Chapter Text
Pete goes to sleep a scumbag and wakes up next to a swan.
It’s like coming back from a far-away place, foggy with jet lag and spatially confused, waking up in Patrick’s bed. Memories of the night before filter in: the screaming match, Pete’s fist through his driver’s side window, his now-ex girlfriend cursing him out, showing up at Patrick’s door bloody and wrecked, begging his way into Patrick’s sympathy, into Patrick’s bed. Patrick supervising the cleaning of his wounds, fussing over him crabbily, grumbling about the injustice of having to share with a cold-toed blanket thief when they’re not touring. Patrick smiling when Pete’s back was turned, not realizing Pete could see him in the mirror. Heartbroken and teeming with regrets, but not alone. Not alone.
So he wakes up, takes a breath or two and lets the events of yesterday catch up, sink in. He flinches as they hit him. Then he rolls over, harassment of Patrick ready on his lips, and gets a faceful of rumpled feathers.
Talk about bedspins. Pete has to recalibrate all over again, rifling through his memories. Where did waterfowl come in? Did they get drunk and raid a petting zoo? But no: neither of them drink. Pete remembers the whole evening, from crying on Patrick’s doorstep to shimmying into Patrick’s pajama pants. There were definitely no swans involved.
The swan lifts its head, its big orange bill, its black eyes, its smooth white feathers. It blinks at Pete. It tilts its oblong head. It opens its beak and says, “Blat?”
Pete leaps out of the bed like it’s burning. Holy shit. Swans are mean. He bolts, slamming the bedroom door behind him, and skids down the apartment hall. “Patrick?” he calls, a little panicked. Whatever amount of panicked corresponds with waking up next to a swan. This is not the way grenade jumping usually works. “Patrick! Bob?”
Pete slides into the kitchen and comes face to face with Patrick’s roommate, Bob Bryar. Bob looks groggy, has a spoonful of cereal halfway to his mouth. “Have you seen Patrick?” Pete asks, rumpled and wild.
“Isn’t he with you?” Bob asks, raising his eyebrows a little more suggestively than Pete appreciates.
Pete doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to deal with Bob right now. He’s been awake all of two minutes. The swan situation is his first priority. “Did you—get any new pets, Bob?” he asks instead.
The cereal makes it into Bob’s mouth. He chews contemplatively. After a longer time than he needs, he says, “Nope.”
Shit. Shit, shit.
“Why?” asks Bob.
“No reason!” lies Pete. Inspired, he seizes some oven mitts and a dish towel off the counter—it’s the likeliest swan wrestling gear within his sightline, anyway—and heads back down the hall to. To deal with this problem, somehow. Maybe he should call animal control? Maybe he can get it on some kind of lead and let it go in a park? Maybe—maybe—
Doesn’t Pete have enough problems? Break-up, broken window, general disaster? Why is he on the swan shepherding squad now, too?
And more importantly of all: where the fuck is Patrick?
*
Okay, so once Pete calms it down, the swan is surprisingly cooperative.
It’s having a kind of panic when Pete ventures back into the bedroom—he finds it flapping so hard it’s hurting itself, beating its wings against the furniture and whirling around like a white maelstrom. Its beak is full of its own feathers, their tips red with blood where the bird has ripped them out.
It’s heartbreaking in a way Pete wouldn’t have guessed, seeing such a beautiful animal tear itself apart. Pete feels its fear and sorrow in his own heart. This is why ballerinas play swans, he realizes: their grace and elegance convey a kind of perfect, innocent beauty that he can’t bear to see damaged.
He’s not exactly a classically trained fowl wrangler, so he goes with his first instinct: throw a blanket over its head. “Easy, easy,” Pete says. “I shouldn’t have left you, I’m sorry. Please calm down. You’re hurting yourself. You’re hurting Patrick’s furniture and it must be hurting you.”
Maybe it’s the sudden darkness or the weight of the blanket or just the tone of Pete’s voice, but the swan stops its hurricane fit. A low, keening hiss emits from the under the blanket. Pete reaches out cautiously, lays the lightest of touches on the blanket protrusion he thinks is the swan’s head. It flinches initially, then presses into the touch. Pete pets the swan’s head region gently through the blanket. “Hey, buddy. Hey,” he says, keeping up the soothing patter in case that’s what’s calming the swan. “I don’t know how you got in here—this is so not Patrick’s kind of prank—but I’m going to get you home, all right?”
Then Pete considers his promise. “Don’t suppose you know your address,” he jokes to the swan. The swan, muffled by fabric, says, “Hhhhgh?”
He tries to pick up the bundle of swan, but that doesn’t go well. They’re stuck like that for a while, the swan in the dark and Pete calling Patrick’s cell phone again and again. It keeps going to voicemail and there’s no number of messages he can leave that will help him get the swan out of here. Eventually, he makes a deal with the bird. “I’ll let you out from under the blanket if you promise to be calm,” he says. The swan honks softly.
It looks a little worse for the wear, its crown ruffled in an undignified manner with static electricity and some very sad bald spots in its coat, but is quite well behaved. Pete reaches out slowly, watched closely by its black eyes, and strokes its head. God, swans are big. Even with them getting along so well, he’s more than a little frightened of it.
“The only place in the city I’ve ever seen swans is Lincoln Park Zoo,” Pete says. “Do you want to go there?”
In a gesture that can only be taken as a no, the swan goes ahead and resumes freaking the fuck out.
*
Finally, Pete leaves the swan in Patrick’s bathtub with a pile of lettuce (in case it gets hungry, and also is a creature that eats lettuce). He has no idea what to do about this situation, but he’s starting to get seriously worried about Patrick, so once he’s made the swan as comfortable as a swan can really be in a two bedroom apartment in Wicker Park, he sets out to look for his friend.
He’s on his way to the record shop where Patrick works when he runs into Jeanae.
After last night—their ugliest and most final break-up yet—she’s the last person he wants to see. But she reacts to the sight of him like he’s the reanimated dead. “What are you doing here?” she blurts.
Pete pauses, looks around at himself, the El tracks overhead, the alley with steaming grates to his left, the city street to his right. “I appear to be walking,” he says. Pete knows this is the kind of answer that makes people want to strangle him. He’s not in any kind of mood to be polite to Jeanae this morning, and he’s a little distracted by the whole missing best friend and somehow responsible for a motherfucking wild swan problems.
Jeanae has backed up two steps, looking paler than usual. She’s dressed in chunky black platform heels, a ragged velour dress, and an army surplus camo jacket. Her dyed-red hair hangs around her face, her features made striking by dark cosmetics. She’s taking in the sight of Pete from head to toe and back again, studying him like he’s not the shape or state she expects. It’s making his skin crawl.
“I can’t believe it didn’t work,” she’s muttering now. She plucks at a large bandage wrapped around her right palm. “I know there was enough blood. And Mari checked my translation…”
Pete, with a bandaged hand of his own, really does not want to deal with this conversation anymore. Isn’t the whole point of breaking up that you don’t have to put up with the other person’s odd bullshit anymore? “Yeah, well, great seeing you,” Pete says sarcastically, and makes to push past her.
“You’re supposed to be cursed right now!” she says. Her voice is creeping up towards a yell in her frustration. “I was outside Patrick’s window working the spell all night!”
“Oh, so you’re a witch now? Great. Great job. 10/10 curse. What was it supposed to do anyway?”
In the lowest, most forbidden voice he has ever heard, Jeanae intones, “May what’s ugly inside you show outside too.”
Yeah, Pete’s got more important things to do than have this weirdo conversation. There’s enough he doesn’t like about his body and his brain without diving into Break-Up Part Two: Instant Replay. He feels absolutely ugly enough, inside and out.
“Bye forever, Jeanae,” he says, and he walks away, something nagging low in his belly that he does his best to ignore.
Three steps later, he stops again. He turns back to his ex-girlfriend. Fuck He might as well ask. “You haven’t seen Patrick anywhere, have you? Like when you were outside his apartment all night like a mentally well-adjusted person? You didn’t happen to see him leave?”
“I’m not going to be the one who reunites you two,” Jeanae snarls. Patrick’s role in Pete’s life had been cited freely in last night’s fight. “If he’s gone, good for him!”
Pete thinks this is as close as he’s going to get to a helpful answer. He leaves her there, in the middle of the sidewalk, chanting behind him.
*
A list of places where Patrick isn’t: the record shop, his favorite gyro place, the bookstore, his mom’s house, hanging out with Joe, any of the Starbucks in this entire neighborhood. Pete looks everywhere he can think of, calls everyone Patrick even vaguely knows. By dinnertime, he’s forced to admit that wherever Patrick is, he doesn’t want to be found. Pete’s better off waiting at his apartment than running all over the city. Patrick lives there; he’ll have to come back eventually, right?
In the meantime, Pete’s gotta see about a swan.
The swan is docile and sad when Pete returns to it. Pete lets himself in with the key Patrick keeps trying to get back from him and calls out, “Hello? Anybody?” There’s no sign of Patrick or Bob (one count of worry, one count of relief) but a low, mournful “Harrrrn” sounds from the direction of the bathroom.
There is lettuce everywhere. The bathroom is a wet, feathered mess. The swan, looking more wilted and less dignified than ever, has curled up uneasily on a crumpled towel. It doesn’t appear to have eaten any of the lettuce, just shredded it with ruthless abandon. It lifts its strange, oblong head and blinks at Pete. Its black-and-yellow eyes look terribly sad.
Pete sits on the floor beside it, not caring that he’s sitting in a puddle that’s soaking through his jeans. He leans his head back over the edge of the tub, the inside of which does not bear description. It’s been full of 3 inches of water and an adult swan all day. It’s not pretty in there.
“I’m sorry, buddy,” Pete sighs. “Did you eat anything today?”
“Mrreh. Mrreh,” the swan clucks sadly. Pete must be imagining it, but for a second he thinks the swan is shaking its head.
“Me neither.” Pete holds up the greasy bag of takeout he’s brought with him. “Do you like gyros?”
The swan blats excitedly, fluffing up and smoothing down its wings. It can probably smell the fries. Pete feels a little weird about giving a swan undifferentiated animal flesh, so he eats the gyro meat himself and shares the pita and French fries.
“You shouldn’t just eat carbs,” he tells the swan while it makes an absolute massacre of a pile of fries and ketchup, its scissored beak sending potato bits flying. “Bad for you. What do swans eat, anyway?”
Okay, he’s definitely imagining things now, because it looks to Pete like the swan hitches up its wings and shrugs.
Pete makes the executive decision to leave the bathroom exactly as it is—after all, this swan is Patrick’s prank, isn’t it? He and the swan go back to Patrick’s bedroom and sit on the bed. He uses Patrick’s laptop to learn about the dietary needs of swans—French fries do not actually appear on any of the lists he finds, which is obviously a mistake, as the swan fucking loved them—and wildlife refuges in the Chicagoland area.
The swan nestles beside him on the bed. It’s surprisingly companionable. “How about this one?” Pete asks, showing the swan a picture of a wildlife preserve out in the northwest suburbs. The swan nips at the back of his hand, letting out a small hiss. “Okay, but you can’t say no to all of them,” Pete says, scrolling to the next result. “I don’t think you can afford rent in this neighborhood.” Pete doesn’t think it’s odd at all, that he’s having a conversation with a swan. Birds are supposed to be smart, right? Swans are basically dinosaurs, and if Jurassic Park taught him anything, it’s that raptors can use doorknobs, language, and barter economies.
Pete shows the swan pictures of mealworms next, after reading a blog that suggests mealworms are gourmet dining for swans. It begins to hiss and flap its wings at the screen. Pete laughs, scrambling away from the large bird. Swan wings hurt. “Don’t! You’ll break Patrick’s laptop! What if I make the mealworms into a smoothie?”
The swan hisses and flaps harder. Pete rolls off the bed to escape, landing ungracefully on Patrick’s bedroom floor. Suddenly he realizes he’s eye-to-eye with Patrick’s wallet, cell phone, and keys. They’re in a pile with his jeans from yesterday and his Bingo cap, which Pete knows from experience is how Patrick gets ready for bed: dump everything he was wearing into a pile, and dig through it later when he can’t find his driver’s license or needs another sock.
This pile makes it look like—like Patrick never left the apartment at all.
“Patrick was kidnapped,” Pete breathes in horror.
The swan pokes it head over the edge of the bed and lets out a disdainful blat.
Pete doesn’t care if a fucking swan thinks he’s being catastrophic. Kidnapping is the only explanation. Unless—
Unless Patrick is still inside the house.
Pete launches to his feet. He’s just gotten a good look under the bed and all that’s under there is dirty laundry. But there are lots of other places Patrick could be hiding, right? Because he could be perfectly safe and just, like, hiding weirdly in a cabinet. Right?
Pete tears through the apartment, throwing open every closet and cabinet, emptying Bob’s dresser drawers, ripping apart Bob’s bedding in case Patrick is somehow secreted away in blanket folds. He’s working himself more and more into a panic, because Patrick isn’t anywhere, Patrick could be in trouble, Patrick could be hurt, the sun’s gone down and it’s dark and Patrick is missing—
Pete’s dialing 911 and skidding back into Patrick’s room to double-check the laundry under the bed and generally freaking out, and then Pete is stopping dead with his mouth dropping open and sputtering, trying to understand what he sees before him.
There on the bed, haloed in a spray of feathers, with a blissy, disoriented look on his face, is Patrick.
“Please state your emergency,” says the 911 operator. Pete is speechless. “Hello? Hello?” comes through his phone.
Patrick blinks at Pete dazedly, slightly shiny with a fine dazzle of sweat. This soft, sweet look on his face—through Pete’s haze of dumb panic, all he can think is that this must be what Patrick looks like in a post-orgasmic glow.
“Please state your emergency,” repeats the operator.
Patrick looks at his hands, turning them to and fro in wonder. Softly, he says, “I was a swan.”