Wintertime (Frerard, Sequel to Summertime)

34: there's like one chapter left after this and maybe an epilogue idk yet

Somehow, he'd just stopped caring.

About the inevitability of death, what people thought of him, and what could possibly become of him.

It was awfully weird.

It wasn't like Frank found himself particularly welcoming any of these things, he just found that he was rather accustomed to them, complacent even, and he couldn't quite figure out what to make of that at all.

Or even what he could possibly make of the whole situation at hand, because what was there to make of know that you were going to die in a few days? What was there to make of every cut and bruise open your body, and what was there to make of the man you loved, sat crying in shame and regret at the end of the room?

Honestly, Frank couldn't quite convince himself that this was even real.

That the whole world was real perhaps, which was certainly an odd situation to find himself in; a float statement between existence and non-existence, between life and death, and the wonders of what may lie in between, and the way time seemed to warp and curve as you reached the end of your life, as it did at the beginning: shorter or longer than it should be, as if perhaps the whole being of your life was spherical, cyclical, going round and round, and round, and time simply warping in order to try and catch up.

Catch up with you, and whatever hell you might fling yourself into.

But Frank didn't care about that, about hell: metaphorical hell, or 'real' hell with Satan and fiery pits and torture and pain, because if hell felt like anything at all, it was this silence and the look of pain on Gerard's face and the rather blunt fact that Frank couldn't do anything about it.

He didn't even try to speak to him, because he knew Gerard would spew out thousands of apologies and start crying as he did so, even finding himself tempted to storm out and fuck this all up, because Gerard was definitely taking it worse than Frank.

Gerard was feeling it.

Gerard was reacting like he had done when he was alive.

And honestly none of those things made any sense, but they really weren't Frank's number one priority in that moment, but maybe they should be.

Because gradually, it had been happening: slowly, it was coming back to Gerard - emotion, feeling, pain and reaction, as everything seemed to fade away from Frank - a balance of power, two magnets that had once clicked but were now polar opposites, and perhaps Frank really should have noticed that.

Not that it was Gerard's fault, because he'd been so caught up in feeling emotion to notice that he was indeed feeling emotion and recognise that logically, he shouldn't be capable of such a thing anymore. Which was perhaps ironic, although irony was particularly irrelevant in such a situation.

Because the thing was, neither of them knew what could and what would become of this, because there was no escaping the inevitable, and the inevitable was indeed some kind of chaos, some kind of fuck up, some kind of balance or imbalance of power - something, and Gerard, although run rampant and ruined, fuck, crippled by emotion, knew that.

Frank did too.

Frank did too as he sat on the floor of the room and struggled to focus on the mere objects before him, on the simplicity of the world, on the concept of reality and living, and even Gerard, because everything kept going fuzzy and out of focus, and he kept closing his eyes, just to blink, and opening them again to see twenty minutes had passed.

To put it simply: somehow, he was fading: fading away into nothingness, and perhaps he was dying, but not dying normally, not how he die: dying as a result of wounds and injuries not inflicted by himself but by the man across the room who kept sketching furiously: thick black marker pen lines and striking harsh scenes, that Frank hadn't really captured enough of a glimpse of, because even in a state such as the one he found himself in now, he felt inclined to appreciate Gerard's artwork, because it was always worth appreciating.