Chapter Text
Thinking about it as he drives, the furthest back Pete can push the blame for everything that happened is to some unknown drunk dude who was in so desperate a need for pizza or something that he steps into the road at about two in the morning without looking and apparently makes a girl called - improbably, Pete thinks - Solstice Moonbeam to crash her bike into a trash bin at the corner of Adams and Wabash.
From what he was told, the resulting neck injury gets Solstice addicted to pain meds, which means that when she picks up a dude called, slightly more plausibly, Michael Grabinski in a bar nine months later, she shares the joy of Percocet with him.
Normally Pete wouldn't be the best person to throw stones over the misuse of a little medication, prescribed or otherwise, but the big downside is that the new habit does absolutely nothing to improve Michael's already shoddy drumming or his ability to remember to turn up to band practice.
Since Michael is the drummer for Pete's band, this makes it Pete's fucking problem.
So, the blame game goes like this:
Drunk dude wants pizza.
Solstice crashes her bike, fucks up her neck and starts popping Hillbilly Heroin like it's going out of style.
Solstice drags Mik into a grubby alleyway behind the bar they've just finished playing and gives him a BJ so apparently epic that he decides she's more important than his band.
The band slowly implodes because a hardcore band without someone who can play the drums at least vaguely in time is not a band that will allow Pete to pay his fucking rent on time.
So Pete doesn’t pay his rent on time, since his shitty barista job doesn't quite pay enough to cover it, especially since Pete insists on also spending his meagre wages on stupid stuff like food, gas, antidepressants and new bass strings.
Pete comes home from the final, screaming argument-filled practice with no band, no money and two packs of the cheapest ramen the store would sell him to find an eviction notice pinned to his apartment door.
Pete reads it carefully, then turns around and gets back into his shitty, shitty Honda and drives away, thinking.
He thinks about the unknown pizza dude.
He thinks about how he gave up College for that band.
He thinks about how he put everything Pete Wentz IS into that band in the absolute confidence that one day his music would save the fucking world.
He thinks about going back to live with his parents at twenty-seven, and how his Mom would be very kind but leave leaflets about adult College courses on the coffee table and how his Dad would also be very kind and phone all his lawyer friends and try to get him a job as a paralegal somewhere he'll have to cut his hair and wear a suit.
Everything feels a little bleak, really - but Pete's got a cheerfully orange bottle of pills in his pocket that will fix that right up.
Permanently, if all goes to plan.
*
Five minutes later he hits Joe with his car.
*
In Pete's defence, he's driving pretty slowly through a parking lot at night and Joe basically falls out of a bush directly into his path, but still, Joe will later greatly enjoy bringing up the time Pete ‘ran me over’ in conversations about how they met.
“Fuck!” Pete yells, as the dark shape collapses in front of his bumper, slamming on his breaks.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” he continues quietly, gripping the steering wheel tightly.
It's a nice night, so he has his windows open, and he nervously calls out, “Uh, are you okay, dude? Please don't be dead…”
Someone pops up in front of him, “Yo!” they say, “That was crazy!”
Pete legitimately presses both hands over his frantically beating heart and slumps back in the seat, staring up at the ripped fabric roof of his awful twenty-year-old car. “Fuck…” he says again with feeling.
The dude bops over to the open passenger side window and grins down at him. He's young - probably even younger than Pete, and looks like the sort of guy who has a wide range of bongs for all occasions, all named after Star Wars characters. He's wearing a grubby Mountain Dew shirt that looks like it came free with a case of cans, worn while repainting a house and then fished out of the subsequent dumpster.
“Dude!” the dude says enthusiastically.
“What the ACTUAL FUCK!?” Pete screeches, “Where the hell did you fucking come from!?”
The dude jerks his thumb over his shoulder towards the bushes, “Over there,” he explains unhelpfully.
Pete takes a long, deep breath in through his nose and out through his mouth, just like Doctor Diane taught him during one of their first sessions, “Why,” he asks through gritted teeth, “Were you hiding in a bush? Or is this some kind of insurance scam? I don't have any money, okay?”
The dude points across the parking lot. All the stores are shut at this time of night, but by the entrance, the gas station is still open, lights glowing through the dark. “Munchies,” he explains slightly more usefully, “It's a shortcut, but, like, there aren't usually cars at this time of night.”
Pete has absolutely no desire to get into the reason why he's hanging around deserted strip mall parking lots right now, so he reaches over and opens the door. “Get in,” he instructs, “I'll drive you.”
“Sweet!” the dude says cheerfully, clambering into the car. He's wearing jeans that aren't so much ripped at the knees as completely destroyed and two mismatched flip-flops - one in navy blue and white stripes and one in neon pink with large purple diamanté studs on the strap. It's like he's cosplaying a twenty-year-old stoner. “Oh man, hey, I'm Joe.” He holds out a hand for Pete to shake.
Pete wipes his sweaty palm on his pants before shaking Joe's hand. “Pete,” he says.
Joe squints at him. “Oh!” he grins excitedly, “Oh man. You're, like, The Dude!”
“I'm… the dude?” Pete questions. Joe hasn't let go of his hand yet, still waggling it up and down.
“I totally saw you play the other week,” Joe continues, “You were playing bass and screaming in The Loophole, yeah? I can't remember you guys’ name, but that was you, wasn't it?”
Pete swallows at the reminder of his now-dead band. “Yeah,” he mumbles instead, “That was me.”
“Nice!” Joe says as Pete finally manages to retrieve his hand, “You wanna smoke up at mine?”
He starts the car and turns around, heading towards the gas station. “I almost killed you,” Pete points out, “And you want me to come over and share a joint with you?”
Joe waves a dismissive hand. “I'm fine,” he says, “No harm done. You seem cool… and, well… you know?”
“I know?” Pete repeats, pulling into the gas station.
“You seem tense, dude,” Joe explains, clapping Pete on the shoulder, “And Doc Trohman prescribes a good eighth, a family sized bag of Cheetos and as many M&M's as you can stomach.”
“Well…” Pete mumbles, because, yeah - that does sound good. His therapist would probably even agree that it's better than his previous plan.
“I've got six cans of Dr Pepper and all the Terminator movies on DVD…” Joe wheedles.
Pete gives up. He's always been weak for Kyle Reece. “Sure,” he sighs, “That would actually be fucking awesome right now…”
Joe nods in that serious way only achieved by the truly stoned. “Excellent decision,” he says, “And I one-hundred percent promise I'm not a serial killer.”
“Good to know,” Pete mutters as Joe climbs out of the car and stumbles over to the store, flip-flops flapping against the cracked concrete.
*
Another twenty-five minutes later and Pete is watching Arnold Schwarzenegger menace unsuspecting people playing on an elderly laptop. He's sitting on a saggy tartan couch with a lap full of gas station snacks next to Joe - who's taking hits on an elegant green glass bong he introduced as ‘Yoda, only the best for guests, you know?’
Everything is getting pleasantly swimmy, so he doesn't stop himself when his mouth says, “My band broke up today…”
Joe pulls a face, “Oh man, that's shitty.”
Pete shrugs half-heartedly, “We were shitty.”
Joe opens his mouth, closes it, thinks, and then says, “Well… like, you were good…”
“We were all shitty,” Pete complains morosely, “We were so shitty I got evicted.”
Joe blows out a cloud of smoke, frowning, “You're got evicted because your band is shitty? Your landlord a big music fan or something?”
“Can't afford the fucking rent without the gig money,” Pete explains.
“Ah…” Joe says sagely, holding out Yoda.
Arnie shoots someone who isn't Sarah Connor and Pete takes the bong.
Pete takes a long drag and exhales, slumping sideways to rest his head on Joe's shoulder. “I'm gonna have to move back in with my fucking parents,” he sighs.
Joe pats him awkwardly with his off hand. He's probably transferring Cheeto dust into Pete's hair, but he can't bring himself to care. “So,” he says slowly, “The door next to the bathroom is like, technically speaking, a box room.”
Pete sits up. “What?” he asks.
Nodding at the door, Joe continues a little nervously, “It's basically the size of a whole queen bed, and it's just my guitar storage at the moment, so if you want, you can move in - get a futon or some shit, you know?”
“I met you less than an hour ago,” Pete points out, “When I hit you with my car. And now you're asking me to live with you?”
Joe shrugs. “I'm a good judge of character?” he says, “Look, the room's tiny, but even if you can give me a couple of bucks a week for rent, I'll be better off. You can do the laundry if it makes you feel better. You seem cool, and I promise I won't keep questioning you about why you haven't met a nice girl yet.”
Pete chokes. “Or a nice boy,” he corrects.
Joe takes this in his stride. “Whatever,” he says, “I'm an equal opportunities dude myself too.”
*
So yeah, the next step on this chain of random fucking happenstance is this: Pete moves into the spare room of the massive stoner he accidentally ran over while contemplating what would be written in his obituary if he deliberately overdosed in a big box store parking lot.
Fucking unknown pizza dude, man…
*
Joe, for all that he looks, sounds and frankly smells like an SNL caricature of a Californian budtender, is fantastically easy to live with.
Pete hasn't had a roommate since his brief foray into college, and even then he hadn't been a fan - publicly complaining about Uptight Ben's weird habits and terrible music taste, while privately convinced that he's probably the nightmare neighbor, what with his chronic insomnia, bipolar issues and tendency to bring home unsuitable ladies and gentlemen for disappointing one-night stands.
Joe, in comparison, is easy-going - he loves hardcore and metal and, weirdly, big-band dance music from, like, the forties, he's happy to share his stash, musically talented and doesn't ask for much apart from roughly fifty bucks a week, as many bags of out-of-date coffee beans as Pete can smuggle out of work and for Pete to take care of all the laundry and do his fair share of chores. It's easily the best deal in the whole city. Possibly the whole state.
He does, however, talk to himself constantly. Pete quickly loses count of the number of times he walks into the living room to discover him hunched over one of his guitars, staff paper beside him, having an argument with thin air. As weird quirks go, however, it's pretty harmless - especially for fifty bucks a week.
Pete is totally gonna find all his friends in parking lots from now on. It obviously works brilliantly.
*
“So, how are you affording this apartment?” Pete asks Joe on their fourth evening together. He's been meaning to ask for a while, since Joe's only paying job seems to be as a session guitarist for a recording studio and whatever guitar or roadie cover he can provide for local bands, which doesn't seem like something that could pay the rent for somewhere this nice. Pete's steady barista job didn't manage to cover his own rent on the terrible one-room place on a run-down block in a pretty dodgy area, so he's interested in how Joe can afford to keep this nice two-bedroom place so close to an El station and the mall.
Joe sniffs in reply and scratches at the back of his head, glancing around the room and awkwardly turning over several forkfuls of the rice on his plate in front of him. “Ugh,” he sighs eventually, “Man… So, like, it's family money.”
Pete raises his eyebrows, “Family money?” he questions. His own family aren't exactly paupers, but they probably wouldn't be able to cover the rent on this place as well as their own bills. “What do they do?” He leans forward, “Are you a trust fund kid or something?”
Wrinkling his nose, Joe says, “Kinda?”
“You're ‘kinda’ a trust fund kid?”
Joe carefully lays his cutlery down. “So, my Grandma was pretty famous back in the forties,” he tells him.
Pete's eyebrows raise even further. “Cool! Anyone I might have heard of?”
Nodding towards the Hi-Fi, Joe says, “You already have.”
Pete looks around at the stereo and then back at his roommate. “Are you telling me that your Grandma is the lady singing on those records?! ” he asks enthusiastically.
“Yeah,” Joe agrees, “That's her. She was, like, a famous singer. Had her own band and everything. She left me all her royalties and shit. My mom and dad are both doctors - not a musical bone in their bodies, but she liked the fact I play..”
“Fuck, that's so awesome!” Pete says.
“Eh, there's downsides,” Joe grumbles, randomly glaring at the couch.
*
“Stop being an asshole,” Joe mutters. For a second, Pete - caught in the short hallway between the bathroom and the bedrooms with a basket of clean laundry on his hip like a pioneer lady - thinks he's talking to him, but then Joe continues, “Look, chord progressions have changed since your day, okay?”
Pete peers around the doorframe and into the living room. Joe is sitting, cross-legged on the couch, guitar in his lap and squinting up at what looks to be the window. As Pete watches, Joe shakes his head slowly, in exactly the sort of way someone would do when confronted with a friend who is being horribly, terribly, tragically wrong about something.
He glares at the curtains for a few more seconds before stiffening slightly and turning to look at Pete.
“Um,” Pete says, “The laundry's done.”
“Cool,” Joe says with a grin, before shooting another glare at nothing. “Come here,” he instructs, “Tell me which one of these sounds better, and why it's the second one.”
“Um,” Pete says again, “Sure. Just let me hang up this shit…” He backs out of the doorway to fling the washing over the small racks he has hooked over every radiator in the apartment, pausing briefly to contemplate the fact that he hasn't managed to wash a single matching pair of socks.
“He's not biased!” Joe is hissing at the empty beanbag chair by the Hi-Fi when Pete returns, “You're biased, dickwad!”
Pete coughs politely, interrupting him.
Joe seems to snap back into reality, and says, “Dude, listen to these, yeah? Which one is the most awesome?”
*
“Still have the right number of kidneys?” Andy greets him.
Pete rolls his eyes, “Yes, thank you,” he replies, ringing up the weird tea Andy prefers.
Andy shakes his head. “Is he feeding you lots of candy?” he asks, “Does he have a really big oven? A suspiciously human sized one?”
“He's not fattening me up!” Pete protests awkwardly, thinking about the giant Halloween-sized bag of Hershey's kisses they'd worked their way through only the previous night.
“Hummm…” Andy says thoughtfully.
“He's a nice dude!”.
“Hummm…” Andy says again, but this is an interrogation technique that Pete is used to by now.
“Your tea is ready,” he tells him, “Please go away.”
Andy glances to the left, where Monica is blatantly still making a latte, the empty cup labelled with Andy's name waiting on the counter next to her.
“I don't think it is,” Andy points out mildly.
“There are customers waiting!” Pete tries.
Andy looks to the right, taking in the entire coffee shop full of exactly three other people, all of whom are busy reading or tapping away on laptops. “Where are they then?” he asks. “Peter Wentz, are you lying to me so I'll stop asking you questions about your weird new roommate?”
“He's not weird,” Pete mumbles.
“Hummm…” is all Andy has to say in return to that.
*
“Okay, so he's a little weird,” Pete admits, joining Andy at his corner table.
Andy takes a long sip of tea. “Weird how?” he questions calmly.
Pete chews his lip and eats a bite of the one free sandwich he gets per shift. “I think he has an imaginary friend,” he replies slowly.
Andy's eyebrows head skywards. “How old is he again?”
Pete shrugs, “Twenty-two.”
“That's a little old for an imaginary friend, don't you think?”
“He's always talking to himself,” Pete says, feeling a little guilty at sharing this information. Joe is an awesome dude who probably doesn't deserve Pete telling Andy this sort of personal shit. “So, like, I dunno, he has an imaginary friend or the apartment's haunted by a ghost only he can see…”
“Or…” Andy encourages, turning his hand at the wrist.
“Or he's nuts, I guess,” he admits, and then shakes his head, “Look, he's cool, okay? He's not gonna steal my internal organs or eat me or… or… sell me to the highest bidder. We get on. He plays guitar like a motherfucker and only charges me fifty bucks a week in rent. I'm the last person who should say anything about his mental health situation, anyway.”
Andy puts his cup down and leans forward, looking concerned. “Are you sure this is a good situation for you to be in?”
Pete pulls a face. “I'm taking all my meds,” he says, “In fact, Joe reminds me to take them. In fact, it's pretty much perfect apart from the imaginary friend and the way he's constantly wandering off and leaving the stereo playing swing music really loudly. I never thought I'd have to say this, but I've heard enough Glenn Miller or whatever that I'm sort of into it now.”
Glancing down at his mug, Andy says, “Wow, I'm glad I wasn't drinking when you said that.” His mouth briefly twitches into a small grin before his expression grows serious again. “Are you fucking him?” he asks bluntly, then, waving his hand, “Or him fucking you, whichever. Not interested in the details.”
Feeling his mouth drop open in surprise - and probably giving Andy a well deserved glimpse of half chewed cheese and tomato sandwich - Pete shakes his head. “No!” he manages after swallowing, “No, I'm not fucking him, what the hell?”
Andy pulls a face, “It would explain a lot,” he says.
Pete narrows his eyes at him. “Just because I run a dude over and move in with him the next day for basically nothing, I must be screwing him?”
“Well…” Andy sighs, “I mean, fifty bucks a week, Pete? You think anyone would believe that without thinking you're giving him something in kind?”
“Are you implying I'd prostitute myself for the opportunity to sleep on a futon in a stoner's box room?” Pete demands, probably slightly too loud for the quiet store.
Andy doesn't reply verbally, but he does blink slowly at Pete in a very meaningful way.
Pete gives in and asks, “Would you feel better if you met him?”
“You know what? Yeah, I probably would.”