(Gifted to Rachel452)

(AN) My immense and eternal gratitude to Rachel452 (who bravely QAed their own gift) and Granger13 who very kindly let me share the musical domain with her beautiful Put Your Records On.

And – as always - thank you so much for reading.


In Chapter 1: we get to know some folks.


Claudia Donovan stands in the wings of the small stage, warming up. She tilts her head from side to side, getting into the headspace of occupying the stage while mumbling lyrics to herself. She practices the progression of chords in her head, and then on the neck of the guitar, her fingers sliding on the steel strings of her telecaster which faintly sigh and creek as she changes the constellation of fingertips on the fretboard.

It's the first time she'll cover Jeff Buckley (even though his is also a cover), and this is very ambitious, and – Christ in a hot rod – is she ready for it?, but it's Steve's request and she loves Steve as much as she does her own brother and he's away on a mission on his birthday, so wherever he is, she knows he will feel her singing Lilac Wine just for him off the stage of small, mid-west-university-town-bar's open mic night.

The MC announces her and she walks on to the dimly lit stage and into the spotlight in the middle of it, to the sound of two – no – three people clapping.

"Thank you," she speaks into the mic, "and thanks, Trey, for that awesome intro. I'm Claudia and let's get this little show on the road."

She strums a hesitant E chord that rings throughout the small bar, then starts picking the chord more gently. Her opener is another cover of a cover: Cat Power's version of Naked if I Want to. It's a bold and very vulnerable choice, but Claudia Donovan has resided herself to the fact that music is the only thing that will save her mortal soul, so for the sake of therapy and catharsis and everything that is healing in the power of exposing the most sacred part of her insides to a bunch of drunken strangers, she sings it like she means it.

Her eyes are clamped shut throughout, and she knows she's supposed to open them, because that's how you connect with the audience, but she can't bring herself to because the lyrics are just so raw and so true. When she opens them after the last of the final notes of the final chord had faded out and the room is completely silent, she's relieved and panicked in equal measures.

Then there is a low-timbered, yet distinctly female voice from the back of the bar grunting "Yeah!" followed by exuberant clapping and the whole bar roars with applause. Well, as much of a roaring applause twenty-odd people can make.

"Thank you," she smiles coyly into the mic, and without much preamble she launches into her second song of the set, one of her own. It's about depression and madness and drugs, but it could equally be about being a twenty-something without a clue of what to do next. That's the beauty of songwriting to Claudia. She can write about something that's so wrong, but people will find something right about it, and make it their own, and like it. And that's so so cool.

The excited female at the back instigates the next round of applause, and Claudia wants to thank her, so she holds her hand up to shield her eyes from the spotlight, but all she sees is a dark silhouette of a lanky female body. She smiles directly at the silhouette, in the hope that it (no, she. It's definitely a she) will catch the small gesture of gratitude.

"This next one," she clears her throat, "is for a dear friend of mine who's putting his life on the line out there somewhere so that all of us can sleep a little bit better at night." She plucks the strings individually and fiddles with the tuning pegs, correcting the tiny faults that occur to guitar strings when you play them. "I'm a little bit scared of playing this, because this song is a bit like a prayer in our household and I've never sung it in front of people before."

She looks up and all the twenty-odd people are looking straight at her.

"I –" her breath catches, "I hope you enjoy it," she says and starts the intro to Lilac Wine.

The silhouette at the back of the bar caught Claudia's smile and smiles back, just in case the artist on stage notices. But as Claudia sings more and more of Lilac Wine, the drunken stranger at the back of the bar realises how much of a prayer it actually is and the smile fades from her lips.

It's fading because the small, skinny redhead on the stage is pouring a whole other truth into a song, a different truth to that of Nina Simone or Elkie Brooks or John Legend or Jeff Buckley. And this truth, the redhead's truth, touches something in the drunken stranger's soul and she knows that's something special.

Claudia finishes her set, thanks the audience one last time and gets off the stage. When she's in the safe and dark confines of the wings she exhales loudly, letting the guitar and her arms dangle limply while she collects herself from the experience.

"That kicked major ass, Claud," Trey, the MC, comes up to her. "Someone left you a thirty bucks tab at the bar again, babe, looks like you're eating tonight!" he smiles down at her and walks on the stage to introduce the next act.

She knows he's joking about the "eating tonight" thing, but she doesn't get a lot of money for these things, and what she's paid for her demeaning tech support job is barely enough to keep her shoebox of an apartment, so realistically, a tab at the bar does mean she will be eating better tonight. And if Artie, the barman, is in a good mood, she'll be eating better tomorrow night too.

She reverently places her telecaster in its hard case and walks out to the bar of Booze & Blues (or the B&B as the locals refer to it), where she hopes to get a club sandwich and chips. She's also hoping to thank the roaring fan at the back of the bar. But when she looks to the far corner of the room the table where the silhouette was sitting is empty.


The door to the studio slams, and that unnerves Helena. It takes a mighty great effort to make that door slam, because it's designed to not slam under pretty much any and all circumstances. She clicks pause and scribbles a note in her pad on top of the mixing desk and gets up to inspect the hinges.

"Sodding bloody buggery of a bastard," she spits and hisses under her breath, because the dramatic antics of the lead singer of this emo band just managed to rip the door off its hinges. Irene will not be happy to foot the $750 bill to get this fixed and Helena, cockiness and confidence aside, is a professional and won't like reporting this type of damage, this being her first month with Irene Frederic's record label.

She huffs with the strain of lifting the door up an inch so that the ripped screws line up with the holes from which they were torn, and rushes over to the cabinet at the back of the control room where she keeps her toolbox. She fishes out eight screws, all considerably longer and thicker than the ones the hinges sported before, and plugs the glue gun to heat up. Blue Petering the door back on its expensive hinges takes 45 minutes which – if calculated coldly – is still cheaper than $750.

She inspects her work and makes final adjustments when she realises that the door is just slightly more open than ajar. "Bollocks," she mutters, because even though her build is fairly small – she will not be able to fit through what is effectively little-more-than-a-crack. Paired with the fact it would take the glue at least four hours to dry, and the time is just past midnight, Helena calls Leena to come and lock the Warehouse's front doors from the outside, because she'll have to spend the night in the control room.

This isn't the first night Helena Wells has spent in the control room of a recording studio, and this probably won't be the last either. In the cabinet where she keeps her toolbox she also keeps a spare set of clean beddings and there is always a sofa that's comfortable enough to sleep on for the night.

There is no way, however, she will be going to sleep with that dreadful whinge of a band on her spool, so she switches the input to the mixing desk from the tape deck to the computer, and loads up some old recordings from eleven years ago, from when she was a product manager for a leading audio software company in Detroit, and was sent out to Washington DC on loan to the Secret Service for two months.

The recordings are of jam sessions Helena and her Secret Service counterpart, Myka Bering, held. They are the result of three slightly drunken nights in which they attempted to re-produce (and by that, Helena recalls with a faint smile that drips of fondness and nostalgia, she means produce again as opposed to simply re-make) albums that they believed needed a different flavour despite their greatness.

Helena's favourite of their three nights' jam was their take of Tracy Chapman's debut album. Neither of them could sing the way Tracy Chapman does, so between them they managed to record all the music, and backing vocals and some very creative solo-stand-ins with the multitude of instruments they could play between them.

On some tracks Helena can hear them humming the tune. And harmonising. It's beautiful.

It soothes her not only because these songs are so breathtakingly blue and calming with their sadness, but because those three nights with Myka (and the six weeks that ensued) are quite possibly the best time she has ever had with any person she's ever met.

She curls up on the sofa and listens to the recording from beginning to end, all 42 minutes of it, and she falls asleep with a smile, tantrums and emos and doors long forgot.