Innocents
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Somehow, Gerard always ends up doing the laundry. Rated R for some language & hinted sexuality. Written for fanfic100, prompt #89: "work".
1,946 words
Written May 15, 2006
I. Clean
It's funny how they always end up making Gerard do the laundry, when it gets done at all - Frank cracking jokes about how, with his long hair and soft hands, Gerard is the best candidate. "You and your prettygirly shit," he'll say, like it's one word, laughing and swinging his arm around Gerard, the hand in a fist, banging into Gerard's chest. "You and your eyeshadow. Go in the kitchen and make me a sandwich."
Even Ray does it, sometimes, eyes guilty and big like a puppy dog's. "I'm really sorry, I just don't have time, and I'm doing an interview with Rolling Stone tomorrow and I wanna look nice, and… y'know how it is, man. I'll take care of your suits and all for you, promise," and even though Gerard is fully aware that Ray will get distracted and forget, he takes care of it anyway.
Secretly though Gerard likes it. Not that they make him do it, but if it has to be done - he enjoys it, sort of. Laundromats are a comfort, a college flashback. He used to sit in them for hours and do five-minute sketches of the old women for practice. He'd draw the ugly grunge kids who put their jeans in with rocks to make them worn; try to capture the tension in their arms, the shadows of stubble across the boys' faces. It's nice to sit and people-watch like he used to and keep his hood up. Even the rumble of the machines is familiar.
His favorite part is watching the laundry that tumbles out. In a businesswoman's load, the quick flash of a neon green bra; in an old man's, the heaps of threadbare shirts he handles like soft newborn babies. Sometimes Gerard wonders what people think of his laundry: mass quantities, enough for a whole band plus assorted crew who throw their shit in when they can. Torn jeans from Frank and hipster babydoll T-shirts for Mikey and cheap ties from Gerard, stained with fake blood. He thinks maybe it's a little mysterious and a little fun. He hopes people smile at it, maybe. That'd be nice.
He likes the drive home, the way the car fills up with the scent of laundry, windows down if it's nice enough and the wind making the shirts smell like cut grass. He blasts the stereo like he always does when he's driving. He thinks about how he used to give Mikey rides home and Mikey would always say "shotgun" even though no one else was coming along, and it made Gerard laugh.
The laundry makes his hands warm while he folds it on the tour bus couch. He kneels in front of the couch like it's an altar, hands moving steady, slow. The heaps next to him decrease and Frank walks by and makes jokes about Gerard the housewife, and Gerard flips him off between pairs of jeans. He sorted it by owner, for awhile, until he started to realize that on tour the concept of owning clothes kind of disappears.
Sometimes, if Mikey's around, he'll wander in and sit on the arm of the couch. "Gerard?" he'll say, always in the same mildly curious voice.
"Mmhm?"
"When we're old, promise you'll live with me, so you can do my chores for me." Mikey laughs like bells ringing and sets his ankles on Gerard's shoulder, crossed neatly. "Promise you'll clean my sink and make the beds and dust the bookcases."
Gerard swats at Mikey's legs and laughs and says, "I'm not your bitch, Christ," but secretly this is what makes the pit of his stomach heat like the bottom of an iron. The thought of Mikey with lines in his face, the statues Gerard will carve in clay of him - the chisel and the way he will attempt to smooth off the lines. Return him to youth. They will live together in a tiny cottage and Gerard will be constantly dusted with dried clay, and Mikey will burn his fingers trying to make dinner, and the curtains will be the color of red jelly beans.
For that dream, he will do any work. He will kneel on the floor like his mother and scrub at the tiles, he will make his hands cracked and sore with soaps and chemicals, he will break his back bending to vacuum the corners.
Not exactly the kind of dream he can tell Mikey about. But something about the light in Mikey's eyes when he makes those jokes… Gerard thinks, Maybe he doesn't want a cottage but maybe he wants an apartment in New York, a block from Misshapes. Maybe a box of geraniums on the windowsill, spilling out onto the fire escape. Maybe geranium petals in his hair when he comes home at night.
And Mikey will smile and get up and go off to do something else, and Gerard will sit and fold his T-shirts like origami cranes. Gerard is sure he's folded a thousand by now but he isn't sure when his life is going to get saved. Soon, he hopes.
He folds laundry in a trance and thinks about the creases he presses his finger to: the knee, the seam running up the calf. He thinks about Mikey's thin calves and the muscles beneath the surface. He thinks how those muscles have grown and stretched over the years, kicked and tensed.
Those muscles that will shrivel and grow fragile like spun sugar melting in the rain. Mikey growing old, Mikey quiet in bed at night, the blankets stretched thin over his hips like his skin is tight over his bones. Gerard painting his still frame. The canvas taut like his eyes feel.
Gerard can smell the flowers in the detergent and it smells like funerals.
He tries to push his mind away from Mikey old and thinks about the life they will have. He thinks about the beauty that is Mikey young, Mikey thin and beautiful and perhaps one day middle-aged and with smile lines around his eyes, the life they will have. The life that brings the smile lines so close to the surface.
He thinks maybe Mikey wants a tiny suburban house, one story, bedroom in the front of the house so they can hear the cars going by when they sleep at night. Cars and rain and rhythmic sounds, the town waking itself up and going back to sleep, lulling itself into peace. He thinks about a swingset in the backyard. Swinging himself into sleep with Mikey perched on his lap, eyes closed, legs crossed at the ankle, smelling of cut grass and lilac fabric softener, the back of his neck white like soap suds, his heart bubbling up into something that could be love. Under the moon and the stars and the falling leaves, the autumn leaves in their suburban maybe-paradise: something that could be love.
II. Dirty
His shirt is still hot from the dryer and Gerard thinks Jesus I look so crazy. He does. Crazy man wandering in, hair unwashed, putting a lone shirt in the dryer without washing it. There's heat in the fabric now. Caught between the threads, like they're wires strung tight, holding in the temperature and the scent.
(There's a smell in it, no question: something not yet covered up by flowers or powdery scents. The smell of skin and sweat. Gerard read somewhere once that girls aren't supposed to be attracted to the smells of their fathers or brothers. Despite all the laundry and all the dreams of being Mikey's housewife there is nothing feminine in Gerard. Maybe that's why - )
He feels crazy too. Sitting in the parking lot of a tiny nowhere strip mall crouched down in the backseat of his car, holding this warm T-shirt and just… absorbing. Absorbing. He thinks about it and he thinks about holding it tight to his chest in his bed, he thinks about Mikey smiling and half-naked and the warmth on the sheets around his body. He's folding it repetitively and thinking, Mikey in the next room, Mikey in the shower and laughing and saying 'Even now you're folding clothes? Even now you're being so fucking neat?' Mikey peeking out of the shower curtain, lips pressed into a thin smile, hair becoming soft again as the water strips the gel away.
There is something not right about this.
Gerard can't keep the noises in. The shirt balled up in his fists, pressing his hands to his mouth, breathing in the cotton. He's moaning and it might be pain might be sweetness. He wants to hold Mikey this tight and feel the dissolution of his body into the water, feel the way the muscles in Mikey's ankles tighten, toes arching like he's kicking. On the points of his feet. He kicks. His arms around the bar that holds towels, his head alternately thrown back, tipped down against his chest, neck straining. Gerard wants to feel the grit of the shower floor dissolving into his knees and staining his blood.
It feels like suffocating. The heat in Gerard's heart could be the steam of the shower, the smell of Mikey's skin, the cloud of vanilla and sugar dissolving around them in the damp air. Sugar in the air and salt in Gerard's mouth. It tastes like the ocean, like swallowing seaweed.
It's like he has to work to keep his arms above his chest, pressed to his face, fabric damp with his palms and his tears. His mouth biting down on the cloth to stifle the noises. It makes his mouth feel strange. He has to work to keep his hips down low and his heart from bursting through his throat and staining the shirt with blood.
(This is the work he will do when he lays down with Mikey at night, sore from cleaning the tiles. This is the work he will do when he bends down to show Mikey the purity he has created: the work he will do to filthy their home again.)
Gerard feels fetal, curled in on himself, crushing his own bones with the pressure of his own embrace. He wants to slip into something warm and wet and silent. He wants to eliminate his own panting breaths. He thinks maybe normal boys don't think about this, about claustrophobia and the release of it all. But here he is, creepy insanity embodied with the shirt pressed to his eyelids, gasping it in and feeling the particles in his chest.
He can smell sweat. Two people mixing and sinking into each other's skin. Two people being washed down the drain, silent and beautiful in the car-crash glow of afterwards.
I'm poetic, he thinks, when I'm in bed at night. Maybe this is why.
He's read a lot about guys who get their inspiration in the shower or whatever. This would explain a lot. He laughs to himself (crazy) and sits up and rebirths himself into the civilization of his car, the parking lot, combs his hair and crawls back to the driver's seat and goes back to the Laundromat. The shirt in his hands is no longer warm except for his own insane heat.
Crazy man, now with his hair combed, his jacket straightened, lacking the intensity of before. He does his laundry and watches the off-kilter rhythm of the spin cycle. He feels the heat drying on the back of his neck.
He thinks somewhere Mikey is innocent and going about his life, and that is a beautiful feeling. It is a pure thing. Something strong and shining, like a house made neat with effort and love. That's what it is: something like love.