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It was another sweltering day and a too-long trek across the parking lot from the stage to the bus. Ray punched in the code and opened the door, and the air inside hit Gerard like a cold front moving in. He let out such a loud sigh of relief that Ray laughed and let Gerard stumble into the bliss of the A/C first.
Inside, Gerard blinked for a while, trying to get used to the dimmer light. Ray and Bob carefully made their way around him and headed into the kitchen. Behind him Frank pulled the bus door shut, cutting off the wall of scorching air, and shoved past Gerard - very gently, for Frank, probably just a light bruise's worth. Everyone was being so goddamn nice to him. Gerard was a little bit touched, but mostly it was driving him up the wall.
Frank didn't head into the kitchen but turned around and looked at Gerard.
"What, motherfucker?" asked Gerard, rubbing his arm and trying to make out Frank's expression.
Frank reached out and plucked Gerard's sunglasses off. "Does that help, genius?"
It did help. Gerard flipped Frank the bird and Frank grinned widely, showing all his teeth, and flipped him off right back with the hand holding the sunglasses. Gerard stole them back and put them on his head.
"You planning to revel in solitude again, or do you want to come watch me destroy Bob?" asked Frank.
Gerard made a noncommittal noise and headed for the kitchen. Ray and Bob were both leaning against the counter chugging water. Ray's hair wasn't limp, but possibly it knew what the word meant, and Bob was wiping sweat off his beard. Frank was cool as a cucumber, probably because he'd already wiped his face on Gerard's back right as they got offstage.
Gerard's phone went off. "Mikey will be back later," he announced after reading the text, and gathered his drawing supplies from the table. "I'm going to draw in my bunk."
He gave everyone a little wave and accidentally flung an eraser at Frank, who caught it right before it connected with his nose.
"Razor-sharp instincts," commented Ray.
"I'm going to try that with my sticks tomorrow," said Bob.
Frank rolled his eyes. "Come on, Gee. I'll carry your eraser if you let me walk you to your bunk. "
Gerard giggled and turned towards the bunk area, motioning with his head for Frank to follow him. Ray and Bob followed too.
"You should come to the lounge later," said Frank when their little herd made it to Gerard's bunk. He handed Gerard the eraser. "Watch a movie with us."
"Maybe," said Gerard. "You guys have fun."
Gerard patted Frank on the shoulder vaguely and crawled into his bunk, pulling the curtain closed behind him and kicking the blanket to the foot of the bunk to make more room to sprawl. Something inside the tangled blanket crunched pleasantly. Gerard leaned forward and extracted what turned out to be an almost full bag of Cheetos. Score.
It was dim and quiet in the bunk; the hum of the Warped Tour outside was indistinct, and the muffled sound of Frank arguing with someone in the lounge made the bunk seem like an even better place to be. Gerard pressed his ear to the wall, trying to hear anything more clear than the usual low-grade noise of tour. It was still pretty early - there would definitely be more screaming later. He wasn't sure who was on now. Maybe Fall Out Boy. There was usually more screaming in the parking lot when they weren't onstage.
The wall was really smooth and cool and so was the pillow, so Gerard bunched it up right next to the wall and turned his face into them, nosing into the space where wall and pillow met. It felt good against his sunburn. If Fall Out Boy was on, that's where Mikey would be. On the other hand, if they weren't on, Mikey would be with them anyway. At least one of them.
The pillow and wall were getting pretty warm and something buzzed in Gerard's pants, so he flopped over onto his back with a sigh and pulled his phone out of his pocket. It was Mikey again.
bunk?
Gerard snapped a picture of himself making a thumbs-up and a cheesy face and texted it back. He ate some Cheetos absent-mindedly and thumbed through his phone, biting his lip against a smile at the texts Mikey had sent him since last night. There were the two latest ones, and the one from right before soundcheck, saying im not late suck it. Gerard read that one just as Mikey walked onto the stage, giving him a little wave.
Before that, there were the texts from mid-afternoon narrating the latest twists and turns in the scavenger hunt that had apparently been going on all tour, and the ones from early afternoon narrating Pete's hair-straightening and hoodie-layering process. Gerard had been trying to play a riff for Ray in the bus studio, except he kept putting the guitar down to text back until Ray started throwing picks at him.
There was also the first text Gerard read that morning - fob coffee as shitty as ours but ttly diffnt way, so wrong - while slumped over his own mug, leaning his head on Frank's shoulder (he made Frank text back: g says no details pls xo frnk), and the one from last night, saying good night.
Thinking about the day before, when Mikey had vanished after the show just like today and everyone else had gone to a party, reminded Gerard of the several pages of new character sketches he had done sitting alone in the kitchen well into the night. He flipped on the bunk light and opened his sketchbook. He got engrossed in adding more detail to the new drawings of Spaceboy, so he didn't notice the footsteps outside his bunk until his curtain was pushed aside and Mikey's face appeared in the gap.
"Mikey!" Gerard said delightedly, pushing himself up on one elbow.
Mikey looked happy and he was there, two of Gerard's favorite things. "Hi, Gee. Hiding again?"
"I was thinking," said Gerard.
"Yeah?" asked Mikey.
"No, I mean I was thinking, not hiding. I didn't want to play video games. Are you staying?"
"I could," said Mikey thoughtfully. "I was going to kick Frank's ass."
"You're not going to kick Frank's ass. You should stay here," said Gerard. "I have Cheetos." He waved the bag at Mikey and a little cloud of orange dust rose up into the air.
"I see that. You have them all over your face," said Mikey, in that voice that meant he was laughing at him.
"Shit." Gerard rubbed his hand over his cheek and looked at it. It was orange, so he licked it and wiped it off on his pants.
"You're a slob. Move over, I'm getting in."
Gerard scooted back towards the wall obediently and tucked his sketchbook between the mattress and the wall. He tossed the Cheetos to the foot of the bunk, on top of the blanket. Mikey snorted but crawled in next to him and tugged the pillow out from under Gerard's head.
Gerard looked at Mikey. He'd lost his jacket somewhere along the way and was just in a hoodie and t-shirt. There was a thistle down caught in his hair. Gerard picked it off and threw it out of the bunk. They watched as it floated in the aisle indecisively, caught in the current of cold air, then feinted back in their direction but reversed course and stuck to the curtain of Ray's bunk. Gerard and Mikey quietly cheered.
"Where did you go after our set?" asked Gerard, flopping back down next to Mikey.
"Said hey to Pete. He wanted to hang out."
"Oh," said Gerard. "Do you think I could have some of my pillow back?" He yanked it towards himself and put his head down, touching his forehead to the side of Mikey's head and throwing his arm across Mikey's waist.
Mikey hummed. The noise felt weird in Gerard's head from resonating through the layers of bone. "Yeah, but I wanted to nap, so I came here."
"Thanks."
"Don't be an idiot, Gee," said Mikey, yawning, and reached to turn off the light and pull the curtain shut. He started to say something else, but was cut off by his phone chiming. Mikey dug it out of his pocket and slid it open. It made Mikey's face glow blue and threw shadows in a fucked up but awesome way, Gerard thought, sharp and kind of skeletal.
Gerard leaned in and angled the screen towards himself to see what Mikey was typing. g time. Gerard tried hard not to smile, but gave it up as a lost cause. He made his best gimme fingers and big eyes until Mikey handed over the phone.
There were lots of texts from Pete. "What the fuck do you even text about, you're together all the time," said Gerard. Most of the texts were nonsensical, the rest not anything Gerard really wanted to know about. "'You got a body like a foreign car?' Your body's all Jersey, Mikes."
Mikey shrugged as well as he could with Gerard lying across his shoulder. His collarbone jabbed Gerard's throat. "Pete likes to keep in touch."
"I just bet he does," said Gerard and yawned right into Mikey's ear.
"Now who wants to nap?" said Mikey. "Give me my phone back."
"'kay," said Gerard. He wasn't sleepy so much as content, so he rearranged Mikey to make himself little nest and settled in.
"Comfortable?" asked Mikey, but he didn't sound annoyed and even turned the phone on silent, so Gerard hummed affirmatively and closed his eyes.
The darkness behind his eyelids was tinted blue. Like the sound of Mikey tapping on the keys, it was familiar and so comforting, a constant through years of nights in the van and fighting stage fright backstage in shitty venues. It made everything seem easier. Gerard screwed his eyes up tight and said, "How are you really?"
Mikey was quiet for a moment. "I don't know. This tour is weird, with you, you know. And Pete. I'm not sure where to be or what to do. But I'm having fun. Pete's fun."
Gerard's stomach flipped over. "I'm pretty boring right now, I guess, and kind of a mess," he said.
"Hey, don't do that. Look at me."
Gerard opened his eyes and looked up. Mikey didn't look mad, but it was hard to tell by the light of the cell phone. "You being a hermit is SOP, dude. It's not because of you."
"It's a little because of me, though," said Gerard lightly. "I'm sorry I've been stressing you out, or bugging you or whatever."
Mikey sighed and ruffled Gerard's hair. "The only thing bugging me is how you think everything is about you, Gee."
Gerard still felt like he wasn't getting something important, but it got swept away along with the flippy feeling in his stomach by the relief at Mikey's tolerant tone. He hid a tiny smile in Mikey's side. He must not have hidden it very well, because Mikey snorted and asked, "What do you do in here all night when you're hiding, anyway? You can't jerk off all the time."
"You're disgusting, Mikey Way. Sometimes I have my therapy call, or I draw."
Mikey laughed.
"Oh my god, stop," said Gerard, secretly pleased that he was making Mikey laugh, even if it was at him. "The point is, I haven't been hiding."
Mikey's silence was very skeptical.
"I drew more sketches of Spaceboy last night?" Gerard offered. "I don't know, Mikes. I need time to think alone, just like you need to go out and do stuff, I guess."
"Gerard..." said Mikey, sounding very serious. "You know that I'm not gone, right?"
"I know," said Gerard. It didn't feel like Mikey was gone right now, even with his fingers flexing around the phone, probably anxious to reply to Pete's latest. It honestly didn't even feel like that the rest of the day, when Mikey's texts were arriving at least every half hour. "Not in the way that counts. I just don't realize how much I miss you until you're back."
Mikey suddenly dislodged Gerard from his side in a flail of limbs and slid down and turned so their faces were level. "I miss you too. But I'm not going anywhere. You're stuck with me."
"Well, when you put it like that," said Gerard and squeezed Mikey around the ribcage, making him squeak and drop his phone on the most painful point of Gerard's hip.
"So let's go to the lounge," said Mikey when Gerard let go. "That was Frank. They're putting Indiana Jones on and he's threatening to dump his laundry on us if we're not there in five minutes."
"Dirty laundry? It's like he doesn't know us," said Gerard sadly. "But we'll let him think he's ahead. I could get up for that cause."
Mikey sat up and smiled. "Bring your sketchbook. I want to see the new stuff."