WIP Amnesty, BANDOM TIME!
Some of you actually friended me because of bandom.
Funny thing is, I rarely post anything that isn't comment-fic.
But I write a lot.
Brendon finds out about the thing four hours later than everyone else, because she's staying in a bed and breafast on the coast of British Columbia, and the night before she stays up to make taffy with her host's daughters, aged ten and eight. Out of gratitude, her hosts tell everyone in the b and b to shut the fuck up until twelve pm.
So, Brendon avoids it a lot longer than just about everyone else on the planet.
But that isn't where the story starts.
.................................................................
The story actually starts about twenty years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Urie have a little girl instead of the little boy they were expecting. They do a terrible job of retooling the name they chose and so Brenda Boyd Urie spends the next fifteen years as “Bentout Boy” Urie.
When she turns fifteen, Brenda has an epiphany while listening to a punk rock version of “Amazing Grace”. An epiphany of the name changing, hair-cutting type, where in her bangs are trimmed and she tells the hairdresser to call her Brendon.
Her mother freaks out and leaves Youth Group pamphlets all over the house until Brendon can reassure her it has nothing to do with sex changes or homosexuality or anything like that, mostly by wearing skirts and a little bit of lipgloss that she isn't supposed to have. Before long her parents get over it, only smiling indulgently when she insists on “Brendon”.
“Brendon” is cool. Brendon is going to go back to school, be one of the popular kids, part of the “in crowd”.
Brenda was going to go back to school and be the same lame music geek.
Instead, Brendon goes back to school and is the same, lame music geek.
It's the same for two years, until a kid named Brent, the kind of kid her parents don't know she wants to hang out with walks up to her in the cafeteria.
“You play guitar?” He asks, smiling a little.
She nods around a mouthful of peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich.
He smiles wider.
...................................................
Brendon spends two weeks playing back up piano and singing back up vocals before Ryan rolls his eyes and yanks her off the piano, puts her in front of his microphone and tells her she's going to sing.
Brendon, whose singing has heretofore been limited to choir and Disney, opens her mouth.
She never really goes back to the piano.
............................................................
Brent, Spencer and Ryan introduce Brendon to liquid eyeliner, stiletto heels and lying to her parents. Also, for some reason, push up bras, which Brendon(who has broad shoulders, lean legs and round hips) thinks about thanking God for, but she and God are on less than speaking terms right now and she has no idea how he'd take that.
Besides, there's not much to push up.
............................................................
In the wake of the push up bra, Brendon starts fighting with her parents, really fighting, the kind of fighting where Brendon is looking for apartments and freaking out because what the fuck is she going to do on her own? She can barely make her own toast.
She freaks out after that and tries to be good for a while, but feelings, feelings like this isn't it, this isn't all, take over her and she winds up on the corner of Ryan's street, tucking quarters into a payphone and wishing she could just go home.
Spencer and Brent come and pick her up, and she spends a week on Spencer's couch before she find sher own place, somewhere where she can sit down on her secondhand mattress and sob into her own hands, missing her mommy so badly it hurts.
.....................................................
Brendon puts up with Pete Wentz's hands all over her for a about a half hour, uncertain of her desire and ability to tell him to fuck off before Patrick Stumph rescues her.
“Pete doesn't mean anything by it,” he tells her, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “He's just-”
“-Got no personal boundaries and a hyperactive sex drive?” Brendon shrugs, running a hand over a smooth, smooth piano bench, marvelling at it. “It's cool. I mean, I can totally relate.”
Patrick frowns, and puts up the lid, showing off pretty black and white keys, like debutantes at a ball, and pulling her up so she can sit down in front of them.
“Look, I just need you to know,” he says, softly. “You're allowed to tell him to fuck off. He offered to give you guys a record deal, you don't have to pay for it.”'
Brendon picks out “Du Lieber Joy” and thinks that Patrick Stumph would be a totally awesome piano teacher.
“You should probably tell Ryan that,” she says, under the notes, but Patrick hears her, she knows by the way Ryan glares at her the next time they're alone in a room together.
......................................................
Where ever you go, whether you're a rockstar or a fifth-grade teacher, there's always going to be some guy who thinks being bouncy and happy and maybe a little bit of a partier means he has license to try to fix you with his magical dick, and there's always going to be a chick who'll let him do that, who'll hold you down for him.
Usually metaphorically.
Brendon goes to a guy's bus one night after she's been having fun with some of the people from Academy Is, and he pulls some cuffs and he pulls some shit, so she pulls some shit of her own, pushes the cuffs out of her way with her foot and walks away, carrying her shirt because it seems the more dignified option.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mutters, and pauses to kick a brick wall left over from a garden. “Motherfucking dick!”
A tech stops, staring at her. “Whoa.”
Brendon's hands snap to her breasts, ridiculous, really, since they're already covered.
“Fuck you.”
She finds herself wandering around, still sort of drunk, but halfway to sober, the dizzy, happy feeling already being replaced by a creeping sense of nausea and weariness.
Finally, after almost stepping in three puddles, she manages to stumble onto her own bus, where Spencer and Ryan are curled up in a puddle of boys on the couch, and Brent was nowhere to be seen. She tries not to make too much noise on her way to the bunks, but a huge hand wraps around her arm, which is still skinny from adolescence and from months when food was a secondary consideration.
Zack looks down at her, frowning. She wants to cry, knowing she looks, well, she has swollen lips, a bruise on her shoulder, she has smeared eyeliner, smeared lipstick. She looks like a slut.
Zack frowns, eyes that bruise with a calculating glare and opens his mouth. Brendon winces, waiting for an angry resignation, a lecture, a comment on her obvious activities. Something.
Instead he just pulls a blanket off her bed and wraps it around her before hugging her.
“Do I need to beat someone up?”
That makes Brendon laugh, remembering the look on the guy's face, first when she said no, then when she told him where he could take his cuffs.
“N-No.”
He shrugs, and lets her cuddle against him for a while, then puts her to bed, like her oldest brother used to do when she was little and easily adored.
She sleeps well, but wakes up with half a hangover and feeling more homesick than she has all year.
................................................
Spencer takes Brendon out for ice cream one day, lets her get the most insanely sugarized crap the little shop has on the menu, then tells her that they're kicking Brent out of the band. That he's going to call him and tell him so in one hour, unless Brendon can come up with a good reason not to.
That's so unfair. She tells Spencer so.
“I know, Bren,” he reaches out and steals some of her chocolate sauce. “Is there anything?”
“He's just homesick,” she argues, weakly. “He's just tired, Spencer, he'll get over it.”
Spencer nods.
“How long have we been saying that, Brendon?”
Brendon argues a little more, makes noises, pleads, but the fact is Spencer is right. Brent's been getting worse, not better, and they can't do this if he can't. It's a matter of cutting off the limb to save the body.
Brendon feels like she's cut off enough limbs, though.
.........................................................
In the end Spencer does it, and Brendon takes time out to do Spencer's laundry, grab his drinks and punched Ryan for calling her a girl.
Then there's Jon Walker.
This came about in the wake of the whole "Brendon's jizz ruins tabletops" fiasco. I admit it. I thought it was hilarious. I also didn't quite believe ALL of it, although I did believe some.
Honestly, though. How rarely do you have to clean your table in order to let jizz ruin it?
At any rate, I was interested in how the scandal would have been different had Brendon been a girl. Also, I'd just read a rather annoyingly pathetic!Brendon as a girl fic that pissed me off and I wanted to write my own.
I might never finish this. But what the hell, I liked the language.
The garden was overgrown, perennials choking each other through the rotten annuals, mint positively filling the air with it's own sharp perfume and the beds and borders no longer even a suggestion. The very sight of it would have made the most ardent gardener throw down his colour coordinated tools and weep. It spoke not so much of neglect as abandonment and a hurried one at that, for a rusting garden shear poked haphazardly out of the grass, and a bench had fallen into its own rusting frame.
Yet, despite abandonment, despite the rusting shears and the fallen bench, the flowers hadn't died. The daffodils and tulips were already gone, as summer was passing, indeed, was half gone, and the daisies were dotting out, one by one, but the roses grew and grew thick. They dripped from trellises, and burst from bushes, yet inspite of it all, they bloomed, with double blossoms, singles and buds. They bloomed in reds and pinks and yellows and daring colours in between. Yet, despite their wildness and their wandering vines and thick-grown bushes, they looked as if they were tended yet, by someone with perhaps more luck and love than skill.
All this was outlined in the black and silver of the moonlight, lacing the dew-laden leaves and shimmering in the It gave off a haunted vibe of the kind found in direct-to-paperback novels sold under the codeword “erotica”, written by girls who had grown up thinking Anne Rice was the height of classical literature. Girls not very much unlike the young lady making her way into the garden, leaving smears in the dewy grass.
Her name weas Lyn-Z, and she had come based on the philosophy that one hundred and fifty dollars was better than one hundred, to pick two roses and take them as proof to the other girls in town that she had better courage then they did, to brave the “haunted garden” and pick flowers that rumor whispered(as it always will) among the younger generations, to be cursed.
The greatest rose bush that stood in the garden was almost tall enough to be a bush and every flower on it was milk-white, though the tip of every petal was as red as blood. Their scent mingled sweetly with that of the mint and this was the tree Lyn-Z stopped in front of and the tree she picked a flower from, snapping the bud off the branch with a harsh crack.
So. Did anyone here know that the whole Tam Lin legend actually comes about because Tam Lin rapes Janet? And she demands his name because otherwise she has to bear a fatherless bastard? AND THEN HE STOPS HER FROM GETTING AN ABORTION AND MAKES HER RESCUE HIM?
These and other fun facts brought to you by a wiki search. Man. Worst research day ever.
But that's not why I stopped writing this. Really, it's a story that's been told so many times that I've just lost interest in this retelling and decided to do an original version, set in the warehouse district in a big city, either TO or Van.
But it WAS going to be cool. LynZ was going to have no idea who Gerard was, but he was going to pick the flowers for her and win her bet, but only in return for her coming to visit him. Jamia was going to tell her the story, or something, and LynZ was going to tell Mikey how she knew where his brother was. Then Lyn Z was going to confront Gerard and he was goign to ask her to rescue him.
Yeah, it was going to be cool.
One day, not long after the summer solstice in 2009, Audrey gets a call from an ex that hurts and feels better than it should.
“So,” Brendon's voice is a little slurred, meaning he's either drunk or high. “I was thinking-”
He pausdes and Audrey draws breath to speak, and he talks over her.
“I was kind of an asshole while we were dating, right?” He swallows something.
“Brendon, are you drunk?” She asks, more irritated than saddened by the call. He makes a noise somewhere between a whimper and a chuckle.
“I had one beer. Nothing else, it's not allowed, but Audrey, I was an asshole, and I wanted to-to apologize.” He swallows again. “I mean, if you don't want me to, you know, and all, but, Audrey, can i?”
She shifts from one foot to the other.
“Brendon.”
“Because I really am sorry, Audrey, I really am, and I know it probably doesn't make one damn bit of a difference, but can I say it? Anyhow?”
She thinks about it.
“Brendon, we were both so young-”
He interrupts.
“Not an excuse.”
“Brendon,” She tries to explain it. “Brendon, you were young, right along with me. I mean, we were both fucked up there.”
He's silent. There's the sound of a party in the background.
“Yeah.” He says, finally. “Yeah, but I'm still sorry. Audrey?”
“Yes?”
“I'm not supposed to be calling you. Can you not tell anyone I called you? I'm not even supposed to have my phone, but he said, to find me later. It's a reward. I'm going to erase the call history. Can you not?”
She straightens up, nervous.
“Are you okay, Brendon?”
“Yeah, yeah, I'm good. I got to go, Audrey. Be happy, okay? Be happy?”
“Brendon-” She interrupted by a beep and the sound of silence.
................................................
I was writing this in the wake of the whole coffeetable thing. There was a short burst of "punishment" type stories, and hopes for punishment stories, and I wasn't attempting to try my hand at one of those. This was going to be kinky, dirty, and, I hoped, horrifying.
Ryan and Jon were going to basically turn Brendon into their toy, along with, to a certain extent, Cassie and Keltie. The intent was to teach him what he'd done wrong and how to be successful, but it would wind up turning into an extremely abusive relationship. Jon and Ryan wouldn't really understand what they'd done until they started giving him "privileges" and a certain degree helplessness was ingrained.
Spencer wasn't going to understand at first. He was going to be Brendon's "refuge", for breaks and stuff. Jon and Ryan would tell Brendon he knew, so Brendon was going to assume he was in on it, but didn't talk about it. When he found out, he was, in a word, going to be livid.
But it got too depressing.
Funny thing is, I rarely post anything that isn't comment-fic.
But I write a lot.
Brendon finds out about the thing four hours later than everyone else, because she's staying in a bed and breafast on the coast of British Columbia, and the night before she stays up to make taffy with her host's daughters, aged ten and eight. Out of gratitude, her hosts tell everyone in the b and b to shut the fuck up until twelve pm.
So, Brendon avoids it a lot longer than just about everyone else on the planet.
But that isn't where the story starts.
.................................................................
The story actually starts about twenty years ago, when Mr. and Mrs. Urie have a little girl instead of the little boy they were expecting. They do a terrible job of retooling the name they chose and so Brenda Boyd Urie spends the next fifteen years as “Bentout Boy” Urie.
When she turns fifteen, Brenda has an epiphany while listening to a punk rock version of “Amazing Grace”. An epiphany of the name changing, hair-cutting type, where in her bangs are trimmed and she tells the hairdresser to call her Brendon.
Her mother freaks out and leaves Youth Group pamphlets all over the house until Brendon can reassure her it has nothing to do with sex changes or homosexuality or anything like that, mostly by wearing skirts and a little bit of lipgloss that she isn't supposed to have. Before long her parents get over it, only smiling indulgently when she insists on “Brendon”.
“Brendon” is cool. Brendon is going to go back to school, be one of the popular kids, part of the “in crowd”.
Brenda was going to go back to school and be the same lame music geek.
Instead, Brendon goes back to school and is the same, lame music geek.
It's the same for two years, until a kid named Brent, the kind of kid her parents don't know she wants to hang out with walks up to her in the cafeteria.
“You play guitar?” He asks, smiling a little.
She nods around a mouthful of peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich.
He smiles wider.
...................................................
Brendon spends two weeks playing back up piano and singing back up vocals before Ryan rolls his eyes and yanks her off the piano, puts her in front of his microphone and tells her she's going to sing.
Brendon, whose singing has heretofore been limited to choir and Disney, opens her mouth.
She never really goes back to the piano.
............................................................
Brent, Spencer and Ryan introduce Brendon to liquid eyeliner, stiletto heels and lying to her parents. Also, for some reason, push up bras, which Brendon(who has broad shoulders, lean legs and round hips) thinks about thanking God for, but she and God are on less than speaking terms right now and she has no idea how he'd take that.
Besides, there's not much to push up.
............................................................
In the wake of the push up bra, Brendon starts fighting with her parents, really fighting, the kind of fighting where Brendon is looking for apartments and freaking out because what the fuck is she going to do on her own? She can barely make her own toast.
She freaks out after that and tries to be good for a while, but feelings, feelings like this isn't it, this isn't all, take over her and she winds up on the corner of Ryan's street, tucking quarters into a payphone and wishing she could just go home.
Spencer and Brent come and pick her up, and she spends a week on Spencer's couch before she find sher own place, somewhere where she can sit down on her secondhand mattress and sob into her own hands, missing her mommy so badly it hurts.
.....................................................
Brendon puts up with Pete Wentz's hands all over her for a about a half hour, uncertain of her desire and ability to tell him to fuck off before Patrick Stumph rescues her.
“Pete doesn't mean anything by it,” he tells her, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “He's just-”
“-Got no personal boundaries and a hyperactive sex drive?” Brendon shrugs, running a hand over a smooth, smooth piano bench, marvelling at it. “It's cool. I mean, I can totally relate.”
Patrick frowns, and puts up the lid, showing off pretty black and white keys, like debutantes at a ball, and pulling her up so she can sit down in front of them.
“Look, I just need you to know,” he says, softly. “You're allowed to tell him to fuck off. He offered to give you guys a record deal, you don't have to pay for it.”'
Brendon picks out “Du Lieber Joy” and thinks that Patrick Stumph would be a totally awesome piano teacher.
“You should probably tell Ryan that,” she says, under the notes, but Patrick hears her, she knows by the way Ryan glares at her the next time they're alone in a room together.
......................................................
Where ever you go, whether you're a rockstar or a fifth-grade teacher, there's always going to be some guy who thinks being bouncy and happy and maybe a little bit of a partier means he has license to try to fix you with his magical dick, and there's always going to be a chick who'll let him do that, who'll hold you down for him.
Usually metaphorically.
Brendon goes to a guy's bus one night after she's been having fun with some of the people from Academy Is, and he pulls some cuffs and he pulls some shit, so she pulls some shit of her own, pushes the cuffs out of her way with her foot and walks away, carrying her shirt because it seems the more dignified option.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she mutters, and pauses to kick a brick wall left over from a garden. “Motherfucking dick!”
A tech stops, staring at her. “Whoa.”
Brendon's hands snap to her breasts, ridiculous, really, since they're already covered.
“Fuck you.”
She finds herself wandering around, still sort of drunk, but halfway to sober, the dizzy, happy feeling already being replaced by a creeping sense of nausea and weariness.
Finally, after almost stepping in three puddles, she manages to stumble onto her own bus, where Spencer and Ryan are curled up in a puddle of boys on the couch, and Brent was nowhere to be seen. She tries not to make too much noise on her way to the bunks, but a huge hand wraps around her arm, which is still skinny from adolescence and from months when food was a secondary consideration.
Zack looks down at her, frowning. She wants to cry, knowing she looks, well, she has swollen lips, a bruise on her shoulder, she has smeared eyeliner, smeared lipstick. She looks like a slut.
Zack frowns, eyes that bruise with a calculating glare and opens his mouth. Brendon winces, waiting for an angry resignation, a lecture, a comment on her obvious activities. Something.
Instead he just pulls a blanket off her bed and wraps it around her before hugging her.
“Do I need to beat someone up?”
That makes Brendon laugh, remembering the look on the guy's face, first when she said no, then when she told him where he could take his cuffs.
“N-No.”
He shrugs, and lets her cuddle against him for a while, then puts her to bed, like her oldest brother used to do when she was little and easily adored.
She sleeps well, but wakes up with half a hangover and feeling more homesick than she has all year.
................................................
Spencer takes Brendon out for ice cream one day, lets her get the most insanely sugarized crap the little shop has on the menu, then tells her that they're kicking Brent out of the band. That he's going to call him and tell him so in one hour, unless Brendon can come up with a good reason not to.
That's so unfair. She tells Spencer so.
“I know, Bren,” he reaches out and steals some of her chocolate sauce. “Is there anything?”
“He's just homesick,” she argues, weakly. “He's just tired, Spencer, he'll get over it.”
Spencer nods.
“How long have we been saying that, Brendon?”
Brendon argues a little more, makes noises, pleads, but the fact is Spencer is right. Brent's been getting worse, not better, and they can't do this if he can't. It's a matter of cutting off the limb to save the body.
Brendon feels like she's cut off enough limbs, though.
.........................................................
In the end Spencer does it, and Brendon takes time out to do Spencer's laundry, grab his drinks and punched Ryan for calling her a girl.
Then there's Jon Walker.
This came about in the wake of the whole "Brendon's jizz ruins tabletops" fiasco. I admit it. I thought it was hilarious. I also didn't quite believe ALL of it, although I did believe some.
Honestly, though. How rarely do you have to clean your table in order to let jizz ruin it?
At any rate, I was interested in how the scandal would have been different had Brendon been a girl. Also, I'd just read a rather annoyingly pathetic!Brendon as a girl fic that pissed me off and I wanted to write my own.
I might never finish this. But what the hell, I liked the language.
The garden was overgrown, perennials choking each other through the rotten annuals, mint positively filling the air with it's own sharp perfume and the beds and borders no longer even a suggestion. The very sight of it would have made the most ardent gardener throw down his colour coordinated tools and weep. It spoke not so much of neglect as abandonment and a hurried one at that, for a rusting garden shear poked haphazardly out of the grass, and a bench had fallen into its own rusting frame.
Yet, despite abandonment, despite the rusting shears and the fallen bench, the flowers hadn't died. The daffodils and tulips were already gone, as summer was passing, indeed, was half gone, and the daisies were dotting out, one by one, but the roses grew and grew thick. They dripped from trellises, and burst from bushes, yet inspite of it all, they bloomed, with double blossoms, singles and buds. They bloomed in reds and pinks and yellows and daring colours in between. Yet, despite their wildness and their wandering vines and thick-grown bushes, they looked as if they were tended yet, by someone with perhaps more luck and love than skill.
All this was outlined in the black and silver of the moonlight, lacing the dew-laden leaves and shimmering in the It gave off a haunted vibe of the kind found in direct-to-paperback novels sold under the codeword “erotica”, written by girls who had grown up thinking Anne Rice was the height of classical literature. Girls not very much unlike the young lady making her way into the garden, leaving smears in the dewy grass.
Her name weas Lyn-Z, and she had come based on the philosophy that one hundred and fifty dollars was better than one hundred, to pick two roses and take them as proof to the other girls in town that she had better courage then they did, to brave the “haunted garden” and pick flowers that rumor whispered(as it always will) among the younger generations, to be cursed.
The greatest rose bush that stood in the garden was almost tall enough to be a bush and every flower on it was milk-white, though the tip of every petal was as red as blood. Their scent mingled sweetly with that of the mint and this was the tree Lyn-Z stopped in front of and the tree she picked a flower from, snapping the bud off the branch with a harsh crack.
So. Did anyone here know that the whole Tam Lin legend actually comes about because Tam Lin rapes Janet? And she demands his name because otherwise she has to bear a fatherless bastard? AND THEN HE STOPS HER FROM GETTING AN ABORTION AND MAKES HER RESCUE HIM?
These and other fun facts brought to you by a wiki search. Man. Worst research day ever.
But that's not why I stopped writing this. Really, it's a story that's been told so many times that I've just lost interest in this retelling and decided to do an original version, set in the warehouse district in a big city, either TO or Van.
But it WAS going to be cool. LynZ was going to have no idea who Gerard was, but he was going to pick the flowers for her and win her bet, but only in return for her coming to visit him. Jamia was going to tell her the story, or something, and LynZ was going to tell Mikey how she knew where his brother was. Then Lyn Z was going to confront Gerard and he was goign to ask her to rescue him.
Yeah, it was going to be cool.
One day, not long after the summer solstice in 2009, Audrey gets a call from an ex that hurts and feels better than it should.
“So,” Brendon's voice is a little slurred, meaning he's either drunk or high. “I was thinking-”
He pausdes and Audrey draws breath to speak, and he talks over her.
“I was kind of an asshole while we were dating, right?” He swallows something.
“Brendon, are you drunk?” She asks, more irritated than saddened by the call. He makes a noise somewhere between a whimper and a chuckle.
“I had one beer. Nothing else, it's not allowed, but Audrey, I was an asshole, and I wanted to-to apologize.” He swallows again. “I mean, if you don't want me to, you know, and all, but, Audrey, can i?”
She shifts from one foot to the other.
“Brendon.”
“Because I really am sorry, Audrey, I really am, and I know it probably doesn't make one damn bit of a difference, but can I say it? Anyhow?”
She thinks about it.
“Brendon, we were both so young-”
He interrupts.
“Not an excuse.”
“Brendon,” She tries to explain it. “Brendon, you were young, right along with me. I mean, we were both fucked up there.”
He's silent. There's the sound of a party in the background.
“Yeah.” He says, finally. “Yeah, but I'm still sorry. Audrey?”
“Yes?”
“I'm not supposed to be calling you. Can you not tell anyone I called you? I'm not even supposed to have my phone, but he said, to find me later. It's a reward. I'm going to erase the call history. Can you not?”
She straightens up, nervous.
“Are you okay, Brendon?”
“Yeah, yeah, I'm good. I got to go, Audrey. Be happy, okay? Be happy?”
“Brendon-” She interrupted by a beep and the sound of silence.
................................................
I was writing this in the wake of the whole coffeetable thing. There was a short burst of "punishment" type stories, and hopes for punishment stories, and I wasn't attempting to try my hand at one of those. This was going to be kinky, dirty, and, I hoped, horrifying.
Ryan and Jon were going to basically turn Brendon into their toy, along with, to a certain extent, Cassie and Keltie. The intent was to teach him what he'd done wrong and how to be successful, but it would wind up turning into an extremely abusive relationship. Jon and Ryan wouldn't really understand what they'd done until they started giving him "privileges" and a certain degree helplessness was ingrained.
Spencer wasn't going to understand at first. He was going to be Brendon's "refuge", for breaks and stuff. Jon and Ryan would tell Brendon he knew, so Brendon was going to assume he was in on it, but didn't talk about it. When he found out, he was, in a word, going to be livid.
But it got too depressing.