The Chasing of Moons

It took Frank all of negative six seconds to convince Brendon to go next door for coffee. It’s almost like their friendship hangs in the balance of the other buying them caffeinated beverages. Which is probably true.

Brendon is practically dragging him to the place, and Frank only barely has enough time to make sure that Gerard is following him before he’s shoved into line. Brendon orders something with too many shots of whatever syrup, and he knows that it will probably taste like liquid sugar, which Frank is honestly not proud to be paying for with his own money. Surprisingly, Gerard’s coffee isn’t as expensive as he’d promised, because he seriously just gets himself a coffee with sugar, and Frank stares at him a little aghast because he’d expected to have to take out a mortgage on his drink.

“You said you were broke...” Gerard says, drifting off and blushing, but Frank doesn’t say anything about it. Mikey tries to trick Frank into paying for him too, but Frank just flicks him in the temple which makes Gerard snort, so Frank decides he’s going to have to do that again. Mikey may, and probably will him, but at least he’ll go out having seen Gerard smiling.

The unfortunate thing that happens is that they all have to get a table, but it’s too awkward for Frank and Gerard to get a table alone so they have to share a table which makes Frank wish Mikey would die in a freak anvil falling from the sky accident. But alas, he does not live in a Warner Brothers cartoon, so no such thing happens.

“Well,” Brendon says, as a way to break the silence that surrounded them as soon as they sat down. That can mostly be attributed to the fact that they all kind of want to drown themselves in coffee, because as hipster as it is, coffee is what makes the world go round. Aside, maybe, from Hallmark greeting cards.

“Well?” Mikey asks him.

“I don’t know, I was just... we can talk about wells. I mean, how about Lassie?”

Frank looks at him like he grew a second head and kicks him under the table for being an idiot. Frank did at least manage to get himself on the same side of the table as Gerard which is already further than he’s gotten so far, so he’s not complaining. Mikey looks rather, uncomfortable glaring at Brendon with an expression that suits what expression Brendon deserves to have made at him.

“Yeah, so,” Frank says, “I’m just going to pretend that Brendon doesn’t exist.”

“I don’t blame you at all,” Brendon says, slurping loudly at his cup full of a gooey mass of sugar and the dead dreams of children.

Mikey nods, looks away from him and at Frank who looks back at him wondering what thoughts he’s reading from Frank’s mind. He’s probably trying to find something juicy that he can use against him some day, and Frank shrugs, because Mikey could probably find out all of his secrets anyway, even if it weren’t for the fact that he is most definitely a mind reader.

Frank can almost feel himself receiving transmitted thoughts from Mikey, like they’re having a completely telepathic conversation.

Somehow, Mikey manages to extract enough to form the statement, “so you told Gerard about the concert then.”

“How do you do that?” Frank asks.

“He’s actually supposed to be in the X-Men, but he doesn’t play well with others so they never sent him his invitation.”

“That explains so much,” Frank says.

“Yeah,” Mikey says, “I’m a mind reader, with a killer Gaydar, and Gerard has the ability to tell if people are left handed or right handed just by looking at them.”

“I have a 70% chance of being right.”

“Without studying them?” Brendon asks.

“Well it wouldn’t be a superpower if I had to watch them first,” Gerard snaps, like Brendon is taking away from his imaginary superpower.

“Well,” Frank says, “I definitely know who I want in my Justice League.”

“What the world really needs is for there to be a guy who stands in a booth at the fair who tells you if you’re right or left handed.”

“I feel like you guys are being a little condescending about my skill, and I don’t appreciate it.”

“Well if it makes you feel any better than my superpower is that I have the ability to turn any and every green light in the world red,” Frank tells him.

“It’s true, I’ve driven with him,” Brendon says.

“And Brendon has an ego the size of Shaq’s feet.”

“Or Shaq’s jacket,” Gerard says.

“Or the shoes that Shaq surely has to have custom made for him.”

“Basically anything to do with Shaq is how big his ego is, and that’s his only superpower,” Mikey summarizes.

“I feel like you guys are making fun of me,” Brendon says.

“What!” Frank gasps, “No! Never.”

“What could possibly make you think that, Brendon?” Gerard asks.

“I’ve never heard such a thing more positively obscene! What a vile, untrue, and completely presumptuous thing to say about us!”

“How dare you.”

“You’re all dicks,” Brendon replies, sulking lower into his chair like it’ll make his ego somehow smaller. “I’m pretty amazing, I don’t know how it is that you guys manage to even notice flaws that I have.”

“See, and it’s words like that which underline how totally ridiculous it is that we would ever dare to make fun of you, oh holy one,” Frank says.

“Your highness,” Gerard adds.

“My liege.”

“Your holiness.”

“Your majesty.”

“Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”

“You win this round, Way,” Frank says, resigning with a sigh.

Pete’s somewhat under dramatic arrival follows there words shortly. Frank isn’t sure if ‘under dramatic’ is necessarily the right term, or if ‘awkward arrival’ is more fitting. Either way, Pete walks in, trips on the door, makes a short frame of eye contact with Frank full of terror that Mikey had seen that, before he’s turning around, and walking back in in a way that could be considered smoother if you are very bad at reading social situations.

He looks around, pretending to look around the coffee shop like he didn’t just stare oddly adoringly at the back of Mikey’s head, and then walks over with what he would try to tell you is swagger, and what Frank would later inform you can be explained by the too-large shoes for his feet. Pete swears, on his own life, on the grave of his family members who aren’t actually dead so can’t have anyone swearing over their graves in the first place, that he doesn’t buy shoes too big for any ego purposes, but rather because he likes the fit better. Frank thinks that’s bullshit. He thinks that Pete’s trying to make people think he has bigger feet, and bigger other things in correlation.

“Mikey, what a crazy random happenstance!” Pete says.

“Sorry to break it to you, but he already used that line, dude,” Brendon tells him.

“Shit,” Pete says, looking at the ceiling as if trying to find a better introduction. “Uh, never mind, hi guys.”

“Hi Pete,” Mikey says, who is the only person who looks surprised to find Pete here.

“Well I feel like Ray is missing out on some serious bonding time right now,” Frank says.

Gerard shrugs, “he works at Kmart. Right now he’s probably falling asleep in the shampoo aisle.”

“We’ve all been there,” Brendon says.

“The craziest thing that you have ever done was go on stage at a magic show,” Pete reminds him, which makes Brendon make a face that looks curiously like the villain of a Bond film.

“You should get a chair!” Mikey says to Pete, and Frank only just realizes that he’s standing next to the table still not having moved, with his eyes fixed on Mikey. It’s kind of gross.

“They really need to put a vomit warning on those two,” Gerard murmurs to Frank.

“I don’t think it would help,” Frank says, “They do it everywhere. You’d think that they’d have hooked up by now for god’s sake, it’s so obvious.”

Brendon, who would not like for it to be known that he is eavesdropping on Gerard and Frank, makes a face of total disbelief at the irony in what they’re saying. Yeah, it sure is kind of surprising that the two of them haven’t hooked up yet, what other two people could that situation be compared to?

“What we really need is a small enclosed space and a stopwatch,” Frank says, then, after seeing the look of confusion on Gerard’s face he says, “We just have to lock them in the small enclosed space, start the timer, and wait. I would say ‘wait patiently’ but I don’t think it would take too long.”

“No it really wouldn’t,” Gerard says.

“Who else do you think that would work with, Frank?” Brendon asks him, because they’re all completely ignoring Pete and Mikey at this point. Pete, who’s pulling a chair from another table over to theirs with a painful screeching noise, is talking about something that none of them could care less about with Mikey who is entranced by every word he says.

“I don’t know, Brendon. Who?” he asks, like some sort of dare.

“Just saying,” he says, and with a sip of his drink he makes a ‘but that’s none of my business face’ which earns him another kick, a little more north, from Frank.

“I’m missing something,” Gerard says, and Brendon literally guffaws at how completely oblivious he is to Frank’s blatant flirting. Frank wonders himself if Gerard’s even aware that Frank asked him out. He’s probably kid himself into thinking Frank’s the most heterosexual heterosexual to have ever heterosexualed.

“You’re missing quite a few things,” Brendon says.

“Namely an idiot friend who walks around with his foot in his mouth,” Frank says, in reference to Brendon, “and that’s something that I’m jealous of you about.”

“I don’t know, have you met Mikey?” Gerard shrugs. Frank’s definitely noticed quite a bit of difference in the past twenty minutes in the way that Gerard is talking to him. He’s not going out of his way to be an ass towards Frank. It’s almost like they’re talking as friends. Frank doesn’t want to read too much into that because he knows he’ll only trick himself into thinking that this is something it isn’t. He’ll convince his brain that Gerard cares more about him than he actually does, and that would be a dangerous game to play.

“I could recite all of Hamlet in one go without either of them looking up,” Brendon notes, wrinkling his nose at the fact that he can smell Pete from where he sits. He smells like dirty clothes and some sort of flowery blend of air freshener that makes him smell like a grandmother’s laundry room.

“Oh, or you know how you can always get Pete’s attention though right?” Frank asks.

“Oh right yeah,” Brendon nods, He clears his throat, while Gerard gives him a strange look, and sings, in all seriousness, “is this the real life?”

As if on instinct, Pete looks up like someone just called his name, and Frank grins, because the easiest way to get to him is usually through Queen.

“What?” Pete asks, looking from Frank to Gerard and then to Brendon.

“I didn’t say anything,” Brendon says, “did you Frank?”

“Nope,” Frank shakes his head.

“Oh,” Pete says frowning, “I thought.... never mind.” Pete then turns back to Mikey to continue their conversation on what Frank is eerily aware to be about Iron Chef.

“He’s too easy,” Brendon sighs, shaking his head.

“You two should write a book,” Gerard says, “hacks on how to interact with Pete. It seems like you’ve got a lot of content that you could use.”

“We probably could,” Brendon says, nodding.

Frank shakes his head, “We’d have to make it a series. We could fill out one whole volume alone talking about the dumb things he’s done.”

“Like that orange juice thing,” Gerard suggests.

“That’s really on the tamer side of his idiocy if we’re being honest,” Brendon says, “I mean, you can’t forget about the skateboard incident.”

“We don’t talk about that,” Frank warns him. He looks at Pete, as if having some sort of overdramatic flashback.

“Right yeah, sorry,” Brendon says.

“Should I ask?” Gerard eagerly wishes that he could know what it is they’re talking about so that he could decide for himself if he’d rather have not known in the first place. But he doesn’t want Frank to think he’s too interested in him because that would be a dead giveaway to the fact that he’s thought about Frank kissing him more times than he could count.

Gerard doesn’t like to think of himself as being creepy, there’s really only two situations that he can think of that could ever be considered creepy. First, there was the time that he stalked a man who he was absolutely positive was one of the Wiggles in an organic food grocery store, only to find out that it was just some Australian with a deceivingly red shirt. The other time is his entire daydreaming system of Frank which includes many graphic images not suited for daytime TV, or really, many pornos. This facet of his imagination is also not as dormant as Gerard would like for you to think, though he doesn’t parade around about it. Mikey’s still completely aware of it, because there’s only so many times when you can wait outside of the shower for your brother to fucking finish up before you’re forced to draw some rash conclusions.

“Trust me, you do not want to know,” Frank says, “It involved a skateboard and a rather large amount of hummus.” At that however, Gerard thinks, maybe not. Maybe not knowing is the best thing for him.

“I still have nightmares,” Brendon adds.

“Me too.”

“You guys are strange,” Gerard says, and Frank thinks that probably no truer words have ever been spoken in all of the existence of the human language.