Chapter Text
When Frank first heard the word ‘mansion’, he had a vague idea of what he was expecting. Something extravagant, obviously. Classy. White brick on the outside, and wrought iron everywhere. Giant bay windows, brilliant lighting full with crystal fixtures, and fancy fireplaces.
With the Paramour, he got… some of that.
It is extravagant, and there is a lot of iron, and some big windows and very fancy fireplaces. Marble ones. In every single fucking room.
But he wasn’t expecting the orange-yellow stucco outside, or the Spanish architecture, or any of the inside which is- eclectic to say the least.
When they first arrived, there was a buzz hanging in the air. By the time Frank pulled up in his car, Gerard and Mikey were already there, milling around the circular driveway with an open van and a couple of guys hauling gear in through the massive front door.
“Frankie,” Gerard said excitedly, nearly rushing him the second he got his foot onto the pavement (literally not even out of the driver’s seat yet). “Dude, this place is- God, it’s perfect.”
And it is, Frank has to admit. For them, anyway, and for the album. It’s not quite as gothic as he was expecting, maybe. There’s a certain mood to all of it, but it’s just not exactly the mood he had anticipated.
The walls of every room are all different colors, for starters. Rich, and saturated, and sure as hell making a statement (even if Frank isn’t sure what that statement is). The furniture is ornate and hand carved. It’s expensive, you can tell just by looking at it. The house itself is massive, but the rooms feel almost cluttered, yet somehow it’s not in a way that's claustrophobic, which sort of seems like it shouldn’t actually be possible. It’s wild, and bizarre, and it just works, and Frank keeps thinking about how it shouldn’t work.
It should be absolutely garish. It kind of is, honestly, but overall, the place has a charm that Frank can’t quite put his finger on.
Gerard loves it, but that’s not surprising at all. It’s right up his alley of perfectly weird. He’d raved about it for a few months, when they first started talking while they were still in New York, about where they wanted to set up to write and record for the new album. He showed Frank pictures, and blueprints, and they watched Halloween H20 and Scream 3 so that Gerard could excitedly point at those blueprints to show Frank exactly where in the house Jamie Lee Curtis was running from Michael Myers.
Somehow, it still hadn’t prepared Frank for the mustard yellow walls of the ballroom, or the blood red of the den. He hadn’t been ready for the three-plus acres with the views from all sides. The Hollywood sign, the observatory, the valley, the skyline. Everywhere he looks, it’s history, and culture. It’s the pinnacle of Los Angeles.
And at the same time that Frank thinks it’s really fucking cool… he hates it.
It is a far cry from Belleville and Trenton. It’s a world apart from anything on the east coast, and he thinks maybe he preferred living in Queens for those few weeks of pre-writing over whatever this place is.
It’s beautiful, sure, and it’s cool. It would be rad to go to a party here or something. A show out on the lawn, maybe. Frank thinks someday he could even picture himself getting married in a place like this with those views out on the grounds.
But living here? He’s not sure how he feels about it.
Not that he’s got much choice. They’re already set up. Their gear and instruments are in the massive ballroom, and they did their luck of the draw room selection. Gerard wrote numbers on pieces of paper and crumpled them into balls to be tossed into the center of the room before each of them grabbed one to reveal their temporary lodgings.
Frank got number 4.
It’s cool that he lives in a tower of sorts, but it also sucks because he has to walk through the courtyard to get to the entrance of said tower. It leaves him detached from his bandmates, which is pretty much 50/50 between good and bad. Frank likes his own space, but he doesn’t exactly like feeling like he’s on the outside (literally).
Cell reception is spotty throughout the property, and the ‘internet’ is really more of a suggestion than anything.
But.
Gerard wanted to write and do demos here because Papa Roach wrote and did demos here. It’s historic, and Jacoby Shaddix said being in a haunted mansion really gave their album its overall sound. Frank was left out of that last part.
Maybe ‘left out’ isn’t quite right. He feels pretty sure that Gerard hadn’t intentionally failed to mention it. Fuck, he might have actually said it directly to Frank’s face at one point, but they’ve been on tour for the last 60 years, and once they got a break he turned business brain off. By the time he set foot in his apartment, it was strictly music (for fun!), junk food, and shitty horror movies.
So now on top of the shock of this mansion being not what Frank expected a mansion to be, he’s finding out that he was not clued in on the fact that it’s supposedly haunted. He ended up learning that little tidbit when someone employed by the estate was showing him to his room and happened to inform him of bumps in the night. She also mentioned something about faulty wiring and noises in the walls. Squirrels, she explained.
Her exact words had been, “Don’t let the stories get to you. It’s a lovely suite up here. The lights can be iffy, and some people say they can hear noises, but it’s just your average critters frolicking around. Nothing to worry about.”
Ray is superstitious. Severely. He’ll walk around a ladder rather than chance somehow miraculously walking under it against his will. He refuses to travel with mirrors, lest they break. He throws salt over his shoulder and says some old prayer in Spanish that his grandma taught him. (Frank is fairly certain that he absolutely butchers the pronunciation, but what would he know?)
According to his brother, Mikey has always believed in ghosts, ever since they were kids. He’s sensitive to that stuff, apparently. One of those people who are a sort of magnet to the paranormal, if you believe in that sort of thing (Frank hasn’t decided if he does or not yet).
Gerard is… well.
Gerard is Gerard. Which doesn’t mean much to other people, maybe, but if you’re friends with Gerard, it makes sense. If you’ve traveled all over the globe with him, and slept in his lap, and been covered in his sweat, and held his hair while he puked, and watched him freak the fuck out over oddity shops in strip malls, and binged every horror flick he could get his hands on at BlockBuster with him? Then you get it. It makes sense.
It all makes sense, in a way.
It makes sense that a place like this is where they would end up to record an album about fucking death, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Frank is happy about it. But he’ll deal because it makes Gerard happy, and if it made Gerard Way happy, Frank would probably stuff his own foot down his throat while playing an accordion or some shit.
Besides, it’s not all bad. The estate really is beautiful. Weird vibes, weird decor, just sort of weird in general. But beautiful.
Frank is particularly fond of the grounds. Maybe less of the Los Angeles skyline, but the other side of the property perfectly overlooks the San Fernando valley and the mountains. He spends the first few hours unpacking in his room and then moves out to the other side of the building to occupy one of the little patio areas just off the ballroom, taking in the view with a guitar in hand. He tries to put notes to strings so he’s got something new to bring to the table when they finally get things rolling.
Overall, what it boils down to is that it’s probably going to be an interesting couple of months for the four of them. If for no other reason than the fact that Ray and Gerard are already at odds over dinner the first night.
As usual, it’s Frank’s fault.
Not that he is intentionally trying to instigate anything (this time). He just happens to make a comment relaying to Gerard that he didn’t know the mansion was haunted before they got here, and Ray just happens to start in on a conversation very quickly with, “Yeah. I was gonna bring that up, too! Nice of you to mention it.”
Frank and Mikey exchange looks across the table. Mikey rolls his eyes with a bit of a grin as Gerard retorts with, “It’s not exactly a secret,” and Frank has to try very hard not to snort into his salad when Ray tells him, “I’m sorry I’m not the kinda guy who google searches: hey, what are the most haunted places that I can write a full length studio album about a dude fucking dying in Los Angeles?” in response.
“It’s just a rumor,” Frank finally says, glancing up. “You know how Hollywood is. The only thing they have out here is rumors. Shit gets around, it’s nothing big, Ray.” It’s an attempt to be comforting, though it seems to not actually help anything.
“Rumors have to start from somewhere, Frank, they don’t just pop up out of thin air!” Ray says, pointing a fork at him. “There’s always some seed of truth to them. If there’s some sort of big huge ‘not secret’-” he makes air quotes with his fingers as he puts on a mocking tone and glares at Gerard, “-going on here, then it has to have some sort of basis.”
Mikey pushes a lone green bean across his plate, leaning his elbow on the table and then follows with his chin on his hand. “It was built in the 20’s,” he says with a shrug. “That’s a long time for shit to go wrong on the property. Could be one thing, could be a bunch of them.”
“It could,” Frank says, trying to placate their other guitarist, “literally be nothing. People make shit up for fun. This place isn’t exactly a hole in the wall. People come here. Lots of people come here. Gee showed me the movies, this place has seen some traffic. Someone is bound to come up with some sort of stupid story eventually.”
Ray leans back in his chair, mumbling something about getting a priest to bless the house before they make things worse with Gerard’s weird concept about the afterlife, but he doesn’t press the issue further. For now, anyway. Frank’s got a pretty distinct feeling they’ll hear about it again at a later time.
For the moment, though, the subject gets dropped and they move on to the next topic of conversation, which is apparently Frank’s room.
“You should grow out your hair,” Mikey quips around a dinner roll. “Our very own Rapunzel. Who’d’a thunk?”
Frank rolls his eyes and just barely resists the urge to fling an entire baby carrot at his head. “I like my hair just like it is, thanks.”
“Yeah,” Gerard says with a grin in Frank’s direction. “If he grows it out again, there’s a real threat for the glue to make a comeback-” he’s in the middle of wiggling his fingers at Frank as if to signify that ‘the glue’ is some sort of Batman villain right up until he gets cut off.
“Oh, fuck you!” Frank laughs, and launches his carrot at Gerard instead. It’s still being used as a projectile for a Way brother, just maybe not the originally intended target.
Dinner is easy, and fun. A nice wind down to a lot of movement and planning today. Just time to hang out, laugh, and talk about nothing that’s actually important. Tomorrow the real work starts.
Ray is the one who insists on all of them turning in and wandering off to their prospective wings of the house. Frank offers to clean up the table and, wouldn’t you know it?
So does Gerard.
The pair of them get dishes stacked, which isn’t that hard considering there’s only four of them. Basically it’s just Frank holding plates, and Gerard grabbing glasses and silverware so that they can haul them all the way down the main hall and to the lower kitchen.
Frank has no idea why anyone would take the time to dig out a cellar and then put a kitchen in it, but whoever the original owner of the estate was seemed to think it was a good idea. Ray was the one to point out that it’s an ‘event space’.
The ‘upper’ kitchen is just off the side of the sitting room and is apparently called a ‘service’ kitchen. It’s where cooked food is prepared to be taken out to, what Frank would assume to be, party guests. The ‘lower’ kitchen is where the cooking actually happens. That’s where they’re taking the dishes. It’s got the stoves, and the dishwasher.
Personally, Frank thinks it’s really fucking weird that the laundry room is also down here, but hey, he’s just a guest. No one asked him about design choices. Which is great, probably, because he’s shit for architecture, and even worse for interior decorating.
If it were up to him, there would sure as shit not be a giant fucking taxidermied polar bear in the dining area.
“So, princess,” Gerard says once they’re safely down the stairs. He deposits his goods into the sink to rinse them before locating the dishwasher right next to it and piles them in while Frank scrapes excess food off into the disposal. “Should I walk you back to your desolate tower?”
Frank snorts, shaking his head with a light roll of his eyes. “Do you not think I’m capable of getting there on my own?” he asks, bumping Gerard with his hip to shove him out of the way so he can put the rest of the dishes in the washer as well. There’s not nearly enough of them in there to start it up and run a full cycle, so they’ll shut the door and leave it for now.
At least that’s what Frank is going to tell himself, because they’re guests in this fancy house. Surely they will remember that there are dirty dishes in the washer and not just leave them there to mold like Frank has personally done so many fucking times in the apartment he shares with Mikey because ‘out of sight, out of mind’- meaning anything he can’t see ceases to exist (it’s apparently called object permanence and it’s apparently a sign that Frank might have ADHD, but he doesn’t have time for a psych eval, thanks).
“I dunno,” Gerard says thoughtfully. “You might fall in the pool if you’re not properly escorted.”
“Have I been known to fall into pools at random in the past?” Frank asks him with a laugh, wiping the water from his hands onto the little dish towel that Gerard hands him. It’s bright ivory white like everything else, but it’s got ‘The Paramour Estate’ embroidered into it in a very dainty black scrawled font
Gerard shrugs a shoulder, “I mean it has happened on occasion.”
“Okay, sorry,” Frank scoffs, rolling his eyes for real this time. “Let me clarify. Have I been known to fall into pools at random, while I’m sober?”
“At least once, I’m pretty sure,” Gerard tells him, taking his hand now and walking backwards towards the stairs.
“Your brother fucking shoving me in doesn’t count,” Frank says in mock defense. “I don’t fall into pools on my own, is my point. I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna start-”
It’s very hard to defend himself any further with Gerard’s mouth pressed up against his own, and to be fair, once that happens, he’s really not all that interested in trying anyway.
He figured they would at least make it back up to his room before any sort of tomfoolery started up, but unless he hears the other occupants of the mansion, he’s not about to complain. Gerard’s mouth is warm, and he gets an arm around Frank’s waist to pull their bodies close together.
Frank tries really hard not to melt into the tiles (he’s almost positive that he fails).
“Do you want me to go to your room with you or not?” Gerard asks in a soft murmur.
“Yesplease,” Frank mumbles back at him in a rush of air.
“Okay,” Gerard kisses him again, gently this time and then pulls away. He releases Frank entirely, and the smaller man resists the urge to pout at him. “You lead the way. I’ll walk you up to your lonely tower and make sure you don’t fall in the pool.”
Instead of pouting, Frank opts to stick his tongue out. Just as childish? Perhaps. But it’s got Gerard smiling at him anyway.
“My hero,” Frank says dryly, but as he walks up the stairs, he has one hand reached out behind him. He feels an alarming amount of butterflies in his stomach when Gerard takes it.
