Work Text:
Frank’s apartment smells… old. About as old as he feels, sitting on one of his creaky green couches and contemplating whether or not it’s worth it to get up and clean with this damn back pain.
Despite how heavily his life revolves around caring for other people and their things, it feels like too much work to take care of himself. It’s so much easier to sit here and rot and stare at the photos on the wall.
He can’t look at them too long or his eyes burn. A baby dressed up all fancy and surrounded in toy trains for a photoshoot. A teenager in a track singlet and running shorts, flaunting a medal at the camera. A man and his wife clinking glasses of champagne together on their wedding day. It’s easier if he pretends he’s in somebody else’s house, that the photographs belong to a stranger. No, Frank doesn’t know these people. He doesn’t know the blonde with the nose that looks just like his own, posing with his dream car, or the woman in well-pressed florals tending to her garden.
Maybe, he thinks, if he pretends he’s angry, if he pretends he’s never seen them a day in his life, that’s when they’ll come back. Like when he pretends he’s more patient than he actually is in the face of a slow-loading webpage. Any moment now, the police will call him. James and Mary are alive, they’ll tell him. They’re alive and well and they’re coming to visit you and you can take them to that Black Bears game you promised them and you can grill them steaks and you don’t have to be alone anymore.
The phone doesn’t ring, and Frank doesn’t get up to clean.