Being an adult sucks because you have to motivate yourself to run in circles-literally, else you'll become fat and ugly and sick. Oh, and you're not getting paid enough to actually not feel like a slave.
But hey! At least your parents can't tell you what to do, right? That's nice.
10
They weren't given much time to recover before Mai had them herded onto a train. As he nodded off against the seat, he drowsily registered Tea geeking out about some tunnel that went under the English Channel and wishing she could see up through all the water.
It was probably because of that comment that he dreamed of drifting up into the sky, just to realize it had been tropical waters all along, yet he still couldn't reach the sun. He wanted that sun, hoping it was the same as it had been in Egypt, when the heat had pressed against his skin like hot metal. He couldn't get warm enough here. Everything was just so muggy.
He woke up when Bakura shoved at his shoulder.
"France awaits," he said. There was no mercy or softness in Bakura's wake up calls. Maybe it was because the white freak had perpetual shadows beneath his eyes. Atem knew for a fact that Bakura did sleep, though how much or how well had always been the question.
Though Atem and Joey stumbled along like the living dead, Tea bounced ahead, her head snapping in every which direction. She stopped abruptly at a metal, cylinder like corral next to the wall with a man inside.
"Is he peeing?" she asked with thin alarm.
"France isn't as prudish as we Americans," said Mai curtly. "Don't stare."
"Think those urinal stalls are called 'iron mans' or something," Atem managed to grumble. He had nothing to be amazed at. How much different was it from American public urinals?
Sadly, limos were constricted to after concerts, and the band was ushered into a taxi-van, or rather the mini-coup version of a van. It was all the same to Atem, though, as the taxi smelled like every other city taxi. Ugh, why did people have to be so god damn disgusting? Or namely why did they have to smoke?
It was about noon France time when Mai showed them to their rooms, or rather, the suite which was more or less a small apartment.
"Check this out, guys," said Joey from down the hall. "The toilet and the shower have separate rooms! Prepare your asses for surprise hot-shower attacks, nar nar nar!"
"You flush the toilet while I'm showering and you'll wake up with a rather interesting tattoo you can't recall getting," said Bakura calmly as he peered into one of the bedrooms. "Two of us are going to have to share, and it isn't going to be me. I've already done that once."
Atem groaned. "Please tell me they're at least king sized."
"Do I look like a mattress vendor to you?"
"Aw, come on, I'm not that bad," said Joey, who was still grinning in the doorway to the 'water closet'.
Neither Atem or Bakura answered to that. They had spent enough time with Joey in sleeping quarters that it wasn't even funny anymore.
"I could sleep on the couch," said Tea from somewhere in the back of one of the bedrooms.
"Forget it," said Atem. "We're not going to do that to a girl."
"Everything's so white," said Joey. "Do they bleach the walls or something?"
"Okay, tours over," said Mai from the front doorway, where she had been watching them all with business like courtesy, interspaced with yawns. "I'm taking you for coffee and lunch and then it's rehearsal time at the venue."
"Oh, guess Tea can't come, since there's coffee involved," said Bakura as he made his way towards Mai. "Wouldn't want her standards to be compromised."
Atem was more than a little pleased when Tea popped her head back into the hallway with a tart retort of, "Seriously, Bakura? You know, you're not the only one who can give weird tattoos."
"What? I was trying to be considerate," Bakura said with obviously false innocence.
She gave him a dead panned look. "Right."
It was nice to know that innocence didn't mean she couldn't defend herself.
At the restaurant, which turned out to be a little café outside in the sun, they all had a good time watching Joey trying his hand at speaking French to the waitress, who endured him with tight-lipped humor. It was moments like these, in the sun at the table, with the back of his head and stomach hurting so hard from laughing, where he tried to lasso time in place. The sun wasn't quite the hot press of metal, but it was warm, even if still with the hints of London's mugginess. But it was the company that really made it.
The good mood continued through rehearsal, which they were all actually awake for. There were few, if any, mistakes and Joey all but howled with confidence when they turned into the green room to get ready. Once more they'd be playing in a closed venue, but it was much larger and more modern than the little show house in London, so hopefully they wouldn't get their ears blasted out.
While they were revisiting Joey's attempts at French in their hair stylists' chairs, Mai came in with a frazzled looking older man. It was only thanks to the tag on his black polo shirt that Atem knew he was the theater director.
"Change to the lineup, boys," she ripped off the song line up on the nearest mirror and stuck up the new one. "Atem, I'll fetch your cello so you can run through it with Tea."
"What?" despite Otaga's protests, he stood and crowded round the new sheet over Bakura's shoulder with Joey. Tea had the grace to be considerate of her hair stylist and stayed put.
Near the end of the list was the song Atem had been hoping Mai would manage to take off, or at least make unavailable: Rebecca's solo, "Scrape Me Off."
Atem slinked back to his chair, Bakura gave a short, closed chuckle, and Joey said, "Now that's just rude."
"What?" asked Tea.
"You listened to track 8, right?" Atem asked.
"Yeah…" then her eyes widened. "Oh no…"
"'Oh no?'" quipped Bakura. "How quaint."
"More like fucking-shit-hell," spat Joey. "Don't worry, I'll say it for you."
"But I-I-I've never…" this time she all but tore her head from the stylist's hands to give Mai her horrified, pleading face. "I don't even sing that good."
"You sing fine," said Atem, who had little patience for her attempts to be modest or whatever the crap she was being. Someone obviously that talented shouldn't have the right to say such things.
"You'll do fine," said Mai, who, in a twist of events, actually sounded somewhat motherly. "You're the most talented person I've ever met, and I meet thousands of hot shot musicians every day."
"I hope you're including us among those hot shots," said Joey.
"Depends on the lighting."
"Lighting! What does that have to do with music?"
"We've got plenty of time to practice," said Atem, growing more aware of the need to comfort her, despite his misgivings as to her reasons for being nervous.
"Playing an instrument is completely different from singing, though," she said fingers dancing every which way. "When you get nervous you can't control your breathing and it gets all over the place and—"
"—and you've been doing it fine until now," said Mai. "Just do what you usually do."
"But I wasn't up front and alone—"
"You're not going to be alone," said Atem firmly. "You'll have me."
"And a bit o' me!" broke in Joey. "Don't forget my part."
"Oh yes, our key instrumentalist," Bakura crossed his legs. "The occasional thrum of a drum, near the end, that you miss unless you're listening really closely."
"Hey, smart ass, it's the little things that make or seal a deal."
"Point is," broke in Atem. "Your panicking isn't doing anything."
"But I can't—I can't—I'm trying—" Abruptly, she sucked in a breath through her teeth and closed her eyes. "I'm sorry, can I go to the bathroom for a minute?"
"I'm almost done, sweetie," said the hair stylist. "Can you wait?"
"Need to hurl?" asked Bakura, looking far too happy at the thought.
Atem kicked at Bakura's chair, twisting it. Sadly, a lock of his precious white-dyed mane had been caught in the stylist's comb and he got a nasty yank. Atem just gave Bakura's reflected glare in the mirror a pointed look.
"Grow up, man," he said. "If she flops, we all flop."
Joey hissed. "Shouldn't've said that—"
He must have seen something Atem hadn't while his attention was on Bakura, for Tea suddenly bolted up from her chair and ran towards the girl's bathroom in the back. The door took its sweet time hissing close, but no sound of violent upchucking followed. In fact, it was dead quiet.
"It's okay," said Otaga to Tea's flustered stylist. "We have time."
Tea did not reappear, even once they had all put on their make up and costumes. Mai had already knocked and checked in on her, but said she was just sitting in a corner of the room, not throwing up or sick or anything. Eventually, their time to practice came ticking by, and Atem, wondering how much of Tea's nervousness was just an act, knocked on the door.
"Tea…we need to practice."
The door opened and blue eyes poked out.
Desert sky. He shook himself of the thought. "You coming?"
"Yeah. Yeah I'm coming."
As he settled down at his cello, Tea sat in a folded chair across from him as her stylist set back to her hair.
"I'm really sorry if I've ruined up timing and—"
"Then don't waste your breath on excuses," he said, more curtly than he intended to, because he wasn't immune to nerves either. "And save it all for singing. You ready?"
She took a deep breath and nodded.
Knuckles stiff about the bow, despite having the position ingrained into them, he settled into the opening notes, closing his eyes as he did so. The belly of the cello vibrated against his knees, humming against his tension.
Back, back, back to the minaret, passed through his mind. A line to a future song? Even so, he imagined himself back there, even though the memory hadn't been exactly reassuring. But it had been beautiful, and even though this particular song didn't have as strong of a middle-eastern theme, the deep-bellied thrum of the cello reminded him, as it always did, of that certain, raw something within him that ached at the call for prayer.
When he didn't hear her at first, he thought she had missed her cue to enter. Just as he hesitated at the end of his bow, though, he heard her, clear, tentative, and fighting to be strong.
"…knowing you will never come to me, I'll not move, so scrape me clean, scrape me clean, and leave my bones to bear."
Sat in the green couch on the other side of the room, Bakura and Joey, the latter equipped with a massive, bongo like monster under his arm, listened.
As the song went on, the little inflection Rebecca would always do steadily vanished from Tea's voice, till, at the last verse, nothing of Rebecca remained. In its place, the strength she had lacked at the beginning had returned, along with something sweet, high, and oddly plaintive.
Second time through the song, it became less of a fight to stay together and more of an exploration. With each drag of his bow, his throat would do its usual hum with the vibrato of the strings. But that voice that died to get out of his throat would instead come out of hers, and while he had remembered a sensation like this when he had played with Rebecca, he had never felt it to this depth. Tea's own style, which he had yet to hear until then as she had been working to immitate Rebecca, filled him with warm impressions of sweet earnestness and gentle efforts.
Who is this girl?
Before they could go through it a third time, Tea turned to Mai, concern furrowing her brow.
"I find it much easier to do it if I don't try to sound like Rebecca," she said hesitantly. "Is that okay? I mean, it's okay if it's not, I can—"
"Calm down," said Bakura (more like barked), his head hung somewhere in line with his shoulders. "You'll do."
That was as close to praise as Bakura ever got, at least with those he wasn't close with. When Tea glanced at Atem, he tried to convey that through his reassuring smile, even if his cheeks didn't seem to want to work quite right just then.
"Hey, what about me? How am I doing?" asked Joey. He punctuated his question with a heady patter of the bass bongo.
Bakura rolled his head to the side. "You're a positive diva. I'm sure all the boys will love you."
Joey flashed his teeth. "Does that mean you've fallen in love with me?"
The look Bakura shot him spelt death in many grotesque ways, one of which would probably include having all your nails pulled out and candles set under your prone form.
Joey bit his lip and scooted as far away as the couch would allow.
The rest of pre-performance prep past by Atem in a daze. Cello music kept playing in his head, along with words to go back, back, back to the minaret. At one point he found a notebook in his hand and scribbled down a song he felt more than read. The sounds of the words came to him more than their meaning. Somewhere along the line Bakura told him to stop twirling his hands like a girl, and he realized he had been imagining a bellydancer, but not in the slinking, seductive way. But rather how he had seen it that one time in passing in Egypt. Slow, methodical, as though the girl were caught up in wonder of every small muscle in her body.
But this was the pop industry. And it wasn't like he could just suddenly change tunes and hire a bellydancer. Not to mention if he even tried to hire a bellydancer in America, he'd just get a straight out exotic dancer, the kind found in strip joints.
The sudden black before the curtain rose slapped him awake like a splash of cold water. For a brief, horrifying second, he forgot what song they were starting with and wondered where his cello had gone.
This stage didn't have platforms that rose up. So warm red lights came to life, bringing them out in shadows. The usual sound of people cheering came to his ears, as always, like an ocean.
He took hold of the microphone, grounding himself.
What in the world had come over him?