(no subject)
Title: Black Eye Casts No Shadow
Pairing: Pete/Gabe
Rating: Adult
Summary: Gabe has buttons and Pete needs to push them.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and does not reflect real lives or relationships.
Note: For the Alternate Lineups ficathon. Contains faily use of d/s and spanking. Lots of spanking.
It started by accident. Every tour is the same: after two weeks everything started to smell like a high school locker room, and behavior adjusted accordingly. They all had a lot of experience with playing grab-ass to kill the monotony. Basically, nothing counted unless someone started crying at some point.
Gabe started it. The venue sound system had malfunctioned and they were stuck downstairs in what passed for the green room, and Gabe, with his terminally low tolerance for boredom, took it upon himself to start throwing his pretzel sticks across the room, before he decided that the back of Pete's head was a better target.
At the time, Pete hadn't even been thinking about fucking around with anyone. He was minding his own business trying to force his phone to get a signal, and then he heard a whoosh and there was snack food flying by his peripheral vision.
"Nice fuckin' aim," Pete said without looking up, and continued to curse at his phone in peace for a few minutes.
He should have been expecting that he'd get hit in the ear with an Utz, really.
"What the fuck," Pete said and spun around. Gabe was smirking at him from across the room.
"What kind of lame superpower are you trying for?" Pete asked. "Supervillain who throws pretzels? Weak."
Gabe smiled sweetly at him and flicked a pretzel directly in the center of his forehead.
"Fuck this," Pete said, and went for a running start.
The floor was pretty grungy, so it wasn't much of a wrestling match. Mainly they just shoved each other a lot, and even that was sort of lame because they both saw the funny side at the same time and kept laughing. It was their basic fight.
Except then Gabe managed to get him down on the couch and then got bored, saying, "Dude, you suck at this," and started wandering away. Not about to go down easily, Pete swung his arm and landed a fast open-hand slap on Gabe's ass. He started to say, "What are you, stupid, turning your back on me?"
Except Gabe spun around, eyes blazing, and snarled, "Do that again and I'll break your arm."
Pete was too startled to respond. Gabe stomped out of the room.
Pete spent the rest of the night swinging between, Who the fuck does he think he is? and What did I fuck up now? His plan was to spend the rest of the tour sulking until he figured it out, but then Gabe caught up to him after the show. Gabe had a way of sealing off all Pete's escape routes, so Pete settled for glaring at him.
Gabe said, "Look, man, I overreacted, you know? Not your problem. Jock flashbacks or something. Just forget I ever did that. Hey, I snagged a few Halcions off of Tyler, want to split them with me?"
"You're such a fuckin' douchebag," Pete said, but he was never one to turn down a peace offering.
He was still pragmatic enough to file the information away for later annoyance purposes: Gabe goes insane when you slap his ass.
*****
"Gabe's got his buttons," Rob told him once. "We try not to push them."
That never made much sense to Pete. Buttons were created to be pushed.
It wasn't like he overdid it or anything. If the venue had a place to shower, there wasn't any harm in snapping a towel at Gabe when he was unbuttoning his shirt. It wasn't a big deal to tap him on the ass when Midtown was coming offstage, just as a hey-well-done-big-guy gesture. He was waiting to see if Gabe would try to take his head off again, but maybe that first time had been a fluke; Gabe always tensed and hissed, like anyone would do, and there was always a moment where he couldn't meet Pete's eyes, but nothing major. He didn't even do it all the time.
Just some of the time.
*****
Gabe scowled down at his toast and the squished jelly packets on the table and said, "Why the fuck do we have to keep eating in these shitholes?"
"Get the most out of the per diem, dude," Pete said through a mouthful of lukewarm egg sandwich. "You want to keep eating tortilla chips and Snickers, go ahead."
"At least I know I'm eating actual food then," Gabe said. "Did they even toast this? I think the little black things are just painted on."
"Gabe, quit your bitching and just eat the damn breakfast."
"No. It's fuckin' gross. I'd rather go hungry."
"Give me it, then."
"I didn't say that."
"What the fuck were you like in restaurants as a kid? Your parents must not have been able to take you anywhere."
"Like we could afford to eat in restaurants," Gabe said. "We were like the hobos outside going through the trash."
"And now you're in the lap of fuckin' luxury," Pete said. "You sure you don't want that?"
"I ain't paying to feed your fat ass. I'm going to go take a piss. Don't touch my food when I'm gone."
"Like I want your cooties," Pete said. Gabe grunted and got out of the booth. Whistling nonchalantly, Pete swung his arm backwards and smacked him as he walked by. Gabe's ass wasn't really much to speak of, as asses went, but there was still the nice satisfying thwack when his hand connected.
Gabe froze. Pete hadn't had time to take his hand away, and he could swear he actually felt Gabe shuddering, legs gone unsteady. Pete thought, Fuck, too far, Wentz, too far, but before he could do anything Gabe was continuing on his way.
Gabe didn't come back to the table. After ten minutes of waiting, Pete turned his head and outside the diner's glass windows he could see Gabe pacing by the van and chainsmoking. Fuck.
Pete threw some cash on the table for the waitress and went outside. Gabe stared at him silently.
"Look," Pete said, "I acted like a douchebag in there. I promise I won't -"
He couldn't finish the sentence. Gabe swooped in, locking Pete against the van, arm pressing his shoulders back against the metal, and said, "I want you to beat my ass."
"I - what?"
"I want you," Gabe said very distinctly, "to take me back to the motel, put me over your knee and fuckin' beat my ass."
This was not the reaction that Pete was expecting.
"You've been fuckin' driving me nuts, you know?" Gabe said. "I swear to fuckin' God, you need to just get it all out of your system right now because I can't handle this shit anymore. I gotta work, dude, and I can't work if all I can think about is you smacking me until I'm raw."
Pete looked at him. Gabe was breathing hard, and his breath smelled like smoke.
Pete knew all about the code. Acting like an asshole to your friends on a regular basis gave them the right to call on you for anything, any time, whether it was car fare or dumping a body in the woods or getting into some freaky sex thing. It was just how things went.
"Can you hang on for a while?" Pete said.
"Yeah."
"Okay," Pete said. "Everyone should be out soon."
*****
Gabe had a plan for everything. Pete sat on the bed in his cheap motel room (Tyler having been bribed with twenty bucks to go hang out in town for a while), bouncing nervously on the mattress, while Gabe went through his suitcase looking for a suitable belt for him to use. Gabe had a lot of belts.
"Dude, I wish you'd said something," Pete said. "I'd have knocked it off if I knew it was really getting to you."
"Don't bullshit a bullshitter, Wentz," Gabe said. He wound a strap of red leather around his wrist, made a face and dropped it back into the case.
"I would've," Pete protested. He would have, too. He might have made a couple of jokes at Gabe's expense, maybe. And maybe talked about it onstage. And put it on the internet. But he would have stopped, anyway.
"Sure you would have," Gabe said. He turned around, having finally chosen a suitable belt, and waved it at him. "Go nuts."
Pete took the belt. "Do I just -"
Gabe was already undoing his fly, yanking at his underwear. "I said go nuts."
"I don't want to hurt you, dude," Pete said. The belt was a thin gray strip of leather, slick in his palm.
"That's the whole point," Gabe said, like he was talking to someone stupid. "I want it to hurt, you know? If I don't come away from this black and blue, I'm going to call you a pussy for the rest of your life."
"You're so weird," Pete complained, and leaned back to allow Gabe to get into his lap.
Gabe was all legs and no ass, and Pete was a little weirded out by having his cock pressing against Pete's leg. He ran his hand over the backs of Gabe's thighs, the hairs tickling his palm.
"Quit stalling," Gabe said into the bedcover.
"Don't smartmouth the guy with the belt," Pete said. "I'll start when I'm good and ready."
"Pussy," Gabe said hopefully.
"Hey, you keep going, I won't use this at all," Pete said.
"No," Gabe said.
"Yeah," Pete said. "We can sit here all day, dude. I got nothing to do."
Gabe made a small pleading noise in the back of his throat. Pete carefully struck him once, quick and open-hand. He doesn't see any marks but Gabe tenses and then sighs.
"I wish you'd told me about this," Pete said again. He didn't want to go from zero to sixty right away, so he timed the slaps exactly - one Mississippi, two Mississippi - and figured he'd save the belt for later.
"I didn't - ow - didn't think we'd reached that particular relationship milestone yet," Gabe said. "Way to - fuck! Way to rush things."
"Yeah, I'm not one to waste time," Pete said. He could see faint pink stripes in the shape of his fingers forming across Gabe's skin. He had some dim memory of a website he'd looked at years ago, something about safety words. "Hey, you have a word or something you want to say when you've had enough?"
"I'll say, 'Fuck you, asshole,'" Gabe said. "Keep going."
"You say that anyway." Pete decided they were both warmed up enough. The belt whistled and then snapped against Gabe's ass. Gabe grunted softly.
"I want - I just want you to decide, okay?"
Gabe liked to live dangerously.
"You start bleeding, I'm done," Pete said. "Fuck it, if you even start to bruise, I'm done. I'm not taking you to the emergency room tonight."
"You wouldn't need to," Gabe said. "Goddamnit, I trust you, okay?"
Pete thought he was telling the truth. He lay there pliant and still as Gabe could get, even when Pete knew he was really starting to feel it and the soft gasps and grunts turned into groans and then a kind of desperate yelping. He winced and jerked across Pete's lap but he didn't move to get up.
Pete thought that this could be easy to lose yourself in, the swinging belt, the snap of connection, the blood rising to the surface of Gabe's skin in indistinct patterns. He wasn't sure if he wanted to lose himself or not.
They were both soaked in sweat. Gabe had stopped crying out but Pete could feel his chest heaving and hitching, and there was no fucking way he was going to make his friend cry.
"I'm done," Pete said. "I'm done, okay? You're bruised and I'm done."
Gabe didn't protest, just shoved himself out of Pete's lap and managed to pull his shorts up, choking with the effort. He huddled into a ball at the corner of the bed and didn't move.
Pete shoved himself up against the headboard. He was sweating and his heart was pounding. He was thinking that this was a friendship that they'd only just managed to attain, that it might not be stable, that it would be easier to slip back into hating each other and he didn't want it, he didn't.
He turned on cartoons to try to shut his brain up. He stared at Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for a while without listening. Gabe's breathing started to even out.
"You okay over there?" Pete said, waiting for the answer.
"Sore," Gabe said. He uncurled a little, wincing, and he hesitated before he looked up. "That was - that was fuckin' weird, right? You don't need to - I mean, you must know - are you okay?"
Pete forgot that he was just like Gabe.
"We're both okay," Pete said. The answer seemed to satisfy Gabe for the moment. He inched across the bed and put his head in Pete's lap, laughing a little at the TV, and Pete shifted to give him more room.
"Put on the History Channel," Gabe said.
"They don't get the History Channel here. This is fine."
"You have the taste of a four year old," Gabe informed him.
"So you don't like it?"
"Nah," Gabe said. "I like it."
Pairing: Pete/Gabe
Rating: Adult
Summary: Gabe has buttons and Pete needs to push them.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and does not reflect real lives or relationships.
Note: For the Alternate Lineups ficathon. Contains faily use of d/s and spanking. Lots of spanking.
It started by accident. Every tour is the same: after two weeks everything started to smell like a high school locker room, and behavior adjusted accordingly. They all had a lot of experience with playing grab-ass to kill the monotony. Basically, nothing counted unless someone started crying at some point.
Gabe started it. The venue sound system had malfunctioned and they were stuck downstairs in what passed for the green room, and Gabe, with his terminally low tolerance for boredom, took it upon himself to start throwing his pretzel sticks across the room, before he decided that the back of Pete's head was a better target.
At the time, Pete hadn't even been thinking about fucking around with anyone. He was minding his own business trying to force his phone to get a signal, and then he heard a whoosh and there was snack food flying by his peripheral vision.
"Nice fuckin' aim," Pete said without looking up, and continued to curse at his phone in peace for a few minutes.
He should have been expecting that he'd get hit in the ear with an Utz, really.
"What the fuck," Pete said and spun around. Gabe was smirking at him from across the room.
"What kind of lame superpower are you trying for?" Pete asked. "Supervillain who throws pretzels? Weak."
Gabe smiled sweetly at him and flicked a pretzel directly in the center of his forehead.
"Fuck this," Pete said, and went for a running start.
The floor was pretty grungy, so it wasn't much of a wrestling match. Mainly they just shoved each other a lot, and even that was sort of lame because they both saw the funny side at the same time and kept laughing. It was their basic fight.
Except then Gabe managed to get him down on the couch and then got bored, saying, "Dude, you suck at this," and started wandering away. Not about to go down easily, Pete swung his arm and landed a fast open-hand slap on Gabe's ass. He started to say, "What are you, stupid, turning your back on me?"
Except Gabe spun around, eyes blazing, and snarled, "Do that again and I'll break your arm."
Pete was too startled to respond. Gabe stomped out of the room.
Pete spent the rest of the night swinging between, Who the fuck does he think he is? and What did I fuck up now? His plan was to spend the rest of the tour sulking until he figured it out, but then Gabe caught up to him after the show. Gabe had a way of sealing off all Pete's escape routes, so Pete settled for glaring at him.
Gabe said, "Look, man, I overreacted, you know? Not your problem. Jock flashbacks or something. Just forget I ever did that. Hey, I snagged a few Halcions off of Tyler, want to split them with me?"
"You're such a fuckin' douchebag," Pete said, but he was never one to turn down a peace offering.
He was still pragmatic enough to file the information away for later annoyance purposes: Gabe goes insane when you slap his ass.
*****
"Gabe's got his buttons," Rob told him once. "We try not to push them."
That never made much sense to Pete. Buttons were created to be pushed.
It wasn't like he overdid it or anything. If the venue had a place to shower, there wasn't any harm in snapping a towel at Gabe when he was unbuttoning his shirt. It wasn't a big deal to tap him on the ass when Midtown was coming offstage, just as a hey-well-done-big-guy gesture. He was waiting to see if Gabe would try to take his head off again, but maybe that first time had been a fluke; Gabe always tensed and hissed, like anyone would do, and there was always a moment where he couldn't meet Pete's eyes, but nothing major. He didn't even do it all the time.
Just some of the time.
*****
Gabe scowled down at his toast and the squished jelly packets on the table and said, "Why the fuck do we have to keep eating in these shitholes?"
"Get the most out of the per diem, dude," Pete said through a mouthful of lukewarm egg sandwich. "You want to keep eating tortilla chips and Snickers, go ahead."
"At least I know I'm eating actual food then," Gabe said. "Did they even toast this? I think the little black things are just painted on."
"Gabe, quit your bitching and just eat the damn breakfast."
"No. It's fuckin' gross. I'd rather go hungry."
"Give me it, then."
"I didn't say that."
"What the fuck were you like in restaurants as a kid? Your parents must not have been able to take you anywhere."
"Like we could afford to eat in restaurants," Gabe said. "We were like the hobos outside going through the trash."
"And now you're in the lap of fuckin' luxury," Pete said. "You sure you don't want that?"
"I ain't paying to feed your fat ass. I'm going to go take a piss. Don't touch my food when I'm gone."
"Like I want your cooties," Pete said. Gabe grunted and got out of the booth. Whistling nonchalantly, Pete swung his arm backwards and smacked him as he walked by. Gabe's ass wasn't really much to speak of, as asses went, but there was still the nice satisfying thwack when his hand connected.
Gabe froze. Pete hadn't had time to take his hand away, and he could swear he actually felt Gabe shuddering, legs gone unsteady. Pete thought, Fuck, too far, Wentz, too far, but before he could do anything Gabe was continuing on his way.
Gabe didn't come back to the table. After ten minutes of waiting, Pete turned his head and outside the diner's glass windows he could see Gabe pacing by the van and chainsmoking. Fuck.
Pete threw some cash on the table for the waitress and went outside. Gabe stared at him silently.
"Look," Pete said, "I acted like a douchebag in there. I promise I won't -"
He couldn't finish the sentence. Gabe swooped in, locking Pete against the van, arm pressing his shoulders back against the metal, and said, "I want you to beat my ass."
"I - what?"
"I want you," Gabe said very distinctly, "to take me back to the motel, put me over your knee and fuckin' beat my ass."
This was not the reaction that Pete was expecting.
"You've been fuckin' driving me nuts, you know?" Gabe said. "I swear to fuckin' God, you need to just get it all out of your system right now because I can't handle this shit anymore. I gotta work, dude, and I can't work if all I can think about is you smacking me until I'm raw."
Pete looked at him. Gabe was breathing hard, and his breath smelled like smoke.
Pete knew all about the code. Acting like an asshole to your friends on a regular basis gave them the right to call on you for anything, any time, whether it was car fare or dumping a body in the woods or getting into some freaky sex thing. It was just how things went.
"Can you hang on for a while?" Pete said.
"Yeah."
"Okay," Pete said. "Everyone should be out soon."
*****
Gabe had a plan for everything. Pete sat on the bed in his cheap motel room (Tyler having been bribed with twenty bucks to go hang out in town for a while), bouncing nervously on the mattress, while Gabe went through his suitcase looking for a suitable belt for him to use. Gabe had a lot of belts.
"Dude, I wish you'd said something," Pete said. "I'd have knocked it off if I knew it was really getting to you."
"Don't bullshit a bullshitter, Wentz," Gabe said. He wound a strap of red leather around his wrist, made a face and dropped it back into the case.
"I would've," Pete protested. He would have, too. He might have made a couple of jokes at Gabe's expense, maybe. And maybe talked about it onstage. And put it on the internet. But he would have stopped, anyway.
"Sure you would have," Gabe said. He turned around, having finally chosen a suitable belt, and waved it at him. "Go nuts."
Pete took the belt. "Do I just -"
Gabe was already undoing his fly, yanking at his underwear. "I said go nuts."
"I don't want to hurt you, dude," Pete said. The belt was a thin gray strip of leather, slick in his palm.
"That's the whole point," Gabe said, like he was talking to someone stupid. "I want it to hurt, you know? If I don't come away from this black and blue, I'm going to call you a pussy for the rest of your life."
"You're so weird," Pete complained, and leaned back to allow Gabe to get into his lap.
Gabe was all legs and no ass, and Pete was a little weirded out by having his cock pressing against Pete's leg. He ran his hand over the backs of Gabe's thighs, the hairs tickling his palm.
"Quit stalling," Gabe said into the bedcover.
"Don't smartmouth the guy with the belt," Pete said. "I'll start when I'm good and ready."
"Pussy," Gabe said hopefully.
"Hey, you keep going, I won't use this at all," Pete said.
"No," Gabe said.
"Yeah," Pete said. "We can sit here all day, dude. I got nothing to do."
Gabe made a small pleading noise in the back of his throat. Pete carefully struck him once, quick and open-hand. He doesn't see any marks but Gabe tenses and then sighs.
"I wish you'd told me about this," Pete said again. He didn't want to go from zero to sixty right away, so he timed the slaps exactly - one Mississippi, two Mississippi - and figured he'd save the belt for later.
"I didn't - ow - didn't think we'd reached that particular relationship milestone yet," Gabe said. "Way to - fuck! Way to rush things."
"Yeah, I'm not one to waste time," Pete said. He could see faint pink stripes in the shape of his fingers forming across Gabe's skin. He had some dim memory of a website he'd looked at years ago, something about safety words. "Hey, you have a word or something you want to say when you've had enough?"
"I'll say, 'Fuck you, asshole,'" Gabe said. "Keep going."
"You say that anyway." Pete decided they were both warmed up enough. The belt whistled and then snapped against Gabe's ass. Gabe grunted softly.
"I want - I just want you to decide, okay?"
Gabe liked to live dangerously.
"You start bleeding, I'm done," Pete said. "Fuck it, if you even start to bruise, I'm done. I'm not taking you to the emergency room tonight."
"You wouldn't need to," Gabe said. "Goddamnit, I trust you, okay?"
Pete thought he was telling the truth. He lay there pliant and still as Gabe could get, even when Pete knew he was really starting to feel it and the soft gasps and grunts turned into groans and then a kind of desperate yelping. He winced and jerked across Pete's lap but he didn't move to get up.
Pete thought that this could be easy to lose yourself in, the swinging belt, the snap of connection, the blood rising to the surface of Gabe's skin in indistinct patterns. He wasn't sure if he wanted to lose himself or not.
They were both soaked in sweat. Gabe had stopped crying out but Pete could feel his chest heaving and hitching, and there was no fucking way he was going to make his friend cry.
"I'm done," Pete said. "I'm done, okay? You're bruised and I'm done."
Gabe didn't protest, just shoved himself out of Pete's lap and managed to pull his shorts up, choking with the effort. He huddled into a ball at the corner of the bed and didn't move.
Pete shoved himself up against the headboard. He was sweating and his heart was pounding. He was thinking that this was a friendship that they'd only just managed to attain, that it might not be stable, that it would be easier to slip back into hating each other and he didn't want it, he didn't.
He turned on cartoons to try to shut his brain up. He stared at Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny for a while without listening. Gabe's breathing started to even out.
"You okay over there?" Pete said, waiting for the answer.
"Sore," Gabe said. He uncurled a little, wincing, and he hesitated before he looked up. "That was - that was fuckin' weird, right? You don't need to - I mean, you must know - are you okay?"
Pete forgot that he was just like Gabe.
"We're both okay," Pete said. The answer seemed to satisfy Gabe for the moment. He inched across the bed and put his head in Pete's lap, laughing a little at the TV, and Pete shifted to give him more room.
"Put on the History Channel," Gabe said.
"They don't get the History Channel here. This is fine."
"You have the taste of a four year old," Gabe informed him.
"So you don't like it?"
"Nah," Gabe said. "I like it."