// Anatomy. Magnetic stars. //

Chapter three - peel my skin and climb inside

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Gerard liked dreams. He liked nightmares, to be more specific. He admired the way that they were so viciously real, and could easily contort people's minds into searing agony merely with thoughts from the victim's own head.

Sometimes Gerard wished that he was a nightmare.

He liked to twist people. To climb under their skin and ruin them from the inside out with little observations he made and secret pieces of information he gathered that no one else seemed to notice. The minor alterations in someone's voice, their stance, posture, pupil dilation and contraction. It was habit. Once a subject had caught his eye, every little detail of their personality-- from their movements to their expressions to their way of getting around others-- would automatically be filed away in his head for later use.

Some people would call it cruel, but Gerard called it intelligent. He was only utilising what everyone so blatantly put on display. And he didn't manipulate his subjects; he only gave them what they deserved. An enlightening, an education on things they should have had drilled into them long ago. It was just karma, essentially. Targeted karma.

It was beautiful to watch people crumble, and beautiful to witness the instantaneous rise in status Gerard would gain from merely indirectly influencing someone's downfall. There was a strange serenity in witnessing how at a waver in his malevolence, his level on the social ladder in the eyes of his peers would plunge. Gerard didn't enjoy popularity at all; he made it his mission to scare away anyone that admired him. He just found it morbidly amusing how changeable and impressionable teenagers were. Didn't they understand? If someone is malicious towards you once, they are guaranteed to be malicious towards you again. It's the fucking rule of nature. People never learn.

This was his art now. Wrecking people, and watching as no one helped pick up the pieces. He only destroyed those who had already caused destruction themselves, of course, so if they had any common sense at all they would know that it was bound to happen sometime and they simply brought it upon themselves.

And of course, once malicious, always malicious, the rule would come into play again. Karma would snap back on his past subjects as soon as they had rebuilt their status in the school, and their towering pride would come crashing down yet again. Gerard would just laugh. People never learned.

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Frank woke up with ungraded test papers stuck to his face and crumpled under his hands, and a broken fountain pen leaking permanent ink onto his white button-up shirt.

He groaned and shuffled the papers into a vague pile on the desk before hauling himself up and trudging into the bathroom. The ink was stubborn, and the stain refused to diminish when he took off his shirt and scrubbed at it, and his hangover was equally as reluctant to go away even when he swallowed three more aspirins than the packet advised. He did manage to get the stink of vodka on his breath to disappear when he rinsed his mouth out with mouthwash, but he knew that within about ten minutes he would only reek of cigarettes instead.

The point in his life where Frank had been stable and happy was long gone. The point in his life where he wasn't an alcoholic or a chain smoker or potentially addicted to aspirin was so far away, it was a fucking dot.

When he thought about it, he sort of hated his life.

Frank fumbled in his pocket and clutched at his cigarette packet, then slid one out and held it between his teeth and lit it. Clotted smoke and charred tar filled his lungs, suffocating his blood and clouding his head with relief. He sighed, letting out a disgusting swirl of smoke.

A long time ago he'd loved his job. He'd loved teaching. He would take joy in bringing a smile to a kid's face or helping a class make it through their exams. But the kids started to bring him down. His bills started to bring him down. He didn't have enough to pay for his food, let alone his apartment, and teens these days were turning into cynical, sarcastic and downright cruel little bastards. They were never open to learning anymore, and the principal refused to let Frank try to make things interesting for them, insisting that he stuck to the outdated textbooks. Frank wasn't one to question a man in a position of such high authority, so he resentfully settled. He just couldn't make his kids smile.

Frank sighed and took another drag from his cigarette. He perched on the edge of the bath, hearing it creak slightly under his weight, and stared at himself in the mirror. The wrinkles around his eyes were deepening, and his frown lines were becoming more prominent. Deep purple stains shadowed his eyes, and his mouth was a thin line almost devoid of colour. Fuck, he looked shitty.

He stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the sink and stood up so he could look at himself in the mirror better. He forced a smile. Did that look alright? Yeah, he could pass as happy. His mouth was stretched into a grin but his eyes were sad and tired. But, of course, no one ever took much notice of the boring old English teacher. No one looked close enough to see that he was just a little bit wrecked inside.

Frank left the bathroom, not wanting to look at his reflection any longer. He felt kind of sick. It might have been the vodka, but fuck, who was he kidding? It was never the vodka.

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Gerard sat cross legged on the grainy classroom floor, underneath an empty desk at the front of the room. The rest of the world was invisible that way, and he was essentially invisible to the world. Mr Iero had glanced around for Gerard at the beginning of the lesson as he read out the register, but had dismissed the lack of response as an absence. He only discovered later, when one of the boys at the back of the classroom muttered a half-witted remark about Gerard being a hermit and threw a ball of paper at Gerard's head, that Gerard was in fact present, and just preferred to work on the floor. Well. Downright refused to work unless he could sit on the floor.

These kids' personalities shone out and sparked around the classroom; this clearly wasn't a high set, but what they lacked in skill they made up for in charisma. They were pretty outspoken and extreme, which, Frank supposed, could be of some use in another situation (perhaps a drama lesson). But, unfortunately, this was an English class, and Frank wasn't particularly keen on having a wild and brazen English set. Gerard excluded. Although Gerard could be rather a difficulty too, despite his quietness most of the time. He wrote flawlessly, with impeccable grammar and eloquence, but immediately rejected any specific task Mr Iero set for him.

"Creativity isn't supposed to be limited," Gerard had muttered from under the table.

"I know," Mr Iero had said carefully, "But in order to possess unconstrained creative energy, you must learn how to use it within particular boundaries."

Gerard paused for a few moments before replying, considering the teacher's words. He tilted his head to one side, but didn't look up from his page. "Lovely sentiment, nice phrasing, bullshit meaning," Gerard said dryly.

"Language," Mr Iero reproached. "But thank you. For the first half of that sentence."

Gerard made an unenthusiastic noise of acknowledgement. He didn't like wasting his mind on teachers, although as a basic human right they really did deserve to know how dense they were being sometimes. It was simply inhumane not to tell them the truth every now and then.

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Gerard was what Mr Iero's old school would have called a 'Difficult Child'. God knows why it required capital letters at the start. Personally, it bothered the hell out of Frank, but it did a good job of sticking in his mind.

Belleville High seemed to have taken to merely branding Gerard as 'mentally ill'. The words were displayed in small printed capitals, coloured red and stamped right beside Gerard's name on the register, accompanied with a pop-up list of all his conditions. Frank stared sadly at the list and its notes for a while in his break, wondering why the staff would think to write such morose and useless comments on the register. It clearly wasn't to help the kid.

Overreacts and is hysterical in response to touch. Extremely distorted and immoral views of the world. Do not let him talk to the other children.

Conditions: Borderline personality disorder, disassociation, autism, obsessive-compulsive-disorder, paranoia, dermatillomania, dermatophagia, trichotillomania-

Frank shut his laptop, not wanting to read any more. It evidently wasn't going to do any good. He could never imagine getting inside this kid's head, with all of those little monsters crawling around and dominating his thoughts- so much so that he was forbidden from talking to other students during lessons. He couldn't imagine how torturous it must be.

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Gerard liked his monsters.

They made him special. Made him able to understand and utilise things that others could never even grasp the concept of. Of course, his disorders did knock him to pieces inside, a little more every day, but he liked the ruin, in a way. It hurt- emotions would manifest as physical pains, and pretty intense ones at that- but hurting all the time and having his mind and perception and feelings was far better than being constantly comfortable but having a blissfully fucking ignorant template of a brain, like the other kids at school.

Gerard wondered what it must be like to see the world from a normal person's perspective. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to only have one  of his conditions, rather than the unholy concoction of sicknesses he had been burdened and blessed with. Gerard knew it would be a struggle just to have compulsions on their own, or to only have dermatillomania, but compared to his ruined and raw fragments of a mind, he envisioned that it would be rather beautifully serene to only have one disorder. Maybe he was just being human in that he thought others had it better, though. 'The grass is always greener' and all that crap. He seemed to have a lot of self awareness in that respect, but no power to change his state of mind-- knew he was always going to believe that he was suffering the most; his brain always seemed to think pessimistically like that, and unfortunately, until someone proved  that they were feeling shittier than him, he was never going to be able to believe that he had it better than anyone.

He welcomed the jealous thoughts of clear minds and painlessness, though, and let them pass, like all thoughts would eventually. It wasn't like he could just remove great chunks of his brain, or climb into someone else's head and live their life instead. Even then it might turn out that his 'suffering' was nothing compared to other people's, even though it felt like hell for him. At least he knew that he was smarter than some people. (And less smart than a significant percentage of the population, but he liked to focus on the positive side, and pretend that he was the cleverest in all the land.) At least he knew that he was in worse physical shape than some people-- that was nice and measurable, and easy to compare. And Gerard knew that, given the choice, he'd rather be brilliant and sick than dumb and healthy any day.