Chapter eighteen - Rose

                                    

                                          
Chapter eighteen - Rose


@mcromance_patd have fun spazzing in front of your teachers


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Mikey held the baby close to his chest like she would fall apart if he wasn’t careful. He was curled up in Ray’s arms on his bed, with the baby sleeping on top of him. Mikey was half asleep himself, tear-stained face weary, eyes alternating between closed and open every few minutes. Ray just looked sad. He had a lock of Mikey’s hair curled around his finger, and every now and then he would twist it and then let it go.

 Bob sat on the floor with his face buried in his hands. Gerard was curled up in a ball in the corner of the room, no longer crying, but possibly worse than before. He wouldn’t respond to anything. Mikey tried with a gentle approach. Bob tried yelling at him. I tried reasoning with him. But he just stared right through us all with his glossy eyes, rimmed with red from crying and empty inside.

 There was just silence now. Nothing but silence as we all tried to recover.

 We couldn’t take the body with us. We had to drag Gerard away from her, screaming and thrashing the whole way home. As soon as we reached the tent, he just collapsed, exhausted, curled up into a ball, and refused to speak or move.

 ----

 “I don’t want to fight anymore,” were Gerard’s first hoarse words after hours of silence.

 “Huh?” I said.

 “I can’t do this. Forget the revolution. I can’t do this.”

 “Gerard. You’ve got to do this.”

 “You can’t tell me what I’ve got to do. I do what I want.”

 “You have to do this. For the baby. To give her a better life.”

 “I don’t think you understand quite how much I hate this baby.”

 “What?” Mikey said, taken aback. He held the child closer to his chest protectively.

 “That kid is the reason mom is dead, okay?” he said. “If she didn’t have to give birth, we never would have had to go to the hospital. We never would have been jailed. We never would have tried to escape, and she would never have been killed.”

 “It isn’t the baby’s fault they shot her!”

 “No, but if that kid didn’t exist, it never would have happened,” he snapped. “Just think about it.”

 It was futile trying to talk to him after that.

 He was speaking and listening to us, but we weren’t changing his mind.

 ----

 It was night. Late at night. Probably closer to morning than evening, come to think of it.

 Ray and Mikey were asleep, along with Bob, who’d taken Gerard’s bed. Gerard still refused to move. I sat by him in the corner of the room, the baby on my lap. She wasn’t quite awake, wasn’t quite unconscious. Her little eyes squinted up at me, and she made a quiet little gurgling sound every now and then. She was drifting between consciousness and sleep.

 Gerard was still awake. Wide awake. He was crying again. Small, weak, broken sobs, with his face buried in his hands. I’m not sure he knew I was there. He hadn’t told me to go away yet.

 I looked down at the little baby in my arms. She looked a lot like Donna. But she looked even more like Gerard, with that same bright spark in her eyes. She even had the same little nose. I sighed.

 Gerard froze. “Frank?” he whispered, his voice thick with tears.

 “Yeah,” I whispered. “Hi.”

 “Hi.” He scrubbed his face with his hands and sat up, leaning against the wall next to me. “What are you doing up?”

 “Couldn’t sleep.”

 “Me neither.”

 It was a quiet night. The only sounds were my occasional sighs and Gerard’s shaky breathing.

 “How’re you feeling?” I asked gently.

 “Shit,” he mumbled.

 “Oh.” I hesitated, then carefully put an arm around him. He sniffed and leaned his head on my shoulder, curling closer to me.

 I could hold the baby to my chest with just one hand. She was tiny.

 “She really is beautiful,” I said after a while.

 Gerard squirmed and buried his face in my neck. “No, she’s not.”

 “She looks just like you,” I said quietly.

 Gerard pulled back, a small frown on his face. “Really?”

 “Yeah,” I said honestly.

 He paused. “Beautiful?” he mumbled, looking up at me.

 “Very,” I said softly. I kissed his cheek. “Very very.”

 He smiled shyly and kissed me again, on the lips this time. “Thank you,” he said quietly as he pulled away.

 “I’m just telling the truth,” I smiled.

 He looked down at the baby and tickled her neck with his little finger.

 “Do you want to hold her?” I asked gently.

 “Okay,” Gerard whispered.

 I carefully lifted the baby into his arms and he cradled her close to his chest. He looked almost awed. “Hello,” he murmured, rocking her gently. I think he was realising just how innocent this baby was. His mind was trying to tell him that it wasn’t really her fault. “Hello.”

 “We should come up with a name for her,” I said.

 “Us?”

 “Well, who else will? We have to call her something.”

 Gerard nodded and started chewing on his lip thoughtfully. “Scarlet?”

 “I’m not sure. Beatrice? Eva?”

 “No, I don’t think so.”

 “Nothing seems to suit her in my mind,” I murmured.

 “I know.” He seemed a little frustrated.

 I wrapped my other arm around him, and he leaned his head on my shoulder again.

 “She really is beautiful,” Gerard commented.

 “She really is,” I said softly.

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 Gerard nudged my shoulder. “Frankie,” he whispered.

 “Hmm,” I grunted.

 “Frankie.”

 “I was asleep, you know,” I mumbled.

 “Frank. I thought of a name.”

 “Really?” I asked tiredly, closing my eyes again.

 “No, stay awake, it’s a good one.”

 “Go on.”

 “Rose.”

 I smiled slightly. “It’s pretty.”

 “She’s pretty.”

 “I changed your mind about her, then?”

 “It wasn’t her fault,” he mumbled.

 “No. But it’s our fault what sort of a world she grows up in. Maybe we can change it for her.”

 “Maybe,” Gerard said.

 I sighed. “Rose,” I said quietly. “It fits.”

 “Hi, Rose,” Gerard whispered to the tiny sleeping child in his arms. “Happy birthday.”

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 In the morning, Gerard was proactive as ever. He wrapped Rose up in a blanket and fixed it over his shoulders so he could hold her and still keep his hands free. He woke everyone up early and forced us all to eat a breakfast bar each before we set out in the incastum. Nobody was quite sure why except Gerard, and I don’t think even he was completely certain what we were doing.

 “Gerard, what are we doing?” Bob asked dully.

 “We’re, um. We’re getting an army,” Gerard murmured.

 “How?”

 “Uh.”

 “You put so much thought into this, what we would do, but didn’t think at all about how we were actually going to get his army.”

 “Uh, no.”

 “Why don’t we just ask?”

 “Ask… How?”

 “Like this.” Bob scanned the area for potential targets. “Hello,” he said, approaching a relatively old woman doing her laundry. “How do you feel about racism?”

 “I think you whites’ a load of ugly bastards!” she squawked. “You deny my childs education and you deny me food and house!”

 “I’m not– I’m not with the council–” he tried to explain.

 “Fuck you off!” she screeched.

 Bob backed away and hid behind a wall. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said in a small voice.

 “Not to be racist at all or anything,” I said, “but why was she talking like that?” I sounded so offensive, but I had no idea what the hell kind of accent that was supposed to be. 

 “The literacy rate round here is very low,” Ray said. “We’re lucky to be able to form proper sentences.”

 “Is that why she said all those… weird things?”

 Ray nodded.

 “Oh,” I mumbled. “You’re quite lucky, then. Being able to speak properly and everything.”

 “Yeah, I guess.”

 “But it shouldn’t be that way,” I said, frustrated. “Everyone should be entitled to the same rights. It’s not fair.”

 “Exactly!” a young woman walking nearby said. “My brother barely knows the alphabet thanks to the terrible school system.”

 “My mother was killed after she gave birth in a whites’ hospital,” Gerard said quietly.

 “It ain’t right!” the old woman perked up, splashing her dress in the wash bucket violently.

 Soon we had quite a few people agreeing with us. Though not everyone agreed with our opinions on homophobia and the likes, everyone seemed to share the same view on racism. Maybe this army thing wasn’t going to be as hard as we’d thought.