Chapter Text
Perfect Sonnet
-You are here, then you’re gone-
If you’ve ever been to an open casket funeral, there’s a chance that you’ve made the earth-shattering mistake of touching the corpse of a loved one.
Frank had done it once, with a great uncle on his father’s side. The old man had just looked so peaceful, like he was sleeping; and little Frankie, not even 10 years old, had thought that maybe if he touched him, he would wake up.
He didn’t.
His skin was cold, and it felt like wax, and Frank had leapt back from the coffin and ran from the church to hide in the attached cemetery to cry as he listened to the church bells ring out the toll of four in the afternoon.
Losing someone you love romantically is… Not like that, or not exactly like that, anyway. But it’s familiar to him in a way.
When he reached for Gerard’s hand across the table at breakfast last week, there was no warmth.
Where there used to be a heat between them, something nearly palpable, there was nothing left. Gerard’s hand felt lifeless, and foreign in Frank’s own, and it made him want to run back to his little churchyard cemetery. The one where he could listen to the bells and count the doves all perched in a line across the branch of the old oak tree that hung out to cast shade over the large angel statue who looked like she was weeping.
Frank wants to weep with her.
Death, even metaphorical, is a hard pill to swallow.
Breakups happen. That’s what he keeps trying to remind himself. Even in long-standing relationships, they happen. It’s a normal part of life. Everyone has at least one great love in their life, and at least one great tragedy.
Frank happens to be experiencing both of them at the same time.
It’s not that it’s new. It’s been coming. They’ve both known about it. They’ve both seen the shift and the gradual pull apart. They’ve known, but they were at least both on the same page. The page that said, ‘we’re not talking about it’.
Not until it was too late and Frank came home to this.
To boxes in the dining room wrapped in brown tape with familiar writing across the sides.
LIVING ROOM
KITCHEN
BATHROOM
DINING ROOM
OFFICE
CLOTHES
“Gerard?”
Frank thinks back to the commercials of his youth. Of volunteers holding little baby ducks, or penguins, or seals. They were always trying to gently suction thick, toxic oil out of their mouths and wipe it from their eyes with Dawn dish soap.
That’s what it feels like to call his boyfriend’s name again as Frank drops his bag unceremoniously to the floor. Like there is something thick and vile flooding his throat and choking his vocal chords.
“Gerard?” His voice rasps.
“I’m in the bedroom.” Gerard’s voice is broken.
His heart plummets at the same time his stomach does. Not just to the floor but through it. Down through all four stories of their apartment building and into the basement. Beneath the basement. Six feet under, to be specific.
Frank steps out of his shoes, and part of him debates if he even wants to follow through with it. With any of it. Taking off his shoes, walking into the rest of the apartment, finding out what the fuck it is that’s actually going on. If he turns around and leaves, he can just pretend-
What, exactly? Pretend that it’s not happening? No. If he doesn’t face it now, he’ll just come back home, and not only will Gerard and his things be gone, but so will the boxes. Maybe a note, if he’s lucky.
Sorry we suck together.
Gerard has his back to the door, and his movements are stiff where he’s transferring clothes from his dresser into another cardboard container.
“What are you doing…?”
Gerard looks up, and Frank wants to die.
His eyes are red from crying, and Frank can see the streaks of it on his cheeks, running through the smudged eyeliner that he put on before work this morning.
“One of us has to do it, Frankie.”
Frank forces himself to take a step into the room and presses himself against the wall to stop his body from completely toppling over.
“No we don’t-”
“We do,” Gerard interrupts, looking back down at his hands as he moves. “And we should have. A long time ago.” He speaks in pained, halted sentences, jerky like the movements of his body. “But we didn’t, and now-” He pauses, frowning at a shirt he’s holding and he takes a breath that sounds like it hurts. Almost as much as it hurts when he says:
“Is this mine or yours?”
Songs about heartbreak are always sad, and Frank is a pretty empathetic person, he feels, so he’s always resonated with most things that are sad. He’s the brooding type. Something about being a Scorpio, Gerard would say.
No amount of brooding or songs about heartbreak prepared Frank for this. Whatever this is. This feeling of weight on his chest. This feeling of literal shattering behind the cage of his ribs. This.
His voice is barely above a whisper. “That’s one of mine,” he answers. His hands are clenched into fists at his sides, so hard that his knuckles are aching. The only thing sparing his palms from being sliced open is the fact that he’d clipped his nails just a few days ago.
Gerard hesitates again before turning to set the folded up black, red, and white plaid flannel on the bed.
“I like that one on you,” he says softly.
Frank feels like he’s going to vomit.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because we’re tearing each other apart, Frank,” Gerard says, looking up at him again. He tucks cherry red strands of hair behind one ear before leaning back on his hip as he speaks, taking another shirt into his hands. Frank realizes he’s shaking, and his entire body aches with the need to hold him, but-
But Frank knows.
He knows now more than he has ever known.
Gerard, hot-blooded as he is - the sort of man who gives off heat like a furnace - will not feel warm to the touch. He’ll feel cold, and lifeless, and it will tear Frank to fucking shreds. It will eviscerate him in one fell swoop. It will rip him limb from limb until there isn’t a single piece of him left.
“I started therapy-”
“And I told you I was proud of you for that, but I haven’t. And I’ve been on and off like fifteen different meds, and things aren’t getting better, Frankie, they’re getting worse, and I’m not going to drag you down with me,” Gerard’s voice is more firm, somehow, despite the shaking. “I love you too much to do that.”
“This isn’t dragging me down?!” Frank asks, and he doesn’t mean for it to be quite as hostile as it comes out. “Gerard, you’re- There are boxes in our dining room. Your boxes, full of your things. They’re not-” his voice breaks, and he sucks in a breath, trying to pull himself together before he loses it entirely. “This is dragging me down. If there was ever a single thing in the world that would drag me down, it’s-”
Gerard clutches the shirt in his hands and Frank watches his throat bob as he swallows. He watches more tears fall down his boyfriend’s face, and he knows, he knows that if he tries to wipe them away, Gerard’s face will feel like wax beneath his fingertips.
“You’ll get over it,” Gerard says finally, and Frank feels like he’s been sucker-punched in the gut. “You’ll move on, and so will I, and we’ll get better, and we can look back on things and not be fucking miserable all the goddamn time, but I’m sick of living like this. I’m sick of both of us walking on eggshells. I’m sick of tiptoeing around your mood swings and your temper and your anxiety, and I’m sick of you fucking treating me like I’m made of glass, or like I’m going to burst into tears if you even dare to look at me wrong.”
“I don’t-”
“You do!” Gerard says in a broken cry. “You do, Frank, you always do! Like you’re afraid that one wrong move is going to break me! Like I’m- like I’m a ticking fucking bomb that you’re afraid of setting off, and I am so fucking tired of it!”
“Then I’ll stop!” Frank says breathlessly from his place against the wall before he pushes off of it.
He’ll touch him. He’ll touch Gerard and he won’t feel cold, or like wax. He’ll feel warm, and alive, and they’ll be okay. They’ll be fine. They’ll be-
They’ll be nothing, because when Frank gets close enough to touch, Gerard withdraws. His shoulders hunch in and he takes a step back, nearly trapping himself in the corner where the dresser meets the wall. He sobs and covers his mouth with the back of one hand as he shakes his head.
“Please don’t,” he whispers. “Just- just don’t. We can’t keep doing this. We’re running around in circles chasing our tails, and we have been, but neither of us is willing to say it, so I’m saying it.”
“Saying what?”
“It’s over.”
“What- What’s over?”
“Us, Frankie. We are over. This is over. Someone has to fucking call it, so I’m calling it, we’re done.”
Frank stares at him. He stares long and hard, and ignores the tear that falls down his own cheek.
“Take it back,” he whispers, not a single decibel over the sound of a breath.
“No,” Gerard says, trying to make his face stern, but the angry frown doesn’t match the way his lower lip is trembling. Frank wants nothing more than to kiss it better. “I’m ending it. We’re done.”
“I’m not,” Frank shakes his head, reaching out to take the shirt from his boyfriend’s hands. His own are shaking just as badly as Gerard’s now, and when their eyes meet, Frank realizes with bracing, devastating clarity, that he has never in his life seen this man more broken than he is right now.
“Let me fix it,” Frank whispers softly. Fix the look on Gerard’s face. Fix the way that Frank apparently looks at him like he’s breaking. Like- like he’s going to turn into this at the drop of a hat. Let him fix it. Let him fucking fix it.
Gerard shakes his head, “You can’t fix it, Frank,” he tells him in a voice just as fragmented as the look behind his eyes. “We have been trying to fix it. We cannot fix it. It’s not working. We want it to work, but it’s- it’s just not, and I know you don’t want to see it, because I don’t want to fucking see it either, but it’s there and it’s-”
Frank closes the space between them and kisses Gerard in a desperate attempt to make him stop fucking talking, because Frank can’t stand to listen to another fucking word.
But he was right. There’s nothing there. No warmth, no spark beneath the surface. Just Gerard’s face, chilled beneath the touch of Frank’s hands. His lips unmoving, his face tearstained, and his breath shaky.
Gerard is cold, and Frank’s entire world is crumbling around him.
There’s no rush or urgency in the way that Gerard places his palm against Frank’s chest and pushes him away. There’s nothing angry, or violent about the action. It’s not a shove, and there’s no enraged screaming. It is simply what it is. A push. A light pressure to Frank’s sternum that forces him to take a single step back.
“We can’t get better together.”
“It happens all the time. People get better together all the time-”
“Okay, but it’s not happening,” Gerard says, and he sounds just as miserable as Frank feels. “It’s not happening. As much as we’ve tried, and pushed, and pulled, and done everything we can think of, it’s just- It’s not working. You know that, I know you do. I’m not stupid, I can hear you crying in the shower. I know you, Frankie, I know you better than I know anyone, I know you better than I know myself-”
“Which is why you can’t just do this to me!” Frank finally breaks. More tears are falling as he shakes his head, “Gerard,” he says weakly. “Baby, please.”
“I am doing this for you!” Gerard says back just as brokenly. Frank swears he can physically see the way his boyfriend is wilting in front of his eyes. Like a flower deprived of water, and sunlight, and all of the things that it needs to keep it upright and just as vibrant as all of that red hair. “Darling, I’m doing this for you, for us, we need this! We can’t keep going like this, don’t make this-”
“I swear to god if you say ‘don’t make this harder than it already is’, I will-”
“Then don’t make me say it!” Gerard shouts the words, and he sounds very nearly like he’s begging. Frank doesn’t blame him, he wants to beg too.
But the heartbreak - that shattering, crumbling feeling - really hits when the sudden thought comes crashing down on him.
They’re both begging.
But they are begging for two very different things. For two exact opposite reasons.
It’s that realization that makes him back off. That makes him retreat further into the room and back towards the door. That makes him rush down the hall and into the bathroom to slam the door shut and throw himself against it.
He sinks to the floor like some stupid fucking scene in a movie, and holds both of his hands over his mouth to silence the sobs so that Gerard doesn’t have to hear them this time.