Archive of Our Own ^beta

Pete Wentz wakes up and he’s not in his bed.

Maybe that’s not where the story starts. It’s hard to know where the story starts. Pete, in a bed that’s not his, thinks maybe the story starts way back in his childhood, deep in his roots. Or maybe it starts during his disastrous, fucked-up high school career. Maybe it starts during his tour of punk bands.

Maybe it starts the day he met Patrick.

Maybe all of Pete Wentz’s stories start the day he met Patrick.

Maybe, though – Maybe it starts the day he told Patrick no.

No, he said to Patrick. I don’t want to.

Patrick had stared at him, blatantly hurt. Pete felt like he’d kicked a dog. I think we should try to write something, he said.

I don’t, Pete replied. I feel like we just managed to get ourselves out from under the whole thing.

What whole thing?

The whole Pete and Patrick thing.

The thing where we write songs together? That thing?

Don’t you feel like we finally figured out who we are without each other?

Patrick had stared at him, and stared at him, and stared at him. What? he said finally.

It had been said to Pete – suggested to him – strongly – by a few of the women he couldn’t seem to commit to – that maybe there was an issue in his relationship with Patrick, that maybe he couldn’t commit because the only person he could commit to was Patrick, that maybe he wasn’t even a full person without Patrick. This was said to him scathingly, as if it were a failure of his, and – maybe it was. Shouldn’t he know who he is without Patrick? Shouldn’t he be…be at least someone without Patrick? Is he nothing but Patrick’s other half? Is that all he’s ever destined to be?

Patrick asked for words, and if Pete gave him words, then they would end up right back where they’d started.

So Pete said, I think we should find other things to think about.

We should?

I should.

Like what? What else would you think about other than Fall Out Boy?

Anything, Pete had said. Anything else in the world but you.

And then, the next morning, he wakes up in a strange bed.

***

Here’s the thing: The apartment he’s in, upon investigation, appears to belong to…Pete Wentz.

The apartment is gorgeous in an extremely flat and uninteresting way. It faces Lake Michigan. Pete tries to imagine the cost of that view and fails, because he doesn’t know Chicago real estate, he knows L.A. real estate. Because he lives in L.A. Except that right now he’s here in Chicago, and in this apartment are a couple of photographs in frames of Pete’s family. Like, there’s his mom and dad and sister, crowded around Pete in a graduation gown. Pete picks up this photograph and stares at it, because Pete has not graduated from…anywhere. Well. High school. But this is not a high school graduation. The cap on his head is some fancy puffy velvet affair. His gown is a rich purple. There’s a gold braid casually hanging around his neck.

Pete breathes, “What the fuck,” and puts the photograph down. What is going on?

Maybe this apartment is owned by a long-lost twin brother he didn’t know he had.

Who somehow also knows his family.

Maybe this long-lost twin brother has taken over his life?

Except that doesn’t explain why Pete is in this apartment.

There are bookshelves in the apartment, and they are crowded with books that Pete would read: Hemingway and Kerouac and some fantasy and some nonfiction. The wide gamut of books that his taste likes. This is actually more alarming to him, somehow, than the inexplicable graduation photo. Because maybe he could pretend this was just a lookalike, but a lookalike with the same taste in books? For some reason, this seems more far-fetched to him.

Pete runs his finger along the spines of the book. They stay tangible, concrete. They do not dissolve like a dream into thin air. In other words, they behave like real books.

On the lower shelf, however, he finds…law books. Weighty tomes. Textbooks with names like Torts and Criminal Law. Pete pulls one out at random, and it’s dog-eared, clearly used, multi-colored highlighting all over the pages, scrawled notes in his handwriting.

Pete puts the book back and backs away and whispers again, “What the fuck.”

Okay, he thinks. Okay. Maybe he needs to go back to sleep. He’s going to go back to sleep and when he wakes up, he’ll be back in his own bed. Back in the right bed.

Of course he can’t sleep. Of course he’s wide awake now in this weird apartment. Of course he watches the sun move across the ceiling in abject terror.

A phone rings.

Pete sits up, startled, shocked, and stares at the phone. It’s by the bed. Of course it is. Plugged in. Charging. Fake Pete’s phone.

Pete picks it up gingerly. It’s flashing a name he doesn’t recognize. Ace. Who the fuck is Ace?

Pete doesn’t pick up, and the phone stops ringing. Its lock screen is a picture of the Chicago skyline. Not a professional one. One apparently taken by the fake Pete who owns this phone. Pete presses his finger to the fingerprint sensor, and of course it opens. He goes to the Photos icon and scrolls through the camera roll. This is definitely his phone. It’s full of selfies of him. He has short hair. Pete for the first time realizes that he no longer has a tangle of hair to pull out of his way. His hair is short. He pulls his fingertips through it and silently freaks out because he’s too freaked out to freak out loudly.

Maybe he has lost his mind.

He opens his Contacts, thinking, I will call Patrick. I will call Patrick and he will make all of this make sense. He’ll be able to answer my questions.

There is no Patrick in his Contacts.

Hang on, there is no Patrick in his Contacts.

He scrolls to the Rs, maybe he’s in there as Rick. No. Maybe Trick? No.

“Jesus Christ,” he says frantically, and then Ace calls again, what does fucking Ace fucking want! “Yeah,” Pete snaps as he answers the call.

“Hello?” Ace says.

“Yes,” Pete says impatiently. “Hello.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Pete bites out.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ace says. “What happened? I thought maybe it was something bad when you didn’t show up to work.”

“Work?” Pete echoes blankly.

“Yeah. We’ve got the Gwyneth Paltrow deposition, remember?”

“…The what?”

“Jesus Christ, Wentz, what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know,” Pete whispers, horrified, and runs a hand through his distressingly short hair, then down his face.

“Should I call someone?” Ace asks. “Like…911, maybe?”

Yeah, because Pete has clearly lost his motherfucking mind. And what the fuck is he going to say to 911? I’m in the wrong life? They are going to medicate him heavily. Pete says, “No, no, no, I’m fine, I’ll be in soon,” and hangs up the phone.

Then he goes to his Contacts and scrolls to Work. He calls the number. It pops up as Farragut, Newell. Pete ends the call before someone can answer and Googles Farragut, Newell. It’s an extremely fancy law firm with offices on Michigan Avenue.

***

Pete has an ID that gets him into this ultra-fancy building. The security guard greets him familiarly. Pete walks into the wrong elevator bank, apparently, because the guy says, “Where are you going?” laughing at him, and so Pete backs out and makes off like it’s all a joke and walks into the next elevator bank, Floors 21 through 38.

He has no idea which of these floors might be for him. There is no clue on his work ID. He should have thought this through.

And then someone gets onto the elevator with him and says pleasantly, “Hi, Pete, how’s it going?” She leans over and presses the button for floor 27.

“Good,” he says faintly. “It’s good.” She’s dressed in fancy black pants and a pristine gold silk blouse. Pete is dressed in jeans and a polo shirt because he looked at the business suits in his closet and felt sick. This is clearly a misstep, he’s going to stand out like a sore thumb.

And she notices immediately. “Dress-down day, huh?” she says cheekily. “You’re on 29, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he manages, and clears his throat. “Yeah, uh, yeah, 29, thank you.”

She presses the button for him.

He says, “I, uh…” He gestures at his jeans. “One of those days?” What the fuck he means that to mean, he doesn’t know.

She laughs and says, “Oh, trust me, I get it. The Paltrow deposition must be freaking you out. I mean, super jealous and everything, but you know it’s going to be all over Goop how you do.”

“Yeah,” Pete squeaks. “Great.”

The elevator stops at 27 and she steps out and gives him a cheerful wave.

The elevator doors close and Pete seriously thinks for a minute that he might throw up.

Then the elevator opens on 29 and he steps out.

There’s no one in the elevator lobby with him. He can go left or right. Both sides have Farragut Newell stamped on the glass doors. He chooses left, pressing his ID against the keypad. It opens with a click. There are people in the hallway he enters, but none of them are really paying attention to him. A couple of them say harried his on their way past him.

What Pete realizes immediately is the offices have names next to them. Thank fucking God. He goes three doors down, peering at the names, before he reaches the one with his name on it. Peter Wentz III, is what it says.

At least he left off the initials, he thinks. At least this version of him isn’t that fucking obnoxious.

The door is locked. Pete fishes out the keys he found in the apartment and the one that’s not a house key fits cleanly into the door. Excellent.

He steps into his office. And the view out the window is the Chicago skyline view that’s the lockscreen on his phone.

“Well,” he says to the version of Pete who lives in this world. “That’s a little pathetic, buddy.”

“Everything okay in here?” someone says behind him, and Pete turns to look over his shoulder.

“Yes?” he says, hesitant.

“You don’t sound convinced,” the guy says. “Look, what’s up with you? If you need a day off, you can take a day off.”

Ace, Pete thinks. This must be Ace. “Ace?” he says.

“Yes?” Ace says slowly. He clearly thinks Pete has lost his mind.

He is not far off. Pete licks his lips and says carefully, “I’m going to be okay. I just need to talk to Patrick. Do you know Patrick?”

“Who?” Ace says.

Not a good sign. “Nope. Never mind. Ignore me. Listen, can you give me a few minutes here?”

“A few minutes for what?”

For my nervous breakdown. Pete does not say this out loud. Pete smiles sunnily and slams the door in Ace’s face. And then he waves to him as he closes the blinds on the glass walls.

And then he sits in front of the desk and says breathlessly, “Okay, think, think, think, think.” He takes his phone out of his pocket and he does something he should have done a while ago. He Googles Patrick Stump.

He gets Did you mean Patrick Stumph?

And there are results for a Patrick Stumph. He’s the drummer for some band called The Five. The Five?

Pete Googles Fall Out Boy and gets…Simpsons results.

Pete Googles himself.

He gets a bio on the Farragut Newell website. Peter Wentz III is a graduate of DePaul University and Northwestern Law School. He is an associate in the Farragut Newell litigation department who specializes in intellectual property.

Pete, feeling sick, puts his phone back in his pocket and looks out the window of the office. What the fuck, he thinks, is he supposed to do now?

Go back to sleep. This is the only thought he has. He should go back to sleep and he will wake up in the right world. That is what he’s going to do. This is all just some wildly vivid nightmare. This is his subconscious manifesting his guilt for telling Patrick no, for saying that he wanted a life with anything else but Patrick in it. He will go back to sleep and he will wake up in the morning and he will apologize for his ridiculousness and tell Patrick yes instead of no. That’s what will happen. He’ll fix this.

Pete opens the door and Ace is still waiting right there. This guy’s a little much, Pete thinks. He says, “Look—” just as Ace says, “You don’t seem okay, Pete.”

He is very much not okay. “I’m not,” he says honestly.

“You look awful,” Ace continues.

“I feel awful,” Pete agrees, because he does.

“Maybe you should just go home and sleep off whatever this is.” Ace looks a little doubtful that sleeping it off is going to work.

But Pete says confidently, “That is absolutely what I’m going to do. I’m going to take a nap and when I wake up everything is going to be massively better.”

“Okay,” Ace says, very dubious.

But Pete is jubilant about the solidity of this plan. He claps his hand on Ace’s shoulder and says gravely, “See you later, Ace,” by which he means Hopefully I will never see you ever again in my life.

He’s not especially tired but he stops at a drugstore and he picks up on over-the-counter sleeping pill. Good enough. He takes the exact recommended amount – he just wants to sleep for a little bit, he doesn’t want to accidentally overdose in this weird alternate timeline place – and he crawls into bed and he waits for it to kick in.

And it does kick in. Pete falls asleep.

Pete wakes up to a phone ringing somewhere. He reaches for it automatically, blindly, just to shut it up, and mumbles, “’Lo?” into it.

“Wentz,” says Andy’s voice. “Where are you? You’re late.”

“I am?” says Pete groggily. “Late for what?”

“Band practice,” says Andy impatiently.

“Band practice?” Pete echoes. He can’t recall that they were practicing for anything. The band was barely existent. That’s why Patrick had wanted to write, had been so insistently hopeful that they might try to… Pete cuts that thought off. He sits up in bed, rubbing at his eyes, and says, “What are we practicing for?”

“Asshole,” Andy says, but he sounds fond. “Chris wants to know if we should save some beers for you—”

Pete hears Chris’s voice shout from a distance, still discernible over the phone, “Or are you a fucking loser who’s not going to show up!”

Pete opens his eyes. He’s still in an apartment looking over Lake Michigan.

Andy is not talking about Fall Out Boy. Or, if he is, not a Fall Out Boy Pete is going to recognize. A Fall Out Boy that has Chris.

Pete says, “Oh, fuck.”

“What’s up?” Andy says. “He’s only kidding around. Are you okay?”

Pete is so not okay. Pete wants to curl into a ball and sob.

Maybe seeing Andy is a good idea. Andy is always wise. Andy has, for many years now, listened to all of the freaking out Pete can do over the plethora of things he finds to freak out about. This version of himself has gotten practically everything wrong, but he kept Andy, so that’s one good thing.

Pete says, “Where’s practice?”

“My place,” Andy says, sweetly exasperated, like this is just Pete for you. Pete stays the same in in every universe in how much he exasperates his friends, he thinks. “Come on, we’re waiting for you.”

“Andy, where—”

But Andy has already ended the call.

Oh, fuck, how the hell is Pete supposed to figure out where Andy’s place is?

Pete looks at his phone, which is his main source of information in this world. He goes to his Contacts list, and there’s Andy, right up at the top. Pete, holding his breath, clicks on it…and there’s a fucking address included with the contact information. This Pete is a goddamn, motherfucking, organized genius and Pete would kiss him if he ever met him if that wasn’t a weird thing to do.

***

The “band” isn’t a band. It’s Andy and Chris and some guy Pete doesn’t know, and they’ve all got instruments but none of them are playing. Which is good because Pete didn’t bring his bass. He wasn’t sure, of course, where this version of him kept his bass. Pete, in his right timeline, has an entire fucking music studio right in his house. This Pete does not.

Chris says, “You didn’t even bring your bass?”

“I’m having a bad day,” Pete answers, which is the most honest thing he can think to say.

Chris shrugs and hands him a beer.

Pete wants to say, So what’s this band? But also it’s very clear this isn’t a band. This is a group of middle-aged men just hanging out and complaining about their jobs. Just – with instruments nearby.

And this breaks Pete’s heart, because what this means is that Andy Hurley is not a famous drummer out there in the world inspiring kids to take up drumming like him. No, instead Andy Hurley is – something, something, nonprofit, is what Pete can discern from what Andy says about his job, and okay, that makes some sense, maybe, that Andy would be out there doing as much good as he can, as opposed to Pete, who just rolled over and turned into his dad, apparently, but it still hurts Pete deep in his soul to see a life that turned out this way. He does not like this timeline. He does not like it at all. And he doesn’t know how to get out of it. Is this just going to be his life now? This?

And no offense to Andy, or to Chris, or to this other guy whose name Pete can’t quite pin down because everybody else keeps calling him a variety of creative nicknames. No offense to any of these guys, but Pete misses Patrick acutely. Pete is in the middle of a crisis, and that is Patrick Time for him. Pete has never learned coping mechanisms that aren’t Patrick.

This is why he told Patrick no, he remembers now. They were supposed to figure out who they were without each other.

Fuck that shit, Pete wants to go home, Pete wants Patrick desperately, Pete is going to find his way back to Patrick and then collapse sobbing in his lap with declarations of adoration, that’s what Pete is going to do.

Pete manages to outlast Chris and Other Guy, who leave Andy’s with lots of bro-style handshakes and hugs and Pete is just like, whatever, he is impatient to get Andy alone so he can ask Andy important questions about what the fuck is going on in this lifetime.

Andy looks at him after Chris and Other Guy leave and says, “What’s up with you? You look terrible.”

“Andy,” Pete says gravely, and then doesn’t know how to start. He probably should have thought this through. Instead he launches into the one question he cares about. “Do you know Patrick Stump?”

Andy has zero reaction to this. “Who?”

Pete’s heart sinks down into his stomach and then his combined stomach-heart sinks down past his feet and through the floor. Pete is surprised he can stay standing upright with all this going on inside of him. He licks his lips and tries again, “Patrick Stump. Did you ever meet him?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Andy says, sounding genuinely confused and concerned. “Who is he?”

He’s my fucking soulmate and I tried to pretend he’s not and look what I fucking did, is not what Pete says but is the truth.

Pete puts his face in his hands and just shakes his head, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

“Pete,” Andy says gently. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Pete answers truthfully.

Andy takes this in stride. “Okay. What can I do?”

“I don’t know, I…” Pete drops his hands away, exhausted. He just slept the whole day away, but he is exhausted. “I really don’t know. I’m lost. I don’t know how to fix it.”

Andy’s gaze is sympathetic, and comforting, and familiar, which Pete needs right now. “It’s never too late to find your way back, Pete.”

No, you don’t understand it, I fucked it up and told Patrick I wanted to think about anything else in the world but him and now I got my wish and I don’t think I can get back to the right timeline. He says, “What if it is? What if I – fucked everything up too much and I can’t fix this?”

“You’re Pete Wentz,” Andy says solemnly. “I have never known you not to be able to fix anything.”

And that is – Maybe that is a statement that is true in both of these timelines. Maybe the Pete Wentz Andy knows is always someone who fixes things. He’s also someone who fucks everything up all the time so that fixing is required but – yeah.

Pete says ruefully, “This is a pretty epic fuck-up on my part.”

“You’ll be okay,” Andy says confidently. He clearly has no idea the shape of what Pete’s done. He puts a hand on his shoulder, heavy comfort, and says, smiling, “I know you, Wentz. You’ll be okay.”

It occurs to Pete that this is not a universe with a Best Buy parking lot in it, because nobody in his current timeline would let him, in this mood, just walk out the door.

Or maybe he’s just loved better in his other timeline.

No, that’s not fair to this Andy. Maybe he’s just known better in his other timeline.

Maybe he – Maybe he never found Patrick and so he never got a soulmate to uncover every layer of who he was, and so here in this timeline he’s just still hidden under everything, under this façade that isn’t him, because he never figured out who he fucking was.

This revelation is astonishing, because didn’t he just tell Patrick he needed time to figure out who he was without Patrick? What a stupid, fucking, pointless waste of time, because it turns out that it was Patrick who helped him figure out who he was in the first place.

Great, wonderful, magnificent insight provided to him by this alternative timeline, he would like to go home now and tell Patrick all of that in person.

But Pete has no idea how to go home, and he just slept the day away, so he’s not tired and can’t try the sleeping thing again. He’s exhausted, yeah, but he’s emotionally exhausted. He’s tired of being in this world. But he’s way too wired about it to sleep. He doesn’t want to go back to his non-apartment.

Pete sits in the back of the Uber and tries to come up with somewhere else to go instead. He can probably just go hide in a bar somewhere.

His fingers tap Patrick Stumph into his phone again. He dives into the links provided, reading about him greedily. There really isn’t much. The Five is not a huge success, but seems to be known locally. Seems to do some performing. Seems to be—

Playing right this very night. Pete checks the date on his phone fifteen times and then says to the Uber driver, “Wait, change of plans, I need to go somewhere else.”

***

The Five is playing at a little hole-in-the-wall jazz club. Honestly, Pete likes it immediately. It’s the kind of place that’s full of regulars who all know each other and who all pay intense attention to the music, full of appreciation. Pete likes the place…but he also doesn’t belong in the place. He is keenly aware of that. In this lifetime, he’s apparently some kind of high-powered attorney wearing the most obnoxiously preppy jeans and t-shirt. These were the best he could find in the closet but he still thinks he stands out like a sore thumb. In his real lifetime, though, he wouldn’t fit in any better, in designer sweatpants and whatever hoodie was his latest design, trailing paparazzi out the door behind him. Maybe he isn’t made to be part of this kind of club, no matter how many lifetimes he gets, no matter how many timelines he jumps in and out of.

The thought makes him a little sad and depressed, as he slides into a seat at the end of the bar, and then he thinks, That’s making him sad and depressed? He’s literally trapped in the wrong motherfucking lifetime, and he’s worried about fitting in at some jazz club? Whatever, his head’s a mess.

When the bartender asks him what he wants, he hesitates, feeling confused, which shows just how little he belongs in this kind of place, and then settles for a Jameson on the rocks, because it feels like that sort of nice.

There is no music playing, although there are instruments set up on a little stage. Pete’s not too close to the stage, because he doesn’t know if he can handle Patrick seeing him, but he’s also not too far away from the stage, because obviously he has to be able to see Patrick. He says, when the bartender brings his drink, “Hey, is there going to be a band?” and nods to the setup.

“Yeah.” The bartender glances briefly at her watch. “Any minute now.”

Pete nods. Perfect timing. He glances at his phone and there’s a text message from his sister Olivia. Apparently he has a sister named Olivia in this universe, too. Is that weird or not? He can’t decide. The text is a part of a group text between Olivia and people he has labeled Mom and Dad, so he assumes that’s his parents. Olivia’s text reads, I’ll stop at the bakery to get bread for dinner tomorrow. There’s probably stuff Pete’s supposed to know about whatever dinner tomorrow Olivia is referencing, but Pete decides that’s a problem for tomorrow!Pete, who maybe might not even still be him, if all goes well tonight and he somehow gets back to his timeline.

In the meantime, the music is starting, instruments being tuned, a tapping crash of a cymbal.

Pete looks up, annoyed he missed the moment when Patrick took the stage, and for a moment he doesn’t see him, because he’s looking in completely the wrong area of the stage. He’s so used to Patrick being the lead singer that he’s looking at the guy in front of the microphone – who’s not a guy at all but a woman. And after a moment of disorientation Pete remembers that Patrick is the drummer, and locates him behind the drum set, fiddling with his kit.

Pete’s heart literally clenches. Pete always thought that was a figure of speech, but he’s reminded at this moment that the heart is a muscle and his clenches into a fist ready to punch its way out of his chest to get to Patrick. Patrick doesn’t look exactly like Patrick would have on a stage in Pete’s lifetime: He’s behind a drum set and he’s not wearing a hat. On the other hand, Patrick still manages to look exactly like Patrick, dressed unremarkably, to avoid attracting attention or comment, his reddish hair carefully combed into a swoop he pushes off of his forehead. In another life, Patrick’s hat would have flattened that swoop down so it would peek alluringly out, but in this life, it’s just there for everyone to see, and that feels a little obscene to Pete. He’s not wearing glasses, and Pete wonders if Patrick did contacts in this universe or if he still doesn’t want to see the people around him when he performs, even if all he’s doing is playing the drums.

Pete chose his seat so he would be in the middle of the crowd, not easily seeable, but now he wills Patrick to look up and see him. Surely the force of the power of their connection should cause Patrick to know that Pete is in the room with him. In the lifetime Pete just left, Patrick would have known, unerringly, that he was there, would have sought him out. In this lifetime – in this lifetime Patrick isn’t even in his phone contacts and most definitely isn’t his. In this lifetime, Patrick just…starts playing the drums.

He's good, of course, because Patrick is good at everything, especially everything to do with music. Well, except words, Patrick’s really bad at lyrics. He’s good at Pete’s lyrics, but Pete has established, over years of working with him, that literally the only thing he thinks Patrick doesn’t have an ungodly talent for is verbal poetry. Which is okay because every other type of poetry comes effortlessly to Patrick. Pete has one contribution to their relationship and he clings to it with the despair of a drowning person with an inner tube.

But anyway, Patrick plays the drums well. He’s not flashy, and he’s not as driving as Andy, because he never has been in the way he plays the drums, but he’s good, and he clearly enjoys it. Patrick has always enjoyed drumming. Pete thinks that to this day Patrick prefers drumming to any other role in the band, and it’s the only role in the band that they never give him. He wonders, suddenly, if this Patrick is happier here in this lifetime, tucked behind the drum set, his main musical love that Pete long ago said to him, No, that’s not for you, and changed the whole course of his life. Maybe all Patrick really wanted all along was a life behind the drum set. Maybe Pete is desperate to get back to his other timeline but Patrick is really happy in this one. If he went back and told his Patrick, There’s this world where you get to be a drummer in an obscure little jazz band, would you like that better? Maybe – Maybe his Patrick would say yes.

The idea is a pang in Pete’s chest, his clenched heart flinching with the need to punch its way to Patrick and insist that can’t possibly be true, that surely the life with Pete is better, surely.

Pete’s not really paying attention to the music, because his eyes are latched onto Patrick, but then, suddenly, Saturday starts playing. This is so alarming that he spills his drink, but he grabs at a napkin hastily and no one really notices since everyone is listening to the band. It’s not quite Saturday, of course, because it wouldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly be, it’s being sung by this random unknown woman. Pete stares at her, this woman singing Saturday, his and Patrick’s love song, and this woman is just singing it, like she is allowed. But, of course, it isn’t his and Patrick’s love song in this universe. Here, there is no second verse. There’s no fucking second verse. There’s an extended little jam session for the band, and then the woman comes back in with the bridge, I read about the afterlife, but I never really lived, only it’s not a reprisal because the first occurrence of that line never happened. And, when Pete really listens, he realizes the chorus is different, too: Two more weeks, I can’t take it anymore, I can’t sleep, I just need a little more. Pete wrinkles his nose. What the fuck is that?

When the set is over, a few people go up to the band. They’re all talking to the singer, or the trumpet player, or the pianist. Nobody seems to care about talking to Patrick, who’s getting his stuff together behind the drum set, completely unnoticed, and it occurs to Pete that that’s probably exactly how Patrick likes it, and Patrick is so fucking wrong about that.

Pete actually hesitates. Because maybe it isn’t his job to change Patrick’s life around for him. Maybe it never was. Maybe that’s what all this is about. Maybe Pete is learning The Important Lesson that he cannot live without Patrick Stump, he is no one without him, no one worth being, no one he wants to be, he’s just better with Patrick, but the flipside of that lesson is: What the fuck was ever in it for Patrick Stump? Maybe Patrick Stump without Pete Wentz gets exactly the life he always wanted, without Pete Wentz fucking everything up the way he always fucks everything up.

But it doesn’t matter. Pete cannot learn this lesson. If that’s the lesson he’s supposed to be learning, he’s going to be stuck in this fucking timeline for the rest of his life. Because Pete, acting like a completely deranged person, practically shoves his way through the mellow, mingling crowd to vault onto the little stage to get to Patrick.

Patrick looks at him, indeed, like he is a deranged person. And then he blinks. And for a moment Pete thinks, impossibly, that Patrick recognizes him. But then Patrick, with a wry little twist to his lips, says, “Can I help you?” and sounds genuinely confused.

“I’m—” Pete gasps, but his clenched heart isn’t letting enough blood flow through his body to get a full sentence out. “I’m, like—” Pete gestures.

Patrick really looks quizzical now, and a little alarmed. “Are you having a heart attack?”

Pete almost laughs. “No,” he says, then reconsiders. “Maybe?”

“Jesus Christ,” Patrick says, concerned, eyes wide.

“No.” Pete shakes his head, leaning slightly on Patrick’s drum set. “No, sorry, I’m okay, I’m just—” Pete notices that Patrick’s eyes are on Pete’s hand on his drums. “Touching your drum set. Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Patrick says, as Pete snatches his hand away, and then looks back up at him. “Was there something I could do for you?”

The lights are low in this bar. Patrick is caught up in dim shadows that kiss the faint stubble on his jawline, that drift over the sheen of sweat on his forehead, dampening his hair into a darker color more like brown. Or – auburn, Pete thinks stupidly. He knows that shade of color in Patrick’s hair, he sees it every time they finish a gig. He has, in his past life, in his other life, ruffled his fingers through it, teasing, affectionate, leaned close to Patrick in complete adoration.

Pete misses his life keenly. His clenched heart throbs painfully. He croaks out, “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Patrick?” It’s the woman who was the lead singer. She sounds curious. Oh, fuck, Patrick is probably totally dating this woman and is about to go home with her and reject Pete entirely, which is just what Pete deserves, because Pete in another universe told Patrick no when he reached out to him, and that’s what the lesson he’s supposed to be learning here is, the way it feels when your soulmate rejects you. It is part of the fucking tragedy of Pete Wentz that he spent years saying Patrick was his soulmate but he didn’t really understand what that meant until coming to this universe and finding himself without him. It fucking sucks and how could he ever have thought for even a heartbeat that what he needed was to learn who he was without Patrick Stump, he is terrible without Patrick Stump. “You okay?” the woman asks Patrick.

Patrick doesn’t look away from Pete. Pete wonders how much panic and agony is in his expression. Pete wonders what Patrick makes of any of it. Patrick, after a moment, glances at the singer with a quick smile and says lightly, “Totally. I’m good.”

“Okay,” the woman says. She looks at Pete in bewilderment but she heads off.

Pete, relieved, looks back at Patrick.

Patrick says, “Yeah, sure, buy me a drink.”

***

Pete is trying really hard not to be nervous. Which is ridiculous, he shouldn’t be the least bit nervous, this is Patrick, he’s spent half of his life by Patrick’s side, why wouldn’t he be totally okay with Patrick?

The bartender says, “What can I get you, Pat?” and Pete wrinkles his nose again because there is a familiarity there, a Pat there, that makes Pete feel even more out-of-place in this universe.

Patrick looks at Pete and says, “What are you drinking?”

“He’s Jameson on the rocks,” the bartender answers for Pete, because she’s a show-off.

Patrick says, “I will take a Jameson, too, then. Neat.”

The neat feels like a little dig at Pete, but maybe everything feels like a little dig at Pete right now.

The bartender goes off to make their drinks and Pete feels like he should explain himself. Which is…a really fucking difficult thing to do in these circumstances. He gets himself all stuck just on the first syllable, like, everything is just too impossible to say. He settles for, “So.” Patrick looks at him expectantly. Bad start, Pete thinks. Now Patrick is expecting things. He continues with, “I don’t know if—” Then he thinks that the sheer tonnage of what he doesn’t know is too much to tackle. So instead he changes his approach. He says, “I’m Pete—”

“I know who you are,” Patrick interrupts him. This happens just as the drinks arrive, so Patrick isn’t even looking at Pete, he’s pulling his drink over to him. Pete, agog, wishes he would look at him. “Were you just going to pretend we’ve never met?” Now he looks up at him, and his dear, familiar face is cast with unimpressed distaste. Pete instinctively recoils from that expression on Patrick, he can’t help it. Patrick goes on, “Or did you forget that we’ve met? Because I don’t know which is worse.”

Pete is completely out of his depths. He has no fucking clue what this Patrick is talking about. He has met Patrick a million times in his lifetime, of course, a million times over thousands of different days of his life, but he doesn’t know how this Pete has met this Patrick. He opens and closes his mouth, unsure what to say.

“You did forget,” Patrick says, looking annoyed, and sips his whiskey.

“No, no,” Pete says hurriedly. “No, no, no. I know who you are. Patrick Stump. I came here specifically to see you. I could never forget you, I swear.”

This is probably overboard, because now Patrick looks extravagantly skeptical. “Really?” he drawls.

“No, I mean, I…” Pete is not going to be able to keep up the subterfuge that he knows the circumstances of their meeting. “The details of how we met might be a little…fuzzy…”

Patrick rolls his eyes and sips his drink again and says, “Joe Trohman introduced us, remember?”

“Yes,” Pete says slowly, because this he does remember. “Joe introduced us. I was thinking of starting a band, right?” Pete desperately hopes that if the Joe detail is still true, so is the band detail.

“Yes,” Patrick agrees sardonically. “You were thinking of starting a band. And then you met me and you decided not to start the band.”

Pete opens his mouth to protest, then says uncertainly, “Did I?”

“I believe your exact words to Joe were, ‘We’re going to have a band with this dude? What kind of ridiculous band would that be?’ It was very charming. As you can tell, I never thought about that particular insult ever again.”

Pete opens his mouth again, then closes it, then looks at Patrick, who’s vibrating with tension and Pete doesn’t blame him if that’s what he said right in front of him. “I really said that?” he says finally.

“You really said that,” Patrick confirms, and sips his drink again. “And then you went back to your successful bands that were already touring and that was that. My brush with the great Pete Wentz.” Patrick says it very sarcastically, and Pete is very aware of how much he means the exact opposite of great Pete Wentz. “So. What are you up to? Trying to start another band? Changed your mind?”

Yes, Pete thinks. But Patrick will never in a million years believe that of him after this story. He says honestly, struck by it, “Fuck, I’m the worst.”

Patrick gives him a sideways look. “You didn’t remember that you said that?”

“I didn’t remember it exactly that way, no.”

“How do you remember it?”

I fell in love and decided to hitch my wagon to yours forever. “I remembered that I was an idiot,” Pete says, because he decides that’s honest enough. “But I’m always an idiot. I just didn’t remember the specifics of what an idiot I was.”

Patrick’s eyebrows flicker upward but he doesn’t dispute Pete’s account of things. He says, “Alright, so, you showed up and you bought me a drink, what’s on your agenda?”

“I don’t have an agenda,” Pete says, because he didn’t, aside from see Patrick. “I was just…thinking about you.”

“Thinking about me? You didn’t even think I knew who you were.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to remember me,” Pete says.

“Whereas you remembered me?”

“I showed up here to talk to you, didn’t I?”

Patrick is studying him closely. “Yes, you did, but I can’t understand… I would not have said that I made the slightest impression on you, and that was all ten years ago. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about Joe Trohman, never mind you. And you just showed up here tonight?”

Pete registers the ten years comment. In the timeline Pete just left, he’s known Patrick for twenty years. So he’s not just in another universe, he’s also ten years younger apparently, a fact he probably should have noticed before this, but he had more pressing things to freak out about. “I think I’ve been rethinking my life,” Pete says.

“So you do want to start a band?” Patrick seems amused now.

“No, but – I mean, not exactly, I just – Do you ever think about the choices you make, and how one little choice might lead you down a radically different path, and you don’t even know it until it’s too late, and then you can’t just turn around and change it, you’re just stuck, you can’t go back, you can’t fix it?”

Patrick regards him evenly for a moment. Then he says, “Not really, no. I mean, I guess now I am. But I still don’t – You’re thinking all about your life choices and you settled on the moment we didn’t form a band? Like, that’s what stood out to you?”

“You have no idea,” Pete says, accidentally more honest than he intended to be.

Patrick says, “Well. That’s a little weird. I mean…flattering, I guess? But – weird.”

“Yeah,” Pete agrees solemnly. “I totally see how it is weird.”

Patrick, after a beat, laughs. “Okay. This whole thing is fucking weird. Pete Wentz. You, like, tumbled out of the scene. What do you even do?”

“I think I’m a lawyer in a big law firm downtown.”

“You think?”

“It is really fucking confusing.”

Patrick laughs again. “You really are in the middle of some kind of crisis. Mid-life crisis? Maybe not quite. Third-life crisis? Something.”

Pete is in the middle of a crisis, so he found Patrick, as he always does.

And maybe Patrick had been in the middle of a crisis, back in their right timeline, and he had reached out to Pete, and what had Pete done. What had Pete done?

“I’m sorry,” Pete says suddenly, a total non-sequitur, wishing he could say it to his real Patrick, thinking of how much he needs to say it to his real Patrick.

Patrick just says, “It’s fine, who among us is not periodically in the middle of a crisis? Did I help at all? Did you see the glamorous life I lead and feel better about your life choices in giving up music?”

“I didn’t exactly give it up,” Pete defends this version of him. “I have a band.”

“You do? What kind of a band?” Patrick is politely interested.

“A fake band,” Pete admits, defeated. “Like, we just sit around and talk, I think.”

Patrick laughs. “That’s, like, every band I’ve ever been part of, mostly.”

“So this is what you do? You’re a drummer?” Pete means by this, You’re not a singer?

But Patrick misunderstands him. He says, “Not for a living, obviously.”

“Oh.” This gives Pete pause. What the fuck did Patrick Stump turn out to be if he wasn’t the lead singer of Fall Out Boy? “What do you do for a living?”

“I am a music teacher.”

Pete smiles. That is the most Patrick Stump thing of all to be. “Of course you are.”

Patrick looks suspicious. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Just I’m – sure you’re a great fucking music teacher.”

“You wouldn’t want to be in a band with me,” Patrick says drily, “but I’m good enough to teach some kids, right?”

“I would love to be in a band with you,” Pete says, achingly honest again. “I’m just worried it’s too late.”

Patrick blinks at him. “Wait. What? You… What?”

“Would you be in a band with me?” Pete asks the question hurriedly, freaked out over the answer.

“What? No, I – What? What kind of band?”

“I don’t know. Kind of unclassifiable. It’s, like, a pop-punk-emo-rock sort of thing? I don’t know what it is, it’s just – it’s just us.”

Patrick still looks bewildered. Pete doesn’t blame him. “Who else is in this band?”

Pete can’t say Joe and Andy, he doesn’t even know where Joe is, and he should probably talk to Andy before— “I don’t know. You and me. Me and Pete. In the wake of Saturday.”

Patrick, of course, doesn’t get the reference. This Patrick wouldn’t. So he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t… He just says suddenly, “Is this a joke?”

“What?”

“What kind of fucking mean-spirited, like, fucking prank is this?”

It’s Pete’s turn to blink. “It’s not. What? Why would you—”

“This is the weirdest fucking thing.” Patrick finishes his drink in a single swallow and slides the glass away from him and says, “Look. Thanks for the drink. I don’t know what your deal is, but I hope you figure yourself out.” Patrick slides out of his seat. “But that’s not what I’m here for, I don’t exist for you to show up when you’re freaking out about your high-powered law job and just, like – What the fuck, man. I’m not your fucking therapist. I hope you get yourself a real one.”

And just like that Patrick is gone, walks out of his life.

Pete finds himself sitting there thinking, tragically, that maybe Patrick shouldn’t just be someone he uses to figure himself out. But figuring out who he is without Patrick is – Turns out he hates this guy he is without Patrick.

***

Pete in the morning wakes up and he’s still in some fucking stupid apartment looking over Lake Michigan, what the fuck.

Pete can’t even be bothered to be actively depressed about the whole thing. He’s more sort of passively depressed about it, if he’s honest. Maybe this is his life now. Maybe he’s just stuck in this fucking awful life this Pete has inexplicably chosen for himself.

At least, according to his phone, it’s Saturday, so he doesn’t have to try to pretend to deal with work. Maybe he’ll just spend all day laying in the dark in his bedroom wishing really hard to be someone else. He tries to think if there’s actually a timeline worse than this one that he could have been tossed into. He thinks it’s impossible.

He gets a text from Ace. Are you still too out of it to work on this depo today????

Right. Pete has managed to forget how lawyers are. Saturday is still a workday.

Pete ignores the text. Maybe he’ll get fired. That would be great. Might as well fuck up this life as much as he fucked up the last one. Maybe he’ll just flit from Pete!life to Pete!life fucking all of them up. That sounds about right.

There are texts from Mom, replying to Olivia’s text from the night before, thanking her for bringing the bread and saying how much she’s looking forward to seeing both of them tonight. Pete considers these texts. Maybe he should go to this family dinner thing. Maybe it would… It would what? He doesn’t even know what he might hope for from this whole thing.

But if this is his life, if he’s stuck in it… What the fuck else is he going to do?

Pete scrolls up through the family text but he doesn’t see a time mentioned, so he texts carefully, What time tonight? and hopes it doesn’t seem like too weird a question. His mom just texts back, 6, so it seems okay.

Pete thinks maybe this is a good idea. His parents have always been used to him being a disaster, after all.

Unless he’s somehow not a disaster in this life, but Pete finds that difficult to believe. He may have fallen in line and become some big deal lawyer the way he was supposed to, but Pete can’t believe he isn’t still a complete disaster. He can’t believe there’s any timeline where he’s not a disaster.

Pete contemplates how terrible all the clothes in his closet are. This Pete has terrible taste. Well, this Pete apparently took one look at Patrick and insulted him. And not in a fond, teasing, I-am-absolutely-head-over-heels-for-you way. In a way so dramatic and cruel that Patrick still remembers it, apparently, ten years later. What the fuck had been up with this version of Pete? Pete wonders if they’ve swapped places, if this Pete has woken up in the universe where he latched onto Patrick, if he’s utterly bewildered by the central importance of Patrick in his life. Then again, would he even fully realize how vital Patrick is to his life, if he woke up the day after Patrick reached out and Pete told him no? Instead of rushing to apologize, was this Pete going to fuck everything up in real!Pete’s life by not even realizing what he’d done?

“Oh, fuck,” Pete says out loud, as this thought occurs to him, and then decides that, because there’s nothing he can do about it, he’s going to decide it’s not true: There is no other!Pete ruining life in the right universe. Pete will get back there and everything will be as it was. Fucked up in the usual way, in a way Pete should be able to fix. Yes. That’s what he’s going to believe.

So, he thinks, as he showers, he’s in some kind of alternative timeline that apparently split off from his own at the meeting with Patrick. He still met Patrick in apparently the way he always had: through Joe. But instead of recognizing what he’d stumbled upon, he’d turned his back on it, made the opposite choice, and it had changed his life irrevocably. With no Fall Out Boy, he’d graduated from DePaul, he’d gone onto law school, he’d left music basically behind forever. Patrick hadn’t – Patrick never would leave music behind, not in any universe, Pete is confident of this – but Patrick is toiling in obscurity, no one realizing the genius that lurks there. Patrick isn’t even singing.

Yeah, this universe is super-fucked-up.

But what is he supposed to do? Is he supposed to fix it? How can he even go about fixing something that had gone so tragically wrong? The Patrick of this universe was right to be skeptical of him, to want to distance himself from Pete’s neediness. Pete thinks again what he thought last night, watching Patrick play the drums: This universe is a disaster for Pete, but maybe – maybe Patrick is really fucking happy here. Like, maybe Patrick had gotten rid of the parasite of Pete pulling him down. Patrick doesn’t have fame or fortune…but Patrick had never wanted either. That had been Pete, shoving him into the whole thing. Patrick had always just wanted to write his songs and send them out into the world. Pete had shifted the trajectory of Patrick’s life into something totally different and maybe Patrick is happier this way. Maybe Pete doesn’t need to fix this universe, because, from Patrick’s perspective, maybe this universe is absolutely fucking perfect.

Pete sinks to the floor of the shower and just sits there for a little while, letting the hot water run over him, feeling deeply sorry for himself. He puts his head in his hands and thinks of the way Patrick had looked at him the night before, with distaste and impatience and wariness, none of the calm, steady affection Pete’s so used to. He thinks of the way Patrick had looked at him in their real, actual universe, when Pete had said no and Patrick had been so obviously hurt by the rejection. Who is Pete Wentz without a Patrick who loves him? He is nobody. But who is Patrick without a Pete dragging him down? Maybe – maybe – happy.

Pete strangles out a sob. He misses Patrick. He misses him doubly. And he’s probably been ruining his life the whole time. Maybe that’s the lesson he’s supposed to be learning here: Leave Patrick the fuck alone to live his life.

Pete finishes crying in the shower. Then he gets dressed and does his hopeless, serious-lawyer hair and looks at his reflection. He has loads of time until six o’clock. What an interminable day. What an interminable life this is going to be, if he’s got to live out the rest of it.

Fuck.

***

Somehow the time eventually ticks by and Pete calls himself an Uber and goes to his parents’ house. He assumes his parents are still in the same house. If the split in this timeline happened when Pete met Patrick and chose a different lifepath, then everything that happened before that must be the same, meaning his parents are still his parents and he grew up in the same house. And he doesn’t see what about his different life choices would cause his parents to sell the house that they haven’t sold even when their son turned into a multimillionaire, so they must still be there, so that’s where he goes.

He has a moment of panic when he knocks on the door that maybe this isn’t his parents’ house anymore, and what’s he going to say to the stranger who opens the door? But then his mother opens the door and smiles at him.

“Peter,” she says. “What’s with the formal knocking?”

Pete doesn’t answer. Pete is so relieved to see a familiar face that still looks at him with deep love and affection. It was nice to see Andy and Chris but also disconcerting, how different his relationship is with them in this alternate universe, and the less thought about the encounter with Patrick the better. But his mom is still, blessedly, his mom, and she just smiles at him and looks like she loves him. And she’s ten years younger than the last time he saw her, and he would not have said that he thought his mother looked tragically old the last time he saw her, but he’s also shocked to realize how old she has gotten, because here she is with a decade shaved off of her, smiling at him with affection.

Pete collapses onto her in a tight hug, burying his face in her shoulder and trying very hard not to cry.

She says, sounding surprised, “Peter! What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

How could he ever possibly begin to answer any of those questions. I’ve woken up in the wrong life, help! The closest he can come to the truth is to choke out, “I’ve had a bad couple of days.”

“Aww, honey,” his mother says, and pets at his hair and says, “Come inside, sit down, you’ll feel better. Your dad’s been fiddling with the microwave, he wants to show you what he’s accomplished.”

“Fiddling with the microwave?” Pete echoes blankly, following his mother into the dining room. Maybe his parents are different in this universe.

“He’s trying to fix it,” his mother answers drily, and Pete, laughing, amends that thought: No. They are definitely the same.

His father is in the kitchen apparently trying to electrocute himself. Pete says, “Jesus Christ, just buy a new microwave.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” his dad insists.

His mom says, “Peter’s had a couple of bad days.”

Pete wishes his mom hadn’t said that. His dad has always been a little less understanding of Pete’s “moods,” even though Pete simultaneously knew he was trying to be more understanding. “It’s fine,” Pete says dismissively.

“Is this about the Gwyneth Paltrow thing?” his father says, still peering into the microwave innards. “You’ll be fine.”

This fucking Gwyneth Paltrow thing, Pete thinks. He hopes he can get back to his life before having to figure out exactly what that is. He says, “Where’s Liv?” because his sister and her raucous kids might help matters.

“Running late as usual,” his mother replies. “And you were early.”

Yeah, he couldn’t wait to get out of his suffocating apartment. He says suddenly, “I don’t know about my place.”

“Your place?” His mother looks at him. “The place where you live?”

“Yeah.”

“You loved that place when you bought it!” she protests.

“Did I?” he asks uncertainly.

His father says, with a sigh, “Of course you’ve changed your mind about it,” like, That’s Peter for you.

Pete frowns. Actually, he guesses he doesn’t know where else he would live. He’s only lived, really, in California as an adult. Or with his parents. Or in a terrible Roscoe Village apartment infested with mice with his band and his Patrick, neither of which he has anymore. “I guess it’s okay,” he says reluctantly, and wishes he hadn’t started the conversation.

“Look, you’ve had a bad couple of days,” his mother tells him wisely. “You’ll feel better about everything in the morning, I promise.” She stands in front of him holding a casserole dish and looks him in the eye. “Changing where you live won’t change what you don’t like about your life.”

“Tell me about it,” Pete agrees fervently.

She hands him the casserole dish. “Bring this out to the table.”

Pete does as he’s told, and Olivia comes in. Well, to be precise, Olivia’s kids come in first, flying through the dining room in their quest to get to Grandma. She’s still got two boys, and Pete smiles at the familiarity of that, although they are also, of course, ten years younger than the surly teenagers Pete had seen at the last Thanksgiving. And then Olivia trails behind. She is holding bread, as promised, and…a gift bag. Pete looks at it with a sinking stomach.

“Oh, fuck,” he says.

“What?” she says, and gives him a hug and a kiss. “Where’s the birthday boy?”

Pete suddenly remembers the date here. It’s his father’s birthday. Well, not technically. That would have been last week. But they are clearly celebrating. Oops. He says distractedly, “In the kitchen trying to kill himself with the microwave.”

“Again with the microwave? Jesus, I keep telling him—”

“Just buy a new microwave.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Pete smiles. This is another nice and familiar thing. Overcome with affection, he pulls Olivia into a much closer hug than she gave him in greeting.

“Oh,” she says in surprise. “You okay?”

“It’s just good to see you,” he says against her, and kisses her head fondly before letting her go. “Where’s Eric?”

“Working.” She rolls her eyes. “You know how it is.”

He knows he’s never been entirely sure about Eric, not even in his own timeline, but that’s not a thing to start up now, especially because he knows that in ten years’ time she’s still going to be with him. And anyway, in this timeline, he supposes he does understand this Eric’s-always-working thing. “Tell me about it,” he says. “I refused to go into work today. Everyone’s lost their minds.”

“The Gwyneth Paltrow thing?”

“It’s not that important,” Pete says. He is so sick to death of Gwyneth Paltrow.

“Olivia?” his mother calls from the kitchen.

“Yeah, coming!” she calls back. She’s looking at Pete curiously, critically. Trust Olivia to be the one to know something’s off about him. She always really is, of the Wentzes. She says, “You and I should catch up later.”

“Yeah, sure,” Pete agrees easily, with zero intention of that happening. He loves Olivia very much but there’s no way he can be honest with her, either. He’s trapped in this universe where he just has to lie and lie and lie.

Dinner is brought to the table. Liv’s kids entertain all of them with endless jokes about butts, because that’s how young boys are. It’s soothing that some things never change. Pete likes that he gets to hide behind their bathroom humor for most of the dinner. It’s nice and he could almost believe that this is the life he belongs in.

Then his mother says, “You’ve been awfully quiet, Peter.”

“What could I possibly add to this?” Pete asks, smiling at the kids, who grin back at him.

“How’s everything going with Sophie?”

“Who?” Pete asks blankly, before he can stop himself.

“Aha!” Olivia exclaims. “I knew it!”

His mother sighs, “Peter, really?”

“I knew she wasn’t the one for you and I’m glad you called it off,” Liv continues.

Pete has no idea if he’s the one who called it off but he’s perfectly happy not to have a Sophie in his life.

His mother says, “Is that why you seem so sad?”

“Do I seem sad?” Pete asks, which is stupid, it must be very obvious to everyone that he’s discontented in this life.

“I think he’s just stressed out about the Gwyneth Paltrow thing,” his father says.

“To be honest, I am sick to death of hearing about Gwyneth Paltrow,” Pete says. “I’m never watching a Gwyneth Paltrow movie ever again in my life.”

“Not even Sliding Doors?” Liv asks.

Pete looks at her, but she doesn’t look like she asked that in a cunning way, so he just says evenly, “Especially not Sliding Doors.”

“Uncle Pete,” Carter asks, “can we go out and play some soccer before it gets too dark?”

“Yes,” Pete says, happy to escape.

Olivia calls after him, “I see you getting out of washing dishes!”

But it’s nice to play soccer with the boys and he’s glad he came to this dinner, it was exactly what he needed. They go in later and sing over the cake and Pete says he forgot his dad’s gift and nobody even blinks at that because Pete has confirmed that he is still, in every timeline, just that kind of disaster.

Pete doesn’t really want to get caught alone with his parents because he doesn’t want to get asked further questions about Sophie, now that he’s identified that minefield, so instead he offers to help Liv out to her car with the boys and a bunch of leftovers and calls an Uber for himself as he walks with her.

The boys are fighting over which side of the car they’re going to sit on and Olivia ignores them with the practice of a mother, saying instead to Pete, as he finishes settling the leftovers on the floor in front of the passenger seat, “For real. You okay?”

“If this is about Sophie, trust me, I am not broken up about Sophie.” Pete straightens up and gives Olivia a smile.

“I know you’re not. You didn’t care about her. She was a hot piece of ass.”

“I’m sure she was also, you know, nice, maybe?” Actually, Pete’s not sure. Hot piece of ass sounds about right for him, he has to admit.

Olivia lifts an eyebrow and says, “No, she wasn’t. I’m still waiting for you to bring home the nice one. But Mom’s right, you do seem sad. Is it about Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“Liv, swear to God, I don’t even know what the Gwyneth Paltrow thing is.”

“You’ve been working on it for weeks. It’s all you ever talk about.”

Christ, he’s pathetic in this timeline. “I’m sick of it.” He exhales in a puff of breath and decides to go all-in. “Maybe I’m sick of all of it. Maybe I want to blow the whole thing up.”

“What whole thing?”

“My life. This whole…life. Like, what if I just – What if I just quit my job and start a rock band?”

Olivia laughs. “Okay,” she says fondly. “I thought we nipped all that in the bud when you were twenty.”

“Yeah,” Pete says. “Apparently we did. And I’m not sure it was the right decision at all.”

Olivia looks at him for a second, then says, “You’re serious about this.”

He is dead serious when he replies, “I don’t think this is the life I’m supposed to be living.”

“Pete,” she says, and then she hugs him close. “Pete,” she says against him, “that breaks my heart, don’t say things like that.”

Pete wonders if this version of him did end up in a Best Buy parking lot somewhere after all, given this reaction. Maybe it’s just that Andy doesn’t know about it in this timeline.

Olivia steps away from him and says, “If you want to blow it all up, do it. You only live once, do it the way you want.”

Do you only live once? Pete thinks. But if you live more than once – If you live more than once, then shouldn’t you take the lessons from one of those lives to fix another one?

***

Pete, after giving it some thought, decides that it’s not likely that the lesson of this world is to learn that he ruined Patrick’s life by clinging to him for so long. Pete, in his real lifetime, had just tried to make a break with Patrick, had just tried to protect Patrick from the disastrous ongoing association with him, and the very next day he woke up here. So it doesn’t make any sense to teach him to stay away from Patrick. That’s what he was trying to do.

It's more likely, he thinks, that the lesson he’s supposed to be learning here is how disastrous their lives are without each other. Like, his life is clearly so much worse without Patrick. And Patrick’s life is probably fine but there is no way Patrick Stump deserves fine. Patrick deserves transcendent.

Pete just can’t believe that Patrick is toiling away in obscurity, with no one recognizing the genius in their midst. This is actually painful to him. He lays in bed in the apartment he hates and Googles Patrick’s name again, just to torment himself with how little there is about him out there in the world. How? he marvels. How is the world getting by without Patrick Stump’s music in it?

Well, it’s not entirely, he supposes. There’s Patrick in The Five. And there’s Patrick as a music teacher.

Pete, struck by that idea, adds music teacher to his Patrick Stumph search terms, and there he is, buried on the faculty page of a music school on the Near North Side, smiling for the camera. It’s such a Patrick photo, and Pete’s heart clenches itself into a closed fist again, a literal pang of affection.

Fuck it, if Pete’s stuck in this world, he can’t go through it without Patrick, he simply can’t. He’s got to try to make up for the fuckery he engaged in ten years ago when he made the totally wrong decision and walked out of Patrick’s life. He simply has to.

The music school, Pete notes, is open on Sunday afternoon. Pete takes down the address and takes off.

***

The music school is tucked into an unassuming little plaza. People are going in and out holding various instrument cases. Little kids bounce their way up and down the steps, parents holding battered songbooks. Pete lurks outside in as creepy a capacity as could be. He doesn’t have a plan.

He really needs a plan. Like, he can’t just stand outside the school looking creepy and waiting for Patrick to come outside. What is his plan?

Pete worries at a thumbnail and considers his options. He can go inside and ask for Patrick. Or he can… He can’t think of any other options. Standing around outside here is absurdity.

And then what happens is Patrick steps outside, putting on sunglasses and holding a guitar case in one hand, and for a moment he doesn’t notice Pete, who stands frozen in front of him, and then he does and turns instantly wary.

“Are you fucking stalking me?” he demands sourly.

“Maybe a little bit,” Pete has to admit, because he can’t come up with a better cover story.

“Do I need to call the cops or something? Take out a restraining order?”

“Please don’t.”

“Give me a reason not to,” Patrick challenges.

“It’s supposed to go ‘I can’t sleep, in the wake of Saturday.’” Pete sings the song pretty horribly, he’s no Patrick, but it’s recognizable.

Patrick blinks. “What?”

“That song. Saturday.”

“I don’t know any song called Saturday.”

“Two more weeks,” Pete sings, frustrated.

“Oh. Yeah. That song. Two more weeks.”

“Right, whatever you call it.”

“It’s called Two More Weeks.”

“Two more weeks,” Pete sings. “My foot is in the door. I can’t sleep, in the wake of Saturday.”

Patrick is silent. Pete can’t read his expression behind his sunglasses. Finally he says, “What is that supposed to mean?”

“The song is good,” Pete says.

“The song is fucking excellent,” Patrick retorts.

“Why doesn’t it have a second verse?”

“It doesn’t need to have a second verse. And its words are fine the way they are. This is how you think you’re going to win me over, insulting my lyrics?”

Pete finds himself smiling. He almost says, It worked the first time. Instead he says, “I want to hear more about your music.”

Patrick’s expression is obviously suspicious. “You didn’t ten years ago.”

“I was an idiot ten years ago. I need to apologize vociferously for what an idiot I was ten years ago. Please let me buy you dinner and hear about your music.”

“So you can make fun of it?”

“So I can tell you that you’re good enough to write top ten songs and be nominated for Grammys.”

“What the fuck is this?” Patrick demands.

“I don’t know,” Pete says, and then suddenly realizes, “A date?” In all of the things he has said about Patrick and all of the things he has been with Patrick, he has never suggested that they go out on a date. That wasn’t the footing of their relationship, in that other universe. They met, they started a band, they became soulmates – but Pete didn’t ask him out on a date.

Patrick, after a moment, sputters, “What?”

“Yes,” Pete says, warming to this, because this feels right, this feels like what ought to happen: He should take Patrick out on a date. “A date. Come on a date with me.”

“A…date date?” Patrick clarifies, sounding stunned.

Pete doesn’t blame him. But now that Pete has settled this, he can’t wait for this. He wants to knock Patrick’s socks off on this date. This is how good we are together, he wants to show him. He’s desperate to show him. He finds himself reaching for Patrick’s free hand, the one not clutching a guitar case. “Yes. A date date.” He plays with Patrick’s fingers and looks coy through his eyelashes.

Patrick says slowly, “You showed up here, ten years after meeting me for ten minutes, to ask me on a date?”

Pete drops the flirtation. Pete looks at his fingers still playing with Patrick’s. He says, “Ten years too long.”

“I don’t get you at all,” Patrick says, bewildered.

This makes Pete laugh. He looks up at Patrick, grinning. “No, but you will,” he says confidently. “Better than anyone else in the world.”

***

Having convinced Patrick he should go on a date with him, Pete is oddly frozen. This should be exciting, he feels like he’s finally on the right track to fixing this life he’s stuck in, but then… Then he thinks about taking Patrick on a date and he starts to panic.

He and Patrick, in his real life, the life he should be living, have never, ever crossed this particular line. They’ve danced right up close to it a million times, they’ve used words and terms and phrases that any romantic, committed, in-a-relationship couple would use to describe themselves and each other. Once, Patrick said in an interview that he could imagine being “any number of things” to Pete and that phrase haunted Pete’s dreams for years, he still obviously has it memorized. What did Patrick mean by that, he wondered and wondered. But he never asked, and they never crossed that line. They always hovered right over it, so intertwined without really being blunt about why, so that, finally, when Patrick came to him wanting to write after the break they had taken, Pete finally decided that maybe they needed to be definitively twisted apart.

And then the next day he wrote up in this universe without Patrick, like, that decision on his part was clearly a mistake.

So maybe, in this universe, as long as he’s fixing past mistakes, he should really fix them. He shouldn’t half-ass them. He shouldn’t end up in this gray-area place he’s in with Patrick in his real life. He should be incredibly brave and he should take Patrick out on a date. This does indeed require an incredible amount of bravery on his part because the idea of actually being a good date for Patrick is terrifying. Pete always worried he wouldn’t be good enough for his actual Patrick who he knew adored him (for reasons Pete could never understand). This Patrick hates him. How the fuck is he going to charm this Patrick? Pete’s terrible at dates and dating. Or at least, in his universe he is. It’s a running joke in the band how bad he is at it. So what chance does he have with Patrick?

On Sunday night, he’s worked himself up into such a froth of panic that he finds himself staring at his phone wondering who he could possibly call. He wants to call Patrick, of course, but he can’t. Not in this universe.

Pete opens his contacts and there at the top is Ace, and underneath Ace is Andy.

Andy.

Pete calls Andy.

Andy answers calmly, “What’s up?”

Pete considers having his nervous breakdown right over the phone, reconsiders it. “Can I come over?” he asks instead.

“Yeah, sure, we can finish rewatching The Mandalorian.”

“This place has The Mandalorian?” Pete says without thinking.

There’s a beat of silence, and then Andy says, “…Yes?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pete says hastily. “Sorry, right, yeah, of course, sounds good, be right there.” Then he ends the call and mutters to himself, “Pull it together, Wentz.” That kind of pep talk doesn’t usually have an effect on him, but hey, there’s a first time for everything. First time for waking up in the wrong life, first time for not fucking things up.

***

Pete shows up at Andy’s with vegan tacos that he picked up on the way because he figures Andy will appreciate that. Andy says politely, “Thank you,” and takes out plates and glasses like a grown-up and Pete watches him dully and registers that Andy’s talking pleasantly about something, probably the fucking Mandalorian, until Pete blurts out, “So I’m in the wrong life.”

Because…yeah. Smooth, Wentz.

Andy doesn’t look at all concerned by this confession. He says calmly, “Yeah, you are.”

Pete stares at him. “Hang on, you’re not… You know this?”

Andy gives him an unimpressed look, like Pete has just been so obvious. “I have never seen anyone less cut out for a biglaw job than you, Pete Wentz, I don’t care what your legal lineage might be. The rest of us may have left the unrealistic dreams of youth behind and found our way, but you never have. You’re languishing. You’ve got the soul of an artiste, you know.” Andy pronounces the word dramatically, teasingly, sketching grandly in the air and smiling kindly at Pete.

So Andy doesn’t know that the Pete sitting in front of him is a Pete from another universe but Andy does know that the Pete sitting in front of him has fucked up his life. Pete wipes stupid tears away from his eyes and says, “Not really. I mean – not really. I’m just – I made the wrong choice.”

“Yeah, you did,” Andy agrees affably, and puts a soothing, comforting hand on Pete’s shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s fixable. You can quit your job and walk away, that’s no big deal. We just need to figure out what you would walk away to do.”

“To do?” Pete echoes blankly. Obviously what he has to walk away to do is to create Fall Out Boy. He keeps forgetting that Andy Hurley, Fall Out Boy’s drummer, has no idea what Fall Out Boy is.

“Yeah, like, what would float your boat? You can do anything, you know. You’re smart, you’ve got a great degree, you’ve got connections. You made a few bad choices, that’s all—”

“One bad choice,” Pete interrupts him, because this is important to explain. “I made one bad choice.”

“Taking a job at a soulless law firm?” Andy guesses.

“Patrick Stump,” Pete says.

“Again what that name? Who is it?”

“A guy you don’t know,” Pete answers grimly. “But you should know him.”

“Why? Is he cool?”

“He’s…” Pete thinks of how to describe Patrick and finds himself laughing helplessly. “He’s, like, the dorkiest guy to ever exist, he really is, he’s just so silly and sweet and kind and he’s so talented, Andy, he’s – He’d blow you away with his talent, he’d knock you over, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Andy is smiling at him. He says, “When did you meet this dude?”

In another lifetime, Pete thinks. “I don’t know, it’s… I don’t know.”

“Pete.” Andy is still smiling so widely at him. “This is great. This is so great.”

Pete is bewildered. He feels like nothing is great right now. “Is it?”

“I’ve never seen you be actually in love before. Not like this. I think it could be good for you. He sounds like he could be good for you. I would love to meet him. I would be honored to meet him.” Andy solemnly puts his hand over his chest.

“I am in love with him,” Pete breathes. This is the truest statement ever said about Pete Wentz, and he’s known it the whole time, but the shape of it, said out loud by Andy Hurley, makes it more real and more true than it has ever previously felt to Pete. Pete’s in love with Patrick but always that’s been an abstraction, unattainable, useless to even think about. But it’s so true that he can’t believe he’s ever been pretending that it’s anything else between them, what was even the point of acting like that. “I’ve been in love with him my entire life,” Pete says, achingly honest.

Andy says, “Well, there’s the Pete I used to know and love, spouting poetic soulmate shit.”

Pete ignores him, caught up in another life he’s led, another life with Patrick stubbornly always by his side and Patrick stubbornly never his. “I should have told him so long ago,” Pete says. “So long ago. And instead I – What did I do, I – said we should figure out life without each other, that was the wrong choice, that was so obviously the wrong choice, we’re soulmates, like for real, what have I been doing?”

“Pete?” Andy says quizzically. He no longer looks delighted. Now he looks worried.

Pete crashes back into this life, where he made such a disastrous choice that he’s never had Patrick at all, not in any capacity, not even the half-capacity he has in the other lifetime. But in this lifetime he can start off right, he can start off as he means to go on. Maybe in this lifetime he can actually make things better. Is such a thing even possible? Maybe he’s been looking at this all wrong. Maybe waking up in this lifetime isn’t punishment, maybe it’s a potential reward. Maybe he can get more in this lifetime.  

Pete says, “I’m so good now. I really am. This has been so helpful.”

“Has it?” Andy sounds dubious. “Look, this Patrick dude, he’s… He is good to you, right?”

He barely even knows me in this universe, thinks Pete. But he’s going to. He’s going to so hard. “He likes ska,” Pete says, like that answers that question, and then he laughs.

***

Pete goes to work on Monday just to quit his job.

Well, he tries to quit his job. The truth is, he doesn’t even know enough about this place he works to know who to go to to quit. So he asks Ace, who once again shows up as soon as Pete walks in the door. Pete wonders if maybe in this universe he is Ace’s version of Patrick, and feels a little bad about abandoning him.

Ace is immediately alarmed at Pete’s question. “Quit? Why do you want to quit?”

Pete wants to say, Because this job is the worst, but doesn’t want to insult Ace. So he says instead, “I’m thinking about becoming a rock star.”

Ace says, “Oh, my God, you really are having a nervous breakdown. Listen, you can’t let Gwyneth do this to you.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Pete says seriously. “In this universe, do I know Gwyneth Paltrow? Like, did we used to date or something?”

Ace stares at him. “What?”

It occurs to Pete that there probably is a universe where he dated Gwyneth Paltrow. Wild. He says, “Nothing. Never mind. Look, this is probably going to sound crazy to you but I’m not supposed to be a lawyer. I was never supposed to be a lawyer. I am in totally the wrong life here.”

Ace says flatly, “You were supposed to be a rock star?”

“Actually, yes. I am a…decent rock star, I guess. I’m okay at it. Mostly I have the right people around me to make me so much better than I am.”

“What people?”

“Like, hypothetical people. The people I’m going to get for my band.”

“Your hypothetical band,” Ace points out.

“It’s only hypothetical so far,” Pete says.

Ace keeps staring at him. He says, “This is such a huge mistake, man. I don’t think you should make this decision now. I think you’re just freaking out because soon you’re going to depose Gwyneth Paltrow.”

“That is really not why I’m freaking out, I promise you.”

“Don’t quit,” Ace says. “You’re clearly going through something. Just – maybe you need to try some therapy.”

“Try some therapy?” Pete echoes. “You mean I don’t already have a therapist?” This is the most alarming thing of all to him. What is this universe’s Pete doing?  

“Huh?” Ace says.

“No wonder I’m fucked up,” Pete mutters, and then says to Ace, “Okay, whatever, you can pretend I’m not quitting and I’m coming back but I’m pretty sure I’m quitting and I’m not coming back, so, you know, you do you, buddy.” Pete pats his shoulder in a way he hopes is supportive.

Ace stares at him some more and then says, “Hang on, does this mean I can depose Gwyneth next week?”

“Knock yourself out,” Pete says.

***

Pete lucks out because a place called Monica’s Lounge does a ska night every Monday. Pete is pretty sure that his life is always improved, in every universe, by getting more Patrick into it, but he knows he’s really doing the right thing here because of how nicely this universe gives him a ska night, at the sort of club that looks from its photos to be dark and cozy and just this shade of respectable. This is the kind of bar where Pete feels at home and where he knows Patrick – in his universe, at least – likes to say the best music is hiding and waiting for discovery. Patrick imagined, when Pete first convinced him to start a record label with him, that they would spend a lot of time in seedy bars uncovering talent, instead of what they actually do, which mainly consists of Pete sending Patrick links to social media accounts to check out.

Anyway, Pete thinks this Monica’s Lounge ska night is a solid choice for a date. Patrick will like the music aspect of it, and anyway, he’s Patrick. He is Pete’s Patrick, in every universe. Pete cannot imagine otherwise. He has never understood why Patrick likes him so much, but he has always understood that Patrick does. Pete doesn’t know what he does to make Patrick like him, he never has, he has no idea how it happened the first time around, but he decides his advice to himself is to try not to overthink it. He has an advantage over Patrick here, because he knows they are perfect for each other, he knows that in another life they are soulmates. He just cannot imagine there is any universe where that is not true of them.

So Pete is letting that confidence carry him into the bar. He’s texted Patrick all of the details and he gets there early just so he can make sure to get them a good table and maybe slip some money to the waitstaff to laugh really hard at everything Pete says like he’s totally hilarious. But when he gets to the bar Patrick’s beat him there and is already sitting at a table close to the stage, with a drink sitting in front of him and a waitress chatting to him familiarly.

Pete hesitates, caught flat-footed by this, and then Patrick spots him and sends him a sheepish-looking wave, so Pete decides it’s safe to approach.

The waitress leaves off talking to Patrick and heads toward Pete, stopping to say, “Look at you. He never brings anyone with him. You must be something special.”

“Oh?” Pete croaks awkwardly.

The waitress ignores his confusion. “He said you’d want a Jameson on the rocks. That good?”

“Sure,” Pete manages, and she nods and goes off and he looks at Patrick, who’s watching the band set up and steadily not looking back at Pete.

Pete takes a deep breath and gets the rest of the way to the table.

Patrick turns away from the band when he gets there, and he’s vaguely pink. Is that embarrassment, Pete wonders. It’s adorable, whatever it is. He says, “Um.”

Pete sits at the table because he can’t not, it’s Patrick, and he says, “You beat me here. I was going to beat you here.”

“I come here kind of a lot,” Patrick admits, twirling his drink around in his hand. “It makes me wonder how long you’ve been stalking me.”

“I really haven’t been,” Pete says. “I didn’t know you come here a lot. I just…thought you might like ska.”

Patrick looks at him directly for the first time that night, all curious blue eyes and frank assessment. “When you sent the text and said to meet you at this place, I thought, ‘He is either a sociopath who’s about to kill me, or…’”

“Or it’s fate?” Pete suggests. “Or he’s perfect for me?”

Patrick doesn’t answer. Patrick takes a sip of his drink.

Pete’s drink arrives, and it’s a welcome distraction. He clears his throat and focuses on it and looks at the band getting ready. He tries not to feel that things are awkward but it irritates him that things are awkward. When things are awkward between him and Patrick, it usually means they need to have a blowout fight to clear the air. But Pete doesn’t think that’s a good tactic now.

“So,” he starts, at the same time that Patrick says, “I,” and they both stop talking and look at each other.

Pete, relieved that maybe Patrick was about to save him from having to come up with a conversational topic other than You and I are meant to be together forever, I swear it, I promise, says graciously, “Please. You go first. I insist.”

Patrick clears his throat and says, “Okay. Well. I’m still a little confused about this whole situation. What even made you think about me after all this time?” He sounds honestly perplexed.

“Why do you think I haven’t been thinking about you the whole time? Regretting the colossal error I made in not starting a band with you immediately?”

Patrick looks dubious. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? I’m not that…”

Pete props his elbow on the table and his head on his fist. “Awesome?” he guesses is the end of Patrick’s sentence.

“Not really, no. I’m not fishing for a compliment here, Wentz. I don’t want you to tell me I’m incredible or something stupid like that. I am just me and I am fine with that.”

“I know,” Pete says fondly. “You really always are. You never realize how extraordinary you are. That’s what you have me for.”

“I…don’t have you,” Patrick points out.

“Yeah, but you should,” Pete says earnestly. “Don’t you feel like you should?”

“You have the weirdest pickup lines. You know that, right?”

“Yeah, I think maybe I ate too many lead paint chips or something as a kid.”

Patrick laughs, sudden, like Pete’s comment startled him but in a good way. It’s nice. It makes Pete smile. He likes to make Patrick laugh and he realizes he’d been taking it for granted that he could do it, that in his other lifetime sometimes Patrick would laugh at something he said and Pete wouldn’t even notice the wonder of it. Fuck that guy who was living that other life taking Patrick for granted, Pete thinks. What was his problem?

Patrick says genially, and Pete can see how he’s relaxing with him, how his posture is less stiff in the chair, how his hands are less tense around his drink, “Okay, so you’ve been pining after me for ten years, got it. Setting aside that you were the one who said you wanted nothing to do with me, why now?”

“I’m supposed to be deposing Gwyneth Paltrow next week,” Pete says, which is really the only thing he knows about this Pete’s life.

“Really? Wow. That’s cool. What law did she break?”

“I actually don’t know,” Pete answers truthfully.

“That seems like something you should know,” Patrick suggests.

“It does, doesn’t it?” Pete agrees.

Patrick chuckles. He says, “You’re not at all what I expected.”

“No? What did you expect?”

“An asshole, obviously. You were an arrogant, entitled asshole to me, let’s be honest. I was a kid and you were Big Deal Pete Wentz, or at least you thought you were, and you didn’t have time for me. Now I feel like I’m even more of a kid and you’re even more of a big deal, so you see why I don’t really get why…” Patrick trails off, then gestures at Pete, the drinks on the table, the bar – everything.

Pete says, “I am definitely not a big deal. I never was. And I – You’re not wrong, I definitely was an arrogant, entitled asshole, I was a brat of a kid, I was…not very smart, even though I thought I knew everything.” Everything Pete is saying is true of him in his other life and must be true of the Pete in this life, too. Except the Pete in his other life had one moment of true intelligence, the moment he met Patrick and saw his dazzle and didn’t doubt that he was right and this kid was amazing and together they would conquer the world. Pete in this world for some reason missed it, missed that one moment of clever insight, missed the dazzle of Patrick, missed the furtive gleam of him that just needed a little polish, a little encouragement, a little love.

Or maybe Pete in this world had seen it, because how could any Pete have ever missed that about Patrick, and maybe it had been terrifying. Maybe, if Pete had stopped to think about it the first time he’d met Patrick, the idea that this surly drummer kid Joe Trohman dragged into his life would be his soulmate and change the course of his entire existence would have been the most terrifying fucking thing in the world. Pete Wentz’s life without Patrick Stump, as Pete Wentz is currently learning as dramatically as possible, is an unbelievably different beast. Maybe it took a leap of faith for his younger self to grab onto Patrick and refuse to let go. Pete’s always viewed it as inevitable, the only possible choice he could make – but he knows now that’s not true. Maybe he was actually being very brave, and maybe he’s never given himself credit for that. Maybe the ongoing bravery of choosing Patrick, over and over and over again, is underlying why he tried to push him away in that other life. Maybe, when he chose Patrick, he agreed to let someone know him and see him in a way no one else ever would or could, and maybe that’s a vulnerability that Pete could see, if fully comprehended, it would be appealing to avoid.

Pete says hoarsely, buoyed by this flash of realization, “And I think I was scared. I think maybe I was scared by how much I could let you – change me, change my life, change what I had planned. Big Deal Pete Wentz about to depose Gwyneth Paltrow. I think I’m definitely not that person, if I said what I really thought about you that day in the basement.”

Patrick is staring at him. Pete thinks maybe he can’t look away, because certainly Pete can’t look away. Patrick licks his lips and manages to say, “What did you really think?”

“You are…” Words from another lifetime drift to his lips. “You are true blue magic. You’re golden. You’re – You’re sunshine. Certainly the sunshine of my life. In another life, you are the sunshine of my lifetime.”

“In another life?” says Patrick.

“In another life, we’re… What if we’re soulmates?”

It might be pushing things too far too fast, Pete thinks, as Patrick furrows his brow and frowns at him.

But he doesn’t get a response because the band starts their set, and they’re so close to the stage that it’s impossible to continue a conversation. The band’s probably good, whatever, Pete doesn’t know. He watches Patrick watch the performance but he’s not sure Patrick is paying any attention, either. Pete knows Patrick when he’s caught up in music, and Patrick’s attention is wandering, his eyes are unfocused, every once in a while he shakes himself and looks at Pete before quickly looking away again.

Pete wants to inch closer, wants to brush their hands together, wants to press their thighs together on the seat, side by side, heat passing between them, he wants to turn his head to press his face into Patrick’s neck and breathe him in, he bets Patrick smells the same in this universe, he bets he would recognize Patrick’s smell always, in every single universe. He wants to do all these things, not in the jokey way of a needy best friend but in the knowing way of a person out on a date. He has never gotten to do any of those things to Patrick on an actual date before.

The band takes a break.

Patrick looks at Pete and shakes his head a little and then gets up from the table.

Great, Pete thinks. He’s totally managed to fuck this up. He probably came on way too strong. He should have taken it easy, taken it slow.

But he has never taken it slow with Patrick, he has always been at a hundred miles an hour. Which, actually, was another lyric missing from the weird, incomplete version of Saturday that exists in this universe.

Pete wonders if he should get up and leave, but then Patrick actually comes back to the table, which Pete didn’t expect, he thought Patrick was going to make his escape, and Patrick says, “You—” and Pete cuts him off by saying, “Why don’t you sing?”

This obviously throws Patrick off. “Huh?”

“You don’t sing in this universe.” And he knows why, Patrick says all the time that he wouldn’t sing without Pete, but Pete really has never thought that’s actually true, like, Patrick has such an incredible voice, surely eventually in every universe that voice would have to make itself known.

Patrick echoes, “In this universe?”

Pete says impatiently, waving his hand around, “This timeline. This world we’re living in right now. You don’t sing.”

Patrick resumes his seat at the table, looking perplexed. “Why would I sing? I don’t sing.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t,” Patrick sounds belligerent now. “I think I would know if I sing. I don’t even sing in the shower.”

“Yeah, I have never understood that, everyone sings in the shower.”

“I don’t because I don’t sing,” Patrick reiterates stubbornly.

“Well, you should. Your voice is unbelievable. You should sing. I know you don’t think you’re a singer, maybe you’re not, but you’re—” Pete stops before he can say You’re my singer, which is the true statement that he really wants to say now, the very truest statement, Patrick is his singer.

Anyway, Patrick takes Pete’s flustered opening as an opportunity to demand, “When have you ever heard me sing, what the fuck.”

Pete ignores the question. “You’ve heard me sing, right? Two more weeks,” he sings.

“Yeah. So?”

“You sing it.”

“I don’t sing, though. I don’t sing that song. I don’t sing any song.”

“My foot is in the door,” Pete sings.

“That’s not how it goes.”

Pete grins, because Patrick isn’t leaving, Patrick is staying, being stubborn and arguing with him about Saturday. This is a thing he recognizes. “I can’t sleep,” he sings, “in the wake of Saturday.”

“That is not how it goes,” Patrick insists.

“How does it go?” Pete asks indulgently.

“I can’t sleep,” Patrick sings, “I just need a little more.”

His voice is, of course, crystal clear, the bell ringing out that it always is. Patrick cannot sing small. He’s terrible at it. His voice is too powerful, it barrels out of him, even when he doesn’t want it to. People all over the bar glance at them and Patrick flushes scarlet.

Pete whispers, “You sing.” He didn’t realize how close he had gotten to Patrick until that moment, until he realizes he is pressed close against him, leaning over him, exactly the way he longed to. His body had subconsciously drifted directly into Patrick’s space, aware even in this universe that it’s exactly where it belongs.  

Patrick’s breathing hard, and Pete doesn’t think it’s from the singing. He says shakily, “Actually, now that I hear it, maybe your line is better.”

“Me and Pete,” Pete breathes, because he can’t get enough air to sing it properly. He rubs his nose against Patrick’s, so close now his eyes are closed, so close that really all he’s aware of is the location of his mouth in relation to Patrick’s. “In the wake of Saturday.”

“Oh, you’re in this song?” Patrick murmurs, shifting the other way to bump their noses together again.

“Babe, I’ve got news for you: That’s our love song,” Pete says, and kisses him.

Kissing Patrick is not like anything he’s ever done before in his life, and it’s impossible to describe. It is not at all like kissing other people. It’s like… It’s like kissing Patrick, and there is no other way to describe it, because that is the only thing that matters. He is kissing Patrick, and Patrick is kissing him back, and it is, like, well, that is happening, what else can he say, what else can he fucking say. For the first time, this universe is better than the one he left, in a really good way.

“I don’t,” Patrick says, the words getting swallowed into their kisses. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” Pete agrees, “I never do.”

“But you—” Patrick uses the hands he has caught up into Pete’s lawyer hair to hold him still, to break their kiss, to blink bewilderedly at him. “You’re the thing I don’t understand.”

“That’s so weird,” Pete says, “because you’re the only thing in my entire life that actually makes any sense to me.”

Patrick stares at him, and then Patrick starts laughing. But it’s good laughter, it’s not…not bad or vindictive or mocking or self-deprecating, it just…sounds like joy. It makes Pete smile in reaction.

“What?” he says. “What’s so funny?”

“You don’t think this is funny?” Patrick gasps. “Two days ago I didn’t even know you.”

“Yeah, but that was so weird, Patrick,” Pete says sincerely. “Don’t you think it was so weird that you didn’t know me?”

Patrick stops laughing abruptly. He says, sounding floored, “I do, actually. And that’s the fucking weirdest thing of all, that I do now think it’s incredibly weird that I haven’t known you all along.”

“Me, too, lunchbox,” Pete agrees with him.

“What do you think we’re supposed to do next?” Patrick asks him.

“What do you think we’re supposed to do next?” Pete counters.

“No, you seem to know all the answers, you tell me.”

“I think we’re supposed to…” Pete doesn’t know what to say. Write a song? Start a band? Conquer the world? He falters, looking at Patrick’s dear and beautiful face.

“Christ, I really thought you’d have one of your super-weird lines for this situation,” Patrick teases.

He’s not wrong. “I should,” says Pete.

“You should take me home,” Patrick says.

Oh. And see, this is the thing, he really should have thought of that, but in his universe he doesn’t take Patrick out on dates and he doesn’t kiss him and he doesn’t take him home like that. He says carefully, “Like, you mean, my home? Like, we go to my home, like, together?”

Patrick cocks his head. “Is that not where this was going? I thought that was where this was going.”

Pete takes back everything he’s thought over the past few days. This universe rocks. “Fuck yeah, that is exactly where this is going.”

***

Pete tries not to say much of anything on the way to his place because he doesn’t want to accidentally say something that would make Patrick change his mind. So he just gets them an Uber and gets them to his absurd apartment building and gets them to his apartment and Patrick looks around it and says, “Big Deal Pete Wentz, huh?” and Pete says, “It’s the worst, this apartment is the absolute worst, don’t even look at it.”

“That’s what she said,” Patrick says with a smile.

Pete pauses, considers. “Not that I don’t love a good ‘that’s what she said’ joke, but I don’t actually think that one works. Not one of your best.”

“I am warming up to my best jokes,” Patrick says affably. “Okay, if I can’t look at your apartment, what do you think I should look at?” He asks it with a smile, flirtatious, seductive.

Pete is dizzy. He has never been at the receiving end of a look quite like that from Patrick, and he is literally dizzy. His poor clenched fist of a heart doesn’t have a chance because other parts of his anatomy are like, Hey, we need some blood, too, buddy. He says, “Am I supposed to say ‘my dick’?”

Patrick laughs and says again, “That’s what she said.”

“No, definitely not, that’s what he said.”

“Uh-huh,” Patrick says, and he’s the one who kisses Pete this time, and that’s just as glorious as when Pete kissed Patrick and just as indescribable and just as—

Look, Pete’s entire system is on information overload, he’s in some kind of parallel universe where he’s getting to fuck Patrick Stump, who expects him to keep up a coherent inner monologue, not him, okay? He’s just, like, a million sensations all at once, how Patrick feels on him, his guitar-calloused fingertips, his hot, wet mouth, the way his tongue curls around Pete, the way his bottom lip curves just for him, the way his teeth scrape and nip until Pete thrashes under him, pulling at his hair, gasping his name in desperation. There is also, though, the way he feels on Patrick, the way Patrick’s skin burns hot under his touch and the way he can chase the blush down Patrick’s body the way he’s always wanted to do and the way his hands close over Patrick’s thighs, his fingers pressing in, and the way that makes Patrick moan, “Jesus,” and then, “Pete,” and the fucking way he tastes, that Pete is never going to get enough of, Pete wants to devour him and then order more for dessert, and Patrick is gasping, “Oh, my God, that’s so good, perfect, perfect,” and Pete is always anything but perfect except when it comes to Patrick.

After, in the dark, Pete lays and admires Patrick moonily, walking his fingers from freckle to freckle on his body, and Patrick murmurs, “But I still don’t understand.”

“Sex,” Pete explains dreamily. “We just had sex.”

Patrick chuckles. “No, that I understand, that – I still don’t understand how I’m here.”

“You asked me to take you home,” Pete says, “and I made sure that you meant my home, and you confirmed that you did, and—”

“No, I also understood all of that,” Patrick interrupts him.

Pete foregoes counting Patrick’s freckles, stretching instead and propping himself up on his pillow as he yawns. “Then I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”

“How did any of this happen?” Patrick asks softly.

Pete looks down at him and doesn’t answer with a joke. He answers seriously. “What if I told you it was love at first sight?”

“First sight was ten years ago.”

“It was still love at first sight.”

Patrick is silent for a long time, regarding him. Then he says, “I am going to say something that is going to sound, like, so fucking silly.”

“I bet you’re not,” Pete remarks. “You could tell me you were from a whole other universe and it wouldn’t sound silly to me.”

Patrick ignores him. He says slowly, “You say love at first sight, and I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think that’s what it was, but it was… You were there, at the bar, and it was like… That was right. You being there, you talking to me, all of it was so weird but also everything inside me was like – I couldn’t walk away from you, I couldn’t say no to you, you were what I wanted, and not like…” Patrick wrinkles his nose, thinking. “Not like love, not like sex, not really, just like—”

“Like all your life there was supposed to be me and you couldn’t understand what had taken me so fucking long,” Pete finishes for him.

Patrick looks up at him in amazement, and then says cautiously, “Kind of?”

Pete smiles at him and reaches out to scratch his fingers through Patrick’s hair, just because he can, and that’s so nice, he’s missed that.

Patrick muses, “Maybe this is what déjà vu feels like?”

“No,” Pete says confidently, and slides down his pillow. “You’ve been trying to go through life without your soulmate, Patrick Stump.”

Patrick looks amused by his confidence. “Oh, have I been?”

Pete nods. “We both have. But it’s okay. We’ve got each other now. It’s going to be okay.”

“I have no reason to believe you,” Patrick says.

“But you do,” Pete finishes knowingly.

“How’s the second verse of Two More Weeks supposed to go?”

“Saturday,” Pete says. “The song’s name is Saturday.”

“Okay,” Patrick agrees indulgently.

“Pete and I attacked the lost Astoria,” Pete sings softly. “With promise and precision.” He lays a hand flat on Patrick’s bare chest, letting his heart beat against him, a bass drum through the skin and bone. He says, “And a mess of youthful innocence.”

Patrick smiles.

***

Pete wakes up and he’s in his bed.

He’s in…his bed.

“Holy shit,” he says, and sits bolt upright, staring around the room in shock. He’s…in his own fucking room.

He feels his hair. It’s long. He gets out of bed and goes to the mirror just to confirm. Yup. His hair is no longer the style of the serious lawyer. He goes to his closet and it is comfortingly full of sweats. He goes to his bookshelves and there are no law books. He goes to his phone, still charging by the bed, and Googles Fall Out Boy, and look, there they are, right there where they have always been.

His thumb is actually shaking as he scrolls through his Contacts, and there’s Patrick’s name and number, right there. There’s an entire text history between them that he can open right now—

And then that reminds him of the terms on which they parted ways in this universe. Of Patrick wanting to write, and Pete telling him no. Of Patrick wanting to be Fall Out Boy again, and Pete telling him no. Of Patrick wanting to be Pete&Patrick again, and Pete telling him no.

Pete closes his eyes and thinks of the night he just had in the other universe, thinks of Patrick, skin to skin, breath to breath, kiss to kiss. He fixed that lifetime.

Now he has to fix this one.  

He wasn’t, he thinks, sent to that lifetime for punishment. He was sent there, he thinks, to learn about reward. There is just so much reward he could have – so much – if he just made better choices. Or different choices. He made different choices for the Pete Wentz he just was, and look what he got him. He can make different choices for the Pete Wentz he actually is, too.

Pete gets in his car and drives to Patrick’s. Possibly a little recklessly.

He has a key to Patrick’s house but he foolishly didn’t bring it in his rush to get over there, so he just pounds heavily on Patrick’s door until Patrick answers.

Patrick answers with his hair sticking up, without his glasses, squinting at him, frowning. “What the fuck, do you know what fucking time it is?”

Pete actually has no idea, and it seems highly irrelevant. Pete needs to figure out what lifetime this is. “Patrick,” Pete gasps.

“Yes,” Patrick says sourly, rubbing at his eyes. “What. What do you want.”

“We met when Joe introduced us, right? And we created a band together, right? I made you sing? We wrote this song together, Saturday, it’s called Saturday, and it goes, ‘Two more weeks, my foot is in the door’?”

Patrick stares at him, bewildered. “What?” he says blankly.

“That’s how it goes, right? That’s how our song goes?”

“Did you fall down and hit your head? Do you have amnesia right now? Of course that’s how it goes, we sing it last every set, do you not—”

Pete dives in and kisses Patrick.

Patrick gasps, a sharp intake of breath that Pete feels, and probably Pete should have, like, warned him, or maybe asked him for permission, or maybe talked to him first, or maybe not—

Patrick tugs Pete in sharply and kisses him back hard, bruising, possessive. He doesn’t kiss the way Patrick kissed in the other lifetime. He kisses like he’s had twenty years of knowing Pete stacked up behind this kiss, ready to burst out of him, ready to explode, ready to take.

It occurs to Pete, in a dizzying way of trying to grasp infinite possibilities, that there are universes out there where Patrick gets fed up with Pete and kisses him first. Because that is what this feels like.

Patrick pulls back and demands, panting, “What are you even doing?” He says this while pulling Pete’s t-shirt up over his head.

“Making a better choice,” Pete says, trying to get Patrick’s pajama pants out of his way.

“It took you fucking long enough,” Patrick snaps.

Pete smiles. This is probably how he would have expected sex with Patrick to go: with a bit of bite in it. He says, “What do you think I can do to make it up to you? Got any ideas?”

“Oh, my God, shut up,” Patrick says.

***

Patrick is staring at him. Pete can feel it even with his eyes closed. And it’s not the look of wonder that Patrick had in the other universe, that how-can-this-be-a-thing-that’s-happening look of dawning adoration. This look, Pete can sense, is suspicious.

Pete cracks an eye open to confirm his conclusion. Yup: suspicious.

“What?” Pete asks. One of his hands is sprawled over Patrick’s bare ass. He gives it a little knead just to punctuate his question.

Patrick says, “Do you have amnesia?”

Pete starts laughing.

Patrick says, affronted, “I think it’s a legitimate question.”

“It is,” Pete agrees, and opens his eyes to look at him. “But I don’t.”

“Why were you asking me about how Saturday goes?”

“I was just checking,” Pete says.

“Checking what?”

“Checking…” Pete looks at Patrick’s dear, familiar face, more familiar than his own, certainly more loved than his own. It looks bewildered and confused but it also looks, underneath it all, steadily fond. This is always how Patrick looks at him, and it’s such a relief to see again. This is his Patrick. “Checking that everything was where it was supposed to be,” Pete finishes.  

“I don’t know what that means,” Patrick says. “You’re not making any sense. I’m worried about you.”

Pete cups his hands around that dear, familiar face and says, “I’m sorry.”

“For…” Pete can practically see Patrick’s thought process in his eyes, so he’s prepared when Patrick goes to withdraw from his grasp as he finishes, “For what—”

“No, not for this,” Pete says, refusing to relinquish his hold on Patrick. He is never going to relinquish his hold on Patrick. “Definitely not sorry for any of this that just happened just now. I’m sorry for what I said to you yesterday. It was yesterday, right? When I told you I didn’t want to write another album?”

“Yes,” Patrick says slowly. “That’s what you said.”

“And then I haven’t talked to you since then, right?” He thinks of his fear that there was another Pete in this universe ruining everything for him.

Patrick is silent for a beat, then says, “Okay, but for real, do you have amnesia?”

“Have you talked to me since I told you I didn’t want to write another album?” Pete asks again patiently.

“No,” Patrick says sharply. “You told me you wanted to try living your life without me and so I left you to whatever sulk you were in the middle of and then the next thing I know you show up here kissing me, so you can understand that I think you’re behaving oddly, right?”

“I told you that I wanted to try thinking about anything else but you, I went to bed trying so hard to think about anything else but you, and that was such a mistake, Patrick, because you are… You are… Without you, I’m not me. I don’t know who I am. But it isn’t me. It’s someone…really terrible and boring and awful and not me, I’m like some big-shot lawyer taking Gwyneth Paltrow’s deposition or something.”

“Gwyneth Paltrow? What?”

“The point is, what I figured out is that if I tried to live my life without you, I would never actually know who I even was, because you let me be me, you push me to be me, you’re the only one who – Patrick, I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I – I cannot imagine a life without you, I really can’t, if you gave me a life without you, the first thing I would do would be to find you.”

Patrick looks at him for a long moment. His blue eyes are liquid with emotion, and Pete feels really terrible that he’s never said this before.

Pete says haltingly, “You were in crisis, yesterday, and you needed me, and I told you no, and I…I don’t know how you can ever trust me again after that, I honestly don’t know what’s in it for you.”

“What’s in what for me?” Patrick asks thickly, sounding genuinely confused.

“This,” Pete says.

Patrick sniffles and shakes his head a little bit in Pete’s hold and says, “I’m still not—”

“This. You and me. What’s in it for you?”

“What the fuck are you even talking about?” Patrick says.

“In another universe,” Pete says, “where you don’t have me fucking up your life, maybe you’re a drummer for this obscure little jazz band that just plays local gigs in Chicago clubs and by day you’re a music teacher and nobody makes you get up on stage and sing in front of tens of thousands of people ever and maybe it’s a good life. Maybe I fucked everything up for you by insisting that you – Maybe you would be happier without me. Do you ever think about that?”

Patrick says steadily, firmly, “No. I never think about that. Ever.”

“Maybe you should,” Pete suggests hesitantly. “Maybe you should—”

“I don’t want to be a drummer in a jazz band. I mean, it sounds cool – actually, so does teaching music – that doesn’t sound like anything bad, but what I mean is that I don’t want to not be in Fall Out Boy. I don’t want to not be with you. Didn’t I say that yesterday? I miss you, that’s why I wanted to write, I don’t want a life without you.”

“You never wanted to be a famous singer, that was all me, and—”

“And it turns out, look at that, I fucking am one. Who knew? Only Pete Wentz, that’s who. I could have just not sung, Pete. It’s not like I don’t have the ability to make my own choices, too. Our lives are not the result of your choices in a vacuum. You’re not the only protagonist, for fuck’s sake. I made my choices to stay with you the same way you made your choices to stay with me.”

These are fair and true points, Pete realizes. He wasn’t the only one making choices. He chose Patrick in this lifetime – but Patrick also chose him back.

Maybe he always forgets about that because he doesn’t get why. So he asks. “Why?”

Patrick looks exasperated. “Pete, from the time I was seventeen years old, you have never once allowed me to doubt for even a second that I am the most amazing person to have ever been born. I mean, Pete, it’s ridiculous, I’m not nearly as special as you think I am, but you have never wavered from that. You don’t think that’s addictive? You’re sitting here like you can’t imagine why I don’t walk away from you, why I keep you in my life. You don’t think that I definitely, definitely get something out of making you say to me all the time that, you know, I’m awesome? You don’t think, if someone dropped me in a life without you, my first move wouldn’t be to look for you? Of course it would be. I was doing that yesterday.” Patrick jerks his head out of Pete’s hands, which he can accomplish because Pete’s too shocked to keep his grip anymore.

Pete says, unconvinced, “Yeah, but that’s—”

Patrick reverses their position, his hands cupping Pete’s face now. He says, “You told me no yesterday, and yes, you hurt my feelings. I can’t deny that. But you… You say things, sometimes, that hurt my feelings.”

Pete winces. “Patrick—”

“But you never mean any of them. You can be a little harsh when you’re freaking out about something. I know that about you now. You were harsh yesterday, and it hurt, but I never doubted for a second that you would be here today apologizing, because you always do. You have always – eventually – come back to me. Always. Pete.” Patrick’s face is so soft, and fond, that Pete has to close his eyes, and then Patrick leans forward and kisses them gently. “You’re my constant in life. That’s why I went to you to write. You’re my constant. And I knew you would always be that.” There’s a pause, then Patrick says, “I have to admit I didn’t think you’d apologize like this, but, you know, I’m not complaining, I guess it’s good you can surprise me if it’s this kind of surprise.”

Pete chokes out a laugh. He says, “It has been a rough few – hours,” because he can’t say days.

Patrick kisses his closed eyelids again and murmurs, “I think that you’ve been going through it.”

Pete laughs a little again. He says, “And I’ve been putting your name to it.”

“Oh, wow, look at those lyrics,” Patrick says. “Are you writing with me? Are you going to write with me now? Did you show up here to write a song with me?”

“Yeah, and I got distracted,” Pete jokes, and then opens his eyes and tackles Patrick back onto the bed.

Patrick looks up at him, grinning, and he doesn’t look at all the way he did in the other universe, while also looking exactly like he did in the other universe. The other Patrick looked at him wonder-struck, but this Patrick looks at him with the absence of wonder, with a familiarity Pete can wrap himself up in, can hide from the world in, and that’s the true wonder, the wonder that Patrick can see Pete for every stupid thing he is, can crawl right into his darkness and come out of it talking only about his glow. The Patrick in the other universe might have done that eventually, but was nowhere near that level of steady, unflinching trust yet. And the Pete in the other universe might have gotten to experience that eventually but had had to spend so much of his life without it.

How incredibly lucky, Pete thinks, did he get.

Or maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe it was making the right choice. Maybe it was seeing destiny in front of you and not shying away from the unknown changes it would wreak but walking right into the middle of it. Pete took a chance, he thinks, when he decided to hitch his wagon to Patrick Stump. The same chance Patrick took with Pete. It’s been so long since he thought of it that way, because he knows how it all turned out and it all turned out incredible, but at the time it made zero sense for either of them to do and they still insisted on doing it and he had just thought it, from his perspective, another foolish, headstrong thing for Pete Wentz to do but now he think of the Pete he had been twenty years ago and he thinks—

He thinks, Thank you so much, past me, for being so fucking brave and smart. Pete’s so glad he’s got this life. And that Patrick was brave and smart right there with him.

“What?” Patrick says, and Pete realizes he’s just been staring down at him.

Pete blinks back to this reality and says slowly, “In another life…” and it occurs to him suddenly that in another life, maybe, he does all this much sooner, much sooner, and he gets it even more right.

Patrick shakes his head and says, “Fuck that. We’ve got this life. Would you change a single fucking thing? What would you trade any of it for?”

“Nothing,” he says honestly. Sure, there are probably lives where he got more things right, but there are lives where he got a lot more things wrong, too. He just came from one of them. “I wouldn’t trade any of it. I would want to end up right here with you. I’d make the same exact choices all over again.”

Patrick beams at him, like the total sunbeam he is, so Pete has to kiss him.

Patrick says, “This is good, this is all so good, but – you’re okay, right? I mean, for real. This is – a little out of nowhere.”

Pete says seriously, “Patrick, in another life I do this the minute I meet you instead of wasting twenty fucking years.”

“We didn’t waste a single minute,” Patrick counters. “Not one.”

“I just mean, like, I could have done this so many times. I just didn’t, for whatever reason, but it wasn’t that I didn’t think about it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was that – I just didn’t do it.”

“I was scared, too,” Patrick says.

Yeah, Pete thinks, maybe in his way he was just as scared of Patrick as the Pete in the other universe, just at a different point in their relationship. Pete says, “I guess if I’d done it sooner…then this whole time we could have had it all.”

Patrick looks genuinely confused when he says, “But, Pete. We do.”

Pete smiles a little. He says, “When I think of my very wildest dreams…they’re all about you. All of my wildest dreams just end up with you and me.”

“This isn’t a dream,” Patrick says. “I promise you.”

“No. I mean, it feels like it will be later. I’m trying to save all of this in my memory for later, so that I can reassure myself that it all happened.”

“What ‘later’?” Patrick frowns.

“You know. Later. Eventually we’ll have to get out of bed.”

“Why?” challenges Patrick stubbornly.  

Pete laughs. “Eventually we have to—”

“No,” Patrick says, and flips Pete over to sprawl on top of him and kiss him. “We really don’t. You think I’m letting you go anywhere?”

“But I always come back, don’t I?”

“Yeah, but I’m being selfish with you for now, how’s that? Can I be selfish?”

“Please do.” Pete lets Patrick kiss him again. “But what will we do when we want to record our new album we’re writing?” Another kiss. “We’ll have to let Joe and Andy—”

“Technology is awesome,” Patrick says. “We could record the album from bed.”

Pete giggles into Patrick’s kisses. “We can’t – How would we – What about touring? We can’t stay just like this forever.”

“This is such a terrible conversation. What kind of pillow talk is this? Write me a love poem. I want a love poem.”

Pete considers, arching his head back as Patrick nibbles down his neck to his collarbone. He murmurs, “I will never ask you for anything except to dream sweet of me.”

Patrick stills and looks up, chin on Pete’s sternum. “Oh, that’s good,” he says.

Pete reaches a hand out to trace over the shell of Patrick’s ear, aching with love. “What do you think it’s like to go through life without your soulmate?”

Patrick says brightly, “Isn’t it nice that we never have to know, because that’s not our life?”

“Yeah,” Pete agrees hoarsely. “It’s not our life. I want you to know, I am never going to let you go ever again. Okay?”

“Didn’t I just say we were never even going to get out of bed?” Patrick points out.

“I know but I’m serious,” says Pete.

“Pete.” Patrick moves back up his body, intertwines their hands on either side of Pete’s head, and looks down at him. “You have never let me go, period. Not since the day you met me. I’m cool with it. Better than cool with it. I think I have to show you. I think you’ve forgotten.”

“Yeah, I probably need to be shown a lot,” Pete agrees solemnly.

Patrick grins and gets to work.

***

Pete Wentz wakes up and he’s not in his bed.

He’s in Patrick’s.

That’s where the story starts.