Playground [Frerard AU]

ONE

     My grandma was a very talkative woman. Her voice stood out among her elderly friends, and I could easily hear her gossiping with them downstairs from my bedroom. The topic they were discussing at the time was, I guessed, how irritating cold-callers were. Each old woman had a different system for dealing with them, apparently.

     I was lying alone on my bed, with nothing else to do but listen to their conversation. My body was on top of the duvet and I was staring at my white ceiling, not moving as my arms slowly became numb due to being underneath my head. I was bored but I liked the tranquility of it. I enjoyed being alone and in silence, which was not what the average eighteen-year-old boy's favourite hobby was. I should have been out in the town getting drunk or high in a group of loud and menacing teenagers, but instead I was at home with no friends or rebellious habits to speak of.

     Minutes passed and after a while I found myself restless. Rolling off of my bed, I stretched out my limbs and yawned, despite it being late afternoon. I could still hear my grandma chatting away downstairs and I let out a small chuckle at one of her comments while I pulled on a pair of converse and picked up a thick black sweater from the end of my bed. It was nearing the end of July, but it was a dull day in New Jersey so I dressed myself in warmer clothing than I had been wearing previously. A walk would be fun and something that I could do alone.

     Skimming my fingers lightly across the banister as I descended the stairs, I hummed a quiet lullaby to myself. The wall beside the stairs were adorned with photos of our family; my parents' wedding, my mother holding me as a baby, 4-year-old me standing in front of the Statue of Liberty holding my father's hand, my grandma and I having a picnic in a park a month after I first moved in with her. Every photo has a memory, and all of these were happy. Nobody hangs pictures depicting sickness, or death, or separation. Human beings prefer to be reminded of the happy moments in life, understandably. My grandma hadn't framed polaroids of my mother dying of cancer in hospital a year after my parents and I took that trip to New York. She hadn't captured the distress I felt when I had to move to Spain with my father and his new wife when I was ten. She had pictures of the holidays, the matrimony, the settling down. She was a typical human being.

     "I'm going to go for a walk." I said quietly to the aging lady sitting among her friends in the living room. My grandma stopped her conversation and smiled at me.

     "Alright, Frank, stay safe." She beamed and I left the house swiftly, shutting the front door behind me as softly as I could so as not to startle our cat. The cat was like me in that it didn't like loud noises. Or too many people.

     My grandma did not like my name. She said it was boring and a silly name for a teenager in this day and age, but I had always liked it. Frank was simple and nice-sounding and there was no way anybody could possibly spell it or say it incorrectly, which removed any possibility for awkward corrections.

     My head was kept securely down while I walked to avoid meeting eyes with strangers. Eye contact - along with basically every aspect of socialising - scared me to death and just thinking about it made me anxious. The streets were virtually empty as I tread along them; the only sounds being the light wind blowing past me and somebody's loud laughter in a house to my left. The lack of noise and people was calming, and for once my breathing while outside was slow and steady.

     I didn't have any particular destination in my head; I was just walking aimlessly with my gaze fixed on my shoes without fault.

     "Sorry," I mumbled to somebody I brushed past accidentally. They grunted in reply and I looked up once I knew that they would be gone from my eyeline. In front of me was no longer a neat row of houses like the block lived on, but rather a boarded-up group of shops and several dirty alleyways. It was safe to say that I had gotten myself lost.

     Skirting around filthy bins, I passed through one of the alleyways in an attempt to get somewhere familiar. I could have just turned around and gone back the way I had come, but obviously my brain decided to be an idiot at that moment in time and tell me to go through.a fucking alleyway. Once out of the alleyway, I came face to face with a rusty fence and a broken gate swinging off of its hinges. Behind the fence was the most beautifully depressing thing I had ever seen.

     A children's playground had been forgotten about a long, long time ago. A cracked slide, a moss-covered merry-go-round that probably squeaked like hell when moved, two extremely dirty but mainly intact swings and a third oddly warped one, and a few of those broken springy horse things. Benches lined the outside of the park, presumably for parents to wait for their kids to get tired and start whining.

     All of the - eight, I counted - benches were empty except one. I yelped when I saw the occupant, as the last thing I expected to see at the playground was another human.

     He didn't hear my cry. I was grateful for that because fuck no did I want him to see me loitering and confront me. Looking closer without moving too much, I saw he had earphones in and was staring at the object in his lap. A sketchbook, I noted.

     The boy seemed to be about my age, with black clothes like me and thick black hair to match. His bangs fell over his face as he drew, so I couldn't see exactly what he looked like.

     I wanted to watch him sketch forever. There was something very elegant about the way his wrist moved fluidly across the paper and the way his fingers gripped his pencil. It was almost art in itself.

      Obviously staring at him had not been a clever idea, as after a few minutes of me watching him, his head snapped up and his eyes locked onto mine.

     I bolted.

-

Holy shit I updated something guys this is big news

I didn't update anything for an AGE because I broke my phone, got banned off of the computer and got a buttload of homework dumped on me. Fun.

So yeah sorry about that!

Feedback would be rad af