Fic: The Anatomy of a Fall (MCR, Frank/Gerard, 5b/12)
Part 5a | Index
***
He set off towards the forest determinedly, leaving the school and the rush of noisy Friday afternoon students behind. He thought he could hear music, somewhere beneath the distant noise of the parking lot and the angry chittering of a squirrel. Maybe the band was starting up, or maybe it was just a car radio. He stood there at the edge of the forest, staring at the enraged squirrel, trying to make himself take that next step.
“Just move,” he muttered to himself, jittery and terrified and excited, and the squirrel seemed to agree, getting louder and louder, until Gerard finally raised his palms and gave in. “You win,” he said, and took a deep breath, and then headed down the path. The woods were empty, for now, and it didn’t take long for Gerard to reach what he thought of as their wall, the one Frank usually showed up by. It was the perfect height for slouching against, and had smooth rounded stones. Gerard took a moment to close his eyes and breathe and try to regain some semblance of calm.
“Hey hey!”
Gerard’s eyes flew open and he stifled a squawk of alarm. Frank was standing in front of him, clutching a guitar case, and his beam faltered to a slightly bewildered smile in the face of Gerard’s stare.
“Uh, what’s up?” he asked, setting the guitar down and hopping onto the wall beside Gerard. He bumped their shoulders together, confused but still cheerful. “Everything okay?”
Gerard shook himself. Frank, totally solid, totally hot. Totally normal. There was no way. “No, yeah,” he said, offering a smile back of his own. “Everything’s cool. School sucks, though.”
Frank nodded. “School always sucks, bro,” he commiserated, and held out his fist to be pounded. Gerard looked at Frank, who had to be kidding with the brotastic fist-pounding thing, but Frank just waggled his eyebrows and waited. Gerard sighed and awkwardly bumped his fist against Frank’s. It was a brief moment of contact. It would have been easy to dismiss the chill of Frank’s skin as poor circulation, or hypothermia, or something.
Something like being dead, Gerard thought. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s dead. He leaned against Frank, who looked confused but pleased with the contact, leaning back into him and smiling. Before he could think too much about it, Gerard shoved a hand out blindly and wrapped his fingers around Frank’s arm, just below the elbow.
Frank immediately tried to tug his arm away, but Gerard had frozen, breath caught in his throat.
“Gee-what? C’mon, man, what are you doing?” Frank said, with a brittle laugh. “Let me go.”
Back home Gabe had a pet snake, a Colombian red-tailed boa named Beatrice, and sometimes they’d all get stoned and watch old kung-fu movies in Gabe’s living room, the boa meandering around the couch and looping across Gerard’s shoulders, winding down his arm. That’s what Frank felt like, like Beatrice, cold-blooded and taut beneath Gerard’s palm. Not icy, not frozen. But-Gerard watched himself rub his thumb across the tattooed saint. Cool. Like a stone lying in the shade.
Frank made a strange, strangled noise and jerked free. Gerard stared at him, oddly aware of how hard his heart was thumping in his own chest. It couldn’t be-but-
“Okay, seriously,” Frank hissed, folding his arms against his chest and huddling in around himself. “What the fuck’s going on, Gerard?”
Okay. There was probably a subtle, tactful way to approach this.
“Are you a vampire?” Gerard asked carefully, and instead of joking or rolling his eyes, Frank stopped glaring and just froze. Seconds passed, and he wasn’t saying anything, none of the lines or excuses Gerard expected. He was just staring at Gerard with huge eyes and a panicked expression.
“Oh my god,” Gerard said, hushed and delighted, and was just about to reach over and feel Frank’s non-pulse when Frank exploded into action, flinging himself backwards and away from Gerard. Gerard frowned at him.
“No, I-a vampire? No!” Frank said, waving his arms over his head. “Jesus, Gerard. What the fuck, a fucking vampire? Seriously?”
“Oh,” Gerard said, disgruntled. Okay, it had been a long shot, but Gerard liked vampires; vampires were awesome. Also, Frank was dead and cold-blooded and lived in the forest, it wasn’t that weird a thing to think. Although he admitted that Frank was walking around in sunlight, which shot a giant-ass hole in that theory. Fuck. “Well, what are you then?” he asked grumpily. “It’s not like you told me. You could have, you know. I mean, you’re Frank Iero, right? If you’re not a vampire, what’s going on?”
Frank’s eyes bugged out and he scooted away from Gerard. Gerard frowned and tried to subtly inch along after him, which didn’t work so well, since Frank just leapt to his feet and backed away, like Gerard was going to leap up and start trying to suck his blood.
“Goddammit,” Frank said finally, voice hoarse. “Fuck, Gerard, I didn’t-I didn’t want… Who told you? Just, look. Stay calm, okay, you know I’d never hurt you or anything, right?”
“Of course not,” Gerard said, bewildered. “I mean, if you wanted to eat me, it would have been totally easy. You didn’t have to drop me in a fucking creek first.”
Frank didn’t seem to have heard him, which was maybe for the best. He just paced and gnawed at his fingernails and never took his eyes off Gerard, just looked at him beseechingly, which was weird.
“Who told you? It was Toro, wasn’t it?” Frank asked, almost more to himself than to Gerard. “God, that fucking kid-I should have known, I should have-”
“What?” Gerard asked, now totally bewildered, and then he fucking noticed-he should have noticed five days ago. Frank was pacing back and forth through drifts of dead leaves. And he wasn’t making a sound. If Gerard closed his eyes, all he could hear was Frank muttering to himself, like hearing a voice from a television or headphones. There were no footsteps, no dead, crackling leaves, just Frank raving on about conspiracies of silence or something. He opened his eyes, and Frank was there, walking back and forth on top of a bunch of crinkly shit, and he didn’t even… he didn’t even cast a shadow. Gerard was the most oblivious fucker in the entire world, holy shit.
Frank finally noticed him staring and stopped mid-stride, mouth twisting.
“Gerard?” he asked, voice wavering.
“You are Frank Iero,” Gerard squeaked out. “Holy fucking! Fuck! You-fuck! You’re totally… I dunno, undead? Immortal? What are you? Jesus, Frank!”
Frank tried to say something, and Gerard knew he should try to calm down, but he couldn’t, couldn’t even stop himself from bouncing to his feet and waving his arms excitedly in the air.
“No wonder you never ran into those fucking mud puddles!” Gerard continued, elated, and automatically whipped out his cellphone to tell Mikey. Holy shit, this was so cool. Mikey was gonna flip, he thought gleefully, then reconsidered mid-type. Or possibly freak out. While he was dithering over what to type, he finally noticed Frank still hadn’t moved. In fact, he looked-okay, he looked pretty distraught. Gerard slid the cellphone back in his pocket, feeling strangely ashamed.
“Gee,” Frank said after a moment, his voice breaking. He was staring at Gerard with an almost alarming intensity, like every iota of his being was focused on Gerard, just on Gerard. Gerard stuck his hands in his hoodie pouch and waited uneasily. “Just, please. I’m sorry, I-I wanted to tell you, I just didn’t… I don’t have anyone to fucking talk to out here, and you’re the first person that’s ever just thought I was a kid, a normal fucking kid, and-I didn’t want you to leave, I-”
“Why would I leave?” Gerard asked, and sidled a few steps closer, now that it seemed like Frank wasn’t going to run away or whatever. “I mean, seriously, dude, this is so cool!”
Gerard leaned over and poked Frank in the chest a couple times, felt the thump of a sternum beneath his fingers. Frank had frozen again, motionless, mouth opening and closing, and when Gerard lifted the hem of his shirt to poke his side-finally getting to see the tattoos was totally just a bonus-Frank snorted with helpless laughter before batting his hand away.
“You’re ticklish,” Gerard said, delighted. “And solid. What are you, a zombie or something?” He bounced on his feet, leaning in a little closer.
Frank stared at him. “What? No! I’m a vegan, dude, that’s gross!”
“Well, if you’re a zombie it’s not like you have a choice,” Gerard offered, rather reasonably, he thought. “It’s not like a moral dilemma. You wouldn’t condemn foxes for eating bunnies, right? Circle of life, man. Or, uh, unlife?”
Frank looked really silly with his mouth hanging open like that, and if he kept staring at Gerard like that, Gerard was gonna do something stupid, like attack his face with a triumphant ‘The undead are real! My life is validated!’ kiss. This was the best day ever.
“I’m not a fucking zombie!” Frank finally squeaked out, voice high and outraged.
“Oh,” Gerard said, a little disappointed. Zombies were sort of a favorite of his. Maybe Frank had an alien symbiote? Like the black oil aliens in the X-Files. Either way, if he was Frank Iero, he looked about ten years younger than he should, so something had to be going on.
“I have a body, it’s-over that way,” Frank continued, flapping his hands in the general direction of the river before turning back and looking at Gerard with huge, earnest eyes. “Are you-I know this is weird, dude, but please don’t-”
“Really?” Gerard breathed. “Where? It was a long time ago, so it’s probably all skeletal by now, right?” He noticed Frank’s eyes getting bigger and bigger, and reevaluated what he’d just said. “Oh, dude, fuck, sorry. Was I being insensitive? I didn’t mean to be.”
There was another long pause and then Frank buried his face into his hands and his shoulders started shaking. Gerard squinted. Was Frank fucking laughing at him?
“Dude,” Frank said between his fingers, the words nearly unintelligible through the giggling. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m serious!” Gerard protested. “I don’t wanna be, like, rude or anything.”
Then he had to wait an hour or so for Frank to stop laughing, a little wild and hysterical, hunched over and clutching his ribs. Gerard took the time to catalog all the ways he’d been a moron not to notice something was up, because sometimes the light shone right through Frank’s shoulder blades-how had Gerard missed that before, seriously-and then Frank’s laughter sounded suspiciously ragged.
Gerard hovered next to him awkwardly and then settled for putting a tentative hand on Frank’s shoulder.
“Frankie?” he said uncertainly. “I, uh. What’s wrong? Seriously, I really am sorry, if I hurt your feelings or anything.”
Frank lifted his head from his hands and stared at Gerard, and Gerard had just enough time to register that Frank looked worried, or-not worried, something stronger than worried. Terrified. Gerard didn’t know what to do, so he just hugged Frank and tried to make a soothing noise, and then Frank’s face wavered from horror to incredulity, and then out of nowhere came this blinding, brilliant, smile and Gerard couldn’t even breathe for a second. Frank huffed out something between a laugh and a sob and flung himself at Gerard, burying his face in Gerard’s neck, nearly toppling both of them off the wall entirely.
“Whoa!” Gerard said, and then awkwardly patted Frank’s back and tried to think unsexy thoughts, because holy fuck, there was a hot guy on top of him. His fantasies didn’t usually involve the hot guy freaking out so much, though. “Uh, there there. Frank, it’s okay. Um, are you, uh, okay? Do you need anything?” Thoughts of donating blood or life force passed through his mind for a moment-how cool would that be? So cool, as long as Frank didn’t actually, like, drain him or whatever, but he trusted Frank not to do that. Frank might be dead or supernatural, but he wasn’t evil. Gerard could tell.
“Gerard Way, you are so fucking weird,” Frank said into Gerard’s neck, but he sounded pretty delighted about it, so Gerard let himself wriggle happily, at least internally. “I can’t fucking believe you. You’re not-you’re not scared at all, are you?”
“Of you?” Gerard asked incredulously, and then snorted. “Uh, no? Hate to break it to you, Frankie, but you’re not super scary.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Frank mumbled, ducking his head a little further into Gerard’s hoodie and snuffling. “I’m fucking terrifying, okay.”
“Uh huh,” Gerard said, and let himself squeeze Frank back a little. “You and your expired Diet Coke and your bridge of doom. I’ll alert the presses.”
“Fuck off,” Frank said indignantly, and drew in a quavering breath that seemed to rattle the trees and send a cascade of leaves around them. He was shaking, just a little, and Gerard was finally reviewing their previous conversation and was coming to the conclusion that he’d been kind of an asshole.
“Frank,” he said, finally, and Frank pulled away, rubbing at his face and not meeting his eyes. “You know… I would never just, fucking leave or whatever, right? I, uh, I mean, I like you. A lot. And,” he added hastily, when Frank’s head shot up, “you’re a fucking ghost! Or something else, I don’t even know. That’s totally awesome except, um, in the way I would rather you not be dead? Except you have to admit it’s kind of totally awesome.”
Frank looked skeptical, and he still had one hand clamped on Gerard’s arm, like he was afraid Gerard might suddenly tear off in the opposite direction. Gerard remembered again how fucking thrilled Frank had been to see Gerard that first time, how Frank constantly reached out to touch him and wow, he really was an asshole. If Frank was dead… Gerard felt abruptly sick.
He must have died when he was just eighteen years old, on the brink of going to college-his whole life stretched out ahead of him. He must have died in a white t-shirt and ripped jeans, alone in the woods. Gerard couldn’t wrap his head around that part of things. Frank could be dead, but he couldn’t have died.
But he had, obviously, and for all Gerard knew he was the first person in over a decade to hug Frank, to talk to him or joke with him. No wonder Frank had freaked out. Jesus, Gerard was a jerk.
“Hey,” Gerard said softly. “Seriously, it’s okay. I don’t discriminate against the dead. It’s okay, Frankie. I am totally pro-the dead. I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”
Frank looked up and when he laughed, it sounded all clogged and choked, but he was grinning again.
“Yeah? I should have known, you giant morbid freak,” he said, and wiped at his nose. Ghost snot! Gerard thought, entranced, and wondered if he could subtly offer his hoodie sleeve for a handkerchief to collect a specimen. Then he immediately felt like a jerk when Frank continued. “It’s just-usually people don’t really see me like you do, just some kind of freaky cloud or a voice or whatever. I mean, some people do, but it’s not like they stay to talk to me, you know? Much less ask to see my fucking body, you goddamn ghoul.”
“Hey,” Gerard said feelingly. “I said I was sorry!”
Frank punched him in the shoulder without looking up, and Gerard couldn’t even be mad about how it actually sort of hurt, because a fucking ghost had just fucking punched him in the shoulder. So cool.
“It’s okay,” Frank said, lifting his head and smiling faintly. “My corpse is pretty awesome, I’m not gonna lie. I mean, who gets to see their own skull? It’s pretty badass.” He made a wiggly hand gesture indicating the general badassness of his cranium.
“People who get MRIs?” Gerard suggested, then backpedalled rapidly when Frank glared. “Not that that is in any way cool. Radar technology, what the fuck ever. Who needs it?” Frank shook his head, and Gerard had to admit he probably did have an awesome skull, what with those cheekbones and that jaw line and the curve of forehead he could see now.
“Do you ever do, like, Hamlet and Yorick scenes?” he asked, unthinking.
“No!” Frank said. “Who would do that? Oh my god, you would. You would totally do that.”
“Maybe?” Gerard hedged shiftily, and subtly changed the subject. “The point is, I mean, you couldn’t have thought I’d have minded, right? You should have told me ages ago! I thought you were fucking homeless, man. I was going to kidnap you and make you live with me in my closet.”
“You what?” Frank spluttered, raising a hand to hide his smile when Gerard scowled. “Dude, seriously? You thought I was just living out here?”
“It was a totally reasonable assumption!” he said defensively. “I didn’t have all the information! If you’d just been upfront about it-I mean, what’d you think I thought?”
“I couldn’t,” Frank interrupted, and then looked away, and his face was all in shadow so that Gerard couldn’t see his expression. “Gerard, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I mean, what if you’d just thought I was crazy, or if you’d run away-Fuck, Gee, what would I do if you left?”
“But I wouldn’t! I won’t!” Gerard said, exasperated. “I told you, you’re not scary. You’re awesome. It’s awesome.”
“Is it?” Frank said weirdly, staring at Gerard, and Gerard had to abruptly steel himself not to look away or lean back. Frank had never looked at Gerard like this before, intense and otherworldly. He seemed almost luminescent, hollow, like the skin of a paper lantern, and his eyes were bright and distant. Not human.
“It is,” Gerard gritted out, and folded his arms over his chest. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t. Frank could fuck off with his fucking freaky-deaky ghost-routine.
Then Frank sighed abruptly, scowling a little and shoving his hair out of his face, and he was just Frank again, rolling his eyes and long-suffering.
“I need a fucking cigarette,” Frank grumped, and laid his head on his knees, holding out a hand imploringly while Gerard fished in his pocket for the battered box of Marlboro Reds.
“How can you smoke, by the way?” Gerard asked, pleased when his voice came out steady and normal. “Do you even taste it, really?”
“This is the end of all normal conversation, isn’t it?” Frank said mournfully, and lit up without answering. Gerard watched to see if he could see the smoke move down Frank’s throat, into his lungs, but he could only see smooth, opaque skin. He wondered if Frank could get hickeys. “We’re never gonna talk about anything else ever again. I’m just ectoplasm to you now.”
“Ectoplasm?” Gerard squeaked, and then, belatedly, said, “Uh, I mean, no, of course not. I would never objectify you like that.”
Frank scowled at him.
“Such a liar,” he muttered, and stole Gerard’s pack of cigarettes, but Gerard saw a faint glimmer of a smile lurking around the corners of Frank’s mouth, so he figured he wasn’t accidentally being a jerk again. Frank was probably used to it by now anyway, he figured. Still, Gerard should probably change the subject. Then he remembered.
“Oh!” he said, rustling in his bag and emerging triumphantly with a stack of comics. “I brought you these, um. Here. Guess you can’t get out to the comic stores much, right? Hah.” Crap, he was talking about the dead thing again. This was useless.
Frank didn’t seem to mind, though, just snatched Gerard the comics out of his hands, and then dug gleefully through the bag for more.
“Normally I just swipe what I can off campers and shit, but damn!” He clutched the Seven Soldiers of Victory to his chest, beaming and looking like any other human comic geek. A hot, totally out of Gerard’s league, geek, to be honest. “This is fucking-Gee, have I told you lately how awesome you are? So fucking awesome. I don’t-how did I get so fucking lucky, man?”
“Aww, dude,” Gerard said, and kicked his feet against a stump, trying not to beam. “I just, you know, didn’t think we could still be friends if you hadn’t read about Zatanna and the new Spider. I guess you, uh, can’t leave the forest or whatever?” He wasn’t prying into Frank’s deadness, per se. Just making polite conversation. Right.
“Obviously not, or I’d have followed you home and set up camp in your closet,” Frank said, pawing through the bookbag for more and crooning to the smooth plastic. Gerard scowled as he watched one of the pages crumple slightly in Frank’s enthusiastic hands. Frank continued absently as he flipped pages, “I’m totally stuck here. Ghostly territory, ends at the edges of the forest, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah. It’s pretty boring. Oh my god, dude, you have the Defenders series? Sweet!”
“You better not fuck those up,” Gerard grumped, a little annoyed to have so thoroughly lost Frank’s attention but at the same time sort of pleased for the opportunity to ogle Frank busting a nut over Gerard’s comic book collection without fear of being spotted. Also, Frank fucking haunted a forest. He rolled that over in his mind gleefully, then got distracted by Frank’s indignant snort.
“Of course not! What do you think I am?” Frank glared Gerard, and god, it was fucking awkward to stare into someone’s eyes, he didn’t know what all the movies and his aunt’s collection of romance novels were all about. It was awkward, and weird, and filled with this expectant waiting, and Gerard wound up having to huff and look away and feel like a necrophiliac.
Was it even necrophilia if you weren’t attracted to the body, but to the, uh, spiritual material? What the fuck was Frank anyway? A strangely solid nimbus? Could Frank even have sex?
“Like you don’t have pizza sauce all over them anyway, asshole,” Frank muttered, peering at the panels in the dimming light. He glanced up at Gerard, then looked down again quickly, fidgeting with the binding on one issue and, Gerard noted indignantly, crumpling the pages.
“On, like, one page,” Gerard pointed out, and then sighed in defeat. Comics were for enjoying, anyway, except maybe first editions and special editions, and okay, so maybe Frank couldn’t really fuck them up any worse than they already were, unless he did some kind of ghost ninja reading kung fu with them and then dropped them in a river.
“So, seriously, who told you?” Frank asked. He still wasn’t quite meeting Gerard’s eyes. “Or did you figure it out all on your lonesome?”
Gerard was a little sheepish that he hadn’t figured it out on his own-if anyone was going to uncover an undead ninja ghost zombie, it should have been him.
“Thought we weren’t talking about it anymore,” Gerard grumbled and stared at his muddy Converse. He could practically hear Frank rolling his eyes. “Ray was lecturing me on the evils of the forest,” he said reluctantly. “And your name came up.”
“Yeah?” Frank said companionably, and Gerard could hear him leafing through pages. When he glanced over out of the corner of his eye, it took a moment to register Frank as anything more than a pale blur. Peripheral vision, Gerard thought. They’d talked about it in biology, how you saw things differently from the side than you did head -on, something about rods and cone cells and the color purple.
“Yeah,” Gerard said, swallowing around a strange lump in his throat, and forced himself to lean against the cool solidity of Frank’s shoulder. “Apparently you scared the shit out of Ray and his friend Patrick five years ago. He’s still all shaken up about it.”
“Five years?” Frank said, finally looking up, a small frown on his face. “I don’t… really, it was five fucking years ago?”
“I guess,” Gerard said, slowly. “Ray said he was twelve, when he saw you. I guess Patrick was maybe ten or eleven. So, yeah.”
“Doesn’t seem that long,” Frank said slowly, scratching his chin. “Or it seems longer. I dunno. But I remember, yeah, little Ray Toro and his friend, sneaking around the woods with their flashlights. Five years, wow.” Frank hunched his shoulders and stared back down at the bright, glossy pages. “I didn’t mean to scare them, you know?” he said softly, flipping the pages. “I was just trying to say hey.”
“I don’t think they saw you really well,” Gerard offered hesitantly, and Frank shrugged.
“Probably not,” he said, then shook himself, grinning up at Gerard. “Fucking kids, man. They come in every now and then, all Are You Afraid of the Dark, with flashlights and s’mores and shit, and get all shocked when I actually show up.” Frank gave a big, shark-like smile, all teeth. “Hey, I aim to please. Sometimes I even steal their shit, their comics and whatever.”
“Low, Iero,” Gerard whistled, and made himself shake his head in mock-disapproval.
“Oh, whatever, some kids love it, right?” Frank said, which Gerard had to concede was probably true, for the most part. “If they didn’t want to get dicked around with, they shouldn’t have come in the motherfucking haunted woods. I have a duty to scare folk shitless. It’s like a moral imperative.”
“Mmm. Justify your petty theft all you like,” Gerard said, snapping open a back issue of Miller’s Batman. “You’re just as bad as Peeves, man.”
“Okay, one? It’s not petty theft,” Frank said, and stole Gerard’s comic and waved it under his nose. “I need comics! For my mental health. It’s extenuating circumstances or some shit. And two,” he said, leaning back and narrowing his eye, “Did you just call me a perv? Because I’m pretty sure that camp of girls were over eighteen. And I wasn’t, uh.” Frank started to stammer as Gerard glared. “I didn’t do anything!” Frank backpedalled. “There were right there! Changing! And I’m all cold and shit so their nipples were all hard, and then I guess I made a noise or something and they ran away screaming like fucking banshees. Tits all over the place.” Frank drifted off dreamily. “I miss sex,” he said a little sadly, and then Gerard choked on his own spit, and decided the better part of valor was to attack Frank’s appalling pop culture ignorance.
“Peeves,” Gerard said faintly. “Peeves is the poltergeist in Harry Potter.”
“The what in the who, now?” Frank said, frowning, and that was Gerard’s afternoon sorted out. By the time it was getting dark, Gerard had about caught Frank up to the Half-Blood Prince-around the Goblet of Fire he finally thought to ask if Frank wanted to actually borrow the books and read them himself, or whatever. Frank stared for a moment before bursting into laughter-which, whatever, stupid ungrateful fucker-and motioned Gerard to continue with his super-awesome condensed version. While he talked, Frank played quiet lilting melodies on the guitar and finished off the rest of
Gerard’s cigarettes, occasionally piping up with questions and what he obviously thought were extremely witty comments about wands and horcruxes.
It was actually easy to forget Frank was dead, most of the time. It just seemed so normal, and then it’d hit Gerard all over again like a fucking brick to the head. Dead. Frank was dead. People went somewhere after they died, obviously. They didn’t just disappear. It fucking blew his mind.
When Gerard had to leave at the end of the day, Frank walked him to the edge of the woods, and then looked at Gerard with a strange, bemused expression. Then he leaned in, wrapping a hand around the back of Gerard’s neck.
Gerard had a brief heart attack.
“Hey,” Frank exhaled, nose to Gerard’s. “Hey, you.”
“Hey,” Gerard squeaked, and almost thought he felt Frank’s lip ring cold against the corner of his mouth. The wind was blowing, just enough to cut through the last of the day’s warmth and scatter dead leaves from the trees above. Wisps of fogs were coalescing in the fields and curling along the entrance to the path in the twilight, damp around their feet, and Gerard thought that probably this was as perfect a moment as his life would ever provide, with Frank’s mouth inches away.
“Thanks,” Frank said, and Gerard tried not to go cross-eyed looking at him.
“For what?” Gerard asked, voice hoarse and nearly soundless, hopeful, and then suddenly Frank shook himself, and stepped back. Gerard made a low protesting noise in his throat before he could stop himself, and then felt his cheeks heat with embarrassment.
“For being, you know, not a screaming girl or whatever,” Frank mumbled, gnawing at a fingernail. “You should probably go.”
Gerard stared, but it wasn’t like he could call Frank out. Because, okay, that totally seemed like the set up for a kiss, but what if it wasn’t? What if Frank had forgotten the bounds of normal behavior out in the forest, living with the rabbits and ducks and campers?
Maybe ghosts didn’t even kiss people. Maybe kissing a ghost killed you. Who the fuck knew. Frank probably didn’t even have a sex drive. He was dead.
“It’s not like boys don’t scream too,” Gerard pointed out sullenly. Fucking tease asshole of a ghost. He had to have known that was the set-up for a fucking kiss, he had to. “But, yeah, I should get going. Mom’s probably waiting for me.”
“You could come back later tonight, though. If you wanted,” Frank said nonchalantly, and now he wasn’t looking at his shoes, he was looking at Gerard’s shoes. It would be just Gerard’s luck to have a crush on a dead guy with a foot fetish.
“I could,” Gerard said, and stuffed his hands in his pockets, trying not to scowl. “I guess. I mean, if you want.”
“Yeah?” And Frank was peeking up through his bangs, the asshole. Gerard tried to glare at him, but from the way Frank beamed he suspected it had come out as more of a dopey smile. Goddammit. “So what time do you want to meet, then? Visiting hours at the hospital end at ten, right? You could come out after that. I can make a fire and shit, it’ll be awesome.”
“Um, yeah,” Gerard said, a little surprised Frank remembered about the visiting hours. “Sometimes Mikey gets the nurses to let us stay later, though. I dunno, I could probably be out here at maybe… midnight? Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay, what the fuck else am I going to be doing,” Frank said, rolling his eyes. “Hate to break it to you, but midnight isn’t actually the witching hour. I’m not off, like, possessing pumpkins or Ouija boards each night.”
Gerard could feel his eyes get huge.
“I didn’t even think of that!” he exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Oh man, are you affected by the time of day? I mean, you were all insubstantial that one night, right? I was sort of drunk, but I think I remember-” Oh fuck. If everything that night had actually happened-fuck. He buried his face in his hands. “Shit, I threw up through you!” he moaned. “Oh, Frank, that’s so gross, fuck. I’m so sorry!”
“No kidding,” Frank muttered, but he was smiling as he said it, a funny crooked half-smile Gerard glimpsed from between his fingers. “No sweat, I forgive you.”
“I can’t believe I threw up through you,” Gerard repeated dolefully, and the only thing that kept him from sprinting off through the night and never coming back was that it was equal parts horrifically embarrassing and awesome. “So does that mean you can walk through me?” He reached out and thumped Frank’s arm, but Frank remained stubbornly solid.
“Christ, Gee,” Frank said, and shoved his shoulder. “You’ll have to find out later, fucker. When you come back. You’ll be back, right? To see me walk through walls if nothing else.”
“Really?” Gerard said, clutching his hoodie closer to himself and beaming. “Through walls?”
“Walls, trees, your face. Whatever.”
“Really?” Gerard squeaked, and Frank rolled his eyes.
“Oh my god, fucker, go, you’re going to be late!” he said, and Gerard totally was, and his mom was going to kill him, so he made himself start jogging off, away from the forest and towards the lights of the school parking lot. He kept looking over his shoulder, though, and Frank was still standing there at the edge of the woods, hands in his pockets.
Gerard waved-like a giant dork, but he was too excited to really care at this point.
“Bye, Frankie!” he hollered. “See you later! Don’t fuck up my comics!”
Even from the parking lot he could tell Frank was flipping him off indignantly. He couldn’t stop grinning, not even when he got home and his mom looked at him weirdly and started muttering about the apocalypse again. Oh man, he could not wait to see Mikey. They had so much research to do.
***
PART SIX
***
He set off towards the forest determinedly, leaving the school and the rush of noisy Friday afternoon students behind. He thought he could hear music, somewhere beneath the distant noise of the parking lot and the angry chittering of a squirrel. Maybe the band was starting up, or maybe it was just a car radio. He stood there at the edge of the forest, staring at the enraged squirrel, trying to make himself take that next step.
“Just move,” he muttered to himself, jittery and terrified and excited, and the squirrel seemed to agree, getting louder and louder, until Gerard finally raised his palms and gave in. “You win,” he said, and took a deep breath, and then headed down the path. The woods were empty, for now, and it didn’t take long for Gerard to reach what he thought of as their wall, the one Frank usually showed up by. It was the perfect height for slouching against, and had smooth rounded stones. Gerard took a moment to close his eyes and breathe and try to regain some semblance of calm.
“Hey hey!”
Gerard’s eyes flew open and he stifled a squawk of alarm. Frank was standing in front of him, clutching a guitar case, and his beam faltered to a slightly bewildered smile in the face of Gerard’s stare.
“Uh, what’s up?” he asked, setting the guitar down and hopping onto the wall beside Gerard. He bumped their shoulders together, confused but still cheerful. “Everything okay?”
Gerard shook himself. Frank, totally solid, totally hot. Totally normal. There was no way. “No, yeah,” he said, offering a smile back of his own. “Everything’s cool. School sucks, though.”
Frank nodded. “School always sucks, bro,” he commiserated, and held out his fist to be pounded. Gerard looked at Frank, who had to be kidding with the brotastic fist-pounding thing, but Frank just waggled his eyebrows and waited. Gerard sighed and awkwardly bumped his fist against Frank’s. It was a brief moment of contact. It would have been easy to dismiss the chill of Frank’s skin as poor circulation, or hypothermia, or something.
Something like being dead, Gerard thought. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s dead. He leaned against Frank, who looked confused but pleased with the contact, leaning back into him and smiling. Before he could think too much about it, Gerard shoved a hand out blindly and wrapped his fingers around Frank’s arm, just below the elbow.
Frank immediately tried to tug his arm away, but Gerard had frozen, breath caught in his throat.
“Gee-what? C’mon, man, what are you doing?” Frank said, with a brittle laugh. “Let me go.”
Back home Gabe had a pet snake, a Colombian red-tailed boa named Beatrice, and sometimes they’d all get stoned and watch old kung-fu movies in Gabe’s living room, the boa meandering around the couch and looping across Gerard’s shoulders, winding down his arm. That’s what Frank felt like, like Beatrice, cold-blooded and taut beneath Gerard’s palm. Not icy, not frozen. But-Gerard watched himself rub his thumb across the tattooed saint. Cool. Like a stone lying in the shade.
Frank made a strange, strangled noise and jerked free. Gerard stared at him, oddly aware of how hard his heart was thumping in his own chest. It couldn’t be-but-
“Okay, seriously,” Frank hissed, folding his arms against his chest and huddling in around himself. “What the fuck’s going on, Gerard?”
Okay. There was probably a subtle, tactful way to approach this.
“Are you a vampire?” Gerard asked carefully, and instead of joking or rolling his eyes, Frank stopped glaring and just froze. Seconds passed, and he wasn’t saying anything, none of the lines or excuses Gerard expected. He was just staring at Gerard with huge eyes and a panicked expression.
“Oh my god,” Gerard said, hushed and delighted, and was just about to reach over and feel Frank’s non-pulse when Frank exploded into action, flinging himself backwards and away from Gerard. Gerard frowned at him.
“No, I-a vampire? No!” Frank said, waving his arms over his head. “Jesus, Gerard. What the fuck, a fucking vampire? Seriously?”
“Oh,” Gerard said, disgruntled. Okay, it had been a long shot, but Gerard liked vampires; vampires were awesome. Also, Frank was dead and cold-blooded and lived in the forest, it wasn’t that weird a thing to think. Although he admitted that Frank was walking around in sunlight, which shot a giant-ass hole in that theory. Fuck. “Well, what are you then?” he asked grumpily. “It’s not like you told me. You could have, you know. I mean, you’re Frank Iero, right? If you’re not a vampire, what’s going on?”
Frank’s eyes bugged out and he scooted away from Gerard. Gerard frowned and tried to subtly inch along after him, which didn’t work so well, since Frank just leapt to his feet and backed away, like Gerard was going to leap up and start trying to suck his blood.
“Goddammit,” Frank said finally, voice hoarse. “Fuck, Gerard, I didn’t-I didn’t want… Who told you? Just, look. Stay calm, okay, you know I’d never hurt you or anything, right?”
“Of course not,” Gerard said, bewildered. “I mean, if you wanted to eat me, it would have been totally easy. You didn’t have to drop me in a fucking creek first.”
Frank didn’t seem to have heard him, which was maybe for the best. He just paced and gnawed at his fingernails and never took his eyes off Gerard, just looked at him beseechingly, which was weird.
“Who told you? It was Toro, wasn’t it?” Frank asked, almost more to himself than to Gerard. “God, that fucking kid-I should have known, I should have-”
“What?” Gerard asked, now totally bewildered, and then he fucking noticed-he should have noticed five days ago. Frank was pacing back and forth through drifts of dead leaves. And he wasn’t making a sound. If Gerard closed his eyes, all he could hear was Frank muttering to himself, like hearing a voice from a television or headphones. There were no footsteps, no dead, crackling leaves, just Frank raving on about conspiracies of silence or something. He opened his eyes, and Frank was there, walking back and forth on top of a bunch of crinkly shit, and he didn’t even… he didn’t even cast a shadow. Gerard was the most oblivious fucker in the entire world, holy shit.
Frank finally noticed him staring and stopped mid-stride, mouth twisting.
“Gerard?” he asked, voice wavering.
“You are Frank Iero,” Gerard squeaked out. “Holy fucking! Fuck! You-fuck! You’re totally… I dunno, undead? Immortal? What are you? Jesus, Frank!”
Frank tried to say something, and Gerard knew he should try to calm down, but he couldn’t, couldn’t even stop himself from bouncing to his feet and waving his arms excitedly in the air.
“No wonder you never ran into those fucking mud puddles!” Gerard continued, elated, and automatically whipped out his cellphone to tell Mikey. Holy shit, this was so cool. Mikey was gonna flip, he thought gleefully, then reconsidered mid-type. Or possibly freak out. While he was dithering over what to type, he finally noticed Frank still hadn’t moved. In fact, he looked-okay, he looked pretty distraught. Gerard slid the cellphone back in his pocket, feeling strangely ashamed.
“Gee,” Frank said after a moment, his voice breaking. He was staring at Gerard with an almost alarming intensity, like every iota of his being was focused on Gerard, just on Gerard. Gerard stuck his hands in his hoodie pouch and waited uneasily. “Just, please. I’m sorry, I-I wanted to tell you, I just didn’t… I don’t have anyone to fucking talk to out here, and you’re the first person that’s ever just thought I was a kid, a normal fucking kid, and-I didn’t want you to leave, I-”
“Why would I leave?” Gerard asked, and sidled a few steps closer, now that it seemed like Frank wasn’t going to run away or whatever. “I mean, seriously, dude, this is so cool!”
Gerard leaned over and poked Frank in the chest a couple times, felt the thump of a sternum beneath his fingers. Frank had frozen again, motionless, mouth opening and closing, and when Gerard lifted the hem of his shirt to poke his side-finally getting to see the tattoos was totally just a bonus-Frank snorted with helpless laughter before batting his hand away.
“You’re ticklish,” Gerard said, delighted. “And solid. What are you, a zombie or something?” He bounced on his feet, leaning in a little closer.
Frank stared at him. “What? No! I’m a vegan, dude, that’s gross!”
“Well, if you’re a zombie it’s not like you have a choice,” Gerard offered, rather reasonably, he thought. “It’s not like a moral dilemma. You wouldn’t condemn foxes for eating bunnies, right? Circle of life, man. Or, uh, unlife?”
Frank looked really silly with his mouth hanging open like that, and if he kept staring at Gerard like that, Gerard was gonna do something stupid, like attack his face with a triumphant ‘The undead are real! My life is validated!’ kiss. This was the best day ever.
“I’m not a fucking zombie!” Frank finally squeaked out, voice high and outraged.
“Oh,” Gerard said, a little disappointed. Zombies were sort of a favorite of his. Maybe Frank had an alien symbiote? Like the black oil aliens in the X-Files. Either way, if he was Frank Iero, he looked about ten years younger than he should, so something had to be going on.
“I have a body, it’s-over that way,” Frank continued, flapping his hands in the general direction of the river before turning back and looking at Gerard with huge, earnest eyes. “Are you-I know this is weird, dude, but please don’t-”
“Really?” Gerard breathed. “Where? It was a long time ago, so it’s probably all skeletal by now, right?” He noticed Frank’s eyes getting bigger and bigger, and reevaluated what he’d just said. “Oh, dude, fuck, sorry. Was I being insensitive? I didn’t mean to be.”
There was another long pause and then Frank buried his face into his hands and his shoulders started shaking. Gerard squinted. Was Frank fucking laughing at him?
“Dude,” Frank said between his fingers, the words nearly unintelligible through the giggling. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m serious!” Gerard protested. “I don’t wanna be, like, rude or anything.”
Then he had to wait an hour or so for Frank to stop laughing, a little wild and hysterical, hunched over and clutching his ribs. Gerard took the time to catalog all the ways he’d been a moron not to notice something was up, because sometimes the light shone right through Frank’s shoulder blades-how had Gerard missed that before, seriously-and then Frank’s laughter sounded suspiciously ragged.
Gerard hovered next to him awkwardly and then settled for putting a tentative hand on Frank’s shoulder.
“Frankie?” he said uncertainly. “I, uh. What’s wrong? Seriously, I really am sorry, if I hurt your feelings or anything.”
Frank lifted his head from his hands and stared at Gerard, and Gerard had just enough time to register that Frank looked worried, or-not worried, something stronger than worried. Terrified. Gerard didn’t know what to do, so he just hugged Frank and tried to make a soothing noise, and then Frank’s face wavered from horror to incredulity, and then out of nowhere came this blinding, brilliant, smile and Gerard couldn’t even breathe for a second. Frank huffed out something between a laugh and a sob and flung himself at Gerard, burying his face in Gerard’s neck, nearly toppling both of them off the wall entirely.
“Whoa!” Gerard said, and then awkwardly patted Frank’s back and tried to think unsexy thoughts, because holy fuck, there was a hot guy on top of him. His fantasies didn’t usually involve the hot guy freaking out so much, though. “Uh, there there. Frank, it’s okay. Um, are you, uh, okay? Do you need anything?” Thoughts of donating blood or life force passed through his mind for a moment-how cool would that be? So cool, as long as Frank didn’t actually, like, drain him or whatever, but he trusted Frank not to do that. Frank might be dead or supernatural, but he wasn’t evil. Gerard could tell.
“Gerard Way, you are so fucking weird,” Frank said into Gerard’s neck, but he sounded pretty delighted about it, so Gerard let himself wriggle happily, at least internally. “I can’t fucking believe you. You’re not-you’re not scared at all, are you?”
“Of you?” Gerard asked incredulously, and then snorted. “Uh, no? Hate to break it to you, Frankie, but you’re not super scary.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Frank mumbled, ducking his head a little further into Gerard’s hoodie and snuffling. “I’m fucking terrifying, okay.”
“Uh huh,” Gerard said, and let himself squeeze Frank back a little. “You and your expired Diet Coke and your bridge of doom. I’ll alert the presses.”
“Fuck off,” Frank said indignantly, and drew in a quavering breath that seemed to rattle the trees and send a cascade of leaves around them. He was shaking, just a little, and Gerard was finally reviewing their previous conversation and was coming to the conclusion that he’d been kind of an asshole.
“Frank,” he said, finally, and Frank pulled away, rubbing at his face and not meeting his eyes. “You know… I would never just, fucking leave or whatever, right? I, uh, I mean, I like you. A lot. And,” he added hastily, when Frank’s head shot up, “you’re a fucking ghost! Or something else, I don’t even know. That’s totally awesome except, um, in the way I would rather you not be dead? Except you have to admit it’s kind of totally awesome.”
Frank looked skeptical, and he still had one hand clamped on Gerard’s arm, like he was afraid Gerard might suddenly tear off in the opposite direction. Gerard remembered again how fucking thrilled Frank had been to see Gerard that first time, how Frank constantly reached out to touch him and wow, he really was an asshole. If Frank was dead… Gerard felt abruptly sick.
He must have died when he was just eighteen years old, on the brink of going to college-his whole life stretched out ahead of him. He must have died in a white t-shirt and ripped jeans, alone in the woods. Gerard couldn’t wrap his head around that part of things. Frank could be dead, but he couldn’t have died.
But he had, obviously, and for all Gerard knew he was the first person in over a decade to hug Frank, to talk to him or joke with him. No wonder Frank had freaked out. Jesus, Gerard was a jerk.
“Hey,” Gerard said softly. “Seriously, it’s okay. I don’t discriminate against the dead. It’s okay, Frankie. I am totally pro-the dead. I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”
Frank looked up and when he laughed, it sounded all clogged and choked, but he was grinning again.
“Yeah? I should have known, you giant morbid freak,” he said, and wiped at his nose. Ghost snot! Gerard thought, entranced, and wondered if he could subtly offer his hoodie sleeve for a handkerchief to collect a specimen. Then he immediately felt like a jerk when Frank continued. “It’s just-usually people don’t really see me like you do, just some kind of freaky cloud or a voice or whatever. I mean, some people do, but it’s not like they stay to talk to me, you know? Much less ask to see my fucking body, you goddamn ghoul.”
“Hey,” Gerard said feelingly. “I said I was sorry!”
Frank punched him in the shoulder without looking up, and Gerard couldn’t even be mad about how it actually sort of hurt, because a fucking ghost had just fucking punched him in the shoulder. So cool.
“It’s okay,” Frank said, lifting his head and smiling faintly. “My corpse is pretty awesome, I’m not gonna lie. I mean, who gets to see their own skull? It’s pretty badass.” He made a wiggly hand gesture indicating the general badassness of his cranium.
“People who get MRIs?” Gerard suggested, then backpedalled rapidly when Frank glared. “Not that that is in any way cool. Radar technology, what the fuck ever. Who needs it?” Frank shook his head, and Gerard had to admit he probably did have an awesome skull, what with those cheekbones and that jaw line and the curve of forehead he could see now.
“Do you ever do, like, Hamlet and Yorick scenes?” he asked, unthinking.
“No!” Frank said. “Who would do that? Oh my god, you would. You would totally do that.”
“Maybe?” Gerard hedged shiftily, and subtly changed the subject. “The point is, I mean, you couldn’t have thought I’d have minded, right? You should have told me ages ago! I thought you were fucking homeless, man. I was going to kidnap you and make you live with me in my closet.”
“You what?” Frank spluttered, raising a hand to hide his smile when Gerard scowled. “Dude, seriously? You thought I was just living out here?”
“It was a totally reasonable assumption!” he said defensively. “I didn’t have all the information! If you’d just been upfront about it-I mean, what’d you think I thought?”
“I couldn’t,” Frank interrupted, and then looked away, and his face was all in shadow so that Gerard couldn’t see his expression. “Gerard, I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I mean, what if you’d just thought I was crazy, or if you’d run away-Fuck, Gee, what would I do if you left?”
“But I wouldn’t! I won’t!” Gerard said, exasperated. “I told you, you’re not scary. You’re awesome. It’s awesome.”
“Is it?” Frank said weirdly, staring at Gerard, and Gerard had to abruptly steel himself not to look away or lean back. Frank had never looked at Gerard like this before, intense and otherworldly. He seemed almost luminescent, hollow, like the skin of a paper lantern, and his eyes were bright and distant. Not human.
“It is,” Gerard gritted out, and folded his arms over his chest. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t. Frank could fuck off with his fucking freaky-deaky ghost-routine.
Then Frank sighed abruptly, scowling a little and shoving his hair out of his face, and he was just Frank again, rolling his eyes and long-suffering.
“I need a fucking cigarette,” Frank grumped, and laid his head on his knees, holding out a hand imploringly while Gerard fished in his pocket for the battered box of Marlboro Reds.
“How can you smoke, by the way?” Gerard asked, pleased when his voice came out steady and normal. “Do you even taste it, really?”
“This is the end of all normal conversation, isn’t it?” Frank said mournfully, and lit up without answering. Gerard watched to see if he could see the smoke move down Frank’s throat, into his lungs, but he could only see smooth, opaque skin. He wondered if Frank could get hickeys. “We’re never gonna talk about anything else ever again. I’m just ectoplasm to you now.”
“Ectoplasm?” Gerard squeaked, and then, belatedly, said, “Uh, I mean, no, of course not. I would never objectify you like that.”
Frank scowled at him.
“Such a liar,” he muttered, and stole Gerard’s pack of cigarettes, but Gerard saw a faint glimmer of a smile lurking around the corners of Frank’s mouth, so he figured he wasn’t accidentally being a jerk again. Frank was probably used to it by now anyway, he figured. Still, Gerard should probably change the subject. Then he remembered.
“Oh!” he said, rustling in his bag and emerging triumphantly with a stack of comics. “I brought you these, um. Here. Guess you can’t get out to the comic stores much, right? Hah.” Crap, he was talking about the dead thing again. This was useless.
Frank didn’t seem to mind, though, just snatched Gerard the comics out of his hands, and then dug gleefully through the bag for more.
“Normally I just swipe what I can off campers and shit, but damn!” He clutched the Seven Soldiers of Victory to his chest, beaming and looking like any other human comic geek. A hot, totally out of Gerard’s league, geek, to be honest. “This is fucking-Gee, have I told you lately how awesome you are? So fucking awesome. I don’t-how did I get so fucking lucky, man?”
“Aww, dude,” Gerard said, and kicked his feet against a stump, trying not to beam. “I just, you know, didn’t think we could still be friends if you hadn’t read about Zatanna and the new Spider. I guess you, uh, can’t leave the forest or whatever?” He wasn’t prying into Frank’s deadness, per se. Just making polite conversation. Right.
“Obviously not, or I’d have followed you home and set up camp in your closet,” Frank said, pawing through the bookbag for more and crooning to the smooth plastic. Gerard scowled as he watched one of the pages crumple slightly in Frank’s enthusiastic hands. Frank continued absently as he flipped pages, “I’m totally stuck here. Ghostly territory, ends at the edges of the forest, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah. It’s pretty boring. Oh my god, dude, you have the Defenders series? Sweet!”
“You better not fuck those up,” Gerard grumped, a little annoyed to have so thoroughly lost Frank’s attention but at the same time sort of pleased for the opportunity to ogle Frank busting a nut over Gerard’s comic book collection without fear of being spotted. Also, Frank fucking haunted a forest. He rolled that over in his mind gleefully, then got distracted by Frank’s indignant snort.
“Of course not! What do you think I am?” Frank glared Gerard, and god, it was fucking awkward to stare into someone’s eyes, he didn’t know what all the movies and his aunt’s collection of romance novels were all about. It was awkward, and weird, and filled with this expectant waiting, and Gerard wound up having to huff and look away and feel like a necrophiliac.
Was it even necrophilia if you weren’t attracted to the body, but to the, uh, spiritual material? What the fuck was Frank anyway? A strangely solid nimbus? Could Frank even have sex?
“Like you don’t have pizza sauce all over them anyway, asshole,” Frank muttered, peering at the panels in the dimming light. He glanced up at Gerard, then looked down again quickly, fidgeting with the binding on one issue and, Gerard noted indignantly, crumpling the pages.
“On, like, one page,” Gerard pointed out, and then sighed in defeat. Comics were for enjoying, anyway, except maybe first editions and special editions, and okay, so maybe Frank couldn’t really fuck them up any worse than they already were, unless he did some kind of ghost ninja reading kung fu with them and then dropped them in a river.
“So, seriously, who told you?” Frank asked. He still wasn’t quite meeting Gerard’s eyes. “Or did you figure it out all on your lonesome?”
Gerard was a little sheepish that he hadn’t figured it out on his own-if anyone was going to uncover an undead ninja ghost zombie, it should have been him.
“Thought we weren’t talking about it anymore,” Gerard grumbled and stared at his muddy Converse. He could practically hear Frank rolling his eyes. “Ray was lecturing me on the evils of the forest,” he said reluctantly. “And your name came up.”
“Yeah?” Frank said companionably, and Gerard could hear him leafing through pages. When he glanced over out of the corner of his eye, it took a moment to register Frank as anything more than a pale blur. Peripheral vision, Gerard thought. They’d talked about it in biology, how you saw things differently from the side than you did head -on, something about rods and cone cells and the color purple.
“Yeah,” Gerard said, swallowing around a strange lump in his throat, and forced himself to lean against the cool solidity of Frank’s shoulder. “Apparently you scared the shit out of Ray and his friend Patrick five years ago. He’s still all shaken up about it.”
“Five years?” Frank said, finally looking up, a small frown on his face. “I don’t… really, it was five fucking years ago?”
“I guess,” Gerard said, slowly. “Ray said he was twelve, when he saw you. I guess Patrick was maybe ten or eleven. So, yeah.”
“Doesn’t seem that long,” Frank said slowly, scratching his chin. “Or it seems longer. I dunno. But I remember, yeah, little Ray Toro and his friend, sneaking around the woods with their flashlights. Five years, wow.” Frank hunched his shoulders and stared back down at the bright, glossy pages. “I didn’t mean to scare them, you know?” he said softly, flipping the pages. “I was just trying to say hey.”
“I don’t think they saw you really well,” Gerard offered hesitantly, and Frank shrugged.
“Probably not,” he said, then shook himself, grinning up at Gerard. “Fucking kids, man. They come in every now and then, all Are You Afraid of the Dark, with flashlights and s’mores and shit, and get all shocked when I actually show up.” Frank gave a big, shark-like smile, all teeth. “Hey, I aim to please. Sometimes I even steal their shit, their comics and whatever.”
“Low, Iero,” Gerard whistled, and made himself shake his head in mock-disapproval.
“Oh, whatever, some kids love it, right?” Frank said, which Gerard had to concede was probably true, for the most part. “If they didn’t want to get dicked around with, they shouldn’t have come in the motherfucking haunted woods. I have a duty to scare folk shitless. It’s like a moral imperative.”
“Mmm. Justify your petty theft all you like,” Gerard said, snapping open a back issue of Miller’s Batman. “You’re just as bad as Peeves, man.”
“Okay, one? It’s not petty theft,” Frank said, and stole Gerard’s comic and waved it under his nose. “I need comics! For my mental health. It’s extenuating circumstances or some shit. And two,” he said, leaning back and narrowing his eye, “Did you just call me a perv? Because I’m pretty sure that camp of girls were over eighteen. And I wasn’t, uh.” Frank started to stammer as Gerard glared. “I didn’t do anything!” Frank backpedalled. “There were right there! Changing! And I’m all cold and shit so their nipples were all hard, and then I guess I made a noise or something and they ran away screaming like fucking banshees. Tits all over the place.” Frank drifted off dreamily. “I miss sex,” he said a little sadly, and then Gerard choked on his own spit, and decided the better part of valor was to attack Frank’s appalling pop culture ignorance.
“Peeves,” Gerard said faintly. “Peeves is the poltergeist in Harry Potter.”
“The what in the who, now?” Frank said, frowning, and that was Gerard’s afternoon sorted out. By the time it was getting dark, Gerard had about caught Frank up to the Half-Blood Prince-around the Goblet of Fire he finally thought to ask if Frank wanted to actually borrow the books and read them himself, or whatever. Frank stared for a moment before bursting into laughter-which, whatever, stupid ungrateful fucker-and motioned Gerard to continue with his super-awesome condensed version. While he talked, Frank played quiet lilting melodies on the guitar and finished off the rest of
Gerard’s cigarettes, occasionally piping up with questions and what he obviously thought were extremely witty comments about wands and horcruxes.
It was actually easy to forget Frank was dead, most of the time. It just seemed so normal, and then it’d hit Gerard all over again like a fucking brick to the head. Dead. Frank was dead. People went somewhere after they died, obviously. They didn’t just disappear. It fucking blew his mind.
When Gerard had to leave at the end of the day, Frank walked him to the edge of the woods, and then looked at Gerard with a strange, bemused expression. Then he leaned in, wrapping a hand around the back of Gerard’s neck.
Gerard had a brief heart attack.
“Hey,” Frank exhaled, nose to Gerard’s. “Hey, you.”
“Hey,” Gerard squeaked, and almost thought he felt Frank’s lip ring cold against the corner of his mouth. The wind was blowing, just enough to cut through the last of the day’s warmth and scatter dead leaves from the trees above. Wisps of fogs were coalescing in the fields and curling along the entrance to the path in the twilight, damp around their feet, and Gerard thought that probably this was as perfect a moment as his life would ever provide, with Frank’s mouth inches away.
“Thanks,” Frank said, and Gerard tried not to go cross-eyed looking at him.
“For what?” Gerard asked, voice hoarse and nearly soundless, hopeful, and then suddenly Frank shook himself, and stepped back. Gerard made a low protesting noise in his throat before he could stop himself, and then felt his cheeks heat with embarrassment.
“For being, you know, not a screaming girl or whatever,” Frank mumbled, gnawing at a fingernail. “You should probably go.”
Gerard stared, but it wasn’t like he could call Frank out. Because, okay, that totally seemed like the set up for a kiss, but what if it wasn’t? What if Frank had forgotten the bounds of normal behavior out in the forest, living with the rabbits and ducks and campers?
Maybe ghosts didn’t even kiss people. Maybe kissing a ghost killed you. Who the fuck knew. Frank probably didn’t even have a sex drive. He was dead.
“It’s not like boys don’t scream too,” Gerard pointed out sullenly. Fucking tease asshole of a ghost. He had to have known that was the set-up for a fucking kiss, he had to. “But, yeah, I should get going. Mom’s probably waiting for me.”
“You could come back later tonight, though. If you wanted,” Frank said nonchalantly, and now he wasn’t looking at his shoes, he was looking at Gerard’s shoes. It would be just Gerard’s luck to have a crush on a dead guy with a foot fetish.
“I could,” Gerard said, and stuffed his hands in his pockets, trying not to scowl. “I guess. I mean, if you want.”
“Yeah?” And Frank was peeking up through his bangs, the asshole. Gerard tried to glare at him, but from the way Frank beamed he suspected it had come out as more of a dopey smile. Goddammit. “So what time do you want to meet, then? Visiting hours at the hospital end at ten, right? You could come out after that. I can make a fire and shit, it’ll be awesome.”
“Um, yeah,” Gerard said, a little surprised Frank remembered about the visiting hours. “Sometimes Mikey gets the nurses to let us stay later, though. I dunno, I could probably be out here at maybe… midnight? Is that okay?”
“Of course it’s okay, what the fuck else am I going to be doing,” Frank said, rolling his eyes. “Hate to break it to you, but midnight isn’t actually the witching hour. I’m not off, like, possessing pumpkins or Ouija boards each night.”
Gerard could feel his eyes get huge.
“I didn’t even think of that!” he exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Oh man, are you affected by the time of day? I mean, you were all insubstantial that one night, right? I was sort of drunk, but I think I remember-” Oh fuck. If everything that night had actually happened-fuck. He buried his face in his hands. “Shit, I threw up through you!” he moaned. “Oh, Frank, that’s so gross, fuck. I’m so sorry!”
“No kidding,” Frank muttered, but he was smiling as he said it, a funny crooked half-smile Gerard glimpsed from between his fingers. “No sweat, I forgive you.”
“I can’t believe I threw up through you,” Gerard repeated dolefully, and the only thing that kept him from sprinting off through the night and never coming back was that it was equal parts horrifically embarrassing and awesome. “So does that mean you can walk through me?” He reached out and thumped Frank’s arm, but Frank remained stubbornly solid.
“Christ, Gee,” Frank said, and shoved his shoulder. “You’ll have to find out later, fucker. When you come back. You’ll be back, right? To see me walk through walls if nothing else.”
“Really?” Gerard said, clutching his hoodie closer to himself and beaming. “Through walls?”
“Walls, trees, your face. Whatever.”
“Really?” Gerard squeaked, and Frank rolled his eyes.
“Oh my god, fucker, go, you’re going to be late!” he said, and Gerard totally was, and his mom was going to kill him, so he made himself start jogging off, away from the forest and towards the lights of the school parking lot. He kept looking over his shoulder, though, and Frank was still standing there at the edge of the woods, hands in his pockets.
Gerard waved-like a giant dork, but he was too excited to really care at this point.
“Bye, Frankie!” he hollered. “See you later! Don’t fuck up my comics!”
Even from the parking lot he could tell Frank was flipping him off indignantly. He couldn’t stop grinning, not even when he got home and his mom looked at him weirdly and started muttering about the apocalypse again. Oh man, he could not wait to see Mikey. They had so much research to do.
***
PART SIX