Love Suicides
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Gerard & Mikey plant flowers in Elena's garden, and Gerard thinks about numerous things. Rated PG-13 for some language. Written for fanfic100, prompt #81: "how?" Text at the beginning from "Running from the Rain" by Thursday.
2,459 words
Written May 14, 2006
operator operator did you lose your way when you got that call your brother made?
you're sick of running and you know it's true, you're coming back, running from the rain
They are in the garden planting rosebushes even though it's probably too late in the season for them. It's Elena's garden. The sun is shining, the rosebushes are scratching at Gerard's wrists and the pads of his fingers, Mikey is humming "This Charming Man". The wind smells like apples. Indian summer, Gerard is thinking, with the sharp pang of nostalgia that comes with that scent - he knows it's still July but he can feel the end of summer gnawing at his ribcage. Mikey is sloppy with his fingers and piles dirt messy, leaving roots exposed and raw.
"These will look nice next year," Gerard says. He watches Elena putter about in the kitchen through the window. She's making bread and he wants, achingly, to smell the yeast and the lilac-scent powder she wears on her skin. "We'll have to make sure we stop by in May, or something. It'll be nice."
"Mmhm." Mikey picks up another tiny bush, works with his bitten fingernails at the burlap around the roots. The string is small and caked with dirt and Gerard reaches past him.
"Here I'll do it."
"Thanks."
The conversation between them has felt sparse all afternoon. Gerard has been writing love letters and putting them in sealed envelopes, stamping them, addressing them to himself and sending them off. When he gets them back in the mail he burns them with his cigarette lighter and his hands smell like butane from refilling his lighter all the time. It's pretty disgusting. Gerard doesn’t know what to say to Mikey lately with his hands smelling like this and now especially with dirt all over his jeans and streaked across his cheekbones.
Gerard undoes the string with a few quick tugs. Mikey smiles with a flash of teeth, shy and careful. "Thanks," he repeats.
The mud on Gerard's face makes him feel like a warrior or something. They used to run around in this yard with tempera paints on their faces, asymmetrical patterns, playing at being fighters. He misses the cool texture of it and the way it flaked off their faces, the way he'd brush at Mikey's cheek and watch blue come fluttering off like butterflies. The garden is lined with rocks making a tiny wall, and they would climb over it, balancing with their arms out. Gerard swipes at his face again - the sun is hot - and watches mud crumble off.
"You know," Gerard says, "I really wish I wasn't scared of needles."
"Yeah?"
"Tattoos are so romantic I think. Wouldn't it be nice to turn yourself into a memorial to someone? Make yourself totally completely about something or someone you love?" Gerard is thinking about those colors in his skin forever, what it'd be like to be a work of art. To have some beauty on you for always. He's thinking about the colors he'd use if he wanted to embed Mikey in himself and they would be shades of deep blue and the slightest green, turquoise maybe. Lots of black outlines of things.
"You think the weirdest things are romantic." Mikey smiles again, a photograph-flash second of a smile. "You think corpses are romantic."
"Mikey let's commit a love suicide," Gerard says, and he laughs with his head down and his hair all stringy and filthy in his eyes. "I think death is the most romantic thing on the planet maybe."
"So how come me then?" Mikey throws a clump of dirt at Gerard, but loose, like he doesn't really want to hit him.
Gerard gets quiet for a moment and thinks about Elena in the kitchen, making them bread, how she used to make them pretzels in the shape of letters spelling out their names, Mikey's pretzels bigger to make up for the lack of letters. He thinks about the hearts Elena used to make with the leftover dough. "I don't know anyone else I trust enough I guess. Like I think if you agreed you'd mean it. You'd go through with it."
"You wouldn't." Mikey is biting his lip like please let me believe you wouldn't.
"I would but only because I'd know that you would. You know what I mean? Like I'd be so sure of you that I'd have to, just so I wouldn't let you down."
There is a long silence and Mikey heaps more dirt around the rosebush. The roots aren't far enough in and Gerard knows this but says nothing. He watches Mikey's fingers burrow into the soil like thin white worms and thinks how someone once told him that death and sex are the same thing basically. Mikey's fingers are white and pale like maggots. His hands are the most elegant things Gerard has ever seen.
"It's going to rain," Mikey says finally. "It's going to rain soon. We should go in maybe."
"I guess."
"We only have a few more right?"
"You've done most of them," Gerard says, not mentioning that Mikey's are far messier. Gerard lets his hands stay in the shade of the rosebush, smoothing the dirt repetitively, the few thorns making deeper and deeper gashes in his skin. He feels like the dirt is making a mask of his hands, filling in the lines, turning him blank and empty. His fingerprints are wearing off in the dirt. Gerard watches himself repeat the motions over and over, slow, careful, like he is dependant on this one thing. The need to make the ground balance itself perfectly.
Mikey points to Gerard's hands and says, "How do you do that?"
Gerard feels like he is suddenly a child again, reduced to simple sentences and basics. He watches the scratches on his hands bloom in red. He can't express his thoughts and he feels somewhere cold and empty open inside him. "I don't know," he says. "I just. Sometimes you have to - sometimes it's - I mean fuck Mikey, why would you ask? I don't want to fucking talk about it. I have my reasons and you don't need to know them, it's too fucking crazy, just go away for awhile." Despite the rambling in his words he tries to keep his voice paced and calm but he can feel it getting away, slipping through his shiny dirty fingers. "Just don't fucking talk to me about it."
There is another pause, and then Mikey runs one smooth white fingertip down a scratch. "Gerard," he says, voice stricken. "Gerard. I meant how do you get the roots all in the ground like that. I didn't mean - "
"No," Gerard says, closing his eyes. "It's fine. You just, y'know, keep going over it till they're pressed down enough - it takes some time but whatever."
"Yeah," Mikey says. "Yeah."
In any conversation it's what doesn't get said that somehow ends up being most important. The way nobody talks about phone calls at midnight, Gerard mixing up his speed dial numbers - the way it is fucking hilarious that Gerard has a suicide hotline on his speed dial, for Christ's sake, it really is funny. It makes Gerard laugh anyway.
They don't talk about the deepness of the silence around them now, the way Mikey is pressing his palms to the ground like he can absorb strength out of it, pull some tiny magic particle from it and into his heart, make himself less thin and fragile. Mikey looks made of porcelain. Gerard imagines porcelain worms, smashing them under his boots. He imagines Mikey with his fingers all in splints. His heart hurts. For a long time now Gerard's been considering throwing himself down the stairs, just to see his arms shatter and mend, the process of it. You know. Just for the hell of it.
"It's going to rain," Mikey says. Gerard squints up and nods. He feels a little ridiculous - they're such city kids, pretending they know the earth. He watches the sky and the gradations of the clouds.
"Wish it would. It's so fucking hot."
"Mmhm."
"Do you ever think," Mikey says, "maybe sometimes how it'd be nice to disappear between the raindrops? You know, like if you could step outside and just… walk between them. And be totally thin enough to do it and almost invisible because of it."
Gerard's answer isn't much of a response. "It's funny," he says. "You grow up with someone your whole life and you can still never tell what the fuck they're thinking or why they think it."
Mikey's tamping the dirt down a little smoother now, like he's kneading dough in his fingertips, careful with it and rhythmic. "Even I don't know why," he says, and laughs. "And I've been living it."
They work in silence for a bit more. The rain starts soon after but it's slow at first, the occasional patter making the dirt speckled with darker brown. Gerard watches it stain and spread. They are finishing the last rosebush, together, hands touching but not lingering and the dirt soft between their aching hands, when the rain really begins. Gerard can feel it slicking his hair to his forehead and making his sweatshirt thick with dampness. His skin feels clammy already.
Mikey says, too loud, "Well at least we don't have to water them now," and Gerard laughs even though it's not an especially astute observation. He climbs to his feet, knees soaked and filthy, and Mikey reaches for his hand almost instinctively to pull himself up. The sky doesn't smell like Indian summers anymore.
"Maybe the bread's done now," Gerard says, tugging at Mikey's hand like they're kids again.
"Maybe."
Lately Gerard's been writing love songs in his journal and pairing them with quick sketches, studies in the movement of the body and the angle of an arm stretched out to pick up a phone, the barest hint of shadow along the stomach and the slice of skin like sunlight through a curtain. Lately Gerard's been doing this but lately he's also been covering himself up like he's ashamed. Mikey might talk about being thin enough to disappear but Gerard's never really had that luxury, even imagining that kind of slender form.
They pick their way through the garden out to the lawn, trying not to dirty their shoes any more than they already have - a futile attempt. When they're standing on the grass, Mikey tips his head back and leans on Gerard's shoulder. "It's like staring into a kaleidoscope," he says.
"Yeah?"
"Race you back," Mikey says, laughing, and he takes off and Gerard has no choice but to follow. The rain is heavier and heavier and splashing off his face and he wants to throw himself headlong into the puddles that are forming. Even in a town like this, he thinks, even in such a pretty suburb by such a nice house, the gutters fill up with rainwater and oil and it feels poetic, and he wants to catch gasoline rainbows with his hands.
Mikey opens the door for him, letting him in first. "You win," he says. Gerard tries to catch his breath.
The kitchen is empty, but Gerard can smell the bread dough, the remnants of lilac. He pulls Mikey in and closes the door behind him. In the tiny kitchen, standing between the locked door and the side of the fridge, Gerard feels terribly close to Mikey with their hands nearly touching and their chests an inch apart. Gerard can see the wispy hairs on the back of Mikey's neck. Mikey is covered in dirt, somehow, and his shirt is streaked with mud in an abstract pattern. His chest is so skinny and Gerard can see the beating of his heart even through the shirt, literally see the thrum of it, and it makes Gerard feel sore inside and he wants to strip the fabric away and press his cheek to it (the cold dampness of Mikey's skin) and feel the place where Mikey's life rests, tiny and birdlike, fragile.
Gerard can't help the fluttering gesture of his hands, up and down Mikey's body. "How do you do it," he says, and they laugh breathless, but Gerard knows. He might mean the layers of mud and filth or he might mean the way Mikey's shoulder blades are lined with light, making Gerard want to cup them in his palms.
"I don't know how to answer that," Mikey says.
"Yeah?"
"Are you hungry? Because I really fuckin want some bread right now," Mikey says, smiling and tipping his head against Gerard's chest with his laugh, so the light flicks off his glasses and stuns Gerard. (It's true: even the light reflection off his glasses can make Gerard's heart stop beating and that is the truest definition of what it takes to commit a love suicide, the way your heart is stopped more than it's beating, and Gerard has that. He knows he does.)
"Yeah," Gerard says, "I guess I am."
"But I don't wanna find Elena and ask when it'll be done."
"You don't?" Gerard nudges Mikey with one shoulder, like, stop being such a lazy douchebag and Mikey laughs. "Seriously, just go ask."
"I don't want to move though," Mikey says, and curls up into Gerard's chest. It makes his arms feel shaky and his wrists sore. It makes him want to collapse with relief. Gerard is shit at describing this sort of thing, really.
"Tell you what." Gerard laughs. "I'll call her and ask her on the phone."
He tries not to note the pang in Mikey's eyes when he takes out the phone but Mikey says, "You sound so sad when you talk on the phone." When Gerard stays silent, he says, "I wish you wouldn't talk about love suicides or anything."
"I wish a lot of things," Gerard says. I wish I wouldn't drive past the train tracks and think about the tall grass next to them, waiting there, throwing myself in front of a commuter train. I wish I never got sick of wishing on dandelions. I wish I'd never started noticing how sad the willow trees look in autumn, or how the color blue looks sad no matter what shade it is.
Mostly I guess I wish you'd love me.
But Mikey stares at him and finally says, "Don't call her I don't want to hear your voice," and Gerard puts his phone away and closes his eyes and pulls Mikey to his chest.
"I'm sorry," he says, but Mikey is shaking his head like it's not your fault or maybe you can't fix it so don't try. Gerard wraps his arms tight and tries not to look at the scratches dug into his hands. "I'm sorry."
"I'm so tired," Mikey says. "Let's just go take a nap on the couch. Maybe when we wake up the bread will be ready."
"Maybe."