Fic: Not a Pretty Girl - Grand Statements 2/2 (Girl!Bob) PG13
Image by Itsy
Title: Not a Pretty Girl - Grand Statements 2/2
Fandom: Bandom: MCR
Characters: Girl!Bob, My Chem
Rating: PG13
Word Count: 1809
Summary: It's not about Gerard. It's not about Frank, either, even though he's the one who got her thinking about it.
(continued from here)
*
Bob's laying in her bunk, her feet pressed flat against the wall at the foot of it, when Frank throws the curtain open and says, "Hey."
Bob flails out an arm but Frank is wise to her shitty moods and a quick little fucker, so he dodges the hit easily. "For fucking fuck's sake," she groans, "go away and leave me in peace."
Frank gives her a sympathetic look and Bob is hopeful that he'll leave. Instead he crawls under her raised legs to sit with his back against the sidewall of her bunk. There's plenty of room under Bob's legs for his lap. Unfortunately. "Still feeling like crap?" he asks.
Bob curls her lips. "My goddamn yeast infection has not gone away in ten fucking minutes, so, yes."
"That sucks," Frank says easily, like Bob isn't laying there with her legs up in the air because she had to squirt goop all up in herself and doesn't want it to slide out. "Watch it, don't scratch."
Bob pulls her hand away from her waistband, where she was about to shove it down her pants to scratch herself completely and utterly without realizing it. And to think, she'd thought the humiliating highlight of the day occurred earlier when Frank had to go out and buy the goop for her. Jesus fucking Christ. She fists both of her hands and shoves them under her ass.
She sucks in a hissing breath between clenched teeth and glares at him. "I'm filled with hate. So much hate."
Frank pats her leg and then pulls a container of yogurt and a plastic spoon out of the pocket of his hoodie. "Here. It's supposed to help. Plus it'll keep your hands busy." When Bob just glares at him some more, he waves the yogurt enticingly. "Cherry Jubilee. You know you want it."
Bob takes it from him with the same ill grace she took the bag from the drug store. When this is over, she'll thank him properly. Until then, she believes that she has every right to be a miserable bitch, especially when her bandmate won't leave her alone. "You realize this is really embarrassing for me, right? And that you're making it worse?"
"Do you know the sort of shit I've had to run out and get Jamia over the years?" He gives her his most earnest expression, which actually rivals Gerard's for effectiveness. "Whatever. It's fine."
When Bob's halfway through the yogurt, Frank shifts towards her a bit and taps her leg.
"So, hey, I was thinking." Bob arches her brows in a question and swallows another mouthful of yogurt. "About that argument you and Gee had last week."
She drags the plastic spoon out of her mouth slowly. "Okay," she says warily.
"Like, it totally makes sense, everything you told him. And I get why you don't want him up there speaking about you or for you. But...why don't you ever speak about you or for you?"
"On stage?" Bob can't help how horrified she sounds.
"God, no, not on stage," Frank says quickly. "No, I mean. Somewhere. Anywhere."
Bob's suddenly getting a headache. "Frank--"
He holds up a hand. "Just hear me out. It's important to you to keep your gender separate from the band. Which, okay. You know we've got your back on that. Without a doubt."
They do. The guys are awesome about stepping in during interviews and keeping things very clearly on Bob's drumming without regard to her gender. Or, in Gerard's case, going off on tangents about women's issues that have nothing at all to do with the question at hand. Or Bob.
"But you can be you without us. Give interviews, or whatever. On your own and for yourself."
"You purposely brought this up now because I can't escape, didn't you?" Bob sighs.
Frank's grin is crooked. "Yeah. But I plied you with Monistat-3 and yogurt, so you can't get pissed about it."
She could, actually, but she won't because Frank isn't trying to push, he just seems genuinely curious. She tucks the now-empty yogurt container in the corner of her bunk and sits on her hands again.
"I haven't really thought about it." It's not evasiveness; Bob really hasn't thought about doing it. "I've sort of been busy getting settled in with you guys and shit."
Frank nods. "Yeah, no, I hear you." He props his chin on Bob's uplifted knee. "You won't be moving from this spot for about eight hours, though. So, you know, maybe you should."
*
When Brian meets up with them four days later, he has a file with him. "These are the requests that have come in," he says and hands it over.
Bob flips through it, making faces at the ones from magazines like Stuff and Maxim, and sort of lost about any of the others. Brian leans over her shoulder and flips through the folder. "These two, maybe. You can probably get in under the deadline if we arrange phone interviews for tomorrow."
"That's really soon," Bob says uncertainly.
Brian looks at her for a while, then closes the folder and takes it from her hands. "You don't have--" He takes a breath and starts again. "Just because Gerard--"
"This isn't about Gerard."
It isn't. It's not about Frank, either, even though he's the one who got her thinking about it.
"Oh, really? Because I know about what happened the other week, and the timing's suspicious."
Bob shakes her head and snags the folder back from him, setting it on her lap. "It's about me. It's about--you and the others, you could always open any music magazine and read about you." She gestures expansively. "About men who were doing what you wanted to do. Pages and pages of it, even. I didn't have that, not like you guys did. I hardly ever looked in those magazines and saw me, or someone I could be."
Brian shifts his arm and Bob gives him a sharp look. He makes a face at her and lowers his arm without giving her a half-hug.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" Brian asks, watching her face closely.
"I'm really fucking not sure." She opens the folder again and squares her shoulder. "But I think I have to."
Brian taps the two on top. "These. I'll set them up now."
*
The first interview goes really fucking badly. The guy from Kerrang asks Bob a bunch of questions over the phone the following day and she answers them as haltingly and uncomfortably as she always answers journalists. He doesn't deviate from whatever list he's working from and Bob's too nervous and awkward to expand on anything on her own.
The "article" ends up being a small blurb on their website the very next day, which speaks volumes about how much work the interviewer actually put into it.
Bob hates the interviewer and herself equally, and she's pissed as hell about the entire thing. The guys walk softly around her and know better than to talk about it.
*
Three days after Brian calls them, Spin flies out a photographer and a female journalist to meet up with the tour for half a day. The guys stay clear of the bus, mostly, and don't engage the journalist at all. After it's over, Bob can't remember many actual questions being asked, though she and the journalist did a lot of bullshitting. The photographer takes a bunch of photos throughout the day, all of them candid shots, and there isn't any kind of formal shoot done.
Given all of that, and what happened with Kerrang, Bob doesn't have much hope for the Spin article.
*
Three weeks later Bob gets a copy of the latest issue of Spin, in which is the article. She doesn't want to read it and the guys try to be supportive but she can see them all twitching, so she leaves it on the counter and goes to her bunk.
Half an hour later Frank throws himself through her bunk curtain and right on top of her. "Motherfucker!"
Frank sits on her stomach and gives her the biggest fucking smile he can fit on his tiny little face. He's got the copy of Spin in his hands and he opens it up to the middle and starts reading. And keeps reading. And reads some more. When he's done, Bob grabs the magazine from him and sits up. Frank tumbles back and slams into the wall, but hardly seems to notice.
"Holy shit!" Bob stares at the two-page article, quickly reading through it on her own. She kind of remembers talking about everything in it, just casually and not in response to any questions, but she didn't think this would be the result.
It's a good article. A fucking good article, actually. It's about the shit Bob's been through: close calls with GHB in her drinks, guys who whipped their dicks out at her, the trouble she's had getting birth control pills refilled on the road, the job offers that came with strings attached, and so much else condensed and put together and out there for everyone to read.
Everything about it is...right. It's respectful, but it doesn't make her seem like some paragon who's done something no other woman has ever done.
Bob loves everything about it, every single fucking thing. It's an article she would have read over and over again when she was younger, when she was making mistakes all over the place and trying to figure everything out.
"The picture," Frank says. His voice is oddly restrained considering that he's still grinning hugely. "Look at the picture."
The accompanying photo is a page back--and, fuck, that means it's actually three pages--and it's of a smiling Bob sitting on the table in the bus' kitchenette. She's wearing black jeans, her old Doc Martins, and a 7 Year Bitch t-shirt that's about twelve years old. Her hands are curled around the edge of the table on either side of her thighs and her legs are blurred slightly because she was swinging them.
But there's so much more to see than those simple details, that straightforward description. There's grit in her smile, a fuck you in her eyes, steel in her spine and freedom in the motion of her legs. All of it is obvious even to Bob who is her own worst critique when it comes to pictures of herself.
The caption underneath, though, is what gets Bob right in the gut. It's a quote of something that she explicitly remembers saying late in the day, when she was comfortable with the journalist and speaking freely, easily: "Guys don't own the scene; they just think they do. Do it your way, on your terms. Not theirs."
"Yeah," Bob breathes. "Yeah."
.End
14valentines Day 8 - Domestic Violence
Eight days and I'm not dead or crazy. That warrants pom-poms. *\o/*