Dare / Truth
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
AU. Ever since the accident, Gerard can't stay away from the beach. Rated PG-13 for some language. Written for fanfic100, prompt #51: "water".
2,519 words
Written April 30, 2006
Ever since the accident, Gerard can't keep himself from walking by the ocean.
He knows it's irrational, a fixation - a way for him to numb himself to the emotional pain and blah blah blah. His therapist has offered a thousand and one theories about the pull of it. Why he can't keep himself from waking up at five in the morning, stumbling out of the apartment, driving down to the coast. She says he's trying to relive that day. Trying to erase it and bring Mikey back and redeem himself from guilt.
She tells him, a lot, "You need to accept that this isn't your fault and move on." Gerard tunes out when she says that. He wants to get over this and whatever but he can't understand who else's fault it could be. Their parents', for not teaching Mikey to swim better? Bullshit - Mikey loved to swim. Never was particularly good, but he did the best he could for being a skinny, unathletic kid. Couldn't be Mikey's (how could it be?)
Ultimately it came down to Gerard and that stupid game they played.
It came down to the way, since they were kids, they'd played "dare you" - had come up with elaborate schemes for each other. It came down to Mikey's birthday, and the note Gerard left on his pillow - a heart-shaped piece of paper that said, dare you to find me.
For them, the game had come to mean something more than just nostalgia - it was what kept them tied to each other. It was the memory of Gerard curled in a ball in his room, sobbing, the TV on for two days straight so he could soak himself in tragedy. And Mikey sat down next to him, stroked his tangled, stringy hair, and whispered: "Dare you to make this into something good."
And Gerard started writing songs, and then it became good - it generated this thing that let them, suddenly, be more than what they were.
And while they were on the road, they shared a ten-dollar box of wine, toasting each other and their childhood and the beauty they had become. One of those nights where everyone else was crashed out, and they were up on the New York coastline, hearing the ocean in their hearts even though they were a couple miles away. Mikey said, "Dare you to make out with Frank onstage," in a fit of drunken amusement.
"Not fair, it's supposed to be for serious things - " Gerard jabbed a finger at Mikey. "Not makin' out with people!"
"Dare you to make out with me onstage," Mikey countered, serene, falling back on the grass where they sat. Gerard looked up at the sky and the stars and fell back too. The outline of the van blocked the moon, but they still felt content, hands next to each other and radiating warmth. "Dare you," Mikey repeated.
Gerard rolled over and said, very quietly, "You're such a little fucker," and pulled Mikey up by his shoulder and kissed him with his mouth open. For the briefest second it was just the moment of shock, all Gerard expected - Mikey falling back, laughing hysterically, freaked out - but then there was the loss of balance, the way Mikey knotted his fist through Gerard's hair, keeping him close and heat-soaked and the stars flickered through the clouds.
When Gerard sat back, dizzy, Mikey said, "Maybe we, um… should not be, y'know. Doing this right in front of the bus windows?"
(Neither of them touched on exactly what this was.)
They walked down to the beach, and there with the sand getting into their clothes, under their fingernails, they kissed again. It was a week after Mikey's birthday. Gerard felt young and beautiful and his legs ached from trembling, from the tension in his thighs.
Now cut to five years later, Mikey's birthday (to the day of the accident) and Gerard's note on his pillow. The back of the paper heart, Gerard had scrawled an address of a beach in New York, and Mikey drove for three hours to find it and the pier where they held hands and wished on a sunrise for the possibility of a future.
Gerard was waiting on the pier. They kissed and held each other close by the hips, and because it was September the beach was deserted - the wind slicing through the threads of their clothes, finding the sensitive places on their skin. Gerard said "Happy birthday" and "I love you" and all those stupid little clichés. (Terrible last words, he thinks, sometimes.)
"Let's go swimming," Mikey said, his smile playful. Gerard raised one eyebrow, like, isn't it fucking freezing? "Please? It'll be fun."
"You just want me to take off my shirt." They laughed, and Mikey stepped closer into the warmth of Gerard's chest.
"Yeah, well… it's my birthday, I should get what I want."
The freezing water, and the way Mikey's mouth turned blue like he'd been eating candy. Gerard laughed and yelled over the roar of the waves, "At least I've got my fat to keep me warm," and Mikey splashed him like he was saying, you haven't been fat for months. Their legs caught and tangled in the water and Gerard felt easy and free.
He can't pinpoint when Mikey disappeared. He'd like to go over it a thousand times in his head - find the place where he failed - but now it's all a blur, just the memory of salt in his eyes and screams and Mikey's thin wrists and fingers clawing at the water and air like he could pull himself to surface, and Mikey pulled away by the riptide, and the way Gerard felt frozen to the heart by the cold and insignificance and immobility -
After your bassist drowns on his birthday, and your lead singer watches it happen, your band kind of falls to shit. Gerard let them take care of the burial and the memorial service and then he took off. For awhile there was a thin layer of guilt, but that washed off. He keeps thinking fuck them, they didn’t see it. They didn't have to carry his clothes and his glasses back and think how he'd never wear them again and they didn't hear him choking on his own lungs and they nevernevernever loved him like I did.
He thinks maybe he should be sadder about that. The memory of Mikey's glasses and the light falling through them onto the metal of the pier, and the crushing awareness that all through the funeral they were thinking brother about him and not everything.
What it feels like, mostly, is like the cold of the water stayed on his heart. Like something froze in a thin veneer of ice and he can't get through to real feeling. Ultimately what it comes down to is that it's his fault, and he is totally blank, and sometimes he thinks, if I really knew what I did then I'd have killed myself long ago.
It's not even the same beach that he walks on these days but it feels the same. All the waves look the same and sound the same. One big blank white-noise crash around him, and if he had any clarity in his head he'd think about how maybe it's meaningful when everything looks the same… but then there's nothing in his head, not anymore.
He feels like he's waiting for something. A ghost, maybe. The kind of thing he always wanted to believe in, so he pretended he did, but it was all too forceful to make up for the lack of belief in his heart. There are no ghosts, no specters waiting in the walls: just the emptiness of his own misery.
He keeps remembering the little things. All the dares they made each other that felt monumental but added up to nothing in the end. All the details.
(The tired feet, the road maps slipped into each other's messenger bags, the stained T-shirts and the holes in the sleeves, the cell phone messages, the plastic bags full of each other's favorite candy. Mikey sitting on the roof of the bus after a show, asking Gerard to buy him some coffee because he didn't want to get down, and Gerard thought I want to be buying you coffee for the rest of our lives and always know exactly what you want. Mikey saying, "Dare you to climb up here with me".
The tiny café where they ate breakfast together at home, their knees touching beneath the table - half on purpose, half just because Mikey was so gangly - and Gerard inching his bare foot up Mikey's leg and saying, "Dare you to not make any noise," and the tiny shudder that went over Mikey. The way he nodded and took it as a challenge and kept his lips pressed into a thin line, even as his eyes slipped closed, lashes fluttering against his cheeks. Details like that. How can they mean nothing? Gerard can remember the heat against the sole of his foot and the way he wanted to take Mikey away to somewhere beautiful and never bring him back and watch him bite his lip like that, breathing erratically. And it's nothing now.)
The longer he thinks about the details the more his heart feels erased-off. He walks down the beach for miles and doesn't eat, and he gets skinny and his legs get sore and swollen-up. He watches the coastline and waits for his miracle to wash up and break on the rocks (but Mikey was his miracle and they dredged his body out and it will never wash up again.)
Then the miracle does wash ashore.
Technically speaking it was there to begin with but it looked born out of the waves, this girl with her hair the color of sand, her brown body and her legs wrapped up in yards of rough fabric, like seaweed woven through with wheat. This girl sitting on the rocks and not even shivering with her bare smooth shoulders to the cold air.
He didn't recognize her at first. Didn't see her hair tangled and the way she braced her hands against the rocks, wrists taut with the tendons strained. It was on his way back to his car that he saw the flash of pink: her mouth, moving. He walked towards her and it felt like a dream and he said, "Are you okay? Are you cold?"
Her hair was dry but there was water in beads down her back, tracing the outlines of it. She smiled with her flashing white teeth and he said, "No, really - here, uh, take my jacket." It felt like the gentlemanly thing to do. This girl sitting here all topless and wet and wrapped in fabric that, despite its opaqueness, looked terribly thin. He couldn't see through to her legs.
"Do you believe in spirits?"
"I wanted to." Gerard sat down, cross-legged, watched her pick at her fingernails. Her hands were rough and callused. "I don't know. I know some dead people… I figure they would've sent me a message or two by now." He tried to laugh, like, I keep waiting for text messages from my dead brother saying 'I love you', how fucked up am I but she didn't look fooled.
"Do you think I look familiar?"
He shook his head. She lifted up the thick ropes of her hair, reached into her skirt - a thick fold of fabric - pulled out a rough-edged shell. "Here," she said, and began to saw at her hair with the shell, and Gerard thought what the fuck, that's not going to work but her hair parted like it was being unzipped.
With her hair short and choppy and messy around her face he could see it. The flatness of her chest - her breasts nothing more than, oh, what was it, he'd read it somewhere - like little scoops of wheat. Little piles of seaweed left by the tide, with her tiny nipples like starfish struggling for air. Her eyes, blinking like she was blind.
Her hair short and spiked up in odd placed by the wind and her angular jaw, the fragility of her wrists. "Fuck," he said, shaking his head. "That's really. Uh. What the fuck."
"No I mean it," she said, and laughed and then she said, "I think you need to start believing." Her teeth looked like tiny diamonds but only with the beauty of love - he knew they were really slightly too large, slightly awkward, in the most familiar way. He watched the wind kick at her skirts but not reveal her toes.
It felt like a cliché but he said, "Do you dare me?"
"I'll do you one better," and she reached out and he moved to her almost instinctively, and she kissed him and it felt… it felt like an ocean rushing in his veins, pounding at his stomach. "There," she said, laughing again. He couldn't find words for it. It was a bomb shelter constructed around his heart, made fragile with ice and winter winds, and there she was with her hands spread across his eyes and destroying the entire thing.
He wanted to take her home. He said as much, touching her arm, saying, "Can I take you away from the sea? Is that okay? You won't die?"
"I'll live in your bathtub." She fell back against the rock and spread her arms like she was tanning herself, but the clouds made her body lined with shadow. "No, I'll be fine. Carry me?"
She felt so thin in his arms (a familiar waist, the same smell in her hair when he kissed her forehead.) He brought her to his car and set her down in the backseat. (Mikey laying there, the same way, head propped on one hand, singing love songs underneath his breath.)
Halfway through the drive home, he said, "So do you have a name?"
"You wanna call me Michelle?" She smiled with her eyes squinted closed.
"Real cute."
She slept in his bed, her legs (?) curled up under the blankets, her arms thin against the whiteness of the sheets. He watched her sleep and he went back out to the beach.
He walks up and down the ocean now and thinks about how she was born, her driftwood body, her light eyelashes, the bleached-out colors of her eyes. He thinks about spirits. He thinks about the faith he and Mikey never had, not with anything but each other, and he thinks how much faith do you need to create something like… like that?
He will stop taking his medication, he will stop wandering the beach with his eyes stinging salty and aching. He will visit Mikey's grave and lay flowers down. He will throw flowers over his bed and leave them for her to find when she wakes. He will let them both wake up, at once, altogether like a dream. Like the first breath after drowning.