(no subject)
Quiet is the New Loud (I Will Follow You Into the Dark)
Pete/Patrick: The experiences of a body without sight.
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When his vision first starts to dim, nobody takes it too seriously.
Pete has had enough of overanalyzing every single thing that happens to him, and Patrick knows that: knows they’re all so tired that fatigue isn’t a word, it’s a fucking lifestyle, throats and bones and limbs and fingertips all hurting in unison. Andy suggests that maybe Pete isn’t getting some mineral or vitamin in the Recommended Daily Allowance, and Pete just squints at him, eyeliner making his eyes seem even smaller.
"We can't all be The Vegan," he retorts. "I'm just the One with the Good Bone Structure, in the same way that Trohmania will always be the Coolest Jew and the Gentlest Creature on the Face of the Earth sings all our songs. We don't choose the roles that God gives us."
“Less internet, more sleep,” Patrick says sagely, softly re-tuning his guitar from his bunk. The strumming is sleepy and matches the clatter of a tour bus moving to the next town quite nicely, streetlights and highway exits blurring past.
“You know, it could be the radiation,” Andy adds.
The smirk in Joe’s tone carries from the back of the bus into the tiny kitchenette at the front, where Pete sits pawing at his eyes, slowly beginning to resemble a raccoon.
“…If you ask me, someone’s been spending too much time under the covers with his right hand.”
The next sound is a G chord gone horribly, horribly wrong (apparently yes, it is possible), strings in a loud trembling yelp, followed by a meek (if somewhat fake) cough.
“Well,” Patrick says, voice relatively-level-but-not-exactly-so. “They always did warn us, back in school.”
+
So.
It got worse when they left it alone.
That is to say: not everything resolves itself if you just lock it away, not everything is so easily wrapped-up and forgotten.
Pete still jokes about the blindness -- it’s gotten quite bad now, by anyone’s standards, with the stumbling, et cetera, though nobody knows exactly what Pete sees and doesn’t see --, and the band still laughs weakly, looks of concern crossing their faces at different intervals, as if it were a peculiarly uniform mask they all shared.
If anything, Pete says to everyone who asks about his health, because that’s all they talk about on the Q&A anymore, his bass playing is getting better, more intuitive. He’s been playing long enough to memorize the weight of the instrument in his hands, how fingers go here to play this tone, the vibration from just the right amount of feedback. He doesn’t stage-dive anymore, but Pete can now, for all intents and purposes, play with his eyes closed. It’s just a matter of time before he can play with one hand tied behind his back.
Until his mother sends him the CD from the ophthalmologist the she’s been promising -- the one that reads back whatever’s typed onscreen in what Joe assures Pete is an extremely hot animatronic female voice -- Patrick types for him, because Pete’s just not comfortable with anyone else handling his words, really.
+
In the dark, everything quiet is loud; everything is funny and grave, all at the same time. There’s another running joke (running’s the right word, because it gets fucking tiring after a while), in which Pete pretends he’s dying.
(He’s pretty sure he isn’t, and the doctors are too, he just won’t be seeing anything for an indefinite period of time, and Andy tries to amuse him with faux-philosophical comic book theories that this is all a transition point before he wakes up with ninja powers, which may or may not be too far from the truth.)
It’s not one of those elaborate jokes that needs a set-up, just a captive audience, so when Patrick tries to walk quietly past Pete’s bunk -- he knows it’s Patrick, nobody else could or would go out of their way to be this fucking stealthy, soundless as a doormouse from the CIA --, thoughtfully mindful of the way Pete’s sidewards-curled form spells out s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g in body language, Pete’s hand suddenly latches onto his wrist with a flutter of blanket.
(It’s odd how Pete can find some things in the dark just by memory, even when he doesn’t remember remembering.)
“Everything… going dim…” Pete says melodramatically, somewhere between Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and William Shatner on quaaludes. His grip tightens just a little around Patrick’s wrist.
“Whatever you do, Pete, don’t go into the light.” Patrick stands still, issues the command calmly. He plays the game without skipping a beat.
“That golden voice! Is that you, God? …It’s me, Margaret.”
“No, Timmy, it’s Grampa. Lassie told us you were at the bottom of the ditch.”
Patrick plays Pete’s game exceptionally well, which is why he is always first choice for Captive Audience Member #1.
“…Wha-what was that? I couldn’t hear you, my life was flashing before my eyes,” Pete pauses to raise a hand to his head, in full distressed-damsel style. “It’s getting dark… Dahling, tell my mother I love her. Tell Andy I love him, too, in much more than the brotherly way. Totally. And tell Joe that the limited-edition glow-in-the-dark Darth lightsaber is his, all his…” And a sigh is cued, and a little shuddering gasp.
“I will,” Patrick concedes bravely, trying to make his voice shake just a little, all part of this stupid one-act, two-person play they’re trying to perform. “Er, darling,” he adds, as an afterthought.
“You’re almost gone, just a speck of light. Don’t ever leave me this way,” Pete is a fast talker, smooth, but not the best actor, drawing out his y’s in breathy mock-despair. “…Don’t leave me this way.”
A pause.
A beat.
“…You know I’d never leave you,” Patrick murmurs quietly, completely serious.
+
In the dark, everything quiet is loud; everything is funny and grave, all at the same time.
+
Life goes on.
He wears dark glasses (80’s enough to be ironic, scene enough to be scene) to hide the fact he’s lost the ability to focus (his eyes, though he can feel the phrase mutating in the back of his head -- a lost focus tightening the ties that b(l)ind --, a play on words struggling against triteness), and turns his head politely in the general direction of anyone who speaks to him in the after-show moments and the meet&greets, straining to pick out their voices through the noise.
He readies lines all mapped out in his head, cleverly prepared for battle: “No, man. This whole blindness thing, I’m just trying to be a younger Stevie Wonder. Like, The Boy Wonder,” and “I’m a vampire for real, and it’s past my bedtime,” and maybe “One day I woke up and had heat vision. If I open my eyes, your hair will catch fire.” This is basically in case anyone asks, because they always do.
He half-worries his ears are becoming hypersensitive, and is half-excited that perhaps Andy’s ninja power theories were not, in entirety, absolute BS. When Pete digs through a lumpy plastic bag of clothes, half-thinking about bats and sonar while looking (feeling, really, and sniffing sometimes) for something proper to wear for tonight’s show, he picks out the shuffle of footsteps, soft but not predatory, like a tame fox.
“...Sound check in a bit,” says Patrick.
“’Trick, man,” he says, “What are the chances I can actually pull clean anything from this bag? I mean, are the odds more like lightning striking twice, or more like someone in the same room having the same birthday as you?”
Pete isn’t really waiting for an answer, he’s just opening and closing his mouth to make sounds, sounds that cover up the fact he really is deep in concentration, cross-referencing textures with states of cleanliness in his head: the soft solidity of corduroy (filthy, if he remembers correctly), the cool smoothness of cotton (similarly filthy), the roughened comfort of worn denim (filthy, but passable).
Patrick stands behind him, leaning his head on the bus wall. “You’re basically dressing from memory, aren’t you?”
“…All the better to pretend I don’t actually get dressed in the dark.” Pete struggles with the zipper on a battered red hoodie (familiar, and therefore safe), the jagged metal teeth not quite interlocking.
“D’ya need me to - I mean, could I help you, or something?”
“Do I even need to make the easy joke about the blind leading the blind?”
Pete is just about to remind Patrick about the Argyle-and-Shorts combination of the often-recounted First Day (not that anyone needs to be reminded of its awfulness), but he feels the gentle tug of Patrick’s hands on his jacket, and it’s a kind gesture, really, so he shuts up.
“Nah, look, we can even bring back the eyeliner,” Patrick says thoughtfully, finding a somewhat crushed kohl pencil in the front pocket of the hoodie. He gingerly slides Pete’s glasses off his nose. “…I’ll be your mirror.”
+
From an online article on rock fashion (always funny, what the messageboard people find), two days later:
At a recent Chicago show, Boy Wonder Pete Wentz once again dons eyeliner in triumph. Millions of underage female fans rejoice at its return.
Patrick reads this to Pete over breakfast (Cap’n Crunch straight from the box). They laugh.
+
Though at some point it happens:
Pete has had enough.
Everyone condescends without meaning to. His mother, the band, the fans. Pete knows he should just shut up and fucking appreciate them caring, but he doesn’t. After a somewhat below-average show (the kids are always great, but Pete’s timing was on-off-on-off the whole time, and he knew it, frowning all the while), all Pete wants (and expects) to hear is something negative, something constructive, something they would have said to him before the blindness.
He steps onto the bus with a Cherry coke in hand, witty comebacks in his head.
Nobody says a word.
In some metaphorical place, a line is drawn and is crossed so many times that the original borderline has become an alien concept in a completely foreign country.
“…For fuck’s sake, stop acting like I’ve stopped functioning!” he says (yells, mostly, to everyone and no-one), “I’m blind, alright? Not geriatric or paraplegic or dying and probably-most-definitely not fucking deaf.”
A can of cherry Coke sails through the air and bounces off the bus window’s tempered glass. It makes an unsatisfyingly solid sound, yet assures Pete that he has punctuated his sentence with perfect force, even though he’s not sure what he’s hit.
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Afterwards, it should all be downhill.
Instead there is a sort of plateau: repetitive and meaningless and characteristically flat.
Pete falls asleep to darkness and awakens to it, over and over and over again. It’s what he’s come to accept as normal. It shouldn’t mean more than it does.
Waking life is almost normal, but always strained. The tour goes on; they play more shows. Pete is never off-time again. They even laugh together sometimes, about random, silly things. They even manage to be a little more than half-hearted about it.
Still, nobody tries to cross his path, as if he were the unluckiest black cat.
+
Part of a conversation overheard at two a.m., drifting in and out of sleep somewhere between New Jersey and New Hampshire:
“…It’s like he’s gone on away somewhere, and left -- I dunno, a robot or something -- in his place, and we’ve kind of been fooled the whole time.”
“Walks, talks, and plays like Pete, though. And still stubborn as fuck.”
(Pete notes the slightly lower ramble, the faintest trace of a stilted accent. Joe…?)
“Yeah, but none of the warmth. Is it childish for me to say I miss him? (the reply is too soft, unintelligible to Pete’s ears: is it a yes or no? Pete thinks, hopes: no, it’s not) …I mean. He’s still here, but admitting and denying everything that’s happened, -- is happening -- all at the same time.”
“It’s always so trippy to talk to you like this, ‘Trick. Existentialism on a tourbus or something like,” and then some mumbling, the click of a light switch, muffled footsteps. The metallic creak of another bunk being filled.
Three minutes later (Pete has become more and more aware of the way time passes, its slow trickle, like honey in a bottle) Patrick walks softly past, similar sounds trailing after him belatedly.
Pete reaches for Patrick’s wrist in the dark, -- he means to mean something, but what? -- instead he grasps nothingness (emptiness), and his heart tightens a just little bit.
It shouldn’t mean more than it does, really.
+
Pete has had a few sleepless nights like this one.
More than a few.
Except that after falling asleep to darkness, awakening to darkness is like one of those dreams where you are waking up from a dream where you are waking up from a dream where you are waking up from a dream, over and over and over again.
You know.
Like the Matrix.
He thinks he should call someone, maybe a girl, because girls don’t really mind as much as guys do when you call them at three a.m., as long as it feels heavy with importance and some kind of sensitivity and i’m sorry it’s late, i just really needed to hear your voice. Because he is that kind of person. He is that boy at three in the morning.
It’s just too bad, then, that the batteries of this world have failed him. His cellphone, uncharged for days on end, is dead weight.
It doesn’t matter. Somewhere by the public restrooms, on the fringe of this bus parking lot, is a public phone booth. It will be ravaged by vandals, but gloriously empty, waiting for him.
Pete staggers out of bed, stumbling over sheets. There is a mysteriously soft noise of something unmysteriously breaking, but it’s not as if he anticipates anyone will say anything about it. He doesn’t anticipate anyone saying anything at this hour, but instead there is this, in the darkness:
“…Pete?”
“Go back to sleep, ‘Trick.”
Thump. Crash.
“Where are you going?”
“Neverland. Second star to the right, straight on till --”
Patrick takes hold of Pete's wrists, tightly at first, but quickly loosening, suddenly self-conscious of his own strength.
Like a fucking stealthy fox, Pete thinks, but this thought is replaced with cold hands, though there is a warm sensation in their wake.
"Okay, Lunchbox." Pete concedes. "To the phone booth."
+
Pete’s fingers know the path to trace to dial her number, like they’ve done a hundred times before, in the happy times and sad times and why-are-you-still-calling-here times. It’s kind of sad to hear the soft tones after each digit, like a song he hasn’t heard in a long while.
Outside the booth, Patrick waits, shivering slightly in mismatched sleepclothes. He can see his breath, and he paces, brow furrowed, as if thoughts were measured in degrees, deeper and deeper as they approached 0°C.
In the receiver, there is some ringing.
And some more.
Outside, there is also a breaking point, which is rather unexpected.
Suddenly, Pete hears the uncooperative clatter of the booth door being pulled open, feels a sudden lack of space inside the booth.
“WHERE IS PETE. WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM.”
.
.
.
Patrick is yelling at him.
Yelling with some force, actually, as if the gates of heaven have opened up, simultaneously pouring divine wrath and angelic voices. Or a voice, singular, with all the power it can carry.
“…I CAN'T HELP BUT FEEL HE'S DISAPPEARED, BUT HE WON'T COME BACK UNTIL YOU'RE GONE, BUT YOU WON'T GO 'TILL HE COMES BACK, WILL YOU?”
Surely some kind of pyrotechnics right now would be timely and appropriate.
Instead, there is only a phone booth to hold in the sound, all this divinely vocalized anger. There are only four scratchy, tempered-glass walls to hold in these four things:
1.) Pete, and
2.) the tiny, tiny (and warm, so warm) distance to
3.) Patrick and
4.) the immense complexity of his frustration.
Yelling, Pete thinks.
Patrick just strikes an unlucky wall with his open palm. Around them, the tiny column of metal and glass shudders.
.
.
.
There is a clattering echo, and then there is quiet, broken by ringing. It starts to sound like the ocean, almost. A wash of white noise.
Patrick’s voice is barely audible. “I just -- God, Pete. You make such a show about keeping it all together, I just want to be around when the lights are out and the sound is down.”
Patrick’s head is bowed, as if this booth was a confessional. Pete knows this because his hair is softly grazing his chin, and the sigh that escapes Patrick’s mouth is hot on his neck.
In the receiver, the ocean-sound has stopped. There are faint repetitions of “…Hello?” peppered with “…Who is this?” and “…Pete?”.
Pete cradles the receiver on his shoulder, traces the line of Patrick’s jaw with his right hand.
(It’s odd how Pete can find some things in the dark just by memory, even when he doesn’t remember remembering.)
“Sorry,” he breathes flatly into the phone, “Wrong number,” he says.
Then there is only Pete's mouth on Patrick's, forceful and silently communicative.
The receiver drops, sways like a pendulum, busy tone echoing like a prayer. Around them, the tiny column of metal and glass is a kingdom, foreign and exhilarating, familiar and therefore safe.
+ + +
1. It is sort of like my debut. Feedback is lovely.
& you totally get 1000 points for saying things like, LOVE IS BLIND.
In my book, cheesy stunts like that are pretty ace.
2. I had to hand-code all the italics for this fic. Surely this is some new way Heaven has devised so that I may burn off some time in Purgatory while still firmly planted on earth.
This is for sonstoodstammer, fic cheerleader, allaround beffy, who stayed up like a nerve-wracked father while this was being written. With all my love and devotion.
ETA: My warmest, most syrupy, honey-tongued songs of thankfulness to _mydecember_, who featured me and sonstoodstammer on letterbomb!