Archive of Our Own

By nine in the afternoon, the air in the studio had gone thick and stale and smelled vaguely like a gym bag someone had forgotten to take home.

They’d been trapped in there since two, grinding the same handful of takes into dust. Ray looked like hell warmed over, his hair sticking out in frizzy little spikes, while Mikey wasn’t much better. His fingers were red and raw from playing the same three bars over and over because Gerard insisted the levels were off.

The levels were fine.

Everyone knew the levels were fine, and that Gerard just needed something to insist about.

Frank, God bless him, had finished his parts first and was now face-down on the couch at the far end of the studio, apparently attempting to become part of the upholstery.

Gerard was saving his voice. Or at least that was what he’d told himself. He hadn’t said a word since he’d finished his background vocals, which meant that for the last forty minutes he’d been communicating entirely through hand gestures and increasingly pointed eyebrow movements. Basically a mime with access to a mixing console.

He slouched over the soundboard, nudging faders up and down while Mikey wrestled with the phone on speaker and tried to order dinner with all the grace of a baby deer learning that its legs were, in fact, optional.

"Gino’s is not doing delivery," Mikey sighed, snapping the flip phone shut with a clack loud enough to make Frank lift his head an inch off the couch before dropping back down. "Some idiot robbed the delivery guy a week ago, so–"

Ray looked personally betrayed. "Seriously?! God. I hate this city."

"We could order from that bistro, maybe?" Gerard offered.

Which rather defeated the whole point of saving his voice, but his stomach had started doing that unpleasant hollow flip, which meant that hunger had officially become a problem.

"No." Ray was already getting up, scrambling for his jacket. "That place tastes like cardboard. We’re going to pick up."

Mikey looked up at him, confused. "We!?"

"You’re the one with the car. Move it!"

Ray was at the door before he’d even finished talking. He tossed Mikey his keys without looking, then pointed at Gerard. "Don't mess with my takes until we get back!" The door swung shut behind him.

Mikey hurried after him, while Frank muttered something about breadsticks into the couch cushion. Gerard watched the two of them disappear through the glass, then turned back to the board.

He was basically just brooding now, nudging one of the faders down and listening to… nothing. He put it back up. Nothing.

Down again.

Up.

Down.

Up.

He did it three more times because apparently the slider had personally offended him and, at this point, it deserved to suffer.

"Finally," Frank said from somewhere behind him.

Gerard glanced over. "What?"

"Food."

"Yeah. Pizza for the third night in a row." Gerard snorted. "Fucking yay." He drew the last word out into a flat little noise.

A moment later, Gerard heard the couch creak, and then Frank was crossing the room with that unhurried way he moved when he had nowhere in particular to be, hands shoved into his hoodie pocket. He stopped beside the soundboard and pulled one of the rolling chairs over, leaning his whole torso against the board like he owned the fucking thing.

He was close enough that Gerard could smell the cigarette smoke still caught in his hair. Close enough that Gerard could've counted his eyelashes if he'd wanted to be weird about it. Which he didn't, definitely.

Neither of them said anything else for a little while.

Gerard nudged a fader again, like that might somehow fix the silence. Then another one. Then he turned a knob that did absolutely nothing because it wasn't even patched into anything.

In his peripheral vision, Frank's hand came up.

Two fingers pressed against his lower lip, fidgeting absent-mindedly with the jewelry of his lip ring. Out of the corner of his eye, Gerard caught the movement.

He was not watching Frank.

He was watching the board, the needle was still jumping on the high end, he could tell you that much.

Gerard pretended not to notice when Frank dug around under the board and came up with a crumpled packet of baby wipes. He tore the corner open with his teeth, spit out the little piece of plastic onto the smelly carpet, and pulled out a wipe.

Then he started cleaning his lip ring in slow, deliberate little circles. Metal first, then the skin around it, which looked pink and tender and briefly disgusting. Gerard watched anyway.

Then Frank pinched the damn thing between his thumb and forefinger and just fucking yanked it out.

The hole it left behind was very, very tiny but it was still a fucking hole.

A cold little shiver ran up Gerard's arms and settled somewhere between his shoulder blades.

"Gross," he muttered. Trying and failing to sound detached, there was no way to hide the horrified little tone he made.

Frank's lips twitched. Not quite a smirk. "What?"

Gerard shrugged and turned back toward the board like it contained the secrets of the universe, while keeping one eye firmly on Frank's hands. "Nothing."

"Sure." Frank went back to putting the jewelry in, already lining the ring up with the hole.

"If it freaks you out, maybe don't stare like a creep."Gerard whipped his head away so fast his neck cracked. And managed to keep it that way for almost three whole seconds.

He really couldn't help it.

There was something deeply unsettling about watching the whole thing. Fascinating, too, in the worst way possible. Frank handled the piercing like it was nothing, like he'd dropped a screw on the floor and just needed to put it back where it belonged. His fingers were steady, eyes half-lidded, and his face was doing absolutely nothing, which was frankly criminal given that Gerard's own lip had gone tight just watching him, some phantom sympathy pulling at the skin.

He kept waiting for Frank to react.

A flinch, a hiss, maybe a little wince. Hell, even one little bead of sweat on his forehead would've done the trick. Something.

He'd been around people with piercings his whole adult life. This wasn't exactly groundbreaking information, but knowing that people could put metal through their faces and actually watching someone do it were two very different things. It was the difference between reading about bears and having one stand in your kitchen trying to get into your cornflakes.

Frank tilted the ring, found the angle, and pushed it right back in.

Fuck that.

Gerard made a noise without meaning to, it was a small, strangled little thing that escaped before he could stop it, and his whole face scrunched sideways like he'd just bitten into a lemon, rind included. "Jesus Christ!"

Frank glanced at him, starting to look a little bothered. "What?!"

"You just–" Gerard stopped, his knuckles almost white against the reverb slider.

There were no good words for what he'd just fucking witnessed but at least his brain ran through the options. Gashed. Punched. Gouged. God forbid, penetrated.

Nope. Not going there.

He landed on the least offensive one. "You just fucking stabbed it back in there."

"Mmm-hmm. That’s what you do." Frank shrugged, then leaned over again and checked his reflection in the sound booth plexiglass, tilting his head side to side like he was admiring a haircut. He hummed something that sounded suspiciously like a commercial jingle. "You gotta keep it open"

"That doesn’t make it less disgusting."

Gerard tried to look at the board, the wall, the cobweb in the corner of the room, literally anything else. Yet, every time he turned his head, his eyes snagged on Frank anyway.

The entire left side of his face felt like it was throbbing with some weird phantom pain in time with the music still faintly leaking from the monitors, which was insane, because nothing had actually happened to him.

"You don’t feel that?"

For once, Frank actually met his gaze and held it. "Feel what?"

Gerard made a vague gesture toward his own mouth. "It. The metal. The–"

He shuddered again when his brain decided to give him the replay of something that looked very much like a needle stabbing through skin, clean and deliberate. He felt dizzy. "Whatever."

"Not really. Maybe a little sometimes, if it gets caught. But mostly you forget about it."

Gerard doubted that so much his jaw actually twitched. He almost called bullshit, but instead he spun his chair back toward the board. There was nothing that needed doing right now, but he jiggled the high EQ for the vocals anyway just to have something else to watch.

"So you can just… yank it out? Anytime? Like a loose tooth?"

"Yeah."

Frank picked at a stray bit of lint on his sleeve, the ring back in place and apparently comfortable and cozy, like a tiny metal tick that had found its perfect little home. "Once it heals you’re pretty much done. It’s your face-hole. Do what you want."

"How long does that take?" Gerard asked, trying to sound like he was asking about the weather and not a self-inflicted facial wound.

"Depends on how your body accepts it, and how well you take care of it. Hours, days, sometimes never." Frank made a face. "I’ve had this one for a couple of years."

Gerard gave a stiff nod, then immediately hated himself for it. He looked like he was considering getting one himself now, which was fucking ridiculous considering even the thought of getting his yearly flu shot made him want to vomit.

"So what happens if it does close up?"

Frank tipped his head so far to the side he was practically looking at Gerard upside down, thinking. "Guess it just heals, like any other wound. Scar tissue sometimes. Sometimes you gotta just…"

He mimed a stabbing motion toward his own face with an imaginary pin. "Poke it again."

Gerard stared at him, horrified.

"I did that once in a Buc-ee’s bathroom with one of those free sewing kit pins." Frank said with some deranged pride about the whole scenario. "Wasn’t even that bad."

A full-body shudder seized Gerard so hard his knee slammed into the underside of the board.

"Fuck off!!" he yelped, his mind already serving him a full-color, IMAX-quality documentary of the event.

"You’re such a fucking baby!" Frank cackled. "I get it, you fucking hate needles, but you asked!"

Gerard made a grand production of rolling his eyes so far back he could probably see his own brain, then folded his arms tightly across his chest, trying to regain some control of the situation. "What’s the point, anyway? Why get your face pierced in the first place?"

"I dunno. I just thought it looked cool." Frank only grinned, shrugging from where he’d perched on the other rolling chair.

"Yeah, but you put a–" He trailed off, his nerves rising again just at the memory of watching the little silver ring get shoved through Frank’s skin. "You punched a fucking needle at your lips, on purpose."

"The hole is there, doesn't hurt anymore," Frank said, as if explaining that the sky is blue.

Gerard squinted at him like he didn't believe a word of it, but given the way Frank said it, he probably meant it. "It really just stops hurting?" He almost didn't want to ask, it felt like a trap, somehow.

Frank had that glint in his eye. The same one he got right before doing something that got them both written up.

"You wanna see?" Frank offered it the same way you’d offer someone the last chip.

He rolled his chair over until their knees bumped, hooked a finger through the fresh ring, and tugged the flesh down.

Yup. There it was.

A perfect little snug hole on his lower lip, and it was wet. Okay, hold on. Did Frank lick his lips first? When did that happen? Gerard filed that away with all the other Frank trivia he'd collected against his will over the past few months.

Fine, it wasn't that gross. It was kind of…

Nope.

Gerard watched as Frank stretched the skin around it, showing off, giving him the full tour. The ring caught the light when Frank moved, making the skin around it glisten a little under the shitty studio lights, still a little pink, huh. That was weirdly interesting. And Frank had a really nice lower lip, which Gerard absolutely did not need to know.

He was investigating the piercing. The piercing just happened to be sitting there in the middle of Frank's mouth being extremely difficult to ignore.

"It’s really in there."

Frank laughed, settling back on his chair as Gerard's eyes stayed on his mouth for half a second too long. "Fakes are for pussies."

Gerard made a face but didn't argue back at all, still thinking about what he just saw and the way the skin on Frank's lower lip had a perfect little home for it. He tried to ignore Frank as he leaned back and stretched his arms over his head, his hoodie jumping a couple of inches off his waist.

"Does it, like, get in the way? Or caught on stuff?" He was staring again, it was like he wanted to see it do a trick now. A little party favor from Frank's face. Purely scientific interest.

"Yeah, sometimes." Frank flicked the ring with his tongue, then grinned wider. "Used to be worse when I first got it, but now I don’t even notice until it gets yanked or something."

"That must be annoying as fuck."

"Meh."

"What about–" The words got stuck, a car trying to start on a dead battery. He spun his chair violently back toward the safety of the board, slamming his palms down on his own thighs like he was trying to CPR them back to life. "Forget it. It’s stupid."

"No, what? Spit it out." Frank swiveled his chair fast as hell to face him full-on, smiling and letting his face do that stupid manic thing that made Gerard's fingers itch for a blunt object to bonk him unconscious.

He shook his head, mumbling, "Nothing, just–"

But Frank was already in motion, rolling his chair forward like a shark closing in. The wheels didn't squeak, they fucking purred. He stopped an inch from Gerard's knees and just waited, Frank was being a little shit, and he knew it, which made it all the more enjoyable.

Gerard exhaled. "I just wondered if it makes, like… mouth-stuff weirder." He immediately regretted every decision that had led him here, to this very specific point in the night. "Does it feel weird when you’re… doing mouth things?"

He absolutely meant eating a sandwich. Chewing. Normal mouth activities. But the way Frank's eyebrows did a little salsa dance said he'd taken the scenic route to a completely different conclusion. Gerard wanted to die in a hole.

"I guess? Sometimes it’s weird if I’m drinking and I forget, or if I have to play right after eating. You get food caught in it, that part sucks." Frank said as he tilted his chair back until it balanced on two legs, a human seesaw of poor decisions. "One time I drank soup that was too hot, and the metal conducted all the heat and I basically deep-fried my own lip from the inside out." He grinned. "It was awesome."

For a full minute, the only sound was the same four bars of guitar looping like a demonic nursery rhyme and the frantic click-clack of Gerard twisting the low-cut knob as if he could somehow filter out his own humiliation.

The real question was a physical thing in his throat now. Stubborn, buzzing, very, very stupid. He stared down at the tragic state of his Vans, the sole peeling away like a sad banana, and forced the words out into the world.

"What about kissing?"

Frank’s eyes instantly snapped up from where he’d been picking at a loose thread on his hoodie, making Gerard quickly launch into damage control, gesturing at Frank’s mouth with one hand, way too fast, like he was swatting at a fly that didn't exist.

"Like, does it–" The words came out backwards, tripping over each other and falling down a ladder with no one at the bottom to catch them. "Get in the way when you’re kissing someone?"

Frank’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. A slow, knowing smirk started at the corner of his mouth and colonized upwards like it had an agenda. "Someone?"

"…A person."

"I would hope so."

"You know what I mean," Gerard muttered, dropping his eyes to the blinking lights of the board like they might save him.

Frank’s grin had gone completely off the fucking rails, apparently designed to obliterate whatever Gerard had left of his composure. "Not a lot, but it does."

"So you do feel it?" Gerard aimed for bored and failed. He let the chair rotate half a turn, trying to regain control of the room by refusing to look directly at Frank. The chair squeaked and it almost sounded like it was laughing at him.

"Depends," Frank replied, somehow making a single syllable sound like a punchline.

Gerard rolled his eyes yet again. "On what?"

"How you kiss."

It should’ve ended there. That would've been the merciful, adult thing to do.

But they were themselves: Big Stupid #1 and #2, respectively. Two guys who could turn a simple question into a hostage situation, the architects of their own doom. So, naturally, the universe demanded escalation.

"There’s no way in hell anyone you’ve ever kissed actually enjoyed that," Gerard fired back, refusing to surrender even a microscopic bit of ground.

Frank snorted so hard he choked on his own spit. "That’s what you think! They usually don’t mind."

"They just didn’t want to crush your ego!"

Frank barked out a laugh so sharp it looked like it hurt, doubling over until his forehead nearly touched his knees.

"I’m a fantastic kisser, Way," he insisted, snatching a pencil off the desk and launching it like a javelin at Gerard. "Some of ’em even get, like, weirdly into it."

Gerard gave him the full-body squint usually reserved for expired milk and major life regrets. "You are so full of shit I can smell it from here."

Frank launched himself forward, elbows on his knees, confidence pouring off him like cheap cologne. He'd clearly been waiting for this moment and now he was going in for the kill. "I have no reason to lie about that."

"Bull-fucking-shit." Gerard furrowed his eyebrows, but the furious blush creeping up his neck was a dead giveaway.

"I’m just saying, it’s got to feel like…" He waved a hand vaguely at Frank's face. "Cold. Weird. Industrial."

Frank flicked the ring with his tongue in an infuriating little demonstration. "Unless I just took it out of the freezer, dumbass. It’s body temperature. It’s attached to me."

Gerard opened his mouth to reply, then closed it.

Because he had no comeback.

He just stared, and Frank stared back. The air between them crackled with the intensity of two idiots playing championship-level chicken in a recording studio.

"Okay, fine, it’s not cold. I’ll take your word for it" Gerard conceded, already regretting every life choice that led to this moment.

"I’m just saying, if you’re so sure it’s gross, you should test it out. For science. Think of it as… field research. Into the great unknown of my face."

"You’re fucking with me."

Frank shrugged, the picture of innocence if innocence wore ripped jeans and knew seven ways to hotwire a car. "You want answers, right? Can’t just go off hypotheticals.I mean, you want answers, right?"

The stupidity of the conversation was meteoric, but it had become a matter of pride now. Gerard’s pride, specifically, which was second only to his anxiety about everything Frank was doing. "I don’t need to test anything. I know what I’m talking about."

Frank’s smile was slow, evil, and slightly unhinged. "You suuuure?" he drawled, stretching the word until it snapped.

"I’m not kissing you, dickhead," Gerard said, but the conviction in his voice was already losing altitude.

Frank just grinned and inched his own chair closer, bracing his elbows on his knees and looking ready to wait out the next millennium if that’s what it took. The guy had the patience of a fucking vulture. "Do you have anything better to do? A hot date with your reverb settings? Maybe?"

"I’m mixing Ray’s stuff" Gerard grumbled, gesturing at the maze of dials and sliders in front of him. His hand was shaking just faintly, and he hated that Frank could probably see it.

"And that won’t get you an answer," Frank singsonged back, far too pleased. "Unless the board is sentient." He tilted his head. "Is it sentient? Is your precious board going to kiss you back? Does it have a little mouth I haven’t seen?"

"Jesus Christ!" Gerard muttered. Then, with a violence he usually reserved for the stage, launched his own chair forward until their knees collided.. "Just–don’t be a fucking weirdo about it, okay?"

Gerard steeled himself and cracked his neck loud enough that Frank winced. He almost apologized, but that felt like defeat. He leaned forward, slow as molasses, not trusting Frank to keep still, and not trusting himself to survive if Frank didn’t. Their knees collided again, a soft, apologetic thud that grounded the whole moment in their shared and deeply fucking stupid reality.

Gerard made his move.

If you could even call it a move, it was more like shutting his eyes and walking off a roof. He aimed for the center of Frank’s mouth, but they weren’t quite lined up, instead, their noses crashed together first. Hard. Hard enough for Gerard to see a brief flash behind his eyelids, probably stars or the ghost of his own dignity leaving his body.

And then his mouth found Frank’s.

He made the very conscious decision not to back out, which was a mistake he’d been making since the start of the millennium. He gave him a single, swift peck, lips pressed together tight like a hermetically sealed ham. It was a perfect, totally scientific hit-and-run, the second he touched Frank’s mouth he felt the cold-warm spike of the metal and jerked back so fast he actually scraped his teeth against it.

It lasted maybe half a second, which was an insult to the entire concept of kissing. Frank didn’t even have time to react before Gerard leaned back, rubbing his nose and making a face like he’d just bitten into aluminum foil.

"There!" Gerard said, triumphantly hollow. "Tastes like a fucking nickel."

Frank stared at him, incredulous. "Are you kidding me? That wasn’t even a real kiss!"

"It’s weird and warm and also metallic, so I win" Gerard said. He gripped the edge of the console, knuckles bone white. "You said I had to try it. I tried it. Fuck you."

Frank let out a disgusted sigh. "You barely even touched it! I don’t want you going around, telling people I have a nickel mouth. That’s slander!"

Gerard stared at him, incredulous. "Is this still about science?"

"It’s about not half-assing things! If you’re gonna do something, do it right." Frank was sitting there with his arms folded, waiting like he was about to win a bet. Gerard felt every muscle in his back go rigid as he steeled himself for round two, the skin along his spine prickling with a cocktail of embarrassment and weird anxiety.

"Fine, again. Don’t you fucking dare move the ring around." He warned, voice thin and dry, but Frank just grinned at him with the confidence of a guy who has never once cared about losing face.

Gerard took a breath, or what counted as one, and leaned back in, properly this time, hands still glued to his sides because apparently someone might chop them off at any second. Eyes shut. Jaw set. He looked like a robot someone had taught to kiss by reading it a manual out loud.

His chin bumped Frank’s, which was humiliating. Then their mouths met and every rehearsal he’d ever done for impressing people packed its bags and left.

It wasn’t horrible. The metal only got in the way if you went at it like a dog drinking from a hose, and right now it was just an extra piece wandering between their lips while they moved slowly. God, this was taking him back to his first kiss, this was stupid. This was so stupid he could cry.

He let the kiss drag, pulled back, and immediately swiped his tongue over his bottom lip on pure instinct, tasting Frank’s chapstick, chemicals, and a faint tinny aftertaste, like licking a penny that had opinions.

"... Fuck off" He was still a little stunned, because part of him was still standing in the corner of the room watching this disaster happen.

"See? You just gotta go with it!" Frank was annoyingly delighted, chuckling like only him knew the punchline to the joke.

"I can still taste it, you’re still losing," Gerard tried to retort, but even as he said it, he became hyper-aware of how close they still were. The warmth of Frank’s breath was hitting his cheeks, it smelled like the awful Folgers coffee the studio provided their broke artists. It was warm, and Gerard’s brain did the blue screen thing.

Loading. Loading. Nothing.

Frank tilted his head, slightly, just looking at him as he thought of a better way to explain it. "It’s like kissing someone with braces," He said, matter-of-factly. "You just get used to the taste, I suppose."

"It kinda tastes like blood" Gerard muttered, looking at the floor, then back at Frank's lips, then back down at the floor because apparently his ocular nerves had taken permanent leave too. Shit.

"Is that bad?"

"Not really, I kinda like blood? tastes funny." Gerard answered, and instantly regretted giving away that much information.

"You're a fucking weirdo" Frank laughed, already leaning back in.

Might as fucking well, shouldn't he? In for a penny, in for a pound, or in for a piece of stainless steel shoved through a dude’s lip, which honestly sounded like the name of a song they’d write and then scrap.

Frank’s mouth landed on him and his brain promptly did the thing where it checks every single thing in the room at once: the chair wheels, the coffee machine gurgling down the hall, the fact that his left sock was bunched up before giving up and shutting off entirely. Frank tasted like those awful menthol Camels cigs, like the little candies the studio receptionist kept in a bowl, and like a cup of coffee that had been sitting abandoned since noon.

His lips just went with it, going slack for a second like they’d been bribed, then picking the rhythm back up because clearly someone had to.

Open, close… Was that his fucking tongue? Fine. Nevermind. Too late to think about it, file it under problems for future Gerard.

It wasn’t that different from a normal kiss. Okay, the little metal piece kept showing up uninvited, but it was fun if you didn’t think about it. But if you did–

His tongue poked out, just for a second. He tilted a bit more to the right, geometry, he was doing geometry now, goddamn, to catch the ring and let his tongue touch it. Frank was right, it was warm by now, which should have been weird and wasn’t. There was a little wet sound as he explored, and he was being so careful with it, like defusing a bomb, because what if it actually did hurt and Frank had just been doing his little shit routine about that the whole time? Which was very on brand, he couldn’t just eyeball that shit.

It tasted… musky? Was that even the right word? It tasted slightly iron-y, like blood, honestly, which somehow was nice. He let his tongue do another lap around it just to verify, like he was checking an answer on a test he hadn’t studied for.

God. He really was a fucking weirdo.

Not that it was news to him, honestly, the list of his crimes was long and evergrowing, but this? This was a new category. They parted with a little giggle at the whole absurdity of it, his lips feeling slightly swollen already.

"What?" Frank asked, laughing too. "Is it that bad?"

Gerard tipped himself back into the chair, freeing his arms from the strict prison he’d kept them in and letting one of them run through his hair. "I mean. No, just–" He snorted, which turned into a chuckle, which turned into him covering his face with both hands. "What the fuck are we doing?"

Frank shrugged, shoulders dropping the same way Gerard’s had. "I dunno, man"

They stayed in silence for a moment. The coffee machine down the hall gurgled. Someone’s phone vibrated against a table with a text notification and nobody answered it.

"So"

"So what?"

"Was it really that awful?" Frank said, looking at him like he was waiting for his brain to log back in and give an answer, his pride depended on that, actually. "Because honestly I'm three seconds away from just taking it off and letting it heal"

"I didn't puke or anything, so..."

Frank snorted. "You can just say it was fine"

Gerard leaned back an inch. Two inches. Exactly far enough that he could claim he was just going back to the abandoned sound board if anyone asked, which nobody would, because nobody was watching. "I liked it"

"Really?" Frank cocked his head to the side, catching Gerard’s lips doing something complicated, twitching, like they couldn’t decide what shape to be. Frank let out a ridiculous breath and, because he had never learned how to properly address feelings, he said "I don’t taste like a nickel?"

Gerard laughed so hard his head dropped. Frank had planted his elbows on his knees and was swinging back and forth in his chair like a nine-year-old in line at the DMV.

"A little" he admitted, way too quietly, his fingers finding a useless button on the board and pressing it three times. It did nothing. He pressed it again anyway.

"You mostly taste like regret," he said at last, and even he could hear the way it sounded too much like a lyric from a song he wrote when he was overcaffeinated. He braced himself for Frank’s retaliation, and he didn’t have to wait long.

"You just said you liked it!" Frank barked, triumphant, sitting up and pointing at him with both hands like he was calling a foul to the referee, but the smile on his face took all the bite away from the words.

"Yeah, but–" and the ‘but’ hung there, quivering in the fluorescent light, a terrified slug pleading for mercy.

Frank’s face did a weird thing, impossibly fluid, his lips settling into a straight line and letting his head fall to the side, farther and farther until at last he looked like a Victorian child being forced to choke down porridge. "Wasn’t that the whole point?"

Gerard stared at the scuffed floor tiles, paralyzed by uncertainty. Apologize? Double down? Launch into interpretive dance? He had no fucking clue.

Frank leaned forward and smacked Gerard’s thigh with an open palm, snappy, not cruel, it was the same kind of motion you did when the TV was acting up and a good smack to the side did the trick, aligning the picture back up. "For fuck’s sake, dude." Frank sighed. "If I’m the guinea pig, buy me dinner first. Or a soda. A soda would work."

"I'm not using you as a lab rat!" Gerard tried to turn away, but the board’s design meant he was effectively cornered by the armrest and the curve of the desk.

"Sure you aren’t" Frank said, arching an eyebrow so high it nearly disappeared under his disaster of a fringe. He leaned in, Gerard could see the ancient, healed-over scrapes on the bridge of his nose. "Come on. Spill me a crumb, what did you have for lunch today? Coke? Cigarettes? You taste like our shitty van smells."

"Recording does that to you," Gerard muttered. The chair groaned as one wheel wiggled anxiously, like it, too, was bracing for impact.

Frank’s eyes darted sideways, locking on the wall behind Gerard. "...I never said I didn’t like it."

Oh, okay. Every muscle in Gerard’s back snapped tight. Was the first round of humiliation just a warm-up? Holy shit. This definitely wasn’t part of whatever the fuck they had been doing for the past hour, this was not part of the plan, if there ever even was one.

"Then what are you saying?" he asked, and only realized how desperate it sounded after it left his mouth.

Frank shrugged, and this time it was so half-hearted it almost didn’t register as a movement. "I dunno."

Frank sighed again and gave Gerard the universal look of ‘don’t make me finish this thought, because I’ll do it and we’ll both hate it.’

"Extremely fucking helpful," Gerard said, but it sounded like he was reading off a sympathy card.

"You’re such an asshole." Frank’s insult landed somewhere between an insult and a marriage proposal. He swiveled toward the desk like a miswired robot and began untangling cables that didn’t need untangling.

"You’re the one who voluntarily stapled your face," Gerard shot back, but his heart wasn’t in it. His heart was currently attempting breakdance moves behind his ribs.

They sat there, wordless, for the better part of a minute. Gerard’s hands hovered uselessly above the mixing board as if waiting for permission to touch anything ever again. He could feel the ghost of Frank’s lips on his own, which was mortifying because he was pretty sure there was nothing more embarrassing than being haunted by a kiss, except maybe being haunted by the second one.

"Yeah. Thought so." Frank leaned in just a fraction closer, the warmth of his breath brushing against Gerard’s cheek.

"Shut up" Gerard shot back, trying to maintain his composure, but the playful challenge in Frank’s gaze sent a thrill racing through him.

Fuck it.

Frank’s smirk was infectious, pulling at Gerard’s lips despite himself. "Make me"

And now it is almost ten pm. And Gerard is willingly leaning in to kiss Frank again. Fuck the entire concept of shame, actually, this had nothing to do with the damn piercing anymore. God was probably watching and taking notes and Gerard did not care even a little.

This one was different, if only by the fact that they were actively making out now, and he wasn’t really sure what the purpose of this one was. Actually, he realized there was no purpose. They were two grown men kissing in a studio at night like teenagers who found an unlocked room. But it was nice, Frank’s hand came up in a hurry to his bicep, using his whole body as an anchor to make the tiny wheels of his chair go towards him, not too much, just enough so their necks wouldn’t have to be strained for however long this was going to take.

He tilted his head slightly more than necessary, which honestly, what even was necessary at this point? He kept feeling Frank’s legs fit perfectly in between his. Gerard went for the whole tongue thing again, since apparently that was allowed. Everything was allowed now.

His hands found Frank’s thigh and held one for dear life as he felt his lips just go for it, which wasn’t awful, at all. Just surprising. It was like any kiss at this intensity would be if both people had decided sanity was for cowards, Frank lost the rhythm for a second, letting a small drop of spit spill out from in between them.

For fuck’s sake.

The little spill didn’t seem to matter, at all, it just kept getting mashed between their chins like a weird, shared secret as they found a rhythm that was mostly just frantic, messy, uncoordinated and almost rushed enthusiasm. This was a chaotic democracy of tongues where no one knew who was supposed to lead, so they just sort of mushed and groped until someone accidentally did something brilliant. Like tracing the entire circumference of the other’s mouth with a suddenly bold tongue before collapsing back into pathetic and panting confusion.

Frank finally broke away to gulp air, his lips pink and weirdly fluffy-looking, shining obscenely under the studio’s shitty fluorescents. Gerard watched as Frank dragged the back of his hand across his chin like he was wiping away evidence of a misdemeanor.

For one heart-sinking second Gerard watched Frank evaluate the stubborn sheen of saliva on his chin, on his hand, on Gerard's face again. All with a small furrow to his brow.

It’s over.

Surely, this is getting more complex than anticipated. The little derailment from the experiment was over.

Nope.

Frank grinned like he’d just discovered fire, adjusted his legs with the precision of a bomb disposal expert, and leaned in again. God help them both.

"Again?" Gerard asked in a voice that had absolutely no business sounding like he had just run a marathon with a particularly steep track.

Frank’s eyes did this rapid-fire thing: lips, eyes, lips again, like he was trying to solve a math problem written on Gerard’s face. "Wanna stop?"

Gerard took inventory. Frank’s mouth was still wet. His eyes were at half-mast. A flush was creeping up his ears like rising floodwater. "Not really."

This time there was no coordinated lean, no polite tilt of the chin. They just crashed into each other somewhere in the middle, noses bumping, teeth grazing, absolutely everything a kiss shouldn’t be, and it was somehow working.

And maybe he hadn’t been giving Frank enough credit, because, yeah, the fucking pandora’s box of a piercing was nothing more than a minor obstacle, the metallic taste was gone completely by now, replaced by some unholy cocktail of bad coffee and something so stupidly animal it made him dizzy.

He could feel the heat spreading to his cheeks as Frank started that stupidly good thing he did with his tongue, little exploratory circles, then a flat push and retreating like he’d changed his mind. Sure, whatever, Frank was an absolute weirdo too.

This felt nice. Strange. But nice. Like eating cereal with a fork.

Frank pulled back for a second, making a small sound between them as he caught his breath, one second, then two, then diving back in with absolutely no regard for whether Gerard’s chair was built to survive this as he somehow managed to lean his whole weight into it. Maybe Gerard wanted to compensate, to make up for the way this was making him feel like his own knees might surrender without notice, so he pushed back a little while his arms did a mad scramble for the back of Frank’s shirt. The flimsy rolling chair beneath him squealed like a dying mouse.

His hands landed on Frank’s shoulder blades and gripped for dear life as he tried to get his tongue under Frank’s with a weird desperation, like he was chasing the last chip in the bag. Air had become a secondary concern by now, only resurfacing every now and then when absolutely necessary, sucking in a breath hard enough to breathe in the scent of Frank’s skin.

Frank, for his part, steadied himself against the armrest of his chair, trying to keep it from rolling away, especially right now. He managed to part for a second to let a small laugh through, his cheeks were turning a violently honest shade of pink.

"Fuck," Frank muttered, abandoning the entire armchair operation to feel around for Gerard’s cheek with his hand.

Gerard’s brain was still conducting a frantic risk assessment of the chair’s architecture versus the gravitational pull of horny chaos. Every squeak was a tiny scream for mercy, a promise that they were only seconds away from becoming a tangle of limbs and cheap office furniture on the dirty carpet.

He was half-listening for the telltale snap of cheap plastic when Frank, the absolute fucking hazard that he was, just let a warm, deliberate glob of spit fall from his lips right into Gerard’s open mouth.

Fuck the chair situation, actually.

Caution evaporated like vodka at a college party. Frank wasn’t kidding about people getting weirdly into it, Gerard was now single-mindedly dedicated to hunting down that damn lip ring with his teeth, a feral little quest for payback that involved latching onto the metal hoop like it had personally offended his entire bloodline.

They broke apart, breathing hard, faces red, connected by a single shimmering string of spit that stretched and held like some unhinged puppet string that defied gravity and all basic human dignity. And then they were both just… laughing. A wet, breathless, unhinged cackle at the state of them: two idiots covered in a shared sheen of saliva, they looked like toddlers who had gone ten rounds with ice cream cones and lost, somehow sticky in places that shouldn’t even be possible.

And like all beautiful, deranged things, it ended. As exhausted musicians’ beautiful deranged things specifically do. Because before either could form a coherent sentence, or even wipe their chins, really, Mikey’s voice boomed from the hallway, screeching at a frequency Gerard didn’t think human vocal cords could produce without shattering glass.

"I fucking told you they got robbed last week, dude!" Mikey’s voice hits the studio door like a brick through a window.

Gerard froze mid-swallow, his throat seizing up like a rusty engine while Frank is doing something similar atop him, mid-drool-drip, his brain bluescreening so hard you can almost hear the dial-up tone. There is a tiny, horrible moment of shared psychic horror where both of them think in perfect unison:

Holy fuck, he’s gonna see the drool.

Because Mikey notices everything, and Frank currently looks like he just French-kissed a waterfall.

Gerard’s lizard brain finally boots up. "Shit."

"Wha–" is all Frank manages before Gerard seizes the armrests of his sad little office chair that is evolving into a death-trap by the millisecond.

Gerard doesn't even look apologetic as he makes eye contact with Frank one last time, steeling his foot on the wheels, ensuring maximum yeeting power. "Move."

"Gera–"

Nyooom.

The chair emits a sound like a stepped-on guinea pig as Frank goes flying backward toward the couch at rib-cracking speeds. His limbs flailing around in the air like an upturned beetle before he collides with a solid thump sound against the cushions.

"Motherfucker!" Frank vanishes into the sofa like a very pissed-off, slightly damp magician.

Gerard immediately starts wiping his face with his sleeve like he’s erasing a crime scene, which, to be fair, he is.

And then Ray enters with no pause, no knock, no reading of the room, because he is above that, at least for tonight. Just Ray, carrying pizza, looking like a man who has recently witnessed a felony and made peace with it.

"Okay but they robbed the delivery guy! I didn't think they’d rob the actual place, Mikey. I already said I'm sorry." Ray argues back as he sets the pizza down on the table with exhaustion practically dripping off his fingers.

Mikey follows behind him, wearing the face of someone who has aged a full decade in forty-five minutes. "You can’t just say you’re sorry, Ray. We gave witness reports."

"I know." The breadsticks are already open. Ray is already eating a breadstick. The breadstick situation is being handled.

"Ray."

"I said I know." Ray says mid-chew, not looking up, as if this is a perfectly normal item on a perfectly normal agenda. "Also why is Frank on the floor?"

The studio falls into absolute silence. The kind that has a pulse.

Gerard was still rubbing his face with his sleeve like he was trying to sandblast his own existence away along with his cheekbones if that’s what it took.

"... He fell off the couch." Gerard says, as casually as he can and lets a pause go by that lasts approximately one geological era. "What took you so long?"

Frank, from the floor, is having a full out-of-body experience. He can see himself from above. He is watching all of this unfold with the quiet devastation of a man attending his own open-casket funeral. His brain is running a very interesting internal monologue as he tries to claw his way out of the wreckage of cushions and chairs and general studio grime.

Betrayed by my own boyfriend? (not boyfriend?) (still unclear) (genuinely cannot feel my left elbow) (the chair is still warm and i think it hates me) (is that ranch on my sock?)

And Ray, bless his entire soul and all souls within a five-mile radius, does not look up. Because there are breadsticks, and he is currently packing the space where trauma should go into with them as fast as humanly possible. "Some fucker tried to run after robbing Gino’s." Ray explained, still chewing like this was just regular small talk. "The dude ate shit on the curb. The police came." Bite. "We gave witness statements." Another bite. "Gino gave us extra pizza and dips."

"The guy had a gun, Ray." Mikey says with the tone of a scolding father as he opens up the pizza, fucking finally.

"Yeah, i saw"

"We could’ve died."

"Yeah. But we didn’t."

Mikey looks like he is on his last remaining thread of sanity and someone has started running around the room with scissors. "Ray."

"What? Free pizza. Free ranch. I’m not going to stand here and be ungrateful."

Then Mikey sees Frank. Frank, who has been horizontal this entire time like a decorative and slightly moist accent rug, unable to wipe his own chin because his own bandmate launched him into upholstery at a velocity that should require paperwork. "You absolute son of a bitch!"

Frank raises one finger. The finger is doing its best. "I–"

"Fourteen texts, Frank! Fourteen!"

"I was… asleep?"

"Uh-huh."

 "I was on the couch."

"You’re always on the couch! Stop sleeping on the couch, you drool on everything! It’s disgusting, it’s like sharing a studio with a Saint Bernard! ...that is–" Mikey abandons the sentence like a sinking ship, pivoting to Gerard with the rage of a man who has filed a witness report tonight and has not yet exhausted his civic energy. "I got pictures of the actual gun, Gerard."

Mikey opens his flip phone and shoves it in Gerard’s face with the energy of a man presenting evidence. Gerard looks at it. Gerard is looking at somewhere between 300 and 400 pixels of pure abstract Nokia expressionism which could be a gun or a thumb or the actual face of god. And he is saying nothing.

Ray has eaten four breadsticks since this conversation started with his eyes closed. He is somewhere warm where nothing has a gun and the ranch is bottomless, somewhere beyond consequence, somewhere the breadsticks are infinite and nothing bad has ever happened to anyone.

Gerard’s eyes find Frank, who has fully reassembled himself into a standing human being with a completely normal dry chin and zero history of being launched across a room by someone he may or may not be their… something?

Frank’s eyes find Gerard back.

The glance lasts approximately half a second and contains the complete and total transmission of: we are going to be fine, nobody saw anything, and God himself apparently loves us and just handed them a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of Ray almost getting shot over garlic and onion dip packets.

Everything is fine.