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Frank thinks half of New Jersey knows about his short temper at this point. Sure, it’s never exactly been a secret, and he got into enough fights at school for people to know that something’s wrong in that kid’s head, but Christ. If one more person at this god damned party glares in his direction before indiscreetly fleeing the room at his arrival he’s going to… Well, he’s going to do something.
It’s not his fucking fault people get on his nerves. Maybe they could try not being obnoxious and air-headed idiots for once and he might even stick around for a conversation. But as it is, his only company is a lukewarm beer in a red solo cup and the icy scowls of various blonde bimbos as he moves through a trashy college party. Whatever. He’s making his way towards the once-white marbled kitchen when some frat freak with a horrendous fake tan shoulder checks him hard enough for Frank’s shitty beer to join the sweat on the guy’s white wife beater. Frank gets about two seconds to acknowledge that it somehow looks better drenched in Bud Light before the guy grabs him by the neck and hauls him up to his eye level.
“Watch your fucking step, punk!” The dude growls in his face, wads of spit landing on Frank’s cheek. His shoes scuff the sticky linoleum floor as he tries to find some footing, half dangling in the air by the guy’s iron grip. His face twists into a frown.
“Watch your fucking mouth, jerk.” His voice is surprisingly flat, but it’s underlined with dripping venom. Unfortunately for him, the jock’s done too many steroids to catch up on it. He throws Frank across the room, rag-dolling him into the quickly forming crowds of voyeuristic white girls. He’s only given a second of triumph, flashing a set of pearly white teeth towards the laughing onlookers before Frank’s fist connects with his jaw. Once, then twice, and three more after that before someone grabs his waist and wrestles him away.
The crowds are shouting at him now, as if this wasn’t what they wanted. Maybe they were hoping to watch a trashy punk get an ass-whooping, but they clearly don’t know what the word punk entails if that’s the case. Frank hears yells about him being an out of control freak and to get the fuck out of there before they skin him alive, or something along those lines, and sees the frat dude’s pearly whites coated in blood before he turns tail and books it out the door.
——
He doesn’t know how long he’s been running when the park opens up before him. It’s dark as shit outside, cold too, and he was sort of hoping it would ease the fury burning rampant in his blood. To no avail, of course. The marathon sprint he just pulled off only leaves his nerve endings buzzing, like pouring gasoline on a house fire. The only sounds out here are his sneakers dragging across the pavement and the distant bass thud from the party. It’s just Frank, a lonely swing-set and a communal dumpster against the world. Except Frank doesn’t think straight when he’s mad, and right now the dumpster seems a fitting enemy for a late night brawl under the stars. The stench of rotting food is pretty much equivalent to a kick in the guts, and Frank has never been one to give up without a fight.
His hands ball into fists before he knows it (or maybe they never unfisted in the first place), and the first swing makes a rattled sound echo across the park. Frank’s hands ache, but he’s too riled up to feel it, alternating between left and right hooks against green metal. A low growl builds in his throat when he speeds up, punch after punch aimed to fucking decimate the poor thing. For a change, his head is gratefully quiet. Soon enough Frank feels his blood simmer down, and he gives the dumpster a finishing kick, twisting his foot to avoid crushed toes before backing away. He’s staring pointedly at the ground, organizing his thoughts when a cough breaks the piercing silence.
“Dumpster break your heart, or?” Frank’s head snaps up to find - Gerard Way, his mother’s old neighbor. His, too, at some point in a time far, far away. He’s twirling a cigarette between his fingers, hand an open palm in that weird way he always used to smoke back in high school. He still speaks from the side of his mouth as well, and his hair is still black and stringy - damn, this dude hasn’t changed a bit. Frank can admire that. Personally he does whatever he can to erase the man he was back then, but it’s a free world. Gerard can do whatever the fuck he wants to do. Or, not do, more specifically. Currently he’s staring at Frank with this slightly amused expression, and Frank realizes he hasn’t actually said anything yet.
He snorts out a very late laugh. “More like my hands.” They’re not actually broken, but now that the adrenaline’s wore off, pain is settling in pretty nice on the bends of his knuckles. Gerard smiles around his cigarette, and it makes Frank ache for one as well, if only to show that there’s less pretentious ways to hold them.
He starts digging through his pockets, but the denim drags against his skin, making it feel on fucking fire. He fishes the battered pack out, putting a cig between his lips and looks down to see blood smeared on the rim of his jeans. Gerard has clearly seen it too, because before Frank can even begin looking for his lighter a flame flickers to life in his face. Frank flashes him a grateful smile before taking his first drag, the burn in his lungs making the last of the anger melt away like ice on the first day of spring. Through their shared cloud of smoke, Frank can see Gerard eyeing his fucked up hands. He waggles his fingers in his direction, and it’s supposed to be funny, but there’s no humor in the way his flesh feels like it’s going through a meat mincer. Gerard frowns at his obvious pain.
“We can patch you up at my house if you want.” Frank watches his face, waits for the punchline and accompanying laugh, but Gerard continues, “I still live ‘round here, you know.” And as Frank glances around himself, he realizes that oh, shit, they’re in his old neighborhood. In fact, he’s probably snuck one or a hundred cigarettes behind this very dumpster, back in the days where he had to be sneaky about them. Now here he is, 10 years later, less sneaky about it but still smoking to the smell of fresh garbage. He’s even kept the temperament his 13 year old self tried so hard to get rid of. What a fucking joke.
If only to escape his downward spiral of déjà vu, Frank agrees and together they head off towards his old street. They’re quiet at first, puffing away on respective cigarettes, before Gerard breaks not-not-uncomfortable silence.
“Life treating you well, I assume?” He jokes and Frank rolls his eyes because, well, no. It’s not his fault the band he dropped out of college to tour with broke up, and left him an underpaid cashier at the local Walmart. In fact, he was the only one with any passion in that god damned band. It’s hard to make something work when no one else wants it to. Ray always said he’d be a bad psychologist anyway. ‘You need to get therapy, Frankie, not become a therapist’, he’d say, and Frank would wave him off because ’I’ll teach the kids to live a little, man, you wouldn’t get it’ even though he totally would because Ray owned the sickest bong Frank had ever seen in his life. Not that it mattered much now, because Ray was in California shooting his first feature film and Frank was punching college freshmen over cheap booze, in true washed-up rockstar fashion.
He shoves Gerard’s shoulder lightly, “Oh, shut it. You still live in your mom’s basement.” Or so he’s pretty sure, unless Gerard got his own house on the same street as her, which would arguably be worse. But the other man just nods, and Frank is acutely aware of how easy he finds it to speak to him. They never used to be close, and yet this feels easier than any conversation Frank has held since Ray left the state for stardom. The realization makes his heart rate kick up a notch, something which he promptly ignores. Fawning over a guy (that he just met behind a dumpster) like a 12 year old girl simply isn’t going to happen.
Thankfully, his thoughts are halted with the jingle of a keychain. They’ve both dropped their cigarette butts somewhere along the way, and while Gerard makes haste up his empty driveway Frank pauses to look back at his mother’s old house. Theres a dirty black truck parked on the curb, and an American flag hanging still by the front door. He shudders.
From his own front door, Gerard starts belting the Star-Spangled Banner, launching Frank into a serious fit of high-pitched giggles. He doesn’t stop until they’ve made it inside, at which point half the neighborhood has probably woken up from their antics. There’s most likely worse things a republican can wake up to than a half-assed rendition of the national anthem, anyway. The stairs leading down to the basement creak with every step and Frank isn’t even given time to obsess over the extensive comic book collection that’s exploded all over the place before Gerard ushers him into a small bathroom. The tiles are in various states of fading pink and the lamp casts a yellow glow over every surface. In the light, Frank can see the blood coated on his hands.
Gerard crouches down and pulls out a pack of gauze pads and a bottle of antiseptics from the cabinets under the sink. Frank thinks it’s all a little unnecessary, he’s done fine with soap and water on far worse wounds before, but having Gerard fussing over him is a strangely nice feeling. It makes him think about the holographic ‘PANSY’ stickers he was gifted as a joke, once, and how maybe they deserve to be raised from the hells of his desk drawers. They’d look sort of nice on his brand new Les Paul.
Suddenly Gerard starts patting the counter beside the sink and nodding towards Frank. “Hop on up, my patient,” he says with a barely contained laugh. Frank glares daggers.
“I’m not that short, dude,” Frank responds, but he walks over and climbs up anyways. Gerard smiles up at him before pouring antiseptic on some wads of gauze, looking for all the world like a mad scientist on a mission. He then takes one of Frank’s hands in his own, touch so light you could barely feel it, and examines the damage with creased brows.
“You’re gonna get some gnarly bruises, man.” Frank just grins. It’s not that he particularly enjoys the limited mobility of black and blue hands, but the bruises are a sign of a fight well fought. So what if his opponent didn’t have much to fight back with? Or a soul to fight with at all. He still won.
Gerard hovers the gauze just above his hand. “This is gonna hurt like a bitch, okay?” Like Frank didn’t know that. He nods, and Gerard begins gingerly cleaning his sore knuckles. It stings more than it hurts, but it stings a lot, and Frank’s jaw tenses with it. Gerard is taking his sweet time, too, really getting in there and taking any atom of dirt away with him. Frank tries to focus on anything other than his hand being attacked with a million pins and needles, and his eyes just so happen to land on Gerard’s face. It’s a nice face, really. Theres a red spot just below his eye, and Frank kinda wants to get his mouth on it. And various other places. His plan of not fawning over Gerard is totally failing, goddamnit.
When Gerard moves on to his other hand, Frank is so not expecting it, and the burn is even worse this time around. “Motherfucker,” he hisses through his teeth, and then he’s unconsciously flexing his calves around Gerard’s middle, pulling him close against his body. It’s a total accident, he swears, and for a second he’s about to start apologizing because Gerard’s eyes are as wide as saucers when said eyes flit down to glance at his mouth. He looks back up just as quickly, a red blush blooming on his cheeks, but Frank simply smiles and takes the opportunity to lick his lips obscenely. Apparently that’s all the invitation Gerard needs.
They keep the kiss slow for approximately two seconds before Frank grabs a fistful of Gerard’s greasy hair, licking into his mouth like a dying man. Gerard responds in earnest, holding onto the other’s hips for dear life. Frank’s legs are crossed behind Gerard’s back, and their chests are flush together but they’re still trying to press closer like they can make the atoms shift and fit the other inside their skin. The gauze lay forgotten on the floor and Gerard is half-mast against Frank’s hip already, not that Frank is any better off himself.
When Frank is getting ready to take their frantic make-out session one step further and start rutting against Gerard like a fucking dog, his hands twitch in their grip against the other’s scalp and pain floods them full-force out of nowhere. It’s enough to make his head spin, and he mournfully breaks the kiss to rest his forehead on Gerard’s shoulder and focus on not passing out. When Gerard asks what’s wrong, he just flaps an arm around and hopes it’s enough of an answer.
Thankfully it is, because Gerard grabs his hand carefully and flips it, palm facing the roof, before placing a gentle kiss smack in the middle. The gesture makes Frank’s insides feel all warm, in a different way than they did just moments ago. He doesn’t suppress it this time, letting it flood his senses right out to his aching fingertips.
He lifts his head from the other’s shoulder and returns the gesture against his lightly swollen lips. Gerard smiles against it, before pulling back just enough to speak.
“Lets go find some ice for your hands,” he says, and Frank can’t help but laugh as he slips off the counter and follows him back up the creaking stairs.