Fic: You Only Hear the Music When Your Heart Begins to Break (1/2) | Frank/Gerard | R
Title: You Only Hear the Music When Your Heart Begins to Break
Author: solar_cat
Fandom: Bandom (My Chemical Romance)
Pairing: Frank/Gerard, mentions of Frank/OFC
Rating: R, mostly for language
Wordcount ~13,700
Contains: Excessive use of the word "fuck" in every possible context, author who has clearly watched too many 1980s teen movies, lots of handwaving of medical details, far too many references to canon for this to be a respectable AU.
Summary: Frank has high school figured out. His mom has given up arguing about the amount of time he spends in Gerard's basement, and he doesn't actually care if people think it's weird that he and Gerard hold hands in the hallways and go to the bathroom together. The only thing Frank cares about is figuring out why Gerard's suddenly avoiding him -- because what's the point of losing your virginity on Prom Night if you can't tell your best friend about it in the morning?
Notes: This is a sequel to my first-ever bandom fic, Vampires Will Never Hurt You (But I Make No Promises About Zombies), in which Gerard has a disease that means he can't go out in the sun, Frank is the New Kid, and they are as married as it is possible for fourth graders to be. This fic picks back up with them in high school, because psuedo_catalyst asked me what happened to them, and I told her, and her squee forced me to make it into an actual sequel. Forced. *cough*
Big thanks to psuedo_catalyst and likeaglass, without whose enthusiasm and prodding this story would not exist, and to ipreferaviators for helpfully informing me that calling this the Vampires sequel all the time was giving people the misleading impression that the story involves vampires. Which it mostly doesn't.
Medical details have been handwaved in the extreme, but Gerard's disease is heavily based on acute intermittent porphyria and hereditary coproporphyria.
The very first day of their freshman year of high school, one of the senior jocks catches Frank watching Gerard take a piss.
It's not like he's actually looking at Gerard's dick or anything, though it's right there and kind of hard to miss. It's that sometimes Gerard's piss turns sort of reddish-purple. Frank thought it was hilarious when he first found out about it, but he'd been all of ten years old at the time. It stopped being funny once he figured out that it meant Gerard was having an attack, or sometimes about to have one, and it really stopped being funny once he realized that if the attack was already starting, sometimes Gerard wouldn't notice.
They do everything together anyway, and so what if that going-to-the-bathroom-together thing is supposed to be for girls? Frank is never, ever going to allow a repeat of the time he sort of giggled about the purple piss thing and not ten minutes later watched in impotent horror while Gerard screamed in pain, curled up on the floor and clutching his stomach, until Mikey came running and kept Gerard's hair out of his face while he threw up and forced pills down his throat when he stopped.
Frank knows all the pills in Gerard's backpack; what they do, and which ones he needs at which times. He knows how to tell when Gee just needs to eat (his lunch is mostly bread, which can't be very tasty but Gerard says he's used to it), and when he needs his pills, and when it's time to get him to the office so they can call his mom and get him to his doctor. Frank also knows that the fact that he does know all of this is the only reason Mikey didn't stow away in one of their backpacks or something. Frank had been forced to promise like, a million times that he would take care of Gerard, and even then Mikey didn't look very convinced. The high school is only a half-mile away from the K-8 school Mikey is still attending, but Frank knows it's pretty much the furthest apart Gerard and Mikey have ever been.
He promised Mikey he'd take care of Gerard, and anyway, Gerard is Frank's best friend, so yeah, he's watching Gerard take a piss (reassuringly yellowish) when this big jock wearing the standard-issue letterman jacket and crew cut comes into the boys' bathroom and sees Frank watching, and says,
"Are you some kinda faggot or something? You like watching your boyfriend take a piss?" In this voice like he expects Frank to be menaced.
And maybe he should be, because Asshole Jock Guy is at least a foot-and-a-half taller than Frank, and probably three times his weight, but basically everyone is bigger than Frank, so it's not like he's gonna be intimidated by that. Gerard, though, looks pretty intimidated, finishing up and tucking himself away quickly, which Frank gets. Gee's not really all that good with confrontation on the best of days, and getting into a fight with your dick hanging out would suck. Luckily, that's what he has Frank for.
"So what if I do?" Frank says, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep himself limber. He wants Asshole Jock Guy to take a swing at him, but he doesn't actually want to get hit. Gerard looks a little wide-eyed, like what are you doing Frankie?? but Frank's between him and Asshole Jock Guy, so he'll be fine. "What's the matter, your boyfriend won't let you watch?" He taunts, and Asshole Jock Guy growls.
"You little punk--!" Asshole Jock Guy shouts, and -- yes! -- takes a swing at Frank that he dodges expertly. A few seconds later, Asshole Jock Guy is on the floor, groaning in pain and clutching both his bloody nose (hopefully broken, Frank thought he felt it crack) and his crotch, and Gerard is saying, "Oh my god, Frank, you're going to get expelled!"
Frank grabs Gerard's hand and starts pulling him toward the door. The break between classes is almost over, and if they're late they'll get in trouble. More trouble, Frank knows, than he'll get in for breaking Asshole Jock Guy's nose, which seems paradoxical, but Frank read the student handbook cover-to-cover. The school has a no-tolerance policy for hate speech and hazing, and Frank has Gee to back him up that Asshole Jock Guy had called him a faggot and tried to punch him. But he doubts it'll even get that far.
"I need to wash my hands," Gerard protests, and Frank lets go of him so he can. He contemplates his own hands briefly before deciding that he doesn't care that his hand touched Gerard's hand that had been touching his dick. Like, dick germs can't be that different from person to person, and Frank touches his own dick all the time, so whatever. But, Gerard's sort of obsessive about shit like that (even though he almost never showers, which is way grosser than a few dick germs), so Frank washes his hands too, then pulls Gerard's gloves out of his pocket and hands them over once Gerard's hands are dry.
Gerard smiles at him and puts them on, but then Asshole Jock Guy gives another moan and Gerard looks nervous again so Frank grabs his newly-gloved hand and tugs him along to their next class.
Gerard spends art class drawing a picture of Frank the superhero defeating a hulking giant with a crew cut, and still has time to draw the stupid bowl of fruit that Frank spends the hour slaving over. Art's not really his thing, but he used his asthma as a get-out-of-gym-forever card, and by taking art instead of PE, he and Gerard have perfectly matching schedules. (Frank sees nothing wrong with this; "codependency" isn't a vocabulary word until like, junior year anyway.) Gerard gives the drawing of Frank to Frank, as he always does, and Frank puts it in his folder to keep it flat until he can file it away when he gets home. He's got a whole shelf of binders full of Gerard's drawings, all in little plastic sleeves that his mom got so sick of buying that she stocked up in bulk.
~*~
As Frank predicted, by the end of the day the entire school knows that it was Frank who broke Asshole Jock Guy's nose, but the Assistant Principal and the school nurse hear some lame-ass story about an accident with a door that Asshole Jock Guy opened too quickly.
The incident catapults Frank to the coveted status of 'coolest person in the class' among the freshmen, and the bigger kids -- which is pretty much everyone -- don't hassle him or Gerard, even though they go to the bathroom together (and Frank watches Gerard piss), and sit next to each other in every class except the fifteen minutes of alphabetically-arranged homeroom, and hold hands in the hallways. Frank doesn't really give a fuck what anyone else thinks about it. It's not like it's a thing, it's just them, him and Gerard. It's what they do.
And it's not like he doesn't have girlfriends or anything. Or girlfriend, anyway, because he dates Vanessa Cavendish for two whole months in the middle of junior year, once he's got his license and can manage to wheedle his mom into letting him borrow the car. They go out for burgers and go to the movies, and in the back row of the theater she lets him reach up under her shirt and touch her boobs, and she sort of pets him through his jeans until he comes in them, which is kinda gross but mostly awesome.
She breaks up with him at the end of the two months, though. As far as Frank can tell, it isn't even anything he did; she just got freaked out by Gerard's drawings, which were mostly of her being eaten by zombies. So, fuck Vanessa Cavendish anyway, because even after two months of dating she wouldn't let him below her waist, and Gerard's drawings are the fucking coolest things ever. He keeps all of them in his binders, even the one Vanessa spilled Coke on the last time she ate lunch with them.
The breakup actually hurts more than Frank thought it would, though. It wasn't like he was in love with Vanessa or anything, but he liked her. And going from guy-with-a-girlfriend to guy-who-just-got-dumped-at-lunch-for-telling-his-girlfriend-she-looked-good-having-her-brain-eaten really sucks. Luckily she breaks up with him on a Friday, so Frank feels justified in spending almost the entire weekend in Gerard's basement bedroom, reading comic books and complaining about how Vanessa was a total bitch anyway, he doesn't know why he ever liked her. Gerard makes sympathetic noises and spends all day Saturday drawing vampires for Frank, which is his way of saying cheer up! and I still think you're awesome. Which is dumb, 'cause he says all that stuff out loud, too, but Frank never looks a gift vampire in the mouth. Gerard draws really excellent vampires.
Gerard's mom bought an air mattress when they were thirteen and she came downstairs one morning after Frank stayed over -- to get Gerard up for some appointment or something, Frank doesn't really remember -- and realized they were still sharing Gerard's bed like they had been ever since they were nine. The air mattress is still in its box, somewhere in the junkyard under Gerard's bed. There's not really space for it on the floor anyway, since the floor is usually covered with a thick layer of dirty clothes and comic books and notebooks and action figures and the detritus of Frank and Gerard and Mikey's ongoing D&D game (which is basically him and Mikey trying to convince Gerard that it's really unfair to put the two of them up against a whole army of orcs when they're still only at level 5).
But even if there was room for it, Frank doesn't want to sleep on the air mattress. Gerard's bed is the perfect mix of soft and lumpy, and Gerard doesn't care that Frank always ends up using him as a human teddy bear. Plus it's better that way, because with Gerard curled up against him, he can kind of just tell when Gerard's gonna be sick in the middle of the night, and he's right there when Gerard needs Frank to hug him tightly, to hold him close so he knows he's safe and that the monsters in his head aren't real.
Sometimes if it's a bad night, Mikey climbs in on Gerard's other side and they all sort of huddle together, even though Gerard's bed isn't actually wide enough for three people. It's not weird or anything, not really, though logically Frank knows that most sixteen-year-old guys would rather be caught dead than sleep curled up with their best friend and his little brother. Frank thinks most sixteen-year-old guys are pretty fucking stupid.
Gerard is way better for cuddling with than Vanessa, anyway, especially when he rolls over and smushes his face against Frank's neck and leaves drool spots on the collar of Frank's t-shirt.
~*~
Frank's mom is worried about him.
He can tell she's worried, because she says things like, "Frank, I'm worried about you," which leads to meetings with his guidance counselor in which he has to explain again that he's not 'anti-social', he'd just rather hang out with Gerard than anyone else. And that he's small and looks sort of sickly because hello, asthma, so it's not like he'd be joining the football team even if he had a foot more height and an extra hundred pounds of muscle. And if he's pale it's because his best friend can't go out in the sun and Frank has this thing where he tries not to be a massive douchebag to his best friend by going off and doing stuff he can't do.
Frank finds himself explaining all of these things at least twice a year, every year since the fifth grade, so he's learned how to phrase that last part so the point gets across without him needing to use the word 'douchebag', which always makes his mother sigh and say, "Language, Frank," like she doesn't know perfectly well that 'douchebag' is exactly the right word.
He's halfway tempted to start some kind of drug habit, just so his mom will have something to actually complain about, but you need to like, make friends with drug dealers to do that, and Frank is basically just friends with Gerard. And Mikey, but Frank's pretty sure Mikey's illegal activities only extend as far as bootlegging DVDs to supplement his and Gerard's allowance-slash-comic-book fund.
Instead, he buys a couple of skin mags off the guy a couple lockers down, and sticks them under his mattress. It should be a good distraction for his mom, he thinks. Or at least it'll give her something different to be worried about for once.
Frank is mystified when he comes home from school to find that his mom has changed his sheets (which means she has to have seen the magazines; he made them really obvious and everything), but doesn't appear to care. In fact, she smiles at him way more than usual, and lets him have a third helping of spaghetti, which she never does because she claims it's for leftovers.
Moms, Frank decides, are fucking weird.
~*~
They don't talk about college until the summer before their senior year, when Frank's mom starts leaving college brochures in places where Frank is likely to find them, like inside the microwave or under the strings of his guitar. She stops with the microwave thing when Frank just leaves the brochure in there while he heats up his hot pocket, and the staples spark and set the whole thing on fire. It's only a little fire, but his mom's really touchy about shit like that. Anyway, there went the University of Nebraska, which Frank wasn't going to consider anyway.
Frank's college choices are pretty limited. If he had to write out a list, it would have one thing on it: Wherever Gerard's going.
Not that he really thinks of it like that, because that would be sort of stupid, like he's some lametard in a John Hughes movie. It's just that Frank doesn't have any particular ambitions, and he doesn't feel like an ambition is gonna drop out of the sky and land on him like one of those ACME cartoon anvils. College without Gerard would be ... well, it'd be a lot like life without Gerard, and maybe it's fucked up, but Frank doesn't actually remember much of life-before-Gerard, and what he does remember was pretty boring. If he'd had Gerard around back then, maybe when he fell out of the tree in his old backyard he would have ended up with a story about how he was wounded battling hordes of the undead, defending the tree fortress from the forces of evil, instead of just getting a cast with lots of stupid "feel better!" comments written on it in Sharpie. Gerard probably would have been willing to do like, a mural on his cast. That would have been cool.
So that's how it is. Frank knows that Gerard's gonna go to art school. He's known Gerard is going to art school since the first time he ever turned his imagination to such mythical places as 'college'. Frank doesn't know if they let you into art school if you can't draw worth shit (despite enrolling in four years of high school art classes, and Gerard trying to teach him all these little tricks that he swears will help), but he figures they've gotta have art history majors, or something that doesn't involve being graded on your actual artistic ability. He flirts briefly with the idea of majoring in guitar or something, maybe they let you do that, except playing guitar is fun and there's no way Frank is going to take his fun thing and make it into work, much less homework. Ew.
They're lying on Gerard's bed at the end of August, enjoying the cool of the basement even though it's the height of summer and Gerard mostly can't go outside, so the cool of the basement is actually about the only temperature they experience. Maybe most people would be lying sideways, legs hanging off the side of the bed and a respectable amount of distance between them, but they're stretched out lengthwise, bare feet knocking together, and Gerard has Frank's arm and is busy drawing Crayola marker tattoos all over it (because Frank's mom vetoed Sharpie after that incident in the fifth grade).
"I think I'm gonna go to art school," Gerard says seriously, capping his marker and letting the ink dry a little before switching colors. He glances at Frank like he's expecting Frank to be shocked or something.
"Duh," Frank says, shrugging his decorated shoulder for emphasis. "Where are you gonna go?"
Gerard fidgets with the green marker for a minute. "I don't know. Somewhere in New York, maybe? Like SVA or Parsons? SCAD is too far south," he says. "The sun." Frank knows, and he reaches out to hold onto the edge of Gerard's t-shirt with his fingertips. It's warm and a little sweaty, kind of like Gerard himself, and the cotton slides over Gerard's belly when he takes a soft breath. Frank likes how Gerard is a little bit pudgy, at that just-right place between bony and muscular where he's really neither of those things.
"Make sure wherever you're going has Art History or something," Frank tells him, and Gerard blinks at him.
"But I don't want to take Art History," he says, following up with, "Or, well, yeah, I guess I probably should, you have to have a solid foundation--"
"You're so dumb," Frank cuts him off, and Gerard looks really hurt for a second until Frank tugs on his t-shirt and says, "I meant for me, fucker. There's no way my mutated fruit pictures are getting me into your fancy artist classes."
"You don't even like art, Frankie," Gerard reminds him, but his eyes are all glittery and he's dropped the marker in favor of letting his hand fall down to Frank's hip, where his fingers splay out across the divide between waistband and skin.
"I like your art," Frank corrects him. "So maybe I'll learn about all this stuff, and then you can be a famous artist and I'll be like, your agent. Or whatever famous artists have. That guy who tells everybody how awesome you are and how they should spend millions of dollars buying your paintings and shit."
"You probably shouldn't call it shit if you want people to spend millions of dollars on it," Gerard says, all his stupidly freaky little teeth on display when he smiles.
"See?" Frank says, as if Gerard has just proven his point, "This is why I need to take all those classes. So you have to go somewhere they have Art History."
"Okay," Gerard says, still smiling, and he picks up his marker again to finish his design. A tangled vine of jagged leaves and alien flowers winds its way up Frank's arm; he reminds himself to take a picture of it before his mom makes him shower it off, this time.
~*~
Frank doesn't have a date for the prom (and probably wouldn't have had a date for prom at all) until Melissa Shepard asks him. So he has to shell out all of his lunch and comics money for the week to buy the tickets, but he figures it's worth it, because the way she asked him he's pretty sure that he's gonna get laid. The rest of prom (and most of high school) can go fuck itself, but Frank isn't going to graduate a virgin if he can help it. He tells Gerard about it during art class, because Mr. Thornapple would probably get down on his knees and suck Gerard's dick if Gerard asked him to, so Gerard -- and by extension, Frank -- can do pretty much whatever he wants to do in art class and never even get called out on it.
"So I'm taking Melissa Shepard to prom," he says, dropping his backpack on the floor next to Gerard's and hopping a little to get situated on his stool. It fucking sucks, being a goddamn midget. But hey, getting laid, so Frank focuses on that instead of how the art room was clearly designed with the basketball team in mind. Gerard pauses, his charcoal and ink stained fingertips hovering over his current piece.
Gerard's already been in the art room for an hour, since the school let him sign up to take two periods of art so he could work on his senior project. It's the first time they haven't had every class together, and it's fucking weird, but the guidance counselor took one look at Frank's class schedule request and snorted at him and said I'm sure you and Mr. Way are capable of surviving without each other for fifty minutes a day and then signed him up for the accounting class that his mom thought he should take and that he thought was bullshit. (It still is bullshit, but he ended up being halfway decent at it, so at least he's not going to flunk the class.)
"Oh. Yeah?" Gerard says tonelessly, going back to smudging, "I didn't know you liked her."
Frank shrugs. "She asked me. But she's totally hot, right?" He briefly imagines Melissa, in that skirt she'd been wearing last week that only barely covered her ass. Yeah, totally hot.
"I guess," Gerard says, picking up his lumpy gray eraser and viciously attacking whatever part of his drawing had offended him in the last ten seconds.
"I'm gonna get laid!" Frank crows, keeping his voice low enough that he's not announcing it to the entire room, but Thornapple still gives him the stink eye. He shifts defensively toward Gerard and looks critically at the blank sheet of his sketchbook that he's supposed to be drawing on, like he's trying to figure out where to start, until someone else raises a hand and Thornapple's teacher-ly attention moves away from Frank.
"But you're not even dating her," Gerard says, setting his lumpy eraser down and looking at Frank with confusion written all over his face.
"So?" Frank wrinkles his nose. He doesn't want to date Melissa Shepard. He'd probably have to go see really awful movies, like the ones his mom likes that all have Hugh Grant in them, and spend all his money on taking her out instead of buying Doom Patrol and Punisher. If there was one lesson Frank learned from his brief relationship with Vanessa Cavendish, it's that girlfriends are way too high maintenance. He thinks he's better off as one of those suave, too-cool, love-'em-and-leave-'em types who wear leather jackets, and sunglasses even when it's dark out, and who have like, lines of girls waiting for their chance to try to tame them (but of course Frank would never be tamed; he would just leave them in the dust, looking mournfully after him as he rides off on the motorcycle he'd developed at some point in this daydream).
"So how do you even know she wants to? You can't just assume that because she wears short skirts she wants to have sex with you, Frank," Gerard says, slipping easily from confused into lecture mode, where he informs Frank about the evils of the world and all the ways people are being oppressed. Gerard's lecture mode is the reason that Frank's a vegetarian now, which is sort of balls because Gerard was supposed to be a vegetarian with him but flaked out after two weeks and came to school smelling like sausage McMuffin. Frank hadn't forgiven him for at least five hours, which still stands on record as their longest fight ever. Now Frank has to content himself with giving Gerard sad, soulful looks designed to make him feel guilty every time he eats something that had a face.
"Dude, I know," Frank says, waving a hand. Gerard shuts up but looks mildly annoyed, probably because he was working up to a full-scale ramble, and Frank knows how much he likes those. "But she said, specifically, that a bunch of people are going to this hotel afterwards, and, get this, we could get a room or something. She said it just like that!" He grins in Gerard's face as Gerard's pinched expression moves around and shifts, like Gerard is totally actually conflicted about this. Frank sighs. "Gee, man, I am getting laid. Stop thinking about teen pregnancy statistics and be happy for me."
Gerard blinks, his face going blank for a second, then he looks down at his feet and when he looks up again, there's something like a smile on his face.
"Okay," he says, and, "That's awesome, Frankie."
"I know!" Frank says, bouncing on his stool. He kind of wants to keep talking about it, but Gerard has gone back to attacking his drawing with the lumpy eraser and is making little muttering noises under his breath, so Frank leaves him alone to be artistic and contemplates his own paper.
Maybe he'll just fill it in all black and call it an expression of his soul. But that's the sort of thing that makes his teachers call his mom and his mom call the guidance counselor, so he decides to draw the stupid water pitcher Thornapple has set out on the still-life table instead. Whatever. He's getting laid.
Frank grins and starts sketching.
~*~
Gerard is acting weird.
It took Frank a couple of days to figure that out, because Gerard always acts weird -- that's like, Gerard's whole thing -- but the point is that eventually he figures out that Gerard is acting weird even for Gerard. On Friday, which is the third day in a row that Gerard frowns when Frank says, "So I'll be over after I finish my math homework," and replies with vague explanations of "plans" and, "Maybe another time?" Frank figures out that something is fucked up.
"He's washing his hair," Mikey says in a flat, expressionless voice that not even Frank, with all his years of experience deciphering Mikeyway, can read into. Frank punches the doorframe of the Way house, which does more damage to his hand than to the house, but he feels better. Sort of. Not much better, though.
"His fucking hair? What the fuck, Mikey!" Frank shakes out his hand and hopes his knuckles don't swell up too much. The prom is at the end of the next week, and ending up with his hand in a cast or a splint or some shit like that will put a serious damper on the whole getting laid plan. "Gee never washes his fucking hair. That is the lamest bullshit I've ever fucking heard."
Mikey shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose with his middle finger, which Frank could choose to interpret as Mikey flipping him off, but he'd rather give Mikey the benefit of the doubt on that one. "You should probably go home, Frank," he says, just as expressionless as ever, but Frank gets the feeling Mikey is somehow disappointed in him. And that's fucking stupid, because Frank didn't do anything!
"Hey!" Frank sticks a foot in the door to keep Mikey from closing it. It doesn't really work -- the door stays open a little bit, yeah, but Frank's pretty sure his foot is now broken. "Mikes, Mikey, man, what the fuck did I do?" So maybe he's begging a little, but this whatever-it-is cleared the Longest Fight record two and a half days ago, and Frank is willing to admit to unhealthy levels of codependency.
Mikey stares at him through the narrow opening of the door for a long minute. Finally he says, "Sometimes you suck, Frank. Get your foot out of the door."
Frank takes his foot out of the door, and stands staring at the grain in the wood. He actually can't remember ever being turned away from the Way house, not even when Gerard was really sick in the 7th grade and had to stay home for almost two weeks and even go to the hospital once (Gerard hates hospitals). Even then, Frank was always welcome.
Whatever he did, it was huge, and Frank doesn't have a clue what it could have been.
~*~
Frank knows Gerard is good at avoiding people -- the combination of living in the basement and letting his stringy hair fall out of his hoodie and over his face when he's forced to emerge for school is remarkably efficient at convincing people to leave him alone -- but Frank has never been considered 'people'. He doesn't want to be considered 'people', he thinks, kicking his heels against the legs of his chair and trying to forget how Gerard is sitting in the desk right next to him, completely ignoring his presence.
Gerard's fingertips are still stained with ink, and there are hints of brightly-colored paint around the edges of his fingernails; cadmium red and cheerful lemon yellow standing out starkly against the black ink and Gerard's pale skin. His fingertips are all Frank can see, the rest of him hidden behind his fingerless gloves and his hoodie and that fall of greasy hair that he had clearly not been washing, Frank knew Mikey was full of shit.
Frank keeps glancing over, hoping that one of these minutes, Gerard will realize that he's being completely overdramatic about whatever Frank did, and that he should probably forgive Frank and maybe turn his head and smile at him with all his stupid, freaky teeth, and then they'll be good again, just like they've always been. But Gerard never turns his head, and he doesn't smile. Frank kicks his heels some more, and tries to give more of a shit about 19th century literature than about whatever Gerard is drawing in his notebook, but he already knows that's a lost fucking cause.
Art class is maybe the worst, now, because Gerard managed to convince Thornapple that he needs private studio time or some shit, so he's working on his senior project in the room that used to hold the kiln until someone blew it up, and Frank is alone in a room full of people he's never bothered to talk to, drawing more mutated fruit pictures. They have to do a painting for the senior showcase, which Frank has been dreading because one, his mom is determined to come to it, which will be so fucking embarrassing Frank isn't sure how he'll survive, and two, he completely sucks at art. And now Gerard isn't even there to help him fix the shit he fucks up. He has to start on the stupid painting, though, so he decides to go with the mutated fruit thing -- it's basically his only art skill, drawing mutated fruit -- and commandeers a bowl of apples that he's pretty sure the freshmen were using for still-life practice, but they'll get over it. What do fucking freshmen know, anyway?
Frank knows fuck-all about oils despite that whole semester of oil painting that he only barely survived, so he digs into the acrylics and sets to work. That's what he does for three days of art class; he just sits there and focuses on his fucking apples, not on how Gerard isn't there. He doesn't think about how Gerard's not standing just beyond his shoulder, slaving away at his own project and occasionally piping up with advice and encouragement for Frank. He absolutely does not think about Gerard's stupid fingertips and their bright paint colors and what Gerard could possibly be working on. He doesn't think about how he hasn't heard Gerard's voice since last Friday. He doesn't think about how all he's seen of Gerard's face this week has been flashes of his nose and chin, sticking out from his hood and showing through gaps in his hair. He doesn't think about how worried he is, even though Mikey's a sophomore now and he can look after Gerard, that Gerard might miss his medication because he's too wrapped up in something to notice the time.
He finishes his fucking fruit painting on Thursday, about halfway through the hour, and sits there staring at it for ten minutes. He used all the wrong colors; the apples in the bowl are bright red and cheerful and generally look like every other freshman still-life apple Frank has ever seen, but the ones in his painting are brown and blue and sickly yellow, with deep purple shadows carving out their edges. They look angry, Frank thinks. Angry and pissed off and sad (especially the ones that kinda look like they're rotting), which he didn't know apples could look like, but there they are, staring back at him from the canvas. The one on top looks like it's ready to start something, Frank thinks, and he decides it's his favorite. Thornapple comes around to check on him, and makes an odd sound in the back of his throat. Frank winces.
"I know the colors are all fuc-- ah, messed up," Frank self-corrects; he doesn't need detention on top of everything else. It takes him a second to figure out that Thornapple doesn't look pissed off, which is how he normally looks at Frank. He's almost smiling, which is fucking weird and usually reserved for Gerard. Who Frank is not thinking about.
Thornapple's hand comes down on his shoulder, and Frank tenses, but then he's saying, "This is really fantastic work, Mr. Iero. It seems that after all this time, you have managed to learn something about art," and looking at Frank like he's proud or something. Frank doesn't understand how a fucked-up fruit painting means he's learned anything about art, but then, he doesn't understand half of the stuff that Gee always rhapsodizes about anyway. If fucked-up, weird-colored fruit makes Thornapple happy, who's Frank to argue?
"Thanks?" Frank ventures, hoping this means he won't fail the class and screw up his scholarship with NYU. Which makes Frank think about Gerard, who he's not thinking about, and how Frank's gonna be in New York, without Gerard, surrounded by art people and hipster kids and trust fund babies that Frank doesn't understand at all. Fuck.
Thornapple hands him a piece of paper, with blank spaces for him to write his name the the title of the picture. "Don't forget to sign your piece," he reminds Frank, clapping him on the shoulder again and almost knocking Frank off his art stool. He re-situates himself, then uses a small brush to paint a little FI in the corner of his painting. It makes it look almost legitimate, like one of Gerard's actually-good paintings, and fuck, he is not thinking about Gerard, who's being a dick even though Frank didn't do anything.
He looks at his little slip of paper, then pulls a ballpoint pen out of his backpack and scrawls his name on the top blank space, then in the second blank space, he scribbles Whatever I did, I'm sorry. Now please stop being such a dick. Thornapple raises an eyebrow when Frank hands him the paper, but doesn't even mention the language, probably because it's "art" so you're allowed to swear. So it's not a great title. Actually it's not even really a title at all, because Frank doesn't know what the fuck to call a bunch of angry-looking mutant apples, but Gerard won't fucking talk to him, or even look at him, and Frank knows for a fact that he spies on all the stuff that's been set aside for the senior showcase, because he's a nosy little shit as long as he doesn't have to actually ask anyone about anything.
Frank hangs around the room until he's sure he sees Thornapple putting his mutated fruit in with the rest of the stuff for the showcase -- it's Frank's only actual contribution to the show, but at least he won't fail the class now -- then hikes his backpack up on his shoulder and gets out of there before Gerard can emerge from the kiln room.
~*~
Frank doesn't get to even try to go over to the Ways' house that night, because his mom takes him out to get his hair trimmed and pick up his rented tux. He thinks he looks like a penguin, but his mom says he looks 'distinguished', which Frank is pretty sure just means 'penguin' in parent-ese. Then Melissa calls him right after dinner to go over every detail of Friday night, from not getting a corsage that will clash with her dress (Frank got a white one, because that seemed a lot fucking simpler than trying to figure all that color bullshit out) to what time the limo they're splitting with like, twenty other people is going to be picking them up at her house, and what time he needs to be there so her mom can take pictures, and a million other things Frank doesn't really give a shit about.
"The hotel room's all set," she purrs into the phone just before they hang up, and Frank almost pops wood right there in the kitchen, because fuck yes, he is so ready for that.
"Awesome," he says, grinning and trying not to think about how he won't be going over to Gerard's the next day to tell him all about it.
Melissa says hi to him in the hall the next morning before first period, winking and tossing her hair. She's wearing her short skirt again, and it distracts Frank long enough that he doesn't notice Gerard actually looking at him until it's nearly too late. Gee's eyes widen fractionally and he turns back to his notebook, burying himself in whatever's there, but he was looking, which means maybe he got Frank's note and is considering forgiving Frank, and that would be an excellent start to his last day of virginity. He's sure he feels Gerard's eyes on him a few more times throughout the morning, and he's tempted a few times to turn, to say something. He keeps himself in check, though. He tried; it's Gerard's fucking turn this time. He'd throw in thought about balls and whose court they're in, but sports metaphors and Gerard don't mix very well.
By the time Government Studies rolls around, though, Frank feels the change in the way Gerard is looking at him, feels it instinctively, with a rush of knowledge that's put together from all the little things -- the way Gerard is clutching his pencil, the way he's sitting, the way he doesn't look away when Frank turns to him, the way his pupils are wide open. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, Frank thinks, because they're in the middle of class, but fuck that anyway, some things are more important than his assured detention. He reaches across the tiny aisle and hunts through Gerard's busted mess of a backpack until he finds his sunglasses, grabbing the side of Gerard's face and turning his head so Frank can get them on his face.
They've got the attention of the entire room, now, but basically everybody knows that Gerard's got some freaky medical shit going on, so all Frank has to say is, "We're going to the office," as he shoves his books and Gerard's into their bags and pulls Gerard out of his seat, and Mrs. Nunez gives him an approving nod. Fuck, Gerard's out of it, totally gone and making tiny whimpering sounds that Frank knows well, knows them against his shoulder on the bad nights, and he's getting Gerard out of here, out of the sight of all the assholes who are snickering at him.
He has to coax Gerard down the hallway, vice grip on his gloved hand because he knows if he lets go Gerard will bolt. He asked, in the sixth or seventh grade, what Gerard saw when he got like this, what he remembered. Frank has all the drawings Gerard did after that, tucked away in one of his binders where he doesn't accidentally come across them. Just the drawings were frightening enough; Frank tries not to think about what it must be like, to think that those things are real. He's just glad there's no one out in the hallways in the middle of the class period.
"Come on, Gee," Frank mutters, over and over, keeping close to Gerard's side and taking most of his weight along with their backpacks. He's gotta get them to the office soon, or he's gonna be squished. "It's okay, right? I'm right here, and I'll punch any fucking monsters that come near us, got it?" It's enough to keep Gerard moving, sort of, though he fights Frank when he tries to take them around the corner to the hallway that leads to the office and the nurse's room, and Frank can't even guess at what he thinks is there.
Finally, finally they make it to the office, and Frank drags Gee through the doorway and says, "You need to call his mom right now," to the startled receptionist, who nods and pulls out the file of student emergency cards. Gerard's has a little red tab on it, Frank knows, because it was easier to do that than to search for it all the time. She hasn't even pulled the tab yet when Gerard grasps at Frank's shoulder, dislodging the backpack strap that was resting there. Frank lets the bag fall to the floor as Gee crowds into his personal space.
"Frankie," He says in this terrible voice, broken and scared and hurt but at least he knows who Frank is, Frank thinks fleetingly before he feels Gerard shudder. He has no idea how he does it, with Gerard clinging to him and the bags and having the reflexes of the opposite of whatever has good reflexes, but he manages to snag the trash can in the corner with two fingers before they go down in a heap of limbs and backpacks in the middle of the office and Gerard starts throwing up.
That's how they are when the runner the receptionist sent comes back with Mikey hot on her heels, and Frank looks up at Mikey as Mikey looks down at the two of them; at Gerard sprawled out and mostly in Frank's lap, dry heaving because he's got nothing left in his stomach -- there wasn't much to begin with, and Frank wants to smack him because he clearly skipped breakfast which he's not supposed to do -- and Frank's hand rubbing slowly up and down Gerard's spine, his fingers catching at the hem of Gee's sweatshirt. Mikey looks almost surprised, for Mikey, and Frank narrows his eyes at him. Like what, did Mikey think that just because they were fighting about... whatever the fuck they're fighting about, he wasn't going to take care of Gee? Fuck Mikey, if he thinks that. But Mikey's face fades back into even-more-neutral, and he settles down on the floor beside Frank, taking over the trashcan-holding duties.
"Mom should be here soon," Mikey says noncommittally. Frank nods, pressing more firmly against Gerard's shoulders when he starts shaking a little more. It helps; it always helps.
"Frankie?" Gerard murmurs again, and Frank scratches his fingers through Gerard's hair, not caring that it's sort of disgusting.
"Yeah," Frank says. "I'm right here, and so's Mikey." Mikey's got one of Gerard's hands in his, and Frank can see him squeeze it, just enough. Gerard relaxes for a second. It's only a second, and then he's crying out and trying to throw up again and it's awful, but Mikey scoots in a little closer until his shoulder is pressed against Frank's, and they stay like that until Gerard's mom shows up along with two paramedics and an ambulance that doesn't have the sirens on but is an ambulance nonetheless.
"Text me?" He asks Mikey as they take Gerard out, already starting to hook him up to needles and shit that he'll fucking hate once he's coherent enough to realize they're there, and Mikey gives him that inscrutable look that Frank thinks only Gerard can translate. But he nods at Frank and says, "Yeah," which means that Frank can actually breathe again.
Then they're gone and Frank realizes he's got Gerard's Government book in his backpack, he'd just been shoving things in, and then the nurse, who hadn't been able to do anything more for Gerard than what Frank and Mikey were already doing, tells him, "You need to get back to class, Mr. Iero," so Frank sleepwalks to Accounting and fails a pop quiz spectacularly.
Continued.
Author: solar_cat
Fandom: Bandom (My Chemical Romance)
Pairing: Frank/Gerard, mentions of Frank/OFC
Rating: R, mostly for language
Wordcount ~13,700
Contains: Excessive use of the word "fuck" in every possible context, author who has clearly watched too many 1980s teen movies, lots of handwaving of medical details, far too many references to canon for this to be a respectable AU.
Summary: Frank has high school figured out. His mom has given up arguing about the amount of time he spends in Gerard's basement, and he doesn't actually care if people think it's weird that he and Gerard hold hands in the hallways and go to the bathroom together. The only thing Frank cares about is figuring out why Gerard's suddenly avoiding him -- because what's the point of losing your virginity on Prom Night if you can't tell your best friend about it in the morning?
Notes: This is a sequel to my first-ever bandom fic, Vampires Will Never Hurt You (But I Make No Promises About Zombies), in which Gerard has a disease that means he can't go out in the sun, Frank is the New Kid, and they are as married as it is possible for fourth graders to be. This fic picks back up with them in high school, because psuedo_catalyst asked me what happened to them, and I told her, and her squee forced me to make it into an actual sequel. Forced. *cough*
Big thanks to psuedo_catalyst and likeaglass, without whose enthusiasm and prodding this story would not exist, and to ipreferaviators for helpfully informing me that calling this the Vampires sequel all the time was giving people the misleading impression that the story involves vampires. Which it mostly doesn't.
Medical details have been handwaved in the extreme, but Gerard's disease is heavily based on acute intermittent porphyria and hereditary coproporphyria.
The very first day of their freshman year of high school, one of the senior jocks catches Frank watching Gerard take a piss.
It's not like he's actually looking at Gerard's dick or anything, though it's right there and kind of hard to miss. It's that sometimes Gerard's piss turns sort of reddish-purple. Frank thought it was hilarious when he first found out about it, but he'd been all of ten years old at the time. It stopped being funny once he figured out that it meant Gerard was having an attack, or sometimes about to have one, and it really stopped being funny once he realized that if the attack was already starting, sometimes Gerard wouldn't notice.
They do everything together anyway, and so what if that going-to-the-bathroom-together thing is supposed to be for girls? Frank is never, ever going to allow a repeat of the time he sort of giggled about the purple piss thing and not ten minutes later watched in impotent horror while Gerard screamed in pain, curled up on the floor and clutching his stomach, until Mikey came running and kept Gerard's hair out of his face while he threw up and forced pills down his throat when he stopped.
Frank knows all the pills in Gerard's backpack; what they do, and which ones he needs at which times. He knows how to tell when Gee just needs to eat (his lunch is mostly bread, which can't be very tasty but Gerard says he's used to it), and when he needs his pills, and when it's time to get him to the office so they can call his mom and get him to his doctor. Frank also knows that the fact that he does know all of this is the only reason Mikey didn't stow away in one of their backpacks or something. Frank had been forced to promise like, a million times that he would take care of Gerard, and even then Mikey didn't look very convinced. The high school is only a half-mile away from the K-8 school Mikey is still attending, but Frank knows it's pretty much the furthest apart Gerard and Mikey have ever been.
He promised Mikey he'd take care of Gerard, and anyway, Gerard is Frank's best friend, so yeah, he's watching Gerard take a piss (reassuringly yellowish) when this big jock wearing the standard-issue letterman jacket and crew cut comes into the boys' bathroom and sees Frank watching, and says,
"Are you some kinda faggot or something? You like watching your boyfriend take a piss?" In this voice like he expects Frank to be menaced.
And maybe he should be, because Asshole Jock Guy is at least a foot-and-a-half taller than Frank, and probably three times his weight, but basically everyone is bigger than Frank, so it's not like he's gonna be intimidated by that. Gerard, though, looks pretty intimidated, finishing up and tucking himself away quickly, which Frank gets. Gee's not really all that good with confrontation on the best of days, and getting into a fight with your dick hanging out would suck. Luckily, that's what he has Frank for.
"So what if I do?" Frank says, bouncing on the balls of his feet to keep himself limber. He wants Asshole Jock Guy to take a swing at him, but he doesn't actually want to get hit. Gerard looks a little wide-eyed, like what are you doing Frankie?? but Frank's between him and Asshole Jock Guy, so he'll be fine. "What's the matter, your boyfriend won't let you watch?" He taunts, and Asshole Jock Guy growls.
"You little punk--!" Asshole Jock Guy shouts, and -- yes! -- takes a swing at Frank that he dodges expertly. A few seconds later, Asshole Jock Guy is on the floor, groaning in pain and clutching both his bloody nose (hopefully broken, Frank thought he felt it crack) and his crotch, and Gerard is saying, "Oh my god, Frank, you're going to get expelled!"
Frank grabs Gerard's hand and starts pulling him toward the door. The break between classes is almost over, and if they're late they'll get in trouble. More trouble, Frank knows, than he'll get in for breaking Asshole Jock Guy's nose, which seems paradoxical, but Frank read the student handbook cover-to-cover. The school has a no-tolerance policy for hate speech and hazing, and Frank has Gee to back him up that Asshole Jock Guy had called him a faggot and tried to punch him. But he doubts it'll even get that far.
"I need to wash my hands," Gerard protests, and Frank lets go of him so he can. He contemplates his own hands briefly before deciding that he doesn't care that his hand touched Gerard's hand that had been touching his dick. Like, dick germs can't be that different from person to person, and Frank touches his own dick all the time, so whatever. But, Gerard's sort of obsessive about shit like that (even though he almost never showers, which is way grosser than a few dick germs), so Frank washes his hands too, then pulls Gerard's gloves out of his pocket and hands them over once Gerard's hands are dry.
Gerard smiles at him and puts them on, but then Asshole Jock Guy gives another moan and Gerard looks nervous again so Frank grabs his newly-gloved hand and tugs him along to their next class.
Gerard spends art class drawing a picture of Frank the superhero defeating a hulking giant with a crew cut, and still has time to draw the stupid bowl of fruit that Frank spends the hour slaving over. Art's not really his thing, but he used his asthma as a get-out-of-gym-forever card, and by taking art instead of PE, he and Gerard have perfectly matching schedules. (Frank sees nothing wrong with this; "codependency" isn't a vocabulary word until like, junior year anyway.) Gerard gives the drawing of Frank to Frank, as he always does, and Frank puts it in his folder to keep it flat until he can file it away when he gets home. He's got a whole shelf of binders full of Gerard's drawings, all in little plastic sleeves that his mom got so sick of buying that she stocked up in bulk.
~*~
As Frank predicted, by the end of the day the entire school knows that it was Frank who broke Asshole Jock Guy's nose, but the Assistant Principal and the school nurse hear some lame-ass story about an accident with a door that Asshole Jock Guy opened too quickly.
The incident catapults Frank to the coveted status of 'coolest person in the class' among the freshmen, and the bigger kids -- which is pretty much everyone -- don't hassle him or Gerard, even though they go to the bathroom together (and Frank watches Gerard piss), and sit next to each other in every class except the fifteen minutes of alphabetically-arranged homeroom, and hold hands in the hallways. Frank doesn't really give a fuck what anyone else thinks about it. It's not like it's a thing, it's just them, him and Gerard. It's what they do.
And it's not like he doesn't have girlfriends or anything. Or girlfriend, anyway, because he dates Vanessa Cavendish for two whole months in the middle of junior year, once he's got his license and can manage to wheedle his mom into letting him borrow the car. They go out for burgers and go to the movies, and in the back row of the theater she lets him reach up under her shirt and touch her boobs, and she sort of pets him through his jeans until he comes in them, which is kinda gross but mostly awesome.
She breaks up with him at the end of the two months, though. As far as Frank can tell, it isn't even anything he did; she just got freaked out by Gerard's drawings, which were mostly of her being eaten by zombies. So, fuck Vanessa Cavendish anyway, because even after two months of dating she wouldn't let him below her waist, and Gerard's drawings are the fucking coolest things ever. He keeps all of them in his binders, even the one Vanessa spilled Coke on the last time she ate lunch with them.
The breakup actually hurts more than Frank thought it would, though. It wasn't like he was in love with Vanessa or anything, but he liked her. And going from guy-with-a-girlfriend to guy-who-just-got-dumped-at-lunch-for-telling-his-girlfriend-she-looked-good-having-her-brain-eaten really sucks. Luckily she breaks up with him on a Friday, so Frank feels justified in spending almost the entire weekend in Gerard's basement bedroom, reading comic books and complaining about how Vanessa was a total bitch anyway, he doesn't know why he ever liked her. Gerard makes sympathetic noises and spends all day Saturday drawing vampires for Frank, which is his way of saying cheer up! and I still think you're awesome. Which is dumb, 'cause he says all that stuff out loud, too, but Frank never looks a gift vampire in the mouth. Gerard draws really excellent vampires.
Gerard's mom bought an air mattress when they were thirteen and she came downstairs one morning after Frank stayed over -- to get Gerard up for some appointment or something, Frank doesn't really remember -- and realized they were still sharing Gerard's bed like they had been ever since they were nine. The air mattress is still in its box, somewhere in the junkyard under Gerard's bed. There's not really space for it on the floor anyway, since the floor is usually covered with a thick layer of dirty clothes and comic books and notebooks and action figures and the detritus of Frank and Gerard and Mikey's ongoing D&D game (which is basically him and Mikey trying to convince Gerard that it's really unfair to put the two of them up against a whole army of orcs when they're still only at level 5).
But even if there was room for it, Frank doesn't want to sleep on the air mattress. Gerard's bed is the perfect mix of soft and lumpy, and Gerard doesn't care that Frank always ends up using him as a human teddy bear. Plus it's better that way, because with Gerard curled up against him, he can kind of just tell when Gerard's gonna be sick in the middle of the night, and he's right there when Gerard needs Frank to hug him tightly, to hold him close so he knows he's safe and that the monsters in his head aren't real.
Sometimes if it's a bad night, Mikey climbs in on Gerard's other side and they all sort of huddle together, even though Gerard's bed isn't actually wide enough for three people. It's not weird or anything, not really, though logically Frank knows that most sixteen-year-old guys would rather be caught dead than sleep curled up with their best friend and his little brother. Frank thinks most sixteen-year-old guys are pretty fucking stupid.
Gerard is way better for cuddling with than Vanessa, anyway, especially when he rolls over and smushes his face against Frank's neck and leaves drool spots on the collar of Frank's t-shirt.
~*~
Frank's mom is worried about him.
He can tell she's worried, because she says things like, "Frank, I'm worried about you," which leads to meetings with his guidance counselor in which he has to explain again that he's not 'anti-social', he'd just rather hang out with Gerard than anyone else. And that he's small and looks sort of sickly because hello, asthma, so it's not like he'd be joining the football team even if he had a foot more height and an extra hundred pounds of muscle. And if he's pale it's because his best friend can't go out in the sun and Frank has this thing where he tries not to be a massive douchebag to his best friend by going off and doing stuff he can't do.
Frank finds himself explaining all of these things at least twice a year, every year since the fifth grade, so he's learned how to phrase that last part so the point gets across without him needing to use the word 'douchebag', which always makes his mother sigh and say, "Language, Frank," like she doesn't know perfectly well that 'douchebag' is exactly the right word.
He's halfway tempted to start some kind of drug habit, just so his mom will have something to actually complain about, but you need to like, make friends with drug dealers to do that, and Frank is basically just friends with Gerard. And Mikey, but Frank's pretty sure Mikey's illegal activities only extend as far as bootlegging DVDs to supplement his and Gerard's allowance-slash-comic-book fund.
Instead, he buys a couple of skin mags off the guy a couple lockers down, and sticks them under his mattress. It should be a good distraction for his mom, he thinks. Or at least it'll give her something different to be worried about for once.
Frank is mystified when he comes home from school to find that his mom has changed his sheets (which means she has to have seen the magazines; he made them really obvious and everything), but doesn't appear to care. In fact, she smiles at him way more than usual, and lets him have a third helping of spaghetti, which she never does because she claims it's for leftovers.
Moms, Frank decides, are fucking weird.
~*~
They don't talk about college until the summer before their senior year, when Frank's mom starts leaving college brochures in places where Frank is likely to find them, like inside the microwave or under the strings of his guitar. She stops with the microwave thing when Frank just leaves the brochure in there while he heats up his hot pocket, and the staples spark and set the whole thing on fire. It's only a little fire, but his mom's really touchy about shit like that. Anyway, there went the University of Nebraska, which Frank wasn't going to consider anyway.
Frank's college choices are pretty limited. If he had to write out a list, it would have one thing on it: Wherever Gerard's going.
Not that he really thinks of it like that, because that would be sort of stupid, like he's some lametard in a John Hughes movie. It's just that Frank doesn't have any particular ambitions, and he doesn't feel like an ambition is gonna drop out of the sky and land on him like one of those ACME cartoon anvils. College without Gerard would be ... well, it'd be a lot like life without Gerard, and maybe it's fucked up, but Frank doesn't actually remember much of life-before-Gerard, and what he does remember was pretty boring. If he'd had Gerard around back then, maybe when he fell out of the tree in his old backyard he would have ended up with a story about how he was wounded battling hordes of the undead, defending the tree fortress from the forces of evil, instead of just getting a cast with lots of stupid "feel better!" comments written on it in Sharpie. Gerard probably would have been willing to do like, a mural on his cast. That would have been cool.
So that's how it is. Frank knows that Gerard's gonna go to art school. He's known Gerard is going to art school since the first time he ever turned his imagination to such mythical places as 'college'. Frank doesn't know if they let you into art school if you can't draw worth shit (despite enrolling in four years of high school art classes, and Gerard trying to teach him all these little tricks that he swears will help), but he figures they've gotta have art history majors, or something that doesn't involve being graded on your actual artistic ability. He flirts briefly with the idea of majoring in guitar or something, maybe they let you do that, except playing guitar is fun and there's no way Frank is going to take his fun thing and make it into work, much less homework. Ew.
They're lying on Gerard's bed at the end of August, enjoying the cool of the basement even though it's the height of summer and Gerard mostly can't go outside, so the cool of the basement is actually about the only temperature they experience. Maybe most people would be lying sideways, legs hanging off the side of the bed and a respectable amount of distance between them, but they're stretched out lengthwise, bare feet knocking together, and Gerard has Frank's arm and is busy drawing Crayola marker tattoos all over it (because Frank's mom vetoed Sharpie after that incident in the fifth grade).
"I think I'm gonna go to art school," Gerard says seriously, capping his marker and letting the ink dry a little before switching colors. He glances at Frank like he's expecting Frank to be shocked or something.
"Duh," Frank says, shrugging his decorated shoulder for emphasis. "Where are you gonna go?"
Gerard fidgets with the green marker for a minute. "I don't know. Somewhere in New York, maybe? Like SVA or Parsons? SCAD is too far south," he says. "The sun." Frank knows, and he reaches out to hold onto the edge of Gerard's t-shirt with his fingertips. It's warm and a little sweaty, kind of like Gerard himself, and the cotton slides over Gerard's belly when he takes a soft breath. Frank likes how Gerard is a little bit pudgy, at that just-right place between bony and muscular where he's really neither of those things.
"Make sure wherever you're going has Art History or something," Frank tells him, and Gerard blinks at him.
"But I don't want to take Art History," he says, following up with, "Or, well, yeah, I guess I probably should, you have to have a solid foundation--"
"You're so dumb," Frank cuts him off, and Gerard looks really hurt for a second until Frank tugs on his t-shirt and says, "I meant for me, fucker. There's no way my mutated fruit pictures are getting me into your fancy artist classes."
"You don't even like art, Frankie," Gerard reminds him, but his eyes are all glittery and he's dropped the marker in favor of letting his hand fall down to Frank's hip, where his fingers splay out across the divide between waistband and skin.
"I like your art," Frank corrects him. "So maybe I'll learn about all this stuff, and then you can be a famous artist and I'll be like, your agent. Or whatever famous artists have. That guy who tells everybody how awesome you are and how they should spend millions of dollars buying your paintings and shit."
"You probably shouldn't call it shit if you want people to spend millions of dollars on it," Gerard says, all his stupidly freaky little teeth on display when he smiles.
"See?" Frank says, as if Gerard has just proven his point, "This is why I need to take all those classes. So you have to go somewhere they have Art History."
"Okay," Gerard says, still smiling, and he picks up his marker again to finish his design. A tangled vine of jagged leaves and alien flowers winds its way up Frank's arm; he reminds himself to take a picture of it before his mom makes him shower it off, this time.
~*~
Frank doesn't have a date for the prom (and probably wouldn't have had a date for prom at all) until Melissa Shepard asks him. So he has to shell out all of his lunch and comics money for the week to buy the tickets, but he figures it's worth it, because the way she asked him he's pretty sure that he's gonna get laid. The rest of prom (and most of high school) can go fuck itself, but Frank isn't going to graduate a virgin if he can help it. He tells Gerard about it during art class, because Mr. Thornapple would probably get down on his knees and suck Gerard's dick if Gerard asked him to, so Gerard -- and by extension, Frank -- can do pretty much whatever he wants to do in art class and never even get called out on it.
"So I'm taking Melissa Shepard to prom," he says, dropping his backpack on the floor next to Gerard's and hopping a little to get situated on his stool. It fucking sucks, being a goddamn midget. But hey, getting laid, so Frank focuses on that instead of how the art room was clearly designed with the basketball team in mind. Gerard pauses, his charcoal and ink stained fingertips hovering over his current piece.
Gerard's already been in the art room for an hour, since the school let him sign up to take two periods of art so he could work on his senior project. It's the first time they haven't had every class together, and it's fucking weird, but the guidance counselor took one look at Frank's class schedule request and snorted at him and said I'm sure you and Mr. Way are capable of surviving without each other for fifty minutes a day and then signed him up for the accounting class that his mom thought he should take and that he thought was bullshit. (It still is bullshit, but he ended up being halfway decent at it, so at least he's not going to flunk the class.)
"Oh. Yeah?" Gerard says tonelessly, going back to smudging, "I didn't know you liked her."
Frank shrugs. "She asked me. But she's totally hot, right?" He briefly imagines Melissa, in that skirt she'd been wearing last week that only barely covered her ass. Yeah, totally hot.
"I guess," Gerard says, picking up his lumpy gray eraser and viciously attacking whatever part of his drawing had offended him in the last ten seconds.
"I'm gonna get laid!" Frank crows, keeping his voice low enough that he's not announcing it to the entire room, but Thornapple still gives him the stink eye. He shifts defensively toward Gerard and looks critically at the blank sheet of his sketchbook that he's supposed to be drawing on, like he's trying to figure out where to start, until someone else raises a hand and Thornapple's teacher-ly attention moves away from Frank.
"But you're not even dating her," Gerard says, setting his lumpy eraser down and looking at Frank with confusion written all over his face.
"So?" Frank wrinkles his nose. He doesn't want to date Melissa Shepard. He'd probably have to go see really awful movies, like the ones his mom likes that all have Hugh Grant in them, and spend all his money on taking her out instead of buying Doom Patrol and Punisher. If there was one lesson Frank learned from his brief relationship with Vanessa Cavendish, it's that girlfriends are way too high maintenance. He thinks he's better off as one of those suave, too-cool, love-'em-and-leave-'em types who wear leather jackets, and sunglasses even when it's dark out, and who have like, lines of girls waiting for their chance to try to tame them (but of course Frank would never be tamed; he would just leave them in the dust, looking mournfully after him as he rides off on the motorcycle he'd developed at some point in this daydream).
"So how do you even know she wants to? You can't just assume that because she wears short skirts she wants to have sex with you, Frank," Gerard says, slipping easily from confused into lecture mode, where he informs Frank about the evils of the world and all the ways people are being oppressed. Gerard's lecture mode is the reason that Frank's a vegetarian now, which is sort of balls because Gerard was supposed to be a vegetarian with him but flaked out after two weeks and came to school smelling like sausage McMuffin. Frank hadn't forgiven him for at least five hours, which still stands on record as their longest fight ever. Now Frank has to content himself with giving Gerard sad, soulful looks designed to make him feel guilty every time he eats something that had a face.
"Dude, I know," Frank says, waving a hand. Gerard shuts up but looks mildly annoyed, probably because he was working up to a full-scale ramble, and Frank knows how much he likes those. "But she said, specifically, that a bunch of people are going to this hotel afterwards, and, get this, we could get a room or something. She said it just like that!" He grins in Gerard's face as Gerard's pinched expression moves around and shifts, like Gerard is totally actually conflicted about this. Frank sighs. "Gee, man, I am getting laid. Stop thinking about teen pregnancy statistics and be happy for me."
Gerard blinks, his face going blank for a second, then he looks down at his feet and when he looks up again, there's something like a smile on his face.
"Okay," he says, and, "That's awesome, Frankie."
"I know!" Frank says, bouncing on his stool. He kind of wants to keep talking about it, but Gerard has gone back to attacking his drawing with the lumpy eraser and is making little muttering noises under his breath, so Frank leaves him alone to be artistic and contemplates his own paper.
Maybe he'll just fill it in all black and call it an expression of his soul. But that's the sort of thing that makes his teachers call his mom and his mom call the guidance counselor, so he decides to draw the stupid water pitcher Thornapple has set out on the still-life table instead. Whatever. He's getting laid.
Frank grins and starts sketching.
~*~
Gerard is acting weird.
It took Frank a couple of days to figure that out, because Gerard always acts weird -- that's like, Gerard's whole thing -- but the point is that eventually he figures out that Gerard is acting weird even for Gerard. On Friday, which is the third day in a row that Gerard frowns when Frank says, "So I'll be over after I finish my math homework," and replies with vague explanations of "plans" and, "Maybe another time?" Frank figures out that something is fucked up.
"He's washing his hair," Mikey says in a flat, expressionless voice that not even Frank, with all his years of experience deciphering Mikeyway, can read into. Frank punches the doorframe of the Way house, which does more damage to his hand than to the house, but he feels better. Sort of. Not much better, though.
"His fucking hair? What the fuck, Mikey!" Frank shakes out his hand and hopes his knuckles don't swell up too much. The prom is at the end of the next week, and ending up with his hand in a cast or a splint or some shit like that will put a serious damper on the whole getting laid plan. "Gee never washes his fucking hair. That is the lamest bullshit I've ever fucking heard."
Mikey shrugs and pushes his glasses up his nose with his middle finger, which Frank could choose to interpret as Mikey flipping him off, but he'd rather give Mikey the benefit of the doubt on that one. "You should probably go home, Frank," he says, just as expressionless as ever, but Frank gets the feeling Mikey is somehow disappointed in him. And that's fucking stupid, because Frank didn't do anything!
"Hey!" Frank sticks a foot in the door to keep Mikey from closing it. It doesn't really work -- the door stays open a little bit, yeah, but Frank's pretty sure his foot is now broken. "Mikes, Mikey, man, what the fuck did I do?" So maybe he's begging a little, but this whatever-it-is cleared the Longest Fight record two and a half days ago, and Frank is willing to admit to unhealthy levels of codependency.
Mikey stares at him through the narrow opening of the door for a long minute. Finally he says, "Sometimes you suck, Frank. Get your foot out of the door."
Frank takes his foot out of the door, and stands staring at the grain in the wood. He actually can't remember ever being turned away from the Way house, not even when Gerard was really sick in the 7th grade and had to stay home for almost two weeks and even go to the hospital once (Gerard hates hospitals). Even then, Frank was always welcome.
Whatever he did, it was huge, and Frank doesn't have a clue what it could have been.
~*~
Frank knows Gerard is good at avoiding people -- the combination of living in the basement and letting his stringy hair fall out of his hoodie and over his face when he's forced to emerge for school is remarkably efficient at convincing people to leave him alone -- but Frank has never been considered 'people'. He doesn't want to be considered 'people', he thinks, kicking his heels against the legs of his chair and trying to forget how Gerard is sitting in the desk right next to him, completely ignoring his presence.
Gerard's fingertips are still stained with ink, and there are hints of brightly-colored paint around the edges of his fingernails; cadmium red and cheerful lemon yellow standing out starkly against the black ink and Gerard's pale skin. His fingertips are all Frank can see, the rest of him hidden behind his fingerless gloves and his hoodie and that fall of greasy hair that he had clearly not been washing, Frank knew Mikey was full of shit.
Frank keeps glancing over, hoping that one of these minutes, Gerard will realize that he's being completely overdramatic about whatever Frank did, and that he should probably forgive Frank and maybe turn his head and smile at him with all his stupid, freaky teeth, and then they'll be good again, just like they've always been. But Gerard never turns his head, and he doesn't smile. Frank kicks his heels some more, and tries to give more of a shit about 19th century literature than about whatever Gerard is drawing in his notebook, but he already knows that's a lost fucking cause.
Art class is maybe the worst, now, because Gerard managed to convince Thornapple that he needs private studio time or some shit, so he's working on his senior project in the room that used to hold the kiln until someone blew it up, and Frank is alone in a room full of people he's never bothered to talk to, drawing more mutated fruit pictures. They have to do a painting for the senior showcase, which Frank has been dreading because one, his mom is determined to come to it, which will be so fucking embarrassing Frank isn't sure how he'll survive, and two, he completely sucks at art. And now Gerard isn't even there to help him fix the shit he fucks up. He has to start on the stupid painting, though, so he decides to go with the mutated fruit thing -- it's basically his only art skill, drawing mutated fruit -- and commandeers a bowl of apples that he's pretty sure the freshmen were using for still-life practice, but they'll get over it. What do fucking freshmen know, anyway?
Frank knows fuck-all about oils despite that whole semester of oil painting that he only barely survived, so he digs into the acrylics and sets to work. That's what he does for three days of art class; he just sits there and focuses on his fucking apples, not on how Gerard isn't there. He doesn't think about how Gerard's not standing just beyond his shoulder, slaving away at his own project and occasionally piping up with advice and encouragement for Frank. He absolutely does not think about Gerard's stupid fingertips and their bright paint colors and what Gerard could possibly be working on. He doesn't think about how he hasn't heard Gerard's voice since last Friday. He doesn't think about how all he's seen of Gerard's face this week has been flashes of his nose and chin, sticking out from his hood and showing through gaps in his hair. He doesn't think about how worried he is, even though Mikey's a sophomore now and he can look after Gerard, that Gerard might miss his medication because he's too wrapped up in something to notice the time.
He finishes his fucking fruit painting on Thursday, about halfway through the hour, and sits there staring at it for ten minutes. He used all the wrong colors; the apples in the bowl are bright red and cheerful and generally look like every other freshman still-life apple Frank has ever seen, but the ones in his painting are brown and blue and sickly yellow, with deep purple shadows carving out their edges. They look angry, Frank thinks. Angry and pissed off and sad (especially the ones that kinda look like they're rotting), which he didn't know apples could look like, but there they are, staring back at him from the canvas. The one on top looks like it's ready to start something, Frank thinks, and he decides it's his favorite. Thornapple comes around to check on him, and makes an odd sound in the back of his throat. Frank winces.
"I know the colors are all fuc-- ah, messed up," Frank self-corrects; he doesn't need detention on top of everything else. It takes him a second to figure out that Thornapple doesn't look pissed off, which is how he normally looks at Frank. He's almost smiling, which is fucking weird and usually reserved for Gerard. Who Frank is not thinking about.
Thornapple's hand comes down on his shoulder, and Frank tenses, but then he's saying, "This is really fantastic work, Mr. Iero. It seems that after all this time, you have managed to learn something about art," and looking at Frank like he's proud or something. Frank doesn't understand how a fucked-up fruit painting means he's learned anything about art, but then, he doesn't understand half of the stuff that Gee always rhapsodizes about anyway. If fucked-up, weird-colored fruit makes Thornapple happy, who's Frank to argue?
"Thanks?" Frank ventures, hoping this means he won't fail the class and screw up his scholarship with NYU. Which makes Frank think about Gerard, who he's not thinking about, and how Frank's gonna be in New York, without Gerard, surrounded by art people and hipster kids and trust fund babies that Frank doesn't understand at all. Fuck.
Thornapple hands him a piece of paper, with blank spaces for him to write his name the the title of the picture. "Don't forget to sign your piece," he reminds Frank, clapping him on the shoulder again and almost knocking Frank off his art stool. He re-situates himself, then uses a small brush to paint a little FI in the corner of his painting. It makes it look almost legitimate, like one of Gerard's actually-good paintings, and fuck, he is not thinking about Gerard, who's being a dick even though Frank didn't do anything.
He looks at his little slip of paper, then pulls a ballpoint pen out of his backpack and scrawls his name on the top blank space, then in the second blank space, he scribbles Whatever I did, I'm sorry. Now please stop being such a dick. Thornapple raises an eyebrow when Frank hands him the paper, but doesn't even mention the language, probably because it's "art" so you're allowed to swear. So it's not a great title. Actually it's not even really a title at all, because Frank doesn't know what the fuck to call a bunch of angry-looking mutant apples, but Gerard won't fucking talk to him, or even look at him, and Frank knows for a fact that he spies on all the stuff that's been set aside for the senior showcase, because he's a nosy little shit as long as he doesn't have to actually ask anyone about anything.
Frank hangs around the room until he's sure he sees Thornapple putting his mutated fruit in with the rest of the stuff for the showcase -- it's Frank's only actual contribution to the show, but at least he won't fail the class now -- then hikes his backpack up on his shoulder and gets out of there before Gerard can emerge from the kiln room.
~*~
Frank doesn't get to even try to go over to the Ways' house that night, because his mom takes him out to get his hair trimmed and pick up his rented tux. He thinks he looks like a penguin, but his mom says he looks 'distinguished', which Frank is pretty sure just means 'penguin' in parent-ese. Then Melissa calls him right after dinner to go over every detail of Friday night, from not getting a corsage that will clash with her dress (Frank got a white one, because that seemed a lot fucking simpler than trying to figure all that color bullshit out) to what time the limo they're splitting with like, twenty other people is going to be picking them up at her house, and what time he needs to be there so her mom can take pictures, and a million other things Frank doesn't really give a shit about.
"The hotel room's all set," she purrs into the phone just before they hang up, and Frank almost pops wood right there in the kitchen, because fuck yes, he is so ready for that.
"Awesome," he says, grinning and trying not to think about how he won't be going over to Gerard's the next day to tell him all about it.
Melissa says hi to him in the hall the next morning before first period, winking and tossing her hair. She's wearing her short skirt again, and it distracts Frank long enough that he doesn't notice Gerard actually looking at him until it's nearly too late. Gee's eyes widen fractionally and he turns back to his notebook, burying himself in whatever's there, but he was looking, which means maybe he got Frank's note and is considering forgiving Frank, and that would be an excellent start to his last day of virginity. He's sure he feels Gerard's eyes on him a few more times throughout the morning, and he's tempted a few times to turn, to say something. He keeps himself in check, though. He tried; it's Gerard's fucking turn this time. He'd throw in thought about balls and whose court they're in, but sports metaphors and Gerard don't mix very well.
By the time Government Studies rolls around, though, Frank feels the change in the way Gerard is looking at him, feels it instinctively, with a rush of knowledge that's put together from all the little things -- the way Gerard is clutching his pencil, the way he's sitting, the way he doesn't look away when Frank turns to him, the way his pupils are wide open. Fuck, fuck fuck fuck, Frank thinks, because they're in the middle of class, but fuck that anyway, some things are more important than his assured detention. He reaches across the tiny aisle and hunts through Gerard's busted mess of a backpack until he finds his sunglasses, grabbing the side of Gerard's face and turning his head so Frank can get them on his face.
They've got the attention of the entire room, now, but basically everybody knows that Gerard's got some freaky medical shit going on, so all Frank has to say is, "We're going to the office," as he shoves his books and Gerard's into their bags and pulls Gerard out of his seat, and Mrs. Nunez gives him an approving nod. Fuck, Gerard's out of it, totally gone and making tiny whimpering sounds that Frank knows well, knows them against his shoulder on the bad nights, and he's getting Gerard out of here, out of the sight of all the assholes who are snickering at him.
He has to coax Gerard down the hallway, vice grip on his gloved hand because he knows if he lets go Gerard will bolt. He asked, in the sixth or seventh grade, what Gerard saw when he got like this, what he remembered. Frank has all the drawings Gerard did after that, tucked away in one of his binders where he doesn't accidentally come across them. Just the drawings were frightening enough; Frank tries not to think about what it must be like, to think that those things are real. He's just glad there's no one out in the hallways in the middle of the class period.
"Come on, Gee," Frank mutters, over and over, keeping close to Gerard's side and taking most of his weight along with their backpacks. He's gotta get them to the office soon, or he's gonna be squished. "It's okay, right? I'm right here, and I'll punch any fucking monsters that come near us, got it?" It's enough to keep Gerard moving, sort of, though he fights Frank when he tries to take them around the corner to the hallway that leads to the office and the nurse's room, and Frank can't even guess at what he thinks is there.
Finally, finally they make it to the office, and Frank drags Gee through the doorway and says, "You need to call his mom right now," to the startled receptionist, who nods and pulls out the file of student emergency cards. Gerard's has a little red tab on it, Frank knows, because it was easier to do that than to search for it all the time. She hasn't even pulled the tab yet when Gerard grasps at Frank's shoulder, dislodging the backpack strap that was resting there. Frank lets the bag fall to the floor as Gee crowds into his personal space.
"Frankie," He says in this terrible voice, broken and scared and hurt but at least he knows who Frank is, Frank thinks fleetingly before he feels Gerard shudder. He has no idea how he does it, with Gerard clinging to him and the bags and having the reflexes of the opposite of whatever has good reflexes, but he manages to snag the trash can in the corner with two fingers before they go down in a heap of limbs and backpacks in the middle of the office and Gerard starts throwing up.
That's how they are when the runner the receptionist sent comes back with Mikey hot on her heels, and Frank looks up at Mikey as Mikey looks down at the two of them; at Gerard sprawled out and mostly in Frank's lap, dry heaving because he's got nothing left in his stomach -- there wasn't much to begin with, and Frank wants to smack him because he clearly skipped breakfast which he's not supposed to do -- and Frank's hand rubbing slowly up and down Gerard's spine, his fingers catching at the hem of Gee's sweatshirt. Mikey looks almost surprised, for Mikey, and Frank narrows his eyes at him. Like what, did Mikey think that just because they were fighting about... whatever the fuck they're fighting about, he wasn't going to take care of Gee? Fuck Mikey, if he thinks that. But Mikey's face fades back into even-more-neutral, and he settles down on the floor beside Frank, taking over the trashcan-holding duties.
"Mom should be here soon," Mikey says noncommittally. Frank nods, pressing more firmly against Gerard's shoulders when he starts shaking a little more. It helps; it always helps.
"Frankie?" Gerard murmurs again, and Frank scratches his fingers through Gerard's hair, not caring that it's sort of disgusting.
"Yeah," Frank says. "I'm right here, and so's Mikey." Mikey's got one of Gerard's hands in his, and Frank can see him squeeze it, just enough. Gerard relaxes for a second. It's only a second, and then he's crying out and trying to throw up again and it's awful, but Mikey scoots in a little closer until his shoulder is pressed against Frank's, and they stay like that until Gerard's mom shows up along with two paramedics and an ambulance that doesn't have the sirens on but is an ambulance nonetheless.
"Text me?" He asks Mikey as they take Gerard out, already starting to hook him up to needles and shit that he'll fucking hate once he's coherent enough to realize they're there, and Mikey gives him that inscrutable look that Frank thinks only Gerard can translate. But he nods at Frank and says, "Yeah," which means that Frank can actually breathe again.
Then they're gone and Frank realizes he's got Gerard's Government book in his backpack, he'd just been shoving things in, and then the nurse, who hadn't been able to do anything more for Gerard than what Frank and Mikey were already doing, tells him, "You need to get back to class, Mr. Iero," so Frank sleepwalks to Accounting and fails a pop quiz spectacularly.
Continued.