Work Text:
Mikey never was sure if Pete took Never Never Land as aspirational or if he just so happened to share a name with the leader of the Lost Boys. Either way, it’s no surprise when the door to Pete’s characteristically lavish and questionably-decorated LA home swings open to reveal doleful eyes, fresh hickeys, and the unmistakable stench of vodka. Time is possibly the last man standing to not get his hands on Pete Wentz.
“Hey, Mikeyway!” It turns out even Pete’s who’s-suspicious-certainly-not-me voice is the same as it always was. He sways slightly in the doorway as he gestures expansively toward the foyer behind him. “C’mon in, the water’s warm.”
“I sure hope not,” Mikey says mildly as he steps over the threshold. “You sure I’m not interrupting anything?”
“Interrupting? Pfft, like what?” Pete shoves the door shut and leans his forearm against it. “What’s there to interrupt?”
“I dunno.” Mikey lets his eyes fall to the angry red splotches on Pete’s necks. “Maybe tennis or something.”
“Tennis or—?” Pete’s hand flies up to his neck and his eyes go comically wide. “Or…something.”
Mikey hums in acknowledgment, fighting back the smile itching at the corners of his mouth. Christ, this many years and it’s still this easy for Pete to get a laugh out of anyone he wants? “I mean, I don’t wanna get in the middle of anything—”
Pete snickers and the sound immediately makes Mikey’s face feel a degree warmer. “You don’t? That’s not how I remember it.”
Mikey huffs out a laugh. “I’m surprised you remember anything from then.”
“Hey!” Pete puffs up and jabs a finger into Mikey’s chest. He keeps up his indignant expression for about two more seconds before he dissolves into giggles. “Shit, dude, me too. Sometimes I think about, like, the brain damage I probably have from the 2000s and I’m like, was it worth it? And then I think about what I was actually doing and I’m like, oh yeah, totally.” He pushes off the door to walk into the living room. Along the way, he leers at Mikey with a grin that’s simultaneously cheesy, charming, and disgusting.
Despite himself, Mikey loses the fight against grinning. Business as usual with Pete, then. Their surroundings are a little new—it’s been a while since Mikey moved out of LA, after all—but it’s all so undeniably Pete that there’s still something familiar to all of it, from the black leather furniture to the messy art hanging on the walls. “I think you might be the only one who feels that way. Besides, it seems like you’ve moved on from—uh, what you were doing, I guess.”
“Huh?” Pete looks genuinely lost and Mikey can’t help but think about the last puppy video Frank sent him.
He takes pity on Pete and clarifies, “I mean, the whole—” He points at his own neck and raises his eyebrows, hoping Pete has enough presence of mind to catch on.
Realization dawns on Pete’s face and he laughs as he drops onto the couch. “Dude, you know this is nothing compared to what I used to get.”
“That’s what I’m saying, though.” Mikey takes a seat next to him. Their knees bump and he can feel the heat of Pete’s skin through his black skinny jeans, brimming over with warmth and energy like always. “Look at you, settling down with a nice girl and going halfway easy on the love bites.” He chuckles. “Man, you’re lucky. Kris always worries about hurting me even though I’ve told her a hundred times she won’t.”
Pete, for once in his life, is quiet. Fortunately, Mikey mastered the art of letting silences sit long before he picked up a bass guitar, so he stretches his arms back and waits. There’s silence in Pete’s house like there never was in a van or on a bus—real silence only slightly muddled by the whir of the air conditioning and twittering birds outside.
Finally, Pete breaks the silence like one drop of water too many spilling over the edge of a glass. “This isn’t from her, though.”
Something in Mikey’s stomach twists. He wishes he could say it was all sour—but, as is so often the case with Pete, a lot of it is stupidly sweet, too. He clears his throat and looks down at his lap. “I thought you’d, uh, outgrown that kind of stuff.”
Pete blinks and then exclaims, “Oh! No, nonono, man, I’m not cheating! It’s not like that.”
“Really?” The part of Mikey that knows Pete’s silver tongue all too well wars against the part of him that has always wanted to believe whatever Pete says. “Then how is it?”
“It’s like—” Pete waves his hand. “You remember when Frank was totally committed to his girl, but he was still like, hooking up all over the place?”
Mikey feels his eyebrows shoot almost through his hairline. “An open relationship?”
“I guess?” Pete shrugs. “I mean, she already knows the whole marriage thing freaks me out, so I guess she realized that…traditional relationships aren’t really my thing, y’know?” He laughs, quiet and self-deprecating. “I think she figured it out before I did.”
The relief of not immediately becoming privy to one of Pete’s guilty secrets loosens Mikey’s tongue. “Yeah, I think everyone did.”
Pete pulls a face that Mikey wants to call a pout, except it’s on a forty-something man. “Hey, no need to be mean about it.”
“What, I don’t get to tease after twenty years of watching you be an idiot?” Mikey grins and dodges the half-hearted swing Pete takes at his shoulder. “Listen, after the shit I saw you do—hell, after the shit everyone saw you do—”
“I know, I know.” Pete groans and lets his head flop back against the couch. “Fuck, dude, you really gotta give me Page Six flashbacks? In 2022?”
“Well, apparently you’re acting like a Page Six lover in 2022, so—” This time, Mikey can’t dodge Pete’s fist, but it doesn’t stop him laughing so hard he almost falls over on the couch cushions. “Come on, you know I’m right.”
“It doesn’t count!” Pete crawls over him, pushing him down against the couch cushions like he can tackle his point into Mikey. “It’s not like I’m still finding hookups at house parties, okay? This is, like, friend stuff. Totally different.”
Mikey snorts and wriggles beneath Pete’s weight, but Pete has always been the jock between the two of them. He’s small but solid, a heavy warmth pinning Mikey to the couch. “Oh, yeah, ‘cause you totally didn’t fuck your friends before.”
“Fuck you!”
“Again?” Mikey replies before he can stop himself. Immediately, he winces. He can feel Pete’s weight shifting off of him—just like it always did when he went a little too far with his words, before they could go quite as far with their bodies. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Nah, it’s—it’s fine, really.” Pete is sitting up next to him now, but he hasn’t moved away. His thigh is still pressed against Mikey’s from hip to knee, and that’s new. Not pulling back, not laughing it off, not reaching for another shot before reaching back for Mikey again—yeah, that’s new. “I know what I did was—I mean, it wasn’t nothing, right?”
Mikey swallows hard but doesn’t reply.
Pete barrels on. “I mean, I wanted it to be nothing, because I thought it had to be, right? Like, if I wanted something—something real—then everything else had to be nothing, you know? Otherwise, it—it would be everything. And it’d be too much.”
Mikey hums, but he doesn’t know what it sounds like to Pete. Hell, he doesn’t even know what he’s trying to communicate, other than the fact that he’s listening—even if he has no idea what to do with what he’s hearing.
Pete seems to get it though, even if Mikey doesn’t. He pushes his hand back through his hair, bleached and straightened into submission, and sighs. “Kinda stupid in retrospect, huh? All or nothing without thinking of anything in-between.”
“I dunno.” Mikey’s voice comes out surprisingly steady considering how he can feel his heart like a hummingbird in his throat. “I feel like being in your twenties is sort of defined by thinking everything’s all or nothing.” At least, Mikey knows that’s how it had been for him. All into the band, and nothing into himself. All into sex, and nothing into relationships that could tie him down. All into the dream, and nothing into the reality he had to fall asleep with every night knowing he would face it again in the morning.
Pete lets out a little laugh, less amused and more appreciative. It’s a nice laugh, one that never makes Mikey feel like he’s being laughed at. “You always did have those little nuggets of wisdom buried in your big old brain, Mikeyway.” He exhales slowly. “Kinda wish I’d listened more. Back when we could…well, back when things were different.”
It’s probably stupid. No, it’s definitely stupid, because even though they’re different people from who they were almost twenty years ago, they’re still them. Still Pete and Mikey, Mikey and Pete, soaked in booze and hidden behind bus bunk curtains. Right?
And still, Mikey hears himself say, “Back when we could what?”
“I mean.” Pete shifts, almost like he’s trying to physically escape the tension lying thickly over them. It almost makes Mikey itch for the easy social lubricant of a drink, but he’s able to tamp down on it quickly now. “You know. When we were still…a thing, I guess?”
Mikey tries to laugh, but he can feel his face twist into something between a smile and a grimace. “I thought you didn’t want it to be a thing.”
Pete’s eyes lower. “There was a lot of shit happening then,” he says slowly, “that I didn’t want to be real. So I just acted like it wasn’t.” He chuckles. “Didn’t work out so well, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Well. There was plenty of that going around.” Mikey looks back up, drinking in Pete’s expression and body language. He’s been told plenty of times that his gaze is unnerving—something the drink used to dull for him—but Pete likes unnerving things. At least, he used to.
Pete is chewing at his lower lip, eyes flicking back and forth from the coffee table to the carpet to his knees, but never rising to meet Mikey’s. When he takes a deep breath to speak, his mouth looks raw and red. “I fucked Gabe.”
“Um,” Mikey says intelligently. “Yeah. Yeah, I think everyone with eyes was pretty aware there was something going on—”
Pete makes an exasperated noise and interrupts, “No, I mean—I fucked Gabe. Like, this morning. Or, like, early in the afternoon, whatever, it felt like morning, you get what I’m saying.”
“Oh. Huh.” Mikey blinks a couple times before his eyes fall to the livid red marks on Pete’s neck. “Oh, he’s the one who—”
Pete snorts. “Yeah, figures, huh? Always gotta make a production out of every goddamn thing.”
An obvious joke about pots and kettles and their relative hues sits on the tip of Mikey’s tongue, but instead, he finds himself saying, “So, that’s why you’re drunk?”
“Well, yeah, Gabe and I got a little carried away, you know how we get when we’re together…” Pete’s voice trails off and he cocks his head. “But that’s not what you meant.”
Mikey clears his throat quietly. “If that’s why you called me,” he starts before changing tack. “We’re not twenty anymore, Pete.”
“I know,” Pete replies immediately. “You really think I’m trying to—what, get wasted and fool around and act like it’s nothing? Is that what this feels like?”
“I don’t know.” Mikey shifts his weight, the leather creaking beneath him. “It didn’t feel like that when we did it before.” Even with the distance of years between then and now, it’s hard to admit. It’s hard not to give in to the urge to pull back and laugh it off—after all, Mikey’s always been a match for Pete in more ways than people realize, right down to the way they’d throw themselves at each other just to glance off.
But he forces himself to look up into Pete’s face. He finds open earnestness there, where it’s usually carefully painted over. It’s funny—Mikey doesn’t think he’s ever seen that expression on Pete in the daylight, before. Suddenly, he remembers just how easy it was to trust this version of Pete, to kiss and believe and hope for…maybe not more, but something.
Pete’s eyes flick downward and Mikey licks his lips on instinct. He can feel the warmth of Pete’s body, softer than it used to be, pressed all along his side, but he’s even more aware of the space where they aren’t touching yet. Where they could be touching. Mikey feels himself sway forward minutely, a breath away from falling in.
It’s the wave of acrid vodka breath that snaps him out of it. He leans back without breaking eye contact, takes a deep breath, and says, “I don’t want to do anything when you’re fucked up like this.”
Pete’s already nodding before Mikey finishes his sentence. “Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, of course.”
It feels suspiciously easy, which always makes warning bells ring in Mikey’s head—especially when Pete’s around. “I’m not saying that just because I’m sober, either,” he clarifies. “If we do anything—if—then I need to know why.”
Pete nods again, but it’s smaller and more contemplative this time. “I think,” he starts slowly, “it wasn’t really a question of why I wanted to do that with you.” When Mikey opens his mouth to object, Pete hastily adds, “No, no, I mean, it was more about why I couldn’t handle it when we weren’t in the middle of it, you know? When I wasn’t wasted or it wasn’t ass o’clock in the morning.”
“When it felt real.”
“It was always real,” Pete replies quietly. “It was just…harder to pretend it wasn’t, when I didn’t have something to numb it.”
The words crash over Mikey like a dam finally bursting, but in slow motion. There’s something warm and light and probably stupid fluttering in his chest, careening through the rest of his body until he’s sure Pete can feel it trying to vibrate out of his skin.
All Mikey can do is let out a short laugh and drop his eyes. “I didn’t think you’d ever say something like that to me.”
Pete shrugs, a self-deprecating smile on his face. “Yeah, well. It just took almost twenty years. No big deal.”
Another laugh bubbles up inside Mikey’s chest, and he lets it out. “Funny how the gayest thing you’ve probably ever done is not kiss a guy.”
That drags a proper laugh out of Pete. His knees come up as he collapses in giggles back against the couch, curling his body in on itself and making him look even smaller. “Well, to be fair, I totally would kiss a guy right now—” Mikey tries not to let his expression betray just how surreal it is to hear those words fall so honestly and easily from Pete’s mouth “—but I’m trying out this wild new thing where I think about what other people want.”
Mikey tries to keep his tone nonchalant when he says, “I never said I didn’t want it.” It’s worth it to see Pete’s eyes go wide and his mouth fall slightly open.
“Huh.” Pete reaches up to scratch at his stubble. “Well. In that case.”
“Yeah?” Once again, Mikey isn’t sure what he’s asking; once again, Pete seems to get it anyway.
It seems to take minutes for Pete to close the gap between them, but Mikey still isn’t prepared for the feeling of warm, dry lips against his own. He doesn’t think he’s ever shared a kiss with Pete that didn’t start tongue-first, but he isn’t complaining. Like this, he can feel the careful slide of their lips, the catch of their stubble, the warm rush of Pete’s breath against his skin. The kiss swells and ebbs, carried by its own momentum rather than pushing hungrily for more.
When they part, Mikey realizes that Pete’s hand is curled lightly in the front of his shirt, almost childlike. Innocence isn’t a word often associated with Pete, but Mikey can’t help but think it’s the right descriptor for that kiss. It felt like the prom slow dance of kisses. Mikey had hated prom, but now he thinks he might get it—the appeal of something already nostalgic, even in the moment.
It almost makes Mikey laugh. Of course, Pete would be able to make everyone around him feel like overgrown kids, too. He’s always been good at that.
Finally, Mikey says, “Never done that sober before.” He wonders if it’s the same for Pete.
The only reply he gets is a slow, cheeky grin. “We’ve got plenty of time to make up for that.” Years ago, that would’ve been accompanied by a saucy wink and another, dirtier kiss, but now Pete just sits there and smiles at Mikey with a horribly charming twinkle in his eye. It’s so much harder to resist than any kiss or grind or half-baked proposition had ever been.
“Yeah?” Mikey might sound deadpan to anyone else, but he can hear the hitch in his voice that gives away his excitement. From the way Pete’s grin widens even further, he can hear it too.
“No time like the present.”