Chapter Text
Gerard is sweating. Gerard is crammed in between a stack he knows needs to be onstage soon and a trailer wall he knows is too thin to get himself where he needs to be. Not before he needs to be onstage too. It’s so hot that he feels like he’s going to puke or pass out or both and he’s two fingers deep and it’s not enough.
It’s hard not to feel like the equipment around him. It’s hard not to feel like a thing: an object that exists not just to be but for a specified purpose with specified parameters. It’s as good as an outright command to spend the rest of his sorry life just fucking languishing until the next time he can make himself useful.
It’s hard to feel like liminality is a positive trait in a human being.
It’s harder to feel all that with his faculties terminally intact.
Gerard, all faculties intact, feels pathetic like a three-minute-old fawn.
Feels new and soft and delicate like a peach, feels exposed and ready to bruise on every sharp edge he can’t numb himself to anymore.
Feels dangerous like a bomb left abandoned half-defused, disaster no longer imminent but the charge still intact, feels that destructive potential sitting loaded and heavy in his gut.
Feels wet and raw and helpless in a way that has nothing to do with the fact that he’s clawing at his own prostate as if hitting it just right, just once will be his salvation.
Gerard feels everything and he feels like nothing. That’s the thought hanging thick and viscous between the front of his mind and the front of the trailer when he hears the door click open.
(He didn’t even try to find somewhere he could lock from the inside.)
It doesn’t matter that he freezes: 5’9 of something resembling a man is going to be visible above a stack. Frank locks eyes with him before the door is even shut. There’s a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
Gerard doesn’t move. Gerard doesn’t speak.
Frank stares in a way that makes him feel more naked than he’s ever felt in his life. He is mostly sure he would still feel that way if he didn’t have a hand still shoved down the back of his unbuttoned-but-still-zipped jeans.
“What’ve you got back there?”
Nothing is what Gerard thinks, in every sense of the word. I have nothing. I have nothing here or anywhere, but that’s not what Frank is asking and he knows it. Gerard is red-faced and panicked and he’s trying too hard to hide the arm behind his back in the dusty corner of the trailer and he knows exactly what it looks like.
(When Frank crosses the floor in too-few too-quick steps he almost wishes it was something. Even a bottle would feel less pathetic than this.)
“I needed—” he starts, and then he stops. Gerard doesn’t know how to begin to explain what he needs.
To be something. Not be something, but be something. Something other than too much and not enough and a nothing of a person who is everything to so many people. Something other than living, breathing deification ripe to be consumed by too many screaming, crying faces and twice as many hands reaching out towards him. As if he means anything. As if any of it means anything.
(It’s barely been two months. He’s not even sure he knows what he needs.)
“I can’t be a fuckin’ messiah, Frankie.”
Frank reaches out a slow, cautious arm, grasps his bicep and tugs. Gerard braces himself against it and squeezes his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to see the realization bloom in real-time.
It doesn’t matter. He hears it in Frank’s voice.
“You don’t—you’re not—”
Gerard shakes his head. His cheeks are hot. His ears are ringing. He feels dizzier than he ever did after too many flimsy plastic cups full of whatever was on offer.
“Do you want, um. People—other people are gonna be here soon. D’you need me to stand guard, or do you want me to—”
Help.
“Please.”
He doesn’t see Frank move, but he feels it. Hears it. The scuff of his sneaker against the wooden floorboards when he grinds out the cigarette. The fingertips digging into his bicep, less demanding and more commanding as they urge him up and away. Hot, wet breath against his ear, voice low and trembling, “undo your jeans.”
Gerard does. He doesn’t even bother wiping his hand off, he just—
Hears. Listens. Does.
Shoves the denim down to mid-thigh and spreads his legs and curls himself around the amplifier like it’s a life raft. Frank spits on his own fingers and shoves both of them right into him, hard and incautious and immediate. Gerard scrabbles blunt fingernails against the peeling black plastic coating beneath them and gasps like it’s the first breath of air he’s ever taken.
He’s barely even hard, but when Frank tells him to touch himself Gerard does. When Frank whispers you can do it, Gee he feels it in his bone marrow that he can.
Gerard cums against the back of the amplifier and pretends his face is only salty from the sweat. Frank crooks the fingers of his picking hand one last time and drags the fingers of his fretting hand too gently down Gerard’s rigid spine. He swears he can feel the calluses through his sticky shirt.
The worst part of sobriety isn’t not drinking.
(When Gerard crawls into his bunk that night everything is where he expects it to be, except there’s a tube of KY stashed under his pillow.)
The worst part of sobriety is everything else.
(The seal is still intact.)
—
This is how it goes:
Gerard Way gets up onstage and rips his chest open and lets thousands upon thousands of strangers feast like buzzards on his innards. Gerard Way lingers at barricades and fences and he signs tickets and t-shirts and occasionally tits, because he still feels bad saying no.
(He fucking hates it when they tell him his band saved their lives.)
Gerard Way says hi and nice to meet you and thanks for comin’ out and he avoids eye contact but it’s fine. That’s not what the kids want anyway. The kids want their Prometheus.
(He fucking hates himself for hating it.)
Gerard Way does what the kids want: he tears himself apart and doles out his pain and suffering like vile hors d'oeuvres for them to gobble down. He holds tight to the edges of the gaping wound in his torso and lets them vomit their own pain and suffering right back into it and he crosses his fingers and prays to a god he’s stopped believing in that he’s not going to rot away from emotional sepsis.
(He fucking hates that he did this to himself.)
Gerard Way throws himself to the feeding frenzy again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and—
Frank shoves another finger inside of him and whispers into the sweaty skin between his shoulder blades that he was made for this, and Gerard (just Gerard) pushes back against it and feels like he was.
(Sometimes it feels like the only thing he was really, truly made for.)
If he thinks about it for too long it makes him want to claw his own insides out.
So he doesn’t.