Archive of Our Own

dear future self, i hope you’re doing well… i’m drunk on cheap whisky in an airport hotel

October 2009

Pete is drunk and maudlin in a hotel just outside of New York City.

His band is over, that much is absolutely certain now. He is a disaster, both personally and professionally. Existence is a loop of media catastrophes labelled with headlines and snappy homemade shirts to match. He doesn’t live his life, just checks the pages of Perez Hilton’s website for a daily rundown of what he’s done wrong this time.

Pete Wentz: From undisputed heavyweight champion of the scene to washed-up has-been, collapsed, bloodied and braindead in the middle of the ring having punched himself to death.

If Pete could claim a wish right now — if there’s a single one left to be squeezed out of the rusted lamp he’s been rubbing for the past eight years — it would be to hurl himself through space and time and into the future. It’s not that he believes things will be better there — he does not. He hopes, though, that they won’t be quite so immediately awful. That’s all. It probably wouldn’t work. If the past four years have taught Pete anything — from Best Buy parking lots to dick pics on MySpace to announcing his marriage and impending fatherhood while Patrick barely controlled his heartbreak — it’s that genies rarely give you what you want, only what you ask for.

Yes, there’s a difference.

Yes, Pete has worked it out the hard way.

So here he is. A human moth, he’s battered himself against the lightbulb of his own selfishness, self-loathing, self-hatred until he finally burnt himself out. That lamp has always had sharp edges, handle it wrong and it cuts you wide open and lets everything fall out. Well, what could be harder, brighter, sharper than this? This exquisite emptiness that throbs through him. If it wasn’t for the alcohol mixing with his stomach acid, Pete would worry he’s lost the ability to feel anything at all.

“You know what your problem is?”

Pete rolls his eyes toward the voice. Patrick’s voice — a sound Pete has substituted for oxygen, sustenance, gravity over the past eight years. Even now he savours it, even now when it’s dripping venom so caustic it burns on impact and holds him down in starless cities. He listens because has the strangest feeling that in a couple of weeks time, Patrick won’t be taking his calls. In a few years, Patrick won’t remember him at all beyond a funny story he tells at parties. 

Pete raises his eyebrows, shakes his head. “Go ahead,” he slurs. “Tell me again what my problem is.”

There’s whisky, crushed Xanax and cherry NyQuil on his breath. He’s exceptionally talented at mixing his prescriptions with his problems.

“You’re so desperate for the world to see you,” Patrick continues, his voice bladed, and Pete braces for the inevitable impact. “You want to be remembered. You keep forgetting that memorable people do memorable things — you’re just a headline, Pete. You’re old newsprint and tomorrow they’ll forget all about you.”

Patrick will have to do better than that if he wants to cause more damage than Pete’s own internal self-flagellation. 

“I’d like to be insignificant,” Pete says nonchalantly. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to go to fucking Starbucks and not have Gawker turn it into an international incident.”

“Well, look at that, it’s like you only attract horrible things,” Patrick says lightly.

Pete doesn’t mention his son, not because he thinks that wonderful collection of all of the best parts of Pete is horrible, but because Pete didn’t attract Bronx. His child is the universe’s idea of a joke: Look at this perfect thing you made, the universe says, look at this ever-changing being of wonder and astonishment, who wakes up every day and learns something new, look at him and remember that he’s not like you. 

“I attracted you,” he says. 

“Yeah, just look what you’ve created,” Patrick sneers. “You took everything I gave you and made it ugly. You’re not a friend, you’re — a fucking cancer. You take root and you grow until you’ve destroyed everything good, everything living. I used to think it wasn’t your fault, you know? I used to think it was the people around you who pushed you into making these stupid fucking decisions that spiralled out of control. But it’s not. You’re a fucking decay and you’re rotting through everything that tries to love you.”

Patrick leans back, self-satisfied. It’s clear he thinks he’s dealt the death blow. The lamplight highlights the way his eyes don’t sparkle anymore, the way he’s dulling at the edges like the family picture in Back to the Future. Maybe that’s just the lightbulb — it’s not like they shell out for mood lighting in budget airport hotels and it’s not like the label are springing for five star when Fall Out Boy has nothing left to give.

“I don’t care about you anymore,” Patrick says viciously, proving that he cares very much. “I’ve taught myself not to.”

And Pete… feels nothing. It’s like he’s spent the past two years feeling everything he could possibly feel and now there’s nothing left. He’s an empty vessel. A hollow hull. There’s no beat or spark of emotion left inside of him. It’s been wrung out gradually, one press disaster at a time, until Pete lost the ability to experience anything beyond this hollow nothingness. He smiles at Patrick, his teeth bared, his cheeks balled, his eyes dead. Patrick doesn’t smile back.

“I’m glad you feel like you can be this open with me,” Pete says mildly. “It’s good – My therapist would tell you we’re in a good place right now. Can I be honest with you now – Fuck!”

Patrick, on his knees at the side of Pete’s hotel bed, licks over the straining red tip of Pete’s cock. He sucks him down with fury, with anger, with just an edge of biting teeth. Patrick lets Pete hit the back of his throat and then goes further, sucks him like a punishment. Pete’s whole world is a ragged wound. Patrick goes down on him like he’s trying to suck out the poison.  

(Or maybe Patrick just wants this to be over quickly, to burn through the motions until they both get off and get out and go their separate ways and never see each other again.) 

(Maybe it’s just pity sex: nothing more, nothing less.)

It always comes back to this, no matter how many different people Pete falls in love with or falls into bed with, no matter how many times he’s hurt Patrick or Patrick has hurt him, they always end up here, on hotel beds or in bathroom stalls or tucked in dark corners of sold out stadiums. Pete digs his hands into the fine, sandy hair at the nape of Patrick’s neck, feels each strand and memorizes it. If this is all they get, this ugly agony one last time, then he’ll keep it as a journal entry he can look back over when he wants to hate himself just a little more. 

“That’s it,” he says softly, looking down into Patrick’s eyes. Patrick holds Pete’s gaze with defiance, with anger and his mouth stretched at the corners. “You know how I like it, don’t you?” He’s taking advantage of the fact that Patrick has a mouthful of cock and can’t bitch back at him. Patrick’s tongue does something tricky and interesting on the way down, his mouth slick and hot. Hot gold sensation throbs through Pete’s groin, delicious molten sunrise. “You know how I like it because I’m the one who taught you. I made you what you are, Patrick.”

Patrick, furious, pops off him in a messy spill of spit and fluid and throws Pete back onto the bed. The back of Pete’s skull meets the headboard and maybe in an expensive hotel where the headboards are solid that might matter, but this is the Marriott and the padding takes the impact until Patrick lands on top of him and crushes the air from Pete’s lungs. The room is anoxic and neither of them can breathe. Pete waits. Pete asphyxiates. 

“Fuck you,” Patrick whispers. 

“Yeah,” Pete laughs. “Fuck me.”

Patrick smashes his mouth into Pete’s like a punch. There is no tenderness in this kiss, no lingering sweetness. They kiss like a bloody, bare knuckle fight, pouring all of their combined anger at Pete into their mouths. There’s salt in Pete’s mouth that he thinks is blood. It doesn’t really matter which of them is bleeding; he’s inside Patrick’s mouth or Patrick is inside his, smeared into his gums like cocaine and, honestly, that’s going to get him through a lot in the next few months. He takes two fistfuls of Patrick’s hair and yanks him closer, lets his bloodied mouth throb and fill with Patrick’s vicious tongue. He sucks down a sticky breath: It turns out Pete can breathe, but only when he’s taking the air from the bottom of Patrick’s lungs in greedy, grateful gulps. 

He palms Patrick’s cock, feels it smooth and hard as he pushes it up against the tiny round of Patrick’s belly. Patrick is skinny like he was on Warped Tour, his hip bones defined, his shoulders so broad. Oh, nostalgia, Pete thinks, so angry, so astonishingly hurt. Pete licks Patrick’s throat, bites his newly exposed collar bone until it’s bruised. It turn, Patrick pulls Pete’s dick raw and red, swollen against his palm as Pete whimpers, keens and defies himself not to come. This universe in which his band exists ends with their orgasm. Pete knows this. Pete knows this.

It’s amazing how black and white everything feels trapped in the epicenter of a wildly uncontrolled explosion. Pete is pliant, lets Patrick lead him by the dick until he’s on his knees, face down in a comforter that smells of generic fabric soap, his ass high in the air. His fists clench and unclench into the sheets, his mouth open, the fabric wet with his desperate drool. When Patrick touches his asshole with lube-greasy fingers Pete sees stars, a whole galaxy etched in diamonds on the sad beige wall. When Patrick finds his prostate with two digging fingertips it narrows down to a white dwarf, a blinding flash, a nuclear detonation. Pete makes an animal noise at the back of his throat and bucks his hips back in greedy desperation. Yes, he can feel this.

“Do you want this?” Patrick asks and Pete’s spine arches without his consent. It’s the first thing he’s said since he spat out Pete’s cock. “You know it’s — It’s gonna be harder — after? — if we do this. For me, anyway.” There is no way they can’t regret this, no way to stop it from hurting. It’s an inevitability like the tear of a band-aid. Pete nods his head. Patrick’s voice breaks into a sob. “Okay. Yeah. Of course.”

Of course. Like the pain Pete causes is ordained. 

The problem is, Pete thinks, as Patrick pushes his slippery dick inside of him, as he expands him from the inside out like the ever-growing heat of an exothermic reaction, the problem is that he doesn’t know how to stop hurting everyone around him. He has never made a correct decision. Then Patrick cants his hips, drops his knees, brushes his tip against the strained gold gland of Pete’s prostate and Pete finds it impossible to think at all. He cries out, ragged, a desperate sound that bubbles up from his belly and into his chest. Yes to this. Yes to all of this.

Isn’t this why he falls into bed with anyone who’ll take him?

Isn’t this the blissful emptiness he craves?

Patrick starts slow but builds quickly. His hips move so precise and practiced that Pete could be a guitar, a drum kit, an empty GarageBand file that Patrick works into something else. Something thrashing and angry and dissonant. Pete bucks his hips, pulls Patrick’s girth and swell up tight against his prostate and tastes it glitter at the back of his throat. This is a love song in their own way. 

Pete comes on a breath, surprised, his body rigid and tight and then loose and limp. And suddenly, Pete feels everything. He feels the soul-crushing loss of Patrick, he misses him, even when Patrick is still inside of him, with such ferociousness it makes him shout. I don’t want you to leave me, he thinks desperately, even as Patrick tenses behind him. Patrick makes a sound like his orgasm has gutted him, like everything he is has been scraped out and he’s nothing but hollow bones and skin and deep, shameful regret. 

Patrick pulls out and flops onto his back, lean and naked at Pete’s side. He doesn’t speak for a long time.

“We shouldn’t have done that,” he says eventually. 

“Obviously we shouldn’t have done that,” Pete mutters into his pillow. “When have we ever avoided something we shouldn’t do?”

Patrick laughs bitterly. “One of us was seventeen when this started.”

“And now you’re twenty-five.”

“And now you’re married.”

And, God. Fucking God. Pete is so, so tired of this. This endless attempt to absolve the guilt, to shift the blame, as if their fate wasn’t prewritten in the stars the moment Pete set foot onto a Midwestern porch a lifetime ago. He shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t want to fight anymore. 

“I should go,” Patrick says, and reaches for his boxers. 

Punch-drunk and sex-lazy, Pete does not object until Patrick is buckling his newly-necessary belt.

“I wrote a song,” Pete says hopefully. “I mean — I didn’t write a song. I have some lyrics, though. A line.”

“We’re not in a band anymore,” Patrick reminds him, Pete tastes it, hot and bitter gorge at the back of his throat. He doesn’t want it to be true. He sees no way to stop it. 

Pete flinches, hurt. “We’re not breaking up,” he says. “It’s just — It’s a hiatus. A break. What we all wanted. What you wanted.”

“You didn’t fucking want me!” Patrick explodes. “Don’t you understand that? You talk about hips and hearts when the hips are always yours and the heart is always mine.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers. And he is. He is. He is so, so sorry but he has no idea how to fix it. His Midas touch is a curse. 

“Right,” Patrick mutters. “You’re always sorry.”

Pete looks at Patrick with such desperate, aching sadness, and says, his voice very small, “I don’t know what to do with what’s inside my head if I can’t give it to you. You make sense of me, Rick.”

Patrick looks down, like he’s waiting until he can trust himself to stay neutral. Carefully, he places his feet into his shoes, ties the laces, stands. Pete’s whole world is breaking apart. Pitifully, he holds out the napkin he scarred with lyrics in the hotel bar. Patrick doesn’t reach for it but scans it briefly. “Dear future self? That’s rich.”

“Maybe one day,” Pete hypothesises, with his knees drawn to his chest, “you’ll want to take a look at it. Maybe one day we’ll write another song together.”

Pete isn’t asking for much, just a taste of hope, even if it’s false.

“Put it in a time capsule,” Patrick bites out viciously. “Mail it to your future self. See if he cares.”

He slams the door and Pete no longer feels nothing. He is the point of impact, he thinks as he throws the lamp through the TV. He is destruction. 

So now he destroys.

August 2011

When Nostradamus predicted the end of the world, he failed to mention that it would take place in Los Angeles in 2011. The divorce requires two more signatures and then it’s final and Pete is no longer married. He sees his son on alternate weekends, bigger and louder and more impossibly perfect with each absence. There’s only so many trips to Disneyland McDonalds Kidspace they can take before Pete admits out loud that it’s no substitute for full time fatherhood. 

Patrick’s prediction has come true with exquisite inevitability. Pete finally did it. He finally drove away every person that tried to love him. He lost Patrick and he lost Ashlee and he lost Bronx and now there are no poles of gravity holding him together. He is collapsing star. He crushes everything that comes too close. 

So, he avoids his own eyes in the mirrors of public restrooms. He makes himself small, mild, unnoticeable. There’s comfort in invisibility. He wants to stop existing but not how he did in Best Buy. Now he wants to never have existed in the first place. Which is probably why he’s here, in the back room of Saint Rocke without a VIP pass, but on the guest list. He sits on a faded blue couch and counts the stains of unknown provenance that spot the unbeautiful carpet. This venue is a cave. It’s been a while since Pete’s been somewhere like this. 

When he opens his mouth to speak, his voice is rusty, unused in days. “I was thinking—”

“Don’t talk,” Patrick says, wiping off sweat with a towel. It’s clear he didn’t imagine himself here either. It’s good that they can bond over that. Pete snaps his mouth closed so hard his teeth snap. “I can’t — I can’t do this if you talk.”

Pete’s shrug is helpless.

“Come here,” Patrick murmurs softly. “I won’t talk either.” Scant comfort. 

When Pete wraps his arms around Patrick, he finds him tiny, birdlike. A flashy creature with big blond hair and a red silk suit. Pete hasn’t showered in a week, hasn’t shaved in longer, his hair riots but he lacks the capacity to deal with it. They’ve never looked less like Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump. They’re tearing open the wounds once again, working their fingernails under scabs that have barely formed because they both like the scars. 

It’s been a rough couple years. Pete needs this. They both do.

They’re doing this in the tiny bathroom off Patrick’s tinier dressing room. Pete’s living out his divorce from the a suitcase in a hotel room he rents by the week. Patrick can’t even afford that. The walls in here are scarred with the passage of the thousands of people who came before them. They’re haunted by the ghosts of every poor choice they’ve made as they kiss, touch, undress. This time four years ago, Pete was the happiest he’d ever been in his life, now he feels like he’s falling apart. God, how did it come to this?

Patrick kicks off his pants, his boxers, his dress shoes. He lowers Pete’s zipper and tugs out his dick. There’s more than one form of addiction. He takes Pete’s painfully swollen erection into his hand and squeezes softly, rubs the heel of his hand over the head until Pete hisses, too sensitive. Patrick turns around, braces over the cistern. He doesn’t offer lube and Pete’s not allowed to ask. Instead, he spits into the ditch of Patrick’s ass, lets his fingers find the nervy quiver of Patrick’s hole and feels him damp and hot and earthy as he slowly, slowly, slowly pushes inside. 

They don’t make a sound. Pete’s fingers find Patrick’s prostate and he ripples from his toes to his hips. Pete feels okay now the dopamine is starting to hit, his heavy cock dark against Patrick’s thigh. Who needs benzos when it can be substituted for self-harm this filthy good? Who needs serotonin when denial works just as well?

He keeps his fingers inside as he lines up his dick, pulls them out as he pushes in and feels Patrick pulse and tremble from the inside. It burns them both, delicious friction, Pete’s dark hands wrapped over Patrick’s pale and prominent hips. His belt buckle clanks with every thrust, he wants to die from this orgasm when it arrives, wants to blow away to dust and ruin. 

Patrick comes first, his release ribboning into the toilet bowl in front of him, splashing the seat, streaking his own belly and shirt tails. Pete stops moving deep inside and feels every flutter of Patrick’s orgasm with his eyes rolled back in his skull. He’d finish over Patrick’s thighs but Patrick reaches back, sinks his nails into Pete’s ass and commands moremoremore. So that’s what Pete gives him, fucking him slow and deep as Patrick arches his back and doesn’t make a sound. Pete comes to the sound of his own desperate sob and wonders; if it’s supposed to feel good, why does it hurt so much?

He pulls out, his dick slick and raw against his thigh and presses his open mouth to the nape of Patrick’s neck. Here, where his sweat gathers, this is where he still smells of sleeping in a van, of untidy boys on unbeautiful floors and screaming me and Pete into a microphone like a litany. 

“Okay,” Patrick breathes. “Alright, well. Until next time I guess—”

This can’t end yet. Pete flips Patrick, shoves him up against the stall wall and kisses his throat, his chest, his pink and pebbled nipples. He drops to his knees and kisses the soft, slick head of Patrick’s spent cock. He pulls Patrick’s thighs over his shoulders and licks deep into his fucked-out hole. Patrick makes a sound like he’s imploding, his hands up in their fingerless gloves to wrap over the top of the stall and take his weight. Pete licks, probes, pushes, seals his mouth over Patrick’s asshole and sucks the taste of himself with huge slurping desperation. He’s there in Patrick’s hidden places, bitter, like everything else about him. Patrick’s cock drools, soft and useless against his thigh. Pete digs his thumbs into Patrick where he’s swollen and pink, holds him open and curls his tongue like his tongue can find a way to fix this. 

Patrick isn’t hard when he comes for the second time. It leaks from him, a thin and painful trickle that makes him shiver and cry out. There’s satisfaction in that sound. His arms give, he folds down onto the cold and unlovely bathroom floor with Pete. With the smell of Patrick in his stubble, Pete does not wipe his mouth. They sit with their backs to opposite walls, Patrick’s thighs spread over Pete’s, and Pete touches the burning swell of the napkin in his pocket. 

He tries again. “I was thinking—”

“Shut up,” Patrick barks. “You’re not speaking.”

Pete falls silent. 

“It doesn’t change anything,” Patrick says eventually, when his breathing is steady and his eyes aren’t glassy. He rubs his gloved hand against Pete’s thigh in a cruel parody of tenderness. “This? You know? I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Another trip around the sun?” Pete says dully.

Patrick sighs, “We had a good run.”

Pete doesn’t show him the napkin before he leaves.

January 2012

“I saw the blog post.”

“It wasn’t about you. It wasn’t about… us.”

“Go fuck yourself, it’s always about us.”

“Not this time! Fuck, am I not allowed a nervous breakdown that’s mine? Does everything have to come with a side order of you and your feelings?”

“Come back.”

“What? No! Fuck you for asking!”

“Fuck you for pretending you don’t need it. Come back.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s… complicated.”

“Uncomplicate it. You need your band.”

“We hurt each other.”

“The band?”

“No. Us. You and me. You… fucking hurt me. So many times.”

“I’ll never hurt you again. I won’t lay a hand on you if it makes you uncomfortable. We can be colleagues if you want, just… associated musicians.”

“That’s not how this pain works. It’s inevitable. It’s… fate.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’re ridiculous.”

“What about Joe and Andy? We’re not — We can’t be the centre of the universe again.”

“They’d agree. Come back.”

“I’ll… think about it.”

“I’ll come over now.”

“You won’t.”

“I’ll bring burritos.”

“You won’t.”

“You want extra guac?”

“... Yes.”

August 2014

They’re not officially writing new material, but it comes together anyway. Trapped like this in tour buses and hotel rooms it flows like breathing. Like heartbeats. Pete has never expended so much ink in one flowing loop. Patrick’s fingers bear permanent indentations in the shape of his guitar strings. 

They pull together an album that feels angrier than anything they’ve written together before. They write songs about pity sex and June gloom and a love that hurts so much it requires anaesthesia. There is so much music in them that it overflows, that they’re pushed to rip samples from 80s pop and 90s rap and fucking 60s family TV shows. They weave it together as the bus wheels hum beneath them. 

Pete is happier than he’s been in years but it’s fragile. He touches it sometimes, tests his fingertips against the blown glass delicateness of it with a hand against Patrick’s shoulder. Then they pause, awkward, remember that this isn’t a thing they’re supposed to do and Pete pulls away. It aches, though. Pete doesn’t know where to put his hands if they’re not on Patrick. 

“Do you have anything else?” Patrick asks, leafing idly through sheafs of notepaper, notebooks with the spirals unpicked, the endless flotsam and jetsam of Pete’s broken lyrics. 

Pete thinks of the napkin he keeps stuffed in a pocket of his backpack. They haven’t fucked since they agreed to make another go of the whole band… thing. Pete is terrified that, if he brings up those memories then the vessel will crack and his undeserved, brilliant luck will pour out. Dear future self… 

“No,” he says quietly. “That’s everything.”

This has to be enough.

August 2017

“Is any of this working for you?”

“I don’t — I don’t know. It’s too… something. Too easy? Too straightforward?”

“I like it.”

“I want to more than like it. I want to love it.”

“Maybe it just needs time…”

“We don’t have time. Jesus. God, get me a fucking time machine and go back to 2009, pick up something from there. Are you sure there’s nothing else? A notebook you stuffed behind the toilet? Anything?”

“I…”

“You…?”

“It’s. It’s nothing. I can write you something new. Something better.”

“It’s no fucking use. We need to push this back”

May 2019

It comes to Pete in a recording studio in West LA. He watches Patrick fiddling with a tuning peg and thinks he is so, so sick of this wasted half-life, this reckless, intentional and ridiculous denial that burns him up. He’s a comet, a tiny chip from a dying star, hurtling through the atmosphere of PatrickPatrickPatrick and he lives this every day.

Pete tells himself it’s different because they’re older.

Pete tells himself it’s different because they’re wiser.

Pete no longer cares what he tells himself as he rifles through his wallet and marches over to Patrick. He stands above him, hands on hips, lips pursed. Expectant. If Patrick says no, that’s fine, he decides. That’s better than another four decades of never knowing. He drops the napkin into Patrick’s lap.

“Dear future self,” Pete says quietly. “Hands up.”

“Is this a sex thing?” Joe asks, wrinkling his nose.

“It’s always a sex thing,” Andy says, deadpan. “When have you ever known it not be a sex thing?”

“It’s not a sex thing,” Patrick says, straightening out the napkin and flushing pink and lovely.

Pete agrees, although he wants it to be a sex thing very much. “We don’t even have sex.”

“It’s a sex thing even when it’s not a sex thing,” Andy says, with much sage wisdom. “The two of you are made of ‘sex thing.’ Since we got back together, you’ve written three albums of frustrated ‘sex thing.’”

“We’d know less about your sex life if you actually had sex,” Joe points out helpfully. “At least you’d do that behind closed doors.”

“Hopefully,” Andy mutters ominously.

“Can we stop discussing my not-sex-life,” Patrick hisses through his teeth.

Pete looks contrite. “I have never discussed your not-sex-life. I wouldn’t do such a thing. I just gave you a song, the least you could do is say thank you.”

Patrick scans the napkin in his hand. He doesn’t speak for a very long time. When he looks up, his eyes are inscrutable. “Can I talk to you for a second?” he asks briskly. He looks at Andy and Joe and then back at Pete. “Alone.”

And he heads for the door.

“Sex thing,” Joe says knowledgeably to Andy.

They find themselves, for the want of another unoccupied space, in the janitor’s room just off a hallway. It is small and grimy and has a lone, swinging bulb in the centre of the ceiling that Patrick doesn’t bother to switch on. With the lock clicked behind them, just enough light spills in from under the door to illuminate his teeth, his eyes. Pete wants him in a way that rearranges his insides. He wants him in a way that hurts.

“I brought you here,” Patrick begins awkwardly.

“Into the closet,” Pete interrupts helpfully. “We’ve spent a lot of time here.”

“That,” Patrick says, “is a terrible joke. You’re not allowed to make any more jokes until I’m done talking to you about very important things.”

“The napkin?”

“The napkin.”

“Okay,” Pete begins, after a pause. “Okay, so here’s the thing. I wrote that when everything felt so dark I’d forgotten what sunrise felt like. I wrote it for the man I didn’t think would make it through. I want – I think I’m ready to share it with anyone who’s ever thought things won’t get better.”

Patrick scratches his cheek, his beard scritch-scritch-scritch beneath his fingernails. The cord that binds them, that’s held them together since they first met, tugs hard at Pete’s gut. The universe has been an unlovely place since 2009. Is it so wrong to want to inject a ray of hope?

“I think,” Patrick says, tracing his toe against the concrete floor. “What I think is…”

And then his eyes are on Pete’s mouth and he’s biting savagely into his own bottom lip and staring so hungrily that Pete can’t help it. He claims Patrick’s mouth, just sweeps it up with own, with the greedy swipe of his tongue against Patrick’s lips. He kisses Patrick for the first time in eight years and it feels like coming home.

Patrick’s lips do precisely what they’re supposed to do and part under the onslaught. Pete can lick past his teeth, taste the roof of his mouth, the soft, tender skin inside his cheeks. Pete is so helplessly blown away by this, so shredded down to dust. They collapse to the floor in slow motion, a controlled detonation. When Patrick parts his thighs and brings Pete into the cradle of his hips, it’s all Pete can do not to hump into him like a teenager. It’s dizzying, disorienting, all Pete wants to do is press Patrick down and make him feel incredible. 

He pulls back, just a breath, pushes a hand through Patrick’s messy, fuzzy hair and thumbs over his cheekbone, his pink and swollen mouth, and gasps, “Fuck, we have to stop.” 

Pete knows, with crushing and clarifying certainty, that if they don’t stop, he’s going to rub himself off against Patrick’s hip. He’s going to come all over himself and Patrick and the closet floor and any other surface that gets in the way. He knows he can’t control this, that it’s inevitable in the way the moon phases are inevitable, the way the tide is inevitable. Pete will come in his boxers like a fucking teenager because this is what Patrick fills him with. His mouth is too numb to form words, so he hopes it’s obvious in his eyes, in the way he bites his lip and pulls his hips back, back and away and whines, desperate, in the back of his throat.

Patrick grins. Patrick keeps his eyes on Pete’s. Patrick slides his palm and curious fingers over Pete’s chest and stomach and slowly sinks a hand down the front of Pete’s sweats. 

Patrick pauses, his devilish hand close enough that Pete can feel the heat from it, and smiles gently. “Is this — This is okay, right?”

Pete can think of nothing, nothing at all, that could possibly be more okay than this. He nods and keens and drops his forehead down onto Patrick’s and prays that this will be enough for Patrick to start touching him. It is. Patrick smiles and shifts and, carefully, closes his hand around Pete’s urgent erection. 

It is… blissful. 

Pete’s eyes roll back and he sees red and white and rich, veined pink. His fingers cord and flex, cord and flex against the floor by Patrick’s head, his body folds and then unfolds in a languid, throbbing pulse of electrons and neutrons and tingling, bone-deep need. Patrick is gentle to start, feels his way to the base like he’s reintroducing himself to the feeling of Pete’s persistent swell against his palm. He curls his fingers, tests his grip, rubs his thumb along vein and velvet and finds his way to the quivering ache of the head. Pete keeps his eyes closed, feels his arms and shoulders tremble with the effort of remaining braced over Patrick’s body, knows that if he opens his eyes, he is lost entirely.

Patrick strokes him with the ease and familiarity of someone who has stroked him for the majority of his adult life, with the careful consideration of a man who knows what Pete wants and has catalogued it, learnt it, committed to memory every way to make Pete come. His wrist is loose and easy, his hand smooth with the quick liquid motion of it, even in the confined space between their hips. 

Pete’s voice is a shattered, broken husk when he parts his lips and rasps in Patrick’s ear, “Show me. Do it how — how you like it. When you touch yourself.”

Beneath him, Patrick shudders. 

And Patrick does. His grip is new, firmer, pressing deep into the veins and nerves and thick, flushed tissue of Pete’s swollen cock. His wrist is still smooth, still precise and rhythmic, like the drummer he never got to be. He strokes in perfect 2/4 time. It’s slower than Pete usually likes, harder too, that Patrick perfectionism bleeding through. There is something utterly enchanting about knowing that this is the way Patrick touches himself, something Pete has never thought about before. It unlocks him, through his throat and his hips and his fucked-raw, pounding heart and he cries out into the hollow of Patrick’s collar bone. 

“I want — Can I?” he asks, palming over the stiff urgency of Patrick’s erection. Patrick bucks under his hand and nods, frantic and fervent and without a hint of hesitation. Pete gets him out of his pants, touches him hot and hard and glorious and shifts his hips, his knees, lines them up perfectly and takes both of their dicks into one large hand. 

“Yes,” Patrick hisses, “yes, God, fuck yes. That — It’s so good.”

He curls his hand over Pete’s, makes him do it right, harder, slower, just how he likes it. Pete might come. Pete might die from this. This aching hollow throb. This place in his chest that’s too large to be his heart. This Patrick. This Patrick. This Patrick.

“Tell me you’re close,” he begs, nipping at Patrick’s earlobe. Patrick makes a noise that could be agreement, could be a heart attack, his hand speeding, his dick throbbing want next to Pete’s. 

“Close,” Patrick groans, head thrown back. Pete takes the invitation and bites into his throat, sucks a bruise there that might be a problem later but isn’t right now. 

Patrick shifts and knocks Pete off balance, sends his arm out from under him and knocks him down. They sprawl on the floor and Patrick is laughing into Pete’s mouth and Pete is smiling around the shape of his own groan and their hands are still rubbing, still sliding, still tugging. Pete has a hand full of their cocks and a mouth full of their laughter and nothing could be sexier. 

Then it hits, that low, unfurling pressure in his groin that knocks him sideways, that glitters his thoughts and makes his blood turn static. 

“Patrick!” he cries out, greedy, opening his eyes so he can watch Patrick watching him come. It’s glorious, tingling, throbbing, pooling out through his stomach and dripping down into his groin, from the twitching head of his hard cock, over Patrick’s dick, hand, stomach. 

Patrick makes a sound like he’s being run over, a wrenching, twisted groan that thrums up through his rib cage and into Pete’s. He stiffens, goes entirely still beneath Pete but for the jackrabbit twitch of his hips as he spills, hot and messy and slicking with Pete. Then he slumps, collapses back into the couch and pulls Pete to him, kisses him entirely uncoordinated and sighs, smiling beatifically at the ceiling. 

For a moment, Pete is boneless. He’s still giggling and there are tears in his eyes that could be from laughing or could be from coming but either way, they blur the world until he raises his head, blinks, and looks at Patrick. There is so much blue in Patrick’s eyes it takes his breath away, his mouth soft and pink in the reddish scruff of his beard. Chubbier, softer, a little less hair and a little more breadth to him, but Pete can see the boy he fell in love with with such arresting and undeniable certainty it makes him gasp. Pete’s heart is so full it spills over and the tears aren’t from laughter and aren’t from orgasm, they’re nothing more than boring emotion. He bites his lip and hiccups and tries to breathe. 

“Hey,” says Patrick, visibly concerned, “hey, come on. I’m the resident enactor of emotional instability — what the fuck is this? A coup d'etat?”

Pete laughs but the sound gets confused and comes out as a sob. “I’m sorry. I just — It’s a lot to take in.”

“Hey,” Patrick says again, pulling Pete down until their foreheads touch. “I’m so bad at knowing how to deal with my own emotions, I’m like, the worst possible person to give you advice on how to handle your own, but… That was nice. I feel… good. You made me feel good and that’s… nice.” 

Neither of those adjectives are the kind that make it into romance novels. But this isn’t a romance novel and Pete will take ‘nice’ and ‘good’ because they’re better than the way he’s made Patrick feel in the past. They breathe the same pocket of air, the same damp heat until his arm begins to cramp and he shifts, uncomfortable.

“I have a handful of come,” Pete says uncertainly. “Like, I want to grab you by the hair and kiss you right now, but I don’t know what to do with it. I feel like you’ll definitely leave the band if I wipe it on your jeans.”

Patrick snorts. “Oh God.”

“I mean, I could get rid of it the old-fashioned way, but it’d be like eating cold oatmeal, so—”

“Stop! Please, just… stop! Just… this is a fucking janitor’s closet, find some rags or something you fucking idiot.”

They lie on their backs in the gloomy half-light and Pete feels a wonderful sense of completion. There’s a sanitation bucket two feet away. In retrospect, this was not the sexiest place for a carnal reconciliation. It doesn’t matter; fucked diligently by Patrick Stump, Pete is forced to accept that there’s no way he’s moving again. 

“Can we keep doing that?” he asks quietly. 

“Fucking in janitor’s closets?” Patrick asks lazily. “I suspect not. Maybe on special occasions.”

“Fucking generally,” Pete clarifies. “I just want to fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and, like, maybe write a couple songs with you in between. But mostly fuck you.”

“There’s this crazy rumour that you have the heart of a poet,” Patrick says archly.

Pete grins at the ceiling and the bare, swinging lightbulb, says, “Sounds fake.”

And Patrick — Patrick murmurs with impossible fondness, “Idiot.”

“Your idiot,” Pete says. “You know, when I woke up this morning, this isn’t how I imagined my day was going to work out.”

“When I woke up this morning I didn’t think you were going to present me with a fucking time capsule song that you wrote at the worst point in both of our lives.”

Pete thinks about this as he lies on the ground. The thing is, he thinks, they’ve both known that they love one another like an inevitability for the past eighteen years. He knows his heart matches Patrick’s, twists with Patrick’s, that they make up two halves of the same folded napkin. Pete isn’t surprised to find himself here — as in with Patrick, not as in a janitor’s closet with come on his fist — so much as he’s surprised it took this long. They always knew where they were going, they just didn’t have a map. 

“We should get back,” Patrick says, “Before they think I’ve murdered you.”

Pete blinks, an exaggerated, Steve Carell blink so there can be no mistaking his meaning, and says, “Patrick Stump. Are you asking me to come out of the closet?”

“I’ve been asking you for eighteen years,” Patrick murmurs, rubbing his nose along Pete’s and kissing him deep and slow and fond. 

“Dear past self,” Pete says seriously, his mouth wet with the taste of Patrick. “It’s going pretty well.”

And Patrick laughs, clear as a bell.

“Tell him,” he says. “Tell him it’s gonna get better.”