Title: Scabbed X-Ray Blues
Pairing: Bert/Gerard
Author: CosmicZombie
Rating: R
Summary: Being alone is the easiest thing in the world. Being lonely is the hardest. Living in his mother’s basement, eighteen year old social recluse Gerard Way is just that- until a chance meeting opens up the kind of friendship he’d always been too scared to make.
Part One
Smoke the Loneliness
He was alone again. The beer was fosy and lukewarm under his tongue, and his fingers were coated in the black charcoal dust of unfinished teenage angst. It was just another Friday night hidden away in the dark, smoky air of his cluttered basement bedroom; the wax of the candles melting and shrunken, black rain sluicing softly down the dark glass of the window outside. The midnight beads hushed into the damp ground outside, underscoring his solitude with their softness.
At eighteen, Gerard Way knew full well this wasn’t the way most kids his age spent their Friday nights- he had no doubt that the majority of his peers would be out right that moment, slurring tequila-reckless words, fucking people they’d regret, and puking their guts out into the grimy Jersey gutters. They were out, having fun- while he sat in a pair of tatty Batman pajamas on his creased black bed sheets, listening to an assortment of gloomy grunge bands as he penciled out a week of bitterness into his sketchbook; smudging and highlighting and perfecting until his eyes would sting with tiredness and his head would be lucid with sour, flat beer.
Sometimes he’d stay up until dawn crept, fluffily pink and frayed, through the moth-eaten red curtains he never bothered to close, drawing, thinking, drinking.
But always on his own.
Everyone knew that Gerard Way preferred to be alone.
All the kids at school took his anti-social behavior as a given fact, and although he never socialized, he wasn’t classed as one of the losers. Perhaps it was simply because instead of being alone and craving attention, he resented any friendly move put on him. People didn’t dare trample on him, let alone smile. If they did, they’d only do it once. For someone with no friends, Gerard was oddly respected within the high school status.
But then again, being on your own wasn’t what the other kids picked on; it was being scared of being on your own.
And Gerard wasn’t. He was simply, antisocial, bitter Gerard Way with his venomously sarcastic tongue, going everywhere in his beat-up leather jacket, raven tendrils flopping in his smoldering glare, sketchbook tucked tightly under one arm. He made it quite clear that he liked best to be left alone. So that’s exactly what everyone did.
Maybe that was why no one seemed to stop and consider the obvious.
Gerard Way was lonely.
Secretly, desperately lonely. Sitting alone in the dingy, smoke-swirling shadows of his room in a pair of pajamas he’d worn since he was a thirteen, drawing self-pitying pictures with a stinging wrist and aching belly was not how he wanted to spend his Friday nights- no matter what he managed to convince his peers.
Convincing himself was a lot harder these days. The unsaid words were bitter in his mouth, sour on his skin, corrosive and synthetic, and they ran backwards, thick and gelatinous in his veins, turning the blood black with defeat.
But the thing was, Gerard didn’t know how not to be lonely. It was simply how he’d existed, how he survived through his later teenage years. It was easier, less painful. At least, that’s what he’d initially convinced himself.
