Summary: The one where Brendon's song lyrics have a habit of coming true.
The first time Brendon had sat down and wrote a song – actually had the idea to get his words down on paper and scribbled out verses with a leaky blue pen – he didn’t really think anything of how quickly the words had come to him.
All it had taken was the press of his pen, blue ink bubbling under the pressure, for the words to come out. It wasn’t deliberate or conscious – not in the strictest of senses – and when Brendon had read back over what he had written, he was a little surprised with what was there.
When he had sat down at his desk, pushing aside his homework, he had meant to write something about suffocating rules from parents who don’t remember what it was like to be young. He had meant to write about Elders and disapproving looks and sisters who take too much time in the bathroom. Instead, the song in front of him – written in Brendon’s messy scrawl in less than five minutes – was about light brown eyes and a voice that hinted at expression but never quite got there.
Brendon didn’t know where the hell that had come from, but when his mom called him to get ready for Youth Group, he stashed the fully formed verses into his desk drawer, not really giving the song another thought.
---
Brendon met Ryan on a Tuesday. He had been nervous about trying out for the band, but Brent had just given Brendon a small smile and said, “Don’t worry. It’s not like we’re really any good, or anything.”
Still, as Brendon walked down the stairs into the drummer’s grandmother’s basement, he was nervous. He was thinking about the song he had written the night before – written in a haze of nerves – and he wondered aimlessly as Brent opened the door to the basement why all the songs he wrote addressed a ‘you’.
The ‘you’ always seemed to be the same person. After two years of writing songs – songs that always just seemed to come so easily, without really thinking – Brendon knew that the ‘you’ he wrote about – he wrote to – was the same person.
He just didn’t know who it was.
Someone with eyes that were like unpolished amber – though Brendon had scratched out that line after he wrote it, embarrassed. Someone who Brendon only knew through the lines of his songs – words that were never fully given a melody, because Brendon didn’t know what they were saying.
He didn’t think it was normal to write something and not know where it came from or who he was talking about, but Brendon had tried forcing himself to write about things he knew, and nothing had ever come from it.
At the end of the day, whenever Brendon tried to write a song, it was always the ‘you’ Brendon wrote about.
Next to him, on the last stair leading to the basement, Brent said, “Good luck,” as he pushed Brendon forward into the dim light.
There were two boys in front of him. One, the one with a rounder face and bright blue eyes, was sitting behind a drum set. He looked Brendon over with assessing eyes and said, “Hey,” with a tone that sounded as if he wasn’t too sure about whether or not he should trust the boy in front of him. “I’m Spencer. That’s Ryan.”
Brendon smiled the best that he could through his nerves. “Brendon. Hey, nice to meet you.”
“Brent says you play guitar,” the other boy said, and the flat tone of his voice made something in Brendon tighten. When he looked over toward the speaker, he was met with soft brown eyes, and Brendon thought you, but he didn’t say that.
“Uh, yeah.” Both boys nodded, but Brendon couldn’t look away from the boy whose long fingers plucked at a worn guitar string.
“Why don’t you play something,” Brent prompted, and Brendon nodded, pulling his guitar out and setting his fingers on the frets.
He was planning on playing some cover, but instead, for reasons that he didn’t know or understand, he played the song he had finished just weeks earlier. One of the songs that had something to do with faded mattresses and bright dreams and “you huddled close to me, both of us escaping, reaching for more together”, and he looked at – sang to - Ryan.
When he finished, Ryan gave him a look, head cocked, and Spencer broke the silence with a “That was really good. We could use you.”
Brendon grinned. “Great. Excellent. I have a couple of things we could work on-” he started to say, and Ryan stopped him.
“I write the lyrics.” His toneless voice almost had an edge to it, and Brendon didn’t want to press his luck.
“Yeah, that’s cool. My lyrics are pretty jumbled, anyway.”
---
Brendon wrote a song about the kiss before it happened. He knew now – or, at least, he suspected – that his lyrics weren’t normal. That they had something more to them. Something that was connected to Ryan, revolved around Ryan, but after spending only two months with Ryan, Brendon knew that everything seemed to revolve around Ryan now.
“What are you writing?” Ryan asked, sprawled out on the dirty, faded mattress in the middle of Brendon’s apartment. Brendon thought for a moment about how when he had read over the lyrics for that song – the song with the mattress – he had thought, for some reason, that his lone sheet covering it would be a soft blue.
It wasn’t – it was his sister’s old Rainbow Bright sheets. It was the only thing he could grab from the linen closet after his parents had told him it was the band or them.
“Nothing,” Brendon said. “Just homework.”
Ryan made a face. “Bullshit. Let me see.” He stood up from the mattress, long limbs a little shaky, and Brendon thought of the bruises that he saw when Ryan had changed into his nightclothes.
Brendon handed over the beginnings of a song, and he looked at Ryan nervously as Ryan’s eyes scanned the page.
On the paper, Brendon had written about cramped bunks on a tour bus and kisses that were hidden but sweet. He had written about stolen conversations and wishing, at times, to be back in a broken-down apartment where at least the touch of skin to skin didn’t have to be hidden.
“Is this where you think we’ll be? You think we’ll make it?” Ryan asked. There was something strange in the way he said that, but Brendon was too distracted to read into it, too nervous that Ryan would know that the song was about him – about them.
“I know we’ll make it,” Brendon said.
Ryan’s face was soft. He was so close, and Brendon knew this was how it happened. He had written about this already. He knew what was coming.
“How can you be so sure?” Ryan asked.
Brendon knew that Ryan didn’t know just why Brendon had seemingly put everything on the line for this band. Left his family. Worked at a shitty minimum wage job. Lived in a rundown apartment in a less than savory part of town. Brendon knew that Ryan didn’t understand how Brendon had so much faith in the band, but Brendon knew that Ryan appreciated it. Needed it.
Brendon couldn’t say that he knew they would make it because he had written about it. He didn’t know how to tell Ryan that. A part of him didn’t want to tell Ryan that, so instead of saying that he might possibly write songs about the future – about his future with Ryan – he just said, “I believe in this – you. We’re going to make it, Ryan.”
And when Ryan’s lips met Brendon’s, tentative and shy, Brendon let out a sigh against Ryan’s mouth, because it felt just like he wrote it would.
---
Brendon hadn’t known that Brent would be leaving. He hadn’t known about Jon or how Brent would slowly be replaced and then all but forgotten.
He didn’t have this whole song-writing future thing figured out, but Brendon knew that he couldn’t base his life on it. It wasn’t always completely reliable.
He hadn’t seen Keltie coming, either.
In retrospect, he should have known. The songs he was writing – still in private, still not showing them to anyone – were becoming less focused. The ones that Brendon could make out were all about guilt and heated moments and not being about to stay away from something that wasn’t there to have anymore.
Brendon didn’t like those songs.
He tore them up just as fast as the words spilled out from his pen, and the first time he wrote something about the “smell of her perfume covering you,” he felt sick.
---
“We should rent a cabin,” Brendon said as he, Ryan, Spencer, and Jon lounged around in the tiny bus kitchen. “To write the next album.”
He had already written about it – about campfires and fresh pines, about high mountains and “your skin keeping me grounded” – but he was sick of waiting for someone else to bring it up. He could really use a change of scenery, too.
They all agreed, just like Brendon had known they would, and in the cabin, writing came easier for him. The words seemed to flow from him, fall as if it were nothing, and Brendon knew that Ryan was growing frustrated.
“It’s not coming out,” Ryan complained, sock covered feet sliding against Brendon’s cold calf under the flannel sheets. “The words.” He groaned, throwing his pen to the ground in frustration. “Fuck! We should just start over.”
“Maybe you don’t have to write everything on your own,” Brendon said. He had been giving it some thought. Just because some of his songs came true didn’t mean that he couldn’t share them with other people. It wasn’t like anyone would notice. Not when the lyrics were always so vague. Vague enough that sometimes even Brendon couldn’t make sense of them. “I could help. We could all help.”
Ryan eyed him warily. “You still writing songs?”
Brendon thought of the last song he had written. He didn’t know what it meant – he rarely did, but this one was bugging him for some reason. There was something almost haunting about it.
It meant something, he knew it did. Meant something for the future – was telling him something. Something about him. And Ryan. It always had to do with Ryan. He just didn’t know what.
“I have a couple things we could throw in,” Brendon said.
“Let me see,” Ryan said, and Brendon rolled away from Ryan’s heat and grabbed his notebook from the side table, opening it up and flipping until he found the page where he had only written a couple of lines down – stopping himself mid sentence because he didn’t know if he could write what was coming.
Ryan read it over, mouth in a thin line. “Where nothing really mattered except for me to be with you,” he said out loud, smiling, and Brendon couldn’t help but think of the lyric that he knew came after, the one he hadn’t had it in him yet to write.
But in time we all forgot and we all grew.