Patrick likes the city. The feel of the wind on his face is something he doesn't think he'll ever get over, the way it cools his skin and sends his hair up in wisps around his face. He likes the plants, the grass that covers every patch of earth and the trees Pete's taught him about; Yew, Oak, Bay, Birch, Fir. They've all got different shaped leaves, but they're all beautiful. The birds, too, the sounds they make and the way they fly. Patrick tried calling out to them, but they didn't understand him. Pete says animals can't talk, but Patrick's sure they do, he just hasn't figured out the language yet.

And the sky. Even when he was homeless and shivering in the rain, the sky was beautiful. To think that right above his head there's an expanse of air that extends for miles and miles is unthinkable. Then Pete started to tell him about the space beyond the sky, and that the stars are actually huge burning clumps of gas really far away in space, and Patrick had to tell him to stop because his head had begun to hurt.

He'll learn it someday, though. He'll learn it all, all the things the people know, he'll know them too. He'll know what cancer is, and how to cure it.

There's no cure. He tried asking the Google, but all the information was different. Some of the writing said there were special plants Pete could eat, others recommended medicine. Most just talked about options, which might make it go away. None of them said anything with any certainty, though. Pete seemed pretty certain when he said he was going to die. Patrick waits until Pete's at work before crying so hard he nearly vomits.

When Pete's home, and he doesn't have to do stuff in his office, he teaches Patrick things, watches movies with him and tells him what words mean and what things are made of. He's seen the different types of screens Pete has before, but he's never been allowed to use them. Andy said it's because they're fragile. The big one on the wall is the television, the smaller one with the rows of letters is the laptop, and the small, rectangular one Pete keeps in his pocket is a phone. Pete never lets him near that one, but he told Patrick it was for talking to other people who also have phones, sort of like the thing Andy talks into sometimes.

The best screen, though, is the tiny one. Pete shows it to him one evening when he's back from work, and one of the people on the television catches Patrick's attention.

"What are those...things?" he asks, pointing at the TV, at the person nodding their head at something or other, then to his ear.

It takes a second for Pete to register what Patrick's saying, but his eyes eventually widen and he laughs, "oh, earphones? They, like, play music and stuff."

"I know," Patrick huffs, looking away. "I just didn't know what they were called." He's seen them before, he's not a complete fucking idiot. "Earphones," he repeats, slowly. Phones that go in ears.

"Wait," Pete says slowly, and Patrick feels the sofa shift, "you, like, know about music, right?"

"Yes," he growls, staring steadfastly at the TV, "the sounds the piano makes."

"Oh, you play piano?" Pete asks, his mouth quirking into a smile, "you don't know what plants are but you play the piano?" There's laughter in Pete's voice that makes Patrick squirm, the same as when he didn't realise it wasn't normal to speak Spanish, "What the hell?"

"I fucking know what fucking plants are, jackass," he spits, but Pete's already starting to talk over him.

"So what music do you like?" the man asks, shifting closer to Patrick and pressing the button that makes the television go silent.

Patrick shrugs, curling in on himself. "Piano music," he says in a stupidly small voice.

Pete does his infuriating laugh again, and Patrick wonders if kicking him in the shin breaches the no-violence rule. "Yeah, but, like, what piano music? I mean, I'm not that into classical, but, like, I know Mozart and stuff? And, Chopin, and the Jurassic Park dude. Who do you like most?"

There's a chance Patrick might cry when he tries and fails to decode what Pete is talking about; he doesn't know what most of those words mean or who any of those people are and he can't answer Pete's question and Pete's going to think he's so stupid and he hates being called stupid, more than fucking anything. In the end, he just clenches his fists and says a quiet, "I don't know."

Patrick refuses to look at Pete, but he feels the sofa move and feels Pete's eyes on him. "So what piano music do you play?" Pete says, not unkindly, but sometimes Patrick can't tell. He's too used to lies.

"Uh," I'm not stupid I'm not stupid – "I just, like, think of it."

"You make it up?" Pete asks, and when Patrick finally tears his gaze away from the floor, he sees that Pete's facing him, legs crossed and eyes curious. It's sort of nice, that Pete doesn't seem scared of him anymore. "That's really cool," he says, and it sounds like he means it. Cool, as it turns out, is another temperature word that can mean something completely different.

The genuine fascination in Pete's eyes is just enough to force a small smile out of Patrick, and he'd love love to talk more about this, about his music and what it means to him and how it makes him feel, but he can't, because it'll lead to more of Pete's fucking questions. Besides, they took his piano away.

"So...you don't know any, like, music artists?" Pete says, and here we fucking go again.

He pumps as much poison as he can muster into his snarling "No," but Pete doesn't seem at all fazed, and keeps grinning his stupid grin with his too-big teeth which actually makes Patrick's chest hurt a little. With a laugh and a pat to Patrick's knee, he springs off the couch and begins to rummage through the wooden box full of drawers on the other side of the room.

"Found it!" he announces, bounding back towards Patrick and flopping back down on the sofa. A small, thin object lands in Patrick's lap, and he looks up, bewildered, into Pete's blinding smile.

"Uh," he mumbles, picking it up and turning it over in his fingers, "what does it do?" It's blue, with a white circle on one side decorated with little symbols.

That's apparently the exact question Pete wanted him to ask, because the man giggles incessantly and snatches the thing out of Patrick's hands, fiddling with something on the top edge of the object. "This," he starts, frowning at it, "come on, please have charge," he mutters under his breath, before his face lights up as bright as the screen just has, "this, is an iPod. God, I haven't used this in years. It plays music, and it also needs – here we are." He thrusts a tangle of wires at Patrick.

"Earphones!" he announces triumphantly, because he fucking remembered. He feels even better when he sees the way Pete's eyes crinkle at the edges.

It takes a little while for Pete to finish fumbling around with the wires and the Pod, or whatever it is, but eventually, he seems satisfied, and leans so far towards Patrick with the little ear things he's only just short of shoving them in Patrick's ears for him.

"Will they make noise?" he asks, probably stupidly. Although he trusts Pete more than practically anyone, he's still hyper-aware of the noises people have put in his ears before; the yelling and the booming and the high-pitched squalls which left his ears ringing for hours, made him jump and scream and cry. But Pete wouldn't do that. Pete's a friend.

"Yeah," Pete nods, "but, like, I'll keep the volume low at first, just in case you, like, have some kind of weird hearing," he laughs, but he's got that uncertainty in his eyes, his brows pinching together minutely like they always do when Patrick slips up, says too much. It's a sign that he needs to leave, soon, before Pete figures out anything that might make him call the police. Patrick pushes the thought aside like he always does.

The pieces of plastic sit rather awkwardly in his ears at first, edges pushing too hard into the ridges of cartilage, and Patrick's a little scared that if he tries to adjust them, they might get stuck in his brain. Pete does it for him, twisting them minutely until they don't hurt anymore. They make everything sound strange, like he's underwater, and he can hear each creak in his head as Pete fumbles with the wires.

Then everything changes. There's piano, everywhere, all around him, clear and full and invisible yet so tangible Patrick has to stop himself glancing around the room for the player. Then there's a voice, a male person, maybe, he can't always tell, saying words, saying them over the music, in tune with the music, then another voice joins in, saying words with different notes in harmony with the first man.

He doesn't know what the man's talking about, doesn't know what some of the words mean but he feels them, feels the other sounds through him when they soar over the piano, the rawness of the man's voice as it reaches the top notes. And it's everywhere. He has no room for thoughts, only notes which worm their way into the farthest corners of his skull and begin to dance. He hardly even realises his eyes have fallen shut.

When the music is over, silence seems unnatural.

The story the man has told him runs over and over in his head, Patrick wants to help him answer his questions, even though he's never been to wherever Mars is, he wants to meet the girl, ask her how she stopped people telling her no, whether she found her friend again. He hopes she did.

"Well?" Pete asks, voice muffled through the headphones. Patrick picks them out of his ears and stares at them, wondering how they make a piece of music seem like an entire world. When he doesn't answer Pete's question, the man just laughs.

"Who's that man?" Patrick asks, trying to shake the squeezed-up feeling in his chest and throw off the tingles running across his skin. He feels a little faint, actually.

"That was David Bowie," Pete smiles, showing him the picture of the white-faced man on the tiny screen.

"Why did he sound like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like..." the words bounce around Patrick's head, and he blinks back the sudden surge of moisture in his eyes, "like...he's broken." It's the only way he can think to put it.

Pete shrugs somewhere in Patrick's peripheral vision as his gaze sinks to the floor. "Well, it's, like, a sad song, I guess, or, well, not really sad, I don't know – are you alright?" When Patrick snaps his eyes back to the other man, he's watching Patrick's shaking hands pull at a loose thread on his nearly-brand-new jeans.

Those sounds, they were nothing like Patrick's ever been able to create. Nothing like Patrick's ever heard. He wonders how this beautiful thing, this music, has been kept from him for so long. It fills a space in his chest that he didn't even know was empty.

Warmth settles through his fingers as Pete reaches out and takes Patrick's hand, squeezing it as if to wring out the shakes. "Hey, it's okay – I'm sorry, I didn't mean to -"

"Don't fucking apologise, that was fucking amazing," Patrick asserts, his voice cracking. He tightens his grasp of Pete's hand; he wants to hold it closer, wants to bring it to his face and nuzzle his nose into it, wants to curl up against Pete and purr and purr and purr. But that's not allowed.

Instead, he stays put, trying not to stare, because Pete doesn't like him staring. It's not his fault, Pete's got these brown eyes, the same colour as the stuff which Patrick thought was square mud but tasted better than anything he's eaten in his life. Chocolate, he remembers. Chocolate with streaks of sunshine, too, that's what's in Pete's eyes. Patrick feels a bit warmer on the inside whenever they're on him.

They lose the rest of the evening to the music, Pete showing Patrick every different style he can think of, eventually fetching the laptop and showing Patrick a place where he can listen to all of it. Well, Pete said it would be impossible to listen to all music, but Patrick's willing to rise to the challenge. That made Pete laugh. Pete's been laughing more, recently.

Somehow, Pete's hand keeps finding its way back to Patrick's.

-

A few nights later, Patrick's alone again.

It's a Saturday night, or, more accurately, a Sunday morning, and Pete's inevitably disappeared to the place which makes him come back smiling too wide to be real. He'll be miserable when he wakes up, and Patrick'll have to make him some disgusting frothy drink to get him out of bed. Not that he minds. He promised he'd look after Pete, and he tries his best.

But he doesn't know what to do when Pete comes home with someone else.

It's happened a few times since he's been here; Gabe was the first, then a mean one, then an even meaner one, then someone called Alex who was actually quite nice to Patrick and cooked weird flat breads in the pan in the morning, but after a few days of kissing, Pete came home sad, and Patrick didn't see Alex again. Then there was the night Pete stayed out and came home crying. Tonight's the first time, since then, that he's brought another home.

They're pressed close, as always, laughing at nothing and completely oblivious to anything but one another's lips. Pete doesn't seem to notice Patrick watching from the couch, his eyes set only upon the fridge, where the metal cans are. Patrick's pretty fucking scared of those cans; they hiss angrily when they're opened, and Patrick always has to rush to stop himself hissing right back. He'll get them one day.

Tonight's new friend has dark hair and a mouth that's too big for his face, fumbling with words around gulps from a can, leaning too close to Pete and sometimes biting at his ear, which is frankly fucking rude. Patrick's not allowed to bite people, or he gets hurt. He'd never bite a friend, though.

They eventually drift upstairs, taking their cans and their slurping noises with them, their hands tightly interlocked. Patrick pushes down a surge of envy.

He tries not to think about whatever it is they might be doing upstairs; more naked fighting, if the things he's seen on the internet are anything to go by. People seem to be rather obsessed with it, there's so many videos of people rolling around together and making strange noises; Patrick's beginning to understand why there are so many people around – all they seem to do is make babies. When he asked Pete about it, though, he took the laptop away, and now the Google won't show Patrick the videos. He's not allowed to use it when Pete's not around, anyway, Pete says there's nasty things on it, and Patrick didn't understand, but he didn't question it, either. He didn't want to seem stupid.

Instead, he buries himself under the books he found on the shelf. There's so much he doesn't understand, it's difficult to read fucking anything because he falls at every new noun. He tried his best, in the daytime – but his best isn't anywhere to be seen at this time of night, so he settles for the tattered maps on the bottom shelf.

He's seen diagrams denoting the floor-plan of buildings, and several small pictures of the layout of streets and roads dotted around the busier parts of London, but this. Fuck. This is something else. These people have documented every house, road, town, city and put it in this book, the coloured lines flowing over the pages, bright as the ones on Pete's body. Patrick wastes a good half an hour just trying to read it before scrambling for a pen and paper and starting to copy out the lines, squinting as he crushes his handwriting to fit on each road, starting with Pete's road (he found it surprisingly quickly) and working outwards.

He's not sure how long he's been asleep on the sofa when he jerks awake, hearing movement behind him. He stills, the papers rustling as his senses lug themselves back to him. After thirty seconds of suspicious staring at the doorway, a figure strides through it, their hands fumbling with dark hair and the cuffs of a leather jacket. Leather's made from dead animal skin, Pete told him. He feels a squirm of hatred in his stomach as the man heads towards the kitchen.

Having been in this position quite a few times, Patrick's learnt that he can peer over the back of the couch and remain unseen from the kitchen, so he wills his muscles still and eyes the stranger. There's light filtering through the kitchen window, pale and grey, highlighting his lean figure. He has big black boots on, and there's mud on them, flaking off onto the kitchen floor with each step he takes. Pete doesn't like dirt.

The man pats himself down until he hears the clink of keys, then reaches for something on the counter. The stack of £20 notes has been there ever since Patrick arrived – to what purpose, he doesn't know – and the man counts them with a flick of his thumb and puts them in his pocket, glancing around as he does so. And if living on the streets taught Patrick anything at all, it's how to tell if someone is stealing. The man's just about to reach into the fridge when Patrick jumps up, simmering with rage.

Patrick counts the seconds as the man takes another can out of the fridge, shuts the door and looks around, and watches the shock cross his face when his eyes meet Patrick's. Then the man's face falls back into its bored expression, and he smirks. "You're the creepy one, right?"

"I'm not creepy," Patrick says automatically, watching the can as it spits and hisses and wishing he could do the same.

The man laughs, a squelching, guttural sound, as if someone had broken an egg near Patrick's ear, and proceeds to look through the cupboards as if he owns the place. Patrick can't quite get his head round what he's seeing, watching as the stranger's hand crunches around a packet of unopened crisps and yanks them from the cupboard. He should stop, right? He should be scared of getting caught, Patrick thinks, carefully moving himself to the middle of the horseshoe-shaped kitchen, blocking the man's exit.

"Stop," he says, pathetically, because he can't think of anything else to say, he doesn't have the words. The man smiles like he knows this all too well.

"Oh yeah? What're you gonna do, kid?" He takes a sip from the can and leans against the counters, crisps tucked under his arm. Patrick's hands curl into fists, but he can't. Pete will kick him out if he hits someone else. When he stays silent, the man carries on. "You gonna hurt me? Gonna call the police?"

The police! Patrick thinks, they're scary. He's run away from them enough times to know that. Maybe the man's scared of them too. "Yes," he says, sticking out his chin and telling himself it doesn't matter that he has no idea how to call them – shouting out the window should do the trick.

"Ah, that's funny," the man says airily, pairing his smile with another of those fucking horrid laughs, "because Pete told me how you met. And I reckon, if it's your word against mine, they're probably not gonna cut the thieving tramp much slack."

Patrick frowns, his head worming its way around the words, trying desperately to make sense of them, fitting tone and body language and context together to cover the gaps in his knowledge of language. He's just about worked out that the man means that the police might blame Patrick for the stealing instead before he feels a shove in his shoulder. The man walks past him and out of the kitchen.

It's a challenge, now, as Patrick whips round and catches the guy's arm, yanking him back and growling as loud as he dares. "Give back Pete's money, you piece of shit," he spits, tightening his grip on the man's arm even as his face contorts in pain.

"Hey – Jesus, get off me," he splutters, yanking his arm out of Patrick's grip and rubbing what are hopefully the beginnings of bruises. "Pete's right, you are a pain in the arse."

Patrick feels ice slip down his spine at the man's words, and his face heats up. "That's a lie," he says, but it doesn't sound fierce so much as just naive. He so, urgently wants to hit the man.

"You wish. He wouldn't shut up about it actually, how he wishes he'd never met you. I wouldn't jump to his defence if I were you." He brushes past Patrick's dumbstruck figure and heads towards the hall, still sipping from the can.

Patrick follows half-heartedly, the words bouncing around his skull. He should hit this guy, he should make him regret laying a finger on something that wasn't his, for taking advantage of Pete and pretending to be his special person. But Pete said he can't. He's not allowed, and he can't find the words to make the guy back down, every sentence becoming more difficult to decipher as his concentration is replaced with confusion. There's nothing he can do but stare.

The man meets his eyes for a few seconds, eyebrows raised in expectation, and then laughs. "Well, I'd best be off, then. Send my best wishes to Pete," he raises the can and crisps as if in homage, "and tell him I'm long gone." He gives Patrick a sickening smile and a short wave. "Bye, freak-show."

Patrick has barely opened his mouth to shout before the slamming door beats him to it.

He just let someone steal from Pete. The man just took Pete's money and walked out, and Patrick did nothing to stop him, because he was too fucking scared. Of the police, of their questions, of what Pete might do if Patrick punched somebody else. He should have done something.

Sam meows from across the room, and Patrick gives him a long look. Even the cat probably understands more than he does. Sam hadn't just let someone take his friend's money. Sam hadn't been defeated by fucking figures of speech. Sam didn't think he'd found his special person, only to find that they wished they'd never met him at all.

It's strangely reminiscent of his nights on the street as he curls up on the couch and pulls the maps over the top of him; he feels an instinctual need to hide, to burrow down into the cushions until no-one can find him. He's angry, always so angry, but he'd been better, these last few weeks – happier than he'd been perhaps ever. The past few nights, he'd slept with music in his dreams, a new universe in his brain. Now he's guilty and cowardly and stupid and hated, and there's that same question again, over and over in his head, the one he can't answer. What's wrong with you?

He's asleep before the sun rises.