fic: You're the ghost on every corner

[subterrain]

So, it was estei's birthday about, oh, a month ago. And I am terribly late with this gift, because even at the time I thought this would definitely, definitely be done by like, June 21st at the latest. But the story and emotions that she gave me to work with were complicated and required a lot of self-examination to write about. And so I kept working and pondering and simmering and percolating and finally, here it is. Meghan, you are old and wise now. I will continue to depend on you despite these shortcomings, which will severely impact our ability to be dumbasses together. I miss your face, and thinking about exactly how much I miss you makes me feel saccharine and sentimental and probably a lot of that seeped into this story. I envy TO your company, but I have found it within myself to magnanimously forgive the whole frigging city. Happy birthday. Happy belated, belated birthday.

Fandom: bandom, panic
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon, background Jon/Spencer.
Warnings: none.
Notes: Post-split getbacktogether fic. Ryan pov counterpart to Hello, I'm too tired to smile today and Don't hold back, feel a little longer. Read those first. They are sad and sweet and full of love and handholding. Also you should harass her to post the Brendon pov that she wrote for it but never shared!
Words: 7111

Summary: Brendon's name left Ryan's phone last month, long after he'd trained his thumb to automatically scroll up from Z rather than down past B. He'd still run into the entry, though. Accidentally. Drunkenly. And every time it was a shock and a temptation and fuck that noise, just fuck it. He'd never once been the one to break. He was not about to start.



Ryan's gone back to bed three times today. Starting at five a.m., when he stumbled in drunk and took half a shower - shampoo, a bar of soap that ended up on the floor - and fell asleep wet and naked on dirty sheets.

Back to bed again at nine-thirty, after hobbling to the bathroom to puke and look at his hair in the mirror. It's dried in mousey tangles haloed three inches above his skull. His face is pale and stretched thin, and thank god he showered because if he could still smell the liquor he'd probably still be puking. Instead, it's just seeping out of his skin, resident in the pit of his stomach and the back of his throat and the dried out space between his brain and his skull.

Back to bed again at one, after wandering into the kitchen for a breakfast of crackers and watered-down orange juice. Just looking at the empty coffee pot is too much effort. Standing in his dim living room with the blinds pulled and the hardwood chilly, nowhere in the world seems any better than his bed anyway.

Then at two - he's still in bed, in his housecoat with the blanket on the floor - his phone rings. He reaches for his jeans, which are still in bed with him, and it's a phone number with the right area code, so he picks up.

"Listen," someone says, "I'm sorry. I just want to know he's okay."

Ryan's parched brain cycles through voices looking for the matching name for a long moment, and after fifteen seconds doesn't even come up with a guess. His mind gives him a blank paper printout with a question mark typed in bold.

The voice waits out the pause. Then, slower, it says: "I mean. Tell me he's with you."

"Who is this?" Ryan says, thinking suddenly about Alex's place last night and wondering for a few panicked seconds if he'd picked someone up or taken someone home and, you know, taken personal responsibility for an unknown third party that he has now lost, mistakenly and without even knowing it.

The line is so quiet that Ryan is one hundred percent sure that he is not going to like whatever the voice says next.

"This is Brendon," Brendon says.

Ryan's brain gives a little click, like the name's jolted it back into functionality. In bold text: Brendon. Of course, Brendon.

Brendon's name left Ryan's phone last month, long after he'd trained his thumb to automatically scroll up from Z rather than down past B. He'd still run into the entry, though. Accidentally. Drunkenly. And every time it was a shock and a temptation and fuck that noise, just fuck it. He'd never once been the one to break. He was not about to start.

It never occurred to him that Brendon would break, instead. That he'd ever call. That Brendon's number would show up, no name, no picture, like some telemarketer.

Ryan realizes that his stomach has taken up a twisted residence somewhere near the base of his spine. He has a cramp in his gut that hurts like tenth grade gym class.

Ryan says: "I don't have anyone with me."

Brendon's released anxiety is audible: his rattled breath reminds Ryan of the way he used to clench his eyes shut against bad news. "Oh, fuck," Brendon says.

Ryan clarifies, because now his brain is functioning on logic overdrive: "It's Spencer? You lost Spencer?"

"I lost-" Brendon cuts himself off, like he can't stand the taste of words that have come straight out of Ryan's mouth. "Yeah. If he's not with you, then yeah. He's lost. I lost him."

And Ryan thinks, you asshole. He says, "Did you try his phone?"

Brendon's silence is just acidic, seething through the speaker, so Ryan goes, "I'll try it," because maybe the unfamiliar number, the too-familiar name, will warrant a pick-up. Maybe Spencer will think it's the call - the confession, the apology, the reconciliation, the breakdown - when it's all just a trick to get him to admit he's sitting in some dank gay bar in the wrong zipcode and he should come home now.

Or, he should go home to Brendon, anyway.

Ryan thinks he's going to hang up now, but instead he asks, even as he tries to close his phone, speaker already away from his mouth: "So what happened?"

And Brendon's voice, tinny and strange, says, "I don't know. I was drunk."

"You were-" says Ryan. And his tone is so catty and so sharp that he can't even finish the sentence. "Where were you?"

"Just. At home. We had a party."

"With who?" Ryan wants to know. He wants to know but the words taste bad because he has parties, too, and he gets drunk and he makes bad choices but this is not. This is not even similar- "I mean, nevermind. Whatever. He left?"

"He left and I didn't notice."

"He left and he went somewhere," Ryan tries to think of where he would've gone. Where Spencer Smith would go to feel safe. Or comforted. Or happy.

He used to know.

Ryan takes a breath. He can hear Brendon on the line, a hitch in his throat, a kind of stutter in the chest that doesn't happen otherwise, not when you're a professional. It makes Ryan think about how good a singer Brendon used to be when they were kids. How great he got. How huge and golden Ryan's words used to sound, coming out of Brendon's mouth.

Ryan says, "We could try a few places."

And Brendon blurts, like if he says it quick it won't sting: "I'll come get you."

"Okay," Ryan says. And after he hangs up, he dials Spencer's number - Spencer's number which never left his phone - and gets sent to voicemail.

"Hey," Spencer says, "It's Spencer, and I'll call you back whenever I get this."

Ryan cuts out before the beep. He doesn't believe Spencer when he says that.

Brendon pulls into Ryan's driveway in ten minutes flat. Ten minutes because it's two o'clock on a Saturday, and ten minutes because his house is barely eight miles away. No one even had the decency to move to their own side of the city.

But, Brendon. Brendon and his same flashy dumbass Audi - it's scary how familiar it still is. With its kicked up bass and crumbs in the seams of its leather seats and food wrappers on its floor and its odor of general feralness.

Behind the windshield, Brendon looks washed out. He kills the engine under the shadow of Ryan’s messy arbutus tree, his hands on the wheel as he waits for Ryan to set the alarm, lock the front door, pull his sunglasses down over his squint.

The weather's strange. He didn't notice until now, but it's cloudy. Grayed over like they're somewhere nine hundred miles north of here. The light still hurts his head.

Ryan comes down the drive, which is steep and littered with sap and twigs and flower petals, in not quite a saunter. He gets into the passenger seat and that smell is still there, sharp and adolescent.

He breathes it in, fills up his lungs with it.

Brendon’s hair is clipped short, washed clean and shiny. He showered this morning, he did his hair, he picked out a t-shirt, not a tie. One of his thumbnails has a black bruise crescented under it. He looks over and says, “Hi.”

Ryan, lifting his loafer off of the fast food container on the floormat, says, “I thought maybe the beach.”

“Which one?" Brendon says, turning the engine back over.

And Ryan says, “Did he take his car?"

And Brendon goes, “It's still sitting in the driveway.”

“Then, I don’t know - whichever’s closest.”

And Brendon says, "He wouldn’t stay there for twelve hours,” and he’s right.

“Lacey’s?”

“The diner? I thought it closed.”

Ryan didn't know that. He pauses. “The Swan?”

Brendon shrugs. “I guess. Never been there.”

“You guys never go to the Swan? It’s the only place where Spencer will drink the beer on tap.”

Brendon glances sideways at him. The car still isn’t moving. “He never mentioned it.”

Ryan finds himself inhaling for a long time. It calms him, the way Brendon's car smells like it did a year ago. The exact same. He breathes out, and thank god it doesn't come out in a huff.

“To be honest,” Brendon adds, “I haven’t seen him touch a beer in months.”

“Weird,” Ryan says. And then he hears how it sounds like a judgment. “I mean, weird that-” he stops again. Fuck, he doesn’t want to say this: “I mean, it’s weird not to know that.”

Brendon frowns at the steering wheel. “I called a few people before you. No one’s seen him. I have no idea. I really thought.”

Ryan says, like to be reassuring, “He probably just checked into a hotel or something.”

Brendon snorts, “He hasn’t slept in weeks. I don’t know why he’d start now.”

“Weeks?” Ryan says, “Really?”

Brendon shakes off the tone, Ryan’s look. “Maybe. I don’t know. Definitely not the last one. He’s been." There is a long pause. Brendon's hand twitches on the steering wheel, already dismissing the words he's saying as insufficient. "You know how he gets.”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. Because he knows there's no adjective for Spencer.

“The beach, huh?” Brendon says, and the car starts rolling backwards and he twists to brace his hand behind Ryan’s headrest as he checks the traffic on the street.

For a second, Ryan thinks Brendon is reaching for the back of his neck or the shell of his ear or the curve of his cheek. Instead, as Brendon peers down the road, waiting for a break, Ryan feels that expectation go sour in his stomach. He turns his face and grimaces at the reflection of his own collarbone in the sideview mirror.

“He's somewhere in the city,” Brendon says, like it's a promise to himself.

Ryan could name probably a dozen places where Spencer and he used to go. Their slurpee place. Their booze place. Their beach. Their guitar string and drumstick place. Their gym, or Spencer's gym, anyway: Ryan really only ever used the sauna. Their I-need-to-buy-a-fiftieth-pair-of-sneakers place. Their sandwich place. Their beer place. Their early morning banana and muffin place. Their very secret vintage place. Their stylish-barista-watching place. Their Pete-says-I-need-a -haircut place. Their fuck-this-shit-I'm-done place, which also doubled as their smoke-up-and-watch-the-sunset place.

Ryan hasn't been to any of those places since last summer. And every time he names one Brendon's chin tilts down a little further, his eyes fixed ahead on the curving road that rolls down out of the canyon. They both know that none of them - not Ryan, not Spencer, not Brendon, not Jon - go to any of their old places any more. There may as well be bombed out shells of buildings standing at those addresses, not shoe shops and convenience stores. Salted earth lost in the war. No one wants to visit the graves of the dead. You risk running into ghosts.

At the first red light Brendon says, blank, like he can't process the options into anything spatial or reasoned: "So which way?"

Ryan says, calm and clear and knowing: "Left."

And at the next light: right. And then straight. And straight, and straight, and straight, and left and Brendon keeps asking and Ryan keeps picking at random because they really don't have a single place to look. So he picks based maybe on the way the trees filter the light into something welcoming, down that street, or how the colors of the buildings seem brighter on this one, or maybe just the way the car in front of them goes. Anything to keep them moving.

They drive until Ryan doesn't recognize intersections or street names. They hit a freeway, they get back off it. They keep driving, and eventually they're somewhere familiar again. It's very quiet. No radio, and Brendon's not saying anything, now. Just following Ryan's directions as he issues them. Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Traffic's been getting thick and messy. People going to malls or bars or grocery stores. They get stuck at a light for six minutes solid. It's stupid, but getting held up by traffic even when they have no destination puts Ryan's teeth on edge.

He says, as soon as they make it through the knot of left-turners, "Pull over here."

It's a schoolyard. A faux-brick building with new windows and a plastic playground in blue and yellow. The houses around here are stucco with rock gardens instead of lawns and maybe not as many For Sale - Bank Owned signs as there are in his neighborhood. The nets in the basketball hoops are well-worn.

Ryan doesn't know what the fuck they're going to do in an empty schoolyard. Maybe bum around on the swings like they used to when they were teenagers and Brendon had curfew at ten and Ryan would convince him to stay out and drink slurpees in the park while the sun went down. The next day Brendon would show up to practice shamefaced and say he couldn't stay, he was grounded. But given a few weeks Ryan could always convince him again. Tempt him with gummi worms and bad jokes until he had him out there on the swings again. There was a good reason that Brendon's folks didn't like Ryan.

Ryan dials Spencer's number again as Brendon pulls off a slightly incompetent parallel park. Spencer's recorded voice is in his ear even as he says to Brendon, "Come on. Let's go."

Brendon looks across the playground, like he's just seeing it. His face goes flat. "Are you kidding?" he says, like there's a real hope Ryan might say yes.

Ryan takes a second look: the swings are empty, the grass is sparse and a bunch of kids are playing a game of basketball on the far side of the park. Ryan shrugs, looks back at Brendon. "What?"

"This is where you expect to find Spencer?"

Ryan blinks. "No," he says. He's surprised by Brendon's surprise; he's confused by Brendon's confusion. "I thought it was obvious that we aren't going to find him."

Brendon jerks his gaze back to the steering wheel. "What the fuck was I thinking," he mutters.

"What?" Ryan's voice ratchets up in his throat. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Brendon just casts a glance at him, eyeroll implicit. And Ryan can hear the pitch he's speaking at, and knows what he sounds like. But Brendon is miserable and guilty and so now he's blaming Ryan for not being able to find Spencer? Which - and Ryan won't say this, because he's grown up this last year, he really has - but that is just like Brendon, just like he's always been. Such a goddamn child.

Brendon answers without even looking at Ryan, in a voice clear and low: "It means there's a good reason we haven't said a word to each other in six months."

It takes Ryan moment to process. To realize that those words aren't just spiteful wartime ammunition: they're his. There's a good reason. He'd been saving that sentence for himself. Just in case. Looking forward to using it, even. Words he'd tell himself every time he caught himself thinking about going to Cruella for an americano or ducking into Pontiff to check out this season's Campers. That way he always knew there was a good reason for not going there anymore, even if he could never quite remember what it was, exactly.

He doesn't like having the sentiment turned back on him. But then, it feels good to hear Brendon say something awful. It saves him from being the asshole for five seconds.

Instead, Ryan backs off. He controls his voice to something reasonable: "Spencer doesn't want to be found. And obviously neither of us knows dick all about where his head's at right now anyway, so we're not going to figure it out until he decides to let us know."

"You-" Brendon cuts off, shakes his head again. "-and you just decided that? You've just made that decision for the both of us? What the fuck, Ryan. You don't care enough to try to find him so we're going to go play on the swings instead?"

"That's not." Ryan says. "Of course I care. You think I don't care?"

"You've made it pretty clear." Brendon says, as he throws the car into gear and steers back out into traffic. "You've spent the last year making it really, really clear."

And then Brendon demonstrates, in thirty-five minutes of acute silence, exactly how much he cares by driving Ryan all the way back to his place without saying another word to him.

Ryan doesn't try to break him out of it. Mostly because he knows it's impossible. And he couldn't talk, anyway. His skin feels too tight and too hot. His eyes are itching even though the light outside is diluted and watery. His teeth are ground so tight together that he's giving himself a third headache to layer on top of the first two. He thinks if Brendon crashed the car right now he'd snap his own spine on impact, his whole body feels so brittle.

When Brendon pulls into Ryan's driveway, he unlocks the doors without glancing over.

Ryan opens his door, and with a foot half-out he says, "Let me know if you hear anything."

Brendon's mouth stays flat, but Ryan thinks maybe he caught a little jerk of the chin.

He goes inside. He drinks some water, eats some more painkillers. He looks out his balcony to where there are a couple of birds huddled in his tree, eating berries and avoiding the wind coming in up the canyon.

He should go back to bed. But he feels so jittery, now, he can just imagine lying there, rattling the bed frame against the wall.

Fucking Brendon. Ryan wants to sprint back down the driveway, pull him out of his stupid dumbass Audi, and scream at him about exactly how much he fucking cares. He cared enough for all of them, he cared more than any of them. Ryan could perforate eardrums, shred lungs, splinter bone with how much he cares.

Instead, he calls Jon.

“Brendon called me,” He says when Jon picks up, trying to make it sound casual and pretty much failing entirely. He wishes he could keep the weirdness out of his voice, the sound of his sweaty palms and spun-up heart. "Spencer is missing. Like, he disappeared from a party last night and didn’t come home and no one has seen him and he isn’t answering his phone. And, so. Brendon called me."

“Ryan, just. Um," there is a long pause, where Ryan realizes that Jon could possibly be high or maybe Jon is in bed with someone or was maybe asleep until three seconds ago. Until, eventually, Jon says: “Spencer is here. With me. In Chicago.”

What? Ryan thinks. Then he says, "What?" He tries again, “That doesn’t… what?”

“He just kind of showed up." Jon says, sounding woeful, like it's entirely out of his hands. "He’s been sleeping, like, since he got here, so. That’s why he isn’t answering the phone.”

Ryan is still having trouble with the facts. He tries to make it make sense: him here in his house, wound up and nauseous because Brendon is a child who can't solve his own problems. And then there's the problem, in Chicago, solved and calm and sleeping. He thinks: I should calm down now. But he doesn't. His brain stutters around, spinning in circles. “So, he just, what? Flew to Chicago last night?"

“He didn't tell me he was coming until he got here. He called me from the diner down the street. He sounded like he was sleepwalking.”

Oh, Ryan wants to say. Thank god. Thank god he's okay. But he doesn't say that. He says, “When was this?”

“Uh, around five, I think?”

“Five. This morning." Ryan counts the hours that Brendon's been flooded with guilt, he measures the anxiety that's built up like a chemical in his system in just the past two. He says, "So what time is it there now? Six?"

Jon must hear something in Ryan's voice, because he's instantly got his back up. “Jesus, Ryan, I didn’t know what to think." He's almost breathless, "I didn’t think Brendon would call you." He sounds guilty, "I didn’t think you’d even-" and Jon cuts himself off there, a sharp halt.

Ryan finishes the sentence with a grimace. On second taste, it's even more bitter.: "You didn't think I'd care," he concludes.

Jon doesn't respond.

Ryan says, after a long silence, “I tried to think about where Spencer might be. But I knew that every place I could name was wrong. It's weird not knowing that shit anymore."

"Ryan," Jon says, using the tone. The one that says, stop being morose, you dick and I know, buddy, all at once.

"So what," Ryan says, changing the subject. He wants his voice to be blithe, but it's not. "You guys have been talking again?"

"No, look. Don't get all."

"I didn’t know you guys were mending fences," Ryan continues, like he's not even aware of how sharp his voice is. "Actually, I'm kind of wondering why the two of you would even bother, considering."

Considering the state of war. Considering martial law. Considering Ryan's feelings, or Brendon's even.

Jon takes a long moment to answer, and when he does his voice is so soft and careful that Ryan almost misses the fact that he's been gutshot. "No," Jon says, "You're wondering why he didn't go to you instead."

Ryan tries to deny it. He tries to make the words that would negate that sentence come out of his mouth. But they aren't there. He can't say them because they're not true. He's quiet. He's silent.

Jon says, after a while: "You haven't even asked if he's okay."

"Is he okay?" Ryan asks, instantly.

"He's fine. Like I said, sleeping."

"Sleeping." Ryan repeats, irritated by the extra flood of anxiety injected into his system just because Jon wanted to get a dig in. Ryan realizes, then, exactly where Spencer is sleeping. Because there's really no other option. And that thought. Really? Really they have to pull a Romeo and Juliet now? They have to make Ryan into one illogical side of a pointless feud? They have to simplify him into a caricature of anger and poor reasoning?

"The two of you" Ryan starts. He wants to call Jon out. He wants to label what they're doing as selfish and self-righteous and juvenile and short-sighted. He wants to ask Jon what the hell his priorities are. He wants to tell him that there's a fucking good reason that they don't talk to Brendon and Spencer anymore. But instead, he takes a breath. And he says in what he considers to be a reasonable tone: "Do whatever the hell you want, Jon. Just remember the difference between who's in your bed and who's in your band."

And he hangs up.

He feels good for about three seconds - getting the last word in, always a victory - before he remembers that he called Jon because he was miserable and wanted comfort. And now he feels worse.

He walks into his kitchen. He turns around and walks to the patio door. He walks over to the bookshelf with all his half-read paperbacks. He walks into the kitchen again.

Ryan can admit to himself - just barely - that he kind of hates the thought of Jon in Chicago. Jon and his weird little apartment with its rugs and static from the electric heaters and faint catty smell and warped old windows that frost over till you can't even see out of them, much less open them, in wintertime. But who would want them open, it's so cold there. Ryan hates the cold, too, even though Jon seems to like it fine. Jon likes it so much that he wouldn't even come visit when Ryan asked in January. Come and stay and write songs for a few weeks, Ryan said, and Jon hedged and pretended the invitation wasn't serious and that he needed to find someone to look after the cats and then after a week of delays said he couldn’t make it and changed the subject back to finding a new manager.

And if Ryan hates that Jon would rather be in deep-freeze in Chicago than here in the canyon with Ryan and his arbutus trees, then the thought of Spencer curled up in that warm and safe little hovel is flat-out hell.

Ryan realizes he has been standing in his bare feet watching the rain splatter against his patio for long enough that the clouds have turned the light into a premature evening purple.

It's still only four, Ryan knows. This entire day has just been the same: he's been unprepared for everything, even the end of it.

He thinks about taking some more tylenol, going back to bed. He thinks about calling Z or Alex and asking what's up for tonight. He wants to find someone to fuck, he wants to find something to drink.

He stares at the puddles forming on his flagstone and thinks about his dad for a while. Just for good measure.

Then he goes upstairs and digs through the spare closet looking for the peacoat he likes to wear whenever the weather suits his east coast pretensions, and grabs his keys off the counter and gets into his car.

It's only eight miles down the road. He still knows the way, even if he's done his best to forget the address, forget the street, forget the untrimmed hedge out front and the way the cement stairs tilt just enough to the left that you will worry about stumbling if you're sober and will definitely, definitely stumble if you're drunk.

Now the rain is falling as hard as it ever has, rushing in silty torrents down the sides of the road. Flash floods happen in weather like this. Sink holes, houses falling into oceans. This ground isn't used to so much water - it's a starving man who'll eat himself to death. Ryan drives carefully, windshield wipers banging away. It's like a fish tank out there.

Ryan knows that if he were sensible he'd just call Brendon. Turn around and watch the downpour for an hour and not try to drive through traffic in it.

But he's not sensible, he's angry - and he wants to see Brendon's face when he finds out about Spencer. He wants to know he's not the only person left in the world who can feel betrayed.

He gets through the lights into Santa Monica before his van breaks down. His van, the '78 Westfalia that he bought when the payments on the Porsche started to interfere with his ability to pay his bar tab. Jon told him it was a death trap, running on three cylinders with dubious brakes, but Ryan doesn't know enough about cars to really contradict him. He'll get it fixed up. He just keeps imagining touring in it. It's a nondescript blue, the roof lifts up for camping. He can see them pulling into venue parking lots with their gear piled in the back. They could save money on hotels. They could get a little trailer to haul their stuff. It'll be perfect for touring.

It's not a good vehicle for driving eight miles in the rain, though.

It starts making a sound like there's a piece of silverware grinding around in the wheel well, and then the steering wheel goes all slack and loose in his hands and it takes all the reefing he can do to drift right, pull out of traffic and over the curb and into something that used to be a ditch but is now a raging torrent of mud between the highway and the beach.

Parked, he's afraid to turn the engine off. He is not convinced he will be able to get the van out of the ditch, steering wheel or no steering wheel.

He gives the wheel a cautious turn, and it spins easily in his hands even though his tires are definitely just sitting there, up to their hubcaps in mud.

He gets out to look, anyway. The rain is all over him, soaking him through in half a minute flat. He slides a little, staggers as he squints at the van, trying to find something that looks wrong, at least. He props open the hood, thinking maybe something will look broken in there. Rain funnels down through his sleeves from his knuckles to his armpits, trailing cold fingertips along the inside of his arm. The engine block could be the inside of a spaceship for all the sense it makes. Still. That's what people do when their car is broken and they're stuck on the side of the road: they open the hood.

He looks at the wet gray blur of traffic passing by. Fragmented yellow headlights blurring, and sheets of water spraying up from tires. No one slows down, though the odd face turns to peer at him through the glass.

He doesn't climb back inside - his loafers are coated two inches thick with mud, it's soaked through to his socks, and the wool of his coat can only bead off so much water. He doesn't want to have to clean the van out later. He calls information from a relatively sturdy patch of ground, and gets forwarded to a tow truck company, who say they can get someone there in ten minutes.

"Okay," Ryan says, "That sounds good. Thank you."

He waits. He watches the sky get dark. He can't even see the sky, it's all just water in the air, water on the horizon. The beach is black, the water rolling up onto it a viscous gray.

He should've listened to Jon. Jon doesn't say it unless he means it. He'd call Jon right now just to say, "You were right" if only he had some kind of assurance that Jon wouldn't be tearing his mouth away from Spencer’s just to say, What, Ryan?

Spencer went to Jon. Ryan would laugh, if only he wasn't so goddamn hurt by it.

The truck shows up half an hour later. The guy - he's wearing a dirty ballcap and he's young and he has a dog in the cab with him - doesn't apologize for being late. He barely even acknowledges Ryan as he puts up his traffic cones and maneuvers halfway into the ditch and lifts the van out like it’s a piece of trash.

Ryan just stands there, watching and feeling about as useless as a drowned rat.

The guy asks him where he wants to go.

"Wherever's closest," Ryan says. "Tell them I'll pick it up tomorrow."

The guy looks at him dubiously, and Ryan meets his unspoken where the hell do you think you're going in this shit? with a flat stare.

"Don't you need my credit card or something?" he asks instead.

And then he walks. He follows the mud on the side of the road until he hits another streetlight, and then he crosses into a residential area with all its hedges and foliage flattened under the weight of the water pouring down. Traffic has all but disappeared, as people cancel their plans or put off errands so they can stand in windows staring incredulously at this weather and the idiot walking past their house in it.

His hair is drenched, siphoning water under his collar to soak his shirt, too. His shoes weigh a ton, his jeans are wicking water all the way up to his thighs, splatter from the road has hit the left side of his coat, which is now carrying water like a forty-pound towel over his shoulders.

He wonders if Jon and Spencer really are making out. Or if that's just uncharitable of him: making it tawdry and pubescent when probably it's something more complicated than he'll ever know. Ryan knows he's always been bad for oversimplifying; pixellating grays into tiny squares of black and white so someone is always wrong and someone is always right.

So Spencer went to Jon. So neither of them came to him. Ryan can recognize when he feels left out. Loneliness is the oldest feeling he has, the very deepest one he knows.

At least Brendon called him.

That thought hits him as funny as he walks, and he smirks down at the sidewalk. Or maybe it's a smile. It's hard to tell.

It takes him thirty-five minutes to get from his van to Brendon's front door. And he walks at a brisk clip. Not a single wrong turn: a first for him. He shuffles past the hedge and up the crooked concrete steps.

And when he's standing there on the porch, with his ears sticking out through his hair and his nose dripping water from the tip, he freezes.

He doesn't knock on the door. He just stands there under the awning, trying to remember what he meant to say. What it was, exactly, that he came all the way down here to see. Brendon's face? The look on it when he finds out that Spencer just skipped town entirely? Ryan can't be sure. He doesn't trust his own motivations, suddenly. He can't identify what it is that he wants.

He almost leaves. He turns away from the house. But he looks up, and gets caught because the lower edges of the clouds west over the ocean have started to burn up orange. They're in flames, even though here on dry land the gray is still wringing water onto everything. Ryan stops, stuck staring at a horizon that is slowly reappearing, in bits and pieces.

And maybe after a minute, maybe after ten, the door opens.

"Ryan," Brendon says. "What the hell?"

Ryan turns and blinks at him for a second. Brendon looks like he could be angry, still. Brendon in his droopy purple v-neck splattered at the waist with water, his hands looking wet and pink like he was doing dishes in the sink. Ryan has never once seen Brendon wash a dish before. He looks at Brendon's hands, mystified that it is some secret hobby of his.

"Spencer's in Chicago with Jon." Ryan tells him. He can't break it to him easy; he can't say it with satisfaction. He says it because he has to. Knowing how terrible it will make Brendon feel. How insufficient, and bereft, and alone.

Brendon's face registers all of that, all the things Ryan was hoping for and afraid of. Seeing it makes Ryan feels awful.

Brendon says, "Are you serious?" He says, "What the fuck?"

"Yeah," Ryan says. "I guess he just showed up this morning."

"He went to Jon." Brendon says it like it's the answer to a crossword puzzle, a dumb riddle. Something he should've figured out himself right off the bat, but the answer was too obvious to possibly be right. Brendon says, "How long have they been-" and then stops himself.

There is no verb, no noun, for Spencer and Jon together.

So they stand there at Brendon's front door for a few minutes, as if maybe together their combined confusion and hurt and dampness might lighten the load for the both of them.

"Really?" Brendon asks finally, plaintively, one soapy hand flopping up and down like a white flag of surrender.

"Yeah," Ryan says. And as he hears himself he understands that he is terribly, terribly sorry for being the one to come and tell Brendon this. It's a relief. It's a huge and terrifying relief to know that he is sorry for this.

Brendon pauses again, this time to look at Ryan's feet. "Aren't those your Fluevogs?"

Ryan looks down too. His Fluevogs: some of the mud has washed off to reveal blisters in the patent leather that will dry into cracks, later. The dove gray shine is off. And their pretty pink insides are probably red, because they're so wet that water squishes out of them when he shifts his weight.

"Come in." Brendon says, sudden and polite. He steps aside, opening the door wider. "I was. Um. I made lasagna. It's in the oven."

Ryan hesitates. "Lasagna?" he asks. Brendon washing a dish. Brendon cooking lasagna. He says, "Do I even know you?"

"Come in," Brendon repeats, and this time he puts a hand on Ryan's shoulder and pulls him through the door. "What, did you walk here?"

"Yeah," Ryan says. "Part way."

Brendon gives him a look, and then takes his sodden jacket, and watches Ryan crouch to untangle the hardened knots in his laces, and says, "What is wrong with you, Ross?"

Ryan looks up, fingers still working at the laces. "I'm sorry," he says.

Brendon shakes his head, shakes the words off like they're a buzz in his ear.

"I miss you," Ryan says. Still on his knee, still gazing up. He didn't know it was true until he said it, but now he knows. Now it's obvious to him.

"I'm sick of acting like you're dead," Ryan says. He grabs one of Brendon's slippery hands. He holds onto it with both of his, which are cold and keep sliding off Brendon's long fingers. He says, "I've made myself so fucking miserable."

Brendon has half a scowl on his face. The other half is unclassifiable. "You made all of us pretty miserable, Ryan."

The part of Ryan that bristles at that - him, like it was him alone that did this - is not the part of him that is dripping half the Pacific on Brendon's welcome mat. He bows his head. He says, "I mean it. I'm sorry."

"It's not the end of the world," Brendon says. His voice is quiet. Ryan can't read it. It doesn't sound like forgiveness. But it sounds like something, at least. A fragment of it, barely recognizable.

Brendon takes a step away, but now he's gripping Ryan's hand back. He pulls at him. "Come eat. We can put your clothes in the dryer."

Ryan shuffles out of his shoes, and his socks leave a swampy trail on the tile as he follows Brendon into the kitchen.

He feels desperate in a way he hasn't since high school. Brendon's kitchen smells like garlic bread and tomato sauce, and it's a giant mess of half-grated blocks of cheese and pasta boxes and old beer bottles and various vegetable detritus all over the counters. Ryan could stand here, breathing in the smell and mess and familiarity of it for hours.

He watches Brendon take two plates out of the cupboard and root around for cutlery in a drawer. Brendon puts his hand in an oven mitt and pulls a glass dish out of the oven. It tilts dangerously before he slides it onto the range, knocking aside empty pots to make room.

"It has to cool," Brendon says, turning back to look at Ryan. He looks like he feels awkward. He glances at the wet patches on the linoleum that Ryan is standing in. "Do you want to borrow some clothes?"

Ryan is worried he might start to cry. He can't name anything more humiliating, more abject, than sobbing in Brendon Urie's disaster of a kitchen when he has managed to never, not once, cry about this shit before. But it seems to be certain, now. That he'll hit that low. Now the gates are open, it seems inevitable that he'll beg.

But Brendon cuts him off before he even starts. "I don't know why Spencer left," he says. It's a confession: his arms folded and his shoulders hunched. He leans a hip against the counter and looks down at the floor and then up through his glasses. "I tried really hard to figure out what was wrong. I tried everything. But I don't think he wanted my help." He frowns. "I should've called you earlier. You could've helped, probably."

Ryan says, "Maybe," when he means, maybe not. "It's funny," he says, trying to make it sound like maybe what he's about to say is actually funny and not just sad, "But you're the only one who called me to ask for help at all."

Brendon goes to shrug aside the comment, but Ryan takes a few steps forward and catches the side of his tshirt and says, "I mean, it's not funny. It's sad. It makes me really- it makes me realize how much I miss you. And how sorry I am, and-" and there. He chokes up. He puts his face down. His fist is still clenching Brendon's shirt and Brendon works it loose gently, and then puts his arms around Ryan's shoulders, wet and cold as they are, and his face in Ryan's collar and holds him there for as long as it takes for Ryan's breathing to even out and his nose to stop running, and the rain to stop falling entirely, and Brendon's purple shirt to soak through to the skin and the garlic bread to burn in the oven and the lasagna to cool down enough to eat.

And sometime in that whole huge length of time, Brendon turns his mouth to Ryan's ear, and says, "I always wanted to call. Every day. I always needed you."

And at some point later, Ryan finds himself sitting on Brendon's couch in a pair of pajama pants too short to reach past his ankles and a clean shirt that smells like laundry detergent and a natty knit blanket wrapped around his shoulders while he forks mouthfuls of lasagna into his hungry maw and listens to his slacks tumble in the dryer and shoves his icy cold bare feet between Brendon's legs and the couch cushions for optimal warmth.

And sometime even later than that, he wakes up in the dark to grope for his phone and send Jon a text that is mostly an apology, but also maybe a blessing that he knows he has no right to give.

And some day, Ryan hopes, he'll know again where Spencer goes when he needs to feel safe. And comforted. And happy.

Right now, though, standing on wet linoleum with Brendon wrapped around him and his voice clogged up past speaking and his whole body cold and wet and shaking, Ryan knows where he can go for all of that. And he knows it’s more than he deserves, and he is grateful.