The Chasing of Moons

2007

Normally, Frank would make an exasperated show of how slow time passes when you are anticipating something. Time just grogs so slowly that you can actually feel yourself screaming out in agony. On the other side of the coin however, when you never want something to arrive, time seems to speed up. The days slip past so quickly that you can actually see the earth turning below your feet with the velocity of it.

The odd spot in between is what Frank is now currently in, but the thing is that time is not moving at a regular pace, as one would guess. It's switching off and on between fast and slow.

At one second, Frank is waiting for the days to fly past him, and they're so slow that he's sure that a grandma could lap his rotation around the earth. At other times, the minutes are slipping off the clock so fast that surely he's accidentally left the fast forward button on.

He thinks that the strange mix of the two is because of the strange mix of the two emotions he has about the concert intertwine in his gut. He has at once both anxiety and pure excitement. He's petrified and bone-chillingly terrified, while also adrenaline filled and pumped. Everything is all tied together to make for the weirdest couple of weeks that Frank has ever experienced.

True to his word, Frank does manage to prevent Mikey from going to school on earth day, as he suddenly comes down with a horrible case of the stomach flu that he miraculously heals from a day later. Mikey's eyebrows stay intact though, and really, that's all that matters.

The day with Mikey gone is the only one where anything seems different to the days surrounding it. The variation is mostly at lunch with Pete's smile not stretching to his eyes as much as it has been recently. It's quick, and also agonizingly long. After a hellish series of miserable days, the two weeks that he awaits end up neither flying past, nor lurching slowly along, but at the same time, they do both.

When finally Friday comes, Frank's internal emotions are so mangled that he's barely even able to comprehend that the concert that he's been dreading and anticipating for nearly three weeks is tonight. Frank's math isn't fantastic, but when he calculates everything together with what he's learned from Gee, he's pretty sure that he and Gerard are meant to get together sometime in the next month. It could be any day now, for all he knows. Frank's supposed to take him to prom so it's got to be sometime before the middle of May. That doesn't give Frank a lot of time to enjoy the bachelor life, but he's honestly kind of sick of being single. He doesn't care about his independence anymore, really he wants to be with Gerard, and that's the end of that story.

Gerard's birthday is next Tuesday, Frank's written that everywhere he can think of in order to remember it. It's next Tuesday. He needs to get Gerard something that he can present the guy with on his actual birthday. Yes, the concert is one thing, but he needs to have something to give him on the actual day of it so that Gerard knows that Frank really cares. He doesn't know what to get him. He's refused Mikey's help on this one, because he wants it to be from him. He wants to be the one who both comes up with and gives Gerard the best present of his life. But what to get him is the problem.

Frank's gone through every possibility. He's coming up short. Every present that could ever be done has been done before and Gerard doesn't deserve some canned present that you read about in a buzzfeed article, he deserves something that no one's ever given anyone before, and he deserves the world but Frank has four dollars and thirty six sense to his name, so Gerard is not going to get the luxury that Frank wants to give him. He'll be lucky to get a cookie that says happy birthday on it.

He knows he's running out of time to come up with something, but that's not what's important now. What he can't get his head around is the fact that the concert is tonight, and he doesn't know what to wear.