Weigh on my Mind (Bert/Quinn, Bert/Tim)
Title: Weigh on my Mind
Author: missellemorte
Pairing: Bert/Quinn, Bert/Tim.
Bert and Quinn had always had this thing.
Blue and Yellow pretty much described it, but most people knew that the only ones who could ever really understand it, were bertandquinn.
They were forever sharing inside jokes, and speaking in a language only the two of them could comprehend.
Bert had spent half of his life curled up against Quinn, and Quinn had spent half of his life just trying to keep Bert there, where he knew he'd be safe.
Laying around with Quinn, doing nothing felt almost congenital to Bert.
The lulling motion of just the way it felt when Quinn was breathing, slow and calm against Bert's cheek; it was habit, really. And it was the best feeling in the world.
"Bullshit," Jepha said. "That is complete bullshit."
Across the room, Quinn flipped him off. He was laying with his eyes closed, on his back with one arm tucked behind his head for support, and the other one drooped over his ribs, just above where Bert's head was resting on his abdomen.
Bert smiled, half-hazed, and sat up. "I'm not shittin' you. True story."
Jepha shook his head, and sat down on Quinn's amp. "You guys have had an entire week to think up new shit while me and Dan have been away. You can not keep blaming your lack of creativity on Quinn's stomach."
"Don't yell at him," Quinn said sternly, his eyes snapping open. He sat up, and rubbed his muddy brown eyes lazily. "It's my fault."
Jepha gawked at him. "I wasn't yelling, I --"
"It's not Quinn, it's --" Bert sniffled, and took in a deep breath, like he was willing-away the need to cry. "-- It's that damn place just below his bellybutton.. That little line that goes down his tummy.." Bert sighed sadly. "I'm sick, Jeph. I'm real sick."
"Oh good lord." Jepha stood up again. As excuses for Bert went, Jepha really should have been used to this one by now. It wasn't one of the more ridiculous ones they'd made up, and they did have plausible evidence of said problem; but they had to be in the studio by next month, and evidence or not, they needed to stop dicking around, and get down to business.
Bert extracted his finger from his nose, and wiped it on Quinn's shirt. "It's a small addiction, I mean… we all have them. You have twitter. Dan has myspace. I have Quinn's tummy." Bert gave a short half-shrug. "And I'm sorry, but I can't help it."
Quinn scratched his neck. "He said he was sorry, Jeph."
"You are not addicted to Quinn's stomach." Jepha pointed at Bert. "And I am not addicted to twitter."
Bert raised the hem of Quinn's white t-shirt, and blew raspberries on his stomach. He pushed his greasy black locks out of his face, stuck his tongue inside of Quinn's bellybutton, and then, "You know that after-taste you get in your mouth when you've just ate out your girlfriend's pussy and then did some meth?"
Jepha blinked.
Bert smiled, and leaned his head against Quinn's shoulder. "When I rim Quinn's bellybutton, it tastes even better." He nuzzled his nose against Quinn's neck. "He is my anti-drug, and I'm addicted."
"Oxymoron. And you cannot be addicted to someone's stomach." Jepha said. "If you could, there would be rehabilitation centers for it."
Quinn was looking off to the side, and tapping his fingers against his leg.
Bert leaned forward and did a front roll across the floor, almost crushing his cigarettes in the process.
"Not everyone has a tummy like Quinny-poo. I'm love-sick for his midsection… and also his dick. It's a disease, Jephy." Bert glanced at him critically. "And I don't want to get well."
"We should go get sushi," Quinn suggested, he started playing with Jepha's shoelace, but Jepha shook his hand away, and side-stepped out of his reach. "If it was a disease, you could get medication for it."
Bert shook a cigarette out of his pack. "You can't get medication for the swine-flu." he put the cigarette between his lips.
"Also maybe some brewskies…" Quinn muttered.
Jepha crossed his arms over his chest. "Quinn's stomach is not the swine-flu."
Bert grabbed a half-empty book of matches off of the floor, struck one, held it against his cigarette and inhaled. "I dunno, Jeph. I'm sick. But despite my raging sickness," he shook the match out, and tossed it over his shoulder. "We still got some stuff done." He pointed to the blue notebook laying haphazardly on the floor, close to where Jepha was standing.
Jepha glanced at it. "If you're really sick, go see a doctor," he picked up the notebook, and flipped through the pages. "And all that's in here are doodles of you and Quinn having sex… and stories about it."
Bert grinned. "It's beautiful."
"Wait, that's it!" Jepha tossed the notebook down. "That's it!"
"Sex?" Bert asked.
"No. We're gonna have us a bet, sheriff," Jepha said in a fake western accent. "You're gonna go see a doctor about your… "problem". And if they actually buy into it, and prescribe you some type of medication to fix this, then I won't give you guys any more shit about not getting any work done. If they don't, I get to go back to Cali with Serina for the weekend --"
"Why Cali? You guys hate it there, go camping!" Bert gave a devilish grin. "Ya'll can go awn out tah that tharr tennerssee, and have ya'll some broke-back miley cyrus mountain sex, and wrestle a full-grown grizzly bear!"
Jepha just stared at him. "Finished?" he asked.
Bert was grinning, sitting cross-legged, and holding his calves as he rocked back and forth.
Jepha cleared his throat. "Anyway --"
"Ya get the beeeesssttt of both worlds!" Bert sang out. He was using the Rick Astley voice. The one he used to mock-sing Never Gonna Give You Up. "Lickin' cunt, doin' blow, then you rim some butthole!"
Quinn immediately started laughing, and Jepha was smiling wide. "Anyway," he said. "I go back to Cali, or… the 'miley mountains'. Whereverthefuck. And you two have to catch up on the work you were supposed to do last week. Deal?"
Bert turned to Quinn for approval.
"If we win, you have to buy us sushi and beer." Quinn said.
Bert raised his hand. "And condoms!" He looked at Quinn. "For Alison, not you."
"Deal." Jepha said.
*
Around noon the next day, Quinn and Bert exchanged heartfelt goodbyes, which consisted of 2 blowjobs before breakfast, 1 handjob in the car, and Bert drawing a face on Quinn's belly, with it's head beginning underneath his crown tattoo, and his bellybutton in place of a mouth. Then, while they were waiting for Bert's flight to start boarding, Bert amused himself by pulling Quinn's shirt up, and making the face "talk". Just after Bert had finished skullfucking the face with his index finger (which he'd drawn a stark phallus on); he sat up, looked at Quinn and said "Your bellybutton is always so clean," he narrowed his eyes at Quinn leerily. "Why is your bellybutton always so clean?"
Quinn crossed his legs. "Because you're always eating it out."
"Because you taste good," Bert replied. He stared at the ticket counter, and scratched his ear. "Mine is never clean. Why is mine never clean?" It wasn't so much a question, as just Bert being silly and vocally saying whatever it was he was thinking.
Quinn turned his body towards Bert, and tried to find a way to explain to him nicely that his (Quinn's) bellybutton was probably cleaner than Bert's entire body. "Um," Quinn said. Fuck it. There's no nice way. "Because yours looks like it might have venereal disease."
Bert lifted a finger, as if to prove a point. "And also because no one makes out with mine," he lifted his shirt up, and peered down at his own bellybutton.
Quinn nodded. "I'd make out with it if you wanted me to."
Bert's face broke into a shy smile. The kind where your chin is tucked down, and you're looking up from beneath your eyelashes, embarrassed, but beaming. The kind of smile where anyone who sees him can tell just how much Quinn means. They can tell that everything he'd hoped for in life is validated in Quinn's eyes. And they both shared that smile so often, it was normal.
When Bert was 15, he was homeless. He was a junkie, a drug dealer, and just a little too trusting. He'd seen things that he would never forget, and he had been through things that he would never tell anyone, not even Quinn. Because they weren't important, no matter how much they'd scared him. It was the past, and it was over. On the night that Bert was kicked out, he spent the night in his 7 year old neighbors tree house. He would have continued to do this, had he not been roused the following morning with a shotgun pointed at him. From then on, he slept in any partly-secluded place that was dry enough for him to be comfortable, and preferably sheltered. Bert had slept in dumpsters, boxes, and bushes. He'd slept in junkyard cars, and people's garages; in dog houses, and truck stop bathrooms. But then, one day, Bert was sleeping in a house again. He was warm, and safe in a bed with this guy who'd showed up out of the blue to save him. Most people go their whole lives without knowing how that feels.
It wasn't just that they were in love. It was the fact that Quinn had been looking for something to believe in. And he found Bert. Bert, who smelled like garbage and had weighed 100 pounds. Bert, who stole stale, 3-year-old hard candies from Quinn's Grandmother's purse.
Bert, who sang like most people breathe; natural and with his own rhythm, flowing and, without it, he would die.
Bert always said that Quinn saved his life. But before Bert, Quinn never knew living.
"You know what?" Bert cupped Quinn's chin in his hand. "You're fucking dreamy." And when Bert kissed him, Quinn let it register just how good it felt to know how to breathe.
*
The plane ride from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was excruciatingly boring, but Bert found simple ways to amuse himself, and make the flight a little less tedious; such as: trading the 11 year old passenger seated next to him a piece of space cake, in exchange for his bag of peanut m&m's. Then Bert sucked the candy off of the peanuts, and occupied his time by throwing them at the backs of peoples heads, and then giggling, and making kissy faces at them when they turned around. This lasted approximately 3.12 minutes. Then, a stewardess confiscated Bert's bag of nuts, and gave him a long lecture of flight etiquette. When she'd finished lecturing him, and was placing the small, yellow candy bag in the pocket of her blue uniform, Bert pouted with all of his might for a whopping 6 seconds before a smile engulfed his face, and he said, "So, I don't want you to think I'm being sexist right now by assuming that I'd have to pay for this, but, if I get those back and they taste like vagina-covered peanuts; I still get them back for free, right? I don't have to pay extra?"
The blonde stared. "Excuse me?"
"No," Bert shook his head. "No, you're absolutely right. You're totally right. You should get paid for that, like, at least a tip. How much? At Pizza Hut the extra toppings are like, what, 75 cents?"
Bert spent the rest of the flight trying to convince the stewardess not to file for sexual harassment.
*
When Bert got home, he dropped his worn-out black backpack by the door. Alison looked up from the newspaper she was reading on the couch. "You're back?" She asked.
"I have a doctors appointment." he replied, walking into the kitchen.
"Mm," Alison said from behind her paper. "The gonorrhea came back?"
"What? No," Bert grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, and returned to the front room. "Maybe, I don't know. But that's not the reason."
Alison replied with an affirmative "mm" and went back to the paper.
"Have you seen the phone?" he asked, looking underneath a throw pillow. "I have to call Brian about a "misunderstanding" I had with a stewardess."
Brian Schechter: epic, and unforgettable tour manager; terrible, terrible matchmaker.
Brian was not the person Bert should be calling about this. He should be calling Craig Aaronson, or John Feldmann, but Craig would just huff a lot, and then try to give Bert some sort of optimistic bullshit speech about how "everything is going to be alright" and "you didn't do anything wrong". And John would call Bert an idiot in seven different languages, probably. Because John hung out with those Peta people, and they were smart as fuck, so Bert suspected that John would be at the least, bilingual.
He would also yell at him a lot, and take away his i-get-to-ride-an-airplane-by-myself privileges, in which case Bert would pitch a fit like no other, and it all seemed like too much trouble, but sexual harassment still sounded like an important subject, so he probably needed to tell someone who was an authoritative figure in his life about this. And Brian had always helped in the past. He was always there whenever Bert needed a place to sleep because Gerard kicked him out of the bunks for trying to insert a fruit by the foot into his anus while he was sleeping because he (Bert) was 'fucking bored'.
"Is the 'misunderstanding' called Sexual Harassment?" Alison asked. She grabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray on the coffee table, and lit it, not looking up from the article she was on.
Bert smiled. "You're awesome. I love you. Let's go make a sex tape, and send it to Gerard, he's gonna be so jealous," he narrowed his eyes. "that motherfucker."
"What?" Alison dropped the paper. Bert was standing by the CD rack, fingering the edges of the jewel cases. He looked up, wide-eyed and alert.
"Jepha," Bert cleared his throat. "I said let's send it to Jepha."
Alison took a long drag off of the cigarette, then slowly nodded when she exhaled the smoke.
"You should probably call Brian first,"
She dropped her cigarette into an empty corona can, and stood up. "I'll go set up the camera. Bring snacks."
Bert's smile widened. "How drunk are you right now, on a scale of 1-10?"
"Drunk enough to not care that this is a bad idea; not drunk enough to say that I won't divorce you if it ends up on YouTube." She grabbed him around the waist, and kissed the tip of his nose.
Bert had a long range of smells he could tolerate before he would actually call them "bad". Bert could tolerate death, and dog shit, and vomit, and Quinn said this was probably because at one point in time, Bert kind of smelled like all of those odors combined.
But at that point in time, Bert decided that Alison was the only thing in California that didn't fucking reek. She smelled like beer, and flowers, and the closest thing to home you could get without actually being Quinn Allman. And Bert really hadn't realized how much he'd missed her in the past week he'd been in Utah.
He grinned. "Let's get married."
Alison pushed his hair out of her face. "We're already married."
He leaned his forehead against hers. "Let's have sex."
"Call Brian."
*
A very on and off 3 hours of marathon-sex later, Bert called Brian.
As soon as he picked up the phone, Bert said "Bri-fi! What's up, buttercup?"
There was a brief pause before Brian said "What do you want, Bert."
Bert picked up a beer he found on the dresser that he sincerely hoped was fresh, and took a drink. "I need a grown-ups opinion on something, so I called you." It was not.
"Which would make sense," Brian said. "Because you're twenty-seven."
Bert laughed. "Exactly."
Brian sighed. "What have you done this time? Or should I say whom," he muttered.
"Is sexual harassment something I should worry about?"
"Bert," Brian covered his eyes with one of his hands. "How many times have we had this conversation?"
"Five..." Bert sat the beer can down. "Hundered... thousand-ish?"
"Okay. And how many times am I going to have to tell you that just because someone is sleeping in the same room as you, you do not have their legal consent to insert edible, or otherwise inanimate objects into their anal cavity?"
Bert giggled. "We had so much fun. I miss you, Brian."
Brian shook his head, and rubbed his closed eyelids. "Yeah, I love you too, Bert."
"Remember that time I let Frank Iero shoot bottlerockets out of my butthole?"
Brian blinked, and thought that he really should consider a new career.
*
10:30 on a Tuesday morning Bert arrived at a LA Doctor's office.
His appointment wasn't until 11:22, but Alison had work, and Jeph wouldn't pick up his phone.
Bert was bored.
He signed himself in, and then had a meltdown when the receptionist told him that they did not have lollipops.
Bert silently flailed around in a way that kind of looked like he was moshing by himself before quietly shrieking, "This place is bullshit!" and retreating to a seat in the corner.
Soon after he'd sat down, he heard a familiar voice release an exasperated, and annoyed "No."
His eyes scanned the room.
The waiting room was surprisingly empty except for a family of three, and an older couple, who all seemed un-phased by Bert's tantrum, but then on the other side of the room he saw two men quietly arguing. The one with the hat on was making angry hand gestures in Bert's direction.
The guy seated next to him appeared to be trying to reason with his friend.
Bert squinted.
A slow grin crept onto his face, and he hopped up, and danced his way over to the pair.
"Brandenstein!" Bert exclaimed.
Branden gave a forced smile, and an awkward half-wave. The guy sitting next to him slid down in his chair, and tilted his hat, just so that it hid his face.
"Holy pinappletits!" Bert said. "Is that a fucking fedora? Okay, this has to be Tim motherfucking Armstrong."
"Bert," Tim said. "I'm not in the mood, Bert."
"You, Johnny Depp, and Michael Jackson are the only two people in the state of California who wear fedoras," Bert continued. He wedged himself into the small space between Branden and Tim. "So how's life, Tim Armstrong?"
Tim moved into another seat. "Good, Bert. Life's good. Thanks for asking, I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm a little sick right now.. Actually, I might be contagious, so…" he trailed off.
"Is it chlamydia?" Bert asked, a little too loud.
Tim gritted his teeth, and looked at Branden pleadingly. "Please get him away from me."
"Hey, Bert, what time's your appointment?" Branden asked.
"What?" Bert turned to Branden. "Like, eleven-something. Why?"
"You wanna go outside and have a smoke with me?" Branden asked, holding up a pack of cigarettes.
Branden himself did not smoke, but he always carried a pack around with him anyway, for just such occasions, and also in case Tim ever ran out.
Bert turned back to Tim. He leaned dangerously close to Tim's face.
"Know what helps chlamydia?" he whispered.
Tim furrowed his brows. "I will punch you."
Tim had been around Bert a total of 3 times in his life, and already he hated the guy.
The first time Tim met Bert was at Branden's birthday party.
Tim had been standing by the pool, when Bert came up to him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and kissed him square on the lips. Before Tim had any time to recover from the shock, Bert was gripping his ass, and whispering "My whole life I only had a couple of things I really wanted to do. One was to make it; just get the fuck out of Utah, the other was to blow Tim Armstrong". Before Bert could say anything else, Tim pushed him into the pool.
"You won't punch me. And normally people are nicer to me." Bert said, sitting back in his seat.
"If you keep provoking me I will. And Normally people don't offer to blow me before I even know their name."
Bert smiled with a far-away look in his eyes. "The first time we met was so romantic."
"So about that cigarette break," Branden said nervously.
A nurse came out, and called the small family to come in and see the doctor.
Bert smiled at Tim blissfully. "On the news this morning they said that they can grow organs now, like in a petri dish, or.. something fucking smart," Bert paused. "So, that means that it wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that there are ways that you could get me pregnant. I would carry your child, Tim Armstrong."
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Tim put his thumb and forefinger to his head, and massaged his temples.
"Oh, I'm here because Jeph thinks I have a problem." Bert confirmed.
"He's not the only one.." Tim muttered.
"I'm gonna go for that cigarette," Branden said.
"You don't smoke." Tim reminded him.
"Well," Branden stood up. "I'm going to go for a candy run. Bert, you in?"
Bert grinned maliciously. "I'm working on that."
Branden sighed, and leaned on one hip. He looked tired, and worn down; like whatever was wrong with Tim had also taken a physical toll on Branden. "Don't try to get in Tim's pants. He's sick, Bert. He'll hurt you." Branden turned to Tim, and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry, man. I tried. I did. Sorry."
Tim gave him a sarcastic sneer of a smile. "Thanks."
"I'll be back," Branden pointed at them warningly. "Don't kill each other.. Be nice. Please." he walked by them, and out of the glass office door.
Bert leaned so close to Tim's face that their noses touched. "I missed you so much."
Tim shoved Bert away by his shoulder, without much force. "You don't know me well enough to miss me. Now, Get away from me."
"We have a lot in common. I look up to you, you know.. as a person. But I idolize you as a musician."
Tim had seen Bert's stage performances. They consisted of a lot of spitting, a lot of cursing, and a lot of puking. He really wanted to take what Bert had said as a compliment, but somehow it kind of seemed like a put-down.
Bert was talented, that was for sure. But he was also a lot of other things that couldn't be excused no matter how nice his voice was.
"I'm not sure how to take that." Tim admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Your music is immortal. It made me realize that it was okay that I wasn't what my parents were expecting. And that's when I decided that as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror, and be alright with it, then nothing else matters. And you know what? You did something I was never able to do.." Bert smiled meekly. "You got clean, Tim Armstrong."
For the first time that day, Tim actually looked Bert in the eyes, and there was something familiar about the two blue orbs staring back at him that made Tim's heart sink into the pit of his stomach.
For one sick moment, Tim remembered how it felt to wake up puking.
Tim had spent the majority of his younger years saturating his organs in alcohol, trying to drown himself in glass bottles that never meant anything to begin with.
Music was a sort of half-jaded sheet-work chapel that Tim could curl up inside of, and be just fingertips away from another version of himself with dry insides, and a feeling of serenity. He could stop trying to drown himself, and just chill out for a while.
When Tim was on stage, the amount of people watching wasn't what mattered. It was the unity. The feeling that no matter what was going on in your life, someone else could look right through you, and pick at your brain, your heart, your soul; they could take you apart and analyze you, and never think a single negative thought. It was the fact that every show Tim had ever put on, everyone had a place, and everyone belonged. Like falling into some sort of alternative universe where everything didn't fucking suck, and people actually cared about each other. And right now, that filthy, annoying kid with his obnoxious fucking personality, and his stupid girly ink looked a lot like drowning.
Tim stood up.
"I need to-- bathroom." he had just enough time to quickly walk the length of the room, and shut the door to the single-stall restroom, before he took three quick steps towards the toilet, and vomited. "Fuck," he vocalized. The smell of puke only added to his nausea, not to mention, the sight of his own half-regurgitated breakfast floating around in a dirty public toilet and painting the sides of the toilet seat and some of the floor in small, liquid puddles was a little too much. He clutched his sides, sunk down to his knees, and threw up again, into the toilet.
When the sickness had subsided, and he felt like he could breathe again, he pulled some paper towels out of the holder, and started mopping up the mess he'd made.
He heard the door open, but didn't look up. "Someone's in here." he croaked out.
The sound of footsteps on tile approaching met his ears, and then, "Is that a french fry?"
Tim frowned. "Get out of here, McCracken."
"I just came to see if you were okay," Bert said. "Are you okay?"
Tim shrugged, and dropped the wad of vomit-soaked papertowels into the toilet.
Bert crouched beside Tim, and peered into the toilet. "You're sick," he sounded concerned.
Tim scoffed, and flushed it. "I think that's a pretty lucid observation."
"You're not going to die are you?" Bert stared at him through child-like eyes.
"I've been in love with you since I was 10 years old," Bert said. "Your music taught me everything I know. You changed my life, Tim Armstrong. Tell me you're dying, and I will kill myself right now."
Tim took a deep breath in through his nose. "You know what's funny.." he muttered, his voice was quiet and dragging along the borderline of serious, and humored. "You spend your life living in bottles, and when you finally decide to break out, you're old enough for grown men to tell you--"
Bert lunged at Tim unsteadily, closing the distance between them, and knocking them both over. Tim fell on his back against the cold bathroom floor, and Bert landed on top of him, and kissed him hard, seemingly uncaring that Tim tasted like cigarettes and stomach bile.
The bathroom reeked of various bodily fluids, and something that smelled kind of like chlorine, and outside of the bathroom they could hear the same generic elevator music-esque radio station that was always on in the office.
They didn't move for a moment.
For a moment it was all tongues, and bathroom tiles, and then Bert was undoing Tim's pants, and the reality of the situation was beginning to concrete. Tim shoved Bert hard, and sat up.
Bert's back hit against the stall wall with a loud clanking noise. He looked surprised, but shockingly un-phased. "What?"
"I'm straight," Tim sat up. "And this is a public bathroom." He paused. "A public bathroom that I just vomited in."
Bert pushed away from the stall wall, and crawled back over to where Tim was now sitting up, looking worn down.
Bert scooted across the floor, and plopped down on Tim's lap, his knees on either side of Tim's hips. "Yeah," Bert said. "I'm straight too, sometimes" and Tim thinks of shoving him away, or pushing his head into the toilet, but fuck, that would probably just make him laugh, and Tim felt too tired anyway.
Bert readjusted the way he was sitting, and tilted his head to the side. He was looking at Tim in that same stupid way he used to look at Gerard whenever he would go on one of his long rants about saving the world, or some other insane shit that sounded to Bert like it should be on the pages of a marvel-fucking-comic book rather than in someone's brain, but this guy sucked a mean cock, so whatever. The same look he gave whenever that particular rant was just too long, and too boring for him to completely follow, but they were doing an interview, so maybe he should at least try to listen to him, but he was only able to catch certain words in the conversation like that time when Gerard had said 'But sector ten really defines it' and what Bert had heard was "Butt sex" so no one really understood why he started laughing.
And it was kind of like that same look, except not at all because Tim's eyes looked hard, and deep, and fucking honest, like someone who'd lived one-thousand lives, and knew how it felt to have to resurrect yourself just to hold on to the one person who'd never turned their back. And Bert thought he looked much too young to have done so much living.
"I never thought I'd live to see my forties," Tim said slowly, as if he'd read Bert's mind. "Never thought I'd have someone young enough to be my biological child molesting me in a filthy bathroom either."
Bert stayed still. "I never thought I'd make it to eighteen.. If it weren't for Quinn I'd -- I don't know what I'd be right now. Probably a pile of bones in the dirt.. Each day I wake up, I'm a little surprised."
Tim exhaled a short laugh out of his nose. "Indemnifiers." he said.
"I'm gonna be honest with you," Bert smiled. "I have no fucking idea what you just said."
Tim blinked. "Okay, indemnifiers aside, how are you not dead yet?"
"Take your pants off, and I'll show you."
"I'm not having sex with you." Tim tries to scoot up a little, but Bert's surprisingly heavy to be so small.
Bert leaned forward enough that Tim could smell his stinky fucking breath, and Tim leaned back onto the stall wall until it was hurting his back. "What are you doing?"
Tim was so distracted in trying to prepare himself for any kiss-attacks that Bert might be plotting, that he didn't realize Bert had slid his hands into his pants, until he was already gripping his dick through bony little fingers.
Tim's spine arched, and he reached up, one hand sinking into Bert's collarbone area, and he started to push him off, but then Bert's spidery little fingers had managed to snake past Tim's underwear, and he was moving his fingers more like a massage than a handjob, like he was playing the fucking piano on Tim's dick, and Tim's stomach turned hot. He gasped.
There was a screw or some part of the blandly-painted stall wall digging into his back, and the feeling of Bert crawling down his body. "What are you doing?" Tim said through gritted teeth.
Bert's face was nearing dangerously close to his crotch. "Making you feel better." Bert said.
The feeling of Bert's breath, warm and moist hit his dick, and he breathed in all the odors present in that tiny germ-infested bathroom and my god, Tim never knew that it was possible to want to vomit and fuck at the same time.
"Bert -" Tim began, slightly shivering and weak after just a few strokes.
Bert's tongue hit the tip of his dick, and Tim moaned as Bert took him into his mouth.
Bert leaned up and smiled. "You were saying?"
Tim grabbed his head and forced him down onto his dick. "Shut up."
Bert went back to work with his mouth, Tim guiding his head with his hands, making him gag a couple of times. He sat back, and worked his hand against Tim's member, until Tim knotted the fabric of Bert's ugly, ratty shorts in his fist.
He spit on Tim's dick, and pitched forward in one single, swift motion, taking Tim deep.
"Fuck," Tim choked out.
His breath was rigid, and he was lost in the sensation of that thing Bert was doing with his tongue. Bert kept his mouth on Tim, gooey-hot, and torrid, only stopping to catch his breath when he felt like he was going to pass out.
Tim grabbed his hair, forcing him down even farther as his thighs started to tremble.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck" Tim chanted out, pushing his crotch against Bert's mouth so hard he thought he might break his trachea.
His body arched against the aluminum wall and he came inside of Bert's mouth.
Bert sat up slowly, swallowed, and licked his lips. "Feel better?"
"Why are you here," Tim said breathlessly. "If you've given me some sort of STD I swear I'll --"
"Relax I'm not infected… currently." Bert said, climbing off of Tim's lap.
"Then why are you here."
Bert looked at him. "I'm in love."
Tim smirked, and closed his eyes, leaning his head against the wall. "There is no cure for being in love."
Bert smiled, watching Tim tuck his dick back into his pants, and do his pants up.
"I don't want a cure," he said. "I just want to muffle it enough to where I can get some fucking songs done and Jeph'll stop bitching." he shrugged. "Quinn puts up with me even when I'm being a douche, and I don't wanna get him in trouble."
Tim remembered a time when he was 26, and he'd promised Matt for what had to be the thousandth time that he was getting clean. He'd looked at him with the same dead-seriousness that he'd put on several times before, and said. "I'm quitting drinking," and most people would be so worn-down from Tim's bullshit talks of how he was going to sober up, and stop vomiting in the back of people's cars; but Matt gave Tim the most honest look he'd ever seen, put a hand on his shoulder and said, "I know."
Indemnifiers, Tim thought as he was standing up. Because fuck it, they were. He'd always thought that if the Tim he was now ever met the Tim he was years ago, he would kick his drunken, obnoxious ass, and truth be told, he kind of thought that maybe, just maybe that was why Bert irritated him so much.
Because Bert and Quinn reminded him of past-Tim and past-Matt, and Tim had had enough of sloppy little addicts who couldn't even breathe without someone there to hold them up.
He moved out of the stall, and started washing his hands in the sink, and he thought about telling Bert that there were better ways to express himself other than drinking, and drugs. And that he didn't have to be fucked up in order to feel alright about what he had to say.
He thought about telling him that everyone needs to put out an opinion, whether it's a 3 year old, a 70 year old, or a filthy emo goblin who molests sick people in dirty bathrooms, because it's still very important. Because it's coming from their heart and mind, and it matters. And then Tim thought that maybe Bert just drank because he was bored, and Tim gave up on trying to help.
The door swung open, and Branden was standing there with a look on his face like he'd just had seven heart-attacks and lived to tell the tale. "Tim? Where's Bert?"
Bert poked his head out of the stall and waved. Branden's body relaxed, and he looked relieved. "I thought you were dead, and Tim was shoving your body in the ventilation shaft by now."
Bert grinned, and wiped his hands on his shirt when he came out of the stall. "Wrong kind of shaft, Brando."
*
Bert sat on the examination table in the small room, playing "drums" on his legs.
He got bored and decided to look through every drawer in the room. He played with the reflex-checker, and shoved an operating-mask, and some latex gloves into his pockets, and was about to use the old desktop computer in the corner to look up porn when the doctor entered the room. "Mr. McCracken," she smiled. "What can I do for you today?" She looked at his chart. "Says here you've been suffering from some sort of addiction? Do you need me to make a referral for a rehabilitation clinic?"
Bert climbed back up onto the examination table. "Actually, no. My addiction's more of a ADHD-type of problem," he smiled. "I'm addicted to my guitarist's stomach, and it blows my concentration, so I can't write anything."
She stared at him, and then flipped through a couple of pages on his chart. "So, you think you have ADHD?"
"Kind of," Bert corrected. "I need something that's going slow me down, so I can concentrate. Like… a reverse-aphrodisiac, or ridilin."
"I can't prescribe ridilin, I'd have to make a referal to another Doctor for that, since it's a behavioral issue."
Bert nodded, and picked at a hole on his shirt. He was bouncing his leg against the stool beside the table.
"It says here you've lost some weight since your last visit," she commented.
"I forget to eat sometimes." He admitted.
"Forget?" she asked. She sat down in a chair across from him.
He shrugged. "I told you I can't concentrate. It's like I just… have no appetite. I get caught up. It's that fucking line!"
She raised a brow. "So loss of appetite is a regular thing for you?"
"When I'm around him," he shrugged. "Forget everything."
She wrote something down. "You do that a lot don't you?" she asked.
"What?"
"Shake your legs like that, are you having muscle spasms?"
Bert frowned, and looked down at his legs. "I don't know?"
She checked his reflexes, nodded, and wrote something else down on his chart. "Any nausea?"
"I puke a lot. Does that count?"
She nodded, and stood up. "Any other problems?"
Bert shook his head, no. "I'm as healthy as a horse."
"Alright, Robert," She tucked his chart underneath her arm, and approached the door. "I'm going to write you out a prescription to help with the loss of appetite, and nausea, and the.. Muscle spasms. See if we can put some weight on you." She smiled. "I'm going to see about fixing you up with a doctor who specializes in behavioral problems, and a neurologist for the ADHD, alright?"
"Thanks." Bert said.
She took out a prescription pad. "I'm writing you a prescription for 6 oz. medicinal marijuana,"
Bert's eyes widened.
"I know it sounds scary," she continued. "But it's going to be very benificial to helping you put on weight, and reducing your leg spasms. It might also help with the hyperactivity, and creative-issues you've been having, alright?" She handed him the prescription. "Do you have any questions for me?"
Bert stood up. "Do I get refills?"
*
Quinn and Bert were smoking a joint on the floor of a recording studio in LA. In front of them, John Feldmann, and a couple of other middle-aged tattooed guys were seated in office chairs, fiddling with switches and buttons on the recording equipment. Through the small glass window, they could see Dan laying down the drum tracks for a song. John swiped his hand around in front of him, trying to fan away the smoke. "Can you two go get baked somewhere else?" he asked.
"It's medicinal," Bert said. "It's good for you."
"It's good for the people it's actually prescribed to," John corrected. "Not for the people who are trying to record shit for your album."
"It's good for everyone," Bert said, he shrugged one shoulder, and passed Quinn the joint. "But it did say that I should "avoid driving or operating machinery until I am quite familiar with how the medicine affects me". But this shit is like… it's like kisses. You've got to share kisses."
"And what are you going to do when you run out?" John asked, he turned a knob on the recording equipment.
"Of kisses?" Bert took the joint out of Quinn's mouth, and took a hit off of it himself. Quinn was too busy trying to hold the smoke in to complain much, and even if he hadn't been he wouldn't have said anything really, because hey, it was Bert.
John sighed. "No, of marijuana."
Bert smiled a bit, goofy-happy when he said it. Like just the word 'marijuana' being said so formally by John of all people made him happy.
He held the blunt between his fingers. "I'll get a refill."
John rolled his eyes, and leaned back into his chair. "I meant of refills. They aren't going to keep prescribing you pot forever."
Quinn took the joint from Bert. "Why not?" Quinn asked. "It's helped or else we wouldn't be in the studio right now."
"Yeah," Bert added. "It'd be another two, three weeks before we were in the studio if I hadn't had my herbals. Otherwise I'd be too busy with Quinn. I'm always gonna have refills, man. I'm sick."
John shook his head and gave a short laugh. "Your inability to write when Quinn's around is not because you are 'sick', or because you have 'muscle spasms',"
"Also ADHD." Bert interrupted.
"Also, shut up." John said. "You aren't fucking sick. The ADHD I'm not too sure about, but you aren't fucking sick. You can't write when Quinn's around because you two are so fucking gay for each other that you can't take your goddamn mouth off of him long enough to get some work done, fuck."
Bert and Quinn looked at each other, blinked, and then looked at John.
Bert waved a hand, like that was a ridiculous prospect. "They don't prescribe you medication for being gay."
Quinn looked at Bert for a brief moment before responding with, "Yeah,"
John just smiled smugly. "Stop being so difficult, and admit that you are in love already."
Bert raised a finger. "Also, they don't have a cure for being in love.. Tim Armstrong said so."
"Tim Armstrong is right," John said. "So why do you have a big bag of pot right now?"
Quinn choked on the smoke, and erupted into a fit of coughs, shaking his head and holding what was left of the joint out to Bert.
Bert took it from him, and ground it out into the glass ashtray that was sitting on the floor between them.
Before anything else could be said, the door opened up, and Jepha walked in. He paused in the doorway, and looked around. "Someone smoking pot in here?"
"It's Bert's 'medication'." one of the guys working with the recording equipment said.
Jeph frowned, and walked over to the center of the small room where everyone else was. "I still don't know how the fuck you did that --"
"He's manipulative." John said, turning back to watch Dan.
"But I fucking applaud you for that. Anyone who can convince a doctor that they need pot to help them kick their addiction to someone else's body parts is fucking talented." He held his hand out, and slapped palms with Bert.
"I told you I was sick." Bert smiled.
"He said he was sick, Jepha." Quinn added.
"Okay, numbnuts, I believe you now." Jeph took a seat on the floor next to them.
"He might get Ritalin, too if the neurologist he has an appointment with thinks he needs it. Isn't that nice?" John asked sarcastically.
Bert flipped John off, but John was too busy pressing a button and speaking into a microphone to see him. "Alright, Dan. We're done." John said.
Dan found it necessary to compulsively slam out random drum beats on his set one more time before throwing his drumbsticks at the window, and exiting the recording room. He entered through the door a few minutes later, covered in sweat. He belched. "Knock, knock," he said with a fake accent. "Is Daaaannn. I come in now?"
"You come in now." Jepha said.
"I come in your butthole?" Dan asked. He stood behind Jepha, and slowly humped the back of his head. "I come in your butthole."
Jepha covered his face with his hands, and dramatically fake-cried, occasionally stopping long enough to swat at Dan and yell something like "Cut it out,"
Bert laughed. "Fuck that motherfucker!" Quinn cheered Dan along. "Fuck him!"
"No!" Jeph cried, shielding his head.
Dan gave Jeph's head one last thrust, and then released him. "Jeph no give good head," Dan said, accent still strong.
"Speaking of giving head, I'm hungry." Bert said. He dug his hands into the pockets on his jacket.
"Hey, you still owe us sushi, fuckface," Quinn looked at Jeph. "And booze."
Jepha uncoiled himself out of the protective ball he'd curled into while Dan was skullfucking the back of his head and sighed. "Fine," He stood up. "We done here?" He asked John.
"If I say yes will you take them away?" John raised his brows.
*
They piled into Jepha's car with Bert and Quinn in the back, and Dan in the passengers side.
"Where are we going?" Jeph was digging his keys out of his pocket, looking for a response in his rearview mirror, but all Quinn and Bert were doing was slapping each other in a way that Jeph believed to be called "the fag fight".
"Sushi and brewskie," Dan sang. "Sue-she and Bruce-ski's, Sue-shi and Bruce-ski's. Brewskie, sushi, applebutter? Lunch and songs and motherfuckers."
"Shut the fuck up!" Quinn griped, smacking the back of Dan's head.
Dan grabbed Quinn's wrist before he could pull it back, and squeezed it. "Ooooowww!" Quinn shouted. "Sushi and brewskies with my paaallls," Dan sang.
"No really, where are we going?" Jepha turned on the ignition.
"Ahhhhhoooouuucchhh!" Quinn complained, punching Dan's shoulder.
Bert pinched Dan's ear between his untrimmed fingernails, and Dan immediately let go of Quinn's wrist with a yelp.
"Fuck you guys," Jeph said, turning up the volume. "We're going to Hamasaku."
The car came to life with the sound of The Transplants, and they pulled out of the parking lot.
Quinn was rubbing his wrist, and Bert took his hand, and kissed the red mark that Dan had left on there. He scootched closer, and rested his head on Quinn's shoulder.
In the front Dan was trying to talk over the music, and create his own lyrics to "Weigh on my mind".
Quinn reached underneath his shirt, and scratched his ribs, the bottom of his shirt rose up, exposing semi-tan soft skin, and Bert was staring.
Quinn caught his eye, and he half-smiled.
"Holy shit," Bert said quietly. "Can I -" he looked up at Quinn.
"Still?" Quinn asked.
Bert nodded. "I love you, Quinn," Bert whispered. "There's no cure for that. But John's wrong. It's totally not gay." He narrowed his eyes. "Because I'm married to a woman."
Quinn smiled. "Gay," he said. Bert just looked at him. In the afternoon sunlight, his blue eyes stood out unbelievably bright, and Quinn could see the scabs on his face from last night, when Bert wouldn't stop fucking with Quinn's cat. He could see the crows feet Bert was developing, and something sticky on his cheek. Quinn cupped Bert's chin in his hand, and wiped away the sticky spot with his thumb, and whispered, "I love you, too."
Bert smiled widely, and his small double chin poked out, he slid his hand across Quinn's stomach, and slid a finger into his bellybutton. Quinn smirked. "Small addictions," Quinn said, because fuck, Bert would forever be prompted to spend an eternity laying on Quinn's stomach, and doing nothing at all.
"I will never give this up," Bert told him. "I wanna crawl inside of your bellybutton and live there until I die."
Quinn pulled his face forward, and kissed him. Bert tasted like smoke, and sweat, and ramen noodles, and something else that reminded Quinn of whiskey, but he couldn't be sure.
In the front seat, Jeph yelled, "No buttsex in my car!"
And Dan started rapping about "handjobs, blowjobs, rimjobs, fuck. Fuckity fuck fucker-fuck, fucker-fuck".
Quinn flipped them off, and craned his arm around Bert's neck, pulling him closer, and Bert isn't sure what he did in his life to deserve this, but he makes a mental note to find out, because Quinn feels good.
The car ran over a pothole, and the sudden jolt made their foreheads knock together, and Bert smiled at the way Quinn tightened his grip around him, like despite his insecurities of feeling like there was just too much shit in the world for him to ever be able to keep Bert safe from; he still felt like he needed to protect him from everything in the world.
Even potholes.
"I'm gonna hold on as long as I can here,
And my American dream, I have some doubts there."
Author: missellemorte
Pairing: Bert/Quinn, Bert/Tim.
Bert and Quinn had always had this thing.
Blue and Yellow pretty much described it, but most people knew that the only ones who could ever really understand it, were bertandquinn.
They were forever sharing inside jokes, and speaking in a language only the two of them could comprehend.
Bert had spent half of his life curled up against Quinn, and Quinn had spent half of his life just trying to keep Bert there, where he knew he'd be safe.
Laying around with Quinn, doing nothing felt almost congenital to Bert.
The lulling motion of just the way it felt when Quinn was breathing, slow and calm against Bert's cheek; it was habit, really. And it was the best feeling in the world.
"Bullshit," Jepha said. "That is complete bullshit."
Across the room, Quinn flipped him off. He was laying with his eyes closed, on his back with one arm tucked behind his head for support, and the other one drooped over his ribs, just above where Bert's head was resting on his abdomen.
Bert smiled, half-hazed, and sat up. "I'm not shittin' you. True story."
Jepha shook his head, and sat down on Quinn's amp. "You guys have had an entire week to think up new shit while me and Dan have been away. You can not keep blaming your lack of creativity on Quinn's stomach."
"Don't yell at him," Quinn said sternly, his eyes snapping open. He sat up, and rubbed his muddy brown eyes lazily. "It's my fault."
Jepha gawked at him. "I wasn't yelling, I --"
"It's not Quinn, it's --" Bert sniffled, and took in a deep breath, like he was willing-away the need to cry. "-- It's that damn place just below his bellybutton.. That little line that goes down his tummy.." Bert sighed sadly. "I'm sick, Jeph. I'm real sick."
"Oh good lord." Jepha stood up again. As excuses for Bert went, Jepha really should have been used to this one by now. It wasn't one of the more ridiculous ones they'd made up, and they did have plausible evidence of said problem; but they had to be in the studio by next month, and evidence or not, they needed to stop dicking around, and get down to business.
Bert extracted his finger from his nose, and wiped it on Quinn's shirt. "It's a small addiction, I mean… we all have them. You have twitter. Dan has myspace. I have Quinn's tummy." Bert gave a short half-shrug. "And I'm sorry, but I can't help it."
Quinn scratched his neck. "He said he was sorry, Jeph."
"You are not addicted to Quinn's stomach." Jepha pointed at Bert. "And I am not addicted to twitter."
Bert raised the hem of Quinn's white t-shirt, and blew raspberries on his stomach. He pushed his greasy black locks out of his face, stuck his tongue inside of Quinn's bellybutton, and then, "You know that after-taste you get in your mouth when you've just ate out your girlfriend's pussy and then did some meth?"
Jepha blinked.
Bert smiled, and leaned his head against Quinn's shoulder. "When I rim Quinn's bellybutton, it tastes even better." He nuzzled his nose against Quinn's neck. "He is my anti-drug, and I'm addicted."
"Oxymoron. And you cannot be addicted to someone's stomach." Jepha said. "If you could, there would be rehabilitation centers for it."
Quinn was looking off to the side, and tapping his fingers against his leg.
Bert leaned forward and did a front roll across the floor, almost crushing his cigarettes in the process.
"Not everyone has a tummy like Quinny-poo. I'm love-sick for his midsection… and also his dick. It's a disease, Jephy." Bert glanced at him critically. "And I don't want to get well."
"We should go get sushi," Quinn suggested, he started playing with Jepha's shoelace, but Jepha shook his hand away, and side-stepped out of his reach. "If it was a disease, you could get medication for it."
Bert shook a cigarette out of his pack. "You can't get medication for the swine-flu." he put the cigarette between his lips.
"Also maybe some brewskies…" Quinn muttered.
Jepha crossed his arms over his chest. "Quinn's stomach is not the swine-flu."
Bert grabbed a half-empty book of matches off of the floor, struck one, held it against his cigarette and inhaled. "I dunno, Jeph. I'm sick. But despite my raging sickness," he shook the match out, and tossed it over his shoulder. "We still got some stuff done." He pointed to the blue notebook laying haphazardly on the floor, close to where Jepha was standing.
Jepha glanced at it. "If you're really sick, go see a doctor," he picked up the notebook, and flipped through the pages. "And all that's in here are doodles of you and Quinn having sex… and stories about it."
Bert grinned. "It's beautiful."
"Wait, that's it!" Jepha tossed the notebook down. "That's it!"
"Sex?" Bert asked.
"No. We're gonna have us a bet, sheriff," Jepha said in a fake western accent. "You're gonna go see a doctor about your… "problem". And if they actually buy into it, and prescribe you some type of medication to fix this, then I won't give you guys any more shit about not getting any work done. If they don't, I get to go back to Cali with Serina for the weekend --"
"Why Cali? You guys hate it there, go camping!" Bert gave a devilish grin. "Ya'll can go awn out tah that tharr tennerssee, and have ya'll some broke-back miley cyrus mountain sex, and wrestle a full-grown grizzly bear!"
Jepha just stared at him. "Finished?" he asked.
Bert was grinning, sitting cross-legged, and holding his calves as he rocked back and forth.
Jepha cleared his throat. "Anyway --"
"Ya get the beeeesssttt of both worlds!" Bert sang out. He was using the Rick Astley voice. The one he used to mock-sing Never Gonna Give You Up. "Lickin' cunt, doin' blow, then you rim some butthole!"
Quinn immediately started laughing, and Jepha was smiling wide. "Anyway," he said. "I go back to Cali, or… the 'miley mountains'. Whereverthefuck. And you two have to catch up on the work you were supposed to do last week. Deal?"
Bert turned to Quinn for approval.
"If we win, you have to buy us sushi and beer." Quinn said.
Bert raised his hand. "And condoms!" He looked at Quinn. "For Alison, not you."
"Deal." Jepha said.
*
Around noon the next day, Quinn and Bert exchanged heartfelt goodbyes, which consisted of 2 blowjobs before breakfast, 1 handjob in the car, and Bert drawing a face on Quinn's belly, with it's head beginning underneath his crown tattoo, and his bellybutton in place of a mouth. Then, while they were waiting for Bert's flight to start boarding, Bert amused himself by pulling Quinn's shirt up, and making the face "talk". Just after Bert had finished skullfucking the face with his index finger (which he'd drawn a stark phallus on); he sat up, looked at Quinn and said "Your bellybutton is always so clean," he narrowed his eyes at Quinn leerily. "Why is your bellybutton always so clean?"
Quinn crossed his legs. "Because you're always eating it out."
"Because you taste good," Bert replied. He stared at the ticket counter, and scratched his ear. "Mine is never clean. Why is mine never clean?" It wasn't so much a question, as just Bert being silly and vocally saying whatever it was he was thinking.
Quinn turned his body towards Bert, and tried to find a way to explain to him nicely that his (Quinn's) bellybutton was probably cleaner than Bert's entire body. "Um," Quinn said. Fuck it. There's no nice way. "Because yours looks like it might have venereal disease."
Bert lifted a finger, as if to prove a point. "And also because no one makes out with mine," he lifted his shirt up, and peered down at his own bellybutton.
Quinn nodded. "I'd make out with it if you wanted me to."
Bert's face broke into a shy smile. The kind where your chin is tucked down, and you're looking up from beneath your eyelashes, embarrassed, but beaming. The kind of smile where anyone who sees him can tell just how much Quinn means. They can tell that everything he'd hoped for in life is validated in Quinn's eyes. And they both shared that smile so often, it was normal.
When Bert was 15, he was homeless. He was a junkie, a drug dealer, and just a little too trusting. He'd seen things that he would never forget, and he had been through things that he would never tell anyone, not even Quinn. Because they weren't important, no matter how much they'd scared him. It was the past, and it was over. On the night that Bert was kicked out, he spent the night in his 7 year old neighbors tree house. He would have continued to do this, had he not been roused the following morning with a shotgun pointed at him. From then on, he slept in any partly-secluded place that was dry enough for him to be comfortable, and preferably sheltered. Bert had slept in dumpsters, boxes, and bushes. He'd slept in junkyard cars, and people's garages; in dog houses, and truck stop bathrooms. But then, one day, Bert was sleeping in a house again. He was warm, and safe in a bed with this guy who'd showed up out of the blue to save him. Most people go their whole lives without knowing how that feels.
It wasn't just that they were in love. It was the fact that Quinn had been looking for something to believe in. And he found Bert. Bert, who smelled like garbage and had weighed 100 pounds. Bert, who stole stale, 3-year-old hard candies from Quinn's Grandmother's purse.
Bert, who sang like most people breathe; natural and with his own rhythm, flowing and, without it, he would die.
Bert always said that Quinn saved his life. But before Bert, Quinn never knew living.
"You know what?" Bert cupped Quinn's chin in his hand. "You're fucking dreamy." And when Bert kissed him, Quinn let it register just how good it felt to know how to breathe.
*
The plane ride from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles was excruciatingly boring, but Bert found simple ways to amuse himself, and make the flight a little less tedious; such as: trading the 11 year old passenger seated next to him a piece of space cake, in exchange for his bag of peanut m&m's. Then Bert sucked the candy off of the peanuts, and occupied his time by throwing them at the backs of peoples heads, and then giggling, and making kissy faces at them when they turned around. This lasted approximately 3.12 minutes. Then, a stewardess confiscated Bert's bag of nuts, and gave him a long lecture of flight etiquette. When she'd finished lecturing him, and was placing the small, yellow candy bag in the pocket of her blue uniform, Bert pouted with all of his might for a whopping 6 seconds before a smile engulfed his face, and he said, "So, I don't want you to think I'm being sexist right now by assuming that I'd have to pay for this, but, if I get those back and they taste like vagina-covered peanuts; I still get them back for free, right? I don't have to pay extra?"
The blonde stared. "Excuse me?"
"No," Bert shook his head. "No, you're absolutely right. You're totally right. You should get paid for that, like, at least a tip. How much? At Pizza Hut the extra toppings are like, what, 75 cents?"
Bert spent the rest of the flight trying to convince the stewardess not to file for sexual harassment.
*
When Bert got home, he dropped his worn-out black backpack by the door. Alison looked up from the newspaper she was reading on the couch. "You're back?" She asked.
"I have a doctors appointment." he replied, walking into the kitchen.
"Mm," Alison said from behind her paper. "The gonorrhea came back?"
"What? No," Bert grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator, and returned to the front room. "Maybe, I don't know. But that's not the reason."
Alison replied with an affirmative "mm" and went back to the paper.
"Have you seen the phone?" he asked, looking underneath a throw pillow. "I have to call Brian about a "misunderstanding" I had with a stewardess."
Brian Schechter: epic, and unforgettable tour manager; terrible, terrible matchmaker.
Brian was not the person Bert should be calling about this. He should be calling Craig Aaronson, or John Feldmann, but Craig would just huff a lot, and then try to give Bert some sort of optimistic bullshit speech about how "everything is going to be alright" and "you didn't do anything wrong". And John would call Bert an idiot in seven different languages, probably. Because John hung out with those Peta people, and they were smart as fuck, so Bert suspected that John would be at the least, bilingual.
He would also yell at him a lot, and take away his i-get-to-ride-an-airplane-by-myself privileges, in which case Bert would pitch a fit like no other, and it all seemed like too much trouble, but sexual harassment still sounded like an important subject, so he probably needed to tell someone who was an authoritative figure in his life about this. And Brian had always helped in the past. He was always there whenever Bert needed a place to sleep because Gerard kicked him out of the bunks for trying to insert a fruit by the foot into his anus while he was sleeping because he (Bert) was 'fucking bored'.
"Is the 'misunderstanding' called Sexual Harassment?" Alison asked. She grabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of the ashtray on the coffee table, and lit it, not looking up from the article she was on.
Bert smiled. "You're awesome. I love you. Let's go make a sex tape, and send it to Gerard, he's gonna be so jealous," he narrowed his eyes. "that motherfucker."
"What?" Alison dropped the paper. Bert was standing by the CD rack, fingering the edges of the jewel cases. He looked up, wide-eyed and alert.
"Jepha," Bert cleared his throat. "I said let's send it to Jepha."
Alison took a long drag off of the cigarette, then slowly nodded when she exhaled the smoke.
"You should probably call Brian first,"
She dropped her cigarette into an empty corona can, and stood up. "I'll go set up the camera. Bring snacks."
Bert's smile widened. "How drunk are you right now, on a scale of 1-10?"
"Drunk enough to not care that this is a bad idea; not drunk enough to say that I won't divorce you if it ends up on YouTube." She grabbed him around the waist, and kissed the tip of his nose.
Bert had a long range of smells he could tolerate before he would actually call them "bad". Bert could tolerate death, and dog shit, and vomit, and Quinn said this was probably because at one point in time, Bert kind of smelled like all of those odors combined.
But at that point in time, Bert decided that Alison was the only thing in California that didn't fucking reek. She smelled like beer, and flowers, and the closest thing to home you could get without actually being Quinn Allman. And Bert really hadn't realized how much he'd missed her in the past week he'd been in Utah.
He grinned. "Let's get married."
Alison pushed his hair out of her face. "We're already married."
He leaned his forehead against hers. "Let's have sex."
"Call Brian."
*
A very on and off 3 hours of marathon-sex later, Bert called Brian.
As soon as he picked up the phone, Bert said "Bri-fi! What's up, buttercup?"
There was a brief pause before Brian said "What do you want, Bert."
Bert picked up a beer he found on the dresser that he sincerely hoped was fresh, and took a drink. "I need a grown-ups opinion on something, so I called you." It was not.
"Which would make sense," Brian said. "Because you're twenty-seven."
Bert laughed. "Exactly."
Brian sighed. "What have you done this time? Or should I say whom," he muttered.
"Is sexual harassment something I should worry about?"
"Bert," Brian covered his eyes with one of his hands. "How many times have we had this conversation?"
"Five..." Bert sat the beer can down. "Hundered... thousand-ish?"
"Okay. And how many times am I going to have to tell you that just because someone is sleeping in the same room as you, you do not have their legal consent to insert edible, or otherwise inanimate objects into their anal cavity?"
Bert giggled. "We had so much fun. I miss you, Brian."
Brian shook his head, and rubbed his closed eyelids. "Yeah, I love you too, Bert."
"Remember that time I let Frank Iero shoot bottlerockets out of my butthole?"
Brian blinked, and thought that he really should consider a new career.
*
10:30 on a Tuesday morning Bert arrived at a LA Doctor's office.
His appointment wasn't until 11:22, but Alison had work, and Jeph wouldn't pick up his phone.
Bert was bored.
He signed himself in, and then had a meltdown when the receptionist told him that they did not have lollipops.
Bert silently flailed around in a way that kind of looked like he was moshing by himself before quietly shrieking, "This place is bullshit!" and retreating to a seat in the corner.
Soon after he'd sat down, he heard a familiar voice release an exasperated, and annoyed "No."
His eyes scanned the room.
The waiting room was surprisingly empty except for a family of three, and an older couple, who all seemed un-phased by Bert's tantrum, but then on the other side of the room he saw two men quietly arguing. The one with the hat on was making angry hand gestures in Bert's direction.
The guy seated next to him appeared to be trying to reason with his friend.
Bert squinted.
A slow grin crept onto his face, and he hopped up, and danced his way over to the pair.
"Brandenstein!" Bert exclaimed.
Branden gave a forced smile, and an awkward half-wave. The guy sitting next to him slid down in his chair, and tilted his hat, just so that it hid his face.
"Holy pinappletits!" Bert said. "Is that a fucking fedora? Okay, this has to be Tim motherfucking Armstrong."
"Bert," Tim said. "I'm not in the mood, Bert."
"You, Johnny Depp, and Michael Jackson are the only two people in the state of California who wear fedoras," Bert continued. He wedged himself into the small space between Branden and Tim. "So how's life, Tim Armstrong?"
Tim moved into another seat. "Good, Bert. Life's good. Thanks for asking, I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm a little sick right now.. Actually, I might be contagious, so…" he trailed off.
"Is it chlamydia?" Bert asked, a little too loud.
Tim gritted his teeth, and looked at Branden pleadingly. "Please get him away from me."
"Hey, Bert, what time's your appointment?" Branden asked.
"What?" Bert turned to Branden. "Like, eleven-something. Why?"
"You wanna go outside and have a smoke with me?" Branden asked, holding up a pack of cigarettes.
Branden himself did not smoke, but he always carried a pack around with him anyway, for just such occasions, and also in case Tim ever ran out.
Bert turned back to Tim. He leaned dangerously close to Tim's face.
"Know what helps chlamydia?" he whispered.
Tim furrowed his brows. "I will punch you."
Tim had been around Bert a total of 3 times in his life, and already he hated the guy.
The first time Tim met Bert was at Branden's birthday party.
Tim had been standing by the pool, when Bert came up to him, grabbed him by the shoulders, and kissed him square on the lips. Before Tim had any time to recover from the shock, Bert was gripping his ass, and whispering "My whole life I only had a couple of things I really wanted to do. One was to make it; just get the fuck out of Utah, the other was to blow Tim Armstrong". Before Bert could say anything else, Tim pushed him into the pool.
"You won't punch me. And normally people are nicer to me." Bert said, sitting back in his seat.
"If you keep provoking me I will. And Normally people don't offer to blow me before I even know their name."
Bert smiled with a far-away look in his eyes. "The first time we met was so romantic."
"So about that cigarette break," Branden said nervously.
A nurse came out, and called the small family to come in and see the doctor.
Bert smiled at Tim blissfully. "On the news this morning they said that they can grow organs now, like in a petri dish, or.. something fucking smart," Bert paused. "So, that means that it wouldn't be too far-fetched to say that there are ways that you could get me pregnant. I would carry your child, Tim Armstrong."
"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Tim put his thumb and forefinger to his head, and massaged his temples.
"Oh, I'm here because Jeph thinks I have a problem." Bert confirmed.
"He's not the only one.." Tim muttered.
"I'm gonna go for that cigarette," Branden said.
"You don't smoke." Tim reminded him.
"Well," Branden stood up. "I'm going to go for a candy run. Bert, you in?"
Bert grinned maliciously. "I'm working on that."
Branden sighed, and leaned on one hip. He looked tired, and worn down; like whatever was wrong with Tim had also taken a physical toll on Branden. "Don't try to get in Tim's pants. He's sick, Bert. He'll hurt you." Branden turned to Tim, and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry, man. I tried. I did. Sorry."
Tim gave him a sarcastic sneer of a smile. "Thanks."
"I'll be back," Branden pointed at them warningly. "Don't kill each other.. Be nice. Please." he walked by them, and out of the glass office door.
Bert leaned so close to Tim's face that their noses touched. "I missed you so much."
Tim shoved Bert away by his shoulder, without much force. "You don't know me well enough to miss me. Now, Get away from me."
"We have a lot in common. I look up to you, you know.. as a person. But I idolize you as a musician."
Tim had seen Bert's stage performances. They consisted of a lot of spitting, a lot of cursing, and a lot of puking. He really wanted to take what Bert had said as a compliment, but somehow it kind of seemed like a put-down.
Bert was talented, that was for sure. But he was also a lot of other things that couldn't be excused no matter how nice his voice was.
"I'm not sure how to take that." Tim admitted, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Your music is immortal. It made me realize that it was okay that I wasn't what my parents were expecting. And that's when I decided that as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror, and be alright with it, then nothing else matters. And you know what? You did something I was never able to do.." Bert smiled meekly. "You got clean, Tim Armstrong."
For the first time that day, Tim actually looked Bert in the eyes, and there was something familiar about the two blue orbs staring back at him that made Tim's heart sink into the pit of his stomach.
For one sick moment, Tim remembered how it felt to wake up puking.
Tim had spent the majority of his younger years saturating his organs in alcohol, trying to drown himself in glass bottles that never meant anything to begin with.
Music was a sort of half-jaded sheet-work chapel that Tim could curl up inside of, and be just fingertips away from another version of himself with dry insides, and a feeling of serenity. He could stop trying to drown himself, and just chill out for a while.
When Tim was on stage, the amount of people watching wasn't what mattered. It was the unity. The feeling that no matter what was going on in your life, someone else could look right through you, and pick at your brain, your heart, your soul; they could take you apart and analyze you, and never think a single negative thought. It was the fact that every show Tim had ever put on, everyone had a place, and everyone belonged. Like falling into some sort of alternative universe where everything didn't fucking suck, and people actually cared about each other. And right now, that filthy, annoying kid with his obnoxious fucking personality, and his stupid girly ink looked a lot like drowning.
Tim stood up.
"I need to-- bathroom." he had just enough time to quickly walk the length of the room, and shut the door to the single-stall restroom, before he took three quick steps towards the toilet, and vomited. "Fuck," he vocalized. The smell of puke only added to his nausea, not to mention, the sight of his own half-regurgitated breakfast floating around in a dirty public toilet and painting the sides of the toilet seat and some of the floor in small, liquid puddles was a little too much. He clutched his sides, sunk down to his knees, and threw up again, into the toilet.
When the sickness had subsided, and he felt like he could breathe again, he pulled some paper towels out of the holder, and started mopping up the mess he'd made.
He heard the door open, but didn't look up. "Someone's in here." he croaked out.
The sound of footsteps on tile approaching met his ears, and then, "Is that a french fry?"
Tim frowned. "Get out of here, McCracken."
"I just came to see if you were okay," Bert said. "Are you okay?"
Tim shrugged, and dropped the wad of vomit-soaked papertowels into the toilet.
Bert crouched beside Tim, and peered into the toilet. "You're sick," he sounded concerned.
Tim scoffed, and flushed it. "I think that's a pretty lucid observation."
"You're not going to die are you?" Bert stared at him through child-like eyes.
"I've been in love with you since I was 10 years old," Bert said. "Your music taught me everything I know. You changed my life, Tim Armstrong. Tell me you're dying, and I will kill myself right now."
Tim took a deep breath in through his nose. "You know what's funny.." he muttered, his voice was quiet and dragging along the borderline of serious, and humored. "You spend your life living in bottles, and when you finally decide to break out, you're old enough for grown men to tell you--"
Bert lunged at Tim unsteadily, closing the distance between them, and knocking them both over. Tim fell on his back against the cold bathroom floor, and Bert landed on top of him, and kissed him hard, seemingly uncaring that Tim tasted like cigarettes and stomach bile.
The bathroom reeked of various bodily fluids, and something that smelled kind of like chlorine, and outside of the bathroom they could hear the same generic elevator music-esque radio station that was always on in the office.
They didn't move for a moment.
For a moment it was all tongues, and bathroom tiles, and then Bert was undoing Tim's pants, and the reality of the situation was beginning to concrete. Tim shoved Bert hard, and sat up.
Bert's back hit against the stall wall with a loud clanking noise. He looked surprised, but shockingly un-phased. "What?"
"I'm straight," Tim sat up. "And this is a public bathroom." He paused. "A public bathroom that I just vomited in."
Bert pushed away from the stall wall, and crawled back over to where Tim was now sitting up, looking worn down.
Bert scooted across the floor, and plopped down on Tim's lap, his knees on either side of Tim's hips. "Yeah," Bert said. "I'm straight too, sometimes" and Tim thinks of shoving him away, or pushing his head into the toilet, but fuck, that would probably just make him laugh, and Tim felt too tired anyway.
Bert readjusted the way he was sitting, and tilted his head to the side. He was looking at Tim in that same stupid way he used to look at Gerard whenever he would go on one of his long rants about saving the world, or some other insane shit that sounded to Bert like it should be on the pages of a marvel-fucking-comic book rather than in someone's brain, but this guy sucked a mean cock, so whatever. The same look he gave whenever that particular rant was just too long, and too boring for him to completely follow, but they were doing an interview, so maybe he should at least try to listen to him, but he was only able to catch certain words in the conversation like that time when Gerard had said 'But sector ten really defines it' and what Bert had heard was "Butt sex" so no one really understood why he started laughing.
And it was kind of like that same look, except not at all because Tim's eyes looked hard, and deep, and fucking honest, like someone who'd lived one-thousand lives, and knew how it felt to have to resurrect yourself just to hold on to the one person who'd never turned their back. And Bert thought he looked much too young to have done so much living.
"I never thought I'd live to see my forties," Tim said slowly, as if he'd read Bert's mind. "Never thought I'd have someone young enough to be my biological child molesting me in a filthy bathroom either."
Bert stayed still. "I never thought I'd make it to eighteen.. If it weren't for Quinn I'd -- I don't know what I'd be right now. Probably a pile of bones in the dirt.. Each day I wake up, I'm a little surprised."
Tim exhaled a short laugh out of his nose. "Indemnifiers." he said.
"I'm gonna be honest with you," Bert smiled. "I have no fucking idea what you just said."
Tim blinked. "Okay, indemnifiers aside, how are you not dead yet?"
"Take your pants off, and I'll show you."
"I'm not having sex with you." Tim tries to scoot up a little, but Bert's surprisingly heavy to be so small.
Bert leaned forward enough that Tim could smell his stinky fucking breath, and Tim leaned back onto the stall wall until it was hurting his back. "What are you doing?"
Tim was so distracted in trying to prepare himself for any kiss-attacks that Bert might be plotting, that he didn't realize Bert had slid his hands into his pants, until he was already gripping his dick through bony little fingers.
Tim's spine arched, and he reached up, one hand sinking into Bert's collarbone area, and he started to push him off, but then Bert's spidery little fingers had managed to snake past Tim's underwear, and he was moving his fingers more like a massage than a handjob, like he was playing the fucking piano on Tim's dick, and Tim's stomach turned hot. He gasped.
There was a screw or some part of the blandly-painted stall wall digging into his back, and the feeling of Bert crawling down his body. "What are you doing?" Tim said through gritted teeth.
Bert's face was nearing dangerously close to his crotch. "Making you feel better." Bert said.
The feeling of Bert's breath, warm and moist hit his dick, and he breathed in all the odors present in that tiny germ-infested bathroom and my god, Tim never knew that it was possible to want to vomit and fuck at the same time.
"Bert -" Tim began, slightly shivering and weak after just a few strokes.
Bert's tongue hit the tip of his dick, and Tim moaned as Bert took him into his mouth.
Bert leaned up and smiled. "You were saying?"
Tim grabbed his head and forced him down onto his dick. "Shut up."
Bert went back to work with his mouth, Tim guiding his head with his hands, making him gag a couple of times. He sat back, and worked his hand against Tim's member, until Tim knotted the fabric of Bert's ugly, ratty shorts in his fist.
He spit on Tim's dick, and pitched forward in one single, swift motion, taking Tim deep.
"Fuck," Tim choked out.
His breath was rigid, and he was lost in the sensation of that thing Bert was doing with his tongue. Bert kept his mouth on Tim, gooey-hot, and torrid, only stopping to catch his breath when he felt like he was going to pass out.
Tim grabbed his hair, forcing him down even farther as his thighs started to tremble.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck" Tim chanted out, pushing his crotch against Bert's mouth so hard he thought he might break his trachea.
His body arched against the aluminum wall and he came inside of Bert's mouth.
Bert sat up slowly, swallowed, and licked his lips. "Feel better?"
"Why are you here," Tim said breathlessly. "If you've given me some sort of STD I swear I'll --"
"Relax I'm not infected… currently." Bert said, climbing off of Tim's lap.
"Then why are you here."
Bert looked at him. "I'm in love."
Tim smirked, and closed his eyes, leaning his head against the wall. "There is no cure for being in love."
Bert smiled, watching Tim tuck his dick back into his pants, and do his pants up.
"I don't want a cure," he said. "I just want to muffle it enough to where I can get some fucking songs done and Jeph'll stop bitching." he shrugged. "Quinn puts up with me even when I'm being a douche, and I don't wanna get him in trouble."
Tim remembered a time when he was 26, and he'd promised Matt for what had to be the thousandth time that he was getting clean. He'd looked at him with the same dead-seriousness that he'd put on several times before, and said. "I'm quitting drinking," and most people would be so worn-down from Tim's bullshit talks of how he was going to sober up, and stop vomiting in the back of people's cars; but Matt gave Tim the most honest look he'd ever seen, put a hand on his shoulder and said, "I know."
Indemnifiers, Tim thought as he was standing up. Because fuck it, they were. He'd always thought that if the Tim he was now ever met the Tim he was years ago, he would kick his drunken, obnoxious ass, and truth be told, he kind of thought that maybe, just maybe that was why Bert irritated him so much.
Because Bert and Quinn reminded him of past-Tim and past-Matt, and Tim had had enough of sloppy little addicts who couldn't even breathe without someone there to hold them up.
He moved out of the stall, and started washing his hands in the sink, and he thought about telling Bert that there were better ways to express himself other than drinking, and drugs. And that he didn't have to be fucked up in order to feel alright about what he had to say.
He thought about telling him that everyone needs to put out an opinion, whether it's a 3 year old, a 70 year old, or a filthy emo goblin who molests sick people in dirty bathrooms, because it's still very important. Because it's coming from their heart and mind, and it matters. And then Tim thought that maybe Bert just drank because he was bored, and Tim gave up on trying to help.
The door swung open, and Branden was standing there with a look on his face like he'd just had seven heart-attacks and lived to tell the tale. "Tim? Where's Bert?"
Bert poked his head out of the stall and waved. Branden's body relaxed, and he looked relieved. "I thought you were dead, and Tim was shoving your body in the ventilation shaft by now."
Bert grinned, and wiped his hands on his shirt when he came out of the stall. "Wrong kind of shaft, Brando."
*
Bert sat on the examination table in the small room, playing "drums" on his legs.
He got bored and decided to look through every drawer in the room. He played with the reflex-checker, and shoved an operating-mask, and some latex gloves into his pockets, and was about to use the old desktop computer in the corner to look up porn when the doctor entered the room. "Mr. McCracken," she smiled. "What can I do for you today?" She looked at his chart. "Says here you've been suffering from some sort of addiction? Do you need me to make a referral for a rehabilitation clinic?"
Bert climbed back up onto the examination table. "Actually, no. My addiction's more of a ADHD-type of problem," he smiled. "I'm addicted to my guitarist's stomach, and it blows my concentration, so I can't write anything."
She stared at him, and then flipped through a couple of pages on his chart. "So, you think you have ADHD?"
"Kind of," Bert corrected. "I need something that's going slow me down, so I can concentrate. Like… a reverse-aphrodisiac, or ridilin."
"I can't prescribe ridilin, I'd have to make a referal to another Doctor for that, since it's a behavioral issue."
Bert nodded, and picked at a hole on his shirt. He was bouncing his leg against the stool beside the table.
"It says here you've lost some weight since your last visit," she commented.
"I forget to eat sometimes." He admitted.
"Forget?" she asked. She sat down in a chair across from him.
He shrugged. "I told you I can't concentrate. It's like I just… have no appetite. I get caught up. It's that fucking line!"
She raised a brow. "So loss of appetite is a regular thing for you?"
"When I'm around him," he shrugged. "Forget everything."
She wrote something down. "You do that a lot don't you?" she asked.
"What?"
"Shake your legs like that, are you having muscle spasms?"
Bert frowned, and looked down at his legs. "I don't know?"
She checked his reflexes, nodded, and wrote something else down on his chart. "Any nausea?"
"I puke a lot. Does that count?"
She nodded, and stood up. "Any other problems?"
Bert shook his head, no. "I'm as healthy as a horse."
"Alright, Robert," She tucked his chart underneath her arm, and approached the door. "I'm going to write you out a prescription to help with the loss of appetite, and nausea, and the.. Muscle spasms. See if we can put some weight on you." She smiled. "I'm going to see about fixing you up with a doctor who specializes in behavioral problems, and a neurologist for the ADHD, alright?"
"Thanks." Bert said.
She took out a prescription pad. "I'm writing you a prescription for 6 oz. medicinal marijuana,"
Bert's eyes widened.
"I know it sounds scary," she continued. "But it's going to be very benificial to helping you put on weight, and reducing your leg spasms. It might also help with the hyperactivity, and creative-issues you've been having, alright?" She handed him the prescription. "Do you have any questions for me?"
Bert stood up. "Do I get refills?"
*
Quinn and Bert were smoking a joint on the floor of a recording studio in LA. In front of them, John Feldmann, and a couple of other middle-aged tattooed guys were seated in office chairs, fiddling with switches and buttons on the recording equipment. Through the small glass window, they could see Dan laying down the drum tracks for a song. John swiped his hand around in front of him, trying to fan away the smoke. "Can you two go get baked somewhere else?" he asked.
"It's medicinal," Bert said. "It's good for you."
"It's good for the people it's actually prescribed to," John corrected. "Not for the people who are trying to record shit for your album."
"It's good for everyone," Bert said, he shrugged one shoulder, and passed Quinn the joint. "But it did say that I should "avoid driving or operating machinery until I am quite familiar with how the medicine affects me". But this shit is like… it's like kisses. You've got to share kisses."
"And what are you going to do when you run out?" John asked, he turned a knob on the recording equipment.
"Of kisses?" Bert took the joint out of Quinn's mouth, and took a hit off of it himself. Quinn was too busy trying to hold the smoke in to complain much, and even if he hadn't been he wouldn't have said anything really, because hey, it was Bert.
John sighed. "No, of marijuana."
Bert smiled a bit, goofy-happy when he said it. Like just the word 'marijuana' being said so formally by John of all people made him happy.
He held the blunt between his fingers. "I'll get a refill."
John rolled his eyes, and leaned back into his chair. "I meant of refills. They aren't going to keep prescribing you pot forever."
Quinn took the joint from Bert. "Why not?" Quinn asked. "It's helped or else we wouldn't be in the studio right now."
"Yeah," Bert added. "It'd be another two, three weeks before we were in the studio if I hadn't had my herbals. Otherwise I'd be too busy with Quinn. I'm always gonna have refills, man. I'm sick."
John shook his head and gave a short laugh. "Your inability to write when Quinn's around is not because you are 'sick', or because you have 'muscle spasms',"
"Also ADHD." Bert interrupted.
"Also, shut up." John said. "You aren't fucking sick. The ADHD I'm not too sure about, but you aren't fucking sick. You can't write when Quinn's around because you two are so fucking gay for each other that you can't take your goddamn mouth off of him long enough to get some work done, fuck."
Bert and Quinn looked at each other, blinked, and then looked at John.
Bert waved a hand, like that was a ridiculous prospect. "They don't prescribe you medication for being gay."
Quinn looked at Bert for a brief moment before responding with, "Yeah,"
John just smiled smugly. "Stop being so difficult, and admit that you are in love already."
Bert raised a finger. "Also, they don't have a cure for being in love.. Tim Armstrong said so."
"Tim Armstrong is right," John said. "So why do you have a big bag of pot right now?"
Quinn choked on the smoke, and erupted into a fit of coughs, shaking his head and holding what was left of the joint out to Bert.
Bert took it from him, and ground it out into the glass ashtray that was sitting on the floor between them.
Before anything else could be said, the door opened up, and Jepha walked in. He paused in the doorway, and looked around. "Someone smoking pot in here?"
"It's Bert's 'medication'." one of the guys working with the recording equipment said.
Jeph frowned, and walked over to the center of the small room where everyone else was. "I still don't know how the fuck you did that --"
"He's manipulative." John said, turning back to watch Dan.
"But I fucking applaud you for that. Anyone who can convince a doctor that they need pot to help them kick their addiction to someone else's body parts is fucking talented." He held his hand out, and slapped palms with Bert.
"I told you I was sick." Bert smiled.
"He said he was sick, Jepha." Quinn added.
"Okay, numbnuts, I believe you now." Jeph took a seat on the floor next to them.
"He might get Ritalin, too if the neurologist he has an appointment with thinks he needs it. Isn't that nice?" John asked sarcastically.
Bert flipped John off, but John was too busy pressing a button and speaking into a microphone to see him. "Alright, Dan. We're done." John said.
Dan found it necessary to compulsively slam out random drum beats on his set one more time before throwing his drumbsticks at the window, and exiting the recording room. He entered through the door a few minutes later, covered in sweat. He belched. "Knock, knock," he said with a fake accent. "Is Daaaannn. I come in now?"
"You come in now." Jepha said.
"I come in your butthole?" Dan asked. He stood behind Jepha, and slowly humped the back of his head. "I come in your butthole."
Jepha covered his face with his hands, and dramatically fake-cried, occasionally stopping long enough to swat at Dan and yell something like "Cut it out,"
Bert laughed. "Fuck that motherfucker!" Quinn cheered Dan along. "Fuck him!"
"No!" Jeph cried, shielding his head.
Dan gave Jeph's head one last thrust, and then released him. "Jeph no give good head," Dan said, accent still strong.
"Speaking of giving head, I'm hungry." Bert said. He dug his hands into the pockets on his jacket.
"Hey, you still owe us sushi, fuckface," Quinn looked at Jeph. "And booze."
Jepha uncoiled himself out of the protective ball he'd curled into while Dan was skullfucking the back of his head and sighed. "Fine," He stood up. "We done here?" He asked John.
"If I say yes will you take them away?" John raised his brows.
*
They piled into Jepha's car with Bert and Quinn in the back, and Dan in the passengers side.
"Where are we going?" Jeph was digging his keys out of his pocket, looking for a response in his rearview mirror, but all Quinn and Bert were doing was slapping each other in a way that Jeph believed to be called "the fag fight".
"Sushi and brewskie," Dan sang. "Sue-she and Bruce-ski's, Sue-shi and Bruce-ski's. Brewskie, sushi, applebutter? Lunch and songs and motherfuckers."
"Shut the fuck up!" Quinn griped, smacking the back of Dan's head.
Dan grabbed Quinn's wrist before he could pull it back, and squeezed it. "Ooooowww!" Quinn shouted. "Sushi and brewskies with my paaallls," Dan sang.
"No really, where are we going?" Jepha turned on the ignition.
"Ahhhhhoooouuucchhh!" Quinn complained, punching Dan's shoulder.
Bert pinched Dan's ear between his untrimmed fingernails, and Dan immediately let go of Quinn's wrist with a yelp.
"Fuck you guys," Jeph said, turning up the volume. "We're going to Hamasaku."
The car came to life with the sound of The Transplants, and they pulled out of the parking lot.
Quinn was rubbing his wrist, and Bert took his hand, and kissed the red mark that Dan had left on there. He scootched closer, and rested his head on Quinn's shoulder.
In the front Dan was trying to talk over the music, and create his own lyrics to "Weigh on my mind".
Quinn reached underneath his shirt, and scratched his ribs, the bottom of his shirt rose up, exposing semi-tan soft skin, and Bert was staring.
Quinn caught his eye, and he half-smiled.
"Holy shit," Bert said quietly. "Can I -" he looked up at Quinn.
"Still?" Quinn asked.
Bert nodded. "I love you, Quinn," Bert whispered. "There's no cure for that. But John's wrong. It's totally not gay." He narrowed his eyes. "Because I'm married to a woman."
Quinn smiled. "Gay," he said. Bert just looked at him. In the afternoon sunlight, his blue eyes stood out unbelievably bright, and Quinn could see the scabs on his face from last night, when Bert wouldn't stop fucking with Quinn's cat. He could see the crows feet Bert was developing, and something sticky on his cheek. Quinn cupped Bert's chin in his hand, and wiped away the sticky spot with his thumb, and whispered, "I love you, too."
Bert smiled widely, and his small double chin poked out, he slid his hand across Quinn's stomach, and slid a finger into his bellybutton. Quinn smirked. "Small addictions," Quinn said, because fuck, Bert would forever be prompted to spend an eternity laying on Quinn's stomach, and doing nothing at all.
"I will never give this up," Bert told him. "I wanna crawl inside of your bellybutton and live there until I die."
Quinn pulled his face forward, and kissed him. Bert tasted like smoke, and sweat, and ramen noodles, and something else that reminded Quinn of whiskey, but he couldn't be sure.
In the front seat, Jeph yelled, "No buttsex in my car!"
And Dan started rapping about "handjobs, blowjobs, rimjobs, fuck. Fuckity fuck fucker-fuck, fucker-fuck".
Quinn flipped them off, and craned his arm around Bert's neck, pulling him closer, and Bert isn't sure what he did in his life to deserve this, but he makes a mental note to find out, because Quinn feels good.
The car ran over a pothole, and the sudden jolt made their foreheads knock together, and Bert smiled at the way Quinn tightened his grip around him, like despite his insecurities of feeling like there was just too much shit in the world for him to ever be able to keep Bert safe from; he still felt like he needed to protect him from everything in the world.
Even potholes.
"I'm gonna hold on as long as I can here,
And my American dream, I have some doubts there."