November 1st (Frerard)

7: Sunday, October 7th

Sunday.

Sunday meant church.

Sunday meant the arguments multiplied by ten.

Sunday meant the worst headache.

Gerard hated it all.

He wanted out.

But he had to wait; he had to cling desperately to a date that never really seemed to come close enough, he wondered perhaps if he'd find himself stuck: living out the thirty first of October for the rest of his life, just because he would never deserve this hell to end.

It was a ridiculous notion, of course, but Gerard couldn't quite get it out of his mind, and much in the same way that he couldn't quite get himself out of bed, because he just didn't want today to happen, he didn't want any day to happen; he couldn't bare to face his own existence at all, and it killed him, it really did.

He lay there, motionless, pretending he could fall back to sleep for a good fifteen minutes before there was the knock on his door that practically kick-started a heart attack, because Kat would never knock so forcefully, and perhaps Gerard's biggest nightmare in that moment was facing either of his parents.

He tended to slip by without much in the way of conversation with either of them, but perhaps he wouldn't be quite so lucky today, and Gerard just didn't know what to do about that.

"Gerard, you have to get up, son." At least it was his father, whatever that meant, just the lesser of two evils in the seventeen year old's mind, but what did that mean, what could that possibly mean.

Gerard couldn't quite manage to force a response, remaining there: still and in the facade of sleep, anything to pull him away from reality, really, but he caught a sigh from the man on the other side of the door, before the door was pushed open, and then footsteps followed, and a dip at the end of Gerard's bed as his father sat down.

"Gerard?" He tried again, and Gerard forced himself to open his eyes this time. "It's Sunday, we've got to go church-"

"I don't want to go." Gerard didn't look his father in the eyes; his voice stern, with meaning, perhaps the one thing he'd truly felt for days besides the urge to kill himself, but he couldn't dictate that to his father with such ease, could he?

"Mikey said exactly the same thing." He let out an odd little chuckle: bemused, perhaps, because honestly, no one besides Mrs Way wanted to be at church every Sunday morning, but Mr Way didn't really know what to say his wife, in regards to anything, really.

"Their name is Kat." Gerard replied with the same tone of voice, still unable to meet his father's eyes, and instead fixating his gaze upon the window and what little of the outside world he could catch from his bed.

Mr Way just nodded, not sure what to make of this at all, but far more concerned with what his wife deemed he should make of it. "Mikey or Kat, whatever you want to call them, Gerard, look, said the same thing, but just like you, he has to go-"

"He." Gerard repeated, finally sitting up.

"Your brother, Gerard." Mr Way let out a sigh, and he was quite honestly rather uneducated on the whole matter of non-binary gender, and wasn't even being purposefully transphobic, just stumped on what would be the appropriate word to use for the younger of his two children.

Gerard wasn't in the mood to care for his father's lack of education. "I don't have a brother. If you ask your son Mikey to do something, your child Kat isn't going to do it. You and mum should respect them and their pronouns and maybe then they wouldn't run off for days on end."