Chapter Text
Gerard still couldn’t get used to sleeping over at Frank’s. It made him giddy for some reason, an amplified feeling of all of the high school sleepovers he’d missed. It was fairly normal now, they often ended up back at Frank’s rather than his place, it was better situated in town after all. Gerard preferred it. His OCD meant that having company at his own flat brought with it a multitude of anxieties that he’d rather not let Frank see.
He didn’t want to burden the other with his stupid coasters or his obsessive washing of dishes, the last thing he wanted to do was make Frank feel like he was in the way. Conversely, Frank made him feel completely at ease in his penthouse, a home away from home, a home he wasn’t scared in. It was so completely new to him to feel so comfortable somewhere, where not one thought of cleanliness or disorder entered his brain, even though if he spent the weekend, the place would look utterly trashed.
Gerard marvelled in the fact that he did not care.
Every time he came over he was struck by the feeling again as if it were new, it felt naughty almost, like he was sneaking out, a self made curfew he’d built up around himself that he was breaking. He wouldn’t tell Frank any of this, but he knew Frank saw his toothy grin and change in demeanour, he wondered if Frank thought on it at all.
When left alone, Gerard still couldn’t shake the feeling that he could fuck it all up on a moments notice, but when he was with Frank, all of that rescinded into a part of his brain he couldn’t reach. It was like he left that version of himself at home.
The pair were lying in Frank’s bed, semi clothed, scrolling through their phones with their legs intertwined. Frank kept nodding off throughout the evening, a long day at work he had cited, so they hadn’t been up to very much that night.
Gerard was however completely content to do nothing at all, so long as it was with Frank. Gerard was still dealing with a lot in therapy. He had told Sarah that he’d begun the conversation with Frank about his past, and they’d talked about it a lot that week. Sarah was both impressed by Gerard’s decision and also painfully smug about how well it had gone, as it was exactly what she’d told him would happen. She could see the sincerity in the relationship and felt vindicated that she’d been right. Gerard had complained to her that of course, she was always right.
They talked more about what they had been for weeks - sex. Gerard reassured her that it was still going well and since he’d started staying at Frank’s over night that a lot of his anxieties around it were being dulled. Gerard still battled with himself over how much more he’d tell Frank, when or if he would. Sarah encouraged him to try to live in the moment when his mind got too foggy with it.
She reminded him sternly that Frank liked him as he was, and to Frank’s mind, nothing was amiss. Gerard had asked what she meant and she told him that Frank was unaware of this imaginary conversation that Gerard was so scared to have, that it didn’t exist yet, that Frank wasn’t expecting it of him because he didn’t know it was there. It made perfect sense and Gerard had to begrudgingly agree with her, once again.
It wasn’t from a sense of duty that Gerard wanted to tell him though, he’d explained. He wanted to be wholly and completely Frank’s, warts and all. He wanted the ability to finally be able to share his whole self with another, something he felt he had never had. Sarah told him once again that the time would come. It would feel natural and right when it did. And if it never came, that this was okay too, that people are entitled to their secrets and private inner lives. Gerard supposed that some of this came from his lack of experience in any type of relationship, friendship or otherwise, and him feeling like a liar for not laying everything out all at once was a problem distinctly his own.
“Do you mind if I get the light? I can barely keep my eyes open” Frank yawned, rolling his head to the side to look at Gerard. Gerard smiled and glanced back. “Go for it” he said quietly, sneaking a quick peck on the lips while he had the opportunity. Frank smiled sleepily. “You can stay on your phone, I don’t mind, I can sleep through a storm” he mumbled, scooting up and hitting the light switch haphazardly with his palm. “No, it’s okay, I wanna cuddle” Gerard said as Frank shimmied back down into the sheets, fully encapsulating Gerard as if that had been his plan all along.
Gerard giggled and settled onto his side, always enjoying his self proclaimed role as the little spoon. “Night baby” Frank murmured into his ear, his voice barely awake. “Night” Gerard hummed back, rocking a little to get comfortable. “I see what you’re doing, you little shit” Frank grumbled amusedly. Gerard didn’t know what he meant until he felt a throb from Frank’s groin on his backside, he couldn’t help but grin to himself, self satisfied.
“I’m not doing anything!” he whined, and it was, for the most part, a genuine mistake. “You’re so hot though” Frank’s hand snaked to Gerard’s hip and gave a squeeze, but Gerard could feel the dead weight in his arm, the guy was practically sleeping. “Go to sleep, Frank” Gerard teased. “Urgh, boring” Frank’s hoarse voice couldn’t even string a sentence together and Gerard was sure that he’d fallen asleep after about ten seconds.
He basked in the warmth from the other and closed his eyes, focusing on where he was and what he was doing to keep his sense of calm. It was easy for his mind to wonder at times like these, a niggling sense that he’d somehow upset Frank by turning him down, or if he’d been so boring that Frank would rather sleep than speak to him. He didn’t know if he’d ever truely be rid of that self doubt, but feeling Frank’s soft breath on his neck, or the tender way in which he was being held, helped him keep it at bay.
Gerard finally started to drift off, and for the first time in the months he had been sleeping at Frank’s, he had a night terror.
It didn’t come as quickly as it usually did, Gerard found himself in restful, dreamless sleep for most of the night. It would be nearly sunrise when his body began to writhe, waking up Frank almost immediately.
There was an external view of the house he’d been kept in, a memory he didn’t know that he had.
He recalled then when he’d first set foot in the place, it had been of his own free will, laughing and holding hands with the man who would later ruin his life. It was nighttime, he remembered the flickering street light illuminating what was an impressively tall apartment complex, grey concrete, fancy cars parked on the elaborately paved driveway.
He remembered smiling up at the man, saying how great it was, thanking him for taking him away from the life he had.
The dream cut to the kitchen, a party, a series of faces that were now a complete blur. They were blurry in the dream too, smudged, like a scribbled out drawing, they looked like monsters to him now. Voices of those men and women ricocheted around him in uninterpretable howls, slow motion and impossibly quick at the same time.
The faces became a swirling mass of shapes he couldn’t recognise, he felt a chill in his blood that made him feel nauseous, a hand dragging a finger nail down his exposed spine. A woman touched his bare chest and when Gerard told her that he was a child, she laughed.
It came as a great roar that traveled around the room and amplified as it did, it picked up echoes like a reverberating guitar pedal. It halted with a screeching noise, Gerard now in the bed, broken and bruised, coddled in a duvet while people leered at him.
Gerard sat there and begged them to continue, that he needed showing.
It was no longer a projection of a memory, but an imprint of Gerard’s own self loathing. The prickly laugher intensified and Gerard’s ears rang, he tried to cover his face but found his hands drenched in blood, hair and teeth mottled in the red slick.
“Don’t stop” he murmured, the voice coming from him was from ten years ago, the voice of a young teenager in way over his head. “Don’t stop, he says! Stop, stop, don’t stop!” it was his own voice again, calling back to him. “Please…” his mother’s voice.
He was still in the bed, in the duvet, but now an inch of black water surrounded him, back in the kitchen where the party was. It lapped coldly at his ankles and he felt the icy chill swallow him up, his hands now blackened with frost bite.
All Gerard wanted to be was an artist, and now he couldn’t, he thought.
He cried then, and the room went silent. Gerard would always be punished if he cried. “Honey…” his mum called out to him, he reached out his decaying arms as if he could embrace her, or a memory of her that he had not tainted with the person he had become. “Honey… please” she sobbed now, but he couldn’t see her.
Gerard feebly felt around for her as the room gradually lit up into a stark white, figures now indistinguishable from walls, a silvery glow that threatened to blind him. “Baby…” it hummed around him protectively, but he couldn’t feel its warmth.
“Gerard!” Frank called in a panic.
He had awoken to Gerard’s legs twitching madly against his own. For a moment, he thought nothing of it, plenty of people move around when they dream. But then, just as he began to fall back to sleep, he had heard the most horrendous choking sob tumble from Gerard’s mouth, and he shot up in the bed to see Gerard’s pillow completely soaked with tears.
“Honey?” he spoke again, louder this time, putting a firm hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, but he did not come to. Gerard was letting out a string of low groans and some muffled words, and Frank had never seen anyone shake as he was.
“Baby… wake up!” Frank was freaking out big time, he’d never seen this before, he didn’t know if the guy was having some kind of seizure. “Gerard!” he abruptly and forcefully rolled Gerard into his back, perching above him, inches face his face. “Gee!” he yelled, tears lining his eyes, completely terrified.
He was about to call for an ambulance when Gerard’s eyes snapped open, and he sat up so quickly that Frank had to dive to the side to avoid being head butted. Frank panted wildly as he sat there, trying to make any sort of sense of what he’d just witnessed, staring at Gerard with wide, unblinking eyes. Gerard’s body still shook, his own chest heaving, sweat soaked through his clothes completely. He looked totally dazed, and peered around the room in short bursts, his eyes moving rapidly, as if he didn’t know where he was.
All Frank could do was stare. This only went on for only a moment but it felt like hours, Frank still reeling from the fact that he thought Gerard was having some kind of medical episode. He really thought the other was having a heart attack or something, and it shook him to his core. He’d never seen anything like it.
“G-Gee…?” he spluttered out after a time. Gerard turned to him quickly, his eyes still scanning around madly, tears still rolling down his cheeks. He cried silently, staring back over at Frank as if his heart was shattered; he looked exhausted.
“Baby… what’s… are y-you okay?” he choked, reaching a hand out to Gerard’s. The other slapped it away as if on instinct and the look of horror that spread over Gerard’s face at the realisation of it made Frank’s heart sink. “I didn’t… I didn’t m-mean t-t-t….” Gerard’s shaking ramped up ten fold and Frank felt powerless to help him.
“It’s okay… tell me what’s happening, baby…w-what can I do?” he said weakly, daring to get a little closer to Gerard on the bed. Gerard stood abruptly, covering his body with the blanked as if he was naked. “I…” Gerard took a few deep breaths, it evened out a touch, and the shaking finally stopped. “Baby, lay down, okay? Talk to me” Frank offered, though his own panic hardly sounded comforting.
Gerard stood there in a sort of stalemate for a while, his expression softening into apathy, his face going blank. “P-please say something baby, you’re scaring me” Frank didn’t know why let that part slip, he supposed looking back on it that he was in flight mode, completely overwhelmed, even to the detriment of Gerard.
“I’m s-sorry, I…” Gerard’s lip wobbled and he seemed to be back in the room. He looked down at Frank with utter hopelessness, clinging onto the sheets like they were a lifeline. “I’m so sorry” it barely came out. “No, no… Gee, come here, sit down, please…” Frank sat up a little to give Gerard the space to get back into bed, keenly aware that Gerard did not want to be touched. Gerard slowly moved to join him, teetering in the edge of the bed, wrapped up tight and firmly out of Frank’s reach.
“I’m so sorry…” he said quietly, his mania subsided. Gerard knew well how to calm himself in moments like this, it happened often enough. He couldn’t even remember the dream anymore, just a dull aching sense of dread. He only panicked now in seeing Frank’s face twisted in concern, eyes brimmed with tears. “Are you okay?” Frank sounded so unsure when it said it and it shattered Gerard.
He just wanted something nice and normal, it was like he wasn’t allowed.
“Yeah… I’m sorry” Gerard kept saying it until it sounded like noise, he said it as if it could undo what Frank had seen. “Stop saying sorry” Frank said softly, edging a little closer; Gerard allowed it. “Do you, uh…” Frank coughed nervously, finding his words.
“Do you have like, epilepsy? Or something?” he asked carefully. Gerard had the opportunity to lie, and it was tempting. But Sarah’s many pieces of advice flashed through his mind, he knew that he owed it to Frank to try his best, he owed Frank emotional comfort in turn.
“No… um, I… get these terrors, sometimes…”. After sex, he thought piercingly; though not this time, somehow. “It doesn’t happen very often”, a harmless white lie, he resented. “I’m so sorry you had to see that… I’m working on it” he didn’t really know what else to say, he studied Frank’s face tentatively. Frank nodded slowly, trying to keep his calm for Gerard’s sake.
On the inside, he was screaming. He knew what Gerard had told him and he was sure that this night terror was directly related. His heart broke for Gerard that he was suffering so much, and that he had to down play in order to keep their relationship in check. Frank wanted nothing more than to absorb Gerard’s pain from him. Frank didn’t want the details until Gerard was ready, but it saddened him that Gerard didn’t seem to have another single person to tell.
What he’d just seen was catatonic, catastrophic, not something someone as true and kind natured as Gerard should have to deal with. Frank did not know what to do. “Frank?” Gerard’s voice shook and Frank suddenly realised that he’d been staring off while he thought, leaving Gerard to sit in silence.
“Sorry… I, I’m here for you, okay?” it was as basic an answer as Frank could have provided, he scolded himself for it. “I think… I think I’m gonna go” Gerard mumbled indirectly. Frank frowned. “No, no… baby, it’s okay. Don’t…” Gerard could see the want in Frank’s eyes but he could also see that he was completely overwhelmed.
He didn’t know if leaving Frank’s side right now was the best thing for him to do, for either of them, but he couldn’t bare to see Frank flounder, the other needed time to process and Gerard felt like him being there would delay it. “I need to call my therapist” Gerard murmured; another detail he hadn’t really discussed with Frank was his over reliance on Sarah.
“Oh right, yeah… for sure” Frank was bursting with questions but he couldn’t verbalise any of it. On a selfish level, he wished he hadn’t seen it, and he was sure Gerard felt the same way.
Gerard was dressed in no time, the sun finally peaking in through the blinds. Frank stared up at him, still unmoved on the bed in a state of shock. He looked dishevelled, exhausted, smaller somehow; weak. Frank wanted to hold him close and make him laugh again. “I’ll text you later” he offered as Gerard started to slip out of the room. Gerard paused and smiled back.
“It’s okay” he said quietly before he left, Frank hearing the front door shut in the distance.
Frank did not know what he meant by that, did he mean he was okay? Frank was? What was “it”? Frank wondered if Gerard meant that it was okay if he didn’t text him, silent permission for Frank to be done with it. Gerard let his tears fall again as he walked quickly through the empty street.