Post #9.

[josiemus_prime]

another synonym for still not over you (pete/patrick + andy/mixon, g.i.n.a.s.f.s fic)


See? Now that the posting day is Wednesday, I'm on time :D

This week is a regular post, so go prompt-crazy. Or not, the crazy part is totally optional.

Anon commenting is on (and preferred), IP logging off. The drill, you know it.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hopefully this will do. If not, sorry :]. It is dark, as a fair warning to readers. Sorry if it sucks, my first fanfiction ever. Got to start somewhere, eh?

1

Pete called at exactly 3:13 am. Patrick remembered because, right before he grabbed the phone off the cradle and mercifully stopped its high-pitched ringing, he’d rolled his half-closed eyes toward his bedside table and groaned at the glowing numbers on his alarm clock.

Of course, all thoughts about the time were wiped out of his head when he heard Pete’s panicked voice. “Patrick? Are you there?

“Yeah,” Patrick said hazily, then, shaking himself awake, “yeah. I’m here, Pete. What’s wrong?”

“Do you think you could come over here? Like, right now? Please?”

Patrick sat up. “Why? What’s wrong, Pete? Are you okay?” It didn’t occur to him until later how funny it was that they were both speaking entirely in questions.

On the other side of the phone, Pete drew in a long, shuddering breath. “No. I mean…yeah. Look, can you please just get here? Please, Patrick?” For a second, all Patrick could hear was Pete’s shaky breathing. Then he heard Pete say quietly, “I need you.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

2

It took four knocks for Pete to answer the door, and for Patrick to get really worried. He stood there, shaking on the doorstep in his thin t-shirt and sweatpants, and wondered what was wrong.

When Pete answered the door, peering around the frame like he was afraid of what was behind it, it only worried Patrick more. Especially when he saw Pete’s face. His best friend had a black eye, and his right cheek was all scratched up, like a cat had attacked him. “Oh my God.”

The palpable relief on Pete’s face did nothing to ease Patrick’s worried mind. Neither did the blood on his shirt. “Patrick. Come in.” He ushered Patrick in, looking around the hallway to make sure no one had followed him.

“Pete, what happened to you? Something is obviously very wrong he…” Patrick’s voice trailed off into the air. “Oh my god.”

There was a boy lying on the kitchen floor. He couldn’t have been more than 21, dark-haired, and attractive in a rough sort of way. And dead. Definitely very dead, judging from the kitchen knife sticking out of his stomach.


“I know,” Pete said breathlessly. “Patrick, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I had to get you involved in this, but I just didn’t know who else to call—”

“How about the police, for one?” Patrick interrupted.

Pete’s eyes widened, and he grabbed Patrick’s arms, hard. “No! We can’t call the cops, Patrick, we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because that guy is a drug dealer. Because we're both in my parents house. It doesn’t matter if I live here or not, the cops won’t see it that way. They’ll probably think I was trying to scam my parents out of their money, and I called Bert over here to bring me some drugs. They’ll never believe it was self-defense, and I can’t go to jail, Trick. I can’t become what everyone thought I would.” Pete was shaking, and his fingers were digging bruises into Patrick’s biceps.

Patrick detached himself from Pete, and pushed the other boy to a sitting position on the couch. “Okay, calm down. I didn’t catch, well, any of what you were saying. Explain it to me slowly, okay? Just calm down, Petey.” He stroked Pete’s shoulder as he would a spooked dog’s.

Pete shuddered a bit at the contact, and then leaned against Patrick, using the other boy for support. He sucked in a long breath, then said, “Okay. Okay. I can do this.” He gestured to the kitchen. “Bert…Bert is—was—this guy I knew from shows. He…protected me. And I mean, he’s a drug dealer, but I didn’t think that necessarily made him a bad person, you know?” He looked at Patrick defensively out of the corner of his eye, then down at the floor. “We used to…screw around. You know what I mean?”

“Horseplay?”

“Fucking, Patrick,” Pete said coldly. He used that jaded adult voice that Patrick hated. “We used to fuck. I mean, we didn’t actually get around to that part, but we got pretty damn close. Okay?”

“Pete…” Patrick searched for words, for something that wouldn’t push Pete further away from him. He settled for, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because you don’t know what its like. You don’t know what its like when you’re twelve or thirteen and this big guy who everybody likes, who always had money, says he wants to…do stuff to you. You don’t know what its like to…like it. To want it.” He shrugged. “And I didn’t think you’d want to be my friend anymore. If you knew I was…like that.”

“Pete.” Patrick’s voice was flat. “I’m sitting here in your living room and there’s a dead guy in the kitchen. It’s a pretty damn safe bet that I’d do anything for you. I wouldn’t stop being your friend over something so stupid.”

When Pete looked up, his eyes were shining. “Thanks, Patrick.” He sniffed, wiped his nose. “Anyway. Then I moved here and I stopped seeing my old friends. Because they were never really my friends, you know? Even Bert. But then he called me. He said he wanted to come over, just to talk.” He smiled, but it was awful, humorless. “He said he missed me.”

“Let me guess,” Patrick said harshly. “He missed you a little too much.”

“Got it in one,” Pete replied with faked brevity. “He just kept…touching me. And I told him to stop. I went in the kitchen to make a sandwich, but he followed me. He was too amped up on crystal meth to listen to a word I was saying. And I picked up the knife…just to scare him, you know? Just to make him back away. Just because it was there. But it was like it turned him on more. And then he backed me into the counter, and I stuck the knife out in front of me and he just…ran himself onto it.”

Pete was staring off into space, caught up in what had just happened. Patrick put his hand on Pete’s knee to center him, to bring him back, and Pete shook himself and finished talking. “When he started bleeding…it was like, unreal. It just didn’t seem possible that his blood was pouring out all over the kitchen floor. He fell and…and his breath made this little hitching sound. And then his eyes went all flat, like when you shoot a deer.” Pete sounded…strangely unfazed. Blank.

“Pete, what are we going to do about this? I mean, we can’t exactly wait for your parents to get home, can we?”

“God, no.” Pete’s face went absolutely white. “Oh my god. If they hadn’t been gone tonight…Bert would have killed them. He would have fucking killed them.”

“Its okay,” Patrick said soothingly. “Look, They weren't here. They’re okay. And you’re okay, too. He didn’t kill you, he didn’t…rape you.” Patrick had to swallow harshly after saying those words. “That’s what matters.”

“No,” Pete said, shaking his head vigorously. “What matters is, how do we get the body out of here?”

Both of them looked simultaneously at the kitchen, but the dead boy provided for them no answers.

3

Eventually they settled for the easiest—well, relatively easiest—method. They wrapped the dead boy in garbage bags and carried him down to Patrick‘s mom’s car.

At that point, it still hadn’t really gelled in Patrick’s head. A boy was dead. A boy who Pete had known, touched, kissed. And Pete had killed him. Pete, Patrick’s best friend, had rammed a knife into the boy’s ribs, intentionally or not.

Intentionally or not. That was the big issue here. Because there were parts of Pete’s story that just didn’t make sense. Like why the boy—Patrick can’t call him Bert, not even in his mind, that made him too real—had two bright red slash marks across his throat. Not deep ones, more like scratches, really. It looked like someone had tried to slash his throat, and failed. Twice.

And who just ran into a knife? Patrick didn’t doubt Pete’s claims about crystal meth, but still. The boy hadn’t even been anywhere near the counter. There was no blood on the top of it, either, where you’d expect blood to fly if someone was stabbed. All the blood was on the floor, and on the boy.

And on Pete.

Patrick was thinking all this as he drove down the dark, unpopulated back roads of the city. Pete noticed his contemplation. “Hey.”

“Huh? What is it, Pete?”

Pete smiled when Patrick looked at him, big and beautiful, despite the bruises on his face. “Thanks,” he said. “For helping me.”

Patrick allowed himself to smile back, to enjoy a moment where he didn’t have to think of his best friend as a murderer. “Hey, what are friends for?”

Pete snorted a laugh. “Hopefully? Not usually this.”

4

When they got to the trailer park, Pete started shaking again. “Patrick, maybe we shouldn’t dump him here.”

Patrick looked at Pete, noting his trembling lips and hands, hoping it denoted something besides panic. “Why not?” he asked simply.

“I don’t want his mom to have to see him like this. And if we leave him here, someone from this trailer park could end up getting charged for it. I don’t like that idea, Trick. I don’t want someone else to get blamed for what I did.”

Patrick wouldn’t let himself think, Then why did you let me get involved? Instead he said, “They won’t, Pete. No murder weapon, remember? Besides…” Patrick hated having to say it, but he had to. “What you said before was right. He’s trailer trash. He’s a drug dealer. Nobody’s going to miss him, and nobody’s gonna try to hard to figure out who killed him.”

Pete looked somewhere between hurt and relieved. But he let it go, laid the dead boy on the ground and pulled the trash bags out from under him. The boy’s eyes rolled back into his head, and Patrick and Pete froze, looking quickly at one another, and then away. They arranged the scene silently—Patrick lay him out and Pete pulled the little baggies filled with pot and coke and god knows what else out of his pockets, and then they left him there. The dead boy lay on the cold ground, and Patrick and Pete got into the car, and turned the heater on.

5

Once they were back in the car, in the warmth, in the dark, Pete’s breathing went harsh and choppy. His eyes teared up, and he bent over, clutching his stomach like he was in pain. “Oh, god,” he kept saying. “Oh, god.”

Patrick didn’t think, just reacted. He pulled Pete into his arms and whispered into his shoulder, “Shhh, shh. Its okay, Pete. Its not your fault.” He could smell an incongruous mix of sweat and blood and shampoo.

Pete‘s tears were hot on Patrick’s neck. “No, it is my fault, Patrick. Because I always knew that this would happen if I stayed friends with you. I always knew I’d drag you into my fucked-up little world, that I’d totally screw you up…” His hands clutched at Patrick’s shoulders, curling into his shirt. “It’s like…you were the only good thing in my world, and now I’ve totally fucked you. I’ve made you like me.”

Patrick reflected briefly on Pete’s choice of words—I fucked you—but he shook off the shiver it sent down his spine. “No,” he whispered into Pete’s hair, “no, I’m still me, Pete. I’m still the same person. You haven’t…fucked me.”

Pete laughed a little, bitterly, and pulled away. “Yeah? Well, tell me something, Patrick. What if I hadn’t grabbed the knife? What if I’d called you up, and instead of a dead guy in the kitchen, I’d told you that he’d raped me? What would you have done?”

“I would have killed him,” are the words that came to Patrick’s lips, but he didn’t say them. He didn’t need to. Pete saw it in his eyes and pulled further away.

He curled into a ball in the passenger seat. “Lets just go back to to my place. We have to…clean up.”


Patrick turned the car around, and they didn’t say a word on the way back.

What Patrick didn’t tell Pete is that, even if he hadn’t just helped his best friend dispose of a body, even if he didn’t know his best friend was a—say it, say it—murderer, he’s pretty sure his response would have been the same.

He would have killed him.

6

It took fifteen minutes to clean the blood up. Luckily, the boy didn’t bleed much—not as much as Patrick would have expected, anyway. Pete and Patrick took sponges and scrubbed the blood off the floor, and Patrick tried to ignore the fact that, just an hour before, this blood had been in a human being. He tried not to shudder as Pete carefully picked the knife up, washed it clean, and put it back in the drawer.

In some ways, Pete was right. Things had changed. By calling him, by showing him a dead boy with a knife in his stomach, Pete had changed Patrick. Patrick helped cover up a murder. He cleaned up a crime scene; he washed his best friend’s hands clean of blood, both literally and figuratively. That changed a person. He didn’t know if this would be one of those things they he and Pete discussed constantly, obsessively, or one of those things that they never talked about at all.

Patrick still couldn’t get the weirdness out of his head. The lack of blood on the counter. The slashes on the dead boy’s throat. The way Pete was acting, cracking jokes one minute, tears sliding down his cheeks the next.

He didn’t know what happened. He didn’t want to know what happened.

Still, despite his suspicions, Patrick stayed. Pete looked at his through his eyelashes and murmured, “Um, Tricky…”

And Patrick didn’t even wait for Pete to finish his sentence. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

When Pete smiled like that, Patrick could almost forget the sight of him nonchalantly pulling a baggie of cocaine out of the dead boy’s jacket, and shoving it in his own pocket.


7

While Pete showered, Patrick slipped into Pete’s bed. The sheets were all rumpled, and there was a condom wrapper, just beneath the comforter. Patrick stared at it a moment, then flicked it into the trashcan. It didn’t matter any more.

Neither did the hickeys on Pete’s chest, the bruises on his hipbones. Pete noticed Patrick watching him dress, and shrugged. “Bumped into the sink,” he said. “Hot water must have made me all red,” passing a finger over a purple-red spot on his stomach.

Patrick shrugged wearily and turned over on his side.

Pete slipped into bed behind him. “Hey. Hey, Patrick. Look at me.” Patrick sighed and turned over, looking into Pete’s earnest eyes. “I had to do it. You know that, right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Patrick said. “I would have helped you anyway.”

“I know,” Pete said. His smile was bright enough to blind. “I know that now, Patrick. You’re my best friend. My best friend.” He cupped the nape of Patrick’s neck, bringing their faces close together. “I love you,” he said softly, and then kissed Patrick on the cheek, gently, as though he was breakable. When Patrick didn’t protest, Pete kissed his nose, his forehead, his chin, and finally his mouth.

Patrick just shut his eyes and kissed back. He didn’t think about Pete’s words—I had to. You’re my best friend. I know that now.

Now.

He didn’t think about all the weeks before this night, all Pete’s comments about distance, ever since he and Anna got together. He didn’t think about what he was going to say to Anna tomorrow.

He didn’t think about the condom on the bed, the hickeys on Pete’s body, or the stunned look on the dead boy’s face. The blood on Pete’s hands.

He just kissed Pete back, because there were things that Patrick knew now, too. Like how far Pete was willing to go to keep him close.


END.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, jeez, wow. That was perfect, I mean, I'm not the OP, but just the way the whole thing went down. I actually felt like I was figuring it out with Patrick, and the ending really summed it up so perfectly. Awesome job. A+

OP Here

[(Anonymous)]

Oh this was absolutely perfect. Thank you. The end was just... perfect. Was this seriously your first fanfiction?