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Brendon Urie: Fan Fic Writer Extraordinaire
By Melanie
He’s bored, Brendon can blame
most of the things that he’s done that he really shouldn’t have done on
boredom.
They have one computer in the
cabin, he thinks that it is Ryan’s but since it is the only one they drew up a
schedule early on for who could use it when. He thinks Ryan is a little
perturbed that his private computer has become community property, but he’s
never actually voiced a complaint.
Besides Brendon thinks that
Ryan kind of expected that to happen, all his personal stuff is locked down
like its in Fort Knox and Brendon think that password protecting all his files
would take longer then the four hours that Ryan’d had before Spencer had found
him with the computer and the schedule had been drawn up.
Brendon gets it from 3-7 pm
Monday through Friday and 12-8 on Saturday and Sunday. He typically only uses
it to check his e-mail, to send random long-winded messages telling his family
that he is still alive, that they haven’t killed each other, sometimes he sends
pictures but only when he can convince Jon to download them onto the computer
for him.
Jon is tetchy about his
camera and while he has given them free reign to use at will, he also pouts and
looks extremely disappointed if he determines that one of them has used it
incorrectly.
He doesn’t normally use all
his time, Spencer follows him from 8-midnight on Monday through Friday, usually
he’ll let him use whatever time Brendon isn’t. He has a girlfriend after all
and their primary form of communication since they get shitty cellphone
reception is via IM’s.
Brendon tries not to think
about the fact they’re most likely having cyber sex instead of phone sex and as
long as Spencer locks the door, cleans the chair and the keyboard and doesn’t
tell them about it he’s pretty sure he’s okay with it.
On Tuesday he stays in the
room for his entire time, door locked so he can’t see Spencer peering at him.
They’d had a crappy morning and they were all starting to get each others
nerves.
Brendon had said something
about Spencer’s shoes and Ryan’s hair and he might have insulted Jon’s eyes but
he couldn’t be sure, he hadn’t slept well the night before because the tree outside
his window kept banging up against the glass and he’d thought someone was
outside the cabin but instead it was just a tree limb trying to get in.
It’s safer for him, until
everyone cools down, to stay in the room with Ryan’s computer and surf the net.
He looks for Panic stuff just
because, he sometimes likes to see what pictures the fans have taken and the
ones that have been published and he can chart time through them by the amount
of eyeliner Ryan is wearing and whether or not Jon has any on.
The ones that have Brent in
them are easy, they’re the beginning and Ryan hadn’t yet found eyeliner.
He clicks on a few links,
just clicking because he has an hour and a half left before he has to show his
face outside this room and wait for Spencer to hit him, or possibly kill him
depending on how pissed he still is. Spencer is very protective of his shoes,
Brendon is pretty sure they don’t have feelings but Spencer treats every pair
like they’re his children.
Ryan won’t touch him, he’ll
write some obscure verse and force Brendon to sing it and Jon will just look at
him with a disappointed look and Brendon will want to smother himself with the
overstuffed pillows on the couch.
So he’s click, click,
clicking and he thinks he maybe clicked one time too many.
He knows this stuff is out
there, Ryan had showed him some Fall Out Boy stuff before they’d ever met them
and they’d laughed at it and wondered if someday someone would be writing
fanfic about them.
Apparently they are.
And apparently people think
they have a lot more sex then they really do, he wonders when performing is
scheduled into their day if they’re spending that much of their pressing each
other up against hotel room walls.
******************************************************************************
Brendon spends lunch the next
day peering intently at everyone, he thinks he’s being very discreet but
Spencer blows about three minutes in.
“If you’re not going to
apologize, stop staring at me,” Spencer hisses.
He’s still pissed about the shoe
comment, Brendon offered to apologize to the shoes in question and Spencer had
glared at him. Then told him that if he couldn’t be serious he didn’t want to
talk to him at all, then stalked away.
“Are you and Jon fucking?”
Brendon asks and someday he’ll figure out how to filter the things that come
out of his mouth before they actually
come out his mouth.
Until then he gets to see Jon
choke on his fries, Ryan is on his left so he helpfully smacks him on the back.
Spencer just stares at him as if he’s lost his mind.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“It’s just, you know, things
happen…” Brendon starts.
“I have a girlfriend, you’ve
met her. Haley, she’d kill me if I ever cheated on her,” Spencer says icily,
Brendon shivers and wonders if he needs to grab a sweatshirt before they go
back to work. “Not to mention Jon’s girlfriend, who you’ve also met…”
“Yeah, but we’re up here, you
know, secluded, far away from everyone and everything and…” Brendon shrugs.
“And that translates to
Spencer and Jon having sex,” Ryan says dryly, he’s rolling his eyes when
Brendon looks over at him.
“Well,” Brendon shrugs again.
There’d been pictures and a
primer and it had all seemed so ‘
So it had seemed to make
sense, and yeah, him and Ryan weren’t screwing around, but there’d been that
one time when Brendon had thought that all it would take would be a strong gust
of wind to blow them together and maybe that strong gust of wind had actually
happened for Jon and Spencer.
Or not, if the way Spencer if
glaring at him and Jon is still trying to dislodge the fry that he’d swallowed
the wrong way from his throat, are any indication.
Hmmm… it might be another
afternoon spent locked in the room with Ryan’s computer.
******************************************************************************
Brendon gets annoyed with the
fanfic quite early on.
And it’s not even really the
stories or his characterization that annoy him.
Because he thinks his is
okay, he isn’t nearly as spastic as some of these writers make him out to be
but all in all he doesn’t have any complaints.
Besides they’re letting him
have sex and he doesn’t see anything wrong with that.
He got tired of the gen stuff
really quickly, and the het stuff makes him cringe a little (and not only
because he’s gay, because he never says gay, he hasn’t come out yet because his
parents will die, so when asked point blank, he just smiles brightly and
changes the subject) because it’s all Mary Sue stuff (see he’s even got the
terminology down) even the stories that have him in threesomes with Jon and
Cassie, or Spencer and Haley, or Ryan and Keltie.
So it’s really only a quick
jump for him to go from gen to het to slash.
So they’re writing him okay,
and they’re letting him have sex so, no complaints there.
The others seem to waver,
most of them have Spencer okay, thought they could probably stand to turn his
bitchiness factor up about a level and a half and he has no absolutely no
complaints at all about Jon’s, because Jon is calm and cool and nothing ever
seems to phase him and their fans seem to realize that.
But Ryan.
They all seem to think Ryan
is some sort of sex-addicted whore who would spread his legs for anyone and
Brendon feels mildly pissed off on his behalf.
Partly because yeah there was
Keltie, even Ryan hasn’t even slept with her and no one had actually said the
words but Brendon was pretty sure she was a beard to keep Ryan from being outed
any sooner then he dictated as being necessary.
As far as Brendon knows Ryan
hasn’t even had sex in like a year (which isn’t for lack of trying on Brendon’s
part, Ryan just blinks at him and looks bemused when Brendon lays on him and
Brendon gets annoyed and goes to lay on Jon who will at least pet his hair and
not look like Brendon is annoying him by just breathing).
So, he decides to fix it.
To show these girls (and
guys) what Ryan is actually like and that’s probably where he gets himself in
trouble.
******************************************************************************
He creates a username and a
profile and he lie, lie, lies through it all.
It takes him three days to
finish his first masterpiece, seven pages and he doesn’t know how these girls
(and guys) are churning out fifty plus pages in a couple of days when he has to
keep going back to double check what he’s already written and make sure he’s
not contradicting himself, then checking the spellings of some words against
the dictionary because Ryan’s spellcheck is on crack.
Maybe they use flowcharts or
something and he decides for the next one that’s what he’ll do.
He’s proud of himself when he
posts it and he does it right before he hands the computer over to a scowling
Spencer and goes to bed.
He’s proud of himself, though
he can’t ever show Ryan what he wrote because Ryan would kick his ass and then
give him a lecture about something that Brendon will tune out, he thinks he’s
got the writing thing down though, he might try his hand at writing a song
next, take some of the strain off a Ryan a little.
******************************************************************************
He has four comments waiting
when he gets on the computer the next day, all four of them telling him that he
needs to work on his characterization of Ryan, one of them helpfully links two
fics that she says have the ‘perfect Ryan’ and advises him to read them before
attempting another Ryan-centric fic.
He responds to the one with
the links with a ‘we don’t know what they’re really like’ (he does, he knows
Ryan almost as well as Spencer, but
he’s pretty sure that Spencer doesn’t read fanfiction and definitely doesn’t
write it) and ‘Ryan could be a sweet, innocent flower, waiting for the right
person to come along’ (he purposefully doesn’t use any pronouns, though Brendon
is pretty sure Ryan’s right person is Mr.
Right and him, but he’s not putting
money on the first till he has more evidence and for the second he’s waiting
for Ryan to make the first move because he’s done everything but toss Ryan down
on a bed and ravish him, so…)
He’s pleased with himself,
even if he only got four comments on a story that he slaved over. He starts his
next one, he’s got all sorts of ideas and he can see why dragging Ryan away
from his notebook when he’s writing is sometimes a near impossibility.
He hides it in his
livejournal under a private post that only he can see. He makes sure to log
himself off and finds Spencer staring at the door, arms crossed over his chest,
foot tapping when he opens the door at seven.
“All yours,” Brendon smiles,
all friendly like because Spencer can’t stay mad at him forever.
Spencer glares at him and doesn’t
slam the door behind him, though Brendon knows he wants to.
Maybe Spencer can stay mad at him forever after all.
******************************************************************************
There’s a scathing response
to his response waiting for him the next night and he has to read it twice.
It takes him almost an hour
to write his response to the response
to his response, partially because he keeps making side comments that might
lead people to think that he thinks
that he knows Ryan personally, then they would label him insane and then he’ll never get any comments to his stories,
he got four, he’d like to keep those four, so he has to go back and keep
removing them.
When he’s got it perfect (and
it doesn’t unknowingly out him as Brendon Urie of Panic! At The Disco or an
insane person that needs to be committed) he sends it.
They go back and forth and
finally, after four days, agree to disagree about their differences in
characterization of one Ryan Ross (his
is right; he knows she thinks hers is right, but she would be wrong).
They become something like
internet friends, she agrees to beta his stuff for him, so he starts sending
her snippets of his next work in progress and he agrees to not disparage her
characterization of Ryan Ross when she sends him her stuff in return.
She’s very prolific and she’s
always pairing Ryan with Spencer or Jon or both of them together but never with
him.
He asks her about it once (it
takes him two hours to draft the e-mail without asking what’s wrong with him) and she responds with a ‘I don’t
see Brendon as a sexual entity, no matter what kind of stage persona he has’.
He changes his story
midstream, the one that he’s been sending her snippets of and it becomes a Ryan/Brendon
and a love story and he purposefully doesn’t think about how Ryan would kill,
kill, kill him if he knew that he was
writing this stuff about him.
******************************************************************************
“Have you found the internet
porn?” Ryan asks drolly at breakfast one morning.
Brendon doesn’t spit his food
out on the table like Spencer or choke like Jon but that’s only because he
doesn’t have anything in his mouth at the time.
“No?” he answers and he’s
pissed that he doesn’t sound sure, but he’s unclear as to whether Ryan would
consider fanfiction porn.
******************************************************************************
He gets an e-mail from
someone whose name he doesn’t recognize with only the subject ‘I know who you are’.
He doesn’t use his computer
time for two days and when he does finally sit back down he keeps expecting
someone to come leaping out from behind the laptop.
‘I didn’t mean to freak you out’, is waiting for him and he looks
around the room and wonders if Pete has bugged the cabin and even now is
watching him look around the cabin for invisible people.
‘Who are you?’ he types slowly. The e-mail address isn’t one he
recognizes and although he flops back and forth between his story and his
e-mail, no response comes before he has to hand over the computer to Spencer.
******************************************************************************
“Are you okay?” Jon asks him after
he checks the locks on the doors and windows for the fifth time in an hour.
“Fine,” his voice squeaks,
and checks the door lock again. It’s a little loose, someone with a credit card
could probably jimmy it, they should probably get someone to fix it before
someone breaks in and murders them all in their sleep.
“Are you sure?” Jon asks,
he’s eyeing him like he thinks that Brendon is a half a second away from
needing massive therapy or streaking through the cabin screaming at the top of
his lungs.
“I’m fine, fine… is it time
for the movie? Is the popcorn done?” he asks in a rush and heads for the
kitchen where Ryan is dumping the popcorn in a bowl and Spencer has sodas in
hand.
Jon grabs his arm and steers
him towards the living room so he doesn’t run into Spencer and Brendon lets
him, curling up next to him on the couch and wondering if Jon would have him
committed if he went to the bathroom and checked all the locks on the doors and
windows on the way back.
******************************************************************************
There’s an e-mail waiting for
him with a link to his first story, and a smilie face.
Brendon doesn’t know what
that means so he types, ‘what is that
supposed to mean?’
He isn’t surprised when no
response comes before his time is up.
******************************************************************************
Ryan is leaning against the
wall, when Brendon opens the door, he looks bored and Brendon blinks at him in
confusion and checks his watch to make sure he hasn’t lost total track of time
and a death threat from Spencer is imminent.
Ryan is a night owl and has
the insane hours of 3 – 7 am. Brendon is normally happily asleep and he’s not
sure who Ryan talks to or what he does on the computer during those hours,
because everyone else is asleep too.
“We switched,” Ryan says
raising an eyebrow at the confusion on Brendon’s face. “We talked about it at
breakfast.”
At breakfast Brendon had been
wondering if it would look odd if he put a slide lock on the front door, he
isn’t surprised that he missed Ryan and Spencer bartering to switch times with
each other.
******************************************************************************
‘I much prefer your portrayal then any of the others’, is waiting
for him the next time he logs on. Brendon is frustrated, he can’t tell if the
e-mailer is a boy or a girl or if they even know who he really is or if they’re
just seeing if they can drive him insane by insinuating they do.
‘Who. Are. You?’ he types again.
He’s frustrated, he’s only
been half working on his story and no response comes before its time to hand
the computer over to Ryan.
He’d paid attention at
breakfast that morning, he knows that Haley is working strange hours, and that
Spencer had switched with Ryan so that he could still talk to her before she
went into work.
Ryan arches an eyebrow at him
and looks like he’s waiting for Brendon to say something, Brendon blinks at him
and Ryan sighs and rolls his eyes, brushes past him and closes the door.
He can hear him muttering
something but can’t make out what and thinks that he hasn’t checked the locks
in four hours and goes to do so.
******************************************************************************
‘You should be able to figure it out the same way I figured out who you
are. Brendon’
Brendon stares at his e-mail
and glances around the room again.
He spends his time on the
internet looking on eBay for things that can check the cabin for bugging.
******************************************************************************
The next time there is no
e-mail waiting for him (of course he hadn’t replied either, to freaked out
about someone actually typing his name
and all) so he starts compiling a list.
The e-mail address at the
top, the times and dates that all the e-mails were sent.
That’s really all he needs to
figure it out. Some people say that he’s really obtuse (this person has actually told him that, numerous times, most of
them over the last ten days) but he loves puzzles, just chooses not to do them
because they would require sitting still for long periods of time and he’s got
way more important ways that he’d like to spend those hours.
‘Why are you reading fanfiction, Ryan Ross?’
He sends it before he can
start second-guessing his deductive reasoning skills, worse case scenario he
gets back an e-mail with a laughing face and a ‘ha, ha, ha’ and ‘moron’.
Spencer is waiting outside
the door when he comes out and Brendon just grins at him and doesn’t go to
check the locks on the doors or windows. Instead he goes and sets his alarm
clock and waits for Ryan’s turn on the computer to see if he’s right.
******************************************************************************
His alarm clock is screaming
at him ‘get up, get up, Ryan is off the
computer and you need to find out if you were right, right, right’.
He has his pillow over his
head and wants to cry.
He doesn’t make a move to
turn the alarm clock off, so he’s momentarily startled when it quiets and
someone sits on the bed. He peaks out from under the pillow, it’s dark and he
can barely make out Ryan sitting perched on the edge of his bed, Brendon thinks
he looks amused but that just might be the dark and the tiredness.
“I was bored,” Ryan says and
Brendon grins up at him.
“So was I, but they had you
all wrong and I had to fix it, because… they had you all wrong.”
“They’re just having fun,”
Ryan shrugs. “How did you figure it out?”
“I made a list of the dates
and times that the e-mails were sent.”
“You never cleaned out the
Internet History files,” Ryan lays down on his side on top of the covers, hands
under his cheek and stares at him. “What are you working on now?”
“You’re not going to make me
stop writing it?” Brendon asks, he’s slightly confused. Once he figured out
that Ryan knew what he was writing, he thought he’d get told to stop. That it
was wrong, wrong, wrong to be writing gay stories about his friends.
“We’re not having sex yet,
are we?”
Brendon shakes his head, he’s
not sure if he’s comfortable writing about sex between the Brendon and Ryan
that live in his head when real Ryan knows
that he’s writing it.
“Then no, I’m not going to make
you stop writing it,” Ryan smiles at him, face soft and Brendon inches a little
closer. “I’m holding out for the grand finale.”
******************************************************************************
It takes him two months and
Ryan looking over his shoulder the entire way to finish the second one, he
posts it on the day they leave the cabin and its almost three weeks before he
has time to go in and see what his feedback is.
He has ten comments and gets
two recs waiting, one from the girl that thought his Ryan characterization was
totally wrong and one from someone that he’s never heard of.
He’s dismayed that his grand
story doesn’t get a better response, but he has Ryan curled up in his bed
sleeping and can’t really find the energy to stay upset.
Besides, if the first story
got four comments and the second story got ten comments and two recs, then the
third story can only do better. It’s
the trend after all.
And now he’s got real life
experiences to go on, he glances over at the bed. Ryan is sound asleep, hand
reaching out over the space where Brendon had been lying until minutes prior,
like he’s reaching for Brendon.
He thinks he can get a couple
of paragraphs done before Ryan gets restless and wakes himself up.
He opens Word and starts typing.
bravenet.com