All That I've Got

Frank’s P.O.V.

The first thing Frank processed was Natalie’s fingers on the phone’s dock. Then he realized exactly what she’d done. She’d hung it up.

The words ‘I love you’ were still pulsing through Frank body with his blood, but now loss was there too.

“No,” Frank said, standing suddenly so he was level with Natalie. “Why’d you do that? Why?”

Natalie looked guilty and pained. “I’m sorry, Frankie,” she mumbled, “it’s just that- it’s that I heard what he said. But you can’t leave because of that.”

Natalie turned pleading eyes onto Frank’s, and he still wasn’t exactly feeling the full shock of what’d just happened.

“Frank, you need to stay here, where you’re safe,” Natalie continued, pleadingly. “The Jury’s after you again- that’s what Chris has been so stressed about. You can’t leave, you just can’t.”

The Jury was after him, and that meant they’d found out he’d been relocated. Which mean they were still after his mom. His life was still fucked.

Then Frank had a stabbing realization. All of that meant that Frank couldn’t go back to Gerard. He couldn’t love Gerard back, because that would bring the Jury down on him too. Frank had already endangered Natalie and Alex and the others, and if Gerard could be safe from that, Frank would make sure he was.

Frank would let this boy that he’d only just remembered go.

Frank could tell that it would be the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.

“Delete all the files on my mom,” Frank said flatly.

Then he left a staring Natalie alone in the dark, and ghosted back to his bed, where he let himself unravel.

----

The world sort of lost its luster for a while after that. Frank didn’t really get up from his bed, other than for school, where he would immediately faze back out into his own tortured mind. He missed his old life- missed Gerard- so bad that it felt like some large animal had crawled inside his chest cavity and was now chewing the walls to shreds.

Natalie and Alex grew visibly upset and concerned with Frank the longer he wallowed in the carnage of the phone call. Frank had already begged Natalie for the number again so he could call back, but she’d refused.

Finally, a week later, Gerard’s voice had stopped ringing in Frank’s head long enough for him to do some actually thinking.

Which soon led to a plan starting to fog Frank’s mind over. It filled the space in his head and distracted from the pain of the simple words Gerard had said to him.

Frank began spending most of his time in class and elsewhere sorting through the mind-fog, scraping forward details and then eventually forming a plan. It was both complicated and dangerous, but those had always been the first words in Frank’s dictionary.

Finally, Frank had the words for what he wanted.

After school one day, he pulled Natalie into his room and explained his plan. He was somewhat surprised when she agreed to it, but then again, Natalie was a lot like Frank. Unpredictable and fierce.

“Don’t mention anything to Alex, please,” Frank said.

“I won’t. We both love him too much to put him in a position like this. We should do this on our own. I was the one who promised you all the answers you wanted, after all.” Natalie looked
determined, and that night she put Frank’s idea into motion. Once again she was sneaking into Chris’s office of secrets and this time not emerging until dawn.