The Space in the Sky

Title: The Space in the Sky
Author:
Pairing: Gerard/Mikey.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: The end of the world can be someone else’s fault.
POV: 2nd person (again), Gerard (again. I have to stop this).
Disclaimer: I do not know or own any member of My Chemical Romance. I know nothing of their sexual preferences or emotional states and so this story is really one hideously inaccurate lie. However, both the horror stories are true.

You used to think of Jersey as a refugee camp, a dumping ground for people who never quite made it to New York. You weren’t naïve. You knew that everywhere was equally fucked up, but the street crime in New York had a more cinematic quality, it was a more glamorous kind of awful, while the gangs in Jersey were just desperate and slightly sad. Similarly, you could imagine all the girls on the street in New York had stories, they had tragedy in their blood, whereas in your town they were just skinny, stupid girls on smack. Then there was the neighbourhood thing. When you lived in New York you couldn’t name a single other person in your apartment block but in Jersey, even if you never spoke to your neighbours you knew every detail of their lives.

Mikey used to joke about it, you and him going there and being anonymous. Doing whatever you wanted and having no one know.

Of course then that happened, and you half expected people to come flooding across the river and set up tents, shitting in the streets and cooking over camping stoves, a real refugee camp. Only by this time it was for people who had escaped. It was a stupid thought, brought on be Luke (who swore blind he was there) telling you that the streets were full of severed heads after, that the fire crews and paramedics were calling out to people, “Look up! Don’t look down, look up! Keep walking!” so then everyone did look down, and there they were. Charred heads. Heaps of limbs twisted together like something out of a Vietnam movie. Disgusting, but everyone kept looking down because death was less terrifying than that empty space in the skyline. (That became Luke’s favourite story, replacing the one about a first cousin who, on his first day of action in the first Gulf War, jumped out of a truck and put his foot straight through an dead Iraqi’s ribcage. The cousin threw up; Luke didn’t).

Mikey stopped joking then. He just got very drunk and very Catholic and went on about how it was all “God, God fucking punishing us for people like us and, fuck, fuck what have we done?”

“Fucked,” you said.

He didn’t see the funny side, just shouted a lot about Hell. But he can’t have meant it because he came back to your apartment and you had that hard, desperate, clawing kind of sex that people in movies have when they think they’re about to die. It was stupid really, because you weren’t dying, didn’t even know anyone who did (though you may have shared an apartment block with them, may have stolen their TV guides from their mailboxes and woken them up when you came home drunk at five and vomited outside their door). It was stupid, but there was that hole in the sky that hit you sometimes, hard and cold in your chest. The days when it hurt to look up.

So you didn’t. You looked inward, you looked at each other, you cut everyone else off and left them there like so many severed limbs. And the next time Mikey got drunk and Catholic he decided that really God was on your side, he was punishing the world because you were “good, yeah? We’re not bad people. We don’t do bad things. And they all just shit on us for this when what they have…they have…it’s sick. It’s perverse. Look at them – ” and you did, you studied all the sad boys and stupid girls and you could see it. “They don’t have half of it. Half of this. Makes me sick.”

“No Mikes, that’s the Pernod. Alcohol is not your friend.”

He didn’t see the funny side but he held you so tight you though his ribs would break, and you imagined yourself crawling into the gaps between them and living there.

“We’ll carry on,” he said. “The end of the world can be someone else’s fault.” It was stupid and drunken and far too melodramatic, but you knew what he meant. Go forward. Keep moving. Don’t look up.