Chapter Text
First Christmas
“Fuck no,” Patrick says.
“Patrick,” Ethan says. “C’mon, Rickster. Seriously. I mean it.”
“I mean it,” Patrick says. “What about ‘fuck no’ sounded like I don’t mean it?”
“No, but like, I mean it mean it. C’mon, don’t be a baby about this!”
“You’re calling me the baby? You’re the one whining.”
“Look, what are you going to do instead?”
“Literally anything,” Patrick replies. “Literally anything.”
“If you don’t go, Mom won’t go, and if Mom won’t go, then Annie and I will have to split up the day in this stupid awkward way. Whereas if you go, Mom will go, and then I can just sit at home all day in boxers watching football.”
“Oh, great,” Patrick says flatly. “Truly the spirit of Christmas. You’ll be super-comfy and it’ll just be the rest of us having to make fucking small talk with the fucking Wentzes. You married them, not me.”
“I only married one of them,” Ethan grumbles.
“Yeah, but she came with an entire boatload of other people attached to her.”
“You’re the only one who has an issue with Annie’s family,” Ethan points out.
Patrick doesn’t have an issue with Annie’s family, he has an issue with this assessment. “I don’t have an issue with her family.”
“They’re all nice people.”
“I never said they weren’t nice.”
“Then why can’t you come to Christmas dinner at our house with everyone else?”
“Because…” Patrick considers an acceptable response. “I don’t like new people.” That, he thinks, is an accurate enough characterization of himself not to be challenged.
Unfortunately, Ethan knows him well enough to challenge it. “Is this about Pete?”
Patrick’s supposed to be working. It’s slow, and also Patrick’s the manager, so it’s not like there’s anyone to really yell at him. But Patrick had been making a big show out of restocking the pastry case. Now he drops a chocolate croissant to the ground. He picks it up, throws it away, and says calmly, “Who’s Pete?”
Ethan gives him an unimpressed look. “Annie’s brother Pete.”
“Ohhhhh,” Patrick says. He screws up his face in concentration, as if trying to place Pete’s name with a face. “Pete. I forgot about him.”
“Uh-huh,” says Ethan.
“How is ol’ Pete?” Patrick asks.
“Listen, I don’t know what the dude did to you—”
“He didn’t do anything to me,” Patrick protests.
“Do I need to kick his ass?”
“Oh, my God,” Patrick says, mortified. “Oh, my God, no.”
“Then there’s no reason you can’t come to Christmas dinner and pretend to be a polite little motherfucker for, like, two hours so I can have a pleasant Christmas. Is there?” Ethan gives him a smile that’s more like the gritting of his teeth.
***
“Oh,” Pete says. “Right, right, right. Cool, cool, cool.”
“Pete,” Annie says.
“No, it’s cool. That’s cool. Of course it’s awesome for you that you get along with your mother-in-law so well, like, they’re supposed to be monsters, right?”
“I think that’s just in the movies,” says Annie.
“No, I’m pretty sure a lot of people have monstrous mothers-in-law,” Pete replies. “Then again, that’s exactly what I would think, because I write for the movies.”
“Exactly,” Annie agrees pointedly. “Look, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable, I don’t want you to feel like you’re not welcome, of course you’re welcome, you’re my big brother and I wouldn’t want anything but—”
“Of course I feel welcome, Annie,” Pete cuts her off. Right as a flashy red Porsche cuts him off, but what the hell, they’re all just sitting in endless traffic on the 405 anyway.
“Okay,” Annie says. “So you’re not going to come up with some kind of excuse not to show up, right? Because Mom would get on a plane to drag you back here and that would ruin Christmas, okay?”
“I’m aware,” Pete says.
“Yeah, don’t sound so enthusiastic about having to spend Christmas with your family,” says Annie.
“No, I am,” Pete says. “I’m enthusiastic. This is how I sound when I get enthusiastic. Look, this is L.A. for you, what are you going to do, we all sound like this, we’re all jaded and unmoved by the extraordinary wonder of life.”
“Uh-huh,” says Annie. “Great. Listen, I think Ethan’s little brother Patrick is going to be there, too. That’s not going to be a problem, right?”
Pete’s foot slips from the brake to the gas pedal and he rear-ends the stupid Porsche in front of him.
***
Patrick Stump met Pete Wentz when his older brother Ethan married Pete’s younger sister Annie. In theory, Patrick had no problem with any of this. They should have just stood next to each other in their matching tuxedoes and smiled for pictures and honestly, there was no reason for them to exchange two words with each other.
Of course, there was the fact that Pete Wentz was achingly, infuriatingly hot and Patrick thought he could have done with a little less of just throw your arms over his shoulders, that’s it, really lean into each other, we’ve got to get everyone into the photo. But, you know, that was just inconvenient lust and so what if Patrick had never seen anyone as stupidly hot as Pete Wentz in real life, that was not the reason he hated Pete Wentz, that would be a stupid reason to hate Pete Wentz. He didn’t even hate Pete Wentz for his stupidly pretty smile, somehow even more attractive than the rest of him, and in Patrick’s (meager) experience, hot people seldom got hotter when they smiled, like, usually hot people had to stay miserable and pouting to be actually hot. But whatever, again, that wasn’t why Patrick hated Pete Wentz.
He hated Pete Wentz because Pete Wentz was a grade A, top-notch asshole who had been rude to Patrick every time he opened his mouth. Rude about Patrick’s age (like Patrick could help that!), rude about Patrick’s sideburns, rude about Patrick’s mouth, rude about Patrick’s music (he had never even heard Patrick’s music). He was just rude the entire time, every statement he made, and Patrick had no clue why, what could he possibly have done to piss Pete Wentz off?
Anyway, he made it through the wedding thinking, Thank God, I never have to see that dickhead again, and now here he was, on Christmas fucking Day, in theory the happiest day on the entire calendar, getting ready to see that dickhead again.
Fuck his life.
***
Pete tries to come up with any possible way he can get out of Christmas dinner at Annie’s, but there is none that would work. First of all, he’s already in Chicago, so he can’t even pretend that his flight has been canceled or something. Once he got on the plane, he’d pretty much sealed his fate at this Christmas dinner. But he had to get on the plane, Annie had been right, their mom would definitely have flown out and dragged him to Chicago otherwise.
Maybe, Pete thinks hopefully on Christmas Eve, he’ll get food poisoning overnight, wake up so sick he definitely can’t go to Christmas dinner. If there’s a Santa, Pete presents him with this wish.
It doesn’t work. Pete wakes up on Christmas morning hale and hearty. And it’s no good pretending to be sick, that would only make things worse, layer guilt onto the whole affair when someone inevitably volunteers to stay back from dinner with him. If he had actually been sick, well, what could there have been to feel guilty about? But faking it, well, that would definitely come with the guilt.
So he sits with his mom and dad on Christmas morning and opens presents and actually, it’s nice, until his mom says, “Okay, time to get dressed to go to Annie and Ethan’s!”
And Pete’s stomach sinks.
But what can he say? He can’t possibly say, Hey, Mom, have you noticed that Ethan’s little brother, who is basically jailbait, is the hottest creature in the universe and I met him a grand total of once and keep waking up from wet dreams about his mouth and he absolutely despises me and it’s super-depressing to me to be reminded how easy it is for perfect creatures to despise me?
Yeah, he can’t say that.
So he gets dressed and he goes to Annie and Ethan’s.
***
Ethan is in a goddamn tie when he opens the door for Patrick, and Patrick says, “I thought the whole point of this was you got to wear boxers all day.”
“I thought so, too,” Ethan says, looking chagrined, “but then Annie said we have to get dressed up because it’s Christmas.”
Patrick looks down at what he’s wearing. He’s pretty sure the sweatpants are clean. At least he threw an argyle sweater on over the old, worn-out Bowie t-shirt he’d spent the morning in.
Ethan says, “It’s okay. You look great.” He pauses, then adds, “I don’t know, should I warn you that Pete showed up in leather pants?”
Patrick had been balancing a stack of gifts. At this the first one decides to slide off and plop into the snow. “Why,” he says, as he tries to rescue it without dropping the rest, “would I give a fuck what Pete Wentz is wearing?” It’s a lost cause. Every single gift somehow manages to end up in the snow.
He and Ethan stand staring down at the mess.
And then stupid fucking Pete Wentz says, “Oh, wow, what happened here? Looks like you could use some help.”
“Nope,” Patrick says firmly, picking up sodden gifts, snow scattered across crooked bows Patrick had attempted to stick on. “We’re all good here. We are perfect.”
“Oh, yeah,” Pete says, “I figured, I usually try to make sure all my gifts end up in the snow first, too.”
“Hey, Pete,” Ethan says heartily, “I think Annie said she needed some help with the—”
“Obviously I didn’t try to drop my gifts in the snow, asshole,” Patrick snaps at Pete Wentz, and starts shoving gifts at him.
Pete, startled, holds out his hands to accept the sudden onslaught.
“Who the fuck tries to put their gifts in the snow, like, what the fuck did you think was going to be helped by you being all, ‘oh, wow, Patrick, looks like you dropped your gifts in the snow,’ like I didn’t already know?” Patrick shoves the last gift at him.
He is wearing leather pants, the fucking asshole.
Pete Wentz gapes at him from over the top of the stack of presents with his wide brown eyes and says, “Did you wrap these yourself?”
“Fuck you,” Patrick says, and stalks past him into the house.
***
“You should apologize to him,” Pete’s mom hisses at him, as he’s helpfully arranging Patrick’s bedraggled gifts under the tree.
“I didn’t even do anything to him,” Pete responds sulkily. “I swear to God, I offered to help him pick up the gifts, and he just went off on me.”
“You embarrassed him,” Pete’s mom accuses.
“By doing what,” Pete demands. “He just doesn’t like me, it’s fine, he just hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“I am pretty sure he hates me, Mom, and please let’s just drop it because it’s Christmas and it’s the happiest day of the year, right?”
“Pete—”
“Thank you, Mom, truly the gift of always listening to your child is the best gift I could have received this Christmas,” Pete says, just as Annie calls, “Dinner’s served!”
Patrick has been placed at the opposite end of the table from Pete, which suits Pete just fine, but it’s not like it’s a very big table, so it’s noticeable that one part of it is scowling at him unhappily whenever he gets the opportunity. Pete doesn’t know what to do about that so he throws himself into making determinedly cheerful conversation, rattling his way through every comical L.A. story he can remember. A lot of them, unfortunately, involve L.A. traffic, which means his mom feels compelled to say, “Pete got in an accident on the highway out there.”
“Oh, no,” Patrick and Ethan’s mom Olivia says, frowning in concern as she looks at him. “Were you alright?”
Pete can’t help that he glances at Patrick, who he catches, for once, not glaring at him, but just looking at him. Maybe concerned for his well-being? The thought is hilarious. At any rate, as soon as he catches Pete looking at him, he drops his gaze back to his plate.
Pete says, looking back at Olivia, “I’m fine. It was very minor. I think I was going, like, five miles an hour.”
“L.A. traffic,” his mother says wisely. “It’s awful. Peter and I went out there to visit Pete and it was just horrendous. Wasn’t it, Peter?”
“Horrendous,” his father agrees.
“And it’s like, we’re from Chicago, it’s not like we live in the middle of nowhere with no traffic, but L.A. traffic.” His mother shakes his head.
Pete says, “I am really sad I got us started on this topic of conversation, nobody wants to spend all Christmas Day talking about traffic. Did you know that opossums have two vaginas?”
“This is not a better topic of conversation, Pete,” Annie says, looking appalled.
“No,” Patrick says, startling Pete by actually speaking. “I want to hear about these two vaginas. How come they have two vaginas?”
Pete wishes he knew the answer to this. He doesn’t know why he suddenly blurted that out. Patrick has a pair of sky-blue eyes that Pete can’t get over and he wishes he could just sit and stare into them and he doesn’t know why he’s expected to be making conversation instead. He hears himself say, “The male opossums have a bifurcated penis.”
“Pete,” his mother scolds him.
Patrick says thoughtfully, “Huh,” and takes a bite of his mashed potatoes and keeps looking inscrutably at Pete.
Ethan says, “Can you believe the price of gas right now?”
And everyone is very relieved by this new topic of conversation.
Patrick is still looking at Pete like he doesn’t know what to think.
Pete winks at him.
Wrong move.
Patrick frowns and goes back to his plate fixedly.
***
There’s a little firepit area in the back corner of his brother’s backyard and Patrick’s huddled by it in the freezing cold, wishing there was a fire lit, when Pete Wentz comes around the corner of the garage, spots him sitting there, and stops dead.
Patrick cannot believe his luck. His luck cannot possibly be this bad. Like, Pete’s already shown him up with smartly wrapped presents worth ridiculous amounts of money that Annie and Ethan ooh’ed and aah’ed over and everybody had to pretend to like Patrick’s two-for-ten-bucks candles that he grabbed off the shelf at CVS because, like, he’s not a fancy Hollywood screenwriter, he’s a barista, sue him. Anyway, the point was, did Pete have to out-spend everybody so extravagantly and then have his gifts professionally gift-wrapped by goddamn Martha Stewart or whatever? The answer was no, he did not, and yet he did, because he’s Pete Wentz.
And now he’s invading the tiny, freezing corner that Patrick retreated to precisely because it didn’t have a Pete Wentz in it, damn it.
“Are you fucking stalking me?” Patrick demands.
“No,” Pete says. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be out here. What are you doing out here?”
“Obviously hiding,” Patrick retorts. “Why the fuck else would I be sitting here in the freezing cold?”
“You might be smoking,” Pete offers.
“I don’t smoke.”
Pete hesitates.
Patrick says suspiciously, “Do you smoke?”
“No,” Pete says. “Except for when I’m having a nervous breakdown. Do you mind if I smoke?”
Patrick actually does mind, he has asthma, but he understands the feeling of having a nervous breakdown, so he says reluctantly, “It’s fine. Blow the smoke away from me.”
Pete fumbles out a cigarette and lights it clumsily and takes a drag and coughs a little over it. Patrick thinks he actually doesn’t really smoke. Which is a stupid thing to lie about. He probably really was stalking Patrick. Patrick watches Pete smoke badly and says, “How many cigarettes have you had in your life?”
“This is my third,” Pete says, and coughs again. “I’m really trying to make it a habit.”
“Why? It is literally deadly.”
“Look,” Pete says, “people say it’s supposed to be calming. And people will tell you that my anxiety isn’t actually life-affirming. Between that and the cigarettes, it’s a toss-up as to which is worse for me.”
Patrick doesn’t know what to make of this. He’s unaccustomed to this flatly human version of Pete Wentz. “Huh,” he says. “I didn’t know big-deal L.A. screenwriters had anxiety.”
Pete laughs without amusement. “Cookie jar, everybody in L.A. has anxiety.”
“I don’t know what you just called me, but don’t do it again,” Patrick orders.
“Sorry,” says Pete, and looks over at Patrick. His cigarette is still glowing between his fingers but he’s not smoking it any longer. He seems to have forgotten all about it. Pete says, “I feel like I should have smuggled a six-pack out here or something.”
“Oh, because I’m not old enough to drink?” Patrick rejoins hotly.
“No,” Pete says, “because—Are you not old enough to drink? Christ, seriously?”
“Oh, great, let’s go over all this again, how I’m a mere babe in the woods or whatever the fuck.”
Pete takes a shaky drag on the cigarette. “We’ve been over this before?”
“At the wedding, I believe you called me ‘young master Patrick’ the entire time.”
There’s a moment of silence. Pete says, “That was a joke.”
Patrick says, “Ha ha.”
There’s more silence.
Patrick says, “Do you have any more opossum facts you want to share?”
“The two vagina thing is true,” Pete says, sounding offended that Patrick might doubt him.
Patrick rolls his eyes. “Whatever. And the bifurcated penis thing, too?”
“Why would I make that up?”
“I don’t know, why are you going around looking at opossum penises?”
“I’m not looking at opossum penises, obviously I watched some kind of nature documentary,” Pete retorts.
Pete looks miffed and Patrick feels satisfied that he has the upper hand. He smirks at him and says, “Tell me the truth, was it weird porn? Do you have a weird opossum kink? Is that how they do it in L.A.?”
Patrick’s mom calls, “Patrick? Patrick! Are you out here?”
Pete starts and drops his cigarette in the snow, muttering, “Shit.”
“It’s not your mom,” Patrick says, amused. “She’s not going to yell at you for smoking.”
“Shh,” Pete hisses at him, “I’m not supposed to be smoking.”
“You know you smell like smoke, right?”
“Maybe I’ll blame you,” Pete mutters.
“I don’t smoke. I can’t smoke. It would be terrible for my asthma.”
“Oh, you’re both out here,” Patrick’s mom says cheerfully, like Patrick’s always hanging out with Pete and she expects to find them together. “Rick, I was looking for you because we’re putting the food away and I told Annie that she simply had to give a bunch of it to you because God knows you’ll starve otherwise, come and tell her which of the leftovers you’d prefer.”
Great, Patrick had finally felt like he was winning a conversation with Pete Wentz and now his mom had to come out and act like he’s twelve years old and can’t feed himself. “Mom, I don’t need—”
“Left to his own devices, he’ll survive on mac-and-cheese and ramen noodles,” his mom confides in Pete Wentz.
Who’s back to looking coolly mocking of him instead of disgruntled. He turns those derisive eyes onto Patrick and says, “Hey, nothing wrong with that.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Patrick grumbles, “I’m sure L.A. is all caviar and champagne.” He stomps past Pete on his way to the house.
“And pate!” Pete calls after him, sounding like he’s laughing.
Patrick would totally throw a middle finger back at him, except that he’s walking right next to his mom, who’s already berating him about not being nice enough to fucking Pete Wentz.
Thank God Christmas is finally over.