Work Text:
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. GarageBand was giving him a headache, and when he tried sounding stuff out on his guitar, it all sounded wrong. Hotel room acoustics: too much big empty space with no one else in it, too many soft, luxurious surfaces.
But now that Patrick was sitting in the bathtub with a guitar in his lap--in the dark, no less--he was starting to feel the difference between making a blanket fort and lying on your living room floor with a towel over your head. The difference was mostly in the area of feeling like an idiot. He played a couple of tentative chords, anyway, and they echoed back from the tile and glass, sounding hard-edged and hollow and a little claustrophobic.
He was contemplating getting back out of the bathtub, giving up and going to bed--and, huh, the covers he'd stripped off the bed and thrown down in the bathtub were probably wet now, weren't they--when he heard the door open. Pete sounded confused when he called out, "Patrick?"
"I'm--" Patrick called back automatically, then stopped short. In the bathroom, in the dark, with the door closed, with a guitar.
But Pete was outside the bathroom door before Patrick could think of a way to finish that aborted sentence. He hesitated just long enough to say, "Trick?" and then opened the door, coming in with a burst of incandescent light.
His face lit up in a grin. "Oh, hey, cool!"
Patrick smiled helplessly back, watching in silence as Pete came over and crawled into the bathtub with him, sitting at the opposite end and tangling their legs together, squirming around to make himself comfortable on top of the piled-up blanket.
"When I was in, like, first grade, the teacher had this bathtub in the corner of the room by the books and it was full of pillows, and you could sit in there as long as you were reading a book. Book tub. Is this the guitar tub? Here, gimme that."
Patrick handed over the guitar, bemused, and Pete squirmed again and stretched, slumping back against the end of the tub and settling his feet on Patrick's stomach. Patrick's hands settled automatically on Pete's ankles, thumbs tracing symmetrical bumps of bone. "What am I supposed to play, then? You're gonna get me kicked out."
Pete snorted and nudged Patrick with his foot. "You play the pipes, man. Come on, sing for me."
Pete started playing, and Patrick shook his head as he recognized the song, but Pete was smiling, and he knew he was smiling back. When he opened his mouth and started singing, he didn't feel like an idiot at all.