fic: Float On, bandslash (kind of), 4500 words
Non-bandslash people: This isn't really bandslash. At all. I mean, there's band, but there's no slash. And Jai says it can stand on its own and I believe her, because she's brilliant. So. Take from that what you may.
Float On
The day the world could have ended was the day Spencer turned twenty-one.
They knew what was going to happen, of course. Tried everything. Every nation sent someone, and they met up somewhere, Switzerland or Luxembourg or someplace ridiculous where there shouldn't have been enough room in the country to fit all of them anyway. They sent things up into space, shot lasers, fired missiles. None of it worked, but at least there was peace for the first time, ever, when the world was about to be destroyed.
That should be ironic, Spencer thinks, but mostly it's just sad.
They warned people. Told them where it was going to hit, what was going to happen, what to expect. It didn't make much difference. There's only so far so fast 6 billion people can migrate, and only so many places they can go.
There aren't 6 billion any more, but Spencer tries not to think about that.
Ryan refused to leave his favourite guitar, and Jon refused to leave his bass, and that left Spencer and Brendon with two acoustics and Spencer's drumsticks. The four of them took what else they could carry and drove out to the edge of the desert. The mountains hung in the distance, dusty blue against a slate-coloured sky. Spencer got out of the car and stared.
Across the burning dust, thousands of people moved slowly towards the horizon.
Backpacks and babies on their shoulders, they walked, dragging inner tubes and air mattresses loaded with strapped-down supplies, wading like ants through water, heat waves distorting their figures. Spencer leaned down and picked up a teddy bear lying in the dust.
Ryan looked over at him. "Should we go?" he asked.
It wasn't a question. There was no other choice.
Spencer nodded.
"Hey," Ryan says, sitting next to him. It's early, a pearly gray gleam seeping out from the edges of the world.
Spencer doesn't say anything. He opens the edge of the blanket he has wrapped around himself and drapes it over Ryan.
They sit and watch the sun rise. Reflected shards of light pierce the air. Spencer closes his eyes.
It's the fifty-fourth day.
They made it to the mountains after midnight on the morning of Spencer's birthday. There were thousands there already, stolen across valleys and shivering next to boulders.
It was silent.
Sitting next to a family of four, Spencer tried to smile at a little girl, tightly grasping her father's hand. She looked terrified. Spencer reached around to his backpack and pulled out the dusty teddy bear, holding it out to her.
She smiled, a little, tucked it under her arm, and popped her thumb in her mouth.
Jon's hand was warm on Spencer's shoulder.
The earth shook for nearly a week, afterward.
The refugees in the mountains looked cautiously up at the rock slopes, and took turns sleeping. There wasn't much else to do, and at any given time, two-thirds of them were wrapped in blankets, snuggled between tree roots.
When the family beside them ran out of food on the fourth day, Spencer, Ryan, Jon, and Brendon shared.
The little girl was named Kelly. The teddy bear was named Jon.
Some people had brought radios, but gave up when the static seeped into the world, until Spencer could hear it when he was sleeping, white noise behind the grinding of settling stones.
On the fifth day, someone yelled that they had gotten reception. Hundreds of people threw off blankets. Spencer and Jon dropped their deck of cards and followed the stampede to a young, bearded father hastily shushing the crowd.
"-little remains of… once was South America… flooding prominent in all areas…"
Spencer grabbed for Jon's hand. Thick fingers encircled his, but neither of their hands was warm.
"Canadian Rockies… some areas of the Alps… warnings for all areas lower than…"
They stood and listened to a list of places that no longer existed.
The water came, eventually. Spencer woke one morning to a damp blanket and the sounds of people packing.
He didn't understand how everything could flood, how there could be more water than before, but he supposed that was what happened when half the earth didn't exist anymore.
He sat up and pulled at Brendon's pant leg.
"Where are we going?" and his voice was cracked. He wasn't sure if it was because of sleep. He wondered when he had last spoken.
Brendon shrugged. "Higher ground. Some people brought boats. There are supposed to be barges coming, but they have to wait until the water's high enough."
Spencer wondered if it should be ironic that the thing that would kill them was the thing that saved them. If it was, he wasn't amused. This was worse than rain on your wedding day.
They stand up, eventually, and join the others in the cabin. The sun's too bright, too low, this early. Spencer asks where they are, and Joe pulls out the beaten GPS and a waterlogged map.
"Canada," he says. "Around Edmonton."
Spencer shivers and is glad it isn't winter.
He looks down at the water and pretends he can see golden waves of wheat blowing beneath them in summer-morning sun.
The barges came five days after that, when the refugees were cramped together on the sides of the mountains, squeezed and shaken, cold and tired. Everything was wet, and most people were sick, and Spencer was really tired of eating soggy bread and wearing salt-encrusted clothes.
That was when they realized there wasn't enough space on the boats.
The joyful sounds of relief petered out. There could have been a rush to the barges, people falling into the water, shouts and trampled hands, lost children. There could have been a re-enactment of War of the Worlds. There should have been.
There wasn't.
Instead, everyone stood silently, hands filled with belongings and children, looking across several yards of brown water to the three massive barges cutting swaths in the current.
"Families," Spencer said into the silence.
The word was picked up, passed along, whispered and repeated until finally, the young bearded father with the radio stepped forward and reached out to an orange-lifejacket-wearing official on the first barge. Their hands clasped, and the father was aboard, a baby girl in his arms.
Lines formed, quiet and orderly, lines of scared people and clinging kids. The family of four that Spencer, Jon, Ryan, and Brendon had spent their time with smiled at them shakily and began to move away.
The little girl, Kelly, suddenly dropped her father's hand and ran back to them. She stopped in front of Spencer.
She held out the teddy bear.
"He'll keep you safe," she said, and when Spencer shook his head, she went on, "I don't need him anymore."
Spencer took the bear and watched her run back to her family.
It took another week for more boats to come. It was the twentieth day. Spencer didn't mean to keep count, not really, but he couldn't help himself.
The sky hadn't ever cleared. It was perpetually gray now, ash and dust and smog pooling around holes in the atmosphere. Spencer hadn't seen the sun since the day before they had hugged their families goodbye and driven to the edge of the desert.
There weren't deserts anymore.
The boats drew up alongside them, and everyone made it aboard. The water was still rising. Spencer imagined that this was how people departing for America must have felt.
But it was easier to believe when you knew where you were going. When you had someplace to go. When there was someplace to go.
Huddled into some kind of meeting hall on the ship, Spencer gripped Ryan's hand and felt Brendon grab his other one. He dredged up a smile from somewhere for them.
There were fewer smiles in the world, now.
A guy in a lifejacket was addressing them all, reading from a paper, calling out for people and relaying messages. "Patty Steinberg, if you are present, your brother is on the other barge… Gregory Redding, your wife is looking for you…"
Spencer let his voice fade into the background and rested his head on Brendon's shoulder. He was still cold, still wet, and the strap of his duffel bag was digging painfully into his shoulder. He looked up, confused, when he heard his name.
"-Spencer Smith, Ryan Ross, Jon Walker, and Brendon Urie, friends are coming for you. Annie Voss…"
Spencer looked at Ryan, who shrugged. Spencer put his head back down on Brendon's shoulder.
Over breakfast, Spencer sees Ryan pull out one of the acoustics and settle it on his lap. His fingers hesitate over the strings, and then his shoulders curve inwards and his head drops to the side of the guitar, forehead resting against the wood.
Spencer swallows and looks away.
Two days later (the twenty-second day, said Spencer's brain, and it had become nothing more than a litany of faces, names, and upward-climbing numbers), a yacht hailed the barge.
Spencer wouldn't have known this, except that the PA system crackled faintly to life, and called the four of them to the deck of the ship.
The refugees had spread themselves where they could, camping in the meeting hall and huddled in the too-thin corridors. Spencer, Ryan, Jon, and Brendon had to pick their way through them, trying not to bump any with their bags.
Pete and Patrick were waiting for them on the deck. The yacht was moored to the barge, small and frail in comparison.
"We brought a boat," said Patrick.
"A yacht," said Pete.
"Okay," said Ryan.
It turned out that Andy could sail, and that Fall Out Boy had picked up the yacht, dubbed The Hush Sound, on the way to Vegas-that-wasn't-Vegas-anymore. And Fall Out Boy wasn't really Fall Out Boy, either, because they weren't a band, not really. They were just Pete, Patrick, Joe, and Andy.
Spencer realized that Panic! didn't really exist anymore, either. He couldn't find the strength to care all that much.
"How did you get here so fast?" Brendon asked.
Pete half-smiled. "Chicago, man. The lakes flooded first. We were out of there right after."
No one asked after what.
It was more than a little strange, floating around gray-brown water under a gray-brown sky. Spencer forgot, sometimes, that there were other colours, other worlds, other places. It was hard to remember the neon lights of the Strip.
He didn't think he would ever get dry.
The sun was still invisible.
It was day thirty-one.
They ate almost nothing but fish. Spencer thought he might have a stale piece of bread in his backpack, but he didn't go through it. He didn't like to see the warped wood of his drumsticks.
It was enough that he had to feel them on his back.
They had taken some extra blankets, a queen-sized mattress cover, and a lot of extra clothes and tied them together into some kind of net. Every day, they dragged it over the side of the yacht and tried to cook the fish.
Andy wasn't a vegan anymore. Brendon had gotten over his initial disgust over killing living things.
Spencer felt perpetually seasick.
He sometimes thought the sky might be lightening, but he didn't say anything. His hopes weren't his alone to raise, anymore.
They were catching fewer fish now, salting or smoking their leftovers "just in case," Ryan said. That night, he didn't eat dinner. Spencer pretended he didn't notice.
The next day, the lines caught and snagged, the clothes sagging under the weight of more than just water, and Ryan grinned. It split his face in two. Spencer had forgotten what that looked like. What Ryan looked like, when he smiled.
"It's a big haul again!" Ryan called. "Someone going to help me, or what?"
The nets slapped on the deck wetly, heavily, and fell open.
Hundreds of dead, bloody fish stared out at them with cloudy eyes. Dull silver, oily red.
Jon and Patrick dumped them back out, and nobody said anything.
Spencer didn't eat dinner that night.
Andy has been trying to teach them all how to sail. It would be more helpful if there was any wind at all, but there hasn't been, not for a long time. They float, mostly, letting the water take them places.
Spencer thought, when he thought about sailing around the world, that were would be more world to sail around than this.
He watches the sun go down on day fifty-four.
It was just when the world was on the brink of death that the sun broke through the dust.
It was day forty-two.
It wasn't by much, and clouds of ash still drifted over the water. The air still tasted acrid and burnt. But it was enough, apparently, to revive the plants, which meant that it was enough to revive the fish.
Spencer couldn't dredge up much enthusiasm about it, and that scared him.
The ash did settle, almost too quickly. In less than a week after the sun broke through, particles of dust were a rarity. The sun was diamond-hard, white and painful off the unnaturally still water. The air was clearer than it had ever been before, scourged and bell-like, thin and perfect.
Spencer leaned against the rail one night, looking at the stars. There were so many, now. So bright on cinder gray. He wished he knew their names, the shapes they made.
There are a lot of things he wishes he knew that he didn't before.
Ryan found him studying a sky with more light than dark between, reflected in calm water like the glowing windows of a drowned city. Maybe there is one, Spencer thought, and didn't lean over to check.
Copying his posture, forearms folded on the rail, Ryan leaned beside him. He didn't say anything, and there was silence. There was more silence in the world, now.
"What's the point anymore?" Spencer asked.
"What was the point before?" asked Ryan.
It didn't help, not really, but Spencer doesn't think about it any more, so he supposes that's something.
It's not the world ending that's the problem, Spencer's discovered.
It's what happens afterward.
It's day sixty-one.
They've settled into a sort of rhythm. Most people have, they think, because they pass a lot more private boats. Sailboats and motorboats, even rafts, and people… people seem to be okay. They seem… alright. They seem okay.
Everyone is sunburned.
On ships around them, people are trading for supplies. Some have bread, some have oatmeal. There's beer. The eight of them have been trading salted or smoked fish. They've gotten pretty good at cleaning out fish guts.
Money is useless now, except that it burns really well.
They passed a Chinese couple the day before, and now the inner cabin bunks are adorned with brightly coloured silk throw pillows. There's an oil lamp in the navigation room - "for ambience!" Pete claims. It's a life, or at least, it's starting to be.
Two days ago, Ryan was the last to pick up his guitar again.
Sometimes, people give them names.
Ryan keeps a notebook with him. Half the page is for the names of those looking, the other half for the names of those lost. They were once able to send a father to meet up with his daughter, who had asked about him the day before and headed due East.
The book is over half full, and that has been the only match.
The ocean is littered with barges, and they see them almost constantly, loitering in the distance, reminders. They've heard that they're still basically refugee camps, but some of them have dropped anchor near each other, and they're kind of like little towns. People are making lives for themselves. Already, some engineers are working on building a city.
"How cool is that, Spencer?" Brendon asks, bouncing on his toes. "A floating city!"
Spencer smiles tightly and thinks of holes in the atmosphere.
He almost trips over Ryan in the dark.
It's three a.m., or something like that, on day sixty-four and Spencer's hoping that a glass of water will contain magical properties to put him to sleep.
Ryan makes a weak sound of protest from the floor.
"What are you doing?" Spencer asks, and he forgets to whisper.
"Writing," says Ryan.
Spencer doesn't tell him that it's pitch black and that there's a table, right there, if he wanted to use it. He sits next to him instead, back to the wall, and waits for the light to seep in through the bottom of the windows.
When he wakes, it's to sunlight on his face, a pillow behind his neck, and a blanket tucked firmly behind his shoulders.
When he wakes, it's to find a notebook loosely clutched in his hand.
He doesn't read it.
"Hey, is that yours?"
It's day sixty-seven, and one of the two guys with whom they're trading fish for beer is staring towards the cabin. Leaning against the outside wall is Joe's acoustic, which he had been playing before the motorboat had hailed them.
"It's one of ours," Patrick said very carefully.
The guy blushed. "Can you… I mean, we haven't heard music in a while, is all."
There's a breath of silence, then Spencer says, "I'll get them."
The rest of the guys are rounded up, and both bands play their first show in over three months. It's mostly covers. They don't feel like their bands anymore. They don't feel like themselves anymore.
The guys on the motorboat insist that they take the beer for free.
"But what will you do for food?" Ryan asks.
The two guys end up leaving with more fish than they had needed.
After that, they start trading music instead of fish. It seems to be something that people want. Maybe even something that they need.
Kind of a lot, actually. Because if there was a meaning to it, a way to measure it, a scale, they'd be rich. They have way more furnishings than they need, Persian rugs layers thick on the cabin floors. They have a huge variety of food, even some canned vegetables that Andy falls on like a dying man.
One night (day seventy), they come aboard a big sailboat and play to a couple of old ladies. They walk away weighed down by a ridiculous amount of stuff. They don't know what to do with the grandfather clock.
The only problem is keeping it all.
Spencer never thought he'd have to live in a world where pirates were a legitimate problem.
The yacht is not only massive, but also really fast, so they only have trouble outrunning boats and ships with motors and some speedier sailboats. Luckily, the ships that can catch them tend to be smaller, so they can usually overpower whoever is in them. Generally, they're left alone.
But there have been a couple of high-speed chases. On the water. In sailboats. Spencer can't get Pirates of the Caribbean out of his head, and mostly, he really doesn't want to.
The pirates are usually in small motorboats that bring to mind Miami and drug dealers from Colombia. The only problem the eight of them have is when a group of pirates surround the yacht and close in. Andy tries some pretty impressive sailing, but in the end, the pirates draw up alongside.
Jon is the one who draws the line.
He stands just in front of the rail, leans out over the water, and says quietly, "You're going to have to fight for it."
He isn't wrong.
This is all they have.
They're lucky that none of their attackers have guns. That's the end of it, because if they had, the eight of them would have sat quietly with their backs against the cabin wall and let them walk away with their possessions, and their guitars, and their music, and gone back to smoking fish. But they don't have to.
Two pirates make it over the rail. Immediately, Brendon and Ryan run at one with a two-by-four and knock him right back into the water. There's a scary moment in there when one of them pulls a knife on Pete from a boat, but Patrick heaves a broomstick over his shoulder and, with a desperate yell, actually breaks it in two on the guy's head.
Spencer grabs the broken end, with the bristles still attached, and plants himself firmly in front of the cabin door. One of the pirates is still onboard. Spencer isn't entirely sure, but he thinks that Brendon is tangling him up in rope, running around in circles and then hitting the guy over the head with a bucket when he can no longer move.
The rest are holding off the pirates still in the boats with whatever they can find. Spencer thinks Joe might be poking one with a fishing rod, screaming, "You leave my mother out of this! She is-" poke- "a very-" poke- "dignified lady!"
Andy is trying to kick their motor into gear, but the pirates have managed to get mooring lines tied around the rails, and everyone's too busy making sure they don't board to cut the ropes away. Spencer drops his broken broom and eases himself between Jon and the rail, normally deft fingers fumbling with the knot above him.
"Get out of here," Jon hisses.
Spencer glares at him, unties the knot without looking, and crawls over to Joe.
Afterward, they sit, engine off and sails furled, on the sun-soaked deck. The wood is starting to crack a little. Spencer picks at a splintering piece with his thumbnail.
"So," Patrick says, and breaks off. He clears his throat.
"Dude," says Pete. "We totally just fought pirates."
"Dude," Brendon agrees, reverence in his voice.
And that is pretty much the end of that.
It's day seventy-four.
There's a barge on the horizon.
It's closer, really, close enough that they could reach it in a couple of hours, and it's coming towards them.
The sun's edging towards the water, ready to be drowned for another night before it swims its way back to the surface, and Spencer is lying in their (brand new) hammock on the deck.
It's the beginning of the end of day eighty.
The barge reaches them at dusk, and the sky is royal blue above them, but there is nothing regal about this, Spencer thinks. It hails them, and they idle their engine, furl their sails.
They exchange news for a while. The GPS says they're somewhere over the Midwest. The weather's turning cooler, and the barge is heading south.
Pete is the one that offers.
Spencer doesn't know why this seems important.
Pete says, "Do you think they'd like some music?"
They lug their stuff onto the barge, and because it was former military, there are places to plug in the amps that have been sitting on the yacht. Spencer and Andy don't have a full drum set, but it's almost like a real show again.
They still play mostly covers.
They hold the show in a large meeting hall like the one where Spencer, Ryan, Brendon, and Jon heard that there were friends coming for them. It looks like a converted gymnasium.
It's mostly kids that come, at the beginning, kids starved for something like this, for a connection, for a world to be a part of. But adults start oozing in, seeping like ghosts through the walls.
Radiohead and Blink 182 turn into a Springsteen cover, Bob Dylan, and there are more adults. Brendon sings Sinatra, and a woman in the back is crying. The faces turned to them are tired, thin, and glowing. Brendon and Ryan give in and do an acoustic version of Lying. Fall Out Boy borrows their guitars and do the acoustic of Grand Theft Autumn.
They don't know how to end it.
They can't find a way to say, It's over. To say, Go back to your blankets. Pete's talking desperately to a silent audience and this, this is the hardest thing Spencer's ever done. The refugees are still looking defeated. Their faces are lined, shoulders slumped. They're done.
It's Ryan who ends it, coming up behind Pete and whispering in his ear. Pete mutters something else and Fall Out Boy retreats to a corner to pack up.
Ryan plays the opening notes of Tonight, Tonight and Spencer thinks, Yes.
Brendon tells him to believe in him, because he believes in you tonight. Spencer thinks, Yes, and keeps the rhythm because he can't see.
When it's over, one of the officials on the boat offers to pay them. The barge has rice, coffee, chocolate, whatever they want.
Ryan watches the people leave, and maybe one or two of them might be humming.
"It's free," says Ryan, and this is the hardest thing Spencer has ever done.
The next day, or maybe the day after, and they're all running together, Spencer sits on his bunk and opens Ryan's notebook.
It's filled with poetry.
Poetry, escaping at the edges of the lines, climbing margins and hopping from the top of the page to the bottom, words curling and angling into crossed-out swirls and salt-encrusted coils.
This in itself isn't unusual for Ryan. The fact that they're all rhyming poems, with structure and rhythm and purpose, is.
Spencer frowns down at the pages, flipping and skimming, until his hand stops, hovering over the corner. He reads, and can't stop.
And I felt the world was shaking
And I prayed for some respite
But the space that was left open
Was not a space within I fit.
I prayed for someone's smile
To open up within the fray
And I sat and watched and waited
On that thin and breathy day.
My dreams all fell to burning
And my faith fell all to dust
Before my smiles started flaking
And my hands began to rust.
For a moment lasting longer
Was afraid I'd missed the boat
With their eyes of dark blue gumming
Up their hands around my throat
With their breath of dark blue sticking
To the pages that I wrote.
He flips again, faster, catching lines and stanzas, notes and half-thought-out bits of song lyrics.
And we floated on
Through the break of dawn
And the dim and pearly mist
Though the sun, rose red
On the surface bled
To midnights ash had kissed.
Hands shaking, he flipped over the final page. Empty. For a moment, his fingers fumble around under his bunk for a pencil. He starts to write.
Spencer wakes up one morning with the sun and struggles out on deck. Stretching, he prods a sleeping Joe with his foot and takes over for him at the sails. The white sheet catches and fills, and Spencer smiles.
Spencer wakes up one morning and can't remember what day it is.
Jon follows him outside, blinking blearily, and then Ryan appears, barefoot in a hoodie, with Brendon jumping around him. Jon rolls his eyes and offers Brendon a piggy-back ride. Ryan stands next to Spencer and bumps his shoulder with his own. He's grinning.
Spencer grins back.
So it's not what he thought, but he's twenty-one, and he has a life ahead of him.
They used to be a band of musicians. Now they're a band of brothers. Spencer can't remember if there's (ever been) any difference.
