Archive of Our Own

Media training is set up as a week-long series of tedious seminars that make Patrick especially glad that he’d opted out of the whole college thing.

Given the option to complete the training with their entire crew or as a “talent only” workshop, the band had unanimously chosen the former. As a consequence, the whole setup sort of feels like a specific moment back in the van years that’s been burned into Patrick’s memory: the time they’d played a university, and Patrick had accidentally wandered into a sociology class’ midterm while searching for their makeshift venue. He’s still glad they hadn’t yet been big enough for anyone to have recognized him.

The day-long group session is located in one of Island’s larger meeting rooms, and starts at an inconceivable hour. There are six tables set at even intervals, surprisingly comfortable office chairs clustered around each of them, and two flat-screen televisions mounted on the wall in front of them. The band, their touring crew, embedded photographers and videographers, and a few affiliated management personnel trickle into the room as the start time approaches; Patrick gets a few hellos and nods and welcome backs as people pass him and tries his best to return them, but it’s such an ungodly time of day that he figures he can’t possibly be expected to be fully cognizant yet. Thankfully, Pete, who’s seated at his left, hops in to handle any interactions that require more than a quick greeting.

The training facilitator, standing sentinel at the door, checks each name off of a list as people enter, and once a certain threshold has been reached, he dims the lights, makes his way to the table at the front of the room, and wakes up his laptop. A slideshow begins to play on the television screens, with the first slide succinctly titled “The Media and You: Engaging in Positive Interactions in the Entertainment Reporting Space”.

The bland beige walls and inoffensive gray carpeting combine with the low lighting and the slightly too-cold temperature to almost perfectly recreate Patrick’s high school English class. Fittingly, just as he had in Mrs. Menotti’s first period classroom, he immediately drops off during each of the four video segments in the first half of the session, only coming awake sharply whenever Joe nudges him back into consciousness with a well-placed kick to his ankles.

“I know it’s early,” Joe whispers on the last occasion, “but the dude running this said there’s supposed to be a quiz at the end.”

What happens if he fails the quiz, Patrick wonders. Will they just not let him talk in interviews? Honestly, it sounds a lot like an overall win for Team Stump.

Pete gives him a knowing glance. “‘Team Stump’ will have to do the seminar again if you fail,” he says, his tone tinged with amusement. “You agreed to be the main character this time. What kind of main character doesn’t speak?”

“Silent protagonist,” says Andy. Seated at Joe’s right on the other side of the table, his eyes are glued to the closest TV screen, his face the picture of a man thoroughly captivated by—Patrick glances at the screen—adjusting interview responses based on cultural contexts. From his viewing angle, however, Patrick can just about make out the glow of a cell phone screen, the light occasionally interrupted as Andy’s fingers fly across it. He continues: “Like Link.” Looks over, clarifies: “From Zelda.”

“We’re not in a video game, Hurley,” Pete hisses. “The same rules don’t apply. And I know what Zelda is!”

“Also, wouldn’t Patrick be a deuteragonist, technically?” Joe asks, voice low and teasing. “Since you guys are splitting the frontman duties?”

Andy shakes his head solemnly. “You’d think Pete of all people would know his narrative terminology.”

“He writes one book and suddenly thinks he’s too cool for literary devices,” Patrick jokes.

“Oh my god,” Pete says, exasperated and a bit too loud, “You guys suck, why did I agree to get back together—”

“Hey, Pete,” says the facilitator, and the whole table jumps to attention: Andy quickly pocketing his phone, Joe and Patrick sitting ramrod straight in an instant. Pete adopts an expression of mild surprise, looking for all the world as though he’d been listening to the presentation with interest moments earlier.

“Would you care to be the first to run a mock interview?” the man asks. He’s not quite as monotonous as the decor; though his tone barely wavers, Patrick detects a light reprimand as he says: “You can refer to the list of questions in your notes for examples.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Joe, sounding slightly strangled, “the notes we’ve definitely been taking.”

Pete hops up from his seat. “Totally,” he says, a wide smile plastered on his face. He flicks a murderous glance at the remaining three band members, then heads toward the front of the room.

The following thirty minutes are spent, much to the chagrin of the facilitator, with the full assemblage of the Fall Out Boy crew heckling Pete as he tries to bullshit his way through sample questions he hadn’t written down, a snickering Brian Diaz acting as the interviewee.

“And, uh, how would you say that the hiatus, um…” Pete scans the room, squints hard at the table populated by their rigging crew, where Robb, their lighting designer, is performing increasingly incomprehensible charades to try and convey information to him; guesses: “How would you say it affected your… hair?”

Robb buries his face in his hands.

“You should ask me about our band’s name instead,” says Diaz, who Patrick thinks is meant to be playing the role of Pete. “That’s a really good question that we’ve never been asked before.”

Pete looks askance at the workshop proctor. “What are we supposed to be learning from this, again? And why am I not Pete in this scenario?”

“Oh!” says Joe, “I’ve got one! Ask Fake Pete where the band’s from!”

Andy, who had returned his attention to his phone at some point, raises his head to say: “Ask him if they’re ready to become Fall Out Men yet.”

“Ask him if he’s ever worked at Subway!” someone calls out.

The room quickly erupts into a cacophony of ridiculous questions. It’s at this point that the facilitator gives up entirely and excuses them all for lunch.

—

Then there are the individual sessions.

As they file out of the conference room, the facilitator hands each of them a thin sheet of paper with a schedule printed on it. Patrick skims his own and feels an instinctive shudder run through him when he gets to the “Meeting Time” column. The print is stark black and small enough for him to have to squint at it, even with his glasses on. He brings it closer to his face, with the desperate hope that the numbers will resolve into a more reasonable time slot.

“All good?”

It’s Pete, hovering at his shoulder, openly curious as he peers at Patrick’s schedule. Patrick swiftly folds the paper in half, in quarters, then jams it into his back pocket.

“Yeah, totally,” he says. Then, before Pete can call him on the obvious lie, he pivots to: “If we leave now, we can probably do lunch at Rustic Canyon and make it back in time.”

Pete’s whole face lights up. So far, they’ve either eaten catering (decent, but limited in choice), ordered in (relatively fast, but not fresh), or eaten as a team (requires a menu that serves the most restrictive diet, so: usually vegan or seafood by default). Patrick knows Pete’s been dying to eat somewhere that isn’t any of those options or a sushi place since last week, and he seizes the opportunity with overwrought enthusiasm.

“If we hurry, we can dip before anyone catches on,” Pete stage-whispers. He crowds closer to Patrick, ushering him down the hallway and toward the elevator bank. “Go, Stump, go!”

—

“Do you think it would be weird if I grew my hair out?” Pete asks.

They’re safely ensconced in a booth near the back of the restaurant, Pete pushing a piece of squash around the dregs of marinade on his plate while Patrick picks aimlessly at his halibut. Patrick’s second-guessing his “food as a distraction” tactic now that he’s realized that his less-than-healthy eating habits are on full display. Pete has been very unsubtle in encouraging him to try bits and pieces of the two appetizers he’d ordered, as well as the vegetables that had come with his flank steak, but truth be told, neither of them have managed to consume more than half of their own entrees.

Patrick considers Pete’s question for a moment before asking, “Like before?”

“No,” Pete shakes his head, “like… longer, I guess?” And Patrick must look as confused as he feels, because Pete adds: “Humor me, here. I’m surveying the significant others.”

“I don’t think it would be weird,” Patrick says, and Pete slumps a bit in his chair, visibly relieved. “But I’m probably not the right person to ask about fashion.”

Pete leans forward, plants an elbow on the table and sets his chin down in his cupped hand. “I mean, I would probably talk to my supermodel girlfriend about that kinda thing,” he says, “but this was more about, like, me as a human being.”

“I’m probably still not a great source, there,” Patrick points out. “I… so, like, physically, how you’ve looked has never had any bearing on whether or not I’ve found you weird—”

“That’s actually really touching, Patrick—”

“Because I’ve always found you weird.”

“Wow, okay, less touching than I thought—”

“But that’s fine by me, because you’re my type of weird,” Patrick finishes. He sets his fork and knife down at the edge of the plate. “What did Meagan say?”

Disgruntled, Pete drums his fingers against his cheek. “Same thing, basically. Apparently, the person whose opinion matters the most when it comes to my appearance is mine.”

“Shocking,” Patrick says. “But she’s not wrong. You could probably, like, turn into a thirty-foot-long alligator or something, and you’d still be my best friend.”

“Am I capable of human speech as a giant alligator?”

Patrick gives him a look, and Pete snorts. “Okay, well, I guess not much would change,” he muses. “Though I figure the alligator would probably be about as good at playing the bass as human me.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Patrick says. He drains the last of his water before continuing. “You’ve improved a lot over the break. You killed it on this album, y’know?” It’s not even a baseless platitude: he had actually been pleasantly surprised when Pete had nailed Where Did the Party Go? within the first few playthroughs.

Pete smiles at him sunnily, then tips his head downward as he returns to carving up his steak. “Thanks, man,” he says. “But now that I’m thinking about it, being bad at the bass as an alligator would be way more impressive.”

Patrick can’t really argue the contrary there. Instead, he catches their waiter’s eye as the man floats past the table and inclines his chin, signaling for the check. Pete sighs, and when Patrick turns to look at him, he finds the other man staring past the tables and out to the bustling street just beyond the glass front doors.

“Back to the grind,” he intones, forlorn.

“Your life is so hard,” Patrick deadpans. “I weep for you, truly.”

“As you should.”

—

The next day sees Patrick’s alarm go off so early that it almost feels physically painful to drag himself from sleep.

With a great deal of effort, Patrick manages to get himself out of bed and into the shower, then down to the hotel’s dining area, where he knocks back something that’s either chewy coffee or runoff from the La Brea Tar Pits. It gives him enough energy to transport himself to Island’s offices, though, where he manages to procure a slightly less awful cup of coffee before heading to the meeting location designated on schedule.

This room is far smaller than the conference room where the presentation had taken place, with only enough room to fit a table, several chairs, and another panel television on one off-white wall. The picture windows along the backside of the room face Santa Monica Pier, Patrick knows, but it’s so early that the sun isn’t yet high enough to illuminate it fully. All Patrick can see is a line of towering palm trees down the avenue, disappearing into the fog that has yet to burn off under the gradual lightening of dawn.

It takes Patrick a full half-minute to realize someone else is already sitting at the table. When he does, he jumps, nearly upending his coffee in his haste to acknowledge her.

“Hi! Hello! Sorry,” he says, “still a little out of it. You’re our new lead publicist?”

The woman, dressed in a smart blazer and a high-collared yellow top, smiles brightly at Patrick. Her eyes are momentarily hidden, her thick-framed glasses catching the overhead light, but as Patrick crosses the room to greet him, the change in perspective reveals her eyes to be a warm honey-brown.

“Patrick! Hi!” The woman clicks her pen twice, beaming at him from across the table. “I’m Harper Thomas! My firm will be collaborating closely with Island’s marketing division on making sure your press engagements and public-facing interactions on the reunion tour go as smoothly as possible. As for our individual sessions, I’ll be working with you and the other boys on some specifics.”

“Hi,” Patrick says superfluously, leaning across to shake her hand. He takes a seat and a moment to situate himself; eyes the tablet laid out in front of Harper beside a file folder stacked thick with paper. “Specifics?” he asks.

“Well, communication skills are a muscle that need to be flexed often, and in a variety of scenarios, before they become natural to you,” says Harper. She tucks a stray loop of dark red hair behind one ear and regards Patrick with a pleasant smile. “Add this to the fact that your interviewers will be playing a game of trying to get the most information possible without seeming outwardly rude, and the fact that you four have very different personalities, and, well… it can be extremely helpful to practice your approach to these situations in advance.”

There’s an undeniable logic to that, Patrick thinks. He’s not sure if interviewers still ask about porn habits, but it would have been nice to have known how to answer those questions (or, preferably, how to not answer them) before they’d come up. “That makes sense to me,” he says.

“My aim is to review some guidelines with you, and help you figure out a strategy that works for your speaking roles on stage and in interviews. Does that sound okay to you?”

Relieved, Patrick smiles at her. “That sounds awesome,” he says. “I was afraid there was going to be another quiz.”

Harper laughs, and the way each “ha” connects to the next sounds almost arpeggiated. There’s maybe a song there, if he goes searching for it, or a motif, at the least. Absently, Patrick wishes for his guitar, or maybe laptop.

“Patrick?”

Patrick shakes himself out of his reverie: the cadence of Harper’s voice suggests that it’s not the first time she’s called his name. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m—I’m listening. Just…” He holds up his coffee. “I’m getting there.”

“Understandable,” says Harper, though her previous vigor seems slightly muted. She threads her fingers together and sets her clasped hands on the table in front of her. “Let’s get right into it, then: I’ve heard you have some anger issues behind the scenes.”

Patrick’s heart’s BPM spikes from The Lady in My Life to Beat It in a half-second flat. “I—what?”

“I’m referring to the physical altercations both you and Pete Wentz have made reference to in the past, as well as,” she glances down at her tablet, taps at it, then nods to herself. “As well as some documented unpleasantness in the recording studio.”

Jesus. Heat floods Patrick’s body from head to toe. He knows he’s probably not blushing, but his cheeks still burn with shame.

“Yeah, uh, it was—I was, um, not great, sometimes, with—with, like, emotional stuff. But it was mostly just with Pete.” He grimaces at his own equivocation: that makes it sound like he’s excusing his actions and placing the blame elsewhere. “Not that it was Pete’s fault. Well, sometimes it was. But I could have handled it better, for sure. I started talking to a therapist over the hiatus, and—”

Harper’s face brightens instantly. “Oh, great!” she says. “Could I get his name?”

It takes a few seconds for Patrick to process the question, and then a few more to figure out a response. “His… name? The name of my therapist?”

Nodding, Harper clicks her pen again and begins to page through the papers in the file folder, eventually coming to a stop at one that looks virtually indistinguishable from the others, at least upside-down. “Yes,” she says, “I want to go over some talking points and interview strategies that I think you should review with him. You know, to make sure you get some good reinforcement in.” She lifts her head to wink at him, then returns to scribbling something down on the sheet of paper.

For a long moment, all Patrick can think to do is stare at her.

Eventually, seemingly sensing that something is awry, Harper lifts her head to blink at Patrick. “His name?” she prompts.

“Her name,” Patrick corrects automatically, “and, uh, no? No,” he says again, more firmly, “I’m not giving you her name. That’s my own business.”

Harper sits up slowly, then settles back into her chair. She looks at Patrick, appraising, and suddenly Patrick feels as though he’s being examined under a microscope.

“Your business is my business,” Harper says.

Which sounds like bullshit to Patrick. “Not this business,” he says.

Harper makes an accommodating noise. “We’ll come back to it.”

“We will?” Patrick asks, bewildered.

“Next: you blink a lot.”

Patrick blinks. “What?”

“Exactly. Specifically, there’s this thing you do that’s similar to a twitch.” Harper demonstrates by fluttering both eyes unevenly.

“I don’t… I mean, yeah, but I can’t control that,” Patrick says, suddenly feeling helpless. “It just happens. Especially if I’m wearing my contacts and they dry out.”

“Well, it needs to happen less. Same goes for the face-rubbing.” She brings her palm to hover next to her cheek and mines scrubbing at it. It feels a little like she’s mocking him.

The only person who’s ever lobbied this volume of criticism at Patrick all at once is Pete, who has the distinct advantage of over a decade of friendship to act as a foundation of trust. Even then, it’s largely been about the music. Patrick hasn’t felt so thoroughly excoriated since his teens, when the parade of hardcore bands he’d joined before meeting Joe had either rejected his compositions or lambasted him for having “too pretty” a voice for a genre so heavy.

“That's, I mean, I get nervous,” Patrick says. Despite his best attempt to keep his voice level and calm, he hears himself becoming progressively more shrill as he speaks. It’s a damn good thing he doesn’t have to sing on stage for real for at least a couple of weeks. “It’s a nervous habit. Am I not allowed to have those?”

“Maybe if you were thumb-twiddling. But Hair and Makeup will have an easier time styling you if they don’t have to plan for you undoing their work five minutes into an interview. Got it?” Harper doesn’t wait for an answer; simply swipes downward on her tablet and peers down at the contents of the new section she has scrolled to. “Ah, yes: let’s talk about filler words. ‘Um’, ‘uh’’, and of course, the dreaded ‘like’.”

“Oh god,” says Patrick. His heart rate has eased slightly, but it’s still uncomfortably hovering around Smooth Criminal speed. Which feels Bad. God, does he ever wish Pete were here to laugh at his jokes. Or deflect some of the judgement, at least.

Harper flips her tablet around and taps at the screen, where a spreadsheet packed with numbers and dates immediately makes Patrick’s eyes swim. The text is black, but every word seems to scream an angry, pulsing burgundy in his mind.

“I’ve analyzed over three hundred interviews, clips, and filmed interactions from your pre-hiatus media tours, and found that about thirty-five percent of your sentences were composed of filler words.” Harper clasps her hands together once again. “We need to help you figure out how to get to the point, Patrick.”

Somehow, the most surprising thing to Patrick is that that number isn’t higher. He briefly debates saying this aloud, but decides against it when Harper only looks at him meaningfully, waiting for his response.

“The thing is, I, uh. Ugh,” he says, wincing at the word. He pauses, puts his thoughts in order, then says, slowly, especially mindful of his words: “I don’t always know what the point is until I get there.”

“You did it just now!” Harper says, bright and encouraging. “You just have to do it faster next time. Let’s practice with a few questions.”

Patrick inhales to speak, but stops before he can vocalize anything. He’s not quite sure what he’d been about to say, and that seems like a dangerous state of uncertainty to be in, right now. Instead, he simply nods.

“Perfect,” says Harper. “Tell me about your relationship with Pete Wentz.”

This, Patrick can do easily. “Sure thing. So, like—sorry, sorry. I… I’ll start by saying that Pete’s such an amazingly talented individual. He’s one of the kindest people I know, truly loyal to his bones, and just so incredibly generous. And smart. I don’t think people have ever understood just how smart he is. Working with him, being friends with him, has always been a privilege.”

He stops there, not because it’s difficult to think of more beneficent things to say about Pete, but because he could keep talking Pete up forever, and that’s not the purpose of this session. Also, Patrick is starting to feel uncomfortable about sharing anything with Harper.

“Hm.” Harper looks up from her tablet, her face neutral as she assesses him. She seems almost disappointed. “Well, that was certainly an improvement over the past data. Let’s do a few more.”

They bounce from question to question, Patrick trying his best to answer in a timely fashion without blinking or moving too much. It is an experience akin to plucking out his eyelashes one by one, and after the sixth attempt (“What did you learn over the hiatus that you’re hoping to apply to this new era of the band?”, which is actually a decent one), Patrick asks:

“Do we really need to do all of this?” It feels like he’s pleading, because he is, sort of. “I mean, we all have a lot of room for improvement, yeah, especially compared to last time. But do the people who like our music actually care about how many times I say ‘like’? It’s not like,” he flinches, redirects, “it’s not as though I’m singing it a million times in a row. And I mostly get nervous while on stage. Interviews aren’t as scary.”

Harper smiles again. Her expression looks exactly the same as it had before, but now Patrick can’t help but read some level of condescension into it. She says, patiently: “I get where you’re coming from, Patrick, but I’ve worked with dozens of artists on their brand representation—”

“I mean—I didn’t mean to question your experience! I just—”

“—and all of them have gone on to absolutely thrive in media interactions, generating positive sound bites and viral clips that have entered the cultural zeitgeist at rates far higher than other publicity agencies.”

Even just the phrase “viral clips” makes Patrick want to slam his head onto the table. She’s just trying to help them, he reminds himself. This is good for the brand, and what’s good for the brand is good for the band. And Patrick will do anything to give the band its best possible shot at success this time around.

As if she can sense the direction his thoughts are heading, Harper says: “You could let Pete go it alone again. But from what Island and Crush have communicated to me, you’ve said you don’t want that.”

“Right, no,” says Patrick. His hand jumps upward, entirely absent of his own volition; he tenses his muscles hard to keep from fidgeting, grips his knees under the table. Harper nods her approval at his restraint, which is great, except that Patrick can’t fucking remember what he was talking about anymore.

“Pete and the media circuit,” Harper prompts. Her smile has significantly reduced in intensity. Clearly, Patrick has some work to do, but it’s really fucking hard to pay so much attention to his own body and keep track of a conversation at the same time.

He clears his throat and tries to force himself back on track. “Right,” he says again, “the media stuff. So, like—sorry,” he says, wincing at the filler word. “You probably heard this from Bob, or maybe Antoinette, but one of my conditions for coming back was that we don’t do the same thing to Pete as before the break: leave him trying to carry the whole press thing on his own shoulders, or make his private life the subject of, uh, public discourse. We can split media duties, or I can take them on if he’s busy.”

Or if he’s feeling overwhelmed, Patrick thinks, but he doesn’t feel confident about exposing any of his own vulnerabilities to Harper, let alone Pete’s.

Harper clicks her pen once again. If she’s attempting some sort of Pavlovian training to get Patrick to focus every time she clicks it, it might be working, because without any conscious thought to it, he immediately sits at attention. “Alright,” she says. “Let’s start with an easy one: are you excited to be heading back out on tour after so long?”

Patrick takes in a breath. He can do this. “I mean—”

“Sorry,” Harper interrupts, “that’s actually on the list of filler words we’re trying to avoid. Here, actually, let me get you a copy.”

She begins to rummage through the file folder as Patrick stares into the middle distance. “I can’t say ‘I mean’?” he asks. “How am I supposed to mean something?”

“With your other words,” says Harper. “Ah! Here we go.”

She passes over a single sheet of paper with over a dozen words and phrases printed in a bullet point list. It occurs to Patrick that it would have been great to have been given this list earlier, but maybe this is part of flexing the communication skills muscle. Maybe he should have known to ask about a list before knowing there was one.

In his head, the words are all that same threatening dark red as the spreadsheet, with the occasional sickly mulberry thrown in for variety. Patrick has always perceived “like” as yellow, but it’s possible that the heightened emotions of the situation are fucking with his perception. The thought scares him, and has him rushing to answer the question so he doesn’t have to dwell on that possibility.

“It’s really awesome to be, li—to be back together. And… and making music together in a way that we hadn’t really explored before. It was incredible, seeing Joe’s growth as a songwriter on this album.” Talking about music is safer, simpler. Patrick can feel himself hitting his stride. “Andy and Pete are skillful contributors, as always, and we were able to work without the expectation of a hard deadline, which allowed us to explore so many different creative avenues with way less pressure than a typical album cycle might have at the start. The thing about touring, though, is that—”

“Pause,” Harper says.

Patrick’s jaw clicks shut on his forthcoming spiel about the highs and lows of traveling the world with his best friends, while leaving the security of his wife and his home behind. “I thought I was doing alright?”

“There was a fair bit of blinking going on,” Harper says, “but the main reason I stopped you was that word: ‘tour’. Could you say it again?”

“‘Tour’? What’s wrong with it?”

Harper ‘hm’s, contemplative. “It’s not the word so much as how you said it. ‘Too-er’. It’s very distinctively Midwestern.”

“I’m… from Chicago? Or, l—the Greater Chicago area.” Patrick says. “It’s very much the Midwest. And, I don’t know, I think Dirty used to say it that way, too, and he’s from Florida.”

Harper makes a thinking noise again. “Alright. I’ll pass that around the focus groups. Let’s continue.”

“I didn’t know—I thought we’re going to go over what I talk about, not how I talk,” Trying for a joke, he says, “If I knew, I would’ve practiced my Johnny Carson. Though I guess he’s also another Midwesterner.” Actually, there’s an opportunity there, to lighten up the increasingly heavy mood while navigating away from what’s starting to feel like a personal attack, and after a moment’s hesitation, Patrick decides to risk it. “Did you know that he used to interview pigeons—”

“The focus groups actually didn’t respond too well to trivia,” Harper says. “Or impressions. So let’s try to shy away from those.”

“R-right.”

It’s not the first time he’d been told not to do so. He’d kind of given up on speaking at concerts as a whole, when he’d once made a joke that had gotten a smattering of laughter and had proceeded to beat that dead horse until Pete had politely suggested he stick to singing. Patrick feels just as sweaty and uncomfortable and panicked as he had then, ten years removed from the event.

“I have more questions when you’re ready,” Harper says. Her voice is soothing now, like she can tell she’s rattled Patrick. It’s probably obvious to her: he can feel his forehead starting to glisten, his armpits dampening. His eyelids fluttering incessantly, despite his best attempts to lengthen the interval between blinks.

“We can start whenever,” he says, then bites his lip against another grimace when Harper proceeds to do just that.

“Tell me more about your struggles during the hiatus. What was it like to be up on stage all alone?”

Jesus, Patrick thinks to himself. He’ll be lucky to survive until lunch.

—

In the afternoon, Patrick leaves the conference room feeling dazed.

He’s not sure how he’s supposed to keep track of all the ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s he’s been given while coherently participating in an interview, but Harper assures him that with enough practice, it will come as second nature to him.

“It’s like playing the guitar,” she’d said, waving at him as he retreated from the table. “Or singing! And you’re good at both of those things!”

Patrick hadn’t had the heart or the wherewithal to tell her that even now, ten years after their first album (“Yes,” Joe had said vehemently, when a social media manager had asked him to clarify, “Grave is absolutely the first one.”), he’s still not entirely sure that he’s all that great at the singing part. Or the guitar part. It’d taken until Dance, Dance had topped TRL for the third time for Patrick to realize, with no small amount of dismay, that no one else in their organization had any intention of looking for a full-time guitarist and vocalist. That—unbelievably, impossibly, irrevocably—he was actually their lead singer, and had always been.

(“Well, duh,” Pete had laughed, after Patrick had drunkenly confessed his continued disbelief in this new reality he’d found himself in. He’d been slumped on Pete’s shoulder at a New Year’s party they’d stumbled into immediately following their MTV performance, bemoaning the fact that Fall Out Boy was effectively stuck with Patrick as a core member now.

“I mean, we have you to balance the scales, obviously,” Patrick had said, gesturing at Pete’s everything. “But, like, we missed our window, dude. We should have found someone better than me before recording. Now Sugar’s going to be associated with my voice forever. With my face.”

Pete, who’d seemed unfairly sober despite the number of cocktails Patrick had seen him consume that night, not to mention the cocktail of psychotropic medications he was on, had given him a considering look.

“I always thought you were joking about not being a good singer,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think you actually believed…”

He’d trailed off, thinking. After a solid minute of silence, during which Patrick had felt weirdly exposed, Pete had nodded to himself, seemingly having come to a decision.

“I’m not letting you talk about yourself like that anymore,” he’d said. “Even as a joke. You are too good to be talking yourself down, Patrick Stump. You’re fucking golden.”)

Anyway, all that is to say is that while singing had come more naturally to him than most things, he’s never been all that confident in it, and guitar had been a years-long learning endeavor about which he’s also not super self-assured. “Practice makes perfect” doesn’t apply to Patrick because he’s never been perfect, no matter what Pete says.

What’s more, every instrument Patrick has learned to play, including his own voice, has been a mere extension of the music that lives in his head. Harper is asking him to be less of what he is, not more, and Patrick’s always been pretty bad at curtailing his innate eccentricities. See: his anger issues, his weird hyperfixations, his perfectionism, his control freak tendencies.

In his rental car, he stares down at the actual, physical checklist she had printed out for him before they’d closed the meeting out. The sheer number of don’ts swim before his eyes: there are at least twenty forbidden movements or actions with detailed descriptions of how and why he should avoid them, plus the list of banned filler words to memorize.

This whole thing is making him reexamine his confidence in his own abilities.

He’d never been especially good at the public-facing part of being a musician. His deal with Pete had been predicated on that fact. But whenever he’d been forced into the spotlight, he’d never thought he was absolutely abysmal.

According to Harper, however, he’s been dragging the band down by a large margin.

And if he’d misconstrued how terrible he had been in interviews, who’s to say that his “not-bad” performances haven’t been complete garbage this whole time? He can’t trust his own judgement, apparently. For the first time since he and Pete had tentatively made a foray into restarting the band, Patrick isn’t sure what to do.

He could talk to Pete, obviously. However effusive the other man typically is about Patrick’s general existence, he’s never been one to sugarcoat his critique of Patrick’s work. They’re honest and open with each other in a way that they’ve never been able to achieve with other people.

But Patrick had agreed to take this on. If this is truly even half of what Pete had dealt before the hiatus, there’s no way that Patrick’s throwing in the towel after one session with someone who’s just trying to help acclimate him to the pressures of media interaction. He can’t let Pete deal with this shit alone again.

But he certainly can’t head back to this hotel and stare at the list until he’s burned it onto the inside of his eyelids. Just the thought of sitting in the always-too-chilly room, working himself up into a panic over how he’s going to get himself through another session—another lifetime—of remembering these rules… yeah, no. Might as well distract himself if he’s able.

Heart still pounding fierce in his chest, Patrick turns the ignition and puts the car into reverse.

—

RubyRed isn’t quite the safe space that Patrick’s home studio is, but it’s the closest he can get to it on the west coast. That, or Pete’s place (or, more generally, anywhere Pete is), but Patrick’s already doubled down on the decision that the less Pete knows about his portion of the individualized training sessions, the better.

It would simply cause unnecessary strife, is the thing. Patrick knows he could be better at interacting with the media, and Harper’s valid observations would only clash with Pete’s continued (and incorrect!) insistence that Patrick is just fine the way he is. No: it’s better to handle this himself.

So Patrick hides himself away in Butch’s studio, tinkering with scraps of songs that hadn’t made the album, or even out of the draft stage. Sometimes he wonders what they’ll do with the hundreds of bits and bobs they’ve collectively created that don’t see the light of day. In his less grounded moments, he dreams up flattering, unrealistic scenarios, like Prince purchasing Fall Out Boy’s entire back catalogue, a la Michael Jackson and the Beatles, and releasing them after Patrick is too dead and gone to worry about how the public would perceive them. Of course, this madcap imagining would necessitate the entirety of Patrick’s band and family being unable to negotiate with Island, which only leads to anxiety spirals about increasingly dire situations where such a thing would be possible.

So. Patrick usually avoids thinking too much about what will happen to the music, and focuses on creating it instead. Given a sound-treated room, an array of instruments, and some alone time, Patrick is usually able to decompress from any level of lingering tension and enter a flow state of sorts. This proves true enough today, thankfully, and he sinks into the music like a warm bath.

Six hours after leaving Island’s offices, he looks up from where he’s been noodling on one of the studio guitars to find Pete lounging in the loveseat across from him, feet kicked up over the side of the sofa arm as he scrolls aimlessly on his phone.

Patrick jumps. “W-when did you get here?” he sputters.

Pete doesn’t even look up, just wiggles his fingers in a lazy hello. “Halfway through your weird Prince daydream, probably? So, like, three hours ago.”

“You should've said something.”

“I did.” Pete smiles down at his screen. “You even said hi back.”

Huh. Patrick thinks back; realizes that he had, indeed, acknowledged Pete’s presence, however briefly. “Sorry. Guess it didn’t really register.”

Pete hums to himself, taps away at his phone for a few seconds more, and then pockets it. He shifts to face Patrick and lifts his brows, expression open and intent. “What’s up?” he asks.

“What?” Patrick says.

“You’re stressed.”

Patrick bristles. “I’m not stressed.”

Pete’s eyebrows climb higher. “Okay,” he says, elongating the second syllable to an excessive degree. “So, like, even if I wasn’t pretty much dialed into your brain by default, that wouldn’t have been even a little bit convincing. Wanna try again?”

This is the downside to knowing someone so well that their microexpressions become a language with which you are innately fluent: Patrick can’t hide from Pete, even if he’s really trying. To Pete’s credit, though, it’s probably impossible to ignore his mood; Patrick’s been on the other side, and he’s well aware that the cryptophasia translator in their brains doesn’t have an off switch.

Still, Patrick tries: “There’s nothing wrong.”

“Uh-huh.” Pete sits up, leans closer. Looks deeper. “Alright. Someone said something to you. Who?”

Jesus. Sometimes Patrick forgets how accurate the whole “twin speak” thing can get. Quickly, he scrambles to think of something inane and innocuous enough to act as a distraction. Like: he’s been meaning to talk with his guitar tech about the pickups for his personal batch of Stump-o-matics. The MegaTrons are wonderful, of course, but he rarely makes use of all three of them in a live setting. He’s been meaning to play around with simplifying his setup, but that’ll require some exploration that’s probably better suited for a gap between tours.

“Boo,” says Pete. He leans back again, frowning. “You can’t just think about boring technical stuff every time you don’t want to deal with a problem.”

“And you can’t actually read my mind,” Patrick says. He’s not sure whether it’s more for Pete’s sake or for his own. He’s also not entirely sure if it’s true.

“Of course not,” Pete agrees. “I just know you better than anyone on the planet, and have since you were sixteen. But fine.” He rolls his shoulders in an unhurried shrug, then stands and begins to make his way toward the door. “Keep your secrets. I’ll figure it out eventually.”

“There’s nothing to figure out!” Patrick calls out at his retreating back. Then he scrubs back through the conversation, replays Pete’s words in his head, and adds: “Also, you can’t know me better than anyone. I’m married!”

“And your wife agrees with me!” Pete replies cheerfully, spinning to grin back at Patrick just before he reaches the door. “By the way, weren’t you supposed to call her before it gets too late in Chicago?”

Oh, shit. “Already did,” Patrick lies. With effort, he suppresses the urge to glance at his watch and prove Pete right. “What did you even come here for?”

“I sensed a disturbance in the force,” Pete says, waving vaguely in Patrick’s direction. “Also, I left my laptop here the other day.” He lifts his arm, presenting the aforementioned device, which Patrick hadn’t noticed until now.

“Ah,” says Patrick.

“Geez, you’re out of it,” Pete says, rolling his eyes. “Go, get outta here. Go back to your hotel, call your wife, and go the fuck to sleep, Rick. I know you’ve been up all day.”

With that, he twiddles his fingers in the air once more, then promptly disappears out the door.

Patrick turns back to the control board, already planning to commit the rest of the night to continued tinkering… but Pete is probably right. His eyes feel sandpaper dry, and his limbs too heavy to attempt any fluid guitar work. With a sigh, he stands and collects his things, eventually elbowing his way out the door with his bag under one arm and his phone in the other hand, Elisa’s contact photo smiling up at him. The dial tone rings melodically in his ear until a light click informs him that the call has connected.

“Sorry it’s so late,” Patrick begins, “but I’ve had kind of a weird day…”

—

The next day’s rehearsal, ostensibly meant to iron out the kinks in a number of Grave songs they haven’t played live for a considerable amount of time, has devolved into a “things we need to add to our final grocery list before we start touring for real” game. The objective is to get the most approval from the other members of the band, and Patrick’s win record is very middle-of-the-pack. He sort of feels that when that pack is composed of only three other people, he should have better odds.

“Peanut butter,” he says, and everyone else claps. Patrick gives a tiny bow.

“Toilet paper,” says Joe, and Pete makes a loud incorrect buzzer sound from his side of the stage.

“Andy already added that one,” he says. “You lose a point. I’m adding bananas.”

Joe plays the buzzer sound back at him on his guitar. Pete makes an impressed noise, even as Joe says, “The fuck do we need bananas for?”

“Potassium?” Patrick guesses. He adjusts his mic stand for the third time in as many minutes: he has to make a note to the rehearsal space’s owners about the stripped screws on the tightening mechanism. “I feel like we could probably also just grab, like—shit. Sorry. We could grab leafy greens? And milk.”

“What’re you sorry for?” Joe says. “Except if it’s not explicitly specifying that you should also grab soy milk. Or pistachio milk. Almond milk? A non-dairy selection, of some sort.”

“Something shelf stable,” Andy agrees. “Also, if you’re all going to eat my protein bars in the middle of the night, I vote we buy way more of them.”

“I’ve never eaten one of your gross bars of sawdust in my life,” Joe says, very obviously lying. “But speaking of things that should be edible, one of the PAs told me about a vegan Thai place nearby.”

Despite the terrible segue, Patrick is sold on the idea immediately. He casts a glance at Pete, who’s usually the least adventurous when it comes to food, but even he looks intrigued. “I’m in,” Patrick says, turning back to Joe and gripping his own guitar by the neck as he begins to lift the strap over his head. “Early dinner, maybe?”

Andy makes a small sound of discontent. “I can’t,” he says. “I have to go talk to Harper.”

Pete laughs quietly, and Joe gives a sympathetic groan and an A minor barre chord, heavy on the whammy bar. And Patrick—

Patrick flinches.

Pete’s head pivots so sharply that Patrick already knows he’ll complain of whiplash tomorrow. His eyes lock onto Patrick, and his lips part to take in the tiniest inhalation of breath. Patrick can follow the exact trail of the connections forming behind his eyes: “a new topic made Patrick uncomfortable” to “the last time Patrick was visibly uncomfortable” to “I know why Patrick was upset the other day”.

Pete’s eyes narrow to thin slits of amber.

“Shit,” Patrick says aloud, then covers his mouth. Shit. There’s no way he can play it off as a coincidence now. Hastily, he tries to summon up a benign topic to think about, something to make his face appear less panicked, but it’s impossible to think past the alarms and sirens sounding in his mind. Pete knows. Pete knows. Oh, shit—

“What’s up?” asks Joe.

“Nothing,” Pete says. His expression smooths out, even as he flicks a glance over to Patrick. His face says “see me after class” in a way that Patrick can almost hear. Which is nearly infuriating, since Patrick hadn’t even responded well to that approach back when he’d actually been in school and Pete had been, for all intents and purposes, a quasi-teacher-guardian-older-brother figure.

Pete lifts a brow, tilting his head minutely in Joe’s direction and, yeah: Patrick concedes that it’s probably better to avoid slipping back into bad habits and start holding entire nonverbal conversations in front of Joe and Andy again. It’s not that they’d been explicitly told to stop, exactly, but this renewal of their band seems so fragile that Patrick will do anything to keep from treading upon any unexpected landmines that hadn’t been unearthed during the series of phone calls and discussions they’d all had before agreeing to get back together.

He has to be better than he was before. As much as he hates the process of it, Harper is helping him tackle that from an outsider’s perspective. But Patrick alone is responsible for upholding the stability of his part of the band’s internal relationship, which means being less insular with Pete and more consociational between the four of them.

“I forgot that I have a meeting with her, too,” he blurts, which isn’t even a lie. It’s scheduled for tomorrow, but whatever.

“Uh-huh,” Pete says. “Y’know what? We can wait on you for dinner, Hurley. Lunchbox, wanna fill in on drums while Andy’s at his meeting? We could do Dance, Dance.”

Patrick stares at him, suspicious. It’s such an easy out that he almost doesn’t believe it.

“...sure,” he says.

“Neat. Hey, I have my second session thing with Harper at, like, three tomorrow. Wanna carpool?”

“Mine’s earlier,” Patrick says. “But we could probably meet up for lunch. Joe?”

“Oh, I’m all done with my sessions,” Joe says. Then, when drummer, vocalist, and bassist turn their gaze upon him, he shrugs and says, “I’m just really good at the PR stuff, I guess.”

The look on Pete’s face says that he believes this less than Patrick’s lies. Joe doesn’t have a direct line to Pete’s thoughts, though, so he remains blissfully oblivious to Pete’s skepticism, whistling The Patron Saint of Liars and Fakes, and… okay, Patrick concedes, maybe not that oblivious.

Andy stands from his kit, looking for all the world like he’s about to head into the jaws of hell. “Just don’t play Sugar without me,” he says. “Or I’m locking up my protein bars this time around.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Joe says, after Andy has waved a grave goodbye and Patrick has settled on his throne. “He loves me too much to let me starve when I’m stoned.”

“Andy’s a real one,” Pete says. He smiles down at his bass, looking happy enough to burst, and starts in on Dance, Dance. Patrick takes a few moments to appreciate how far Pete’s come from the first time he’d struggled with the bassline, at how effortlessly he plays without a clicktrack now.

Then he adjusts his grip on his drumsticks, inhales, and dives in.

—

At an unfortunate time of day the next morning, Patrick hauls himself into Island’s offices again. In front of the elevator, he stares blankly at the hazy suggestion of his reflection in the brushed steel doors, searching deep within himself for the willpower to move forward.

“Are you afraid to go up?” asks Pete.

When Pete retells this story later, he’ll insist that Patrick shrieks and gets “incredible air”, jumping back from where Pete has magically appeared at his side. Patrick will maintain that it was more of a “manful yelp”. Either way, the truth of the matter is that Patrick startles hard enough to spill half of his coffee across the elevator bank’s pristine terrazzo flooring.

“What the hell, Pete,” Patrick snaps. To the receptionist and the two security guards who come running, he says, much more subdued, “Oh god, I’m really sorry, there’s nothing wrong, I just—just freaked out a little. It’s fine, I swear.”

“I scared him, sorry,” says Pete, and then he does the thing with his smile and his general presence that make people fall in love with him instantly, and the security guards chuckle and wave as they leave to return to their posts. The receptionist, on the other hand, eyes them suspiciously, then lets his gaze drop to the mess of the floor between them.

“Sorry?” Patrick tries again. “I can—I’ll grab some paper towels and—”

“I’ll send someone to clean that up,” he says primly. He turns to Pete and his whole demeanor changes, eyes going half-lidded with appreciation. “If that was from the cafeteria area,” he says, “there’s actually a much better self-serve machine in the kitchenette, since you’re heading to… the sixth floor?” Pete nods, and the man’s smile broadens. “I could show you the way there, if you need help.”

“I think we can find it,” Pete says. The receptionist wilts slightly, but perks up when Pete offers him a fist bump. The elevator arrives then (when had Pete pressed the button, Patrick wonders?), and Pete gently guides him into the waiting car, calling out over his shoulder: “Thanks for the tip, man!”

“Any time!” comes the reply, just as the doors slide closed.

A moment of silence passes as the elevator creeps upward. Then Pete begins to laugh, loud and hard.

“‘Makes people fall in love with me’,” he repeats slowly. “You have such an odd perception of the world, dude.”

“Tell me that guy didn’t look like he wanted to strip you naked in the lobby.”

“He didn’t want to strip me naked in the lobby,” Pete says with confidence. “He probably just wanted to take me out to a nice dinner.”

“And then strip you naked at home.”

“Maybe,” Pete says.

“You mean definitely.”

The elevator dings, and they both step out onto the sixth floor. Pete takes the lead, directing them to a small kitchenette that Patrick had overlooked two days before. There’s an imposing-looking electronic kiosk sitting next to the sink, with a touchscreen embedded at the front and a spout extending just below it. Pete withdraws two Island-DefJam-branded mugs from the cabinet above the sink, places one below the machine’s spout, and begins to tap at the screen with an experienced hand.

“Have you done this before?” Patrick asks, watching as the machine begins to regurgitate coffee at an alarming speed.

“Yeah, I’ve had to come through Legal a few times, on seven. Didn’t know there was one of these on this floor, though.” Pete withdraws the mug from the machine and hands it off to Patrick, who takes a tentative sip. It is, of course, delicious. He hums his approval, and Pete gives him a thumbs-up and sets to making his own cup.

“Don’t you have a later session?” Patrick asks, after a few more fortifying sips.

“Figured I’d come in early, get some coffee. Do a strip-tease in the lobby. Y’know, reunion things.”

Owing to the pleasant February weather (something Patrick’s not sure he’ll ever get used to in Los Angeles), Pete is dressed in a pale-blue short sleeve button-down, tight black jeans, and a smart pair of boots Patrick recognizes as having been purchased from a Goodwill during their van days. They might actually be older than him. Overall, Pete looks good, objectively, but also like he would perform an embarrassingly short strip-tease.

“Rude,” says Pete. “And right after I made you coffee, too.”

“Those are just the facts,” Patrick says. He gestures toward himself: at his cardigan, shirt, hidden undershirt, jeans. Hat, glasses. “You’d need layers for it to be interesting.”

Pete leers at him. “Oh, are you going to demonstrate?”

Patrick doesn’t bother to respond; just rolls his eyes, turns to exit the kitchenette, and begins to make his way toward the meeting room. He expects Pete to head off toward the Legal floor, or Marketing, or some other department, but instead, he hears hurried footsteps behind him before Pete appears at his side and shortens his stride considerably to match Patrick’s.

“Considerably?” Patrick slows to a halt in front of the designated meeting room door and arches a brow up at Pete. “Really?”

“Just seeing if you were paying attention,” Pete says. “Hey, Harper.”

This time, Patrick has enough caffeine in him to be reasonably alert, to have observed Harper’s approach in the door’s panel window. No manful yelps or screaming: instead, he simply shifts to face her head on, smiling as sincerely as he can at 6:57 in the morning. Judging by the pained grimace Pete sends his way, he doesn’t quite hit the mark.

“Good morning!” says Patrick, a bit too loudly. “Pete was just heading to… wherever Pete needs to go. I’m ready to get started if you are.”

Harper, who Patrick discovers is a few inches taller than Pete, now that she’s standing, looks between the two of them, then gives them both what looks to be a genuine smile. She backs into the room and gestures for Patrick to enter, Pete just a step behind him. “Good morning to the two of you,” she says. “Though, Pete: I don’t have you until later, right?”

Patrick shifts next to Pete, trying to catch his eyes. He’s leaving, right? Right?

Pete ignores him, instead choosing to drop into the nearest available seat without any grace to speak of. He throws one arm over the back of the chair and crosses an ankle over his knee, looking for all the world like the jovial, airheaded extravert that some media outlets used to paint him as.

“Just thought I’d sit in,” he says, “since I was going to be around, anyway. Wanted to see what your personalized PR lessons were all about.”

Then he scoots closer to the table and rolls his wrist in the air, as if to say “carry on”.

This is painfully reminiscent of a shameful moment back in high school, when Patrick’s mother had been called in by his guidance counselor for a disciplinary meeting. The counselor had proceeded to rake Patrick over the coals about his tendency to fall asleep in class, and his mother’s consequent look of disappointment on the drive home still haunts him to this day. It's exactly the scenario that Patrick had been trying to avoid: Pete bearing witness to Patrick being stripped down to his faults and built back up again slowly, painfully. It’s bad enough to experience alone, but with an audience? This will be mortifying.

Pete gives him a quizzical look: what’s wrong?, it says. Before Patrick can deflect, however, Harper begins to speak.

“Are you sure you want to stick around?” she asks. “Patrick’s sessions have been a little… complex. We have a lot to get through, and you might get bored. The subject matter is more complicated than what we’re going over in your meetings.”

Every stray thought about the checklist, the interviews, looking like a fool in front of his loved ones—it all flees Patrick’s mind at once.

“Sorry,” he says, “I… what did you just say?”

“I just thought that Pete might lose interest in our session fairly quickly," Harper suggests, apparently unaware that she’s just stumbled upon one of Patrick's most consistent sources of rage, the one surefire thing an interviewer can do to make him fly off the handle: insult Pete to his face.

Or maybe it’s intentional, to see how he’d react to it? No, it has to be, Patrick thinks: there’s no way she could have done so much research about his every spoken and written word and then blatantly ignored how he’s made it a point to always have Pete’s back.

He gives Pete a sideways glance: if it's not some pretense meant to test Patrick's ability to keep cool in the face of his biggest conversational stressor, if she’s actually falling for the “gregarious dumbass” act, she’s a lot less astute than Patrick had given her credit for. In response, Pete only lets a lazy grin spread across his face. He settles into his chair more deeply, adopting the lackadaisical slump of his that had been nearly ubiquitous during the pre-hiatus era.

Ah. So he’s going to play the part for now. Well, it’s not like Patrick can stop him. He gives Pete a warning glance, a nonverbal instruction to play nice for now, and looks back to Harper to see her inspecting the two of them with a critical eye.

“While reviewing past footage,” she says, “I did notice that you two tend to lose focus when you’re both present in an interview. It might make sense to book separate media events for each of you, if we can’t train you out of getting lost in each other’s eyes.”

“Sorry,” Patrick blurts, immediately shamefaced at his own blatant discourtesy. Despite the disastrous start to this session, he should be putting his best foot forward. “We don’t—we usually try not to do it in meetings and during press stuff. We’ll be better about it, I swear.”

“About what?” Harper cocks her head to one side, puzzled. “Staring at each other?”

“No, we…” Patrick begins, before looking at Pete, abruptly feeling uncertain. Pete’s mouth twists upward in an incredulous arc, which Patrick totally gets: she doesn’t know that they’re talking to each other? Even the Island executives that had joined during the hiatus had been informed that “Pete and Patrick plus prolonged eye contact plus silence” means that they’re communicating in some capacity. Either Harper has decided not to heed their management’s warnings, or someone’s decided to set her up for failure and had excluded her from the memo entirely.

Pete lips crease together into a discontented shape. Do you want to tell her, or should I? his expression says. Patrick pulls a face of his own at the thought of trying to explain their relationship to a person with whom every interaction he’s had has proven to be unfairly judgmental. Then he freezes, because shit, he did not mean to give that last part away.

Pete’s eyes widen fractionally, and he reacts to the unintended disclosure without hesitation.

“What did you say to Patrick?” he asks.

“Hm?” Harper favors him with a perplexed smile. Patrick can’t blame her: it must seem like a complete non sequitur from the previous topic. “Nothing out of the ordinary. We’ve only been going over his individual media training plan.”

“Right, sure,” Pete says, “which entails what, exactly?”

“Pete,” says Patrick.

“Actually, it’s great that you’re here.” Harper taps her tablet to wake it up, then swipes right twice. “I’ve reviewed some of the data from our focus groups, as well as legacy recordings, and I’ve built up a playbook for you to take a look at. If you’re committed to interviewing together, then this might be a good strategy to pivot to.”

She places the tablet on the table and slides it between them; Pete picks it up and begins to scroll through whatever document she’s presented them with. His eyes grow wider and wider with each panning swipe down the page.

“What?” Patrick asks. He leans in to read; Pete leans further in the other direction, angling the tablet away from Patrick and out of his line of sight. “What the fuck?” Patrick mutters.

Across from them, Harper jumps. “Oh,” she says, mildly surprised, “I didn’t know you could curse.”

Patrick freezes, halfway out of his chair (and halfway into Pete’s). He turns to give her a look of flat disbelief; senses Pete mirroring his expression from beside him.

“I’m twenty-eight,” Patrick says slowly. “Respectfully, of course I can fucking curse.” Then, to Pete: “Let me read it.”

“It’s all corporatese bullshit,” Pete says, his eyes glued to the screen once again. “You’d fall asleep halfway through the first paragraph.”

“I’m fully capable of reading some publicity briefs,” Patrick retorts. He stretches over Pete, grasping for the tablet; Pete brings it even closer to his chest, effectively keeping it out of Patrick’s reach. Frustrated, Patrick snaps out: “You don’t need to handle everything on your own again.”

Pete’s gaze flicks upward, meeting Patrick’s over the edge of the tablet. “I know I don’t,” he says, “but I also don’t want you to have to do it, either. You’ve always preferred the music side, and that doesn’t have to change just because we decided to split the frontman duties this time around. Let me handle the business strategy part.”

Patrick frowns. “But—”

Harper also begins to voice her objections. “I really do think he should—”

“Don’t bother Patrick with this stuff, please,” Pete says, polite but sharp. He nods down at the tablet. “Also, we’re not doing this.”

For the first time in their short acquaintance, Patrick sees some measure of frustration begin to creep into Harper’s normally placid countenance. “But the focus groups—”

“Are irrelevant,” Pete finishes. He places the tablet back on the table and slides it back to Harper. “Me and Patrick have an agreement about how and when we want to interact on stage from now on. I don’t care if the polling on ‘homoerotic demonstrations of friendship’ is over seventy percent positive in the eighteen-to-thirty-five female demographic. It doesn’t have any bearing on what we’ve decided we’re comfortable with.”

Harper looks at them, unblinking. (She’s good at that, Patrick thinks.) Her stare lowers, gradually, to where Patrick has his knee planted on the edge of Pete’s chair, his hand braced on Pete’s upper thigh and chest pressed to his shoulder, still in the same position he’d climbed into in his attempt to reach across Pete’s body for the tablet.

Shame fills Patrick's body like a flash flood. He makes to retreat to his own seat, but then Pete’s arm hooks around his waist, the crook of his elbow resting at the small of Patrick’s back.

“We’re not on stage right now,” Pete says, cheeky and irreverent. He pulls Patrick closer to him for half a second, squeezing him tight in a half-hug, then releases him.

Just as Pete had probably intended, the embrace manages to blunt the embarrassment, replacing some part of it with the instinctive fondness he always feels for Pete. As he returns to his own chair, Patrick makes sure to catch Pete’s eyes so he can roll his own at him. He can’t just hug Patrick as a distraction every time he does something to piss him off.

Pete’s eyes twinkle at him. Patrick knows exactly what he’s thinking: he’ll stop doing it when it stops working.

God, Patrick thinks, biting at his lip as he finds himself fighting a hysterical laugh, now Harper’s probably convinced that they’re having an affair. Pete’s eyebrows bounce suggestively at that thought, likely because he’s thinking about how her mind would be blown if she knew that they still share a bed sometimes.

With a sigh, Patrick decides against making a futile attempt to explain to Harper that this isn’t particularly intimate or romantic; it’s just how they are. Nearly three years of separation has made them very aware of the fact that physical proximity is a necessity for the both of them, but it’s more like self-soothing than anything approaching sensual. Pete’s touch barely registers in his brain as a foreign entity.

(Listen: he gets that they’re wildly codependent. Patrick’s had that conversation with his therapist, with his wife, with Pete, dozens of times, rehashing details and redrawing boundaries until they’d finally reached a solution that works for all of them. The point is that it used to be astronomically worse, and this is probably as good as it’s going to get, so he’s made peace with it, okay?)

It’s just that they’ve agreed, along with their partners and with Joe and Andy, that falling all over each other on stage is kind of unnecessary. Pete doesn’t have to prostrate himself at Patrick’s feet to show him how much he loves him anymore, and Patrick doesn’t need to drive himself (and his band) crazy with tyrannical perfectionism while trying to show Pete how much he loves him through song, because they’ve finally sat down like adults and had a fucking conversation about it. Maybe it would make some fans excited, but it would give them the wrong idea about their relationship, as well as distract from the music. And neither of them have any interest in making a return to the front page of the tabloids.

“Okay,” Harper says, dragging Patrick’s attention back to her as she drags out the word with some skepticism. She seems to scrabble to keep her expression neutral. “Well. We’ll put a pin in that. I will reiterate, however, that if you keep zoning out while gazing into each other's eyes, your fans will probably draw their own conclusions.”

Pete gives her a shark’s smile. “Oh, is that what you think we were doing?”

“Bob said something about twin telepathy,” she says, which answers that lingering question: she’d received the memo, but had simply chosen to discard the information. “I suppose it does look like that from the outside.”

This time Patrick does laugh. “Kinda looks like that on the inside, too,” he says. “But sorry again. We’ll stop, I promise.”

“Right,” Harper says. Her smile has been reduced to a thin line, lips pursed tight and nearly bloodless. “Let’s move on to—”

“Before that.” Pete holds up a hand. “About timing: unless it’s urgent, I think our management indicated that most engagements should be scheduled after noon?” he says, saccharine sweet and more a statement than a question. “If you could bump Patrick’s meetings to after lunch, that’d be great. I can take his time slot, if you need to shuffle us around.”

Once again, Patrick finds himself caught between being irritated and feeling grateful. It’s not like he can’t function this early, but it is… well, it’s hard. Even after a frigid wake-up shower, one and a half cups of coffee, and his daily dose of his ADHD medication (the latter duo a horrendous combination that Patrick does not advise), he’s barely firing on half the cylinders needed to be a passable conversationalist.

“I’m fine, Pete,” he says, even though he knows his body language is screaming the opposite. “I can do this.”

“You’ll be on quite a few morning radio shows eventually,” Harper adds. “He needs to be able to perform just as well off-stage as he does on it.”

“I understand that,” says Pete, each word delivered like a verbal fist to the teeth, “but you’re also in charge of scheduling. If he does too much morning stuff, he doesn’t get enough sleep. If he doesn’t get enough sleep, his immune system tanks. If that happens, he gets sick more easily, and if he gets sick, he can’t perform. And, very obviously, if he can’t perform, we’re all out of a job.” Palms turned upward, Pete spreads his arms as though he’s physically presenting this cause-and-effect series of events to Harper. “He can’t control when his brain makes the right amount of melatonin, but you can control how frequently he has to try to fight his own nervous system. So maybe we shouldn’t wreak havoc on his sleep schedule when we don’t absolutely need to, okay?”

Terrifyingly, Harper’s expression is inching toward something like real anger. She says, voice strained, “The schedule—”

Patrick, desperate to steer them away from certain disaster, interrupts. “We don’t need to plan around something that might happen—”

“This isn’t hypothetical,” Pete snaps, directing his ire at Patrick like a floodlight. “You run yourself down to nothing at the end of the tour, every tour. And I've accepted that I can’t keep you from doing it, because you’ll never give our fans a subpar show if you can help it, but what I can do is make sure we give you enough time between shows and press to recover. Or do you really want to fly around the world constantly feeling like shit warmed over again?”

Despite his knee-jerk desire to object, Patrick can’t prevent himself from grimacing at the truth the question unearths. In particular, he knows the exact occasion Pete’s referring to: just before their split, there’d been a long spate of early mornings and late nights that had resulted in a fatigue so all-encompassing, it’d caused Patrick’s body to betray him entirely. Persistent nausea, fever, chills, and other flu-like symptoms had beset him overnight, and had been frustratingly resistant to all medical remedies. Only a week’s worth of strict bed rest had allowed him to climb out of that hole in time for their next touring sprint.

He knows, intellectually, that Pete is right, but it feels like admitting defeat to restructure their entire interview docket around Patrick’s inability to keep normal hours and get up before noon. It smacks of the laziness he’d been accused of in high school. It puts his lack of willpower on full display and asks their whole team to operate around it.

“For the hundredth time: you can’t help it,” Pete says, looking peeved. “So stop feeling guilty about it. Harper,” he says, turning the charm back on, “we’re good on this, right? I’ll get final approval on our timetables?”

For several agonizing seconds, no one says anything at all. Patrick has no desire to see what an unstoppable force (Harper) looks like when it meets an immovable object (Pete). Fortunately, the collision is narrowly avoided, with Harper settling back into her chair and giving a tense nod.

“Fine,” she says, far more clipped than her usual bright tones. It seems she’s beginning to realize that she’s massively underestimated Pete Wentz. “We’ll discuss the cadence of morning bookings later.”

Patrick figures he might as well make one last attempt at negotiating on his own behalf. It seems like the adult thing to do. “Do I get a say in this?” he asks.

“No,” Harper and Pete say in unison.

Patrick shrinks in his chair. “Okay, then.”

Silence.

“Why don’t we shuffle the exercises around?” Harper says eventually. “Let’s talk about stage presence today, since you mentioned that as an area where you’d like to improve.”

This actually sounds extremely promising to Patrick, up until the point where Harper reaches under the table to retrieve something—a clipboard, with a sheaf of papers attached to it—from her bag. She hands it across to him, along with a pen, then begins fiddling with the remote control for the television mounted to the wall.

“If you take a look at the notes I’ve made,” she waves a hand toward the clipboard, “you’ll see I’ve prepared some observations on your past performances. What we’re going to do here is—ah, there we go,” the television buzzes to life, “we’re going to review some footage, both from before the hiatus and during your solo tour, and write down how you could have improved each show using the tools and methods we went through yesterday. Sorry, I didn’t bring an extra set of worksheets, Pete: I didn’t know you would be here. But Patrick, how does that sound to you?”

“Holy shit,” Pete breathes.

That’s about how Patrick feels. This is going to be absolute torture.

“Sounds great!” he says, sounding very far from great. He clicks his pen to the ready. “Let’s get started!”

—

“She’s a tough one,” Pete remarks.

They’re at Sugarfish, a local sushi restaurant, at Pete’s insistence, because he loves Patrick enough to eat the same thing every day if it makes him happy. Or at least cheers him up.

“Is it working?” Pete asks.

Patrick looks down at the remains of his lunch, the “chef’s choice” set of yellowtail, salmon, and some remarkably satisfying fatty tuna, and admits: “Sort of, yeah.”

The midday rush is surprisingly sparse, and they’d been able to grab a seat at the bar, a rectangle of gleaming, warm-toned wood set in the back of the restaurant. Pete traces lines in the condensation beading on the glass of his yuzutini, and Patrick momentarily considers tossing his calorie count and strict adherence to a no day-drinking policy to the wayside to order one of his own…

And then does the mental equivalent of an about-face before he can focus on that thought long enough for Pete to pick it up.

“We kind of need someone tough,” he says around the last of his yellowtail sashimi. (Eating with Pete always results in the stark degradation of his table manners, somehow.) He swallows before speaking again. “No one wants another ‘Jason’ fiasco.”

“Um, wrong: the kids would totally dig the return of Jason.” Pete dunks the whole of a dragon roll into his soy sauce, coating it thoroughly before popping into his mouth, chewing, swallowing, and continuing. “And anyways, that was fucking brutal. I know you listen to recordings of yourself singing for, like, practice and shit, but watching yourself talk for four hours must really suck.”

“I can confirm that it does!” Patrick says, giving him a thumbs-up with his free hand. “Do not recommend.”

“You were really in the zone, though.”

To be honest, Patrick might have dissociated through it: the last few hours are a blurry smudge of memory, and he has no recollection of anything that had been written on the clipboard. “Hope she has something better planned for you.”

A shrug. “Eh. I can take whatever she throws at me. I just don’t like how she was talking to you.”

Patrick hadn’t much liked how she’d talked to Pete, either. Still, perhaps unwisely, he tries to give her the benefit of the doubt. “She’s a professional, Pete. She’s paid to be effective, not nice.”

“Everyone should be nice to you,” Pete says, entirely serious. “It should be the law.”

“Sounds like something you could’ve had a say in if you went the lawyer route.”

“But then I wouldn’t have met you, and wouldn’t know of the obvious gap in our country’s legal framework as it pertains to you, so there would be no reason to be a lawyer.” Pete shakes his head in mock despair. “The greatest Catch-22 of my life.”

He pauses, and the twitching corners of his mouth imply strongly that he’s putting all of his willpower into trying not to make the obvious joke: that Patrick is the greatest catch of his life.

“Very admirable of you to hold that in,” Patrick says. He sets his chopsticks down upon the ceramic hashioki next to his plate and gives Pete a polite golf clap. “You deserve a medal for your restraint.”

Pete sits back in his chair and heaves a put-upon sigh. “You’re the hardest person to impress,” he says. “It could drive a lesser man to tears.”

“Why are you flirting with me?” Patrick asks, amused. “You already have me.”

“Well,” Pete sits up, parks an elbow on the edge of Patrick’s chair and dips his head, leaning in close to whisper: “The thing is, Stump, that sometimes you’ve gotta take some shots just to make sure you can still score.”

A beat passes as this processes in Patrick’s mind. Another, and then he’s hit by a full-body cringe too powerful for him to suppress—so he doesn’t even make an attempt. Instead, he curls forward onto the bar, laughing so hard that it’s almost silent, nothing but shuddering gasps of air and the occasional squeak.

“Jesus, it wasn't that funny,” Pete says after a full minute of laughter. Unfortunately, this only restarts Patrick’s giggle fit. Another minute elapses, and Pete sighs again, this time in the soft tone that he always drifts into when he’s feeling especially enamored with Patrick. He settles his arm across the back of Patrick’s chair, content to wait out his dying giggles; winces, and twists his neck left, then right.

“Why does it feel like I have whiplash?” he mutters.

This results in Patrick laughing so hard that their waitress brings them their check without them having to ask for it.

—

“For this session, I’ll be tallying up the ‘don’ts’ from the checklist as we run through some more mock interviews,” Harper says. She gestures toward the table, where she’s adjusted the seating such that there is one chair set on either side. “Then we’ll pause, discuss, and go again. Pete, you can sit over here,” she taps on the back of a chair along the wall closest to the door, outside of Patrick’s field of view. “We want to make sure Patrick has as few distractions as possible.”

“It’ll be like I’m not even here!” Pete says. The sound of him flopping into his seat, followed by a low curse as Pete’s body promptly reminds him he isn’t twenty-two anymore, immediately discredits this statement.

“Right,” Harper says, looking skeptical.

“Ignore him,” Patrick says as he takes his seat. “It doesn’t work for me, but it’s a pretty decent tactic for everyone else.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Harper says. She sits as well, and adopts the fingers-laced pose that Patrick has come to associate with imminent psychic damage. “We’ll start with some softballs today. First, I wanted to know: how did you get your band’s name?”

Behind him, Pete audibly chokes on a laugh.

“Pete,” Harper says, a warning in her voice.

“Sorry!”

“Uh,” says Patrick, and Harper immediately looks down at her tablet and taps on the screen. His scorecard, presumably.

“Sorry,” he says, echoing Pete. “Let me—let’s try again. So we… first started out playing local shows and parties…”

It’s slow-going, and painstaking, but Patrick feels like he’s making progress. The questions are rote enough that Patrick’s already formulated the perfect answer as Harper asks them, confidence born of years listening to the same docket of inquiries that every pre-hiatus reporter seems to have pulled from. The lack of difficulty allows him to focus on what his body’s doing, lets him count seconds between blinks and keep his hands firmly planted in his lap.

“You’re doing great, Patrick,” Harper says, sounding proud and encouraging at once. “Now, would you say that the failure of your solo album is what encouraged you to reclaim fame with your old band?”

Patrick’s blood runs cold.

“W-what?” he stutters.

“That’s out of line,” Pete snaps.

Harper tsks. “Stammering,” she says. “And blinking. And Pete, please, Patrick knows that this line of questioning is purely for educational purposes. Personally, I thought your album was lovely.”

“Thank you?” says Patrick, who is finding it hard to breathe at the moment. It’s not that he’s never been asked something similar, or that he hasn’t imagined having to answer this exact question in his recurring nightmares about the whole of 2011. It’s just that no one’s ever outright said to his face that he looks like he’s just chasing the fame and the money.

And it's especially fucking tragic because Patrick has never cared about the fame or the money. He likes having enough to get by, to make sure he and Elisa and his family and friends are comfortable, but he doesn’t need to be a millionaire. He doesn’t need people to know his name. He just wants to—to create, to make music, to see someone bob their head along to a tune he’s written, or get a phrase of Pete’s stuck in their head. He wants to write and play with the people he loves, and it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s in a basement or a fucking arena; it’s just easier to get everyone else on board when the stakes are higher, easier to justify it when it’s his job. The rest is irrelevant, as Patrick has said time and time again, but it strikes him now that this might be a common assumption he’ll have to fight hard against during this album cycle, maybe every album cycle, and—

“That’s a lot of blinking, Patrick,” says Harper. “And remember your hands. Can we try to focus, please?”

Fuck. He hadn’t even realized it, but he’d brought his hand up to scrub hard at where his sideburns would’ve been at nineteen, twenty. He pulls his hand away, only to find that it’s shaking, his fingers trembling like the palm leaves in the breeze wafting off the ocean, just outside the windows.

“I think we should take a break,” Pete says. His voice comes from Patrick’s immediate left—it appears that he’d stood from his chair without Patrick even noticing.

Shit. This is not at all painting Patrick as a reliable frontman, is it?

Pete has had far more terrible things said to and about him, has been the victim of a vicious paparazzi; has, along with his ex-wife and child, been stalked, harangued, and harassed by strangers for no other reason than the fact that he chose to take on that burden so that Patrick wouldn't have to. If Patrick can’t take the slightest interrogation from a neutral party, how is he meant to weather the true storm of their critiques?

“I—no, I’m. I’m good,” Patrick says. When Pete goes to object, he shakes his head, eyes still trained on Harper; firms his voice and says, “Next question, please.”

Harper’s face is blank. “You didn’t answer the last one.”

“Next question, please.”

“Alright.” Click. “It’s actually fine to skip questions, and that isn’t a terrible way to do it. We’ll workshop some more cordial alternatives later.”

“Patrick,” says Pete, beseeching. “C’mon.”

Patrick risks a glance up and over, where Pete has his arms crossed tight against his chest and a deep frown marring his features. “I’m fine, Pete,” he says. “This is helping.”

He hopes it’s helping. If this is meant to be strengthening a muscle, Patrick fears he might be dangerously close to pulling it.

Face full of reluctant resignation, Pete returns to his chair. Patrick faces Harper again, who graces him with a radiant smile. “The next one’s a bit easier,” she says. “Between you and Andy, who’s the better drummer?”

The next few questions run along the same general vein: all of them tailored to rile Patrick up, either with direct attacks or vague inferences. And they are easier: Andy’s the better drummer, obviously; no, he doesn’t have hard feelings about the hiatus, because it needed to happen; no, he’s definitely not upset about the fact that Pete’s fame far eclipsed his own.

The problem is, though, that Patrick has lost access to the reservoir of restraint within him, the command over his own body that he’d gained only half an hour ago. He’s unstrung, his pulse surpassing Heartbreaker and escaping Michael Jackson’s discography altogether. And Harper won’t let him slide even once.

“Hands,” she says, when Patrick reflexively goes to tug at his hair after a question about the possible return of his sideburns.

“Eye contact,” she says, when Patrick tips his head to hide behind the brim of his hat after an especially prying question about his weight. (“Pass,” Pete had said, authoritative and inflexible, and whatever look had been on his face had made Harper move to the next question without hesitation.)

“Filler,” she says, when Patrick collapses into an unintelligible mess of word salad after she asks if he feels his music is good enough to warrant a return from hiatus at all.

“Patrick,” Harper says, sighing his name, “are you even trying?”

“I am,” Patrick says, “I—I am trying.”

But Harper only gives him a disappointed look. “Let’s go through a new set of questions, maybe?”

Pete says: “I don’t think—”

“I’m asking Patrick,” Harper says. She sounds so reassuring, but she’s not. It’s a terrifying dissonance.

“And I’m telling you, for Patrick, that this isn’t okay,” Pete says. “We can reconvene or something.”

“Patrick?” Harper’s voice increases in pitch and volume as she attempts to drown Pete out. “What do you want to do? Take a break, or keep going?”

Patrick wants to bury his head in his hands, but he can’t touch his fucking face. He wants to—wants to…

“Hey.” Pete appears within his field of vision. He’s kneeling in front of him, hands gripping the armrests on either side of Patrick. “You good?”

Not particularly, and Patrick knows it shows on his face. His eyes feel hot, and his skin damp with a cold sweat. He tries not to blink, half because of the checklist, and half because he thinks he might cry if he does.

He just doesn’t understand why this shit is so hard for him.

For a minute or an hour, Patrick tries to control his breathing. Tries to remember the breathing techniques he’d work through in therapy. Tries to remember what his therapist said about self-affirmation exercises, about accepting his quirks and unique traits; tries to remember anything that will keep him from fucking spiraling—

A long moment passes. Pete’s eyes drift from Patrick’s face, to the death grip he has on his knees; to Harper, then back to Patrick.

“Yeah, okay,” Pete says. His words are clearly directed toward Harper, even with his eyes still locked to Patrick’s. “So I’m pretty sure we’re no longer in need of your services.”

There’s no force on the planet that could make Patrick lift his head to look at Harper right now. Nevertheless, her sharp intake of air still rings like a gunshot in the quiet of the room. Patrick flinches at the sound, and Pete’s fingers curl tighter around the armrests.

“I would like you to leave,” Pete says. His eyes search Patrick’s: are you okay? Please be okay. I will make this right, they say. To Harper, out loud: “If your contract with Island or Crush has termination fees, I’ll pay them.”

“I don’t—you can’t—”

“I can,” says Pete. “Please leave.”

A full minute passes. Patrick knows this because he counts it out, uses the steady tick of the wall clock as a metronome to try and calm the blast beat pace of his heart.

A quiet huff sounds, followed by the low murmur of voices Patrick can’t find it in himself to listen to. The shuffling of paper, soft footsteps. The whoosh of a door opening, the small displacement of air and a tiny click as it closes again.

“Fuck,” Pete says with feeling. “Fuck.”

He presses forward and envelopes Patrick in his arms.

Ordinarily, a hug from Pete is everything. Even through their most tempestuous fights and their most bitter arguments, through horrendous pranks and self-inflicted hazards, it’s the place Patrick has always felt safest.

Right now, he feels nothing.

“She’s wrong, Patrick.” A clammy palm presses itself to his cheek; when Patrick doesn’t react, it slides down to rest lightly against the pulse throbbing in his neck. Softly, with so much care, Pete strokes his thumb against the base of Patrick’s chin. “She’s so—you know that, right? That you’re not… that there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing.”

Nothing is what Patrick feels like. Nothing is what Patrick is, if he isn’t able to do this for Pete.

“Wrong. That’s so wrong. It’s… c’mon, let’s go. I don’t—let’s go somewhere else. Somewhere not here. C'mon. Up.”

He blinks, and they’re in the elevator.

Another blink: the parking garage. Pete guides him to his car with utmost caution, like he’s delivering a package full of fine china, or a glass harmonica. Patrick certainly feels like a glass harmonica someone kicked down the stairs.

“Call your wife,” Pete says, once they’re seated and belted in his car.

When Patrick says nothing in response, merely stares at the footwell of the passenger seat, Pete swears creatively. “Scratch that: I’ll call her. You’re coming home with me.”

—

“I just don’t get why you didn’t tell me,” says Pete.

It’s two in the morning, and the house is wrapped in a blanket of silence thick enough that Patrick could probably hear his own heartbeat if he focused. They’d spent the day vegetating on the couch while the television played game shows on low volume, Patrick excavating some of Pete’s old journals for resources, Pete scribbling down his thoughts in a new one. After a light dinner, they’d mutually decided to turn in for the night.

Tonight they’re in one of the guest bedrooms, in deference to one of their agreed-upon boundaries. (“Primary bedrooms are for primary partners,” they’d once recited in unison, before pitching into a shared fit of laughter at their synchronicity.) The room is equipped with the same blackout curtains and trillion-thread count sheets in the main room, though they’re an absurd highlighter orange hue rather than the sedate colors Patrick knows trim Pete’s actual bed.

(“Your favorite color,” Pete had said, that first time Patrick had stayed over. “Meags picked them out.”)

They’ve already changed into their sleep clothes, Patrick having borrowed sweats and a shirt that hang somewhat loosely on him, a first for him when it comes to Pete’s wardrobe. Pete, who’s been quietly and unnecessarily concerned about Patrick’s eating habits as of late, doesn’t look particularly happy about this revelation, but he wisely declines to comment aloud.

The bed is queen-sized, and they’re both fun-sized individuals, but they still crowd closer than Patrick imagines normal friends would, their knees pressed together in the divot created by their shared weight. Half a foot away, Pete’s eyes glow golden in the dim light emitted from the nightlight in the bathroom. His voice is nearly at a whisper’s volume when he asks his not-a-question, but Patrick hears him nonetheless. He debates ignoring it, briefly, but it’s not like pretending to be dead to the world would be in any way convincing.

Strictly speaking, they’re not supposed to be doing this. Not the “sleeping together” part—that’s been cleared by wives, partners, therapists, basically everyone involved—but the “not-sleeping” part. Pete’s meant to be practicing good sleep hygiene, and Patrick’s on doctor’s orders to acclimate himself to a diurnal schedule before they hit the road.

(He’s still not quite convinced that he actually has a sleep disorder, but will concede that his perennially shitty sleep-wake patterns had probably contributed to him going halfway insane during the recording and touring on Folie. It also kind of explains the excessive daytime sleepiness he’d dealt with back in high school. He’d almost called up his old guidance counselor to share the news once he was given the diagnosis, but decided it would be presumptuous to assume the man would remember him at all.)

Cool, lightly calloused fingers wrap lightly around one of Patrick’s wrists, drawing him out of his mental tangent with a gentle squeeze. It’s a prompt without words, and Patrick sighs, filling the space between them with warm air, before dredging up the truth.

“I wanted to learn how to do it on my own,” he admits. “I didn't want you to have to fight my battles. You did that so much the first time around, and it almost killed you.”

It’s only after Pete lets loose a protracted, shuddering exhale that Patrick realizes these are the first words he’s spoken aloud since the conference room.

“Sorry,” he says. He frees his other hand from the mess of blankets covering him to brush against Pete’s fingers, then smooths the furrow at the center of his brow. “Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“Was afraid she broke you,” Pete says. There’s a smile on his face, but an edge of fading panic in his voice still. “I was about to call up David Massey and end her whole career.”

The idea of putting someone out of a job, no matter how poorly she’s treated him, makes Patrick feel faintly ill. He shifts on the bedspread, fights back the creeping feeling of did I earn this? do I deserve this? that always rises whenever he remembers that he’s an actual rock star now, with the accompanying rock star privileges. Like getting random publicists blacklisted if he so desires. Ugh. Even just the thought of doing so makes his stomach twist uncomfortably.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “She probably just needs sensitivity training or something.”

“Or something,” Pete mutters darkly. With his unoccupied hand, he twists his topsheet between his fingers, clearly disgruntled. “That was a terrible way to train someone, and we’re allowed to say it. You’re just too fucking nice.”

“Maybe.”

“Definitely. Anyways. A few things,” Pete says. “One, the obvious: you always talk up how loyal I am, and I love that about you, but we both know that outside of my kid, there’s, like, three or four people I’d die for. You don’t need me to list them.”

Patrick doesn’t. “I mean, me too, of course,” he says, “but I don’t want you to have to. I need you to be able to lean on me whenever you need a break, and that means I have to be able to do this shit myself, too.”

Quiet covers the room once again as Pete ruminates upon this. Eventually, he squeezes Patrick’s wrist once more before releasing him.

“That’s fair,” he says. “I’m going to sound maybe a little too corporate here, but: could we agree that we’ll do our best to communicate when we need help?”

“And then actually let me help,” Patrick urges. He nudges Pete’s knee with his own, insistent. “We’re partners, remember? No more suffering in silence. I can read you, sure, but sometimes I’m not quick on the uptake, y’know?”

“Oh, I know.” Pete’s grin flashes white in the low light. “It’s honestly impressive, the number of songs where you still don’t pick up all of the subtext. Not consciously, at least.”

“You are a very layered and nuanced writer,” Patrick mutters, turning his head into his pillow to cool the embarrassed flush spreading across his face. “Maybe it takes a little longer for those of us who slept through English class to read between the lines, okay?”

“You get my words, Rick,” Pete assures him. His voice has gone soft, both fond and amused at once. “Maybe not here, at first,” he draws his hand up to tap at Patrick’s forehead, then brings it down to press the side of his fist to Patrick’s heart, “but always here.”

A pause. Then, because Pete is older and wiser but no less Pete Wentz, he begins to drag his hand lower, toward the hem of Patrick’s borrowed sweatpants, breath hitching with barely restrained laughter as he says: “And sometimes here—”

Patrick knees him in the thigh, hard, and the resulting sound of Pete’s pained cackles shatters the quiet of the room. It triggers a sharp snort in Patrick, then a giggle, and soon enough they’re wheezing through tears of laughter against each other’s shoulders.

“Not that kind of partner,” Patrick says, after he regains his breath. Pete nods, grinning: that goes without saying.

“Look at us,” he says instead, “being adults who talk this shit through. Twenty-five year-old me wouldn’t be able to listen to this with a straight face.”

“Twenty-five year-old me probably would have thrown a chair at me if I tried therapy-speak on him,” Patrick admits. The thought alone makes him want to curl up into a ball of shame, but Pete’s in the way, probably by design. Pete pokes him in the stomach—definitely by design, then. Patrick sighs. “It was hard for me to really get how badly I was handling everything, before.”

“None of us were a walk in the park back then. ‘cept for Hurley. Cheery motherfucker, that guy.”

It’s Patrick’s turn to poke Pete. Judging by Pete’s quiet oof, it’s possible that he does it with more force than he intends. He presses a palm to the injured site in apology as he says, “Andy wasn’t fine and you know it.”

“I know,” Pete concedes, apologetic. They’re both determined not to take their drummer’s easygoing nature for granted again, nor Joe’s patience.

Pete huffs out a short breath and lets his eyes fall to half-mast. He begins to trace an abstract pattern on the fabric of his pillowcase. “You know it’ll be different this time,” he says.

“It kind of has to be,” says Patrick. “If we have to split again…”

It would be disastrous. Not only would Patrick lose the easy camaraderie that comes with Joe and Andy’s friendship, but he’s also fairly certain he and Pete would never recover from another catastrophic breakup.

(Shortly after they had reconciled, they had tried establishing what Google had assured them were “healthy boundaries” for a “normal friendship”. They’d persisted through about a month of polite, distant interaction, and then… well, Patrick had been glad to have been back on the insurance plan their management team had drawn up for them. They’d racked up so many hours in emergency sessions—individual, paired, and with their partners—that they might have paid off a decent chunk of their shrinks’ mortgages.)

“Or rent for a few years, at least,” Pete says. “But yeah. I don’t think I can do that again. So let’s not think about it, okay? Catastrophizing is out. Optimizing is in.”

“I don’t think that’s the actual verb form of being optimistic. Are you sure you’re the words exp—”

“Number two,” Pete interjects, “is that we’ve got this, Patrick. We all took the time to get our shit together, and if something comes up, me and you and Joe and Andy can deal with it now, instead of bottling it up until we explode. Stop stressing yourself out with doomsday scenarios based on outdated data. That’s my job.”

Patrick shakes his head. It’s somewhat difficult to do with his face half-pressed against his pillow, but he manages. “Not your job,” he says. “Remember: if this ever stops being fun, if we ever get tired of it, we reevaluate. If we have to take a step back again, some nebulous time in the future, it’ll be because we all want to move on, okay? And it’ll be on good terms this time.”

Pete rolls slightly, hiding a grimace in his own pillow. “You need to be writing music, though.”

“I need you more,” Patrick says. “And I’m always writing music. It’s better when it’s with you, sure, but that only works if we’re both on board. The moment you feel like you’re about to capsize, let me know and I will hop on that lifeboat with you. Or be your life preserver. Whichever works better.”

This wandering monologue, besides colorfully illustrating Patrick’s point, also accomplishes his true objective, which is to make Pete smile.

“You’re in a real metaphorical mood, huh,” he says.

Patrick lifts one arm to make the widest version of a grand, sweeping gesture that can be done while wrapped in a blanket burrito. “This is when I do my best writing.”

“Maybe stick to your day job. Or your ‘whatever hour makes you a musical genius’ job.”

Abruptly feeling guilty again, Patrick admits: “Historically, it’s probably about an hour from now.”

“Nope,” Pete says. “None of that. You don’t feel tired yet, and that’s okay: your brain juices just haven’t started brewing.”

“Brain juices,” Patrick repeats, skeptical.

Pete nods. “Yeah. You’re not fully steeped in that good melatonin shit yet. Fortunately for you, I know one surefire way to make it happen: I’m going to tell you all about how I’m planning to relaunch Decaydance.”

“Wait,” Patrick says, “but that’s actually interesting.”

“Not the way I’m telling it,” Pete promises. “So, to start with, the record pressing game has totally changed in the past few years. Like, you would not believe—well, maybe you would: you had to press Soul Punk right?”

“Mm?” Patrick mumbles.

“Man, this really works every time,” Pete says.

The smugness underscoring his tone almost makes Patrick want to shake himself back to full consciousness to argue that he’s not that predictable; that more often than not, he’s the one boring Pete to sleep with long-winded, one-sided chattering about new fixations or evergreen obsessions. But it’s so warm under the blankets, and Pete’s voice is soothing as he continues to drone on about business-to-business specifics.

“So obviously, we’re contracted with Island, and pressing and distribution is mostly handled by them. With Warner, we might have some options. There’s this new kid on the block, QRP—not to be confused with QPRs, if you get what I mean.”

Here, Pete pauses for effect. Patrick surfaces from his daze just enough to give him the faint “ha” he so clearly expects.

“I’ll take it,” says Pete. “Anyway, they spun up out of Acoustic Sounds, and they’re really stepping shit up. They’re more about audiophile stuff, though; the kind of thing that collectors like you might line up for, but don’t make a huge difference to, y’know, plebs like me.”

“Not a pleb.”

“Thank you,” Pete says, low and tender, “but we both know which end of that spectrum I’m closer to. So anyways, they’re making good stuff, but overall, not sure it’s worth the cost. The cool thing is that there’re a lot of pressing factories in the States available to choose from, though. Oh, but apparently there’s, like, two places left in the world that even make the lacquer masters, the stuff you use to press mass productions. But you already knew that, right? Right. So that’s the logistics on records. What's much cooler is the A&R stuff, I know. I’ve been playing Bandcamp Roulette—listened to some Go! Team recently, I think you’d like them; lotta horns on some tracks—and apparently, powerviolence is really taking off. I’ve heard some bands that aren’t, like, amazing, but they’re definitely, uh. Unique? But talking about the music would actually be interesting to you, and that’s the opposite of what we want, so instead I’m going to tell you about the whole legal process of procurement for bands in the EU, as detailed to me by Johnny Minardi over a brunch where I had way too many bottomless mimosas, and I know what you’re thinking: ‘Pete, they were bottomless? How did the drink stay in, then? Sounds messy.’ Ha. You’re not even awake enough to properly appreciate a genuine dad joke. And yeah, I totally agree: I was incredibly messy that day—what you would actually be saying is: ‘Pete, why were you drinking so much while you’re on mood stabilizers?’ And honestly, I don’t really have a great answer for that besides the fact that they were bottomless, dude…"

—

In the morning—

Okay, at noon (effectively Patrick’s 7 AM), Patrick crawls out of bed, coaxes himself through the standard ablutions, and follows the rich scent of dark roast to the kitchen, where a shirtless and bespectacled Pete hands him a freshly poured mug. He lifts his chin in acknowledgement, letting the gesture double as a silent thanks for allowing him to sleep in.

“You’re welcome,” says Pete, “but also, you actually said that out loud.”

“Oh. Cool,” Patrick mumbles. He blinks blearily at his coffee, then tenses; he flinches further when Pete flicks his knuckles as he drifts past Patrick and toward the refrigerator.

“Don’t get self-conscious over fucking blinking,” Pete chides. “It’s an automatic… automatic? No, wait,” he retrieves his phone from the depths of his flannel pajama pants, unlocks it and taps rapidly for a moment, then gives a victorious grin. “Autonomic. It’s an autonomic reaction. Once again, you can’t control everything your body does, so stop fucking worrying about it. Do you want Eggos?”

Patrick attempts to do some vague calorie-counting in his head to get yesterday’s tally and today’s allowances, but it’s early (for him), he’s already bad at math, and Pete immediately frowns at the thought, so he decides to shelve it for now.

“Sure,” Patrick says instead. Then, midway through the sudden onset of a yawn, he asks: “Did you get some rest, at least?” It’s incomprehensible, of course, but Pete still understands him.

“Some,” he says, treating Patrick with a smile before attending to his overly complicated toaster. As he loads the frozen waffles into the contraption (which could also be an air fryer? Patrick isn’t sure, and neither is Pete), he asks: “Y’know how we talked about, like, sleep anxiety and shit?”

“Yeah?” It takes Patrick a moment to follow the question to its logical conclusion. “Right, I know. I’ll try not to stress about it too much. Just don’t want to make everyone march to my own beat, y’know?”

With the Eggos now properly situated and cooking, Pete turns and leans against the marbled countertop, folding his arms across his chest loosely. “I think you’ll find that we’re all marching to Andy Hurley’s beat, actually,” he says.

Patrick groans. “Shut up. It’s too early for dad jokes.” He rounds the corner of the kitchen island to refill his mug from the still-steaming Chemex. Freshly topped up, he hoists himself up onto the counter next to Pete and lets his legs dangle over the side. He takes a deep draw from his mug, tries to remember where he’d left off… ah. “Speaking of dad jokes?”

“It’s Ash’s week,” Pete explains. “We traded so I could do the media training stuff without interrupting his schedule too much. We’re all heading to the beach on the weekend, though, if you wanna join us.” Patrick gives him a level look, and he erupts into laughter. “Yeah, I told her you’d say that. You’d look like a lobster in next week’s photoshoots. Oh! But speaking of lobsters, you should at least come to dinner with Meags and me when she’s back from New York.”

The offer is more appealing than the prospect of going to the beach to willingly subject himself to the treacherous rays of the sun, but food is still a touchy subject for Patrick right now—for both of them, actually. Patrick’s plenty oblivious, even at the best of times, but there had been no way to miss the way Pete had felt hollowed out in Patrick’s arms when he’d come to visit him immediately after hearing news of the divorce. Pete’s come a long way since then, but he still has some ways to go, and wow, Patrick knows he’s being a bit hypocritical, but there really isn’t any reason for Pete to be giving him such an exasperated look.

“Glass moons,” Pete says, his tone paradoxically sage-like and impish at the same time. Glass moons, as in, people on them shouldn’t throw stones, presumably.

“You can’t quote yourself at me,” says Patrick, indignant. “That’s like writing a paper and citing ‘Pete Wentz’ as a source.”

“Who am I to deny such heavenly counsel,” asks Pete, “when it’s conferred upon me by the voice of an angel?”

Patrick stares at him. “I think that’s the worst compliment you’ve ever given me.”

Pete gives him an exaggerated wink. “The worst compliment so far.”

And. Well. Patrick’s not usually one to initiate physical affection, but sometimes he becomes overwhelmed by how much he’d missed this. In this moment, he can think of nothing but reaching out and grabbing hold of Pete and holding on for good. Then he remembers that he can, he’s allowed to, that they’ve talked through how to make this work, and he nearly sobs with it. Chest swelling with unburdened happiness, Patrick leans over and tips his head onto Pete’s shoulder, and Pete immediately and instinctively melts against him. If he were a cat, Patrick’s sure he would be purring; in lieu of being able to, he makes a low, contented sound that resonates in his throat and against Patrick’s temple.

“Still can’t believe I got you back,” Pete whispers.

At that, Patrick lifts his head and gifts him with a smile. “You never lost me,” he says. “We just misplaced each other for a while. Is it supposed to be doing that, by the way?”

Pete looks down at the toaster-microwave-air fryer, which is now smoking slightly. “Probably not,” he says, then turns the timer knob until it dings! cheerfully and the contraption powers down. “Hey, d’you wanna grab donuts on the way instead?”

“Might as well.” Patrick sets his mug on the countertop and slides off of it. “Do you know of any place that sells vegan ones, too? Think we might need a peace offering.”

“Gotcha covered, babe,” Pete says, his phone already in hand. “If I order ahead, we can probably even get to the rehearsal place on time.”

“Look at us, being real adults.”

Pete swats at him. “You’re not allowed to quote me unless you’re singing. Now go get dressed: there’s some shit of yours in the closet in the guest room.” And before Patrick can ask, he adds: “Yes, I still steal your clothes every time you visit. Wear the blue henley; it brings out your eyes.”

Then he returns his attention to his phone and shoos Patrick out of the kitchen.

—

“I fired our publicist,” Pete says. “Also, we brought donuts.”

It’s the first thing he says as he enters the rehearsal space. Not even a good morning, Patrick thinks, pushing his way past where Pete’s planted himself in front of the doorway to deposit the box of donuts on the nearest horizontal surface. Pete shrugs at him: to him, it’s better to rip the bandage off from the get-go.

“Okay,” says Andy, somehow entirely neutral. His attention does not stray from his laptop, where he seems to be navigating through an asteroid field on screen.

Joe, on the other hand, groans loudly. He deposits his guitar on the couch next to him and gives both Pete and Patrick a flat look. “Did we not agree that we were going to make decisions democratically this time around?” he asks. “Was that just some weird fever dream I had?”

Arms crossed and voice firm, Pete says: “She was getting on Patrick’s case about all his… y’know.” He presses a hand to his cheek and blinks twice, somehow managing to imitate Patrick’s nervous habits without making a mockery of it.

“Oh.” Joe’s shoulders settle immediately, even as his brows knit together. “Well, no regrets there. Fuck her.”

“Yeah,” Andy says, dragging his eyes away from his laptop for just long enough to nod in Patrick’s direction, “fuck her.”

Momentarily stunned by their effortless concession to this change, Patrick scrambles for words for a few seconds before finally managing to ask, “You guys aren’t mad?”

A frown forms on Joe’s face. “I mean, yeah, kinda, but only at her. That’s just how you are, dude. She has no business telling you to be less Patrick Stump for the camera.”

The problem is that Patrick’s not entirely sure how much Patrick Stump is too much Patrick Stump. And now he’s thought his name so many times in a row that he feels like a narcissist. “I get where she was coming from, though,” he says. “I’m a little weird.”

“Well, at sixteen, you joined a pop-punk band that spawned out of the local hardcore scene and spent your formative years on the road with a bunch of headcases. And also me,” says Andy. He’s still playing his game, completely unperturbed. “It would be weird if you weren’t weird.”

“Ouch,” says Pete.

“You’re very lovable headcases,” Andy adds.

Pete nods. “Much better.”

“Anyways, we like your weird little brain, Stump,” Joe assures him. “It comes up with cool ditties and makes us tons of money.”

“I do like that part,” Pete says. “And thank you. I’ve been trying to tell him this whole time that he’s perfect the way he is, and he won’t believe me.”

“It’s possible that you may not be the most objective source,” says Andy.

“Besides, do you think it would be okay for her to ask me to be less Jewish?” Joe asks, sounding as patient as he is when he’s walking Patrick through an idea he’s had for an addition to a song’s arrangement. “Or to tell me to talk without the lisp? Or not be clinically fucking depressed?”

“No,” Patrick says, “but—”

“Ergo, it’s fucked up to ask you to not be you,” Joe finishes. He waves both hands outward with a flourish to emphasize his point. “Like, don’t get me wrong: you’re an oddball, and boy, do we clash sometimes. But I like that about you, even when you’re pissing me off.”

Patrick’s still not sold on this straightforward acceptance of his many faults—he’s fairly sure that he has room for growth on the filler words, at the very least. But Pete and Andy and Joe all look like they’re ready to fight him to defend him, so maybe that’s a conversation better left for later.

“Incidentally,” Joe continues, “she did tell me to do all three of those things. Says they don’t poll well.” He smiles up at the ceiling, playing at wistful. “Ahhh, would that bad focus group data were all I needed to be able to turn this frown upside-down.”

If life were a television show, Patrick thinks, the background music at this moment would have ground to a halt with a horrendous record scratch.

“What,” Patrick says. Or, well, yells. It’s difficult to control his volume, what with the sudden burst of anger that’s washed over him. Red-hot rage burns in the center of his chest, pumping like fresh, superheated magma through his veins and leaving his skin feeling too warm, too tight.

The utter fucking nerve. She could—anyone could say whatever they want to Patrick, but Joe? Joe, who Patrick loves dearly, who’s one of the most talented, funniest, smartest people he knows, who’s done nothing to deserve this beyond agreeing to return to a band that’s already put him through hell and back once before?

Hell no, Patrick thinks viciously. Suddenly, Pete’s desire to call up the CEO of Island Records feels a lot less like revenge and more like retribution.

Andy pauses his game. “Sorry, what? She asked you to do what?”

“I’m not saying she had SS tattoos or whatever,” Joe says mildly, “but she did come prepared with a spreadsheet that tallied up all my casual usage of Yiddish. Said that Middle America couldn’t connect with it.”

“What the fuck,” Pete exclaims. The acoustics of the rehearsal space allow the sharpness of the “fuck” to ring so perfectly that Patrick almost gets distracted by it. He forces himself to tune back in when Pete snarls: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Didn’t want to kvetch too much about it,” says Joe. He snaps his fingers. “Oh, dang it: there I go again.”

“I’m serious,” and now Pete looks downright distressed: his eyebrows creasing inward, the corners of his mouth dropping precipitously. “Joe, that’s fucked up.”

“Kinda didn’t want to be the one to rock the boat,” Joe says. “I sort of figured she was shitting on everyone, but I—”

Patrick doesn’t need to be in Joe’s head to know how he’d been about to finish the sentence. “I know you’d go to bat for Patrick”, probably. Which is utter bullshit, because even with the vast host of characters with which Pete had held court during his days as the prince of the Chicago hardcore scene, even with having already met Andy in their teens, everyone knows that Joe Trohman was the first person to make it onto that list of people Pete would take a bullet for.

Everyone except Joe, apparently.

Patrick blinks, and suddenly Pete is knelt in front of Joe, both hands clasped around Joe’s.

“Joe. JT. Joe Troh,” he says, voice pained. “I am always, always in your corner. I will always be there to back you up. Please tell me you know that.”

Joe averts his eyes, tipping his head forward so that his curls cast his face in shadow. Still, Patrick can see his expression grow soft.

“I know that,” he says quietly. “I just… you know me. My brain makes me believe some bullshit sometimes.”

“I know the feeling.” Pete’s fingers tighten around Joe’s. “Don’t let it tell you I don’t care.”

Patrick’s never known Joe to fluster easily, but it’s apparent that this level of sincerity hits the target dead center: there’s a telling pink tinge to Joe’s face when he finally lifts it. “Geez, okay,” he mutters. “I get it. Get off your knees, Pete, you’re getting too old for that shit.”

Now radiating a bright smile, Pete springs to his feet in one smooth motion. “Yeah, yeah, it’s all jokes now, but just wait until you’re over the hill, too, Joey.”

“I don’t have to wait. I feel elderly right now.”

“Don’t you have to be forty to be over the hill?” Patrick asks. Pete takes in a breath to respond, but Patrick reads it off him faster: “Oh, right: rock star years.”

Mournfully, Pete heaves a dramatic sigh. “I’m basically forty-seven,” he says.

Andy looks thoughtful. “What’s the math on that in human years?”

The three of them turn in unison to Joe, who rolls his eyes so hard it looks like it hurts.

“Liking math rock does not actually make me good at math,” he reminds them. “But that’s, like, 1.4 human to musician, probably.”

“I’m decrepit,” Pete says. “An antique.”

He’s going to be insufferable when he’s actually old, Patrick thinks. But then, ten years ago, Pete having the opportunity to grow old hadn’t been a given. Even a year prior, with the specter of Pete’s past attempts having faded with time, Patrick had still been uncertain that he’d be allowed back into his life ever again. It's a wonderful feeling now, knowing that he’s regained the privilege to watch Pete be annoying across decades to come.

“Not sure if that was a compliment,” Pete says, “but thanks, I guess?”

Joe looks between the two of them, then snorts loudly. “Can’t believe I forgot about that,” he says. “Bet she took the Starbuck Twins routine real well.”

Pete presses a hand against his chest, seemingly genuinely shocked. “Jesus, Joe, what a deep cut.”

“I have been known to read a book or two, on occasion,” Joe says primly. “So what happened? Did she give you stats on how your weird brain thing was endangering our listening numbers in Mississippi?”

“I don’t think she believed it was a real thing,” Patrick says. He finally drops his bag off near the drum riser and heads toward his dedicated instrument case on the other end of Joe’s couch, circling the table Andy’s set up at and receiving a fist bump from him on the way over. He perches on the arm of the sofa and explains: “She spent most of the time criticizing my bodily functions.”

“If it’s any consolation,” Andy says, “she told me I have to speak up at least as much as Pete. And that talking about being vegan and straightedge in contrast to the rest of you came off as ‘supercilious’ to her focus groups.” He pauses. “Not that it isn’t, but I still love you guys, anyways.”

“Once again, thank you for that heartwarming clarification, Andy.”

“Any time, Pete,” Andy says pleasantly.

Patrick turns to face his band and takes a moment to marvel at how all of them had separately had terrible experiences, but had been too hesitant to share them. A glance at Pete reveals he’s thinking the same thing. One step further, even: maybe, Pete thinks, Joe had been onto something when he’d suggested group therapy before the split.

Patrick arches an eyebrow at him: You think?

Out loud, he says: “She didn’t even try to get to know us at all, did she? I mean, obviously, but like, it’s like,” he stops, collects his thoughts, starts again: "It's like she made up some version of us in her head that she thought we should be, then decided to stick with it.”

Speaking of which: they all turn to look at Pete as one.

“What?” he says. “It’s not like that’s a brand new thing for me. People have invented terrible versions of me in their heads since we started the band.”

Which is painfully true, yes, but it usually comes from external sources: tabloid photographers creating malicious narratives with out-of-context pictures; interviewers fishing for shitty quotes to plaster all over gossip site front pages. Rarely does it come from within their own organization.

“Yes, Pete,” Andy says, “you’ve been treated terribly in the past, and it’s one of the most devastating things I ever witnessed happen to someone I love.” He crosses one leg over the other at the knee and threads his fingers together on top of them. Even and empathetic, he says: “That’s why we want to know if our publicity team is doing the same thing on the inside. So what did Harper say to you?”

“Nothing!” Pete tosses his hands into the air. His eyes flick toward Patrick, and he hastily appends: “Nothing new.”

Uh-huh. What was it Pete had said the other day? Even if Patrick wasn’t already plugged into Pete’s brain as a consequence of their bizarre synchronicity, that response wouldn’t have been even the slightest bit convincing. Yeah, Patrick thinks, tipping his head to one side to convey this to Pete with an unimpressed twist of his lips, that sounds about right.

Pete scowls back at him.

For Andy and Joe’s sake, Patrick says aloud: “Remember that this goes both ways, Wentz?” He taps at his own forehead, then points at Pete, drawing an invisible line between the two of them. “If you don’t tell me now, I can just read it off you later.”

Curiosity visibly piqued, Joe leans forward slightly. “Wait, is it actually that accurate?”

Pete rolls his shoulders in a shrug that hints at resignation. “More or less.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Andy says, “does that mean Pete can’t lie to you? Oh,” his eyes widen slightly, “is that why Bob and Dan made us stop doing poker nights on tours?”

“Dude,” says Joe, aghast, “were you guys hustling us?”

“Not the point!” Patrick says, because yes, they absolutely were, but no one needs to know that. “We’re talking about Harper and Pete!”

“We’re coming back to the poker thing,” Andy promises. Then he redirects his attention to Pete once again, crosses his arms, and says, commanding: “Start talking, Pete.”

“Well,” Pete says.

“Oh, c’mon, you can’t make us spill about these attacks against our deep-seated insecurities and not share,” Joe says. “What happened to being in my corner?”

The corner of Pete’s mouth twitches upward. “That’s what you call backing you up?”

Joe shakes his head, faux-solemn. “Solidarity, dude.”

“Pete,” says Patrick.

“Jesus, okay! I mean, it was all just the basic stuff I’d get from any publicity manager. ‘Don’t ever take a picture of your dick again’, ‘please take your meds or we’ll have Crush take over your social media accounts’, blah, blah, blah.” He taps an index finger against his chin, humming tunelessly as he thinks to himself. “Oh. I guess she did tell me in, like, the most indirect, super-vague way that I should probably try to downplay being black—”

Patrick stands, filled with enough fury to throw a thousand chairs. “I’m going to kill her.”

“Or at least fire her again,” Joe says helpfully.

“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” Pete says. He seems bemused, at most. “What she said to you guys was much worse.”

“Not even a little bit,” says Andy. He pauses, then tips his head toward Joe. “Well, maybe a little bit.”

“It’s not really all that different from what I’d overhear back when we started touring outside of cities,” Pete says. “You kind of grow a thick skin when said skin color sets you apart from, like, ninety-nine percent of the scene.”

“Still!” Patrick blurts, and then doesn’t follow it up with anything, because what the fuck does one even say to all of this? He curls his hands into tight fists under the sleeves of his sweater, digging sharp crescents into his palms. The last thing he wants to do so early into their reunion is have a full-on rage blackout, but god, is he ever close to one right now.

“I think Patrick’s gonna lose it,” Andy says.

“I’m not!” Patrick says. Shouts. Shit. He closes his eyes, sucks in a steadying breath. Holds for ten seconds. Then, slowly, releases it, controlling the speed so that his lungs empty over the course of a slow count to ten.

Calm. He can be calm.

“Whoa,” he hears Joe whisper. “No one told me Patrick 2.0 could abort the self-destruct sequence.”

“He doesn’t even throw anything anymore,” Pete says. He sounds proud, but also pensive, like he misses dodging flying furniture.

“Just—it’s fucked up, okay?” Patrick says, opening his eyes. He’s still angry, but leagues away from spewing venomous wrath all over the place, as he would have done before the hiatus and several thousand dollars’ worth of therapy. “Like, life is hard as it is. I don’t know why people actively choose to be assholes when it’s so easy not to be. I don’t know why we hired one of them! I don’t even—I just—”

“You can’t punch every racist,” Joe says. “Or every antisemite. Your hands would get fucked up, and we’d have to revive the search for a second guitarist.”

“Well, she’s out,” Pete says. “We don’t have to worry about her anymore, so don’t get worked up over nothing, Patrick. Let it go.”

God. With no small amount of effort, Patrick forces his fists to unclench. He flexes his fingers, then brings them to his face; consciously stops himself from going for his cheek, detours to pinch at the bridge of his nose instead. “I’ll… I’ll try, I guess.”

“And I’ll talk to the powers that be and figure out how much the social media strategy needs to change, and who else we might need to replace. We’ll burn it all down and rebuild, if we have to. Got it?”

“Yes, Dad,” Joe intones. “God, wait.” He shudders. “It feels so weird to say that now that you’re an actual dad.”

“‘Yes, Mom’?” Andy offers.

“Huh.” Joe’s curls brush his shoulder as he tips his head to the side, contemplative. “Honestly, I feel like that works better.”

“Okay!” Pete says, interrupting the banter with a loud clap. He looks flustered, suddenly, but seems to be employing Patrick’s “think of complex tasks as a distraction” strategy to great success: all Patrick gets from him is a laundry list of people to contact at Island and Crush. “New rule,” Pete continues, “if something’s fucked with the label, tell me and I will make it right, okay?”

Joe holds up a hand. When Pete points at him, he says: “That actually sounds like an old rule.”

Pete rolls his eyes. “Okay, well, then I’m reiterating the rule. Putting it in 72-point font, bolding it, and triple-underlining it.”

“Proposed addendum to the rule?” Patrick asks. When he’s sure he has everyone’s attention, he says: “If something’s fucked with the label, tell me, too.”

Joe and Andy look to each other, then at Patrick. His breath stutters—he really doesn’t want to have to argue his case to them, too—but then Joe downright beams at him. It’s a beautiful sight to behold, especially to Patrick, who’s still halfway convinced that Joe hates his guts for his totalitarian command of Folie a Deux.

“You’ll go to bat for wittle ol’ me?” Joe asks, splaying a hand across his chest in a Southern belle-esque fashion.

Patrick feels his face warm. “Of course I will. Like Pete said, I’ve always got your back.”

(In the process of involving himself with some of the business side of their comeback, Patrick’s come to realize that there are many advantages to being the lead singer for one of their genre’s most successful bands. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much impossible for him to say “the label can’t have Fall Out Boy without me, and I will walk if you are ever mistreated,” and not sound like a conceited tool—)

“I can say this because I’m not Patrick,” says Pete, “but the label can’t have Fall Out Boy without him. And he’ll walk if they shit on any of us. So will I.”

Well, that’s one way to do it. Patrick shoots Pete a grateful look; Pete tips his head in the barest approximation of a bow. Patrick feels a little bad about pushing him earlier. (Pete thinks: good. Patrick promptly rescinds his remorse.)

Anyway: “Exactly that,” Patrick says, turning back to the other half of their band. “We’re a team. Pete might be the quarterback, but I am absolutely ready to be… um. The forward?”

“You were doing so well,” Pete says.

“It’s definitely a position in a type of football,” says Andy, encouraging.

Patrick grimaces. “Point guard?”

“Colder.”

“Sports metaphor!” Patrick says, throwing jazz hands into the air. “The point is that I am always ready to step up to the plate for any one of you.”

“Hey, we managed to bring it back to baseball,” Joe says. He’s still smiling, though it’s settled into a placid sort of endearment. “Good for you.”

“Like you know anything about sports, either,” Pete says.

“I know you don’t need a point guard on a football field!” Joe pauses, thinks. “Wait, do you?”

“I appreciate your attempts at figurative cohesion," Andy says, “and your support, Patrick. I don’t think you had to really say it, because we already know you care, but it’s really sweet of you. Also, go Packers.”

Everyone groans.

“You really had to get that one in there, didn’t you?” says Pete, though he’s clearly fighting a grin. He flops onto the couch next to Joe, who only narrowly rescues his guitar from being crushed. “Man, we’re definitely back.”

“Wow, cool, we all love each other and would commit heinous breaches of contract to defend anyone in the band,” says Joe. He stands and moves to place his guitar in one of the racks lining the walls before turning to look at the rest of them. “Can we eat these fucking donuts now? I’m starving.”

Pete nods, waving his hand magnanimously toward the box. “Donuts, then DoA.”

They each manage a donut and two and a half playthroughs of Dead on Arrival before Patrick remembers what he’d meant to say earlier. He clears his throat, instantly becomes the focus of intense scrutiny for doing so halfway through a verse and into the mic, and nearly chickens out. After another moment of waffling, during which Pete loudly clears his throat right back, he throws caution to the wind and goes for it.

“I just wanted to—to say sorry about the…” Patrick points to his own forehead again, then at Pete, in lieu of any proper way to describe their whole thing. “We’ll try to keep it to a minimum.”

I did not agree to that, says Pete’s look of moderate betrayal. Patrick ignores him in favor of awaiting judgement from the rest of the band. Whatever comes next has to be up to them.

Joe, who is now absently plucking out the first few chords of Get Busy Living as he roams the stage area, narrows his eyes at Patrick. “Don’t you guys go a little insane when you’re not in each other’s heads?”

“No,” Pete and Patrick say as one, even though that is precisely what tends to happen. It had been just one of myriad reasons why they’d spun completely out of control during their last tour. The hiatus had been its own special kind of hell, and even more recently, last year’s attempt to draw up the “healthy boundaries” hadn’t fared much better.

“And that’s a double negative, so I’d say it’s a yes,” says Joe. “Please do not turn off the cosmic brain shit and drive us all crazy as a consequence. I had to promise Marie a five year moratorium on nervous breakdowns before she agreed to let me go out on tour. Don’t make me break it on year one.”

Andy’s expression clouds over. “Are you sure Harper didn’t tell you off for it?”

“No, I,” says Patrick; he looks to Pete for confirmation that he hadn’t either, then turns back to Andy. “She didn’t. It’s just that I know it was annoying last time—”

“The next person who apologizes for being their authentically weird self gets a donut to the head,” Joe declares.

“But,” Patrick starts, and Joe steps toward the box, making clear his threat is very real. Patrick shifts gears sharply. “Can we at least choose the donut?”

“Nope, I’m throwing Andy’s. That way you get pastry all over your face and you get to feel bad about depriving him of his special vegan protein monstrosities.”

“C’mon, Patrick,” Andy says. “Don’t take my donuts away from me. I need those to live.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Patrick assures him. Even as a joke, making Andy unhappy is still an upsetting prospect he tries to avoid whenever possible.

“God,” Joe says, “I forgot how easy it is to strong-arm you into doing shit using our shared and deeply-ingrained Midwestern fear of upsetting anyone.” He easily dodges Patrick’s ineffectual swat at his shoulder, then adds: “Anyone besides Pete, I mean.”

“Wait, what?” Pete loosens his hold on his bass, letting it hang off of him as he grips his mic stand and leans heavily on it. “Why am I excluded?” he says, his voice amplified and twice as whiny for it.

Pete has migrated his setup close enough for Andy to reach out over his kit and pat his arm gently with a drumstick. “When you’re the exception to every rule Patrick has, it includes the nice ones, too,” he says.

The look on Pete's face indicates that he has never before considered it as a negative. He shakes his head, says: “Gotta take the good with the bad, I s’pose. If I can’t handle him at his Trickiest—”

Joe, who’s drifted stage left at this point, leans into Pete’s mic to drown him out with: “God, shut uppp.”

Pete cackles, elbowing Joe away so he can speak into the mic, deep as his voice can go: “Make me.”

“Fine,” says Patrick. He hooks his own mic stand with one ankle, steps inward until it’s sliding up the length of his leg (and watches Pete and Joe’s eyes go wide—yes, he learned a bit about stage presence during his solo tour, and intends to put it to good use), and catches the microphone just as it swings toward him. Throaty and rich, he starts: “You could have knocked me out,” and watches his band scramble for their instruments.

Joe manages to free up one hand by switching to hammer-ons for a single bar, and uses it to give him a thumbs-up. Pete, meanwhile, glares at Patrick until he rotates in place, still grinning, to display his own guitar, hands pressed to the correct frets such that Pete can mirror him. He can feel Andy’s mild exasperation burning at his neck. On all three sides, Patrick feels a kind of warmth that can only come from a decade of unquestionable, occasionally aggravated, true blue love.

And Patrick thinks—knows—that he’ll never get tired of this.