nobody will love you like the devil will//frerard/ferard

chapter twenty-five

Frank sits in assembly the next morning and tries to look surprised when Sister Agnes announces that Father Agostino has suddenly been taken ill. Frank didn't feel bad last night and he doesn't now. It was self-defense, he reasons. People have been acquitted of worse. Then again, he's biased.

Sister Agnes moves onto a rambling tangent about how God knows all people's thoughts. In the name of science, Frank thinks as loudly as he can about Gerard fucking him in the ass. Unfortunately, he has to cut his experiment short when his dick starts getting interested, but it's still pretty satisfying.

Instead, he tries to remember what he dreamed about last night. The scraps of it he had when he woke up are nearly all gone now, all he's got left is the image of two women sitting together in the shade of an apple tree – one was Eve, dark-haired and smiling, and the other was his mom, young and hopeful and dressed in sunshine yellow. Eve waved to him, he thinks, but that's all he can remember. He doesn't know what he's supposed to make of that, but thinking about it makes him feel weirdly peaceful, sure and centered but not burdened anymore.

Frank autopilots his way through the rest of the morning, his head too full to concentrate. He just feels like there's an obvious answer to all this, something he isn't seeing. Like a missing puzzle piece, but all the crazy shit is still rattling around in his head and making it impossible to think straight. Sister Roberta asks them all to turn in their quizzes before they leave, and Frank drops his blank quiz on her desk. He'll get shit for it later, but he's got more important things to think about. Frank avoids the crowds of people heading for the main gates, all in a rush to get home. He threads his way through the packed hallways like a ghost, heading for the back gates. He starts mentally re-playing everything Gerard said last night in the hope that he'll catch something he missed the last hundred times. The words are getting threadbare already, like rosary beads worn smooth and the cloudy glass that washes up on beaches.

stops by the notice board out of sheer force of habit, scanning it for anything important. It's on his way, and it's the best way to get advance warning of things like parents' evenings and ensuring other plans. There's only one new one up today, from the school's eco-warrior club. It says "SAVING WATER FOR THE FUTURE IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY TODAY!!!"

And suddenly, there it is. The obvious answer Frank's been clutching at all day.

Maybe he doesn't want to be saved. Maybe you've been wrong all along and he doesn't need saving.

He doesn't need saving.

He doesn't need saving.

It feels like a revelation. Like having the millstone cut from around his neck, the pebbles taken out of his pockets, the cross lifted off his shoulders. He wants to laugh, he's fucking floating. He doesn't need saving, he never did.

He pushes the door open and stumbles out into the light, giddy like his blood has turned to champagne. He sticks his hand into his pocket for his cell phone. He needs to talk to Gerard, he needs to tell him--

And then Tony, Matt and Steve step out of the shadow of the wall, and Frank comes back down to earth with a thud that could break bones. Fuck, fuck, fuck and another dumpster full of fuck. Frank knows these guys. They're the ones who like to mix up altar boy duty with kicking the shit out of Pete Wentz. It must have been one of them who saw Gerard's little PDA and wrote on Frank's locker. What with everything else going on, he'd completely forgotten.

They saunter towards him like three sleek, well-fed cats advancing on a cornered mouse, like they've got all the time in the world, and Frank feels a surge of hopeless, burning frustration. Why do they even give a shit? What difference does it make to them if Frank happens to prefer having Gerard's dick in his ass to lusting pointlessly after sister Alicia?