Hands
your love, your love
Gerard Way was an artist. He was an artist in many different ways - through his voice, his art, his writing, his clothes - he was the embodiment of the flamboyant gay artist stereotype.
And he was always using his hands.
Whether gesticulating wildly to make a point, painting or sketching his strange, dark art, or touching Frank with gentle, sweeping caresses, his hands were always in motion. His fingers were long and pale, and they moved like spiders - almost jerky, but still graceful, like a baby foal. He kept his nails short and sometimes painted them black, but not often. Most of the time they were covered in paint or stained with ink, but no one ever really noticed their imperfections - his smooth, soft skin was enough to distract most.
And this is why his world fell apart after the accident.
---
Frank Iero slumped down in a hard plastic chair in an abandoned hallway of the quiet hospital, his hands squeezing an empty cup of cheap coffee, his eyes blank and unseeing. His foot tapped an incessant rhythm on the white linoleum, and the soft sound of the rubber smacking down was the only real sound echoing in the cavernous hallway.
He waited. Waited for what had seemed like - and had been - hours. Waited for Gerard.
He didn’t even know what happened, not really. All he knew was that his cell rang late that night, and he picked it up without even glancing at the caller I.D, thinking it was Gerard, calling to explain his lateness.
The voice on the other end wasn’t Gerard, but it answered quite a few of Frank’s questions.
“Is this Mr. Frank Iero? Partner of Mr. Gerard Way?” The voice was a woman’s nasally drawl, and Frank winced a bit as it pierced into his ear through the tiny speaker.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s me. What of it?”
“Mr. Way has been in an accident, and you are listed as his primary contact. Can you come down to the hospital as soon as possible?”
His vision gray and swimming, Frank dropped the phone and ran.
---
It was really very stupid, all of it. But then again, most tragedies are.
Gerard had been walking down a busy street in New York, the sound of cars beeping falling all around him as usual - how was he supposed to know that that one incessant beep, no different from the hundreds of others - was directed towards him.
One of his arms was holding up rolled canvases, the other hand clasped around burning hot coffee. He wasn’t concentrating on anything but holding up his drink and not bending his treasured art.
The woman’s brake line had snapped. She was beeping, beeping, beeping, screaming, screaming, screaming - but Gerard didn’t hear her.
He stepped off the curb and tripped over his own feet, going sprawling across the dirty, hot asphalt, skinning the side of his face and, on reflex, tried to break his fall with his hands.
His screams blocked out the sounds of her tires crunching over his bones.
---
“We did everything we could.” The doctor said, her eyes sad. Frank felt the white hallway go gray, and a mechanical buzzing sounded in his ears.
He dropped the destroyed coffee cup to the floor, his face drained of color.
“It will be a shock when you see him.” A voice was saying gently, but Frank didn’t know who was talking. What were they talking about? Where was he?
“Would you like to see him, Mr. Iero?”
And it was like someone hit a power button inside him.
Gerard.
“Y-yes. Is he… Is he… okay?” The doctor, a woman with a pale, haggard face, smiled sadly. Frank noticed for the first time that there was blood splattered on the front of her hospital scrubs.
“He’s alive, Mr. Iero.” Frank fell back onto the seat, breathing heavily, his chest feeling lighter than it had in hours. Alive. Alivealivealive. “Am I correct in saying Mr. Way is your longtime partner?”
Images of the ring stashed in the bottom of Frank’s bedside cabinet rushed through his mind. He banished them and tried to speak coherently. “Yes. Partner. 10 years next month.”
Something flitted across the woman’s face, but she did not betray any of her emotions - besides exhaustion.
“Congratulations.”
Frank nodded.
“Mr. Iero, before we go in, I have to inform you of his condition.”
Frank sat up a little more in the chair, swallowing quickly, his heartbeat racing. “O-okay.”
“The car, on impact, crushed the bones in his hands and wrists. When he was brought in, he had already lost a dangerous amount of blood and was in incredible pain.”
She didn’t have to keep talking. Frank knew what had happened from the look on her face.
“We had to amputate below the elbow.”
---
Gerard went home three weeks later, with appointments with therapists and doctors and specialists lined up for the next six months. They insisted on wheeling him out to the car in a wheelchair, and he went silently, his eyes trained down. Frank opened the car door and Gerard sat down, his face stony, pale, the bags under his eyes brownish black and heavy.
The entire way home, Frank kept sneaking glances at Gerard, who pretended not to see.
The cuffs of his jacket were empty, and Frank thought of Gerard’s long fingers and beautiful hands and just wanted to sob and sob and cry and cry.
---
The adjustment was hard. At night, Gerard could still feel his hands, flex his fingers - but there was nothing there. Sometimes, he would absentmindedly bring his arm up to scratch his face or even worse, reach out for a pencil and a blank piece of paper, only to see his arm ending at the elbow. No forearm. No wrist. And of course… no hands.
Those were usually the only times he cried, and Frank did his best to help him, but he was so helpless himself that he didn’t really know what to do. So he did the only thing he knew do to - he loved Gerard, kissed him, told him he was beautiful - and he was. Nothing could ever take Gerard’s beauty away.
---
“Please, Frankie, no.”
“Gerard, please, let me touch you.”
Gerard twisted his body away, using what was left of his arms to pull the sheet up to his chin. He shook his head and his hot tears flew off his face, splattering across the bed. Frank felt some on land on his hand.
“Frankie, I can’t, I’m so ugly, please, don’t, Frankie…” Gerard fell into heaving sobs, his swollen eyes shut tightly. Frank was reminded forcibly of Gerard’s first negative review in a major newspaper, where the reporter had suggested Gerard take a long walk off a short dock and take his ‘hideous abominations of art’ with him. Gerard cried all night like the world had ended, and he hadn’t cried so hard since.
The difference was that the first time Gerard lost control, he woke up the next day determined to prove the reporter wrong - to get revenge for his tears. Now, there was nothing and no one to get revenge from. No matter what he did, Gerard’s hands were gone.
“Gerard, no, you aren’t. You could never be ugly, please… I just want to touch you, don’t you miss me touching you?” Frank’s strained voice cracked with every word. He pulled the covers down slowly, ignoring Gerard’s tears.
“I do, I miss you, I miss it…” Gerard trailed off, using his shoulder to wipe tears off his cheeks. Frank noticed - not for the first time - how thin and pale Gerard had become since the operation. His ribcage and collar bones were just as prominent as the constant dark bags under his eyes. “Just, Frankie, please, I don’t… I…”
But Gerard could say no more, as his tears had reached maximum volume and Frank’s lips were pressed down hard on his, so hard it was almost painful. Gerard realized that Frank was crying too, but silently - fat tears were rolling down his face, hot and fast. The sight filled him with such an incomprehensible mixed feeling of sorrow, love, and exhaustion - Gerard could think of nothing else to do but kiss back, pushing their lips together with all his might.
Frank reached up, tentatively, and brushed a bit of Gerard’s hair back from his eyes. Gerard shook a little, his arms rigid at his side. He wished for nothing more than to reach out and graze his elbows along the smooth skin of Frank’s cheek, to feel the bumps and curves of his beauty as best as he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch Frank with his… deformities.
“Please, Gerard, let me do this…” Frank said, his teary voice changing. Gerard looked into his eyes and realized that somewhere behind the tears, there was lust. Desperate lust. It occurred to him for the first time that Frank may need this more then he did. Instead of trying to keep his lover away, he finally nodded and closed his eyes, accepting that nothing could ever stop Frank.
“Thank you.” Frank whispered, his words leaving a trail of goosebumps along Gerard’s jaw line.
The next thing Gerard felt was Frank’s full lips all over his forehead, Frank’s hands tangling through his hair. Through each soft, warm kiss Frank whispered I love you, and Gerard could feel the vibrations of Frank’s vocal chords through the spots that Frank’s lips made contact with his skin, tracing down from his forehead onto his still closed eyelids, over the soft curve of his cheeks. Frank’s tongue traced over Gerard’s adam’s apple, leaving a wet trail of what was spit but felt like lust on his neck.
And then came in Frank’s hands. He used his fingers to massage the skin of Gerard’s shoulders, down Gerard’s almost concave chest, feeling each and every one of his ribs, counting the bars of the cage over his heart.
“I love you.” he whispered into the skin above Gerard’s heart. Frank thought he heard Gerard murmur something above him but he didn’t want to stop now, didn’t want to detach himself from how close he was to his lover’s pale, warm skin.
But next to the chest were the arms. Frank could feel Gerard’s back straighten underneath him, as if he knew what was coming and was deathly afraid of it.
“Frankie, I…” he started, but Frank put a stop to his words by pressing his hand over Gerard’s mouth.
“No. Let me do this.” Frank said forcefully, eyeing Gerard with something that was almost anger. Again, Gerard faded back into the pillows without really fighting, resigning himself to the inevitable. Frank’s lips started at the right shoulder, his I love you’s mixing with the heated flesh of Gerard’s arm. He kissed and kissed and was even more gentle with him then than he was the night they first slept together, when he had treated Gerard like a china doll, like he was afraid of breaking him.
Frank’s lips traced the end of Gerard’s arms, the soft skin of his full mouth scraping along the stitches that held Gerard’s scarred skin together. It was healing, but still tender, so Frank held his breath and kissed with all the force of a feather. His lips only made contact for less than a second, but those few moments were enough to feel the rough, sharp edges of the stitching holding his lover together.
Above him, Gerard seemed to have gone beyond the point of tears. He laid straight, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, completely resigned to letting Frank do what he needed to do - for both of them. He couldn’t even bring himself to be ashamed that he was letting Frank touch - kiss! - his disgusting deformities, couldn’t believe it was actually happening, couldn’t believe any of it. It was simply too much to take. He didn’t feel the tears sliding down towards his ears until Frank came back up after finishing his tour of Gerard’s torso, licking those wayward tears up with his tongue.
“It’s done, baby.” Frank said, his nose touching Gerard’s. “I went near your arms. It finally happened, and guess what?”
Gerard couldn’t speak. He was horrified. He didn’t know what Frank was going to say or how he would say it. And he prepared himself for the very worst.
“I still want to fuck you. I still want to… make love to you. I still think you’re fucking beautiful and sexy and I wouldn’t care if you lost every single one of your fucking limbs, Gerard, I would still love you. I didn’t love you because of your hands, baby. I loved you for every part of you, for your mind and your voice and your face and… for you. I love you for everything. Every beautiful part of you.”
Gerard Way, who thought he lost his life with his hands, finally realized that he had his life with him the whole time. He felt his heart beat slow down as more and more things made sense, as puzzle pieces fit into empty spaces and words and actions fell into place. His life wasn’t in his hands. His love wasn’t in his hands. His love was in his heart. His love was in Frank.
His love… well, no one could take that away from him.
And he was always using his hands.
Whether gesticulating wildly to make a point, painting or sketching his strange, dark art, or touching Frank with gentle, sweeping caresses, his hands were always in motion. His fingers were long and pale, and they moved like spiders - almost jerky, but still graceful, like a baby foal. He kept his nails short and sometimes painted them black, but not often. Most of the time they were covered in paint or stained with ink, but no one ever really noticed their imperfections - his smooth, soft skin was enough to distract most.
And this is why his world fell apart after the accident.
---
Frank Iero slumped down in a hard plastic chair in an abandoned hallway of the quiet hospital, his hands squeezing an empty cup of cheap coffee, his eyes blank and unseeing. His foot tapped an incessant rhythm on the white linoleum, and the soft sound of the rubber smacking down was the only real sound echoing in the cavernous hallway.
He waited. Waited for what had seemed like - and had been - hours. Waited for Gerard.
He didn’t even know what happened, not really. All he knew was that his cell rang late that night, and he picked it up without even glancing at the caller I.D, thinking it was Gerard, calling to explain his lateness.
The voice on the other end wasn’t Gerard, but it answered quite a few of Frank’s questions.
“Is this Mr. Frank Iero? Partner of Mr. Gerard Way?” The voice was a woman’s nasally drawl, and Frank winced a bit as it pierced into his ear through the tiny speaker.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s me. What of it?”
“Mr. Way has been in an accident, and you are listed as his primary contact. Can you come down to the hospital as soon as possible?”
His vision gray and swimming, Frank dropped the phone and ran.
---
It was really very stupid, all of it. But then again, most tragedies are.
Gerard had been walking down a busy street in New York, the sound of cars beeping falling all around him as usual - how was he supposed to know that that one incessant beep, no different from the hundreds of others - was directed towards him.
One of his arms was holding up rolled canvases, the other hand clasped around burning hot coffee. He wasn’t concentrating on anything but holding up his drink and not bending his treasured art.
The woman’s brake line had snapped. She was beeping, beeping, beeping, screaming, screaming, screaming - but Gerard didn’t hear her.
He stepped off the curb and tripped over his own feet, going sprawling across the dirty, hot asphalt, skinning the side of his face and, on reflex, tried to break his fall with his hands.
His screams blocked out the sounds of her tires crunching over his bones.
---
“We did everything we could.” The doctor said, her eyes sad. Frank felt the white hallway go gray, and a mechanical buzzing sounded in his ears.
He dropped the destroyed coffee cup to the floor, his face drained of color.
“It will be a shock when you see him.” A voice was saying gently, but Frank didn’t know who was talking. What were they talking about? Where was he?
“Would you like to see him, Mr. Iero?”
And it was like someone hit a power button inside him.
Gerard.
“Y-yes. Is he… Is he… okay?” The doctor, a woman with a pale, haggard face, smiled sadly. Frank noticed for the first time that there was blood splattered on the front of her hospital scrubs.
“He’s alive, Mr. Iero.” Frank fell back onto the seat, breathing heavily, his chest feeling lighter than it had in hours. Alive. Alivealivealive. “Am I correct in saying Mr. Way is your longtime partner?”
Images of the ring stashed in the bottom of Frank’s bedside cabinet rushed through his mind. He banished them and tried to speak coherently. “Yes. Partner. 10 years next month.”
Something flitted across the woman’s face, but she did not betray any of her emotions - besides exhaustion.
“Congratulations.”
Frank nodded.
“Mr. Iero, before we go in, I have to inform you of his condition.”
Frank sat up a little more in the chair, swallowing quickly, his heartbeat racing. “O-okay.”
“The car, on impact, crushed the bones in his hands and wrists. When he was brought in, he had already lost a dangerous amount of blood and was in incredible pain.”
She didn’t have to keep talking. Frank knew what had happened from the look on her face.
“We had to amputate below the elbow.”
---
Gerard went home three weeks later, with appointments with therapists and doctors and specialists lined up for the next six months. They insisted on wheeling him out to the car in a wheelchair, and he went silently, his eyes trained down. Frank opened the car door and Gerard sat down, his face stony, pale, the bags under his eyes brownish black and heavy.
The entire way home, Frank kept sneaking glances at Gerard, who pretended not to see.
The cuffs of his jacket were empty, and Frank thought of Gerard’s long fingers and beautiful hands and just wanted to sob and sob and cry and cry.
---
The adjustment was hard. At night, Gerard could still feel his hands, flex his fingers - but there was nothing there. Sometimes, he would absentmindedly bring his arm up to scratch his face or even worse, reach out for a pencil and a blank piece of paper, only to see his arm ending at the elbow. No forearm. No wrist. And of course… no hands.
Those were usually the only times he cried, and Frank did his best to help him, but he was so helpless himself that he didn’t really know what to do. So he did the only thing he knew do to - he loved Gerard, kissed him, told him he was beautiful - and he was. Nothing could ever take Gerard’s beauty away.
---
“Please, Frankie, no.”
“Gerard, please, let me touch you.”
Gerard twisted his body away, using what was left of his arms to pull the sheet up to his chin. He shook his head and his hot tears flew off his face, splattering across the bed. Frank felt some on land on his hand.
“Frankie, I can’t, I’m so ugly, please, don’t, Frankie…” Gerard fell into heaving sobs, his swollen eyes shut tightly. Frank was reminded forcibly of Gerard’s first negative review in a major newspaper, where the reporter had suggested Gerard take a long walk off a short dock and take his ‘hideous abominations of art’ with him. Gerard cried all night like the world had ended, and he hadn’t cried so hard since.
The difference was that the first time Gerard lost control, he woke up the next day determined to prove the reporter wrong - to get revenge for his tears. Now, there was nothing and no one to get revenge from. No matter what he did, Gerard’s hands were gone.
“Gerard, no, you aren’t. You could never be ugly, please… I just want to touch you, don’t you miss me touching you?” Frank’s strained voice cracked with every word. He pulled the covers down slowly, ignoring Gerard’s tears.
“I do, I miss you, I miss it…” Gerard trailed off, using his shoulder to wipe tears off his cheeks. Frank noticed - not for the first time - how thin and pale Gerard had become since the operation. His ribcage and collar bones were just as prominent as the constant dark bags under his eyes. “Just, Frankie, please, I don’t… I…”
But Gerard could say no more, as his tears had reached maximum volume and Frank’s lips were pressed down hard on his, so hard it was almost painful. Gerard realized that Frank was crying too, but silently - fat tears were rolling down his face, hot and fast. The sight filled him with such an incomprehensible mixed feeling of sorrow, love, and exhaustion - Gerard could think of nothing else to do but kiss back, pushing their lips together with all his might.
Frank reached up, tentatively, and brushed a bit of Gerard’s hair back from his eyes. Gerard shook a little, his arms rigid at his side. He wished for nothing more than to reach out and graze his elbows along the smooth skin of Frank’s cheek, to feel the bumps and curves of his beauty as best as he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch Frank with his… deformities.
“Please, Gerard, let me do this…” Frank said, his teary voice changing. Gerard looked into his eyes and realized that somewhere behind the tears, there was lust. Desperate lust. It occurred to him for the first time that Frank may need this more then he did. Instead of trying to keep his lover away, he finally nodded and closed his eyes, accepting that nothing could ever stop Frank.
“Thank you.” Frank whispered, his words leaving a trail of goosebumps along Gerard’s jaw line.
The next thing Gerard felt was Frank’s full lips all over his forehead, Frank’s hands tangling through his hair. Through each soft, warm kiss Frank whispered I love you, and Gerard could feel the vibrations of Frank’s vocal chords through the spots that Frank’s lips made contact with his skin, tracing down from his forehead onto his still closed eyelids, over the soft curve of his cheeks. Frank’s tongue traced over Gerard’s adam’s apple, leaving a wet trail of what was spit but felt like lust on his neck.
And then came in Frank’s hands. He used his fingers to massage the skin of Gerard’s shoulders, down Gerard’s almost concave chest, feeling each and every one of his ribs, counting the bars of the cage over his heart.
“I love you.” he whispered into the skin above Gerard’s heart. Frank thought he heard Gerard murmur something above him but he didn’t want to stop now, didn’t want to detach himself from how close he was to his lover’s pale, warm skin.
But next to the chest were the arms. Frank could feel Gerard’s back straighten underneath him, as if he knew what was coming and was deathly afraid of it.
“Frankie, I…” he started, but Frank put a stop to his words by pressing his hand over Gerard’s mouth.
“No. Let me do this.” Frank said forcefully, eyeing Gerard with something that was almost anger. Again, Gerard faded back into the pillows without really fighting, resigning himself to the inevitable. Frank’s lips started at the right shoulder, his I love you’s mixing with the heated flesh of Gerard’s arm. He kissed and kissed and was even more gentle with him then than he was the night they first slept together, when he had treated Gerard like a china doll, like he was afraid of breaking him.
Frank’s lips traced the end of Gerard’s arms, the soft skin of his full mouth scraping along the stitches that held Gerard’s scarred skin together. It was healing, but still tender, so Frank held his breath and kissed with all the force of a feather. His lips only made contact for less than a second, but those few moments were enough to feel the rough, sharp edges of the stitching holding his lover together.
Above him, Gerard seemed to have gone beyond the point of tears. He laid straight, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, completely resigned to letting Frank do what he needed to do - for both of them. He couldn’t even bring himself to be ashamed that he was letting Frank touch - kiss! - his disgusting deformities, couldn’t believe it was actually happening, couldn’t believe any of it. It was simply too much to take. He didn’t feel the tears sliding down towards his ears until Frank came back up after finishing his tour of Gerard’s torso, licking those wayward tears up with his tongue.
“It’s done, baby.” Frank said, his nose touching Gerard’s. “I went near your arms. It finally happened, and guess what?”
Gerard couldn’t speak. He was horrified. He didn’t know what Frank was going to say or how he would say it. And he prepared himself for the very worst.
“I still want to fuck you. I still want to… make love to you. I still think you’re fucking beautiful and sexy and I wouldn’t care if you lost every single one of your fucking limbs, Gerard, I would still love you. I didn’t love you because of your hands, baby. I loved you for every part of you, for your mind and your voice and your face and… for you. I love you for everything. Every beautiful part of you.”
Gerard Way, who thought he lost his life with his hands, finally realized that he had his life with him the whole time. He felt his heart beat slow down as more and more things made sense, as puzzle pieces fit into empty spaces and words and actions fell into place. His life wasn’t in his hands. His love wasn’t in his hands. His love was in his heart. His love was in Frank.
His love… well, no one could take that away from him.