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markoftheasphodel · 6 years

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je me lance vers la gloire

A belated Nagamas gift for @sshining, a fill for the prompt The Deliverance trio/Celica squad (echoes). Can be Canon, modern AU, game of thrones-esque FE steeped in the reality of war and politics, comedy, romance, adventure, angst, crossovers.

How about RBG Trio with cameos from Genny & Mae+Boey, 1970s band AU, intimations of Forsyth/Python/Lukas and a splash of background Lukas/That Girlfriend?

Summer. New York City. 1975

Forsyth skirted around Python’s dead weight on the air mattress as he crept around the apartment collecting their mail and trash. Once he’d shredded all the mail into tiny scraps and wadded it up with all the other refuse in one nondescript plastic bag, he concealed the trash in one end of his duffle bag. Forsyth walked down the six flights of stairs with the sort of purpose that usually prevented anyone from asking him what he was doing there at such an hour.

Fake it ’til you make it, Python called it, but it worked. It really did.

Forsyth opened the rear stair to the alley and got a blast of sticky summer heat along with the general sense of foulness he’d gotten used to since coming to the city. One of the local strays, the black dog with white feet and one white pointed ear, was hanging out by the dumpster, and Forsyth took a moment to scratch the dog on its white ear before he slipped the refuse out of his duffle bag, tucked it into the corner of a dumpster, and just kept walking towards the Y. The only time he made eye contact with anyone was to look at the newsstand guy, who was sitting there melting next to the stack of screaming headlines.

“President to New York: DROP DEAD!”

That hurt. Forsyth had kind of liked the President, had defended him to Python as a decent guy who was in over his head, maybe. He could only imagine what Python was going to say when he finally got around to reading the news.

-x-

Lukas contemplated the headline for a long moment, appreciating the bold blackness, the heft of every letter. He picked up his X-Acto knife and began to cut them apart, the better to admire each one.

-x-

Forsyth could hear the sound of drums echoing all the way down the stairwell as he came back to the walk-up after his workout. Not that it worried him; the racket they made wasn't much worse than the guy with the tool-and-die setup on the first floor. Rehearsing wasn't the illegal part of their situation, it was living there in the industrial space to begin with. They'd get evicted if anyone found out about their mail or their hot plate, but not for Python banging drums at eight in the morning.

Banging wasn't the right word. Too atavistic, Forsyth thought as he huffed up the stairs. What Python was doing was more nimble, more clinical maybe. The opposite of primal.

Forsyth had a smile on when he flung open the door to their walkup to behold Python at the drums, his shirt coming apart at the seams but his hair catching the morning light just so, as though it'd been arranged one lock at a time for that scene, that moment of entry.

-x-

Lukas showed up when Python was putting on his eyeliner and Forsyth was making a beer run.

“Hey, stud,” Python greeted the Lukas in the mirror. If Andrea had been tagging along he wouldn't have said it because Andrea didn't always think Python was funny, but there was obviously no Andrea of the black clothes and black moods in the mirror and Lukas only smiled in response.

They carried on a three-way conversation, Python addressing the reflection before his eyes as the real Lukas spoke to his back, while they waited for Forsyth to show up with the beer. Lukas was dressed today like he belonged on a tennis court instead of an industrial loft with exposed pipes and he was holding a satchel filled with notebooks behind his back. He and Andrea came from a place where they didn't have to take showers at the Y or hide trash from the landlord and it showed. If Andrea'd been there, Python would have tried to get some cigarettes off her; she could afford them.

Forsyth clattered in with the beer and some tale about the sad dogs in the alleyway. Python cut him off with the ting of a cymbal and they fell into rehearsal, Forsyth adding his plaintive guitar on top of the drums while Lukas read weird poems he'd assembled from newspaper headlines pasted onto index cards. It wasn't rock or jazz or anything with a name to it, just the sound of three odd souls reverberating off the pipes and the mirror while the city fried around them.

They were never gonna get famous like this and it was all right with Python.

Winter. 1976.

This was the life. Grabbing dinner from the old lady at the knish bakery a few doors down from The Last Mile, chowing down on rough mouthfuls of kasha that tasted like the best thing he’d eaten all week as he marched through pools of filthy slush on his way back to the club. They'd started sound check without him, and the spare and angular sound of Forsyth's guitar skittered over the bass line with a nervous tension that wasn't like anyone else in the city.

Python set the paper bag bulging with knishes down on a ledge as he watched Forsyth bounce sounds off Lukas. In every band Python'd ever played in from the time they were kids, everybody wanted to be the guitar hero— except Python himself, who’d always wanted to rule over a drum kit. Everybody wanted to sing, whether they could carry a tune in a bucket or not. Everyone wanted to be a rock star.

Forsyth wanted all those things and so Lukas slid on over to playing the bass without a peep of protest. Maybe he actually liked it; Python noticed a look of wonder about him at times as Lukas explored what the fat sound of his new instrument could actually do. When Lukas drew something out of the bass that evoked the sense of black snakes writhing in the muck of a swamp, Python sometimes felt something turn in his gut, like this moment might somehow matter down the line.

Then he remembered they were still three weirdoes from different walks of life improbably playing in a black hole of a dive together, because things like that happened in New York City, as inevitable as murder.

-x-

Boey and Mae told her not go out on her own because nobody'd caught the serial killer yet, but Genny had gotten adept at sneaking around when they were in school and getting into The Last Mile was easy now. She just walked in like she was supposed to be there with her notebook and pen, and if anyone asked Genny gave them the names of magazines that didn't exist. Sometimes she pretended to be from Canada.

That evening when the wind blew cold down the littered streets, the band Genny was hoping to see at The Last Mile wasn't there. They'd moved on to a better club, outside the Bowery. Some new trio was in their place.

Genny wasn't sure at first if they were all boys or not. The drummer had a strange kind of grace, a little feline and a little androgynous (how Genny loved the sound of those words) and his arms somehow were slender with the most wonderful muscles, like the saints’ statues that fascinated her in the priory. The bass player was tiny-- taller than Genny, but everyone was, and very small compared to the gangling singer who fired off strange sounds from his guitar. They held their guitars like weapons, Genny thought, but not like the careless boys who used guitars as stand-ins for guns and other things that shot. These were sacred weapons.

Genny had stars in her eyes and visions of ancient samurai swords in her brain and when the bass player looked at the singer or the singer glanced back at the drummer, she could almost see strands of light connecting them as they played their odd music.

Genny wrote it all down in her notebook. She was very good at writing in the dark.

-x-

Andrea went back to Rhode Island or wherever it was she was from and Lukas used his family money to get them all a place where they weren't in danger of being evicted by the cops. Now all their crap was intermingled the same way their bodies fell into a strangely chaste tangle most nights— Python's wood shop pieces that were never going to make him famous either mixed up with Forsyth's guitars interspersed with Lukas's books and all the strange things that spilled out of his satchel, index cards and notebooks and clippings from magazines.

Lukas carried multiple copies of that weird and glowing anonymous review they'd somehow earned at The Last Mile. Forsyth taped one copy to the fridge and he looked at it every day like something in it sustained his soul. Python thought it was nice but it didn't mean anything. They had a fan, that's all. A nameless fan at that.

He was more concerned about the other things that Lukas carried in his satchel, like the vaguely creepy lyric sheets made of letters cut out of newspapers, almost like Lukas writing a ransom note to himself.

“I’m sadder than you’ll ever know," Python read from one of these sheets, and he wondered if this was some breakup song for Andrea. "What’s that from?"

"Just a song I've been constructing," said Lukas, because he "constructed" things instead of just writing them.

"Okay. What's it about?" asked Python.

“A serial killer," Lukas said through a delicate smile.

“Okay, so it’s topical,” said Python, thinking of the Son of Sam. Topical was probably bad, the way all the great “anthems” of the sixties were laughably dated now, but then again he wasn’t the lyricist so that wasn’t his problem.

-x-

Forsyth saw the literal word on the streets, the proclamation that punk was coming. It meant nothing; he'd read Jack London and Burroughs both and he knew the layers of meaning in the word and didn't care. Some day he'd go home and his father was going to know that the money spent sending Forsyth to college hadn't actually been wasted, but punk wasn't going to get him there any more than the dopey mumbling rockers that he and Python escaped would've.

Maybe the word didn't exist yet.

Forsyth moved through the city that took him in in as it took comers from every corner of the globe, straining to hear some note that'd never been played before, hoping any moment he'd be in the thick of the revolution they'd been promised. He looked past the dead dogs in the gutter and the sordid headlines, because something was coming.

Winter. 1977.

They moved up from The Last Mile to a slightly better species of dive bar and that's where destiny found them. Python noticed him first; he had a radar for squares and this guy was it, baby. He had to be close to thirty, wearing a bowl cut that was about a decade out of date. Nice jacket, though-- real leather instead of pale-blue plastic. Expensive.

“He’s a phony,” said Python, the jacket notwithstanding. “What’s he even doing here?”

He was scouting for talent on behalf of an actual label. Python would've respected him more if this guy, Clive, had been scouting for tail. The second time he brought his girlfriend, though, tall and blonde and exquisitely put-together, looking like money and yet hanging out in a dive with no complaints. The girlfriend, Mathilda, was the one who echoed what that weird anonymous article had already told everyone. They sounded fresh, maybe in a foreign kind of way like fake-Japanese or something with pentatonic scales, and Lukas “looked cute” with his big bass in his hands. That carried some weight with somebody. They got signed.

-x-

"Allow me to do the negotiating," Lukas said to Forsyth, and Forsyth let him. They ended up with a contract that guaranteed things that Forsyth never even thought about, like tying the royalties for songs to the rate of inflation. Lukas was a genius. Lukas was going to make them a fortune.

-x-

When someone broke into their apartment and made off with three guitars, Python couldn't help but notice that Clive bought Lukas not one but two replacements while Forsyth had to go down to the pawn shop and fend for himself. So that was how it was going to be from now on.

Again, if he thought Clive had a thing for Lukas, he would’ve been kind of okay with the disparate treatment, but he knew it was because Clive thought Lukas was the brains, the leader, the essential person who kept a steady stream of words coming through Forsyth’s lips. Clive couldn’t conceive that they were a trinity, each of them as important as the other.

Squares, thought Python. He almost wouldn't mind if the city really did burn this year. Almost.

-x-

The label put them on a package tour with another trio, a group whose guitarist was a girl with two tails of pink hair and whose drummer wasn't white. This was fresh and exciting, and Lukas was pleased to share the bus with them. As they were three and three, he shared a seat with their keyboard player, a tiny girl with a cloud of apricot-colored hair. She was their writer, and like Lukas carried a stack of notebooks, though in her case he saw doodles and what appeared to be short stories in place of his own word collages.

He noticed some other things in her notebook.

"Do you speak French?" he asked on the third day of the tour.

"We learned French and Latin both in school," said Genny in her sweet and small voice.

"What would be the best way to express the phrase 'I hurl myself towards glory'?" Lukas put on the subtle smile that tended to get him what he wanted, and Genny helped him craft the thorny yet crucial middle section of the song that was going to make them.

“I’m glad we’re touring with you,” Genny said on the third day, as the silver moon shone over the sea that glimmered out the window. “I was afraid they’d have us with punks, but then I saw you and I knew everything was going to be fine.”

Lukas heard the shudder in her voice at the idea of spike-haired cretins spitting gobbets of phlegm all over the bus and pissing out the window. Of their group, only Python with his well-tended hair and strategically torn clothes looked even vaguely punk, and Python had too much pride to spit up in public for amusement. He heard the caress in her voice aimed at them, or at him, just as clearly. It pleased and unsettled him in one moment that this tiny girl thought they were safe. But then Genny asked him, in the voice of a someone setting up the trap of a hypothetical question, what he thought of the term New Wave for the sort of music they were doing.

“Some would say there are no new waves at all, only the ocean,” said Lukas, and he looked past her cloud of curls out the window, counting the cars along the turnpike until Genny fell asleep on his shoulder.

To be continued, maybe.

(Yes, it’s the RBG Trio as the not!Talking Heads. My mind made connection between Lukas and David Byrne while I was playing the game last year. Hopefully this fit the bill in some fashion)

#nagamas #fire emblem ficcing #valentia love #long post #text post

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