Perfect

It was bad, the feeling of killing.

Gerard sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded delicately on top of his thighs. He shot glances shocked with nerves at the limp figure slumped further up toward the head of the bed, then back down to his hands. There were six veins underneath the pale skin, three running the length of each appendage. Inside of them he knew there was the Bad Stuff, the stuff that was supposed to be in veins but not come out and spill on sheets. Leaning slack against the pillows, the body he loved oozed Bad Stuff, dripping onto the crisp blue bedspread.

He sunk his face into his hands, eyebrows furrowing with indecision, and then stood so abruptly that the bed shook and quivered on its legs. Pacing across to the opposite side of the room, he glanced up into the mirror above his hand-painted wooden set of dresser drawers. The reflection that furtively peered back was ghostly, purple rings circling his anxious hazel eyes. There was a thin smear of blood, that taboo liquid life, down the side of one hollowed cheek. Turning on his heels, Gerard crossed hurriedly back to the bed where his brother motionlessly lay.

“Mikey, come on. This isn’t f-funny anymore,” he demanded angrily. Bitter rage flushed his paled cheeks and a familiar burning sensation claimed him. He grabbed hold of his brother’s thin rib cage and gave him a good shake, as if to wake him from dream-filled slumber. But the only sound that pierced through the silence was the haunted rattling of the thin silver handcuffs that chained Mikey to the bed posts above his head. Gerard’s eyes pricked up to the metal shackles, absorbing the horizontal cuts in Mikey’s wrists from where they dug into the thin flesh. The skin there was carved and ragged, tendrils of the Bad Stuff creeping down his sallow forearms. Gerard sucked in a vacant gasp through his parted lips and then exhaled, the unease slithering up his spine with icy fingers.

“M-Mikey, c’mon,” he murmured under his breath, the anger seeping away into a chilling fright. He shook his brother softly again, but the flesh was cool and hard. Not the way skin was supposed to be. Not soft and balmy like when he wrapped his arms around Gerard in bed. Gerard fretfully gnawed on his bottom lip. There was a trickle of red leaching from the corner of Mikey’s chapped, drained lips; with trembling fingers, Gerard tried to swipe it away, but it only smeared across his brother’s fair cheek, tracing a horrifying smile in blood.

The nausea took away from Gerard’s usually calm, collected appearance. He tried to reach inside of himself, find that reserve of confidence to draw upon, only to find it emptied for once. Looking at his brother, seeing the way his fragile ribs didn’t swell with the intake of oxygen—he knew that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Knew that it had been his fault. He tried to think back to any time period in his life, find any memory from adolescence, or even a vague glimpse of childhood to compare to. Nothing came to him at all. It was as if somebody had wiped the surface of his mind clean after every encounter, leaving him with only the indistinct present until that, too, could become the mindless past. He could remember the last couple of months well enough, though their edges were already starting to fray and blur. Mikey, crawling into his bed, whispering that it was okay, everything was…perfect. Gerard had believed him, had held onto him, knowing that they all would just think he didn’t know any better. Wouldn’t grasp the fact that touching your brother was wrong, kissing your brother was wrong. Handcuffing your brother to your bed and fucking him raw was wrong.

He supposed some part of him, some dim shred of his mind knew that it wasn’t intended to work this way. In the beginning it wasn’t okay to like guys. On the playground in grade school, it wasn’t okay to tell the other boys to take off their shirts so that you could touch them, the smooth planes of their chests, the pre-pubescent hollows of their narrow collar bones. Later he’d figured out that it was okay, as long as you were over the legal age. It was okay to hang out in bars and smoke cigarettes, and when the stranger sitting on the bar stool beside you asked if you needed help to the bathroom, it was okay to vomit with your head deep inside of the toilet bowl and then make him drop his pants, covering his mouth with one sticky hand to silence his moans. It was okay for him, Gerard, to not understand why all of this was wrong, so utterly, inconceivably wrong. But he couldn’t deny the fact that some part of him, some dim shred of his backwards mind, knew that when it was your brother kneeling in front of you, your hand pushing his head closer to your hips so that your cock could hit the back of his throat…it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t okay at all.

The panic set in. He looked at the Bad Stuff, smudged all over his hands and chest. It made his lungs feel tight, his skin crawl. He tried to think of where it had gone wrong. Mikey had wanted it, the sex; he’d begged Gerard, pleaded for contact. But when Gerard had brought out the handcuffs, had grinned and tightened them around Mikey’s bony wrists, there had been a flash of…something. Fear, maybe. The very thing Gerard got off on, the very scent that brought that high, superior feeling into the pockets of his mind. Gerard had ignored the trembling limbs, the fright that struck his dear brother’s face. And when his brother has squealed and gone limp, his face twisting and freezing in pain before going slack…Gerard had just pushed faster, harder, to finish himself off while the body rested beneath layers of sweat.

He hadn’t even realized it when the opposing heart had tightened and then stopped out of stress and fright and shock of what Gerard, his perfect, insane brother could do, living outside the cage of consciousness.

It was bad, the feeling of killing.

Every muscle in Gerard’s body went rigid, more like rigor mortis than apprehension. He sprung away from the cool, lifeless body, pressing his bloody hands into the dresser that was digging into his back. Shaky fingers pulled the top drawer slightly open a crack, and he spun around to leaf through the stack of emergency numbers Mikey always made him keep in there. Each was written on a small corner of paper, scrawled in various types of penmanship and coloured ink. They weren’t in any particular order, he didn’t think; Gerard couldn’t even recognize most of the names. The panic started up again when he couldn’t locate a single number that he had even ever dialed before, and then suddenly the name Frank appeared in the cradle of his hands. Frank was honest, Frank was stable. Frank had a car and he never judged anyone. Frank was the polar opposite of Gerard, Frank was…an option.

He misdialed twice, accidentally disconnecting the third time. On the fourth try there were six rings and a static click, and then Frank’s sleep-heavy voice mumbling into the speaker.

“Gerard, is that you?” Frank asked despairingly, the bright Caller ID still flashing behind his closed eyes. He shifted in his bed, pulling his face out of the pillow to be understood. “What are you doing calling at one in the morning?”

“I need you to come to my apartment. Now.”

Frank stared blankly at the darkened ceiling over his head. He was probably the only person who wouldn’t take shit from Gerard, who acted like he owned everybody. Gerard was dangerous, Gerard was a little crazy. Gerard had some sort of mental disorder and he was the most cryptic genius Frank had ever known. Gerard was the complete dramatic opposite of Frank, Gerard was…a fucking nuisance at one in the morning.

“Listen, Gerard, I know how much you love to be a pain in my ass, literally and figuratively, but give me one good reason why I should get dressed and come over when we both should be asleep. And ‘because I want a good fuck’ is not an acceptable answer right now,” Frank mumbled, trying to keep his annoyance from making him sound like a complete asshole.

There was a pause from the other end, where Gerard stood naked in his living room, feeling the emotion called fear for the first time in his entire life. And he said, “Frank, I think I killed someone.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Frank did not bother knocking; somehow he knew that the door would be unlocked. He barged in right away in an inside-out t-shirt and red plaid pajama pants. Upon observing the living room, he was surprised to find that absolutely nothing was out of place. No blood, no body, no signs of a struggle. It seemed to him that there should at least be a sign of life, even if there was no immediate sign of death. He wiped the last of the meager sleep from the corner of his eyes and quietly shut the front door behind him, crossing the length of the living room in less than two seconds.

“Gerard?” he called out nervously, cocking his head to glance into the kitchen for his alleged murderer. Not even a dirty glass in the sink.

Gerard poked his head out from the bedroom doorway. He didn’t think he had ever felt more helpless in his life, and it was not a gratifying experience. “I think I…I k-killed…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. Wanting, no, needing to somehow gain back some control, he rubbed at his eyes in impatience and indignantly said, “Either come in and help me or take off your pants, Iero.”

“Shut the fuck up, Gerard, you…you fucking call me in the middle of the night and tell me—twice—that you killed someone. You do not call the shots here.”

In an attempt to feign condescendence, Gerard rolled his eyes, but the action was feeble and he only felt dizzy when his focus came back on Frank. The younger man was sleep-rumpled and on edge, his hair mussed even though his hazel eyes were now wide awake and alert. But he didn’t look afraid of Gerard, and that sort of pissed the older man off.

Frank was walking toward the bedroom now, his hands locked tightly at his small waist. “You better tell me what’s going on, because if you think this is some sick joke—” His own sharp inhalation of breath chopped off the tail of his sentence, and the rest of his sane flow of consciousness. There were no more words loud enough to be heard over the dull roar of shock.

Mikey Way, barely drinking age and underdeveloped enough to still be a school boy, lay haphazardly across the length of Gerard’s queen-sized bed. His skin was unnaturally pasty and waxen, covered in the shady beginnings of bruises. Slashed across his wrists were angry red slits, the skin ripped and inflamed. His body was mangled and crumpled up like a used rag doll, the limbs displayed as if someone had tried to place them in natural positions.

“Mikey?” Frank gasped in a ragged voice, gaping at Gerard through a stinging layer of tears. “You’re telling me you killed your brother?”

Looking as if he’d almost just realized it himself, Gerard nodded slightly and fiddled with the waistline of his jeans. He had cleaned away the blood from his skin and un-cuffed Mikey from the bed posts, but no matter how he placed his brother, there was no disguising the distinct lack of life there.

“What…what happened?”

Unable to look at the body anymore, Gerard ushered Frank’s shocked, liquid-limbed body from the bedroom and shut the door behind him. He tried to quell the shake in his own hands, despising his disability to suddenly be in control of himself and everyone around him. Why hadn’t he stopped? How come he hadn’t been able to realize that things were so wrong?

Frank blandly followed him to the kitchen and dropped into a slump on one of the island chairs. “Gerard, why was he naked? What about the cuts on his wrists?”

“Handcuffs.”

“What? Why was he—” Frank stopped mid-sentence, eyes widening until he could feel them bulging out of their sockets. “Oh no. Oh no, Gerard, no.”

Bobbing his head up and down without a hint of shame, Gerard stared the younger man straight in the eyes. He wanted to reach out and touch his face, just to feel the tightness of the skin there. “Don’t fucking judge us, Frank, because if you’re gonna see it that way you can just get the fuck out.”

“I wouldn’t,” Frank immediately replied, and there was honesty in his frightened eyes. “I mean, I…I don’t care what you guys did together, I guess. That’s not up to me to judge. But when it comes to the point where you were hurting him, where you killed him—”

“It was an accident, okay? I think…I think maybe his heart failed. He didn’t like the handcuffs as much as I did.”

Frank stood up unexpectedly, his motion so jolting that his chair toppled to the tiles with a loud clatter. “Are you a fucking monster, Gerard? Do you even feel any remorse? Your brother is dead,” he yelled, pushing his hands deep into his muddled hair. His breaths came in quick and strangled, squeaking through his tightened air passages.

Gerard thought about it. There was no guilt when he thought about the mangled puppet lying in his bed covers, though he knew that he had brought the end upon him. But there was a buried sadness there that he couldn’t really purge. He realized that he would miss the fragile man who had curled around him at night, never judging, always there to tell Gerard that he was absolutely…perfect.

“Ugh, you make me sick,” Frank spat in disgust, pacing to the kitchen sink. He turned on the tap and splashed cool water on his face, praying that he wouldn’t throw up.

Gerard rose in anger and strode to where Frank was pressed against the tile countertop. He grabbed the younger man’s shirt and pulled him away from the sink, slamming his back into the counter instead. “I thought you said it wasn’t your place to judge,” he seethed, tightening his grip on Frank’s arm.

Instead of fighting back, instead of cowering in fear, Frank simply shrugged out of Gerard’s hands and folded his arms over his chest. “I’m not talking about you fucking your brother, Gerard,” he said coolly. At the brief look of shock that ghosted over the older man’s face, he sneered slightly and placed his palms over Gerard’s bare chest. “Because that’s what you and Mikey were doing, right? Was he just another sometimes fuck like I am to you? You make me sick because you don’t even care. You don’t even care that he was your brother, and now he’s dead.”

“I care…”

Frank pressed forward into Gerard, pushing his face up close to the other man’s. “Then tell me what happened in there.”

“S-something happens when we’re near each other. It’s just...he looks at me, and I know that what’s in our veins isn’t the Bad Stuff, it can’t be, not if the same stuff is in both of our veins…”

A look of puzzlement collapsed Frank’s rigid features. “What do you mean, ‘the Bad Stuff’, Gerard?”

Gerard pursed his lips, thinking, and then he slid his hands to the small of Frank’s back and drove Frank’s body into his. The younger man let out a sharp little gasp, bracing himself on Gerard’s shoulders. His lips parted lustily, eyes falling half-lidded, and he momentarily seemed to lose himself to the embrace of their chests touching. Feeling the sudden urge to kiss him, Gerard closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The control quietly came back to him, and he reached around Frank, as was his original intention, to prop open a drawer built in under the counter. From the wooden slide-out he extracted a long carving knife. He took a step back from Frank, who fell back like lead into the counter, and drew the knife carefully over his own palm.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Frank cried out. He leaped forward and plucked the knife from Gerard’s fingers, tossing it into the aluminum sink with an echoing smash. Blood pooled out of the shallow cut in the creases of Gerard’s left hand, curving like a broken vein down his arm. He thrust the injury out to Frank, who gently took the hand and began frantically searching for something to wipe the blood away with.

“Don’t be mad.”

“Why did you do that?”

Gerard relished slightly in the throbbing pain that numbed his hand, and then shuddered at Frank’s tender fingers holding onto his. “It can’t be the Bad Stuff, not if it’s in both of our veins,” he repeated quietly.

There was something in the way that Frank’s features softened in disillusioned understanding. He flipped the sink on again and, as caringly as he could, washed the blood away from Gerard’s wounded palm. There was something in the way his fingers brushed gently over the slash and then wrapped a dishtowel over it to catch the flow of blood.

There was something about Gerard, strong-minded and bitter and controlling, that was just…broken. It was frightening to see in his butterscotch eyes peering into Frank’s, almost begging for…for someone else to take the control this time.

“We need to make this look like an accident, Gerard,” Frank finally said in the quiet of the kitchen glow.

“What?”

“You…you said that you thought that Mikey’s heart had failed, right?” He waited until the older man nodded and then leaned into the sink again. “Well, maybe we can make it look like that. We’ll…we’ll put him in the bathtub and deepen the handcuff marks on his wrists. It’ll look like he killed himself, Gerard.”

“But why?”

“Do you want to go to jail?”

Gerard shook his head, his hair falling into his eyes. “No, I mean, why are you doing this, Frank? What’s in it for you?”

Dropping his head into the palm of his hand, Frank closed his eyes and thought about it. He couldn’t come up with a reason that wouldn’t plummet him into the same mental disorder category as his older counterpart. So he decided to just go with the one that was most true. Dragging his eyes up to Gerard’s, he let a long sigh filter through his lips before telling him, “I don’t want to be just another sometimes fuck, Gerard.”

There was a feeling there, an emotion that Gerard didn’t recognize. It wasn’t love, no, he was very much aware that he was inept when it came to that particular sentiment. It just wasn’t mentally possible for him to grasp. He realized with distress that it was compassion. He recognized that the younger man did, in fact, feel that emotion that escaped him, that love, and he felt that he could empathize somewhat. It was a strange feeling, connecting to someone on more than a superficial level. He found that it made him want to kill himself.

“Frank…” he trailed off, lifting his uninjured palm to rest around the younger man’s smooth cheek. His skin felt hot to touch, and he could feel Frank’s erratic heartbeat pulsating under his fingers. “I can’t promise you anything.”

And Gerard, the human error, placed aside his need for control. Ten fingers, ten toes. To the regular human eye, he was…perfect. But for once it wasn’t about him.

It was about Frank.

They moved the body together, carefully carrying Mikey’s stiff remains into the bathroom. Frank filled the bathtub while Gerard erased any emotion from his head and then dug the carving knife from the kitchen into Mikey’s thin wrists. The crusts of blood already there crumbled into the porcelain bath tub and floated like sediment on top of the rose-coloured water. Fresh blood, the Bad Stuff, gushed from the latest slashes and stained the porcelain a reddish-orange. Cool sweat poured over Gerard’s temples, his skin clammy and pallid. He swiped his forehead with the back of his hand and then pulled Frank close.

“You have to come with me,” he stated, an order.

The younger man furrowed his eyebrows and wiped a smudge of blood from Gerard’s cheek with the hem of his t-shirt. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t have a car. And now that you’ve h-helped me with this, you’ll look suspicious as well. We just…we have to get out of here, Frank, you k-know that.”

“Why are you stammering?” Frank asked softly, tracing Gerard’s thin, curled lips. He didn’t even grasp the fact that he had just lost his life as well, figuratively speaking. It was over, everything he had ever known was over. Well, maybe not everything, he thought as he closed his eyes and brushed his lips over the older man’s. That was still something familiar, morbidly comforting as he tasted the bitter, metallic tang of blood on the puckered flesh.

Gerard frowned into the kiss and then touched his pounding head. “I’m not supposed to feel scared like this…it’s not me. I don’t get scared, I don’t feel this way. I control these emotions, but I don’t suffer them.”

“Don’t be scared. We’ll make this all go away, I promise.”

Being a liar himself, Gerard couldn’t believe in promises. But he did believe in Frank, honest Frank.

The knife handle was cleared of all fingerprints and left on the edge of the bathtub, dripping crimson onto the tiles. The puddle spread, seeping into the cracks and gutters of the marbled terrazzo. Stretching out like veins on the white skin of the bathroom floor.

The pool of Bad Stuff crept across the floor, becoming a mirror as it swelled into an ocean under the bright bathroom lights. It reflected a broken puppet in the bathtub, and the receding backs of Gerard and Frank, their fingers laced like knots, anything but…perfect.