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Day and weeks and months had led to this. Those day and weeks and months that filled me with warped hate and twisted love for the man that I face here on the roof of this tall, tall building, with the sunrise as our backdrop and his eyes boring into mine and mine glaring into his.
Those ceaseless green orbs. The ones I’ve seen flashing in anger or darkening with lust or lit up with happiness. They aren’t flashing or dark or lit up now though. They’re glazed with tears, while both his hands and mine cling on to our weapons like that was the only lifeline we have.
The sun is rising and we’re on the roof of a skyscraper and we’re aiming our weapons at one another’s hearts.
I wonder how much of my own heart would shatter if I pulled the trigger.
*
I meet Gerard in a coffee shop on an otherwise unremarkable morning in New York. It was raining, I remember that much - those big, awful droplets that feel like you’re being shot at by the very clouds themselves - but there were two other things that stand out in stark relief in my memory; one was Gerard’s glaringly bright red hair and the other was the pain from stab wound I’d received courtesy of a Columbian drug boss a week prior.
We met in a manner that could have been stolen from a clichéd romantic comedy film – Gerard turned around abruptly whilst on the phone and walked straight into me, spilling his newly bought (and therefore hot) coffee all down the front of my t-shirt.
After hanging up the phone remarkably quickly, a flustered Gerard started to pat me down with napkins he hastily grabbed from the counter, only to realise midway through that a) he’s only making the stain worse and b) he is feeling me up in the middle of a coffee shop. More stuttered apologies fall from his mouth and I am struck with how beautiful this boy in front of me is, with his face matching his hair in its hue and his tiny embarrassed smile that lingers around the corners of his mouth.
I remember laughing and telling him that as I’d gotten in his way, I’d buy him a new one if he agreed to have it with me. I remember his eyes lighting up a little and his blush that glowed all the brighter when he agreed. I remember sitting a filthy little table in the corner of that coffee shop, giggling at the other customers sneakily, chattering about the crazy ass weather we were having, the casual exchange of names we gave and the way his smile warmed me up from the inside like good soup on a cold day.
When you’ve heard the rest of my tale, you’ll probably assume that I deeply regret the day I met Gerard Way in that coffee shop in New York. Out of all my terrible life choices though – and I’ve made a few – Gerard is the only one that has never failed to make me smile and is the only one I need like a junkie needs heroin. The rest of my mistakes? The blame for them rests firmly on my own shoulders. But Gerard… Gerard was something I could never regret. Never. It would be like regretting to breathe.
*
As we stand on this rooftop today, Gerard and I have been married for close to seven years. Even as he grips the gun in the hands I’ve spent hours worshipping and have spent hours being worshipped by, I can see the glint of the wedding band that I slid on his finger all those years ago.
I’m surprised he’s still wearing it. The lack of that ring on my own finger makes me feel like I’ve betrayed him, even though I can still feel the weight of that gold band and all that it meant to me, to us, firmly on my finger.
I suppose with the situation as it stands, the lack of a wedding band is probably the least of the betrayals between us. Yet somehow it feels like the biggest. I say this as if I don’t have him aiming the barrel of a gun at my heart, and I at his.
He might be aiming at my heart, but I gave him the rights to do what he wanted with it the day I met him. Looks like he’s finally going to take some liberties with it.
Perhaps it serves me right.
*
When I was twelve years old, I watched my mother Linda die at the hands of my father, who was the underboss for one of the more notorious Mafia Don’s in the state of New Jersey, and a gang of his thugs. It was not a clean kill and they had made sure to search me out in the house first, use duct tape to secure me to a chair and made me watch as they first raped my mother repeatedly, before shooting her in the back of the head, execution style.
Her screams and the silence that fell from her mouth after that gunshot still haunts me at night, and I’ve seen well over a thousand deaths in the eighteen years since I watched her die in front of my eyes.
In fact, it was because of her death that I then went on to witness and, more often than not, have a hand in these deaths. But when I think of my life like that I feel ill. I loved that woman with damn near all of my heart because she fought to have me and scraped by and stole and starved in order for me to grow up and have good life and what am I now? I’m a thirty-year-old contract killer that hates doing the washing up and loves his husband. I’m a contract killer because I swore revenge. When I was fifteen, I achieved my goal. I killed the bastard in front of his little gang in a back alley bar by smashing a bottle and grinding it into his neck, severing both the carotid artery and the jugular.
Those who witnessed the attack later tracked me down and persuaded a homeless fifteen year-old that making money killing those who “deserved it” was better than dying of starvation on the streets. As that homeless fifteen year old had not eaten for three days, he accepted the offer.
And he never looked back.
*
That’s how you end up ending lives for money. I’m disgusting. I used to think that Gerard was the better part of me, but as he stands facing me, aiming that gun at me for the same reason I’m aiming this gun at him, I know he’s the same as I. But I still can’t help but think of him as my moral compass, as the glowing angel that could not and will never be able to do any wrong in my eyes, as the better half of myself, the one that made me feel like a human being, not a dancing murdering puppet.
Even if he pulls that trigger, I’d let my blood seep out of the wound, spilling the love I have for him all over the rooftop we’re standing on.
*
We live in the suburbs of Jersey City, New Jersey. I was living in NJ when I met Gerard and as we were both from there, it made sense to use our collectively considerable amount of money to buy a nice, decent sized house in one of the slightly less grimy areas of the state. I loved that house, and all the memories that accompany it.
The day that Gerard carried me over the threshold the day we got back from out honeymoon is one of the best, non-sexual memories I have of the pair of us. It had been a warm, warm summer and I was sick of the long flight home from London, and the taxi ride and I was generally pretty sick of the entire fucking day. So when we got out of the taxi, Gerard hoisted me up into his arms bridal style and carried me into the house, kissing me all the while, his then black hair cascading around his face as well as mine.
I laughed and told him to stop being a sap, he murmured in my ear that I was his fucking husband now and if he felt like carrying his tired husband into the house, he’d bloody well do it. The look he had on his face as he told me that is permanently carved into my memory - his beautiful face shining with love for me, for us, for our life together.
Of course, once we were in the house, he lent down to kiss me again and all my fatigue ebbed away, and we stumbled up the stairs, laughing and kissing all the while, to have some of the best sex we’ve ever had on our new marital bed.
Another one of my favourite memories in that house is waking up on morning to the smell of burning and rushing down the stairs only to see Gerard getting drenched by our sprinkler system, pouting at the range on top of the stove. I later found out that the blackened charred mess in the frying pan were supposed to be pancakes and that Gerard had intended to serve me breakfast in bed as I’d been away on a business trip all week and he wanted to make something nice for me as a way of showing how happy he was I was back.
Those charred pancakes went straight in the bin, and I pulled him onto our couch, turned on the television and cuddled up to him. We satisfied ourselves with watching cartoons and eating dry cereal straight from the box and tickling and wrestling with one another. His laugh was so contagious and made me feel like I was floating.
It didn’t matter that my business trip was to kill a Senator in Mississippi. I was home with the man I loved and he loved me and we were happy.
*
I have to wonder, as I replay moments from our life together, whether he ever did love me, or he gave himself a way for his company to wipe me out. Perhaps he never did and I was just another target, a target that needed to be surveyed and watched over until the time was right to kill me.
If that were true though, I’m near certain he would have killed me in my sleep. Or when I was in the shower. Or when we were slumped together on our bed, fucked out and sweat sheened and trading sweet kisses.
He could have killed me in a million ways numerous times over the seven years when I was near defenceless. Yet we’re standing on this fucking rooftop, staring at each other and yet neither of us moving.
Abruptly, I lower my weapon.
*
The flush on Gerard’s skin as I traced my way over his collarbone with my tongue absolutely fascinated me – I wanted to make it rise everywhere, tinge him as red as his hair was the day I met him. With every touch of my tongue, he writhed under me a little more and moaned a little louder, a little more uninhibited.
I smirked at the reactions I was causing and when I slid my tongue over his nipple teasingly, he groaned into the think heavy silence of our room, his back arching off the bed, the sheets sticking to the sweat that made his back gleam. He pants and when I trace my fingers over the newly hardened aureole, he moans again, tugging frantically on my hair so he can crush our lips together and flip us over lithely. I’m pinned under his weight and the assault he’s giving my lips and tongue and I don’t care.
His hard cock is pressed up against mine and he grinds down ever so slightly, causing the slightest bloom of pleasure to shoot straight up my spine and settle low in my belly, foretelling all the delight that was forthcoming. I rake my nails up his back, leaving welts on his back that will last for days, and savouring the moan he slips between my lips due to my actions. I kiss him harder, taking what I want from his delectable lips and he gives back as good as he’s got, pinning me to bed with one of my wrists in each hand.
He pulls back from my lips a second and he smirks sinfully before grinding down, hard. I jolt under his grip, but this cause him to smirk further, before he begins to nip down my neck, each tiny bite a painful surge that just adds to my arousal.
Too soon, he’s lavishing my chest piece with his tongue, tracing every line and I can no longer bear it, I beg him to fuck me, to take me any way he pleases as long as he does, I beg him to thrust his cock into my ass, I beg him to skip the prep and just get inside of me, Gerard, please, I can’t stand it anymore. He finally complies, sliding his fingers in my mouth and telling me to get them dripping with saliva, before deeming them satisfactory and fisting his cock, spreading my spit all over his dick. It’s shiny with spit and so tempting and I plead to have him in me.
He does, he takes me with one hard thrust, making me yell his name out in pleasure. I lock my legs around his waist and then he’s pounding straight into my prostate, getting him right where I want him. All I can focus on is the exquisite feeling of his cock, so thick and long, filling me up just right, every thrust pushing me that bit closer to orgasm. My rim feels stretched to the right amount and as he chases his own orgasm, he pumps his hips faster, more carelessly, more pressure on my rim and my ass, which only pleasures me further.
He comes, and I can feel him pumping his come inside of me and the feeling nearly tips me over the edge, until Gerard pulls out, disappointing me. But he makes up for it by sliding down the bed and proceeding to spread my legs and press his tongue to my entrance, savouring his own come that dribbles out of my hole. He presses his face in further, hot breath and tongue lapping up all the come like it’s water to a man dying of thirst and I’m coming, my cock spurting white all over my stomach. I arched off the bed when it hit me, and as I came down I slumped back, feeling Gerard’s smile pressed into the inside of my thigh.
*
Many things had driven us to this point. You can’t become an assassin by having a conscience, or any sense of moral standards, or any real empathy with anyone. If I have to climb onto a rooftop with a sniper, and look through that scope, I can’t see my target as a person. They do not have hopes or dreams. They don’t have family. In that moment, all they are is a heartbeat that needs to stop.
But to try and think of Gerard that way, when he is my only family, when we’ve curled up together at 3am whispering our hopes and dreams and words of love into one another’s hair, when I would have to pull that trigger and watch as his heart – and mine – stop beating.
Until death do us part, indeed… Except I don’t think the wedding vows cover you and your beloved husband trying to kill one another because you’ve been commissioned to.
*
Our wedding was beautiful. Gerard looked so stunning that day in that black suit, with his green eyes spilling with tears as he promised to have and to hold, for richer for poorer until death do us part. And the glow in his eyes brightened when I promised him the same things. And I meant them. I would have taken my heart out of my chest that day and put it at his feet if it made him happy. And when we kissed after reciting those words, I felt like my heart could explode in my chest. The most beautiful man in the world was mine. I remember the leaves were just beginning to fall as we stepped outside of the empty church, clinging to one another hands and kissing again and again, tiny sweet kisses as the red leaves fell around us. He laughs, quiet and compelling, and I laugh with him, smiling up at his wonderful beaming face.
The amount we drunk was night was obscene, and I can nearly feel how tight his arms were wrapped around me as we stumbled up the dirty streets of New York in our matching suits and gleaming wedding bands. How he pressed endless kisses into my hair as we moved from neon lit bar to backstreet bar, giggling in alleyways and on street corners where prostitutes lingered.
The filth and human carnage around us was ignored, the filthy looks and muttered digs about our “fagginess” were disregarded and the only thing I had eyes for were his, his beautiful bright green eyes that were slightly unfocused from the booze, but that lit up whenever they settled on me. Under that gaze, I would have killed any man he pointed out to me, I would have removed my own heart from my chest, I would have danced with him under the moonlight in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge if he so desired. Under that gaze, I felt like the sun, the moon and the stars were all shining directly on me like I was beyond untouchable. Under that gaze… I felt bulletproof.
*
The irony makes me sick. Even when he focuses those eyes on me, I still feel bulletproof and yet he’s the one wielding the gun.
My own is still is pointed at the floor – if I really wanted to pull that trigger, I would have done the moment I set eyes on him and so would he. We were professionals after all, and professionals don’t hesitate once a target is within sight. He wasn’t my target; how could he be? He was my husband, my eternally beloved husband, and the man I would do anything for.
If I made that decision to end his life today, I might as well suck on the barrel and force a lump of lead in my own brain as well. There was nothing for me without him, and there never would be.
“Do it. Please. Don’t make me do this to you.”
*
I receive the e-mail on the fourth of May 2012, claiming that a rival assassin group have set up residence in my hometown, and that three internationally renowned assassins have been spotted in Jersey. The e-mail highlighted the fact that there were no events attended by anyone of significance in NJ for at least three months, and that the arrival of three was both suspicious and dangerous.
There is no honour amongst assassins – we kill for money, modern day mercenaries without the war – and you’re as likely to be taken out by another one as you are to get hit by a car. Add that to the fact that if you’re on another commissioned killer’s hit list you’re never leaving until you’re in a grave and the fact that various organisations around the world are trying to put a face to your codename and would love to put you behind bars meant that you were nearly always in danger, but at times it was more indirect than other times.
I always tried to protect Gerard from the worst of this, having set up various accounts across the globe that could not be traced nor were known to anyone else in order to leave him with enough money to live comfortably without having the government looking too closely at where a sum of money that large came from.
That protective instinct faded away the morning I received that e-mail. There was an attachment that was simply called “targets” – it was a link to the MI6 database that had been hacked by an associate of my boss months ago that had the codenames and faces of the assassins in Jersey that shouldn’t be here. The names that I was faced with – The Gentleman, Black Widow and Cottonmouth – all meant something to me; internationally dangerous assassins are often something worth knowing about, but it wasn’t until I clicked on the file marked The Gentleman and saw a grimy surveillance photo that my heart stopped.
That photo showed the distinct green eyes of my husband, with a large overnight bag slung over his shoulder, wearing a scruffy black coat that I’d sent to the dry cleaners barely a month prior according to the timestamp on the photograph and behind him was the unmistakable sprawl and skyline of London, England. His hair hung in his face the way it always did and his shoulders were raised, half burying his head into the collar of the coat as he did when he was cold but too stubborn to let me help him warm up.
I scrolled further down that page about him, finding out his name stemmed from the fact that he sent flowers to the deceased’s family – black roses, specifically, every time. Much like the black roses that sat in vase in our hallway at home. He had a hand in killing two members of the Spanish Royal family and several higher up’s in Vatican City. His most noticeable murder and the crime that made him wanted by the British Government was the fact that he’d successfully assassinated a corrupt judge that was personally friends with the Prime Minister.
Referring back to the e-mail I’d been sent, I had instructions to terminate each of their lives – and I’d been awarded a hundred thousand bucks for each one.
The price for my husband's life was a hundred thousand dollars. A hundred thousand dollars to take his life. I went to pick up my throwing knives, the one thing in the world that could calm me down and found for the first time in my life that they had no effect. Nothing had calmed me like weaponry could until I met Gerard and now I was being dispatched to kill him.
I remembered an earlier line in that wretched e-mail: that no events of significance were to be in Jersey for a while. There were no significant senators, government officials, powerful mob bosses or anyone resembling a reason why three internationally infamous assassins were here. Logically, this meant that they were here presumably because I was. My life in Gerard’s hands completely.
One thing I will never admit to another living soul as long as my cursed life plays out – I lay down on the floor of my office and began to cry, just imagining my life without Gerard, let alone me being the reason for him being in a grave. Tears slid down my face as I imagined him killing me in cold blood, having never loved me at all.
*
“How am I supposed to?”
He looks at me with dead eyes, eyes that have seen so many die, eyes that have seen me at my best and worse, hands that have nursed me when I’m ill, that have handled sniper rifles, that have pushed my straggling fringe back to drop kisses on my forehead.
He asks me again, to do it. To pull that trigger, so he doesn’t have to.
Suddenly, I am furious. He wants me to end his pain and his misery whilst prolonging my own. He wants me to have his beautiful blood on my hands so that his hands aren’t stained. He wants to die knowing he was loved whilst knowing that I won’t have that luxury. He wants me to put a bullet in his head so he doesn’t die alone at the top of this god forsaken building, kneeling next to corpse like I will be, because I do not plan on living long if it means that he’s dead.
For one moment, I am so angry that I nearly do raise my gun and shoot him between his emerald eyes. For one moment, all I can see is him. And in that moment, all I see is the black hole at the end of barrel, drawing my eye. I see the pale finger pulling back the trigger, and I can almost picture that mechanism springing into life, preparing to send the bullet on it’s merry, deadly way. I see the bullet, speeding towards me.
The last thing I know before the dark is that I love him and I think to myself: Gerard Way, the most beautiful man that made my world, I –
*
There is a note on the roof.
The police puzzle over it for hours, and it’s not until the CIA contact MI6 to let them know that two assassins can removed from the database does it make sense.
“The Gentleman’s gone away and with him he took the one thing that a Gentleman can never afford to lose – his Ink.”
*
An e-mail:
“International assassins Ink and The Gentleman have been eliminated. Their real identities were discovered once their deaths were investigated, and both files must be updated then archived as soon as possible. The cause of death in both scenarios was a gunshot wound to the head, but in The Gentleman’s case, it was self-inflicted.
Ink (nee. Frank Anthony Iero the Third) and The Gentleman (nee. Gerard Arthur Way) were both part of separate assassin squads.
Following their deaths, new information has been uncovered about both squads and it must be ensured that the necessary steps are taken to attempt to shut down these squads as soon as possible.
C.”