Work Text:
There was a young man in a long-sleeved shirt standing outside Gerard's art classroom door, looking rather uncertain. Gerard put down the essay he was marking (with his favourite gold glitter pen) to go and see what he needed.
"Mr. Way?" The guy asked.
"That's me," Gerard replied. "Can I help y- oh! You're Frank Iero, right? The student teacher?"
Frank nodded. "Yep. I- you were assigned to work with me?"
Stepping back from the door, Gerard made the universal, 'come into my classroom' gesture. "Yeah, come on in, man. I've got a class next period, you can help me out."
Frank looked alarmed by this development. "Uh, ok. I gotta warn you, I am only a student teacher, like..." he stopped talking when he saw Gerard's Hello Kitty lunchbox propped up on his desk. "Did one of your students leave her lunch here?"
Gerard looked up from where he was digging through the pile of papers on his desk. "Hmm? No, that's mine. Pretty cute, right? Aha!" He emerged from his paper mountain victorious, clutching a stapled-together booklet. "Here's the term overview," he said, opening it and handing it to Frank. "We're looking at this one this week." He pointed to a line of text.
"Textiles and fabrics?" Frank read. "What, like cloth and stuff?"
"Yep!" Gerard agreed. "And papers, too. I bought some stuff along for the lesson." He gestured to his desk, where a package of decorated project paper in pastel colours stood next to a bucket of assorted fabric scraps in various degrees of sparkliness.
Frank tipped his head at the teacher. "You really like cute stuff, huh?"
Gerard looked around from where he was packing his lunchbox and matching thermos into a strawberry-patterned shoulder bag. He brushed biscuit crumbs off his cardigan and shrugged. "It's a thing of mine."
"Right," Frank nodded. Gerard could see a smile forming on his lips - and they were rather nice lips, too; they suited the angles of his pretty face.
'No, Gerard,' he thought to himself sternly. 'Please do not think about the relative cuteness of your student teacher, who looks to be only two or three years younger than you and alarmingly sweet. That is exactly the sort of stuff about which you should not be thinking.' He left Frank reading the lesson plan, and busied himself with organising something in the stock room, where Frank couldn't see how pink his cheeks probably were.
***
"Well," Mr. Way said to Frank cheerfully, as the last students left the room. "That was... fun." He brushed heart-shaped glitter from his fluffy brown hair.
Frank watched it fall dolefully. "Are they always that excitable?" he asked.
"Sometimes," Mr. Way replied, and Frank heaved a sad sigh. "The glitter fights were new, though. I wasn't expecting those!"
"Neither was I," said Frank.
Mr Way had reached across a table to sweep some glitter into his hand, and Frank was trying very hard to not stare at his ass. Frank was very unsuccessful. Mr. Way's voice voice made him jump guiltily. "Frank, would you mind getting me the brush and dustpan? I think I left it under my desk."
When Frank returned with the requested item, Mr. Way was leaning even further over the desk. His shirt had ridden up his back, and Frank could see the band of his boxers. Oh no.
He leaned over, about to tap Mr. Way's shoulder, when the teacher straightened up, his warm back colliding solidly with Frank's chest. Frank turned bright red and stuttered an apology, holding out the brush and dustpan and making small, flustered gestures. He fell silent when Mr. Way laughed, running his hand through his hair. "It's all good, man, don't worry." His cheeks looked slightly pink as well, Frank noticed - even cuter than before.
He stopped thinking about it when his stomach made an audible gurgling sound and began looking mortified instead. He'd skipped lunch on the way here; he hadn't realised the time. Mr. Way obviously heard it as well, as he cracked a grin. "Hungry? I think I have some onigiri in my lunchbox - I usually make extra, in case a student forgets their lunch."
He rooted through his bag again, and Frank managed to avoid looking at him inappropriately again - he had noticed Mr. Way's cute patterned socks. Oh dear.
"Tuna or plain?" The teacher asked.
Frank looked up from his sock-watching. "Uh, I'm a vegetarian, so..."
Mr. Way nodded. "Plain it is, then. They're rice balls," he explained, holding one out to Frank, who stared.
"They're pandas."
"Yes, they look like pandas. I was trying out a new recipe."
"Holy fuck, you made panda rice balls." Frank looked amazed. He took the food gingerly and carefully bit off the 'head' of the panda. "Shit, this is amazing," he mumbled around a mouthful of rice.
Mr. Way ran a hand through his hair, looking pleased. Frank noticed that he had a lock of hair pinned back with a tiny sparkly clip. He grinned. "Nice hair clip, Mr. Way."
The teacher touched a finger to the clip. "Thanks! And Frank, call me Gerard. You're practically my age."
"Ok, Gerard, cool." Frank's cheeks turned pink again. "Uh, I'll do some more cleaning," he said, turning so Gerard couldn't see his silly grin.
***
When Frank walked into the room the next day, he was greeted with the sight of a small box with "F" written on it in gold gel pen. Putting his bag down by the desk, he opened the box to find a small jumble of onigiri. His eyes widened, and he looked to the storeroom where he could hear Gerard rustling around. Apparently his presence here wasn't noticed yet - when Gerard emerged a moment later, he jumped when he saw Frank, and quickly removed his earbuds.
"Hey Frank! Did you see the- yeah, you found them! I filled them with this seaweed stuff, so they should be ok for you to eat!"
"Thanks so much Mr. - uh, Gerard!" Frank quickly took a bit out of an onigiri, mildly embarrassed at his slip up. As he did so, the sleeve of his shirt slipped from his left wrist to his elbow, baring the skin there. He didn't notice it, too busy enjoying the food, until Gerard's eyes widened as they fixed on his tattoos and he let out a small noise. Frank glanced up, wiping a grain of rice from his lip. "Hm? Ah," he said, pulling the sleeve back in place.
"You have tattoos?" asked Gerard, sounding slightly husky - he must have a crumb in his throat.
"Yeah, totally. I wear long sleeves for a reason, man; I don't really think they" - Frank made an upwards gesture, as though indicating at some all-encompassing authorative entity - "would be too enthusiastic about some inked-up punk teaching their kids. Gotta keep covered up." He looked a little anxious. "You won't tell 'em, will you?"
Gerard blinked, looking at Frank's eyes instead of his now-covered arm. "Yeah, no, don't worry about it. They're art, right? It's awesome. It's just... needles, man." He shuddered lightly. "Don't know how you could do it."
Frank nodded. "You don't like needles, huh?"
Gerard shook his head emphatically, glancing at Frank's arm again before re-entering the storeroom. "Lesson plan's on the desk, dude. Check it over - textiles again, shouldn't be too alarming."
Frank felt a small pang of disappointment - 'At what?' he wondered. 'Did you think he was checking you out?' He shook his head, laughing quietly at himself as he picked up the lesson plan. 'No chance of that, more's the pity.'
***
Gerard stood in the storeroom, door half shut, hands in his hair. 'Oh god oh god I though I decided to not check out the hot student teacher,' he thought. 'Especially not his gorgeous forearms and awesome tattoos and the way he licks his lips when he's eating. I'm pretty sure that's something I should absolutely not be thinking about. In addition, I should not stare at his lips and think about biting them. That is also something I should not do.' He dragged a hand through his hair, closing his eyes and sighing loudly.
"Hey, Gerard, what are y-"
"Aah!" Gerard jumped violently as Frank stuck his head through the door. A box of pencils fell off a shelf and onto the floor, and he bent down to pick them up (and to hide his pink cheeks). "Uh, just- just getting a pencil, I left my pencil case at home," he stammered.
Frank frowned. "Your pencil case is on your desk."
"Hmm? Ow!" Gerard banged his head on a shelf as he straightened up, clutching the dropped pencils. "O-oh. Whoops. Sorry! I'll be out in a minute, I'll just put these away."
"Ok then," Frank said slowly, looking concerned. Mercifully, he withdrew his head from the doorway and Gerard was left alone. He put the pencils back in the box and thumped his head against the wall a few times, then scuttled back out before Frank could come back in to ask what the noise was.
He sat down at his desk, trying and failing to not look at Frank, who was sitting in the pillow pile in the back corner of the room, reading the lesson plan and snacking on his onigiri. Gerard pulled out his sketchbook and opened his cat-patterned pencil case - (why did he say that he didn't have it? It was sitting in plain fucking sight, god!) - and began to sketch to take his mind off of things in the few minutes before the first lesson. He gave up after five minutes, when he realised that all he had drawn were several sketches of Frank's face and arms. Shit.
He shut his pad and tucked his pencil behind his ear, then slumped down on the desk, head in his arms.
"You ok, man?" Frank said. He was probably looking concerned again, which put a stupid crease between his eyebrows. Stupid Frank.
"Yeah, I'm good," Gerard mumbled back, not raising his head. "Just thinking." 'About how much I need a drink,' he thought, reaching out and fumbling in his bag for a biscuit to munch on moodily.
Stupid hot student teacher.
***
Two days after the storeroom incident, Gerard looked at Frank's outstretched offering - a a tupperware box of misshapen, wonky macarons - and beamed. "Frank, you made these? I didn't know you could bake!"
"I can't. I mean, not really. But, I thought that since, y'know, you made me the onigiri and stuff, that I should try to make you something too, so, yeah." Frank rubbed his nose. In actuality, Frank had stayed up most of the previous night making batches of macarons, looking up recipe after recipe and making himself feel sick after licking the spoon clean of vanilla essence that he knew would taste horrible, he knew, why did he do that to himself?
Gerard adopted a peculiar expression; he scrunched up his nose, looking almost pained. Frank panicked internally. 'Oh god, what if he's a pastry snob and I've mortally offended him by offering sub-par macarons? Are macarons even counted as pastry? What if I bought all that almond flour for nothing?'
Gerard interrupted his meltdown when he took the box of maybe-pastry out of Frank's hands. He opened it and took a bite out of one of the macarons, chewing slowly and carefully. "These are really good! But," - Frank braced himself for the worst - "I was planning on showing you how to make some macarons, actually! Since you seemed really interested in my cooking, and they're not too hard to learn, and..." Gerard rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. "I guess you're past that now, though!"
"No!" Frank said loudly, startling both Gerard and himself. "Sorry, uh- no, I'd love for you to teach me how!"
Frank had no idea what he'd done to make Gerard slouch moodily at his desk for several days, but he'd figured that he might as well indirectly apologise with some attempted baking - and it appeared to have gone down quite well. Gerard was smiling again, anyway.
Gerard tipped his head, then grabbed his strawberry-themed planner off his desk. Checking a page, he said, "It's Friday, so I don't have anything to mark or anything this afternoon - do you want to come over after school finishes?"
Frank looked startled. A bit abrupt, but... "Yeah, sure, if you're not busy or anything."
"Great! Ah - just let me help this kid." He gestured to where a young girl stood outside the classroom door, very un-subtly watching the conversation unfold. When Gerard opened the door, she quickly pulled him into a conversation about the previous day's art homework, leaving Frank to absent-mindedly snack on a macaron and look at Gerard's hands waving about as he talked.
***
Gerard's hands were a little shaky as he tidied his kitchen. Frank had stayed behind at the school, needing to sign himself out on the visitor's register, which meant that Gerard had a few minutes to prepare - resulting in a frantic dance of setting out bowls and ingredients, while making desperate attempts to not knock over the piles of books and knick-knacks positioned around the area.
He was putting out the packet of almond meal when the doorbell rang.
"Hey, Gerard!" Frank was standing on his doorstep with his fingers hooked in the belt loops of his jeans, looking far too hot to possibly be legal. He gave Gerard a little smile, and Gerard's stomach did something funny.
"Come in! I've set out the ingredients in the kitchen."
Gerard could feel Frank watching him as he opened the recipe book. He pushed the egg carton over to Frank and instructed him to extract the whites and begin beating. He then set to mixing the almond meal and other ingredients. They worked together for a while, chatting absently, before Frank gestured at the radio on the counter excitedly.
"Can you turn it up? It's a good song."
Gerard and nodded, turning up the volume of the alternative rock station. After a minute, he noticed that Frank was swaying his hips and tapping his foot to the beat of the music, humming quietly. Too cute. He grabbed a spatula from the bench opposite him; when he turned back, he crashed into Frank's back, knocking Frank forward and into the bowl of macaron batter, which flipped up and splattered all over Frank.
"Oh, god, Frank, your shirt! I'm so sorry!" Gerard exclaimed, staring at the large pale streak down Frank's front.
"Ah, it's ok. It's not my favourite or anything, I'll be good," said Frank, shrugging and looking like he was trying not to laugh. He lifted up the hem. "It feels kinda gross, though, do you mind if I..?"
"Oh, no, that's fine!" Gerard tried very hard to not swallow his tongue as Frank tugged his shirt off, revealing a constellation of tattoos over his arms, chest, and back. The lines of his body and tattoos made it extremely hard for Gerard to keep his eyes from wandering down to Frank's hips, where his pants were riding very low and Gerard dragged his eyes up because he should really not be looking down there and instead he glanced at Frank's chest tattoo and definitely not at his nipple, before focusing further up on Frank's face. Gerard thought his cheeks might be red, but hopefully that was hard to see under all of the icing sugar.
Frank shifted, still holding his shirt, and Gerard blinked back to life. "Uh, I'll grab a spare shirt for you!"
He winced internally as he turned around, cursing himself for his squeaky voice as he grabbed a freshly-washed shirt from the laundry. When he returned, Frank had combined the egg whites and almond mixture and was mixing them together; his back was turned, and Gerard leaned against the door for a moment, watching the subtle ripple of the muscles in his back and shoulders, and the spread and curl of his various tattoos. He decided that this was the sort of thing he would very much like to see more frequently.
He straightened and walked back into the kitchen before Frank could catch him watching, and handed him the shirt.
"Thanks," said Frank, with a smile. He licked his fingers clean of batter - the United Nations' policy against cruel and unusual torture flashed through Gerard's head - and accepted the shirt, dragging it on and shaking his head to get his hair out of his eyes. The shirt was slightly tight on him, clinging to his sides, and that really wasn't helping Gerard's cause. Fortunately (or unfortunately), it covered most of Frank's tattoos, meaning that Gerard could at least look at Frank's face, and not his body.
He manage to fumble his way through the rest of the baking process with minimal stuttering, staring or blushing (except for one point, where Frank leaned up over him in order to grab a measuring cup off a tall shelf, pushing his body flush with Gerard's and giving Gerard terrible heart palpitations). While the macaron cases baked, they prepared the ganache filling, whipping together butter, sugar, food colouring, and vanilla essence into a creamy paste, and then used it to glue the macaron cases together. Gerard had a nasty suspicion Frank was licking his fingers in an intentionally seductive way because there was really no other explanation for that level of messiness in the kitchen. All the while they talked - about food, teaching, and especially music. Both Frank and Gerard enjoyed a surprisingly similar range of music, although Gerard had a fondness for k-pop which Frank very much did not. They chatted on the relative merits of various artists for a good amount of time, until another of Frank's favourite songs came on the radio and Gerard'd had to "shut up and listen to some real quality music".
Once the macarons were done, though, Gerard had no real excuse to keep Frank around, so he packed what he could fit of the large macaron batch into a plastic takeaway carton and gave it to Frank to take home with him.
At the door waving Frank off, he had the serious urge to give Frank a goodbye kiss on the cheek, which he squashed immediately, instead going in for a quick hug. It was only after Frank had left that Gerard realised that he hadn't returned his shirt. Oh well; he could get it back on Friday. Anyway, it looked much better on Frank than it did on him.
***
Frank felt positively bubbly as he collapsed on his couch. Not only did he have a box full of delicious macarons, he'd helped Gerard make them. In Gerard's house, listening to Gerard's radio. Talking with Gerard in a non-work place where they talked about non-work-related things like music and jokes and common interests.Frank was pretty sure that counted as hanging out, and there was nothing that he could think of that would be better than hanging out with Gerard. Except maybe kissing Gerard, but that definitely wasn't something that Frank thought about because he didn't have a massive primary-school crush on Gerard or anything.
The bubbly feeling stayed while he had dinner and brushed his teeth, and while he took a shower and went to bed, not bothering to change out of his clothes. It stayed the next morning, when he had a healthy breakfast of macarons and coffee, and it stayed when he realised that he was still wearing Gerard's shirt, which he hadn't returned.
Whoops.
He quickly shucked it off and dumped it in his ancient washing machine, then made himself another cup of coffee while he waited for the spin cycle. Once it was done, he spun it in the dryer for a minute and folded it carefully. He wasn't planning on doing anything today, and a quick trip to Gerard's wouldn't take too much time, anyway. After changing out of his pyjama shorts into something more respectable (jeans, a flannel shirt, and a leather jacket), he poured his leftover coffee into a thermos and drove over to Gerard's house, using the directions he had been given yesterday.
When he rang the doorbell at Gerard's house, he was greeted with a yell of "Just a second!", then a rather loud bang, followed by a string of curses.
Then the door opened and Gerard was standing there on one foot, holding what looked to Frank like a stubbed toe. More importantly, he was wearing a dressing gown. A fluffy, purple dressing gown. He looked up at Frank and smiled, then looked back at his toe, and Frank thought that sitting down might be a good idea because his heart was doing something funny.
Instead, he said, rather intelligently, "You're wearing a dressing gown."
***
Gerard hadn't been expecting visitors, and he was still in his pyjamas, despite waking up over an hour ago. A dressing gown was perfectly reasonable, in his opinion.
"Yes, I am," he agreed. He looked back up at Frank, then straightened, gingerly putting his bruised foot back on the floor. "You're wearing a leather jacket."
"Yes, I am," Frank repeated. Then he held something out to Gerard. "Uh, your shirt?"
Gerard's shirt appeared to have been freshly washed and folded. He beamed at Frank, who grinned back. As he did so, something on his lip glinted and Gerard abruptly realised that Frank was wearing a lip ring, which he had most certainly not been during work hours. He felt heat creeping up his neck. "Thank you! Um, do you want to come in? I still have some of the macarons we made in the lip ring."
Frank tipped his head. "What?"
"In the kitchen!" Gerard felt himself flush all over and decided that as soon as Frank left, he was buying himself a one-way ticket to Antarctica, where he would live among the penguins and never talk again. He ran a hand through his hair as they walked to the kitchen, wondering if he could order thermal underwear in floral print.
"Do you want anything to drink?" he asked Frank, who had found the box of macarons and had helped himself.
"Mff." Frank answered, swallowing. "Do you have milk? Like, to have with cookies? Or are macarons too gourmet for milk?"
Gerard looked at him seriously, thermal underwear patterns forgotten. "Nothing is too gourmet for cookies and milk." He pulled out a jug from the fridge - nice and cold, just like Antarctica will be - and poured out two glasses of milk and leaned on the counter next to Frank, sliding one to him.
Frank's eyebrow lifted a fraction. "Pink milk?"
"What?" said Gerard, defensive. Who doesn't like pink milk?
Shaking his head, Frank grinned. "Nothing."
Gerard thought he could see Frank's cheeks colour slightly, but he couldn't be certain, because Frank had just taken a huge swig of pink milk and was now choking loudly. Gerard thumped his back, and Frank croaked, "Thanks."
He slouched against Gerard's side, still rasping somewhat as his throat worked to clear the blockage. Gerard's brain shorted slightly out at the full-body contact, but he rubbed Frank's back soothingly anyway. Once he could breathe normally again, Frank stayed leaning against Gerard's side, and Gerard made no effort to move away.