kayla's writing journal.

who the hell can see forever? [1/1]

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:02:21 GMT

title: who the hell can see forever?
author: bellbee/nightlark
bands: Panic and MCR, mention of FOB
pairing: mostly gen, but spencer/ryan and frank/gerard if you squint
warnings: post-character death, kinda morbid
word count: ~9500
summary: "He won’t know that his whole past just walked past him, that his history just turned the corner into the bread aisle, where he takes a loaf because all he has in the fridge is mustard and an apple gone bruised. Some parts of them will be the same, but the most important parts might not be, and Spencer can’t breathe.” [purgatory!AU]

a/n: so this fic has been in the works for half a year! it's finally done, though it's incredibly far from what I set out to make it. and holy crap, I actually managed to write a fic where I only mentioned Pete Wentz once. the inspiration for a “purgatory AU” comes from the song “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine (title/cut text taken from there as well.) hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.

OH OH AND it has a soundtrack! click here.

who the hell can see forever?
“The Trapeze Swinger” -- Iron & Wine

one:

He wakes up in a ditch, which isn't normal. It’s also his first indication that he’s not in Vegas anymore.

Spencer takes a look around and purses his lips in distaste. As it is turning out, Purgatory is not made of fluffy clouds and golden gates and manual sin-atoning labor. It looks more like the kind of place you’d break down and wait in the sweltering heat for help to pass by, or maybe a rural town that the highways have bypassed and the world has forgotten about. He’s not too familiar with what limbo is supposed to be- when living, he’d set foot in a Catholic church only once, and that was for a funeral- but he gets the feeling that this is not the afterlife of anyone’s holy book.

Rather than towering bronzed gates, all that’s surrounding this place is a stretch of old, lush-looking trees. The sky is cerulean brilliance, empty of clouds where the angels might practice harp-playing. He looks up and down the street in front of him, where the asphalt has faded to light gray and the yellow dividers are only echoes of their former bold stripes. There are no chain gangs clad in orange jumpsuits, busting up rocks as a particularly grueling form of penance.

Despite all this strangeness, Spencer knows three things.
1) His name is Spencer Smith.
2) He is trapped in limbo.
3) He is definitely, irrevocably dead.

None of this distresses him. Instead, he’s worried that he has no idea where this place is, in relation to good old planet earth. Logically, heaven traditionally being a happy place in the sky, and hell being a not-happy place under the ground, Purgatory would be about half the distance up. At least if he were kicking back with angels on a cloud, or- far more likely- flailing around in a bubbling lake of lava, his internal GPS would realize its own uselessness and calm down.

But now he’s in the midst of this warm afternoon, with swaths of oak trees rustling greenly in the breeze and a wooden shack in the tall-grassed field across from him. The air feels damp as it hazes across his skin, and the katydids are making buzzing sounds in an incessant chorus. He hasn’t been to a place like this since a drive to visit his great-aunt since he was ten, and if he were haunting any place, this wouldn’t be it.

He turns around to see a squat building. On one of the porch windows, in cheerful red and yellow, the words “Way’s Antiques Store” are painted. The sight of it pushes him from confusion to anger. He wants answers and an air-conditioner and maybe a heavily caffeine-laden cup of iced coffee. Instead he’s standing in a boggy ditch with his jean cuffs getting muddy, he’s sweating like a pig, and he’s definitely, irrevocably dead. Spencer is more than pissed off at the order of things right now. And it’s not like he’s snooty or anything, but honestly, the only place around here is an antiques store? He thinks, If I go in there, I’ll never be able to live it down. He can’t decide whether to laugh or grimace when he realizes the pun.

But he has no other choice. Spencer is forced to swallow his pride and tramp up into the street. The mailbox, painted crudely with the numbers ‘1618’ and filled with junk mail (advertisements, coupons no one ever uses), is hanging open. He crunches up the gravel drive and scowls at the wraparound porch and its cheerfully creaking rocking chair, at the smudged windows and the propped-open door. He’s disconcerted and a little mad, thinking whatever cosmic being designed this place could do with a boost of creativity. And maybe a better sense of style, though Spencer learned long ago not to place too much faith in other people’s ability to put things together well.

The wood of the front porch is smooth under his hand as he climbs the steps; it feels almost soft with age. The stairs creak under his weight, in rhythm with the rocking chair, and he wonders if even the people here are so old that their bodies would whine with movement.

He shakes his head and presses his lips into a determined line, crossing the porch where sawdust clings to the mud on his shoes. Beyond the windows he can see rickety metal shelves, extending away from him so far that he can barely see the back wall. They’re spilling over with random stuff and he can’t figure out what makes them “antiques” – he sees a teddy bear missing a paw, a cellphone charger, and a lampshade clumped right next to each other. It’s dark and he can’t see if anyone’s inside, but the door’s ajar, so he takes a deep breath and reaches for the knob.

He’s half-expecting a cry of protest, for whatever spectral being that owns the place to come running, but all that changes is the air of waiting. It’s the feeling he gets every time he comes home to an empty house. The floorboards’ groan sounds oddly like a sigh of relief, and the dust gliding through dim sunbeams starts to settle. After a few expectant moments he treads over to the counter on the far right of the room, where a dated cash register is sitting abandoned. Spencer peers into the hall that opens off of the backroom, but it’s even darker in there, cluttered with boxes and stacks of newspaper.

He starts down one of the aisles, half terrified that some barely balanced vase will fall on his head, or that the shelves will topple like dominoes the next time he breathes out. But everything is still and silent, more quiet than anything he can remember on earth, the kind where he can hear his heartbeat between footsteps. He doesn’t like the feeling. He knows something will have to break the silence eventually, and while he doesn’t want it to be his fault, he’s scared of what else might do it for him.

Spencer walks and gives only passing glances to the clutter piled high on the shelves. It all looks discarded- broken toys that should have gone in the garbage, but someone couldn’t bear to part with them; wires snarled and tangled in on each other, connected to nothing. It’s a warehouse of everything useless, things that should no longer exist.

Then he catches sight of two broken drumsticks sitting on the top row. One of them is swinging from its splinters, like someone has just brushed it; it's barely hanging on. Things start to pulse behind his eyes, recollections of sticky afternoon heat and yellow light and musty fabric. He looks at the shelves of broken things and it’s all so clear that it hurts to keep his eyes open. He shuts them tight and wants it to go away. He wonders if this is what having amnesia feels like, if this is the sensation that contorts your insides when the memories return. It’s not worth it. He would rather stay blind.

They’re his drumsticks. They're his first pair, and the ones Ryan broke when they were eleven. They were wedged between cushions on the broken couch Spencer’s father had stuffed into the corner, and when Ryan sat down, his weight was enough to bend them in just the wrong way and snap them in two. He itches at his brain to remember what happened to them- if his mother had found them in the midst of spring cleaning and thrown them into the trashcan along with old leaves and newspaper; or if in a fit of sentiment he'd kept them tucked away in his room somewhere and forgotten about them.

It’s not the drumsticks that are making him dizzy. It’s the thought of Ryan- how startled his face had been when he heard the clean snap of wood, the brown eyes blinking wide and thin lips parting. It’s the fact that he’s dead and Ryan’s not here and he has a single memory of living. The recollection of that late afternoon ten years ago- the light on a slant through the window, dust lit up against the panes- is bright like flint; it’s the only clear thought behind his eyes.

Spencer sits down and doesn’t move again until a man comes tottering up the aisle. He can’t move, until the curious thwack of a foot hits him in the side. He gasps so hard, it takes five minutes and several strong claps on the back before he can remember how to breathe properly again.

two:

“It doesn’t,” he says, “usually startle them that much.”

“What, you?” Spencer runs his hand over the sore spot on his ribs, his fingertips barely ghosting over the place where a bruise should be forming. But there’s nothing there. No swelling, not even a tinge of pain. The surprise thrills through him, and he wonders if this is what superheroes feel like right after the bite or the explosion- a little scared, a little wondrous.

“No,” the man frowns, “their things. You nearly passed out. It’s just a pair of drumsticks.”

“Sure,” says Spencer, a little dazed. “It’s more the issue of me being dead, I think.”

“Oh, right,” the man nods, and maneuvers around Spencer’s legs sprawled out in the aisle. “You’ll get used to that.” He turns a corner and starts down the back wall. He’s half-swallowed up by the darkness before Spencer remembers to speak.

“Where is this place?” he yells. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Gerard,” the man answers, “and this is the Way Station.” He’s vanished by now and the voice is disembodied, drifting toward Spencer over the sea of broken and lost things.

“That’s not much of an answer!”

“You didn’t ask for an answer that made sense,” Gerard points out. He comes hurtling out of the dark aisle, perched on top of a ladder like Spencer used to see in libraries. Gerard plucks a pillowcase from the top shelf. It's torn down the middle and mended with large, clumsy stitches. He scrutinizes it, then flings it over his shoulder before looking down at Spencer.

“I’ll give you the day off,” he says, and smiles at Spencer like he’s doing him a favor. It’s the kind of smile that an older brother or a teacher would give you-- someone who believes in you no matter what you think of yourself. It’s a broad and round-cheeked grin, but no matter how reassured Spencer feels, he still doesn’t know what’s happening. “I hate to send people to work on their first day, after all,” Gerard continues. “You’re bound to be a little shell-shocked.”

There are a hundred questions that are struggling to leap off his tongue. Instead he takes a steadying breath and asks, “Could you please tell me what’s going on? All of it? Slowly?” His words are neutral, but he can’t keep the terseness from the edges of his voice. The look on Gerard’s face says this is just a routine, nothing he hasn’t seen before, and Spencer wants to clench his fists so much that his fingers twitch at his sides.

“You are dead,” Gerard begins, and scrutinizes Spencer to make sure he’s following him so far.

Spencer is mildly thrilled because, indeed, this is one of the (now five) things he knows. But he works on keeping up the down-to-business face that got him every place he needed to go when he was alive. The “bitchface,” Ryan used to call it, and another wave of memory hits him, the dizziness so strong that he stumbles back against the shelf. The sharp press of Ryan’s elbow into his side, the stupid laugh that sounded almost mirthless.

“Yeah,” Gerard says, and offers Spencer a hand. “That’ll happen a lot, at first.”

“Do I get used that that, too?” Spencer asks through gritted teeth. He goes to rub the place where he should be hurting- the sharp line of metal that just indented itself in his back- then remembers. He drops his hand and tries not to look like an idiot.

“Depends on how long you’re here,” shrugs Gerard. “But you’re dead, and now you’re in the Way Station. You’re stuck here until you fix whatever it is you fucked up when you were living. It takes some people just a few days, but other ones are so stubborn that they never leave. Anyway. You work it off here and then you move on.”

“On?” Spencer finds it odd that, from this flood of nonsense, he can come up with only a one-word question. He also finds it odd that Gerard won’t, or can’t, elaborate.

“On,” he nods, and turns back to the shelf. This time he picks up a cracked plastic cup, one of those cheap red ones that people drink beer out of at frat parties. It’s so ridiculous that Spencer can’t help but laugh, and Gerard grins with him, revealing a row of tiny, even teeth. They’re a little sinister, but in a face that’s beaming that broadly, Spencer is okay with taking his chances.

“What are all these things?” Spencer asks. “Are they supposed to be special?”

Gerard shrugs again. “I don’t know a damn thing about my own job. I guess it’s a precaution. If we’re uninformed, we can’t overthrow the big guy.”

“Big guy?”

“I guess there has to be one,” says Gerard. “But it’s not like I’ve ever met him.”

“And this supreme ruler of everything can be overthrown?”

“Why not? Every leader has to die or be killed eventually, doesn’t he? I don’t know why you think he’d always be the same person. Hell, don’t you think the poor bastard gets tired?”

Spencer is utterly boggled. He decides to thank Gerard for his time and walks away to enjoy the rest of his day off.

three:

He makes his way up and down all the aisles, scanning every shelf in the murky afternoon light. But nothing leaps out at him; nothing gives him that dizzy feeling like he's fallen and failed to hit the ground. It's clear by now that the “Antiques” label is a fake one. None of the objects are valuable, and most aren't old. Spencer tries to figure out what they all mean- if they all belong to a body that will come through here someday, if they're special things from your life that's your only attachment left to the real world.

Except the drumsticks weren't exactly special. Before he'd died, he hadn't thought about them in years. They weren't nice ones. They weren't his favorites.

And- he picks up a half-empty bottle of nail polish- what could be special about these things? He feels a little bad for laughing- maybe this was something a teenage girl's boyfriend gave her, something she only used every once in a while to make it last longer. Like something one of his little sisters would do. And the memory of them both-- blonde hair one shade darker than wheat, eyes so much darker than his own-- bats at his eyes; it laughs at him like they used to. He keeps walking, and when he reaches the end of the last aisle, he walks outside.

The porch wraps all the way around, and he tiptoes to the back of the store. He's not sure where he's allowed to go, and the boards beneath his feet creak like they're determined to give him away. He swings his legs up over the railing and looks down at the grass, wondering if there will be some forcefield that stops him from leaving. Spencer takes an unsteady breath and jumps. A shock of pain jolts up his legs- didn't bend my knees, he thinks- but nothing happens. He takes a few steps forward. Nothing.

He raises a hand to his eyes to block out the sun, and squints at the horizon. There's woods to either side, just clusters of pines and oaks that he can't see all the way through. In front of him, beyond the clumsy wire fence, there's fields of tan grass- past Spencer's knees, if he tried to walk through it. There are mountains, indistinct with fog; they're so far away that he acts like he's a kid again, holds up a finger and thumb like he can pinch it out of the sky and hold it in the palm of his hand.

He's had enough for one day, he thinks, and he decides to lie in the grass instead. He lets the blades of grass spring up between his fingers. He likes the feeling of them on his skin and he wishes it was someone's hair. That was what he used to do when one of his sisters got upset, crying because someone had made fun of her at school, or because she'd spilled her soda in a wave of sticky brown onto the pavement. He'd tuck her up tiny in his lap, like she was still a baby, and run his fingers through her ponytailed hair. He'd tug it gently from the rubber band, braiding it loose and sweet over her shoulders, until she'd stopped crying and was letting her head swing with the movements of his hands.

Spencer thinks about them until he's almost asleep. This close to dreaming, he can make himself believe anything, so he weaves his fingers in the grass and smiles.

four:

He wakes up to the feeling of being prodded in the shoulder. A kid with thick framed glasses, bad hair and a sailor-striped shirt is crouching over him. Spencer assumes, drowsily, that it's a stick or something he's feeling press over and over into his shoulder. But when he finally gets his eyes open and blinks the blurry sleep out of them, it occurs to him that the kid is nudging him with a blue highlighter.

“Gee wants you to wake up,” the kid says. “Please.” He bounces a little on his heels and stares down at Spencer. There's no fascination in his eyes, which makes it somehow worse. He's just blinking and breathing in steady rhythm, ready to wait indefinitely if Spencer does not get up from the grass.

But Spencer does as he's told. He brushes the flecks of dirt from his jeans and follows him. The boy walks like his heels are made of rubber, bouncing and sprightly, but his chin stays tucked down by his chest like a disappointed child's.

Spencer doesn't want to walk back through that doorway: he feels himself lean backward a little when his first foot crosses the threshold, like he has the choice to start walking down that empty highway and see where it takes him. He wonders if there's an end to that road, a place where the universe stops and stutters into white. A little wooden sign, marking the place where the sidewalk ends.

Gerard hops down from his ladder when he sees them enter, skipping the last few steps. Spencer can tell he's done it a million times, and he tries to guess how old Gerard is, how long he's been here. “Hey, Mikey,” Gerard calls, and Spencer realizes they must be brothers. There's not much resemblance in their faces- Mikey's is all angles and bones, while Gerard's is made from wide planes and gentler curves. But they walk the same. The only difference is how Gerard keeps his head high, locks his eyes onto you and doesn't take them off until he gets there.

“I want to show you to your room,” Gerard offers. He gestures to a door that Spencer hadn't noticed, tucked in a corner next to the window. He's led up a narrow staircase, windowless and lit by a bare yellow bulb dangling overhead. Spencer feels a chill ripple its way through his body. This reminds him of horror movies at 3 AM when he was still alive and half asleep, the kind of secluded room where boarders went to sleep and woke with the thin edge of death at their throats.

But there's no death here- that mystery is already over. So who knows what happens next? He feels directionless, like for all of his life he was being pulled toward that moment, the end, following a string until it snapped and there was nothing to catch him. He doesn't know where he's headed, and it puts an anxious itch in his fingertips that he has no idea how to scratch away.

Gerard opens a door at the top of the stairwell, and sunlight falls onto the landing. Spencer is smiling before he realizes how much better it makes him feel. They emerge into a room with high ceilings, spacious and bright. Wide picture windows span every wall and he feels almost dizzy, being up high and able to see clearly just how far removed he is from solid ground.

“This is yours,” says Gerard. “There's the bed, and a dresser, and a desk. Anything else you need, let us know. I'm sure we can whip something up.” There's a loud thump from down below, and though Gerard's mouth doesn't fall into a frown, a deep crease appears between his eyebrows. “Mikey,” he calls as he descends the stairway.

The bed looks like a Victorian, something classic, and there's a canopy draped over the tall bedposts. The lace is yellowed and musty, but it still looks like it's floating, a wisp on the breeze that never fell back down. It fits with this place, sitting lonely and ghostlike. The air feels stale, so Spencer opens all the windows and sits down at the huge mahogany desk. He closes his eyes while the breeze stirs his hair. It doesn't smell like anything, no hint of pine or even pollen, and something in his chest aches that he can't quite place.

Gerard stomps back up the staircase, looking far less patient than before. “Come on,” he says, forcing a smile. The effect is unnerving. It stretches his cheeks beyond what a human ought to be capable of, and Spencer thinks of old cartoons, a fuse running out and someone bursting like a balloon. “Time to get to work.”

five:

When they reach the store, Mikey is nowhere to be seen. Gerard sweeps an arm, gesturing grandly at all the shelves, and asks- “You good at organizing?”

“What, like alphabetically? Sure. I used to sort files-”

“No. I mean, ah- sort of like-” Gerard flits his hands in the air, looking at Spencer as if these motions will make it all clear. “--purpose-betically.”

Spencer stares at him.

“Okay- imagine that someone's given you this enormous toybox, then, and you've got to sort the whole thing out before you can play with anything. So your job is to take the scattered toys and put them where they belong in the box. Except,” Gerard says, “the organizing never ends, and instead of playing with toys, you get reincarnated.”

There's a beat of silence. “That's the worst analogy I've ever heard.”

“There are not,” Gerard says tersely, “many comparisons for being dead.”

“So how do I know what goes where?” asks Spencer.

“Oh,” Gerard says, and he sounds surprised, like it was a dumb question. “Here, pick something up.”

Spencer reaches out and closes his fingers around a torn scarf. It grows hot in his hand, pulsing and pulling him along like it has a magnetic charge. He follows where it takes him, his footsteps clumsy and slow. He's tugged halfway across the shelves until the scarf leaves his hands and falls into place on its own. It settles contentedly between a keyboard with half the letters missing and an umbrella. Spencer does not think this achieves anything, but when he looks back at Gerard, he beams and gives Spencer a wholehearted thumbs up.

“So you're telling me,” Spencer asks, “that I get pulled around all day and move things from one random places to another?”

“It's not random,” says Gerard.

“It's boring.”

“What,” Gerard laughs, “did you expect Purgatory to be fun?”

six:

When Spencer goes to sleep that night, he's exhausted and covered in dust.

“Why should I be tired?” he asked Gerard. “I'm just walking around.”

“All those things need you,” Gerard says, and there's love in his voice, like he was talking about people he missed. “They need your energy to get where they belong. They can't do it alone. They each take a little bit from you, and you give a little bit to them.”

Spencer isn't sure what to say. Instead, he sighs, “I need a shower.”

“Don't worry,” Gerard says. “You'll wake up clean. You wake up every morning like the clocks have just reset, and you have a memory of a day that never happened.”

It takes him a long time to get to sleep. He watches the canopy flit in the dim moonlight like it's filled with ghosts; he tucks the blankets up to his chin like when he was small and scared, when his father would sit at the edge of his bed until Spencer fell asleep then woke up into the safety of morning.

He tries to remember things about his life, about his family, about Ryan. Their faces are a negative print on the backs of his eyes, bright outlines against a dark backdrop that flicker every time he blinks. Sometimes they're smiling, and other times looking at him as if they're disappointed.

How could you do that to us? he hears his mother asking. She's raising a hand as she speaks, pressing it against the mirror that separates them, life and death, before and after. There are calluses on her fingertips from years of cleaning and chasing after her children.

“I didn't mean to,” says Spencer, and his mother smiles because she understands.

seven:

Ryan shows up the next day.

He comes walking out of the field, hands in his pockets, moving in that stilted way like his limbs are connected differently to his body than everyone else's. It's early and everything is still. Spencer sits on the porch swing and looks at things through the fog, the clouded shapes too distant to be real. The trees sprout from the sea of white; the sun is iced and pale in its corner of the sky. Under the creak of the swing, the buzz of katydids is all he can hear. He takes a breath and it hurts a little, in the way that cold breaths do. Then he sees Ryan, moving like a marionette, crushing the grass with his cowboy boots.

Ryan looks up through the hair falling across his eyes (it's getting too long, it doesn't look good, and Spencer itches for scissors.) He sees Spencer, bounces his shoulders like a shrug, turns his eyes back to the ground and doesn't walk any faster. When he climbs the porch stairs- clop, clop, clop- Ryan says, "hey," and stands there. He's awkward like a kid in a new school. He doesn't know where he is, he doesn't know what to do.

Spencer wonders how he made it this long without him. He wants to leap up, throw his arms around Ryan's shoulders and assure himself that he's real, solid and warm and not just an apparition of the fog. But he knows that Ryan would tense, the muscles of his back underneath Spencer's fingers going taut and anxious. Instead he just smiles, and the smile he gets back is crooked and comes up bit by bit.

"You're here," Spencer says, and when he hears it out loud it's easier to believe.

"Yeah," answers Ryan, "I am."

He sits down with Spencer and tells him where he's been. He tells him about the desert he woke up in, and the caravan he followed until they emerged by the ocean. He tells him about sailing on the boat, across the sea, with a old woman and her cat that liked to sleep next to Ryan most nights. He tells Spencer about the long walk through the field, in the fog where he could barely see. "But when I saw you, at the end of it," says Ryan, "I wasn't surprised. I knew you were going to be there, sort of. Or I knew I'd be done traveling. And there you were, and I thought, of course. Now I'm done."

"I've been here all along," Spencer explains. He feels simple, next to Ryan, who's come all this way.

"Really?" Ryan asks. "You didn't go anywhere?"

"I didn't know there was anywhere to go," he says. "And if I had gone, I wouldn't have been here to meet you."

"I'm glad you stayed," says Ryan.

eight:

Gerard sends Ryan and Spencer to work on the same job, but sometimes, Ryan can't feel the pull. He sits shaking a cracked Christmas ornament for a few minutes before he gives up, takes another thing off the shelf. It's hard, but if he closes his eyes he can feel it, the charges aligning.

“Why is it so hard for him?” Spencer asks, but Gerard doesn't know. They watch Ryan move along like he's sleepwalking.

“What was he like,” Gerard asks, “when he was alive?”

“He liked to write,” Spencer says. This is what he tells people about Ryan, if they ask. There are other descriptions that fit him better- how giddy and loose-limbed he would get at three am during their weekend sleepovers, or the way Spencer used to trace the curve of a bone that stuck out at his elbow where there wasn't enough skin to shield it.

If Spencer had to describe himself, he'd talk about drumming or how neat he likes everything to be. Except there are better words, ones about how he feels like he has to protect Ryan from ever realizing the world he's made up in his head isn't the real one.

“The people who spend most of their time thinking-- closed in their own heads, imagining anything but what's right in front of them-- they have it the hardest. People like you, people who could always read faces and could see the machinery of things, how they worked-- it's easy for you. You're in tune. Ryan--” Gerard grins a little when Ryan's hip scrapes the edge of a shelf and his eyes fly open. He hops around, wincing in pain. Spencer knows Gerard isn't a sadist-- he's softhearted, really; he hates seeing people get hurt. Instead, he likes anything that proves to him that Ryan is actually solid, that he has a stake in reality, however small. “Ryan has no idea what to make of anything. It'll always be hard for him.”

Spencer doesn't like the way Gerard says “always,” like the job will never end, or stretch on until they crumble into dust. But the alternative is going beyond, the place no one knows, and he can't decide which sounds worse.

nine:

“Mikey?”

Mikey stands up so fast from where he's working behind the counter that he stumbles backward, eyes shut and mouth agape with the dizzy head rush. Spencer bites the inside of his mouth to keep from laughing. He's never laughing at Mikey, not in a mean way. He's just not sure how a person can be so disconnected from what's around them. At least it's charming, he thinks. It's not as if Mikey goes walking through sliding glass doors and dropping hammers on a regular basis. Then again, these are not items Gerard tends to trust Mikey with, but Spencer has faith in him.

“Yeah?” Mikey moves to push his glasses up his nose before he realizes he doesn't have them on. He grins crooked at Spencer and picks them up from the counter.

“What are all these things?” Spencer doesn't bother to point at the shelves. Mikey always understands what you mean, even when he hasn't been paying attention. He's not the type of person you could get away with muttering about.

“Beginning and end things,” Mikey says, and ducks back down behind the counter. Spencer can hear him shuffling boxes around and humming something , dramatic like a movie score. Mikey has a flare for these sorts of things that you would not guess from the calm exterior. He waits for a moment, seeing if this explanation might start making sense. It fails, rather spectacularly, to do so. He lifts himself up onto the counter, sitting cross-legged and peering down at Mikey in his little den. To Mikey's credit, or perhaps just to his complete lack of attention, he doesn't look startled.

“Continue,” Spencer encourages.

“Your kid lives and grownup lives are different things,” Mikey says, and frowns down into a box completely full of blue highlighters. “Yours was a beginning thing. From the day that your lives switched. It's not something you would have noticed, at the time. It's just the first day you start to grow up.”

Spencer privately thinks that he was no more grown up at eleven than he had been at five, but it's charming to hear Mikey talk so much at once. “Then what are end things?”

“From the day you die,” he says. “Maybe from whatever you were doing when you passed, maybe the jacket you wore out to dinner before the car crash or the coffee cup you drank from before the heart attack. Anything. It doesn't have to be special.”

Spencer thinks of the nail polish and frowns. He wonders if it would bother someone to show up in Purgatory with only some nails painted and the other ones smudged. “Why do you bother keeping all these things? Don't you run out of room?”

“The very old ones disappear on their own. They've all got little schedules. Gee and I can feel it, if we hold them- they start shaking a little, and-” He takes a small pocket watch from a drawer. It's gold, but the film is flaked and tarnished in places; it's sad to see it, tucked away in a dark place without anyone to check the time. Mikey flips it open. “Still running,” he laughs. “Here, hold it. Can you feel it?”

Spencer thinks he can, almost. It's like the tiniest vibration in his skin, one he can't quite feel, but still makes his palm itch. “Keep holding,” Mikey encourages, “it's only got a minute left.” He waits, turns his face away a little and holds his palm out. He's expecting an explosion, but Mikey says, “No- look at it!”

The watch crumbles into dust. It collapses on itself, gold disintegrating into tiny grains of sand and a little puff of smoke.

“Nothing can vanish completely,” Mikey says. “A little bit of everything and everyone gets left behind.” He holds his hands out, cupped so Spencer can pour the sand into them. He opens the front door and Spencer watches while he lets it trickle, bit by bit, from his hands into the grass outside. He smoothes the ground, more lovingly than Spencer has ever seen him touch anything, and he's smiling when he comes back inside. “It's amazing,” he says, “it really is.”

And though Spencer's not quite sure why, anything that can put that look on Mikey's face is worth leaving alone. “Wait- Mikey, when I first showed up here, Gerard told me he had no idea what the things were here for.”

Mikey does not look surprised. His face suggests that this is exactly the kind of stunt his brother is likely to pull, and Spencer has seen the same look on Gerard's face so many times that he laughs into his shoulder. “He was either kidding or he really doesn't know. Screwing with you, probably. He tries to be normal, but things can get boring around here.”

“So why do all the things show up here in the first place?”

Mikey shrugs. “Because everyone wants a little piece of their life to hold onto. You'd remember your life without them, I think. And they're not the special things, like diamond necklaces or that flat-screen TV you spent ten years working for. Just little things. But they're what you need.” He holds a glass container up to the light and studies it for a moment before he looks at Spencer. “Give it a while,” Mikey says, “and the little things are what you'll start missing the most.”

eleven:

Ryan is bad at his job. He puts things away in the wrong places, and it never occurs to him that it might be wrong. It isn't new; he's been like that forever. He does things and then they're over. And there's no changing it, so he tucks it away as a memory. Ryan doesn't do regret. It's pointless, he says, which has always struck Spencer as funny: nothing much in Ryan's life had a point. He did the things that first occurred to him, the little impulses to touch or move or speak.

"How did it happen?" Spencer asks him one afternoon, looking at Ryan through the holes in the back of an empty shelf. He sees circles of skin and dark eyes and a thin mouth, but he can't tell what exactly the look on Ryan's face is. He doesn't like that feeling. Before, he would look up at Ryan and scan him, like he was monitoring the tiny quirks of an eyebrow or a lip. He can't do that here; he doesn't know why. It doesn't feel right.

"How did what happen?" Ryan's voice is rough at the beginning, startled, until it goes breathy at the end. It's the sound of someone left in their thoughts, emerging now, remembering that they have a way to get the words out. That hollow in their head, tongue and teeth, has been taken for granted. But Spencer has always hated that phrase. It is granted, now; Ryan is dead already and no one gets hurt here. It’s a small condolence.

He can't tell whether Ryan really does understand the question or if he's stalling for time, throwing it back in Spencer's face so he has a moment to figure it out.

"You know. How did you end up here?" Spencer turns around, pretends to work on another shelf. He doesn't want to see Ryan's face when he answers, even through the gaps, fragmented. He's scared it'll hurt Ryan to remember, but he's also scared that Ryan won’t.

"Same as you, Spence."

He knows that he should be shocked, he should be going numb, his mouth should be falling wide open like a kids' cartoon. But he's sick of not knowing and he can't bring himself to waste time on being surprised.

"How did we die, then?"

Ryan looks up at him. It's a hard look, quick but unmistakable.

"We were with Jon and Brendon. They're not here, though. They were okay. Do you remember the warehouses? Those ones we used to hang around in? We were jumping across the roofs. It was dark, but the gaps weren't that big. We were running and going across, out to the canal, remember? And I was looking out at all the lights on the other side, and it was freezing cold with the wind. And I was so happy, I had this dumb smile on my face. I couldn't get rid of it. I turned around and looked back- Brendon and Jon were on the roof behind us. Brendon was laughing so loud he sounded crazy, and Jon looked up at me when he jumped across the gap. He looked like he was flying. I started laughing and I couldn't stop. You came up to see what was going on, remember? And I started falling over because the look on your face, I don't know, it was too much. I lost my balance and tripped. You came with me. I don't know how it happened." Ryan pauses. "It was a long way."

Spencer sinks down to the floor. He moves slowly; everything feels like slow motion. The memory of it is like ice in his head. Ryan was right. It had been cold.

He can hear Ryan shrug, the shift of fabric; he knows how Ryan is twisting his mouth to the side, feigning casualness. It's not easy, knowing him this well. Sometimes he feels like translator between Ryan and the world. Except here there’s no one to explain it to and he's still doing it, converting Ryan's language into everyone else's.

"And when I was traveling," Ryan says, "I wished we'd never gone up there. I was thinking, it was so stupid. But then I remembered how perfect it had felt, thinking about nothing, just weightless for a few seconds. It was the best I'd felt in my whole life, until it wasn't my life anymore."

twelve:

Gerard sits on the front stoop with Spencer one morning, while Ryan and Mikey are still dozing inside. Gerard sips from a tall mug of coffee, and Spencer itches to ask where he got it. He's not really tired, but it was a habit when he was still alive-- to wake up a little early so he could sit drinking his coffee, taking his time, watching the sun crest over the roofs of houses that looked just like his own. His dining room would always be spotless, the wood floor gleaming and the white table glossy. He can't believe he's missing suburbia, but in comparison to being dead, a cookie-cutter life is no issue.

“Why did I end up here?” Spencer asks him. “At the Way Station, I mean? Not somewhere else?”

“I think it must be chance,” says Gerard, and Spencer figures he should be used to it by now. Nothing seems to have a purpose here. He rearranges things on shelves that no one is ever going to buy; he lies out in the sun with Ryan; he wonders what will happen when this is over. It would be a good model for hell, he thinks, at least for people like himself, who spy an end out in the distance and take the shortest path to it. “After all, it's not like you're stuck in one place, is it?” Gerard asks. “Ryan came to find you.”

“Yeah-” but that's different, we're different, he thinks. “Why are we the only people here, then? Thousands of people die every day. How big is this place?”

Gerard shrugs. “There are other stations. You know, we've got Stump Canyon to the north, up in the mountains, and Wentz Hill down near the river. Not that it's ever very crowded,” he says dryly, “since Wentz himself usually spends all his time with Stump, writing things on paper napkins that Patrick will set to music.”

Spencer's ears perk up. “Music? There's music here?”

“There's music anywhere,” Gerard laughs. “Just start singing.” He follows his own instruction, half-humming a melody under his breath that sounds unfamiliar but sweet.

“Can't sing,” Spencer frowns. “I was a drummer.”

Gerard slaps his palm flat onto the porch, then curls his fingers and raps the same place with his knuckles. It takes a minute, but Spencer understands soon enough, and he smiles. “Anything is a drum,” Gerard adds, “if it makes noise when you hit it. Have you ever thought about what people did, before sound could be recorded? That didn't happen until the 1800s, you know. The first was of a little French girl singing “Clair de Lune.” I wonder if she knew how important it was. I don't think anybody remembers her name.” He pauses and looks out at the empty shack. Grass sways in the breeze, swishing against the old bleached-out wood. “They made their own music. And they went to operas, to musicals. That must have been a treat, hearing music that wasn't your own voice for the first time in weeks.”

Spencer has never thought this way. He doesn't deal much with what-ifs or before-and-afters. He's most comfortable with what's real in this moment, except he still hasn't settled into the rhythm of this place. Living here, he feels like he used to when he slipped behind his drumset, like he's constantly one beat behind.

“Are you--” he hesitates. Gerard doesn't seem easily offended, and Spencer figures nothing can shock him much after he's turned into some kind of celestial gatekeeper. But he's not sure how to put it nicely. “Are you dead, then?”

Gerard shakes his head. “No. I guess I'll still have to die at some point. Or maybe the big guy will take pity on me and let me go without the nasty experience that comes before it.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I was summoned,” he answers, and grins sidelong at Spencer like he expects him to not believe it. But Spencer is ready to believe anything, and Gerard continues, “I heard this voice in my bedroom one night. I was in my apartment in Jersey, and I'd fallen asleep over my work. This comic book company had paid me to draft a story about zombies-- a zombie love story, if I'm remembering right-- but I was more interested in drinking like a fish and puking my guts out afterward. The deadline was almost up and I was nowhere near done. So this woman's voice--”

“A woman's voice?”

Gerard looks sternly at him. “God is perfectly capable of being a woman,” he admonishes. “God's made up of everything that's ever existed and you really think he has a gender? It's not that poor bastard's fault that humans are small-minded. Anyway, this woman's voice asks if I'd like to have a new life purpose, and I said sure, why not? The window flies open all of a sudden and instead of the city, there's light shining in through it, so bright it almost burned a hole in my eyes. I stood up and I was staggering toward it-- moth to the flame, you know-- but Mikey busts in asking what the hell's going on. I told him, so he grabs my jacket sleeve and says he's going, too, whether I like it or not. And here we are.”

“How long do you think we have left here?” Spencer's voice is smaller than he expects it to be.

“You could stay forever, if you wanted.” Gerard bites at his lip, and suddenly Spencer is worried that he's asked the wrong question. “There was a guy that showed up here once. Name was Frankie, and he was a short little dude covered in tattoos. He'd died after getting trampled in a mosh pit, of all fucking places, but he said it was probably the most badass way he could think of dying, other than maybe shark attack or eating fire. He had way too much energy to be stuck in this little place, but he was so scared of what came after Purgatory that he didn't ever want to finish his job. He hung around for a few months, then one day he set off down that highway and said he intended to never stop walking.”

Spencer rubs the back of his hand across his mouth. That sounds awful, he thinks, but the alternative is no more comforting.

The door swings open behind them and Ryan is standing there, long fingers curled around the frame. He doesn't say anything. Spencer watches his hands go tense, watches him shift from one foot to another, and Spencer stands up to follow him inside.

thirteen:

Spencer tries to remember certain days, but the last few weeks are a haze of afternoon light, the sun on a slant through the window. They're the sallowness of Ryan's face fading away, replaced by a flush that rises whenever Spencer can get him to smile. They're how much Gerard knows and how much Mikey says without speaking.

They're trying to remember and wanting not to. They're wondering what will happen now that they're done, now that Spencer puts away the last thing-- a paper birthday hat, showering glitter on his bare feet, the elastic snapped. They're done; he can feel it, the pull ebbing away until it's gone. He looks up where Ryan is waiting, unsure. He can't tell if it's over or if he's just lost the feeling again, Spencer realizes, and he wants to laugh.

We're done, he tries to say, but his throat is dry and he's afraid.

Gerard comes out of the backroom and stops dead in his tracks when he looks at the shelves. He looks at Spencer, nods once, and motions for them to follow him.

“You've done a good job,” says Gerard. Spencer doesn't feel like he's done anything, but he smiles because he doesn't want to answer out loud. He can hear Ryan's uneven footsteps behind him-- feet sliding along, barely lifted from the ground, but occasionally hitting the floor with a sharp noise. He wonders what Ryan is feeling, or if he's occupied himself with something more interesting behind his eyelids.

Gerard stops when he reaches a ladder of metal rungs set into the wall. It stretches far upward, and as Spencer squints, he thinks it might even touch the ceiling. Gerard grasps the first metal rung and looks back at them.

“Don't be scared,” he says. “I promise you, you won't die.” He gives them a wicked grin before he starts up, moving step by step toward the dark roof. Spencer feels reckless in a pleasant way as he follows, knowing nothing he does can hurt him. He could jump from here, twenty feet up, and he wouldn't be hurt.

His muscles ache when they reach the top, little pulses underneath his skin. Ryan is breathing hard but looks content, as Gerard ushers them onto a catwalk that extends to the center of the room. “Do you remember,” he asks, “when I said it wasn't random?” He points down at the shelves, columns of rusted black metal from this view, and Spencer's eyes go wide.

There are letters scrawled in white chalk, one for each shelf. They're tall and block-printed in capitals, like the handwriting of a child. “THANKS FOR THE HELP,” it says, and Spencer laughs so hard that he falls off the catwalk. He doesn't realize he's hit the floor until he opens his eyes, and Ryan and Gerard are grinning down at him. It's so dark up there that all he can see is their teeth, gleaming white like Cheshire-cat smiles.

fourteen:

“What comes next?” Spencer asks Gerard. Gerard stands with them, facing the meadow with its foggy mountains blocking the horizon. He takes a drag from his cigarette and doesn't answer yet.

Spencer asks because he knows Ryan won’t. Ryan would rather leap in without knowing than get an answer he doesn’t want to hear. But Spencer likes that certainty. He wants to know for sure where he’s going.

“You go back,” Gerard says.

“How do you know we’re not done?” says Ryan.

“You’re not,” Gerard answers, and Spencer knows it’s true. There’s a sense that he never had, before, a tightening of muscles around his bones. It’s impossible to lie here. He can say the words, but Ryan will never believe them, not like he used to when Spencer had to whisper white lies across phonelines to get Ryan to go to sleep. He knows it’s true because there are things he still hasn’t done. There are people he needs to go back to.

“Back to the same lives?” Spencer can’t see Ryan flinch, but he feels it, the brush of fabric on the back of his arm. The skin there is soft, vulnerable. He’s never paid attention to it before. Sometimes he doesn’t notice things until Ryan lays his hands on them.

“No,” Gerard says, and laughs. “Would you really live the same life twice?”

Yes, Spencer wants to say, but he knows that Ryan is thinking no. If going back means Ryan being unhappy, then it isn’t the same, and nobody can get what they want. His stomach starts to hurt. He wants to grab something, someone, and shake them until they promise to fix it.

Spencer would take the same life, just because he wasn’t done with it. Someone reached out and pushed the stop button, spit him out of the world. He wouldn’t change the first nineteen years. He’d just make the sure the next ones counted. He would visit his sisters every morning to braid their hair, he'd clean for his mother to give the calluses time to wear away. He'd move out of the big white house and travel somewhere, anywhere, all over the country in a beat-up car with a dog in the front seat to keep him company. He'd do all the things he'd wanted to, the kind of things he used to wish on New Years' Eve, things that got lost in reality.

“But will we be together still?” says Ryan. He tilts his head down and toes at a dandelion on the ground-- like the answer doesn’t matter, like he’s asking just to fill the time.

“You’ll find each other,” is the reply. And Spencer’s heart constricts because there will be a time when they won’t know each other. There will be a time that he doesn’t know there is a boy and a best friend named Ryan, who lives either two houses down or two lives away or maybe somewhere Spencer has never even heard of. There will be a time that he doesn’t know Ryan’s mother just made him get an awful haircut, or that he’s heard the song on the radio that made him, for the first time, try to write one himself. Spencer won’t know him.

He feels like gravity has gone. He feels like the only thing sticking his feet to the ground is luck.

And maybe when they do find each other, it will be in a supermarket when they are both forty. Maybe Spencer will be going through his first divorce and thinking about what's going to happen to his kids; maybe Ryan will have never married, but maybe he'll have slept with women he didn’t love and still tried to write love songs about. Maybe they will pass each other and they won’t even smile. Maybe they will care too much about their own worlds to look into someone else’s.

And maybe Spencer won’t even know what it means, the man with the start of a receding hairline and a wheel that sticks on his shopping cart. He won’t know that his whole past just walked past him, that his history just turned the corner into the bread aisle, where he takes a loaf because all he has in the fridge is mustard and an apple gone bruised. Some parts of them will be the same, but the most important parts might not be, and Spencer can’t breathe.

Gerard turns and walks toward the front gate. He takes his time, like he knows Spencer and Ryan will barely be able to follow. When they reach it, he steps back and squints at them both. He drops his cigarette onto the gravel, grinds it out with his heel, and smiles.

“If you come through this station next time,” he says, “you can tell me all about what came next.”

“Do you think you'll still be here?” Spencer asks.

Gerard shrugs. “It's a good life.” He heads for the porch, where Mikey watches from the window and pretends he isn't looking. Spencer and Ryan don't look away until he shuts the front door and puts a hand on Mikey's shoulder, when they both disappear.

They start onto the pavement at the same time, without speaking. Spencer reaches for Ryan's hand and traces the tendons, the skin stretched tight over muscle. These are the same hands that used to hold Spencer's when they were small, sleeping in the dark to prove to themselves that they were brave. These are the same bones.

“How long do you think it will take?” Ryan asks.

“I'm not in a hurry,” says Spencer, and they keep walking.

Bandfic: "the reflection side of things" (part three)

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:52:46 GMT

PLEASE NOTE. this is not new fic, it is old fic that's been moved from my regular journal (</a></a>nightlark ) to here. any new comments should be moved here and if you want to update your del.icio.us bookmarks, feel free :] thanks for reading!</font>

eight:

There are some people sneaking around his backyard the next day, though they're not really being subtle about it. Jon is nervous at first, flexing his fingers around the grimy handle of a knife that Spencer dug out of a kitchen drawer and deemed suitable for 'protection'. It's not like he's ever used one before- well, not like this- but just seeing the dull gleam of it and feeling the muscles of his arm clench up makes him feel safer.

He's watching the intruders, peering around the torn window curtain. After a few seconds he realizes it's Peter, Patrick and two teenage kids, young and doe-eyed. There's a guitar slung across the taller one's back, and a scarf tied primly around the other's neck. Pete catches sight of Jon's harried face in the window and starts laughing that loud, ridiculous donkey laugh, obnoxious and endearing at once.

Jon takes it for an invitation to go outside, through why he feels strange- like he's trespassing in his own house- he doesn't know. He emerges from the house, cool and shaded, into the warm breeze and the gentle shush of pine trees. It's a backward feeling- the sense of being exposed, of someone examining him inside that house, and the way here he feels happy and untouchable. Not the sun or the sky or the overgrown grass can touch him.

Spencer must have heard the door squeaking open and shut, because he's looking out startledly at the circle of people in the yard. Jon waves and his face disappears from the window before he comes out to join them. "You made friends?" His voice is breathless, shimmering with fear, and Jon realizes his own mistake. As far as Spencer knows, they were the only people on the entire island for days. But there's no going back on this, and at least Spencer seems hospitable enough- he's smiling, if forcedly- so Jon waves him over and sits down in the grass, next to Pete.

"We met some kids," Pete announces, "wandering around. Grimy little vagabonds. Runaways- possibly orphans, or not both, I guess."

"I'm Brendon," the one with the guitar offers, and beams broadly as he sticks out a hand to shake. The gesture seems so out-of-place, so overly formal in this setting, and Jon sort of looks at it all startled before he comes to his senses. "It's nice to meet you! You seem really nice." The kid's manners are thus far exquisite. He doesn't really strike Jon as your average homeless kid. Too clean and good-looking, for one thing.

"And I'm Ryan," says the other one, giving a listless little wave. He doesn't echo the same pleasant sentiments as Brendon, but it's not that he seems annoyed to be there- just uncomfortable, maybe, and restless. Pete grins knowingly at him [knowing of what?-- Jon thinks maybe he doesn't want to know].

"You guys were just wandering around?" Spencer asks, startled. He clutches at handfuls of grass and tears them out of the earth, shredding the blades into fine green strips before he drops the whole pile. He might not even know he's doing it, Jon thinks. He's not exactly good with stress, or mysterious circumstances.

"Yeah. We both happened to be skipping out of Vegas at the same time, rode on the same bus. We ended up friends because we were the only people on the bus who didn't look like baby-rapers or murderers," Ryan said. His voice is a flat, dryly humorous monotone. He raises a hand to swirl the edge of his long scarf, woven in pastel hues of yellow and green. He's even got on these cowboy boots to match, and something that looks alarmingly like a cowhide vest. He looks sort of like a kid in elementary school dressed up to play Woody from Toy Story in the school play, and it's hard to not start cracking up. Jon looks up at Spencer who's practically staring open-mouthed at Ryan, much less subtle; it's not hard to understand he's thinking the same thing.

"I would have been your friend anyway," Brendon grins, raising an elbow to nudge at Ryan's waist. Ryan artfully dodges the blow with just a simple, slight shift to the right, a motion he has clearly perfected recently.

"But how'd you end up on the island?" Jon asks. He's curious, despite wanting to keep it hidden from Spencer, and a growing lack of concern with whatever weird stuff goes on around him. There's just too much of it for anything to be interesting anymore.

Brendon shrugs, mumbling, "Um, you know. Pete did his little time thing. Pulled us along with him. Said he would like, mentor us, watch over us in these times of trouble. Stuff like that."

He's eager now, knowing he has a flood of questions and two people who finally know the answers. "So was the mainland hit, too? I mean, it wasn't just the island?"

"We were cruising through the desert for a few days before Pete picked us up," Ryan points out. "I mean, I didn't see any nuclear bombs going off in the distance, but if someone was attacking us or whatever, I guess the Nevada desert wouldn't be a prime target. Maybe something did happen. But we weren't listening to the radio or watching TV. We just wanted to ignore everything and the whole world, you know?"

"Except each other," Brendon insists. Ryan nods, because that much is a given.

"Do you play guitar?" Spencer asks, gesturing at the instrument slung across Brendon's back.

"No," Ryan says dully, rolling his eyes. Spencer cringes a little, pulling his knees up tighter to his chest where he sits next to Jon. Jon reaches behind him and rubs a soothing finger along the edge of his waistband, and he feels the muscles' tension ebb gradually out, melting into his touch.

"Yep," Brendon says brightly, determinedly ignoring Ryan. "In fact, I think all four of us do. Want us to play something?"

Spencer is fidgeting, apparently no longer in a condition to answer, so Jon does it for him. "Sure. What do you know?"

"I can play you Ryan's song," he offers. "I made up some of the notes, and Patrick helped me where I couldn't get it just right." He swings the guitar deftly around to the front of his body, strumming out a chord with the mechanical precision of someone who's not completely comfortable with what they hold. But his eyes stay focused, his head bowed to listen intently to the guitar, so his eyelashes are like little crescents of black on his skin and the hair falls across his forehead.

Brendon settles when he starts to play. All the quicksilvery little movements of his body, the twitch of his sudden smile and the flexing of each lithe muscle, flow into his fingertips where it blossoms from the guitar in vibrating notes. All the intensity he puts into living and moving is suddenly strumming its way out of the guitar in a light, trilling melody. It feels familiar, a well-worn old song that's been sewn neatly into the heart and knows its comfortable place there.

When he starts singing, there's a different air to it, a kind of reverence that comes into the words. He leans, just barely, toward Ryan. Jon sees the stain of ink ringing one of Ryan's fingernails, and then he gets it.

After a while he hands the guitar to Ryan, who handles it gently, knowing a little better than Brendon that they won't be finding another one anytime soon. He plucks at it with delicate skill, with those awfully long and refined fingers. He's better than Brendon, a lot better, technically speaking. But his is a soft, subtle talent that you have to be listening hard to catch, unlike the kind of playing that had moments before been snaking around you and pulling you in even against your will. They end up singing together, Brendon's voice that effortlessly dips and climbs compared to the solid steadiness of Ryan's. They snake together until it's like a rope of sound, the tones inextricable from each other.

Jon has missed hearing music, which before was like a lifeblood to him, next to water and breathing. Always with at least one headphone in, the songs on shuffle. He felt strange without it, even if he weren't paying close attention to the sounds- like his ears were caved out and empty, like the world was too silent and flat. Now he feels as if he's being filled again, poured full of water he's been thirsting desperately for, though he's been too anxious and busy to notice its absence.

In the sky, a cluster of clouds are billowing dark and tall, but they look so far away that they can't be a threat. They look like cartoons, comically angry, with insides that are soft and kind. Even when it begins to rain, warm fat droplets that snake down his neck and darken the fabric of his clothes, Jon doesn't worry. He doesn't worry about the house or how to keep dry or where they will sleep tonight.

This is the bliss, this is the blessing that Pete couldn't have taught him if he'd wanted to: the knowledge that you only need make it to midnight, and everything is suddenly fixed. You're pulled backward by the imperceptible rope around your wrists, a comfortable tumble through time while you sleep. You sacrifice things, or maybe 'lose' is a better word, since none of it is your choice or your bravery. You are handed gifts, too, that no one else has ever dreamed of.

When the song is over, Ryan starts talking in a hushed low voice to Brendon. "Are they normies?" Jon asks Pete, mumbling as discreetly as he can, leaning over so the soft bathrobe fluffs at his jaw. Both the kids have their heads bowed. Ryan looks like he's trying to convince Brendon of something, gesturing widely and repeating the same things over and over. But Brendon looks absent- not bored, just dead to whatever Ryan's so intent on, letting his forehead bump into Ryan's and blinking intently.

"Yeah," Pete whispers back, though his softest voice seems to be a stage whisper instead. "I think so. They haven't told me otherwise. And they don't have the air of a freak, you know?"

Jon doesn't know, but he doesn't say that. He leans his head back and they recline against the wall of the house, closing their eyes and feeling the warm, wet bath of rain starting to dot their shoulders more and more. He hears Pete and Patrick laughing with each other, but all the sounds are distant, muted by bad weather and sleepiness. He opens his eyes just a little, when he realizes Spencer's warmth is gone from his side. He's deep in a conversation with Ryan, apparently a good one, from the grins on both their faces. Ryan has a nice smile, but it's the first time he's done it since he got here. It wipes the worry lines from his forehead and stretches the skin over his cheekbones, making him look younger.

"I'm going walking," Pete says suddenly, and Patrick by definition proceeds after him. Whether or not he expected them to follow, Brendon leaps up immediately and trots off in his wake- one obedient foot after another. There's a muted look of reverence in his eyes; Jon's not sure it's Pete dragging them along as them being drawn, irresistibly, like moths to a flame. Ryan follows without a word, unthinkingly, on an impulse. He and Spencer go too, one in front of another, until all fall of them have fallen in single-file line, links on a chain.

The rain falls faster, the drops filing down into sharp points and whipping sideways. His hair is slick with water and plasters to his neck, angling down in smooth planes. Jon turns back to wait for Spencer and watches, transfixed, the droplets beaded in his eyelashes and hurtling down the sharp edge of his nose. He's looking skyward at the clouds, lit from behind, glowing warmly at the edges in a murky-yellow gray; their muddied shapes are reflected in his eyes.

There's a sickly light drenched over everything, an ugly color that throws the upended houses and dented cars into harsh relief. But they keep walking.

Pete's is a swaggering, bouncy stride- animated and brash. Brendon's is lively but uneven, little stumbles in all directions, an excess of energy propelling his gangly legs along. Ryan walks like he's on a wire, perfectly balanced, stripped of all naturalness. (He doesn't have to turn around to know how Spencer moves- confident, calm, a certain looseness in the bend of his knees and the swing of his hands. In that house, turning corners with a slight sway, with an assured ease of movement. But he's thinking like he's already gone. He shakes himself out of it.)

That night, in the darkened hush of their bedroom, Spencer talks in his sleep. It's around eleven, but he's taken his watch off, because the numbers are too large and ugly for him to think about right now. None of it makes sense, but he listens anyway. There's mumbling about trees, and at some parts it sounds scared. His breathing hitches and Jon's heart skips a beat. The words get frantic, they come spilling even more nonsensical and terrified out of his lips, until he's babbled himself awake and he's staring at Jon. Staring like he doesn't have a clue who he is, breathing deep and blinking quickly.

Jon doesn't know what to say. It seems ridiculous to reassure him- like a mother smoothing down her son's sweaty hair and singing until he's faded back to sleep- because that would feel like lying. Everything suddenly is pressing on him. He feels like things will not be okay, he knows they will not be okay, and he can't lie to Spencer and tell him otherwise.

"I'm sorry," he says. Spencer squints his eyes tightly shut and tries to make sense of it.

"What?" he asks. His voice is thick with sleep.

"Nothing. Go to sleep, okay?"

Spencer nods and turns over, presses his face into the pillow. His anxious breathing has evened out, and his back rises and falls with its rhythm. Jon lays an arm across him and feels the hot skin of his neck through a curtain of hair. All he can think about is all the small things he will miss. Stupid things like this, things that aren't even any good, not the stuff of poems or dreams. That is what he will miss about Spencer. And what he will regret most- that they never got the chance to wander around a mall together, never got to fight over something stupid and never got to kiss all anxiously afterward, never got to lie around on someone's roof and talk about high school. A list like this would never end, but he still can't sleep. He can only lay here and try to imprint this feeling into his head, the feeling of skin and the feeling of knowing someone is your own.

nine:

Spencer asks about the rings around Jon's eyes the next morning, while they're taking a break from cleaning a table that was spotless last night. Jon shrugs a little and leans over, kisses him before he can talk any more. It occurs to him, in the midst of Spencer's startled jolt and the way it takes a second for him to melt into it, that this must have been the first real kiss, beyond a hesitant brush of the lips yesterday, and his stomach twists in a way that verges on actual pain.

"What's wrong?" Spencer murmurs against his lips. Jon crushes their mouths together again and closes his eyes so tightly he sees stars, hoping that's enough of an answer. But then there's a hideous paranoia creeping up his spine and souring in his mouth, telling him that Spencer must think he's done something, said something wrong.

"It's nothing," he says, and Spencer leans his head onto Jon's shoulder, weaving his fingers through Jon's own. "It's not you. I just don't feel good." Spencer squeezes his hand tightly for just an instant, like a reflex of fear, and he sits up rigidly straight as he asks-

"Sick, you mean? You think you're getting sick?" His voice starts loud and panicky then fades and cracks.

"No, no. Jesus, no. I'm just- it's just-" he throws up his hands and shrugs helplessly. Helpless is a good word for him right now, this sense of careening along and hurting everything and everyone that stands in his path, no matter how hard he tries to dodge the obstacles. "Everything is so fucked up. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-" but he can't finish this sentence, either, because he can't say 'I didn't mean to do this to you.' It would mean nothing to Spencer. Jon would be left staring at a pale and blankly beautiful face, wide gray eyes devoid of understanding and life.

Jon drags Spencer along with him when he goes out walking. Spencer is scared, babbling about looters and aftershocks, lingering by the door. Jon tries to smile reassuringly at him but it comes out wistful, and as Spencer's eyes widen and he staggers back a little bit, he knows what Spencer saw in his face. The wordless message that it would not matter much how they go, if they die of violence or of simply wasting away in this house, that either way the hope is so little, they might as well just get some fresh air. He gets all that from one sad smile and Jon wonders if he's right.

There are people on this street they're wandering down, a street with small high-windowed houses and yards that have turned into jungles. It's stopped surprising Jon, but Spencer's eyes go wide, not least because one of them is a girl. It's the first girl Spencer's seen in days, Jon reminds himself, so it's not like he can be faulted for staring and blinking over and over, like he's terrified he's going blind. It's a blonde girl and another kid, maybe her boyfriend or something. He's looking at them sort of cautiously, but the girl is beaming and waves to them as they approach. All the hurts and worries of this morning seem to fade, to retreat to the back of his mind where he doesn't have to think about them much.

This girl is different from Vicky, too, who seemed so streamlined and outlined boldly in black. This girl is blonde and soft and sweet looking; before she speaks, Jon expects her to have a charming little accent, French or Russian. Though her English is clear and unmarked, it's a charming and smooth-edged voice. One of those people where you can hear the laughter swelling in their throat, behind the words. She's wearing a skirt and her shirt's sleeves have lace on the cuffs. Her hair is long and bounces down her back in fluffed little blonde curls. She's easily the girliest thing he's seen in forever, all blush and a soft body, white and lace. There's a swipe of dirt up her freckled cheek which makes him grin like an idiot, it's so adorable, and when she smiles back he realizes he's a little in love.

From the dumbstruck looks of it, so is Spencer, so things appear to be cool.

"Hello there!" she chirps. "I'm Greta. This is Chris. Who are you?" She looks openly at them, curious and honest, the sort of look Jon misses seeing in people.

Chris is a simple, friendly-looking guy, with a clean mop of brown hair and a face full of gentle angles. Greta has an elbow crooked behind her back, and every few moments her fanned-out fingers brush against his. A funny blissed-out look crosses his face every time, not so much a smile as a slackening of the features- the eyes going vacant, the corners of his mouth twitching up.

"Jon, and Spencer," he informs her. "We've been living nearby."

"So," she says, her eyes peering intently at Jon, though she seems to be looking less at his face and instead at the space around him, "tell me something." He's uneasy now, knowing that she must be able to see the weird air around him that Pete and all the others have seen. He wants to erase that. He wonders, fitfully, if Spencer has ever detected it.

"What?" He feels sort of breathless, knowing that she knows things, wanting to understand how she does it. How all of them do it- strip him down to simple shapes, with just one long look. If he could do it, he thinks, everything would be easier. Maybe it will come with time.

"Oh, I don't know," she says, and shrugs lightly, then flounces down into someone's dying lawn. "Just something. You're the first people we've seen in forever. It would be a pity if you were boring." She grins at him, a wide and mischievous thing, full of even white teeth. But in a face like that, she makes it seem innocent. She could get away with murder, he thinks, if she weren't too perfect to ever want to kill someone.

"Have you been on the island this whole time?" Spencer asks, sounding bewildered. "We thought we were the only ones left. We didn't see anyone."

Chris nods, and Greta sighs faintly, giving her curls a petulant shake. "Let's not talk about that. I'm bored of that. It's all I can ever think about anymore."

Spencer looks confused out of his mind, but Jon frankly feels relieved at someone who wants to talk about normal things that normal people talk about, and not the supposed apocalypse or other assorted weird phenomena. "You look like a doll, you know that? Like one of those fancy-lacy-dressed ones with an umbrella and a stand." He considers a moment later that this might sound rude- those dolls are, after all, usually made out of plastic- but Greta giggles and seems delighted at the comparison.

"I'd offer to let you be my Ken, but I guess Chris already fulfills that position. I don't know, Chris, do you think you have the washboard abs and plastic pelvis? Up for the challenge?"

"Not really," he admits. "How about I be Skipper?"

"What, my little sister? You don't think that's twisted? And how do you know her name, anyway?" Greta smirks.

"I had siblings," Chris shrugs. "Younger ones. Female ones. They mutilated their Barbies which isn't exactly 'playing' with them, but whatever. I was the one who had to unwrap the damn things at Christmas."

"So you said you haven't seen anyone, this whole time?" Greta asks, tilting her head and looking curiously at Spencer. She looks a little like a lost puppy and even Spencer, who is both confused and slightly worried, has to give in and relax. "Because we've seen a lot of people wandering around. Maybe not a lot, but more than we expected anyway. There's even a pack of ghosts that hang out by the beach," she adds in a bright, hard voice, like a challenge to question her knowledge.

Jon glances back at Spencer. He can practically see the gears whirling in his head, and he knows that Spencer- logical to a fault- is searching for an explanation to how perkily crazy this girl is acting. He hopes the answer, regardless of accuracy, is solid enough to keep him from asking too many dangerous questions.

"Were you from the island, then?" Jon asks, and wants to add 'before', but it's unnecessary.

She nods. "Uh-huh. Graduated from high school last year. We were taking a year off and we meant to go to college in Chicago, but, well. Things got in the way." She giggles at her own joke. Jon just can't believe how endearing it is.

"Yeah," he agrees, "I'd say things are a little problematic."

"Oh, you too?" she asks brightly, shifting closer. It's as if she's picked up on some thread of companionship, but Jon has no idea what she's talking about.

"Huh? Oh, I mean- you know- the whole island-blowing-up thing." He winces. "Sorry, I know you said not to talk about it-"

Spencer is standing at a slight distance from them now, arms folded and body terse, looking utterly bewildered and defensive. Jon catches his eye and wants to reassure him, but what Greta says then knocks the wind right out of him.

"No, that's not it. Look, I see the shimmery thing around you, and I know Chris and I have things just like it. You're going backward too, aren't you? Hasn't Pete told you yet?"

"You mean you're both-" Jon is so stunned he doesn't know how to finish it, the words hovering on the edge of his tongue but too terrified to make the leap.

"Going backward," she confirms, nodding. "You are too, right?"

"But- both of you? At the same time?" Beyond the disbelief, outrage and jealousy are both bubbling up in his stomach. What made them special? What did fate see in them that made it decide they deserved to still have each other, what thing was it that made fate gloss over him and Spencer with a light little shrug?

"Of course. Why wouldn't we be? You don't mean-" her eyes widen, and the smile slips off her face for the first time, pale eyebrows arching in surprise. "He doesn't go with you?"

"No!" Jon yells, and luckily she seems to understand that he's not really yelling at her. She just stands with a small hand pressed to her mouth, eyes closed as he completely falls apart. "For god's sake, no! I'm all by my self in this- you really don't even know, do you? Oh my god, I wake up every goddamned morning and the time has gone backward, and the boy I'm in love with just forgets about it every day. I feel like I'm in a shitty fantasy novel, I feel like this is a stupid chick flick and I'm not even real, that's what it feels like! It doesn't make sense! At least the end of the world was supposed to be something that could actually happen, but time isn't supposed to fuck up like this, people aren't supposed to end up alone like this! And- oh, my god-" a laugh, harsh and strangled, claws its way up his throat. "I can't believe this. There are more of you around, just walking around out there, and I didn't even know. It's- it's-"

At some point in his screaming he's sunk to the ground, resting on the curb next to Greta and crushing the grass beneath him. He opens his mouth and he has more to say, he has sentences, paragraphs, novels more to say, but his voice cracks all painful and embarrassing. He pulls his knees up and rests his heavy head on them, too horrified at himself to look up at the three stunned faces above him. He assumes they're stunned. Spencer is probably confused, probably scared. He doesn't know how to fix that.

"I'm so sorry," she whispers breathlessly. "I'm so sorry, Jon. I didn't know. Pete didn't mention you were by yourself. I shouldn't have said a thing." Greta's eyes start tearing up, ringed now with a glossy pink color. "Oh, please don't be angry. I didn't mean to upset you."

"No, no no," he says, pushing a hand frustratedly through his hair and looking up at her. "I just- I'm messed up, you know? I guess a little venting like that was a long time coming. You just happened to be here when it happened. Not your fault." This is a comfortable role for him, like he's playing mediator between his temper and the people it's hurt, the guy who smooths things over and keeps things sailing breezily along. Usually the problems are not ones he has caused, but he can deal either way on familiar ground.

"Okay," she says softly, "it's okay. I'm not mad. I hope things get better for you. I really do." Greta reaches out, her movements timid but affectionate, and brushes Jon's hair out of his eyes. "We're going to go now, okay? But- I guess we might see you around."

"I'm not chasing you off, am I?" he asks, gives her the most mischievous look he can convincingly fake. She shakes her head, setting off a flurry of blonde curls. Chris looks all longingly at the way the sun swoops along the curve of her nose and cheek, and for the first time Jon is grateful for how alone they've been, so no one has caught him looking so pathetically at Spence. It's cute, though, and he feels all worldly-wise and old when Chris notices he's been caught and jumps a little, blushing like crazy.

"No, no. You're not. But we've got places to go," she smiles, "if not many people to see."

As they're walking away, Spencer leans in toward him. "I feel bad for her," he says, whispering though they're already a few yards away.

"Why? What do you mean?" Jon's somehow even more horrified that maybe Spencer's figured it out, shrewdly pieced together the mess of words into an outline of the truth. At least if he's still in the dark, Jon can do a haphazard job of damage control, smoothing things over with murmurs and a few well-placed kisses. And then he realizes the way he'll have to manipulate Spencer, lie to his face, and he feels sick.

"You know. That she's gone crazy." He kicks at a pebble, his face solemn and sad. "She looks like such a sweet girl, I guess. I wouldn't have expected it." He takes a ragged breath. "I'm glad we're still okay. I mean, things could be worse."

Jon tries to breathe, but he just can't- the air gets lodged in his throat, drags its way down to its lungs where it's poisoned and useless by the time it gets there. "I- you think she's crazy?" He wants to sound conversational. He knows exactly what Spencer must be thinking. He knows he's wondering if they're doomed to go crazy, if Jon's already halfway there, breaking down and screaming at some kids they just met. If he'll wake up one morning and find himself alone because Jon has abandoned him, gone loping and howling down the midnight streets, if maybe this is just one side effect that no one expected.

"Yeah. And you- you know I'm not really forgetting you, right? But I know you're scared. I would have started screaming, too."

"I'm sorry, you know," Jon said softly, and takes Spencer's hand. He rubs the inside of his palm, the gap between his thumb and first finger, the lines across his skin and the muscles and bone of his skinny wrist.

"I know," Spencer says. "I know you are."

And he lets him keep on believing it, that they've just met a beautiful crazy girl and her equally crazy boyfriend, that Jon had a little breakdown just because the stress is too much, that this sickening little idyll of loneliness will continue as long as they want it to. He lets him believe all this because it's easier than the truth, but staying quiet feels exactly like lying and he can't make the burn of guilt in his mouth go away.

*

part four