Thickheaded.

He hadn't meant to kill him. Until the day he died, Mikey swore to himself that he hadn't meant to kill Frank. He'd just wanted to literally knock some sense into his boyfriend because he swore to God that Frank's skull was literally a foot thick; mere words seemed to deflect off it like tiny pebbles. Mikey had lost count of the number of times he'd had to remind Frank about things, simple things that really shouldn't have been that hard to remember.

Please Frank, make sure that you turn off the stove when you're done using it.

Please Frank, clean up the floor after you have a shower so that I don't slip and fall.

Please Frank, I play video games to unwind, leave me alone.

It was this last one, oddly enough, that Mikey had the most problem with. After nearly burning down the house that they shared, Frank finally realized that he actually did need to check the stove when he was done using it. After he slipped on the wet floor of the bathroom and smacked his head off the linoleum hard enough to give himself a concussion, he was much more vigilant about making sure that he'd cleaned up before stepping out. But it seemed that no matter how many times Mikey asked Frank to please leave him alone or just plain fuck off, he just didn't get it.

Now, Mikey knew that in the grand scheme of things, he didn't have a particularly stressful job. He was a stockboy at a grocery store, working days to make sure that the aisles were filled. Even on the days that the orders came in, things really weren't that difficult; he knew that the cashiers had a hell of a time, dealing with customers who were just fucking grouchy for no particular reason or who smelled absolutely awful. Nonetheless, there were some days where absolutely everything seemed to go wrong and when Mikey got home from one of these days, all he wanted to do was sit down and shoot a few innocent people and since it wasn't legal to do that in reality, he had to settle for the latest graphic video game.

The only problem was that Frank always wanted to play too. Mikey didn't understand why; Frank was in between jobs and had literally all day to play games, to get it out of his system until Mikey came home. However, it seemed that he only ever wanted to play when Mikey was home; when he needed to blow the heads off a few people to let off some excess hatred he had towards his boss or another employee; when he did not need to hear Mikey, look out! or Mikey, you should be using the pistol for this mission.

Mikey had screamed at Frank. He had whispered and shrieked and outright begged for Frank to just please go away, for half an hour and Frank would usually go away for about ten minutes before bouncing back into the living room, smiling as if nothing had happened and Mikey would just groan and repeat the process. He'd pleaded and sobbed and demanded but until that one day, he had never hit Frank. There had been days where he'd had to leave the room and slam his fist into a pillow but he had never struck Frank purposely.

However, he hadn't truly experienced stress until that day as well. Mikey had gotten fired. There'd been no reasoning for it that he could decipher; his boss, a bloated whale of a man, had simply told him that he was no longer needed and his employment was terminated. The entire bus ride home, Mikey had stared at the other passengers and imagined aiming crossbow bolts through each and every one of their skulls. When he finally got to his house, he didn't even bother changing out of his work clothes; he simply needed to kill someone before he completely and utterly snapped. His fingers were as white as the controller they ferociously clutched and he had to force himself to loosen his grip so that he didn't' snap any of the fragile buttons. Once he had the game loaded up, he immediately delved into the action, fingers switching from button to joystick to trigger as he dispatched dozens of in game humans, firing shotguns into their heads at close range. He could feel his stress slowly peeling away, like a layer of skin off a snake. Frank was nowhere to be seen, which was unusual but he wasn't complaining.

He'd spoke too soon. Only a minute later, Frank came in from the kitchen, holding a plate stacked high with pizza in his hand. Mikey only barely acknowledged him, nodding his head sideways, eyes not leaving the screen. He had already completed this mission in the past but he loved it, especially the end, where you got to-

Frank tripped. In a scene straight out of some Three Stooges slapstick, the plate went flying across the room, making it rain pizza. Falling towards the carpet, Frank flailed his arms outwards, hoping to grab something that would make his impact a little less painful. (Reflecting on the moment, Mikey didn't know why Frank had done that, since their living room was carpeted and he was quite sure that the impact wouldn't have hurt at all). What Frank happened to grab was the cord for Mikey's game console and when he hit the ground, breath rushing out of him in a womph noise, he yanked the cord out of the wall. The screen immediately went to black; none of this fading crap, it instantly went black, right as Mikey was about to deliver an entire clip of bullets to some mob boss' face. His jaw dropped and, for a few seconds that seemed to stretch into infinity, all he could do was stare at the television, where he thought he could still see the faint outline of his character. On the floor, Frank was groaning up a storm, clutching his stomach with his fingers, greasy from pizza. When Mikey finally moved his head, staring down at the lump on the carpet, he couldn't even think straight.

He snapped.

"Frank! What in the fuck is wrong with you?" Mikey fell to the carpet on his knees and grabbed Frank's hair, yanking his hair hard enough to make him yelp.

"I just wanted to bring you pizza!" he wailed, tears congregating on the edge of his eyelids. "I thought that you would like some-"

"No!" Mikey wasn't thinking straight, he knew that, but he couldn't help it. He was almost literally seeing red; his thoughts were all being tunnelled into sheer aggression and anger. "How many times have I told you to just leave me the fuck alone? Why can't you get that through your thick head?"

This was when it happened. Muscles acting on the wishes of his rage, Mikey's right hand, still clutching the controller, came up and then swiftly back down, slamming the plastic object into Frank's left temple. For a few seconds, Frank's eyes continued to blink but then, with one shuddering gasp, they stayed open, blankly gazing up at Mikey. Blood trickled from his ear as he collapsed to the carpet, a maroon halo slowly forming around his head. All Mikey could do was stare, his jaw dropping open again as the controller fell to the floor.

That had not just happened. Frank was just unconscious, that was all. In a few minutes, he would wake up and, although he'd probably be mad for a bit, he'd forgive Mikey because that's just the kind of person he was; forgiving. No matter how many times Mikey had screamed at him, Frank had forgiven him.

If he'd been more like Frank, his boyfriend wouldn't be lying on the floor dead (because there was no doubt now that Frank was indeed dead, not just passed out). Mikey sat down on the floor, back against the couch and stared at his lifeless body, mouth a closed line. Frank's eyes were looking in his general direction, looking but not exactly focused. They'd started to glaze over and the blood that had been flowing from his ear had congealed, sticking to the carpet. The pizza lay all around him, completely and utterly forgotten in the chaos.

Mikey felt strange. He didn't feel horrible or sick or distraught; he just felt strange, because he knew he should have been feeling those other emotions but he simply didn't. He just felt empty, empty of absolutely everything; everything, including the stress of his job. It seemed to have suddenly melted away, flowed out of him like Frank's blood had flowed out of his ear. He no longer felt angry at his boss or his piece of shit job or anything. He felt... calm, in a way his video games had never succeeded.

That night, after the sun had gone down and only the flickering streetlights illuminated his backyard, Mikey dragged Frank outside by his feet, wincing as his boyfriend's head slammed onto each step. By the time he had finished digging a deep enough hole, his muscles were screaming at him, not used to the exertion. His bare chest was slick with sweat as he roughly manhandled the body (he didn't remember Frank being so heavy) into the hole. He knew that he probably should have done the burial with a little more dignity; at the very least, he could have wrapped Frank up in a sheet. However, to be quite honest, Mikey just didn't feel like doing such a thing.

By the time he had recovered the hole, carefully parking a wheelbarrow on top of the freshly turned earth, the sun was beginning to rise above the horizon, turning the sky a sickly shade of orange. Mikey was asleep before the streetlights turned off, passed out on the kitchen floor from sheer exhaustion. The carpet of the living room floor was still covered in blood but he ignored it, even after he woke up. He did clean up the pizza, but only because it was starting to leave an unpleasant odour that he had to cover up with Febreeze.

Later that day, a tall, skinny man with blonde hair and glasses walked into a New Jersey gun store and, ten minutes later, walked out with a crossbow. Only six hours later, across town from where Mikey Way lived, the manager of a local grocery store was found with a bolt through his head, executed in his living room. Two days later, another person was found; this time, a woman, locally known as a prostitute, found in a ditch with another crossbow bolt through her skull.

Until the day Mikey Way died (or was executed, he supposed; what goes around comes around, after all), he would swear that he had never meant to kill Frank. That was a complete accident, brought on by sheer rage and the fact that Frank was a complete imbecile.

Yes, Frank was never meant to die. But the others?

Well, Mikey supposed that they'd just been in the wrong place and said the wrong thing at the wrong time. After all, he could no longer blame their behaviour on sheer ignorance; they were doing it on purpose.

After smashing Frank's skull in with a video game controller, Mikey no longer believed that people were thickheaded.