Ghost Towns In The Ocean ☀︎ Ryden

6 | alibi

july 2nd

- hello there i'm currently writing a really Really nice chapter of this and holy hell i am enjoying myself i love this fic sooooooo much oh my GOD. i might have gotten overly attached to my flicker, fade characters but who said that was well written this thing here is a MASTERPIECE

anyways also this song is alibi by thirty seconds to mars and it is so beautiful honestly say what you will about jared leto but shit he has a voice and him and his band sure as hell know how to make music

━ we faded faster than the speed of light

It was the guitar that did it, of course. The fact that he wasn't playing the piano when there was a perfectly good one downstairs, and the fact that both of the dogs were missing and were hanging out downstairs with him was even more insufferable because, fuck, heat was supposed to rise.

And it didn't.

Maybe the house was in some weird parallel universe or something, maybe it was upside down but looked right side up, or maybe all of the heating vents on the top floor had broken but something was definitely wrong with everything and the fact that Brendon was playing his own guitar and not the piano was getting on Ryan's nerves for unconventional reasons because it was the piano. William's piano.

And William hadn't known how to play the stupid thing and he had bought it and dragged it home himself; how, Ryan still didn't know, and there it had been, a useless block of wood and keys that sat in their basement and every time William touched it, it just sounded wrong. Over time, he had learned. He had played it more and more and maybe those times it didn't sound so bad but it still sounded wrong and in the end, he seemed too elegant for the instrument. For any instrument, really, it didn't suit him and if you had to play the piano then you had to appreciate rain but William didn't and that might have been the whole problem.

So the sound of a guitar coming from the basement was a very welcome, very appreciated change. A surprising one, but an appreciated one. At first, Ryan couldn't identify the song and he was about to lose it because the only thing he could think of was fucking Coldplay, but it made sense when he hesitated on the edge of the stairs near the basement.

The Cure. Of course, what else would he be playing for the dogs as a private concert? Ryan tiptoed down the carpeted basement stairs that he was seriously thinking about ripping the carpet out of because cold stairs deserved carpet. Not warm ones. At the bottom of the stairs, Ryan was hit by the overwhelming smell of berries that had seemed to soak into the basement, a smell that Ryan reserved to himself that he would burn out if he had to. If Brendon left on a bad note, that basement would go up in flames before Ryan would ever smell berry flavored Trident gum again.

It smelled sort of like cherries. Like fake cherries, jolly rancher cherries, and like the smell of really warm, on the verge of being rotten fruit. But not bad. It was almost a comforting smell, and that mixed with the sound of the guitar, of the gentle strumming, the fingernails connecting with the strings somehow without a pick to hold, all mixed with Brendon's voice that was like the deepest reddest fucking wine, jesus christ.

Ryan stood at the bottom of the stairs, and couldn't help but smile when he saw Bogart and Dottie sitting at Brendon's feet while he sang Pictures of You to them, of all songs to play on the guitar and sing to dogs, Ryan didn't understand why it was that one, but it wasn't a bad song.

"There was nothing in the world that I ever wanted more, than to feel you deep in my heart," Brendon sang, smiling back at Bogart's happy little face. It was, and had to be, of course, at that moment when he became aware of Ryan's presence.