Far Away Love ࿐ Ryden

10

hello everyone i am officially a Permitted Driver and thats the most exciting thing thats ever happened to me and thats all i have to say. enjoy the story.

10 -- [0311]

i ain't gonna let you down, i ain't gonna let you leave me

While Patrick is spending his morning in Pete Wentz's bathroom making conversation with his younger sister and Ryan is riding out a panic attack that's lasted maybe twenty four hours, Brendon Urie is sitting at the hospital.

He's been sitting at the hospital, and he will continue to sit at the hospital for quite some time. And it sucks because he's being treated like he's just a child, even though he's the second oldest. Matt, his older brother, hasn't come to tell him anything. His younger siblings, Caroline, Jameson, and Valerie have been sitting with him all night. Val is leaned against him, half sat in his lap. She's seven, youngest out of all of them, and hadn't even bothered to stay awake. After asking Brendon a few questions about how long they were going to be there and if mom was okay, she had passed out. Jameson, who's eleven, had tried to force himself to stay awake. He had lost his steam around two in the morning, and had dozed with his head back against the wall until the sun rose again.

Caroline has been awake the whole time, sitting two seats away from Brendon, her eyes focused clearly on the wall. Her and Brendon are the closest to each other. They know most of each other's secrets and tell each other what there is to tell. They advise each other and help each other out but tonight they haven't spoken at all. Caroline is fourteen, only three years off from Brendon's age, and a freshman in a private school that Brendon had managed to avoid by promising his parents that he'd go to mass, bible study, and his youth group before and after school every day. When they had agreed to it, Brendon had been so wildly excited to go to a public high school that he hadn't even considered how miserable his parents' ridiculous religion would make him.

And then his mom just had to get pregnant again because that's what Mormons do, apparently, they just fuck a lot and they're always fertile all the time and Brendon's been in so many hospital waiting rooms except nothing has usually taken this long. Except this time, something is completely wrong and both him and Caroline know it for sure. Neither of them just care to admit it.

The thing is, Brendon's pissed. The lights in this waiting room are way too bright and he's pretty sure that he's had a migraine for the past, like, sixteen hours and he's hungry as hell and he can't move or pace around like usual because his little sister is passed out on top of him and his shoes are still sort of radiating the smell of Ryan's puke and he would give anything to just go to the damn bathroom and clean them again and dry them in the hand dryer so he can stop smelling Ryan Ross's fucking guts.

This is too much.

Brendon pushes Val off of him which gets him a look from Caroline but she hasn't had to deal with this, and as his youngest sister wakes up and Jameson snaps out of his dozing daze, Brendo stands up and stretches. All three of his siblings watch him closely as he cracks his knuckles, neck, elbows, back, and knees, and finally turns to them.

"I'm going to wash my shoes." No one replies to him and Brendon storms off to the bathrooms, dirty, puke stained shoelaces dragging on the floor behind him. In the brightly lit stalled restroom, Brendon stares at himself for a good while in the mirror. His skin is pale and breaking out a bit, great, it's a good day to look like the seventh grade acne phase is back to haunt him, and his hair is greasy and looks flat and long around his face, and the bags under his eyes are dark and deep.

He moves in a daze as he takes off his shoes and puts them on the sink counter. He can feel the cold, tiled bathroom floor through the holes in his socks. This doesn't feel right at all. Those gross, stained, beat up white Converse are glaring at him and Brendon doesn't want to think about Ryan right now but he does anyways, thinks about how Ryan's got a wild crush on him and it's not like he's being vain, he can just tell. And the problem is, Brendon likes Ryan. Brendon thinks that Ryan's cute and Ryan is fun to spend time with and Ryan's smart and it's Ryan who Brendon's mind turns to while he washes puke off of his shoes in the sink of the bathroom at the hospital.