Chapter Text
I guess you really did it this time.
Michael tried to be a good father.
He strung up fairy lights in his two daughters’ bedroom that glowed a soft pink in the darkness, keeping the shadows at bay. He checked under their twin beds for monsters and he took the little girls to flower markets at the weekends sometimes, so that they could both choose pretty blooms to go in the vases they’d painted together that sat on their bedside tables.
Michael taught himself to bake so that the girls could have homemade birthday cakes like Michael’s nanna had always made for him back when he was little. He sat down in the evenings with his daughters and helped them make little beaded bracelets while a Disney film played in the background in the quiet hours before Lily and Georgie had to go to bed.
Michael tried to make sure he was always present in a way that his ex-wife had never been for their children.
Left yourself in your warpath.
Michael still found it hard to believe just how fast time flew sometimes.
It felt like only yesterday that he’d been sitting in his bedroom with a battered, second-hand guitar in his lap and band posters plastering the walls of his room, back when he was a teenager with piercings, brightly-coloured hair and fresh cuts lining his wrists.
Now he was in his thirties with scars and emerald eyes that were soft behind glasses, and there was absolutely nothing punk rock about his dull life and the ache in his chest, like something was missing almost. He had two daughters who depended on him and it was fucking scary, just not in the same way as walking out onstage in front of thousands of people was.
Back when Michael was younger, he had always kind of assumed that he wouldn’t live to see twenty, let alone the grand old age of thirty two. He’d always thought that if the drugs, alcohol and clubbing didn’t kill him first then the motorbike he’d stolen would but, somehow - seemingly against all the odds - it hadn’t happened.
Instead Michael had met Hannah when he was twenty three years old - which was coincidentally the year he’d last seen his three best friends from the band too - and he’d done everything he’d always sworn he’d never do.
Back in his teenage years, Michael had spent his time playing the guitar badly and singing along angrily to songs. He’d kissed boys and girls, gone out clubbing and drinking until his head was spinning with it and the gaping emptiness in his chest was whole again, and then 5 Seconds Of Summer had been born and Michael’s coping mechanisms had stopped working and the anxiety had burnt through his veins like wildfire.
Everything had spiralled out of control and it had all been ripped from Michael’s hands.
There’d been drugs and drink and police warnings, and Michael had been burning so hot that it had felt like he was going to melt away sometimes, felt like he was going to crumble into dust and disappear on the wind because he couldn’t cope with the roaring hurricane that came with their turbulent life.
And then those years had ended and Michael had been left behind with messily dyed hair and dull green eyes, with their music ringing faintly in his ears like a ghost and the stress that had come with years of touring painfully evident in the scars lining his arms.
Michael wasn’t like that anymore though.
His hair was golden again now, like it had been when he was a kid, but it was shot through with silver too, and his piercings were all gone, and the scars and tattoos inking the pale skin of his arms were hidden beneath the sleeves of the shirts he wore to work at the office downtown.
Michael had a failed marriage and two kids his ex-wife Hannah hadn’t wanted in his custody nowadays which was something the thirty two year old had never planned for, and he hadn’t talked to any of the guys he had been best friends with at school in almost ten years.
Michael looked at himself sometimes, when he was putting six year old Lily to bed or giving her four year old sister Georgie a bath with his shirt sleeves rolled up and the faint silvery scars on display, and although he’d never planned for his life to be this way, he thought it could be a lot worse probably, even if it wasn’t what he’d expected back when he was a teenager with dirty hair and death in his heart.
Sometimes he saw the tiny little scar where his eyebrow piercing had once been though and all he could remember as he stared at the damaged skin was a faded guitar and the dull roar of a crowd as the needle marks in the crook of Michael’s elbow burnt with a phantom pain, and then everything would flicker and, jarringly, Michael would be standing back in his kitchen again, staring despairingly at the leaking faucet as Georgie started wailing upstairs and Lily started crying because she didn’t want to go to school.
The anxiety in Michael’s veins was duller now - muted almost - and a certain numbness was slowly suffocating him because life was fucking hard now… just not in the ways Michael had imagined back when he was a kid.
Lost your balance on a tightrope.
Michael was sitting on his daughters’ bedroom floor now, struggling to read them a bedtime story in the dimly lit room beneath the fairy lights but it was getting harder and harder to see the words through the tears blurring his vision.
The thirty two year old looked up jerkily as the book slipped from his fingers to fall with a muted thump onto the soft pink carpet.
It was okay though.
They were both asleep.