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Dizziness. Out of breath. Stumbling into someone, feeling a body hold him up. Hands on him, moving, carrying him forward, not sure where to. He tries to dig his feet in, tap a shoulder, tell them he needs to go find his band, but he can't get the words out. They say something soothing, he can't understand it, or just forgets it as soon as it goes through his ears. He's in a car, and there's nothing to do but lean against the shoulder holding him up. He tries to keep his eyes open, but they shut without his permission, and all he can do is breathe in and out, feel the rhythm of the car, hear the rumble of voices he can't parse.
Frank feels the pounding in his head before he's even conscious enough to register any other sensation. Sort of like there's an elephant grinding his skull into the ground with a huge, heavy foot, but from every direction. He breathes through the crushing pressure and feels the nausea curdling in his stomach, or already curdled, a familiar feeling amplified, reaching somehow out of his belly and into the rest of his body. Next, he catalogues the soreness in his back, shoulders, thighs. Feels the stiffness in his neck, then the hardness of plastic or something equally unyielding underneath him, holding him up at weird angles. He's woken up in enough bathtubs to recognize that one.
He breathes some more and tries to open his eyes, remembers as he does how heavily a night can glue eyes shut. Overall, he's feeling about as bad as he's ever felt, and he's just barely started squinting into the morning light.
He gives up on that after a moment when a surge of nausea knocks his hazy morning awareness off-balance (he's already lying down, how much more off-balance can he get?). A breath huffs out of him that could be accused of being a whimper, but he just feels the sickness rise and fall, riding it out until a little equilibrium returns. Then he forces his eyes open fully, like ripping off a band-aid, letting the dim light filtering past the shower curtain burn them until he has to blink away the forming tears.
He breathes in deeply. First he sees the ceiling, white popcorn-plaster eight feet up, not the closed-in, claustrophobic roof of his bunk. No rhythmic, rumbling movement swaying under and around his body, at least.
He turns his head—not as far as he means to, because his muscles shriek in protest and draw a sharp gasp out of him. He shivers, and realizes abruptly that he's stark naked. He looks down at himself, and it takes him a second to process what he sees.
He thinks for a second it must be… paint or something. But he moves his protesting arm to swipe through the flaking substance and feels certain that it's cum staining his thighs and belly. He feels sick again.
"What the fuck?" he whispers, just to say something. That is way too much to be from him. That's, like, multiple dudes worth of orgasm. Seriously, what the fuck.
Frank is not gay. Frank does not fuck dudes. Frank also has a girlfriend, who he does not cheat on. Those are the first things that come to mind, but they don't do much against the evidence of sex present on his body. Sex with… at least one dude. One dude multiple times, or multiple dudes at least once, his brain unhelpfully supplies. He wouldn't have immediately attributed it to getting fucked without the obvious visual clues, because he doesn't have anything to compare to, but he is sore in places he's never felt before. Like, deep inside him places. Thighs, ass, and lower back feel like he got into a squats competition with a bodybuilder, at the very least.
Jesus Christ. He closes his eyes to ward off vertigo, because the sight of his own body is seriously upsetting everything right now. He tries to remember the actual events of last night, or maybe what the fuck he was drinking that led to this decision. Nothing's coming up. Last night in general, he's finding a complete blur.
They played a show. He went to the bar to watch the headliners, he thinks. There's no bridge in his memory connecting the bar to this bathroom. He almost wants to laugh, a single wheezy stress-giggle bursting out of his chest.
This isn't the first time Frank's ever gotten blackout. It's not the first time he's done stupid shit while blackout drunk either, which is why he doesn't do that on purpose. It might be recency bias, because it's been awhile, or the sheer panic bubbling in his gut, but he's gotta say this time feels worse than the others, and it's not close.
He doesn't want this to be real. He wants to blink and wake up and be in the van, not having gotten so drunk he fucked a handful of strangers and woke up in a bathtub. He also doesn't… He forces himself to feel between his thighs, behind his dick, and feels more fucking dried cum flaking off from his ass. He realizes with another twist in his stomach, a literal sinking feeling, that he might seriously have let some stranger fuck him raw. Christ, he could get fucking AIDS or some shit.
Fuck, he could have given someone Epstein-Barr. It's always technically possible for him to be in the beginning stage of reactivation without realizing it, and if he fucks around at that point—his stomach heaves more violently, and when he feels his throat respond, he pushes himself up and twists just fast enough to hurl onto the bathtub surface instead of his own torso.
He stares at the bile staining the white acrylic. His eyes start stinging. Oh fuck off, he tells himself, What are you gonna cry about? Your own bad decisions? Another laugh, louder and a bit more hysterical. He pulls himself up miserably, clinging to the bar on the shower wall, and pushes the shower curtain open, stepping out. He can't just lay here in his own misery and fluids forever.
The bathroom light is off, so it's just sunlight beaming in through the windows lighting the cramped room. He spots a rumpled pile of clothes by the toilet which look like his. He stands in front of the mirror and thinks the holistic view is even worse. His eyebags are as bad as Gerard's, and with more light and a better angle, there's no mistaking the hickies dotting his chest and neck, or the suspiciously hand-shaped bruising on his hips. He ignores the sight of the grayish substance practically fucking covering his belly and thighs. He twists around, hissing through the stiffness of his everything, and sees a nasty fucking bruise on the back of his shoulder. It looks like he got hit with a baseball or something. Maybe he fell hard into the bathtub? It was a pretty hard surface, and he clearly wasn't feeling very fucking coordinated last night.
He has to do something. Looking at himself in the mirror makes it pretty fucking clear what step one is, because he's not going to face the day like this. He reaches over and locks the door, grabs a washcloth from the open shelf of towels above the toilet, and turns back to the shower. He lets the water heat up for a minute and watches the liquid vomit (he drank a lot on an empty stomach, because it's pure stomach acid and alcohol, if the stench is any indication) wash away into the drain before stepping in.
There's a few bottles of bodywash and hair shit, and a tube of toothpaste, which he squeezes some out of to try and rinse the taste of bile out of his mouth. He uses more soap than he needs to, and scrubs and scrubs at himself, tries to clean cavities he's never concerned himself with before, because he feels fucking disgusting. He's still reeling over the knowledge that he could be convinced to do something like this, no matter how low his inhibitions. It's not like he's never thought about it, or he's never looked at or noticed other guys. But Frank is pretty fucking health-conscious by necessity; trying not to get sick is kind of integral to how he interacts with the world. He doesn't fuck around like this. He doesn't fuck around on Jamia.
This is fucking shameful. Frank isn't used to being ashamed. Sometimes he makes mistakes; hell, sometimes he hates himself, but this under-the-skin, dirty feeling is new to him. The water burns like he can boil last night out of himself. Whatever last night even was, because he still can't fucking remember it.
He stays in the shower for longer than he probably should, considering he's likely made the whole band late in leaving town and maybe left them without a clue as to his whereabouts. He doesn't even know his own whereabouts.
When he finally makes himself turn the water off and step out of the shower, he does actually feel a little better. Not being covered in—yeah, it's just better to be clean. He pulls on the same Black Flag shirt, torn jeans, socks, and sneakers he wore on-stage yesterday, all of which could definitely use a wash, but whatever. At least he can feel his wallet in his pocket. He still needs a coffee, some extra-strength Tylenol (he wouldn't say no to an oxy right now, to be honest), and a phone. Actually, he pauses and feels around the mirror hanging over the sink, finding a latch and opening the medicine cabinet.
He feels a rush of relief at the sight of an orange bottle of Oxycodone, shaking a couple out into his palm. He only takes two, tossing one in his mouth now and slipping one into his pocket—he's in pain, but he's not an asshole. And if he's already made them late, he doubts it'll help his case to be too high when he finds the guys. Another stab of anxiety, and he fights the urge to just down the second pill now, shuffling out of the bathroom to brave the rest of the house.
There was clearly a party here that nobody bothered to clean up. He really can't be assed about that with the misery throbbing through his head and body at the moment. He just peeks his head into every room, but the only other people he encounters are a lady asleep in the back bedroom who he doesn't want to wake, and some shirtless skinhead passed out on the living room couch. No band.
The clock in the living room reads 11:15. Frank grimaces. Yeah, they're not gonna be happy. They were supposed to be leaving town at 10:00. He's gotta make a phone call or figure out where he is somehow, but when he glances out the door, there's nothing but more suburban houses lining the street. He goes out and walks a couple houses down to read the street sign before hurrying back, feeling weirdly exposed and alone in a strange area. He really doesn't like that nobody knows where he is right now.
He finds the landline in the house without too much trouble and starts dialing Mikey's cell number. He pauses before pressing call, closing his eyes. The idea of even listening to the fury that's waiting for him for making them over an hour late in departing… whatever city they're in right now, is almost too exhausting to tolerate. He calls anyway.
Barely one ring goes by before Mikey's voice is in his ear, and it feels like being stabbed right through the temple. "Frank, for fuck's sake, where are you? What were-" Frank interrupts him by rattling off the address, just wanting to cut off whatever tirade is about to commence. Under other circumstances, he might laugh at Mikey's certainty that it was him calling. There's a pause, then Mikey asks, more subdued, "Are you, like, okay?"
Frank bristles, but even he cringed at the gravel in his voice when he first opened his mouth. And it's not like it's an insult for Mikey to notice he's feeling less than stellar. That's kind of something friends should pick up on, but he really does not want to explain this one. "Yeah, man, just fucking come pick me up. Sorry for… Sorry."
He must sound really miserable, because Mikey just says, "Yeah, we'll be there in like 20 minutes. Gerard got your stuff from the venue last night, by the way." Frank actually does feel relieved at that, because of course they all know to pick up after each other when someone disappears, but it's nice to have confirmation that the others were on top of things this time. He certainly wasn't. He mutters thanks, and Mikey hangs up to presumably gather the troops.
Frank stands in the kitchen, feeling lost. Twenty minutes. His stomach growls, and he realizes part of the nausea might be lack of food since before the show last night. He's pretty familiar with dancing the line between nauseous hunger and vomiting. He rifles through the fridge and is pleasantly surprised to find actual, like, health food and shit. There's some applesauce packets, which are probably all he can stomach right now, so he tears one open while he surreptitiously looks through the pantry. He fills his pockets with a few protein bars and trail mix and some chickpea chip things. He slips an avocado in there while he's at it. Finding food with none of his allergens on tour is like finding a leprechaun, alright? It's definitely no worse than the pills, he thinks with a shrug.
He wishes he had a beer in his hands instead of applesauce and a glass of water, but he tries to quell the anxiety thrumming under his skin. At least he's actually taking care of his body. That reminds him of what he did last night, and his stomach turns again, and he sets the things he's holding on the counter to run his hands roughly over his face.
There's nothing he can fucking do about it right now. He needs to go to a fucking clinic and get tested, but they're not gonna have time until after tonight's show because he's put them two hours behind schedule. His breaths are coming quicker and he can feel his hands shaking. Fuck it. He finds the other oxy in his pocket and throws it back, then goes to wait on the front porch. Maybe the outdoor air will make him feel normal. He sits on the steps in front of the door, knee bouncing, willing the van to appear so he can just get out of here, in spite of his previous dread of dealing with the others.
The nausea is still pulling his gut in different directions, but the pounding in his head has actually dimmed. The first oxy is just starting to kick in, he thinks, because he is finally feeling a little calmer when the van finally pulls up. Relief floods through him nonetheless, and he stands abruptly, balancing himself on the wooden railing of the porch before he approaches the door Mikey's already pulling open from the inside.
Ray in the driver's seat rolls his window down and looks Frank up and down. Frank looks right back and sees his face go from mostly impatient and a little worried, to worried and a little annoyed. Frank doesn't like that journey, and he really doesn't want to deal with anyone's feelings about anything right now.
"You alright, man?" Ray asks, looking back at him as he clambers into the van, past the guys into the one empty seat not covered by merch boxes. It won't help the nausea, sitting in the back, but the thought of eyes looking at him from every side kicks his heartrate into overdrive again. He feels safer in the van with the guys around him, less on edge, but at the same time, exposed in a new way to people who actually pay attention. He just wants to sit here, unseen, until he feels less a bit miserable.
"Fine," he mutters, "Fucking… hungover. Sorry we're so late." Frank grabs the hoodie left haphazardly on top of the nearest box and pulls it on. As soon as he pulls the hood up, to give himself a little extra cover, he remembers with a cringe the hickey on his neck, too high for anyone looking at him when he climbed in to miss. He can feel the weight of Gerard's gaze on him, see in the corner of his eye that G's twisted his neck to look back at him. Frank just closes his eyes and burrows into his hoodie, willing the pills to kick in a little faster.