Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thing Mikey knew was the pain.

Every part of him was on fire. He choked out a wet breath, his chest falling down on shallow breaths, taking all the energy in his body to raise it back up again.

The sky above him was a neon shade of blue. It stung his eyes when they shot open, rays of sunlight glaring off the lenses of his glasses, which were askew, with a chip in the left lens. His hands flew out above him, reaching for something, anything, to keep him stable. His fingers closed on something rough and scratchy. A tree branch, he was pretty sure. He tightened his grip, hauling himself up into a sitting position. 

Bad idea.

His head swam, and his stomach rolled. He hunched forward, retching and spitting onto the sand in front of him.

Jesus, what the fuck happened?

He tried to concentrate, tried to think back to the last thing he could remember, but his brain had shut off. All he could think about was how much everything hurt.

He sat for a while, gasping for breath, until his heart stopped racing and his stomach finished doing somersaults, and then he finally managed to roll up onto his knees. Testing his limbs slowly, it seemed like everything was still fully functioning, despite what his brain was trying to tell him. Something had really fucked up his back, though. Probably the impact of hitting the ground.

It was at that moment, when he was hunched over, wheezing into his knees and heavily considering just curling back up on the floor and waiting to fall apart, that his hearing tuned back in. Everything before this point had been ringing, any semblance of noise drowned out only by the thudding in his ears, but suddenly the world around him came crashing in.

There were the waves rolling up on the beach in front of him, and the spinning of what sounded like a mangled engine gone horribly wrong, and then there was the sound of someone shouting. 

He squinted into the sunlight, scrambling to his feet and ignoring the way his body protested as he made his way towards the sound of the voice. He didn’t know who was shouting, but they sounded scared and panicky, and they were yelling for help. So he forced his body to cooperate, stumbling towards the voice until he rounded a corner. There, on the grass in front of him, was Pete. 

Not moving.

“What-?” He tried to say, but it came out more as a wheeze.

Andy Hurley, the owner of the voice yelling for help, was kneeling over Pete, shaking him by the shoulders. He looked up.

“Mikey?”

“What’s going on?”

His voice came out all small and scared, he folded his arms across his body, trying to still the way they were shaking.

Andy ignored him, turning back down to the body underneath him.

“Come on, Pete, stay with me,” He murmured, interlacing his fingers and compressing Pete’s chest. He counted under his breath, Mikey counted with him up to thirty, then watched him stop and lean down to breathe air into Pete’s lungs.

Pete convulsed a little, body jerking under Andy’s hands, but he still wouldn’t open his eyes. Mikey didn’t even think he was breathing. His stomach twisted painfully, acid burning a hole in his gut. He couldn’t watch. He turned, and his legs carried him away, back out onto the beach. He’d raised a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, which meant he couldn’t see what was right in front of him until he stumbled directly into it.

Huh.

He blinked.

Stepped back.

Blinked again.

Nope, his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. That was definitely the tour bus. 

On the beach.

Engine still running.

Broken in half.

The front end, with the driver and the kitchen, was gone. Mikey had walked right into the outside wall attached to the back lounge. He staggered around the side, one arm against the hot metal for support, until he made it to the crack.

He looked at the bunks. The sofa in the back. His blanket was still draped over the cushions, the one that he’d stolen out of Pete’s bunk the night before.

“What the fuck?”

Behind him, there was a sudden, horrible gasp. He turned and raced back to Andy’s side, where he was pulling Pete into a sitting position, bracing his arms around his back. Pete clung to Andy’s elbows, making awful guttural noises into his shoulder. Relief flooded through Mikey’s body. Rushing from his heart all the way out to his fingers and toes so quickly that it left him feeling lightheaded for a moment.

“That’s it, you’re okay,” Andy murmured, rubbing a hand along his neck. “Just breathe,”

They stayed there for a long time. Pete shaking and sobbing, leaning over to cough bile into the sand beside him, Andy mumbling gentle things into his ear, rocking them both back and forth just enough to be comforting but not jostling his fragile frame too much, and Mikey standing behind them, watching. He pictured himself kneeling down on Pete’s other side, taking the hand that was resting on the sand and squeezing it between his own, pushing the hair out of his face, telling him he was going to be okay. But he couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t move, no matter how much he tried to make himself.

It was all too much. The noise, the heat, the pain spiking through his whole body every time he moved. They were terrible, but it all paled in comparison to this. This awful sick feeling of dread that came from watching Pete cling to his life. 

He’d had nightmares just like this. Forced, night after night, to watch his friends, his family, die. Paralysed to do anything to save them. 

Usually the dreams took place in a hospital room, or an ambulance, or on the cold tiles of a bathroom floor. Mikey would watch them shake and cry and he’d try. He’d try so hard to make himself move. To comfort them. To hold onto them. To not let them die alone.

It never worked.

The ocean was warm. Mikey had never felt it like that before. He hadn’t even been near the ocean for years. He tried to remember the summer days back in grade school, him and Gerard in matching swimming trunks, jumping over waves while their Grandma watched them from a rented deckchair. Long afternoons spent huddled under one towel, sharing their ice creams because neither could decide what flavour they wanted, so they got both and ate half of each. The ocean was always freezing, sending shivers up Mikey’s legs and turning his lips blue. But he didn’t care, he was too busy trying to splash Gerard when he wasn’t looking.

This was nothing like that. The water was a bright, clear, blue, washing over Mikey’s toes like it wanted to pull him into its depths. It was so warm against his skin that he could see it turning pink underneath the waves. He squinted up at the rippling sun with a sigh, he hoped there was sunscreen on the bus, he did not want to end up with a tan.

“You thinking about going for a swim?”

He whipped around. Pete was standing behind him, hands in his pockets, grinning up at Mikey like he hadn’t almost died less than an hour ago.

“Are you okay?”

Pete shrugged, his mouth turning down just slightly at the movement. Mikey looked at the bruises creeping up from the neck of his shirt, he thought about the sound of Andy’s hands thudding against his chest.

“Still kicking. You?”

“Can’t complain,”

“You’re Mikey, you always complain,” Pete kicked off his shoes and waded into the water beside him, standing just close enough that their shirts brushed, but they didn’t touch.

“You nearly died, like, ten minutes ago. Feels kind of insensitive to start talking about the sand in my socks?”

Pete frowned. “You’re not wearing any socks,”

“Why do you think I took them off?”

“Touche, mikeyway,” He laughed a little, then stared out at the horizon. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Mikey shrugged.

“Do you think we’re dead?”

He looked at Pete, not blinking, eyes fixed on the clouds rolling above them. This close, he could see little bruises blooming around his mouth and nose from where Andy had gripped him too hard, and dry blood on his cheek, right underneath an ugly looking graze. Mikey hadn’t looked in a mirror, but based on the way his face hurt when he spoke, he guessed he looked in a similar shape.

“What, like, this is some kind of heaven?”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t know, I just. How did we get here?”

“The bus crashed,”

“On a tropical island?”

“I don’t know, man. I guess,”

“We’re not dead,” 

They turned around together. Andy was staring at them, holding a backpack in his hands. Mikey didn’t recognise it. 

“Now come on,” He continued. “Stop being dramatic and help me,”

Much to his dismay, they were immediately put to work trying to put out the burning wreckage that used to be the tour bus, and scavenging what they could from inside. Apart from the front being completely missing, it had actually held up pretty well. They managed to pull out the cushions and blankets from the bunks, and there was still food in some of the cupboards.

Pete insisted on helping, squeezing in right next to Mikey, literally hand over hand. Mikey would be annoyed, but they were both so spindly that they kind of needed their combined strength to get the mattresses out of the bunks. But then he started wheezing, and Mikey made him go and sit down in the shade with a bottle of water rescued from the little freezer section of the minifridge. Mikey was kind of useless after that, torn between half-assed excavation and half-nervous check ins with Pete every thirty seconds. He seemed fine, reclined against the back of a tree all smiles and dumb comments, but Mikey just couldn’t shake the image of him laid out under Andy’s hands, and the horrible dread in his gut that he was going to lose him forever. He bent his head down against the beating sun and did his best to ignore the feeling.

The sun had started to sink over the horizon before anyone broached the topic again. Mikey was sat, legs curled up underneath him, gazing up at the pink and purple streaks across the darkening sky, when Andy clapped his hands so hard that he practically jumped out of his skin.

“So,” He said, when Mikey and Pete had both stopped blinking cluelessly at him. “I figure we were in some kind of freak accident, right? Maybe the bus got into some kind of crash, floated out into the ocean, I don’t know. But I think as long as we keep the fire burning as big as we can, we’ll get rescued pretty quick,”

Mikey looked at the signal fire, a little further down the beach, but still close enough that he could feel his cheeks get hot when he turned towards it. It had started with a burning bus tire, but they’d been feeding it all afternoon. Andy had told him so many things about air flow and stacking branches or something. He hadn’t followed any of it, he’d just copied what Andy was doing and hoped for the best. It had gotten pretty big. If there were any boats out there, surely someone would see them.

“Yeah, dude, of course we’re gonna get rescued,” Pete said, laying back on the sand. “I bet there’s like a million search parties out for us right now. Imagine the headlines. ‘Warped tour cancelled as half of fall out boy and some of my chem disappear’,”

Oh.

Something clunked into place in Mikey’s brain.

“Where are the others?” He blurted out, his heart rate spiking suddenly. “What happened to them?”

“It was only us three on the bus last night,” Andy reasoned, clearly having thought of this already. “I don’t know where Patrick and Joe ended up, but all of your guys were on your bus,”

Pete frowned. “Are you sure? A whole bus and only three guys?”

He nodded. “Just us and the driver. Which brings me onto my next point, we need to find him,”

“What?”

“The front half of the bus broke off somewhere. I think it must be off in the jungle somewhere, or washed up further down the shore. Tomorrow morning we need to go out and find it. The driver could be hurt, or trapped. Or even if he isn’t, strength in numbers, right?”

Pete nodded, saying something that sounded like agreeing. Mikey wasn’t really listening, he was busy thinking about Gerard and Frank and Ray, somewhere back home, not knowing where the hell he was. He thought bitterly that they probably weren’t even worried yet. They probably thought he was just out crashing in some girl’s hotel room or bouncing from bars to clubs until the sun came up. How long would he need to be gone before they noticed something was wrong?

The night took a million years to pass. Mikey spent most of it rolling from one side to the other, shifting on the blanket that was somehow already covered in sand the instant they set it down. The three of them slept side by side, huddled together under the stars. It was surprisingly cold for a tropical island, and Andy was a huge blanket hog, so Mikey woke up every five minutes shivering. He pulled his hoodie tighter around his shoulders, and tucked himself right up against Pete’s side. He was warmer than a radiator, and he made little snuffling sounds with every breath. Mikey relaxed a little more each time he heard it, knowing that he was still alive, but it didn’t help him sleep any more.

Andy got up as soon as the sun started creeping over the horizon. One look at his sunken eyes told Mikey that he’d slept just as badly. He nodded when they made eye contact, but didn’t say anything, just started rummaging around in his backpack and humming to himself. 

Bizarrely, Mikey fell asleep again after that. Something about Andy’s meandering movements had tuned his brain into feeling normal for a minute, and had sent him off faster than anything he’d tried all night. When he woke up again, the sun had crept further up in the sky, and he felt like a lizard under a heat lamp. He threw back the blankets and sat up with a start, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Good Morning Sunshine!”

Pete was grinning at Mikey, so wide it was practically coming off his face.

“Mm,” He mumbled, shifting his legs so he wasn’t sprawled out in the sand. “What time is it?”

“Early,” Andy answered, not looking up from where he was fixing the signal fire. He nodded to the ground. “I made coffee,”

Mikey blinked.

“In the coconuts,” Pete answered, before he’d even cobbled together the braincells to ask. He picked one up and pressed it into Mikey’s hands. “It’s good. No milk, though,”

That was fine, Mikey took his black anyway. What he was confused about was how the hell he was being made coffee on an island.

“What-?” He managed eventually.

“It’s Andy, he’s a survival genius,” Pete shuffled closer, dropping his voice conspiratorially. “I think he’s been praying for something like this to happen for years,”

“Do you think he brought us here on purpose?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him,”

Andy turned around. “What was that?”

“Nothing!” Pete shouted, glancing sideways guiltily. Mikey stifled a laugh into his coconut.

They trekked along the beach all morning, then veered off into the jungle when the sun got too high to be in the open. Andy had charted some kind of potential path to find the front half of the bus, but it was hours before they saw any sign of life. It was so weird. There was nothing out of the ordinary for miles, and then suddenly they were standing in front of half a bus.

It was upended in the trees, windscreen pointing towards the sky. Sunlight reflected off the broken glass.

“Shit,” Andy murmured, staring up at it. He took his bag off, dropping it in the dirt, and jogged to the base of the tree. 

The crack was just as jagged as their half at camp (Obviously, Mikey thought to himself), but it wasn’t on fire. In fact, it was eerily still. Beside him, Pete folded his arms, leaning forward a little.

“Do you see anything?”

“Not yet. Come here,”

They looked at each other, not moving. Mikey blinked, glanced at Andy, who was already waist deep in the bus and showed no sign of waiting for them, and shifted.

The thing was, he really didn’t want to go in there. It was all quiet, and weird. At that ridiculous angle the chances were the driver hadn’t made it, and Mikey didn’t exactly fancy looking at a dead body today. He stared at his shoes, watching the toes wriggle around in the grass for a while, until Pete nudged his shoulder.

“Come on,” He said, making absolutely no move towards the bus.

They looked at each other, exchanging reluctant expressions, until Andy emerged again and stalked back to where they were standing.

“Hey. Earth to Pete and Mikey? You gonna help me save the driver or what?”

Mikey sighed. “Yeah man, coming,”

The bus was gross inside. It had only been a day, but somehow it was covered in dust. All the windows had smashed on impact, so every surface was topped by a layer of broken glass. Tree branches were coming through the gaps in the frames, flicking back into Mikey’s face every time he pushed them away. The angle was so severe that they had to practically climb the bunks, Mikey was watching Andy obsessively, copying exactly where he was putting his hands and feet, but he was still slipping constantly. Which was ridiculous, because he was taller than Andy, so he should be finding this easier, but fine. Pete was no better. He was shuffling along underneath Mikey, grumbling and cursing quietly with every movement and trying to pretend he wasn’t panting for breath every time he stopped to figure out his path. The bruises on his face had darkened overnight, gaining purple and yellow rings around the edges. He’d been coughing all day, insisting he was fine every time anyone suggested a break. Mikey glanced down, stomach twisting anxiously at the sheen of sweat across his brow.

He opened his mouth, to ask if he was alright, maybe, or suggest they go and sit down, but before he could put the words together there was a crash above him.

He squinted upwards. Andy was prising the door to the cab open. He was hanging from one arm and a foot, practically 90 degrees in the air with a stupid grin on his face (because he had the audacity to be enjoying this), pushing at the door. The lock was half open, and he was banging some kind of fucking rock against it. Mikey closed his eyes.

Less than twenty four hours. And they’d already become cavemen.

He smacked the lock a few more times before it gave, the door swinging open and colliding with Andy’s side with such force that for a second he thought he was going to fall on top of them. He braced himself against the wall, sliding down and around to grip the doorframe. Mikey stared at him. Was he expecting them to do that too?

He hauled himself haphazardly up to Andy’s level, managing to poke his head through the doorway without falling. The driver was still buckled into his seat, head lolling back against the headrest. Mikey’s stomach churned.

Please don’t be dead please don’t be dead please don’t-

He spluttered suddenly. Spitting a cloud of dust out into the air in front of them.

“Holy fuck,” He flinched backwards, grip tightening on the doorframe.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Andy murmured, placing a hand on his shoulder and rubbing. He pulled a bottle of water out of his pocket, pouring some into the driver’s mouth, mumbling comforting things the whole time.

He should become a doctor or something, Mikey thought, his bedside manner was amazing.

A hand closed around Mikey’s ankle. 

He jerked back.

“Sorry,”

Oh, it was just Pete. Weirdly, he’d forgotten he was there.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I- What’s going on?”

Pete was clinging to the seat just below Mikey, chest rising and falling as he pushed out shallow breaths.

“The driver’s awake,”

“Oh, is he alright?”

Mikey looked back up. The driver and Andy were locked into a quiet conversation, leant in so close to each other's faces that their foreheads were nearly touching.

“I think so? He’s-”

There was a sudden impact in the side of the bus. A metal clanging rang out through the whole frame. Mikey gritted his teeth, his eyes falling shut. The bus rocked sickeningly, sliding a fraction down.

God, Mikey thought. We’re going to fucking die.

Pete’s hand was around his ankle again, gripping so tight his fingers met on the other side. 

“What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Andy had fallen against the driver’s side. He looked up at Mikey. “Get Pete out of here. We’ll be right behind you,”

Mikey nodded, shaking his ankle loose of the clammy fingers around it.

“Back down,” He said to Pete, who mumbled something he couldn’t hear, and started lowering himself.

Going down was so much harder than going up. Mikey’s arms shook, muscles protesting every movement. He forced himself to concentrate on where he was putting his feet, on watching to make sure Pete was still moving underneath him. He listened distractedly to Andy’s harried conversation with the driver. Something about navigation, or the engines, or something. He’d practically stopped paying attention when the screaming started.

The Something collided with the bus again, smashing through the windscreen. Andy let out a horrible screeching noise, and there was a clang that sounded like him falling back against the wall. Mikey dropped down the last few feet, landing painfully in the grass, half on top of Pete, who grabbed him by the waist and hauled him out of the bus frame.

They fell awkwardly into the mud. One of Mikey’s shoes was wet, suddenly, liquid seeping through the fabric and onto his sock. He scrambled to his feet, looking down.

Fuck.

His legs, from where his shins had still been under the shelter of the bus right down to his toes, were covered in blood.

Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit.

“Andy!” He crawled back under the bus frame, straight into a horrible dark red puddle that soaked onto his arms and his shirt. “Andy?”

“Yeah,” He called back down, strangled. “Yeah I’m-”

“What the fuck happened?”

“They- I- Fuck!” The bus rocked again. “Run!”

“Andy, what-?”

“Just go!”

Mikey shook his head, pulling himself out of the bus and hauling Pete out of the grass. It had started to rain while they were inside, and his feet slid against the slick ground. Pete was asking him questions, but he just shook his head and kept dragging him away. Crashing sounds echoed through the trees behind them, it sounded like some kind of dinosaur or something. His mind filled in the blanks with just about every horror movie villain he could think of.

There was another metal crash, and the footsteps were getting closer.

Jesus Christ.

He stumbled. One hand hit the ground. There was blood on his knuckles.

Pete tugged at his wrist.

“Here, this way,” He wheezed, dragging Mikey off the path and into the trees.

They ended up in some kind of cluster of tree trunks, all connected to one set of roots. It made a sort of cage that they wriggled right into the centre of. The whatever-it-was crashed closer and closer, horrible screaming noises echoing around them. Mikey winced, bracing all of his muscles for impact. Pete had his face pressed into Mikey’s shoulder, hot breath panting against his neck. They were pushed together from head to toe, arms wrapped around each other and feet interlocked. Mikey wasn’t sure if it was Pete’s heart he could feel pounding against his chest or his own.

His whole body felt hot and cold at the same time, blood rushing past his ears so hard that his head was spinning. His fingers found Pete’s, down by their hips, and gripped as hard as he could. Pete squeezed back, making a reassuring sort of noise against his neck. 

Impossibly, the sound faded away. Retreating back into the depths of the jungle. They stayed there, ragged lungs sharing the air between them until the rain slowed to a stop, and the clouds above them cleared away.

“Are we okay?” Pete whispered, pulling his head back to look up at Mikey. His eyes were huge and dark in the low light.

“I think so,” He tried to say, but it mostly came out as a cough. Pete tipped his head forward, his forehead knocking against Mikey’s chin. He sighed shakily.

“Is Andy-? Um…” His voice was so quiet.

“We’ll go back,” He untangled their fingers, reaching up to nudge at Pete’s shoulder. “We’ll go back and we’ll find him,”

He nodded, shifting awkwardly backwards until he could twist his way out of the tree trunks. 

The mud slid under their feet. Mikey looked down at his blood soaked jeans, and the smears running all up his forearms. There were splashes in his shirt, and he was pretty sure it was down his neck and face too. 

“You’re okay,”

Andy’s voice behind them was hoarse, and tinged with disbelief. 

Pete threw himself around his shoulders, squeezing him in what looked like an attempt to fuse the pair of them together.

“Jesus Christ, I thought that thing had eaten you,”

“No, I, uh. I’m okay. It… it left me alone,” Pete stepped back, and Mikey got a proper look at him for the first time. Andy was covered in blood, head to toe, and his hands were trembling. 

“The driver wasn’t so lucky,”

Chapter Text

“Remind me what we’re doing out here?”

Pete slumped back against the trees, digging the toes of his shoes into the dirt in front of him. He’d been complaining all day, protesting every little movement or instruction, pleading his injuries as an excuse not to come along, as if they hadn’t healed days ago.

Andy slowed his pace, turning back to look over his shoulder at him “I told you, I need to show you something,”

“Can’t you just tell us what it is?” Pete whined, throwing his head back dramatically. Andy rolled his eyes, all he did these days was act like some kind of fainting maiden.

Okay, yes, he did almost die, but they were all in the same crash. Andy was the one who’d looked that thing dead in the eye as it ripped the bus driver apart, but was he complaining? No, he was getting on with things.

What Pete didn’t seem to understand, was that their crashing on the island was no coincidence. There was absolutely no logical explanation for how they’d got here. That left two options: they were either dead, and in some kind of purgatory (unlikely, given that they’d seen without a doubt that people here can die), or something had brought them here. They were on this island for a reason, and Andy knew what it was.

He ignored Pete, carrying on through the trees. The path wasn’t obvious, but Andy had walked it every day for weeks now, so he could have done it in his sleep. Pete and Mikey, however, had never come with him, so they were having a much harder time of it. It was only when he heard Mikey start to stumble that he actually slowed his pace.

Andy liked Mikey. He was quiet, but he seemed like a cool dude. He was just as lazy as Pete was, but he didn’t complain all the time, so he was a bit easier to deal with. 

“We’ll be there soon,” He said, in what he hoped was a comforting tone, barely glancing back.

“Yay!” Pete called from behind them.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” 

He turned back to the path, but just before he did, he was pretty sure he caught Mikey smiling.

When they finally came to a stop, Andy dropped his backpack, kneeling to pull out his water bottle and draining half of it in one. They’d had to ration the water for a while, but he’d found plenty of running streams nearby to top them up. There was even a waterfall inside a cave a couple of miles up from where they crashed, it made for a great shelter at night.

Pete collapsed dramatically to the floor, throwing his arms out to his sides and sighing. Andy watched him carefully, studying the way his chest rose and fell heavily with each breath. He had a feeling the exhaustion wasn’t entirely pantomime. Mikey however, seemed to be doing fine suddenly. He folded his arms, reclining against a tree like he owned it, and looked down at Andy from over the top of his glasses.

“So, what are we doing here?”

Andy sighed. “We’re here because of this,”

Backing up, he reached down and pulled at the weeds beneath him. They came away in his hand, revealing a square of metal, with a small window in the centre.

“Shit,” Pete crawled over from his spot in the grass, pressing a hand flat against the glass. “What is it?”

“Some kind of hatch. My guess is it leads to a bunker or something, but it’s welded shut, so I can’t get in,”

He looked up. “Have you tried? How long have you known about this?”

“I tried a couple of things,” He hedged. “But nothing has worked so far. I think with all three of us we can get it open, though,”

The truth was, Andy really hadn’t wanted to tell the others about the hatch. He’d found it in the first week after they crashed, while he was exploring. He was wandering around, trying to find the right plants to keep them properly fed, when he’d tripped over at just the right moment and dropped his bag, making a huge metallic clang when it hit what was supposed to be mud. He didn’t know what was down there, but something deep in his chest told him that it was the reason they were there. The reason he was there. That he was meant to find it, meant to open it, meant to find his destiny inside.

But everything he’d tried hadn’t worked. He hadn’t had as much time to focus on opening it as he would have liked to, spending most of his days foraging and stoking the signal fire and doing everything else that helped them survive while Pete and Mikey swanned around on the beach, but he’d snuck away at every opportunity to examine it. The echoes in his steps told him that the metal kept going in a wide circle around the window, and that whatever it led to went a long way down, but he just couldn’t get in. He’d tried breaking the glass, and prising off the door, but it just wouldn’t give. 

Call him crazy, but it felt like some kind of a test, like he just had to find the right route, and once he mastered the approach, he’d be able to get in. And maybe the answer lay in the two men before him, maybe what the island was telling him was that they had to work together, share their knowledge, and then they’d finally-

“Why?”

Mikey butted into his thoughts, pushing his glasses back up his nose with one finger. Andy wondered for the hundredth time in the thirty-some days since they’d got here how they’d made it through the crash without the lenses smashing.

“What?”

“Why do you want to open it?”

“Well- I-” He floundered for a second. “Don’t you want to know what’s inside?”

Pete obviously did, he was crawling his way around the edge of the hatch door, trying to fit his fingers underneath the welded edges. His face was so close to the metal that he was nearly touching it.

“Not really,” Mikey shrugged. “It’s not going to get us home, is it? So who cares,”

“It might,” Pete argued, looking up at him with huge eyes. “It’s a bunker, right? What if it’s got a phone, or a radio system or something,”

“Or it might just be a metal box. It’s not worth wasting our time on,”

“As if we’ve got anything else to do. Come on, mikeyway, it’ll be fun,”

Andy wasn’t sure about ‘fun’, but if it worked then it worked. He watched them argue for a little longer, untying the bundle attached to his backpack and setting about stripping the bamboo of leaves. He’d made it halfway through the pile before Pete settled down next to him, picking up a branch and turning it over in his hands.

“So what are these for?”

Andy glanced up at him, eyes tracing just briefly over his arms holding the bamboo up to the light. The way he’d tilted his head back exposed the barest marks still visible on his neck and chest. Andy was pretty sure he’d left scars. Across from them, Mikey slid down to kneel on the ground. He wasn’t going to help, but apparently he was content to watch.

“We’re going to build a trebuchet,”

“A what?”

“Like a catapult?”

There it is. Andy didn’t even bother disguising his smile. A moment of curiosity was all it took, he met Mikey’s eyes, and saw just a glimmer of excitement hiding there.

“Yep, like a catapult,”

With all three of them on board, progress moved much quicker than he was expecting. By the time the sun was setting, they’d gathered all the wood and vines they were going to need, and the frame for the base was starting to take shape. Three more sunsets later and the trebuchet towered above them, and by the time a week had gone by they were nearly ready to use it.

Andy’s hands were covered in calluses, wrists protesting every shovelful of dirt as he descended further and further into the ground, revealing more and more metal as he went. He’d been right; The hatch was circular, about six feet across and god knows how many feet down. They’d uncovered enough of it that the hole was just as deep as it was long (after getting a bit too caught up in digging they’d spent one very frustrating afternoon boosting Mikey out and having him throw branches down so Andy could turn them into a ladder and get them free), but still he kept digging long after the others had given up.

Pete kept telling him they weren’t going to find anything new, that he was wasting his time, but he just felt like he had to make sure. He knew there was something important down there. The lid couldn’t be the only entrance, there had to be a back door somewhere, if he could just find it. But all he’d found so far was a series of numbers stamped on the side of the metal. A serial number, probably, although that raised far more questions than it answered.

Andy sat on the edge of the pit, his legs dangling down, kicking against the metal every time he swung them forward. He read the numbers over and over again, wracking his brain for what they might mean.

4 8 15 16 23 42

He came up empty every time.

He thought about asking the others if they had any idea, but he knew they wouldn’t get why he was asking. They wouldn’t understand that he was meant to be here. They didn’t know that this hatch was the reason they’d crashed. They just wouldn’t get that this was his fate.

He shook his head a little, wiping sweat from his brow. Man, he was definitely going crazy, but he just couldn’t explain it. He felt it, deep in his chest. This was what he was meant to do. And once the trebuchet was finished, he’d finally know why.

Behind him, Mikey and Pete were grumbling to each other. Complaining about aching limbs and burnt skin. Andy tuned them out, sipping his water, looking up at his masterpiece.

“So, when are we gonna smash this thing?”

Pete squeezed in next to him, pressing their sides together as if they didn’t have an entire jungle to spread out in. 

“Soon,” Andy said, pushing back. “It’s nearly ready,”

“How soon?”

Mikey settled on Pete’s other side, leaning forward to watch him. Pete shuffled back a little bit so he was equally spaced between them. Or maybe he just moved back so he was touching Mikey instead.

“As soon as we find something decent to put on the end,”

He pointed up to the end of the trebuchet, where it was currently resting on the ground. Once they fixed it to the frame, they’d pull it back as high as it would go, and let it fall down onto the glass window. If they found the right end for it, something heavy and sharp that would concentrate all the force in just the right place, then it’d break right open.

“We could probably just use a rock or something, or maybe a piece of the bus, if we can break it off,”

“Would that work better?”

“It would be sharper,”

“Okay, well, let’s go try,”

Pete jumped back onto his feet, dragging Mikey by the arm until he stood up too, groaning in protest, and then pulling at Andy’s shoulder.

“You guys go ahead,” He said, shaking Pete off. “I’m going to stay here and make sure it’s all set,”

Mikey scoffed. “That’s code for ‘I don’t trust your knot tying’,”

“Hey, my knots are perfect, thank you, I was the best webelo in my group,”

Andy rolled his head back, looking at upside-down-Pete with a frown.

“Webalo?”

“You know, scouts,”

He laughed. “Sure,”

“Is that like a Chicago thing or..?” He heard Mikey ask as they disappeared into the jungle. The path back to the beach now marked out by their collective footfalls enough that they could follow it without Andy leading. He hoped, anyway.

The sand down by the bus was all soft. The tide had been rolling in and out around it for days, leaving it all damp and solid. Pete’s feet sunk right into it with every step, sometimes right up to the ankle. He felt it right between his toes, wriggling them each time he moved.

Mikey was watching him from the grass, pretending not to laugh every time he nearly fell over because his feet were stuck. He’d had to roll up his jean legs to keep them dry and the result of the (already skinny) fabric being folded was well and truly cutting off the blood circulation to his feet, so walking straight was becoming harder by the minute.

“You could help me, you know,” He said, wrestling with a crack down the side of the bus. If he could lever the metal properly then maybe it would break off. It wasn’t particularly heavy, but if the cuts down his palms were anything to go by it was totally sharp enough, so hopefully it would work.

“No, I’m good,”

Pete watched him carefully out of the corner of his eye. The way his shoulders were hunched over, just a little, and how his smile dropped away as soon as he wasn’t being looked at anymore.

“Are you okay?” He asked carefully.

Mikey shrugged. “Never better,”

“You sure?”

“Obviously not,” He sighed. “We’re on a fucking island,”

“Well, yeah, I know it sucks, but you’ve looked totally miserable since we got here. I didn’t think one man could maintain an emotion for that long,”

“What’s new? This is just my face,”

“Nah, you definitely look more miserable than normal,”

Mikey made a face at him.

“Did something happen?”

“Look around you!" He yelled suddenly, throwing his arms out. "This happened! Our bus fucking crashed, I guess, and somehow it landed us here. And now we have to sleep on the fucking floor and spend all day digging holes and burning our couch cushions to make a signal fire and eating whatever the fuck Andy keeps bringing us from the jungle. Any day now we could get eaten by whatever knocks down the trees at night and ripped up the bus driver, or starve to death, or catch some island fever and fucking die here. It’s hot and there’s sand everywhere and we don’t even know if the others are alive and I’m sick of it!”

He sounded so angry and hopeless, all these words bursting out of him in some kind of huge rush, putting words to every single bit of fear and upset that Pete had been trying to ignore for the last thirty something days. That they were going to die, that his friends were already dead, that nobody was ever going to come for them, and he’d never get to see the people he loved or do the things he enjoyed ever again. That voice, at the back of his head, that said Andy was right when he said they were meant to be there, that they’d been brought here as a test, or maybe as some kind of punishment.

Mikey dropped his hands to his sides, pulling his glasses off and pressing the heel of his hand into his eye. Pete realised with a jolt that he was crying. His stomach twisted.

He only stumbled a little when he dragged his feet out of the sand, closing the space between them and wrapping his arms around Mikey’s thin shoulders before he could give himself time to think about it. Mikey hugged him back instantly, his head falling forward to rest on Pete’s shoulder, sighing right in his ear.

“I want to go home, Pete,” He mumbled, sniffing.

“I know,” He whispered back. “Me too,”

They rocked together for a little bit, pressed so close that Pete could feel Mikey’s heart beating against his chest. He squeezed harder for a second, then stepped back a little.

“Can I show you something?”

“I found it last week. You know when Andy sent us out looking for vines and shit?”

Mikey was walking so close that his feet kept bumping against Pete’s calves. He’d already complained about the incline about seventeen times, but he still hadn’t asked where they were going.

“Yeah, you disappeared all day, we thought something had happened to you,”

“Well, it sort of did,” He stopped, leaning his arm against the break in the trees. “Not like- I was okay, but I was following this path, wondering if there were any creatures out here that haven’t been discovered yet back in the real world, and then suddenly I was here,”

Mikey raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“And where is here?”

He nudged the branches aside, turning around and facing the sky.

It was all pink and orange above them, stretching out across the horizon, shining over the ocean for miles around. The little peak of rock jutted out on the cliff face, the jungle behind them, so all you could see was water.

“Wow,” Mikey said softly, stepping forward.

“Beautiful, right?” Pete asked, sitting down on the rock and looking up at him. “I sat here for hours, just watching the clouds move. It’s like, obviously I hate it here, and I want to go home more than anything in the world, but out here, looking at it all, it kind of feels right. Like, the world is so beautiful, and we’re so small, and nothing else matters but being here and living and all the little amazing things we get to experience,” He watched Mikey for a second, then glanced back at the horizon and shrugged, feeling a little exposed. “I don’t know, it’s just cool,”

There was a pause, then Mikey nodded and sat down next to him.

He curled his legs up beneath him, not taking his eyes off the sunset the whole time.

“It’s really something,” He said finally.

“It is. Kind of makes me feel like I’m not real anymore. But in a good way, like I’m not really Pete, I’m just a bunch of carbon or atoms, or whatever, just the same as the rocks and the ocean and everything. At some point it all rearranges back into me, but I feel like I’ve been put back together a little bit different, my atoms have made space for a little bit of the sky. Everything’s changed, but then I look up, and I’m back here, just hanging out on a cliff with my friend Mikeyway, and everything is all alright again,”

Mikey blinked at him. 

“How do you do that?” He asked quietly. “You make everything sound so beautiful,”

Pete shrugged, his cheeks heating as he looked down at the ground.

“I guess I spent a lot of time hating everything about being alive. If you want to stick around, you’ve got to turn it into something worth sticking around for,”

He might have said something else. Something more profound, something a little too honest, but before he could even start to form the words Mikey had laid a warm hand on his cheek and pulled his face back up. He only had a second to take in the barest of smiles on his face before he’d pulled him in, and then Mikey was kissing him, and nothing else in the world mattered.

Pete sighed, shifting his shoulders to wriggle closer, his stomach backflipping so hard he was pretty sure it was just going to fall all the way out, splashing into the depths of the water beneath them. His hand slid up from the stone ground, anchoring itself on the back of Mikey’s neck, fingers sliding just a little bit higher to thread through the hair there.

They broke apart, breathing heavily into the space between their lips.

“Wow,”

Mikey laughed.

“Yeah, sorry,”

Pete made a noise that was something like protest, ducking in to kiss him again. Just to prove that he wanted it, that he had absolutely nothing to be sorry about. Mikey pressed back against him, humming.

He moved back just a little, tracing his fingers along Pete’s cheekbone, drawing a line where the sun had settled there. “It’s not just the sky that’s beautiful, you know,” 

The corner of Pete’s mouth tugged up. “That was terrible,” He said, voice hoarse.

“But it worked,”

Pete nodded. “Yeah, it worked,”

He pulled him back in again, and then their chests were pressed together, and Mikey’s tongue was in his mouth, and his hands were in his hair, and Pete was laying back against the cold, solid weight of the stone beneath him, and everything around him was turning a hazy shade of pink…

The bamboo creaked under its own weight. Andy gritted his teeth, praying that it didn’t fall apart under his hands. He raised his arms above his head, pulling the trebuchet back until it towered high up over the hatch glass.

He’d spent the afternoon sharpening a stone he’d found down by the river, lashing it to the head of the trebuchet. He had no idea where the others had gotten to. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was this.

It was ready.

The rock climbed higher and higher into the night sky. Stars twinkled above him, casting a glowing light over the grey metal underneath his feet. He leant forward, throwing his whole body weight against the lever, and then held it, just for a second, enough to take a breath, before he stepped back.

With a whoosh, the trebuchet swung through the air, colliding with the hatch lid with a deafening crash that rang out through the trees. Andy threw his hands up to cover his ears, blinking as the dust around him settled. His heart picked up, and he almost tripped over his feet in his haste to get to the window. The broken pieces of the trebuchet lay around him. The force of the collision had broken its bonds at last. He pushed the rock aside, holding his burning torch up against the glass.

Nothing.

“What?” 

He didn’t understand. His palm pressed against the window, pushing into the glass, testing for any point of weakness, any evidence that his plan had worked. It didn’t give. 

He pushed harder and harder, until his fist was banging into the metal frame. He knew he was yelling something, but he could barely even hear his voice over the rushing in his ears. 

This didn’t make any sense. This hatch was his destiny, it was why he’d been brought to this god forsaken place, it was what he’d been made for. He knew it, he’d dreamt about it. 

Why would the island keep this from him? What else did it want him to do? He didn’t understand. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Where he was supposed to go from here. What was the point of it all, if there was nothing waiting for him at the end?

The light blinded him.

He fell backwards, sitting back against the metal that was growing warm under his skin. Blood dripped down his fist where he’d been beating it against the glass. It throbbed with every heartbeat.

Light was coming through the hatch.

Bright and white, like a huge flashlight had been turned on, or a switch had been flicked. It shone through the muddy glass, casting a glow onto his pale skin.

A light.

A literal light in the darkness.

Coming from the hatch.

His hatch.

It wasn’t just a light, it was a light that had turned on after he’d beaten his hand against the metal and yelled against the scratching in his throat. It was a light that had turned on after he’d made a racket. After someone had heard him.

Somebody was down there.

Chapter Text

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Patrick woke up with a start, rolling onto his side and groaning into his pillow. The little pips of the computer spiked through his temple and right into his skull, pain shooting across his forehead.

“Don’t worry, I got it,” 

The voice from the top bunk, a hint of laughter hidden behind the words, no doubt in response to Patrick uttering another loud groan. Gerard jumped down from the bunk, feet landing heavily on the concrete floor, and practically skipped across the room and over to the desk. Patrick could hear him sliding into the swivel chair, along with the little tap tap noise of the computer keys. He let his eyes slide shut again, mind’s eye filling in the gaps of Gerard inputting the code into the computer. He pictured the other man’s hands hovering over the buttons, pausing just before hitting execute to watch the timer click on. He always does. Always waits until it starts blaring angrily at them, like he thinks this time it might not happen. This time the timer might just stop. Like they might not have to keep saving the world. 

Like they might be able to leave.

Like clockwork, Patrick hears the final tap right as the gentle pips turn into an angry alarm. The computer silences, and he hears the riffle of the timer turning back to one hundred and eight. The sound that follows is the wheels of the chair sliding right back across the room. Patrick opened his eyes right as Gerard landed in front of him, shadow obscuring the harsh fluorescent light coming from the ceiling. He grinned down at Patrick, who grumbled and shoved his head under his pillow.

“Breakfast?”

He felt a bit better after he’d eaten. Forcing down the omelette that he’d only managed to half focus on cooking. Bleary eyes blinking at the sizzling pan in front of him, because he’d learnt very quickly that you can’t trust Gerard in the kitchen. He’d made one meal early days and immediately nearly burnt down the entire hatch. Honestly, he’s worse than Pete.

So Patrick cooks, and then he makes Gerard do the dishes. Leant back against the kitchen counter, arms folded, he watches the fading box black hair fall across Gerard’s forehead, obscuring his wrinkled grimace at having to touch the wet egg left on the plate.

“You know there wouldn’t be leftovers to scrub off if you finished it,” He said with a smile, reaching for a towel to start drying.

“I’d finish it if you made something that didn’t taste like rubber,” Gerard muttered back.

“Hey, it’s not my fault there’s no spices down here,”

Gerard giggled. “Can you imagine? Dharma Initiative paprika,”

“In a white cardboard box that’s impossible to pour,”

“Or maybe those little sachets, like the salt ones from McDonald’s,”

“Oh yeah, of course. With the little hexagon logo stamped on each one,”

They laughed a little, then finished the dishes in silence. Patrick handed Gerard the towel to dry his hands, then nudged his shoulders towards the bedroom.

“Okay, I’m on next shift, go to bed,”

“I’m fine,” He protested. “I slept this morning,”

“For a hundred minutes? I don’t think so, Gerard. Go lie down,”

He sighed exaggeratedly. “Fine, Dad,” He crossed to the bedroom doorway, then stopped and turned back, hovering with one hand on the door handle. “Wake me up if anything happens, okay?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Patrick said. “Apart from saving the world,”

It had been just over forty days since they woke up on the beach. Patrick had been barely conscious, only half aware of the person with one hand fisted in the back of his shirt and the other on his neck, pushing him ahead down the jungle path. He’d only really come to his senses when the hands had let go of him to tug open a huge metal door. It shrieked horribly when it was pulled open, like it hadn’t been used for a very long time.

Patrick hadn't even had time to start freaking out before being shoved unceremoniously inside, and the door had been closed again, leaving him in total darkness. He’d felt his way through the dim light until he found a wall, and sat, curled up with his back against it, trying to take deep breaths and keep his vision clear. He didn’t know how long it was before the door opened again, but he didn’t move an inch until the outside light streamed through, illuminating the walls around him. 

The figure, who was tall and broad and covered entirely by a yellow hazmat suit complete with breathing apparatus, was dragging something behind them. Heavy breathing came through the ventilator in pants, Patrick thought dumbly that it sounded just like Darth Vader, before the person slumped over, hands against the floor as they shifted the mass beneath them. They stood, flicking on a lightswitch, and Patrick realised with a hot spike of fear that they’d been dragging a body. 

He’d blinked, and suddenly the figure was in front of him. They leant over, and barked something at him that got lost in the mask.

“What?” He managed, cringing at the way his voice squeaked.

The hazmat suit sighed, pulling off the ventilator to reveal his face. He had a grey beard, and blue eyes, and he was looking at Patrick like he wanted him dead.

“I said do you wanna save the world?”

“Uh, um, yes?”

“Great,” The man grabbed Patrick by the shoulder, pointing with his free hand across the room. “Then you better push that damn button,”

He stood up, and shoved his mask back on, making for the door. On the way he’d picked up a bag that he’d slung onto his back, and then reached down and grabbed… a gun?

He stopped in the door, pulling the mask off just enough to speak.

“Oh, and I think your friend needs your help,”

And then he was gone, and Patrick was alone. 

Well, not alone. 

He’d stared down at his shoes for what felt like hours and seconds at the same time, but was probably only a few minutes, before he’d brought himself to crawl over to the body across from him. He’d seen their back moving up and down, so he knew they were still alive, but they’d clearly been knocked unconscious, or something. He reached out a trembling hand to roll the body over.

Gerard.

Patrick heaved a sigh. He’d been worried, for some reason, that it was going to be a stranger. At least the man in the hazmat suit had been right to call him his friend. His hands slid under Gerard’s warm shoulders, wrestling him back over onto his side. He wasn’t strong enough to lift him up properly, but the first aid class he’d taken in high school rose to the forefront of his memory, and he managed to put Gerard in a passable attempt at the recovery position before the beeping started.

He’d thought, at first, that it was some kind of alarm that they’d set off. Then he thought there was a bomb in there with them. Then, when he’d actually plucked up the courage to investigate, he found the computer.

It was old. Like, really old. 

It looked like the kind his Mom had at home. He was reminded, once again, of high school. Long afternoons watching the clock hands drag until he could practically run home to get on the computer. Because as if he wasn’t already enough of a geek stereotype, he’d also spent his weekends learning to code. 

He’d sat down at the computer, pulling the keyboard towards him in an old, instinctive gesture.

Dude, high school wasn’t that long ago. A voice in his head, that sounded suspiciously like Pete, reminded him.

He’d pushed it away, though, turning his attention instead to the timer counting down above him. Three minutes and twenty three seconds. Then three twenty two, then three twenty one. Each second counting down with another pip of the alarm. 

He really didn’t want to know what happened when it got down to one.

The computer screen was flashing. An arrow, and three dots, waiting for instruction. Patrick glanced down, and noticed for the first time a green post-it note stuck to the desk. A series of numbers was scrawled on it.

4 8 15 16 23 42

And then underneath:

Execute. 

He typed in the numbers, and pressed the Execute button beside the keyboard, heart pounding in his chest.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the screen flashed back to black, and the beeping stopped. Patrick looked up at the timer. It had riffled all the way up to its starting point. 

108.

He had no idea what the hell he’d just done. The man’s voice echoed in his head.

Do you wanna save the world?

Behind him, there was a shuffling, and a groan. He turned in his chair. Gerard was blinking up at him from the floor.

“Patrick?” He asked hoarsely. “Where are we?”

They’d found the orientation video not long after that. Some professor from the 70s explained that there had been an ‘incident’ in The Swan (which was apparently the name of the bunker they were in) which meant the code needed to be entered into the computer every one hundred and eight minutes. The video claimed that they would be down there for five hundred and forty days before their replacements arrived, and suggested that the trade off sleep shifts in the meantime. But the video also claimed that they were part of some hippie scientist cult called The Dharma Initiative, so Patrick doubted that was true. The scientist wished them a "Namaste, and good luck" before the screen faded to black. Whatever that meant.

Still, like clockwork, the alarm started to pip as soon as it counted down past four minutes. They never let it get down to zero. Gerard suggested it a few times, just to see what would happen, but they both got too worried to go through with it. What if they really were saving the world?

They took the video’s advice, donning the Dharma Initiative branded beige boiler suits (which Patrick had to cuff the trousers and sleeves of, and tried his hardest not to be embarrassed about) and white t-shirts, and trading shifts so that someone was always awake and on button duty. They ended up spending most of their time together. Partly from lining up their schedule to not go insane from loneliness, and partly because Gerard slept so terribly that he spent most of his rest shifts hanging around Patrick anyway. 

It was weird, because this was by far the most time he’d spent one on one with Gerard since they’d met (and honestly, maybe the most time he’d spent one on one with anyone ever), but they managed to fall into a steady routine fairly quickly. The instruction video also told them that food deliveries would come every twenty-four days, and sure enough after the first couple of weeks they got a beeping message through on a fax machine that said a crate had been delivered, and after thoroughly covering themselves with the same yellow hazmat suits that the man who brought them in there had been wearing, they ventured out through the doors and spent a long, sweaty afternoon carrying boxes of cereal and fish crackers into their little kitchen. That was the first time Gerard had been outside since they’d been woken up, and he didn’t do a very good job of hiding how much it freaked him out.

They didn’t go out again after that. They had no reason to, and they had to stay close to the computer anyway.

The first real bump in the road came when Patrick found the syringes.

“Come on, we’ve got to do it,” He said gently, holding up his hands like he was placating an anxious dog.

“Why?”

He flipped the little book in his hands over. “The manual says they have essential vitamins and… energy or whatever, that we’re missing out on because we can’t go outside,”

Gerard folded his arms, eyes filled with fear as he backed up against the opposite wall. “I don’t care. Inject yourself all you want, I’m not doing it,”

“Gerard,” He fought to keep the frustration out of his voice. “Come and sit down,” 

They stared each other down for a long minute, then Gerard walked across the room and slumped down on the bench beside where Patrick was standing. He smiled a little, and started to prep the injection. He’d already done his own, his bruised vein protesting at the motion of his arms.

“I’ll do it for you, so you don’t have to look, okay?”

“Okay,” He mumbled.

Patrick felt bad for the guy, really, he was obviously really freaked out, but he wasn’t keen on letting Gerard die from vitamin deficiencies, either, so he’d just have to get over it. He finished sorting out the vial of liquid, slotting it into the barrel of the gun thing. According to the diagram, you were supposed to put the tip against the inside of your elbow, and then press the trigger, and the fluid would go right into your veins. He studied it for a little bit longer than he needed to, using the time to compose himself, and put on his best nurse persona. 

“Just try to take deep breaths,” He said carefully, employing the same tone he was used to using to coach Pete through panic attacks. “And don’t look down,”

Gerard made a non-committal and deeply uncomfortable noise. Patrick glanced up at him, freezing where he’d been unbuttoning Gerard’s boiler suit cuff and sliding back down his wrist to squeeze his hand. He blinked a few times. His eyes were shining in the low light.

“You’re doing great,” He reassured.

Gerard scoffed. “You haven’t even done anything yet,”

He sounded utterly miserable, but he squeezed Patrick’s fingers back anyway.
Satisfied, Patrick returned to rolling his sleeve up past the elbow. He massaged the pale skin on the inside a little, trying to bring the veins to the surface.

“Still doing great,” He said. “Hey, at least this way you know you’ll never get addicted to heroin,”

Gerard laughed again, but it sounded forced. Patrick sighed.

“Come on, talk to me,” He tried. “Anything, it’ll help,”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, tell me about yourself,”

Gerard laughed. “You know everything about me already,”

“I doubt that. You went to art school, right?”

“Yeah, SVA in New York,”

Patrick hummed, reaching down for the syringe.

“How come you’re doing music then?”

“I worked at Cartoon Network for a while, animating, but I just wasn’t happy, you know?”

Patrick glanced up at him. “Are you happy now?”

“Right now? No, not at all,”

“Not what I meant,” Patrick laughed. He lined up the tip of the gun, feeling Gerard flinch under his hands. “I never went to college. Fall Out Boy started when I was still in high school. When I graduated, it was all I wanted to do. My mom gave me a year to make it work, before she said I had to give it up,”

“What happened?”

“We released Take This To Your Grave. And then things kind of snowballed from there. She seemed satisfied enough to let me keep going, so we made it to Cork Tree. I still think I could call her tomorrow to say I’m packing it all in and getting a degree, and she’d be overjoyed,”

“I wish I could call my mom,” He said quietly.

“Yeah,” He murmured, lining his fingers up. “Yeah, me too,”

He pressed the trigger, feeling Gerard’s flesh give under his hand as the needle went in. He made a sort of whimpery groan, and tried to pull away, but Patrick held fast to his hand, rubbing circles into his bicep with the pad of his thumb.

“There you go,” He said with a smile, pulling the needle out and placing it back on the bench. “You did it,”

Gerard sighed shakily, raising his other hand to his face to push his hair back. He glanced down at the arm still held in Patrick’s, paling even more when he saw the bleeding spot in his skin. Patrick pulled a plaster from his pocket, pressing it over the little scratch. Unnecessary, maybe, but he knew it’d make him feel better if he couldn’t see it anymore. He hesitated for a second, then shifted his hands up to Gerard’s shoulders and leant in to hug him. He hugged back immediately, melting into Patrick’s chest with another sigh. 

“Bravest guy I know,” He said, wrapping an arm around Gerard’s back and rubbing up and down along his spine, feeling his unsteady breaths come in and out.

Gerard had hugged him once before. It was their second or third show on the tour, and mychem had come down to watch their set. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but he guessed they must have liked what they saw, because they’d practically stormed the stage as soon as the performance was over. Gerard had made his way over to Patrick, gripping him by the shoulders, this wild grin crossing his face. 

“Dude, you’re amazing,” He’d said, and pulled Patrick right into his shoulder, crushing his lungs between his arms. “How the hell did you learn to sing like that?”

Patrick had shrugged, mumbling something about just being able to into Gerard’s jacket. He was still wearing his guitar, so he couldn’t even get his arms free enough to hug him back. He’d just tangled a fist into the fabric at the front of his shirt, and laid his head down. He’d been sweating, and spinning, and high on adrenaline from the show, but he couldn’t forget the way his heartbeat had picked up, jumping from his chest right into the back of his throat.

Right now it was doing the exact same thing, and he didn’t have a show to blame it on. He waited there until it calmed down, focusing on the feeling of Gerard’s forehead on his shoulder, his arms around his waist. His hands were settled over Gerard’s back, so he could feel the way his lungs were shaking on every breath. He wasn’t the only one; It wasn’t long before Patrick found a lump forming in his own throat, and his vision swimming just slightly.

“Patrick?” Gerard mumbled against his shirt.

He pulled back just enough to give them space to look at each other. “Yeah?”

“Where are we?”

Patrick sighed. He stepped back, slumping down onto the bench. Gerard shuffled a little, so they were pressed together from their shoulders all the way down their arms.

“I’ve been trying not to think about it,”

“Me too, but we’ve gotta talk about it at some point, right?”

He supposed they did.

“I woke up before you did,” He started, looking down at his hands as he spoke. “When we were still outside. You were there, I think, but I didn’t- I had no idea what was going on. The last thing I could remember was speeding down the highway on the bus and then suddenly I was on some kind of beach,”

“Beach?”

Patrick swallowed.

“Yeah. We weren’t there for long, though. I woke up to this guy dragging me. Or like, pushing me ahead of him, so I couldn’t look at his face, through the jungle. We didn’t walk for that long, and then he pulled open this big metal door and shoved me inside,” He nodded across the room to the hall, which led down to the room with the computer. “He left me in here for a while, then came back dragging you behind him. Asked me if I wanted to save the world, and then when I said yes, he said ‘well, you better push that button’, and then left us,”

“What did he look like?”

“He was wearing one of the yellow suits, so I don’t really know. But, uh, he had a grey beard. That’s all I know. I don’t know what happened to the others, or if they’re…”

He trailed off with a shrug. If they’re what? Out in the jungle somewhere, looking for them? Back in Chicago wondering why the hell he split on them? He didn’t even know how they’d got there, let alone if there were any more people, he couldn’t even begin to wonder what had happened to Pete or Joe or any of the others.

“Do you think we’re dead?”

The way he asked it made it sound like Gerard very much did. Patrick looked up from his hands to study his face, but Gerard was staring at the opposite wall, not blinking.

They were silent for a long time. The possibility had crossed Patrick’s mind, of course it had, there was basically no other explanation for what had landed them there. But it didn’t make any sense, either. This wasn’t nearly bad enough for hell, but it obviously wasn’t heaven either. Was it some kind of purgatory? Would these ‘replacements’ come for them in five hundred days and let them move on to the next life? Patrick had never really given much thought to life after death, but he was pretty sure no religion had ever predicted this.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t feel dead,”

“No, me neither,” Gerard admitted.

“Well then, that settles it. We’re alive and well,”

“But- Why are we here?”

“I don’t know, Gerard, but there’s no use agonising over it. It sucks, obviously, but there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”

“I guess not,”

Patrick leant over, bumping their shoulders together. “Hey, look on the bright side, at least we don’t have to be around Pete and Mikey’s whole situation anymore,”

“I- you know about that?”

He laughed, shifting to clear the needle gun away and set it back on the bookshelf where he’d found it.

“I mean, I have eyes,”

“Has anything actually happened between them?” He asked carefully.

“Shouldn’t you know?”

“Shockingly, no, my brother doesn’t tell me the details of his sex life,”

“Okay, good point,” Patrick laughed. “As far as I’m aware, nothing’s happened yet, just a whole lot of longing stares,”

Gerard hummed, leaning back against the wall. His eyes glittered in the light, tilting his chin back to look up at Patrick. “Do you think something will?”

He shrugged. “I know Pete wants it to,”

That was a understatement to say the least. Pete had been totally smitten with the dude since the day they met. But as Gerard had so conveniently reminded him, he and Mikey were brothers, and Patrick imagined that he didn't want to hear the filth Pete had been spouting about him. Patrick didn't even want to hear it, but Pete didn't seem to understand what 'oversharing' meant.

He set the box of needles back on the top shelf, running a hand across the books and records lined up on the ones beneath. The biggest fight they’d had since getting here was over which albums to play on the record player (they’d talked about it for hours, and ended up with just agreeing that whoever was on computer duty would get to choose the record). His fingers settled on the stack of VHS tapes on the bottom shelf.

“Dude!” He wrestled a tape free, holding it up to show Gerard, who brightened when he saw the cover. “They’ve got Star Wars!”

That was the only time they’d really talked about what happened to land them down there. They skirted around it a few more times, but one of them always shut it down before it got anywhere. The only time they let themselves even mention the outside world was when they talked about what they missed.

One such conversation found them on the hatch sofa. Patrick was sitting back, desperately trying to keep his eyes open long enough to focus on the Charles Dickens book he was reading when Gerard flopped down beside him, laying his head on the arm of the sofa and swinging his feet up on top of Patrick’s thighs. 

“I never thought I’d miss going on walks,” He declared, throwing an arm dramatically over his head. “But, fucking hell,”

Patrick laughed, setting the book down and settling a hand on Gerard’s shin.

“Fancy a 10k?”

“God, no,”

“Yeah, me neither,”

“I want, like, a casual walk. None of that hiking shit,”

“Late night stroll on the beach?”

“Exactly,”

Patrick sighed. “I want a Dr. Pepper,”

Gerard hummed.

“I want alcohol,”

“Me too,”

“Are you even old enough for that?”

Patrick scoffed. “I’m twenty-one, thank you. And anyway, we’re on international waters, no laws apply,”

“Fine. I miss pizza,”

“And garlic bread,”

“Mashed potatoes,”

“Onions,”

“Gravy,”

“I want to write songs again,” Patrick said suddenly.

Gerard pulled his hand off his eyes, blinking. “Seriously?”

“What’s so weird about that?”

“That’s, like, going on vacation and saying you miss your day job,”

“I wouldn’t call this a vacation,” He shoved at Gerard’s legs a little, not enough to knock them to the floor. Patrick hadn’t had hold of his guitar for nearly forty days, now. But he’d been singing on and off almost constantly, they both had. “Don’t you miss performing?”

“I guess, yeah,” He leant back again. “I miss Mikey,”

“I miss Pete,”

“And Frank,”

“And Joe,”

“And Ray,”

“And Andy,”

“We could write a song,”

Patrick blinked. “Huh?”

“If you wanted,” He sat up, pulling his legs back to cross them and lean forward. “Pete does your lyrics, right? I could do lyrics,”

“But, I don’t have my guitar or anything,”

“We can figure it out. I bet there’s something around here we can record sound on. Maybe we should sample the computer alarm,”

Patrick laughed, trying to imagine what that song would even sound like. Gerard started drumming out a beat on the cushion between them, mimicking the little pips of the alarm, which just made Patrick laugh more.

Then the crashing started.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

He jumped to his feet, bumping into Gerard, who was doing the same. They looked at each other, reflecting fear and shock into each other’s faces.

“What the fuck is that?”

Patrick swallowed. “I think it’s coming from the roof,”

The noise rang out again, echoing down the walls. Patrick took off through the hatch, feet sliding along the floor in his haste to make it down the hall. Only slowing down when he made past the corner that always pulled on his belt buckle. Electromagnetic energy, supposedly, sucking all the metal in the entire bunker towards it. 

He staggered to a stop right underneath the emergency exit. The round room at the end of the disused hallway, with the ceiling that led all the way up to a tiny glass window. 

When they’d first got there, he’d tried to climb the ladder, but the second rung had given under his foot, and he’d never touched it since. Now, though, the whole thing was vibrating. Shaking with the force of something, or someone, pounding against the hatch roof.

He staggered to a stop. Gerard collided with his side, mumbling an apology. Patrick shushed him, craning his neck to try to catch a glimpse. It was night outside, he couldn’t see anything.

“Patrick, I think there’s someone up there,” Gerard said quietly.

His breath caught in his throat, and he shushed again. He could barely even hear the clunking anymore over the sound of both of their heartbeats.

A voice was shouting down at them, punctuated by smack after smack against the metal. Someone on the surface. He strained to make out what they were saying.

What….point of it all……… we here. ….. Why

Patrick’s stomach dropped out of his body. He scrambled, grabbing hold of Gerard’s arms. His vision tunneled and his chest heaved. He thought he might pass out. 

“Hey… what-?” Gerard started, bracing Patrick’s shoulders.

“It’s Andy, Gerard, it’s Andy,” He swallowed, his ears rushing. “He’s up there,”

Gerard made a choked sound. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t know,” He hissed back. “I can’t see,”

“There’s a floodlight,”

He raced back down the hall. Patrick heard a huge clunking sound, then was all but completely blinded. It was worse than being under stage lights. His hands flew to cover his eyes, and he blinked, pulling his glasses off against the glare. He craned his neck to see something, anything, through the tiny window in the hatch roof, but the stamping and the shouting had stopped, and they were plunged back into silence.

They hadn’t slept that night. They’d spent hours arguing over what to do about it. Patrick had wanted to go out there straight away. Fuck the button, fuck saving the world, Andy was out there and he was upset and he needed them. But Gerard wouldn’t let him. He said they needed to think it through. They didn’t know what might be up there, what could have made him that mad, and they still had the computer to worry about. The one thing they could agree on was that they couldn’t split up. If one of them left, then anything could happen to them and nobody would know. Whoever was left behind would go insane waiting for them to return. But if they both went, they couldn’t be gone for longer than a hundred minutes, and that wasn’t exactly time to explore.

Patrick knew that staying was the right move, but he just couldn’t shake how distraught Andy had sounded. His words were looping in the back of his skull, he’d sounded so desperate, so hopeless. They’d argued into the middle of the night, until something in Patrick broke, and he found himself collapsing in a heap on the floor, shoulders heaving in sobs. Gerard knelt beside him, his arms wrapping, solid, around Patrick’s shoulders. One hand rubbed up and down his back, murmuring vague, soothing things into the top of his head over the sound of Patrick's heavy breathing.

“He’s up there,” Patrick choked out.

“I know, I know,”

“He’s alive,”

“I know,”

He tried to say something else, but the words dissolved on their way up his throat. He screwed his eyes shut, burying them in Gerard’s chest, and cried until his head felt like it was going to burst. 

When he was worn out, he let Gerard pull him to his feet and guide him over to the bunks. He lay him down on the bottom mattress and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. Patrick let his eyes fall shut when Gerard reached out and took his glasses off. His hand was warm on his cheek when it brushed the tears away.

“This is a good thing,” He said gently. “It means they’re alive,”

Patrick grumbled, his shoulders hitching again.

“It’s okay. Get some sleep, we can talk about it again in the morning,”

“It’s my shift,” He managed, his voice coming out all husky and wet.

“Yeah, well, we shared mine,”

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but the next thing he knew eight hours had passed, and his head hurt like he’d been concussed.

Two days later it had been Gerard’s turn to break down. He’d obviously been doing his best to hold things together for Patrick’s sake, but it wasn’t long before the idea that his bandmates were alive, and so close, but so out of reach, got to him. Patrick found him in the shower, where he’d been for at least three hours, the dismal water pressure doing nothing to obscure the sounds of his tears. They’d sat either side of the mildewy shower curtain for a while, Patrick watching the shadows jumping on the wall while they talked in circles around every possible scenario of what was going on in the jungle above them, until Gerard had finally managed to get up and shut the water off, kicking him out so he could get dressed. 

That left them here, on day forty four, having all but abandoned the schedule. The pair of them were nervous wrecks, only just about managing to fit pushing the button around their schedule of breakdowns and crying. 

Patrick yawned, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye, staring at the closed bedroom door. He was gripped by the urge to follow Gerard in there, to climb up into the top bunk and get under the blanket behind him. Which was weird, because he’d never wanted that before, but something about being here had just… brought it out. He wanted it now, though, he wanted to lay next to him on the tiny, crappy mattress. He wanted to get close enough to get his arms around his waist, to interlock their fingers, to fit his face into the hollow in Gerard’s neck. 

They’d gone from being barely acquaintances to unbelievably close in such a short time. He couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d held him while he cried, and was so utterly confused by the part of him that wanted to break down just so he could feel it again. 

He stirred his coffee, and stared at the computer screen, and focused very hard on pushing that feeling down to somewhere where he couldn’t think about it anymore. He hoped that if he tried hard enough, he could forget he’d even felt it. Because it wasn’t worth it, to hope for something you know you can’t have.

When his shift ended, he only watched Gerard sleep for a minute or two before waking him up. 

“Wakey wakey,” He mumbled, shaking Gerard’s shoulder.

His eyes shot open, and he jolted into a sitting position.

“Hey, easy. Nothing happened,”

“What-?”

“Just a shift swap,”

He ran a hand through his hair, pushing the black strands out of his eyes.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly five,”

Gerard frowned. “My shift was supposed to start at three,”

“I know, but you needed it. Come on, I’ll make coffee,”

He pulled away, and sped off into the kitchen, before he got lost in the closeness and the whispering and called Gerard sleeping beauty or something.

They were either side of the kitchen counter, sipping mugs of black coffee, when a sudden boom rang out across the hatch.

The walls shook with the noise, knocking the mugs to the ground.

Patrick leant into the counter, throwing his hands over his head, and screwed his eyes shut until the room stopped reverberating. When he looked up, he was alone.

“Gerard?”

“Through here. Come look!” He called from the hallway.

He stumbled towards the sound of Gerard’s voice, and found him at the mouth of the hallway, next to the magnet core. He was looking down some kind of periscope that was attached to the floodlight. He grabbed Patrick’s shoulders and pushed him in front of the scope.

Patrick blinked. 

“Dude,” He looked back up at Gerard. “I think someone blew the roof,”

They raced down the hall, a near perfect mirror of the week before, except this time instead of crashing into each other Gerard had a firm hold on Patrick’s wrist, and was dragging him along behind him. They stopped in the same spot under the roof, but it wasn’t there anymore.

Instead, Patrick found himself staring up at the sky. The actual, real sky. Stars twinkling at them through a canopy of trees, midnight blue that was just starting to pale into daytime. He drew a long breath, the scent of fresh air rushing into his lungs was almost dizzying. He gripped his other hand onto Gerard’s arm, just to keep himself steady. 

And all of that was before they heard the voices. Faint from the wind and the space between them, but recognisable all the same.

“It worked! Andy, it worked!”

Gerard faltered, suddenly leaning his weight into Patrick. His mouth fell open on a choked sound, breath sucking in and out in pants.

“Mikey?” Patrick shouted, as loud as he could get his lungs to go. Gerard’s hand was so tight around his wrist that it hurt, he shifted his arm to rub his back.

“What the fuck? Patrick?”

His heart stuttered.

“Pete?”

A silhouette came into view under the stars. The outline of a head and shoulders that it felt insane to say he recognised. He nearly choked on the balloon expanding in his chest.

“Patrick?”

“How did you find us?”

“Andy found some dynamite- Who’s us? Is Joe with you?”

“No, it’s just me and Gerard,”

“Gerard?”

Mikey’s silhouette appeared next to Pete’s. He felt Gerard tense.

“Mikey!”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, we’re- we’re alright,”

Their voices dropped, and all Patrick could make out for a while was a bunch of frantic arguing, along with the appearance of Andy’s head over the roof.

“Okay, guys!” Andy called down. “We’re going to try to come down, but it might take us a while,”

“Oh, um,” Gerard swallowed, raising his voice. “There’s another door on the other side, It’s ground level,”

“Where?”

They looked at each other for a second.

“I don’t know,” Patrick answered. “Left?”

Andy laughed. “You’re useless. We’ll find it. See you soon, okay?”

“Okay,”

Patrick rolled his neck down, releasing his hold on Gerard’s back to rub the muscles at the back where they’d started to ache from looking up. He glanced over, and caught Gerard’s eye, who couldn’t stop grinning at him.

“They’re alive,” He murmured.

Patrick threw his arm back around him, squeezing. Gerard pulled his shoulders in closer, burying his face in the top of Patrick’s head. Neither was even trying to pretend they weren’t crying.

“They’re alive,” He repeated into Patrick’s hair.

“They’re alive,”

They didn’t get to relish in the joy for long before the computer started to beep.

Chapter Text

It was probably an hour before they all stopped hugging each other. 

Every time they thought they could let go someone would say something, or move, and then they’d all be laying all over each other again. It was funny, really, how many times this tour Patrick had wished he could just be away from everyone else. To just take some time to himself for a few days where he wouldn’t have to be crammed into absolutely no space with the rest of his band and a bunch of guys he barely even knew. But here he was, squished so close in between Pete and the arm of the sofa that he was pretty sure he could feel them merging into one. It wouldn’t be the first time either of them had wanted it.

Mikey was on Pete’s other side, with Gerard on the end. They were murmuring quiet things to each other that Patrick couldn’t make out. Not that he was trying to, really, he was too busy burying his head in Pete’s shoulder and telling him again and again how much he’d missed him.

Andy, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to sit still. He was pacing up and down the walls of the bunker like a tiger in a cage, increasing in energy each time his bare feet padded past them and talking to himself all the while.

“I can’t believe I was right all along,” He mumbled, rushing past them for the seventeenth time.

“What is he talking about?” Patrick asked.

Pete shrugged. “He’s been going on and on about how opening this thing was his destiny ever since we got here-” He raised his hands to put air quotes around destiny, then rested them back on Patrick’s thigh. “- I guess the fact that you were here means he was right,”

“What, like a cosmic destiny thing?”

“Yeah. Apparently it’s the reason we were brought here,”

“Well it’s definitely the reason we were brought here,” Gerard joked from the other end of the sofa. “That old guy who dragged us down here definitely had a plan,”

“I’m not sure I’d call that destiny,”

“Unless he was God,”

There was a pause.

“He wasn’t,” Patrick said quickly.

They all mumbled rapidly in agreement.

“What’s this?” 

Andy emerged from the living room, holding the film reel up above his head.

“That’s the orientation video,” Gerard answered, jumping up to take it from him. “Be careful, it’s fragile,”

“Show it to me. Now.”

They disappeared into the other room, and then Mikey said quietly.

“Has he always been a dick?”

A couple of hours later, they’d successfully raided the pantry, and swapped stories of survival over a Dharma Initiative Feast. Andy had played and replayed the Orientation video so many times that Patrick was sure the film was going to wear out, and everybody was really sick of hearing the Doctor wish them all ‘Namaste and good luck’ before he shut off the camera - Much to Andy’s frustration, Patrick had no idea why he said it, or what on earth it meant. He looked at everything the Doctor in the video referenced, inspecting the computer and the surrounding tech in detail (even though Patrick knew he knew nothing about technology and wouldn’t be able to figure out the communication system any better than he and Gerard had). He made Patrick show him all of the equipment, asking a million and one questions that he didn’t have any answers to. He pressed his hands flat against the walls of the tunnels, mumbling things to himself that Patrick couldn’t make out.

“What happens if you don’t enter the code?” He asked, staring up at the hole his dynamite had made in the tunnel ceiling.

Patrick shrugged. “The end of the world,”

“Huh,”

To his surprise, Andy sounded like he wholeheartedly believed him. Which, given this whole ‘forget our old lives this place is more important’ thing that he’d adopted, Patrick wasn’t totally surprised, but still. He’d woken up to the sound of the alarm every day for a month, and he still had his fair share of doubts.

“What if you can’t?”

“Can’t enter the code?” Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Everything explodes, I guess,”

“Well, yeah, but- there isn’t any kind of back-up or anything?”

“Oh you mean the failsafe?”

Andy frowned at him.

“Come on,”

“We’re only supposed to use it if it’s an absolute emergency,” He said, rummaging through the drawers in the kitchen. “But it’s- Gerard!”

“Yeah?” He was still on the sofa, smiling up at them.

“Where’s the failsafe key?”

“Oh, uh. I think I put it on the bookshelf,”

“Why would you-? Never mind,” Patrick sighed, dragging Andy round the corner to the shelving unit. It was still scattered with books from where they’d been debating how best to alphabetise them (Patrick wanted to do it by author surname, Gerard wanted to go by title). He stood on his tiptoes, pushing away the books still left on the shelf, finding the key tucked behind a copy of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. He pulled it out, showing it to Andy.

It was huge, the head of the key carved in the shape of the Dharma Initiative logo, with the swan symbol in the centre. The hole for a keyring had a string threaded through it instead. Patrick was pretty sure it was supposed to be hanging on a hook somewhere, but he had no idea where this hook was.

“What does it unlock?” Andy asked, glancing around the room.

“Nothing. It triggers a shutdown procedure. But like I said, it’s only for emergencies. Here,” He shoved his hand through the pile of books, finding the ‘Swan Handbook’ that had given him directions on how to administer the injections. “It’s all in there,”

Andy stared down at the book for a second, then took it out of Patrick’s hands, thanked him, and disappeared into the bedroom, presumably to read the whole thing as many times as he’d watched the film.

They wrote up a new schedule that evening. And, of course, Andy jumped at the chance to take the first shift, leaving the rest of them to cram into the bunk beds and try to get some sleep.

Patrick was surprised how tired he felt. Sliding under the thin blankets, he found he could barely keep his eyes open. Although, he had barely slept at all since they’d heard Andy banging on the roof, and the relief that had filled him since they’d been reunited was so palpable he thought he might be able to reach into his chest and pull it out. Next to him, Pete was already asleep, making little snuffling noises every time he breathed out. Patrick wondered what it had been like for them, trying to survive up in the jungle for all that time. He tried to imagine sleeping in the sand and eating plants. Although, with a guy like Andy in your party you were pretty set for successful survival. Still, it can’t have been pleasant. He wasn’t surprised they'd both fallen asleep the second they’d hit the mattresses. 

If he strained, he could just make out Gerard and Mikey’s matching breaths on the bunk above them. They’d barely made it up the ladder before they’d passed out. Fast asleep, their relaxed faces sharing one pillow, Patrick had never seen them look more alike.

He yawned, wriggling down under the covers and throwing an arm over Pete’s waist. Focusing on the sound of his breathing, and the way his chest hitched under Patrick’s hand, it wasn’t long before he drifted into sleep.

The next morning, Patrick felt happier than he had in weeks. Maybe happy wasn’t quite the word, more accurately he just felt like things were okay. Which was kind of ridiculous, because they were still stranded on a tropical island, and they still had a button to push every one hundred and eight minutes or the world would explode, and Joe and Frank and Ray were still missing, but he just had this bizarre feeling that they were going to be alright.

They ate breakfast all together, and then sent Andy to bed (he was supposed to be waking one of them up after a few hours to swap onto the computer, but he’d refused to leave the desk until someone physically dragged him away). Patrick took over with the button, while the others set off back to the beach to retrieve Pete and Mikey’s stuff from their camp. He was alone for one and a half pushes-of-the-button before he heard the shrill screaming of the metal door opening and shutting again. There was some rustling in the kitchen, then Pete poked his head around the door.

“Hey,” He said quietly, glancing behind him and shifting into the room.

“Hey,”

“Get everything you needed?”

“Yeah, pretty much. Mikey’s taking Gerard out to get the rest,”

Pete closed the door behind him, hovering in the middle of the floor for a second, fiddling with something in his pocket.

“What?” Patrick asked finally. “Come on, spit it out,”

He sighed. “Okay,”

That wasn’t an answer, and Patrick was about to tell him so, but he crossed the room quickly, grabbing a metal crate from the corner and dragging it over to sit next to Patrick at the desk.

“But you can’t say anything,” He finished.

Patrick blinked.

“Um.. Alright,”

Pete shifted a few more times, his eyes darting around the room.

“This Dharma Initiative, they’ve got, like, everything you need, right?”

“Yes,” Patrick said hesitantly, unsure where this was going.

“And not just food. There’s like, books and pens and medicine and stuff?”

“Mhm,”

There was a moment’s silence, then Pete swallowed, and coughed, and then-

“Are there any condoms?”

Patrick raised his eyebrows, his mouth quirking upwards. “Oh?”

“Don’t,”

He shimmied to the side, knocking their shoulders together. “You and Mikey finally took things to the next level, huh?” 

Pete made a face, and Patrick fake frowned, dropping his voice. "Unless there's something Andy hasn't been telling me,"

He grinned, then, laughter fading into something totally genuine, letting it spread across his whole face. “I don’t know. It’s all kind of weird, and, well, we’re on an island, so I don’t know if it’s-” He broke off, shaking his head. 

“Hey, I’m sure it’ll last,”

Pete shrugged. “As long as we’re here, at least. He doesn’t have any other options,”

“He had other options before, he still spent all his time hanging around on our bus,”

Pete mumbled something vague and self deprecating, and Patrick wished he wasn’t so scared to get his hopes up.

“There’s condoms in the bathroom cupboard,” He turned back to the computer timer. “Behind the conditioner,”

“Great, thank you,” Pete jumped up, speeding towards the door.

“You kids have fun,” He glanced up. “Oh, and don’t do anything in my bed, please. I’ve got to sleep in that later,”

“Where else do you expect us to do it?”

“I don’t know, out in the jungle Adam and Eve style?”

Pete laughed, and kept chuckling to himself as he walked back out the door. As Patrick watched him leave, he was all too aware that he hadn’t said he wouldn’t. He made a mental note to wash the sheets later.

There were birds flying overhead. Actual, real birds, flitting from branch to branch and making little chattering noises. 

Gerard would be lying if he said it wasn’t freaking him out, but he wasn’t trying to fool anyone, so he had no reason not to be telling the truth.

Walking back to the beach had taken much longer than it was supposed to, partially because the lack of going outside had left him embarrassingly winded, and partially because he’d found himself unable to keep himself from touching almost everything he saw. Running his hands through the grass, along tree bark, sticking his feet in the rushing river they crossed. Everything felt so much more real than it used to. It was all so vivid it almost felt artificial. Like a set for a movie, or something. The sun was hot overhead, turning his cheeks pink and his back sweaty in minutes. The sensation sent a hot, fizzing buzz of excitement through his chest. He knew he’d missed going out, but damn.

He stood, now, up to his mid thigh in the ocean, watching the horizon. After a few seconds, he gave in to the impulse in the back of his mind and sat down, crossing his legs in the sand under the water, and stretching his back out so that everything above his shoulders was well clear of the water. He closed his eyes, focusing on the feeling of the waves washing over him.

The last twenty four hours might have been the worst whirlwind of emotions that he’d ever been through. This time yesterday he’d been curled up in the top bunk, staring at the bedroom door and wondering if he asked nicely enough whether Patrick would come up and lay with him, and now he was outside, in the sun, and he had his brother back. He opened his eyes again, rubbing them with a balled up fist and turning back to the beach. Mikey was wandering up and down the shore, kicking some bit of tire or something up and down the sand, looking up at Gerard every five seconds like he thought he might disappear. Gerard understood why. Every time he shut his eyes he thought he was going to wake up back in the hatch, like he’d fallen asleep in front of the computer and had this horrible hopeful dream that would leave an aching in his chest.

His eyes drifted past Mikey and over to the jungle, watching the trees wave in the breeze. He wondered what had happened to Ray and Frank, and where Patrick’s Joe had gotten to. He hoped that they were alright, that they were together, keeping each other safe. 

A wave broke suddenly, right behind his head, sea foam washing around his neck and right down his ear canals. He squealed, standing up and shaking his head back and forth like a dog. Mikey came running, catching him by the shoulders to steady him, his laughter ringing out across the water.

“You alright?”

“Water in my ears,” He answered, pulling up a section of his sodden shirt to try to wipe his face, succeeding only in getting it even wetter.

“Okay, I think it’s time to go back inside,”

“What? No. I just got here,”

Mikey smiled sympathetically, tugging on Gerard’s shoulders until he started to follow him out of the water.

“I know, but you need to ease yourself into it. You know how easily you burn,”

He grumbled, but followed back through the jungle all the same. Marching away from the crashing waves and towards the metal clanging of Andy fixing the lid back onto the hatch roof (it was supposed to be his rest shift, but apparently this guy never needed sleep). He’d been hunched over it all morning, but he straightened up when he saw them, wiping his hands against a white T-shirt that wasn’t anything close to being white anymore, and grinning at Gerard and Mikey.

“There,” He gestured to the lid, stamping on the top a few times for good measure. “All fixed,”

“Remind me why we needed to do that?” Mikey asked over his shoulder, starting along the trail that led to the back door.

“Entryways to and from the Swan Hatch should be barred closed at all times to avoid any unwanted contamination from the outside world” He parroted. “It’s in the handbook, chapter nine,”

He pulled it out of his back pocket, gesturing with it for a second, then putting it back and turning to follow Mikey down the path.

They were silent after that. Gerard trailed behind, staring at Andy for the rest of the walk in a way that he knew was entirely unsubtle. He couldn’t help it. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that something weird was going on. His mind rolled back over the last forty days, replaying the moment he’d woken up on the floor of the computer room, the feeling in his gut like some kind of higher power had brought them there. He thought about the weird dreams he’d been having since that day. They were the same every time; visions of walking up and down the hatch hallway, past the magnetic core over and over again, feeling the way the change in his pockets pulled him towards its buzzing centre. It was almost like something real, something he'd done plenty of times before, but then everything around him would start shaking, and then the roof would fall in, and everything would go dark.

He’d wake up sweating, unable to shake the feeling that they were going to die. Race out of his bunk and over to the core, put his hands against the hot metal searching for something, anything, that might be trying to kill them. He never found anything, and after a while he just stopped looking. The dreams still came every night.

He thought about the time when he'd been on computer duty. Day twenty-something. And after checking that Patrick was sleeping soundly in the next room, he'd let the timer count all the way down. Past the four minute mark where it started beeping, down to the last sixty seconds when the alarm blared angrily, until it finally got to zero. The timer had frozen for a second, then the numbered cards had spun around to reveal symbols that he didn’t recognise. Hieroglyphics, maybe? He hadn’t gotten a good enough look - just the sight of them had scared him enough that he’d hit execute right away, and everything had returned to normal.

He thought, as he struggled against the hatch door, that the reason it was all sealed up wasn’t to keep the outside world out - but to keep whatever was going on in there contained. He thought that Andy fixing the lid back on meant that when it all imploded it wouldn’t harm the rest of the island. He hoped that nobody else was inside when it happened.

They’d hauled the door all the way open when they heard the noise. A far-off rumbling, quiet at first, but getting louder. Getting closer.

Gerard turned back, squinting into the trees to find the source, but hands gripped him suddenly by the wrist, tugging him back. Mikey was yelling something frantic in his ear, he sounded scared, Gerard didn’t understand why. He held his hand up to block out the sun, but Mikey caught his elbow and dragged him, hard, into the hatch hall. He fell back against the metal floor, cursing under his breath as his arm caught against the door frame. Mikey and Andy were pulling on the door, and right as the last sliver of the outside world disappeared, he caught sight of a dark, loud something moving right towards them, knocking down trees in the process.

The door slammed, and the lock slid into place right as the whatever-it-was collided with it. The impact shook the walls around them. Gerard clapped his hands over his ears, screwing his eyes shut and trying as hard as he could not to think that this felt just like his dream. Thank God Andy had fixed the roof.

The monster barrelled away, obviously realising that it wasn’t going to get what it wanted here, and retreating back into the jungle. Gerard uncovered his ears, rubbing gingerly at his elbow as he listened to the crashing move further away. Okay, so maybe he was wrong about the ‘protection from the outside world’ thing being bullshit. 

He looked up at Mikey, then followed his gaze over to Andy, who was rubbing his hands together and looking at the floor.

“So, uh,” Andy swallowed. “Remember when I said something killed the bus driver?”

“So it’s some kind of black smoke?”

Gerard ran a hand through his hair, turning his head side to side in the mirror. Maybe the next food delivery would come with some hair dye?

“Yeah, apparently,” He answered, shifting his focus to watch Patrick in the mirror behind him. He was stooped over, fiddling with something in the shower. Apparently the water had stopped draining properly and it was making puddles on the floor. “Andy said he was going to draw what he saw, but-”

“It’s just going to be a bunch of black squiggles,”

A weird giggle escaped him. 

“Pretty much,” He turned, leaning back against the sink. “How’s that looking?”

Patrick sighed. “Like a shower?” He glanced up at Gerard through his hair. “I’m not going to pretend I know what I’m doing here,”

“It’s probably just because everyone’s been using it at once. This place is only built for two people,”

He hummed in agreement. “Either way, I’m not making the situation any better. So I think it’s bedtime,”

“What about the button?” 

The question was half hearted at best. Gerard was exhausted. Going outside had wiped him out a lot more than he’d expected after getting used to sitting around all day, and he was still shaken from the near death experience that afternoon. So while he cared about saving the world, right now he cared a bit more about getting into bed.

“Andy’s on it,” 

Patrick had gone ahead of him, speaking over his shoulder, but when he got to the bedroom he stopped suddenly.

“Thank fuck for that,” Gerard said, joining him in the door. “What?”

“Um…”

His eyes adjusted to the low light, and he saw what Patrick was looking at.

The bottom bunk was occupied by Pete and Mikey, limbs tangled together, the blanket all twisted up and abandoned by their feet. Mikey had taken his glasses off, his face screwed up against the light leaking in from the bathroom. He shifted, making a little grumbling noise and shoving it under Pete’s shoulder.

Gerard opened his mouth to say something along the lines of ‘aw, cute’, but then he caught Patrick’s frustrated gaze, and shut it again.

“I told them not to use my bed,” He said, throwing his hands up like a cartoon. Now that was cute.

“It’s not their fault, they weren’t here to call dibs,”

“No, but I-” He sighed. “Nevermind. It’s fine, I’ll sleep on the couch,”

He turned to leave, but Gerard caught him by the shoulder.

“You don’t need to,”

“I’m not gonna make you do it, your bed’s fine,”

“No, I meant, we could share,”

Patrick stared at him, blinking a few times, squinting just a little in the dark. Gerard waited, smiling. He didn’t think he was imagining the blush on Patrick’s cheekbones.

“Uh,” He cleared his throat, loud enough that Pete made a groaning noise from the bed. “Okay, yeah, sure,”

“Great!” He said, a little bit too quickly, turning and climbing into the bunk before he could let himself say anything else.

They closed the door and crawled into bed in the near darkness, only breaking the silence to mutter awkward apologies when they knocked into one another, and then they were laying down. Propped on their sides, facing each other. 

“Hi,”

Gerard smiled. 

“Hi,”

“This isn't going to be some kind of pillow wall situation is it?”

He laughed, struggling to keep his voice lower than a whisper. “What, like a gay guard?” 

Patrick turned bright red.

“No.” He said insistently. “I just meant, like, a personal space boundary,”

“How many times have I laid on you on the couch?”

“Well yeah, I just didn't want to assume,”

“You don't have anything to worry about,” He rolled onto his back, eyes falling shut. “I'm a cuddler,”

He couldn't see Patrick, but he heard the smile in his voice. 

“Okay, cool. Me too,”

He woke up hours later, boiling hot and throat painfully dry, but feeling better rested than he had in weeks. He sat up, rubbing his eyes and crawling over to hang his head over the edge of the bed. Pete and Mikey were up already, evidently, because the bottom bunk was now occupied by a tossing and turning Andy. 

“Morning,”

Patrick had shuffled away a bit, pressing his back against the wall. Only their legs were touching now. 

“Hm? Yeah, morning,”

“Are you okay?” He sat up, concerned. “Did you have that dream again?”

“No, actually. For the first time since we got here. You must be magic,”

For a second, Patrick just grinned at him, then his voice turned serious. 

“You don't think it was about the others, do you?” He asked, voice low and conspiratorial. “A prediction?”

He considered it. “I don't think so. It wasn't like one sudden explosion, more like it was building up to something,”

“Oh,”

“I'm sure it's nothing,” He said quickly. “Just my brain getting stuck on something,”

“Yeah, no, you're right. It was stupid,”

“It wasn't stupid. Come on, we've got a few more hours ‘till we need to be awake,”

They laid back down, and Patrick fell back to sleep almost immediately. Gerard stared at the ceiling, wondering if his dreams really did mean something, if they might be a bad omen of things to come, but then Patrick rolled over, his head knocking right into Gerard’s shoulder, and his thoughts were derailed completely. He closed his eyes again, drawing in a slow breath, and just as he was drifting back into sleep, he thought that he really must be magic, to make him feel like this. 

Chapter Text

They woke up in the water. 

This was bad. Because Frank couldn’t swim, and judging by the shouting coming from somewhere behind him, Ray couldn’t either. Honestly, it was a miracle he even made it to the surface, air rushing into his lungs as his arms flailed through the water, reaching for anything to keep him afloat. His numb fingers closed around something rubber, and he hauled himself towards it, spluttering out a mouthful of salt water. He blinked, vision blurring in and out of focus every time he moved.

He was in the ocean. 

What the fuck? Why was he in the ocean?

He focused very hard on trying to remember how he got there, but it seemed like all of his brain power was being taken up by forcing breaths in and out of his open mouth, and clinging to the tire that was holding him above water.

A hand shot out of the water beside him. Frank yelped, reaching out to grab hold of it and pull. The hand held fast to his wrist, turning quickly into an arm, and then a shoulder, and then a torso with a head attached. The head shook, spraying water droplets all over Frank’s face, and then blinked at him.

“Frank?”

“What’s up Joe?” He wheezed. “Fancy seeing you here,”

Joe Trohman, the guitarist from Fall Out Boy, was clinging to Frank’s sodden shoulders. He could feel their feet knocking together as they both kicked to stay afloat.

“What..?”

Frank shook his head, wrapping an arm around Joe’s back to hold him steady. His skin was trembling under Frank’s hand.

“I don’t know, but we need to get to land,” He leaned forward and spat salt water onto the tire. “Ray’s out here somewhere,”

Joe coughed. “Right, okay. Where is he?”

“I don’t know, but I heard him yelling before,”

“Have you tried calling back?”

He shook his head again, and they both launched into shouting for him without another word. Joe’s voice echoed in Frank’s ears, making it hard to make out anything else, until finally he heard a weak yelling reply.

Relief rushed through his chest, all the way out to the tips of his fingers and toes. Frank whipped his head around, squinting against the sun, he could just about make out a silhouette slumped against a scrap of metal not too far from them. 

“There!” Joe said. “Come on,”

He started to move. Frank’s hands gripped him tighter.

“Wait, don’t!”

He’d gone rigid suddenly. He couldn’t make his limbs work. Couldn’t make himself let go.

“What?”

Joe was staring at him. Frank looked down.

“Don’t let go. I can’t swim,”

“Oh,”

He shifted, the arm still under the water looping around Frank’s waist and lifting him, just slightly, so he was better propped against the tire they were both clinging to. Joe murmured something about holding on tight, and then started to kick. Frank protested as they began to drift towards the shore and away from Ray. They couldn’t just fucking leave him out there, he was going to die. He tried to wriggle out of Joe’s grip, but he couldn’t get him to let go, and he was still far too scared of being left alone.

Finally, Frank’s toes hit sand. He started to push with his feet, until he could walk - or, more accurately, stagger - his way out of the water. He collapsed on the sand, all of his muscles trembling at any little movement.

“Stay here,” Joe muttered breathlessly, laying a steady hand on Frank’s back as he curled into a ball. “I’ll go get Ray, okay?”

Frank nodded, turning his face and making a strangled noise that could have been crying, if he’d had the energy to sob. Instead, he just lay there, spitting grains of sand out of his mouth while his skin dried in the baking sun. Slowly, he managed to roll onto his back, his chest rising and falling rapidly with the effort to keep his heart pounding in his ribcage, and was starting to struggle into a sitting position when he heard splashing, and Joe and Ray emerged from the water. 

They both collapsed, just like he did, curling into themselves and groaning at the ground. Ray leaned forward and coughed up a lungful of seawater, drawing deep, ragged breaths that made Frank’s chest twist in sympathy pain. Joe had essentially stopped moving altogether. His eyes had fallen shut, casting shadows across his pale face. Frank could still see him breathing, so he knew he was alive, but he didn’t react when he shuffled closer, rubbing his back a little.

“So, um,” Frank started, speaking mostly to the collection of pebbles by his feet. From the corner of his eye, he saw Ray turn in his direction. “What the fuck happened?”

By the time the sun had started to set on the horizon, they’d deduced absolutely nothing about their situation. 

Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate.

What they could ascertain was that their tour bus had crashed in a tropical ocean, landing the three of them on this island. The thing itself had exploded, leaving debris floating in the water. With a bit of work, and a lot more swimming from a steadily weakening Joe, they’d managed to pull out some stuff that might be useful to them. Seat cushions, glass from the windows, some sopping wet clothes, that sort of thing. And they’d set up a kind of shelter where they were going to sleep.

What they couldn’t figure out, however, was a) where everyone else was, and b) how the fuck the bus ended up in the sea.

“There’s no point carrying on about it,” Ray said, reaching out to stoke the fire he’d created by reflecting the sun through a bit of jagged glass. “We’re not going to get any answers,”

“But I don’t get it!” Frank protested. “Why the fuck are we here?”

Ray shrugged. “I don’t know, but we are. We need to focus on more important things,”

“Like what?”

“Like keeping ourselves alive until rescue comes,”

Frank looked at Ray, who had dark circles under his eyes, and kept making strangled coughing noises every other sentence, then at Joe, already asleep in a ball by the fire, looking like a corpse dragged out of a river, and then down at his own hands, where the skin around his knuckles had already become red and raw.

“Yeah, I don’t love our chances,” He said finally.

He’d meant it to be a joke, if a morbid one, but his voice came out hollow and small. Ray’s mouth twisted into a sympathetic smile, and he got up from his spot in the sand to sit beside Frank, sliding an arm around his shoulders. Frank pressed into him, laying his head on his shoulder and sighing.

“Hey, we’ll be okay,” He murmured. Frank made a whiny noise that was something along the lines of a half-hearted protest. “Just try to get some sleep, and I’m sure the rescue boats will be here by the time you wake up in the morning,”

Frank had wanted to say something about taking shifts, because it felt like one of them should stay awake in case rescue came, or they were attacked by gorillas or something, but before he could raise his head to ask, he was dragged into unconsciousness.

The next thing he was aware of was the sun shining right into his eyes. He rolled onto his back, raising his arms above his head to stretch, and yawned.

“Morning Frankie,”

His eyes fluttered open, and he propped himself up on his elbows, grinning.

“Good morning, Ray,”

Ray smiled back at him, kneeling to haul him into a sitting position. “You’re in a good mood,”

He shrugged. “I feel good. Slept well, I guess,”

“Speak for yourself,” Joe muttered. He was slumped over, poking the fire with a stick. “I slept like shit,”

“You were out cold when we went to sleep,”

He shook his head. “I kept waking up. My back is killing me,”

“Mine too,” Ray agreed.

Frank rolled his neck from side to side. His joints, weirdly, felt totally fine. Usually Frank woke up in some kind of pain. Day-in, day-out, his body always had some complaints to make. Especially first thing in the morning. His throat would be dry, or his stomach would be in knots, or his wrists would be all cramped up from playing too much. But today he felt completely alright. 

Must be the adrenaline, or something.

Whatever, Frank didn’t pretend to understand his body, but if it decided to give him a painless morning, then he’d take it and he’d be grateful.

They spent the morning, and the better part of the afternoon, wandering up and down the patch of jungle closest to the beach looking for something to eat.

There were mango and banana trees, and they found coconuts by the shore. Frank was small enough to climb up in the branches, and the higher he got, the more fruit he found. Up a few trees, he found birds nests, and after consistent reassurance from the others that it was the wrong time of year for them to have chicks inside, he brought some eggs down too. Ray loaded it all into this big hammock thing made from a shirt they’d pulled out of the sea, and took it back to their camp at the beach, where they ate until their stomachs hurt.

Frank wiped his hands against his chest, but the juice from the mangoes had gone all the way up to his forearms, and the thin t-shirt fabric did very little to clean it away. He gave up, traipsing back down to the sea to wash off in the water. On the way back, he noticed how much of the stash they’d gone through already, and his heart sank a little. Keeping themselves alive was going to be a lot of work - and a lot of tree climbing. 

The second day was largely the same as the first. As was the third, and the fourth. They stoked the signal fire and scavenged for food and slept in shifts huddled in balls in the sand. Although Joe barely slept at all, complaining every morning of pain in his head and his chest. He was barely keeping food down, and his breathing was shallow and wheezy. Aside from exchanging worried looks every time he doubled over to cough, there wasn’t a whole lot that Ray and Frank could do about it. Basically all the shit from the bus was currently sitting at the bottom of the ocean, and Joe wouldn’t even accept that he was sick. He must’ve caught something in the ocean, after swimming out to save them both. Frank felt a painful twist of guilt in his stomach every time he thought about it. If he’d been able to swim himself to shore, then Joe wouldn’t have had to spend so long in the water. Besides, he was the one who normally got sick all the time. It felt like he’d traded curses, or something.

On the fifth morning, they ventured further into the jungle, having cleared out all the trees nearby, they’d realised they needed to travel further afield. Frank was starting to enjoy all the climbing, venturing further and further, onto thinner and more precarious branches to get to his prize, ignoring Ray’s warnings from the ground. He even found a beehive, nestled inside a tree. He’d reached a hand towards it, wondering if he could find a way to get the honey out from inside, and was inches away from shoving his fist into a million stings when the realisation hit him, and he stopped. Maybe that was enough tree climbing for one day. Back on the ground, he reported what he’d found to the others, who debated how they could get to it safely while Frank wandered off and started picking at the flowers.

Most plants were edible, right? That was, like, how all humans had survived before they’d invented cooking. He rummaged through the different colours, and picked one, bringing it towards his mouth and-

“Hey! Don’t eat that!”

Joe snatched the bright yellow flowers out of Frank’s hand, crushing them in his fist and dropping them to the floor.

“What?”

“It’s poisonous, are you stupid?”

“How was I meant to know it was poisonous?” He protested, holding his hands out so Joe could rid them of pollen.

Joe glanced up at him for a second, then his face dropped a little.

“I forget not everyone has to listen to Andy’s survival lectures,”

“His what?” Ray had joined them, standing just behind Frank.

“The dude is obsessed with living off the land, he spends all his spare time watching nature shows, and reading ultimate survival books, and he’ll talk about it to literally anyone who’ll listen. Including me, even though usually I’m ignoring him,”

“If only he was here,” Frank grumbled.

“So you know about this stuff?” Ray asked. “What plants are edible?”

Joe shrugged. “I don’t know it all off by heart or anything, but I guess I’ve remembered more than I thought,”

After that, they split up. Covering both ground and sky, and managing to put together a relatively balanced diet (even if most of it did taste like shit). Joe brightened significantly now that he had something to do. He’d been too sick to do any foraging, and as the days passed his fever just wasn’t going anywhere; Frank could tell he was feeling pretty sorry for himself, but now he could be just as useful as the others. More, even, because he actually knew what to look for, instead of taking everything as a stab in the dark. On their travels, they even stumbled across what looked like a herb garden. Uniform lines of plants, overgrown and shrivelled in the sun, but it was obvious that someone had actually tended to them.

“I guess we aren’t the first people here, then,” Ray said, nudging his toe against one of the vines. “Any idea what they are?”
Joe shook his head, mumbling something about them not being native. Frank ignored them, focusing his attention on the thing he’d maybe least expected to find in the jungle, but that was looking up at him from the grass regardless.

“Guys, check this out,” He said, kneeling down to pick up the book and hold it up. “What the hell is the Dharma Initiative?”

Whatever they were, they clearly knew a lot about the island, because the survival guide in there was far more useful than Joe’s patchy memory. It wasn’t just what plants to eat and what to avoid, it showed them how to build shelters, where to avoid the wild animals, even weather patterns across the seasons. Clearly they’d been on the island for a while. Frank wondered if they were still there, if they’d be able to help them get home.

Despite their growing confidence in exploring the island, they always returned to their beach camp each night. Never venturing far enough that they couldn’t get back before sunset. Something about the jungle gave Frank the heebie-jeebies. All the plants that could poison them, or the animals that might have them for dinner. One time, when he was walking back alone one night, he swore he heard whispers coming from the shadows. 

On the thirtieth day, when they’d long since given up hope of rescue, and any motivation to figure out how they got there, Frank woke up before the others, when the sun was only just climbing over the horizon. He detangled his limbs from Ray’s, and stretched his hands over his head, rolling his neck from side to side. The air around him was warm, and the sea was rolling slowly towards them. Tiny little waves breaking into foam before they could reach Frank’s feet. He took off his shoes, wading up to his ankles in the water. It flowed over him, tickling the hairs on his shins. He closed his eyes, sighing, enjoying being on his own. Twenty nine solid days of fighting for survival with the others wasn’t exactly his idea of an ideal holiday, and he’d be lying if he said the stress wasn’t starting to get to him. 

Or it had been, when he’d fallen asleep that night. Right now, though, he felt calm. Calmer than he had in days, months even, maybe. The tour wasn’t exactly relaxing either. But here, with the sand between his toes, and the sun on his face, he felt like everything was going to be alright. 

Warmth rushed up his limbs, suddenly, and he was overcome with a feeling like he was floating. His eyes flew open, and he realised that he was underwater. A momentary fear gripped his chest, but then he realised that he was still breathing, and he relaxed. He craned his neck back, blinking up at where the sunlight was shining through into the water.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Frank looked down, searching for the source of the voice. He twisted his back, turning somersaults under the waves.

“There’s just something so peaceful about it,”

He rotated, eyes landing on the figure, floating opposite him.

“Dad?”

His father blinked at him, smiling.

“Hello, Frank,”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He shrugged. “That’s a good question. I don’t know, but I feel like I’m meant to be,”

Frank looked up at the light again, the rays trembled a little.

“Am I meant to be here?” He hadn’t even thought about the question before he asked it, but as soon as the words fell out of his mouth he felt sure that he knew the answer.

“Are you meant to be anywhere?”

Frank scoffed. “Not helpful, Dad,”

His father laughed, kicking his body back so that he was floating horizontally.

“You need to find them,”

He said suddenly. His voice turning cold.

“What?”

Frank looked up at the light again, something creeping right into the back of his skull. A feeling, or maybe a noise.

“You have to find them, Frank,” He lurched forward, grabbing Frank harshly by the shoulders. “It brought you here for a reason. It healed you,”

“Healed-? What?”

“Find them, Frank,”

The noises grew louder, suddenly. An engine whirring, high pitched crying, the sound of someone drawing a gasping breath. Somebody shouting, Mikey, shouting for help, panting, pained. Frank jerked his head around, looking for where it was coming from, but he couldn’t see. He couldn’t see anything anymore. Voices started to layer over each other. Ray, Gerard, Pete, Patrick. Frank writhed and fought, trying to get to them, but his limbs wouldn’t work. His body was a dead weight, dragging him further and further beneath the waves.

“How?” He called out finally. “How do I find them?”

He couldn’t see his father anymore, but he heard his voice, right next to his ear.

“Follow the light,”

Frank woke up with a start. His arms shot out in front of him, colliding with the warm skin of somebody’s arms.

“You’re okay, it’s just me,” Ray, hands on Frank’s shoulders, rubbing warmth into his skin. 

Frank forced himself to draw a deep breath, swallowing down the bile that had risen up in his throat. He raised a trembling hand to wipe sweat from his forehead and nodded.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Frank cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably. “I just had a really weird dream,”

“Weird like how?” Joe asked, propping himself up by the elbows to look at Frank.

He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut for a second. He could still feel the water against his skin.

“I think we need to move,”

Ray started to ask what he was talking about, but Frank ignored him, shaking out of his hands to start packing up their things.

“No one’s coming for us, man,” He said, glancing back. “We can’t stay here forever,”

“It hasn’t been that long, you don’t know-”

“Yeah, I do. Over a month is a pretty long time. We can’t keep waiting for someone who isn’t gonna come. We need to find somewhere with shelter, and better food,”

“We’re okay here,”

“No we’re not,” Frank sighed, folding his arms across his chest. “We’re sunburned and we’re starving and Joe looks like he’s going to keel over any day now. Come on, surely you wanna see what else is on the island? What if-” He paused, echoes of the cries for help racing around his brain. “What if the others are out here somewhere? What if we weren’t the only bus that crashed?”

Ray’s face shifted, suddenly, like that hadn’t crossed his mind at all. He stood up, looking down at Frank.

“Okay, maybe you’re right, but where do we even start?”

Frank’s father’s words echoed in his mind.

Follow the light.

He raised his hand and pointed towards where the sun was rising above the horizon.

“East,”

They walked for hours, sun climbing higher and higher in the sky. Frank watched its progress, wondering if once it started pointing west they were meant to turn around and walk back the way they came. He was craning his head back in the sky, looking up at the shapes the clouds were making, when he collided with soft flesh in front of him. He looked forward and at Joe, who had stopped walking, and was swaying slightly. 

“Hey man, you okay?” He asked, skirting around to stand by his shoulder while Ray forged ahead.

Joe blinked, his eyes were glassy. Frank nudged him in the shoulder.

“Earth to Joe?”

“Huh?” Joe looked down at him. “Yeah, I’m fine, just…”

“You need to sit down?”

“No, I’m fine,”

“Ray! Come back, we’re gonna take a break,”

Frank made to set his bag down, but Joe grabbed his arm.

“No, I told you I’m fine,”

Frank looked up. He raised his hands wordlessly and pushed at Joe’s shoulders. He stumbled backwards, tripping and falling heavily into a tree.

“Yeah, you’re in peak physical condition,” He muttered, putting his bag on the floor. “Come sit down,”

Reluctantly, Joe curled up on the floor, drawing his knees into his chest. He eased backwards into the tree behind him, eyes sliding closed. Ray joined them, sharing out water and some fruit he’d found on a tree up ahead. Frank eyed them warily, his stomach hurting preemptively at the thought of digesting something so unfamiliar, but eventually he gave in and took a bite. Food was pretty scarce out here, he couldn’t afford to be picky.

Follow the light. 

Frank looked up at the sun again. It was hanging right above him, morning bleeding into afternoon. If it was right above them, then what were they meant to be following? He slumped back, turning the idea over in his mind until it started to send him round the bend.

“What is it, Frankie?” Ray asked finally. “You’ve been acting weird all day,”

Frank shrugged. “I was in a coach crash that landed me on a tropical island, of course I’m acting weird,”

“Fine, you’re weirder than normal,”

“I-” He stopped, eyes catching on something right behind Ray’s head.

There was a light glinting through the trees, something shiny in the near distance.

Frank jumped up, racing towards it. He ignored Ray’s questions about where the hell he was going. He felt like if he so much as spoke, or took his eyes off the glimmer, that it would disappear. He skirted around Ray’s legs, nearly tripping over on the strap of his backpack in his haste to get through the trees, practically breaking into a run until he broke out into the clearing.

A river, running through the jungle. There was a little bend right at Frank’s feet, a change in depth making the water shift angles, catching the sun just so. He tilted his head this way and that, watching the light bounce off the rushing water. 

Follow the light.

Without even thinking about it, Frank stepped right into the river. The water splashed up over the tops of his shoes, soaking right through the thin fabric and leaving his socks sodden. He turned, watching the glimmers of light bouncing off each other downstream, and followed. 

The river twisted and turned, Frank’s feet sliding against mud and stone as he ventured further down into the valley. At one point, he thought he could hear someone’s voice shouting at him to stop, but he ignored it. He could find the others later, after they got whatever it is they were looking for. He wasn’t really sure what the dream was leading him to, but he was sure he’d know it if he found it.

And he did.

He stepped out of the river, bending to run his hands across the fabric, sliding underneath to lift the heavy weight up.

Suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks. 

Theirs.

Frank unzipped his bag, pulling out jeans, socks, his white button downs and the bulletproof vest he wore on stage. He rummaged through until he found his bag of toiletries, almost crying with relief at the sight of shampoo and toothpaste and deodorant. 

He found Ray’s case, a notebook full of hand scrawled guitar tabs. Gerard’s jackets, all stuffed into a massive plastic bag. A purple bag he didn’t recognise, with an ‘I <3 Bingo’ hat attached that he definitely did. A Clandestine hoodie, with Pete scrawled in the tag like a grade school jumper. His hands curled around Mikey’s backpack, holding it to his chest, his heart pounding with certainty that he was alive, that they were all alive, that they were somewhere on this island.

That he had to find them.

Ray burst through the trees, splashing Frank as he stormed through the river, hands on his hips like a disappointed mother.

“You can’t just run off like that, it’s dangerous out here!” He exclaimed, but his upset was short lived when he noticed what Frank was holding.

His eyes fell on a spot right behind Frank’s head, and his mouth fell open.

“Shit,” He breathed.

Frank started to ask what, but before he could get the word out, Ray had reached over his head to grab it.

A guitar case.

“Shit,” He echoed.

They could play again.

They camped by the river that night. Taking turns with the guitar - which none of them really recognised, so it must belong to one of the techs or something - until everyone’s fingers were sore. Frank revelled in the feeling, running a finger across the aching pads of his other hand. In the days since the crash, he’d been able to feel the skin on his fingers start to soften as his calluses fell away. He was so relieved that they were coming back.

Even Joe finally cracked an exhausted smile when he nailed the riff from Sixteen Candles, laughing with relief at the familiar sound. Ray took the guitar out of his hands, replacing it with painkillers he found in Patrick’s backpack, and Joe took them without complaint, slipping into sleep right as the sun began to set. Frank watched the light of the moon fall over his face. He didn’t think he was imagining the way his skin had already begun to clear, shaking off the pallid colour it had had since the day after they crashed.

He lay down next to Ray, curling gleefully underneath a hoodie that smelled just like home. Ray was warm next to him, his breathing steady as he rolled over and threw an arm over Frank’s shoulders. He tucked his head into Ray’s chest, and let sleep drag him under.

When they woke up, the air was much cooler, the canopy of leaves above them providing shade from the tropical sun. The trio were in high spirits, happier than they’d been since they landed on the island. They had food, a water source, medicine, and buoyed by the idea that the others were alive somewhere nearby, they continued on their journey with renewed enthusiasm. Joe’s condition improved immediately, he grew steadier on his feet with every passing hour, the haze and the rattle in his lungs clearing away. 

Within a few days he was waking up with a smile on his face, bounding ahead down the jungle paths as he wondered aloud how long it would be until they encountered his bandmates. Once, when following the path of the stream had led them back to the beach, they encountered a cluster of rockpools. Frank had refused to go anywhere near them, not wanting to slip on the seaweed and break his ankle or get concussed, and Joe had laughed, tossing his backpack to Ray and hauling Frank onto his back without a sign of complaint.

Frank looked out over the horizon, clinging to Joe’s shoulders, trying to ignore the way his heart bounced hopefully with every step they took. He couldn’t help it, he just had this feeling that everything was going to be okay. They’d find the others, and they’d work together, and they’d get out of here. And even if they didn’t get rescued, this island wasn’t so bad. 

He realised suddenly that he hadn’t gotten sick at all since they got here. Suddenly was maybe the incorrect word, since he’d noticed it every day since the crash, but the way the dots connected felt like a surprise. His father’s words echoed through his head once again.

It healed you.

His health, the weird dreams, this feeling that he could follow his gut and lead them to safety. It all meant something, didn’t it?

This wasn’t any ordinary island, and it wasn’t any ordinary bus crash. Something had brought them here. But why?

He looked down at the water beneath them, tightening his grip as little waves splashed high enough to catch his ankles. 

Now that Joe was better, maybe he could teach them how to swim.

Chapter Text

The light on the computer screen flashed. 

Andy blinked at it, yawning. With every flash the pain building behind his temple throbbed a little more. His eyes drooped, and he realised that he had no idea when the last time he’d slept was.

The rest of them were in the other room, sleeping all tangled up with each other again. It felt like every time he went into the bedroom there was some new arrangement of bodies squished into the bunks. It had been a week since they’d blown the lid and he still hadn’t managed to sleep a wink on them. Unless you counted the time when he’d gone to wake Pete up for his shift and he’d just grabbed him and dragged him under the covers instead. Mostly he’d just been crashing on the sofa whenever he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. 

Patrick kept saying he needed to let the others take over, that there were enough of them to take reasonable shifts without him needing to be totally in charge, but he just didn’t want to. He knew that Patrick and Gerard had handled the button for forty something days before they’d got there, but to him that just sounded like they deserved a break, and he didn’t trust Pete or Mikey to handle anything that wasn’t each other, and even then he had his doubts. He’d spent so much time since they crashed working on getting in here. Long days alone in the jungle, pretending he didn’t notice the black smoke streaks lingering on the air, knowing that he had to open the hatch lid. Now that he was in here he could focus on what mattered: Why.

Ever since the day he’d found the hatch, Andy had felt like it was his purpose to open it. Every waking thought - and most of his dreams - had been committed to how to get in. But now that he was in there, he was a little lost. Sure, they’d found some of their missing friends, and they had food and a shower and a working toilet, but he just felt like there should be more. The answer couldn’t only be the computer, it just couldn’t.

The island must have brought them there for a reason.

The door swung open. Andy’s chin slipped out of his hand, blinking at the light streaming in from the hallway.

He squinted, rubbed his eyes, then squinted again. His sleep deprived mind must be playing tricks on him, because it couldn’t be-

“Joe?”

Joe smiled, tilting his head to the side, eyes all crinkled up.

“Hey!”

“Wh- um. How did you get here?”

Joe frowned, then looked around him, and back at Andy, shrugging.

“I didn’t,”

Andy pushed his chair back from the desk. He tried to move towards Joe, but he stumbled and knocked the empty mug of coffee off the desk and onto the floor. It smashed, bits of ceramic scattering across the floor.

“Shit, um..”

He scrambled to pick them up. But by the time he’d set the shards on the table, Joe was gone. He pushed himself to his feet, shooting to the hallway, but nobody was there. 

Down the hall, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the whole place was empty. He couldn’t even find the others. 

In his frenzy, he opened the cupboards and drawers, checking the fridge shelves and under the sofa for any sign of life. But he was alone.

“Joe?” He called out. “Patrick? Pete?”

The air around him hung with silence.

He burst out of the hatch doors, the cool night air a balm on his sweating skin. The sky above him was full of twinkling stars. They didn’t look right, he thought, all the constellations he knew had fallen out of shape. Behind him he could hear a dull beeping as the computer alarm began to sound, somewhere in the distance the trees were rumbling.

No one was there.

This wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t be left here alone with nothing. Not after everything they went through together.

The rumbling grew nearer. Black smoke tendrils pouring out of the trees around him. They coalesced, forming one long battering ram of air. Andy swallowed, his mind flashing unpleasantly back to watching the bus driver being torn apart. The black smoke shifted, grew a little, and then flew towards him.

He opened his mouth to call out, but found that he couldn’t make a sound.

“Andy!”

His eyes flew open, air rushing suddenly into his lungs.

“Joe?”

“Huh? No, Andy it’s me,” 

He blinked, swallowing. The sun was shining right into his eyes, he shifted, and saw that it was Pete who had his hands around his shoulders. Pete. Not Joe. For a second all he could hear was his own heart beating. Then Pete’s voice made it through again.

“You were dreaming,” Pete says, rubbing his hands over Andy’s arms. “I think,”

“What do you mean you think?”

“Well, you were talking. So,”

“Oh,” He swallowed again, looking down. For the first time he noticed the piece of paper clutched in his hands. “What was I saying?”

“Something about ‘what does it all mean?’ and ‘why would you do this?’ So, nothing important I don’t think,”

Andy laughed. “Right, of course,”

He evaded questions for a little longer, then Pete got up and left him knelt in the grass.

Why was he outside?

Who was watching the computer?

He blinked. The sun was hot overhead. It must be afternoon already. How long had he slept?

He looked down at the paper in his hands again. It was a lined page, torn from a Dharma Initiative notebook that he’d been carrying around to write down his theories in, He’d been mapping the hatch, and recording what he could of how the island was laid out. Although apparently he’d felt the need to take this page out. He unfolded it.

A question mark.

Smeared across the page, in mud.

What was it Mikey had been saying about them turning into apes?

By the time he got back to the hatch, he could barely remember the dream at all. All that lingered was a feeling that something was wrong, along with the dirt covered sheet of paper folded up in his pocket.

Patrick caught him by the shoulders as soon as he walked through the door.

“Dude,” He said, pulling him towards the computer. “Come look at this,”

The others were all pacing around the room, lights off, yelling at each other. Andy followed, half of a question about what the fuck was going on dying in his throat when he saw the wall.

The wall of the computer room, the room he’d been staring at for a week straight, was absolutely covered in glow in the dark paint.

“Uh,” he said. “What?”

“Insane, right?” Patrick agreed, pointing up at a crude recreation of the hexagonal Dharma logo - four hexagons within each other, made up of thick black lines - with wings drawn inside. “We think this might be where we are now,”

“And these,” Gerard continued, reaching above him and gesturing at the other shapes. All in different colours, with arrows drawn between them. “Are the other stations,”

“From the orientation video,”

“Exactly,”

Andy walked right up to the wall, laying a hand flat against it.

“How did you find it?”

“Pete pressed the wrong thing on the computer, initiated some kind of lockdown procedure,” 

Andy looked to Pete, who was folded in a ball on the floor with his head on his knees.

“I can’t believe it,” Gerard continued. “Forty five days down here, and we had no idea. You’ve got some kind of magic touch,”

Pete made an upset humming noise from the corner. He seemed convinced that he had caused some kind of apocalypse.

“So it’s a map of the island?” Andy asked, running his hand further up along the lines. He traced them to the centre, then stopped. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,”

There, in the middle, was a green hexagon, connected to every other station by hastily scribbled lines. A green hexagon containing a question mark.

“What?” Mikey asked. He was pacing up and down the back wall, hand ghosting over Pete’s knees every time he passed.

“Nothing. Do you know where this is?”

He looked at the map for a second, then shrugged. “I don’t know, man, you’re the explorer,”

“Do none of the rest of you pay attention?” He asked, looking back at the room.

Gerard shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I’ve been outside three times this month,”

Andy looked away from them and back at the wall.

“Fine, that’s fine. I’ll find it,”

The others were calling questions after him, but he wasn’t paying attention. He packed a bag with enough food for a few days' journey, along with the biggest water bottle he thought that he’d be able to carry, and headed out.

Pete caught him on the way out, apparently having managed to unfold himself from the floor for long enough to slow him down. He grabbed his shoulder and wouldn’t let go, even when Andy tried to pull his way out.

“Andy, what the hell is going on?” he said, squeezing harder. “You’re acting crazy,”

“Really? I feel saner than I have in years,”

Pete rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s not filling me with confidence. You can’t go out there alone, what if you get lost, or hurt?” He lowered his voice a little. “What if that thing gets you?”

“I’ll be okay, trust me. I just need to do something important,” He stepped forward and hugged Pete, speaking right into his ear. “I’ll see you in a few days, okay?”

In an hour, Andy had walked past all the land they’d used to camp on. After four or five, he’d passed every tree they’d picked fruit from, and every stream they’d used to collect water. By the time the sun was starting to set behind him, he was in completely unchartered territory. 

He walked all day, and most of the night, only stopping to eat and drink when he felt he absolutely couldn’t carry on. The sun was creeping back up over the horizon in front of him when he finally collapsed, sinking into the dirt beside the rotten stump of a tree. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when he woke up the sun was high overhead, beating down on his boiling skin. He got up and kept moving straight away.

The crumpled paper was clutched in his fist, dirt transferring onto his sweating palm. By this point he was walking more on instinct than on any semblance of knowing where he was going. He knew, consciously, that this had turned very quickly into a bad idea. He was exhausted, and hungry, and very close to having no idea how to get back. But he just couldn’t make himself stop.

There had to be something out here, something that the island wanted him to find. He just had to get to this question mark, and then it would all make sense.

He flipped open his notebook again, studying the map of the island that he’d started to draw. Holding it up against the copy he’d made of the map on the hatch wall, he was able to get a vague idea of where this question mark was supposed to be. The trouble was that he had no idea where he was standing in relation to all of this. There was no scale on the hatch wall drawing, and with only the location of one station he had no way of figuring out how far apart they had been built. Hell, he didn’t even know how big the island was. 

God, he was going to die out here.

As if on cue, the trees around him began to shake. Andy tensed, his head whipping from side to side, trying to track what direction the sound was coming from, but it felt like it was all around, circling him like a hawk about to drop down on its prey. He thought about bracing himself for a fight, but he knew there was no way to defend yourself from this kind of monster. Instead, he just folded his arms, breathing heavily against the sick feeling in his stomach, and waited for impact.

The black smoke flew out from the trees, shooting past Andy’s legs and up into the sky behind him. It flew down again, disappearing in the direction that it came from. For one long moment everything was quiet and still, and then the smoke burst back out into his clearing, moving right towards Andy’s chest and-

Coming to a stop.

Andy stared at it, completely still apart from the heart pounding like a drum in his chest.

This monster, this tunnel of black smoke that Andy had watched tear a man to shreds, spending days after scrubbing blood out of his hair and from under his fingernails. The smoke that had stalked Andy through the woods, making its presence known only when he was alone. Crashes in the distance, howls of wounded animals, tendrils shooting out from the trees so fast he thought he was seeing things. The smoke that had come clattering into the doors to the Hatch like it wanted to rip apart every single person inside. The smoke that it seemed like nobody else had seen apart from him.

And here they were, face to face, and it wasn’t hurting him at all. Andy swallowed, looking at the column of smoke hovering only inches from his face. It moved. Back a little, then down, and then back up, almost as if it was nodding. Very slowly, not breaking his eye contact, Andy nodded in return.

The smoke moved differently now. Slow and careful, a far cry from the rushed destruction that he had come to know it for. Gradually, it began to retreat. Withdrawing into itself, then turning all the way around. The front point turned back for a second, and Andy got the distinct feeling that it was looking over its shoulder at him, then shot away through the trees.

So Andy did the only thing he could think to do. He bent down, picking his things up from where he’d dropped them on the ground, and he took off after it.

He trailed the ends of the smoke through the jungle, running as fast as his legs would carry him. When he was starting to think he couldn’t keep up any longer, the smoke slowed, dispersing into big billowing clouds, until it had disappeared completely.

Andy hunched over, gasping for breath as the adrenaline drained out of his system. His head spun, the ground feeling so close and so far away at the same time.

When his vision cleared, he saw that he was standing on the edge of a cliff. The path he was running on suddenly disappearing into a sharp drop to the ground beneath. He held a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun, certain that he couldn’t be looking at what they were telling him he was looking at. The ground under the cliff edge was almost entirely obscured by a small yellow passenger plane. The kind that could carry three, maybe four people, along with some cargo. It didn’t look real, more like the kind of thing he would have begged his mom to get him a model of as a kid, poring over the tiny pieces for days and then leaving it to gather dust on his shelf as soon as it was built. 

He paced back and forth frantically, trying to see around it as best he could. It looked like the navigation equipment inside was mostly intact, and there were boxes and boxes of something blue and white that he couldn’t make out. He knelt down, crawling forward so that he could poke his head through the smashed window and, yeah, okay, that was definitely a rotting skeleton. Two, by the looks of it. He gagged, and coughed, and scrambled backwards as fast as he could to get back into the clean air.

So it seemed that they weren’t the first people to crash here. Andy wondered why they had been brought here, and why the black smoke had taken him to see them.

He tested the stability of the plane with one foot, but it immediately rocked under his weight, so he backed away, head spinning. He couldn’t go in there without the whole thing falling off, and he didn’t fancy his chances of surviving the drop to the ground underneath. 

“Well,” he said to no one in particular, whipping his head back to look up into the sky. “What the hell am I doing now?”

“Andy?”

He whipped around, squinted, then sighed. 

“Fucking hell, you again?”

Joe frowned. “Um…”

“How did you find me this time?”

“I heard a noise and I thought- What?”

Andy rolled his eyes. Joe’s hair was longer than it had been in the other dream. He had a beard now, and there were pale purple marks under his eyes, but he was wearing the same shirt as he had been the night before the crash, just like the night before.

“How much of this is fake, then?” He carried on, throwing his arms out. “The plane? The smoke? Did I ever even leave camp?”

“Andy, are you-?”

“When I said I needed a sign I meant something to tell me what the hell we’re doing here, not a monster that apparently doesn’t want to kill me anymore followed by visions of my probably dead friend,”

Joe’s eyes screwed up for a second. He opened his mouth-

“Joe? Are you alright? What is it?”

Frank Iero came out of the trees, a guitar case slung over his back. Andy rubbed his eye, swaying. This dream was getting weird. His head was pounding suddenly, pulsing with every heartbeat.

They locked eyes, and Frank smiled.

“Oh my god, hey!”

He made to walk towards Andy, but he flinched and stepped back, and Frank stopped.

“Are you alright?”

“I don’t, um-” The light around them had started to blur. It looked like halos on their heads. Andy blinked. He could feel the edge of the cliff under his heels.

Ray Toro was there too. Following down the same path that Frank had come from, hauling a couple of huge backpacks, hair plastered to his neck.

“What the hell is-” He noticed Andy. “Oh!”

Andy’s mouth opened and closed a few times. He couldn’t find any words. His throat was so dry.

“Andy, you good?”

Joe was stepping towards him, now, almost close enough to touch. This wasn’t like before. It wasn’t right. He should have disappeared by now. 

Something heavy in his chest rushed down to his feet, and his vision began to tunnel.

His fingers stretched out, they brushed just barely against Joe’s shirt. Then he raised them, and set his hand against the pale skin on Joe’s face. It was warm under his fingertips. The skin shifted when Joe raised his eyebrows.

“You’re real,” he murmured, and Joe smiled. 

“I’m real,”

Darkness began to rise around him. He blinked, and stumbled forward into Joe’s very solid arms.

Chapter Text

“It’s a lockdown procedure, apparently,”

Mikey rolled his eyes, clambering off the bed and turning around.

“How many times have I told you to knock?”

“I’m not knocking on doors in my own hatch,” Gerard answered, gesturing with the dog eared handbook he was holding.

Pete watched them bicker from under the duvet, hiding laughter in the pillow under his head and waiting for his dick to calm down enough to get up and join in. He loved when Mikey got all riled up about things like this. He was normally so quiet, and then all of a sudden this big energy would jump out of nowhere. Plus he could never stop grinning when he talked to Gerard these days, it was cute.

“Fine,” He said, throwing his hands up in the air. “Don’t knock. But don’t get mad when you walk in on something you don’t want to see,”

“We share a bus, Mikey, I don’t think there’s anything left to see,”

Pete, who would very much not like Gerard to walk in on him and Mikey fucking, sat up to change the subject so fast that his head collided with the top bunk.

“Ow, fuck,” He rubbed his forehead. “What’s the lockdown procedure?”

“Oh,” Gerard held up the book. “What you triggered on the computer. You know where all the lights turned off,”

“Right,”

“It’s an emergency mechanism, designed to ‘prevent the entrance of any hostile parties who may seek to damage the equipment or threaten those working in The Swan’-” He made air quotes with his free hand, reading out of the handbook. “-Apparently the doors were supposed to lock, too, but we had shit blocking them, so they couldn’t close. But here’s the crazy thing, the manual doesn’t mention anything about the UV map, so that must have been added after,”

“Like by the scientists?”

Gerard shrugged. “By whoever was here before us. There’s a load of old paint in the hallway down where you guys blew the roof off, I guess some of it glows in the dark,”

Pete hummed. It was weird to think about there being people on the island before they got there. He knew that they had, obviously, someone had to have built the hatch, but it felt so deserted. But then again, he supposed it had taken them forty days to find Gerard and Patrick, so there could be a whole neighbourhood of people out here and they’d never know.

“Okay, that’s great Gerard,” Mikey said, ushering him towards the door. “Goodbye,”

“Okay, but I-”

The door clicked shut. Pete giggled at the muffled protests coming back through the wall. Mikey moved across the room, grabbing a chair and shoving it under the doorknob.

“Okay,” He smiled. “Where were we?”

Pete started to lay back down, grabbing a fistful of Mikey’s shirt to pull him down with him. He ducked in under the bunk, settling over Pete’s thighs. The lights were turned down low, it highlighted all of the sharp angles of Mikey’s face as he leant in and brushed their lips together. 

“Pete! Mikey!”

It was Patrick this time, banging a fist on the door. Mikey pulled back, cursing under his breath.

“What now?” He yelled.

“It’s Andy,”

“It’s always something with that guy, isn’t it?” He murmured. Pete laughed.

“He’s with Frank!”

Mikey’s whole body went tense.

“What?”

Andy wasn’t just with Frank, although he had fallen through the hatch door clinging to him, he was also with Ray and Joe, who followed close behind, laden with bags and water bottles.

There wasn’t much time for heartfelt reunions. They’d barely made it back into the living room before Frank practically threw a wheezing Andy onto Pete, who immediately buckled under his weight and ended up pinned on the sofa underneath him. Andy groaned, his skin felt hot under Pete’s palms.

“I think he has a fever,”

“Yeah no shit,” Frank collapsed into a chair, throwing his head back, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “More importantly where the fuck are we?”

“Hatch,” Gerard said distractedly, clattering around in cupboards. Ray followed him, murmuring something and then handing him a bottle from his backpack. Gerard nodded and raced back to the sofa. “Pete, can you roll him over?”

With difficulty, he heaved Andy’s shoulders until he was laying on his back. Patrick leaned over to put his hands under his armpits and drag until he was sat up. Basically, he ended up in Pete’s lap, head lolling against his shoulder. Gerard leant in close to them, opening Andy’s mouth and pouring some gross smelling liquid in. Andy coughed, his eyes sliding open, unfocused.

“Hey Andy, can you hear me?”

“Joe?”

Joe rushed forward, cramming himself into the space beside Pete.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m still here,” He murmured, rubbing Andy’s shoulders.

His head lolled back. “Are you real?”

“I’m real,”

After that, his breathing evened out, and he kept taking whatever medicine Gerard was feeding him, along with a glass of water that ended up spilled half down Pete’s shirt, until his skin had cooled down a little, and his eyes weren’t so unfocused. Pete managed to wriggle himself free while Andy was more lucid, rolling him over in the process. He curled his legs up in the space that Pete left, falling asleep with his head on Joe’s lap.

“He keeps asking me if I’m real,” Joe explained quietly, his hand rubbing up and down Andy’s arm. “When we first found him he said something about nothing being real, and getting a sign? I think he might have been having weird dreams like Frank,”

They all turned expectantly to Frank, who was splayed out in an armchair with his eyes closed. He was swinging his feet backwards and forwards, colliding occasionally with Ray’s shins. 

“Oh yeah,” he answered, not opening his eyes. “I had this dream where my dad told me to walk towards the sun, and then when we did it lead us to the guitar,” 

He gestured to Ray, who shrugged the shoulder with the guitar case slung over it.

“And the medicine that kept Joe alive,” He added.

“Oh, yeah, that too,” Frank agreed.

“Do you think it’s the same as the dreams you’ve been having?” Patrick asked, nudging Gerard’s shoulder.

Gerard made a face at him. Mikey stared.

“The what?” He asked.

There was a pause.

“Oh,” Patrick said quietly. “Was I not supposed to tell anyone?”

The room went a little stiller. Mikey looked at Pete, his eyebrows raised, then back at Gerard, who held his hands up like he was calming an upset animal.

“It’s not a big deal. It’s just this dream I keep having, that’s all,”

“What happens in the dream?” Pete prompted when no one else spoke.

“Um..” Gerard’s voice went very small. “The hatch blows up. But I don’t think it means anything!” He added quickly, dropping his hands back to his lap.

He glanced at Patrick, who was watching him with an expression of abject misery. He mouthed ‘Sorry’ to Gerard, who shook his head, pushing their arms against each other.

Mikey was standing now, pacing the small stretch of floor space available between them all. “This could be important. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,”

“Oh, come on. Like you’ve been Mr. Perfect,” He shot back, suddenly heated. “You didn’t even tell me you were fucking Pete until I walked in on the two of you,”

Joe’s eyebrows rose. “He’s what?”

Pete looked down, feeling his cheeks turn hot.

“I didn’t- I’m not-” He struggled. “Shut up Gerard,”

“Why don’t we all just take a second to-?” Patrick started, raising his hands.

“You can stay out of this,” Mikey snapped.

“Hey!” Pete and Gerard yelled at the same time.

“Okay!” Ray clapped his hands, making everybody jump (apart from Andy, who was still somehow sound asleep). “Everybody sit down,”

They sat down.

“Let’s rewind a little, shall we? Hello! Nice to see you again! We crashed on an island, isn’t that crazy? Frank and I would have died if Joe wasn’t able to swim, and then we spent a month eating bananas and weird shitty eggs. Why don’t you tell us what happened to you guys, and maybe explain why we’re in a metal underground bunker?”

There was a brief, uncomfortable, silence, followed by mumbled apologies from almost everyone. Then they started to explain.

Pete got sick of listening to them swap stories pretty quickly; They’d only just done this with Patrick and Gerard like a week ago, and while he was eager to hear about what had happened to Joe, he didn’t really want to live through the last 50 days again.

Sometimes when he swallowed, he could still feel his throat closing up, and Andy’s hands pounding against his chest as he willed the life back into him. That was reminder enough.

He slipped out of the room and wandered back to the computer desk. Wary of touching anything in case he triggered another lockdown, but just wanting to go somewhere quiet.

There was a notebook and pencil on the table by the keyboard. He picked them up and started scribbling. Nothing of substance, really, just a few lines that had been running around in his head lately, along with some little bug doodles marching along the bottom of the page. He was so absorbed in drawing all the little legs on the ladybird that he didn’t notice that Mikey had come in until he was right over his shoulder.

“Jesus,” He jumped back, flipping the notebook over so his drawings were face down and pressing a hand to his chest. “You scared the shit out of me,”

Mikey smiled. “Sorry,”

“Is everything okay? With the others?”

“Yeah, I think so. Andy’s still asleep,”

“Ray and Frank?”

Mikey shrugged. “I think they're fine. I haven’t really talked to them,”

Pete frowned, turning in his chair so that they were properly facing each other.

“Are you okay?” 

Mikey didn’t answer, his head tilted forward so Pete couldn’t see his eyes from behind his hair. 

“What is it?” Pete pressed, standing up.

He shrugged, then rolled his neck from side to side, then shrugged again, folding his arms across his chest.

“I just feel bad for yelling like that,”

“Oh," Pete blinked, that wasn't quite what he was expecting to hear. "It’s not a big deal, I don’t think you need to worry about it,”

Mikey glanced up at him. “No?”

“Nah. You were pretty justified for being mad, we all were. Besides, nobody’s going to hold it against you when we’re busy keeping Andy alive and shit,”

“Okay,” He nodded, biting his bottom lip. “So we’re cool?”

Pete frowned. “Yeah? Why wouldn’t we be?”

“You seemed really upset,”

His stomach twisted a little. He dropped his eyes.

“I’m not, like, mad at you or anything. I just don’t like listening to people fight,”

It made him feel like everyone being mad was all his fault, for some dumb repressed psychological reason that his therapist would probably say was something to do with his obsessive desire to impress his dad as a child, or something. But he wasn’t about to tell Mikey that. He’d already done enough to scare the guy off.

“You sure?”

He kissed him. Short but lingering, just enough to mean it. When he pulled back, Mikey was smiling at him.

“We’re good,”

Andy woke up the next morning far more lucid than the day before. Over breakfast he managed to explain, with periodic encouragement from Joe (whose hand he wouldn’t let go of, and who he’d clearly told all of this to before bringing it to the group), the dreams he’d been having, along with the feelings he’d had about why they’d been brought to the island. He apparently felt one hundred percent certain that it had something to do with the hatch - opening it, finding each other, understanding the computer - or so he’d thought, until Pete had been fucking around with the selection menus on the computer and triggered the lockdown procedure that lead them to finding the map.

“I don’t know why I did it,” He said hesitantly, unfolding a battered piece of paper and laying it out on the table. “But I had this crazy dream, and then when I woke up I was holding this,” 

Pete leant in over their shoulders, looking at the question mark smudged in dirt across the page.

“And this was the same day we found the UV on the walls?” Patrick asked, spinning the drawing around to study it.

Andy nodded.

“We found a question mark in the grass,” Ray said. “Didn’t we?”

“Oh yeah, the landing pad,” Frank agreed.

“Landing pad?”

“We called it that because it was underneath this little plane,” He clarified, “We figured that was what they were aiming to land on, but they got caught in the cliff instead. It was right by where we found you, actually,”

Andy looked at them for a second.

“You’re joking,” He said with a sigh. “I was that close?”

It didn’t take as long to get there as it had taken Andy the first time. Apparently he’d walked around in circles for quite a while before he’d found what he was looking for. Every time they asked him what he’d been following, he got weird and evasive, and said he’d just had a feeling.

Although it wasn’t a twenty-four hour expedition, any amount of walking was too much walking for Pete, who was getting really sick of the others telling him to keep up. He glared up at the sun, wondering what on earth had possessed him to say he wanted to come on this trip and not volunteer to stay back at the hatch with the computer. Then his eyes trailed back down to Mikey, who turned around and grinned at him, the sun glinting off his glasses lenses, and he immediately remembered why he came.

He did miss Patrick, though. He’d stayed behind to watch the computer while they were gone, along with Frank, who had spent the entire morning hogging the shower, and then said that nothing could drag him out of bed and back outside except a rescue plane. It was silly, because they’d been apart for weeks before, but he still found himself looking for him everywhere. Besides, he needed to get him alone and ask why he was acting so weird. 

Patrick was being evasive and shifty whenever anyone talked about going home, and he kept asking weird questions about him and Mikey. Not intrusive questions, because Pete was an oversharer anyway and wouldn’t have an issue giving Patrick the raunchy details if he really wanted them (he certainly hadn’t hesitated giving them in the past when he didn’t), but the kind of searching questions that someone who is dancing around the real thing they want to talk about asks. Stuff like ‘how did you know how you felt?’ and ‘when did it all start?’. The kind of questions that told him Patrick was having some kind of personal gay crisis that he was too nervous to talk about, which meant that Pete had absolutely no choice but to corner him and annoy him about it. Only he couldn’t do that, because there were so many of them that somebody was always around when he was trying to have a quiet conversation, plus he was a bit distracted by his own gay developments to focus on it too much.

Apparently, he was also too distracted by his thoughts to look where he was going, because he found himself colliding suddenly with someone’s back.

“Woah,” Ray said, catching him by the shoulder as he stumbled backwards. “You alright?”

He mumbled that he was fine, straightening up and standing on his tiptoes to try to see over the others.

“Are we there?” He asked, feeling very much like a child on a long road trip.

“See for yourself,” Ray answered. 

He squatted down, grabbing Pete by the waist and heaving him over his head and onto his shoulders without any semblance of warning.

Pete squealed, grabbing Ray’s shoulders and kicking his feet. Down on the ground he could hear a high pitched giggling that might be Mikey, or could be Gerard.

“Put me down!”

“You’re fine. I’ve spent the last month carrying Frank over rivers, I’ve got you. Just look,”

Pete took a deep breath and did his best to relax. He wasn’t used to being up this high and it was freaking him out. He squinted over the group, refusing to take a hand off Ray to shield his eyes.

“Well, shit,”

Above them, he could see the plane that the others had been talking about. Exactly as little and yellow as Andy had said. Then underneath, there was an exposed circle of grass, a patch of dirt in the centre curving around into a perfect question mark, exactly like Andy’s drawing. Pete watched, now, as a little version of Andy ahead of him moved down the line of the mark. He made it to the period at the bottom, bending down to lay his hand flat against it. Pete opened his mouth to ask him what was wrong, but then he straightened up and stamped his feet, and the metal clanging that sounded across the valley answered his question.

It was another hatch.

Luckily, this one didn’t need dynamite to blow it open. With a bit of help from vines and big sticks they found nearby, they managed to come up with a pulley system to lever the door open. It didn’t seem to be sealed in the same way that the other one was, and there was no huge QUARANTINE stamped on the inside of the lid. There was also nobody inside, which Pete was mostly expecting, especially since there wasn’t anybody missing anymore, but he would be lying if he said he wasn’t kind of disappointed. Part of him had been hoping to find someone down there, maybe a wise old scientist who could explain exactly what they were doing there, or some survival genius who could build them traps to catch rabbits or something. Or maybe he was just hoping that he’d find someone to give them a way home.

Instead, what they found was a tiny cylindrical room, with two recliner chairs and a little toilet in a room off to the side, covered wall to wall with TV screens.

Andy got to work immediately, looking underneath and behind every surface he could find and writing everything down in his little notebook. Joe followed suit, fiddling around with the contents of the cupboard on the back wall. It was apparently bigger than it looked, because his entire head and shoulders had disappeared into its depths before he found anything useful. When he emerged, coughing and shaking dust out of his hair, he was clutching a video reel.

The man on the screen was the same one from the orientation video in the other hatch. He went through the same spiel, explaining who the Dharma Initiative are, and reeling off all of the supposed types of science they experimented with. Pete wondered, again, what parapsychology and zoology could possibly have to do with anything the Initiative had been doing on the island. Although he’d noticed this time that there was a caption on the title screen reading ‘station five out of six’. Was there a number on the other video? He couldn’t remember.

“....You and your partner will observe a psychological experiment in progress,” The Doctor was saying, pointing to a tiny digital version of the television screens surrounding them. “Your duty is to observe team members in another station on the island,”

The camera cut away, showing a security feed, black and white grainy footage of two men leant over a pool table, sharing meals, exercising.

“No,” Gerard said quietly, falling heavily against the back wall.

Then the camera shifted again, showing a domed room with a desk at the centre. The desk had a computer on it, with a ticking timer sat above.

“These team members are not aware that they are under surveillance or that they are subjects of an experiment,” The man from the video continued, unperturbed by the sick feeling spreading through the room. “... All you need to know is that the subjects believe that their job is of the utmost importance. Remember, everything that occurs, no matter how minute or seemingly unimportant, must be recorded,”

He went on, showing them how to put their completed notebooks in a pneumatic tube that would supposedly send them to the researchers somewhere else on the island, and once again wishing them ‘Namaste and good luck’ on their assignment, then the film clicked, the screen went black, and the reel spun to a stop.

The room was silent for a while, the weight of the realization sitting heavily on them all.

“Shit,” Mikey said finally.

They all mumbled agreement.

“So that’s it?” Pete asked. “It was all fake?”

Gerard stared at the blank screen for a moment longer, then shrugged. “I guess. Jesus, we wasted so much time,”

“You couldn’t have known,” Ray said.

“Yeah, but I wondered,” He started to pace, or tried to, across the tiny amount of exposed floor space. “Every day I tried to let the timer go down to zero, but I chickened out every time. I kept thinking it was fake, but then I’d suddenly just go ‘but what if it’s real?’” He stopped, running a hand through his hair and sighing at the ceiling. “If I’d just gone through with it, we could’ve-”

“But you didn’t. It’s fine,” Ray pressed.

“But we-!” His face fell suddenly. “God, Patrick is still down there. I have to go,”

He vanished back up into the light without another word. Mikey called after him to wait, scrambling to his feet and rushing after him, dragging Ray behind him. 

Pete got up to follow him, but then he noticed that the others were still. Joe was staring at Andy, who hadn’t moved to look away from the projector screen. He blinked, swallowed, blinked again. 

“Andy?” Joe prompted, nudging him with his shoulder. “Come on,”

“It’s not right,”

His voice was barely above a whisper.

“What?”

“It can’t be,”

Pete and Joe exchanged confused looks.

“What isn’t right?”

He stood up, crossing to the screen and disconnecting the film reel. Methodically, and with a quiet calm that Pete found incredibly unsettling, he opened the reel, unfurled the film, and tore it apart. Frame by frame, scattering in shredded strips at his feet. When he was done, he dropped his hands, then turned, suddenly filled with energy, and punched a hole straight through the screen for good measure.

“It isn’t right,” He repeated, then stalked straight past Joe and Pete, and up into the sun.

Chapter Text

Andy was practically foaming at the mouth by the time they made it back to the hatch. He'd been muttering to himself all the way back, bits and pieces about how it was all bullshit. That they were being lied to, that there had to be a reason for it all. Mikey tried to talk to him a couple of times, but didn't get any kind of reply, so he gave up pretty quick, and the rest of them walked back in silence. 

When they got back in he stormed into the kitchen, knocking everything off the counter in one sweep, and yelling into the air.

“What the fuck?” Patrick emerged from the computer room. “What’s going on?”

Gerard turned his shoulders around, nudging him back through the door.

“We need to talk,” He said in a low voice.

Mikey wondered how he’d take learning that they had been trapped down there for nothing. 

Although personally, he was finding it kind of hard to believe. It might have been set up as a psychological experiment, sure, that made sense (sort of), but Gerard and Patrick weren't employed by the Dharma Initiative, and it didn't seem like the grey beard guy who dragged them in there had been either. From what they could tell, the Initiative hadn’t existed at all since the 80s. Why would it still be going if it wasn't real? Wouldn't someone have figured it out by now? 

How could they know which video was real and which one was fake? Nobody had been down there observing them, so they couldn’t prove that The Pearl was ever even functional.

He didn't say any of that, though, everybody was already tense enough without throwing a contradictory opinion like that into the mix. He didn’t think anyone would listen to him, anyway, they all seemed completely absorbed in their own things.

He slid into a stool at the kitchen counter beside Pete, nudging him in the feet with one of his own. Pete nudged back, shuffling to the left so that their hips touched.

“Hey,” He asked, leaning in and keeping his voice low. “Is Andy alright?”

Pete looked across the room, where Andy was methodically flicking through the Dharma Initiative handbook and tearing each page out one by one, and shrugged.

“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen him like this before,”

“Is there anything we can do?”

Pete’s mouth twisted downwards. He thought for a second, then shook his head.

“I don’t think so,”

Andy’s head snapped up, looking at them like he’d heard everything they just said. The book, now just a hard cover, fell from his hands, and clattered loudly on the floor. He turned on his heel and stormed from the room.
Distantly, Mikey could hear more crashing. He could only assume that he’d gone to tear apart the bedroom instead. There was no yelling that drifted through the doors along with it. In fact, Andy had gone eerily silent. It was sort of freaking Mikey out. He got up from behind the counter, gathering the pages up from the floor and setting them in front of Pete, who rummaged through them idly.

“What’s this about a failsafe?” Pete asked, pointing at the notes.

Mikey leant over the counter to look at the diagram on the page he was holding. “Oh, yeah, Gerard mentioned something about a key. I think it shuts off all the tech down here or something, in case it all goes wrong,”

“If they could shut it down, why didn’t they just do that in the first place?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it also summons the black smoke beast from the woods to come kill them for daring to doubt the science of the Dharma,”

Pete’s mouth turned into a hard line.

“That’s not funny. What if you’re right?”

“I was kidding. It probably doesn’t do anything,”

The papers shifted under Pete’s hands. The piece he was holding slipped from his fingers and fluttered to the ground.

“What do we do if we need to shut it down, then?”

“Well, it’s not real, right? So we’ve got nothing to worry about,”

Pete rolled his head on his neck. 

“I guess,” He sounded unconvinced.

They lapsed into silence. There didn’t feel like anything else to say.

Error message. Incorrect code entered.

Patrick sighed, clicking the return key and staring at the selection menu again. Every pathway he’d tried had led him to a dead end, either displaying an error message like the one he’d just been shown, or just taking him back to the screen with the flashing green dashes, waiting for him to input the code. Aside from the route to the lockdown procedure, the only other success he’d had was one page that had some kind of communication feature, but after typing out a few messages with no response, he’d given up. He took off his glasses, rubbing a knuckle into his eye.

“Just leave it. You’re not going to find anything,”

Gerard was watching him, reclined against the wall with his arms folded. His hair had fallen in his face, but he wasn’t moving to push it back. It framed his eyes in a way that made him look like a movie poster.

“If it isn’t real, then there must be some way to turn it off,” Patrick protested. “It’s got to be somewhere here,”

There was a pause, then-

“So you believe it, then?”

“Hm?”

“That it’s not real,”

Patrick spun around in his chair, facing Gerard. For a few seconds, they just looked at each other, sharing the weight of the time they’d spent down here alone, the knowledge that it might have all been for nothing. Then he turned back to the screen.

“I don’t know,”

Gerard sighed. “Yeah, me neither,”

“What if that place is the experiment? The- what did you say it was called?”

“The Pearl,”

“What if The Pearl is the fake one? You said yourself that nobody was down there. Why would they bother finding replacements for here but not for there? And- if this wasn’t real, we would know,” Patrick looked down at his hands on the keyboard. The light from the screen cast them in a sickly green glow. “Wouldn’t we?”

They were still for a while.

“I don’t know,” Gerard said quietly. “It felt real,”

The door clattered open, bouncing back on its hinges with a crash. Andy was framed in the doorway, breathing heavily, eyes closed.

He looked crazy. Patrick couldn’t think of any other way to put it. Gerard had mentioned that he hadn’t reacted well to the news, but this was something else. In all the years they’d known each other, he’d never seen him this upset. So Patrick did the only thing he could think to do. He stood up, skirted around the computer desk, and joined Andy in the doorway, throwing his arms up and hugging him as hard as he could.

For a second, nobody moved, then Andy softened. He bent his head down to Patrick’s shoulder, arms coming up around his waist and squeezing. Patrick rubbed his back. He sighed, a broken little sound hidden in the curve of Patrick’s neck.

“It’s okay,” He murmured.

“It’s not,” Andy pulled away a little. “It’s not. This was all for nothing,”

“Yeah, I know, I’m pissed off too. I was locked down here for all this time and-” 

“No, not just that,” He shook his head. “All of this. I thought- I thought we’d been brought here for a reason, for something important. But if it's not real then what’s the point? Why are we here? Are we just stuck here forever with no purpose?”

He stepped back from Patrick, anger rising in his voice.

“I thought you liked it here,” Patrick said helplessly.

“I did. I loved it here. Because I thought I could finally do something fucking important with my life. I thought I was special,” He swallowed, his breath was coming in ragged pants. “Did you know the black smoke didn’t kill me?”

Patrick felt his eyes widen in shock.

“It wanted to,” Andy continued. “Or it tried, or- Something. But it didn’t. The first time, with the bus driver, I was so sure it was going to kill me too and then it didn’t. And then later on it came right up to me, and I thought that that was going to be the end. But then I looked at it, and it looked back at me, and it saw something important. Something that convinced it to keep me alive, to lead me to Joe, and to the question mark. I thought this was all for something. But now-”

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Andy’s face went hard, his gaze drifting past Patrick’s shoulder and towards the computer. Or more importantly, Patrick realised as he turned around, towards Gerard, who had started to enter the code.

“Leave it,” He said, his voice hard.

Gerard looked up, fingers hovering above the Execute button.

“Well, I-”

“It’s not real. Don’t.”

“We don’t know that Andy, we might-”

“Don’t!” He stormed past Patrick, shoving Gerard away from the desk, who stumbled back from the force of it, tripping and falling hard against a metal unit. “You’re doing what they want!”

“Andy,” Patrick held up his hands. “You need to-”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!”

“I wasn’t going to,” He lied. 

“We’re giving them what they want! They brought us here for nothing, and now we’re…”

He trailed off, the steam seeming to drain suddenly out of him, then he lurched forwards against the desk, slamming his hands into the computer and shoving it to the floor. It smashed into the concrete ground, sending broken glass scattering across Patrick’s feet.

“What the fuck!” Gerard yelled, scrambling back to his feet. “Andy!”

The timer kept beeping at them angrily, flickering down from one minute to fifty-nine seconds.

“I’m not scared of you,” Andy said to it, breathing heavily around the words, “you’re not real,”

“You don’t know that!” Gerard repeated. 

“I do!”

He whirled around, and for one sick second Patrick thought he was about to hit Gerard, but they were interrupted by the alarm reaching zero. 

For a second, the room was silent and still, the timer frozen at 00:00. Then it shifted, rolling from nought to a thousand and back again. When it fell still, the numbers had been replaced with red tiles displaying hieroglyphic symbols that Patrick didn’t recognise.

All around them, alarms started to blare, all of the lights pulsing on and off. After a second, the room started to shake.

“Shit,” Gerard said. “Shit, shit shit shit shit,”

He ran, shouting down the hallway for the others, who were already trailing into the room in twos and threes, covering their ears and yelling.

“Get out of here,” Gerard was telling them, grabbing Mikey by the shoulders. “All of you. You need to go,”

Patrick was on his knees, hauling the computer upright. The screen was destroyed, lights of the interior blinking at him helplessly. He clicked a few buttons on the keyboard, but didn’t get any kind of response. Ray shoved his way into the room, wrapping his arms around Andy’s waist and practically lifting him out. He didn’t even fight back, he’d just gone still. Gerard was talking again, explaining what happened, ushering everyone out of the door, but Patrick wasn’t listening. He followed the cables from the back of the computer, scrambling beside them across the floor until he reached the wall, stopping at the grate that they led into. He peered into the darkness beyond. The grate led to a series of tunnels, just about big enough for someone to crawl down. Somewhere far away he could see a flashing light, pulsing in rhythm with all the ones around them. 

A hand was on his shoulder, a body kneeling down beside him. Gerard.

“I have to go down there,” He told him, looking up from the grate, he tugged on the cable again to illustrate his point. “I have to figure out how to stop it,”

“Shit,” Gerard bit his lip, gazing down into the darkness. “It’s real, isn’t it?”

The room shook harder, jostling Patrick’s shoulders. His glasses started to slide down his nose, he raised a trembling hand to push them back up. The alarms had begun to wail.

Patrick nodded. “It's real,”

Gerard blinked a few times, turning the words over, then something clicked into place, and his hand tightened suddenly on Patrick’s shoulder. “Oh my god, it’s real!”

He stood up and ran from the room, muttering to himself and rummaging through the remains of Andy’s destruction.

“What?”

“Oh, I was so stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. It’s real, Patrick, and it’s all about you,” He rushed back to Patrick’s side and brandished his fist at him. He was clutching a metal chain with a key dangling from it. The failsafe.

“Me?”

“My dreams. I thought they were telling me that I had some kind of purpose. Like I was down here for a reason. But I see it now. It wasn’t about me: It was about you. You’re the one who’s here for a reason, Patrick, you figured it out. We have the key, you can go down there and use it. Shut down the computer, save us all,”

Patrick shook his head, his mind was reeling. He looked down at Gerard’s fist, stomach swooping to the floor.

“No, no, it can’t be,”

“But it is,” Gerard grabbed him by the shoulder, pressing the chain into his hand. “It is,”

“We don't even know what will happen. What if it blows us all up?”

“Well, better just us than the whole world, right?” He shook his head. “It won't. You'll be alright, I can feel it,”

Patrick looked at him, into his eyes. He looked at the face he’d gotten to know in the last fifty days. Into the eyes he’d come to know so well that he felt sure he’d recognise them anywhere, eyes that were looking at him with so much confidence. So sure that he was important. Patrick, who had never felt like it was his purpose to do anything really, much less to save the world.

He swallowed.

“Okay,”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” He nodded. “But you can’t wait around for me. You’ve got to go, get the others out of here. I don’t know where, as far away as you can. If something goes wrong, and- and I don’t come back-”

“You’re going to come back,”

“I know, but if I don’t-”

“You will,” He insisted.

“Just- get them somewhere safe. Okay?”

He put his hand over Gerard’s, pulling it off his shoulder and down, tangled fingers hovering by their hips. He’d meant to push him away, but he was struggling against the urge not to let go.

Gerard nodded, squeezed his hand, and nodded again.

“I will,” He let go, stepping back. The room around them was shaking so hard he could barely stand upright. “As long as you get us out of here,”

Patrick nodded, and watched as Gerard turned to leave, knowing it might be the last time. He stared down at the key in his hands. The alarm behind him was beeping dully. Like even the computer was sick of all of this freaking out. 

Jesus, was he really going to do this?

“Wait!”

Gerard stopped, turning back, mouth slightly open as a question started to form on his lips. But Patrick would never know what it was going to be, because before he could let himself doubt for even a second he was rushing forward and grabbing him by the shoulders and dragging Gerard down and pushing their mouths together.

Gerard kissed him back immediately, dissolving all the apprehension Patrick had felt so quickly that it made his head spin. A warm feeling spread through his chest and down into the pit of his stomach, urging him to press closer, to take in as much of Gerard as he could. Then the alarm blared again, and he pulled back, heat rushing to his face. At some point in the last few seconds an arm had come up around his back, and as much as the end of the world was pressingly imminent, Patrick very much did not want to step out of it.

Gerard’s mouth was still open, his cheeks reflecting the pink Patrick could feel radiating off his own. His hair was a little messy, sticking up at the back where, apparently, Patrick's hand had been only moments before. Because he’d done it. He’d actually gone over and kissed him. And it had only taken the threat of them both dying to make it happen.

“What was that for?” Gerard almost whispered, the words falling out on something that might have been nervous laughter.

“Just.. In case we both die,” Patrick shrugged, eyes flickering down. “No regrets, right?”

He could feel Gerard’s eyes on him, glancing up just enough to catch him start to smile. The warm feeling spread even further.

“No regrets,” He echoed.

For a moment, Patrick allowed himself to smile back, then he stepped away, shoving at Gerard’s shoulders.

“Okay, now go before the roof collapses on both of us,”

He stood there for a second longer, watching Patrick and looking very much like he didn’t want to go anywhere, but then he just nodded, turning and running down the hall without another word.

Patrick swallowed, his heart jumping up into the back of his throat. With every second the alarm sounded again, perfectly in time with the pounding in his chest. He looked down at the key clutched between his fingers. 

Okay then. 

The grate in the ground came off easily in his hands, screws falling away and rolling across the floor. Flakes of rust fell off with the movement, transferring onto his hands. Patrick screwed his face up. This was going to be so gross. 

His suspicions were confirmed by the splashing noise when his feet hit the tunnel. He didn't even want to think about what had made those puddles, especially not if he was about to crawl through them. Instead, he just sent out a silent thanks to the Dharma Initiative manufacturers for making their boiler suits so thick, and with sleeves so long that he could shake them down to cover his hands so he didn't have to touch it. 

The sound was dulled in the tunnel, but the shaking felt all too real. Everything seemed to be moving now - the walls, the ground - making it almost impossible to draw breath without feeling like he was going to die. Patrick squinted against the fluorescent strips flashing along the shaft, focusing his gaze on the literal light at the end of the tunnel. 

This is just like Star Wars. He thought, automatically. Then he laughed. 

“Use the force, Patrick,” He muttered, then started to crawl. 

The air outside was disconcertingly calm. Sun shining, a light breeze tousling Mikey’s hair, birds calling out overhead. It almost made him laugh - Hadn’t they heard that the world was about to end? Didn’t they know that they needed to run?

His legs ached, and there was a pain in his chest that spiked with every breath, but he pushed onwards, stretching to keep up with the others. Frank was beside him, fingers wrapped around Mikey’s wrist, tugging him along. The familiar rattle of his lungs was absent, though. Mikey realised that he hadn’t heard it, or any of Frank’s annoying little sick complaints, since before the buses had crashed.

His foot caught in a tree root, and he stumbled, shaking his head. No time for that. He told himself. Focus.

They only started to slow down when they reached the beach, hunching over and heaving breaths back into their aching lungs. Joe actually knelt down in the sand, fingertips tracing along the grains beneath him.

“So what now?” Pete asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

Ray shrugged. “Gerard just said to get as far away as we can,”

They exchanged nods, and then dragged themselves right to the shoreline. Settling down at the edge of the waves.

Mikey looked out at the horizon, focusing on the feeling of the water lapping at his ankles, and not the feeling of it soaking into his shoes. It was a nice place to die, he thought. If this had to be the last thing he saw, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

He’d definitely take it over a regular old bus crash.

There was a rumble in the distance. He jumped, turning back to face the jungle, fear climbing up his chest.

“What the hell is that?” Somebody yelled over the rattling, but they all knew the answer.

It was the hatch. Shaking so loud that they could hear it from here.

Fucking hell. They really were going to die, weren’t they?

To his right, Joe and Andy were curled on the ground, cross legged in the wet sand, huddled close together. Joe reached up and grabbed Pete’s hand, pulling him towards them. On the other side, Ray had both of his arms around Frank’s shoulders. Frank was peeking out from under his arm, blinking his huge, scared eyes. Mikey shuffled forward, slotting into the gap left for him in the middle. His shoulders connected with Frank’s, the heat of Ray’s fingers tangling in the neck of his shirt. 

Pete was looking at him. Mikey forced his eyes to meet him. He smiled, just a little, and held out his hand. Mikey took it, intertwining their fingers together. 

A wave broke against his ankles, spray splashing up onto their joined hands.

There was movement on the tree line. Mikey blinked, his heart leaping as he made out the shape of Gerard running out of the jungle. He tried to smile, but Gerard was shaking his head, yelling something that he couldn’t make out over the rumbling. He threw his hands up to cover his ears, screwing his eyes shut. Mikey tore his gaze away from him just in time to catch the explosion.

Trees flew up into the air, shooting jets of fire and metal coming up around them. A horrible, broiling heat rolled towards them, and then everything lit up.

Even with his eyes closed, Mikey could see that he was surrounded by purple.

Chapter Text

Everything was blue.

Solid and unmoving and so bright it almost hurt, but even when he closed his eyes it was all that he could see.

The air in his lungs was warm, and the water on his back was cool. He threw his arms out, little splashes of salt coming up on his face. He felt calm. Heart beating steadily in his chest like the sunlight beating down on his skin.

And when the sky shifted into a neon shade of purple, and scraps of metal started flying through the air, coming down in great heaving splashes around him, and the explosion shook the water so hard that he sank beneath it, he wondered if this feeling of calm would follow him. He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, and waited to die.

When Frank woke up everything hurt. His back and shoulders ached, his stomach was twisted in knots, and when he rolled over his head swam. He opened his eyes, staring at the darkness above him and taking deep, slow breaths. The calm feeling had not chased him into waking. Instead, all he felt was an eerie sense that something was wrong. It was disconcerting, having your emotions flipped on their head so quickly like that, like looking at the negatives of a photo. 

His hands flew to his chest, pressed down hard to feel the beating of his heart. Okay, he was still alive, thank god. How he’d survived that, how any of them could have survived that, he had no idea. But he wasn’t going to question it if it meant he could carry on living.

He lay there a while longer, breathing evening out as the pounding in his chest slowed down to a dull thud, then his vision began to adjust to the darkness, and his brain became suddenly aware of his surroundings.

He was lying in a bunk, his bunk, on the very same tour bus that he’d last seen floating in pieces in the ocean. 

He pulled his curtain back, rolling out onto the carpet, which was the same faded blue colour it had been before. Stumbling to the bathroom, he found that the toilet looked exactly the same, right down to the zippy black bag holding his shampoo and soap that sat on the top next to the toilet roll. 

He found a bottle of water on the side by the sink, right where he’d put it fifty days ago. He cracked it open, draining half and then bending to wash his face with the rest. When he looked up, the mirror was right where he left it, but the reflection looking back at him was something he didn’t recognise.

Frank hadn’t shaved in fifty days - not his face, or the sides of his head. The last time he’d looked in a mirror his hair dye had completely faded, his skin had darkened from all the time spent out under the sun, and the lower half of his face was covered with what Joe had deemed ‘a passing attempt at a beard’.

But now, he was as pale and trimmed as ever. He leant in close, blinking at his reflection, he was pretty sure he could even see remnants of eye makeup that he hadn’t washed off properly after their last show.

Something crashed in the lounge. Frank unlocked the bathroom door, sticking his head out into the dim light. Ray looked back at him, confusion etched into every inch of his face.

“Morning,” Frank said quietly.

Ray nodded slowly. “Yeah, morning,”

They wandered down to the end of the bus together. Frank slumped down on the sofa, watching Ray rummage through the cupboards to find something to eat. He boiled the kettle, filling two mugs with coffee and setting them down, still steaming, on the table in between them. Frank took a sip, groaning with relief as the warm liquid slid down his throat. He didn’t even care that it burnt his tongue. 

“You okay?” Ray asked. He wouldn’t stop looking at him funny.

Frank shrugged his aching shoulders. 

“I had the craziest dream,”

Ray laughed, sudden and surprised.

“Me too,”

Mikey came through pretty soon after, taking Frank’s mug right out of his hands and drinking deeply. He rubbed his eyes, groaning vaguely when Ray asked if he was feeling okay.

“I slept like crap,” He said darkly, staring at the dregs in the bottom of the mug, then he glanced up at Frank, and mumbled. “Sorry, I’ll make another cup,”

Gerard was the last to join them, stumbling in after Ray had opened all of the curtains and Frank had polished off a box and a half of cereal (fucking hell he’d missed eating normal food), looking equal parts tired and confused. His hair was sticking up in all kinds of directions, and when he slumped down in the seat beside Frank, his hands were shaking.

Frank slid his (second) mug of coffee across the table to him, reaching up to smooth down the back of his hair. Gerard took this as an invitation, folding in under Frank’s arm and laying his head down on his shoulder. He gripped the mug like a lifeline, but didn’t actually take a sip.

Frank finished his cereal, and turned to look over Gerard’s head and out of the bus window. The sky was dreary outside, grey clouds already pissing onto the car park gravel. He wasn’t sure where they were, or even when they were, but he was sure there would be kit to unpack and warm-ups to do pretty soon. He could already see techies walking back and forth with boxes and huge backpacks, yelling at each other and pointing in the direction of what he assumed was the venue. He leant forward, his forehead bumping against the cold glass, and tried to ease the twisting in his chest.

Had it been real? The island? The hatch? The prophetic dreams where his dad told him he’d been healed by magic?

He certainly felt like shit now, worse than he had when he’d literally nearly drowned. Then again, if it had been real then the last thing he’d experienced was an explosion, so it was no surprise he was hurting. 

Maybe this part wasn’t real, he thought, maybe this was the dream, and his dad was about to walk through the door and tell him what the Dharma Initiative was really up to. Maybe in a few minutes he’d find himself floating on his back in the ocean again, staring up at all the blue around him.

The door slid back, and for a second Frank really thought he was about to see Iero Sr.

“Good morning sunshines!”

Not dad.

“Brian!” Gerard jumped out of his seat, nearly sending the coffee mug flying, and practically tackled their manager into the wall, hugging him so hard that Brian had to whack him on the back to get him to loosen his grip and let him breathe. “It’s so good to see you!”

Brian pulled back, informing him that they saw each other last night, and leaning in to check his pupils.

“You taken something?” He asked warily.

“No, no I’m just,” Gerard shrugged, leaning his head down on Brian’s shoulder for a second. “Happy to see you,”

“Okay, well, good to see you, too,” He rubbed Gerard’s back with the arm that was still pinned around him, he looked around the room. “ The rest of you all good?”

They nodded and mumbled agreement. Frank flashed Brian a grin and a thumbs up.

“Peachy,” He said.

“Okay, good! I’ve got to go set things up with the venue managers, but we shouldn’t need anything from you guys until sound check at 3ish,” He glanced down at his watch anxiously. “Oh, the hotel is round the corner, you need to go and check in. I’ve texted you all the booking info. Can’t remember who’s sharing with who, you’ll have to figure that out, cool?”

“Cool,” Frank answered, when everybody else stayed silent.

“Great. I’ll call you if anything else happens, but otherwise I’ll see you later, don’t be late,” 

He walked back out of the room, pulling his phone out of his pocket and pressing it against his ear. 

Gerard turned back to the group. They all looked at each other, listening to Brian march down the bus, then the sound of the door swinging open, the rain outside, and then it slamming shut again.

“Um,” Gerard cleared his throat, glanced at the door, cleared his throat again. “Do you guys-?”

“Yeah,” Mikey said immediately. “I remember,”

Gerard looked at Ray, who nodded, then at Frank.

“Won’t be forgetting in a hurry,” He said with a shrug.

“Okay, okay,” He nodded, laughing. Frank laughed a little, too, the relief that he wasn’t the only one who remembered leaving a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I thought I was going crazy,”

“You and me both,” Ray agreed. “I laid in bed for like an hour after I woke up, trying to figure out if I was still alive or not,”

“I had a dream where I was dying,”

They all turned to Frank. He shrugged, suddenly uncertain.

“Is that weird?”

“I don’t know,” Mikey said. “Was your dad there?”

“No, but the Hatch did explode again,”

Gerard’s face fell suddenly, he straightened up.

“Shit. Shit, I need to find Patrick,”

He disappeared into the hallway, racing to the front lounge. Frank ran after him, but he’d stopped, staring out of the open door at the car park in front of them. 

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t-” He glanced back at Frank. “I don’t know where their bus is,”

“Oh, shit,” Frank joined him at the door, scanning over the buses parked next to theirs. “No, I've got no idea. Can you call him?”

“I don’t have his number,”

They glanced at each other.

“Mikey,” They called in unison.

Mikey didn’t have Patrick’s number, and somehow didn’t have Pete’s either.

“We see each other all the time, I don’t need to text him!” He protested, staring down at his phone. “Brian might have their manager?”

“No, we shouldn’t bring anyone else into this. Maybe-”

A phone started ringing. Frank’s phone. 

All four of them scrambled around, looking under piles of crap for the source of the noise. Finally, Ray emerged from an empty bunk holding one of Frank’s hoodies.

He pulled the phone out of the pocket, clicking the green button and pressing it to his ear.

“Hello?” He asked, heart jumping suddenly into his throat.

“I’m not seeing any checking in to hotels happening,”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Brian,” He rolled his eyes. “Are you spying on us?”

“No, Frank, I’m busy working my fingers to the bone to make sure everything goes perfectly for you while you ignore the one thing I asked of you,”

“It’s been like five minutes!”

“Check in to your hotels,”

He hung up. Frank cursed at the phone.

In various states of nervous breakdown, they managed to get themselves dressed and checked into their hotels without too many problems. All four of them were looking over their shoulders at every turn, scouring lines of people for the four faces they desperately needed to see.

Walking back across the car park, Mikey’s face suddenly split into a grin.

“That’s their bus,” He pointed, grabbing hold of Frank’s wrist and breaking into a run to drag them to the door.

“Are you sure?”

Mikey looked back over his shoulder, fist hovering just shy of knocking on the metal.

“I crashed in it, I’m pretty sure I remember,”

It was Joe who answered the door, eyes wild and hair sticking up all over the place, looking younger than Frank had ever seen him. He beckoned them inside, trailing behind them to shut and bolt the door, telling them quietly that nobody else was around.

The scene inside was one that was largely the same as the one on their own bus that morning. The band, spread out across the lounge, in various states of anxious unrest and holding a wild array of all the foods they’d missed out on eating on the island.

“Patrick,” Gerard said softly when his eyes fell on him across the room. He crossed the lounge and laid a hand on his arm. “You’re alive,”

“I-um, yeah,” He swallowed, fidgeting with the half of a pop tart clutched in his fist. When he looked down at Gerard’s hand on his bicep, a little flush crept along his cheekbones. 

Frank caught Joe’s eye, eyebrows raising. Joe smirked, and shrugged. 

“We all are,” Pete said, curling his knees up underneath him on the floor. “I can’t believe it,”

For a while they just talked things over, rehashing everything they’d been through together, making sure all of their memories matched up. Frank mostly tuned out, focusing instead on methodically bundling himself up in every blanket he could find because someone had turned the air conditioning up to full blast and he was freezing (it was amazing, if he was honest with himself, God he’d missed feeling cold). He leant back against Ray on the sofa, who wrapped an arm around him, tucking in right under his shoulder, and started listening again right as they got to the destruction of the hatch.

“...After we didn’t enter the code, the computer started freaking out,” Patrick was saying, hands folded in his lap. “That was when all the alarms started, and the place started shaking,”

“So we all left,” Joe said.

“Sure, yeah. Gerard and I-” He looked up, meeting Gerard’s twinkling eyes for just a second, then looking down again. “We figured that this was what the failsafe key was for,”

“You figured it out.” Gerard corrected. “All I did was find the key.”

“Right. I went down through the grate in the computer room into this tunnel. There was a light flashing about halfway down, so I crawled towards it, and there was a keyhole, so I put the failsafe key in and I turned it and-” He shrugged. “Then I woke up here,”

Pete frowned up at him from his spot on the floor, reclined against Mikey’s shins. “So that’s it?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Patrick asked, making a face back at him.

“I don’t know… Just feels kind of anticlimactic,”

Patrick laughed. “Sorry, I just thought you’d want the facts. You want me to tell you about how the whole tunnel was shaking so hard I nearly shit myself, and the random metal pipe that flew off the wall and hit me in the face, too?” 

“I think there’s a reason you write the lyrics,” Mikey said over Pete’s shoulder, giggling.

“Anyway, what happened to you guys?” Patrick asked, rolling his eyes.

“We ran away when you told us to,” Ray told him, his voice was rough against Frank’s ears, so close that he sounded just a little bit too loud. “Then when we got to the beach everything blew up,”

“And the sky turned purple,” Frank added.

“The sky turned purple,” He agreed, a hand patting Frank's shoulder. “And then we were back,”

For a minute, they were all quiet. 

Frank still didn’t know how to feel. His memories of the island felt so real, and the other guys all remembered the same things, but it felt so completely impossible to believe that it really happened. Every logical bone in his body was telling him that there was no way that he’d actually experienced any of that.

It was a bit like like the feeling he’d get after coming back from a holiday, where your life goes back to normal and suddenly all of that fun doesn’t feel like it happened to you at all, and you can’t really remember it properly until the photos come back from being developed and you’ve got proof that it was real. Only the feeling was multiplied by a thousand, and he didn’t have any proof to fall back on apart from that the other guys remembered it too. 

He looked down at his hands, tangling his fingers in the blankets, and tried to remember how it had felt to use them to scavenge for fresh fruit, sneaking fingertips into bird's nests to search for eggs. 

His eyes slid closed, and he was absorbed by the sense memory of curling up to sleep in the sand, pressed in hard against Ray’s side, hand clutched into Joe’s shirt on the other, terrified that he’d wake up and find them gone, and he would be left all alone. He thought about how it had felt to cough up mouthfuls of seawater, to kick his feet underneath him and feel certain that he was moments from death. He remembered how it felt to see Mikey and Gerard again, after a month of being resolutely convinced of their being dead. He remembered waking up after a night of tossing and turning on the jungle floor, and feeling better rested than he did half the days he woke up in a bed.

His eyes flickered open again. He wasn’t doubting if it was real anymore.

“I can’t believe it,” Andy said quietly. He leant back, stretching his arms over his head. “I can’t believe I-” He shook his head. “- did all of that, I mean– I think that place was making me crazy,”

“You think?” Joe asked him. 

Andy bit his lip. 

“I'm sorry,” 

Frank knew it was addressed to all of them, but Andy only looked at Joe when he said it. 

“Sorry if I freaked you out,”

A moment went by, something passed between the two of them.

“It’s okay,” Joe said quietly, shrugging. “Not your fault you were the island’s favourite,”

Andy laughed, then clapped his hands suddenly. “Oh! The bus driver’s alive,”

“What?” Mikey asked, sitting up straight.

“We saw him this morning, he’s fine. I don’t know what he remembers, or if he remembers anything, but- He’s alive,”

“Shit,” Mikey looked down at his knees. “I guess everything really went back to how it was,”

Regrettably, they all had things to do that day - Sound checks and unloading and calling their families to tell them that the tour is going just fine and ‘No, I’m having a great time with all the other bands, they’re all really friendly’ - So they couldn’t spend all morning and afternoon bonding over the weird freak thing they just went through and what the hell any of it might mean.

The weirdest part, Frank thought, was how quickly everything went back to normal. It barely took any time at all before they were falling back into the old routines they’d gotten so used to over the first leg of the tour (although, when Frank was sent to round the band up for the show he found Mikey making out with Pete against the back of the bus, so clearly not everything had reverted to how it was before). He stood next to Gerard in the dressing room, watching in the mirror as he put on his stage makeup, and wondered how quickly they would forget about the whole thing.

“What do you think it was, then?” He asked quietly, leaning in to put on his own eyeshadow. “Mass hallucination?”

“No, it was real,” Gerard answered, not even thinking about it. “That was like, the lesson of the whole thing,”

“What do you mean, lesson?”

“Well, Andy kept asking Joe if he was real, we thought the hatch computer was an experiment, but then it really exploded,” He explained. “It’s like, a sign, or whatever. That the whole thing was real, it really happened to us,”

Frank swallowed. That made sense, but– “If it was all real then how did we get back?”

They stepped back from the mirror, comparing their finished looks.

“I don’t know,”

Brian ducked his head into the dressing room, yelling that they’ve got five minutes until they’re on. Gerard nodded, making to move backstage, but Frank caught his arm.

“Hey,” He said quietly, leaning right into Gerard’s ear. “Is something going on between you and Patrick?”

Gerard froze, eyes cycling between shock and annoyance and embarrassment so fast it’s sort of impressive, then he smiled a little, his cheeks turning pink.

“We spent a month underground together and then he blew himself up to save us all,”

Frank raised an eyebrow.

“And?”

“Guys!” Brian again, head sticking through the door. “Crowd won’t wait forever,”

Gerard sighed, trying to pull away. Frank tightened his grip, repeating the question.

He rolled his eyes. “And we kissed once. Happy?”

Frank grinned at him. “Very,”

The show was electric. The notes came back to Frank the instant his fingers touched the fretboard, words climbing up and screaming their way out of his throat like a possession from a ghost. He played and sang and threw himself around the stage just like he did every night, just like he’d longed to since the moment they’d crashed on that stupid fucking island. It was incredible. 

He practically fell off the stage at the end of the night, panting and leaning into Mikey’s side.

“Fuck, I missed that,” He mumbled into his neck.

“Me too,” Mikey agreed.

He stayed pressed into him, exhausted, until Mikey walked them both back to the dressing room and deposited Frank into an armchair. Then he straightened up, staring at himself in the mirror for a moment. He scrubbed a hand over his face, fingers sliding under his glasses and through his hair, then moved to start packing his things up off the dresser. He picked up his hair straighteners, winding the cable up and shoving them into his bag, then froze, staring at the gap they’d left on the dresser.

“What?” Frank asked, forcing himself back to standing.

He looked down at the spot Mikey was fixated on, and immediately saw why. There was a card, plain white and folded in the centre. Frank knew it didn’t belong to any of the band, because in the middle of the front it had the logo of the Dharma Initiative.

“You see it too, right?” Mikey asked hesitantly.

“Yeah,” Frank mumbled, reaching out to pick it up.

He flipped it open. The inside was almost as blank as the exterior. There was no name, no return address, just what looked like a phone number scrawled at the bottom of the page, with one sentence above it.

Want answers? Let’s talk.

Chapter Text

They called the number together.

Piled into one hotel room the next morning, huddled around Mikey’s phone, sitting face up on the bedside table. The voice that answered was robotic. It didn’t ask any questions, or respond to anything they said, it just repeated a time and a location. Looping over and over until Ray wrote it down on the little hotel notepad and reached across them to hang up the phone, rolling his eyes as the disembodied voice was cut off.

The office it took them to was on the eleventh floor. When they’d spoken to the man behind the desk, he’d looked at them like they’d asked him to meet with Santa Claus about some discretions in the Christmas present quota. He’d made several phone calls, covering his mouth so that they couldn’t hear what he was saying, then rummaged around in a drawer underneath the desk, handing a key across the desk to Gerard.

“To unlock the elevator,” He explained, turning back to his desktop.

Gerard looked down at it, running his fingers down the teeth. It was shaped like the Dharma Initiative logo, exactly the same as the failsafe key, only this one had a sun symbol in the centre instead of a swan. He glanced up at Patrick, who had gone a little pale, eyes fixed on the key. Gerard put it in his pocket and nudged him towards the elevators.

They had to go in two trips, Gerard staying in the elevator with the key like some kind of old timey hotel worker, to get them all upstairs without breaking something.

The office they were ushered off the floor reception into was filled with the funniest assortment of chairs Gerard had ever seen. Clearly, they weren’t used to entertaining groups as big as them, especially not when said group was eight disgruntled musicians who just got back from seven and a half weeks on an island that may or may not really exist.

They sat, huddled together on fold outs and swivel chairs that were all different heights, waiting in silence for someone to join them at the desk opposite. The room, just like the rest of the floor, was totally corporate beige. It seemed like everything was a monochrome shade. The Dharma Initiative logo was painted on the wall across from them, with the word Dharma in the gap where they’d grown used to seeing a station logo. Nobody spoke, just casting confused looks at each other. Occasionally, somebody would clear their throat, then look almost apologetic when they drew attention from the rest of the office. Through the door, Gerard could see a few people at desks, typing on big computers or writing frantically in notebooks. He wondered what they were writing about.

“Hello Gentlemen,”

A man stood in the doorway, wearing a crisp pressed suit and tie. He had dark brown hair that was gelled down onto his head, and green eyes that studied them like rats in a cage. He crossed the room, his shiny shoes squeaking against the waxed floor, and sat down behind the desk. He regarded the woodwork for a moment, then leant back in his seat, folding his arms across his chest.

Gerard, who had naively hoped they might be meeting with the same scientist from all the Orientation videos, felt his cheeks go hot in unison with the heart sinking in his chest. This man was someone he didn’t recognise at all, and who seemed, this early in the meeting, to have already decided that he didn’t like them.

“Hello,” Joe said. They all looked at him, he smiled and waved at the man, just a little overly cheery.

He studied Joe for a moment, then nodded a little.

“We’ve brought you here to discuss some recent activity in our research stations,” He said, practised and businesslike, not making direct eye contact with any of them. “The Pearl Station -” He flipped open a file on the desk, pointing at some figures. “-has been out of commission since an incident that occurred at its location in 1991, however a few days ago we received correspondence that led us to believe the station had been broken into. The equipment tampered with, and some of its contents destroyed,”

Gerard glanced at Andy, who looked guiltily down at his knees.

“We didn’t intend to damage-” Ray began, but the man held up his hand for him to be quiet.

“The Swan Station, meanwhile, has been in consistent use since its construction in the summer of 1977. And yet, on the same day as this breach of security at The Pearl, The Swan’s communications were completely destroyed, and the company has been unable to remotely access any of the data stored within. Given the nature of the work undertaken in The Swan, this leads us to believe that the failsafe was engaged, and that the entire station has been destroyed,” He flipped the file closed again, sighing like a disappointed headmaster. “Our systems have been able to identify you gentleman as the culprits of these damages. Now, I’m sure you can understand that these are serious security violations for the Dharma Initiative, and that we must investigate them thoroughly and reprimand those responsible,”

He sat back in his seat. They looked at each other, finding reflected expressions of confusion and guilt.

“Um, sorry, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” Andy said, clearing his throat. “We were under the impression that we had been invited to this meeting to be given an explanation for why-” He hesitated, Gerard thought he could actually hear the cogs in his head turning rage filled profanities into business talk. “- why we found ourselves responsible for the Initiative’s stations,”

“On the contrary, Mr..?”

“Hurley,”

“Mr. Hurley, we have brought you here to get answers, from you,”

Andy took a breath, opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“Well I- Sorry, I don’t understand,”

The man sighed and leant forward, enunciating each word he said like he was speaking to young children.

“Why were you tampering with the stations?”

“Because we had to,” Patrick said bluntly. “The other guy left, so we had to put the code into the computer,”

“Oh, yes, I don’t doubt that you felt obligated to continue the job left for you, especially given the gravity of the job being done. And the Dharma Initiative thanks you for that, of course,”

A muscle in Patrick’s jaw tensed.

“Then what are you asking about?” He asked slowly, forcing a pleasant tone into his voice.

“Why you entered The Pearl station, when you were completely unauthorised to do so. Why you used the failsafe key. Why you broke the computer,”

“It was an accident,” Gerard cut in, unable to bear the look of misery that had been growing stronger on Andy’s face since the conversation started. “The computer was broken, and we couldn’t repair it. So we had to use the failsafe,”

“And The Pearl station?”

“Well, I-”

“Forget about that,” Frank cut in, sitting forward, wound tight in his seat. “Why the hell were we there in the first place? How did crashing a bus land us on an island? And how did we get back?”

The man stared at him for a moment, his mouth slightly open as if he was aghast that Frank would dare to speak to him that way, then he blinked, and pulled himself back into his corporate neutral composure.

“The island has a lot of, shall we say, mysterious properties, that our scientists were unable to understand in their entirety,”

“So you don’t know,”

“Our research-”

“You know what,” Frank stood up suddenly, slamming his hands against the desk. The man flinched. “I’m not listening to any more of this. I’m not gonna sit here and let you scold us like high schoolers for doing what we needed to do to survive on that goddamn island, working for your Initiative that we didn’t sign up to being a part of, when you can’t even explain how we got there!”

The man opened his mouth, but Frank turned and stalked out of the room before he had the chance to say anything.

For a second, everybody stayed still, then they started to trail out after him. Mikey went first, then Ray and Pete. Andy looked like he wanted to say something else, but when Joe grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, he didn’t protest. Gerard looked at Patrick, and found that Patrick was looking right back at him. There was a question on his face, as clear as if he’d written it down. Gerard swallowed, then stood up, facing the desk.

“You might want to cancel the food delivery,” He said to the man behind the table. “Since there’s no one there to eat it anymore,”

He moved to leave. Patrick joined him, rushing forward to open the door. Right before they left, he turned back.

“It was nice meeting you,” He said pleasantly, smiling at the man from behind his glasses. He pressed his hands together in a prayer motion, bowing his head. “Namaste, and good luck,”

They walked from the room, managing to maintain their composure through the office and back to the elevator, waiting for the metal doors to slide shut before they dissolved into laughter.

After that, the tour continued. The bands moved from city to city, playing shows and signing T-Shirts and posing for pictures. Pete posted increasingly sappy things on his blog, until the fans started spending all of their time online trying to find pictures of him and Mikey together, plastering their increasingly ridiculous theories and speculations all over the internet. Gerard thought it was cute, to see the guy so excited, so desperate to show Mikey off, even though he couldn’t really say anything without homophobic ‘fans’ making it everybody’s problem. Mostly he was glad that Pete hadn’t posted anything too explicit about their time away. He was pretty sure if they started going around telling people about what happened to them on the island, the Dharma Initiative would hunt them down and silence them. Or they’d just end up being locked up somewhere for sounding crazy.

One night in their shared hotel room, Mikey broke, and said the kind of sappy, lovesick things that Gerard hadn’t heard him say since he’d asked that girl in his English class to be his date to the middle school Valentine’s Day dance. He’d made some searching comments afterwards, but Gerard had shut him down, turning out the light and feigning sleep before he could push any further. Aside from how gut-wrenchingly jealous of them he felt, there was really nothing to tell. Patrick had been avoiding him for days, finding excuses to leave rooms as soon as Gerard entered, not answering the bus door when he knocked, even though Gerard knew he was in there. Whenever they did end up in the same conversation, there would always be two or three other people as a buffer, and Patrick would stare at his knees and mumble half responses every time someone spoke to him.

Gerard was starting to think he was going crazy, that he’d imagined everything that had sprung up between them when they were locked underground, that he’d let his own heart get in the way of understanding what it really meant. Finally, on the next tour stop, he built up the nerve to corner Patrick in the dressing room after his set finished. He told him, with a voice that was only shaking a little bit, that it was okay if he regretted it. That he didn’t mind, really, if he’d had second thoughts, but that Gerard needed to know now so he could get on with the ‘wallowing in heartache’ part without dragging out the ‘hoping that it might work out’ part.

Patrick had looked at him like he’d been slapped in the face, his expression a bizarre mix of shock and uncertainty, then he’d stepped forward and he’d kissed him, so hard that it stole all of Gerard’s breath away. He whispered, in between kisses, that he could never regret it, kept telling him over and over again. He told him the whole time they spent pressed against the wall in the dressing room, told him again when the cold air hit their faces outside, and again while they were looking at each other in the hotel elevator, hearts pounding in tandem. He told him once, while he was locking the door to his room. Then they were kicking off their shoes and Gerard was laying back on the bed, and then he wasn’t saying anything at all.

The next morning, Gerard woke up before sunrise. His head ached, and his eyelids were heavy, but when his bleary eyes forced themselves open and landed on the face resting on the pillow beside him, he decided the lack of sleep had been worth it.

Patrick was still asleep, facing him, his face half squished into the pillowcase. He was frowning deeply, like someone in his dream had said something that pissed him off. Maybe he was dreaming about the Dharma meeting, Gerard thought, stifling a laugh into his own pillow. God knows he’d been fantasising about telling that guy to shove it since the day they walked out on him. It had felt so good to leave him like that, even if it meant getting used to the idea that they'd never get any answers.

He rolled onto his back, yawning into his fist. The room was filled with an ambient glow from the ever turned on lights in the hotel hallway. He tucked his hands behind his head, shuffled a little so his and Patrick’s legs were touching, and let his eyes fall closed.

He wasn’t sure if he fell asleep again, or if he just dozed for so long that he had no idea what time it was, but the next thing he was aware of there was sunlight leaking in through the curtains, the bedroom was baking with the summer heat, and Patrick was sitting up sharply beside him.

He shouted something unintelligible, breath coming heavily, sweat glistening on his face. There was a moment’s silence, then Patrick rubbed his eyes, looked down at his own bare chest and, after incredibly slowly connecting the dots, his eyes trailed over to Gerard.

“Morning,” He said, grinning up at Patrick’s slightly confused expression. 

“Um,” Patrick coughed a little, his voice coming out all hoarse. His cheeks immediately turned a bright shade of red, face splitting into a smile. “Good morning,”

“Bad dream?”

He sat up, pushing the covers back off of both of them to let some fresh air in. Patrick rubbed his eyes again, squinting, so Gerard leant over to his bedside table and grabbed his glasses.

“I don’t really remember it,” He answered, putting them on and blinking a few times. “But I think so,”

“Well, whatever it was, it’s over now,”

Patrick nodded. “Right,”

Gerard opened the curtains while Patrick was in the shower. He squinted out into the morning sun, looking over the skyline of whatever city they were in right now. It was nice out there. Sunny enough to be hot, but the kind of day where just sitting in the shade would be enough to keep you cool. Unfortunately, Patrick had an east facing room, so they weren’t getting much shade right now.

“Let's go out,”

He turned around, the sun hot on his back. Patrick looked up at him from where he was knelt on the floor pulling clean clothes out of his suitcase. 

“It's nice outside,” He said, explaining. “We could, I don't know, go have lunch or something,”

“We haven't had breakfast yet,”

Gerard giggled. “Let's go have breakfast then,”

Patrick stood up, looking down at the jeans clutched in his hands. 

“Do you mean like–” He asked the jeans. “Like a date?”

“Sure,” Gerard shifted from one foot to the other. “If that's… Something you want?”

Patrick scoffed a little. “Yeah, obviously. I mean, do you?”

“Hundred percent,” His heart skittered at the idea. He moved to unlock the door before he did something stupid that might put breakfast off even longer. “Get dressed, I'll meet you downstairs,”

He found the others scattered across the hotel restaurant eating toast and eggs. Gerard didn't want to ruin his appetite, so he just poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down on the end of the table. 

“Where were you last night?” Frank asked through a mouthful of croissant. “You took off after the show,”

He fiddled with his shirt collar, hoping he’d pulled it up high enough that nobody could see the red marks underneath. He was lucky, really, to have a reputation for never wearing clean clothes, otherwise somebody would surely say something about it being the same one he'd had on the day before.

“Oh, uh, nowhere,” He said in a tone of voice that was maybe a passing attempt at casual, sipping his coffee to avoid saying anything else. Frank had already asked too many questions about him and Patrick, he didn't want to spill any more secrets before he knew more about what was really going on between them. He knew how he felt, sure, and he knew what he wanted (along with how badly he wanted it), but he didn't want to make any assumptions. 

He liked Patrick, he really liked him. He liked how he took everything so seriously, the way his face twisted when he was concentrating, how passionate he was about the music he wrote. He liked how he'd made him breakfast every day after Gerard had told him how much he hated cooking, he liked how gently he'd handled him when they had to do the shots, how he hadn't made him feel stupid for freaking out. And he liked the sideburns. They really worked on him. 

But he wasn't about to assume anything about where this thing between them was going. They'd gotten close in the hatch, of course, but it had been such a weird situation, he'd be an idiot to expect it to carry on now they were home. But Patrick had been the one to kiss him first, and after last night– 

He just didn't want to jump to conclusions. 

He tightened his hand against the flimsy cardboard cup, resolutely ignoring the look Frank was giving him across the table. 

“So, what's on the agenda today?” Brian asked from Gerard’s other side. “You're free all day, as long as you're back on time to leave tonight,”

“I think I might just… Hang out,” Gerard said vaguely. 

Brian raised his eyebrows. Gerard ignored him. 

“Okay, well have fun. Bus leaves at 2,” He finished the end of his breakfast and got up, patting Gerard on the shoulder, and disappearing down the hall. 

“What are your plans for today Frank?” Frank said, high pitched and singsong, then switched his tone of voice to something lower. “Well, Gerard, I'm so glad you asked. I am going swimming,”

This finally broke Gerard out of his thoughts. 

“Swimming?”

“He's not doing any swimming yet,” Joe cut in, sliding into the chair Brian had left empty. “Today is for floating. Maybe,”

Frank stuck his tongue out at him. 

“You're teaching him?” Gerard asked. 

Joe shrugged. “Doing my best,”

“You should come,” Frank narrowed his eyes. “Or are you busy hanging out?”

“No thanks,”

At that moment, Patrick came downstairs. He made a beeline for the empty seat at the opposite end of the table, eyes fixed on the floor as he accepted a cup of tea from Andy. Gerard finished his coffee, and talked about swimming with Joe and Frank, and tried to keep himself from staring. 

It didn’t work.

The cafe they ended up in was this cute little hole in the wall place. It had yellow painted walls with framed art of coffee beans and slogans about seizing the day scattered across them, and every table was surrounded by a mismatch of chairs and sofas. Patrick paid for coffee and breakfast at the counter while Gerard picked them somewhere to sit. He found a table tucked into the corner, with two little armchairs and a bench against the wall. He dumped his jacket down on the bench (why he’d chosen to bring it out when it was sweltering outside, he had no idea) and settled into one of the chairs.

He sat back, watched Patrick carrying a tray towards him, and tried to swallow the butterflies jumping around in his chest.

As soon as they started talking, the tension between them began to ease. They talked about being back, and everything they’d missed, and how they were dreaming of when tour would be over and they could really go home. They gossiped about Mikey and Pete, and laughed about Joe and Frank’s newfound friendship, and ate their body weight in breakfast foods because they’d gotten so sick of the processed crap they’d had in the hatch, and it wasn’t hard to go from just one more to let’s try this one to ordering one of everything on the menu.

Gerard learned that cherry pastries are really sour inside, and that even though he still didn’t really understand what eggs benedict was, he really liked it. He also learned that Patrick thinks waffles are better than pancakes, but he’ll eat anything with strawberries on. He learned that they get along just as well outside the hatch as they did in it, and when he got chocolate sauce on his cheek and Patrick leaned in with a napkin to get it off, Gerard learned that his hands were warm, and he was wearing some kind of cologne that paired insanely well with the lingering smell of coffee. He didn’t know what state they were in, or how free thinking the people were here, or how many hangups Patrick might have about showing off his sexuality in public. Hell, he didn’t even know if he had doubts about that kind of thing, but none of that stopped him from pushing the napkin away and setting his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and leaning in-

“Do you mind if I join you gentlemen?”

Gerard jumped back in his seat, his heart flying into his mouth and his hand withdrawing back into his lap. An old woman was standing above them, holding a teacup and saucer in one hand, a big leather handbag in the crook of her other elbow. She had short, white hair, was wearing a purple flowy shawl, and she spoke with a British accent.

“I don’t mean to be a bother, only it’s so busy, and I noticed you weren’t using this bench here,”

For a second longer, they both just blinked at her, then Gerard shook himself, leaning forward to pull his jacket off the cushion.

“Yea- Yes, of course, sorry,”

“Thank you, dear,” 

She set her tea down on the table, nudging aside the array of dirty plates they’d spread across it, and sat down, folding her arms and leaning back with a sigh. Patrick cleared his throat, then lurched forward and put both hands around his glass of water, draining half of it in a few seconds. He caught Gerard’s eye from under the brim of his cap, and they shared a smile.

“Something funny, darling?” The lady asked, sipping her tea.

“No, no, not at all,” Gerard said. “It’s just that my- friend and I made, uh, a bit of a mess here before you arrived. And I guess we’re a little embarrassed,”

“Oh, nonsense, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You boys are clearly just enjoying yourselves,”

Gerard and Patrick shared another look.

“You could say that,” Patrick conceded.

“Besides, I’m sure you’ve made bigger messes,” She dropped a lump of sugar into her tea, stirring it achingly slowly. “Explosive ones, even,”

Gerard felt his whole body turn cold, all the fuzzy feelings of the date curdling into a pit of dread in his stomach. For a second, he couldn’t react, he was back on the island, running through the trees, feeling his back turn hot and jamming his hands over his ears as the hatch blew to smithereens behind him. Then the moment ended. The lady withdrew her teaspoon from the cup, tapping it against the edge of the china and fixing Gerard with a little smirk.

Patrick’s hand found his under the table.

“Sure,” He said with a smile. “You should have seen my teenage bedroom,”

The lady laughed kindly, nodding just a little.

“I think you know that’s not what I’m talking about,”

Gerard felt like the rest of the room had been turned down. He couldn’t hear anything from the rest of the customers anymore, couldn’t feel the heat coming in through the windows or smell the coffee from the machine behind the counter. All that mattered was this table, and the woman behind it. His grip tightened on Patrick’s fingers.

“What are you talking about, then?”

“You. And your friends. And where you disappeared off two for fifty days only to return in an instant, unharmed and unsure of whether it was even real,”

The woman looked at them both, steam rising from the teacup between them.

“Was it real?” Patrick asked quietly.

“Oh, yes, dear,” She said with a smile. “The island is real, and it is so thankful for your assistance,”

She refused to say any more in the cafe, so they followed her out, trailing her down streets and around corners like lost children until she led them into a nearby park, sitting down on a bench and gazing across the lake opposite.

Gerard sat on the other end of the bench, Patrick in between them, he folded his hands in his lap and stared at his shoes, waiting.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the island is made up of much more than just earth and rocks,” She said finally, eyes following a family of ducks swimming across the water. “Very few can set foot on its land without feeling its history,”

“You mean the electromagnetic anomaly?” Patrick asked.

“That’s one way of putting it, dear. Although it’s certainly not the words I would choose,”

“So you’re not with the Dharma Initiative?”

This woman was a far cry from the uniform logos and corporate grey that they were used to. Gerard wasn’t surprised when she shook her head, although he was a little shocked by the disgusted expression that spread across her face.

“The Dharma Initiative were a terrible group of people,” She turned her head, regarding them. “They wanted to exploit the island for their work, using the guise of science to harness its power for unnatural means. They were like leeches, draining us, and they were an infestation that needed removing. No doubt you boys saw mention of the hostile natives in their training?”

They nodded. Gerard remembered all of the security measures to prevent unauthorised personnel from getting into the hatch.

“We did all that we could to remove them ourselves, but they were smart, smarter than we gave them credit for, and they’d prepared for us. The Swan Station was a special point of contention among us. Those manning the station never left, never let anyone in unless they knew the secret codes. Up until recently we had no way of knowing if it was even still active. Then you gentlemen arrived, and everything changed,”

“What did we do?” Patrick asked, frowning.

“Well, now the station is gone,”

He looked down, mumbling something. The old woman continued, speaking gently.

“Thanks to you, as I understand it,”

“Hold on,” Gerard said. “You’re telling us that the island needed us to blow up the hatch?” The woman nodded slowly. “But why us? And how the hell did we get back?”

“You were sent home the same way that you were brought there. The island needed you, and then it was done with you. Time moves differently over there, things can jump around, or move too quickly, sometimes one leaves feeling like the entire world is different, sometimes it looks like nothing at all has changed.”

“What, so it’s Narnia?" Patrick scoffed.

She studied him for a second, then looked back up at Gerard.

“As for why you. I’m afraid I can’t answer that one so easily. I can tell you that our visitors are chosen carefully, although what criteria they are chosen under, I cannot be completely sure of. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was something important,”

“But we’re not important,” Patrick protested. “We’re not scientists, or survival geniuses, or- or magical or whatever. We’re just some boys from a band. We can’t have been that special,”

The woman turned in her seat and laid a hand on Patrick’s shoulder. “You were the one who turned that key, correct?”

There was a long pause, then Patrick realised she was waiting for an answer, and nodded.

“And you did so knowing that you might die, but that in sacrificing yourself your friends would get a chance to live, unburdened by the hatch, or the island, ever again?” His mouth twisted a little, then he nodded again. “Would you have sacrificed yourself for just anyone? Do you think you would have gone to those lengths to protect others, if they weren’t those you love? The eight of you were connected together by something far more important than science or magic. You were bonded by love, and support, and keeping each other alive when the odds were stacked against you. Your careers tie you to the act of creation, something that can only be done together. I don’t know why the island chose you, I don’t know why it chose any of you, but I know that you aren’t just some boys in a band, and you certainly aren’t unimportant. I think your thousands of adoring fans would have something quite different to say on that subject, wouldn’t they?”

She squeezed his shoulder, and Patrick smiled, then she gathered her shawl up around her shoulders, and stood up.

“Now, I’d best be off, I’ve got to get back to The Lamppost tomorrow-” Gerard and Patrick exchanged a confused look. “- But it was lovely to finally meet you both, and I wish you luck with your little tour,”

She extended a hand to shake. Gerard stood up, taking it.

“I- I don’t even know your name,” He realised out loud.

“Eloise,” She told him. “Eloise Hawking,”

“Thank you, Eloise, for everything,”

“No, thank you,” She smiled, Her palm was a warm weight against his. “I truly hope that we never see each other again, and that the island is finished with you for good, but if you ever find yourself in need of assistance, I trust you will know where to find me,”

Something cold slid in between their hands. Eloise’s thumb shifted, pressing the cold, thin thing against Gerard’s hand. He let go, folding it close into his fist.

“We will,” He nodded. “Thanks again,”

He sat back down on the bench, Patrick sliding in front of him to say his own goodbyes. Carefully, he unclenched his hand, looking down at the card nestled in it. It had a series of numbers printed on it. Co-ordinates, it looked like, maybe for this lamppost? He'd take it to a library or something next time he got the chance, maybe try to visit the spot if the tour took them in the right direction. Or he'd just ignore it, leave the question unanswered and try to forget that this whole thing ever happened. He turned the card over. On the back was a neat script bearing the sentence ‘God loves you as He loves Jacob’.

He laughed a little, of course this lady was into some weird religious cult shit. He looked up, opening his mouth to say something, but Eloise was gone, and Patrick was sitting next to him again, looking out at the lake.

“Well,” He sighed, leaning back against the peeling wood. “That was fucking weird,”

Gerard barked out a laugh. “Yeah, it fucking was,”

Then a group of tourists walked past, bearing matching bright yellow hats and turning maps this way and that, so they fell silent. Side by side, they watched as the group filtered out through the nearby gate, then got on a bus that was probably going in the opposite direction to where they wanted to go. Gerard turned back to the lake, his eyes following a particularly confident duck that was hopping in and out of the water trying to scare a squirrel away from a slice of bread.

“Oh my god,” Patrick said suddenly. Gerard looked at him, and he was grinning. “I can’t wait to tell Andy,”