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Brendon didn’t like to think of himself as melodramatic, and as such, he determined that anything he did could not be considered melodramatic unless he thought it to be so. Which, sitting alone in a darkened dorm room on Friday night, twirling the head of the flashlight around so it blinked on and off—well, that wasn’t melodramatic, it was just…boredom.
Right. Brendon was sticking with boredom.
The light clicked on again, and Brendon thought, this is not what I expected college to be like.
It clicked off, and he thought, am I really that surprised?
He twisted it on again, metal warm in his hands as he let his fingers dance over the streams of light. No, he decided. He wasn’t really surprised at all.
Spencer had shrugged, had told him it’ll be fun, I’ll bet there’s a party every weekend.
Spencer, as it was, remained back in Vegas. He called once a week, talking about old high school people, and what mess his sisters had gotten themselves into lately, and how amazing his new friends at the local college were. Brendon didn’t care, and he felt like a jerk for it.
Twist. Light. Twist. Dark.
Brendon sighed. No, he wasn’t being melodramatic at all.
He twitched a little in his seat at the edge of the bed, let himself fall backwards onto the mattress, blankets tangled up like a tumbleweed because Brendon hadn’t made his bed since he got here. It had been freeing, in the beginning—the sudden realization that he could do whatever he wanted, be whomever he chose, no longer stunted by the totalitarian rule of his parents and their religion.
Now, it just felt like another trap. Jail 2.0, except his parents weren’t the ones keeping him far away from the things he wanted anymore, it was only him. Six months, and every single person he’d smiled at had given an awkward smile back, and sat in a different seat the next lecture.
Twist. On. Twist. Off. Twist.
Maybe Brendon wasn’t trying hard enough.
But no, that wasn’t it. Brendon tried. He just wasn’t trying the right way. The right way, apparently, was to go galavanting off into the night, find a party to get wasted at, fall asleep on a stranger’s floor, and make friends with the girl that threw up all over you in the morning.
At least, that was how Ryan was doing it, so far as Brendon could tell. He’d come back to the room at dawn six times now, each time claiming he had no idea what had happened after midnight the night before, each time insisting Brendon should’ve gone with, and half the time covered in puke, but still sporting the messy scrawl of blue on his arm where some girl wrote her phone number in a drunken haze.
Brendon was waiting for Ryan to start bringing the girls back with him, because no matter how many dates he apparently went on, Brendon never once saw the end result. Maybe that was what college was supposed to be. A series of impersonal encounters, never to be repeated.
Brendon was still having a hard time overcoming the I’m-allowed-to-drink-now phase, he hardly had time to work through abandoning his hopes at human connection altogether.
Brendon shifted around fitfully on the bed, contorting himself until his head lolled off the edge, and he twisted on the flashlight to admire the room from a new perspective. The furniture was hanging from the ceiling, the new floor sparse and covered in posters of bands, most of them Ryan’s, but a few from Brendon, the rare posters he’d been able to sneak into the house without his parents seeing.
Brendon ignored the pounding in his head and kept still, wondering if anyone ever died from hanging upside down too long. Maybe their heads just filled with so much blood that they popped. All the medical shows Brendon had ever seen told him no such thing would happen, but it was still amusing to think about someone hanging upside down until one day, pop.
Like a fucking balloon.
Jesus, he was morbid. When did Brendon get to be so damn dark? He clicked the light off again, immersing himself in the comfortable darkness of the dorm room. It was probably Ryan’s influence. For the past month, Ryan had kept bringing strange people around, always talking in excited yet hushed tones about philosophy or music. One of the kids, Gerard or something, the one with the dark shock of hair that hadn’t been washed in years, he was always leaving sketches of zombies and werewolves and skeletons around.
Yeah, definitely Ryan and his friends’ doing, then. If Brendon’s parents could see him now…
Maybe things would be easier for him if he just went back home. Promised his mother he’d go on a mission, promised his father he’d stop trying to get anywhere with his music. Promised empty promises for the sake of sanity, because Brendon was fairly sure he was going to lose his mind if the rest of the year went on like this.
Brendon was a people person. He needed people around him to function, and classes and rooming with Ryan had been enough for awhile, but they were wearing thin. Brendon hadn’t said more than three words in days, and he was fairly sure his voice was going to fall into disrepair pretty soon.
Maybe that’s what he wanted, subconsciously. Ryan was taking a psychology course, he always came home ranting about the mind and how the subconscious propels us to make different decisions in our daily lives. Brendon was fairly sure it was all bullshit, but he was also spending his Friday night locked in his dorm room with the lights off, clicking a flashlight on and off and hoping the blood rushing to his head would cause him to start hallucinating.
He definitely qualified as a crazy person, so assuming his subconscious was blocking his social life from blooming—or from happening at all, really—in the hopes that it would lead to his eventual demise: not that farfetched.
Brendon sighed again, and counted that as his fourth one this night. He was definitely pushing the boundaries for melodramatic here, so he twisted the flashlight into life again and kept twisting until it sharpened into a single point. He drew patterns on the ceiling, trying for actual objects but then promptly remembering he wasn’t an artist and switching to a simple figure eight.
He’d counted a total of ninety-three figure eights until his mind simple sputtered out and died, losing track of his number as the light swirled on the ceiling by no cognitive act of his own.
It probably didn’t help his case any, this particular bout of crazy. He couldn’t be expected for form any sort of social life when this was how he chose to pass his time. They might as well throw him in a padded room, for all he was doing with his life right now. He’d probably amuse himself for hours, bouncing off the walls in the most literal sense until he figured out a way to knock himself unconscious.
Brendon shook his head violently to wake it up from the blood flow haze, then rolled over before his head really did pop from staying upside down too long. The room took at least a minute to right itself, and by that time the flashlight had rolled off the bed and across the floor, laying just out of his reach.
Brendon spent a good three minutes debating whether it was worth his time to get up and grab it. On the one hand, it was his only source of entertainment and it was currently wasting away both its batteries and its fascination factor. On the other hand, it’s not like grabbing it would improve his quality of life any. At the rate he was going, he’d probably regress to using bits of string for amusement.
Brendon counted to three and then crawled off the bed, letting his knees slam into the carpet before he simply let himself fall where he was, catching his fingers around the end of the flashlight and bringing it over his head as he rolled to lay on his back.
This is pathetic, Brendon thought, moments before his eyes settled on his hand, glowing orange as he gripped the end of the flashlight. He almost felt like smiling, but he didn’t because it took to much energy. Brendon had stopped smiling weeks ago because it didn’t even feel like him anymore. He was becoming a husk of his former self, and so far he almost didn’t mind.
He pressed the light against his closed fingers, lighting them up in fluorescent orange, and Brendon wondered how come he couldn’t see the silhouette of his bones.
Maybe he didn’t have bones, and he was an alien robot experiment sent down to Earth to sabotage the government, but until they needed him he was to bide his time at some local college and waste himself away into depression until he would be too lethargic to even bother doing what the aliens wanted him to, when they finally activated him and all the other sleeper agents.
They were damn stupid aliens, then, and Brendon blamed them.
He needed someone to blame for his loneliness, anyway, and he was done blaming himself for things. He’d done enough of that with his parents.
His fault he got mediocre grades in high school. His fault the people at church were whispering about their family, because where was Brendon lately? His fault that Brendon’s mother had started crying, because he used his mission money to pay to go to this school. His fault that his father’s business no longer had a future, because he wanted to go off to college to study music.
His fault that he was gay, and in love with his roommate.
Nope. Definitely the aliens’ fault, this time.
Brendon tried to follow the dark, shadowed lines he assumed were veins through the palm of his hand, down fingertips until they twisted away and Brendon couldn’t see them anymore.
He was dragging the flashlight down his forearm, trying to determine why his arm suddenly became opaque just after the wrist ended. Maybe he could take an anatomy class next semester.
That was, if he even made it to the next semester. At this point, jumping off a bridge seemed almost as likely, and Brendon didn’t like to think about himself as that kind of person, because suicide always seemed like such a selfish and sad thing, but he was also turning into a realist against his will, because if he had to spend one more day shining lights through the skin of his arm for lack of something better to do, he’d—
“Bren?” A familiar voice called out, just as the door cracked open and slits of violent light burst in from the hallway. Brendon rushed to cover his eyes with his arm, but Ryan inched in and snapped the door shut moments later. He had the common sense not to turn on the light, and Brendon was almost positive that Ryan had seen him, but apparently not because two seconds later, Ryan was kicking a foot into Brendon’s side and flailing to the floor with too-long limbs.
“Fuck!” Brendon shouted, clutching his side and wincing as the flashlight rolled away and Ryan finally stopped moving, pressed against Brendon’s middle and disoriented, maybe a little drunk.
Ryan scrambled off him just as Brendon remembered what breathing was and how to do it, and then Ryan was yelling “What the fuck, Bren?” and he was way too close.
Brendon winced again, shifting so he was up on his elbows, and the flashlight was still on somewhere, rolled under one of the dressers, casting a faint glow on Ryan’s face all scrunched up in pain, or anger, or confusion.
“Ow,” Brendon said, because there really wasn’t much else to say.
“What were you doing asleep in the middle of the damn floor?” Ryan questioned, but at least he wasn’t shouting anymore. Brendon really didn’t think he could take the shouting right now.
“I wasn’t asleep,” Brendon sidetracked, hesitant to admit that he’d been playing Cast Away for the better part of five hours.
“Then what were you doing?” Ryan shot back, and oh. Brendon’s little plan to completely skirt around the fact that he was loser backfired all over his face.
“I was…thinking?” Brendon tried, trying to keep his eyes from tracing the line of Ryan’s neck in the dim lighting, just the underside of his jaw lit when he shifted his head to the left, and it made such a pretty—
“Thinking?” Ryan deadpanned, and even without proper lighting, Brendon knew that was an accompanying eyebrow quirk, one of the ones that was barely even there, but so distinctly Ryan that it was hard to miss. After all, Brendon had spent the last six months studying it, along with all of Ryan’s little quirks and giveaways, because what else was there to do with his time but study his roommate all the time, so desperate for a connection that he accidentally fell in love with the guy.
“Yes,” Brendon answered, and threw in a confident nod and a fake, flashy smile. Even if Ryan couldn’t see them, it still hurt more than he expected.
“About?” Ryan pressed, and Brendon spared a moment to wonder if Ryan actually breathed, or if he was always this deathly still.
“Um.” Well, shit, he didn’t actual have shit to think about, here. At least, not anything he was willing to tell Ryan. Go for confusion, Brendon’s mind told him, so he asked quickly “How come you can’t see your bones when you shine a light through your hands?”
It was dark, but Brendon was fairly sure Ryan blinked at least five times. “What?”
“When you—” Brendon stopped and redirected, because now that he’d succeeded in derailing Ryan’s questioning, he needed to keep him distracted until he completely forgot about what Brendon had been doing with his Friday night. He searched for the flashlight, stretching his arm under one of the dressers before pulling it out and shuddering a little as he swept the cobwebs from his arm, tickling and light.
“Look,” he commanded, and pressed the flashlight into the palm of his hand, sliding it down and towards his closed fingers until they lit up entirely in orange. “How come you can’t see the bones?” He asked, and was suddenly rather hopeful that Ryan actually knew the answer, because he really did want to know.
Ryan stayed quiet for a long time, and Brendon assumed it was because he was contemplating the question and using his vast amounts of knowledge to figure out the best way to explain it to Brendon, but—
“Bren, what have you been doing all night?”
Well, shit. Plan A failed. Moving on to Plan B, which was definitely going to work despite the fact that it didn’t exist. Yet.
“Um, just, hanging out, you know,” he mumbled, shifting his eyes away for as long as possible until they inevitably gravitated back to Ryan’s face. He thought he saw something like pity in his eyes, but it was hard to tell because this way Ryan, King of the Stoic, and it’s not like it wasn’t expected, so it shouldn’t really make his chest close up like that, and—
“Whoa,” Ryan exclaimed, just as Brendon twisted the light off and sent them sprawling into darkness again, because he’d been nervous and twitchy and fiddling with his hands. “Bren, turn it back—Yeah,” Ryan said as Brendon fumbled the flashlight back on.
“Sorry,” he replied meekly, pointing the flashlight away from his face to hide the slight blush. Brendon thought they should probably get up now, because they were still both sitting in the middle of the floor, and Ryan probably wanted to go to bed because it was probably really late, and— “Hey, what time is it?” He asked, because he hadn’t looked at a clock since he’d turned down Ryan’s offer to go with him to some party.
It was completely Brendon’s own, private business if half the reason he didn’t have a social life was because he didn’t want to go out with Ryan and watch him make out with girls all night.
Ryan replied “Eleven thirty, why?”
Brendon blinked a couple of times to clear his head, then pointed out “You’re home early.”
“Yes…”
“Why?” Brendon probably didn’t want to know the answer to that. “Party sucked?” Not enough pretty girls there? “Beer sucked?” Too drunk to remember why you wanted to party in the first place? “People sucked?”
Who was Brendon kidding, the people at parties never sucked, at least not in comparison. He really needed to stop trying to live vicariously through Ryan, it was getting ridiculous.
Ryan shrugged, though, and he had Brendon’s rapt attention back. “Didn’t really feel like partying.”
“Hum,” Brendon said involuntarily, because that was strange for Ryan, who’d gone out every Friday and Saturday night since they’d gotten here in September.
Ryan, apparently, took that as an insult, and snorted sarcastically, “What, am I impeding on your weekly Friday night moping?” Ryan snapped his mouth shut immediately after he said it, but it didn’t particularly matter to Brendon.
He lasted all of about five seconds of a stony-faced glare before he felt himself begin to give out into wobbling lips and blurring eyes, so he twisted off the flashlight and bounced to his feet, stating “I’m going to bed.”
“Bren, wait, no. I didn’t mean—” Ryan’s waving arm brushed past his wrist, and moments later his hand clasped around Brendon’s wrist in the dark, holding him firmly in place. Brendon tried to ignore the fluttering little dance his heart had taken to doing in his chest.
“Whatever,” Brendon drawled, trying to yank his arm free but only forcing Ryan’s inexplicably long fingers to tighten around his wrist. According to the flashlight, he didn’t actually have any bones in his wrist, so then everything about Ryan’s touch shouldn’t feel so damn hard.
“How come you never come out with me?” Ryan asked quietly, and Brendon really wished he’d kept the light on now, because he thought he heard something akin to anxiousness or fear in Ryan’s voice, but he could never quite be sure. Besides, that just didn’t fit. Ryan didn’t get that way. He didn’t care. He went to his parties, he banged his chicks, he lived his life, and he invited Brendon out of courtesy, or pity, or obligation.
“Because,” Brendon answered shortly, “it’s not my thing.” It didn’t feel like a lie, and Brendon was starting to think that maybe it wasn’t. So far as he knew, music was his thing, and he didn’t want to spend all weekend wrecking his voice when he’d given up so much just to get here and do this.
Brendon was expecting a barking laugh, or some more of Ryan’s famous, scathing wit, but instead all he got was a mind-boggling “Okay.” Ryan was acting completely out of character tonight, and it was starting to weird Brendon out.
Hoping to canvas his actual thoughts on the matter at hand, he reverted back to humor, forcing on a false grin Ryan couldn’t even see while he pressed his free hand against Ryan’s forehead, once he found it in the dark, and asked “You got a fever or something, Ross? You’re acting awfully strange.”
Brendon counted up to six Mississippi before Ryan responded. “Want to watch a movie?” He asked quickly, then tensed up like he was expecting Brendon to hit him or something.
Brendon was still reeling from the non sequitur, he hardly had time to go about hitting his roommate for asking to watch a movie. And he was past thinking Ryan was being sarcastic, because obviously tonight was not one of those nights, with the way Ryan had been acting.
“Sure,” Brendon replied jovially, breathing out something that felt like relief. “Aladdin?” He prodded jokingly, because Ryan was more than aware of Brendon’s love for belting out Jasmine’s part in ‘A Whole New World’, and he would never stand for it, not since the first time when Ryan’s friend Jon had walked in and immediately joined in with Aladdin’s part, sending Ryan into a flustered fit of embarrassment.
“Okay,” Ryan agreed easily, then let go of Brendon’s wrist to stumble through the darkness to the shelf that housed both of their DVD collections. He said something else, but Brendon was way too distracted trying to figure out what had happened to the real Ryan, and why anyone would want to replace him with a less sarcastic, Disney-loving model.
“Brendon? Flashlight?” Ryan huffed a little louder, and Brendon dropped it twice before he finally managed to twist the light back into existence, and Ryan immediately started rifling through Brendon’s DVDs for Aladdin.
Brendon was still massively confused five minutes later, when the creepy guy with the huge turban was talking to you like he knew things from the other side of the television screen, and Ryan was perching himself lightly next to Brendon on the edge of the bed, face tilted towards the movie like it was the most fascinating thing he’d even seen.
Brendon didn’t even try to hide the fact that he was staring at Ryan, blankly and feeling rather like a goldfish, in over his head and completely forgetting everything that had ever happened before seven seconds ago.
Ryan shifted his gaze after a few minutes, catching Brendon’s gaze and asking pointedly “What?”
Brendon’s brain was currently whizzing around like a bumblebee with half a wing, so his default reaction kicked in and he shook his head, replied hazily “Nothing,” and turned back to the movie. Not that he was paying attention at all.
Ryan shifted back, getting himself more comfortable, and there were a thousand questions reeling through Brendon’s head, like Why are you here? What are you doing? Why are you being so nice to me? What do you want? What the hell is even going on?
None of them were being answered.
Brendon’s mind, somewhere right when Aladdin first started running through the streets, decided that tonight was a complete anomaly, and it was best to just ignore it and take everything with a grain of salt. Obviously Ryan had smoked some sort of fucked-up pot at that party, and his strange behavior would be completely abandoned by morning, and Brendon should relish this time because it was so rare that he had company on a Friday night.
He should definitely, definitely not be thinking about how close Ryan’s thigh was to his, and how he could feel the warmth from it, and how his skeletal fingers were splayed out behind him, and all Brendon would have to do is inch his hand back.
No. Absolutely none of that, even though Ryan still smelled faintly of alcohol and that fruity shampoo he swore wasn’t his, but that Brendon still popped the cap off of every time Ryan left it out just to get a whiff and try to figure out for the hundredth time what kind of fruit it was.
Maybe pomegranate.
But, no, definitely not doing anything like that right now.
Out of nowhere, Ryan asked “Is the reason you never come with me to parties because you don’t like me?”
Brendon asks “What?” because none of that even makes any sense. Ryan’s halfway through repeating the question, slower, when Brendon sputters out “No, no, I swear! I’m not, like, harboring secret roommate hatred or anything, I just—” Brendon searched for anything but the reality, the fact that he was still trying to get used to this and didn’t think he could handle alcohol and shirtless men and flirty women he had to pretend to be interested in all at once. “It’s just not my thing,” he replies lamely, blushing sheepishly and trying to remember why Aladdin was so much better than inappropriate thoughts about his presumably straight roommate sitting inches away, on his bed.
“Oh,” Ryan responded, and then his attention forcibly shifted back to the movie for awhile and Brendon’s breathing almost evened out.
Then, “If I try something, will you promise not to freak out?”
“I, uh—What?” And it was back to the fucking cancan in his chest, kicks and all.
“Just—” Brendon had never seen Ryan so nervous or fiddly, twisting his fingers around in his jeans, shifting his eyes every few seconds, cheeks pinking even in the flickering light from the television. Then it looked as if something had snapped straight in Ryan, and his entire posture and demeanor shifted, and suddenly he was saying “Hell, screw it,” and a strong hand clutched around the back of Brendon’s neck, tugging him forward, and the next thing Brendon knew, Ryan’s lips were mashed against his and his head was screaming Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmyfuckinggod and Finally and What? all at once.
Right as Ryan’s tongue had darted out across Brendon’s lower lip, Brendon pulled back in haste, a little more violently than he’d intended, and he stifled a whimper at the loss of contact and the way Ryan shirked away.
“What?” He squeaked, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, waiting for Ryan to recover and right the world again, put the furniture back on the ground where it belonged before his head exploded. “What?”
In a moment, all of Ryan’s snark and attitude was back, and he was relaxing his posture and rolling his eyes, snapping waspishly “Please, like you didn’t know.”
“What?” Brendon asked, because what the hell was he supposed to know, about this?
A small smirk tickled the corner of Ryan’s mouth, but he stopped it and said “All those damn parties, all that free beer, and I still couldn’t get you to make a move. I got sick of waiting for you to make up your mind. Thus, I’m here. Now. Watching Aladdin and asking you if you get the hint, you moron.” Ryan cut a glance over to him, expectant and somehow loud. Someone was singing on the screen, and Brendon’s mind was supplementing in the lyrics instead of actually having to think, because he was fairly sure all the important stuff had simply grown legs and walked away.
“I—What, Ryan, this—?”
Ryan cut him off again with a quick shake of his head and a small smile, then “Let’s just—Yeah,” Ryan decided, and apparently what he decided was to hell with words because before Brendon’s mind could even pull itself back out of the Disney lyrics loop, Ryan’s mouth was hot and wet against his again, and he was pushing Brendon back onto the bed, mumbling incoherent sounds against Brendon’s skin as his fingers stroked down the sides of Brendon’s face and shoulders, desperate and wanting.
Suddenly, words started making a lot less sense, and Brendon’s mouth was opening under Ryan’s, and his hands were moving to Ryan’s lower back, and Aladdin hadn’t even reached ‘A Whole New World’ yet but Brendon could swear he heard it playing somewhere.
Right before his mind clicked off, he spared a moment for Oh and This is not what I expected college to be like and This is so, so much better.
Ryan’s mouth was moving down to his neck, and Brendon stretched backward to give him better access, and his head tilted off the corner of the bed and hit thin air. Brendon’s eyes darted open when Ryan bit down and moaned against Brendon’s skin, and the furniture was on the ceiling again but it really, really didn’t matter anymore.
He kind of liked the new perspective.