Chapter Text
The Strip’s lights are loud, the people think they are too. But no one can hear you in the desert. You can scream with joy, you can call out for help, but no one can hear you in the desert. The sun doesn’t even eat up your cries— not before the lights’ smoke clogs up the journey to heaven, or the giant casinos underground block its way to hell too.
Ryan dreams of leaving, like everyone else does. He listens to Pete’s record (well, Fall Out Boy’s, but Ryan doesn’t see it that way) while driving, thinking maybe if he goes fast enough, he could outrun the endless generating sand. Then the song’s over and he opens his eyes and he’s still here, always the sun’s victim. It starts to go down by the time he goes home. He’s still listening to them. Or rather, just Pete’s words. He imagines what it’d be like for Pete to speak to him. Maybe it’d be in LA where the palm trees are real, maybe it’d be in Chicago. He wonders what it’s like to be from a city that loves you back.
He’s seen him on stage before. Pete was so real. Hands were reaching up to him like he was their God. Waves of arms attached to bodies with no faces, as if they had no identity than his Devout Follower. Ryan got lost at sea trying to look at him. But the lights on Pete’s face got so bright, the young fan shut his eyes on instinct. Then his idol stepped further upstage. Ryan watched him at the barrier, swaying, rocking, puppeteering.
These are lights I could get used to.
I never saw a star before I saw you.
Ryan has his own thing going on, too. It’s scrappy and rushed but they all hope it’s going to dig them out of the sand. Not sure what’s on the surface— maybe it’s Jupiter, or somewhere out in the galaxy that no one has discovered yet, or Chicago, Illinois. Either way, they have to get out. His guitar isn’t loud enough to blast them off, but maybe his words could be. He never liked the way he looked, too scrawny, girly, disoriented. But maybe every pound he loses will make him light enough to stop sinking in.
He posts pictures of himself online. Whether it’s safe or not, he doesn’t really care, he just wants to be admired. (I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives). He posts them on falloutboylove, a LiveJournal community for other fans. Those fans seem to take a liking to him, calling him words like pretty, and hot, which made his face burn up but did not make his heart beat again. But he’ll take it. In fact, he could be taking more. So, he posts links of his band on the forum, laying his heart out in the sun and waiting for it to dry.
And it works, Pete reaches his big hands into the scalding ground to pull Ryan up. Of course, it didn’t hurt the idol, maybe where he’s from, they’re all heat resistant. Maybe he was born in the cold. It takes five hours to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Ryan thinks, and tries to not let it eat him alive. When he watched Panic! play, Ryan has never been more terrified in his life. He was in a game of Russian Roulette he created then wanted to pansy out of. He couldn’t sing any of his lines. Brendon took the gun and fired for him. Luckily, it was an empty round. They had passed this game. Luckily, you couldn’t kill us. We proved ourselves worthy to stay, you permit us to go to the surface.
That night, Ryan couldn’t sleep. He looks at the sky and he can’t see stars but he swears he sees Pete. And he doesn't care if he’s worshipping a false prophet because he wants to grab Pete’s open calloused hands and wrap his own around the neck and heart of what he offers him and never let go. It’s impossible to see stars in this faux oasis but the first glimpse of it has gotten him higher than the smoke. He wants to take what his saviour has and squeeze and squeeze so it will always be with him. He thought of taking pieces of Pete, one-by-one, until there is nothing else but the various bits of him that are with his devotee. Until Pete eventually reconstructs himself because Ryan actually didn’t know what he was doing taking him apart like that. Then Pete starts tearing him apart too, or maybe this was his plan all along. But Ryan would be succeeding— in his morsels, there lies tiny fragments of stars. At least he’s got that. I just hope when you dispose of me, you don’t dump me in the sand. Throw me into the sea where no one will find me, toss me into Jupiter’s orbit, but don’t let me be born and die in the desert.
Ryan stops paying attention to school, and as a result, his dad, but he can carry on. In the end, it won’t matter. He knows it will all be worth it when he writes his way to life. The young band was walking on a tightrope on their way to salvation and Ryan was leading everyone. If they fell off, he knows how to hoist them back up. But he knows if he fell, they’d all go down with him, too. One way or another. He made their very own record about burlesque queens he’d only ever met with his tail tucked between his legs and older, well-established men promising young women jobs in exchange for sex and infidelity at ballroom floors and the fear of falling off this fucking tightrope he offered to put him and his friends on just for Pete to see and clap and let them join his circus full-time.