Work Text:
Here are the consequences of Brendon “forgetting”to delete Ryan’s number, despite phone upgrades, for the past five years:
- He has a minor panic attack every time he scrolls through his contacts.
- He has to be constantly talked down from calling Ryan for the first eleven months of the Split.
- Or texting him.
- Or Skyping him.
- Or sending him passive-aggressive pictures of his own middle finger, with the vinyl album cover of Pretty. Odd. in the background.
- (He still saves those pictures, though.)
- Or, really, attempting any form of contact.
And, of course, the most important:
- He knows exactly who’s calling him on FaceTime right now, and so has no excuse for picking up, even though it’s 4 AM and Brendon’s jittery and his hair looks like shit, and his phone is at 10%.
The first thing he notices is how good Ryan looks. He’s wearing a white tank top and pajama shorts, light streaming through a port hole behind him. He’s way too pale, his eyes are almost too big in their sockets, his cheeks have completely lost their baby fat, he’s got a sunburn on his left shoulder and dark stubble across his chin, but he’s alive and happy—miles better than the ghost Brendon had dreamt up over the years.
The second thing: Ryan’s been talking, soft and low, and Brendon has completely tuned him out. Shock (mostly) worn off, Brendon sits back in his desk chair and watches, and tries to listen.
“…been in Europe for like a week and my phone is already loaded with pictures of Captain Knots that Mom’s sent me. Mostly of him sitting on her shoulders. He does that a lot, you know? He’s clingy and he’s tenacious about it and he thrives under attention. For a kitten.” Ryan pauses and licks his lips. They’re chapped and Brendon opens his mouth to comment on it (and ask him what the fuck and why are you doing this and maybe yell a bit), but Ryan cuts him off.
“I tried ouzo balls last night—we’re in Greece, or close to it, we’re actually on the sea but you know—anyway, I tried them and they tasted a lot like licorice. They weren’t as tough, but they were kinda sweet and kinda bitter, and it just reminded me of how when I was a kid—before I met you—I tried licorice at the movie theatre once and I hated it, and I kept hating it for years. Until now, I guess.”
Ryan runs a hand through his hair. His voice has started rasping, and Brendon looks at the sunlight behind him and guesses he’s just woken up. It’s kind of a weird thought; when the band slept on the tour bus (five years ago, goddamn), Ryan had always gone to bed first, and thus woken up first. Brendon never once, even after they’d started sleeping together, saw Ryan go through his morning routine, brush his teeth and comb his hair. There’s a sort of vulnerability, now, in Ryan’s puffy eyes and sleepy voice. Brendon’s not sure he likes it.
“Maybe I was just a picky eater back then. Whatever, I still can’t stand the taste of red wine. One time, for, you know, Romance’s sake—Lord Byron Romance, not like pink cards and chocolates—I drank an entire bottle of red wine, the absolute cheapest I could find, and tried to write a song based on my experience. A whole album, maybe. I was a teenager, I was like fifteen. I drank and I drank and I scribbled down some abstract shit, like your skin is legend or you bleed out like moonlight floods a patio—” and Brendon’s never understood this, Ryan’s constantly raising standards, like no line and no love and no one can be enough— “and then I passed out. Couple hours later, woke up hungover, looked at my shit, and realized I’d written a poem. Not a song, a poem. I don’t know if you’d understand but lyrics and poetry are completely different—repetition, for instance, a song needs a refrain and doesn’t care if it’s overdone—and it’s intensely difficult to transform a song into a poem, or a poem into a song.”
“Unless you’re Pete Wentz,” Brendon mutters, then realizes and bites his lip, hard. His phone buzzes and tells him it’s almost dead.
Ryan lights up. “Exactly. But, like, I don’t know how they do it now, but back in the day Pete would do what I just did and write a bunch of poems, and he’d dump them on Patrick, and Patrick would sort through and see what didn’t fit and what could be turned into a chorus or a bridge, and it’s like, I don’t have that. That person. Anymore.”
Shit, Brendon thinks. Ryan continues: “And I’ve tried writing songs recently but they’ve all come out as poems and I can’t—”
Brendon’s phone dies.
-
It’s four days until Ryan calls again. In the meantime, Brendon hasn’t told anyone—not Sarah, who never knew Ryan and would sigh and recite a string of “motivational” quotes; or Spencer, who knew Ryan too well and would probably throw Brendon’s phone out the window, or worse, pout at him like he’s a terminally ill puppy. Brendon hasn’t even accepted the call as real, not something he dreamt up out of desperation or nostalgia.
Thing is, ten-years-ago Brendon, half in love and stupid about it, would’ve loved that shit. He would’ve done anything for ten-years-ago Ryan to rant to him about his day and his past and his fucking art. Five-years-ago Brendon might’ve tried harder to hold on if Ryan had trusted him with his thoughts, had trusted them to progress beyond angry sex and shallow banter and music. Now, it just fucking hurts.
So. It’s 10 PM. Brendon’s lazing about at home while Sarah’s out with her friends, eating cold ramen from a takeout box, wearing nothing but boxers and jeans because it’s summer and it’s ridiculous, when his phone buzzes in his back pocket. He pulls it out, sees Ryan Ross is calling you on FaceTime (along with the picture of a heap of trash he’d set as Ryan’s contact icon), and sits down on the kitchen counter. He breathes. He accepts the call.
The image is a little grainier this time, Ryan especially pale and ragged against a dark background, and Brendon realizes it must be night where Ryan is. Early morning, even. Silence stretches between them, one second into two and three, as they take each other in: Ryan’s eyes bloodshot and puffy, Brendon’s lips bit raw.
Ryan speaks first: “Usually when I can’t sleep, I get up and put something in the oven. Mozzarella sticks, bread, whatever. It’s not because I’m hungry. I’m never hungry.” Brendon thinks of how thin Ryan always is, especially now. “It’s more like, I wanna be busy. I need to be busy. And I can’t write—I don’t let myself write after 1 AM, or else it’s all crap, and I can’t stand writing crap—so I cook. If I’m angry, I get cookie dough or brownie mix and I take it out on the mix, while I’m stirring, and usually it turns out shit, but I’m a writer, not a chef. Sometimes I even eat it. And by the time all this has finished, it’s maybe 6 AM, dawn’s breaking, birds are twittering and all that shit, and if I’m still angry or high or sad, I watch the sun rise, or if it’s too early, I watch the clouds pass in front of the moon. If I’m not, I go to bed. And that’s it.”
Ryan stops and looks at Brendon, reading him for a reaction. Brendon almost stirs up something to say when he realizes that he doesn’t want to speak. He doesn’t want to break whatever truce Ryan’s brokered here, like Ryan’s got the Earth perfectly balanced on the tip of a sword and the wrong word will send it tearing through oceans, slicing cities.
Ryan gives him a small, tired smile, and continues. “Anyway, tonight I’m still on the boat, obviously. And it’s like 3 AM and I can’t sleep. I guess I could use the oven on board, but I didn’t exactly bring cake mix with me. So we’re here.” Ryan inhales deeply, almost sighs, and Brendon’s own breath sticks in his throat. “I never thought I’d be lonely trapped on a tiny ship with five other people for a week. They don’t even know me that well. I mean, they know me now, but they don’t know me way back then, so it’s like there’s this whole other layer to me, bricked up, that they’re never gonna see, or maybe never even look for, you know?”
Brendon nods. Sarah’s bright grin and faded freckles flash through his mind.
“Normally I would work this shit out in a song, let the world know who I really am, so they’d know even if my friends didn’t, but. I’ve been writing poems. And, Bren, they’re so fucking unhelpful, they’ve got no rhythm or they’re full of trite rhyme or they don’t even make sense, and I’d give anything to have Patrick Stump—or someone close—sift through them and find the song in two pages of pontificating about my goddamn cat.”
Ryan buries his face in his hand, his shoulders tense and breathing ragged, and Brendon knows if he were there, could feel the sea swaying and smell the brine and dwell in the dark heat, he’d wrap Ryan in his arms and hold on until the world righted itself. Until dawn, even.
Brendon says, “I wish—” and Ryan hangs up.
-
Brendon spends three days lying on his couch, listening to Pretty. Odd. on loop, soaking up Ryan’s voice, until he’s relearned every breath, and every chord. On the second day, he lets Sarah drape her arms over his shoulders and playfully nip at his ears, press her cheek to his, until she recognizes the soft guitar of “Northern Downpour” and jerks away. He shuts his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the pity in her frown.
Day four passes in a fit of panic, staring at Ryan’s entry in his contacts, composing a million text messages—did I do something wrong, I get what you mean about your friends not knowing you, I’m tired of being picked up and thrown away in the same breath—and sending none. Day five, Brendon sits at his piano and plays classical shit, Bach and Mozart and Debussy, anger steadily mounting until he’s slamming on the keys, punching the foot pedals into the floor.
By day six, he’s done with it, all of it, and he leaves his phone at home and crashes at Dallon’s place. Breezy kicks him out around midnight, which is fine. When he gets home (empty, Sarah must be out), his resolve lasts for maybe twenty minutes before he cracks, slips into his bedroom, and checks his phone:
Three missed calls from: Ryan Ross.
He sits on his bed, shoulders slumped. He thinks back to when a missed text from Ryan was a disaster, and a missed call was blasphemy—when he was so eager for approval he changed his look and headlined a band and gave up college. For a good part of his life, Ryan exercised the deepest control over him, and it hurts to think he maybe still does.
Brendon likes to work in certainties. He’s committed or not, he’s happy or pissed, he absolutely trusts his band or he can’t stand any of them. He’s Ryan’s or he isn’t, wasn’t, never could be.
Time passes. Ryan calls. Brendon watches his name blink next to the little FaceTime icon on the screen, and picks up.
“Hey. You answered your phone.” Ryan looks surprised, almost exhausted. In the background is a bookcase, a desk; Brendon guesses he’s off the boat.
“Yeah.”
“So.” Ryan stares at him for a moment, at a loss, and then sets his phone down. Brendon studies Ryan’s ceiling—regular off-white plaster—and wonders what the hell he’s doing, if it’s even worth the trouble. Before he can hang up, Ryan picks up his phone again. He’s got a small clump of brown fur in his arms, curled into his chest, which Brendon recognizes as a cat.
“This is Captain Knots,” Ryan says. He’s looking down at the cat, mouth curled into a fond smile. “He’s just barely out of his kitten years, but I don’t think he’s realized it yet; he waits for me to pick him up instead of, like, clawing up my jeans. Which is nice. I mean, I’d—”
“Ryan, listen to me.” He looks up, right at Brendon, and very slightly nods. Brendon bites his lip. “I’ve been thinking of what you said last time, about trying to write songs and writing poems instead, and you’re right, I’m really not much of a poet, but neither is Patrick but Patrick’s stuff works because he always gets what Pete’s trying to say, or that’s how Pete describes it, so my point is. If you really wanna turn some of those poems into songs, and if you’re, you know, if you—” trust me, “—I’d be happy to. To try. And do that for you.”
Silence. Ryan’s eyes are wide, and he’s perfectly still. Brendon watches Captain Knots sleep on Ryan’s chest, tiny ribcage slowly expanding and collapsing. He waits. He’s never been good at waiting, never sat still for more than a minute, but he’s an adult and he’s willing to wait for this.
Then, Ryan bursts out laughing—a sharp, surprised bark followed by a series of giggles, delight dripping from each one, and Brendon can’t help joining him, grinning like a fool. Captain Knots startles, ears flicking irritably, and climbs off Ryan’s chest. Ryan keeps giggling as he gets out, “Sorry, I mean—thanks, I mean—God, I’ve missed you, Bren.”
Brendon laughs louder, lets the same crazy joy from ten years ago sweep through him. He says, “Me too, Ryan, me too,” and means it.