Yesterdays and Tomorrows [2/2]
Cont. from here
The flight out of La Guardia is hell.
It’s too noisy and crowded and cold, cold, cold and it takes him forever to catch a last minute flight to Los Angeles. The primal impatience he’s not prone to arises again because Misty behind the counter, with her stupid fake smile and fucking ridiculous uniform, obviously doesn’t understand the concept of “I need one fucking ticket, right the fuck now.” And of course, there’s always That Guy on the plane that’s clearly illiterate and ends up in Ryan’s seat and tries to argue with the fact, even though it’s evident that Ryan’s ticket says 14C and his says 19G. The flight attendants are too cheerful - No, it’s not going to be a nice fucking flight - and too polite, especially when Ryan gets up to go to the bathroom and wakes up with a cold rag to his forehead.
He groans and asks, “What are you doing?”
And Abby (Ally?) replies, “You got a little woozy from the altitude,” and then “Don’t worry, it happens all the time,” when Ryan notices several passengers staring at him with concern. He bites the inside of his cheek for the next three and a half hours, and the minute he steps out of the airport, inhales the muggy Los Angeles air, he refuses to allow his nerves to cause another scene.
Flagging down a taxi, he swallows down the impending fear bubbling in the pit of his stomach.
-----
Ryan regrets letting Brendon drive the minute they pull out of the driveway. He’s distracted by miniscule things - balloons tied to a telephone pole or a dog yapping in the front yard of someone’s house - to an almost fatal degree.
Brendon says, “Ryan, let’s go to that garage sale,” and Ryan says, “Brendon, let’s not and say we did.”
Brendon says, “Ryan, that man looked a lot like Elvis,” and Ryan says, “Brendon, this is Vegas.”
Brendon says, “Ryan, your car has sensitive breaks,” and Ryan says, “Brendon, shit. I think you just gave me whiplash.”
Toeing the gas lightly, Brendon hums along to the radio and Ryan vaguely remembers hearing Brendon sing the song in the shower once, or maybe when he was arranging the DVDs, or something equally as mundane, but a perfect moment, regardless, to catch Brendon in his truest form, singing softly to himself and being generally content with life. Ryan wonders what the song is but opts not to ask or press the Info button on his radio, decides Brendon will get around to the chorus soon enough. And if not, he’s certain he’ll hear it again.
He brakes again, still too fast, at the next stop light and Ryan lurches forward, hands slapping onto the dashboard to still himself. “Damn, Brendon,” Ryan breathes, half in astonishment, half in exasperation. “Maybe you just need to get your brakes tightened, fuck.” He rubs the back of his neck and looks at Brendon with a sharp eyebrow.
Brendon chews his lip in apology and then smirks, “Baby, I can only keep one thing tight at a time,” and trickles his fingers down Ryan’s forearm with a devilish grin.
“Shut up,” Ryan bites, tossing off Brendon’s playful hand with a scowl that’s fighting so hard not to turn into a broad smile. “You’re lame.”
Brendon cackles and eyes the car in front of them, still stopped. He eases forward slightly and his eyes shift back to Ryan’s with an evil glint apparent in them. Ryan warns, “Brendon,” but Brendon pumps the brakes, slinging Ryan forward in what looks like mild convulsions and giggles, “Show me how you ride my dick, Ross.”
And Brendon, just like this, laughing and smiling and being generally immature is what Ryan lives for, what makes Ryan roll his eyes and succumb to Brendon’s playful coaxing enough to smile, bright and open and Brendon pumps the brakes again, harder this time and Ryan’s seatbelt tightens around his chest. His back slams against the cushion of the seat again and.
His fingers trace over the cloth covering the seat, sticky and mangled by cigarette holes and tears, and he glances up to find himself staring through the two headrests in the front of the taxi and into the face of the cab driver looking at him expectantly.
“Your fare?” the man says, holding out one hand while pointing to the meter with the other.
Ryan swallows hard, feels his pulse pounding in his head, thundering through his veins and lets out a shaky breath. Out the window looms the hospital, frightening with it’s gigantic, wide windows and bustling crowd of visitors. Leaning over on his hip, Ryan takes out his wallet, tosses a few bills at the man in the front and curls his fingers around the door handle, pushing the door open to taste the Los Angeles night.
The trek up to the main entrance is grueling. It isn’t the distance, or the whirring about between comers and goers, but the blur of each step, the ever growing fog that accumulates around his head with every stride that brings him closer to the wide glass doors. It’s confusing and overwhelming and before he realizes it, he’s seemingly floated through the lobby and to the reception desk, trying to unglue his heavy tongue in order to speak to the patient woman behind all her papers.
She blinks and says, “Can I help you, sweetie?”
He shakes the lingering phantom fingers of haze from his mind and blurts, “Urie. I’m- I’m here to see Brendon Urie.”
With a frown, she takes a quick glance at her computer and says, “Is he expecting you? Your name, please.”
“Ryan Ross.” His words are coming out like vomit, uncontrollable yet bubbling in his stomach with enough forewarning that he has enough time to shape them correctly. “I got a call today, or- maybe it was a few days ago, I don’t know.” He shakes his head, battling away the guilt of not having had his phone, of not knowing exactly when the call had been made. “But I flew from New York, I’m on his emergency contact list.”
The pang in Ryan’s heart at that realization - still, he’s still there, that Brendon never took him off despite having all the protection and love from the people he surrounds himself with on a daily basis - hits him harder than he’s willing to let on.
“I see,” she says and pushes her chair so that it glides her over to her computer. She types in a few letters and says, “Now who is the patient you’re visiting?”
“Uh, Brendon Urie,” he clears his throat, his voice cracking only a little. “Brendon Boyd Urie, if that helps.” It helps her, not him.
She nods, types a few more characters in and clicks the mouse. “And you were-?”
“Ryan Ross,” he repeats, stuffing his hand in his pocket. “I, uh. He’s an old friend.”
The two words he used to describe his relationship with Brendon are not only blatantly false, but completely irrelevant to the information the woman enters into the computer. He shuffles his feet nervously.
“We do have a Brendon B. Urie checked in, but I’ll have to check with his doctors to see if he’s up for visitors. If you’ll have a seat, I’ll call and check for you.” She gestures to the few chairs by the front window. He nods and shakily makes his way over to an empty one. When he sits, he takes the first real, conscious breath since walking in, a deep, haggard tremble through his chest, awakening his limbs and stimulating his brain and.
Suddenly, he’s not sitting in the hospital lobby anymore, but sprawled out, confident and poised in the same black leather tattoo chair he reclined in all those years ago, laughing with Spencer that “Hell no, it doesn’t hurt,” despite the itching, burning pain being needled into his wrist with each outline of the words he chose to ink there.
And the scent of this place. It’s just as sterile as he remembers. Clean and piercing and sanitized so well it burns a little when you breathe it in.
Ryan looks up, through the bright eyes of an innocence he never knew he had and his eyes glisten, behind unwilling tears, resting on Brendon, sitting with his legs curled beneath him on the plastic bench just before him, eyes widened with concern and fingers in his mouth, gnawing away at uncontrolled nerves.
Ryan smiles.
“Brendon,” and the mahogany eyes of the boy in question quickly fixate on Ryan, his leg bouncing anxiously, a tick. “C’mere,” Ryan says, jerking his head, fringe peaking out from beneath the brim of his newsboy hat. Brendon unfolds himself from the bench, his panted on jeans squeaking on the plastic as he pushes himself off and walks over to Ryan, shy and quiet. Ryan puts a hand on his hip, slides his thumb across the exposed strip of Brendon’s abdomen below his too-small shirt and smiles up at him, wincing a bit as the needle catches a rather sensitive spot. He’s only on his first wrist and Brendon looks more paranoid than he did the day he decided to tell his parents he was going to do the band full time. “What’s the matter?” Ryan asks and Brendon’s eyes flitter over the latex gloves of the tattoo artist.
Brendon chews his lip and looks back at Ryan. “Doesn’t it hurt?”
Ryan’s thumb grazes over the top of Brendon’s underwear and when he opens his mouth, a startled gasp is all that comes out. Brendon tenses and his hands curl into fists, knots of fingers formed by instinctive protection and the need to feel strong, two things he’s only felt when he’s near Ryan.
“Nah,” Ryan laughs, patting Brendon’s hip reassuringly with a smile only rivaled by those of Brendon himself. “Not too bad.”
Brendon gives him a lopsided grin, still tainted a bit by worry and stands to the side of Ryan’s chair until his left wrist is done and the guy, John’s his name, informs everyone he needs a cigarette break before they start on his right.
The two weeks after, Ryan doesn’t remember anything but Brendon’s fingers, breath, mouth healing the raw, whelped skin and kissing comfort back into Ryan’s bones.
“Ah, Mr. Ross?”
A hand rests on Ryan’s shoulder and he startles back into reality, shaking the feel of prickling wrists but not the scent of sterilized equipment and when he blinks, blinds himself with the bright white of the hospital lobby, he remembers, and looks up at the nurse addressing him.
“Mr. Ross,” she repeats, glancing at her clipboard to make sure she’s not talking to a stranger.
“Yes?” Ryan chokes out and scrambles to his feet.
“Visiting hours are over for the day,” she informs and a flare of something violent strikes up deep inside Ryan, something ugly and horrid and untamable and then she says, “But I explained to the doctors that you were first on his emergency contact list-” And there it is again: that devastating fact that he’s still first, after a whole year, he’s still first. “-and they’ve agreed to let you step in to see him.”
The monster inside Ryan, the snarling whirlwind of rage and impatience and defiance, it mellows out and deflates in his chest, becomes a thumping heartbeat and he breathes deep.
“If you’d follow me, please,” she says, bowing her head as she leads Ryan down a fluorescent corridor and into an elevator. Ryan’s legs feel like jelly and they’re between floors one and two when Ryan is struck with the sudden realization that he’s still unaware of why Brendon was hospitalized; they’re halfway between floors two and three and Ryan thinks in over a year and feels his head spin; they’re stepping out onto floor three and Ryan has to pry himself off of the steel support bars lining the wall in order to get off on the correct floor.
She says, “He’s asleep right now, so you’ll have to be quiet.”
And Ryan says, “Could you tell me what happened?”
They stop in the middle of the hall - Ryan’s sure it’s the middle because there’s not a growing knot in his stomach yet, a winding ball of anxiety that becomes present when facing things from the past - and she looks at him with a serious face. “There was a bad reaction with his pills and alcohol; his stomach had to be pumped,” she informs and Ryan feels like his stomach is going to involuntarily pump itself.
It’s crippling, the idea of Brendon doing any type of drug - not counting the copious amounts of weed they smoked those last few tours - but. But overdosing? It’s not. He can’t even.
“It wasn’t intentional, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she amends. “Nor was it any type of hard drug. Sleeping medication has never mixed well with alcohol,” she says, and Ryan wonders how Brendon could ever be so careless. How those people around Brendon could allow him to be so careless and then he thinks.
He was careless enough to leave in the first place.
“So, is he- ?”
“He’s fine, yes. No harm done. I don’t want to say it’s nothing too serious, because had it not been taken care of in the time that it was, there could have been complications but,” she pauses, sighs and smiles. “For the most part, he’s doing okay. Still a little groggy, though, I’d imagine. Been sleeping most of the day.”
“When was he admitted?” Ryan questions, and when she answers eleven the previous night, Ryan can feel Keltie’s hands roaming, the same as they had in the moments Brendon had been carried in on a stretcher and his gut twists guiltily.
She leads him further down the hall and that knot starts growing, coiling in the pit of his stomach and sucking the breath from his lungs so that each inhale is quick and sharp and when they finally come to a door and stop, he’s so lightheaded he slumps against the wall.
“Are you okay?” she asks and he shakes his head but answers, “Yeah.” Nodding, she pushes the door open and whispers, “You’re allowed twenty minutes. I’ll be back to see you out,” and then turns to walk back down the hall, leaving Ryan braced against the wall, mind nowhere and everywhere all at once.
It takes a minute for Ryan to gather enough composure to stand on his own, and another moment for him to gather the courage to step into the room. But he manages and he gets completely through the doorway before the sight of dark hair fanned out across a white pillow catches his eye and from there things disintegrate into what Ryan can only describe as an overwhelming stimulus to all his vital organs, followed up by the staggering conclusion that he didn’t travel across the country because Brendon needed him - Brendon’s doing just fine, based on what the nurse said, and the guitar perched in the chair next to the bed, and fuck, just. The overall beauty of his face, how it’s not worn at all, not like Ryan’s. No, he flew straight out of New York to California because he needed Brendon, quite possibly has for an entire stubborn year.
Ryan can’t breathe.
Brendon’s there, eyelashes splayed out over his cheekbones and his lips parted slightly, breathing in the oxygen Ryan can’t take, but gently, slow and quiet. The fingers of his left hand are curled around his blankets, sleep-loose and tired, and on his other hand, the needle of an IV sinks down beneath his fair skin, secured on with a strip of medical tape. And his face, Ryan can’t. It’s hard. To look at Brendon, that is. Because it was always so easy to look at Brendon in the past; so simple and welcome and natural to just soak in the glow of his smile or the flash of his brown eyes. But now it’s not so painless, because a year makes everything so complicated and besides, Brendon’s sleeping and Ryan feels like he doesn’t belong.
He’s breathtaking though, stunning and more beautiful than Ryan ever remembered - but maybe it’s not the shock of seeing Brendon so striking, but perhaps, the shock of realizing he never forgot that perfect face. At least, not enough to find his features unrecognizable or for it to be a memory, even.
And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Brendon’s eyes flutter open and take in the sight of Ryan, staring hard at him and matching the dips of Brendon’s lips with the outline he kept in his head, and aligning the curvature of Brendon’s jaw with the line his mind’s eye drew him so long ago. Brendon’s head shifts and skews Ryan’s tracing, but when his eyes rest upon those eyes, those all-knowing, vibrant eyes, everything in Ryan just. Shuts down. Chills emerge from somewhere, no distinct location in particular, but scatter through his entire body, fingers and toes and arms and legs and focus into one direction, like spilled marbles gathering in the center of a warped floorboard, and when his goose bumps collide, it jolts his heart with a single heavy thud and.
He’s strangely aware of his entire being.
Heartbeat racing in his ears, breath scraping through his lungs, fear tinkering through his nervous system.
Brendon smiles, tentatively at first as if to say Hello, and then with his eyes, too, as if to say I knew you would come. Ryan chokes out a laugh of incredulity.
“Ryan,” Brendon breathes, voice thick and raspy from sleep, but it pulls Ryan attention in and his right foot slides forward, just a fraction of an inch. “C’mere,” he whispers, beckons Ryan over with the same assured eyes Ryan gave him when he had his wrist pinned to an armrest, inking his skin and Ryan obeys, but not in that clichéd movie ‘let-me-rush-to-my-destiny’ way. In the way that he creeps, timid and awkward, two things Ryan has always been but never more obvious than in that moment, as his heel meets the floor then toe, heel, toe, heel. And he’s at the edge of Brendon’s bed.
Brendon’s face is relaxed now, no smile but no frown, just a speculative eyebrow and imploring eyes and Ryan’s heart is running laps around the feeble beats Brendon’s machine announces.
“I flew from New York,” Ryan says, like it’s a proper hello, I’ve missed you.
But Brendon just stares at him for a moment, observing the new wrinkles in Ryan’s face and then his eyes crinkle a little, the effects of a tiny smile. “I know.”
Brendon shuffles over on the bed and draws back the blankets. He nods at the open space. Ryan stares at the heated mattress, knits his eyebrows up in a wistful smile and wonders if Brendon’s toes are as cold as they always used to be. “I can’t. I’m only allowed twenty minutes.”
His face falls, just a little, but his eyes veil over with something like understanding and Brendon drapes the covers back across his bed, but remains just off the center of the mattress.
Then there’s this moment, it’s there and it lingers for what feels like hours to Ryan - an entire year? - and the only thing that happens is an exchange of oxygen. Brendon’s eyes flicker over every inch of Ryan’s face again, flitting over his Ryan’s caramel eyes each time his own sweep over the pale planes of Ryan’s cheekbones and they trail down to his shoulders, very much broken and weak, to his arms, still as lithe as ever, but shaking, and Brendon rests is focus on his hand. The veins there are still apparent, like vines crawling beneath the thin skin of the top of his hand, and the tendons that connect his fingers quiver and strain below the surface.
Ryan feels a smooth scratch of warmth beneath his palm and he looks down just as Brendon closes his fingers around the top of his hand. It’s- It’s gentle and subtle and so small yet so, so much bigger than anything Ryan’s ever known and it hurts. To feel that familiar heat beneath his fingertips and know an entire year was wasted not knowing the wonder of such a simple touch.
At the sound of oxygen being sucked through Brendon’s nose, a slow, collecting breath, Ryan blinks back his self-bitter nostalgia and sees Brendon’s eyes fixated on their hands, fear and sad, sad hope and a fierce glint of determination swelling behind his eyelids. And then all of that emotion meets the confusion tainting Ryan’s and Brendon exhales with twitching lips. “I wrote a song the other day.”
Ryan’s heart starts beating again and he lets go of a silent breath. “Yeah?” he asks, voice cracked and unprepared for use.
Brendon’s thumb brushes along Ryan’s index finger and he says, “It’s really simple.”
“Will you- ” Ryan begins, clears his throat and glances at the polished acoustic in the chair next to him. “Will you play it for me?”
Brendon’s thumb freezes over Ryan’s knuckle and his eyes shift to just beyond Ryan’s shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Ryan breaks his gaze away from Brendon to turn and see the nurse standing in the doorway. His heart maybe sinks a little. “It’s time for you to go, Mr. Ross.”
And just as Ryan’s fingers grip tighter around Brendon’s, instinctively, Brendon’s thumb begins swiping away at the side of Ryan’s paling joint. “’S okay,” Brendon whispers and Ryan looks back at him. Brendon smiles, confident and knowing, and his eyes twinkle when they meet Ryan’s again. “I’ll play it for you tomorrow.”
Ryan smiles, a bit weak and rueful as he lets go of Brendon’s hand and backs away to join the nurse in the doorway. With each step that meets the ground, his smile grows a little wider because Brendon’s going to play for him tomorrow. Just him and Brendon and music, and maybe tears, but nothing he can’t handle.
Brendon smiles again, wider, and Ryan lets go of all his yesterdays to welcome his tomorrows.
FIN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SARA, BB!
Thank you to my wonderful beta my_obsession_xx for being so supportive, and starlesscities for letting me bounce ideas off of her/help beat me back into writing this. Anna Bee, you know I love you. Thank you endlessly. xoarianne_ilyxo, girl, I don't know where you've gone to, but I miss the fuck out of you :( And hell, while I'm at it, thank you Colin (lolab) for your general overwhelming awesomeness and for humoring the Zoo!AU.