The Kiss of Vanity Blessed Me With A Spiritual Murder

Weeks had passed, but the sinking feeling inside of Gerard’s bones has not.

He thinks letting go of things is necessary even though their previous impact still hurts his head. Bad things happen, people leave, people get hurt. It’s how life works, he tells himself. He just wishes he could finally admit that life is one of those things he’d never been good at.
Donna doesn’t enjoy seeing him troubled. It makes her feel anxious. It’s a fear of the unknown, she supposes, plaguing her thoughts and sending a giant wave of tension through the air above the breakfast table. It’s an enchanted circle, Gerard thinks, the tension just makes him feel worse about everything.

Knowing why she gets so worried doesn’t help the situation in the slightest. It’s different than general guilt, it’s searing into the back of his skull like a tape recording of all the things he hates about this world. He feels like a scratched record, fuzzy and dysfunctional but playing the damned album all the same- glitches distorting the sound every five seconds and making goosebumps grow across your arms.

The words hanging in the air as they’re drinking their morning coffee in silence feel like ten thousand ghosts were trapped in his room just to haunt him. Gerard hates feeling like he’s being examined.

“Just tell me I have nothing to be worried about,” she finally says, eyes boring into her Aladdin Sane mug as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world. Her hair is dark on her white t-shirt, the glow of the soft streetlights illuminating her skin. They’re still lit, it’s not even six in the morning.

Everything is blue in the room, Gerard feels as if his skin is, too. His hair probably looks like midnight even though he needs to dye his roots again. It feels like forever since the last time his shampoo foam was lavender and everything hurt in the right way. He should remember to pick up some dye on his way home from school today.

Gerard takes a deep breath, staring into the crevices of the wooden table beneath his hands. They’re harsh like the shallow gashes across his knuckles, dry skin spread apart and nearly bleeding. He has to learn how to moisturize properly- Jamia had already given him three creams, and he's lost every single one.

He isn't used to his mother's question. She knows how stupid it makes him feel when people talk to him like that. It's this incredibly unnecessary pride within him, he figures; it's nonsensical how much he wants to keep everything inside. It adds a few bricks to the faux wall of security he's built around his metaphorical frame. He tries to convince himself it's made out of solid rock, but it's pretty obvious it can be cut through as scissors on paper. It definitely means he isn't having an easy time answering it.

“You have nothing to worry about,” he says. He means it, for the most part- the situation at hand truly isn’t something he wishes to give her headaches about. He's just confused, and troubled, and everything he always is but with the addition of someone he can't read and his own feelings he doesn't comprehend. “I’m fine. I’m just a bit out of it.”

She lifts up her left eyebrow, opening up the pack of cigarettes lying on the table. “Out of what?” she asks, putting one in his mouth, one in her own.

He smiles a bit as she’s lighting them. “Everything.”

The corner of her mouth turns upwards, sadly. She knows what he means, even though sometimes she wishes she didn’t. Gerard never realizes how well his mother knows him. But maybe it’s for the best, she thinks, taking a drag and looking at the murky clouds through the window. It’s just another thing he’d overthink.

He doesn’t need that. Overthinking kills. She knows that better than anyone.

*

Gerard sometimes wishes Ryan wasn't as nice as he is.

It'd be self-absorbed of him to say that it makes him feel bad. It's not about him, and even if it is it's definitely not because Ryan wants Gerard to feel like an asshole.
He just has this aura of acceptance to him, it's simply who he is- a personality whose thoughts are as gentle as his words, as his hands. Gerard sometimes feels as if Ryan’s mouth is filled with flowers that bloom whenever he speaks.

The sunny weather is so unusual for late November but it seems to make Ryan happy. He's all golden eyes and even brighter smiles ever since the last rain fell and the northern wind dried up the city. He’s been wearing a really ratty trench coat ever since, but even Gerard has to admit he’s a little tired from carrying an umbrella wherever he goes.

Wednesday morning, Jamia has gone to her grandmother's for Thanksgiving holidays and left them three rolled up joints in Ryan's locker, in a thick envelope with a note that said ‘if you're the principle, please don’t tell my mom’. Gerard doesn’t think he’d laughed that hard in a while.

That afternoon, Ryan takes Gerard to the graveyard. He is slightly uneasy as he walks the stone path, but he has a feeling Frank hasn’t been there in a while. The flowers on his mother's grave are withered and close to gone, but he'd never admit he’s checked. Ryan sat on the ground since it wasn't wet, rambling some bullshit about dying grass with an already lit joint in his hand. Ryan never changes. It’s probably one of the things Gerard is grateful for this year.

He doesn't usually like to smoke. Not cigarettes, cigarettes are fine, he doesn’t feel like they affect his brain as other opiates do. It’s why he never drinks, he supposes, losing the faux control he's convinced himself he has just makes him feel endlessly unsafe. He doesn’t like feeling unsafe in his own head if he can avoid it.

Right now, he’s alright, though. There’s something about Ryan that denies most of the anxiety Gerard feels on a usual level. It's like he tamed the lion, turned the hurricane into a breeze- it's still there but now he can breathe through it. He doesn’t think Ryan even understands he's doing it, but he's still glad he does. Another thing he’s grateful for, he supposes.

“I dreamed about the ocean last night,” Ryan says, voice airy through the wind. His skin is pale, freckles soft underneath his eyes, hair glowing orange and hazel underneath the four PM sunlight. “The water was purple, the sand was red and brown. I was in really shallow water, lying on my back. I was looking at the sky, it was dark as hell, but it was still kind of light. It was like a sunset, the sky was dark orange but the clouds on it were like really thick ashes.” He took a drag, coughed a bit, closed his eyes and continued.

“I remember feeling really… dispersed in the sea. Oh, and I'm totally bullshitting all of this eloquence right now, but there's literally no other way for me to describe it. It was like… like I was the salt, like I was the waves- it felt like the ocean and I were one, you know?” He looks really serious for a moment. He opens his eyes and looks up at Gerard, small frown curving from the tip of his nose towards the left side of his mouth. “It felt like a sign. Maybe that feeling is what this life is all about and whatnot. It felt like that in the dream, at least. Again, I sound really fucking pretentious, but I guess I'm making some sense at least.” He looks at Gerard with blown pupils. It's endearing. “Am I?”

“You are,” Gerard says after a few moments. “I like the ocean. Being close to it feels like home. Jersey shore sucks, but it's still the place I grew up in.”

Ryan sighs, looking over the graves absent-mindedly. “There used to be this boy.” He doesn't continue, he leaves it at that until the butt of the joint is dead and inside a plastic bag sitting on the grass beside him. Gerard waits for him to resume as if he knows why it's hard for him to talk about it. “The dream reminded me of him. His clothes always smelled like the ocean. I guess his mom used some fancy-ass detergent, I don't know.” It's all he says- practically nothing, but it feels like so much more from the way his voice sounds like he's floating somewhere far away.

“Something tells me this boy is no longer around.” Ryan nods, still not looking at him. “And something else tells me you're not that indifferent about it.”

“He fucked off to God knows where this summer. I only found out he had moved away when I saw his house was on sale.” It feels wrong, seeing Ryan so bitter. He looks like his skin is going to tear any second now. It’s scary for many reasons- but mostly because Ryan is the Sun and this feels like so much more than a regular eclipse. “He didn’t call, or write. I tried for a while, I did. But after a few days of doing that I realized he would’ve said something if he wanted me to know.” Gerard can’t describe the expression Ryan’s face is holding when he says that.

His words don’t sound like flowers anymore. “Jamia doesn't know.” It's just a statement, but Gerard knows it might as well be a warning. It doesn't feel good, but he knows he won't tell her. She doesn't need that right now, anyway.

“You can tell me about him. If you want.” Gerard stumbles over his words. He knows Ryan's noticed, but he won't point it out. He never does.

Ryan's eyes are red when he looks at him again. He clears his throat once, twice before he seems alright enough to talk. Gerard doesn't ask. “We met because he needed help with, uh, how do I put it… paying attention in class, I guess. He had a hearing aid. He wasn't completely deaf, but he had trouble taking notes and all that. I remember him wearing his hair long because he was embarrased about it.”

“It never made a difference for me. People thought he was weird because he was quiet. He was actually really funny, but nobody saw that because they never made an effort to get to know him. He wore these really stupid striped t-shirts with little patches on them that made him look like a giant nerd. He had a crescent shaped stick-n-poke on the back of his neck. I thought it was so fucking cool.”

“It was really weird for me when I first realized I liked him. It wasn't a surprise, or anything like that, I had always thought he was attractive, but it felt different when I actually admitted to myself that it wasn't just that.” He huffs a laugh and ruffles his own hair, nose crinkling a bit. He doesn't look ashamed, just slightly nostalgic, as if he's living through a memory he's been trying not to think about for a while. “He took me everywhere. We once went to the shore with his dad's van and smoked pot by the sea with our shirts off at 4 AM. That was the first time he kissed me. Right under the fucking stars. It's so you think of me every time you look up at the night's sky, he said. I don't look at the stars anymore.”

“He was my first. Everything, really. On the Fourth of July we got drunk in his backyard, emptying his mother’s bottle of cherry schnapps and falling asleep on the grass. He had a thing for stars and fireworks, I just had a thing for him, I guess.”

“We bickered a lot. We were never official, either. That's a part of the reason why Jamia doesn't know. The other part is mostly because I didn't want to tell her I had a friend who was more than a friend, but refused to admit it to anyone that wasn't me or him. It made me feel pathetic.” He laughs for real now, but it's shallow and fake, and the saddest sound Gerard has heard in weeks. “He did care for me, though. I don't know if he loved me like he said he did. I don't want to invalidate whatever it is that he said to me. I guess I'm not being rational, but it doesn't even matter anymore.”

Gerard gets up from the rock, nesting himself next to Ryan on the floor, thigh to thigh. He's not good with emotional support, but he hopes Ryan can see he's doing his best. He puts his hand on Ryan's shoulder, tentatively.

Ryan looks at him, eyes wide and bloodshot. For a moment, Gerard thinks he'll say something, but suddenly he's deathly close, eyelids closed and lips on Gerard’s mouth. Ryan smells like blueberries, honey and heartbreak, and his lips are so soft and sweet that they might as well be sugar, but a kind so bitter that it’s oozing with despair and a hopeless kind of deliberation. Gerard has never felt this frozen in his entire life.

Ryan quickly moves away, face scared and shoulders shaking. “Oh, fuck, sorry, I didn't mean to do that, I-” he bites his lip looking everywhere that isn't Gerard, “I'm a fucking mess and you were there and I'm so sorry.”

Gerard is still frozen, but he manages to will his arms to come unstuck, so he opens them wide
and hopes Ryan will get the message.
He does, after a second of hesitation, and his head is in Gerard’s clavicle, breathing shakily as Gerard tries to keep him from trembling. Strangely, he doesn't mind.

“You’re okay,” Gerard says quietly, hands on Ryan's back. “He’ll fade. Everything fades. So will he. Some day you won't remember him when you dream about the ocean, and if you do, it won't make you feel like it does right now. I know it.”

“You're so sweet, Ryan, you're the sweetest person on Earth and that boy can't be the thing to make you bitter. I know he felt like it, but he isn't the ocean and you can't be his shore. You can't stay and wait for him while the current carries him away from you. The ocean may be beautiful, but it never stays.”

Silence. For a long time, neither of them speaks. The wind is humming around Gerard’s shoulders, warm, tangling his hair with Ryan's.
It feels like a decade has passed when one of them speaks again.

“Thank you,” Ryan mumbles. “I don't think I've ever felt so understood.”

Ryan is definitely one of the main things Gerard is grateful for this year, and maybe even every year- if he’s lucky enough.

*

Gerard’s mother doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

She tells people it’s her way of rebelling against the authentic american lifestyle, but Gerard doesn’t need her confirmation to know that's mainly just a really good excuse. A big family dinner tastes like nothing but phantoms of the past when you remember none of the people you used to have it with are there anymore.

It used to make him sad. Now he doesn’t feel a thing, but maybe that's how it should be. Mikey wouldn’t want him to be sad over things he can’t change and he's grown so accustomed to the ‘Mikey wouldn’t want him to…’ mindset that he might as well embrace it. It's not that he doesn't care anymore, it's just that he's found a way to feel less guilty about it as time passes.

“I'm not going to pray,” she says as they’re watching TV on Thursday evening, bowl of popcorn between their thighs. Gerard just blinks, his silence ushering her to keep on talking. “But I'm going to say that I'm thankful for you being such a good kid.”

Gerard sighs, forehead creasing, fighting a bubble of laughter caught in his throat. “Yeah, the model child.”

“You're the only one I have.” Gerard pretends it doesn't sting. “And I'm not talking about your grades, or the pot I can smell on your clothes every now and then. You're a good person, Gerard. I guess that's all I ever wanted from you.”

Maybe that's all Gerard has ever wanted from himself, too.

*

That night, it's strangely easy for Gerard to fall asleep. His room is warm and the blanket folds around his body like it belongs, arm underneath his pillow whilst he’s listening to the sound of his own thoughts. It's started raining around 11 PM but it's still nothing more than a drizzle. It calms him down enough to breathe freely.

He lets himself think about Frank before he sleeps. He tries to remember what happened in the mausoleum exactly, but he can't escape the fact that the only memory plaguing his mind is the kiss.

Why did he do it? Was it some sick joke, was Frank trying to fuck with his head?
No, Frank is not that kind of person. He's a giant asshole, but the last thing he would do is make someone feel used and pathetic. He seemed so honest, anyway, but Gerard’s brain can't seem to process why anything even happened. And, more importantly, why he let it happen. It's not like he made a move to push Frank away.

And, even if he doesn't want to admit it, the feeling of Frank's warmth underneath his palms wasn't uncomfortable at all. On the contrary, the stiffness that ensued after the kiss was the only bit that didn't make Gerard tingly on the inside.

He falls asleep thinking about hands brushing through his hair and eyes so clear he can see universes just by peeking through them. He doesn't think he'll endure the denial for long.

But it's worth a shot, he supposes.

*

It's a clearer setting this time.

The forest is dim and the grass has a texture as soft as baby's breath, but Gerard’s feet feel sore and cold as he runs through it.

His eyes are popping out of his skull and he can sense his hair pulling itself from its roots, blunt nails scratching across timid flesh of his bare thighs. He isn't running anymore. Or, was he running at all?

There's a flash in the air in front of him. Something big, something black, something diabolic, and Gerard screams before he even feels the pain that ensues.
It starts in his abdomen, deep, fiery and red, explosion of blood tainting his cheeks and neck, clots and bits of torn skin ending up on his shoulders. It smells like a ticking clock with his name on it, like sleeping pills and rotten corpses pulled out from the bottom of the lake. He can sense the blood pooling in the dimple of his bellybutton before it, too, gets shredded along with the left side of his stomach.

There's teeth as white as a winter’s day, and the creature looks at him in the eye, face closer than death before his mouth gets devoured, as well. It's kisses elicit the loudest screech from the bottom of Gerard’s gut, dirty and black like the parts of his body the creature hasn't gotten to yet. It’s long and he can feel his teeth turning black with tar before any of them are out, his gums shiny and gross like raven’s feathers spritzed with newly flowing blood.

Gerard doesn't know where his lips and tongue went but what's left of them is leeking red into his skull. Gerard swallows it whilst his eyes are rolling back and forth from madness to real and his larynx stings from all the tar that's seeped around it.

That thing kisses his neck next, knife-sharp fangs dipping into the milky fair, and before he knows it a piece of his trachea is out and he can't breathe anymore. He's choking on the blood, on the tar, there is nothing that can bring some oxygen into his lungs and the creature smiles innocently before it pushes the rest of his flesh downwards to his ribcage.
It's teeth are in the left side of Gerard’s chest and the obscene, guttural moan the creature lets out is the last thing he hears before everything goes black.

*

Gerard’s woken up by his phone's obnoxious ring. His voice is groggy when he picks up, one hand rubbing his eye whilst the other is holding the phone.

“This better be important,” he huffs.

“I swear to fucking God," Ryan breathes, clearly upset, and Gerard sits up in the bed immediately. “I had a horrible nightmare. No, heinous fucking nightmare, with this thing crawling all over me and fucking tearing me apart with its teeth and there was something black as fuck- black as fucking tar everywhere and I wake up and there are cuts on my fucking abdomen and there is oil fucking tar all around my room and I think I'm going bloody insane.”

Gerard drops the phone on the floor.

Notes

i'm such a horrible person, honestly. y'all should unsubscribe on my ass. to make it up 2 you, i wrote this long-ass chapter [not that long, ok, it's like 3,5k words but it's still p long.]
my characters are so fucking emo. it's unbelievable. i'll try 2 upd8 sooner this time, but no promises.
xo

milo