Archive of Our Own

Patrick gets the phone call at the asscrack of dawn.

He wouldn’t even be awake but the Discovery Channel is doing a really sweet feature on bears and he’s got a serious addiction to nature documentaries. It’s a legitimate problem and Joe tries to sign him up for rehab every once in a while, only half-joking. Patrick isn’t quite sure why he’s still friends with Trohman, he’s such a shit.

So he’s still awake, albeit wrapped in a million hoodies and stuffing his face with awful microwaveable popcorn. He’s idly considering becoming a documentary narrator when he cellphone starts to buzz angrily.

It’s an unknown number but the only person who calls him this late is Joe, when he’s too trashed to get home on his own, so Patrick answers it without a second thought.

“Yo?” he asks, attention still mostly on the grizzly bear momma and adorable cubs rolling around on the screen.

“Patrick,” someone sighs tinnily in his ear, and it’s most definitely Pete Wentz.

Patrick chokes, hard, and feels his face catch fire. Pete’s got a very distinctive way of making Patrick’s name sound like the world’s least conventional booty call. Patrick tucks his chin into his hoodie collar even though he’s the only one who could possibly have heard.

He hopes. He crosses his fingers that there’s no one in earshot on Pete's end.

“Wentz?” he demands, still choking a little bit. “What the fuck!”

Pete huffs, sounding fuzzily annoyed, then giggles. Apparently Patrick is easily forgiven.

“I think I messed up again, ‘Trick,” Pete says, and he sounds…

He sounds kind of resigned, actually, like he expected it from himself. Patrick shakes that idea away because for one thing he doesn’t want to think Wentz has the self-awareness to know he does this regularly and for another Wentz is too high to know his ass from his elbows anyway.

“Surprise surprise,” he says sarcastically. Pete makes an unhappy, plaintive little noise.

“We can’t all be good like you, Pattycakes,” he says. He’s sort of vicious when he says it, like he means it to hurt, but Patrick is too busy blinking to be offended. He’s pretty sure Wentz just gave him an honest-to-god compliment. Even though he’s high off his ass and probably not even sure who he’s talking to, shit. “I’m trying my fucking best.”

“Good?” is all Patrick can manage, in a slightly strangled tone. He’s not a hundred percent sure if he’s asking what Pete meant or telling Pete he’s doing a good thing by trying. He’s not sure Pete cares either way, or even heard him. Pete had just giggled like a child and started talking a mile a minute, forgetting his petulance in a haze of probably cocaine, fucking christ.

Patrick suddenly feels an echo of unease because Pete actually sounds really messed up and still hasn’t told Patrick what’s going on and it sounds like he’s not with anyone who’ll take care of him. It’s not like it’s Patrick’s responsibility, Patrick reminds himself, and tunes back in.

“-’mon, I’ve heard your stuff, it’s good, it’s really good, it’s like this punk take on hip-hop without being, like, a douche about it and-,”

Patrick cuts him off by squeaking in an incredibly embarrassing way because he’s pretty sure that Pete just said he’d heard some of Patrick’s stuff and he just doesn’t know how to process that. He clears his throat before Pete can start again and speaks up.

“You looked my stuff up?” he asks, trying for a casual tone even though it’s probably pointless. Pete’s too fucked up to tell one tone from another.

“Yeah, Patrick, it’s good,” Pete says into the phone. His voice is low and sincere, a little wrecked. His words slam into Patrick in the approximate area of his gut. “‘Trick, you’re gonna save rock’n’roll.”

For probably the first five or six seconds Patrick feels the absolute conviction in Pete’s voice pounding through his veins like he imagines heroin would feel. Intoxicating, like that feeling his gets when he has a riff in his head that just won’t go away. That little niggle in his skull that says ‘show them what you’re fucking capable of’, but bigger. Better.

Then Pete breathes out a giggle and Patrick just feels cold and a little empty.

“Pete, where are you?” he asks with a sigh.

There’s a long, guilty silence. All of Patrick’s cold disappointment gets washed away by the vague premonition he’s going to be very angry very shortly.

“Wentz,” he growls and Pete snorts out a surprised laugh.

“Your apartment!” he says blithely, and Patrick experiences a rage-induced heart-attack.

“Wentz!”

Pete’s shivering when Patrick opens the door to his apartment. It’s no wonder, he’s wearing what’s probably the remains of his party clothes, a pair of ripped-up jeans and no shirt. It looks like he’s wearing glitter body paint, or someone wearing it was smearing themselves all over him, and he’s humming.

Patrick’s first inane thought is that he really really likes Pete’s tattoos.

He’s vibrating in place, bouncing up and down in place like a helium balloon. Patrick sighs because Pete is still off his ass on whatever he’d dosed himself with and it’s going to be a bitch and a half to get him calm enough for Patrick to feel okay ditching him.

“Patrick!” Pete says when the sound of the door opening gets his attention. He bounces across the hall looking like he has a tenuous relationship with gravity and fetches up against the doorframe, grinning madly.

“Wentz,” Patrick replies, resigning himself to dealing with Pete for the next, probably, six hours.

“Patty!” Wentz says, sounding like he’d been mainlining nothing but coffee and sugar since birth.

The door to the apartment across the hall creaks, the same suspicious sort of noise it would make if someone were leaning against it to eavesdrop through the peephole. Patrick growls and spends a few seconds trying to decide where he wants to grab Pete to drag him inside. His shoulders and upper-arms are wet and glittery, his hand is too intimate, and any region below that is right out, no matter how on-display it is.

In the end he kind of hovers a hand around the back of Pete’s head and guides him awkwardly into his apartment. It still ends up being too intimate, too much acknowledgement of Pete’s vulnerability, but Pete doesn’t seem to notice. He also doesn’t notice that Patrick’s face has suddenly acquired a truly brilliantly shade of scarlet, so he doesn’t mention it.

Pete strolls right through Patrick’s entryway and into his living room without waiting for an invitation. When he sees Patric’s record collection he makes an overjoyed noise and bounds over to take a look. Patrick trails after him and considers homicide.

“Why are you here?” Patrick demands, and tries not to let the way Pete’s hovering his fingertips over his record collection get to him. He hopes there won’t be any glitter paint on the sleeve when he next goes for Sergeant Pepper. He really hopes Pete doesn’t notice the dog-eared sleeve of Arma Angelus’s first album tucked into the A section.

“You’re nice to me,” Pete says blithely, fingers thankfully travelling down the alphabet from B for Beatles and not into the A’s. Patrick relaxes marginally.

“I’m not,” he argues.

Pete looks over his shoulder and grins and there’s something to that expression, a momentary flash of tiredness that looks like sobriety and more, looks like the kind of exhaustion that Patrick can’t fathom before it’s gone and Pete’s back to giggling.

“No, you’re not,” he agrees, and Patrick feels a pang of guilt at that. He doesn’t like thinking of himself as a bad person and there’s nothing about this situation that doesn’t read that way, to an outsider. He’s having a hard time reading it differently himself, actually.

“What are you doing here?” he asks instead of considering that. Another, even more excellent question occurs to him. “How do you even know where I live?”

“I’m a rockstar,” Pete says, like that answers anything, and continues without pause. “Hey, I thought you hated my band,”

Patrick’s lifted out of his confused annoyance right into a level of panic that’d probably be unwarranted with anyone but Pete.

“I do!” Patrick spits, on autopilot.

“Really,” Pete says, grin awful, waving the cover at him. Patrick glares as hard as he can, his most intimidating expression, but Pete just grins harder. It’s an impressive amount of grinning, all around.

“I hate your newer material,” he sighs after a few seconds, defeated by Pete’s white, evil grin. “Your old stuff, before you got big, that stuff I liked.”

Pete turns away, back to the record stand, and stuffs the sleeve back into it’s space.

“Me too,” he mutters. It’s quiet, and if it weren’t for how hard Patrick’s paying attention to him Patrick wouldn’t even have noticed he had said anything at all. Probably, he wasn’t supposed to hear.

Patrick opens his mouth to say something. He’s not sure what, maybe ask what Pete means, maybe ask why he’s not with his band members. What it all means, that he’s here bothering Patrick who’s made it very obvious he doesn’t like Wentz, when there’s probably a million adoring fans out there to stroke his ego.

Before he can form the words Pete’s hoping back around and bouncing into Patrick’s kitchen, and Patrick has to charge after him to prevent him from operating the oven while, Patrick’s pretty sure, buzzed out of his skull. It’s a pretty effective distraction.

In an hour Pete’s crashing hard and Patrick’s pretty much done being angry. Other than making the kind of drunk idiot decisions Patrick himself regularly made, he hadn’t done anything too bad. He’d even sort of wiped off the glitter paint when Patrick had pointed it out to him, then put on one of Patrick’s old shirts when he’d proven too drunk to get it off.

Patrick wasn’t feeling up to washing glitter bodypaint off leering rockstars, not today.

“Wanna go home?” he asks when Pete’s started nodding off only to jerk awake for the third time.

“Don’t wanna,” Pete mutters rebelliously, but gets to his feet when Patrick gestures impatiently and follows him to the door. He’s asleep on his feet and frowning rebelliously, which Patrick has to remind himself is annoying and not endearing.

In the car he keeps one hand ready to snag Pete by the back of his borrowed shirt if he went for the backseat or the door handle again.

Pete had really only tried the door handle once but the car had been moving at the time and Patrick really doesn’t want to be responsible for Pete’s next hospital trip. Pete mostly gives that up in the first ten minutes anyway and settles in to humming restless snatches of songs Patrick halfway recognizes and occasionally yanking on Patrick’s sleeve to get his attention.

He looks like a kid when he does that, all of sixteen instead of nearly twenty nine.

“I’m sorry you had to take me home,” he says the first time. He’s got big, wide eyes fixed on Patrick when he risks a glance over and Patrick groans.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to someone’s place without asking, huh?” he grits out. He’s not yelling, he justifies, and doesn’t let himself feel guilty for the way Wentz’s face falls.

“Sorry, ‘Trick,” Pete says softly.

“Don’t call me that,” Patrick says shortly, feeling guilty despite himself.

“Sorry.”

Pete shuts up for about five minutes before he’s tugging on Patrick’s sleeve again. Patrick feels a moment of sympathy for grade-school teachers and resists the desire to slam his head into the steering wheel.

Pete lives in a fucking mansion.

Of course he does.

Getting Pete into his house turns out to involve more touching than Patrick was bargaining for. Pete’s about ten seconds from passing out and he refuses to get out of the seat until Patrick grabs him bodily. He’s still mostly asleep when he promptly snags a double-handful of Patrick’s hoodie and climbs around to sit on his back.

“Piggyback ride,” he declares, sleep-slurred, and falls asleep on Patrick’s back.

Patrick has to lift him and carry him all the way inside, cursing under his breath because Pete’s a heavy motherfucker.

He’s warm, too, and smells nice under the rank chemical scent of bodypaint and sweat, but Patrick tries not to think about that. It’s hard. Pete’s tucked a hand into the collar of Patrick’s shirt and it’s splayed across his collarbones.

“Pete, I’m dumping you on the couch,” Patrick says when he’s finally struggled his way through the lock on the door and the mile-long entryway and into the spacious, cold living room. Pete wakes in half a second and clings tighter, growling.

“No,” he says petulantly and Patrick huffs in annoyance. His spine is complaining very loudly, and he wants to sit down.

So he sits down on Pete.

Pete shrieks and his legs flex around Patrick’s waist, yanking tighter and pulling them flush. The hand still under Patrick shirt - Patrick had forgotten about that hand somehow, jesus christ - is suddenly digging its nails into Patrick’s skin.

He makes a choked off noise, the almost-pain and motion against his back and the heat of Pete’s body all going straight to his dick.

Pete doesn’t notice Patrick’s sudden stillness, hands suddenly all over Patrick’s shoulders and face, pushing at him ineffectually. His shriek of surprise is turning into laughter now. It sounds a little rusty but it warms up rapidly until Patrick can’t help but join in because it’s so squeaky, Patrick can’t believe a world-famous rockstar has such a dorky laugh.

His dick hasn’t calmed down, still half-interested in the proceedings, but Patrick’s tired and Pete’s obviously still a little drunk and he hasn’t had anyone to do this with in a long-ass time. He twists and sticks a hand into Pete’s side and starts to tickle in earnest.

It all kind of devolves from there.

One epic tickle-war later, Patrick is pretty much asleep and his dick has gone back to mostly ignoring Pete’s presence, thank god. Pete’s sprawled indiscriminately over the entire sofa, which includes Patrick for the moment. Pete’s heavy and hot and he still stinks faintly of spilled beer and glitter bodypaint. Patrick is pretty sure he should be annoyed about it. Instead, he feels warm and content.

“I was serious, ‘Trick, you’re the best thing ever,” Pete says drowsily, out of nowhere.

Patrick wishes he could take the words seriously but all he feels is suddenly sick to his stomach. It’s hard to believe Pete when he only says it when he's drunk.

“Whatever you say, Wentz,” he says wearily and starts maneuvering his way out of the Pete-octopus trying to lay claim to him. Pete grabs him by the front of his hoodie before he manages to get all the way out, putting all his small but significant body weight behind it. Patrick barely stops himself from falling face-first into Pete’s ribcage.

Instead he’s got one foot slipping on the smooth wood floor and the other knee still tucked behind Wentz, supporting himself with a hand each on the back and the arm of the couch by Pete’s lolling head. It’s awkward, and leaves him pretty much straddling Pete. Patrick goes brilliantly scarlet - he can feel the heat in his cheeks - and hopes Pete doesn’t notice.

“Why am I always Wentz?” Pete frowns, expression childishly confused and upset. Patrick take a deep, calming breath and starts trying to detangle Pete’s hold on his front.

“It’s your name,” he says absently and Pete snorts, letting go as suddenly as he’d snagged Patrick.

“So’s Pete,” he says. Patrick almost doesn’t catch the words, already on his way towards the door. They’re quiet and bitter, but when Patrick chances looking back Pete’s got his back to the room, shoulders hunched determinedly up near his ears.

Patrick leaves feeling guilty. He adds Pete's number to his phone and resolutely doesn't think about why.