Chance

Frank spends hours in the bar, more hours than even Ray is willing to spend trying to cheer him up. He watches as the whole of the city comes in, watches as the whole of the city leaves, and feels the dread when he’s asked to leave at closing. He can’t leave. Gerard might come back. What will he do if Gerard comes back?

He knows it’s closing, Gerard isn’t going to come back when it’s literally closed but part of him also feels the weight of every second that passes that Gerard isn’t by him. He can sense it, like a bridge between their brains. He can practically hear Gerard hurting. He can sense him. And all he can sense now is that Gerard is there, he is out there somewhere, and he is missing Frank just as much as Frank misses him, and there’s no way to find him.

Frank doesn’t even know that the man who sat across the bar from him was the brother of the man he was looking for. He doesn’t know that Gerard is only a few levels away. He can’t know. There’s no way to know.

So, Frank is forced to pack up his stuff at closing, and drudge his way to a taxi. He almost falls asleep on the ride to the apartment. He feels like it’s been years since he last slept. He wants the relief of not knowing that Gerard is missing for a few hours, it sounds hypnotic to him. There’s nothing he wants more than to just be in his own bed, lying against his own pillow, not caring for a little while that the love of his life is nowhere to be found.

When Frank gets home, Ray is still up. He tries to make Frank think that he didn’t stay up so late because he was worried about Frank, but he’s not an idiot. He can see it in Ray’s eyes. Just because Ray doesn’t want to be stuck in a bar on a Saturday night with a man who kept taking trips to the bathroom to cry, doesn’t mean that he was going to go to sleep without knowing that the guy is safe first.

“You okay?” Ray asks.

“No,” Frank replies, before walking to his room, and closing the door shortly. He hears Ray’s footsteps a moment later, and the quiet sound of the TV turning off, a sound so unbelievably unique that it always catches Frank off guard. Ray knocks, and he doesn’t wait more than a couple of seconds before he comes in.

“Um, excuse you, I could have been naked,” Frank says, and Ray rolls his eyes.

“Listen, Frank, what is it right now that you need?”

“I need Gerard,” Frank says, surprised by the question, because the answer is so obvious.

“Yes, I get that, and I understand, but right now, I can’t give you that. I just need to know if there is something that you need in order to not self-destruct, which honestly, it looks like you’re already in the process of.”

“I just, I don’t know. Nothing is okay right now, everything, it feels like everything has blown up in my face, and I want to do everything, everything in the world to make things work out, but I can’t and the fact that I can’t, it just, it kills me, like you can’t believe.”

Ray shakes his head, “I just want you to not look like you’re dying on the inside.”

“Right now… I can’t help that.”

“That kills me,” Ray sighs.

“It kills me too,” Frank says, feeling himself get ready to cry again, which he has seriously got to stop doing.

“What was Gerard like?” Ray inquires, because he wants to hear from Frank’s own mouth what was special about him. It’s not that he doubts how much Frank cares, he just wants to know how much.

“He was just like, he was everything, Ray, you can’t understand. He just had this way about him, you know? Like he was funny, and he wasn’t trying, and when he was trying he was such a fucking dork. Like he’d look at me with this like raised eyebrow like ‘I made a funny, now you gotta laugh’ and when he tried, he wasn’t even fucking funny, like he was just natural at it, until he tried to force it. And you should have seen him talk about Scooby Doo, like, he was raised on that shit, and just the way he talked about it, I mean you can’t imagine anyone ever being as passionate as that. But then he would say something else, anything else, and you could tell it just, it came from his heart, it didn’t matter what it was he was talking about, his voice, it just, it could get all serious, and it was like being stabbed straight through the heart, but not in a bad way. It was like, when Gerard talked, and when he was passionate about what he was saying, it was like one of those inspirational movie speeches with all the violins going all strong and pretty in the background. I swear, it was like he carried a whole orchestra with him, because just looking at him, just talking to him, hearing him speak, it was a gift. Gerard is a symphony. Gerard is poetry. Gerard is, he’s a monument, an epic. He’s a world all by himself, just this one man, who, without even trying, could touch you, like right in your fucking heart just by smiling or looking confused, or laughing, or anything. Gerard is everything now. The world seems like a shade of grey without him, because when he was in my world, I swear I saw colors that didn’t exist. Now I can’t even see the colors that I used to know.”

Ray looks at Frank, and he’s getting a sinking feeling, because there is no way in this entire world that Frank could have said any of those things about anyone yesterday. He couldn’t even have put those words together yesterday. This isn’t even the same person that Frank was yesterday.

“Well shit, man,” Ray says, shaking his head. “You got it bad.”

Frank just whimpers, and nods.



Gerard sleeps uneasily, but he does sleep which is a mercy on his aching head. What dreams he has are unpleasant and frightening, but not being awake is all that he asks for. He finds Frank in many of his dreams though, and that’s what kills him when he wakes up.

It’s far too early in the morning for a person to be awake. So early that the sun isn’t even up yet. Gerard looks out the window and he sees nothing but darkness. He expects it to be raining, because it should be raining when he feels this shitty. The weather should reflect that. But it’s not. The sky hasn’t got the memo that Gerard is having a bad day.

It’s only four in the morning and Gerard has already figured out it’s a bad day. It’s a bad day because Frank’s not here.

This time yesterday, he might still have been awake, with Frank. He can’t remember when they fell asleep, but it was around now. Gerard looks around his room, seeing ghosts of Frank on everything. He sees a stack of CD’s, Black Flag, Misfits, The Clash. All bands Frank had liked. He sees a Ramones record and laughs to himself, because Frank didn’t like the Ramones. He sees a sweater that he threw to the side of his room that looks like the one Frank was wearing. He sees the colored pencils strewn across his desk, and the dark brown looks like Frank’s eyes. There’s a pink one that looks like Frank’s lips, a violent yellow one that reminds Gerard of his personality.

Frank has a bright yellow personality. He’s got the cheer, the care, the empathy. Frank is bright yellow. Gerard’s more of a warm green, he thinks. Frank is sunsets coming over a field, Gerard is the grass on that field. Frank is stars glowing from billions of miles away. Frank is a field full of dandelions overtaking a deserted piece of highway. Frank is a sunflower, which was also his favorite flower. Frank is pure, bright, energetic.

Gerard doesn’t feel like dragging himself out of bed quite yet. He knows he’s not going to get any more sleep, but he doesn’t want to have to pretend to be a functional human being right now. He just wants to stay here for a little while and be unhappy. He’s going to be unhappy whether or not he gets out of bed or not, but at least if he’s here, he doesn’t need to be near Hayley. Hayley probably isn’t going to wake up for a little while yet, but he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.

He just wants to lie around, thinking about Frank. Well, he’s trying not to think about him, but that means that the only thing in the entire world that he can think about is Frank.

Gerard stares at his ceiling for a good half hour or so. Not really doing anything other than trying to think about nothing. He almost manages to wipe his brain of all thought for a little while, and thinks that this is what meditating must be like, until he gets bored and starts daydreaming about Frank as a knight in shining armor.

This gives Gerard an idea.

He pulls himself out of his bed, and drags himself to his desk where he looks around for his sketchpad. Rather lazily, Gerard starts to try to draw Frank’s face. However, without a reference, this is not an easy task.

The thing is, he can picture Frank’s face in his head, but for the life of him, he can’t remember exactly what his nose looked like. Or what his cheekbones were like. He can see Frank’s face, clear as day, but when he tries to focus in on the details, they’re not there.

Nevertheless, Gerard does his best, drawing a messy image of what he remembers Frank to look like. He definitely does not have a future career as a police sketch artist. Frank’s eyes end up being all wrong and his nose doesn’t look right. Gerard scraps the page, and then starts again. This one ends up going sour not long after he starts as well. Frank’s face is definitely not that shape.

Four more tries, and Gerard starts to get a handle on what the shape of his face is, and he starts to get the nose to actually look like a nose a little bit. It’s not exactly right though, because it doesn’t look like Frank.

Gerard’s never drawn an actual human face without a reference before, and he’s starting to think it’s impossible. How can he draw Frank when he’s not looking at him?

Gerard manages to waste two whole hours trying to draw him, with varying degrees of success, when he finally sprouts up an image that has a passing resemblance with Frank.

He doesn’t realize what time it is until he looks at the clock and sees that it’s nearly seven. It’s still way too early in the morning. Gerard feels his stomach grumble at him, pleading for food, and he’s got to pee pretty badly as well. He knows he also smells like he hasn’t showered in a few days, mostly because he hasn’t showered in a few days. He’s kind of a mess of a human being right now.

It’s in this moment that he realizes that he doesn’t feel like complete and utter shit right now. He thinks for a second, and then, the feeling of helplessness and desolation comes back. Gerard thinks for a minute, and tries to figure out why he didn’t feel so shitty, and then looks down at the sketchpad below him. He hasn’t felt shitty since he started drawing. Sketching took his mind off of Frank for a while, even though he was drawing Frank, and thinking about him all the while. It was a distraction.

Gerard flips the page and starts drawing again, the first thing that comes to his brain, which happens to be a superhero, that he doesn’t even know he’s drawing until he starts to see it on the page. Gerard is always doodling superheroes though, anywhere really, napkins, notebook paper, himself, on a bathroom stall once. Though when he gets to the face he realizes too late that it looks like Frank. He hadn’t even tried to make it look like Frank, but it just happened. All the while, Gerard forgets for the few minutes it takes for him to complete the drawing, that he’s in pain. He just forgets that the world sucks for a few minutes.

When he looks down at the finished sketch, he realizes that he distracted himself again. He resorts back to feeling like shit only seconds after, because his brain reminds him that the world sucks, but he’s astounded that he managed to make it stop hurting for a little while.

Then he hears a knock on his door and he makes a grunting sort of sound that means “come in.”

Hayley walks in a few moments later, looking way too good for it to be seven in the fucking morning, but then again, Hayley usually wakes up looking like she just spent five hours at a salon. That’s just kind of her default look. Honestly, if Gerard weren’t the gayest fucking person on the planet he’d be so in love with her. But to be fair, most people are in love with her at least a little bit.

“Hey,” she says, looking over at Gerard, who she is surprised to see is actually out of bed.

“Hi,” Gerard responds, rather despondently.

“So I’m assuming life still sucks?” Hayley asks.

“Yeah,” Gerard nods.

“I’m sorry,” she says, sighing.

“I just miss him,” Gerard says. “I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s like he’s haunting me.”

“He must have been special,” Hayley says, walking over to sit on the bed, as Gerard looks back at her.

“He was. He is. I mean, fuck, I don’t know how to describe him to you,” Gerard says. He didn’t actually tell Hayley much of anything about him, not even what happened, and he feels that he owes or something at least.

“That’s alright.”

“No, I mean, you couldn’t understand, because you’d have to meet him, but he was, wow. He made me feel alive, I don’t know. He just gave me this, like, fuzzy feeling inside, and he was warm, and he was sweet, and he was just fucking hilarious. But, really, the thing that made me fall in love with him, and believe me, I am in love with him, I’m positive of it, but what made me fall in love with him was that he just made me feel good. Like it wasn’t like he was pandering to me, or anything like that, because he wasn’t trying. Ya know, he just, he just had this way. He made you feel good about yourself, just by being near you. He looked at me like no one has ever looked at me before. He talked to me like no one has ever talked to me before. Everyone thinks they’re superior to everybody else, it’s a consequence of the human existence, we all do it, we don’t know we think do, but we do. But Frank, he, he felt to me like an equal, and he looked at me like he felt the same. It was just unreal meeting someone who was more human than anyone else I’ve ever seen.”

“And you fell in love with him in one night?” Hayley asks, not in a condescending tone, because she doesn’t have a condescending bone in her body, she’s just trying to make sure she has her facts straight.

“I fell in love with him in one minute,” Gerard replies.