XX

Chapter 02 - Stainless Night

XX

Francis walked into Gilbert's renovated practice room to find rehearsal for their next concert proceeding slower than expected. In fact, they had not even started.

"What are you doing?" he found Antonio leaning back on the red leather couch, reading a copy of Ok, Rock! with a ridiculous smile on his face.

"Ah, the article that a friend of mine wrote is in here. It's very cute. See?" Antonio held up the magazine and Francis could see the pictures from last week's gig at The Butterfly with that odd band. His gaze ran down the page. "They're playing again? At Peacock Blue?" he voiced his surprise when he reached the end. Had those two Italians managed to sneak backstage and talk to the members? Had they talked to Arthur, the lead singer with those furious green eyes and foul temper?

"Bleh, a nobody-band playing at a nobody-club!" Gilbert walked in, throwing open the door to announce his entrance. "C'mon, I'm ripping and ready to go! Let's practice!"

"You're only this energetic when Roderich says that he's coming."

Gilbert grinned, plucking at the strings of his Fender restlessly. "Hey, I don't want to have the boss man shouting at me, do you? He might even tear up our contract. Trust me, he'd do that!"

Antonio folded the magazine on the side of the couch and France obediently picked up his sticks with a look that said that they had been used to Gilbert's whims for far longer than the three years since becoming an official band.

"Then we should start practicing, oui?"

XX

They went through song after song, playing nonstop for hours until the sun began to sink. Antonio, with the mic in front of him, sang with a strange passion one would not normally associate with his laid-back air and Francis tried not to think how right Arthur had been in his assessment of their vocals.

"Oh yeah! We rock!" Gilbert yelled as the last chords of their final song drifted away. "And old Roddy didn't come by after all!"

"We're not bad," Antonio smiled. "Perhaps we should work on tightening our chords?"

"Hey, we're already awesome as it is!" Gilbert never liked listening to criticism, the one trait that, without which, he could have been rather good friends with Roderich. The two liked to butt heads whenever in the same room; Roderich always telling him to straighten up and Gilbert disobeying as far as possible without seriously pissing their manager off enough to make him tear out his hair and their contract.

"Though I agree with Antonio…today, I think we should call it a night," Francis put aside his sticks.

"Alright! Wanna go out for drinks?" Gilbert grinned, throwing down his guitar on the couch with a carelessness that would have made any collector grimace with horror. Francis frowned, wondering how he could refuse Gilbert without looking too suspicious. Although he frequently voices his wishes for Gilbert to drink with more finesse, he had never turned down the opportunity to exercise their music star rights to get stinking drunk.

Antonio, however, noted the second Francis' hesitated and asked; "Do you have somewhere that you have to be?"

"I just wanted to check on something," Francis shrugged on his coat quickly before they could ask him what it was. In truth, he was not sure why he felt so drawn to that band and that rude, foul-mouthed singer. It was not a pleasant day to be out either. The sky looked as though it would rain.

"Have fun!" Antonio bid him farewell.

Francis snorted. Fun? Yeah right.

XX

The interior of Peacock Blue was in rather bad shape after years of abuse without ever being repaired. It was certainly not ramshackle but it was the nicest place to perform with a small stage and cheesy neon lights and a dirty floor; all of these defects obscured however by the dimness by which the concert hall – if it could be called that – was covered in.

Despite the dingy quality of the venue, Francis found himself in a fairly packed hall. It amused him to think that the band could possibly be gaining a following. He wondered if they would start printing T-shirts with Arthur's face and his ridiculous eyebrows one day.

"Are you ready to rock?!" the bassist, Alfred, if France recalled correctly, screamed through the microphone. Arthur grabbed it off of him, shoving him away from the centre spot with his hand and an attempted kick to his shin.

Pretending as though nothing had happened, he smiled at the audience with a look of gentle courtesy, the suddenly roared; "Right ladies and gents, get ready for the night of your life!"

The audience repaid him with an even louder wave of screams and claps and the neon lights lit up around the stage and the first rift ripped through the hall.

Francis watched from a good distance as the song sped up in tempo. Arthur grabbed the mic stand and leaned in, almost pressing his lips to it as his eyes, which seemed eerily ablaze in the lighting, remained sharp and focused on the crowd. Francis felt a cold trill run up his spine. It looked as though he were staring right into you.

Halfway through the song they hit the chorus and Alfred managed to quick-draw the saxophone strapped to his side – like a cowboy in a Western movie, Francis smirked – and began to play solo while his base was left hanging around his shoulders on its strap.

The crowd went wild, their cheers pitching above the humanly possible octaves as Arthur joined in with a series of furious rifts and Ivan started to appear as though he would destroy his drum set under the furious thundering sticks.

"They're not bad," Francis almost jumped as he heard a cool, calm voice speak almost next to his ear.

"R – Roderich?! What are you doing here?" he turned his bewildered at the company manager.

Roderich Edelstein – not to be confused with Edelweiss. He really hated it when people called him that – was a difficult man to find, and an even more difficult man to work with, but so brilliant that everyone clamoured to create a contract with him anyway. He had been a big name in the classical music scene before "things had happened" and he had quit for good – Francis had always been too smart to ask his boss what those "things" had been.

Roderich, whom Gilbert always accused of always having a "stick shoved up where the sun don't shine", folded his arms and leaned back from the crowd, immune to the apparently infectious fervour carried on the waves of music.

"I went to check up on your band mates but it seems that practice was already over. However, Antonio had an inkling that you would be here and I was curious as to discover why."

"He can be strangely perceptive at times," Francis sighed. Despite Antonio's devastating inability to read the atmosphere, he could be almost telempathic at times. If he did not know better, he would have thought Antonio's air-headedness to be just a ruse.

"What do you think of them?" Roderich nodded toward the stage.

Their first song had finished and now they were playing a less intense song, the kind that made for easy-listening on those long hours caught in the evening rush-hour.

Francis frowned. "We could do much better."

"Perhaps," Roderich looked as though he had been expecting such an answer, "but they do have potential. Perhaps I will have a chat with them after this gig."

"Ah, you can't mean that…"

Roderich smiled at him, although, when Roderich smiled, many people often found themselves wishing they were not on the receiving end of such a smile. "Is that a problem? Well, even if you have a problem, I won't listen to it," he said before Francis could open his mouth.

XX