Random Frerard Fluff [ONE SHOTS] [COMPLETED]

The Fall

TW - SUICIDE

AU FIC

Obsessed with falling.

Frank's sacred space was really nothing more than a mediocre, yet near-derelict slab of concrete, around a three feet in width and thirteen feet in length, appearing there in an almost suspended state with no strict effect of motion; it seemed to just sit with no attachment to anything, like it was a body of its own. Under these theoretical laws, the balcony was in no way spanning outward from his apartment's back door, and was in no way built into the foundations of his apartment's fore wall, which was likely an artistic impression conjured of the imagination. It was an abstract concept of independent substance, unperturbed by anything bar climatic conditions (a sheerly heretical factor), which held a certain significance to Frank – whenever he sat brooding in the single deck chair that constantly habituated the small space, he felt unequivocally aloft and unattainable, but it was always the weather that brought him down to reality.

Falling into reality.

The weather was his gravity, grounding him to all that mattered and all that didn't, all that was worth a happy thought and all that was worth a second's depression. It was always the weather that either ruined his mood or enlightened it, il fait mauvais or il fait beau: it seemed there was no in between. Perhaps this was all a product of fate's playful hand – after all, certain days and certain events deserved and, in some cases, demanded, certain emotions and certain atmosphere, which was often subconsciously dictated by the weather itself.

The season of fall.

The balcony was physically nothing special, nothing to be noted – unless of course it was under speculation of any conceivable risk. Even then, there was nothing much to talk about. Frank didn't care much for his safety in regards to that balcony. He felt a specific calmness, a homely feel, whenever he was encompassed in the peaceful and familiar sound of rushing cars on the streets below, which compensated for any hazard. In the odd instance where he was warned of its posable 'danger', he would merely scoff. It was fenced at the edges by a whitewashed railing, which was once – in younger times – a moody grey (as it was, the railing was incidentally turning an ugly green with years of decay and daily chemical exposure to the cars in the busy, bustling Big Apple). In the younger times, when the moody grey contrasted Frank's ever-present happiness, when he shone and radiated it, when he wasn't depressed, and when the thoughts of suicide didn't litter his mind on a daily basis.

Easy to fall.

Presently, Frank stood clasping the railing, and felt its coating come off in his hands. He took one hand away and studied his fingers briefly, brushing away some of the paint with a single, nervous shake of his wrist. The only unconventional factor about this scene was that, instead of being stood inside the railing, on the marginally safer side of the balcony, he was stood outside it; his feet overhanging the edge of the concrete by an inch or so. He was scared shitless, positively shaking with fear, this fear only being enhanced by the slight sway in his body, against the soft wind of October.

Every year, the leaves will fall.

It was Hallowe'en night, a date shrouded in childish tradition and fun. It was also Frank's birthday; thus the only frightening aspect of Hallowe'en, for Frank, was the fear of aging, the fear of approaching the inevitable. The future. A future of what he was sure would contain only constant feelings of regret, emptiness, loneliness, and self-loathe. A future he'd rather not live to see, although he saw it in his mind every day. Something that only pulled him further down into the abyss of depression.

Falling, falling, falling.

The fall had always been Frank's utmost favourite season. Ever since he was a child, he'd loved the temporary swatches of orange that clouded the canopies of parks and forests situated in his neighbourhood. The chilly breeze that could only belong to the tail end of the year. The blissful sound of leaves crunching beneath his rake as he worked in people's front yards as a young teenager, an action that lead to the purchase of his very first concert ticket. The way that his first forbidden cigarette tasted on his sixteenth birthday, mixed with the bite of the October air. The indescribable surge of relief and overwhelming love that he had felt on his eighteenth, when he had been accepted as gay by his weary-eyed mother. But even all of these positive feelings toward the season couldn't change what Frank thought of it this particular year, as he stood there, not quite ready to jump, on October thirty-first. He didn't love the fall anymore. He couldn't appreciate the orange when everything was grey. Now, after so many years, he had learned to fear the fall. He feared the fall, but not so much the season; the fall that would end his life. The fall from his beloved balcony. Of course Frank was afraid; he never really wanted to die. He only thought he did.