Heaven Help Us ::Part 2::

***

Frank slammed his room key down on the battered bedside table, in his by now utterly sickening motel room.

He couldn't dispel the hopeless anger that picked its way through his mind and forced itself out in his every moment.

The image of Gerard's devastating hazel eyes emblazoned upon his mind was driving him mad, filling him helplessly with vitriol. Involuntarily his fists clenched; he felt truly as if this hurt and humiliation could eat him whole.

He wrenched open the squat mini-bar and scooped out the contents into his arms; dumping them onto the bed behind him. Foolishly he hoped that draining them would, in some infinitesimal way, help. At least it would be a distraction for some blissful moments, before the thoughts of reality again plagued his mind. And the idea brought some relief.

In the long run he knew he'd just be adding to his long list of appalling and relentless mistakes.

Just watch me fall. Came to his mind as he twisted off the first cap knowing full well it wouldn't be the last.

The hours ticked by evidenced by the scattered accumulation of drained bottles laying discarded like trees felled in some violent storm.

Letting himself fall back on his bed was like falling into a dream, a nightmare; he wrapped his arms around himself. He knew he was giving his whole self over to the pain coursing through him, and to him it felt as if it grew and spilled out, radiated off the battered walls and returned back to embed itself deeper inside his heart.

Thinking of Gerard a distaste tainted his senses just as strongly as the unpleasant cocktail of hard liquor that still lingered on his tongue.

"Gerard," he whispered bitterly, as an unwelcome tear blurred his vision and greeted his cheek.

I'm in love with a man who gets his kicks from my public torture. Who could hurt someone he knows is so lost in his love for him? And he knew it, he knew I was drowning…

He told himself he'd never forget the cold calculated gleam in Gerard's eye as he turned the screws, as he completed the private, and yet so awfully public, humiliation. The pleasure he'd taken in Frank's fear of exposure had so obviously taken his senses over like a drug.

He asked himself how could he love him? How could he take this, and still feel the same? And though love was there around the peripherals it was hate that shook his body so and invaded the remaining expanse of his mind. He'd never felt so lost in the ugly feel of it, he had never felt so unlike himself.

Nothing like a dose of pain to make you forget who you are.

Frank swallowed the contents of another miniature before getting lost in the way the murky late night light refracted and gleamed and winked right back at him from its surface.

Beauty is buried in the most mundane of things…

His hands trembling, he launched the empty bottle into the air and watched with little satisfaction as it bloomed into a thousand tiny vicious shards against the wall before him.

Finding no solace in destruction, Frank wondered what it would be to slip completely into despair.

A quiet knock roused him from the ensuing darker thoughts, and he called out a reluctant 'yes' to the unwelcome intrusion. The coldness of his voice was so unexpected and alien to him that it was almost frightening.

When the knock came again he seethed with the irritation that only one disturbed from absolute self-indulgence can feel.

As he rose to answer the door the bed below him did its best to drag him back. His limbs resisted and cried, in the grips of drink's fatigue. But this was the only way, he reasoned, he could eventually find peace.

Shaking his head incredulously at the hand that trembled before him on the doors knob, the reticence in his every inch making it near impossible to turn. As he did so, he didn't know who or what he expected to see. But what he did hadn't even for second entered the darkest corners of his mind.

They say misery loves company… Well there Gerard stood.

Misery and company all at once.

***

"Can I come in?" Gerard asked, lazily surveying the room beyond Frank, as he stood proudly at the threshold.

"Would you go if I said no?" Frank sighed turning away and back to the dishevelled bed; leaving Gerard to click the door quietly behind him and make his own way into the dim and claustrophobia of the room.

"No," he laughed. "I guess not."

Gerard's expression was far from discernable in this light and that made Frank all the more uneasy. An overbearing sense of trepidation and anxiety fell upon him and worked its way across his chest.

It pained him to watch Gerard's silhouette make its way across the room and pause at the pile of broken glass laying on the floor across from him. Did the little shards whisper words to him of their creation? Frank winced at the thought of Gerard's knowing smile upon discovering them.

"Look what do you want?" Frank snapped as a response to the thought, he didn't want Gerard to discover another solitary thing about him. Secrets are such for a reason he told himself, he'd risked too much already and this is what it had got him.

Franks tortured thoughts tangled and roared to the surface and he struggled to keep them from rushing out of his shuddering lips.

"Earlier… You know, that wasn't funny." They blurted out, betraying him.

"I don't think I was laughing," he replied coolly, flatly; still making his graceful way around the room.

"No I guess you weren't, you weren't doing that at all," Frank snapped angrily pulling his pack of cigarettes closer to him from across the sheets.

"In fact, I don't think you did anything that would show you have a single normal human emotion in you." He stated trying to make it just that, an emotionless observation; his face draining white at the realisation he was involuntarily squashing the cigarette packet within his grasp.

"And tell me, why don't you Frank, how I should have been for you? Did I not live up to what you dreamed?" He replied; his cool flat tone slightly, but almost imperceptibly, faltering.

Frank was shocked by the resentment and pain, that anyone but him would have been unlikely to detect, woven into the fabric of Gerard's response.

"Don't try to turn this around on me," he replied, the vengeful anger within him impossible to quash now; making him dismiss the fact that his friend was as conflicted and as hurt as he had become.

He unfurled the packet within his hands and retrieved a desperately needed, but woeful looking, cigarette. He winced in recognition at the visibly shaking lighter he had picked up in tired fingers.

As he lit up the flint sparked and the gas roared into flame, and it startled him to observe that Gerard stood intently staring into his features as it did so; taking this opportunity to drink in and study every faint appearance of an expression he could detect upon Frank's tiring countenance.

"I'm no good at this shit," Gerard remarked bitterly, throwing himself down in the tired chair by the door, his wrist resting reluctantly on the hopelessly frayed upholstery of its arm rest.

"Earlier…  It was no big deal," he offered. "I just wanted to… I don't know, I guess I just wanted some kind of reaction."

Frank's fury, that he had had barely within his control before, flared and burned like the lighter, still sitting within his hand, had moments before.

"Well here's your reaction Gerard. Is it what you hoped?" Burst forth from Frank's lips, involuntarily, but in a way that felt like he was being set free. "You know something, nothing's a big fucking deal to you. Because you're Gerard fucking Way and nothing matters does it? The only problem is that all this it's a big deal to me."

Frank took a purposeful and long drag on his cigarette, staring at it balanced between his fingers, he looked at it, he knew, far longer than he should, but it was all he could do to avoid Gerard's devastating gaze and the chance of catching his reaction.

"You know Gerard… Please just go. If even part of you wants to make this right, then just go." Frank finally managed to say and he knew if he weren't so angry he would have been on the edge of tears.

He hated himself for that; truly he did, he hated himself for the thought that he could cry for this man, cry for what he still meant to him.

"I don't get this," he protested. "I don't get you at all."

Frank laughed caustically; again shocking himself to the point of shame.

"You don't get people Gerard. And that's your problem. How did you think this was going to go. Coming here after what you did to me. And expecting what? Understanding? Even sympathy?" Frank answered, before anger faded into bitterness and apathy.

"You can't punish people for loving you Gerard," he sighed sadly.

Frank looked ashamedly at his hands that still refused to quiet, knowing that he had already softened, he had already begun to put Gerard's feelings before his own again.

And Frank felt sadly that Gerard would never love him in the same way he did him. When he knew that Gerard couldn't even bring himself to respect him because of it.

Frank watched the bittersweet moment unfolding before him as Gerard, wracked with a bruising realisation, looked down at his palms open before him slowly bringing his fingers together in a fist and unfurling them again.

He glanced briefly at Frank before he dropped them to his sides and made his way swiftly out the door.

***

For the next few hours Frank thought of Gerard and drank. The night seemed so filled with the subtleties of sorrow; and it was as if his fractured psyche had broken free of his mind and splashed itself indelibly upon the very landscape of the room.

He began to realise his plan to drink away his pain, and that catastrophically beautiful face, was utterly misguided. Gerard was with him now more than ever.

It was as if the chill down Frank's spine was from Gerard running his cool slender finger along it.

He pulled himself uneasily off the bed and felt drinks grasping hands, not for the first time recently, try to drag him back down.

At least the room's not spinning as much anymore he thought to himself, nevertheless realising that although things aren't that bad, they were pretty close.

And when the idea of sleep struck him he greeted it with the same disinterest he had everything else since Gerard had made a spectacle of the most precious thing he had held in his heart. He felt nothing but the pain of the moment his devotion and love for him had been crushed beneath the weight of Gerard's cruel hands.

Running his listless palm over the sheet below, he watched with disinterest, as the bottles, displaced by it, bounced away and ricocheted off the carpet and walls, smashing against each other and falling down dead to the ground.

***

They say, and who are they anyway? That things'll always look better in the morning. Well, Frank wincingly observed, they didn't.

His head still swam with the conflicting enemies of pain and indifference, his heart still felt as if he had a blade lodged deep within it; and if only he could just reach down and pull it out.

This was the indescribable level of pain only, the scourge that is, love could impart upon you.

Gerard was still an indelible blot on Frank's mind, but with the single-mindedness alcohol imposes removed, he thought also, somewhat flinchingly, of his band mates. He agonised over the horrific idea that they'd picked up on any of this, worked out what the backroom charade was really about. The idea stung at the core of him; and he had no one to blame but himself. He had exposed the secrets he had nurtured for so long within himself, he'd risked it all and come out burnt. And for what?

Was it really such a burden to keep that most awful of thoughts just that, a thought trapped in his mind? And now that he had lost the anonymity of his feelings, he truly felt like a part of himself was ebbing away.

All he'd achieved was to paint across his most precious of loves a sense of futility, a once treasured dream to believe in had become broken, a burnt out wreck. It was to him a skeleton of what it had once been, lying there within his mind. A reminder, a corpse of something that had been so pure and so earnest, now tainted with the acrid touch of reality.

Reluctantly Frank rose from the bed, aiming to wash away the grime of past events and the smell of drink that was draped all over him making him nauseous every time it rose up to taunt him.

He made himself head to the tiny bathroom, that had been built shoddily and somewhat awkwardly into the corner of the room. Robotically he turned the taps on the bath tub, that it seemed was also making do as a shower. He felt the cool metal under his fingers threaten to lift the sleepy haze still cushioning his mind, that had been mercifully making all of this feel not quite so real.

Hot water rushed out above him and fell like acid rain; he involuntarily smiled as it bit at his forearm turning it a warmer shade.

He looked down despairingly at his crumpled shirt, at the knees of his jeans that were inexplicably coated in a fine layer of dust. And would anyone believe he'd been up all night praying? Ironically, Frank thought, he'd spent so many of his nights before this one lost in worship and the truest, most sincere, form of devotion.

He stared up at the gleaming torrent from the shower head and felt its purity beckoning him in. Gratefully he stepped over the porcelain edge of the tub and greeted the cool surface of its bottom under his bare feet.

The sensation of the warming water overthrew the thoughts of love and regrets that plagued his mind; and for this moment it was like being set free. He enveloped himself in the feeling of the tingling of his flesh as the water rushed over it. He felt as if it were surrounding him, protecting him and mercifully washing away all that had passed.

The sound of it gushed over his head and down his back, filled his ears and calmed his pulse. He felt as if these sacred events might be enough to drown out the anger, the pain, the thoughts and wishes that blighted his every moment and threatened to engulf his very being and tear apart the rest of his shattered mind.

Incredibly he felt as if he might laugh aloud as the ravaging flow soaked his shirt and rushed through its fabric onto his flesh.

Frank wearily leant his palms on the tiles in front of him, decorated with a garish and dated pattern, and closed his eyes, concentrating on separating the feel of each drop of water that fell upon his neck and came together to cascade down his back; marchinging relentlessly down his torso.

The relief was sublime, it was total peace being lost in the physical world; shutting off all other thoughts, when before he had been so stuck amongst the torture in his mind.

His shirt clung to his back and sides, and he took the time to concentrate on the sensory delight of a lone river of water that ran right down the middle of his chest; his body a ravine; his lungs beneath he could clearly feel slowing, calming, becoming a hypnotic motion within him.

The fabric felt so alien upon him like this, a second skin. It was both a welcome protection and an unwanted barrier he longed to tear through.

In the cramped bathroom, a place of questionable hygiene and normally little significance, Frank felt as if he could lose himself forever; just focus on every physical moment there in being alive and forget perpetually the rest of his thoughts as the detritus and mess of his consciousness mind.

The cool surface of the tiles he leant upon penetrated the tips of his fingers and made its way into his palms; he felt as if he could eternally revel in the contrasting feel of the hot heat, raining down upon his body, and the pleasing coolness under his touch.

He forgot himself in the rhythm of the water drumming down upon his skin; a disparate melody he was sure was buried somewhere there in its incessant descent.

He guessed anything can be a distraction, and it felt like mercy to be completely lost amongst the feel of water rushing over him.

One last ephemeral joy before you need to face the world again, he told himself as he stood up straight under the water's force and ran his fingers through his drenched hair. Small rivers were birthed upon before meandering down his nose and over the delicate curves of his lips.

Frank for a moment thought that the water curling around his waist, on its way down to the plug, felt like the arms of someone dear holding him close, as if to say I can't let you go.

Frank shuddered involuntarily at the idea of it, horrified he leant down listlessly and turned the taps, shutting off the water.

I guess you can't ever escape completely, he thought despairingly, as the water running off and from his clothes made them stick to his skin unpleasantly, cooling almost instantly in the air.

Cold and alone every emotion he had blotted out came crashing back to him all at once, it was overwhelming to the point of complete devastation, it was so much more than his now frail mind could take.

He felt as ashamed and alone as he could only remember being before as a child.

Hopelessly he sunk down, his knees pressed to his chest, his fingers meeting and lacing together over his head. Overwhelmed by the emotions crashing into him like tidal wave after tidal wave, he let his forearms press tightly over his ears, and embraced the sting of his elbows pressing deeply into his thighs.

He stayed paralysed and watched as the remains of his pride swirled away, escaping down the dark plug hole before him, through the blur of tear stained eyes.

***