Matching Legs are Marching Clocks (Bandslash fic: Brendon/Ryan)
2000 words, G.
Thanks to
lordessrenegade for the beta!
Ryan's sixteen and doesn't believe in anything at all. Spencer's fifteen and believes in everything too much. (He never thinks that includes Ryan.)
"What if," Ryan said, "we woke up in a different life every day?"
"That doesn't make any sense," said Spencer. "I remember what happened yesterday. I was thinking about tomorrow. Which is today."
"But as soon as anything happens, it's a memory. How can you prove that it did happen? What if it didn't and you just remembered that it did?"
"Dude, no. Other people see the same things. Shared memories. I was with you last night. We watched Fight Club and ate pizza. I remember that. You remember that."
"Witness reports," said Ryan, and it almost didn't make sense, except maybe it did, because "witness reports are always a little different. Even when people saw the same thing. They don't remember it the same. Maybe they didn't see it the same. Maybe they never did."
"It doesn't make much sense."
"The only thing," Ryan said, and now he was scaring himself but he wasn't going to let Spencer know that, "the only thing that we can prove happened is right now. And right now is such an infinitely small amount of time that it basically doesn't exist."
Spencer shook his head, sighed. "Go to bed, Ryan," he said. "I'm tired," he said, and turned over.
"G'night," Ryan whispered, but he didn't think Spencer heard.
Spencer's breathing evened out, deepened. Dark fell heavily between his eyelashes as they fluttered against his cheek.
Ryan didn't close his eyes. Shaking, arms folded around knees, he didn't close his eyes. He leaned against the wall, and watched Spencer sleep.
- - - - -
The bus is small, cramped, and it reminds Spencer of something, but he can't remember what. They're touring somewhere in Middle America, somewhere where the fence posts have snow caps and the barbed wire sparkles with thorns of ice.
"Do you remember…" Spencer starts, and stops.
Ryan is quiet beside him, waiting.
Spencer sighs. "Sometimes, I hope we don't wake up."
Ryan is suddenly still even though he wasn't moving before. "I remember," he says. It's been years since a conversation in the quiet of late-night took place, but Ryan remembers. He thinks about it too much, sometimes.
"Maybe," Spencer says, "we don't wake up in a different life every day. Maybe," he says, "we wake up in a different life every life."
Ryan is quiet beside him.
When Ryan kisses Brendon for the first time, it doesn't feel like the first time. It feels like a landslide stopping, the tide going out, the moon sliding down the sky.
They're in the kitchen on the bus, and it's the kind of late that might be early, if one were to check a clock. Brendon feels like he lives in clocks, sometimes. He's thinking of this as he pours himself a bowl of cereal when Ryan walks in. Brendon stands to put away the cereal, and Ryan is in front of him, and he's in the way, and the cereal is on the counter beside him. These are the things Brendon remembers.
These are the things Brendon remembers: the press of the cupboard handle between his vertebrae, the sharp edge of the counter digging into his palm, Ryan's warmth through his shirt, the silence of a sleeping bus, metal and glass somehow turned warm and heavy, the hum of the asphalt beneath the wheels, and Ryan's lips dry and soft against his.
When Ryan kisses Brendon for the first time, it feels inevitable.
Neither of them sleep that night, and they each have different reasons.
What if your memories weren't your own?
Brendon sleeps, and he dreams.
He dreams of men that are tall beyond the normal limits of physicality, and of red-headed women with green eyes, cold like sea glass, and tousled brown hair slipping far beneath his grasp in a sea like stolen azure.
He dreams of time and all its forms, hope and all its incarnations. He dreams of blood on bare earth and a rusted sword on a plain.
Brendon dreams, and he dreams of a place that isn't this one.
And when he wakes, he can't tell which world is real.
Brendon gets out of his bunk one morning and wanders into the kitchen. He pours coffee and it makes him think of blood-rusted streams. The stray thought is innocuous but erroneous. He shakes his head.
Ryan frowns at him when he sinks into a chair.
"What?" Brendon asks.
Ryan's eyes squint and he tilts his head in a gentle jerk of confusion. "You look different," he says.
Brendon's eyebrows draw together. "What?"
Ryan shakes his head. "Never mind." He grins a little. "You're just you."
Brendon knows he should react to the jibe behind the comment, but he can only manage to feel a vague, uncentered sort of relief.
Ryan gives him strange looks sometimes, as if Brendon isn't who he thought he was.
Little looks, in inconspicuous moments, a touch on the back of the neck, or sitting still to watch the slow slide of fields past the bus like the turning of the earth.
Sometimes Brendon thinks that he isn't who he thought he was, either.
The night he realizes his dreams are memories isn't different in any way from the other nights.
He's dreaming of the sea again, not the battle and the tall man. The sea, and the woman with sea-glass eyes. The sun is warm on his back, and that's wrong. It should be raining, he always thinks, and can't understand why.
The dream isn't clear; it never is. It feels sad, and nostalgic, with a sort of forgotten, casual grandeur about it. In the dream, he traces the path of two flying blackbirds, lying on his back in the water, salt thick in his mouth, and it's such an unconscious action, something he'd do in life.
And just like that, he's sure he has.
An image of tousled hair in the sea beneath him. But this time, he recognizes it.
He wakes up to wintery sunlight in the bus and the taste of salt in his mouth.
Everyone dreams of drowning. Just like everyone dreams of flying, falling, fucking, everyone dreams of drowning.
But in Brendon's dreams, he's not the one sinking.
Brendon sits on the couch and doesn't watch the muted TV. Ryan is asleep, head heavy on Brendon's lap.
"Do you remember…" Brendon starts, but trails off.
"What?" mumbles Ryan, head shifting, cheek brushing Brendon's sweatpants.
"Nothing," Brendon says, and turns his face away.
The sea again, the woman with the cold, cold sea-eyes. And the tousled hair.
The dream is clear now: a golden afternoon and a face beside him capped with tousled hair like fence posts are capped with snow. The azure sea is blue, blue. Deeper and clearer than the sky.
The red-haired woman with the green eyes that are the sea. Brendon's mind flinches away, and the dream spirals suddenly, tugging him and distorting time. The woman's face is a thundercloud; the sun is shining.
And the tousled hair is slipping far, far, where the azure fades to black and cold, but Brendon's hand can't reach, and he's being pulled up. Farther and farther. His fingertips are cold, and the sun is warm on his back, and it should be raining, but it's not, and Ryan's hair is swirling in the water, disappearing, and -
His head breaks the surface.
Brendon wakes, and the sky is blue, blue.
Ryan sits next to him as Brendon sits on the couch in dark and early morning. Sleep is calling to him, deceptively. He scrubs his hands over his eyes.
Ryan smells like sleep, and his eyes are bleary. He's quiet for a long while, but when he speaks, his speech is not slurred. "Brendon," he says, and he says it again until Brendon hears.
"Brendon," he says, and then stops. And then says, "I'm scared to sleep sometimes." Brendon looks at him, exhausted. "In case I wake up in a different life."
Brendon shakes his head. "It doesn't happen that fast," he says, and his voice sounds strange.
Ryan says nothing. Usually, people, Brendon thinks, when they're quiet, just don't say anything. Ryan doesn't. Ryan actively says nothing.
"Ryan," he says. He pauses. "Do you believe in life?"
Ryan says nothing.
Brendon dreams about the tall man. And his eyes are blue, but they're like ice in glass. And his hair is red.
There is a mountain in the middle distance, and a long, barren plain, and a battle that Brendon knows happened. And a sword that he's holding, and then is planted into the empty plain, cold and windy, grass gray. And he's crying, tears on his hands and then the sword, and the metal rusts as Brendon watches.
He is nowhere near the sea.
Ryan sits beside him in the morning, and says nothing.
Brendon leans his head against Ryan's shoulder, as if to remind himself he's there. That he's warm. That he's alive.
Ryan shifts, but doesn't shrug Brendon off. "I remember," he says, softly.
Brendon stills. "How much?" he asks.
Ryan doesn't shrug, but Brendon can feel his muscles tense as if he was considering it for a moment. "Enough," Ryan says. "What happened?"
Brendon blinks away sudden tears, and two of them sink into the cotton of Ryan's old t-shirt. "I think," he says, "I broke a promise."
Ryan's hand comes up to rest on the back of Brendon's head, to stroke his neck, to soothe him. "Not you," Ryan says.
"No," Brendon says, "it was me. A long time ago, but it was me."
Ryan leans back so he can look Brendon in the eye, but then looks away. "People change," he says. "And you paid the price."
Brendon flinches suddenly, hearing the word "price" in a voice cold like the sea. "I showed what price she would pay," he says softly, and thinks of a tall man with red hair, and a battle.
Ryan is quiet for a moment. "That was a long time ago," he says, and sighs.
Brendon buries his head into Ryan's shoulder, breathing him in. Ryan's voice is a rumble against his ear. "It's not a curse," he says. "It's not history repeating itself, over and over."
"Really?" Brendon asks.
Ryan shakes his head. "It's not a curse," he repeats. "And it's not a warning."
"What, then?" Brendon asks.
Ryan considers a moment. "It's a reminder," he says.
It's sunny two weeks later, when they walk from the bus to the venue and Brendon sees a red-haired woman with eyes like the sea.
He doesn't tell Ryan.
After sound check, he wanders outside and finds her waiting for him. He's tense, afraid, and so, so tired.
She has a small half-smile on her face. Brendon leans against the sun-warmed wall. "Ryan says it's not a curse," he says by way of greeting.
"It's not," she said. "You paid the price."
Brendon jerks his chin at her. "So did you," he said. "You are owed."
She shakes her head, red curls swishing oddly, and there is almost, almost an emotion in her sea-eyes. "I was given what I was owed a long time ago," she says.
Brendon doesn't understand, but he is entirely tired of this. "We're done, then?" he says, and he hadn't meant it as a question.
She nods.
"Great," he says, slapping the wall with his palm. From the shade of the doorway, he turns back, eyes watering in the bright sun that makes her edges hard and white-hot. "What were the dreams, then?" he asks.
She smiles. "You should learn to listen to those who understand," she says, and walks away.
Brendon walks slowly back into the venue, to where Ryan is waiting.
He drapes himself, exhausted, over Ryan's back, and feels more like himself than maybe ever. Ryan looks at him, and Brendon gives him a tired smile.
"I remember," he says.
Thanks to
lordessrenegade for the beta!
Ryan's sixteen and doesn't believe in anything at all. Spencer's fifteen and believes in everything too much. (He never thinks that includes Ryan.)
"What if," Ryan said, "we woke up in a different life every day?"
"That doesn't make any sense," said Spencer. "I remember what happened yesterday. I was thinking about tomorrow. Which is today."
"But as soon as anything happens, it's a memory. How can you prove that it did happen? What if it didn't and you just remembered that it did?"
"Dude, no. Other people see the same things. Shared memories. I was with you last night. We watched Fight Club and ate pizza. I remember that. You remember that."
"Witness reports," said Ryan, and it almost didn't make sense, except maybe it did, because "witness reports are always a little different. Even when people saw the same thing. They don't remember it the same. Maybe they didn't see it the same. Maybe they never did."
"It doesn't make much sense."
"The only thing," Ryan said, and now he was scaring himself but he wasn't going to let Spencer know that, "the only thing that we can prove happened is right now. And right now is such an infinitely small amount of time that it basically doesn't exist."
Spencer shook his head, sighed. "Go to bed, Ryan," he said. "I'm tired," he said, and turned over.
"G'night," Ryan whispered, but he didn't think Spencer heard.
Spencer's breathing evened out, deepened. Dark fell heavily between his eyelashes as they fluttered against his cheek.
Ryan didn't close his eyes. Shaking, arms folded around knees, he didn't close his eyes. He leaned against the wall, and watched Spencer sleep.
- - - - -
The bus is small, cramped, and it reminds Spencer of something, but he can't remember what. They're touring somewhere in Middle America, somewhere where the fence posts have snow caps and the barbed wire sparkles with thorns of ice.
"Do you remember…" Spencer starts, and stops.
Ryan is quiet beside him, waiting.
Spencer sighs. "Sometimes, I hope we don't wake up."
Ryan is suddenly still even though he wasn't moving before. "I remember," he says. It's been years since a conversation in the quiet of late-night took place, but Ryan remembers. He thinks about it too much, sometimes.
"Maybe," Spencer says, "we don't wake up in a different life every day. Maybe," he says, "we wake up in a different life every life."
Ryan is quiet beside him.
When Ryan kisses Brendon for the first time, it doesn't feel like the first time. It feels like a landslide stopping, the tide going out, the moon sliding down the sky.
They're in the kitchen on the bus, and it's the kind of late that might be early, if one were to check a clock. Brendon feels like he lives in clocks, sometimes. He's thinking of this as he pours himself a bowl of cereal when Ryan walks in. Brendon stands to put away the cereal, and Ryan is in front of him, and he's in the way, and the cereal is on the counter beside him. These are the things Brendon remembers.
These are the things Brendon remembers: the press of the cupboard handle between his vertebrae, the sharp edge of the counter digging into his palm, Ryan's warmth through his shirt, the silence of a sleeping bus, metal and glass somehow turned warm and heavy, the hum of the asphalt beneath the wheels, and Ryan's lips dry and soft against his.
When Ryan kisses Brendon for the first time, it feels inevitable.
Neither of them sleep that night, and they each have different reasons.
What if your memories weren't your own?
Brendon sleeps, and he dreams.
He dreams of men that are tall beyond the normal limits of physicality, and of red-headed women with green eyes, cold like sea glass, and tousled brown hair slipping far beneath his grasp in a sea like stolen azure.
He dreams of time and all its forms, hope and all its incarnations. He dreams of blood on bare earth and a rusted sword on a plain.
Brendon dreams, and he dreams of a place that isn't this one.
And when he wakes, he can't tell which world is real.
Brendon gets out of his bunk one morning and wanders into the kitchen. He pours coffee and it makes him think of blood-rusted streams. The stray thought is innocuous but erroneous. He shakes his head.
Ryan frowns at him when he sinks into a chair.
"What?" Brendon asks.
Ryan's eyes squint and he tilts his head in a gentle jerk of confusion. "You look different," he says.
Brendon's eyebrows draw together. "What?"
Ryan shakes his head. "Never mind." He grins a little. "You're just you."
Brendon knows he should react to the jibe behind the comment, but he can only manage to feel a vague, uncentered sort of relief.
Ryan gives him strange looks sometimes, as if Brendon isn't who he thought he was.
Little looks, in inconspicuous moments, a touch on the back of the neck, or sitting still to watch the slow slide of fields past the bus like the turning of the earth.
Sometimes Brendon thinks that he isn't who he thought he was, either.
The night he realizes his dreams are memories isn't different in any way from the other nights.
He's dreaming of the sea again, not the battle and the tall man. The sea, and the woman with sea-glass eyes. The sun is warm on his back, and that's wrong. It should be raining, he always thinks, and can't understand why.
The dream isn't clear; it never is. It feels sad, and nostalgic, with a sort of forgotten, casual grandeur about it. In the dream, he traces the path of two flying blackbirds, lying on his back in the water, salt thick in his mouth, and it's such an unconscious action, something he'd do in life.
And just like that, he's sure he has.
An image of tousled hair in the sea beneath him. But this time, he recognizes it.
He wakes up to wintery sunlight in the bus and the taste of salt in his mouth.
Everyone dreams of drowning. Just like everyone dreams of flying, falling, fucking, everyone dreams of drowning.
But in Brendon's dreams, he's not the one sinking.
Brendon sits on the couch and doesn't watch the muted TV. Ryan is asleep, head heavy on Brendon's lap.
"Do you remember…" Brendon starts, but trails off.
"What?" mumbles Ryan, head shifting, cheek brushing Brendon's sweatpants.
"Nothing," Brendon says, and turns his face away.
The sea again, the woman with the cold, cold sea-eyes. And the tousled hair.
The dream is clear now: a golden afternoon and a face beside him capped with tousled hair like fence posts are capped with snow. The azure sea is blue, blue. Deeper and clearer than the sky.
The red-haired woman with the green eyes that are the sea. Brendon's mind flinches away, and the dream spirals suddenly, tugging him and distorting time. The woman's face is a thundercloud; the sun is shining.
And the tousled hair is slipping far, far, where the azure fades to black and cold, but Brendon's hand can't reach, and he's being pulled up. Farther and farther. His fingertips are cold, and the sun is warm on his back, and it should be raining, but it's not, and Ryan's hair is swirling in the water, disappearing, and -
His head breaks the surface.
Brendon wakes, and the sky is blue, blue.
Ryan sits next to him as Brendon sits on the couch in dark and early morning. Sleep is calling to him, deceptively. He scrubs his hands over his eyes.
Ryan smells like sleep, and his eyes are bleary. He's quiet for a long while, but when he speaks, his speech is not slurred. "Brendon," he says, and he says it again until Brendon hears.
"Brendon," he says, and then stops. And then says, "I'm scared to sleep sometimes." Brendon looks at him, exhausted. "In case I wake up in a different life."
Brendon shakes his head. "It doesn't happen that fast," he says, and his voice sounds strange.
Ryan says nothing. Usually, people, Brendon thinks, when they're quiet, just don't say anything. Ryan doesn't. Ryan actively says nothing.
"Ryan," he says. He pauses. "Do you believe in life?"
Ryan says nothing.
Brendon dreams about the tall man. And his eyes are blue, but they're like ice in glass. And his hair is red.
There is a mountain in the middle distance, and a long, barren plain, and a battle that Brendon knows happened. And a sword that he's holding, and then is planted into the empty plain, cold and windy, grass gray. And he's crying, tears on his hands and then the sword, and the metal rusts as Brendon watches.
He is nowhere near the sea.
Ryan sits beside him in the morning, and says nothing.
Brendon leans his head against Ryan's shoulder, as if to remind himself he's there. That he's warm. That he's alive.
Ryan shifts, but doesn't shrug Brendon off. "I remember," he says, softly.
Brendon stills. "How much?" he asks.
Ryan doesn't shrug, but Brendon can feel his muscles tense as if he was considering it for a moment. "Enough," Ryan says. "What happened?"
Brendon blinks away sudden tears, and two of them sink into the cotton of Ryan's old t-shirt. "I think," he says, "I broke a promise."
Ryan's hand comes up to rest on the back of Brendon's head, to stroke his neck, to soothe him. "Not you," Ryan says.
"No," Brendon says, "it was me. A long time ago, but it was me."
Ryan leans back so he can look Brendon in the eye, but then looks away. "People change," he says. "And you paid the price."
Brendon flinches suddenly, hearing the word "price" in a voice cold like the sea. "I showed what price she would pay," he says softly, and thinks of a tall man with red hair, and a battle.
Ryan is quiet for a moment. "That was a long time ago," he says, and sighs.
Brendon buries his head into Ryan's shoulder, breathing him in. Ryan's voice is a rumble against his ear. "It's not a curse," he says. "It's not history repeating itself, over and over."
"Really?" Brendon asks.
Ryan shakes his head. "It's not a curse," he repeats. "And it's not a warning."
"What, then?" Brendon asks.
Ryan considers a moment. "It's a reminder," he says.
It's sunny two weeks later, when they walk from the bus to the venue and Brendon sees a red-haired woman with eyes like the sea.
He doesn't tell Ryan.
After sound check, he wanders outside and finds her waiting for him. He's tense, afraid, and so, so tired.
She has a small half-smile on her face. Brendon leans against the sun-warmed wall. "Ryan says it's not a curse," he says by way of greeting.
"It's not," she said. "You paid the price."
Brendon jerks his chin at her. "So did you," he said. "You are owed."
She shakes her head, red curls swishing oddly, and there is almost, almost an emotion in her sea-eyes. "I was given what I was owed a long time ago," she says.
Brendon doesn't understand, but he is entirely tired of this. "We're done, then?" he says, and he hadn't meant it as a question.
She nods.
"Great," he says, slapping the wall with his palm. From the shade of the doorway, he turns back, eyes watering in the bright sun that makes her edges hard and white-hot. "What were the dreams, then?" he asks.
She smiles. "You should learn to listen to those who understand," she says, and walks away.
Brendon walks slowly back into the venue, to where Ryan is waiting.
He drapes himself, exhausted, over Ryan's back, and feels more like himself than maybe ever. Ryan looks at him, and Brendon gives him a tired smile.
"I remember," he says.