You Will Not Rattle Us Apart, Ryan Ross // Vol. V

[subterrain]

VOL. V: Sunday

He calls Zach in the morning. The sun is up, and he can hear cars on the street, so he can only assume that it is a normal time when normal people might be waking up and eating breakfast.

He gets a muffled syllable for an answer - maybe a yup, maybe a what.

Ryan says, “Hi, it’s Ryan. Were you sleeping?”

Zach says, “Uhhh,” like he can’t decide whether to lie or not. Then: “Yes.”

Ryan says, “Sorry.”

Zach says, “What time is it?”

“Like, 9:00?” Ryan wanders around the apartment, looking for a clock that isn’t his phone. He finds Brendon’s: “Okay, no, 7:30.”

Zach goes, “Oh.”

Ryan says, “I really need to talk to you. Can I bring over some coffee?”

“Um, sure. Okay. Sure.”

“So, where do you live again?” Ryan asks, and the part of him that feels bad for being so obnoxious and stalkery is also the part of him that writes down the street names: the civilized part.

He peeks in on Brendon before he goes. He and Olivia look so innocently hetero all curled up together that Ryan actually creeps himself out a bit, looking. He changes his underwear and his shirt in the kitchen. He scribbles a note, grabs his and Brendon’s matching stainless steel travel mugs out of the cupboard. He closes the door quietly.

.

Zach answers the door in a t-shirt that’s way too big for his skinny frame and a pair of cargo shorts that look like they got taken off a drunk frat boy. He does not look like anyone even remotely involved in the Brooklyn music scene. Ryan does his best not to judge, and adjusts his paisley scarf a little self-consciously. At least Zach’s hair looks decent. Kind of like he’s just been fucked, actually.

Ryan starts to say hi and apologize for forgetting what Zach takes in his coffee, but Zach shushes him. He gestures at a closed door in the hall and mouths something that looks like They’re sleeping. Then he draws Ryan into the next room over, closing the door after them, but still staying quiet.

He takes one of the travel mugs out of Ryan’s hand and points at a chair.

The room is swamped with equipment. In fact, except for the fact that there’s sunlight and windows and no wretched odors, it looks kind of like Astrobase Go. A mixing board and a few computers and a half a dozen mike stands and - yeah, Ryan twists his head around - an orchestra of instruments that would give Brendon a raging hard-on.

Zach is fiddling with the closest laptop. He hands Ryan a massive pair of headphones and murmurs, “I don’t know, you woke me up and I had to record this. I think I dreamt it.”

He clicks play and stands back, watching Ryan’s expression with this kind of goofy, anxious look on his face. Ryan, wanting to give an honest reaction, closes his eyes and concentrates on listening.

At first he can’t identify the instrument, but he doesn’t cheat and crack an eyelid to peer around the room. It could be a keyboard setting or some bass pedals. It sounds like a flute, maybe, or a fucking vibraphone. Bells? It carries a thin, straining melody that only lasts for a minute. It sounds very alone. It sounds like it’s waiting to be joined by the rest of the song.

Ryan opens his eyes, pretty sure that the counterpoint and the beat and the layers of horns and the lyrics, when they come, will drown out that single voice, even as they lift it up. He’s honest when he says in a quiet tone, “That’s really beautiful.”

Zach gives a self-deprecating little laugh, shakes his head. He bends over Ryan to poke at the laptop, pushes around the settings just to put them back again. “I just, it’s not a big deal. It’s not exactly right. I wish I could’ve recorded it outside or something. It should be on the street. But I don’t know where it came from, except that you woke me up and it was there. So um, I thought you should hear it.”

Ryan shrugs, smiling because he can sympathize with the creative high, the giddiness that comes with channeling something alien and brand new out of the ether. “Glad to be of service,” he says, only a little ironic.

When Zach looks back over his shoulder, their faces are very close.

And maybe it’s because he knows a flirtation when he sees one, or maybe it’s because he’s been waiting for so long for Brendon to tell him it’s over, or because he can’t feel anything but emptiness underneath his scrabbling feet, but Ryan kisses him.

He pushes his mouth against Zach’s and feels the surprised part of lips and a hint of tongue and overall it’s a longer kiss than it should be, really, for a first one.

But it’s obvious that he’s shocked them both. Zach’s body jerks as he breaks away, and he straightens up and steps back, looking a little wild-eyed. Ryan kind of pushes away in the chair, feeling his breach of manners keenly.

But he also felt Zach’s response: the push back, the open mouth.

Neither of them says anything, and Zach looks away quickly. He picks up his coffee.

Eventually, Ryan looks away, too. He wonders if now, on top of everything else, he’s fucked up things with Zach, too. It wouldn’t be a huge surprise. It would make sense given how spectacularly he’s been doing with everything else.

“Let’s go outside,” Zach says, quiet again, after a while.

They go back out, through a kitchen and a screen door onto a little balcony that looks over the street, and Zach offers Ryan one of the natty plastic chairs. “My brother and his girlfriend are asleep,” he says, conversationally. His tone is strong and normal, like nothing happened in the studio. “We saw the Rapture down at the Ship last night. They didn’t get on until like, 2:00 a.m.”

“Sounds like a shitty organizer,” Ryan says, trying to match his casual tone.

“Yeah, it’s always like that there, but they still get good acts.” Zach sips at his coffee, pondering the mysteries of the universe. “So you want to talk about your band now?”

Ryan doesn’t, really. Because talking about his band is kind of like talking about his boyfriend, and how he’s going to get dumped and abandoned because he’s such a bitch - now, a cheating bitch - and his boyfriend’s the most talented prick in three states, present company excluded. But that’s why he came here, so. He takes a breath.

“I don’t know,” says Ryan. “We’re ready to focus, I guess. I mean, I hope we are.”

Zach doesn’t look that impressed. Ryan tries to clarify: “We did some really good stuff last summer, and we’ve been writing songs like crazy, we just - need to get back out there.” He pauses, and then admits, “I got lazy about the business side of things. It’s my fault.”

Zach’s eyebrows twist a little mockingly, he grins. “And you want my advice? I’m not like, an oracle. Do you want me to tell you to buck up, it’s gonna be okay? Just work harder?”

Ryan’s mouth twists. “No. I mean, no. I know that.”

“Because you guys are doing okay. Not everyone gets onto the set list at the Drum’s open mic.”

“We only got on it because of you, though,” Ryan says.

“Yeah, but you deserved it.” Zach says, like that means anything to anyone.

“That’s not how things work, though,” Ryan argues. When the scene is full of the most talented bands in the country, it’s not how you play, it’s who you’re banging. Ryan looks at Zach and wonders if he’d let Ryan kiss him again, knowing that Ryan had a little economy worked out in his head. Handholding is artistic approval, blowjobs are currency for collaboration, a kiss is as good as a promise.

Zach says, “I’m serious: you guys are good enough that eventually it’s not going to matter who you know.”

Ryan shakes his head, “That doesn’t help me right now. Open mic nights aren’t enough to keep us going. I want more, I know that Brendon-” he cuts out, he takes a breath, “I know that my band deserves more, and I know that there’s only one way to get where we want to be.”

Zach looks amused and also slightly mystified, “What’s that?”

Ryan shrugs, “Politics, or whatever. You know, you’ve lived through it.”

Zach shakes his head. “No.”

“No?”

“I mean, I know what you’re saying, but-” Zach dismisses the thought with a gesture. “Play well, and it’ll come to you. I don’t know you very well, but you seem pretty obsessed with chasing this vision down. You’re one-track, you’ve got blinders on.”

Ryan tries so hard to not sound insulted that he doesn’t respond at all.

Zach eyes his clamped mouth and says, “I’m just saying that you’re good. All you need to do is play and you’ll get what you want. Go on tour or something. Hook up with someone who’ll let you impress their fans.”

Ryan leaps on the opening: “What about you?”

“What about me?” Zach asks, like it’s a trick question.

“Are you guys touring soon?”

“We’re going in July.” Zach squints, and moves his chair back out of the creeping sunlight. “Out west and then flying back, so like, a dozen shows. Nothing too major because then we have to go back over to Europe again.”

“That’s really soon,” Ryan says, embarrassed that he sounds disappointed. No way will they be ready in time. Like, they could put together a half-hour, forty-five minute set easy enough, but getting an EP to sell, and getting everyone’s lives organized, and even just the money for a van to put their stuff in would be impossible. And who knows, maybe it’ll all fall apart no matter what he does, once Brendon breaks up with him.

There is always that to consider. Ryan knows that keeping the band moving forward is his last lifeline on that front. Ryan feels like he’s begging Zach for a rope, not knowing whether he’ll use it to climb to safety or tie a knot around his neck.

Zach doesn’t seem to realize that it’s all that desperate, though. “Ben at the label wants us to bring one of their bands to open. But they’re kind of, whatever.” Zach’s mouth expresses his opinion pretty clearly. “If you guys got it together in time, I could try to bump them.”

“Yeah right,” Ryan says, hoping.

Zach shrugs. “I said I could try. Hey, this is really good coffee.”

“It’s one of the in-house roasts from Oso Noir over on Atlantic,” Ryan says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He wants to rent a van right now. He wants to tell Spencer to stop hating him and dig up their recording gear. He wants to put his mouth all over Brendon’s body and beg him to stay.

“Huh,” Zach says, “Never heard of it.”

Ryan says, “I should get going.”

But at the door, he hesitates. Zach is holding it open for him, and when he stands up from tying his sneakers he wonders about another kiss. Another promise. Not because the first one was so amazing, but because. Well, at least then he’d have something. And where Brendon’s commitment, is rattling apart like an old engine, Zach seems attentive. He seems interested, in a way that Ryan can’t quite read.

Ryan looks at Zach’s mouth and thinks about kissing him, and what that promise would mean.

Zach smiles then, almost shy, and offers a hand. Like for shaking. “Let me know about the tour, okay? Soon.”

“I will,” says Ryan, and gives the most limp-wristed handshake of his life before turning to hurry down the stairs too fast, feeling suddenly, terrifyingly free.

.

Ryan is doing his very best to not go home when Brendon texts him three times in quick succession:

where are you?

I’m at work.

Come meet me.

The second one, when he reads it, makes Ryan flip up a hand in disgust in the middle of the dumb coffee shop, because it’s Sunday and what is Brendon doing at work today, and like hell he’s going to go back to that inglorious shithole to be mocked some more.

Ryan can imagine few things worse than getting dumped in front of Doc Hammer. That’s the stuff of nightmares, right there.

He texts back:

at oso noir. You come here.

Brendon totally surprises him by doing just that. He texts from the train half an hour later and Ryan drains his espresso and walks outside to meet him. He can already feel himself bracing for what he knows is coming: a meek confession, dawning betrayal, public breakdown. He’ll try to hold it together, but as soon as Brendon gets upset, he will, too. He’ll either get meaner and colder or he’ll just start crying and not be able to stop. His bets are on the latter, at this point. He’s hoping to be inside by then.

Brendon comes around the corner from the subway stop and they pause under a leafy tree. Brendon’s grinning. He’s grinning so hard it looks like he’s been beaming an incandescent ray of happiness out over everyone from Astrobase Go to here.

“Hi,” he says. “You are about to fall in love with me all over again.”

Ryan tries to stop him right there: “Okay, just wait.”

But Brendon can barely hold in his announcement. He is all glee, and bouncing on his feet and gripping Ryan’s forearms: “I have studio time. We can use their sound booth. Doc says he recorded his last album in there, and since they’re paying me shit the least they can do is let us use it for a new demo, or like, an EP or whatever. Am I not the most fantastic person you’ve ever met? Don’t you want to marry me and father a billion kittens on me?”

Ryan can’t help himself, “Really?” he says, “Jesus, that’s awesome. That’s like, ten kinds of incredible. I can’t believe-”

Brendon hums with delight and leans in to cut Ryan off with a kiss - with a makeout, really - he laughs as wraps his arms around Ryan’s neck and starts at the jaw line. But Ryan pulls back.

“Listen to me: I kissed Zach.”

Brendon blinks. He says, “What?”

“That guy, my contact, he works with Spencer. I mean. I just came from his place and we were listening to this song he wrote and I kissed him. And I spent the other night with him, too, watching old movies at work.”

Brendon makes kind of an animal sound, he looks lost, like Ryan is telling a joke in another language. “But-” he says. And then, “Why would you tell me that?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan lies. Because they’ve been fighting about dumb shit and important shit for months. Because they've been getting off like furtive teenagers instead of banging like consenting adults for even longer than that.

Because Ryan can’t stand himself, and can’t figure out why Brendon is bothering. And the suspense is killing him. It has been eating him for months, this mystery, this relationship that feels right and looks right but isn’t right, on some deep mechanical level, is in fact very very wrong.

“I think you need to explain this to me a little bit better,” Brendon says. “Are you telling me this because you’re breaking up with me?” He’s staring so hard at Ryan that it’s possible the rest of the planet has just fallen away and left them alone here with their tree and scrap of sidewalk.

But still, people are walking past, shopping, talking to their children and their cell phones.

“Do you want to go sit in the park?” Ryan asks.

Brendon nods.

They pick a bench and sit on it for hours. Ducks come and eye them, but people stay away, because they can see the language of something tearing apart, even if they aren’t close enough to hear the words.

It should tell Ryan something that Brendon is so blindsided, but Ryan already knows that this is inevitable, that this was going to happen anyway. The fact that he said it, not Brendon, is almost funny. Like someone fucked up the punchline.

They spend most of the time watching the ducks, silent, shoulder-to-shoulder.

Brendon says, very quietly, after a long time. “You know what? You can dump me, but you are not breaking up this fucking band, Ryan Ross. You’re still going to have to live with me in your band, in your life. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m really glad,” says Ryan. That’s the only thought that’s kept him going, so far. That maybe Brendon would stay in the band for a little while, ease the transition to clean split between Brendon’s success and Ryan’s lazy, selfish failure.

But only now is the conscious part of Ryan’s brain realizing how goddamn miserable that’s going to be. For some reason he thought that they could go back to last summer, before Ryan figured out how hard he’d fallen, before he started fucking things up because he was lazy and complacent and in love. That was what got in the way of the band. But fixing it isn’t like flipping an off switch. Neither of them will be able to pretend that nothing happened. Neither of them will be able to start fresh.

But still, Ryan says, “I never wanted the band to break up.”

Brendon stands up, stiff. “I’m going home,” he says. He’s looking at Ryan, waiting for him to say he’s coming.

But Ryan can’t. If he goes home with Brendon they’ll crawl into bed together and it’ll just get more and more impossible with every passing minute.

“I’ll come get my stuff when I find a new place,” Ryan says. He can live with a toothbrush and a new bag of underwear for a few days. He’ll find something.

Brendon leaves him there.

.

Ryan doesn’t skulk into the compound until well after dark. He tried to call Jon, but didn’t get an answer, and Zach isn’t an option - not if he wants to look professional, or even merely sane - so here he is, with a sunburn on his nose from spending the day homeless in the park, now standing two feet away from his own apartment.

This is his plan to get his act together. This is his plan to get shit done. He feels like a trainwreck and it’s so much harder than he thought it would be to turn away from his and Brendon’s door, knowing that Brendon is lying in their bed just a few feet beyond it.

He knocks on Spencer’s instead, very quietly.

Spencer looks angry, answering the door and finding Ryan there. He doesn’t move aside to let Ryan in, just says, “What did I tell you? What did I fucking tell you about Brendon, you jackass?”

Ryan shrugs, feeling helplessly wrong despite himself, despite his hundred thousand reasons for doing it. For precipitating it, for anticipating it and heading it off at the pass.

“He’s too good for me,” Ryan agrees with whatever Spencer’s thinking. Even if he wasn’t before, even if it was all unjustified terror and fear of failure, now Ryan’s done it. He’s proven it to the world: Brendon Urie is a saint and a genius, and Ryan is a bitchy little kid who can’t sing and can’t keep his hands to himself and can’t see a good thing even when he’s mourning the loss of it. It’s all there, written on his face for everyone to see.

Still, Spencer chokes a disbelieving laugh at the volume of self-pity contained in that one statement. And he doesn’t move from the door, “What do you want?”

Ryan’s voice gives when he tries to say it, and he has to start again: “I need somewhere to sleep tonight.”

Spencer stares at him, and Ryan can see pity and disbelief displacing the anger just a bit. Spencer has never said no to him, not once. Not for anything. Spencer’s voice is pained: “You didn’t plan this very well.”

Then the door hinges slightly wider, and Jon is standing there in the doorway, too.

This wouldn’t be weird, except Spencer is in boxers and a t-shirt, and Jon is wearing pajama bottoms and nothing else. “You can’t stay here, Ryan.” Jon says, and Spencer looks just as startled as Ryan. Still, Jon tosses a bundle of keys at Ryan’s chest. “Go sleep at my place tonight.”

Maybe more out of surprise than anything, Ryan does.
.

VOL. VI: Monday