Fic: When you want to feel like you're good enough [MCR, pretty much everyone, R]
So 
cold_clarity saw the new MCR video and told me the greatest AU idea in the history of recorded time.
I hijacked it and added conjunctions and frottage.
Such is life.
When you want to feel like you're good enough (the sex lives of the bombsite boys)
Frank/Gerard, Ray/Gerard, some Ray/Frank, Mikey/Gerard if you squint and are that way inclined.
R
~2,000 words.
Ray and Gerard are fifteen and bored and living in a community that’s largely populated by post-pandemic mutants. What happens between them is occasional and inevitable and doesn’t get mentioned much.
*
Mikey ends up in the hospital like this:
Gerard comes home one day when he’s sixteen to find a good haul in the yard. It’s nearly a full shopping cart of mostly-working electronics, traps and plates and navs and more. The rest of the caravan have ventured out of their trailers to look at it, admiringly, from a safe not-gonna-steal-from-you-no-way distance. Gerard drops his bike and whoops, helmet only halfway off by the time he gets inside, voice muffled when he calls out, “You guys are like fucking wizards. Where did you find all that shit?”
“Language,” his mother snaps.
His father is at the table up front, making the most of the last light as he fidgets with the wires of a Hospital-grade bear trap. “Holy shit,” Gerard breathes. “Is that - ?”
“It was at the yard. Greys must not have known what it was.”
“Holy shit.”
“Language.”
“Where’s Mikey? Hey, Mikeski!” Mikey is twelve and doesn’t have a scavenger’s eye yet, is constantly pissed that he never manages to find anything good.
“Gerard!” his mother shrieks, and it’s then that he notices how strained her voice is, how high and rough, how she has her hand covering her mouth like she doesn’t way to speak.
“Greys,” his father says. “At the junk site. There were –”
“You sold him,” Gerard hears himself say, because this is bullshit, this is such fucking bullshit.
“There were Greys at the junk site,” his father repeats. “I couldn’t, and they – ”
“You sold him,” Gerard shots, because no, no way, if there had been Greys at the junk site there’s be Greys here now. They follow, they fight, they don’t like giving up what’s theirs.
“They gutted him. Right in front of me, they –” his father sobs, a torn wet sound in his chest and Gerard wants to punch him in the face, wants to break his father’s skull open with his helmet because they sold him, they sold him, they gave him to the Doctors and –
“I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t.”
There would never be that much of the good stuff at a junk site. There’s barely that much of the good stuff in a torched clinic.
“Get infected,” Gerard hears himself say. “Get infected, and get fucked. I hope you both die.”
And then he leaves home.
Home drives away two nights later, the entire caravan roaring and spluttering away into the night, and Gerard is halfway glad that they made up his mind for him.
*
Frank and Gerard are go to check out the gas station while Mikey and Ray keep the van at the kind of distance that means only two of them can possibly die at once.
It looks dead, but then so does everywhere and so do Greys, and just because the pumps are sitting empty, even the pools where the hoses have been pulled out dry, doesn’t mean there isn’t something in there that something else’ll kill them for.
They’re rounding the corner of the carwash when Frank swears and tackles him with enough force that he tastes dirt and feels his gun spin away from him.
“Pick it up,” Frank hisses. “Fuck, fuck, pick it up, there’s one in there.”
Gerard’s gun is back in his hand before he really thinks of moving. “It’s real?”
“It’s real.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus, Way, I’m sure. I heard it move.”
“Fuck.”
Frank pulls his revolver, which is a rusted piece of shit most useful as a bludgeon. Gerard takes a breath and reminds himself that neither of them have a huge amount worth living for. They cut across the last of the lot and slide in under the ledge of the cashier’s bulletproof bubble. “You charged?” Frank asks.
Gerard nods. “There anything in that?”
Frank grins. “Only one way to find out, right?”
Well, no, Gerard wants to say, you could just look, but then the doors open and Frank’s screaming and firing and the Grey by the paperback stand is lunging forward with an unholy shriek despite the four holes in its chest and Gerard can do nothing but charge in and open fire on it too, in the hope that a laser will pierce its posthuman hide.
It does.
It doesn’t do much to stop another one leaping over the register and sinking its claws into his fucking face, though.
He falls back into a rack of something sharp and the gun goes, he doesn’t know where the gun goes, he just keeps kicking and kicking and digging his thumbs into the suppurating sores that should be its eyes until Frank stops laughing long enough to throw his whole body at the thing and knock it on its back long enough to shoot it in the head.
It doesn’t bleed much, Gerard notes, absently. It must have been an old one. “You could’ve done that faster,” is what he says. He can’t feel his face or catch his breath or trust his knees to hold him if he tries to move, so he just stays slumped there against the bumper bags of processed foods as Frank settles himself down, knees bracketing Gerard’s hips and says, “Could’ve done it slower too, pretty boy, and then where would you be?”
One of his nails traces a gouge in Gerard’s cheek. “You’re gonna turn into one.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s okay,” Frank says, cupping Gerard’s face, pressing hard against the set of symmetrical cuts. “I’m gonna turn into one, too. From the medicine.” He smiles, not unkindly. “Mikey’s gonna.”
Gerard’s had enough, then; goes to push him off but Frank’s surprisingly fucking dense for a half-starved midget and Gerard can’t get the sick shaking feeling out of his arms and all that happens is that Frank hitches himself up closer, gets one of Gerard’s hands under his knee and holds the other, his free hand slotting itself under Gerard’s jaw and clamping down, hard. “Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.”
Gerard tries to twist his way out from under, grunts with the effort of trying to make his muscles do something, but they’re watery and limp and Frank slams his head back against the rack so hard his ears ring.
“Nobody gives a fuck,” Frank tells him.
“I – ”
“Nobody gives a fuck. I want you to say it.” He rocks up against Gerard’s stomach and Gerard can feel that he’s already hard, feels his own dick twitch in response, thinks, there has to be a healthier way for us to do this.
“Nobody gives a fuck,” he says. “Nobody’s coming. Nobody cares.”
Frank tightens his grip and ruts harder against him.
*
Frank ends up in the hospital like this:
He’s driving his dead cousin’s pickup down Route 447 when some asshole rams him from behind and the gun on the passenger seat slides heavily into the footwell.
There’s a bang and a sickening swerve as one of the back tyres goes, and Frank’s brain switches to a litany of motherfucker, motherfucker, holy mother of fucking fuck because if they’re shooting at the truck they don’t want the truck and if they don’t want the truck they’re Doctors and fuck and fuck and fuck.
Another bang, another swerve, and a vehicle pulls up alongside him. He tries to get back under control enough to run them off but the truck’s going on two rims and won’t cooperate, the back end swaying wildly when he needs it to plough into this tinted-windows asshole.
The next shot goes through the hood, and for a glorious moment Frank thinks that God loves him and they’re all going to die in a fire.
He doesn’t. They don’t. He wakes up in wires.
*
“I know what you’re worried about,” Mikey says, softly, and Gerard looks up because it’s rare enough that Mikey says anything, even now.
“I’m not worried.”
“You’re so worried.”
Gerard shrugs, goes back to killing the last of the fire.
“You wanna see it?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Mikey pulls his expression – he only has one, which he uses at different levels of intensity for each emotion, like he doesn’t remember variety. “Frank tells everyone.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Frank should be in a rubber room.”
“I want you to see it.”
“There’ll be nothing there.”
“No,” Mikey says, firmer, and that there’s anything in his voice at all is enough to make Gerard say yes, yes, okay, anything. So Mikey shrugs of his jacket and his shirt and peels off the wifebeater under them, stands with it looped inside out over his elbows, staring at his feet like they’re suddenly the key to the cure. “Come and take a look.”
Gerard suddenly really does not want to. He is suddenly, sickeningly unsure. “There’s nothing there.”
“I know what’s there,” Mikey grinds out, sharp. “I want you to come and look at it. Please.”
Gerard edges toward him, takes sick, guilty steps around his baby brother because this is all his fault for not finding him fast enough, for not getting to him first, for going fucking joyriding while he parents sold their youngest son for a cart full of techy shit. He closes his eyes.
“You’re –”
“Look.”
So he does. He opens his eyes and he stares at Mikey’s back and he takes in the grey sores on his shoulders, the patches of soft, sunken skin with their angry red rims, and something inside him breaks. “Get it off,” he says. “Get it off. Get it off.”
And then he’s clawing at the skin over Mikey’s shoulder blades, digging his nails in and chanting no, no, no like that makes any fucking difference, and Mikey is saying, “It’s the cure,” his voice perfectly even like his brother isn’t tearing a layer of skin off of him. “It’s a cure. You don’t get sick, but some people –” he shudders and swallows and Gerard stops, panting. “Sometime people turn.”
“I’m so sorry,” Gerard tells him, because how can he not. Mikey is turning and Mikey is dying and Mikey is bleeding from red welts across his dead grey back and all Gerard has ever done has hurt him and let him be hurt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, let me –” He unwinds Mikey’s wifebeater from his arms and begins pulling it to strips. “We’re going to fix this,” he says, trying to keep to sick shudder out of his voice. “You’re my brother and I love you and we will fix this.” He runs a hand over the torn, dead skin, and feels Mikey relax for the first time in a year.
*
The plan Ray comes up with is like this:
“I’ve got a laser,” he says. “I find it down at Shackleton’s. It’s pretty beat up, but it charges okay.”
And about two weeks later he says, “Do you know there’s a hospital in Patterson?”
And it works largely because Doctors don’t expect people to be suicidally fucking stupid unless they’re on the inside of a research facility.
*
The thing Frank likes about Ray is that he’ll pretty much do anything you tell him, as long as you sound like you know what you’re doing.
*
The plan Gerard comes up with is like this:
“I want to go home,” he says one night, lips soft against Ray’s shoulder. “I need to see my mom and dad.”
Ray cocks his head. Gerard has never expressed any wish to see his parents, except about ranting about how much he wanted to watch them rot in a camp.
“I want them to meet Mikey again. I want to show them.”
“They isolated?”
Gerard shakes his head. “Amos Caravan, last I heard.”
Ray sighs. Sometimes he’s the rational one. Sometimes he’s the one who finds them enough ammo to halt a caravan, take a trailer hostage and force a very sick couple to see their very sick son.
“Give me a week,” he says, and feels Gerard smile.
cold_clarity saw the new MCR video and told me the greatest AU idea in the history of recorded time. I hijacked it and added conjunctions and frottage.
Such is life.
When you want to feel like you're good enough (the sex lives of the bombsite boys)
Frank/Gerard, Ray/Gerard, some Ray/Frank, Mikey/Gerard if you squint and are that way inclined.
R
~2,000 words.
Ray and Gerard are fifteen and bored and living in a community that’s largely populated by post-pandemic mutants. What happens between them is occasional and inevitable and doesn’t get mentioned much.
*
Mikey ends up in the hospital like this:
Gerard comes home one day when he’s sixteen to find a good haul in the yard. It’s nearly a full shopping cart of mostly-working electronics, traps and plates and navs and more. The rest of the caravan have ventured out of their trailers to look at it, admiringly, from a safe not-gonna-steal-from-you-no-way distance. Gerard drops his bike and whoops, helmet only halfway off by the time he gets inside, voice muffled when he calls out, “You guys are like fucking wizards. Where did you find all that shit?”
“Language,” his mother snaps.
His father is at the table up front, making the most of the last light as he fidgets with the wires of a Hospital-grade bear trap. “Holy shit,” Gerard breathes. “Is that - ?”
“It was at the yard. Greys must not have known what it was.”
“Holy shit.”
“Language.”
“Where’s Mikey? Hey, Mikeski!” Mikey is twelve and doesn’t have a scavenger’s eye yet, is constantly pissed that he never manages to find anything good.
“Gerard!” his mother shrieks, and it’s then that he notices how strained her voice is, how high and rough, how she has her hand covering her mouth like she doesn’t way to speak.
“Greys,” his father says. “At the junk site. There were –”
“You sold him,” Gerard hears himself say, because this is bullshit, this is such fucking bullshit.
“There were Greys at the junk site,” his father repeats. “I couldn’t, and they – ”
“You sold him,” Gerard shots, because no, no way, if there had been Greys at the junk site there’s be Greys here now. They follow, they fight, they don’t like giving up what’s theirs.
“They gutted him. Right in front of me, they –” his father sobs, a torn wet sound in his chest and Gerard wants to punch him in the face, wants to break his father’s skull open with his helmet because they sold him, they sold him, they gave him to the Doctors and –
“I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t.”
There would never be that much of the good stuff at a junk site. There’s barely that much of the good stuff in a torched clinic.
“Get infected,” Gerard hears himself say. “Get infected, and get fucked. I hope you both die.”
And then he leaves home.
Home drives away two nights later, the entire caravan roaring and spluttering away into the night, and Gerard is halfway glad that they made up his mind for him.
*
Frank and Gerard are go to check out the gas station while Mikey and Ray keep the van at the kind of distance that means only two of them can possibly die at once.
It looks dead, but then so does everywhere and so do Greys, and just because the pumps are sitting empty, even the pools where the hoses have been pulled out dry, doesn’t mean there isn’t something in there that something else’ll kill them for.
They’re rounding the corner of the carwash when Frank swears and tackles him with enough force that he tastes dirt and feels his gun spin away from him.
“Pick it up,” Frank hisses. “Fuck, fuck, pick it up, there’s one in there.”
Gerard’s gun is back in his hand before he really thinks of moving. “It’s real?”
“It’s real.”
“You sure?”
“Jesus, Way, I’m sure. I heard it move.”
“Fuck.”
Frank pulls his revolver, which is a rusted piece of shit most useful as a bludgeon. Gerard takes a breath and reminds himself that neither of them have a huge amount worth living for. They cut across the last of the lot and slide in under the ledge of the cashier’s bulletproof bubble. “You charged?” Frank asks.
Gerard nods. “There anything in that?”
Frank grins. “Only one way to find out, right?”
Well, no, Gerard wants to say, you could just look, but then the doors open and Frank’s screaming and firing and the Grey by the paperback stand is lunging forward with an unholy shriek despite the four holes in its chest and Gerard can do nothing but charge in and open fire on it too, in the hope that a laser will pierce its posthuman hide.
It does.
It doesn’t do much to stop another one leaping over the register and sinking its claws into his fucking face, though.
He falls back into a rack of something sharp and the gun goes, he doesn’t know where the gun goes, he just keeps kicking and kicking and digging his thumbs into the suppurating sores that should be its eyes until Frank stops laughing long enough to throw his whole body at the thing and knock it on its back long enough to shoot it in the head.
It doesn’t bleed much, Gerard notes, absently. It must have been an old one. “You could’ve done that faster,” is what he says. He can’t feel his face or catch his breath or trust his knees to hold him if he tries to move, so he just stays slumped there against the bumper bags of processed foods as Frank settles himself down, knees bracketing Gerard’s hips and says, “Could’ve done it slower too, pretty boy, and then where would you be?”
One of his nails traces a gouge in Gerard’s cheek. “You’re gonna turn into one.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s okay,” Frank says, cupping Gerard’s face, pressing hard against the set of symmetrical cuts. “I’m gonna turn into one, too. From the medicine.” He smiles, not unkindly. “Mikey’s gonna.”
Gerard’s had enough, then; goes to push him off but Frank’s surprisingly fucking dense for a half-starved midget and Gerard can’t get the sick shaking feeling out of his arms and all that happens is that Frank hitches himself up closer, gets one of Gerard’s hands under his knee and holds the other, his free hand slotting itself under Gerard’s jaw and clamping down, hard. “Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.”
Gerard tries to twist his way out from under, grunts with the effort of trying to make his muscles do something, but they’re watery and limp and Frank slams his head back against the rack so hard his ears ring.
“Nobody gives a fuck,” Frank tells him.
“I – ”
“Nobody gives a fuck. I want you to say it.” He rocks up against Gerard’s stomach and Gerard can feel that he’s already hard, feels his own dick twitch in response, thinks, there has to be a healthier way for us to do this.
“Nobody gives a fuck,” he says. “Nobody’s coming. Nobody cares.”
Frank tightens his grip and ruts harder against him.
*
Frank ends up in the hospital like this:
He’s driving his dead cousin’s pickup down Route 447 when some asshole rams him from behind and the gun on the passenger seat slides heavily into the footwell.
There’s a bang and a sickening swerve as one of the back tyres goes, and Frank’s brain switches to a litany of motherfucker, motherfucker, holy mother of fucking fuck because if they’re shooting at the truck they don’t want the truck and if they don’t want the truck they’re Doctors and fuck and fuck and fuck.
Another bang, another swerve, and a vehicle pulls up alongside him. He tries to get back under control enough to run them off but the truck’s going on two rims and won’t cooperate, the back end swaying wildly when he needs it to plough into this tinted-windows asshole.
The next shot goes through the hood, and for a glorious moment Frank thinks that God loves him and they’re all going to die in a fire.
He doesn’t. They don’t. He wakes up in wires.
*
“I know what you’re worried about,” Mikey says, softly, and Gerard looks up because it’s rare enough that Mikey says anything, even now.
“I’m not worried.”
“You’re so worried.”
Gerard shrugs, goes back to killing the last of the fire.
“You wanna see it?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Mikey pulls his expression – he only has one, which he uses at different levels of intensity for each emotion, like he doesn’t remember variety. “Frank tells everyone.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Frank should be in a rubber room.”
“I want you to see it.”
“There’ll be nothing there.”
“No,” Mikey says, firmer, and that there’s anything in his voice at all is enough to make Gerard say yes, yes, okay, anything. So Mikey shrugs of his jacket and his shirt and peels off the wifebeater under them, stands with it looped inside out over his elbows, staring at his feet like they’re suddenly the key to the cure. “Come and take a look.”
Gerard suddenly really does not want to. He is suddenly, sickeningly unsure. “There’s nothing there.”
“I know what’s there,” Mikey grinds out, sharp. “I want you to come and look at it. Please.”
Gerard edges toward him, takes sick, guilty steps around his baby brother because this is all his fault for not finding him fast enough, for not getting to him first, for going fucking joyriding while he parents sold their youngest son for a cart full of techy shit. He closes his eyes.
“You’re –”
“Look.”
So he does. He opens his eyes and he stares at Mikey’s back and he takes in the grey sores on his shoulders, the patches of soft, sunken skin with their angry red rims, and something inside him breaks. “Get it off,” he says. “Get it off. Get it off.”
And then he’s clawing at the skin over Mikey’s shoulder blades, digging his nails in and chanting no, no, no like that makes any fucking difference, and Mikey is saying, “It’s the cure,” his voice perfectly even like his brother isn’t tearing a layer of skin off of him. “It’s a cure. You don’t get sick, but some people –” he shudders and swallows and Gerard stops, panting. “Sometime people turn.”
“I’m so sorry,” Gerard tells him, because how can he not. Mikey is turning and Mikey is dying and Mikey is bleeding from red welts across his dead grey back and all Gerard has ever done has hurt him and let him be hurt. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, let me –” He unwinds Mikey’s wifebeater from his arms and begins pulling it to strips. “We’re going to fix this,” he says, trying to keep to sick shudder out of his voice. “You’re my brother and I love you and we will fix this.” He runs a hand over the torn, dead skin, and feels Mikey relax for the first time in a year.
*
The plan Ray comes up with is like this:
“I’ve got a laser,” he says. “I find it down at Shackleton’s. It’s pretty beat up, but it charges okay.”
And about two weeks later he says, “Do you know there’s a hospital in Patterson?”
And it works largely because Doctors don’t expect people to be suicidally fucking stupid unless they’re on the inside of a research facility.
*
The thing Frank likes about Ray is that he’ll pretty much do anything you tell him, as long as you sound like you know what you’re doing.
*
The plan Gerard comes up with is like this:
“I want to go home,” he says one night, lips soft against Ray’s shoulder. “I need to see my mom and dad.”
Ray cocks his head. Gerard has never expressed any wish to see his parents, except about ranting about how much he wanted to watch them rot in a camp.
“I want them to meet Mikey again. I want to show them.”
“They isolated?”
Gerard shakes his head. “Amos Caravan, last I heard.”
Ray sighs. Sometimes he’s the rational one. Sometimes he’s the one who finds them enough ammo to halt a caravan, take a trailer hostage and force a very sick couple to see their very sick son.
“Give me a week,” he says, and feels Gerard smile.