Chapter Text
There are some issues to address before anyone can go about living happily ever after. Namely: what did it mean when Patrick kissed Pete? Did it mean he was scared to die, or that he wanted to kiss Pete in particular? And: what will the best musician Pete knows do with only one hand? And: why does Pete’s heart quicken like that, imagining his skin being stroked by feathers?
The first order of business is group hugging and crying and, at long last, Pete’s explanation. His words are rusty, after so long without speech. He barely knows where to begin. He settles for saying, “There was a curse. I couldn’t speak until I broke it.”
Patrick, with one soft span of feather and one clever-fingered human hand, cradles Pete’s ruined hands. “Your poor hands,” he says. “Nettles were a terrible fucking idea.”
Pete, uncomfortable, slips his hands into his hoodie sleeves. He doesn’t want to hear about his poor hands. The curse wasn’t meant to be kind, but this—this is unbearable. “I didn’t save you,” Pete says. His throat is hoarse. His nose still bleeds irregular drips into his lap. A knot of tears unshed burns at the back of his throat. “I wrecked you. You—you have a wing.”
“I have an idea,” Patrick says. Before anyone can stop him, he gets to his feet and strides purposefully out of Joe’s apartment. Andy helps Pete up, keeps an arm around him charitably. Joe leads them out into the night.
Patrick is standing on the shabby grass outside Joe’s building. He has his arms stretched in the moonlight. Before their eyes, his wing fizzes silver and resolves into an oddly gleaming human hand. Patrick’s grin is fixed to his face with determination, as if really he is devastated but he doesn’t want the others to know. As if he doesn’t want Pete to feel bad, even though all of this is Pete’s fault and Pete is terrible, really just the sorriest excuse of a boy ever to live.
“See? Man in the moonlight, swan in the sun. I’ll have both hands at night. That’s when our shows are anyway, right?”
“We’ll get you a prosthetic hand for the daytime,” Andy suggests.
Joe adds, “You’ll be able to do almost everything you normally would.”
“I’ve always been pretty much nocturnal anyway.”
Pete can hear in the tight cheeriness of everyone’s voices that they’re only trying to be nice. He squeezes his hands into fists, relishing the pain, the way the blisters split and crack. He will tear himself apart, if it makes this feel better. He will shred and shed his skin from the outside in. He will howl penitence from the inside out.
“This is all my fault,” Pete says. He’s so exhausted, the sleep deprivation of weeks crashing over him all at once. The fight is over. The curse is broken, more or less. So is Patrick. He’s ruined Patrick’s life. Just by his being in it, Patrick is ruined. “The curse was meant for me. I should be the one broken. She designed it so no one would be able to save me. It could only be undone if you had someone who loved you, someone who would sacrifice—it should be me. It’s meant to be me.”
He’s babbling, sinking to his knees in silver-dappled grass. Patrick squats down in front of him, leans forward to rest his forehead on the top of Pete’s head. Andy’s hand grips Pete’s shoulder. Joe’s legs press into Pete’s back. His friends surround him, stand like sentinels. He deserves to be abandoned but they’re not hearing him. He has words and by some new magic, they can’t hear him. This is his fault, his fault, his fault. They should cast him out. They should—
“We all love you,” Joe says gently. “Idiot.”
Pete looks up, blood and tears drying into well-worn tracks on his face. “But—” he says.
Patrick touches his cheek with a silver hand, one that will be a wing when once again the sun rises. He silences Pete with a careful, deliberate kiss.
Pete is quietly surprised at the relief he finds tucked away in silence.
*
There is a conversation, one of many, one of a series that is like to continue all through their lives, or as long as this thing lasts. It comes after the show, which they make it to, somehow. Pete can barely play but Patrick more than makes up for him. Patrick’s joy and relief burn up the stage. He glows gold in the stage lights, and not just the stage lights, Pete thinks. He makes everyone in the crowd believe in magic. His voice rips and soars, unself-conscious like never before, exactly like swan wings. He dances and thrashes over his guitar, electric with melody. He plays like a man grateful for each knuckle of each finger, for each unfeathered lungful of air. Watching Patrick play is the opposite of being cursed.
Then, after, Patrick pulls Pete into a shitty vinyl booth in the corner of the bar. He’s glowing still. Pete doesn’t understand why no one else seems to notice it. “I kissed you. You kissed me back,” he says.
Pete stares down into the beer he ordered and won’t drink. “More than kissed you,” he mumbles. He is so spent from the stage, from the panic attack he’s been living ever since Patrick first transformed, from the lack of sleep and the pain of nettles and the way his best wasn’t near enough and how Patrick’s going to say it was all a mistake, a symptom of desperation, just a way to use a body that made him feel human again.
Patrick blushes, grinning rueful at the tabletop. He swipes Pete’s beer and takes a sip. He winces at the taste, then goes back to smiling. “Yes. The graveyard,” Patrick says. “That was almost worth the curse.”
When Pete doesn’t react, Patrick sighs. “Will you look at me, at least?”
Pete really, really doesn’t want to.
“I’m sorry for what I said. Um—I probably made you feel pretty disposable. Like you didn’t mean anything much to me.”
Pete, who knows he deserves to feel much worse than that, just shrugs. “Wasn’t anything,” Pete says. He drinks some of his beer after all, tries not to taste Patrick’s lips on the rim. “You wouldn’t have been so desperate if I hadn’t gotten you cursed. Can’t imagine what things I’d say, situation like that.”
“Okay, stop.” Patrick’s voice is tight with crabbiness. Pete relaxes a little, knowing the warning signs of a Mount Patruvius eruption. He will feel so much better when Patrick’s yelling at him. When Patrick’s finally treating him like he deserves. Pete’s not good at much, but he knows how to absorb blows. “It’s not your fault I got cursed. You understand that, right? You didn’t literally curse me? It’s Jeanae’s fault. She is the only person to blame in this situation.”
Pete takes another sip of his beer. “She wouldn’t have needed to try and curse me if I wasn’t—”
“And if I wasn’t so pathetically into you, I wouldn’t have let you sleep in my bed in the first place, and the curse wouldn’t have hit me instead of you. And if I hadn’t gone to Borders that day, I would never have met Joe, and I never would have met you at all, and I wouldn’t have ended up cursed either. And if your parents hadn’t boned nine months before you were born, your particular genetic makeup never would have combined in this particular way, and if Jeanae had gotten rear-ended on her way to my apartment, and if she wasn’t a creepy mean witch in the first place, and if dinosaurs had never died out, and if fish had never crawled out of the sea—”
“Okay, okay,” Pete interrupts. He’s laughing just the tiniest amount, though he’d never admit it.
“And if you hadn’t woven a coat of nettles, I would still be a swan,” finishes Patrick. His voice is softer than Pete can stand.
“Didn’t do it right, though, did I?” Pete demands, voice blunt as the instrument he wants to be struck with.
Patrick takes Pete’s hands roughly. Pete makes a small sound of pain. “Look at your fucking hands,” Patrick growls. “Look at them.”
So Pete looks. Thick chunks of white, pus-warped, dead skin are punctuated by furious red welts. Cracks ringed in putrefying yellow darken from marrow-gold to valentine-red to heartsblood-black. The stink of infection rises from them. The palms are torn by long-unhealed weals and blistering open sores. The fingers are double-thick with swollen pain; they barely curl. They are numb, clumsy, discolored and burnt almost beyond recognition of human hands.
Patrick knocks back more of Pete’s beer than he is strictly entitled to. “I think you were weaving as fast as you could,” Patrick says. “Faster, maybe.”
Pete closes his eyes because he doesn’t want to look anymore.
“You saved me,” Patrick says, as if that settles it. Maybe it does. “And I made you feel like you didn’t mean anything to me, and being terrified doesn’t make that okay. This is me apologizing.”
Pete nods. He peeks at Patrick through a slit in his eyelids. “Were you really? Pathetically into me?”
Patrick shows his teeth grinning. “Yes. Obviously. Yes. Being scared isn’t what made me want to kiss you. Being scared just made me brave enough to do it.”
“I told you I loved you,” Pete blurts out. Three times promised, three times vowed.
“Couldn’t have broken the curse if you didn’t, right?” Patrick says. He finishes Pete’s beer without asking. Pete supposes malt liquor will have to do, since he doesn’t have fear of death to make him brave anymore. “If you’d stop beating yourself up for a second, maybe I’d get the chance to tell you: I love you too.”
And maybe there’s more magic in the world than he ever realized, because Patrick Stump says I love you, and Pete Wentz believes him.
*
At night, Patrick touches him with hands and lips and heart. Pete falls asleep with his head on Patrick’s naked chest, his whole body quivering with the ghost of Patrick’s love. He wakes with lovebites and bruises. He wakes with feathers in his face, or at his waist, or on his…
Never has Pete loved waking so much.
They sleep the day away, or go downtown to the big public library and dig through dusty books, or scroll through the blogs of worldwide witches, looking for countercurses, for potions and unguents to smooth away the aftereffects of bad spellcasting. They browse through arcane supply stores, Pete stroking secret feathers inside Patrick’s sleeve, Patrick kissing Pete’s neck and blushing when people look at them. The Wiccans they meet are almost too helpful; they run into Jeanae only once, wearing white now like she’s had her fill of harm magic, and she buys them half the shop, more purifying crystals and bundles of herbs than they’ll use in a lifetime. When the sun goes down, they work on their album, or play shows, or eat pizza and play board games with Joe and Andy. Sometimes Pete’s shower drain clogs with feathers, and for a long time, nothing worse happens to them than that.
*
Here is what happens after the fairy tale ends, after the curse is mostly-broken and the prince is mostly-human:
Pete is learning.
Pete is learning to be careful with his words, now that he knows the weight of them, built up on his tongue. Pete is learning to say what he means when he gets the chance, because chances are fickle, easily lost. Pete is learning how to restore himself with quiet, instead of erasing himself with noise.
Pete is learning about intention.
Pete is trying to be the kind of person who doesn’t get his friends cursed, who doesn’t need to fear what he’d turn into if he his outside matched his insides. He is trying to live like he has people who love him, people who would sacrifice for him, people who would weave him a nettle coat. He is learning to believe that he does.
He is trying to be worthy of the love of a swan.
And he is learning to accept it, worthy or not.
What would you call all this, if not happily ever after?