Brother (Petekey)

Close Eyes, Open, Close Again, Forget to Fall Asleep

   Wednesday morning. It had been for several hours already, but Mikey had only just decided to allow himself to think it. Before this, no matter which day it was technically, it was still Tuesday night, and Mikey still held some vague hope of sleeping. Now, however, at six thirty on Wednesday morning, the sound of his parents' alarm clocks ringing from down the corridor forced him to accept that this had been just another sleepless night.

It was the fifth one in a row, in fact; Mikey hadn't slept since Thursday night, the night before Gerard died, and as far as he could see, it didn't look like he'd be sleeping very much in the foreseeable future, either. As much as he hated it, these nights spent lying awake, maybe crying, maybe silently screaming, maybe just curled up in a ball shaking, had become something of a routine, and after any normality he'd had before had been completely shattered by the events of Friday night and Saturday morning, he clung to these new routines as though they could somehow save him.

Which was ironic, because this new set of routines consisted solely of things that he knew were sure to be the end of him: sleepless nights, hours on end spent crying and shaking, further hours spent lying completely still just thinking about Gerard and letting it slowly take him to pieces, and, of course, taking enough morphine to practically wipe him off the face of the earth for a few hours every time it all got a bit too much. He was headed for the fucking bin, and he knew it, but there was nothing he could – or would – do about it.

Now, he stretched and considered getting up. He really should, and he knew that doing things and staying busy helped to keep him from falling apart for a little while, but staying right here, in the warm (he decided to ignore the fact that it was summer and so was warm everywhere), was all he wanted to do. Because maybe, just maybe, he enjoyed falling apart.

Any time that was not spent lying completely still and thinking about Gerard felt like wasted time, because it felt like Mikey was choosing to forget about his brother, like his parents chose to forget. Mikey knew that over time, he would change, and he would become something new – in regards to how he felt about Gerard, and how he coped (or didn't cope) with his death – but the one thing he knew for certain was that he would never end up like his parents. He would never, ever, choose not to think about his brother.

Mikey didn't give a shit if people thought he was wasting his life over this, and he knew that people died all the time – for the most stupid reasons – and the people who loved them coped, and got over it, but maybe he felt like this was so sudden, so unexpected, and so fucking unnecessary, and Gerard had meant so much, that it was worth it: maybe Gerard was worth wasting his life over.

And so Mikey lay there. He lay there, and thought about Gerard, and thought that his brother should be asleep in the room next door, and thought about how easy it would have been for things to have been different, and he cried.

He cried and he cried and he cried, because he hadn't cried about anything for over a decade, because he was Mikey Way, and he was fucking tough, and everyone knew it, and he didn't give a shit about anything, but now he had found something that completely smashed that all to pieces, because Gerard had been possibly the only person in the world who Mikey had deemed more important than his fucking stupid persona, and his even more fucking stupid reputation. And now, with Gerard gone, there was no one he cared for nearly as much.

And, just when Mikey had decided that he no longer gave a hint of a fuck about anyone alive, his mother walked in. And the sight of her brought just another wave of tears, because she confused him. She confused him so much. He wanted so badly to tell her to fuck off, and not to care about her, because she was just his mother, and he was eighteen, and he could move out any time he wanted – and would if he had enough money – but since Gerard, he had realised that she was the person who was now, in his absence, helping him to stay sane, and she was, he believed, the only one who made him choose not to follow his older brother. He would never admit it to himself, let alone anyone else, but there was just a tiny chance that he really did give a shit about her.