Iron Skeletons - Part Three
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"Fuck, it’s loud in here,” Ryan shouts over the music. They picked some Mexican bar and grill in the city, and none of them had been expecting quite as much emphasis on the bar part. But it’d been a long time since Ryan, Spencer, Jon and Brent had been out at a club, too, so they all decided to stay.
They’ve all already eaten, and Brendon had won the taco eating contest (much to everyone’s surprise). Now Jon, Spencer and Brent are out on the dance floor, grooving to Mexican rap music. It’s maybe one of the funniest things Brendon’s seen in a long time.
Brendon nods in response to Ryan, too lazy to try and make his voice loud enough for him to hear. They both stayed at the bar, neither having any desire to dance.
“You wanna get out of here?” Brendon looks at Ryan with a bit of surprise at the idea. He wouldn’t have taken Ryan as the sort to ditch his friends, but then, maybe that’s not quite what this is. He nods anyway.
“Alright, cool. You stay here for a few minutes while I go find the others and tell them we’ll catch a taxi or something back.”
Brendon nods again, but Ryan’s off too quick to see it. He’s back in just a few minutes and grabs Brendon’s arm to pull him out.
Once they’re outside the restaurant and can hear enough other, Brendon grins. “Have anywhere in mind?”
Ryan shrugs, and it’s a gesture Brendon’s used to seeing. He’s learned in the past few weeks what each of Ryan’s odd gestures mean; living with someone does that. He could tell someone what almost any shrug meant if they asked, he thinks, and smiles at the thought. This particular one was the one Ryan used when he was trying to act like he didn’t care, but had some idea in mind.
“I hear the park is beautiful at night,” Ryan says eventually, and Brendon nods again.
---
“You said,” Ryan says slowly, leaning his head back against the tree behind him. They’d settled in the Great Lawn in Central Park, a place that was surprisingly quiet. He keeps his gaze cast forward, focused on something in the distance. “When you first got here or whatever, you said that your dad -- that no one was going to care if you just disappeared. What…how can you say that?”
Brendon is quiet for a long time. He doesn’t usually like to show himself to the world -- which is why him being in theater is so odd, but it’s different, really, it is, because on stage he’s not showing himself to the world, he’s showing someone else, someone with makeup caked on their face, someone with a different story, a different life -- but somehow, he wants to show himself to Ryan, wants to let Ryan open him up. Or maybe he just hopes that if he does, Ryan will, too; will rip himself open and bleed out in words, strings of sentences that Brendon can use to stitch him back together again.
And then Brendon stays quiet because he doesn’t know where that came from, why the words popped into his head, because just as sure as he’s never been the type to share himself with the world, he’s never been the type to want to take anything out of it, either. But he wants to pick Ryan apart and figure out what makes him think, what makes him who he is.
Ryan is about to tell Brendon to just forget about it, that he’s sorry he pried, but then Brendon starts.
“Because it’s true,” he says simply. He doesn’t make it sound dramatic or like it’s some great tragedy, even though he easily could. In fact, he almost sounds bored, totally indifferent, but Ryan’s good at picking up subtleties, undertones laced more into the contours of Brendon’s face than into the tone of his voice. “I mean, people would wonder, sure, but it’s not like I’ve got a bunch of friends.” He pauses, and his lips curl into something akin to a smile, but there’s bitterness and regret mixed in there and it doesn’t seem like the happy kind of smile, not really. “I guess I should edit that. I’ve got plenty of friends, it comes with the money and semi-fame, but none that really care. I guess the producers might give a damn, actually, if I randomly dropped off the face of the earth, but since I called and let them know I’d be gone for a few weeks…”
Brendon trails off and shrugs, flickering his eyes to where Ryan is now watching him. Ryan’s gaze is indecipherable, but intent nonetheless.
Ryan thinks that it must be awful, to have no friends, no one that cares about you enough to worry if you’ve dropped off the face of the earth. He wonders for a moment if Brendon’s maybe exaggerating it, but something tells him that he’s not. If it hadn’t been for Spencer and his unfailing strength and friendship, Ryan doesn’t know where he’d be, what with his lack of family.
And then he blinks, a sudden curiosity overwhelming him -- what is it like? To have no one at a constant by your side, no one to turn to when you’re at your worst. Ryan has never had a family, but he’s had Spencer for as long as he could remember, and Spencer’s family to turn to when it got especially hard -- did Brendon have even that?
“What about… I mean, your dad, he wouldn’t…” Ryan trails off, but there’s an unspoken question there, vague enough that Brendon wouldn’t have to answer it specifically, but there in case he wanted to.
But Brendon wants to let Ryan in, wants to open himself up in hopes that Ryan will do the same.
“You remember when we first met?” Brendon asks, turning his gaze back out to the field before them. He doesn’t hear Ryan say anything and doesn’t see him nod, but assumes he does anyway, because it’d be pretty hard to forget that.
“I didn’t even have to be in the city that day. I’d come in for work, and practice got canceled, but I was already on the train. I figured I’d wander around the city for a while, maybe catch a play, because you really don’t see that many when you’re actually, like, involved, you know? Like, with practice and shows, and then you really just don’t want to be around it at all. But it’d been a long time since I’d seen one, so I just figured maybe I’d go watch one.”
Brendon pauses for a moment and Ryan wonders what any of this has to do with his dad, but doesn’t have to wonder long.
“I don’t even know where my dad had been the last few weeks. Um… Shanghai? No, that was last month. Uh, maybe London, but anyway. He must’ve just gotten back, like, that morning or something and realized I wasn’t in the house, since I’d spent the night at a friend’s the night before. He called me, though, yelling at me because I hadn’t let him know where I was. Which, I don’t even know where her gets off with that, considering I don’t know where he is the majority of the time. But whatever, he said some shit, we pissed each other off, and I’m pretty sure the last thing I did was tell him that he’s the reason -- the reason my mom killed herself, and then I hung up the phone. He tried calling back a few times, but I just turned off my phone.”
Ryan nods slowly, tracing the line of the forest on the other side of the field with his eyes. It's hard, in the dark of night, but it's something to concentrate on. He can feel Brendon’s gaze turned back to him, but doesn’t turn to meet it; he’s not sure he wants to see what’s in Brendon’s eyes right now. Eventually, Brendon turns away.
“Me and my dad, we don’t get along very well. He’s your stereotypical hardass CEO, always expecting me to get the best grades in whatever pretentious private school he sent me to, always making me go to the right events to meet the…the right contacts, or some shit, I don’t even know. And I always had to date the perfect pretty rich girls that would look good to all the outsiders looking in at my family’s private life.” Brendon lets out a dark laugh at that. “I’ve pretty much done everything wrong in his eyes. I dropped out of school when I was fifteen to find work on Broadway, I refused to go to those stupid fancy galas. Things were tense for a little while, but manageable because he was always gone. But when I told him I was gay? He kicked me out of the house for like, three months.”
There’s another pause after that, and Brendon seems to be considering what to say. Ryan stays silent because he knows these stories take time, knows what it’s like to have to find the right words to say that’ll make sense of the jumbled mess in your head. When he chances a glance out of the corner of his eye, it's too dark for Ryan to see that Brendon’s face is blank, staring off into space, but he can guess. His knee is, as always, bouncing.
Brendon doesn’t know how much more to tell. Does Ryan want to know his whole life story? Brendon doubts it, but looks over at Ryan for clues anyway. Ryan’s face, as usual, is carefully guarded, but his eyes aren’t. Even in the dark, he can make out that expression. Brendon takes a deep breath.
Alright, then.
"I went back eventually," he starts. "My mom made him let me come back home, even though I didn't really want to. I did for her, though. She was the one person whose heart I couldn't break." He pauses for a second, then, some emotion filtering into his voice. If Ryan could make out his expression right now, he'd see a carefully guarded stare. "But things with my dad were really bad. We screamed at each other every day, I think he slapped me once. It was just...bad."
He bites his lip now, looking down at his knees.
“I… I’d been back in the house for a few weeks when it happened.” Brendon doesn’t sound bored at all anymore. Instead, he sounds tired, stilted and hesitant and unsure. “My dad never got me to go back to school. My -- my mom, she was proud of me where I already was, making a name for myself in Broadway, and didn’t let him. They were fighting about it a lot, actually. Not that he would’ve been there to force me anyway.”
That same regretful little smile made its way back on Brendon’s face, as if whatever he was remembering was something that might’ve, at one point in time, brought on that real Brendon grin, but the memory had been twisted and distorted to the point that now all it brought was bitter regret.
“I came home from practice early one day. It -- the show was, was going well, and we’d been practicing like fucking crazy. Opening night was like, a week away, and we just -- the director figured, I guess, that we could all use a break.” Brendon took a shallow breath and closed his eyes. “I… My dad was supposed to get home that day, I think. He -- it was Paris, that time, and he was supposed to be back before I got home from practice, we were all going to go out for dinner, somewhere in downtown Hartford, I can’t really remember anymore. But, like I said, I…got home early.”
With each word, Brendon starts to sound more strained. Ryan hasn’t known him very long but it’s been long enough for him to know that Brendon hasn’t told this story much, if at all. Ryan wants to do something to comfort him, but Brendon’s shoulders are hunched and tense, curled into himself, and Ryan’s afraid of what might happen if he touches him. He doesn’t want to bring Brendon out of his trance if it means the story will stop, and he realizes how selfish that is but he can’t help it -- the curiosity is getting overwhelming.
Brendon’s eyes glaze over and a shiver, visible even in the dark, courses down his spine, and Ryan’s curiosity is getting closer and closer to being sheer desperation.
Brendon is falling back to that day, a single image flashing in his mind over and over until he’s actually shaking and it’s getting hard to breathe. Ryan knows that look, that feeling. He knows what it’s like not to be able to breathe, but he’s always -- he’s always had Spencer there. How many times had this happened to Brendon when he didn’t have anyone to pull him out of it? Suddenly he longs to abuse his power within Pete’s band, to find all the people who hadn’t been there for Brendon and make them all pay.
The feeling scares him.
But the point is, Ryan knows what it’s like to let the panic pull you in, to feel helpless, almost like you’re drowning but you feel like you will be forever. To feel like there’s water in your lungs, filling them up, and you have no way to get it out, nor the peace of mind in at least knowing the suffering will be over eventually and there will be a peaceful black. No, when you get like this, you don’t feel like you’re ever getting out.
No matter how bad his curiosity is, Ryan can’t sit and let Brendon go through that. He reaches over and gently touches Brendon’s shoulder, which doesn’t seem to do much of anything. When he shakes it, though, Brendon lurches in the opposite direction, although his head snaps toward Ryan.
“Don’t touch me!” he almost shouts.
Ryan flinches, but doesn’t withdraw his hand. He’s never been the one keeping someone else together, but he figures he has enough years of watching Spencer do it to be able to at least get the job done. He reaches his other hand to Brendon’s other shoulder and holds tight, trying to look Brendon in the eyes.
“Brendon,” he says, and he tries to keep his voice as sure and strong as possible -- he mostly succeeds. “Brendon, snap out of it.”
Tremors go through Brendon’s body for a while before he finally stills and closes his eyes, breathing hard. But, Ryan figures, at least he’s breathing.
Brendon is still curled into himself and Ryan removes his hands, letting them rest by his sides. He plays with the grass while he waits as Brendon slowly return back to normal. It takes a while, but eventually his breathing evens out and the shaking subsides, and Brendon goes to look at Ryan.
“Sorry,” he says quietly, and means it. “I…Well, I’d be lying if I said that’d never happened before. But I just…the memory drew me in, and then you weren’t -- you weren’t you, you were my dad when he found me with -- and it just. I’m sorry.”
Ryan is leaning forward and pulling Brendon toward him before Brendon’s even finished. “Shh,” he says just as softly, and Brendon’s head is pulled into Ryan’s lap.
Brendon feels like a child, and he hates it, but he can’t deny that he likes the feel of Ryan’s fingers carding through his hair, the sound of Ryan’s low hum.
“I think,” he says after a while, once his heart rate is back at normal and he’s composed, though still in Ryan’s lap. “I think I can finish the story now.”
Ryan hears the question in his voice the, if you want to hear it, and he does. He really, really does. But --
“Are you sure?” he says, despite the curiosity. He doesn’t want that to happen again.
Brendon nods in Ryan’s lap. “I… I think so. Just give me a second.”
Ryan hums in acceptance and continues to run his hands through Brendon’s hair, enjoying the soft, silky feeling much more than he thinks he should.
“I got home from practice early,” Brendon says finally, and while it’s not the completely indifferent voice he’d been using, it at least isn’t as bad as before. “It didn’t seem like anyone was home, ‘cause when I called out, no one had answered. Which was weird, because my mom should’ve been home. So I went up to her room to see if she was taking a nap or -- or something. She’d been taking a lot of naps around that time.”
Brendon’s pause is a long one, the seconds stretching into minutes as he sits with his eyes closed, concentrating on the feel of Ryan’s hands running through his hair, keeping him grounded.
“It was or something. I found her in her room, ha -- hanging from the ceiling. She’d hung herself.”
Brendon’s eyes are shut tight, and his breathing is speeding up again, but he doesn’t think he’s going totally back into the memory, not this time. Tears spill down his cheeks, though, silent sobs that he just can’t hold back anymore, and somehow Ryan feels them, too, feels Brendon’s sobs down to the core of his bones.
That feeling scares him even more.
“Shh,” Ryan murmurs again, but he knows there’s more. He wonders if he’s the first person to hear this story, or if there were other people Brendon has told it to.
Brendon tries to take a deep, albeit shaky breath and continues. “She… There was a note on her bed, and I couldn’t help but go over, look at it after the initial shock had worn off.” He doesn’t mention that it was almost half an hour before he could will himself to move again. “It only had seven words. This is what you did to me. Now I know -- I know that the note was meant for my dad, she’d meant for him to find her, but I…got home early. It took me two years before I figured out she hadn’t meant the note for me.” Two of the worst years of my life, he doesn’t have to add. It’s written all over his face, an expression that would've been visible in pitch black dark, the words practically spelled out in tears and shaky breaths, the crease of Brendon’s eyebrow, the wrinkles on his forehead because of how his face is screwed shut.
Then he lets out a humorless laugh, letting his face relax just a little. “I haven’t actually let go of the note since I found it, not even when I realized it was meant for my dad…I didn’t give it to him, or even tell him about it.”
Now that the worst was over, it was all just coming out, a rush to get the words he’d kept locked inside for so long out, a race to see how quickly he could make it go.
“I hate him.” Brendon says, and there’s vehemence in his voice, but it’s understated, second to the sadness that’s most prominent. “I hate him so fucking much, but he’s my father, and…and I love him, too. I couldn’t show it to him.” Brendon opens his eyes. “I couldn’t do that to him.”
Ryan nods like he understands because he does, and Brendon knows that, somehow, but wants to know why he understands. Who messed up Ryan Ross? In the same way Ryan wants to hurt everyone who hadn’t been there for Brendon, Brendon wants to hurt whoever it was that put the shell around Ryan.
Brendon opens his eyes and takes his first real breath.
“I’ve just kept it with me since. I -- it’s even in my pocket now.” He laughs a little more, hysterical little noises probably mistaken for sobs, shaking his head in Ryan’s lap. “That’s kind of fucked up, isn’t it? That I keep my mom’s suicide note with me. God… I never look at the words as a whole phrase, though. It’ll put me back -- back where I was, just now. But if I look at just a word at a time, I can remember her. I can picture her writing, her hands scribbling across a page. And it’s -- it’s good to remember.”
“I know,” Ryan says softly, and his fingers stop running through Brendon’s hair, but he doesn’t move his hand. “I know.”
---
Brendon's attempt at laundry isn't going so well. It's not so much that the task itself is difficult, it's just that he's never actually had to do it before. His parents had all kinds of hired help long before he'd been born, so he'd grown up in that mindset. He had a cook to make him food, a maid to clean his room (and do his laundry), a nanny to take care of him. He doesn't think he'd ever even seen a real washing machine before he came here and had to do it himself.
Another issue, he's found, is that he doesn't have nearly as many clothes as he did. While he used to have huge closets filled with whatever he could ever want to wear, his wardrobe at this house is pretty minimal. They only let him buy a few things, and as a result, he has to do this whole laundry thing a lot more often. He's starting to realize just how much he took for granted back home.
He's fussing with the detergent when Spencer walks in. Brendon turns to look at him, and in the process accidentally pours too much detergent into the cap. It overflows into the machine, which Brendon doesn't even realize until Spencer is raising his eyebrows and gesturing towards it.
"God dammit," Brendon says, slamming the bottle down on the counter. He can hear Spencer laughing at him, and turns back to glare. "This is your fault, you know. I'd been doing just fine until you came in and distracted me."
Spencer just laughs. "You've been down here for the past twenty minutes, and from the looks of it, you haven't even started the first load yet."
Brendon doesn't think that's worthy of a response, so he just continues to glare. Eventually, Spencer's chuckles die down, and he gets a more serious look back on his face.
"You're running out of time, you know," he says, and Brendon looks away, forgetting about the laundry. Yeah, he knows. "Don't you have any ideas?"
Spencer's voice is laced with just an undertone of desperation, something similar to what Brendon's beginning to feel. He's been starting to figure out just how much learning what these guys' faces would mean to everyone here, and for the first time in a long time, he's actually felt the desire to help someone out. He wonders idly about the irony of the people taking him hostage being the only ones he seems to care about.
"Not really," he says after a while. His voice seems loud in the too-quiet room, but he knows it's barely above a whisper. "I know it, Spencer, God, I know I do. I just need something to trigger my memory, or -- or something."
Spencer nods but doesn't say anything, just studies Brendon's face. Brendon wonders if he knows what it's like to feel like this -- almost helpless in your wish to help someone, for not knowing how to do that. From the look Spencer's giving him, Brendon thinks he must, and his mind flickers to Ryan.
Ryan and his cryptic comments, his letting people in slowly and showing them glimpses they don't understand. Brendon wonders what he's already told Brendon in puzzles and riddles, all this time they've spent together. Was it Ryan that Spencer couldn't help? Brendon's itching to know, but he bites the questions back.
The uncomfortable silence lingers for a while before Spencer coughs, shifting and plastering his usual, bored expression on his face. "Anyway," he says, sliding right back into his role of Go Between Guy, "what I came down here to tell you was that Ryan's looking for you. I think he wants to go out or something, I dunno. How about I finish up this load of laundry for you, you go out, and when you get back, I'll teach you how to do this for real?"
The smile Spencer gives Brendon -- friendly and genuine, but also sympathetic and apologetic, like this is all somehow Spencer's doing -- is the only indication that their relationship has changed over the past few weeks. Brendon appreciates that simple gesture more than he thinks Spencer knows, and returns the smile easily.
"Yeah, sure," he says, already on his way out of the room. He pauses at the door, though, and looks back. "Thanks." He's surprised to find the word rolls easily off his tongue, despite how seldom he's used it. It's almost as though it's just been waiting for the right time to come out, for a fitting place to finally be used. Brendon's pretty glad it's here.
When he gets upstairs, Jon and Brent are sitting in the kitchen, bowls of macaroni and cheese in front of them. Ryan's rinsing something in the sink that Brendon assumes must be his own bowl, and wonders why no one invited him up to share lunch. He glances over at the stove just as Ryan says, "There's some left in the pan, we didn't want to distract you from your endeavors with laundry, lest you mess it up even more than you inevitably already had."
Brendon rolls his eyes and flicks Ryan on the head as he walks past him and to the stove, taking the entire pan. He grabs a fork and leans against the counter, glancing at the other three in the room while he stuffs forkfuls of cheesy goodness into his mouth. It strikes him how normal this all is, five guys sharing a house like roommates. It also strikes him, not for the first time, how normal these guys are -- definitely not the type he'd have ever expected to be involved in such illegal activities.
But then, he supposes, maybe that's why they get away with it so well. He suspects if they all looked like Italian mobsters, they'd have been busted a long time ago. He wonders if maybe it's being so normal that makes them extraordinary, and then laughs at himself. When did he start thinking like that?
"Spencer said you wanted to go somewhere, Ryan?" Brendon asks between bites. He flicks his gaze over to Ryan, who's moved from the sink to sitting beside Brent.
"Yeah," he says. "Central Park, whenever you finish eating?"
Brendon nods, taking another bite. He thinks for the hundredth time that he should be regretting not putting up more of a fight when they took him, that there must be something wrong because he's enjoying this, being with all of them. He doesn't have the background of a rich kid with these guys, though. They don't care how much money his dad makes an hour, what kind of house he lives in. They don't care what happened to him before they met him, they just gave him a fresh start and acceptance as long as he tried to remember what those guys looked like.
So he thinks he should regret it, but he doesn't. He wonders if any of them do.
---
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