Épousez-moi, Restez la Même Chose

WiL rolled over onto his side, winced at the loud creaks as the springs shifted under his weight after years and years without use, and hoped that he didn't wake up Gerard, who was nestled between his chest and the wall now.

Gerard really didn't sleep much. Ever. When wiL would go to bed, Gerard would still be in the middle of some important project and he told wiL not to wait up for him, and he didn't because they both knew Gerard wouldn't be in bed until around dawn. But wiL loved to sleep. The bed he shared with Gerard was amazing, a Queen size with clean sheets and a big blue Teen Titans blanket that didn't itch his face when he wanted to burrow down into the covers and hide from the sun when morning rolled around. Once upon a time in the dreary haze wiL used to live in he laid on hay and covered himself up with a burlap sack fashioned into a blanket.

It was always a frightening thing to sleep in the barracks with the rats and flies and maybe snakes--wiL hadn't ever seen one in there, but he thought they could be, and just thinking about that made his skin crawl. What if there was a snake hiding in the hay he slept on? What if it only slithered up and down his back at night when he didn't know it?

Worse than the creatures was when wiL was left to his own thoughts. He's always been imaginative, always. Stories could float through his brain in coherent forms, he could picture princes being rescued by much more handsome princes and imagine it was himself being rescued. His favorite was the one he made from the Cinderella tale. The stories could get him through so much--being placed on high walkways to be gawked at, being groped when he followed one of the administrators in bars, the much worse things that he hoped Gerard never found out about. All he had to do was get lost in thought and in beautiful lands of pastels and blurred edges. But sometimes in the dead of the night, among the nasal snores of his 'family' and the sweltering body heat and the miserable smells, his mind went to dark places, visiting the scenarios that could and probably would happen to him when he finally got sold.

Fat, bald old men groping him more forcefully than the slightly-interested men at the bars, whipping him when he did wrong, getting so frustrated at him that they locked him in a cellar or bomb shelter or even just tied him up to a tree and let him starve. That is what all the other boys told him could happen when he was taken away, so he didn't want to go. He was in hell, but he didn't want to die. He didn't want to belong to someone. He wanted to stay in his bed of straw and think happy thoughts about his prince arriving to save him on a unicorn that he named Percible with a pink mane. He wanted to think about what his mom looked like--a thin, small woman with fair hair and dark-rimmed eyes and too many debts for her own good. He didn't want the bad things to invade the only place he had that belonged to himself.

When the call had finally come in that it was wiL's turn, he screamed. He screamed until the back of his throat itched for aloe and someone to extricate the cotton lodged in his mouth. None of his friends helped him either. They stayed back in the shadows as wiL was dragged out of bed and taken away. That was probably the worst wiL had felt ever, that none of his friends, his comrades, were going to miss him or even give him another thought other than, 'Oh, that wiL kid? Yeah, he's gone, went yesterday'. Or four days ago, or now, two months ago.

It had been two months since the morning wiL was awoken to three men pulling him out of bed. Now his only worry was that Gerard wasn't getting enough sleep. The bad thoughts were gone, because Gerard was the best person in the world. WiL wanted to spend forever with him because there had never before been someone who cared like he did, who looked and spoke and acted like he did and who never once made wiL feel like he was being controlled.

Gerard had explained to him, somewhat, that he didn't actually want to be wiL's lover, but that was fine. He was a good cuddler and an even better conversationalist when the language barrier didn't inhibit them too badly, and he was sharing his family with wiL. His mom had welcomed him into the family while he, she, and Alicia were upstairs in the kitchen cooking and Alicia had cooed at him and hugged him and said she was about to cry from her heart being happy.

Yeah, wiL knew the feeling. Every fucking time he saw Gerard smiling or reading the newspaper or smoking his heart did summersaults on a wire suspended from the Eiffel Tower all the way to Maine, to their house. He wished he was back there now. Oh, he liked Gerard's old house just fine, but it wasn't home, and he wanted to be home with Gerard.

He had homesickness. He had a home to be homesick over. He tried not to wiggle too much.

*

WiL woke up in the middle of the night--early morning, twilight, the dark before the light, whatever the time no one should be awake is called, much much earlier than he ever woke up at home with his back aching and panic pounding behind his eyes. He winced into the dark and rolled over, squinting against the pain to see where he was. For a minute he laid still, letting his eyes adjust until Gerard's pale face popped up out of the dark. The shadows of his eyes shone and wiL knew he was awake like he always was when he needed sleep.

"Gerard?" There wasn't really any need to whisper down in the basement with both boys awake.

"Yeah, wiL?" Late-night talking was a common thing between the two. It shouldn't be, not to wiL because Gerard needed sleep, dammit, and he was just so hooked on all forms of caffiene and online games that he didn't notice he went through his days half-dead. He tugged greedily on Gerard's collar, pulling him on top of his stomach as his own little human blanket.

"Go to sleep, okay?" That won't really happen, and he knew it, and Gerard knew that he knew it but he didn't know why it was always the first thing out of his mouth when he woke up like this.

"I'm not--"

I know," wiL sighed. "You're not tired." He tucked his hand up under Gerard's shirt to rub his back. "Sleep." Like the very word would help somehow. He'd never known it to, not when it was commanded or just a suggestion, or, as he was putting it a plead because he just wanted Gerard to be alive in the morning and not--ergh, zombified with an IV drip full of caffiene the whole day.

Gerard just mumbled more of the usual excuses, he wasn't tired, he didn't need to sleep, he could just take a nap that he never really will. His head dipped down to supersede his pillow for wiL's chest, fingers tugging at his sleeves because he needed to always be doing something with his fingers and now wasn't the time for a cigarette or badly-humored comic about talking eyeballs who travel to a distant country to find the bodies they belong to.

Gerard really wasn't as heavy as wiL thought he might be. Just a warm weight settled over his heart and stomach and legs reminding him that he was with the amazing person he liked so much, that kind of really got him sometimes. His hair was soft and pliant between wiL's fingers as he found his own abberation, his breath warm as it soaked through wiL's shirt. Both of wiL's hands were on Gerard under the guise of lulling him back to sleep, but wiL was also a tyrant when it came to Gerard. He liked to touch the warm white skin and kiss and smell and taste and breathe. He liked when Gerard flooded his senses, filled all the places that the bad thoughts could hide and flushed them out.

And before he could stop himself--since Gerard didn't know that much French, right?--he mumbled a quiet "Je t'aime," against the crown of Gerard's head wrapped in a kiss. He felt Gerard freeze on top of him, and then he knew he fucked up, because of course Gerard would know what it meant, everyone knew those words in French and shit, he really really didn't mean to make things weird between them because it was all going so well, too well, and Gerard had already made it clear that they weren't crossing that line.

He squeezed his eyes shut as Gerard's head moved and his face popped into view. It was too much to look.

The voice that replied to him was hesitant, laced with something wiL couldn't work out but it wasn't really 'this has gone too far and I'm kicking you out'. "I--I love you too, wiL. 'Night."

*

He watched intently as the litle circles of yellow....egg-ified? Congealed? As they did whatever the fuck it was they did to come out as edible. Around him, the sounds of life circulated through the house, Alicia and Gerard's mom at the dining room table talking in clipped tones about grandchildren, Gerard and Mikey in the living room both crying out in anguish as Mikey's on-screen character got obliterated time and time again. He heard Gerard exclaim that 'My brother is useless, Mom, why did you have to birth such a sorry excuse for a human being?' and his mom shout back, 'Gerard Arthur Way, apologize to your baby brother right now! What if he stepped outside this house in two minutes and died, huh, then you would be crushed that those were your last words to him!'

WiL smiled slightly at the argument and turned back to the stove. As much as Gerard's mom and Alicia insisted, he really wasn't part of this family. He appreciated them acting like it, but he never could be. He didn't grow up knowing all of them, didn't even grow up in the same country or hemisphere watching the same things or acting the same way as a child.

"Isn't my brother such a loser?" Gerard asked when he stepped into the kitchen, hopping up onto the counter beside wiL to watch him cook.

WiL smiled and batted at his leg. "That's not nice, Gerard," he told him with a growing smile.

"'s true, though." He bumped wiL's hip with his foot. "He sucks."

From the living room, wiL could hear Mikey protesting loudly to his mom how much of an asshole Gerard was and giggled.

"Hey, I'm not an asshole...I just tell the truth! If you can't handle criticism, you suck!" Gerard frowned for a minute. "Which just furthers my argument that you suck!"

Mikey's indignant voice floated out of somewhere closer, probably in the dining room with the girls. "You suck!"

WiL wondered if this was what Mrs. Way had to go through every morning when Gerard and Mikey were still living with her. She was a brave woman.

"You both suck," he called out.

"WiL, I love you!" That was Alicia.

Gerard fixed him with a pout and shimmied off of the counter, coming to stand next to him with his chin resting on wiL's shoulder. "I'm hurt." He stuck his bottom lip out as far as it would go and whimpered. Mikey told wiL yesterday that this was how Gerard lured people into his web of apathy and over-thirty emo-ness.

"Tu n'êtes pas."

Gerard fake-sniffled and buried his head into wiL's neck. "Am too. You hurt my feelings."

WiL twisted his head to kiss Gerard's hair. "Too bad."

"Yeah! See, see Gerard! Even wiL won't take pity on you because you're an asshole!"

WiL stepped away from Gerard so his head was up and his pout was in view. "You're not an asshole, Gerard." He leaned up to kiss the pout away.

"Le petite déjeuner est prêt!" he called out to the house.

"That means Breakfast is ready!" Gerard echoed in the preferred language.