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magdalyna504 has a show the next night. He shows up early, avoids Tom uneasily during sound check. The show is all tense energy and bad sound quality. Not really any different from their other shows then. Nick leaves almost as soon as they’re done with their set.
Jon sees Bill and Sisky in the crowd at one point and after the show Tom goes off with them, all carrying amps and wiring, Tom’s guitar. Jon’s precarious mood turns sour.
He sees Pete a few blocks away, charm on full blast for this short kid in a trucker cap and a horrendous green argyle vest. Jon turns into a side street, away from the pair: he’ll find out who the kid is eventually. Pete likes to boast about his new toys.
Jon goes home but Nick is in his room waiting for him. Nick has a bottle of Jim Beam as a peace offering. Jon reaches for it from the door. Nick flips him off, takes a swig. Jon steps closer and Nick meets him in the middle of the room, lips warm and burning.
Jon pulls away to breath. Nick’s hand is solid around his shoulder. Jon grabs the bottle and drinks. His insides churn and twist and smolder. “Tom went drinking with Bill and Sisky.” Jon says clearly, petulantly (he can hold his liquor now, they all can).
Nick laughs low and deep. “You thought 504 would actually last? ‘Cause I gotta tell you, that’s improbable. None of us are taking the band seriously. Bill and Mike Carden, you know Carden, right? Well, they had another cat fight over some stupid shit and now they’ve made up. They’re scouting for members for a new band. Sisky put in a good word for Tom. Pay attention, dude. Bill and Mike’s truce happened two weeks ago.” Nick chides him, only slurring his words a little.
Jon’s head is spinning. Not about 504, but about Bill and Carden. They hated each other. They were oil and water. He definitely would, should have heard about this earlier.
“What is with you? If you can’t even keep up with your own friends in the scene, maybe…” Nick doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t have to. Jon knows what exactly this is about now. He doesn’t want to hear it.
The topic of colleges for high school seniors and futures for college seniors had been buzzing around the scene for weeks: it was April.
Jon would be starting work part-time at Starbucks on Monday. He’d be graduating next year. He had no idea what he wanted to do after that, aside from vague ideas about music and maybe studying photography more.
Jon takes a swig from the bottle again. Nick watches him swallow predatorily, senses dulled from drink. Their mouths mash together clumsily and warm and wet. Nick’s new stubble rubs against his throat and jaw. Jon grinds against him, currents winding tighter between them.
This would be perfect, except that Tom isn’t here to complete the circuit, close it.
Jon growls thinking about it. Nick arches an eyebrow at him. Jon pushes Nick onto his bed, grabs at fabric. Nick unzips his jeans, lets Jon takes his boxers off. Jon bites at the point where neck, chest and shoulder meld. Nick bucks up, cursing lowly.
Jon grasps at Nick fiercely, desperately.
“Possessive bastard.” Nick grits out laboriously. Nick doesn’t lie, doesn’t have to. Nick knows Jon too well.
Jon rubs him, tempos rising. The crescendo is rushed hot and sticky between his fingers. Their breathing is rushed and mingled. Jon licks his hand mostly clean before offering it to Nick. Nick sucks at his fingers tenderly, before guiding them lower and lower.
Nick kisses him, urging him onward. Jon works them into Nick gently. He hasn’t done this before, at least not from this side of the equation. Nick bites Jon’s neck, laving his tongue along the marks he makes. Jon twists inside Nick and Nick arches like a crescent moon. He removes his fingers just as slowly, spits on his hand. Jerks himself once, twice. Nick shifts and Jon enters him. Nick bites his shoulder, moans.
Nick breaths, settles into the feeling around him, sending ripples of motion out to Jon’s spine. Then he fucks himself on Jon, rhythm matching perfectly to Jon’s timing.
They rock together like that, sweating and biting and swearing rapidly followed by groans and moans until Jon’s orgasm unspools from his core and into Nick’s.
Nick has smeared pre-come over their middles: salty and bitter. Nick grinds against Jon and then is coming in short bursts between them. Jon kisses gently over the pale expanse of Nick’s chest, his collar bone. They disentangle from each other and lie on Jon’s bed.
“You really need to talk with Tom.” Nick says finally.
Jon falls asleep like that: bitter, exalted, jumbled.
||
Nick isn’t there when Jon wakes up. Jon expected this, but feels hurt and used anyway. Which is odd, considering.
Jon showers and dresses listlessly. Food has lost its taste for him, feels leaden in his mouth and stomach. Everything is grit and ash on his tongue. His rhythm is jagged, uneven.
It’s Saturday.
Jon goes to find Tom again. Tom fins him, this time in Graceland Cemetery.
Jon is picking at grass, sitting near a bush. He feels the air swish around him first before Tom seeps into his view. Tom is … less Tom now.
His hair is dull and lank, he’s thinner, and he’s slightly paler.
Jon’s stomach turns at the sight, guilt washing over him. He’s caused this. It’s never been more clear. He needs to fix it here and now. A curled up part of him unfurls at this, creeping out from the cobwebbed recesses of his mind, heart, soul. Jon is responsible for Nick and Tom, responsible for their downfall, rebirth. He can make them more stable. Nick and Tom are his to fix, since he’s the one that gate crashed into something steady and perfect. New can be beautiful though. He can make something better, stronger.
“Hey.” Tom starts. Jon looks up, meets his gaze.
“So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.” Tom goes on. Jon can tell where this is going, can feel the rhythm smooth out inside of him.
“I’ve been thinking about everything. The two of us have to stop. We can still have Nick, but we can’t have each other. I’ve taken too many things from you. Things I had no business taking in the first place.” Calm soothing tone, but the words have sliced through Jon’s core. He waits for blood to start welling up, for the shock to wear off.
He didn’t see that coming.
“Does Nick know how you feel yet?” he manages, but just barely.
Tom shakes his head. “I’m gonna go find him now. I just thought I should tell you first.”
Jon’s eyes narrow, inner beat going sharp and flat.
“First. You keep saying that. Those ‘things’ you took, I freely gave. Would have given earlier if I had known there was something more to how you felt about me.” Jon spits viciously.
He was going to fix the three of them. Now what?
Tom recoils, grimaces. He looks sicker, if that’s even possible. Jon is morbidly fascinated by the minute changes. Tom is sweating; his skin is a tinge green, like the insides of a cucumber. Serves him right for rejecting the best thing in their lives.
“I didn’t know Nick let you make his decisions for him.” Jon knows how to slice and rend as well as Tom.
Tom is stricken, biting back words. He turns and stalks away from Jon. Well then. Be that way.
Nick is waiting for him when Jon gets home, sitting on his couch.
Jon just wants this day to end. He gathers his energy.
“Has Tom talked to you today?” he sounds dead to his own ears. His beat is sluggish. He wonders how Nick is hearing him, feeling him.
“No. Had some errands my mom wanted me to run.” Nick explains, curious now.
“He wants you. He’s alright with you and me, but doesn’t want me anymore.” He doesn’t even care how clingy and weak that sounds. The beat changes form, first sluggish then to a crawl.
Nick’s arms are around him, cheeks pressed against each other. Nick rubs circles slowly into his back. Jon stands limply like a rag doll. Jon doesn’t realize that he’s crying until he can feel wet trickles down his neck.
They sink down, lean against the back of the couch. Nick murmurs soothing sounds, trying to use his rhythm to soothe Jon’s. Jon is lost. He can’t see outside the circle they’ve made. He can’t even think of dealing with what’s out there right now, can’t take everything the world has decided to dish out.
It hits him all over again that he’s gained a brother and lost one of his best friends, a lover. There’s a stranger where his other half, no, third, used to be.
They sit like that all night curled together like a parenthesis.
||
Jon wakes up with a crick in his neck and Nick’s drool on the shoulder of his shirt. Their knees are angled at each other. The fingers of Nick’s left hand are laced into Jon’s right. It’s the best and worst night of sleep Jon has had in a long time. The reasons are the same for both: Tom isn’t with them.
Jon sits like that as it gets brighter, waiting for Nick to wake up.
Nick wakes up in degrees. Eyes flutter, breathing patterns shift, quicken, rhythm livens up. His eyes open slowly. His smile is thin but bright.
“Oh. Hey.” Nick’s voice is sleep-rough, heat spreading. “I’ve decided something. I’m gonna go talk to him. Without you, I don’t want any of it to continue.”
Jon’s head is still foggy. “But you two were first. I just stumbled into you late.”
Nick’s eyes harden, shakes his head. His mouth is curved cruelly.
“You still matter. Three is better than two.”
Jon blinks, confused. His lips quirk downward.
Nick touches his jaw, disentangles himself from them. He raids the pantry and then leaves.
Jon is alone, in more ways than one. He stretches like a cat, curved spine and convex limbs. His stomach rumbles so he makes some toast. He dresses and takes his camera out for a walk.
||
He wanders aimlessly for what could be eons, snapping pictures of anything and everything that catches his eye, people in the street, the insides of shop windows, street lamps, and parking meters. When he next sees a clock and actually notices the time, it’s been four hours.
He heads back to his house, mind clear and refreshed.
Nick and Tom are in his kitchen, eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Jon didn’t know he even had fruit in the refrigerator.
Jon’s internal footing is clumsy. His rhythm slows, cautious now.
Tom sets his sandwich down. He shifts his feet awkwardly and then comes over to Jon, holding Jon’s face with both hands. Jon won’t let himself hope, has to close his eyes.
Tom’s lips meet his and Jon opens his mouth, letting Tom’s tongue in. Jon tastes the banana, the peanut butter, and the bread, but it’s still perfect. Jon’s hands go to meet Tom’s, curve around him like an octopus. He opens his eyes. Tom is warm and solid against him, blissfully reassuring. Jon luxuriates in the feeling.
Jon glances over to Nick.
Nick is watching them, calmly eating his sandwich.
“I’m gonna fuck you and Tommy here is going to let you fuck his mouth because he’s very sorry for wanting to exclude you and wants to show it.” He tells Jon evenly between bites.
Jon blinks, feels his blood, rhythm quicken, pick up. He has no idea what Nick did to get Tom back, but he’s grateful.
Tom stops kissing him. “Some dude wants to sign 504.” Tom says to him, smiling shyly now. Like he has any reason to be shy around Jon.
The floor drops out from under him.
“The good news just keeps coming for you, huh?” Nick’s eyes glint in the afternoon light that’s streaming in, looking at the pile of mail Jon’s been too distracted to collect.
The mail is stacked neatly, waiting for his father to pay the bills. There’s one at the top that’s fatter than the others; a different kind of envelope. Tom hands it to him, since Jon seems to be frozen where he is. It’s from CCC.
He got in: Photography (no surprise there) with a full ride.
When he applied for early admission, he didn’t think he would actually ever get in. Surely he wasn’t that talented. Surely the admissions people would see that he was just a seventeen, nearly eighteen year old who liked playing with cameras.
He wonders which picture in his portfolio is the one that fooled the admissions board this completely.
One that stands out is a color one of a reflecting pool that showed trillions of Toms in its depths, a kaleidoscope of shade and tint and texture.
Jon smiles at them, as Tom pulls him to his room and Nick follows, after cleaning up the bread and dirty knives.
Jon is sitting on the bed with Tom at his knees when Nick comes in.
They relearn each other, remembering the places that feel the best and Tom is contrite and considerate, cleaning Jon up, kissing him and sorts of other things with his tongue while Nick is inside of Jon. It’s perfect and overwhelming and Jon loves them.
||
504 gets signed, tours with Pete and Joe’s new pet project, once Patrick (the boy Jon saw with Pete that one night) joins and Andy realizes they’re serious. The parade of would-be drummers and guitarists had amused Nick and Tom. Bill and Mike get their acts together with Sisky as their constant rock. Apparently they meet this vegan that works in a butcher’s shop. Butcher is calm, cool and wickedly funny.
Jon goes to CCC and works part-time at Starbucks and it’s fascinating and right and utterly monotonous. Taking pictures is homework and passion, instead of just the latter.
504 has a demo, but dissolves mostly due to disinterest and too much of themselves elsewhere. Tom gets absorbed into Bill and Mike’s band anyway.
Nick starts working with Pete on a top secret project neither will speak of, so as not to ‘spoil everyone’s fun’.
The scene suddenly explodes, gets popular. Mystification is the name of the game for Jon now.
||
TAI is born and has a demo, gets signed to Ramen, just like Pete and Joe did earlier. They go on tour, fast as mad men. It feels like Jon is being twisted in all different directions.
He leaves school and does sound for them. It soothes the crackle of feedback that normal life was filling him with. It doesn’t feel like work, the tuning and fixing of guitars, the carrying of equipment, as if it were grinding into his core the mantra of ‘this is all you will ever be’ ceaselessly.
Besides cash, they pay him a bottle of Jack a week, even though he can’t buy anything yet.
Nick doesn’t drop anything. He stays in Chicago, learns coding and design and works part-time at an indie music store, gearing up for something. Pete keeps in touch, via email&texts&calls, who knows what else.
Jon isn’t sure what’s up with that. Usually people have punched Pete by now, at the very least.
Soon enough one bus becomes two. Tom takes over the second one. Jon worries at that, at the amount of Jack, Jim, Grey Goose passing through him, soaking his rhythm.
But it’s not like he himself isn’t drinking through his stash either. Not like Bill and Mike are any more sober than Tom. Or Sisky, or even Butcher.
They take a break, TAI. Pete and Joe’s band takes off. Pete gets his own label, a clothing line, through shrewd negotiations and intensity. Nick goes to work for Crush, does freelance stuff for Clan.
Jon gets a job at another Starbucks, and this time ropes Tom in with him. It feels like Jon is going through the film for his life faster and faster, his rhythm blurred so he can’t make anything out.
||
Pete signs TAI over to his label, along with some new band from upstate New York.
TAI makes another album and goes on another tour. This time some baby band Pete flew to Vegas to see and sign tours with them. Jon goes with them, itching to be anywhere but where he was. Music still makes sense, even if he’s not the one making it.
Jon is polite to the painfully young band, as he is with anyone he doesn’t hate outright and blindingly. Jon doesn’t have much inclination to hate things though.
The nights after shows he and Tom aren’t fucking on Tom’s bus sober, they’re on Bill’s, playing poker with TAI and the lead singer from the other band getting really drunk.
Jon doesn’t talk to Tom about the bus assignments. He’s still just a tech for his boyfriend’s band, one of them at least, and it ultimately isn’t his decision. He’s just a tech this time, this isn’t his (and Nick’s and Tom’s) to meddle with, screw up. It’s Tom’s turn now, in a way.
And then Pete’s baby band ends up co-headlining with TAI.
Bill calls them cheeky little upstarts with all the fashion sense of a troupe of dead, fruity Circe du Solie rejects. He says this drunk, more often than not, hands splayed across Sisky’s chest and Mike’s hip. Bill is tactful enough to not say this within the ‘cheeky upstarts’ hearing.
It reminds Jon vaguely of junior high but with moderately more alcohol as part of the equation.
||
Then one of the ‘upstarts’ begins to arrive at sound check later and later. He looks skittish, sick, and droopy. Jon’s eye for detail quietly catches the shift from the boy’s pale skin to pallid to sallow. He even misses a show and the other have to scramble to save face. Jon steps in graciously, delegating his teching duties to another tech.
And then the troubled ‘upstart’ doesn’t join them for the next leg of the tour.
Jon filled in the first time out of boredom. He fills in the second time out of pity and regret. Pity for their present, regret for his past. Boredom for the future he has waiting.
He likes them for their fresh, honest emotions: Brent’s obviously painful shyness, Ryan’s brazenness (if the rumors are true) for writing those songs, shameless self-promoting tendencies, Brendon for his whole-hearted optimism in the face of his family, the press, the snide things techs say behind his band’s back, and Spencer for his strength.
They completed each other, like Nick and Tom do for him.
He likes them, pities them, and regrets a lot of things about how he handled 504.
So he helps, learns their songs, learns their rhythms.
Tom is drinking, too drunk to do anything but play; Nick is busy with the new, shiny life he’s building. Bill and Mike are fighting – viscous close little asides and things that mean nothing at all. Something is going to have to give and Jon is betting it won’t be Bill or Mike. But that’s if he was a betting kind of person. TAI has closed ranks, from the taunt line in Sisky’s collar to Butcher’s tense back to Bill and Mike’s prima donna fights to Tom’s sullen closed off attitude. Closed ranks and even Jon is out of the loop.
So he helps Panic! because the plates he’s been spinning are dropping around him and he can’t think of the future without starring into a bottle, the abysses’ gaping maw (wasn’t that what a particularly grungy looking book from his childhood had said? German on one page, English on the next, the author's name something with an 'N').
It feels right playing their songs.
||
Part Three- Daguerreotype i
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