Fic: Grace - Chapter 17 (part 2)
Title: Grace - Chapter 17 (part 2)
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Grinning back, I turn around again and Ryan, Ryan, he isn’t there. I have to stifle my panic, breathe in too quickly, so quickly it shakes my lungs and there’s this bench across the street, you can see it from the window here, and Ryan’s sitting there with his legs crossed and a tiny little book that is almost hidden by his palms.
Right, and I choke out a breath, let it loose through my clenched teeth. It’s all I can do not to scream, not to storm across the street and almost get hit by a speeding Mercedes.
I fist my fingers around the Styrofoam coffee cups instead, walk over on stiff legs until I loom over Ryan’s tiny shadow.
“You shouldn’t wander off,” I say. “I could’ve like…I could’ve lost you.”
Ryan’s eyes glance up from the book, and he stares with wide eyes. “I’ve lived here almost as long as you have. I know my way around.”
“Yeah, but, uh-“
“You haven’t lost me,” he mumbles, “not yet.”
I let loose a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding back, choke it out from the dark depths of my throat, my lungs, and I throw myself onto the bench beside him, pass him a coffee that he takes with nimble, curling fingers.
“So I called my mum,” I mumble, and me saying this, it has to be Alice, has to be her coz she’s ripped the plaster off, peeled back the bandage too quickly and the scars are too raw still. She’s torn off the lid, and the memories scatter, ooze onto the floor between Ryan and me.
“So I heard.”
“Uhm, she was…” I take another deep breath, scuff the toes of my shoes on the grit that litters the ground. “You said she was unhappy and you were…well, you were like, right.”
“I know,” Ryan says, and he blows strands of hair off his face.
“My point is,” I say, “I did what you asked.”
“Brendon,” Ryan replies, and he’s staring like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “I didn’t ask you to do it for me, I wanted you to do it for you. I…how…did you miss the point of all that?”
He takes a deep breath, but his eyes, those almonds that are so deeply ingrained in his face, they don’t blink or waver. “I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I wasn’t trying to win a fucking argument, I wanted you to…forget it.”
And the blood is pounding between my eyes; the monster’s sitting there hammering away with a chunk of wood that looks like something from The Flintstones. A headache is coming on, setting in, so all I can say, all I do say is, “All right.”
Only I hesitate, instead of leaving it, I tack on a - “My mum had an affair.”
Ryan just smiles, very briefly, very softly, “More than sixty-percent of marital relationships have suffered the effects of adultery.” He casts me a sidelong stare, peers deep from beneath his eyelashes. “More than forty-percent of those live through it unaware.”
I ignore him though, take a draining gulp of coffee, and stare at my shoes. “She told me and…and what do you say to that?”
Ryan stares for a moment, sighs and drops his book into his messenger bag. He doesn’t quite make eye-contact, opting instead to watch the ants run races past the trailing denim of his jeans.
“Nothing,” he says. “And she wouldn’t…she couldn’t have expected you to.”
I laugh a little, wrap my fingers tighter around the coffee cup. “I kinda wish she hadn’t told me.”
His eyelids flutter shut, and right here, right now he looks like he was born for this role, this quiet understanding. “Can you honestly say your relationship is worse because she did?”
“It wasn’t all that good to begin with.” And I shrug, move my shoulders enough that the rest of me slumps back onto the cold wooden bench.
Again, someone’s found the remote control, has tapped it too hard against the counter, wrong side up, and the mute button’s been hit in the process. This silence, it’s not comfortable, it’s odd and out of place - my lips are still moving, and everyone who watches on moves closer to the speakers, tries to hear, but the point is…the point is, no sound is coming out.
Nothings being said, not a word, not a whistle, not a hum of breath until Ryan, until he sighs too hard, slumps forward, and stares at the ground. Not until he says, “My dad was an alcoholic.”
I close my mouth here, stop gaping like a fish out of water, a cat without air.
“He made me unhappy, and y’know, I say I’m a writer, I pretend that I can say all these things so beautifully, but when it comes to him, when it comes to that, all I can say about our relationship was that it was destructive, for, well, for both of us.” Ryan rubs clenched fists on the thighs of his jeans, his coffee cup having been dumped on that bare fraction of wooden bench between us.
“He came back from Vietnam unhappy, and he thought he could clutch onto those bare threads of life by fucking some teenage girl in a bar, apparently without a condom, without birth control. And when she didn’t want the baby, he thought he could renew his lease on life by starting a new one.”
I find my mouth, my vocal chords again in just enough time to choke out a, “Didn’t work?”
Ryan laughs a little, manages to look up at me through his bangs and shakes his head. “Nobody can expect a new life to bring back one already lost. Maybe your mum and my dad were alike in that way. My dad expected me to give him something I couldn’t give, and maybe your mum was expecting you and your siblings to validate a love for a man she didn’t have.”
And maybe, maybe that makes more sense than it should. “Yeah.”
“When I couldn’t give him happiness, he looked for it in other places.” Ryan, he’s, and I don’t know why I’ve never seen it before, but he’s tired, exhausted even. It’s not something entirely visible, no dark rings beneath almond eyes, no wrinkles or sighs, but there’s this atmosphere, this air to him that’s just so much older than he is. “I could write a million clichés on the bottom of a bottle, but none would be as predictable and as hopelessly desolate as the real thing.”
“He wanted to drink himself back to life,” Ryan continues, and he leans back on the bench, looks me straight in the eye for maybe the first time in forever. “But instead he drank himself to death.”
I always end up in these conversations, chats, discussions, debates where I don’t know what to do or say or think, and instead of thinking out an answer, instead of figuring out a way to break the silence sensibly, I sit tight and quiet until my mouth breaks it for me. “How’d you end up in the diner?”
Ryan stares for a moment, shifts his feet on the ground and picks up his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I don’t even know. He died and I hitchhiked my way to oblivion.”
“And then?”
“And then,” he says, and he smiles at me, really smiles, and there aren’t any teeth and it might be a little sad but it’s directed at me, and that’s all I can pay attention to. “I met you.”
Something warms at that, my chest swells and my heart aches and wires pull at my cheeks and my lips and I’m smiling back before I can stop myself. I duck my head a little, and fuck, there’s heat in my cheeks and I’m, I’m blushing or something.
Ryan, he must see coz he laughs a little, chuckles deep in his throat and runs a hand through his hair. “What a pair we make.”
I don’t reply, so Ryan, he continues, “We’re living clichés, living parodies, cut down on the cusswords and we could work the Disney scene.”
“Nah,” I say, “there haven’t been any villains to defeat.”
Ryan laughs again and it echoes in my ears. “Really? I thought I made a pretty good one.”
“No, you were the, the mentor guy,” I reply. “Merlin to my Arthur.”
He smiles at that. “Always the hero.”
Ryan stares at the ground again, his eyes, the liquid chocolate of his eyelids, they’re half-lidded and delicate right now. Everything here, the breeze and the coffee, the sky and the company, it’s so fucking serene, so gentle and this…And this, I think I could live like this, in these moments, these seconds because I’ve never spoken like this, I’ve never felt like this about a situation, about someone.
“I think I’m in love with you.”
I could count the silences today, the moments where the conversation trails off, the chatter dies, and maybe someone leans on the mute button again, coz this, it can’t be normal.
Ryan sighs, and he won’t, doesn’t make eye contact for a million moments. It’s been a decade, a millennia before he opens his mouth again, and I’ve been left to sweat and shake and drink until my throat is raw from the heat of boiling coffee.
“What happened to the ballet dancer, Brendon?”
I start at that, because this, it wasn’t what I was expecting. “What?”
“That girl you used to fuck,” he says, and his fingers, they’re clenched around the coffee cup. I can see the indent his fingers are making on the Styrofoam. “The ballet dancer.”
“Oh.” And I hadn’t thought of her really.
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and his eyes are wide, forehead furrowed and again, he’s not…he’s older, tired and I don’t understand, I don’t get it. “Brendon, that’s my point. You get bored of people, and then they just, they just fall off the face of your Earth. They keep on living, but you don’t give a fuck. You didn’t give a fuck about your mother, or Catherine, or the ballet dancer, and you won’t give a fuck about me.”
Ryan’s fingers, they’re still on the Styrofoam, but maybe they’re around my throat as well, because all of it, my neck, all of its insides are clenching shut. My trachea tangling around my vocal chords and a part of me can’t breathe, and the other part of me just, it says, “There’s a difference between you and the ballet dancer though.”
Ryan scoffs, and his fingers clench tighter around the cup, and my throat constricts even more because this, this isn’t what I want, this isn’t fucking serene anymore, this is quickly becoming bitter and angry and all these emotions that I’ve always associated with the word love. This is everything I’ve never wanted it to be.
”What difference?” he says, and he mutters it too quickly, out through clenched teeth. “I’m a guy?”
“No,” I reply, because no, “well, yes, but that’s not what I mean, and…”
“And what, Brendon?”
And this isn’t going the way I want it too.
“I never thought I was in love her.”
Breathe in, I tell myself, just breathe.
Ryan’s eyes are scrunched shut, and he rubs tight fingers over them, drops his coffee cup back onto the bench. He sighs and his arms, if I look close enough, I swear I can see them shake. “This won’t work,” he says, and fuck you, Ryan Ross, fuck you for saying that, even if maybe I’ve been thinking it all along.
“Not with that attitude it won’t,” I say, and I lean over, grab one of his clenched fists in my hands and hold it close to my thigh. Ryan, he doesn’t snatch it away, so I take that as a good sign.
“What happens when you get bored of me?”
“I…” And I don’t know.
Ryan, he’s rolling now, autopilot, has released the parachute and all of this, it’s out of his control. He’s latched onto a topic I’m not even sure he believes in, and he’s talking until he can stop. “What happens when people ask about me?” he says. “Who are you going to be taking to premieres? Award ceremonies? Parties? Who’s gonna be on your arm on E! News?”
He’s moving too quickly for me, so when I choke out a, “You won’t be a secret,” he’s armed and perfectly poised with a, “Prove it.”
And me, I do what I always do when faced with something I don’t understand, something I can’t comprehend, something that I don’t fucking know. I let go of his hand and grab hold of his face before crushing my lips onto his. I’m trying to get so close, too close, trying to merge, trying to get in his face, in his head, trying to change his mind, and I don’t, I’ve never kissed like this before. Never kissed with so much intent and purpose and raw desperation, and when we come up for air, we’ve both had the life and the emotion and the thought sucked out of us.
“We don’t know anything about each other.” And maybe he doesn’t even say it, it’s so quiet, too quiet, breathed out onto the passing breeze.
This, it’s enough of an excuse that I don’t blame myself when all I can counter Ryan’s blank gaze and heaving breath with is, “Come home with me.”
He doesn’t nod for a second, but when he does I hold his hand too tight, so tight that maybe we did merge, maybe we are one person now, one thought, one concept and when we walk the three blocks to my empty apartment we don’t talk, we fuck.
*
The sunlight filters through the splice in the curtains, and the monster’s been stifled enough that all I can feel is his claws raking tiredly against the back of my skull, the sides of my neck. I roll over, fling an arm over an empty bedside, and Ryan, he left sometime in the night, stumbled over shoes and magazines and CDs and I pretended to sleep through his muttered curse words and staggering feet.
I wasn’t surprised, and even today, years later, I don’t blame him for it. I would’ve done the same thing in his position.
It’s in these moments, when I’m tired and hungry, but probably more sexually-sated than I’d like to admit, that I lie back and think too hard. Think until my brain swells shut, props a closed for renovation, a do not disturb sign up between my eyes and I’m left with conclusions that leave me aching. Results and dead-end thought processes that leave my stomach twisted in on itself and blood that runs thin and slow between my vital organs.
Ryan says I get bored of people, but I don’t.
They get bored of me, and I leave them before they can figure that out.
Rating: M
Fandom: P!atd (Brendon/Ryan)
Grinning back, I turn around again and Ryan, Ryan, he isn’t there. I have to stifle my panic, breathe in too quickly, so quickly it shakes my lungs and there’s this bench across the street, you can see it from the window here, and Ryan’s sitting there with his legs crossed and a tiny little book that is almost hidden by his palms.
Right, and I choke out a breath, let it loose through my clenched teeth. It’s all I can do not to scream, not to storm across the street and almost get hit by a speeding Mercedes.
I fist my fingers around the Styrofoam coffee cups instead, walk over on stiff legs until I loom over Ryan’s tiny shadow.
“You shouldn’t wander off,” I say. “I could’ve like…I could’ve lost you.”
Ryan’s eyes glance up from the book, and he stares with wide eyes. “I’ve lived here almost as long as you have. I know my way around.”
“Yeah, but, uh-“
“You haven’t lost me,” he mumbles, “not yet.”
I let loose a breath I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding back, choke it out from the dark depths of my throat, my lungs, and I throw myself onto the bench beside him, pass him a coffee that he takes with nimble, curling fingers.
“So I called my mum,” I mumble, and me saying this, it has to be Alice, has to be her coz she’s ripped the plaster off, peeled back the bandage too quickly and the scars are too raw still. She’s torn off the lid, and the memories scatter, ooze onto the floor between Ryan and me.
“So I heard.”
“Uhm, she was…” I take another deep breath, scuff the toes of my shoes on the grit that litters the ground. “You said she was unhappy and you were…well, you were like, right.”
“I know,” Ryan says, and he blows strands of hair off his face.
“My point is,” I say, “I did what you asked.”
“Brendon,” Ryan replies, and he’s staring like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. “I didn’t ask you to do it for me, I wanted you to do it for you. I…how…did you miss the point of all that?”
He takes a deep breath, but his eyes, those almonds that are so deeply ingrained in his face, they don’t blink or waver. “I wasn’t trying to prove a point, I wasn’t trying to win a fucking argument, I wanted you to…forget it.”
And the blood is pounding between my eyes; the monster’s sitting there hammering away with a chunk of wood that looks like something from The Flintstones. A headache is coming on, setting in, so all I can say, all I do say is, “All right.”
Only I hesitate, instead of leaving it, I tack on a - “My mum had an affair.”
Ryan just smiles, very briefly, very softly, “More than sixty-percent of marital relationships have suffered the effects of adultery.” He casts me a sidelong stare, peers deep from beneath his eyelashes. “More than forty-percent of those live through it unaware.”
I ignore him though, take a draining gulp of coffee, and stare at my shoes. “She told me and…and what do you say to that?”
Ryan stares for a moment, sighs and drops his book into his messenger bag. He doesn’t quite make eye-contact, opting instead to watch the ants run races past the trailing denim of his jeans.
“Nothing,” he says. “And she wouldn’t…she couldn’t have expected you to.”
I laugh a little, wrap my fingers tighter around the coffee cup. “I kinda wish she hadn’t told me.”
His eyelids flutter shut, and right here, right now he looks like he was born for this role, this quiet understanding. “Can you honestly say your relationship is worse because she did?”
“It wasn’t all that good to begin with.” And I shrug, move my shoulders enough that the rest of me slumps back onto the cold wooden bench.
Again, someone’s found the remote control, has tapped it too hard against the counter, wrong side up, and the mute button’s been hit in the process. This silence, it’s not comfortable, it’s odd and out of place - my lips are still moving, and everyone who watches on moves closer to the speakers, tries to hear, but the point is…the point is, no sound is coming out.
Nothings being said, not a word, not a whistle, not a hum of breath until Ryan, until he sighs too hard, slumps forward, and stares at the ground. Not until he says, “My dad was an alcoholic.”
I close my mouth here, stop gaping like a fish out of water, a cat without air.
“He made me unhappy, and y’know, I say I’m a writer, I pretend that I can say all these things so beautifully, but when it comes to him, when it comes to that, all I can say about our relationship was that it was destructive, for, well, for both of us.” Ryan rubs clenched fists on the thighs of his jeans, his coffee cup having been dumped on that bare fraction of wooden bench between us.
“He came back from Vietnam unhappy, and he thought he could clutch onto those bare threads of life by fucking some teenage girl in a bar, apparently without a condom, without birth control. And when she didn’t want the baby, he thought he could renew his lease on life by starting a new one.”
I find my mouth, my vocal chords again in just enough time to choke out a, “Didn’t work?”
Ryan laughs a little, manages to look up at me through his bangs and shakes his head. “Nobody can expect a new life to bring back one already lost. Maybe your mum and my dad were alike in that way. My dad expected me to give him something I couldn’t give, and maybe your mum was expecting you and your siblings to validate a love for a man she didn’t have.”
And maybe, maybe that makes more sense than it should. “Yeah.”
“When I couldn’t give him happiness, he looked for it in other places.” Ryan, he’s, and I don’t know why I’ve never seen it before, but he’s tired, exhausted even. It’s not something entirely visible, no dark rings beneath almond eyes, no wrinkles or sighs, but there’s this atmosphere, this air to him that’s just so much older than he is. “I could write a million clichés on the bottom of a bottle, but none would be as predictable and as hopelessly desolate as the real thing.”
“He wanted to drink himself back to life,” Ryan continues, and he leans back on the bench, looks me straight in the eye for maybe the first time in forever. “But instead he drank himself to death.”
I always end up in these conversations, chats, discussions, debates where I don’t know what to do or say or think, and instead of thinking out an answer, instead of figuring out a way to break the silence sensibly, I sit tight and quiet until my mouth breaks it for me. “How’d you end up in the diner?”
Ryan stares for a moment, shifts his feet on the ground and picks up his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I don’t even know. He died and I hitchhiked my way to oblivion.”
“And then?”
“And then,” he says, and he smiles at me, really smiles, and there aren’t any teeth and it might be a little sad but it’s directed at me, and that’s all I can pay attention to. “I met you.”
Something warms at that, my chest swells and my heart aches and wires pull at my cheeks and my lips and I’m smiling back before I can stop myself. I duck my head a little, and fuck, there’s heat in my cheeks and I’m, I’m blushing or something.
Ryan, he must see coz he laughs a little, chuckles deep in his throat and runs a hand through his hair. “What a pair we make.”
I don’t reply, so Ryan, he continues, “We’re living clichés, living parodies, cut down on the cusswords and we could work the Disney scene.”
“Nah,” I say, “there haven’t been any villains to defeat.”
Ryan laughs again and it echoes in my ears. “Really? I thought I made a pretty good one.”
“No, you were the, the mentor guy,” I reply. “Merlin to my Arthur.”
He smiles at that. “Always the hero.”
Ryan stares at the ground again, his eyes, the liquid chocolate of his eyelids, they’re half-lidded and delicate right now. Everything here, the breeze and the coffee, the sky and the company, it’s so fucking serene, so gentle and this…And this, I think I could live like this, in these moments, these seconds because I’ve never spoken like this, I’ve never felt like this about a situation, about someone.
“I think I’m in love with you.”
I could count the silences today, the moments where the conversation trails off, the chatter dies, and maybe someone leans on the mute button again, coz this, it can’t be normal.
Ryan sighs, and he won’t, doesn’t make eye contact for a million moments. It’s been a decade, a millennia before he opens his mouth again, and I’ve been left to sweat and shake and drink until my throat is raw from the heat of boiling coffee.
“What happened to the ballet dancer, Brendon?”
I start at that, because this, it wasn’t what I was expecting. “What?”
“That girl you used to fuck,” he says, and his fingers, they’re clenched around the coffee cup. I can see the indent his fingers are making on the Styrofoam. “The ballet dancer.”
“Oh.” And I hadn’t thought of her really.
“Brendon,” Ryan says, and his eyes are wide, forehead furrowed and again, he’s not…he’s older, tired and I don’t understand, I don’t get it. “Brendon, that’s my point. You get bored of people, and then they just, they just fall off the face of your Earth. They keep on living, but you don’t give a fuck. You didn’t give a fuck about your mother, or Catherine, or the ballet dancer, and you won’t give a fuck about me.”
Ryan’s fingers, they’re still on the Styrofoam, but maybe they’re around my throat as well, because all of it, my neck, all of its insides are clenching shut. My trachea tangling around my vocal chords and a part of me can’t breathe, and the other part of me just, it says, “There’s a difference between you and the ballet dancer though.”
Ryan scoffs, and his fingers clench tighter around the cup, and my throat constricts even more because this, this isn’t what I want, this isn’t fucking serene anymore, this is quickly becoming bitter and angry and all these emotions that I’ve always associated with the word love. This is everything I’ve never wanted it to be.
”What difference?” he says, and he mutters it too quickly, out through clenched teeth. “I’m a guy?”
“No,” I reply, because no, “well, yes, but that’s not what I mean, and…”
“And what, Brendon?”
And this isn’t going the way I want it too.
“I never thought I was in love her.”
Breathe in, I tell myself, just breathe.
Ryan’s eyes are scrunched shut, and he rubs tight fingers over them, drops his coffee cup back onto the bench. He sighs and his arms, if I look close enough, I swear I can see them shake. “This won’t work,” he says, and fuck you, Ryan Ross, fuck you for saying that, even if maybe I’ve been thinking it all along.
“Not with that attitude it won’t,” I say, and I lean over, grab one of his clenched fists in my hands and hold it close to my thigh. Ryan, he doesn’t snatch it away, so I take that as a good sign.
“What happens when you get bored of me?”
“I…” And I don’t know.
Ryan, he’s rolling now, autopilot, has released the parachute and all of this, it’s out of his control. He’s latched onto a topic I’m not even sure he believes in, and he’s talking until he can stop. “What happens when people ask about me?” he says. “Who are you going to be taking to premieres? Award ceremonies? Parties? Who’s gonna be on your arm on E! News?”
He’s moving too quickly for me, so when I choke out a, “You won’t be a secret,” he’s armed and perfectly poised with a, “Prove it.”
And me, I do what I always do when faced with something I don’t understand, something I can’t comprehend, something that I don’t fucking know. I let go of his hand and grab hold of his face before crushing my lips onto his. I’m trying to get so close, too close, trying to merge, trying to get in his face, in his head, trying to change his mind, and I don’t, I’ve never kissed like this before. Never kissed with so much intent and purpose and raw desperation, and when we come up for air, we’ve both had the life and the emotion and the thought sucked out of us.
“We don’t know anything about each other.” And maybe he doesn’t even say it, it’s so quiet, too quiet, breathed out onto the passing breeze.
This, it’s enough of an excuse that I don’t blame myself when all I can counter Ryan’s blank gaze and heaving breath with is, “Come home with me.”
He doesn’t nod for a second, but when he does I hold his hand too tight, so tight that maybe we did merge, maybe we are one person now, one thought, one concept and when we walk the three blocks to my empty apartment we don’t talk, we fuck.
*
The sunlight filters through the splice in the curtains, and the monster’s been stifled enough that all I can feel is his claws raking tiredly against the back of my skull, the sides of my neck. I roll over, fling an arm over an empty bedside, and Ryan, he left sometime in the night, stumbled over shoes and magazines and CDs and I pretended to sleep through his muttered curse words and staggering feet.
I wasn’t surprised, and even today, years later, I don’t blame him for it. I would’ve done the same thing in his position.
It’s in these moments, when I’m tired and hungry, but probably more sexually-sated than I’d like to admit, that I lie back and think too hard. Think until my brain swells shut, props a closed for renovation, a do not disturb sign up between my eyes and I’m left with conclusions that leave me aching. Results and dead-end thought processes that leave my stomach twisted in on itself and blood that runs thin and slow between my vital organs.
Ryan says I get bored of people, but I don’t.
They get bored of me, and I leave them before they can figure that out.