#microficverse

Of the ficlets I’ve written in this universe, so far, I’d say this is the earliest in the timeline. (Also, @andsoshepaints just requested the same one, so this is for both of you!) (Also also, this is not as ‘micro’ as intended.)

15. Trembling hands

Patrick was pretty sure he was gonna puke. He was sweating and his vision had gone a little blurry - and he couldn’t blame either on the heat or the fact he’d taken his glasses off. He’d made a dignity dash down the rear steps of the stage and propped himself against the back wall of the restroom trailer, taking deep, careful breaths.

It’s something you ate, it’s something you ate, it’s something you ate.

46. Shimmer

Evenings were always the best time at Warped, as far as Joe was concerned. The heat of the day would begin to fade and the lights hanging in strings around the fences and the merch tents would shimmer in the lingering warmth rising from the asphalt. The roof of the bus, their favourite place to hang out, by now, would get so hot they’d have to bring up towels to sit on. They’d found you could get up through the skylight, too, if you climbed on Pete and Charlie’s bunks and lifted yourself through, which meant Patrick no longer had to dangle between the trailer and the bus and risk death by falling on to the hitch.

Tonight, Patrick was sprawled with his head resting on Joe’s leg as Joe sat back, propped on one hand, smoking idly, careful to lift his chin and exhale away from them as much as possible. They didn’t have many dates left, on this tour. In less than a week, it’d be over and they’d be back in Chicago. It’d be like leaving summer camp with promises to keep in touch with all the kids they’d made friends with, knowing they probably wouldn’t.

39. is Accursed, which @awake-atnight cheekily also asked for, for her second picks.

This is set before the last one.

“Dammit!” Patrick hissed, pushing at Joe’s chest until he’d clumsily knelt back on his heels and done his jeans back up, while Patrick wriggled to yank his own pants back to decency. They’d both heard the steps bounding up the bus’s stairs, and nobody bounded like that, except - 

“Yo! How’s it going homies?” Pete was grinning as he yanked aside the bunk curtain. Joe was pretending to get something out of the cubby hole at the foot up the bunk, carefully angled so Pete could only see him from behind, while Patrick sat up and dropped his cap into his lap nonchalantly. “Busy?”

“Nope,” Joe muttered, pointedly, “never busy around here.”

“Great, well, I was thinking that maybe tonight we can get Ken to stop the bus on the way through town somewhere, pick up a couple of pizzas and do a movie night, kind of? We’ve spent a bunch of time hanging out with everyone else, and I figured maybe we could do some band hangs, or whatever.”

Patrick glanced at Joe, wondering how long he could spend pretending to rifle through a cupboard smaller than the glove compartment in his car, and shrugged. “Uh, yeah, sure. Sure, Pete, that sounds good.”

“Sweet, I’ll go find Andy.”

“He’s probably, like, still sitting at the last venue, wondering where everyone is...”

Pete winked and finger gunned them, “I’m on it.”

They waited just long enough for the bus door to click closed before Joe finally turned and flopped onto the mattress beside him.

“Fuck. This.”

Laughing a little, Patrick caught his fingers in Joe’s hair, gently, and rubbed affectionately with his thumb. “The time will come.”

“Yeah, well, it feels like I’ll never actually get to, on this accursed fucking tour!”

“It’s not like you expected this to be easy, right?”

“No, but I feel like two M&Ms trying to bone in a candy tube.”

Patrick chuckled and bit his lip, quietly pleased by the fact that Joe so eager to progress their two-week old and still-sort-of-secret relationship, even if it meant sneaking around to find a time when all eleven other members of their tour party were out, and more instances of blue balls than his grandma’s bingo nights.

“Our options are kind of limited, y’know? Either we keep trying until it works out, or we stop caring what people think. God knows Pete didn’t care about people knowing he had someone in his bunk, two days ago.”

For a moment, Joe remained face down on Patrick’s comforter, wedged between his thigh and the side of the bus, then he pushed himself up onto his elbows, frowning pensively. “Well, I mean, like... I don’t care if they know. I thought you did...”

“Well, not really, I just -”

Sunbathing, candles and accost. I know you don’t ship Patroh, so I’ve tried to make this one gen-ish, although it’s set in the same universe as the others. It’s set very early in the tour, before the other fics posted so far.

There was a highway running way too close to today’s venue, in Joe’s opinion. It made the air thick in the heat and irritated his lungs as he ran around on stage, taking great gulps of it in his leaps. It was utterly gross and he’d found himself complaining to at least three different Warped staff about the choice of venue, during the day. He probably sounded like an entitled dick, but he was pretty sure he was entitled to air to breathe, like it was a basic human right or something.

He didn’t bother changing after the set, either, he just peeled off his soggy shirt and flopped down onto the grass outside the bus to let himself gently roast in the southern heat. The dry, yellow grass prickled at his back and somewhere a generator was whirring gratingly. This was totally not The Life.

“Sunbathing?” Patrick’s voice asked, as he dropped onto the ground beside him.

Joe opened his eyes to squint at him in the bright afternoon light. His cap was pulled low over his face, sweaty, reddish strands sticking out from beneath it, stuck to his forehead and cheeks; his shirtsleeves were unrolled to protect the pale skin on his arms; still, he looked pink in the face and faintly flustered. “Yeah, bathing in my own sweat,” he snorted. “It’s actually pretty gross and I think I’m lying on a bug’s nest.”

“I am not designed for this,” Patrick nodded resignedly, tugging at the shirt sticking to his belly and shaking some air in to cool down.

“I’m like, dreaming of a Chicago winter, right now, dude. I will take my car buried in, like, six feet of snow any day of the week, rather than this crap.”

“You’re a Floridian, shouldn’t you be able to deal with it?”

“Don’t you curse at me, jerk. Floridian! How dare you?”

Patrick grinned and dropped a handful of dead grass on Joe’s face in response.

For a little while, they sat, not quite enjoying the weather, but tolerating it peacefully together, watching the rest of their tour mates wandering around in varying degrees of misery and sweaty disarray. There was a distinct solidarity with the My Chem boys, their fellow Not Southerners, watching Gee stoically remain in his stage jacket in 102°F heat, his make up smearing itself into the overheated redness of his cheeks as he dragged on a cigarette in the thinnest sliver of shade on the site.

But it was Frank who strolled over to them, his hair plastered to his face with either sweat or pomade, the remnants of black smudged all around his eyes and down his face.

“Hey,” Patrick said, grinning up at him and giving his habitual half-wave. “How’s it going?”

“I’m melting like a fucking candle, man,” Frank told him grimly. “You seen Pete?”

“Pete?” Joe asked, opening one eye to peer up at him curiously. “Like. Our Pete?”

Frank frowned and glanced around them shiftily, shrugging. “Well, yeah - is he around?”

Patrick glanced at Joe pointedly. “He’s on the bus, I think.”

“If not, look for the horde of screaming girls if you feel like getting accosted,” Joe offered, watching as Frank nodded a thoughtful thanks and made his way to the door.

“Hey, you don’t… you don’t think…?” Patrick asked, under his breath.

The splutter of laughter slipped from Joe’s lips before he could stop it. “Seriously?”

“Well, I mean… stranger things have happened.”

Joe scrunched up his nose and grinned at the thought. “It can’t happen, dude. It’d be like dividing by emo.”

The air had just enough chill in it that Joe zipped up his hoodie as he settled down on the roof of the bus, then turned to reach down and help pull Patrick up after him. In the distance, the little twinkling string lights of the arena flickered like birthday candles in the warm air rising from hotdog stands and the body heat of thousands of kids bouncing and writhing in front of the stage.

“Thanks,” Patrick groaned, heaving himself clumsily off the top of the gear trailer. It was almost too far from the coach for him to reach, his legs flailing a little as he wriggled, jeans riding down until he looked like a labourer.

Joe just grinned and patted his butt companionably, then waited for him to push himself on to his knees and haul his pants back up, grumbling.

Patrick settled down next to him, folding his legs in such a way that one knee rested on Joe’s thigh, tucking his hands around his ankles and drumming to a distant tune with his thumbs. Joe just propped himself back on his hands, his smile even broader, and enjoyed the moment. The scent of fresh donuts and fried onions drifted across the field to their enclosure with the rumbling of the bassline on an unidentified song. Night was already falling and the sky had taken on a two-toned cerulean-indigo tint, the first silvery white sparks of stars blinking into place as the light faded enough to expose them.

“This is pretty sweet, right?” he said, after a few minutes of contemplation and internal debate, popping the ringpull on a can of crappy beer that he’d stuffed in his hoodie pocket, and producing a Sprite for Patrick from his other one.

Nodding thoughtfully, Patrick cast him half a grin and took the can, tapping the top with his fingertips. “Yeah.”

It wasn’t the first beer Joe had had that day, so he sat up feeling confident and dropped a casual arm around his shoulders. “And I mean, like, you know the best part, right?”

“Uh - ?”

He reached out his spare hand and tugged Patrick’s hat off, leaning in. “I’m pretty sure it’s dark enough than nobody’s gonna see if I do this.”

It could have been a smooth move. It almost felt like one, save for the flailing as Patrick’s can slipped from his fingers and sloshed first into his lap before rolling out of their reach and through the rooftop vent, bouncing directly into Joe’s bunk, where it emptied its contents into his bedding.

“Oh - shit, I’m sorry -” Patrick gasped, leaning down to gaze into the half-lit bus, as Joe slumped back into a giggling heap beside him.

Prompt: Silent fury

“Uh-oh,” Andy winced and slid down on the bus couch, lifting his comic a little higher, hoping to go unnoticed and avoid the crossfire. Standing at the bunk room door was Patrick, wearing only his boxers, a crumpled day-old (maybe week-old) t-shirt and a hastily dragged on bingo cap, fists clenched at his sides in silent fury.

Joe almost fell over himself in his scramble to get out from behind the table, where he’d been shovelling cereal into his mouth, sending the milk slopping over the rim of the dish and half-tumbling down the stairs to the door, squawking, “IT WAS PETE! IT WASN’T ME, IT WAS PETE! I PROMISE, DUDE!”

Patrick’s eyes narrowed and his lip pushed out in a tight, disgruntled pout. “WELL, ONE OF YOU’S GOING TO FUCKING DIE AND I DON’T CARE WHO IT IS, RIGHT NOW!” he bellowed after him. He paused, casting Andy a dark look, muttering, “I hate that fucking website!” Then turned on his socked heel, slamming the door behind himself.

Andy cast a side-long glance at the kitchen cupboard Pete was curled up in, just out of Patrick’s un-spectacled visual range. “I warned you.”

Hit me up with numbers and words from the list here.

You can read the original batch here.