Chapter Text
The first time it happened couldn’t really be considered the first time. It just happened to be the first time it had happened around the band.
Fall Out Boy had just finished one of their better shows under that name, which they were all hoping would stick. It was a small crowd sure, only around fifty or so people, but it was still a better than the turnout they had for when they played under the name “Boner Party”. Andy especially had been in rare form, playing with so much energy that his hair flew all over as he crashed his drum sticks onto his drums. How he could see with that much hair in his face, Pete had no clue, but had no intentions of questioning it because it looked sick.
As it was, the energy had been infectious. Joe was head banging and jumping all over the place, and Pete had attempted a spin while playing. It hadn't turned out badly, and a couple people in the audience cheered when he did it. Patrick had done this weird little pelvic thrusty- hip thing. Pete laughed a little, but definitely thought it was better than standing still and looking nervous. Besides, he seemed to be getting more comfortable with being the front man.The adrenaline could only last so long though, and soon enough they were all feeling the post show drowsiness punching them in the gut. It was gnawing on them as they ate a box of pizza. Patrick, who out of all of them usually stayed up the longest, was surprisingly the first to ‘drop’, or at least they assumed he did. In all honesty, he had probably disappeared into the empty van to listen to Prince or David Bowie.
Not too long after, Andy and Joe both dropped leaving Pete to his own devices. He could try to sleep like the others, but he usually couldn’t quite manage that. Most nights he stayed awake until ungodly hours of the morning lost in thoughts. Feelings of inadequacy had been abundant in his brain for as long as he could remember and would often pick at his mind in the lonely nights. So, as he trudged off to the van he and Patrick shared, (touring kind of sucked because they couldn’t afford buses or hotel rooms, so most nights were spent crammed in the backs of rented vans.) he wasn’t expecting much sleep. Still, he laid down on the inflated air mattress that covered the floor of the van with his headphones and laptop on standby, hopeful for some sleep but prepared for the inevitable.
It wasn’t until around two o'clock that Pete knew that exhaustion wouldn’t win out. His mind was buzzing at a million miles per second, thoughts racing and tumbling until he couldn’t pick them apart anymore. The overwhelming majority told him that he wasn’t good enough, that he was a total screw up, that his lyrics weren’t good enough, faster and faster until he was depressed, wasn’t breathing well, and had a major headache. Pete’s breathing increased and soon he was sweating through his shirt.
He was grateful, not for the first time, that Patrick was a sound sleeper. He felt bad enough for grabbing the kid away from a sure to be successful job as it was without infringing on his sleep schedule. He slowly got up and grabbed his laptop. Pete winced at the bright light and typed the password as quickly as he was capable of. As soon as he saw his familiar wallpaper, his fingers sped along the keys as they worked to lower the brightness. It was still too bright for his liking at the lowest setting, even though his eyes took forever to adjust. He pulled up Microsoft Word and Itunes, only vaguely aware of what he was doing as he repeated the monotonous cycle.
Pete’s fingers thrummed lightly on the keys as the steady guitar riff of “Enter Sandman” slammed through his giant headphones. They were reliably soundproof as far as Pete knew, so he only turned it slightly lower than he normally would. He mouthed the words as he typed them onto his document with endless pages of lyrics he’d stored up. “I’m having another episode, I just need a stronger dose.” “I’ve got troubled thoughts and a self esteem to match, what a catch, what a catch.” So on and so forth well past the time he could feel the bags under his eyes growing.
The night wore on in that manner; Patrick assumed to be blissfully asleep and Pete awake slowly letting his musings carve a path through the insanity of his thoughts. What Pete didn’t know was that Patrick wasn’t actually asleep the whole night. Patrick’s piercing blue squinted eyes stared up at Pete’s silhouetted figure in the dimly lit van, Elvis Costello faintly streaming through his dinky earbuds.
Patrick was confused, to be sure. This practice was more common than he’d like it to be, but he didn’t think that Pete actually had insomnia. The set had been absolutely exhausting and all he wanted to be was asleep. And then he saw it through his blurry vision, the tear tracks running down Pete’s face and the way his body wracked. He laid there in distress as he watched one of his best friends suffer in the darkness, internally debating whether or not to ask if he wanted to talk about it. Ultimately, he decided against it. Still pretending to be asleep, he waited until the opportune moment when the van made a turn (He wasn’t sure why they were moving, though he knew that tomorrow's set was far away.) to roll his body into Pete’s side. He felt Pete’s breathing even shortly after and a cautious hand begin to rub gently through his hair. Patrick was dead to the world in seconds, dropping off to the faint strains of “Space Oddity” and the even fainter ones of “Welcome to the Jungle”. Subconsciously, he murmured a feeble, muffled “Pete”, the same time Pete chimed in a soft “Patrick” under his breath, but neither of them were aware or awake enough to hear it.