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When Alex walks into the Hollywood Ghost Club, he isn’t thinking about Caleb. He’s thinking of the afternoon he and Willie spent introducing each other to their favorite musicians, blood pumping to the invigorating beat of Link Ray’s “Fever,” how Willie had carefully coaxed his fingers solid enough to make contact with the laptop keys, typed it in urgent and reverent. Alex had been almost too busy wanting his drumsticks in his hands to wonder whether the song choice had been, y’know, intentional. It’s some sort of prophecy, right, the only myth there ever is: a boy in a pink t-shirt with drumsticks in his back pockets strolls into hell trying to look unconcerned and tells the devil what he’s got on offer. His heart, phantasmic and bloody, but Caleb’s already got that, has ever since he stamped a purple sigil into Alex’s love’s soft wrist.
“Broke it here once,” Willie had said, leaning over to show him, pointing to just below where the vein dipped too deep below the skin to see, and Alex had kissed it on impulse, fast and earnest.
“I’ll play for you,” Alex says now, shoulders set, neck solid, chin raised, “for one week. And on the seventh night, I’m walking out of here, with Willie behind me.”
Caleb smirks. Tilts his head, narrows his eyes. “Oh, a scholar, are we? Go on, then, you know the rest. Let’s hear it, hmm?”
Alex tightens his fists. “If I don’t look back, he’s free. And if I do—you can have me, too.”
“Sweetening the deal, I see,” Caleb says, and gives an exaggerated sigh as he examines his nails for a long moment. It makes Alex viscerally uncomfortable, something slimy and tepid settling on the back of his neck—he feels better around flamboyant queer people, safer, even though his casual clothes with a splash of pale pink stick out in the opposite way in those kinds of crowds, make him seem closer by comparison to a masculinity he’s never really bothered trying to claim. But Caleb’s performance is exactly that, an act, and not in the winking, satirical way Alex is accustomed to, where he feels like he’s been let in on a joke against the rest of the world; Caleb is the rest of the world, cold and demanding and judgemental, and he wears his stage manners with a misdirected vitriol that makes him seem constantly at risk of tearing himself to pieces, shredding apart before Alex’s very eyes. The showmanship isn’t for the joy of it anymore, if it ever was, and the constant scramble for power has painted his very form in something toxic, heavy about the wrists and eyelashes and mouth.
“Very well,” Caleb says. “If nothing else, it shall certainly prove entertaining, I’m sure.” He extends a hand to shake, but Alex slips into a salute instead, something that’s always hung just as awkward against his tendons as Caleb’s affectations do his.
“Scout’s honor,” he says, and when Caleb laughs, he looks like he didn’t quite mean to.
“Sure,” Caleb says, “why not,” and at the wave of his hand, Alex is whisked off to a dressing room and tight clothes and cotton swabs removing his black nail polish and clouds of heady hairspray.
The first night, it feels like he’s onstage an eternity. It would be easier, he thinks, if this was a different retelling, if he wasn’t a drummer boy but a half-god, if he could dive into this crowd of souls and come up for air holding Willie to his chest and punch Caleb in the face on the way out. His hands have always been the most reliable part of him, though, between clumsy feet and a brain more likely to twist the truth than not, so he readjusts his grip and keeps playing. His hands tell him it’s been ages, though, innumerable eight-counts, hundreds of cymbal crashes. The back of his palm aches, out of place with its absence of a seal.
The day passes in a flash. It feels like his head hasn’t even reached the pillow when his alarm rings.
By the end of a week, his hands are tattered, bloody and painful in a way nothing has been since death, worse than the shocks in their persistence. His drumsticks are stained with his own blood. Once, there was a musician, he thinks, and the thing is, there are only two ways that can go. You fall in love and you make music; you fall in love and you lose it.
If this doesn’t work, he wonders if any of the partygoers will be kind enough to tear him limb from limb, or if he’ll have to pray for an infection to set in where the blisters have burst.
It’s been entire lifetimes since he first put on these clothes. Alex leaves them in a heap on the floor, checks the bandages on his hands before pulling his hoodie over his head.
“He’ll be behind you,” Caleb says, “as agreed,” and motions him to the door.
The thing about the devil is that he doesn’t keep his word, except when he knows doing so will hurt you worse than lying. So Alex tucks his bandaged hands in his pockets and taps a drum beat against his thighs and walks. He understands about Willie and Caleb, really, would’ve done the same thing if their positions were reversed. His parents had said you can tell us anything and he’d gone and believed them, or at least wanted to prove them wrong enough to risk everything else, so he gets it. Willie isn’t just the guy who got used by the guy who tried to kill them; Willie is a person, dead and more full of life than most people Alex ever met. He’s fearless when making a skatepark out of a 5-star restaurant and terrified at the thought of losing the world he knows and loves. He’s got a heart so strong it doesn’t need to beat.
Alex hasn’t seen him since before the Orpheum, can’t hear Willie’s footsteps behind his own, and the hallway keeps going and going. Alex stops trying to keep count of his steps. His feet hurt. His knees ache. At least one spot on his left hand is bleeding again, cracked open and raw.
It’s always been Alex following Willie, not the other way around. There’s a symmetry to it: Willie leading them in and Alex leading him out, Willie teaching him to scream and Alex calling his name, Willie breathing life into him even with his own soul half-tethered to one man’s self-made hell. Willie risking everything to let him go. Alex risking the same to get him back.
The door hasn’t gotten any closer for the last—five minutes, maybe? Twenty? Maybe he should’ve shaken on it, Alex thinks, maybe that means something, maybe this is the rest of his afterlife, maybe the devil has staked his claim on purgatory, too. He reaches his hand out, and the handle is right there, if only he could touch it—
There’s a sound behind him, wounded and sharp, and Alex’s head turns on instinct, pulled on a string by his panic more urgently and organically than Caleb’s music ever managed to puppeteer his bones. It’s Willie, of course it’s Willie, and Alex tries to fall to his worn out knees and take his face in his bandaged hands but he can’t, he can’t do anything but listen to Caleb’s laughter reverberate over this infinite hallway even as it shrinks dizzyingly to the length of a matter of yards—
Willie gasps, and one of them is glowing, both of them are glowing, they’re the same body and they’re a million miles apart, they are one and they’re unreachable, and Alex feels so much in his chest and his fingers and his tear ducts that he’s struck with the abrupt terror that maybe this is it, maybe his unfinished business was falling in love, maybe in this telling of the myth he’s the one who dissipates into the mist. But then Willie’s arms are around him, separate and solid, his mouth is pressed carefully to Alex’s wrist where a drop of blood has escaped his wrappings and traced a pathway down, Willie’s own hand is beneath a purple silhouette that even now is evaporating into a memory.
Oh, Alex thinks, so that’s how Julie did it. More Disney flick than Greek myth, maybe, but god, if they aren’t owed it after everything.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Willie says, forehead pressed to Alex’s so that his own head moves when Alex nods.