Title: The Night and the Day (1/?)
Genre: dramatic romcom, AU
Rating: currently T, M for later chapters
Couple: Austin/Ally
Summary: Austin Moon is the world's most famous rockstar and due to heartbreak completely out of control. So his agency brings in songwriter Ally Dawson, who is as brilliant as she is desperate. She needs a job - and what she gets is Austin Moon's crazy everyday life.
Chapter 1 - Segways & Red Envelopes
Ally first contact with Austin Moon happened through his manager: She was a small Latino woman, petite even, but loud and cheerfully desperate. Ally's first note of her had been a red envelope that said "urgent", but Ally got a thousand of those a day, so she had pointedly ignored it.
Another red envelope had arrived after that and another and another - they grew both in size and number and finally, one day, the mailman had pulled a giant red envelope up the stairs of her house. Later, much later, Ally would meet Dez - big props were "his thing" and the size of the envelope had been his idea.
But then, in the face of the huffing mailman who had carried that thing three flightsof stairs, the entire thing had just seemed weird and ridiculous. She had signed for the envelope, of course, had pulled it through her door and opened it. The letter inside was regular-sized. It said "De La Rosa Management" on the top of the letter and the letter was polite, formal and reeked of desperation.
They said she could drop by whenever she liked, because they were looking for a new songwriter for Austin Moon.
Ally had heard of it. The entertainment world was abuzz of it. The tabloids had huge splashes of it all over their front pages about Austin Moon and how his regular songwriter, Cassidy Kennedy, had left him. Nine months ago this had been big news - now, it was just somewhere drifting along page twenty. And Ally knew that his record company was getting nervous, because since then Austin had neither written a song, nor had he announced a new album nor had he appeared at any gig. He had also worn out around two dozen of Ally's songwriter collegues - those were the things the tabloids didn't write about. They were thinking about founding a support group - the worn-out songwriters, not the tabloids, of course.
Austin Moon, meanwhile, had just disappeared from the scene - and given that Austin was his company's biggest asset, she knew they would do anything to keep him.
However she wondered what had caused them to contact her. She hadn't written anything for a popstar in at least five years; since then all her piano and imagination produced were dramatic, slow ballads, most of them sad. Some of her songs had popped up here and there at independent labels and the occasional mainstream label, too, but nothing to catch attention of a big production company.
Yet, the big, red envelope sitting in her kitchen was hard to ignore. For a moment, she considered considering it a joke - who, with a serious business proposition in their mind, would send her a door-sized red envelope?
She thought about the sender. Patricia Maria De La Rosa was completely unknown to her. She was executive producer of Austin Moon's agency, but that was about all Ally knew about the woman. Her company was well-known, though. Many of the greater popstars were signed by them and some of Ally's colleagues had sold songs to them. But none of her immediate friends had worked with Austin Moon.
Austin had the reputation of being difficult, out-of-control, eccentric, more concerned with alcoholic beverages and groupies than his own life. He was a typical rockstar, a rockstar of the old school. Why would Ally write songs for someone like Austin Moon? Someone who didn't even have a classical musical education, who was a loose cannon more than anything, who, as she was informed, couldn't even write and read notes properly?
Ally was about to crumble the letter she had received, when ...
"Mom?"
Ally turned. A little boy with dark hair and dark eyes padded into the kitchen. He rubbed his eyes slowly and yawned gently. He was wearing blue and white striped PJs and held Dougie the dolphin in his free hand.
"Who is it from?" he asked, still rubbing his eyes. He went over to the freezer and opened it, taking out a box of milk. The box was placed on the table next to the glass he used earlier in the day. Ally watched with some fascination how her son climbed onto a chair, placed Dougie carefully onto another chair and then filled his glass with milk.
"You should go to bed, Denny," she said, but she knew the little boy wouldn't.
"Who is it from?" he asked again.
"Austin Moon," Ally answered.
"Oh, I know him. Some of the girls at my school like him." He thought about it. "And some of the teachers, too. Why did he write a letter to you?"
"He asked me if I considered writing songs for him," Ally said slowly.
"You mean a new job?" the boy asked. He looked at his mother excitedly through his white milk beard. "That's good, right?"
"I guess," Ally said. She absentmindedly crinkled the letter. She had stopped nibbling at her hair out of nervousness. It wasn't good for her son, seeing her like that. She didn't want him to copy her. Yet, she wished she could bite her hair, because now seemed like a good time.
She was sure that the offer of Austin's management company was a good one, but working for the bigger companies usually involved a lot of stress and overtime. And she had to think of her son. Denton needed the attention of his mother. She couldn't leave him alone.
But then again ...
He attended a good school, so tuition was needed and his school uniform and not to mention money for all the trips they went on. Ally's father could do only so much - and she relied on him much more than was already necessary.
"Will you stop working at grandpa's store?" the boy asked.
Ally took a deep breath. "I don't know yet, Denny." She nodded at the door. "You really need to go to bed now. You have school tomorrow."
In some aspects, her son was like a being from another planet. He got up and placed the empty glass into the sink. Kissing Ally on the cheek, he wished her a good night and went to bed. There was never much of a fight when it came to that. There was never much of a fight over anything. It was as if Denny had come out of her aged fourty, and not aged seven, like he should have been.
She brooded over De La Rosa Company's suggestion for the entire day. She would visit their offices the other day and offer them her terms and conditions. If they declined, she would go on with her life as it was, if they accepted, she would be the luckiest girl on the planet.
Either way, she refused to be surprised. Even though money was sparse, she would endure, she knew, and she would never let Denny feel anything else besides happiness and a sense of completeness.
Yes. That was the plan.
With those kind of thoughts, she went to bed in the evening, her sleep dreamless and quiet.
Little did she know that events had been set in motion that would turn her life upside down. Plans were a good things, but if destiny decided to mess with you - especially for its own amusement - you could cheerfully wave at your plans as they walked the plank.
But Ally, of course, didn't know that.
The next day, she dropped Denny off at school, gave him a kiss on his cheek and then drove her old red Volvo Estate over to the huge, high tech building of De La Rosa Entertainment. She parked her car between something that looked like an IPhone turned into a vehicle and another that looked like the Mars Lander. Compared to those two, her own car looked like an relict from a gone-awry time travel attempt.
The building of Austin Moon's entertainment agency looked like a toaster made from blue glass and white steel. It was very sleek, very futuristic, very pretty, but somehow somebody had overdone it.
There was a huge ever-changing billboard with Austin Moon's face on it. The album's title was from last year, she noticed. Another picture changed to another starlet the company was representing - and while Ally made her way to the entrance, the billboard changed another dozen times or so.
Three times, pictures of a red-haired lanky guy roasting hamburgers on a xylophone and a chubby Latino woman popped up. Both looked slightly manic to Ally. She had no idea who they were - maybe a new duo the company promoted?
But whatever music they made, it was either really folksy, really alternative or really experimental. Or all three of them combined.
The main entrance doors opened automatically with a whooshing sound and moments later the Miami heat was replaced by the carefully regulated temperature of an air conditioning system. Before her, the lobby opened, wide and spacious, with everything made from glass and steel and white plastic.
She rose her head - the building was hollow in it's middle. Above her, she could see huge balconies cascading toward the roof made from glass. People walked there, on their way to their bureaus. She could hear them talk softly.
She looked around for someone she could check in with and noticed a round counter close by the entrance. Her steps clacked on the polished white floor when she made her way over.
Ally paused when she saw he girl behind the counter in the huge entrance hall. She wore a white, futuristic headset, wore a sleek, white catsuit and dark hair waved down her shoulders. Ally also assumed that she did bodybuilding or something similar as a hobby, because she was around thrice Ally's size. Her demeanour was slightly angry as she roared into her headphone:
"Two dozen bloody donuts! And a yellow turtle! How difficult can it be?" Then she ended the conversation and directed her attention at Ally.
A part of Ally didn't want that attention at all and instead wished herself back into bed.
"Hello, welcome to De La Rosa, how may I help you?" she asked. There was a name tag attached to her clothes: It said "Mindy".
"Uhm, hi," Ally said. "My name is Ally Dawson, Miss De La Rosa is expecting me?"
Mindy's previously darkened face lightened up significantly. She produced a smile that made Ally even more afraid. "But of course! I'll inform them you are on your way." She disappeared for a moment behind the counter, then appeared again, with a basket filled with cakes. "If you could deliver this to Dez?"
Who is Dez?"Sure," Ally said, just to get out of the immediate range of the shark smile of that girl.
Mindy handed her the basket with cakes. "Their bureau is in the penthouse," she said and waved her off.
Ally fled to the elevator. A lift boy, dressed all monochromatic like Mindy send her off to the highest floor of the building and Ally was already debating methods on how to tell them "no".
Their offer was tempting, but the their receptionist alone was enough to creep her out. Plus, the building, the billboard, the Apple-vibe of it all; it wasn't her style.
She was Wall-E and everything around her was EVE. She would not fit it.
The elevator doors dinged apart and Ally stepped into a white, immaculate, long corridor. Doors opened to each site and the only spot of color were plants, scattered around once in awhile. Besides that, everything was empty.
Maybe the wrong floor?
She turned around, but the elevator doors closed already. The lift boy waved at her through the closing slit of the doors. Then, she was alone.
"Hello?" she called.
Nobody answered.
"Hello?" she tried again.
This time, someone did answer, however not as she hoped they would.
"Be careful! Out of my way!"
She turned, just in time, to see Austin Moon - popstar, actor and humanitarian, if you believed TMZ - on a Segway, racing down the corridor toward her, the red-haired, freckled guy from the billboard racing after him.
She didn't remember the collision, only how she fell. She remembered a short period of darkness and when she opened her eyes again, faces appeared in her besparkled point of view. Reality seemed to dance around her.
The faces belonged to Austin Moon, of course, Freckle Guy and the Latino Girl from the billboard.
"Is it still alive?" Freckle Guy asked.
"God, Dez, you can't just ask someone if they are still alive," Austin said. "Plus, it blinks. It surely looks quite alive."
"I told you, no Segway races in the corridor," Latino Girl said. "It scares the alligators."
Alligators.
Ally definitely didn't want to work here.
"Is she the new secretary?" Freckle Guy asked.
"There should be a sign for no racing in the corridors," Ally mumbled, and to their expressions of shock, surprise and confusion, she fell unconscious.
Her last thoughts were:
I will most certainly not work for Austin Moon. Decisions are a great thing.
And, just out of curiousity:
There are alligators?
end (1/?)