Peroxide (Peterick)

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"Patrick, why were you screaming?" A haggard Frank Iero, with pitch hair riding the sea and boxers corroding his legs, leans in the threshold, banishing the waste from his tear ducts with the insides of his fist as he anticipates my reply as to why I woke him up at one o'clock in the morning with my uncontrollable shrieking.

Winnowing the comforter between my fingers as the last stable thing I can hold onto, nervousness distorts my speech. "I-I had a nightmare."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Why would I want to talk about a nightmare that devastated my cooperation with reality in a matter of a few hours? Why would I want to talk about hands grabbing me from every direction with the same black gloves that have appeared everywhere? Why would I want to talk about glancing up to find that the beholder of the gloves isn't even Dallon but Pete? Why would I want to have a fucking panic attack in someone else's embrace as they silently condole with me at a dream they don't even understand? Why would I want to make myself so vulnerable like that when I could be slashed down so much more easily?

"I don't know. I just..." A wave of sobbing billows through my lungs until it's all I can manage, and Frank, recognizing my inability to do anything else, comforts me in a hug.

"It's okay. You don't have to tell me."

"I feel like I owe you something, but I'm just comprised of secrets that I can't disclose to anyone, so I'm fucking lost," I gush like the self-pitying character in a high school drama movie that all the girls crowd around while covertly despising them.

Frank weaves an arm around my shoulders in reassurance. "You don't owe me anything, Patrick. You're an individual person."

I shrug hopelessly and overdramatically, refusing to accept Frank's law. "But you're always so kind to people, and I treat everyone around me like shit."

"No, Patrick, that's me," a figure opines from the doorway, a figure who haunted my dreams only minutes before, and I crawl deeper into the bed in fear.

The memories of my nightmare rush back vividly, baptizing me in blood and terror and everything in between, and maybe our relationship shouldn't be as hectic as it is now, but Pete has scarred me in the span of twelve hours or less, and with something as impressive as that, I can't resist fleeing in trepidation.

"What the hell are you doing here?" I screech, wielding the nearest pillow to me and flinging it at the man I used to call my boyfriend, and the connotations of the action are more hurtful to him than the pillow's impact.

"I thought you two were madly in love," Frank spectates, elasticized with glances between us in intervals. "Why do you hate each other all of the sudden?"

Pete's vision is shackled to me while he speaks, brows leached by candid ache. "Because I made a terrible mistake."

"The hell you did," I mutter as I slant away from him so as to not revisit the events of my harrowing nightmare.

Frank squirms anxiously through the awkward (more so for him than for us) silence, proposing an offer as a solution to the quietness. "Should I leave you alone to, um, sort things through?"

Pete agrees before I can object to the advocacy, and I find myself barred within the version of reality in my nightmare, but this time I can't escape by simply cutting through my lids, who happen to be as stubborn as me.

"Please go away."

"I just want to explain," the man pleads, begging me to address him with an unbiased approach that I haven't utilized in years.

"Explain how much of a fucking idiot you were?" I finally snap while awarding him the unbiased approach he was beseeching me to give him.

"Yes, explain how much of a fucking idiot I was." Pete searches for my permission before he begins, which I provide with a mere nod, and he carefully selects his phrases to start. "I was dead set on loving you, Patrick, but then...there were these notes I found in my room."