By Small and Simple Things
Title: By Small and Simple Things
Author: selectivelyurie
Beta: the_randomist, my_obsession_xx, alphabetatoast (and a few others)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon
POV: Third
Summary: And there’s no way that Skittle is currently hoisted above the head of a tiny little brown-haired man who is pressing the mouse away with his foot and shrieking in frantic whispers... No, it’s just not possible. Except it is.
Disclaimer: I really wish Brendon Urie was five inches tall. Sadly, he is not.
Author Notes: This started out as something completely indulgent - and it still is - but after I sent the first part to behindthec, it became obvious I was writing for both of us. Colin, bb, this is for you ♥ (And thanks to the_randomist for helping me with the title.)
When they pick Jon up at the airport, Spencer has one of those really ridiculous movie moments where his smile is almost sickeningly wide and his eyes are practically sparkling. It takes him four seconds to cross the terminal to Jon and when he all but tackles him with a hug, Jon let’s out a groan threaded with laughter and gratitude and tucks his face into Spencer’s neck. Ryan lets them have their moment but can’t fight off the grin stirred by seeing Spencer smile that bright; it gets him every time.
Spencer allows Ryan rights to an easy Jon Walker hug for a few moments and Ryan lets himself be tugged forward into Jon’s arms.
“I brought you bastards something,” is the first thing Jon says and Spencer punches him in the arm.
It’s not unlike Jon to come from Chicago bearing gifts - books, movies, clothes (scarves, if Ryan’s lucky), even a few extra bags of his favorite kind of coffee “because everything tastes better in Chicago” - but when he drops down to his knee and pulls out two boxes from his small rolling suitcase, Ryan is surprised to see it’s more than just commodities.
“Here,” Jon says and thrusts a box eagerly at Spencer. It’s wrapped. In birthday wrapping paper, no less, and Spencer’s birthday isn’t for another four months. Jon shrugs, “Just be thankful it wasn’t that day’s newspaper.”
Spencer laughs and tears into it as Jon hands Ryan a slightly smaller box, which, oddly enough, is wrapped in newspaper. Ryan looks from the box to Jon, back to the box and then laughs, “What the fuck, Jon?” and turns the box over in his hand.
“It’s high time you learned to stop being so high maintenance, Ross. Just shut up and open it.” The grin on Jon’s face is playful and goodhearted and Ryan’s just got one finger beneath the clear scotch tape before Spencer explodes with laughter, wrapping paper crinkling as he tucks the garbage beneath his arm.
“Jon, oh my god. I cannot -” Spencer says around his giggles. He stares at his brand new electric razor and all out beams up at Jon.
“I’m tired of you using mine every time I come visit, you ass,” Jon says, peeling a stray piece of tape off the side the box with an impish smile. Spencer says, “Thank you, Jon. Really,” and Jon looks at Ryan who is still standing with a newspaper cube and a small smile. “Well, open it,” Jon urges, waving his hands at Ryan.
He takes two good tears at the paper and is met with the dulled, slightly scratchy surface of a brown wooden box.
“Isn’t it cool?” Jon asks as Ryan takes the paper completely off and holds the small box in the palm of his hand. It’s about seven inches long and four inches wide and the top of the lid is engraved with weaving vines and wrapping branches of trees reaching out to a few very worn flowers in the center. There are a few flecks of gold visible through the almost rusted metal lining the rim of the lid and the bottom of the box and Ryan runs his fingers over it carefully.
“Jon,” Ryan says, starting out carefully so as not to offend Jon. It’s a beautiful box, despite it’s weathering, but seriously, “What is it?”
“It’s a music box,” Jon says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Then he frowns a little and scratches the back of his neck. “At least, I think it’s a music box. There’s a little hole in the back where I think a winder used to be, and I can’t get it open. But it looks cool, right? All old and shit?”
“Where did you get it?” Ryan asks curiously because really, the box is beautiful and it doesn’t have to be in pristine condition for Ryan to admire it or wonder where it came from.
Jon chuckles and says, “I don’t really remember. Some old antique place down the block from my house. The guy that sold it to me said it had only been in the shop for a few weeks; said some guy from the jazz club brought it in for cash. I bought myself an old Polaroid there,” he says and digs an ancient looking camera out of a small bag inside his suitcase. “S’pretty cool, I thought.”
Ryan smoothes over the box another time, fingers tripping over the small clasp at the front that seems to be sealing the box shut. It doesn’t look that old, just weathered and dulled. Still, it’s beautiful and Jon’s gesture still stands as thoughtful.
“Thanks, Jon,” Ryan says, tearing his eyes off his gift. “It’s really nice.”
“Sorry it doesn’t like, open. Or, um. Work. But I figured you could decorate with it, or- something. I don’t know, Ross. Use your domestic imagination and find a use for it,” Jon smirks and Ryan knows it’s a light jab at the current obsession he has with having a fixture - or a bowl or a picture frame or a lamp - on every available surface of his house, but he smiles.
“Will do,” Ryan says, tucking the box under his arm carefully. He throws a side glance at Spencer who hasn’t stopped looking at Jon since he arrived because Jon is here and it’s not every day that Spencer can just look at him, so. Ryan drums his fingers along the top of the box and says, “Let’s go get your luggage, Santa Clause. We have an hour to make our dinner reservations and I’ll have your head if you cause me to miss out on Thai food.”
Jon laughs, crisp and answering and he and Spencer let Ryan lead the way to baggage claim.
Jon tells them over dinner that he’s planning on staying for two weeks, if they’ll have him. Spencer throws a piece of stir fry at him and says, “Now you’re staying three for doubting our hospitality, douche.” Jon’s smile is radiant.
Ryan invites Jon and Spencer over for a few beers and Jon watches with amusement as Ryan tries hide the shade of red tainting his cheeks as he turns circles in his living room for a place to put his gift (seriously, every available surface). Jon tells him to stop worrying and start drinking in so many words and forces Ryan to put the box on the counter for the time being.
They fish three beers out of Ryan’s fridge and talk about nothing and everything until Ryan’s clean out of alcohol and it’s two in the morning. Jon says, “Hey Spen-” and Spencer says, “Of course,” and they both give Ryan hugs before leaving Ryan with the lingering warmth of his couch.
----
On Thursday, Jon says, “Dude, when did you organize your pantry? It looks good.” And, no. That’s weird because Ryan doesn’t know the meaning of the word organize.
Ryan meets Jon’s impressed gaze at the pantry door and sees his boxed foods are not only pulled to the very front and into view, but also descending in order from tallest to smallest, almost like a staircase. It actually does look really good - and fuck, where have those oatmeal cream pies been? - but still. It’s weird because Ryan never touches his pantry unless it’s to rifle through it and after that, it stays messy. So for things to be in an actual row, aligned and attractive, Ryan questions his sanity, because he doesn’t remember being suddenly concerned with the placement of his food.
An “uh, thanks” is all Ryan can manage.
Jon steals a Twinkie out of the smallest box on the right and pushes the pantry door closed with his foot with a shrug.
A few days later, Ryan sees a mouse run across his kitchen floor when he’s coming in from work and when he checks to see if his mousetraps are still armed, he’s surprised to find that the only thing snapped by the small metal bar is a toothpick and the small pinch of cheese that once sat at the trigger is now gone.
Picking it up to inspect it, the bits of toothpick fall freely from either side of the trap and Ryan’s only explanation is that his house is overrun with rodents smarter than he is. The thought is both depressing and scary.
But apart from the genius mice that are, by evidence he just observed, apparently still alive in his house, Ryan is still a bit creeped out over how organized his pantry has stayed. Every box is in perfect alignment with the edge of the shelves and yesterday, just to make sure he wasn’t really losing it, Ryan pushed his box of Cheerios to the back and turned his Pop Tart box on its side before heading over to Spencer’s for a jam session with Jon. Upon opening the pantry door, Ryan noticed that everything was OCD perfect again and the mousetraps he’d spent most of the afternoon re-rigging had snapped shut, empty.
Ryan refuses to harbor the possibility that he could be dealing with mice that are not only smart and organized, but quite possibly sing and hem dresses too; so he opts for finally admitting his house is haunted and tries not to acknowledge how his counters have started to gleam.
----
Ryan wakes up in the middle of the night with a dry throat and parched tongue. He rolls over to check the alarm clock and groans as he gets out of bed, 3AM mocking him in glowing red digits. Shuffling over his carpet in socks that are stretched from wear, he yawns and heads toward the kitchen.
There’s a dim glow from the light on the ice and water dispenser on the front of his fridge and he’s like a moth to the flame, only venturing from his path to bypass the table in the middle of the floor and to grab a cup from the cabinet.
He fills his glass and takes three long gulps, the moonlight streaming in through the small window above the sink turning the water crystal in the darkness. With a refreshed sigh, Ryan turns to make his trek back to his room and he steps on something that crinkles under his weight.
“What the -” Ryan lifts his foot and squints through the dark, allowing the glow of the moon to illuminate his sight and his eyes focus on the vague outline of a bag of - “Skittles?” Ryan asks no one in particular. Setting his empty glass on the edge of the counter, he bends down to pick up the inconveniently placed candy, confusion racking his thoughts. What is even more strange, is that as he takes up the package, a few stray candies escape an apparent opening and they crackle as they hit his linoleum, rolling and bouncing across the floor. He curses once but stops short when he hears the distinct sound of tiny feet scraping along after the displaced food and he growls in irritation.
“Alright, you little bastards,” Ryan says angrily, standing up quickly to turn on the light and finally catch sight of these smart rats. The light is too bright when he flicks up the switch on the wall and he squints against his blindingly white (seriously, he will never understand how everything is staying so clean) tile, but when the blurriness in his eyes is blinked away, he sees a small mouse hurdling after a green Skittle rolling under the table.
Ryan quickly drops onto his hands and knees, only narrowly claiming his fly-swatter, and he takes a moment to grow even angrier because there’s another mouse down there and he the thought of one alone was disgusting enough. But he’s still partially blind because his floor is channeling the sun currently and there is no possible way that there is a second mouse squeaking and vying for the possession of a blue Skittle. And there’s no way that Skittle is currently hoisted above the head of a tiny little brown-haired man who is pressing the mouse away with his foot and shrieking in frantic whispers, “No, no, no! Be quiet, he’ll hear us!”
No, it’s just not possible.
Except it is, because Ryan’s shadow washes over them and the little creature gasps in fright and freezes while the mouse, the very much alive and real mouse, snatches the Skittle from ground and scampers off and Ryan is staring into a little face filled with worlds of fear.
And, okay, maybe Ryan shouldn’t have screamed like he did because it was a bit dramatic, but he is totally justified in murdering the back of his head on the underside of his table because the initial reaction to witnessing something terrifyingly abnormal is to run. Well, at least that’s Ryan’s initial reaction.
He scrambles backward cursing and seeing stars in dizzying patterns and for a few moments he allows himself to be angry that he actually believed there was a little person under his table and in turn gave himself a concussion from shock. But then the little thing is bounding over each tile on the ground in a total of three steps and shouting things at Ryan and in a move of pure instinct, Ryan reaches up to claim his empty water glass and has the little creature trapped beneath it.
The clink of the glass on the floor brings about a very strange silence. Ryan realizes how quiet his air conditioning is, how soft the motor in his refrigerator is, and how loud his heart is beating. The thing in the glass looks helpless and sad and scared and that’s exactly how Ryan wants it: trapped. It’s hitting the inside of the glass with small little fists and its lips are moving in wide stretches, as if it were shouting but all Ryan can hear is the soft little thunk of its hand meeting the wall of glass. It’s disturbing, seeing that a person - if that’s what it is at all; it looks like a person, but Ryan is not above believing it’s a gremlin - can fit inside a drinking glass and try as it might, the creature - no, it’s definitely a gremlin - simply cannot knock the heavy glass cage over to escape.
Ryan breathes out a “I’m out of my fucking mind,” and is dodging the mice in his floor, still parading after Skittles, and reaches the phone in record time.
----
“Ryan, what the fuck do y-?”
“Spencer, there is a four inch person under my kitchen table.”
“…”
“I trapped him in a glass and he won’t stop looking at me.”
“We’ll be right there.”
----
Were Ryan not atop the counter, fly swatter in hand, due to his irrational fear that the creature trapped beneath his table might escape, he probably would have laughed at Spencer’s reaction. It went something like, “What the fuck?” before he was joining Ryan on the higher (safer) level of the kitchen. He had said, “Shit, you weren’t lying,” and Ryan had said, “It’s been staring at me since I caught it.”
Now, they perch in silence on the edge of Ryan’s countertop and Spencer glances from the glass to Ryan and then back to the glass before he says, “Hey, um. It’s like, terrifying as fuck and all, but. Do you think we should maybe turn the cup over? So that he can breathe?”
“It, Spencer. It,” Ryan corrects. “And I’m not getting near that thing so if you want to turn it over and let it eat your face off, you go right ahead.”
“Okay, Ryan. I know that we’ve established that this is in no way normal - as a matter of fact, a part of me is convinced that I’m really, really high right now - but from what I can see, he -”
“It.”
“- doesn’t look like he’s going to hurt anyone.” Spencer makes a pointed glance at the It in question and raises his eyebrows at Ryan.
Inside the cup, the tiny person is pressed up against the glass, eyes wide and pleading and he’s waving his little hands in this pitiful, hopeful fashion and there seems to be a pout on it’s lips that rivals any innocent child Ryan has ever seen.
“Eat. Your face. Off,” Ryan says with emphasis and Spencer rolls his eyes.
“Fine, I’ll do it. Gimme that,” Spencer huffs and snatches the fly swatter from Ryan. Carefully, Spencer bends down to the glass and once he’s eye level with the creature inside, Ryan makes a threat from above:
“If you let that thing out, I’ll kill you.”
Spencer rolls his eyes again and when he focuses his attention back on the cup, he notices the creature inside is giggling, eyes crinkled and hand over its mouth, tickled by their argument. Spencer frowns in disapproval - he does not approve of the impossibility of this entire situation - and the creature’s laughter stops abruptly before it looks down at it’s feet which, Spencer notices, are tucked into a pair of black Converse. This thing may be the creepiest thing Spencer has ever witnessed, but at least it’s creepy with style.
Sliding the plastic square of the swatter across the floor, Spencer wraps his fingers around the glass and lifts up a single edge, allowing enough room to slide the fly swatter beneath. To his surprise, the creature inside steps to the opposite side of the glass and when the encroaching swatter reaches his planted feet, he hops up on to the plastic with a smile.
Spencer says, “Well, that was easy.”
“Did it try to get out? Did it bite you? Spencer, where the hell is Jon?” Ryan asks, paranoid as he tries to peek over Spencer’s shoulder when he stands up with the cup in his hand. Spencer turns the glass over right side up and bites his lip as the creature inside tumbles and twists, bumping its head and elbows and knees against the hard surface surrounding him. “Spencer, you’re supposed to be the heartless one. Now, stop fawning over that thing and answer my question. Where is Jon? I thought he came with you.”
Spencer removes the fly swatter from the top of the glass and turns to Ryan, “He did, but, uh. I kind of made him drop me off here. So he could run to the drugstore. To get some NyQuil. For you. Because um. I thought you were just on one of your insomniac spells when you called. So. Yeah. He’ll be back.”
If Ryan’s eye twitches, Spencer pretends not to see it.
“You mean you didn’t believe me?” Ryan accuses, dropping off the counter to face Spencer eye level.
“You called me at three in the morning screaming that you had a four inch man under your kitchen table, Ryan,” Spencer counters. “What was I supposed to -?”
“But I do!”
“Yes, I’m very well aware of this now.”
“And you sent Jon to get me medication?” Ryan asks in disbelief.
“Ryan, I don’t know if you recall the time you called me at two AM last summer and told me you and the Boogieman were having a slumber party and would I like to join, but after that, I’ve started taking your insomnia relatively seriously so -”
“Okay, so I admit the Boogieman thing was a little ridiculous. But that doesn’t change the fact that there really is a four inch little… thing in my kitchen and you can’t stop ogling at it long enough to think that maybe I -”
Ryan stops himself short at the sight just over Spencer’s shoulder. Within the confines of the drinking glass, the little creature, who is now standing again, is breathing heavily on the spotless walls surrounding him and with itty bitty fingers, is tracing smiley faces and stars into the fog his breath leaves on the glass. He looks content for the time being, creating little pictures on the side of his prison, but it’s bordering on precious - the way Ryan spots a tiny, pink tongue sticking out in concentration - and no, Ryan thinks, this is horrifying and nothing more.
In one swift movement, Ryan reaches over and thumps the side of the glass rather hard, sending it wobbling a little and the small person inside braces itself with flat palms against the walls. Ryan says, “Don’t smudge my glass,” with little sympathy and scowls when a tiny head peeks up over the evaporating remnants of a crazy-eyed smiley face.
Spencer gives him a smack on the back of the head and Ryan cries out, “Jesus, Spencer. What was that for?”
And Spencer says, “For being a dick.”
Ryan huffs and they wait in silence for Jon to arrive.
----
It’s a miracle Jon has the patience of a saint because the minute he steps over the threshold into Ryan’s house he’s bombarded with questions, demands and pleas, all of which are lost in a shouted slur that Jon only manages to catch his name in.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jon says carefully, throwing his hands up to stop the rambling nonsense spewing from both Ryan and Spencer’s mouth. “Both of you chill out and stop yelling; you’re probably scaring him.”
“What?!”
“You know about that thing?!”
Jon looks at Spencer and shrugs, “You said Ryan was freaking out over a little man under his kitchen table.”
“Yes, but how did you know that Ryan wasn’t just on an insomnia trip?” Spencer demands.
Again, Jon shrugs, “They’re common in Chicago, so it’s not entirely impossible.”
Spencer pales and gives a shocked, “What?”
Ryan, on the other hand, all out shrieks, “You mean you brought that little gremlin to Vegas - to my house - and didn’t tell me?!”
Jon Walker, the unfazed soul that he is, laughs at Ryan’s hysteric rage and says, “I didn’t know about him, okay? And dude, stop screaming, you’re hurting his ears.” Jon nods to the glass on the table and Spencer and Ryan turn to see the little person inside cupping his ears in pain, eyes squeezed shut.
Jon squeezes through the wall Ryan and Spencer have made and approaches the table. “God, I bet you smuggled him over in that damn music box,” Ryan groans loudly.
Perking up a bit, Jon raises an eyebrow. “You know, that’s probably what happened. It would explain a lot considering I found Tom in my camera bag.”
“There’s more?!”
“Calm down,” Jon dismisses with a wave of his hand. “I left him in Chicago. When I bought my camera in that store - the one I bought your music box in, Ryan - I got home and went to put it in the old leather camera bag the man had given me for free and there was Tom, sitting at the bottom.”
“You named it?” Spencer asks, bewildered.
“No, Spencer, I didn’t name him. He already had a name. Just like this little guy probably does,” Jon says and smiles, sweet and charming at the tiny person inside the cup only to see that his hands are no longer over his ears and he’s smiling so wide it could split his little face in two. He’s gesturing wildly at himself, eyes bright and hopeful and Jon chuckles a little, “Your name is Tom, too?” The little guy frowns and shakes his head but points to his temple and smiles again. “You know Tom?” Jon tries again and his face breaks into a wide grin when the little person inside nods frantically and claps, bouncing up and down a little.
Jon turns to Ryan and Spencer and both of them are staring at Jon in complete horror. Shaking his head, he turns back to the little person inside and asks, “Is it cool if I let you out?” Inside, the little person nods his head but keeps a wary eye on Ryan. Jon says, “I won’t let him hurt you,” and carefully turns the cup over on it’s side and watches as the tiny thing inside crawls out cautiously.
“Jon. Jon, what are you doing? Jon, did you let it out? Jon, I swear if you let that thing -”
“Relax, Ross. He’s harmless,” Jon soothes, placing his hand on the table so the little man can climb onto his hand. Jon assures a quiet, “It’s alright,” and watches as he steps up onto his palm before Jon throws “You’ve already scared him to death” over his shoulder.
When Ryan and Spencer see that Jon is holding the tiny person in his hand, they both cringe and back away towards the fridge. “Oh, c’mon guys, really? You’re scared of him? By the way, what is your name, little man?”
And in a surprisingly audible voice, the little person beams up at Jon and says, “I’m Brendon.”
Ryan doesn’t allow himself to think it’s unbearably cute.
“Hi, Brendon. I’m Jon,” Jon says and sticks out his right pointer finger. Brendon clasps it with two hands and shakes with a huge smile. “These are my friends, Spencer and Ryan. I’m sure you know who is who: Spencer is the one staring at me like I’m skinning a small child and Ryan is the one looking pissed off. They’re both a bit cranky this morning; not enough beauty sleep.”
Brendon snickers and waves goofily at them, “Hi, guys!”
The corner of Spencer’s mouth twitches upwards.
“So what are you doing here, little buddy?” Jon asks, crossing his right arm under the his elbow to better support his pose to keep Brendon at eye level. “Shouldn’t you be in Chicago?”
“Well, yeah,” Brendon begins and he seems nervous, what with the way he’s running his fingers through his hair and chuckling softly. “I mean, that doesn’t mean I should be here either because, well, I don’t mean to be here. But that’s not to say I don’t like it here because I do! Ryan has a beautiful house and I -”
“Easy now, Brendon,” Jon laughs and Brendon looks down at the lines in Jon’s palm. “I’m just wondering how you got here; I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“I know, I just -” Brendon pauses and looks up at Jon, worrying his lip. “I don’t want him to be mad at me.”
“Who? Ryan?” Jon asks. Brendon nods slowly, painfully adorable. “He’s not mad.”
“The fuck I am,” Ryan growls, stepping to Jon’s side and glaring down at Brendon. Brendon flinches at the volume of Ryan’s voice when Ryan shouts, “You come into my house, uninvited, and you fuck with my pantry and my mousetraps and my head and you -”
Brendon tries to make Ryan understand that he didn’t know, says, “I didn’t mean to make you mad. I tried to pick up after myself, I really did but the mice -”
“You are worse than the mice!” Ryan shouts and Brendon squeaks, curling Jon’s stubby fingers around his tiny little body, like a protective dome from Ryan’s anger. “At least when they use my things they don’t try to make me believe they never did!”
“Ryan, stop it!” Jon bites and Ryan deflates from his cloud of rage a little. “Look at what you’re doing to him,” Jon says and Ryan looks down to see Jon’s entire hand trembling; a glance at the other one proves that Brendon is the cause. Ryan straightens up.
Spencer comes over, places a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and Ryan clears his throat. “What Ryan is trying to say is that he was really confused and -”
“No, what Ryan is trying to say is that he doesn’t want that little- little- you in his house,” Ryan says, pointing to Brendon as he refers to himself in the third person. It makes him feel more superior, whatever.
Brendon ducks down into Jon’s fingers again, wrapping his hands around the crease in Jon’s knuckles and peeks out with wide, fearful eyes.
“Jon, if you like him so much, just take him back to Chicago where he belongs,” Ryan sighs heavily.
“I will - if he wants to - but you and Spencer insisted that I stay for three weeks and he has to have a place to stay until then.”
“Fine. He can stay at Spencer’s. Problem solved,” Ryan decides, crossing his arms.
“Can’t,” Spencer says. “I have dogs. They’d eat him.”
“Well, he’s not staying here,” Ryan sneers as Spencer steps forward to Jon. He says something softly to him and Jon shrugs and opens up his palm carefully. He mumbles something to Brendon and there’s a pause.
“I won’t hurt you,” Spencer says, holding out his hand. “I promise.” A second later, Brendon is stepping from Jon’s palm to Spencer’s palm and Spencer is cupping him delicately with both hands while Brendon plops down in the middle of Spencer’s palms, tucking his knees up to his chin..
“Oh, god. Not you too,” Ryan groans, rubbing his face in in frustration. “I can’t believe you’re letting his size dictate the fact that he’s not normal.”
“Ryan, stop being an asshole and give your new room mate a proper welcoming,” Spencer says, holding Brendon out just a little, displaying Brendon sitting in his hand, as if Ryan can’t already see.
“He’s not my room mate, stop saying that.”
“He’s staying with you, Ryan. He can’t stay with me and Spencer, so he’s staying with you. End of story,” Jon says.
“No, this is my house and I reserve the right to chose who stays and who goes and I don’t want him here so -”
From Spencer’s hold, Brendon stands and pipes up, “I promise I’ll stay out of the way. And I’ll help keep everything clean and I’ll tell the mice to stay out of your food. I won’t be any trouble I swear.”
Ryan voices a defiant, “No.”
“George Ryan Ross, as your best friend of seventeen years, I demand that you let Brendon live with you until Jon is able to take him back to Chicago. Further assholery will not be tolerated, do you understand?” Spencer finally says and Ryan was trying to avoid the bitchface but there it is, all authoritative and intimidating. There is no way he’s winning this argument now.
“Fine,” he snaps, hand curling hard around the edge of the table.
Brendon, tickled with the excitement of being able to stay, wraps his arms around Spencer’s finger, pressing the side of his wide grin into the bend in his thumb.
----
It shouldn’t bother him as much as it does, but Brendon really is a bit upset that Ryan won’t allow him to continue sleeping in the music box. He really doesn’t need to sleep in it, it’s just. Comfortable. And reminds him of home, everything that this empty shoebox and thin stack of Kleenex isn’t. Brendon isn’t going to complain though, even if the cotton balls Ryan allotted him to use as pillows scratch into his ear at night and tickle, even if he has trouble climbing over the thin cardboard walls of the box without tipping the entire thing over, even if Ryan is still making him sleep in the kitchen, Brendon isn’t going to complain. Because at least he has a place to stay, regardless of whether or not Ryan wants him there.
And that, his (un)welcoming, is apparent every day when Ryan gets up and comes into the kitchen for breakfast, passing through on his way to work. Brendon is always up just as the sun rises and the first morning of being a known guest in Ryan’s house, he had carried a Pop Tart out of the pantry and laid it on the edge of the counter, all nice and neat with a little note that read, “Good morning, Ryan!” and Ryan had completely ignored it, even Brendon’s small, scratchy handwriting that took so long to perfect because Ryan has those big, heavy, expensive pens, not those plastic pens that are easier to hold. Brendon likes those pens because they’re made for little people, their logo even says so.
Brendon tries, he really, really does, to get Ryan to talk to him, but Ryan just walks by like he doesn’t notice Brendon, paces in the living room with a notepad and one of those stupid heavy pens and writes down things Brendon won’t ever be able to see because Ryan leaves the notepad on the mantle piece and Brendon can only dream of ever climbing that high.
Everyday, Ryan makes sure Brendon knows he isn’t welcome and everyday Brendon tries harder to see that that changes.
On Monday, Brendon cleans Ryan’s counters. Ryan knows this because his counters are, well. Clean. And he knows he didn’t clean them. That, and when he comes into the kitchen for the first time that morning, Brendon meets him at the edge of the counter, Pop Tart ready, and smiling so bright when Ryan approaches, Ryan thinks it looks like it hurts. “I cleaned your counters, Ryan!” Brendon announces and Ryan just leaves through the garage for work without a word.
On Tuesday evening, Brendon ventures into the living room and stops in front of the couch, looking up at Ryan watching TV, the volume up so loud you’d think the gunshots were actually coming from outside the window. Brendon flinches at a particularly loud blast and tugs the ankle of Ryan’s pants. “All of your dishes are clean,” he says when Ryan looks down. Ryan blinks and looks back at the screen just as someone gets shot.
Wednesday and Thursday, Brendon makes efforts to speak to Ryan but with Ryan leaving the house in the morning and not returning until dark on both days, it’s difficult to speak to a blur. Ryan takes his notebook with him, stopping at the mantle before bypassing Brendon’s attempts at conversation and heads off in the car. Brendon hopes he’s taking the notebook to actually write in, not because he feels suspicious of Brendon reading it.
Friday morning Ryan drags himself into the kitchen and Brendon stifles a laugh at how furry Ryan’s head looks with his hair sticking up in various odd directions.
“What are you laughing at?” Ryan grumbles and Brendon’s smile grows even wider because Ryan is speaking to him and he’s actually nibbling on the Pop Tart Brendon laid out for him for the first time this week. His eyes are twinkling.
“Your hair looks funny,” Brendon giggles softly, hiding his smile behind his hands. “It’s cute.”
Ryan blinks twice and takes another bite of his Pop Tart, chewing softly. A few crumbs scatter across the counter and Brendon makes haste to see that they don’t dirty up his hard work too much. Ryan watches with a blank expression, eyes still a little sleep foggy, as Brendon gathers up the crumbs and carries them over to the edge of the sink before dropping them in. As he’s heading back for a fresh batch fallen from another of Ryan’s bites, Brendon smiles up at him and says, “I know you probably don’t care or anything, but you really do have a pretty house. It’s nice and roomy. Big. I know my size helps with that but I can imagine the space you have is nice, too.” Brendon bends down to scoop up the corner of crust that Ryan picks off and sets on the counter and he says, “I hope you don’t mind, but did a small tour of the house the other day, just to see what everything looked like.” He tosses the crumb into the sink and says, “I saw your music room; it’s beautiful - all of your guitars and your piano. You have a gorgeous piano.”
Ryan swallows his bite of food and quirks an eyebrow, “Thanks.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” Brendon laughs nervously, dusting the Pop Tart powder from his shirt. He looks up from his chest and smiles. “I’ll let you finish eating now. I need to go reorganize your cereal boxes.”
As Brendon turns and walks off towards the opposite end of the counter, swatting off any lingering crumbs, Ryan takes a thoughtful bite of his pastry.
Okay, so maybe he is kind of cute. Maybe.
----
Ryan is stirred from sleep by the dim lamp light glowing from the nightstand beside his bed and the hushed repetition of his name into his ear. He pulls his eyes open slightly, noting the soft orange glow of his room and then a tiny face is staring back at him, eyes wide and scared.
“Ryan, wake u-”
He’s scrambling up his headboard before he can even comprehend what’s being said and just like the first night he saw Brendon under his table, the back of his head throbs in protest after being slammed against the oak behind him. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry, Ryan. I’m so sorry,” Brendon winces, crawling over the mountains of wrinkled sheets piled between him and Ryan now. “I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m sorry. I -”
“God,” Ryan groans, rubbing the back of his head gently, voice gravelly and dry.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you like that,” Brendon rushes, finally coming to stand at Ryan’s side. Brendon he says, “I just didn’t know any other way to wake you so -”
“So you crawl up into my bed and get two inches away from my face?” Ryan bites. Brendon looks pointedly at his hands, not at Ryan and most certainly not at that exposed flesh of Ryan’s hip an arms length from him. Ryan notices the tenseness in Brendon’s shoulders, the way his entire little frame seems to be shaking and the nervous way Brendon flicks his eyes up to Ryan every other second. “What are you -? How did you even get in here anyway?” Ryan asks, suddenly confused and angry and fuck, his head hurts.
“I- I crawled under the door,” Brendon says carefully, wringing his hands. Ryan’s scowl deepens and when he opens his mouth to protest, Brendon rushes to Ryan’s hip, grabs two tiny fistfuls of Ryan’s shirt and cries, “But I had to do something or it was going to eat me, Ryan!”
If it’s possible, Ryan’s scowl gets even harder.
Wait. “What?”
“There’s a - uh. There’s a - a big… thing in the kitchen,” Brendon whispers, pulling the hem of Ryan’s shirt over his mouth, capping off any further words like speaking of the thing might bring it into Ryan’s room.
“And it’s trying to eat you?” Ryan deadpans.
Through huge eyes brimmed with fear, Brendon pulls the cotton of Ryan’s shirt from his face and nods, “Yeah.”
Ryan rolls his eyes and says, “And what does this ‘thing’ look like, hm?”
“It’s big and black and it had all these hairy legs and these really ugly beady eyes and it was making this really scary hissing sound and -” Brendon pauses to take a breath after his dramatic build up. “Ryan, it crawled into my bed and tried to eat me!” Brendon squeaks, burying his face in Ryan’s hip.
“…So there’s a cockroach in your bed?”
Brendon nods, face still planted in Ryan’s shirt.
“…And what exactly do you want me to do about this?”
Brendon raises his head carefully, eyes still wide but this time they’re pitifully hopeful. “Kill it?” he says, and it sounds like a desperate suggestion.
With a resigned sigh, Ryan waves at Brendon to move and he scuttles away to the edge of the bed closest to the nightstand so that Ryan can get out from under the sheets without knocking him off. Ryan’s back cracks and he groans, biting his lip.
“Um. Ryan?”
Ryan turns and sees Brendon toeing his sheets, looking bashful. “What?”
Brendon ducks his head a little and holds out his arms. “Can you maybe… carry me? It’s kind of a long walk for me and. It’s dark. I don’t want it to get me.”
Ryan is torn between forcing Brendon to travel all that way to the kitchen in the dark or fulfilling Brendon’s request. He decides the latter is easiest and reaches out for Brendon to crawl onto his hand. Brendon is lightweight, but there’s a certain heaviness surrounding the realization that this is the first time Ryan has held Brendon in his palm.
“Thank you,” Brendon says softly, shyly, and Ryan clears his throat.
“So where is this roach?”
Brendon sits up a little straighter, a little braver, safer in Ryan’s hand and he points in the direction of the kitchen. Ryan follows the line of his finger and notices Brendon seems even tinier than before, sitting stoically in the cup of Ryan’s hand, his legs outstretched and spread across the joints in Ryan’s fingers. Brendon’s legs are only as long as Ryan’s pinky, which, although Ryan does have abnormally long fingers, still only puts Brendon at standing about four or five inches tall. Ryan had originally guesstimated four, but that had been when Brendon was under his kitchen table, doing a lot of cowering so yeah, he’s probably five.
They make it to the kitchen and Brendon stage whispers, “Did you bring anything to kill it with?”
“There’s a flyswatter on the top of the fridge,” Ryan replies in a normal tone. Brendon nods determinedly and Ryan sets him on the highest ledge of the counter, above Brendon’s shoe box and turns on the light.
“Are you sure it can’t get me up here?” Brendon asks, paranoid as he steps to the ledge and looks down the three inch drop. “He climbed up the walls of my box so won’t he be able to climb up here?”
“Brendon, you’ll be fine,” Ryan sighs, going to fetch the flyswatter.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You promise you won’t let him get me?”
“I promise that I won’t let him get you,” Ryan sighs, searching the top of the fridge with a blind hand. He pulls back an empty, dusty palm and makes a face at how unclean the top of his fridge is. He stands up on his tiptoes to peer over the edge and finds that his flyswatter isn’t up there. He glances into the crack between the fridge and wall and squints into the darkness but with no avail. Straightening up, he scratches his head and ponders where on earth he could have put it when suddenly -
“Ryan!”
Ryan whips around to see Brendon leaping off the ledge he’d been placed on, onto the much wider countertop below, scrambling as he hits the solid surface and looking over his shoulder, terrified of the large black bug scurrying after him. Brendon wasn’t lying: the roach is fucking huge.
“Ryan, help! Help, he’s going to eat me!” Brendon shrieks, running the length of Ryan’s counter with the bug trailing close behind. For a moment, Ryan stands helpless and watches as Brendon keeps checking over his shoulder to see how the bug is gaining on him. And then Brendon screams again - “Ryan, please! Come kill it, please!” - and Ryan is kicked back into reality.
He tears his eyes away from the scene playing out on his counter and scans his entire kitchen for something to crush the bug with. Plates are a no go because, ew. And he doesn’t read the newspaper religiously so there aren’t any lying around, and the only thing his mind registers are his Italian leather shoes he toed off at the front door when he came home earlier that evening.
But they’re Italian, he reminds himself, and brutally murdering a cockroach with the soles of his expensive shoes does not seem very rational and -
“No! Leave me alone you big, ugly bug! Ryan, do something! He’s trying to eat me!”
Right. Okay, so the shoes it is.
Rushing to the front door, Ryan fumbles with one of his shoes before darting back into the kitchen just as Brendon is running in front of the sink again, heading back towards his bed. He’s staring over his shoulder and running as fast as his little legs can carry him, but as he rounds the far edge of his shoebox, he trips, stumbling and gaining the momentum to fall. His eyes squeeze closed tight and he braces himself for the impact of Ryan’s counter and his otherwise inevitable demise when the roach gets a hold of him.
But Ryan is there just in the nick of time, scooping him up with one hand at the same time his other brings his shoe down hard on the counter, crushing the bug.
And Brendon’s shoebox.
In his palm, Brendon is shaking so much Ryan feels like he’s holding a swarm of bumblebees. When Ryan tries to open his loosely clenched fist, Brendon tugs his fingers back down around him, his frightened eyes visible through the slits in Ryan’s fingers.
“Hey, Brendon,” Ryan says and it’s softer than he expected it to be. “Hey, it’s gone now. It’s okay.”
Ryan tries to pull his fingers open again and Brendon protests with a quick tug and a squeak, “Don’t.”
“Brendon, he can’t get you,” Ryan says. “I killed it.” As an afterthought he adds, “Along with your shoebox.”
“Ryan, it was so big! And it had a hold of my shirt and I thought I was going to die!” Brendon wails and Ryan’s face falls a little before he turns to survey the damage done to the shoebox. It’s smashed nearly flat and Brendon’s small bed of Kleenex inside is crumpled beneath the damage done to the walls. It’s not irreparable but there is also a fair share of bug guts decorating the side and well - Ryan can’t be that heartless and make Brendon still sleep there.
So he takes the shoebox to the trash and dumps it, doubles back to scrape up the remnants of the cockroach and clean his counter and he makes it all the way to the living room before Brendon pokes his head through Ryan’s first and middle finger with curious eyes and says softly, “What are you doing?”
“Going back to bed,” Ryan says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“But- what about me?” Brendon asks cautiously.
“You are too.”
Brendon takes a confused moment to look around when they get back into Ryan’s bedroom. Ryan gets a single knee pressed into the bed before Brendon questions, “Where do I sleep?”
Ryan sets Brendon down carefully onto the bed and pulls open the top drawer, “In here.”
Brendon furrows his brow. “With you?”
“Well, I won’t be sleeping in here per say,” Ryan chuckles softly, rearranging things inside and taking out books, boxes and bottles - he keeps a lot of B’s in his top drawer and now he’s making room for a more important B. “But you will.”
Stepping to the edge of the bed, Brendon peers over into the now empty drawer and says, “You mean I don’t have to sleep in the kitchen anymore?”
Ryan travels to his larger set of drawers across the room and returns with two pairs of argyle dress socks. “Nope. You can sleep in here with me.” A lilt of a smile flickers across Brendon’s face and Ryan adds, “Nothing’s going to get you in here,” and it sounds more like a promise than a statement of fact.
Brendon just blushes and ducks his head as Ryan lays one pair of the socks flat along the inside of the drawer and proceeds to roll up one from the other pair. When he’s pleased with his handy work, he passes the leftover sock to Brendon and places him in the drawer.
“Um. I made you a pallet.”
“A sock pallet!” Brendon beams, observing the makeshift bed before him. “And it’s argyle!”
“Yeah,” Ryan says a little breathless with a laugh. “Yeah, it’s- it’s argyle.”
“Thank you so much, Ryan!” Brendon cheers, squatting down to pet the soft fabric of Ryan’s socks.
“They’re clean, just so you know,” Ryan says, rubbing the back of his neck. “My socks, that is.”
Brendon just smiles up at him, eyes bright and teeth bared so wide his eyes crinkle around the corners. Then Brendon notices just how tight he’s gripping the other sock in his hand and he says, “Do I sleep in this too? Like a pocket?”
“Or like, a sleeping bag, yes,” Ryan answers and tries not to acknowledge how his hands twitched when Brendon stepped into it and almost fell over in his haste. Instead he forces himself not to smile at Brendon’s surprised giggle and says, “Yeah, so.”
Brendon drops down onto his pallet and tucks into Ryan’s fuzzy argyle sock quite comfortably. Closing his eyes he sighs, “Mmm, cozy.” Ryan nods and- right. Bedtime.
He shifts on his bed, slipping his legs back under the sheets that have gone cold and stretches over to turn off the lamp above Brendon.
As he closes his eyes, he hears the small, labored breathing of the tiny person in his drawer and knows that Brendon has already fallen asleep.
----
The next few days are interesting.
Brendon still wakes up with the sun and Ryan still wakes with the laziness of too much sleep. Brendon leaves Ryan Pop Tarts and Ryan eats them sloppily around conversations he's started having with Brendon - conversations that he's even initiated - while Brendon makes trips back and forth to the sink with Ryan’s mess. They talk about Ryan’s house and Ryan says he picked it because Spencer said to. They talk about Brendon’s home in Chicago and Brendon says he didn’t really have one.
When Spencer calls, Ryan shrugs and says, “No, I mean, he’s okay. He’s not as big of a pain as I thought he’d be,” and Brendon smiles to himself as he rinses out Ryan’s milk glass. When there’s a Mythbuster’s marathon on Discovery Channel, Ryan offers Brendon the armrest. When Brendon says he’s feeling hungry, Ryan orders pizza and Brendon lets him cut up his food into sizeable squares. When Brendon can’t quite move his Queen to check Ryan’s King, Ryan helps Brendon lift it and carry it all the way across the Chess board to clench his victory. When Brendon is claimed by the gap in Ryan’s couch cushions, Ryan is tugging him out and fussing over Brendon being more careful.
When Brendon asks about Ryan’s piano, Ryan says, “Let’s play.”
And they do. Ryan first, as Brendon watches from the fall board and kicks the underside of it with his heels as Ryan plays ‘You Are My Sunshine’ at a tempo that Brendon can memorize by sight, little bobs of his head as he drives each key into his memory. Brendon hums the words beneath his breath and when Ryan asks if he wants to try, Brendon blushes, holds up his hands and says, “I wish I could.”
“You don’t have to play with your fingers, Brendon,” Ryan says and lifts Brendon from his seat before setting him down on the keys of the piano, a crash of sound below Brendon’s feet. Brendon’s face is a confused grin that explodes across his face when Ryan says, “Go on, play.”
For a moment, Brendon is still hesitant, not quite sure which keys to step on, still not quite sure if he’s heard Ryan correctly. But then he presses the toes of one foot into a the white key before him and giggles when noise erupts, a nice light sound and Ryan simply cannot resist the smile that infects his face. Brendon presses it again and again and then puts all of his weight on it before dropping it back onto the key next to it and he’s bouncing between the two notes like it’s the most entertaining thing in the world. (Currently, Ryan would have to say he agrees.)
Ryan lets Brendon hop around, leap across two keys to hear a different note in his progression as he high steps down the scale and Brendon honestly cannot stop giggling and Ryan is forced to calm him down before he starts doing the same.
He says, “Do you remember the right keys?” and Brendon nods, his bottom lip clenched between his teeth as he gently toes the key beneath him, making the piano purr softly. “Okay,” Ryan says. “I’ll play these notes right here -” He places his long fingers over said keys. “- and you play the rest, yeah?”
“Gotcha,” Brendon salutes and makes one last run to the end of the piano for good measure. Ryan presses two fingers harshly into the darkest, most sinister sounding chord and Brendon skitters to a halt on the sharpest G. Ryan smiles at him and laughs as Brendon exaggerates a pout and trails back to where Ryan has positioned his hands.
“Ready?” Ryan asks and Brendon jumps onto the first note.
----
Ryan wakes up to a loud roll of thunder and he can’t find Brendon.
It’s normal for Brendon to not be in his drawer after sunrise, and it’s normal for something uncomfortable to rise in Ryan’s stomach when he rolls over and sees that there isn’t anything occupying his favorite pair of argyle socks. What isn’t normal is Brendon to not being in the kitchen and for it to be torrential outside.
Ryan’s gut instinct is to check the back of the drawer, see if the thunder scared Brendon to the farthest corner where he might curl up and tremble. His second instinct is to double back to the kitchen and check every one of the drawers in there. His third instinct is to panic.
He calls Brendon’s name more times than he can count, searching every room, every corner, every nook and fucking cranny for Brendon’s small shadow and after thirty minutes of shouting for him, Ryan’s voice is cracking and he’s shaking a little. He calls Spencer, borderline hysterical, and Spencer makes him swallow, breathe, sit down and wait. Spencer and Jon arrive at Ryan’s front door quicker than they had the night Ryan first called Spencer about Brendon.
They tear the house apart - namely Ryan, but “It’s my fucking house, Spencer. And don’t tell me to calm down!” - they throw the cushions off the couch, pull the dishes out of the cabinets, take the books off the shelves. Ryan even goes so far as to push all of it into the center of the living room so that he can re-comb every square inch of the house that he’s ransacked.
Brendon isn’t anywhere to be found.
“Look Ryan,” Spencer says and even though his tone is that of Calm down before I have to kill you, Ryan knows that look in Spencer’s eyes - it’s the same look he got when he and Ryan were just two little bastards lighting electrical boxes on fire in their neighborhood and hiding in Spencer’s treehouse away from the cops. Spencer’s learned to be the rational one, for Ryan’s sake, but sometimes his eyes betray him. “I’m-” Spencer pauses when Jon forces Ryan down on the couch. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably out playing with the mice or something. You know how he is about those things,” Spencer says, trying to sway Ryan into believing him.
Ryan shakes his head and goes to argue, but Jon cuts him off with a clap on the shoulder and butts in, “Or maybe he just fell asleep somewhere and can’t hear us. You said yourself he likes to look around the house so maybe he just got tired and -”
“No, no, no! You’re wrong! Both of you. He’s not with the mice and he’s not sleeping. He wouldn’t - he would have told me if he -” Ryan stops and runs his fingers through his hair and takes a deep breath. “He’s not here.”
“Where do you think he could b-?”
“I don’t know, Jon!” Ryan explodes and Jon and Spencer both flinch. “Fuck, I don’t know,” Ryan says softer, impatience fizzling down until he’s this anxiety ridden bundle of nerves wound so tight he’s trembling.
Outside, lightning sends a strobelight effect through the blinds for a split second and a few moments later the loud rumble of thunder growls and crashes against the house, windows rattling. Jon and Spencer watch as Ryan has an internal debate with himself, forehead creased with concern and he’s worrying his bottom lip. There’s silence in the house for a few minutes, nothing but the slap of the rain on the house and finally Spencer says, “Ryan, I think -”
“We’re searching the house again,” Ryan says defiantly, standing up with conviction.
“What? But you just said he wasn’t h-”
“We’re searching the house again,” Ryan interrupts and Spencer shivers at the sound of determination heavy on Ryan’s tongue. Ryan makes his way to the kitchen and opens up each drawer all over again and Spencer doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing he’ll find in those drawers is the silverware Brendon cleaned a few days prior and a whole lot of disappointment.
Jon and Spencer sigh and follow Ryan into the kitchen.
Part Two
Author: selectivelyurie
Beta: the_randomist, my_obsession_xx, alphabetatoast (and a few others)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon
POV: Third
Summary: And there’s no way that Skittle is currently hoisted above the head of a tiny little brown-haired man who is pressing the mouse away with his foot and shrieking in frantic whispers... No, it’s just not possible. Except it is.
Disclaimer: I really wish Brendon Urie was five inches tall. Sadly, he is not.
Author Notes: This started out as something completely indulgent - and it still is - but after I sent the first part to behindthec, it became obvious I was writing for both of us. Colin, bb, this is for you ♥ (And thanks to the_randomist for helping me with the title.)
When they pick Jon up at the airport, Spencer has one of those really ridiculous movie moments where his smile is almost sickeningly wide and his eyes are practically sparkling. It takes him four seconds to cross the terminal to Jon and when he all but tackles him with a hug, Jon let’s out a groan threaded with laughter and gratitude and tucks his face into Spencer’s neck. Ryan lets them have their moment but can’t fight off the grin stirred by seeing Spencer smile that bright; it gets him every time.
Spencer allows Ryan rights to an easy Jon Walker hug for a few moments and Ryan lets himself be tugged forward into Jon’s arms.
“I brought you bastards something,” is the first thing Jon says and Spencer punches him in the arm.
It’s not unlike Jon to come from Chicago bearing gifts - books, movies, clothes (scarves, if Ryan’s lucky), even a few extra bags of his favorite kind of coffee “because everything tastes better in Chicago” - but when he drops down to his knee and pulls out two boxes from his small rolling suitcase, Ryan is surprised to see it’s more than just commodities.
“Here,” Jon says and thrusts a box eagerly at Spencer. It’s wrapped. In birthday wrapping paper, no less, and Spencer’s birthday isn’t for another four months. Jon shrugs, “Just be thankful it wasn’t that day’s newspaper.”
Spencer laughs and tears into it as Jon hands Ryan a slightly smaller box, which, oddly enough, is wrapped in newspaper. Ryan looks from the box to Jon, back to the box and then laughs, “What the fuck, Jon?” and turns the box over in his hand.
“It’s high time you learned to stop being so high maintenance, Ross. Just shut up and open it.” The grin on Jon’s face is playful and goodhearted and Ryan’s just got one finger beneath the clear scotch tape before Spencer explodes with laughter, wrapping paper crinkling as he tucks the garbage beneath his arm.
“Jon, oh my god. I cannot -” Spencer says around his giggles. He stares at his brand new electric razor and all out beams up at Jon.
“I’m tired of you using mine every time I come visit, you ass,” Jon says, peeling a stray piece of tape off the side the box with an impish smile. Spencer says, “Thank you, Jon. Really,” and Jon looks at Ryan who is still standing with a newspaper cube and a small smile. “Well, open it,” Jon urges, waving his hands at Ryan.
He takes two good tears at the paper and is met with the dulled, slightly scratchy surface of a brown wooden box.
“Isn’t it cool?” Jon asks as Ryan takes the paper completely off and holds the small box in the palm of his hand. It’s about seven inches long and four inches wide and the top of the lid is engraved with weaving vines and wrapping branches of trees reaching out to a few very worn flowers in the center. There are a few flecks of gold visible through the almost rusted metal lining the rim of the lid and the bottom of the box and Ryan runs his fingers over it carefully.
“Jon,” Ryan says, starting out carefully so as not to offend Jon. It’s a beautiful box, despite it’s weathering, but seriously, “What is it?”
“It’s a music box,” Jon says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Then he frowns a little and scratches the back of his neck. “At least, I think it’s a music box. There’s a little hole in the back where I think a winder used to be, and I can’t get it open. But it looks cool, right? All old and shit?”
“Where did you get it?” Ryan asks curiously because really, the box is beautiful and it doesn’t have to be in pristine condition for Ryan to admire it or wonder where it came from.
Jon chuckles and says, “I don’t really remember. Some old antique place down the block from my house. The guy that sold it to me said it had only been in the shop for a few weeks; said some guy from the jazz club brought it in for cash. I bought myself an old Polaroid there,” he says and digs an ancient looking camera out of a small bag inside his suitcase. “S’pretty cool, I thought.”
Ryan smoothes over the box another time, fingers tripping over the small clasp at the front that seems to be sealing the box shut. It doesn’t look that old, just weathered and dulled. Still, it’s beautiful and Jon’s gesture still stands as thoughtful.
“Thanks, Jon,” Ryan says, tearing his eyes off his gift. “It’s really nice.”
“Sorry it doesn’t like, open. Or, um. Work. But I figured you could decorate with it, or- something. I don’t know, Ross. Use your domestic imagination and find a use for it,” Jon smirks and Ryan knows it’s a light jab at the current obsession he has with having a fixture - or a bowl or a picture frame or a lamp - on every available surface of his house, but he smiles.
“Will do,” Ryan says, tucking the box under his arm carefully. He throws a side glance at Spencer who hasn’t stopped looking at Jon since he arrived because Jon is here and it’s not every day that Spencer can just look at him, so. Ryan drums his fingers along the top of the box and says, “Let’s go get your luggage, Santa Clause. We have an hour to make our dinner reservations and I’ll have your head if you cause me to miss out on Thai food.”
Jon laughs, crisp and answering and he and Spencer let Ryan lead the way to baggage claim.
Jon tells them over dinner that he’s planning on staying for two weeks, if they’ll have him. Spencer throws a piece of stir fry at him and says, “Now you’re staying three for doubting our hospitality, douche.” Jon’s smile is radiant.
Ryan invites Jon and Spencer over for a few beers and Jon watches with amusement as Ryan tries hide the shade of red tainting his cheeks as he turns circles in his living room for a place to put his gift (seriously, every available surface). Jon tells him to stop worrying and start drinking in so many words and forces Ryan to put the box on the counter for the time being.
They fish three beers out of Ryan’s fridge and talk about nothing and everything until Ryan’s clean out of alcohol and it’s two in the morning. Jon says, “Hey Spen-” and Spencer says, “Of course,” and they both give Ryan hugs before leaving Ryan with the lingering warmth of his couch.
----
On Thursday, Jon says, “Dude, when did you organize your pantry? It looks good.” And, no. That’s weird because Ryan doesn’t know the meaning of the word organize.
Ryan meets Jon’s impressed gaze at the pantry door and sees his boxed foods are not only pulled to the very front and into view, but also descending in order from tallest to smallest, almost like a staircase. It actually does look really good - and fuck, where have those oatmeal cream pies been? - but still. It’s weird because Ryan never touches his pantry unless it’s to rifle through it and after that, it stays messy. So for things to be in an actual row, aligned and attractive, Ryan questions his sanity, because he doesn’t remember being suddenly concerned with the placement of his food.
An “uh, thanks” is all Ryan can manage.
Jon steals a Twinkie out of the smallest box on the right and pushes the pantry door closed with his foot with a shrug.
A few days later, Ryan sees a mouse run across his kitchen floor when he’s coming in from work and when he checks to see if his mousetraps are still armed, he’s surprised to find that the only thing snapped by the small metal bar is a toothpick and the small pinch of cheese that once sat at the trigger is now gone.
Picking it up to inspect it, the bits of toothpick fall freely from either side of the trap and Ryan’s only explanation is that his house is overrun with rodents smarter than he is. The thought is both depressing and scary.
But apart from the genius mice that are, by evidence he just observed, apparently still alive in his house, Ryan is still a bit creeped out over how organized his pantry has stayed. Every box is in perfect alignment with the edge of the shelves and yesterday, just to make sure he wasn’t really losing it, Ryan pushed his box of Cheerios to the back and turned his Pop Tart box on its side before heading over to Spencer’s for a jam session with Jon. Upon opening the pantry door, Ryan noticed that everything was OCD perfect again and the mousetraps he’d spent most of the afternoon re-rigging had snapped shut, empty.
Ryan refuses to harbor the possibility that he could be dealing with mice that are not only smart and organized, but quite possibly sing and hem dresses too; so he opts for finally admitting his house is haunted and tries not to acknowledge how his counters have started to gleam.
----
Ryan wakes up in the middle of the night with a dry throat and parched tongue. He rolls over to check the alarm clock and groans as he gets out of bed, 3AM mocking him in glowing red digits. Shuffling over his carpet in socks that are stretched from wear, he yawns and heads toward the kitchen.
There’s a dim glow from the light on the ice and water dispenser on the front of his fridge and he’s like a moth to the flame, only venturing from his path to bypass the table in the middle of the floor and to grab a cup from the cabinet.
He fills his glass and takes three long gulps, the moonlight streaming in through the small window above the sink turning the water crystal in the darkness. With a refreshed sigh, Ryan turns to make his trek back to his room and he steps on something that crinkles under his weight.
“What the -” Ryan lifts his foot and squints through the dark, allowing the glow of the moon to illuminate his sight and his eyes focus on the vague outline of a bag of - “Skittles?” Ryan asks no one in particular. Setting his empty glass on the edge of the counter, he bends down to pick up the inconveniently placed candy, confusion racking his thoughts. What is even more strange, is that as he takes up the package, a few stray candies escape an apparent opening and they crackle as they hit his linoleum, rolling and bouncing across the floor. He curses once but stops short when he hears the distinct sound of tiny feet scraping along after the displaced food and he growls in irritation.
“Alright, you little bastards,” Ryan says angrily, standing up quickly to turn on the light and finally catch sight of these smart rats. The light is too bright when he flicks up the switch on the wall and he squints against his blindingly white (seriously, he will never understand how everything is staying so clean) tile, but when the blurriness in his eyes is blinked away, he sees a small mouse hurdling after a green Skittle rolling under the table.
Ryan quickly drops onto his hands and knees, only narrowly claiming his fly-swatter, and he takes a moment to grow even angrier because there’s another mouse down there and he the thought of one alone was disgusting enough. But he’s still partially blind because his floor is channeling the sun currently and there is no possible way that there is a second mouse squeaking and vying for the possession of a blue Skittle. And there’s no way that Skittle is currently hoisted above the head of a tiny little brown-haired man who is pressing the mouse away with his foot and shrieking in frantic whispers, “No, no, no! Be quiet, he’ll hear us!”
No, it’s just not possible.
Except it is, because Ryan’s shadow washes over them and the little creature gasps in fright and freezes while the mouse, the very much alive and real mouse, snatches the Skittle from ground and scampers off and Ryan is staring into a little face filled with worlds of fear.
And, okay, maybe Ryan shouldn’t have screamed like he did because it was a bit dramatic, but he is totally justified in murdering the back of his head on the underside of his table because the initial reaction to witnessing something terrifyingly abnormal is to run. Well, at least that’s Ryan’s initial reaction.
He scrambles backward cursing and seeing stars in dizzying patterns and for a few moments he allows himself to be angry that he actually believed there was a little person under his table and in turn gave himself a concussion from shock. But then the little thing is bounding over each tile on the ground in a total of three steps and shouting things at Ryan and in a move of pure instinct, Ryan reaches up to claim his empty water glass and has the little creature trapped beneath it.
The clink of the glass on the floor brings about a very strange silence. Ryan realizes how quiet his air conditioning is, how soft the motor in his refrigerator is, and how loud his heart is beating. The thing in the glass looks helpless and sad and scared and that’s exactly how Ryan wants it: trapped. It’s hitting the inside of the glass with small little fists and its lips are moving in wide stretches, as if it were shouting but all Ryan can hear is the soft little thunk of its hand meeting the wall of glass. It’s disturbing, seeing that a person - if that’s what it is at all; it looks like a person, but Ryan is not above believing it’s a gremlin - can fit inside a drinking glass and try as it might, the creature - no, it’s definitely a gremlin - simply cannot knock the heavy glass cage over to escape.
Ryan breathes out a “I’m out of my fucking mind,” and is dodging the mice in his floor, still parading after Skittles, and reaches the phone in record time.
----
“Ryan, what the fuck do y-?”
“Spencer, there is a four inch person under my kitchen table.”
“…”
“I trapped him in a glass and he won’t stop looking at me.”
“We’ll be right there.”
----
Were Ryan not atop the counter, fly swatter in hand, due to his irrational fear that the creature trapped beneath his table might escape, he probably would have laughed at Spencer’s reaction. It went something like, “What the fuck?” before he was joining Ryan on the higher (safer) level of the kitchen. He had said, “Shit, you weren’t lying,” and Ryan had said, “It’s been staring at me since I caught it.”
Now, they perch in silence on the edge of Ryan’s countertop and Spencer glances from the glass to Ryan and then back to the glass before he says, “Hey, um. It’s like, terrifying as fuck and all, but. Do you think we should maybe turn the cup over? So that he can breathe?”
“It, Spencer. It,” Ryan corrects. “And I’m not getting near that thing so if you want to turn it over and let it eat your face off, you go right ahead.”
“Okay, Ryan. I know that we’ve established that this is in no way normal - as a matter of fact, a part of me is convinced that I’m really, really high right now - but from what I can see, he -”
“It.”
“- doesn’t look like he’s going to hurt anyone.” Spencer makes a pointed glance at the It in question and raises his eyebrows at Ryan.
Inside the cup, the tiny person is pressed up against the glass, eyes wide and pleading and he’s waving his little hands in this pitiful, hopeful fashion and there seems to be a pout on it’s lips that rivals any innocent child Ryan has ever seen.
“Eat. Your face. Off,” Ryan says with emphasis and Spencer rolls his eyes.
“Fine, I’ll do it. Gimme that,” Spencer huffs and snatches the fly swatter from Ryan. Carefully, Spencer bends down to the glass and once he’s eye level with the creature inside, Ryan makes a threat from above:
“If you let that thing out, I’ll kill you.”
Spencer rolls his eyes again and when he focuses his attention back on the cup, he notices the creature inside is giggling, eyes crinkled and hand over its mouth, tickled by their argument. Spencer frowns in disapproval - he does not approve of the impossibility of this entire situation - and the creature’s laughter stops abruptly before it looks down at it’s feet which, Spencer notices, are tucked into a pair of black Converse. This thing may be the creepiest thing Spencer has ever witnessed, but at least it’s creepy with style.
Sliding the plastic square of the swatter across the floor, Spencer wraps his fingers around the glass and lifts up a single edge, allowing enough room to slide the fly swatter beneath. To his surprise, the creature inside steps to the opposite side of the glass and when the encroaching swatter reaches his planted feet, he hops up on to the plastic with a smile.
Spencer says, “Well, that was easy.”
“Did it try to get out? Did it bite you? Spencer, where the hell is Jon?” Ryan asks, paranoid as he tries to peek over Spencer’s shoulder when he stands up with the cup in his hand. Spencer turns the glass over right side up and bites his lip as the creature inside tumbles and twists, bumping its head and elbows and knees against the hard surface surrounding him. “Spencer, you’re supposed to be the heartless one. Now, stop fawning over that thing and answer my question. Where is Jon? I thought he came with you.”
Spencer removes the fly swatter from the top of the glass and turns to Ryan, “He did, but, uh. I kind of made him drop me off here. So he could run to the drugstore. To get some NyQuil. For you. Because um. I thought you were just on one of your insomniac spells when you called. So. Yeah. He’ll be back.”
If Ryan’s eye twitches, Spencer pretends not to see it.
“You mean you didn’t believe me?” Ryan accuses, dropping off the counter to face Spencer eye level.
“You called me at three in the morning screaming that you had a four inch man under your kitchen table, Ryan,” Spencer counters. “What was I supposed to -?”
“But I do!”
“Yes, I’m very well aware of this now.”
“And you sent Jon to get me medication?” Ryan asks in disbelief.
“Ryan, I don’t know if you recall the time you called me at two AM last summer and told me you and the Boogieman were having a slumber party and would I like to join, but after that, I’ve started taking your insomnia relatively seriously so -”
“Okay, so I admit the Boogieman thing was a little ridiculous. But that doesn’t change the fact that there really is a four inch little… thing in my kitchen and you can’t stop ogling at it long enough to think that maybe I -”
Ryan stops himself short at the sight just over Spencer’s shoulder. Within the confines of the drinking glass, the little creature, who is now standing again, is breathing heavily on the spotless walls surrounding him and with itty bitty fingers, is tracing smiley faces and stars into the fog his breath leaves on the glass. He looks content for the time being, creating little pictures on the side of his prison, but it’s bordering on precious - the way Ryan spots a tiny, pink tongue sticking out in concentration - and no, Ryan thinks, this is horrifying and nothing more.
In one swift movement, Ryan reaches over and thumps the side of the glass rather hard, sending it wobbling a little and the small person inside braces itself with flat palms against the walls. Ryan says, “Don’t smudge my glass,” with little sympathy and scowls when a tiny head peeks up over the evaporating remnants of a crazy-eyed smiley face.
Spencer gives him a smack on the back of the head and Ryan cries out, “Jesus, Spencer. What was that for?”
And Spencer says, “For being a dick.”
Ryan huffs and they wait in silence for Jon to arrive.
----
It’s a miracle Jon has the patience of a saint because the minute he steps over the threshold into Ryan’s house he’s bombarded with questions, demands and pleas, all of which are lost in a shouted slur that Jon only manages to catch his name in.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jon says carefully, throwing his hands up to stop the rambling nonsense spewing from both Ryan and Spencer’s mouth. “Both of you chill out and stop yelling; you’re probably scaring him.”
“What?!”
“You know about that thing?!”
Jon looks at Spencer and shrugs, “You said Ryan was freaking out over a little man under his kitchen table.”
“Yes, but how did you know that Ryan wasn’t just on an insomnia trip?” Spencer demands.
Again, Jon shrugs, “They’re common in Chicago, so it’s not entirely impossible.”
Spencer pales and gives a shocked, “What?”
Ryan, on the other hand, all out shrieks, “You mean you brought that little gremlin to Vegas - to my house - and didn’t tell me?!”
Jon Walker, the unfazed soul that he is, laughs at Ryan’s hysteric rage and says, “I didn’t know about him, okay? And dude, stop screaming, you’re hurting his ears.” Jon nods to the glass on the table and Spencer and Ryan turn to see the little person inside cupping his ears in pain, eyes squeezed shut.
Jon squeezes through the wall Ryan and Spencer have made and approaches the table. “God, I bet you smuggled him over in that damn music box,” Ryan groans loudly.
Perking up a bit, Jon raises an eyebrow. “You know, that’s probably what happened. It would explain a lot considering I found Tom in my camera bag.”
“There’s more?!”
“Calm down,” Jon dismisses with a wave of his hand. “I left him in Chicago. When I bought my camera in that store - the one I bought your music box in, Ryan - I got home and went to put it in the old leather camera bag the man had given me for free and there was Tom, sitting at the bottom.”
“You named it?” Spencer asks, bewildered.
“No, Spencer, I didn’t name him. He already had a name. Just like this little guy probably does,” Jon says and smiles, sweet and charming at the tiny person inside the cup only to see that his hands are no longer over his ears and he’s smiling so wide it could split his little face in two. He’s gesturing wildly at himself, eyes bright and hopeful and Jon chuckles a little, “Your name is Tom, too?” The little guy frowns and shakes his head but points to his temple and smiles again. “You know Tom?” Jon tries again and his face breaks into a wide grin when the little person inside nods frantically and claps, bouncing up and down a little.
Jon turns to Ryan and Spencer and both of them are staring at Jon in complete horror. Shaking his head, he turns back to the little person inside and asks, “Is it cool if I let you out?” Inside, the little person nods his head but keeps a wary eye on Ryan. Jon says, “I won’t let him hurt you,” and carefully turns the cup over on it’s side and watches as the tiny thing inside crawls out cautiously.
“Jon. Jon, what are you doing? Jon, did you let it out? Jon, I swear if you let that thing -”
“Relax, Ross. He’s harmless,” Jon soothes, placing his hand on the table so the little man can climb onto his hand. Jon assures a quiet, “It’s alright,” and watches as he steps up onto his palm before Jon throws “You’ve already scared him to death” over his shoulder.
When Ryan and Spencer see that Jon is holding the tiny person in his hand, they both cringe and back away towards the fridge. “Oh, c’mon guys, really? You’re scared of him? By the way, what is your name, little man?”
And in a surprisingly audible voice, the little person beams up at Jon and says, “I’m Brendon.”
Ryan doesn’t allow himself to think it’s unbearably cute.
“Hi, Brendon. I’m Jon,” Jon says and sticks out his right pointer finger. Brendon clasps it with two hands and shakes with a huge smile. “These are my friends, Spencer and Ryan. I’m sure you know who is who: Spencer is the one staring at me like I’m skinning a small child and Ryan is the one looking pissed off. They’re both a bit cranky this morning; not enough beauty sleep.”
Brendon snickers and waves goofily at them, “Hi, guys!”
The corner of Spencer’s mouth twitches upwards.
“So what are you doing here, little buddy?” Jon asks, crossing his right arm under the his elbow to better support his pose to keep Brendon at eye level. “Shouldn’t you be in Chicago?”
“Well, yeah,” Brendon begins and he seems nervous, what with the way he’s running his fingers through his hair and chuckling softly. “I mean, that doesn’t mean I should be here either because, well, I don’t mean to be here. But that’s not to say I don’t like it here because I do! Ryan has a beautiful house and I -”
“Easy now, Brendon,” Jon laughs and Brendon looks down at the lines in Jon’s palm. “I’m just wondering how you got here; I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“I know, I just -” Brendon pauses and looks up at Jon, worrying his lip. “I don’t want him to be mad at me.”
“Who? Ryan?” Jon asks. Brendon nods slowly, painfully adorable. “He’s not mad.”
“The fuck I am,” Ryan growls, stepping to Jon’s side and glaring down at Brendon. Brendon flinches at the volume of Ryan’s voice when Ryan shouts, “You come into my house, uninvited, and you fuck with my pantry and my mousetraps and my head and you -”
Brendon tries to make Ryan understand that he didn’t know, says, “I didn’t mean to make you mad. I tried to pick up after myself, I really did but the mice -”
“You are worse than the mice!” Ryan shouts and Brendon squeaks, curling Jon’s stubby fingers around his tiny little body, like a protective dome from Ryan’s anger. “At least when they use my things they don’t try to make me believe they never did!”
“Ryan, stop it!” Jon bites and Ryan deflates from his cloud of rage a little. “Look at what you’re doing to him,” Jon says and Ryan looks down to see Jon’s entire hand trembling; a glance at the other one proves that Brendon is the cause. Ryan straightens up.
Spencer comes over, places a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and Ryan clears his throat. “What Ryan is trying to say is that he was really confused and -”
“No, what Ryan is trying to say is that he doesn’t want that little- little- you in his house,” Ryan says, pointing to Brendon as he refers to himself in the third person. It makes him feel more superior, whatever.
Brendon ducks down into Jon’s fingers again, wrapping his hands around the crease in Jon’s knuckles and peeks out with wide, fearful eyes.
“Jon, if you like him so much, just take him back to Chicago where he belongs,” Ryan sighs heavily.
“I will - if he wants to - but you and Spencer insisted that I stay for three weeks and he has to have a place to stay until then.”
“Fine. He can stay at Spencer’s. Problem solved,” Ryan decides, crossing his arms.
“Can’t,” Spencer says. “I have dogs. They’d eat him.”
“Well, he’s not staying here,” Ryan sneers as Spencer steps forward to Jon. He says something softly to him and Jon shrugs and opens up his palm carefully. He mumbles something to Brendon and there’s a pause.
“I won’t hurt you,” Spencer says, holding out his hand. “I promise.” A second later, Brendon is stepping from Jon’s palm to Spencer’s palm and Spencer is cupping him delicately with both hands while Brendon plops down in the middle of Spencer’s palms, tucking his knees up to his chin..
“Oh, god. Not you too,” Ryan groans, rubbing his face in in frustration. “I can’t believe you’re letting his size dictate the fact that he’s not normal.”
“Ryan, stop being an asshole and give your new room mate a proper welcoming,” Spencer says, holding Brendon out just a little, displaying Brendon sitting in his hand, as if Ryan can’t already see.
“He’s not my room mate, stop saying that.”
“He’s staying with you, Ryan. He can’t stay with me and Spencer, so he’s staying with you. End of story,” Jon says.
“No, this is my house and I reserve the right to chose who stays and who goes and I don’t want him here so -”
From Spencer’s hold, Brendon stands and pipes up, “I promise I’ll stay out of the way. And I’ll help keep everything clean and I’ll tell the mice to stay out of your food. I won’t be any trouble I swear.”
Ryan voices a defiant, “No.”
“George Ryan Ross, as your best friend of seventeen years, I demand that you let Brendon live with you until Jon is able to take him back to Chicago. Further assholery will not be tolerated, do you understand?” Spencer finally says and Ryan was trying to avoid the bitchface but there it is, all authoritative and intimidating. There is no way he’s winning this argument now.
“Fine,” he snaps, hand curling hard around the edge of the table.
Brendon, tickled with the excitement of being able to stay, wraps his arms around Spencer’s finger, pressing the side of his wide grin into the bend in his thumb.
----
It shouldn’t bother him as much as it does, but Brendon really is a bit upset that Ryan won’t allow him to continue sleeping in the music box. He really doesn’t need to sleep in it, it’s just. Comfortable. And reminds him of home, everything that this empty shoebox and thin stack of Kleenex isn’t. Brendon isn’t going to complain though, even if the cotton balls Ryan allotted him to use as pillows scratch into his ear at night and tickle, even if he has trouble climbing over the thin cardboard walls of the box without tipping the entire thing over, even if Ryan is still making him sleep in the kitchen, Brendon isn’t going to complain. Because at least he has a place to stay, regardless of whether or not Ryan wants him there.
And that, his (un)welcoming, is apparent every day when Ryan gets up and comes into the kitchen for breakfast, passing through on his way to work. Brendon is always up just as the sun rises and the first morning of being a known guest in Ryan’s house, he had carried a Pop Tart out of the pantry and laid it on the edge of the counter, all nice and neat with a little note that read, “Good morning, Ryan!” and Ryan had completely ignored it, even Brendon’s small, scratchy handwriting that took so long to perfect because Ryan has those big, heavy, expensive pens, not those plastic pens that are easier to hold. Brendon likes those pens because they’re made for little people, their logo even says so.
Brendon tries, he really, really does, to get Ryan to talk to him, but Ryan just walks by like he doesn’t notice Brendon, paces in the living room with a notepad and one of those stupid heavy pens and writes down things Brendon won’t ever be able to see because Ryan leaves the notepad on the mantle piece and Brendon can only dream of ever climbing that high.
Everyday, Ryan makes sure Brendon knows he isn’t welcome and everyday Brendon tries harder to see that that changes.
On Monday, Brendon cleans Ryan’s counters. Ryan knows this because his counters are, well. Clean. And he knows he didn’t clean them. That, and when he comes into the kitchen for the first time that morning, Brendon meets him at the edge of the counter, Pop Tart ready, and smiling so bright when Ryan approaches, Ryan thinks it looks like it hurts. “I cleaned your counters, Ryan!” Brendon announces and Ryan just leaves through the garage for work without a word.
On Tuesday evening, Brendon ventures into the living room and stops in front of the couch, looking up at Ryan watching TV, the volume up so loud you’d think the gunshots were actually coming from outside the window. Brendon flinches at a particularly loud blast and tugs the ankle of Ryan’s pants. “All of your dishes are clean,” he says when Ryan looks down. Ryan blinks and looks back at the screen just as someone gets shot.
Wednesday and Thursday, Brendon makes efforts to speak to Ryan but with Ryan leaving the house in the morning and not returning until dark on both days, it’s difficult to speak to a blur. Ryan takes his notebook with him, stopping at the mantle before bypassing Brendon’s attempts at conversation and heads off in the car. Brendon hopes he’s taking the notebook to actually write in, not because he feels suspicious of Brendon reading it.
Friday morning Ryan drags himself into the kitchen and Brendon stifles a laugh at how furry Ryan’s head looks with his hair sticking up in various odd directions.
“What are you laughing at?” Ryan grumbles and Brendon’s smile grows even wider because Ryan is speaking to him and he’s actually nibbling on the Pop Tart Brendon laid out for him for the first time this week. His eyes are twinkling.
“Your hair looks funny,” Brendon giggles softly, hiding his smile behind his hands. “It’s cute.”
Ryan blinks twice and takes another bite of his Pop Tart, chewing softly. A few crumbs scatter across the counter and Brendon makes haste to see that they don’t dirty up his hard work too much. Ryan watches with a blank expression, eyes still a little sleep foggy, as Brendon gathers up the crumbs and carries them over to the edge of the sink before dropping them in. As he’s heading back for a fresh batch fallen from another of Ryan’s bites, Brendon smiles up at him and says, “I know you probably don’t care or anything, but you really do have a pretty house. It’s nice and roomy. Big. I know my size helps with that but I can imagine the space you have is nice, too.” Brendon bends down to scoop up the corner of crust that Ryan picks off and sets on the counter and he says, “I hope you don’t mind, but did a small tour of the house the other day, just to see what everything looked like.” He tosses the crumb into the sink and says, “I saw your music room; it’s beautiful - all of your guitars and your piano. You have a gorgeous piano.”
Ryan swallows his bite of food and quirks an eyebrow, “Thanks.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” Brendon laughs nervously, dusting the Pop Tart powder from his shirt. He looks up from his chest and smiles. “I’ll let you finish eating now. I need to go reorganize your cereal boxes.”
As Brendon turns and walks off towards the opposite end of the counter, swatting off any lingering crumbs, Ryan takes a thoughtful bite of his pastry.
Okay, so maybe he is kind of cute. Maybe.
----
Ryan is stirred from sleep by the dim lamp light glowing from the nightstand beside his bed and the hushed repetition of his name into his ear. He pulls his eyes open slightly, noting the soft orange glow of his room and then a tiny face is staring back at him, eyes wide and scared.
“Ryan, wake u-”
He’s scrambling up his headboard before he can even comprehend what’s being said and just like the first night he saw Brendon under his table, the back of his head throbs in protest after being slammed against the oak behind him. “Fuck.”
“I’m sorry, Ryan. I’m so sorry,” Brendon winces, crawling over the mountains of wrinkled sheets piled between him and Ryan now. “I didn’t mean to scare you, I’m sorry. I -”
“God,” Ryan groans, rubbing the back of his head gently, voice gravelly and dry.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you like that,” Brendon rushes, finally coming to stand at Ryan’s side. Brendon he says, “I just didn’t know any other way to wake you so -”
“So you crawl up into my bed and get two inches away from my face?” Ryan bites. Brendon looks pointedly at his hands, not at Ryan and most certainly not at that exposed flesh of Ryan’s hip an arms length from him. Ryan notices the tenseness in Brendon’s shoulders, the way his entire little frame seems to be shaking and the nervous way Brendon flicks his eyes up to Ryan every other second. “What are you -? How did you even get in here anyway?” Ryan asks, suddenly confused and angry and fuck, his head hurts.
“I- I crawled under the door,” Brendon says carefully, wringing his hands. Ryan’s scowl deepens and when he opens his mouth to protest, Brendon rushes to Ryan’s hip, grabs two tiny fistfuls of Ryan’s shirt and cries, “But I had to do something or it was going to eat me, Ryan!”
If it’s possible, Ryan’s scowl gets even harder.
Wait. “What?”
“There’s a - uh. There’s a - a big… thing in the kitchen,” Brendon whispers, pulling the hem of Ryan’s shirt over his mouth, capping off any further words like speaking of the thing might bring it into Ryan’s room.
“And it’s trying to eat you?” Ryan deadpans.
Through huge eyes brimmed with fear, Brendon pulls the cotton of Ryan’s shirt from his face and nods, “Yeah.”
Ryan rolls his eyes and says, “And what does this ‘thing’ look like, hm?”
“It’s big and black and it had all these hairy legs and these really ugly beady eyes and it was making this really scary hissing sound and -” Brendon pauses to take a breath after his dramatic build up. “Ryan, it crawled into my bed and tried to eat me!” Brendon squeaks, burying his face in Ryan’s hip.
“…So there’s a cockroach in your bed?”
Brendon nods, face still planted in Ryan’s shirt.
“…And what exactly do you want me to do about this?”
Brendon raises his head carefully, eyes still wide but this time they’re pitifully hopeful. “Kill it?” he says, and it sounds like a desperate suggestion.
With a resigned sigh, Ryan waves at Brendon to move and he scuttles away to the edge of the bed closest to the nightstand so that Ryan can get out from under the sheets without knocking him off. Ryan’s back cracks and he groans, biting his lip.
“Um. Ryan?”
Ryan turns and sees Brendon toeing his sheets, looking bashful. “What?”
Brendon ducks his head a little and holds out his arms. “Can you maybe… carry me? It’s kind of a long walk for me and. It’s dark. I don’t want it to get me.”
Ryan is torn between forcing Brendon to travel all that way to the kitchen in the dark or fulfilling Brendon’s request. He decides the latter is easiest and reaches out for Brendon to crawl onto his hand. Brendon is lightweight, but there’s a certain heaviness surrounding the realization that this is the first time Ryan has held Brendon in his palm.
“Thank you,” Brendon says softly, shyly, and Ryan clears his throat.
“So where is this roach?”
Brendon sits up a little straighter, a little braver, safer in Ryan’s hand and he points in the direction of the kitchen. Ryan follows the line of his finger and notices Brendon seems even tinier than before, sitting stoically in the cup of Ryan’s hand, his legs outstretched and spread across the joints in Ryan’s fingers. Brendon’s legs are only as long as Ryan’s pinky, which, although Ryan does have abnormally long fingers, still only puts Brendon at standing about four or five inches tall. Ryan had originally guesstimated four, but that had been when Brendon was under his kitchen table, doing a lot of cowering so yeah, he’s probably five.
They make it to the kitchen and Brendon stage whispers, “Did you bring anything to kill it with?”
“There’s a flyswatter on the top of the fridge,” Ryan replies in a normal tone. Brendon nods determinedly and Ryan sets him on the highest ledge of the counter, above Brendon’s shoe box and turns on the light.
“Are you sure it can’t get me up here?” Brendon asks, paranoid as he steps to the ledge and looks down the three inch drop. “He climbed up the walls of my box so won’t he be able to climb up here?”
“Brendon, you’ll be fine,” Ryan sighs, going to fetch the flyswatter.
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You promise you won’t let him get me?”
“I promise that I won’t let him get you,” Ryan sighs, searching the top of the fridge with a blind hand. He pulls back an empty, dusty palm and makes a face at how unclean the top of his fridge is. He stands up on his tiptoes to peer over the edge and finds that his flyswatter isn’t up there. He glances into the crack between the fridge and wall and squints into the darkness but with no avail. Straightening up, he scratches his head and ponders where on earth he could have put it when suddenly -
“Ryan!”
Ryan whips around to see Brendon leaping off the ledge he’d been placed on, onto the much wider countertop below, scrambling as he hits the solid surface and looking over his shoulder, terrified of the large black bug scurrying after him. Brendon wasn’t lying: the roach is fucking huge.
“Ryan, help! Help, he’s going to eat me!” Brendon shrieks, running the length of Ryan’s counter with the bug trailing close behind. For a moment, Ryan stands helpless and watches as Brendon keeps checking over his shoulder to see how the bug is gaining on him. And then Brendon screams again - “Ryan, please! Come kill it, please!” - and Ryan is kicked back into reality.
He tears his eyes away from the scene playing out on his counter and scans his entire kitchen for something to crush the bug with. Plates are a no go because, ew. And he doesn’t read the newspaper religiously so there aren’t any lying around, and the only thing his mind registers are his Italian leather shoes he toed off at the front door when he came home earlier that evening.
But they’re Italian, he reminds himself, and brutally murdering a cockroach with the soles of his expensive shoes does not seem very rational and -
“No! Leave me alone you big, ugly bug! Ryan, do something! He’s trying to eat me!”
Right. Okay, so the shoes it is.
Rushing to the front door, Ryan fumbles with one of his shoes before darting back into the kitchen just as Brendon is running in front of the sink again, heading back towards his bed. He’s staring over his shoulder and running as fast as his little legs can carry him, but as he rounds the far edge of his shoebox, he trips, stumbling and gaining the momentum to fall. His eyes squeeze closed tight and he braces himself for the impact of Ryan’s counter and his otherwise inevitable demise when the roach gets a hold of him.
But Ryan is there just in the nick of time, scooping him up with one hand at the same time his other brings his shoe down hard on the counter, crushing the bug.
And Brendon’s shoebox.
In his palm, Brendon is shaking so much Ryan feels like he’s holding a swarm of bumblebees. When Ryan tries to open his loosely clenched fist, Brendon tugs his fingers back down around him, his frightened eyes visible through the slits in Ryan’s fingers.
“Hey, Brendon,” Ryan says and it’s softer than he expected it to be. “Hey, it’s gone now. It’s okay.”
Ryan tries to pull his fingers open again and Brendon protests with a quick tug and a squeak, “Don’t.”
“Brendon, he can’t get you,” Ryan says. “I killed it.” As an afterthought he adds, “Along with your shoebox.”
“Ryan, it was so big! And it had a hold of my shirt and I thought I was going to die!” Brendon wails and Ryan’s face falls a little before he turns to survey the damage done to the shoebox. It’s smashed nearly flat and Brendon’s small bed of Kleenex inside is crumpled beneath the damage done to the walls. It’s not irreparable but there is also a fair share of bug guts decorating the side and well - Ryan can’t be that heartless and make Brendon still sleep there.
So he takes the shoebox to the trash and dumps it, doubles back to scrape up the remnants of the cockroach and clean his counter and he makes it all the way to the living room before Brendon pokes his head through Ryan’s first and middle finger with curious eyes and says softly, “What are you doing?”
“Going back to bed,” Ryan says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“But- what about me?” Brendon asks cautiously.
“You are too.”
Brendon takes a confused moment to look around when they get back into Ryan’s bedroom. Ryan gets a single knee pressed into the bed before Brendon questions, “Where do I sleep?”
Ryan sets Brendon down carefully onto the bed and pulls open the top drawer, “In here.”
Brendon furrows his brow. “With you?”
“Well, I won’t be sleeping in here per say,” Ryan chuckles softly, rearranging things inside and taking out books, boxes and bottles - he keeps a lot of B’s in his top drawer and now he’s making room for a more important B. “But you will.”
Stepping to the edge of the bed, Brendon peers over into the now empty drawer and says, “You mean I don’t have to sleep in the kitchen anymore?”
Ryan travels to his larger set of drawers across the room and returns with two pairs of argyle dress socks. “Nope. You can sleep in here with me.” A lilt of a smile flickers across Brendon’s face and Ryan adds, “Nothing’s going to get you in here,” and it sounds more like a promise than a statement of fact.
Brendon just blushes and ducks his head as Ryan lays one pair of the socks flat along the inside of the drawer and proceeds to roll up one from the other pair. When he’s pleased with his handy work, he passes the leftover sock to Brendon and places him in the drawer.
“Um. I made you a pallet.”
“A sock pallet!” Brendon beams, observing the makeshift bed before him. “And it’s argyle!”
“Yeah,” Ryan says a little breathless with a laugh. “Yeah, it’s- it’s argyle.”
“Thank you so much, Ryan!” Brendon cheers, squatting down to pet the soft fabric of Ryan’s socks.
“They’re clean, just so you know,” Ryan says, rubbing the back of his neck. “My socks, that is.”
Brendon just smiles up at him, eyes bright and teeth bared so wide his eyes crinkle around the corners. Then Brendon notices just how tight he’s gripping the other sock in his hand and he says, “Do I sleep in this too? Like a pocket?”
“Or like, a sleeping bag, yes,” Ryan answers and tries not to acknowledge how his hands twitched when Brendon stepped into it and almost fell over in his haste. Instead he forces himself not to smile at Brendon’s surprised giggle and says, “Yeah, so.”
Brendon drops down onto his pallet and tucks into Ryan’s fuzzy argyle sock quite comfortably. Closing his eyes he sighs, “Mmm, cozy.” Ryan nods and- right. Bedtime.
He shifts on his bed, slipping his legs back under the sheets that have gone cold and stretches over to turn off the lamp above Brendon.
As he closes his eyes, he hears the small, labored breathing of the tiny person in his drawer and knows that Brendon has already fallen asleep.
----
The next few days are interesting.
Brendon still wakes up with the sun and Ryan still wakes with the laziness of too much sleep. Brendon leaves Ryan Pop Tarts and Ryan eats them sloppily around conversations he's started having with Brendon - conversations that he's even initiated - while Brendon makes trips back and forth to the sink with Ryan’s mess. They talk about Ryan’s house and Ryan says he picked it because Spencer said to. They talk about Brendon’s home in Chicago and Brendon says he didn’t really have one.
When Spencer calls, Ryan shrugs and says, “No, I mean, he’s okay. He’s not as big of a pain as I thought he’d be,” and Brendon smiles to himself as he rinses out Ryan’s milk glass. When there’s a Mythbuster’s marathon on Discovery Channel, Ryan offers Brendon the armrest. When Brendon says he’s feeling hungry, Ryan orders pizza and Brendon lets him cut up his food into sizeable squares. When Brendon can’t quite move his Queen to check Ryan’s King, Ryan helps Brendon lift it and carry it all the way across the Chess board to clench his victory. When Brendon is claimed by the gap in Ryan’s couch cushions, Ryan is tugging him out and fussing over Brendon being more careful.
When Brendon asks about Ryan’s piano, Ryan says, “Let’s play.”
And they do. Ryan first, as Brendon watches from the fall board and kicks the underside of it with his heels as Ryan plays ‘You Are My Sunshine’ at a tempo that Brendon can memorize by sight, little bobs of his head as he drives each key into his memory. Brendon hums the words beneath his breath and when Ryan asks if he wants to try, Brendon blushes, holds up his hands and says, “I wish I could.”
“You don’t have to play with your fingers, Brendon,” Ryan says and lifts Brendon from his seat before setting him down on the keys of the piano, a crash of sound below Brendon’s feet. Brendon’s face is a confused grin that explodes across his face when Ryan says, “Go on, play.”
For a moment, Brendon is still hesitant, not quite sure which keys to step on, still not quite sure if he’s heard Ryan correctly. But then he presses the toes of one foot into a the white key before him and giggles when noise erupts, a nice light sound and Ryan simply cannot resist the smile that infects his face. Brendon presses it again and again and then puts all of his weight on it before dropping it back onto the key next to it and he’s bouncing between the two notes like it’s the most entertaining thing in the world. (Currently, Ryan would have to say he agrees.)
Ryan lets Brendon hop around, leap across two keys to hear a different note in his progression as he high steps down the scale and Brendon honestly cannot stop giggling and Ryan is forced to calm him down before he starts doing the same.
He says, “Do you remember the right keys?” and Brendon nods, his bottom lip clenched between his teeth as he gently toes the key beneath him, making the piano purr softly. “Okay,” Ryan says. “I’ll play these notes right here -” He places his long fingers over said keys. “- and you play the rest, yeah?”
“Gotcha,” Brendon salutes and makes one last run to the end of the piano for good measure. Ryan presses two fingers harshly into the darkest, most sinister sounding chord and Brendon skitters to a halt on the sharpest G. Ryan smiles at him and laughs as Brendon exaggerates a pout and trails back to where Ryan has positioned his hands.
“Ready?” Ryan asks and Brendon jumps onto the first note.
----
Ryan wakes up to a loud roll of thunder and he can’t find Brendon.
It’s normal for Brendon to not be in his drawer after sunrise, and it’s normal for something uncomfortable to rise in Ryan’s stomach when he rolls over and sees that there isn’t anything occupying his favorite pair of argyle socks. What isn’t normal is Brendon to not being in the kitchen and for it to be torrential outside.
Ryan’s gut instinct is to check the back of the drawer, see if the thunder scared Brendon to the farthest corner where he might curl up and tremble. His second instinct is to double back to the kitchen and check every one of the drawers in there. His third instinct is to panic.
He calls Brendon’s name more times than he can count, searching every room, every corner, every nook and fucking cranny for Brendon’s small shadow and after thirty minutes of shouting for him, Ryan’s voice is cracking and he’s shaking a little. He calls Spencer, borderline hysterical, and Spencer makes him swallow, breathe, sit down and wait. Spencer and Jon arrive at Ryan’s front door quicker than they had the night Ryan first called Spencer about Brendon.
They tear the house apart - namely Ryan, but “It’s my fucking house, Spencer. And don’t tell me to calm down!” - they throw the cushions off the couch, pull the dishes out of the cabinets, take the books off the shelves. Ryan even goes so far as to push all of it into the center of the living room so that he can re-comb every square inch of the house that he’s ransacked.
Brendon isn’t anywhere to be found.
“Look Ryan,” Spencer says and even though his tone is that of Calm down before I have to kill you, Ryan knows that look in Spencer’s eyes - it’s the same look he got when he and Ryan were just two little bastards lighting electrical boxes on fire in their neighborhood and hiding in Spencer’s treehouse away from the cops. Spencer’s learned to be the rational one, for Ryan’s sake, but sometimes his eyes betray him. “I’m-” Spencer pauses when Jon forces Ryan down on the couch. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably out playing with the mice or something. You know how he is about those things,” Spencer says, trying to sway Ryan into believing him.
Ryan shakes his head and goes to argue, but Jon cuts him off with a clap on the shoulder and butts in, “Or maybe he just fell asleep somewhere and can’t hear us. You said yourself he likes to look around the house so maybe he just got tired and -”
“No, no, no! You’re wrong! Both of you. He’s not with the mice and he’s not sleeping. He wouldn’t - he would have told me if he -” Ryan stops and runs his fingers through his hair and takes a deep breath. “He’s not here.”
“Where do you think he could b-?”
“I don’t know, Jon!” Ryan explodes and Jon and Spencer both flinch. “Fuck, I don’t know,” Ryan says softer, impatience fizzling down until he’s this anxiety ridden bundle of nerves wound so tight he’s trembling.
Outside, lightning sends a strobelight effect through the blinds for a split second and a few moments later the loud rumble of thunder growls and crashes against the house, windows rattling. Jon and Spencer watch as Ryan has an internal debate with himself, forehead creased with concern and he’s worrying his bottom lip. There’s silence in the house for a few minutes, nothing but the slap of the rain on the house and finally Spencer says, “Ryan, I think -”
“We’re searching the house again,” Ryan says defiantly, standing up with conviction.
“What? But you just said he wasn’t h-”
“We’re searching the house again,” Ryan interrupts and Spencer shivers at the sound of determination heavy on Ryan’s tongue. Ryan makes his way to the kitchen and opens up each drawer all over again and Spencer doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the only thing he’ll find in those drawers is the silverware Brendon cleaned a few days prior and a whole lot of disappointment.
Jon and Spencer sigh and follow Ryan into the kitchen.
Part Two