(In)Security.
Soup Is Good Food.
"At least we get a dignified cremation!" came Jello Biafra's voice from the depths of Dewey's apartment. Terribly ironic, Freddy thought, in light of the scolding Dewey was giving him.
" – and what kind of band cannot accept constructive criticism? And who gives a shit what a group of high school kids thinks anyway?"
"We are a group of high school kids," he put in, but Dewey didn't seem to hear him.
" – and to actually ask them to have a go at you – I mean, look at the odds, you idiot, that was six against one and if Zack hadn't come back for you – "
"Yeah yeah, I would've been in the hospital – I know – "
"I don't care if they put you in the hospital – it might have taught you a lesson!" Dewey was getting slightly apoplectic now, a close resemblance to the faces he made in the throes of a guitar solo. "What I care about is the band's rep – we're finally getting our songs good radio play and you want to go make us out to be spoilt rich kids who can't take a bit of flak?"
He opened his mouth to tell Dewey that he wasn't that much of an idiot, and definitely not a spoilt rich kid – and swallowed it all. Because that meant telling them about Katie. While Katie wasn't here.
"How does it feel to be shit out our ass?"
"Can we take it off repeat, please?" he snarled.
"Leave it on, Leonard!" roared Dewey, as Leonard moved towards the stereo. "Are you even listening to me, Freddy Jones? I don't want you having one of your phases again just when we're on the verge of breaking the local circuit – "
Oh, fuck. "I blew up, okay? Shit happens – I'm sorry – whatever – get over it!"
"I am not going to get over it until you tell me it's not gonna happen again!"
"You want me to say that? Is that it? Fine!" He put on his best fifth-grade-Summer impersonation. "It's not going to happen again, Dewey!"
"That's exactly what I mean!" yelled Dewey. "Stop acting ten and listen to me – "
He wasn't acting ten. He was taking this shit just because of some ambiguous sort of obligation to Katie that he wasn't sure he understood – Dewey was going to think he was an idiot just out for the posing, again, like he had all those years ago in that yellow van, and it didn't matter that he'd held it in for so many worse comments over the past couple of years, because he'd blown up this time –
"I need a smoke," he said, and got up and left.
He could hear the music even out in the hallway. "You'll just have to kill yourself somewhere else."
Hadn't had a cigarette for a good six months, and he didn't have any on him now either, but he had a lighter, so he stood in the corridor attempting to burn down the wall until Zack came outside.
"You here to talk the retarded drummer out of his suicidal – or bandicidal – urges?"
"Not really," said Zack. "And if you needed a cigarette you just had to ask."
"Because you've always got a pack," sneered Freddy. Zack hadn't touched a cigarette in his life.
"No, but Dewey does," Zack said innocently, and leaned back against the wall next to him.
Freddy snorted, and continued clicking away with the lighter.
"So what'd they actually say?" said Zack eventually.
"The guys at the table?"
"No, Marta and Tomika just now."
"Nothing really," he said, and it was true. "Said drums could use some work."
Zack waited.
"Said our bassist was hot." He couldn't say Katie. Couldn't.
He hadn't known Zack was so tensed up until he let out a loud breath and slouched against the wall. "Well, that's all okay then. I thought – "
"You thought I was trying to get my rocks off somehow, huh?"
"Freddy," said Zack quietly, and he shut up. Zack continued, "No … I just thought you were being you – even if it was a twelve-year-old you – and we really couldn't have that just now."
"I'm not that much of an asshole," he muttered. He thought his cheeks might be red. They couldn't actually think that of him. Not that he had given them reason to think otherwise.
"I thought you weren't," said Zack honestly. "But that's all you would tell Dewey – what were we supposed to think?"
"Er – 'Freddy's not that much of an asshole'?"
Zack grinned. "Yeah, well. You wanna go make your apologies to Dewey now, or are you gonna go home?"
He raised an eyebrow at him. "You think I'm gonna apologise to him? You're fucking kidding me."
"Well, if you haven't spilt the beans so far, you might as well tie a bow on your bean-bag with an apology."
"That's one crap metaphor, Mooneyham."
"I'm not even sure if it's a metaphor."
There was silence for a minute. "Fine then," said Freddy.
He opened the door, stepped inside with his eyes shut – "How does it feel to be shit out our ass?" – and recited the speech he used every time something like this happened: "I'm sorry, Dewey, I was being stupid and betraying everything we believe in. But you were sounding like my mom, so I guess we're even."
"Leaving, then?" said Zack as he stepped back out.
He grinned at him. "Yeah. While the going's good and Dewey's still speechless."
Zack peered inside. "I think he's in awe that you never manage to vary that apology. In content or tone."
"Pretty impressive, huh? Only wish I could learn Chem that easy." He looked at Zack, Zack looked at him. He wondered if he understood that Freddy felt very very – weird. As if he'd done something he'd never expected of himself. Proven something. Except no one but Zack would ever know.
"See you tomorrow," said Zack, with one of his introspective smiles.
Yeah, Zack got it. More than Freddy got, anyway.
"See ya," he said, heading down the stairs.
Almost midnight and there was barely any snow on the pavement but it was still freezing cold. His house was a good forty-minute walk from Dewey and Ned's apartment, and most late nights he would get a ride home with someone – Zack or Katie, as a rule. But not today …
The street was eerily quiet, the only noise the faint hum of electricity in the streetlamps, which was why he practically jumped when his phone rang. He didn't check the number; he just flipped it open and answered it.
It was Katie.
"Back from the wedding thing?" he said.
Her voice was loud in the quiet, even over the phone. "Mm, yeah. Got back a while ago. I thought I'd come over to Dewey's, but there's no car."
He snorted, slightly, breath puffing as mist. "Hey, us human kids, we walk."
"You're putting us in the same category?"
"Dinner sucked without you."
She was silent for a second. He wondered if that was kinda too much to say. They never really said anything to each other – they taunted, and they joked, and they made out, but they never said … anything like that. "Bet it did," she said. "You probably spent most of it pulling Marta's hair."
"Spit bubbles," he said in a bored tone. "Hair-pulling is so yesterday."
"You sound like such a girl, Freddy Jones."
"That's 'cause you do the manliness for me."
"What's that supposed to mean?" she said, but she didn't wait for him to answer. "You wanna come over?"
Images flashed before his eyes – Katie on the swings, skin blue with cold, breath forming clouds around his face, Katie under the tree, glazed eyes and mussed hair. Katie in the girls' bathroom, warm and soft and so girl all around him. He thought he might have staggered, he wasn't sure. "Your parents home?"
She sounded huffy. "Yeah. Obviously."
He hated to be the one to point out things like this – it was so bad for his image – but, "It's almost midnight, Katie."
"I know," she said. There was silence. "We can be quiet."
"You don't own a Dead Kennedys CD, do you?"
"What?" she said, but he'd already shut the phone. He had to run.
Her fire escape was down – it always was. He'd climbed it numerous times before, at all times of the day, so it was familiar enough, even with the damp steel slipping under his fingers as he hoisted himself up. Stupid apartment buildings, he thought, but he took that back – because it was harder to climb up windows in houses. He knew; he tried Zack's incessantly.
She was waiting for him; she opened her window immediately, and he tumbled through, landing ungracefully on his back in a wet pile of snow.
"Nice entrance," she smirked.
"Because you look so great yourself," he said.
She looked down at her dress, the kind of floral pattern old women with millions of cats wore. "It was my uncle's wedding, what did you expect? I don't really bother to see what my mom's got picked out for me."
It was so random, he thought, that he would be lying on his back in the middle of her room – in the middle of the night, no less – talking about dress patterns.
"I think I should do something suitably manly and kiss you," he said.
She grinned. "Go ahead."
He wrapped one gloved hand around her arm and pulled her down to him; she squeaked, slightly, at the cold wool against her bare skin. It made him grin – "See, I have gloves today," he whispered.
"I'm proud," she said, and she was whispering too.
She wasn't like this anywhere else, he knew, when her lips settled over his and her body nestled against his side. She didn't ever let anyone touch her like this, not with words and not with skin, and he felt strangely honoured to be allowed to run his hands up her arms, down her back, to pull her tight against him so that he wouldn't have to imagine like he always did.
"Lose the jacket," she muttered, and he struggled to comply.
He got his arms stuck in the sleeves because he was in such a hurry, and she sat up with him, laughing against his mouth. For two seconds he was helpless, arms caught behind his back and she was half in his lap, hands on his face, in his hair – he would think that she was kissing him except kissing was too mild a word for this –
He made an unintelligible sound of celebration when the jacket finally fell away, and then he could put his arms around her and she was properly in his lap, legs around his waist, and everything was just there and he wondered, vaguely, if she would let him –
"I missed you," she mumbled, and he swallowed the words more than heard them.
"You saw me in the morning."
She smiled against his mouth. He knew what she meant. He shivered.
"You've still got your gloves." Her voice was a whisper.
He made a frustrated sound. "It takes too long to take them off."
She grinned, hands at the base of his neck. "I get that."
He wanted to ask her if she got it, really, if she understood what he was feeling and thinking, if she understood that he'd been this far and further with a girl before but he'd never – never felt it like this, like he wanted to talk to her in the middle of it and tell her –
"I got into a fight today," he said against the side of her neck. She smelt different here; nothing artificial, just girl-smell, Katie-smell.
"Uh-huh?" she said, and she wasn't listening. That was fine, he wasn't sure what he was saying.
"We were at the Red Diner." It was warm here, where her pulse beat in her throat. If he put his nose there he could feel the rhythm of her heartbeat. Drumbeats. Thud thudda thud thudda thud thudda thud. Faster than normal. So was his.
"Group of guys – " Her mouth was near his ear; he was twitching down below, he could feel it. He wondered if she could. "Said drumming sucked. Private school – " His mind blanked, he groped for words. " – brats. Thought you were hot."
"Hm?" she said, and she still seemed distracted. If he opened his eyes, all he could see was skin, and the ugly flower pattern on the edges of his vision.
"So I told them – to keep their – " His words were lost, he could only remember the end, " – to themselves."
She leaned back; he groaned, the light in the room hurt his eyes. "What?"
It was different when she looked at him like that, eyes all deep and brown, different with the walls of her room staring down at them. Suddenly, it didn't feel like the world ended where she stopped. There were other things, in the room, in her, in him – "They thought you were hot," he said, and he looked at a point somewhere above her shoulder. He didn't know what he was ashamed of. "Dewey gave me hell."
He thought, for a split second, that she was going to give him hell too, and maybe she would have if she hadn't been sprawled in his lap with her dress hiked up around her waist. But they were too close, and there was only them, after all, no versions of themselves that they had to be faithful to, for now, so she said, "Oh, Freddy – " and she sighed, and she sounded sad, and he leaned forward and kissed her because he was sorry for making her feel sad.
She leaned back when he stopped, looked at the clock on her desk.
"Is my time up?" he asked.
She smiled at him. "Yeah."
It seemed to him as if there was a deeper meaning to that than he meant, so he said, "So I'll see you tomorrow?"
"Of course," she said. "We've got a show, haven't we?"
"No, I mean, apart from that."
He would never understand why she would need to think about that, but he supposed she always would. And maybe it didn't matter, because she was here, wasn't she, legs around his waist, the neck of her dress half hanging off her shoulder?
"Okay," she said, finally. And she smiled, as if to negate the time she'd spent thinking about it, and she moved forward to kiss him and he was only a boy after all … that always worked.
He couldn't hide the disappointment on his face when she climbed off him, and it helped only slightly to see the same lost expression on hers. He levered himself back into his discarded jacket – it seemed cold and empty next to the warmth of her skin, and because he couldn't stop himself, he leaned down and kissed her again before he slipped out her window.
A/N: I think this fandom is something of a cop-out. Unless you're writing about the band when they're all ten years old, you don't have to be faithful to anything - no fixed characterisation, a few basic physical descriptions (and nothing that can't be fixed with hair-dye) ... It's like a fandom of AUs. And I'm no exception. It's why I don't update as often - I'm torn between taking the whole story down and putting out every chapter I have. Ah well.
