Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (16/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (16/?)
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
“Have you heard about that new movie?” Josh asked as we walked around the back of the gym, completely disregarding DiGironimo’s order to run to the workout room. He always beat all the students there and only gave the four of us semi-disappointed looks when we walked into the room five minutes after everyone else, laughing about whatever mindless bad joke that had recently been passed and half-jogging in a wimpy effort to appear like we actually put in an effort in that class. Come on, who actually tries in PE?
“There are a lot of movies, Josh, you’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that,” I replied, the shorter boy next to me rolling his eyes. I knew I was an asshole sometimes, but really couldn’t find it in me to care it. As rude as it was to think, some people were just so stupid sometimes, and I did not retain the ability to let that slip by without some snarky remark.
“The one with zombies! The title has something to do with bodies…” Josh trailed off, seemingly realizing he was relaying the shittiest description of a film ever. Nonetheless, it had a tear of something flitting through my mind, failing fingers trying to grasp at the thought, since that sounded incredibly familiar. Maybe I’d seen an ad for it?
“Warm Bodies?” Alex piped up, smiling on the other side of me. We were about to round the corner to the workout room, the rest of our classmates having disappeared through the dull green doors minutes before. Our teacher had already glanced around outside, assuming all his students were accounted for before ducking back inside. Arriving places in a timely manner wasn’t important, the way I saw it.
“Oh yeah, didn’t that just come out? It looks funny.” Kellin added, fingering through his hair. He was basically the only person that Alex and I - we had quickly discovered that we were similarly unmotivated, shitty runners, and kept each other company during our twelve minute miles - beat when doing runs, because he would rather keep his hair looking good than pass gym. I was the same, really, but a bit of wind usually only added to the I-just-woke-up-and-rolled-out-of-bed-the-morning-after-I-had-sex look that I tried so hard to perfect every morning, while it seemed to make him look like Frankenstein’s monster’s wife.
“I saw a commercial for that with a lot of zombies and grunting,” Alex laughed, sliding through the door we’d finally reached. I ended up walking through last, thumbs hooking under the band of my gym sweats to link through my belt loops and pull my jeans up. I’d taken to rolling up the bottoms of my pants wearing my PE sweats over them; it made changing both faster and easier, as well as preventing the slim possibility of my boxers revealing something while I tried to switch my pants. I did not need that happening again.
“Way to make it sound like zombie porn,” I joked, taking in our teacher’s command to do eight hundred meters on the rowing machines. My long limbs made bullshitting my way through workout room activities construct decent results. Rowing was the only PE exercise in which I managed to not finish last.
Josh chuckled at my remark, leaning forward to select the correct options on the menu of the rower at the end of the aisle he’d swung onto, replying, “We should go see it.”
And despite the fact that I figured that was a casually thrown out joke and not suggestion of a serious outing, I was wrong, because four minutes and five hundred meters later, Alex was leaning towards me and asking if I was free at noon on Sunday. I said that I would be busy sleeping, relenting about two seconds later when Alex gave me this look that said I was giant idiot, with a smile playing on the edges of his lips, bangs hanging in front of his eyes with that front blond chunk tangling through the caramel strands, his sparkling honey eyes part laughing at me and asking me to go and ok, wow, no way I could say no to that. Not that I actually had anything better to do on Sunday. Which is exactly what I relayed to him.
And then I found myself with the first plans to go out with anybody besides Zack, Rian, or my family since Sophomore year. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I didn’t particularly mind. Stupid movie with three friends; could only be fun, right?
___
That night, I lay in bed, contemplating how I heard, once, that you have physically seen, with your eyes, everyone in your dreams. Our brains are not capable of creating realistic people from nothing. The humans infiltrating our subconscious at night are not figments of our imagination.
Maybe we have only seen the subjects of our dreams in passing. Many of them, we do not know. I don’t remember most of what goes through my mind after the moon comes out and the stars take their place in the sky, my limbs finally stilling from tangling through the blankets and breathing evening out as sleep takes over. But I certainly had no idea who that attractive guy leading me through a mansion where some kind of game show was taking place was. Try as I may to analyze my dreams, they consistently failed to make any semblance of sense.
I wondered how many strangers’ dreams I had been in.
Perhaps I was the villain in a nightmare of some girl I had never met, possibly that teenager who bumped past me in the school halls last week and caused my pencil case to fall off the stack of binders in my arms. Maybe I was in the background of an unknown old man’s fantasy where he won a million dollars. I could have been the soldier shooting a middle aged woman’s late husband dead in a nightmare that had her shocking awake with broken breath and a wet pillow.
I liked to think that I would only play the good guy in the minds of strangers, but, then again, I would never know what took place in other’s dreams. It was out of my control, as were many things, though this particular oddity that I had no power over didn’t quite concern me. I was just curious.
If you think about it, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people in our lives. I lived in Baltimore; big city, crowded sidewalks, bright lights, clogged streets, the whole shebang. Large population. So when I was casually driving home from school, how many perfect strangers glanced through their car windows to see me lip synching to pop punk? And out of them, how many of their dreams did I appear in? Statistically, I figured, it had to be at least some.
Sure, there were people who had probably met millions more than me - I wasn’t exactly the most sociable person. But, nonetheless, I realized that I had an impact on the characters of people’s late night, subconscious stories.
It was things like this that made me oppose the idea that anyone is unimportant.
I mean, out of all seven billion people in the world, there were countless humans that would change the Earth more than I. But that didn’t negate my influence on the people around me, no matter insignificant it was. Then again, I refused to believe that I was not important.
They way I saw it, everything is relative. Yes, what I did with my life would, in all likelihood, have no overall impact on the future - or present - of this world. That being said, what happens to the Earth will have absolutely no effect on the universe at large. And, the actions that I do will, in fact, have consequences, big or small. Even if the misplacement of my Converse accidently killing a butterfly would not cause the end of life as we knew it, it sure as hell would cause the end of everything for that butterfly. And who’s to say that doesn’t matter?
In English a couple years ago, we read a story set in the future, where there were time traveling excursions taken to the dinosaur era, purely for fun. Some idiotic guy broke the rules and left the predestinated path, accidently terminating the life of nothing more than a butterfly. And when they went back to the future - or present, for them, I suppose - a different president had been elected. The spelling of a warning sign was altered. Nothing was the same.
I didn’t remember the title of that short story, nor did I recall the author, or purpose of reading it. But I recollected the details just fine. I didn’t know why - the memory is a strange, erratic thing.
So, yes, I, Jack Barakat, would not be remembered long after I died. I would not be a name that went down in history textbooks. I would not be on any memorial plaques. And I was ok with that.
Because, unless something went horribly wrong with my life, I hoped to have grand children looking back on their crazy Grandpa Jack with his unrelenting fondness for old music played on retro iPods and CDs that hadn’t been made for a hundred years. Even if I didn’t cure cancer, I could make the people close to me happy. My stupid jokes put a smile on my peers’ faces during school. The A I brought home on my latest essay (one of the highest grades in the class, even though I still wasn’t entirely sure what the essay was about) made my mom proud, though my dad and his dislike for the education system barely batted an eye. Our mindless conversation about his hometown Red Wings later that night had him grinning.
That’s what people who commit suicide say, isn’t it? That they don’t matter. They won’t be missed. No one will care. Honestly, I think that is fucking stupid.
Of course people would care. I was fully aware that if I happened to trip off the side off a twenty story building, my family would be devastated. There would be tears, mourning, endless sadness. Rian and Zack would be shocked. Alex would forever feel guilty because he hadn’t done more to help me. Everything has repercussions, and everyone is important.
We alter the lives of people we don’t even know. The way I got into music was a prime example of this - that guy had no idea how he’d changed who I was. Maybe I was ‘that guy’ for somebody. Maybe everyone is; surely more people are than they know. Well, that’s the whole point - that we wouldn’t know.
Strange as it was to think about, there must be someone who remembered me more than I recalled them. Our existence influences other people; their memories, their lives, their today and their tomorrow, more than we will ever be aware of. It’s kind of beautiful, in a way.
My thoughts having stumbled down this path, I rolled over in bed, wishing that my mind could shut the fuck up and let me sleep. For whatever reason, the thoughts that had me ridiculing myself and enhancing my flaws tended to only come while I was going about my day instead of attempting to shut my brain off while I was curled up in sheet. It was in the night that I would lay, wrapped in blankets and alone, brain tripping over itself while trying to comprehend these odd things. Sometimes I would got so focused on decoding the meaning of life or exploring my thoughts that I completely gave up on knocking off, rolling onto my back and staring blankly at the black ceiling. Every now and then, it made my eyes tired enough to have me curling up and commit to slumber again. Not quite often enough.
On that night, my head was spinning without any hope of being pulled back under control. I’d tried thinking through lyrics to lull myself to sleep - the already set words worked as a good way to both occupy my thoughts, and calm my brain enough to let it relax into sleep. But since the beginning of that year, my brain’s over activeness had increased, layering an undercurrent of words through whatever songs I was silently singing. I had to abandon the pretense of lyrics, instead surrendering to my thinking and hoping that it would eventually slow enough to let me pass out.
It was concerning, to say the least, that I didn’t even have any power over my own mind.
Most of the time, I still slept fine, just wasted half an hour or so lying awake and contemplating meaningless shit. Perhaps if I had someone to talk to, all that wouldn’t clog up my mind, and I could be better rested. It was more likely, though, that I would just find some other stupid ideas to obsess over.
I wished I had somebody to call and spill my thoughts out to in the middle of the night, a person who wouldn’t mind listening to my late night ramblings until the line went dead and I dozed off. There wasn’t anybody who wouldn’t find that simply incredibly annoying, though.
I sighed, knowing no one was willing to supplement my sleep and scooting onto my side, pulling a spare pillow to my chest. I tugged a leg over the bottom of it, wrapping my arms around the white square and wiggling until my blankets fell to rest comfortably against the question mark of my back. My normal pillow was pushed almost off the side of my bed, head resting barely on the corner with my mouth hanging off the edge.
If I ever actually slept in a bed with someone else, I couldn’t imagine being able to get comfortable. But, then again, maybe a body would be the perfect substitute to replace the pillow in my arms. Perhaps that was exactly what I needed.
I drifted off with images of honey hair splayed across my pillow patterning my eyelids.
____________________
The short story that Jack was talking about is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, as I discovered after some Googling. Also, I really truly believe everything I expressed in this chapter. If anyone read this who feels like they don't matter, I hope it could change your mind a little bit. Please tell me what you thought of it?-Rose.
Author: Rose Rose682
Rating: nc-17
Pairing: Jack Barakat/Alex Gaskarth
Summary: I’d lost count of how many had gaped at my arm with shocked expressions and open mouths, curious people unsure of whether or not they wanted to know the answer asking, “Did you cut your arm?”
Disclaimer: I own neither ATL or any other real person mentioned in this fic, though I wish for it constantly.
Author's Note: At the bottom.
Masterpost.
“Have you heard about that new movie?” Josh asked as we walked around the back of the gym, completely disregarding DiGironimo’s order to run to the workout room. He always beat all the students there and only gave the four of us semi-disappointed looks when we walked into the room five minutes after everyone else, laughing about whatever mindless bad joke that had recently been passed and half-jogging in a wimpy effort to appear like we actually put in an effort in that class. Come on, who actually tries in PE?
“There are a lot of movies, Josh, you’re gonna have to be a bit more specific than that,” I replied, the shorter boy next to me rolling his eyes. I knew I was an asshole sometimes, but really couldn’t find it in me to care it. As rude as it was to think, some people were just so stupid sometimes, and I did not retain the ability to let that slip by without some snarky remark.
“The one with zombies! The title has something to do with bodies…” Josh trailed off, seemingly realizing he was relaying the shittiest description of a film ever. Nonetheless, it had a tear of something flitting through my mind, failing fingers trying to grasp at the thought, since that sounded incredibly familiar. Maybe I’d seen an ad for it?
“Warm Bodies?” Alex piped up, smiling on the other side of me. We were about to round the corner to the workout room, the rest of our classmates having disappeared through the dull green doors minutes before. Our teacher had already glanced around outside, assuming all his students were accounted for before ducking back inside. Arriving places in a timely manner wasn’t important, the way I saw it.
“Oh yeah, didn’t that just come out? It looks funny.” Kellin added, fingering through his hair. He was basically the only person that Alex and I - we had quickly discovered that we were similarly unmotivated, shitty runners, and kept each other company during our twelve minute miles - beat when doing runs, because he would rather keep his hair looking good than pass gym. I was the same, really, but a bit of wind usually only added to the I-just-woke-up-and-rolled-out-of-bed-the-morning-after-I-had-sex look that I tried so hard to perfect every morning, while it seemed to make him look like Frankenstein’s monster’s wife.
“I saw a commercial for that with a lot of zombies and grunting,” Alex laughed, sliding through the door we’d finally reached. I ended up walking through last, thumbs hooking under the band of my gym sweats to link through my belt loops and pull my jeans up. I’d taken to rolling up the bottoms of my pants wearing my PE sweats over them; it made changing both faster and easier, as well as preventing the slim possibility of my boxers revealing something while I tried to switch my pants. I did not need that happening again.
“Way to make it sound like zombie porn,” I joked, taking in our teacher’s command to do eight hundred meters on the rowing machines. My long limbs made bullshitting my way through workout room activities construct decent results. Rowing was the only PE exercise in which I managed to not finish last.
Josh chuckled at my remark, leaning forward to select the correct options on the menu of the rower at the end of the aisle he’d swung onto, replying, “We should go see it.”
And despite the fact that I figured that was a casually thrown out joke and not suggestion of a serious outing, I was wrong, because four minutes and five hundred meters later, Alex was leaning towards me and asking if I was free at noon on Sunday. I said that I would be busy sleeping, relenting about two seconds later when Alex gave me this look that said I was giant idiot, with a smile playing on the edges of his lips, bangs hanging in front of his eyes with that front blond chunk tangling through the caramel strands, his sparkling honey eyes part laughing at me and asking me to go and ok, wow, no way I could say no to that. Not that I actually had anything better to do on Sunday. Which is exactly what I relayed to him.
And then I found myself with the first plans to go out with anybody besides Zack, Rian, or my family since Sophomore year. I wasn’t sure how it happened, but I didn’t particularly mind. Stupid movie with three friends; could only be fun, right?
___
That night, I lay in bed, contemplating how I heard, once, that you have physically seen, with your eyes, everyone in your dreams. Our brains are not capable of creating realistic people from nothing. The humans infiltrating our subconscious at night are not figments of our imagination.
Maybe we have only seen the subjects of our dreams in passing. Many of them, we do not know. I don’t remember most of what goes through my mind after the moon comes out and the stars take their place in the sky, my limbs finally stilling from tangling through the blankets and breathing evening out as sleep takes over. But I certainly had no idea who that attractive guy leading me through a mansion where some kind of game show was taking place was. Try as I may to analyze my dreams, they consistently failed to make any semblance of sense.
I wondered how many strangers’ dreams I had been in.
Perhaps I was the villain in a nightmare of some girl I had never met, possibly that teenager who bumped past me in the school halls last week and caused my pencil case to fall off the stack of binders in my arms. Maybe I was in the background of an unknown old man’s fantasy where he won a million dollars. I could have been the soldier shooting a middle aged woman’s late husband dead in a nightmare that had her shocking awake with broken breath and a wet pillow.
I liked to think that I would only play the good guy in the minds of strangers, but, then again, I would never know what took place in other’s dreams. It was out of my control, as were many things, though this particular oddity that I had no power over didn’t quite concern me. I was just curious.
If you think about it, we have seen hundreds of thousands of people in our lives. I lived in Baltimore; big city, crowded sidewalks, bright lights, clogged streets, the whole shebang. Large population. So when I was casually driving home from school, how many perfect strangers glanced through their car windows to see me lip synching to pop punk? And out of them, how many of their dreams did I appear in? Statistically, I figured, it had to be at least some.
Sure, there were people who had probably met millions more than me - I wasn’t exactly the most sociable person. But, nonetheless, I realized that I had an impact on the characters of people’s late night, subconscious stories.
It was things like this that made me oppose the idea that anyone is unimportant.
I mean, out of all seven billion people in the world, there were countless humans that would change the Earth more than I. But that didn’t negate my influence on the people around me, no matter insignificant it was. Then again, I refused to believe that I was not important.
They way I saw it, everything is relative. Yes, what I did with my life would, in all likelihood, have no overall impact on the future - or present - of this world. That being said, what happens to the Earth will have absolutely no effect on the universe at large. And, the actions that I do will, in fact, have consequences, big or small. Even if the misplacement of my Converse accidently killing a butterfly would not cause the end of life as we knew it, it sure as hell would cause the end of everything for that butterfly. And who’s to say that doesn’t matter?
In English a couple years ago, we read a story set in the future, where there were time traveling excursions taken to the dinosaur era, purely for fun. Some idiotic guy broke the rules and left the predestinated path, accidently terminating the life of nothing more than a butterfly. And when they went back to the future - or present, for them, I suppose - a different president had been elected. The spelling of a warning sign was altered. Nothing was the same.
I didn’t remember the title of that short story, nor did I recall the author, or purpose of reading it. But I recollected the details just fine. I didn’t know why - the memory is a strange, erratic thing.
So, yes, I, Jack Barakat, would not be remembered long after I died. I would not be a name that went down in history textbooks. I would not be on any memorial plaques. And I was ok with that.
Because, unless something went horribly wrong with my life, I hoped to have grand children looking back on their crazy Grandpa Jack with his unrelenting fondness for old music played on retro iPods and CDs that hadn’t been made for a hundred years. Even if I didn’t cure cancer, I could make the people close to me happy. My stupid jokes put a smile on my peers’ faces during school. The A I brought home on my latest essay (one of the highest grades in the class, even though I still wasn’t entirely sure what the essay was about) made my mom proud, though my dad and his dislike for the education system barely batted an eye. Our mindless conversation about his hometown Red Wings later that night had him grinning.
That’s what people who commit suicide say, isn’t it? That they don’t matter. They won’t be missed. No one will care. Honestly, I think that is fucking stupid.
Of course people would care. I was fully aware that if I happened to trip off the side off a twenty story building, my family would be devastated. There would be tears, mourning, endless sadness. Rian and Zack would be shocked. Alex would forever feel guilty because he hadn’t done more to help me. Everything has repercussions, and everyone is important.
We alter the lives of people we don’t even know. The way I got into music was a prime example of this - that guy had no idea how he’d changed who I was. Maybe I was ‘that guy’ for somebody. Maybe everyone is; surely more people are than they know. Well, that’s the whole point - that we wouldn’t know.
Strange as it was to think about, there must be someone who remembered me more than I recalled them. Our existence influences other people; their memories, their lives, their today and their tomorrow, more than we will ever be aware of. It’s kind of beautiful, in a way.
My thoughts having stumbled down this path, I rolled over in bed, wishing that my mind could shut the fuck up and let me sleep. For whatever reason, the thoughts that had me ridiculing myself and enhancing my flaws tended to only come while I was going about my day instead of attempting to shut my brain off while I was curled up in sheet. It was in the night that I would lay, wrapped in blankets and alone, brain tripping over itself while trying to comprehend these odd things. Sometimes I would got so focused on decoding the meaning of life or exploring my thoughts that I completely gave up on knocking off, rolling onto my back and staring blankly at the black ceiling. Every now and then, it made my eyes tired enough to have me curling up and commit to slumber again. Not quite often enough.
On that night, my head was spinning without any hope of being pulled back under control. I’d tried thinking through lyrics to lull myself to sleep - the already set words worked as a good way to both occupy my thoughts, and calm my brain enough to let it relax into sleep. But since the beginning of that year, my brain’s over activeness had increased, layering an undercurrent of words through whatever songs I was silently singing. I had to abandon the pretense of lyrics, instead surrendering to my thinking and hoping that it would eventually slow enough to let me pass out.
It was concerning, to say the least, that I didn’t even have any power over my own mind.
Most of the time, I still slept fine, just wasted half an hour or so lying awake and contemplating meaningless shit. Perhaps if I had someone to talk to, all that wouldn’t clog up my mind, and I could be better rested. It was more likely, though, that I would just find some other stupid ideas to obsess over.
I wished I had somebody to call and spill my thoughts out to in the middle of the night, a person who wouldn’t mind listening to my late night ramblings until the line went dead and I dozed off. There wasn’t anybody who wouldn’t find that simply incredibly annoying, though.
I sighed, knowing no one was willing to supplement my sleep and scooting onto my side, pulling a spare pillow to my chest. I tugged a leg over the bottom of it, wrapping my arms around the white square and wiggling until my blankets fell to rest comfortably against the question mark of my back. My normal pillow was pushed almost off the side of my bed, head resting barely on the corner with my mouth hanging off the edge.
If I ever actually slept in a bed with someone else, I couldn’t imagine being able to get comfortable. But, then again, maybe a body would be the perfect substitute to replace the pillow in my arms. Perhaps that was exactly what I needed.
I drifted off with images of honey hair splayed across my pillow patterning my eyelids.
____________________
The short story that Jack was talking about is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, as I discovered after some Googling. Also, I really truly believe everything I expressed in this chapter. If anyone read this who feels like they don't matter, I hope it could change your mind a little bit. Please tell me what you thought of it?-Rose.