(fic) and a star to steer by | PATD | Spencer/Brendon | R | PART ONE
and a star to steer by
~21,000 | PATD | Brendon/Spencer | R
The life of lonely lighthouse keeper Brendon Urie is changed forever when Ryan Ross, Jon Walker and Spencer Smith are shipwrecked on his beach.
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I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper
And keep him company
Brendon is usually awake before the birds - the morning light streams in through the windows so early, because the lighthouse is east-facing - but this morning he can already hear a couple of cheeky seagulls squawking, probably perched on top of the lamp and peering in at him.
Brendon doesn’t mind so much. In fact, he’s pretty grateful - he stayed up too late last night trying to work something out on his guitar, and who knows how long he could have slept - especially since it feels like the sunlight is slicing his retinas in two, ow, and he was managing to sleep through that?
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up,” he grumbles, squinting, and swings his legs over the side of his bed. He drums his toes against the floor for a few seconds, waiting to wake up. Brendon’s generally a real morning person, but he feels like he’s been hit on the head by a hammer this morning.
He ambles over to the lamp, where the sound is coming from, and hooks his fingertips around the band of his sweatpants, where they’re trying to slip off his hips.
“Good morning,” he tells the seagulls sleepily, and gets a few honky squawks in return, as they flap around, off balance. Seagulls are cheeky bastards, but Brendon likes them anyway. He toys for a second with the idea of opening up the window and tossing them some bread, but then he figures if he did, they’d never give him any peace.
So he opens up the window, leans out of it up to his shoulders, and says, “shoo!” in the best bird-scaring voice he can muster. He even flails his arms around a little.
The gulls look distinctly unimpressed. In fact, Brendon is pretty sure they’re laughing at him. Oh well, that’d be just like Brendon’s life, to be filled with seagulls with attitude. He shrugs, says have it your way, but where you’re sitting gets the worst of the midday wind instead, and closes up the window again.
In the gap in the wall where the lamp is and his mirror, Brendon has a calendar pinned up. It’s the beginning of his eighth month on the island, and as it’s the first, the little exclamation mark in the box indicates that he’s due a visit from the grocery ferry.
He starts - because is that really the date? - and accidentally kicks the leg of his desk chair in his panic. He hobbles around on one foot, swearing loudly as he scavenges in the general rubble on the floor for a pair of pants that he’s pretty sure are mostly clean, and yanks them on inelegantly.
It occurs to him while he’s going down the steps two at a time that the boatmaster is unlikely to leave without seeing him, as Brendon is in fact the only occupant of the island. Brendon’s tried his best to get used to the island life, but he still trips up sometimes. You’d think it would be easy enough to remember that you’re the only person for miles around, but he finds himself doing stupid things all too regularly.
The catch on the lighthouse door doesn’t stick for the first time in a while, so Brendon stumbles a little onto the sand. The grocer has already moored his boat awkwardly on the shore, using a large pointed rock that’s been wedged into the sand from before Brendon got here.
“Brendon!” he greets, raising his hand. Brendon sends fine yellow sand spraying everywhere in his haste to get over to the little motorboat.
“Mr Paphadoulos,” Brendon says, just as cheerfully. Mr Paphadoulos is an old family friend, hardy and Greek with a head a little bit like a walnut. He’s also way more awesome than you’d expect a small old guy who wears fishermen’s sweaters to be.
“What do you have for me today?” Brendon asks, reaching his hands down to the boxes on the boat’s floor. Mr Paphadoulos laughs and swats Brendon’s hands away.
“Keep it a surprise!” Mr Paphadoulos scolds mildly. Brendon massages his hand with an exaggerated injured expression, just to make Mr Paphadoulos smile - which he does.
“I put in some tuna and cat food for your cat,” he says. “You still have that little tabby, don’t you?”
Cat had showed up six months into Brendon’s stay on the island - she was kind of tiny and very thin, and Brendon had no idea where on earth she’d come from. He’d been sitting on the beach strumming his guitar and writing HELP in huge backwards letters on the sand (not out of any real desire to be found, just… because) when she’d wound her way up silently, like, from out of nowhere.
Brendon had thought she was wild, and so they both stood very very still, looking at each other, Brendon not breathing. She didn’t bolt, though, just looked at him with steady tawny eyes and then yawned, breaking the impasse, and walked over to lay in the sand at Brendon’s bare feet.
He took her inside with him when he was going, and filled one of his saucers with milk and left it for her. He left the lighthouse door propped open that night - so that she wouldn’t be afraid - and fully expected to wake to find her gone. Instead, he’d found her sleeping curled up on one of his kitchen chairs, and she’d woken when he’d come in, purring like an engine and rubbing around his ankles.
He’d called her Cat so he wouldn’t get too attached, but although it now seemed like she’d stay, it had stuck.
“Yes, I still have her,” Brendon says to Mr Paphadoulos. “Thank you very much - it’s been kind of awkward trying to feed her from my own food, so that’s awesome.”
It only takes them about fifteen minutes to carry the two weeks’ worth of boxes in across the beach to the lighthouse. They pass at regular intervals, never long enough for Mr Paphadoulos to start asking Brendon any of the concerned questions that he’s clearly writing and rewriting in his head (only ever enough to crease his eyebrows and open his mouth before Brendon’s gone again, humming an old tune that’s bee catching at him).
Brendon loves Mr Paphadoulos, okay, mostly because it’s completely impossible not to, but he doesn’t feel like having Conversations today, however glad he is of the company. The thing that has probably changed the most since he came to the lighthouse is that it’s pretty much becoming a total bitch for Brendon to express his feelings in words - if you’d said before that there was a pipe running straight from Brendon’s brain to his mouth with absolutely no filters or time delay, or little dudes (amoebas, maybe?) in official-looking hats manning those lifty arm things that they have across highways vetting every thought and saying whoa, are you sure you want to let this past?, you’d probably have been right. Now, frighteningly, he’s starting to remind himself a bit of his grandfather, the last keeper, who was pretty much the silentest (silentist? most silent?) man Brendon knew - who might be coerced to say my God in an absent kind of voice if his house started to burn down around him.
He always looked pretty zen, though, Brendon’s grandfather. Brendon could use some zen.
The point is that Brendon has a sieve now, a sieve in his pipeline, and the holes are like, micro holes and the stuff making up the sieve is like razor chicken wire so everything he thinks gets cut up into little pieces and doesn’t make sense anymore anyway by the time he might say it. Those amoeba dudes are getting seriously powerhungry, too.
“Thanks, Mr Paphadoulos,” Brendon says, when they’re standing in his kitchen with all the boxes piled on the kitchen table, the counters, and on the chairs. Brendon thought Cat was out prowling the island, but instead she’s hiding in the cupboard with all the pots and pans, looking warily at all the boxes. All he can see of her in the cupboard gloom is her twin tawny eyes, watching suspiciously. It’s kind of hilarious.
“Brendon,” Mr Paphadoulos begins, as he stuffs his handkerchief back into his pants pocket. There’s a deliberate pause. Brendon glances over at him, and balances on one foot to scratch the back of his calf with his sneaker toe.
“Would you like something to drink, Mr Paphadoulos?” Brendon asks, quick enough to head him off at the pass, not so quick it’s embarrassing. He turns to his kettle and flicks the switch, and busies himself in the cupboards, his back to Mr Paphadoulos.
“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, boy?” he says, but he doesn’t sound hurt, just accepting. Brendon’s shoulders tense up over the mugs.
“I -“ he starts, and realizes he doesn’t know what he wants to say next. It’s getting old.
“We’re worried about you,” Mr Paphadoulos says. He has this gruff little voice, and it sounds rusty over the sentiment. Brendon winces a little bit, against the cupboard door, and wonders if he’s been talking to Brendon’s mother or something.
“Well, I’m doing fine,” Brendon says briskly, because the kettle’s singing. “Black, right? I remember.”
Brendon feels tired all of a sudden, and his hands shake on the mugs. He plasters on a bright smile before he turns around and proffers a mug towards Mr Paphadoulos.
“Any news from home?” Brendon asks, brightly as he can while Mr Paphadoulos wraps his hands gratefully around the mug. “Any engagements, or births? My brothers and sisters -“
Mr Paphadoulos takes a deep sip from the mug and pulls his upper lip over his teeth, considering. Finally he smiles benevolently.
“Oh, there’s a pool going on little Mikey Way and Miss Alicia,” he says, as proudly as if they were his own grandchildren or something. Brendon snorts.
“Did Frank start this pool, by any chance?” he asks. Mr Paphadoulos looks surprised.
“How did you know?” he asks, genuinely, and Brendon just laughs again, shaking his head.
They chitchat idly for maybe half an hour, standing around because there’s no room to sit down. Cat eventually creeps cautiously out of the cupboard and watches Mr Paphadoulos with suspicious eyes instead, sitting at Brendon’s feet.
“Well,” Mr Paphadoulos says, wrapping up. He sets his empty mug on the counter. “I probably should get going. Do you have any letters you want me to take back with me, Brendon?”
Brendon scratches his elbow so he doesn’t have to answer right away.
“Um,” he says, shooting a glance sideways.
“Um, I don’t think so,” he tells the wall. “Not today. If you see my mom or anything, tell her hi, though. From me. Tell her I’m alright.”
Brendon can see Mr Paphadoulos nod from the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t look up in case he looks sympathetic. Brendon doesn’t want that.
“Well, alright,” Brendon says.
The thing is, Mr Paphadoulos’ visit is the only human company Brendon will have for the next two weeks and so he should probably be savoring it, but he doesn’t really feel too bad when he stands on the beach and waves Mr Paphadoulos away across the water until he can’t see the boat any more.
He looks down at Cat, standing at his feet like a sentry, and says, “come on, daisy.”
He spends the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening sitting on one of the big, flat rocks on the beach, strumming his guitar and composing letters back to the village in his head, ones he will never write down, much less actually send.
It goes from pleasantly dusky to completely pitch black within about ten minutes, or so it feels like. Brendon rests his guitar across his lap because he can’t see shit anymore, and rubs his eyes with his knuckles.
“Cat, you still there?” he says aloud, and Cat meows from close by. Brendon sits on the rock for another few minutes, wondering whether he should just lie down on the sand and sleep (he’s wanted to for forever, but never does). He can’t, though - he has to set the lamp up for the night. So, instead, he gets up and slings his guitar over his back and clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He and Cat go inside. For the first time, Brendon carries her up the lighthouse’s spiral staircase and sleeps with her on his bedclothes.
I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper
And live by the side of the sea
It isn’t the gulls that wake Brendon the next morning.
He opens his eyes muzzily, with a vague feeling that something isn’t right - he flails a hand out, reaching for the alarm clock on his nightstand, thinking maybe that he’s woken up at some weird time by accident - maybe it’s three AM, or something. He wiggles around a bit, trying to work out if he needs to pee, before he squints at the clockface.
It’s a half hour before he usually wakes, that’s all. He cranes his neck back on his pillow, following a rumbly breathing sound, and finds himself looking into Cat’s eyes. She’s moved in the night to lie curved like a parenthesis on the pillow around the top of his head, and Brendon’s nose is centimetres from her belly. Seeing her looking back at him and flicking her tail is enough to make him crease up laughing.
“Maybe I’m going crazy, you think so, girl?” he asks her, reaching up to scratch at her belly with a sleep-loose wrist. She closes her eyes blissfully.
“Let’s go downstairs and get you your morning milk,” Brendon says, and then there’s an almighty hammering on the lighthouse door. Brendon freezes in his bed, because - oh my God - his siblings totally laughed at him when he said this might happen, but there are totally pirates on his beach, they’ve come to storm the lighthouse and kidnap him. Pirates! He kind of can’t decide if he’s terrified or thrilled.
“Hello?!” someone yells. “Hello?! Is there anyone there? We need help!”
Brendon wrinkles his nose at Cat. That doesn’t really sound very pirate-y. She just flicks her tail at him, though, giving him nothing. She’s probably thinking all about her milk.
Brendon leaves her on the bed and creeps over to the windows surrounding the lamp, very gingerly, trying to make sure he can’t be seen. At the foot of the lighthouse, he can see a guy about his own age flinging his arms around at another guy, who also looks - in Brendon’s rough estimate - about his own age. Brendon’s not close enough to make out their expressions, but the lines of their bodies look tense and worried. They don’t look a lot like pirates.
On the beach there’s a motorboat mostly in pieces, and on the sand where the tide meets the shore, there’s another boy lying flat on his back, not moving.
||
“I told you,” Jon says to Ryan, “nobody mans these things anymore, this is pointless. Do you have a signal on your cell yet?”
Ryan’s face is pinched and he sort of looks like he’s going to throw up. Jon doesn’t blame him - the only reason he hasn’t thrown up himself is because he can’t throw up and yell at the same time. At Ryan’s feet, Spencer doesn’t stir.
Without saying anything, Ryan lifts his cell out of his pocket and opens the battery compartment. Water comes pouring out.
“Shit,” Jon says.
Ryan kneels in the sand near Spencer and shakes him as gently as he possibly can.
“Spence,” he says, and there are tears in his voice. “Come on. Spencer, it’s me, it’s Ryan, I need you to say if you can hear me. Can you hear me, Spencer? Come on, man, wake up.”
Spencer remains completely unresponsive, flopping weakly in Ryan’s grip. Ryan’s knuckles are white.
“He’s still breathing, Ryan, he’ll be alright,” Jon says, kneeling down next to Ryan. They’re both covered in sand and are completely soaked - Ryan has a string of seaweed over his left shoulder. Jon feels exhausted.
“He needs to go to hospital,” Ryan says, surprisingly forcefully. “We need to - we need to get off this fucking island. Are you sure that lighthouse door is locked? What kind of lighthouse doesn’t have an emergency telephone? What the fuck are we gonna do, Jon?”
Jon opens his mouth - it’s only to deliver an extremely dissatisfying answer, though, so it’s no real loss when he’s interrupted by someone running down the beach dressed in a purple hoodie and cow-patterned pj pants yelling, “I’m here, I’m here!”
||
Brendon - that’s the keeper’s name, Jon learned during a frantic two minutes where Brendon looked at Spencer lying prone on the beach, waved his arms around a lot, and helped Jon and Ryan carry him into the lighthouse - has Jon and Ryan in his kitchen dressed in his borrowed clothes and wrapped in fleecy blankets pretty much before Jon can blink. They’re both taking huge grateful draughts from mugs of hot instant coffee out-of-sync with each other. Brendon’s pants are like capris on Ryan, which would be hilarious at any other time.
Brendon’s little - it’s probably a little rich of Jon to think so, but Brendon’s all lithe and jumpy energy and he’s only about eighteen, all of which makes him seem smaller - and dark-haired and a bit like the world’s most comic mother hen, clucking around Jon and Ryan.
Jon shoots a glance at Ryan while Brendon prattles something - clearly thinking they might be in shock and so he should keep talking - but Ryan’s shoulders seem to have come down a couple notches, at least. Brendon helped them carry Spencer upstairs, and Ryan peeled his wet clothes off him and tucked him into Brendon’s bed. When they left him he was still unresponsive, but Brendon had cleaned the gashes on his head and hands with some antiseptic and he’d still been breathing. There’d pretty much been nothing more that any of them could do - Brendon had some first aid training, he said (Jon believed him, because he figured living so isolated like this meant Brendon would need it) and he’d taken Spencer’s pulse and said it was a little slow, but regular, and that he’d definitely come around soon. Brendon reckoned the bash on the head that had given him the cut (which Brendon assured them was shallow, despite the scary amount of blood) had knocked him out.
So. Brendon’s really been nothing but unfailingly nice and kind of endearingly weird, so Jon doesn’t really want to push anything, but there are some questions they kind of have to ask.
“Um,” Jon begins, stretching his arm out of the folds of his blanket so he can set his mostly-empty mug back on the kitchen table. Brendon immediately stops talking and looks encouragingly at him with big, open eyes, and Ryan continues to just sit there impassively.
“Listen, man, you’ve been really awesome, and all, but we should probably get Spence to a hospital. You know?” he says awkwardly. Unfortunately, Brendon’s reaction to this isn’t great - he gives this sort of very sheepish laugh and refills Jon’s mug without making eye contact with either of them. Ryan and Jon share a Look.
“Um,” Brendon says, finally, scratching the back of his neck with his hand and squinting at the far kitchen wall, “that might be kind of a problem? Because, um, your boat is kind of really broken.”
Okay, Jon’s aware of that.
“Yeah,” Jon says, slowly, “but there has to be some other way to get to the… The mainland or whatever, right? You can’t possibly live here alone all the time, what do you do for food?”
“Um,” Brendon says, finally pulling out a kitchen chair and plopping down on it. He starts massaging his temples, and suddenly looks tired.
“Every month - on the first and the fifteenth - a fisherman from the village takes a boat out to the lighthouse with my groceries,” Brendon explains. He looks like he’s trying to will Jon to understand something with the power of his mind, but Jon’s drawing a blank.
“So?” Jon asks, completely nonplussed. In his peripheral vision, Ryan pulls his blanket tighter around his shoulders.
Brendon coughs. “You asked me what I do about food,” he says.
“Yeah,” Jon says, feeling a bit of hysterical laughter bubbling up in his throat. “But I -“
“Listen,” Brendon says, very gently. He looks straight into Jon’s eyes. “The next time you’ll be able to leave the island is September 15th.”
“But - but it’s the 2nd!” Ryan says, a tiny bit shrilly. Brendon starts - the only thing Ryan’s said so far within Brendon’s earshot is his own name.
Brendon nods. Jon’s hands are shaking a little bit.
“So the only time you can leave this godforsaken place is when the grocery boat pulls up?” Jon asks. He thinks he might be a little bit shrill himself. “Don’t - don’t you have a powerboat or a rowboat or anything? Isn’t there a ferry? What if there’s an emergency and you die?”
Brendon looks thoughtful for a second, and then shrugs.
“I guess nobody thought that far?” he says. Ryan’s left eyebrow is twitching.
“Well,” Jon says, kicking his chair back and standing up. “There must be something. You must have a phone, or some way to contact the emergency services.”
“The island doesn’t get any service,” Brendon says, shaking his head. Ryan looks on the brink of tears.
“Well - you can send a letter, or something, can’t you?” Jon asks. He’s starting to feel desperate. “Even - even by carrier pigeon!”
“Um, by the time you’d train one of the seagulls to carry a letter, the grocery boat would have come around again,” Brendon says simply.
“Look,” he goes on gently, and he really does sound sincere and apologetic and everything else, “I’m honestly not trying to be all. Awkward or anything. There’s nothing you can do except wait here. Your boat’s not taking anyone anywhere.”
Jon shoves one hand over his hair and slumps back down into his chair.
“Spencer needs to go to the hospital,” Ryan puts in, voice barely above a whisper. Brendon turns and looks at him, eyes kind.
“Spencer’ll wake up, Ryan,” Brendon tells him. “I promise you. Maybe not today, but it won’t be long.”
“There’s really nothing else we can do, huh?” Jon says. “I couldn’t even… How far is it to your village? Could I swim?”
He’s already expecting Brendon’s headshake before it happens.
“It’s about a five mile swim,” he says. “It’s not safe, I couldn’t let you go, especially not after what you’ve been through.”
Jon nods, a little jerkily. Ryan looks about as exhausted as he feels, sitting stiffly at the table.
“There’s one guest room with a good sized bed,” Brendon says, getting to his feet and looking officious again. “Nobody’s slept in it since I moved in here, so the sheets and stuff are clean and all. I think you two should probably get some sleep, or rest at least. You good to share, or do you want me to make up the couch?”
Jon shakes his head quickly.
“No, um, we’re good to share. Listen, thank you. And I’m - I’m sorry we’ve sort of barged in here.”
Brendon smiles.
“Dude, no, listen, don’t worry about it. I’m just sorry for what happened to you, and all. It was pretty… Rough.”
He turns to Ryan, then, because for a kid barely out of high school, he’s displaying a surprising amount of insight.
“Um. Don’t worry about going to sleep, I’ll check on Spencer every hour or so.”
Ryan nods, a little stiffly, and then he and Jon follow Brendon down the hall to the guest room.
||
Brendon keeps his promise. Strictly, Brendon goes away for an hour (he watches half of Clueless, just because it’s the first thing he flicks to. And kind of because Alicia Silverstone) and then he actually checks Jon and Ryan before Spencer, just because they’re on the ground floor.
They’re completely out for the count when he pokes his head around the door. Ryan’s lying ramrod-straight on his side (the right, which is so anal and so hilarious to Brendon in a way that he knows is probably cruel), hands folded over the coverlet like he’s fucking, like he’s Snow White or something. The sleeves of the shirt he borrowed from Brendon expose his bony wrists.
Jon, on the other hand, has his face screwed into the pillow, his mouth wide open and probably drooling, and one of his legs hanging off the side of the bed. Brendon considers for a moment - because if Jon sleeps like that for the rest of the day or all night, even, he’s totally going to wake up with a terrible dead leg. On the other hand, trying to sort his leg out might wake him.
Brendon leaves them eventually, feeling more fond than he probably should of people he just met this morning (and who mostly kind of, let’s face it, yelled at him). Probably living like this - he hasn’t met anyone new in… Well, at least the eight months that he’s been on the island (unless Cat counts). Though he thinks that it’s probably been longer than that, as well - is explanation enough for the weird sudden feeling of attachment.
Maybe it’s just hard not to feel fond of people when they’re wearing your wrongly-sized clothing.
Spencer looks surprisingly like Ryan, actually. He hasn’t moved from the position he’d been left in. Brendon pulls over the chair from his desk to Spencer’s bedside, and sits down on it. He rests his elbows on the edge of the bed, and then leans his jaw on his hands. He looks at Spencer.
“Hey, Spencer,” he says, because he feels like he should talk to Spencer, because isn’t that what they do in movies and stuff? Thing is, Brendon’s mostly not shitting Ryan and Jon when he says he’s pretty good with first aid stuff. He is - and he’s pretty sure that Spencer doesn’t have that kind of, long-term coma sort of unconsciousness. He’s not a doctor or anything, though; and he’s still kind of superstitious about stuff, so. Talking it is, then.
“You don’t know me, but I’m Brendon. You and Ryan and Jon got into a - well, your boat got wrecked and we think you got hit on the head, which is. Why you’re unconscious and I’m talking to you. Um. Well, the point is, Spencer - you’d better wake up soon, because I promised your friend Ryan that you would, and I’m kind of afraid of his elbows.”
Spencer doesn’t say anything, or move. Which… Brendon wasn’t really expecting anything. A shaft of sunlight falls over Spencer’s cheek, and Brendon grins a bit, despite himself.
“You totally look more like Snow White than Ryan does,” he says. It’s true, as well - there’s something about the texture of Spencer’s cheek, all clean-shaven and smooth. He has fewer lines on his forehead than Ryan, as well - Ryan’s maybe more like… Whichever fairytale princess was kind of secretly all uptight and indignant all the time. Ryan frowns in his sleep and got shipwrecked in pinstripe pants and a maroon vest - he’s clearly a special kind of guy.
Brendon doesn’t even realise he’s said all this until his mouth suddenly feels dry. He rubs at his jaw sheepishly and thinks the room’s kind of stuffy, he should open a window maybe.
Brendon checks everyone every hour until 11 PM (Ryan and Jon sleep all day - Ryan doesn’t move so much as a milimeter! It’s so weird! - and Spencer doesn’t stir, either). He means to check them more after that, but he accidentally falls asleep on the couch instead, remote in his hand and an old episode of Scrubs playing, almost on mute.
||
Ryan wakes at 11:45 PM and feels a brief moment of pure panic seize him as he blinks in the gloom and doesn’t recognise anything - the room looks and smells wrong, it’s the wrong temperature and there’s someone in bed with him.
The moment passes, however, leaving Ryan with a hand clasped to his chest, trying to get his breathing back together. At least Brendon has proved not to be an axe murderer. Or, if he is, today is not Ryan and Jon’s day.
Ryan sits up in bed and elbows Jon indelicately in the shoulder - he’s rewarded by Jon shooting bolt upright and squinting murderously at him.
“I need to pee,” Ryan hisses. “And I’m not about to go alone.”
It might be so dim that Ryan can’t see him properly, but he just knows Jon rolled his eyes just then.
“You’re seriously going to make me stand outside while you pee?” he mutters grouchily, rubbing the palms of his hands over his face. “You should just go talk to Brendon - it’s not like I, like I know where the fuckin’ bathroom is anyway.”
“Come on,” Ryan says, and throws the coverlet back. Jon growls a little bit, because Jon is the most laid back dude Ryan knows - until you try to wake him up.
Ryan has to admit that the kind of guy who leaves two glasses of water on the nightstand for his guests (and who has obviously emptied and refilled the glasses at regular intervals, because the water’s cold) is probably not the kind of guy who’s going to burst in and murder Ryan while he’s trying to pee.
Still. Being vigilant never hurt anyone.
They pad out of the guestroom on light feet - if you’d asked them why, Ryan’s pretty sure neither of them would be able to say, but it just feels like the thing to do - and then Ryan stops abruptly in the hallway. Jon bumps into him.
“What?” Jon says, at his back. Ryan just sighs, and points to the lounge at the end of the hallway.
Brendon’s lying passed out on the sofa. He’s resting his head on a couch cushion at a terrible angle, and he hasn’t even lifted a blanket or something for himself.
“Oh, man,” Jon says, when they’ve tiptoed the whole way in, careful not to wake him. “Ryan, dude, can we keep him?”
Ryan bites his lip to keep back a laugh.
“He is pretty endearing, isn’t he?” Ryan says. Brendon sighs in his sleep.
“You sound like someone’s maiden aunt again,” Jon tells him, then stretches out his shoulders. He makes a satisfied face when his back cracks.
“Come on, use that weird Spidey sense you have and give me your best guess for where he keeps his bedstuff,” Jon says.
“Try the small door in the hallway next to the kitchen,” Ryan says, immediately. He tries to school the expression on his face, because Jon always says he looks like a mix between the psychic chick from that stupid teeny vampire movie (that he’s NEVER going to forgive Ryan for dragging him to) and a constipated person when he guesses these things. “It’s painted white,” he adds.
Jon makes a face.
“You’re so freaky, you know that?” he says.
Jon heads off back down the corridor with steps as light as he can manage this soon after being woken. Ryan shuts the television off and tries to rearrange Brendon’s body into a shape that looks less painful. He doesn’t notice that Jon’s come back until he feels someone touch his shoulder.
“You were right,” Jon says, and gives Ryan a fleecy blanket not unlike the ones from earlier. Ryan shakes it out and lays it gently over Brendon, who snuffles and then smiles a little.
“I never even though about the fact that we left him with no bed to sleep in,” Jon says, sounding guilty. Shit, that didn’t occur to Ryan, either.
“He’s a good kid,” Ryan says. Jon laughs, a little bit.
“What?” Ryan asks, annoyed.
“Kid?” Jon says. “Ryan, he’s probably a whole year younger than you.”
In his sleep, Brendon looks a lot younger - his brow is unclouded, and his hands curl up like Ryan’s nephew’s do.
“What’s a kid just out of high school doing living alone in a lighthouse?” Ryan asks, really more voicing the thought aloud than anything. He’s kind of mad about it, actually, if he thinks about it too long - there’s a small but insistent flicker of anger at whoever used to be in charge of Brendon.
“One thing that’s pretty certain,” Jon says, scratching his chest, “is that we’ll probably find out everything we want to know. We sure as hell have enough time.”
Ryan crosses his arms over his chest and stuffs his hands into his armpits.
“You think we should check on Spence?” Jon says. He watches Ryan with wary eyes, Ryan shifts his gaze away.
“I don’t want to go up into Brendon’s room without him knowing,” Ryan says uncomfortably. “How much good will it do, realistically, anyway? Spence’ll wake up when he wakes up, he won’t do it magically just because we go up there.”
Jon rests a solid hand on Ryan’s shoulder and squeezes, once.
“Come on,” Ryan says, steady-voiced. He doesn’t shake Jon’s hand off. “Let’s go back to bed.”
PART TWO
~21,000 | PATD | Brendon/Spencer | R
The life of lonely lighthouse keeper Brendon Urie is changed forever when Ryan Ross, Jon Walker and Spencer Smith are shipwrecked on his beach.
This fic has a downloadable mix over HERE.
I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper
And keep him company
Brendon is usually awake before the birds - the morning light streams in through the windows so early, because the lighthouse is east-facing - but this morning he can already hear a couple of cheeky seagulls squawking, probably perched on top of the lamp and peering in at him.
Brendon doesn’t mind so much. In fact, he’s pretty grateful - he stayed up too late last night trying to work something out on his guitar, and who knows how long he could have slept - especially since it feels like the sunlight is slicing his retinas in two, ow, and he was managing to sleep through that?
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up,” he grumbles, squinting, and swings his legs over the side of his bed. He drums his toes against the floor for a few seconds, waiting to wake up. Brendon’s generally a real morning person, but he feels like he’s been hit on the head by a hammer this morning.
He ambles over to the lamp, where the sound is coming from, and hooks his fingertips around the band of his sweatpants, where they’re trying to slip off his hips.
“Good morning,” he tells the seagulls sleepily, and gets a few honky squawks in return, as they flap around, off balance. Seagulls are cheeky bastards, but Brendon likes them anyway. He toys for a second with the idea of opening up the window and tossing them some bread, but then he figures if he did, they’d never give him any peace.
So he opens up the window, leans out of it up to his shoulders, and says, “shoo!” in the best bird-scaring voice he can muster. He even flails his arms around a little.
The gulls look distinctly unimpressed. In fact, Brendon is pretty sure they’re laughing at him. Oh well, that’d be just like Brendon’s life, to be filled with seagulls with attitude. He shrugs, says have it your way, but where you’re sitting gets the worst of the midday wind instead, and closes up the window again.
In the gap in the wall where the lamp is and his mirror, Brendon has a calendar pinned up. It’s the beginning of his eighth month on the island, and as it’s the first, the little exclamation mark in the box indicates that he’s due a visit from the grocery ferry.
He starts - because is that really the date? - and accidentally kicks the leg of his desk chair in his panic. He hobbles around on one foot, swearing loudly as he scavenges in the general rubble on the floor for a pair of pants that he’s pretty sure are mostly clean, and yanks them on inelegantly.
It occurs to him while he’s going down the steps two at a time that the boatmaster is unlikely to leave without seeing him, as Brendon is in fact the only occupant of the island. Brendon’s tried his best to get used to the island life, but he still trips up sometimes. You’d think it would be easy enough to remember that you’re the only person for miles around, but he finds himself doing stupid things all too regularly.
The catch on the lighthouse door doesn’t stick for the first time in a while, so Brendon stumbles a little onto the sand. The grocer has already moored his boat awkwardly on the shore, using a large pointed rock that’s been wedged into the sand from before Brendon got here.
“Brendon!” he greets, raising his hand. Brendon sends fine yellow sand spraying everywhere in his haste to get over to the little motorboat.
“Mr Paphadoulos,” Brendon says, just as cheerfully. Mr Paphadoulos is an old family friend, hardy and Greek with a head a little bit like a walnut. He’s also way more awesome than you’d expect a small old guy who wears fishermen’s sweaters to be.
“What do you have for me today?” Brendon asks, reaching his hands down to the boxes on the boat’s floor. Mr Paphadoulos laughs and swats Brendon’s hands away.
“Keep it a surprise!” Mr Paphadoulos scolds mildly. Brendon massages his hand with an exaggerated injured expression, just to make Mr Paphadoulos smile - which he does.
“I put in some tuna and cat food for your cat,” he says. “You still have that little tabby, don’t you?”
Cat had showed up six months into Brendon’s stay on the island - she was kind of tiny and very thin, and Brendon had no idea where on earth she’d come from. He’d been sitting on the beach strumming his guitar and writing HELP in huge backwards letters on the sand (not out of any real desire to be found, just… because) when she’d wound her way up silently, like, from out of nowhere.
Brendon had thought she was wild, and so they both stood very very still, looking at each other, Brendon not breathing. She didn’t bolt, though, just looked at him with steady tawny eyes and then yawned, breaking the impasse, and walked over to lay in the sand at Brendon’s bare feet.
He took her inside with him when he was going, and filled one of his saucers with milk and left it for her. He left the lighthouse door propped open that night - so that she wouldn’t be afraid - and fully expected to wake to find her gone. Instead, he’d found her sleeping curled up on one of his kitchen chairs, and she’d woken when he’d come in, purring like an engine and rubbing around his ankles.
He’d called her Cat so he wouldn’t get too attached, but although it now seemed like she’d stay, it had stuck.
“Yes, I still have her,” Brendon says to Mr Paphadoulos. “Thank you very much - it’s been kind of awkward trying to feed her from my own food, so that’s awesome.”
It only takes them about fifteen minutes to carry the two weeks’ worth of boxes in across the beach to the lighthouse. They pass at regular intervals, never long enough for Mr Paphadoulos to start asking Brendon any of the concerned questions that he’s clearly writing and rewriting in his head (only ever enough to crease his eyebrows and open his mouth before Brendon’s gone again, humming an old tune that’s bee catching at him).
Brendon loves Mr Paphadoulos, okay, mostly because it’s completely impossible not to, but he doesn’t feel like having Conversations today, however glad he is of the company. The thing that has probably changed the most since he came to the lighthouse is that it’s pretty much becoming a total bitch for Brendon to express his feelings in words - if you’d said before that there was a pipe running straight from Brendon’s brain to his mouth with absolutely no filters or time delay, or little dudes (amoebas, maybe?) in official-looking hats manning those lifty arm things that they have across highways vetting every thought and saying whoa, are you sure you want to let this past?, you’d probably have been right. Now, frighteningly, he’s starting to remind himself a bit of his grandfather, the last keeper, who was pretty much the silentest (silentist? most silent?) man Brendon knew - who might be coerced to say my God in an absent kind of voice if his house started to burn down around him.
He always looked pretty zen, though, Brendon’s grandfather. Brendon could use some zen.
The point is that Brendon has a sieve now, a sieve in his pipeline, and the holes are like, micro holes and the stuff making up the sieve is like razor chicken wire so everything he thinks gets cut up into little pieces and doesn’t make sense anymore anyway by the time he might say it. Those amoeba dudes are getting seriously powerhungry, too.
“Thanks, Mr Paphadoulos,” Brendon says, when they’re standing in his kitchen with all the boxes piled on the kitchen table, the counters, and on the chairs. Brendon thought Cat was out prowling the island, but instead she’s hiding in the cupboard with all the pots and pans, looking warily at all the boxes. All he can see of her in the cupboard gloom is her twin tawny eyes, watching suspiciously. It’s kind of hilarious.
“Brendon,” Mr Paphadoulos begins, as he stuffs his handkerchief back into his pants pocket. There’s a deliberate pause. Brendon glances over at him, and balances on one foot to scratch the back of his calf with his sneaker toe.
“Would you like something to drink, Mr Paphadoulos?” Brendon asks, quick enough to head him off at the pass, not so quick it’s embarrassing. He turns to his kettle and flicks the switch, and busies himself in the cupboards, his back to Mr Paphadoulos.
“Don’t want to talk to me, huh, boy?” he says, but he doesn’t sound hurt, just accepting. Brendon’s shoulders tense up over the mugs.
“I -“ he starts, and realizes he doesn’t know what he wants to say next. It’s getting old.
“We’re worried about you,” Mr Paphadoulos says. He has this gruff little voice, and it sounds rusty over the sentiment. Brendon winces a little bit, against the cupboard door, and wonders if he’s been talking to Brendon’s mother or something.
“Well, I’m doing fine,” Brendon says briskly, because the kettle’s singing. “Black, right? I remember.”
Brendon feels tired all of a sudden, and his hands shake on the mugs. He plasters on a bright smile before he turns around and proffers a mug towards Mr Paphadoulos.
“Any news from home?” Brendon asks, brightly as he can while Mr Paphadoulos wraps his hands gratefully around the mug. “Any engagements, or births? My brothers and sisters -“
Mr Paphadoulos takes a deep sip from the mug and pulls his upper lip over his teeth, considering. Finally he smiles benevolently.
“Oh, there’s a pool going on little Mikey Way and Miss Alicia,” he says, as proudly as if they were his own grandchildren or something. Brendon snorts.
“Did Frank start this pool, by any chance?” he asks. Mr Paphadoulos looks surprised.
“How did you know?” he asks, genuinely, and Brendon just laughs again, shaking his head.
They chitchat idly for maybe half an hour, standing around because there’s no room to sit down. Cat eventually creeps cautiously out of the cupboard and watches Mr Paphadoulos with suspicious eyes instead, sitting at Brendon’s feet.
“Well,” Mr Paphadoulos says, wrapping up. He sets his empty mug on the counter. “I probably should get going. Do you have any letters you want me to take back with me, Brendon?”
Brendon scratches his elbow so he doesn’t have to answer right away.
“Um,” he says, shooting a glance sideways.
“Um, I don’t think so,” he tells the wall. “Not today. If you see my mom or anything, tell her hi, though. From me. Tell her I’m alright.”
Brendon can see Mr Paphadoulos nod from the corner of his eye, but he doesn’t look up in case he looks sympathetic. Brendon doesn’t want that.
“Well, alright,” Brendon says.
The thing is, Mr Paphadoulos’ visit is the only human company Brendon will have for the next two weeks and so he should probably be savoring it, but he doesn’t really feel too bad when he stands on the beach and waves Mr Paphadoulos away across the water until he can’t see the boat any more.
He looks down at Cat, standing at his feet like a sentry, and says, “come on, daisy.”
He spends the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening sitting on one of the big, flat rocks on the beach, strumming his guitar and composing letters back to the village in his head, ones he will never write down, much less actually send.
It goes from pleasantly dusky to completely pitch black within about ten minutes, or so it feels like. Brendon rests his guitar across his lap because he can’t see shit anymore, and rubs his eyes with his knuckles.
“Cat, you still there?” he says aloud, and Cat meows from close by. Brendon sits on the rock for another few minutes, wondering whether he should just lie down on the sand and sleep (he’s wanted to for forever, but never does). He can’t, though - he has to set the lamp up for the night. So, instead, he gets up and slings his guitar over his back and clicks his tongue against the back of his teeth.
He and Cat go inside. For the first time, Brendon carries her up the lighthouse’s spiral staircase and sleeps with her on his bedclothes.
I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper
And live by the side of the sea
It isn’t the gulls that wake Brendon the next morning.
He opens his eyes muzzily, with a vague feeling that something isn’t right - he flails a hand out, reaching for the alarm clock on his nightstand, thinking maybe that he’s woken up at some weird time by accident - maybe it’s three AM, or something. He wiggles around a bit, trying to work out if he needs to pee, before he squints at the clockface.
It’s a half hour before he usually wakes, that’s all. He cranes his neck back on his pillow, following a rumbly breathing sound, and finds himself looking into Cat’s eyes. She’s moved in the night to lie curved like a parenthesis on the pillow around the top of his head, and Brendon’s nose is centimetres from her belly. Seeing her looking back at him and flicking her tail is enough to make him crease up laughing.
“Maybe I’m going crazy, you think so, girl?” he asks her, reaching up to scratch at her belly with a sleep-loose wrist. She closes her eyes blissfully.
“Let’s go downstairs and get you your morning milk,” Brendon says, and then there’s an almighty hammering on the lighthouse door. Brendon freezes in his bed, because - oh my God - his siblings totally laughed at him when he said this might happen, but there are totally pirates on his beach, they’ve come to storm the lighthouse and kidnap him. Pirates! He kind of can’t decide if he’s terrified or thrilled.
“Hello?!” someone yells. “Hello?! Is there anyone there? We need help!”
Brendon wrinkles his nose at Cat. That doesn’t really sound very pirate-y. She just flicks her tail at him, though, giving him nothing. She’s probably thinking all about her milk.
Brendon leaves her on the bed and creeps over to the windows surrounding the lamp, very gingerly, trying to make sure he can’t be seen. At the foot of the lighthouse, he can see a guy about his own age flinging his arms around at another guy, who also looks - in Brendon’s rough estimate - about his own age. Brendon’s not close enough to make out their expressions, but the lines of their bodies look tense and worried. They don’t look a lot like pirates.
On the beach there’s a motorboat mostly in pieces, and on the sand where the tide meets the shore, there’s another boy lying flat on his back, not moving.
||
“I told you,” Jon says to Ryan, “nobody mans these things anymore, this is pointless. Do you have a signal on your cell yet?”
Ryan’s face is pinched and he sort of looks like he’s going to throw up. Jon doesn’t blame him - the only reason he hasn’t thrown up himself is because he can’t throw up and yell at the same time. At Ryan’s feet, Spencer doesn’t stir.
Without saying anything, Ryan lifts his cell out of his pocket and opens the battery compartment. Water comes pouring out.
“Shit,” Jon says.
Ryan kneels in the sand near Spencer and shakes him as gently as he possibly can.
“Spence,” he says, and there are tears in his voice. “Come on. Spencer, it’s me, it’s Ryan, I need you to say if you can hear me. Can you hear me, Spencer? Come on, man, wake up.”
Spencer remains completely unresponsive, flopping weakly in Ryan’s grip. Ryan’s knuckles are white.
“He’s still breathing, Ryan, he’ll be alright,” Jon says, kneeling down next to Ryan. They’re both covered in sand and are completely soaked - Ryan has a string of seaweed over his left shoulder. Jon feels exhausted.
“He needs to go to hospital,” Ryan says, surprisingly forcefully. “We need to - we need to get off this fucking island. Are you sure that lighthouse door is locked? What kind of lighthouse doesn’t have an emergency telephone? What the fuck are we gonna do, Jon?”
Jon opens his mouth - it’s only to deliver an extremely dissatisfying answer, though, so it’s no real loss when he’s interrupted by someone running down the beach dressed in a purple hoodie and cow-patterned pj pants yelling, “I’m here, I’m here!”
||
Brendon - that’s the keeper’s name, Jon learned during a frantic two minutes where Brendon looked at Spencer lying prone on the beach, waved his arms around a lot, and helped Jon and Ryan carry him into the lighthouse - has Jon and Ryan in his kitchen dressed in his borrowed clothes and wrapped in fleecy blankets pretty much before Jon can blink. They’re both taking huge grateful draughts from mugs of hot instant coffee out-of-sync with each other. Brendon’s pants are like capris on Ryan, which would be hilarious at any other time.
Brendon’s little - it’s probably a little rich of Jon to think so, but Brendon’s all lithe and jumpy energy and he’s only about eighteen, all of which makes him seem smaller - and dark-haired and a bit like the world’s most comic mother hen, clucking around Jon and Ryan.
Jon shoots a glance at Ryan while Brendon prattles something - clearly thinking they might be in shock and so he should keep talking - but Ryan’s shoulders seem to have come down a couple notches, at least. Brendon helped them carry Spencer upstairs, and Ryan peeled his wet clothes off him and tucked him into Brendon’s bed. When they left him he was still unresponsive, but Brendon had cleaned the gashes on his head and hands with some antiseptic and he’d still been breathing. There’d pretty much been nothing more that any of them could do - Brendon had some first aid training, he said (Jon believed him, because he figured living so isolated like this meant Brendon would need it) and he’d taken Spencer’s pulse and said it was a little slow, but regular, and that he’d definitely come around soon. Brendon reckoned the bash on the head that had given him the cut (which Brendon assured them was shallow, despite the scary amount of blood) had knocked him out.
So. Brendon’s really been nothing but unfailingly nice and kind of endearingly weird, so Jon doesn’t really want to push anything, but there are some questions they kind of have to ask.
“Um,” Jon begins, stretching his arm out of the folds of his blanket so he can set his mostly-empty mug back on the kitchen table. Brendon immediately stops talking and looks encouragingly at him with big, open eyes, and Ryan continues to just sit there impassively.
“Listen, man, you’ve been really awesome, and all, but we should probably get Spence to a hospital. You know?” he says awkwardly. Unfortunately, Brendon’s reaction to this isn’t great - he gives this sort of very sheepish laugh and refills Jon’s mug without making eye contact with either of them. Ryan and Jon share a Look.
“Um,” Brendon says, finally, scratching the back of his neck with his hand and squinting at the far kitchen wall, “that might be kind of a problem? Because, um, your boat is kind of really broken.”
Okay, Jon’s aware of that.
“Yeah,” Jon says, slowly, “but there has to be some other way to get to the… The mainland or whatever, right? You can’t possibly live here alone all the time, what do you do for food?”
“Um,” Brendon says, finally pulling out a kitchen chair and plopping down on it. He starts massaging his temples, and suddenly looks tired.
“Every month - on the first and the fifteenth - a fisherman from the village takes a boat out to the lighthouse with my groceries,” Brendon explains. He looks like he’s trying to will Jon to understand something with the power of his mind, but Jon’s drawing a blank.
“So?” Jon asks, completely nonplussed. In his peripheral vision, Ryan pulls his blanket tighter around his shoulders.
Brendon coughs. “You asked me what I do about food,” he says.
“Yeah,” Jon says, feeling a bit of hysterical laughter bubbling up in his throat. “But I -“
“Listen,” Brendon says, very gently. He looks straight into Jon’s eyes. “The next time you’ll be able to leave the island is September 15th.”
“But - but it’s the 2nd!” Ryan says, a tiny bit shrilly. Brendon starts - the only thing Ryan’s said so far within Brendon’s earshot is his own name.
Brendon nods. Jon’s hands are shaking a little bit.
“So the only time you can leave this godforsaken place is when the grocery boat pulls up?” Jon asks. He thinks he might be a little bit shrill himself. “Don’t - don’t you have a powerboat or a rowboat or anything? Isn’t there a ferry? What if there’s an emergency and you die?”
Brendon looks thoughtful for a second, and then shrugs.
“I guess nobody thought that far?” he says. Ryan’s left eyebrow is twitching.
“Well,” Jon says, kicking his chair back and standing up. “There must be something. You must have a phone, or some way to contact the emergency services.”
“The island doesn’t get any service,” Brendon says, shaking his head. Ryan looks on the brink of tears.
“Well - you can send a letter, or something, can’t you?” Jon asks. He’s starting to feel desperate. “Even - even by carrier pigeon!”
“Um, by the time you’d train one of the seagulls to carry a letter, the grocery boat would have come around again,” Brendon says simply.
“Look,” he goes on gently, and he really does sound sincere and apologetic and everything else, “I’m honestly not trying to be all. Awkward or anything. There’s nothing you can do except wait here. Your boat’s not taking anyone anywhere.”
Jon shoves one hand over his hair and slumps back down into his chair.
“Spencer needs to go to the hospital,” Ryan puts in, voice barely above a whisper. Brendon turns and looks at him, eyes kind.
“Spencer’ll wake up, Ryan,” Brendon tells him. “I promise you. Maybe not today, but it won’t be long.”
“There’s really nothing else we can do, huh?” Jon says. “I couldn’t even… How far is it to your village? Could I swim?”
He’s already expecting Brendon’s headshake before it happens.
“It’s about a five mile swim,” he says. “It’s not safe, I couldn’t let you go, especially not after what you’ve been through.”
Jon nods, a little jerkily. Ryan looks about as exhausted as he feels, sitting stiffly at the table.
“There’s one guest room with a good sized bed,” Brendon says, getting to his feet and looking officious again. “Nobody’s slept in it since I moved in here, so the sheets and stuff are clean and all. I think you two should probably get some sleep, or rest at least. You good to share, or do you want me to make up the couch?”
Jon shakes his head quickly.
“No, um, we’re good to share. Listen, thank you. And I’m - I’m sorry we’ve sort of barged in here.”
Brendon smiles.
“Dude, no, listen, don’t worry about it. I’m just sorry for what happened to you, and all. It was pretty… Rough.”
He turns to Ryan, then, because for a kid barely out of high school, he’s displaying a surprising amount of insight.
“Um. Don’t worry about going to sleep, I’ll check on Spencer every hour or so.”
Ryan nods, a little stiffly, and then he and Jon follow Brendon down the hall to the guest room.
||
Brendon keeps his promise. Strictly, Brendon goes away for an hour (he watches half of Clueless, just because it’s the first thing he flicks to. And kind of because Alicia Silverstone) and then he actually checks Jon and Ryan before Spencer, just because they’re on the ground floor.
They’re completely out for the count when he pokes his head around the door. Ryan’s lying ramrod-straight on his side (the right, which is so anal and so hilarious to Brendon in a way that he knows is probably cruel), hands folded over the coverlet like he’s fucking, like he’s Snow White or something. The sleeves of the shirt he borrowed from Brendon expose his bony wrists.
Jon, on the other hand, has his face screwed into the pillow, his mouth wide open and probably drooling, and one of his legs hanging off the side of the bed. Brendon considers for a moment - because if Jon sleeps like that for the rest of the day or all night, even, he’s totally going to wake up with a terrible dead leg. On the other hand, trying to sort his leg out might wake him.
Brendon leaves them eventually, feeling more fond than he probably should of people he just met this morning (and who mostly kind of, let’s face it, yelled at him). Probably living like this - he hasn’t met anyone new in… Well, at least the eight months that he’s been on the island (unless Cat counts). Though he thinks that it’s probably been longer than that, as well - is explanation enough for the weird sudden feeling of attachment.
Maybe it’s just hard not to feel fond of people when they’re wearing your wrongly-sized clothing.
Spencer looks surprisingly like Ryan, actually. He hasn’t moved from the position he’d been left in. Brendon pulls over the chair from his desk to Spencer’s bedside, and sits down on it. He rests his elbows on the edge of the bed, and then leans his jaw on his hands. He looks at Spencer.
“Hey, Spencer,” he says, because he feels like he should talk to Spencer, because isn’t that what they do in movies and stuff? Thing is, Brendon’s mostly not shitting Ryan and Jon when he says he’s pretty good with first aid stuff. He is - and he’s pretty sure that Spencer doesn’t have that kind of, long-term coma sort of unconsciousness. He’s not a doctor or anything, though; and he’s still kind of superstitious about stuff, so. Talking it is, then.
“You don’t know me, but I’m Brendon. You and Ryan and Jon got into a - well, your boat got wrecked and we think you got hit on the head, which is. Why you’re unconscious and I’m talking to you. Um. Well, the point is, Spencer - you’d better wake up soon, because I promised your friend Ryan that you would, and I’m kind of afraid of his elbows.”
Spencer doesn’t say anything, or move. Which… Brendon wasn’t really expecting anything. A shaft of sunlight falls over Spencer’s cheek, and Brendon grins a bit, despite himself.
“You totally look more like Snow White than Ryan does,” he says. It’s true, as well - there’s something about the texture of Spencer’s cheek, all clean-shaven and smooth. He has fewer lines on his forehead than Ryan, as well - Ryan’s maybe more like… Whichever fairytale princess was kind of secretly all uptight and indignant all the time. Ryan frowns in his sleep and got shipwrecked in pinstripe pants and a maroon vest - he’s clearly a special kind of guy.
Brendon doesn’t even realise he’s said all this until his mouth suddenly feels dry. He rubs at his jaw sheepishly and thinks the room’s kind of stuffy, he should open a window maybe.
Brendon checks everyone every hour until 11 PM (Ryan and Jon sleep all day - Ryan doesn’t move so much as a milimeter! It’s so weird! - and Spencer doesn’t stir, either). He means to check them more after that, but he accidentally falls asleep on the couch instead, remote in his hand and an old episode of Scrubs playing, almost on mute.
||
Ryan wakes at 11:45 PM and feels a brief moment of pure panic seize him as he blinks in the gloom and doesn’t recognise anything - the room looks and smells wrong, it’s the wrong temperature and there’s someone in bed with him.
The moment passes, however, leaving Ryan with a hand clasped to his chest, trying to get his breathing back together. At least Brendon has proved not to be an axe murderer. Or, if he is, today is not Ryan and Jon’s day.
Ryan sits up in bed and elbows Jon indelicately in the shoulder - he’s rewarded by Jon shooting bolt upright and squinting murderously at him.
“I need to pee,” Ryan hisses. “And I’m not about to go alone.”
It might be so dim that Ryan can’t see him properly, but he just knows Jon rolled his eyes just then.
“You’re seriously going to make me stand outside while you pee?” he mutters grouchily, rubbing the palms of his hands over his face. “You should just go talk to Brendon - it’s not like I, like I know where the fuckin’ bathroom is anyway.”
“Come on,” Ryan says, and throws the coverlet back. Jon growls a little bit, because Jon is the most laid back dude Ryan knows - until you try to wake him up.
Ryan has to admit that the kind of guy who leaves two glasses of water on the nightstand for his guests (and who has obviously emptied and refilled the glasses at regular intervals, because the water’s cold) is probably not the kind of guy who’s going to burst in and murder Ryan while he’s trying to pee.
Still. Being vigilant never hurt anyone.
They pad out of the guestroom on light feet - if you’d asked them why, Ryan’s pretty sure neither of them would be able to say, but it just feels like the thing to do - and then Ryan stops abruptly in the hallway. Jon bumps into him.
“What?” Jon says, at his back. Ryan just sighs, and points to the lounge at the end of the hallway.
Brendon’s lying passed out on the sofa. He’s resting his head on a couch cushion at a terrible angle, and he hasn’t even lifted a blanket or something for himself.
“Oh, man,” Jon says, when they’ve tiptoed the whole way in, careful not to wake him. “Ryan, dude, can we keep him?”
Ryan bites his lip to keep back a laugh.
“He is pretty endearing, isn’t he?” Ryan says. Brendon sighs in his sleep.
“You sound like someone’s maiden aunt again,” Jon tells him, then stretches out his shoulders. He makes a satisfied face when his back cracks.
“Come on, use that weird Spidey sense you have and give me your best guess for where he keeps his bedstuff,” Jon says.
“Try the small door in the hallway next to the kitchen,” Ryan says, immediately. He tries to school the expression on his face, because Jon always says he looks like a mix between the psychic chick from that stupid teeny vampire movie (that he’s NEVER going to forgive Ryan for dragging him to) and a constipated person when he guesses these things. “It’s painted white,” he adds.
Jon makes a face.
“You’re so freaky, you know that?” he says.
Jon heads off back down the corridor with steps as light as he can manage this soon after being woken. Ryan shuts the television off and tries to rearrange Brendon’s body into a shape that looks less painful. He doesn’t notice that Jon’s come back until he feels someone touch his shoulder.
“You were right,” Jon says, and gives Ryan a fleecy blanket not unlike the ones from earlier. Ryan shakes it out and lays it gently over Brendon, who snuffles and then smiles a little.
“I never even though about the fact that we left him with no bed to sleep in,” Jon says, sounding guilty. Shit, that didn’t occur to Ryan, either.
“He’s a good kid,” Ryan says. Jon laughs, a little bit.
“What?” Ryan asks, annoyed.
“Kid?” Jon says. “Ryan, he’s probably a whole year younger than you.”
In his sleep, Brendon looks a lot younger - his brow is unclouded, and his hands curl up like Ryan’s nephew’s do.
“What’s a kid just out of high school doing living alone in a lighthouse?” Ryan asks, really more voicing the thought aloud than anything. He’s kind of mad about it, actually, if he thinks about it too long - there’s a small but insistent flicker of anger at whoever used to be in charge of Brendon.
“One thing that’s pretty certain,” Jon says, scratching his chest, “is that we’ll probably find out everything we want to know. We sure as hell have enough time.”
Ryan crosses his arms over his chest and stuffs his hands into his armpits.
“You think we should check on Spence?” Jon says. He watches Ryan with wary eyes, Ryan shifts his gaze away.
“I don’t want to go up into Brendon’s room without him knowing,” Ryan says uncomfortably. “How much good will it do, realistically, anyway? Spence’ll wake up when he wakes up, he won’t do it magically just because we go up there.”
Jon rests a solid hand on Ryan’s shoulder and squeezes, once.
“Come on,” Ryan says, steady-voiced. He doesn’t shake Jon’s hand off. “Let’s go back to bed.”
PART TWO