A/N: My very first fic! It started out as a little story when I noticed that, if Roger stopped leaving the house a year ago when April died and the show starts on Christmas Eve, then April must have died on Christmas last year. Then it grew. Rather mammothly, actually. I have eleven chapters planned out. Incidentally, if you want a mental image, the Roger I'm going for here is not our dearest Adam Pascal, but the guy in the last-show-on-Broadway movie version with all the guyliner and the tattoos. It just gave me a more... interesting... mental image in a couple of the later chapters.
Disclaimer: Rent isn't mine, unless there's something my parents aren't telling me.
Roger Davis, a cult singer/songwriter especially famed for his personal, confessional lyrics about his partner Mimi Marquez, his struggles with HIV and his life as an impoverished artist, died Wednesday of complications from AIDS in his apartment in New York City. He was 39 years old.
Independent filmmaker Mark Cohen, a longtime friend, said that Davis had learned in September that he had only a few months more to live and spent most of his remaining months at home, surrounded by his friends and loved ones.
Davis, who established himself as a mainstay of the rock scene in the post-punk era, followed his vision through a series of astonishing musical changes that continued to resonate for other rockers and a dedicated although small contingent of devoted fans and critics.
Mark threw down the paper in disgust. Thirty-nine years creating the music he loved most, and that was all Roger became? Sixteen column inches in the back pages of the New York Times? A (God help him) "cult singer/songwriter" with a "dedicated although small group of fans"?
He felt a sudden, irresistible urge to find out whoever wrote this excuse for toilet paper, kidnap him and make him suffer the most exquisite agony Mark could devise.
Well, maybe not an endless repeat of Celine Dion. Mark was still civilized.
That thought was quickly followed by a second thought, that is, Mark was pretty sure he still had the number of that anarchist who'd lived next door in their squat and knew how to make napalm, and that the New York Times building would look really pretty as an explosion.
Mark sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He'd known Roger for more than half his life and lived with him for most of that. Even now whenever he looked over his shoulder he expected to see Roger's roguish grin or hear him complain about the new song that just wasn't going right. Even seeing one of his leather jackets thrown on the floor (despite living with the man longer than most married couples did, Mark had still not managed to persuade Roger that dirty clothes belonged in the laundry basket) would be welcome.
Instead, Mark's apartment was full of an echoing emptiness, waiting for a man who would never again come back.
No one to complain with about bosses that would not see their visions or actors/drummers/tech guys (delete as appropriate) who wouldn't do as told or critics who appeared to not know any words besides "quirky." No one to laugh at the old running jokes that went back to the time when guests had to call them from a pay phone to throw down the keys. No one whom Mark had held while he wept or shook from heroin withdrawal or fought for a last breath of life.
Soon he and Joanne would be the only ones left.
They haunted him like shadows, the dead ones. Their names were like a steady drumbeat in his ears. AprilAngelCollinsMimiBennyRogerandMaureensoonenough.
(The people at the AIDS hospital knew Mark. He had been a fixture there longer than most of the nurses. Occasionally the new ones mistook him for a patient since he was around so much.)
Roger was dead.
Mark felt like crying out to the God he didn't believe in. Roger couldn't be dead. It wasn't possible. He had loved with such a passionate intensity and brooded like he was Byron back from the grave and lived like every day was his personal victory against death and sang like a little taste of heaven. How could someone so alive be reduced to nothing more than ashes in a little urn on Mark's death, while so many of the walking dead still lived their dull little suburban lives? It wasn't fair.
It just wasn't fair.
A knock came at the door and Mark realized with a start that (a) his face was wet, (b) the sun was high in the sky and (c) he had done nothing except stare at Roger's urn for several hours. "Come in," he called out, his voice sounding dead to even his own ears. "It's unlocked, I'm pretty sure."
In some dim corner of his brain, Mark wondered who it could possibly be. Maureen was too weak to come here by herself and he'd given Joanne Roger's key. He'd possibly just invited in some Jehovah's Witness.
Instead, a pale, thin woman with a well-lined face, decorous black clothes and an oversized handbag appeared in the room. "Excuse me," she said. "I came as soon as I could. Was I too—?"
Twenty years of forlorn, ignored answering-machine messages played in Mark's head in half a second, followed by a wave of guilt. "You're—you're Lisa Davis," he said. "You're Roger's mother."
Lisa seemed to think of nothing she could do but nod. "Is my son… still here?" she asked, looking around anxiously.
There was no good way to say it. There never was a good way to say it.
Mark shook his head. In answer to the questions in her eyes, he said, "A few days ago. I cremated the body." He gestured towards the urn on his desk. "I would have waited if you knew…"
Lisa laughed softly. "You never picked up when I called. I thought it would be easier to just show up. Harder to refuse." She picked up a picture of Roger at a concert. Her long fingers traced his features. "You know, I hadn't seen him since he was nineteen. He looks." She paused, searching for the right word. "Older. More worn."
Mark's wave of guilt was quickly growing into a full-blown tsunami.
"I played his albums for my friends, whenever they came over," she said. Mark got the feeling she was speaking more to the picture than him. "I played them and I said, I said, 'That's my son. That's my boy.'"
Mark didn't dare say anything and interrupt her reverie. In fact, he felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if he was walking in on something private.
"I wish," she said softly, so soft Mark had to strain to hear it, "I wish I could know what he had been. You know, for twenty years all I've known of my son is postcards twice a year? 'April's dead. I have AIDS. Merry Christmas.' I kept them all." Her voice was full of a sort of desperate, quavering hilarity. "I had a scrapbook. Every newspaper article. Every interview. Every review, even the bad ones. I'd look over it and I'd wonder, what was he like? Did he live in the way I'd dreamed, when he was younger and I bent over his crib and kissed his cheek and imagined what he would be when he grew up?"
"Your son was a great man." The words left Mark's lips without his mind having anything to do with the matter. "And he was very much loved. I think he was happy, in the end. You would have been proud of him."
Lisa set down the picture quietly. "Tell me," she said, in the tones of someone who had just made a major decision. "Tell me everything."
A/N: So. If you liked it, send me a review and make me feel great. If you didn't like it, send me a review and make me write better. If you have no opinion about it, move to the Neutral Planet from Futurama.
An imaginary cookie to the first person who notices the Order of the Stick reference. If you don't read it, you need to.