Blood Orange
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
First you'll be with me. (then you won't) Then you will again. Rated R for some language. Written for fanfic100, prompt #12: "orange". A terrible experiment in style that I actually kind of like, against my better judgement.
2,328 words
Written May 21, 2006
1.
Gerard sits in the kitchen and eats oranges with his fingers, scattering the peels all over the counters. The room is heavy with the smell of citrus. There is pulp in his teeth. He's doodling on the table with his fingertip, spreading juice in concentric circles, designs that fade as the sun dries up the juice. His fingers are sticky with it. He draws lines across his forearms with his fingernail and feels them dissipating off into the humid summer air.
He's thinking of writing a song about Three Mile Island. Playing a concert on top of one of the reactors. He's thinking about inviting everyone he knows to a massive party, at night, champagne bottles everywhere and dance music making the air too small for their bodies. Sparklers stuck in the empty champagne bottles, lighting up the sky on top of Three Mile Island, Gerard dancing with his hands clapping in the air, Gerard throwing a New Year's party on top of a nuclear reactor and diving off headfirst at midnight.
"You're hanging out with Geoff too much," Mikey says from the next room, and Gerard's heart feels solid from the thought that Mikey can read his thoughts. Then he realizes he's tapping out the bass line to 'Jet Black New Year' on the table. He laughs and puts a wedge of orange into his mouth, over his teeth.
"Mikey," he mumbles, sticking his head into the next room through the doorway. He grins garishly. Mikey throws popcorn at him and rolls his eyes like, how juvenile, and turns back to the TV.
Gerard feels shamed and tiny. He spits the orange into the garbage and washes his hands. He's thinking in fragments again, his stomach filled with knife-pains that twist up and down him, exploding in his lungs. the memory of vomit acrid in the back of his mouth. He doesn't have an explanation for his health problems these days. Maybe nuclear radiation, he thinks, and laughs, but it is not funny, really.
2.
He's never made anyone disappear before.
Not like this.
It could be a magic act, could be imagination and cottoncandy dreams turned suddenly horribly real. First he was born and then he wasn't, running down steps and plummeting through elevator shafts, heart left behind in Gerard's palms. He was running. He was gone.
3.
"No," Alicia says, "hold still," and then laughs in this high-pitched squeal that only comes out when Mikey or Eliza is around. Or the kitten, sometimes. Gerard frowns so the corners of his mouth pinch down, but holds still. Alicia's fingertips feel large and rough on his eyelids.
"If I didn’t know better," he says, "I'd think you're hitting on me."
"Don't be cute," Alicia says. She purses her lips. "Honey has anyone ever told you that you cannot sit fucking still?"
"They don't have to tell me," Gerard says, and tries not to roll his eyes. Alicia smears a bit more eyeshadow on. "Jesus, am I going to look like Mikey? Please tell me I'm not going to look like Mikey." Alicia makes the same squeal and smacks his arm, like, but I like how Mikey looks. Gerard tries not to move. Any movement he makes will just scream, I like how he looks too, that's the point, I'm scared of turning into him. I'm scared of how it feels when I wear his T-shirts. I'm fading away. I love him so much I'm turning into him.
She taps the top of his head and says, "Tell me what you think. It might need a touch more pink, maybe."
He opens his eyes. The plastic hand mirror reflects his eyes with blooming tropical flowers above them, orchids blossoming. His eyelashes look like dragonflies fluttering to rest. "Oh shit," he says, tilting the mirror back and forth to admire. "Not anything I'd wear for a show, but… Wow. For a photoshoot or something, maybe."
"Exactly. You'd need really good lighting to bring the colors out anyway." Alicia half-shrugs and hops off the arm of the couch. "Let me take a photo?"
"Promise it won't end up on Myspace somewhere?" Gerard grins.
"Not unless you cuddle with me and Bunny and look adorable." She smiles back, and laughs, and Gerard thinks how fucking adorable those pictures really are (is that the nuclear radiation in his stomach? Maybe? Can you die of jealousy?) He thinks how he could take her statement one of two ways - the pictures won't go up unless, or I won't promise unless. She really could be hitting on him. Maybe.
If she was, maybe he'd try to sleep with her, a little. It wouldn't take much. Not because he's a fucking rockstar or whatever, but… because they're friends. Because Gerard could reach up and cup his hand around her cheekbones, and her face would fit so neatly into his palm; because he could whisper pretty silly things about smearing makeup across their stomachs, and seeing what ended up where. If nothing else he could make out with her for awhile and taste orange lip gloss on her and think about the oranges he ate, the ones he peeled and left on the counter for Mikey, the orange scent that trailed Mikey around and hung on his lips like honey.
He won't sleep with her. He tried that with Pete and it was a fucking disaster. (All that sadness just to get a little closer. The heat of skin and the colors melting off Pete's body, the painful look of his hips and the insecurity, just to get down to one degree of separation. Gerard is used to separation.)
Still, he watches her put away her makeup and thinks, I know where your hands have been and wants to eat the skin off her fingertips like sugar coating. She would make him sick, if he ate the roses out of her cheeks, but then isn't he sick enough already?
4.
First I'll be in your heart. Then you'll be in mine. You'll grow and spread and claw at the chambers, nails digging into the thick muscles. Then I'll say 'I love you'.
I was in your heart, but after that I won't be. Not anymore.
5.
"Draw me a new tattoo," Frank says. Gerard is sprawled on the couch and listless. He doesn't feel like drawing, but Frank is insistent and tugging at his wrists. "Draw me a phoenix, okay? I decided. I want a phoenix on my chest."
"That's kind of lame."
"Fuck you, you're just saying that." Frank has this way of seeing in Gerard's head and through the translucency of his bullshit motives. He smiles whenever he does it. He tugs at Gerard's wrist again. "I'll get the good markers, okay? I just want you to draw me something."
"Fine, fine." Gerard rolls over and buries his face in his arm.
The phoenix is large, bursting into color, shooting up like it will pierce its beak through Frank's throat. Gerard does a brief sketch on paper first but it's already in his head. The feathers, tapering off from red to the gold of Frank's skin. The smooth arcs of the tail. The deep orange he uses to color in the body, the shades and contours of it, the fire that Gerard can feel in his head.
"It's awesome," Frank says, holding his shirt up to inspect it. He nods approvingly. "I'm taking it to the shop right now, I'll have them get a tracing of it. Fuck yeah."
Gerard lies on the couch once he's gone and thinks about Mikey's wrist and the colors there. The reds and pinks. Not enough orange, he thinks, mouth tight and sour with sadness. I wish I could still taste oranges. I wish I could still taste his mouth. The thoughts are cliché and incoherent. Gerard clings to them, lets himself float off on them into sleep.
6.
"You're hanging out with Geoff too much."
(did you lose your way? did you lose your way when you got that call your brother made - did your brother lose you?
your brother's lost.)
lovers entwined but pretend it's fake pretend it's made up. her makeup on the pillows, your eyeshadow like flower pollen smeared down with tears when you said 'i love you'. first i'll be with you. then i won't.
then i'll be lost.
wound up in the music with my arms taut with piano wire. those scars you found on my chest, the places i wrote your name with red marker, the way it faded to orange in the shower.
oh, mikey.
7.
Once, when he was seventeen and Mikey was fourteen, they went to buy their mother flowers for her birthday. They were in the jungle air of the store, feeling choked by all the bright colors, and Mikey said, "Hey, what's that on your sleeve?" There was orange smeared all over Gerard's shirt where he'd backed into a stand of lilies.
"Whoa, crazy." Gerard brushed at it and it came off on his fingers. "I think it's just pollen."
"You could do some cool stuff with that, probably." Mikey gnawed on his lip. "Could you… I dunno, make paint out of it? That'd be pretty sweet."
"Maybe." Gerard's eyes closed a little. He thought about what you could do with powder pigment like that. He thought about the girls at school with their thick white eyeshadow, smeared on, dusting off over their clothes. Powder… maybe. He said, "Let's buy these, we'll see what we can do."
Mikey turned pink, happy to be included in we.
In their bathroom, he had Mikey use one fingertip to blot the pollen onto his eyelids. "It looks like you got Cheetos on your eyelids," Mikey said, laughing. Gerard blushed.
"It needs to be darker, I guess."
"Like red, or something. Or black." Mikey's eyes widened. "That'd be so cool! You'd look just like Robert Smith with black, I bet. Oh, wow, you could totally look like him!"
Gerard had wanted to say "maybe for Halloween", but he watched Mikey's eyes glowing, and something in his chest loosened up a little. "Maybe," he said, and turned to the sink to wash his face off.
8.
When you feel so much that it’s like ocean waves in your throat sometimes you drown other people in them. Sometimes you have to let them float out to the horizon and collapse into themselves, back to the salt that leaves marks on their skin, stinging at their face and eyes.
Sometimes you have to watch the crabs that click about like nothing is different and wait, and watch the tourists on the shore and wait and hear the outboard motors chewing up your fingers and crushing your bones and sit there silent. Wait. Sit there and they will float back in and you will lift them, your hands mangled, you will hold them with the pulp that was once your hands and you will cradle them and there it is.
The salt stings at you and washes your blood away. There it is.
9.
Mikey comes into Gerard's room and says, "I'm sorry I freaked out."
"Yeah. Well."
"I just." He sits on the edge of the bed like it will yawn open and pull him in with blanket arms. It's a ridiculous image. Gerard smiles a little. "I'm sorry I ran."
"You needed the exercise, am I right?" Gerard shrugs.
Mikey says, slow, "I love her… I love her," faster, "so much that it's in my skin, it's in me forever," and Gerard knows he's been practicing this line in his head for so long that it's lost all meaning. "I love her so much. You've gotta understand, there's just no way I can do anything else now."
"No, yeah. I understand."
"Do you?"
Gerard stands up and climbs past Mikey. He feels rough and violent. The kitchen is so close, everything so cramped, but his legs are sore from walking that short distance. "Let's have a snack," Gerard says. "Let's just sit and talk and be like before."
Mikey doesn't bother asking if they even can. Gerard takes two oranges out and sets them on the counter. He uses a knife to start the peel, instead of struggling uselessly with his fingertips. "I don't even like oranges that much," he says, pointlessly. Mikey stands behind Gerard, arms around his waist, cheek on his shoulder. "I don't even like oranges much at all. They get stuck in my teeth."
"I know," Mikey says.
"Nothing rhymes with orange. Did you know that?"
"These are clementines I think." Mikey sighs very lightly. "I think maybe something rhymes with clementine. Maybe." Gerard closes his eyes and feels the way the skin splits under his fingers. He feels out the edges. Pulls the sections apart. He used to have dreams about sliding razor blades in between the sections, giving them to Mikey. Unzipping the sections of the heart inked on Mikey's wrist. He'd wake up and shake and feel sick and eat in the kitchen, silent, hair in his face, sweating with his own vileness.
"Eat this," Gerard says. He holds up the soft flesh. He thinks about what would happen if there were solid razors hidden inside.
Mikey eats it from his fingertips, tender despite himself, and Gerard feels the places where his lips are chapped. "I'm sorry," Mikey says, and his breath in Gerard's ear reeks of orange. "Will this be enough?"
Gerard thinks I don't know. He honestly doesn't. "Maybe," he says. "We'll have to wait and see." He thinks, We will find you an apartment, I will bring you a tiny orange tree sapling. Orange blossoms scattered over your bed when you bring her home from the honeymoon. I could've slept with her but I didn't. The orange blossoms will bloom when you get married. I'm glad I didn't sleep with her. But I still wish there was more orange in your tattoo.