Title: Don't Worry Your Head
Pairing: Pete/Patrick
Word Count: 9727
Summary: "in the morning itll all be better / dont worry your head just go to sleep."
Author's Notes: At end of fic.



1

For the most part, Patrick had a really good childhood. Just your basic summer camp and elementary school band type stuff, first kisses and best friends and Saturday morning cartoons, the kind of thing you see in sitcoms and movies aimed at kids under twelve. Totally PG-friendly, if anyone ever found it interesting enough to make a movie about him, which he doubted. There was his parents’ divorce, sure, the death of a grandparent, a beloved cat that ran away, but no major trauma, and even those memories were far away enough that they didn’t make much of an impact. Whatever sadness or loss he might have felt at the time, he didn’t carry them later on, or even remember very clearly what he felt at the time.

Really, most of his memories from before he was fifteen or so were kind of hazy. Not like, in a scary brain damage way—of course he remembered stuff, and everyone he’d ever talked to about it said their memories of being a kid were pretty fuzzy, too, all blurring into each other to create just a basic impression, “good childhood” or “fucked up childhood” or somewhere in between. But they usually had a few dozen good, strong memories, impressions that stayed with them through the years, and Patrick didn’t really. Two, maybe three things stood out—helping his dad move boxes to the car after the divorce, staring at the vibrant sleeves of the records that had never really interested him before; picking up a guitar for the first time—but that was it. The rest was mostly just happy blur, first grade into fifth grade into his freshman year of high school.

Later, he’ll think about this and catalogue it as one more thing he should have had, those sharp, detailed memories of a life; as one more thing he might never have had, any memories of any kind of life at all. It kind of works both ways.

2

His most vivid memory before the age of sixteen was of meeting Pete.

That day, he opened the door to see Joe, accompanied by a short dark kid with tattoos sketched onto his arms, twitching like he’d had too much caffeine and tapping his foot impatiently. When he saw Patrick—even shorter, but still hoping for a growth spurt; short blond spikes not yet thinning at the top, young-skinny with arms and legs that felt too long most of the time—he stilled, and then a smile spread slowly over his face, an honest to god grin of delight, as he reached out to touch Patrick lightly, just on the inch of bare skin inside his wrist.

“You’re…you,” he said, and Patrick narrowed his eyes because okay, this was Pete Wentz, straightedge superstar, he hadn’t really expected him to be on drugs.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I’m Patrick.”

Pete paused a second, like he was collecting himself, and then grinned even wider, deliberately charming. “Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, I knew I was going to meet you. But fuck,” he said, “ I didn’t expect you to be dressed like my grandpa.” He twisted the sleeve of Patrick’s sweater, raising his eyebrows like a dare.

Joe looked nervously between the two of them, like he was trying to gauge their reactions to each other. Patrick could see it in his eyes, that he was waiting for his band to evaporate before it even started, and Patrick can’t say it didn’t cross his mind to just step back and shut the door between them.

The thought was fleeting, though, more an acknowledgement of a possibility than any real desire to do it. Pete was rude and pushy and frankly, kind of fucking weird, but Patrick had never met anybody who warmed to him to quickly and so completely, jumping over formalities and right into familiarity in a way that made Patrick want to do the same.

So instead, Patrick just laughed, and drew his arm away from Pete’s grabby hands before inviting them both in.

3

Pete’s always been overly familiar with strangers—with everyone, really, but even more so with Patrick. It never really bothered him, even in the beginning, mostly because Pete seemed to know without being told where most of Patrick’s boundaries were. Occasionally he went over the edge, sometimes on purpose, but somehow he knew what to tease about, what to leave alone, when to crowd and when to keep his distance, and somehow Patrick knew Pete the same way.

He’d expected Pete to be mysterious, hard to figure out—he remembered, vaguely, Bill Beckett showing him one of Pete’s online blogs forever ago, when they were both fanboying Arma Angelus pretty hard, and not understanding it, how someone could be so nakedly honest and yet so abstract at the same time—but he wasn’t. Patrick understood him perfectly, like he’d known Pete forever and had just been waiting to meet him. Which sounded—it sounded fucking stupid, like something from one of his mom’s romance novels, even if he didn’t mean it that way, but it was the best way he could think of to articulate it.

Pete was the word guy, but all he could come up with was, “You were made for me, Stumph. I dreamed you up out of pure awesomeness, and the benevolent forces of the universe saw fit to deliver you to me.” When Patrick rolled his eyes, trying to cover for his blush with teenaged derision, Pete’s grin always faded a little bit and he’d say, “Hey, better you than some of my nightmares coming true,” running his fingers over the tattoo on his stomach. That was Patrick’s cue to distract him, talk about the song they were working on or the book Pete was reading or Joe’s latest attempt at a hairstyle.

They knew each other like that, even early on. Even from the very first time they met.

4

It wasn’t that Patrick wasn’t attracted to girls, because he was. Also maybe dudes, but definitely girls, he was pretty clear on that one. For some reason, though, the idea of hooking up with a girl, or even dating one, didn’t really appeal to him for a long time, long after it appealed to all of his other friends. He’d much rather chill with his (mostly male) friends and talk about movies and play music, which didn’t leave a lot of time for dating anyway, and since he had no real inclination, he never tried.

Other dudes who weren’t interesting in dating chicks got shit for it, got called queer and fag and all that other crap, but for some reason it never seemed to bother anyone with Patrick, possibly because he didn’t hang out with the kind of dudes who called people fags. Instead, it just made him the perfect friend, someone who would listen to his friends whine about their girl problems but never had girl problems of his own, who never got too busy to hang out because he was hanging out with his girlfriend, who was always available for video game marathons or a concert or a movie on a Saturday night.

Maybe it was being in a band, maybe it was seeing Joe and Andy and well, maybe not Pete, because his relationships were kind of a giant neon advertisement for the joys of bachelorhood, but seeing the other guys with their girlfriends, it made him kind of wonder what it would be like. He’d never really felt anything missing in his life before, it all seemed to be there, conveniently provided for him, but around the time he was eighteen it just started feeling like he was…missing something, sort of. Missing out on something.

That’s when he met Anna.

It wasn’t one of those things where they instantly felt a connection, or even one of those things where they instantly liked each other. Not that they didn’t like each other, just, they felt pretty neutral, or at least Patrick did. She was the friend of a friend of someone’s girlfriend who was tagging along to a party, one of the few that Patrick wasn’t playing at those days, and at first she was just another girl there, pretty and nice enough but nothing particularly exceptional.

She stayed that way for the rest of the night until they both ended up at the food table, talking about the meager options. Patrick was picking at something that might have been potato salad, and he said, “Yeah, I don’t even know what I’m eating here.”

“Maggots, Michael,” she said. “You’re eating maggots.” And then she clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh shit, sorry! I just watched that movie last night, it’s like, stuck in my head.” He grinned, and then she grinned, and it was just like something out of a music video, it was so perfect.

That led to a two-hour conversation about the joys of 80’s movies, and then to him getting her number at the end of the night, and then to them suddenly, inexplicably dating.

Patrick adjusted to it pretty well, for someone who’d never really dated before. She was upfront with him when he was fucking something up and told him how to fix it, and she understood about the band and how that had to come first, even if she wasn’t exactly happy about it, and overall she was just so fucking wonderful. Having a girlfriend was great—he totally couldn’t figure out why it had never appealed to him before.

Pete, though, seemed confused about the whole concept of girlfriends, or rather, the whole concept of Patrick having a girlfriend. “But you’re my friend,” he said when Patrick told him about Anna, emphasis on the ‘my’.

“Yeah, and I’m still your friend. Only now I’m Anna’s boyfriend, too,” Patrick told him patiently. Pete still seemed confused. “It’s not gonna fuck up the band, okay? Like, she gets that stuff. She totally gets me.” Patrick was aware that he had a stupid grin on his face, but he couldn’t really get rid of it.

“But I’ve never even met her. I’ve never pictured you with her.” Pete was pretty much talking to himself at that point—it was one of those where Patrick didn’t really need to be there. Except he did, because he needed to make sure Pete knew how things stood.

“You don’t need to picture me with her—and dude, you should think about how that sounds, because really. Please don’t picture us, ever. But no, like, I can picture myself with her, and that’s the important part.” He sighed, a little put out that he had to make this speech when Pete had a new True Love every other fucking week. “Like, I really think you’ll like her, and I hope you do because you’re, you know, my best friend and stuff, but.”

“But,” Pete echoed. “Just but?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said, raising his chin. This wasn’t a fight, not yet, and he really didn’t want to make it one, but he also wasn’t giving up Anna just because Pete never learned how to share in kindergarten.

“Okay,” Pete said finally. “Like, okay. Bring her to the next show. I’ll get used to it, I guess.”

5

After he met Pete, Patrick remembered things more; his memories were clearer and more lasting. More real, somehow. Patrick figured it was his changing brain chemistry, finally adjusting itself so that he could function at an adult level, or maybe it was just that things were more memorable after he met Pete. The band coming together, fragmenting and solidifying as people joined and left; the first album; their brief and hectic tours, and then finally Andy joining; the second album; longer and more wide-ranging tours, kids knowing who they were in states they’d never even visited before. The four of them, taking a dream and making it into something real.

6

He can’t remember which tour it was, that he tried to call his mom, but that’s normal too. States, dates, whole years tend to blend together when you’re on the road, until everything seems like one big day, the same day over and over again. Even in your dreams, you’re still loading and unloading the van, still up on the stage, still staring out the window at the moving landscape, until the tour’s over and you just stay still for a while.

That day, whatever day it was, it was edging towards night in the state they were in, but it was still early enough back in Illinois that he knew his mom would still be up, and he hadn’t called her in way too long. It had been a bad night, Pete distracted all through the show and after by something that had gone down with his girlfriend, and it threw all of them off, detached from each other instead of playing as a single, functional unit. Even now Pete was locked in his own little bubble, staring down at his cell with a scowl, violently texting because apparently she wasn’t taking his calls, and all Patrick wanted was something stable and sane and there with him.

He called his house and said, “Hey Mom, it’s me.”

His mom’s voice traveled through the earpiece, reassuringly familiar. “Kevin?”

He rolled his eyes. “No, Mom. Patrick.”

“I’m…sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. I think you have the wrong number.”

He froze. He didn’t have the wrong number, he knew it didn’t, it was programmed into his phone under Home so he didn’t even have to dial. “Mom—”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m not your mother.”

Then she hung up.

Patrick sat staring silently at the phone in his lap for the longest time, he didn’t even know how long, it felt like forever, and then he made some small noise in the back of his throat that made Pete look up from his own phone.

“Patrick?” Patrick just looked at him, and Pete was immediately up on his feet and then down on his knees, in front of Patrick. “Hey, hey—you okay? What happened?”

“My mom,” Patrick said. He felt a little angry, and a whole lot confused, because what the fuck, and deep inside the pit of stomach where he wouldn’t even admit the emotions existed, sad and lonely and sort of scared. “She didn’t…she said she wasn’t my mother. I think…I think she didn’t recognize me.”

Pete’s eyes flickered, and he went still. And then he laughed. “That’s all? Fuck, Patrick, you scared the shit out of me for a minute, there. You probably dialed the wrong number or something.”

“I didn’t have to dial, asshole, the number’s programmed into my phone,” Patrick said, shoving Pete.

Pete fell back on one elbow, still laughing. “Then she was probably distracted by something, or the distance made your voice sound all wonky or something.”

“This isn’t fucking funny, asshole,” Patrick said, but anger was already winning over confusion and sadness, because…well, it really wasn’t funny, he was honestly scared there for a minute, but really, Pete had to be right. Of course his mom knew him; she was his mom. It was just some weird glitch, phone distortion, too much static or something.

“Seriously, Patrick,” Pete said, sitting up. “Here; use my phone. Call her again, I bet she won’t even know what you’re talking about, she’ll just tell you about some weird dude who tried to call from some staticky connection earlier. Trust me.”

Patrick narrowed his eyes, because when Pete said that, it usually meant that you should smell your clothes for piss, but he took Pete’s phone and dialed his parents’ number, pretending his fingers weren’t shaking just slightly.

“Hello?”

“Hi.” His voice was small, almost inaudible, so he cleared his throat and spoke a little louder. “Mom?”

“Patrick! Oh, honey, it’s so good to hear from you, you don’t call nearly enough. How’s the tour going?”

Patrick looked at Pete, but he just raised his eyebrows, like, ‘I told you so,’ and picked up Patrick’s phone to commence his texting marathon. Patrick thought about warning him not to break the keypad, but he seemed to have calmed a little, tapping at a leisurely pace like he no longer cared so urgently about getting through to her, so instead Patrick sat back against the bed and told his mom about the tour.

7

The songs always worked, once they got the formula right. Back at the beginning, Patrick had expected—he didn’t know what, exactly. He was just a kid, sweet sixteen and never really set foot on a stage, and Pete was…well, he was Pete Wentz. He wrote lyrics and then screamed them out for audiences, and that worked. Kids loved him; they stared at him onstage and read his blogs and listened to the albums dozens of times so they could scream out the barely-intelligible lyrics with him. His words meant something to them.

He’d expected the formula to be basically the same with their band, but no. Pete wanted him to sing the lyrics, and since he was singing them, Pete seemed to expect him to write them, too. Maybe he was burnt out from Arma Angelus. Maybe he just wanted to see what Patrick could do. And Patrick was sixteen and invigorated by Pete’s confidence in him and convinced of his own invincibility when it came to music, so he told himself that he could do it, and then he did.

Whenever Patrick turned up with lyrics, Pete looked at him expectantly, eagerly, but he always seemed somewhat disappointed with the finished product. (Later, Pete tells him, voice quiet in the close space of the bunk, “I think I thought you’d be able to do everything for me. Write out the words in my head along with the music. I should have known it wouldn’t work that way. I needed…I needed to write the words, and that’s why you couldn’t do it for me.”) Patrick tried to write about love and life and real, human experiences, the kind of thing great songs were made of, the kind of thing Pete wrote about, the kind of things he’d never experienced, but they always read flat to him, false and unconvincing.

That came out in the lyrics, too—I got an honorable mention in the movie of my life, starring you instead of me; I read about the afterlife but I never really lived. Pete hated it when anybody would psychoanalyze his own lyrics or ask him to explain them, but back then, when Patrick was writing, he would quiz Patrick about his words: Do you really feel like that? Don’t you get how amazing you are? And Patrick would mumble something reassuring and wonder how Pete could deal with it, having his feelings so exposed. It was like that with the music too, sometimes, his feelings out there for everyone to hear and react to and criticize, but at least music was more abstract, more subtle—nobody ever asked about the meaning of a note or a chord. So for the most part he stuck to fiction, broken hearts he’d never even cracked and switchblade smiles he’d never seen.

Pete had broken those hearts and been cut by those smiles, so he always ended up tweaking things, adding and subtracting lines to make them work better, sound more real. The songs usually ended up as a hybrid, half-Patrick and half-Pete, their individual words and music cut up, mixed, and sewn back together, with Joe and Andy adding their own contributions later on. It always felt strange, and unbalanced, and false, until finally Patrick turned the words over to Pete entirely and focused himself on the music. It worked better that way, the two of them complementing each other instead of trying to be something they weren’t.

Once they had their process the way it should be—Pete writing the words around bits of music Patrick played for him, Patrick writing music to wrap around Pete’s words—the songs worked. Sometimes Patrick would find himself half-humming words in the back of his throat as he wrote, and he wouldn’t know what they were until Pete gave them to him on paper; no matter what Pete gave him, he always had music for it, somewhere, just waiting for Pete’s words to be written into existence so they could come together.

Pete said that when they wrote, they went to Arcadia. Patrick was pretty sure that Arcadia actually had something to do with death, or the afterlife, or something, but yeah—he couldn’t deny that when they were writing, especially when it was completely spontaneous, just Patrick with his guitar and Pete with his notebook writing whatever came to them, really together instead of in their separate rooms and bunks and heads, it was like being somewhere else, where only the two of them existed. Where they understood each other perfectly, no barriers between them, like those dreams where you don’t even have to talk, you’re underwater but the other person still knows exactly what you’re saying. Like that.

8

At rehearsal, Pete stopped in the middle of “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner” and said, “Wait, no. Patrick, you said you were gonna change up the arrangement in the middle, shift the lyrics around.”

Patrick sighed; he’d thought they were done with this argument. “No, I didn’t. You spent three hours trying to convince me to, and I still said no, up until the time you fell asleep on top of your notebook.”

“No, last night—afterwards, you said—” Pete stopped himself. His fingers were clutching the neck of his guitar, and his jaw was clenched, but he didn’t look angry, exactly, just…confused.

“Afterwards, you fell asleep,” Patrick said again. “Look, maybe you dreamed it or something; you can’t hold me responsible for shit I said in your dreams. What are you taking right now, anyway?” Pete was popping a couple of pills a day now, who knew what the side effects were? Hallucinations, maybe. Lucid dreaming.

Now Pete looked angry. “Fuck you,” he said, throwing off his bass. “I’m not taking anything, fuck you. Maybe you just can’t remember conversations we had last fucking night.” He stomped out of their practice space, and Patrick cringed as he heard the door slam shut.

“So…I guess practice is over?” Joe said, guitar still awkwardly in his hands.

Andy threw his sticks down and snorted. “You think?”

9

Patrick can’t remember when it first started fracturing. When the band started getting bigger, maybe. When they signed with Island, with the prospect of getting even bigger. When Pete and Jeanae split up, not the first time but the worst time, at least so far, and the words were coming hard and fast and good, but they weren’t words that Patrick particularly wanted to hear. When Pete was taking way too many pills, and not in any combination that a doctor recommended, and they couldn’t get to that place anymore, Arcadia or wherever. He was writing amazing stuff, they were writing amazing stuff, but it wasn’t the same, that talking underwater feeling was gone. Now it was like Pete was underwater, sinking so fast Patrick could barely see him anymore, and Patrick was on the shore, unable to reach him.

He tried, they all tried, to talk to Pete about it, but the one quality of the old Pete he seemed to retain was his inability to be fucking honest in person instead of on paper. Even when it was impossible to brush off, when Pete was only coming out of his bedroom to eat and use the bathroom and shove barely legible but still distressing lyrics underneath Patrick’s door, Pete still acted like nothing was wrong, like there was something wrong with them for being so worried about him. Especially Patrick; Patrick didn’t know what the fuck he’d done but the few occasions when Pete looked at him, he looked like Patrick had betrayed him, somehow. Maybe he’d expected Patrick to understand, effortlessly, like he always had before. For the first time, though, Patrick didn’t.

It was surreal, almost, like being cut off in the middle of a conversation but the conversation was only in your mind. Patrick felt cut loose, left behind. Unreal, almost, sometimes, like if Pete didn’t believe in him, then maybe he didn’t exist. Like if Pete didn’t believe in himself, then he didn’t exist.

And then he got better. He learned to cope, he got over his weird reactive-depressive stage, whatever, he got better. And Pete, well. Pete didn’t.

10

Nobody else would believe him if he ever said it out loud, but the day Pete overdosed in a Best Buy parking lot, Patrick knew, because he dreamed it.

In the dream, he was sitting next to Pete, in the passenger seat of Pete’s shitty car, watching him stare blankly out the windshield with a CD in one hand and a half-empty pill bottle in the other.

“Pete. What are you doing?”

“Hmm?” Pete turned his head, slowly, and looked at him. “What are you doing here? You never come to see me anymore.”

“Pete, I see you all the time. You’re the one who decided not to come—look, you know what, never mind. What are you doing?”

But Pete seemed fixated on the first part, the part Patrick hadn’t said all the way. “No, I mean here, you never come to see me here. Not anymore. Not for a long time.”

“What, in your car? In a parking lot?”

“You’re leaving me alone in here. You’re not…you’re not mine anymore, I can’t…I dunno.” Pete’s hands clenched around the CD, the bottle; he squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s all fucked up, I don’t know anymore what’s real, what was real before—”

“Before what?” Patrick reached over and shook Pete, hard, panicky. Everything felt real, he thought he was awake, but the sun was too bright outside and Pete wasn’t making any sense and hey, hadn’t he been in England just a few minutes ago?

Pete’s eyes opened. “Before I made you real,” he said, and then Patrick woke up, in England, in the bed of a shitty hotel.

That night, they played a show, Patrick trying to ignore the totally nice guy on bass who wasn’t Pete, who couldn’t be Pete. The next day, they got the call.

Patrick didn’t remember the whole dream until later, a lot later. What he did remember was a shaky sense of deja vu at the familiarity of those words, Pete, parking lot, pills, and the way they connected to an image of too-bright sunlight in his head.

11

When Pete came back—really came back, from wherever he’d been, locked inside his own head—things were different. Better, definitely better than they’d been when Pete was fucked up, but different than they’d been before that, too.

They could still get to that place when they were writing, Arcadia or whatever, the songs and the words coming together like magic, like they were communicating silently and instinctively. They still connected on a level that nobody else got, still got each other in ways that nobody else could, but it was just…different. Patrick still had that interrupted feeling, like holding the dead end of a telephone.

It took a while to get over it, and Patrick still isn’t sure that he really has. Maybe it’s like a phantom limb, where you just stop missing it after a while, you’re so used to the absence that it becomes your new normal. And even if he missed it, that thing that he and Pete had before, Patrick’s new normal was so much better than the fucked-up abnormal that he did his best to ignore it, pretend the limb had never even existed.

Pete still noticed it, but he seemed to make up for it by crawling all over Patrick even more, using their time on stage when they were wide open to press closer, try to get inside physically the way he couldn’t any other way. Patrick just made that part of his new normal, too.

12

Pete never really did get used to Anna, never opened up to her the way everyone else did. Every time he saw her, he always seemed surprised, like he didn’t expect her to be there even when Patrick had told him a week in advance that she was coming.

When they broke up, he was the first to breach Patrick’s sulking wall and talk to him about it, and he at least had the decency to give him a good solid week of sulking first so that Patrick was at the philosophical stage instead of the brain-numbing depression stage.

“Really, you can quit your pouting, dude. I told you years ago that you two wouldn’t work out.”

Patrick gave him a look over his glasses. Sometimes it was easier to deal with Pete if he was blurry. It meant he couldn’t successfully hit him, for one thing. “It took almost four years for it not to work. That’s a pretty good lifespan for a relationship, dude. Longer than any of yours, at least.” He felt a little mean saying it, but a) it was true, and b) he’d just been dumped and Pete was giving him shit. He was allowed to be a little mean.

Pete was in a surprising, annoyingly ‘up’ mood, though, and just ignored it, creeping closer and edging his way into Patrick’s space. “Whatever. I still knew it wouldn’t work out for you two. You weren’t made for each other.”

Patrick rolled his eyes, but raised his arm to let Pete burrow under it. “Nobody’s made for anybody, man. We all just wander around trying to find somebody who’ll fit with us until we become somebody else, you know? Until we don’t fit anymore. And it’s like, fuck, it’s sad, but eventually we’ll find somebody else who’ll fit with the person we are now.” Or we’ll wander around lonely and hollow inside until we die in a gutter, he thought but didn’t say. He was still pretty fucking down from being dumped, but that wasn’t the sort of thought that he wanted to put into Pete’s head. Besides, he knew he’d get over it. Eventually. Probably.

“No,” Pete said, tipping his head back on Patrick’s shoulder. “Some people are made for each other. Some people are made to be perfect for that one person who’s out there somewhere, and eventually they meet and spend the rest of their lives together, because that’s what they were made for. To fit together, like puzzle pieces. Two halves of a whole.” This was one of those things Pete said that made Patrick’s belly prickle uncomfortably, one of those things that Patrick where couldn’t tell if it was directed towards him specifically or if he was just the person Pete was talking at during that particular point in time, and he didn’t know what to say or how to react.

He settled for squeezing Pete’s shoulder and looking away, muttering, “Yeah, maybe.” It was a nice thought, sort of, even if he wasn’t sure he could really believe in it. True Love, two people coming together like a puzzle. Being made for someone, like being made to order instead of created like art, one of a kind. It was like a fairy tale, something Pete would blog about and Patrick would eventually turn into a song—something that sounded good and was true, but not, ultimately, real. Still, it was comforting, sometimes, especially later on.

13

Patrick’s not sure he ever would have noticed except that Fall Out Boy was getting bigger, and they were all busy. Pete was distracted, especially, with his new Hollywood life, girls and parties and cameras and probably, somewhere in there, just once or twice, booze and drugs and whatever else. Like Patrick’s one to talk –he’s not, he’s been there, for the booze and the drugs and the parties and the girls, sometimes, but like everything else, Pete always does it spectacularly bigger and spectacularly worse than anyone else.

So Pete was distracted and Patrick was worried, and they were writing the album and then recording the album and then Patrick was buying a place in LA because he did a lot of work there, but also, maybe, to keep an eye on Pete.

And then Patrick disappeared from his fifth grade yearbook.

14

He’d moved all his yearbooks down to LA with him because his mom told him he should. “They’ll keep you grounded, honey,” she said, and it’s not like she knew what was going to happen but he can’t help blaming her, a bit. It’s not like he can blame her for him being born anymore.

They’d been on his bookshelf for a while before he bothered to look through them. There was a kid he used to hang out with in fifth grade, a kid who’d introduced him to Green Day, freaking Green Day, and Patrick couldn’t remember his name. Fucking typical, with his memory, but that kid was important. In some ways, that kid had started all this.

He found the kid. Tommy Martin, messy hair and braces and all, and he’d been the coolest fucking kid in fifth grade because he had a discman and pop punk cds. Patrick couldn’t remember much more than that, but he was glad to have the memory, that sense of anticipation hearing this music that he knew would change his entire life.

When he flipped back to find himself, Patrick Stumph, he wasn’t there. Not even a blank square saying Not Pictured, just nothing, no space between Mary Stevens and James Stuyvessent’s awkward, grinning photos. He looked for himself in the band picture, in the random pictures of kids walking in the hallways or hanging out at school dances, and he wasn’t there, either.

He looked at the other yearbooks, sixth grade, eighth grade, senior year.

Then he called Pete because, not to put too fine a point on it, Pete had experience in being crazy. Pete could recommend psychiatrists, Pete could tell him how to tell his parents and the band, Pete could help him deal with losing his fucking mind, because he’d been there before.

Pete told him to come over, and to calm the fuck down, because there was probably a good explanation for it.

15

“A good fucking explanation?” Patrick said. “I fucking disappeared, Pete, and I’m supposed to believe that’s not fucking crazy?”

“You’re not crazy,” Pete said. He tried a smile, but it didn’t really work, resting uneasily on his face. “Look, I know crazy, dude, and you’re not. You’re not, I swear.”

“Just—seriously, just give me your therapist’s number. We can let her work out whether I’m crazy or not, I just need some sort of fucking answer.”

“No! You—you can’t, Patrick, seriously. You don’t need to see a therapist, you just need to calm down and think about this. You’re not crazy.”

“Then what? What the fuck is going on, what…” He looked at Pete, really looked at him. “You know something. You fucking know something, Pete, you have to tell me.”

“I don’t,” Pete said, but he was staring at his shoes, twisting his feet on the ground the way he did when he was uncomfortable or bored or blatantly fucking lying.

“Pete. Pete.” He waited until Pete looked up at him, made him look Patrick in the eyes, and said, “Tell me. You have to fucking tell me.”

“I…” Pete faltered, visibly searching for a lie, anything, anything to fill the silence, and then he stopped, raising his chin and looking Patrick directly in the eye. “Okay. Okay, this sounds crazy.”

“Is it less crazy than shit disappearing in front of my eyes? Because if it is, I’ll fucking take it.”

“I don’t—it might be more crazy, Patrick, I don’t fucking know, you were never supposed to…I was never going to tell you, because it doesn’t fucking matter anymore, it never mattered, you’re—”

“Just fucking say it, Pete. Fucking say—”

Pete’s voice was clear and loud and lucid, and he looked Patrick straight in the eye. “I dreamt you.”

Patrick laughed. It was a little choked gasp of a laugh, yeah, but he still wasn’t really sure why he was laughing, except that it was so fucking absurd. “This is not the time for your fucking…weird ego-stroking crap, Pete. I’m fucking serious here.”

“So am I.” Pete was still looking at Patrick, clear-eyed, clear-voiced, and telling the fucking truth, Patrick could tell just by looking at him.

“What—fucking, you know what? Call me when you’ve taken your meds, Pete,” Patrick said. He slammed the front door after he left, and pointedly didn’t answer Pete’s phone calls for the next two days.

When he looked through the yearbooks again, his photo was there staring up at him from the pages.

15

Patrick had done his reading about bipolar disorder after Pete was diagnosed. He knew all about delusions of grandeur, delusions in general, side effects of medications on the brain. He also knew that sometimes Pete didn’t take his meds, that when he didn’t the chemical crash was even worse than if he hadn’t been taking them for a while, that he never slept much in general and that when he med-crashed he slept even less, and that these combinations of factors could fuck up Pete’s head to the point where he couldn’t tell if events, conversations, were really happening or if he was imagining them.

This…didn’t feel like any of those things. What it did feel like was those times when Pete would remind him of a conversation they’d had the night before, and Patrick could remember having it, even if they’d been in separate rooms for the whole night, even if Patrick could have sworn that he’d fallen asleep long before he ever got the opportunity to tell Pete about that funny joke or new song or movie that he wanted to see.

Like they’d met up somewhere else, while they were sleeping. Arcadia, maybe. A dreamworld.

After a week, he went back to Pete’s house and let himself in with the key Pete had given him when he first moved in. “In case I ever need you,” Pete had said, folding Patrick’s fingers around the metal, “in case…” Patrick hadn’t let him elaborate, had just nodded and stuck the key on his ring, between the ones for his car and his apartment.

Pete didn’t seem surprised to see him, even though he hadn’t called. He was sitting on the couch with Hemingway watching a movie, something with subtitles and surreal European cinematography, but he paused it and stood up when he saw Patrick in the doorway.

“Hey,” he said tentatively.

“Hey,” Patrick said. He sat down heavily on the couch, and was almost surprised to feel it register his weight. “So, you dreamt me.”

“I…yeah.” Pete stared down at him searchingly. “You believe me.”

Patrick just snorted, but the answer was pretty much implicit—he was there, after all.

Pete kept talking like he hadn’t rewritten Patrick’s whole fucking reality with his words, his brain, the way he always did. “I’m sorry, Patrick, I’m so fucking sorry. You were never supposed to—you weren’t supposed to fucking find out.”

“Maybe you should have dreamed me stupider, then,” Patrick said, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. “Or more fucking blind. Christ, Pete. Pictures were disappearing, my past was fucking disappearing in front of my eyes, how was I not supposed to fucking notice that?”

“It’s…I don’t know.” Pete collapsed on the floor next to Patrick’s feet, staring up at him. “Pictures, things…things I had to change, to fit you in… I don’t know. I think I was just too busy, too busy to focus on anything, to make it stay…”

Patrick laughed, more an exhalation of air than anything else. ”You’re too busy to focus on me? On the…the thing that you fucking pulled out of your head? Jesus. What else could disappear, Pete? My family?”

“No,” Pete said quickly. “No, they’re…I didn’t make them. I just, like, put you in there, sort of?”

“Fuck.” It was suddenly hard to breathe, hard to think, even though everything was so fucking clear now. Like it was too much raw reality for his head to accept. “She forgot about me.”

“Who? What, Patrick…” Pete was hovering close, trying to touch, but Patrick brushed him off.

“My mom. A couple of years ago, I called her on the road, and she fucking forgot about me. What the fuck makes you think she wouldn’t again? And Jesus Christ, what about me? What if you got pissed at me, you could just—fucking wish me away to the cornfield or whatever!” Pete was trying to say something, but Patrick didn’t care, he was beyond fucking caring. He sick of cleaning up Pete’s messes, had been for a while, and now he was Pete’s mess. “I mean, usually when you get bored of your toys and want to put them back in the toybox, at least they have their own fucking lives to go back to, they’re not just…nothing.”

“You’re not nothing, Patrick! When I…when I made you,” Pete said, voice cracking, and Patrick closed his eyes. “When I did, it was just you at sixteen, just you then. You were…static, you know? Just that one dream. But you fucking grew, you’re different than you were then, you have whole other parts of your life that I don’t even know about, that I can’t touch, can’t change—”

“You fucking tried?”

“I—” Pete seemed to wrap even further inside of himself. “Only…only a few times. But I couldn’t, Patrick. I couldn’t. You…I think you affect too many other people now, you’re too important, too fucking real for me to change, even if I wanted to. You’re real. You’re your own person, I swear to god. It doesn’t even matter anymore, it doesn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter?” Patrick was laughing again, harsh gasps of air that hurt his throat, the throat that didn’t really exist, that shouldn’t exist. “I’m not fucking real, and it doesn’t matter?”

“You’re real,” Pete said pleadingly. “I made you real. No—fuck, you made yourself real. You’re like—”

“If you say the velveteen rabbit, I swear to god I will punch you in the face.”

“Then…fine, I won’t say it.” But I’m thinking it, Pete didn’t add, but Patrick knew that he was.

Pete turned away from Patrick so his back was resting against the couch, clutching his knees and picking at his shoelaces and thankfully silent for a while.

“This doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Patrick said finally. Before, he’d always thought that he lived in a world that was somewhat chaotic, yeah—it had Pete in it, after all—but mostly sensible and sane. Now…now he didn’t fucking know what it was.

“Yeah,” Pete said. He was still picking at his shoes, drawn into himself the way…the way he had a few years ago, back when he went through the worst depression Patrick had ever seen him go through. Back when Patrick stopped coming to see him, when Pete stopped dreaming him, and Patrick became…whatever the hell he is now.

Back when Pete started being alone in his own head again.

Patrick had a sudden memory, of him and Pete picking out chords on their guitars in a dark, dirty room. There were shadows in the corners that seemed to grow closer, almost enveloping them, but when they played, their fingers made sparks on the strings to keep away the darkness. Pete’s lyrics were written in the dust on the walls like finger paints, and Patrick used them to sing until his throat felt like it was on fire, too.

Patrick tugged at Pete’s hoodie until he came up, next to Patrick on the couch. Pete didn’t curl into him the way he usually would, still too curled up into himself, but he was there. “I guess…” He swallowed. “I guess better me than some of the other things you dream about, huh?”

Pete shivered. When he spoke, his voice was raw, like he hadn’t spoken for weeks, like he’d been keeping the words inside himself for longer than that, years even. “Yeah. That always worried me, that I’d…pull something else out, or whatever. Something bad.”

Patrick thought about some of Pete’s other dreams, the ones he’d told Patrick about and the ones he’d written down in the book and, now that he knew, now that he was slowly remembering, the ones that he’d seen himself. He shivered too, and moved closer to Pete, until they were touching, just barely.

“I didn’t expect you, you know,” Pete said quietly. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I just followed Joe to some kid’s house one day, and you were just standing there in the door, perfect, exactly the way I imagined you. You were real. You are, and I can’t fucking regret that, Patrick, I’m sorry.”

When he imagined…not even life, really, but un-life, un-existance, what could have been if whatever weird fucking solar flare or genie wish or whatever it was hadn’t pulled him out of Pete’s dreams, Patrick couldn’t really bring himself to regret it either. He just wished he didn’t have to fucking know.

16

Mostly it didn’t change things, except in the way that it fucking changed everything Patrick had ever believed about himself or the world or Pete. But on a day to day basis, it mostly didn’t matter. Real or not, he still has songs to write, albums to record, interviews to give, shows to play. Real or not, he had a job and friends and a life to live, and not a lot of time for existentialist bullshit.

Sometimes he didn’t think about it at all. He’d be playing, or joking around with the guys in a green room somewhere, making fun of the shitty catering or the even shittier host, or he’d be eating cereal or buying records or driving, doing something totally normal, and he didn’t even stop to think about how he shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t even exist, really, outside of Pete’s head.

Sometimes he’d be doing those normal things and it’d just come out of the air to remind him, you’re not real, and he’d think, really? I sure feel real, and then brush it off as unimportant, because he was too busy living his (real or otherwise) life.

Sometimes he’d write a really fucking fantastic song, or work on an arrangement for some other band, and think that it didn’t matter whether Pete created him or not, because he couldn’t create this. He might have made Patrick to be able to do this, write and play and produce and sing, but he didn’t write this song, he didn’t craft this series of chords and work these words into something mangageable, meaningful. Pete might have given him the basic ability, but Patrick had worked for this. He had callouses on his fingers and bad eyes from peering at GarageBand all night; he had an hour of warm-ups each night, half an hour of guitar and half an hour of voice, not to mention all the off-time he spent singing and playing and learning.

He had jokes that could make Pete laugh, because Pete had never thought of them before, hadn’t dreamt them up and just deposited them in Patrick’s head; they came from Patrick, his thoughts, his mind. He had conversations that didn’t involve Pete at all because they bored him, because Patrick had interests that Pete didn’t share or invent for him. There were things about Pete that annoyed the shit out of him, and there were things about Pete that he fucking loved that Pete would never really understand or believe.

He still repeats these things to himself now, over and over again, listing traits and eccentricities like a mantra: I’m real, I’m real, I’m real.

17

Sometimes Patrick indulged in stupid, random fits of curiosity, asking questions that he didn’t really want to know they answers to, but that he had to know. This time, he and Pete were sitting in the back lounge of the bus, pretending to work on music but really just avoiding the constant Halo marathon that was going on in the front. Patrick had burned out at around hour six.

“So, where did I come from?”

Pete looked up from his Sidekick, looking vaguely annoyed at being interrupted. “What?”

“I mean—dreams don’t come out of nowhere, Pete. They’re crap we like, absorb from our daily lives and blend together in our heads. I had to have come from somewhere, some memory…”

Pete looked away and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember, really. It was a long time ago.” And Patrick knew he was lying. Fuck, of course he knew—he was made to know.

“Pete.” He didn’t say you owe me this, but it was sort of implied.

Pete looked at him, and then slowly turned his phone off and then closed it. He took a deep breath. “Okay. So. There was this kid, my freshman year of high school. He was a couple of years ahead of me—fifteen, sixteen, maybe. I think he was a junior, one of those dudes who look younger than they are, even though he obviously looked way older to me then.”

Patrick made a ‘hurry along’ gesture, because if you let Pete go on for too long he’d tangent forever. Pete glared, but went on.

“He was one of those dudes where they don’t really look like they’re into punk rock, you know? He looked like a good kid, like he’d be on the honor roll, like old ladies would trust him to bring their groceries in.”

Patrick remembered himself at fifteen, sixteen. “Geeky.”

“No. No, he was the coolest fucking kid I’d ever seen. He looked like this good little Midwestern kid, but he had all these shirts for bands I’d never heard of. I used to sit near him and his friends during lunch, and he was always talking about these concerts he went to, these records he had, these bands he knew. He knew everything about music, about this world that I wanted to be a part of.” Pete’s voice was full of nostalgia, and almost…almost awe, like the way he talked about Patrick, sometimes. His golden ticket. “He was so fucking cool, Patrick.”

Patrick did his best to talk around the lump in his throat. It still came out choked. “I—you had a crush on him—me.”

“No! Yes. I mean…I don’t fucking know, Patrick. I was fourteen, I didn’t know what the fuck I felt. I wanted to kiss him, I wanted to fucking be him, it was all the same back then, you know?”

Patrick nodded, even though he didn’t know, not really. He thought maybe it was something like what he felt for Tommy Martin, but that’s as fake as the rest of his memories. There’s no way of knowing. “What happened to him?”

Pete shrugged. “No clue. Moved away, I just stopped noticing him—who the fuck knows? But I dreamed about him for years. Just stupid shit, hanging out at shows, in his house. Him showing up to save me from monsters. And then the dreams changed. I guess I…I dunno. Incorporated other shit. He wasn’t him anymore, he was you. You were you.”

Patrick didn’t exactly believe him, but he let it go, turning back to his laptop. “Okay. Thanks.”

He got a couple of minutes of silence, and then Pete said, “He doesn’t look anything like you now, you know. I looked him up, and he’s…I dunno, good-enough-looking? But he isn’t you. You could be cousins, maybe, but that’s it. I think he’s not even into music anymore, he’s like an accountant now.” Patrick kept his head down, even as Pete put a hand on his shoulder, leaning in close to his ear. “He’s not you, Patrick. He was just the foundation, something to build on. You made everything else.”

It wasn’t exactly true—Patrick knew how much of him had come from Pete, how he was cut to Pete’s standards, face and music and everything else, how he grew beyond that but the basis is still Pete—but he let himself find it comforting.

18

Patrick thought about it for a long time, about getting Pete to make his parents forget him, if he still could. It seemed like it would be easier, to stop invading this perfectly normal family that he’d been thrust upon, forced into, so he wouldn’t have to pretend every time he saw them. Pretend that he belonged there, that he didn’t feel absurdly guilty every time his mom hugged him or his brother called him on the phone. It would definitely be easier than waiting for the day they’d forget him again, for good, the day he’d fade from all the family photo albums and home videos, his baby shoes and elementary school grade reports disappearing from their boxes. The day he disappeared, when Pete didn’t need him anymore.

He recognizes in himself the same impulse that made Pete call his mom after he took the pills, though, that impulse to cling to life even when you feel like you don’t deserve it, as though anyone really deserves it. He can’t let them go, just like he couldn’t let anything go—the band, the music, Pete. His life. If he’d never lived, if he had been just a toy Pete pulled out and then put away again, once or twice, maybe it would be different. But he’s not—he’s a person, as much of a person as he can be, and he’ll keep that for as long as he fucking can, for however long it lasts.

19

Pete said that he couldn’t do it anymore, pull anything out or his dreams or put anything back, couldn’t change the world that profoundly anymore (“except with the songs,” he said, half-jokingly, and Patrick had smiled, because yeah). Still, Patrick was relieved when when Pete finally kissed him, fucked him, because one thing you can say about Pete is that he never gives up on an obsession, not really. He’s still writing songs about Morgan five years later; he still remembers girls he kissed in middle school and wonders “what if.”

He can never forget about Patrick now, not even if he wants to.

On the next tour, the first tour they were together, they had beds—separate buses, but they could sneak over when they were parked, once all the fans were gone—and they’d lie together with their heads touching, like they were willing their thoughts into each other’s heads. It still didn’t work that way, though—Patrick had to write and speak and think his own thoughts, the same way Pete did. They’d started slipping into dreams together again, though, sometimes, and Pete always acted like he couldn’t tell whether they were his or Patrick’s. Maybe he wasn’t even lying; maybe he really couldn’t tell. Maybe Patrick really did have dreams of his own.

Sometimes, late at night when they were curled close together and close to sleep, Patrick would still ask him questions. How, why, when, all the answers he couldn’t get from baby books and childhood stories and memories, not any more. “Why didn’t you—I mean, you could have just made me. You could have made me anything you wanted to, you could have made me perfect, you could have made me do anything you wanted, want anything you wanted, any time, you could have—”

“Shh,” Pete said, voice low and desperate. “I didn’t want any of that, I just wanted you, I want you. You’re perfect, Patrick, bald and chubby and pissy and everything, when you want me and when you don’t want me and when I’m pissed at you and when you fucking hate me. You’re exactly the way that I dreamt you. You’re real.”

20

The thing is, Patrick wants him, too, really wants him. He always had, really—he was fucking made to—and he never said anything, did anything about it, barely even thought about it until Pete kissed him, because he was made to do that, too. And it’s kind of comforting, to have a destiny, a purpose. To be made for someone, and not have to wander around alone, always searching for something or someone.

Still. Sometimes he wishes he could be sure that anything was really his, even just the impulse to brush his lips against Pete’s shoulder instead of his cheek when they’re lying there together, in the dark.

21

Pete offered to take "Hum Hallelujah" off the album, even though Patrick knew how much it meant to him. He thought about it for a long time, all the way through mixing, all the way through mastering, almost into manufacturing, the way it would feel to sing those words every night. You are the dreamer and we are the dream, and he’s the one who changed those lyrics from I and you to you and we, so he knows its not about the fans and the band, it’s about Pete and him. But it didn’t bother him when he thought it was about some girl, when he thought it was about Jeanae or Ashlee or some other girl, some dream girl Pete tried and failed to have for more than a night, so he figures it shouldn’t bother him now.

I could write it better than you ever felt it. That one he still stumbles over sometimes, even now, years after he’s found out, but Pete always comes over right after and whispers against his neck. He can’t hear it with his in-ear and the guitar in his hand and the roar of the crowd, but he knows Pete’s saying over and over again, into his skin, “You’re real. You’re real. You’re real.” Sometimes, up on stage with all those eyes shining up at him and Pete’s breath hot against his skin, he even believes it.

END

Author's Notes: Whew. I can't believe I even finished this, and I'm not even sure if it's any good, but I really need to disengage because this has been eating my brains for months. This was based on several things. First, this june 23rd prompt from we_are_cities. It was also based on Pete's answer to a q&a: Pete, would you and Patrick be friends if Fall Out Boy never existed? / we would have to be friends. cause i dreamt him. (Thanks to erilyn for providing the needed quote!)

The Arcadia bits were inspired by a quote from Pete in an article: "I read about how great songwriting partners wrote together. Usually, they'll go to this place they call 'arcadia'. The writers don't really meet on any other levels, but in this arcadia, they totally get each other. I think Pat and I have created our own arcadia. It's never going to be explained right in interviews because it's something only we both share and understand."

Not to mention all the other dream references in FOB songs: "I used to waste my time dreaming of being alive / now I only waste it dreaming of you," and sharpest_rose's post on Pete's prediliction for hypothesizing on who's a dreamer and who's a dream. And Pete's blogspot from November 15th provided the title, summary, and cut tag, of course. Honestly, this was just supposed to be a short little thing to sustain me between actual stories, and then it turned into this. Hope you enjoyed.