Sewing hearts together
Title: Sewing hearts together
Author:
alles_luege
Pairing: Gerard/Mikey
Rating: PG (at most)
Summary: Mikey doesn’t know how to say what he thinks is wrong with him and Gerard, and pictures sometimes speak louder than words anyway.
Warning(s): Well, incest obviously.
Author’s Notes: So, I wrote this at two in the morning, sent it to my beta to know if it is crap and she said it’s not…*laughs*
Word Count: 1.607
Beta: tygermine
Disclaimer: Don’t know, don’t own, not real.
~1~
Mikey likes to think that he doesn’t do it on purpose. It’s easier that way. Not healthier, but easier. After all, it doesn’t interrupt the day to day routine. Doesn’t disturb his peace of…what?
Mind?
Soul?
Life in general?
The order of things like they should be?
All he knows for sure, is that things aren’t as they should be. But it’s simpler to believe they are. If you believe it, it’s true. It’s not lying. Not to himself, not to others. It’s a choice he makes every day.
“What are you doing?” Gerard asks dropping on the couch gracelessly. Water droplets are hitting the back of Mikey’s hand in the process. He doesn’t look up from his book, he doesn’t even bother rolling his eyes at his brother.
“Reading,” he answers holding the book up as if to prove his answer.
“Really?” What Gerard actually means is ‘What are you reading?’
“Yes,” he says his voice flat. He doesn’t know what Gerard wants. For Mikey to entertain him? Mikey wishes he’d just spit it out.
“Is it good?”
Mikey sighs, putting the book aside and looks at Gerard. “So, why did you shower?” he asks ignoring the question.
“What do you mean?” Gerard is leaning over Mikey reading the book cover.
“Just answer the question,” Mikey replies into the back of Gerard’s head.
“I’m going out.” Gerard sounds almost proud, as if he’d just said he’d overcome his fear of needles and was planning to get a tattoo.
“Right. Have fun,” Mikey says taking the book in hand again.
“Come with me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m reading.”
“Mikey…”
“No.”
“Mikey.”
“No.”
“Mikey!”
“I said it already. No.”
“Mikeeeyyy…” Gerard is now on his knees after sliding to the floor by the couch. He obviously has no pride. At least not where his brother is concerned.
“Goddamn it!” He chucks the book at Gerard, who actually squeals. “Why?” he asks finally looking at Gerard.
“I don’t want to go alone.”
“That is so stupid! I can’t even…you’re a moron! You’re nearly twenty years old! A twenty year old moron.”
“You…I like it when you come with. I like that you’re always here…” Gerard says as if that would explain a thing.
“I wasn’t. You were alone for a whole three years before I came along.” Mikey tries to point out rationally.
“I can’t remember a time where you weren’t around.” Gerard says. Mikey thinks about pointing out the four years Gerard is about to spend at Art School. He isn’t planning on squatting in the dorm room with his brother. Not that Gerard would be above the idea.
“That’s the drugs killing off your memory cells.” Mikey answers silently wishing he could escape with his book. He weighs up his chances and comes up short.
“Low blow.” Gerard sulks against Mikey’s legs.
“You know it’s true.”
“Come with me. You will have fun…” Gerard has gone back to pleading.
“Dragging your drunken ass home…yeah, good times.” Mikey has mastered sarcasm.
“Maybe.”
“For sure.” he says sighing.
He has already given in and Gerard knows it, because Gerard made him like that. The concept was so warped, he was scared that thinking about it would send his moral compass into meltdown.
Mikey really doesn’t remember much from his early childhood, but he remembers Gerard always being there like the sun or the moon.
He remembers Gerard’s larger, comforting body next to his and that his face was usually the last thing he saw when he closed his eyes and the first thing he saw when he woke up the next morning. It was Gerard’s sleepy voice he heard last, telling him stories about unicorns and later zombies - sometimes even zombie unicorns - when sleep claimed him.
Now, it’s still Gerard’s voice he hears last at night and first in the morning, mumbling, slurring like a zombie before he has his coffee. He wonders if he would be a coffee addict if it wasn’t for Gerard’s addiction. Sometimes he thinks he never stood a chance.
It’s not a bad thought.
~2~
Sometimes he feels like Gerard is suffocating him. All of this personality. As if Gerard’s very aura takes up whole rooms.
Gerard is like a vine, slowing creeping around him. His neck. His arms. His entire body. Moulding him, while sucking his very being out until there is nothing left.
And he isn’t able to move. Doesn’t want to move. Happily defenceless against the world.
But it’s not the world he needs to defend against. It’s his very own brother. And the crux is, he doesn’t know how to do that, Gerard never showed him. He isn’t sure he wants to know anyway.
“That is pretty scary shit,” he says peeking over Gerard’s shoulder to see the drawing.
“It always is,” his brother answers. It’s true, Gerard may have mastered the bloody, gruesome and brutal, yet bunnies and rainbows elude him.
“It wasn’t always like this…” Mikey tries to pinpoint the moment Gerard fell into the void of movie monster clichés.
“Yeah.”
“You know I have some of them still,” Mikey says sitting down on the bed next to Gerard. His brother shifts to make room. He does it without thinking about it, it comes naturally, a habit developed over the years.
“You do?”
“You don’t?” he asks. He can’t believe Gerard has thrown them out.
“I do,” Gerard admits, not looking up from his drawing. Mikey smiles.
“I miss you drawing non scary things…” Mikey sighs lying down. The bed smells like Gerard and that means it smells like cigarettes, beer, and slightly of weed, but it isn’t that bad, it’s familiar.
“You want me to draw unicorns and rainbows and flowers?”
“Maybe…” he says burrowing his face in Gerard’s pillow. He honestly doesn’t know if he wants Gerard to draw him unicorns and flowers and fucking rainbows.
Sometimes he wishes he could draw so all the things in his head would have an outlet. A place to go. He wants Gerard to see what’s in his head and put it on paper for him.
“Mikey?”
“Hmmm…I’m tired.” he mumbles. He can feel Gerard’s body heat, that and the smell…it reminds him of being a kid. Of things lost forever. Days long forgotten.
“Don’t fall asleep here.” Gerard warns.
“Just let me…” he answers softly, already drifting off.
“Mikey…” Gerard’s voice is the last thing he hears.
He tried once to explain to Gerard what it is he thinks is wrong with them.
“Gee…we’re…like, tied together, you know? Like, freakin…Siamese cats or something.” And that’s why Gerard was considered the eloquent one.
Gerard just shook his head and told him he didn’t make sense and should lay off the weed before he can’t talk at all and for fucks sake don’t put your hand on the wet palette!
In Mikey’s own mind, he does make sense, he knows that and he knows that Gerard knows it too. It’s just easier not to think about it.
~3~
He realises, as he looks at the picture of an anatomic heart - it’s more a sketch really - that Gerard was right. They aren’t tied at all, because that would be easy. Just untie the knot. They are different.
He rips the page out and makes an inverted mirror copy of the heart, so that he has two of them.
“We are like that,” he says sitting down on the floor, handing the picture to Gerard.
“Is this my sketch?”
“Yes,” Mikey rolls his eyes, as if it could be someone else’s. Duh. Gerard looks at it.
“We are like this?” Gerard is thinking about all the anti depressants stocked in his cabinet, wondering which combination will work on Mikey’s warped view of life.
“Yes, and you made us like that,” Mikey says. Gerard looks at him, deciding on a dosage for his brother.
“I made us like that?” It’s a little disconcerting.
“Who else? I couldn’t…I…you were there first,” he answers.
“I didn’t mean to…” Gerard says softly, finally understanding the full extend of the damage he unwittingly inflicted on his brother. He flinches at the thought.
“But you did. And you’re still doing it, all the time.”
“I’m sorry Mikey.” He lights a cigarette, inhaling deeply. “Why do you think I did it?” He asks.
“So that we stay like this, forever. It isn’t healthy. It’s like, stunting our emotional development or something. I read it somewhere.” Mikey answers.
“Freud?” Gerard eyes his brother with concern and little bit of fear. “You want to take out the stitches?”
“No.” Mikey mumbles, the hypocrisy of the word twisting in his gut.
”Why not?” Gerard asks as if he wouldn’t know.
“I’m…you know… scared…like, of what would happen.”
”Why?”
“Because there wasn’t a time for me we weren’t like this.” Mikey answers softly.
“Does it bother you?” Gerard asks, Mikey looks up. He keeps quiet, thinking about it.
“Sometimes.” He says after a while, Gerard nods.
“Me too.”
Mikey likes to think that Gerard doesn’t do it on purpose.
But he knows that Gerard does. Did it maybe from the first day he laid eyes on Mikey.
Mikey can’t really blame him. He had the best intentions.
“I wanted you to love me.” Gerard says, hoping it would explain everything.
“You succeeded.”
“I know,” he answers. Mikey isn’t sure he’s happy about it. He himself doesn’t know if he is happy about it.
Mikey knows Gerard keeps the picture of the two hearts sewn together. It’s under his pillow. Mikey can feel it sometimes when he dozes on Gerard’s bed.
It’s scary and strangely comforting.
It’s how they are.
~End~