fic: In The Walls (2/8)

[thesamefire]

 
Headers & Main Post - Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six - Part Seven - Part Eight - Bonus Content



When Gerard stumbles into the kitchen shortly before noon a few days later, the only person there already is Ray.

"There's coffee," Ray says from behind his mug, and Gerard makes a beeline for the coffeemaker. He pours himself a mug and then sits down across the table from Ray.

They sit in silence as Gerard makes short work of his first cup, and it's not until he's sitting down with his second that Ray opens his mouth.

"So, hey, maybe this is a weird question," Ray starts tentatively.

"Go for it," Gerard says. The words get kind of garbled because he's talking into his coffee mug, but he figures Ray's used to that.

"We're the only people staying here right now, right?"

"Right."

"So it's only us in the house."

"Yeah."

Ray sighs. "Okay, that's what I thought."

"Why do you ask?" Gerard may only have two cups of coffee in him, but that was definitely kind of a weird question-especially coming from Ray, whose attention to detail really puts the rest of them to shame-and his curiosity is piqued.

"Last night, I... I could have sworn I heard voices, like there were other people in the house."

"Me and Frank were talking in the kitchen until pretty late," Gerard offers. "Maybe that got carried through the ducts or something?"

"Maybe," Ray says, totally unconvinced. "I heard a woman, though. And I know what you guys sound like, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't you, even distorted."

"Oh," Gerard says. He could make the obvious joke, but he doesn't.

"And it sounded like she was talking to someone, maybe a man, but the way they were talking? I don't know, it sounded kind of... old-fashioned, I guess?"

"That's real weird. I didn't hear anything like that at all."

Ray shrugs. "It's okay. Maybe someone was watching a movie and I heard that. Or it was just noise, and my brain was trying to tell me it was voices, you know, making order out of chaos?" Ray doesn't look like he believes his own theories, though, and it leaves Gerard kind of unsettled.

It occurs to Gerard then that Ray isn't the only one to have had something weird happen to him since they've been here. The memory of the strange face in the mirror is rushing back to him, and he's about to say something about it when he stops, practically biting his tongue to keep the words in. It's not that he wants to keep it a secret per se; it's more that he still isn't sure at all what exactly happened, and he'd rather not have word get back to Mikey and Frank when it would do nothing but freak them out for no good reason.

Ray lifts an eyebrow at him, and Gerard realizes he must still have his mouth hanging open like he's about to say something. "More coffee," he says lamely, and then gets up to go get it.

When he turns back to the table, Frank is sitting in Gerard's seat, wrapped in what looks like three or four hoodies. Gerard grabs another mug from the cupboard and fills it for Frank, who takes it from him gratefully.

"Any word on when we're getting the heat on?" Frank asks.

Ray shakes his head. "I talked to Brian last night-"

"Holy shit, you got cell reception?" Frank interrupts, his eyes wide. "How?"

"Believe it or not, the house has a landline," Ray says. "I found a phone in the front hall. It might be the only one, though."

"So that's a no, then," Frank says glumly.

"Hey, what did Brian say?" Gerard asks, even as he wraps his hands more tightly around his mug for warmth. He's starting to get used to the cold, but that doesn't mean he likes it.

"He said that the heat should be on already, but he'd look into it for us."

"Oh," Frank sighs.

"Thanks, though," Gerard says to Ray. "Hey, did you manage to get the internet in your room working yet? Mine's still down."

Ray shakes his head, frowns. "It should work. It looks like all the settings are right, so I don't know what's wrong. It just doesn't work."

"Shit," Gerard says with feeling.

* * *

Rehearsals go well for the first week. They're having fun playing with the way the new songs sound in the ballroom, and some of the pieces they've been working on are definitely starting to turn into something. The songs they wrote in New York are getting better and better as they tweak them and start really owning them, and it gives Gerard a little thrill that keeps him going through the admittedly tough schedule they've set themselves: they get up around noon and then play until midnight or later every single night. It's working for them, though, and that's what matters.

And then one morning the second week they're there, they're all left sitting around doing nothing while they wait for Bob, who is rather late for practice. It's not that they've got a hard and fast rule about when they start each day, but they've all been coming downstairs around the same time every day and getting started by 1, 1:30 at the very latest. But it's almost 2 now, and there's still no sign of Bob.

Gerard and Ray go upstairs to knock on his door. There's no answer. It's completely quiet inside Bob's room, and after a few minutes of banging on his door and yelling his name in case he needs to be woken up, they give up and go back downstairs to the ballroom without him.

"He wasn't there," Gerard shrugs apologetically when he sees Mikey and Frank's expectant faces.

Mikey looks upset for a moment, and then goes back to glaring down at his cell phone, as if he's trying to convince a text message to go through with the power of his mind.

Frank shakes his head and goes back to working on the riff he's been playing for the last week. It's sounding better and better and Gerard has been starting to think about what kind of words it might need-he's got a couple ideas already simmering in the back of his mind now, and he's excited for Frank to get it finished enough to share properly with everyone.

When Bob does finally show up almost an hour later, he's red in the face and his hair is soaked and he looks pretty pissed off. "Sorry guys," he says as he hurries over to where they're all sitting around in the ballroom.

"What the hell, Bob," Frank calls at him, getting up off the amp he'd been sitting on and taking a couple steps toward him.

Bob sighs. "Sit down, Iero. I'm sorry, okay? The bathtub in my room decided it wanted to overflow in the middle of the night, so I've been cleaning it up for the last four hours."

"You left the tub on overnight?" Ray says, kind of incredulously.

"It took you four hours?" Mikey frowns.

"I did not leave the tub on overnight," Bob says, crossing his arms over his chest defensively. "I haven't even used the thing in like three days, okay?"

Ray spreads his hands apologetically, and Bob waves it off.

"And it took me four hours," Bob goes on, "because I couldn't get the damn faucet to stop running. The taps wouldn't turn, and then they did and nothing happened, and then they wouldn't turn again, so I had to keep bucketing water down the sink." Bob scowls. "Fuck, I hope there's no permanent water damage, I bet they'll charge us an arm and a leg for that."

"How'd you get it to stop?" Mikey asks him.

Bob shrugs. "Honestly? It stopped by itself."

"Just like it turned on by itself?" Frank asks, but it sounds pretty rhetorical. Nobody answers him, anyway, but Mikey gives him a long look.

"So you were in your bathroom the whole time?" Gerard asks.

"Yeah."

Gerard shoots a sidelong glance at Ray, and can see the exact moment he gets where Gerard is going with that-his eyes go wide and his jaw drops.

"We were knocking on your door," Ray tells Bob. "Calling your name."

"Didn't hear you, I guess," Bob says.

"Yeah, but we didn't hear you," Gerard says, "and you'd think we'd have at least heard the water running."

"It was totally quiet," Ray confirms.

"Okay, that's weird. I don't know what to tell you." Bob starts shaking his hands out, and then reaches for his sticks. "Seriously, can we play now? I feel bad about holding things up."

Ray nods and pulls his guitar off its stand, and Mikey does the same thing a moment later. He's still giving Bob weird looks, half-considering and half-upset.

"Did you get everything cleaned up?" Frank asks Bob.

Bob nods. "I need new towels now, though."

"Okay," Frank says. He looks Bob up and down like he's confirming that he's okay, and then goes to get his guitar too.

* * *

They're working out some of the last kinks in the outro to "Dead!" when it happens: Mikey stops playing halfway through a measure, his hands going limp against his guitar.

"Mikey?" Frank is the first to notice and he stops playing, too, and takes the few steps across the middle of the loose circle they've formed to go put his hands on Mikey's shoulders. "Hey, hey, Mikey, you okay?"

Mikey blinks and jerks back like he's just been woken up. "Yeah. I'm fine."

"Sure," Frank says suspiciously, and looks at Mikey's face as if he's searching for something. He must not find it, because his lip is curled a little when he turns away and goes back to stand in front of his amp.

They start playing again, but now Gerard is paying a lot more attention to Mikey. He looks like he's playing okay, his hands moving the same way they always do, but then as Gerard watches, Mikey drops his pick-which he almost never does anymore-and he's slow to pull a new one out of his pocket, his fingers fumbling and clumsy.

Gerard's eyes go narrow with concern as he watches Mikey get back into the song. His whole demeanour is off, now; his shoulders are slumped and his hands are slow, and he looks like he's holding himself up by sheer force of will alone. And even though Mikey's got his glasses on, Gerard can see that his eyes are bleary, unfocused, and bloodshot.

As Gerard watches, Mikey's hands slow more until they stop again, his left hand halfway wrapped around the neck of the guitar partway towards the head but not actually touching any strings.

Ray frowns at Mikey. He opens his mouth to say something, but Mikey cuts him off pre-emptively.

"I'm, uh, I'm going to take a break," Mikey mutters, shifting his weight from foot to foot. It's obvious he can feel them all staring at him, but what else are they going to do?

"Why?" Bob asks.

"Can't concentrate," Mikey says as he takes off his bass and rests it on its stand.

"Are you coming back?" Ray asks him.

"Dunno," Mikey shrugs. "I don't feel very good."

"Are you okay?" Frank asks, full of concern, and Mikey just nods at him.

Gerard really wants to go give Mikey a hug and try to convince him that having a bad day isn't the end of the world, but Mikey is giving off these serious prickly vibes and Gerard doesn't want to aggravate him. He knows Mikey will come around and talk to him later. So for now he stands by and watches as Mikey turns and walks unsteadily out of the room, leaving them with something mumbled about being in his room for the rest of the night.

Gerard's stomach jumps sideways at the simple mention of Mikey's room. That place gives him the creeps, even though there's no good reason for it. There's just something about it that doesn't sit right with Gerard, that sends chills down his spine and makes the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

And now that he's started thinking about it, he can't stop. It's strange how fucking cold Mikey's bedroom is; it's even colder than the ballroom, the kitchen, the hallways, the entire rest of the house. It's like a fucking meat locker in there, Gerard's brain supplies unhelpfully. Gerard cringes, and a shudder of revulsion shakes him to his toes as a grotesque parade of mental images marches through his head-limbs hanging on hooks, dripping blood into frozen spikes-

Stop it, he orders himself sternly.

"Are we going to keep playing?" Ray asks.

Frank shrugs and looks to Gerard, probably on instinct. When Gerard glances over to check, Ray and Bob are also looking expectant, like they're waiting for him to say something.

Gerard bites his lip as he thinks. He knows they should go on-there's really no reason not to; they still have little drum bits and guitar parts to play with and there's always that song Frank's been working on, but for some reason he can't bring himself to keep going. He's too unsettled, both by his thoughts of Mikey's room and by Mikey's strange, abrupt departure from practice, and he's not sure any work he's involved in right now will be in any way productive.

"You guys can," Gerard says lamely. "I'm going to be in the kitchen, I really need some coffee." He doesn't actually need the coffee, but he always finds it soothing and he's not sure what else to do with himself right now. And besides, he'll take any excuse to get out of the ballroom; the atmosphere is getting too heavy and stifling in there.

He lights a cigarette even though they're not supposed to smoke inside, and then pours a cup of coffee and sits down. He pulls his chair in closer to the table, then folds his arms on its old, pock-marked surface and rests his head on top. It gives him a pretty clear view out the window, inasmuch as it counts as a view. All he can see is the thick growth of trees ringing the house in, keeping drunk teenagers and other unsavoury types away.

And keeping us unsavoury types in, Gerard thinks darkly; they've been so intent on their work that they haven't really left the house since they arrived. When they need something-food, space heaters, a new guitar pedal, Netflix-they have it delivered. At first it felt like a real perk of being in L.A., but now it just means that they're completely holed up and hidden away from the outside world. He can't help but think the isolation is starting to get to them.

Rain keeps hitting the window, creating rivulets running on angles, merging and diverging and merging again as they roll their way down and off the glass.

Gerard isn't completely sure, but he feels like it hasn't stopped raining at all since they got here.

* * *

It's pushing well into the wee hours of the morning and Gerard feels like he's only just finally drifted off to sleep when something jolts him back into wakefulness. He's totally disoriented for a moment when he breaks back into consciousness, and his heart thuds hard in his chest as he tries to figure out what woke him up.

It was a noise, he realizes when he hears it again. It was the door from Mikey's room into their bathroom opening-and then the door from their bathroom into his own room. The door is open far enough that he can pick out the silhouette of someone standing there, black-on-black in the room's darkness.

"Mikey?" Gerard calls out. It comes out mostly a croak, thick with sleep.

"Sorry, I'm sorry," Mikey mumbles as he steps the rest of the way into the room, pushing the door shut with a solid thud behind him.

Now that Mikey's away from the door Gerard can see that he's wrapped in blankets, cocooned head to toe in them, and he's shivering so hard that Gerard can see it even from halfway across the room, even with the blankets hiding his body.

"Are you okay?" Gerard asks, a little alarmed. He's feeling a lot more awake now.

"I'm sorry," Mikey repeats, hunching in on himself as he stands there in the middle of the floor.

"For what?"

"I can't take it anymore," Mikey whispers into the blankets around his face, but it's quiet enough in the dark that Gerard catches it anyway.

Gerard blinks at him. "What, your bedroom?"

Mikey nods, his jaw clenched tight. "Can I sleep in here?"

"Of course! Do you want to sleep in the bed? There's room." Gerard scoots over to make space.

"The floor's fine," Mikey says, already starting to sit down near the bed. "Go back to sleep, Gerard."

Gerard watches as Mikey adjusts the blankets around himself before he lies down, curled up tight with his face practically hidden. He wants to insist that the bed will be more comfortable, wants to try to comfort his brother somehow, but Mikey seems happy enough where he is so Gerard lets it go.

But he can't stop thinking about Mikey, about Mikey's bedroom, the strange blue light and Mikey's strange behaviour since they've been here. He lies awake for a long time, listening to Mikey breathing.

Mikey is already gone when Gerard wakes up the next day, and Gerard can't help but wonder if he simply dreamed it happening.

* * *

Even though things between Mikey and everyone else are a little strained, like a hangover from the weirdness the day before, the next day of rehearsal goes well, and the next one goes even better, and the one after that is good, too. Gerard thinks it's because they're all doing a good job of keeping a lid on the worst of their tempers, which have started running unusually high. Nobody is sleeping well by the sound of it, and he suspects that none of them have really gotten used to the vibe in the ballroom or how quietly creepy the whole house is, with the permeating chill that still hasn't gone away and then all the dusty antiques and statues that sit around staring at them.

The day after that, though, Gerard wakes up late and in a hell of a bad mood, the kind where he knows nothing is going to go right for the rest of the day. He debates rolling over and going back to sleep, but he forces himself to get out of bed anyway. He doesn't bother to brush his teeth or get dressed, just takes a quick piss and shuffles out into the hallway, which is dim and grey and cold even though it's mid-afternoon in fucking California.

He keeps his head down as he walks, not even watching his feet as he zones out. He looks up when he figures he's almost at the stairs, but to his shock he's staring down a long hallway that's even darker and colder than the one outside his bedroom.

What the fuck, Gerard thinks. Did he seriously just get lost? But it can't be; he knows the way from his room to the stairs, he knows he was walking the right way, didn't make any turns. The stairs should be right there.

But they're not.

Gerard's heart starts racing as he fights down a sudden panic, and he looks around to try to get his bearings.

The stairs are behind him. Walking past them in a daze wouldn't be that weird, except...

Gerard thinks about it very carefully, and what he knows as fact is simply not matching up with what's happening at this very moment: the hallway has always ended at the stairs, but right now, somehow, the hallway extends past them, and where Gerard is standing should not even physically exist because he'd have to be out over the yard somewhere.

And yet the floor is solid under his feet and the stairs are a dozen yards behind him.

He looks ahead to the end of the hallway and that's when he sees the full-sized mirror hanging on the wall another ten feet ahead of him.

A moment of blind panic rips through him and he wants to retreat, run back to the stairs as fast as he can and get the hell away from the mirror, but when he lifts his feet to back away he finds himself moving towards it instead, entirely against his will.

Gerard sucks in a breath through his teeth as his reflection wavers, getting distorted like the picture on a TV channel you don't get, and then changes in front of his very eyes. It's still him, sort of-it isn't as much as it is. The face staring impassively back at him is old, lined with wrinkles around the eyes and mouth, and its-his-skin sags over his cheekbones. The skin is bone-white, paper-thin. His hair is thin too, wispy and pale around his temples.

Just like last time, it's his reflection's eyes that give him pause. They're so dark; it's like his pupils have expanded to fill his entire iris. It's the same unnervingly stark blackness, flat and empty and dead.

Gerard's heart is suddenly in his throat as he struggles to breathe. He tries to make himself look at anything but the ghastly face in the mirror, but he can't. It feels like something is holding his gaze in place, and he can't break eye contact-because that's what it is, he realizes with a sick jolt. It's staring at him as much as he's staring at it.

Gerard feels a chill at the back of his neck, and it feels like both a breeze and the touch of cold fingers in equal measure. His whole body strains against it, trying to break free from whatever's keeping him mesmerized and held in place.

He stands helplessly frozen, staring with growing horror at the reflection, but then finally, finally, the reflection looks away, breaking eye contact. And then Gerard can move again, and he's stumbling backwards and away as fast as he possibly can, not quite daring to turn his back to the mirror.

When he gets to the stairs, he runs into Frank-literally. Frank catches him by the shoulders before he can lose his balance and fall.

"Thanks," Gerard gasps, still pretty freaked out from whatever the hell it was that just happened with the ghost hallway and the mirror.

"I was just coming to look for you," Frank tells him.

"Overslept," Gerard says shortly. He makes to move past Frank to head downstairs to get some breakfast and get the hell away from this hallway when Frank stops him with a hand on his arm. "What?"

"You okay?" Frank asks.

"Eh," Gerard says after a moment of thought. "Having a shitty morning. It's just one of those days, you know?" He feels bad for lying (even though it's only by omission), because he's pretty sure that Frank would believe him if he told the truth.

But the thing is, he still isn't convinced that what's going on is actually, irrefutably supernatural. He can't shake the feeling that maybe his brain is playing tricks on him-that it's taking the undeniable creepiness of the house and filtering it through his stress about the album and his worrying about his brother and the fact that he's not sleeping that well most nights, and it's coming up with this. So he doesn't say anything to Frank, even though he suspects that telling somebody will probably help, might even make it stop.

Frank nods, clearly accepting Gerard's explanation at face value, then slings an arm around Gerard's shoulder to draw him in for something almost resembling a hug. "Everyone's been having those since we got here, it's about time you had your turn."

"I guess," Gerard says into Frank's shoulder.

"I swear to god it's because of this house," Frank says quietly. "Remind me again why we're here?"

Gerard laughs, totally humourless. "Change of scenery for inspiration," he says, the words flat like he's reciting it by rote.

"Right," Frank says. "Inspiration."

They're quiet for a moment, and Gerard is just about to pull away to go downstairs and drink four cups of coffee because damn, he really fucking needs it, but Frank stops him dead when he says, "I seriously hate this place."

Gerard blinks at him.

"It's definitely haunted," Frank goes on. "It felt like there was something in my room with me last night."

"What, like a ghost?" Gerard blinks some more. On the one hand, he's relieved that apparently he's not the only one having weird shit happen, but on the other hand, it's not as easy to write off the weird shit if it's happening to other people, too.

Frank's eyebrows creep together as he shrugs. "A ghost or something else, I don't know. But I kept turning on the light and nothing was there."

"So maybe it was nothing?"

"Maybe," Frank allows slowly. "But I could swear I heard something breathing, right near my bed."

Gerard knows it's not the right thing to say, but he's still feeling off-kilter so he doesn't stop himself from asking, "Are you sure it wasn't you?"

Frank sticks him with a level stare, and then says, "I saw eyes, too."

"Eyes?"

"Yeah, they were yellow. Like a dog's or something." Frank sounds matter-of-fact when he says it, but Gerard knows him well enough to read the tension in the lines of his body and realize that he's actually sort of freaking out about it.

"There aren't any dogs in the house, Frank," Gerard says. He's aiming for soothing but it comes out a bit short.

Frank's shoulders sag as he sighs. "I know that! But I wasn't dreaming, I wasn't seeing things or hearing things. I know I wasn't."

Gerard bites at his lower lip, worrying at the skin with his top teeth. "So, okay," he starts slowly, "there was a ghost dog or something in your room last night. Did anything happen?"

Frank shakes his head. "It was... watching me, it felt like. Sizing me up like I was its dinner. You know when somebody's watching you and it makes the back of your neck prickle? It was just like that, but kind of slithery and cold. It was really fuckin' freaky."

Maybe it's a coincidence, but the feeling Frank described sounds an awful lot like what Gerard had just felt at the mirror.

The thought that he should say something surges again, but Gerard pushes it back down and forces himself not to shiver. He doesn't want Frank to get even more freaked out over what still might be nothing. He looks up to meet Frank's eyes. "Well, it's gone now, right?" he says, offering it like a condolence.

"Yeah," Frank nods. "I didn't sleep too good after that, though."

Gerard makes a sympathetic noise. "Sounds like we both need coffee," he says as lightly as he can manage.

"When do we not?" Frank asks, just as fake-lightly as Gerard.

When they head down the stairs, the hair at the back of Gerard's neck prickles when they step onto the landing, but a quick glance around reveals nothing out of the ordinary. He takes a deep breath and keeps walking.

* * *

It's another indistinguishable grey and rainy afternoon and Gerard's mood hasn't improved, not really. He's still got his metaphorical hackles up like he's waiting for the other shoe to drop, and he's so on edge that he's having trouble losing himself in the music, letting himself get fully immersed like the songs deserve.

When they get back to practice after wolfing down a quick dinner, Frank announces that the song he's been working on is finished enough to share with the rest of them. It's a matter of minutes for him to explain what he was imagining for the bass and drum parts-they're all attuned to each other well enough at this point, after days and days of ten-hour rehearsals-and he's nodding right away at the licks Ray starts playing along with him. Mikey comes in a few bars later, just picking the root notes at first but quickly adding more, and it sounds like a real song almost right away.

"Holy shit," Frank cheers when they break off after a few verse-chorus repetitions, his whole face lit up with delight. "That's it, that's exactly it."

Bob is staring at Frank over his drum kit, visibly impressed. "It's a hell of a song," he says, blushing a little when Frank beams back at him. "Where the fuck did it come from?"

Frank gives a one-shouldered shrug. "From the house, I guess. There's such a strange vibe to this place, I don't know, I wanted to try to capture it in music."

"I'd say you sure did it," Ray says, and Mikey murmurs his agreement, even as he keeps fingering his part without actually playing the strings, already starting to push his fingers towards muscle memory.

"Do you have any ideas for lyrics?" Frank says, turning to Gerard.

Gerard does, in fact, have some ideas. He's gotten into the habit of staying up after everyone else has gone to sleep, sitting in the chair by his bedroom window with a pen and paper in his lap and staring out at the pool, watching the way the reflection from the lights along the patio jitter and skip across the pool's surface as the rain keeps pelting at it. He sits and he watches and he writes, almost as if he's in a trance, like he's letting the words get pulled out of his brain through his eyes to guide his fingers.

There are two pages in particular full of lyrics he's been working on since the song first started to really come together. There's something dark about the song's aggression, something that makes him want to turn that aggression against himself, to peel himself open and stick his most tender parts full of knives.

And when the words are ready, he's going to pull back his skin and spill his guts for everyone.

"I do, actually," Gerard tells Frank. "I just need to put the finishing touches on them tonight."

"We could break so you could work on them now, if you wanted?" Frank offers.

"No, but thanks," Gerard shakes his head. "I've been writing in the middle of the night, there's something about it that's been working really well for me."

"Oh, um, speaking of the middle of the night," Ray interrupts. He sounds nervous, and Gerard turns to look at him, trying to figure it out.

"Yeah?" Frank prompts.

"Did anybody else hear that dog barking all night? It kept me up, I had a terrible time trying to sleep."

Gerard spins on his heel, looking instinctively to Frank as he remembers their earlier conversation. Frank is staring at Ray wide-eyed, his mouth slightly agape.

"Maybe we have dicks for neighbours," Bob muses. "Leaving their dogs locked out all night in the rain, real nice."

"I didn't hear anything," Mikey says, sounding pretty bewildered.

"Me either," Bob shrugs, "but my room faces the other way, so maybe it was coming in Ray's window or something?"

Gerard isn't sure which way his room is facing with respect to Ray's but he knows he didn't hear any dogs last night either, but with the way Frank is visibly paler now than he was a minute ago, he doesn't want to say anything. "Why don't we run through the song a few more times," Gerard suggests, to change the subject.

After they call it a day on rehearsals, Gerard heads up to his room with a big mug of coffee and a sandwich and settles into the chair by the window. He promptly forgets about the food as he sits and stares out at the swimming pool, his notebook open on his lap. The pool's surface is still for the first time since he's taken to watching it, and he realizes that it means it must have stopped raining. It's still as dark as ever outside so he peers up at the sky, but he can't see any stars. He's not sure if it's because it's still overcast or if there's too much light pollution from the city to ever see them.

The house is perfectly quiet around him except for the soft scratching of his pen against paper. He writes, stops to cross things out, keeps writing. The words are coming steadily, but it's still a fight to tear them free from where they're clinging to the dark thoughts that lurk in the back of his mind.

Gerard loses track of time as he writes, and it's almost 4 a.m. when he finally puts his pen down. He was mostly working on some new ideas he just had to get on paper, but for the last hour he was finally pinning down the last of the words he needed to finish Frank's new song. He knows that the song is done, now-something about it resonates with him, hits all the right notes, and he's equal parts excited and nervous to share it.

When he brings his notebook to rehearsal the next morning, he realizes that it's actually the first time he's officially put new words to new music since they got here. They have a new song, their first in the house, and they're all visibly buoyed by the achievement as they launch into the first run-through with Gerard singing.

Gerard taps his foot as Ray starts in on the intro and when he opens his mouth to sing, he can practically feel the words as a tangible thing leaving his body, like he's sweating them out, bleeding them away, spitting them up out from the dark corners of his being. "To unexplain the unforgivable," he snarls into the mic, and then closes his eyes and lets the words take over.

The last notes of the song are still vibrating in the air around them when Frank launches himself at Gerard, nearly hitting him in the stomach with the headstock of his guitar. He shoves it around to hang behind his back and wraps his arms tightly around Gerard and hugs him as hard as he can.

"I don't know how you do it, but that's perfect," Frank tells the side of Gerard's neck.

Gerard smiles weakly and pats Frank's shoulder. He's strangely sweaty from the single run-through, and he's breathing hard and feels tired like he's just run a mile with the hounds of hell hot on his heels. It's crazy how good he feels, though, considering the dark thoughts he was stirring up.

"Glad you like it," Gerard says, and his smile gets bigger when he looks up and sees the rest of the guys grinning at them.

"Can we do it again?" Frank asks as he pulls back.

Gerard laughs. "Yeah, we can do it again."

* * *

Later that night, much later, when he knows he really ought to be asleep but can't seem to find a way to get there, Gerard hears the creak of Mikey's door opening into their shared bathroom. The tap turns on and stays on for almost a minute, and once it's off Gerard hears the soft sounds of Mikey spitting into the sink.

It's a comforting and almost homey noise, but then Gerard hears the tell-tale rattle of pills in a prescription bottle cutting through the stillness, and that's not the most reassuring sound. There's no noise again for long moments until the little quiet clink of glass against the marble counter carries through the closed door.

Then more silence. No running water, no more rattling or clinking, just the faint groan of the floorboards under Mikey's feet as he shifts his weight.

Gerard has no idea what Mikey is up to and he's dying to ask, dying to get up and stick his head into the bathroom and make sure his little brother is okay, but he can't quite convince his body to get out of bed to do it.

He tries again.

He can't get his body to move even an inch.

His heart starts beating way too hard as he struggles to get his legs to respond. It beats against his ribs as he tries to get his knees to bend, tries to get his feet to slide out from under the blankets to the floor, tries to get anything to cooperate.

He tries to move even one of his fingers from where they're resting, still relaxed, on the sheets at his sides.

But nothing happens.

Gerard shuts his eyes and tries to draw in a deep breath, tries to fight off the panic growing fast and hot in his mind.

But even his lungs don't cooperate. Panic blooms full and deep in his chest, beating like dark wings. Gerard doesn't know what to do. Lurking right at the edge of his thoughts is the idea-the knowledge, even-that if he can't get his body working, his lungs breathing, he might... he might...

There's a noise, then, and Gerard gets one eye open to look wildly around the dark room. There's a sliver of light where there was none before, and it takes him a moment to cut through his terror to place that it's from the door to the bathroom.

The sliver turns into a wedge and then a full-on beam, and Mikey appears in the doorway, half his face illuminated and the other half in deep shadow. He's totally expressionless and the lenses of his glasses are opaque slices of reflected light, almost like a wild animal's.

Gerard wants to call out to him, tries with all his might and will to get his body to do something. He's tense, straining, desperate to move, to draw a deep breath and run away, to get the fuck out of his room and out of the house and never look back.

Mikey lifts a hand and turns off the bathroom light, plunging them back into darkness. The door clicks shut and Gerard can barely make out Mikey's dark shape moving through his room towards the bed. He can hear Mikey's blanket dragging on the floor, so soft it's barely a noise at all. Mikey walks right up to the bed and Gerard can feel Mikey's eyes on him, the force of his gaze like a physical presence against his skin.

And then Mikey reaches out and does touch him, just a brush of a fingertip against Gerard's forehead. It's almost painful, like a shock when you touch a doorknob on a dry day, and Gerard flinches from it by reflex, draws in his next breath like a gasp.

Wait, Gerard tries to call out as he watches Mikey step away from the bed to settle onto the floor in the corner where he'd taken to sleeping most nights. But no sound comes out. Gerard focuses his attention on breathing, takes a deep breath.

That, at least, he can do now. He takes another-in through the nose, out through the mouth-and then another still. He starts to relax despite himself, and the next thing he knows there's a warm tingle in his legs. Hoping against hope, he tries to bend his leg.

It moves easily, muscles and tendons cooperating exactly like they should.

When Gerard lets out his next breath, it's shaky with relief. He moves his other leg, just to make sure he can, and then wiggles all his fingers for good measure.

He rolls over and stares at Mikey, wrapped up in his blankets and huddled in the corner. He's completely still, but Gerard can't tell if he's asleep already or not. He has no idea how much time has passed since Mikey touched him, since he lay down... and what the hell had happened there, anyway? Gerard doesn't like any of the vague ideas his brain is spinning out-that the strange paralysis was somehow Mikey's fault, or that it wasn't but that Mikey had somehow made it go away anyway, or that maybe Gerard's own body is turning against him, or-

Gerard takes another deep breath, relishing the feel of it it because he can, and tries to clear his mind. It's tough going, though, and he spends a long time staring at Mikey before he finally falls asleep.

* * *

Bob is late coming downstairs again a few days later. Frank paces the kitchen in concern, even though they're really only pushing forty-five minutes behind schedule-and it's not like they haven't all accidentally overslept before, as Ray keeps pointing out unhelpfully. Gerard and Ray take turns offering to make Frank breakfast if he'll just sit down, but he shrugs them off and keeps pacing.

"Why don't you go bang on his door?" Mikey finally asks him from where he's sitting at the end of the table, flipping his Sidekick around between his fingers as he glares at it.

"Why do you even bother with your phone?" Frank asks him in return. Mikey shrugs at him, puts it down to pick up his coffee instead, and then gestures with his free hand at the door to the hallway, like he's inviting Frank to leave.

Frank shakes his head at Mikey and keeps pacing.

Gerard sighs quietly and stares down at his coffee to try to block everything (and everyone) else out. Frank's nervous energy is starting to get to him, making him unsettled and jittery. He can still hear Frank's footsteps, though, soft against the hardwood floor and squeaking sometimes when he steps on a loose board. And then he realizes what's holding Frank back.

"I'll go up with you, to knock," Gerard tells Frank, who stops in the middle of the floor and turns to look at him.

"Yeah, okay, since you guys insist," Frank agrees, playing it off like he's caving even though the relief in his eyes is pretty obvious.

Gerard is just getting to his feet when Bob walks into the kitchen, his expression dark and his whole body tense.

Bob blows past them to stand by the sink, and they all watch in stunned silence as he turns on the taps. "Fuck!" he shouts once the water starts running, and he turns the taps off again with a vicious shove.

Gerard's view is blocked by Bob's back so he has no idea what exactly happened to get such a reaction, but he can see the freaked-out looks on Frank and Mikey's faces and he can tell that whatever it was, it can't be good.

"What's going on?" Gerard asks carefully.

"Every time I've turned on the water in my room in the last couple days," Bob starts, his words measured like he's barely holding himself back from freaking out, or maybe getting real angry, "the water's been running red. And it just did it here, too."

"What, like, rusty pipes?" Ray asks.

"That's what I thought," Bob says, "but it never clears up, it keeps running red."

"It shouldn't be doing that," Mikey says thoughtfully.

"No fucking kidding." Bob crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the cabinets.

"No, I mean, it shouldn't, I..."

"You what?" Gerard asks.

Mikey flushes red, then shrugs. "Nothing, it's nothing, never mind."

Gerard wants to push Mikey further, try to figure out what the hell he's talking about, but then Frank is gently pulling Bob away from the sink and then reaching down to turn it on himself.

Gerard stands up straighter and tilts his head and he can see around Frank. It looks like the water is running perfectly clear, not even a trace of red in it.

"Oh, thanks, way to show me up there," Bob mutters.

Frank shrugs and turns the tap off.

Bob hesitates briefly and then reaches out to turn it back on, the expectation clear on his face.

The water comes out red again, bright and dark and opaque.

"Okay, that shit's just not right," Frank says, backing away quickly until he's got his back up against the counter on the other side of the room. There's fear in his voice, and Gerard doesn't blame him-his own heart is suddenly beating much, much faster.

"It hasn't been doing this for anyone else?" Bob asks angrily.

They all shake their heads no.

"What the hell is going on?" Bob asks the room.

Nobody has an answer.

"What were you saying before, Mikey?" Gerard asks, turning to look at his brother. He's going to get a straight answer out of him eventually, and he figures it doesn't hurt to start now.

But Mikey's not there.

"Uh," Gerard starts slowly, "when did Mikey leave?"

"He left?" Bob asks, turning away from the sink. "Huh."

"I didn't notice," Ray says. He sounds concerned-and fuck, Gerard's worried too.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we could text him," Frank sighs, and Gerard can't help but laugh at that a little desperately. Just because Mikey's taking it the hardest doesn't mean they aren't all chafing at the total lack of cell reception.

Maybe they should take a day off soon, Gerard thinks, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table as they all look back and forth at each other. Maybe it would do them all some good.

"So, hey, let's find Mikey and get to work," Bob says. He sounds kind of... nervous isn't quite the right word, Gerard thinks, but he's definitely unsettled and Gerard doesn't blame him for wanting to stop talking about the water and get on with more normal things.

"Maybe he's in the ballroom already," Frank suggests. It's a pretty good idea, actually, and it makes most sense to start there, so Gerard grabs a quick refill on his coffee and then follows the rest of the band out of the kitchen and over to their rehearsal space.

But Mikey isn't in the ballroom when they get there.

"Maybe he's in his room?" Ray says.

"We could wait for him here," Frank points out. "He knows we're going to be in here eventually anyway."

"I'm gonna go look for him," Gerard announces. Mikey's sudden disappearance really isn't sitting right with him, and he really wants to figure out what the hell is going on.

"Have fun with that," Frank says. "I'm going to stay right here, if it's all the same to you."

"Fine," Gerard shrugs, and heads off into the house to start looking. He's got this feeling that Mikey probably isn't in his room-he doesn't know where he would be instead, but Gerard can't imagine that Mikey would want to be in his room any more than he has to, not when he's already sleeping on Gerard's floor every night.

Gerard starts walking, letting his feet pick their own path through the house's winding hallways. He knows he's probably been through the entire house at least once by this point, but he doesn't recognize the hallway he's in right now and it's starting to give him the creeps.

But then he hears a noise coming from behind a door that he's definitely never opened before-and it sounds like a voice.

He chews on his lip as he hesitates for a moment, but then decides he should open the door to check, just in case it's Mikey-because if everybody else is waiting for them in the ballroom, what else would it be?

The door swings open easily when he turns the handle, and it turns out the room is a small library. He blinks, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the dim light in the room, and then stands there in awe as he takes in his surroundings. The walls are lined with shelves crammed full of old books that probably date back to the turn of the century-the last century-and there's a thick layer of dust everywhere, ashy and uninterrupted, like nobody's been in for years and years.

Mikey isn't in the room, and clearly never has been.

Gerard shakes his head and is about to back out of the room when something in his peripheral vision catches his attention.

It's a mirror.

He stops dead and stares. Just like the last time he found himself suddenly facing a mirror, he can't shake off the sudden and overwhelming compulsion to stare at it-and he hates it, tries to fight against it, but it's not taking.

And then he starts to move. His feet are bringing him closer and closer to the mirror even as he tries to resist. He can feel himself breaking out into a sweat as he concentrates on getting his feet to stop moving, but they don't, they keep walking him forward until he's standing right in front of the mirror.

The room is dark around him except for a single weak ray of sunlight coming in through a crack in the heavy curtains, and it hits the mirror at a long angle. The mirror's elaborate frame is wreathed in shadows, and as Gerard steps towards it his own shadow spreads across its surface as he blocks out the dim light spilling in from the hallway.

As he watches, the shadows already lurking under the edge of the massive frame seem to grow even bigger. They're pulsating, not in even measured beats, but-

But more like a heartbeat. He drops his mug in shock as the recognition uncurls in his stomach. He doesn't even notice when the coffee splashes over his feet, searingly hot for a moment, or that the mug breaks into a dozen pieces. He keeps staring at the mirror.

And the face staring back at him, well... It's nominally his, but it's somehow all wrong. It's pale, sallow, with dark bruise-coloured circles around his eyes. It looks like he's sick, so sick he's almost dying, like he's got a bad case of something vicious and lingering that's sapped everything out of him but the very last spark of life-and by the looks of it, that spark is next to go.

Gerard tries to swallow but finds his muscles aren't cooperating. He just stands there, helplessly staring this twisted reflection down while his heart beats harder and harder and his lungs don't quite pull in enough air. He can feel a fat drop of sweat rolling between his shoulder blades, another slipping down the side of his face. He's fighting this strange compulsion as hard as he can, and he's not winning.

Time stands still as his legs keep him locked in place in front of the mirror, watching, being watched. He keeps struggling against it, trying to get his body to move, to turn around, even just to look away, but he can't do it. It feels as if his body has somehow turned to stone and he's trapped inside, doomed to fight against it forever.

And then, as he looks on helplessly, the light in the reflection's eyes grows dim.

Then the shadows around the mirror's edge seem to subside, too; from the corners of his eyes, it seems to Gerard like some of them are slithering away from where they were lurking, writhing down and across the wall to mass in the corners of the room.

Gerard keeps staring, totally horrified, as that last spark of life in his reflection's eyes flickers weakly for a moment before finally fading out completely. He's hit with a wave of nausea as he watches his reflection's eyes sag half-shut, the eyeballs growing glassy and cloudy.

Gerard's heart is beating too hard against his ribs and his stomach starts clenching abruptly. He wants to throw up, he wants to run as far away as humanly possible, he wants to get the fuck out of here and never see another mirror for the rest of his life.

It's not until his reflection's eyes glaze completely over and turn almost white that the reflection finally fades away, leaving Gerard's own face-sweaty and red and shocked, but undeniably his-staring back at him. He flinches away at the sudden change, and that's when he realizes he can finally move again.

He runs. He runs right the fuck out of the room and slams the door behind him. He books it away as fast as he possibly can, trying to put space between himself and whatever the fuck that had been in the mirror, whatever the fuck it was that had just happened. Soon enough he finds himself back in the ballroom like he went there on instinct, his feet taking him somewhere he knows he'll be okay, surrounded by his band.

They're all waiting for him-Mikey included-when he staggers around the corner and then slows until he's stopped in the middle of the room. His legs go weak on him as he bends forward, hands on his knees, and tries to catch his breath. He's sweaty and panting and he's sure he looks like hell, and he's not surprised at all to feel them staring at him in concern.

"You okay?" Ray asks gently, and Gerard forces himself to nod, even though he isn't entirely sure that he's fine.

He takes another few moments try to get ahold of his breath again, and then he straightens up and walks the rest of the way over to his band. "Where were you?" he asks Mikey.

Mikey shrugs, gives him a blank look. "I was cold, so I went to get another sweater."

"Oh," Gerard says. He feels monumentally stupid for freaking out the way he did.

"Seriously, are you okay?" Frank asks, coming up to Gerard and putting a hand on his arm. "Why were you running, anyway?"

Gerard doesn't shake Frank's hand free even though his skin is crawling. He wants to forget what he just saw, ignore it, make like it never happened. He's not so sure that the memory will ever fade-it feels like the face with its dead eyes is seared into the front of his brain, now-but it never hurt a guy to hope.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Gerard says, trying to sound as reassuring as he can. He doesn't think he does a very good job, though, and Frank doesn't look like he's buying it.

Gerard realizes then that he doesn't have to make like something freaky didn't just happen-it's not like they didn't all just witness something inexplicable in the kitchen when Bob turned on the taps, and it's not like Frank wouldn't believe him anyway.

Gerard sighs, and then puts his free hand on Frank's shoulder and pulls him in close. "Actually, I... saw something that kind of freaked me out," he says quietly by Frank's ear, and he feels Frank get tense all over.

"What was it?" Frank asks, just as quietly. His breath is warm against Gerard's skin, and there's something about his proximity, his body heat, the way he's so undeniably alive that Gerard finds incredibly reassuring.

"I'm not sure," Gerard hedges. He doesn't want to lie to Frank, but he doesn't really know how to describe what he saw, either-or how to explain why he didn't mention it the other times it happened. "I found this room that had a strange mirror in it, and there was something wrong with my reflection-"

"Wrong how?" Frank cuts in sharply.

"It was me, but it wasn't. The face in the mirror, it... I don't know, it looked sick, like it was dying or something. I think- I think I watched it die."

Frank tenses up against him at that, so quickly he's practically recoiling. Frank's mouth is open, moving slightly like he's testing out words in his head before he says them, and Gerard wishes Frank didn't look quite so scared by what he'd just said.

"Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me," Gerard offers, trying to sound like he believes it, "but I figured I'd be better off getting back here fast. Just to be safe."

Frank moves back half a step, and looks seriously at Gerard, taking him in. "You're okay now, right?"

Gerard bites his lip and takes a deep breath in through his nose, then nods. "Yeah. Yeah, I am. I need to get over it, you know? Wait for my heart to stop beating so fast."

"Hey, so-" Bob's voice cuts through the weird tension that Gerard seems to have brought with him, and Gerard startles back from Frank to cut a glance at Bob. "When you guys are done having your tender moment, we have a new song to work on."

Frank keeps a straight face for almost ten seconds before he starts laughing, and Gerard cracks a smile, too, because he can't not. He doesn't know how Bob managed to find the right thing to say to help him shake off most of the lingering weirdness from earlier, but he did and it helped and fuck, he loves his band. Sometimes he can't get over how right it feels to have them all in his life, constantly around him, constantly in his space, bugging him with their weird habits and weirder smells. He loves his band, and they are going to make a great fucking record together.

* * *

When Gerard wakes up in the middle of the night, it's not with a sudden jolt like it's been every other time. It's more of a slow resurfacing into consciousness, a little at a time, and when he's finally awake enough to actually realize that he's awake, he has no idea why.

He lies there, still and silent, breathing in deep breaths to get himself ready to roll over and go back to sleep.

He's about to roll onto his side when he hears it: a soft scratching noise, coming from somewhere quite close.

He freezes, suddenly wide awake, then slowly finishes rolling over anyway, so he can look at his room and convince himself that it's nothing.

Except it turns out to be something, after all.

Mikey is in his room again tonight, but he's not curled up in a pile of blankets in the corner like Gerard would have expected. Instead, he's sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, hunched over something.

Gerard blinks a few times and then squints, trying to get the sleep out of his eyes so he can see exactly what's going on. It takes him a few minutes to make out the details against the dark of the room, but the sheet of white paper on the floor in front of Mikey jumps out at him first, almost luminescent in the moonlight coming in through the window. Mikey's got a pen in his hand and it looks like he's writing on the paper.

Gerard watches as Mikey's hand skitters across the page in jerky movements, and he realizes after a moment that Mikey is holding the pen all wrong compared to how he normally does. His knuckles are sticking out all weird and it seems like he's barely holding the pen upright, let alone pressing hard enough to actually write.

Gerard looks up at Mikey's face and the deep strangeness of the whole tableau starts to really sink in, not like a punch to the gut but more like cold fingers on the back of his neck.

Mikey's not wearing his glasses and his face is slack and his eyes are glazed, like a thousand-mile stare at nothing. His mouth is hanging slightly open and he looks completely disconnected from the world around him, as though he's wrapped up so tightly in something in his head that it's squeezed out everything else.

It's like he's in a trance, Gerard thinks.

Gerard holds his breath as he watches. Mikey is completely still-even his chest is hardly moving, like he's barely even breathing-except for his hand, which keeps moving across the page. Gerard's eyes have adjusted enough to the dark that he can see the vague shapes of the marks left behind. It looks like writing, but it's nothing like Mikey's handwriting at all.

The touch of cold on Gerard's neck starts to creep down his spine. He can't look away and he can't bring himself to say anything, either. He just watches, completely enthralled. He's confused and increasingly scared, both by the writing and the total lack of awareness on his brother's face, and he worries that if he looks away, something terrible might happen and he wouldn't be able to stop it.

Not that he'd be able to stop it anyway, he thinks with an edge of panic, because he has no idea what the hell is going on or why it's happening. It's like Mikey isn't even in his own body anymore, like something else has taken over and is making use of it.

Gerard wants to say something. He wants to call out to Mikey, ask what's going on, demand an explanation or just reassurance that Mikey is okay, but he can't bring himself to even make a noise. He has no idea what will happen if he interrupts and he's not willing to risk it. He watches, wide-eyed and desperate with growing fear, as Mikey keeps sitting there, still lost to the world around him and still writing.

And then Mikey stops. One moment his hand is moving awkwardly over the paper and the next moment it's completely still, like all the muscles in his body have seized up in unison. But then Mikey's face tenses up, his nose wrinkling and his lips curling for a few moments before relaxing again, and then his eyes slide slowly shut. They're closed for almost a minute-a very long, tense minute where Gerard watches impatiently, waiting for something, anything to happen-before they open again, and when they do, Mikey is back to normal. Gerard isn't sure how he knows it except for how he just knows his brother, and it's clear that whatever was going on before is now over. Mikey looks okay, more or less; Gerard doesn't get the feeling that whatever just happened has affected him much. He's glad his own stunned inaction didn't end up being the wrong move. He doesn't think he'd ever forgive himself if something happened when he could have maybe stopped it.

Gerard watches as Mikey puts his glasses back on and then picks up the paper. It's covered in strange writing now and Mikey squints at it for a while, then sighs, folds it up, and grips it tightly in one hand as he reaches out with the other to start rearranging his blankets. He lies down a moment later, pulling his blankets up over his head as he curls into a ball, same as always. If Gerard didn't still feel the last touches of a strange chill prickling his skin he would be questioning whether he'd really seen anything at all, or if he'd maybe just dreamed it and Mikey'd actually been asleep the whole time.

Gerard waits for as long as he can stand it before he gets out of bed. He can't figure out what exactly he saw, but he's really rattled by it and he wants to put some distance between himself and his room. There's a strange energy lingering there, and he wants to wait it out somewhere else.

He walks to the bathroom and doesn't bother turning on the lights. Going by feel, he turns on the sink and splashes some water on his face, and then sits on the edge of the bathtub, leans forward, and presses his face to his knees.

It's not until he rolls his shoulders and shifts his face so he's looking the other way that he realizes that the light must be on in Mikey's room-there's a faint blue glow coming in around the edge of the door. Why would Mikey leave his bedroom light on, Gerard wonders. He slides along the edge of the tub so he's as far away from that door as he can get. Why would Mikey leave that light on?

Now that Gerard's aware of the faint blue light he can't ignore it. It's there, nagging at the edges of his awareness, bothering him, setting him on edge. The last thing he wants to do is go into Mikey's room and face it full-on in order to get to the switch and turn it off, but he's not in any hurry to go back into his own room, either.

So he sits there, curled up on the edge of the tub, for as long as he can stand it. His back eventually starts to protest being all hunched over so he slides off the cool rim and sinks down to the floor, pulling his knees up as close to his chest as he can and wrapping his arms around them. He faces resolutely away from the door to Mikey's room, biding time as he waits for some sort of sign that it's safe to go back into his own room.

But nothing happens. There's no sign, no indication that anything is different. It's just Gerard, alone in the dark, trying to ignore the blue light even though it's got him gritting his teeth. He sits there until he can't take it anymore; his ass is almost numb and he's straight-up bored, sitting there and waiting for nothing. He eventually gets up slowly, the muscles in his legs protesting after being bent tight for so long, and he tip-toes back to bed, holding his breath against whatever bad mojo still lingers in the air in his room.

He falls asleep more easily than he would have expected, and when he wakes up, it's to the full force of the noon-day sun shining down on his face.

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