(no subject)
Title: I Didn't Come To See The City, I Came To See It Around You
Pairing: Pete Wentz / Mikey Way
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own absolutly nothing. It's quite sad.
Summary: "Some days it feels like you're the only person really living anymore.
It terrifies you. And if you think to long on it, your head starts to spin so fast you can't see straight for days."
A/N: The title is from the Chris Garneau song, "Relief".
You've always been ungrateful, at least according to your brother.
Gerard would say, "Mikey, you could own the world, but you wouldn't be happy until you had the moon. And when you finally had the moon, all you'd think about was the sun."
You never bothered to tell him he was probably right.
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Some days it feels like you're the only person really living anymore.
But most of the time, you just feel lonely.
And it's the kind of lonely that almost makes you forget to breathe. But by the time you remember again, you're not so sure you feel motivated enough to do it anyways. (It's times like those that make you grateful your brother introduced you to the benefits of smoking. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat.) It's the type of lonely that can drive anyone mad, that you have seen take hold of persons much stronger than you could ever be.
It terrifies you. And if you think to long on it, your head starts to spin so fast you can't see straight for days.
So you don't think about it. Ever. This tactic has proven very effective over the years, with hundreds of trials spanning over the decades of your existence, all with the same result. If you don't think about that lonely, that dark shadow in the back of your mind, you start to forget it's there. And if you forget about it, if you're able to avoid that madness and remember to breathe, than it almost feels like you've beaten it.
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"I can't believe you still do that."
You're sitting on some ledge outside another nameless venue in some city you can't even remember the name of (in they end they all look the same anyway), savoring your post-show cigarette and trying to remind yourself that at least the stars are the same as the ones back home, while one of your vices pesters you about the only one you actually want to keep.
The taste of nicotine has always bothered you. Something about the bitterness never really sits well in your stomach. But you honestly can't bring yourself to care enough to quit. Your whole life you've been trading one habit for another. And this particular one is a hell of a lot less destructive than any of the ones before.
Including Pete.
But lately you've been tacking on as many habits as you can manage, building a collection of sorts for you to pick and choose from when you're feeling particularly self-destructive. And you can't seem to bring yourself to choose between your nicotine fix and it's short, tattooed poet of a counterpart.
You're beginning to think you'll never be able to.
Lift. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Pause. Flick. Repeat.
You remember Gerard telling you why he started. You also remember him lighting your very first cigarette, pinched between his thumb and pointer finger and quickly kindled. He handed it over to you and told you it would make you feel better, how it would give you something to think about when you couldn't wrap your mind around anything else.
"Are you even listening to me?"
Inhale, "Honestly?" Hold. "No." Exhale."Do I ever?" Flick.
In all your time together, you've never once been able to wrap your mind around Pete completely. You suppose that's probably why you smoke like a chimney whenever he's around.
"Maybe if you weren't such a fucking smart ass, Michael." He spoke into the air, carefully fanning the smoke wafting from your cigarette out of his face, "I used to kind of think it was endearing. But that theory went out the window after hanging around you for more than a week. "
The ledge is starting to dig into your skin and you can't bring yourself to care.
"Don't call me Michael, Peter."
Lift. Inhale. Hold. Exhale. Pause. Flick. Repeat.
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Life can be living, but living can never be life.
To live, to truly have the freedom to be whatever it is makes your heart pound and blood pump, that's something completely seperate from the simple complexities of life. Life is waking up and knowing you woke up for a reason, it's why you pull the curtains back and brew that first pot of coffee. It's the reason you go to work or fold your laundry, it's why you try for hours to get the wringles out of a shirt that just doesn't want to be seamless. Life is your midnight run when sleep just won't set it.
But living, to truly live instead of just being a part of that life you know so well, that's a completely different animal, a new breed that only a select few have started to tame.
Life is laying your head down to sleep, living is only sleeping so you can be a part of the dreams.
Sometimes you're sure you were just moving through life before you met him, that somehow he pulled you from your routines and the safety they brought you, and made you wake up from a long dreamless sleep.
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"Do you ever wonder if maybe we've been asleep all this time?"
"Pete... It's 3 in the morning. We should be asleep."
"Not that kind of sleep, that's not what I'm talking about. You know when you wake up, and sometimes it feels like you never really did, like you're still dreaming and maybe you're just dreaming about what you think the next day will be. But then the day happens, and you never woke up, so then you realize that you've been awake that whole time. Maybe we're never really awake at all. Mikey, what if I'm dreaming you and me?"
"Then it was a good dream."
"What happens when I wake up?"
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When you were little, you never really imagined your life to be any particular way. Everything was moment by moment back then, and that's just how you liked it.
Looking to far in the future gave you a headache, and it always left you feeling like nothing at all.
Gerard used to pretend he could see anything he wanted when he was looking at himself in the mirror of your mother's jewelry box. He'd sit for hours and hours just staring at his reflection. Most of the time, he'd be completely silent, not utter a word for ages. And others, he couldn't stop laughing. He'd just laugh and laugh for hours on end at nothing at all but his own eyes looking back at him.
But this one time, while your mother and father yelled about everything there was to yell at in the kitchen, Gerard looked in that mirror like he always did, and started to cry.
And not the loud, obnoxious tears your mother had perfected during those arguments, not even the silent tears you once saw your father shed after your grandma's funeral. This was so much more than loud theatrics or quiet despair. It was like your brother's heart was breaking to pieces right there in front of you, with a single tear slicing its way down his pale cheek.
When you asked him what he saw, all he could do was grab your shoulders and hug you tight, whispering something about love and loss and all those things you never really could understand.
Neither of you ever searched for your futures in the reflection of that mirror again.
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Inhale.
You saw him today. He was sitting in a patch of grass out behind the buses, looking up towards the sky and picking at the blades of green by his feet. You almost forgot the space that had grown between you and ran over to sit with him. You could see yourself throwing your arms around his neck and laying down on the grass with his shoulder as your pillow, watching the sky and whispering secrets into his skin, just like you used to do.
But just as your feet started moving in his direction, the space grew wide again and you were almostswallowed by it, like some horrible waking nightmare. Besides, you're sure Pete wouldn't take to kindly to having an ex-whatever hanging around.
Because that's what you were, what you'd become to him.
Whatever you might of had at one time, in all it's once glorious undefined freedom, had grown into something that could be ignored just as easily as you both looked over the confines of a 'relationship'. And that realization, understanding just what it was you two weren't anymore, that almost hurt worse than seeing him lying there and not being able to do a thing.
Exhale.
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When the nightmares come, you curse under your breathe and send hateful thoughts to a bed thousands of miles away. Sometimes you hate him for making you dream again.
It feels like you never get any rest.
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We hid behind his poetry, underneath sunsets and inbetween sunrises, in the backseat of cabs and the front of your car. The two of you had become experts at games you remember playing as a child with your brother, the difference being how those games feel a lot less like play and more like survival now.
You were the king of hide and seek. And he made you that way.
There would be days when you wouldn't see him at all, when not even his bandmates would know where he was hidden away. And when those times came, you knew just what to do. You had a mental map stored away in your memory of all the places he liked to hide the most, of the type of crowds he liked to get lost in, the music he tried to escape through. You knew what days you would find him hiding in his bunk, wrapped tight in his blankets and trying to forget how the road made him feel like a lost boy, without a home.
And you also knew when he would be sitting under the only tree in the entire venue, scribbling away and ignoring everything he could think to forget.
You'd find him buried under a heap of jumpled words and barely legible prose, head bent over a tattered notebook barely clinging to the metal wire running through it's pages. He'd look up at you with glassy eyes and a stitched on grin, it's thread unraveling with every step closer you took, and whisper, "You're it." like a death sentence.
It took you months to realize what he was talking about, how he understood the game you two were playing with each other. And in the end, it almost did feel like the gavel falling to the stand, a quilty verdict on the jurors tongues.
Sometimes you'd turn around and start looking for a hiding place of your own. But mostly, you'd sit down with him and help pick apart all those tangled thoughts he had lodged in that head of his and scrawled across the paper of that tattered notebook.
You always loved puzzles.
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And now here you are, sitting in his bedroom in Chicago, looking out at the stars and trying to remind yourself that they're the same ones you looked up at all those months ago, the same ones you've been looking at for years.
It's in those stars, in the combination of light and dark thrown across the sky by some faceless God, that you finally understand.
Pete is your addiction. He's that fix you just can't seem to be rid of. And no matter how hard you try to purge him from your system, he's still there, lurking just under the surface.
But the thing that really scares you, the one part of this great big mess of an affair that you can't seem wrap your head around, is how easily you allowed him to become just that.
He dug in under the wire while you let him.
In the end, that's all there is. Pete Wentz found a way inside your heart, through his poetry and his eyes, through how he touched you and the way his breathe settled over your skin like a warm blanket. And through all of that, with every touch and sleepless night, you feel in love with him right back.
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When you tried to get up the next morning, he wrapped his arms around you tighter and whispered in your ear, "It's okay to be still for a while, you know."
His breathe tickles your skin and you smile.