Summertime (Frerard)

46: After All The Things We Put Each Other Through

We hadn't spoken.

Nothing had been spoken: not a sound, not a whisper, since I let the words slip and I let us fall down into a slippery mess of silence and missed glances that never turned out to be what we intended them to be.

Perhaps an apology would have fixed this; perhaps an apology would have fixed everything, or perhaps it wouldn't have, but we never got to find out because Gerard was arrogant and I was far too self pitying, and I was struggling with the concept of hating Gerard right now, because I wanted to, but I didn't, and I just... I couldn't.

He'd driven us up to the next town or something, but by now I hadn't the slightest clue as to where we were, because this wasn't some fucking honeymoon perfect adventure - this wasn't anything like that, this was just us and the mess falling into the ground around us and I knew by now that I was destroying myself by still being with him, but I loved him and my heart overweighed my head, and right now I was pretty certain that if my head tumbled right off my shoulders right now I would barely even notice.

I jumped a little, flinching like an idiot at the click of his lighter, lighting what was probably near to his hundredth cigarette in this damn car that someone would eventually grow to care that he didn't own - hell, he didn't even have a fucking driving license, surely we were all so fucking fucked if the police even did so as to bat an eyelash in our direction.

Gerard, of course, found himself utterly oblivious to this, leaving me to break down in a state of worry for the both of us as he drowned himself in nicotine and I looked at my cellphone up on the dash and considered just fucking calling his mother and telling her where we were, but that made me feel like the older of the two, and Gerard the teenager calling himself an adult for nothing more than egotistical reasoning.

He acted like a fucking fifteen year old like this and he seemed all too reluctant to admit that fact. He acted like a fucking fifteen year old who thought he was the coolest fucking piece of shit ever because he managed to bum some cigarettes off some hungover senior kid, and then I realised that Gerard wasn't acting, Gerard was just that kid, or at least what that kid had grown up to be, and I almost buried my head in the backseat as I came to piece together just how fucked up his head would be right now.

He killed his ex-boyfriend, he shot his ex-bestfriend, he ended the life of someone who changed his fucking life, even if not for the better, it still made an impact, and here I was thinking all about myself, and the fact that he hadn't taken some fucking pills, and none of this mattered in the slightest when I met his gaze for the first time and saw the tears in his eyes and his teeth dug down deep into his bottom lip, almost willing it to bleed.

And we just stared at one another for far too long entirely, because I didn't know what to say, and I couldn't say anything, and even if I managed to get accept what he was feeling and what had happened, that we'd still have the problem of convincing him to accept what he'd done and getting him to let me call Mikey and turn this car back around, and still then we'd have murder allegations that we'd struggle with and as he'd said, Bert's gang to hide from, and all due to perhaps one fucking cigarette Gerard got off some guy when he was fifteen.

And it almost scared me how such seemingly small decisions could pretty much turn your whole life around in what seemed like an instant, and it hit hard as I came to accept that right now, and right here and the two of us would probably define what happened with the two of us for the rest of our lives, and that only made what I said to him right now all the more important as I felt my head falling apart at the concept of where we'd even go from here in the long run.

Things weren't working and that was obvious, and I wanted them to work more than anything and perhaps that was even painfully obvious and really I would just kill to know what Gerard thought and what Gerard wanted, but the silence made clear as to just how unrealistic such a demand could be. But I soon came to realise I had no long term plans as to what I wanted to do with my life or with Gerard and I for that matter: I was simply naive enough to think that as soon as we got back home and Gerard was on medication that everything would be fine.