You Don't Have To Love Me (You Already Did) - Prologue.
Title:You Don't Have To Love Me (You Already Did) - Prologue.
Rating: PG.
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon.
POV: 1st - Brendon's.
Summary: After Brendon Urie’s parents suggest their youngest son takes some time away from the family, he finds himself alone in an apartment (which is one storm away from falling in on itself) in the slums of Las Vegas. He's eighteen years old and still doesn’t know where he belongs, but as his journey of self-discovery deepens, so does Brendon's relationships with the kids his parents warned him about.
Disclaimer: None of this ever happened. The title comes from something Ryan Ross once posted on LiveJournal. A repost of that particular blog can be found here.
April 12. A very merry unbirthday to me.
Every year on this day it’s meant to be “happy birthday”, but today it’s just “birthday”. I never really took good care of myself, I mainly just focused on surviving and existing. So, why am I supposed to celebrate making it to twenty-three? At seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, I never even thought about making it to twenty-three, but I did. I kept going for Spencer and Ryan and Jon. And I kept on making it, and now I’m here with Spencer and Jon; Ryan’s probably on another continent somewhere, playing to a crowd of thousands as he sings the words he once wrote on the fog of my mirror.
Mein geburtstag.
Pete’s closed his Los Angeles branch of Angels and Kings for the night, throwing up tacky birthday banners and piling cupcakes with cerulean icing on a table by the small stage. Almost everyone I’ve ever known, ever met, are here, and so is everyone else. Friends of friends of friends of Pete’s. Years later, he still throws the best parties. People come in flocks, and they’re mostly here to see Pete or the entertainment. I’m just secondary. I still don’t what band’s playing, but there’s a single wooden chair behind a mic stand on the stage. Like always, I find myself fixated on the possibility of music instead of my own surroundings. An acoustic guitar is propped up against the chair, and even from this distance, I recognise it as one that I used to own but lost when my apartment was broken into.
I really should have gotten the lock fixed the first time Ryan broke in. He sat on the floor and played his guitar, the same one that’s on stage behind the cerulean toothaches, and I thought it was sweet. Instead, I should have been calling a locksmith. I want to reach out and run my hands down the guitar. I want to see if the scratches on the back are the same, if there’s still Ryan’s initials, a carved GRRIII, at the neck, and that’s just Pete; re-gifting something of mine that I already owned a long time ago. I make a move to climb up on stage, but then there’s arms wrapping around me and Pete’s braying laugh is in my ear.
Somebody tells me that the band playing are local burnouts. Somebody else says that Pete got Third Eye Blind to agree to play. It’d be nice to finally hear them live, I suppose, after all of those years of singing their words instead of slamming my fist into the wall. I don’t get my hopes up, though. It’s Pete Wentz; he would have deliberately been spreading rumours over the past few weeks so nobody would have any idea. Just to throw them off the trail. Someone from one of Pete’s old bands pats me on the back and says, “Happy birthday, Brandon,” but I don’t correct him. I just nod and smile back.
Near the bar someone tells me that it’s Ryan playing, but I don’t believe it. I’d know he was here, Pete would have warned me. Spencer and Jon, they would have warned me. But, then I remember the guitar and Pete’s knowing smile. Somebody takes a photograph of me and the flash burns my eyes, and when I can see again they’re shaking a Polaroid in my face and I’m just shaking in general. I search the closest pile of Polaroids for evidence, waiting to find Ryan’s face looking back up at me. It’s not there. I find several shots of Pete, and I fight back the urge to shred the photographs until the multiple shots of his wide, smiling mouth and eyes crinkling in laughter are nothing more than confetti on the floor.
Everything’s changed and nothing has.
Spencer knows, I realise that now, and that’s why he hasn’t come up to me to say “happy birthday” or ask if I’m okay, or to make fun of the people that flail more than they dance to whatever’s playing.
The lights fade out and then Pete’s on stage, and everyone’s singing happy birthday and looking for me. I lift my hand and laugh, a forced choke splitting through my lips. There’s no cake being wheeled out like last time I was here, and there’s no dancer coming out of the cake to laugh and put her hands around Ryan’s neck. There’s no look between Ryan and I, his eyes screaming for forgiveness but his shoulders shrugging in a, “what could you do?” manner as Keltie Colleen throws away her dignity for her boyfriend’s birthday in a public display of affection.
But, Ryan is here.
He walks out on stage and his hair’s longer than I remember and all he does is look at his feet as they step one in front of the other. I can see that he’s uncomfortable, and I’m back at the ferris wheel when he’s bloody and broken and there’s someone else throwing his tantrum. I’m back at his father’s funeral, watching him do a speech that I once thought George Ross II could never have deserved. Someone hands him the guitar, and I should have known. I should have fucking known that somehow Ryan would have gotten that back. The guitar that he gave to me, that was taken when it was the only part of Ryan I had left. He promised he’d never leave me, and he slowly took away everything that reminded me I once had him.
The chorus of “happy birthday” ends and Ryan clears his throat. Only now does he search the crowd, but I’m behind William and Gabe and he won’t see me. He won’t see me watching him, craning my neck so I can see every little detail. The subtle movement of his adam’s apple when he swallows nervously, his eyes darting around between the crowd and his girlfriend, and I’m relieved to see it’s not Keltie, standing side-stage.
The 60-inch plasma television behind him is covered with a spectacularly distasteful banner, seeming to have been painted in every shade present on the colour wheel. Ryan takes his seat and I look away from the TV, from the stage Alex Gaskarth once climbed onto when his bandmate bet him he couldn’t steal anything from the bar and he chose to take what is possibly the most noticeable thing. Security stopped him before he had even tried to pick it up, but when they tried to talk him down, when his manager told him that it was okay to just leave and walk away, he pulled his arm back and put his fist through the glass.
Pete laughed and said, “this is why we can’t have nice things” and never got it replaced.
And I feel like that television; broken a long time ago just because an egotistical musician couldn’t have me when he wanted. Nobody ever bothered to pick up the pieces, and nobody ever fixed me. It took me too long to realise that I could fix myself, but I’m still learning how. Ryan was always shit at cleaning up after himself, so years later, I’m still fixing his mess. Fixing me.
Alex is around here somewhere, and he’s probably boasting to his friends about the time he got drunk and broke Pete Wentz’s TV. Jack Barakat, who dared him, and Matt Flyzik, the manager that couldn’t quite talk Alex down, are both here and probably laughing. Rolling their eyes because the story Alex tells isn’t quite like the one that they remember.
So, when Ryan sings I think of Alex, because he sings the words of a story that begun when I thought I was already nearing the closing chapter.
He begins with idle strumming on the guitar, announcing, “I have a new song for you tonight,” to which the crowd applaud. Gabe and William attempt to wolf-whistle over one another and see who’s the loudest. Somebody else, who sounds an awful lot like Pete, yells out, “You’re fucking hot!” and Ryan rolls his eyes, beginning the introduction to the song that sounds familiar, and says, “Thanks, Pete.” Everything is still so familiar, and it’s hard to remember that it hasn’t always been like this. Hasn’t always been this easy.
The further Ryan gets into the song, the more I believe that this isn’t a new song at all. It’s the first single he released, actually, and I’ve never listened to it properly, but there’s still familiarity in it. I realise it’s the song he was writing when he broke into my apartment that night.
It’s his version of what happened, and something he once referred to as a “therapeutic chain of events” in an argument with Spencer. When I move from behind Gabe and William, when I move forward and toward the stage, my hand clutching at a glass of champagne that I can’t remember picking up, his eyes finally find mine. They’re full of both regret and pride.
I listen to his song and I keep listening even when he’s finished and gone off stage. Pete hands me a cupcake and I’m still hearing that song, and he’s smiling. The bastard is smiling as he apologises and says he hopes it’s not too much. I don’t know if he’s talking about the party or the bright blue cupcakes or perhaps Ryan. I nod and say it’s okay, and then I walk away. As I walk away from Pete I begin to consider, perhaps for the first time, that the story of Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie might have some kind of conclusion after all. No happy hugs, and no montage of the beach. It’s not a dream where you’re running through a sunflower field with clouds dancing across a crystal blue sky with your lover running toward you, the wind whipping through his lovely lavish locks, and you reach to him for that perfect passionate kiss. There’s no sunflower field or crystal blue sky. There’s drunken musicians dancing and spilling their drinks, and the carpeted floor by the bar could be wrung out into a shot glass if we ever run out of drinks. So, there’s none of that, but there’s something better than the mess that came before.
Rating: PG.
Pairing: Ryan/Brendon.
POV: 1st - Brendon's.
Summary: After Brendon Urie’s parents suggest their youngest son takes some time away from the family, he finds himself alone in an apartment (which is one storm away from falling in on itself) in the slums of Las Vegas. He's eighteen years old and still doesn’t know where he belongs, but as his journey of self-discovery deepens, so does Brendon's relationships with the kids his parents warned him about.
Disclaimer: None of this ever happened. The title comes from something Ryan Ross once posted on LiveJournal. A repost of that particular blog can be found here.
April 12. A very merry unbirthday to me.
Every year on this day it’s meant to be “happy birthday”, but today it’s just “birthday”. I never really took good care of myself, I mainly just focused on surviving and existing. So, why am I supposed to celebrate making it to twenty-three? At seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, I never even thought about making it to twenty-three, but I did. I kept going for Spencer and Ryan and Jon. And I kept on making it, and now I’m here with Spencer and Jon; Ryan’s probably on another continent somewhere, playing to a crowd of thousands as he sings the words he once wrote on the fog of my mirror.
Mein geburtstag.
Pete’s closed his Los Angeles branch of Angels and Kings for the night, throwing up tacky birthday banners and piling cupcakes with cerulean icing on a table by the small stage. Almost everyone I’ve ever known, ever met, are here, and so is everyone else. Friends of friends of friends of Pete’s. Years later, he still throws the best parties. People come in flocks, and they’re mostly here to see Pete or the entertainment. I’m just secondary. I still don’t what band’s playing, but there’s a single wooden chair behind a mic stand on the stage. Like always, I find myself fixated on the possibility of music instead of my own surroundings. An acoustic guitar is propped up against the chair, and even from this distance, I recognise it as one that I used to own but lost when my apartment was broken into.
I really should have gotten the lock fixed the first time Ryan broke in. He sat on the floor and played his guitar, the same one that’s on stage behind the cerulean toothaches, and I thought it was sweet. Instead, I should have been calling a locksmith. I want to reach out and run my hands down the guitar. I want to see if the scratches on the back are the same, if there’s still Ryan’s initials, a carved GRRIII, at the neck, and that’s just Pete; re-gifting something of mine that I already owned a long time ago. I make a move to climb up on stage, but then there’s arms wrapping around me and Pete’s braying laugh is in my ear.
Somebody tells me that the band playing are local burnouts. Somebody else says that Pete got Third Eye Blind to agree to play. It’d be nice to finally hear them live, I suppose, after all of those years of singing their words instead of slamming my fist into the wall. I don’t get my hopes up, though. It’s Pete Wentz; he would have deliberately been spreading rumours over the past few weeks so nobody would have any idea. Just to throw them off the trail. Someone from one of Pete’s old bands pats me on the back and says, “Happy birthday, Brandon,” but I don’t correct him. I just nod and smile back.
Near the bar someone tells me that it’s Ryan playing, but I don’t believe it. I’d know he was here, Pete would have warned me. Spencer and Jon, they would have warned me. But, then I remember the guitar and Pete’s knowing smile. Somebody takes a photograph of me and the flash burns my eyes, and when I can see again they’re shaking a Polaroid in my face and I’m just shaking in general. I search the closest pile of Polaroids for evidence, waiting to find Ryan’s face looking back up at me. It’s not there. I find several shots of Pete, and I fight back the urge to shred the photographs until the multiple shots of his wide, smiling mouth and eyes crinkling in laughter are nothing more than confetti on the floor.
Everything’s changed and nothing has.
Spencer knows, I realise that now, and that’s why he hasn’t come up to me to say “happy birthday” or ask if I’m okay, or to make fun of the people that flail more than they dance to whatever’s playing.
The lights fade out and then Pete’s on stage, and everyone’s singing happy birthday and looking for me. I lift my hand and laugh, a forced choke splitting through my lips. There’s no cake being wheeled out like last time I was here, and there’s no dancer coming out of the cake to laugh and put her hands around Ryan’s neck. There’s no look between Ryan and I, his eyes screaming for forgiveness but his shoulders shrugging in a, “what could you do?” manner as Keltie Colleen throws away her dignity for her boyfriend’s birthday in a public display of affection.
But, Ryan is here.
He walks out on stage and his hair’s longer than I remember and all he does is look at his feet as they step one in front of the other. I can see that he’s uncomfortable, and I’m back at the ferris wheel when he’s bloody and broken and there’s someone else throwing his tantrum. I’m back at his father’s funeral, watching him do a speech that I once thought George Ross II could never have deserved. Someone hands him the guitar, and I should have known. I should have fucking known that somehow Ryan would have gotten that back. The guitar that he gave to me, that was taken when it was the only part of Ryan I had left. He promised he’d never leave me, and he slowly took away everything that reminded me I once had him.
The chorus of “happy birthday” ends and Ryan clears his throat. Only now does he search the crowd, but I’m behind William and Gabe and he won’t see me. He won’t see me watching him, craning my neck so I can see every little detail. The subtle movement of his adam’s apple when he swallows nervously, his eyes darting around between the crowd and his girlfriend, and I’m relieved to see it’s not Keltie, standing side-stage.
The 60-inch plasma television behind him is covered with a spectacularly distasteful banner, seeming to have been painted in every shade present on the colour wheel. Ryan takes his seat and I look away from the TV, from the stage Alex Gaskarth once climbed onto when his bandmate bet him he couldn’t steal anything from the bar and he chose to take what is possibly the most noticeable thing. Security stopped him before he had even tried to pick it up, but when they tried to talk him down, when his manager told him that it was okay to just leave and walk away, he pulled his arm back and put his fist through the glass.
Pete laughed and said, “this is why we can’t have nice things” and never got it replaced.
And I feel like that television; broken a long time ago just because an egotistical musician couldn’t have me when he wanted. Nobody ever bothered to pick up the pieces, and nobody ever fixed me. It took me too long to realise that I could fix myself, but I’m still learning how. Ryan was always shit at cleaning up after himself, so years later, I’m still fixing his mess. Fixing me.
Alex is around here somewhere, and he’s probably boasting to his friends about the time he got drunk and broke Pete Wentz’s TV. Jack Barakat, who dared him, and Matt Flyzik, the manager that couldn’t quite talk Alex down, are both here and probably laughing. Rolling their eyes because the story Alex tells isn’t quite like the one that they remember.
So, when Ryan sings I think of Alex, because he sings the words of a story that begun when I thought I was already nearing the closing chapter.
He begins with idle strumming on the guitar, announcing, “I have a new song for you tonight,” to which the crowd applaud. Gabe and William attempt to wolf-whistle over one another and see who’s the loudest. Somebody else, who sounds an awful lot like Pete, yells out, “You’re fucking hot!” and Ryan rolls his eyes, beginning the introduction to the song that sounds familiar, and says, “Thanks, Pete.” Everything is still so familiar, and it’s hard to remember that it hasn’t always been like this. Hasn’t always been this easy.
The further Ryan gets into the song, the more I believe that this isn’t a new song at all. It’s the first single he released, actually, and I’ve never listened to it properly, but there’s still familiarity in it. I realise it’s the song he was writing when he broke into my apartment that night.
It’s his version of what happened, and something he once referred to as a “therapeutic chain of events” in an argument with Spencer. When I move from behind Gabe and William, when I move forward and toward the stage, my hand clutching at a glass of champagne that I can’t remember picking up, his eyes finally find mine. They’re full of both regret and pride.
I listen to his song and I keep listening even when he’s finished and gone off stage. Pete hands me a cupcake and I’m still hearing that song, and he’s smiling. The bastard is smiling as he apologises and says he hopes it’s not too much. I don’t know if he’s talking about the party or the bright blue cupcakes or perhaps Ryan. I nod and say it’s okay, and then I walk away. As I walk away from Pete I begin to consider, perhaps for the first time, that the story of Ryan Ross and Brendon Urie might have some kind of conclusion after all. No happy hugs, and no montage of the beach. It’s not a dream where you’re running through a sunflower field with clouds dancing across a crystal blue sky with your lover running toward you, the wind whipping through his lovely lavish locks, and you reach to him for that perfect passionate kiss. There’s no sunflower field or crystal blue sky. There’s drunken musicians dancing and spilling their drinks, and the carpeted floor by the bar could be wrung out into a shot glass if we ever run out of drinks. So, there’s none of that, but there’s something better than the mess that came before.