Crazy By Degrees

[callie_chan]

CRAZY BY DEGREES

WARNINGS:

ANGST

LANGUAGE

Callisto says: I've been teasing Arien about mpreg for the past few days--don't ask, and don't worry, I'm never going to write it or anything--so he's been giving me the cold shoulder. And in his absence, Gabe spoke up in my brain and decided he wanted fic, so here it is.
Also, have decided to borrow a good idea from rackhamrose and put appropriate song lyrics in front of my fic. That way it's not quite a songfic, but I still get to indulge myself in pimping the music I like.
Gabe's inner monologue repeats the words crazy and insane a lot in this, I know.
Also, for the record--I hold the same opinion as Max. But I like Gabe enough that I mean it in a good way.

We were tight but it falls apart as silver turns to blue
Waxing with the candlelight and burning just for you...
-36 Degrees, Placebo

He wasn't crazy.

He was pretty sure, because he'd done research.

This was not to say that the people--and there were lots of them--who said he was weren't justified in thinking so. Pyromania was not exactly what most rational human beings filed under 'sane'; Gabriel recognized this and didn't argue with it. But he'd looked up the definition of insanity in the dictionary, and if anything fit better than that, it was lunacy. Insanity was a more or less permanent condition; lunacy was more fits and starts, brief visits to wherever it was people went when they went crazy--judging from Gabe's own personal experience, it seemed a lot of them went to the park, whiling away the hours screaming obscenities at pigeons and joggers, and he hardly ever went there.

And in any case, Gabe didn't think that truly crazy people spent much time thinking about whether or not they were crazy. They were generally too busy talking to the voices in their heads or murdering people or checking their ketchup for CIA survelliance cameras to bother pondering such trivialities. Gabe, however, thought about being crazy a lot; you could only hear people calling you crazy so many times before you started to wonder about yourself, after all. Sadly, there didn't seem to be a whole lot of material on the subject of losing your mind; even the Internet yielded very few results--or at least, very few RELEVANT results, seeing as the phrase "am i crazy" was quite popular in a number of places that were of no use to him at all. He'd found a few message boards on the subject, but the people who frequented them were so much worse off than he was that he didn't even bother asking their opinions.

He'd tried asking his friends, which had gotten him a number of conflicting responses. JT had trotted out the opinion that a truly crazy person was equally a danger to himself and the people around him--and while Gabe was dangerous to everyone, he was -less- dangerous to his friends than to his enemies or to people he didn't know, so that he was only mildly crazy and should stop worrying about it while JT was trying to get work done thank you oh and if you set one more trashcan fire Zach's going to have your ass on a plate. Max's answer had been more succinct--"crazy as a shithouse rat"--but given the fact that Max had a long history of getting high and doing arguably insane things himself, his opinion was not entirely to be trusted.

When he'd asked Arien, he'd gotten what was perhaps the most helpful--if ambiguous, but that was Arien's style--answer of all. When he'd asked "Arien, am I crazy?", his friend had fixed him with a contemplative look.

"What would you do differently if I told you that you were?"

"Nothing," Gabe had confessed.

"Then I don't think it matters much."

Like most of Arien's logic, it made a perfectly twisted sort of sense.

If he was crazy, Gabe had finally decided, then it wasn't such a bad life. He got to do whatever he wanted, more or less, and he seemed to have almost everyone around him cowed without even having tried--the thought of someone who set buildings and people on fire, just for his own amusement, carried a certain general terror with it that beat out even the intimidation factor of an assassin like Arien. Arien, at least, was particular.

Still, it was kind of annoying listening to people whisper, seeing them flinch and tiptoe around him like he might jump on them and pour lighter fuel in their hair. Most of the time Gabriel felt just as sane as anybody else--he played video games, he laughed with his friends, he ate fast food. Sometimes he did things that certainly might be portrayed as crazy--the other day, for instance, when he'd not exactly accidentally set fire to his bedroom rug to see what it looked like--but that didn't mean he was always and forever irretrievably insane.

Of course, calling himself sane would be going a bit too far in the other direction, he conceded to himself privately; sane people did not sit contemplating insanity while fire engines screamed closer, not unless they wanted to get their asses caught--that was out there even for Gabriel. So with one last lingering glance, he trotted over to his idling car and left the scene to the arson investigators.

A minute later Gabe caught himself humming and decided that, okay, just a little insane.

END

-Callisto