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My Chemical Romance: On Tour Forever. Posting that sign back in ‘05, Frank supposed Gerard had grander plans of forever—all of them like bullets blistering on an immutable path on and on eternally. But what could you do? Sometimes art and life don’t mix like that. Forever in terms of this Black Parade tour would turn out to be forever in terms of a love affair—in that about one and a half years is where it has burned on and on and out.
The Black Parade is something they’ve done on a different caliber than ever before. For once in their lives they had not started out on the road in a van hauling a trailer. This time they’d started out their tour in their shiny new bus, with their bunks and their veritable fleet of a crew and whole trailer devoted to both guitars and pyro, enough cannons to set the world on fire.
Yet instead of waking from a dream of burning like a martyr, Frank wakes up empty. His hotel room is dark, and the clock next to his head reads 2 a.m. He’s alone, with nothing but the low volume TV and white noise of the window AC unit to keep him company.
It always seemed too cramped back then in their van days—always touching somebody or something. The wall of the van, another person’s shoulder. Yet now, Frank can stretch his hands to either side of the bed, try to touch each corner. Spread out and thin.
With a touch more self-reflection—he smiles to himself sardonically—he realizes he’s lonely. He’s spread too thin because there’s nothing around him heavy or solid enough to brace his pieces back together. It feels as though the gaps between his joints are widening, and he’s becoming like an atom—ninety-nine percent empty space inside.
He lays there for another moment, scrubbing his hand over his face. It isn’t the kind of loneliness, he thinks, that warrants calling up his newly not-fianceé in the middle of the night, although he knows she’d answer. She’s good like that. Against many methods of logic, and numerous past times he’s wanted to pummel one of his bandmates into the floor for spending every waking moment around them, he’s missing his friends.
He gets up with a purpose.
Each one of them are booked in individual hotel rooms and they have been for nearly every show. He would have gone to Mikey first if he’s being perfectly honest with himself, but Mikey, being Mikey, is nowhere to be found. Probably out, probably somewhere else, maybe sleeping upside-down on the ceiling and indisposed to answer the door at the moment. So he hits the next door over, feeling inexplicably better, just for seeking out one of his friends.
Ray is in his room, and he answers the door after a second, not a long enough interval for Frank to have woken him up, though. The glow of his laptop screen from his bed behind him, too, is enough indication that he hasn’t been sleeping. Regardless, he looks soft and rumpled. He’s wearing Gerard’s pajama pants, and it makes Frank look down at his ankles and smile. Ray grins too. He says, “Don’t tell him.”
“Thin ice, Raymond,” Frank says, grinning.
Ray leans against the doorframe, casual as anything, and says, “So what’s up?”
Frank knows what’s up, at least on some, abstract level he does. He got himself out of his warm bed into this cold, murdery hotel hallway to go seek out Ray. But thinking about his feelings is an entirely different thing than articulating them. And he finds he doesn’t really want to. It’s embarrassing to say, “Hey, I feel lonely, even though you’re right across the hall from me, even though my wife is a phone call away.”
All that deliberating comes out in a clumsy expression of, “I… well.”
Ray just waits because he’s good like that, drumming his fingers on the doorframe. His arm is guitar burned from shredding his brains out every night, and it makes Frank think that the last time they spent time together offstage was far too long ago. “What are you working on?” he says.
Ray grins and lets him in. Easy does it, apparently. “Nothing big,” he says. He points to the Les Paul leaning against his bed. “Just tracking something weird.”
“Can I hear it?” Frank says.
Ray must be farther along in the project than Frank originally thought, because instead of making excuses and saying it’s not ready yet, he sort of lights up, and it makes something in Frank spin around with joy. They sit knee to knee on Ray's bed.
It is weird when he listens to it, but not bad weird. Definitely more prog than Toro’s signature, including a blistering tap solo that he would never play live. Frank pokes and praises it. They can talk about guitar stuff for hours, but Ray seems tired, and Frank is too, so he doesn’t push it. He archives the discussion for the bus ride on the way to Philly that they’ll be travelling in the next couple days.
“So I mean, not that I’m not happy to see you,” Ray says, “Because you’re the love of my life—“
Frank grins and shoves him.
“Why are you here, though? Aren't you tired?”
“Aren’t you?” Frank teases. Ray doesn’t even dignify him with a response, and Frank sighs. Out with it, he supposes. “I dunno, man,” he says, which he figures is an okay place to start, and then he asks, “Do you ever miss when we were in the van?”
Ray shrugs. “Sure. In the way I never want to go back there ever again.”
“Yeah, but I dunno,” Frank says again. “I guess I just…”
“You miss being around everybody,” Ray says.
Something gets punched out of Frank. Relief, maybe. All he knows is that it’s a huge exhale of air like he’s dislodging a cold stone from his gut. “Exactly,” he says. “Like, I know I wanted to kill all of you half the time—“
Ray says, “The feeling was mutual.”
Frank laughs outright at that, even though it’s not that funny. “Exactly,” he says. “But I don’t know. I just woke up in my room and it seemed… too big.”
“I know,” Ray says. “I don’t know what to do without fighting you for what to watch on TV.”
“Or stealing Gerard’s clothes,” Frank puts in, and it’s such a relief, he thinks, to know somebody this well. That they can feel the same things at the same time, and that Ray within a minute of talking to him can plunge a hand within the tangle of his chest and pull out a live wire that’s more or less what he’s feeling at the moment.
“I could call Jamia,” Frank says, “And I love her, it’s just not the same.”
“No, I know,” Ray says. “Everybody still needs friends.”
Frank flops back to lay down on Ray’s bed, looking up at the shadowy ceiling. “You understand me, Toro.”
“I did spend two years in a van with you." Ray puts a hand on his knee and squeezes. Frank, for the millionth time in his life, finds himself jealous of Ray's goddamned Rachmaninoff hand spread.
Frank sighs dreamily, sitting up. He only hesitates a moment before draping himself over Ray's back, arms flung about his shoulders and face buried in his neck.
"Jeez, Frankie, you're cold," Ray says, even though his hand comes up to tug on a lock of Frank’s hair.
"You're warm," Frank mumbles, digging the frigid point of his nose into the flesh of Ray's neck. Ray squirms and complains, but doesn’t try to remove him. Frank cackles, then because he’s a world-renowned shit, tongues Ray’s ear that’s closest to him.
Ray yelps, but at the same time he’s dissolving into giggles and trying to bat Frank away. Grinning too big for his face, Frank chases after him, making ghoulish tickle-hands. Ray goes, “Motherfucker—“ then flips his laptop closed and launches himself at Frank.
“Ray, ah!” Frank throws his forearms up but Ray catches him around the middle and tackles him. He lands his full weight on Frank, who’s already out of breath from laughter. A ferret could probably fight better than Ray, but he has the advantage of size so he can pin Frank when he tries to get a leg around him to flip him. Ray then gets him in the worst approximation of a headlock he’s ever experienced. He couldn’t escape it anyway, because he’s so giddy with laughter that his limbs feel about as strong as cooked spaghetti.
“This is my turbo ninja chokehold,” Ray giggles. “You’ll never escape.”
“You’re such a dweeb,” Frank says. He struggles for a second, just for fun, then taps Ray twice on the leg to admit defeat and make him let him go. Ray takes his forearm from Frank’s neck but doesn’t roll away. Instead of holding Frank in place by his windpipe he just grabs him and hugs him for a second.
It’s terrible, he thinks, that he can’t remember the last time he got a good old fashioned Ray Toro hug. Toro doesn’t speak through his words too often, but his actions are articulate enough to tell Frank that he’s missed their early, casual closeness as much as Frank has. And good God, the man can hug. Maybe Frank is touch starved or something, but he melts into Ray’s embrace like it’s all he’s ever needed. Ray throws off heat like a furnace, and he covers the back of Frank’s neck with his hand. Then he ruffles Frank’s hair in the patented Toro expression of love. Frank feels all sickly sweet and fuzzy inside.
“Hey, guess what,” Ray says, shoving Frank up to a sitting position.
Frank folds his hands behind his head and crosses his legs at the ankles, lounging in a truly spectacular fashion. Frank pokes him with his foot, somehow communicating to Ray that he’d like him to come lounge spectacularly as well, which Ray does, kicking back against the headboard next to him. “What am I guessing?”
“I found my DVD player.”
“Uh huh.”
“And Transformers.” Ray spreads his hands as though he’s bestowing a blessing, and he might as well be. Frank laughs for joy. And even though it’s a bad idea and means they’ll both regret it in the morning, they stay up nearly all night watching Transformers, talking, and giggling like idiots. Just like old times.