Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tyler doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t know how else to describe it other than not knowing. It’s like the inside of his skull is painted in the indeterminable colors of a foggy dawn, shades of not-quite-grey and uncertain blues. He knows – he knows that he feels something, knows that his heartbeat hurts and his eyes are darting and oxygen seems to be running away from him. But he doesn’t – he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what it is.

The things he knows are these: it is four AM and the bus is hurtling down an empty interstate and the small window that his bunk is graced with shows a blur of white highway lines and paper cut-out horizons edging the different shades of black that are land and sky. He knows that Josh is asleep below him, soft breaths somehow audible through curtains and walls and pillows and dreams (Tyler doesn’t know what it means that he can hear Josh breathing even over the sound of rain, even over the sound of LA traffic and spans of empty sheets, even over the chaos of 12,000 people screaming together with him. He doesn’t know.). He knows that they played last night in Phoenix and will play tonight in Tucson and it will be as unbearably hot as the past week of shows and he will feel like suffocating with his mask (but maybe worse without it – and still, after all this time, he doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know.). He knows that in three hours he will get up, regardless of the itch behind his eyes and the instability that the ground will possess with so little sleep, that he will get up simply for the relief of acknowledging that he made it through another night. He knows that best. He knows that the night will be over eventually. He knows that the sun will rise. He knows that he will get up, he will try again. Nothing lasts forever, not even the bad parts. That, he knows.

But right in this moment, it’s the things that he doesn’t know that are making his skin itch. Because he doesn’t know what this feeling is – this uncertainty, this emptiness. It’s been plaguing him for weeks, months, maybe years, who knows. He doesn’t know. It’s the feeling that hides behind the hours that are either late night or early morning, behind 12, 1, 2, 3, 4 AM. It is the feeling that makes sleep impossible and makes smiling at the world feel like a bit of a farce. It is gnawing.

The only thing that fights the aimlessness of this…whatever it is – the only thing that helps is knowing the things he knows. He begins from the beginning and stacks them up in his head.

My name is Tyler Robert Joseph. I am 26 years old. I have a mother and a father and two brothers and a sister. I sing. And I – I speak. Not rap. Just speak, sometimes really fast. I am in a band. I am in a band named twenty one pilots. I am in a band with Joshua William Dun. I am…

And then it stops.

Recently it’s always been stopping there. It stops there, and Tyler doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know.

Because before, the next sentence would have been, “I am best friends with Joshua William Dun.” But. But.

But in the past weeks, or no, months, hell, the past year (he doesn’t know, he doesn’t), the words won’t come. They don’t fit right, jumbling together and pressing sharp edges into the soft matter of his brains, and something much deeper in him, something that hides at the base of his esophagus, somewhere near his lungs (or his heart. He doesn’t know.). He wonders what it means.

(He doesn’t know.)

So the stacking of The Things I Know isn’t really helping, because it seems that right now, he doesn’t even know the things he thinks he knows. God. He is tired. Tyler is so tired. And so the obvious solution is to roll out of his bunk, so tired but so far from sleep. He keeps his feet kitten-soft, pads to the front lounge.

The divider is closed, giving him privacy from the driver, which is – well, it’s nice. Tyler likes the guy, but he doesn’t like much of anybody when there are too many Things He Doesn’t Know.

So he has the room to himself. He could watch a movie, or boot up his laptop where he left it on the table, or snuggle up in the blankets on the sofa and maybe see if things feel less uncertain out here, with the windows and the stars. But it’s still hard to breath, and his heartbeat feels like a separate entity drumming its fingers on every inch of his skin, panicky and hot. So he simply sits, directly down on the linoleum of the lounge. He sits. He knows what this feels like this. He knows cold and hard and he knows shivering. These are things he knows.

Time is something he doesn’t know. How it slips past unseen and then takes hold in his veins so that every second ticks out its own crescendo behind his temples, demanding his attention. It feels like it’s been hours that he’s sat curled on the floor, shivering and staring at the stars out the window, but the clock only shows 4:12 AM when he hears the door to the bunks slide open.

Josh knows lots of things, many of them different from what Tyler knows. It’s nice, because they complement each other. Their knowing fits together, dovetails into each other’s perfectly, so that alone they don’t know much but together it’s like they know everything. (Tyler doesn’t know what that means, he doesn’t, but it suddenly dawns on him that Josh might.)

The thing that Josh knows best, maybe even better than drumming or music, is Tyler. It’s not something either of them can explain, their innate knowledge of each other. It just is. It’s the way they finish each other’s stories without knowing where the other had started. It’s their immediate integration of each other’s jokes in interviews. It’s the way Tyler can predict to the exact day and hour when Josh will next dye his hair, and how Josh knows exactly what snacks to bring Tyler in the studio. It’s that Josh has never once had to tell Tyler his Taco Bell order, and that Tyler never had to say, “I couldn’t sleep last night,” to Josh. Not once. They knew. They have always known.

(Which is why that unanswered sentence in his list of Things I Know makes Tyler feel slightly sick. It’s shifting tectonic plates, uncertain bones and unsteady hands. He knows everything Josh. He knows. Except how now, he doesn’t.)

Josh knows now, just how he always does. He’s sleepy in plaid pajama bottoms and no shirt, shivering as he clumsily lowers himself beside Tyler. They don’t look at each other, just sit in matching legs-curled chins-on-knees positions and watch the stars.

Josh knows, and maybe he can hear Tyler breathing too because it’s when Tyler feels like his lungs have finally unshrivelled that Josh knows to speak.

“Did you know that scientists found a new black hole that’s 12 million times the size of our sun?” Josh’s voice is scratchy, the perfect cadence and rough flannel sound for 4:30 in the morning. Tyler feels his own smile in his insides, as a little of the gray washes away. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.

“Really?” His own voice is equal parts gravel and whole wheat bread, still aching a bit from last night’s show. “That’s…that’s really sick. I love black holes.”

He can feel Josh’s smile maybe more than his own. “Me too,” Josh says, unraveling his arms from where they’re wrapped around his own calves to shift a little closer to Tyler. “Like, how metal is that? This massive thing that eats everything, including light. Nothing can escape.” The last bit is gritted out in a throaty horror-movie-trailer narrator voice, and Tyler feels his laugh wash a bit more gray away.

“Maybe we should write a song about black holes,” he muses, bumping his shoulder against Josh’s. The heat of skin against skin settles deep behind his ribcage. “You know, to like, gain back some of our street cred. Since black holes are so hardcore. I sing way too much about, like, feelings. Nothing hardcore about that. Black holes are hardcore.”

Josh is laughing, and Tyler has to look at him so he does. He knows the curve of Josh’s neck as his head lolls back to look at the stars, knows the curl and riot of Josh’s hair in the dim starlight, knows the starry squint at the corners of Josh’s eyes. Maybe that’s why Tyler loves Josh so much. Josh is an accumulation of Things He Knows. Josh is calm heartbeats and steady fingers and certainty. Josh is something that Tyler has always known.

Love. Hm. That’s a funny word. He thought he knew that word yesterday. He’s beginning to think – maybe not.

(He doesn’t know.)

Josh isn’t laughing anymore, and suddenly Tyler realizes that he is looking at him. They are looking, and seeing, and knowing, and the stars are bright and there is a black hole out there in the universe that could swallow their sun 12 million times and still not be full and the air is cold and everything suddenly –

It clicks and he knows he knows he knows.

He knows.

“I love you.” The words are not shaky because he is not. They are quiet and star-coated and certain because he knows. His heartbeat is suddenly no longer foreign, it is under his own skin and he knows it, and he knows the steadiness in his fingers, and he can hear Josh breathing. He knows. And maybe Josh does too.

Maybe this is one of the things that they both know. Those things are the best.

“I love you too.” Josh is not-quite-smiling, but his eyes look like the sky after a good rain, fresh washed and electric and alive, and Tyler thinks maybe they both had gray to wash away. He doesn’t care anymore. The gray is gone.

.

They pull the blankets and pillows off the couch and make a nest there on the linoleum of the lounge, so that they can watch the stars. The sky is still uniformly dark, the pearly sunrise still hidden behind million mile horizons. Tyler feels tired but in a way that he knows, in a way that is good. In a way that means that the Things He Doesn’t Know will wait till morning. They will wait forever if they have to.

Josh curls around Tyler and they breathe in together and name constellations for each other. They don’t know any of the same ones and it’s perfect. And when they run out of constellations in the small patch of sky they can see through the windows, they turn away and begin painting them into the dark for each other. Tyler tells Josh about Cygnus the swan and Josh tells him about Cassiopeia. It’s amazing, the things they know.

And when it gets late enough – or early enough – and they’re too tired, they don’t need to know anymore. They know each other, and that’s enough. Tyler breathes in the heat of Josh’s skin and shifts closer, feeling the world slow down into colors that are unknowable in a different way than the gray. Colors that no one has ever imagined.

Tyler doesn’t know. He doesn’t know a lot of things. He doesn’t know how many miles they’ve driven tonight or what the Great Wall of China looks like or how it feels to be pulled apart in a black hole. He doesn’t know if the gray is gone for good or if his heartbeat will stay there in his chest, where it belongs. He doesn’t know much about life or night or fear or the meaning of all this. He doesn’t know much. But as he feels Josh’s heartbeat line up with his own and he hears Josh’s breathing closer than it’s ever been, he thinks to himself, I know this.

He doesn’t know much, but he knows this. Maybe that’s enough.