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It started out as frustration, pure and simple. Gerard was clean and sober, cold turkey. Everyone was telling him how well he was doing, but with nothing to drown out the swarming thoughts he wasn't doing as well as he had been.
Late at night after a show was when Gerard wished for booze the second-worst. Second only to pre-show, it was really, really hard. Gerard was doing it, though. He was staying clean. But he needed something to do, damn it.
When he first did it, it was by accident. While trying to transition from one filthy shirt to the next, a bitten-off fingernail caught his stomach. He could feel the stinging, burning pain of breaking his own skin so roughly, but at the same time he felt the cool wash of a distraction - a real distraction. It made him feel like he was accomplishing something; as for what, he wasn't quite sure. All he knew was that it gave him the relief he was wanting.
Even as Gerard’s cravings died down, he'd sometimes work himself into a frenzy and drag his nails across his stomach in order to calm down. He eventually grew immune. He pulled a blade of of an old razor one night, letting the cool metal slide across his skin. He pulled it slowly across the skin of his wrists, just to see what all the uproar was about. Days later, he found himself doing it again, for no reason other than to see if he could handle the pain better this time. It became not only a stress reliever but a sort of challenge - a competition with himself.
The days between got fewer and fewer, and when he was cutting every day, he started noticing the scars becoming more prominent and realized in a moment of lucidity that he needed to stop. However, he found himself going back again and again, just to prove to himself that he could. He moved to his legs when there were too many scars in the way, and marred those, too.
The new challenge became how much pressure he could withstand. As cuts got deeper, he spent more and more time cleaning up trails of blood each night, until one night when the bus jolted and he pressed a little too hard on his thigh. A long, dark tendril of blood joined the other streams in making their way down his leg, and as he bent to mop them up, his vision went fuzzy and then faded from red to black.
When they finally found him, he was beyond rescue. Gerard Way, twenty-something hero, bled out by his own hand. The world was silent, in respect or confusion or both. He tried to save the world, but he couldn't even save himself.