Memefic, Redux
I just realized I posted these to the private journal, and not here, and I felt bad.
Frank/Gerard
One-shot
For restriction. Fanfic of fanfic: "How to Be Dead" in a horribly pretentious Faulkner-inspired style. Rated PG-13 for weird creepy stuff.
732 words
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with opened eyes
There is forgetting and unforgetting, here.
Things they will forget in the delirium drowning haze of carrying him about, back and forth, propping him up in chairs, moments mused over and dismissed out of hand. Fingertips fluttering in the breeze like autumn leaves, their hands falling off, their bodies crumpling into piles of ash. There is a moment: Gerard touching his fingernails, and believing they are seeping blood of their own volition, frantic, lashing out with hands crumpled into fists -
"no, no," Mikey soothes, one hand on his shoulder, face averted. "No. You were biting around your nails."
Unspoken: you did this to yourself
His cuticles ragged, and his nails ragged, catching on his clothes when he tries to tear them off. (Away from his fucking skin he is so unclean - ) They believe in nightmares, and talk to each other knowingly of night terrors, sleepwalking. (Though God knows how long it's been since he slept)
And: he's trying to get back to the place where the light caught on Mikey's hair. He presses himself to the window. The glass should be cool, but instead prickles at his skin with an insistent, gentle pain. He looks out the window. There's a young deer, all wide eyes and velvety folds of ear. For a moment its legs are human (he asks himself: the inverse of a minotaur? - and when was the last time he read mythology, and how does he know to recite these words in long-dead languages?) and he pictures Mikey staggering about, scared, knees trembling, with a deer's sadness.
"Look," he whispers, "it is - " and then hesitates because there is a word for it, something young, something about to be turned into something terribly old. But he doesn't know it. ("knowing remembers notknowing")
Warm leather, the scent almost skinlike, close to the surface, reminding him oh so vivid: we are all flesh and he looks at the pinkness of his leg. In the shower sometimes he picks at it. Finds the edge of the scab and pries it up just to see the blood run again. Because: if he does this often enough, impresses upon himself the vision of it open, maybe he can remember how it got there. (It does not. It stays stubborn, feeling wrong, the blood coming out. It's supposed to be in. Inside and pink and sour.
What?)
Oh - and don't forget. Sometimes you know things before the rest of the world is aware that they can be known.
He sits with one hand over his knee, the other on his stomach, thinking I need to keep myself away from the holes in me, the places where I can leak. This is what he's reduced to? This? Hotel sheets going in and out all the time, and always the same pattern of poppies blooming red and yawning in the pillowcases. And they're sitting on the bed, all of them watching a movie, and the girl onscreen has too much eyeshadow on, and Gerard says, "God, put the makeup on with a shovel why don't you," and they laugh. It is a very awed sort of laugh. And Gerard realizes: in two seconds, he will have forgotten
and a jump.
He's in Frank's arms.
Frank has, inexplicably, made him grilled cheese. It sits sullen on the table, and Frank has picked off a corner - just a few crumbs of bread, loosely connected - and holds it before Gerard's mouth. He presses his lips into a thin line. Frank is talking: "I was massaging your back and you said you'd keep me around, later. Do you remember? Secretly I think I miss that. The idea of later. Not so secretly I guess; we were sitting here and you were trying to sleep and you said I smelled, sort of good, I think, although sort of weird too; do you remember? I remember -
- just please eat" his voice unspooling red threads, intertwined, humming up and down the space between them. Stitching them together along their skin. Gerard refuses to open his mouth (refuses to be treated like a child) and reaches up for the bread. His hand is heavy, thick and difficult with the blood drained out, with no energy or heat left in it. Frank makes a soft surprised noise.
"I thought you were asleep."
"I thought I was too."
-----
Mikey/Geoff
One-shot
Written for astaria51. Mikey during a not-so-fabulous point in his life, and maybe love can't save you, but maybe it does the best it damn well can. Rated PG-13.
1,130 words.
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blinded
And all his sentences start in the middle and stop before they're over and the walls are black and black and the windows filthy and there are no windows, they are just metaphors, they are all just in his fucking head and therefore there cannot be birds outside, or dark bats, or frantic hummingbirds beating against the glass and dying and dying in heaps
- this is how he thinks lately -
he's lying on his belly on the bed, the door is locked, he wants to get up and check anyway. He can't. That would require movement and his entire body is just, oh, limp, and there is probably a better word for the exhaustion like lead melted on his skin, but he can't. Doesn't know the word for it. His head is a stone labyrinth.
In a lot of ways he is sad he got rid of the glasses because now, no matter where he is, he can see with total clarity. And the cracks in his fingernails made by his hand shaking with his razor, and the bumps and dents in his skin say, but you don't want to see, do you? And he shakes his head at the mirror, hair filthy, no, no. He doesn't want to see.
The phone's been ringing for awhile. He turns his head and sings into the mirror, listless, mouth barely moving: lately i've been feeling like but he stops because he doesn't feel. At all. (yes he does) he doesn't know where to draw the line, anymore, between the shaking under his skin and the way the world is just an earthquake all the time and how is he supposed to step outside, knowing? Knowing what he does. Is it possible, anymore? And it is so much feeling that it all goes numb, perhaps. His mind stupid simple unable to handle anything but soft basic words. I like you. I'm scared. You make me sad.
The phone is next to him on the pillow. He can feel it vibrating against his cheek. He turned the sound off. When he looks at it, it is just a smiley face (the letter 'g' was already in use for his brother, and he was happy then, and he smiled when people called him all the time, out at clubs, yelling over the music, saying i love you i love you, don't go away, let's go dance together and he was happy. He was. This is what he must hold onto.)
He picks it up but doesn't speak. Geoff is silent for a moment too before he says, "Hey, little guy." Mikey's mouth twists and snaps on itself in the mirror. "Wrote you something."
"Don't wanna hear it."
He knows he is being vicious and sullen, but Geoff's voice is heavy with charm, and innocence, and some deep genuine caring and what the fuck, why doesn't everyone just give up? go away? he knows, he knows it will happen eventually stop fucking dragging it out, stop trying to give me hope, you sadistic bastards. Geoff says, "I'm gonna play it for you anyway," and Mikey feels he ought to hang up but that requires a certain... force. And he doesn't. He can't. So he sets the phone on the table next to his bed, crowded with ashtrays and half-smoked cigarettes (he got sick in the middle of all of them, and said I don't even like this I just want to hurt myself and he got frustrated and then five minutes later he'd be lighting up again just to have something to do with his hands, his fucking hands)
and the song goes like this: please someone, please someone
- rings like silver snowfall -
tear me up & throw me away
and after, Geoff is back on the phone, mumbling. Mikey can picture him running a hand through his hair and blushing and kicking his steel-toed shoes at the floor, watching them dent in the soft wood. "Listen," he says, voice low. "Listen. I want you to be around long enough for me to be really fucking jealous at your wedding. Okay?"
"stop"
"I'm flying in next week. I totally get it if you're gonna be filthy, or not eating, or whatever. You don't have to get dressed. You don't have to talk" (he knows how it is: this will be what he says at first and then, soon, he will be sick and tired and dragging Mikey about by the ankles, furious) "but just fucking promise me you'll be there. All right?"
"Why would you be jealous?" His mouth is chewed and brittle in the mirror, ferocious, a monster mouth with sharp tiny teeth. He knows Geoff will look at this mouth and not hear the words that come out (he knows this will stop him from speaking.)
And Geoff says: "If you gotta take your cues from Gerard, if you gotta drink some, hurt some, I'm gonna be okay with that," and Mikey can hear the song on repeat, faintly in the background, howling and thrashing about in its own soundproof room, tearing shreds off the walls, ragged edges on its own skin, and Geoff says, "but whatever you look like, I'm - I'm gonna hug you - that's just a warning, okay?"
Mikey's voice is flat. "I guess I will just have to learn to deal with it." (too many infinitives, not enough time left for infinity. Geoff has slept in his own bed and felt the blankets coming up to choke him. He will understand he must understand. not enough space left for eternity)
And then Geoff puts the song back on, and your body burst into a streak of light and this, this is how he wishes his death could be: a brilliant flash, and then nothing, and just the phone lines still humming with the music of somebody who hasn't left yet. And he wants to die before everyone does leave. And yet he doesn't: and this is why, he thinks, because someday soon he's gonna have another song, and without me, who would he have to listen to them? who would he have to write about?
It's the hollowest reason but it is one, and he wiggles his toes against the blankets and feels a pinprick of energy. Quick and it's gone. He sets the phone on his pillow and lies there with it, falling asleep, and knows that when he wakes up, it will still be playing, the same desperate wishes ten times over. And it is entirely possible, in this brief, exhausting moment, that those wishes will cancel the ones he speaks into empty bottles.
It is not much of a life, but then he has always been good at working something from nothing.
-----
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Written for supersandoz. Title is from "i carry your heart" by e.e. cummings. Gerard & Mikey make a collage, and listen to some music. Rated PG-13 for emo.
1,060 words
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the deepest secret nobody knows
"What are you going to do with me?" Gerard says, rolling over on the bed. "When I'm dead. Tell me what are you going to do?"
They are cutting up comic books, these old cheesy ones they found at a dollar store, making a collage for Frank. They are listening to Taking Back Sunday and talking. The scissors flash silver and brutal, and Mikey cuts out a heart around some wannabe-Aquaman. He squints down at it. His eyeliner is smudged from rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm, and it has smeared out in wings, nearly connecting across the bridge of his nose.
"Nothing," Mikey says, "I'll be dead first."
There is a sweet assurance in his voice, and the scissors do not stop. In the background, Adam is singing i know you well enough. They are lying on their bellies, heads pointed away from each other, toes lined up with each other's necks. Gerard rolls onto his back again and sits up, touching the small of Mikey's back. "I know," he says. "But just saying. What if?" Mikey's back arches faintly, curling into his palm like a cat.
"What if, nothing. We're done with that."
Gerard's hand tightens against his back, fingers curling over to his hip. "Mikey," he says, and it is soft and low. Alicia and Eliza are in the next room watching TV. Gerard knows how it is: they are making jokes about the boys and how they never grew out of high school, and they are drinking and hooking the can tabs together. They are making a dress out of pop-tabs. It is really funny, most of the time - this throwaway silly idea they have - but right now Gerard is exhausted and his hands are filthy with ink and he's sick of playful hypocritical jokes.
He looks at the back of Mikey's neck.
"Yeah?" Mikey turns his head, hiding the soft wrinkled lines in his neck, eyes narrow and deep, soft around the edges. His lashes are thick. "What is it?"
Adam is singing, never loved you nearly half as much. Gerard remembers, briefly, drinking with him too, and their heads in each other's laps as they slept, and their hair long and tangled together when they kissed. Adam was skinny and his nails were black with chipped polish, and he thrust his fists into his pockets and hunched his shoulders when he said, "How fuckin' sick is this?"
Gerard blinked twice, slow. "Uh...?"
"Both of us, usin' each other to get away from someone else, 'cause we can't get close enough to them - " His voice hiccuped over a few words, catching, and he spun himself around. Gerard realized too late: he is crying.
"Everyone's trying to get away from someone," he finally said, and it was raining outside the window, and the bed was narrow, the blankets twisted into themselves. Gerard clung to a corner with his fist. This is what he thinks about now: the raindrops on the window, and the dark sweet-scented earth outside, fresh with grass seedlings. His own hand, twisted on itself, thinking never never never will get close enough.
What he says to Mikey now: "It's nothing."
Mikey bites his lip, but turns back to the heap of comics, leafing through them with a slow intensity. He stops every few pages to inspect some tiny panel, squinting at it, right up close. Gerard moves his hand to the top of Mikey's back, between the shoulderblades, where a tiny knot has formed beneath the skin. He rubs at it gently and Mikey squirms, saying, "That hurts."
"Mm. Sorry."
"So what is it, really...?" Mikey sets the scissors down, the blades open and reflecting, and props himself up with one hand. Gerard fears (for a second) that he will roll over, or set his other palm down on the blades, and the moment will be shattered, Mikey's skin unzipped and gaping open - he stares at the bed and has to bite the inside of his cheek to bring himself back. Mikey stretches out with one hand to touch his leg. "Hey," he whispers.
"Hey."
"Tell me."
Gerard's hand has stopped digging at the knot, but now he is feeling the sharp angles of Mikey's bones instead. "If I do die," he says. "Just saying. If I do. Don't care what you do with me but - but don't let them bury my heart, or burn it - "
Mikey is, sure enough, scrambling to his knees; the scissors are shifted and buried beneath a heap of scraps of paper, and Gerard watches them tumble off the side of the bed, into a shower of color. He looks down. Mikey grabs at his hands, frantic. "No," he says, high, frantic, "never, never. I - what do you want me to do? Name it."
He feels the possibilities blossom, slowly, in his mind. He chases about after them for a split second - feed it to the birds, plant it in the yard like a tree - but finally settles on, "Keep it. In a jar." And after a moment's hesitation from each, the air still between them, he begins to laugh.
Mikey does not laugh with him.
Deadly serious, he lifts one hand from Gerard's entwined fingers, touching Gerard's cheek, his shoulder. "Where should I tell them to cut it out of?" he says, only the merest flicker of a smile in the way his cheeks twitch. His hand rests against Gerard's wrist. "Here?" Gerard shakes his head, and Mikey moves his hand to the place behind Gerard's knee. "Or here? No, that's not it... your stomach?"
They look at each other, face-to-face on the bed, and Mikey stops even the hints of smiles, now. His hand is thin and pale like a calla lily. He places it, narrow and tense, against his own chest: "Oh," he whispers, "here it is," and Gerard cannot find it in him to say, yes, that is it. It is too obvious already. He looks at Mikey's hand, and his own, feeble and limp on his lap, and falls onto his back, rolling away, face buried in the sheets. It is only with his mouth pressed shut that he is able to say it: Yes. There I am.
One hand pressed to his own chest: And here you are.
-----
Geoff/Gerard
One-shot
Written for anatomiae. "Something sad and apathetic but hopeful"; driving home and smoking cigarettes, looking at the shoreline. Rated PG, even though smoking is bad, kids.
657 words
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seashell ashtrays
The radio makes sparkling static noises between them, and Geoff stares out the window, and the ocean shoreline sweeps by in waves of flickering light and dark.
"I wish there was a really nice lake around here," Gerard says. He flicks a bit of ash out the window, hand loose around his cigarette, mouth tucked down at the corners. "I wish we could drive all the way around it. And stop at Denny's or something and get pancakes. Wouldn't that be good?"
"It'd be nice." The shoreline goes in and out, in and out. Geoff tips his head back. He wants to listen to something besides static but doesn't feel like searching for something that doesn't suck. "Do you have your CD case in here?"
"Nah, Mikey's got it."
He watches the trees flicker, the leaves falling soft and gentle. "Oh." They drive faster and the leaves speed up like they're on film. They are coming back from a show in New York. The beaches are wastelands, covered with beer cans and cigarette butts. Gerard flicks his out the window, and Geoff imagines he hears the faintest brief sizzle of heat dying like fireflies in a puddle of oil. Does my head ever stop working?
Gerard's silent for a long time, before saying, "Grab me another cigarette, yeah?" Geoff rummages through the glovebox for a pack, pushing aside scraps of lyrics and a Swiss Army knife, rusted shut with disuse. He holds the pack out. Gerard shakes his head. "Driving. 'm busy, you dick, just take one out okay?"
"You want me to hold it while you smoke it, too?"
They both laugh, so much that Geoff knows he will be expected to, now. He slips one hand into Gerard's coat pocket (and it says something for the night, and the aura, and the drive, that Gerard does not flinch) and he lifts out a tight cold cigarette lighter. It feels solid in his hand. Nice. He lights it carefully, holding it to his own lips to breathe in and drag the heat close (thinking I want you close to me. But. Except not.)
He holds it to Gerard's mouth, fingers against his chin, his cheeks. Gerard breathes once (twice) and his breath catches in his lungs and then it is all soft smoke, all over their hands and faces, and Geoff breathes it in. He doesn't smoke these days but oh he loves the taste (and breathing, and the same space and air...)
Outside, the beaches die off, slowly, as the road veers away. Geoff looks out the window and sees his own reflection.
A Cure song comes on the radio as they move back into the range of the radio station, right in the middle, and Gerard's face shifts from its scowl: suddenly he bursts into song, eyes bright with eyeliner and stinging with smoke: "You make me feel like I am young again - "
- and he's bellowing it out, too fast and loud for the music, and Geoff feels his heart speed up and jitter in his chest, and he takes a drag off the cigarette just for the sake of it. Just to do it. And he tastes tobacco and smoke, yeah, but also something sweeter, something that can only be the taste of shiny-penny blood. And he's singing along, the two of them, we are singers it's almost an epiphany. Here in this car, this encapsulated space: only the slightest crack of the window open to let them out, and they are voice and smoke and all of it entwined, and everything gets caught in the air and rushes out the window, fluttering like a kite off into the sky, into the great black night.
The cigarette burns down, until Geoff finally prods Gerard with his elbow, waving the cigarette as if to ask, and now...?
Gerard motions out the window, as if to say, and now, we let go.
Frank/Gerard
One-shot
For restriction. Fanfic of fanfic: "How to Be Dead" in a horribly pretentious Faulkner-inspired style. Rated PG-13 for weird creepy stuff.
732 words
-----
with opened eyes
There is forgetting and unforgetting, here.
Things they will forget in the delirium drowning haze of carrying him about, back and forth, propping him up in chairs, moments mused over and dismissed out of hand. Fingertips fluttering in the breeze like autumn leaves, their hands falling off, their bodies crumpling into piles of ash. There is a moment: Gerard touching his fingernails, and believing they are seeping blood of their own volition, frantic, lashing out with hands crumpled into fists -
"no, no," Mikey soothes, one hand on his shoulder, face averted. "No. You were biting around your nails."
Unspoken: you did this to yourself
His cuticles ragged, and his nails ragged, catching on his clothes when he tries to tear them off. (Away from his fucking skin he is so unclean - ) They believe in nightmares, and talk to each other knowingly of night terrors, sleepwalking. (Though God knows how long it's been since he slept)
And: he's trying to get back to the place where the light caught on Mikey's hair. He presses himself to the window. The glass should be cool, but instead prickles at his skin with an insistent, gentle pain. He looks out the window. There's a young deer, all wide eyes and velvety folds of ear. For a moment its legs are human (he asks himself: the inverse of a minotaur? - and when was the last time he read mythology, and how does he know to recite these words in long-dead languages?) and he pictures Mikey staggering about, scared, knees trembling, with a deer's sadness.
"Look," he whispers, "it is - " and then hesitates because there is a word for it, something young, something about to be turned into something terribly old. But he doesn't know it. ("knowing remembers notknowing")
Warm leather, the scent almost skinlike, close to the surface, reminding him oh so vivid: we are all flesh and he looks at the pinkness of his leg. In the shower sometimes he picks at it. Finds the edge of the scab and pries it up just to see the blood run again. Because: if he does this often enough, impresses upon himself the vision of it open, maybe he can remember how it got there. (It does not. It stays stubborn, feeling wrong, the blood coming out. It's supposed to be in. Inside and pink and sour.
What?)
Oh - and don't forget. Sometimes you know things before the rest of the world is aware that they can be known.
He sits with one hand over his knee, the other on his stomach, thinking I need to keep myself away from the holes in me, the places where I can leak. This is what he's reduced to? This? Hotel sheets going in and out all the time, and always the same pattern of poppies blooming red and yawning in the pillowcases. And they're sitting on the bed, all of them watching a movie, and the girl onscreen has too much eyeshadow on, and Gerard says, "God, put the makeup on with a shovel why don't you," and they laugh. It is a very awed sort of laugh. And Gerard realizes: in two seconds, he will have forgotten
and a jump.
He's in Frank's arms.
Frank has, inexplicably, made him grilled cheese. It sits sullen on the table, and Frank has picked off a corner - just a few crumbs of bread, loosely connected - and holds it before Gerard's mouth. He presses his lips into a thin line. Frank is talking: "I was massaging your back and you said you'd keep me around, later. Do you remember? Secretly I think I miss that. The idea of later. Not so secretly I guess; we were sitting here and you were trying to sleep and you said I smelled, sort of good, I think, although sort of weird too; do you remember? I remember -
- just please eat" his voice unspooling red threads, intertwined, humming up and down the space between them. Stitching them together along their skin. Gerard refuses to open his mouth (refuses to be treated like a child) and reaches up for the bread. His hand is heavy, thick and difficult with the blood drained out, with no energy or heat left in it. Frank makes a soft surprised noise.
"I thought you were asleep."
"I thought I was too."
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Mikey/Geoff
One-shot
Written for astaria51. Mikey during a not-so-fabulous point in his life, and maybe love can't save you, but maybe it does the best it damn well can. Rated PG-13.
1,130 words.
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blinded
And all his sentences start in the middle and stop before they're over and the walls are black and black and the windows filthy and there are no windows, they are just metaphors, they are all just in his fucking head and therefore there cannot be birds outside, or dark bats, or frantic hummingbirds beating against the glass and dying and dying in heaps
- this is how he thinks lately -
he's lying on his belly on the bed, the door is locked, he wants to get up and check anyway. He can't. That would require movement and his entire body is just, oh, limp, and there is probably a better word for the exhaustion like lead melted on his skin, but he can't. Doesn't know the word for it. His head is a stone labyrinth.
In a lot of ways he is sad he got rid of the glasses because now, no matter where he is, he can see with total clarity. And the cracks in his fingernails made by his hand shaking with his razor, and the bumps and dents in his skin say, but you don't want to see, do you? And he shakes his head at the mirror, hair filthy, no, no. He doesn't want to see.
The phone's been ringing for awhile. He turns his head and sings into the mirror, listless, mouth barely moving: lately i've been feeling like but he stops because he doesn't feel. At all. (yes he does) he doesn't know where to draw the line, anymore, between the shaking under his skin and the way the world is just an earthquake all the time and how is he supposed to step outside, knowing? Knowing what he does. Is it possible, anymore? And it is so much feeling that it all goes numb, perhaps. His mind stupid simple unable to handle anything but soft basic words. I like you. I'm scared. You make me sad.
The phone is next to him on the pillow. He can feel it vibrating against his cheek. He turned the sound off. When he looks at it, it is just a smiley face (the letter 'g' was already in use for his brother, and he was happy then, and he smiled when people called him all the time, out at clubs, yelling over the music, saying i love you i love you, don't go away, let's go dance together and he was happy. He was. This is what he must hold onto.)
He picks it up but doesn't speak. Geoff is silent for a moment too before he says, "Hey, little guy." Mikey's mouth twists and snaps on itself in the mirror. "Wrote you something."
"Don't wanna hear it."
He knows he is being vicious and sullen, but Geoff's voice is heavy with charm, and innocence, and some deep genuine caring and what the fuck, why doesn't everyone just give up? go away? he knows, he knows it will happen eventually stop fucking dragging it out, stop trying to give me hope, you sadistic bastards. Geoff says, "I'm gonna play it for you anyway," and Mikey feels he ought to hang up but that requires a certain... force. And he doesn't. He can't. So he sets the phone on the table next to his bed, crowded with ashtrays and half-smoked cigarettes (he got sick in the middle of all of them, and said I don't even like this I just want to hurt myself and he got frustrated and then five minutes later he'd be lighting up again just to have something to do with his hands, his fucking hands)
and the song goes like this: please someone, please someone
- rings like silver snowfall -
tear me up & throw me away
and after, Geoff is back on the phone, mumbling. Mikey can picture him running a hand through his hair and blushing and kicking his steel-toed shoes at the floor, watching them dent in the soft wood. "Listen," he says, voice low. "Listen. I want you to be around long enough for me to be really fucking jealous at your wedding. Okay?"
"stop"
"I'm flying in next week. I totally get it if you're gonna be filthy, or not eating, or whatever. You don't have to get dressed. You don't have to talk" (he knows how it is: this will be what he says at first and then, soon, he will be sick and tired and dragging Mikey about by the ankles, furious) "but just fucking promise me you'll be there. All right?"
"Why would you be jealous?" His mouth is chewed and brittle in the mirror, ferocious, a monster mouth with sharp tiny teeth. He knows Geoff will look at this mouth and not hear the words that come out (he knows this will stop him from speaking.)
And Geoff says: "If you gotta take your cues from Gerard, if you gotta drink some, hurt some, I'm gonna be okay with that," and Mikey can hear the song on repeat, faintly in the background, howling and thrashing about in its own soundproof room, tearing shreds off the walls, ragged edges on its own skin, and Geoff says, "but whatever you look like, I'm - I'm gonna hug you - that's just a warning, okay?"
Mikey's voice is flat. "I guess I will just have to learn to deal with it." (too many infinitives, not enough time left for infinity. Geoff has slept in his own bed and felt the blankets coming up to choke him. He will understand he must understand. not enough space left for eternity)
And then Geoff puts the song back on, and your body burst into a streak of light and this, this is how he wishes his death could be: a brilliant flash, and then nothing, and just the phone lines still humming with the music of somebody who hasn't left yet. And he wants to die before everyone does leave. And yet he doesn't: and this is why, he thinks, because someday soon he's gonna have another song, and without me, who would he have to listen to them? who would he have to write about?
It's the hollowest reason but it is one, and he wiggles his toes against the blankets and feels a pinprick of energy. Quick and it's gone. He sets the phone on his pillow and lies there with it, falling asleep, and knows that when he wakes up, it will still be playing, the same desperate wishes ten times over. And it is entirely possible, in this brief, exhausting moment, that those wishes will cancel the ones he speaks into empty bottles.
It is not much of a life, but then he has always been good at working something from nothing.
-----
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Written for supersandoz. Title is from "i carry your heart" by e.e. cummings. Gerard & Mikey make a collage, and listen to some music. Rated PG-13 for emo.
1,060 words
-----
the deepest secret nobody knows
"What are you going to do with me?" Gerard says, rolling over on the bed. "When I'm dead. Tell me what are you going to do?"
They are cutting up comic books, these old cheesy ones they found at a dollar store, making a collage for Frank. They are listening to Taking Back Sunday and talking. The scissors flash silver and brutal, and Mikey cuts out a heart around some wannabe-Aquaman. He squints down at it. His eyeliner is smudged from rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm, and it has smeared out in wings, nearly connecting across the bridge of his nose.
"Nothing," Mikey says, "I'll be dead first."
There is a sweet assurance in his voice, and the scissors do not stop. In the background, Adam is singing i know you well enough. They are lying on their bellies, heads pointed away from each other, toes lined up with each other's necks. Gerard rolls onto his back again and sits up, touching the small of Mikey's back. "I know," he says. "But just saying. What if?" Mikey's back arches faintly, curling into his palm like a cat.
"What if, nothing. We're done with that."
Gerard's hand tightens against his back, fingers curling over to his hip. "Mikey," he says, and it is soft and low. Alicia and Eliza are in the next room watching TV. Gerard knows how it is: they are making jokes about the boys and how they never grew out of high school, and they are drinking and hooking the can tabs together. They are making a dress out of pop-tabs. It is really funny, most of the time - this throwaway silly idea they have - but right now Gerard is exhausted and his hands are filthy with ink and he's sick of playful hypocritical jokes.
He looks at the back of Mikey's neck.
"Yeah?" Mikey turns his head, hiding the soft wrinkled lines in his neck, eyes narrow and deep, soft around the edges. His lashes are thick. "What is it?"
Adam is singing, never loved you nearly half as much. Gerard remembers, briefly, drinking with him too, and their heads in each other's laps as they slept, and their hair long and tangled together when they kissed. Adam was skinny and his nails were black with chipped polish, and he thrust his fists into his pockets and hunched his shoulders when he said, "How fuckin' sick is this?"
Gerard blinked twice, slow. "Uh...?"
"Both of us, usin' each other to get away from someone else, 'cause we can't get close enough to them - " His voice hiccuped over a few words, catching, and he spun himself around. Gerard realized too late: he is crying.
"Everyone's trying to get away from someone," he finally said, and it was raining outside the window, and the bed was narrow, the blankets twisted into themselves. Gerard clung to a corner with his fist. This is what he thinks about now: the raindrops on the window, and the dark sweet-scented earth outside, fresh with grass seedlings. His own hand, twisted on itself, thinking never never never will get close enough.
What he says to Mikey now: "It's nothing."
Mikey bites his lip, but turns back to the heap of comics, leafing through them with a slow intensity. He stops every few pages to inspect some tiny panel, squinting at it, right up close. Gerard moves his hand to the top of Mikey's back, between the shoulderblades, where a tiny knot has formed beneath the skin. He rubs at it gently and Mikey squirms, saying, "That hurts."
"Mm. Sorry."
"So what is it, really...?" Mikey sets the scissors down, the blades open and reflecting, and props himself up with one hand. Gerard fears (for a second) that he will roll over, or set his other palm down on the blades, and the moment will be shattered, Mikey's skin unzipped and gaping open - he stares at the bed and has to bite the inside of his cheek to bring himself back. Mikey stretches out with one hand to touch his leg. "Hey," he whispers.
"Hey."
"Tell me."
Gerard's hand has stopped digging at the knot, but now he is feeling the sharp angles of Mikey's bones instead. "If I do die," he says. "Just saying. If I do. Don't care what you do with me but - but don't let them bury my heart, or burn it - "
Mikey is, sure enough, scrambling to his knees; the scissors are shifted and buried beneath a heap of scraps of paper, and Gerard watches them tumble off the side of the bed, into a shower of color. He looks down. Mikey grabs at his hands, frantic. "No," he says, high, frantic, "never, never. I - what do you want me to do? Name it."
He feels the possibilities blossom, slowly, in his mind. He chases about after them for a split second - feed it to the birds, plant it in the yard like a tree - but finally settles on, "Keep it. In a jar." And after a moment's hesitation from each, the air still between them, he begins to laugh.
Mikey does not laugh with him.
Deadly serious, he lifts one hand from Gerard's entwined fingers, touching Gerard's cheek, his shoulder. "Where should I tell them to cut it out of?" he says, only the merest flicker of a smile in the way his cheeks twitch. His hand rests against Gerard's wrist. "Here?" Gerard shakes his head, and Mikey moves his hand to the place behind Gerard's knee. "Or here? No, that's not it... your stomach?"
They look at each other, face-to-face on the bed, and Mikey stops even the hints of smiles, now. His hand is thin and pale like a calla lily. He places it, narrow and tense, against his own chest: "Oh," he whispers, "here it is," and Gerard cannot find it in him to say, yes, that is it. It is too obvious already. He looks at Mikey's hand, and his own, feeble and limp on his lap, and falls onto his back, rolling away, face buried in the sheets. It is only with his mouth pressed shut that he is able to say it: Yes. There I am.
One hand pressed to his own chest: And here you are.
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Geoff/Gerard
One-shot
Written for anatomiae. "Something sad and apathetic but hopeful"; driving home and smoking cigarettes, looking at the shoreline. Rated PG, even though smoking is bad, kids.
657 words
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seashell ashtrays
The radio makes sparkling static noises between them, and Geoff stares out the window, and the ocean shoreline sweeps by in waves of flickering light and dark.
"I wish there was a really nice lake around here," Gerard says. He flicks a bit of ash out the window, hand loose around his cigarette, mouth tucked down at the corners. "I wish we could drive all the way around it. And stop at Denny's or something and get pancakes. Wouldn't that be good?"
"It'd be nice." The shoreline goes in and out, in and out. Geoff tips his head back. He wants to listen to something besides static but doesn't feel like searching for something that doesn't suck. "Do you have your CD case in here?"
"Nah, Mikey's got it."
He watches the trees flicker, the leaves falling soft and gentle. "Oh." They drive faster and the leaves speed up like they're on film. They are coming back from a show in New York. The beaches are wastelands, covered with beer cans and cigarette butts. Gerard flicks his out the window, and Geoff imagines he hears the faintest brief sizzle of heat dying like fireflies in a puddle of oil. Does my head ever stop working?
Gerard's silent for a long time, before saying, "Grab me another cigarette, yeah?" Geoff rummages through the glovebox for a pack, pushing aside scraps of lyrics and a Swiss Army knife, rusted shut with disuse. He holds the pack out. Gerard shakes his head. "Driving. 'm busy, you dick, just take one out okay?"
"You want me to hold it while you smoke it, too?"
They both laugh, so much that Geoff knows he will be expected to, now. He slips one hand into Gerard's coat pocket (and it says something for the night, and the aura, and the drive, that Gerard does not flinch) and he lifts out a tight cold cigarette lighter. It feels solid in his hand. Nice. He lights it carefully, holding it to his own lips to breathe in and drag the heat close (thinking I want you close to me. But. Except not.)
He holds it to Gerard's mouth, fingers against his chin, his cheeks. Gerard breathes once (twice) and his breath catches in his lungs and then it is all soft smoke, all over their hands and faces, and Geoff breathes it in. He doesn't smoke these days but oh he loves the taste (and breathing, and the same space and air...)
Outside, the beaches die off, slowly, as the road veers away. Geoff looks out the window and sees his own reflection.
A Cure song comes on the radio as they move back into the range of the radio station, right in the middle, and Gerard's face shifts from its scowl: suddenly he bursts into song, eyes bright with eyeliner and stinging with smoke: "You make me feel like I am young again - "
- and he's bellowing it out, too fast and loud for the music, and Geoff feels his heart speed up and jitter in his chest, and he takes a drag off the cigarette just for the sake of it. Just to do it. And he tastes tobacco and smoke, yeah, but also something sweeter, something that can only be the taste of shiny-penny blood. And he's singing along, the two of them, we are singers it's almost an epiphany. Here in this car, this encapsulated space: only the slightest crack of the window open to let them out, and they are voice and smoke and all of it entwined, and everything gets caught in the air and rushes out the window, fluttering like a kite off into the sky, into the great black night.
The cigarette burns down, until Geoff finally prods Gerard with his elbow, waving the cigarette as if to ask, and now...?
Gerard motions out the window, as if to say, and now, we let go.