Belonging

Boy, I've been raised from the dead

He sees the hair first, messy and dark. Gerard sighs at the features, soft freckles dotting a round nose. The jaw is more square than Gerard had imagined, face older and troubled.
Leaning down over the sleeping form, Gerard knows the exact color that will greet him when this man opens his eyes.

Gerard turns away from from the couch, feet silent as he walks around the desk. The room is dark, the floor length windows behind the desk have their curtains drawn. The day's fading light seeps through them and casts the room into an blood-orange haze.

Gerard drags his fingers across the glass surface of the desk as he walks around behind it. A closed laptop sits on top. Nothing else is on the desk except a down face picture frame, but the trash can in the footwell is overflowing and toppled over.

Motions slow and thought out, Gerard reaches for the frame and stands it up. The glass is cracked and it makes the image hard to see.

A young face smiles at Gerard, long black hair hiding their eyes.

"I thought you'd come today."

"How's that?" Gerard isn't startled at the voice, the snoring stopped as soon as he picked up the photo frame.

"I just knew."

"Where's Anthony?"

"Dead."

Gerard places the photo frame back down on the desk, it meeting the glass surface with a soft clink. He walks back over to the couch, sitting down on the edge.

"I always thought this would be different."

"Yeah?" Gerard sighs and turns towards Frank.

"I thought we'd win the war."

Gerard doesn't comment. Frank's got much more than a five o'clock shadow going on, but it can't constitute as a full beard. He pulls an arm out of the blanket, sliding himself up into a sitting position against the arm of the couch. He settles before looking back up at Gerard.

His eyes aren't hazel or sparking in the golden glow of the room. They are brown like summer dirt, bleak like the color grey without actually being so. Frank's jaw is wider, cheekbones sharper than Gerard had once dreamt. When Gerard moves under his cold stare, the skin where he touches fingers to Frank's doesn't burn or tingle up his arm. Nothing in this moment is magic, but Gerard knows it's profound.

"I saw you," Gerard pauses awkwardly. He doesn't want to hold Frank's sad stare but he makes himself. "I was in a coma."

"Yeah, I know, in the bed. I was gonna come back after I killed him."

"And then you didn't."

"And then I didn't."

They both pause, neither of them really knowing what the other is talking about. Gerard thinks back to his days in Jersey and they all mush together, dream and reality. The vision of the Iero pack-house stands out to him, and each time he blinks the image switches between the one of perfection and another of destruction. Gerard can see himself running through the forest, drowning in a lake, falling asleep in the snow and waking in Frank's arms. Each memory seems too far away to me really. His childhood in California is too far down in his head to reach.