Work Text:
Welcome To Canada.
They had seen the signs everywhere. Their bus was somewhere around rural Ontario, slowly but surely arriving to Winnipeg after a show in Toronto. It was fascinating and in Mikey’s words “feels very European”, which made everyone laugh.
Somewhere past Kingston, someone had used the last of the milk without saying anything, they had planned on cereal for dinner, which was already a compromise, and now even that was gone. After some back and forth with their driver, the bus groaned to a stop at a convenience store on the side of the road, the kind that appears in the middle of nowhere like it had always been there.
It was a cozy little thing, Dépanneur Amanda, as the tiny sign read.
The door opens and Gerard and Frank hop out, the two of them spill out into the night air, which is colder than either of them had dressed for. They are starving and quietly doing the math on whether a gallon of milk and some chips can survive a twenty-dollar Canadian bill they had left over.
“You know, I actually took French in high school” Frank says as they walk the short parking lot to get inside, his breath fogging slightly.
“Really?” Gerard nods toward a dense block of text plastered on the glass door, just above a small sticker that reads pousser, french for push. “Read that”
“I mean– no. It’s been a while“ Frank squints at it briefly. “I know the numbers and some very basic sentences.” He pushes the door open, then turns back to watch Gerard, who had been pulling it. “It’s some government PSA, I think.”
Inside, they set out on an expedition to find the good flamin’ hot chips and the dairy section.
“So why French?” Gerard says, tilting his head down each aisle, his hands already reaching for things he probably won’t buy.
“They also had Spanish and German, but I couldn't roll my R's and German was already full.” Frank admits, finding the chips and doing the mental math on whether he can justify grabbing the large bag.
"What, were they like, really popular?" Gerard asks, grabbing another bag of chips and tossing it into Frank’s arms without looking.
"...The kids that took German were… really intense about it."
Neither of them says anything for a while. It makes sense, in some deranged way, it is a terrible reason and also a completely airtight one, and they are both far too exhausted to say so out loud.
"Fair.” Gerard says, and then immediately, without breaking stride, rolls the most catastrophically bad R Frank has ever heard in his life.
Frank glares. "Shut up."
“Oh, excuse-moi, Frankie.” Gerard glances back at him, already giggling, and turns down the last aisle where a row of fridges hums faintly against the far wall. “... Hon hon hon baguette croissant.”
"I hate you."
"You don't even know if I said something offensive!"
Frank stares at him for a long moment in the refrigerator light. "I know enough."
And then, because Gerard is Gerard, he starts reading everything aloud. Labels, expiration dates, a small laminated sign about a two-for-one deal on yogurt and the small print on a promotional sticker. All of it with complete and total confidence. “...Late?”
“Lait.” Frank corrects. “It’s lait.” He has a death grip on his salt and vinegar chips. “Go get the milk. I’ll pay.”
Frank makes the sharpest U-turn known to man, because if he has to stand there while Gerard attempts to become bilingual at nine P.M. on a Tuesday he is going to lose his mind.
“I knew that one!”
“No, you didn’t.” Frank is already halfway down the aisle, rounding the corner.
“I did!” Gerard calls after him, turning back to the fridge with a furrowed brow, squinting between two cartons. ‘Faible en gras’ in one hand and ‘vitamines ajoutées’ in the other.
“You just pronounced it like a gelato flavor!”
The register is up front, near the door, where the draft comes in cold every time it opens. The kid behind the counter is maybe sixteen, maybe older, it’s hard to tell, there’s a textbook open beside the register, Mathématiques: Algèbre 2, which is the dead give away that he is in high school at most. Frank puts the chips on the counter and exhales slowly, trying to remember the last time he heard actual French spoken out loud by someone who actually knew it.
“Uh, bonne nuit?” He wonders if ‘bonjour’ is only for the morning, or if using it at night is a sure sign of a tourist with a death wish.
The cashier looks up, disinterested at first, then catches the uncertainty in Frank’s voice and offers a half-smile. “Salut, ce sera tout?”
Oh fuck, Frank thinks, a lightning bolt of panic straight to the frontal lobe. The cashier speaks so quickly and with such a complicated accent that it takes a few seconds to sort the syllables into anything meaningful. He recognizes salut, which is “hi”, which is better than nothing at all.
Was there a polite way to say ‘please don’t talk to me in French’, or would that be the most American thing he could possibly do?
He just nods, because positive body language is universal, right? Right? He watches the cashier ring up his chips, his hands moving with the muscle memory of a thousand similar nights.
Somewhere far away, something crashes. Hard.
Frank winces. Some instinct in him knows, with a bone-deep certainty, that Gerard is the source of the disaster. This is confirmed by the high-pitched whimper that follows, a sound that Frank has cataloged over years of touring when Gerard accidentally forgot his bunk was raised, or when the kitchenette cabinet was open and he banged his shin against it.
“Ayoye! Est-ce que ta copine va bien?” The cashier asks, voice rising with real alarm.
Frank’s brain, which has been busy buffering, hears only the word ‘ta’ and is instantly transported back to sophomore year, where a girl named Stephanie used to throw crumpled-up notes at his head during the possessive pronoun review. ‘Ta’ as in ‘your’, as in ‘your something.’ Frank blanks on the rest, but the intonation is worried, which is probably bad.
“Pardon, mon... qui?”
The cashier points past Frank. “Votre petite amie! Elle est tombée là-bas, dois-je appeler une ambulance?” The cashier says, tilting his head to try and get a good look, eager to help, or at least to be part of minor drama on an otherwise slow Tuesday night.
Frank understands ‘ami’ and fucking ‘ambulance’ and his brain decides that's context enough and that he is very much ill-equipped for this. He turns back, half-expecting to see Gerard lying in a pool of his own blood somehow, but instead sees him already struggling to his feet, a cartoonish look of triumph on his face and the gallon of milk is intact. Frank is reminded, not for the first time, that Gerard’s entire career is built on surviving disasters.
“Oh, no, he’s fine!! C’est bon.” Frank blurts, his voice a little too loud. He flashes a thumbs-up, which must be international sign language for “not dead”.
The cashier’s eyes go wide, and then narrow, and then go wide again. “...Lui?”
“...Oui?” His brain is just grabbing pronouns like someone trying to catch fish with bare hands.
“Ah, désolé, désolé!” The cashier’s cheeks go an intense shade of red. He offers an apologetic shrug, and then, in a sudden burst of rusty English: “Sorry, d'accord– your friend is okay?”
Frank is so grateful for the switch back to English that he nearly bows. “No, really, it’s good, he’s good, we do this all the time.” He tries to laugh, but it comes out as a weird snort.
Gerard staggers dramatically, nearly loses control of the milk, and then leans into the counter next to Frank with a theatrical sigh.
The cashier, now mortified, rings up the rest of their haul in silence. He tries very hard to not make eye contact with either of them, and then, in his best attempt to neutralize his accent: “Sixteen and twenty and three cents, please”
Gerard hands over the crumpled bill with all the nonchalance in the world, as if he hasn’t just upended two entire shelves and embarrassed himself in front of a local teenager, the kid is just displaying his best customer service face, which they both recognize because they had also worked in retail long enough back in Jersey.
The transaction completes with a few more awkward nods, a handful of words that no one bothers to understand and then the two of them are back outside, the automatic door giving their exit a little musical chime.
“What were you two talking about?” Gerard asks once they are walking back to the bus.
Frank snorts, shoving his hands deep in his hoodie pocket. “You eating shit, mostly.”
Gerard blinks, replaying his own klutzy trip in the refrigerated aisle. Honestly, falling in public was just another day at the office for him. "I figured."
"You scared the cashier." Frank manages to say in between giggles and fishing out more wonky translations from his memory.
"I did?"
Frank laughs, the sound muffled but genuine."He thought you needed an ambulance."
"I was fine!” Gerard laughs, even if he's limping a bit from here his knee took the fall. “Anything else?"
“I think he thought you were a girl?”
“Why?!” Gerard stops just short of the bus's steps, turning around with his full body so hard he almost falls. Again.
“I dunno, man.” Frank grabs his elbow before he can go down for the second time in one night. “Pretty sure ‘elle’ means ‘she.’” He pushes Gerard up the steps by the shoulder and ducks in after him because he's had a long day and maybe frosted flakes are the answer to all of his problems right now.
Inside, Mikey is already installed at the kitchenette table like he’s been there for hours, guarding the last bowl of fruity pebbles because he swears they are somehow illegal contraband in Canada. “How was it?”
“Fell in the dairy aisle.” Gerard sets the milk down. The bus lurches back onto the highway and he pulls out a chair and sits down across from Mikey like nothing happened.
Frank dumps the bag on the counter and drops onto the couch, pulling his hoodie sleeves down over his knuckles. “I got chips. Also the cashier thought Gerard was a girl.”
Ray also appears from his bunk, making a beeline for the plastic bag with the chips inside it. “How?”
“Ask the cashier, he said ‘she’ in french” Frank says, settling into the couch and opening up his bag of chips, shoving a very generous handful into his mouth.
Ray plops down by his side, trying to steal some chips. “You speak French? Since when?”
“I took like two years in high school”
“Lucky, I took Spanish!” Mikey says, digging into his bowl to make the milk soak in the colors and excessive sugar of the cereal. Gerard is also getting his fix on the kitchenette.
“Why is French ‘the language of love’ anyway? It sounds like someone's dog needs to cough” Gerard says, immediately launching into some gross-sounding and horrifying approximation. “I think Italian is more romantic than that”
Frank snorts into a chip. “You don't even speak Italian.”
“Neither do you.”
“I speak more French than you speak Italian.”
“Fine” Gerard is still very much unconvinced. “Still, Italian sounds romantic. Amore. That's nice.”
“You know one word.”
“I know ciao.”
“That just means hello."
“See? Romantic, way better than bonjour”
Frank rolls his eyes. “French has good lines too.”
Gerard immediately perks up, because Frank was right, and he'll take any opportunity to learn new sentences and be incredibly annoying about it. “Like what?”
Frank freezes mid-chip, he knows exactly three complete sentences. One is to ask where the bathroom is. One is his name and where he’s from. The third one is from the unit on romance, and he learned it at fifteen, and he has never once said it out loud to another human being, and he is absolutely not saying it out loud on this bus. “Nothing. Forget it.”
Gerard puts both elbows on the table. “C’mon!”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“So?”
“So, no.”
“Please!”
Frank stares at the fake-woodgrain table, preparing himself, and for a second he cycles through every last phrase he’s ever learned in French, every stuttering apology and train station inquiry, every line from a textbook and also every insult. It’s not enough, but it has to be, because Gerard is looking at him like he’s just promised a secret, and now Frank is on the hook to deliver.
He clears his throat, feels the heat rise in his cheeks, and says, very quietly, “Tu as de beaux yeux… et je veux être avec toi.”
For an instant, the bus seems to hold its breath: Mikey stops mid-spoonful; Ray, who was in the process of eating the entire bag of chips, pauses.
Gerard echoes it, murmuring, “That sounds pretty.”
Frank shrugs, trying to play it off. “Told you so.” He punctuates by shoving another handful of chips into his mouth, but it’s mostly for the excuse to look away and go back to snacking in peace, half his chips have disappeared, probably under Ray's hand.
“What does it mean?”
Frank, who had been banking hard on the hope that Gerard would just let the mystery be mysterious, now finds himself in a pickle. He could lie. He could absolutely lie, say it means something boring, or force a joke. Instead, because he's tired enough that his brain has stopped filtering anything, he translates to the best of his ability "You have beautiful eyes, and I want to be with you”
What's next is dead silence.
Frank stares at the table. The table stares back. The bus fills with the sound of two people eating cereal like it’s a competitive sport and Ray trying to wrestle ten chips out of the bag at once. “...That sounded way less weird in French,” Frank says finally.
"...Italian's still prettier.” Gerard decides, approximately one full commercial break too late.
Ray reaches into Frank's chips again. “I also took Spanish” He chews so loud Frank can hear it in his own skull. “One whole year, but I retained basically nothing. I can say hello and ask where the biblioteca is.”
“Good, you can use that when you need the bathroom,” Mikey says, grinding his fruity pebbles into paste.
Ray sets the chip bag down on the cushion between them. “Mikey. Biblioteca is library.”
Mikey points his spoon. “Next you’re gonna tell me embarazada doesn’t mean embarrassed.”
“It doesn’t!”
“It starts with embar—”
“It means pregnant!”
"Then what's embarrassed?!" Mikey says, and the spoon goes down into the bowl with a wet clink, sending a small tide of pink milk toward the rim.
Ray’s jaw shifts to one side. His eyes go to the middle distance somewhere above the microwave. “... Avergonzado. Maybe.”
Mikey stares at him. “You just made that up.”
"It's Spanish!" Ray turns to Gerard and Frank on the couch, gesturing at Mikey with an open hand like he’s presenting evidence. “Those are false cognates.”
"What the fuck's a cognate?" Frank asks, suddenly running back his conversation with the cashier for some fucking reason.
"The words that look like they should mean the same thing.”
“Oh my god!” Frank yelps, hand flying to his mouth like he can shove the realization back in with enough denial. “Fuck!”
Everyone’s head snaps up, the Spanish vocab lesson dead on arrival.
“Petite amie.” Frank says it to the middle distance, to no one, to the ghost of his tenth-grade French teacher. “He said petite amie.” He can feel it clicking into place in real time, the gears grinding, two years of high school French dragging themselves up from whatever shallow grave he’d buried them in.
“And?” Gerard has pushed his cereal bowl to the side entirely, both arms on the table now, chin practically in his hands. Eyes glued to Frank and his crisis.
“I thought it meant little friend!” The words come out squashed and miserable from behind his fingers. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
Mikey wipes the milk off his chin with the back of his wrist. “What does it mean?”
“Girlfriend.” He drops his hands just long enough to look at all of them, then puts them back. “He thought you were my girlfriend.”
At the revelation, Ray collapsed backwards on the couch with a howl, legs diving off the floor, chips scattering everywhere. Mikey’s reaction was way worse, he snorted so violently that a cloud of powdered sugar and milk rocketed out his nose, detonating over the table. It splattered the side of Gerard’s face, who, rather than being grossed out, just cackled harder, stretching his hands over his stomach in a desperate attempt to keep his insides contained.
Frank wanted to crawl under the upholstery and die inside the foam padding. He wanted to rewind time and never take French, never leave his house, never go on tour, never interact with another human being.
“You just realized?!” Gerard choked, words barely understandable between giggles. “Dude, you just realized?”
Ray was pounding on the armrest, wheezing, “Like, a small friend. A tiny friend. A little buddy?”
Frank tried to save face, halfheartedly. “I just said ‘he’s fine’, I thought I corrected him!”
“You did.”
“I mean– sort of?”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
Frank sighed. “It means I corrected him into thinking you were my boyfriend.”
Ray’s wheeze hit a pitch that shouldn’t have been possible from a grown man. Mikey put his face directly into his arms. Gerard just sat there with his chin in his hands, grinning like Frank had handed him a gift.
Frank sat very still in the center of all of it, a man watching his own house burn down, wondering distantly if he’d left anything inside worth saving.
“So technically I was your french boyfriend for like... four minutes?” Gerard giggled, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye with the back of his hand. He looked so delighted that Frank had to fight the impulse to throw the whole chip bag at his face.
"You were my canadian french boyfriend, if anything!"
Gerard grinned, that wild smile of his flashing for just a second. “Is there a difference?”
“At least we’d have free healthcare,” Frank says, which comes out wetter than intended because he’s still half-laughing and his face is doing something embarrassing. He realizes how badly his classes had failed him six years down the line. He could at least laugh about it. “I’m never speaking French again in my life. I’m done. I’m a stupid American and I’m proud of it.”
Gerard has already torn a paper towel off the roll and is holding it out to Mikey, who is still face-down in his arms, shoulders shaking. Then Gerard crosses to the couch and drops a hand onto Frank’s shoulder, patting it twice like a coach pulling a player from the game.
“Yeah,” he says, still grinning. “Probably for the best.”
Ray finishes cracking up and raises his hands like he's about to reveal classified information. “From now on, we have permission to just be dumb Americans”
“Amen” Frank says once he has a chance to catch his breath, scrubbing a hand down his face.
Gerard tilts his head. Something flickers across his face. “Amen, mon petite amie”
Frank digs out the one intact chip left at the bottom of the bag and fires it at him. It catches Gerard square on the forehead, bounces off the bridge of his nose, and disappears somewhere behind the couch cushions. “Shut the fuck up!”