6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

All Apologies

The only reason he was standing outside of Kelly's door, pounding on it so they could talk, was because Hawk had pressured him into doing it, or at least, that's what Aaron told himself as he banged on it again. If it would put an end to Hawk's insistence that Aaron try playing with the band before he declared it a shitshow in the making, then he'd do whatever the fuck Kelly wanted until everyone agreed that he was a piss poor choice and let him slink away.

"Alright, fuck, I hear you! You can stop knocking any time now!" Kelly bellowed; his words quickly followed by a collision with something. "Owe, son of a bitch!"

The sight of him wincing at the light, rubbing his eyes with his hair all disheveled was almost as amusing as the shocked way Kelly said his name. "Aaron?"

Snickering, Aaron gave a little wave. "Hey."

"Seriously, that's what you have to say to me? Hey? Like we're just passing one another on the street."

"Would you have preferred I just used my key and woke you by jumping up and down on the foot of your bed screaming wakey wakey eggs and bakey?"

"I would kill you."

"Exactly. So…."

Aaron let the word trail off as he leaned against the wall beside the doorway.

"What do you want, Aaron?" Kelly grumbled, tapping his fingertips against his arm impatiently. "And why didn't you bring coffee?"

"Because you have a coffee maker," Aaron shot back. "Hawk said you wanted to talk."

"You didn't need Hawk to tell you that, and yet, it still took you this long to come up here."

"Had some things I needed to work out."

Kelly snorted like it was the most ridiculous thing Aaron could have said. "No shit. So…did you?"

"I guess only time will tell."

"What exactly am I supposed to do with that?"

"Fucked if I know. I'm here. That's what you wanted."

"No, what I wanted was you here and invested two weeks ago when we were supposed to have our first session. Now you're standing here at some hour that better not be obscene or I'll kill you, talking like we just disagreed over whether condiments should be put on the meat or on the bun."

"If you're putting other shit on it, like vegetables, then you'd better put the condiments on the meat or all you're gonna taste is under seasoned burger."

"Why not both, then everything tastes good?"

"More like tastes the same, but whatever."

"I thought cookie cutter was your thing these days?"

"'Scuse me?"

"No. Not yet."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Aaron growled, shoving away from the wall. His fingers flexed, dancing the way they did along the strings when he played guitar, only now they were rubbing against the seams of his jeans, half self-soothing and half anxious energy.

"I'm not ready to excuse your behavior!" Kelly snapped. "You wanting us to sound like we used to, thus the whole Kazzy thing, is bullshit, especially when you know all he'll do is imitate our old drumlines and grossly overembellish at least one solo every god damned show."

"What is your issue with Kazzy since I've already gotten an earful about Hawk's?"

"Shouldn't I be asking you that, since you're suddenly so keen on making him a member of this band when you used to gripe and complain every fuckin' time he subbed for us!"

"Maybe he's just grown on me, you ever think about that?"

"Or maybe he's done more than grown on you. I've heard all about him being your new running around town buddy now that you've gone back to haunting all the places that got us into so much shit in the first place?"

"I'm not haunting anyplace," Aaron remarked, rubbing the back of his neck. "I haven't been out near as much as when the band was partying together."

"Uh-huh, we can come back to that later."

Aaron's hand dropped to his side, fingers curling into fists as he stopped pacing and glared. "What the fuck do you want from me?"

"My best friend back, for one, and an honest fuckin' answer as to why you treated Micah and Declan like shit," Kelly snarled, looking for all the world like he wanted to shake the hell out of Aaron, especially when he grabbed his sleeve, putting a halt to some of his restless movements.

Pulling away from the hold wasn't enough to free him, but it did stretch the hell out of his shirt. "I didn't do fuck-all to them!"

"Not directly, but Declan overheard what you said to me."

"And that's supposed to be my problem?" Aaron grumbled, though his annoyance waned a bit as a surge of guilt hit. He'd had no intention of that conversation becoming public. All he'd ever wanted was to get Kelly to hear him and maybe meet him halfway and let him have Kazzy if Kelly was hell bent on having Micah play guitar for them. Kazzy would at least have been a buffer and an ally when it came to keeping the music from shifting into the realm of Christian rock.

"No one told him to eavesdrop," Aaron muttered, knowing he sounded lame, but what the fuck else was he supposed to say under the circumstances. He sure as hell wasn't about to apologize for something that hadn't been his fault in the first place. He'd had more than enough of that shit to last a lifetime.

"No one told you to be a dick, either and look what happened there."

There was a stalemate for a moment and a bit of a stare down too, until Aaron glanced away and busied himself with studying his shoe. "Yeah, coming up here was a mistake."

"Why? Is it ‘cause I'm not heaping praise all over your lackadaisical apology."

"Whatever. See you around, I guess." With that Aaron tried to turn away, only to find himself physically yanked back around to face Kelly.

"That's what you do best, isn't it! Bail and make up bullshit excuses as to why! You act like you're better than Ethan but at least he said his piece honestly before he turned his back on us. You can't even give me the courtesy of the truth."

"Maybe it's cause I don't know what the truth is!" Aaron bellowed, flinging the stress ball he'd been kneading at the wall beside Kelly's head. It bounced off and dropped to the floor with a soft splat.

"Now we're getting somewhere."

"It's a bunch of things, okay," Aaron said. "Everything changed too fast. One moment I knew what the end goal was and what we were all working towards, and the next half of us were somewhere phones have apparently not been invented and you wanna turn around and just replace them like…like it doesn't matter that they're not coming back."

Aaron felt tears shimmering in his eyes and brushed them away angrily. "We were family. That should matter for something."

"Of course it matters, but I can't roll out a time machine and fix where shit went wrong," Kelly said. "All I can do is pick up the pieces that aren't broken and see if I can forge new ones to fill the holes. Now if that means doing it without you, well, it's going to suck and I don't want to stay that course, but I will, if that's the only choice you leave me with."

Aaron wanted to tell him to go ahead, but that wouldn't prove the point he was trying to make and would likely piss Hawk off in the process, something he was desperate to avoid at all costs.

"Can we have this conversation inside?" Aaron asked as he knelt to retrieve his stress ball. "At least then you'd have some coffee to mellow you the fuck out."

"If you wanted me mellow, you should have just brewed some and brought it with you. At least then I could have had a cup in me by now," Kelly said even as he backed up to let Aaron in.

They headed for the kitchen, Aaron perching on a stool while Kelly reached for a k-cup box only to discover it was empty.

"Son of a bitch! God dammit," Kelly cursed, shaking the box like that would magically make another pod appear.

Aaron couldn't resist snickering, at least until Kelly whirled and turned a furious glare on him. "Hey man, I've got nothing to do with your little coffee crisis, that's all on you. I'm just sorry that mellow is off the table."

"You could always put it back on the table by going downstairs and grabbing some from your place."

"Or I could remind you about the box of triple caffeinated you stashed behind the Coco Pebbles so you wouldn't be tempted to drink too much of it."

Nothing could have held his laughter back at the way Kelly's eyes went wide before he whirled and reached for the cabinet door, nearly smacking himself in the face with it in his haste to find his precious caffeine. Watching him snatch the box down, hug it to his chest, and dance across the kitchen to the coffeemaker left him doubled over and gasping for breath, having seriously missed this side of his friend. In difference to Kelly's mood, Aaron waited until he was blowing on a freshly brewed cup, to actually address some of the issues between them.

"I'm not trying to make this band sound like a carbon copy of our last one," Aaron said as he ran his fingers through his hair. "I just want us to sound enough like ourselves that the fans will still want to hear us…especially if, well, we still have that invite to Rocktoberfest, and time enough to decide if we can do it or not."

"If the music is good, and I have no doubt that we can be better than good, the fans will prove that there was never a reason to question their loyalty."

"And if you're wrong?"

"I don't think I am."

"But if you are?"

"Then I'll admit I fucked up and we can take it from there," Kelly grumbled through clenched teeth. "At least I can say I tried, which is more than you seem willing to do."

"I'm here, aren't I? And part of why I came up here was to tell you that I'm willing to give it a shot, even if I don't feel the best about our chances."

Kelly shot him a look he was painfully familiar with. Part hurt, part exasperation and still fully pissed off. "Glad to see Hawk can still change your mind when I can't."

Aaron sighed and shoved his fingers through his already messy hair. "It's not that he changed my mind, he just convinced me not to declare it was an epic fail until I had proof. I just wish you'd give Kazzy another listen. We already know what to expect from him. He knows the places we've been and the stories that have been told about us. He's been on some of the same tours, played in front of the same crowds. It might not have been with us, but there's a kind of shared history that just makes him…"

"Safe. Familiar. Someone you don't have to learn anything more about ‘cause you already know enough to relax and just shred with him," Kelly said. "Problem is, there is no challenge in that."

"Who says I want a challenge?"

"You may not want it, but we need it if we're going to stay relevant. Fans hate when bands change members, you know that. They watch for the train wrecks and speculate about what happened to cause the switch up. They'll be standing by ready to make comparisons, too, so we can't just measure up. We have to blow the past out of the water if there is ever gonna be a future for us."

"And if it's too late for all that and we've already peaked and started down sliding?"

"Then we've already failed ‘cause we didn't stick to our vow to make every new album better than the last. I hate failing, so I refuse to accept that we can't tap into some layer of ourselves that we've never exposed before. You have to start looking at this restructure as the best thing that could ever have happened to us, rather than the exclamation point on an aborted career."

"What if it needs to be the exclamation point?"

"Are you trying to say you're done?"

Aaron shook his head, nodded, then shrugged a little before running his fingers through his hair again. "I don't know, okay. Sometimes I think I'm ready to be done with it all, and something I think, one last time, one more song, one chance to go out the way I always wanted to."

"That's what I'm looking for too."

"No, it's not," Aaron said. "You're looking for epic long term world tour shit, and that's not something I think I can give you."

"But you don't know that you can't."

"I don't know that I can either."

"So, we figure it out together, just like everything else we've ever done," Kelly insisted. "All I'm asking is that you give it a fair shot. If you do that and still decide that you don't want to do this any longer or just don't want to do it with me, then we part on good terms and I hear from you on the regular, fucker, the same way we do Hawk. No more radio silence bullshit! You had me worried."

"Sorry, that wasn't my intent. In case you need to hear it, I didn't backslide. I didn't even smoke up all that much, since I spent three days up at Hawk's place."

Aaron could see the relief on Kelly's face and felt shitty for sending his thoughts spiraling.

"Good," Kelly said. "And for the record, I did need to hear it. I kept picturing you passed out lifeless somewhere, and it wasn't a good look, my friend, it just wasn't."

"I'm not planning on letting that happen."

"Good to know."

"I just need you to know that I'd have still been up there if Hawk would let me stay," Aaron said. "I feel like I'm in limbo. He thinks my heart is still on touring and being on a stage a hundred and twenty nights a year when sometimes I wish I'd never picked up an instrument."

Now that left Kelly staring at him with a shocked look on his face.

"Maybe if I hadn't, my grandparents would have been less shitty," Aaron admitted. "Maybe I'd know what a family was supposed to look like and maybe Hawk…"

"You wouldn't have Hawk if it wasn't for the music!" Kelly snapped. "And you do know what a family looks like, fucker, we've been your family for over a dozen years."

"And now we're broken, just like my last one and the one before that!" Aaron snapped. "I'm really starting to wonder if it's just me! If I'm the one whose too broken to belong anywhere, or to anyone, and if that's why everything falls to shit when I'm around."

"You didn't cause the band to fall apart."

"But I couldn't do a damn thing to keep it together, either," Aaron said. "When Jason and Ethan bailed, the only thing I cared about was getting so numb that I didn't have to feel what it was like to miss them. You asked why I didn't go with them? Easy, they didn't ask. I wouldn't have been a good fit for them any more than I'll be for you. The only difference is that they knew it and you refuse to get the point through your head. You can do with that what you will. That's all the truth I can give you right now."

"Just answer me one thing," Kelly said as several long, tense moments of silence stretched between them. "Did you start feeling this way about the music before Hawk left, or after?"

"Before," Aaron admitted, holding Kelly's gaze. "But I stayed for you guys, because I didn't want to fuck up what we'd created and unlike the rest of you, it was the only thing I had and sometimes, I resented it, because falling in love with the music wrecked what little of a relationship I had with my grandparents."

"No, they wrecked that like they wrecked your guitars," Kelly said, reaching out and catching Aaron's wrist. "They destroyed it like they did your love of singing, and I think that's why you don't want to front this band. Because you're still ashamed of the way they stood you in front of the whole congregation and made you repent for singing a metal song. They don't have the power to do that anymore, Aaron, and they shouldn't have the power to put that look in your eyes."

"I won't sing because I don't want to sing. I've never wanted to be the frontman."

"It's a damn shame and a waste of talent, but then, you've never believed that you had much of that, either," Kelly said. "I blame them for that, and I hate them for it and for all the ways they've made you feel like you were doing something wrong just by living your life the way you wanted to."

"But was I really or was I just following the only people who gave a damn about me?"

He could see by the expression on Kelly's face that he didn't know how to respond to that, though he did finally release the hold he had on Aaron.

"I'll play, if that's what you really want," Aaron conceded. "I just wanted you to know where I stood before you asked again."

"I want you to want to play for you," Kelly said. "If you truly can't, then I'll except it."

Aaron was quiet for a moment, glancing everywhere but at Kelly. "I guess we'll know after the next jam session, because I can't answer that yet and maybe that's what Hawk really sent me up here to find out, so, when is it?"

"I still don't know what time it is now!" Kelly snapped, glancing around until his eyes landed on the dragon skull clock above the mantle. "Shit! Less than an hour from now."

"Then I guess we'll have our answer by the end of the day."

"Yeah, I guess we will, now, do us both a favor, go back downstairs, grab one of your acoustics and get your ass back up here. I need to grab a shower and find some food. Fuck! Where the hell did the day go?"

"It vanished behind your eyelids."

"Ha. Ha. Just go. I'll leave the door unlocked for you."

"Wanna tell me what the hell I need my acoustic for?" Aaron asked, even as he pushed away from the counter and headed for the door.

"A little something we've been working on, and please don't give me shit about it being too soft when you haven't heard it yet."

"Fine. Whatever."

"Hey Aaron?"

"Yeah."

"Have you and Hawk resolved your shit yet?"

Shrugging, Aaron muttered, "We fucked."

Kelly stuck a finger in the air and twirled it around. "Kinda figured."

"There's nothing else to know."

"Sure. Deflection was never your strong suit, so I know there's more. You'll spill eventually, now hurry up and get moving. I still haven't had breakfast, and I doubt you have either."

"That's because it's technically lunch time and I forgot to go grocery shopping again."

"At this point, you'd be better off having shit delivered and calling it a day."

"Maybe I will, if I ever get around to making a list."

"You and me both," Kelly remarked, making a shooing motion towards the door. Aaron took the hint and trudged back downstairs, popped a couple frozen pastries in the toaster and let them heat up while he grabbed the case holding his sunburst acoustic and an elastic to tie back his hair.

There was half a blunt resting in the ashtray on the table, so he smoked it while he ate, the smoke curling in his lungs and settling there, making him cough a little. For a moment, he was reminded of the first time he'd smoked, shotgunning from Hawk once he'd gotten over his fear of someone catching them with their lips pressed together.

More wasted time he could never get back.

This time, he grabbed the key for Kelly's apartment before heading up, a full-blown case of the munchies having hit by the time he finished that elevator ride. After letting himself in, he headed straight for the cookie jar only to discover that the Thin Mints had been replaced by Fudge Striped cookies, a fact that was so disappointing he didn't bother grabbing one.

In the music room he set his acoustic aside to pick up the piebald electric he'd left behind, effortlessly falling into the pattern of carefully tuning the strings. It was off, which didn't make any sense considering he was certain he'd checked every string before the first session was set to begin.

"Was someone playing this?" Aaron asked the moment Kelly stepped into the room, his hair still damp and darkening the shoulders of his t-shirt.

"Me. Attempting to, anyway," Kelly admitted as he picked up his bass. "I knew the sound I wanted, but I couldn't get my fingers to cooperate."

"That's ‘cause you've been playing four strings for so long you've forgotten what to do with the other two."

When Kelly snickered and flipped him off, Aaron found himself comforted by the normalcy of the gesture. He heard but chose not to acknowledge the arrival of one of their new bandmates, gathering from the small talk taking place between him and Kelly that it was Micah who'd joined them.

"Do you know if Declan was planning to be late?" Kelly asked once twenty minutes had passed without anyone else showing up.

"I haven't spoken to him since we left here last night," Micah muttered, fiddling with his guitar in almost a mirror image of what Aaron was doing.

"Maybe we should just get started and have him jump in when he gets here. We could always work out that intro to Haunted Dreams," Kelly suggested with a note of tension in his voice.

Aaron almost asked what the issue was, then thought better of it. Whatever was going on wasn't his concern. This was Kelly's baby. What Aaron needed was a definitive answer, one he hoped he'd have by the end of the night.

"I'm game," Micah said.

Aaron's fingers traced an unbroken pattern along the curve of his guitar while he waited for them to start. Micah played the chords, a dark, melodic intro that was just begging for something to enhance it. There was a sad, haunting ache to it that fit well with Aaron's mood, making it easy for him to appreciate. By the third time Micah played it through, Aaron was picking out a series of notes, pulling a few to draw out the somber tones in them. The tension and restless energy of earlier had melted away, leaving nothing but the newly evolving song.

"There's still something off. Let's try starting with G," Kelly suggested.

Aaron never looked up, he just played when Micah did, scowled, and fiddled with a changeup when the flow felt off.

"I don't think G is gonna work," Aaron reluctantly offered after they'd tried it a handful of times, producing a drab, dull melody that sounded almost like a funeral dirge.

"Then what would you suggest?" Kelly asked.

He hesitated to suggest anything because he was supposed to be keeping his mouth shut. Like with several other things he sucked at, he'd never been good at taking his own advice. "EM with a progression through C, G and D."

Micah's fingers went still on the strings as he cocked his head to the side, hair falling like a curtain over his face while he hummed, slowly working out a melody before demanding that Aaron play it . It came out hard and a bit growly, but no different from the way Aaron and the guys had always spoken to one another when they were in the zone, so Aaron didn't take offense and instead did as he'd requested and played the intro in the new chord.

"Fuck yeah!" Kelly declared, playing a variation of the notes he'd been fooling around with on his bass. "Now we've got something we can work with!"