Chapter Text
July 10, 2025. T-Mobile Park, Seattle.
The Black Parade was coming back from the dead.
Tomorrow they would finally resuscitate that dead horse for a final run. Years of planning had gone into every detail—the new costumes, pyrotechnics, all the small ornamental things meant for fans to decode like a language they already half-remembered.
The first soundcheck had barely ended when Gerard Way stepped offstage.
Something in his spine still felt like it was vibrating from the noise. He ducked into the nearest sink, splashed water onto his face, and stayed there a moment too long, hands braced against the porcelain. Stadiums this big always felt wrong before the show started. Too empty to be real, too large to belong to them. And yet every seat was already spoken for, sold out in minutes.
A familiar pressure sat low in his stomach. Not quite nerves. Something older.
He tried to smile in the mirror.
The version that used to fit under lights. The one that knew where to sit on his face when he wasn’t sure where to put himself. It didn’t land the same way anymore. There was less softness in his features now. More definition. Lines that hadn’t existed the last time this persona felt like skin instead of costume.
He exhaled.
Too old, he thought. Not dramatically. Just as a fact he couldn’t negotiate anymore. Too old to keep becoming someone else on command.
When he straightened, the rest of the band was already filtering into the room behind him.
“Okay, does anyone else feel like they’re about to puke?” Frank asked, peeling off a knee brace like it had personally offended him. “I forgot how all those seats feel… empty.”
“That’s literally every venue,” Mikey said, setting his bass case down. “Your brain just does the math wrong. You don’t see thirty thousand empty seats every day.”
A couple of quiet laughs followed that, the kind that came easier once someone named the obvious thing out loud. The room loosened a little, yet Gerard stayed where he was, letting the noise pass through him instead of joining it. The green room always looked like this before a show, way too normal for what it was about to become. Coffee cups, cables, half-open cases. Like nothing historic was about to happen at all.
Gerard zoned out as his little brother and bandmates left for dinner back at the hotel. He lingered behind, looking at every detail of the green room. He was still staring at nothing in particular when footsteps came back in.
Frank.
“Not hungry?” he asked. “We’re gonna hit the hotel restaurant. You can come if you want.”
Gerard snapped out of it at the sound of his voice. “Uh, nah, man. I still have to call Bandit and Lynz. I’ll catch up with you guys later,” he said quickly, a little too quickly. He cleared his throat.
He wandered around for a bit more, the smell of smoke still lingering on the stage and calling him to look again. His knees cracked a little as he sat down on the edge of the stage, careful not to damage any equipment. The phone in his pocket started buzzing. He took a quick glance and saw Ray’s number. He let it go to voicemail.
He observed each seat, from section A all the way to the nosebleeds. Patterns that repeated over and over under the moonlight, warping in the distance until they became dots. He stared at it longer than he meant to. His heart started beating more intensely with each little detail he noticed: a folding chair in section P, still half-wrapped in plastic; the merch booth with the prices for each item already posted; emergency exits and barricades. It was a place screaming with expectation.
The thought did not arrive with a warning. It just punched him.
“I can’t do this.”
A beat went by.
“I need something.”
He clenched his fists, subtly shaking his head as if to erase the thought from his mind. He remembered there was no difference between small bar gigs and this stadium. It wasn’t the empty seats: it was the fact that each of them represented someone wanting something from him. He got up and headed backstage, looking for a drink. Whiskey, vodka, anything. Even a goddamn Bud Light would do.
Gerard stopped right as his fingers reached the cold glass of a beer bottle inside the minifridge. Another call. This time it was Lynz.
He cleared his throat a little before answering.
“Hi, honey,” he said, the cell service already getting shitty. “How have my ladies been doing?”
The connection wavered in and out, but her voice carried anyway, warm, steady, familiar in a way the stadium wasn’t.
Then Bandit.
A burst of sound through the phone, slightly distorted, guitar slightly out of tune, a small voice pushing through it all. Something about a song she’d made up. Something about a dad who came home.
He closed his eyes without meaning to.
His hand drifted to his throat.
There was nothing there, but it still felt tight. He checked his collar anyway, like he could adjust the feeling out of his body, to no avail. His own family was still holding him up to the same golden pillar everyone seemed to put him on.
He put the beer back and left the venue.
The hotel hallway was too quiet after everything else. Back inside, the ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, indifferent. He watched it until the edges of the room softened, and eventually the rest of him did too.
July 11, 2025. T-Mobile Park, Seattle.
He finally woke up at eleven or so. He decided to take a quick shower before he heard Mikey at his door, asking him to join them at the hotel’s restaurant for a very late breakfast.
Gerard walked down the halls, his jaw tense and palms sweaty, the morning light switching his brain back on before he arrived at the table with the band.
He heard Ray laughing a bit too loud about something he didn’t quite catch, small banter back and forth about the way the costumes fit. He instead retreated into his seat and focused only on his piece of toast. It wasn’t long before someone noticed his strange mood, especially when everyone else seemed excited and cheery about the kickstart of the tour.
“Did you sleep well, Gee?” Mikey asked, his eyes focused on the mechanical way his older brother was eating.
“Huh?” he looked up from his plate, noticing the sudden silence at the table and all eyes on him. “Oh, yeah, I’m just still waking up, you know how it is.” He dismissed the question as casually as he could, even throwing in a little practiced smile.
The conversation at the table shifted again. He could hear something about speakers and cues and the ever-present fire safety. He was still not quite sure what there was to talk about when there was no time left since the show was tonight.
Soon enough, they were shuffled into the van and dropped off at the venue again, staff running in the backstage and alleys. It wasn’t even two p.m. when he noticed a small line already forming at the main entrance.
“Okay, one, two, check, check, one, two…” Frank's voice echoed through the stadium, checking the mics absentmindedly as the sound engineers adjusted levels.
Gerard watched from the side wings, clutching his bottle of water. Ray brushed past him, saying something that sounded distant, muffled even, but Gerard managed to catch that he was being asked something.
“Yeah,” he answered quickly, then chugged his water and stepped onstage. They had a whole list of things to get through before they could even change.
Everything came a bit more into focus when he started singing, even if his voice wasn’t fully there yet. By the grace of whatever god was in charge of technical failures, his earpiece stopped playing the metronome and he lost the tempo. Not even lyrics came out, he just froze. The sudden shift threw him off completely, and the band had to stop.
“What happened?” Frank asked, still plucking at his guitar.
“My earpiece. Lost the tempo, sorry,” Gerard said, fumbling with it before putting it back on.
“Oh, okay, let’s just take it from the top,” Ray said, reassuring the team before counting them back in.
It happened again. The metronome was gone, and he could only hear the drums at a low level. The band stopped once more as he checked in with the engineers. He could almost feel the eyes of his bandmates on his back as he explained that he needed the metronome all show long.
Eventually, it was fixed, and they all headed backstage.
“Take a nap,” Frank said from the opposite couch, almost like an order. “You need it.”
“I’m okay. Just technical issues,” Gerard said, arms crossed over his chest.
“These are the same songs we’ve played forever. Why do you need the metronome?” Ray asked, tying his hair into a low ponytail.
“It’s different. Too much feedback. I can’t hear everything,” Gerard said. He hated to admit it, but he did need rest.
Instead, he settled into the couch while Frank texted the setlist for the night to the tech group chat, occasionally switching over to messages with his daughters.
Right. He should call Lynz.
He reached for his phone and called Lynz. He could tell something was off by the tone of her voice, cold, distant. One of those days. Those days where they both realized things were falling apart but kept up the perfect façade for Bandit, because sometimes pretending felt gentler than confrontation. He ended the call when she told him to break a leg.
When the show finally started, he felt more alive. The energy buzzed through the crowd, and he played his part as expected.
It was all theater. The DRAAG national anthem. The notes being passed. A slap on the face. An election that was always rigged. The whole pantomime was fun to perform. They moved from the main stage to the smaller, more familiar stage B, where it was easier to ignore the megalophobia still lingering from the night before, the memory of empty seats in the dark.
In the last part of the show, they stripped away the Black Parade act to reveal themselves as they were. He even introduced the band as My Chemical Romance from New Jersey, which threw him off a little. The small stage, the forced closeness, the stripped-down energy: it all felt too familiar. Even more so when Frank leaned close to his ear so he could be heard over the crowd.
He didn’t notice the sweat covering his body until the set ended. His knees felt shaky.
Back at the hotel, he rested his head against the couch in his room.
The rest of the band had gathered there, talking through the show, what worked, what didn’t, how they could shift things from city to city. Gerard mostly nodded along, offering agreement instead of input. His head felt like it was about to split open. He just wanted them gone.
Eventually, they started filtering out. Frank didn’t. He stayed behind, holding out a piece of paper Gerard’s eyes struggled to focus on.
“What do you think?” Frank asked. “It’s the stage B setlist for San Francisco.”
“Whatever you think is best, Frankie, I trust you,” Gerard said, rubbing at his temple.
“I’m serious. I want to know if you’re up for playing these.” He handed him a few crumpled sheets.
The setlists were spread out between them, half-marked, half-rewritten, ink bleeding into older versions like they couldn’t quite decide what they were supposed to be yet. Frank tapped one of the pages with the back of his pen.
“You seem more comfortable with the old stuff. Revenge, Bullets…” he said, not looking up.
Gerard glanced down. “They land.”
“They do.” Frank nodded. “That’s not the point, though.”
Gerard didn’t answer right away. He shifted one of the pages slightly, aligning it with nothing in particular.
“It keeps the pacing up,” he said after a moment. “People want that energy.”
Frank huffed a quiet laugh. “People want a lot of things.”
Gerard let his eyes linger on the page, then smirked faintly.
“‘Boy Division?’ You’re trying to start a riot, dude,” he said, a hint of bitterness slipping in. He scanned the rest of the list. “Lots of old songs. I like it.”
“Well, I tried to keep it balanced,” Frank said. “Something from every album. We’re doing the Smashing Pumpkins cover next show, too.”
He hesitated.
“It’s just weird,” he added. “Feels like we keep circling the same place instead of moving forward.”
“It’s a tour,” he said, a little too evenly. “We already know what works. What people want.”
Frank finally looked at him, something sharper in his expression.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’m just saying… it’s like you’re trying to stay there.”
The words weren't loud. But they landed wrong. Not explosive. Not confrontational. Just wrong.
“Like I said, I trust you,” he replied. “Put whatever you think is best on those.”
Clean. Professional. Done.
Frank leaned back slightly, like he’d run into something he hadn’t meant to touch.
“Right,” he said.