Fic: The Last Famous International Playboy
Oh god oh god oh god oh god. I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY.
So, remember that Prison!AU I was going on about? The one where Pete kills people and Patrick has to get into his mind? Er, well, here it is. Let me know what you think because I'm freaked out about this and I kind of consider it my first real Bandom fic and that's weird and I was going to post it to a comm somewhere because I'm a total attention whore when it comes to this sort of thing but I don't even know where to begin because I only really read slash comms and I'm not convinced that this is slash anywhere but inside my head so, yeah, feedback makes me love you, guys. Have fun trying to guess who each of the victims is supposed to be. And don't hate me for killing awesome people in this, okay?
Title: The Last Famous International Playboy
Fandom/Pairing: Bandom (Mainly FOB, but with Panic!, CS, TAI, MCR, and others). Gen, although can be Pete/Patrick depending on how you look at it.
Rating: R, I suppose, for disturbing images
Word count: ~6000
Summary: In our lifetime those who kill, the news world hands them stardom and these are the ways on which I was raised. I never wanted to kill, I am not naturally evil- such things I do just to make myself more attractive to you. Have I failed? - The Last of the Famous International Playboys by Morrissey.
Disclaimer: Did. Not. Happen. Completely a work of fiction. For the record, I wish no harm on anyone in Bandom, and I do not think Pete Wentz is a psychotic murderer.
Warning: This is a very dark fic. It deals with psychopaths and murder and disturbing images. In it, many bandom people are dead, although none are mentioned by name. Please do not read if this offends you.
A/N: I’m not even going to begin to try and decipher what was going through my head that made me write this. It was inspired by the song ‘Last of the Famous International Playboys’ by Morrissey, which I’ll upload if anyone wants it. Beta’d by the wonderful vampyreranger.
“Pete Wentz,” the guy introduces himself, pushing his too-long sleeve up over his elbow and offering his hand to Patrick. “Do you recognise me?”
Patrick opens his mouth, because, yes, of course he recognises him. He has Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz the Third’s file in his hand, complete with medical and psychological history and a handful of mug shots.
“Don’t say you don’t know me,” Wentz interrupts before Patrick can say a word with a grin that is half charming, half pleading splitting his face in a way that makes Patrick falter for a moment. Wentz isn’t what Patrick was expecting at all, and Patrick’s been trained to deal with the unexpected, to find that speck of humanity in these people and work it to his advantage, to get under their skin and into their minds.
“Please,” Wentz says, looking hopeful, looking desperate. “Please say you do know who I am.”
And that’s it right there, the hook, what Patrick needs to know, the key to unlocking this whole mystery, and he smiles and nods. “Of course I know who you are, Mr Wentz.”
“Pete,” Wentz corrects and Patrick nods and introduces himself. They take their seats at the wooden table, heavy chairs scraping on the concrete. Patrick throws a quick glance over his shoulder, a nod, and the door is shut. Patrick waits until he hears the heavy bars sliding into place, the clunk and fall as the lock is turned. He shuffles his papers, and then looks up, opening his mouth to speak.
Pete beats him to it though.
”You know who I am,” Pete says, gleefully, and then his expression turns serious. “The question is, do you know who I think I am?”
He’s not supposed to, it’s not part of the training, and it goes against every instinct Patrick is having right then and there, but he smiles. There’s something about this guy that makes him different than the others. This is going to be a challenge. And, really, that’s why Patrick does what he does. That’s why they’ve sent him here, because he’s the best.
~~~
The thing is, it seems half the world knows who Pete Wentz is. He’s a modern day celebrity, name linked in the minds of the public not for the way he delivers lines on screen, not for melodies that intertwine in people’s minds, not for scribbled thoughts sandwiched between cardboard covers, not for who his parents are or even for his reality TV shows or appearance at the opening of an envelope.
When the public thinks of Pete Wentz, they think of blood and death and pain and suffering and terror and screams. Screams that wear your throat raw. Screams that no one can hear. The sort of screams nightmares are made of, where the sound echoes inside your head but your mouth is open and mute and the shadowy figure is coming closer, closer but you’re unable to run.
The public adores him. Adores him for no reason other than the strange kind of worship that people like Pete Wentz inspire in people, the tug of sympathetic heart strings, the familiarity in him that reminds you of someone- an old friend, perhaps, or a loved one, or someone you wish you knew. People find it hard not to adore the cruel, insane, charismatic, genius psychopath caught somewhere between death row and a padded cell.
For now he’s in solitary confinement, not destined for either until they learn what they need to know.
That’s why Patrick is here.
~~~
“You must have some stories to tell,” Patrick says conversationally on the second day. Sometimes this works- sometimes they’re desperate to pour their rage and triumph and hurt out of their mouths and into someone else’s ears. Mostly it doesn’t work, and so Patrick isn’t disheartened when Pete spends an hour telling Patrick stories about his college days, tales of fireworks and daring and vandalism and pranks that would make some people horrified at the cruelty, the malice, the stupidity of them all. Patrick’s heard worse, seen worse, and knows that to Pete there is no black and white in terms of deeds, just many shades of grey.
~~~
“They caught Gabe Saporta,” Patrick announces on the fourth day, sliding a newspaper across the table, headline proclaiming ‘The Cobra Killer Strikes for the Last Time’. Pete looks up, interested, although Patrick can’t be sure if it’s for the news he brings or for the actual paper, pages crisp and fresh.
“He was keeping them in his basement,” Patrick continues, watching Pete carefully as he picks up the newspaper, pushing up one leaf slightly with his fingers, letting it crinkle then smoothing it back out again. “Said it was warmer down there, better suited for his purposes. The things he did to those girls…give me nightmares to think about.”
He watches as Pete quickly runs the pad of his thumb along the edge of the paper. Patrick hears the soft intake of breath as it slices into Pete’s skin, a drop of crimson falling to splash down on the grainy photo of Saporta, eyes dark and hollow, mouth down-turned. Pete sticks his thumb into his mouth and sucks. Then he grins around his thumb.
”Fucking amateur,” Pete says, and reaches out with his now wet thumb to smear his fallen drop of blood over Saporta’s features. He stares down at his handiwork, face blank and emotionless.
“This guy?” Pete says, making it a question, and Patrick nods. “This guy is no one. You know what’s going to happen? A few months, a few trials, a few stories. Then the quick jab, press, slip slide of the needle, fire through his veins and then nothing, nothing, nothing left. Nothing but a name in a file, on a computer, in back issues of newspapers no one will ever read. A few months and people will rack their brains for his name and come up with nothing but the buzz of memories that aren’t important enough for us to hold onto. The only people who’ll ever remember him are the ones he directly wronged- the families, the friends, the ones who discovered the bodies. And what’s the point in that? The stories will die when they do. That’s this guy,” he says, eyes glittering darkly as he leans back triumphantly, sucking his thumb again, lips stained red at the corner.
They sit in silence for a long moment.
Patrick tries to collect his thoughts, to process everything quickly, to see if today will be the day he finds the magic words, the translation into Pete’s language of ‘open sesame’, that will make him split open and spill knowledge into Patrick, onto the paper, onto the floor.
“I’m not this guy,” Pete says, emphatically, dark eyes flashing and Patrick’s hands clench by his sides.
Today is not going to be that day.
~~~
Day five, and Patrick is starting to run out of the techniques they’d all been taught for such situations. He’s winging it now, which is what he’s supposed to do, what he’s good at. That’s why he’s here and not one of the others from his department. He’s an expert on manipulating these people, taking what they say and twisting and disguising it until they’re giving up whatever’s left of their souls.
He’d thought he’d finally gotten a handle on Pete. He already knows what makes him tick- this burning desire for infamy, to be remembered, etched on people’s minds for generations to come. A modern day Jack the Ripper, that’s what he wants to be. He wants people to have heard of him, to have his name slip off their tongues in conversation, to be a pile of newspaper clippings and Internet sites and biographies that promise an insight into his mind.
It should be easy, then, to slip under Pete’s skin and use this to his advantage, to twist the desire, impossible, as it is to not be laced with insecurities, and get Pete to spill the information that a dozen or more people outside of this room are dying to hear.
Patrick should be talking more. He knows he should. Except.
Except.
Except he likes listening to Pete talk. It’s something Pete does so easily, and it’s as if he’s not holding anything back, as if he’s just saying what he’s thinking, his opinion, without caring whether it’s right or wrong, without doing that thing people do when they hold things back, because they’re scared of disagreeing with someone or seeming stupid or revealing too much of themselves. And Patrick finds he likes listening. It was for clues at first, for openings he could use to steer the conversation in the right direction. Somewhere along the line he’s found that he’s stopped listening for those moments, and he’s actually hearing Pete now. And most of the time he likes what he hears.
“You weigh up the pros and cons,” Pete is saying. “For everything. Every little action. You may not realise you do it, but you do. Stupid things. Everything is a decision. Everything becomes a list in your brain, eventually- all it is are two neat columns, pros and cons of living or dying, of letting live or letting die, of breathing or not breathing. Sometimes it’s the wrong decision.”
~~~
Patrick wonders, later, if that’s as close as he’ll ever get to hearing Pete be remorseful for what he’s done. He thinks about it all night, and in the morning, his sleep quota running on empty, he thinks that maybe that wasn’t what Pete meant at all, that perhaps it was the living or dying decision that Pete was regretting.
~~~
That night, over a dinner that he turns up late to, sliding into his seat with apologies and a wry expression and rolled eyes at ‘work stuff, you know how it is’, she’s agonising over a decision. It’s something stupid- Patrick isn’t even sure what, but it’s probably cheesecake versus sorbet or something, and he leans over and takes her hand, pressing it quickly to his lips with a small smile. When he relinquishes her hand and she’s frowning down at the menu again, listing reasons why the sorbet is so much better, calorie wise, Patrick laughs and says:
“You know, everyone weighs up the pros and cons of everything. Think about it. Every action you make, no matter how small, you weigh up the pros and cons. Shall I have cheesecake or fudge cake? Should I turn left or right? Should I breathe or not breathe? Should I live or die? Everything becomes a list that we weigh up.”
And it’s then- as she makes a face and reminding him again of how much she hates fudge cake and how it was never an option anyway and how she’s decided to have the sorbet and will he get the cheesecake in case she changes her mind? - that his stomach knots and he has to loosen his tie a little to get some air, because he realises that at some point while he’s been trying to get under Pete’s skin, into his mind, behind his eyes, that Pete’s managed to do the exact same thing to him.
And that’s a dangerous thing. He should take himself off the case. He should throw up his hands and admit defeat, no matter how much he hates doing that. He should never, ever, see Pete again.
~~~
Patrick never gets to find out if he could really have walked into his boss’s office and dropped the case, because when he gets into work the next morning, there’s a message for him, and ten minutes later he’s arguing his case as to why he should stay, why he should be allowed to continue working with Pete, how he’s just been building his trust because anyone can clearly see that all Pete needs is a friendly shoulder to cry on. All Pete needs is a friend.
Which, now that Patrick really thinks about it, is blatantly true. His boss gives him a level look and then sighs and says ‘I like you, kid’ and ‘I have faith in you’ and ‘If there’s no progress after today I’m putting Iero on the case’ and Patrick fucking hates that guy, and wouldn’t inflict him on Pete if Pete were his worst enemy, and so, when he walks into the room and decides that if Pete needs a friend, sees Patrick as a friend then, well, that’s what Patrick’s going to play on.
~~~
“Patrick,” Pete says, and it makes Patrick shiver. Pete says his name like it means something to him, like a secret they share that no one else knows.
Patrick scrapes back the chair and sits. Then he leans forward and puts his elbows on the tabletop. He sees Pete’s head snap up at this sudden intrusion on his space. Patrick never touches the table. He always sits with files in his lap, away, separate. The table is Pete’s- possibly the last luxury he has left now, a temporary space to call his home that is more than the practicalities of a floor, hard bed, sink, toilet, and that is not something Patrick ever wanted to intrude on, less so once he started to get to know Pete.
“Please,” Patrick says, and his voice is foreign to him, old and pained and tired and scratchy, and Pete is frowning at him. “Please. Pete,” he adds, and Pete’s head is cocked to the side. He rubs his nose and stares at Patrick.
“I need to know,” Patrick says. “I need you to tell me. I- they’re transferring me to another case.”
Pete frowns at him then, as if he doesn’t understand what Patrick means.
“Transferring you,” he echoes, rolling the word around in his mouth, “to another case?” he asks, slowly, and Patrick begins to wonder if Pete even knows why he’s here, why he’s spent hours, every day for over a week with him, talking and watching and sitting in oddly companionable silence. He wonders if Pete has become delusional. His psych report says he’s as sane as anyone who goes on a random killing spree can be, but maybe these four walls, day after day, are starting to take their toll on his sanity. Patrick thinks maybe it’s starting to take a toll on his own.
Pete’s biting at his bottom lip now, watching Patrick like he’s going to explain, going to sort everything out, and with a horrible, terrible swoop of his stomach overturning, Patrick realises he was right- he’s Pete’s friend. His only friend. And in some twisted way Pete has become his friend too. Which is all kinds of fucked up that he doesn’t particularly want to think about right now.
They’ve trained him well.
“Yes,” Patrick says, pressing his advantage. “They’re going to stop me from seeing you, Pete,” he says. “They won’t let me come anymore, and they’re going to bring someone else in for you to talk to.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” Pete says, abruptly, and makes a move as if he’s going to jump over the table and tackle Patrick.
Patrick’s flinch is small, but noticeable, and Pete lowers himself back into his chair.
“Sorry,” Pete says, as if he knows he’s broken some unwritten law that he’s never seen.
“They’re going to make me go away,” Patrick says as if he’s talking to a child, self-hatred almost suffocating, the way he’s twisting Pete’s feelings, his emotions, to get what he wants. He knows he shouldn’t care, not as much as he is right now, knows that he’s supposed to put all his sympathy and pity and compassion and empathy into a box and stash it at the back of his mind, because he deals with monsters on a daily basis and caring for people like that will get you fired and a long stint lying on your back on a couch talking about your feelings and possibly even a broken heart. He wonders briefly if he’s already in too deep, if there’s any way for him not to care about this, about hurting Pete by abusing the trust he’s stupidly put in Patrick.
But this is his fucking job, and there’s more at stake than his own sanity, so he pushes emotions aside as best he can. “Unless you tell me,” Patrick says earnestly. “Tell me where they all are.”
Pete stares at him for a long moment and Patrick wonders what would happen if he let himself throw up, right here and now, onto Pete’s spotless table, onto the cold grey floor, onto his crisp pinstripe suit. Wonders if it’d help rid himself of the queasy feeling, the way his skin’s crawling as if he’s got a really bad case of food poisoning, the way the lights in the room are suddenly all too bright.
Pete’s face is carefully blank. “Tell me what they say about me,” he says, and then when Patrick nods, promises, he stands, leans across the table.
Patrick sits perfectly still, holding his breath until his lungs are screaming for air, as Pete slides a piece of paper out of the file on Patrick’s lap, as his fingers, with their bitten down nails, gently pluck the fountain pen out of Patrick’s hand.
He scribbles until the ink runs out, and Patrick hands him a Biro, letting Pete fill up the entire page with words and pictures and lines that seem to mean nothing.
“The last,” Pete says, when he hands the paper over. Both sides are covered, tiny, cramped writing that Patrick has to squint at.
~~~
If Patrick believed there was a God, he’d think it was a miracle, divine intervention or some fucking thing like that.
They find the kid alive. He’s in the basement of a house in the woods in the middle of Nevada, of all places, and they don’t even have evidence that Pete’s ever been to that state before except for this kid who’s been in a locked, dark room with nothing but a cooler of water and a few tins of food he’d managed to break open for over 6 days.
Patrick gets the call at home, late that night, when they’d broken Pete’s code- clues hidden in prose, directions in and around and through the doodles he’d made. They tell him about the kid, how he’s in intensive care now, how he’s lost a lot of blood from the shallow wounds, how he’s so thin it hurts to look at him, but he’s alive, this kid is alive and Patrick puts the phone down and walks into his bathroom and is sick so violently that all the tiny blood vessels around his eyes burst and he wears his glasses with the extra thick frames the next day to hide them.
He doesn’t sleep that night, thinking about how, if he hadn’t spent so much time inadvertently developing an impossible friendship with Pete, this kid could have been found earlier, days earlier. He wonders how many more are out there.
~~~
He asks Pete the next day if there are any others that could possibly be alive, but Pete shakes his head adamantly, making Patrick wonder how much of the kid surviving is luck, and how much of it is part of Pete’s great plan, leaving someone alive who can be interviewed, who can tell the world over and over what it was like to be kidnapped from the other side of the country and driven, trussed up in the trunk of an old car, across state after state and through the desert into the middle of nowhere. To tell of the fear and horror and the way his spirit broke, when he realised no one was going to come and rescue him, and how it was all because of one man.
But something has started now, and Pete asks for another piece of paper, and scribbles away. Patrick spends his time alternating between watching Pete write, having brief conversations whenever Pete wants to rest his cramped hand, and thinking of the kid. How he could have saved him, could have gotten to him before he’d given up. Patrick deserves to remember the kid’s name for the rest of his life, remember as penance for what he did. If he was the kind of guy who got tattoos, he’d get one of the kids initials- two letters that fit together so neatly, somewhere he wouldn’t be able to ignore. He spends a decent segment of the afternoon contemplating the fleshy mound at the base of his right thumb, a constant reminder of pain, at first, and then a marking he couldn’t ignore for the rest of eternity.
He’s wondering if doing that, if doing anything could ever give the kid back even a sliver of what’s been stolen from him. What Patrick’s stolen from him, because he’s just as guilty as Pete now, for his inaction in finding the kid, for his selfishness at enjoying Pete’s company while the kid was sitting in the dark and contemplating his death.
Patrick’s contemplating how unlikely it is that anything he did could ever make it up to the kid, when Pete slides the paper back across the table like a kid who’s completed his homework on time for a change.
“Number 4,” he smiles.
~~~
Number 4 looks ridiculously young. Not in the original photos from the crime scene- in those he’s just pale skin and dark red blood and matted dark hair. But in the photos they send after the autopsy, the kid looks young, too young, with even spaced holes along the edges of his full lips where his mouth had been sewn tightly shut- while he was still alive, the report noted, filling Patrick with a whole new sense of horror. Presumably this was to keep the kid from screaming as Pete tied him down and painstakingly carved words into his skin: Free to choose liberty and eternal life or to choose captivity and death.
~~~
Everyday, a new number, never any sort of sequence or pattern.
Everyday, Patrick offers Pete a laptop or a tape recorder to record what he’s been scribbling on clean white paper, but Pete always declines, it’s easier to hide the clues and red herrings in non-linear ramblings and designs and pictures and poems and lines that could be songs, that Patrick has to stop himself from putting to music in his head.
Everyday, they still talk. It’s never awkward between them, the conversation. Patrick doesn’t analyse this.
~~~
Pictures of the guy wrapped in guitar strings make Patrick lose his breakfast and he can hardly look Pete in the eye when he goes in to see him shortly before noon. The images haunt him, etched onto his eyelids, the deep gashes, the gaping flesh, the neck, garrotted by the fine wire until only the back of the spinal cord is holding it attached to the body. It takes a lot of strength to do that, and Pete’s such a little guy. If he didn’t know Pete as well as he did now, Patrick would think he had some sort of accomplice, but Pete isn’t the type to share the limelight.
For the first time, Patrick is scared of Pete, scared of whatever hatred and anger and desire that burns inside him that is enough for him to almost rip a man’s head from his body. Patrick sits a little further back in his chair that day, and if Pete notices, he doesn’t comment.
~~~
A new victim, each day, and they begin to merge in Patrick’s mind, until he can’t remember if number 12 is the boy they’d found lying neatly on a bed of photos taken at various stages of his drawn-out death, or the tall, skinny man whose head had been shorn, curls scattered around him like a halo, once beautiful face nothing but a mesh of knife cuts and empty eye sockets.
~~~
“The 8th,” Pete says.
~~~
A boy, with his neck slit from ear to ear.
~~~
“The 15th,” Pete says.
~~~
A guy, head caved in on one side, shoulder length hair matted with blood and brains and strands of it stuck to the game console that turned out to be the murder weapon.
~~~
“The 1st,” Pete says.
~~~
A teenager, hanged, one sneaker still dangling from his lifeless body when they’d found him.
~~~
“The 11th,” Pete says.
~~~
A man, found in a freezer in the basement of Pete’s estranged and innocent sister’s house, chopped up like cuts of meat, each labelled neatly in Pete’s choppy handwriting- Leg, Thigh, Hand, Back.
~~~
Eventually Patrick brings himself to ask what number the kid that survived would have been, should have been, could have been, if it had taken them just that bit longer.
Pete just looks at him with cold eyes and shakes his head. There are some secrets he’s not sharing. Not yet.
~~~
A guy stabbed straight through the heart with a wooden stake. It’s like something from a vampire movie.
Pete shrugs when Patrick comes in the next day.
”I just wanted to try it,” he says, matter of fact, and Patrick doesn’t ask anything else all day.
~~~
Patrick doesn’t always get a chance to read Pete’s scribbles. Once he’s out of the room, the paper is snatched away, copied and sent to wherever the people who are a hundred times smarter than Patrick work.
Every so often he catches a glimpse of a word or two.
‘Hearts and wrists intact’ he sees once, and the next day there’s another file on his desk.
Two teenagers, childhood friends, limbs intertwined, their hands stuck together by the blood that had run from their slit wrists. Later Patrick learns that their chests had been carved open, spread, and their hearts removed and switched, the wrong organ in the wrong body, chests neatly sewn closed again.
He asks Pete about it, the first time he’s really questioned any of the deaths, asked why, because no-one cares about that anymore, they just want the where’s and when’s and who’s and how’s.
Pete gives him an even look and launches into a lengthy story about how, sometimes, people are just built wrong, they have parts that belong to other people and it’s wrong, so wrong, until Pete fixes it. He says this is the way those kids were meant to be, and Patrick doesn’t argue, because for all he knows, Pete might be right.
~~~
There doesn’t seem to be a logical pattern to Pete’s victims, nothing linking them to him, or to each other. They’re spread across the country, dotted from coast to coast. They have nothing in common, except for the fact they’re all male. So when the next two victims Pete shares with him are female, and the next, and the next, Patrick can’t help but be surprised.
~~~
The first two are sisters. Poisoned, the coroner says, found slumped at opposite ends of a room in an abandoned house in Texas. Their long blond hair extensions have been hacked off. One’s nose has been sliced from her face, the others breasts slashed down deep enough to reveal sharp whiteness of rib bone.
~~~
It’s hard not to become familiar with the myriad of ways of murdering a fellow human being when you have a job like Patrick’s. But even he’d never heard of someone bleeding to death from a thousand shallow cuts, dark skin turned pale through blood loss. The man had been covered in tattoos and Pete had carefully traced around every line with a wickedly sharp blade, outlining every picture and word on the man’s body, slicing out piercings as he came across them.
~~~
The third girl had already been found, although nothing had linked her to Pete until he’d written his clues in black on the piece of white paper and slid it across to Patrick. Electrocution, cause of death said. Accidental, it had said, and Patrick finds himself wishing Pete could have let this one go, not mentioned it, let her fade into a story about being careful around guitar amps and rain on floorboards. Owning up to her is just another nail in a coffin that already contains more metal than wood, and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t effect how the majority of the world sees Pete, but Patrick still wants the growing list of the dead to be shorter, as if one or two less victims on the roll call would make a difference.
Pete wouldn’t want any to be left out anyway. Patrick knows he’d ask what would be the point of killing people for the fame, if you don’t get to take the blame for each and every one?
~~~
Pete wasn’t evil. Patrick had met evil, once, empty eyes staring out at him from behind a fringe of coal black hair. Patrick hadn’t slept for days after than, and even then only with chemical assistance. He’d been like a void, that man, sucking everything positive out of Patrick’s brain as soon as he’d stepped into the room, and replacing it with the stuff of nightmares, like some bizarre twisted Tim Burton movie playing itself out on repeat in his head, skipping the happy ending every time.
~~~
The fourth- and last- girl, had been found draped over a sofa in an old artists studio, arranged as if she were posing for a portrait or for a photo shoot. Her pretty face was artfully made up, her long blonde hair elegantly styled. And the rest of her skin was neatly peeled away from her entire body and abandoned on the floor, like discarded clothing.
~~~
One day, Pete hands back a blank sheet of paper.
“No more,” he says, when Patrick raises questioning eyes to his own.
They look at each other. They both know what this means.
“Write a book about me,” Pete says, and looks past Patrick to the door. “You can take me away now. You’ve used me up, bled me dry, plastered my art and my achievements over your canvases. You’ve made a martyr out of me,” he says, and the door opens and two guards step inside.
“I tried,” Pete says quietly, to Patrick. “Tried to make myself more attractive to you, to you all. Tell me I didn’t fail.”
Patrick wants to do something stupid, like use his non-existent kung-fu skills to knock the guards out, to grab Pete by the wrist and run, somehow get through the seventeen million check points, get out of the country and into some desert island somewhere and…
But Pete Wentz is a murderer, a cruel, twisted man whose heart is dead and cold and nothing, nothing to Patrick.
Patrick convinces himself of this for all of a split second, and then, before the guards can reach him, Pete moves, quick like lightening, into Patrick’s personal space and his body is surprisingly warm against Patrick’s. He can feel Pete’s grasp of his arm burning into his skin, and then Pete’s lips are on his, light, nothing but a mere brush of skin and breath and the slightest hint of moisture. And then the guards pull him away and he’s gone, out of the door. And Patrick just stares and stares and stares at the door and then he picks up Pete’s file, an inch thick now, not just a few pages in a manila folder like it was before.
“You didn’t fail,” he says, quietly, to the now empty room.
He slips the file into his briefcase and goes home and tells himself he’s done his job, that he’s good at it, that this is the perfect ending to what’s turned out to be almost an entire month.
~~~
…
~~~
The world is fucked up.
Patrick watches TV from his bed, surrounded by sheets of the day’s newspapers.
The world mourns the death of a murderer.
They film him, all the way up to the chamber. Pete had asked for reporters to be allowed inside, for his last moments. It had been ruled indecent.
Not as indecent as taking payment as a death for a death, Patrick thinks, mouth twisting bitterly. He can see the clock on the wall; can almost hear it’s ticking if he concentrates. He knows what time they’ll press the button.
Reporters weren’t the only people Pete had asked to be present. Unsuitable, it had been deemed, and Patrick had let out a shaky, cowardly breath when he’d been told of the request and the denial.
~~~
Patrick tells himself it’s society’s fault. This argument rarely works. He’s too aware that the case knows what he’s done, why he’s done it, even if he hides the reasons behind silence and clever words and lies.
For the first time since he was a rookie and fell for every line they fed him, Patrick thinks maybe this is a case of society screwing people’s minds. It’s a fast and quick disposable world, obsessed with everyone getting his or her fifteen minutes and holding onto it, fighting tooth and nail.
~~~
The book is a best seller. Wins an award, even, although Patrick doesn’t go to collect it.
In it, he publishes all of the pages Pete had scribbled on, and he knows without looking for them that there are now websites out there with people deciphering the clues, reading into words things that were never there. He knows that on high school notebooks across the country perhaps even the world, lines from those pages are scrawled in cursive as if they were lyrics from a song.
Patrick grows to hate the book as much as he loves it. Pete Wentz’s life- his thoughts and his sins and anything else Patrick could discover in the months of research- stuffed into a wad of leaves between hard cardboard covers and stuck on Patrick’s shelf.
The book makes a decent profit, enough for Patrick to live on now he’s quit his job- because even though he doubts it could happen again, he can’t face having the same feelings for another one of his cases and wouldn’t want to anyway, because that was something between him and Pete- with a sizable chunk going towards the psychiatrist’s bills he’ll be paying for years to come and for the sleeping tablets he needs to fall asleep every night.
Patrick is famous in his own right now; the man who saw through the glamorous monster’s eyes and lived to tell the tale. His answering machine often has messages from talk shows and tabloids, requesting an interview with him. He changes his number, but they still keep calling. Patrick stops answering his phone.
~~~
Patrick decides that maybe he was the last of Pete’s victims, dead on the inside, smiling on the outside. He wonders if the other victims felt the same about Pete that he does, if they miss the connection they had with him, now they’re dead, now Pete’s dead.
When his phone rings, months and months later, when the book is about to become a paperback so that it can find it’s way into carry-on luggage across the country, can lie beside loungers and towels on beaches across the world, Patrick isn’t completely surprised. He lets the machine pick it up.
“You probably don’t remember who I am,” the voice is quiet, nervous, unsure- tinny down the mouthpiece of a public telephone. “I was the…the last…I…you wrote the book about Pete Wentz and…I wanted to talk to you about it. Could I…”
Patrick picks up the phone. He gives the kid his address, and sits and waits for him to arrive all the while rubbing a finger over the zig zagged lines at the base of his thumb that, if you squinted, could be someone’s initials.
So, remember that Prison!AU I was going on about? The one where Pete kills people and Patrick has to get into his mind? Er, well, here it is. Let me know what you think because I'm freaked out about this and I kind of consider it my first real Bandom fic and that's weird and I was going to post it to a comm somewhere because I'm a total attention whore when it comes to this sort of thing but I don't even know where to begin because I only really read slash comms and I'm not convinced that this is slash anywhere but inside my head so, yeah, feedback makes me love you, guys. Have fun trying to guess who each of the victims is supposed to be. And don't hate me for killing awesome people in this, okay?
Title: The Last Famous International Playboy
Fandom/Pairing: Bandom (Mainly FOB, but with Panic!, CS, TAI, MCR, and others). Gen, although can be Pete/Patrick depending on how you look at it.
Rating: R, I suppose, for disturbing images
Word count: ~6000
Summary: In our lifetime those who kill, the news world hands them stardom and these are the ways on which I was raised. I never wanted to kill, I am not naturally evil- such things I do just to make myself more attractive to you. Have I failed? - The Last of the Famous International Playboys by Morrissey.
Disclaimer: Did. Not. Happen. Completely a work of fiction. For the record, I wish no harm on anyone in Bandom, and I do not think Pete Wentz is a psychotic murderer.
Warning: This is a very dark fic. It deals with psychopaths and murder and disturbing images. In it, many bandom people are dead, although none are mentioned by name. Please do not read if this offends you.
A/N: I’m not even going to begin to try and decipher what was going through my head that made me write this. It was inspired by the song ‘Last of the Famous International Playboys’ by Morrissey, which I’ll upload if anyone wants it. Beta’d by the wonderful vampyreranger.
“Pete Wentz,” the guy introduces himself, pushing his too-long sleeve up over his elbow and offering his hand to Patrick. “Do you recognise me?”
Patrick opens his mouth, because, yes, of course he recognises him. He has Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz the Third’s file in his hand, complete with medical and psychological history and a handful of mug shots.
“Don’t say you don’t know me,” Wentz interrupts before Patrick can say a word with a grin that is half charming, half pleading splitting his face in a way that makes Patrick falter for a moment. Wentz isn’t what Patrick was expecting at all, and Patrick’s been trained to deal with the unexpected, to find that speck of humanity in these people and work it to his advantage, to get under their skin and into their minds.
“Please,” Wentz says, looking hopeful, looking desperate. “Please say you do know who I am.”
And that’s it right there, the hook, what Patrick needs to know, the key to unlocking this whole mystery, and he smiles and nods. “Of course I know who you are, Mr Wentz.”
“Pete,” Wentz corrects and Patrick nods and introduces himself. They take their seats at the wooden table, heavy chairs scraping on the concrete. Patrick throws a quick glance over his shoulder, a nod, and the door is shut. Patrick waits until he hears the heavy bars sliding into place, the clunk and fall as the lock is turned. He shuffles his papers, and then looks up, opening his mouth to speak.
Pete beats him to it though.
”You know who I am,” Pete says, gleefully, and then his expression turns serious. “The question is, do you know who I think I am?”
He’s not supposed to, it’s not part of the training, and it goes against every instinct Patrick is having right then and there, but he smiles. There’s something about this guy that makes him different than the others. This is going to be a challenge. And, really, that’s why Patrick does what he does. That’s why they’ve sent him here, because he’s the best.
~~~
The thing is, it seems half the world knows who Pete Wentz is. He’s a modern day celebrity, name linked in the minds of the public not for the way he delivers lines on screen, not for melodies that intertwine in people’s minds, not for scribbled thoughts sandwiched between cardboard covers, not for who his parents are or even for his reality TV shows or appearance at the opening of an envelope.
When the public thinks of Pete Wentz, they think of blood and death and pain and suffering and terror and screams. Screams that wear your throat raw. Screams that no one can hear. The sort of screams nightmares are made of, where the sound echoes inside your head but your mouth is open and mute and the shadowy figure is coming closer, closer but you’re unable to run.
The public adores him. Adores him for no reason other than the strange kind of worship that people like Pete Wentz inspire in people, the tug of sympathetic heart strings, the familiarity in him that reminds you of someone- an old friend, perhaps, or a loved one, or someone you wish you knew. People find it hard not to adore the cruel, insane, charismatic, genius psychopath caught somewhere between death row and a padded cell.
For now he’s in solitary confinement, not destined for either until they learn what they need to know.
That’s why Patrick is here.
~~~
“You must have some stories to tell,” Patrick says conversationally on the second day. Sometimes this works- sometimes they’re desperate to pour their rage and triumph and hurt out of their mouths and into someone else’s ears. Mostly it doesn’t work, and so Patrick isn’t disheartened when Pete spends an hour telling Patrick stories about his college days, tales of fireworks and daring and vandalism and pranks that would make some people horrified at the cruelty, the malice, the stupidity of them all. Patrick’s heard worse, seen worse, and knows that to Pete there is no black and white in terms of deeds, just many shades of grey.
~~~
“They caught Gabe Saporta,” Patrick announces on the fourth day, sliding a newspaper across the table, headline proclaiming ‘The Cobra Killer Strikes for the Last Time’. Pete looks up, interested, although Patrick can’t be sure if it’s for the news he brings or for the actual paper, pages crisp and fresh.
“He was keeping them in his basement,” Patrick continues, watching Pete carefully as he picks up the newspaper, pushing up one leaf slightly with his fingers, letting it crinkle then smoothing it back out again. “Said it was warmer down there, better suited for his purposes. The things he did to those girls…give me nightmares to think about.”
He watches as Pete quickly runs the pad of his thumb along the edge of the paper. Patrick hears the soft intake of breath as it slices into Pete’s skin, a drop of crimson falling to splash down on the grainy photo of Saporta, eyes dark and hollow, mouth down-turned. Pete sticks his thumb into his mouth and sucks. Then he grins around his thumb.
”Fucking amateur,” Pete says, and reaches out with his now wet thumb to smear his fallen drop of blood over Saporta’s features. He stares down at his handiwork, face blank and emotionless.
“This guy?” Pete says, making it a question, and Patrick nods. “This guy is no one. You know what’s going to happen? A few months, a few trials, a few stories. Then the quick jab, press, slip slide of the needle, fire through his veins and then nothing, nothing, nothing left. Nothing but a name in a file, on a computer, in back issues of newspapers no one will ever read. A few months and people will rack their brains for his name and come up with nothing but the buzz of memories that aren’t important enough for us to hold onto. The only people who’ll ever remember him are the ones he directly wronged- the families, the friends, the ones who discovered the bodies. And what’s the point in that? The stories will die when they do. That’s this guy,” he says, eyes glittering darkly as he leans back triumphantly, sucking his thumb again, lips stained red at the corner.
They sit in silence for a long moment.
Patrick tries to collect his thoughts, to process everything quickly, to see if today will be the day he finds the magic words, the translation into Pete’s language of ‘open sesame’, that will make him split open and spill knowledge into Patrick, onto the paper, onto the floor.
“I’m not this guy,” Pete says, emphatically, dark eyes flashing and Patrick’s hands clench by his sides.
Today is not going to be that day.
~~~
Day five, and Patrick is starting to run out of the techniques they’d all been taught for such situations. He’s winging it now, which is what he’s supposed to do, what he’s good at. That’s why he’s here and not one of the others from his department. He’s an expert on manipulating these people, taking what they say and twisting and disguising it until they’re giving up whatever’s left of their souls.
He’d thought he’d finally gotten a handle on Pete. He already knows what makes him tick- this burning desire for infamy, to be remembered, etched on people’s minds for generations to come. A modern day Jack the Ripper, that’s what he wants to be. He wants people to have heard of him, to have his name slip off their tongues in conversation, to be a pile of newspaper clippings and Internet sites and biographies that promise an insight into his mind.
It should be easy, then, to slip under Pete’s skin and use this to his advantage, to twist the desire, impossible, as it is to not be laced with insecurities, and get Pete to spill the information that a dozen or more people outside of this room are dying to hear.
Patrick should be talking more. He knows he should. Except.
Except.
Except he likes listening to Pete talk. It’s something Pete does so easily, and it’s as if he’s not holding anything back, as if he’s just saying what he’s thinking, his opinion, without caring whether it’s right or wrong, without doing that thing people do when they hold things back, because they’re scared of disagreeing with someone or seeming stupid or revealing too much of themselves. And Patrick finds he likes listening. It was for clues at first, for openings he could use to steer the conversation in the right direction. Somewhere along the line he’s found that he’s stopped listening for those moments, and he’s actually hearing Pete now. And most of the time he likes what he hears.
“You weigh up the pros and cons,” Pete is saying. “For everything. Every little action. You may not realise you do it, but you do. Stupid things. Everything is a decision. Everything becomes a list in your brain, eventually- all it is are two neat columns, pros and cons of living or dying, of letting live or letting die, of breathing or not breathing. Sometimes it’s the wrong decision.”
~~~
Patrick wonders, later, if that’s as close as he’ll ever get to hearing Pete be remorseful for what he’s done. He thinks about it all night, and in the morning, his sleep quota running on empty, he thinks that maybe that wasn’t what Pete meant at all, that perhaps it was the living or dying decision that Pete was regretting.
~~~
That night, over a dinner that he turns up late to, sliding into his seat with apologies and a wry expression and rolled eyes at ‘work stuff, you know how it is’, she’s agonising over a decision. It’s something stupid- Patrick isn’t even sure what, but it’s probably cheesecake versus sorbet or something, and he leans over and takes her hand, pressing it quickly to his lips with a small smile. When he relinquishes her hand and she’s frowning down at the menu again, listing reasons why the sorbet is so much better, calorie wise, Patrick laughs and says:
“You know, everyone weighs up the pros and cons of everything. Think about it. Every action you make, no matter how small, you weigh up the pros and cons. Shall I have cheesecake or fudge cake? Should I turn left or right? Should I breathe or not breathe? Should I live or die? Everything becomes a list that we weigh up.”
And it’s then- as she makes a face and reminding him again of how much she hates fudge cake and how it was never an option anyway and how she’s decided to have the sorbet and will he get the cheesecake in case she changes her mind? - that his stomach knots and he has to loosen his tie a little to get some air, because he realises that at some point while he’s been trying to get under Pete’s skin, into his mind, behind his eyes, that Pete’s managed to do the exact same thing to him.
And that’s a dangerous thing. He should take himself off the case. He should throw up his hands and admit defeat, no matter how much he hates doing that. He should never, ever, see Pete again.
~~~
Patrick never gets to find out if he could really have walked into his boss’s office and dropped the case, because when he gets into work the next morning, there’s a message for him, and ten minutes later he’s arguing his case as to why he should stay, why he should be allowed to continue working with Pete, how he’s just been building his trust because anyone can clearly see that all Pete needs is a friendly shoulder to cry on. All Pete needs is a friend.
Which, now that Patrick really thinks about it, is blatantly true. His boss gives him a level look and then sighs and says ‘I like you, kid’ and ‘I have faith in you’ and ‘If there’s no progress after today I’m putting Iero on the case’ and Patrick fucking hates that guy, and wouldn’t inflict him on Pete if Pete were his worst enemy, and so, when he walks into the room and decides that if Pete needs a friend, sees Patrick as a friend then, well, that’s what Patrick’s going to play on.
~~~
“Patrick,” Pete says, and it makes Patrick shiver. Pete says his name like it means something to him, like a secret they share that no one else knows.
Patrick scrapes back the chair and sits. Then he leans forward and puts his elbows on the tabletop. He sees Pete’s head snap up at this sudden intrusion on his space. Patrick never touches the table. He always sits with files in his lap, away, separate. The table is Pete’s- possibly the last luxury he has left now, a temporary space to call his home that is more than the practicalities of a floor, hard bed, sink, toilet, and that is not something Patrick ever wanted to intrude on, less so once he started to get to know Pete.
“Please,” Patrick says, and his voice is foreign to him, old and pained and tired and scratchy, and Pete is frowning at him. “Please. Pete,” he adds, and Pete’s head is cocked to the side. He rubs his nose and stares at Patrick.
“I need to know,” Patrick says. “I need you to tell me. I- they’re transferring me to another case.”
Pete frowns at him then, as if he doesn’t understand what Patrick means.
“Transferring you,” he echoes, rolling the word around in his mouth, “to another case?” he asks, slowly, and Patrick begins to wonder if Pete even knows why he’s here, why he’s spent hours, every day for over a week with him, talking and watching and sitting in oddly companionable silence. He wonders if Pete has become delusional. His psych report says he’s as sane as anyone who goes on a random killing spree can be, but maybe these four walls, day after day, are starting to take their toll on his sanity. Patrick thinks maybe it’s starting to take a toll on his own.
Pete’s biting at his bottom lip now, watching Patrick like he’s going to explain, going to sort everything out, and with a horrible, terrible swoop of his stomach overturning, Patrick realises he was right- he’s Pete’s friend. His only friend. And in some twisted way Pete has become his friend too. Which is all kinds of fucked up that he doesn’t particularly want to think about right now.
They’ve trained him well.
“Yes,” Patrick says, pressing his advantage. “They’re going to stop me from seeing you, Pete,” he says. “They won’t let me come anymore, and they’re going to bring someone else in for you to talk to.”
“I don’t want anyone else,” Pete says, abruptly, and makes a move as if he’s going to jump over the table and tackle Patrick.
Patrick’s flinch is small, but noticeable, and Pete lowers himself back into his chair.
“Sorry,” Pete says, as if he knows he’s broken some unwritten law that he’s never seen.
“They’re going to make me go away,” Patrick says as if he’s talking to a child, self-hatred almost suffocating, the way he’s twisting Pete’s feelings, his emotions, to get what he wants. He knows he shouldn’t care, not as much as he is right now, knows that he’s supposed to put all his sympathy and pity and compassion and empathy into a box and stash it at the back of his mind, because he deals with monsters on a daily basis and caring for people like that will get you fired and a long stint lying on your back on a couch talking about your feelings and possibly even a broken heart. He wonders briefly if he’s already in too deep, if there’s any way for him not to care about this, about hurting Pete by abusing the trust he’s stupidly put in Patrick.
But this is his fucking job, and there’s more at stake than his own sanity, so he pushes emotions aside as best he can. “Unless you tell me,” Patrick says earnestly. “Tell me where they all are.”
Pete stares at him for a long moment and Patrick wonders what would happen if he let himself throw up, right here and now, onto Pete’s spotless table, onto the cold grey floor, onto his crisp pinstripe suit. Wonders if it’d help rid himself of the queasy feeling, the way his skin’s crawling as if he’s got a really bad case of food poisoning, the way the lights in the room are suddenly all too bright.
Pete’s face is carefully blank. “Tell me what they say about me,” he says, and then when Patrick nods, promises, he stands, leans across the table.
Patrick sits perfectly still, holding his breath until his lungs are screaming for air, as Pete slides a piece of paper out of the file on Patrick’s lap, as his fingers, with their bitten down nails, gently pluck the fountain pen out of Patrick’s hand.
He scribbles until the ink runs out, and Patrick hands him a Biro, letting Pete fill up the entire page with words and pictures and lines that seem to mean nothing.
“The last,” Pete says, when he hands the paper over. Both sides are covered, tiny, cramped writing that Patrick has to squint at.
~~~
If Patrick believed there was a God, he’d think it was a miracle, divine intervention or some fucking thing like that.
They find the kid alive. He’s in the basement of a house in the woods in the middle of Nevada, of all places, and they don’t even have evidence that Pete’s ever been to that state before except for this kid who’s been in a locked, dark room with nothing but a cooler of water and a few tins of food he’d managed to break open for over 6 days.
Patrick gets the call at home, late that night, when they’d broken Pete’s code- clues hidden in prose, directions in and around and through the doodles he’d made. They tell him about the kid, how he’s in intensive care now, how he’s lost a lot of blood from the shallow wounds, how he’s so thin it hurts to look at him, but he’s alive, this kid is alive and Patrick puts the phone down and walks into his bathroom and is sick so violently that all the tiny blood vessels around his eyes burst and he wears his glasses with the extra thick frames the next day to hide them.
He doesn’t sleep that night, thinking about how, if he hadn’t spent so much time inadvertently developing an impossible friendship with Pete, this kid could have been found earlier, days earlier. He wonders how many more are out there.
~~~
He asks Pete the next day if there are any others that could possibly be alive, but Pete shakes his head adamantly, making Patrick wonder how much of the kid surviving is luck, and how much of it is part of Pete’s great plan, leaving someone alive who can be interviewed, who can tell the world over and over what it was like to be kidnapped from the other side of the country and driven, trussed up in the trunk of an old car, across state after state and through the desert into the middle of nowhere. To tell of the fear and horror and the way his spirit broke, when he realised no one was going to come and rescue him, and how it was all because of one man.
But something has started now, and Pete asks for another piece of paper, and scribbles away. Patrick spends his time alternating between watching Pete write, having brief conversations whenever Pete wants to rest his cramped hand, and thinking of the kid. How he could have saved him, could have gotten to him before he’d given up. Patrick deserves to remember the kid’s name for the rest of his life, remember as penance for what he did. If he was the kind of guy who got tattoos, he’d get one of the kids initials- two letters that fit together so neatly, somewhere he wouldn’t be able to ignore. He spends a decent segment of the afternoon contemplating the fleshy mound at the base of his right thumb, a constant reminder of pain, at first, and then a marking he couldn’t ignore for the rest of eternity.
He’s wondering if doing that, if doing anything could ever give the kid back even a sliver of what’s been stolen from him. What Patrick’s stolen from him, because he’s just as guilty as Pete now, for his inaction in finding the kid, for his selfishness at enjoying Pete’s company while the kid was sitting in the dark and contemplating his death.
Patrick’s contemplating how unlikely it is that anything he did could ever make it up to the kid, when Pete slides the paper back across the table like a kid who’s completed his homework on time for a change.
“Number 4,” he smiles.
~~~
Number 4 looks ridiculously young. Not in the original photos from the crime scene- in those he’s just pale skin and dark red blood and matted dark hair. But in the photos they send after the autopsy, the kid looks young, too young, with even spaced holes along the edges of his full lips where his mouth had been sewn tightly shut- while he was still alive, the report noted, filling Patrick with a whole new sense of horror. Presumably this was to keep the kid from screaming as Pete tied him down and painstakingly carved words into his skin: Free to choose liberty and eternal life or to choose captivity and death.
~~~
Everyday, a new number, never any sort of sequence or pattern.
Everyday, Patrick offers Pete a laptop or a tape recorder to record what he’s been scribbling on clean white paper, but Pete always declines, it’s easier to hide the clues and red herrings in non-linear ramblings and designs and pictures and poems and lines that could be songs, that Patrick has to stop himself from putting to music in his head.
Everyday, they still talk. It’s never awkward between them, the conversation. Patrick doesn’t analyse this.
~~~
Pictures of the guy wrapped in guitar strings make Patrick lose his breakfast and he can hardly look Pete in the eye when he goes in to see him shortly before noon. The images haunt him, etched onto his eyelids, the deep gashes, the gaping flesh, the neck, garrotted by the fine wire until only the back of the spinal cord is holding it attached to the body. It takes a lot of strength to do that, and Pete’s such a little guy. If he didn’t know Pete as well as he did now, Patrick would think he had some sort of accomplice, but Pete isn’t the type to share the limelight.
For the first time, Patrick is scared of Pete, scared of whatever hatred and anger and desire that burns inside him that is enough for him to almost rip a man’s head from his body. Patrick sits a little further back in his chair that day, and if Pete notices, he doesn’t comment.
~~~
A new victim, each day, and they begin to merge in Patrick’s mind, until he can’t remember if number 12 is the boy they’d found lying neatly on a bed of photos taken at various stages of his drawn-out death, or the tall, skinny man whose head had been shorn, curls scattered around him like a halo, once beautiful face nothing but a mesh of knife cuts and empty eye sockets.
~~~
“The 8th,” Pete says.
~~~
A boy, with his neck slit from ear to ear.
~~~
“The 15th,” Pete says.
~~~
A guy, head caved in on one side, shoulder length hair matted with blood and brains and strands of it stuck to the game console that turned out to be the murder weapon.
~~~
“The 1st,” Pete says.
~~~
A teenager, hanged, one sneaker still dangling from his lifeless body when they’d found him.
~~~
“The 11th,” Pete says.
~~~
A man, found in a freezer in the basement of Pete’s estranged and innocent sister’s house, chopped up like cuts of meat, each labelled neatly in Pete’s choppy handwriting- Leg, Thigh, Hand, Back.
~~~
Eventually Patrick brings himself to ask what number the kid that survived would have been, should have been, could have been, if it had taken them just that bit longer.
Pete just looks at him with cold eyes and shakes his head. There are some secrets he’s not sharing. Not yet.
~~~
A guy stabbed straight through the heart with a wooden stake. It’s like something from a vampire movie.
Pete shrugs when Patrick comes in the next day.
”I just wanted to try it,” he says, matter of fact, and Patrick doesn’t ask anything else all day.
~~~
Patrick doesn’t always get a chance to read Pete’s scribbles. Once he’s out of the room, the paper is snatched away, copied and sent to wherever the people who are a hundred times smarter than Patrick work.
Every so often he catches a glimpse of a word or two.
‘Hearts and wrists intact’ he sees once, and the next day there’s another file on his desk.
Two teenagers, childhood friends, limbs intertwined, their hands stuck together by the blood that had run from their slit wrists. Later Patrick learns that their chests had been carved open, spread, and their hearts removed and switched, the wrong organ in the wrong body, chests neatly sewn closed again.
He asks Pete about it, the first time he’s really questioned any of the deaths, asked why, because no-one cares about that anymore, they just want the where’s and when’s and who’s and how’s.
Pete gives him an even look and launches into a lengthy story about how, sometimes, people are just built wrong, they have parts that belong to other people and it’s wrong, so wrong, until Pete fixes it. He says this is the way those kids were meant to be, and Patrick doesn’t argue, because for all he knows, Pete might be right.
~~~
There doesn’t seem to be a logical pattern to Pete’s victims, nothing linking them to him, or to each other. They’re spread across the country, dotted from coast to coast. They have nothing in common, except for the fact they’re all male. So when the next two victims Pete shares with him are female, and the next, and the next, Patrick can’t help but be surprised.
~~~
The first two are sisters. Poisoned, the coroner says, found slumped at opposite ends of a room in an abandoned house in Texas. Their long blond hair extensions have been hacked off. One’s nose has been sliced from her face, the others breasts slashed down deep enough to reveal sharp whiteness of rib bone.
~~~
It’s hard not to become familiar with the myriad of ways of murdering a fellow human being when you have a job like Patrick’s. But even he’d never heard of someone bleeding to death from a thousand shallow cuts, dark skin turned pale through blood loss. The man had been covered in tattoos and Pete had carefully traced around every line with a wickedly sharp blade, outlining every picture and word on the man’s body, slicing out piercings as he came across them.
~~~
The third girl had already been found, although nothing had linked her to Pete until he’d written his clues in black on the piece of white paper and slid it across to Patrick. Electrocution, cause of death said. Accidental, it had said, and Patrick finds himself wishing Pete could have let this one go, not mentioned it, let her fade into a story about being careful around guitar amps and rain on floorboards. Owning up to her is just another nail in a coffin that already contains more metal than wood, and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t effect how the majority of the world sees Pete, but Patrick still wants the growing list of the dead to be shorter, as if one or two less victims on the roll call would make a difference.
Pete wouldn’t want any to be left out anyway. Patrick knows he’d ask what would be the point of killing people for the fame, if you don’t get to take the blame for each and every one?
~~~
Pete wasn’t evil. Patrick had met evil, once, empty eyes staring out at him from behind a fringe of coal black hair. Patrick hadn’t slept for days after than, and even then only with chemical assistance. He’d been like a void, that man, sucking everything positive out of Patrick’s brain as soon as he’d stepped into the room, and replacing it with the stuff of nightmares, like some bizarre twisted Tim Burton movie playing itself out on repeat in his head, skipping the happy ending every time.
~~~
The fourth- and last- girl, had been found draped over a sofa in an old artists studio, arranged as if she were posing for a portrait or for a photo shoot. Her pretty face was artfully made up, her long blonde hair elegantly styled. And the rest of her skin was neatly peeled away from her entire body and abandoned on the floor, like discarded clothing.
~~~
One day, Pete hands back a blank sheet of paper.
“No more,” he says, when Patrick raises questioning eyes to his own.
They look at each other. They both know what this means.
“Write a book about me,” Pete says, and looks past Patrick to the door. “You can take me away now. You’ve used me up, bled me dry, plastered my art and my achievements over your canvases. You’ve made a martyr out of me,” he says, and the door opens and two guards step inside.
“I tried,” Pete says quietly, to Patrick. “Tried to make myself more attractive to you, to you all. Tell me I didn’t fail.”
Patrick wants to do something stupid, like use his non-existent kung-fu skills to knock the guards out, to grab Pete by the wrist and run, somehow get through the seventeen million check points, get out of the country and into some desert island somewhere and…
But Pete Wentz is a murderer, a cruel, twisted man whose heart is dead and cold and nothing, nothing to Patrick.
Patrick convinces himself of this for all of a split second, and then, before the guards can reach him, Pete moves, quick like lightening, into Patrick’s personal space and his body is surprisingly warm against Patrick’s. He can feel Pete’s grasp of his arm burning into his skin, and then Pete’s lips are on his, light, nothing but a mere brush of skin and breath and the slightest hint of moisture. And then the guards pull him away and he’s gone, out of the door. And Patrick just stares and stares and stares at the door and then he picks up Pete’s file, an inch thick now, not just a few pages in a manila folder like it was before.
“You didn’t fail,” he says, quietly, to the now empty room.
He slips the file into his briefcase and goes home and tells himself he’s done his job, that he’s good at it, that this is the perfect ending to what’s turned out to be almost an entire month.
~~~
…
~~~
The world is fucked up.
Patrick watches TV from his bed, surrounded by sheets of the day’s newspapers.
The world mourns the death of a murderer.
They film him, all the way up to the chamber. Pete had asked for reporters to be allowed inside, for his last moments. It had been ruled indecent.
Not as indecent as taking payment as a death for a death, Patrick thinks, mouth twisting bitterly. He can see the clock on the wall; can almost hear it’s ticking if he concentrates. He knows what time they’ll press the button.
Reporters weren’t the only people Pete had asked to be present. Unsuitable, it had been deemed, and Patrick had let out a shaky, cowardly breath when he’d been told of the request and the denial.
~~~
Patrick tells himself it’s society’s fault. This argument rarely works. He’s too aware that the case knows what he’s done, why he’s done it, even if he hides the reasons behind silence and clever words and lies.
For the first time since he was a rookie and fell for every line they fed him, Patrick thinks maybe this is a case of society screwing people’s minds. It’s a fast and quick disposable world, obsessed with everyone getting his or her fifteen minutes and holding onto it, fighting tooth and nail.
~~~
The book is a best seller. Wins an award, even, although Patrick doesn’t go to collect it.
In it, he publishes all of the pages Pete had scribbled on, and he knows without looking for them that there are now websites out there with people deciphering the clues, reading into words things that were never there. He knows that on high school notebooks across the country perhaps even the world, lines from those pages are scrawled in cursive as if they were lyrics from a song.
Patrick grows to hate the book as much as he loves it. Pete Wentz’s life- his thoughts and his sins and anything else Patrick could discover in the months of research- stuffed into a wad of leaves between hard cardboard covers and stuck on Patrick’s shelf.
The book makes a decent profit, enough for Patrick to live on now he’s quit his job- because even though he doubts it could happen again, he can’t face having the same feelings for another one of his cases and wouldn’t want to anyway, because that was something between him and Pete- with a sizable chunk going towards the psychiatrist’s bills he’ll be paying for years to come and for the sleeping tablets he needs to fall asleep every night.
Patrick is famous in his own right now; the man who saw through the glamorous monster’s eyes and lived to tell the tale. His answering machine often has messages from talk shows and tabloids, requesting an interview with him. He changes his number, but they still keep calling. Patrick stops answering his phone.
~~~
Patrick decides that maybe he was the last of Pete’s victims, dead on the inside, smiling on the outside. He wonders if the other victims felt the same about Pete that he does, if they miss the connection they had with him, now they’re dead, now Pete’s dead.
When his phone rings, months and months later, when the book is about to become a paperback so that it can find it’s way into carry-on luggage across the country, can lie beside loungers and towels on beaches across the world, Patrick isn’t completely surprised. He lets the machine pick it up.
“You probably don’t remember who I am,” the voice is quiet, nervous, unsure- tinny down the mouthpiece of a public telephone. “I was the…the last…I…you wrote the book about Pete Wentz and…I wanted to talk to you about it. Could I…”
Patrick picks up the phone. He gives the kid his address, and sits and waits for him to arrive all the while rubbing a finger over the zig zagged lines at the base of his thumb that, if you squinted, could be someone’s initials.