fic: All Fires Have To Burn Alive, 2/3
Spencer is in front of the television when Brendon comes in the door. He is perched on the coffee table, his back curved in attention. It's dark now, but the lights aren't on. It's just Spencer and the blue glow off the news. CNN has pictures of skies glowing red.
"They say it's coming down through Thousand Oaks," he says when Brendon pauses to look. "They already evacuated Santa Paula but then the wind changed."
"Jesus," Brendon says. "That's so close."
"They have fire breaks and stuff," Spencer says, as if to reassure him. Even though Spencer's the one with the antacid pills. Unrelated to the wildfires, maybe, but still.
"That's good," says Brendon.
Spencer doesn't ask where he's been. The dogs are piled around on the floor like throw pillows. Brendon steps over them as he goes to his room. He closes his door against Dylan, because he is going to lie down on his bed and think of Ryan's gratified smirk in sepia sunlight and jerk off imagining Ryan's mouth.
--
Spencer again, at seven in the morning: "I mean, you know we're booked to record next month, right?"
He looks like he maybe hasn't slept. He's standing in the doorway of Brendon's room, boxers and an OK Go t-shirt. His hair at odd angles. Brendon gets the strangest feeling that Spencer is actually sleep-talking, sleep-walking. That he hasn't been to bed yet. He sounds plaintive.
Brendon sits up, eyes squinted closed, a twisted sheet wrapped around his legs. "I know, Spencer. I know that."
"We don't have any songs," Spencer says. "I mean, new ones. And that's like, three weeks-"
"Why are you in here?" Brendon asks. Because he doesn't actually remember Spencer coming in, or the start of this conversation. He puts the heel of his hand in his eyesocket, trying harder to wake up.
Spencer's hair is at odd angles because he keeps putting his fingers in it, tugging the ends of it in frustrated jerks. "We should get to work. We need to start writing stuff down. Lyrics, some fucking lyrics would be good."
"I don't have any lyrics right now," Brendon says. "I'm not even awake."
Spencer stares at him. His mouth open, then closed. He says, "I'll make some coffee. Come downstairs."
When Spencer goes, Brendon rolls out of bed to follow.
He wasn't lying: he still has no lyrics. But there are plenty of melodies, so he sings gibberish over them. Spencer rolls his eyes when he rhymes cat with bat with hat, but they're doing what he wanted. Raw material. Brendon can grind it out with the best of them.
They break for waffles at ten. Ian makes them with buckwheat and blackberries and a fifty-year-old waffle iron that Spencer's mom found at an estate sale last time she visited. It is glorious and sugary and when they go back down Brendon starts to feel the flow. He has his guitar, he has his keyboard and the notes are all there in his head, he just has to let his fingers move with them. Spencer spends more time with his notebook than his drum kit. He comes and sits beside Brendon at the keyboard and takes over for the chorus while Brendon tries out something with the guitar. The beats will come later. Brendon thinks the words might not come at all.
They come up out of the basement, hungry again, and it's six o'clock. The house is already darkening.
"God," Shane says from the couch, Left 4 Dead paused on the flatscreen, "Who knew rock stars ever put in eight hour days?"
"Ha," Spencer says, heading to the kitchen, examining the contents of the vegetable crisper. He doesn't come up with anything wittier than that, just pulls a bag of spinach out.
Brendon pauses in the living room to watch Shane and Ian coordinate their attack on a spitter zombie. Then, restless, he drifts through the house to his bedroom, not knowing what he's after until he picks up his phone off the nightstand.
It stares back at him, blank. No new messages.
He tosses it back on the bed. He doesn't feel disappointed. But he doesn't feel accomplished, anymore, either. The day feels less like they were building something up, now. More just pushing something along. A boulder up a hill. A dead car down the highway.
Brendon doesn't go back downstairs after dinner. He hits the couch beside Ian and spends the rest of the evening with his xbox controller and some scary-as-shit zombies.
--
Two days later there are still no lyrics and Spencer has a meeting scheduled with their business manager, Barry. Brendon does not want to go. He doesn't tell Spencer this until they're circling the block, looking for street parking outside Barry's office.
Brendon says, "You know, I kind of hate Barry,"
Spencer looks sideways at him as he makes his sixth right hand turn in the last five minutes. "Okay?"
"It's his hair," Brendon says. "He looks like a shampoo commercial."
"It is voluminous," Spencer admits. He creeps up behind an Escalade that a dude in a suit and sneakers is getting into. Slowly. While talking on his cell phone and coaxing his shih tzu into the back seat.
"So would you mind if maybe I didn't come in with you?" Brendon asks.
Spencer's forehead has a deep crease in it. The Escalade isn't moving yet, because the guy is now reading his text messages with the engine running. There are at least three vehicles stuck in the lane behind them, and whoever's at the end of the line honks.
Brendon presses his point: "You know I'm not going to actually say anything. I don't even know what this meeting is for."
"We're signing off on last year's expenses." Spencer says it like he's already said it four times. Which is possible.
"See?" Brendon says, "I'll be useless. I'll just go find a coffee shop or something and wait."
The guy in the Escalade shoulder-checks and, seeing that Spencer is blocking traffic for him - as he has been for the last five minutes - vacates his space. Spencer hits the gas, pulls into the spot, and is parked with the engine off in three seconds flat.
He turns to Brendon as he pulls the keys out of the ignition. "You're saying you want me to do this by myself?"
"If that's okay?" Brendon tries to look as small as possible. He knows the look on Spencer's face: annoyed, and long-suffering, and sick of being both.
Before, between Ryan and Spencer, Brendon always used to get a free pass with the paperwork. But things are different now. And the look on Spencer's face reminds him of that, acutely: it looks like he's waiting for Brendon to say something else so that he can tear into his hide with his incisors.
Brendon's need to escape is faltering under that stare. He opens his mouth to back down, agree to go and look at Barry's spreadsheets and see how much they spent on personal shoppers and website maintenance, but instead he says, "I just - I have some stuff that I really need to get down. Words."
Spencer's stare bends away, locks on the dashboard. "Oh," he says. He glances back. "Really? That's good."
"Call me when you're done," Brendon says as they get out of the car. "I'll meet you back here."
Spencer is headed down the sidewalk to one of several indistinguishable glass-doored lobbies. "Bring me something good," he calls back, a little too sharp to be casual.
Brendon waves in response. He has no idea if Spencer means something good like a latte or something good like a decent song.
He finds a table and a coffee and he pulls out his phone with its note-taking application because he doesn't really carry his notebook around, he's not that pretentious. Although: sitting in a coffee shop hunched over your phone. Well.
He has no lyrics, which makes him a liar. Or at the very least, a child. He has no excuses. Besides the fact that Barry, yeah, is kind of interminably boring and the chairs in front of his desk where he twists his monitor to face you so you can see your Excel file are maybe the third ring of hell. And Brendon can't handle that right now. The ins and outs. The dwindling pile of cash that needs to get them through until the next album. And then there's that: the next album needs to earn enough to pay everyone, to pay them and Pete and the personal shoppers. And then they need to get out onto the road again, and the thought of playing songs that they haven't even written yet - not the old ones, not the ones they always play when they go out, none of those - the thought that he needs to write the words that he'll sing for the next year or five or ten or however many his career lasts for, it's terrifying.
He has no idea how Ryan managed to do it for so long.
He almost calls him right then to ask.
But he remembers the rules about what they talk about. He'd bet the pile of money Spencer is sifting through right now that Ryan would hang up on him the second he asked.
Whatever got said, Brendon is a hundred percent sure Ryan didn't leave to write his own songs. There was never any argument about that - Ryan always wrote what he liked. He left because he wanted to sing them himself, that's all. And to tour around like a gypsy musician with no money for booze and no bus and no tour manager and just half-empty bars and scowling audiences that don't want to like you.
Ryan's always had a talent for making things harder than they needed to be. Whereas Brendon keeps things easy. So easy they kept the name. That's all.
Brendon sits and drinks his coffee and pokes around on his keypad thinking maybe he can fake writing a song. Put some words together in a nice, obscure way that is functionally meaningless. Or maybe he can write a song that is not about him or anyone at all. Just a story. Lots of bands do that. Write fiction instead of memoir.
Brendon looks around the coffee shop, and punches out three separate sets of verses about the way-too-attractive barista, the girl by the door with her daughter, and the very intense-looking bald man with the scraggly beard who walks by outside holding a violin case.
They all suck, he's pretty sure. They come too easy to be any good. But he hopes Spencer won't notice. He picks him up a latte, just in case.
--
Ryan texts him a full week after their slurpee run. It's been long enough, actually, that Brendon was starting to think that the blowjob had just been some kind of manipulative fuck-you punishment. Not that he was thinking about it. But it's four o'clock and he's driving back from the groomers' with like, a dozen dogs in his back seat and he reads the message at a stoplight even though he knows he shouldn't.
checking out some local kids tonight, want to come?
The feeling in his gut for those last three words is adolescent and chemical. He doesn't think, he just types back, fast, because traffic is starting to move again: sure.
He's pretty sure Ryan means music. And he has no idea who, or where, or when, or if Ryan means just the two of them or if it's a thing all his new friends will be at.
He doesn't want to see Ryan's new friends. But he'd maybe consider it, if he had to.
He makes it to his driveway before Ryan sends on the details. Some band Brendon's never heard of, which figures. Dive bar. I'll be there by 10, Ryan says.
Brendon gets there at 9. He is accidentally early, after dropping off the spare key at Regan's sister's house and picking up some allergy pills at the drug store. It's the smoke in the air, which has been getting thicker and thicker so that some days Brendon wakes up with his nose bleeding onto his sheets and he can't see the ocean from the window. The houses in their rows down the hill turn into shadows of themselves and then fade into the fog. He downs glass after glass of water. The air advisory is running constantly, telling them to stay indoors, stop exercising, listen for updates. It doesn't tell people not to leave LA, but it doesn't tell them to stay, either.
You hear the same conversation everywhere. The guy checking IDs at the door, the girl behind the bar. Soon it'll rain, people say. It's not like the city's going to burn.
Brendon sits at the bar and orders a beer and takes a half-interested inventory of the instruments crammed onto the little stage at the back. The mess of amps and cords are sitting maybe a foot off the ground, the stage done up in tinsel and tinfoil in a way that manages to look glam and gothy and ironic all at once. He tries to look intent, focused, so as not to feel so conspicuously alone.
People are filtering down the stairs, ordering drinks, standing in clumps. Eventually a couple of people wander onstage and start playing a low, driving set with a Hammond organ and a floor tom and admirably simple harmonies. Brendon strains to hear their lyrics. Gets up and plants himself in the center of the semi-circle around the little stage so he can listen better, watch their mouths move. There are maybe twenty people who are listening. Everyone else floats around the bar, talking loudly, their faces illuminated white by the screens of their phones.
The first band leaves the stage after a half-dozen songs, and another one comes and goes, and now it's these dudes with jangly guitars and horn-rimmed glasses and roses on their black button-down shirts singing songs so familiar that Brendon would guess they were covers, except he knows Ryan would never be caught dead at a show featuring a cover band, so.
So it's after eleven. So for the fifth time that night, Brendon considers the possibility that Ryan has stood him up. Invited him out just to stand him up. The thought is ugly. But Brendon is starting to feel ugly, standing there with an empty beer bottle in his hand pretending to look interested in this alt-country shit. He can't put it past Ryan because he doesn't know Ryan anymore. He hasn't known him for ages.
But then the song ends and he looks over and Ryan's standing right there beside him, watching the stage, chewing on his lower lip as the guy playing the lap steel adjusts his fingerpicks and the singer makes small talk into the mic. This set's almost over, too.
Ryan glances over and grins a greeting. He leans in and speaks close to Brendon's ear. "I didn't realize I was so late."
Brendon shrugs off the half-apology, staring blankly at the stage, and says, "It's fine."
As the band kicks up again, he realizes it's not. He's pissed. If Ryan was high, that would be an excuse. But he's not, and he still doesn't care that Brendon just stood here waiting for him for two and a half hours. Brendon is a breath away from turning and walking out without another word when Ryan's hand snakes into his.
He glances over, and Ryan is smiling at the stage. He squeezes Brendon's hand without looking at him.
So Brendon stays for the rest of the set, tethered by Ryan's warm palm and long fingers.
But as soon as the band puts down their instruments, Brendon turns and says, "I've got to get going."
"No way," Ryan says. His face is actually - he actually looks concerned. Eyebrows. "There's another set, I think."
"I'm tired," Brendon says. He can't resist adding, offhand, "I've been here since nine."
"Oh," Ryan says. He glances at the stage, like he's checking to make sure nothing interesting is about to happen, and then says, "Well, let me walk you to a cab anyway."
Brendon is surprised, and he doesn't argue. They thread through the crowd and push up the stairs.
Outside, the air is sluggish and dirty when it should be yellow with streetlamps and storefronts and headlights.
Ryan heads for the curb, but Brendon says, "My car's around the corner."
Ryan looks at him, like he might ask how much Brendon's had to drink, and then lowers his eyes when he realizes - he must see it, it's obvious in how stiff Brendon's shoulders are, how he's mashed up his hair by constantly putting his hand into it - that Brendon spent the whole evening in perfect sober contemplation. Like a nun in a chapel. Waiting.
Ryan is fiddling with the bottom button of his jacket. They walk to the corner of the block side by side. Then he says, "Hey, you know, I'm sorry for being so late. I don't know what happened."
"It wasn't on purpose?" Brendon asks. His voice sounds a little tight, but it's an honest question.
"No. I don't know." Ryan glances over - the same flash of dark eyes and a twitchy mouth. "Maybe it was."
Brendon curves in a little and stops in Ryan's peripheral vision, folding his arms over himself. Ryan Ross, answering questions. Ryan Ross, being honest.
Ryan gives a nervous smile. "I thought maybe you would've left."
Brendon's mouth is tight, his throat is tight, his arms are constricting his breathing and his shoulders are folded in. He shrugs, because yeah, he'd considered it.
Ryan nods. "I would have, if I were you."
Brendon stiffens. He opens his mouth to say something biting, but before he can Ryan is stepping in closer, winding in like a cat wanting his ears rubbed. "I'm glad you waited."
Ryan kisses Brendon. It's gentle and apologetic and it unwinds every tight string in Brendon's body. He finds himself arching open. He believes Ryan when he says it, he believes him entirely.
Ryan backs him up against the façade of the building, into the sheltered entryway of a sari shop, and kisses him more. Still delicate and asking permission. He is holding both of Brendon's hands. Their hips don't touch, they tip together like wine glasses.
People pass by on the sidewalk, and they laugh and chatter and sometimes make surprised noises and say things in high, hushed voices as they walk away. Brendon barely registers them, because all he can hear is the wanting, impatient sounds Ryan is making into his mouth.
They make it to Brendon's car. The parkade is mostly empty and full of huge cement columns that are begging to take the paint off your bumper, but are also handy for a feeling of privacy if you need a shadowy place to get off with your ex-boyfriend.
In the front seat, Ryan clambers into an awkward perch over the console and rubs his palm over the front of Brendon's jeans while his tongue moves in Brendon's mouth. "You're hard," he mutters. "You want me."
Brendon makes an agreeing noise, and Ryan pulls his mouth away, opens up Brendon's jeans. Brendon can't choose between watching Ryan's hand on his cock or squeezing his eyes closed to take in the sensation when Ryan starts to jerk him off. Ryan's palm is dry, his thumb is crooked to hit that spot that makes Brendon shudder and his legs twitch. His hand is a light, gentle curve, but it's moving at a tempo that would give a violinist a cramp.
Brendon knows he could come in thirty seconds flat, the way Ryan is working him. He's not slowing down, he's not teasing, he's hitting all of Brendon's cues in order: bang bang bang. Speed, grip, angle.
Towards the end last spring, Brendon had decided that sex with Ryan was like being played like an instrument. It was boring in the way that string quartets are boring: every note timed, every breath a cue, every change in tempo or tone pre-determined. The music written out a hundred years ago. But lately, in bed alone at night, he's been starting to think he was wrong. It's not that sex with Ryan was practiced and dull. It was the product of years of training. It was flawless.
Brendon's mouth is open, panting, his hips are bucked up into Ryan's fist. His jeans are worked down around his thighs. He wants to come, he wants Ryan to make him come, and he says so, over and over and over again.
He babbles: "Fuck, I've never. I've never. Ryan. You're perfect."
And Ryan, whose mouth is on Brendon's ear, sucking and breathing hard, says, "I know. I know. Did you miss me?"
"Yes." Brendon grates it out - he's given up on watching, his eyes are squeezed tight and his mouth is slack and his hips are straining up with how much he wants Ryan to keep touching him and never stop, never never stop. He says, "Yes, I fucking missed you. I haven't even looked at anyone else since you. I haven't kissed, or fucked - I've been a monk, Ryan. No one. No one else."
Ryan's hand, on his cock: a thousand nerves firing at once. Ryan's voice like a sigh in his ear: a current that rolls down his spine. "Me either."
Brendon's orgasm stretches through his veins like an electrical surge. He shoots ropes of come up his belly, and Ryan coaxes them out as Brendon shudders: one more, two more. And he is shaking, shocked with the effort.
He falls back into his seat and Ryan withdraws his hand. Pulls a handkerchief out of a pocket and cleans himself up.
Brendon's heart is trying to bust through his ribcage, but still, he sends a questing hand along the floor for some paper napkins for the pool of come on his stomach. He didn't have time to start sweating, but now it pours out of him, prickling from his temples and his neck and his whole hypersensitive, blown-out body. He shudders in his sprawl, limbs twitching.
Ryan is quiet in the passenger seat, and Brendon glances over, suddenly aware of that.
Ryan is examining the stitching on his handkerchief with mild interest.
Brendon tests the air. "You're so perfect." He repeats himself, and then remembers Ryan hates it when he repeats himself. But before he meant it like, in terms of performance and relief and absolute driving need, and now he means it in terms of the curve of the tip of Ryan's nose in backlit profile.
Ryan's eyebrow twitches. "So you said."
His tone hits a note inside Brendon that spreads familiar ripples: they hit the walls of his stomach and double back to form a rising wave of anxiety. "Ryan," Brendon says.
He knows he should've used a different word. At least the second time. Perfect is so trite.
"What?" Ryan looks over, and his face is a blank mask again. Eyebrows. Tight mouth.
Brendon can feel himself stalling out. He's - he knows he has to head this off, but he doesn't know what changed, and he doesn't know how to get back to the Ryan that was murmuring in his ear five minutes ago. "What just happened?" he says. "Did I- are you mad at me for something?"
Ryan shakes his head, like he has no idea what Brendon's referring to. But he says, "Look, I have to get going, or I'll miss the whole show." Which means, yes, dumbass, I'm pissed.
Ryan folds his handkerchief in quarters and opens the door.
Brendon takes a breath, Ryan is halfway out of the car before he blurts, desperate, leaning after him, knowing he's not going to stay: "I don't want to play games. I want to see you again. Can we do that? Please?"
Ryan looks back, just for a second. Brendon registers that he says something. Like, he sees Ryan's mouth move. He sees that Ryan's expression is narrow and pointed.
But Brendon doesn't hear it at first. Ryan's out of the car and the door has closed in Brendon's face and the narrow suited figure has disappeared into the stairwell before Brendon actually hears the words. Before they sink in enough for him to understand them.
Ryan said: "You know, for the record, you dumped me, asshole."
--
Black ash snows down on Brendon's windshield on the drive home. Big flakes of it smear into muddy streaks that he squints and twists to see through. He runs out of washer fluid, trying to keep the glass clear. Other cars on the road are having the same problem: traffic on the freeway is glacial.
The radio says that there's been an accident at the Port of Long Beach. The reporters are all on scene, there's sound clips of sirens and half-yelled accounts of the chaos. Brendon can't stand listening to it. He just wants to hear some music, so he fiddles until he finds a station streaming pop songs without a DJ to ruin the music.
Spencer is still up when Brendon comes in through the front door. He's standing under the eaves on the patio, watching the ash from burnt up forests drift silently through the yard. It flowers blackly on the surface of the lit pool.
He comes inside when he hears Brendon, a look on his face that says we have to talk about the album. Past that, he looks haggard, still. Brendon's starting to think he doesn't sleep at all anymore.
Brendon stops in the middle of the room and waits. They can have this conversation as many times as Spencer wants. He wishes his own answers would change. He wants to give Spencer some kind of hope or satisfaction. But he's got nothing. Especially right now: he's got fuck all.
Spencer pauses, flicking on a lamp. Then he blinks at Brendon. "Jesus," he says. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Brendon says, wondering how bad he could really look. Rumpled, probably. Tired. "I'm fine," he says. "Why?"
Hollowed out, maybe. Torn up. Wrung dry.
Spencer looks the same, in that case.
"You just." Spencer's face has lost that hunting look, and instead of coming closer he drops himself into Shane's ugly-ass recliner. "You've been gone a lot, and I know - whatever. It's cool. I just wish you'd come back looking happier."
Brendon's skin is cold, he realizes, and his stomach is curled up. He stands there, swaying a little as his body tries to decide what to do, where to move.
"I should be focusing more," Brendon says, a little stiff. "You're right."
"No, that's not-" Spencer waves a hand at the couch. "You work how you work."
Brendon sits down. Then he sprawls. A dog jumps onto his belly from the floor and he oomphs and lets her settle down into a warm ball over his solar plexus. "But it's not going that well, doing it my way," he says. It's harder than he'd thought it would be, admitting it.
"Have a little faith," Spencer says, and then laughs.
Brendon laughs too, because Spencer would never take crappy advice like that, if Brendon was the one saying it.
"I'm serious," Spencer says. Then: "I cancelled our studio time."
Brendon can't help it, he starts forward enough that Indie startles off him, affronted. "What?" he says, "Why?"
Spencer's hand lifts and drops. His mouth opens to explain, but it takes a long time for the words to form. Eventually, he says, "I don't think the pressure was helping either of us."
"But," Brendon wants to say: but what about Pete? What about the label? What about the contract? What about - fuck it, what about Ryan and Jon and their fucking assload of spectacular new songs that they keep waving around? What about that?
Spencer heaves a breath out like he knows exactly what questions are so crowded up in Brendon's brain that none of them can make it out of his mouth. He's probably thought of them all. He's probably got a spreadsheet somewhere with them ranked by importance.
Spencer gets up out of his chair, and comes over to the couch. He settles in beside Brendon with an arm snugged behind his waist and his head on Brendon's shoulder. Indie hops back up, snuffling around for a less hazardous lap.
"It's our album," Spencer says to Brendon's shoulder. "We can do it however we want."
Brendon lets the air out of his lungs, and with it, the panic. Spencer is warm against him. Brendon says, turning his face into Spencer's hair so that he won't have to admit this in anything louder than a murmur, "I think it's going to take me a really long time."
Spencer nods, but doesn't move away. Indie finally chooses a spot to wedge herself in, half between, half on top of them.
They stay like that for a long time, and watch the black ash falling down on the patio.
Part 3