entrancelogs | merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

It takes him a moment or two - he mostly learned to play by ear, as it were - but he plucks an E obligingly. The ducking of his head is just enough to hide the faint twist to the side of his mouth at the alacrity with which Jay abruptly complied, plainly unintentionally.

Given the hellhole that was last year's Christmas, this isn't such a bad turn of events.

"It's not like either of us have been practicing any," he says diplomatically. "I'm kinda rusty."

"That's rusty." Jay's eyebrows raise, sarcasm laced with genuine appreciation.

With the E string tuned as well as he can manage, Jay works his way through the others. It takes him longer than he'd like. He can't trust his ear, leaving him twisting the tuning knob and plucking at the strings while he tries to just--just make it sound close enough. Close enough is fine.

He doesn't realize he's humming the right sequence of pitches as he goes. It's a little flat, but that's clearly what it's trying to be.

He stumbles through a few notes of Smoke on the Water. Might not even be recognizable since the lead guitar's the famous part, but there it is. It's easy. He learned it, sort of. He can play along with the recording.

"I've been..." He's not even sure why he's admitting to this. "I've been practicing a little, sort of. Not sure it did much good, to be honest."

"You expecting to need to whip out your bass at any point?" says Tim, by way of even retort - considerably less bladed and more relaxed than is his usual style, but that's just the name of the game when it's the holidays and mood-altering cookies sing an inexorable allure, to the point where you straight-up just end up eating them without meaning to.

Still. There are worse fates than this - plucking out an E while Jay strums a few bars of Smoke on the Water. Every kid's first tune on the bass. It nearly cracks a smile out of him.

Nearly.

Tim's tone isn't harsh. It's harder to muster the strength to be annoyed when there doesn't seem to be any vitriol behind what he's saying. Things are just...nice, in a way Jay's not really accustomed to.

"You said I should get a hobby, right?" Jay ducks his head. "So I got a hobby."

He plucks out a few more notes that don't sound like anything.

"I mean, you don't sound like somebody who's out of practice."

"I play sometimes," he says, a whole hell of a lot less defensive than he initially meant it to be. "Just not...y'know, where people can hear. Or see." Or care at all, really. That's his general preference.

(Except he left that clip behind, in one long montage of each day tramping tiredly by. Drinking coffee, cleaning a mirror, staring absently at a lighter, talking aloud.)

(Plucking at a banjo.)

(Days before it, and everything else, was swallowed whole.)

That actually drags a crooked half-smile out of Jay, along with a low hissing sound that could be construed as a laugh.

"Yeah, same. I think this is the first time I actually turned on the amp."

He plucks one string for emphasis, sliding his hand up the neck of the guitar. Sounds cooler with the amp connected, he has to admit.

"Did you get any other...any other gigs or whatever--" He winces at the term. Sounds corny anyway, but it sounds even cornier when he says it. "--after the, uh. The soundtrack?"

"Me?" He's pretty sure that if anything that memorable happened to him, that'd be permanently seared into his brain with the sheer bizarre audacity of it. "It's not like I was playing anything professionally. I mean, y'know Alex. You could be playing 'The Wall' on a glass bottle and a recorder and he'd think it's a masterpiece, wanna slap it on his next cinematic opus."

It rolls off so easily that he doesn't question it. Doesn't have any need to question it, when Jay's the one who brought it up in the first place. But he never mentioned it by name.

Maybe his Mirror was right, in some ways.

Maybe naming the thing grants it some measure of power.

That does pull a genuine snicker out of Jay, brief as it is. He's stuck imagining 'Another Brick in the Wall' on a glass bottle and a recorder, vocals by Tim Wright.

Hey! (toot) Teachers! (toot) Leave those kids alone!

Another quiet, hissing laugh, like air through a leaky pipe. He doubts this would be so funny without the spiked cookies, but...honestly, maybe it would be. Alex Kralie, enraptured. The next John Williams. The voice of a generation.

It comes so easily, joking about the people they knew. Jay wonders if it'd be so easy if he hadn't watched hours and hours of footage, filling in the gaps left by his own experience. Jay knows them all so well now, his friends from 2006, frozen in amber.

"And Brian's just delivering his lines, dead-serious, like they don't sound like they're...y'know, Alex's, and meanwhile that's going on in the background." He's got a hand over his eyes now, almost a half-hearted facepalm. "God, we're a whole production studio of bad."

Edited 2017-12-17 08:59 (UTC)

God, is this how people do stuff like this? Do they just...rattle out jokes and huff out little breathless sounds of vague amusement and act like none of it is wrapped up in years of betrayal and unsolved mysteries and murdered friends?

Alex Kralie was here, once. He wasn't here for as long as Tim has been, but he was here. He was here, and he made friends who still carry him in their hearts the same way he carried Amy's photograph - only they didn't march him to the edge of the pier and say they didn't have a choice as they shoved him off.

Alex Kralie is dead.

Alex Kralie is dead, and there's no proper way to grieve him because there's no proper way to know when it is that the man they knew slipped on out and when something else stepped effortlessly into his place with a locked jaw and a flinted glower and a penchant for shooting people he once called friends. Alex Kralie is dead, and all they have to mourn him is a shitty script for an unmade student film, and the gentle ribbing that aches all the more, for knowing that even at the very end, Alex had written his own fate into the story.

He never intended to walk away from any of it and be able to look himself in the eye after. He never intended to walk away at all.

"You talk about hosting those bad movie nights," says Tim, with only a fraction of difficulty. "I think we could give any one of those directors a run for their money."

"Yeah," he says, and it's only a little pained. "Just get the band back together, churn out some kind of godawful sequel."

His voice cracks on that second part. Like they could just call everyone up. Like they all just fell out of contact, like regular college friends half a decade later. Like they'd all be happy to see each other, like Alex would get that gleam in his eye, that spark of validation, that proof that he's not the only one who thinks this stuff is worth it, that drive that drew Jay in as easily as everyone else.

Alex Kralie is dead.

Jay Merrick is dead.

"I bet people'd love us."

Edited 2017-12-17 09:25 (UTC)

Get the band back together.

There's a wrench in his gut at that, a twisting of the blade he himself sunk in to the hilt. He did this. He knows that he did this and he has no one to blame but himself for that, for pursuing a thought that might be painful, but it still burns like a trail of gasoline down his throat.

"They'd love to hate us," he corrects, like the words aren't closing, like there isn't a lump the size of a golf ball he has to speak around to force the words into the air. "But that's kinda the point, yeah?"

"I mean, not consciously." Jay's holding onto the neck of the bass a little too tightly now. "No bad movie worth watching was bad on purpose.The people making it have to think--"

His voice catches. No. No, he's not doing this right now.

"--They have to think they're making something worth something, y'know?"

That doesn't help. That does not even remotely help, because the sincerity Alex applied to his project, that prima donna insistence that the film was meaningful and loaded with a deep, philosophical weight communicated purely through shots of Brian walking through burned-out buildings looking reflective, was one of the few things he can still claim with any certainty was something that belonged to Alex.

Except even then, he was already devolving, decohering, coming apart because Brian was generous enough, persuasive enough, stupid enough to invite his buddy Tim to the audition.

"Like that asshole in every college dorm who always plays 'Wonderwall' on the acoustic." An awkward subject shift, but a necessary nonetheless. Neither of them are here to dwell. "If you didn't have one, you probably were the asshole."

The conversation takes such an abrupt left turn that Jay just...stares for a moment.

No, no, wait. It makes sense.

"Yeah. Yeah, like...he's only an asshole if he thinks it makes him look cool. Like, like he learned it to...get girls or impress people or something."

Jay manages to pluck out a lucky and may-be before continuing. "If he's just doing it 'cause he likes the song, then it's...whatever. And if he's doing it because of the joke, like he's trying to be self aware, then it's not funny. He's just a jackass."

Jay pauses.

"I'll accept that one."

"The two aren't mutually exclusive."

He lets the mindless, aimless strumming shift in tempo and pick up into something a little bouncier, though he doesn't dare add vocals to the mess, considering how sloppily he's churning it out. Can't even say where he heard the song in the first place, not that it matters.

"I mean, I'm pretty sure I was that jackass."

Jay doesn't recognize the song, but it doesn't stop him from trying to improvise a bass line, his fingers fumbling on the frets. It doesn't sound like much of anything, but sometimes he'll get it. Not too many chords, just...got to figure out what sounds passable with them.

"I wasn't--dammit." He tries to slide onto a note that doesn't sound like complete garbage. "I wasn't that specific jackass, but I was, like...I tried to be Flea. I'm not. I'm not Flea."

"Flea?"

That almost crooks something like a smile out of him - a lift of eyebrows, a twitch to the side of his mouth, a vaguely amused slant to the fall of his shoulders and the tilt of his chin.

The reference is lost on him.

"He's the, uh...bassist from...the Red Hot Chili Peppers."

Jay ducks his head, the brim of his hat shading his face.

"He's good."

"Oh."

Now it's Tim's turn to feel like an idiot for not knowing that. Granted, it's not like he ever had a whole lot of time to look up band trivia; he just liked hearing the music and, if he was feeling like he was in a particularly good mood, maybe picking up an instrument or two to try and echo back a couple bars on ear.

"I, uh. I guess there's a lot about music out there."

"Yeah, it's not--"

Jay shouldn't have assumed, and now it's awkward, and he doesn't know how to carry a conversation for the life of him, and now Tim looks like he's ashamed for some reason, like he screwed up somehow by not knowing one specific bassist's name and what does he say what does he say?

"Like, I don't know...I don't know much of anything. I just picked stuff up here and there. I mean, you're the music guy, so you probably know more than I do, just, like, total."

"I don't know trivia." Tim snorts softly, like that might be enough to dispel whatever anxiety seems to have mantled over Jay without much warning. He can't know the source of it in earnest, but he can take a pretty good guess.

(Distant memories of jam session that he can't actually remember, that he had to relive on tape, hearing his own voice mumble in the background as Alex sat with a keyboard on his lap, backlit by the glare of a flashlight.)

(I'm not the movie guy, says Tim, a million years ago.)
(You're the music guy, says Jay.)

"It's been years, anyway."

"Yeah," Jay manages, turning his focus back to the bass. It's been years for both of them. Jay's barely touched the guitar since high school, and god knows how much Tim has practiced since the whole 'music major' thing. Tim still sounds great, at least to Jay's ear, but yeah, makes sense that he wouldn't exactly be lugging all this trivia around.

(If Tim's the music guy, is Jay the trivia guy? The puzzle guy? The camera guy?)

(He's not really good enough at any of them.)

His memory's patchy, even without any interference, but he knows he used to know Animal Bar. It was a simplified version, and he was never exactly great at it, but maybe the muscle memory's still there. Slowly, he starts to fumble his way through it. It doesn't come easily, but it's still there. He still remembers.

It's not easy to just pick up a song without any prior practice, and he isn't intimately familiar with the tune Jay starts ticking out. The phantom declaration of jam session still rings in his ears - storming, sleeting rain and Brian's towel-tousled hair and the bare white walls of Tim's music room, complete with, and he can still hear it in Alex's dry monotone, box of thing.

Bit by bit, he starts to work his way into the melody. He hasn't got perfect pitch. He's out of practice. He's not capable of immediately exhibiting some raw and awe-inspiring talent.

But he can play along for a few bars, and then for a few more.

It doesn't sound too bad.

merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

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