The Difference Between You And Me {Petekey}

Chapter two

Gerard, unsurprisingly, was totally cool with going out again. Mikey sent Pete a Message to let him know, to which Pete replied with a picture of his face, all scrunched up and smiling, next to his hand, that had a thumb sticking out. He could have just used the thumbs up and excited face emotes, but Pete thought that they were stupid and instead just took pictures of his face with the right emotions in his expression. Mikey argued that if the usage of emotes was stupid, then so were his weird picture things, but Pete insisted that "nothing about my face could ever be stupid, Mikeyway."

They agreed to meet up at Leathermouth, a bar near Pete's place, at 8. In the meanwhile, Gerard and Mikey sat in Gerard's new room, sipping Capri Suns.

"What'd you do today?" Gerard inquired.

"Pete and I were at the last Olympics, then we had to interrupt some birthday party in the nineties," Mikey said nonchalantly, and it took Gerard a second to register that Mikey did this every day and going to the Olympics was not something notable for him. "What about you?"

"Well, I had to go to the store to get canvases and stuff, then I went to the park, saw a dog, and got unreasonably happy, then I painted for a bit," Gerard said, setting down his Capri Sun.

"Ooh," Mikey wowed. "Can I see what you painted?"

Gerard shrugged. "Sure," he agreed, standing up to go get the paintings from where they were sitting to dry. "I couldn't get many canvases with what little money I have left, so I used paper for some of them," he explained.

As he looked down at the paintings, Mikey's expression was one of utter admiration. There were four of them. Three of the four were in a similar style. Mikey recognized it immediately, it was Gerard's unique and somewhat old-fashioned way of painting. The lines were drawn imperfectly, and the colours didn't always reflect reality. Gerard was never much of a realist, and instead took the meaning of colours into consideration when he painted. People's skin, for instance, was never peach, mocha, or any colour variation that it usually came in. You could always find the trace of another colour hidden in there somewhere. He painted himself as pink that one time he did a self-portrait. He said it represented his weakness, his passion, and his fears. Mikey nodded along to the explanation despite not understanding. There were some things that he figured he would never understand about his brother.

The first of those three was a portrait of someone, someone Mikey had seen before, but Gerard's artistic approach together with the immense amount of faces Mikey had been bombarded with today led him to not be able to put a name to that face.

The next one was a drawing of a scorpion- or maybe a lobster, Mikey wasn't sure. It was blue, in any case. Again, Mikey felt that he recognized the animal, but had no clue as to where from. But where would he recognize a drawing of a lobster from? It wasn't like he saw much art, or at least not any in Gerard's style. He had seen tons of paintings from the past in the last week, all from different times. Probably more than Gerard had seen that week.

The last of the three that struck Mikey as absolutely Gerard, was a bottle of vodka, spilling over onto the floor. The drink itself, unsurprisingly, was a deep, violent red. Probably for the violence that alcoholism brings, Mikey thought. The label on the bottle was written in six languages, at least two of them were dead languages. Maybe to symbolize the timelessness of alcohol's control over humanity?

He shifted his eyes over to the last of the four - this one was on a canvas. It was a landscape, a city skyline. It kind of resembled the view from Mikey's apartment without copying it entirely. What struck Mikey as odd about it, though, was that every window had some kind of eerie, empty feeling about it. Well, they were all physically empty, but there was something else entirely. There was no yellow light radiating from any of them; only different shades of dull grey, varying from building to building or on the perspective. It was all chillingly empty.