Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Hey. Gee.”

Gerard wakes up to Frank watching him from the driver’s seat, backed by an inky sky that’s swollen with the morning's colors. He looks like he’s been up for a while already; his hair is semi-brushed and his face washed, the shirt on his back cleaner than the one he fell asleep in, and he’s got an unopened can of Vienna sausages in his hand.

That familiar dread starts to settle in around Gerard the longer he’s conscious, the heavy weight of grief stretching its leathery wings inside his ribcage like the gremlin it is and taking up more space than he’d like, but every day it gets subtler and subtler, and seeing Frank holding a can of cocktail weenies and smiling that shy smile of his that’s been so fucking scarce lately, Gerard can almost pretend it’s not there at all. He can almost pretend it’s just a normal day, and Mikey and Ray are washing up somewhere, about to join them again.

(Mikey and Ray have been dead for two months, three weeks, and six days. Gerard and Frank haven’t seen any living being but each other for just as long.)

Gerard takes a deep breath and holds it. He cracks his neck. He stretches out his legs. He smiles a smile that feels foreign but isn’t entirely fake.

“Morning.”

Frank’s own smile grows (the sun isn’t even up and today is already different than every day of the last three months), and he shakes the can a little like he’s enticing a cat. “Happy birthday. Breakfast?”

Gerard can’t help the swell in his chest that he knows isn’t that pesky beast for once, and snatches the can of sausages from him. He turns it over in his hands. It’s only a few months out of date. “Do I wanna know where you got this?”

Frank runs a hand through his scraggly hair. “My methods were completely ethical. It was a bitch and a half trying to hide them from you, though. I practically had to shove it up my ass.”

And the swelling grows, so much so that Gerard is afraid he might erupt into a cloud of phosphorescence before the sun is even up. It feels so out of place, when his body has been ebbing and flowing with waves of grief for so long now. But it’s definitely not unwelcome. He can’t meet Frank’s eye, not yet, so he settles for continuing to stare down at the peeling label on the can. God, Gerard hasn’t had these since before, when his parents would throw their parties and have canned hors d'oeuvres because they tried so hard to be fancy for their work friends. He and Frank would always steal a plate and bring it downstairs to the basement, and they’d eat them while drinking warm, equally stolen champagne from his mom’s special glasses and get grease and mustard all over his dad’s record collection. It’s a stupid memory, really, he’s not emotionally attached to cocktail weenies, but it’s a good memory all the same and Frank went through the trouble of getting them and hiding them and they’ve smiled at each other more this morning than they have in the last three months and he kind of feels like he’s going to cry all of a sudden.

“Thank you,” Gerard says, clearing his throat. When he looks back up at Frank, he looks the same.

Frank doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to.

And then he checks his watch and glances through the windshield at the navy sky and says, “Come on. I got more surprises.” He climbs out of the car after taking the can back, and Gerard follows after him.

Frank is patient enough to not devour the entire can of sausages while Gerard does his morning stretches and cleans himself up best he can, and when he gets back from pissing in a nearby clump of weeds (he has no idea where they are, and he won’t know until the sun comes up, but he trusts Frank), he finds Frank sitting on the hood of the car with the can open and their forks sticking out of it and two cans of lemon-lime seltzer that he conjured up from who-knows-where.

He pops one of the cans open and hands it over. “It’s not exactly champagne, but it’s close enough. I think.”

The gremlin in his chest with the leathery wings is currently being strangled to death by an entirely new emotion outside of that blissful swelling. No, not new. Definitely not new.

Gerard just hasn’t thought about it in a long time. Not since that cold day on the roof.

Frank has always been uber-perceptive to how Gerard’s feeling, and any little changes in his face earns him a, “You okay?” but he doesn’t say anything this time. Because Frank hasn’t thought about it since that day either. It was sort of an unspoken agreement, that whatever the hell had been building between them needs to be put on hold.

Gerard thought it was squashed entirely because now there are just way more important things to be worrying about, but apparently not. And it’s all because he decided to turn twenty-fucking-nine.

And I didn’t even make a birthday wish yet.

When he feels like he could move without melting into a pile of ectoplasm, Gerard climbs up onto the hood of the car and takes the proffered seltzer. It’s piss-warm since April is inching into hot and Gerard always hated lemon-lime flavor, but it’s the best damn thing he’s ever tasted. And when he spears a weenie on his fork and pops it into his mouth, that feeling like he’s going to burst into tears comes back tenfold, and he lets out a wobbly smile. Maybe Frank won’t notice though; his mouth is crooked anyway.

“Better than a Taylor Ham, egg, and cheese.”

Frank lets out a sudden, squawking laugh that almost sends him right off the car, and Gerard grabs ahold of his arm. “Fuck, man.”

“Fuck,” Gerard echoes, and laughs too. Not as brash as Frank, but it’s a noise that his throat isn’t used to, and it sounds strange to his ears.

This whole day is strange so far, in the best way possible.

The sky lights up out on the horizon like someone flipped a switch, the last dregs of night like grinds at the bottom of a cup of coffee being pushed out by waves of crimson. The two of them watch the sunrise like they would a movie, silent and entranced, eating their lukewarm expired breakfast pressed up against each other shoulder to hip, feet just barely touching, and Gerard feels like he can finally breathe again.

He doesn’t remember the last time he breathed without it hurting.

The sky turns brilliant shades of orange and purple and pink right before their eyes, drenching the parking lot they’re sitting in, that’s now more pothole than anything, in pastels and making everything feel hazy and unreal, like a dream. When Gerard chances a glance over at Frank, he finds him with one hand on his stomach, the other propping his head on the windshield, staring up at the sky open-mouthed and wide-eyed like he’s never experienced anything like it before. Gerard has never wanted to paint something so bad in his life. He doesn’t remember the last time he did anything remotely artistic (he doesn’t remember the last time he did anything other than try to survive, now that he thinks of it), but his hands ache, phantom pains that have him curling his fingers around an invisible brush. He could even name the shades of paint he’d use.

Goddamnit.

When they’re finished eating and Frank lifts his hand from behind his head to put the empty sausage can and their forks on the hood of the car, his other hand slips from his stomach and lands dangerously close to Gerard’s. He doesn’t notice though, or maybe he does, but either way, when he settles back down against the warm glass of the windshield, he doesn’t move his arm.

Their pinkies are mere centimeters apart, but Gerard knows they’re much, much farther away, and he’s sick of it. Mikey and Ray have been dead for two months, three weeks, and six days and Gerard and Frank haven’t seen any living being but each other for just as long and he’s sick of feeling like strangers.

He grabs Frank’s hand. Harder than he meant to, like his hand was a spider that Gerard didn’t want to let get away before he could squish it, but Frank doesn’t even respond. It’s awkward, that intimacy that’s always been between them shaky on its legs as a newborn fawn, but then Frank’s hand blooms like a rose, and he tucks his fingers between Gerard’s, all the while staring up at the marbled sky with those open, hazel eyes.

Gerard lets out a sigh that crawled its way up from his toes and grips Frank’s hand like the fucking lifeline it is. And then Frank finally decides to acknowledge him, twisting his head ever-so-slightly on the glass to turn those eyes on him, and his face is so calm. The only thing that gives him away is the bobbing of his Adam’s apple.

“Happy birthday,” he says again, whispering it so as not to shatter this moment that feels as fragile as spun sugar. He reaches out his other hand, crossing his arm awkwardly over his chest to ghost the tips of his fingers over Gerard’s mouth in a nonsensical gesture that leaves him feeling feverish outside the humidity of the impending summer, and it is a happy birthday. It really is, and it’s only dawn.

That vice grip around Gerard’s diaphragm seems to fall away entirely then, and he feels, for what might be the first time since that day in January, like everything’s gonna be okay.

When the sun is sitting high in the sky and the myriad of colors above have melted away to a steady blue, Frank bags up their trash like the upstanding citizen he is and tucks it under his seat so they can get rid of it later. They let go of each other’s hands without any fuss, simply dropping their hold on one another when they both slide off the hood of the car, but Frank is smiling to himself, and Gerard still feels like he downed a bottle of Fizzy Lifting Drink, so he knows the thing between them has been rekindled somehow.

Gerard eventually realizes they’re parked outside of a shopping mall, small compared to the ones they used to go to back home, but it sends a thrill through his spine all the same. The parking lot is vast and desolate and the building looming before them is littered in graffiti and ominous messages, but Gerard feels warmed to the bone.

Frank locks the car up and stands beside him, and they stare at the mall like they’re admiring some grand view. It might as well be; they all grew up going to malls, and that’s where most of Gerard’s best memories lie. After, though, they had to avoid them.

“Ray always said malls are high-risk,” he tells Frank, and his voice doesn’t even catch on the name. Yet another first. It’s true; malls attracted crowds looking for shelter, for supplies, for food, and crowds attracted the undead. And they always tried their best to avoid both.

“I know,” Frank says. He’s standing so close Gerard can smell the soap he used this morning. “When you were asleep I dug up some reports, and everyone from the area gave it a green light.”

“And you trust them?”

Frank shrugs. “There’s no one here, is there?”

No. Just them.

They’re cautious going in nonetheless, attaching their guns to their hips and bringing their packs full of extra ammo and emergency supplies just in case. They treat this as they would anything else, armed, eyes peeled, using hand signals. The fuckers aren’t a quiet bunch, so it doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that there aren’t any of them here; they don’t even have to leave the first floor to check. And if there are any other people here, they’ll deal with them if it comes to it.

But for now, they’re gonna enjoy themselves.

Frank chases Gerard up the broken down escalator the moment they meet back up at the entrance like they’re teenagers all over again, laughing so carefree and pretending to pull their guns on each other as if this was a game of laser tag. They leap over debris and those unnaturally large plant pots that have been overturned and treat the first floor like their own personal parkour course and Gerard feels like he’s celebrating his 19th birthday instead of his 29th, and he and Frank merely found this abandoned mall through an urban exploration forum.

But it’s so good. They don’t get to treat their young adulthood like they should be able to very often.

When they’re sweaty and out of breath and Frank has hectic spots of red coloring his cheeks that Gerard knows he must mirror, they sit down on the edge of an empty penny fountain and pass a canteen of water back and forth.

“Thank you,” Gerard says again when his throat isn’t cotton-dry. He feels like he could spend the rest of the day thanking Frank, for more things than one. Thank you for holding my hand, thank you for bringing me here, thank you for staying when neither of us wanted to.

Frank scoots a little closer, tossing his hair out of his eyes. They’re both overdue for a trim. Maybe that’s how they’ll end the day, cutting each other’s hair by the fading light of the sunset. That sounds nice. “You’d do the same for me.”

He’s right.

There’s always some degree of work in every bit of fun they have, no matter how scant, so when they both catch their breath they decide to root around some, even though it looks like every store and every kiosk has been ransacked already a hundred times over. It never hurts to check yourself, that’s one thing they’ve learned over the years, one thing Mikey’s always drilled into their heads.

Those pulsing waves of grief that rise in his throat like hot vomit are as regular as ever, but Gerard finds it easy to breathe through them, to acknowledge them and blink away the threat of tears and move on. The way Frank smiles at him every time their hands brush or their eyes find each other’s helps, too.

They spend the better half of the morning sifting through garbage and nothing of use, but they share a stale granola bar from Frank’s pack with dirty hands and crack meaningless jokes and Gerard didn’t think he would ever have this sort of fun again. Today doesn’t just feel like how it was. It feels like how it could be.

And it feels good.

They decide to rest for a while before they head upstairs to the second floor, where they’ll probably find less than they did down here, and Frank leads Gerard to a shallow pit at the other end near where a Macy’s or a Sears would be if this mall wasn’t the size of a department store in and of itself. The pit looks like it was probably one of those areas that had masseuses and eyebrow threading, but there aren’t any fancy padded chairs or tables, so they lay down side by side in the center of the pit on the floor right beneath a handful of skylights that miraculously are still intact.

Gerard takes out his canteen and a half-eaten bag of pretzels and they eat what’s probably going to be their only lunch watching clouds roll over the skylights. Eventually they hold hands again, and it feels so natural, so right, that Gerard starts questioning whether they really did stop. And then he questions how they were ever able to stop in the first place, how they both survived what happened being so far away from each other.

Because they didn’t just stop holding hands, they barely have conversations anymore outside of the bare necessities, they never look too long at one another, and if they hug, it’s only because one of them had a nightmare. They’ve become, in almost every sense of the word, strangers. And that’s not right, grieving or not. They’ll always need each other.

“I’m sorry, Gee,” Frank says suddenly to the sky, licking salt from his lips, and Gerard is certain he’s able to read his mind.

Gerard squeezes his hand. “Me too, Frankie.”

Frank turns his head to look at him, and it’s been so long that every time feels like a punch to the gut, one more blow to that beast in his belly. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’d probably be dead. Or turned.”

Gerard’s heart clenches when he hears that, but he feels the same way. He swears sometimes that he and Frank were cut from the same cloth. He feels that way about Mikey, and about Ray, of course he does, but there was always something different with Frank. And it was building into something more, and then they cut it off at the legs after that day. But now…

Well, now maybe they can finally see where it was always trying to go.

Gerard pushes the bag of pretzels and canteen out of the way, letting go of Frank’s hand, and tentatively puts his head on his chest. He’s on his right side, but Frank’s heart is beating so hard that he’d probably be able to hear it no matter where he pressed his ear. An arm goes over Frank’s stomach, and Frank puts one around Gerard’s back, holding him so tight like if he let go Gerard might float away like a balloon. And then Frank picks up Gerard’s hand from where it lay on his stomach and brings it to his mouth. He presses a kiss to Gerard’s knuckles, then to his sweaty palm, then holds his hand out flat over his heart. And it really is beating so hard. Gerard sighs into his throat and shuts his eyes. Frank kisses the top of his head and relaxes back.

And they don’t have to say anything else.

The floor is hard and dust tickles Gerard’s nose and he kind of has to piss, but he wouldn’t ask Frank to move even if a hoard of those fuckers busted down the doors right now.

“What was that?” Frank whispers suddenly, picking his head up a little so Gerard’s is wedged between his chest and his chin.

His heart, which was starting to slow to a semi-normal pace, picks up again beneath Gerard’s ear.

“Wh—”

“Get up, get up.”

Gerard peels himself off Frank and sits up, pressing his palms flat against the floor so rubble digs into his skin. He watches Frank climb to his feet slowly and unholster his gun.

“What did you hear?” Gerard asks quietly, pulling his own gun out and getting up on his knees. Frank shifts so he’s standing in front of him. He always had sharper ears than Gerard.

But then Gerard hears something too, behind him, coming from the direction of a hallway around a corner that he knows must lead to an emergency exit.

Gerard stands up and puts his back to Frank’s.

“Oh, fuck.”

There’s a crash in the direction they came in, and Gerard chances a glance over their shoulders. A dozen or more of those fucking fuckers are crashing their way clumsily through the front doors.

A cacophony starts up from the hallway leading to the emergency exit, and Gerard spins back around to find even more of them pouring out from around the corner. Frank starts shooting, and it leaves Gerard’s ears ringing from their close proximity, but he shoots too, hitting them one by one between the eyes so they drop like stones and trip up the others coming in from behind. Frank starts shooting more frantically, and Gerard’s hand is starting to cramp, and how fucking many are there?

“Gee!” Frank shouts. Gerard didn’t realize how loud they were until now; between their moaning and groaning and their own gunfire he can barely hear himself think. “Gee, fuck, we gotta— We have to go!”

Gerard turns around, stupidly putting his back to the group he was working his way through, and he wasn’t prepared for this. It’s like a never-ending stream, and no wonder Frank sounds so out of breath.

“Go where?” They both drop a couple more in quick succession. Gerard can hear them gaining on them from behind. They’re completely blocking both exits.

Frank looks around, sunlight catching on the droplets of sweat dotting his face like morning dew. His eyes finally land on the escalator. “We have to go up.”

“Come on, guys, let’s head to the roof!”

“Are you listening?! Gerard!”

Gerard looks behind them, then at the escalator, which is quickly being surrounded by the fuckers.

“Okay. Okay! Let’s go.”

The thing about them is that they aren’t the loping feet-dragging dopes from the movies. They’re definitely not fast, but they don’t move like zombies. Which is just really fucking fantastic. Especially when they’re being surrounded like this.

Gerard finds himself suddenly unable to move.

Frank looks back at him when he starts to go and realizes he’s not being followed, his eyes wide and wild, his skin pale as the moon. He looks over Gerard’s shoulder, then over his own, then back at Gerard’s face. He gets up close in two huge steps, and his breath is sour with fear.

“Listen,” he says as steadily as possible. “I know, okay? But the roof is our only option here. They’re blocking both fucking exits, Gee.”

And Gerard knows that, he does, so why can’t he move forward? All their options will be out if he doesn’t move.

He nods jerkily, and puts one foot in front of the other. His chest feels tighter and tighter the closer they get to their unwelcome visitors and the broken down escalator, and he’s afraid he might stop breathing entirely before they get to the second floor.

The fuckers are fully surrounding the escalator now, but none of them seem inclined to actually go up. Despite being faster than expected, they’re still just fragile corpses. Maybe they’re not all stupid. They shoot until they’re out of bullets, trying to make some sort of room at the bottom of the stairs so they can go up.

“You first!” Frank shouts at Gerard, and plants his feet on the cracked floor. He swings his pack around so he can fish out an extra cartridge of ammo.

Gerard takes a huge, heaving breath and vaults himself over the railing and onto the staircase, getting as close to the fuckers’ rotting, grabbing hands as he dared. He goes up a couple of steps and drops his pack at his feet, rummaging around for another cartridge of his own.

His hands are shaking and sweat is dripping from the tip of his nose like snot, but by the grace of God he gets his gun loaded up properly. He shoots down into the crowd blindly, and when he peeks over the railing, Frank looks ready to throw himself into the throng.

“Come on!” Gerard screams down at him, seeing the group that’s still steadily streaming in from the emergency exit in the opposite direction closing in from behind.

Frank holsters his gun, clenches his fists, and makes a break for the escalator. He grabs the spot on the railing Gerard did to launch himself over and onto the safety of the steps, but one of them grabs his legs at the last second and pulls him down. Frank disappears with a shout.

“Frank!”

They’re swarming like vultures over roadkill, their hands greedy, their moans hungry, and Gerard can’t shoot at them fast enough. He practically breaks his neck flying down the stairs, wasting corpse after corpse, biting his bottom lip so hard he’s surprised his teeth aren't going right through his skin.

“Fuck— Frank!”

Frank’s gun goes off. Then again, and again, and again. Gerard steps back as bullets fly upwards and outwards, and then finally a single tattooed arm reaches out towards the stairs. Gerard grabs it in his free hand and pulls as hard as he physically can. Eventually Frank appears at the end of the arm, and Gerard holsters his gun so he can use both his hands. Frank continues to shoot behind him blindly as he’s being dragged out of the throng.

Gerard lets go when Frank scrambles to his feet, and they race to the top of the escalator two steps at a time. At the top, Frank collapses almost immediately to catch his breath, and Gerard watches the fuckers dogpile themselves at the bottom, still not willing to climb up to them. He shoots a couple more in the head to deter them further. They’re safe for now.

Frank is breathing so hard he’s practically wheezing, his hair in his face, his shirt plastered to him with sweat.

“God, are you okay?” Gerard pushes his head back against the glass barrier he’s leaning on, crouching down so he’s eye level. He brushes Frank’s hair away from his face.

Frank, eyes closed, licks his lips. It takes him a few tries before he’s able to say anything. Gerard takes his canteen out of his pack that still has a few sips of water left and shoves it to Frank’s mouth. He drinks the rest without protest, holding on loosely to Gerard’s wrists like a little kid. Gerard puts the canteen away when it’s empty and waits for him to catch his breath.

Finally, Frank says, “Fuck.”

Gerard can’t help but laugh, feeling manic and relieved; he’s tingling all over. He’s shaking with residual panic, and can’t seem to keep his hands off Frank, touching him more than he has in the last twelve weeks. He touches his cheeks, his forehead, his shoulders, making sure he’s real and whole and here. “Yeah, fuck. Are you okay?” he asks again. “That was— That was fucking terrifying. Where the fuck did they all come from?”

Frank opens his eyes then, and reaches out to clap a hand to Gerard’s shoulder. He squeezes the junction of his neck. He licks his lips again. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

And Gerard laughs again. He grabs Frank’s wrist with one hand and puts his other on the side of his face. His skin is cold, like the fear sucked all the warmth right out of him. Gerard knows what that’s like; he swears after that day on the roof he wasn’t able to shed that winter chill until March. It’s still not entirely gone, he thinks.

“Are you okay?” He’ll ask it until he gets a straight answer. He looks through the glass barrier to the floor below and finds none of the fuckers heading their way, so he’ll wait all day if he has to.

“Yeah, uh, yeah.” Frank shakes his head like he’s trying to shake off the fear. “Fucked up my leg, but I’m fine.” He taps his right knee.

Gerard’s stomach sinks a little as he pulls up Frank’s pant leg to find blood.

“I didn’t get bit,” Frank assures him, some strength returning to his voice. “I think it was just glass or something.”

He’s relieved it’s not that, but any sort of injury is worrisome. A paper cut could become lethal in times like these. He reaches for his pack to clean him up and Frank stops him.

“No, no, let’s keep going. Let’s get up to the roof. It’s not exactly a tall building, so we shouldn’t have too much trouble getting down to the car.”

Gerard frowns. “Frank—”

“Then you can play doctor. Okay?” Frank squeezes his hand. “I promise I’m not gonna keel over between now and then.”

Gerard studies his face for a few moments, sees how serious he is in the gleam of his eyes, and nods. He trusts him. He’ll always trust him. “Alright. Let’s go.”

He helps Frank to his feet, any slide of their skin lessening the anxiety roiling in Gerard’s belly, and he tucks Frank’s sweat-lank hair behind his ears because he wants to. Just because he can.

Because he’s not letting another potentially traumatic situation drive them further apart.

Frank puts his hands on the sides of Gerard’s face like he’s going to kiss him (fucking hell), but he just presses their foreheads together. Gerard lets it happen, lets both of their fear fan across each other’s faces. They just breathe.

And then they shoulder their packs and holster their guns and start walking. Get up to the roof, get down to the car. It’s as simple and complicated as that.

But they’re barely out of sight of the escalator when Frank stumbles.

“Hey— You okay?” Gerard grabs his elbow harder than he meant to.

Frank’s brows are drawn, and he stops walking. He’s looking down at the floor. “Leg feels kind of funny. Did I get an artery?”

Gerard looks at the back of his leg, but there isn’t any more blood than there was when he last checked. “No, it looks okay. Do you want to sit back down? We can wait, those fuckers aren’t going anywhere.”

But Frank is shaking his head before Gerard is even finished speaking. “No, let’s keep going. There’s gotta be an entrance to the roof around here somewhere.”

Gerard doesn’t take his hand from Frank’s elbow, because now he’s limping, and Frank is sort of known to have a wildly high pain tolerance. He thinks of that time last spring when he didn’t realize he’d been walking around with a rusty nail in his foot until he passed out, nearly septic, while they were looting a Lukoil, and wonders what he could’ve possibly done to his leg now that would make him limp.

(“I’m not gonna keel over,” Frank said. But there’s a voice in the back of Gerard’s head that says, “What if?”)

Gerard wants to stop, wants to make sure Frank isn’t gonna do something stupid like pass out, but he wants to leave. He wants to get to the car and get the hell away from here and make sure the day ends on a good note. He wants to cut Frank’s hair tonight.

They have no idea how many are outside, and he knows that if they waste any time getting out there, they might not get away as cleanly as they did now. But Frank is practically dragging his leg behind him now, holding onto Gerard’s jacket with a steely determination. He’s so fucking torn.

Frank makes the decision for them, whether to take another breather or push on, in the form of stopping short and saying, “I don’t feel so good.”

Gerard looks at him, and he looks positively green. The sickly pallor that Gerard thought was just the makeup of a good scare, a very real near-death experience, hasn’t gone away yet. His cheeks are sallow, sweat beads his brow, and he’s holding onto Gerard like his life depends on it. It’s like when he almost went septic from that rusty nail, but it’s come on much, much quicker. And a shard of glass wouldn’t have him looking like this, especially since he’s still not bleeding.

Frank starts to fall.

Heart in his throat, Gerard hauls him up. “Okay, okay— Let’s— Okay.”

He all but drags Frank over to what used to be a Mattress Firm and helps him sit down against the wall outside.

“I think I’m gonna puke, Gee.” He swallows roughly, then says, “No I’m not.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Gerard asks, voice shaking, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, his cheek. Frank’s skin is tacky with sweat, but he’s still cool to the touch. Gerard’s heart hiccups in his chest.

Frank shoves the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I don’t know. I feel like shit all of a sudden. Food poisoning?”

Gerard shakes his head. “You could eat a chicken that’s been sitting on the side of the road for weeks and you’ll be fine. In fact, I think you did that once.”

Frank attempts a smile, and it soothes Gerard’s heart a little. Just a little though; something doesn’t feel right. Like the air before a storm. Electric.

“I’m gonna check out your leg.” He’s not entirely sure why he says it though. “Does it still feel funny?”

Frank drops his hands to his lap and straightens his leg out slowly. He’s frowning again, his eyes focused inward on himself. “It’s numb.”

Numb.

Gerard blows out a breath and rolls the hem of his pant leg up over his calf. The skin is stained and torn, but it’s hard to really assess the damage. He shoulders his pack off and finds a bottle of peroxide at the bottom, which he dumps over Frank’s leg.

And Frank lets out an ear-splitting scream.

With a gasp that has his chest seizing up, Gerard smacks his hand over Frank’s mouth. He looks around them as if the fuckers will appear out of nowhere and start attacking.

“Shh— Frank!” he whisper-yells.

Frank is whimpering like a kicked puppy behind Gerard’s hand, blowing snot over his knuckles and pressing his head so hard into the wall it’s like he’s trying to push himself through it. He’s shaking like a fucking leaf.

“I’m taking my hand off,” Gerard warns, breathy with anxiety, and removes his hand from Frank’s mouth. He can see Frank reaching forward and wiping the blood away from his leg out of the corner of his eye, but Gerard busies himself with screwing the cap back onto the bottle of peroxide and putting it away. Because he doesn’t want to look at whatever Frank did to himself. Because he’s scared.

“Oh,” Frank says then, high and unrecognizable. He sniffs shakily. “No…”

Gerard squeezes his eyes shut tight, clenching his jaw so hard his temples ache. He doesn’t want to look. He doesn’t want to—

“Gee,” Frank cries. “Gee…”

He can’t look. He can’t.

Frank grabs the front of his shirt, grabs his jaw, his hair, trying to pull him closer. His hands smell tangy with blood and peroxide. Gerard lets himself be pulled, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He can’t because he knows what he’ll find. He thinks he knew it the moment Frank stumbled. Because Frank has a high pain tolerance.

“Please, please, please,” Frank chants quietly, dragging his hands down his face, trying to force Gerard’s eyes open.

Something tells him to look. Something inside him tells him to buck up, and it sounds suspiciously like his brother’s voice. Like Ray’s voice.

He opens his eyes.

There on Frank’s leg, clear as day, is a bite mark. His beautiful skin, torn open by broken, rotting teeth. Trailing away from the wound, wrapping around Frank’s leg and disappearing into his dirty sock, into the leg of his jeans, is a spider web of what looks like varicose veins, but uglier. The skin around the bite is bruised, but the rest of his leg is paper-white. Tinged yellow, as if with jaundice.

A sob tears its way up and out of Gerard’s throat, and his head drops onto Frank’s shoulder like his neck is no longer strong enough to support it.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be fucking happening, not here, not now, not like this.

“No, Frankie, no…” he moans. Frank pulls on his hair so hard it hurts, but he doesn’t care. This isn’t happening.

He feels like he’s drowning. His ears are ringing. He’s shaking down to his very core like a kitten left out in the rain.

Frank isn’t moving. Gerard rears back so fast he almost gives himself whiplash, but Frank’s alive. He’s still here. He’s just in complete and utter shock. Gerard can see it in the comical wideness of his red-rimmed eyes, in the way his chest is stuttering, struggling to let air in, the mindless way he’s fisting Gerard’s shirt in his hands. He knows the signs of shock like he knows the back of his own, calloused hand.

They have to— They need to—

“The car,” he says dumbly, his tongue feeling swollen and wrong in his mouth. When he stands his knees threaten to buckle. “Fr— We need the car.”

Frank tips his head up to look at Gerard. He moves as if he’s going in slow motion.

“The car, Frank. We have to leave.”

Shock is a familiar thing. If you experienced it once, it’s forever easy for it to slip right back in and behind the controls.

Silent tears start leaking from the corners of his Frank’s eyes, running down his flushed cheeks and teetering on his chin. His eyes are so red, and getting redder. The whites spider-webbed like his leg. This, Gerard knows, is a symptom.

“I can’t walk, Gee,” Frank whimpers, sounding a million miles away.

“Yes you can,” Gerard assures, and grabs him by the front of his shirt and hauls him roughly to his feet. “We need to leave, right? You said we had to leave, we have to get down to the car so I can—”

“Gee.”

“My birthday isn’t over. I wanted to cut our hair—”

“Gerard…”

“You can’t leave me!”

They both fall into a stunned silence, backed by the distant, bone-chilling chorus of the walking dead from the floor below them. It sounds like there’s a million now. Waiting. Hungry.

Frank claps a hand to Gerard’s burning cheek, his other holding on for dear life because he has absolutely no strength left in him from the waist down.

It’s happening so fast. Everything is happening so fast. Gerard won’t let him go.

Frank tries to smile again, but an invisible force is tugging the corners of his mouth down, down. Gerard hates the look in his bloodshot eyes.

“I’ve lost so much,” he whispers, and Frank breathes out a single sharp breath through his nose like the words physically hurt him. “I can’t— I can’t lose you too.”

Frank looks like he wants to say something else, but what comes out is, “The reports were old.”

Gerard swallows. “What?”

“The reports for the area were old, but I trusted them anyway. I just wanted—” The valley between his eyebrows grows. “I just wanted to give you a good day.”

Gerard collapses like a marionette with cut strings, but it’s Frank who catches him this time. Frank, who’s—

He can’t even bring himself to think it.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.”

It’s so fucking typical of Frank to be apologizing for something like this. Something so out of their control. Who gives a fuck if the reports were old? The rest of this damn tumbleweed fucking town was a big fat green light! That much he fucking knew.

But Gerard cries anyway. The wall is the only thing holding them up. The only thing from keeping them from falling apart. That and the fucking vice grip they have on each other, even though Frank is losing energy by the minute.

“Oh—” Frank makes a sound in the back of his throat. “I need— I’m—”

He starts to slip again, but Gerard doesn’t let him go anywhere. He throws his arm over his shoulders and drags him into the ghost of Mattess Firm.

“Let’s— We’re gonna sit down, okay?”

We’re going to sit down and we’re probably not going to get back up.

Gerard wants to ram the butt of his gun into his temple a few good times.

By some miraculous force, there’s a single mattress left in the place, sitting on a rusty old frame towards the back. It’s stained and moldy and torn open by knives and who-knows-what-else, but it’s comfortable. It’s a place for Frank to sit. But he doesn’t just sit, he falls over the minute he’s on the bare mattress, curling in on himself with his legs hanging over the edge. With hands that are endlessly trembling, Gerard lifts his legs onto the bed for him. He gets blood on him. He doesn’t wipe it off.

He thinks of the contrast between this morning and now, and hates that he’s still surprised that things can change on a dime. Of course they can. The world ended. Anything is fair game, and nothing should come as a shock. They know this. They prepared for this.

The world ended. And then Mikey and Ray died, and it ended again. And now Frank is lying here looking like a fish out of water, and Gerard knows it’s going to end once more.

He’s not prepared for this. He wasn’t prepared when his brother and his best friend died in front of his eyes on that fucking roof in January, and he’s not prepared now.

“Gee.”

Gerard is so fucking tired of dealing with the after.

“I’m here.”

If Frank isn’t leaving this room, neither is he.

But Frank can read his mind. Gerard fucking forgot that Frank can read his fucking mind like they’re Siamese twins. Mikey always made jokes; Maybe Frank and I got switched at the hospital.

“You need to get out of here.”

“Frank—” He sits down on the bed at his feet. His leg is so hard to look at. He wants to roll his pant leg back down but doesn’t want to touch it.

“No. Don’t you do that. Don’t you Romeo and Juliet this shit.” His voice sounds stronger, but he knows it’s just the anger speaking. A furious second wind. “We’ve talked about this.”

Yeah, years ago. Back when everything was still a hypothetical, back when they all thought they were fucking indestructible. Just kids running around playing a fucked up game of cops and robbers.

But things fucking change. He didn’t kill himself in January because Frank was there, no matter how shaky things were between them. And Frank didn’t kill himself because Gerard was there. But now Frank is dying— worse than dying, and Gerard doesn’t want to be alone. Really alone.

But Frank can read his mind.

“Gerard.” He props himself up on an elbow. He’s so soaked with sweat he looks like he just jumped in a river. “This is serious, don’t check out on me. The city, remember?”

The city. The last resort. The place where things are supposed to be better. It always felt like a pipe dream though, because how could things possibly be better there?

None of them ever thought they’d actually have to go to the city.

Frank lurches forward suddenly and vomits over the edge of the bed. He stays there with his head hung, a thin line of spit connecting his mouth to the floor, and it’s so disgusting, so devastating, but Gerard is reminded of when he and Ray used to buy alcohol when they finally turned twenty-one and subsequently turned his parents’s basement into a hangover recovery room the next morning. All of them sick to death, face down on the floor, their clothes soiled with their own bodily fluids.

He’s crying again before he knows it, curling himself around Frank like a second skin. He wipes his mouth with his hand, combs his damp hair back with his fingers. He pleads unintelligibly into the back of his neck for a divine intervention that he knows won’t come.

“Gee,” Frank says roughly, like he swallowed a handful of the glass he thought he cut himself on. “I feel like shit.”

Gerard squeezes him a little tighter and shuts his eyes against the pounding in his head, the blood roaring in his ears. “What— Our bags are outside. I can— There’s no water left but—”

Frank turns himself around in Gerard’s arms, slowly, painstakingly, and doesn’t meet his eye. But Gerard’s eyes flit over Frank’s face like he’s mapping him, trying to burn every inch of him into his memory because despite how ignorant he wants to be right now, he knows he won’t ever look at this face again within the next hour. Maybe sooner.

Probably sooner.

He really wishes ignorance was bliss.

“There’s only—” Frank sucks in a deep breath like just those two words winded him. “There’s one thing. To do.”

Gerard knows this too.

He wants to play dumb, wants to be the desperate lover or brother or child in all the horror movies and say “But!” and “What if!” and “We don’t have to!” But ignorance is not fucking bliss, and whoever thinks that deserves to be thrown to those fuckers like raw meat to a pack of wolves.

Frank looks like a shadow of himself already, and it hasn’t even been that long. His skin is the color of fresh clay, the bags under his eyes as dark as bruises, and he swears his lips are starting to turn blue. He looks like he’s already dead.

And he confirms this by putting a weak hand to Gerard’s face (he didn’t even have time to get used to touching again) and saying simply, “I’m dying.”

They never went through this with Mikey or Ray. They never held them in their arms while their bodies went necrotic and betrayed them and the only relief was a bullet in the brain. No, they had the awful fucking pleasure of watching from the sidelines, Gerard barricaded behind the safety of the door to the roof and Frank down below in the car. Their getaway driver.

Gerard watched Ray get his throat torn out. He watched Mikey fall. Frank watched him land, and they both watched from the rear view mirror as they claimed his body like the vultures they are.

Watch, watch, watch. That’s all they did, and nothing else. They couldn’t help them.

“Gee,” Frank is saying, almost whispering it. “Please.”

Gerard can help. He can help. He can’t stop it, he can’t go back and fix it, but he can help now in the only fucking way he knows how.

He hugs Frank to his chest, hiding his slack, cool face in the crook of his neck. He cries into the top of his head. He wishes he was hungover in his parents basement, a million lifetimes ago. He wishes it was this morning, and he was holding Frank’s hand while they watched the sun rise.

Things change on a dime. They know this, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

“I’m so sorry,” Gerard says quietly into his hair. “I’m sorry I wasted so much time.”

“Grieving isn’t wasted time.”

Fuck, even on the edge of oblivion, Frank Iero knows just what to say.

Gerard shuts his eyes and breathes once, twice. He wills his body to stop trembling. He tries to claw his way into a state of zen he never wants to be in again, because if he doesn’t detach himself from the situation to some degree, he’ll never be able to go through with it.

The end of the world teaches you to suppress things or you’ll never survive. He learned how to compartmentalize a long time ago. He shuts his brain off and hones in on the task at hand, probably the most annihilating task he’ll ever have to carry out, and tells himself he’ll let himself feel the weight of the situation when he’s in the car on his way to the city. That is one after that he is not looking forward to.

But he’s not thinking about that right now.

Okay.

Gerard cradles the back of Frank’s head in a hand that doesn’t shake and lays him back against the dirty mattress. The sickly spider-webbed veins crawled up his body and wound their way around his throat when he wasn’t looking. It looks like barbed wire choking him. His breathing is shallow and labored, his eyes stained red and lidded like he won’t be able to keep them open much longer. Gerard knows the next time they close, and the next time they open, it won’t be Frank staring back at him. He has to do this now.

He has to—

“Gee.”

Gerard stills, hand on the gun on his hip. Sweat pools in the hollow of Frank’s throat, and on every stilted inhale it glistens like sunlight on the surface of a pond. The poisonous veins are winding their way into his sallow cheeks now. His leg is almost black. Dead.

“Gee,” Frank says again, and Gerard can’t check out entirely. He can’t do that to Frank.

“Yeah?”

He looks like he wants to cry, but he can’t. He doesn’t have the energy. He settles for reaching a weak hand out. Gerard abandons his gun and takes it, wrapping both his hands around it as if to warm him up, even though he knows he can’t.

Frank’s eye slide languidly over Gerard’s face, and it’s so hard to meet them, but he does. There’s a million things he wants to say, Gerard knows it, can see it behind the broken blood vessels and in the furrow in his brows, but all that comes out is, “I love you.”

And the walls inside Gerard crumble like fucking Berlin.

“Frankie,” he cries, falling forward like someone struck him on the back and pressing his head into Frank’s chest much like Frank was doing to the wall outside. He wants to disappear inside of him, wants to burrow in his ribcage and be swallowed by his heart. How could he ever think he could do this without completely falling apart? Even for a second?

He can’t do this. Plain and fucking simple.

“No,” Gerard cries into his chest.

“I love you,” Frank says again. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

He chants it softly into his ear like it’s the only thing he knows how to say. Like he’s making up for all that time they spent grieving.

Gerard stays where he is as long as he dares, only doing so because he can still feel Frank’s chest rising and falling beneath him, no matter how stilted. He bawls like a baby that’s fresh to the world; terrified, confused, wanting to crawl back into the safety and warmth they’d just started to get used to.

He finally pulls away when the pauses between Frank’s heartbeat get a little too long for comfort. His head hurts so bad he can hardly see straight. “Why’d you have to say that.”

Frank does something with his blue-tinged mouth that could be considered a smile under literally any other circumstances. “What should I have said? Stay gold, Ponyboy?”

Gerard swallows down something vile and blinks more tears from his eyes.

“Say it back. Please. Say it.”

Gerard doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He wants to touch every inch of Frank at once, remembering how he feels while simultaneously wishing he could siphon out the poison running through him. He settles for resting them on either side of his face. “I’ve loved you since…”

Frank watches him expectantly. As expectantly as his vacant and stained eyes can, and reaches up to hold onto Gerard’s wrists, pressing his thumbs into his pulse point.

“Always,” he says simply. He can’t pinpoint the exact moment, it’s just always been there, even when he thought it wasn’t. An undercurrent.

That seems to satisfy Frank. He lets his eyes flutter shut, and Gerard knows he won’t be opening them again. “Me too. Me too, Gee.”

Gerard bites the inside of his cheek so hard he tastes blood. The gun on his hip feels like it weighs a ton, threatening to drag him down through the bed, through the floor.

He uses his thumbs to brush over Frank’s eyebrows, to smooth out the furrow between them. He’s wasting time. “Don’t be scared,” he whispers, his voice wobbling, his chest hiccuping. He’s not sure if he’s saying it to Frank or himself. Perhaps both.

“How can I be?” Frank’s mouth is barely moving now, those veins curling around his lips and sewing them shut. “I’ve got my best friend in the whole world here. And he loves me.”

Gerard starts nodding frantically, his hands moving more frenetically over every inch of his face. “I love you. I love you so fucking much, Frankie, I feel like I could die right here alongside you.”

It feels so fucking good to say; one weight off his shoulders as another takes the saddle.

“Don’t do that.”

“I won’t.”

“The city.”

“I know.”

A pause that has Gerard’s heart in his throat.

And then: “Sunrise.”

“W-what?”

Frank frowns. Works his jaw as if to physically mold the words on his tongue. “Sunrise. That’s me. Spilling your paints…to get your attention.”

Another memory. Mikey and Ray busy working, Gerard swamped with commissions from family and friends who keep telling him he should go back to school, holed up in the basement and drowning in art. Frank pissy and needy, “Let’s go to the movies. Let’s get drunk. Do you wanna play video games?” He started making a mess with Gerard’s supplies until he stopped what he was doing and tackled him into the couch. And they laughed and laughed and laughed.

It makes Gerard laugh now, a tearful burst that could’ve easily been interpreted as another sob.

“Please,” Frank says again, and Gerard’s blood turns to ice, that sort-of-laugh evaporating into thin air. “Please, Gee, I can’t. Hurts.”

He has to do this.

Gerard leans forward, feeling like he’s in a dream, and presses his mouth to Frank’s in the best imitation of a kiss that both of them can muster. Frank whimpers, and his hands fall away from Gerard’s wrists.

He has to do this.

“Please.”

I can do this.

“I love you.” He reaches for his gun. “Tell the guys I said hey.” He takes it out of its holster on his hip. “I love you.”

Checks the magazine.

Safety off.

Cocks it.

Finger on the trigger.

“Love you,” Frank whispers.

Presses the barrel between his eyes that Gerard will never get to see open again.

“I love you,” he whispers back.

Gerard shuts his eyes, takes a breath, and he keeps whispering it as he pulls the trigger.

He stays there on the bed with his eyes closed until his ears stop ringing, then he holsters his gun, feels blindly for Frank’s that’s still attached to his hip, and leaves the store. He doesn’t look back.

One glance over the glass barrier out in the sunlit main area tells him the fuckers are still there, still refusing to climb the escalator, still moaning and groaning and completely unaware that they just claimed yet another innocent fucking life.

Gerard briefly thinks of throwing himself over the railing, but then he thinks of how the sunrise will look over the city, and he doesn’t.

Instead he pulls down the rolling security door to the Mattress Firm, sealing Frank in like some twisted version of that story he read in high school, the one him and Ray used to laugh over.

And then he picks up both their packs from the floor and heads off in search of an access to the roof.