Chapter Text
1.
It was half an hour to soundcheck, and Ryan had just connected his guitar to one of the mics as Brendon walked in. And the sight of Ryan made his heart beat faster, causing Brendon to walk right back out before he said anything stupid.
“Brendon?” Ryan asked, his tone slightly confused.
The boy in question hid behind the door counting to ten slowly as his nerves made him question if he wanted to do this. No. He had promised himself that he would, that he would at least try to flirt with Ryan, and he sure wasn’t going to back out now.
There was some rustling as he heard Spencer and Jon also enter the soundcheck room from the other entrance and he gulped in air as he too ducked in.
“Hey again, Bren” Ryan said, still bent over.
Brendon’s face froze in a smile, which, he later swore to Ryan was one meant to charm his pants off. Ryan had just laughed and said looked as if he was a serial killer. Brendon supposed it may have looked a bit off-putting (not that he would ever agree to Ryan’s suggestions).
Hey, Ryan, you beautiful creature. Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? He thought. But his mouth didn’t seem to want to cooperate with his brain. So he stood, frozen to the spot with that “charming” smile plastered on his face.
Jon clapped him on the back. “You okay, man?”
Yes, I’m fine. Jon, why won’t Ryan look at me? Ryanryanryanryanryan?
Almost as if Ryan had heard Brendon’s loud thoughts, his head rose and he looked at Brendon through his bangs.
His smile widened on its own but his face was still frozen due to his brain short-circuiting (if possible, more than it was ten seconds ago) as a dopey grin formed on Ryan’s face. “Come on, we need your lovely voice at soundcheck.”
Am I dead? I could be dead, I could be. I’m hearing all these nice words coming out of Ryan’s face and I’m frozen….but I think I could be frozen forever if Ryan keeps at it. Ryanryanryan tell me more nice things…
Ryan chuckled and walked past Brendon. “You’re too cute, Bren.”
And if Spencer found Brendon lying on the bed with a dazed grin three hours later, it was definitely not because George Ryan Ross the Third had called him, Brendon Boyd Urie, cute.
2.
Ryan, his Ryan, looked incredibly dressed up today. Not that he didn’t usually look great, but today...well, today he looked just fuckable. And the minute Brendon saw him, he wanted, no, needed to, tell him that. And so he marched himself up to Ryan with words on the tip of his tongue.
“Going somewhere today?” Brendon asked, sliding himself down on the couch opposite Ryan (very attractively, he might add).
Ryan beamed. “Yes, actually--”
Just then, Jon’s voice came from the one bathroom from the only room in the motel they had managed to get. “Spence! There’s no fucking toilet paper here, did you use it all up?!”
“You know that pasta we ate made my stomach upset, you can’t blame me for using it all up!” Spencer retorted from the bed.
“WELL WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO WIPE MY ASS WITH?!” Jon roared (Everyone was a bit irritated with the few hours of sleep they had gotten-- especially Jon, who had, unfortunately, fallen off their one bed and slept most of the night on the floor.)
“I DON’T KNOW, USE THE FUCKING WET WIPES!” Spencer huffed and threw a pack of the hand wipes in the general direction of the door.
“Wonderful, Spence, I’ll just walk around with a WET ASS then.” Jon said irately as the two bickered with heated glares.
Brendon grinned sheepishly at Ryan, too excited with his newfound confidence to let the squabble affect him.
“You were saying…?” Brendon said cheerfully, his thoughts threatening to bubble out.
Wow Ryan, you’re so incredibly hot today. I love your outifit. You should always wear that. Or not. I’m fine with you not wearing anything as well. I think-
Ryan’s smile came back on his face as he looked at Brendon. “I have a date. I think I really like her, Bren. How do I look?”
The smile slid off Brendon’s face instantly and his heart clenched. “Like a wet ass.”
Brendon inwardly cringed as his mouth formed those words. That was not at all what he had meant to say. He wanted to shower Ryan with his affections. What does you look “like a wet ass” even mean? Ryan probably hated him now, he thought, as he took in Ryan’s hurt face while fleeing from his friend’s gaze. That look, if possible, hurt his heart more than when he found out about Ryan’s apparently wonderful date later.
*It took Ryan an entire week to forgive Brendon, through all of which Brendon spent moping and offering Ryan compliments through the closed bunk curtains of the tour bus or the occasional hotel door. And when they broke up soon after, Brendon blamed it on the outfit Ryan had worn, and Ryan's girlfriend blamed it on him (although Ryan never told him so until much later).*
3.
About a month after the incident, as the previous attempt at flirting was now referred to, they had all decided to break the tour into two legs and take a short vacation before getting back on tour. Ryan bought an apartment where they were in Las Vegas, and Brendon, being Brendon, bought one right next to him.
“It’s almost like I’m living with him.” he had told Jon in awe earlier, to which Jon promptly rolled his eyes and flip-flopped out of his housewarming party. Not that it was much of a party...it was only the four of them and a very awkward pizza delivery boy who clearly needed to get back to his job but was far too polite to refuse their companionship requests.
Long story short, they stayed up the whole night and by early morning, everyone had left to their respective homes. When it was time for breakfast, Brendon had been worried that Ryan would starve, since his mom had left when he was young, and his dad had been occupied with things that definitely weren’t cooking. He just knew that Ryan would be miserable if he was forced to eat that “sugary death” of cereal that Brendon could eat buckets of. So, as any good friend would do, (Brendon had begun to hate that word in relation to Ryan), he made him an omelet and some toast.
Now would be a good time to mention that Brendon was absolutely terrible at cooking. Not just a oops-i-put-sugar-in-the-omelet-instead-of-salt type, although he most definitely did that as well, but more of a i-was-watching-a-youtube-vid-on-how-to-cook-omelets-and-i-almost-burned- down-the-kitchen type.
So it was Ryan, not Brendon, who was banging on his friend’s new apartment’s door twenty-something minutes later with a plate of bagels coated in cream cheese, smoked salmon, and a concerned look adorning his face. And it was Ryan, not Brendon, who refused to let his friend cook another meal in his own house.
From that day on, Brendon took up that offer seriously. All his meals were eaten in the comfort of Ryan’s living room, the two of them laughing like idiots over random things or having hushed late night conversations in which he found out some of Ryan’s deepest secrets. But the proudest moment of Brendon’s life was the one morning he walked in to the sight of Ryan eating his Cocoa Pebbles with a content smile on his face.
4.
Ryan told Brendon he might as well just sell his apartment and move in with him since it was almost always empty. Brendon had agreed (um, obviously), and moved in all his daily appliances the second he deemed it wasn’t “too quick” after the offer. He had wanted to move in the second that Ryan offered, but both Spencer and Jon had warned him about seeming too eager as it often scared off people, but he couldn’t make himself wait more than 1 day, 4 hours, 23 minutes, and 32.5 seconds.
Not that he was counting.
They spent the evening watching old movies, and if they cuddled on the couch, Brendon told himself that it was all friendly and not at all because Ryan felt anything for him, because how could he? The last movie was all sap and it made absolutely no sense when the girl actually fell for the guy, how in the world could she fall for him with such terrible lines? Brendon glanced up from his place on Ryan’s shoulders to meet his eyes so that they could laugh at the lines together because he just knew the writer in Ryan would find these ridiculous. But Ryan’s eyes were glued to the screen with...was that longing? And Brendon’s heart broke a little because how could Ryan not see that he was perfect and that Brendon loved him? But if Ryan wanted sappy, cringey one-liners, Brendon would willingly give them to him.
As they were brushing their teeth, ready to go to bed Brendon’s eyes met Ryan’s in the mirror and Brendon came up with the brilliant idea on the spot to tell him something nice because he wanted Ryan to know that he was loved and wonderful and perhaps a little for the selfish reason that it might make Ryan see that Brendon was his dashing prince and they would ride off into the metaphorical sunset, together at last.
“Your teeth look very nice.” Brendon said, and he was proud, because he had managed to say what he wanted, and it came out as a compliment, so he was slightly offended when the corners of Ryan’s mouth ticked upwards and he could tell Ryan was trying to hold in his laughter.
“Thanks, Bren.” Ryan grinned as he rinsed the toothpaste out of his mouth.
“I mean it. They’re very rectangular. And some are triangular. Geometric is what I’m trying to say.”
Ryan’s smile grew wider and he said over his shoulder on the way out of the bathroom, “That’s very sweet, Brendon.”
Less than a minute later, Brendon’s phone dinged with a message from Ryan.
I like your teeth, too.
And he could hear Ryan chuckling from his room, but it didn’t matter because Ryan's text meant that Brendon’s teeth were apparently fucking geometric too.
5.
It was Halloween. Brendon dressed a vampire, and for some reason, they were going to some rich girl’s Halloween party when all Brendon wanted to do was trick-or-treat…and for some reason, everyone else preferred going there as opposed to “babysitting Brendon”, as Spencer called it, and going out with him on this glorious candy holiday.
Ryan had promised him that they would stick together at the party, Ryan not wanting to be left to meaningless conversation, and Brendon not wanting to be at the party at all. After having far too many drinks, the two of them snuck away to a library and giggled as the heavy doors shut behind them.
They silently made their way to a window seat in the back of the library and sat looking at the trees, faces bathed in the light glow from the window.
“Ryan?” Brendon whispered, and suddenly the moonlit darkness that had seemed so innocent was filled with charge.
“Brendon?” Ryan whispered back.
Brendon could smell the alcohol on Ryan’s breath and wondered if the older boy would remember what he said in the morning.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have the prettiest smile?”
Ryan hummed softly and his eyes caught Brendon’s in the dark. “There’s a chance that a certain someone hinted at it when they told me my teeth were geometric.”
Brendon grinned sheepishly.
“But Bren?” Ryan's tone turned serious as he tipped Brendon’s head to meet his eyes again. The honey brown depths were incredibly distracting. “I think yours is much prettier than mine.”
Brendon blushed and looked away.
“That’s a lie” he whispered, but was only greeted with a soft snore.
5 and a half
Brendon was crying, bawling his eyes out on the floor right outside his dressing room in the venue they had just played at. Jon, of course, was the first to notice him and stop.
“Hey, hey, hey. What’s up?”
“Jon?” Brendon managed between sniffles.
“Yeah?”
Brendon fisted a hand in the boy’s shirt and pulled him closer.
“I don’t think Ryan likes me.” he whispered in a heartbroken sob.
“Brendon, you know that’s not true….”
“I know he likes me, but he doesn’t like me.”
“Brendon..”
Brendon’s heart was breaking, shattering in a million pieces, and Jon understood. He let Brendon cry in his shirt until his sobs didn’t sound like knives to his heart and then Jon made a silent promise to himself that he would get Ryan and Brendon, his two clearly blind friends, to finally see one another.
+1
Within the last week of tour, both Spencer and Jon had gotten tired of Brendon’s relentless pining and practically dragged him right outside Ryan’s bunk before promptly leaving, faking a need to go buy groceries, of all things...and the four of them hadn’t cooked their own food since the tour started.
“Weird, huh?” Ryan said, poking his thumb in the direction of the two of them.
“Yeah.” Brendon chuckled nervously. “Weird.”
Ryan nodded and moved over to the small table in the kitchen of the tour bus (if you could even call it that) and opened up a book. Brendon padded next to him and sat on the seat across from him. Almost by habit, Brendon had placed his feet on Ryan’s lap and Ryan (without tearing his gaze from the literature), was warming his freezing toes with the hand that wasn’t still attached to the book. A couple minutes ticked by and Brendon felt the urge to say something, anything to get Ryan’s attention away from the damn book, and to focus on him.
“So...uh...do you..uh” Brendon swallowed. “Do you like music?”
Ryan quirked an amused eyebrow up as he stopped reading and closed his book at the pace of a snail. “Brendon?”
“Mhm?”
“I’m in a band with you.” Ryan said slowly, the way one explains something to a small child, or perhaps a mentally sick relative. The smile on his face took away all the edge of his tone, however.
“Right. Yes, we are in a band together.”
“That kinda means that I really really like music.”
Brendon’s face turned red as he turned his face to the floor. Suddenly the drab linoleum was very interesting.
“I know, I don’t know why I asked that, I guess I was just trying to get your attention...god do you know how hard it is to do that, I mean I’ve only been trying since tour started and there’s nothing. No response. It’s like nothing I do affects you in any way, I should probably just stop now, what’s the point now that I know for sure that you’re not interested--”
Ryan uttered Brendon’s name for the second time, cutting off his ramblings.
“Brendon.”
“What!” He snapped.
“Are you trying to...flirt with me?”
If possible, Brendon’s face turned a brighter red. Ryan is almost certain to this day that if there was a fire hydrant next to Brendon at that moment, he would have put the red of the hydrant to shame.
“I--no. Of course not. Actually, yes, definitely yes. I mean-maybe?”
“Oh my god.” Ryan sat up straighter in his chair. “Everything makes sense now. All this time I thought you weren’t interested in me.”
“I am! So, so, so interested.” How had Ryan thought he wasn’t interested? Wasn’t his smiling and pickup lines clear enough? He had thought Ryan wasn’t interested this whole time and now--
“I was flirting so much with you, and you never responded. That first day at soundcheck, I said you were cute, Bren. I never call anyone cute. You practically lived in my house for the two months we were on break. It’s an actual mating ritual for some birds to bring food back for their partners. You didn’t respond to the mating ritual. The ritual, Brendon, how was it not clear that I was flirting? And then at every party--”
“Wow” Brendon said as his mouth dropped open.
“What?” asked Ryan.
“You are terrible at flirting.”
Brendon’s legs were pushed off the warm lap.
So perhaps both our boys didn’t have the best of luck in the flirting department. But they got there eventually.