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Colors swirl on the ceiling, 'cause maybe the road outside shakes them. It's the dark corners that his vision focuses on, just as it's at night that he chooses to blink in adrenaline like a broken mainway beacon rather than sinking into sleep. His head doesn't exactly comfort himself in a travel bag (which he suspects isn't his) packed to glide across the country until he finds success, dwelling in infinity. But for now, that's all he has.
Daydreaming about a trio of pillows, he thinks. Distracted, huddled among the band's sound equipment. He can hear, with a slight effort, the raw noise of snoring, slipping past his ear beside him in the dark. It's even doubtful how well Pete can sleep at that moment, a fickle rarity. Inside, he's proud. In the morning, he'll be grumpy as hell.
A cold drink to tear the throat out, a handjob on linen sheets, an air conditioner and a fucking shower. A room alone. Holy shit, at least a pillow.
Since he was a child, Patrick has known how to describe himself as a boy connected to comfort, something that can refresh his brains for at least an hour. He knows that much of his current essence is bruised under the icy, rushing breeze, a nudge of loneliness in such a small space of reality. In his room, under the sheets, he would know how to deal with what he feels and process everything at once.
Clicking his tongue cautiously over his teeth, he manages to deduce: his mother would easily deliver him a hot soup in that winter the band finds itself, with the roads full of snow and the wheels dangerously slipping at times. When it's daylight and the ice threatens to kill them all at once, Andy maneuvering as much as possible of his experience behind the wheel and Joe screaming, he finds himself in an unusual near-death situation that wouldn't pass within the four walls of his personal refuge. His memory will remind him of his old Nintendo, of how his eyes have always been sleepless, even as he tastes homemade chicken broth in bed and sees snowflakes falling through the window. Inside, being buried in ice until his body cracks and shatters to pieces is a distant possibility.
My God, his mind snaps back. He would be with a pillow, of course, being just a protected, happy child hugging pillows. The first project of a forever friendly body, possibly even the last.
On the other hand, Pete would say he's just feverish from missing home, 'cause he's got everything a real man needs to survive in a shitty van with his only best-friends-and-bandmates in the middle of Dallas. It's there, the music, the chance to produce music, the bars at the end of the interstate trip, and maybe welcome sex. Patrick would say he's not gay, shit, why is Pete so close to me like that? But he will definitely kiss him in the early hours of a party, will exchange mature and real loves when they are alone, feelings so solid that they stink, that they warm any cold skin.
Patrick doesn't complain. Maybe he likes Pete. Maybe it's just the lack of soup. It's probably something different than what his old basic childish need would say, maybe, and that's when stops for a hotel room can prove something. Arms around his hips and his ass cuddled in the cradle of someone's groin, unmatched warmth. It would reside between his thighs and between his ribs, and if he heard Pete's voice whisper in his ear while he had the key in the door lock, or with his legs splayed across the bed and the air escaping his lungs, he'd just be a complete man.
Who needs soup and pillows when you are boning?
Only he's not proving anything from anyone to any unsubstantiated probability at the moment. Soup seems like a more effective solution 'cause it's freezing. Hypothermia is threatening, his blood is turning to popsicles to vampires inside his veins and he feels like his balls are disintegrating. If he's going to die, he doesn't want him to start rotting by the neck first, at least. He has virtues. One is to make his soul comfortably slip out of his idiot body, so it's the same way with his idiot remains in a padded coffin.
Virtues.
In the fortieth muffled snore he hears, he turns to face Pete, his neck aching as if someone had strangled him for hours. There's something about the bassist's closed eyelids and serene face that comforts him, reminds him of a faint timbre, a light rhythmic beat, and his heart pounds for this rare melody. He's just someone who wants a lot, misses a little, but remembers too much. There is something in the future that is yet to happen, much more than his past stories. It's desiring the impossible that he starts to move.
We'll trade our hopeful misfortunes for world credit, and we'll be rich and famous, he thinks. Slowly and silently, he leaves the uncomfortable space of the backpack to lay his cheek on the chest beside him. His body turns, rests against Pete's, and he takes one arm to cover the bassist's hip while the other resides between them. Something hammers in his chest, so intoxicating it unravels the trapped threads of sleep in his system, a magical and intense kind of Benzatine with black roses. The colors fade from his vision 'cause he closed his eyes.
I'll be able to buy a lot of pillows one day, sleep a lot so I don't process everything that's going to happen by then. We'll appear on Billboard, Alternative Press and even the fucking Rolling Stones, we'll be the lyrics that form the watermarks of youth media programs. We'll get so many kids together at our shows that even I might forget mine.
An arm also rests around his waist, and the sleep effect soon marries the sweet, addictive emotion of passion, gigantic nostalgia. Pete stopped snoring.
I don't want this to be a wish, he thinks. Not even.
A kiss settled on his forehead before someone buried their face in his hair. If it was daytime, Patrick would complain because he hasn't showered in days and he'd be stinking the equivalent of rotten egg and rancid cheese. He would also be vibrating with bad temper, repelling any existing contact. His current adult can't stand social life when he's really awake.
He smiles weakly against Pete's chest. There are no children and no adults now. Everything that occupies the void is the personification of emotion, of something that time would not explain. Pete's lyrics would say more about him in the future, soon, and he would say more than enough.
They hug each other tightly. Patrick gradually abandons colors.
That was his prediction.