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“Are you sure?” Mikey’s asking for the third time. Or maybe it’s the fourth? Admittedly, he’s lost track but that doesn’t distract him from the fact that it bears repeating because this is literally insane. Pete’s done some silly shit before but this? “Like really, really sure?”
Pete’s only half-listening to Mikey’s palpable uncertainty. He’s eyeing his reflection in the full length mirror, steadying his hands enough to place the stencil but not quite committing to it just yet. He’s running out of open space in certain areas, so he has to be mindful of overlap. Wrinkling his nose, he shakes his head and mumbles incoherencies mostly to himself as Mikey continues to insist on rationality.
“Like…really super sure? This is," stupid, Mikey wants to say, but he manages to bite his tongue quick enough to catch the word, “impulsive. Nuts! Pete, I don’t even–”
“What about here?”
“Huh?”
Pete points to a bare patch of skin on his left bicep. Tilting his head, he angles the stencil, grimaces and huffs. Not right.
Now it’s Mikey’s turn to wrinkle his nose. “Are you even listening to me?!”
“Yeah, yeah…” A beat of silence. A cocked eyebrow. “...wait, what?”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Mikey resists the urge to take Pete by the arm and just shake the sense back into him. “Are you really, really, really, ridiculously sure? This is wild. I don’t know what I’m doing and at this point, I don’t think you know what you’re doing and–”
“Ah!” Pete triumphantly crows. He tugs the leg of his shorts up, exposing preciously pristine real estate, skin uninked and simply begging for it. He hovers the stencil over his thigh, inching it to the left a little, then to the right, then, “Perfect.”
He’s astounded. Watching Pete so focused on this, so determined and stubborn, unwilling to see reason…Mikey hates how endearing this is, how endearing Pete is. Always has been. He wants to be frustrated but he feels that familiar flutter in the pit of his stomach. It’s that fuzzy, foot’s asleep feeling that signifies he’s lost, Mikey’s willing surrender to Pete’s eternal charm.
So, Mikey sighs. Withdrawing his cell phone from his pocket and, while admiring the pride smeared across Pete’s face, opens up YouTube and searches ‘How to use a tattoo gun’ .
---
To Mikey’s surprise, Pete sits fairly well. It shouldn’t surprise him, considering the sheer amount of tattoos Pete has, but his own inexperience gives him pause. Of course, the temptation to shriek in terror, feigning a mortal injury, in order to startle Mikey proved too great and it earned Pete a firm punch to the shoulder. "I nearly stabbed you!” Mikey exclaims but Pete’s unbothered by the thought, it seems. Other than that, it’s oddly okay. Pete’s enamored by the look of concentration on Mikey’s face, how he squints his eyes and mumbles curses under the consistent hum of the tattoo gun. Any whisper of movement and Mikey’s shooting Pete the cutest glare. “Why’d you have to pick something with so many straight lines?”
“Symbolism. Plus, you drew it,” Pete had replied, reaching out to ruffle Mikey’s hair.
“Pete!”
And Pete chuckles, because of course he does. He watches the tattoo come to life under Mikey’s hand and he falls more in love with it with each passing line.
It doesn’t take long considering its simplicity. Granted, it takes a little longer than it should because Mikey continues to reference the YouTube video and keeps agonizing over the hiccup in one line, the length inconsistency in another, and it makes Pete love it, love him, even more. Once Mikey sets the gun down, sighing the weight off of his shoulders, he takes a good, hard look at what he’d just done to Pete. “I mutilated you,” he grumbles. Gerard’s the artist, not him. Why did he even agree to do this?!
Pete’s smiling. He’s back at the mirror again, looking at his newest tattoo with adoration. The raised skin, red and agitated, and the black lines to contrast it, make Pete feel relentless joy that he has no hope to control. “I love it,” he says, eyeing Mikey through the mirror’s reflection.
He doesn’t believe him. It’s an odd little thing, Mikey’s drawing turned tattoo. He had known it was odd three days ago when Pete asked him to draw him a compass, his interpretation of one. Insisting it didn’t have to be ‘a fucking Picasso,’ he’d just asked for the four directional points with the arrow pointing west. That was it. Pete made it sound so simple and there was a part of Mikey that had almost texted Gerard to ask him what the hell to do, but because this was for Pete, he did it. He drew four hardly straight lines and the abbreviations for the directions. He then put the most time, the most care, into the needle pointing west. Pete had put a lot of emphasis on that. And after all that, after stressing out so much over it, he’d handed the paper to Pete and he’d smiled, thanked him and it went unmentioned until an hour earlier.
“Why a compass?” Mikey finally asks, moving to stand behind Pete. Resting his chin atop Pete’s eyes, he eyes the tattoo curiously, considers it thoughtfully. “Why west?”
Pete looks at him thoughtfully, seemingly considering the question. There’s a moment, just a moment, where Mikey thinks he’s going to get a straight answer out of Pete, when it’s all going to come crashing down on him and finally make sense. But it never comes. Pete leans his back against Mikey’s chest, hums in satisfaction and says, “Gotta wrap this up. Don’t want it to get infected.”
“Pete–”
He pulls away and wanders towards the bathroom, humming a far-too familiar tune that hits Mikey just hard enough to send him off balance.
Symbolism.
Fucking symbolism.