Disclaimer - I don't own any member of Weezer. Nor do I claim to know how they really are. This is fiction, maybe alternate universe - you decide. It is set at some unfixed point in the Extended Midget tour. Contains slash. Will get mildly explicit in later chapters.

This is how it goes:

Scintillate, sever, explode.

When Rivers has his razor, every color is bright enough to blind. White is empty, black is everything, red is life and all over the floor. His skin is white and his eyes are black and everything else - well. He must clean up.

Every night: The last thing he does is wash the blood off his hands. The first thing he does is scream.

It's hard in hotels. Everyone is just a wall away. Screams are heard as danger, thumps and slams as tantrums. Bruises are clumsiness or assault. He does not know what cuts look like to others, because they haven't seen them yet.

Extended Midget is a weary joke, but true enough to Rivers: tiny body, long nights. Months of transit, quick minutes of show. Extend extend extend. The midget waits for it to end. The blade looks bigger than his hands. Maybe even his whole heart. The midget watches the blood swirl down the drain.

Pain and pleasure come from the same part of the brain. When he comes moaning into his own hand he is one neuron away from screaming in agony, and he knows it. He never lets himself forget.

When he is left alone, at night and at last, the razor says hello. It gathers all the light in the room and stabs it into one point, a bright concentration of all the fire in the whole wide world. Rivers swims in gallons of vagueness, self-doubt, fraud and fancy. He uses the razor to concentrate the pain. It slices like a dream, parting white for red, and Rivers can bleed and breathe. He needs it and loves it and hates it and tries not to let himself think about it when there are others in the room.

He can hear Brian next door. Shuffling, moving, runing water, turning the covers down. Rivers listens and aches with wanting; then, in guilt and puzzlement, asks himself what he wants. He does not have an answer and so the razor comes again, for the second time tonight.

In the morning, it's time to go again. More hours of faces and wear and people speaking at him; Rivers does his best but feels too slow, too dull. He is too deep inside himself to answer right away, and peoples' eyes begin to wander away when he speaks. "Come on, man, shake a tail feather." Brian slaps him on the back. It's the first time he has been touched today, and it rubs him raw. He can still feel the hand for minutes after it leaves his skin. He picks up his gait and weaves through the airport, eyes focused on Brian's back. his glasses are off - a safety measure, against lurking hordes of teenage girls - so he concentrates hard on Brian's ribbed sweater-vest, determined not to lose him in the swirl of all the others who are not where they want to be.

On the plane, he finally feels himself coming down from the sleepy high that has followed him from bed this morning. In first class, on the nine AM flight, almost every privacy curtain is drawn. The stewardess wafts down the aisle, taking drink orders and showing off her dental work. There is something crazed and plastic in her smile and Rivers declines a drink.

Brian is sitting behind him. He can hear him breathing. For lovely minutes he imagines he can feel it on the back of his neck, as well. But the clatter and chatter of the other passengers ground his senses in reality, and Brian's imagined warmth passes back into the weediest corner of his brain: Cordoned off with tape, labelled: felt, not felt. Good thoughts. For later. Soft and squeeze.

Rivers wants badly to be off the plane. There are other things he wants badly but they won't crystallize, only swirl in warmth and hurt. He sits very very very still. Pat jabbers next to him, making jokes out of unrelated words: Frosty box KICK MY ASS happy jamboree. Rivers is listening, but Pat can't tell. Scott is sleeping. Brian is quiet, and Rivers can't see him unless he turns and peeks conspicuously around the barrier between them. He wants to but knows he won't.

The plane has to circle again and again before it gets clearance to land. Rivers feels tiny inside it, inside the sky, circling - swirling downdowndown the big cloudy drain into the big shiny pipes and out. He doesn't know there things go after that, but the pilot tells him there's a runway. They hit the ground, and Rivers feels the bump. Pat is already complaining. "That took long enough. "Where are we? Charlotte? Think the Chinese food here is any good?"

Rivers thinks it probably isn't. He knows all he has to do today is wait and play and sing and sleep, but the day ahead still daunts him. He tries to organize it in his mind: Step on the ground, sound check, liquor, guitar, good night. It doesn't sound so bad when he puts it in order. He watches the luggage leave the plane from below, and knows the razor is in there somewhere, hidden from light but ready to shine. He hopes and hopes that he won't need to see it again tonight, but knows better.

Brian is sticking unusually close to him today. Rivers knows that he is getting weirder. While the others move away, write him off, and call him "genius" and "asshole" under their breath, Brian comes close and looks at him for minutes at a time. His eyes are softer than usual, and there is something on his face that Rivers has been trying to read for years. Leaving the airport, little Rivers is between Brian and his bag. The razor feels like the only weight inside it and he feels like a planet in retrograde: Caught between two gravitational pulls, one flesh, one metal. Both are equally heavy, and both are equally loved. Swinging back and forth, reversing, puzzling everyone who watches. Ripping up their theories of the universe because he can't make up his mind.

To be continued.