petekey smut

The League of Extraordinary Bottle-Dodgers

"I think Ray's going try to punch me in the face one of these days," Pete commented, dumping all of the sugar packets out of their little holder onto the Formica tabletop.

"Try to?" Mikey asked.

Mikey had faith in Ray's ability to bring the pain if anyone ever managed to get him pissed enough. He was also developing a fair amount of faith in Pete's superhuman ability to piss Ray off, so it was pretty much a match made in... somewhere with a lot of face-punching potential.

"Well, I can run really fast," Pete confided with an evil grin. (Maybe more of a Chaotic Neutral grin.) He was building a rough person-shape out of Splenda and brown sugar packets on the café table while Mikey started into his third cup of coffee.

Bottomless cups of coffee were the best invention ever, even if the café's sole waitress had started giving them pointed looks after they'd finished their pancakes and just chilled for a while. Well, they'd paid and it wasn't like there was anyone else who wanted their little booth yet. Mikey just kept forgetting to leave, was the thing; he was distracted by stuff like the possibility of more coffee, and watching Pete's hands.

Pete's nails were painted black today, which reminded Mikey of Frank. It looked pretty cool despite the polish being chipped all to hell, or maybe because of it, and it made Mikey wonder how some guys could get away with wearing nail polish and buying hair product in bulk and carrying more make-up in their tour bags than Mikey had owned in his whole life, even during the years when he'd still been pretending that his self matched with his body. But that line of thought was the way of tension headaches and un-fun times, so Mikey let it go.

(He'd talked to Gerard about it once though, the make-up thing. He wound up putting so much effort into making faces like he had understood what the hell Gee was talking about after the first five minutes that he'd actually missed most of the conversation. His brother was really smart, but not always super user-friendly.)

"Whatcha building?" Mikey asked, nodding at Pete's sugar-guy, who had sprouted a creamer top hat and a stir stick flag since the last time Mikey had looked.

Pete beamed like he'd just been waiting for Mikey to ask. "Meet the newest member of the gang: Sweetener Little Dude."

Mikey snorted loudly enough that the waitress glanced up from her paper. "His name's Sugar Ray Leonard," Mikey decided, "He's a total badass."

Pete laughed, his hair falling in his eyes, and grabbed Mikey's ankle under the table with his feet. Mikey tried to steal his shoe, cheeks aching a little with all the smiling he'd been doing.

He really fucking liked Pete.

And he got it, he did, all the stuff that Gerard and Ray said about being careful and not putting himself out there to get hurt and blah blah blah. But, like, they told him to ignore the people who hated him because of who he was and then they told him to be careful around the people who liked him because of it, and what they didn't get was that he would be pretty lonely playing that game. There weren't too many people who didn't have an opinion about him one way or the other.

Except maybe Bob, whose strongest opinions usually boiled down to "No, Frank, you can't" and "No, Gerard, I won't". Bob was so cool.

"Do you seriously have to leave?" Pete asked, hitting him with the patent heartbreak eyes (which had been rendered somewhat less effective since Pete had explained in enthusiastic detail how he did it).

"Mm," said Mikey. "We're supposed to do an interview thing."

"I know how much you love those," Pete said, hooking his sneaker around Mikey's heel and leaving it there. Holding feet instead of hands.