[id like to apologize in advance because this chapter is actually really really terribly written]
A week and 2 days before Halloween, Brendon was ready for the holidays. "It's just for the free candy" he insisted, taping black and orange streamers across the ceiling with special tape decorated with jack o lanterns. "It's a tradition" he yelled from across the store while shoving sweets marked half off into his cart.
"It's the one holiday besides thanksgiving and Saint Patrick's day that gets him excited." Pete told me and passed a drink from the local coffee shop into my hands. It was warm and I instinctively thought Brendon would probably like one to wake him up, but watching him knock countless decorations into his arms proved otherwise.
"Do we have a staple gun?" He asked and held up a paper chain of dancing skeletons doing the conga
"Probably." Patrick sighed. His head was covered by the hood of his jacket and he was slumped over the table we'd taken refuge at so that his disappointed expression was hidden from view. He didn't want to discourage Brendon on his favorite holiday.
"Great," he grinned "I'll take 20."
..:..::..:::..::..:..
I failed to understand what was so hilarious about golf tournament reruns. But for some reason Pete still found them amusing, so Patrick and I watched the wall while Brendon hung up his decorations with Petes hyena laugh as background noise. Ryan sat at the kitchen table, typing furiously on his laptop for a project in his human anatomy class due online in less than an hour.
"Nightmare before Christmas is the best movie, even though I can't tell if it's a Halloween or Christmas movie, but that doesn't matter because it's a good movie and the music is awesome and the characters are awesome." Brendon rambled like he'd been doing for the past hour, and waved around the staple gun in one hand and held up the paper skeletons with the left. "Dallon you should be Jack and I'll be like Sally or something without the weird looking hair because I feel like that's too far-"
He pulled the trigger on the staple gun without checking where he was aiming, and about 6 shots fired before he toppled off the ladder and on to the floor, clutching his left wrist and crying out when the metal crashed on top of his forearm.
"Whoa." He said, dazed, and shook his head quickly like a dog trying to dry off after a bath. Ryan was almost immediately by his side, pushing the ladder off his arm and inspecting the back of his hand, which had been struck with 4 staples in a direct line and 2 up closer to his knuckles.
"Dude, I'm no doctor yet but I think you broke your wrist." Ryan huffed, glancing backwards to us over the couch.
"How the fuck did you do that?" Pete raised his voice and pressed his face to the couch in exasperation.
"I don't know." Brendon pouted, bit the inside of his cheek, and stood up carefully with Ryan's help.
"Is it hospital worthy?" Patrick asked, worry lining his tone.
Ryan sighed and hung Brendon's already purple wrist over the couch and next to Patrick's face. He squirmed away and nearly fell off the furniture.
"Dude, that looks awesome." Pete grinned and reached out to touch it, but got his hand slapped away.
"You're absolutely disgusting. I'm taking him to the hospital."
I wasn't exactly sure how I ended up driving with nobody in the passenger seat but with Ryan and Brendon in the back. He'd insisted that Pete and Patrick both stay home and finish decorating with the supplies he'd bought.
"I have no idea where the hospital is," I yelled to the back in hopes of receiving some directions. Ryan probably knew the way to the emergency center, considering one of his parents was a first responder. Well at least I hoped he did.
"Just head straight through like 5 intersections and you literally can't miss it." He told me, ripping a piece of medical tape with his teeth and wrapping it around Brendon's hand. I wasn't really the best in the medical field, but I really hoped it was applied on top of some gauze to stop the blood from gushing all over Patrick's seats.
"On a scale of 1-10, 10 being it feels like it's about to explode and 1 being it doesn't hurt at all, how bad does your arm hurt?"
"Haha, jokes on you Ryro. I can't feel a thing."
"Like... You can't feel your arm at all?"
"Yep." Brendon grinned proudly at himself when I checked the mirror, and Ryan looked dead inside. He stared at the mirror with a look of utter disappointment and mouthed 'drive faster'.
When we got there, the parking lot was nearly full and it took a couple minutes to even find a parking lot the shortest distance away from the ICU, and I was reminded of the time in kindergarten when I'd broken my foot trying to carry a chair across the kitchen and the doctors had to carry me from the car because we couldn't find a spot to park. Eventually I swerved into a slot before another car could steal it, and Brendon loosely screamed 'woohoo' from the back seat. His cheer was followed by Ryan yelling "keep your arm still, you stupid idiot"
Brendon insisted he get picked up and carried on my back for the distance from the car to the ICU front doors, and the only reason he got what he wanted was because he gave me puppy dog eyes and it was a proven fact nobody can resist puppy dog eyes.
"You love him too much, Dallon." Ryan laughed and tried to keep up with my giant steps.
"Yeah, I guess I do."
..:..::..:::..::..:..
"Urie?" A guy in a white lab coat pushed open the door, squinting down at a clipboard in his hands. He looked like he'd been run over with a bus a couple times and then sent to work a 24 shift at the emergency room.
"That's my name, don't wear it out I don't wanna lose it." Brendon sighed and sat up, leaning into my side and shutting his eyes. They'd given him anesthetics when he started complaining that his arm was on fire and that it was literally going to explode. Ryan had been filming the entire visit after the medicine hit his system, because he said whenever someone was administrated the drug they acted loopy for a couple hours and that it was the best thing ever to watch.
The doctor smiled halfheartedly, hanging a few X-rays on the wall over a light box. He addressed Ryan as the one who'd follow his line of thinking, and kept pointing out distinguishing features that led to his broken wrist and staples stuck in his hand. They kept exchanging big words that I couldn't figure out or explain to Brendon when he whispered "what's that" with childlike wonder, because I had absolutely no idea what in the world they were even saying.
"It's stuck in the proximal phalanx?" Ryan narrowed his eyes, standing up to get a better look at the diagram of Brendon's hand. "It looks like it barely missed it. Even on his hand the staple is to the left side of the bone." No wonder he was planning on going to medical school.
The doctor shrugged and plucked the sheet from the wire to examine it closer. He moved his glasses to the tip of his nose and squinted more than he had before (which I didn't think was possible) and hung it back up with an impressed smile.
"I guess you're right. The procedure will be much simpler then."
Ryan smirked, impressed with himself, and sat back down next to the table I was sitting on. Brendon sighed and compared his hands, eyes lingering on the staples stuck in the left one.
"I'm going to have to ask you two to leave the room unless you'd like to hold him down in place of a few nurses. And Mr Urie-"
"It's breadbag. I mean Brendon."
"Alright, Brendon, could you get into a comfortable position on your back? We're gonna take the staples out in here."
I wasn't sure if it was safe to do it in this room, considering Brendon had a tendency to impulsively break things if he was exposed to a certain amounts of pain and there was a huge mirror right next to him, along with what I assumed to be hundreds of dollars worth of equipment. The theory had been tested a couple days ago when Pete stupidly had the same thought process as I did, and made the brilliant decision to shoot him in the back of the neck with a modified nerf gun; he still needed to patch up the hole Brendon created in the wall. I could've told the doctor it was a bad idea, but I decided against it and left the room with Ryan.
"The last time he used a staple gun, he got so drunk and accidentally shot it into his neck a couple times before he realized what he did. Gave the first responders the scare of their lives when he woke up halfway through removing the 6th one. A girl kept talking to him while they took out the other 5; wish I filmed the look on their faces." Ryan said blankly and sank to the floor, hugging his knees and staring at the wall with a distant smile on his face.
"He never learns?"
"Never." He confirmed.
Behind the door, Brendon's voice was more clear than you'd have expected it to be. And I guess it wasn't a bad thing because we were still able to catch his words on tape so we could show it to Pete and Patrick.
I showed Ryan my phone and he laughed and quickly passed it back to me when Brendon's voice echoed through the near empty hallway.
"Whoa there's like 8 of you guys in here... Hey man what's that pointy thing for?"
Ryan cracked open the door and slipped his phone camera through so he could catch the scene on video. Brendon's arm was outstretched as far away from him as possible, held down at the elbow by one nurse while a few others pressed down on anything else that could shoot up and break anything. The doctor was pinching a pair of tweezers together out of his line of sight, trying to keep him calm as long as possible. It didn't last long, only since he was a curious little shit and had to see everything that was going on.
"Wait no don't touch the staple it hurts-" Brendon yelled 'no' a couple times as quickly as he could before he shrieked and the doctor held up one of many staples.
Ryan stifled a laugh and looked away from the screen, biting the inside of his cheek.
"So Brendon, how'd you do this?" One of the nurses sputtered, holding down his legs so he wouldnt kick anyone or anything. She was obviously trying to distract him, but it wasn't going to work.
"I was just trying to hang up some dancing skeletons on my wall" he cried out again when the 2nd staple was removed, which if I remember correctly was the one buried in his knuckle. I laughed and Ryan shushed me as the 3rd one was taken out.
"Halfway done, Brendon-"
"Fuck off!"
Ryan completely lost what little composure he had left and passed me the phone while he took off running down the hall and had a coughing fit from trying to hold back his laughter. If only Pete and Patrick were here to see this.
The doctor cursed under his breath trying to remove the final staple from Brendon's hand, who kept squirming, and instead of screeching profanities had turned to asking questions at rapid fire at the top of his lungs like they would make the pain fade away. He could dream.
"How many watermelons can you buy for $100? What's lip balm made of? How do people make jean pants? Is this real life or is it just fantasy? What would you do if I burst into flames like the human torch? What if I am the human torch?" He seemed to get more excited near the last sentence, and started bouncing up and down like a kid in a bouncy castle. The nurses were no match for the side of Brendon I hadn't seen before.
"Flame on!" He yelled and the doctor took advantage of his adrenaline high to yank out the last staple, which worked but also probably woke up the entire hospital due to his bloodcurdling pterodactyl screech.
Ryan turned to me, tears streaming down his face, and took back the camera. "I really hope you got that all on camera"
"Can't wait to show it to everyone." I smiled back at him as 8 nurses left the room, adjusting their shirts and muttering incoherently. The doctor burst through the door and looked wearily down at us. His glasses were bent crookedly on his nose and his sleeve had been partially torn off. I would've laughed for hours if I hadn't remembered Brendon had still broken his wrist, and that it was the time to be serious. The room was worse off than he was, even though he'd been mildly restrained; somewhere in that mess he found a way to create spiderweb cracks in the corner of the mirror, which I hope we wouldn't have to pay for, and most of the equipment hanging on walls was gone, another thing I prayed to whatever god was listening that we didn't need to replace with money from our own pockets. Hopefully it had just slid down the wall and crashed to the floor , if we were lucky, which I had a sneaking suspicion we weren't.
"He needs stitches still," he said and gestured to the table so I could sit down with Brendon again. He insisted on holding my hand with the one that hadn't just gotten 6 staples ripped out while he was given the information on what would happen next. "And he's going to be given a cast for his wrist."
"Oh boy," Brendon mumbled, his adrenaline high slowly fading away to sleep "make sure its blue."
[2436 words, I wrote this when I got like 2 hours of sleep. It's also more of a long filler and I hate it but,,]