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He can’t get the fucking song out of his head, and it’s driving him near tears, because there are forty-five minutes left until he’ll be watching Keltie walk down the aisle, and he needs to not be fucking thinking about this.
It started in the morning, before he woke up, even. He hadn’t slept well—even with the sleeping pills he’d taken because he knew he wasn’t going to be able to sleep well—and sometime between dawn and the time Spencer came in and started shaking his shoulder, he found himself on the set of I Write Sins, Not Tragedies, asking one of the clowns how the make-up girls had managed to create the cool design over one of his eyes. The clown had moved away, and he’d spotted Brendon through the crowd, humming the melody of the song they were filming the video for softly under his breath and twirling his top hat slowly between his fingers. The hat turned into a veil, but Brendon didn’t seem to notice, just stood up and put it back on his head, moving over to the director to start shooting the next scene.
He’s tried every single trick he knows to make it stop playing, but so far, nothing has worked, and now he’s standing in a hotel bathroom, trying to keep himself together and not hyperventilate, telling himself that he can do this. That it’s just a fucking song.
***
“Hey, half an hour till showtime. You okay? No cold feet? Need a getaway car?”
He turns around and watches Brendon come closer, walking up to where Ryan is standing in the beautifully designed rose garden of the hotel/casino hosting the wedding. He looks pale, and the tone of his voice is unnaturally cheerful. Ryan doesn’t believe it any more than he believes his own, fake, blissful smiles.
“I thought your job was to make sure I didn’t run away from the wedding?”
Brendon ducks his head, shrugs, flashes a bright display of white teeth, keeping up the show, keeping things light and breezy.
“Nah, that’s Spencer’s job. I’m just here to entertain and get drunk with the slutty bridesmaids at the reception.”
It only makes things harder.
“Hey,” Ryan murmurs, catching Brendon’s attention, finally meeting his eyes. “If you can’t… I mean, if it’s too—I’m sure Jon could—”
Brendon interrupts him with a hand on his arm, the first actual physical contact they’ve had in days, and shakes his head.
“Thanks, but I need to do this,” he says softly, and all Ryan can think is tell him. “Closure, you know?”
“Yeah,” Ryan whispers, biting down around the I’m sorry I was too scared's and the I’m so in love with you's, keeping them firmly inside his mouth. It’s no use saying them now. This time, it really is too fucking late. He picked the path he knew—the path of summer breezes and simple love, of family and promises made and convenience. He’s not even sure he regrets it. Time will tell.
“Have lots of kids, okay?” Brendon says, squeezing Ryan’s arm before he lets his hand drop. “I’m sure you’ll have really great ones, and then I can come by every weekend to teach them how to play all their instruments really well and make sure that you and Kelts are giving them a proper Disney education.”
He walks away, goes over to where Jon is chatting with one of the girls who will be playing strings for the wedding march. Ryan watches him go, straight-backed and beautiful, and then turns his gaze away to look at nothing in particular. There’s a ladybug crawling over a petal of a white rose on one of the nearby bushes, and he stares at it until the burning in his eyes and stinging in the top of his nose goes away. The lump in his throat is harder to get rid of, but swallowing thickly ten or eleven times in a row seems to do the trick, and when one of the hotel wedding planners comes up to tell him they’re about to start, the smile he gives her is almost natural enough to make her smile back.
***
“I do.”
What else was there to say?
***
The ceremony moves on to the reception, and he’s doing fine, holding it together, smiling and laughing, every inch the happy groom. He even manages to keep his smile through Spencer’s speech, manages to laugh at the jokes Jon tells and to breathe through Pete’s happy wishes.
Brendon gets to his feet for what seems like the hundredth time (Ryan curses himself for asking him to be their toastmaster) and this time, he doesn’t pass the mike to anyone, just stands up, turns towards them and smiles.
The smile is the worst part.
“Hello, everyone,” he starts. “It’s me again, and this time, I actually get to keep this baby to myself.” He makes a small pause, looks across the room, gives the crowd a moment to settle down.
Brendon turns half-way away from the guests as he speaks, looking straight at Ryan (well, at the two of them technically, but Ryan feels the whole weight of the brown eyes on his own skin). The speech starts out with mostly light-hearted jokes and things meant to entertain (which Ryan can take), but soon moves into heartfelt—completely cheesy but with just enough Brendon in it to make the words achingly sincere.
Ryan tries not to listen, tries not to let the words get inside of him, because he only has that much resistance left, and he needs for it to last for at least another five hours. Finally, after about three minutes—that feel more like a decade or two—Brendon leans down, gathers his glass.
“A toast to the lucky two,” he says, raising the flute of champagne in the air. “To finding that special person to brighten your life.” He raises the glass a little higher, smiling big and happy in their direction. “Keltie, welcome to the Panic family,” he says, grinning at her. “And, Ryan,” he continues, moving his attention a little to the right. “What more is there to say? I love you. Always will.”
Brendon tips his glass and looks right into Ryan’s eyes, and Ryan feels his heart stop. Whoever said that Brendon Urie was a cuddly, harmless person obviously never watched him stab someone with a gentle smile and twist the knife around. He breaks the look and lets Keltie pull him in for a kiss, wondering if this is how it’s going to be between them now—daggers made of honesty and sweet innuendo until they’ve managed to completely crush everything that was beautiful between them.
Just as he thinks that he’s got himself somewhat back under control—enough to meet the other guests’ eyes again in any case—Brendon puts down his glass and raises the mike back to his lips.
“I have something more,” he says, and people’s heads turn around once again, some interested, others simply polite. “Actually, the three of us plus a couple of friends do. See,” he continues, moving away from the table, making his way over to the stage at the side of the room, “I kind of sneaked into Ryan’s house and stole one of his notebooks a couple of months ago, and there was this one poem in there that I’m pretty sure he wrote about our lovely bride—and it kind of stuck with me and made me think of a song I think you all know. So, anyway, I got these guys to help, and well, you’ll see.”
Ryan stiffens where he sits, doing his best to smile when Keltie shuffles around excitedly in her seat and leans in to press a kiss at the corner of his mouth. Jon and Spencer join Brendon on the stage, and so do Pete and Patrick, Pete foregoing the bass and holding a tambourine instead, grinning and murmuring something into Patrick’s ear as they get ready for whatever Brendon is having them sing. Spencer gets behind the drum set, counts out a slow, steady beat, and Patrick starts to play, plucking the strings on his guitar gently as Brendon leans into the microphone.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby
Ryan closes his eyes, because he’s not going to crumble. He made it too far to fall apart over an old show tune, no matter how frighteningly appropriate it is to his current heartbreak.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
Brendon got it wrong. Ryan knows what notebook he found, which of the poems made Brendon pick this particular song, and it wasn’t written about Keltie. None of the poems in that notebook were, and he curses himself for leaving it out of the box under his bed where he keeps things that he never intends for anyone to read.
Someday I'll wish upon a star and
wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me
He wants to be angry, and maybe he is, just not for the right reasons. He wants to be mad about the invasion of privacy—that Brendon would pull this particular confession out of him against his will—but the only thing he can really think about as the song goes on and Patrick and Jon join in for back-up vocals is that Brendon didn’t get it. Ryan wrote a whole notebook full of fantasies about the two of them, and even with everything that’s happened—even with all the emotional drama of the past week—Brendon didn’t even fucking get it.
Since when do things turn out this way, the first line of this poem goes. Like melting lemon drops / Filled with chocolate eyes / And endless skies? And he sees how Brendon could have read it as wonder instead of the quiet longing it was meant to convey, he supposes. It’s not such a great leap when you don’t know that the person who wrote it is completely in love with you.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me
He turns to look at Pete, because there’s no way he can look at Brendon right now and not have him see everything that hasn’t been said between them. And Pete is a lot smarter than the tabloids make him appear, and he’s had Ryan figured out for a long, long time.
On top of that, Pete has a rainbow of his own to chase, and just like Ryan, he never fucking spread his wings and went for it either. He meets Pete’s eyes and then slowly leans his head a tiny bit to the left. Pete’s smile fades and he throws a quick look to the centre of the stage, where Brendon and Patrick are singing their hearts out into the same mike, harmonising together on the high notes, pitch-perfect and beautiful.
“Somewhere, over the rainbow, bluebirds fly…” Keltie sings along next to him, leaning her head happily against Ryan’s shoulder. Her voice is sweet and sure as always, but sounds so wrong in his ear that he has to focus all his strength on keeping the smile on his face and not put a hand over her mouth.
Birds fly over the rainbow,
Why then, oh, why can't I?
Ryan swallows and blinks, steeling himself as he glances over Patrick and finally meets Brendon’s eyes. He doesn’t really know what he’s expecting to see in them—tenderness or resignation maybe? He’s been wrong so many times in the past week that he doesn’t even know what to think anymore.
What he does see manages to pull the last corner of the rug out from under his feet, and as he falls, he wonders how he could have missed it before. Resigned acceptance or hibernating hope—it’s not such a great leap when you finally know that someone is completely in love with you, after all.
