Lullaby for Helena
Title: Lullaby for Helena
Author:
alles_luege
Pairing: Gerard/Helena (OFC)
Rating: PG -13
Summary: Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl - MCR-style.
Warning(s): character death…duh, also depressing for sure (I mean, come on, this whole video is about a dead girl.)
Author’s Notes: Helena-VIDEO- AU. Lyrics taken from: Miss Platnum, Katey Perry and La Roux.
Word Count: 1 682
Beta: tygermine
Disclaimer: Don’t know, don’t own, not real.
I. About the living
~1~
All the shadows used to love you
The first time he saw her was in a dark shadowed alley. He remembered that much later though. So he always thinks about first seeing her on the stage. She was dancing- ballet. He isn’t sure why he went, maybe because his mom really wanted to and his dad was so out of it and he likes to see her happy and of course Mikey flat out rejected her. But it’s not Mikey’s fault that he isn’t into ballet at all. It’s not like Gerard was into it. He still isn’t. It’s the truth, he was just into Helena. Maybe it was the play as well. She was just…not white. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that was it. He isn’t sure.
She danced like she was playing with the shadows, like she would caress them, like they would in turn caress her. He has never seen anything like that.
When he stepped onto the cold street after with his mom, he breathed in deeply and tried to gather his courage to talk to her.
Useless to say he didn’t.
~2~
In the morning you wake up and you don’t know where you are
The first time he met her was outside a comic book store. He couldn’t believe his luck, or lack thereof, because he looked like a mess. He was over at Frank’s and things got out of hand and he ended up dead drunk on Ray’s couch. He didn’t even know how he ended up at Ray’s place in the first place.
She was leaning against the brick wall, smoking a cigarette and nursing a cup of coffee he would have killed for. Well, maybe not Mikey or Frank, but still, bodily harm would have been involved.
He was looking for a coffee shop nearby, but couldn’t locate one and then she looked up and smiled. He remembers his heart stopping for a second or maybe two.
“Looking for coffee?”
He could only nod, and wonder about how her voice sounded. Nothing like he would’ve imagined. It was a bit raspy and she had a slight lisp.
“It’s down the next corner…it’s no good,” she said.
“You’re drinking it,” he pointed out.
“It’s coffee.” She had answered, shrugging.
“I guess…”
“I’m heading to get another one…”
“Ahm…” he was so doomed, from the start.
“I’m Helena.”
“I know,” he had blurted out and wanted to smack his head against the brick wall, because what the hell was that? She raised an eyebrow at him, flipped the butt of her cigarette into a puddle close by and he said: “I saw you dance?” and it sounded more like a question. She had laughed and asked his name and then they went to buy some crappy coffee.
~3~
But we don’t know how to stop
He loved everything about her and it sounds stupid and cliché and Mikey told him this on several occasions himself, but it was the fucking truth. He loved how she smoked leaning against walls, how she drank her coffee black but with cinnamon, how she danced and could talk about it for hours and he loved how she loved her favourite ballet shoes, that were black and how she would laugh at him when he added more red to a portrait he painted of her.
“You just don’t know when to stop, do you?” she asked one evening. They were lying side by side and she was only wearing the black ballet shoes and he had paint all over his arms and on his neck and there was red on her breasts and it looked like they got into a fight or killed someone or something bizarre like that.
“I do…I just don’t know how,” he had told her and she kissed him then, because she knew he wasn’t talking about the painting of her or any other trivial thing, he was talking about her, about how he didn’t know how to stop loving her, because he didn’t know, he didn’t want to know. It was all the same really.
“I hope you never learn,” she had answered and he flipped them over so that she was lying underneath him, she laughed and he kissed her like she was the air he breathes, and he really believed it at that moment and didn’t care how clichéd that sounded. At all.
II. About the dying
~1~
Why are these lights so bright?
It was not something that could’ve had prepared him, if there is something like being prepared when someone you love dies. Knowing it in advance doesn’t make it easier, he supposes. He wouldn’t know. She died suddenly and alone.
“She got hit by a car…” he heard his mother whisper to his dad and he couldn’t take it anymore. So he left, slamming the door and he heard Mikey calling his name, but he couldn’t be with the living.
The night outside was dark and cold and the lights were too bright and he wished, oh how fucking he wished, that one of these lights would hit him too. The slow death inside was too painful to bear.
~2~
Drink, this will not be the last one
The pain didn’t go away. He couldn’t…even when he passed out from exhaustion and lack of food. He couldn’t, because he dreamed about her, about how she looked naked and covered in red paint. And was that the beginning of the end? For her, for him, for them? He doesn’t believe in faith, he doesn’t believe in …anything. Anymore.
“You think she would’ve wanted that?” Mike asks quietly. He doesn’t respond. “Gee…”
“You don’t know what she would’ve wanted, no one knows what the dead want!” He says too sharply, but Mikey doesn’t flinch and that’s just because he knows how Gerard can get when he’s angry and now…now Gerard himself doesn’t even know if he is angry anymore. He feels closer to being fucking destroyed. That is what he is.
“She wouldn’t want you to waste away…like this,” Mikey says softly and strokes his hair and Gerard shuts his eyes tightly and pretends Mikey is her.
~3~
But we don’t know how to stop
She looks exactly like this one time he saw her on stage. She even wears the same dress and he can’t look at her face, but can’t not look either. Maybe that’s how people feel that are watching a train wreck, maybe that’s how his friends feel watching him.
The mass is held with all the pomp the Catholic Church is capable of.
Black and a bit of red everywhere, the red was his idea, he couldn’t stand just the black and Mikey went along with it and it was never a question who would carry her coffin with him.
Gerard doesn’t believe in god, he stopped believing in god the first time he kissed a boy, because he knew that there can’t be a god that doesn’t find love a good thing. He stopped believing and never looked back. Helena believed, but she was a silent believer. He loved her for that even more.
He doesn’t know how to stop loving her, how to stop slowly dying, because of her.
III. About the dead
~1~
Baby, your time is running out
The first time it really sinks in, is maybe when he shoves the coffin into the back of the hearse. His fingers slip on the polished surface and leave a wet smear. It’s raining again.
He closes the trunk lid and it makes a satisfying, closing sound. His hand on the window a star shaped piece of flesh.
Mikey grabs his sleeve and tries to pull him away from the hearse and to their car. He knows his mom is somewhere close by, but he doesn’t know where and he doesn’t care. He can’t leave her here. Not alone, she never liked to be alone, she told him one morning when he finished his painting of the dead ballerina he was working on for weeks.
These are the last minutes, seconds maybe, she is part of his life. Her body is a part of his life.
“Gerard…” Mikey’s soft voice in his ear and a drop of rainwater on his skin that made its way from the tip of Mikey’s nose. Maybe it’s a tear.
“I…”
“Gerard…please,” Mikey says softly, his breathe ghosts over Gerard’s chilled skin, he nods. But he doesn’t know why.
Or what to.
~2~
To walk away from something when it’s dead
She is a ‘was’ now and he still can’t say her name out loud.
She’s been buried for weeks and he tried that one time, after day 21 of her coffin being driven away from him, after her body was taken away from him, he tried to go to the cemetery and visit her grave. He didn’t even make it past the gates.
He doesn’t know what that says about him. Mikey gives him fucking looks and he knows he drinks too much, maybe even more after he got the news, before she was buried six feet under tons of dirt.
“Gerard?” Frank sounds fucking worried and he hates that he is the source, but he can’t deal with Frank now, on top of everything.
“Go away.”
“You need to stop, you think Helena would want that?”
“You don’t know what she would want, she is rotting away…”
“Gerard!”
“That’s the truth about the dead, Frank! They are rotting away, slowly, their flesh eaten away by worms and maggots,” he answers and he knows he sounds like a crazy person, but it’s still the truth and for the mercy of everything that is holy or not, Frank shuts up and passes him his cigarettes.
~3~
But we don’t know how to stop
He can’t stop drawing her face, can’t stop thinking about her body rotting away in the dark womb of mother earth.
Can’t stop remembering all the small things.
He doesn’t know how to deal with the knowledge that she doesn’t care anymore.
~end~