Gerard was finding it harder and harder not to slip into the depression that felt as if it were on the other side of the cliff he was teetering on. Every day he was reminded of how Mikey wasn't there and they were getting absolutely nowhere in their investigation.
He could tell Pete was feeling it, too. They both loved him, just in different ways. The search for him had been pretty nearly called off. There were a significantly small amount of people looking for him, and it was rare that the two of them would be called into the office to brainstorm. The company just couldn't keep losing money to this. Gerard tried not to get defensive about that. Not everybody was related to Mikey, not everyone knew him like Gerard did. To them, he was just as significant as any other Traveller, plus the fact that he was costing them a ton of money.
He wasn't the most respected person around the office, either. People didn't like the fact that he made such an expensive mistake, which, again, Gerard tried not to get offended about.
He tried painting again in an attempt to keep himself from bursting into tears whenever he let his mind wander into where-the-fuck-is-Mikey mode, to little avail. Everything he painted just reminded him of what was missing and what he needed. He could never sell any of them, either. They all felt too personal and too difficult to grasp if you weren't him. Pete would offer to take them, he thought they were all beautiful, but Gerard denied any and all of his compliments.
"It's hard to be the optimist sometimes," Pete confessed to him one night where they were both feeling so crushingly lonely that they had to get together and chat, just to be in the presence of someone who wasn't themselves.
"Then don't," Gerard sighed. He knew what Pete meant, though it had never occurred to him that Pete was the optimist and he, the pessimist. It made sense, though, with Pete's encouragement and Gerard's distressing statements.
"I have to, though. Not just for you, I don't mean to insinuate that you, like, need me or something-"
"I do, though, it's fine," Gerard interrupted Pete.
"But I need to be the optimist, too. I have to pretend to be all happy-go-lucky and shit or else the opposite'll just consume me," he mumbled. "As pretentious as that sounds," he laughed after a brief pause. Gerard nodded. "You know what I mean? I have to show myself that there is a bright side, even if I don't believe it."
"Do you need me to stop being so dark and depressing then?" Gerard asked. It wasn't an offer. Gerard would rather never talk to Pete again than have to suffocate on how much he missed his brother.
"No," Pete said wistfully. "No, I need to be aware of the reality, too. It just gets tiring, trying to search for hope sometimes. It feels like it's getting harder and harder to find it, which makes it feel like there's less and less of it there, if that makes any sense." Gerard nodded.
"Do you think he's gone forever?" Gerard asked, fighting back the tears in his eyes. Pete shook his head.
"Do you believe in destiny?" Pete said back.
"Not really," Gerard mumbled.
"Well, I kind of do. And if you can convince yourself that, like, he had a lot of unfinished business here, and it would be unfair for him to just... leave, then you can probably keep hanging onto that," Pete suggested, feeling himself tear up, too.
Gerard choked out a sob, letting his head lean into Pete's armpit. Luckily, Pete had better hygiene than Gerard, so it wasn't as unpleasant as his own. Pete ran his fingers through Gerard's hair comfortingly, letting a tear roll down his cheek.
"He just-" Gerard hiccuped, "He deserves to be happy and to be here with us and we deserve to have him here," he cried.
"I know," Pete agreed. "And he'll be here. We'll find him, I promise."
-
Neo-Gerard approached Mikey cautiously that night as he was getting into the tent. Mikey was already laying in bed with his eyes closed when he noticed a shadow sitting next to him for way longer than it needed to if it was just getting into bed. Mikey opened an eye, confirming it as Gerard, and sat up a little to make it not look like he was trying to get some goddamn sleep before lights out.
"What do you want?" He asked tiredly, glaring slightly at him, partly from frustration and partly from the annoying ass lantern in the tent, and really, he had to salute whoever engineered the lantern to be so damn bright.
"I just..." he lowered his voice. "You miss someone from back home, don't you? That's why you're so angsty." Mikey didn't know what angsty meant, he probably outdated it, but he could guess. It seemed like a pretty solid word, too. Gerard really hit the nail on the head in his observation, though.
"Um," Mikey said, "yeah. You're, uh, completely right, there." He tucked some of his hair behind his ear. Gerard nodded.
"A girl?"
"Um, no," Mikey answered, "just someone I love." Gerard nodded.
"That's okay. I'm not mad at you but I understand that you're mad at me," he said. It was way too hard to be mad at him when he was being so reasonable, why couldn't he just be offended and call Mikey a bad name? Plus, he reminded Mikey too much of his Gerard, and it was impossible to be mad at his own brother, who he knew he left. "I get that sometimes too. I didn't really like anybody back home, but I always keep thinking of what could be, if I just went back and tried to fix things," he signed. Mikey hummed in understanding, not making eye contact. "But I know I can't go back now. Maybe after ll this is over, the war and everything, things will be better."
"Things will definitely be better," Mikey promised.
"Wars always have a loser. What if we lose and the Nazi government takes over the entire planet? What if we never see our families again?" Mikey almost brushed Gerard's concerns off, because of course he knew the outcome of World War 2, but then realized: he was messing with time in a big way by being there and participating in the war. He probably caused a different, past version of his brother to appear two hundred years before he was born, and the repercussions of everything he had done in this time period could definitely change who won and lost the war.
The thought terrified him: before, he had the luxury of security in the safety of the country. Hitler would be overthrown, commit suicide, and fascism would never exist on such a great scale until 2033, when Robinson would rise to power in Scotland. But now there was no telling what could happen.
Mikey knew more than the average person in his time about history. It was to be expected when you were Travelling to three or four different time periods a day. There was no way he could walk out of any of those experiences without learning at least a little something about them. If he was back home and working his job as usual, he would be able to predict what the chances were with any of the outcomes with one of the probability calculators, but he didn't have access to that resource. Actually, he had no access to any Travelling resource. But he knew that, of course he knew that.
Spontaneously deciding to spice up his life was a bad idea. Travelling two hundred years in the past was a seriously bad idea. Putting his Communicator and Messenger on the same hand was a terrible, stupid, thoughtless idea. He wished he was anywhere, any time but there and then. He wished he had Gerard with him, the real Gerard, and Pete. God, did he need Pete. He needed him so badly, he felt like he was trapped inside a block of ice and Pete was an open flame and he needed to thaw out and he didn't care how badly he got burned, he just needed to be warm and safe.
It then occurred to him that everybody in this time was on the same boat as him. Nobody knew that in Mikey's timeline, Nazi Germany wouldn't last longer than fifteen years and that all of the pain and suffering would be over. For them, there was no foreseeable end to all of this oppression and war and poverty.
During all of his travels, Mikey had always found that he seemed to understand the people from the time periods he visited. He was able to communicate with them with little misunderstanding and hey all treated him with respect if it was reciprocated. He was aware of the hardships they were facing, and he admired their resilience when faced with terrible, immoral situations. But never once had be taken their place and lived like them for as long as he had been. Never once did he know exactly how terrifying it was to know that there was a chance that his country could be taken over by a fascist government. Never once had he known that at any time, one of his closest friends or family who were fighting a war could be pronounced dead. He never knew what it was like to live that way.
A tear rolled down his cheek. He knew that the world was a scary place; he knew that there was tragedy out there and that people lived in the most devastating conditions. But knowing one thing and experiencing it firsthand are two very different concepts. If you picked up a guitar and played it, you would know more about what a guitar was than somebody who read a paragraph about how it was played.
"We still have to fight, I guess," came Mikey's weak reply. Gerard nodded.
"Are you okay?" he asked, noticing Mikey was crying. Mikey looked him in the face for the first time in the few minutes they had been talking. Concern was written all over it. It was comforting, knowing he cared.
"Yeah. I think training and everything is just getting to me," he said, wiping his eyes on his wrist.
"Happens to us all," Gerard noted, turning off the lantern. "Goodnight, Mikes. Sleep well."
Mikey hummed in response, burying his face in his pillow. He had stopped crying, which was a good thing since he liked to imagine that he was above crying himself to sleep. He stayed still for a while, eventually letting himself fall asleep.
-
Getting all of your hair shaved off was definitely not something Mikey would thought he would ever do. While he didn't mind other people with buzzcuts, he just never thought it would look good on him.
Despite that, he found himself standing in a line of men, waiting for his turn to get his hair shaved off. He was behind Gerard, who kept worrying about losing his hair.
"But it looks so good, Mikey, I would be hideous bald!" He complained, clutching onto his strands for dear life. Mikey rolled his eyes.
"Gerard, you signed up for this knowing full well what was going to happen," he countered. Gerard muttered something about being drafted, and Mikey furrowed his eyebrows.
"You were drafted? How did I not know this before?" He asked, feeling stupid for not knowing.
"It just never came up, I guess," Gerard shrugged. There was silence for a few minutes, Mikey wondering if he should apologize, then Gerard turned around again and said, "I bet you'd look even worse than me, holy shit."
Mikey raised his eyebrows. "Yeah, so stop complaining," he said as Gerard giggled.
"You've got such a long head, I bet you'd look like an alien!" he laughed, covering his mouth to keep from getting told off.
Just as he was composing himself, he was tapped on the shoulder.
"Your turn, Way," the man who was in front of him called, rubbing his freshly shaved head incredulously. Gerard grimaced at Mikey before stepping forward and sitting down onto the chair. A towel was wrapped around his shoulders. He closed his eyes as he heard the snip of the scissors cutting his hair shorter so that it could be shaved without making much of a mess. He opened an eye to look at the floor and saw his black hair falling and resting among the other trainees' dead locks. He looked back up at Mikey, who gave him a thumbs up.
"Does it look bad yet?" he asked.
"I have no idea, it just looks like you're getting your hair cut," Mikey chuckled. "Besides, I thought we already established that you wouldn't look good." Gerard sighed as they finished with cutting his hair and got the razor ready.
"You know, I really wish we could just skip this part of being a soldier," Gerard noted, wincing as he felt the cold razor touch his scalp.
"It's mandatory. You knew what you were signing up for," the officer shaving him said, shaking the razor to get rid of the tufts of Gerard's hair still stuck to it.
"I know," Gerard signed. "Just... wishful thinking," he said, looking at Mikey wistfully.
-
"So you're, like, real trainees now," Frank noted that night at dinner. Mikey's hand flew up to touch his bald head and the stubble that still remained. Gerard was right, he did look like an alien. "How does it feel?"
"Feels like this is actually happening," Mikey said sadly. "Like we're actually going off to war in a couple of months." Frank nodded.
"Yeah, I remember when I had mine shaved. I had such a stupid crisis, like I regretted volunteering. But, you know. It's what the country needs," he sighed.
"I don't know what you're all talking about. I just feel like... like a turtle. Without its shell, you know how weird they look? That's how I feel," Gerard grinned.
"Mostly I just feel sore," Mikey said, ignoring Gerard but taking delight in his innocence. He knew that it wasn't genuine, but it still made him happy, witnessing it. Both Frank and Gerard let out a hum of agreement.
"I can't remember a time where my limbs didn't feel like they were about to fall off," Frank said.
"Seriously, there's no way it's that bad out on the battlefield," Gerard complained.
"I heard the worst part - physically, I mean - is traveling. The actual combat is fairly simple," Frank said.
"Well, obviously, or else they wouldn't be making us carry rocks in our bags," Mikey joined in, rubbing at his back. He was sure he was developing some sort of spinal injury from the cruel marching drills.
"You get used to it," Frank told him. "At least a little bit. It still fucking hurts every time, just less."
"Do any of you think it's kind of sad, how we look forward to the most basic things?" Gerard asked. "Like, the other day I found myself daydreaming about a nice, hot shower where I get out and look at myself in the mirror and it's foggy but I rub my hand all over it so I can look at myself. That used to be the norm."
Mikey nodded. He totally understood what Gerard was saying. "We take things for granted all the time. It's human nature." Like how he took spending time with the brother and Pete for grated. What were they doing now? Maybe they were just watching entertainment, or cooking in their kitchens. Maybe Gerard was painting an animal, sitting in the living room and wondering where Mikey was. Maybe he was out shopping, feeling the texture of everything he was considering trying on because some textures just didn't work for him.
He was snapped back into reality when he saw Frank lifting his glass of water out of his peripheral vision. "I'll drink to that," he said, and Neo-Gerard and Mikey lifted their glasses in a toast, something Mikey had never taken part in. He laughed even though nothing was funny and he actually kind of wanted to cry a little bit. The corner of Frank's mouth lifted up, and Mikey took that as what little encouragement he would get.
happy fathers day!!! im probably not gonna update for the next 2 weeks since im going to new hampshire next saturday and i doubt i'll get a new chapter done by then but im definitely gonna write a ton while im away so!!!