Fic: The Holiday [Brendon/Spencer, 4/?]

[sunsetmog_fics]

Title: The Holiday [4/?]
Author: sunsetmog
Fandom: Panic! at the Disco
Pairing: Brendon Urie / Spencer Smith
Rating: PG-13 (this part) NC-17 (overall)
Word count: 3,600 (this part)
Warnings: None.
Notes: Thank you to octette for the beta. Any remaining errors are my own. Additional thanks to harriet_vane for this part. For ohohstarryeyed.

Further notes can be found in part one. Also posted here at AO3.

Inspired by The Holiday. Sort of. Um.

Summary: "We look like idiots," Spencer said.

Previously: [I] [II] [III].



~*~

"We look like idiots," Spencer said, a couple of hours later, as Brendon took the lane down to the beach that Dave had suggested earlier. They'd just been home to drop off the groceries, and now they were heading out to find food. "Total fucking idiots."

"Hmmm," Brendon said, without really committing to an answer. The lane was single-track, which they were kind of getting used to, but it was also really fucking steep, and carved into the hillside, so where the lane ended to their right, a steep incline of trees was the only thing between them and almost-certain death. Spencer had started obsessively counting passing places, the curved swellings in the lane that took it from single-track to just wide enough for two cars to pass, just for the length of a parking spot. He waited until he'd negotiated the next lethal bend in the street before saying anything else. "At least no one is going to see us that we know."

"Good," Spencer said, grumpily. It turned out that the local town didn't actually have any clothes stores, unless you counted the one store which stocked things for old ladies and had one rack of clothes for those women under forty who wanted to splash out and show an inch of calf. The only thing it did have was a kind of tiny outlet store, where clothes that were either a few seasons out of date or had something slightly wrong with them jostled for space in the window.

Inside, it had racks of shirts and sweaters, mostly of the kind that Spencer's uncles tended to wear, woolen and v-necked and patterned like a TV screen where the signal had gone kaput. They'd bought three of the sweaters each, and some thick day-glo neon socks. Brendon bought some plaid flannel pajamas that were two sizes too big for him and were built for someone seven feet tall, but what the fuck ever, if they were going to spend their time here eating breakfast in the kitchen and staring out the window, they needed warm clothes to do it in. There was also a whole rack where you could buy pajamas that were either missing pants or a shirt. Spencer wasn't sure that that counted as pajamas.

They were let down, however, by the lack of waterproof, windproof coats. There weren't any at all in the men's section, but they were desperate, and in the middle of nowhere, so they ended up in the women's section, trying on coats with hoods and inner fleece removable linings and more pockets than either of them knew what to do with. Neither of them came from families that were particularly outdoorsy; and, anyway, growing up in Las Vegas hadn't exactly called for the kind of coats that they needed right now.

It was just their luck that all the coats were lurid and purple.

"I guess at least we'll be warm," Spencer grumbled, as Brendon took an s-bend at a snail's pace. "And dry, hopefully. Doesn't it look like rain to you?"

"Concentrating," Brendon pointed out, braking as he spotted a car coming up the road towards them. "Fuck, we're going to die. Why doesn't anyone else look like they're terrified by the roads apart from us?"

"He's pulling in to that passing place," Spencer said. Brendon edged the car down the road even slower than before. Brendon was usually fearless and thought risks were there to be taken, but clearly that didn't extend to tiny winding roads down Welsh hillsides in weather that promised rain.

It was worth it, though, by the time they got to the bottom of the hill. They were in a tiny valley, banked on one side by a beach, and on the other by a parking lot with a smattering of cars, a tiny stone pub, and a wood. Dave had promised them that there was a path through the wood that led to another beach, but it looked like it was beginning to rain, and Spencer thought that exploring might be something they could leave for another day. In front of them, the road trailed away to nothing, ending in a gate, the path that replaced the road winding up and up again as the hillside turned into the headland.

"Wow," Brendon said, pulling into the parking lot. "This place is amazing."

It was, and not just because it was nothing like the coastline back home, bright and beautiful and drenched in sunshine. Here, the coast was craggy and wild and gray. From the parking lot, they could see the cliffs all the way along the coastline, all the way back to the town they'd just come from, where the lights were starting to blink on as dusk started to make good on its promise to show up again. It was endless and rugged and a million miles away from LA.

"Dave was right, then. Good place for pictures."

"Come on," Brendon said, tugging at Spencer's sleeve. "Before the light goes."

They took pictures on the beach, clad in their stupid lurid coats. The sand was dark and drenched and cold, the seaweed line almost up to the wall that marked the edge of the beach. There were rocks to both sides of the beach, and once they had taken their pictures of the coastline, they wasted twenty minutes poking at the rock pools and trying not to fall over as they clambered over the wet, gray rocks. Spencer was thankful that the tide was so far out; they were in no danger of being cut off as they wandered further from the beach.

They stopped, and took more pictures, and then Spencer slipped on the rocks, seaweed coming from nowhere, and Brendon reached out to grab him, fingers curling around Spencer's wrist.

"Careful," Brendon said, eyes flitting to Spencer's, just for a moment.

"Yeah," Spencer said. It was his new coat that was making him feel so warm. That was it. "We should get back." He wished he had gloves. They'd have to head back into town tomorrow and get better gloves, and scarves, and hats. There had been waterproof pants too, the kind that you pulled on over the top of the pants you were wearing, and Spencer couldn't help but think that they would at least be warmer than his jeans right now. He didn't let himself think about the boots they should both be wearing, ones with grips so they wouldn't break their neck on the rocks. There was only so much stuff they could buy when they were only here for a couple of weeks.

"You want to try that fish and chip restaurant?" Brendon asked, sounding uncharacteristically uncertain, and pointing at the pub and restaurant that edged onto the beach from the parking lot. "That's the one Dave suggested, right?"

"Yeah," Spencer said. "Come on."

The parking lot was busier than it had been when they'd first gone on to the beach. Now it really was getting dark, and along with the twinkle of lights from the town down the coast, they could see the periodic flashing of the lighthouse even further south. The parking lot was busier, too, and from the restaurant they could hear the buzz of conversation.

It was all going swimmingly until they got inside to find that most of the restaurant had been booked out for an eightieth birthday party. "Oh," Spencer said, suddenly disappointed. He'd had chicken tikka masala the last time they'd been in the UK, and after that they'd spent the whole visit checking out Indian restaurant after Indian restaurant. They'd been in the UK more times than Spencer could even remember, but they'd never actually had fish and chips—not so far as he could remember, at least.

"We do takeaway, though," the guy behind the counter said. It was the strangest set up that Spencer could remember seeing—there were two lines up to the counter, one marked "sitting in", the other marked "takeaway". Underneath, there was a polite sign saying that equal numbers were seen from each line, so no pushing. What made it even more bizarre to Spencer—and to Brendon, who was nudging Spencer and pointing at the sign—was that this was a tiny restaurant at the bottom of a fucking lethal country lane down a steep hillside, and yet there were still very strict rules about queuing systems. The "sitting in" line was full of old ladies with walkers, and Spencer was suddenly filled with a lot of unanswered questions about how twenty wizened old ladies had made it down that lane, and why they were expected to line up to order their food when this was a restaurant, and waiters were supposed to come to the table. Clearly the Welsh were not as terrified by single-track lanes as he and Brendon were, but the lining-up system remained an enigma.

This whole place was crazy.

The guy behind the counter kept trying to wave them forward, but, frankly, neither Spencer nor Brendon could stomach the idea of getting served before any of the old ladies who had been lining up for longer than either of them, so they took a couple of steps back and leaned against the wall instead. They didn't mind waiting. The walls were full of really fucking old photographs of the area, with handwritten labels underneath each one to explain who the picture belonged to, and what it was of. For some reason, Brendon kept looking at the ones of the old fishermen, with their thick knitted sweaters and full beards.

"Maybe we could do an album of sea shanties," Brendon suggested once they'd been waiting a while. "Look at this guy's mustache. You think we could beat that if we put our minds to it?"

The man in the picture had a huge mustache that curled over in loops at the ends. It was pretty amazing.

"Sure," Spencer said. "Let's try and beat it when we get home."

"Let's not shave until we have an album," Brendon suggested, and then his face fell. "We might be stuck with mustaches forever then, at this rate."

Spencer frowned. "We'll figure it out, Brendon," he said, which is what he always said.

"Yeah, but when," Brendon said in frustration, and this was reminiscent of the way he'd sounded before they'd left LA, when writing had been a source of grief for them both. They'd taken to drinking their way through it and coming up with nothing.

Spencer touched his elbow to Brendon's. "Look," he said, slowly. "Maybe we should—let's talk about what we're doing. We haven't done that for a while."

Brendon didn't do very well at covering up his panic. "Okay," he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets and hunching his shoulders up.

"B," Spencer said, quickly. "I just mean—look. It's been really hard, right? And doesn't it just feel like we've hit a wall?"

Brendon shrugged. "I guess," he said.

"Ryan always used to show up with these songs fully formed," Spencer went on. "But we don't work like that, you and me, so we should maybe stop trying to do stuff the way we did stuff before, that's all I'm saying."

"Have you been thinking about that for a while?" Brendon asked.

"Not really," Spencer said. "Maybe it's the Welsh air."

"Just checking," Brendon asked carefully, "but when you say stop trying to do what we've done before, you don't mean breaking up the band, do you?"

Spencer looked at him. "No," he said softly. "I don't mean that at all."

"Okay. Good."

"We could talk about it when we get back to the cottage, if you want," Spencer suggested. "After dinner."

Brendon glanced at the line of old ladies, which was thankfully getting a lot shorter. There were only a couple of ladies between them and their turn at the counter, now. "I don't want to do what we've done before, Spence."

"Well, what we do now doesn't have to be a linear progression from everything we've done before. I don't know. Maybe we should just try thinking about the songs we want to write, and stop thinking about the album we think we should make. Try it from a new perspective."

Brendon looked at the floor for a moment longer. When he looked up again, his eyes were bright. "That's a song about blow jobs."

Spencer looked at the pictures again, and didn't meet Brendon's eyes. It must be hot in here, he was suddenly stupidly warm inside his coat. "Yes," he said finally. "It is."

"Yeah," Brendon echoed, his elbow brushing Spencer's, and as the last little old lady made her choice at the counter, Brendon stepped up to follow her. "So, imagine you have two Americans who've never had fish and chips before... what would you recommend?"

The guy grinned, slowly. "Are you the honeymooners that are staying in Dave and Mary's place?"

This whole coastline was fucking incestuous, Spencer grumbled to himself. "We are," he said, a little cautiously. One thing that could be said for being in Wales was that they were fairly anonymous, not because they didn't expect anyone in Wales to listen to Panic!, but because no one in Wales expected them to be here. Over the years Spencer had come to realize that there was no better hiding place than going somewhere no one expected you to be. Any sightings of them tended to be explained away as a mistake, especially when even the people who knew them expected them to be in California.

"Great," the guy said, holding his hand out over the counter for them to shake. He was wearing a blue latex glove. "Oh," he realized, looking down at the glove and pulling his hand back. "I'm Gareth. It's so great that you're gay and married."

"Uh-huh," Spencer managed, because it was one thing to accidentally tick a box on a website when you were drunk—it was entirely another to have to live out the lie to a whole coastline of people.

"It's amazing," Gareth went on, not giving either of them time to talk. "You should come down the pub with me and my mates whilst you're here."

"Yeah?" Brendon said, and he sounded enthusiastic, which was Brendon's way. Brendon could talk to people and shed his inhibitions in a way that Spencer never could . Even after all these years of interviews, he sometimes still found it hard talking to strangers, even though he was pretty good at it, all things considered. Sometimes it drove him crazy, other times he kind of liked that he could let Brendon do the talking, so he wasn't forced to make small talk himself.

"Yeah," Gareth went on. "My friends are great, but, like, I came out and they have no idea, you know? It's all about what they see on the telly, like Eastenders and Hollyoaks, and I'm not like any of those people. I thought if you might come with me, then they'd stop being weird to me. You know?"

Oh, Spencer thought, and suddenly he felt guilty for this lie they were living, for the wildly hopeful look on Gareth's face as he looked between the two of them, waiting for approval. The only person Spencer had ever told that he thought he might be bisexual were his mom, and Ryan. Both of them had taken it in their stride, but Spencer had never actually brought anyone home for either of them to meet, so it had all remained relatively theoretical.

"Sure," Brendon said, stealing a glance at Spencer. He felt weirdly guilty too, Spencer could tell. He plastered on a smile, because one of the good things about being here was that nobody knew who the fuck they were, at least, so if one consequence of their accidental lie was helping someone out, then it was probably the least they could do.

"Ace," Gareth said. "Tomorrow, do you? Are you still here then?" At Brendon's nod, he started to draw them a map on the back of a menu, and to explain that the pub was the one on the main road just at the spot where the lane up from the valley hit it. "Any time after about half past seven," he said. "And I'll do you two fish, chips, and mushy peas, with curry sauce and a buttered roll. You should really have tea to go with it, hang on, I'll just see if Bridget will do you some to take away. Bridget! Do we have any of them takeaway cups left? These are the couple that have just got married, they've taken Dave and Mary's cottage for Christmas." This last part was directed to the whole room, if only because Bridget was the waitress currently handing out bread and butter to the whole of the eightieth birthday party gathering.

Spencer could feel his cheeks flushing.

Brendon awkwardly waved at everyone. "Hi," he said, and Bridget just smiled at them and said she'd be right over.

"This is going really well," Spencer said in an undertone, when Gareth was busy spooning great scoops of fries into polystyrene trays. "This is, like, so much more than I could have imagined when you started watching The stupid fucking Holiday."

"It's not so bad," Brendon said with a grin. "Look at that old lady over there, she hasn't stopped grinning at us for the last five minutes."

Spencer stopped himself putting his head in his hands, and instead busied himself trying to figure out which bill was which as he tried to figure out how much they were going to get charged. The money was pretty easy, once he got it fixed in his head, but it always took him a couple of days to figure out which currency he actually had in his wallet when they were on tour overseas, and this vacation was turning out to be no different.

In every other way, though, this vacation was not going anything like the way in which he'd imagined it going.

~*~

They ate their fish and chips in the parking lot by the beach, sitting in the back seat with their paper-wrapped fish and chips laid out between them on the seat. There were polystyrene trays with huge portions of too-hot thick-cut fries, with a piece of large battered cod resting on the top, and the car already smelled like salt and vinegar. The tub of curry sauce looked kind of revolting, but Spencer braved dipping a fry in it and found that it tasted delicious, if nothing like actual curry. He tipped the rest of his tub over his fish and chips, and watched in amusement as Brendon gingerly tried it.

"You can have that," Brendon told him, after one taste. "I'm going to stick with ketchup."

"Why have they given us bread and butter?" Spencer asked, mystified.

"For chip butties," Brendon said, awkwardly trying to balance a bread roll in one hand and a blue plastic fork in the other. Weren't you listening?"

"Clearly no," Spencer said. "Who puts potatoes on a sandwich?"

"Apparently, us," Brendon said. "Come on, let's do it together."

Spencer held out his fist for Brendon to bump. "Just the two of us," he said softly, which wasn't what he'd intended to say, or how he'd intended to say it.

Brendon touched his fist to Spencer's, but didn't move it away. "I never thought writing an album together was going to be so hard," he admitted quietly.

"Me neither," Spencer said. "I thought we were going to walk it."

Brendon put his bread down on the paper fish and chip wrapper. "I thought we were going to walk into the studio and get the whole fucking album written and wrapped by now. I thought we had it."

Spencer's breath caught in his throat. "Me too," he said, too quickly. His heart pounded. He had been thinking this for weeks, but he'd thought it was just him.

"Oh fuck," Brendon tried to laugh. "I was so scared we were just going to fall apart, like—" he stopped. Like before, Spencer filled in for him. Like before, with Brent and Ryan and Jon.

"I'm not going anywhere," Spencer said. He was still holding a fry. It was burning his fingers. "I just think we haven't figured out how this is going to work, that's all. How we're going to write."

"How do you think it should work?"

Spencer made a face. "Let's get a fucking studio together. Let's make a list of everything we want to try out, or what we liked about Fever or Pretty. Odd. Let's get rid of everything we've done already that we don't like. Let's talk about what we do like."

"I don't want to make either of those albums again, Spence."

"Me neither," Spencer admitted. "But I want to fucking play the drums. I want it to be hard."

Brendon grinned. "Me too," he said.

Spencer found himself grinning back, unable to help himself. It felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest, and he couldn't even pinpoint why. He'd been worried about this stuff for weeks, and it wasn't like they'd suddenly figured out any of the answers to the questions that had been plaguing them since the summer. The relief of sharing it, and finding that Brendon felt at least partly the same way, gave him hope that they could figure their shit out, that there was a way through.

"You okay?" Brendon asked.

"Yeah," Spencer said, and for the first time in a while, he felt like he could be. They could be.

"Awesome," Brendon said. "Let's have us some potatoes and bread, huh?"


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