The pirate boy (Frerard, Petekey)

Chapter thirty three - Quarter Notes Don't Mean a Thing

Chapter thirty three - quarter notes don't mean a thing

sorry this is so short and so late i cant manage writing much. title from action time vision (ATV).

also this is unrelated, but i love her music so so much and once she favourited my tweet so please listen to nicole dollanganger.

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I couldn't decide what I was more distraught over. The fact that such a great man who had such an impact on people's lives had died in such a mundane and predictable way, or the fact that it was my father's fault. It almost enraged me how Gerard could have died in an incredible battle, or in the process of doing something that actually meant something. Dewees tried to get it across to me that saving your entire crew and your sister was a pretty impressive thing to die for, but I couldn't let it sink in. All I could think about was what Gerard could have died doing, and what he never got to do.

I knew that I hadn't recovered from the shock enough to be of a remotely sound mind, but I still had more than enough half-formed questions to drive Stump to madness. I had wanted to ask Lisa, but it occurred to me that she would be lucky if she was just as distressed as I was. (She had only just found her brother, and now he was dead again, and I couldn't envision the impact that would have on a person—although I imagined that it couldn't be far too much worse than losing your lover at your father's hands.) Dewees was taking it pretty hard, too—I hadn't realised how attached he'd been to Gerard. So Patrick was left to be the object of my endless furious confusion.

"Why the fuck didn't you try to save him? Did you really need me in your stupid failure of a plan?" I didn't give Stump a chance to answer. A part of me didn't even want to hear a response. "Didn't it occur to you that I might be a little too stressed to fucking participate?"

"Frank, fucking shut up, okay?" Stump said. "I know I should be being nicer to you but we're all taking this hard, okay?"

"You don't think I'm just a little more upset than you?" I asked, shoving him in the chest. He dug his hook into the rail behind him to steady himself, and pointed his finger at me.

"You can't blame us for anything. It was your father who sentenced us all to death, and it was Gerard who was stupid enough to save us. It could have been any one of us."

"But it wasn't," I hissed. "It was him, and he did it for me."

Stump scoffed. "How could you be so deluded, Iero? What d'you think makes you special?"

It was then that Dewees stepped in. "He was special to Gerard. He loved him, Patrick."

I laughed sharply at how simply Dewees was speaking. "And he doesn't already know that?"

Stump started. He looked sad all of a sudden—finally acting how he was supposed to have been all along. "I didn't."

"And Frank," Dewees said, putting his hands on my shoulders, "Gerard asked us not to try to pull off some massive escape plan. He wanted to go with respect, not as a failed rescue. Not as a victim."

Lisa didn't turn away from the sea to speak. She hadn't turned away in hours. "He wanted to keep you safe." Her voice almost got lost in the screeching of the waves and the sand against the rocks, but I heard the outlines of her words, and they were never going to leave my mind.

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Lisa came to me in my room that night, quietly and passively. "Frank."

She sounded like she had been crying. I hadn't expected anything else.

"Gerard told me something," she said. "About the map. About. The prophecies."

I laid in my bunk, and tipped my head back to stare at the planks above my head. Dewees breathed steadily and evenly from the bunk beside mine; Lisa crumpled onto the ground and scrunched her hands in her nightgown.

"One of you was always going to die, Frank. And I thought it would be you."

I didn't have the energy to be angry at Lisa. All the rage I had was for Belleville. For that cursed fucking town.

My mouth found words, but I'm not sure I was listening to what they were. "Why wasn't it?"

"Gerard wanted to die for you, and you know once he's made a decision he's not going to fucking back down."

"It was a stupid thing to do," I muttered.

"It was a stupid thing," Lisa agreed. "But I'd do it for Peter."

My answer was resentful, and I knew it—but I deserved to be resentful now. "And I would have done it for him. If he'd given me a goddamn choice."

Dewees groaned in his sleep, and I swallowed down the urge to smother him with the pillow. I didn't have the energy for that sort of thing, so I decided I ought not to be fantasising about it. "What's that map say is going to happen next, then?" I asked.

Lisa shook her head. "Various dreary and easily misinterpreted bits of nonsense. I wouldn't bother looking." She was lying, and I knew, but I no longer had the capacity to care. "You better sleep."

I agreed, knowing full well that it wasn't going to happen, and Lisa left the room, rising up like a little ghost in the night, and disappearing down the corridor again, presumably on her way back to Gerard's room to cry.