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There are places in America where the only thing left to eat is regret, shrink-wrapped in cellophane and blessed by a gas station soda fountain.
Ray doesn't bother. He's not above gas station food in principle, but there are lines, and this is all lines and no food. By his standard, the only edible thing in the place is the coffee, but even that’s a negotiation with fate.
Frank, on the other hand, is physically incapable of passing any food item without considering taking a bite. He returns to the bus with a plastic bag of breakfast atrocities, grinning, and tosses Gerard a burrito at rib-cracking velocity. Gerard snags it mid-air, dramatic, as if he’s catching a live grenade. They both settle into the cracked vinyl seats of their moving coffin and tear through the wrappers in tandem, desperate and victorious.
Mikey elects to abstain. He sits cross-legged in his bunk, methodically peeling the label from a bottle of Brisk tea. He sips the tea as if it’s the last potable liquid on Earth. He is, at this moment, the only person on the bus with a future.
"That burrito tasted kinda funny." Gerard announces, balling up the wrapper and launching it to the nearest pile of trash.
Frank, who is already halfway through his second burrito, snorts. "Coward."
By the time they hit the Idaho border, the last of the breakfast carnage is gone, reduced to a sticky residue and a growing sense of dread. Six more hours into the drive, somewhere between bathroom break number three and Mikey calling their manager, the consequences begin manifesting. The bus starts to sound like a haunted house with Mikey and Ray being the main targets.
Nobody is naming what's happening because naming it would make it real, and it's already too real. It's been an hour of muffled suffering, the bathroom door rattling in its frame, the unmistakable acoustics of Gerard weeping with his forehead against the wall while Frank is wrapped around a trashcan in his bunk like it's the only stable thing left in the universe, which, for Frank, it is. Both of them are making promises to gods they don’t even believe in anymore. Ray watches Frank's white-knuckled grip on the plastic rim and thinks he's maybe thirty seconds from asking somebody, anybody, if there's a rosary on this bus.
“For fuck's sake!” Mikey screams when the bathroom door opens and the smell wafts out, following a very pale Gerard.
“Everything hurts.” Gerard mutters, holding his battered stomach.
“I bet” Ray mumbles under his pinched nose, he's crying now too, the misery of being stuck on a rolling tube with two food-poisoned people is too much to bear.
Thirty minutes later Gerard’s bunk is decommissioned in light of him not making it quick enough to the bathroom and barfing all over his pillow. Frank’s bunk is the next to suffer the same fate, it turns out crying and aiming at the same time is very hard.
Ray starts measuring time by the distance between catastrophes, which makes today feel at least three days long.
They decide to make an emergency stop at a Chevron. Making do with the little nozzles to wash the car windows, Ray is covering his nose while he hoses down the bedding in water and blue windshield wiper while Mikey searches for any kind of disinfectant and air freshener inside.
“Shut the fuck up, i warned you!” Ray screams when Gerard groans again on the curb, he had volunteered for the cleanup, because the alternative is sitting forty-five more minutes inside the stink.
“I said I'm sorry!” Frank has the decency to stand on the other side of the parking lot, shuddering and drinking a Sprite. He is, by his own admission, a bioweapon, and he's doing the only right thing by quarantining himself as far away from the others as possible while trying his best to keep Gerard seated and sane by his side.
They spend another gory hour in that fucking gas station, doing their best to keep the two barf machines contained and hydrated while Mikey manages to put the damp bedding up to dry in the bus bathroom, Ray has already decided to leave the cushions for dead in a dumpster.
Eventually, when the bus is declared as habitable again, they climb back inside, everything smells like cleaning products and the faint lingering remains of breakfast.
“Where’s… my mattress?” Gerard croaked, his voice thin and frayed. He stared at the naked plywood platform of his bunk, then turned around to witness Frank's bunk, equally barren.
“In the dumpster behind the Chevron,” Ray said from inside his own intact and clean bed. “You’re lucky I didn't burn it.“
“So what now?” Frank asks, still nauseous.
Mikey emerged from the bathroom still spraying a cloud of lemon-scented Lysol. "You two are sleeping in the lounge." He gestured with the can toward the two worn couches bolted to the floor. “The manager will sort your bunks in Jersey. For now? Couch.”
The digital clock on the microwave flickered to 11:00 PM. They stood there in the lounge: Gerard pale and shivery, Frank green around the edges, surrounded by the faint, chemical-sweet smell of cleaner and the funk of sickness.
“Which one are you picking?” Frank clutched a spare blanket to his chest like a shield. In his other hand dangled a plastic bag full of Gatorade bottles and a loaf of white bread.
Gerard didn’t answer with words. He just swayed forward and collapsed onto the left couch, the smaller one. It suited him. He couldn’t spend more than ten minutes outside the fetal position anyway.
They are very practical about it, even if their insides feel raw and exposed.
Frank wedges two triple-bagged trashcans between the couches, then he arranges the Gatorade bottles and the loaf of bread into a sad little shrine in the middle of the aisle. Soon enough they are cocooned into musky old blankets on the couches, Gerard chooses to pass time reading a book about some poltergeist while Frank takes over the laptop, pushing the old South Park DVD into the tray.
At first, they just suffer in parallel silence. Gerard glanced over every few seconds with another question.
"...What's happening?” Gerard says, turning over and abandoning his book.
Frank is bent over his trashcan again, shoulders heaving. He doesn’t look up from the plastic rim. “Kenny died again.”
"Did he always die every episode?"
Frank lifts his head for a second, sweat beading at his temples. “Yeah.”
"That's fucked up." Gerard says, already reaching for his own can as his stomach lurches.
"...Yeah."
Another wave hits them both, a messy, synchronized emptying into plastic-lined bins. But it’s quieter this time, less violent; their bodies are learning the rhythm of this hell, at least it is less lonely than the first time.
“I hate you so much.” Gerard says once he’s done, arm flopped over his face.
Frank, from across the aisle, does the same thing with his own arm. “Yeah. I know. It’ s okay.”
The laptop is turned over on the floor to face Frank, who technically is watching it in between groaning and going very still whenever something threatens to be funny, because funny means laughing, and laughing, he has discovered, is a fast track back to the trashcan. Gerard can hear it from his couch.
“What episode is that?” Gerard asks. He cranes his neck to catch the screen directly, then gives up and squints at the window instead, hunting for a reflection in the dark glass.
“The Casa Bonita one.”
"...Move over." Gerard says, slowly but surely wrapping himself on the blanket, but now that he’s holding it in the light, is not really a blanket at all, just a flat box sheet.
Frank doesn't object, just pushes the laptop a bit more to the left and sits up, making room for Gerard to plop down beside him. Both are too tired to do much else than just watch and pass a big bottle of water in between them each time someone feels bile come up again.
“Would you invite me to your birthday at Casa Bonita?” Frank asks, eyes fixed on the screen, voice coming out rougher than intended.
"Right now? No." Gerard doesn't even look up. "Ask me again in a week."
They chuckle a bit, both for the joke and the fact that Cartman is currently putting a cardboard box over Butter’s head on the tiny screen. Then Frank shudders, a full-body thing that rattles the couch cushion under them both.
"...You cold?"
Frank, whose body has completely betrayed him, immediately lies. "No."
"You're shaking."
"I'm fine."
Gerard stares at him for a moment with dim, glassy eyes. Without a word, he grabs the edge of his blanket, the scratchy one, the box sheet, the one that smells exactly like the inside of a tour bus, and shoves half of it in Frank's direction. "Here."
Frank catches it without protest because he's officially reached the stage of illness where pride has packed its bags and gone home. He wraps it around himself and says nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
Five minutes later. They're both still freezing, and the episode keeps running.
"This sucks," Gerard mutters at the ceiling.
"Yeah." Frank pulls his knees up tighter, and the couch cushion shifts under them both.
Then nothing, for a long time. Just South Park and the low diesel groan of the road, Frank shivering like a puppy that got left in the rain.
"Just get over here," Gerard finally says. It comes out the way you'd say ‘fine, keep the change’.
Frank just gathers up his blanket, the trashcan and the Gatorade, then shuffles the eighteen inches between them. The movement is small, yet it feels significant, as if that slight adjustment might somehow ease the discomfort clinging to both of them like a second skin.
Gerard reaches across and hauls the blankets over both of them in one clumsy pull, and now they are side by side in the dark, two people held together by scratchy fabric and the shared understanding that warmth is warmth and that's all this is.
"Don't throw up on me." Gerard says as he feels how Frank's head has settled against his shoulder, a dead weight that is somehow both clammy and warm at the same time
"You first."
There is a pause in which the laptop screen flickers blue across both of them. "Deal," Gerard says.
That’s what is happening. Two bodies slumped together on a secondhand couch, arms and hands and legs an accidental tangle, faces gray and eyelashes stuck together. The open laptop is the lone source of light, flickering every time the credits roll and blend into the next episode.
Frank has oozed sideways until his entire body is pressed from thigh to forehead against Gerard, who in turn has become the gravity well at the center of this disgusting universe, cradling Frank’s head in the crook of his shoulder and drooling with a slow, sickly persistence into Frank’s hairline.
They are absolutely, unequivocally cuddling, but you’d never get either of them to say it.
Frank’s arm curls around Gerard’s ribs like it’s some necessary life raft, and Gerard’s palm stays glued to Frank’s elbow, thumb rubbing unconsciously at the skin, which he would probably blame on stomach-bug shivers.
Every so often, one or the other will let out a small noise, but they always settle again, winding tighter and tighter into the couch with each minor disaster that reruns through their bodies.
They’re trapped at the bottom of a fever dream, and in this place, touch is the only thing that makes sense.
At some point, Gerard’s stomach makes a threatening noise, and he bolts upright, dragging Frank with him. There’s a mad scramble for the trashcan, a few seconds where it seems like the whole night is going to collapse into a suck loop, but then Gerard just spits twice and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. The effort leaves him trembling and pale, so Frank forces a crust of bread into his hand.
“I’m fucking dying,” Gerard says, head tilted back, eyes closed.
Frank’s cheek is mashed into Gerard’s shoulder, but the rest of him is sliding south. “Don’t die on me, you’re not allowed.”
“Too late. I’m a dead man. You have to finish the tour without me.”
Frank makes a noise that could be a laugh, or maybe just a hiccup. He reaches over, snags the edge of the blanket, and yanks it up to cover both of them, muttering, “Shut up, you drama queen.”
For the rest of the night, even as they drift in and out of fevered sleep, neither lets go. Frank kicks off his blanket and curls up against Gerard’s ribs, wedging his head underneath Gerard’s chin. Gerard’s hand ends up in Frank’s hair, lazy and tangled, and he kneads at Frank’s scalp whenever he starts to shiver. They don’t speak, except for occasional muttered curses or pitiful requests for a sip of Gatorade, which they pass back and forth like communion in between sleep, or whatever blackout is happening every now and then.
They wake only to trade the Gatorade back and forth, mumble another curse at the universe, or make another clumsy grab for the trashcan.
Once, Frank opens his eyes to find their hands linked together somewhere beneath the blankets.
Neither of them remembers reaching for the other.
Once morning arrived, Ray was the first to climb down from his bunk, feeling suspiciously well-rested for someone whose last memory was of Lysol and the distant sound of retching. He felt on the verge of something rare, a true good mood, but that evaporated the second he actually laid eyes on the couch.
He stopped dead in his tracks and reeled back. “Mikey.”
There was a long pause. From the next bunk, a voice rose, flat and unimpressed. “What.”
“Come look at this.”
Mikey groaned, rolled out of bed, and shuffled down the aisle, his hair a mat of static and remorse. “If you’re about to show me puke I will literally kill you,” he said, not even looking up until he’d made it into the lounge.
He looked up. “What the fuck?”
What Ray was pointing at wasn’t so much a pile of people as it was a sculpture: Gerard was nested in what appeared to be every available blanket. His face was squashed into the back of the couch, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other dangling loosely across Frank’s shoulders. Frank, in turn, had become a human pretzel. His right leg was stretched all the way across the aisle, exposing a bare foot. The other leg was somehow underneath Gerard’s knees, which had migrated sideways off the edge of the couch. His body was twisted around so that he hugged Gerard’s shin to his chest. One of Frank’s hands had vanished into the couch cushions, the other is holding on for dear life to Gerard’s free hand.
They look like a human octopus, that’s the best way to describe it.
Ray stared at the crime scene for so long he forgot to blink. Mikey, meanwhile, was cycling through the five stages of grief behind him.
“Why are they like this?” Mikey whispered, mostly to himself. Ray just shrugged.
Frank snored, kicked once in his sleep, and dragged the remains of a blanket tighter around his torso. Gerard mumbled something that sounded like “fucking… goddamn” then burrowed deeper, if possible, into the couch.
Mikey rubbed his eyes and examined the rest of the bus. The laptop’s menu screen had given up waiting and defaulted back to the episode select, the cursor blinking patiently over episode four. An empty Gatorade bottle had rolled against the leg of the coffee table. The trashcan had been abandoned. Ray went to the kitchenette, hoping over the limb disaster, and came back with a thermos. He stood there opening it, looking at them.
Frank twitched again, made a sound like a drain unclogging, and went still again. Gerard absorbed the movement without waking, his arm tightening across Frank’s shoulders on pure instinct.
“They look terrible,” Mikey said.
“Yeah,” Ray answered with a yawn.
There's drool, there’s sweat, there’s spilled gatorade and bread crumbs everywhere. Nobody looks remotely comfortable. And yet they're sleeping like rocks.
Ray stood at the edge of the lounge and took it in. “It’s kind of sweet,” he said. “If you don’t think about the germs.” He poured himself coffee from the dented thermos and leaned against the wall, sipping like a man observing an art exhibit.
Mikey just stood there, staring, all the words in his head running into each other until only ellipses remained.
“Ray,” Mikey managed, finally. "Should we wake them?"
Ray looked at the human pretzel on the couch, then back at Mikey. There was a certain calm in Ray’s posture, like nothing happening here could possibly surprise him. “No,” he concluded. “I wanna see how they get out.”
Mikey had to admit he was a little curious, too. He poured cereal into a Styrofoam bowl and sat at the kitchenette, making the least sound possible as he chewed. The menu music began to harmonize with the clink of his spoon. Every so often, Frank would grunt or twitch, and Gerard would respond by shifting and adjusting the same way Mikey remembers him doing when the family dog slept on their bed.
Ray drifted to the counter and stood there with his coffee, eyes still fixed on the couch like he was waiting for a nature documentary narrator to materialize.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “Camera.”
Mikey was already on it. He found the digital one wedged between two bunk mattresses, battery at eleven percent. He crept forward in increments, holding his breath, he had once woken Frank Iero by accident and learned from it.
Four shots. One came out blurry.
Ray reviewed the remaining three like a museum curator. “These are going in the Christmas card.” He pointed at the best shot, Gerard’s mouth was open. Frank’s foot was just hanging there, mid-air, attached to nothing useful.
“Frame that one.” Ray said.