Kill The Gerard

Gerard steps outside the back door, shivering violently as the cold air permeates his thin jacket. He wishes he brought another one with him, a better one, but he remembers he’s only going to be outside for a few minutes and his shivering seems a little less important. He casually leans against the brick wall behind him and lights up a cigarette as the heavy door closes.

Two sounds fill his ears in the same moment. One is the crisp twitter of someone else’s chattering teeth, a fitting echo in the chilling weather. The other, the consistently paced bell tones of a simple, mechanically formed song, overpowers the first. He raises one eyebrow in confusion and walks toward the sound. The cigarette dangles in his mouth, forgotten, as he finds the source nearby in the form of a girl sitting on the ground with a music box protected in her hands like a baby bird.
He opened his eyes as a gust of air rushed into his lungs. He blinked a few times and pulled his jacket tighter around himself, but when he realized he didn’t feel cold, he relaxed. Glancing up and seeing a perfect full moon in the night sky dotted with stars, he sighed deeply and began to walk. He still heard that song playing incessantly in his mind, though now he could have sworn he heard the smooth, dancing notes darting through the air.

“Hey,” he says quietly. He silently curses the cigarette for obstructing his voice and making it sound so hoarse and painful to speak. The girl’s head snaps up and her eyes go wide when they fall upon his face. “What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”

“I-it’s fine,” she says with chattering teeth. “My mom will be here soon to get me.”

“It’s almost six… Why don’t you come back inside and wait there?” he offers warmly. The girl shakes her head, sending snow flying in all directions.

“I have to wait out here.”

“Can I wait with you?” He waits for her to give some sign of agreement, but she simply drops her attention away from him and looks back at the intricate box in her hands. Turning the key on the side, she starts the song over and sings along in a voice so quiet he never would have thought it possible.

“‘All alone again, she
Dances around and around,
Practicing hours on end every day,
Her feet hardly touch the ground…’”
Gerard finally stood still for a moment and looked around. The first thing he noticed was that even though no clouds obscured the moon’s light, the ground was entirely dark. He wanted to say it was black, but he could find no words to describe the scene either in his mind or aloud. The surface of the ground was loose and moved easily as he walked over it, like sand on the beach. He had once heard of a beach made entirely of volcanic rock, where all the sand was black, and wondered if that was where he might be. Upon seeing no ocean nearby, however, he decided to change his theory.

His eyes fell upon a tiny speck on the horizon. It seemed just a few shades darker than the mysterious ground beneath his feet, but it was a different color than the sky. His eyes narrowed. He subconsciously stretched out one hand and suddenly saw hundreds of large black flakes floating in the air. He caught one, but it broke apart in his hand. It left a smear of black soot against his striped glove and white skin.

“What song is that?” Gerard asks quietly, not wanting to interrupt the music, but desperately wanting to know what it’s called.

“‘The Lonely Ballerina,’” the girl answers. “It’s my favorite.”

“It’s beautiful.” He watches and listens, playing the role of the silent observer, something he’s strangely unaccustomed to. He’s content, though, hearing such a soothing song before the most memorable concert of his life. A violent shiver shakes the girl, almost causing her to drop the delicate treasure she holds so carefully. He slides his jacket off and places it around her shoulders. Layers of snow plaster his bare arms like soaked confetti, but he doesn’t notice because he knows he’ll be thankful for it in a few minutes. She sets the box on the ground and slips her arms through the springy fabric of the sleeves. The jacket smells like coffee and cigarettes. The faintest trace of lemon reaches her nose, laced throughout the black material as if it’s the only thing that belongs there. She smiles. It suits him, she thinks.
Gerard had no idea how long he’d been walking when he finally came upon the strange shape. At first he thought it was some kind of animal because it was so low to the ground, but he soon saw that it was a person sitting cross-legged atop the ash. He had to stop walking and catch his breath. He felt as if he had just run a few miles without a chance to rest for even a second.

He raised his eyes from the ground to try and study the being, but it was completely obscured by darkness. He suddenly felt further away from the figure than he was when he first began the trek towards it. His face fell slightly when he realized how much further he had to go.

“What’s your name, kid?” he asks, taking another drag off his cigarette.

“Sam,” she says absentmindedly. He wonders what has suddenly drawn her attention away from him, but then he knows it has to be because she’s just realized that she’s wearing his jacket. He still can’t get over the fact that the little things never mean as much to him as they do to other people, and it never hits him until there’s nothing he can do about it. ‘Oh well,’ he thinks. ‘It won’t matter. Soon enough, it won’t matter.’

“Why are you out here so late, Sam?” he questions. “It’s not exactly safe this time of night.”

“First of all, I live here, so I know. And I had a piano recital earlier. In there,” she says, pointing to the stage where he knows he’s going to be standing in a matter of minutes.

“And you always have that with you?” He points to the trinket as he asks. The nervous smile of admiration falls from her face quickly, too quickly.

“My dad gave it to me when I was first learning. It was the first real song I could play.” She pauses and inhales a deep breath of the frigid air. “He doesn’t exactly…show up to these things anymore.”

Gerard wants to press the topic further, even though he knows where it might lead, but the honk of a car’s horn catches his attention. Sam jumps to her feet, still cradling the music box, and reluctantly slips the jacket off her shoulders and hands it back to him.

“Bye, Gerard,” she says with a minuscule smile before dashing off to the pair of car headlights he can see at the end of the small parking lot in the back of the venue. The recognition of his face paired with his name doesn’t bring that familiar warmth back into his heart. He slides the jacket back on his shoulders and grounds his cigarette into the dirty snow before he steps back inside. He can’t risk waiting any longer or his plan will fall apart.
The shadows melted away from the figure and slid out of Gerard’s path. He was closer now, almost able to see the other man’s face, the clumsy black flakes still dancing in the moonlight. They leapt and fluttered about in circles spiraling to the ground, as if all of them were singularly focused on him. His footsteps crunched into the piled up ash, and the grooves disappeared as soon as they were created.

The other man looked up. Gerard’s breath caught in his throat and stopped escaping in visible puffs from his lips. His mouth twisted into a crooked smile, revealing the rows of small pearls that hadn’t seen the light in too long.

“Mikey…Mi-”

Something clung to the side of his brother’s head. It looked like a dark spider hanging on by its tiny teeth, with the legs dangling down, limp and useless and dead. It had no color, but then again, nothing else did, either.

Blood. Clotted and glued to his skull like a wad of black gum that had gotten stuck in his hair, but so much worse than that. Gerard stumbled forward and nearly lost his footing in the slippery black particles shifting beneath his feet like sand. The smile dripped off of his face and seemed to land like a raindrop onto his brother’s, as he noticed when Mikey looked up at him with the same crooked grin he had seen in the mirror countless times.

Mikey moved. He reached his left hand up to the hole and pulled something out of the coagulated mess, a gleaming object obscured by the sheer amount of sticky blood on its surface. Gerard noted that he heard no sound when his brother did this, but was more amazed when, not of his own volition, he stretched out one hand and let his brother drop the tiny thing into it. He smeared off some of the blood with one finger; it instantly dried up and dropped into the ash, becoming completely indiscernible from the stuff. It gleamed in the brilliant wash of moonlight. It appeared to have been round once, but crushed by some powerful impact. He tried to imagine what it could be.

“So anyway, this kid keeps talking, and he’s telling me he’s got nothing to live for,” he continues into the microphone. The crowd overwhelms him with a wave of anguished noise. “Yeah, that’s what I said. And he goes on and on about how his friends hate him and his parents wanna kick him outta the house and shit, and meanwhile I’m sitting there wondering what drugs he’s on…” Gerard is lying, and he feels no guilt. This is nothing more than another ruse, a play, even a musical to him. Just a big theatrical production he has absolute control over. Regardless, he has to be careful not to lift either of his arms too high. He hates that his jacket has to be so short, but it would have been wrong to try and borrow Mikey’s. Besides, everyone recognizes his jacket. Give the kids the show they paid for, right?

“And then… You know what he does then?” he asks quietly. He subconsciously switches the microphone to his right hand and moves his left to the thing he’s wanted to show off the entire time.

“He goes and blows his brains out.”

Gerard swipes the thing from his belt and holds it against the left side of his head, just in front of his ear. It’s warmer than he expected. Shrill shrieking encompasses him completely, but he continues speaking into the microphone as calmly as he was just a moment ago, even allowing a crazed smile to creep onto his features.

“Kinda like this.”
Something tickled his nose, but it vanished before he could brush it away. He looked up as more of the strange sensations encased his body. Glittering flakes of silver-white danced to the ground around him, layering themselves over the dark ash like a blanket. He stood, looking up as he did so, and felt himself stop breathing at the sight. It looked as if the stars themselves were falling upon him, catching in his hair and eyelashes and edging his vision with sparkling beauty. He suddenly thought he should be cold and subconsciously hugged his threadbare jacket tighter around him, but he felt no different.

Gerard heard something shuffle next to his feet. He glanced down, only to find that his brother had vanished, leaving behind only his silver-striped parade jacket and the medal pinned to it. His eyes swept over the field of black around him, but he saw no footsteps. It was as if Mikey had disappeared into thin air, like a ghost. A flurry of snowflakes landed on top of the ruffled fabric of the jacket and buried it beneath a layer of soft ice.

He panicked and started digging through the snow with both hands, sending wet clumps of ash spraying into the air, but the jacket was gone, dissolved into the very materials he was now sending flying into oblivion. He felt water streaming freely from his eyes and wondered why it wasn’t clotting together like the blood from his brother’s wound. Nothing made sense anymore. He was the one shot first, and at closer range, so why wasn’t he bleeding as profusely as little Mikey?

He fell backwards in exhaustion and left a deep depression in the loosely packed snow. The wet flakes kept piling on top of him, and he violently shook them out of his hair, but countless others took their place. Gerard knew he was crying, not from the liquid-ice tears dripping from his face, but from the violent sobs racking his body every few seconds.

The bullet explodes through his skull and vanishes into oblivion not half a second later. He thinks he knows what happened to it, but he can’t tell because his whole world has been engulfed in the hysterical screams. He falls, the gun slipping out of his grasp as he does so, and manages the faintest trace of a smile before his world goes black. He can feel the blood gushing out of his tattered brain and spilling out onto the floor, and he finds it strange because he’s certain he should be dead by now, but he’s not questioning it anymore.

The words suddenly become intelligible. He can decipher his own name among the tortured screeches, but a single word sears itself into his mind and nothing else matters.

“Mikey!”
“N-no…” he whispered to himself. “I k-killed him…” He sat back on his heels and let out a high-pitched whine followed by a short series of broken sobs. His voice shattered the silence with a hoarse scream, a broken remnant of his once-beautiful voice. “I killed my little brother!”

He gasped as a cold shiver gripped his body. He could feel again, he realized. And then, all at once, a soothing, sweet release overtook him and made him want nothing more than to sleep forever, just as he had before. He closed his eyes, struggling to stay balanced, knowing the slightest breeze could topple him. The snow dusted his face like powdered sugar. No pain came to him as his skin and everything beneath it dissolved into a checkered confetti of ivory and ebony, and he contentedly exhaled his final breath into twinkling crystals of ice.

The snow buried the pile of black and white paper, liquefying it into a muddy mess among the ashes. The jacket crumpled and collapsed once its support system vanished and instantly fell prey to the quietly plummeting flakes as the song continued echoing into the eternal night, lulling the two newly arrived souls to sleep. Gerard would have smiled had he not already become part of the scenery.