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ryan reaches for his tongue with clumsy, slightly clammy fingers- he can see brendon wince, across from him, and it doesn't make him feel any better. (but the tab doesn't taste that bad, actually. burns for a second, but he's had cbd that did that, a little dropper that he pressed under his tongue-)
spencer says, 'your jaw's gonna hurt,' and he cracks open a water bottle, 'you clench it, when you come down.'
jon's nodding sagely to ryan's right, all the calm steadiness of him, and brendon starts to talk, in a very brendon-like way, wandering and- slightly anxious, ryan can hear it, it army-crawls on the bottom of his words, a sharp lavender note- and spencer, to his left, is holding the bottle out and murmuring something about staying hydrated.
the sun is coming in through the trees, all dappled and golden, catching on brendon's eyes, the loose strands of his hair. he needs a haircut. they all do, really.
ryan starts to pick at the grass and listens to brendon talk with half an ear, his voice basket-weaving around a guitar riff he wants to try because he can imagine it, and it would sound so good- he tosses up a word game, experimenting, and spencer catches it on the way down, and they go back and forth. ryan listens and he takes apart a clover leaf by leaf, tugging at it, and he's starting to think maybe the tab's a dud when he realizes brendon's voice has gone all far-away and lost, and he's fumbling where he's usually velvet-soft and sure-
and spencer grins, wolfish, and says, 'comin' up.' jon's elbow digs into ryan's side, excitement coming off him in thrumming waves that cushion the sparks dancing on brendon's skin. (ryan leans into it. he watches brendon's eyes get blown-out and smiley and jon presses a kiss to the space right under his ear.)
the word game comes back, some version of a roadtrip thing that's gotten twisted and warped by theater troupes and improv classes and ryan doesn't remember their current set of house rules, so he lies down on his back and lets them go on without him. he gets his fingers deep in the grass, in the fresh dampness of it, and he watches the clouds swirl around each other. they're kissing, he realizes distantly, the clouds above and also spencer and brendon and jon. above him, too, but different. above but beside. not as distant as the clouds. touchable- tangible, ryan knows the word is, and he must say it out loud because there's a wet noise and then spencer is looking down and he asks, 'you okay?'
ryan mumbles something that he means as a yes. spencer smiles.
'don't want you to have a bad trip.' his hand is on ryan's hip, skin to skin because his shirt rode up at some point, his shirt is gone from his stomach so he can feel the warm sun and the warm grass and the warm pressure of spencer's palm.
'what do you see?' he asks, and ryan looks away from him, because he has the sense that spencer'll fade away if he stares too long, and he focuses on that steady feeling of spencer's hand and tries to explain it.
tries is key, because his sentences start to not make sense to even his own ears, bits of nonsensical poetry that just sort of- come out, when he's trying to explain to spencer how the clouds are sort of pink and blue at the edges, and how they run together like mixing paint, except at some point he's stopped talking about the clouds and instead he's talking about how they make his chest ache with a lovesick nostalgia, and then he's looking up into bemused eyes, fond, smiling eyes. spencer leans down until their noses are touching and he says, 'close your eyes,' and ryan does. he can hear better like that, hear the rustling sounds of jon and brendon, their low voices, vaguely musical- and spencer kisses him and ryan remembers how to kiss back, eventually.
jon says he's going for a walk and ryan, surprisingly, gets up to join him. he hadn't meant to, hadn't wanted to move from his spot, but then jon was getting up on wobbly legs and ryan was following him. their hands are brushing, while they walk, and jon starts to talk, his voice low and mellow and steadying- ryan wants to be steadied, because he thinks his mind will float away without him. if he's quiet and still and untouched for too long he'll just sink into the ground like water and cease to be, become the soil and grow into the grass except he won't be ryan anymore, like walt whitman said; he tries to quote it, to jon, grabbing at his hand and his sleeve and trying to remember the words. 'i bequeath,' he begins, and then he giggles and he tries it again, just to flip it over in his mouth, the sharpness and the softness of it, of q and then e and then the cushioning th , 'i bequeath myself now to the dirt to grow from the grass i love,' except that he doesn't know what comes next so it hangs in the air like a soap bubble, perfect and preserved and fleeting.
'if you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,' jon finishes softly, and ryan is so delighted that he kisses him on the cheek at least twice.
'spence said acid makes you talk more.'
'really?' the trees are swaying gently, with the breeze.
'yeah. i asked if it was like shrooms, 'cause shrooms make me quiet, and he said- he said you want to talk.'
'i mean,' ryan says, nudging his shoulder, 'we're talking.'
'you're right,' jon says, and he looks over and his eyes are dazzling, big and sparkling and happy.
'i don't talk, though. if you didn't talk to me i think i'd be quiet.'
'huh,' jon says. it sounds kind of gray-blue. a dove coos somewhere. 'yeah. me too.'
he turns them around, at some point, like a ballroom dancer slowly rotating them together, their hands and their arms and their eyes all close together and in love. 'don't wanna wander too far,' he says, hand cupped on ryan's elbow. it feels intimate, in that secret way that things do. it feels like it matters. ryan shuts his eyes to kiss him and sees colors he doesn't know the name of.
brendon heralds their return, crowing like an angel blowing the trumpets at rapture, his eyes warm and wild. he's mumbling some mountain goats song, the notes pretty and the words blurring together, and spencer's head is in his lap.
'i think our brains work different,' he tells ryan, his gaze darting around in a way that's somehow lightning-fast and yet devoid of any anxiety. ryan feels sort of meditative, in contrast- 'yeah, you're probably right.' he leans forward to brush a strand of hair out of brendon's face and his eyes focus all-at-once on ryan, all the big brown intensity of them. he looks kinda twitchy.
(ryan's heard that these things can turn on a dime, a good trip to a bad one, on more intense shit like this; bren can come back from a weed-fueled existential crisis like a champ, but he's never done acid before-) he mimics what spencer did for him, keeps his hand on brendon's slightly damp cheek and asks, 'what do you see?' spence and jon are around, the vague sense of them, a hand rubbing at ryan's spine and a weight in brendon's lap, but for a second it's the two of them.
brendon's brain does work different, ryan realizes, because while ryan is just trying to keep inhabiting his body without drifting off somewhere, brendon is most definitely here, concrete as anything, and he's trying to tell ryan how everything connects, everything's locked into place like when you find the right arrangement for a set of lyrics and it just sings, like a goddamn turtledove, and then he breaks off to laugh, sort of breathless. ryan nods. (ryan doesn't get it, quite, but he's used to that. it's comfortable. familiar. jon's knuckles dig into his back in a way that's not unpleasant.)
he finds himself on jon's lap, all bony and probably poking him in the worst spots, while spence and brendon talk music and jon mouths absentmindedly at the nape of his neck. he dips his hand into the grass and spencer ends up under his fingers, somehow, his hair soft and fine, and he begins a meandering story about a roommate he used to have, a dallon-something who had such a good straight face when he was high. he used to draw, when he tripped, geometric shit. perfect patterns. spence's story fades, slowly, as he runs out of details, and so he leans into ryan's hand like a cat and starts to describe the coral reef in the grass, the shimmering fish among the clover and wildflowers. jon's arms are warm and solid around ryan's waist. his gaze slips over to brendon, whose palm is splayed out on spencer's back, and he watches as he blows a dandelion fluff into the wind. (he smiles, wide and excited, as it floats away.) jon presses a kiss to ryan's neck and the sensation is- it's not far away, exactly, not distant, but it feels separate. like ryan and his body are tethered, but loosely, like an astronaut to a space station, floating and liable to just forget each other, in the great scheme of things. ryan is both in his body and not.
spence looks up at him and asks, 'you alright?' and he wants to say yes because now he is, now that someone's spoken to him, but that's not what spencer's asking, is it, and there's a weird feeling in the back of his throat. (is he crying? he doesn't feel bad. he feels fine, just-)
(he's feeling that not-ryan thing again, like he only really exists at his joints, like he's all out of himself, and that scares him, a little-)
jon's arms tighten the smallest bit, around his waist, and his voice is right up against ryan's ear when he says, 'you're okay.' ryan's jaw is tight.
spencer sits up and brendon makes some sort of noise and moves to rest his chin on spence's shoulder, twin expressions of concern.
kissing helps, ryan learns, mouth full of brendon's mouth and the feeling that spencer and jon are- doing something, together, kissing and touching and brendon laughs so much, high and not-high but especially high, he laughs into ryan's mouth and his eyes close with all of their long eyelashes and they lean and roll and hold onto each other until they're lying down, together, their faces in the grass. brendon glows. ryan touches his lips, his cheeks, runs a thumb over his eyebrow. his skin is glittering, kind of, shiny and sparkly in a way that's like twilight, but subtle, pretty, and bren, you'd make a cute vampire. ryan makes an attempt to kiss him. 'you'd look nice with fangs,' he continues and brendon laughs, and he looks like he'd throw his head back if he could; he rolls over onto his back, instead, and laughs until he coughs. (it's a good feeling again, ryan notices. he feels solid. he feels good. )
they do something that's close to sitting up but doesn't make ryan's head spin and brendon wolf-whistles while jon and spencer kiss; jon pulls back, embarrassed, but spence just laughs and moves to his neck. brendon strokes at the line of ryan's jugular. he's singing again. (ryan could bottle his voice. it makes him feel wine-drunk and slippery-soft and want to kiss, hot and blistering.)
the sun starts to set and brendon makes everyone stop kissing and talking so they can all look and to ryan's right jon stretches and whispers, 'oh, fuck, ryan, try that, it feels like my bones are finally right,' and ryan feels insulated, jon on one side and spencer on the other. (he does stretch, and it feels- like everything's sparking in his arms and his back and then his muscles are warm and he unravels like a slinky to rest his head on jon's shoulder.) the colors of the sunset bleed into each other and drip down the mountains, pink and orange and molten, like ryan could reach out and dip his fingers in and lick it off. (brendon always says he wants to drink lava and now ryan kinda gets it; watching the sky drip down like that makes him wanna- touch it, or drink it, or something, and he realizes he's fidgeting a little, digging his elbows into jon and spence-
(spence pokes him in the side for it, snickers when he jumps, and he's glad for it, glad to feel firmly inside himself, like he lives in his skin and his bones.))
'i think,' brendon says, some time later, time that could've been an hour or two or five- 'i think i'm coming down.'
ryan's looking at the stars and he's wandering, vaguely conscious of the hand in his hair (he isn't sure whose it is) and the breeze on his face and the openness of everyone, the bright and earnest sound of them, and ryan is part of the them, in the love and in the grass and reaching out to make ripples in the sky (everything is so liquid, the sky and the grass and maybe ryan's brain just likes the ocean, maybe ryan's brain just swims all day long while his body is doing person things)
(spencer wasn't kidding about the jaw thing, huh. (ryan reaches up to rub at it and he might curse or he might just make some noise-)) and the stars are blinking, like ambulance lights, winking in and out of existence.
'do you wanna-' jon's voice breaks off into a yawn. 'do you wanna try and sleep?' he asks, and the hand in ryan's hair pauses, ruffles like he's petting a dog.
'sure.' he's not- not tired, but not really tired, either; he relays this to spencer, who nods and kisses his forehead and says, 'we can talk, if you want. until you come down.' (and ryan's left in the awkward position of being the only one who isn't down yet, the only one whose brain is still fuzzy-scattered-awake, and he recites poetry to the night air (and spence, if he's listening), siken and auden and millay.) he runs out of memory somewhere between wishbone and the fawn.
''m glad we're not trying to drive home,' brendon's voice rasps, from somewhere, and it's unexpected and funny and ryan laughs, breathless and somewhere to the side of startled.
( you're in a car with a beautiful boy )
( an orchard soft with rot )
( you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire- )
he's fizzling faintly like a fresh can of soda and he's wiggling up into someone's arms, tucking his head into a warm chest and trying to shut his eyes and maybe-succeeding and after an hour or a minute or a year of screwing himself up tight into a little ball of tension that radiates outwards from his jaw,
he finally (finally) comes down enough to get tired. the body beneath him shifts and sighs and he presses a kiss to the sternum. an owl hoots in the distance.
they're gonna miss the sunrise. ryan's kind of sad about it. there'll be more sunrises, he supposes. plenty more sunrises to watch sitting sandwiched between boys who love him. he situates himself solidly into the silhouette of the ryan he left behind and fits them together, the ryan of before and the ryan of now who is trying to slip back into where he belongs like a thief. sneaking into the shoes of ryan ross. (it's comfortable here, safe and warm.)