Archive of Our Own

Coda.

Sometimes all the moments
That we savoured for the last
Get crushed between the good and bad
From pressures we have had

It wasn’t the biggest house in the world, or the most fashionable - it was in the suburbs close to Patrick’s mom, a single storey with a master bedroom wedged into the roof; little blue window shutters and white, wooden cladding - and when they'd first parked outside, waiting for the realtor to arrive, they'd laughed at it. It was too cute, it looked like somebody's grandma should live there, but it overlooked the memorial woods and it had a big, secluded yard surrounded by trees. Privacy was to be treasured, after the year they’d had. 

Joe had watched Patrick's face soften as they toured it - not sure what questions they were supposed to ask (even with the list they'd googled and used to rule out a townhouse with no parking and a place that seemed fine except it was next to a high school) because, in the past, Joe's parents had helped or Pete had made the decisions, and this time they'd been determined to do it alone, together. So, even if he thought the place was a little twee and they could have found something more modern, with more rooms, he found himself awkwardly complimenting the yard and the size of the kitchen and asking if the guy could recommend any local chimney services for the stone structure in the living room.

They could have afforded bigger, but it wasn’t really what they needed. What they needed was a new start, somewhere safe and familiar but untouched by the complicated mess they’d created for themselves.

Back in the car, after they waved off the realtor and sat in the street, gazing at it, Joe had simply said, "It's pretty much the last place they'd think to look for a couple of - quote-un-quote - 'rockstars'..." 

"You don't hate it?" Patrick asked, his voice tinged with confused hope, and for months Joe had been trying his hardest to make sure Patrick had whatever he needed, or wanted, but there was something about this little house that made him want it, too.

"I mean, we're totally getting a new kitchen, but having a bedroom in the attic kind of reminds me of my old room at my parents' place. It's kind of like, comfortable or something… Safe."

They didn't really discuss it any further; they both knew they'd found the one they wanted, because it already felt like home.

By the first week of May it was theirs. There was no furniture in it - they'd gotten rid of everything they’d each owned, save for their childhood toys and favourite gear (or what was left of it) replacing it all with things that they shared. It was a little like trying to wash off five years or so of bad choices, sloughing off a skin they’d outgrown.

Standing in their new entrance hall, Patrick sighed and leaned in to be cuddled. It was only three in the afternoon, but it had been an exhausting day. The tension of waiting for the go ahead to move, of avoiding people trying to figure out where they’d moved to, had been draining them both for weeks.

"We did it, dude," Joe whispered, wrapping him tightly in his arms with their brand new keys pressed into the palm of his hand, and feeling Patrick’s cap shift a little against his cheek as he nodded in agreement. 

He didn't really know how to deal with it, Joe just being there. He'd only just gotten his head around Joe being gone. But there he was, and here Patrick was, sitting by the lake because he couldn't stand being in the apartment, in yesterday's - or maybe last week's - clothes, suddenly embarrassed.

He'd been so sure they were serious about each other, a few weeks ago… But then, he'd been sure Pete was serious about him before that, too.

And he wanted to be mad - really, really mad - because Joe had promised to be different, but instead he'd taken the easy way out. He'd abandoned him with the humiliating mess they'd made and acted like he was the reason that Patrick had made his decision to end his fucked up relationship - gave him back to Pete like he was returning the house keys in a fit of compassion after winning a drunken bet with a gambler. 

He really wanted to be mad, but he wasn't; not really. He was just sad. And Joe was sad, too, he realised - sad that he'd given up everything because he thought it would help and all he'd done was make both of them miserable and kill off the band he'd been trying to save. And he'd been sadder still when he finally convinced Patrick that they should talk in the apartment and he'd seen the comforter on the couch. Patrick hadn't tried sleeping in the bedroom after the first night, and he hadn't gotten around to throwing out the trash from the few take out meals he'd mustered the energy to order, or to washing the clothes he'd worn and tossed onto the designer easychair in the early hours of every morning.

When he'd thought about it, over the past few weeks - the idea of what might happen, what they'd say if they ever saw each other again - sometimes he imagined fights and sometimes he imagined fucking, but he never imagined the stricken look on Joe's face at the state of the apartment, or the way Joe's shoulders shook against his knees while Patrick sat uselessly on the arm of the couch and Joe knelt on the floor in front of him, spilling apologies into his lap.

But when he packed a small bag - laundry, they agreed euphemistically - he knew he wasn't spending another night in the apartment. He'd spent it, like he would many others, spooned on Joe's couch with little snores on the back of his neck, afraid to fall asleep in case he woke up alone.

They spent that first night in their new home camping out on the living room floor, eating take out and watching TV in the dark because they didn’t bring any lamps and the overhead lights were too glaringly bright when they just wanted to hide away together. After those horrendous few months when the band ended, they were half afraid that a telephoto lens would catch them through the window before they had time to buy blinds. 

Neither he nor Patrick was used to getting papped, still. He hadn't been online at all while he was away - the whole point was to escape - so it was kind of shocking when he got home and discovered half the entertainment media was talking about them. For a while, they were smeared in every gossip column. Speculation about why the band had broken up was everywhere, stories about Joe’s ‘disappearance’ and Patrick’s sudden weight loss (because ‘svelte’ was a valid synonym for ‘wasted away from stress’) or Pete's Barbie Doll moving into the house that none of them knew used to be Patrick's, ran on every media website. They couldn’t go to the store to get bread without someone trying to take photos of them looking fraught and tired, all with dramatic and inaccurate captions. It had never been like this before - they'd been with Pete when it happened to him, but they'd been uninteresting footnotes in photo captions, never the subjects. Never the ones they wanted the photos of, the ones being followed.

He'd watched Patrick sit in the living room with the curtains closed all day, sure that if they even ran to the store someone would be waiting to make up stories; that he shouldn't go visit his mom in case they followed him and harassed her, too. Joe took his house off the market because viewings weren't possible when every potential buyer was a spy, and for Patrick it seemed certain that they were. It gave them somewhere to stay at least, in the short term, but the paranoia was insidious. It started with convenience - it was easier to stay home and get things delivered, to avoid the melee - and then it quickly became habit, but before they could really get a handle on it, it was a panic attack in the garage because going to Patrick's mom's for Thanksgiving was too big of a step after not leaving for weeks. 

The whole year had been hard - it seemed to pass slower than even the childhood ones when summer seemed to last forever - but all of the isolation and the intensity of being confined together, with no one to turn to but each other, had brought them closer than anything else. 

They’d gotten through it, though - through friends taking sides and fans sending cruel and accusatory messages through social media, through confused relatives’ questions about what happened to Marie - because they’d dealt with it together. There were a few rumours, but none of them stuck and gradually the interest had faded away as the next scandal stirred - celebrity breakdowns and pregnancies and marriages paid more in advertising views than a D-list guitarist from a broken-up, B-list band going on a vacation. People simply forgot about them, and it was fucked up when the people who 'forgot' - blocked them on Facebook, ghosted on texts and emails - were the kids they grew up with, the people they'd hauled up the career ladder behind them, but Joe knew he should have seen it coming when he went to his blog on Friends or Enemies and all that came up was an error message. He didn't exist in Pete's world anymore. And, after all, that's what it was - Pete's world. Pete was, and always had been, from the day they met, the centre of the universe as Joe knew it. He'd been the centre of Patrick's, too, and even after everything, Joe could see him struggling to fill up the gap where tending to Pete's needs had been.

Every day he silenced the little trills his phone made - reminders to tell Pete to take his medication (always three: he never listened to the first prompt, and only occasionally the second) - and every day he told himself to cancel the setting, but he never did. Not until a couple of weeks after Joe came home, after he'd moved his possessions out of the apartment with Joe's help and into his mom's garage, and some asshole with a Nikon had pressed his lens to the window of Joe's car and stolen images of him looking weary so Perez Hilton could scrawl over it with his white cursor. Sad sad: Is post fall-out Fall Out Boy missing ex-BFF Pete?

The screenshot came with a jibe attached, not the first and not the last.

Funny how they only care who you are to me. And nobody cares about him.

The reminders had stopped because his phone smashed when he threw it across the room.

But then he worried. Even though he hadn't been passing the reminders on, the little voice whispering in his ear still asked the questions - did he remember to take them? Does She know what ones he needs? Does She check? Does She even notice that he doesn't sleep?

And the voice at his other shoulder still sneered, because of course she wouldn't know! She didn't know him at all. Nobody knew him like Patrick did.

He'd thought for the longest time that nobody knew Patrick like Pete knew Patrick, either, but as the days became weeks and the weeks became months, he started to wonder if Pete had known him or if Pete had shaped him into a mould that suited Pete. 

His therapist - the one he'd scoffed at the idea of seeing, because he'd had his fill of strangers wanting to know everything about him - asked him questions she didn't want real answers to, sometimes. Ones he'd answer reflexively as he sat in her office, indignant because he wasn't a victim, but then ruminate on for days after, until he found himself picking away at the layers Pete'd plastered over the old cracks of doubt and distrust until he could see them for what they really were. And he was starting to see, chip by chip, that all the things he'd known were really more like illusions. 

Yet, somehow, it was hard to shake the wish - the need to tell himself - that it really had meant as much to Pete as it had to Patrick, and for the same reasons. That what he'd grown into adulthood knowing, had been real - even if it was unconventional and even if it ended more bitterly than he could ever have imagined when he was seventeen and sneaking downstairs at 2am to call his secret, insomniac boyfriend from the kitchen. He'd fallen asleep in class so often in his senior year that it was amazing he graduated at all. It hadn't mattered, though - everything would work out, because Pete had a plan and he wouldn't need his 2.3 GPA. All he'd need was to trust him.

Things had only seemed to improve after Joe convinced Patrick to try therapy. He'd refused outright for months, determined that he wasn't telling any more strangers about his private life, that he didn't want to share himself with anyone but Joe, anymore. Even after nights when Joe would wake to pee and step out of the bathroom to find him having a panic attack, convinced he'd been abandoned again, he was typically stubborn. Joe didn't say it aloud, but it was starting to weigh heavily on him. There was only so much he could do for someone who wasn't willing to carry their own weight. Some nights, he lay awake wondering if this was how Patrick had felt through all those years of Pete's problems. He'd coped for years, through all the bullshit Pete could find to put him through, knowingly or otherwise, and Joe didn't feel like he was in any position to demand compromise when it was he who'd caused this. If he hadn't left, maybe everything would have been different - he'd never know for sure, but he couldn't help feeling that he'd brought all of this down on both of them and getting through it was the price he was going to have to pay for happiness on the other side.

Joe had been afraid that things would be too difficult for them to be together, for a long time - that after everything they'd put on the line and regardless of how long they'd both waited to deal with the way they both felt, it would simply be too much. He’d been sure, too, that Pete was directing the shutterbugs to them like flying monkeys, using the last of their friends to spy on them and find out what they were doing, so that someone was always there to disrupt things. It was paranoid and absurd, and he’d laughed at himself for it a number of times before Patrick confessed that he’d been afraid of the same thing. Maybe they weren’t both insane - after all, everyone knew how vindictive Pete could be when he was upset. 

Thanksgiving had been the turning point. Patricia had showed up the next morning, foregoing Christmas shopping to bring them leftovers and hugs, and stern parental intervention. She'd given Patrick the talking to he needed and Joe had helped with the rest, putting him in touch with his own therapist and driving him to appointments, using the time he was there to run errands he couldn't do when Patrick was around, because he wouldn't leave the house and he fretted relentlessly if Joe tried to do things without him, convinced he'd leave again - like he'd left him behind on the tour.

So, after everything, it was hard not to be half afraid that a telephoto lens would catch them through the window before they had time to buy blinds. 

Patrick had turned twenty-four, just a couple of weeks ago. For the first time in months they’d gone out together, ate dinner at a cosy restaurant and wandered down the river, holding hands in the shadows, and no one had recognised them at all. Maybe it was because Joe's hair was long enough to tie back, these days, and Patrick had filled out a little to a weight that felt more natural, and they'd both tried to shake off the childish hoodies people expected to see them in. It wasn’t something they’d ever had the opportunity to do, before. They were a year into their relationship and it was really the first proper date they’d had, but it was a watershed moment - made them feel almost normal. Like what they were doing was a grown up thing - something of substance, rather than sharing a foxhole in a battle against everything else. And the timing had been good - just as the purchase of the house was being finalised. It felt like at last, after a horrible false start, things were finally working out the way they’d both been too afraid to hope for.

"Joe?" Patrick’s voice asked softly, chin on Joe’s chest as they bedded down in sleeping bags they hadn’t used since they travelled the country in a wrecked old van.

"Hmm?"

"I just... you’re happy, aren’t you?"

"Huh? Oh. No, actually - I just moved into a new house I bought with, like, the smart and sexy boyfriend I didn’t ever think I’d get to have, so I’m like, super bummed out."

Patrick snorted and tightened his grip. "No, but... if you could wind everything back to y’know: before. If the band could still be together and nothing had happened with us - you could still be with Marie or something, maybe -"

" No , dude. ‘Cause if we did that, you’d probably still be living a miserable life with that asshole. You’d be unhappy, still, and I’d be feeling shitty watching you and I’d still be stringing along someone who deserved better, and Pete would be living a lie, and... No. I know I fucked up, when I left, and I feel like I’m just the worst for doing that and being dumb enough to think it’d help or something, but I really fucking love you, and I wouldn’t give this up for anything. Okay?"

"Okay."

There was a sudden, anxious pang in his stomach, because what if - what if - ? He sat up slightly, looking down at the mussed hair and the whiteness of the moonlight reflecting on his skin. "But, I mean - you’re happy, too, right?"

Patrick nodded and rested his head on Joe’s belly, instead, rubbing his cheek against it softly, like a cat, and his fingers over the words he'd had tattooed on his rib one day while Patrick was at his session. It's just love, selfish love . It was taken from a piece he'd caught him writing at the peak of their siege. Impermanence was at the root of his insecurities, according to his therapist; Patrick had told him so in a fit of pique. And Patrick might have thought she was talking a bunch of crap, but Joe didn't, so he'd given him something permanent as proof - a contract, of sorts, or a promise. 

"When we get our studio set up, maybe we could… y’know, try actually working on some stuff together."

Laughing a little at the sudden change of subject, but sufficiently reassured, Joe scratched tenderly at the back of Patrick's neck. "Sure, little dude."

"I want people to know."

"That you have a studio in your house? I mean, with you, I feel like people would pretty much assume -"

"About this. I don’t want to hide, anymore, y’know? I spent all my life hiding and singing his feelings and now I want to sing mine. Anyway, it’s our studio, in our house, and I want people to recognise that, Joe. They always wanted the big story, so y’know - fuck ‘em, I’ll tell them everything but they’ll have to buy the record. But - y’know - obviously only if you’re okay with that..."

Joe leaned down to kiss his forehead, stretching awkwardly to make the angle. "Alright," he whispered, unable to contain a proud grin, even if he didn't really think Patrick would have the nerve to go through with it.

Patrick twisted a little to look up at him, the light glinting in his eyes. "Yeah?"

"Well, I mean, I can only come out of this looking like the luckiest loser on Earth, right? He’s got three million fangirls who ‘can’t all be wrong’, and somehow I still got you. Personally, I think I’m the winner, here."

They started by forgetting about the phantom camera lenses and making the most of the fact that they no longer had to rely on what they could scrounge from their pockets and wallets, because they were a real couple, now, and everything they needed had been dumped out of the bedroom drawer and into an old wash bag.

In the plane, he spent the whole flight turned towards the window, cap pulled down over his eyes so that nobody could see him. It was a little like playing at being an ostrich - if he couldn't see anyone else, nobody could see his pale, blotchy face or that his eyes were raw from the freak out he'd had in the mensroom when he had to leave the hospital for the airport. Mr Trohman had picked him up, and Patrick had climbed into the back seat beside Joe, who immediately lifted a companionable, comforting arm to drape it around his shoulders. Joe's eyes were dark grey at the corners. They said nothing to each other. Joe knew not to ask - not in someone else's presence. 

Richard tried to make amiable small talk; his cheerfulness, usually so disarming, now grating and at odds with the churning in Patrick's stomach. Because no, he wasn't excited to be leaving and no, he didn't think Pete would be better from his bout of fake food poisoning before they knew it, because Pete didn't have food poisoning, Pete had almost died and none of them knew if he'd really wanted that or not. Not even Pete.

He was awake, now, and he was talking, but he was different - like he'd seen the other side and didn't know whether to be glad he survived or sad he came back. He made poor taste jokes to try to make Patrick crack a smile, and his mother admonished him, because nobody would leave him alone, anymore, not even with Patrick there. Maybe especially with Patrick there. Not even so they could talk or say goodbye in private. Because they'd known, once, what was going on, and they'd wanted it to stop; so it had, briefly. Pete had told him that they'd threatened to tell Patrick's mom about it, because Patrick was too young, then. It hadn't taken long, though, just a few weeks of hollow, gnawing pain while they tried to keep it exclusive to band business, before Pete was writing him cryptic posts on LiveJournal and the calls in the early hours started again. He'd seen, then, how it felt to not have this thing. Been convinced that Pete would do anything to protect him, including sacrificing what he himself wanted; that this was what love and heartbreak felt like, and that he should do whatever it took to avoid it. So, they pretended they were just friends, to almost everyone, and Patrick watched as Pete put on his front with scene girls who'd gossip enough about his exploits to make it seem real, and found the one who'd come back for more so often that it passed for a relationship. Sometimes, as he lay awake in the apartment they shared with Joe and listened to her voice in their bedroom, he'd wonder if it was.

And he'd sat out the plane journey, above the Atlantic, out of range and out of the loop, with one of Joe's earbuds and all of his attention. That was how it had been for days - weeks - the whole time they were in England. Joe had stuck around. Joe had moved into his hotel room, into the bed that should have been Pete's, and then let Patrick into the narrow twin beside him when he woke up in the dark, sweated through his sheets and unable to catch his breath.

Joe, unknowingly, did all the things for Patrick that Patrick did for Pete. He carried him; he made Patrick feel, for the first time in a long time, like what he needed mattered. And maybe that was why, on the nights when Joe let him fall asleep wrapped around him, warm and uncomplaining, Patrick found himself wishing this was the real world, instead of what he had back home.

Over the coming weeks, they’d filled their little house with furniture they'd argued over in boutique interior design stores and a table they picked up at a neighbourhood garage sale, and painted it themselves - although there was no terracotta, Patrick had vetoed it. Bit by bit, it became a home, where they cooked in their own kitchen and bickered over what to watch on TV in their own den and their parents came over and treated them like grown ups.

All of the time they'd been together, staying at Joe's old place, it had felt temporary. And it had been a short-term fix, but it felt temporary in the sense Joe never felt completely sure this whole thing would work out. He woke up every day almost surprised to find Patrick there - like it might all have been a dream and he'd open his eyes, soon enough, and find he was still passed out in his bunk on Warped Tour, hungover and depressed. 

They'd called that tour the 'Summer of Like', but Joe hadn't liked it much at all - for weeks he watched Pete spend more and more time away from the bus, while Patrick sat in the lounge pretending not to notice the marks on his throat or the pet names being used for somebody else. And Joe had found himself in the dutiful friend role again, letting Patrick curl up with him in his bunk with a brazenness owed to the unspoken fact that Pete's Others were supposed to be cover and neither of them could see how his current plaything could be any less of a scandalous secret.

Joe didn't raise it - not in so many words - he tried to distract him and made small gestures to cheer him up, but he could see how futile it was. One night, during a round of Dead to Rights: Reckoning in which they'd laid together in Joe's bunk, Patrick's head on his shoulder as he held the left side of the PSP and handled directions while Joe managed the function buttons, collaborating as hilariously as they were badly, Patrick had grasped Joe's free hand. It was to give his idle trigger thumb something to do, he said, because he kept wanting to grab the console away from him. And the rush of heat that ran through him made it impossible to ignore the reality of the situation. What he'd done in England had been innocent, well-intentioned support for a friend he could see was distraught, but in the tender comfort there had been something else, too. They'd grown close and Joe had grown protective of him, started to look forward to getting into bed at night just to have him near - to feel useful, he'd told himself. It had been a harsh change to return home and see Pete waiting for them at the airport, watch Patrick walking directly to him for a hug, glancing back over his shoulder as he left Joe to drag his bag to the pick up point and find his parents' car.

He thought about those nights a lot, afterwards, not really sure if it had been the trauma or solidarity or teenage loneliness, but the churning in his belly as they lay together in his bunk had been the uneasy proof of his feelings evolving. And he knew, as his palm began to grow hot against Patrick's, that his feelings weren't some manifestation of the worry he felt, because Pete was doing better but they hadn't gone away. 

Panicked, he'd called time on the games for the evening and insisted that Patrick go back to his own bunk, or the lounge, or anywhere so he could sleep. He hadn't slept, though, and he'd spent the following day trying to smother it, keeping away from the bus as much as possible, working through a personal record for the number of beers he sank and making his best efforts to find a girl who might be willing to take up the space in his bunk that Patrick kept claiming. Instead, it was Andy who'd found him, wasted and feeling sorry for himself - and for Patrick - at the back of the catering tent, on a keg stool. It was probably better that way, because he poured out everything like he'd been upended, and at least Andy would keep it quiet.

"I had a feeling…"

"How?! Like, how could you know? How can -"

"I was in England, wasn't I? Even if you two hardly noticed..."

"But I was just - he was upset, Pete was -"

"You jumped in there the first chance you had. Pete had food poisoning, there was no need -"

Joe blinked and stared at him. "...no. No, dude, he didn't." It dawned on him, suddenly, that no one had told Andy anything but the cover story. None of them had wanted to talk about it, at the time, and no one had explained. It steadied his inebriated mind like a slap to the face. "Dude… dude, he overdosed on Ativan. He almost died. I - I thought you knew."

Andy hadn't known and Andy's fury, grasping Pete by the hoodie it was too hot to be wearing and shoving him against the door of the bus as he yelled at him for his stupidity, had burned through Joe's misery long enough for him to pull them both apart and climb into his bunk to sleep. When he woke up in the morning, Pete wasn't there but Patrick had found his way behind the curtain and stretched out with him. He was sinus-y and quiet all day, and Joe didn't ask if something had happened because there was so much wrong with all of it already, he just opened himself up like a comfort donor and tried not to glare at Pete when he strolled up late to soundcheck in someone else's t-shirt.

But these days, it was Joe borrowing Patrick's things - Patrick's shoulders were too broad to wear much of Joe's without stretching it and he was too particular about his possessions to let that happen. They'd even built in separate closets so that Patrick could throw his shoes in however he wanted while Joe colour-ordered his shirts. It was a little absurd but it worked. It was part of being a real, human couple with differences and peeves and the ability to compromise and consider each other's needs and it meant that when they had their first fight in the new place, over something ridiculous, like Patrick always leaving cushions wedged into the corner of the couch instead of shaking them out, it didn't feel - not for a moment - like their relationship was fragile enough that this could end it.

In the past, over the time they'd spent at Joe's old townhouse, he'd been terrified every time he said something that even had the potential to raise tension, because he knew that Patrick would be well within his rights to tell him he was done and to leave, just like Joe had left him. But the first time they fought, in their brand new house, surrounded by all the things they'd chosen and negotiated on together, there was no fear, anymore. When he came downstairs after sulking in the bedroom for an hour, the living room was spotless and the cushions were plumped and positioned where he liked them, and he brought Patrick one of the herbal teas he liked out to the mancave they were turning into their studio, as a peace offering. By dinnertime, they'd sat down together on the floor and written out lists of the equipment they'd need in order to convert the space into something useful and it was as if the whole thing never happened - except Patrick was more conscious of the soft furnishings and Joe tried a little harder to be less uptight about the things that didn't matter.

Turning the previous owner’s mancave behind the garage from a workshop to a decently-equipped studio full of toys they were still sort-of-learning how to use, was Joe's favourite part of setting up a house together. Not really because he got to buy nerd gear with impunity, but because of how happy he could see Patrick was working on it. While they'd disagreed, from time to time, on the right shade of mocha for the walls and the practicalities of wood flooring over rugs, with gear there was a sense of 'more is more' that neither of them could argue with. They enabled each other horribly, but they had the money to spend and the space to put it in, so it didn't matter if they weren't completely sure what that piece of kit truly did, they were just having fun doing it together.

"I'm not saying it sucks, but…" Joe shrugged and gave him a half-hearted smile.

"It sucks?" Patrick asked, already knowing the answer.

"It sucks, like, a whole, sweaty donkey dong, buddy."

Patrick sighed and looked around the living room of his and Peter's brand new house, filled with a bunch of expensive, mismatched 'pieces' in rooms all cold and white and barren, more like a gallery of bad taste than the cosy den he'd wanted. "It does, doesn't it?"

"I mean, I can totally like, get a sense of the person who lives here," Joe told him, thoughtfully, before breaking into a playful grin. "He's a fucking poser with no taste"

"Asshole."

"That's another good word to use."

He leaned in to Joe's shoulder wearily as his friend chuckled, and sighed. "I don't have the heart to tell him. It was his surprise - for me."

"He nailed the surprise, at least."

It was hard not to laugh with him at the tragic absurdity of it. "If he'd just asked, y'know?" 

"I'm pretty sure he's gonna, like, get bored of it in three months and then you can junk some of the Hard Rock Cafe-looking stuff? Maybe?"

He pushed his fingers under his glasses to rub at his eyes, and straightened up, too comfortable in the warmth radiating through Joe's shirt. "Maybe." Or maybe he'd learn to live with it because Pete loved it and he'd put together this horrendous pop-culture compendium for Patrick's benefit, so he shouldn't be ungrateful and he shouldn't be mocking it with Joe behind his back, wondering how different the place would be if he'd had some say in its design. Or if Joe had. 

Andy came down for a few days to hang out and check up on them, soon after they'd settled in. They hadn't seen him in a long time, although they'd caught up in other ways - there had been too much going on, times nobody was to be trusted, not even the people they usually would - and it was good to have him there for a while, their first overnight visitor in their newly painted guest room.

It was another hot, dry June and they spent the last evening sitting at the wooden table under the big, old maple on their boundary, talking about almost anything except the band or Pete. Patrick had gone inside to answer the door to the delivery guy bringing their food, when Andy carefully observed, "It’s a year, today."

Joe nodded slowly, picking up his bottle and taking a sip for something to do with his hands. It was a year. When he’d opened his eyes, that morning, Patrick had been gazing at him across the pillow, waiting for him to wake up. 

"I dreamt you left again."

"Oh. Sorry to disappoint you, I’ll just get my pants on and I’ll be out of your hair."

"Don't you fucking dare."

"They’re having a baby."

Joe swallowed his mouthful of beer as naturally as he could, with his throat closing awkwardly at the news. "Fantastic."

"Does he know?"

"Not unless you told him."

Andy shook his head. "Will he -? I mean... He always wanted kids."

"We can have kids!" Joe retorted, a little hurt that he might think that was a problem. "If he wants kids, we’ll have kids. There are ways ... Pete would never have had kids with him. He’d just have made some shitty excuse about not being able to keep them a secret, or something. We’re not a secret, anymore. We’re fine. Don’t bring it up with him - not today, okay?"

"Actually, I already knew," Patrick’s voice said levelly, as he reached between their shoulders to place the paper bag of Chinese takeout boxes on the table.

"What? How?" Joe asked, frowning, suddenly worried that they'd gotten back in contact. Every time they'd been in touch over the sale of the apartment, it had been torment for everyone.

Sighing, Patrick pulled out his phone and showed him a picture message. A hand - Pete’s - holding a tiny ultrasound print. The message was timestamped 06.03 that morning. Sent in the middle of the night, LA time, to make sure it was there when he woke, today. 'Thinking of naming him Judas after someone I used to know.’ The message before it was from January, when the sale of the apartment was finalised, and it wasn't any kinder. Joe had already seen those, months ago - accidentally - when he'd picked up Patrick's phone to bring it to him, because his mom was calling, and hadn't made it on time. When it stopped ringing, there was a notification on the screen and his breath caught at the name.

Peter

There were dozens of them, mostly exchanged in the middle of the night, while Joe was asleep. It had made him feel sick, for a moment, certain that if he read them he'd see the same pleas and excuses he'd heard Pete use a thousand times before. That maybe there would be signs of Patrick wavering, falling for it again, as he had for so many years… But when Patrick gently took the phone from his hand and self-consciously admitted that what had started out as practical exchanges about their properties had turned into cathartic, post-therapy rants, he realised it wasn't like that - not at all. The messages from Pete were cruel - trying to convince Patrick that Joe didn't love him, and never could - while Patrick's responses were defiant, increasingly angry and more confident as the therapy began to change his outlook. It culminated in a particularly vicious spat with Patrick responding to a threat to out them with, "Go head, I'm looking forward to telling Chris Hansen how a fucking celebrity groomed me and manipulated me when I was a kid, then got a kick out of flaunting it to millions of fans like it was a joke."

He'd been at once proud of him for standing up for himself and suddenly sickened at the thought that maybe what he'd seen in their relationship was more legitimately fucked up than he'd had the awareness to recognise. Either way, it made him more grateful than ever that no matter how difficult that winter was for them, they'd made the choices that they had.

"That’s cute of him," Joe muttered, holding the handset out to show Andy the message. Wanting him to be mad at Pete, too, because there was no fucking need to try to hurt Patrick like that. He knew, though, that Andy wouldn't take the bait. He'd always come down just a little more on Pete's side, since the band broke up.

He looked at the phone impassively, instead, and shrugged. "I never said he’d grown up any."

When they went to bed, that night, lying under sheets because it was too hot to bear a proper cover - too hot, really, to be curled up on top of each other the way they were, even naked - Patrick murmured, "I wanted to text him back and tell him to go fuck himself, y'know?"

"Should have," Joe mumbled back, sleepily.

"The thing is, I think I have a better idea…"

"Yeah?"

"Tomorrow, we're gonna go to the store and buy a congratulations card, and send it from both of us, like he wasn't being an asshole. We're not gonna stoop to his level."

"We could just ignore it, dude, I mean…"

"Ignoring it would be the same as sending back a bitchy message. It lets him think he got to us."

" Did he get to us?"

"No, he fucking didn't. I'm happy, Joe. I'm not gonna let him think he can spoil that."

"Alright," Joe shrugged, brushing the hair out of Patrick's eyes. "Then I guess that's what we're gonna do."

So that was what they did - sent a card addressed to both of them, wishing them happiness and good luck for the future, each name signed by their own hand. It'd be the last direct contact they had with Pete for a very long time. 

"Don't keep doing that, dude, someone's gonna think you're a perv."

Patrick pulled his eyes away from the happy, laughing toddler being pushed on the baby swing by a man a little older than Patrick himself, clearly having as much fun as the kid was. Instead, he jostled the fries in their cardboard carton, knowing he was flushed with embarrassment and guilt, like it was wrong to see people happy and enjoy the moment - to feel like he was missing out when he had things in his life that others would die for. So, he wasn't going to get that himself, they'd talked it out - agreed that it wasn't for them, not with the way things were - but he still thought about it, still wished that things would change enough that maybe, in time, when Pete had calmed down, then…

It gave him a slightly acid feeling in his stomach to imagine, though, trying to raise a kid with Pete. Being a parent meant being responsible, sacrificing things; Pete wasn't good with either. He'd probably be a really cool dad - the kind who got muddy and went on adventures - but he wasn't a natural parent. He wasn't even a natural adult, most of the time. 

"Hope you're not getting broody again, or whatever," Pete smirked, chucking Patrick's cheek as he bounced off the wall and wandered off towards the bus. Patrick just sighed. It wasn't practical, he knew it wasn't practical, but that didn't mean he didn't still want it.

"Did you see the face on that little fat baby in the swing?" Joe's voice asked, as his shadow fell across Patrick's lap and he swung one leg casually over the wall to sit astride it and steal one of Patrick's cold fries. "Cute as fuck, basically."

The acid in the pit of Patrick's stomach fluttered away as he eagerly held out his carton for Joe to take more; this was something else he couldn't have, but still wanted. He'd been wanting it for over a year, already, kept it as a little private fantasy that was safe and tender because it wouldn't come true.

"I wish I was that happy," Patrick shrugged, not really meaning to sound despondent - he'd been as fine as he could be, five minutes ago - but he could feel concern stirring beside him. 

"Are you not?"

"No… I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm good, I just meant… life was a lot simpler when I was two."

Joe snorted and gave a concessionary nod, licking the grease from the fries off his fingers. "I'm gonna have as much fun as that dude when I have kids." He shoved his hand in his pocket to pull out his phone as it vibrated, and grinned reflexively, starting to reply before seeming to remember he had company and hesitating, then putting it back.

"Your mom?" Patrick asked, and the acid feeling was back. Nobody smiled like that at a text from their mom.

"Nah," Joe shrugged, his eyes wandering back to the swing. "Just like, a girl…"

"Oh, hey, cool!" He tried his hardest to sound happy for him through the sudden wave of jealousy in his chest and guilt that rolled in after it. "I didn't know you were, uh… y'know, dating… anyone."

"We're not, like, dating , we're just… I mean, she'll probably tell me she sees me like a little brother, in a week, or something…" 

"Then that would be her loss," Patrick told him, measured almost to the point of sarcasm.

Joe got to his feet, tapping down the bill of Patrick's cap. "It wouldn't. So, I should like, go call her, probably."

Patrick nodded at him, adjusting his cap with a small huff, and when he looked back, the swing was drifting, empty, and the kid was gone.

It was Chris who reached out first. It kind of stood to reason, in a way - he'd known them since they were kids, witnessed the whole thing until he had enough of Pete's bullshit to know that things probably weren't as straightforward as the old hardcore grapevine might have implied. He was still close to Charlie, he'd probably heard some abrupt and frill-less run down of the whole thing as soon as the tour ended.

They went out to a small show - no one they'd expect to know, really, just an exercise to get them out of the house - and he'd come over to them, warm and easy and a little concerned, and they more or less forgot about the music in favour of sitting in a booth in the bar, covering all the ground they'd missed in the last couple of years, bringing each other up to date - Chris telling them about the friends they'd left behind, hadn't really heard from since all this shit took off; the two of them filling him in, carefully, on what had happened.

"Fuck, man. I feel like I could've warned you about him years ago…"

Joe cast him a guilty look. "Yeah, that's the rub, right?"

Under the table, Patrick's hand wrapped around Joe's fingers. "Sure, y'know, but here's the thing: right up until everything went down, I wouldn't even have listened. I was totally in there with the whole thing - if you'd told me, I probably would have just assumed you were trying to keep us apart for some dumb reason, because I wasn't really in my own head - I was always in his, y'know? The more I talk with my therapist, the more I realise it. And that's fine. It was the way it was. Nobody could really have helped with that."

Joe watched Chris shrug, maybe accepting the answer or maybe doubting it. 

"I'm just glad you guys seem to have come out of this whole thing on top."

"If you can call having no friends and no band, like, 'on top', I guess," Joe replied, gazing into his glass.

"You have more friends than that guy does."

Patrick laughed a little. "We really kind of don't. He got them all in the 'divorce', apparently."

"He got the people who want to hang out with him and are willing to take his bullshit for the privilege - are those the guys you want, man, 'cause I can give you a whole bunch of names of people who are pretty much done with that?"

"There are a lot of good people in that camp, dude," Patrick sighed, shaking his head. "I can't expect to come out of this whole thing smelling of roses, y'know? And I don't, I just…"

"It's isolating, right? One minute, you know what your world revolves around - you've got someone who's gonna call the shots and pilot the Falcon and then the dude's gone and you're kind of marooned in a whole fucking sea of 'what now?', right?"

They both nodded. It was easy to forget, in the midst of it all, that Chris and Pete had been a double act for a long time, before everything happened. He'd been a real friend to all of them - so much so, they'd written a song about him - and even though he'd never really done anything against them, the second he became Pete's enemy he'd had to become theirs, too. It was just the way it was.

"Listen: Pete is a fucking mess. He doesn't know who he is, he builds a little shield of people around him, his yes-men, who create a picture of what they want him to be and he becomes that. Maybe he's even more broken than any of us fucking knew, but he's not a guy you need in your life, because he'll take any certainty you had about yourself and eat it . Like some kind of fucking dementor. He'll take what confidence you had and he'll absorb it until you're left with nothing for yourself." He paused in his little rant and sank back into his seat, sighing heavily. "I mean, I know you don't need to hear it, I'm just saying, you know? There are people here who - 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend', right?"

A couple of days later, they were in a mom and pop Mexican place with Chris and two of the other guys they'd known from the old days, and then Patrick's old school friend was in town and came over for dinner and Joe could see how much better he felt. Joe had always been the outgoing, social one, but Patrick needed friends - real friends - people whose company he was comfortable in, when he could be himself and goof off and let his inner comedian out and be funny for an affectionate audience. And of course, Joe fell into that category, but it wasn't the same.

Things were getting better; things were settling down and becoming more normal and he was coming back from his therapy sessions lighter, and eager to talk, instead of weighed down with heavy introspection. And the weight off Patrick's mind was a weight off Joe's shoulders. Every week it seemed less and less likely that his stupid martyr complex had destroyed Patrick's confidence so completely as to be unsalvageable.

Before they knew it, it was Thanksgiving again, and there were people in their house - Joe's parents and Sam, and Patrick's dad and stepmom, and two of his step siblings - and his mom was helping him with the cooking while Patrick entertained the guests because Patrick couldn't cook a hot pocket. And then it was November and they were Christmas shopping and arguing over whether it was reasonable to spend that much money on people just because they could, but Patrick wanted to show their gratitude for everything over the past year and a half and Joe thought that it would just look douchey… It was the same argument for every member of their respective families - moreso on Joe's side - until he finally let Patrick buy his dad high-end golf clubs worth more than Joe's first car, just because he'd said he'd thought about taking it up.

In the corner of the living room, close to the fireplace (but not too close, because Joe was convinced it was a hazard), they had a tree with their hard-fought purchases under it, wrapped by their own hands as they sat in a cats cradle of tape and crumpled paper on the floor by the couch. Christmas wasn't really Joe's thing, but as they lay there together on Christmas Eve, sprawled on the couch with the twinkling lights and the fire burnt low as they struggled to keep their eyes open for a lame horror film, it really felt like home. Like it always had been home, and everything that had happened was a thousand years ago.

When Patrick fell asleep, Joe nudged him awake and pushed him up the stairs to their attic bedroom and they crawled under the covers, socks catching against the loose fabric of the comforter, spooned tight together to ward off the chill in the air - the heat had dropped down for the night long before they went to bed - and, for the first time in a long time, Pete didn't even cross his mind.

"That poor kid."

Joe leaned over his shoulder and read the forwarded email. He grimaced, chewing on his toast. "Woah. Okay."

"Y'know, this is exactly how I thought it would be - call a kid something like that and you're condemning them to a lifetime of hell. I mean, I should know."

"My little Stump," Joe grinned, kissing him on the forehead and picking up his coffee from the counter.

Patrick scowled a little harder. "There is no way I'd have let him do this to our kid."

"He's not gonna get to do it to ' our kid' ," he said, shrugging. " I'm gonna name our kid." He finished off the slice, musing at the ceiling. "Luke Chewbacca. Or Lando Han! Leia if it's a girl, obviously."

"Do we have to be married for me to divorce you?"

"I think that's the natural order of things."

"Yeah, well…" He trailed off, too giddy with the fact that Joe would even think of joking about their having kids to maintain the appearance of disdain. "I don't want Luke and Leia growing up in a broken home, I guess…"

"Lando," Joe amended, dusting crumbs off his fingers into the sink, so he could loop his arms around Patrick's waist. Patrick leaned into it, locking his fingers into place around the back of Joe's neck.

"I believe you mean 'Fuckno'."

"To be honest, I probably mean whatever your mom tells us we're calling him."

"My mom came up with 'Kevin' and 'Patrick', Joe. I'm not letting her carry on that spree." He ducked in and kissed him lightly on the lips, shrugging. "Anyway, we don't need names until we have babies."

"No," Joe acknowledged, as if weighing up his agreement. "But they're good to have in the ol' brain bank for when we do."

He wandered back off to the studio with a kiss and his breakfast, leaving Patrick in the kitchen to quietly meltdown because for the first time since they got together they'd had a conversation about kids and they weren't off the table, like they had been in the past. The big, idiot grin on Patrick's face didn't wear off for days.

One of the things that had been the biggest relief, for Joe, was how readily Patrick's family had accepted him. His mom, in particular, seemed very fond of him in a way he didn't recall from when he was an awkward, sarcastic teenager, but he was grateful for the hugs she greeted him with and the pumpkin squares she sent him home with. Perhaps it was a case of 'anyone but Peter' or maybe they believed he was as happy, now, as Joe thought he was. It was just something in the way he woke up smiling nearly every morning, even though he wasn't an early riser, and the sound of him cheerfully singing old soul in the shower as Joe made the bed. He'd started writing again, too. Not the introspective stuff he'd put together when he first moved into the town house, before he started therapy, but pensive things - work that talked of other people rather than dwelling on what had gone wrong in his own life.

Joe didn't think he'd ever been happier. He'd been writing, too, idle noodling with no intent to do anything with it and he tried not to let it go to his head when Patrick told him he liked what he was working on, or that maybe they should do something with it, because they hadn't really gotten into that yet. He was happy enough with just the idea that Patrick wanted to.

It was during one of the warm spring evenings, laying together on the floor of the studio with the outside door to the jamming den wide open - too stuffed after dinner at Patrick's grandma's to sit up properly - that the idea first came up. The scent of flowers on the air through the door billowed the heavy curtain a little and reminded Joe of a beach hut on a Thai island, precarious on the edge of a low cliff and wedged amongst palms at the end of the resort.

For most of his month away the little cabin had been home.  He'd lain awake into the night, getting used to the sound of unfamiliar bugs chirruping in the dark, numb at first, and then sadder as time went on. He'd switched his phone on, from time to time - called his parents, acknowledged the text notifications and ignored the messages themselves, not ready to deal with it. He thought he knew what they'd say: Thanks for making me see sense. Or, We shipped your stuff to your parents' place, good luck. Or, on the darkest nights, I'm sorry if I led you on, I was in a bad place, I hope we can be friends.

Looking back on it, now, nearly two years later, he wasn't sure he would have had the strength to say 'no', if that had been what Patrick wanted. He'd thought about him constantly, during those weeks, imagined that back home the tour had continued without him, that Patrick would have fallen back into Pete's waiting arms. And he'd pitied himself pathetically, taking solace in the idea that he'd been so noble as to put himself through misery to remove the problem for everyone else. 

In a way, he'd felt like the tragic protagonist of a 1950s novel, an erudite young man finding some new meaning in life in isolation in a beautiful surrounding. Some kind of sub-Kerouac drivel, probably, of a kind that the setting really didn't deserve. The island was like paradise - he could sit on the veranda at dawn, outside his little bamboo hut, and watch wild exotic birds in colours that made the familiar garden birds in Illinois look dowdy; watch the sun rising over the sea, silhouetting mushroom-shaped islands against the sky - it was a place that deserved wonder and happiness, not the mess he'd been in when he arrived there.

The idea rose in him almost unbidden, as though Patrick's absent fingers massaging the scalp on his lap had charmed it out of him like some kind of genie, and he was saying it before he thought to stop it.

"Can we go on vacation?"

"Hmm?" Patrick's voice was sleepy and content, he could almost hear him blinking his eyes open to make sense of the question. "Vacation?"

"Well, yeah. Like… like, maybe we could go to this place I went before… it's really pretty. I think you'd like it, and I mean, I think I'd like to go back there. In... better circumstances, or something, basically."

He felt Patrick shift to prop himself on his elbows and look down at him, but he didn't say anything, at first. With an awkward need to fill the silence, Joe found himself ploughing on.

"Everything was pretty shitty when I went, but I spent most of it kind of wishing you were there… so, like… we don't have anything stopping us, and I figure we could just -"

"I'd like that."

Joe stretched his neck a little to look up at him, checking that he wasn't just saying it to be accommodating. "Yeah?"

" Yeah ," Patrick insisted, and he wasn't quite smiling, but the expression on his face was soft as he gazed down at him, one hand now stroking gently at his cheek. "If you want to go back and you don't mind me kind of intruding on that whole experience... then we could go, totally." He seemed to hesitate for a split second, as though the thought had caught in his throat. "I've never… It'd be a nice change to get to be the one going on romantic vacations, for a change, y'know?"

They'd barely been home a day, when he heard it - Pete's voice in the living room, early in the morning, when he hadn't come to bed. It was indulgent and needy at once, his best endearing effort to get what he wanted while sounding for all the world like he was being selfless. The one he used to use on Patrick, when they were younger and he thought he was being cute.

"I feel like it's totally your turn, babe - you've been so patient, you deserve this."

His stomach curdled, fingers curling into fists at his side. He didn't even need to know what it was to know he wasn't going to like it.

He leaned in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the frame, the cuff of his sweater pinched between his teeth as he watched Pete lounge on the couch, phone pressed to his ear. He was shirtless, wearing just his skinny, girls' jeans with his belt undone and it dawned on Patrick as he stood there that what once would have made him red in the cheeks, his heart racing, simply didn't. Something had changed in the past few weeks, a sense of familiarity was crumbling away as he realised that he didn't really believe he knew Pete, anymore. He wanted to. He wanted all the good things that had driven him to sacrifice all those other wants, to still feel as good as they had when he was younger, when all it took was a steady look from hazel eyes - before they'd come smeared in black - to make him feel like what they had was more powerful and important than anything else in his life.

Instead, when he looked at his tattooed stomach, what Patrick saw was a blonde head at Pete's waist, just as it had been in the photo he'd found on his Macbook. And, somewhere along the line, leaning into a hoodie or faded Queen t-shirt to rest his head on a supportive shoulder, not caring who could see, became far more intoxicating than promises of private devotion that never seemed to follow through.

He'd agreed to this a long time ago, understood that once he was old enough that it didn't matter who he dated it wouldn't be a secret anymore and they could have a normal life; but there was always something. There was always a reason why it wasn't the right time, and eventually it seemed like they'd passed the point where it could be explained away. He watched the public cover become more and more authentic, watched her walk around his house like she owned it, felt the resentment stirring and stirring inside him and now he stood and listened as Pete offered away their together time, promised to take her on the vacation that Patrick could never have because it would seem 'weird' and 'people would start asking questions'.

He knew, as he watched Pete throwing clothes into his case, that there was nothing he could say to change the outcome. Pete was taking her to Cabo and Patrick was going to stay home and work on those production demos. But as he stood in the kitchen and listened to the front door slam as Pete left, he felt some defiant pride in the knowledge that in the guestroom was a suitcase of his own, already packed, and once he knew that they'd be too far away to run back for a forgotten phone charger, he'd be heading to LAX for the next flight home.

They'd decided to be extravagant and fly the nearly twenty-four hour journey in first class, because Joe was a little worried he'd get DVT if he wasn't comfortable and because the staff and passengers in that section were far more discreet. It wasn't that he minded, he'd have been perfectly happy to tell anyone who had questions exactly what the deal was, but he could feel the tension in Patrick's shoulders as he slung an arm around them in the tunnel onto the plane. He wasn't going to make him confront his anxieties before they'd even set foot on the jet.

The first thing they did when they arrived at the resort was to go directly to bed. The whole journey had been exhausting, but they'd barely slept, even in the luxurious surroundings. It was lunchtime when they arrived, and dark when they awoke, nestled together under the mosquito net and nothing else. Joe ushered Patrick out on to their veranda, in search of food at the late night bar down the beach, but they'd slept longer than either of them realised. Out across the water, the sun was beginning to push its first warm fingers over the horizon.

"Wow," Patrick whispered, wrapping his arms around himself and leaning under Joe's in the early morning nip. "Why did you even come home, dude?"

Joe smiled and kissed his temple, hair tousled from sleep and no hat at this hour to get in his way. "Even paradise kind of gets old on your own."

Instead of dinner, they settled for breakfast, watched the rest of the resort begin to come to life - first the birds and the macaques outside the resort fences, then the other holidaymakers, in sarongs and ugly shorts, stumbling their way out onto the sand. While everyone else began their day, Joe led Patrick back along the beach and into their cabin to try to get him to enjoy it before it was too hot for his fair skin to bear.

It became a routine, while they were there - they'd stay awake late and rise early, napping in the shade on their veranda in the middle of the day, and eating at the tiny restaurants dotted around the resort in the evenings. Occasionally, they'd make their way into the small town along the coast and enjoy something less primed for their appreciation, and walk back in the dark, hands clasped together as they watched small fishing boats with swinging lanterns bob on the water.

"Must've been pretty hard to be depressed in a place like this," Patrick told him, contemplatively, as they sat themselves down on the white sand outside their little bamboo hut, strings of lights in arching lines between the trees behind them.

"It was… really not at all hard," Joe informed him, reaching out and pulling at the wrist looped around Patrick's knees so he could retrieve his hand and hold it tight. "I wasn't on vacation, dude, I was kind of in hiding."

"No, but I mean…" Patrick gave a little, guilty laugh. "I don't know. It's stupid, sorry."

"Dude, it was basically the worst time ever. Being here, watching all these couples being romantic and enjoying themselves… it fucking sucked, honestly. I just spent every night thinking that you were probably with Pete and how I wished that, like… you weren't. It was fucking dumb, because you didn't even know where I was, but I kept kind of hoping that one day I'd wake up and they'd call me up to reception and you'd be there, or something…"

The fingers around his grew tight and then loose as Patrick pulled them away and rubbed at his nose. "You don't have any idea - you don't. I would've done anything for that to be what happened."

"I know, dude," Joe nodded, looking over at him, using his newly-released hand to stroke the back of Patrick's neck. "I know that now, but back then…"

"It hurt. Like, a lot . It hurt a lot, when you left. It seems kind of dumb, now, because you're here and I'm here and everything's so, so great, but you don't - I'm not saying this is your fault, but - you don't know how much I loved you even then, and you thought I'd be better off with fucking Pete . Pete."

"You and Pete, though -" He stopped himself. He'd learned too much about Patrick and Pete in the last couple of years for that to be enough. "I made a mistake, I know I did, and I know I made us both feel really, really shitty in a way we didn't need to - but if I'd stayed… do you think that, like, we'd be where we are now?"

Patrick shrugged a little and played with fingersful of sand while he thought about it. "I want to think that we would, because I just… It was already two years for me, y'know? You made me realise that what I had with him was - to use your own words - a fucking 'sham', but you did that way earlier than you knew, because when we were in England… when you were there for me, you were a better boyfriend for me than he'd ever been. I just… the whole thing was that I never thought I even stood a chance with you, I thought - "

"I didn't think I had a chance with you , dude," Joe cut in, wanting Patrick to believe him, to really understand how infatuated he'd been. "I was on the other side of this - I wasn't just into my friend, I was completely in love with someone I had to watch get screwed over by my other best friend. Anything I said to show you - I mean, even telling you he was a jerk was kind of betraying my friend, but telling you because I was in love with you ever since then, that was just… it was betraying this guy who was like my big brother, basically. Someone I knew was a total fucking mess but basically got me the famous band I told him I wanted to be in when I was fourteen… And after that week when he took her on vacation and you actually chose to come home and hang out with me, and this whole thing started… It didn't matter that it was something we'd both wanted for a long, long time, or that what he was doing to you was sketchy as fuck on its own - I was just this piece of shit who was sleeping with you behind his back. But after he found out, I thought, 'Well, maybe he'll change', you know? I thought you needed him more than you needed me, and that all our friends would keep on doing their thing. I was just replaceable. To you, to him - to everybody. That's how it felt."

"You weren't, though -"

"Sure, but that wasn't what I felt . It was never that I didn't want to be with you, or that I thought that, like, I was giving you back to him or something lame. I thought if I took myself out of that whole thing I'd stop ruining everybody's lives… I thought you'd be better off if I left. Happier."

There was a stiffness in Patrick's incredulous shake of the head. He pushed his hands into the sand again, but this time to shift them side to side, to lean into his shoulder, clasping Joe's hand in both of his.

"I'm sorry I left you behind. You don't know what I'd do to take it back, but if I hadn't… if the band had kind of carried on… probably the tension and stuff would have ended this, too. You know there was no way he could let us be happy together, right?"

Patrick nodded. "I know he wouldn't. Of course he couldn't do that, he's a self-centred asshole, he could never -"

"I mean, I couldn't totally blame him for that part, but…"

For a few moments, they sat in silence, listening to the gentle lapping of the water on the shore, but then Patrick spoke again, softly. "You wanna hear something extremely pathetic?"

"Sure, why not? I feel like we've crossed that whole boundary now, anyway…"

"I told a flight attendant you were my boyfriend, once. Like, way, way before any of this started."

There was a hot wave that ran from Joe's stomach, all the way through to his face and broke out of him in a little, delighted giggle. "You did?"

"Yeah… I mean, it wasn't like I pressed the call button to announce that we were fake dating or anything, but it was one of those things where we'd been to like New York or someplace, and we were the only ones going home, so when she came round and you were asleep on my shoulder - she was a little older, so I guess she wouldn't have known us, right? - and she said something like, 'Would your partner like a coffee, too, sir?' and I just looked at you and you were completely out for the count, and you had your headphones in anyway, so I just said, 'No, he's good,' and she carried on. But then, later, you went to the restroom and she was handing out coffees again, and I said to her, 'Could I have one for my boyfriend, too, please? He'll be right back.' And she did. She really thought we were dating for that one flight, and I got off on that so hard, y'know? Like, emotionally speaking."

Joe found himself trying to smother his chuckles, eyes closed tight and his arm tighter around Patrick's shoulder. "You're so weird… Couldn't you have just, like, jerked off with one of my shirts like a normal dude, or something?"

Patrick was laughing by then, too, gentle hics against his shoulder, face tilted to nuzzle into his neck. "I did that, too. Once. On the bus. Pete had pissed me off, I think, and I just…"

He was laughing too hard to finish the sentence and they laid there for a long time, under the stars, giggling and cuddling on the sand until Patrick fell asleep and Joe stayed there, watching the sky and the water and cataloguing in his mind all the things he'd have changed if he could. There weren't many, but the one he knew he'd have done differently was to not share his new buddy with Pete when he was sixteen years old. Even if he'd been too awkward in his skin back then to know what he knew now, at least he would have saved them all the trauma. And who knew? Maybe if this was how things were supposed to work out, then maybe they would have, anyway.

He shut himself in his room at the front of the bus, when everyone left, curled up on the floor behind the bed where he could reach the outlet to keep his phone charged, shaking uncontrollably. His head was swimming, he was so overwhelmed with worry that he felt like he was going to puke. He didn't understand - a few hours ago, everything had seemed fine. He was the happiest he'd been in a long time. He'd even been home and told his mom his news, seen the relief on her face that the whole thing with Pete was done and that he'd chosen to be with someone she knew and liked and trusted. But suddenly, Joe was gone - just gone with his things, and a bunch of notes all that was left behind. 

There was a fear inside of him, that twisted the air out of his chest and left him struggling to breathe. They'd sent out a search party - walking along the lake, going to places that they knew were familiar and important to him, going back to his house to check if he'd just gone home… 'He took his stuff,' at least three of them had said - he hadn't really noticed who -  'He wouldn't take his stuff if he wasn't planning on using it.' He knew what they were implying, trying to reassure him, but it really only made him worry more, because suddenly that seemed like a possibility.

"You hear anything?"

The sound of the voice in the doorway raised his hackles, a snarl away from lashing out. 

"Get out. I don't want you here." 

Pete had caused this. In Patrick's stupidity, he'd fallen for the neediness, the same pitiful act he already knew, and he'd spent the last few days trying so, so hard to fix things. He'd spent time following him around, trying to make opportunities for them to talk or at least be civil, so they could salvage something from it all. And he'd done it at Joe's expense, when they were just starting to make something out of the ashes, when he should have been working on their budding relationship - been protecting what they had, what he'd wished he could have for so long, instead of rebuilding something new with the person who'd ruined his life.

Pete didn't leave - he didn't even acknowledge the statement.

"What did he say? In your note, or whatever." He didn't even wait for Patrick to answer. "'Cause in mine, he said, we should work things out."

"I said get out ."

The bed creaked as Pete crawled on to it, stretching out in Patrick's space like it belonged to him. And that was it, wasn't it? Pete thought everything was for him. That he was the centre of everything, and everyone else just lived in his world. 

"Maybe he's right, kind of? He said he doesn't 'want this to ruin everything for everybody' and that we can't throw away a good thing. I mean… it'd take a lot more for me to forgive what you did, kind of, because you fucking cheated on me , but… What we had worked out for five years. It's not like she knows anything, we can carry on like we did before and I could like, think about forgiving you or something, maybe… But you're gonna have to get fucking used to dealing with the fact that to get what we want, you need to make sacrifices. He knew that we've got something he couldn't compete with - that the way things were was the way it had to be - but he'll never get you like I do. I mean, you were feeling kind of low about everything and the little creep was ready to take advantage of that. Obviously, he was right about how nobody needs him anyway, right? It's not like he contrib-"

Patrick didn't remember turning and he didn't remember making a decision to strike out, but the back of his hand had connected with Pete's lip at the knuckle. He had the gall to look shocked for a moment, before starting to push himself off his elbow. He opened his mouth to spit a reply, but Patrick couldn't bear to let him say it; didn't want to hear his voice. Before either of them knew it, he was pinning Pete down on the bed, one hand pressing him into the pillow by the throat, the other colliding with his face two or three or several times - until it hurt to keep going and Pete was intermittently dragging at the hand on his windpipe and sending flailing punches back at him.

He was choked as the words poured out of him, his cheek throbbing where one of Pete's blows must've connected. He released him just enough to gasp some air, but didn't let him go, he just leaned in a little closer, looking him in the eye and hoping the sheer contempt he felt was demonstrated there. "If lose him - I swear to God, Pete, if I lose him…" He wanted so desperately to cry as the reality of what had happened rolled through him. Joe was gone. He'd left him, because of Pete - because Patrick had prioritised Pete, who had done nothing but hurt him and hurt him for years, while Joe had done nothing but try to protect him and support him and had been so loyal to Pete he'd tried to refuse everything he'd said he'd wanted for years, for the sake of protecting Pete.

"Too fucking late," Pete rasped, glaring up at him but no longer fighting. "So, what now?"

What now, was Patrick sliding off the bed, broken, back to the floor to pick up his phone and yank the charger from the outlet, pulling himself to his feet heavily and snatching up his bag. He made for the door, leaving Pete coughing on the bed behind him. He didn't know where he was going, but he knew he was leaving and he knew this was the end. It was done. Everything. And he didn't look back.

He walked out of the bus and out of the backstage compound, nodding jerkily at the venue security guy he had to get to unlock the gate, when he asked if he was okay. He wasn't okay, but he was better. Better for having released some of the tight anxiety and fear stored up in his chest and for giving Pete a tiny bit of what he deserved and for escaping the claustrophobia of the bus, into the warm Chicago night.

He tried calling Joe's number as he walked out of the planetarium grounds and into Grant Park. It had been turned off a long time ago, but he was desperate to hear his voice. He hung up and called again after the answerphone greeting, sinking onto a bench and pulling his rucksack onto his lap, one arm hugging it to himself.

He left another message, this time - he wasn't sure how many there had been, but he'd texted, too, hoping that Joe would read those, even if he wouldn't listen to his voicemail.

"H-hey, it's… me. It's Patrick. Joe, where are you? Can you… could you just let me know you're -" his voice cracked and he took a shuddering, painful breath "- that you're safe? Please? If… if you changed your mind, about me, or - or us - then…" The thought of it crumpled him around his bag, biting his lip hard to try not to give in to the pain than seemed to be running through every part of him, deep loss and rejection coursing into all of his body through his bloodstream. He couldn't contain a heartbroken choke. "Can we maybe talk, a little bit? I don't wanna do this. I love you, I want you to come home and - please, please come home. Please come home. I don't care about Pete, I don't want to be with him, Joe, I don't want to give him any more chances, because he's the biggest mistake I ever made. It should've been you. It should always have been you and I just… I thought you felt... Please. Please just talk to me. Even just to let me know you're okay, because…" The thought that he might not be okay, that it might be too late, pushed him beyond the limits of composure, and he squeezed his fingers into the corners of his eyes, trying desperately to be quiet. "I'm so afraid I lost you, and if I did… then…"

It was too much and he couldn't contain it anymore. He moved the phone away from his face, for a moment, not wanting to make Joe feel bad if this was just the decision he had to make. When he'd pushed his urge to sob down far enough, he finished with, "Please. Please call me. I just want to talk. I love you."

He sat on that bench until the sun came up, not knowing what else to do, and watched it rising over the water in the distance, hardly moving although the early morning had gotten cold and he was wearing only a t-shirt and hoodie. It was almost nice to feel a different sort of pain, after a while. 

Joe hadn't called. 

Andy had. Patrick hadn't answered it, just stared numbly at the phone, because somehow he knew that he wasn't calling to say they'd found him. And eventually his phone battery gave out, leaving him to fear that Joe would call and Patrick wouldn't be there to help him when he needed it most. He knew he should find a place where he could charge his phone, but he couldn't bring himself to move. What if Joe had no battery, either? What if he was looking for him? At least, out here, they stood a chance of running into each other.

It was Andy who found Patrick, still sitting on the bench, curled around himself.

"I have a little news," he said, perching on the far end, carefully, and Patrick felt his eyelids slide closed against what he was suddenly sure Andy would say. His breath starting to vanish from his lungs. "It's good news, I think? Apparently Joe texted Sam, last night. Dan got a hold of his dad, and there was a text to say he's fine, he just went away. They don't know why. But they think he's okay. And that's something, right?"

The relief, the crashing wave of reassurance, took down all of his remaining composure, and Andy moved closer, silently, pulling him in to lean on his shoulder. Afterwards, he let Patrick go, promising not to say where he went, on the condition that Patrick called him later, after he'd had some sleep.

He checked himself into a hotel nearby, that night. Overlooking Navy Pier and the sun over the water, and he fell asleep in his clothes, on top of the covers, when he couldn't hold his eyes open any longer to watch for his phone to ring.

He waited and waited for it to - trying, occasionally, over the next couple of weeks, hoping there would be some moment when the voice on the line wasn't pre-recorded - but there was never any answer. 

Joe was listening to the latest Anthrax demos in their little studio lounge, at full volume, grinning to himself as he absently fretted out the chords by ear, when Patrick snuck in. The music was loud enough that he could have cantered in on a palomino, and Joe probably would still have been surprised at the arms slipping around his chest and the chin propped on his head, but his jump and the accidental headbutt on the chin made them both giggle and he set down his SG to let Patrick perch on his knee, instead.

"Wow. It's very… um…"

"Metal?"

"Yes. Yes, it is exactly 'very metal'."

He reached out for the volume control and turned it down enough that they could talk. "Scott sent me some stuff he's been working on - thought I might be into it."

"It seems… a lot like something you'd be into," Patrick grinned, kissing him on the forehead.

"It's Scott fucking Ian. He could send me a playlist of his farts and I'd be into it."

It made him smile to see the scrunched nose of amused distaste on Patrick's face; he'd never been into crude humour, not even when they were kids. 

"It's pretty cool, though, I mean - my dad listened to this stuff when I was a little kid, and now the best rhythm guitarist on the planet's sending me his shit, dude, and I can't even, like…" He hesitated, not sure if now was a good time to share the other incredibly cool thing he'd received from Scott, but not wanting to keep it from him, either. "I can't think of anything cooler, than kind of like, playing with him …"

"Well, why don't you ask him?" Patrick shrugged, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to ask someone you'd idolised since you were eight if they wanted to jam with you. But then, people were already asking him to work with them, producing or guesting or co-writing, and he'd turned most of them down because he wasn't really ready to put his name back out there, but it meant he was way more used to this stuff. By the time the band had ended, Joe was still too insecure to easily show the rest of them what he wrote when he was left to his own devices.

The thing was, Scott had actually beaten him to it. He'd heard some of the stuff Joe had been putting together, quietly, just for his own amusement. And there had been an email, short and to the point - a lot like Scott himself - That's good stuff, kid. You should do something with it. It put a couple of ideas in mind, if you want to work through something.

He'd forwarded it to his dad, in the end, asking for his verdict on whether that meant what it sounded like it meant. His father didn't curse much, but he'd learned some interesting words to respond to the email with.

"Actually, it's kind of funny you should say that…"

"Yeah?"

"I think he, like… I think he wants to actually work on some of the stuff I sent him, with me."

Patrick almost slid off of his lap in his gleeful effort to throw both arms around his neck. "That's so fucking cool !"

Joe felt himself blushing a little with pride, tightening his grip around Patrick's ribs and nodding against his arm. "Yeah. It kind of is."

"You're gonna do it, right?"

"Well… I'd like to, but I just didn't want you to think that… I mean, we kind of said we'd work on some stuff, didn't we, and I just didn't want it to seem that I was blowing you off, or anything, basically."

For a fraction of a second, he felt Patrick tense, and then shift himself so he was astride Joe's lap on the leather recording desk chair, which spun to the side a little as he dropped his weight onto his thighs and looped his wrists behind his neck. "Okay. So, here's the thing, and I kind of… I didn't know if this actually was the thing, but I think it kind of is, and I hope you kind of know where I'm coming from on this, but… I am so not upset about you wanting to do something like this, y'know, because…" He paused and took a breath, resolutely looking Joe in the eye like he was about to say something that would devastate both of them, and Joe tried hard not to laugh at it. "The thing is, I spent a long time writing for other people, doing what other people - " Pete "- thought would sell records, and I don't know if I really want to compromise, right now, y'know? I wouldn't wanna work on stuff with you and have you feeling like you had to waste the first chance you had to do this whole thing on sounding how I wanted… and I'll never write like Slash, y'know? I mean, I obviously could, but… I don't want to."

Joe nodded at him soberly. "You could most definitely out-Slash Slash, I'm pretty sure, but like… the last thing I want is to make you do stuff you don't want to."

"I know. I know, and that's… it means a lot to me, y'know?"

"It's not a big deal, but whatever makes you happy, basically. I mean, we don't have to never, ever work together if it's something we're into later, but I think it'd be… kind of healthy… to sort of like, do our own thing a little bit. For a while. But if you ever need a session guy when you're super famous like fucking Elton John or somebody, I'm down for that. Gotta earn the housekeeping somehow, right?"

Patrick laughed at him, relieved, and bumped their foreheads together, clunking two pairs of glasses into the bridges of both their noses. "Ow. Sorry."

"Now I have your face print on my lenses, you jerk," Joe grumbled, but he kissed him anyway. Patrick was forever nuzzling his face into Joe's glasses and he got through bottles of cleanser in days, getting them smudge-free again.

"Sorry," Patrick pouted a little, trying to take them off to clean them on his t-shirt, but Joe swatted his hand away.

"Dude, are you trying to make it worse?"

"Maybe I'm just hoping if you can't see anything your eye won't wander to some other metal dude in, like, leather pants and no shirt or something."

Joe snorted at the idea of it - the last thing he'd be interested in was someone who wore clothes that couldn't be washed. "Sure, Iggy Pop is totally gonna be there. I feel like I'd have to be blind to be into that in the first place, dude." He pulled his glasses off completely and steered the chair around a little so he could reach the clear area of desk to the right, then carefully took Patrick's glasses off and laid them beside his own.

"Oh?" Patrick asked, quirking an eyebrow, and Joe got it, even though it wasn't a real question.

" Oh, yeah ."

He emailed Scott back, later, when Patrick had done his buttons back up and gone back into the house, deleting and re-writing the reply a few times before he finally settled on his answer, still worried that he'd seem like an over enthusiastic fanboy.

Sure. He wrote. You can only improve the damned things.

"What're you doing, Cookie?" Pete's voice asked, the sound of a fridge door slamming behind him. "You've been on it all day, man, I'm not getting any fucking attention, what gives?"

"Writing," Patrick shrugged back at him, hunched over his notebook, hoping to shield the words from Pete's view, self-consciously. He hated anyone seeing what he was working on before it was finished.

"What for? I've got that, dude, you know that."

"It's not… I wasn't writing for the band, I was just writing. For me. Is that okay, or…?"

He could feel Pete behind him as he sat at the table to the side of the living area, overlooking the recently paved-and-pooled garden that he hadn't been consulted on. Reflexively, he closed his pad and pressed his hand down on it a little harder, to make it less easy to grab away, but it wasn't enough.

"Lunchbox…" Pete's voice was weary and exasperated and patronisingly fond as he flicked it open and scanned the pages; Patrick exhaled tensely, through his nose, trying not to grit his teeth. "Dude, seriously, this isn't what you're best at, yeah? It's not worth your time, right now. We have an album to write, right? You're the music guy, or whatever, and I'm the words guy. You don't need to do this stuff."

"Pete, I just said - "

"Yeah, I know," Pete said, running a hand over his shoulder and into the collar of his t-shirt, leaning down next to his ear, his voice growing quiet. "I just don't want you working too hard when you don't need to, kind of."

"I'm not working too hard, I'm just writing some ideas, Pete, c'mon. Don't you have a meeting in like ten minutes, forty minutes' drive away?"

He saw Pete shrug in the reflection on the wide wall of glass. "Yeah, but time is a fucking construct, right?"

Patrick took another careful, even breath and didn't point out that this seemed to support his point more than Pete's. "Do you want a ride, or something?"

Pete laughed and straightened up, leaning back down to kiss him on top of the head, winding a finger in a lock just behind Patrick's ear. "Not right now," he told him. "I'm late, remember?"

Patrick hmmed and nodded, as Pete picked up his keys and a completely unnecessary hoodie, because lately it seemed like even when they had all the time in the world Pete didn't have time for that. He'd much rather sit in the cinema room, where they couldn't cuddle into the same seat, and play Xbox or watch movies. And those nights were great, in their own way, because they'd talk, often. It felt like hanging out with his best friend, putting the whole world to rights. But it also felt like that was all they were, and he'd go to bed when the sun came up and leave Pete on his second-rewatch of The Outsiders. And sometimes, he'd text Joe and wait for him to answer that Patrick should be asleep, just because it was nice to know he was thinking of him.

Watching Patrick on his own stage, doing his adorable, white James Brown thing and looking like he'd been hatched from a Bowie egg and raised by a pre-creepy Michael Jackson, couldn't have made Joe more proud. He could remember clearly the way he used to shake and bury his face in Pete's collar before they went on stage, ten years ago. How he barely had the confidence to look at the audience, back then, and now Joe got to watch him dance, pretty sure that at least half the crowd was convinced he was eye-fucking them personally.

He wasn't jealous. It was hilarious and endearing and even if there were some selfish shitheads who felt the need to try to ruin it for him, he could see how much being out there on his own was forcing him to learn to be confident. 

He stood on the side of the stage, hood up and mostly out of view, not wanting anyone to notice him and distract from the moment, but he could still see a few girls in the front standing on tiptoes to get a better look, seeing if it was possible that Joe was there. They got their answer at the stage door, afterwards. Patrick paused to take a deep breath and put on his affable grin, even though he was tired, and Joe followed him out, hanging back a little while he scribbled on copies of his album.

"Hey, is that Joe?" one of them asked, looking over his shoulder.

"It is," Patrick laughed. "Has it been that long, or is he just that hairy?"

The girl didn't even react to the question. Instead, she yelled Joe's name far louder than she needed to, and beckoned him over. He could hardly ignore her, it'd just seem rude, so he sauntered over and said hi, shook some hands, signed a couple of items of clothing because no one had a copy of Ironiclast, because why would they? It was Patrick's show. He'd trailed Joe all around Europe in the last couple of months, at the start of summer, and now it was his turn.

"What're you doing here?" a different girl asked. She didn't seem to have taken her eyes off him since he walked over and it was starting to get unnerving.

"Hanging out, my dude."

"Yeah, but I mean…?"

Patrick gave a light, breathy laugh and reached out to give him a one-armed hug. "He's being an awesome, supportive friend."

Joe dropped an arm around his shoulders, loosely, testing his boundaries - hyper-aware of the 'friend' statement. There hadn't been many opportunities for them to be out in public together, around this corner of their fragmented fanbase, in years. "Yup. I'm a great 'friend' apparently. I definitely go way above and beyond. And under." He didn't think they'd pick up on his choice of words, but that Patrick would - only two of the girls turned away from them a little and started whispering. He let go as gracefully as he could.

"Okay, fine," Patrick laughed, easy and bright, like Joe's tease belied his indignation and it tickled him, "you're a great, supportive boyfriend, God ."

Joe could feel his face rush with warmth as one of the girls nearly yelled, " Excuse me? Are you fucking kidding?!"

Patrick just grinned at her and looked away to pick up someone's cap to scrawl on. He didn't acknowledge it any further or repeat it, even in the face of a barrage of questions. Joe took his lead and started asking questions about a girl's pin badges to try to change the subject. It didn't entirely work, and they politely escaped to the bus and their room in the front, where Patrick collapsed on his back on the bed, chuckling to himself.

"So, I guess we're out, now," Joe said, slumping down next to him with a heavy sigh. He may only be 27, but his bones were telling him he was getting old and he wasn't going to argue.

"We'll see," Patrick shrugged, turning his head, the remnants of stage make up still visible under the creases of his eyes, this close, even after a shower. They were almost nose to nose, and Joe leaned in, reaching out his pursed lips to kiss him lightly. "Do you mind?"

"Nope," Joe shrugged back at him. "A little notice would've been good, but like, at least those ladies know that it doesn't matter how much twerking you're doing in the show, your ass is already spoken for."

He grinned at the half-amused, half-offended hum of laughter that rolled into a giggle, and Patrick flung himself heavily onto his side to wrap an arm across Joe's chest and snuggle up next to him. 

"There is one thing, actually," Joe told him, after a few moments, folding the arm that Patrick was laying on so he could fiddle with his hair. "Can I not be your 'boyfriend'? It makes me feel like we're fourteen and my mom's gonna tease me when I ask to go over your house."

Patrick squeezed him and rubbed his nose under Joe's jaw, softly. "What do you wanna be?"

"Well, like, 'partner' feels like what adults have. Doesn't it? We've been doing this whole thing for sort of like, four years."

"That works," Patrick told him. He gave another small, tired chuckle and added, "For now."

"For now?" Joe asked, quirking a tired brow. "You gonna give me my papers, or something?"

"Oh, yes. Yes, I'm trading you in for someone less sarcastic."

"Well, I call dibs on the ottoman. You can have that shitty writing desk."

"I thought you liked the writing desk?" Patrick asked, lifting his head to look at him, surprised. 

"You liked the writing desk, I just like making you do the dumb happy face. That desk has taken out my pinkie toe like four times, already. Safe to say, me and the writing desk are not bros."

" Aw . I was right, you are a good boyfriend. Partner." 

"I am the very fucking best boyfriend-partner. So, you think about that before you junk me, dude."

Patrick was quiet for a minute, and Joe turned to look at him, concerned that he'd missed the jest in his argument. He was nibbling his lip a little, brows contemplatively low, and Joe almost apologised, but Patrick cut him off.

"So, I was thinking." He stopped without elaborating. 

"Yeah?"

"I mean, we're doing a bunch of our own things, right now, which is, y'know: awesome. But like, we're gonna eventually plan in some time for the important stuff, right?"

Joe blinked at him. Aside from being glad that Patrick didn't seem serious about leaving him, he wasn't totally sure what important stuff Patrick meant. The uncertainty must have shown on his face, because Patrick's face fell a little.

"Like… well, this is great and everything, and I am seriously enjoying all of this stuff and, y'know, our life and all of… that."

"But?"

"There's just… more to life than having a nice house and a job, y'know? And I know that when we were doing the band, that was kind of all we ever got time for, so I just wanted to be sure. That, y'know - that we're gonna make time. For the other things. We won't just… keep on keeping on and waste all the good years, y'know?"

It dawned on Joe, then, what Patrick was getting at. They'd talked about it before, loosely, and he knew that they both had ideas about the whole thing, but he hadn't realised that Patrick was actively thinking about how they'd make it a reality. "You mean for, like, kids?"

"I'm not saying right now , y'know? But. Yeah."

"Oh, then yeah, of course. I mean, did you have like, plans or something? You're not pregnant, are you?"

"No, I'm - now I see why you got an F in biology - no, but… I kind of wanted to get all our various waterfowl in a row, before we do."

"Right." Joe took a deep breath and detached himself from Patrick to shift so they could both sit up, legs crossed, tugging at him until he copied. "Right, so, let's just… figure it out. It'll be kind of written-on-a-napkin quality, right now, but let's do the thing."

"Seriously?" Patrick asked, but he was already kicking off his shoes and scrambling to sit up.

They didn't really sleep that night - it was already getting light when they tugged the blanket over themselves and yawned into each other's shoulders, settling down to get a couple of hours in before the bus parked up again. Nothing was really finalised, none of it was set in stone, but they knew what they agreed on, and what they'd have to think through - and they knew what their priorities were, what order they wanted to do things in. And there was something important that they needed to do first.

Patrick had been kind of ready for people to ask the same, obvious questions over and over, after they posted their video, shortly after his solo tour ended. He'd been prepared for the flak that Joe thought he was shielding him from by only telling him the nice stuff that people said on Twitter, as if he couldn't just log in and read the truth for himself.

He hadn't been ready for the fact that the person asked about it the most, by the media, was Pete. 

It angered him, the first time. 'Did you know that there was a secret romance happening within the band, back then?'

"I feel like I knew way earlier than I thought I knew, kind of. Sometimes, people aren't who you want to think they are."

Joe had confiscated his laptop and phone for an hour, after that particular post surfaced on TMZ, so that they didn't have to go out and buy him new ones. By the time he'd given them back, with a tender kiss on the forehead, the speculation was already halfway out of control.

They'd sat together, when they got home from tour, after their Big Talk, and scripted what they wanted to tell people: this is us, we're doing good, we don't want to be dishonest to the people who support us and we don't want to live secretively by choice when a lot of people like us don't have that luxury.

There were already people making that same decision - people the world cared about way more than they cared about either Patrick or Joe, probably - so, in a way, they were just adding their voices to the others; using their platform the way they felt they should, and taking the opportunity to start afresh. Because they'd agreed on that - right from the start, almost viscerally - if they were going to do this, if they were bringing kids into the world or taking on kids who needed a loving home, they couldn't do it if they were always afraid of people finding out the truth. And the truth would get harder and harder to keep hidden, with kindergarten and tours and all of the other stuff that took up their time. It'd shape them as a family, and the shape Patrick wanted for them was gentle and well-rounded and wholesome.

It didn't matter that they'd also agreed that they weren't totally prepared for kids yet. They both still had a lot to do - musical oats that needed sowing, a house that needed extending, because they were too happy to leave it all for the sake of an extra bedroom or two - and they figured that maybe they could make the most of the next couple of years. Because it wouldn't be long before they were old news, and the older the news, the less people would be interested when their family finally did grow a little.

It was hard to forget, though, when he turned on the TV and saw Pete on the screen, how he'd asked so many times to just let it all go - how much he'd wanted to just tell everyone what he'd believed himself: we're together and we're happy and that's all that matters. And how Pete had always explained so patiently that there was too much riding on their availability. On the endless will they / won't they in gossip inches about who Pete was or wasn't dating and the speculation from corners of their fanbase, which they fuelled with cynical double-bluffs but could never reveal the truth about.

And it made him mad because for all the time Pete refused to talk openly about their relationship, he seemed to have plenty to say now, when it was none of his business.

"If he's so hung up on people being fucking honest , maybe I'll help him the fuck out!"

"Help yourself out, dude: let it go."

"I would! But look at this crap - this isn't his fucking story, Joe!"

Joe just shrugged at him. "To me, it kind of sounds like whatever he thinks they wanna hear isn't actually our story, either."

It took them both by surprise when Andy called, late on a Thursday night, and said, "Put E! News on." It already sounded like he was pinching the bridge of his nose.

He knew that Andy wasn't hearing from Pete as often as he used to, lately; then barely at all, while he spent weekends in their house, putting together tracks for The Damned Things. They'd drifted, he said, people grew out of each other and for all the years they'd been friends, he still cared for him - still wanted him to be happy and safe - they just didn't have as much in common, these days, and they lived almost a whole country apart.

"You didn't know?" Joe asked, as the rolling news recap played clips of Pete and his Barbie doll with torn photo graphics superimposed on top, the word 'DIVORCED' plastered over the whole, horrible mess.

"He hasn't returned my calls in months."

"Well. I mean, I guess it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy." The sarcasm in his voice was tinged with a smug, vindictive spite that even Joe didn't like to hear. He scrambled with the remote, trying to change the station before Patrick could see, as he walked back in from the bathroom, but he wasn't fast enough.

"What was that?"

"Uh - it's not a big deal, it's just…"

"Tell him," Andy huffed in his ear. "He's gonna find out, just tear off the bandaid."

"I don't -"

"Joe?" 

He looked worried; Joe could see the pulse in his throat throbbing hard, a clear sign that his anxiety was rising. It didn't make sense to worry him more than he needed to be.

"Pete's getting a divorce."

There was a momentary, fleeting frown which flitted across Patrick's face, and Joe watched it knowing that this could be a weak point. A set back. Not for their relationship, but for Patrick, because there were old habits that were deeply ingrained in him, that he hadn't had to confront, yet.

"Oh." He adjusted his glasses a little and almost reached for his phone, but stopped, pulling back his hand and looking up at Joe uncertainly. "Is that Andy?"

Joe nodded. 

"So, what did Pete tell him? Is he…? Does he seem okay, or…?"

"He didn't speak to him, he just saw it on the celeb news thing."

"Has anybody spoken with him?"

"Patrick's asking if anybody has spoken with him," Joe relayed.

"Not that I know of," Andy said, wearily. "I'm gonna try to call. Leave me to deal with it, I'll let you know if I hear anything. I just thought you oughta know."

"Yeah," he sighed, watching as Patrick did pull out his phone this time and then sank onto the couch, staring at it. Pete's phone number wasn't even in there, anymore. "Call me if you get any news, dude."

Carefully, Joe ended the call and crouched down in front of him, knees creaking, each of his hands resting on Patrick's thighs to steady himself. He tried to catch his gaze, but Patrick kept it fixed, deliberately, on the handset.

"Andy's on it."

He nodded stiffly. 

"There's no real detail. For all we know, it might have been Pete's decision, or something. He's probably fine."

"And what if he's not?" Patrick asked. "He can't deal - we don't even know who his friends are, now. Andy won't get anywhere and if he can't, who will?"

"Dude - he got all of our friends out of this fucking mess, I'm pretty sure someone'll be looking out for him. He's always surrounded himself with people ready to do anything for him - he's not gonna be lonely, I'm pretty sure." He reached out, gently cupping his cheek to encourage Patrick to look at him. "I know it feels like it, and it's pretty shitty news for anybody, but his happiness isn't your problem, anymore."

"It is my problem. He's my problem, right? Him, and all the fucked up stuff that happened - it's all my 'problem' - and I'm programmed to let it be my problem, basically forever. I've been in therapy for fucking years! When am I ever gonna be able to live my life and not be waiting for him to have a crisis, where I'm thinking, 'Is this it? Is this the time when nobody fucking finds him?'"

Joe sighed and shifted until he was kneeling, and leaned in little, so that their foreheads were pressed together. "It's fucked up, and I know it's fucking stressful, but you can call Conway tomorrow, book in an extra session or something, yeah? Hash things out a little with her. Andy's gonna deal with Pete. If you want me to, I can call Gabe, see what he knows."

Sighing, Patrick sat up and shook his head. "No… No. You're right, we should wait. See what Andy hears."

They sat up late, that night, waiting to hear from Andy. They put a movie on the TV, but neither of them was really watching it, they just sat, tucked into the corner of the couch like one of Patrick's cushions. They'd talked about it, but they also kind of hadn't - scratched the surface of the problem - because they both knew, for all the optimism that Joe tried to peddle, that this had the potential to unravel Pete completely. They had a kid - a real life together, of the kind that Pete would never have had with Patrick. Despite the shitty way in which they'd started, this was the kind of serious relationship they'd all assumed had calmed him down. So, for that to be gone, they both knew posed a risk.

It was a little after 2.15am when Andy finally called.

"He's fine. Well… not fine , but he's got it covered. Gabe's been down a few days, recently. Travie's down now - I said I'd go and hang out, when he has the space."

The sigh that Patrick huffed into Joe's chest was leaden with relief. 

"Should… Do you think I should call him? I know everything has been -"

Andy's voice was tinny over the speakerphone, but the response was clear enough. "No. The last thing he needs, right now, is a reminder of what happened with you guys. Don't call him."

"I know, but I'm just thinking that -"

"You'll just make things worse for everybody. Including yourself. You guys are done, and that's for the best, for sure, but you are done and this is not the time to play Mother Theresa. He's bummed out pretty bad, but he doesn't need you trying to save him from himself. You can't fix him, anymore."

When they went to bed, they both laid awake, staring at the ceiling. It didn't matter what Andy said, Joe knew what was running through Patrick's mind, the same thoughts on repeat. The same doubts and sense of duty that had suffocated him for the latter part of his teenage years and the start of his twenties.

"I think it's for the best, probably," Joe said softly, when he sighed heavily again, the glint of light on his eyes disappearing as they fell closed. "I bet he has a bunch of people calling, now that the news broke. Hot girls with a lot of baggage but not enough clothes, probably."

There was a reluctant smirk on Patrick's face as he leaned in and gave Joe a kiss on the cheek. "Don't be bitchy."

"I'm just saying, 'don't worry', basically. You don't owe him any sympathy. He had this amazing thing for years, and he fucked it up. He fucked you up. It's taken four years to get to where you are right now, you need to think what going back into that situation - even as a friend - would do to all the progress you made. I feel like getting you caught up in his bullshit again would be an awesome consolation prize, right now." He paused and looked over at him in the darkness. "I don't want you to be anybody's consolation prize anymore."

He felt Patrick's hand scramble for his under the covers and met him halfway, sliding their fingers to interlock and holding on.

"I'm not the prize," Patrick answered, eyes steady and sincere. "I'm the lucky dumbass who won." 

When Joe woke up, a couple of hours later, though, the bed was rumpled and empty. He laid still, in the dark, feeling his heart hammering in his chest as though he'd woken from a nightmare he had no memory of; something felt out of place. The en suite was empty, the door open and the light off, so he knew Patrick hadn't just gotten up to pee. There was a sense of dread that seemed to sink down from the ceiling, weighing on him until he felt smothered and had to sit up.

As he made his way to the stairs down to the living room, he wondered if this was how Patrick felt on those nights before he started therapy - grimly certain that he was losing everything again, powerless to stop it.

"Hon?" He could hear the shake in his voice as he called ahead of himself, not wanting to feel like he was sneaking around, trying to catch him out. "Whatcha doin'?"

Patrick didn't answer at first, and when Joe walked into the room, he almost seemed surprised to see him there, because he was too transfixed by his laptop. "Oh… you're up? Did I wake you?"

Joe made his way around the coffee table and perched on the edge of it, consciously avoiding looking at the screen - partly for Patrick's privacy and partly for his own sanity. "What're you doing up? It's like four in the morning?"

"I know… I know, I just couldn't sleep, y'know? I was just… it's nothing."

"Did you do it?" he asked, quietly, watching his face for the fleeting signs of relapse in an addict. 

"Do what?"

There was a pressed lightness in Patrick's voice, and he wasn't looking him in the eye, he kept glancing down at the screen, and Joe said nothing, waiting; Patrick knew what he was asking.

After a moment, he rubbed under his glasses and sighed wearily. "No… No, I was just… I wanted to know what they were saying, y'know? I was just being ridiculous." With embarrassed reluctance, he beckoned at Joe to move to sit beside him and turned his laptop a little so he could see it more easily. "Ridiculous and a hypocrite, right?"

When Joe shifted to the cushion beside him, reaching out to rest a grounding hand on Patrick's pyjama'd thigh, he realised what Patrick meant. On the screen in front of them was the same candy pink page that had displayed stolen pictures of them both with hand-edited white spills from their mouths and white scrawl labelling them 'down & out boys'. Only, this time, it was Pete's face on the page, the white cursor-drawn spillage being tears down his unshaven cheeks.

"I just wanted to know, y'know?"

"You think they're gonna know anything ? I mean, like, the shit they wrote about us was such crap…"

"No… no, you're right," Patrick groaned, as though he knew what kind of fool he was being, but would totally do it again. But he pulled down the screen and clicked it closed, then shuffled closer, almost ready to get up and leaned in to kiss Joe's temple. "It's just an itch and I couldn't scratch it," he said, apologetically, "so I just… I was trying anything, y'know? To tell myself he's doing okay… And I don't want you to think that this is… y’know, about wanting any of that back. I don't. I wanted you more, even when that was my life. I just feel like… Kind of like a first responder, where I know I'm retired, but I'm still trained to react a certain way, y'know? I can't stop feeling like I should intervene."

The apartment was uncomfortably quiet, but at least in the silence any sounds would be more detectable. He sat on his own, most days, on the couch outside Pete's bedroom door - just waiting for him to come out. When the car the label sent to bring them to the studio arrived, he'd knock on the door and call through, "Are you coming, today?" 

The only answer Pete would ever give was, "I have to write." 

And Joe would wait outside the door to their apartment, hands in his pockets, and walk him down to meet Andy in the lobby. Sometimes, he'd comment on Pete's absence and Patrick would be too embarrassed to say, 'Actually, Pete won't talk to me. I wake up every morning to sheets of note paper under my door, because we aren't even sleeping in the same room.'

The notes frightened him. The words on them weren't vicious and spiteful the way they had been before, they were resigned. Tired. So many of them seemed like they talked to Patrick directly, telling him, 'You don't know me. I'm not sure even I know who I am.' 

The notes frightened him because he was starting to believe it, too. 

But Joe would be there, in the studio, sitting on a chair tucked behind Neal and the technician on the desk, watching them work with the interest of an apprentice and beaming at Patrick when he nailed a take, thumbs aloft. They'd duck out for food, when they took breaks, eating In-n-Out in the parking lot, just to be outside for a little while. Joe was the tether keeping him at dock in an ocean of worry. Pete was the sea, deceptively still on the surface, but churning dangerously underneath, strong enough to drag him under or swirl into a sudden, freakish tempest a hundred feet high, with the power to shatter his wooden decks and sink him beneath the waves.

Every night, when he got home, he'd knock softly on Pete's door - tell him how the day was going, through the wood. Sometimes he'd answer, leaning against the jamb with a small, dim smile and eyes that didn't seem to shine like they used to, racooned by lack of sleep and smudges of the make up he'd taken to wearing but never washing off.

"You doing okay?" Joe had asked, fumbling for the fob that let them back into their building, one evening when they'd hit a wall and clocked off well before usual. 

"Um… yeah. Yeah, I think so." But there were already palpitations building in his chest at the thought of going back to their apartment and spending a whole evening with the monster in the closet.

Joe had just looked at him speculatively and given a slow nod. "Well, I was thinking of going out or something, maybe. If like, you wanna come."

The urge to say 'yes', to say, 'please, please get me out of this situation just for tonight' and the fantasy of going out with Joe, of it being just the two of them hanging out together, of forgetting the constant shake he had to smother so other people couldn't see how anxious he was, was a deep, lonely ache. And he said, "Maybe, but… Pete's been alone all day, I kind of feel like…"

Joe had nodded back at the bunch of keys in his hands and said, "Well, like… let me know if you change your mind, yeah?"

He had changed his mind, too, as he stood in the kitchenette and listened to the silence, after Pete had failed to even acknowledge his coming home. He'd half-run to the shower to get freshened up, afraid Joe would go before he was ready, and found his smart gingham shirt and cleanest jeans, bothered to put on some cologne for the first time in weeks, and then told Pete through the door, "I'm going out with Joe. Call his cell if you need me."

It had been nice. They were both too young to buy alcohol, still, but they sat outside a bar, eating wings and onion rings and bowls of salty fries as the December sun went down over the Pacific coast, talking and laughing until Joe's cell began to vibrate on the table.

"You could just, like… not hear it," Joe suggested, watching Patrick's eyes fall closed for a moment as he knew he was about to be summoned.

"I can't," he'd replied, reaching for the phone. "What if he needs me?"

"What can he need? He's in the apartment he -"

But Patrick had answered, and he got in a cab and left Joe there, saluting his departure with a raise of his glass and the tight expression he wore when he wasn't letting himself say what he really wanted. It had gnawed at Patrick's belly the whole way, afraid of the mess he'd find and anxious that Joe also felt abandoned and might not ask him again.

Pete was on the balcony, when he arrived, curled into the chair, watching night falling over Burbank from their high rise.

"Hey," Patrick said, gently, feeling as breathless as if he'd climbed the eleven floors, with the sudden awareness that the balcony was there at all - how far down the ground seemed. He sat down slowly on the other seat and rested his elbows on his knees. "What's going on?"

"I didn't know where you were."

"Sure you did - I was with Joe, just getting food, I didn't think you wanted to come?"

"I didn't want you to leave."

"Then why didn't you say?"

"I didn't exactly get a choice - you just left, kind of, and I needed you."

"Well, I'm here, now. And I'm sorry - I didn't… I thought you wouldn't mind."

"Yeah," Pete said, standing up and leaning over the balcony, a little more, and a little more, until Patrick's hand moved out ready to grasp at his t-shirt - stolen from the girl who wouldn't be shaken off - and then standing upright, abruptly and turning around. "I guess I mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know I'm gonna go out - meet up with some girl I've been talking to. She does TV, so..."

And Patrick had nodded, too stunned to argue, watched him grab his towel and shower, then leave with a hand snaking around his neck but not even a kiss goodbye.

It was the last time Patrick saw him, that night, and he went to bed alone. When he woke again, to Joe knocking at the apartment door, yelling that they were gonna be late, there was another piece of paper stuffed under his own. 

It read: Even when there's nothing worth living for, you're still worth lying for.

Joe watched him, for the next few days. Saw the way his fingertips drummed on the back of his phone, tempted to dial a number he didn't even have saved on it, anymore.

He didn't draw attention to it, but it started to squeeze at his heart every time he saw it - a drawstring pulling tighter and tighter with the threat of history repeating, a lingering worry that karma was coming for him, all these years later.

It was hard to deny that he'd always had a subconscious fear that all of this happiness was too good to be true. But he trusted Patrick - was secure in the knowledge that he loved him - it was just that the memories were ingrained in him, too. He couldn't forget the things he'd seen, had known were wrong even as a teenager, but didn't know how to address. Didn't feel he had a right to. All those years of expectations and carefully curated insecurities had grown normal for him, too, in a way. He expected Patrick to jump before Pete had ever raised his fingers to click, because that was what had always happened. That was how their relationship had been, even when Patrick was in high school - moreso, before he'd started to find his own voice, than later, when his patience was wearing thinner.

It felt like he was looking over his shoulder at a past creeping up on them.

The frustration was growing, too, coiling up around his spine until it could snap and he'd finally lose his composure. Because even after all that had happened - after the anger and stress and hurt, and the hours upon hours of therapy - he knew that Patrick had already stumbled. He knew that after they'd caught a news item, flicking between channels, and seen the grey-eyed wraith shambling out of Starbucks, Patrick had done the noblest, stupidest thing he could have. And he knew it because he'd watched him leave the room with his phone and come back tense, and because in the night he'd been the one to lie awake, unable to sleep for fear of giving him the chance to fall into that trap again. Afraid that he wouldn't be there to catch him before he stepped into the beartrap and couldn't pull away, and if he did, he wasn't sure he could cope with the fallout again. 

Because he'd read the message when Patrick left his phone on the counter to get the house phone when his mom called, later, and he'd seen the words laid out like a human sacrifice on the screen, to a number without a name because it had been dialled from memory.

If there's nobody else you have my number.

And even though they frequently used each other's phones, because they had nothing to hide, maybe he shouldn't have looked; maybe he was no better than the guys who got drunk and scoured their girlfriend's texts and Facebook messages for a reason to get mad, but he was scared and it wasn't for himself. But it wasn't for Pete, either, otherwise he probably wouldn't have given in to the frantic impulse that pressed his thumb to the screen and swiped at the corner, tapping the blacklist button it presented.

His hands were shaking around his mug when Patrick walked back in, smiling and telling him that his mom said 'Hi', but he smiled back and kissed his forehead and nodded as he left the room because he couldn't look him in the eye. And he pretended not to notice when Patrick checked his phone again and again, that night. Tried not to worry that maybe Pete had tried to dial that number because he needed to , or what would happen if there was no answer, or that it would be Patrick who'd feel the weight of responsibility if he couldn't get through.

But when he woke again to the first winter light cutting through the cracks in the curtains, he slid Patrick's phone from his nightstand and took it with him into the bathroom, undoing the deceit he'd committed before returning it; hoping that it wasn't already too late. Instead, he saved the anonymous number to Patrick's contacts under Years More Therapy and put the phone back - if he dialled in the number again, the name would show up and he'd know Joe had seen it. Maybe then he'd say something and they could talk it out, or it would be the reminder he needed of why he cut Pete off in the first place - or maybe he'd never dial it again and never see, and Joe would just have to wonder, indefinitely.

So, it was for himself, too, in a way, that he asked, "Do you need me to call Trav?" casually but gently catching Patrick's hand as it fiddled with his handset on the kitchen counter. "I could just, like, get a status update, if you need me to…"

He could see it in Patrick's face, for a second - in the little flash of brightness in his eyes as he looked up and released his lip from between his teeth - but then it was pushed down again and he turned his eyes down to look at their hands, entwining their fingers.

"No. No, I don't… I don't want to know."

"You sure?" 

"Yeah…" He nodded jerkily. "Yeah, I don't - I don't want to know." 

The words fell out of him carelessly, driven by the need for reassurance but sounding and feeling bitter on his lips. "You wanted to know two days ago, though, right?"

Patrick blinked at him, at first, confused and searching, and then his cheeks began to redden and he tugged his hands away to pick up his phone, unlocking it and going immediately to his messages. "Look," he started, and then stopped when he saw the words.

Joe watched as he froze, staring down at it with the redness draining from his face.

"Is this…? Were you trying to be funny?"

"No."

"Then why would you - ?"

" Why ? It's right there, Patrick!" Joe told him, clasping the phone and Patrick's hand and holding both up so he could see it. "This is why - the four years of therapy that you're still doing , because of him! Because I wanted you to just, like, stop and think for a fucking second before you let him get in your head again…"

Patrick tugged his hand free, face tight behind his glasses. He was making little sounds that were almost like laughter, but short and breathy with incredulity. "You don't trust me?"

"It's not about trusting you! It's about trusting him - it's about knowing what he does to you. You know what'd happen -"

"You don't. You don't trust me."

"Did you trust me when you decided to go behind my back and text him? Did you even think, like, 'Maybe I should talk to my partner about this'? 'Maybe I could even tell him I did it, so he can help me work through it'? At any point did you think - ?"

"What do you want me to do, Joe? Let him just -?"

"Yes!" Joe blurted, and he could see the shock on Patrick's face, felt the immediate shame of what he'd said reflected back at him. "I mean… not that I want - I'm just saying it isn't your problem anymore, Ric - we've talked about this, and you promised me -"

"I know! And you know that I couldn't just let him -"

"Let him fuck you up some more? Let him fuck this up? Is he more important to you than this?" The frustration and the hurt that he'd been trying to ignore ever since he found the message, waxed in the fear of how much damage it would do and how far it would push Patrick back in the work he'd done in therapy, formed into a lump in his throat. He couldn't breathe and he couldn't bring himself to wait for the answer, so he started to walk away from it, out of the kitchen and through the living room, scooping up his keys and making for the front door, just to get out of the situation - if he wasn't in the house they couldn't fight about it, and he didn't want to fight about it, because this felt like Pete winning.

"Don't," Patrick's voice said, behind him, and he wasn't in the kitchen anymore, either. He was hovering on the threshold to the hall. "Joe, don't walk out on me again - please, don't leave me again, I can't -"

And in a split second he realised what he was doing, how it must seem, and the frustration and hurt dissipated, leaving a sad, empty horror in its wake. 

"I'm not," he said, tossing his keys onto the little hall table, and scraping his fingers into his hair, instead. "Patrick, I'm not leaving, I was just…" He sank down onto the bench behind the door, heavily. "I'm not leaving."

"Good - good, you don't need to leave, okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry - I get why you're upset - "

"You don't, because you think it's about trusting you, and it's not, Ric. I just… It scares me, okay? It scares me to think what'd happen if…"

"Okay," Patrick said, quickly, rubbing his nose on his sleeve and proffering his phone, "okay, then take it and delete it. Or block his number, or something, I don't care, okay? Just - just, don't feel like you need to leave because…"

Sighing, Joe ignored the phone and pulled his outstretched arm to tug him into a tight cuddle, his face buried in Patrick's stomach which Patrick cradled his head against without hesitation. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "This is exactly what he'd want and I'm sorry if I was the same kind of asshole that he was… I didn't mean to freak you out. I'm not leaving - I wasn't gonna leave, I just wanted some air or something… I love you, and I'm never going to leave again, I promise."

"It's okay, I know you do and so do I… it's stupid and you're right, this is exactly what he'd want. I don't want to know how he's doing, I just don't want whatever happens to be my fault…"

"It's never going to be your fault, though - I know why you think like that but it just doesn't work that way." 

"You're right - I know you are, it's just…" 

Joe nodded and sat back, swallowing the urge to get back into this cyclical argument - because he got it, he really did, he just wished it wasn't imprinted so indelibly on Patrick's mind. "I know. I just wish there was something I could do to make you see, basically… What if someone you respect told you it was a bunch of crap?" Joe asked, trying to lighten the mood just a little. "Like Weird Dave From Space, or something…" 

 "Stop calling him that!" Patrick said, and the little splutter of indignation was reassuring. "And no. You know my rule: never meet your idols."

"Unless it's an opportunity for them to like, pat you on the back and stuff, huh?"

"If you hadn't introduced me to your idol we wouldn't be in this position," Patrick said, sitting down to perch beside him, and Joe knew it wasn't what he meant but it still tightened his drawstring just a little. Because Joe had introduced them. Joe had introduced them and that had started the ball rolling on a whole sequence of events that had brought them here. 

And here was great - he loved it here - it was the path they'd taken to reach this point and the scars they'd gotten along the way that was the problem.

"I wish I hadn't," he said, quietly, imagining how much easier their lives would have been.

"I'm glad you did."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, 'why'? Because if you didn't, I probably wouldn't've come and tried out for your dumb pop-punk band and you'd just be some weird rich kid who used to hang out in my store and I never saw again once we went to college. And if I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn't have wasted three years before I noticed that the weird rich kid was kind of the best thing that ever happened to me."

There was still a flutter, a little internal shiver of flattered excitement, when Patrick smiled at him like he was now, but now there was relief, too. He sighed, grinning back and kissing him on the forehead as he draped one arm over his shoulders to pull him into a cuddle. 

Patrick hummed a little chuckle against his shoulder and they sat together for a long, comforting moment before he murmured, "I get what you've been worried about, y'know. I know you think that if he clicks hard enough, I'll jump, but… It's not a real thing. It's kind of academic. Being afraid that I'm gonna wake up to a news bulletin that he really fucked up, this time, it just… it's not about him or wanting to fix him, anymore, it's that I'm afraid of the guilt I'm gonna feel if he does. Like, somehow, in all of this, I contributed to it. And I don't know - maybe that sounds callous, y'know? - but I don't wanna feel like this."

"It's never anybody's fault, when that happens, Ric… it just… Like, I get it and everything, but he really isn't your problem anymore - even if he's a problem for you. And it kind of makes me nervous, I guess, 'cause I know it messes with your head, basically, and I just want you to be happy. With me. To not, like, feel like you're on duty, anymore."

"I know… I know. And I need to work that out, I've got a session on Tuesday, I'll make it a whole Thing, I promise."

"I mean, I'm not telling you what to do, or anything…"

Patrick snickered softly and leaned up to kiss him, pinching at Joe's cheek fondly as he pulled away. "I would love to see you try."

"Can be arranged," Joe shrugged, quirking his eyebrows at him, the relief letting him breathe again and escaping as a laugh. "Been waiting for you to suggest that…"

And things did get better, over the next week or so - Patrick snorted and spanked him through his jeans when Joe confessed that he'd originally blocked Pete's number, muttering that it might have been less petty than labelling it with a bitchy warning. And things got better still when the details started coming out. Patrick stopped worrying and started breathing again. He seemed satisfied enough when Andy texted over news. Until one evening, when Joe had to reflexively kick Patrick's phone off course as it sailed towards the open fireplace, clattering onto the wooden floor loudly.

" What ?" he demanded, looking at the beverage soaking into the leg of his pyjamas, before moving to set the cup down and snatch up a handful of tissues from the table to mop at his shin.

Patrick was seething, though, rage swirling inside him and vibrating with the tension of keeping it in.

"Hon?"

"That son of a bitch !" he exploded, finally. "That little, selfish shit!"

"Oh, Pete . Why didn't you say?" Joe replied dryly, dropping down onto the couch in a heavy slump and looking up at Patrick beside him. "What d'he do?"

The fury was starting to simmer down inside him, and Patrick fumbled to look around for the phone he'd just thrown aside in disgust, until Joe held it up for him to take.

"Fucking look." 

He swiped back to a screen and held it up for Joe to see, too close to his face and at the wrong angle, so he had to reach out and tug it from his fingers.

For a moment, it made his heart skitter painfully, because the picture on the screen was from an article on a gossip site, and there was Pete, walking out of somewhere flashy with the fucking shark grin on his face, dragging some young girl Joe didn't recognise, by the hand. He blinked at it and then quietly held it out for Patrick to take back, feeling the underside of his chin pressing against his chest as he thought about something to say that wasn't Why does that fucking matter ?

"Can you believe that?" Patrick demanded, incredulously, switching the screen off and tossing it onto the relative safety of the easy chair, this time.

"Can I believe it's pissing you off that your ex is dating again?" he asked, and it was snippy and a little childish, but it didn't feel completely unreasonable in the circumstances.

"What? Did you even read it?!"

"Yes. I mean… the caption. What kind of name even is that, anyway?"

"God. Who cares what her name is, the point is that he was cheating with her! She's the reason he's getting a divorce! This whole fucking time, I've been concerned, y'know? I've been worried that he was gonna have a breakdown, and the whole time, fucking Typhoid Mary has been hooking up with some other chick!"

"Typhoid isn't a venereal disease, for what it's worth. It's like stomach flu. But you die shitting blood."

"Fucking Chlamydia Pete, then…"

"Herpete would've been better."

"Not for me. They don't do an antibiotic for that…"

There was an icy wave of panic which washed over him, when he first saw it - his heart skipped a beat and he couldn't help feeling a little queasy. He'd been feeling kind of sick for days, already, slightly weary and it hurt to pee - almost like one time when he'd chopped some chillies for his mom and then hadn't washed his hands well enough before he went to the bathroom. But inside. And he'd tried to put it out of his mind - drank cranberry juice, because maybe it was just a UTI - but he knew, deep down, that it wasn't. He knew, but he was too ashamed to do anything about it - to go to his family doctor and say, 'The boyfriend I'm not supposed to be dating gave me something.'

And he was afraid, too, to go to Pete and accuse him of being responsible, because he knew what that would mean - how hurt he'd be, how terrible he'd feel, how, in a roundabout way, Patrick would find himself comforting Pete for the discomfort he was in himself.

But now there was something fucking gross happening and he was going to need to do something.

He sat up in his room for hours, waiting for Pete's key in the apartment lobby, but it didn't come. Instead, it was the jangling of Joe's keychain on his pants that made him climb awkwardly off his bed and move towards the door.

"Suuuup, homie?" Joe started, grinning and holding a hand out for a hi-five, flushed from whatever he'd been drinking on his night out. He froze, though, when he caught a proper look at Patrick's face, and whatever he saw alarmed him into some semblance of sobriety. "Hey, you okay?"

"Um. Um, yeah, I just…" He could feel himself blushing, embarrassed at struggling to find something to say to Joe, of all people. "I just feel a little sick, I guess."

"Damn," Joe said, patting at his shoulder. "I got some Tylenol, if that's like, useful at all?"

The expression of faintly uncoordinated concern on his face was sincere and endearing and Patrick found himself grasping at Joe's sleeve, imploringly, and saying, "Could I ask you something, real quick? Y'know - privately?"

Joe had blinked at him and then looked around the apartment, as if he thought someone else was there. "I mean, totally, dude, if that's…" 

He let Patrick pull him into his bedroom and close the door firmly, waiting with wide eyes as Patrick fumbled for the words he wanted to say.

"Did you… I mean, it's kind of personal, but, did you ever need to go to see a - a doctor, or anything? About stuff, y'know?"

"I mean, my dad's a doctor, so…?" Joe said slowly, like maybe whatever was wrong with him was addling his brain.

"No, I - not - or I mean, like… a clinic, or something?" He added the words carefully, looking up at him and hoping he'd get it, " Y'know ?"

The expression on Joe's face softened slowly as the message began to sink in through the haze of alcohol. "Oh… shit, dude. I mean, no, I didn't but… I can give you a ride somewhere if you wanna get, like, checked out or whatever? Obviously, not right now, but. Tomorrow? Tomorrow I can help, or whatever, if you want…"

It was a tragic, humiliating relief to have told someone and pathetic how grateful he was that Joe hadn't laughed at him, or been openly grossed out, even though Patrick knew he probably was. All he could do was nod awkwardly and bump his fist into Joe's arm in gratitude.

"Let me get you the Tylenol, at least," Joe was saying, as he grabbed for the door, "at least tonight might not fucking suck as bad."

And the next morning, when he got up, Joe was already drinking coffee in the kitchen, dressed and waiting to go. He stayed with him, too, sat in the waiting room with the anxious girls and women in body-hugging dresses; passed him some cash when he didn't have enough for his prescription at CVS… But it was the way he looked at Pete, when he got home with a new hickey at his throat, that really made Patrick realise where Joe's loyalties lay.

He never told him, though - he whispered thanks, but he never told him, not even years later - that if there was a single instant that made him pause and question whether all of this truly made sense like he'd thought it did, it was when he realised Joe didn't think it was okay.

It had taken four years of therapy for Patrick to really come to terms with all of it; accept how unhealthy his relationship with Pete really was - that he'd been too young, and Pete too old, for it to ever have worked. That Pete had enough issues to resolve on his own, that Patrick could never have fixed them, and agreeing to his terms had been assuring him that there was nothing wrong with his expectations or coping methods. But, most importantly, that it wasn't Patrick's fault.

There had been a period, a few months in, when he'd gotten really angry about it - It was his responsibility to be a goddamn grown-up! - and then sad again, the way he had been early on. He wasn't grieving the relationship, he said, he was grieving the five years he spent letting himself be a fool - and no matter how often Joe reminded him that sometimes even he could see that Patrick was happy with Pete, Patrick didn't want to hear it. 

So, he let him deal with it his own way and supported him as best he could, until he finally turned a corner. Joe's leaving, in the middle of the tour, stopped being his rejecting Patrick and became Joe sacrificing his happiness for Patrick to have a chance at his. It was still a mistake, of course, but he stopped dreaming about it, stopped asking a handful of times a day if Joe was happy and if they were okay, because he knew they were. Instead, he turned to talk of 'When we get married' because he didn't seem to have any doubts that they would, despite neither of them having asked.

The only doubts Joe had were that they'd ever be legally able.

It was on one early November day, six and a half years after the whole thing started, just as they were leaving Patricia's and getting back in the car, that Joe checked the alerts on his phone and stopped, the passenger door still open. He stared at the screen, numbly, trying to let the information sink in.

"Well, shit."

"What? Is everything okay?" Patrick asked, pausing with his seatbelt in his hand, eyes wide behind his glasses.

"Dude, I…"

" What , Joe?"

"They passed the bill."

"What bi- wait, the bill?"

" The bill. It passed the House."

Patrick plugged in his belt clasp and dropped his hands into his lap, staring blankly at the steering wheel. He was almost thirty, now, and they'd been together longer than Patrick was ever with Pete - fuck, they'd been in their house longer. They were happy and settled and people had entirely gotten over the fact that they were together, there was no reason to change anything or stir up interest, because a piece of paper didn't matter. That was why they'd never gone for the civil partnership that had been available to them all along. The only reason it mattered, was that it mattered .

"So, okay," Joe said, shifting in his seat to look at him. "I'm totally unprepared for this and everything, dude, because I was sure those shitheads were gonna like, vote it down again, but… will you marry me before they change their minds?"

Patrick had watched Pete's performative queerness for a long time, wondered how true it was that he was 'gay from the waist up' given that there had been nothing from the waist down in a very long time. He'd been double-bluff fodder from the first message boards Joe had built for their website, in the early days, and he'd sat quietly in the corners of bars talking to their friends' girlfriends while Pete french kissed Gabe for the cameras, growing increasingly unclear why that was okay, but being with him wasn't.

He'd stayed awake, alone in hotel rooms while Pete slept elsewhere - they always booked two, to avoid any suggestions of impropriety - watching old films dubbed in Japanese or Spanish and thought that maybe they were a good metaphor for his life. He knew all the scenes because he'd seen them before, but he didn't completely understand them, anymore.

Often, Joe would hang out with him, half-stoned to manage his travel anxiety - Andy would often be off with whoever he'd brought on tour, this time - and they'd watch the movies together, reinventing dialogue to make each other laugh. It was in Sydney, jetlagged to fuck, that Joe fell asleep in the bed beside him - the first time in a proper bed in a long time - and Patrick had turned off the TV and wriggled down to take the chance to feel a warm, familiar body beside him. Joe's arm had sleepily lifted to let him curl up under it, and Patrick had closed his eyes and breathed in the moment, imagined that this was how it was, always. How it would always be. No more nights going to bed alone, no more lying awake until his head hurt, worrying. No sleeping in the guestroom in his own house, because Pete had his fucking Barbie Doll over.

Before he fell asleep, that night, he'd assembled a thousand tiny details in his head - how life would be, like this. What it would feel like, how happy they'd be, what they'd say to each other every morning when they woke up, what they'd call their kids, what their vows to each other would be… And he'd known he couldn't have it, been acutely aware when he woke a few hours later with his face pressed close to Joe's hip on the edge of the pillows and Marie's voice just audible through the handset pressed to Joe's ear, that it was all just a sad, little fantasy to keep his mind off the truth.

But that didn't stop him inviting Joe to hang out in his room again in Melbourne, or putting on My Own Private Idaho while they ate room service fries. Joe went back to his own room, that night, awkward and hurried, and Patrick fell asleep with his pillow over his face, idly hoping he'd suffocate and relieve himself of the embarrassment that his awkward efforts at seduction had had entirely the opposite effect to what he'd hoped.

They didn't tell anyone. There were no engagement rings, no party, no Facebook status updates. They weren't doing it for other people and they knew they'd have to wait for the whole thing to be signed into legislation, anyway. It was coincidence that the date it became possible was a week before the seventh anniversary, but it seemed apt, somehow. Joe had resisted, at first - he didn't want to spend the rest of his life thinking of his biggest mistake, he wanted new memories, not old, miserable ones - but Patrick was determined, for exactly the same reason as Joe.

"I want to just put the whole thing to bed, y'know?" he'd said, twisting and twisting at the spaghetti already wound around his fork, until Joe reached out to catch his hand. "I don't want to spend every year thinking, 'Hey, this is the anniversary of the worst thing that ever happened to me!' I want it to erase that with something good."

And he'd given in - of course he'd given in, he'd have done whatever Patrick asked, more or less - and they started to put their plan into action.

The thing they'd both agreed on immediately, was that they didn't want a fuss. They didn't want to try to choose friends to invite - ones who'd slowly rebuilt bridges over the years, asked Patrick to help with their albums, felt their loyalty to Pete waning as their usefulness to him faded - without making them feel stuck in the middle. It'd still be a red rag to a bullshitter if he thought they were advocating what had happened all those years ago. It wasn't worth the effort or the money to have everyone they cared for declining for fear of invoking Pete's wrath.

So, they decided on families only - and then just parents, when they realised that getting siblings home from three states for the sake of the small event that they had planned was far more organisation than they could manage without raising suspicions. 

Nobody was told in advance. Patrick's mom had been dropping hints since the day the law change was approved, but they hadn't confessed that they'd already decided, because they both knew it would spiral wildly if they gave her the opportunity. Instead, they told their respective parents to meet them for lunch at the corner of Randolph and Clark, and then dragged them into the courthouse with no pre-amble. No fuss. No fuss, no fancy photos, no extended family and definitely no speeches. In twenty minutes, they were done and on their way to their reservations. It was perfect.

Patrick had never been more grateful for Richard Trohman than when he bundled them both into his car, waving Patrick's mom off at the door where she'd held them all hostage with coffees and home baking well into the evening. He'd yawned theatrically and patted his cake-filled belly, casting Cathie a knowing look, before insisting they give Joe and Patrick a ride home as they'd both had a drink at their wedding lunch.

They sat together in the back seat, joking like they used to when they were teenagers getting a ride to that night's show at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Arlington Heights, the same Steely Dan record in the CD player as there had been all those years ago. Only, back then he wouldn't even have thought about holding Joe's hand, because Joe was the goofy, bottle-blond kid in his band and the idea that they'd be here again, twelve or so years later, only this time with rings on their fingers, would have probably grossed them both out.

"I'm gonna call you mom and dad, now," he declared as he leaned between the seats and kissed them both on the cheek while Joe climbed out, making Richard chuckle and Cathie pat his face fondly.

Joe had reached back in and dragged him out by the arm, grinning. "Dude, it's cool, we're already married, you can quit sucking up to them, now."

"I'm not!" he protested, but he let Joe pull him out of the car and shut the door, waving them off and calling, "Night! Thank you!" as they drove out of the cul-de-sac.

For a minute or two, they stood on the front lawn with Joe's arm slung around Patrick's neck, looking at the house they'd lived in for the past six years. He would quite happily have stood there all night, listening to the insects buzzing and looking at the comfortable glow of the porch lamp in the last of the evening light, if Joe hadn't sighed and said, "I'm not carrying you in, if that's what you're hoping."

He spluttered with laughter so unexpectedly that he had to wipe his chin, and shoved him towards the door, only for Joe to wait while he unlocked it and then hop himself into a piggyback for Patrick to stumble over the threshold with him, wheezing from half-drunken mirth. Together, they sank down onto the bench by the door, to pull off their shoes, and leaned against the wall in a slump of weary happiness.

"We did the thing," Joe announced to nobody, eyes closed and a broad grin spread across his face.

"We totally did the thing," Patrick nodded, yawning.

"I am… not totally sure we'll be doing the other thing, tonight, just so you know."

"God, no," he said, patting his husband's knee and chuckling to himself a little. Husband . "Got forever to do that crap, now. You're locked in."

"For life," Joe added, throwing some form of half-hearted attempt at a gang sign. He gave Patrick a light shove in the face when he laughed at him and climbed to his feet with a prematurely middle-aged groan, and said, "I'm putting on pyjamas and Breaking Bad, and you're either with me or against me, dude."

And that was how they spent their wedding night, curled up on the couch with a boxset and all the windows open to let in the balmy summer air, until they both fell asleep and only woke when the remote fell out of Joe's hand onto the wooden floor beside the couch. It was exactly what Patrick always wanted, but the last thing he would have planned. The last thing he'd have been allowed to do, if things had been different. It might just have been the most reassuring thing they'd done together in the seven years since the first night on Joe's couch, back when everything seemed such a mess.

After, they went on vacation - honeymoon, officially, although they only called it that sarcastically - and spent three weeks in Europe, visiting place after place that they'd been to before and always sworn they'd take the time to really see, one day, when they weren't being shuttled from show to show like performing cattle. 

They travelled around Italy and watched the sun setting over the city from an elevated piazza in Florence, drove around Lake Garda in a tiny bubble of a car, and then over the border to spend a few days in a chalet in the Alps, catching cute trains up mountains and back down to take in the elegant squares of Vienna. It sounded classy and grown up, but they still felt like kids absconding from a school trip with their parents' credit card, staying in cool city hotels and cosy cottages in picturesque valleys.

Driving from city to city, taking turns to control the stereo and read maps in the spots where the satnav got them lost, was unifying. They were largely unnoticed, broadly accepted as they were, handed keys to their one hotel room with courteous smiles, like they were actually welcome - rather than being eyed with the suspicion afforded to any touring rock band and its entourage. They tried hard not to hi-five each other every time they got to say, "My husband" to some stranger who couldn't care less as long as they left a decent tip.

Over time, Joe had seen Patrick's smile grow brighter - unshaded, as the years of stress were peeled away and he found his way into himself and out of his shell at once - but cycling along the canals of Amsterdam on rented bikes, it was almost like the sun in his eyes. He'd use that excuse for a long time after, having ridden into an obelisk at the foot of a bridge and fallen off, but Patrick had tended to his grazes at their little boutique hotel, gently and with great seriousness, once he'd stopped laughing.

Somewhere in France, in a rest stop in the mountains on the way south, they watched a family stretching their legs - a toddler chasing the family dog until she fell face-first into the grass and shrieked until her father picked her up. Instinctively, they'd both started to leap to their feet to catch her before fell, with no hope of getting to her in time.

"Aw," Patrick sighed, watching her father wiping at her tears with his shirt sleeve. "I hope she's okay…"

"She looked okay," Joe assured him, kissing his temple tenderly. "She'll probably get an ice cream out of it, and it'll all be neat. It was cute watching you basically vault the picnic table, though."

"Like you didn't!"

"Dadbro instincts," he shrugged, watching the family heading for the kiosk. "I guess we must be ready."

Patrick's fingers slipped between Joe's under the picnic table and it didn't require any further discussion. The decision was made before they even set foot back on American soil.

Watching Joe sit in the garden, sharing a beer with Kevin and Megan, absently tapping the underside of his wedding ring on the bottle while they talked about Italy and the sheer terror of driving a stickshift on winding mountain roads populated by maniacs, Patrick smiled to himself. Megan had been furious that she hadn't been invited to the wedding, and even Kevin was clearly disappointed not to have been asked to be best man, although he tried to play it down. But Patrick hadn't had a best man - neither of them had. Their dads had been witnesses, they'd run through the formalities and the vows they'd written to each other, and then they'd gone for a fancy lunch in a hipster restaurant that impressed their parents and had a name that meant 'love' or something in one of the Scandinavian languages. It had been a little like stopping off at the DMV to get an address changed on a licence, only with Patrick's mom sniffling into a tissue. But better.

In a way, it had felt like a lot of the life they'd had together, in the old days: drive-by visits, everything planned meticulously on a tight schedule, and then waiting around for a long time while someone complained that they were hungry - sitting beside Joe and casting each other pointedly amused looks at the mayhem.

He wouldn't have changed the day for anything, but now that they were here, he did kind of wish they'd given their siblings the chance to be there. It was only now that he was older that they were really getting a little closer. Through his childhood, Megan had been away studying and Kevin had been the annoying older brother, and then he got into his teens and early twenties and spent months away from home with the band… There were gaps that had made it hard to really be friends as well as siblings, and it still felt kind of cool that his older brother and sister wanted to hang out with him. Kind of like graduating into real adulthood, finally.

He'd lost track of the conversation by the time he returned from the bathroom, picking up another bottle of wine as he passed through, but Joe leaned back to look at him, half-smiling but wide-eyed as he reached out a hand to draw him closer to the table.

"Hey, Ric? Your sister has a suggestion you might be into."

"Lawn darts are banned , Megan," he sighed, letting Joe take his hand as he leaned over to set the bottle on the table in front of them.

Megan snorted into her wine glass and waved him around the table to sit beside her. "So, now you guys are officially married and everything, what's the plan?"

"The plan?" Patrick asked, picking up his glass and grimacing at the fly doing backstroke in the middle of it. He tossed the liquid onto the grass along with its occupant.

"Ric, when you were little, you used to steal my dolls to be your babies. They're on the cards, right?"

"Well… yeah, I mean, we want them. Obviously, we want them. It's just… a complicated thing, is all. Why?"

"Joe said that you've been looking for someone."

Patrick blinked at her and turned to Joe for clarification, but he just gave him an uncertain smile and nodded towards Megan. "You mean like a surrogate?" He cast Joe a look he hoped conveyed ' We'll be having words about this later' because nobody was supposed to know, yet. 

Kevin was busy gazing into the hypnotic swirl of beer in the bottom of his glass, possibly recusing himself from the conversation, or possibly wondering when someone would give him dessert.

"I'm going to start feeling rejected if you keep not asking me to be involved with these things, you know."

"There's nothing to be involved in, yet!" He kicked at Joe's ankle under the table. "It's not even a thing yet. We're talking to agencies about options, that's all."

"Why would you need an agency?" she asked, in the same tone she used when she was a teenager and he was in elementary school and wanted to borrow her then-hip fannypack to be his superhero utility belt.

"Okay, here's the thing: there are procedures - you can't just turn up at the maternity ward and call dibs on the best looking womb."

"What if you were offered one?"

"Like whose?" Patrick asked, huffing out a laugh and pouring himself another glass of wine.

She rubbed at her belly with both hands and grinned. "One careful lady owner."

The bottle gave a noisy clatter as it half slipped from his fingers as he set it back down, staring at her, bewildered, as Joe leaned in and steadied the bottle, flapping his hands out of the way gently to avoid a calamity.

"Are you kidding me?" He'd never have considered asking her. It was such a huge request, nothing he could expect someone he loved dearly and wouldn't say no to him if he asked, to do. "Meggo, you can't. It's too much. I mean, thank you , but… That's a huge thing -"

"Wow. That was so not even on your radar you forgot I can even do that."

"I'm not even sure you can do that! Not legally. And I mean, it'd be kind of weird - having your brother's kid and everything…" 

Across the table, Kevin made the kind of face Patrick desperately wanted to, but was too polite to risk.

"Joe's not my brother."

"No, but…" It was so overwhelming, so out of the blue, he didn't really know how to respond.

"We could at least, like, look into it, maybe…" Joe shrugged when Patrick looked at him for help. "If it's cool and Meg wants to do it, I mean. It's way less risky than some stranger, right?"

"Well, yeah, but… it's just a lot to ask."

"You didn't ask. I offered."

"But would Mark be okay with that, even?"

Megan took a mouthful of Rioja and nodded as she swallowed. "Sure. Mark's basically a saint. All he'd care about is that he won't not get to sleep for another six months, after."

That night, standing in the kitchen and clearing plates and glasses into the dishwasher while Patrick attempted to use Tetris skills to fit as many wine bottles into the recycling container as possible, Joe brought it up again.

"It was pretty kind of her to offer to do that whole thing."

"I'm pretty sure she'd had a whole bottle to herself at that point," Patrick told him. "She's like Mom - she has this compulsive saviour complex."

"But if she's still into it when she's sober… All I'm thinking is that we could look into it."

Patrick propped himself against the countertop and tucked his fingers into the back of Joe's lounge pants, stroking at his spine tenderly. "I didn't know you were so eager."

Straightening up and pushing the door shut, Joe took a moment to shrug, and nodded. "We had a plan, didn't we?"

"No, we have a plan."

Joe sighed a little. "I just think it's worth a shot, if she really means it. I don't wanna be, like, rude about your sister, or anything, but it's better we try her first, now, than kind of like, treating her totally generous offer as a last resort... because she's not exactly our age, right? We don't know how long it's even an option for, right now."

"She's 38, Joe."

"Technically, over 36 is a 'geriatric mother', just so you're, like, aware."

Patrick looked at him, realising how seriously he was taking this - how much it meant to him to make it happen - and he chuckled. "Are you sure you're not just looking for an excuse to sleep with my sister?"

The offended look on Joe's face only lasted a moment, before Patrick was nudged up against the counter each of Joe's hands on the worksurface beside him. "No," he said, soberly, "but I'd be down for giving it another try to see if we can manage by ourselves."

Joe had never really expected becoming a parent to require so much work. If anything, he'd expected everything leading up to becoming parents to be the easy part. The funnest part. But then, he hadn't always known becoming a parent would involve jerking off in a cup in a booth in a medical centre, to the kind of porn he had never even looked at as a teenager. At least they'd tried to be inclusive, though, and handed him the special collection on the basis that he'd showed up with his husband. 

He was pretty sure Patrick was still sitting outside, giggling about the look on the receptionist's face when Joe asked if he could just bring him in and let them keep their porn. Not that Joe could entirely see a problem with that suggestion, everyone knew why they were there, and they were married . Surely, his own husband should have been the most legitimate and acceptable material they could accommodate?

And it had been awkward and funny, and exciting when they confirmed he was primed for baby making, and then Megan's part of the process went ahead and…

It was Mark who called to let them know - apologetic and sad for all three of them - and they'd gone over and sat with her all day, running cycles of optimistic commentary about how they didn't really expect it to happen right off the bat and that it was common in any pregnancy in the early stages.

"Well, we'll go again," she'd said, reaching out to squeeze Patrick's hand, and they'd all nodded.

"It almost never works out first time, y'know? The doctors said it can be maybe three tries, most often."

"Two-point-seven," Joe had clarified, absently, trying to manage a smile that didn't seem disappointed. "It's not like money's an issue, even. Don't worry about it - just like, focus on feeling better. It was only five weeks in, anyway."

When they got home, into the security and privacy of their own lobby with the door closed behind them, Joe pulled Patrick into a tight hug. They stood there, in the dark, for a long time; the disappointment was hard to push down, even though they knew they had to be pragmatic about it. Conceiving in this way was always going to be challenging, but maybe his eyes were just a little damp with frustration as he nuzzled into Patrick's neck.

Laying in bed, later, curled around each other with Patrick's hand tucked into a light fistful of Joe's hair, he sighed to himself and whispered into the half-light, "Hey, babe?"

And Patrick had responded immediately, clearly nowhere near as close to sleep as Joe had imagined. "Yeah?"

"Well," he started, trying to sound sincere, although he only really wanted to make him smile, "maybe if the next one doesn't work out, we should just try the old-fashioned route and I should go ahead and sleep with your sister."

"You do that," Patrick murmured, nuzzling back down with a snort, "but bear in mind that Mark is about a half a foot taller than you, and I won't be the one asking."

The closer they got to the day, the harder it got to sleep - mainly because Joe would be tossing and turning beside him in the bed, asking questions like, 'Are you sure we got enough diapers?' at the exact moment he'd started to doze off. Patrick had taken to shushing and spooning him to hold him still, but he also seemed to find it comforting, because it usually worked in minutes.

It was one of those nights, when Joe had gotten up again to check that the bunny they'd bought as their baby's first toy really was childsafe, at 3am, that Patrick's phone started vibrating on the nightstand. For a moment, he stared at it, almost unable to breathe - frozen in panic because it was fucking happening - and Joe had stubbed his pinkie toe on the door frame as he scrambled back into the room, yelling, "Answer it, jackass!"

They ran into the wrong hospital building, first, and had to be redirected to the neonatal building, so by the time they got to the waiting room, he still couldn't breathe, but it was as much from running as it was the anxiety of his child being born without him there. He needn't have worried, though, as it turned out, because it wasn't until six hours and seventeen minutes later that he was stood, propped against the wall of a delivery room, clutching a tiny, pink and icky person, while Joe tried to rasp, "She's beautiful, she's perfect," while hyperventilating with his hands on his knees, next to him.

When they'd relinquished her long enough to be cleaned up and wrapped up in fresh swaddling, they were sent to the little family room together, while Megan rested.

The room smelled like antiseptic and talc, and there were pictures of baby animals on the walls; a fake plant in the corner by the watercooler. None of that really mattered, although he'd never forget the details, because Joe was finally calm enough to hold her and count her fingers for the fourteenth time and kept saying, "Look at her hair, hon, she has so much hair…"

And he wasn't really sure what possessed him, because they'd chosen a name already, but he found himself blurting, "Can we call her Poppy?"

Joe barely looked up, but he grinned and gazed down at her, lifting her up so he could duck the distance and kiss her forehead. "Do you like Poppy?"

"Yeah, I just - "

"I was asking her."

"Oh."

"I think she'd like it. What do you think, Miss Tiny Toes? You wanna be named after a flower associated with war, instead of a space princess?"

"I just feel like I always want to remember this, y'know? And poppies are associated with remembering… "

"You're gonna regret that when she's fifteen and throwing a hissy fit, and you're like, 'Shit, I remember when she used to be so sweet…'"

"No," Patrick said, watching them both and smiling as Joe kissed the little fingers wrapped around his thumb, and looked up at him with wide, blue eyes, "no, I really won't."

It was a last minute decision to stay home. Patricia had been primed to babysit while they travelled down to California for the ceremony, but she was three months old and screaming mad with colic and it had been hard enough for Patrick to leave them, even with her tiny, pink fists tangled in Joe's hair, perfectly safe. Neither of them could face leaving her home without one of them, even if Grandma had raised three kids of her own and was more than able to take care of things.

He'd kissed Patrick goodbye at the door, waving her tiny hand at him while he got into the taxi, and emailed him photos of her sleeping contentedly on his chest, on the couch, to stop him climbing the walls with worry, that evening.

They sat up, the next night, Poppy on his lap and MTV on the television, waiting to see if Daddy was interviewed on the red carpet and won his award. There was nothing at first, an endless stream of artists Joe wasn't even sure he recognised. He'd stood up to wind her and wander around the living room, to shake the numbness out of his foot, and she'd just spit up over his shoulder and in his hair, when he heard the familiar voice behind him.

"Hey, you little puke monster, it's Dad, look," he cooed, turning her around, balanced on his palm against his chest, as he tried to wipe sick off his shirt with her drool towel. He grinned as he watched his husband adjust his glasses self-consciously and explain that Joe was home with a sick baby. Patrick was so proud of her, so unabashed about their little family - a million miles from the way things had started.

"Love you, you loser," he smirked to himself.

But then, his face fell. The interviewer was saying something the audio didn't catch and a moment later, Patrick glanced into the camera, anxiously, scratching at his ear. 

Pete .

Of course he'd fucking be there. They'd been afraid of this.

"Pete! Thanks so much for joining us."

Pete. Fucking Pete . What kind of jerk would force them to interact on live TV when they hadn't seen each other in the better part of a decade?

"So, we have a little band reunion, right here! This is an MTV exclusive, right guys?"

"You could say that, kind of," Pete laughed, and he wasn't looking at her at all. He was looking at Patrick, and Patrick was looking at the floor and Joe was watching it happen with a crying baby in his arms and puke in his hair.

"I know, Pops, my tummy hurts, too, little buddy."

"What do you think, Pete? Is there any chance of a comeback? Would you be willing to work with Patrick and the rest of the band again? I mean, things were a little acrimonious, before, right?"

Pete reached out and pulled her mic a little nearer. "I think that's probably down to Patrick, right now."

"No!" Joe half-yelled at the TV. "The answer is fucking 'no', you asshole." He looked down at the grizzling infant in his arms, too small to hold her own head up, and whispered, "Don't repeat that in front of Daddy, he'll break my arms."

Patrick laughed nervously on the screen. "Here's the thing: I don't know, y'know? Things have kind of changed for everyone. I don't know that we'd want to revisit stuff from all that time ago. We've all moved on a lot, and styles and things have changed, and…" He paused and looked directly at Pete. "Honestly? No. I don't see it happening."

"Well, that fucking shot me down!" Pete laughed, and the host panicked and covered his mouth with her hand, allowing Patrick time to wave awkwardly and move down to sign some autographs in the background.

Joe scrambled for his phone and dropped himself back on the couch so he could sit Poppy on his lap and type around her.

You okay? x 

There was no reply, and he sat there all evening, scanning the tables to see if he could catch Patrick anywhere, hoping he wouldn't see Pete sitting next to him. The only time he appeared was when his best male video award was handed to Mark Ronson, clapping pleasantly. Joe knew he'd wanted Uptown Funk to win, so it worried him that he didn't look more cheerful about it.

It would have helped if they'd sat him on a table with people he knew. Maybe Taylor, even, just anyone, but he hadn't ever met Maroon 5 before and he wasn't feeling as affable tonight as he was that morning. It was hard to make small talk with people when his knuckles were aching because he was holding his whiskey and soda too tight.

He got up during a break while they set up the stage for Beyoncé, smiling his best cordially fixed grin, and made his way through the tables to the lounge backstage. There was a terrace at the back, decorated with string lights and potted palms amongst the water features, and he made his way straight to the railing to rest upon it and get some fresh air. It was LA, though, so the air didn't feel fresh, it felt gritty and dry, and suffocatingly warm, like the time he'd had to stand on a video set while someone blowdried his armpits.

Someone came to the door behind him, soon after, calling, "We're curtain up on Beyoncé in three minutes, doors are closing on lights - if you're coming to church, take your seats now."

Ordinarily, he'd have been studiously fixated on the entire performance - analysing it and breaking down every sound in his head, learning everything he could - but he was kind of done with the evening the moment that he'd been accosted on the carpet.

He hadn't seen Pete in years, before that moment. The last time he'd seen Pete in person, he was clutching a towel full of ice to his face, two days after Patrick had tried to stove his skull in on the bus on the night Joe left. It was for effect, and Patrick knew it. He'd come to their apartment to take some of his things, with Charlie to 'protect' him from further assault. Patrick had been alone when they'd walked in unannounced, curled into the corner of the couch; not crying anymore, but puffy and miserable. He hadn't even been dressed in outdoor clothes - just his lounge pants and a t-shirt he wore to bed - but he'd jammed his feet into his sneakers and walked out, gone down to the lake, without saying a word to either of them.

Aside from the icepack, Pete looked fine. He looked defiant, and Patrick just looked pathetic. And the whole scenario made it seem like it was Pete he was upset about, and it wasn't - it wasn't Pete at all - but by the time he'd gathered enough anger and indignation, and embarrassment for sitting out on the lake in his pyjamas while super-fit strangers in ran past in branded lycra, Pete was gone.

Seeing him there on the carpet so unexpectedly had made his breath catch. He thought he might have been able to hide it just enough to get away with his dignity, but it had put all the hairs on the back of his neck on end and he'd made his way through the handlers on the door almost without knowing.

"Huh. I figured you'd be inside, watching your fave."

The hairs prickled upwards again, he could almost feel every one. Pete. He didn't reply, at first, just dropped his head to look down at the sidewalk below them.

"Sorry to hear your kid's sick."

"She's fine," he said, feeling his jaw tighten, and then realising that in his petulance he'd contradicted himself. "She has colic."

"That sucks."

"Yeah. It does."

"I mean, at that age you can't even explain to them why it hurts, or whatever… It's shitty. Must've been hard to leave her."

No , Patrick thought, no, I'm not letting you do this. "She's fine. Joe's taking care of her. He's an amazing dad."

Pete leaned back against the rail, pulling his phone out of the pocket of his ugly fucking designer jacket - it was too hot for a jacket. "I always knew he'd make a good dad, kind of. He's got a whole lot of kid in him, right?"

Patrick cast him a sidelong glare and opened his mouth to tell him to go fuck himself, but Pete quickly clarified.

"I didn't mean that to be shitty. I meant he's always gonna be good with kids, 'cause he gets them."

They lingered in silence for a few painful moments and just as Patrick was going to turn and walk away, Pete held out his handset, a photo on the screen - two little boys, both blond and fair. "My little dudes. They're pretty amazing."

Patrick glanced at it, and then away. "I'm glad you're happy."

"That's not what I said."

He snorted, cynically, and shook his head, but didn't answer.

"Do you have, like, a photo or something?" Pete asked, and there was something in his voice, soft and urgent, and in spite of himself, Patrick found his hand sinking into his jacket pocket. It was petty of him, he knew, but the picture he chose was Poppy on Joe's lap, laughing while he held her hand, his wedding ring very visible and her huge, blue eyes as bright as her father's.

Pete really seemed to study it, the glow of the screen reflecting on his face in the dim outdoor light. "She looks like him," he said, as he handed it back.

"Yeah, well… hopefully she'll get his metabolism."

"You're still doing that, huh?"

"Doing what?" Patrick asked, looking at the photo and then switching off the screen to put his phone away, ready to leave.

"Putting yourself down. You shouldn't do that, kind of. You should, like, appreciate yourself. I'm surprised he still lets you talk like that, honestly…"

"Well, that's the thing: he never wanted to control me, he makes me feel appreciated every fucking day without needing to fix up meaningless grand gestures, okay? And it's kind of fucking rich for you to talk about appreciation, Pete, don't you think?"

"Yeah," Pete said, without hesitating. "Yeah, for the way things were back then. I didn't fucking… I know I didn't appreciate you the way you deserved."

"You didn't just 'not appreciate me' you son of a bitch, you almost fucking ruined my life," Patrick told him, leaning in a little nearer to hiss it at him through gritted teeth, because there may not be anyone within sight on the terrace, but he didn't trust there to be no mics hidden in plant pots for the gossip. "You took an impressionable fucking high school kid, and you turned me into some kind of fucking puppet - and I still don't know why. I still, after all this fucking time, I still never figured out why you'd drag me through that - "

He cut himself off at the feel of Pete's hand on his wrist, started to jerk it away, but Pete held on. 

It was 2am before the call came. Joe was propped against the headboard, rubbing Poppy's stomach with his iPad in the other hand, trying to distract himself from the fact that his husband was at an huge party with Fucking Pete and he hadn't responded.

"Hey," he said, trying not to sound worried. "Congratulations on not winning."

Patrick gave a small laugh. "Thanks, darling ."

"You alright?" He didn't need to explain what he really meant.

"Yeah, I think so… We kind of talked. How's Poppy?"

"She's a grumpy little monkey. She's kind of drowsing in my lap, right now. She chucked on me right as you got on screen, it was like she planned it."

"That's my girl…" Patrick said, softly, and Joe could hear the smile in his voice.

"So, you talked, huh?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Yeah?"

There was a long pause. "I think he's doing okay. We kind of exchanged photos of the kids, gave a little update on how things are going, y'know? He seems happy. He um, he moved on."

"Well. Good."

"Yeah, it is. It's… I thought I'd care more, y'know? Like seeing him might hurt, or something, but…"

"But?"

"It didn't. I just felt kind of tired about it. I think… well, no. I don't think anything, I just… I'm really over it, Joe. I'm done. I have you and I have Pops and… I love you both so much, y'know, and…"

"Hey," Joe soothed, hearing his voice cracking a little. "We love you, too, you big dork. Why don't you kind of like, go get some sleep and we'll meet you at the airport, tomorrow?"

"No, Joe, she's sick, keep her home -"

"All she does is sleep and cry, she can do that in the Moses basket. We miss you, dude."

"I miss you, too, Joe. I do."

"Well, obviously. I mean, like, how could you not?"

Patrick laughed, wetly and Joe gave a sympathetic sigh.

"Aw, hon."

"I wish I'd never come, y'know? I should've stayed home with you and her…"

"Are you kidding? And let you see me covered in spit-up in my jammies? What about the mystery? You'd be unblocking his number in no time…"

"No," Patrick told him, firmly. "I really wouldn't."

"I'm sorry," Pete said, leaning edging closer and lowering his voice like Patrick had, still holding his wrist lightly. "I was a selfish little fuck, and I was a mess, man, I know that. I feel like you know that, too, kind of, but… I thought it was what you wanted. Me; us. I thought you wanted it and if you didn't get it the way you needed, then…" He shrugged, as if it were nothing; as though he was talking about one time when Patrick wanted to get Thai instead of pizza, but he looked at Patrick through his lashes. "You wanted this… this fucking idea of me, and you wanted me to want you like that from the start, and it was fucking obvious... I tried to break it off, once, kind of soon after we started, but you kind of fell apart, so I gave in because I didn't want to lose my best friend. People always left me if I didn't give them what they wanted, so I gave you want you wanted from me. I gave you that, for fucking five years, man… and then, when it got harder for me and I couldn't, you left me, too."

Patrick's greatest fear in the world had always been tinnitus, and there was something about Pete's words that affected the pressure in his skull to create a sudden, piercing squeal in his ears. "What?"

"And I mean, I talked about it with my therapist, actually, about all of that, and I get that it probably seemed shitty - and I behaved shittily, afterwards. I was pissed off, I guess, because you were part of my life and I loved you, after everything, and I really tried to give you what you wanted, but in the end I couldn't ever love you the way you wanted me to and I'm sorry. I'm sorry I just never could make myself be what you really wanted, but you can't force something that isn't there, right?"

Pete was looking at him earnestly when Patrick's vision snapped into focus, waiting for a reaction that absolved him of his guilt. And he wanted to say something. He wanted to say, 'So?' or 'I never believed you did' - anything to slightly rebalance their positions, reclaim some of the authority in the conversation, because suddenly he was seventeen again and the boyfriend he was hopelessly infatuated with had just told him they couldn't be together anymore.

And he looked at Pete, as they stood there, one hand still tight on Patrick's skin, and he saw the lines forming on his face as he aged, ridiculous when paired with the absurd outfit he was wearing - a hotch-potch of pieces, a mismatched suit jacket and pants and a neon t-shirt with some kind of slogan on it in electric blue Korean text. He'd thought him pioneering, when they were younger, brave in his willingness to stand out while Patrick desperately wanted to fade into the background. Now he just saw a man in his 30s trying his hardest to keep people interested; afraid that people would stop caring. 

But Patrick had. He'd stopped caring, and he didn't even have anything to say to him, anymore. He could tell him how long he'd been in love with Joe before they broke up, he could even tell him how Joe had slept in his bed and comforted him when Pete had been in hospital, but that would only give him more of a reason to feel like the victim in all of this. The one who'd been wronged. So, he cleared his throat and nodded slowly. "Goodbye, Pete. Enjoy your night."

He held it together as he walked away, all through the venue to the car outside, and then all the way back to his hotel room; but once the door was closed, he crumpled, just for a few moments. Just long enough to feel the hurt in the heart of the kid who'd waited up all night for his calls and fell asleep in class so much he almost flunked high school, or the insecure twenty-something who'd tortured himself because he'd believed in spite of everything that Pete had loved him. Who'd been through it all because, at least early on, he'd believed they'd really been in love.

And he felt embarrassed for all of it, for being such an idiot that he'd never realised, even after all this therapy, what suddenly seemed so obvious. 

But as he sat on the edge of his hotel bed and pulled out his phone again, to call home and hear Joe's voice, the screen opened on the photo he'd showed Pete, earlier - of his family, the life he'd chosen and fought for so hard - and he remembered that he wasn't that kid, anymore. He hadn't been that kid for a long time, and he'd never been more glad of it.

Joe hated goodbyes, but there came a time when it had to happen - they didn't fit, anymore, and in the end it had been the sensible thing to do. 

"Bye, house!" Poppy was yelling from the window, waving as they pulled away to follow the removal truck. They weren't going far - she was happy in her school and Davy was starting the same kindergarten she'd gone to - but they'd been happy in their little house for so long, that it felt like part of the family. 

"We should've kept it," Patrick groaned, "we could have rented it out…"

"Daddy! Is truck, Daddy!" 

"I know, kiddo, it's coming to the new house."

"And it's, like, seventy-three percent your toys…"

"And twenty-five percent yours," Patrick said, but he was grinning at Poppy's snickering in the rear view mirror. 

When they'd unpacked and settled the kids into bed, that night, they stood in their new hallway and Joe pulled Patrick into a cuddle, just as they had all those years ago, in the first home they'd bought together. 

"Maybe we could buy it back, one day?" he suggested, swaying them both playfully as Patrick gave a forlorn sigh. 

"I wish," Patrick said into his shoulder, wistfully.

"When the tiny hoarders have graduated, maybe." 

And Patrick chuckled into his chest as he squeezed him tight and pulled away to finish making coffee in their brand new kitchen. "Nah," he said, "things are never the same if you try to go back."