whiskey, smoke and aces high

It's too bad. When did it get cool to be so sad? We're spinnin' backwards, did we all go mad?
Yeah, we're only human but w?'ve got hands and hearts and noses,
So stop and sm?ll the fucking roses

Cool and musician might go together in sitcoms and teen dramas, but in the real world, all that time spent honing one's craft usually meant you got a pass in the you're awkward, bud department. If you were any good, anyway. And Remi was. So too was his inability to be cool over texts. And in real life as we'll see, but that's for later. Remi's phone is in his pocket as he heads back inside, and it's with an inward cringe that he accepts a quick bump of something to get him through the second set rather than allowing himself to read whatever response his terrible pun had earned him.

Waving for the stage lights to be turned down—a gesture that immediately has his manager on edge, making constipated faces at him from behind the curtains—Remi grins out at the crowd. "Okay with you all if we do something a bit—" The bartender is swirling a cherry stem on her tongue, that she's probably just tied, while making eyes at hallway🍆 . It's too much to say it makes his blood go cold, but his stomach certainly turns as if he's mixed coffee and yoghurt together. "—a bit different?" Steve, the manager, is fuming; Remi locks eyes with someone in the crowd. Someone. Anyone. Doesn't matter. "Alright with you, bella?"

Yeah. It's alright with her, if the way she jumps and demands a selfie from her friends is any indication.

Pulling in a breath, Remi begins to sing. There's only atmospheric noise from the band at this point, and the way the lights have dimmed make it feel to the RocKStAr that it's just he and the microphone. That makes him feel better. Just shy of a minute in, the harmonies come on thick and strong, and Remi loses himself in them; in them, in the lights that are blown out and full of colour, in the drugs in his system, in the way he can sink into the sounds and ignore all the bullshit that has been added onto getting him to this moment.

So he sings and latently he thinks fuck that pretty boy with the blue eyes—which is exactly what he'd like to do to him. Instead, he'll go home alone and write a song about it.

---

Remoodle sings this

ThE RoCkStAr