Dancing Bruises.

Frankie's trying to dig up his head from between his ribs. His palm is so close to his chest it might rip open his paper skin since his fingernails are already making cherry marks right over his heart.
He's trying to find it; find where it sunk deep within his lung and spine. He just hoped he'd be able to make sure it was where he left it.

It wasn't.

Every time it would be there; peeking, raw and naked, between his blooming rib-bones. Now there was just this hungry hole screaming POUR ME SOME WINE AND AFFECTION.

He couldn't grasp his heart that's glued between his shoulder-blades and Frankie's on the edge of tears, hell, he's just seeing blurs, shadows and double frames now.
He used to savor every baby scar, now they just hurt. Like scars normally do. Frankie's beginning to sound a little human.

This gasping black hole in the middle of his burnt-rosebud chest made it all too real again.
And he only has Wentz to blame for that.

No. This wasn't love, even sexual interest. This was a prolonged one-nightstand that got fucked; got so hot and chaotic causing this puddle of a heart-mess to leak and form under his eyes: a soup of scarlet acid and molten powder-white tendon strings.

"Frankie?"
He froze.

And when he looked away from himself, his splintered ribs, his pathetic vacant cavity, all he saw were Pete's fingers singed in imaginary red.

Pete found him. And it's not a pretty sight. He saw the naked Frankie before, it's nothing like that.

He's grimacing and he's squinting so hard that he forgot how to breathe, scrutinizing every reddened patch across Frankie's face, across Frankie's fingers, across the whole of Frankie. He did shrink in the dark. Right now Pete felt like he could pick him up and put him in his pocket just like that.

"Why're you here?"

"I just-" Pete gestures at his back without a second thought before Frankie interrupts his half-baked answer.

"You didn't answer my question." Frankie's voice is like a calm disrupted piano tune where you can hear those menacing rats nibbles on his inner strings; you can hear that the tunes are not as harmonious and peaceful at the piano player wants you to think. You can only think of those poor poor rats behind the scenes with the bleeding gums and growing appetites.

"I'm here to see you," Pete replies looking back at Frankie's rose-tainted ivory features, trying to spot the rats dancing and swimming behind his mossy retinas.

"Well, here I am; now go." Frankie felt his desperation for grasping his exposed easy-to-find heart blowing smoke rings all over the folds of his brain; folds and folds of smoked silk Kimono folds with their irregular naturalistic portraits, burning and gathering in soot-smothered wrinkles around the pit of his skull.

"What did I do, Frankie?" He's watching Frankie's face change colors and expressions, and it's a mesh of emotions and blood-bloated rose blush and ugly ugly welling tears. An alabaster sculpture possessed by confused confused souls running away from Hades.

"Just go away, Pete," he whispers holding onto his bony chest with tears tears tears and more tears flowing from every pour in his body to wash away at the black hole in his chest.

"Stop. Just stop. Stop crying, Frankie. Fuck, stop crying." But Frankie's still crying. This is when Pete sees that there's something so wrong about Frankie now.
He's hemoglobin red now and his fingertips feel corpse-cold but look sheer red like a strawberry icicle gone glacial.

"Stop crying." Pete's looking all distressed and feeling all useless at the Frankie he wanted to see, but he wasn't even sure if this is Frankie.
The shaking heartless mess within the reach of his fingers left him at awe. The human rattle toy that was shaking, shaking and convulsing like a lost babyface looking for its owner, had this snowflake air about him. In Pete's head, he had forced away all the smiles and took away all the coy words and the seductive liquid-greens several times.

"Seriously; stop." He's all flustered and unsure of what's going in Frankie's head that's making him cry so fucking much. "Shit, Frankie. Just stop fucking crying." Pete's just freaking out now; he's freaking out so bad that his fingers just sunk into Frankie's puny arms and started shaking him all over. "Shut up, Frankie. Please. Just stop."

The rats are panicking in Frankie's head as he lets himself fall to the floor that he just left. The floor misses Frankie and Frankie misses it too. The floor's the only stable thing Frankie can find.
Frankie shuts up. Pete stops panicking. Everything slipped into Mute.

"Pete?" he mumbles, glued to the floor; his voice sounded like he had sandpaper in his larynx

"Yeah?" Pete gently sits on his knees, next to Frankie's body, hesitant and a bit dizzy.

"Do you ever feel...like a paper?"

"Why paper?" he says but Frankie doesn't seem to be listening as he keeps talking.

"That you can be folded, reshaped with every touch of a person? That you're powerful just by making people feel powerful?" Frankie's fingers are drawing invisible circles all over the tired maple floor. "People who burn you, tear you apart, write on you, pass you on to other people. I'm like a joint. Paper that's filled with shit, only good for a couple of breaths then it's passed on. Sometimes you stick a match in it so you can smoke the whole thing."

"You shouldn't say crap like that Frankie." Hell, for a moment there Pete thought he actually meant it. But you know he didn't, don't you?

"Why? You think like that, too. You were lying, Pete. From the very start. I knew it, you knew it, but we just kept silent, didn't we? So why...why did I let you fuck with my head so much? Why did I let you get through? Why?"

"Maybe you really wanted to answer my questions." And that's so fucking narcissistic Frankie has to laugh.

"Maybe you never had questions to begin with." And that's just so fucking confusing Pete has to laugh.

They're just laughing now; they're laughing through their teeth and eyes. They never really gave a fuck about one another. Frankie only cared about Frankie and Pete only cared about Pete. Right from the start. All that talk in their heads about being mindfucked by the other was probably one funny illusion, funnier than the confusing narcissistic lines they ate up. Nothing made sense as they laughed at the other's face.

Frankie's eye-rats pretty much drowned in his tears as his shaky ribcage quaked with choked heaves several times, Pete's question marks were still there, lying on the floor next to Frankie's eye-rats which nibbled on the ink-black marks. There're no rats. There're no question marks. They were just two fucked-up boys laughing and laughing their chests out to stupid things.

"I'm a bit happy. Just a bit." Frankie grins face down to the floor, gazing at the unseen rats. "Just a bit. I feel like I killed Santa."

"I just set the cat on fire." Pete swallows a deep breath, running his fingers all over his eyes feeling his corneas rapidly escaping under his eyelids. "I didn't wait for it to get killed. I killed it, Frankie."

"We're both murders." Frankie giggles staring at space.
It's all silent now; a lonely sigh emerges from within Frankie's lips. "Pete?"

"Uh-huh?"

"Nothing seems to have a point anymore." The air's still and frozen now. "We just laughed what kept us chasing each other away. We laughed it off."

"What'd you mean, Frankie?" Pete feels the frozen air pressing on his chest like a brick wall. He knew. He knew.

"What's the point of even talking to each other anymore?" See? Pete just knew. "We're not friends, we're not more than friends, hell, we don't even know anything about each other."

"I'd say we do."

"Like what?" The hole in Frankie's chest is wide-open now: a lustful dry mouth aching for raindrops.

"That I'm selfish and you're insane; we're fucked-up, Frankie. We're pathetic." And he topped it off with a smile; a shell of a smile, but still...a smile.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

"'Cause I think I was obsessed. You were my obsession; I was obsessed. With you. With your dancing. With your insanity."

"Huh." Frankie shuts his eyes and wipes off his last expressions. "Maybe I was too, in a sense."

"But you killed Santa." Pete remembers Santa. Santa's claw marks are still black and throbbing on his back.

"And you burnt the cat." They're laughing again.

"You lost the magic."

"But you fucking killed it." They stop. Frankie's gripping his empty ribs. THREW IT. Right between Nameless Girl's thighs.

Rewind to several laughs and tears away and press Play. "Why're you here, Pete?"

"I wanted to see the real you." Pete says, undisturbed by this change of subject. Frankie's silent now, but it's an honest silence. Everything's all laid out on the table; no need to wear those lies anymore.

"But you never really cared, did you?"

"No. I didn't." That's the first sincere thing Hero Pete ever said since they met. And he felt amazing.

"Thanks." That's the first time Frankie-fucking-Iero ever meant it.

"...what for?"

"For wanting to see the real me. And for not caring. Can't forget the not caring part."

"But I don't." Hero Pete turned Honest Pete. A saint with liar branded on the plam behind his back and Believe me carved on the one he shakes your hand with.

"Don't feel bad," Frankie says with the brightest eyes, sparkling with burning rats, "I never really cared, too." But I did want to. There's no Back button now.

We're living in Play.

"Frankie?" I did want you. Not 'cause I was obsessed with you. Nonono.
But 'cause you were my very own private insanity; my little mobile insane asylum. Yet, you're the end of everything.

"Yeah?"

"I didn't have any questions."
I just wanted to fuck with your head.

"Good. Because I never had any answers to begin with."
I lied to you on the third night.

"I'm leaving."

"Good night."

"Just so you know, endings were never my thing, Frankie." The door's wide-open now, wooing him out. "Good night." Even though it's morning.

"Bye." And the hole in Frankie's chest began eating up the room. His heart was still nowhere to be found.

It's a war-baby that they had in this room. The wolf and the lamb are both blown away. The rats and the cat were baked into coal inside Santa's guts and Pete's pieces of God, scattered all over the ashes of Frankie's dancing bruises. The baby's screaming it's lungs out as its daddies ran off. Frankie's ignoring it, and Pete's running away as fast as he can from it. Everything thing went along with the winds of their selfishness and coldness.

The baby's left in the ruins, dying and withering in Play, clinging to the air for its daddies to nurture it and love it. It's shriveling up and curling on itself and weeping in heart-shredding sobs. It's sinking it's fingers into a heart, a purple bruised heart, sucking the life out of the little shriveling baby in the corner of the room.

But Frankie and Pete are living in Stop and Eject now.

The movie's on the table, next to their cards. They're gonna leave the ending unwatched.
Because the ending's the best part of it all.

And the door's still gaping and open; like Frankie's chest.
-

The end.