FicWad

Chapter One – Lightning Can Strike Twice

Bert’s POV



“Bert, what have I told you about drinking in the house?”

Great. Here we go. Again.

I’m twenty fucking years old and yet my boyfriend seems to think that I need him babying me; telling me what’s right and what’s wrong even though he knows full well that I couldn’t give a fuck, that I do have my own conscience that I am perfectly capable of listening to should I so wish. Besides, it’s not like he’s never drunk in the house before. In my house; mine. It was my parents’ money that bought our little paradise, not him. So why the fuck shouldn’t I be allowed to do whatever the hell I want in my own home?

Because of Mikey fucking Way. Because of some weak little sixteen-year-old who constantly acts like a rabbit being blinded by the headlights of life; like every loud voice is the sound of a bullet jet-propelling straight for his pretty little head; like every touch is a guarantee of pain. Because of my boyfriend’s baby brother I can’t even drink on my own property. Okay, the kid’s cute, I’ll give him that, but does he really need to be treated like some sort of ancient relic?

No. He’s sixteen. He needs to learn that life won’t pander to him like Gerard constantly does when he should pandering to me instead; when he should be pandering to his boyfriend instead of telling his little brother that the kid can share our bed whenever he has a nightmare. I mean, who the fuck does that? I could probably understand if Mikey was a toddler, but he’s sixteen; the kind of age where he should know that not everything is sunshine and lollipops, that shitty things happen to good people as well as bad but that’s life, that we have to get over all of the crap that life throws at us. I get that Gee has some sort of guilt complex about protecting his brother now that he knows what used to go on at the old Way family home, I myself have been known to hug the kid over what happened when nobody else is around to do so or to see, but does he really need to make everything so… I dunno; kid friendly? So boring; so everything that I don’t want my own home to be?

Apparently so because I obviously mean less to Gerard than his twig of a brother. I rank lower to him than some kid he barely saw for three years.

But he’s also an abused kid, a kid who does need someone to make him at least feel safe, someone to help him through the nightmares like a lantern guiding lost a traveller through the mist of hurt; I’ve seen his scars, some of them are enough to make even me wince at the thought of how the fuck they were ever inflicted upon such fragile skin, and I truly do feel sorry for the kid, but that doesn’t stop me from resenting him. Resenting him because not only does he ruin my fun, he takes up all of Gee’s worry and attention and care and everything else that should solely be mine.

And now Gerard’s telling me off for living my life.

“Are you fucking stupid, Bert; do you enjoy scaring Mikey?” He growls at me before waving my unopened bottle of vodka, the cause of my shameless chastising, furiously in front of my face as though he expects me to apologize for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

And that’s why it stings me like a hive of hyper wasps; he actually wants me to feel bad, wants to make me feel as shit as he does at the thought of Mikey being scared.

Obviously I do find seeing the kid, a kid who quite honestly really isn’t all that bad at his best, scared or upset distressing, of course I do; he is, to some extent, my family so it goes without saying that I don’t want him hurt, but what does he expect me to do about it? I can’t go back in time and take every hit for Mikey, I can’t make everyone be as sickeningly sweet to the kid as Gee is; I can’t change my own nature and nor do I want to. As far as looking after Mikey goes, I acknowledge that he went through some nauseatingly horrific things, things that no child or adult should ever have to face like an oncoming onslaught of fire, and that I should hand the kid a tissue if he starts crying about it but other than that I have no responsibility for the kid. And neither does Gerard; he’s a twenty-one-year-old, vampircally hot guy who should be allowed to go out and get smashed if he wants to, not have to act like the sole caretaker of the last of some kind of near-extinct breed of mouse. But he is; he’s the only person left who’d actually piss on the poor kid if he was on fire.

No. That’s not true. I care. Really, I do; I just don’t see the point in fawning over him like life will be full of sunshines and fairy-tales just because he isn’t getting abused anymore. And there’s that Ray kid too, I’m pretty sure that he cares. Whenever I’ve seen the two of them together it’s like Ray is constantly on the lookout for anything that could possibly even consider becoming a threat to Mikey and then swiftly removes it. I do like Ray, he takes some of the burden off of Gee thus sparing me some more of my lover’s waning attention, but he really is too soppy with the kid for me to stand to be around the pair for more than two minutes at a time. He’s always eating the boy’s face, or rubbing his hand, or whispering in his ear, or just holding him so tightly that I half expect Mikey to pass clean out due to asphyxiation. At first it was kind of cute, but now it’s just gotten clichéd, annoying and, if I’m perfectly honest, infuriating; seeing Mikey have what I’m starting to lack with Gerard because of the overly-pandered-to emo kid.

“I keep telling you and telling you but you never fucking listen; you can’t drink in the house anymore! Why’s that so hard for you to understand?” He snarls at me exasperatedly, reminding me very much of my own mother when I was little and wouldn’t leave the swings at the local play park; annoyed, aggravated and more than slightly pissed off.

His black, toddler-scribble hair is a complete mess, like his frustration is forcing it to fall into his face in dilapidated despair and, I can’t help but notice, it does look extremely sexy. Or rather, it would if it wasn’t for the fact that he’s pissed with me. Because of some scrawny excuse for a teenager. The same scrawny teenager who had my boyfriend up crying last night; crying straight into my overwhelmingly concerned arms over the fact that he’s convinced that Mikey needs some sort of professional help. Why?

Because half of the time the poor kid won’t even admit that his parents beat him for three fucking years, beat him to the point that the night Gerard finally got him out of that putrid hell the kid was practically passed out on the back seat of Gee’s car, all bloody gashes and swelling bruises. That night, a night that took place just a few months ago, was the closest that I’ve ever come to crying in front of anyone other than my mom; crying because, despite the fact that I may come across as some cold dickhead in need of a slap, I honestly don’t believe that any kid should ever get hit, especially not a kid so obviously weak as Mikey Way. It took Gerard hours to get Mikey clean, to get him calm enough to actually form words or even just look his big brother in the eye, to make him feel safe enough to realise that he didn’t need to flinch away every time Gee leaned in to hug him like he so blatantly needed to be hugged.

But, no matter how piteous his situation may have been and may still be, that doesn’t stop me from resenting the kid; he’s stealing my basic rights away from me and now he’s stealing my boyfriend. He’s making me share and I don’t fucking like it. Not one little bit.

“Because I don’t fucking get it, Gee! Why can’t I do what I want in my own fucking house anymore?” I demand, venom dripping from my words for the eighth time this week at the impracticalities of having a teenage abuse victim under the care of myself and my boyfriend.

My heart’s pulsating like a raging tide, making my lungs work with the swiftness of a howling hurricane; this has been building up for an extremely long time now, a time that started the split second that pathetic excuse for a teenager became my housemate; a time that has been a living hell not only because of the late nights spent hearing him scream in terror at some sort of nightmare nor simply because I have to put up with hearing him sniffle every time I speak my honest thoughts of him, but because of the fact that he’s reduced me and Gee to this. To shouting at each other over things that used to be commonplace.

“Because it isn’t your house anymore; it’s our home.” The sad, broken windows of his eyes make me feel a pinprick of guilt, the kind that makes me just want to become a second brother to Mikey just to please my beautiful boyfriend. I settle for reaching out and squeezing his non-alcohol-occupied hand instead, my own little way of letting him know that I do love him; that this our home and always will be. “A home that, whether you like it or not, includes Mikey.”

And here I was thinking that we were talking about Us for once. As in the real Us, the Us that means us a couple; not us as some sort of foster family for some fucked-up kid in need of professional help. But no; we never talk about Us anymore. Not since Mikey became our cross to bear.

So I snatch my hand out of his, ignoring his fragmented little whimper that would normally break my heart at hearing, and storm across the cream carpet to collapse into the squeaky-clean leather couch. A couch that, little over a few months ago, would have been occupied with Gerard sitting curled up into me and the two of us watching some gory horror flick or another and not caring about the crappy special effects because we were paying more attention to feeling one another’s hot skin or measuring the softness of the other’s satin-ribbon lips to care. A couch that, almost every night over the past few months, has been filled with either Gerard cuddling his frightened little brother or with Mikey and his boyfriend doing the things that I desperately miss doing with Gee in the same way that a drowning man misses oxygen; in the same way that a damned soul misses life.

I rake my hands roughly through my scraggly hair and steam out a sigh that comes nowhere close to conveying to my boyfriend, who is still stood on the other side of the room looking like some omnipotent fucking power who can just tell me what to do, just how pissed off I am feeling; just how short-changed I know for a fact that I have been by the arrival of his mess of a fucked-up little brother.

“Do you think I like that he got hurt, Gerard? Do you think that I don’t care or something?” I wince at the way he looks as though he has some very clear thoughts on that; thoughts that I really don’t want to hear right now through fear of just imploding upon myself in apocalyptic frustration. “Because I really fucking do; but there’s nothing I can do about what happened to him so why the fuck can’t I just live my life?”

“You’re unbelievable, Bert McCracken, un-fucking-believable. Everything has to be about you, all of the time and I’m sick of it!” He shouts, his words like slicing blades tearing through my tissue-paper heart, and slams my full bottle onto the coffee table with such a force that I’m half frightened that it’s going to smash into thousands of undrinkable pieces; just like we are.

“Well maybe you should leave then!”

There’s a painful silence; the sort of silence that I imagine you’d probably hear after the explosion of an atomic bomb, the kind of silence that screams pain and disaster and anguish and fire. The kind of silence that’s tearing me apart inside because it’s the sort of silence that I’ve been causing a lot lately, the kind of silence that could well mean the beginning of the end for me and Gee; the end of the most perfect thing that I’ve ever had in my sorry little life. The end of something that I never want to finish, that I thought nothing could ever wreck.

That I thought nothing could wreck until I met Michael James Way.

“Oh, believe me I would if I didn’t have Mikes to think about, if I had some place safe to take him. How do you think the poor kid fe-“

“Here we go again; Mikes this, Mikes that! It’s always about fucking Mikey!” I’m yelling at him now, yelling like a spoilt toddler in a toyshop but I was beyond the point of caring the second that he raised his voice at me; over something that his stupid little brother is responsible for. A stupid little brother who needs to learn that life isn’t all overprotective cuddles and ridiculous coddling; that he needs to get the fuck over himself. “He’s all you ever think about!”

“Because he’s my little brother; he’s my responsibility and I let him get hurt for three years, Bert. I let my baby brother get beaten up by a pair of adults for three fucking years and all I can do to make it better is to make him feel just a little bit safe.” He looks down, all of his temporary fire being extinguished with the icy daggers that are streaming hard and fast down his fury-reddened face; a face that I ache to cup with my hands until it stops dousing itself in tears. “But I can’t even do that right. He still screams in his sleep, still has to climb into bed with me whenever he thinks that Dad’s gonna get him; still refuses to openly admit what happened to him no matter how many scars he has and there’s nothing I can do to make him feel better, to make it all go away.”

He falls back against the wall, sliding down it like the crystalline bullets are sliding down his flawless face until he reaches the ground where he proceeds to pull his knees into his chest; just like I’ve seen Mikey do whenever he’s scared or upset, which is pretty much all of the time.

God, I’ve fucked this right up, haven’t I? I quite honestly never meant to hurt him, to upset him with my brutal honesty; I’d rather suffer the kind of abuse that Mikey went through just to avoid Gee’s tears. But I have made him cry and now I’ve got to make him smile again, smile like I’ve only seen him do in recent months whenever Mikes is; like that wreck of a kid is the key to his happiness, just like I used to be. It’s like whenever Mikey’s sad we all have to be, like no sun can rise because Mikey’s past is clouding the horizon. Now don’t get me wrong, I really do care about the kid, I really do believe that he deserves better than what life has given him, but I just don’t see why our lives have revolve around his misery; around everything that could just be fixed if he were to just fuck off.

No. I didn’t mean that; he’s just a kid, a weak little kid who really does need someone like Gee. And besides, it’s not like he’s not a sweet kid, he really fucking is, it’s just that he, or rather his past, has ruined my life; every good thing that I ever had going for me has been bought to shreds simply because he has nowhere else to go.

But right now I’m the one who’s been stupid enough to bring my one good thing to shreds, to make Gee cry and so it must be me who swallows my pride and fixes it; brings back the kind of optimism that he used to have all of the time, that he now only shows in front of his little brother and even then I can tell that it’s being faked in an attempt to do that which no-one can do, not even Ray, for the poor kid. Make him feel safe.

I slip off of the couch and to my knees, my actions slowed by my thoughts, crawling until I reach the side of my sobbing boyfriend; my insides turning into an exploding mass of guilt, sorrow and undeniable frustration at the fact that Mikey can do this to us, that the kid, admittedly unwillingly, has managed to make us fight and make his own big brother cry. Has made it so that instead of me telling Gerard what I really think, I’ve instead got my arms wrapped around his shaking shoulders in some sort of pitiful effort to make him feels better even though I know that I never will. Because Mikey isn’t.

“I’m sorry, Babe. I didn’t mean to shout at you, I know that you’ve got a lot going on at the moment.” I whisper, pulling his head into my shoulder so that I can at least pretend that I’m helping him as much as a single smile from Mikey would. “And besides, you know he’s been getting better.”

It’s a lie, a huge lie the size of the whole in my chest where my heart used to be before I gave it to Gee but the hopeful diamond-like glint that it installs into his overflowing eyes makes it worth it; anything is worth making my saintly sinner at least a little bit happy. Because nobody deserves to be as happy as he does, he really is one of the most selfless people I know. He must be for him to be able to stand practically giving up his old life to help Mikey rebuild what’s left of his.

“You really think so?” He’s looking up at me like a small child second-guessing parental praise at some fridge-worthy crayon masterpiece, like nothing else matters as long as I believe in him; in Mikey; in the fact that Gerard can fix everything that’s broken inside that poor kid.

He can’t, I know full well that no-one can fix the kind of trauma that that kid has been pulled through, but a little lie never hurt anyone.

“Of course I do.”

I feel something vibrate against me and Gerard instantly pulls out of my warm embrace; the kind of warm embrace that I’ve been missing way too much for it to be bearable. He fumbles with his jean pockets before pulling out his overused iPhone, pressing it immediately to his ear with panic-doused eyes after looking briefly at the screen. I bet it’s Mikey, ruining everything. Again.

“Okay, Bro, okay. I need you to calm down for me, Mikes. You’re gonna be alright. He’s gonna be alright. I promise.” He pauses, his beautiful irises once more being blurred by his arsenic synonymous tears, and I squeeze his hand as his face contorts with pure agony; the kind that I never want to see on his enchanting features ever again. “Mikey! Calm down, Kiddo. I’m on my way, alright?” I flinch as he visibly swallows a whimper. “I love you too, Kiddo. I’ll be right there.”

And with that he hangs up, the horrified look in his eyes forcing out any anger I may have still been harbouring at our little dispute; instead I give him a soft, questioning look as he searches frantically for his car keys.

“Where are we going?” I ask into his panic-fuelled silence, emphasising the ‘we’ part so that he knows whatever he’s got to do he won’t have to face doing it alone.

Panic that was caused by Mikey fucking Way.

“To the hospital. Mikes and his boyfriend were involved in an accident.”

Oh no. No. He really is just a kid.

Despite whatever impression I may give off, he is a part of my somewhat dysfunctional family; he really is just a little kid in need of care.

Just a kid. A kid that I really do care about.

Of course I fucking do.






A/N: Thank you very much for reading; I hope that this was alright! This chapter was my attempt at doing halfway decent dialogue, so I hope that it didn’t fail as biblically as my dialogue normally does. Thanks for reading and please review! :)

Also, I screwed around with how the ages would work, so for those interested it goes like this; Mikey is sixteen as will Frank be, Ray is eighteen, Bert is twenty and Gerard is twenty-one. Sorry if this annoys anybody, but I thought that it would work better like this rather than having the correct age gaps. Sorry.