Against The Sun

Last Chances

The next morning Mikey woke Gerard up early and dragged him down to the gym. Gerard hadn't slept well. He couldn't stop thinking about the kiss with Nate and how disappointed he was that it all got cut far too short for his liking. Immediately after seeing the news report Nate had rushed off to contact Cherri, and Gerard had gone back to the paper work in a daze, his lips still tingling. That combined with the constant heart hammering anxiety about what was going to happen now had meant sleep had not come easy. But Mikey was not going to let Gerard sleep in.

"We don't have a lot of time before we leave," Mikey said as he dragged Gerard along the platform to the gym. "It's going to be dangerous and I want to know you can at least throw a decent punch."

"I've never hit anything before Mikey," Gerard answered nervously.

"I can teach you," Mikey replied confidently. "You did really good yesterday. What you managed to get down in one lesson would take most people weeks."

"Your just saying that," Gerard mumbled self consciously. "If I was any good at this stuff then they would of put me in the classes like you."

Mikey stopped dead in his tracks and spun around to face Gerard suddenly. Gerard not expecting the sudden stop ran into his brother clumsily.

"What do you mean if you were any good at this stuff?" Mikey asked clearly confused.

Gerard looked at Mikey like he was crazy. "I mean I'm not good at this stuff. This was always your thing. You're the one that got accepted into all the advanced courses, you're the one who always brought home the glowing reports from school. I wasn't good enough."

Mikey stood silently for a second, a worried expression on his face. "But you were."

Gerard scoffed.

"You don't remember, do you?" Mikey said sadly. 

To be honest Gerard's memories were all a bit hazy and jumbled from about the age of nine, when he first started taking the BLI medication, up until he got the drugs out of his system. Everything was a fuzzy and hard to grab hold of, especially the further back in time he looked.

 "Don't remember what?"

"You took all the aptitude tests at the same time as me," Mikey explained. "You scored as highly as I did, in some areas higher."

Gerard stood there in shock. He had no memory of this. How could he have no memory of this? But he knew exactly how. Underneath the confusion Gerard was beginning to become aware of a deep, burning pulse of anger.

"Then why didn't..."

Mikey was looking at him like the answer should be so obvious.

"I wasn't what they wanted," Gerard said with a cold certainty.

Mikey nodded. "The report came back from BLI with 'too many undesirable qualities', or something like that."