Anatomy. Magnetic stars.

Chapter two - you're a bottled star

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It was fairly rare that Gerard found himself lost outside in a daze during school, having slipped unnoticed out of lessons, although it did happen on occasion. Unfortunately, today was one of those occasions.

He hadn't noticed that he was outside, or even that his head was craned right up at the sky, until his neck started to cramp from being angled so steeply upwards, and he felt a wave of dizziness wash over him. He supposed, absently, that the vertigo had been caused by the blood leaving his head and spiralling down to his toes, magnetically repulsed by the non-existent stars, and he came to the conclusion that he was about to faint.

Sadly though, he didn't have time to be pleased about guessing correctly, because after a stumble of his footing and a shock of static overwhelming his vision, he promptly collapsed in the middle of the playground.

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When he awoke, someone was touching him, and it was only about a millisecond before the agonising prickling that came with being touched was scraping at his brain and he was crying into the chest of the stranger. He scrabbled at the man's shoulders, wordlessly pleading to be put down, but his silent cries were not answered, nor even acknowledged.

The longer the contact went on, the more he felt like he was choking, drowning; his mind was asphyxiated by the ropes of touch, from being so close to another person and so excruciatingly far from the stars. The stars were his oxygen, his fucking life force.

The stranger finally released him, and he slumped back onto a lumpy bed with a coarse tangle of sheets that quickly proceeded to swallow him whole. He thought could hear the faint buzz of voices, and feel a dip at the end of the bed where someone was sat, but nothing really felt clear enough for him to be able to confirm that it was real. He felt like his head had been shoved in a heap of sand, and all of his senses were clogged with the tiny abrasive grains. He lay, for what could have been several minutes, or possibly several hours, on the unfamiliar and unpleasantly firm bed, spinning in between the stars and the harsh and strangling fabric of reality.

He wondered if he could force himself out of his body, push his soul out so that it would fly up to the stars and leave behind his mortal form in the school sanatorium, but he'd tried a similar idea before, and it had resulted in six weeks in hospital and some pretty severe second degree burns. (He had thought that perhaps he could drive his soul out in the same way you smoke out wasps, so he set himself on fire to test his theory. It was quite promptly proven wrong.)

The low buzz of voices seeped into his semi-conscious haze; Nurse Helen, speaking in a familiar motherly tone, and a man's New Jersey drawl that Gerard couldn't put a name or a face to. He could only hear faint, muffled sounds, and he couldn't distinguish any actual words, but he decided that it was probably better that way. He doubted that they would be talking about anything interesting or worth wasting his valuable mind on.

Soon, the female voice disappeared, and the man started talking in a softer voice, kinder, directed at Gerard. Gerard could just barely make out his words, but he could hear the unintentional descant in his voice clearly.

Gerard counted each time the man's voice rose to an F note. It wasn't even difficult anymore- it was habit. It was more than habit; it was so ingrained in his head that he didn't even have to make an effort to hear each note in the melody of conversation. It just happened, like breathing, or the blood pumping through his veins. And if he stopped, then, just like with breathing and the beating of his heart, he would die.

That was its favourite threat, the little monster virus in his brain, the mutated compulsion mechanism. You'll die, it would hiss at him, an echo (albeit an extremely persistent and perpetual one) bouncing off the inside of his skull. You'll die, you'll die, you'll die. Whispered in his eyes, screamed in the back of his head. They'll all die.

Gerard shivered, and curled up into a ball under the duvet, counting F notes and counting his breaths and squirming until his legs were evenly positioned in an idiotically arbitrary way, just to the liking of the taunting compulsion in the back of his mind. He counted, he counted, and the notes mapped out and made delicate Fibonacci dragonfly wings, and spirals of binary. The inside of his head was an intricate web of numbers, files, and strange and beautiful expressions and words that nobody else understood.

The man touched his shoulder, attempting to wake him, clearly having not read the medical notes in his folder on the school system. Gerard flinched away immediately with a strangled breath, and folded in on himself, his skin still crawling and body still trembling from the sickly residue of human contact. He forced his eyes open to find them stinging with tears, and to see the stranger staring at him with wide eyes and a look of bewildered shock.

The first thing Gerard noticed about the man was his smell. He had an air of fresh mint - not gum or softmints - fresh mint leaves, and he radiated ivory stardust. Gerard noticed nothing about his face. He couldn't fill in the vague blank space he saw because he hadn't built the man's personality in his mind yet. At that moment, this man was no one. A rather baffled no one who had not read Gerard's file. Gerard was immediately distrustful of him.

"Did you steal my stars?" Gerard asked.

The man parted his lips and his face scrunched up a little, and Gerard fidgeted, rather distressed by the fact that he couldn't match up this expression to any of the labelled ones on his picture cards.

"You look like stardust," Gerard mumbled, trying to justify his rather blunt demand. "Your hair is all..." Gerard trailed off and gesticulated vaguely with his hands. "Constellation-y."

"I didn't steal anything of yours," the man said. "I promise."

"Then where are my stars?" Gerard asked in a plaintive whisper.

"Uh, nurse?" The man leaned over to the door, searching for Helen. "I think the kid's a little concussed."

"I'm not concussed," Gerard said indignantly. "Give me my fucking stars back."

The stranger blinked. "It's daytime, I think the stars just aren't visible right now."

Gerard let his body slump a little, let the tension fall slightly. Logical explanations were his constant, his security. "Really?"

"I'm not a hundred percent sure- I teach English, not physics- but I am fairly certain."

"Oh," Gerard murmured. "You're a teacher?" Gerard began to suspect him of theft slightly less. Teachers were transparent and idiotic, with grudges against humanity and the most enormous rods stuck up every one of their asses, but they weren't generally malicious on purpose. They were just born that way.

"Yeah, I'm Mr Iero," the man smiled lopsidedly. "I'm taking over from Mrs Stuart. Just got here today."

"I'm in Mrs Stuart's class," Gerard mumbled absently.

"Well, it looks like I'll be teaching you then. Do you like English? What's the curriculum like?"

Gerard's mind glitched. That was two questions too many.

Mr Iero blanched at Gerard's blank face. "The principal at my last school was a hideously incompetent infraction on functioning society. Most of the students spent their school lives re-enacting 16 and Pregnant, and his only advice to me in regard to that was to try to get them into Jersey Shore instead."

"State school?" Gerard asked dryly.

Mr Iero winced. "How did you guess?"

"Well, at prep schools people seem to be much more interested in Made in Chelsea."

The teacher shook his head and laughed, and his hair fell around his eyes like the perfect curl of a breaking wave, sea foam glittering in his silver-hazel flecked irises in a reflection of the elating stars.

"What's funny?" Gerard asked curiously.

A furrow appeared in Mr Iero's brow. "You just made a joke?"

"No, I pointed out the obvious."

There was an unsolicited pause, and Gerard let out a breath. The air swirled in an imperceptible mist around the two figures in the sanatorium, and settled like ash, heavy in the thick air. Gerard was near closing off- since he wasn't planning on becoming an English teacher, talking to this man was going to be of no benefit to him, ever, and he was quite eager to cease all contact unless it was absolutely essential. He'd been making an effort to keep his replies to the man's questions to three to six words in the hope of shutting him out (social cues and all, like in that book Doctor Morgan had thrust upon him exasperatedly when he asked her what a grimace was), but it didn't seem to be having any effect. Jesus Christ, did English teachers like to go on.

Gerard shut his eyes and pressed his palms over them, with enough pressure to spark a burst of a glistening spectrum of fireworks behind his eyelids. His mind spiralled into the depths of the vivid and intangible sky in his eyes, and after a few blissfully safe moments, he braced himself to return to the surface, and drown in the sea of the teacher's eyes and the sanatorium's dazing aqua walls.

"Sleepy?"

Gerard choked on his breath a little. Mr Iero's voice had been like the brush of a snapped thorn gracing over his shoulder; momentarily shocking, but harmless. Gerard shivered. Hopefully harmless.

"You think you're alright to go back to class?" the teacher asked him.

"No," Gerard said with unquestionable certainty. "But if I don't then mom will get upset. What time is it?"

Mr Iero glanced down at his watch. "About half past one."

"Yes, but what time is it specifically?"

The man squinted at the tiny numbers on his watch. "Twenty eight minutes past one?" he responded apprehensively.

"Yes, but-" Gerard said more insistently- "Specifically."

"Um." Mr Iero blinked and scrutinised the smallest hand on his watch. "Twenty eight minutes and forty nine seconds past one."

The stiffness in Gerard's shoulders disappeared and an easy smile found its way to his face. "Thank you." He swiftly pulled himself up off the bed and turned to leave, but Mr Iero stopped him.

"Don't you want your jacket?" the man asked.

Gerard shook his head. "No, you've got the stars tonight. They're in your eyes. It'll get pretty cold in there when night comes," he said, gesturing at his head as if he was suggesting that the temperature was going to drop in Mr Iero's mind.

The man's blank face didn't faze Gerard. He knew that this one had the night sky inside him, but that he would only realise it himself once he looked in his mind at night, delved into his own icy black world and really looked.

"Trust me," Gerard said. "You'll need it."