Setting: Present times. Lutheran School and Church. City/State unspecified.

Characters: Gerard (16) Frank (16) Mikey (15) ((From My Chemical Romance))

Disclaimer: I do not own the guys from My Chemical Romance, nor do I claim to. This is a completely fictional story, and I am their fan, (thus fanfiction). The characters are simply based off of the band members and are not meant to be representations of them.

WARNING: If you're not cool with guys kissing then get out. This story has a lot of cussing as well as some scenes that people might find offensive such as corporal punishments in schools, an angsty teenager's opinion of religion, and homophobia. If you're uncomfortable with that then leave.

Hope you all enjoy this! :D

I would have rather been hanging from the edge of a cliff by my fingertips. Giving a blow job to a 300 pound, 40 year old DnD player. Cleaning my grandmother's underwear. Kissing Sarah Smith, the girl with a unibrow and mustache from French class. So basically, I would have rather been doing anything else besides going to church.

Okay, maybe it wasn't just the fact that I was going to church. I used to go to Catholic school, attend Sunday Mass religiously, do confessions… blah blah blah. Church didn't exactly bother me. What bothered me was that my uncle was making me go to 'youth group' before church. Possibly the STUPIDEST idea on the face of the Earth.

First off, I had to wake up earlier. Then I have to dress up in clothes I hate wearing. Then I get to walk my snot nosed cousin, Tiffany, to Sunday School. And then, the icing on the 'kill me please' cake, I get to sit in a room with a dozen other teenagers who gape at me like I'm the spawn of the devil.

I'm not even kidding you.

I think it's because I have a lip ring, but I couldn't be certain. It's not like there's anything completely off about me. I mean, sure I'm wearing a lip ring, and I'm wearing converse instead of church shoes… but it's not like I drew the antichrist symbol on my face or flipped every cross in the room upside down! By the way- there are seven crosses. Just in case you were wondering.

I used to go youth group when I was in sixth grade, and I actually enjoyed it at my old church. The group leader, Bob, was young- college aged. He told us to call him by his first name, gave us donuts and had us act out scenes from the bible. He didn't even get mad if we acted silly or sarcastic. That was a good youth group. I had friends there.

But I'm not in sixth grade anymore, and this isn't Queen of Saints Catholic Church. This is St. Paul's Missouri Synod Evangelical Lutheran Church. I don't get why they have such a long name. What are they trying to prove here? Maybe God spoke to the priest- I mean pastor (weird Lutherans) and told him to have the longest fucking title in the whole Christian community for his church. Who knows!?

So I sat in the basement of St. Paul's Missouri Synod Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Let's just call it Luther Land) on a ratty old couch, next to a kid with legs longer than the Mississippi river and watched everyone stare at me. Except for the kid with the legs. He just ignored me.

Eventually an adult showed up, but they were old, and they didn't have donuts. It took her a while before she noticed I was there, and then she stopped whatever she had been doing to ask me who I was. Then she had me stand up and introduce myself.

Lutherans don't know how to use humor.

"Hello, I'm Frank Iero and I'm here to possess your souls!" I said, smiling wide and clapping my hands together. Silence. Complete silence.

"We do not joke about those things, Franklin," the woman, Mrs. Berk, said gently. She gave me the disappointed eyes, and maybe I would have felt bad if I actually gave a care. She then started talking about our souls, our relationships with God, and temptation.

I don't remember ever talking about temptation this much at Queen of Saints. They talked about hell a lot… and liked to use expressions like "Mother Mary, save our worthless souls from the fiery depths of hell!" But we didn't talk about temptation.

As if this youth group thing couldn't get any worse, Mrs. Berk suddenly said, "One of the biggest temptations for young people is sex. Would anyone like to share their experiences?"

Noeyecontactnoeyecontactnoeyecontactnoeyecontact… Usually if you don't make eye contact, people ignore you. Right? No.

"Franklin, how about you share something?" she said, making me blush slightly.

"I'm a flaming homosexual who likes to watch men walk in front of me!"

That's not what I actually said. That's what I could have said. That's what the truth would have been. But the truth, despite what they preach, does NOT set you free. It gets you in trouble. It gets people to look at you with those disappointed eyes. It gets you phrases like "Oh Franklin," and "God forgives all sins," and "Go to Hell you fucking faggot!"

Instead I smiled and shrugged me shoulders. "No ma'am, I'm a virgin," I say. Part truth. That has to count for something.

"Surely though, you have temptations. Have you ever looked at a girl in a way you know was wrong? Or have you ever fantasized?" She looked around the room, as if asking the questions to the entire class. "Have you ever masturbated?"

Have you ever blushed so hard that you felt your face was going to catch fire? It's unpleasant. My tongue felt swollen, so talking wasn't an option. I blinked, stared at the crazy woman in front of me with a slack jaw, and then looked around to see if anyone else was surprised by her straightforwardness. Okay, maybe there is hope for this religion. Most of the others looked mortified. Except for one- the long legged kid next to me. The only one who hadn't stared at me like I was a freak show. That's when I noticed he had ear buds plugged into his ears, hidden expertly by shaggy hair and an upturned collar. The fucking genius was tuning out the world while the rest of us poor suckers had to talk about masturbating! Unfair.

I managed to avoid answering those questions, and soon found myself speed walking through the basement church hallways, trying to find my way back to the Sunday School room where I had dropped Tiffany off. It was my responsibility to escort her from the basement up to the main floor for mass- I mean service. Gosh Lutheranism!

I must have looked as lost as I felt because suddenly I felt a tap on my shoulder. I jumped out of my skin, and then turned to see long legged kid. I hadn't noticed before that he wore glasses, but he wore them low on his nose, so he looked down on me more than he would otherwise. Sixteen year old male and I was still only 5'4". This kid had to be a half foot taller than me.

"Looking for a way out?" he asked, and his voice was quiet- like he didn't use it too much. "There's no escaping this place, mother fucker," he said. And for a moment I wasn't sure if he was joking or if Lutheran people were as crazy as I thought. He smirked slightly and said, "That was a joke,"

"Oh," I said, chuckling a bit awkwardly. The time for laughter had passed. "I'm looking for the Sunday School room. I have to pick up my cousin," I said.

Leg boy nodded, grabbed my wrist, and started pulling me down the hallway. His fingers were unusually cold.

"It's not hard to find, ya know," he said quietly. "Big blue door, colorful sign, says 'Sunday School' in big rainbow letters…"

"Haha, yeah well I'm new here," I said sarcastically.

"No shit,"

That actually threw me off guard, because I didn't think these people could curse! The ones I'd met so far had this 'Holier than thou,' ambience that made me think their shit was pure white. But here was this kid, listening to music during youth group and using curse words in the basement of God's house. I just might try to befriend him.

Well, there was the door. Long legs was right. How had I missed it? As we were approaching it I heard a voice from inside call out "Shut up and sit down or you don't get any candy!"

Once upon a time when I had been a good little Catholic boy- when I had worn the school uniform and tie and did confessions and worked as an altar boy once a month and went to Sunday School, our Sunday School teachers were always old, wrinkly, and nasty. (That is, until I got to sixth grade and got to go to Youth Group with Bob.) They were like Mrs. Berk, except they didn't talk about masturbating. The voice I was hearing come from this room didn't belong to an old, wrinkly, nasty. It belonged to a kid- a boy. And when the human giraffe went and opened the door, motioning for me to follow, there was a boy there. And the boy had red hair. And he was absolutely gorgeous.

"Oh, hey there Mikey!" the boy said, holding a bucket of what I assumed to be candy high above his head, so that the swarm of children around him couldn't reach it.

"Hey!" he barked. "Make a line,"

The kids actually listened. They were all very small, only half my own height. The girls were dressed in pretty skirts and dresses, and the boys wore sweater vests or ties over collared shirts. One boy wore a shirt that at one point must have been white, but was now decorated in all different sorts of marker scribbles, along with his hands.

The boy with the candy turned to me and smiled. "Hey, I'm Gerard," he said, pushing a strand of hair out of his eyes. He had red hair. No, not like gingers-have-no-soul red, but like out of a box, firetruck red hair. It was long enough to brush his collar and fall in front of his eyes. He smiled at me. "What's your name?"

I forgot how to speak, or maybe I forgot that I had a name, but suddenly Mr. Legs- Mikey poked me and I answered. "Frank!" I said, too fast and too loud. "Frank Iero. I'm new here… supposed to pick up Tiffany,"

"Oh, yeah, great," he said, smiling at me again. "Tiffany, go with Frank. I'll see you next week, okay kiddo?"

Tiffany broke away from the flock and walked over to me. "Bye bye Mr. G!" she said in her ridiculously small six year old voice, and then took my hand and pulled me out of the room. When I looked back, Mikey had his music back on and Gerard was still smiling.

!

"We have to make sure that we are living our lives as stewards!" the priest, I mean pastor, demanded. "We cannot act! We cannot lie to God! Just as Jonah couldn't hide, we cannot lie. We have to be stewards!"

The pastor dude had said the word 'steward' at least twenty times in the past century he'd been giving his sermon, but he had yet to tell me what a steward actually was. The bulletin was no help in solving this mystery, and when I asked my uncle Clark, he told me to "shut up and pay attention, Franklin." I've decided I don't like Uncle Clark very much.

So now I have heard the word steward twenty four times, and I still have no idea what it means. The only thing I'm getting from his sermon is that if I don't do it, I'll get eaten by a whale… or something to that effect. What the hell, Lutherans? Catholic Mass was never this hard to understand, and sometimes it wasn't even in English. It was in Latin! That language nobody even speaks any more!

I think being a steward has something to do with giving money to the church. Bummer, because I don't have any money. Sorry God. You'll have to rely on all the working adults in this church, because I guess I can't be a steward. At least I'm being honest to the big guy, right? Because the pastor just said once again "You can't lie to God!"

The pastor said something I think I might have recognized from Catholic Mass all those years ago, and suddenly everyone was bowing their heads and drawing crosses with their fingers, and I struggled to keep up, confused. Even the eight year old boy in the pew in front of me knew what he was doing. Fml. Stupid Lutherans.

And then everybody stood up to sing a song. I recognized the lyrics, but these crazy people changed the tune, so I just stood there and stared at the stained glass window. It was really pretty. That's one thing about this church. It was really pretty.

Just like the altar boy. Did I mention that yet? Gerard and Mikey were altar boys, or as I've been told- acolytes. What the heck kind of a word is that? Acolyte. That just sounds ridiculous. 'Altar boy,' makes much more sense, but whatever.

Gerard and Mikey got to sit up by the altar, Gerard on the left and Mikey on the right. They wore long white robes that covered their whole arms and went down to their ankles, and for some reason they had pointed hoods. It's a good thing they didn't put their hoods up, otherwise the two black people in the congregation may have gotten offended. Gerard's hair matched the color of the carpet on the altar, but it really stood out against his robe. At one point during the song I didn't know how to sing, Gerard must have caught me staring at him, because I swear he made eye contact and winked. He winked at me… what did that mean? How was I supposed to interpret that?

Was it just a thing he did? Was it some psycho Lutheran sign language? Was he coming onto me?

I was actually so busy thinking about it, that I didn't notice the Priest (damnit. Pastor) raise and then lower his arms, apparently the universal sign for 'sit down mother fuckers.' Suddenly I was the only one left standing out of the three hundred people there, and Uncle Clark pulled me down so hard I swear I bruised my butt cheeks. I'll check later. Totally normal, right?