Chapter Text
Patrick had this soft, sweet, lovely feeling, heavy with desire and light with adoration, and he loses it all at once, all in an instant, and an instinct kicks in that he always knew he had but he never acted on until that moment.
Pete snarls, “Oh, you fucking asshole—” and goes to lean toward the hipster dude and Patrick pushes him back and shoves Spot onto his lap and puts himself right in front of them, between them and this wizard.
“We’re not doing this,” Patrick says sharply.
The hipster dude looks amused. “Oh, we’re not?”
“Patrick,” Pete says, struggling a little bit, trying to move out from behind him.
“Stay back there,” Patrick snaps at him, and turns back to the wizard. “No. We’re not.”
“Oh, good, so you’re giving me the dragon?”
“Fuck you,” spits out Patrick.
“See, that doesn’t sound like someone who just learned a very valuable and important lesson about what happens when you cross me,” says the wizard, mildly but with a threat underneath, present in the way he gazes heavily at Patrick.
“I have a dragon you care about so little you want to kill him, and you tried to take away someone I love and can’t imagine living without,” Patrick retorts. “That’s not an even exchange.”
“An even exchange wasn’t my intention,” the wizard replies lightly.
“We’re not giving you Spot,” says Patrick.
“Then I’ll take Pete,” says the wizard.
“No, you won’t,” says Patrick.
“Then I’ll take you,” says the wizard.
Patrick says nothing.
Pete says, “No, wait, what the fuck, no,” and scrambles out past Patrick. “You’re out of your fucking mind,” he bites at him, and then looks at the wizard. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You stole my dragon—”
“He was given to us,” Pete says, “probably because you were going to kill him. What’s wrong with you? He’s a dragon! Why would you fucking kill a dragon? Dragons are awesome! How often do you see a dragon?”
“Exactly,” the wizard responds icily. “Precisely why his organs are so valuable for my spells.”
“That’s really creepy,” Pete says, “and you should stop that. You’ve got issues, man.”
“Silence!” thunders the wizard.
“You’re the one making all the noise,” says Pete, “you’ve got these machines beeping out of control.”
The wizard narrows his eyes at Pete. “Why aren’t you dead?”
“Because love is more powerful than any spell. Haven’t you ever read Harry Potter?”
“Saved by true love’s kiss,” says the wizard distastefully, looking at Patrick.
“Yeah,” Pete responds, “and I’ve got to tell you, you’re really preventing true love’s kiss from turning into true love’s orgasm here, so why don’t you stop cockblocking and go away?”
“Gladly,” says the wizard. “With the dragon.”
And Patrick’s been fighting all this time for Spot but he realizes in that moment that he’s not sure Pete agrees.
And then Pete says tightly, “His name is Spot,” and Patrick knows there’s no way in hell Pete’s ever handing Spot over.
“Look,” Patrick says, “we’ll buy him from you, how much is he worth?”
“He’s irreplaceable,” the wizard sniffs.
“Come on,” Pete says, rolling his eyes, “everyone has a price, what’s yours?”
The wizard looks from Pete to Patrick. And then he smiles silkily and points at Patrick. “His voice.”
There’s a moment of dumbfounded silence. The beeping machines fill it.
Patrick says finally, “My voice?”
The wizard’s smile is slimy, Patrick feels like oil is oozing into the room with them. “You have no idea the weapon you’ve got in your throat. You have no idea the things you could do with it. I could do so much better, it’s wasted on you.”
“Okay,” Pete says uneasily, and shifts to put himself between the wizard and Patrick. “You’re not taking his voice, don’t be ridiculous.”
“I could take your words,” the wizard says to Pete. “You do wield those sharply but you could cut so much more. I could use those, too.”
Pete swallows thickly and says, “Can’t you be a not-evil wizard for, like, two seconds?”
“Where’s the fun in that?” asks the wizard. “Anyway, I am the wronged party here. I need some amount of vengeance, would you not agree?”
“Not if the vengeance is killing something, no,” says Pete.
“How long would you need my voice for?” Patrick asks suddenly.
Pete looks at him. “What? Patrick, no—”
“I’m not giving it to you forever,” Patrick says evenly, watching the wizard. “If it’s as powerful as you say, then you don’t need it very long. A day?”
The wizard regards him, narrow-eyed. “A week,” he says.
“Patrick, wait, no,” Pete protests.
“We’ll cancel a few shows, it saves Spot, it saves you,” Patrick says. “It’s fine.”
“But what’s he going to do with it?” says Pete.
This gives Patrick pause.
And then a thing happens that, honestly, for whatever reason, had never occurred to Patrick before. Spot stands up on his hind legs behind them, his forelegs resting on Pete and Patrick, and he looks at the wizard, and he bellows a stream of fire at him.
The heat of the fireball Spot throws flings Pete and Patrick backward on the bed. The wizard starts screaming, and he doesn’t stop. Spot leaps off the bed, following his fireball up with another one, and then another one. The fire alarms go off, and water starts raining down from the sprinklers in the ceiling, but it doesn’t seem to affect Spot’s fire. The wizard screams and screams until he stops, until all Patrick can see is ash and cinders on the floor, and Spot breathes one last hot breath over the pile.
And then looks up at Pete and Patrick and wags his tail.
The room is very loud, but it still feels silent.
Spot bounds over to the bed and up onto it and immediately commences to cuddling with them.
“Did he just kill that dude?” Pete asks, his voice low and shocked.
“Kind of seems that way,” Patrick manages numbly.
The doctor runs in and shouts, “And what the fuck is happening in this room now?”
***
Spot is still Spot with them. You’d never know he burned a wizard to a crisp. He trots behind them like an oversized puppy, sleeping curled at the end of their bunk.
It really cramps their sex life.
When Patrick complains, Pete says, “He saved us from an evil wizard,” which Patrick supposes trumps his orgasms, whatever.
On hotel nights, Spot obediently curls up in the bathroom and Pete takes Patrick totally apart to make up for their weird bus situation.
Patrick appreciates it.
Eventually, though, Spot is too big. He keeps growing and growing and they can’t keep him a secret and, anyway, Spot spends longer and longer periods of time outside when they stop the bus, sitting in the middle of empty, open fields and looking up at the sky, like he’s watching for something.
Patrick’s the one who says it, because one of them has to. “I think he’s getting ready to leave us.” He’s sitting next to Pete, watching Spot in the field. He’s taken to flying now, his wings grown in and powerful, and he’s sweeping laps around them, the air pulsating with the beats of his wings.
Pete doesn’t say anything. Pete presses his face into his drawn-up knees.
“He should,” Patrick continues gently. “He’s probably got a family somewhere. He should go be with them. We were never going to be able to have him live with us on a bus forever.”
“I know,” mumbles Pete.
Patrick looks at him, then moves closer and leans against him. Pete is the one more inclined to initiate cuddles; Patrick knows how much they mean to him.
“I’m going to miss him a lot,” Pete says.
“Yeah,” Patrick agrees. “Me, too.”
When Spot does leave, it’s at the end of the summer. There’s a week left in the tour. The nights have started to taste of fall. Joe and Andy keep saying how much they can’t wait to not be living with a pair of sex maniacs (whatever). Spot sits in the middle of a field in Pennsylvania, framed by a billboard about meeting Jesus and a billboard about abortion, and looks from Pete and Patrick to the sky and back again. Then he lumbers over and looks at them with his expressive galaxy eyes.
“Yeah,” Patrick says. “You’ve got to go. We figured it out.”
Spot wags his tail and leans down to press his head against first Patrick’s cheek, and then Pete’s.
Patrick scratches behind his ear tufts one last time.
Pete says, “This is the saddest moment of my entire life,” morose.
Spot looks morose, too, snuffling at Pete’s face anxiously, like he wants a smile out of him before he leaves.
“You’ve got to promise to come back to visit,” Pete tells him.
Spot wags his tail some more.
Pete flings his arms around his neck and kisses the scales there. “Also, if we ever need to kill someone again, you’re going to show up, deal?”
Spot does something Patrick’s never seen him do before, and licks Pete’s cheek.
Then he gives them one last constellation look, and then he bounds over the field and up into the air, and he beats his wings once, twice, three times, and he’s already a tiny dot on the horizon.
“Oh, fuck,” Pete says thickly. “Fuck, I fucking hate the fucking end of fucking summer.” Pete, sniffling, gets up and goes back onto the bus.
Patrick takes a second to lift up his glasses and press his hands against the wetness on his cheeks, the tears on his eyelashes. Then he stands up and follows Pete in.
Joe and Andy give him a sympathetic look, and he moves past them into the sleeping quarters, and then into the bed where Pete’s curled in a ball.
“I don’t leave,” he says fiercely. “You know that, right? I’m the thing that doesn’t leave.”
Pete looks at him for a long moment, then says, “Spot gave me you. That’s what Spot left me with: you.”
And Patrick thinks, No, Spot gave me you. He doesn’t say that, though. He leans over and kisses Pete softly.
And a week later, when the tour is over, when they’re pulling their stuff off the bus, when Patrick’s thinking how the rest of their life is about to begin, new music, the next album, the next tour, only with them being a Them now—Pete comes to stand beside him and curl their hands together and kiss his ear and say, “Your place or mine?”
And Patrick thinks, You know what was a good idea? Pete keeping that dragon egg.
He doesn’t say it out loud, though. Pete doesn’t need the encouragement.