fic: Be Thou Bound (1/1, Frank/Gerard, Pete/Patrick, AU)
So a few years ago - oh my *God*, seriously? - I wrote a story called "And the Moon In Their Net". It's kind of a good story. I like it.
This is the sequel to that, though it's more of a continuation. MCR gets magical powers, y'all. It's good times.
be thou bound
by Gale
SUMMARY: "For Christ's sake, you're standing here telling me that faeries are *real*. What, is Def Jam sending you unicorns instead of Benzes, now?" (Sequel to “and the moon in their net”.)
When he thought back on it later, Gerard could admit there was something morbidly funny about finding out after leaving the fucking TRL Awards.
*
"You know," Gerard said, rounding the corner, "I could have sworn I saw -- oh, shit." He stopped so fast that Frank ran right into his back.
"Dude, what the hell?" he said. "Dammit. Now I have coffee all over me *again*--"
And then Frank shut up, because he'd lifted his head to look for something -- probably napkins -- and seen it, too.
Pete and Patrick were standing just inside the green room, kissing softly. Something about it reminded Gerard of the one and only time he'd walked in on Pete and Mikey last summer, which was stupid because they were both still clothed and no one was saying anything he'd need hypnosis to scrub out of his brain, but.
"Hey," Mikey said, waving. He was on the couch on the other side of the room, Sidekick in hand. Probably talking to Alicia, Gerard thought, half-dazed. "Something wrong?"
*
"You *knew*?" Gerard said quietly, not quite able to hide his surprise. They were back at their hotel -- Fall Out Boy's, anyway, since they'd gotten in the day before and had spent the night. Pete had invited them, and their flight wasn't leaving 'til that night, so he'd said okay. It was that or go to Sharper Image, which never ended well. Bob had threatened to actually start kicking Mikey's ass if he brought one more tiny, hideously expensive technological...thing onto the bus.
Mikey blinked at him. "Of course I knew," he said. "We've been talking lately."
Which -- okay, they had, but somehow Gerard hadn't figured "we've been talking" translated into "I'm totally cool with my ex-boyfriend hooking up with his best friend". "And you're okay with this."
More blinking. "I'm *engaged*," Mikey said, sounding for all the world like Gerard was crazy.
And there wasn't a polite way in the world to tell your little brother that yes, he was engaged, but it hadn't stopped him the last time he and Pete had decided to "hang out", so Gerard just shook his head and tried to look less startled.
"Besides," Mikey added, "it's not that surprising. Except in that way where you're surprised where anything's happening, but not about, like, the underlying emotions. You know?"
"Yeah," Gerard said, even though he really didn't.
"Hey," Pete said, appearing between the two of them like -- actually, there wasn't an appropriate metaphor for it. Jeph did things like that sometimes, almost magically appearing out of nowhere, and he'd seen Quinn do it once or twice, but he hadn't known Pete could, too. Fucker. "I need to talk to Mikey for a second, if that's okay." He glanced at Patrick, who was on the other bed talking about something with Frank, heads bowed together.
Patrick looked up and blinked at him, cocking his head to one side. Pete did the same thing back at him; probably unconsciously, Gerard thought. If he lived to be a hundred, he was never going to get used that in people who weren't related. He and Mikey didn't even do it that often, for fuck's sake.
"In private," Pete added.
Translation: we're going to go have sex now, so everyone please just raise your voices when the rhythmic thumping starts. Alarmed, Gerard looked at Patrick.
"Bathroom's free," Patrick said, and Pete nodded. He grabbed Mikey's hand and yanked him into the bathroom, closing the door behind them. Gerard heard the lock snick.
Frank stared at Patrick. "You're *okay* with this?" he said incredulously.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Patrick asked. He looked a little baffled.
Frank leaned over. It was sort of an awkward angle, but he didn't look uncomfortable; Frank was like that sometimes, part-mountain goat or something. "Patrick," he said, taking hold of the other man's shoulders, "if -- if there's something going on you need to tell us about, some...fuck, I don't know, private arrangement or whatever--"
"What are you talking about?" Patrick looked genuinely baffled, now. Gerard knew the feeling.
"YOU'RE FUCKING KIDDING ME!" Mikey shouted, and Frank whipped around to look at the door and fell off the bed.
*
"Okay," Gerard said, pinching the bridge of his nose, "you're going to have to say that again, because I had to have heard you wrong the first time."
"No," Patrick said from the other bed, not looking up from whatever he was doing on his laptop. "You really didn't."
Gerard glared at him and looked back at Pete.
Pete just looked insulted. "What? You didn't."
"Really? Because I could have sworn that my little brother just told me that his ex-boyfriend told *him* that we were both part faerie. As in Shakespeare play-faerie. Terri Windling-faerie. Neil Gaiman-faerie."
"Okay, it's not really like Sandman," Pete said. "Not anymore, anyway. Modern technology isn't just encroaching over--"
"Pete!" Patrick yelled. "Not helping."
"Right," Pete said, "sorry. Habit." He shook his head. "But yeah, I told him that, and no, I'm not kidding. You didn't hear me wrong, you aren't hallucinating, and you're not being Punk'd." He looked almost apologetic. "I wasn't even going to say something, but *somebody* --" he glared at Patrick "--told me it wasn't really fair to keep it from you anymore."
"You're so full of shit," Gerard said flatly.
"Well, yeah," Pete said, "but that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"No, you really, really are."
"What if he's not?" Mikey asked quietly. Gerard had actually forgotten he was in the room; so had everyone else, actually, because they all turned to look at him. "Because -- I mean, it sort of makes sense--"
"No it doesn't," Gerard said, because really. "If you want to tell me that Pete isn't entirely human, I'm sorry, but that's not the surprise of the fucking year--"
"*Hey*," Pete said, at the same time Mikey and Patrick said, in identical irritated tones, "Gerard."
"--*but*," Gerard added, "that doesn't mean that we aren't. For Christ's sake, you're standing here telling me that faeries are *real*. What, is Def Jam sending you unicorns instead of Benzes, now?"
"Well, that would be stupid," Patrick said. "Since no one here is a virgin, so no one here could touch them." And -- really, that just made the whole thing *worse*, that Patrick was lending it any kind of credence.
"Oh, what," Gerard snapped, "you're telling me I'm just gonna go like *this*--"
The lamp slammed into the far wall and shattered.
There was a very long pause.
"Okay, could you not do that again?" Pete finally said. "Or at least give me, like, ten minutes to come up with a decent reason why we're trashing our hotel room? Because this is gonna be on some news outlet tomorrow, and I should warn people before it breaks or I'm gonna get that lecture again."
*
"You're really not kidding," Gerard said, maybe an hour later.
Pete shook his head.
Gerard looked at Patrick. "He's really not kidding."
"Not even a little," Patrick said. He looked normal. Pete looked worried and a little pissed off, probably about the lamp. Mikey looked like Gerard felt, shell-shocked and sort of dreaming. Frank...didn't actually have an expression, which was either really good or really bad, depending.
Gerard had no idea how he looked.
"It doesn't seem real," he said faintly. He looked at his hands. "I'm--"
"Not entirely human," Pete said. "No."
It actually -- okay, it didn't make *sense*, but Pete had been pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing. He'd explained that a couple generations back, someone in their family had slept with someone who wasn't human, and that person had had a kid, and that kid had grown up to be one of their parents, and bam! Gerard and Mikey, part-faerie. "You're probably closer, generation-wise," Pete had said, "because I can't make shit move even if I try."
"And don't think he hasn't," Patrick had said. "Seriously, if you want an afternoon of fun, you should come backstage with us sometime and watch him try to telekinetically move a package of tube socks.”
There'd been more basic information; he'd spent a lot of time on "okay, don't talk shit about the Court if you can help it," which had earned him a foot to the back of his head from Patrick, which had degenerated to Pete trying to carry on an intelligent conversation while not looking as he reached around to knock Patrick's foot away and smiling a little.
Finally, Mikey said, "I can feel you." Pete and Gerard looked at him. "Both of you, in my head. Sort of."
Which, now that he mentioned it, Gerard could too. Mikey was like a bonfire in the back of his head; Pete was like a candle, if a particularly steady one. Frank and Patrick were -- not dead spaces, exactly, but very, very faint. Like stars.
"It's like gaydar," Pete said. He looked substantially kinder than he had with Gerard, but then, Gerard had never slept with Pete. "You can sense others, once you know. It's like an early warning system."
"Or Spider-Sense," Patrick added, which made Gerard nod. Better reference.
"You can't ever unknow it," Pete said, still kindly. "It's -- it doesn't go away. It's never going to go away. You're just going to get used to it."
Mikey looked at him. "Mom and Dad--"
"--don't ever have to know," Pete said. "If they don't know and you don't tell them, it just...you can live with it your entire life and never know, and nothing ever happens. My parents don't know, and neither do my brother and sister. And I'm not telling them, either."
"Oh," Gerard said suddenly, "but you felt compelled to tell *us*?"
He wasn't mad, exactly, but it -- it was *sudden*. It was like having something giant and terrifying dropped in your lap, and then just abandoned, with no instructions or any fucking idea what to do. Maybe it'd be cool in a little while, but right now it was just shitty.
"Hey," Patrick said sharply. "If you're going to be mad at anyone, be mad at me. It was my stupid idea."
"It wasn't stupid," Frank said, speaking for the first time in what felt like days. "It..." He looked at Patrick. "Thank you," he said sincerely, and glanced at Pete. "Both of you."
Pete shrugged, but he looked slightly mollified. "If it wasn't me, it would've been someone else," he said. "And they probably would have just said it and watched shit go up in smoke. This way, you get some warning."
"You told me in the *bathroom*," Mikey said. He sounded insulted.
"Well, I would have liked to have told you in, like, actual privacy, but--" Pete shot a look at Gerard, who just rolled his eyes.
"Yeah," Gerard said, "'cause the *last* time you were alone with Mikey, it ended so well." Something about Pete just brought out the pissy older brother in him, always had.
"Okay," Frank said, before Pete could do more than glare and open his mouth to respond, "we're not getting into this now. We're *not*," he added when Gerard looked at him, "unless you want to start chucking furniture around, Gee. And I'm sorry, but I'd rather you practice with that shit first so I don't get accidentally clipped in the ear or whatever."
"I'm fine--"
"You're really not," Patrick called. Gerard looked over -- and holy shit, he'd moved to the table, which was now vibrating ever so slightly. It was like a tiny concentrated earthquake.
Gerard's eyes widened and he thought calm, calm, calm and thought about his bunk back on the bus, the smell of paint and the feeling of blank canvas under his fingers. The vibrating stopped.
"Thank you," Patrick said a second later. "So you, you know, might want to keep a handle on your temper."
Gerard stared at his hands. "That's new," he said, a little weakly.
"It gets easier with practice," Pete said after a couple of seconds. "Controlling it, I mean. And the flinging-stuff-around part. Both of them." He threaded his fingers together and wiggled the fingers in place. "It's -- they're linked."
"Wow," Mikey said mildly. "Hey, what do you think I can do?"
"Right now," Frank said, "I think you and Gerard can stay here with Pete while Patrick and I go get dinner." If he was freaked out, he didn't show it. But then, Frank was really hard to actually unnerve. Gerard didn't think he'd ever appreciated it this much before, not even back when he was getting fucked up every day.
"I think," he said slowly, looking up at Pete, "we have a lot to talk about."
"You know," Pete said, "you're really not wrong."
*
"It didn't freak you out at first?" Gerard asked Patrick, later.
Patrick shrugged. He'd put the laptop away after Pete had lifted his head and threatened to toss it into traffic if he didn't cut out the goddamn typing and let him get some sleep. "I don't think he would," he'd said, "but you can't always tell with Pete." But he'd said it fondly, and he'd had that same my-God-my-dick-is-making-me-stupid-and-I-don't-really-care look on his face he sometimes saw on his own, usually in pictures with Frank. He and Gerard had gone outside to sit on the balcony.
"We had other things to worry about," Patrick said. "Pete wasn't actually going to say anything, but he'd managed to piss off the Queen of All Faerie, and we had to formally apologize or she'd kill us all--"
"Wait, what?"
"--and that sort of made it worse." Patrick pulled the bedspread tighter around himself and looked thoughtful. "I was more worried about maybe being killed to freak out about him not being human, which isn't even the point."
"It isn't," Gerard said warily. His feelings on Pete were mixed at best: he couldn't not like the guy, because Mikey had been crazy into him for a long time and still loved him a little; and because Patrick loved him, and that wasn't something he did easily and with no regard. And he was honest, which Gerard could respect, even if wasn't the same exact kind of honesty as his own, not to mention fairly easy on the eyes, though he wasn't really Gerard's type. But he couldn't *like* him, either, because he could be capricious and kind of a dick, and he'd seen how charisma could backfire and hurt other people. Gerard wasn't convinced that Pete wasn't here from another planet or something, with a basic understanding of how human beings worked emotionally but not a lot of practical experience in other people's feelings.
But people Gerard loved, loved him, so what the hell. It wasn't like he was in a band with the guy.
"No," Patrick said. "I mean -- okay, you can't think of it like some huge thing, because then you'll wind up taking anti-depressants in a Best Buy parking lot in the middle of February and stranding your best friends in an emotional void that takes a long time to come out of." He glanced at Gerard. "Um. You know, hypothetically."
Gerard grinned and tapped the ash off his cigarette. "Hypothetically," he said, nodding.
"He's still Pete," Patrick said. "He hasn't changed. What you know about him has, but *he* hasn't. And you're still Gerard. It doesn't invalidate everything you know about yourself: you still like art, you're still in a band, you're still from New Jersey. You just...make this part of yourself, too."
"You stole that from Dogma," Gerard said after a second.
"Yeah," Patrick said, "but it's a really good movie. Also: not wrong."
"That's why I keep him," Pete said sleepily from the doorway, rubbing the bridge of his nose and yawning. He made his way across the balcony and over to Patrick -- yelping the whole way, because his feet were bare and the balcony floor was cold -- and nudging him with his toe. "I like my men smart. Move over."
"You're such an asshole," Patrick muttered, but he was smiling. He unwrapped a corner of the bedspread and let Pete slide in, then wrapped it around both of them. "Why are you awake, anyway?"
"I couldn't sleep," Pete said. His voice was muffled. "I got cold." He peeked the top of his head out, from the nose up, and looked at Gerard. "Are you freaking out less?"
Gerard thought about it for a second. "A little," he admitted. "I still think this is the shittiest practical joke ever, but it's too late for me to think about it just now."
"I'm cutting back on those," Pete said. He slipped his head back under, then lifted a hand and awkwardly touched Patrick's cheek. "*Someone* gets cranky." He poked his head back out and added, "I was not always this whipped. I want you to know that."
"I'll try," Gerard said. He took a drag off his cigarette, tapped some more ash away. "Why weren't you going to say anything? If you don't mind me asking."
"Because," Pete said, "it's a pain in the ass. I don't get anything useful out of it, except the deep-seated fear that every friend I've ever had has been my friend because something told them to and the occasional compulsion to swear oaths." He looked a little more awake. "Did you get that? The friend thing, I mean."
Gerard shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "The ones I have I'm close with, but I'm not like you. You're a fucking walking MySpace account."
"Fuck off," Pete said, but it sounded amiable enough. "But you've never felt that? Like -- if you just wanted something enough, you could have it?"
"Everyone does that."
"No they don't. Not like us."
Gerard opened his mouth to say no, he didn't think so -- but the band had been like that, hadn't it? Not without work, because they'd been through enough shit to kill most bands even before the whole thing with Matt, but he'd never really questioned if they were going to make it. Deciding to do it, recording demos, growing slow and steady...it had all just *blossomed*. They'd worked their asses off to get here, but he'd never questioned whether or not they should be doing it. Not once, not for a second.
"I don't know," he finally said.
Pete nodded. "Yeah, it's gonna be like that for a while. You're going to second-guess every part of your life for the next, like, month. And that's in addition to reminding yourself not to get pissed off and make expansive hand gestures, because eventually someone's gonna notice that every time Gerard Way gets angry and starts waving his hands, lights start blowing up."
Shit. He hadn't actually thought about that. "And then?"
"And then," Pete said, "you'll wake up one morning, think to yourself 'I'm not entirely human', then shrug and poke Frank in the shoulder and ask him if he wants to go to breakfast with you."
Gerard just stared at him.
"No, really," Pete said. "You can get used to anything if you work at it long enough." He yawned once, then suddenly looked more awake. "Oh! Try something for me, okay?"
"That depends," Gerard said, looking at him warily. "What?"
Pete didn't say anything; he just kept staring at Gerard very intently, almost fixated. Gerard waved a hand in front of his face. "Wentz," he said, "*what*?"
Pete blinked and sat back, then let out a sigh. "Shit."
"I told you it probably wouldn't work," Patrick said, not entirely unsympathetically.
"What are you -- oh my God, were you trying to whammy me?"
"Yeah," Pete said. "I'm trying to figure if it works on people when they know what I am. Or what they are. Whichever. I'm not picky. So far, no."
"Which I already said," Patrick said, rolling his eyes, "if you'll remember back two freaking hours--"
"No, seriously," Pete said, looking at Gerard again, "try something for me." Patrick pulled on his ear, *hard*, and he added, "Please."
Gerard rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Fine," he said, sighing. "What?"
"Try to whammy Patrick."
"*What*?" Gerard looked at Patrick, who just looked long-suffering again.
"Humor me," Pete said. "It doesn't matter what, just -- focus on something and try to make him feel it. Do it, say it, whatever. Something."
"I swear to God," Patrick muttered, "I'm getting you fish or something when we get back home." He looked at Gerard and said, "It's fine. He's testing something."
Gerard shrugged and looked at Patrick, tried to concentrate.
Two weeks, he told himself and the air. Two weeks, most of them on cramped tour buses, avoiding making eye contact with anyone else for fear of hearing Lead Singers with Crushes jokes for the rest of the summer. A lot of kissing; not a lot of sex, but what we had was good. More talking than anything else, words pressed against sweaty, sleepy skin, and even when you're talking it sounds like music. It wasn't permanent, wasn't supposed to be, but I got to see you in a way no one else ever will, not even the man curled up in your lap, and I'm still so grateful for that it hurts. Smooth pale skin, widesoft mouth, and you let out long, shuddering breaths when you're coming. You taste salty--
Gerard made himself stop.
Pete looked back and forth between them. "Anything?" he asked.
"My nose itches," Patrick said, "and I'm really starting to get cold out here. Other than that, no."
"Okay." Pete looked relieved. "Just wanted to make sure it wasn't me." He kissed Patrick on the mouth and got out from under the bedspread. "I'm going back to bed. You're coming in?"
"In a minute," Patrick said. Pete nodded and kissed him again, then went back inside.
"You *do* seem to be freaking out less," Patrick told Gerard, wrapping the bedspread around himself again. "Though that could just be the nicotine talking."
Gerard poked him with his foot. "It's not like I have a choice," he said. "I made a lamp go across the room, for fuck's sake. If I keep freaking out, I'm just going to get upset and do it again, only this time I might not be with friends. I might be at FUSE, or the VMAs, or somewhere else with a hundred cameras." He shrugged and stabbed out his cigarette on the balcony floor. "I figure I'll just ignore it."
"I don't know that that's how it works," Patrick said. "But you can give that a shot, sure." He got to his feet. "You coming back inside?"
"Might as well," Gerard said, getting to his feet. "Mikey and Frank are probably freaking out right now, wondering if I'm at a bar or something."
"Please," Patrick said, opening the door to the room. He lowered his voice to a murmur. "Like you'd break your sobriety for something this trivial."
Gerard looked at him for a second, then leaned in and kissed his cheek. "You're sure you want me to leave you here alone?" he said, glancing at the bed.
"He's not alone," Pete said, using his outdoor voice. "And you're taking away my bedwarmer, Gerard, so fuck off back to your own room. I'll see you in the morning."
Gerard glanced back at Patrick. "Is he always this much fun?"
"Oh, no," Patrick said. "Sometimes he's cranky."
*
Mikey had somehow managed to talk the label into getting them two singles instead of one double with three people crammed inside -- a minor miracle, Gerard figured, considering that the day before he'd called them they'd been insisting they didn't even need to stay overnight in New York.
It sort of made sense, now. Gerard was starting to wonder just how many things in their lives had been brushed by magic, and not just surprisingly good people skills.
Gerard closed the door behind him carefully, trying not to make a sound. He could just get his shoes off and get into bed, and he'd be--
"So," Frank said lazily, opening one eye to look at him. "You're a creature out of myth and legend."
"Yes, Frank," Gerard said. He rolled his eyes and unzipped his hoodie. "I'm a frigging pixie."
Frank sat up on one elbow. "No, really," he said, "it explains a lot. Your magnetism, your exotic good looks, your fondness for D&D--"
Gerard threw his shoe at him. Grinning, Frank dodged it.
"You're not freaking out about this?" Gerard said. "Even a little?"
"Gerard," Frank said, "I have seen you drunk, I have seen you stoned, I have seen you practically comatose. You mentally throwing a lamp across Pete's hotel room isn't even the weirdest thing I've seen you do this month. And I figure if I could still be in love with you when you were falling-over drunk and doing lines of coke, you having wood nymphs as distant cousins isn't going to faze me much." He yawned and scrubbed at his face, falling back against the mattress. He tossed the covers back, exposing a pale line of thigh. “Get over here, okay?"
Gerard did.
*
The knock on the door came around six in the morning.
Gerard lifted his head and snarled something wordless, then fell back to the mattress and tried to go back to sleep. But no, the knocking kept going. He shoved Frank's arm aside, earning a mumble, and climbed out of bed.
"*What*?" he muttered, rubbing at his eyes.
"Morning," Pete said, so cheerfully that Gerard kind of wanted to slug him for a moment. But just a moment, because he really did think violence was stupid, and more importantly, he had the sneaking suspicion Pete would just wait 'til his back was turned and come at him with a broken bottle of Rolling Rock or a pool cue or something. Not a bad guy, really, but a sneaky son-of-a-bitch. "Feel like going for a walk? I need coffee."
"Starbucks isn't open," Gerard said automatically.
Pete just looked at him. "It's six in the morning, and we're in New York."
Gerard yawned into his hand. "Give me ten minutes," he said, and closed the door.
*
It turned out to be closer to fifteen minutes, what with digging his clothes out from under Frank's and finding his shoes. He'd woken Frank up for all of ten seconds, but Frank had mumbled something about birds and gone right back to sleep. If Gerard timed it right, Frank wouldn't even know he'd been gone; the guy could sleep through an earthquake.
The Starbucks across from the hotel *was*, in fact, open. They hadn't even been the first ones inside, though they had been third and fourth, respectively. It was weirdly gratifying to see that Pete wasn't so different from him -- tall latte, half-caf, skim milk. He wasn't even wearing eyeliner, for once, though Gerard was pretty sure he still had on some from the night before.
"So," Pete said, still sounding cheerful even if he looked half-awake, "do you hate me yet? I mean, more than you usually do."
"I don't hate you," Gerard said, because it was true. He didn't *hate* Pete. He sort of wanted Frank to kick his ass, or maybe Bob, but he didn't hate him. "I just don't know why you decided to tell us. I mean, if you've known all this time-"
"I told you," Pete said, "it wasn't my idea." He blinked, looked away for a second. "Um. Entirely," he added.
Gerard just drank his coffee and looked at him.
"Oh, *come on*," Pete said. "I wasn't even going to say anything to Patrick about the two of you, but it just slipped out one night when we were writing, and then it's been, like, nothing but that goddamn long-suffering face, and I don't know whose bright idea it was to make me fall in love with someone with an actual fucking conscience, but it kind of sucks." He took a sip of coffee and looked mournful. "He started withholding oral sex, man. And then yesterday it was 'oh, look who else is here,' and I'm sorry if I fucked up your world view, Gerard, but the possibility of me ever getting a blowjob again kind of trumps that."
Gerard couldn't actually argue the point; he'd been on the receiving end of Patrick's blowjobs, he knew what Pete was missing. And just the idea of Frank ever doing the same thing--
"Okay," he said, "point."
Pete was quiet a minute, then said, "So have you told Frank yet?"
Gerard stared at him. "He was in the room with us, dumbass," he said. "He knows all about--"
"No," Pete said, "not about you and Mikey."
Gerard kept staring. Then he remembered: forest fire, candle, stars.
"Oh fuck," he muttered.
"Come on," Pete said. "You're trying to tell me you haven't told him yet? That that wasn't the first thing you did when you got two minutes to yourselves?"
"I don't know," Gerard snapped. "The first time you got Patrick to yourself for two minutes, did you tell *him*?"
Pete looked at him for a long time, then sighed. "No," he said, "and I'm not going to. I'd just get the 'well, why the hell couldn't you tell me this back *then*?' speech and have to sleep in my own bed until he stops freaking out. And it's Patrick, so I could be there a while." He shook his head. "It's practically negative generation anyway."
"Negative--"
"It's like diminishing returns," Pete said. "The closer you are to the ancestor, the more power you have access to. You and Mikey are stronger than I am, but the line sort of trails off at whatever *I'm* at. It's possible to be part-faerie and not be able to do anything with it. It shows up in other ways, though -- creativity, artistic expression. A tendency toward tattoos and piercings." He cocked an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"
"Huh," Gerard said thoughtfully. "You think that's why everything just bounces off Patrick?"
"I don't know," Pete said. He leaned back against his chair. "It doesn't bounce off Joe or Andy, but it takes longer to work on them."
Gerard stared at him. "Wait," he said, "you--"
Pete was staring at him like he was crazy. "Uh, yeah?" He started ticking names off on his fingers. "Patrick, Joe, Andy, Bob, Ray, Bert and all his guys--"
"You're shitting me."
"I really wish you'd stop saying that," Pete said. He rubbed his eyebrow. "No, I'm not shitting you. Dude, you should have seen Warped. I could count on one hand the amount of people who *weren't* part-faerie, and that's with fingers left over."
Gerard tried not to gape at him. "That's ridiculous," he said. "If we're talking odds--"
"So don't talk odds," Pete said. "I have all kinds of respect for math, but it's pretty linear. Multiply A by B and get C; divide C by A and get B." He looked at Gerard. "How many artists do you know? How many musicians, how many painters, how many poets and people with stars in their heads? It's not that surprising. Statistically, it's insane, but statistically, you should be working a dead-end office job, and I should be dead."
Cruel, Gerard thought, and mean, but not needlessly. "If I don't tell them--" God, it even sounded wrong in his head.
"--then they won't know," Pete said. He scrunched down a little, pulled his hoodie closer to his face. "Or someone else will tell them, but I don't think so. They're pretty -- not null, but that's the best word I can think of right now." He shrugged. "Past, like, my generation, it's sort of a moot point. You can't do anything."
Gerard thought about Bob and Ray, how they looked on stage, how they were tied up with him as tight as Mikey could ever be. He thought about Patrick and how he sounded, and the way Bert could be, sometimes, madness doled out in controlled bursts. "Bullshit."
"They can't do anything like mentally fling lamps around," Pete corrected, "or make people go along with their dumb-ass ideas. I don't mean they can't do *anything*. The odds of someone tracking them down and telling them is really slim."
"But if someone wanted to make a giant fucking mess of--"
"See, you're thinking like a human again," Pete said. Gerard could just hear the mockery there, dry and a little bitter. It sounded frighteningly like Bert could, when he was sober and feeling particularly caustic. "Faeries - actual faeries, the ones who think this is a nice place to visit but don't live here - don't care. We're half-breeds, by-blows of an interesting vacation a couple generations back. As long as we don't butt our noses into their politics, they could give a shit if we live or die or what we do in-between. And if someone like you or me tells them, so what? It sucks, and you'll get a ration of shit for, like, ten years, but it won't affect them the same way. They'll freak out, and they'll be able to sense others, but that's it."
Gerard stared at him.
Pete shrugged and drank some more coffee. "And that's it," he said. "That's all I've got. Which isn't a lot, but most of what *I* know was passed on to me by a guy who now thinks I'm a dick, so just tell yourself things could always be worse, because at least I'm not talking shit about you on Livejournal."
Gerard kept staring. "My God," he said, stuck between appalled and fascinated. "You're the worst Yoda ever."
"I'm not trying to be. I'm just trying to pass on a few pertinent pieces of information so you don't wind up in a park in Los Angeles, performing for the Queen of All Faerie like your life depends on it, which it very well might." Pete paused. "You know, hypothetically."
"Mikey's going to have questions," Gerard warned.
"Of course he is," Pete said. "I already said he could call and ask. He can even call and ask your questions for you, because we both know the less time we spend around each other, the better." He looked at Gerard critically. "You're going to be okay?" And wonder of wonders, he sounded like he gave a crap.
Gerard thought about it for a couple of seconds. He'd spent the last half-day making furniture crash into walls and watching Mikey get expressions he never thought he'd see on his brother's face again. And Frank kept touching him every couple of minutes and grinning in delight, which was wonderful and a little weird all at once.
"Yeah," he finally said. "I am. Fucking confused for a while, but. Yeah."
"Good," Pete said. "Because if you weren't, Mikey would never let me live it down. And he's the next-to-last person I want doing big, soulful eyes of guilt in my direction." He picked up his coffee and got up from the table, came around and briefly kissed Gerard's cheek before turning to go.
"You're kissing the wrong Way," Gerard said suddenly, raising his voice just a little, enough to be heard over by the door.
Pete blinked at him. "According to who?" he asked. "Besides, I figure we're all family now." He waggled his fingers once, in Gerard's direction, and leaned back against the door. The light hit him just right, all early morning golds and pinks--
--and for a second it was like he was staring at a stranger, all angular features and dark eyes. The light turned his hair red where it touched, and his features were maybe too pretty to be considered masculine, but Gerard would bet money that somewhere in another plane of existence, there was a guy running around who didn't look all that different.
For that matter, he realized, there was probably one running around looking like him and Mikey.
"Have a good drive back to Jersey," Pete added, and left.
*
Frank wasn't there when Gerard got back to the room, let alone waiting up for him, but Mikey was. Trying to, anyway; he'd apparently fallen asleep halfway through. Gerard shook his arm. "Mikey," he said quietly. "Mikey. Hey."
"Hey," Mikey said sleepily. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes. "Everything go okay?"
"Fine," Gerard said. He sat on the edge of the bed and took his sneakers off. "We didn't kill each other, and he said if I had any questions, I should tell you so you can pass them along."
"You could just call him yours-" Mikey started, but Gerard looked at him. Mikey changed the subject.
"Do you have any, so far? Because I was making up a list earlier, and I figured--"
"Mikey," Gerard broke in, "you don't think this is weird? Any of it?"
Mikey looked at him like he was nuts. Or tried to, anyway; without his contacts in or his glasses, Mikey's short-distance vision was crap. "Of course I think it's weird," he said. "Pete shows up out of nowhere and announces that we're part-faerie and can do magic. That's like something we made up when we were kids."
It was weirdly close to some of the things they'd made up when they were kids, actually, except little Gerard had thought it was wonderful and not at all surprising, but grown-up Gerard couldn't really wrap his brain around it.
"He made it sound like a complete fucking nightmare," Gerard said, falling back on the bed. He stared up at the ceiling. "Like, there's nothing good that can come out of it. But if that's true, why did he even say anything? I mean, unless he just wanted to be an asshole, and I'm sorry, Mikey, but that wouldn't be a big fucking surprise."
Mikey was silent for a minute.
"Pete's -- okay, you know those kids you had drama with?" Mikey asked. "The ones who were really nice guys, and actually kind of cool, but they wore a lot of black and tried too hard?" Gerard nodded. "He's like that, a little. He's one of the nicest guys I've ever met, and smart and funny and *great*, but some days I want to smack him in the back of the head and tell him to cut it out."
Gerard turned to look at him. He was pretty sure he was gaping a little. "And you slept with him," he said after a second, because it was the first thing that popped out.
"Of course I did," Mikey said. "Him occasionally being a dick who likes the sound of his own voice didn't stop me from caring about him, and it didn't mean he stopped being smart and funny and really nice. It just meant I had to dig a little harder to see it." He fell on his back next to Gerard. "And when he gets really freaked out, he makes things into way bigger deals than they need to be," he added, a little pragmatically, "so you probably shouldn't listen to him when he says it's all bad stuff." He shook his head. "If you're asking me to be pissed at him, Gee, I can't do it. I can't imagine not knowing, now."
Gerard pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at Mikey. "Have you. Y'know. Tried anything?" He wiggled his fingers in the same vague motion Pete had.
Mikey folded his hands on his chest. "I can't move lamps," he said, sounding mournful. His face lit up. "Oh! But, okay, shut up, this is cool." He sat up and cracked his fingers -- Gerard winced at the sound -- then cupped his hands in front of him. His expression folded in on itself, becoming blank and unreadable--
--and then, suddenly, there was a tiny flame in his cupped hands.
Gerard stared at him for maybe thirty seconds, just watching the flame, then looked back at Mikey. "Shut up," he said quietly.
"I know." Mikey grinned. "It's portable, too. See?" He moved his hands apart, and the flame stayed in the palm of his right hand, curling in and making a little ball. It was like something out of Labyrinth, only cooler, because this wasn't mid-80s CGI; this was *real*, this little ball of fire, and his little brother was tossing it from hand to hand like a tennis ball.
"I think I could throw it," Mikey admitted, still tossing it to himself, "but I don't want to try in the hotel."
"Hey," Gerard said, scooting back to sit up against the headboard, "try--" and he held his hands in front of him like he was going to serve a volleyball. Mikey didn't ask anything, just tossed it in Gerard's general direction -- and sure enough, it lit into Gerard's hands like it had a fucking homing device or something.
Gerard stared at the flame in his hands - a flame again, not a ball - before he said, "Okay, that's fucking awesome."
"Throw it back," Mikey said, and Gerard did.
They were still playing catch when Frank came back into the room, smelling like smoke and putting his cellphone back in his pocket. He watched them for a minute, looking a little bemused, then climbed into the bed and rested his head in Gerard's lap. "Don't set me on fire," he warned, and went back to sleep.
*
They'd gotten to Jersey around ten that morning and promptly crashed at Mikey and Gerard's mom's house, coming in the back door and flumping down in the living room rather than heading all the way up a flight of stairs and going to all the trouble of turning the sheets down. It was way easier to kick Mikey in the ass around four in the afternoon and send him up for pillows and blankets.
That was how Gerard woke up early that evening, Mikey on the sofa -- stretched out, the skinny little fuck -- and Frank pressed up next to him on the floor, wrapped around him and still wearing his shoes. There was a note from their mom pinned to the arm of the sofa, but Gerard glanced at it just enough to confirm it was her handwriting before going back to sleep.
Some time later, Frank woke him up with a smack to the shoulder and a cup of coffee. Mikey was on the phone with someone -- probably Alicia, though he was in the kitchen and talking in eavesdrop-proof murmurs, so Gerard couldn't really tell.
He’d thought about saying something to their mom, on the drive back, but decided against it; she was perfectly okay being normal, and the last thing Gerard wanted was to freak her out more than absolutely necessary. He wondered if Elena had known, then decided she hadn’t. Then he remembered the practical motion of her hands, the way she’d always known what was going on with him before he’d said anything, and changed it to a solid “she’d maybe suspected something”.
"So," Frank said, sitting down cross-legged next to him. "Weird couple of days."
"Very weird," Gerard agreed. "But we got a shiny statue from MTV, and Mikey and I got brand new superpowers, so it wasn't a waste." He yawned and drank his coffee, leaned into the touch when Frank started playing with his hair.
And he could see all of it, suddenly -- the way Frank's eyes could get closed off if he didn't want to talk, the way he couldn't be anything but naked on stage. How it always seemed like he wasn't getting new tattoos, he was peeling away useless skin that had gotten in his way. The way he smiled.
I can't imagine not knowing, now, Mikey had said the other night. And that was all of it, really.
"Hey," Gerard said, touching Frank's arm.
Frank stopped touching Gerard's hair and and looked at him, forehead crinkling. "Everything okay?" he asked, putting his own cup down.
"No, it's fine," Gerard said. He shook his head. "I just -- there's something I need to tell you."
*
This is for everyone who wanted to know if there was going to be a sequel. I HATE YOU ALL. (Also, this is in line with ATMITN canon, not RL-canon, just so y’all know.)
Okay, not true; if I hate anyone, it’s The Used for that goddamn photoshoot where they’re all, like, an element, and Jepha’s fire, and THIS STUPID THING IS NOW A TRIPTYCH SON OF A WHORE. (Extra points if you’ve seen the picture in question and can figure out what the hell Dan would do. And don’t say “he’d be Heart!”, because this is not goddamn Captain Planet. F’real.)
This is the sequel to that, though it's more of a continuation. MCR gets magical powers, y'all. It's good times.
be thou bound
by Gale
SUMMARY: "For Christ's sake, you're standing here telling me that faeries are *real*. What, is Def Jam sending you unicorns instead of Benzes, now?" (Sequel to “and the moon in their net”.)
When he thought back on it later, Gerard could admit there was something morbidly funny about finding out after leaving the fucking TRL Awards.
*
"You know," Gerard said, rounding the corner, "I could have sworn I saw -- oh, shit." He stopped so fast that Frank ran right into his back.
"Dude, what the hell?" he said. "Dammit. Now I have coffee all over me *again*--"
And then Frank shut up, because he'd lifted his head to look for something -- probably napkins -- and seen it, too.
Pete and Patrick were standing just inside the green room, kissing softly. Something about it reminded Gerard of the one and only time he'd walked in on Pete and Mikey last summer, which was stupid because they were both still clothed and no one was saying anything he'd need hypnosis to scrub out of his brain, but.
"Hey," Mikey said, waving. He was on the couch on the other side of the room, Sidekick in hand. Probably talking to Alicia, Gerard thought, half-dazed. "Something wrong?"
*
"You *knew*?" Gerard said quietly, not quite able to hide his surprise. They were back at their hotel -- Fall Out Boy's, anyway, since they'd gotten in the day before and had spent the night. Pete had invited them, and their flight wasn't leaving 'til that night, so he'd said okay. It was that or go to Sharper Image, which never ended well. Bob had threatened to actually start kicking Mikey's ass if he brought one more tiny, hideously expensive technological...thing onto the bus.
Mikey blinked at him. "Of course I knew," he said. "We've been talking lately."
Which -- okay, they had, but somehow Gerard hadn't figured "we've been talking" translated into "I'm totally cool with my ex-boyfriend hooking up with his best friend". "And you're okay with this."
More blinking. "I'm *engaged*," Mikey said, sounding for all the world like Gerard was crazy.
And there wasn't a polite way in the world to tell your little brother that yes, he was engaged, but it hadn't stopped him the last time he and Pete had decided to "hang out", so Gerard just shook his head and tried to look less startled.
"Besides," Mikey added, "it's not that surprising. Except in that way where you're surprised where anything's happening, but not about, like, the underlying emotions. You know?"
"Yeah," Gerard said, even though he really didn't.
"Hey," Pete said, appearing between the two of them like -- actually, there wasn't an appropriate metaphor for it. Jeph did things like that sometimes, almost magically appearing out of nowhere, and he'd seen Quinn do it once or twice, but he hadn't known Pete could, too. Fucker. "I need to talk to Mikey for a second, if that's okay." He glanced at Patrick, who was on the other bed talking about something with Frank, heads bowed together.
Patrick looked up and blinked at him, cocking his head to one side. Pete did the same thing back at him; probably unconsciously, Gerard thought. If he lived to be a hundred, he was never going to get used that in people who weren't related. He and Mikey didn't even do it that often, for fuck's sake.
"In private," Pete added.
Translation: we're going to go have sex now, so everyone please just raise your voices when the rhythmic thumping starts. Alarmed, Gerard looked at Patrick.
"Bathroom's free," Patrick said, and Pete nodded. He grabbed Mikey's hand and yanked him into the bathroom, closing the door behind them. Gerard heard the lock snick.
Frank stared at Patrick. "You're *okay* with this?" he said incredulously.
"Why wouldn't I be?" Patrick asked. He looked a little baffled.
Frank leaned over. It was sort of an awkward angle, but he didn't look uncomfortable; Frank was like that sometimes, part-mountain goat or something. "Patrick," he said, taking hold of the other man's shoulders, "if -- if there's something going on you need to tell us about, some...fuck, I don't know, private arrangement or whatever--"
"What are you talking about?" Patrick looked genuinely baffled, now. Gerard knew the feeling.
"YOU'RE FUCKING KIDDING ME!" Mikey shouted, and Frank whipped around to look at the door and fell off the bed.
*
"Okay," Gerard said, pinching the bridge of his nose, "you're going to have to say that again, because I had to have heard you wrong the first time."
"No," Patrick said from the other bed, not looking up from whatever he was doing on his laptop. "You really didn't."
Gerard glared at him and looked back at Pete.
Pete just looked insulted. "What? You didn't."
"Really? Because I could have sworn that my little brother just told me that his ex-boyfriend told *him* that we were both part faerie. As in Shakespeare play-faerie. Terri Windling-faerie. Neil Gaiman-faerie."
"Okay, it's not really like Sandman," Pete said. "Not anymore, anyway. Modern technology isn't just encroaching over--"
"Pete!" Patrick yelled. "Not helping."
"Right," Pete said, "sorry. Habit." He shook his head. "But yeah, I told him that, and no, I'm not kidding. You didn't hear me wrong, you aren't hallucinating, and you're not being Punk'd." He looked almost apologetic. "I wasn't even going to say something, but *somebody* --" he glared at Patrick "--told me it wasn't really fair to keep it from you anymore."
"You're so full of shit," Gerard said flatly.
"Well, yeah," Pete said, "but that doesn't mean I'm wrong."
"No, you really, really are."
"What if he's not?" Mikey asked quietly. Gerard had actually forgotten he was in the room; so had everyone else, actually, because they all turned to look at him. "Because -- I mean, it sort of makes sense--"
"No it doesn't," Gerard said, because really. "If you want to tell me that Pete isn't entirely human, I'm sorry, but that's not the surprise of the fucking year--"
"*Hey*," Pete said, at the same time Mikey and Patrick said, in identical irritated tones, "Gerard."
"--*but*," Gerard added, "that doesn't mean that we aren't. For Christ's sake, you're standing here telling me that faeries are *real*. What, is Def Jam sending you unicorns instead of Benzes, now?"
"Well, that would be stupid," Patrick said. "Since no one here is a virgin, so no one here could touch them." And -- really, that just made the whole thing *worse*, that Patrick was lending it any kind of credence.
"Oh, what," Gerard snapped, "you're telling me I'm just gonna go like *this*--"
The lamp slammed into the far wall and shattered.
There was a very long pause.
"Okay, could you not do that again?" Pete finally said. "Or at least give me, like, ten minutes to come up with a decent reason why we're trashing our hotel room? Because this is gonna be on some news outlet tomorrow, and I should warn people before it breaks or I'm gonna get that lecture again."
*
"You're really not kidding," Gerard said, maybe an hour later.
Pete shook his head.
Gerard looked at Patrick. "He's really not kidding."
"Not even a little," Patrick said. He looked normal. Pete looked worried and a little pissed off, probably about the lamp. Mikey looked like Gerard felt, shell-shocked and sort of dreaming. Frank...didn't actually have an expression, which was either really good or really bad, depending.
Gerard had no idea how he looked.
"It doesn't seem real," he said faintly. He looked at his hands. "I'm--"
"Not entirely human," Pete said. "No."
It actually -- okay, it didn't make *sense*, but Pete had been pretty matter-of-fact about the whole thing. He'd explained that a couple generations back, someone in their family had slept with someone who wasn't human, and that person had had a kid, and that kid had grown up to be one of their parents, and bam! Gerard and Mikey, part-faerie. "You're probably closer, generation-wise," Pete had said, "because I can't make shit move even if I try."
"And don't think he hasn't," Patrick had said. "Seriously, if you want an afternoon of fun, you should come backstage with us sometime and watch him try to telekinetically move a package of tube socks.”
There'd been more basic information; he'd spent a lot of time on "okay, don't talk shit about the Court if you can help it," which had earned him a foot to the back of his head from Patrick, which had degenerated to Pete trying to carry on an intelligent conversation while not looking as he reached around to knock Patrick's foot away and smiling a little.
Finally, Mikey said, "I can feel you." Pete and Gerard looked at him. "Both of you, in my head. Sort of."
Which, now that he mentioned it, Gerard could too. Mikey was like a bonfire in the back of his head; Pete was like a candle, if a particularly steady one. Frank and Patrick were -- not dead spaces, exactly, but very, very faint. Like stars.
"It's like gaydar," Pete said. He looked substantially kinder than he had with Gerard, but then, Gerard had never slept with Pete. "You can sense others, once you know. It's like an early warning system."
"Or Spider-Sense," Patrick added, which made Gerard nod. Better reference.
"You can't ever unknow it," Pete said, still kindly. "It's -- it doesn't go away. It's never going to go away. You're just going to get used to it."
Mikey looked at him. "Mom and Dad--"
"--don't ever have to know," Pete said. "If they don't know and you don't tell them, it just...you can live with it your entire life and never know, and nothing ever happens. My parents don't know, and neither do my brother and sister. And I'm not telling them, either."
"Oh," Gerard said suddenly, "but you felt compelled to tell *us*?"
He wasn't mad, exactly, but it -- it was *sudden*. It was like having something giant and terrifying dropped in your lap, and then just abandoned, with no instructions or any fucking idea what to do. Maybe it'd be cool in a little while, but right now it was just shitty.
"Hey," Patrick said sharply. "If you're going to be mad at anyone, be mad at me. It was my stupid idea."
"It wasn't stupid," Frank said, speaking for the first time in what felt like days. "It..." He looked at Patrick. "Thank you," he said sincerely, and glanced at Pete. "Both of you."
Pete shrugged, but he looked slightly mollified. "If it wasn't me, it would've been someone else," he said. "And they probably would have just said it and watched shit go up in smoke. This way, you get some warning."
"You told me in the *bathroom*," Mikey said. He sounded insulted.
"Well, I would have liked to have told you in, like, actual privacy, but--" Pete shot a look at Gerard, who just rolled his eyes.
"Yeah," Gerard said, "'cause the *last* time you were alone with Mikey, it ended so well." Something about Pete just brought out the pissy older brother in him, always had.
"Okay," Frank said, before Pete could do more than glare and open his mouth to respond, "we're not getting into this now. We're *not*," he added when Gerard looked at him, "unless you want to start chucking furniture around, Gee. And I'm sorry, but I'd rather you practice with that shit first so I don't get accidentally clipped in the ear or whatever."
"I'm fine--"
"You're really not," Patrick called. Gerard looked over -- and holy shit, he'd moved to the table, which was now vibrating ever so slightly. It was like a tiny concentrated earthquake.
Gerard's eyes widened and he thought calm, calm, calm and thought about his bunk back on the bus, the smell of paint and the feeling of blank canvas under his fingers. The vibrating stopped.
"Thank you," Patrick said a second later. "So you, you know, might want to keep a handle on your temper."
Gerard stared at his hands. "That's new," he said, a little weakly.
"It gets easier with practice," Pete said after a couple of seconds. "Controlling it, I mean. And the flinging-stuff-around part. Both of them." He threaded his fingers together and wiggled the fingers in place. "It's -- they're linked."
"Wow," Mikey said mildly. "Hey, what do you think I can do?"
"Right now," Frank said, "I think you and Gerard can stay here with Pete while Patrick and I go get dinner." If he was freaked out, he didn't show it. But then, Frank was really hard to actually unnerve. Gerard didn't think he'd ever appreciated it this much before, not even back when he was getting fucked up every day.
"I think," he said slowly, looking up at Pete, "we have a lot to talk about."
"You know," Pete said, "you're really not wrong."
*
"It didn't freak you out at first?" Gerard asked Patrick, later.
Patrick shrugged. He'd put the laptop away after Pete had lifted his head and threatened to toss it into traffic if he didn't cut out the goddamn typing and let him get some sleep. "I don't think he would," he'd said, "but you can't always tell with Pete." But he'd said it fondly, and he'd had that same my-God-my-dick-is-making-me-stupid-and-I-don't-really-care look on his face he sometimes saw on his own, usually in pictures with Frank. He and Gerard had gone outside to sit on the balcony.
"We had other things to worry about," Patrick said. "Pete wasn't actually going to say anything, but he'd managed to piss off the Queen of All Faerie, and we had to formally apologize or she'd kill us all--"
"Wait, what?"
"--and that sort of made it worse." Patrick pulled the bedspread tighter around himself and looked thoughtful. "I was more worried about maybe being killed to freak out about him not being human, which isn't even the point."
"It isn't," Gerard said warily. His feelings on Pete were mixed at best: he couldn't not like the guy, because Mikey had been crazy into him for a long time and still loved him a little; and because Patrick loved him, and that wasn't something he did easily and with no regard. And he was honest, which Gerard could respect, even if wasn't the same exact kind of honesty as his own, not to mention fairly easy on the eyes, though he wasn't really Gerard's type. But he couldn't *like* him, either, because he could be capricious and kind of a dick, and he'd seen how charisma could backfire and hurt other people. Gerard wasn't convinced that Pete wasn't here from another planet or something, with a basic understanding of how human beings worked emotionally but not a lot of practical experience in other people's feelings.
But people Gerard loved, loved him, so what the hell. It wasn't like he was in a band with the guy.
"No," Patrick said. "I mean -- okay, you can't think of it like some huge thing, because then you'll wind up taking anti-depressants in a Best Buy parking lot in the middle of February and stranding your best friends in an emotional void that takes a long time to come out of." He glanced at Gerard. "Um. You know, hypothetically."
Gerard grinned and tapped the ash off his cigarette. "Hypothetically," he said, nodding.
"He's still Pete," Patrick said. "He hasn't changed. What you know about him has, but *he* hasn't. And you're still Gerard. It doesn't invalidate everything you know about yourself: you still like art, you're still in a band, you're still from New Jersey. You just...make this part of yourself, too."
"You stole that from Dogma," Gerard said after a second.
"Yeah," Patrick said, "but it's a really good movie. Also: not wrong."
"That's why I keep him," Pete said sleepily from the doorway, rubbing the bridge of his nose and yawning. He made his way across the balcony and over to Patrick -- yelping the whole way, because his feet were bare and the balcony floor was cold -- and nudging him with his toe. "I like my men smart. Move over."
"You're such an asshole," Patrick muttered, but he was smiling. He unwrapped a corner of the bedspread and let Pete slide in, then wrapped it around both of them. "Why are you awake, anyway?"
"I couldn't sleep," Pete said. His voice was muffled. "I got cold." He peeked the top of his head out, from the nose up, and looked at Gerard. "Are you freaking out less?"
Gerard thought about it for a second. "A little," he admitted. "I still think this is the shittiest practical joke ever, but it's too late for me to think about it just now."
"I'm cutting back on those," Pete said. He slipped his head back under, then lifted a hand and awkwardly touched Patrick's cheek. "*Someone* gets cranky." He poked his head back out and added, "I was not always this whipped. I want you to know that."
"I'll try," Gerard said. He took a drag off his cigarette, tapped some more ash away. "Why weren't you going to say anything? If you don't mind me asking."
"Because," Pete said, "it's a pain in the ass. I don't get anything useful out of it, except the deep-seated fear that every friend I've ever had has been my friend because something told them to and the occasional compulsion to swear oaths." He looked a little more awake. "Did you get that? The friend thing, I mean."
Gerard shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "The ones I have I'm close with, but I'm not like you. You're a fucking walking MySpace account."
"Fuck off," Pete said, but it sounded amiable enough. "But you've never felt that? Like -- if you just wanted something enough, you could have it?"
"Everyone does that."
"No they don't. Not like us."
Gerard opened his mouth to say no, he didn't think so -- but the band had been like that, hadn't it? Not without work, because they'd been through enough shit to kill most bands even before the whole thing with Matt, but he'd never really questioned if they were going to make it. Deciding to do it, recording demos, growing slow and steady...it had all just *blossomed*. They'd worked their asses off to get here, but he'd never questioned whether or not they should be doing it. Not once, not for a second.
"I don't know," he finally said.
Pete nodded. "Yeah, it's gonna be like that for a while. You're going to second-guess every part of your life for the next, like, month. And that's in addition to reminding yourself not to get pissed off and make expansive hand gestures, because eventually someone's gonna notice that every time Gerard Way gets angry and starts waving his hands, lights start blowing up."
Shit. He hadn't actually thought about that. "And then?"
"And then," Pete said, "you'll wake up one morning, think to yourself 'I'm not entirely human', then shrug and poke Frank in the shoulder and ask him if he wants to go to breakfast with you."
Gerard just stared at him.
"No, really," Pete said. "You can get used to anything if you work at it long enough." He yawned once, then suddenly looked more awake. "Oh! Try something for me, okay?"
"That depends," Gerard said, looking at him warily. "What?"
Pete didn't say anything; he just kept staring at Gerard very intently, almost fixated. Gerard waved a hand in front of his face. "Wentz," he said, "*what*?"
Pete blinked and sat back, then let out a sigh. "Shit."
"I told you it probably wouldn't work," Patrick said, not entirely unsympathetically.
"What are you -- oh my God, were you trying to whammy me?"
"Yeah," Pete said. "I'm trying to figure if it works on people when they know what I am. Or what they are. Whichever. I'm not picky. So far, no."
"Which I already said," Patrick said, rolling his eyes, "if you'll remember back two freaking hours--"
"No, seriously," Pete said, looking at Gerard again, "try something for me." Patrick pulled on his ear, *hard*, and he added, "Please."
Gerard rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Fine," he said, sighing. "What?"
"Try to whammy Patrick."
"*What*?" Gerard looked at Patrick, who just looked long-suffering again.
"Humor me," Pete said. "It doesn't matter what, just -- focus on something and try to make him feel it. Do it, say it, whatever. Something."
"I swear to God," Patrick muttered, "I'm getting you fish or something when we get back home." He looked at Gerard and said, "It's fine. He's testing something."
Gerard shrugged and looked at Patrick, tried to concentrate.
Two weeks, he told himself and the air. Two weeks, most of them on cramped tour buses, avoiding making eye contact with anyone else for fear of hearing Lead Singers with Crushes jokes for the rest of the summer. A lot of kissing; not a lot of sex, but what we had was good. More talking than anything else, words pressed against sweaty, sleepy skin, and even when you're talking it sounds like music. It wasn't permanent, wasn't supposed to be, but I got to see you in a way no one else ever will, not even the man curled up in your lap, and I'm still so grateful for that it hurts. Smooth pale skin, widesoft mouth, and you let out long, shuddering breaths when you're coming. You taste salty--
Gerard made himself stop.
Pete looked back and forth between them. "Anything?" he asked.
"My nose itches," Patrick said, "and I'm really starting to get cold out here. Other than that, no."
"Okay." Pete looked relieved. "Just wanted to make sure it wasn't me." He kissed Patrick on the mouth and got out from under the bedspread. "I'm going back to bed. You're coming in?"
"In a minute," Patrick said. Pete nodded and kissed him again, then went back inside.
"You *do* seem to be freaking out less," Patrick told Gerard, wrapping the bedspread around himself again. "Though that could just be the nicotine talking."
Gerard poked him with his foot. "It's not like I have a choice," he said. "I made a lamp go across the room, for fuck's sake. If I keep freaking out, I'm just going to get upset and do it again, only this time I might not be with friends. I might be at FUSE, or the VMAs, or somewhere else with a hundred cameras." He shrugged and stabbed out his cigarette on the balcony floor. "I figure I'll just ignore it."
"I don't know that that's how it works," Patrick said. "But you can give that a shot, sure." He got to his feet. "You coming back inside?"
"Might as well," Gerard said, getting to his feet. "Mikey and Frank are probably freaking out right now, wondering if I'm at a bar or something."
"Please," Patrick said, opening the door to the room. He lowered his voice to a murmur. "Like you'd break your sobriety for something this trivial."
Gerard looked at him for a second, then leaned in and kissed his cheek. "You're sure you want me to leave you here alone?" he said, glancing at the bed.
"He's not alone," Pete said, using his outdoor voice. "And you're taking away my bedwarmer, Gerard, so fuck off back to your own room. I'll see you in the morning."
Gerard glanced back at Patrick. "Is he always this much fun?"
"Oh, no," Patrick said. "Sometimes he's cranky."
*
Mikey had somehow managed to talk the label into getting them two singles instead of one double with three people crammed inside -- a minor miracle, Gerard figured, considering that the day before he'd called them they'd been insisting they didn't even need to stay overnight in New York.
It sort of made sense, now. Gerard was starting to wonder just how many things in their lives had been brushed by magic, and not just surprisingly good people skills.
Gerard closed the door behind him carefully, trying not to make a sound. He could just get his shoes off and get into bed, and he'd be--
"So," Frank said lazily, opening one eye to look at him. "You're a creature out of myth and legend."
"Yes, Frank," Gerard said. He rolled his eyes and unzipped his hoodie. "I'm a frigging pixie."
Frank sat up on one elbow. "No, really," he said, "it explains a lot. Your magnetism, your exotic good looks, your fondness for D&D--"
Gerard threw his shoe at him. Grinning, Frank dodged it.
"You're not freaking out about this?" Gerard said. "Even a little?"
"Gerard," Frank said, "I have seen you drunk, I have seen you stoned, I have seen you practically comatose. You mentally throwing a lamp across Pete's hotel room isn't even the weirdest thing I've seen you do this month. And I figure if I could still be in love with you when you were falling-over drunk and doing lines of coke, you having wood nymphs as distant cousins isn't going to faze me much." He yawned and scrubbed at his face, falling back against the mattress. He tossed the covers back, exposing a pale line of thigh. “Get over here, okay?"
Gerard did.
*
The knock on the door came around six in the morning.
Gerard lifted his head and snarled something wordless, then fell back to the mattress and tried to go back to sleep. But no, the knocking kept going. He shoved Frank's arm aside, earning a mumble, and climbed out of bed.
"*What*?" he muttered, rubbing at his eyes.
"Morning," Pete said, so cheerfully that Gerard kind of wanted to slug him for a moment. But just a moment, because he really did think violence was stupid, and more importantly, he had the sneaking suspicion Pete would just wait 'til his back was turned and come at him with a broken bottle of Rolling Rock or a pool cue or something. Not a bad guy, really, but a sneaky son-of-a-bitch. "Feel like going for a walk? I need coffee."
"Starbucks isn't open," Gerard said automatically.
Pete just looked at him. "It's six in the morning, and we're in New York."
Gerard yawned into his hand. "Give me ten minutes," he said, and closed the door.
*
It turned out to be closer to fifteen minutes, what with digging his clothes out from under Frank's and finding his shoes. He'd woken Frank up for all of ten seconds, but Frank had mumbled something about birds and gone right back to sleep. If Gerard timed it right, Frank wouldn't even know he'd been gone; the guy could sleep through an earthquake.
The Starbucks across from the hotel *was*, in fact, open. They hadn't even been the first ones inside, though they had been third and fourth, respectively. It was weirdly gratifying to see that Pete wasn't so different from him -- tall latte, half-caf, skim milk. He wasn't even wearing eyeliner, for once, though Gerard was pretty sure he still had on some from the night before.
"So," Pete said, still sounding cheerful even if he looked half-awake, "do you hate me yet? I mean, more than you usually do."
"I don't hate you," Gerard said, because it was true. He didn't *hate* Pete. He sort of wanted Frank to kick his ass, or maybe Bob, but he didn't hate him. "I just don't know why you decided to tell us. I mean, if you've known all this time-"
"I told you," Pete said, "it wasn't my idea." He blinked, looked away for a second. "Um. Entirely," he added.
Gerard just drank his coffee and looked at him.
"Oh, *come on*," Pete said. "I wasn't even going to say anything to Patrick about the two of you, but it just slipped out one night when we were writing, and then it's been, like, nothing but that goddamn long-suffering face, and I don't know whose bright idea it was to make me fall in love with someone with an actual fucking conscience, but it kind of sucks." He took a sip of coffee and looked mournful. "He started withholding oral sex, man. And then yesterday it was 'oh, look who else is here,' and I'm sorry if I fucked up your world view, Gerard, but the possibility of me ever getting a blowjob again kind of trumps that."
Gerard couldn't actually argue the point; he'd been on the receiving end of Patrick's blowjobs, he knew what Pete was missing. And just the idea of Frank ever doing the same thing--
"Okay," he said, "point."
Pete was quiet a minute, then said, "So have you told Frank yet?"
Gerard stared at him. "He was in the room with us, dumbass," he said. "He knows all about--"
"No," Pete said, "not about you and Mikey."
Gerard kept staring. Then he remembered: forest fire, candle, stars.
"Oh fuck," he muttered.
"Come on," Pete said. "You're trying to tell me you haven't told him yet? That that wasn't the first thing you did when you got two minutes to yourselves?"
"I don't know," Gerard snapped. "The first time you got Patrick to yourself for two minutes, did you tell *him*?"
Pete looked at him for a long time, then sighed. "No," he said, "and I'm not going to. I'd just get the 'well, why the hell couldn't you tell me this back *then*?' speech and have to sleep in my own bed until he stops freaking out. And it's Patrick, so I could be there a while." He shook his head. "It's practically negative generation anyway."
"Negative--"
"It's like diminishing returns," Pete said. "The closer you are to the ancestor, the more power you have access to. You and Mikey are stronger than I am, but the line sort of trails off at whatever *I'm* at. It's possible to be part-faerie and not be able to do anything with it. It shows up in other ways, though -- creativity, artistic expression. A tendency toward tattoos and piercings." He cocked an eyebrow. "Sound familiar?"
"Huh," Gerard said thoughtfully. "You think that's why everything just bounces off Patrick?"
"I don't know," Pete said. He leaned back against his chair. "It doesn't bounce off Joe or Andy, but it takes longer to work on them."
Gerard stared at him. "Wait," he said, "you--"
Pete was staring at him like he was crazy. "Uh, yeah?" He started ticking names off on his fingers. "Patrick, Joe, Andy, Bob, Ray, Bert and all his guys--"
"You're shitting me."
"I really wish you'd stop saying that," Pete said. He rubbed his eyebrow. "No, I'm not shitting you. Dude, you should have seen Warped. I could count on one hand the amount of people who *weren't* part-faerie, and that's with fingers left over."
Gerard tried not to gape at him. "That's ridiculous," he said. "If we're talking odds--"
"So don't talk odds," Pete said. "I have all kinds of respect for math, but it's pretty linear. Multiply A by B and get C; divide C by A and get B." He looked at Gerard. "How many artists do you know? How many musicians, how many painters, how many poets and people with stars in their heads? It's not that surprising. Statistically, it's insane, but statistically, you should be working a dead-end office job, and I should be dead."
Cruel, Gerard thought, and mean, but not needlessly. "If I don't tell them--" God, it even sounded wrong in his head.
"--then they won't know," Pete said. He scrunched down a little, pulled his hoodie closer to his face. "Or someone else will tell them, but I don't think so. They're pretty -- not null, but that's the best word I can think of right now." He shrugged. "Past, like, my generation, it's sort of a moot point. You can't do anything."
Gerard thought about Bob and Ray, how they looked on stage, how they were tied up with him as tight as Mikey could ever be. He thought about Patrick and how he sounded, and the way Bert could be, sometimes, madness doled out in controlled bursts. "Bullshit."
"They can't do anything like mentally fling lamps around," Pete corrected, "or make people go along with their dumb-ass ideas. I don't mean they can't do *anything*. The odds of someone tracking them down and telling them is really slim."
"But if someone wanted to make a giant fucking mess of--"
"See, you're thinking like a human again," Pete said. Gerard could just hear the mockery there, dry and a little bitter. It sounded frighteningly like Bert could, when he was sober and feeling particularly caustic. "Faeries - actual faeries, the ones who think this is a nice place to visit but don't live here - don't care. We're half-breeds, by-blows of an interesting vacation a couple generations back. As long as we don't butt our noses into their politics, they could give a shit if we live or die or what we do in-between. And if someone like you or me tells them, so what? It sucks, and you'll get a ration of shit for, like, ten years, but it won't affect them the same way. They'll freak out, and they'll be able to sense others, but that's it."
Gerard stared at him.
Pete shrugged and drank some more coffee. "And that's it," he said. "That's all I've got. Which isn't a lot, but most of what *I* know was passed on to me by a guy who now thinks I'm a dick, so just tell yourself things could always be worse, because at least I'm not talking shit about you on Livejournal."
Gerard kept staring. "My God," he said, stuck between appalled and fascinated. "You're the worst Yoda ever."
"I'm not trying to be. I'm just trying to pass on a few pertinent pieces of information so you don't wind up in a park in Los Angeles, performing for the Queen of All Faerie like your life depends on it, which it very well might." Pete paused. "You know, hypothetically."
"Mikey's going to have questions," Gerard warned.
"Of course he is," Pete said. "I already said he could call and ask. He can even call and ask your questions for you, because we both know the less time we spend around each other, the better." He looked at Gerard critically. "You're going to be okay?" And wonder of wonders, he sounded like he gave a crap.
Gerard thought about it for a couple of seconds. He'd spent the last half-day making furniture crash into walls and watching Mikey get expressions he never thought he'd see on his brother's face again. And Frank kept touching him every couple of minutes and grinning in delight, which was wonderful and a little weird all at once.
"Yeah," he finally said. "I am. Fucking confused for a while, but. Yeah."
"Good," Pete said. "Because if you weren't, Mikey would never let me live it down. And he's the next-to-last person I want doing big, soulful eyes of guilt in my direction." He picked up his coffee and got up from the table, came around and briefly kissed Gerard's cheek before turning to go.
"You're kissing the wrong Way," Gerard said suddenly, raising his voice just a little, enough to be heard over by the door.
Pete blinked at him. "According to who?" he asked. "Besides, I figure we're all family now." He waggled his fingers once, in Gerard's direction, and leaned back against the door. The light hit him just right, all early morning golds and pinks--
--and for a second it was like he was staring at a stranger, all angular features and dark eyes. The light turned his hair red where it touched, and his features were maybe too pretty to be considered masculine, but Gerard would bet money that somewhere in another plane of existence, there was a guy running around who didn't look all that different.
For that matter, he realized, there was probably one running around looking like him and Mikey.
"Have a good drive back to Jersey," Pete added, and left.
*
Frank wasn't there when Gerard got back to the room, let alone waiting up for him, but Mikey was. Trying to, anyway; he'd apparently fallen asleep halfway through. Gerard shook his arm. "Mikey," he said quietly. "Mikey. Hey."
"Hey," Mikey said sleepily. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes. "Everything go okay?"
"Fine," Gerard said. He sat on the edge of the bed and took his sneakers off. "We didn't kill each other, and he said if I had any questions, I should tell you so you can pass them along."
"You could just call him yours-" Mikey started, but Gerard looked at him. Mikey changed the subject.
"Do you have any, so far? Because I was making up a list earlier, and I figured--"
"Mikey," Gerard broke in, "you don't think this is weird? Any of it?"
Mikey looked at him like he was nuts. Or tried to, anyway; without his contacts in or his glasses, Mikey's short-distance vision was crap. "Of course I think it's weird," he said. "Pete shows up out of nowhere and announces that we're part-faerie and can do magic. That's like something we made up when we were kids."
It was weirdly close to some of the things they'd made up when they were kids, actually, except little Gerard had thought it was wonderful and not at all surprising, but grown-up Gerard couldn't really wrap his brain around it.
"He made it sound like a complete fucking nightmare," Gerard said, falling back on the bed. He stared up at the ceiling. "Like, there's nothing good that can come out of it. But if that's true, why did he even say anything? I mean, unless he just wanted to be an asshole, and I'm sorry, Mikey, but that wouldn't be a big fucking surprise."
Mikey was silent for a minute.
"Pete's -- okay, you know those kids you had drama with?" Mikey asked. "The ones who were really nice guys, and actually kind of cool, but they wore a lot of black and tried too hard?" Gerard nodded. "He's like that, a little. He's one of the nicest guys I've ever met, and smart and funny and *great*, but some days I want to smack him in the back of the head and tell him to cut it out."
Gerard turned to look at him. He was pretty sure he was gaping a little. "And you slept with him," he said after a second, because it was the first thing that popped out.
"Of course I did," Mikey said. "Him occasionally being a dick who likes the sound of his own voice didn't stop me from caring about him, and it didn't mean he stopped being smart and funny and really nice. It just meant I had to dig a little harder to see it." He fell on his back next to Gerard. "And when he gets really freaked out, he makes things into way bigger deals than they need to be," he added, a little pragmatically, "so you probably shouldn't listen to him when he says it's all bad stuff." He shook his head. "If you're asking me to be pissed at him, Gee, I can't do it. I can't imagine not knowing, now."
Gerard pushed himself up on one elbow and looked at Mikey. "Have you. Y'know. Tried anything?" He wiggled his fingers in the same vague motion Pete had.
Mikey folded his hands on his chest. "I can't move lamps," he said, sounding mournful. His face lit up. "Oh! But, okay, shut up, this is cool." He sat up and cracked his fingers -- Gerard winced at the sound -- then cupped his hands in front of him. His expression folded in on itself, becoming blank and unreadable--
--and then, suddenly, there was a tiny flame in his cupped hands.
Gerard stared at him for maybe thirty seconds, just watching the flame, then looked back at Mikey. "Shut up," he said quietly.
"I know." Mikey grinned. "It's portable, too. See?" He moved his hands apart, and the flame stayed in the palm of his right hand, curling in and making a little ball. It was like something out of Labyrinth, only cooler, because this wasn't mid-80s CGI; this was *real*, this little ball of fire, and his little brother was tossing it from hand to hand like a tennis ball.
"I think I could throw it," Mikey admitted, still tossing it to himself, "but I don't want to try in the hotel."
"Hey," Gerard said, scooting back to sit up against the headboard, "try--" and he held his hands in front of him like he was going to serve a volleyball. Mikey didn't ask anything, just tossed it in Gerard's general direction -- and sure enough, it lit into Gerard's hands like it had a fucking homing device or something.
Gerard stared at the flame in his hands - a flame again, not a ball - before he said, "Okay, that's fucking awesome."
"Throw it back," Mikey said, and Gerard did.
They were still playing catch when Frank came back into the room, smelling like smoke and putting his cellphone back in his pocket. He watched them for a minute, looking a little bemused, then climbed into the bed and rested his head in Gerard's lap. "Don't set me on fire," he warned, and went back to sleep.
*
They'd gotten to Jersey around ten that morning and promptly crashed at Mikey and Gerard's mom's house, coming in the back door and flumping down in the living room rather than heading all the way up a flight of stairs and going to all the trouble of turning the sheets down. It was way easier to kick Mikey in the ass around four in the afternoon and send him up for pillows and blankets.
That was how Gerard woke up early that evening, Mikey on the sofa -- stretched out, the skinny little fuck -- and Frank pressed up next to him on the floor, wrapped around him and still wearing his shoes. There was a note from their mom pinned to the arm of the sofa, but Gerard glanced at it just enough to confirm it was her handwriting before going back to sleep.
Some time later, Frank woke him up with a smack to the shoulder and a cup of coffee. Mikey was on the phone with someone -- probably Alicia, though he was in the kitchen and talking in eavesdrop-proof murmurs, so Gerard couldn't really tell.
He’d thought about saying something to their mom, on the drive back, but decided against it; she was perfectly okay being normal, and the last thing Gerard wanted was to freak her out more than absolutely necessary. He wondered if Elena had known, then decided she hadn’t. Then he remembered the practical motion of her hands, the way she’d always known what was going on with him before he’d said anything, and changed it to a solid “she’d maybe suspected something”.
"So," Frank said, sitting down cross-legged next to him. "Weird couple of days."
"Very weird," Gerard agreed. "But we got a shiny statue from MTV, and Mikey and I got brand new superpowers, so it wasn't a waste." He yawned and drank his coffee, leaned into the touch when Frank started playing with his hair.
And he could see all of it, suddenly -- the way Frank's eyes could get closed off if he didn't want to talk, the way he couldn't be anything but naked on stage. How it always seemed like he wasn't getting new tattoos, he was peeling away useless skin that had gotten in his way. The way he smiled.
I can't imagine not knowing, now, Mikey had said the other night. And that was all of it, really.
"Hey," Gerard said, touching Frank's arm.
Frank stopped touching Gerard's hair and and looked at him, forehead crinkling. "Everything okay?" he asked, putting his own cup down.
"No, it's fine," Gerard said. He shook his head. "I just -- there's something I need to tell you."
*
This is for everyone who wanted to know if there was going to be a sequel. I HATE YOU ALL. (Also, this is in line with ATMITN canon, not RL-canon, just so y’all know.)
Okay, not true; if I hate anyone, it’s The Used for that goddamn photoshoot where they’re all, like, an element, and Jepha’s fire, and THIS STUPID THING IS NOW A TRIPTYCH SON OF A WHORE. (Extra points if you’ve seen the picture in question and can figure out what the hell Dan would do. And don’t say “he’d be Heart!”, because this is not goddamn Captain Planet. F’real.)