fic: So Haunted (2/2)
[ part one]
Saturday
Gerard wakes up at the crack of dawn feeling like death warmed over. It takes him a moment to realize he's in his own bedroom, in his own apartment. He was going to spend the night at Frank's, he remembers, and he went straight to Frank's apartment after work, and Frank made dinner and played guitar and Gerard remembers pulling Frank into the bedroom, and then nothing after that. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking fuck... He stares up at the shadows on the ceiling and tries to piece together how he got home. There's just... nothing.
His room is still mostly dark and he can't figure out why he's awake until he hears the ticking of a clock. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to figure out where it's coming from. Maybe the apartment next door? The walls are kind of thin, after all. But the ticking is really loud, so loud it almost sounds like it's actually in his bedroom.
He really isn't in the mood to try to deal with this. He hasn't had a drink in a week now, and he's completely sure that he isn't using again (if only because his bank balance hasn't dropped the way it would if he was buying even half as much as he used to), but he has a splitting headache that throbs in time with his heartbeat and makes his vision go grey at the edges. Was it even worth it to stop, Gerard thinks bitterly, if I wake up feeling like shit anyway?
Getting out of bed is a monumental challenge-he rolls onto his side and swings his feet onto the floor. Then he sits up slowly, cradling his head with one bent arm as he stands tentatively and hobbles hunched-over towards the bathroom. His stomach feels okay, at least, but the headache is so bad that he might puke anyway.
He pours himself a glass of water, still bent almost double at the waist, and it isn't until he stands up to drink it that he gets a look at himself in the mirror.
He drops the glass in shock, barely even feels it as the cold water soaks through his pants and the rug beneath his feet.
The bottom half of his face is just crusted with dried blood. When he brings a hand up to touch it, to pick a flake off his chin, he sees more of it under his nails, rimming his cuticles, worked into the folds of his knuckles.
Gerard leans closer to the mirror to stare down his reflection, to try to see if he was clawing at his face or something-what else could have happened that he'd have so much blood on his hands? But his skin seems intact under his touch, looks normal as it gets exposed when he carefully picks more of the flaking blood off, and it doesn't sting or hurt or ache.
It's only when he's leaning back from the dingy mirror to take in his whole face that he notices the wide smear of blood across his bare chest. He tucks his chin into his neck to look down at it. It almost looks like... it looks like it was left by a hand, by four fingers raked across his skin. But the skin's not broken there, either. He might have done it to himself in his sleep during the nosebleed, he rationalizes, but then again the angle is pretty weird, and he would have had to bend his wrist just so, and...
But who else could have done it? Gerard asks himself, frowning at his reflection.
His headache throbs, then, hot and sharp, and Gerard collapses against the sink and throws up, his stomach twisting and clenching and spasming as it forces its contents up and out. He squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn't have to watch as the bile splashes into the sink. He's terrified it might be bloody, too, and just doesn't want to know.
When he finally, finally stops heaving, he straightens back up as best he can and drinks a sip of cool water out of his cupped hands. It feels good in his mouth but when he swallows it burns in his throat-it's raw from his retching. Gerard spits out the rest of his mouthful of water and heads back into his room.
There's a new painting on his desk, propped up against a makeshift easel of trade paperbacks and a coffee mug. A new figure leers out at him, grinning and black-eyed and evil.
Gerard can't shake the feeling that he knows this figure, too, and it's right on the tip of his tongue-right at the front of his brain-but it's like there's this thick fog keeping him from putting his finger on it.
He creeps a little closer, trying to get a better look despite the fact it makes his stomach churn and his skin go clammy. His heart starts pounding in double-time.
It's all shades of red and vivid brush strokes, the paint's surface scratched and gouged and spattered. Gerard glances down at his fingers, which he didn't scrub enough to get rid of all the blood when he washed his hands, but the colour's not quite the same. He can tell even in the dim light that the canvas is drenched in Crimson Lake red, and the empty tube of oil paint on the floor next to his desk chair confirms it.
There are dark streaks running through the paint, though.
Gerard knows, right in the pit of his stomach, that the dark streaks are blood. He's too freaked out to figure out how to confirm it, isn't sure he'd even want to if he could.
He lifts the canvas gingerly, turns it so it's face-down on his desk even though he's sure the paint is still wet, and he backs away slowly, a growing feeling of dread gnawing holes through his insides.
* * *
Gerard's headache subsides as his room gets brighter and brighter with daylight, and by the time it's about ten, he feels almost completely himself again.
He's still insanely freaked out, though, and still hasn't managed to scrub all the blood out from under his nails and from the ridges of his knuckles, even though he spent twenty minutes at the sink running almost-too-hot water over his hands. He works around it by not letting his hands enter his field of vision at all, and it's worth it even when he has to clean up a giant scoop of coffee grounds that ends up on the floor by accident when he can't bring himself to look when he's trying to get them into the basket in his coffee maker.
He turns his phone over and over in his hands as he thinks about calling Frank to ask if he has any idea what the fuck happened last night. The fact that he woke up in his own bed and not Frank's is a pretty big hint that that things didn't go so well, though. Gerard squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember if they fought, tries to remember if Frank threw him out or if he left for some other reason, tries to remember anything about what he might have done. All he gets is a weak flicker of an image of Frank's face below his, looking up at him with wide dark eyes, his mouth open and pink.
No.
He's not going to call Frank. He can go another day or two before he needs to find out what he's fucked up this time.
He ends up calling Mikey instead, just before noon. He's got a sneaking suspicion that he's going to wake Mikey up, but tough shit. He can't deal with being alone in his apartment any longer. There are too many moving shadows in the corners, too many weird noises in the walls.
He has to call three times before Mikey actually picks up.
"Finally," Gerard breathes out in relief.
"Wha? Gerard? What?"
"Dude, look, I'm sorry I woke you up, but I am seriously freaking out here and I need to get out of here, I need to see another living, breathing human being or I am going to go fuckin' crazy, and I-"
"Oh my god," Mikey cuts him off. "Can you give me five minutes? I need coffee. Seriously, you woke me up."
"Sorry," Gerard mumbles, "I can call back."
"No, it's okay," Mikey says, and Gerard hears a muffled thump in the background, and then the sound of a tap running. "I just, ugh, fuck, what time is it?"
"Noon?"
"Oh. Huh, it's not as early as I thought."
"Late night?" Gerard asks.
"Yeah," Mikey agrees, but doesn't elaborate.
Gerard can hear the unmistakable sound of a coffee maker coming to life through the phone line, and turns instinctively to look at his own, which has maybe just less than a cup left in it. He pours it into the nearest mug without checking to see if it's clean first, and drains it in three long gulps.
Mikey is still mostly silent all the while, but then Gerard hears some clinking and then the sound of what is possibly Mikey putting his phone down on the counter or table or something.
"Sorry," Mikey says a minute later. "I have coffee now. What were you saying before?"
Somehow, Gerard's frantic desperation has ebbed in the last few minutes as he listened to Mikey making coffee, and it takes him a moment to recapture what he'd been trying to say when he'd first called. "Um," he starts, "so the weirdest fuckin' shit keeps happening to me."
"Yeah?" Mikey sounds vaguely interested, which is a big reaction, Gerard thinks.
"Yeah, like, um. Uh, man, this is going to sound like total bullshit, but I swear to god it's true, and I'm not making it up, and it's kind of scaring the shit out of me, and-"
"What happened?" Mikey interrupts, sounding almost excited now to hear it.
"When I woke up this morning?" he starts, and then stops to try to figure out how to put the next part.
"Yeah?"
"I, uh. I was, like, completely covered in blood."
Mikey is silent for a long time before he says, "Whose was it?"
"Mine, I guess. I don't know."
"Oh." Gerard can hear Mikey swilling coffee like a total pig, but the sounds of him gulping and putting his mug down and refilling it are kind of reassuring in their normalcy.
"It's happened before," Gerard says slowly. "Today wasn't the first time."
"Was it your blood the other times?"
Mikey is such a morbid little shit, Gerard thinks. "Yes. Maybe. I don't know who else it would belong to."
"You're right," Mikey says thoughtfully. "That is really fucking weird,"
"Thanks for the confirmation," Gerard says dryly, and eyes his coffee maker longingly. He's finished the last of it, now, and he could make more but then he'd have to look at his hands or clean up another mess or, god forbid, both, and he just can't deal with that. Maybe he'll put on gloves and go to Starbucks or something.
"So look," Gerard continues, "I was talking to this guy I know at work, and he thinks it's some sort of crazy paranormal shit or something, I don't know, I don't believe in that shit or anything, but."
"But what?"
"He told me that I should go talk to this friend of his, his old roommate or something, who apparently knows everything about all that kind of stuff."
"Yeah?" Mikey sounds even more interested now than he did before when they were talking about the blood that may or may not have been Gerard's.
"So I suddenly feel like I really want to go talk to this guy. Like, today. Right now."
"Couldn't hurt," Mikey says. "You want me to come with you, right?"
"Yeah, read my mind why don't you," Gerard laughs a little. He doesn't have it in him for much more than a nervous chuckle, but he means what little he can muster. "You don't have any other plans or anything, do you?"
"Nothing important," Mikey assures him, "I can totally reschedule, no big deal. This is kind of cool, actually."
"Yeah," Gerard says. "We'll see about that. I'll come pick you up, okay? And we can stop for coffee."
"Go on, twist my arm." Gerard can practically hear Mikey's smile through the phone. He's glad at least one of them is enjoying this.
* * *
Mikey starts sniggering as soon as Gerard pulls his car to a stop in front of the storefront with the address on the business card Bob had given him. "'The Faerie Castle'? Really?"
"Shut up," Gerard snaps at him. "I bet they have unicorn figurines, why don't you shut up and go look."
Mikey keeps laughing, but doesn't leave Gerard's side as they step through the doorway into the tiny shop. There's a woman in a plain dress and lace apron behind the counter, so after a moment of waffling in the doorway, Gerard heads straight over to ask her if Ray is in.
"He's in the back, dear," she says, patting his arm and then pointing to a beaded curtain in the far wall of the store.
"Thanks," Gerard says, and is pleased but not surprised when Mikey continues to follow him through the shop instead of pulling one of his usual tricks, like claiming allergies and a desperate need to wait outside.
Gerard pushes through the surprisingly-heavy curtain sectioning off the back of the store and is immediately overwhelmed by the smell of stale incense. The tiny room is cramped with shelves tilting at odd angles, filled with books and crystals and carved wooden boxes and statuettes and jars of incense sticks and at least half a dozen things that Gerard can't identify at first glance. He makes a face, and then he spots a guy standing in the corner, arranging something on a shelf.
"Ray?" Gerard calls.
The guy turns around and smiles at them. "Yeah, that's me. You must be Bob's friend," Ray says, and puts down the pile of books he's holding before offering his hand to Mikey. He's wearing an ancient Iron Maiden shirt and his hair is enormous and he looks neither touchy-feely nor particularly threatening. "Good to meet you," the guy says.
"I'm Mikey," Mikey says, taking Ray's hand and shaking it lightly. "I think you're supposed to be talking to my brother." He lets go of Ray's hand and points to Gerard.
"Hi." Gerard's face is carefully neutral as he sticks his hand out at Ray. "I'm Gerard, and yeah, I work with Bob, he sent me your way." Gerard is pleased to note that Ray's handshake is firm and dry, and he starts to feel that maybe, maybe this guy isn't going to be a complete wackjob.
"Why don't you tell me what's going on," Ray says as he turns back towards the room, making a follow-me gesture with one hand. When they round a bookcase in the middle of the room, Gerard can see that there are two threadbare armchairs tucked together in the corner. "Bob didn't tell me much about your situation," Ray continues as he gestures that Gerard and Mikey should sit, "just that you think you might have a bad ghost." He sits on a stool on the floor between the chairs, resting his elbows on his knees and looking up at Gerard.
"That's one way to put it," Gerard mutters as he settles down in the chair. The cushion under his ass is a little lumpy but mostly comfortable, but the upholstery reeks like the air in the room, except ten times worse. Gerard tries not to breathe through his nose as he starts telling Ray his story. He ignores Mikey fidgeting with his phone in the other chair, instead pushing himself to concentrate on remembering as many details as he can without falling into the temptation to maybe embellish things a little. He's not trying to impress Ray, after all; he's trying to get his fucking life back. Plus he gets the fucking heebie-jeebies bad enough as it is anyway without trying to make anything sound worse. He still has blood under his nails that no amount of scrubbing would get out. He shows Ray his hands when the thought crosses his mind.
Ray takes Gerard's wrist and pulls his hand closer to his face so he can squint at Gerard's nails, at the pink-tinged creases in his knuckles, at the cracks in the dry skin of the back of his hands from where Gerard spent twenty minutes scrubbing as hard as he could.
"Have you done anything that would piss off the spirit world?" Ray asks with a distinct lack of humour, and it takes everything Gerard has to not burst out laughing right in his face.
"Fuck no, man," Gerard says, "I mean, I draw cartoons of vampires and zombies and shit sometimes, but it's not like I'm invoking them or talking shit about their moms, you know?"
Mikey makes a choked noise and Gerard turns to look at him, but instead of finding his little brother doubled over in silent laughter like he was expecting, he actually finds him looking remarkably... guilty?
"So, um," Mikey starts when he notices Gerard and Ray staring at him, "you know that Ouija board you got me for my birthday last year, Gerard?"
"Oh for fuck's sake, Mikey! That shit doesn't work! It isn't real," Gerard bursts out, his brain already spinning out ways to best to exact revenge on a little brother who won't stop being a total jerk today.
"It doesn't work for you because you don't believe in it," Mikey tells him. "Anyway, so you know that girl Alicia I've been sort-of seeing?"
Gerard nods and glances over at Ray, who looks frighteningly intent on Mikey's story.
"Yeah, so, she came over for the first time a couple weeks ago, okay? And she was admiring the Ouija board-because you did pick a really nice one, even if you think it's all just fake-so I was like, 'Hey, do you want to take that out and see if we can talk to any ghosts,' and she was pretty into it, so we, you know, turned off the lights and lit candles and everything, and, uh..." Mikey trails off and starts blushing.
"What, Mikey?" Gerard prompts after he's been silent for a moment too long.
"We talked to a ghost," Mikey mumbles.
"Bullshit!" Gerard leans forward in his seat to smack Mikey's leg. Mikey brushes him away, but still looks kind of guilty.
"What happened?" Ray asks gently, pulling his stool closer to Mikey's chair.
"So, um," Mikey blushes harder and Gerard can tell he doesn't want to admit to whatever he's about to say, "I was maybe trying to impress Alicia, you know? And... yeah, it's entirely possible that I pissed off the spirit world."
"Mikey!" Gerard hits him again, harder this time, and scowls. "Stop dicking around, for fuck's sake."
"Fuck off, Gee, I actually did that, okay? I talked to a fucking ghost, I said some things I shouldn't have. Pretty dumb, right?" Mikey breaks off and starts picking at a loose thread at the ankle of his jeans. When he starts talking again, he's quieter. "Is all that shit actually happening to you? Like, all the blood, and the creepy paintings?"
Gerard sighs. "Yeah, I told you about that on the phone this morning, remember?"
Mikey wrinkles his nose and stares at his shoes. "I kinda didn't believe you then. Sorry."
The room is silent for a moment as Mikey sits and looks sullen, Ray looks lost in thought, and Gerard tries to figure out if Mikey is playing some kind of elaborate joke or something.
"Why," Gerard eventually says, and then loses his train of thought and clears his throat and tries again. "Why would I be the one getting haunted, if Mikey is the one who pissed them off?"
"Revenge," Mikey and Ray say at the same time. Mikey chuckles nervously, and Ray just looks somber.
"You gave him the board," Ray points out.
"You know how it works, Gerard, you've seen enough horror movies," Mikey offers.
"Yeah," Gerard says. "Fuck."
They fall into silence again. Gerard stares at his fingers, suddenly unable to look away from this immediate evidence that something is going on. Shit, Gerard thinks. He doesn't believe in this shit, not ghosts, not spirits, not Ouija boards or séances or talking to the goddamned dead, but Mikey doesn't look like he's fucking around and Gerard honestly can't come up with a better explanation for what's been happening to him, and... shit. Just, shit. Shit shit shit.
He shivers as he picks at the last trace of the red crust still clinging to his knuckle, and he absently zips his hoodie the rest of the way up. It doesn't help, though; the chill clings to his neck, his back, his hands, seeps down into his toes. Gerard shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets and very deliberately doesn't think about it.
"I could apologize," Mikey says then. Gerard looks up at him. Mikey looks more serious than Gerard's ever seen him, with his mouth pressed into a thin line and his eyes hard. He's sitting hunched in on himself, his shoulders up almost to his ears, his knees tucked in close under his chin. "I could go back on the Ouija board and try to get the same ghost, and try to fix things?"
"You know what," Gerard frowns, "I'd really rather you just never touched that fucking thing again, if it's all the same to you."
"You really don't want to make it worse," Ray adds, and Gerard jumps at the sound of his voice because he'd practically forgotten he was in the room.
Mikey just nods and curls back into himself. Gerard sits and watches him for a moment, and then his skin crawls as the chill creeps down his spine again, far colder than before. Gerard imagines for a moment that it's trying to work its way into his bones and promptly creeps himself the fuck out. Fuck, he thinks, I need to get out of here.
"I need a fucking smoke," Gerard announces as he gets to his feet, pulling his pack out of his pocket to illustrate. "I'm going outside."
"Good luck," Ray says as he gets up off his stool, offering his hand again. Gerard takes it, and the handshake is a lot less awkward than the first time around. "Sorry I couldn't be more help."
"Thanks," Gerard says. "Sounds like I'm going to need it, huh."
Ray doesn't smile or try to shrug it off; he just nods slowly.
Gerard has his cigarette in his mouth and lit practically the moment he gets back outside, and Mikey comes out right behind him. Gerard walks down the sidewalk a ways until he finds a stretch fully in the sun and plants himself there, right in the middle of the pavement, and squints up at the sun as he smokes.
Mikey gives him a weird look and sticks close to the storefronts and the shade from their awnings. "I'm sorry," he says again when Gerard crushes out his cigarette and lights a second one.
Gerard shrugs helplessly. "Okay," he says, and sucks hard on the new cigarette. He frowns when he sees how upset his brother looks, but just, fuck, what the fuck, this is so incredibly fucked up. "You're sorry because you pissed off a ghost who is now scaring the living shit out of me in revenge. What do you want me to say to that, Mikey?"
"Nothing, I guess." Mikey sounds as miserable as he looks, and Gerard wants to forgive him, he does, but right now he's too busy trying to wrap his head around what just happened, around his increasing inability to remain totally disbelieving in ghosts and all that crap, and the possibility that maybe this isn't going to just stop by itself next week.
Gerard jitters from foot to foot and lights a third cigarette, then jams it into his mouth and rubs his hands together. He's standing in the sun but he can't shake off the damn chill he's caught, can't get his fingers to warm up, can't shake off the feeling like something is hovering just over his shoulder, watching and waiting.
* * *
Wednesday
"I talked to your friend Ray on the weekend," Gerard says to Bob instead of hello when they finally manage to sneak out for smoke breaks at the same time.
"Yeah?" Bob holds out his lighter before Gerard can even ask.
"Yeah. Nice guy. I can see why you guys are friends. He says 'hi,' by the way."
"Uh-huh." Gerard can feel Bob looking at him. It makes him feel like a bug pinned to a fucking board. "What else did he say?"
"Funny story," Gerard says, in the kind of voice that suggests it isn't funny at all. "Turns out my dumbass little brother's been playing with a Ouija board I gave him and managed to insult a ghost's mom or something, and now he and Ray both think I'm getting haunted in revenge."
"Whoops," Bob deadpans.
It startles Gerard into a loud gasp of nervous laughter. "Yeah, whoops. Fuck."
"Do you believe it?"
"I never did before," Gerard hedges.
"But you do now?" Bob looks pretty skeptical. Gerard doesn't blame him.
"I don't want to." Gerard ashes his cigarette so hard the cherry almost falls off.
"But you do."
"I guess? But that's crazy, right? Believing in ghosts and shit?"
Bob looks at him for a moment, then sucks hard on his cigarette. "Well, didn't Sherlock Holmes say something like if... fuck, how does that one go, you know, if you know something's impossible, it's not... no, fuck, that's not it."
"Oh, dude, you fucking mangled that. It's supposed to go, Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Gerard punctuates his impromptu recitation with emphatic waves of his hand, and Bob has to step back quickly to avoid catching the lit end of Gerard's cigarette with his face.
"How do you even... I can't believe you have that memorized, right off the top of your head like that."
Gerard shrugs. "I read a lot as a kid."
"Guess so," Bob says. "I didn't."
Gerard doesn't know what to say to that, so he just focuses on the last of his smoke before he grinds it out under his heel. He's pretty sure he gets Bob's drift, anyway.
* * *
When Gerard finishes the cell he's been working on for almost half an hour, he looks up from his light table and blinks at the ceiling to clear the spots away from his vision. He's almost done for the day, but all he has to look forward to is the shitty drive home, a microwave dinner, and killing time somehow before he watches The Daily Show and then goes to bed. What he really wants is to have dinner with Frank and then watch crappy TV together on the couch for a few hours, but Frank is apparently still not talking to him, if the ongoing lack of response to his texts and voicemail messages is anything to go by.
Gerard sighs and dials Frank's number again, but hangs up when it goes to voicemail after four rings. He realizes then that he can't quite remember when the last time he actually talked to Frank was, and flips through his call log and tries not to count the number of times he's called Frank in the last... six days? Gerard squints one eye shut as he counts back to find that six days ago was Friday.
Jesus, he thinks. He can't even begin to piece together what he might have said, what he might have done, that Frank would be avoiding him. Fuck, did they break up? Did Frank dump him? Or is Frank just so pissed off that he needs to shut Gerard out until he cools down? That'd happened once before, and Gerard hates to think about how awful those four days were before Frank called and was ready to talk to him again.
Gerard tucks his phone back into his pocket and glares back down at his light table. He's not very good at waiting, but he can do it if he has to.
His phone rings a moment later, and hope swells in his chest. He digs it out of his pocket in a hurry and flips it open without even checking the caller ID.
"Hello?" he answers.
"Hi, is Gerard there?"
It's not Frank's voice. It's some guy Gerard can't place, and he sounds kind of angry. Gerard's heart sinks. "This is Gerard," he tells the guy.
"Hi, Gerard," the guy says, "my name is Brian, and I work with Frank."
"Oh, I've heard him talking about you," Gerard tells him absently.
"Nothing good, I'm sure," Brian says. "He talks about you, too, so let's call it even. Anyway, is Frank okay? He's missed his last couple shifts at work and hasn't called in about it, and nobody can get ahold of him." Brian sounds surprisingly anxious, Gerard thinks, for somebody who by all accounts spends entire shifts giving Frank a hard time.
"I have no idea," Gerard admits. "He's not talking to me at the moment, so he obviously hasn't said anything."
"Oh," Brian sighs. "Thanks anyway. Sorry for bothering you."
"Yeah," Gerard says, "sorry I couldn't help."
Brian hangs up, and Gerard stares down at his phone. What the fuck, Frank, he thinks, and then Jesus, what happened that Frank's freaking out so bad?
* * *
Thursday
Gerard bolts awake sometime mid-day. There's a clock ticking loudly, right in his ear. When he tries to open his eyes to find the fucking clock and stop it from fucking ticking, he finds that he can't.
His eyelids are stuck shut.
He concentrates on trying to pull them open with as much force as he can muster, and finally, finally one peels free with a stinging jolt of pain. When he touches his eye carefully, he can feel the dry crackled flake of whatever it was holding the lid shut. He feels his way down his cheek towards his chin, and the blood-because what else would it be, he thinks bitterly-seems to be covering his entire fucking face, which is disgusting and terrifying and a lot of other ings he just isn't awake enough for. His mouth is so dry but he's afraid to lick his lips in case it's there, too, and he tastes it. He shudders at the thought.
Once he can focus his one open eye, he squints down at his fingers, which are vaguely red. One has a small pile of eyelashes stuck to the tip. Gerard groans and looks down at the rest of his hands, which are thickly crusted with a layer of rusty red-brown that he's pretty sure no amount of scrubbing will get completely off.
Where the hell did this all come from? he wonders. He doesn't think it's his; he doesn't hurt anywhere except for a dull throbbing behind his left eye, doesn't see any gaping wounds when he squints down at his arms and chest.
What he does see is that it's not just his face, not just his hands-his entire body is covered in it. It's not a uniform layer, though; even with a single eye, even with his vision still blurred with the lingering traces of sleep, Gerard can see the lines of movement through the dark red surface, the areas where it's thicker and where it's thinner. He can see the hardened edges of waves and ripples from where the blood must have splashed on him, what the fucking fuck.
Gerard groans and squeezes his eyes shut and wishes very hard for it to all go away.
It doesn't.
The clock is still ticking its steady tick, but when Gerard turns to his bedside table to find it there's nothing there, just his digital alarm clock flashing 5:17 at him in baleful red LCD. Power failure, Gerard thinks, because it's surely much later (or earlier) than that; his room is filled with the kind of sickly daytime sunlight that has to force its way through dense clouds before it can come in the windows.
The clock keeps ticking. It sounds like it's right next to him.
Gerard jerks his body around to look at the bed next to him, the other pillow.
Nothing.
Gerard throws his pillows to the foot of the bed, but wherever the clock is, it's not hiding under his pillows.
He's beginning to suspect there may not actually be a clock, and it scares the fuck out of him. He shivers as he breaks out into goosebumps, all the little hairs on his body standing up from head to toe.
He pulls back his blankets anyway so he can search the bed for the goddamned clock, but all he finds are sheets soaked through with dark blood.
Gerard's stomach lurches in disgust and he jumps out of bed as fast as he can, running for the bathroom. He turns on the shower, cranking the faucet as hot as it will go, and he lets it run while he stares at himself in the mirror.
He barely recognizes himself for all blood caked on his face like some kind of grotesque mask. He starts making a face in disgust, but stops when he catches sight of it in the mirror. He looks like a monster.
He jumps into the shower, standing under the full blast of the spray even though it's not as hot as he wants it, and just lets the water hit him. When he goes to run a hand through his hair, it gets caught in knots and snarls and comes out with a clot of blood stuck to the ridge of his knuckles. Gerard shakes it free and cringes when it sticks to the side of the tub.
The hot water lasts a long time before it runs out, and even when it does Gerard keeps standing there, letting it beat down on his skin as he shivers and keeps scrubbing. The water swirling around his feet is still faintly pink, and he doesn't want to get out of the shower until it's running clear.
Finally, finally, when the shower is ice-cold and Gerard is seriously starting to consider just getting out and dealing with whatever hasn't washed off, the water running down his legs and into the drain fades to the palest pink, and then the pink drops out and it's just water again. Gerard heaves a huge sigh of relief and turns off the shower more firmly than is strictly necessary, then jumps out and wraps himself in three towels, clutching them tightly around himself. He wonders if he's shivering hard enough that he could just shake himself dry.
He wanders back into his bedroom to grab a blanket off his bed to add to the layers of towels, but stops dead halfway across the room when he realizes that all his blankets are kind of soaked in the same blood he just spent God knows how long scrubbing off.
Gerard glances at his clock to try to get a sense of how long he was in the shower.
The numbers blink 3:48 at him.
Gerard blinks back at it, shakes his head to try to refocus his eyes or something. 3:48 can't be right.
But that's what the clock says, the red numbers clear in the dim light of the room.
Gerard just stands there and waits to see what the clock does next. 3:49, it tells him a few dozen seconds later.
The steady blink of the numbers wavers then, skips a beat, and then flicks out. The numbers flicker back on tentatively after a moment, then blink out again. When they come back on a heartbeat later, they read 9:52.
Oh my god, I can't deal with this, Gerard thinks, fighting off the panic rising up from his stomach to clench around his heart. He turns away from his clock and finds himself facing his desk. There's a canvas propped up on another makeshift easel, because there's always a fucking canvas when there's blood.
This time, though, it's facing away from the room.
Gerard approaches his desk slowly, half-afraid something's going to jump out and grab him. He reaches out very carefully, takes hold of the top hinge of the easel. He holds his breath as he turns it around.
The canvas is completely blank.
Gerard stumbles back and doubles over, as if the canvas had lashed out and punched him in the gut. He's overwhelmed with dread; foreboding breathes doom down his neck to clench around his heart, to sit like a stone in his stomach. He runs out of his room, dropping two of his towels and stubbing half his toes as he goes, pausing only to scoop up his bag with his phone and his sketchbook. He slams the door behind him.
It isn't until he's sitting on his couch staring out his window that he realizes he still isn't dressed. He bites back a curse and gets up to stick his head into the bathroom to see if he's left any clothes on the floor. He finds a pair of pajama pants balled up in the corner, and if they smell a little musty then he can just live with it. He's pretty sure there are at least a couple hoodies hanging in the front closet, so he goes and grabs one and settles back onto the couch again, his heart beating much faster than he's comfortable with.
Gerard closes his eyes and breathes in deep, trying to force his heart to stop racing. He thinks about calling in sick to work, but decides it's too late to bother and he'll just deal with it tomorrow.
He calls Mikey instead. He vaguely wonders, while he waits for Mikey to answer, if he should have tried calling Frank at all, but decides he'd rather not have Frank ignoring his fucking call at this particular moment.
"I'm at work, what?" Mikey hisses when he eventually picks up.
"Um," Gerard says. He has no idea how to put this shit into words. "I'm so fucked," he tries. It's true, anyway, if not particularly descriptive.
Mikey sighs; it crackles against Gerard's ear. "Why?"
"The thing with the blood happened again, way fuckin' worse than last time."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, and I have this feeling like something really fucking bad's about to happen."
"What's going to happen?" Mikey is still whispering, but he at least sounds less desperate to hurry Gerard off the line.
Gerard presses his hand over his eyes. "I don't know, Mikey. Fuck, I'm going crazy, I'm-"
"Hey, hey, look, are you at home?"
"Yeah."
"I'll come over as soon as I'm done at work, okay?"
"Okay," Gerard says. He's really glad Mikey believes him, that he's got Mikey on his side for this... this whole fucking ordeal, is what it is. Like some kind of fucking Biblical trial or something.
"Maybe you could try going outside and getting some air?"
Gerard looks down at his ratty flannel pants. "Maybe."
Mikey says something away from the phone, then, his words muffled and indistinct. When he comes back on the line, he says, "Look, I really have to go, but I'll call you when I'm leaving work, okay?"
"Okay."
It isn't until Mikey's already hung up that Gerard realizes that he has no idea what time it is, and so has no idea how long he's going to have to wait for Mikey. He glances down at his phone, which tells him that it's 12:00.
He looks out the window at the sky, grey behind an unbroken curtain of clouds. It doesn't really feel like noon, but maybe that's just because he slept way more than he's used to, because he woke up so late. Anyway, he's got a lot of time to kill.
Coffee, he thinks, and gets up to go put a pot on. He glances at the microwave as he walks past. 12:00, it says in little blue numbers.
Gerard stops dead in the middle of his kitchen to stare at the microwave. When he snaps out of it, he runs back to the other room to look at his phone, which still says 12:00.
Gerard's stomach lurches when he looks back at the microwave. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. His microwave has always been ten minutes faster than every other clock he has, ever since Frank set the time off his own phone after he got sick of weeks of Gerard not setting the time after he unplugged it by mistake that one time.
Gerard crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the kitchen wall to watch the microwave. The numbers aren't flashing which means the time must be set, but after he counts to sixty three times in his head, the time still hasn't changed. When he realizes that it's not going to, he rushes to unplug the microwave.
The numbers blink out, and Gerard breathes a sigh of relief.
Gerard spends the rest of the afternoon alternating between pacing the narrow hallway of his apartment and trying to watch TV. He jabs at the remote and the channels flip by in bright flashes, one after another after another after another as he rotates through them. Nothing holds his attention for more than a minute or two at a time, and daytime TV sucks anyway.
Eventually, Gerard's phone beeps with a new text message. Leavng work, on my way, it says, from Mikey.
Almost as soon as Gerard drops the phone back onto the couch, there's a tickle against the back of his neck, like a cold wind just blew by.
Gerard knows for a fact all his windows are closed.
The wind brushes against him again, and his skin prickles as all the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up and his fingers tingle and start going numb. All of a sudden he's gripped by the most intense feeling of dread, of terror, of overwhelming wrongness he's ever felt. It sinks into his bones and creeps with cold fingers through his veins.
Gerard's chest goes tight, then, like his ribs are trying to squeeze his heart to a pulp, and he very, very carefully does not freak out. Instead, he picks up his phone again and calls Mikey back.
"Don't come over," he blurts out as soon as Mikey picks up.
"...Um?" Mikey sounds confused. Gerard totally doesn't blame him.
"You don't need to come over," Gerard presses. "Something really bad is about to happen, I can feel it, I don't want-"
"You said that before," Mikey points out, "and I really don't think you should be alone right now, Gee. I'm on my way, okay? I'll be there in like twenty."
Mikey hangs up and the line goes dead.
Gerard gets up and starts pacing, trying to shake off the mood that clings tight and won't let go.
It feels like only a minute before Mikey arrives, knocking on Gerard's door in the same erratic pattern he always uses.
Gerard is about to shout that it's open before he realizes that it isn't, so he peels himself off the couch to go unlock the door.
Mikey sweeps in, dropping his messenger bag on top of Gerard's pile of shoes and dropping his hoodie on top of his bag.
"You look like hell," he says, wrinkling his nose as he eyes Gerard.
"Thanks." Gerard glares at him, but Mikey doesn't seem to notice.
"You okay?" Mikey asks as he pushes past Gerard to go into the kitchen and start digging through the fridge.
"I don't know," Gerard says.
"You need more groceries," Mikey announces, staring at the block of cheese he's holding like he's not sure if it's about to attack him or not.
"You need to stop eating all my food," Gerard tells him.
"Yeah, yeah," Mikey waves it off, and he pulls out a loaf of br-
-nd Geoff said that would be a terrible idea," Mikey sniffs, then bites into his sandwich.
Gerard blinks, scrubs at his eyes. Sure, he's in the habit of tuning out Mikey when he's talking about the latest drama at work, but he's not sure how he missed Mikey putting together an entire sandwich.
"Have you eaten today?" Mikey asks after he's finished chewing.
Gerard shakes his head.
"You'd probably feel bett-
-takes the can of Chef Boyardee Mikey hands him and goes to the drawer for a can opener.
Wait, Gerard thinks, this isn't right. He bites his lip as he opens the can and empties it onto the pot that wasn't on the stove last time he'd looked.
The feeling that something is so incredibly wrong flares up again in his stomach, shoots upward to throb in his forehead like it's about to explode.
His vision goes grey around the edges, then black. The empty spaces creep in until everything is dark and he can't see. No, no, no Gerard's thoughts race around in a panic. What the, what's, stop-
-Mikey's looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face. "Are you okay?" he asks gently, stepping closer to put a han-
-hat's going on, Gerard?"
Gerard looks down. He's got his hand wrapped so tightly around Mikey's wrist that Mikey's hand has turned a sickly shade of mottled pink-blue.
Gerard lets go quickly, jerking his hand away and sticking it in the pocket of his hoodie.
"You should leave," Gerard whispers. He clenches his hand into a fist and takes a step back.
"What's going on?" Mikey asks again. He sounds concerned, but scared.
Gerard's heart sinks. He's scared of me, what's happening, what the fuck...
His vision goes grey again, like a screen dropping between one breath and the next, but it doesn't black all the way out.
He feels himself take a step forward, towards Mikey. Wait, he thinks, I didn't-
He takes another.
Mikey takes a step back.
Gerard tries to take a step back, but can't. It's as if his legs don't even register the thought. No, Gerard thinks, panicked. No, no no no, why can't I move, what's going on?
He takes another step forward. His head aches with a nauseating pain, the hot heat stabbing in his temples in time with his racing heart.
NO!, he shouts-tries to shout-pushes out with his mind as hard as he can, trying to force back the thick fog keeping him separate from his body. "NO!" he shouts again, and this time it echoes in his ears, real sound waves forced from his own mouth.
Mikey gapes at him, all pale and cringing, his eyes huge behind his glasses.
"You have to get out of here," Gerard tells him, and he barely recognizes his own voice. It's hoarse and low and wavering.
His vision starts to swim and he shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut, rubs his eyes with his knuckles, but nothing works. "Go, Mikey."
Mikey keep staring at hi-
-re scaring me, Gerard," Mikey says, his voice tight.
Gerard just looks at him for a moment before he realizes that he's back in himself, and he moves towards Mikey, who shrinks back away from him.
"You need to leave," Gerard hisses, grabbing him by the shoulders and hauling him across the apartment towards the front door. Mikey is dead weight in his arms; not struggling but not cooperating, either. He's dumb with shock.
"I am kicking you the fuck out, Mikey, seriously, you have to get out, shit is going so bad-
-t the fuck are you doing? Let go of me! Gerard!" Mikey's shout is heated and verging on shrill and Gerard barely has time to register, Thank God he's snapped out of it, before he realizes what exactly is going o-
* * *
Friday
Gerard wakes up to a bedroom full of warm sunlight and the feeling that he's just had his best sleep in years. He feels calm, relaxed, and above all else, he's happy. It's kind of weird, really, but he's not about to start complaining. He fucking deserves a good morning, these days. He swings his feet out of bed and wanders into the bathroom, humming absently as he goes. He's got this big warm feeling, right in his gut, that whatever the fuck has been happening is done and over. No more inexplicable blackouts, no more blood-soaked mornings, no more creepy-ass paintings.
It's a really fucking good morning, actually.
It's only when he's halfway through brushing his teeth that he stops to look at his reflection, and he almost chokes on his mouthful of toothpaste when he sees the faint trickle of dried blood under his left nostril.
For fuck's sake, he thinks as he wipes the blood off with a wet finger. I thought...
It's only then that he realizes that he can't remember anything that happened the night before. Can't remember the evening, or late afternoon. Which is really weird, because the blackouts never started that early before. And it's even weirder because he's never woken up from a blackout feeling this good. That can't be right.
When he gets back into his room, he notices the canvas propped up on his desk. It's facing out again, and it's practically radiating malice from its dark surface.
His heart just sinks, right through to the fucking floor, and he concentrates very hard on keeping the twisting in his stomach in check.
The painting is another figure, a man, this one more human than any have been previously, but it's still oily black and harsh red like all of its predecessors. The shades of red in this one are entirely the sickly rust-brown of new blood.
Gerard knows in his gut that this time, it's someone else's blood.
The figure, though, this one is achingly familiar, differently and more than any of the ones in the other paintings. He can't stop himself from reaching out to trace the line of the man's jaw, the narrow cheeks. He knows he knows who it is; he feels like he knows it somewhere deep in his bones, but it's stuck behind some sort of fog. The fine features of the face are lost in the messy technique, the broad smears of paint and the ridges of fingerprints left behind in dried liquids.
It isn't until he tears his gaze away from the face that he notices the rest of the details-because while the rest of the painting suffers the same sloppy execution, the man's fate is abundantly clear.
There's a gaping hole where his stomach should be, ridged in dried clots of blood and thick smears of paint. Coming down-falling-from the bottom are thick smooth streaks of red that gleam in the morning light.
And that's when then Gerard realizes that he does actually remember last night, or at least, he can remember pieces of it, fleeting snapshots of moments frozen outside time.
Mikey, he thinks as he remembers a flash of light off a pair of two-tone glasses. His brother was here, he came over to check on Gerard because he was freaking out, and then-
And then there's a surge of images rolling through his brain.
He gets a flash of a fist swinging-
again and again and again-
-and there are noises, grunting and gasping and a sick crack.
He looks down at his hand, and sure enough, there's a dark blue-purple bruise blooming across his knuckles.
Oh, shit, he thinks, and closes his eyes. He's hit with another set of images, then.
Another flash, but this time off of bright metal-
He's holding something, it's clutched tight in his fist and he's swinging it around-
Somebody is shouting, and the shouts turn to screams, harsh and desperate-
Heat and wetness spilling down over his hands, a river, a flood of it-
-and then there is silence.
Gerard gasps for breath, tipping forward to brace himself against the edge of his desk. His head is heavy and he lets it hang, lets his hair fall forward to hide his face, a curtain between himself and the painting.
But the images keep coming.
Mikey? he thinks when he gets an image of a long, long shadow, a glimpse of skittering legs and knock knees and a gangly body falling, crawling across the floor, leaving behind a dark gleaming trail of...
Of blood.
Through the roaring in his ears, Gerard can hear that goddamn fucking clock ticking again, but faintly, like it's buried under something in another room.
Gerard looks back at the painting with growing horror, a whole new set of images-memories-flash across his brain.
-strangled shouts, hoarse and thin and furious-
-hands clenched tight into white-knuckled fists, beating down on his shoulders and arms before slowing to shake weakly-
-sharp wooden shards on the floor under his knees, their lacquered white surface scratched and dingy under long smears of blood-
-big hazel eyes going wide and then glazing over-
The images stop abruptly, and the sudden blankness sends Gerard reeling back to trip over his own feet. He lands sprawled out on the floor and he immediately curls up into a ball, trying to keep his sudden gut-wrenching heaves from turning into full-on puking as his thoughts tumble over and over and over. Oh my god, oh my god, what the fuck happened, what have I fucking done, what the fuck is going on-
The roaring in his ears starts up again, like all his blood is rushing by at top speed, and it drowns out even the sound of his own thoughts. When it finally dies down, he pushes himself up onto his hands and knees. He opens his eyes so he can find his way out of his room, and gasps.
The painting has somehow moved from the desk to end up on the floor, and it's propped up against the leg of the chair right in front of him.
It stares at him from a dead, white face and Gerard finally recognizes it-recognizes him.
Gerard's arms give out from under him as he stares helplessly into his brother's painted eyes.
Somewhere very far off in the distance, the clock stops ticking.
Saturday
Gerard wakes up at the crack of dawn feeling like death warmed over. It takes him a moment to realize he's in his own bedroom, in his own apartment. He was going to spend the night at Frank's, he remembers, and he went straight to Frank's apartment after work, and Frank made dinner and played guitar and Gerard remembers pulling Frank into the bedroom, and then nothing after that. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucking fuck... He stares up at the shadows on the ceiling and tries to piece together how he got home. There's just... nothing.
His room is still mostly dark and he can't figure out why he's awake until he hears the ticking of a clock. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to figure out where it's coming from. Maybe the apartment next door? The walls are kind of thin, after all. But the ticking is really loud, so loud it almost sounds like it's actually in his bedroom.
He really isn't in the mood to try to deal with this. He hasn't had a drink in a week now, and he's completely sure that he isn't using again (if only because his bank balance hasn't dropped the way it would if he was buying even half as much as he used to), but he has a splitting headache that throbs in time with his heartbeat and makes his vision go grey at the edges. Was it even worth it to stop, Gerard thinks bitterly, if I wake up feeling like shit anyway?
Getting out of bed is a monumental challenge-he rolls onto his side and swings his feet onto the floor. Then he sits up slowly, cradling his head with one bent arm as he stands tentatively and hobbles hunched-over towards the bathroom. His stomach feels okay, at least, but the headache is so bad that he might puke anyway.
He pours himself a glass of water, still bent almost double at the waist, and it isn't until he stands up to drink it that he gets a look at himself in the mirror.
He drops the glass in shock, barely even feels it as the cold water soaks through his pants and the rug beneath his feet.
The bottom half of his face is just crusted with dried blood. When he brings a hand up to touch it, to pick a flake off his chin, he sees more of it under his nails, rimming his cuticles, worked into the folds of his knuckles.
Gerard leans closer to the mirror to stare down his reflection, to try to see if he was clawing at his face or something-what else could have happened that he'd have so much blood on his hands? But his skin seems intact under his touch, looks normal as it gets exposed when he carefully picks more of the flaking blood off, and it doesn't sting or hurt or ache.
It's only when he's leaning back from the dingy mirror to take in his whole face that he notices the wide smear of blood across his bare chest. He tucks his chin into his neck to look down at it. It almost looks like... it looks like it was left by a hand, by four fingers raked across his skin. But the skin's not broken there, either. He might have done it to himself in his sleep during the nosebleed, he rationalizes, but then again the angle is pretty weird, and he would have had to bend his wrist just so, and...
But who else could have done it? Gerard asks himself, frowning at his reflection.
His headache throbs, then, hot and sharp, and Gerard collapses against the sink and throws up, his stomach twisting and clenching and spasming as it forces its contents up and out. He squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn't have to watch as the bile splashes into the sink. He's terrified it might be bloody, too, and just doesn't want to know.
When he finally, finally stops heaving, he straightens back up as best he can and drinks a sip of cool water out of his cupped hands. It feels good in his mouth but when he swallows it burns in his throat-it's raw from his retching. Gerard spits out the rest of his mouthful of water and heads back into his room.
There's a new painting on his desk, propped up against a makeshift easel of trade paperbacks and a coffee mug. A new figure leers out at him, grinning and black-eyed and evil.
Gerard can't shake the feeling that he knows this figure, too, and it's right on the tip of his tongue-right at the front of his brain-but it's like there's this thick fog keeping him from putting his finger on it.
He creeps a little closer, trying to get a better look despite the fact it makes his stomach churn and his skin go clammy. His heart starts pounding in double-time.
It's all shades of red and vivid brush strokes, the paint's surface scratched and gouged and spattered. Gerard glances down at his fingers, which he didn't scrub enough to get rid of all the blood when he washed his hands, but the colour's not quite the same. He can tell even in the dim light that the canvas is drenched in Crimson Lake red, and the empty tube of oil paint on the floor next to his desk chair confirms it.
There are dark streaks running through the paint, though.
Gerard knows, right in the pit of his stomach, that the dark streaks are blood. He's too freaked out to figure out how to confirm it, isn't sure he'd even want to if he could.
He lifts the canvas gingerly, turns it so it's face-down on his desk even though he's sure the paint is still wet, and he backs away slowly, a growing feeling of dread gnawing holes through his insides.
* * *
Gerard's headache subsides as his room gets brighter and brighter with daylight, and by the time it's about ten, he feels almost completely himself again.
He's still insanely freaked out, though, and still hasn't managed to scrub all the blood out from under his nails and from the ridges of his knuckles, even though he spent twenty minutes at the sink running almost-too-hot water over his hands. He works around it by not letting his hands enter his field of vision at all, and it's worth it even when he has to clean up a giant scoop of coffee grounds that ends up on the floor by accident when he can't bring himself to look when he's trying to get them into the basket in his coffee maker.
He turns his phone over and over in his hands as he thinks about calling Frank to ask if he has any idea what the fuck happened last night. The fact that he woke up in his own bed and not Frank's is a pretty big hint that that things didn't go so well, though. Gerard squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember if they fought, tries to remember if Frank threw him out or if he left for some other reason, tries to remember anything about what he might have done. All he gets is a weak flicker of an image of Frank's face below his, looking up at him with wide dark eyes, his mouth open and pink.
No.
He's not going to call Frank. He can go another day or two before he needs to find out what he's fucked up this time.
He ends up calling Mikey instead, just before noon. He's got a sneaking suspicion that he's going to wake Mikey up, but tough shit. He can't deal with being alone in his apartment any longer. There are too many moving shadows in the corners, too many weird noises in the walls.
He has to call three times before Mikey actually picks up.
"Finally," Gerard breathes out in relief.
"Wha? Gerard? What?"
"Dude, look, I'm sorry I woke you up, but I am seriously freaking out here and I need to get out of here, I need to see another living, breathing human being or I am going to go fuckin' crazy, and I-"
"Oh my god," Mikey cuts him off. "Can you give me five minutes? I need coffee. Seriously, you woke me up."
"Sorry," Gerard mumbles, "I can call back."
"No, it's okay," Mikey says, and Gerard hears a muffled thump in the background, and then the sound of a tap running. "I just, ugh, fuck, what time is it?"
"Noon?"
"Oh. Huh, it's not as early as I thought."
"Late night?" Gerard asks.
"Yeah," Mikey agrees, but doesn't elaborate.
Gerard can hear the unmistakable sound of a coffee maker coming to life through the phone line, and turns instinctively to look at his own, which has maybe just less than a cup left in it. He pours it into the nearest mug without checking to see if it's clean first, and drains it in three long gulps.
Mikey is still mostly silent all the while, but then Gerard hears some clinking and then the sound of what is possibly Mikey putting his phone down on the counter or table or something.
"Sorry," Mikey says a minute later. "I have coffee now. What were you saying before?"
Somehow, Gerard's frantic desperation has ebbed in the last few minutes as he listened to Mikey making coffee, and it takes him a moment to recapture what he'd been trying to say when he'd first called. "Um," he starts, "so the weirdest fuckin' shit keeps happening to me."
"Yeah?" Mikey sounds vaguely interested, which is a big reaction, Gerard thinks.
"Yeah, like, um. Uh, man, this is going to sound like total bullshit, but I swear to god it's true, and I'm not making it up, and it's kind of scaring the shit out of me, and-"
"What happened?" Mikey interrupts, sounding almost excited now to hear it.
"When I woke up this morning?" he starts, and then stops to try to figure out how to put the next part.
"Yeah?"
"I, uh. I was, like, completely covered in blood."
Mikey is silent for a long time before he says, "Whose was it?"
"Mine, I guess. I don't know."
"Oh." Gerard can hear Mikey swilling coffee like a total pig, but the sounds of him gulping and putting his mug down and refilling it are kind of reassuring in their normalcy.
"It's happened before," Gerard says slowly. "Today wasn't the first time."
"Was it your blood the other times?"
Mikey is such a morbid little shit, Gerard thinks. "Yes. Maybe. I don't know who else it would belong to."
"You're right," Mikey says thoughtfully. "That is really fucking weird,"
"Thanks for the confirmation," Gerard says dryly, and eyes his coffee maker longingly. He's finished the last of it, now, and he could make more but then he'd have to look at his hands or clean up another mess or, god forbid, both, and he just can't deal with that. Maybe he'll put on gloves and go to Starbucks or something.
"So look," Gerard continues, "I was talking to this guy I know at work, and he thinks it's some sort of crazy paranormal shit or something, I don't know, I don't believe in that shit or anything, but."
"But what?"
"He told me that I should go talk to this friend of his, his old roommate or something, who apparently knows everything about all that kind of stuff."
"Yeah?" Mikey sounds even more interested now than he did before when they were talking about the blood that may or may not have been Gerard's.
"So I suddenly feel like I really want to go talk to this guy. Like, today. Right now."
"Couldn't hurt," Mikey says. "You want me to come with you, right?"
"Yeah, read my mind why don't you," Gerard laughs a little. He doesn't have it in him for much more than a nervous chuckle, but he means what little he can muster. "You don't have any other plans or anything, do you?"
"Nothing important," Mikey assures him, "I can totally reschedule, no big deal. This is kind of cool, actually."
"Yeah," Gerard says. "We'll see about that. I'll come pick you up, okay? And we can stop for coffee."
"Go on, twist my arm." Gerard can practically hear Mikey's smile through the phone. He's glad at least one of them is enjoying this.
* * *
Mikey starts sniggering as soon as Gerard pulls his car to a stop in front of the storefront with the address on the business card Bob had given him. "'The Faerie Castle'? Really?"
"Shut up," Gerard snaps at him. "I bet they have unicorn figurines, why don't you shut up and go look."
Mikey keeps laughing, but doesn't leave Gerard's side as they step through the doorway into the tiny shop. There's a woman in a plain dress and lace apron behind the counter, so after a moment of waffling in the doorway, Gerard heads straight over to ask her if Ray is in.
"He's in the back, dear," she says, patting his arm and then pointing to a beaded curtain in the far wall of the store.
"Thanks," Gerard says, and is pleased but not surprised when Mikey continues to follow him through the shop instead of pulling one of his usual tricks, like claiming allergies and a desperate need to wait outside.
Gerard pushes through the surprisingly-heavy curtain sectioning off the back of the store and is immediately overwhelmed by the smell of stale incense. The tiny room is cramped with shelves tilting at odd angles, filled with books and crystals and carved wooden boxes and statuettes and jars of incense sticks and at least half a dozen things that Gerard can't identify at first glance. He makes a face, and then he spots a guy standing in the corner, arranging something on a shelf.
"Ray?" Gerard calls.
The guy turns around and smiles at them. "Yeah, that's me. You must be Bob's friend," Ray says, and puts down the pile of books he's holding before offering his hand to Mikey. He's wearing an ancient Iron Maiden shirt and his hair is enormous and he looks neither touchy-feely nor particularly threatening. "Good to meet you," the guy says.
"I'm Mikey," Mikey says, taking Ray's hand and shaking it lightly. "I think you're supposed to be talking to my brother." He lets go of Ray's hand and points to Gerard.
"Hi." Gerard's face is carefully neutral as he sticks his hand out at Ray. "I'm Gerard, and yeah, I work with Bob, he sent me your way." Gerard is pleased to note that Ray's handshake is firm and dry, and he starts to feel that maybe, maybe this guy isn't going to be a complete wackjob.
"Why don't you tell me what's going on," Ray says as he turns back towards the room, making a follow-me gesture with one hand. When they round a bookcase in the middle of the room, Gerard can see that there are two threadbare armchairs tucked together in the corner. "Bob didn't tell me much about your situation," Ray continues as he gestures that Gerard and Mikey should sit, "just that you think you might have a bad ghost." He sits on a stool on the floor between the chairs, resting his elbows on his knees and looking up at Gerard.
"That's one way to put it," Gerard mutters as he settles down in the chair. The cushion under his ass is a little lumpy but mostly comfortable, but the upholstery reeks like the air in the room, except ten times worse. Gerard tries not to breathe through his nose as he starts telling Ray his story. He ignores Mikey fidgeting with his phone in the other chair, instead pushing himself to concentrate on remembering as many details as he can without falling into the temptation to maybe embellish things a little. He's not trying to impress Ray, after all; he's trying to get his fucking life back. Plus he gets the fucking heebie-jeebies bad enough as it is anyway without trying to make anything sound worse. He still has blood under his nails that no amount of scrubbing would get out. He shows Ray his hands when the thought crosses his mind.
Ray takes Gerard's wrist and pulls his hand closer to his face so he can squint at Gerard's nails, at the pink-tinged creases in his knuckles, at the cracks in the dry skin of the back of his hands from where Gerard spent twenty minutes scrubbing as hard as he could.
"Have you done anything that would piss off the spirit world?" Ray asks with a distinct lack of humour, and it takes everything Gerard has to not burst out laughing right in his face.
"Fuck no, man," Gerard says, "I mean, I draw cartoons of vampires and zombies and shit sometimes, but it's not like I'm invoking them or talking shit about their moms, you know?"
Mikey makes a choked noise and Gerard turns to look at him, but instead of finding his little brother doubled over in silent laughter like he was expecting, he actually finds him looking remarkably... guilty?
"So, um," Mikey starts when he notices Gerard and Ray staring at him, "you know that Ouija board you got me for my birthday last year, Gerard?"
"Oh for fuck's sake, Mikey! That shit doesn't work! It isn't real," Gerard bursts out, his brain already spinning out ways to best to exact revenge on a little brother who won't stop being a total jerk today.
"It doesn't work for you because you don't believe in it," Mikey tells him. "Anyway, so you know that girl Alicia I've been sort-of seeing?"
Gerard nods and glances over at Ray, who looks frighteningly intent on Mikey's story.
"Yeah, so, she came over for the first time a couple weeks ago, okay? And she was admiring the Ouija board-because you did pick a really nice one, even if you think it's all just fake-so I was like, 'Hey, do you want to take that out and see if we can talk to any ghosts,' and she was pretty into it, so we, you know, turned off the lights and lit candles and everything, and, uh..." Mikey trails off and starts blushing.
"What, Mikey?" Gerard prompts after he's been silent for a moment too long.
"We talked to a ghost," Mikey mumbles.
"Bullshit!" Gerard leans forward in his seat to smack Mikey's leg. Mikey brushes him away, but still looks kind of guilty.
"What happened?" Ray asks gently, pulling his stool closer to Mikey's chair.
"So, um," Mikey blushes harder and Gerard can tell he doesn't want to admit to whatever he's about to say, "I was maybe trying to impress Alicia, you know? And... yeah, it's entirely possible that I pissed off the spirit world."
"Mikey!" Gerard hits him again, harder this time, and scowls. "Stop dicking around, for fuck's sake."
"Fuck off, Gee, I actually did that, okay? I talked to a fucking ghost, I said some things I shouldn't have. Pretty dumb, right?" Mikey breaks off and starts picking at a loose thread at the ankle of his jeans. When he starts talking again, he's quieter. "Is all that shit actually happening to you? Like, all the blood, and the creepy paintings?"
Gerard sighs. "Yeah, I told you about that on the phone this morning, remember?"
Mikey wrinkles his nose and stares at his shoes. "I kinda didn't believe you then. Sorry."
The room is silent for a moment as Mikey sits and looks sullen, Ray looks lost in thought, and Gerard tries to figure out if Mikey is playing some kind of elaborate joke or something.
"Why," Gerard eventually says, and then loses his train of thought and clears his throat and tries again. "Why would I be the one getting haunted, if Mikey is the one who pissed them off?"
"Revenge," Mikey and Ray say at the same time. Mikey chuckles nervously, and Ray just looks somber.
"You gave him the board," Ray points out.
"You know how it works, Gerard, you've seen enough horror movies," Mikey offers.
"Yeah," Gerard says. "Fuck."
They fall into silence again. Gerard stares at his fingers, suddenly unable to look away from this immediate evidence that something is going on. Shit, Gerard thinks. He doesn't believe in this shit, not ghosts, not spirits, not Ouija boards or séances or talking to the goddamned dead, but Mikey doesn't look like he's fucking around and Gerard honestly can't come up with a better explanation for what's been happening to him, and... shit. Just, shit. Shit shit shit.
He shivers as he picks at the last trace of the red crust still clinging to his knuckle, and he absently zips his hoodie the rest of the way up. It doesn't help, though; the chill clings to his neck, his back, his hands, seeps down into his toes. Gerard shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets and very deliberately doesn't think about it.
"I could apologize," Mikey says then. Gerard looks up at him. Mikey looks more serious than Gerard's ever seen him, with his mouth pressed into a thin line and his eyes hard. He's sitting hunched in on himself, his shoulders up almost to his ears, his knees tucked in close under his chin. "I could go back on the Ouija board and try to get the same ghost, and try to fix things?"
"You know what," Gerard frowns, "I'd really rather you just never touched that fucking thing again, if it's all the same to you."
"You really don't want to make it worse," Ray adds, and Gerard jumps at the sound of his voice because he'd practically forgotten he was in the room.
Mikey just nods and curls back into himself. Gerard sits and watches him for a moment, and then his skin crawls as the chill creeps down his spine again, far colder than before. Gerard imagines for a moment that it's trying to work its way into his bones and promptly creeps himself the fuck out. Fuck, he thinks, I need to get out of here.
"I need a fucking smoke," Gerard announces as he gets to his feet, pulling his pack out of his pocket to illustrate. "I'm going outside."
"Good luck," Ray says as he gets up off his stool, offering his hand again. Gerard takes it, and the handshake is a lot less awkward than the first time around. "Sorry I couldn't be more help."
"Thanks," Gerard says. "Sounds like I'm going to need it, huh."
Ray doesn't smile or try to shrug it off; he just nods slowly.
Gerard has his cigarette in his mouth and lit practically the moment he gets back outside, and Mikey comes out right behind him. Gerard walks down the sidewalk a ways until he finds a stretch fully in the sun and plants himself there, right in the middle of the pavement, and squints up at the sun as he smokes.
Mikey gives him a weird look and sticks close to the storefronts and the shade from their awnings. "I'm sorry," he says again when Gerard crushes out his cigarette and lights a second one.
Gerard shrugs helplessly. "Okay," he says, and sucks hard on the new cigarette. He frowns when he sees how upset his brother looks, but just, fuck, what the fuck, this is so incredibly fucked up. "You're sorry because you pissed off a ghost who is now scaring the living shit out of me in revenge. What do you want me to say to that, Mikey?"
"Nothing, I guess." Mikey sounds as miserable as he looks, and Gerard wants to forgive him, he does, but right now he's too busy trying to wrap his head around what just happened, around his increasing inability to remain totally disbelieving in ghosts and all that crap, and the possibility that maybe this isn't going to just stop by itself next week.
Gerard jitters from foot to foot and lights a third cigarette, then jams it into his mouth and rubs his hands together. He's standing in the sun but he can't shake off the damn chill he's caught, can't get his fingers to warm up, can't shake off the feeling like something is hovering just over his shoulder, watching and waiting.
* * *
Wednesday
"I talked to your friend Ray on the weekend," Gerard says to Bob instead of hello when they finally manage to sneak out for smoke breaks at the same time.
"Yeah?" Bob holds out his lighter before Gerard can even ask.
"Yeah. Nice guy. I can see why you guys are friends. He says 'hi,' by the way."
"Uh-huh." Gerard can feel Bob looking at him. It makes him feel like a bug pinned to a fucking board. "What else did he say?"
"Funny story," Gerard says, in the kind of voice that suggests it isn't funny at all. "Turns out my dumbass little brother's been playing with a Ouija board I gave him and managed to insult a ghost's mom or something, and now he and Ray both think I'm getting haunted in revenge."
"Whoops," Bob deadpans.
It startles Gerard into a loud gasp of nervous laughter. "Yeah, whoops. Fuck."
"Do you believe it?"
"I never did before," Gerard hedges.
"But you do now?" Bob looks pretty skeptical. Gerard doesn't blame him.
"I don't want to." Gerard ashes his cigarette so hard the cherry almost falls off.
"But you do."
"I guess? But that's crazy, right? Believing in ghosts and shit?"
Bob looks at him for a moment, then sucks hard on his cigarette. "Well, didn't Sherlock Holmes say something like if... fuck, how does that one go, you know, if you know something's impossible, it's not... no, fuck, that's not it."
"Oh, dude, you fucking mangled that. It's supposed to go, Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Gerard punctuates his impromptu recitation with emphatic waves of his hand, and Bob has to step back quickly to avoid catching the lit end of Gerard's cigarette with his face.
"How do you even... I can't believe you have that memorized, right off the top of your head like that."
Gerard shrugs. "I read a lot as a kid."
"Guess so," Bob says. "I didn't."
Gerard doesn't know what to say to that, so he just focuses on the last of his smoke before he grinds it out under his heel. He's pretty sure he gets Bob's drift, anyway.
* * *
When Gerard finishes the cell he's been working on for almost half an hour, he looks up from his light table and blinks at the ceiling to clear the spots away from his vision. He's almost done for the day, but all he has to look forward to is the shitty drive home, a microwave dinner, and killing time somehow before he watches The Daily Show and then goes to bed. What he really wants is to have dinner with Frank and then watch crappy TV together on the couch for a few hours, but Frank is apparently still not talking to him, if the ongoing lack of response to his texts and voicemail messages is anything to go by.
Gerard sighs and dials Frank's number again, but hangs up when it goes to voicemail after four rings. He realizes then that he can't quite remember when the last time he actually talked to Frank was, and flips through his call log and tries not to count the number of times he's called Frank in the last... six days? Gerard squints one eye shut as he counts back to find that six days ago was Friday.
Jesus, he thinks. He can't even begin to piece together what he might have said, what he might have done, that Frank would be avoiding him. Fuck, did they break up? Did Frank dump him? Or is Frank just so pissed off that he needs to shut Gerard out until he cools down? That'd happened once before, and Gerard hates to think about how awful those four days were before Frank called and was ready to talk to him again.
Gerard tucks his phone back into his pocket and glares back down at his light table. He's not very good at waiting, but he can do it if he has to.
His phone rings a moment later, and hope swells in his chest. He digs it out of his pocket in a hurry and flips it open without even checking the caller ID.
"Hello?" he answers.
"Hi, is Gerard there?"
It's not Frank's voice. It's some guy Gerard can't place, and he sounds kind of angry. Gerard's heart sinks. "This is Gerard," he tells the guy.
"Hi, Gerard," the guy says, "my name is Brian, and I work with Frank."
"Oh, I've heard him talking about you," Gerard tells him absently.
"Nothing good, I'm sure," Brian says. "He talks about you, too, so let's call it even. Anyway, is Frank okay? He's missed his last couple shifts at work and hasn't called in about it, and nobody can get ahold of him." Brian sounds surprisingly anxious, Gerard thinks, for somebody who by all accounts spends entire shifts giving Frank a hard time.
"I have no idea," Gerard admits. "He's not talking to me at the moment, so he obviously hasn't said anything."
"Oh," Brian sighs. "Thanks anyway. Sorry for bothering you."
"Yeah," Gerard says, "sorry I couldn't help."
Brian hangs up, and Gerard stares down at his phone. What the fuck, Frank, he thinks, and then Jesus, what happened that Frank's freaking out so bad?
* * *
Thursday
Gerard bolts awake sometime mid-day. There's a clock ticking loudly, right in his ear. When he tries to open his eyes to find the fucking clock and stop it from fucking ticking, he finds that he can't.
His eyelids are stuck shut.
He concentrates on trying to pull them open with as much force as he can muster, and finally, finally one peels free with a stinging jolt of pain. When he touches his eye carefully, he can feel the dry crackled flake of whatever it was holding the lid shut. He feels his way down his cheek towards his chin, and the blood-because what else would it be, he thinks bitterly-seems to be covering his entire fucking face, which is disgusting and terrifying and a lot of other ings he just isn't awake enough for. His mouth is so dry but he's afraid to lick his lips in case it's there, too, and he tastes it. He shudders at the thought.
Once he can focus his one open eye, he squints down at his fingers, which are vaguely red. One has a small pile of eyelashes stuck to the tip. Gerard groans and looks down at the rest of his hands, which are thickly crusted with a layer of rusty red-brown that he's pretty sure no amount of scrubbing will get completely off.
Where the hell did this all come from? he wonders. He doesn't think it's his; he doesn't hurt anywhere except for a dull throbbing behind his left eye, doesn't see any gaping wounds when he squints down at his arms and chest.
What he does see is that it's not just his face, not just his hands-his entire body is covered in it. It's not a uniform layer, though; even with a single eye, even with his vision still blurred with the lingering traces of sleep, Gerard can see the lines of movement through the dark red surface, the areas where it's thicker and where it's thinner. He can see the hardened edges of waves and ripples from where the blood must have splashed on him, what the fucking fuck.
Gerard groans and squeezes his eyes shut and wishes very hard for it to all go away.
It doesn't.
The clock is still ticking its steady tick, but when Gerard turns to his bedside table to find it there's nothing there, just his digital alarm clock flashing 5:17 at him in baleful red LCD. Power failure, Gerard thinks, because it's surely much later (or earlier) than that; his room is filled with the kind of sickly daytime sunlight that has to force its way through dense clouds before it can come in the windows.
The clock keeps ticking. It sounds like it's right next to him.
Gerard jerks his body around to look at the bed next to him, the other pillow.
Nothing.
Gerard throws his pillows to the foot of the bed, but wherever the clock is, it's not hiding under his pillows.
He's beginning to suspect there may not actually be a clock, and it scares the fuck out of him. He shivers as he breaks out into goosebumps, all the little hairs on his body standing up from head to toe.
He pulls back his blankets anyway so he can search the bed for the goddamned clock, but all he finds are sheets soaked through with dark blood.
Gerard's stomach lurches in disgust and he jumps out of bed as fast as he can, running for the bathroom. He turns on the shower, cranking the faucet as hot as it will go, and he lets it run while he stares at himself in the mirror.
He barely recognizes himself for all blood caked on his face like some kind of grotesque mask. He starts making a face in disgust, but stops when he catches sight of it in the mirror. He looks like a monster.
He jumps into the shower, standing under the full blast of the spray even though it's not as hot as he wants it, and just lets the water hit him. When he goes to run a hand through his hair, it gets caught in knots and snarls and comes out with a clot of blood stuck to the ridge of his knuckles. Gerard shakes it free and cringes when it sticks to the side of the tub.
The hot water lasts a long time before it runs out, and even when it does Gerard keeps standing there, letting it beat down on his skin as he shivers and keeps scrubbing. The water swirling around his feet is still faintly pink, and he doesn't want to get out of the shower until it's running clear.
Finally, finally, when the shower is ice-cold and Gerard is seriously starting to consider just getting out and dealing with whatever hasn't washed off, the water running down his legs and into the drain fades to the palest pink, and then the pink drops out and it's just water again. Gerard heaves a huge sigh of relief and turns off the shower more firmly than is strictly necessary, then jumps out and wraps himself in three towels, clutching them tightly around himself. He wonders if he's shivering hard enough that he could just shake himself dry.
He wanders back into his bedroom to grab a blanket off his bed to add to the layers of towels, but stops dead halfway across the room when he realizes that all his blankets are kind of soaked in the same blood he just spent God knows how long scrubbing off.
Gerard glances at his clock to try to get a sense of how long he was in the shower.
The numbers blink 3:48 at him.
Gerard blinks back at it, shakes his head to try to refocus his eyes or something. 3:48 can't be right.
But that's what the clock says, the red numbers clear in the dim light of the room.
Gerard just stands there and waits to see what the clock does next. 3:49, it tells him a few dozen seconds later.
The steady blink of the numbers wavers then, skips a beat, and then flicks out. The numbers flicker back on tentatively after a moment, then blink out again. When they come back on a heartbeat later, they read 9:52.
Oh my god, I can't deal with this, Gerard thinks, fighting off the panic rising up from his stomach to clench around his heart. He turns away from his clock and finds himself facing his desk. There's a canvas propped up on another makeshift easel, because there's always a fucking canvas when there's blood.
This time, though, it's facing away from the room.
Gerard approaches his desk slowly, half-afraid something's going to jump out and grab him. He reaches out very carefully, takes hold of the top hinge of the easel. He holds his breath as he turns it around.
The canvas is completely blank.
Gerard stumbles back and doubles over, as if the canvas had lashed out and punched him in the gut. He's overwhelmed with dread; foreboding breathes doom down his neck to clench around his heart, to sit like a stone in his stomach. He runs out of his room, dropping two of his towels and stubbing half his toes as he goes, pausing only to scoop up his bag with his phone and his sketchbook. He slams the door behind him.
It isn't until he's sitting on his couch staring out his window that he realizes he still isn't dressed. He bites back a curse and gets up to stick his head into the bathroom to see if he's left any clothes on the floor. He finds a pair of pajama pants balled up in the corner, and if they smell a little musty then he can just live with it. He's pretty sure there are at least a couple hoodies hanging in the front closet, so he goes and grabs one and settles back onto the couch again, his heart beating much faster than he's comfortable with.
Gerard closes his eyes and breathes in deep, trying to force his heart to stop racing. He thinks about calling in sick to work, but decides it's too late to bother and he'll just deal with it tomorrow.
He calls Mikey instead. He vaguely wonders, while he waits for Mikey to answer, if he should have tried calling Frank at all, but decides he'd rather not have Frank ignoring his fucking call at this particular moment.
"I'm at work, what?" Mikey hisses when he eventually picks up.
"Um," Gerard says. He has no idea how to put this shit into words. "I'm so fucked," he tries. It's true, anyway, if not particularly descriptive.
Mikey sighs; it crackles against Gerard's ear. "Why?"
"The thing with the blood happened again, way fuckin' worse than last time."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, and I have this feeling like something really fucking bad's about to happen."
"What's going to happen?" Mikey is still whispering, but he at least sounds less desperate to hurry Gerard off the line.
Gerard presses his hand over his eyes. "I don't know, Mikey. Fuck, I'm going crazy, I'm-"
"Hey, hey, look, are you at home?"
"Yeah."
"I'll come over as soon as I'm done at work, okay?"
"Okay," Gerard says. He's really glad Mikey believes him, that he's got Mikey on his side for this... this whole fucking ordeal, is what it is. Like some kind of fucking Biblical trial or something.
"Maybe you could try going outside and getting some air?"
Gerard looks down at his ratty flannel pants. "Maybe."
Mikey says something away from the phone, then, his words muffled and indistinct. When he comes back on the line, he says, "Look, I really have to go, but I'll call you when I'm leaving work, okay?"
"Okay."
It isn't until Mikey's already hung up that Gerard realizes that he has no idea what time it is, and so has no idea how long he's going to have to wait for Mikey. He glances down at his phone, which tells him that it's 12:00.
He looks out the window at the sky, grey behind an unbroken curtain of clouds. It doesn't really feel like noon, but maybe that's just because he slept way more than he's used to, because he woke up so late. Anyway, he's got a lot of time to kill.
Coffee, he thinks, and gets up to go put a pot on. He glances at the microwave as he walks past. 12:00, it says in little blue numbers.
Gerard stops dead in the middle of his kitchen to stare at the microwave. When he snaps out of it, he runs back to the other room to look at his phone, which still says 12:00.
Gerard's stomach lurches when he looks back at the microwave. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. His microwave has always been ten minutes faster than every other clock he has, ever since Frank set the time off his own phone after he got sick of weeks of Gerard not setting the time after he unplugged it by mistake that one time.
Gerard crosses his arms over his chest and leans back against the kitchen wall to watch the microwave. The numbers aren't flashing which means the time must be set, but after he counts to sixty three times in his head, the time still hasn't changed. When he realizes that it's not going to, he rushes to unplug the microwave.
The numbers blink out, and Gerard breathes a sigh of relief.
Gerard spends the rest of the afternoon alternating between pacing the narrow hallway of his apartment and trying to watch TV. He jabs at the remote and the channels flip by in bright flashes, one after another after another after another as he rotates through them. Nothing holds his attention for more than a minute or two at a time, and daytime TV sucks anyway.
Eventually, Gerard's phone beeps with a new text message. Leavng work, on my way, it says, from Mikey.
Almost as soon as Gerard drops the phone back onto the couch, there's a tickle against the back of his neck, like a cold wind just blew by.
Gerard knows for a fact all his windows are closed.
The wind brushes against him again, and his skin prickles as all the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up and his fingers tingle and start going numb. All of a sudden he's gripped by the most intense feeling of dread, of terror, of overwhelming wrongness he's ever felt. It sinks into his bones and creeps with cold fingers through his veins.
Gerard's chest goes tight, then, like his ribs are trying to squeeze his heart to a pulp, and he very, very carefully does not freak out. Instead, he picks up his phone again and calls Mikey back.
"Don't come over," he blurts out as soon as Mikey picks up.
"...Um?" Mikey sounds confused. Gerard totally doesn't blame him.
"You don't need to come over," Gerard presses. "Something really bad is about to happen, I can feel it, I don't want-"
"You said that before," Mikey points out, "and I really don't think you should be alone right now, Gee. I'm on my way, okay? I'll be there in like twenty."
Mikey hangs up and the line goes dead.
Gerard gets up and starts pacing, trying to shake off the mood that clings tight and won't let go.
It feels like only a minute before Mikey arrives, knocking on Gerard's door in the same erratic pattern he always uses.
Gerard is about to shout that it's open before he realizes that it isn't, so he peels himself off the couch to go unlock the door.
Mikey sweeps in, dropping his messenger bag on top of Gerard's pile of shoes and dropping his hoodie on top of his bag.
"You look like hell," he says, wrinkling his nose as he eyes Gerard.
"Thanks." Gerard glares at him, but Mikey doesn't seem to notice.
"You okay?" Mikey asks as he pushes past Gerard to go into the kitchen and start digging through the fridge.
"I don't know," Gerard says.
"You need more groceries," Mikey announces, staring at the block of cheese he's holding like he's not sure if it's about to attack him or not.
"You need to stop eating all my food," Gerard tells him.
"Yeah, yeah," Mikey waves it off, and he pulls out a loaf of br-
-nd Geoff said that would be a terrible idea," Mikey sniffs, then bites into his sandwich.
Gerard blinks, scrubs at his eyes. Sure, he's in the habit of tuning out Mikey when he's talking about the latest drama at work, but he's not sure how he missed Mikey putting together an entire sandwich.
"Have you eaten today?" Mikey asks after he's finished chewing.
Gerard shakes his head.
"You'd probably feel bett-
-takes the can of Chef Boyardee Mikey hands him and goes to the drawer for a can opener.
Wait, Gerard thinks, this isn't right. He bites his lip as he opens the can and empties it onto the pot that wasn't on the stove last time he'd looked.
The feeling that something is so incredibly wrong flares up again in his stomach, shoots upward to throb in his forehead like it's about to explode.
His vision goes grey around the edges, then black. The empty spaces creep in until everything is dark and he can't see. No, no, no Gerard's thoughts race around in a panic. What the, what's, stop-
-Mikey's looking at him with a peculiar expression on his face. "Are you okay?" he asks gently, stepping closer to put a han-
-hat's going on, Gerard?"
Gerard looks down. He's got his hand wrapped so tightly around Mikey's wrist that Mikey's hand has turned a sickly shade of mottled pink-blue.
Gerard lets go quickly, jerking his hand away and sticking it in the pocket of his hoodie.
"You should leave," Gerard whispers. He clenches his hand into a fist and takes a step back.
"What's going on?" Mikey asks again. He sounds concerned, but scared.
Gerard's heart sinks. He's scared of me, what's happening, what the fuck...
His vision goes grey again, like a screen dropping between one breath and the next, but it doesn't black all the way out.
He feels himself take a step forward, towards Mikey. Wait, he thinks, I didn't-
He takes another.
Mikey takes a step back.
Gerard tries to take a step back, but can't. It's as if his legs don't even register the thought. No, Gerard thinks, panicked. No, no no no, why can't I move, what's going on?
He takes another step forward. His head aches with a nauseating pain, the hot heat stabbing in his temples in time with his racing heart.
NO!, he shouts-tries to shout-pushes out with his mind as hard as he can, trying to force back the thick fog keeping him separate from his body. "NO!" he shouts again, and this time it echoes in his ears, real sound waves forced from his own mouth.
Mikey gapes at him, all pale and cringing, his eyes huge behind his glasses.
"You have to get out of here," Gerard tells him, and he barely recognizes his own voice. It's hoarse and low and wavering.
His vision starts to swim and he shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut, rubs his eyes with his knuckles, but nothing works. "Go, Mikey."
Mikey keep staring at hi-
-re scaring me, Gerard," Mikey says, his voice tight.
Gerard just looks at him for a moment before he realizes that he's back in himself, and he moves towards Mikey, who shrinks back away from him.
"You need to leave," Gerard hisses, grabbing him by the shoulders and hauling him across the apartment towards the front door. Mikey is dead weight in his arms; not struggling but not cooperating, either. He's dumb with shock.
"I am kicking you the fuck out, Mikey, seriously, you have to get out, shit is going so bad-
-t the fuck are you doing? Let go of me! Gerard!" Mikey's shout is heated and verging on shrill and Gerard barely has time to register, Thank God he's snapped out of it, before he realizes what exactly is going o-
* * *
Friday
Gerard wakes up to a bedroom full of warm sunlight and the feeling that he's just had his best sleep in years. He feels calm, relaxed, and above all else, he's happy. It's kind of weird, really, but he's not about to start complaining. He fucking deserves a good morning, these days. He swings his feet out of bed and wanders into the bathroom, humming absently as he goes. He's got this big warm feeling, right in his gut, that whatever the fuck has been happening is done and over. No more inexplicable blackouts, no more blood-soaked mornings, no more creepy-ass paintings.
It's a really fucking good morning, actually.
It's only when he's halfway through brushing his teeth that he stops to look at his reflection, and he almost chokes on his mouthful of toothpaste when he sees the faint trickle of dried blood under his left nostril.
For fuck's sake, he thinks as he wipes the blood off with a wet finger. I thought...
It's only then that he realizes that he can't remember anything that happened the night before. Can't remember the evening, or late afternoon. Which is really weird, because the blackouts never started that early before. And it's even weirder because he's never woken up from a blackout feeling this good. That can't be right.
When he gets back into his room, he notices the canvas propped up on his desk. It's facing out again, and it's practically radiating malice from its dark surface.
His heart just sinks, right through to the fucking floor, and he concentrates very hard on keeping the twisting in his stomach in check.
The painting is another figure, a man, this one more human than any have been previously, but it's still oily black and harsh red like all of its predecessors. The shades of red in this one are entirely the sickly rust-brown of new blood.
Gerard knows in his gut that this time, it's someone else's blood.
The figure, though, this one is achingly familiar, differently and more than any of the ones in the other paintings. He can't stop himself from reaching out to trace the line of the man's jaw, the narrow cheeks. He knows he knows who it is; he feels like he knows it somewhere deep in his bones, but it's stuck behind some sort of fog. The fine features of the face are lost in the messy technique, the broad smears of paint and the ridges of fingerprints left behind in dried liquids.
It isn't until he tears his gaze away from the face that he notices the rest of the details-because while the rest of the painting suffers the same sloppy execution, the man's fate is abundantly clear.
There's a gaping hole where his stomach should be, ridged in dried clots of blood and thick smears of paint. Coming down-falling-from the bottom are thick smooth streaks of red that gleam in the morning light.
And that's when then Gerard realizes that he does actually remember last night, or at least, he can remember pieces of it, fleeting snapshots of moments frozen outside time.
Mikey, he thinks as he remembers a flash of light off a pair of two-tone glasses. His brother was here, he came over to check on Gerard because he was freaking out, and then-
And then there's a surge of images rolling through his brain.
He gets a flash of a fist swinging-
again and again and again-
-and there are noises, grunting and gasping and a sick crack.
He looks down at his hand, and sure enough, there's a dark blue-purple bruise blooming across his knuckles.
Oh, shit, he thinks, and closes his eyes. He's hit with another set of images, then.
Another flash, but this time off of bright metal-
He's holding something, it's clutched tight in his fist and he's swinging it around-
Somebody is shouting, and the shouts turn to screams, harsh and desperate-
Heat and wetness spilling down over his hands, a river, a flood of it-
-and then there is silence.
Gerard gasps for breath, tipping forward to brace himself against the edge of his desk. His head is heavy and he lets it hang, lets his hair fall forward to hide his face, a curtain between himself and the painting.
But the images keep coming.
Mikey? he thinks when he gets an image of a long, long shadow, a glimpse of skittering legs and knock knees and a gangly body falling, crawling across the floor, leaving behind a dark gleaming trail of...
Of blood.
Through the roaring in his ears, Gerard can hear that goddamn fucking clock ticking again, but faintly, like it's buried under something in another room.
Gerard looks back at the painting with growing horror, a whole new set of images-memories-flash across his brain.
-strangled shouts, hoarse and thin and furious-
-hands clenched tight into white-knuckled fists, beating down on his shoulders and arms before slowing to shake weakly-
-sharp wooden shards on the floor under his knees, their lacquered white surface scratched and dingy under long smears of blood-
-big hazel eyes going wide and then glazing over-
The images stop abruptly, and the sudden blankness sends Gerard reeling back to trip over his own feet. He lands sprawled out on the floor and he immediately curls up into a ball, trying to keep his sudden gut-wrenching heaves from turning into full-on puking as his thoughts tumble over and over and over. Oh my god, oh my god, what the fuck happened, what have I fucking done, what the fuck is going on-
The roaring in his ears starts up again, like all his blood is rushing by at top speed, and it drowns out even the sound of his own thoughts. When it finally dies down, he pushes himself up onto his hands and knees. He opens his eyes so he can find his way out of his room, and gasps.
The painting has somehow moved from the desk to end up on the floor, and it's propped up against the leg of the chair right in front of him.
It stares at him from a dead, white face and Gerard finally recognizes it-recognizes him.
Gerard's arms give out from under him as he stares helplessly into his brother's painted eyes.
Somewhere very far off in the distance, the clock stops ticking.