Chapter Text
In Gerard’s defense, he wasn’t staring at the guy in, like, a creepy way or anything. He was just trying to get the details right. Drawing a subject in constant motion was like trying to throw a dart at a moving board. A frenetically moving board that kept spinning around to rinse steaming pitchers and talk to people waiting for coffee and bending to grab a gallon of milk out of the fridge at his knee at, fucking, a million miles a second. Gerard wasn’t even sure what color the guy’s eyes were, he was moving so much. Did this dude ever stand still? It reminded Gerard of a hummingbird. Yes, that. If you stuck a hummingbird in a bell jar and just let it ping around against the glass like a feathered Pong simulation, it would look something similar to what the Current Subject for Totally Un-still Life Portraiture was doing behind the espresso bar. It was fascinating. He could so use that kind of motion in Breakfast Monkey. Maybe, like, some kind of coffee character? A cartoon latte? It was fluid motion for sure, that could translate over visually, you didn’t have to be shaking to be super caffeinated after all, fluid motion made sense for a being made of coffee -
Okay, too many ideas, not enough sketching. Gerard scrawled a quick note grasping at that train of thought in the upper corner and hoped he’d be able to decipher it later.
It was really impressive just how fluid the guy’s motion was, considering Gerard had never seen him in here before, and Gerard came to this coffee shop more often than he went to his own house, probably, but hello, it was like five blocks to the ferry terminal that he was in literally every weekday of his life and what was he supposed to do? Make his own coffee? Gerard had barely enough working brain cells first thing in the morning to get dressed, thanks, he wasn’t going to try to create a coffee-making routine that he would inevitably forget about and then end up having to come here anyway. Besides, he got paid a salary now. (Albeit a shitty, intern-level one.) He could throw as much money as he wanted at coffee he didn’t have to brew himself. Gerard didn’t even see the guy come in, actually, he’d already gotten his latte and set up shop in his usual spot when he happened to look up from Harley Quinn #10 and, well. Next thing he knew he was reaching for his sketchbook.
“Therese, rice milk latte with cardamom for you.”
So the guy had to be new, was the logical conclusion. But he didn’t move like the other newbies Gerard had seen; they were at least a little bit clumsy to start, more hesitant, unsure of the rhythm to making drinks. This guy - Frank, he finally read off of the guy’s elusive name tag, Jesus, he’d only been trying to see it for fifteen minutes - he moved like he’d been born there. Wasn’t even looking at his hands half the time. He must’ve been a barista somewhere else, for awhile, by the look of it. Anyway, what had really caught Gerard’s attention, other than Frank’s kinetics and the newness of him, were his tattoos. They were amazing, and he had more of them than skin, practically, and he would not fucking hold still long enough for Gerard to draw them the way he wanted to, god damn it. Hence the staring. The absolutely not creepy staring.
Also, he was kind of jonesing for something to do with his hands that wasn’t smoking or shoving them through his hair, because he was out of cigarettes and his hair was starting to feel gross. Today was the day the network would get back to him about whether they were going to pick up Breakfast Monkey or not, and he was so anxious about it that he’d almost puked in the shower that morning and he’d accidentally smoked all of his mom’s menthols at the kitchen table. She let him, though, which spoke to the gravity of the situation. (She’d been annoyed about it, but she didn’t say anything and just read the paper instead. Which was nice. Gerard loved his mom.) This was Gerard’s only real shot at his own cartoon, and he could not fuck it up, because he did not have any backup plan whatsoever and he sure as shit was not going to teach or god forbid, work retail. The whole point of going into debt for art school was to avoid retail and retail-adjacent professions.
So far the only one of Frank’s tattoos he was sure he’d nailed was the one of the left side of his neck, because it was the one facing him the most often and when it was, it didn’t move much. Gerard didn’t even have a body to affix it to, just a series of aborted figures in various coffee-making poses hastily penciled on top of one another. He’d doodled it off to the side of the main sketch in its own little study. He stuck the eraser end of his pencil into his mouth and held the sketchpad at arms length to examine his work. It looked sort of like he’d jumbled all of his animation tracing papers together on the light board. It looked like a fucking mess. He frowned at it with all his might, went to rip it off of the pad, and then thought better of it when he realized it had the only coherent tattoo sketch on it. Instead, he flipped violently to a fresh page and felt a little better.
He didn’t make a habit of drawing the baristas here or anything. Actually, he’d never tried before today. He normally did just his regular work; Breakfast Monkey concepts, bat-humanoids, David Bowie but dressed in Tom Cruise’s costume from Interview With the Vampire, normal stuff. In fact he rarely did live studies of real people, not since art school at any rate, mostly because people sort of made Gerard uncomfortable and especially so when there was that intimate element of trying to capture their essence in a drawing, which was the point of live studies. He took inspiration from real people, of course. People on the subway and the ferry and stuff. Sometimes a person had a really cool nose, or their outfit was awesome, or they made a particular expression that Gerard hadn’t seen before, and the bits and pieces of humanity that stuck with him wound up in his art. That was inevitable, he figured. But he never really drew them. Until now.
The problem, he decided, was that he had no sense of place. In the sketch, that is. There was no context for the movement and it felt chaotic without the background of the bar and the rest of the shop. Gerard glanced around to size up the pertinent details. The shop itself was tiny, which was the way he liked it honestly, it meant fewer people for him to suffer. All the windows were on the street-facing side. Four spindly-legged, tall tables with two stools each occupied each window. The bar took up most of the floor space - its pine (? Gerard thought it was maybe pine but he also didn’t know much about wood) counter went in a big L around the machines and you could sit at the shorter side, which was where Gerard liked to set up because there was only one stool and no one could try to share his spot. Sometimes when the shop was busy people would stand practically on top of him while they waited on their coffee, but the shop usually wasn’t busy, so it was fine. Behind Gerard’s spot was a wall, where a couple of bright orange, kind of dingy-looking upholstered armchairs with a beat to hell coffee table between them waited in vain for anyone to sit in them. (Gerard had never once seen them occupied in all the weeks he’d been coming here since he started at Cartoon Network. He felt a little sad for the things. Not sad enough to give up his place on the bar, though.) The opposite wall had a huge, amazing mural of a coffee plant on it that Gerard was not even going to try to replicate for a sketch, and the wall behind the bar had the chalkboard menu on it. Various coffee appliances took up the majority of the counter space, most of it dedicated to the espresso machine, shiny and loud and quite busy at the moment. And in the middle of it all, of course, was Frank, still swirling around like a motherfucker. Gerard watched him flick a stray lock of black hair out of his face before he ducked down to reach into a red bucket for a wiping cloth.
He could admit to himself that yeah, much of the reason he’d started drawing Frank was that he was hot. Gerard was allowed to find people hot. He was not being creepy. He wasn’t. Creepy would be like, openly ogling his ass and then just drawing that. He was observing. It was different, duh.
Drawing, his brain shouted at him, and he shook his head a little, checked his watch. “Fuck,” he said out loud when it told him that he only had five minutes to catch the ferry back to work. Drawing would have to wait. Gerard shoved his pencil behind his ear, scrambled off of the barstool - out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed Frank starting to turn toward him - and stuffed his sketchpad into his bag before draining the last of his coffee and making a break for the door. As he shouldered his way out he lifted his chin and made a nanosecond of accidental eye contact with Frank, who looked…surprised? But then Gerard was on the sidewalk, and the afternoon sun shot directly into his eyeballs, and he didn’t have time to decide whether it was actually surprise or if Frank just wanted to tell him to have a good day or something.
The date was September 7th, 2001. Gerard would remember that later.
By the time he got home that night, Gerard had mostly forgotten about Frank and the drawing because his fucking life was over. The producer who’d heard the Breakfast Monkey pitch finally pulled him and Joe into a conference room and delivered the verdict: they were passing. Too similar, blah blah blah, so sorry, keep drawing. Bastards. The entire fucking reason for his fucking internship was toast, and now he’d have to get absorbed into some other bullshit project he didn’t care about, and everything sucked, and Gerard hated his goddamn motherfucking bitch of a life. He flung himself face first into a miserable heap on his bed and screamed into the comforter.
What the fuck was he supposed to do now?
He ignored his mom when she came down to ask him what he wanted for dinner, and ignored her again when she came back down to tell him she’d made lasagna and he’d better eat it because she slaved over it, and then when she returned much later with a gin and tonic for him he finally mustered the energy to flop his head into her lap and bawl out the whole story. How Joe was so pissed that he punched the elevator door and put a ding in it. How Gerard had taken down all the Breakfast Monkey stuff from his cubicle walls, and then ran away to cry in the stairwell. That Asshole Glenn from six cubes down came in to touch all his action figures and move them ever-so-infuriatingly out of place and tell Gerard all about his pitch that day, and how well it went, and how excited they were about his concept, and so much other slime that by the time he left, Gerard felt like his entire cube was covered in kiss-ass ooze. His mom patiently let him sniffle and snot all over her jeans, and petted his hair.
“Baby, your life is not over,” she told him when he’d finished.
“It is,” Gerard insisted. By now he was clutching his gin and tonic against his stomach, where a little circle of condensation had stained his shirt. He took a long sip from it before he went on, “I got this internship because they were looking for new work, and now they don’t want my work, and I’m fucked. I’ll have to get a job at, I don’t know, fucking Blockbuster or something.” He sniffled a little, eyes refilling at the thought of wearing a vest. Sapphire blue was so not his color.
“No, you’re being a drama queen.” She raised her eyebrows at him when he dropped his jaw in exaggerated surprise. “Gerard, you told me your life was over when they stopped selling that shampoo you liked at Walmart.”
He remembered. In fairness, he’d been viciously hungover and his girlfriend had just dumped him, and bursting into tears in the haircare aisle at the Kearny Walmart had felt like the appropriate reaction at the time. Plus, that shampoo was the only one that made his hair hang straight. He gave his mother a rueful look in response.
“You’ll be fine,” she went on, ignoring the (probably pitiful) expression. “You always have more ideas, even when you think you can’t, and there’ll be a place at the table for at least one of those ideas. Rejection is good, remember? Makes you a better artist."
Gerard rolled his eyes. “Literally no one thinks that, Mom.”
“Grandma told me that one. You want to tell Grandma she’s wrong?” Gerard said nothing, and pouted, because no, of course he didn’t. His mom patted his cheek. “Maybe you should call her and let her tell you herself. I left your plate in the oven for you if you get hungry. More gin in the freezer.”
He sat up to let her stand, and as she started back up the stairs, he called after her, “Mom? I love you.”
She smiled at him from over the banister. “You better. I’m fabulous.” He snorted, and she called over her shoulder before pulling the door shut, “Clean up your room, you fucking slob,” and Gerard laughed, and felt the weight on the middle of his chest lift a little.
He nursed his gin and tonic a little longer while he paced around the room, tossing the dirty laundry in the hamper and gathering up all the dishes to take upstairs. He paused for a moment over the Breakfast Monkey storyboards he’d put together with Joe, remembering how nervous he’d been just before they went into the room and Joe nudging him a little with that weird, crooked smile and murmuring dude, they’ll love it, don’t get hand sweat all over my ink, and Gerard had giggled, and they did their pitch. God, they’d been so sure. And everyone had seemed so positive and smiley about everything - but it didn’t matter. They didn’t want it, and now Gerard was back to square fucking one. He drained his glass, swore, and took the dishes upstairs so he wouldn’t have to look at his failure anymore.
While he was up there, he ate his lasagna - so good, holy shit, if Gerard was ever on death row he’d for sure ask for Donna Way’s Eat-This-You-Sad-Fuck Lasagna, which was its actual name given to it by Mikey - and called his grandma even though it was almost ten o’clock by then. He cried again over the phone while he recounted the story, but by the time he hung up he felt miles better than he had, and he was in the middle of fixing another gin and tonic to take downstairs when the back door popped open and whacked into the wall.
“Mikey!” he said, as his little brother staggered over the threshold and into the kitchen. “Hey, you good?”
“So fuckin’ good,” Mikey agreed, grinning, and scraped out a chair to spill into. “It’s gonna be a good weekend, good, good month, good life, dude. Fuck yeah!” He thrust both fists in the air in triumph, and Gerard giggled at him.
“Getting an early start on your birthday, I see.” Even though Mikey clearly didn’t need one, he made him a gin and tonic too, and Mikey accepted it with both hands and a happy sort of sound. “Thought you would be gone this whole weekend, actually.”
Mikey drank a huge gulp of cocktail and nodded earnestly at Gerard. “M’gonna. This is pregame. Julie’s gonna pick me up innnnnn…ten minutes,” he decided, after squinting at the oven clock. “Wanna come?”
Gerard pretended to think about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “Nah, you have fun. I’d be kind of a drag tonight anyway.”
He waited for Mikey to look up with that scrutinizing face and pick out exactly what it was that was making Gerard sad, but he didn’t, and that’s how he knew Mikey had totally crossed drunk event horizon. Oh well. He’d tell him about it tomorrow, or possibly Sunday, if Mikey was gonna be useless and/or gone tomorrow. When Mikey polished off his drink with two more chugs, Gerard took his glass from him and filled it up with tap water instead before handing it back to Mikey with his eyebrows raised. Mikey didn’t seem to notice. He was telling Gerard about the club they were going to tonight, and how Mikey was pretty sure the owner was going to hire him as a promoter when he was actually twenty-one for real, since he was always bringing people there and they didn’t card him because of that, seriously Gerard they are so nice there, he had to come for Mikey’s birthday party, promise he’d come? And Gerard nodded his solemn duty that yes, he would come, and Mikey grinned at him in that big way he only did when he was plastered, and Gerard made him drink another glass of water before a towering, beautiful woman with a bright blue afro came to collect Mikey at the front door. She shared a look with Gerard, the kind reserved for two sober people who are taking mutual responsibility for a third drunk person, and bundled him outside with a wave.
It made Gerard a little wistful. Mikey’d been so shy before he started college, Gerard had wondered from time to time if he would ever find his tribe. And then he did, in what felt like no time at all, and even though Mikey came home every weekend he never stayed in the house (awake) for very long. Gerard missed him. They hadn’t had a zombie movie marathon in months.
His heart was heavier when he went back down to the basement. The feeling got worse when he looked at the storyboards again, so he stuffed them out of sight behind an overburdened bookshelf and sat back down on the bed, feeling sorry for himself all over again. He decided he’d be less miserable if he slept, so he pulled down the comforter until it got stuck on his bag that he’d forgotten he’d thrown there, and when he went to grab it and toss it on the floor, his sketchbook fell out. Oh, right. Frank. He carefully picked up the sketchbook and flipped it to the page he’d tried to forget earlier. They weren’t bad, he decided, after a few seconds of study. They were rough, for sure, and stacking them on top of each other was dizzying, but they were workable. Maybe if he concentrated on one pose, he could build from there. Still needed sense of place though. He frowned at the scribbles in the top right corner - what the fuck did that say? God, he needed to work on his handwriting - and his fingers drifted down to the tattoo study. As far as tattoos went, it wasn’t the most visually interesting one Frank had, but beggars couldn’t be choosers since he couldn’t fucking see any of the other ones long enough and at any rate it probably came with a cool story. It was old-school, a pair of scissors with a ribbon banner that said “JINX REMOVING” and some numbers underneath that were arranged like a date: 10-31-16. Gerard wondered what it meant. The date was weird since it hadn’t happened yet, unless it was referring to 1916, which was interesting. Maybe it was a family curse that went all the way back to then. Maybe a psychic told him something hinky would happen to him on Halloween in 2016. Or maybe it wasn’t a date at all, but a safe code, or coordinates, or the day Frank thought he would die, or…He fell asleep still theorizing, sketchpad in hand.
Across town, in the world’s draftiest apartment (or at least New Jersey’s), a battlefield trauma kit had been assembled along the bathroom counter. Kinda. Mostly it consisted of bandages and gauze, along with some Advil, a bottle of disinfectant, stuff for stitches, and one very sharp, very shiny disposable scalpel. Frank had to take another swig out of his Maker’s Mark bottle staring at it. Jesus, did he really have to do this? He could just get it covered up. In fact, that was his first suggestion to Them after he got Their first message, because seriously? Mutilation was Their best idea? It didn’t even have to fit in with the design, he could just do solid black, come on please it was a tiny oversight please just let him get it covered up, it wasn’t his fault that Gerard Fucking Way happened to gawk at it -
But They insisted. Didn’t want any more people seeing it and getting confused. “Please send proof of completion.” They were definitely punishing him for fucking up. They could be cruel when They wanted to make Their point.
Why did he ever get the fucking thing on his neck, Frank despaired, eyes still locked on the scalpel. He was going to fucking bleed to death in this outdated awful bathroom and shit, maybe that was what They wanted, it occurred to him all of a sudden. They were tired of Frank screwing the pooch and wanted him to take himself out. He imagined the terminal clean guys coming to incinerate the apartment, picking his bones out of the wreckage, scattering them in, fucking, prehistoric France or something. It wasn’t the first time he’d imagined his own death. By now it was a kind of defense mechanism. Death wasn’t even the worst thing that could happen to him. That honor belonged to - well - he didn’t want to think about it. They could make that happen just as easily, and would if he didn’t follow Their instructions. Scalpel it was.
He chugged a good fourth of the bottle and set it down with a solid thunk on the edge of the bathtub. Maybe he should do this in the bathtub? Make less of a mess. But then, he wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing. Fuck, he was nervous. The whiskey had been to steady his hands a little, but they were still trembling, and that didn’t bode well for not severing Frank’s jugular and/or carotid artery. He turned his head and peered at his tattoo in the mirror. Some jinx removal. He looked tired, he noticed, tilting his chin this way and that to get a good look at himself. Tired and older. He wondered how old he really was, now. He used to keep track in the beginning, but it was easy to fall behind, and now he didn’t bother. Didn’t make much difference. Linear time was meaningless anyway.
But to business.
Frank picked up the scalpel. It felt surprisingly light in his fingers, more like a pencil than a razor sharp instrument of doom. He held it to his throat and pulled a horror-victim face at himself in the mirror. “These are my friends,” he sang to his reflection, and giggled a little hysterically, then shuffled in closer to the mirror. He wished it was brighter in here. The overhead light cast weird shadows in a sickly yellow that made Frank look jaundiced and forced him to squint to see the details he was carving out of his skin. Jesus. He allowed himself a full body shudder, and dropped the scalpel back onto its towel. Probably best to prep the gauze and bandages before the bleeding began.
Twenty minutes later, Frank lay curled up in the bathtub with a huge wad of gauze pressed to his throat, willing himself not to pass out. Fucking fuck that was awful, God, there was not enough bourbon in the world to get that image out of his head, but he was trying. The Maker’s Mark was all but gone. Which might have been why he hadn’t stopped bleeding, despite the stitches that he’d had to do himself holy fuck why. He gulped down the last inch or so of bourbon and groaned when his neck throbbed at him. Performing cosmetic surgery on himself was so not in his fucking wheelhouse.
His Them phone went off on the counter a billion miles away. He flipped it off, and then pulled himself up to his feet, wincing and complaining all the while. When he was upright, he took the gauze away to check on the bleeding. “Gahhhh,” he said, and pushed it back over the stitches again. Blood was not his thing either. Not a whole bunch of it. And not his. He grabbed for the phone.
Please send proof of completion.
“Fucking ghouls,” Frank muttered. He shut his eyes, pulled the gauze away again, and held his phone out at arm’s length to snap a picture of the stitches. “Here’s your motherfucking proof, Big Brother.”
He waited for the response, which came unnervingly quick as usual.
Further contact with subject Gerard Way will be monitored for tampering. Failure to comply in accordance with repair rules will result in redundancy.
Frank threw up his hands and almost winged his phone into the bathtub. “What the fuck! It was one tattoo! I gave you assholes my pound of flesh, give me a break!” He managed to restrain himself from typing exactly that in his response, just shot off the standard reply and sank down on the edge of the bathtub. Therein lay the problem, was the thing. He’d been giving them pounds of flesh over and over again for years. They owned him. He owed Them. Frank ran his free hand over his face and let out a sigh that turned into a growl of frustration.
This was the last event chain that needed repair. The only thing keeping him from going home was making sure Gerard Way got onto the 9:00 AM ferry that Tuesday, September 11th. He could not fuck this up. He couldn’t.
Also, he was probably going to have to burn Gerard’s sketchbook.