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Chapter Text

It's Valentine's Season on the grounds of the Fall Out Boy Fan Fiction Factory, and festivities are in full swing. No one hates this more than Cupid!Patrick. Except maybe Save Rock and Roll Demon!Patrick. The two face off in a poorly-lit side corridor, Demon!Patrick's yellow-eyed snarl strobe-lit in the flickering overhead lights. The dissonant screech of his hook hand as he drags the blood-caked makeshift prosthesis along the plaster wall echoes. His body is all angles--shoulders and elbows--underneath the blood and gore-stained t-shirt and the leather jacket, and his cheekbones could split wood.

Cupid!Patrick, however, has neither the same angles, nor the same weapon in the hook-hand, nor the same clothing coverage. What he does have is a loincloth, both hands, forty more pounds, and a custom-made single barrel flintlock love-spell shooter (a modern take on the traditional Cupid's bow and arrow with a heart-shaped barrel that had both sniper and spray-and-pray settings).

He also has a fierce atomic wedgie. This is not the day to get on Cupid!Patrick's bad side.

Demon!Patrick pauses under a flickering light, raises his hook hand, and snarls. The dank air of the underground asylum hallway has been giving Cupid!Patrick's asthma fits. Of course, it's always the asylum wing they run to. 

For some reason, they think the place where the orphans and veterans of the angst fics, the whump fics, and the MCD (Major Character Death) fics reside will scare him off. It's a prison--a MaxSec, with the tough steel doors and tiny observation portholes. An adorable, fluffy li'l Cupid!Patrick should be scared out of his mind to be in the same place where the "crazy" Petes live, right? 

Cupid!Patrick makes a minute adjustment to the tripod of the spell-shooter from his perch on the grate of the landing halfway up the stairs to the second level and sights down the heart-shaped barrel at his target.

A sudden, hard thump of a body hitting a door sends a shock through Cupid!Patrick. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see a crazy-eyed Pete in the glass porthole of the door to the last cell under the stairs, wearing smeared Sandman make-up (the real Sandmans, Benzedrines, Horseshoe Crabs, and Donnies have their own section of the Factory (Suiteheart Park). You need a day pass to visit them, and the Park is only open during certain times of the year). This Pete is not a real Sandman!Pete. He is something much more...fragmented. Cupid!Patrick dismisses him once he's identified the distraction.

They go with the Scary because that's what they know, and they always assume that soft, mostly-naked, fluffy Cupid!Patrick will give up the chase and cower, shaking right out of his fuzzy little loincloth around the psychotic Patricks, the evil Andys and the henchman Joes.

He can hear Inmate!Andy counting out chin-ups and the steadily escalating numbers make him overly conscious of his apparel and the soft, plump body wearing it. Cupid!Patrick doesn't mind his thickness (or thiccness as the kids say)--he's got a lot of muscle under there. 

What he minds is the fact that he's wearing yards and yards of gauzy fabric, most of it bunched up between his legs and around his waist like a goddamn adult diaper, with one long sash draped over one shoulder. The whole thing is wrapped and tied with complexity that defies the laws of physics (literally--the back tail of the sash floats out behind him in its own anti-gravity field and if he moves his body just so, he enters the field and becomes a full-on, flying-through-the-air like an overgrown baby with wings Cupid. It's ridiculous and Patrick hates it, but it's his fucking job and he will do it because that's what you get when your fic gets abandoned by its Author after jumping the shark and breaking your heart but is well-loved enough that you can't just fade back into the ether or become something else). 

Beneath the diaper and the sash, Cupid!Patrick wears...nothing.

Bupkis.

Naked as the day he was born.

Chafing like a motherfucker.

Which is why his matching, blush-pink bandolier of spellets and fuckshot contains no less than three slots for small tins of baby powder. That's not a cloud of magic love dust Cupid!Patrick's trailing behind him everywhere he goes.

He hears another set of clattering from the second floor and wonders if it's one of the more clever Andys or Joes or even a Patrick who's figured out how to bang the pipes to make it seem like the footsteps are coming closer (also that they sound like hooves, but whatever--this is not the sane wing of the Fanfiction Factory).

Before him, Demon!Patrick's lip curls up again and he growls now, stalking down the corridor like he's the scariest motherfucker to walk these halls. Cupid!Patrick can sort of see why he's been chosen for the Festivities this year--SRAR Patrick has cheekbones you could hang the rest of his (stupidly sexy slender) body off of. It's why Screaming!Pete always has a hard time taking the final blow and usually ends up in the infirmary (but to his credit, Demon!Patrick nearly always sends Get Well flowers and a clumsily-scrawled apology card and in his lucid moments tries his hardest not to get viscera on it).

But here's the thing--Cupid!Patrick isn't sent after the happy participants of the Open Season festivities. The lovesick Petes and the boy-crush Patricks and the happy-go-lucky make-out king Andys and Best Single Dad Ever Joes don't need...persuading. It's the crazies, the violents, the tough-guys who all think they're exempt from participation. They know their Stories, and they know they're not made for "fluffy romances." So they run to the Scary Places, hoping to outrun Cupid!Patrick. 

What they don't understand is that you don't walk around this joint wearing an adult diaper with your pudge hanging out without being the scariest motherfucker to ever walk these corridors.

Because Cupid!Patrick fucking lives here. It's his motherfucking job to haul in these paper tough-guys and toss their asses bodily through the Portals to their inevitable romances the same way they walk under their own power (okay, some with the "encouragement" from the cattle-prods of the guards in the Lockdown wing) to the scary stories and angst-fests.

And it's his job to send them, again and again--gibbering in panic--back through until their work is done.

Cupid!Patrick reaches back, picks his loincloth out of where it bunched up his ass-crack, and cocks the spell-shooter. As his senses narrow to laser-focus, he can hear SRAR Pete-Wentz-screaming-in-the-distance and getting closer. All he's gotta do is hit Demon!Patrick with the right amount of ammo and the spell will take care of the rest. It, too, was custom-formed in the Prop Shop, and because it's vital to the smooth running of the Factory itself (and so is Cupid!Patrick, goddammit), it's the result of the finest craftsmanship and engineering from the smartest Patricks and Andys, (and the Joes and Petes from the most promising Mad Scientist AUs and of course, the Joe from the Superhero AU that no one talks about. NO ONE. TALKS. ABOUT).

He tucks the stock more firmly against his shoulder--your weapon should be an extension of your body, his training tells him--and sights down the custom-designed heart-shaped barrel. The heavy silver filigree and pearl-inlay sit perfectly in his hands and under each finger, as they were designed to. 

Demon!Patrick stalks forward, his hook hand squealing along the wall and some of the inmates begin hooting. Cupid!Patrick stares at this other iteration of himself while carefully pulling the Port-a-Portal canister from his bandolier, leaving the pin securely attached to his sash. The timer subtly chimes a countdown as Cupid!Patrick tosses it over the railing of the stairwell.

It sails over Demon!Patrick's head, illuminating his blood-crusted blonde hair and lighting up his eyes to gold before it hits the floor behind him and detonates in a swirling flash of pearlescent light banded by a pop-up temporary framework in an oval that wobbles slightly as it sets itself.

His thumb strokes against the safety as Screaming!Pete's yells get closer.

"You can't do this," snarls Demon!Patrick. "I'm gonna kill him! I have to kill him!"

But Cupid!Patrick has his assignment. It's Valentine's Season at the Fanfiction Factory and his job is to make this shit work. Whatever it takes. "Not in this fic, you're not." He takes a deep breath and lets it out.

SRAR!Pete-Wentz-screaming-in-the-distance comes barreling around the corner just as Cupid!Patrick pulls the trigger.

What also comes barreling around a different corner--specifically, the one behind and above him, which he can tell by the sound of hooves from above him and the freight-train slam into the center of his back--where the anti-gravity lives, which grinds him down onto the grated surface of the landing, but then bounces him up as both him and his assailant fly up into the air, ass over teakettle. and sends the shot ricocheting off the walls, scattering in a spray of tiny spellets, also caught in the anti-grav, which go zooming down the hall, past Demon!Patrick and screaming Pete, and through the still-gelling Port-a-Portal.

Well fuck.

Patrick sees all this just before he sees what barreled into him. First, he sees the hooves, then the wooly legs. Then the poorly-manscaped but nevertheless rather nicely-shaped NAKED DICK (waving merrily in micro-gravity right past his nose) and the rest of none other than Calamity!Pete.

"Paatriiick!" Calamity!Pete's bright eyes and wide, shit-eating grin would light up a room, except the majestically-curled satyr horns on his head would bust out the bulbs. Which they do right now, plunging the corridor into darkness, save for the last few spell-motes, one of which slams right between Demon!Patrick's glowing yellow eyes.

"Oh shit," Calamity!Pete says.

Cupid!Patrick flails in the anti-gravity field for a moment. Calamity!Pete's big, stupidly-beautiful eyes meet his as they're both drifting over the railing of the stair landing. "I wanted to see you--"

Cupid!Patrick rights himself in the flicker of the portal's light. Demon!Patrick and Screaming!Pete are screaming at each other now.

"I'm gonna fuck then stab you! I mean fucking stab you!"

"That's not in the story, Patrick! Just shut up and go through the portal!"

"You have to make love to me! I mean, you can't make me! Arrgh!"

"Shut up and kiss me--ow!" The two are wrestling and Cupid!Patrick is frowning. The spell should have taken full and complete effect instantaneously. Instead, the two SRARs are taking turns pulling each other's hair and mashing their faces against each other's. As they tumble through the gate, Screaming!Pete yells out, "Fuck! Patrick, watch the hook!"

"Knee, you asshole! Not in my crotch!"

The Portal begins to dim. It wavers, static running along the opalescent surface. Sparks shoot out from it--or maybe that's Cupid!Patrick's vision as he and Calamity!Pete finally escape the anti-grav field and fall over the banister and onto the floor below.

"Oof!"

"Aiiee! Sorry, Patrick!" Calamity!Pete scrambles off him and offers him a hand up.

Patrick, who at this point is red-faced and furious enough to spit nails but can't because he has no breath left, stares hard up at Calamity!Pete. "What--" he wheezes, "--the fuck--did you think--you were doing?"

Calamity!Pete's open, perpetually-joyful features falter. Not taking his eyes off Patrick, he crouches down, his goat legs bending at all the wrong places, and picks up Patrick's snowy fedora. "I--I thought--look, I--I just wanted to help. I like to watch you work. You're so--useful."

"Useful," Patrick spat, snatching the hat from Pete's outstretched hand and jamming it back on his head. "This is a job, you idiot! My job. Aren't you supposed to be doing your job? Surely there's some--some--Bacchanalia you're supposed to be presiding over? Waving that thing around over an orgy or something?" 

Pete cocked his head. The ram's horns curled close to his head, just not quite closely enough. Patrick almost had a smidgen of sympathy for the cryptid. But not enough to stop scowling.

Pete finally grinned. "Nope. Not from the erotica zone, either. I'm just...me. Being me, with nothing else to do all day. I thought I'd help out around the grounds. You know, re-stock the props, kick up the dirt clods so that the couples frolicking in the meadow have an excuse to tumble to the ground and start making out, or someone can trip and fall into someone else's strong, capable arms and...maybe...marvel at their sure-footedness..." he trails off.

Cupid!Patrick's brain could, like his reflexes, zero in to laser-focus when it wanted to. Other times, parts of it definitely moved through space and time with a distinct lack of sprightliness. Now was one of those times as Patrick's hind-brain registered that Calamity!Pete had stuck out his cloven-hoofed leg and was flexing it in a deliberately nonchalant way while he rubbed the bare bicep of one arm with the palm of his other hand and glanced down at the floor with a bashful smile.

But at the same time, his fore-brain had circled back around to the other thing he should have been laser-focused on, and that was the fact that Calamity!Pete had said "help" not once, but twice, in the middle of his ramblings.

And when Calamity!Pete said "help," there was only one surefire outcome from his "help." It was the one that had earned him his name.

"Pete," he said, very carefully, "What, exactly, did you do to, uh, help?"

The Port-a-Portal wobbled uncertainly, a resonance having formed in its structurally-unsound framework.

Calamity!Pete wrung his hands, cupping them protectively over his junk in a nervous gesture (not that Calamity!Pete let his nudity bother him--that, too, was Cupid!Patrick's job--to be bothered by Pete's nudity. Well, flustered, at least. And only sometimes at that). "I only wanted to help--I didn't do much. I knew you'd need a lot of spellets and--and you were running low on fuckshot, too, so I--"

Just then, the Port-a-Portal flared back to life. Spent casings of the spellets that had gone rogue ricocheted back out and pinged onto the floor in the sudden silence. Feminine voices came from the Story on the other side and the dissonant chords of what sounded like a church organ with an ass pressed up against it blasted through the portal so loudly that tendrils of the opalescent haze fluttered out before the portal went silent again.

Pete perked up. "Hey, that was a genderswap AU! Lady Pete and Lady Patrick. Wonder what was going on."

Patrick was about to turn his long gun on Pete when the Portal flared again. Spellet casings sprayed out of the sickly green haze while a long, calcified groan sounded in the background. The voice of a Patrick followed. "Ohgodohfuck, Pete noooo!"

On this side of the portal, Calamity!Pete cringed, rubbing the base of his horns. He wouldn't look at Patrick, but he mumbled, "Zombie apocalypse."

Patrick was coming to understand the gravity of the situation. "You mean to tell me that when your stupid hooves landed on my back just as I was taking my shot, not only did you make me miss my shot at Demon!Patrick, but that you also sent it into not one, but two AUs that have no business for a Cupid interference?"

Calamity!Pete looked up at him, eyes wide, fingers nervously rubbing at the base of his horns like they itched. His pointy ears poked out from his flat-ironed hair. Why did I never notice his ears? Cupid!Patrick wondered.

Then it happened again.

"Uhh, three," Pete said.

Spellet casings spat out. Weak gray light and antiseptic hospital smells. "--without a soulmark, Stump's chance of finding a donor...it'd take a miracle...keep him comfortable...weeks at best--"

Calamity!Pete curled down into himself even further, if that were even possible. "Soulmark AU. Supposed to be a play on 'It's a Wonderful Life.' They never meet. It's angst." He licked his lips and whispered the last bit. "It's an MCD."

Fuck. Patrick did a few mental calculations. "That--that can't be right."

Calamity!Pete shrugged. "Look, I just know the AUs."

"No, you don't understand." Patrick began to gather up the spellet casings. He slipped them into his bandolier pouch. "When the Season starts, there's only so many Cupid intervention licenses issued to the non-romantic AUs. It's how we keep the whole place from turning into a permanent porn palace. Licensing is strictly controlled!"

"That's because the balance has to be maintained." Pete perked up. "I can always tell when we're getting too porny." He tapped his horns. "They get bigger." He waggled his eyebrows and grinned, his former melancholia evaporated. "Too much porn and not enough story and, well, the Factory fragments itself. Not that we can't handle a lot of porn. I mean--" Pete gestured to himself. "I have to have come from somewhere, right?"

Patrick engaged the safety and cleared the chamber of his long gun, then slung it over his shoulder, criss-crossing the bandolier. "Right, then." He tugged on his hat. "I need to get into those AUs and fix them. They were never supposed to have intervention."

He heaved a sigh. Walking into someone else's AU never felt good, but neither would the wholesale reshaping of the Fanfiction Factory he called his home. Cupid!Patrick reached into his second pouch and brought up a tuning fork. He tapped it against the wobbling portal frame and the Save Rock and Roll AU opened. 

He stuck his head into the AU and saw the dusty parked cars outside the trailer park. An El Camino parked near the end was rocking. As he prepared to duck back out, a hook slammed against the El Camino's back window, spider-webbing the glass with cracks. "Fucking wreck me!" Demon!Patrick growled. The vehicle kept rocking, and Cupid!Patrick didn't bother knocking.

He ducked back through and touched the tuning fork again. "At least they're set, for the time being," he muttered.

Calamity!Pete shuffled behind him, hooves clocking on the cement floor. Patrick turned to him. "What are you still doing here? Don't you have some chaos to cause somewhere else?" The portal with the organ music and the laughing women flashed to life and he pointedly ignored the hurt flashing in Pete's eyes. "See you when I get back," he said gruffly, then stepped through the portal.

"I didn't mean to--to affect the spellets. I just wanted to help--"

Patrick stopped, one foot still in the Fanfiction Factory. "You what?" His voice dropped to the deadpan quiet with which he usually issued the Formal Notice of Cupidary Intervention. You have been selected for Cupidary Intervention during Open Valentine's Season. You will feel mild discomfort. Proceed to your AU portal and resume your Stories. Do not resist. Resistance is futile. "You affected my ammo?"

"It was an accident!" Calamity!Pete protested. "You were running out! I knew the Prop Shop wouldn't be able to get you more in time. I just replicated it, is all."

Cupid!Patrick knew it was a bad idea. But a worse idea would be to leave Calamity!Pete on this side of the portal where he couldn't keep an eye on the satyr. So he grabbed Pete by one horn and pulled him into the story alongside him. "You got me into this mess you goat-legged dumbass. You're going to help me get out of it, too."

Chapter Text

"Patsy!" Pete hissed from the nave of the chapel where her best friend--former best friend--waited in a white dress the size of a small barge to walk down the aisle and say, "I do" when she really, really shouldn't. "Patricia Martina Stump!"

"Petra? Petra Wentz?" 

The woman who answered her was not Patsy. She was some sort of bridesmaid wearing a teal dress--off the rack, goddammit Patsy you know me why didn't you call?

"Oh my God, you're Petra Louise! You're the 'Pete' that Patsy used to talk about!" The teal-garbed redhead--really not a good choice in spite of the dramatics of the colors, Pete thought. Honestly, Patsy should have gone for yellows or golds. She's radiant when she's the center of the sun.

But Patsy never liked being radiant, did she? That's why she told you to go off with Caleb Swank when he promised you he'd give you the world on a runway during Fashion Week. And instead of taking five minutes to think about what that might really look like, you jumped at the shiny thing because your brain is full of squirrels and it could have been full of gold.

"I--er, yes," Pete said awkwardly. She felt strange and out of place in her artfully-torn black suit, like a raven that had come to caw Ominous Portents (TM) over her best friend's wedding. One is for sorrow, two is for mirth... But Pete was always one. "We...used to be...close." As if one five-letter word could describe the whispering in the dark, the open doors with open-ended promises and messy youthful innocence.

"I'm sure she'll be glad you showed up. I just--I'm so sorry to have to ask, but--I need your invitation." The redhead's smile fixed when Pete hesitated. "I'm sure you understand. Ethan's family is very protective of their privacy--you'll need to check your device, too."

Pete raised her eyebrows. "Oh, I didn't think I'd need an invitation." Teal's smile grew more fixed and Pete switched tracks. "I left the thing in my car. With my driver."

"I'm so sorry for the inconvenience," Teal said, completely not. 

A scuffle interrupted that fixed smile and Pete's fixed instability surrounding it. Teal's brow furrowed--she really could have used a better brow gel, Pete thought. Especially if she were going to be standing up near Patsy. A jewel like Patsy deserved a classy setting. "I'll just go fetch it, then," she said, slipping out of the nave and out of Teal's line of sight.

She waited for a count of six (proud of herself for waiting that long) before slipping back into the foyer and looping around to the right, away from the disappearing hem of Teal's skirt heading up the left-hand staircase to the choir balcony. Pete trusted her instincts as her feet carried her up the stairs and towards a small, cramped landing and a low door of carved wood. She turned the worn brass knob and pushed the door open. "I thought I'd find you here."

"You always did prefer to make our entrance from Stage Left." Patsy stood, her blonde hair in feathery tendrils around her face and pinned up everywhere else. Baby's breath leapt out from the tiny pillbox hat that secured her finger-veil.

That hat needs a brim, Pete thought. She needs something to pretend to hide behind. She looked around. "No, I knew to look for you in the place where the music's most concentrated. Since the bell tower is under construction, I figured the pipe organ would be the next best thing. A musical instrument the size of a room? I'd be more surprised to find you not here."

"I'm not supposed to be here," Patsy said. Pete noticed her hands were knotted together in front of her, digging hidey-holes in the satin folds of her dress.

"You look--" Pete gestured to all of her. "I don't even know where to start."

"I didn't pick the dress," Patsy said. "Or the hair, or the make-up. Ethan's family employs a stylist who used to work for Celine Dion."

Pete pursed her lips. "Oh, I came just in time, because you are in a bad way."

"Excuse you," Patsy said hotly. Sudden and explosive like the spitfire Pete knew the other girl was. "What are you even doing here? How did you get in without an invitation?"

Pete rounded on her. "So you admit that you didn't even think of inviting your best friend to your own wedding!"

Patsy's face went red. "Best friend? Would my best friend have let Ryann Ross, of all people, get an exclusive when not one, not two, but five Grammy winners took the statue wearing her name on their clothes? An exclusive, I might add, that included a tell-all about her 'humble origins of failure after failure in the pop-punk scene?' You made it pretty clear that I was just another one of your failures."

Pete winced. She knew that interview was a mistake, that she'd let Ross's bemused "oh, look at the outsider crashing our party" demeanor and casual mention of her inborn familiarity with the elite make Pete want to impress the young woman with a version of her history that emphasized the "meteoric rise from obscurity" part. But it didn't stop her from sniping back. Because Patsy was never a failure. "You've certainly done all right for yourself." The failure was all Pete's. "You didn't pick out the bridesmaid's dresses, either, I take it?"

Patsy refused to look at her, picking at her iridescently-polished nails instead. They were still short and Pete could see the calluses still there, exactly as they were meant to be. Her heart leaped with a tiny spark of hope. If Patsy still played--

"I didn't even pick the bridesmaids."

Fuck. It was worse than Pete thought.

**

Calamity!Pete landed on top of him again. Cupid!Patrick could not remember a time when Calamity!Pete had ever landed underneath anyone or anything. They landed with thuds in the choir loft of the beautiful church where--"Fill me in," he ordered.

Instead of his Cupidary Archives providing him with the necessary knowledge about the Story, Calamity!Pete's voice chirped the pertinent information. "Petra left Chicago in 2005 when a talent scout spotted her merch and promised her fame. Patsy told her to go off and get the fame she craved and she did. But--Pete wanted to be talked out of it. Patsy wasn't on board with the band yet. They'd only ever played with Andy once. Joe didn't learn of it until after Pete went to New York and wouldn't speak to Patsy for a week. Joe still hasn't forgiven Pete for leaving, but Andy and Pete stayed in touch. Patsy keeps--" Calamity!Pete shook his head, his horns dangerously close to impaling Cupid!Patrick's hat. "Oh, baby--" He looks over in the direction of the organ room door, his lip trembling.

"What?" Cupid!Patrick's mind is already half on the angles from the balcony to the altar, allowing for updrafts and stray breezes. His flintlock is halfway off his shoulder already. "Just get Patsy down that aisle and I'll take care of everything with the counter-spell. The story will be back on track and she can get her handsome prince and Pete will watch jealously from the balcony as Patsy moves on without her."

"Is that what you really think about us?" Calamity!Pete's tone goes from chipper to disbelief. His eyes are wide and brimming with hurt.

"Us?" Cupid!Patrick's lip curls up. "There is no 'us' here! They are not us. They're Iterations! Characters. They have roles to play. If you want to catch up with them, show up in the dining hall during chow hours, for fuck's sake."

For a second, Calamity!Pete's eyes go pure gold. "You don't understand, Patrick," he said. "You don't understand at all, sometimes."

"No," he snaps. "I don't understand why--" He huffs and turns to busy himself with his weapon. "I--you keep showing up and nobody knows--" He stops before he can say what's truly on the tip of his tongue. "Nobody knows what you do."

Calamity!Pete's features lose their tension and he smiles softly. "You're right, Tricky. You should trust me more."

Against his will, Cupid!Patrick chuckles. "Dude, not as far as I can throw your horny little ass." He fumbles in his bandolier and finds a kerchief that hasn't been used to clean the barrel of his flintlock and passes it back to Pete. "Speaking of your horny little ass, cover your junk. This is a church."

"Don't worry, Trick. I'm saving myself for you and me down there. Besides, this isn't our AU. No one can see or hear or sense us. We have Immunity."

Patrick scoffs. "Don't be ridiculous." He can't explain the sudden heat that prickles over his skin or why his loincloth feels suddenly tight and restricting and he's uncomfortably aware of the bunch in the crotch and the hot swamp behind his balls. 

He knows Pete doesn't mean anything by it. And even if he did, Patrick shouldn't upset the equilibrium. One day, Calamity!Pete would find his Fic, and it wasn't going to be one that included an orphaned Cupid from an abandoned AU.

And if Patrick squirmed about that inevitable day, it was probably because he was running out of powder. That's it.

Patrick turns and faces the organ door as raised voices and a sob filter through. Maybe getting Patsy to the aisle is too much. Just pop open that door and I'll fire inside. Looks like Spray and Pray is the order of the Big Day.

**

Now Pete's anger drained away enough for her to stop seeing red and start seeing reality. Patsy's foundation was thick and unnecessary. Faint lines of white around her mouth. The darkness under her eyes and the less-than-brilliant white of her eyes themselves. Her own mouth tightened. "How long?" she asked.

Patsy didn't answer. She knew what Pete was asking and she wouldn't answer, which was answer enough. "Let me guess. It's not just passing on dessert or an extra run around the track, is it? If you just took a few pills, did a bump here and there, you could fit into the dress? Look better standing next to him. I know what it looks like, Pats. I work in the fashion industry." Pete scowled when Patsy's face went pink underneath all the makeup. "You're lucky he puts up with you? He could do so much better?" She ducked her head. "You should be grateful? Am I hitting all the right notes?"

Patsy's mouth set and there was the mulish stubbornness Pete remembered. She lifted her chin. "What gives you the right--" She stopped in mid-hiss and touched her lips, feeling around the corners of her mouth.

"You didn't smudge," Pete said. "They'd be angry if you smudged and had to hold up the whole wedding to get your make-up reapplied, am I right?"

"Stop it!" Patsy's lip trembled. "Why did you even come back here? And--and how do you--" How do you know? is what she tried not to say. After ten years, Petra Wentz couldn't just swirl back into her life with big ideas and big dreams and big expectations and open doors with open-ended possibilities. Patsy had finally given up the idea that she'd have any closer connection to music than her journalism.

Patsy had finally given in to Ethan's sisters' "patronage" and let them fix her up with Ethan. Which led to an on-again, off-again thing with the man whose family published her magazine (and forty other properties online and in print). Patsy had finally given in when Ethan said, "We might as well get married or something," as if he were ticking something off in his planner. 

She later snooped into said planner and found that he'd already scheduled a wedding four months out. In fact, as she discovered when she said, "might as well" in return, thinking it was a joke, that he'd not only scheduled the wedding but had everything else arranged, too--venue, reception, right down to her dress and the bridal party. It was only when she got the now-rare opportunity to cover a show for the magazine that she thought about how...odd it might be to have your boyfriend already have planned every aspect of the wedding around you before he even asked you. 

But Ethan was like that. Sensible. Methodical. Ethan had step-by-step plans for everything and when she followed them, she got Expected Results.

Not promises and open-ended possibilities and dreams and two more weeks. Not tipping glasses in no direction. No wasted nights wasting time with has-beens and never-weres in the back booths of half-empty venues with sticky floors and agreeing to sub-in for somebody's drummer who flaked or trading guitar riffs and bassline tabs and scribbled lyrics on the backs of napkins and ticket stubs and hand-lettered flyers taped to utility poles.

And then Pete said words that sliced Patsy's dress to ribbons. "I'm good to go," she said. "But I'm going nowhere fast." Sliced her life to ribbons. "Are you good to go, Trix? Is he taking you there with him, or are you still on your own?"

Patsy felt her world crumble around her like ten years of living her own life was nothing more than smoke. Like she'd been holding her breath, gasping for air, ever since she told Pete, "Sounds like everything you've ever wanted. Of course, you should go. This thing we have wasn't ever serious anyway."

It was a lie, of course. Nobody had ever made her feel as edge-of-the-cliff terrified and exhilarated at the same time as Petra Louise Kingston Wentz had. "You remembered that stupid song."

"I couldn't ever forget it," Pete said. "We wrote it together."

The motions I've been going through have failed. Patsy didn't say the words out loud, but she didn't need to--she saw in Pete's eyes that Pete had seen them in hers. Her gaze dipped to Pete's lips. Far from the polished runway model-slash-fashion icon, she saw the grubby scene girl flat-ironing her hair in the tiny, cramped bathroom of an apartment in Roscoe Village she shared with Patsy and Joe and the guy who lived in her closet. She saw the girl who licked her lips too much and who always stole her Chapstick and who'd sometimes stolen it through lip-to-lip transference before laughing and dancing away to leave Patsy feeling very quivery and confused.

Pete was licking her lips too much again. Patsy's own lower lip quivered. "Start the van," Pete whispered. She took a step closer to Patsy, invading her space. Patsy's gown gave way and let her in. Patsy would always let her in. "Get us out of this one-horse town."

Patsy's lip disappeared between her teeth for a moment, then re-emerged, red and swollen with the pale-pink lipstick stuck to her teeth. "Waste this night."

**

"No, no, no, this is not right," Cupid!Patrick said. "This is a Patrick emancipation fic, where Patrick moves on from a Pete who missed her chance and rebuilds her life. This is not a runaway bride fic!" 

Calamity!Pete's hooves make sad little clop-clop sounds across the wooden floor of the choir balcony. Inside the organ room, Petra has cupped Patsy's face in her hands and is ruining her lipstick even further. "Yes it is. Or at least, it could be."

"Nonsense." Patrick patted his bandolier until he found the right canister of spellets for the flintlock. "I'll just load the counterspell ammo and shoot them both and this fic will be righted in a jiffy." He did the thing as he said the words, sliding the spellets into the slot and cocking the bolt lever to send them into the chamber.

He brought the stock to his shoulder, using the railing as a stabilizer. The two women whispered animatedly between kisses, framed in the doorway of the organ closet. Against his will, against his training, against the Cupidary Realities (the ones that viewed the Great Mystery of Love and its attendant emotions as numerics and percentages and ratios and chemical reactions, quantifying the unquantifiable), Cupid!Patrick felt a pang. The hitched breaths of the two in the organ room were gasping sounds of oxygen intake after a long time without. Patrick didn't get a chance to see it that often--those kinds of AUs rarely required a Cupidary Intervention.

This one never should have, either. He sighed and eyed the duo again. If they kept crawling into each other, he bet he could get them both with a single shot. He sighted down the barrel and narrowed his eyes and his focus and his world to the woman in the wedding dress with the heaving cleavage and the full, trembling lower lip, leaning towards the lean and angular moon to her sun, whose spell-influenced response pulled her into Patsy's orbit. "Steady...aim..."

"Wait!" Calamity!Pete put a hand on his arm. The weight of his hand was enough to blow the walls of Cupid!Patrick's tunnel vision to encompass the entire nave.

"What?" Patrick snapped.

"What if it's not supposed to end with Petra watching everything she lost?"

Patrick sighed. "This is a breakup fic," he said. "It's right there in the tags--angst, whump, break-ups, missed connections, unhealthy relationships."

"But--are you sure?" Calamity!Pete leaned down into his field of vision, his curlicued horns blocking Patrick's view of the two in the organ room for a moment. "What if it's not?"

"The only reason I could even consider the possibility is because of your stupid flub with the spellets!" Patrick said crossly as he re-balanced the muzzle of the flintlock against the warm wooden banister.

"What if--" this time, Calamity!Pete did not touch him. He just murmured something that made Patrick's Cupid-sense tingle. "What if it's a 'best friend stops you from making the worst mistake of your life, because she knows what it feels like to say yes to the wrong thing' fic? What if the 'unhealthy relationships' is Patsy getting married?"

Patrick tried to recapture the focus, but the environment worked against him. He noticed too much. The majesty of the church organ with its soaring pipework, the stray shaft of sunlight catching the beautiful amber of Petra's eyes as they crinkled at the corners as Patsy ducked her head and her blonde hair caught fire in that same sunbeam.

"I never should have listened to that talent scout," Petra was saying. "He promised me the world."

"But--you did get the world. He delivered. You've walked the runways in Paris, Milan, London, Stockholm--" Patsy gaped at the other girl.

Petra shook her head. "That wasn't the world. He could never have given me the world." She lifted a hand to Patsy's cheek. "None of those runways brought me a fraction of the wonder that playing terrible bass guitar in a shitty pop-punk band in the corner of a dive bar did when you opened your mouth to sing right next to me."

"What are you saying, Petra Louise?" Patsy's hands knotted in the satin folds of her gown.

Petra sniffed, one lovely tear spilling artfully down her cheek. She ruined the effect by swiping her whole hand across her face, smearing make-up, foundation, mascara, liner, and smoky-eye in one long, horrible streak over her cheekbones. "I'm saying I quit my modeling career and bought a bunch of twenty-five cent notebooks and filled them up with all the incoherent ramblings of my patched-together heart." She trailed reverent fingers down Patsy's face. "I want you to put the pieces of me back together to the music that lives right here--" she thumped the spot where the teardrop pearl dangled between Patsy's cleavage. "I'm saying I want to make music with you, the way we were meant to."

Beside him, Calamity!Pete sighs as Patsy cups Petra's cheeks and brushes their lips together in a tear-filled kiss. "And Joe?" She whispers. "God, I need to apologize to him. Ethan's personal assistant told me it looked bad that we kept in touch even though we never--"

"He and Andy are already on their way to Chicago." Petra clasped her best friend's wrists. "And you'd be on your way to goddamn therapy if we weren't going to meet them right now. I should never have let things go for this long and I'm so sorry, babe."

"I'm going to be disowned," Patsy said. "The magazine's going to fire me and I'll never work in publishing again. Ethan's family will make sure of it. I--I don't even have a place to live."

"I--do you remember the apartment? Roscoe Village?" Pete smiled through her tears. "I bought the building five years ago under a separate business entity named Ronin. Alex couldn't touch it in the divorce."

"So we're doing this--throwing away the last ten years?"

Petra shook her head. "We're getting back on track."

Calamity!Pete sighed again. "See?"

Cupid!Patrick glared up at the goat-horned menace. "They're going to have a hell of a time surviving. Petra gave up everything for that stupid apartment and Patsy's name is going to be mud throughout the music journalism industry. They'll be left with nothing more than each other and a broke-dick van, rambling around the midwest and hoping to get gigs for pizza. It's a shitty life with little chance of payoff."

Calamity!Pete smiled gently. Sadly. "It's their home AU. They gave up closure, but they traded it for possibility."

Cupid!Patrick searched his friend's expression. Yes, his friend's. In spite of Calamity!Pete living up to his name in every way during their every interaction, the satyr didn't intentionally fuck everything up. It just sort of happened around him. "But what if they fail?"

"What if they fly?" Calamity!Pete's grin broke through the clouds and he held up the tuning fork. 

"Hey, where did you get that!" Patrick patted his bandolier to find the slot for the tuning fork empty. "You jackass!"

"Goat-ass, thank you very much." Pete grinned and tapped the tuning fork against the balcony railing as the two women darted out of the organ room and clattered down the stairs, laughing and crying in turns and kissing each other's entwined fingers. 

The portal whirled into existence and Calamity!Pete cocked his head. The gory sounds of teeth ripping flesh drifted through. He made an "after you" gesture to Patrick. Of course, he'd want Patrick to go into the zombie apocalypse AU first. Patrick huffed and stepped through, Calamity!Pete close on his heels.

"At least they have a chance."
**

Chapter Text

Patrick had always worn layers. That served him well when the virus swept over the country and turned fully half the population into flesh-eating undead practically overnight. Being a little guy meant he was harder to grab, and wearing the layers meant the teeth tore through fabric, not flesh. 

None of that mattered when summer hit the city, and there seemed to be a break in the relentless horror of humanity's end and the corpses began dropping like flies, the dance of decay finally coming to an end, but at the expense of the entire city smelling like bloated corpse as some of the oldest Infected finally rotted down to component parts and sludge. 

None of that mattered because the survivors who still had working organs and brain function were suffering from heatstroke behind the barricades, and the runners who traveled from camp to camp cut way down on their runs to conserve their strength. Nothing like surviving the zombie apocalypse if you dropped from something stupid like dehydration. So Patrick stripped down to a t-shirt and shorts as he waited for Pete to return from the run back from Camp 2. The sun was setting and Pete should be back shortly and if Patrick just laid down on their bedroll for a bit of a nap, it'd be okay...

None of that mattered when the teeth belonged to your best friend who hadn't fucking told you he'd been bitten.

Patrick woke up to soft kisses at his throat, trailing down his chest. "Mmm, Pete," he murmured. His eyes fluttered open and he spread his legs.  "Too hot for foreplay. Just fuck me already." 

Pete looked a little sallow, but it'd been a long run to Camp 2. Patrick threaded his hands through Pete's tangled hair as he worked kisses down over Patrick's chest. "Babe--"

Pete groaned when Patrick stroked his scalp with light fingernails. His fingers brushed over something at the back of Pete's neck, but he forgot about it as the kisses turned to licks down Patrick's stomach, then little nips as Pete worked his shorts down. Patrick lifted his hips. "I love you," he said. "Whatever else happens, we got this far and we just might make it--aaauugh!"

The worst pain he'd ever felt ripped through him as Pete's teeth sunk into his midsection. He grabbed two fistfuls of Pete's hair and jerked his boyfriend's head up and--oh no. "No. Nononono--"

Pete's eyes were milky white with the virus, and Patrick's hands came away bloody. "I'm--sorry--Paaa-trick--"

Patrick didn't even feel much when Pete lowered his head again and buried his face in the mess at Patrick's midsection. Just--"We...said we'd...die for each...other..." he wheezed. "Looks like...you went...first..."

**
Calamity!Pete's face wore a stricken expression that Cupid!Patrick couldn't look at for more than a moment.

"Patrick, you have to do something."

Patrick glanced at him, then away again when Pete's lip began to wobble. "What? It's a zombie apocalypse AU. Nobody makes it out alive. That's the point. The zombies always win in the end." He gripped the flintlock tight, even though they were guaranteed immunity and safe passage through the AU.

"But--but--this is not the prize you get for love!" He gestured to the tableau, which now involved zombie!Pete digging his face further into Patrick's abdomen and many more internal organs on the outside than two minutes before. Patrick's eyes are still slitted open, glimmering with tears and Cupid!Patrick can't tell if his counterpart is still hanging on or already Assuming Room Temperature (not that room temperature is any lower than Internal Body Temperature in the thick heat of Chicago summer during a heat wave).

Zombie!Pete lifts his head and stares down at his meal. "Paaa--" The cry ends in anguish. As if the firing of his last untainted neurons is grief. Zombie!Pete howls and his arms--already mottling as his blood thickens and blackens in his veins, the tattoos graying out--gather the hollowed body of Patrick to Pete's chest. His blood-flecked lips press against the matted, sweaty hair at Patrick's temple. "Noo...NOOO!"

Beside Cupid!Patrick, Calamity!Pete buries his face in his hands. "Patrick, make it stop!"

Cupid!Patrick cocks the flintlock. "There's no saving this AU, Pete. I'm sorry."

Suddenly, Zombie!Pete lifts his head, scenting the air. He turns his milky-blank eyes towards where Cupid!Patrick is standing and for a second, it feels like he sees right through them. Sees them. 

He shoves his hand into Patrick's open chest and pulls out something bloody, lumpy, and the size of a fist. It's still beating. He kisses it and holds it out to where Calamity!Pete and Cupid!Patrick are standing, supposedly invisible, a plaintive wail emerging from his bloodstained teeth.

Patrick's wedgie grows more intense, thanks to the sudden flood of sweat in his ass-crack. "Pete," he whispers. "What's happening. Why does it seem like he sees us?" A terrible thought occurs to him. "Fuck--is this your AU?"

Calamity!Pete shakes his head. "I'd be drawn into the story if it were," he whispers back. Zombie!Pete is looking at them beseechingly, Patrick's quivering heart held out like an offering. "You have to do something, Patrick! It's Valentine's!"

Cupid!Patrick opens the chamber of the flintlock. Beside him, a sniffling Calamity!Pete passes him some spellets and he loads them into the chamber, then cocks the bolt assembly. He sights down the barrel at Zombie!Pete and the remains of Patrick. Maybe he sees Patrick's gore-stained hand twitch. Maybe he sees Patrick's empty chest flush with something--virus or maybe just escaping gas. Maybe he sees Patrick's heart, safe in Pete's hands, beat again. Maybe not.

Calamity!Pete is already touching the tuning fork to the windowsill and the portal replaces the window at their backs.

Cupid!Patrick pulls the trigger. The recoil conveniently sends him backwards through the portal as the spell shoots out the barrel. It is not the sober gray mist he expects, but it's too late now, just as it was too late for the doomed lovers in the zombie apocalypse AU. "Love hurts."

**

The virus burns through Patrick, mutating his cells, consuming his organs, thickening his blood. Visceral tears fall from Pete's eyes and drip onto the organ he has clutched in his messy fingers. Little gets through except the sense that this organ, this body, was riddled with signs that his new senses said "DO NOT EAT" and he ignored them because his very cells told him that this body was his and he was meant to possess it. But the filter of the virus failed to correctly translate that message and he senses that he is losing this body and that this organ is the key to reversing that.

He tastes the salt and copper of the organ in his hand. Puts it back into the place he pulled it out of. Curls up next to the body that is his but not his. 

Patrick turns to face him. Milky eyes flutter open. Around them are scattered the detritus of young lives they don't remember--battered Converse, album covers stacked in crates and scattered on the floor around them, a guitar, some drumsticks from a kit long shattered.

The motes of the spell settle over them, coating their outsides with something undetectable to the AU's interference sensors. Imperceptibly, organs and tissue begin to knit together. From their joined hands, neurons fire new messages. Brain tissue rebuilds itself from the necrotic to the robust, trading the viral for the virile.

On their insides, the virus mutates.

Believers Never Die.

Chapter Text

Cupid!Patrick is prepared for the next AU. 

Or so he thinks.

The Pete on the ambulance gurney is wasting away, his body missing the critical component that only a soulmate can provide. He slips in and out of lucidity, crying out for someone he doesn't even know in this universe. Because in this universe, Joe Trohman never went to a Borders, never had a conversation that began with a, "Well, actually," with a short, pretentious kid from another school, and an argyle sweater with black socks was never worn by said short kid who never answered a door to meet one Pete Wentz.

In this universe, there is a kid in the Terminal wing (they don't call it that where the residents can hear it) who likes to play guitar and wants to write all of the music. He busies himself most days pulling out the eldritch melodies in his head and getting them down, well, anywhere--on paper, on napkins, on the walls of the Unit. This kid practically grew up here. He never went to school, never got to see a hardcore show except on MySpace clips, never went to a Borders where he'd overhear Joe Trohman loftily proclaim something about Neurosis, never had an opinion because he hadn't been able to see Neurosis live (which was the only way you were really allowed to have an opinion about Neurosis). He never answered the door wearing black socks and an argyle sweater and found a local celebrity on the other side of it.

Never felt that instant click of soul-to-soul.

But he's there, snuck outside the Unit when the ambulance comes screaming up to Emergency and the stretcher is offloaded. The paramedics are rushing, calling out, "O.D. No soulmark." to the triage nurse, and the flurry of activity as the crash cart is wheeled in and a triage room prepared. Patrick shrinks back against the wall with a nervous growl in his belly and the uncontrollable urge to get closer, to lock eyes with this other Terminal soul whose chances are about as slim as his.

**

"No." Cupid!Patrick puts his foot down. Well, he would, if Calamity!Pete hadn't fallen on him and knocked the wind out of him. "This is an angst fic. A sad fic. A Major Character Death fic."

"It's Valentine's!" Pete protests.

"We can't go around fixing every sad AU! There's a limit!"

"Who says where the limit is!" Calamity!Pete's fingers knot in his makeshift loincloth, making it look more like the gun-cleaning rag that it is.

Patrick gestures to the ether around them. "The Rules, I guess." He scowls. "Look, we can't impose our will on the AU against the Author's wishes! Do you know what happens when the Stories start writing themselves?"

Pete sticks his hands on his hips. "No, and neither do you!"

Patrick sights down the barrel of the flintlock. "I know it's not good. Let me spare these two some unnecessary heartbreak." He's positioned behind the nurse's station at an angle. He should be able to nail Terminal!Patrick as soon as those orderlies clear out, then it's a small matter to duck into the doorway where Triage!Pete is counting down heartbeats into the single digits and provide what small mercy a cupid can give a dying man.

Calamity!Pete hunkers down beside him and sights down the barrel, his horn brushing against Cupid!Patrick's hat. He smells like goat and grape Fun Dip, but it's not a bad smell, because underneath it is the musk of Pete and something about Pete will always smell right to Patrick, even when it's objectively terrible. 

"You're a Cupid, Patrick. You're supposed to spread love. Like peanut butter." 

Patrick huffs and does his inhale. "More like herpes." A sudden flurry of activity comes from the room and two orderlies rush in, blocking his shot of Stump. "Goddammit, could they be any more in the way?"

The door bursts back open and the stretcher, accompanied by a critical care team, bursts out. Cupid!Patrick lines up the shot and inhales again--

But it's too late.

Terminal!Patrick locks eyes with the man on the gurney with the squeaky wheel. A sudden beat of silence mutes the screaming of the monitors, the frantic cries of the residents and nurses, the clang and clatter of the doors to the OR roaring to life.

Triage!Pete's body heaves up, his arm pulling free of the four-point restraints to tear the oxygen mask from his face. He stretches that hand out to Terminal!Patrick, who now looks like he's been shot in the chest. Terminal!Patrick clutches one hand to his sternum and the other to Triage!Pete. "You!"

Terminal!Patrick's eyes are already at half-mast as his fingers touch Triage!Pete's. By the time their fingers twine, Patrick's eyes have already gone dim. His body crumples.

Sound comes rushing back to the unit and to Cupid!Patrick's ears, Triage!Pete's long, anguished wail harmonizing with the steady flatline klaxon from the monitor as he spills over onto the floor next to the crumpled body of his soulmate.

Cupid!Patrick hears nothing but the shattering of a heart in his cry.

**

It's Calamity!Pete who taps the tuning fork on the desk of the nurse's station to open the portal. "They found each other," he said quietly.

"Found each other?" Cupid!Patrick's tone is full of disbelief and it cracks with the weight of it. "Found each other? They died, Pete! It was given to them and it was ripped away in the very next heartbeat! How cruel are we to have done that? How utterly sadistic are we?"

Around them, nurses were moving swiftly, trying to make sense of the chaos. Someone was sobbing in the waiting room while tall orderlies hurriedly put up temporary curtain barriers between the triage hallway and the waiting room. Doctors in scrubs were calling out for "twenty cc's of" this and "two hundred milligrams" of that and "Who let him out of the Terminal ward? I want answers and the whole place on lockdown!"

"I can't get a reading! We're losing them both!"

Nausea crawled up Cupid!Patrick's throat. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted someone who should not be anywhere near anyone or anything during Valentine Season. 

Calamity!Pete grabbed his face and physically turned him away from the dark figure. "We set things right, it's okay."

Patrick's lip trembled. "We didn't! We should have never--and you should have never touched my spells! Look what you've done!"

Calamity!Pete's features crumple. "What I've done? I only meant to try to help you. And we've helped them, too. We fixed them! Three times now! Three whole shots at happiness!"

"That were never meant to be!" Patrick can't get past the tightness in his chest. "We didn't fix anything, we just made it worse for them."

"Why shouldn't we fix them, Patrick? If they were unfixable--if these AUs were really, truly immutable, why would your spellets even work in the first place?"

"I don't know why!" Patrick threw up his hands. Pete was being as stubborn as his horns indicated. "Why do we have to fix them? Who says they're broken in the first place? Who says that all these Petes and Patricks in their AUs have to--to--subject themselves to the heart-breaking pain of falling in love in such shitty circumstances? Was it romantic that those two soulmates found each other right before they died? Did Zombie!Pete somehow end up eating Patrick's spleen a little more tenderly because they were in love? Did it hurt Patrick less when Zombie!Pete literally ripped out his heart? No! Listen," Patrick yelled, his fury now full-bore. "Sometimes love isn't enough! Sometimes, all it does is make everything else hurt more!"

Pete stood in front of the portal, his shocked expression devastating. His horns suddenly looked too big for his head. His shoulders drooped. "How can you believe that, Patrick? You're a Cupid! You know the power of love!"

Patrick's bottom lip trembled and he tightened it. "Pete, I'm the one they send after the horror AUs. Do you know why I go into the MaxSec wing? Why even the Youngbloods run away from me?"

Pete shakes his head. His horns look like they weigh even heavier than usual. "Because you're a Cupid? You're the Original Gangster of Love. Nobody can resist your powers."

It's Patrick's turn to shake his head. "That's not relevant," he says gently. "They run from me because as scary and terrifying as their AUs are, they're nowhere near as terrifying as falling in love. Love is scarier than Demon!Patrick at his hookiest. Love is scarier than anything Sandman can come up with in his worst nightmares."

"No, that's not true, and you know it, Cupid!Patrick Stump." Pete clenches his fists at his sides, staggering closer to the portal. "Love isn't scary! Love sets you free!"

Patrick jams the fedora down on his head. "How can you be free when someone else can leave and take your heart with them?"

Now Pete just looks sad. "How can you be free when you keep your heart chained to the ground?" He falls through the portal. 

But it's not an AU that Patrick is familiar with. Patrick doesn't recognize the swirling pink-sugar iridescence. And when he tries to go through the portal, he lands hard on the ground. But completely alone.

Chapter Text

Patrick never thought he'd feel bereft of the lack of a Pete landing on him. He rises and sees a Valentine's nightmare of a landscape stretching before him. "The fuck is this hellscape?" he calls out to no one in particular. 

The answer comes to him from the Cupidary Archives. This is the Valentine's Seasonal meta-AU for the Fall Out Boy Fanfiction Factory. Fanfiction Factory meta-AUs source the in-factory activities for their special occasions and provide additional power for the elements employed by individual Fanfiction Factories which are necessary to make seasonal adjustments. Seasonal meta-AUs are temporary, and they expire at midnight, Universal Factory Time of the endpoint date of their season. Any elements, Iterations, or other materials present in the meta-AU at the time of expiration will be rendered into their component molecules and returned to the Primordial.

"Fuck," Patrick muttered. "How did he get in here?"

The Cupidary Archives are extra-helpful today. The time is now seven fifty-five. This meta-AU will expire in four hours. If your Iteration remains at large for more than four hours, please see your Factory doctor or consult your Cupidary Archive manual outside of this meta-AU. All Iterations and conscious elements must evacuate the meta before midnight or risk discorporeality.

"Yeah, yeah," Patrick muttered and began stalking into the cotton-candy fog. "Peeeeete! Come on, man, where are you?"

You made him feel bad. This time, the little voice wasn't the Cupidary Archive, it was Patrick's own guilt. "Goddammit," he muttered. "He's an idiot. He screws everything up, doesn't understand a thing about the responsibility of being a Cupid, doesn't realize what a burden it is to have your AU abandon you--or your counterpart break your fucking heart--and doesn't realize that it can all be taken away by a stupid portal to the wrong fucking place!"

An hour later, Cupid!Patrick has fallen into a quicksand patch of Fun Dip and gotten chocolate handprints all over his ass from repeatedly having to pull the wedgie out of his loincloth after having forded the chocolate fondue river to find that Calamity!Pete wasn't in the Strawberry Fields, even though his hoofprints were.

"Look," Patrick grumbled as he slogged through strawberry bits. "Every single time I get set up to do an easy job, he shows up. And lands on me! Like he wants me to fail at my job. Like he has to make things twice as hard for me. What did I ever do to him? Did I wrong him in his original AU?"

Two and a half hours after that, the sweat is running off Patrick in rivers. He's gasping for breath and tasting sugar on the back of his tongue. He can feel it itching inside his lungs. He's pretty sure he's going into some sort of pre-diabetic shock. The fondue fjords and the strawberry fields have disappeared in favor of thin sheets of unstable chocolate he's forced to step lightly upon as he follows the hoofprints (which were not lightly-stepped). Calamity!Pete's hooves have broken through the chocolate crust to reveal the thick ooze of cherry cordial underneath. When Patrick stopped to poke through it with his flintlock barrel, the long gun emerged completely coated and hadn't hit bottom. Even waist-deep, Patrick would run out of time before he could get to stable land if he fell in.

His anger at Pete still kept him moving in spurts, but they were shorter and buoyed up on a tide of something else that was turning rapidly into worry. Thirty minutes to go-time.  He looks around and, in the distance, he thinks he can see a gray smudge. "Pete? Come on, man. Please come out?"

Out of the sticky candy-coated plains of the AU, Patrick finally comes to a trampled meadow. "How," he wheezes, "--in the fuck--does he have the energy--to go--this fast--for this long?"

The answer comes to him the same time he realizes he's no longer alone. The dark side of love comes out to play in the form of twisted golems made of thorny rose stems. The hoofprints lose their cherry-coated goo and the crimson that stains the leaves of Pete's passing is darker, smells like copper. Patrick has approximately point-seven seconds to make this observation before the golems are on him.

He fires the flintlock, grateful for the bolt-action that gives him something hard to jam his hands against. Defensive spells propel out of the heart-shaped barrel as fast as he can cock it and pull it, snaring the golems in nets of warm feelings and softer emotions. They tangle in the nets and Patrick uses the stock of the flintlock to physically cut his way through the rest of them towards the line of a forest he can see through the swirls of thickening cotton-candy fog in the distance. 

"The hearts and candies are enough to make me puke and somebody fucking added goddamn flowers into the mix?" Cupid!Patrick shoulders his flintlock. He's not mad at Calamity!Pete anymore. He's worried. And guilty. And looking for an outlet for the simmering rage whose fires burn as hot as the insides of his thighs because those fuckers have been rubbing together all across the chocolate plains and the skin is burning like a bonfire between his legs. 

The Red Vines are his closest targets. "Go ahead and try it, fuckers. I don't care if I have to do it with spellets and fuckshot. This whole place is gonna be so full of hot enchanted lead they won't even be able to break it down for components!" Patrick stalks through the hellscape towards the woods, the fluffy, cotton-candy scented clouds swirling at his feet. "It's like something summons him, and then throws him at me! Over and over again, like--what kind of message does that send?"

What kind of message does that send? He turns his face up to the blushing pink sky. Pete, throwing himself at Patrick over and over again, battering against his walls with those stubborn horns. Head-butting him over and over with that stupid smile, that open expression.

That open heart.

Chocolate drops of rain start up, pelting him with sweet bitterness. Red Vines tangle in his arms (but hesitantly, as they heard his rant from before and are wary out of self-preservation if nothing else). He uses the butt of the stock to slam them away. "Peete!" He cries out against the spun-sugar fog. "Look--I'm sorry, okay? Love hurts! Sometimes it's better to avoid heartbreak!"

He hears a broken-hearted bleat off to his right and dashes for it, fighting Red Vines all the way. "This AU. This fucking AU can go to hell and die in a goddamn fire!" A lollipop forest stands between him and the bleat of Calamity!Pete's sobs. Unable to find his way through the dense sticks of the heart-shaped lollies, Cupid!Patrick sets the flintlock against his shoulder and starts shooting again. "Pete, I made a mistake, okay? I was wrong!"

Fuckshot flies out in all directions, shattering the ruby-refracted sunlight filtering through the candy trees. Sharp shards of lollipop sting his face from the backblast as the trees begin to fall, one by one, and he kicks them to the side until he makes it to a clearing. The disaster himself is curled up, his cloven-hooved legs bent beneath him, sniffling into the loincloth that was supposed to be used to clean Patrick's gun but instead hid Pete's junk for modesty purposes.

A hail of pop-rocks sprays out of the clouds above as Calamity!Pete lifts his head. "You hate me!"

Cupid!Patrick snarls and whacks a particularly big pop-rock away from his head with the stock of the flintlock. "I do not." Tinier pop-rocks are sticking to his sweaty skin, forming a crunchy candy shell that smells of chemical strawberry and Patrick-sweat (which is not, as one might believe, magically floral, no matter what any stray Petes might claim. Patrick-sweat smells like armpit and B.O.) and makes his thighs stick together. Now they're on fire and stuck together. He will be bow-legged for all the wrong reasons for weeks. "Look--I know you can't help fucking things up whenever you're around me but listen! There is no way in heaven, hell, or the Fanfiction Factory multiverse that I'm letting you stay here to die!"

"It's better this way," Calamity!Pete hiccups into his dickrag. "The Valentine Season AU disappears at midnight and so does anybody still here. I'll finally be out of your hair and you won't have to keep fixing my mistakes."

This is sort of Cupid!Patrick's wet dream. Calamity!Pete being Somewhere Else and Patrick being able to Do His Goddamn Job without interruption, without error or unforeseen disaster.

Endless days of sighting down the barrel of the flintlock in peace and silence, taking aim and taking them down in one shot. Of packing up the flintlock and checking out new ammo cartridges that did exactly what he expected them to do.

Endless, monotonous days of competently performing his duties.

Day after day, punctuated by the chaos of the Valentine's season once a year, where everyone around him paired up of their own free will, or under the influence of his own "encouragement" while he remained blissfully immune.

Unattachedly single.

Inexorably alone.

Endlessly, timelessly, solitary.

He drops the flintlock. It hangs listlessly at his side. "But--that's what I do, Pete." The seconds are ticking away and he can see the creeping edges of the nothingness that will consume the AU and return it to the primordial soup. He edges closer to Pete in the pile of cotton candy, snot, and dickrag and crouches down. "I fix your fuck-ups." As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew they came out wrong. "What I mean is--"

"You just don't want to be alone." Calamity!Pete snuffles into his dickrag and Patrick's had just about enough.

He grabs the rag and wipes Pete's face with it, then tosses it down. Pete's face--his stupid, beautiful, horny-goat-horned satyr face. "Dumbass," he says. "I mean we fit together. Satyrs and Cupids. Horny Goat Dumbasses and Idiots in Adult Diapers tripping around the multiverse and making people fall in love."

Pete sniffled again and curled into Patrick's awkward embrace. "And bone. We make them bone, too."

Patrick just rolled his eyes. "Yeah. We make 'em bone." With his free hand, he fiddled with the brim of his fedora. "Look--I'm scared, okay? What if your AU shows up and you fade into it and forget all about me? What if I'm keeping you from a--a better Patrick?"

Calamity!Pete nuzzles him. His horn catches Patrick's glasses and knocks them askew. "You're my best Patrick." When he kisses Patrick, even though the Cupid is immune to Cupidary Intervention, Patrick still feels like he's been shot through the heart.

It feels wonderful.

Patrick watches the world grow even smaller. "We have to get out of here. I'm not letting you go." He pulls Calamity!Pete to his feet, but the satyr crumples right back into a heap.

Pete looks up at him with wet eyes. "I--too much cotton candy. I can't--"

Then Patrick does the only thing he never ever wants to do (nor does voluntarily--he doesn't have to, with Calamity!Pete around). He falls backward, into the anti-grav field, and gravity dissipates. With an awkward, slidey, candy-coated hold on Pete (and he can already see the pop-rock dust matting the wooly fur of Pete's goat legs), they float upward.

Patrick whips out the tuning fork, but without anything to tap it on, they can't get a portal. Desperate now, with the gray seeping closer and closer to their little clearing, he taps it against Pete's horn.

The swirling vortex that sucks them in is black. Black as night, black as forever, black as the dark between stars and he floats there, Pete no longer conscious. 

Patrick panics. "Hello?" he calls out. It's airless, this void, but he can still breathe. There is literally nothing here. He doesn't know whether he's up or down. He holds Pete tighter and the satyr huddles against him but he's gone--his eyes are closed and moving rapidly beneath his eyelids.

"Patrick?"

The voice is Pete's, but it doesn't come from Pete.

"Pete! Wake up! Where are we?"

"I'm awake. I'm always awake. Where are you coming from?"

"Right here. Wherever here is." Patrick couldn't even see the portal now. The only thing he could see was Pete, who...felt smaller in his arms. "It's almost midnight. The AU is dissipating. Where are you? Why are you? How do we get out? Is this an AU?"

"This...is Pete."

"I don't understand." Patrick looked around at the blankness. "You're everywhere but you're not awake. Am I in your dream?"

"You're in my horns. And we have to get you back out. It's not safe for you or me to be in here."

He glances down at Calamity!Pete. This voice...it's definitely Pete's but it doesn't feel like his companion. "What happened to us?"

The everywhere-Pete sighs. "Patrick, I don't have an AU," he says finally. "I never did."

"What?" Patrick leans away and adjusts his glasses. The nothing where they are wobbles. "That's--that's impossible! Everybody has an AU! It's like, our reason for existence."

"Not me. I don't know how or why, but I don't have an AU. Most of me doesn't even realize this. It's the horns--that's why I know all the other AUs. There's a lot of...institutional knowledge in the horns. It sort of makes me a little crazy sometimes."

"But--how? I mean, the Cupidary Archives are pretty explicit. Every Iteration has an AU."

"I just...snapped into existence one day. And the first thing I laid eyes on was the most beautiful Cupid in the whole multiverse."

"I--Pete." Patrick's throat grows thick.

"Listen. We don't have much time, though. I just wanted you to know this so you don't worry. I'm not going to ever leave you for an AU because I don't have one. You are my AU."

Patrick couldn't cling more tightly to Calamity!Pete if he crawled inside him. "Pete," he said thickly. "You--you're my whole world."

The dark exploded into light and Cupid!Patrick landed hard on the grounds of the Fanfiction Factory that was his home.

Calamity!Pete, as he had every other time they came into each other's orbit, landed safely on top of him. This time, he didn't bounce because Patrick was ready and waiting to catch him.

Chapter Text

Cupid!Patrick proposed to Calamity!Pete during the Summer Solstice. Out of respect for Patrick's profession, they got married on Halloween. The whole Factory turned out to attend, leaving a slew of bewildered authors with a case of temporary mass writer's block for a few hours. 

At the reception, at a side table so far out of the way it was almost in the woods outside the parklike gazebo setting, a foursome of weary-looking Fall Out Boys watched the festivities. "So...orphaned Iterations?" Andy asked.

"Spontaneous Iterations without a corresponding AU?" Patrick said.

"Shh," Joe said, sipping a glass of red wine amid the remains of their dinner. "These two--they belong to the Factory itself. What do you think that means?"

"I'm not quite sure yet." Pete gazed off in the distance, not really looking at the satyr and the cupid, tripping merrily arm-in-arm around the assembled guests. "The Factory put them together--no Authors necessary. The implications are...immense." 

Patrick worried at his lower lip. "I just hope we're ready for them."