Chapter Text
It comes as a surprise to no one when Gerard starts to root through the junk drawer in the kitchen for a box of cigarettes. Not a day goes by without him smoking at least half a carton. It’s been that way long enough to be concerning. He grows a pile of pens and post-it notes and sauce packets as he digs deeper into the drawer, eventually slamming it shut in frustration, coming up empty-handed.
His mother drops her touch to his shoulder. They spend half a second looking at one another before she brings him into the fold of a hug, kissing the top of his head. “I’d give you a cigarette if you’d just tell me what’s the matter.”
Gerard makes a sick, annoyed noise in the back of his throat. It isn’t just because his mom smells so strongly of hairspray and old lady perfume. “Nothing’s wrong, Mom.”
From across the kitchen, Mikey shoots Gerard a pointed, you’re not fooling anyone sort-of glare. He picks up his keys and snags his older brother’s elbow as he breezes past, making an offer. “I gotta go to the store anyhow, and my heat works. I’ll drive.”
Gerard spins out of his mother’s arms and barely manages to grab a coat and a pair of shoes in his brother’s wake. He should be wearing more than socks and slide-ons in the dead-cold of December. In a feeble attempt to recover what feeling he once had in his toes, he shoves his feet right up against the floorboard vents when Mikey starts his car, shivering uncomfortably.
Mikey’s eyes shoot to the rearview, locked on the approaching end of the driveway. He works his jaw for a moment before asking, in no uncertain terms, “Is this because of church?”
Of course it is! Gerard could scream, just wail in frustration, because it’s so obvious that it’s all about what happened at church. That he had to be dressed in an ill-fitting button up and tie and khaki pants that haven’t graced a human body in at least four years, that he had to brush his hair back all nice and his mother had gone so far as to put bobby pins in it. Of course that’s the way he looked when he passed the collection basket to the pew behind his family’s, and whose hand must his have graced? Who was sitting back there with a tarnished ring in his lip, a stupid look of sweetness over his smile?
It was Frank Iero. “Thanks,” he’d whispered.
“Oh, shit,” Gerard had said, to himself and no one else except God, maybe. And the immediate next thing he wanted to say was I’m sorry, but Mikey shoved his elbow so deep into Gerard’s side that he saw spots and hypercolors, and had to whip around and grab the back of the pew in front of him to suck wind and recover.
So Mikey asking now, Is this because of church? It feels so rhetorical. It feels like he’s trying to do the brother/friend/concerned adult thing and open a delicate conversation.
Gerard wants delicacy about as much as he wants to continue being out of cigarettes. “It’s about Mom not having Reds at home. Since when am I the only smoker in the house?”
It’s an opportunity for Mikey to regale Gerard with the story of it all going down, their mother deciding to quit smoking because her good, chainsmoker friend at the hair salon came down with some ugly wet cough and if Donna Way were to hack on her clients like that, she’d never forgive herself, and because she quit and Mikey’s about as liquid as a rock, he had to quit too, unable to afford packs of his own. “She’d always have them in her purse,” Mikey says. “I keep reaching in there when she’s not around and coming up with lipstick and tampons. No smokes.”
Gerard half-smiles, half-listens, half-everythings, distracted watching houses slide by the window. He counts them in his head, blue one story, red two story, brick two story, white one story, until they turn the corner and the count changes to laundromat, abandoned building, Autozone, apartments, gas station.
Mikey swings into the pharmacy and throws the car into park. He waits expectantly, like Gerard is supposed to know what to do, but Gerard stays with his hands and feet perched at the vents of blasting hot air.
After a moment of glaring eye contact between the brothers, Gerard shrugs, rubbing his hands together, finding warmth in the friction. Mikey audibly groans.
“What?” Gerard says, strung. “I’m cold.”
“Go inside and get your smokes!” Mikey waves to the door impatiently. “C’mon, I’m fucking cold too, Gee.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No. I’m good.”
“Are you sure?”
Mikey reaches across the car and pushes Gerard’s door open without answering. In that moment, it becomes painfully apparent that the entire drive was supposed to be a means for Mikey to ask Gerard about church, about Frank, about whatever the hell had crossed his face in that horrible moment during the collection and what it meant. Gerard had offered exactly nothing about it.
“Be right back,” Gerard says quietly.
“Get me…” Mikey sighs, throwing a crumpled dollar bill at Gerard. “Get me a pack of gum. And bring back the change.”
The twenty-eight cents Gerard jingles into Mikey’s palm goes straight in the nasty cupholder to be forgotten forever. Gerard frowns at the slop of change, wrappers, and spilled soda slowly growing together, wondering when Mikey turned into such a slob. This is the sort of thing that would have sent him on a tirade a few years back, had it been Gerard’s car with the toxic cupholder and not his own.
“Go park by the church,” Gerard suggests. “Nobody’s gonna be there on a Monday.”
Mikey gives his brother a sidelong glance, considering. “Are you gonna talk about your problem?”
“My problem?” Gerard pauses with a cigarette stuck between his lips. “Which is?”
“Fuck, you’re impossible.”
Gerard shrugs, lighting up as Mikey deigns to shuttle them in the direction of the church down the road. It would be so easy to pick Mikey apart, ask him why his car is messy, or how his grades are, or if he’s working at the book store for winter break, but Gerard finds himself at an impasse– he can’t possibly put Mikey under the microscope when he himself is both unemployed and in the bad graces of SVA, holding his degree on account of backlogged library fines he can’t pay and a class he never took a final for.
It's a stalemate of mutual failure.
Mikey parks and idles away in the alley that stretches between the United Methodist Church and the public high school, the one he and Gerard were lucky enough not to go to. Gerard slips out of the passenger side and drags himself up on the trunk to sit and smoke and stare down a dumpster. It’s the most interesting thing he’s seen in a while, overflowing with garbage and reeking like rotten, sweet fruit. A fatal combination of wine and bread gone bad.
Mikey finally decides to join him, holding a stick of gum with weak resolve. Gerard hesitantly offers his cigarette to share, and after a long moment of consideration and near-caving, Mikey pushes his brother’s hand away.
“If you don’t talk to me, I’m pulling out the big guns,” Mikey declares. “I’ll call Ray.”
Gerard glazes past the part where he’s supposed to talk about feelings, focusing instead on the name he hasn’t heard in way too long. A smile, a bigger one than he’s been able to manage in a while, lifts his features. “Ray’s in town? He didn’t tell me he was coming home. You’ve talked to him recently?”
Mikey rolls his eyes, slowly unwrapping the stick of gum one tiny fold at a time. “We talk, yeah. He’s only visiting around Christmas, he couldn’t get much time off work. Something about teachers don’t really get the entire break off, and he’s gotta plan next semester or something. I don’t fuckin’ know.” Mikey pops the gum in his mouth and chews loudly until it softens into something he can blow a decent bubble with. “But if you’re still moping by Christmas Eve, I’m bringing Ray over, and we’re having an intervention. I’m not putting up with your miserable ass all break, especially not because you saw Frank one time.”
“This isn’t about Frank!” Gerard explodes. “All you wanna do is get me to talk about Frank, but there’s nothing to say. There’s fucking nothing worth saying.”
Mikey looks startled when Gerard finishes what honestly turned into a spitting, angry rebuttal. He shrinks on himself, fingers twitching in regret of not accepting a cigarette. He certainly needs it now.
“Gotcha,” Mikey whispers.
Gerard realizes too late that he’s done the worst thing possible– he’s upset Mikey. With the words fumbling and rushed, he tries to offer something that will sate Mikey’s thirst for gossip and angst and whatever else he needs to wring out of his brother.
“Y’know that trope, it’s like… the one that got away?” Gerard grits his teeth against his lip, holding down a breath of smoke that curdles in his lungs and burns in his nose.
“I’m familiar.”
“It’s my fault, though. Frank didn’t get away, I got rid of him.” Gerard observes the scant bit of white left on his cigarette, flicking it down to his feet. The cold air bites as soon as his hands are empty, unoccupied, as soon as his mind wanders off enough to notice how subzero the wind makes every breath feel. “Seeing him at church threw me, that’s all.”
“Threw you into a major funk,” Mikey adds.
“I haven’t seen him in three years.”
“It’s been that long?”
Gerard decides his window of open honesty has expired, and instead of answering, he drops his head to his brother’s shoulder and blows a line of smoke ahead of them. “Ray’s back, for real?”
“I wouldn’t for-fake about Ray.”
Gerard laughs and it brings up a cough full of thick, nasty shit inside him, but it’s enough of a full-body spasm that it gets Mikey laughing too, and finally, they’re caught in a hilarious moment, freezing their asses off with gum and cigarettes to squash cravings, and Gerard is genuinely happy to have his brother around.
He hasn’t said it out loud yet, so he puts his arm around Mikey’s shoulders and tells him, in case he might ever forget, “I missed you like a sorry sack of shit, Mikeyway.”
“I missed you too, Gee.”