Patricksitting (Call It A Love Song) (Peterick) [by adellyna]

Monday

He misses his parents for the first time when he comes downstairs in the morning, and instead of finding his mom in her ridiculous snowflake pajamas, he finds Pete curled into a chair in a hoodie and boxers, sulky, dark-eyed, clinging to a cup of coffee like it's a lifeline.

"This is inhumane," Pete complains. "Making you kids get up at this hour. I don't remember school starting this early. God, I swear. How do you even learn anything?"

"Usually, I find a hot breakfast wakes me up. Gets me all ready for the day." A hot breakfast that will probably not be made by Pete, since his feet are still tucked under his ass, and his shoulders haven't moved from their pathetic slump.

Oh, and because he says, "Ooh. If you make eggs, I like mine just a little runny."

What Patrick makes are Pop Tarts, strawberry for himself, and s'mores flavor for Pete, since he seems the type to need approximately eight metric tons of sugar just to get on with his day. He even puts them on paper towels, just so they won't have to do dishes. They sit together in companionable silence for a while, the quiet broken only by chewing and the sound of Pete's chair squeaking under his constant shifting, and just when Patrick is starting to get really homesick for his mom's tuneless humming and his dad's newspaper-related outbursts, Pete says: "Do you have a lunchbox or something? Because I can't make sandwiches or anything, but I can definitely slip a Twinkie and five bucks into it."

"Dude, no, I--" Patrick stops, reconsiders, and says, "Brown paper sack, actually. I think we're out of Twinkies though, so you should give me seven bucks instead, and I'll just buy my own."

Pete laughs, and it's ridiculous, too big, but he musses Patrick's hair on the way to the door, and when he comes back downstairs his hoodie is unzipped. Patrick spends a long moment (or ten, if he's going to be honest) staring at Pete's chest before he figures out that some of the glinting metal there is nipple ring, not just zipper. Which is. Um. It's nothing. Patrick doesn't care, and it makes total sense. Ink, piercings, skinny jeans and lurid shirts, it's, yeah, it makes sense. For Pete.

"Here," Pete says. He bumps Patrick's shoulder with his hip and grins, dorky, but with glinting eyes, like people just stare at his nipples all the time.

Which, hey, they probably do. Exhibit A: pierced nipples.

He presses a handful of moist, crumpled bills into Patrick's hand and tugs Patrick's ear. "I only had six. You can either cope, or call DCF on me. Just know that if they put you in foster care, your new mommy won't cook you breakfast like I do."

***

Coming home to Pete's heavily bumper-stickered Saturn is kind of weird; Patrick's used to his mom's Volvo in the drive, used to the lights being on, and something that smells like dinner in the air. What he gets instead is a dim hallway, loud hardcore music coming from the living room, and something that sounds suspiciously like an orangutan in labor, but that seems to somehow go along with the music, so. So Patrick's assuming this is Pete's interpretation of singing along.

He drops his backpack in the corner, trips over a clunky black boot in the middle of the hall carpet, and stumbles into a hopefully casual lean in the doorway of the living room. Pete's on the couch -standing on the couch - with his hair flying, playing enthusiastically shitty air guitar, with his mouth open and the monkey-delivering-triplets shrieks pouring out.

Patrick's course of action is clear. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and takes a picture, another, and when Pete turns and poses, fist above his head, Patrick gives him a thumbs-up and snaps another shot.

"I'm sick of playing my own guitar," Pete shouts over the music. "I'm made to front, man, get your lazy ass onstage."

It's not his taste, the music, but Patrick clambers over the back of the sofa anyway, ducks through the strap of his invisible guitar, and leans into Pete, talking too-loud into the sudden silence between songs.

"Like this," he says, adjusting Pete's grip. "You'll get better sound."

Air rocking-out turns into air crooning; Pete throws one of Patrick's dad's Sinatra albums in and butchers the lyrics ("Hard on my pillow, just thinking of you") until Patrick's curled into the couch, laughing so hard his ribs ache. He's actually crying - the water catches on the bottom bevel of his glasses and fogs them up - and he has to eventually kick Pete's feet out from under him just to make him stop. It's still long minutes before he can breathe, and when he looks up, Pete's sprawled on the sofa with a hand pressed to his stomach, panting.

"Pizza?"

"Dude," Patrick laughs. "We just had pizza last night, come on."

Pete huffs and bites his lip. "Yeah, okay. Chinese?"

It takes an hour and a half to settle on an order that doesn't cover half the menu, too many minutes of which are spent convincing Pete that paying fifteen dollars for a dozen egg rolls is possibly the stupidest idea ever, and then what feels like eleven years of waiting for the delivery, the whole of which they spend camped out on the sofa.

"Do you have any homework?" Pete asks. He keeps turning the mute button on and off, turning the commercial breaks into little staccato bursts of sound. Annoying little staccato bursts of sound.

"No," Patrick answers. "But if you keep doing that, I'm sure I can dig up some extra credit, or something."

"Boring." Pete's finger slows on the mute button though, and Patrick gets whole sentences before the voices are silenced again. Not that, like, he really wants to listen to the amazing benefits of Tide laundry detergent, but still.

He shoves at Pete's leg with his foot. "Annoying."

"I'm bored."

"You're not going to be bored when I'm kicking your ass, which is what's going to happen if you don't lay the fuck off the remote."

Pete laughs, and it's so sincere as to be genuinely irritating. "Yeah, right."

The lady on the TV says, "Ask your healthcare provider about--" and then she's silent, though her lips are still moving, her hands gesturing excitedly.

Patrick shoves at Pete's leg again, harder. "Dude."

"Dude," Pete mimics, slapping Patrick's socked foot away from his thigh.

"Side effects may include-" says the lady on the TV, right before the next descent into silence.

Patrick scrambles onto his knees and tries to snatch the remote from Pete's hand, but Pete is fast and dodges, turns mute off for two words and then back on again. Patrick is going to kill him, just as soon as he can fling the remote across the room.

He makes another grab for it, and ends up falling face-first into Pete's thigh when the remote is snatched off to the side.

"Frisky," Pete crows, and only just wiggles away in time to evade the sloppily placed bite that Patrick aims at his leg. "Dude," he says, laughing. "Biting?"

Pete sounds amused. He looks amused, too, lying across the arm of the couch with the remote stretched over his head, out of Patrick's reach. Basically, being a giant asshole.

"You're an asshole," Patrick informs him. "And I'm getting that remote."

"Awesome." Pete grins; he waggles the remote above his head, and is generally infuriatingly amused by Patrick's annoyance.

Patrick isn't careful with his knee placement when he crawls forward, and he isn't particularly concerned with Pete's continued ability to breathe; it results in a lot of Pete wiggling under him, muttering sharp warnings to "Watch the knees, Christ" and "Fuck, Patrick, a little air here" while he switches the remote from hand to hand, pulls it between their bodies, and then back out in the air when Patrick shifts his weight to pursue it.

Eventually, Patrick settles for squashing Pete as flat into the sofa as he can get, and he has a forearm braced against Pete's shoulders, and Pete's hands are possibly pinned, and he's reaching for the remote when Pete bucks and flips them both off of the couch. Patrick lands on his back, with all too-much of laughing Pete on top of him and oh, now it's on.

Honestly, he doesn't know when they lose the remote, but he thinks it's somewhere between Pete on Patrick's back, smushing his face into the carpet, and when Patrick manages to get Pete in a headlock, but it's definitely long before Patrick winds up flat on his back with Pete straddling him, Pete's hands pressing Patrick's wrists into the rug, and an infuriatingly smug smile spread across his face.

At least Patrick can hear every word of this commercial for McDonald's. That's something, right?

"You are such an asshole."

Pete grinds Patrick's wrists down a little harder, grins a little wider. "But I'm not a bored asshole."

"Still an asshole."

"A victorious asshole."

Well, yeah. Pete's actually freakishly fucking strong, and none of Patrick's dirty tricks worked at all, not even his attempt to elbow Pete in the throat. He can't think of a way free. He bucks a little, but Pete just clamps his knees around Patrick's thighs tighter and holds on; tries to push up on his wrists, but Pete's grip is firm, almost-but-not-quite bruisingly tight; tries to roll to the side, but Pete just presses down and clucks his tongue.

"Early fortune cookie," Pete says. "Accept defeat gracefully."

"You're not a cookie." Patrick is only pouting a little.

Pete is grinning, more than a little. "Better. More delicious."

"Oh, well in that case." Patrick bites him; right on the forearm that's braced next to his head, just above the stretched tendons. It's stupid, but Patrick kind of expects Pete's skin to taste like something. Cinnamon, maybe, because of the color. It doesn't though; it just tastes like skin, a little sweaty. He presses his teeth into Pete's arm, not hard enough to break skin, just hard enough to rub across the surface.

Above him, Pete goes very still, and then gets very heavy. Patrick can feel breath on his neck, hot and wet against his jaw, and he braces himself for retaliatory biting, tightens his own teeth, but stubbornly refuses to stop. Pete's arm twists a little; Patrick's mouth slides off, down to Pete's wrist, and Pete's breath stops gusting against Patrick's neck, even though he hasn't moved further away or anything.

"Asshole," Patrick mumbles again, into Pete's wrist, for emphasis.

The doorbell rings before Pete can answer, spurring him into a quick backward scramble. He turns immediately, presents his back to Patrick, and Patrick watches while he wedges his fingers into his pocket for his wallet, digs through it and says, tightly, "Hungry asshole."