Casa y Corazón
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
AU. Gerard & Mikey run away from what troubles them, but sometimes it's not always that easy. Rated PG-13 for language, drag, etc! Written for fanfic100, prompt #90: "home". Written for harmyjo as an AU to the Dragclub AU of Infamy. Jojo, someday we'll get married behind Bethy's back for all the crackfic you give me :D
3,185 words
Written April 18, 2006
In retrospect, Gerard really thinks the whole damn thing is Mikey's fault.
Not just the whole thing - not just the airplane, and the suitcases, and the apartment and new jobs and all of it. Well. Yeah. That was his fault. But also, the pearl earrings Gerard had been wearing that night, and the way Gerard walked so confidently towards the taxi, the hem of his skirt caught between his ankles. Also the deep inkblack of his mascara. Also the boneshattering strength of Mikey's grip on Gerard's hand, the reassurance of it in the back of the taxi when he daubed blood off Gerard's cheek.
Also the kisses that stopped up the wound, also the soothing of knuckles rubbing against Gerard's side.
It's all Mikey's fault, of course, not because Mikey did anything, but - just because Gerard loves him. Because Gerard believed in him enough to take his college fund and use it for plane tickets. Had enough faith to say, "Stick a pin in a map and wherever it lands, that's where we'll go," and Gerard knew instinctively that Mikey wouldn't land them in the middle of the ocean.
They hit the coast of Mexico. "Okay," Gerard said, "okay, Puerto Vallarta it is." The plane tickets, the passports, all of it rushing by in a blur - Mikey in the window seat, watching America drop away. Gerard next to him, their hands clutched tight, whispering, "Just keep pretending it's only for summer break. Just keep pretending." All the other kids' parents were crying and saying, we still have three months together; Gerard's mother was staring at an empty room with pinched lips and wrinkles around her eyes.
He wanted to blame her or their father. He wanted to blame Elena for not standing up enough, not keeping them safe; blame himself for being young and in love and crazy enough to run away. "The country's going to hell anyway," he whispered in Mikey's ear. They were running away. Expatriates, Mikey called them. Artistic revolutionary defectors from a nation of fuck-ups who couldn't accept love.
When it came down to it, Gerard couldn't blame anyone, because he was happy to be going and he knew that was entirely Mikey's fault.
Then, last night, was the broken beer bottle.
Gerard knows it is his fault he was attacked: all the other girls, smart enough to change in the back room, wash their faces clean. No traces of eyeliner on their skin; no tights tracing the curves of their legs out. But again he blames Mikey because Mikey gives him such confidence, makes him feel so secure walking the streets. The ocean breeze kicking the skirts up around his knees, making the sweat on the back of his neck cool off; the heat of Mikey's arm around his waist.
Mikey is so delicate undoing the laces and zippers and buttons and it makes Gerard want to change at home, savor the private tenderness of it. The communal dressing rooms at the club would mean forsaking secret kisses: it would mean giving up the way Mikey kneels to help with his shoes, lips fluttering kisses against the inside of Gerard's knee, pushing his skirts up to place kisses higher. Gerard can't make that sacrifice.
(Not that he'd dare say that to Mikey - not that he'd blame him, really, but it just... it feels like it all comes back to Mikey. It feels like Mikey is the reason for everything.)
And the summertime breeze, and the heat so high, even at night, with the stars brighter than in Jersey where they'd been choked by fog... the tourists sparser than Gerard expected. He felt so confident, with his best pearl earrings on (a gift from Mikey after the first year of stolen kisses.) He'd had a good night, earned a lot of tips, danced especially well. He's still getting used to singing and dancing at the same time, especially in heels, but there was such confidence.
And then there were screams and shards of glass crossing his cheek and blood trickling down, making inkblot-sharp splatters on the pavement. Not screams but laughter, taunts, and none of the taxis were stopping to let Gerard in and he felt himself collapse, shaking. He landed on his knees and felt electric pain race up through his skin - he'd landed on the glass.
Mikey managed to flag down a taxi, helped Gerard into the back. He sponged the blood off Gerard's knees with the sleeve of his jacket. He tipped the driver too much and pressed frantic kisses all over Gerard's cheeks, like it would staunch the flow of blood.
"Ssh," Gerard said, closing his eyes. "Ssh."
"I'm so sorry, fuck, those guys are such assholes, oh, shit, Gee. You're okay? You promise you're okay?"
"Mmhm. Ssh. Just calm down." Gerard tangled one hand in Mikey's hair, stroking the back of his head gently. "We'll go home and sleep and, uh, we'll get... mangos for breakfast. We'll get mangos and you can bandage me up and tell Patrick I got in a bar fight, okay?"
Mikey's laugh was so weak, but he sounded reassured. Gerard felt better. (He's always had to be the strong one - because Mikey does things, tiny weak things that make Gerard's heart crumple and make Gerard love him. Mikey's the one who cried when their mother walked in and Gerard's the one who called her an evil bitch. Gerard's the one who helped Mikey pack his things, folding the shirts so tenderly, like they were Mikey's body in pieces.)
In the apartment, Mikey opened the balcony doors to let the night air in, the scent of the lime tree that overhung them. He washed Gerard's face with lavender soap and bandaged it. Gerard's face felt tight and dry, like he'd been swimming in the ocean all night; he kissed Mikey's forehead and said, "I think I can undress myself, tonight."
Mikey looked away and said, "Yeah. No, I understand."
That was the one thing their mother never found out about - the dresses Mikey spent his whole paychecks on. She might've seen too much skin, tangled sweat-soaked sheets, the door left unlocked in a moment of heat and rushing - Gerard flushed, pulling Mikey on top of him, kicking the door shut and forgetting to lock it because love means not hiding. She might've seen all that but she never found how beautiful Gerard could be.
Tiny blessings, sometimes. Some part of them that remains untainted by her curses and closed eyes and bitterness. When Mikey is smoothing gloss onto Gerard's lips with one fingertip, Gerard can believe for a minute that they are whole: when Mikey kisses the small of Gerard's back through a corset, Gerard can believe they have made it out alive. They will continue making small talk with Patrick, the grocer, until they are old and forgetful. They will feed each other fruit between delicate kisses on the mouth, their lower lips swollen pink like watermelon.
(Or so Gerard believes, with Mikey's fingertips to his shoulderblades.)
But then there were the shards of glass, and then Gerard was thinking maybe he shouldn't let Mikey in because obviously they have not made it out alive. Obviously this is not okay and which of them is the fuckup who kissed his brother, who performs in a tacky drag show every night? Which of them works in a restaurant and speaks such good Spanish, because he is out all the time and not lounging in the apartment, painting and reading poetry? Maybe Mikey shouldn't be kissing him and eating his poison.
Gerard changed into soft worn flannel pants - a holdover from the nights he slept in his bed at home (he needs to stop thinking of it as that. Jersey can't be home anymore.) He slept on the expansive couch in the living room, the one that faces the balcony, the doors with the lace curtains. The breeze was cool enough to strike into his bones even though it's summer. He shivered and curled in on himself and tried not to cry and soak through his bandages.
But now it is morning and Mikey is up already, waiting with Gerard's clothes laid out for the day: skintight girls' jeans, a thin T-shirt the color of pink pearls. The color of the faint blush that rises in Mikey's cheeks when he whispers, "Morning."
"You're up this early and not at work?"
"It's Saturday, dumbass." Mikey touches Gerard's cheek - the one facing up, the bruised one. Gerard bites his lip. There's the slightest extra weight when he says, "I wanted to make sure I'd be here for you." A pause, just enough to let the meaning sink in, and then - "I wanted to take you out for breakfast."
"No mangos?"
Mikey closes his eyes, lashes soft behind his glasses. "I was thinking pancakes and fruit on the boardwalk? If you're up for that many tourists this morning." Gerard looks out the window at the orange-streaked sunrise. "And after, we can find some excuse to swing by and visit Patrick."
All the tourists (the drunken fratboy tourists with their hoots and square jaws and masculinity and rage). Gerard can sense the unending depth of concern in Mikey's voice so he touches the ridges of Mikey's knuckles and says, quietly, "I don't think most of them will be up this early, do you?"
Mikey breaks into smile and kisses the top of Gerard's head.
Breakfast is quiet and they hold hands, sharing one (virgin) strawberry daquiri and feeding each other chunks of papaya. Gerard feels whole and pure. He licks syrup from the places between his fingers, then lifts Mikey's hand and imitates the motion so delicately that he thinks, no one can find us obscene. He watches the waves crash behind the twisted surrealist sculptures and says, "One day, my paintings are going to be as famous as those."
"They're already twice as beautiful," Mikey says.
Gerard thinks but I am not. He watches the waves crash and thinks about tenderness, and the narrowed eyes of the waiter, and the way their mother called him ugly and wrong. He thinks about Elena's letters where she reassures him but how infrequent they are, and he thinks about running away. He watches the waves and the spray of white against deep gray rocks. Something timeless and beyond place. Something that feels like home, no matter where you're from.
After breakfast they walk back to the apartment. On the way they stop in at the tiny boutique on Juarez - the clothes are far too flashy and pink for Gerard's taste, but the owner Pete is a friend of Patrick's, and Gerard likes the feeling of network he gets from visiting. The feeling that he's met people here and he's making connections. They make idle chatter; Gerard tells numerous elaborate stories about the bandage, each one more blatantly false than the last. Mikey perches on the counter and laughs.
"Such a fucking liar, Way," Pete says, flicking a miniskirt at him like a towel. "You know I'm just gonna hear the truth from Trick later, right?"
"Yeah, well. Now I purposely won't tell him." Gerard flashes a moviestar smile and puts on an oversize pair of white sunglasses. "Do these make me sexy? Mikey, what do you think, could I be famous with these on maybe?" Pete laughs and shoos them out of the shop, blowing kisses at them all the way down the block.
Patrick is far more worried - he's the pale plumpness to Pete's dark, sleek body. He fusses over Gerard and brings him a bag of fresh tortillas, saying, "You better take care of yourself, you hear? Christ, Mikey, you better - " He flutters his hands about uselessly. "Take care of him, damnit!"
"And to think," Gerard deadpans, "he's younger than me."
Patrick shoos them out too, calling incoherent blessings at them as they walk off. "You know he's in love with you," Mikey says casually, tucking one hand into the pocket of Gerard's jeans. It's horribly awkward, especially with Mikey's large-boned hands, but Gerard sighs happily.
"He is not. I see him once a week, he's the fucking grocer."
"You read Neruda poems at him and spend an hour shopping for three things." Mikey laughs, snuggling his head down into the crook of Gerard's neck. It's true - Gerard does read him the odd poem, but only when he's spent a whole day on the couch reading poetry, and it's seeped into his brain and he has to share it with someone before his heart implodes. And besides they're friends; it definitely can't be construed as flirting if he reads a poem to a friend in the interest of spreading beauty.
"And besides," Gerard says, as if Mikey's been tagging along in his head, reading his thoughts. "It's not my fault I'm really picky about food."
"An hour to buy paper plates, Gee," Mikey says. He grins. His voice is down to a soft whisper now, caught in the breeze. "Can't I just believe the whole world is in love with you?"
A pause, a silence. Gerard sighs. If Mikey had let the conversation stay so light and bubbly… He doesn't want to remember that even here, miles from home, he is hiding what he does for a living and what he looks like when the sun goes down. The boy Patrick smiles at is still separate from the pretty genderless thing that floats onstage, singing sad songs with pearls around his neck.
He turns his face into Mikey's hair and says quietly, "But you are my whole world," and Mikey laughs in a way that sounds like a dry sob.
"Isn't it weird," he says, "that all the people we've really met here are all foreigners? Like, they all speak English, you know? It's a little weird I think."
"I guess."
But all he's thinking is, That's because 'home' still means a house in Belleville. I can't speak Spanish when my heart thinks in English. For all the Neruda he reads, everything's still in English - he skims straight over the Spanish originals. He can quote full sonnets straight off from memory, but couldn't translate a line back to the original.
Mikey persists. "Even with your job - like, Bohemia's a total tourist trap, right? I mean not like your regular tourists, but… how many local guys do you see in there?"
"Yeah," Gerard says, "yeah, I get the picture - let's go home." He curls his fist tight in his pocket, nails digging into his palm. "I'm tired. Let's go home, I just want to lie around and read today." Mikey sighs and nods and removes his hand from Gerard's pocket, looping one arm through Gerard's. The walk home is slow and silent like a funeral procession.
Gerard sleeps listlessly on the couch, sun spilling through the thin curtains. He reads off and on. Mikey putters around in the bedroom like an old man, working on something or other; Gerard ignores it and focuses on the smell of lime hanging heavy in the air. It feels like it's hours and hours later when Mikey flops down on the end of the couch and says, listless, "Read me something."
"Okay, uh, let me find a good one." Gerard bites his lip. When he moves his mouth too much he can feel the tension of the bandage pulling at his cheek and it hurts.
"Something in Spanish," Mikey says. Gerard looks up. "Something pretty."
Gerard closes the book and his eyes at the same time, then opens the pages randomly. He lets his finger drift down the page and when he opens his eyes, it's right at the end of a poem. "Okay," he says. "Okay. Here." The syllables are a bit awkward in his mouth as he pronounces them. "Quiero hacer contigo lo que primavera hace con los cerezos."
"Mm." Mikey frowns. "Cerezos… cerezos…?"
"Cherry trees."
"They don't have cherry trees in Belleville, huh." Something is in Mikey's eyes now, and he touches his palm to Gerard's ankle. There's such warmth in the gesture. "They don't have cherry blossoms there." (Already it's there and Belleville instead of back home. Gerard wishes he could be the same.)
He sits forward, hand curled around Mikey's wrist. "They don't have cherry trees here either."
"Nah, we really don't. But." Mikey's lips so close to Gerard's, now, that he can feel the exhalations of breath. "But we have lime trees, and palm trees, and flowers everywhere." (We.) Gerard nods, silent, and Mikey says, "And it's not spring here but it's always summer, so… hey. So hey. So our lives are better than even Neruda could think up, huh?"
Gerard sighs and Mikey lifts his hands to Gerard's face, cups his cheeks with his palms like he is holding a massive and delicate flower to the sun.
"And look," he says, "the flowers - they have to bloom sometime, right?"
"Yeah…"
"So, it might not be spring, and it might not be cherry trees." Their lips brushing now, and Mikey pulls Gerard's lower lip between his own, the most tender kiss Gerard has ever felt (and oh how many he has felt.) Mikey's voice is low like a prayer. "But I want to do it anyway."
Gerard thinks about the way he'd fallen to his knees last night, skirt crumpled around him like the time-lapse bloom of a flower. He thinks about the elaborate exotic flower petals Mikey makes of his eyelids with makeup. He thinks about what it would be like to bloom entirely into himself, to spread out in waves of color, arms extended to the sky, and what it would be like to collapse into a bed with glowing pink sheets like bright nuclear pollen. What it would be like to explode into fireworks that couldn't have ever been set free over the Atlantic, only over the Pacific, here, on a different coast thousands of miles away.
"You know," he murmurs into Mikey's lips, "we forgot the mangos."
"Mmhm."
"You wanna go get them…?" Gerard pulls back slow and gentle, smiling with his lower lip between his teeth. "And then let me eat them off your stomach?"
Mikey bursts into laughter, barely letting on a hint of a blush. "Fuck yeah," he says. "Give me two seconds. I'll be back before you realize I've left, even."
"I always realize when you've left," Gerard says, sprawling back out on the couch. He watches Mikey grab his wallet and hurry frantic out the door, like the mangos are really a big deal - big enough to forget his key over. He spreads his fingers in a starburst over the bandage on his cheek. It doesn't feel like a lot, in this morning. It doesn't feel like it'd hurt if he peeled the bandage away. It seems like nothing at all.
(Nothing important, anyway, like the mangos. Because what's important - what's real - is the moment when Mikey will step back into the apartment, into Gerard's arms. The moment when Gerard will say, welcome home.)