Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (21/?)
Title: Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (21/?)
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.
When I was around seven, I went searching through my Mom’s messy closet upstairs. I don’t remember why; maybe I was looking for a tie so I could pretend to be grown up, maybe I had managed to somehow get lost in my own home, maybe I was hopelessly bored and looking for an adventure in scarcely mapped places.
Whatever the reason, I ended up contemplating a pile of fully wrapped presents on one frosted December afternoon, suspicion growing when almost the exact same formation of gifts appeared under our sparkling tree a couple days later. That was the first time I started to doubt the existence of Santa Claus, and it was all downhill from there.
Somewhere between then and now, my parents had also completely given up the pretense of our holiday gifts being shipped from the North Pole and delivered personally by some jolly old elf with a pot belly and ice white beard. It was a sort repeat of that belief disproving day from my childhood when, every Christmas, all of the presents I received had been handpicked by none other than myself a few monotonous weeks earlier. That was okay, I supposed, because it ended with me getting stuff I actually wanted. I pretty happily sacrificed the surprise in order to save time returning useless gifts that I’d have to fake smiles while opening.
I hated faking anything. Half of the words I said were irritated lies, and I didn’t need more crap to repetatively bluff about, so I went along with a smile when May and my mom alerted me that we were going to the mall for holiday shopping. Well, my features were contorted into more of a grimace than a grin, considering that this happened at, like, eleven a.m. on Sunday, and I had a strict rule against getting out of bed until noon whenever possible. But I sucked it up, showered and dressed, and slumped into the back seat of the car later that afternoon. I played Temple Run on my phone and listened to Jimmy Eat World in order to distract myself from the fact that my teenage sister was driving on the way there since I could still not find it in myself to trust her behind the wheel.
It also happened that I’d been texting Zack while hastily blow drying my hair, sending him my plan for the day after being prompted. Zack responded that his mom needed to return some things and he wanted to check out new skateboards at some shop I’d never heard of, saying that he’d meet me there. My mother gave me some cash and sent me off once we arrived, my eyes immediately falling on my old best friend, sipping one of those disgustingly healthy green smoothies that seemed to be from the Jamba Juice he was standing next to.
I grinned at him with a half wave once I spotted him, quietly thinking about when the last time we’d been alone was. Zack was a great guy and an awesome friend, but, as much as I hated to admit it, he hadn’t been a very top notch friend to me once he got together with Rian. I understood, I did, that he was preoccupied with being in love with that little nerd, but I couldn’t help getting slightly more annoyed each time he ran off to watch Rian’s marching band practice instead of playing Mario Kart in his basement with me, like we used to during all of our Middle School free time. I wished that I’d appreciated those years while they were happening.
I was looking at the snow flitting down through the tall mall windows as Zack called a ‘hey!’ and plopped a Strawberry Surfrider drink in my hand, Futures playing as background music in one of my ears as I figured that maybe, after all, life wasn’t all that bad.
___
“C’mon, I only have like ten dollars left! Please?” I begged, grinning through the pout I was trying to put on as my blond friend rolled his eyes at me. I’d blown almost two hundred bucks on the items in the Hot Topic and Music City bags slung over my elbow. I only bought, like, ten CDs, and, to be honest, that was not a decision that I’d be regretting any time soon. Music was everything to me.
“Maybe if you hadn’t spent all your money on records you already own, you wouldn’t have this problem,” Zack retorted, completely ignoring me as he continued shoving mini gummy bears into the sugar filled plastic bag in his hand. We had somehow been attracted to the only sweet shop in the mall, and I did not actually want to spend the last of my cash on cavities, but I also couldn’t live without the giant gummy strawberry that I’d found. Seriously, that was too good to not eat, and my lack of pride perfectly enabled me to beg for it.
I groaned, trailing behind him as Zack bustled around the store, whining, “I already told you that May stepped on my Cheshire Cat disc, and Still Not Getting Any is scratched beyond repair! So what if I already know both of those albums by heart? It doesn’t lessen my need for candy.”
“Fine, I’ll buy you something, but you’re not getting anything for Christmas.” (That wasn’t true, he’d hand me a sparkly red bag filled with ear buds, guitar picks, the biggest bag of Starburst I’d ever seen [Zack was the first person I bugged when I decided the citrus candy was necessary for my life to continue], and an iTunes gift card. Simple and exactly what I wanted; maybe Zack actually still knew me better than I realized.)
“You’re the best!” I exclaimed, running off to go collect all the junk food that I’d been longing to bite into. I was kneeling in front of a display of every kind of M&M known to mankind when my pocket buzzed.
I straightened up with a bag of dark chocolate M&Ms in hand, slipping my phone out of my tight pocket to check the messages, biting my lip on a grin when I saw who it was from.
Alex: So my mom asked me if ‘the thing I was doing with that guy’ tomorrow was a date, and I’m trying to piss her off less, so I’m need to confirm, that guy; is our Monday outing a date?
I blushed in the corner of the candy store, uncontrollable giggles slipping past my lips as I tried to still my hands enough to type back an answer to Alex’s teasing question. The fact that my hands were shaking from laughter and jittery nerves made this a bit difficult and determined that I was still grinning idiotically at me phone when Zack showed up behind me, peering over my shoulder and reading the top of my screen, asking, “Alex? Which Alex are you texting?”
I coughed, the air I’d just exhaled lodging itself in my throat as I nearly backed into a rack of jelly beans and shockedly replied, “Uh, Gaskarth. Alex Gaskarth.”
Zack gave me a skeptical look, face splitting into a mile-wide smile as he started laughing, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he chuckled, “Dude, you totally like him.”
I laughed along nervously, quietly wondering wondering whether or not this really was Eight Grade all over again as the muscled boy started interrogating me about Alex, and we both realized that we had a lot to catch up on. We still ate lunch together, but that mostly consisted of me staring angstfully at the metal indents in the table before me as Zack and Rian flirted, wishing that the break would end so I could get through the rest of my day and go home. Perhaps I should participate a bit more.
I was embarrassingly unable to answer half of Zack’s questions, though, since I still had no idea what was actually going on with me and Alex. All I knew was that he’d kissed me approximately three times since the red Starburst incident, and we were going for coffee in the picturesque, winter wonderland Baltimore park tomorrow (hopefully he wouldn’t think I was too much of a five year old when I actually ordered hot chocolate). I decided, as I replied to his message, that it was certainly a date.
___
I rested my forehead on the window beside me, eyes flickering over the dents in my arm from the heavy bags my family had dumped on me before I’d thrown them in the trunk, clicking up Blink’s volume as the night whizzed by. My mom and May were bickering about driving, the sun had knocked off hours ago, and we were about to hit the freeway. My sister driving actually really did make me uncomfortable; the way my nails were instinctively digging into my thumbs and my knees were curled stiffly to my chest was a dead giveaway of this. I was doing my best to focus on the lyrics being blasted in my ears and keep up my digital banter with Alex instead of worrying about May’s lack of experience, though I managed to horribly fail, mind expressively focused on the possibility of a crash.
I’d just sent a text replying to Alex’s proclamation that he was ‘freezing to death’ that detailed how happy I would be to provide my body as a heater when Reckless Abandon came on, deciding that, to properly do that song justice, I had to give it my full attention. Complying to this, I set my phone on the seat beside me, shuffling a bit to get more comfortable in my nervous position and looking through the frosted glass at the sparkling car lights passing as the song I loved more than myself started up. I could distantly hear my mother offering directions about merging onto the freeway as I watched red speed away from us, manmade world obscured by bits of natural ice clinging to the synthetic window.
We made our way into the next lane. I had a flash second of thinking that the van next to us looked incredibly close, and then there was a crack.
Suddenly, it wasn’t Mark Hoppus singing to me but my mother panicking and yelling at May to ‘pull over!” as I tried to discern what had just happened. I was worried that I’d been jolted into some horrible afterlife in which nothing actually changed, producing its own special version of hell.
We got to the side of the freeway, Mom screaming to stay in the car before stumbling out onto the asphalt, a black minivan stopped in front of us. May was sat shock still, breathe rasping out in puffs, hands gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white. It took me until then to figure out that the driver’s side mirror was broken, we’d hit the side of a van, and I was shaking uncontrollably as water stripped down my cheeks.
There was a lot of yelling and arguing and information exchanging that I didn’t notice happening as I curled in on myself and tried to get my breathing to slow down, fucking terrified out of my mind. Apparently the minivan was unharmed and its owners were nice, this failing to calm my mother as she shrieked at May to change to shot gun.
At some point during the encounter my ear buds had disappeared, phone probably having jolted off under one of the seats during the impact. And that, that did not help, because there was a reason that my phone was perpetuallty glued to my side, and it had nothing to do with how often people were contacting me. No, I didn’t do well when I didn’t have access music. And at that time, it was all I had with my two loving family members busy yelling at each other, having forgotten that I existed. I needed the guitar riffs and rough vocals to calm me down, but they were gone, and I was so scared.
My songs had left me and my mother was screaming at the drivers on the freeway in the dark, trying to surge back into the stream of traffic, accelerating enough that I was sure we were going to smash right into the brick wall at the side of the road. It wasn’t even the mini car accident that had me shivering out of my skin; the fact that my mother was jolting down the freeway at night with a broken mirror in absolutely no mental state to be steering a car, alternating between throwing glares at the traffic over her shoulder and shouting at May about how she wasn’t mad that her teenage daughter had just added another repair to her used car was what had me approximately ninety percent sure that I was going to fucking die. A possibility that, honestly, had me petrified. I didn’t exactly like living, but I wasn’t ready to stop.
May sounded like she was having a mental breakdown, and I was too absorbed in my own internal panic to find an ounce of compassion in me. I was silently sobbing, trying to choke back the pathetic noises my throat was letting out, because I was horrified by the thoughts screaming in my mind that I wouldn’t make it home alive.
I was sitting on the driver’s side; another couple feet, a bit more momentum, and that impact would have smashed the side of the Toyota. What would have become of me?
Over the past couple of months, I’d decided that being a person wasn’t particularly enjoyable. I had gotten to the point where I didn’t really want to die, but I didn’t exactly want to live, either. If I was crossing the street and a speeding truck appeared out of nowhere, I wasn’t completely sure that I’d do my best to jump out the way.
It wasn’t that I hated my life enough to kill myself. But I also didn’t love it enough to try to make sure that it wasn’t prematurely ended.
I managed to make it back to my room in one piece that night - physically, at least - and I did a lot of thinking while waiting for the tears blurring my red eyes to stop, choking noises to taper off, and relentlessly thrashing body to slow. Even twisted up in my safe, stationary sheets, I was terrified, and couldn’t control the fear shredding through my mind and blood.
I learned two things from that night: one; May should never be allowed to get a driver’s license, and, two; I did not actually want to die. Really, I had so much to live for.
I had yet to leave the continent, drink German beer, hear the patter of rain in Paris, eat authentic spicy Indian food surrounded by scorching sunlight and rainbow shawls, tan in the Bahamas, swim in the Atlantic Ocean, and eat real Swedish chocolate.
I’d never fallen in love, had sex, or been kissed while laying in the snow, gotten that stomach plummeting feeling I’d always heard about when I looked into someone’s eyes.
I hadn’t watched the Ravens win the Super Bowl, caught beads in a Mardi Gras parade, gone skydiving, seen the sun rise from the top of a mountain, ice skated in Rockefeller Center, slept under the open stars, sung along to my favorite music at the top of my lungs while driving at night with the windows down, or even mowed a lawn.
Of course, the most important thing I hadn't done yet was listen to music. My favorite bands would release new records one day, and I had to be around to hear them.
And I couldn’t die before I’d lived.
____________________
A/N: I don't really like this chapter; I feel like I didn't write it well enough even though it was something I really wanted to talk about, so I don't know. Maybe you guys'll enjoy 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.
When I was around seven, I went searching through my Mom’s messy closet upstairs. I don’t remember why; maybe I was looking for a tie so I could pretend to be grown up, maybe I had managed to somehow get lost in my own home, maybe I was hopelessly bored and looking for an adventure in scarcely mapped places.
Whatever the reason, I ended up contemplating a pile of fully wrapped presents on one frosted December afternoon, suspicion growing when almost the exact same formation of gifts appeared under our sparkling tree a couple days later. That was the first time I started to doubt the existence of Santa Claus, and it was all downhill from there.
Somewhere between then and now, my parents had also completely given up the pretense of our holiday gifts being shipped from the North Pole and delivered personally by some jolly old elf with a pot belly and ice white beard. It was a sort repeat of that belief disproving day from my childhood when, every Christmas, all of the presents I received had been handpicked by none other than myself a few monotonous weeks earlier. That was okay, I supposed, because it ended with me getting stuff I actually wanted. I pretty happily sacrificed the surprise in order to save time returning useless gifts that I’d have to fake smiles while opening.
I hated faking anything. Half of the words I said were irritated lies, and I didn’t need more crap to repetatively bluff about, so I went along with a smile when May and my mom alerted me that we were going to the mall for holiday shopping. Well, my features were contorted into more of a grimace than a grin, considering that this happened at, like, eleven a.m. on Sunday, and I had a strict rule against getting out of bed until noon whenever possible. But I sucked it up, showered and dressed, and slumped into the back seat of the car later that afternoon. I played Temple Run on my phone and listened to Jimmy Eat World in order to distract myself from the fact that my teenage sister was driving on the way there since I could still not find it in myself to trust her behind the wheel.
It also happened that I’d been texting Zack while hastily blow drying my hair, sending him my plan for the day after being prompted. Zack responded that his mom needed to return some things and he wanted to check out new skateboards at some shop I’d never heard of, saying that he’d meet me there. My mother gave me some cash and sent me off once we arrived, my eyes immediately falling on my old best friend, sipping one of those disgustingly healthy green smoothies that seemed to be from the Jamba Juice he was standing next to.
I grinned at him with a half wave once I spotted him, quietly thinking about when the last time we’d been alone was. Zack was a great guy and an awesome friend, but, as much as I hated to admit it, he hadn’t been a very top notch friend to me once he got together with Rian. I understood, I did, that he was preoccupied with being in love with that little nerd, but I couldn’t help getting slightly more annoyed each time he ran off to watch Rian’s marching band practice instead of playing Mario Kart in his basement with me, like we used to during all of our Middle School free time. I wished that I’d appreciated those years while they were happening.
I was looking at the snow flitting down through the tall mall windows as Zack called a ‘hey!’ and plopped a Strawberry Surfrider drink in my hand, Futures playing as background music in one of my ears as I figured that maybe, after all, life wasn’t all that bad.
___
“C’mon, I only have like ten dollars left! Please?” I begged, grinning through the pout I was trying to put on as my blond friend rolled his eyes at me. I’d blown almost two hundred bucks on the items in the Hot Topic and Music City bags slung over my elbow. I only bought, like, ten CDs, and, to be honest, that was not a decision that I’d be regretting any time soon. Music was everything to me.
“Maybe if you hadn’t spent all your money on records you already own, you wouldn’t have this problem,” Zack retorted, completely ignoring me as he continued shoving mini gummy bears into the sugar filled plastic bag in his hand. We had somehow been attracted to the only sweet shop in the mall, and I did not actually want to spend the last of my cash on cavities, but I also couldn’t live without the giant gummy strawberry that I’d found. Seriously, that was too good to not eat, and my lack of pride perfectly enabled me to beg for it.
I groaned, trailing behind him as Zack bustled around the store, whining, “I already told you that May stepped on my Cheshire Cat disc, and Still Not Getting Any is scratched beyond repair! So what if I already know both of those albums by heart? It doesn’t lessen my need for candy.”
“Fine, I’ll buy you something, but you’re not getting anything for Christmas.” (That wasn’t true, he’d hand me a sparkly red bag filled with ear buds, guitar picks, the biggest bag of Starburst I’d ever seen [Zack was the first person I bugged when I decided the citrus candy was necessary for my life to continue], and an iTunes gift card. Simple and exactly what I wanted; maybe Zack actually still knew me better than I realized.)
“You’re the best!” I exclaimed, running off to go collect all the junk food that I’d been longing to bite into. I was kneeling in front of a display of every kind of M&M known to mankind when my pocket buzzed.
I straightened up with a bag of dark chocolate M&Ms in hand, slipping my phone out of my tight pocket to check the messages, biting my lip on a grin when I saw who it was from.
Alex: So my mom asked me if ‘the thing I was doing with that guy’ tomorrow was a date, and I’m trying to piss her off less, so I’m need to confirm, that guy; is our Monday outing a date?
I blushed in the corner of the candy store, uncontrollable giggles slipping past my lips as I tried to still my hands enough to type back an answer to Alex’s teasing question. The fact that my hands were shaking from laughter and jittery nerves made this a bit difficult and determined that I was still grinning idiotically at me phone when Zack showed up behind me, peering over my shoulder and reading the top of my screen, asking, “Alex? Which Alex are you texting?”
I coughed, the air I’d just exhaled lodging itself in my throat as I nearly backed into a rack of jelly beans and shockedly replied, “Uh, Gaskarth. Alex Gaskarth.”
Zack gave me a skeptical look, face splitting into a mile-wide smile as he started laughing, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he chuckled, “Dude, you totally like him.”
I laughed along nervously, quietly wondering wondering whether or not this really was Eight Grade all over again as the muscled boy started interrogating me about Alex, and we both realized that we had a lot to catch up on. We still ate lunch together, but that mostly consisted of me staring angstfully at the metal indents in the table before me as Zack and Rian flirted, wishing that the break would end so I could get through the rest of my day and go home. Perhaps I should participate a bit more.
I was embarrassingly unable to answer half of Zack’s questions, though, since I still had no idea what was actually going on with me and Alex. All I knew was that he’d kissed me approximately three times since the red Starburst incident, and we were going for coffee in the picturesque, winter wonderland Baltimore park tomorrow (hopefully he wouldn’t think I was too much of a five year old when I actually ordered hot chocolate). I decided, as I replied to his message, that it was certainly a date.
___
I rested my forehead on the window beside me, eyes flickering over the dents in my arm from the heavy bags my family had dumped on me before I’d thrown them in the trunk, clicking up Blink’s volume as the night whizzed by. My mom and May were bickering about driving, the sun had knocked off hours ago, and we were about to hit the freeway. My sister driving actually really did make me uncomfortable; the way my nails were instinctively digging into my thumbs and my knees were curled stiffly to my chest was a dead giveaway of this. I was doing my best to focus on the lyrics being blasted in my ears and keep up my digital banter with Alex instead of worrying about May’s lack of experience, though I managed to horribly fail, mind expressively focused on the possibility of a crash.
I’d just sent a text replying to Alex’s proclamation that he was ‘freezing to death’ that detailed how happy I would be to provide my body as a heater when Reckless Abandon came on, deciding that, to properly do that song justice, I had to give it my full attention. Complying to this, I set my phone on the seat beside me, shuffling a bit to get more comfortable in my nervous position and looking through the frosted glass at the sparkling car lights passing as the song I loved more than myself started up. I could distantly hear my mother offering directions about merging onto the freeway as I watched red speed away from us, manmade world obscured by bits of natural ice clinging to the synthetic window.
We made our way into the next lane. I had a flash second of thinking that the van next to us looked incredibly close, and then there was a crack.
Suddenly, it wasn’t Mark Hoppus singing to me but my mother panicking and yelling at May to ‘pull over!” as I tried to discern what had just happened. I was worried that I’d been jolted into some horrible afterlife in which nothing actually changed, producing its own special version of hell.
We got to the side of the freeway, Mom screaming to stay in the car before stumbling out onto the asphalt, a black minivan stopped in front of us. May was sat shock still, breathe rasping out in puffs, hands gripping the steering wheel, knuckles white. It took me until then to figure out that the driver’s side mirror was broken, we’d hit the side of a van, and I was shaking uncontrollably as water stripped down my cheeks.
There was a lot of yelling and arguing and information exchanging that I didn’t notice happening as I curled in on myself and tried to get my breathing to slow down, fucking terrified out of my mind. Apparently the minivan was unharmed and its owners were nice, this failing to calm my mother as she shrieked at May to change to shot gun.
At some point during the encounter my ear buds had disappeared, phone probably having jolted off under one of the seats during the impact. And that, that did not help, because there was a reason that my phone was perpetuallty glued to my side, and it had nothing to do with how often people were contacting me. No, I didn’t do well when I didn’t have access music. And at that time, it was all I had with my two loving family members busy yelling at each other, having forgotten that I existed. I needed the guitar riffs and rough vocals to calm me down, but they were gone, and I was so scared.
My songs had left me and my mother was screaming at the drivers on the freeway in the dark, trying to surge back into the stream of traffic, accelerating enough that I was sure we were going to smash right into the brick wall at the side of the road. It wasn’t even the mini car accident that had me shivering out of my skin; the fact that my mother was jolting down the freeway at night with a broken mirror in absolutely no mental state to be steering a car, alternating between throwing glares at the traffic over her shoulder and shouting at May about how she wasn’t mad that her teenage daughter had just added another repair to her used car was what had me approximately ninety percent sure that I was going to fucking die. A possibility that, honestly, had me petrified. I didn’t exactly like living, but I wasn’t ready to stop.
May sounded like she was having a mental breakdown, and I was too absorbed in my own internal panic to find an ounce of compassion in me. I was silently sobbing, trying to choke back the pathetic noises my throat was letting out, because I was horrified by the thoughts screaming in my mind that I wouldn’t make it home alive.
I was sitting on the driver’s side; another couple feet, a bit more momentum, and that impact would have smashed the side of the Toyota. What would have become of me?
Over the past couple of months, I’d decided that being a person wasn’t particularly enjoyable. I had gotten to the point where I didn’t really want to die, but I didn’t exactly want to live, either. If I was crossing the street and a speeding truck appeared out of nowhere, I wasn’t completely sure that I’d do my best to jump out the way.
It wasn’t that I hated my life enough to kill myself. But I also didn’t love it enough to try to make sure that it wasn’t prematurely ended.
I managed to make it back to my room in one piece that night - physically, at least - and I did a lot of thinking while waiting for the tears blurring my red eyes to stop, choking noises to taper off, and relentlessly thrashing body to slow. Even twisted up in my safe, stationary sheets, I was terrified, and couldn’t control the fear shredding through my mind and blood.
I learned two things from that night: one; May should never be allowed to get a driver’s license, and, two; I did not actually want to die. Really, I had so much to live for.
I had yet to leave the continent, drink German beer, hear the patter of rain in Paris, eat authentic spicy Indian food surrounded by scorching sunlight and rainbow shawls, tan in the Bahamas, swim in the Atlantic Ocean, and eat real Swedish chocolate.
I’d never fallen in love, had sex, or been kissed while laying in the snow, gotten that stomach plummeting feeling I’d always heard about when I looked into someone’s eyes.
I hadn’t watched the Ravens win the Super Bowl, caught beads in a Mardi Gras parade, gone skydiving, seen the sun rise from the top of a mountain, ice skated in Rockefeller Center, slept under the open stars, sung along to my favorite music at the top of my lungs while driving at night with the windows down, or even mowed a lawn.
Of course, the most important thing I hadn't done yet was listen to music. My favorite bands would release new records one day, and I had to be around to hear them.
And I couldn’t die before I’d lived.
____________________
A/N: I don't really like this chapter; I feel like I didn't write it well enough even though it was something I really wanted to talk about, so I don't know. Maybe you guys'll enjoy it?-Rose