#just the spiral and his little bookburner

[akalikai]

Gonna christen this account with a doorkeay colored sketch from Twitter (yeah its magnet bc I'm fucking cringe and a vocaloid nerd shhh)

I just love the idea of gerry calling michael those cheesy nicknames like "sunshine" "pretty boy" "blondie" "curls"

[jaysworlds]

new gerrymichael fic hello lads

ao3 link

Gerry is not going to mourn his mother, he knows that much. All she ever taught him was how to be afraid, and he resents her for that.

And now she’s flown too close to the sun and burnt her wings, and Gerry is beautifully, gloriously alone.

Being alone is a lot of things, for him. It’s staying up until one in the morning and blasting the loudest music he knows and getting wine-drunk on the couch and calling Gertrude to tell her to go fuck herself.

(She laughs at him down the phone and hangs up, and he goes into work the next day with a hangover, but sometimes being free is being laughed at and having to chase down an avatar of the hunt with a headache).

Things sort of level out, after it’s all blown over, but it doesn’t wear off, the feeling of not having to ask permission before leaving the house. The feeling of being able to play whatever music he feels like.

All the fear she taught him doesn’t leave, though. He still tenses whenever he hears a car pull up outside, when the house creaks in a way that could be construed as footsteps. He’s afraid of her ghost, still. More afraid than of the worse things out there.

There are so many things out there. He knows, of course, that every time he leaves the house it could be the last, and he knows that perhaps he should be more worried about that than he is.

But he can’t really bring himself to care. He’s afraid of death, of course, but in a distant, abstract way. Not the same way he’s afraid of his mother’s ghost.

Maybe he isn’t scared enough, isn’t careful enough, because after a long, tiring day he isn’t paying enough attention, opens his front door and finds himself stumbling aimlessly down a long, twisting corridor with a high, inhuman laugh echoing in his ears.

“What do you want with me?” he screams, and gets no response. Just the same laughter.

He knows what it is. He knows enough about the spiral, has heard enough stories of the distortion.

That doesn’t mean he knows what to do.

He walks until he’s exhausted, screaming at it to show itself, to stop being such a coward, but it never does, and eventually he collapses against one of the lime-green walls, unable to keep going.

It laughs again.

“Like being in the world’s shittiest sitcom,” Gerry mumbles to himself, and closes his eyes. He just needs to rest for a bit.

When he opens his eyes again he’s in bed. His bed, pressed into the corner under the window. No freaky corridors, no hellish laughter.

He’s been gone three days. Gertrude raises an eyebrow when he walks into her office, but doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t tell her.

His front door is yellow when he gets home. He sits down on the step and waits for it to go back to normal, and when it doesn’t he goes back to the institute and sleeps there.

Two days after that he finds that his door is yellow on the inside, and he has to leave his apartment through the window. The distortion is smart, but he is not going to be easy prey.

After a week every door he passes is bright yellow. Gertrude raises an eyebrow when she catches him climbing into the institute through a window, and he tells her just felt like a bit of exercise.

A week after that he wakes to find it standing over him.

It’s … almost human, but if a human had been made of playdough and then stretched out.

He stares up at it, and it grins down at him. He has to resist the urge to roll over and pull his blanket over his head, like a child.

“What do you want?” he asks, and it tips its head.

“You’re afraid of me.”

He considers denying it, but what would be the point? “No shit, Mr. uncanny-valley.”

It laughs, at that, and it gives him a headache. “You’ve been evading me.”

“You’ve been trying to eat me.”

“No.”

He snorts. “Sure looks like that from my end.”

“Perhaps,” it says, “I just wanted to talk.”

“Perhaps,” he says, “you’re full of shit.”

“You’re so brave, little bookburner.”

And then it leaves.

“You’re a bastard,” he tells it, and fancies he hears the echoes if its laughter.

He has to tell Gertrude after that. She looks at him and purses her lips.

“Well. If you’ve been in its tunnels once I’m afraid it may be too late.”

“Jeez,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Thanks.”

“I’m sorry, would you rather I lie to you?”

“Don’t you have any … I don’t know, wisdom?”

She gives him a Look. “Don’t get killed.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m taking a smoke break.”

“You haven’t actually done anything,” she points out, and he ignores her, stomping out of the institute and leaning against the wall outside, lighting a cigarette.

He hears footsteps crunching on the gravel, and looks up to find a pretty blond man standing in front of him. A moment of staring and he realises this is the distortion.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hello,” it says.

He’s not sure what to say to it. “You want a fag?”

It laughs, and it hurts Gerry’s head. “Alright.”

He pulls a second cigarette out of his pocket, lights it and hands it over.

It takes a drag of it and exhales spirals into the air.

“Show-off,” Gerry grumbles.

It laughs again, and for a few minutes they smoke in silence.

“When are you going to kill me?” he asks, and it shrugs.

“Perhaps today. Perhaps never.”

“You’re not very good at giving a straight answer.”

“I’m not very straight.”

He looks at it, askance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

It just laughs, and laughs, and blows spiral rings of smoke into the air. It doesn’t look quite so human anymore.

It doesn’t kill him today. Or that week. Or that month. Just keeps showing up out of nowhere and laughing at him.

He isn’t quite so scared of it anymore, and it showing up so often has another side effect. He’s no longer quite so scared of noises in his house, no longer jumps at a door creaking or footsteps on the landing.

He doubts it intended to make him less scared, but somehow it did.

“You know,” he says, laying back on his bed. It’s sitting on his desk, running its fingers across his ceiling. “You’re pretty shit at being a monster.”

It stares at him, face twisted into a manic grin, though somehow it still manages to look affronted. “I’m a very good monster.”

“You’re not,” he says, giving it a lazy smile. “You’re not even that scary.”

“I could kill you,” it says. It sounds petulant.

“Go on, then.”

It huffs, and scratches its fingers against his ceiling. “I don’t want to.”

“’Cos you’re a shit monster. Leave my ceiling alone.”

And it does. Because it does as he tells it, sometimes.

He learns its name quite by accident, from one of Gertrude’s scribbled notes. He doesn’t know how she knows, and he doesn’t ask.

“Michael,” he says, next time it comes to visit him, and it jumps right out of its skin.

“Why do you know that name?”

“It’s your name, isn’t it?”

“It was. It is. It is and it is not.”

That was closer to a yes than it was a no, so Gerry took it as such. “Alright, Mikey.”

“Gerard.”

Gerry laughs so hard he chokes. “We should start a band.”

“I dislike you,” Michael says, climbing right up onto his bed and staring at him. “Do not call me Mikey.”

“I called Gertrude Gertie once.”

Michael stares at him. “Gertie.”

“Yeah. She was pretty pissed off.”

“Perhaps this is why she has not tried to save you from me.”

Gerry snorts, looking up at it. It’s very close to him, now, leaning over him. “I think she’ll be delighted when I kick it.”

“Are you afraid?” “Of you?” “Of ‘kicking it.’”

Gerry shrugs. “Not really.”

It hums, a loud, grating note. “I would not let you.”

“You wouldn’t let me … die?”

“The End has no claim over you, bookburner.”

He blinks up at you. “Michael. Are you flirting with me?”

It twists its mouth into something wide and monstrous. “For a servant of the Eye you are not very perceptive.”

“Is that a no?”

“You are late.”

“I’m…” he props himself up on his elbows. “I’m late?”

“You are late, bookburner.”

“How long have you been flirting with me?”

It doesn’t give him a straight answer, but it laughs and laughs and laughs, until he pulls it down to kiss it, and that shuts it up.

And then it just sort of … stays. It sits in his house and walks in and out of its door at its leisure, and bends down to kiss him gently whenever it feels like it.

Gerry has no idea how it happened, but he finds he doesn’t mind. He likes it, even.

He’d thought that freedom meant being alone, but perhaps not. It still feels like freedom when he plays his music and watches it dance (it isn’t very good at dancing), and when he gets wine drunk on his couch with it curled up beside him.

It feels like safety. Feels like home.