Lost Boys

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

A gift for Raphiael. An FE8 AU set in a fictionalized 1960s UK. Contains adult themes and situations, including substance abuse. And language.

And a metric tonne of musical in-jokes.

Innes blew a perfect failure of a smoke ring, which fit with the way everything else was headed that particular session. They'd gotten nothing accomplished that morning, the studio canteen was all out of apple tart by the time they went to lunch, and Lyon and Ephraim had voted that Innes had to take his filthy cigarettes outside to spare Lyon's asthmatic lungs. Innes was triply annoyed on that count- first for being banished, second because that rat Joshua had abstained from the vote, and finally because it struck Innes as ridiculous that the pot-smoking contingent of Mogall had decided to come down on the tobacco user. So there he was, standing outside the studio door with water dripping down his coat, his mood reflected in the grey drizzle that fell upon the western edge of the capital.

Innes flicked the half-burnt cigarette to the pavement and ground out its fire with his heel. He straightened his coat and marched back into Studio Three to the sound of Lyon plodding through another take of what Innes had privately titled "The Most Boring Song I've Ever Heard, Bar Three".

Make that Lyon and Ephraim. The guitarist faithfully followed along the turgid sequence of minor chords, silently mouthing the words. Innes watched them for a few moments, hoping he would find something of merit in the song upon hearing it for the seventy-fifth time. He didn't, and Innes retreated behind Joshua, who had taken up his common position- slumped on a stool with his hat pulled down to his eyes.

"Is this song about a girl going down on her brother?" Joshua asked it without moving his eyes, and almost without moving his lips.

"I don't think we're supposed to take the see-saw metaphor that way." As far as Innes could tell, it was about losing one's childhood innocence in a playground, or something to that effect. And he hadn't interpreted "innocence" in the way Joshua meant it.

"It'd make the song more interesting," Joshua muttered. He began rummaging about in his pockets, then pulled out his lucky gold sovereign. "Heads, we don't get anything accomplished here today. Tails..."

It was heads. Joshua thrust the coin back into his pockets and returned to his motionless vigil. Innes, rather than being stung by their apparent defeat at the hands of the vast cosmos, considered the verdict of Joshua's coin a call-to-arms. If fate said nothing would be accomplished today, Innes was there to defy it.

"Artur," he whispered to the tousle-haired sound engineer. "Why don't you let them know that the take we agreed upon yesterday is damaged and Ephraim needs to record his vocal again?"

"Excuse me?" A pink tinge of panic showed in Artur's cheeks.

"I said, why don't you let them know that the take of Ephraim's vocal that we liked so much yesterday got wiped somehow and he needs to do it again? Tactfully, of course."

Artur was older and a little wiser than he looked, and he got Innes's meaning the second time around. As Artur brought the endless takes of "The Most Boring Song..." to a close, Innes gazed with grim satisfaction at the poster on the studio wall behind his bandmates.

"This IS the place!" shouted the poster, a gesture of rah-rah motivation apparently aimed at those already signed to the label that was making a pun on its own acronym. Innes thought he knew what it meant when they'd first entered Studio Three, or at least he'd felt some jot of pride in the statement. He wasn't sure about that now.

Ephraim re-recorded the vocal with a bottled-up passion that, to Innes, sounded even better than the perfectly preserved take they'd liked the day before. So, in that sense, his ruse proved successful. But, in the silence between takes, Lyon was the one that held his attention. Lyon stood with his fingers frozen above the keyboard and his head at an angle, seemingly caught up in the faint sounds that drifted over from Studio Two.

-x-

Mogall, with their status as the Hot New Thing from International Sound Records, worked out of Studio Three, whose ancient two-track recording setup had that summer been upgraded to four tracks. Studio Two and its splendid eight-track system belonged to That Band, the immortals, the ones known even to their acquaintances as "the four princes of IS Records". The lesson, to Innes, was that if one's group had the top-selling album of the decade (to date), then the studio rewarded one with the best technology available. Innes intended to hold IS to this fine tradition of nurturing artists once Mogall actually made good on their own promise of coming up with a second long-play album.

Of course, the recording system wasn't the only reason Innes and his mates felt they lived ever in the shadow of Studio Two. Every teenager walking around the streets of the capital with a high-collared jacket and a floppy fringe of hair down in his eyes, every poseur who thought a velvet cape a must-wear accessory for parties, everyone who'd affected a small curved mustache in the last six months... they all drew inspiration from the same source.

Even the Establishment, from the Empress on down, had gotten behind That Band, saying they'd brought the realm out of the gloomy postwar malaise and into an era of light and colour and magic. They'd done something, in Innes's own reckoning, and there wasn't an up-and-coming act on IS records or anywhere else that might deny it. But while it might make them pop royalty, it didn't make them gods. There was room at the top of the mountain for anyone else willing to climb it. And Innes was nothing if not ready to climb.

-x-

Moonstone and Tiger Eye would be Mogall's second album (whenever it was finished, which now looked to be some time into the next year). Lyon's somewhat feverish brain proved as good with titles as it was terrible with lyrics. He could come up with a striking image or six, but string them all together in verse form and the images made for a faintly horrible muddle.

And since Ephraim claimed he wasn't a words person, and Joshua thought "na na na" made for good lyrics as long as girls could dance to it, that left Innes in charge of one-half of Mogall's recorded output. This, incidentally, meant that Innes also collected fully half the royalties, but he felt he deserved it.

But on an afternoon like this, locked up in his flat contemplating a blank sheet of paper, Innes did admit to himself that he wouldn't have minded a little assistance from his mates. Lyon and Ephraim between them had come up with a marvelous little tune, one with an actual beginning, end, and bridge, and it would be The Next Single if only some words were attached.

He didn't have to write a love song. Nobody did, not since That Band showed that it was possible to have an LP go Gold seven times over without relying on the usual permutations of I-you-love-me-too. That Band weren't into love, not the kind of love that involved taking your girl to the summer dance and exchanging rings with her. Their songs seemed to come from some other headspace entirely, a place where the stakes were immeasurably higher than whether or not you got a kiss on the doorstep after the dance. When Innes first put on Setting Sun and Paint the World, it took him back to being an infant in his mother's arms, being taken out in the street to celebrate Victory Day along with everyone else in the town. Even at that age, he remembered how strange and muted a celebration it was, this attempt at joy made by people who knew they'd lost too much to ever truly feel joy again.

People born in the days before the Great War, before rationing and blackouts, couldn't have written anything like Setting Sun. It came out of the new world, the one where great gaps in the street marked places where apartment blocks had been, the one where everyone Innes's age knew someone whose father wasn't coming home from overseas. And when Innes listened, he wanted to crawl right into that space in the music where all the horrible things of his childhood were transmuted into something painfully beautiful, something that offered some kind of meaning to the dark and fractured landscape of the Empire in its victory.

He supposed it was funny, really, that the sparkling and colourful world the capital was at present, the world fueled by the "magic" of That Band's albums, existed precisely because somebody had taken all the terrors of the war and done something with it. Innes also suspected that half the girls bopping their heads at listening parties, girls born ten years after Victory and too young to remember chocolate being rationed, just thought the music was pretty and the singer was pretty and didn't go deeper than that.

So when Innes assigned himself the task of doing Paint the World one better, he did acknowledge the goal was somewhere between "steep" and "impossible". In his own assessment, he'd done a fair job with Queen of the White Dunes , which didn't have a single "I love you" song on its tracklist. The reviews mostly agreed that White Dunes transported the listener off to some interesting new world, but it was a prettier, more whimsical world that Innes really wanted to build. He'd almost gotten there, but not quite. Still, White Dunes sold so well that Innes and Mogall had another crack at making their perfect statement; too bad all he had to show for it at present was a blank sheet of paper.

-x-

Innes did the talking to the press for the same reason he wrote the lyrics; the others had assigned him the duties of being the Words Person, and that meant prose as well as poetry. He escaped from another bad day at Studio Three to do an interview with a journalist from Music Maker, which had finally gotten around to noticing that pop music was a phenomenon amongst the new generation and something possibly worthy of their attention. The interview started off on the wrong foot when the journo asked Innes how long "The Mogalls" had been around.

"Mogall. Not The Mogalls. I'm not a Mogall myself!"

Innes didn't even know what a Mogall was, really, except that Lyon claimed to have encountered one in a nightmare. He'd thought it a damnably silly name and had offered up some alternatives to his mates, which they'd uniformly rejected.

The rest of the interview didn't go much better than the outset, and Innes left the encounter feeling the need for a beer or three. He went toward the blue neon sign of the Pegasus, which had a fellow pop musician for a co-owner and offered a refuge from journalists and autograph seekers alike. Innes had managed to gain entrée there over the summer, after it looked like Mogall had some staying power.

Innes ordered his usual and was about to retreat to his favorite corner when he spied familiar figure at the bar, tall and blond with a profile that looked like it belonged to the cinema rather than pop music.

"Hello, Cam."

The golden-haired enigma of the "four princes of IS" looked as sombre tonight as he did on the cover of their fourth LP. Cam always came across as prickly in the press (come to think of it, Innes could sympathize with the apparent disdain for journos), but the press loved That Band enough that they preferred to interpret Cam's opaque statements as the signs of some deep guiding philosophy. Innes found him an amiable drinking partner; they got along better than a miner's son from the west country and a professor's son from the rugged north ever would without the common ground of pop to serve as a leveler.

Cam asked how things were going in Studio Three; the members of That Band always expressed a friendly interest in how the up-and-comers in their shadow fared, and Innes didn't much care if the interest was genuine or merely diplomatic. Either way, it helped Mogall along. Innes allowed that the second album was giving them more problems than the first. He figured the recording engineers and such all talked amongst themselves, and there wasn't much point in lying.

"How's yours coming along?" Cam's lot were taking forever to assemble an album with that magical eight-track system.

"It's coming in its own time," said Cam, giving the sort of stone-faced non-answer that made him such a delight when a microphone was thrust into his face. "Mike has been on one of his sprees, with all the usual noise."

This, translated, meant that Cam's flash dresser of a drummer was going around claiming to be the only man of any talent in the industry. Even on a down day, Mike's every word and gesture betrayed his belief that he was the big attraction and the secret to their success. It was, admittedly, part of his charm. Innes felt that there wasn't any shame in an artist taking pride in his genuine accomplishments, but he did have to admit that Mike pushed things to the limits.

"He'll simmer down after a bit, won't he?"

"I keep telling myself that," said Cam as he peered into his half-empty lager. "But the other two are at loggerheads as well, and I don't even know what the problem is this time."

He wouldn't say any more on the matter, and Innes didn't ask Cam to confirm or deny the rumor he'd heard from a reliable source- that Cam had caused a bit of trouble himself by openly fancying the girlfriend of one of his mates.

"Takes friction to make a spark, doesn't it?" Innes said, instead of asking whether Cam had been after the posh dressy blonde or the pert brunette.

"It'll end in murder. It can't not end in a murder." Cam said it with such detachment, such a marked lack of passion, that Innes felt the truth of the statement somewhere in his bones.

Innes and Cam called it a night just before the bus routes shut down. As Innes waited on the corner, he noticed a bright bit of paper in the gloom across the street. Innes, perhaps not in the most cogent state of mind, abandoned his place at the bus stop to investigate. There on the lamp post was a small poster from some months back, one that no one had gotten around to taking down. Innes recognized it as the advert for Mogall's second single, a "trippy" portrait that Lyon made of Ephraim's twin sister in her red boots and miniskirt. While Innes wouldn't even pretend to like all of Lyon's scribbles, he'd rather liked this particular poster, and it felt wrong to leave Eirika there on the lamp post to fade through the winter. He took hold of the poster at the top corners and pulled it off clean, then did the same at the bottom so the paper didn't tear. Good thick paper, he thought; seemed a bit of an unnecessary expense at the time, but the posters did their part in getting the single to the Top Five.

He brought Lyon's portrait of Eirika back to his flat and put it among the things that Innes hoped he'd be proud of two decades on.

-x-

They hadn't played Valhalla in months; Mogall had outgrown the place, really, but Valhalla was on the downslide now that the blacklit cavern named Erebus had become fashionable, and so Mogall returned to the converted church at the outskirts of the capital to show their support for old benefactors.

Mogall's entire caravan- four band members, two roadies, a dancer, a visual-effects technician and the girlfriend of one of the roadies- pulled up the lot at Valhalla to find people waiting for them, waving signs and flowers. That wasn't the way it used to go, Innes thought as he checked the wing mirror to make sure he wasn't going to run anyone down as he parked. They used to creep in through the back, in the days when he and Joshua were playing for beer money and Ephraim and Lyon played for... love. Or weed money, perhaps.

He was glad to have the help of their expanded road crew in dealing with this crush of people. Innes had, at first, taken a dim view of the roadies Ephraim had scrounged up, deeming them a pair of freaks. Forde, the one with the ponytail who napped a lot, turned out to be a capable man with their lighting setup, and Kyle, the other one, cared for their gear like his life depended on it. He would not allow any silly flower-waving girl to breathe on the instruments, much less touch them or drool upon them. Innes had not yet given a more favorable assessment to Kyle's girlfriend/hanger-on, as he suspected her of being everyone's drugs supplier but hadn't been able to prove it yet.

Inside Valhalla, it was the same old dive, and not. This wasn't the crowd they'd played to the year before. In the front rows alone, Innes counted several dozen girls in the audience wearing hats with upturned brims in imitation of Joshua. These were people who'd come to Mogall through Queen of the White Dunes and promos on the television. Innes felt little, if any, connection to them, and from a whispered comment Lyon made to Ephraim, Innes got the impression the others didn't feel any more of a bond with these newcomers.

The dressing room, at least, as the same piss hole it always had been. They jostled up against one another as Innes buttoned his stage jacket and Lyon put on his violet cape with a pattern of gold flames at its edges. An early reviewer had called him their "shaman" and he'd taken it to heart, and perhaps a little too far, but Lyon did cut a unique figure on the scene. Ephraim's current stage kit was completely derivative and beneath them, at least as Innes saw it. He looked like he was pretending to be somebody more famous, and that sort of act belonged to the beer-money days of their career.

By the time they'd dressed, and unwound with the cigarettes of their preference (Innes refused to step outside this time), the stage was ready for them. Vanessa was already at work, setting the mood with her slides and coloured oils for the visual effects that Mogall pioneered and everyone else wanted to copy.

"Here you are."

Lyon handed Innes the bass- perfectly tuned, the way only Lyon could do it by ear.

"Thanks," said Innes, and hurried to take his place onstage.

When Innes was asked what he was for "The Mogalls," it usually took him a second to remember he was the bass player. He thought of himself as the wordsmith, the press agent, the organizer. Playing his assigned instrument proved a secondary, possibly tertiary concern. But he'd come around to it, and made it his own, and something interesting developed in his playing style. In his hands, the bass was the lead instrument. Innes led them, playing out in front and ahead of the beat, while Joshua's jazz-inflected drumming came in behind. Then came Ephraim's arpeggiated waves of guitar noise and Lyon's wavering curtains of synthesized sound. Those two might be the "musicians," with Lyon's music-school credentials and Ephraim able to wring a tune out of any instrument he touched. They could be the musicians; Mogall needed their talent. But the heart of the Mogall dynamo was unmusical tone-deaf Innes and his electric bass, and he wasn't going to let anyone in this room forget it.

The dynamo was going at full force tonight. They had the audience from the first whisper of Lyon's keyboards and didn't let go the entire set. Lyon's shaman act always had worked a charm at Valhalla, and when he switched to the grand piano for one number, just the sight of his tall scrawny figure draped in violet mystery drew shrill screams out of the crowd. Ephraim gave each song his all, bawling out the vocals with his eyes screwed shut and cords of muscle standing out on his neck, while Joshua scampered about, switching from the drum kit to the bells to the gong without breaking his stride. Through all this, Innes anchored them in the sonic and the visual sense, holding down stage right while Tethys and her dancing made a focal point at stage left, as Vanessa's coloured slides washed over them all.

Mogall came home, and all was right with the world.

-x-

It should've been a fine way to cap off the year, headlining a holiday extravaganza at the Palace. After the Valhalla homecoming, everyone had "unstuck" and now Moonstone and Tiger Eye was done and ready to present to the label. Innes had finished the lyrics to what would become their next single, and they'd won damages against the tabloid that had called them "a pack of social deviants," so all that was looking up.

But when Innes stopped to pick up Lyon, he felt something was terribly... wrong. Lyon's eyes were strange, not bloodshot from his stupid spliffs but empty, glazed and vacant.

"You okay?"

Lyon licked his lips and nodded; he didn't say anything the whole drive across the city to the Palace, save for a mumbled greeting to Ephraim. He didn't even acknowledge Joshua.

"What the hell is with him?"

"I don't know," Innes replied to Joshua's question. Through the remainder of the drive, he kept checking the view in the rearview mirror to see if Lyon had changed back to normal.

They had two vans now, one for the musicians and one for their gear and crew, and the instant they reached the Palace, Innes was out on the floor looking for their roadies. And not on account of the gear.

"Where's Kyle's girl? Lute!"

When he found the small creepy girl who dressed like a witch and quite frankly acted like one, he frog-marched her over to Lyon.

"What's wrong with him? What's he taken?"

After Lute subjected Lyon to an extensive examination, catalogued his symptoms and gauged his reactions to various stimuli, she announced that no known single agent accounted for his condition. It was possible, she said, that a combination of substances had done it, or perhaps he'd obtained a new substance of unknown origin and effect. Or his current state resulted from a psychosomatic condition and it was all in Lyon's head. Ephraim seized on that last part, and dragged Lyon off to the dressing room to coax him out of his shell.

"Let's get a drink," suggested Joshua once they'd gone.

"Not before the show. You know the rules."

"Rules are out the window tonight," said Joshua, and Innes admitted he did have a point.

Two beers later, Ephraim emerged with a subdued but apparently lucid Lyon, who offered them a watery smile and some murmured apologies.

"You know that he's shy," Ephraim said, making it sound more of an offence against the rest of them than a defence of Lyon. "The pressure of tonight had him all worked up. You didn't have to get the crazy girl to work him over- that made him even more terrified."

Innes nearly said that mind-destroying shyness wasn't the best attribute for someone who wanted to be a pop star, but he bit back on the comment. Ephraim had given them a functional keyboardist/vocalist again, and that was all he should care about at present. That, and the ten thousand people there to see them top the bill.

Mogall waited out the bottom of the bill, including some truly terrible acts- The Generics and The Sub-Humans, both of whom lived up to the name- and one fairly decent group calling themselves The Common Mercenaries. They had a promising guitarist, a scruffy kid of about seventeen who finished the set by leaping into the air and bashing his guitar against the floor of the stage.

"Expensive stunt," said Innes. "I wonder if they do that every show."

"Hey, fake it 'til you make it," replied Joshua. "Worked for us."

"We didn't trash our own equipment."

"No, we just lied our bums off about songs we hadn't written yet and used equipment we'd stolen out of rubbish bins. Remember that first light-show thing you and Vanessa cobbled together out of trash?"

"Those were the days," Innes said. He didn't feel it, though. This was supposed to be the day, ringing out the old year before their largest audience to date.

Still, Innes sensed that everyone in the Palace felt the presence of a group that wasn't even there, mostly because of the massive poster tacked up over the windows at the back. Star of the Age: 1.1.68, it said. It didn't say the name of the artist because it didn't need to, because a little cartoon logo below the lettering told everyone in the Empire and beyond that Star of the Age was the latest from That Band.

Innes wondered if Moonstone and Tiger Eye would get a promo campaign like that. Probably not, he admitted to himself. Not yet. Next time. He did wonder what precisely it would take for Mogall to achieve that kind of wordless recognition. Maybe he ought to encourage Lyon to draw some more things, since that poster with Eirika had turned out so well...

Three songs into the show, Innes didn't have a single charitable thought about Lyon left in his head. He didn't play well and he didn't play poorly; Lyon simply did nothing at all. His shaking hands rested on top of his silent keyboard, he stood slack-jawed before the microphone and did absolutely nothing. If shyness was the problem, he'd gone catatonic from it.

They stepped into the void Lyon left, all three of them did. Ephraim sang until his voice began to fray, played as though he could make up for the loss of the keyboard parts by drowning the audience in feedback. Innes did the same, tried to play bass lines that were simultaneously as fat and as melodic as possible, while Joshua banged up not just a flurry but a thunderstorm of percussive effects. And nobody booed, but Innes felt that it wasn't going over; not with the metaphorical dynamo pushed to its limits and beginning to falter. Vanessa skewed the light show to hide how just terrible Lyon looked, but the lights and colours couldn't mask the silence from his quarter of the stage.

And then, just as Innes was really beginning to sweat, he noticed a familiar face in the crowd. A too-familiar face. The most beloved member of That Band, the brightest light in the pop music firmament, was there in the audience... accompanied by the adorable brunette girlfriend that Cam the Enigma might or might not fancy.

Innes attacked his bass with energy fueled by something close to spite. Failing in public was bad enough, but failure before peers... no, rivals... was beyond his tolerance. Halfway through the next song, he spotted the final member of That Band- a tall figure with lupine features and that unmistakable oft-copied mustache. He had his girl along, too, all done up like a fairytale princess. How nice that they'd come to see Mogall's disaster. Perhaps they'd all come, Innes thought as his heartbeat began to quicken. They'd all come, the four princes and their ladies, the guy who co-owned the Pegasus and his two bandmates, everyone who was anyone in the capital was there tonight watching Mogall implode. Even Eirika was there, looking as though she'd stepped right off the poster, perfect hair spilling over her shoulders and perfect legs on display below that little frill of a skirt. She swayed back and forth in time to the music that wasn't working, and Innes couldn't tell if she was as aghast as she ought to be.

Right as Innes thought it couldn't be any worse, he saw a flash of brilliance at the edge of his vision and felt something hard sting his forehead right as he turned toward it. A coin, he realized after a moment, one of the "lucky coins" that girls tossed up onstage in case Joshua needed a spare. Lucky. He stopped singing, stopped playing, struck dumb by the indignity of it all as warm sticky stuff spilled down into his eye. Innes went at the very edge of the stage and peered at the upturned faces, wondering which of them had thrown the coin at him. There was no way of knowing; all the audience was a mad shapeless mass, and for a moment Innes couldn't hear anything beyond the sound of blood churning in his own ears. One figure did resolve out of the terrible blur- Eirika. Innes mumbled her name, in shame as much as anything else.

He wasn't sure, then or afterward, if he'd called Eirika out of the crowd or if Ephraim had. But she clambered up onstage in those teetering red boots, and took up the microphone that was supposed to be Lyon's, and she sang. She sang as well as Ephraim or better, and she knew all the parts that were supposed to be Lyon's, and people cheered and possibly all loved them again. Innes turned his back on the audience and pretended to strangle his bass guitar as the blood dripped down onto his favorite satin shirt.

He was well enough after the show to drive them all back in the van, but none of the rest of the evening registered with him. People wished them well. Joshua got off at his stop. Eirika and Ephraim went home with Lyon to see if they could look after him and get him back to normal. Then everyone was gone, and Innes was alone in the van, with just his own thoughts and a near-blinding headache born of rage and that stupid bloody coin.

"It'll end in murder," he muttered to himself, repeating Cam's words. "It can't not end in a murder."

Innes looked down at his hands, nicotine-stained and white-knuckled upon the wheel. Or maybe the stains were blood, his own blood from the oozing cut on his forehead. He pulled off the road and stopped the van, then rested his cheek upon the steering wheel.

"Maybe I should just go back to university," he muttered. But he didn't really mean it. That glorious mountain was out there, waiting for someone bold enough to climb it...

The Mogall came and talked to him in the dream Innes had there in the van on the side of the road. A Mogall, it seemed, was a giant sort of eyeball that sapped one's soul. It said it had already taken Lyon and was coming for the rest of them, one at a time. The price of doing business, it said. Innes didn't realize until then that giant eyeballs could, somehow, put on a truly evil smile.

The End. Maybe.

Author's Notes: Readers familiar with the 1960s British music scene, especially with the careers of Pink Floyd and The Beatles, who both recorded in EMI's Abbey Road Studios. For instance, song "Randy Scouse Git" by The Monkees refers to The Beatles as "the four kings of EMI". Et cetera.

Also, British spelling and punctuation quirks intentional.