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Brendon totally doesn't believe the guy when he first shows up. Actually he thinks he's hallucinating, because real people don't dress like that, so the first thing he says to the guy wearing all the scarves who's sitting on his bed is 'Wow, you're really hot.' He's allowed to say it if it's inside his own head. And if he's really tired because it's been a really long shitty day at school and then he had jazz band and managed to knock over half the drum section. And if the guy is clearly a figment of his imagination, since Brendon doesn't get hot anyone sitting on his bed, let alone hot boys in tight jeans.
But the guy looks sort of taken aback and says, 'Um, Brendon? I have an important message for you.'
Brendon's sort of surprised, because normally the fantasy attractive people who think he's awesome skip straight to the making out. 'Can't we just make out?' he says.
The guy's eyebrows go right up, and he murmurs, 'You didn't mention this part,' but he's obviously got a script and he's sticking to it. 'Okay, listen,' he says. 'You know Brent?' Brendon nods. He knows Brent. Well, he knows who Brent is. He's never actually spoken to him because Brendon's kind of a loser and most people would rather laugh at his clowning about than actually talk to him, so he's gotten out of the habit.
'Next time you see him you should talk to him,' says Brendon's fantasy guy.
'Uh,' says Brendon.
The guy nods firmly. 'Yeah.'
'Who are you?' says Brendon. 'Listen, he won't want to talk to me. No one wants to talk to me.'
The guy's eyes go wide and he says, 'That's bullshit.'
Brendon's still carrying his schoolbag. It's pretty heavy. He puts it down on the desk chair, on top of a heap of laundry that his mom is going to yell at him about later, and doesn't look at Fantasy Guy who is clearly delusional. 'Brendon, fuck, that's bullshit,' he repeats.
Brendon shrugs. 'If you're not going to make out with me, can you go away? This is a pretty shitty daydream.'
'It ends, okay,' says the guy urgently, leaning forward on the bed, 'it ends, high school sucks, but it's gonna be over, and you are so fucking talented and brilliant and, and hot, so trust me, Brendon, all right, and just fucking talk to him, because you're going to be -' His watch beeps. He stops. 'Fuck,' he says, and vanishes.
Brendon walks over to the bed. The cover is crumpled where the guy was sitting, and it's warm from his body heat.
_
The next time it happens, a guy Brendon's never seen before walks up to him after jazz band and says, 'Hi, I'm Jon, and I'm from the future.' Brendon stares at him. He doesn't look crazy.
Jon says, 'You're going to be a rockstar. All the people who make you miserable now are going to brag that they used to know you,' which, Brendon bursts out laughing, and Jon looks kind of annoyed. 'No, seriously,' he says, and then he says 'Hey, is that weed?'
They end up getting high together in a park somewhere. 'Go on,' says Brendon, 'tell me more about being a rockstar,' and Jon tells him that fangirls scream his name, and he gets paid to do nothing but make music all day, and he has friends who want to hang out with him all the time, and Brendon giggles at him. He says 'What about you? Are you my imaginary future rockstar boyfriend?' and Jon says, 'Huh, guess Ryan wasn't joking,' and then 'Yes, Brendon, I will be your imaginary future rockstar boyfriend if you'll just go talk to Brent.'
So Brendon's totally not surprised when Jon does the watch-beeping and vanishing thing too. He was probably just made of pot fumes anyway, and yes, Brendon knows how pathetic it is to go smoke up by yourself, which is why he doesn't do it again.
_
The third time it happens is the time Brendon stops thinking he's hallucinating, because he's pretty sure his imagination couldn't come up with the feeling of beard scraping his face and, oh god oh god oh god, a guy's tongue in his mouth.
He gasps and breaks away. The guy who just turned up in Brendon's bedroom and stuck his tongue down Brendon's throat scrubs his hand through his shiny, shiny hair and says, 'So that's what you're turning down. If you don't listen to us.'
Brendon stares at him and licks his lips and oh my god and he says, 'I don't know who you are, but you're totally going to get arrested.'
The guy scowls and says, 'I'm younger than you are.'
'No you're not,' says Brendon. That beard is not the beard of a highschooler. 'You're like twenty-eight.'
The guy looks really annoyed now. 'I'm twenty.'
'That's not younger than me either.'
'I'm from the future.'
Brendon nods. He'd be flailing and yelling what what WHAT? if he could just stop staring at the guy's mouth. The guy grins at him and says, 'So. Talking to Brent,' and oh. Oh fuck. That smile.
_
He goes and talks to Brent.
_
Ryan and Spencer are pretty cool guys. Brendon is so, so determined to impress them, it's insane, he feels like he's on edge all the time. The feeling doesn't go away until five weeks after he's met them, when he's singing harmony for a song during practice, actually getting into it and belting it out, and Ryan suddenly turns and stares at him.
Brendon realises he's been drowning the tune a little bit. Or a lot.
He shuts up and looks down, rubs the back of his neck. 'Sorry,' he says. 'I'm kind of loud. Didn't mean to -'
'Sing something,' says Ryan.
Brendon blinks. Ryan's sort of scary intense when he stares at you like that, though, so he swallows and starts singing. It's the first thing that comes into his head, it's a fucking country song that his mom had on the radio earlier, and he sort of trails off when he realises. Ryan's still staring at him.
'Dude,' says Brent.
'Ryan,' says Spencer. Ryan shoots him a glance, one of their unreadable best-friends-forever-speak things. Then Ryan looks at Brendon.
Brendon swallows. 'I'm -' he says.
'You're our lead singer,' says Ryan. 'As of now. Any questions?' He glances around at Brent and Spencer, a suspicious glare, daring them to say anything.
Brendon shakes his head. 'Nope,' he says. 'No questions.'
Ryan shoots him a small fierce smile. 'Don't keep stuff like that to yourself next time, Brendon, okay?'
The dizzy light-headed feeling Brendon gets lasts all the way home, right until his mom starts demanding to know if he's been with those - 'I'm sure they're nice boys, honey' - again. It turns into something fiercer and smugger then. 'Yeah,' he says, grinning at the floor. 'They're nice.'
He goes over it in his mind over and over when he's lying in bed that night, trying to fix every detail.
The memory of Spencer's smile behind the drum kit tugs at something in his head, but he can't figure out what it is exactly.
_
'So,' says Ryan.
'So,' says Spencer.
'So,' says Jon.
Brendon hides his face behind his fingers. 'Um?' he says. And then, 'Thanks?' He can't quite meet Spencer's eyes. He didn't explain exactly what happened in his memories, he just thought - well, maybe it would happen differently. From this end. Or -
'So I hear I'm really hot,' says Ryan.
'Apparently I'm supposed to be someone's rockstar boyfriend,' says Jon.
'Twenty-eight?' says Spencer.
'I - I jerked off to that for two and a half years,' falls out of Brendon's mouth. 'Until I put it all together. Um. After that it was kind of weird, so I...' He trails off, because saying 'I stopped' would be lying and Brendon tries not to lie to the important people.
The other two are staring at Spencer now. 'You made out with him?' says Ryan disbelievingly. 'He was jailbait.'
Spencer folds his arms. 'He needed convincing.'
'Thanks,' says Brendon again, staring at his feet.
'For fuck's sake,' says Ryan, and then someone sits down next to him on the couch - it's Jon, Brendon can tell by the flip-flops, he's still looking at the floor - Jon sits next to him and puts an arm over his shoulders.
'So,' he says. 'This is the bit where we all have sex.'
Brendon makes a totally embarrassing squeaking noise. 'What?'
'No, seriously,' says Jon, and Brendon's staring-at-the-floor strategy suddenly stops working because Ryan crouches down in front of him and puts his hands on Brendon's knees.
'You should have said something,' he says.
Brendon's face is burning. 'What was I going to say?' he demands as well as he can when he wants to hide. 'Oh, by the way, guys, I'm totally gay for the band?'
'No,' says Spencer, and Brendon looks up. Spencer's standing pretty close. Ryan stays where he is. Jon's hand rubs the back of Brendon's neck. 'Not that. You should have said, by the way guys, I'm totally in love with the band,' and he smiles. 'It's cool. We'd have been cool about that.'
Oh, fuck, that smile. Brendon kept daydreaming about that smile long after he realised who it belonged to.
He licks his lips. 'Then, by the way, guys,' he says, 'I'm totally in love with the band.'
Ryan kisses him first, surging up and pushing him back into Jon's lap. 'Oof,' says Jon, and wraps an arm around Brendon's waist. Then Ryan breaks away, grinning and breathing hard, and it's Spencer instead, and Brendon closes his eyes and it's exactly how he remembers except better, so much better. 'You were my first kiss, you know,' he mumbles against Spencer's mouth, and Ryan repeats, 'Jail. Bait,' and Spencer stops kissing Brendon so he can say, 'Oh, shut up.'
Jon kisses behind Brendon's ear. 'You're gonna be a rockstar,' he says. Brendon can hear the smile, and he turns because he wants to kiss it.
'I totally didn't believe you,' he says when they pause to catch their breath.
'You're going to be famous,' says Spencer.
'You are so fucking gifted,' says Ryan.
'And hot,' agrees Jon.
Brendon starts laughing. 'Guys, guys, it's okay,' he says. 'I'm not in high school anymore -'
and he's really not, is the thing, and how is this his life? Who would ever have guessed that this would be his life?
Jon kisses him again. Spencer kisses Ryan. Brendon thinks that maybe he should go back, too, and talk to his teenage self, but he's got no idea what he'd say at all except Seriously, seriously, you have no idea, it's all going to be so worth it.