My Chemical Romance Fanfiction

Negative Space

Frerard, almost!smut, 2,200 words
By: jedusaur

The important point to establish here is that Frank is not going to cheat on his wife.

***

Gerard is wearing jeans and an ancient plain black hoodie, torn at the seams from wear and tear. He's not wearing a shirt under the hoodie, and patches of skin peek through the holes as he moves. He must be cold right now, out in the late Jersey fall, but he won't be once they get inside and the swarm of bodies closes around them. These hardcore shows, the crowds are like orgies at Fight Club, hard dicks and broken teeth and movement, always shifting, always something new.

There aren't many places they can go these days without being recognized and approached, but this is a dirty basement show for five hundred people who each have their own detailed definition of punk. These kids don't give enough of a damn to pay attention to either pop stars or faces in crowds, and if they do, they have the sense not to show it. Gerard keeps his hood up just in case, covering his loud pink hair.

Frank hooks a finger in Gerard's belt loop to keep them together as they make their way through the ranks of folded arms and cocked hips at the back of the crowd, but he lets go further in, when the gaps get tighter and the people get rowdier. That's a good way to break a finger. This isn't the kind of crowd that will stop dancing to let the paramedics through.

It's grotty and dark, just ambient noise from the people before the show starts. This isn't even really a concert, let alone the type of concert that pipes in music during downtime. People are smoking all over the place, some holding cigarettes high above their heads and tilting their faces up for each drag, some keeping them at the usual level and risking brawls over accidental burns. There are a lot of people with beers toward one corner of the room, and a lot of people popping pills along another wall, but no one's officially selling anything. Nothing is official here.

It's such a breath of fresh fucking air that Frank almost wishes for a moment that My Chem hadn't made it big. Almost.

No one claps when the band files onto the stage. A few people yell, and the buzzing in the room gets louder. Some cigarettes get stamped out. Some don't. No one knows who the fuck the band is, except that the guitarist is the dude from that other band, you know, the one with the numbers in the name that played a bunch of intense gigs early in the year before they fell apart.

This kind of show isn't really about making music. It's about spending energy. The lead screamer takes them through three or four songs without a break, then hollers something inappropriate and threatening into the mic. The room yells back at him while the band dives back into the noise. Most of the crowd is the mosh pit by now. Frank gives as good as he gets when he can move and enjoys the all-consuming human pressure when he can't. He likes it when they squish together so tightly his feet leave the ground and he's so in the moment that he barely notices.

He tells Gerard this after the show is over. Gerard lost the tattered hoodie somewhere in the crowd, but his hair is so dark from sweat that he's still not too recognizable on the way out of the stifling basement. The air is still freezing, but they're overheated enough to enjoy it as they walk back to the car. Gerard wears his skin well these days, more comfortably than Frank could possibly have imagined he ever would ten years ago.

"It's a push and a pull, you know, sometimes you're part of this giant power moving everyone forward and sometimes you're part of the crowd getting moved." Frank leans against the car while Gerard fishes his keys out of his pocket. "I like being moved, when you lose your balance and you can't do anything except let yourself go. It's like undertow, you just keep your head up and stop fighting back."