Fic: Chocolate Syrup
Title: Chocolate Syrup
Author: vinvy
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: eventual Frank/Gerard
Summary: He hates not being able to breathe.
Word Count: ~ 2510
Warnings: A Recovering Agoraphobe, Manipulative Siblings, Profanity, Gorgeous Men Performing
Disclaimer: Puh-lease! None of this has happened at all.
A/N: Because my dearest iron_fist123 is feeling unwell. She's already read this but it's the thought that counts, right? (And because this is so short that I need to get it out of the way.)
Part the First
Part the Second
“Oh you cannot be serious, Gee!” Mikey shouts. Before Gerard can finish picking the lock, the bathroom door is open and his brother is there glowering with one hand on his hip. He’s been looking like that a lot this last week because Gerard is going through a phase of needing to tell him absolutely everything. “What is it this time?”
Gerard stands there feeling guilty and chewing on his lip.
Mikey rolls his eyes and yanks him into the bathroom.
As soon as he’s in the confined space with a closed door Gerard can breathe a little bit easier. He can see all the corners and that means no one is there waiting to jump out at him or listen to what he might say.
“Do you mind if I get on with this while you prepare yourself to talk or emotionally purge or whatever it is that you need to do?”
Gerard shrugs. He’s kind of annoyed by Mikey’s impatience. He watches his brother read and start following the instructions on the home-bleaching kit. He’s gonna try to highlight his hair again. Gerard is worried that it won’t turn out well because they can’t afford to have a stylist do it (even though it looks really good done right). He holds his breath when Mikey starts brushing the bleach into his hair and wrapping the bleached sections in tin foil.
“So, are you just gonna sit there on the back of the toilet staring at me while this stuff does what it does or are you gonna tell me what’s bothering you?”
“You get annoyed with me when I do.”
“Yes, Gerard, I do-“ Yup. The exasperation in his voice is incredibly obvious. “- but that’s because you’re my brother and I wish I could keep things from freaking you out. Not because I’m annoyed with you needing to talk. Now tell me what’s up.”
Gerard loves his brother. He loves his brother so much it almost hurts because he forgets so often who’s the older one, like it doesn’t matter. Mikey takes such good care of him. He catches himself before he gets lost in how awesome Mikey is. “It’s Frank.”
“I kinda figured.” It’s been Frank the last eight times out of ten. Mikey is sitting on the sink and stretching his legs out towards the door.
“Yeah... He kind of invited me to go to one of his band’s shows.”
Mikey’s eyes get huge at that. “That’s great! Why are you so sad about it? Isn’t this a good thing since you’re so stuck on him?”
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey. Gerard loves him to death but he’s missing the obvious point. He shakes his head slowly.
It finally dawns on him what the problem is. “Oh.”
Gerard’s hands are shaking. “Exactly.”
“…Did you already say yes?”
“I didn’t mean to!” He’s pleading and panicked. His lungs are starting to work a little faster.
“Gerard,” Mikey hops off the sink and stands in front of him, “look, you have to go.”
He shakes his head fast. “I can’t!”
“Gee, you already said yes.”
“But-“ He doesn’t get the rest of his sentence out because he can’t talk again, he can only think about breathing and how that’s getting harder to do. His throat is really tight and he can’t get enough air into his lungs.
Mikey is trying to talk to him again but Gerard can’t really hear him.
Fuck. He hates not being able to breathe. What’s wrong with him? Then, damn it, he knows and he’d rather not know at all.
This is a panic attack. He doesn’t want to have a panic attack. He wants to be calm. Panic attacks make it really hard to be calm because they keep him from breathing or thinking about calm things only panicked things. Things like leaving the house and how many people he’s going to have to be around and almost getting killed- Fucking calm down! He leans forward to hug Mikey tight and almost knocks him into the wall. Mikey won’t let them fall though. He never has.
“… In through your nose and out through your mouth, Gee, go slow. It’s alright.” Mikey’s hands are on his shoulders and he’s telling him how to breathe again. He rubs Gerard’s back until his brother’s breathing evens out and his heart isn’t thundering quite so hard.
Mikey smells like hair bleach and cheap generic body wash. Gerard breathes in that smell because it’s consistent and strong and easy. He read somewhere once that smell is the most primal sense and that the brain will connect things faster and more permanently to smells than to anything else. He mutters that fact into his brother’s shirt.
“So you’re telling me I should study Calculus while sniffing roses?”
“Lavender might work better, since it’s calming. Roses tend to be associated with more romantic and erotic things and I don’t think you want to have those thoughts about math.”
Mikey chuckles. “You okay now?”
Gerard nods and pulls back. “He’s gonna be up on the stage, Mikey. I’ll be alone and there’ll be people.”
“You can stay at the back,” Mikey offers, hurriedly pulling the foil out of his hair then turning on the sink to rinse out the bleach.
“No, because if I do that he’ll think I didn’t like it enough to get close and damn it, Mikes, there’ll be all those people that I don’t know and I won’t know where I’m at or where to go if there’s like an emergency or someone has a gun. What if I die?”
“That’s irrational, Gee, and you know it.”
“Fires and shootings happen at clubs all the time. Someone could, like, wanna kill Frank and then end up shooting a ton of people.”
“Does Frank seem like the type to have enemies who will shoot him on stage?”
“...Not really.”
“Then there’s no reason for anyone to have a gun. Does the show use any pyrotechnics?”
“...Probably not?”
“Then you’re golden, Gee.”
“What if-“
Mikey holds up one hand to silence Gerard and reaches for a towel with the other. “No. You agreed to this because, subconsciously, you really want to go,” he says, drying his hair, “ You go to school and work just fine every day. This isn’t any different from that.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Only because you have a massive crush on the guy. This isn’t a real date though, so it’s okay. What do you do to keep yourself occupied at school?”
“I draw.”
“You can’t exactly do that in a pit.”
Gerard isn’t sure if he’s going to be anywhere near the mosh pit at all but he knows he has to at least try to look like he’s having fun.
“What about at work?”
Mikey waits for him to answer. The silence stretches well into the zone of what’s uncomfortable when Gerard is speaking to anyone else. His brother is undaunted, though and he watches Gerard until he’s forced to reply by that freakishly calm face.
“I sing.”
Mikey’s eyebrows shoot up. Gerard knows he wasn’t expecting that. Gerard wasn’t expecting it, either, the first time he started to have a panic attack at work. He’d started humming some stupid song from Peter Pan of all things and it had gotten him through his shift. Now he does it whenever he can because it just sort of works, no matter how loathe he is to admit it.
“Do you realize how perfect that is?”
“It’s humiliating and strange, Mikes, not perfect. What planet are you from?”
“How did you graduate high school, bro? You’re going to a concert. Singing keeps you from spazzing about being out in the world. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Gerard gasps. “There is no way I’m doing that in public!”
“You already do!”
“Yeah, but around co-workers who think it’s normal for me!”
“Gerard, I hate to rain on your parade here, but no one is going to be looking at you and no one is going to care that you’re singing to yourself. Frank might, because he invited you, but he’s gonna think you’re singing along so that’s just fine. It’ll work.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It’ll have to.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going if I have to bribe Bob into carrying you there. You told Frank you were going to go and you will. Didn’t you promise yourself that agoraphobia wasn’t going to rule your life?”
Gerard wants to point out that he goes to school and works just fine, thanks very much. When he made himself that promise he didn’t think that socializing would ever be a part of his life. “Yes.”
“What did Grandma always admire?”
Oh, fuck you Mikey, pulling the Grandma card like that. That’s a low blow. Shit. This is not fair. “People who could keep their promises.”
Mikey smirks and shoos his brother from the bathroom.
~~
Gerard is fighting the impulse to wrap his hands around Frank’s arm and hang on for all he’s worth. Frank has been saying a lot of things since they walked into the club, about the band he’s in and how excited he always is before he gets on stage. Something like that. Whenever there’s a pause Gerard smiles or nods to make it seem like he’s really listening and not making the very best effort to commit all the exits to memory.
“… to go help set up. I’ll see you afterwards, okay?”
“Sure thing. Break a leg.” Gerard grins, dying a little on the inside, and Frank is gone.
The benefit of arriving with the band is that it’s not crowded yet so he can think. He taps out the main rhythm for ‘La Bamba’ against the side of his leg. He gets to watch everyone come in. First it’s just some techs and friends of the band. He supposes he can be classified as a "friend of the band". He zones out for a while, leaning on a wall and the next time he pays any attention there are about a million other people crammed into the club.
His eyes get huge.
Okay, it’s not a million people, but there are still so many! It’s strange, though. He’s got, like, this bubble of space around him. On one side there’s the wall and the rest of the way around him there’s a foot of ‘do-not-enter’ territory that is respected. It’s not an open and vulnerable area but it’s not crammed in tight with a bunch of strangers. An island of safe in the sea of bodies. ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ starts going through his head and he lets it. There’s a semi-easy way to an exit if he sticks close to the wall. He can deal with this, he knows he can deal with this.
The lights go down and he scrambles along the wall to climb on top of a chair. A random moment of genius, that. Now he can not only see the show without being too close to people but he has a heads up if any serious shit starts to go down. This is perfect.
Watching Frank perform is… overwhelming. Everything about it is just intense and angry. Gerard remembers that kind of anger- and Frank’s still a few years closer to high school than he is so it must be fresher for him.
Gerard could never have gone on stage in front of people to vent it. Here Frank is, though, unselfconscious and screaming into a microphone. This much rage wrapped up into one person and it’s coming out in such a… harmless way. It’s even beneficial. The audience, the kids, they’re screaming along and the catharsis is hanging in the air like so much cigarette smoke.
Damn that’s smart. Of course Frank is smart, though, because Gerard doesn’t get fixated on just anyone. He has standards, high ones, difficult to meet and-
Oh, well, look at that. Frank’s on his back. Writhing and snarling into the microphone, thrusting his hips up every so often for… emphasis? Or was it just to mess with audience members? That’s just fine, actually because it’s nice to watch. There go his hips again, along with Gerard’s mental faculties. He likes seeing Frank like that way more than he probably should. He’s glad his mouth is closed because he’s started salivating and it’s really gross to drool in public.
That song ends and Frank composes himself long enough to thank the fans and say some incredibly nice things about them. Then the drums pick up and after a few beats Frank is making the most obscene sounds Gerard has ever heard. It’s like… he doesn’t know what it’s like but it’s astonishing and erotic. He didn’t walk into this growling mess expecting to hear something erotic. He might just have an aneurysm, if there’s any blood left in his brain to make a vessel pop.
The rest of the song is loud and boiling and there’s frequent mention of blood. He kind of stopped listening, though, after the first fifteen seconds. He keeps replaying the sex-sounds to himself in his head, hoping that no one here can read minds.
At the end of the set, after the last encore, Gerard sticks his fingers in the sides of his mouth and wolf whistles as loud as he can. There’s nobody looking at him so he can get away with it. Besides, he was here to cheer on his friend, right?
I guess he is my friend now. He ponders that idea for a little bit. He hasn’t had any friends for a while. At least, not the kind that he’d willingly leave his room for. It isn’t entirely normal, though, to have massive infatuation with one’s friends. So are they really friends? Is it a one-sided friendship? But it's not one-sided because Gerard does have friendly feelings towards Frank they're just the more-than kind. Maybe he should just label it "it's complicated" in his head and leave it at that?
“So, how’d you like it?” Frank has worked his way through the crowd and is standing a few feet away from him.
He bites his lip. “Well, I think you can consider my mind blown.”
Frank breaks into a huge grin and throws himself at Gerard.
Gerard’s not ready for a hug, let alone having Frank hanging from him like a demonic spider monkey. He stumbles around but doesn’t drop him. Frank is laughing in his ear, hyper and rambling about the show. The man is dripping sweat onto Gerard’s face and clothes. He smells divine. Gerard stops himself from sniffing Frank but just barely.
“Thanks for coming,” Frank says as he lets go, smiling sheepishly.
“Thanks for inviting me. You’re great. You guys. You’re great.”
“Thank you.”
Frank’s face is going to crack in half because of how hard he’s smiling, Gerard is sure of it. He smiles back. That’s a good idea for a character, someone whose face has split from smiling. He can see the psychological problems that’d stem from that. When he gets home he’s going to make Mikey give him the laptop so he can write about it
Author: vinvy
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: eventual Frank/Gerard
Summary: He hates not being able to breathe.
Word Count: ~ 2510
Warnings: A Recovering Agoraphobe, Manipulative Siblings, Profanity, Gorgeous Men Performing
Disclaimer: Puh-lease! None of this has happened at all.
A/N: Because my dearest iron_fist123 is feeling unwell. She's already read this but it's the thought that counts, right? (And because this is so short that I need to get it out of the way.)
Part the First
Part the Second
“Oh you cannot be serious, Gee!” Mikey shouts. Before Gerard can finish picking the lock, the bathroom door is open and his brother is there glowering with one hand on his hip. He’s been looking like that a lot this last week because Gerard is going through a phase of needing to tell him absolutely everything. “What is it this time?”
Gerard stands there feeling guilty and chewing on his lip.
Mikey rolls his eyes and yanks him into the bathroom.
As soon as he’s in the confined space with a closed door Gerard can breathe a little bit easier. He can see all the corners and that means no one is there waiting to jump out at him or listen to what he might say.
“Do you mind if I get on with this while you prepare yourself to talk or emotionally purge or whatever it is that you need to do?”
Gerard shrugs. He’s kind of annoyed by Mikey’s impatience. He watches his brother read and start following the instructions on the home-bleaching kit. He’s gonna try to highlight his hair again. Gerard is worried that it won’t turn out well because they can’t afford to have a stylist do it (even though it looks really good done right). He holds his breath when Mikey starts brushing the bleach into his hair and wrapping the bleached sections in tin foil.
“So, are you just gonna sit there on the back of the toilet staring at me while this stuff does what it does or are you gonna tell me what’s bothering you?”
“You get annoyed with me when I do.”
“Yes, Gerard, I do-“ Yup. The exasperation in his voice is incredibly obvious. “- but that’s because you’re my brother and I wish I could keep things from freaking you out. Not because I’m annoyed with you needing to talk. Now tell me what’s up.”
Gerard loves his brother. He loves his brother so much it almost hurts because he forgets so often who’s the older one, like it doesn’t matter. Mikey takes such good care of him. He catches himself before he gets lost in how awesome Mikey is. “It’s Frank.”
“I kinda figured.” It’s been Frank the last eight times out of ten. Mikey is sitting on the sink and stretching his legs out towards the door.
“Yeah... He kind of invited me to go to one of his band’s shows.”
Mikey’s eyes get huge at that. “That’s great! Why are you so sad about it? Isn’t this a good thing since you’re so stuck on him?”
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey. Gerard loves him to death but he’s missing the obvious point. He shakes his head slowly.
It finally dawns on him what the problem is. “Oh.”
Gerard’s hands are shaking. “Exactly.”
“…Did you already say yes?”
“I didn’t mean to!” He’s pleading and panicked. His lungs are starting to work a little faster.
“Gerard,” Mikey hops off the sink and stands in front of him, “look, you have to go.”
He shakes his head fast. “I can’t!”
“Gee, you already said yes.”
“But-“ He doesn’t get the rest of his sentence out because he can’t talk again, he can only think about breathing and how that’s getting harder to do. His throat is really tight and he can’t get enough air into his lungs.
Mikey is trying to talk to him again but Gerard can’t really hear him.
Fuck. He hates not being able to breathe. What’s wrong with him? Then, damn it, he knows and he’d rather not know at all.
This is a panic attack. He doesn’t want to have a panic attack. He wants to be calm. Panic attacks make it really hard to be calm because they keep him from breathing or thinking about calm things only panicked things. Things like leaving the house and how many people he’s going to have to be around and almost getting killed- Fucking calm down! He leans forward to hug Mikey tight and almost knocks him into the wall. Mikey won’t let them fall though. He never has.
“… In through your nose and out through your mouth, Gee, go slow. It’s alright.” Mikey’s hands are on his shoulders and he’s telling him how to breathe again. He rubs Gerard’s back until his brother’s breathing evens out and his heart isn’t thundering quite so hard.
Mikey smells like hair bleach and cheap generic body wash. Gerard breathes in that smell because it’s consistent and strong and easy. He read somewhere once that smell is the most primal sense and that the brain will connect things faster and more permanently to smells than to anything else. He mutters that fact into his brother’s shirt.
“So you’re telling me I should study Calculus while sniffing roses?”
“Lavender might work better, since it’s calming. Roses tend to be associated with more romantic and erotic things and I don’t think you want to have those thoughts about math.”
Mikey chuckles. “You okay now?”
Gerard nods and pulls back. “He’s gonna be up on the stage, Mikey. I’ll be alone and there’ll be people.”
“You can stay at the back,” Mikey offers, hurriedly pulling the foil out of his hair then turning on the sink to rinse out the bleach.
“No, because if I do that he’ll think I didn’t like it enough to get close and damn it, Mikes, there’ll be all those people that I don’t know and I won’t know where I’m at or where to go if there’s like an emergency or someone has a gun. What if I die?”
“That’s irrational, Gee, and you know it.”
“Fires and shootings happen at clubs all the time. Someone could, like, wanna kill Frank and then end up shooting a ton of people.”
“Does Frank seem like the type to have enemies who will shoot him on stage?”
“...Not really.”
“Then there’s no reason for anyone to have a gun. Does the show use any pyrotechnics?”
“...Probably not?”
“Then you’re golden, Gee.”
“What if-“
Mikey holds up one hand to silence Gerard and reaches for a towel with the other. “No. You agreed to this because, subconsciously, you really want to go,” he says, drying his hair, “ You go to school and work just fine every day. This isn’t any different from that.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Only because you have a massive crush on the guy. This isn’t a real date though, so it’s okay. What do you do to keep yourself occupied at school?”
“I draw.”
“You can’t exactly do that in a pit.”
Gerard isn’t sure if he’s going to be anywhere near the mosh pit at all but he knows he has to at least try to look like he’s having fun.
“What about at work?”
Mikey waits for him to answer. The silence stretches well into the zone of what’s uncomfortable when Gerard is speaking to anyone else. His brother is undaunted, though and he watches Gerard until he’s forced to reply by that freakishly calm face.
“I sing.”
Mikey’s eyebrows shoot up. Gerard knows he wasn’t expecting that. Gerard wasn’t expecting it, either, the first time he started to have a panic attack at work. He’d started humming some stupid song from Peter Pan of all things and it had gotten him through his shift. Now he does it whenever he can because it just sort of works, no matter how loathe he is to admit it.
“Do you realize how perfect that is?”
“It’s humiliating and strange, Mikes, not perfect. What planet are you from?”
“How did you graduate high school, bro? You’re going to a concert. Singing keeps you from spazzing about being out in the world. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Gerard gasps. “There is no way I’m doing that in public!”
“You already do!”
“Yeah, but around co-workers who think it’s normal for me!”
“Gerard, I hate to rain on your parade here, but no one is going to be looking at you and no one is going to care that you’re singing to yourself. Frank might, because he invited you, but he’s gonna think you’re singing along so that’s just fine. It’ll work.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“It’ll have to.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re going if I have to bribe Bob into carrying you there. You told Frank you were going to go and you will. Didn’t you promise yourself that agoraphobia wasn’t going to rule your life?”
Gerard wants to point out that he goes to school and works just fine, thanks very much. When he made himself that promise he didn’t think that socializing would ever be a part of his life. “Yes.”
“What did Grandma always admire?”
Oh, fuck you Mikey, pulling the Grandma card like that. That’s a low blow. Shit. This is not fair. “People who could keep their promises.”
Mikey smirks and shoos his brother from the bathroom.
~~
Gerard is fighting the impulse to wrap his hands around Frank’s arm and hang on for all he’s worth. Frank has been saying a lot of things since they walked into the club, about the band he’s in and how excited he always is before he gets on stage. Something like that. Whenever there’s a pause Gerard smiles or nods to make it seem like he’s really listening and not making the very best effort to commit all the exits to memory.
“… to go help set up. I’ll see you afterwards, okay?”
“Sure thing. Break a leg.” Gerard grins, dying a little on the inside, and Frank is gone.
The benefit of arriving with the band is that it’s not crowded yet so he can think. He taps out the main rhythm for ‘La Bamba’ against the side of his leg. He gets to watch everyone come in. First it’s just some techs and friends of the band. He supposes he can be classified as a "friend of the band". He zones out for a while, leaning on a wall and the next time he pays any attention there are about a million other people crammed into the club.
His eyes get huge.
Okay, it’s not a million people, but there are still so many! It’s strange, though. He’s got, like, this bubble of space around him. On one side there’s the wall and the rest of the way around him there’s a foot of ‘do-not-enter’ territory that is respected. It’s not an open and vulnerable area but it’s not crammed in tight with a bunch of strangers. An island of safe in the sea of bodies. ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ starts going through his head and he lets it. There’s a semi-easy way to an exit if he sticks close to the wall. He can deal with this, he knows he can deal with this.
The lights go down and he scrambles along the wall to climb on top of a chair. A random moment of genius, that. Now he can not only see the show without being too close to people but he has a heads up if any serious shit starts to go down. This is perfect.
Watching Frank perform is… overwhelming. Everything about it is just intense and angry. Gerard remembers that kind of anger- and Frank’s still a few years closer to high school than he is so it must be fresher for him.
Gerard could never have gone on stage in front of people to vent it. Here Frank is, though, unselfconscious and screaming into a microphone. This much rage wrapped up into one person and it’s coming out in such a… harmless way. It’s even beneficial. The audience, the kids, they’re screaming along and the catharsis is hanging in the air like so much cigarette smoke.
Damn that’s smart. Of course Frank is smart, though, because Gerard doesn’t get fixated on just anyone. He has standards, high ones, difficult to meet and-
Oh, well, look at that. Frank’s on his back. Writhing and snarling into the microphone, thrusting his hips up every so often for… emphasis? Or was it just to mess with audience members? That’s just fine, actually because it’s nice to watch. There go his hips again, along with Gerard’s mental faculties. He likes seeing Frank like that way more than he probably should. He’s glad his mouth is closed because he’s started salivating and it’s really gross to drool in public.
That song ends and Frank composes himself long enough to thank the fans and say some incredibly nice things about them. Then the drums pick up and after a few beats Frank is making the most obscene sounds Gerard has ever heard. It’s like… he doesn’t know what it’s like but it’s astonishing and erotic. He didn’t walk into this growling mess expecting to hear something erotic. He might just have an aneurysm, if there’s any blood left in his brain to make a vessel pop.
The rest of the song is loud and boiling and there’s frequent mention of blood. He kind of stopped listening, though, after the first fifteen seconds. He keeps replaying the sex-sounds to himself in his head, hoping that no one here can read minds.
At the end of the set, after the last encore, Gerard sticks his fingers in the sides of his mouth and wolf whistles as loud as he can. There’s nobody looking at him so he can get away with it. Besides, he was here to cheer on his friend, right?
I guess he is my friend now. He ponders that idea for a little bit. He hasn’t had any friends for a while. At least, not the kind that he’d willingly leave his room for. It isn’t entirely normal, though, to have massive infatuation with one’s friends. So are they really friends? Is it a one-sided friendship? But it's not one-sided because Gerard does have friendly feelings towards Frank they're just the more-than kind. Maybe he should just label it "it's complicated" in his head and leave it at that?
“So, how’d you like it?” Frank has worked his way through the crowd and is standing a few feet away from him.
He bites his lip. “Well, I think you can consider my mind blown.”
Frank breaks into a huge grin and throws himself at Gerard.
Gerard’s not ready for a hug, let alone having Frank hanging from him like a demonic spider monkey. He stumbles around but doesn’t drop him. Frank is laughing in his ear, hyper and rambling about the show. The man is dripping sweat onto Gerard’s face and clothes. He smells divine. Gerard stops himself from sniffing Frank but just barely.
“Thanks for coming,” Frank says as he lets go, smiling sheepishly.
“Thanks for inviting me. You’re great. You guys. You’re great.”
“Thank you.”
Frank’s face is going to crack in half because of how hard he’s smiling, Gerard is sure of it. He smiles back. That’s a good idea for a character, someone whose face has split from smiling. He can see the psychological problems that’d stem from that. When he gets home he’s going to make Mikey give him the laptop so he can write about it