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As Bobby leaves Lyle Anderson Jr. still leaning on the wall in the alleyway, he brings his fingers to touch damp patches on otherwise dry lips. He considers wiping it, but in his pure joy decides against it, giggling to himself at the absolute marvel of it all and closing his eyes for only a mere moment to replay in his mind the events having just occurred. What a day! The clear sky holds up the sun, who is unashamed to show its face. Bobby, on the other hand, covers his mouth. He can’t bear to part from the physical evidence of it, but he can’t risk showing the rest of the world his smile.
He does smile nonetheless.
But of course, with his luck, such a day cannot last for long.
There’s a chill that brushes up against him like an unpleasant thought. Not a normal breeze—it’s too much of a warm day for that—something colder, something twisted and unnatural. Beside him, a figure begins appearing from nothing.
“I don’t suppose you could spare me a hint of peace tonight?” Bobby says lowly.
The fellow beside him fully materializes, and Bobby is no longer alone in his walk home. With his image more solid, his grin is apparent. Maybe if Bobby were a girl, and this chap were also a girl and his best friend, then such wide smile could be interpreted as giddy excitement and support; in another life, maybe, they’re two schoolgirls giggling and squealing over the fact that Bobby just kissed the bloke he’s in love with.
Of course, that’s bullshit, because Gerard Lacroix is not his best friend.
And the grin is mocking.
“I don’t think I will,” he says, raising an elbow as if to bump Bobby’s arm, but he passes right through. Bobby would chuckle at how he seemingly genuinely forgot about his intangibility if he weren’t so vexed.
Swiftly recovering from his blunder and sharply filling in the space before Bobby can get a protest in, Gerard adds: “Of all men, too, you had to choose that mumpish molly.”
If he were solid, it would’ve been at that moment that Bobby would have shoved him; but he knows from experience that he too will only hit the air like passing through a cloud. “Don’t call him that,” he snaps, careful to rein it in if only to not attract looks, but he can’t mask his evident anger.
Gerard takes note of it—the anger—that much is evident in the pure manic delight in his eye. What is even more noticeable is his pointed and spiteful ignorance of it entirely, carrying on with a tone as if he hadn’t heard him at all: “I mean, I can’t comment on it. I suppose I’ll just have to trust your pansy opinion.”
“You sound like my father,” Bobby says, teeth bared. Because he does, dreadfully so.
“Oh, that makes sense. Just imagine, your pig father finds out that his darling son who he fought so hard to save from the motions of the justice system (that he himself upholds) is a sodomite. I think he’d have to turn you over on the spot.”
That’s not true, Bobby wishes to say, but he cannot find the voice for it. Thomas Brackenreid may not turn him in directly, but he probably wouldn’t bail him out, either. Not after everything else.
Gerard scrunches up his face and kisses the air, making wet and frankly obscene squelching noises, and well, at least that kills any similarity to Bobby’s father.
The wind has dried all dampness on Bobby’s lips by now, but still in disgust he shivers and wipes them clean, just as the normalcy and punchable mundanity are wiped from the ghost’s face. Black and purple bruises fade in. Spatters and stains of dried blood slowly appear, and strips of skin peel back from his forehead. The unmistakable stench of rot fills the air. Gerard stops his crude demonstrations, but his pace does not break. He raises his eyebrows and nods as if acknowledging the change, but generally smugness remains the same. He is wholly unaffected.
The sight evokes a pang in Bobby’s chest and a lurch in his stomach. He wrinkles his nose and turns his head, but Gerard moves, fights to be seen, fights so he meets him in the eye. His eyes are blank and white and glossy.
“You don’t want me arrested,” Bobby mutters, “you were even more bored in there than I was.”
When the spectre had first appeared, years ago now in his jail cell, Bobby had been napping, dreaming of home, when he had smelled it. The rancidness of the rot, the sickness and guilt. Nice hat, Gerard had said, and Bobby had screamed like the devil.
It usually takes a little longer to get them to break, the surrounding inmates would whisper amongst themselves, but the boy wasn’t a hallucination. Bobby was perfectly sane, only a little (a lot) shaken at the development, but after a few weeks even that shock had worn off, and it hadn’t been enough to protect either of them from boredom.
(It had been enough, however, for Bobby to completely write off the Catholic proselytisers who had come to visit the inmates.)
“Of course I don’t want you arrested,” Gerard says, like it’s obvious. He says everything like it’s obvious. “I’m just stating the truth.”
“The truth that is unnecessary at this very moment.”
“So you admit it? It’s the truth?”
“Can you shut up? At least for today?”
Something about that provokes a snap. The phantom stops dead in his tracks, and Bobby stops with him, as if held down.
“I’m sorry, am I ruining your perfect day? Your perfect afternoon with your perfect little boyfriend? You know what you ruined, huh, Brackenreid?”
There it is, the true terror. With fervency, the ghost grows. He’s all he sees, wretched and red and terrible. Bobby really can’t move his legs.
Through one eye black and nearly swollen shut, through lips caked with red, the cadaver rages and raves. Gerard doesn’t yell—he doesn’t need to. His speech is a violent hiss, one that cracks from his throat, every sentence punctuated by spitting out a mouthful of blood.
“Two years of you terrorizing the whole town. Not just us locals but your own toff buddies as well. Two years of making everyone miserable, and afraid. All ending with my skull cracking on the street.”
His jaw disconnects with a crack, and he has to fix it himself with his hand, popping it back into place.
The worst of it, the very worst of it, is how none of it, none of the blood and gore and decay, is what makes Bobby look away.
It’s the shame.
The sight repulses him because he knows that all the wretchedness, that desolation and putridness, is because of him.
“How fucking awful do you think it is to see you with your tongue down some presumably perfect guy’s throat while I’m…” And there’s the second of hesitance, a moment of struggle and desperation and humanity that Bobby can’t stand. Gerard fights through it. “I– I can’t… I… won’t ever get to–”
Gerard Lacroix is a bloodied crumbling corpse at Bobby Brackenreid’s hand.
“I know, okay, I’m sorry! You don’t have to fucking remind me!”
He’s loud, too loud. So loud, he wonders if even Junior heard him, back in his alley.
And consequences of the outburst drop on him like a blow to his own head.
A few people turn to stare, and a lady even gasps, presumably at his language. It isn’t lost on him how, to them, he’s screaming at nothing, or worse, provoking a fight with a random passerby.
From experience, he knows how to run.
He disappears down another back alley and into the insides of the city, and his leg still gives him hell but he runs hard until he’s breathing so heavily he’s certain he’ll cough his heart out of his chest. He stops behind a bakery, careful not to re-emerge onto the streets until his pressing business with his ghost is concluded.
Gerard is also panting, all red faced and out of breath, though how or why he does it Bobby has no idea, when his incorporeal state has no energy or breath to run out of. The rot is fading again. Gradually, the smell and the stain and the injury, until all that’s left is a shadow of a kid Bobby used to bully.
They just stand there, for a while. It’s cruelly ironic. It was a back alley like this where Gerard had breathed his last. Where Bobby had beaten that breath out of him.
“Were you ever in love?” he finds himself asking, before his memories can consume him.
“Yes, actually.”
The response is unexpected enough to cause his head to jolt up a little, once again looking him in the eyes. By now he’s just Gerard Lacroix again, with nice brown eyes, honest, and a little weary. Just Gerard, a normal boy who frankly did not do much to deserve such an end, let alone a curse to be bound for the foreseeable future to the asshole who made him meet it.
“And you never told her?” Bobby presses on, a knot forming in his stomach at the thought of robbing the fellow of such an opportunity.
“No, I did,” he says, plainly, “She didn’t want me.”
It’s so awful, because not only does he look normal, but he looks eighteen.
It’s another side effect of having lived with him for so long; day after day, Bobby has aged while watching nothing change in his companion, the gap in their ages growing wider and wider. Sometimes, it’s worse than staring at his beaten form. The perfect image of a boy who’s now only a memory. A final image.
Gerard sighs.
The mundanity and acceptance is what truly disorients Bobby, making it feel as though his ears are flooded with water. The way Gerard just takes it. She just didn’t want him. That maturity, with hardly even a hint of sadness, is what makes him want to throw up his insides.
He shouldn’t need to accept it just like that. The living can afford to lose today when tomorrow they can simply try again. He doesn’t have the luxury of tomorrow. And yet.
“Oh,” Bobby manages.
Again, a period of silence.
“I physically can’t leave you alone for too long,” Gerard says softly. “You know that.”
They have made an effort to fight it. Every time he disappears he always comes back at most a few hours later.
“Can’t you just try? Please?”
He can’t tell anymore. He can’t tell if it’s selfish of him, wanting to spend the night with someone, to forget for just a night about the ghost living over his head, and the blood he can’t wash from his hands no matter how hard he tries.
But what else is he supposed to do?
Gerard’s an arse, but he’s not illogical, and he can be kind. He’s always kind when Bobby feels like he deserves it the least.
“Fine, I’ll try,” he says. “Though I can’t promise I won’t pop in in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping in each other’s arms, or whatever.”
Bobby shivers again. The statement is too loaded: the idea of holding Junior is so much he sends himself into a coughing fit just thinking about it; then the image of Gerard fucking Lacroix appearing in his bedroom during such an action only makes him cough more.
“You can maybe avert your eyes?” he suggests, though it’s more of a plea.
“Of course I’ll avert my eyes, do you think I wanna watch?” Again, like it’s obvious, though Bobby supposes this time it is. “What do you take me for, a deviant?”
“I have half a mind to kill you again.”
“And I wish you could.”
Bobby grimaces.
Instead of cackling like he always does, Gerard only once again juts out his elbow, only to once again meet the air.