Chapter Text
Gerard Way is twenty three and he hates his life.
Well, maybe that's a little dramatic. It's not as if he's starving to death or homeless or something like that. He doesn't even have a boring, office job in the city or a nosy girlfriend who yells at him when he forgets to put the toilet seat back down or clean up after he's made himself a bowl of cereal. Not anymore.
Even working at Schechter's Strings: Guitar Enterprises isn't nearly as glamorous as it sounds. They have regulars and loyal customers, but the place is often dead for hours at a time. Gerard sometimes looks up at the peeling shop store front and feels betrayed: an "Enterprise" is a large expanse of something, it means intimidation and success.
The word suggests that there's more of these music shops, that they are an impressive and well-known branch all over America, and in reality it's anything but.
Walking along the sidewalk of 123rd street, in the self-consciously hip city of Manhattan, New York, Gerard feels like the small, faded building is the furthest thing away from an enterprise. It's a fucking joke.
This makes him way angrier than it should. If he has nothing better than to do than obsess over a stupid name, then he probably isn't working hard enough.
Maybe he's too involved with the shop. After all, he'd been living in the back room since Eliza dumped him.
It does have it's perks, though. In the past he'd have to get up at eight o'-fucking-clock and freeze his ass off on a stupid station platform, only to shiver his way through a forty minute train ride in order to arrive at the shop and finally be warm.
Now, he gets to sleep in until 9:45, and even then he usually lies on the dusty mattress for a good ten minutes, willing the old, rusty alarm clock to shut the fuck up so that he can get a few minutes extra beauty sleep. Every morning he'll stare at that goddamn hunk of junk and try to Jedi it back to silence. That hasn't worked so far, though, and his other tactics are just as ineffective. Pleading with the merciless device is useless; that just might be down to the fact that alarm clocks are inanimate objects and prone to feeling little to no empathy.
Still, what does he know? A customer brought the clock to the shop a good year ago for repairs and never came back for it. Brian put it out back and now it lives with Gerard. It's quite possible that it has magic powers.
After he loses that particular battle, Gerard heaves himself up and begins to dress. He blames his bad fashion sense on his lack of consciousness when he wrestles with a t-shirt and a pair of jeans: normally, he has no idea what he's wearing until about lunchtime.
He feels better after his morning coffee, and with the liquid warming his brittle bones he gets to work, sweeping the floor of the dirt the customers tramped in the day before and making sure all the new stuff they've bought is priced and on the shelves.
That usually gives him about twenty minutes before the store officially opens to catch up on the comic world using the computer. Because he always deletes his history, Brian genuinely believes that they only use it for pricing.
Speaking of the man, his boss arrives at ten sharp every morning, brushing snow off his shoulders or pathetically fanning himself and sweating, depending on the season. Gerard will have a project out on the counter, but he always takes time to grab a crumpled ten out of the till and gets Brian his morning coffee from the Starbucks across the street.
He owes Brian big time. Not only did he give Gerard a job when he barely knew him, but he also didn't object to letting him have the back room the morning he turned up for work with all his stuff in a couple of trash bags.
He does all the running around for food, coffee and paper towels, and because Brian doesn't know that he has his own coffee maker out back, he tells Gerard to grab himself a cup too.
If it's a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, Dewees will turn up half an hour late and start watching some dumb video on YouTube while blaring his hardcore, dub-step-screamo across the store speakers. He's the most chilled out person Gerard knows, but he's a goddamn genius when it comes to stuff like radios and VCR's, whereas Gerard can only do guitars.
Luckily for him, guitars and music accessories is what the store mostly sells, but they often do electrical repairs and make a considerable amount of money from it.
Maybe Gerard is too involved with the store, but it isn't like he has anything better to do. Mikey still lives in outer Jersey, and the wages aren't really good enough to regularly go out to clubs and bars. He doesn't mind though, because even if he had more money he'd still spend it on art supplies.
He's happy to spend the evenings in his back room, sketchbook on lap
Maybe one day he'll get a job as a comic intern, or some indie publishing company will take him on. If that happened he'd rent a cheap apartment, but until then he's just going to live a life of guitar-infused solitude; sleeping in the back room and surrounded by spare parts like a Victorian apprentice.
Today, some old dude has dropped in an clunky Rickenbacker Tanglewood, complaining that the strings are rubbing off the frets. Gerard gets this problem a lot, so all it takes is a screwdriver and some patience and he's raised the action so that there's some space between them. He's putting the pickup back on when the guy returns and gets talking to Brian about the time he met Paul McCartney outside his hotel when he was visiting his buddy in Bristol (sure you did, thinks Gerard), but eventually he pays and leaves, and Gerard heaves a tired sigh.
He loves guitars. He probably loves them more than most humans, but that could be because they don't talk back and say scary things like mortgages or income tax. Ever since Mikey first started playing at fourteen and he'd try to take apart and put back together his squire bass, Gerard's been messing with them. He's actually a pretty shit player. In fact, he was kicked out of a band in his teens for sucking at the goddamn instrument.
Having said that, he can change a set of strings in under forty seconds, and since he started working here two years ago, he's built two jazz basses and a fender imitation using only the old parts out back. He might not be able to play well, but he's somehow ended up knowing everything there is to know about the stringed machines.
Occasionally, he'll be sorting out the mess of cardboard boxes or fixing the blocked toilet, and he'll lift his head to look out the tiny, filthy window.
It works best if it's late, because then the moon is weakly shining onto his face and lighting up the room in silver. He'll pause whatever shitty, disgusting task he's doing and stare dramatically at the moon, whispering "someday..."
He doesn't have the foggiest idea what someday is, but he feels like a cool, misunderstood comic-book hero when he says it, so he does.
Maybe he is looking for something different, but the idea of leaving is pretty risky. It's pretty depressing to be so young and yet, to have settled down already. He could still make it as an artist, but his other fantasy, the one that involved sweaty rock shows and beer, seemed to have completely slipped out of his grasp.
But who knows? Gerard likes to believe that nothing's impossible, and he still has time to embark on the carefree and wild life he's always wanted to live. After two years of doing the same work and doing the same thing everyday, he'd sell his soul to escape normality.