Fic: Not Dead, Only Sleeping (1/4)
Not Dead, Only Sleeping
Band(s): My Chemical Romance, with Pete Wentz, Ryan Ross, and Lyn-Z
Pairing(s): Mikey/Alicia, implied past!Pete/Mikey, Gerard/Lyn-Z, Frank/Jamia
Word Count: 34,000
Rating/Warnings: PG (off screen death, angst, kid!fic)
Author Notes: There's a fic, before this, called Talitha. This is not a sequel, more like Possible Continuation A. You will probably need to read Talitha to understand this one, but you do not need to read this after reading Talitha.
Thank you to mxtape, stealstheashes, solflower22, and nova33 for the beta work and helping me bang this into something coherent. You guys are awesome. Thank you to choclitbunny whose enthusiasm helped me regain confidence in this piece. Also, thank you to sinuous_curve for helping me talk out an earlier version of this story and see that it just wasn't working as it was. This is what came later, and thank you, even if I never had the chance to speak with you again.
Summary: When she cries, Mikey tries to remember everything he read and Alicia told him. He tries to support her head and not drop her and keep his voice calm and soothing, even if he feels grimy from sleeping on the couch without a sheet, where a spring cuts into his back for most of the night--when he's not pacing with Deirdre in his arms, hips bumping against the counter because he's too sleep-starved to keep his pacing in a straight line
They bury Alicia on a Wednesday, put her into the damp ground when it's an unseasonable 68 degrees. She would have snorted and said, "And they say there's no such thing as global warming," but she doesn't because she's in the box. Mikey just has Gerard's hand on his back and his mom clinging to his left arm. There's a pastor that he can't understand, someone there to make Alicia's mother happy even though neither of them believe(d) any words could make it difference when there's a body sinking into the damp ground with worms and larvae.
He sways between Gerard and his mom when he feels his lungs starting to collapse around the weight of his thoughts, the way his mind swirls down into its catalogue of horror movies and pulls out a cast of things he never wanted to link to Alicia.
His stomach turns over, and he throws up the half-waffle that Mrs. Simmons made him eat, tastes the blueberry syrup all over again. Gerard's arm slides around to hold his waist.
***
They take three weeks off, and Mikey spends them on his mom's couch. His room is still there, but Deirdre is in her PackNPlay. He doesn't know if they could fit her in the bedroom too, with all the boxes of memories from his childhood and the things they sent while they were on tour, old vinyl records that he has duplicates of at the apartment.
Deirdre cries more in those three weeks than Mikey remembers her crying when the three of them were all tucked into the bed together, Alicia's hand wrapped around one of her legs. She cries and doesn't take the formula he buys or that Gerard buys. His mom is the one that finally finds this weird orange bottle of Similiac at the Walmart thirty minutes away, finally gets her to stop.
When she cries, Mikey tries to remember everything he read and Alicia told him. He tries to support her head and not drop her and keep his voice calm and soothing, even if he feels grimy from sleeping on the couch without a sheet, where a spring cuts into his back for most of the night--when he's not pacing with Deirdre in his arms, hips bumping against the counter because he's too sleep-starved to keep his pacing in a straight line. He's too tired to feel the ache, where everything inside was taken out with ice-cream scoops and he's waiting to cave in.
He tells Gerard about it, and the next day they go out and buy a proper foldout that Deirdre can sleep on too and five cases of the orange Similiac. Gerard sleeps over that night, tucked against him like he's five again and there are thunderclaps that he needs protection from.
Gerard gets up with Deirdre that night, and Mikey can hear him singing the new songs to her in the kitchen.
***
He leaves Deirdre with his mom when he goes back to the studio. Frank sort of hovers when Mikey looks at the basslines that he wrote before, the ones he wrote when he left her alone, and Ray and Bob won't stop looking over at him even if they're supposed to be arguing with Gerard about how he can't sing the bridge in falsetto because it sounds awful in the worst kind of way.
Mikey tells this much to them, a bit more snarl than he's supposed to use, but the way the other four grin, Frank launching himself onto Mikey's lap, makes it all right. He doesn't smile back, but he nods, acknowledges them.
They've got eight songs already: four that are solid and ready to track; two that need Mikey to lay down his parts, so they can hear the complete rough cut; and two that are half-written, bits of chorus and refrain with a drumline.
Gerard has lyrics without music, pinned up to the corkboard in their practice space. It's just the five of them right now, six or seven when Brian and Reprise show up, and sometimes the lyrics help Ray and Frank piece together guitar melodies.
It's the same as before, everyone coming to the table with ideas and throwing them into a colander, letting the shit drain out until the mostly good stuff is left. He drifts back and forth between Ray and Bob, keeping his bass close to him.
Mikey doesn't think about anything beside how heavy the instrument is around his neck, how his fingers hurt after over a month of not practicing. It's working for him, only thinking about the immediate world and nothing that happened before or what will happen in the next five minutes.
"I think we could lead with you for this song, sort of set it with a bluesy feel?" Ray says, and Mikey glances at the chords they've already mapped out. He's not the best at arranging, but when he picks out a line, Ray nods encouragingly. "Yeah, like that."
They work for ten hours with thirty-four cigarette breaks and one meal, and Mikey wants to leave after the second hour. He calls his mom every time Gerard drags Frank and Bob outside for nicotine because he knows if he doesn't, he'll go outside with them. His fingers twitch with the need to smoke again.
"Mikey, she's fine," his mom says every time, and he doesn't know how to say that he's not calling to ask about Deirdre.
He tells Ray about it every time he hangs up, that he's sure Deirdre's fine and he doesn't know why everyone thinks he's so obsessed with her. Ray looks over, hair bobbing slightly. He doesn't put any products into it when it's just them dicking around in the studio.
"I don't know," he says, every time, and he only starts to sound annoyed after hour eight.
***
He wants to think that it's sort of cool how Deirdre will be exactly two months old on her first Christmas, but he spends most of the time leading up to it sort of in a daze. He does stuff for the band because Gerard shows up at their old house every afternoon at 1 PM sharp, unless Frank makes it there first. He gets used to diapers enough that he doesn't make a huge mess all over himself and Deirdre's legs.
Deirdre just cries too much, and Mikey can't figure out if she's still growing. He keeps remembering documentaries, where the narrator would drone on about wildebeest young failing to thrive when lions ate the mother. She's still feels too tiny, all torso with froglike legs and hands that are slowly getting better at reaching and holding. He wishes he still wore glasses sometimes, to see if she would try to pull them off his face.
Sometimes he wishes that she would just stop for a minute, just one, especially after she's been screaming for over ten, when she doesn't want to be rocked or to eat or to have her diaper changed
Those moments make his eyes burn, and he feels the cracks widening, knows that he's going to fall into himself too soon. He clings to the baby with her little kicking legs and tries to sway to a different rhythm.
When he realizes that she'll fall asleep to "This is Halloween," it's an accident, the song stuck in his mind from a late night marathon with Gerard. He rocks her for another five minutes before he sets her into the PackNPlay and calls Alicia without thinking.
It's only when he hears her message on the voicemail that he realizes what he's done. He opens his mouth to leave a message, to tell her that he misses her or that he wants her back, but it comes out as a gasp of breath before he's on the floor and trying not to cry too loud because he shouldn't wake the baby.
Mikey calls T-Mobile the next day and has her phone turned off, goes onto MySpace and deletes her page, and then texts Gerard to let him know that he's not going to practice. Deirdre slept through the night, and it's the first time in a long time that he feels awake enough to walk to the park by his old house and sit on the top of the slide, without a coat and with snow leaking into his jeans. He tries not to fall apart.
Gerard finds him when the school buses are just starting to circulate around the neighborhood.
"Hey," Gerard says, and he climbs up the icy stairs to the slide. The slide groans a little, too old and too rusted for two adults to be hanging out on it.
Mikey nods and rubs his nose. He can't feel the tip, and he's used up all the tissues that were half-folded in his pocket.
"So, I was thinking that maybe we should go out for pizza before we go into the city. I'm really feeling up for pizza, and because Jamia and Frank are awesome, they're going to watch Dee tonight." Mikey's the only one who calls her "Deirdre." Even Alicia had a nickname for her, before she was old enough to get a personality.
He just looks at Gerard, at his raised eyebrows and lip tucked between his teeth. "You know she'll keep them up all night."
His brother laughs and scratches at his head. "Yeah, I know, but, hey. This is Frank. If he wants kids, he'll have to get used to that whole 'never shut up, oh my god,' thing at some point, right?" Gerard blanches and waves his hands. The slide sways. "Not that, like, Dee's not awesome--"
"She cries all the time." Mikey tries to read the graffiti on the side of the water fountain that hasn't worked since 1992. "I know what you meant."
Gerard sighs and takes another two steps up, so he can rest his hands on Mikey's legs, pushing on them until Mikey swings them over onto the slide. Most of the snow has pooled at the end, and he rolls his eyes because he knows what Gerard is going to do before he feels his brother's hands at his back.
"You better follow me down, fucker," he says just before he lets go of the bar.
Later, after pizza and a trip to the therapist, who he should have been seeing all along but didn't, he lets Gerard undelete the MySpace, if only so he can stop repeating No major life decisions for a year, Mikey. because apparently the internets really are serious business.
***
When Christmas actually comes, it's too warm to snow, so it rains. Only half the tree lights up, all the hand-made ornaments from preschool through eighth grade stuck on it haphazardly. There are better ornaments, gifts from Europe and things that Gerard made after SVA, but they're mostly displayed behind glass and stuck on the mantle. His mom thinks that Christmas is a time for family, for memories and embarrassing stories that they've all heard before.
He wakes up after Gerard and Lyn-Z get there, his dad pulling Deirdre off the foldout at the first sign of fussing. It's not that he doesn't want to be celebrating and eating ham and sweet potatoes that are a little burned; it's that he remembers last Christmas and waking up burrowed against Alicia with the cats and the dogs. They put on the old Rudolph special and spent most of the day lazily falling into each other, soft gasps and lingering touches.
"Mikey, are you up?" his mother asks, breaking him out of the memories. The rest of the family is in the dining room, and he can hear knives against plates. They're eating without him.
He blinks at her when she sits down beside him and takes one of his hands. "Before, when you were in California," she says slowly, voice sort of raspy from years of cigarette smoking, "I thought maybe I didn't tell you that it was all right to be sad, sometimes--"
"Ma," he says. He resists the urge to flop back down onto the foldout and wish that she wouldn't talk about this, not now. The sheets smell like dust and spit-up, nothing like the lilac body powder Alicia used to wear.
She leans over and kisses him on the temple. "I'm not saying that right now, Michael," she whispers and squeezes his hand, nails pressed into his palm "I'm saying that it's been over a month, and you can be sad, but you need to come back and take care of that little girl."
Blinking, he moves back from her, as far back and away as he can get. She doesn't let go of his hand. "Ma, Alicia just--"
"I'm not saying that you have to move out. You all are welcome here until you feel like it's time to go back, but I am saying that we're all worried about both of you. I know it's hard to hear, sweetheart." He knows he's in trouble by the way she says the endearment. His mother isn't one for those, not while pressing pointy nails into his hand. "But you don't get to do the full mourning, and I know it's awful and not fair, but you're a father now. You have to be an adult about this."
He waits until she's done before he moves to get off the foldout. He kisses her cheek, once and too quick to have her notice that he is shaking, fine tremors running over his arms as he escapes to the bathroom and turns the sink tap onto cold. He watches the water rush down into the drain, doesn't think about the cost of plumbing or the way that it's bad for the environment to just let it run.
When Mikey goes downstairs, he takes the baby from his dad and accepts a plate of lukewarm food to balance on his knees when they all get together to watch It's a Wonderful Life on cable. He picks at his ham and wonders if it counts as a life decision to move back into the apartment.
***
He does it on the Saturday after New Year's, with both cat carriers and Deirdre in her stroller. Everything feels scabbed over, secrets and memories just starting to heal under the surface, unless he wants to scratch.
The band drops him off. It's been another week since Mikey's been in the studio, and there's a set to Frank's eyebrows and Ray's shoulders that tell him that they want to ask him to step down. Except, of course, he's an adult. He's an adult who will be at work on Monday with bells on and a baby. He hasn't had time to find a nanny yet.
Most of the useless toys that Deirdre get for Christmas stay at his mom's house. He doesn't know how to integrate them into the life they had here, his posters for old Ed Wood films and Alicia's maps of feudal Japan and WWII-era Tokyo.
He sits down on the couch after they leave. Deirdre is whimpering, just a little plaintive sound to let him know she's discontent. The case of formula is on the floor by the kitchen, box of size 2 diapers beside it, but he sits and watches the cats relearn how their home should be, scent-marking the edges of the sofa with their faces before looking to him to play with them like he hasn't done since Alicia called him about complications.
Mikey stands without meaning to, starts to sway and tuck Deirdre tighter into the blue and green swaddler. There's a fine layer of dust that is going to wreak havoc on his allergies, everything as still as it was the morning he came back and Alicia's mother started babbling about comas and ambulances, Alicia too still in their bed with one arm flung and her fingers curled around his edge of the blanket.
His singing, off-key and warbling, cuts off because he can't breathe around the knot in his chest. He wants to fall back down and sink back into the emptiness until he knows that there isn't anything that will pull him out of it.
But he has to be an adult, so he keeps swaying and trying to remember what comes after "Red and black and spider-green."
There are cat clothes in his apartment, and he has more 1960s B-movies on DVD than most people have towels. He plays in a rock band that his big brother formed; everyone watches out for him and claps his shoulder in a sort of I'm-here-if-you-need-me sort of way. His name is Mikey, not Michael or even Mike.
He's going to let this all slough off, so he can be a father. He mentally repeats the same message as many times as it will take to stick while he sings Danny Elfman four more times. Mikey tries not to think about what Alicia would have picked to sing to the baby. He makes it until later, when Deirdre's sleeping and the cats are lying over heating ducts. He buries his head into pillows that still smell like her and doesn't fall asleep until morning.
***
When January begins to melt into February, they've got almost an entire album plotted. They're going to go to the studio in two more weeks. His bones ache when he wakes up in the morning, just after eleven, to shower and go to the practice space, dropping Deirdre off at daycare. He pretends that he doesn't notice Ray's retooling of his parts, to make them tighter and faster. They need to blend in better with the rest of the album, a little more punk rock and a little more Frank's speed than Black Parade was. He plays the parts and doesn't smile when Gerard looks over at him.
Mikey's just coming in one day, still nursing his Starbucks as Frank says, "So, I was thinking."
"That's dangerous," Bob says, looking over a takeout menu with the barest hint of a smile.
"Fuck you, Bryar." Frank settles down on the couch next to Gerard, tongue pressed against his lip. "So I was thinking about when we release this album. What's the latest we can do it?"
Mikey sits on the other side of Gerard, mostly perched on the arm of the couch. There are open chairs, but Gerard leans against his leg without being asked because he's never made a comment about how Mikey needs to be an adult.
"They want it out before summer," Ray says. He's in front of one of the laptops, pushed back far enough to hold his guitar in his lap. "I think like June or so." They all know that he has the exact date written down somewhere and circled in three different colors.
"And when do they want to start the tour?" Frank bounces little, feet bracing against the coffee table in front of them.
"Brian has us lined up for a few things in May, I think." Gerard starts patting at his pockets for cigarettes.
"Big shows start June 5th." Bob flicks his eyes over to Mikey when he talks.
Mikey shrugs. He doesn't have an opinion of any of this. He has to wait a year, until November, but he's made decisions already, things he can't tell them yet because they will end him.
"Let's push it to June, then, give us all time to sort of settle." Frank says "us" like it doesn't necessarily just mean Mikey, but Gerard sits up a little bit straighter and Bob is looking at him again. Ray won't look up from his guitar, and that's almost as bad. "I want to spend more time with Jamia, I mean, fuck it's going to be a year." He looks off, and Mikey's shoulders relax a little, just a hint, because he remembers that swell of pride and awe. He still feels it sometimes, when Deirdre stops crying long enough to smile at him when he sings.
"Yeah," Gerard says and then he sits up again. "Yeah. Lyn has a tour, and I was going to try and hit part of it with her, and if we wrap it up and then take some time to release it, it could work."
Mikey falls off the couch's arm and onto his brother, nose pressed against Gerard's shoulder. Bob and Ray are giving their reasons of why they want this, even if he doesn't think Bob ever gets tired of touring or Ray wants to compress their time between interviews and touring that much.
Gerard reaches over and cuffs his hand around Mikey's neck, warm and slightly damp, before he calls for a cigarette break and goes outside with Bob and Frank. Mikey doesn't even worry that they're talking about him.
***
Sometimes, he still forgets and leaves his picks out on the floor where Deirdre can find them, even after she's rolling around on the floor and her eyes are able to focus on bright colors.
He forgets that she's not a pet, sometimes, until she sticks out chubby fingers and then his pick is in her mouth. There's too much drool on her chin, shiny under the glare of the television. She's teething, and then she's not making any sound besides the awful wheezing that makes him look over from the DVDs (attempts to fill the too small apartment with something besides the white noise of memories).
"Deirdre," he says, too loud, and he knows that she'd be crying from him raising his voice if she could. "Oh, shit, shit." He kneels next to her on the rug, hears her wheezing again and there's some wet sound coming out of her throat. Her arms aren't waving.
His Sidekick is still in his bag, in the hallway where he dropped it off with her diaper bag, and he doesn't know where the real phone is anymore, if it can still ring. She makes the sound again.
Something clicks inside, and he reaches down to gently, gently tip her head back and sticks two fingers into her mouth, ignoring that they're covered in dust and subway grime. Her mouth is slick, hard nubs that are going to be teeth pressing against his index finger until he feels the edge of the pick.
She vomits onto his hand when he manages to get it out of her mouth, and she starts screaming her head off. Mikey holds her tight enough to worry that she'll break before he gets up to call his mom and tell her what happened and tell her that he understands, now.
***
After that, he fakes it better. He argues harmonies with Ray like he used to, and he calls old friends that he hasn't talked to since Alicia told them about the pregnancy and let them make soft sounds of sympathy from miles away. Mikey still doesn't go out, though. He still marks off the passage of time on a faerie calendar he found at Borders for $4.99. He wakes up on March 7th and tries to pretend it's any day.
Mikey goes to practice without saying anything to Gerard about the day. They're in the studio, and he can't just cut out on them now. He brings Deirdre up with him that day, and Gerard takes her without being asked. She's old enough now that she understands raising her arms means she'll get picked up, and there's always someone around that will pick her up and listen to her babble on about the meaning of life in little high pitched squeals and words that they've all forgotten.
Brian doesn't ask Mikey to lay anything down that day, but he does it anyway, rips through the basslines of the song Gerard's just calling "Justice" and replays the two that he's already put down, tighter this time. His fingers pull the lines without him having to think about it.
Mikey doesn't notice that he's biting his lip hard enough to just taste blood until Ray's voice blares into the studio with Hey, Mikey, take five, all right and he has to put down his bass. He doesn't go into the green room, just steps out of the recording booth and into the hall, curled up in his hoodie. He starts calling people.
Lyn-Z is the first person who picks up, instead of the phone clicking over to voicemail. He hasn't seen her since mid-January, off opening for Linkin Park again in heated amphitheaters.
She talks first. "What's up, Mikey?" Her voice is soft with sleep, and he wonders where she is. Gerard usually doesn't know her itinerary, lets her decide when and where to call him unless he just wants to listen to her voice, but Mikey feels bad. He knows how rough bunk-sleep can be.
"Nothing. Just calling people." He leans against the wall and wills the studio door to stay closed. "We're on a break."
"Oh?" Mikey thinks that he can hear the slide of sheets and wishes that he'd called Patrick instead. "How's it going?"
"All right. No one's having a breakdown this time."
She's quiet for the next four minutes. He watches the clock across from him, like the ones they used to have at school with the huge red second-hand that always seems to slow down just before it hits the next minute.
He looks away from the clock and down at the industrial-grade grey carpet that still manages to have coffee stains. There is a streak of white paint or something on his new boots.
"Mikey," she says softly. "I know what today is."
"I figured you did." He doesn't comment on it, and he feels his jeans pocket with his free hand, fingering his ring through the fabric. He doesn't wear it when he plays, and if he slides it on now, he knows that he's going to leave.
She sighs. It reminds him of Gerard's sigh so much that it's a little disturbing, too loud at the start and held on for just three seconds too much. "What are you going to do when you go home?"
He shrugs even though she can't see it. It's hard not to think about last year, when he and Alicia woke up together, legs draped over each other's and lazy kisses. He bought her a set of nesting dolls painted like Stitch, with the smallest removed so he could tuck a necklace with a paper clock pendant. She'd laughed and pressed him against the wall of the living room, back when it was still their living room and it wasn't littered with teething rings.
He can't remember if, on that morning, Alicia had brushed her teeth yet or not. He closes his eyes and almost chokes on his exhale.
"Mikey?" Lyn-Z says, and she's speaking louder. "You still there?"
"Yeah." He looks up at the clock. "Hey, I should probably get back to the guys. Thanks for." He doesn't have anything to thank her for, and he can't blame her for his lack of memory, how Alicia is growing fuzzy around the edges and he can't remember the exact feel of her hair between his fingers. It's only been five months.
"All right," she says slowly. "If you need anything else, you call me all right?"
"Yeah, I will. Bye, Lyn." He ends the call and slides his ring back onto his hand. He can still remember how cold her hands were when James said the words, and he isn't going to forget that, not now, not yet.
***
Somehow, they finish the album in April. It's done, seventeen tracks with two B-sides ready for the first single. They all hug and shove each other because they're secretly seven, Frank pounding the shit out of their backs with enthusiasm and the general being of Frank. Mikey'll be bruised in the morning, but Gerard's grinning too wide.
Mikey's smiling too, and he can't stop himself from doing it, singing under his breath when they play it for Brian and Craig. It's not that Brian hasn't been there all along, but there's something great in the way he looks at them, clear-eyed and proud.
Deirdre's there too, tucked on Brian's hip with her fingers in her mouth. She's too little to understand music, he's pretty sure, but she smiles with everyone else and laughs when Gerard takes her and dances around the room, belting along with his own voice.
Someone's filming it, and he knows that Ray's taking a picture. He crosses his arms over his chest and watches and tries to press their awkward shuffle into his mind because they aren't going to release a "Making Of" DVD with this one either, too many personal discussions. He knows that's mostly about him, thinks it is anyway, and he doesn't want the fans to read too much into his business.
Gerard's told him that there are two song on the album about Alicia, one about Deirdre. Mikey doesn't want to know which ones they are because he thinks that he'll never be able to play them.
Except, now, with Gerard's too big smile and Deirdre's blue-blue eyes wide with delight, he thinks that he might be able to.
***
He sends his section of the liner notes in that night, starting it off with "Mikey Way would like to thank" in a different color font because he figures they can change that to whatever they need. It's easier than he thought it would be.
...my band and best friends, the fans, Mom, Dad, my big brother Gerard for getting me through this one, too, Alicia for showing me strength and teaching me as much as I could learn, and Deirdre for giving me a reason to smile each day. I love you all.
Mikey sleeps on the couch that night because he thinks that he sees shadows in the bedroom. He doesn't call Gerard about it.
***
It lasts until it's almost one year to the day Alicia told him, Deirdre six months old and able to get up on her hands and knees and rock. She's going to start moving any day. She's all smiles now, and he sees more of Alicia in those little grins than he does anywhere, except in her blue eyes that only get lighter instead of changing color.
"You're going to make my life living hell, aren't you?" He scoops her off the floor and walks with her into the bedroom and puts her down in the PackNPlay because the crib is still foreign thing to him. There something strange in sleeping alone.
He reads half of a Politically Correct fairy tale (Snow White, because it still makes him laugh all these years later) to her before she's asleep, soft baby snores. He can't bend down to kiss her cheeks, the sides just too high for him to fold his body around, so he settles for brushing a hand against her skin. The hard earned calluses don't wake her up.
Mikey goes into the living room and puts on The Two Towers as he starts to clean up. He brushes cheerios into his hands to throw away and kicks the stacking blocks and shape sorters into the sides of the room, so he won't trip over them in the morning when he gets up to do nothing besides watch the baby.
It's the first time since before Deirdre was born that he isn't doing anything but waiting for the tour to start. Weeks filled with Fairy Tale Theatre, Shelley Duvall, and maybe a few episodes of Baby Einstein. He sits on the couch and tries not to think about it, sitting Bunny on his chest and carding his fingers through her fur.
He doesn't pay much attention to the film until Frodo and Sam reach the Dead Marshes, and then he wishes he hadn't stopped to watch the movie at all. His lungs go heavy, stomach like lead just under Bunny, and he remembers watching this with Alicia, her warm body against his and the curve of her stomach, the way it still fit under his palm because she was too skinny going in.
Once he turns the memories on, though, he can't turn them off. Everything's there: when she told him, when she first smiled at him on Warped, the way they made promises of forever even if she wasn't a complete romantic, how she looked when he gave the okay to take her off life-support and let her go, her laugh. It's freight trains, each of them hitting him at full speed and ripping along his spine. He turns the movie off, settling on Craig Ferguson because Alicia hated him, and it's still not enough to make it stop.
Mikey gets up without thinking, knocks Bunny onto the floor. He squeezes his eyes against the memories, the feelings, and maybe, maybe, something tells him that it's a good idea to go into the bathroom. It's the same something that put him into shaking fits in the Paramour's bathroom, scratching up his arms and ripping out his hair when Gerard tried to talk him out of it.
But his Forever tattoo feels like it's burning, like his skin is trying to force out the ink and memory of the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled all at the same time. He grabs two of his pills bottles and goes into the kitchen, to the top cabinet where they kept Jack and Absolut for Alicia's parties.
He's gotten better at dry swallowing, opening the first bottle and downing a mouthful before he's opened the Jack and taken the first pull. He doesn't relish the way his eyes water, but he's missed the way it numbs his lips, burns the top of his mouth before hitting his throat. He puts down the bottle and tries to step away, but it's there again, the way her nose crinkled when she hugged him on tour, her lips against his dirt-streaked neck, her black hair against the last white pillow, face painted pale so you wouldn't have even guessed that kidney failure turned her skin yellow.
The second handful of pills goes down harder than the first. He feels like his throat should be cauterized from the Jack he chases it with, but it still feels like it's bleeding. The third pull is better, mind and eyes completely used to the crash of whiskey.
It's half a bottle gone before he lets it slip out of his hands and crash onto the floor. It doesn't break, just bounces twice and spills everywhere. He's glad the dogs are still with Frank. They'd try to drink it.
Mikey falls on the couch and puts the movie back on. He can't concentrate on the plot, parts of his vision dancing with black even though it's his favorite part of the movie, the Ents coming and talking to Merry and Pippin. He always wanted an Ent, and Gerard used to tell him that all oaks really were, when he was still young enough to believe all of Gerard's stories.
He turns the movie up to hear dialogue and fighting over the roar in his own ears.
It wakes Deirdre up, and she starts to scream in the other room. Mikey can't figure out where that is. He tries to find her in the crib at first, knocks over a tower of CDs and can't find her in between cool sheets. He knows what she looks like when she cries, too, because her eyes go brilliant like Alicia's always did, like they did when he told her how close he came in the Paramour. It's nothing like now.
Mikey thinks, maybe, that he lost her, and he calls Gerard while he's standing in the doorway of the crib room. It's a surprise when Gerard picks up because he can't even hear his own dial-tone over the screaming and the baby and the bum-bum-bum in his head. It's not even a good techno beat.
"Mikey?" Gerard says like he's been saying it a lot, high and maybe shaky. "Mikey, are you--Is that the baby?"
"I think I lost her." His words seem hard to pull out of his mouth, awkwardly shaped. "She's crying."
Gerard is quiet, and Mikey turns the TV off so he can hear him better. "I'm still looking, Gee, don't worry." His mouth feels sloppy, filled with spit and gross. Deirdre's not on the couch either, but he stretches out on it anyway. "She'll go back to sleep, I think."
"Mikey, are you drunk?" Gerard asks, voice soft and hushed but there's something hard in it.
He shakes his head. The baby is still crying, and he knows his own cheeks are wet. "Not too bad."
"Fucking fuck." He remembers, then, that Gerard's in Montana or someplace equally ridiculous, someplace where he can't do anything about the way Deirdre's crying. "Mikey, what did you do?" He uses the voice, the big-brother-what-the-fuck-Michael-James-Way voice that always makes him tell the truth. He shouldn't be able to command Mikey from fucking Montana, but it is what it is.
"Took some pills," he says. "And Jack."
Gerard breathes too hard into the phone. "How much."
"Half a bottle. No more pills." His eyes sort of want to close, and he lets them, nose pressed to the couch upholstery. Deirdre spit up there once. He can smell it, but he can't roll his head to the side. "I think she's sleeping again."
"Mikey," Gerard says, and there's more stuff, but Mikey misses it because he falls asleep. He feels goodbye fall off his lips, something close to it at least, but he's not sure if Gerard hears it. He probably drops his phone, too, but he's way too asleep to remember.
***
He wakes up to Frank shaking him in the shower hard enough that the back of his head cracks against the faucet. His shirt is cold, soaked to his skin, and he can barely move in his jeans. He feels like he's three-hundred pounds, and all the weight is in his head.
Everything aches. He blinks up at the shower head, frowns at how it's on. His eyes can't focus. "What time...?" He wants to ask why Frank is in his apartment, in his bathtub. He knows it's his because there's a Felix the Cat shower curtain. Frank's bathrooms all have sliding doors.
"You stupid mother fucker." Frank's hands are balled up, like he wants to hit Mikey.
Frank's face is the first thing he sees clearly, and he knows it. It's the same look that he used to give Matt, almost at the end. It's narrowed eyes and tight lips, squared shoulders and bent arms. There's maybe three seconds before he falls on Mikey with fists and elbows. They fought once, by accident, in a mosh pit when he was still interning with Eyeball and Pencey was going strong. Mikey ignores the phantom ache in his jaw.
"What time is it?" He manages to sit up, feeling his own head for goose-eggs. Something died in his mouth, rotted away there. His teeth are slimy.
Frank doesn't answer his question, just gets out of the bathtub without turning the way-too-cold water off and strips off his t-shirt and drops it into the sink. "Fuck, Mikey." His jeans make little puddles on the floor as he sits down on the toilet. The cover is red-shag, something they found at Big Lots, but Frank doesn't seem to care.
"He's awake," Frank calls.
Mikey can't figure out the knobs on the tub without looking at them, but he tries anyway, reaches behind his back and ends up turning on the hot water instead. It's warmer, though, and that's what matters.
He hates feeling like this, like there's something just outside him and he can't grab onto it, no matter how far he tries to reach. Frank's got his hands tucked over his knees, but the burn in his eyes is still there.
It's only when Jamia comes into the room with Deidre's favorite blanket draped over one shoulder and her cellphone tucked against her ear that he remembers. She says, "He's awake, now, no, I don't think we're going to have to take him. I'll make sure he calls you, when we get there."
Mikey groans and lays back down in the tub. With the little flowers on the bathmat and the shower head raining on his nose, he feels mostly like Ophelia, only she got to escape the dark shapes in her head. His just get him and Deirdre packed up into Jamia's hybrid with Bunny and Snowball in pet carriers. He's barely warm in old grey sweat pants and his Google t-shirt.
"You're going to be staying with us until Gerard gets in," Frank explains, turned around in the passenger seat. "You're going to stay with us and you're going to go to your therapist tomorrow, and then you're going to see your mother and apologize." He reaches over and knocks his knuckles lightly against Mikey's forehead, hard enough to let him know that he's still mad but it's mostly affectionate.
He doesn't know how to explain to Frank why he did it, what he was trying to do. It's partly because Frank wouldn't get all of it, partly because Mikey doesn’t know himself (and couldn’t put into words even if he did.)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Directory Post
Band(s): My Chemical Romance, with Pete Wentz, Ryan Ross, and Lyn-Z
Pairing(s): Mikey/Alicia, implied past!Pete/Mikey, Gerard/Lyn-Z, Frank/Jamia
Word Count: 34,000
Rating/Warnings: PG (off screen death, angst, kid!fic)
Author Notes: There's a fic, before this, called Talitha. This is not a sequel, more like Possible Continuation A. You will probably need to read Talitha to understand this one, but you do not need to read this after reading Talitha.
Thank you to mxtape, stealstheashes, solflower22, and nova33 for the beta work and helping me bang this into something coherent. You guys are awesome. Thank you to choclitbunny whose enthusiasm helped me regain confidence in this piece. Also, thank you to sinuous_curve for helping me talk out an earlier version of this story and see that it just wasn't working as it was. This is what came later, and thank you, even if I never had the chance to speak with you again.
Summary: When she cries, Mikey tries to remember everything he read and Alicia told him. He tries to support her head and not drop her and keep his voice calm and soothing, even if he feels grimy from sleeping on the couch without a sheet, where a spring cuts into his back for most of the night--when he's not pacing with Deirdre in his arms, hips bumping against the counter because he's too sleep-starved to keep his pacing in a straight line
They bury Alicia on a Wednesday, put her into the damp ground when it's an unseasonable 68 degrees. She would have snorted and said, "And they say there's no such thing as global warming," but she doesn't because she's in the box. Mikey just has Gerard's hand on his back and his mom clinging to his left arm. There's a pastor that he can't understand, someone there to make Alicia's mother happy even though neither of them believe(d) any words could make it difference when there's a body sinking into the damp ground with worms and larvae.
He sways between Gerard and his mom when he feels his lungs starting to collapse around the weight of his thoughts, the way his mind swirls down into its catalogue of horror movies and pulls out a cast of things he never wanted to link to Alicia.
His stomach turns over, and he throws up the half-waffle that Mrs. Simmons made him eat, tastes the blueberry syrup all over again. Gerard's arm slides around to hold his waist.
***
They take three weeks off, and Mikey spends them on his mom's couch. His room is still there, but Deirdre is in her PackNPlay. He doesn't know if they could fit her in the bedroom too, with all the boxes of memories from his childhood and the things they sent while they were on tour, old vinyl records that he has duplicates of at the apartment.
Deirdre cries more in those three weeks than Mikey remembers her crying when the three of them were all tucked into the bed together, Alicia's hand wrapped around one of her legs. She cries and doesn't take the formula he buys or that Gerard buys. His mom is the one that finally finds this weird orange bottle of Similiac at the Walmart thirty minutes away, finally gets her to stop.
When she cries, Mikey tries to remember everything he read and Alicia told him. He tries to support her head and not drop her and keep his voice calm and soothing, even if he feels grimy from sleeping on the couch without a sheet, where a spring cuts into his back for most of the night--when he's not pacing with Deirdre in his arms, hips bumping against the counter because he's too sleep-starved to keep his pacing in a straight line. He's too tired to feel the ache, where everything inside was taken out with ice-cream scoops and he's waiting to cave in.
He tells Gerard about it, and the next day they go out and buy a proper foldout that Deirdre can sleep on too and five cases of the orange Similiac. Gerard sleeps over that night, tucked against him like he's five again and there are thunderclaps that he needs protection from.
Gerard gets up with Deirdre that night, and Mikey can hear him singing the new songs to her in the kitchen.
***
He leaves Deirdre with his mom when he goes back to the studio. Frank sort of hovers when Mikey looks at the basslines that he wrote before, the ones he wrote when he left her alone, and Ray and Bob won't stop looking over at him even if they're supposed to be arguing with Gerard about how he can't sing the bridge in falsetto because it sounds awful in the worst kind of way.
Mikey tells this much to them, a bit more snarl than he's supposed to use, but the way the other four grin, Frank launching himself onto Mikey's lap, makes it all right. He doesn't smile back, but he nods, acknowledges them.
They've got eight songs already: four that are solid and ready to track; two that need Mikey to lay down his parts, so they can hear the complete rough cut; and two that are half-written, bits of chorus and refrain with a drumline.
Gerard has lyrics without music, pinned up to the corkboard in their practice space. It's just the five of them right now, six or seven when Brian and Reprise show up, and sometimes the lyrics help Ray and Frank piece together guitar melodies.
It's the same as before, everyone coming to the table with ideas and throwing them into a colander, letting the shit drain out until the mostly good stuff is left. He drifts back and forth between Ray and Bob, keeping his bass close to him.
Mikey doesn't think about anything beside how heavy the instrument is around his neck, how his fingers hurt after over a month of not practicing. It's working for him, only thinking about the immediate world and nothing that happened before or what will happen in the next five minutes.
"I think we could lead with you for this song, sort of set it with a bluesy feel?" Ray says, and Mikey glances at the chords they've already mapped out. He's not the best at arranging, but when he picks out a line, Ray nods encouragingly. "Yeah, like that."
They work for ten hours with thirty-four cigarette breaks and one meal, and Mikey wants to leave after the second hour. He calls his mom every time Gerard drags Frank and Bob outside for nicotine because he knows if he doesn't, he'll go outside with them. His fingers twitch with the need to smoke again.
"Mikey, she's fine," his mom says every time, and he doesn't know how to say that he's not calling to ask about Deirdre.
He tells Ray about it every time he hangs up, that he's sure Deirdre's fine and he doesn't know why everyone thinks he's so obsessed with her. Ray looks over, hair bobbing slightly. He doesn't put any products into it when it's just them dicking around in the studio.
"I don't know," he says, every time, and he only starts to sound annoyed after hour eight.
***
He wants to think that it's sort of cool how Deirdre will be exactly two months old on her first Christmas, but he spends most of the time leading up to it sort of in a daze. He does stuff for the band because Gerard shows up at their old house every afternoon at 1 PM sharp, unless Frank makes it there first. He gets used to diapers enough that he doesn't make a huge mess all over himself and Deirdre's legs.
Deirdre just cries too much, and Mikey can't figure out if she's still growing. He keeps remembering documentaries, where the narrator would drone on about wildebeest young failing to thrive when lions ate the mother. She's still feels too tiny, all torso with froglike legs and hands that are slowly getting better at reaching and holding. He wishes he still wore glasses sometimes, to see if she would try to pull them off his face.
Sometimes he wishes that she would just stop for a minute, just one, especially after she's been screaming for over ten, when she doesn't want to be rocked or to eat or to have her diaper changed
Those moments make his eyes burn, and he feels the cracks widening, knows that he's going to fall into himself too soon. He clings to the baby with her little kicking legs and tries to sway to a different rhythm.
When he realizes that she'll fall asleep to "This is Halloween," it's an accident, the song stuck in his mind from a late night marathon with Gerard. He rocks her for another five minutes before he sets her into the PackNPlay and calls Alicia without thinking.
It's only when he hears her message on the voicemail that he realizes what he's done. He opens his mouth to leave a message, to tell her that he misses her or that he wants her back, but it comes out as a gasp of breath before he's on the floor and trying not to cry too loud because he shouldn't wake the baby.
Mikey calls T-Mobile the next day and has her phone turned off, goes onto MySpace and deletes her page, and then texts Gerard to let him know that he's not going to practice. Deirdre slept through the night, and it's the first time in a long time that he feels awake enough to walk to the park by his old house and sit on the top of the slide, without a coat and with snow leaking into his jeans. He tries not to fall apart.
Gerard finds him when the school buses are just starting to circulate around the neighborhood.
"Hey," Gerard says, and he climbs up the icy stairs to the slide. The slide groans a little, too old and too rusted for two adults to be hanging out on it.
Mikey nods and rubs his nose. He can't feel the tip, and he's used up all the tissues that were half-folded in his pocket.
"So, I was thinking that maybe we should go out for pizza before we go into the city. I'm really feeling up for pizza, and because Jamia and Frank are awesome, they're going to watch Dee tonight." Mikey's the only one who calls her "Deirdre." Even Alicia had a nickname for her, before she was old enough to get a personality.
He just looks at Gerard, at his raised eyebrows and lip tucked between his teeth. "You know she'll keep them up all night."
His brother laughs and scratches at his head. "Yeah, I know, but, hey. This is Frank. If he wants kids, he'll have to get used to that whole 'never shut up, oh my god,' thing at some point, right?" Gerard blanches and waves his hands. The slide sways. "Not that, like, Dee's not awesome--"
"She cries all the time." Mikey tries to read the graffiti on the side of the water fountain that hasn't worked since 1992. "I know what you meant."
Gerard sighs and takes another two steps up, so he can rest his hands on Mikey's legs, pushing on them until Mikey swings them over onto the slide. Most of the snow has pooled at the end, and he rolls his eyes because he knows what Gerard is going to do before he feels his brother's hands at his back.
"You better follow me down, fucker," he says just before he lets go of the bar.
Later, after pizza and a trip to the therapist, who he should have been seeing all along but didn't, he lets Gerard undelete the MySpace, if only so he can stop repeating No major life decisions for a year, Mikey. because apparently the internets really are serious business.
***
When Christmas actually comes, it's too warm to snow, so it rains. Only half the tree lights up, all the hand-made ornaments from preschool through eighth grade stuck on it haphazardly. There are better ornaments, gifts from Europe and things that Gerard made after SVA, but they're mostly displayed behind glass and stuck on the mantle. His mom thinks that Christmas is a time for family, for memories and embarrassing stories that they've all heard before.
He wakes up after Gerard and Lyn-Z get there, his dad pulling Deirdre off the foldout at the first sign of fussing. It's not that he doesn't want to be celebrating and eating ham and sweet potatoes that are a little burned; it's that he remembers last Christmas and waking up burrowed against Alicia with the cats and the dogs. They put on the old Rudolph special and spent most of the day lazily falling into each other, soft gasps and lingering touches.
"Mikey, are you up?" his mother asks, breaking him out of the memories. The rest of the family is in the dining room, and he can hear knives against plates. They're eating without him.
He blinks at her when she sits down beside him and takes one of his hands. "Before, when you were in California," she says slowly, voice sort of raspy from years of cigarette smoking, "I thought maybe I didn't tell you that it was all right to be sad, sometimes--"
"Ma," he says. He resists the urge to flop back down onto the foldout and wish that she wouldn't talk about this, not now. The sheets smell like dust and spit-up, nothing like the lilac body powder Alicia used to wear.
She leans over and kisses him on the temple. "I'm not saying that right now, Michael," she whispers and squeezes his hand, nails pressed into his palm "I'm saying that it's been over a month, and you can be sad, but you need to come back and take care of that little girl."
Blinking, he moves back from her, as far back and away as he can get. She doesn't let go of his hand. "Ma, Alicia just--"
"I'm not saying that you have to move out. You all are welcome here until you feel like it's time to go back, but I am saying that we're all worried about both of you. I know it's hard to hear, sweetheart." He knows he's in trouble by the way she says the endearment. His mother isn't one for those, not while pressing pointy nails into his hand. "But you don't get to do the full mourning, and I know it's awful and not fair, but you're a father now. You have to be an adult about this."
He waits until she's done before he moves to get off the foldout. He kisses her cheek, once and too quick to have her notice that he is shaking, fine tremors running over his arms as he escapes to the bathroom and turns the sink tap onto cold. He watches the water rush down into the drain, doesn't think about the cost of plumbing or the way that it's bad for the environment to just let it run.
When Mikey goes downstairs, he takes the baby from his dad and accepts a plate of lukewarm food to balance on his knees when they all get together to watch It's a Wonderful Life on cable. He picks at his ham and wonders if it counts as a life decision to move back into the apartment.
***
He does it on the Saturday after New Year's, with both cat carriers and Deirdre in her stroller. Everything feels scabbed over, secrets and memories just starting to heal under the surface, unless he wants to scratch.
The band drops him off. It's been another week since Mikey's been in the studio, and there's a set to Frank's eyebrows and Ray's shoulders that tell him that they want to ask him to step down. Except, of course, he's an adult. He's an adult who will be at work on Monday with bells on and a baby. He hasn't had time to find a nanny yet.
Most of the useless toys that Deirdre get for Christmas stay at his mom's house. He doesn't know how to integrate them into the life they had here, his posters for old Ed Wood films and Alicia's maps of feudal Japan and WWII-era Tokyo.
He sits down on the couch after they leave. Deirdre is whimpering, just a little plaintive sound to let him know she's discontent. The case of formula is on the floor by the kitchen, box of size 2 diapers beside it, but he sits and watches the cats relearn how their home should be, scent-marking the edges of the sofa with their faces before looking to him to play with them like he hasn't done since Alicia called him about complications.
Mikey stands without meaning to, starts to sway and tuck Deirdre tighter into the blue and green swaddler. There's a fine layer of dust that is going to wreak havoc on his allergies, everything as still as it was the morning he came back and Alicia's mother started babbling about comas and ambulances, Alicia too still in their bed with one arm flung and her fingers curled around his edge of the blanket.
His singing, off-key and warbling, cuts off because he can't breathe around the knot in his chest. He wants to fall back down and sink back into the emptiness until he knows that there isn't anything that will pull him out of it.
But he has to be an adult, so he keeps swaying and trying to remember what comes after "Red and black and spider-green."
There are cat clothes in his apartment, and he has more 1960s B-movies on DVD than most people have towels. He plays in a rock band that his big brother formed; everyone watches out for him and claps his shoulder in a sort of I'm-here-if-you-need-me sort of way. His name is Mikey, not Michael or even Mike.
He's going to let this all slough off, so he can be a father. He mentally repeats the same message as many times as it will take to stick while he sings Danny Elfman four more times. Mikey tries not to think about what Alicia would have picked to sing to the baby. He makes it until later, when Deirdre's sleeping and the cats are lying over heating ducts. He buries his head into pillows that still smell like her and doesn't fall asleep until morning.
***
When January begins to melt into February, they've got almost an entire album plotted. They're going to go to the studio in two more weeks. His bones ache when he wakes up in the morning, just after eleven, to shower and go to the practice space, dropping Deirdre off at daycare. He pretends that he doesn't notice Ray's retooling of his parts, to make them tighter and faster. They need to blend in better with the rest of the album, a little more punk rock and a little more Frank's speed than Black Parade was. He plays the parts and doesn't smile when Gerard looks over at him.
Mikey's just coming in one day, still nursing his Starbucks as Frank says, "So, I was thinking."
"That's dangerous," Bob says, looking over a takeout menu with the barest hint of a smile.
"Fuck you, Bryar." Frank settles down on the couch next to Gerard, tongue pressed against his lip. "So I was thinking about when we release this album. What's the latest we can do it?"
Mikey sits on the other side of Gerard, mostly perched on the arm of the couch. There are open chairs, but Gerard leans against his leg without being asked because he's never made a comment about how Mikey needs to be an adult.
"They want it out before summer," Ray says. He's in front of one of the laptops, pushed back far enough to hold his guitar in his lap. "I think like June or so." They all know that he has the exact date written down somewhere and circled in three different colors.
"And when do they want to start the tour?" Frank bounces little, feet bracing against the coffee table in front of them.
"Brian has us lined up for a few things in May, I think." Gerard starts patting at his pockets for cigarettes.
"Big shows start June 5th." Bob flicks his eyes over to Mikey when he talks.
Mikey shrugs. He doesn't have an opinion of any of this. He has to wait a year, until November, but he's made decisions already, things he can't tell them yet because they will end him.
"Let's push it to June, then, give us all time to sort of settle." Frank says "us" like it doesn't necessarily just mean Mikey, but Gerard sits up a little bit straighter and Bob is looking at him again. Ray won't look up from his guitar, and that's almost as bad. "I want to spend more time with Jamia, I mean, fuck it's going to be a year." He looks off, and Mikey's shoulders relax a little, just a hint, because he remembers that swell of pride and awe. He still feels it sometimes, when Deirdre stops crying long enough to smile at him when he sings.
"Yeah," Gerard says and then he sits up again. "Yeah. Lyn has a tour, and I was going to try and hit part of it with her, and if we wrap it up and then take some time to release it, it could work."
Mikey falls off the couch's arm and onto his brother, nose pressed against Gerard's shoulder. Bob and Ray are giving their reasons of why they want this, even if he doesn't think Bob ever gets tired of touring or Ray wants to compress their time between interviews and touring that much.
Gerard reaches over and cuffs his hand around Mikey's neck, warm and slightly damp, before he calls for a cigarette break and goes outside with Bob and Frank. Mikey doesn't even worry that they're talking about him.
***
Sometimes, he still forgets and leaves his picks out on the floor where Deirdre can find them, even after she's rolling around on the floor and her eyes are able to focus on bright colors.
He forgets that she's not a pet, sometimes, until she sticks out chubby fingers and then his pick is in her mouth. There's too much drool on her chin, shiny under the glare of the television. She's teething, and then she's not making any sound besides the awful wheezing that makes him look over from the DVDs (attempts to fill the too small apartment with something besides the white noise of memories).
"Deirdre," he says, too loud, and he knows that she'd be crying from him raising his voice if she could. "Oh, shit, shit." He kneels next to her on the rug, hears her wheezing again and there's some wet sound coming out of her throat. Her arms aren't waving.
His Sidekick is still in his bag, in the hallway where he dropped it off with her diaper bag, and he doesn't know where the real phone is anymore, if it can still ring. She makes the sound again.
Something clicks inside, and he reaches down to gently, gently tip her head back and sticks two fingers into her mouth, ignoring that they're covered in dust and subway grime. Her mouth is slick, hard nubs that are going to be teeth pressing against his index finger until he feels the edge of the pick.
She vomits onto his hand when he manages to get it out of her mouth, and she starts screaming her head off. Mikey holds her tight enough to worry that she'll break before he gets up to call his mom and tell her what happened and tell her that he understands, now.
***
After that, he fakes it better. He argues harmonies with Ray like he used to, and he calls old friends that he hasn't talked to since Alicia told them about the pregnancy and let them make soft sounds of sympathy from miles away. Mikey still doesn't go out, though. He still marks off the passage of time on a faerie calendar he found at Borders for $4.99. He wakes up on March 7th and tries to pretend it's any day.
Mikey goes to practice without saying anything to Gerard about the day. They're in the studio, and he can't just cut out on them now. He brings Deirdre up with him that day, and Gerard takes her without being asked. She's old enough now that she understands raising her arms means she'll get picked up, and there's always someone around that will pick her up and listen to her babble on about the meaning of life in little high pitched squeals and words that they've all forgotten.
Brian doesn't ask Mikey to lay anything down that day, but he does it anyway, rips through the basslines of the song Gerard's just calling "Justice" and replays the two that he's already put down, tighter this time. His fingers pull the lines without him having to think about it.
Mikey doesn't notice that he's biting his lip hard enough to just taste blood until Ray's voice blares into the studio with Hey, Mikey, take five, all right and he has to put down his bass. He doesn't go into the green room, just steps out of the recording booth and into the hall, curled up in his hoodie. He starts calling people.
Lyn-Z is the first person who picks up, instead of the phone clicking over to voicemail. He hasn't seen her since mid-January, off opening for Linkin Park again in heated amphitheaters.
She talks first. "What's up, Mikey?" Her voice is soft with sleep, and he wonders where she is. Gerard usually doesn't know her itinerary, lets her decide when and where to call him unless he just wants to listen to her voice, but Mikey feels bad. He knows how rough bunk-sleep can be.
"Nothing. Just calling people." He leans against the wall and wills the studio door to stay closed. "We're on a break."
"Oh?" Mikey thinks that he can hear the slide of sheets and wishes that he'd called Patrick instead. "How's it going?"
"All right. No one's having a breakdown this time."
She's quiet for the next four minutes. He watches the clock across from him, like the ones they used to have at school with the huge red second-hand that always seems to slow down just before it hits the next minute.
He looks away from the clock and down at the industrial-grade grey carpet that still manages to have coffee stains. There is a streak of white paint or something on his new boots.
"Mikey," she says softly. "I know what today is."
"I figured you did." He doesn't comment on it, and he feels his jeans pocket with his free hand, fingering his ring through the fabric. He doesn't wear it when he plays, and if he slides it on now, he knows that he's going to leave.
She sighs. It reminds him of Gerard's sigh so much that it's a little disturbing, too loud at the start and held on for just three seconds too much. "What are you going to do when you go home?"
He shrugs even though she can't see it. It's hard not to think about last year, when he and Alicia woke up together, legs draped over each other's and lazy kisses. He bought her a set of nesting dolls painted like Stitch, with the smallest removed so he could tuck a necklace with a paper clock pendant. She'd laughed and pressed him against the wall of the living room, back when it was still their living room and it wasn't littered with teething rings.
He can't remember if, on that morning, Alicia had brushed her teeth yet or not. He closes his eyes and almost chokes on his exhale.
"Mikey?" Lyn-Z says, and she's speaking louder. "You still there?"
"Yeah." He looks up at the clock. "Hey, I should probably get back to the guys. Thanks for." He doesn't have anything to thank her for, and he can't blame her for his lack of memory, how Alicia is growing fuzzy around the edges and he can't remember the exact feel of her hair between his fingers. It's only been five months.
"All right," she says slowly. "If you need anything else, you call me all right?"
"Yeah, I will. Bye, Lyn." He ends the call and slides his ring back onto his hand. He can still remember how cold her hands were when James said the words, and he isn't going to forget that, not now, not yet.
***
Somehow, they finish the album in April. It's done, seventeen tracks with two B-sides ready for the first single. They all hug and shove each other because they're secretly seven, Frank pounding the shit out of their backs with enthusiasm and the general being of Frank. Mikey'll be bruised in the morning, but Gerard's grinning too wide.
Mikey's smiling too, and he can't stop himself from doing it, singing under his breath when they play it for Brian and Craig. It's not that Brian hasn't been there all along, but there's something great in the way he looks at them, clear-eyed and proud.
Deirdre's there too, tucked on Brian's hip with her fingers in her mouth. She's too little to understand music, he's pretty sure, but she smiles with everyone else and laughs when Gerard takes her and dances around the room, belting along with his own voice.
Someone's filming it, and he knows that Ray's taking a picture. He crosses his arms over his chest and watches and tries to press their awkward shuffle into his mind because they aren't going to release a "Making Of" DVD with this one either, too many personal discussions. He knows that's mostly about him, thinks it is anyway, and he doesn't want the fans to read too much into his business.
Gerard's told him that there are two song on the album about Alicia, one about Deirdre. Mikey doesn't want to know which ones they are because he thinks that he'll never be able to play them.
Except, now, with Gerard's too big smile and Deirdre's blue-blue eyes wide with delight, he thinks that he might be able to.
***
He sends his section of the liner notes in that night, starting it off with "Mikey Way would like to thank" in a different color font because he figures they can change that to whatever they need. It's easier than he thought it would be.
...my band and best friends, the fans, Mom, Dad, my big brother Gerard for getting me through this one, too, Alicia for showing me strength and teaching me as much as I could learn, and Deirdre for giving me a reason to smile each day. I love you all.
Mikey sleeps on the couch that night because he thinks that he sees shadows in the bedroom. He doesn't call Gerard about it.
***
It lasts until it's almost one year to the day Alicia told him, Deirdre six months old and able to get up on her hands and knees and rock. She's going to start moving any day. She's all smiles now, and he sees more of Alicia in those little grins than he does anywhere, except in her blue eyes that only get lighter instead of changing color.
"You're going to make my life living hell, aren't you?" He scoops her off the floor and walks with her into the bedroom and puts her down in the PackNPlay because the crib is still foreign thing to him. There something strange in sleeping alone.
He reads half of a Politically Correct fairy tale (Snow White, because it still makes him laugh all these years later) to her before she's asleep, soft baby snores. He can't bend down to kiss her cheeks, the sides just too high for him to fold his body around, so he settles for brushing a hand against her skin. The hard earned calluses don't wake her up.
Mikey goes into the living room and puts on The Two Towers as he starts to clean up. He brushes cheerios into his hands to throw away and kicks the stacking blocks and shape sorters into the sides of the room, so he won't trip over them in the morning when he gets up to do nothing besides watch the baby.
It's the first time since before Deirdre was born that he isn't doing anything but waiting for the tour to start. Weeks filled with Fairy Tale Theatre, Shelley Duvall, and maybe a few episodes of Baby Einstein. He sits on the couch and tries not to think about it, sitting Bunny on his chest and carding his fingers through her fur.
He doesn't pay much attention to the film until Frodo and Sam reach the Dead Marshes, and then he wishes he hadn't stopped to watch the movie at all. His lungs go heavy, stomach like lead just under Bunny, and he remembers watching this with Alicia, her warm body against his and the curve of her stomach, the way it still fit under his palm because she was too skinny going in.
Once he turns the memories on, though, he can't turn them off. Everything's there: when she told him, when she first smiled at him on Warped, the way they made promises of forever even if she wasn't a complete romantic, how she looked when he gave the okay to take her off life-support and let her go, her laugh. It's freight trains, each of them hitting him at full speed and ripping along his spine. He turns the movie off, settling on Craig Ferguson because Alicia hated him, and it's still not enough to make it stop.
Mikey gets up without thinking, knocks Bunny onto the floor. He squeezes his eyes against the memories, the feelings, and maybe, maybe, something tells him that it's a good idea to go into the bathroom. It's the same something that put him into shaking fits in the Paramour's bathroom, scratching up his arms and ripping out his hair when Gerard tried to talk him out of it.
But his Forever tattoo feels like it's burning, like his skin is trying to force out the ink and memory of the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled all at the same time. He grabs two of his pills bottles and goes into the kitchen, to the top cabinet where they kept Jack and Absolut for Alicia's parties.
He's gotten better at dry swallowing, opening the first bottle and downing a mouthful before he's opened the Jack and taken the first pull. He doesn't relish the way his eyes water, but he's missed the way it numbs his lips, burns the top of his mouth before hitting his throat. He puts down the bottle and tries to step away, but it's there again, the way her nose crinkled when she hugged him on tour, her lips against his dirt-streaked neck, her black hair against the last white pillow, face painted pale so you wouldn't have even guessed that kidney failure turned her skin yellow.
The second handful of pills goes down harder than the first. He feels like his throat should be cauterized from the Jack he chases it with, but it still feels like it's bleeding. The third pull is better, mind and eyes completely used to the crash of whiskey.
It's half a bottle gone before he lets it slip out of his hands and crash onto the floor. It doesn't break, just bounces twice and spills everywhere. He's glad the dogs are still with Frank. They'd try to drink it.
Mikey falls on the couch and puts the movie back on. He can't concentrate on the plot, parts of his vision dancing with black even though it's his favorite part of the movie, the Ents coming and talking to Merry and Pippin. He always wanted an Ent, and Gerard used to tell him that all oaks really were, when he was still young enough to believe all of Gerard's stories.
He turns the movie up to hear dialogue and fighting over the roar in his own ears.
It wakes Deirdre up, and she starts to scream in the other room. Mikey can't figure out where that is. He tries to find her in the crib at first, knocks over a tower of CDs and can't find her in between cool sheets. He knows what she looks like when she cries, too, because her eyes go brilliant like Alicia's always did, like they did when he told her how close he came in the Paramour. It's nothing like now.
Mikey thinks, maybe, that he lost her, and he calls Gerard while he's standing in the doorway of the crib room. It's a surprise when Gerard picks up because he can't even hear his own dial-tone over the screaming and the baby and the bum-bum-bum in his head. It's not even a good techno beat.
"Mikey?" Gerard says like he's been saying it a lot, high and maybe shaky. "Mikey, are you--Is that the baby?"
"I think I lost her." His words seem hard to pull out of his mouth, awkwardly shaped. "She's crying."
Gerard is quiet, and Mikey turns the TV off so he can hear him better. "I'm still looking, Gee, don't worry." His mouth feels sloppy, filled with spit and gross. Deirdre's not on the couch either, but he stretches out on it anyway. "She'll go back to sleep, I think."
"Mikey, are you drunk?" Gerard asks, voice soft and hushed but there's something hard in it.
He shakes his head. The baby is still crying, and he knows his own cheeks are wet. "Not too bad."
"Fucking fuck." He remembers, then, that Gerard's in Montana or someplace equally ridiculous, someplace where he can't do anything about the way Deirdre's crying. "Mikey, what did you do?" He uses the voice, the big-brother-what-the-fuck-Michael-James-Way voice that always makes him tell the truth. He shouldn't be able to command Mikey from fucking Montana, but it is what it is.
"Took some pills," he says. "And Jack."
Gerard breathes too hard into the phone. "How much."
"Half a bottle. No more pills." His eyes sort of want to close, and he lets them, nose pressed to the couch upholstery. Deirdre spit up there once. He can smell it, but he can't roll his head to the side. "I think she's sleeping again."
"Mikey," Gerard says, and there's more stuff, but Mikey misses it because he falls asleep. He feels goodbye fall off his lips, something close to it at least, but he's not sure if Gerard hears it. He probably drops his phone, too, but he's way too asleep to remember.
***
He wakes up to Frank shaking him in the shower hard enough that the back of his head cracks against the faucet. His shirt is cold, soaked to his skin, and he can barely move in his jeans. He feels like he's three-hundred pounds, and all the weight is in his head.
Everything aches. He blinks up at the shower head, frowns at how it's on. His eyes can't focus. "What time...?" He wants to ask why Frank is in his apartment, in his bathtub. He knows it's his because there's a Felix the Cat shower curtain. Frank's bathrooms all have sliding doors.
"You stupid mother fucker." Frank's hands are balled up, like he wants to hit Mikey.
Frank's face is the first thing he sees clearly, and he knows it. It's the same look that he used to give Matt, almost at the end. It's narrowed eyes and tight lips, squared shoulders and bent arms. There's maybe three seconds before he falls on Mikey with fists and elbows. They fought once, by accident, in a mosh pit when he was still interning with Eyeball and Pencey was going strong. Mikey ignores the phantom ache in his jaw.
"What time is it?" He manages to sit up, feeling his own head for goose-eggs. Something died in his mouth, rotted away there. His teeth are slimy.
Frank doesn't answer his question, just gets out of the bathtub without turning the way-too-cold water off and strips off his t-shirt and drops it into the sink. "Fuck, Mikey." His jeans make little puddles on the floor as he sits down on the toilet. The cover is red-shag, something they found at Big Lots, but Frank doesn't seem to care.
"He's awake," Frank calls.
Mikey can't figure out the knobs on the tub without looking at them, but he tries anyway, reaches behind his back and ends up turning on the hot water instead. It's warmer, though, and that's what matters.
He hates feeling like this, like there's something just outside him and he can't grab onto it, no matter how far he tries to reach. Frank's got his hands tucked over his knees, but the burn in his eyes is still there.
It's only when Jamia comes into the room with Deidre's favorite blanket draped over one shoulder and her cellphone tucked against her ear that he remembers. She says, "He's awake, now, no, I don't think we're going to have to take him. I'll make sure he calls you, when we get there."
Mikey groans and lays back down in the tub. With the little flowers on the bathmat and the shower head raining on his nose, he feels mostly like Ophelia, only she got to escape the dark shapes in her head. His just get him and Deirdre packed up into Jamia's hybrid with Bunny and Snowball in pet carriers. He's barely warm in old grey sweat pants and his Google t-shirt.
"You're going to be staying with us until Gerard gets in," Frank explains, turned around in the passenger seat. "You're going to stay with us and you're going to go to your therapist tomorrow, and then you're going to see your mother and apologize." He reaches over and knocks his knuckles lightly against Mikey's forehead, hard enough to let him know that he's still mad but it's mostly affectionate.
He doesn't know how to explain to Frank why he did it, what he was trying to do. It's partly because Frank wouldn't get all of it, partly because Mikey doesn’t know himself (and couldn’t put into words even if he did.)
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
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