on the floor all the time, and one morning when he rolls over to get up his back gives a loud CRACK, and all of a sudden Ryan REALISES that he's been there for like, a week, and Jon's been sleeping on the floor all this time.
And he gets all panic-stricken and guilty and stuff, and he tries to hide it, but Jon is familiar with Ryan's covering face from when Ryan suggests lyrics about gilding cages by hand, and he knows something is wrong, and he knows it isn't what's usually wrong because instead of avoiding his eyes, Ryan keeps sneaking him little stone-faced looks.
And he asks Ryan about it, because it seems to be Jon-related this time, and Ryan blurts out, "I think--I think I should--" and he chokes on, "go back to my hotel." Because in the hotel is the pretty landlady's daughter who makes him think of what he's lost, and the bed he laid in to jerk off, hot and miserable and guilty, thinking about Brendon sucking Spencer's cock, and the stain on the wall from when he had to throw the wine bottle to keep himself from just giving up on what makes Spencer happy and going back to beg them to come back to him.
Jon stills. "What? Why?"
Ryan glances involuntarily at Jon's jacket, still bundled into a pillow on the floor beside the bed, and Jon laughs. "Ryan, don't be ridiculous. I'm glad to have you here."
"It isn't good for you," Ryan mutters, stubborn, but thinking miserably of that hotel.
Jon rolls his eyes. "So share with me."
And somehow it's just that ridiculously simple. They go back to the hotel just once, to pay Ryan's tab and get his papers and clothes, and then they buy an extra pillow, and from then on, they share the bed. Ryan pays half the tiny rent Tom charges Jon and buys the groceries every other week, and sometimes they fight over who should cook or wash the dishes, but it all winds up an equal division of labour.
That first night, Jon asks if he can see what Ryan's written already, on his own, and Ryan hesitates before he nods yes. He shoves the papers at Jon and mumbles that he's going to bed. He throws off his shirt and crawls over to the wall side of the bed, collapsing onto his new pillow. He just barely misses opening his eyes in time to see Jon breathlessly watching the lamplight dance over his skin.
By the time he does open them to say his locked-down goodnight, Jon has looked down at the papers instead. He answers Ryan absently, then takes a deep breath and starts to read.
The words are beautiful. The words are rich with images and metaphors and a hurt loss so strong it practically bleeds off the page. Jon knew Ryan was sad, was left behind, was lonely, but this-this is beyond anybody's ability to heal, he thinks, and it quietly breaks his heart, too, because Ryan isn't only beautiful, he's funny and talented and clever, and he understands Jon, understands what his music is saying.
He had been hoping that, maybe, eventually, when Ryan had time-but yeah, no, this isn't going to be something Ryan gets over, not ever. He flicks a tear off the edge of the page before it can smudge the ink too badly, and gets ready for bed.
He crawls in beside Ryan. At first it hurts too much to think about touching him, but as he watches Ryan stir a little in his sleep he thinks about the broken bird and the fast horse who was too wonderful to keep racing the track when he could be racing the wind, and even if he can't fix Ryan, he can give him this, so he lays a hand on Ryan's back and snuggles close to him to sleep.