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magdalynaHe learns all the card games TAI feels like playing, learns all the dirty jokes he missed growing up. He sneaks Ryan’s edgier philosophy books and Spencer’s business magazines and plays Guitar Hero with Brent, when Brendon can find him, which is no mean feat these days.
Ryan and Spencer are off hanging out with Brendon’s favorite tech ever, a zen photographer Jon Walker, so Brendon finally gets time on the bus with Brent without interruptions and he pounces.
“What’s up, Brent?” Brendon knows Brent hates what Brent calls ‘fake worry’, so he asks it as levelly as possible so Brent will actually tell him instead of picking a fight.
Brent looks drained all the time now, and Brendon hates not knowing what to do, how to help or what to say. Brendon curls up on the couch with him, hoping.
“Do you… go you ever wish that everything in the world was dead? So that … so that you wouldn’t have to exist anymore?” Brent asks it quietly, voice wavering and unsure.
The bottom of Brendon’s stomach drops out, scuttling around his abdomen with anticipatory fear.
“No. And I’m sorry I don’t understand it. But I do love you, Brent. And I want you to exist with me for a long time. What do you need me to do?” Brendon says, mind racing with thoughts he doesn’t want to become real. Brendon is just so lost and his parent’s God won’t help him now. Brendon realizes it’ll just be this band helping Brent.
“Don’t tell Ryan or Spencer, please. They’re fighting every single day for this band to make it, and Ryan will be pissed to have a weakling gumming up the works. I want to deal with this on my own terms and Ryan won’t let that happen, not now, with touring and promotions and whatever else Spencer has penciled in to remind us of.” Brent sounds so defeated that Brendon’s heart clinches. Defeated and resigned. Brendon hates it.
Brendon nods weakly.
“I can do that. Anything else?” He asks and snugs up against Brent closer, memorizing this moment in skin and smell and heat.
“Just … be here with me. Steady me.” Brent asks, looking away. Brendon takes in the dull skin and different jaw line and nods, gets closer.
They fall asleep like that and Brendon wakes with a crick in his neck and Spencer calmly eating cereal while Ryan grouses over his coffee. Brent is gone.
\
Brent becomes harder to find and Brendon doesn’t know where he could be, fears an attack of a phalanx of zombie carnies from that one carnival a few miles back or alcohol poisoning or something far worse.
Brendon’s temper, his clawing, mean thoughts start to surface strengthened by stress. He shuts down, won’t talk unless directly spoken to.
Brent doesn’t show up for sound checks, is horrendously late to a show.
They have a break in Vegas and they have to call in a favor with Pete, William, and maybe even the blue Genie from Aladdin to get Jon Walker to fly in and rescue them from disaster. They show is better than it has been for awhile and Brendon isn’t thinking about why that may be. He won’t because to do so would be betrayal.
Spencer puts his foot down, which means Ryan made the decision final and Spencer enacted it.
Brendon doesn’t think about phone calls on speakerphone and awkward conversations.
\
Jon swoops in and saves them from themselves and Brendon’s boyfriend back in Vegas. He laughs at their really lame jokes, tells his own, eases the tensions seemingly just by breathing. He learns their likes and dislikes, makes himself at home. Heteronormative male bonding occurs, even.
It’s all truly perfect.
Then Ryan’s father dies.
Ryan and Spencer close ranks and fly back one weekend. The tour is stalled.
They come back perfectly normal except Brendon can tell they’re faking it. He’s a master at faking it. They come back wrong, they look at each other differently, they touch just the same, but now they think about the touches.
Ryan goes out of his way to bring tokens back to Spencer and Spencer keeps breaking his drum sticks until Cortez makes him do yoga a few times.
It goes on like this for weeks.
\
Brendon’s boyfriend back in Vegas enrolls in community college and talk therapy, gets a prescription for Zoloft and Xanax, and rebuilds his life after the band. Brendon couldn’t be happier for him.
Ryan throws himself into the stage costume, dresses up his face in layers of war paint slathered on to look like trees and birds and flowers. Brendon thinks it would be almost funny, if only for the context behind it all.
What’s curious is that Ryan and Spencer touch more now than when they first got together. But Brendon is willing to let this slide for however long they want to until they’re ready to explain.
Jon blithely goes on about his duty as a bassist and doesn’t say a thing about Ryan and Spencer’s behavior. It’s not his place yet and he hasn’t earned the right, Brendon thinks. He’ll wait a few more interviews; see how Jon shakes up to the vultures and jackals of the press out for a juicy story before he backs down. Bassists are replaceable after all.
Brendon learned that lesson the hard way.
\
They call each other as often as they can, Brendon and his boyfriend back in Vegas. Brendon tells him about how his day or week went and he does the same about school and work and how therapy went today.
Brendon always ends the calls the same way, by saying a little unrelated joke. He’ll tell Brendon he loves him and is happy being alive and Brendon will tell him he loves him too. It’s sickeningly sweet and Brendon loves it, a little slice of what’s waiting for him when Panic! winds down.
\
They stop in this little town somewhere in the Carolinas or Kentucky. Brendon is a little hazy on details like this, but everything is green and hilly and has trees. Spencer would know, if Brendon was really curious. Spencer always knows things like that.
Brendon and Jon go exploring and find a street festival is happening. They wander a bit and Brendon sees pretty scarves, like the kind Ryan has taken to collecting, hoarding. It’s very relaxing, but it’s missing something.
Brendon and Jon head back to the hotel to find Ryan and Spencer to drag them out into the light of day.
Brendon knocks and Jon invites them to go out. A picnic is suggested. Brendon waits for Jon to start heading to find Zack, and he beams at them, telling them he’s pleased they’ve made up.
He can see the carpet that’s got a different grain, like something was rolled on it, and the messy bags. He is happy for them, that they can have this.
\
The picnic is lovely and they have a food fight and chase each other and he’s truly happy for one glorious hour. He even found a music box that’s perfect for his boyfriend back in Vegas’ birthday.
Jon takes Ryan and Spencer’s picture under a tree after the fight and chase is done with. Zack herds them back to the hotel like the mother hen he truly is, the big softie. Zack is his favorite bodyguard ever.
\
Brendon goes to the bus to look for some better paper to write with than the crap the hotel is trying to peddle and Jon is hunting up his camera supplies to develop his picture. A briefcase is wedged into their business nook Spencer voted in the first time they got a bus. Next to it are some paper pads.
Brendon goes to reach for the paper and the briefcase is yanked out with it. The clasps weren’t shut right maybe, and out comes spilling legal documents and Birth Certificate, more than one are splayed out on the floor. Jon comes up behind him, and they read what the papers say.
Brendon is sitting on the floor when he next realizes himself again. Jon is slightly paler.
“I’ve got something to tell you all. Take this to them? I need to make a few calls.” Jon says softly. He hands off the file folder he had been carrying to Brendon, who just takes it numbly.
\
Swearing and Mountain Dew and wanting to kiss boys, doing things with Brent, Brent himself, his pills, his frailties. All of this swirls inside Brendon’s mind. He doesn’t know what to think.
He knows what he should be thinking, what his parents, the press; anyone else would want him to think. Disgusting, wrong, immoral, sick, gross. Evil.
He should be thinking that, but Ryan and Spencer are none of those things inherently.
They love each other, and showed each other how they loved each other before they had a chance to find out they weren’t alone, that they were family instead of only soul mates.
He knows this because of the dates on the papers, saying Sealed Adoption and other, official looking words that blur together in his minds’ eye.
He should think it’s negative and awful, but he can’t make himself work up that kind of outrage. Plenty of other people would though, and that’s the chilling, nauseating thought that makes Brendon decide what to do.
They’re a band and will face it like a band.
\
Brendon packs up the briefcase and takes the file Jon gave him and goes to their room.
He gives both to them and tells them Jon wants to talk with them all and he waits in his and Jon’s room.
Jon comes back from making his calls to whoever a minute before Ryan and Spencer walk in, faces determined.
“Well?” Ryan asks impatiently. Spencer surveys them, flanking Ryan.
Jon sighs.
“Chicago is a big place if you don’t know anyone, I guess. But it’s really just a collection of people who are connected. Tom was my best friend growing up, and then he met Nick. And I had always hero worshipped Tom. And Nick was around after a while, too. So we all hooked up and stayed that way. Stayed three.” Jon pauses, steeling himself visibly.
“And then when Tom turned eighteen, our parents met at my house and told us we were full brothers. That since Tom was an adult now that his records had been unsealed. So I found out I had done stuff with my brother and a dude who felt like a brother. And it got really bad for a few months. It was a really crappy time to be us. We managed to get through it, though. We’re still three.” Jon says in a relieved manner.
Ryan just blinks at this. Spencer remains blank.
Brendon feels light headed. What are odds?
“So what you’re saying is, I’m in a band full of accidental, and then continued consensual incest?” Brendon queries, just to be sure.
Ryan quirks an eyebrow. “Seems like it” he says. Brendon knows it’s a wry comment from years of practice.
“How …how did it start?” Brendon asks quietly after a while.
Ryan looks at him, up, from the floor.
“Because we were all we had. He’s my other half, what I’ve always wanted.” Ryan says, as if this is the clearest constellation in the night’s sky.
Brendon lets that sink in, nodding. He knows what part of that is like, at least.
“So what do we do now then?” Spencer says for the first time since entering the room.
“We go on our merry way, enthralling the world with our dulcet entertainments, Spencer Smith the Fifth, how could you think otherwise?” Brendon tells him serenely, grinning like a cat that got the cream. And the canary.
Jon looks at him, smiling. “I think it’s past someone’s bed time.” He says amusedly.
Brendon rolls his eyes, since Zack is the only one who can declare bedtimes. They all voted on it months ago.
“I want to talk about our schedule for the next album tomorrow on our way to Raleigh, since we need to get that ironed out soon.” Ryan says.
North Carolina it is then, Brendon thinks as they all nod and Spencer goes into his and Ryan’s room, Ryan following, lost in thought. Whatever it is, Brendon knows he’ll hear about it so he doesn’t ask.
\
The tour winds down and they go back to Vegas and Chicago for a few weeks before Ryan has them trekking to northern Nevada to live in a cabin for the summer to write a new album.
Brendon is dubious, since the last time he was in a cabin in Nevada, he saw his fellow church going men and youths shoot at rabbits as a bonding and manliness ritual.
But the few rabbits he sees here are alive and hopping about, and the only manliness ritual any of them partake of is attempting to grow beards with varied success.
Ryan unleashes his scarf collection slowly, as not to scare to scarves themselves by their sheer number in species or the cabin’s human inhabitants. It doesn’t work, and Brendon has a dream where the scarves try and strangle him in his sleep.
Jon and Spencer seem unaffected by them and their brightly floral patterns.
Brendon decides to be a brave little toaster and not plot against them. Well, not plot too much.
He figures that his plans wouldn’t be appreciated with the problems they’re running into, anyway.
\
Ryan has this neat concept about a wolf musical with the seven deadly sins smushed together with crack, but Jon and Spencer have no idea how that should sound. Brendon doesn’t even know how his touring piano could hold up to that. And his touring piano is made of pure joy and skills. So he’s floundering too.
They watch DVDs of random shows Jon grabbed from his living room. This is how they all end up watching The Notebook, on the couch together, with Jon and Brendon at one end and Ryan and Spencer curled up together at the other.
This is how they’ve always sat, but Brendon can’t shake the feeling of awkwardness that it has now. Brendon doesn’t let himself treat them all differently, but it’s still strange, weird. Even if none of them knew, and couldn’t stop the feelings for their partners.
They get into stupid little fights about how to work out Ryan’s concept properly, like whose turn it is to cook dinner or collect the trash or smaller things like socks in the hallways.
Ryan gets snippy, Spencer gets bitchy, Brendon gets viscous and Jon gets closed off.
Brendon gets irritated during practice, since they keep running around in circles.
Brendon’s boyfriend back in Vegas gets his AA degree, gets more hours at his part time job. Brendon’s happy for him. Brendon still hasn’t told him about what he’s learned, because when it really comes down to it, what he’s learned is only for those blessed few in his band. The band comes first. It has to, for any of them to make it.
They head to Vegas frustrated and begin recording something. Finally the moment crystallizes for them, cooped up in this windowless studio in some gaudy casino hotel combination.
\
It flows better after that, this entirely reworked idea that’s all of them. Ryan and Jon sing, Brendon plays more guitar and writes, Spencer has more input.
Brendon cries from relief when he’s by himself after the first song is fully done.
The album gets done rapid fire after that and the promotion for it gets under way a few months later on the press circuit.
Brendon’s boyfriend manages to patch up his old friendships with Ryan and Spencer, mostly Spencer. Ryan doesn’t forgive betrayal easily. Spencer seems genuinely happy for Brendon’s boyfriend.
Brendon doesn’t bother trying to contact his parents, since he knows they’ll be too busy this time of year.
He spends the holidays with his band and his boyfriend, in Vegas. Jon split up the time between Chicago and their home nicely to Ryan’s satisfaction.
\
Brent asks Brendon to marry him a year after Nevada follows Massachusetts and California’s lead. It took Nevada a while to get with the program.
Brent asks a few months after Brent turns twenty five and Brendon turns twenty four.
Brendon only pauses for a moment, to think of all the bad press and he doesn’t think about who won’t be there (he doesn’t, not at all) before he says yes.
The wedding planner Brent’s mother hired somehow is hoodwinked into letting Patrick and Pete plan it with her.
It still ends up being tasteful, with only a few bat designs tucked into things, a nice surprise, Pete had insisted.
Ryan and Jon act as his best men while Spencer, Tom and Nick serve as Brent’s.
Brendon asks the other couples when Brent is off with his parents, if they ever miss things like this. Spencer and Tom look slightly wistful but Ryan shakes his head, curls his hand into Spencer’s.
“We still know, is the thing.” Nick says as Jon nods in agreement.
Brendon feels a pang then, that they won’t get a party with cake and bats printed into the napkins like Brent has for something they all know.
Pete got himself ordained online and is their priest.
When Pete says they can now kiss the groom, Brendon kisses Brent fully, to the cheering of everyone.
Fin
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