---

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the things we take to make us feel like this

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---

Gerard’s mother is Very Catholic(™). That’s probably the root of a lot of his problems, not that being Catholic itself is anything that Gerard really hates. It’s just that it’s hard for him to really understand someone being Very Catholic when twenty two years (and nineish months) previous they’d been knocked up by a real, live, Greek God out of wedlock and very much un-Judeo-Christian. Simply put, Gerard doesn’t understand his mother very well.
Mikey, however, seems to understand Gerard’s mother a fair deal better. Which, at nope-o’clock, is exactly why Gerard is relieved to see Mikey scuffing along at his mother’s heels instead of feeling the kind of pit of dread he’s felt seeing Mikey’s face since about eight months after he left for Garden of the Gods Institute two years prior.
When Mikey sees Gerard over his mother’s shoulder, he looks down. But when his mother catches his eyes, she smiles a Very Catholic(™) smile, her teeth carefully not showing and her mouth tucked up in that way it always is. Gerard knows that it’s genuine, but only because he’s known her so long.
Gerard shoves himself a little further into the corner of the booth at the very back of the coffee shop he’s been working in for about two months now. He tries to convince himself Mikey will tell his mother to pretend they didn’t see him and leave. He tries to hope it’ll happen because it’s too fucking early in the morning and this coffee isn’t going to be enough to get him to deal with whatever shit his mother is going to spew this time.
His hands flex on the cup of coffee, a wide-lipped mug he fucking loves the coffee shop for. He blows steam off the coffee cup in the perfectly executed shape he’s been practicing for years (a perk of being Hades’ kid), a skull. He almost feels embarrassed for it, but he can’t bring himself to feel embarrassed for (what he perceives as) art. (He catches Mikey roll his eyes at him as he slides into the seat a foot away from Gerard and picks up a menu, peering down at it through his glasses.)
Gerard’s mother sits right next to him, the Very Catholic(™) smile remains.
“Hi,” he says, trying to match her smile and looking a little more like a dismayed cat than a happy-to-see-you-missed-you-very-much child.
“Hello, Gerard. We’ve missed you,” she’s saying, and a part of Gerard realizes he really is happy to see her. As much as his mother’s Very Catholic(™), she raised him, and Gerard generally thinks, all things considered, he has a claim to a relatively un-miserable upbringing. Mikey helped. A lot. Mikey’s watching him go through this realization and quickly, somehow, reading Gerard’s mind. (He has a knack for that.)
“I think he might actually be genuinely happy to see you, mom,” Mikey stage whispers into her ear in deadpan.
Of course, Gerard would never admit it. He just makes a vague ‘pshhhh’ sound and waves his hand.
“How’s ‘dad’?’ He asks while his mother and his little brother mirror each other’s body language in this terrifyingly familiar way. (‘Dad’ is not Hades, ‘Dad’ is the man Gerard’s mother married five years ago.)
(Until this moment, Gerard has been convinced that he’s gotten away from family. He’s gotten away from knowing, caring about, or wishing to exist in the reality he used to have. This is the moment he realizes he has not.)
“He’s alright,” his mother chirps, neither she nor Mikey take their eyes off the menu.
“How’s the summer after senior year? Got a job or anything, Mikes? Girlfriend?” Gerard practically flinches, eyes buzzing over to his brother, pleading for an ice breaker.
Mikey looks over his glasses.
“Alright.”
Gerard is kind of getting desperate now. For something to talk about.
“What should I order?” Mikey asks, pointing at the menu with a look that says ‘what do they do half-decent?’.
Gerard scoots across the foot in between them without thinking, placing his finger on an item on the menu.
When Mikey flinches, it kind of makes Gerard want a cigarette, in the vague way any empty feeling makes Gerard want a cigarette. He pulls back before he talks.
“They do really great salted caramel lattes,” Gerard says, his smile faltering a little.
Mikey nods.
It goes on awkward like that through them ordering their coffee. (Brad is working and doesn’t give him or them too much shit, thank god.)
Gerard eventually warms his mother up, and avoiding talking about things like what the fuck he’s going to do with his life definitely helps. They talk about supermarket sales and capital G capital U Grown Up things that Gerard can see Mikey visibly cringe at him contributing to. (Gerard remembers one time when he was eighteen and still living at the house and he bought his own socks and spent 20 minutes discussing what kind were better for when the seasons change and joints get creaky, Mikey had literally fucking gotten upset with him for ‘growing up and selling out’. Sometimes Gerard still laughs about it. He laughed about it more before their falling out.)
Mikey, on the other hand, is a stone wall; he has been to Gerard since about fourteen months ago. Usually, the subtle expressions Gerard can read so well give him a secret look into Mikey’s life that no one else has. Mostly, lately, there’s just been this cold, seeping rage from behind it all. Now, now it’s just a wall. Gerard doesn’t even get the rage.
He will remember this day only, in the end, because it’s the day they drop the news on him.
“Mom and Dad want me to come to Garden of the Gods,” Mikey says, kind of abruptly, and Gerard is in the middle of a sip of his coffee and he splutters, coughs, blinks. Because Mikey doesn’t mean Gerard’s mother, nor his ‘dad’. Mikey means that Persephone and Hades personally told him they want him attending a college for demigods (Gerard wonders why in the long term, because Mikey isn’t technically a demigod.)
Gerard shoots his mother The Look. (Not the one that says ‘kill me now’, or the one that says ‘you don’t even know what I’m thinking do you?’, the one that says ‘Moooooom, Mikey’s taking something that is Mine.’)
“You can’t,” he says to Mikey, because his mother just gives him a sweet smile in response.
“Why not?” Mikey flicks his eyes up to Gerard’s. And there it is. There’s the rage, for a second Gerard can see it. It makes him fucking crumble. Gerard forgot how much he hates Mikey hating him.
(Brad refreshes Gerard’s coffee without having to ask.)
Gerard hides his response in a straight-swig of black coffee. It’s his moody way of saying ‘I feel fucking bitter’. MIkey used to appreciate things like that.
“It’s my college,” Gerard mutters. He doesn’t want his little brother there. Not when they’ve hardly been friendly. (If things were like they used to be, Gerard would think differently. Things aren’t like they used to be. He has to keep telling himself they never will be again. Which makes him hate himself and Mikey a little more each time.)
“And apparently Mom and Dad want me to go. I’m as thrilled as you. They don’t ask very much,” Mikey’s saying and Gerard grits his teeth because Mikey has been taking the side of not only Hades and Persephone, but also his mother in any argument. And Gerard has a feeling this is that. He gives Mikey a glare that says he knows very well. Mikey’s eyebrows raise half a centimeter, which says ‘I’m innocent, I don’t know what you’re talking about’ and Gerard tries not to fall in love with him again. He buries his head in his arms on the table.
“This year?” he groans.
“I’m moving into the dorms on the ninth,” Mikey says, nodding at his mother. (He hasn’t told her the time yet, is what that means.
“Ugh,” Gerard mutters. He’s given up trying to be civil. (It’s nope-o’fucking’clock, he didn’t have much of a chance.) He watches the suits on their way to and fro in front of the shop and groans.
“I’m going to die,” he growls, looking straight at Mikey, “Mikey Way you are fucking killing me.”
“Gerard,” his mother scolds at the same time that Mikey responds.
“Cool. Maybe I’ll actually see you when I visit Mom and Dad.”
“Fuck you,” Gerard murmurs into his arms at both of them.
“We’re going to tour the campus today,” his mother says after she’s let Gerard sulk for a moment, “We thought we’d stop in on your dorm to get a feel of the place.”
Gerard actually screams a little on the inside.
“Can I check with my roommate before you invite yourselves over?” he asks.
“Nope,” Mikey says. Gerard glares at him.

---

Gerard slings his shoes up onto the coffee table and stares at the ceiling.
“They’re fucking coming by,” he says, to Ray, who’s standing at their tiny kitchenette, wrestling their ancient coffee maker for his first cup of coffee. He hasn’t touched his hair and it’s probably harboring small animals, Gerard thinks. (Ray did not get up at nope-o’clock in the morning and this is something Gerard will hate him for all day. If he can manage to hate Ray for more than, like, two minutes.)
“Who?” Ray asks, scratching at his chin. They both need to shave, Gerard observes dully.
“My mom and my brother.”
“I thought he wasn’t actually your brother. You were really clear about that for a while there. Didn’t you just see them this morning?” Ray asks. His voice is slow, groggy.
“Different moms, he was raised by mine though,” Gerard mutters. He pulls a chair up to the window of their miniscule (and very cluttered) living room and opens the window. He fishes his reds out of his pocket before he continues, “I had ‘breakfast’ with them this morning. Mikey’s applying. They’re visiting. Here. This Room. In,” Gerard looks at his phone, “An hour and a half.”
That finally gets Ray’s attention,
“Wait, dude, seriously? Here?”
“They invited themselves over,” Gerard groans, reaching for a half-full, lukewarm water bottle that he sets in the window frame before he lights his cigarette, holding it out the window.
“Don’t set off the smoke alarm again, please.”
“That totally wasn’t me,” Gerard mutters, taking a drag.
“So what do we do?” he asks Ray, after a minute, staring at the embers burning his cigarette down.
“Straighten up,” Ray says, gesturing helplessly around at their living room.
Ray and Gerard have technically only lived in this dorm room for a year together; before that, Gerard lived in a single (in which two people had been living at the time) on the floor above them, and Ray lived with a (kind of ex-) friend of theirs, Matt, in the same room. It kind of feels like they've lived together here forever, though, and Gerard's made himself at home. Ray is usually pretty neat, if only just because he doesn’t have a lot of stuff that isn’t for class or whatever.
Which is probably why, looking around the room, the canvases, art carrier bags, paper, clips, old coffee mugs, almost-empty cigarette packs (Gerard has a bad habit of getting himself his next pack when he’s got five left because he freaks out and thinks he’ll run out), rolling papers, pill bottles, endless sketches and notebooks, ink splatters, and straight razors all seem to be Gerard’s. Actually, as Gerard desperately searches for something in the living room that isn’t his, the only things he can find are a lighter (on the corner of the coffee table), a music theory textbook (on the couch), a mechanical pencil (next to the lighter, it’s Ray’s favorite pencil), and the sundial watch hanging over the windowsill that Gerard is currently smoking out of.
“Fuck it’s a mess in here,” Gerard mutters.
“If nothing else, you might want to move the borderline-Satanic skull art, illegal prescription drugs, illegal recreational drugs, and porn before your Catholic mother gets here,” Ray says as he walks over to give Gerard the first cup of coffee out of the machine (he knows Gerard would whine for it until he gets it anyway). Gerard looks around.
“There’s porn in here? That’s not mine.”
Ray gestures with an elbow toward the table by the door.
“Oh hey wait that actually isn’t mine,” Gerard says, walking over to examine the full-page print of what appears to be a satyr mid-orgasm.
“Should probably still move it,” Ray points out and Gerard shrugs, but he’s kind of intrigued as to how the fuck they ended up with satyr porn on their entryway table. It strikes him it’s been a long time since he spent more than twenty minutes in here sober. Like, five or six months.
Gerard sighs and drops the end of his cigarette into the water bottle with a fizzle-hiss, starts gathering things into his arms to shove into his closet.
(He ends up with something like two and a half full packs of cigarettes once he’s gathered up all the tail ends of old packs which haven’t had coffee or something else spilled on them. Which he guesses is okay.)
By the time there’s a knock on their door, Gerard has the place looking like a mess, but decent art student’s digs. He’s got the canvases all shoved up to the window and his papers and notebooks stacked in some semi-decent mimicry of order and the carrier bags are shoved into the corner and the weed and pills and half-empty bottles of booze have all been shoved under Gerard’s bed (because he can’t think of anywhere better to put them). He even goes out of his way to hide his cigarettes (even though both his mother and Mikey know he smoke), the straight razors (even though these are the ones he bought specifically for art, and only that), and the satyr print (even though he still has literally no fucking clue where it came from.)
Ray has not, no surprise, moved any of his shit. Which is fine with Gerard because none of it’s particularly incriminating to a Very Catholic(™) mother. Gerard’s on his fourth cup of coffee, and he has his hand wrapped around his favorite mug when he answers the door.
Only Mikey stands there, which is kind of a relief and kind of pisses Gerard off because Mikey probably wouldn’t give a shit if Gerard hadn’t put in all that effort.
“Mom went home,” Mikey says by way of explanation, he stands in the doorway, all awkward hair (and Gerard realizes this is the first time he’s seen Mikey out of his school uniform in, fuck, two years?) and awkward knees and empty, unreadable eyes.
“I have class in an hour,” Gerard says, level. Ray’s head pokes out from his room. Ray’s hair catches literally any tiny bit of light and gives him a halo, it’s like some sort of rule (probably one of those ‘Apollo’s grandson things’), so both Mikey and Gerard are blinking back the bright feedback from it as he crosses the living room.
“So this is the fabled younger Way,” Ray says, peering around Mikey.
“She’s not coming,” Mikey says, picking up the fact Ray’s looking for Gerard’s mother at the same time Gerard does.
“Why are you here?” Gerard asks, and Mikey stares straight at him in this way that just tells him he’s fucking burn rubble on the inside. Gerard has to drop his eyes to the carpet because he fucking knows that was mean.
“To ask if you’re going to the party tonight. So I can avoid you.” Mikey’s voice bites on the last bit, he’s taking barbs where he can get them if Gerard is.
“Party?” Gerard says, because there’s always a party on campus, there’s always some gathering of too-poor, too-stressed college students doing stupid shit, and when Gerard wants to do that shit he’s usually already fifteen minutes late and figures out where the party is from there.
“Cobra Eta Phi is apparently throwing a big pre-start-of-semester bash. Before the new kids all move in,” Ray pipes up, going over to the kitchenette again, “Coffee, Mikey?”
“Please,” Mikey says, and then to Gerard, “I’m going.”
“Gabe’s parties are shit, go ahead and go,” Gerard says, maybe spitting his words out a little more than he intended, because if he had known he’d totally want to go. (Pete will be there, Brendon will be there, probably half of the Bad Poet crew. Gerard may not like a lot of them, too bright and cheery oftentimes, he fucking loves Pete. Pete can write and his eyeliner is on point and the dark circles are kind of attractive in the way Pete wears them and Gerard may or may not be about a month out of the last hookup they had but he can’t remember any of it and he hates that just a little. Not to mention Gabe’s parties are always wrought with more booze than anyone can drink.)
“Okay,” Mikey says, and he almost turns on his heel there, but Ray’s handing him coffee and Gerard hisses through his teeth, dropping his mug to the table and disappearing into his bedroom to fish his cigarettes out of the art bag he shoved them into in anticipation of his mother’s visiting. He shoves one between his teeth and another behind his ear and scrambles the lighter out of his pocket while he stalks back to the living room. (Because as much as Gerard Way is a grade A motherfucker, he won’t leave his best friend with his probably-homicidal-or-something and actual-minor-god-of-life-and-death little brother.)
He lights his cigarette after wrestling the window open and sitting down by it.
“How do you not set off the smoke alarms?” Mikey asks, sitting next to Ray on the couch. (Gerard thinks, childishly, that that is his spot and Mikey has no right to it, but then again he fucking despises Ray’s leather couch for the last time he tried to sit on it midsummer and it literally tried to take a bit of his skin off his body.)
“Fuck if I know,” Gerard says, barely inhaling and letting a skull-shaped smoke cloud spill from his lips and creep toward the window. Ray flips the page in the campus newspaper.
“I’m pretty sure he can just bend reality to his preferences and he doesn’t tell anyone about it so they still do shit for him,” Ray says absently, taking a swig of coffee. They’re all quiet for a long time. Gerard’s looking out the window at the little calico cat who’s been hanging around the residence halls lately (who’s currently playing with what Gerard presumes to be a dead butterfly) but he can feel Mikey’s eyes on him. Then they’re gone.
“Why are you only drawing bullshit?” Mikey asks. He’s standing now, flipping through the canvases on the wall.
“It’s not bullshit.”
“Yeah,” Mikey says, looking over at Gerard levelly, “It really is. Since when do you do fucking still lifes, Gerard?”
Ray’s eyes flick up to Gerard’s, concern slithering behind the look. Gerard drops his eyes from both of them to roll the filter of his cigarette between his fingers. He hasn’t told Ray he’s playing by the art department’s rules and guidelines lately because he doesn’t know what to fucking draw, he doesn’t know what to fucking paint, there’s just nothing where everything used to be, he just said he wants to pass.
“I’m trying to not fail my classes this year,” Gerard mutters, his conviction isn’t there, though. He remembers drawing in high school, and his two gap years, he remembers how almost every stroke of pencil or pen was him bursting at the seams trying to get Mikey to smile. Trying to impress him. (Gerard can trace so many of his behaviors to protecting or impressing Mikey, trying to get him to emote. Nowadays he wonders if he threw away all of the life he put to living for his little brother.)
“Bullshit,” Mikey mutters, shaking his head. Gerard can hear the resentment slipping from his voice like it’s just too much effort.
“Yeah, bullshit,” Gerard concedes, quietly, flicking his cigarette out the window. Mikey finishes his coffee and walks over to set the mug in the sink and then he’s really geared for the door and Gerard just wants to say goodbye and fucking hug Mikey.
“Promise you won’t be there?” Mikey asks at the door.
“I work tonight,” Gerard says, because he does. And because he doesn’t know what else to say.
“Okay,” Mikey says, and then he’s gone.
“Falling out?” Ray asks once the door is closed and he’s sat back down.
“Falling out,” Gerard confirms, “A year and a half ago, almost.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Gerard shrugs.
“I didn’t think it would be an issue,” he says, crossing to the coffee machine to officially give him the cup of coffee which will bring him into overcaffeination. Ray nods, giving Gerard a concerned little smile. He doesn’t press, thank gods.
“Let’s catch dinner after you get off work, okay? I’ve got class til five, but I should be off before you,” Ray says, shoving the newspaper further away and continuing talking while he gets up and heads to his bedroom, presumably for his guitar, “I, unlike you, didn’t promise not to go to that party, but I can keep you company until I have to get ready.”
“What if I go?” Gerard asks, watching Ray settle down on the couch again with his Gibson and about a metric fuck ton of music sheets.
“You told him you wouldn’t,” is all Ray says, but he looks up with that same look of vague, muffled concern. That’s the only way Ray has looked at him for a while. Gerard can’t tell if it’s insulting, disturbing, or just deeply, echoingly painful.
Gerard tucks his second cigarette between his lips, lighting it, to keep himself from going to fish another substance from under his bed. Instead he just walks through the kitchen (ashing in the sink, on his way, which makes Ray frown), and pulls a bottle of jack from under the sink, topping off the tail end of his coffee with probably more than he should.
He turns around, waves the bottle in Ray’s direction, who shakes his head. The concern intensifies a little.
“Is Lindsey going?” Gerard asks, letting hope seep into his voice. He grimaces as he tries to take a full swig of coffee like he didn’t just spike it.
“I don’t know. You’re the one who talks to her, like, every day.”
“Yeah,” Gerard murmurs, he stares blankly out the window until he finishes his coffee.

---

Gerard leaves it to the last minute to call Lindsey; he’s walking to work, because despite popular opinion, Le Petit Chat is not the closest coffee shop to campus; it’s just the closest one that isn’t simultaneously staffed by a son of Hades, a daughter of Deimos, and a son of Ares, and frequently visited by a son of Morpheus. They’ve got a different, vibe, but they’re also literally the closest building to GotGI that isn’t legally on the premises or a residential.
It’s on the corner just outside of where the main road on campus lets out into the nearby sprawl of Colorado Springs, and Gerard can already see it in the distance while the ringer continues rolling on his phone and he takes the last drag of a cigarette.
He examines his chipped nail polish and nearly trips when Lindsey actually picks up before the fifth ring.
“Gerard? You’re conscious? It’s only,” she’s saying groggily when she pauses, “Oh, it’s four.”
“Three thirty, actually,” Gerard says, “I’m walking to work.” He can hear a lighter click from the other side of the line.
“Are you going to the Cobra party tonight?” he asks while he listens to Lindsey inhale, then exhale.
“Yeah, probably. I’ve got a few friends coming to hang out tonight anyway. Why?”
“Because my brother made me promise not to go,” Gerard says, he flicks his butt into the gutter, stopping a corner away from his work, “So I kinda want to go.”
“Mikey? Why? Wait,” she says, Gerard hears shuffling on the other end of the line, “I’m going to meet you to smoke with you on break. You’ll tell me then.”
And that’s that, the line goes dead. (Ever since Lindsey noticed that no one ever says goodbye on the phone in movies, she’s tried to implement the practice. Lindsey’s biggest secret is she’s a huge fucking nerd. Which isn’t a secret at all, but Gerard still likes to pretend he’s the only one who knows the full extent of her nerdiness.)
He continues across the street feeling a little odd about how the shop looks so quiet. It occurs to him when he’s standing in front of it that it’s not even fucking open.
Which means Gerard forgot he had opening shift. Again. (JitterBug Perfume has weird operating hours, and Lindsey, who is almost always in charge of scheduling, is really shitty at telling people when they’re opening or closing.)
Gerard curses, dropping to his knees and opening his satchel, trying to find the keys he knows he has and trying desperately to remember the combination to the alarm. When foot steps approach, Gerard can’t be assed to look up because obviously they’re fucking closed and it can’t be a customer.
“Are they open?” a guys voice asks as Gerard’s peripheral vision becomes vaguely aware of a pair of white trainers stopping next to his left knee. Gerard has to bite back ‘obviously fucking not’ while he looks up at the kid standing next to him. He can’t be more than fifteen.
“No,” Gerard says, instead, quirking an eyebrow at the kid’s pierced lip, because the kid’s playing with the shiny little ring there and Gerard has to stop himself real quick from thinking about the needle that it took to get that in there, “If I can remember the alarm combination we will be in like two seconds though.”
The kid shoves his thumbs through his backpack straps and leans over to look at the alarm keycode box. Gerard stands and shoves his jangling keys into the doorknob, peering around the kid’s head.
“Is it one-two-two?” the kid asks, looking back up (up because he’s fucking short) at Gerard. Gerard groans.
“Yes. How’d you know?”
“The numbers are worn down. Plus my grandfather did work for that company for a little while and the default of their alarms is always one-two-two. Like, no one ever changes that shit. Do you have a smoke?” the kid says it all at once like he’s got all the fucking energy in the world. Gerard’s a little jealous. He opens the door, and raises an eyebrow at the kid.
“You’re like fifteen, I’m not giving you cigarettes.” It helps I don’t like you, Gerard adds in his head, even though he doesn’t actually. He just doesn’t like people who bother other people when they’re obviously trying to open an establishment.
“Sixteen, like, seventeen in a month,” the kid says.
“Late on the growth spurt thing, then, huh?” Gerard steps inside, turning on the light and making a beeline for the counter, dropping his shit behind it and flicking on the lights in the back, too.
“My whole family’s really short, I guess.” He follows him in, looking at the menu above the counter.
“It’s gonna take, like, five or ten minutes for the coffee to be ready, you know. If you’re in a hurry you should go hit Le Petit Chat.” Gerard’s eyes skate the guy again. He’s wearing the uniform from the Catholic school in town that Mikey used to go to (that Gerard used to go to, too, but that seems so long ago he doesn’t even think about it), but he’s obviously abandoned the blazer and his striped tie hangs limp and loose at his neck like the true underachiever of all nooses.
“I’m not in a rush. I’m early. Just gonna surprise someone with coffee,” he says, and his smile is way too bright for having obviously just been told to get the fuck out. Gerard crosses to the coffee machines, loads them and sets them burbling, and sets about the more technical shit of opening a coffee shop. While he does that, the short Catholic schoolboy who claims to be almost seventeen is wandering around the shop.
“Who’s the art by?” he asks, pointing to a framed sketch on the wall.
“That one’s Lindsey’s. Most of it’s hers,” Gerard says, looking up, “She works here, I think she’s technically the manager. The stuff shoved off in the corner by the bathroom’s mine, and the stuff in the entry is by a friend of Brad’s. All of us are art department from Garden of the Gods Institute.”
The kid beams and pretty much literally dashes to the little hallway between the shop, the corner lounge, and the bathroom. He comes back holding a painting of Persephone Gerard did what feels like a decade ago, when he and Mikey were still on good terms. He’s pointing at it with the hand not holding it and has wide eyes.
“You fuckin did this?”
“Careful Catholic boy, don’t swear, the devil will jump down your throat and play with your guts from the inside.” Gerard smirks at him, because he’s trying to swallow the pride so he doesn’t have to like this kid at all for stroking his ego.
“I’m not Catholic,” the kid says, looking a little confused.
“You’re wearing a Catholic school uniform.”
“Oh,” he looks down at his uniform like he didn’t even notice he was wearing it and comes up with a huge grin, “Yeah, I go to Catholic school.”
“Parents, then?” Gerard can’t help but let the sympathy touch his voice as he checks the coffee machines.
“Nah, my mom isn’t, she just sends me there cuz they won’t expel kids until they’ve exorcised them like ten times or whatever.”
Gerard snorts.
“What did you want for your sweetheart?” he asks, finally, shaking his head and leaning over the counter to look pointedly at the menu above his head.
“Uh, uh,” the kid says (he goes bright red), leaning the art up against the counter and promptly forgetting about it while he looks up at the menu again, “Gimme a big latte of whatever your favorite kind is and uh, a medium iced cold brew light n sweet.”
Gerard rolls his eyes because no one ever uses their sizes, and nods, turning around, not bothering to ask the kid’s name since he’s the only other one in the shop.
He makes short work of both coffees, being nice enough to put them in a coffee traveler because he was smart enough to ask for cold brew iced coffee and that makes Gerard respect a person a little more.
The kid pays in crumpled singles, and is out the door by the time Gerard’s fixed the facings and put the cash in the register, unstrapping a skateboard from his backpack and rounding the corner before Gerard has a chance to ask if he wants change.

---

---

does anyone have the guts to shut me up?

---

---

“Am I really helping my friend who’s sworn not to go and two underrage girls get to a party which is one hundred and ten percent certainly going to have alcohol?” Ray asks, for what has to be the sixth time. Gerard lights his second cigarette since they left the residence hall. Lindsey taps his shoulder from the back seat of Ray’s 1997 Volvo V70 (also, colloquially, Ray Toro’s Baby) and Gerard twists over the front center console, offering her the cigarette he just lit. She takes it and rolls down the window.
Her friend is, by some coincidence, also sixteen, and was wearing the Catholic school’s uniform until she shoved into Lindsey’s dorm and stole something which looks like a schoolgirl outfit anyway and made Gerard question why she’d changed in the first place. Lindsey’s friend is also named Jamia. Which is one of the coolest names Gerard has ever heard, if he’s totally honest.
“Could I bum one of those, please?” She’s also, apparently, polite. And because she seems cool, Gerard gives her one, too, and lights himself another before handing her the lighter.
“And my friend is giving them fucking cigarettes, too.” Ray’s dismay wouldn’t be so funny if his expression of it combined with his hair didn’t make him look like a really, really upset puff ball.
“I’m totally legal for cigarettes,” Lindsey points out, helpfully.
“If anyone asks I got it from a homeless dude on the corner of Centennial,” Jamia adds, smiling as she rolls her window down too. Gerard doesn’t say anything to defend himself, he just keeps smoking and reaches down to crank up 93.3 Modern Rock. High and Dry pounds through the speakers during the rest of the ride to the Cobra House.
A knot of worry grows in Gerard’s stomach. When he closes his eyes he can see the bassline being played.
(You’d kill yourself for recognition, you’d kill yourself to never ever stop, you broke another mirror, you’re turning into something you are not.)

---

Suave Suarez is leaning against the door, smoking one of his disgusting menthols, and Gerard can feel the bass from inside as soon as he puts his foot on the first step of the front porch.
“Hey Suarez,” he says, and shoves a twenty into his hands before he can even ask for the door fee. Alex opens the door for them and Gerard doesn’t even say thank you. (Jamia does, and Ray does, and Gerard’s pretty sure they’re going to be friends with Jamia. She’s a nice person. She’s a good one. And she’s wearing Lindsey’s clothes like she belongs in them, so that has to go for something.)
The Cobra House (a colloquial name for this huge just-off-campus mansion which houses Cobra Eta Phi, a notoriously infamous fraternity technically run by Gabe Saporta, although the house is owned either by the goddess Hera or by Brendon Urie, no one’s entirely sure) is one Gerard is very familiar with; he frequently ends up here because there are always people, drugs, and more booze than anyone could shake a stick at for long enough to get through it all.
He takes a left down the hall as soon as he’s in because he knows it’s early enough the party will mostly just be outside, even if the house totally allows smoking and all the things that make parties drift outside in the first plac e. Ray’s at his left, and Lindsey’s at his right and Jamia trails behind them and Gerard feels like he should be more confident than he is, really he just wants to knock back as much alcohol as he can in the next ten minutes.
It’s all Gerard can do not to slam the back door behind him when Wish You Were Here starts playing inside. Only the fact he’d hit Jamia in the face stops him.
Surprisingly, there are only, like, fifteen people outside, but Gerard guesses they’re kind of early. He checks his phone, and it’s only eight, despite the fact that Lindsey and Jamia had been so stressed about how long makeup was going to take them (spoiler alert; not longer than it took Gerard).
The most immediate are the five sitting around the closest table to the door, Gabe, Will, Travie, Sean, and Kitty are all involved in what looks like storytime with Gabe and Will, Gabe is saying,
“So I look up, and there are my underwear and it’s not like I want to go home naked, if I get arrested for public indecency again--”
“Again?” Lindsey asks, crossing to sit next to Kitty, and beckoning Jamia over. Gerard inches closer, casually swiping the open bottle of vodka next to Gabe. He doesn’t read the label, just overturns it in his mouth.
“Gerard,” Gabe says, and Will winces next to him just in time for Gerard to slam the bottle down and fight to keep the liquid in his mouth.
“Yeah,” Will says, looking at him with concern which is very carefully masking mirth, “that’s mine, not Gabe’s.”
Gerard forces himself to swallow. (Definitely not the first time.)
“That was fucking disgusting and I’m going to fucking kill you, William fucking Saporta.”
“That’s not my last name,” Will points out.
“It totally is,” Gabe insists, and Gerard just rolls his eyes.
“You know there’s, like, stuff, over there, right?” Gabe says, waving a careless hand at the table opposite them, which is where the migratory flock of booze bottles at any party has decided to settle for the moment. Gerard lets out a sound somewhere between relief, frustration, and utter bliss and makes his way to the table, He lets his awareness of Ray and the girls drop at the door. He won’t remember the night in its entirety when he wakes up the next morning, and the memory cuts off with him reaching for the closest bottle of vodka and pouring himself what is neither a double, nor a triple, and for which his liver will probably hate him.
(Gerard doesn’t care.)
He makes his way out onto the lawn with his drink, downing half of it by the time he sits down next to Max and Monte, who are laughing their heads off at Brendon, who’s chasing a peacock around the yard flapping his arms. (Gerard’s pretty sure he’s not drunk, either, Brendon, as he’s observed, tends to just do really weird shit.)
“Hey Gee,” Max says when he sits down, and he bums a smoke off Gerard when he takes one out to light for himself. Gerard doesn't feel very talkative, but he forces it between drinks of vodka.
“Hey. How's it shaping up?”
They snicker as Brendon trips over the peacock. Gerard hears his swear but doesn’t think Brendon’s actually that angry at the bird.
Max talks about some shit Gerard won’t remember anyway, and about Pete, and Monte joins in every now and then with a little quip, but Gerard’s just whittling down the time until the bottom of his cup.
(This is Gerard’s usual behavior for the first half hour of a party; drink and eye the competition. Competition for what? Gerard’s never known.)
After a while, Monte and Max drift inside to meet the other half of their party showing up late because of some emergency downtown. Gerard’s getting fuzzy on details by that point. He’s getting sloppy enough not to care. (Because at the core he really fucking doesn’t.)
Gerard just sits outside and watches Lindsey leaning back on the porch, clinking her red solo cup against Gabe’s, they’re laughing but Gerard can’t quite make out what about. When Lindsey curls her hair around her finger and nods, that wild grin of hers shining, Gerard has a single moment of feeling pristinely blessed to have her in his life.
Gerard makes himself stand up when he reaches the bottom of his cup and Gabe takes Jamia and Lindsey inside to give them the tour, Travie, Kitty, and Sean wander over to the flock of booze, where Gerard meets them, and pours himself another drink, he catches Ray’s attention and gestures wildly at the table, to which Ray gives a thumbs up, so Gerard grabs him a beer and brings it over. He sits between Ray and Will and lights a cigarette, tossing Ray his beer and then offering him the pack, Will takes out one of his Virginia Slims and lights it in unison with Ray’s and they’re all kind of quiet and then there’s small talk and Gerard goes for a beer and then he turns around and Jamia is sitting down with Will and Ray and the kid from the coffee shop is talking to Ray with a huge grin on his face and a hand on Jamia’s shoulder and Gerard shakes his head and slips past them, back inside, quiet as death.
He’s on his way down the hall, still smoking his cigarette when Gerard runs, literally, into Pete, who’s heading outside next to Andy, probably to commence much the same ritual Gerard just finished.
“Hey,” Pete says, and he’s smiling that toothy grin and it makes Gerard just a little angry, but he likes it. There’s something about that little annoying quality about Pete that he wears almost, almost endearingly. Gerard can admit that sometimes.
“Hey,” Gerard returns, then nods at Andy, who waves, then steps past them and keeps going. Pete stays, and for some reason Gerard’s a tiny bit relieved.
“You wanna go upstairs a minute?” Pete’s asking, then, and Gerard, who has never actually had a bad experience with hanging out alone with Pete, says yes.
They end up in Brendon’s room, because Brendon’s hanging out chasing peacocks while there’s a party in his house, apparently, and because there’s a fucking sitting room in Brendon’s bedroom for some reason.
“There’s a fucking sitting room in Brendon’s bedroom for some reason,” Pete remarks, gesturing around as he sits down on the couch. He pulls a sleeve of pills from his jacket pocket and pokes open the foil with a frayed fingernail, he pops it into his mouth and hands the sleeve over. Gerard makes a questioning gesture at the sleeve while he pulls one out and slips it between his teeth.
They both swallow dry with the ease of practice.
“Rohypnol,” Pete says, by way of explanation.
“Isn’t that, like, a date rape drug or something?”
“Hey I offered, didn’t I? Total consent.” Pete fucking smirks. Gerard glares, hard. Death glare. He shoves his hand into his pocket for his smokes, passes one to Pete before he can ask, and slides his own out of the pack. He’s running low, has to stop for cigarettes after the party. He’ll have Ray drop him at the bus stop so he can make a trip of it and get new rolling papers and maybe, god forbid, an actual pipe. He’s been meaning to treat himself to some nicer cigarettes, too.
Pete worms a hand into Gerard’s pocket to steal his lighter, lights his cigarette, and then hands the lighter back.
Gerard gives him a sarcastic, “Thanks,” and sits down next to him, “if you have papers I can roll us a joint.”
“Nah. I’m going to drink so hard,” Pete says, content, looking at the ceiling.
“You sure?” Gerard pulls an ashtray between them on the couch.
“Yeah. Why are you here? I thought you had work.”
“I got off at like, seven thirty. It was a slow day, too. The short kid who’s out back now dropped in but not many other people.”
“What’s his name?” Pete asks, but Gerard just shrugs in response. He blows out a skull smoke ring. Pete smiles.
“Don’t you also have work?” Gerard asks, turning his head to properly look at Pete.
“Every fucking day, baby,” Pete says, pushing himself up off the couch, “Catch me later, huh?” He winks, and he’s going for the door, but Gerard stands, too.
“Wait, I’m coming with you.” Pete laughs, grins that genuine fucking toothy grin, and says,
“Okay,” and that’s it.
It’s only as they’re coming downstairs that Gerard spots Mikey at the entrance with the coffee kid (or, at least, presumably the coffee kid, since he’s got the same skateboard strapped to his backpack) next to him and Lindsey gesturing wildly at both of them, Jamia nowhere to be seen despite having been more or less attached to Lindsey all night. Gerard almost goes to catch Lindsey’s attention and tell her to stop it holy shit that’s his brother, but then he catches sight of Pete, and the way he’s practically scoping Mikey out and Gerard grabs him by the collar of his shirt and drags him so their chests are tight to each other and his mouth is at his ear.
“Pete Wentz, if you fucking touch my little brother, you will never know this earth again, and I will make sure there is a special place in the underworld picked out just for your sorry little fucking ass, understood?”
Pete doesn’t flinch and comes away grinning like a coyote smelling fresh roadkill, and by the time Gerard lets Pete go, Mikey’’s already disappeared in the throng of tipsy college students. Dread knots in Gerard’s gut and he pushes Pete back, shoving him up against the stair rail, and Lindsey notices as the kid melts away into the crowd. She has that look that screams ‘Gerard, please, you’re being an idiot’ and Gerard just shakes his head and lets his hands fall. There will be time to punch that shit in the mouth later.
Gerard has a knack for stealth, and he full-heartedly intends to follow Mikey as best he can without his brother knowing, but then he decides he needs to pee possibly worse than he’s ever had to and wanders off, briefly, in search of a bathroom. By the time he ducks out of the quiet little side-hall off Cobra House (quiet, being relative, of course; the bass of some song Sean wrote with this senior about to graduate in the music department, Katy, is literally making the porcelain jump against itself when Gerard finally finds the bathroom. It makes him want to puke.) it’s too loud to hear his own voice and too packed to move comfortably, so he alters his plan, because the front door is closer and he needs some fresh air.
(Or nicotine-addled smoke, but the two are pretty much synonymous to Gerard at this point)

---

Alex is still on door duty (it’s only been, what, an hour and a half since Gerard showed up?) but he’s got a beer in one hand now, and Ryland’s standing with him. Gerard sits on the railing and pops a cigarette into his mouth (seven left).
His lighter clicks dully but doesn’t light and Gerard groans because he doesn’t want to have to bum lights from people, but Alex leans in and lights his cigarette without asking before Gerard has the chance to get pouty. He throws his dead lighter at the tire of the nearest car, because that seems like the right thing to do. Nothing happens, he expects some vast array of car alarm sounds to spring from it but the lighter just clatters uselessly to the ground.
Gerard groans.
“What’s up with you,” Ryland asks. He’s dressed as Guy Ripley, which Gerard is still, at this point (the joke will be explained to him in a month or so), convinced is some sort of media character of whom Gerard does not understand the reference.
“My fucking brother’s here,” Gerard mutters, he downs his beer and considers tossing the cup, too, but he doesn’t really have the energy to watch it flutter against the wind for that second before it falls so he just holds it in his hands and crushes it between his fingers.
“Why’d you come, then?” Alex asks, and he’s pulling a little tin out of his pocket, which makes Gerard just a bit hopeful.
“Because I fucking miss him.” Gerard shakes his head, watches Alex slide a joint out of the tin and light the end, then pass to Ryland. Gerard is so okay with this development.
“Then why aren’t you talking to him?” Ryland passes to Gerard, who sighs, takes a hit, and speaks with held breath as he passes back to Alex.
“Because he hates me.”
Alex lets a girl who he calls Ashlee in after she pays five dollars and nods, passes.
“Why?” Ryland is the one to ask.
“I think. I think it’s because I’m a shit brother who fucking bailed on our shit fucking Catholic fucking household and fucking left him to rot in fucking Catholic school with people he hated and people who beat him up and treated him like fucking crap,” it all comes out in a jumble between a pull on the cigarette and a pull on the joint, because he’s getting drunk now and he’s getting high and the rohypnol is killing whatever inhibition he had and maybe, with it all raw and new and there in his fucking face he just wants it out of his chest.
His heart won’t stop beating like it’s trying to escape. Gabe ducks out the door, grinning, before Ryland or Alex has a chance to respond, and shouts,
“Sixes and beer pong motherfuckers!” And Ryland and Alex both give Gerard pleading eyes as Gabe retreats back into the throng.
“Will you watch the door for a little while?” says Alex, kicking the little lockbox under his stool with his toe. “Just take a five from everyone who goes in and put it in there.”
“Yeah, sure,” Gerard says, and gives this defeated little fucking laugh he didn’t mean to come out quite as pathetic as it does. It’s just fucking ironic that as soon as he has the guts to drop his shit, it doesn’t matter, then he calls after them as they’re turning around to fight their way through the house.
“Bring me a fucking drink before you go, though.”
(Story of his life.)
He sits on Alex’ stool for a while after Alex brings him a beer, letting people in and letting himself get more intoxicated (that’s the point of being here, isn’t it?) and then the music is changing and Alex and Ryland are back and Gerard dives back into the crowd in search of the migratory booze bottles and ends up getting caught by the speakers as the track switches again, and he’s half-sitting on the arm of a chair inhabited by none other than the skateboarding Catholic schoolboy who bought coffee from him earlier. Jamia’s still nowhere to be found. He looks like he’s well on the way to being smashed himself, and he’s obviously gotten stoned in the past fifteen minutes for what might have been the first time in his life. Gerard has a pang of wanting to be a rebellious teenager again, but quickly quells it because he’s just the mess of a teenager he used to be with the added responsibilities of being an autonomous person.
The track switches and there’s a pause that indicates poor producing (Ray always got on his case for that) or a conscious decision to grab everyone’s attention by way of sudden, total silence. All it does to the party is make everyone talk a little slower and quieter than they had been. Then his fucking demo is pounding through the speakers and it’s not good, it doesn’t have anything beyond his shaky guitar running behind it but Gerard’s alcohol-addled brain can’t help but feel proud that all these fucking people are being subjected to his shitty music.
And then his stomach bottoms out because it’s not just any one of his stupid, solo demos free of attempting to write with Ray, it’s fucking Brother, and Ryland is shooting him a thumbs up from the controls of the music and Gerard’s caught combing the crowd for Mikey, because Mikey hasn’t heard this demo yet and he’s not supposed to and he’s.
Mikey’s not there. He must be outside. But the coffee kid is tapping his fingers against his knee and then he looks up with these hazel eyes that look straight out of a fucking flat color comic book and he’s tugging on Gerard’s sleeve until Gerard’s ear is by his mouth.
“Do you know who this is?” coffee-kid half-yells into Gerard’s ear. Gerard laughs, he fucking slurs his laugh, too, patting his knee because for a second he kind of feels o-fucking-kay.
He doesn’t trust his voice to answer, so Gerard just points at himself, grinning and mouthing ‘it’s me’.
“Seriously?”
Gerard can hardly hear his voice but he sees the guy’s eyebrows raise up and he reads it on his lips and expression easy enough. Gerard just smirks and nods along to the music, then leans into the guy’s ear, starts singing along, even though he knows it’ll mostly be garbled out by the party noise. The guy’s eyes light up and Gerard just shakes his head. The music’s filtering down to a close on the four and a half minutes of demo, and Gerard’s standing up again as Jamia flits over to coffee-kid and grins at Gerard, then leans down to talk to him and Gerard takes that as his cue to melt back into the party.
He makes his way to the back door, slips out as best he can, most people don’t notice him, but Mikey, who’s standing with Robert and Brendon and Gabe at the corner of the back patio, smoking a cigarette which is probably one of Will’s, probably does. He’s had years of practice watching Gerard sneak around.
Gerard watches Mikey drop his cigarette and can hear his swear (and their laughter). He turns around, grabs a beer from a migratory booze cooler which showed up sometime in the interim between his last visit to the back yard and now.
He cracks the tab so quiet no one’s eyes flick to him, Mikey’s almost do.
The track rolls over again and suddenly Latest Flame is on and Gerard’s eyes jump to Mikey to watch his fingers tap against his cigarette in time and his lips curl around the lyrics silently while he nods along and listens to Robert talk. When Mikey overturns the red cup he’s holding to get out the last drops, Gerard can’t help but wince at the slight wobble at his knee.
Mikey’s little sweep of his surroundings to get his bearings again obviously turns Gerard up on his brain, because Mikey’s eyes linger on him for half a second more than they should and then he’s trying to ash the cigarette he just picked up so hard it snaps at the filter.
Gerard tries not to laugh and slides his own cigarette out of the pack (five left), then realizes he doesn’t have a lighter and looks around for a source of fire. Which, very conveniently, is Lindsey stepping out of the door, and catching sight of him. She’s carying two drinks and Gerard finishes his by the time she walks over, steals the second one, gives her a cigarette (four left) and then says,
“I need a fucking lighter.”
“Why didn’t you bring two?” Lindsey asks, handing him her black one which has a length of masking tape reading ‘Lyn-Z will kill u if you’re reading this” in sharpie. He lights his cigarette and hands it back so as to not incur her wrath.
“Because I’m not a fucking genius,” Gerard says, and by the time he’s looking over Lindsey’s shoulder to try to find Mikey, he’s gone, and Gabe is kissing Will across from them on the porch and Gerard groans.
“I want to go home,” he decides.
“No you don’t,” she argues, lighting her own cigarette. For some reason, the alcohol in their brains tells them both it’s a great idea to switch cigarettes with each other at this point, even though they’re smoking the same thing. This is, for some reason, a really common a occurrence between Lindsey and Gerard. Once they’ve flipped cigarettes, they just look at each other like they’re trying to understand what the other’s thinking by sucking in their mouth germs on the filter. Ray finds them, and Lindsey melts off into the crowd again to find Jamia.
“You okay?” Ray asks, bumming a smoke (three left, Gerard tells himself he needs to stop bumming them out).
“Yeah. Will you take me to the bus stop before you head home?”
“You’re fucking drunk,” Ray points out.
“I also need cigarettes,” Gerard says, shoving the top of his pack down and showing Ray the three sad, sad filters.
“Didn’t you recover like a pack and a half this morning?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t help me now.”
“Then start bumming, Gerard.”
And Gerard ‘pshhhh’-s at him and rummages around in his pockets, sitting down at the table and grabbing his rolling papers, setting about rolling a joint.
“I fucking hate Pete Wentz,” he says, absently, tearing buds fine and maybe using it as a little bit of a way to gett out his frustration. He takes a heavy swig of beer. Ray follows suit.
“Why do you hate him this time? Did he stand you up on a fucking date or something?”
“We’re not dating. Never have been.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Gabe!” Gerard calls across the patio, to where that little circle have begun their own joint spinning around their little triangle, “Have I ever dated Pete Wentz?”
“No,” Gabe shouts back, “But you sure as hell fucked his brains out.” And Gerard watches Will grimace and refuse the joint and Gerard rolls his eyes and looks at Ray.
“See? Never dated Pete Wentz.”
“Is that why you hate him?” Ray asks, accepting the unlit joint when it’s handed to him and fishing a lighter out of his pocket and puffing it to life before handing the joint back and pocketing the lighter again (damn, Gerard wanted to see if he could swipe one from Ray, no dice.)
“No, he eyed Mikey up.”
“So you’re jealous.”
“No,” Gerard says, and he realizes as he’s saying it that it’s the truth, he passes the joint back, “I just, I dunno. People like me and Pete? We’re fucking assholes, we’re scum. We’re toxic. We’re venomous, we ruin people, we’re hurricanes ready to erupt.”
“You mean volcanoes?”
“No, shut the fuck up, like I was saying, I just. I don’t want him near Mikey. I’ve fucked him up enough,” Gerard’s starting to slur, he pulls hard on the joint when it’s passed back.
“I’m leaving that with you,” he says to Ray, passing it back to his friend again, “Merry fucking Christmas.”
“It’s September,” is the last thing Gerard hears from Ray that night.

---

Gerard finds himself a perch on the speaker he was sitting by when he talked briefly to the coffee kid.
He can watch the wider lounge and part of the hall and he can see Mikey in the opposing corner, separated from him by a large potted plant, sipping at a red cup, his arm slung carelessly over the back of the couch around the aforementioned coffee kid, and suddenly it fucking clicks.
That coffee kid is Frank fucking Iero. That’s Mikey’s Catholic schoolboy (boy?)friend, his high school rebel pal. The one Mikey always talked so highly of. Gerard’s gut burns with distaste. He has to stop himself from spitting into the plant next to him. He hisses behind his teeth in jealousy. (We are our own damn coffins.)
And then there’s something else to be burning about because Mikey’s stood, with intent, he’s probably about to go get him and Frank another drink, but Pete’s caught him halfway across the room, a hand on his arm. Pete’s drunk, and Gerard’s pretty sure his eyeliner’s tracked down one cheek, but he can’t tell from this far away and it doesn’t fucking matter if he’s been crying anyway, because he’s obviously fucking hitting on Mikey, all smiles and way too close, way too close.
Mikey takes it, gives that little secret smirk he fucking knows breaks people, and leans in half an inch, just enough to signal an ‘okay’. Gerard takes the second to last gulp of his beer. He’s starting to feel sloppy, sloppy to the point of not really being able to do anything. And he doesn’t fucking care because Pete is fucking flirting with his little fucking brother.
(Neither Mikey nor Gerard will remember how he gets away from Pete, just that Gerard’s still sitting on the speaker when Pete is suddenly standing in the middle of the room alone and that’s enough of a sign for Gerard.)
Gerard stands up, swaying a little on his ankles, and then lurches forward, the crowd kind of catches him before he falls, which is probably what keeps his conviction burning and he fights his way through and it’s fucking ironic because a recording of one of Pete’s poems is suddenly playing and without the instruments backing, the room is quiet and when Gerard gets to Pete, all eyes are on him because he screams, over the Pete in the speakers,
“Motherfucker, I told you not to go near him,” and in some corner of Gerard’s brain where some tiny fraction of him still wants to use the judgement of a sober man, there’s a whisper of embarrassment at the way everyone’s looking at him, and Pete just has wide eyes.
He lands one hit before Pete quite realizes what’s going on, His knuckles sink in Pete’s solar plexus and he can hear the air leave Pete’s lungs and some part of Gerard is made viscerally happy by this sound, so he brings a knee up to slam against Pete’s chest as he goes down, which keeps him half standing, but bent over, trying to get his breath back. Gerard’s readying another punch by the time he literally gets fucking kicked in the shins by Andy, and he’s turning on the little guy, ready to punch him too, when he gets more than beaten to it by a blow square to the side of the head from Pete. Because Pete and Andy apparently have this routine worked out or something. (Which Gerard, in the moment, can only think is really fucking unfair.)
Gerard goes down and takes Pete’s knee to his cheekbone and then Pete and Andy are gone in the crowd and Gerard’s on his hands and knees, his head spinning in so many ways he can’t tell which way is up or down and he reaches for the nearest plant feebly and pukes.
Twice.
The world turns into a top, spinning wobbly on end and suddenly the edges are fuzzy and black and Gerard is fighting the white spots out of his vision and the track rolls over again and Morrissey is grinding into his ears and Gerard’s fighting to breathe. There are two sets of hands on his shoulders, then, pulling him vertical and he’s pushing at them because, fuck, no, being vertical is not what his brain wants in the slightest.
“Hey, hey, what the fuck?” a warped voice is saying and as a bit of pressure lets up in Gerard’s head, he identifies it weakly as belonging to Dewees.
“You finally fucking punched him,” Bert’s saying on his other side, and Gerard can practically imagine him shaking his head and trying not to smile but his vision’s swimming, or trying to, at this point his vision’s drowning.
Somehow, Bert and James manage to get Gerard standing, and shove a glass of ice water into his hand to hold by his face and that feels nice but it doesn’t help the fact that Gerard is staggering and the room is spinning.
Gerard groans, shaking his head.
“Mikey,” he mutters.

---

He’s not at all sure how he gets to the corner store, he just knows he’s still drunk and having problems staying upright and that’s about all he can focus on.
That and that he doesn’t have a lighter and it’s, he checks his phone, four AM, and his cigarette pack has mysteriously been whittled down to his very last precious cigarette and for some reason he’s wearing a bracelet on his wrist he didn’t have before and he’s got a bunch of random runes scrawled on his arm in permanent marker and his face fucking hurts and his shin fucking hurts and he wants to be home. He wants Ray telling him it’s okay. Or Mikey. He really just wants Mikey.

---

When Gerard wakes up, it’s like peeling his eyelids off his eyes and the second he does that it feels like he’s been repeatedly bashed over the back of the head with a purse full of car keys and cat food cans. Then everything else starts aching and Gerard immediately quells any thought of moving from this half-sitting propped position he has going on here.
He kind of just brings his knees up and cradles his head, covering his eyes.
The sensation overload comes crashing over him; his phone pushed against his ass, his keys in his front pocket digging into his hip, the cold, cold ground underneath him, the blue, blue sky above. It’s way too fucking bright. The smell is kind of dismal, too. Like burnt pigeon mixed with the aftertaste of cough syrup. Gerard feels the bruise on his cheekbone from Pete’s knee swollen against the soft tissue near his eye, and the side of his head where Pete punched him pounds worse than any other bit of him.
He digs his phone out of his pocket with some whining and grunting and ignores the, what, (holy shit) twelve text messages he’s got backed up on him, and speed dials Ray. (Because Ray is the only person on his speed dial, and the only one who’s ever been on his speed dial, for that matter.)
“Help,” he croaks into the phone when the line picks up and there’s rustling on the other end, moving his jaw brings his head into a whole new kind of hell. His mouth tastes like a mix of the bottom of an ashtray and the residue left after mixing all the alcohol in every residence hall resident’s liquor cabinet and then drinking it all and leaving the very last half-sip to sit in the sun for six months. He wants a cigarette, coffee, and-or water. He’s going to puke instead. Which he does, into the gutter thankfully. He somehow avoids covering his phone in vomit.
“Gerard?” Ray is saying when he lifts it back to his ear, “Where are you? Fuck. Are you okay? I’ll come get you.”
It’s a worse kind of hell looking up into the sunlight to check his cross streets and letting sunlight fracture into his eyes and set his brain on literal fucking fire. (When he lifts his arm to shield his eyes, he realizes the runes from last night are actually Bert’s number scrawled in big digits across his forearm with ‘if lost please return to’ above it) He barely manages to relay them before he’s retching in the gutter again. Gerard groans in relief as Ray murmurs, quieter, more careful, that he’ll be there in ten minutes.
Gerard welcomes death when he manages to hoist himself up to his knees, and he’s begging for it by the time he stands, wobbly and upright.
He staggers inside the corner store, grinding his brain through buying a bottle of water (the only coffee they have is the energy drink kind and Gerard isn’t in any fucking way ready to subject his pounding head to that), a pack of Black and Golds, and a pack of reds. He tips the cashier, for some reason.
He lights one of the black and golds while he waits on the corner for Ray and starts trying to convince himself that he feels okay. He’s downed the bottle of water by the time Ray gets there and feels no better because of it, but the nicotine puts the pounding in his head on the back burner and he slumps thankfully in the passenger seat of Ray’s volvo.
“How’d you get out here? I thought you left with Bert,” Ray asks when he’s settled. He’s being merciful and keeping the radio off and the windows (except the one Gerard has hardly cracked to smoke out of) shut.
“Probably convinced him I needed cigarettes,” Gerard rasps, finally checking his phone’s messages.
The most recent is from Pete, not twenty minutes before Gerard woke up.
srry xo
He fires a quick ‘you’re not fucking forgiven’ back, and checks the others. The three just previous to that are Ray (ten minutes before Pete’s, then at around 6 AM, and one when he left the party at 3:30) wondering where he is, if he’s okay. Then there’s Lindsey’s ‘where are you? I’m going to take Jamia home, catch up with you tomorrow if you survive the hangover’ and Jamia’s ‘It was really nice meeting you, goodnight.’ and Gabe’s ‘thanks for coming.’ And five. Five from Mikey.
Gerard can’t open them fast enough.
The first is from ten; late enough after Mikey showed up that he was drunk enough to talk to Gerard, early enough nothing major had happened.
Why are you here?
The next is from half an hour later.
New you would b.
Then an hour in between.
asshloe.
Then at two-forty-five.
im sorry.
And the last one, the last one is fucking heartbreaking. Because Mikey’s said it so many fucking times, because he stopped when they stopped talking, because Mikey’s beautiful and perfect and shouldn’t, but because it says Mikey cares. Mikey wants him okay. And because it was sent at four AM and that means Mikey had the time to get a little sober before he sent it, or he at least had the time to let the booze work through him on the way home.
i gto home safe. frnie and jam n lynz are ok. i hope yr ok big brother.
And Gerard leans his head back into the seat and sighs. The headache doesn’t really matter anymore. He takes a long time to text Mikey back. They’re sitting at their dorm room coffee table with coffee when he does. He’s ignoring Ray’s disapproving looks as he spikes his coffee over his phone and lights a joint because it’s only noon. He shares the joint with Ray while he composes a text to soothe the censure.
Home safe. Hungover, I’ll be okay. I’ve got class, then work. Please text me. I love you, little brother. -G
He’s mostly-drunk by the time he goes to class. Mikey doesn’t text. Gerard tries to convince himself that he’s okay with that. He tries to convince himself he’s okay at all.
(He’s not okay.)

Notes