Five Definitions of the Word 'Light'
Gerard/Mikey
One-shot
Five vignettes about the distance between Mikey & Gerard. Rated PG-13 for some language. Written for fanfic100, prompt #68: "lightening".
1,713 words
Written June 6, 2006
1.
the way pockets of air are opening up inside your bones and between the layers of your skin.
From the right angle he's even starting to look like one of those skeletons he's so obsessed with. The bones that make crazy angles from his face and his wrists and the tendons that jut out of his hand, no muscles left to contain them, his mouth so thin and the lips that gape open more easily. The skeleton he is becoming: it would look ridiculous in suits, couldn't properly fill the chest of the shirt (oh he had so much heart to expand and make space before, so much air in his lungs,) this skeleton dresses instead in t-shirts and jeans but it is so awkward.
"You look," Mikey says, "you look kinda like you're just pretending to be a person."
Gerard shrugs. He is facing himself in the mirror. There is something light and powdery over his cheekbones, making them more prominent. Mikey's stomach curls in on itself like a starving cat. He can see his own ribs and hips in the mirror when he is naked. He doesn't like showering because he gets so aware of the cartilage around his knees.
The way Gerard puts on his makeup, smeary and violent, Mikey could be talking about that. "You look like you're pretending to be real." But like a secret message coded in a bottle, printed into the glass, warping with the sunlight and salt, Mikey means this: God created the universe so he could say "be not like me" and I loved you because you were so different. I watched you in the mirror and said, this, this is different. The way you really occupied space instead of just moving around inside it.
Now you're skinny and ugly and you look just like me. Now you have the same angles in your jaw that I do. I liked you better when I could pet you like a cat and feel you fill up my palm. I don't know how to find you anymore. I don't know where you've gone.
2.
the way i hold my breath when you're around like i can make an absence of words somehow mean the same as all the song lyrics ever did.
Gerard is shaving, tipping his jaw back and forth in the mirror, singing to himself like something out of a silly old movie. Some typical boy getting ready for - his first job? his prom date? - oh something adorable and simplistic and free. Mikey watches him. Sometimes with Gerard it's obvious how off-kilter he is and sometimes it's just the details: the eyeliner left in remnants around his eyes, the way he is singing i hold my breath to kill the sound, i'm falling down.
There was a time - Mikey remembers this with the clarity of the edge of a glass vase. There was a time when Gerard had stood before the mirror in their tiny bathroom and Mikey had stood behind him, arms linked around his neck like some ridiculous tie, hands dangling and linked over Gerard's heart. (Back when his heart was buried and Mikey was the only one whose fingertips could find it.)
There was a time when Gerard's razor had slipped and caught at the skin of Mikey's wrist, ragged, like a nail on a piece of cloth, and the tiny gasp Mikey made at the pain blended into the exhale of relief (Gerard's mouth sucking the blood away, keeping the wound clean, the way he dropped the razor without thinking.) That was the definition of "alive", then - a moment of pain, then a moment of happiness, oh so simple.
Now, Gerard is shaving in the mirror and he is so careful. There is no blood blooming like tissue-paper roses in the sink. (Mikey used to have dreams about turning on the faucet and vines pouring out, roses blooming in the shower, wrapping around the curtain rod. Petals thick like carpet on the tiles.)
"You'd better hurry up," Mikey says, "we have to get going in fifteen minutes," and casual as he sounds, he does not allow himself to punctuate the sentence with a kiss.
3.
the way, even with green eyelashes like a mermaid and blue metal lips, orange peels spiraling open like daylilies on your cheeks, you are so supernaturally beautiful that it hurts my heart.
For all Gerard's talk about putting on a good show and making sure the kids get their money's worth, Mikey really isn't sure they care: does the backdrop matter? The colors of light that play over their faces and make them look distorted and not at all accessible, not "a band that will save your life" but "the monsters under your bed." When he lay in bed and wanted more than anything to see the Smashing Pumpkins live, it wasn't about aesthetics: it was about guitar chords reaching into his heart, bass lines growling at the back of his neck.
He watches Gerard micromanage the set lists and the outfits and, in his and Frank's case, the makeup; he watches Gerard debate over what shade of red looks more like blood. What color light will turn them supernatural vampiric and beautiful.
The light guys insist on brightness and Mikey thinks, maybe they know their stuff. The colors may not be evil but something about turquoise streaking seafoam up Gerard's cheeks: Mikey thinks, when you were born you stepped out of the sea whole and covered in pearls. I wish I'd been there to see you.
It might be the alcohol making his thoughts slur long and lonely. More likely it's just the sky opening up above them, pouring purple light over Gerard's hair like lilac rain, making him smell like violets and those flowers that supposedly reek of rotting meat. Mikey's senses get confused these days. He doesn't think it's very important to anyone else if the lights are this shade of cool blue as opposed to that one, but perhaps he thinks it might one day be terribly important to him.
(All those "maybes" just to avoid the desperation that pulses like infection in his heart.)
4.
the way your shoulderblades never reminded me of wings but your hair looked like feathers and i wanted to make a fan out of them to filter the sunlight through.
When they were kids they'd play "light as a feather, stiff as a board" and Gerard was always bitter because he was too heavy to be in the middle. Still he persists even now with this occult fascination - the Ouija board he hauls around, buried under stacks of comic books and assorted CD cases. They don’t get it out a lot. The D&D stuff comes out a lot more, and even that is rare lately - they don't always have the time for a full marathon session.
And it's not even like they know a lot of dead people. Mostly the usual family members, an occasional friend or acquaintance. No one especially close for most of them. And since Gerard won't even mention Elena's name…
(In a way Mikey thinks Gerard is scared of the silence that would result. When they stick to asking fortunes it gets a lot lighter. A lot fewer chances for disappointment.)
Sometimes they'll ask for those acquaintances, the fifth-grade cancer death vaguely remembered, the uncle who disappeared leaving a bitter graying wife. Mikey asks a lot about this great-grandmother they had. Nana, they called her.
She lived in Newark and they'd drive to see her, until she died when Mikey was only five. He has this really vague memory of some tunnel. Spitting the car out of it and into the city, it felt like going through some magic portal. Mikey thinks about the tiny holes of sunlight at the end of that tunnel and how, when he dies, maybe he will rocket through there and wind up in some immense crystalline city. Mikey wants to know if she went through a tunnel like that. She fed them these weird butter-and-sugar sandwiches, and Mikey can feel the grit in his teeth even now.
When he asks about her, Gerard gets this faraway sad look in his eyes and Mikey wants to ask what is it in your heart? Do you have the same filth still rotting away your teeth? I think we might have the same tunnels in our heads. But he stays silent.
Today they have the Ouija board out again and when Gerard says, "Whose spirit do we want to contact?" Mikey feels something twitch in his fingers. He doesn't normally move the pointer (it feels childish.)
Still, today it might not even be him moving the letters to spell out the dead in blocky capitals like tombstones: L-O-V-E.
5.
the way the clouds stilled, very briefly, over your eyes, and then disappeared in a shower of clearness and shards.
A film clip, as if taken from a short movie - perhaps something Ray put together in a moment of affection, a part of the endless film he will never really make:
Mikey and Gerard walking. Not walking down red carpets or letting their feet sink into backstage grime, not making their way through any crowd or anything. Just walking down the sidewalk with autumn leaves making listless suicide dives at their hair, missing, floating on towards the ground. Backlit. Mikey's hand in Gerard's (but not vice versa.)
The last cicadas are making repetitive screeches behind them. They're not talking. It could be a silent film (might be better - maybe then there would not be a silence so heavy and oppressive on their shoulders, tugging Gerard's hair down, lank and unwashed; digging insistently at Mikey's spine).
They walk and the camera rolls backward, following them from in front, staying steady on their bodies. There is a slight downward cant to the street. Finally Mikey speaks:
"I don't know anyone who's fallen in love with the person they're supposed to."
There's a long pause and finally Gerard says, grim, "Well don't tell Alicia that."
Suddenly the road drops out, turning to a steep hill, and the camera drops down. The sun behind their heads suddenly bursts above them like fireworks and they disappear into a flash of white, vanished, overexposed.