It's the kid's first tour. He can barely speak English, can't play the guitar worth shit, shakes in his boots and can't apply his own corpse paint. Carefully cultivated facial hair can't hide the fact that he barely scrapes early twenties in age, his eyes wide and pupils blown with fear and awe. He's gotten a haircut recently, just a trim, the dead ends all swept up into a dustpan, and he looks so fresh, so young, so naive. So precious. The rest of them are shaking for their own reasons, Magnus's betrayal rattling inside their individual heads, far too preoccupied with themselves off on their lonesome to pay attention for the kid.
Skwisgaar didn't come into this friendship on his own volition. You're Scandinavian, they told him, go ease his culture shock. Teach him English they told him, teach him the guitar. Be his buddy. Be his friend. Skwisgaar agreed. Without Magnus, Skwisgaar was the lead, the position of authority, and he wasn't about to let the new power go to waste. He nodded at the kid when their manager led him into the room, took him aside, talked to him in Swedish to see if he understood it. The kid knew a little Swedish; Skwisgaar knew a little Norwegian; the discrepancies disappeared in the similarities of the languages and the kid didn't have much to say anyway. He listened with that same wide-eyed look as Skwisgaar led him around the place and shoved a guitar in his arms. "Spela," he'd told the kid. It was close enough.
He hadn't the slightest clue of how the kid was found or what the kid's name was or if he'd ever seen a guitar before. Nobody told Skwisgaar anything, just that there was this new Scandinavian kid that was going to be their new rhythm guitarist, and they all went off by themselves after leaving him to play babysitter. So Skwisgaar played babysitter, sitting beside the kid on the ratty couch in their ratty apartment, showing him how to play chords, showing him how to shred, teaching him English, teaching him about this great place called America and how easy capitalism was to take advantage of and how they were going to be rich one day. The kid was quiet, giving Skwisgaar the opportunity to speak at him instead of to him, and Skwisgaar did. He found himself telling these intricate stories about his own childhood in the Swedish snow, about playing in every band known to man, about picking up prostitutes and being so good at sex they refused his money at the end. Skwisgaar grew fond of the kid.
He learned, eventually, that the kid's name was Toki. Toki Wartooth, a Norwegian, they found him wandering the streets without a shirt and his back oozing blood from fresh whip wounds. Skwisgaar didn't think about that—or, more apt, when he did, he pushed it from his mind and only laid his hands over the kid's, showing him something on the guitar and forcing a smile. He really was growing fond of him. As it came closer to touring time, to showing off their new member to the world, Skwisgaar spent less time with the kid out of necessity and preparation for the upcoming tour, and he was surprised at how sad that made him.
But: it's the kid's first tour. Toki's first tour. His first show, nonetheless, and he's hanging out behind the curtains, guitar looped around his neck, chewing on his own mouth and shaking in his boots. Skwisgaar's been hovering around him, sort of, sticking close, looking out for him. He's fond of the kid, he really is. He walks over to him, confident in his own boots, hands moving up and down the guitar to get a feel for it tonight. Something Magnus taught him: get a feel for your instrument, don't put it down, live with it, think of it as an extra limb. Magnus was fucking crazy but the guitar is in his arms and the knife was in Magnus's hands and he's starting to understand why the kid is shaking. Why they should all be shaking. He walks over to the kid and he extends a hand and touches him on the shoulder.
"Hey," he says. He makes eye contact with the kid, with those fat pupils ringed by a thin and pale blue, like ice, like Skwisgaar's own eyes. "It ams goingks to be okay," he says. Simple English, simple words, but there's so much more he wants to convey to the kid. Like: he was nervous, once, too. Like: everybody was nervous. Like: it's okay for you to be nervous. Like: the first and only time he fucked something up during a show Magnus constructed this elaborate ruse so that he'd break his left ankle because his fingers were too valuable. Like: who the fuck lashed you? Like: who the fuck let them? Like: can I see your wounds, and do they still bleed at night while you're alone?
Toki doesn't say anything, of course. Skwisgaar pats him on the shoulder, a little awkward, and doesn't walk away. Doesn't disconnect his eyes. Skwisgaar feels unnerved. He has a good handful of inches on the kid, a good handful of years, a good handful of life, but the kid—Toki, he has to call him Toki, that is his name, and he's fond of him, really—unnerves him.
The show goes well. They're only a couple cities away from the town they're living in at the moment, in the biggest metropolis in the area, and there's people lining up at the door to see them. The audience likes the new guitar player, even with his inanimate (except for the shaking) stance, his inexperienced fingers fretting. The audience loves Skwisgaar as usual, eats up his skill with a spoon, and Skwisgaar smiles at every pretty girl he can see. Some of the pretty boys, too, the ones with the strong jaws and long hair. The audience loves Nathan, the girls screech when he growls. The audience loves to hate Murderface. They move in rhythm with Pickles's drumbeats and Pickles plays it up like only Pickles does, twirling his drumsticks, putting his body into the music, becoming the music. Skwisgaar pinwheels and pivots and thrusts and sweats himself all over the place, lifting his head and letting his hair swing behind him, sharp as the whip that inflicted the wounds on Toki's back, long neck strong and glistening in the grimy lighting of the venue they're playing at. In the break between songs he looks over at Toki, at the kid, catches his eyes, lets himself smile. It ams goingks to be okay, he tells the kid, tells Toki, in his head. It's going to be okay, man, just believe me, just throw yourself in and let yourself transcend. But he doesn't have the words or the time to say that.
After the show the kid disappears again. Skwisgaar shrugs off the groupies that come to him, that cling to him, that beg to be fucked, both with words and with looks. He can get that any night of the week, any minute of the day, but the kid—Toki, he's played his first show, he's one of them, now—disappearing behind the curtains after their first show is a one-time kind of deal, and Skwisgaar's going to let himself behave in a one-time kind of way. He searches among the backstage debris and finds Toki sitting on a busted amp in a corner, guitar on the floor in front of him, head cast down. There's no light back here and he looks ghoulish with his corpse paint, soul too old for his corporeal body, like he's haunting the place instead of having just played a show there. Skwisgaar guesses that he probably looks ghoulish, too. He can feel the slime of makeup in the process of being sweated off against his skin.
"Hey," he says to Toki, soft as the sound of his footsteps. Toki looks up. The black around his eyes is running down his face and Skwisgaar doesn't know if it's because of tears or sweat, doesn't ask, hopes it both or the latter.
"Hey," Toki says, his voice a hollow hoot. Skwisgaar extricates himself from his guitar and lays it beside Toki's on the floor, then sits on the amp beside Toki himself, their thighs pressing into each other.
"What does you thinks of de yous first show?" Skwisgaar said. He coaxes himself through the complex sentences, dumbs it down, wants the communication to be clear.
Toki looks at him. His elbows are on his knees, but he turns his head towards Skwisgaar, he looks at him. He really fucking looks at him, and it feels so profound, like nobody has ever seen Skwisgaar until this morning in the corner on a busted amp in the dark. Skwisgaar swallows back something. "It ams okay," Toki says, and the corners of his mouth turns up, there's this type of playfulness in his voice that makes Skwisgaar mirror the action. Something runs out of him, escapes through his feet, some sort of relief replacing it.
"Good," Skwisgaar says. Then, twisting his tongue to conform to the language of their shared motherland: "God."
"Good God," Toki says, and he uses the English pronunciations, his smile widening into something big, something tangible, something real. Skwisgaar wants to take his smile and pin it into a book like a butterfly. It's the weirdest thing he's ever thought.
"Good God," Skwisgaar repeats, and they're copying each other, mirror images, he's so fond of this kid. He puts a hand on the kid's thigh and leans in closer to him, racking his brain for words to say, what the fuck does he say? He wants to ask Toki about the scars on his back. He wants to ask Toki to tell him, really tell him, with words or whatever else he can come up with, what it felt like to play that show. He wants to tell Toki that things are going to be good, they're going to get rich, they're going to have authority and power and agency, all these wonderful things, because music is their calling and their purpose in life. He wants to tell Toki that he can't separate himself from the guitar at this point, can't think of himself as somebody who doesn't make music. He wants to ask Toki if he feels the same way.
He doesn't have words. Words, language, it all fails him, he would laugh at the other guys for thinking that he's the perfect babysitter and teacher and whatever for this kid just because he sort of speaks the same language and sort of knows a little English. No—that's wrong. Toki's thigh is warm underneath his hand. Fleshy. Toki is fleshy, he is made of flesh and muscle and bone and skin, he is real, and his wounds bleed. Skwisgaar can feel the thrumming of life beneath his hand. He looks at Toki and tries to pour everything into the kid's mind with his eyes, but he's pretty sure he's failing, so he uses his mouth instead. He kisses Toki, and it's not sexual, not really. He doesn't know what it is. It's a kiss.
Toki kisses back and Skwisgaar comes to a realization. It's not a kiss, it's a language, a whole fucking language, another thing to share between them, a similarity, something that disappears the discrepancies. The kid kisses excellently, so excellently that Skwisgaar's fighting for dominance after a few minutes, his hands are lost between them and they're both edging up and up and up until they're standing and their sides are slamming into a wall and they're tangling their hands in each other's hairs and grinding into each other's pelvises and they haven't broken mouth contact yet. Yes, Skwisgaar thinks, over and over again, I understand, I agree, I see what you're saying, I feel the words you're working directly into my mouth, into my body, into my bloodstream, yes, I understand. He asks the questions and receives the answers. Their shirts get thrown off and the corpse paint dragged across their skin and he sees Toki's back as he turns the kid around to tug his pants down. He runs his fingers over the skin, over the scars—the wounds do not bleed, they are only scars now—and he lowers his mouth to the kid's neck as he works his fingers inside of him. Resuming the conversation. Telling him: it's going to be okay.