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Pete is pacing, back and forth, back and forth across the small hotel room in front of the bed. The room is perfect — dark, tiny, womb-like. It’s a nest, or a den. Even the thought of the openness and the sheer white cleanness of his usual poolside suite was enough to push him over the line into another panic attack. Every time he passes the mirror, he looks at himself in disgust, disheveled and dirty, and thinks about the hundred thousand million things he could be (should be) doing right now. And then he turns on his heel and comes back the other way. It’s possible that he’s been doing this for hours.
There are footsteps in the hallway, getting louder as they come near. The brittle sound of a key card in a lock, a soft swear and then the heavy ca-chunk of the lock releasing. Pete turns and looks up.
“Mikey…?” His voice is still scratchy from about fifteen hours of drinking dry air and fitful, broken sleep. Mikey Way stands in the nondescript hallway of the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel ina blue baseball cap and gigantic army green parka, holding a tower of faintly steaming boxes of Chinese food with a Walgreens pharmacy bag dropped on top. He looks almost like a delivery guy and Pete has to stop and look more than twice to make sure that it’s him, really, really him, before he launches himself bodily in Mikey’s general direction.
“Wait, dude. Wait.” Mikey says and Pete pulls himself back at the last moment, to let Mikey turn and at least set the food down before he ends up with double armful of smelly, shaking Pete.
“You’re here…” Pete whimpers into Mikey’s neck. "Did Patrick call you? I can't believe you're here..."
“‘Course I am.” Mikey whispers back, tightening his arms around a body that Pete is pretty sure is about to shatter apart like so much glass. He shakes quietly in Mikeyway’s arms for a moment, feeling the tightly wound spring inside him finally start to unwind. “Promised, remember?”
Pete does. But people have promised him forever over and over and over and he can count the number of those promises that he could actually count on when the chips are down and his life is falling apart on one hand. With, apparently, one more finger left over than he would have ever expected. “But… you have a baby now.” He protests.
“So do you.” Mikey says, and he can feel the muscles of his face, so close to where Pete is buried into his neck, bend into a smile. “Doesn’t mean I won’t come when you need me.”
They hold each other for a long, long time standing in the semi-darkness of the hotel room, before Mikey very gently pushes him away. Pete hears the soft whine long before he realizes that it came from him. “Food first.” Mikey says firmly, holding him at arms length. “And meds. I picked up your refills.” His smile is a little crooked and Pete wishes he could see his eyes underneath the brim of that stupid hat.
Mikey carefully pushes him away and Pete collapses back into the messy chaos of the bed, flopping back into the tangled covers like a starfish and coughs — deep, hacking coughs that still taste of cinders and smoke. He can hear Mikey moving around in the bathroom, the clink of glassware and the water running, the tearing of paper and the rhythmic crack-crack-crack of a prescription drug bottle being opened.
Mikey is in his peripheral vision with a glass of water a few minutes or hours later. When Mikey hands him the pills he can’t think of what to do besides take them. Holding them in his hand, the whole thing is like muscle memory, something he can do without thinking, while looking at how Mikey has taken off that stupid hat, and how his hair tumbles down into his eyes and over his face.
Hours later, after Mikey had made him eat more mapo tofu than any human was meant to consume, and forced him into and out of the shower, they’re laying sacked out on the bed with empty Chinese food containers scattered on the floor around them. The lights are low, and the TV flickers over them as Mikey changes the channels with the remote, flipping between a marathon of Chopped champions and a program about the endangered habitat of Red Pandas. Pete’s head is curled against Mikey’s skinny thigh, and it shouldn’t feel as good — as grounding, as substantial, as real — as it does, considering that the dude has always been boney as fuck. Mikey is warm and real and here and scratching his fingers idly as he flips channels. The cold panic, the mania and the desire to run, to get away, is slowly draining away from him as if someone had pulled a plug and as he lays sleepy in the lee of Mikey’s body the memories of smoke and fire and a frantic run through the desert trying to get away from whatever was chasing him feels like something that happened to another person. Slowly, Pete lets himself sleep.
He wakes with a shock to a dark room — he isn’t sure if it’s the drugs wearing off, a lingering nightmare, or just another stage of the madness, but he feels like something inside of him is shaking apart, even though his body is still. He presses his hands into his eye-sockets, trying to swallow a quiet sob and just wanting everything to stop and wanting more than anything else to run away again.
“Ssssh.” He hears, feeling Mikey’s big, long-fingered hands on the skin of his back, warm and soft and stopping the shakes that he can hardly sense, but actually feel. “You okay, Pete?” Mikey’s hands slide around to his belly, under the hem of his beat up white shirt, taking up residence across his chest and stomach. They feel outsized against his skin, as if they were big enough to hold him together all on their own. Big hands, I know you’re the one… he thinks, swallowing a desperate giggle that is more like a cry.
“You came…” he whispers into the half-light streaming in from the window, unsure if Mikey can even here.
“I did." He says, and then whispers back "You needed me.” his voice warm against Pete’s ear as he presses his body closer into Pete’s back, holding him tight. “I’ll always come. Just like you’ve come for me.”
That was the promise that they’d made to each other, two skinny emo kids baking in a hot summer where they’d both gotten too big too fast. That even when it felt like the end of the world, they’d hold each other together. And despite all the considerable water under any number of bridges, they had. Pete had been Mikey’s first call when it all felt too much, too loud and too real. He’d listened through his divorce, and paid for the right lawyers, the right PR people behind the scenes to quash the stories when Mikey’s guys were too preoccupied with Gerard and the band. He’d helped get Mikey into rehab and been his place to crash and a strong set of hands to hold a shaking Mikey together when he got out. And he loved the quiet sense of pride he’d built at this one thing that he could do for the kid that he still, despite everything, loved with a depth and a madness that scared him.
But Pete, himself? Pete had been okay. Talking about mental health in magazines, raising his kids, and killing it with the band and his projects until he’d started to think he’d beat it. As if he were a sponsor into the world of mental illness and bipolar disorder in the way he knew that Mikey had a sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous. He’d thought that he was better. He’d forgotten the central truth of his illness, that it will always, somehow, come back to get him.
It’s a long moment before Mikey says anything again, a long silence where Pete feels like he’s breathing into Mikey’s warm body, wrapped around him. Mikey is an ageless ghost in the night — somehow at the same time the bumbling, nervous, sweet boy he’d spent summers with and this strange, wise, quiet man he knows now. He is safe and loved and cared for, right here and right now.
“You wanna tell me what happened?” Mikey asks. For the first time since he ran away, Pete realizes he wants to talk.
“It was everything, you know? Just… it all became too much.” And he knows, bone-deep and true, that Mikey does in fact know. That he can talk to Mikey in ways that he can never talk to perfect, shiny, beautiful Patrick, his platonic soul-mate whose body makes it’s own sparkling neurotransmitters and doesn’t need to resort to store-bought pills and occasional disasters. “I didn’t mean to.” He says, because if he needs Mikey to know — to really believe — one thing, it’s that. This was not another pre-meditated disaster.
“I know.” Mikey says.
“‘Kay.” He says, taking a deep breath, and then another. “So, we were working on tour stuff, and it had been this fucked up day where nothing was working and Patrick and I were shouting at each other and Megan wasn’t around and no one really saw the mania coming, you know? So everyone else had taken off to get food or something, and kind of left me there. I had my journal and whatever and I was sitting there messing around with some stuff when the board started shorting out. There were sparks and I didn’t know what to do — Like, I probably should have tried to disconnect it or turn off the power or something, but then carpet caught, and there was all this smoke everywhere. I just ran. And I guess everyone else went out the front door, and the fire department was counting heads and making sure that everyone was accounted for. But I was in the basement, and I went out this weird little half-door, like a coal shoot? Joe used it to sneak out and some. I guess no one realized there was another exit, so no one ever did a count. Or maybe no one knew I was there, I have no idea. And then, I don’t know. I got outside and I didn’t really know what to do with myself and realized I’d left my phone in the studio, so I couldn’t call a cab so I just… kept walking? But the next day and I saw that Pete Wentz was declared missing. And the internet was going crazy and there were rewards and all and I thought, well, let’s see how that works out for us.”
“So you stole a car and accidentally faked your own death.” Mikey says, as if he understands that disappearing is, in fact, the most logical choice in this situation.
“I borrowed a car from the valet. It’s totally not the same thing.” He doesn’t have to see Mikey’s eyebrows to know the look he’s getting at that.
“Okay, you borrowed a car and went speeding off into the desert, in the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, well… By that point I was more than a little manic and it seemed like the right thing at the time.” He shrugs a little, and feels Mikey shrug back. This, like so many other things, is something they don’t need words for — Mikey has been there, done that, and worn the tee-shirt to a rag. “It maybe would have worked a lot better if I’d borrowed a car with a full gas tank.” Pete admits, and hears Mikey stifle a giggle.
“Details.” He whispers, and Pete is pretty sure that was a kiss he felt, behind his ear. He can’t control a small, soft noise of contentment. He can feel himself slowly, slowly coming back down to earth under the gentle touch of Mikey’s hands, his words, his breath.
“Yeah, well. Things kind of got worse after that, you know? I hadn’t taken my meds for a couple of days already, and it was a little more than a minor detail by the time the car ran out of gas. I guess by the time the highway patrol found me I had wandered a couple of miles into the desert and taken off all my clothes.”
“They’re not running with that on TMZ.” Mikey offers. “If that helps. Your PR people are good at their jobs.”
Pete sighs, turning in Mikey’s arms, pressing his face into Mikey’s chest. He’s broader and more muscled than he used to be and Pete loves how safe it makes him feel as Mikey’s arms wrap around him, as he tucks Pete under his chin the same way Pete used to hold Bronx. “I just think about all the outreach I’ve been doing, the show we’re working on about managing your mental health and all that. I felt like I was doing some good, finally, and now I’m going to go back to being a cautionary tale, and I hate that despite all my work on like, crisis planning and establishing safe spaces and therapy and taking my fucking meds that this still happened.”
There’s a long silence between them, and he can feel Mikey pressing himself more closely into Pete’s body, wrapping those long, long legs around him. “It happens.” He says quietly. “It happens, and it’s not the end of the world.”
But it is, something inside Pete wants to cry, crushed by the expectations of Patrick and the band and the fans and Clan and all the people who expect things and need things from him. “It feels like the end of the world.”
“But it’s not.” Mikey says.
Pete can’t believe in that yet, but Mikey can and Mikey will believe until Pete is ready. He’ll believe until Pete do all the things that terrify him now; leaving the hotel, calling the label, going back to being a rockstar. And if Pete can believe in anything, he can believe in Mikey, and that Mikey will steer his ship through this storm.