Anatomy Of A Fall |Frerard

Chapter 5

That night Mikey was upset, jittery with some new corticosteroid treatment they had him on.

"Don't like it," he whispered at Gerard, hoarse and quiet. "I can't stay still. I can't sleep."

So Gerard climbed in the bed with him and let Mikey play with the old broken bits of glass Frank had collected, running them over his hands and listening to them clink together like windchimes while Gerard described the river and the toppled gravestones. He figured it was safe telling Mikey about the mill house, about Frank's sleeping bag, because who would Mikey tell? Mikey kept all Gerard's secrets; Gerard didn't know how not to tell him.

Mikey seemed just as worried about Frank as Gerard, but didn't have any better ideas of what to do about it, so Gerard let it drop for a while. Mikey had enough to deal with, after all.

Gerard got out an old issue of Sandman and read it aloud, instead, doing all the voices, Doctor Destiny and everything. Nurse Ratched came in after an hour or so, to stare disapprovingly and inject some poison into Mikey's IV, taking spirometry measurements.

He made himself watch for the IV thing, because if Mikey had to deal with it then Gerard could at least do the solidarity thing, and tried not to shudder too obviously.

"'S cold," Mikey said, sighing and rubbing at his arm above the needle insertion. Gerard was not going to throw up. He put his arm around Mikey in a show of support. IVs were the worst of all needles, maybe even worse than the eyeball death needles from Fire in the Sky, which were pretty fucking bad. He started flipping through the comic book again, trying to distract himself from the rising bile in his throat.

"You smell weird," Mikey told him after the nurse had left, burying his face in Gerard's shoulder and sort of wheezing carefully into the cloth. "Like dirt."

"Your mom smells weird," Gerard retorted, and Mikey rolled his eyes. "I told you, I fell in the fucking creek. And stop talking, you'll make it worse, man."

Mikey shook his head, face calm and resigned as his breath rattled and his thin frame shook with each intake of air. Gerard hated it. He hated the face Mikey made sometimes, like he'd given up hope, like he'd accepted the inevitable cruelty and irrationality of the universe and moved on.

Gerard choked down his directionless rage. Maybe he was like Mikey's portrait of Dorian Grey, siphoning off all the unhappiness and despair Mikey couldn't afford to feel or articulate. He wanted to smash shit and scream and rip down curtains until someone gave into his tantrum and fixed things. Fixed Mikey. He flashed on a memory of Ted's sneering face and had to close his eyes, count to ten for a moment.

"M'okay," Mikey said, leaning into his brother, head on his shoulder. He mouthed the words into Gerard's shirt, and Gerard could feel them, warm and soft. "M'okay, Gee."

"You're not," Gerard said lowly, quiet enough that Mikey couldn't hear, and took a couple deep breaths of his own until he could force a smile on his face, into his voice. "Yeah, I know, Mikey. Hey, did I tell you about how awesome Bob and Ray are? I told you about our sleepover plans, right? Lemme get my sketchpad out, I'll show you."

He spent the rest of the hour drawing. He drew Bob and Ray in the lunch line, Bob drooling on his desk during history, Ray in safety goggles making a dubious face as he wielded scissors and dissection pins at a dead frog. When his mother caught his eye and jerked her head towards the door, he realized that Mikey was sleeping, wheezing faintly and eyelids twitching. Gerard always worried that Mikey would suffocate while he slept. Gerard should be there to make sure he was safe, to listen for the sound of choking, the restless twitching of bedclothes.

"Time to go, Gee," his mom whispered. "Let him sleep."

Gerard disentangled himself, and left the sketches and his Sandman comics under his brother's sleeping hand.