Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

NORTH VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA

JUNE 1978

The thrumming sound of guitar strings echoed against the dark basement. 

Only one light source fought back the dark in Macklin's room: a massive, vintage, and super orange lava lamp that he had thrifted in a garage sale in his neighborhood for about $20. Through those horrible orange fragments of light, one could see the dense twirl of smoke all around the place, along with various pieces of clothing scattered on the floor and an ashtray overflowing with stubs—a perverse, sculpted heap of dirt. A massive record shelf stuffed with LPs stood in the back, along with his record player and a beautiful speaker that had been purchased recently. A busted couch was placed neatly across from the furniture, and numerous posters of bands decorated the walls: The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin—all the big ones.

He would be on posters in teenagers' bedrooms one day, too. He just fucking knew it. 

Mack had just hit the bong five times because he was out of rolling papers and, honestly, he didn't want to come out of his room to buy more—the world outside was too demanding right then. Prom had been about three weeks ago, and he felt he was allowed to soak in his room for a bit. He was just going to hit the bong or whatever.

He loved the feeling of the steel strings on the tips of his calloused fingers. The rough skin molded against the worn-out frets of his old electric guitar. It was interesting how the sound could echo through his whole body and reach parts of his consciousness that he hadn't even known existed. Maybe he was too fucking stoned, but he knew his shit. The buzzing sound that he was producing right then was that shit. His fingers sprinted across the frets, each bend reaching for a note that felt like a scream, perfectly sustained by the overdrive of the amp.

While the note felt like a scream, it did nothing to muffle the real, guttural sound that Rick Celebrini was making as he yelled and punched the door.

"Macklin! Turn this shit off and open the fucking door!"

Mack didn't have to see his dad to know his appearance. He was almost certainly spitting all over the wood in his ire; his neck would be scarlet red, the flush spreading to his cheeks and forehead.

"And stop smoking dope in my fucking house! Bastard!"

Mack dug his pick into the strings with a violent rhythm, the roar of the amplifier acting as a shroud. Every time a yell from his a father drifted through the wood, he answered with a piercing slide up the fretboard, burying the shouts in electricity. The music would always drown out everything his family had to say—or yell—to him. And thank God for that.

"Why are you turning this shit up? You motherf— FUCK! I won't repeat it ag—"

Oh my god. Mack wondered if Rick would ever drop it. His dad never knew how to stop at the right time. 

Rick was really going at it this time, his heavy boots hammering against the old wood of Mack's bedroom door. The frame groaned, already splintered and abused from years of previous outbursts. Inside, Mack barely even blinked, his fingers still moving, still lost in the vibration of his sound.

Then the door didn’t just open. It shattered. Under the final, violent weight of Rick’s kick, the wood gave way with a hollow crack that sounded like a bone breaking.

In that split second, the dense, orange-grey haze of the room—the private atmosphere Mack had been cultivating for hours—surged toward the breach. The smoke sprinted out of the dark of his basement and into the sharp, violent natural light of the hallway. It looked like a living thing escaping a cage. The thick fog of weed slammed directly into Rick’s face, momentarily obscuring him in a ghostly white shroud before he could even take a step across the threshold. 

For a moment, his father was just a silhouette behind a curtain of Mack’s own making, a monster caught in a hazy mist. Then the smoke cleared, and there was only Rick—scarlet-faced, spitting, and ready to tear the rest of Mack's world apart.

Mack’s brain was scrambling to join everything that was happening together in thought, but he knew what would be coming next: Rick would try to break his things, things that he had worked really hard for. It wouldn't have been the first time his dad smashed his instruments. The biggest hole the man had ever left in the drywall was still hanging there behind some posters that were also used to disguise previous outbursts of anger. Mack couldn't have his colleagues visiting and seeing how busted the walls were; they would probably think he had serious anger issues—which was true, but never like that. 

Mack found a twisted sort of logic in the posters—band-aids he wrapped around the rotting basement, just like the ones he wrapped around his mind to muffle everything: the loud guitar, the weed, the vibration of his speaker. Mack felt as though his entire life was built of these band-aids that he would keep gluing together until someday it would all take shape and just be alright. He was trying to actively convince his brain of that lie all the time.

The way he didn't stick with his father's plans would always be a sore topic in the family. The Celebrinis were athletes, and Mack was an athlete, too—well, an ex-athlete or a deserter, depending on who was asked. He had just returned from Chicago after shaking the entire junior hockey league with an outstanding performance. He had been invited by Boston University to enroll at just 17. Mack had declined, deciding to finish high school instead and go back to Vancouver. That was the tipping point for Rick. 

And the math of his house was simple, even if it was a bitch to swallow. There was the love Rick had for his brothers—loud, sweaty, and heavy with pride—and then there was the thin, brittle tolerance he saved for Macklin. Mack had spent years trying to bridge that gap with outstanding performances, hoping the roar of a crowd might finally sound like his father's voice. But standing there, with the door in splinters, the truth was finally loud enough to hear over the amp: he wasn't a son to Rick; he was just a failed investment. 

Maybe he was too high to care, or maybe the weed acted as a low-pass filter, rolling off the screech of Rick's voice until the resentment was just a dull thrum he could sit with. He had convinced himself it was alright. In his head, he was a slow-burn track. One day, they would hear what he was actually playing. He would provide for them not through the brutal, cold friction of hockey, but through his own sound. 

Hockey wasn't for him, and he was okay with that. It had been fun during the fourteen years he dedicated to the craft, and he hadn't just been good—he’d been a freak of nature, an NHL prospect with a ceiling higher than his basement rafters. He was much better than Aiden, much better than anyone else around him. But standing in the wreckage of his door, the ‘amazing’ version of Macklin Celebrini consisted only of a boy who was too scared of his father. He was a body built for the NHL that he was currently letting rot in a basement because his heart didn't beat to the rhythm of skates on ice. His fingers froze abruptly over the strings, bringing the music to a screeching halt, but the amp held onto a high, piercing whine.

If he leaned into the sound long enough, he could trick his brain into thinking the screech was actually the chime of the bell at that record store, and that the smoke hitting Rick’s face was the sweet, heavy incense of the shop.

He closed his eyes, letting the hallway light behind his father blur and stretch into something psychedelic and wide, as the biting chill of 1969 replaced the stale heat of the basement. Suddenly, he was nine years old again, half-frozen beneath layers of scarves while Aiden dragged him down a Vancouver sidewalk. Their heavy hockey bags scraped against the pavement, and above them, cursive letters shimmered on a psychedelic billboard.

“Licorice Pizza,” Mack had read aloud in disgust “That’s a horrible name for a restaurant”

“It’s a record store, dumbass.” Aiden replied.

Mack remembered staring at the walls covered in posters and records, realizing for the first time that adults could build lives around the things they loved. Then came Abbey Road. Four men crossing a street, and one of them was barefoot. Behind the counter stood Angela, the shop owner. She was always smiling, a stark contrast to the world outside, her presence as familiar and comforting as the scent of old paper and vinyl that filled the store. 

Back in their house, Aiden had dropped the needle carefully onto the vinyl. The record turned slowly between them, scattering music into the dim room with a fragile crackle. He and Aiden sat across from each other.

And the music.

God, the music.

Until that moment, music had belonged vaguely to his life and clung more to the world of adults: radios in distant rooms, songs half-heard in passing cars, melodies without consequence. But for the first time in Mack’s life, he felt not merely that he liked music, but that it belonged to him.

Neither of them spoke for the remainder of the song, or the remainder of the album. They only talked about it the next day.

Mack forgot what they ate that night. He forgot the weather. But years later he would still remember the opening bassline of Come Together filling the bedroom while something enormous and irreversible shifted quietly inside his chest.

The next morning, he asked Rick for a guitar. The answer sounded a lot like this. That rage, the same disbelief that followed the question years ago, was now magnified and bearing down on him in the form of his father. Rick’s shadow loomed over him, filling the basement with the present danger he had been trying to drown out with noise. 

Rick was getting closer now. Screaming like a madman. 

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. 

He needed to react. Quick. 

"What the fuck?" Mack rasped. His throat was scratchy from a week of near-silence. It would be over fast. His dad would just yell, scream, and spit on him, and he just had to endure that very quickly, dismiss him, and go back to his normal routine. Play, smoke, listen, and write. It would be okay. He would be okay.

“What the fuck? I’m the one who should be saying that! I don’t understand you, Macklin! I swear I don’t! I gave you and your brothers everything. What did I do that was so wrong that only you turned out this way?” Humpf. That's so Rick. He’s so fucking funny sometimes. It’s really dense from his part that he didn’t know what he would do that was so fucking wrong. “You waste your life smoking dope and playing that racket all day."

Mack just let out a sharp, dry laugh. "Whatever, old man." he muttered, the words disappearing into the empty hallway. 

“It’s not whatever! I’m done with this shit for real, Macklin.” His father gesticulated wildly. “Throw that fucking guitar away, enroll in college like a normal person, or go find a real fucking job! Start doing something useful with this fucking life of yours!”

“How many times do I have to actually beg you to be fucking normal?” Now he was spitting on Mack’s face. Just great. “Do you think that you could be a successful musician? You’re no McCartney boy. You weren’t raised for that and you fucking know it. Grow. The. Fuck. Up!”

Ouch. Did it have to hurt so much every time he did that? How Macklin isn’t used to this by now?

“I’ll prove it to you Dad. I’m no McCartney but I also could be someone. You’ll have to believe in me sometime.” Mack’s trembling raspy voice echoed through the room. Why did it always feel like there was barbed wire wrapped around his throat? “I just know I have the talent that it takes. Please, Dad. Could you, for just one fucking time listen to me?”

It’s actually humiliating to plead like this—to beg to be understood. He already did that so many times. It didn’t mean that things would actually change. He could already feel his eyes welling up with unshed tears. It was too much. It was always too much when it came down to his family.

“You won’t prove anything to me.” Rick said, his voice flat and cold. “I don’t want you to prove anything to me. I just know you don’t have what it takes. You’re my son—I raised you, I know you. You’re a hockey player or a fucking nobody. How could you know shit about music? That old lady filled your brain with lies. You’re no good, Macklin. You’re not an artist. These sounds you make? They aren’t even close to music.”

Rick’s words drove into him like the sharpest knife, and he seemed to twist the blade with every breath. “Where is your fucking band? Do you sing? What the fuck do you do? You have no future, kid, and you’ll see that soon.” 

Mack remained standing in the same place he was in the moment his father kicked his door. His head stayed lowered while Rick’s words continued to fall heavily through the room, each one striking with the dull precision of something rehearsed many times before. The record sleeves scattered across the bed, the guitar pressed against his hips like a box of nails, the posters on the walls—all of it suddenly appeared childish beneath that merciless voice.

You have no future kid. 

The sentence seemed to linger in the air even after it had been spoken. He pressed his mouth shut hard enough to make it tremble. His vision blurred anyway. The orange light emitted from his lava lamp almost looked like a supernova explosion by now. At eighteen, he had already learned very well the particular humiliation of crying in front of someone determined not to be moved by it. He always hated the way his throat would just close and his eyes would open the floodgates. He hated how that man knew how to push all of his buttons, like a shark smelling blood. The blood could easily be mistaken for Mack’s tears though. 

And when this shark smelled his blood, he was always merciless.

“You’re not crying on me now Macklin. This can’t be fucking real.” His dad said, his voice sharp. If snakes could talk, Mack bet they would sound exactly like this. The man dragged his hands through his hair in a quite aggressive motion. He inhaled some air, exhaled. In one abrupt movement he drove his foot into the side of the couch that Mack was in front of; sending it scraping harshly across the old floorboards. “FUCK! How did I manage to raise such a fucking fag? Tell me how, Macklin! What the fuck are you crying about?” 

The violence of the movement made him recoil, his breath catching sharply in his throat. He drew back immediately, every muscle tensing beneath the force of his father’s outburst.

Rick used to beat him up pretty badly every time Mack would defied him in some way or another. He knew about his father’s temper. He had been a pretty abrasive kid, so he thought he probably deserved it. He was taller now, bulkier. Bigger in all the places that mattered. He wasn’t that scrawny, scared, little kid that had to sit staring at the sinuous grey walls of his living room, always in the ‘naughty corner’ listening to his brothers who would usually be playing basketball outside—always Aiden versus RJ and Charlie. He’d sit in the silence while they watched films on the brand-new VCR his dad had bought for Aiden’s birthday.

He could defend himself now, and Rick knew it. So he just stuck to the program by destroying his room. Because in a certain way, his dad also knew that this basement right here represented everything to Mack. All that he loved.

His dad continued his angered shouts, but Mack scarcely heard him anymore. The noise in his head was too loud for that right now. Something inside him continued to collapse quietly under the weight of those words—not yet dead, but wounded in a place too deep to defend.

“–ucking waste of space. That is what you are! A drug addict, a fag” Rick’s voice continued to crack through the room, it almost felt like he was tearing Mack’s band-aids away with his voice. “You just had your birthday huh? You know what that means, Macklin? You’re eighteen years old. I want you out of my fucking house right now. I have absolutely zero obligations with you.”

At first, Mack almost laughed.

Not because anything about the situation was funny, but because the alternative felt impossible. His father was angry—furious, even—but anger passed. It always passed. In another hour the house would fall silent again; doors would close; dishes would clatter distantly in the kitchen; life would resume its ordinary shape.

He has to be joking.

The thought repeated itself desperately while his father continued speaking.

But then his father was stepping around the room in ragged breaths, his eyes frantically searching for something. He stopped when he spotted the half-packed duffel bag that Mack had been too lazy to unpack after coming back from Chicago. He grabbed the bag from the chair and threw it toward him hard enough for it to hit the floor at his feet.

“Get out,” He repeated again, his voice raw with laced fury. Rick was trying really hard to keep his composure this time, Macklin noticed. “I really mean it this time.”

And suddenly Mack understood. This was his tipping point. He couldn’t deny it anymore. He was being kicked out of his house. 

“Are you sure about that, Dad?” he said, the words frail enough to disappear almost immediately into the room. 

His face was drenched with tears. Yet what made the question unbearable was not the crying itself, but the thin desperate hope still lingering behind it. Hope. Such a beautiful word for something that had never survived long in Mack’s world.

Rick had always possessed a particular talent for extinguishing it quickly.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” his father shot back immediately. The answer came without hesitation, without mercy.

“You think music’s gonna save you? It won’t. For once in your life somebody has to tell you the truth. You’re eighteen years old and you’ve done nothing except hide in this basement chasing fantasies.” He gestured sharply toward the records scattered around the bedroom as though they personally offended him. “You want to waste your life? Fine. But you’re not doing it under my roof anymore. I’m done financing your delusions.”

Mack lowered his gaze slowly.

The words hurt—of course they hurt—but not in the clean, immediate way they once had. That kind of pain belonged to younger versions of himself: the child who still waited for encouragement, the teenager who still believed approval might eventually arrive if he worked hard enough, played well enough, became good enough.

That boy no longer existed, and now the insults landed against something already numb by repetition.

Financing your delusions.

This exact phrase echoed bitterly through his mind. His father had never financed anything except the bare minimum required to call himself a father. Food. Electricity. Hockey gear. Ice time. A roof that had always felt conditional.

The records filling the room had been bought with Mack’s own paychecks from long afternoons spent shelving vinyl and sweeping dusty floors at Licorice Pizza. Yet those hours had never truly felt like work. They belonged to Angela—to the warm clutter of the shop, the endless music drifting between shelves, the smell of incense and old cardboard, her laughter carrying easily through the colored light while she taught him artists no one else around him cared enough to mention. Her soft gaze always rested on him while she told beautiful stories and terrible jokes with equal sincerity.

Everything in this room had been built that way.

The guitar leaning in the corner carried grooves worn into the wood by exhausted hands that had practiced late into the night after shifts and unfinished homework. Even the turntable beside his bed had taken nearly a year of saving to afford. None of it had come from Rick. Music had survived in Mack’s life despite him, not because of him.

Rick spoke as though he had built the dream himself and now possessed the right to destroy it. Something inside Mack hardened quietly at the thought. The tears still clung to his face, but the desperation behind them had begun to change shape. Beneath the grief, beneath the humiliation, another feeling emerged slowly—colder now, steadier.

Resentment.

Then Mack remembered that he was also a shark. After all, he was raised in a family them 

“Financing my delusions?” He repeated incredulously. “How do you even have the courage to say something like that? You didn’t pay for shit in this fucking room. The only thing you did was destroy everything that I worked my ass off to get.” 

His voice, which was always soft-spoken, barely sounded like his own anymore—rough with fury, sharpened by years of swallowed bitterness. His throat burned with the force of the words forcing themselves out at last.

“Nothing was ever enough for you. You always wanted more. Whatever my brothers did, I had to do better. Bigger. Louder. Four times over just to be noticed.”

Rick’s eyes widened slightly—not with guilt, never guilt. With surprise. For perhaps the first time in years, Mack had stopped sounding defensive. There was no pleading left in his voice now, no desperate need to be understood. The anger emerging from him felt frightening precisely because of how long it had been restrained.

The room fell abruptly silent except for the sound of their uneven breathing.

“You think working part-time in a record store makes you a man?” Rick snapped harshly. “You have no idea how the real world works.” He stepped closer then, fury tightening every word that followed. “You wanna know why I pushed you harder than your brothers? Because you were always the weakest one.”

Mack stared at his father for a long moment. Really stared, his chest still heaving faintly from the words he had just spoken. Shaking his head in disapproval, a small exhausted laugh made out of his lips, it sounded utterly devoid of any humor. 

“You’re actually unbelievable,” Mack said quietly. “You think I’m weak? What weak person could have endured years of your demands? What weak kid could have survived you and your temper and still be standing here looking you in the eye?” 

Rick’s expression darkened immediately, but Mack continued before he could interrupt. He shook his head, the pity in his gaze sharper than any shout. 

“And you know what’s actually funny? Angela’s done more for me in seven years than you have in my entire life. She actually listened to me. She cared about the things I cared about.” His gaze flickered briefly toward the records scattered around the room. “Everything I love, I found myself. Every single thing in this room—I paid for it. Not you.”

Mack straightened up, finally gaining control over his body. His hands tightened around the neck of the guitar as he removed the strap from his shoulder and carefully lowered the instrument onto the couch. Then he reached down and grabbed the duffel bag that was at his feet like an invite.

If he were lucky, one hour from now he would be out of this hellhole. Behind him, Rick had fallen strangely silent—for once in his life, contrary to everything Mack had believed about him, the man apparently understood that there was nothing left to say.

The silence settled heavily across the room, but Mack wasn’t finished yet.

Sharks never stopped swimming, after all.

“You keep talking like you made me,” He said quietly without turning around. He wound the amp cable through his fingers before tossing it into the duffel bag. “But most days I survived because I knew eventually I’d get to leave this house.”

He crossed toward the closet and began pulling shirts from their hangers. His vision was still blurred uselessly by tears.

“You know the worst part?” Mack asked, folding another shirt into the bag with shaking hands. “I spent years thinking something was wrong with me because you couldn’t love me correctly.”

He laughed again. He had been so stupid.

“And honestly? I still don’t know what it was about me that disgusted you so much.” He zipped the bag shut. The sound cut through the room with quiet finality. “But I think I’m finally glad you pushed me away before I wasted my whole life trying to earn something from you I was never going to get.”

Rick said nothing. The silence looked unnatural on him. Moments earlier, his voice had shaken the entire basement with rage; now he stood motionless near the doorway while Mack continued packing in the heavy quiet that followed.

Mack wiped roughly at his face before crouching beside the couch again. His movements were on the autopilot of someone functioning several seconds removed from reality. One by one, he disconnected the pedals from the tangled maze of cables spread across the floor, coiling each wire carefully despite the tremor still lingering in his hands.

He packed the distortion pedal first. Then the reverb. Then the small cracked tuner Angela had insisted still worked perfectly despite all evidence to the contrary. Rick remained silent behind him. Mack could feel his father watching, but he refused to look back.

Finally he reached for the guitar again.

For a brief moment his fingers lingered against the worn wood near the body—against the scratches, the chipped paint, and the shallow grooves carved there by years of restless practice late into the night. Then he opened the case carefully and lowered the instrument inside with a tenderness entirely absent from everything else in the room.

The metallic click of the latches locking into place sounded unbearably loud. He hoisted the guitar case onto one shoulder, the duffel bag hanging crookedly from the other. It felt impossibly heavy, weighted down by hastily folded clothes and the tangled, broken pieces of a life he’d spent eighteen years building beneath Rick’s roof. Every strap bit into his skin, a physical reminder of what it cost to finally walk away. After that came the amp. Mack wrapped both arms around it and lifted with visible effort, the weight dragging painfully against muscles already exhausted by adrenaline and grief. 

He glanced around the basement one final time.

The records remained stacked beside the turntable. Posters curled slightly at the corners of the walls. Clothes still lay abandoned across the chair. The room looked painfully unchanged, as though it had not yet realized he was leaving.

“I’ll come back later this week for the rest of my stuff,” Mack said at last, his voice sounding as if it were being dragged painfully from somewhere deep in his throat. “I’ll contact RJ or Charlie about it.”

Then, after a brief pause:

“Have a good life, Rick.”

Somewhere upstairs the house creaked softly. Mack swallowed hard. Everything would be okay. It had to be.

Then, without another word, he walked past his father and toward the stairs. Behind him, his father finally spoke. Of course he did. The bitter old man could never allow silence to have the last word.

“You’ll come crawling back.”

Mack tightened his grip around the amp, the weight of it felt like more than life itself right now. 

We’ll see about that. 

He entered the store, the busted and comforting sign of Licorice Pizza hanging above his head like a blessing. The straps around his shoulders were grinding into his collarbones like fucking hell, the amp seemingly gaining a pound for every step he took.

Don't pass out. Not here.

He was in a daze, fueled by nothing but adrenaline and the terror of the concrete meeting his face. Mack was on the edge of a panic attack—though he wouldn't have a name for the feeling for years—his breath was shallow and jagged. His eyes were vacant, staring out from a face that felt like a mask.

Something in his brain had snapped. It felt like someone had reached into the back of his head and yanked the master cable, leaving his consciousness to drift up toward the ceiling. He was watching his own life from a third-person perspective, a bizarre glitch. He’d always joked about fearing a lobotomy—and had always gotten weird looks for it.

Well, that joke isn’t funny anymore. 

He forced his eyes to sweep the store, searching for the constants. It was all there. It was a mix of colors—none of them the sickening yellowish light that he encountered in every corner of his house—The colored lights dissolved the limits of the room. Blue melted into crimson; crimson drowned itself in green; shadows danced across the ceiling beneath the turning blades of an old fan. Plants crowded the windows of the shop. Any outsider would think this looked like a jungle, but to Mack, it was the only place left where he could breathe.

Everywhere Macklin looked there were cables, records, dust, colored reflections, ashtrays, speakers, books, forgotten cups of coffee, posters curling at the edges, and the low continuous murmur of music vibrating through the floorboards like a second heartbeat—California Dreamin’ was playing, Mack immediately noticed.

It was a mess. It was perfect. Just as it had been since that first day with Aiden. The few clients browsing the stacks. The faint, distant smell of incense that lived in the floorboards. And Angela, propped against the counter, smoking like she had all the time in the world. She was the only thing that looked real right now. He all but scrambled toward her, dragging the amp and the weight of himself in a last, desperate effort that left his muscles screaming.

Mack watched the exact moment Angela’s eyes found his. She was an ageless hippie spirit who seemed untethered from the years, her long white hair falling over a flowery tunic and her signature round glasses catching the light. He saw the warm smile she reserved only for him already beginning to form. He also saw the exact moment her face dropped—the instant the cigarette smoke cleared and she saw the vacant, terrified wreck of a boy standing in front of her.

Mack had barely blinked before she was already there, closing the distance between them. Her steady hand moved to his face, fingers grazing his cheek with a look so fond it made his chest ache more than everything.  

"Oh my god," she whispered, her voice a soft anchor in the middle of his storm. Then she looked past him, as if she could see the ghost of Rick standing in the doorway miles away, and the bite in her tone was palpable. "Macklin... what did he do?" 

“He— I—” He couldn’t talk. His voice was muffled by the silent hiccups that rattled his chest, and he was fighting with every ounce of his remaining strength to keep his jaw shut. Mack just looked into her eyes, pleading with the best ‘Can we talk about this later?’ expression he could manage. Angela would get it. She always got it.

She simply nodded, her old round glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. The familiar wrinkles of her face folded into an expression of profound sadness that she was fighting to keep under the surface. He felt her firm hands prying the amp from his fingers, whisking it away to some safe corner of the store. Then she was there again, unhooking the duffel bag from one shoulder and lifting the strap of the heavy guitar case off the other.

He stood there, drifting in the haze of his own mind, barely registering the world around him. But he could feel her pulling the weight off his shoulders, just like she always did. He knew, with a bone-deep certainty, that she would take care of everything he loved as if it were her own.

Angela didn’t ask—she simply announced a 'short break' to the few lingering clients with a sharp, clear tone that brooked no argument. Without waiting for a response, she hooked her arm through Mack’s, her hand was a steady anchor on his arm, guiding him past the shelves of vinyl he’d spent years dusting. While anyone else would have panicked, Angela handled his breakdowns with a calm that only came from years of practice; she was the only one who knew how to wait for the storm to pass—instinctively knowing when to push and when to simply let the silence act as a bandage.

She moved with efficiency, navigating them through the 'Staff Only' door and toward the steep staircase. Mack felt like a passenger in his own body, his legs moving only because her hand compelled them forward. By the time they reached the top and stepped into the soft, sun-faded light of her apartment, the heavy thrum of the shop floor felt a thousand miles away. The apartment didn’t just smell like Angela—it felt like her. It was a dense, vibrating cocoon of color that seemed to swallow the harsh afternoon light and soften it into something golden and honey-thick. As she eased him onto the white couch, the velvet fabric felt impossibly plush against his skin, a stark contrast to the busted, neglected furniture of his basement.

Ivy and spider plants descended from every shelf, their vines tangled with macramé hangers and stray guitar cables that snaked across the floor in green profusion. There were no overhead lights here. Instead, the room was illuminated by a cluster of amber glass lamps and the soft, flickering orange of a vintage lava lamp that mirrored the one he’d left behind.

Every inch of the wall was a collage of the life he wanted. Hand-woven tapestries in deep crimsons and ochres hung beside posters of the greats—Hendrix, Joplin—their edges curling in the humid, incense-heavy air. Beneath his feet, thick Persian rugs were layered over one another, grounding him and muffling the outside world until the only sound left was the low, continuous murmur of a record spinning in the next room. He learned from a very young age that Angela always let something play in every background. 

It was a beautiful mess, just like the store below them. A kaleidoscope of velvet, leaves, and dust that felt more like home than any house he’d ever lived in. In this room, surrounded by the warm-toned shadows and the scent of cedar, Macklin wasn't a failed investment. He was just a boy who was searching for the right frequency. He didn’t realize how bone-deep the exhaustion went until the moment he sank into the velvet. Before he could even register the warmth of the room, he was falling—plunging into a sleep so sound it felt like the first real rest of his life. 

Mack woke up in the dark and immediately thought, Where the fuck am I? His eyes felt like they had been rubbed with sandpaper, and for a split second, he was back in the basement, reaching out for the obnoxious orange glow of his lava lamp. His hand slapped against empty air and hit a bunch of velvet pillows instead. 

Right. Fucking hell. 

The memories hit him like a bad trip—the door splintering, Rick’s screaming face, the weight of the amp dragging him across town. He wasn't in his room. He was homeless, crashing on a couch that smelled like expensive incense and old vinyl. 

He sat up with a violent jump, his spine popping in a jagged rhythm that sounded like a snapped string. He stayed there for a second, head in his hands, performing a long, bone-creaking stretch that made his muscles ache with every inch of effort. He let out a big, ugly yawn that felt like it was tearing his jaw open. 

When he finally stood, his legs felt like lead pipes—heavy, unresponsive, and completely disconnected from the rest of his body. He roamed through the shadows of Angela's apartment, his feet sinking into the layered rugs as he tried not to trip over his own shadow. He moved with a mechanical, stiff precision, navigating toward the bathroom with his eyes half-shut against the dark.

He took a piss, then stood over the sink for a minute just staring at the wall, feeling like a total glitch in the system. He drifted to the kitchen, opened the fridge—the light blinding him for a second—and grabbed a bottle of water. He downed half of it in one go, the cold finally reaching the back of his throat and waking up his brain. 

He didn't want to be there when the sun came up and made everything look real. Without a word, he turned toward the stairs, heading back down to the shop to find his gear and figure out where the fuck he was supposed to go next.

He headed straight for the counter where Angela usually sat, the smell of stale smoke and old paper welcoming him back. On the counter lay the latest issues of Crawdaddy! and Creem, the magazines Angela devoured to keep up with the latest releases.

He flipped through an old issue of Rolling Stone from late ’77 perched on the counter, his eyes landing on a feature about the California rock scene. Los Angeles sounded like it was on fire—clubs packed every night, bands clawing their way up from the Strip. Up north, San Francisco had its own thing brewing. Fleetwood Mac seemed to be everywhere, and tucked between the bigger names were rumors about stranger, more experimental sounds coming out of the desert. Sitting there with the magazine open in front of him, California felt like a map to a life that didn’t involve hockey rinks or the freezing cold of his hometown.

He knew then that Vancouver was just a rehearsal. The real show was headed south. 

That was it for him. He was going to try his luck in a new place without looking back, leaving nothing behind but the faint drag path of his gear on the floorboards.

He found his equipment in the staff room, tucked neatly behind the counter exactly where he knew Angela would put it. Mack opened his duffel bag to grab the Canucks hoodie he’d recently bought. He hated the game for himself—the skates, the rinks, the 'prospect' label—but he was still a fan, after all. As he pulled the thick cotton over his head, he noticed Angela had even coiled his cables. They weren't the tangled, knotted mess he usually carried; they were in neat, professional loops.  Zipping the bag up again, he checked the side pocket of his duffel bag, his fingers brushing against the thin roll of bills he’d managed to scrape together from his own shifts. Five hundred dollars. It was enough for a bus ticket and maybe a month of starving in a closet, but it felt like nothing. It felt like the real world Rick always talked about. 

He turned to his gear, and when he lifted his amp to check the back—like he always did—an envelope fell out from the speaker cabinet, taped securely to the wood. Inside, wrapped in a rubber band, were ten crisp hundred-dollar bills. One thousand dollars. A small scrap of paper was tucked into the center. It wasn't a long letter; she knew him better than that. In her elegant handwriting it just said:

Mack stood in the quiet of the staff room for a long moment, the envelope a heavy weight in his palm. He didn’t exactly celebrate when he found the money, but he let out a small chuckle. Angela knew him too well. She knew he would sneak off in the dark, and she already knew exactly what had gone down in that basement. She was smart like that.

In a way, Mack realized he would never truly be by himself—he would always be carrying her belief in him, too. It was a strange, terrifying comfort to have at least one person who actually believed in him.

He shoved the envelope deep into his bag, alongside his own five hundred dollars. One thousand five hundred dollars total. He could totally do this. This was the only investment that mattered—one he had actually asked for.

He grabbed a Sharpie near the register—the thick black kind Angela used to mark price tags on LPs—and flipped over a discarded Licorice Pizza flyer. The letters came out bigger than he expected, thick black strokes eating up the paper almost immediately. He stared at the cramped mess for a second, then pulled over a second flyer and kept writing.

Mack taped the letter to the register with a firm press of his thumb, the ink still fresh on the paper and smudging a little bit. He hoisted the amp, the weight dragging painfully against his side as he navigated the store. He didn't look back at the stairs or the warm, velvet sanctuary above. He just pushed through the double doors, the silver chime of the bell ringing out a final, metallic goodbye.

The walk to the terminal was a grueling trudge. The transition from dawn was a slow, agonizing fade-in. At first, the world was just a series of dark shapes and the rhythmic pop of his own joints. But as he neared the terminal, the dawn cracked open. The grey sky bruised into a pale yellow, the color of an old record sleeve. 

He dragged his wreckage into the terminal’s orbit, the iconic blue dog on the sign mocking him as he crossed the threshold. He hit the Greyhound station just as the diesel fumes and the smell of stale coffee began to fill the air, the heavy scent of travel acting as a hard reset for his senses. He bought his ticket with one of Angela’s hundred-dollar bills, the thick roll of change feeling like a heavy, paper secret tucked deep in his duffel bag.

He was an eighteen-year-old with fifteen hundred dollars and a one-way ticket to the only place that made sense right now. 

The boarding call was a garbled, bored voice over the station speakers that made Mack’s head throb. He gathered his gear, his muscles screaming in a dull, synchronized protest as he lugged the amp toward the gate.

He didn't even look at the luggage bay. There was no way in hell he was letting his amp be tossed into the dark underbelly of the bus with the suitcases. When he reached the steps, he ignored the driver’s skeptical glare, huffing under his breath as he hauled the heavy cabinet up the narrow aisle. The amp clipped against armrests and seat corners the entire way back, earning him a few irritated looks from exhausted passengers he was too tired to care about.

By the time he reached the rear seats, sweat was already sticking the Canucks hoodie to his spine again. He shoved the duffel bag beneath his boots, jammed the guitar case tightly between his knees—a hard fiberglass barrier between him and the rest of the world—and hoisted the amp onto the seat beside him. He strapped a seatbelt around it, securing his only passenger for the long haul south.

As the engine roared to life, a vibration rattled through the floorboards and up into Mack’s boots. It was a grounded, rhythmic hum that soothed something in his chest.

The trip was a blur of flyover towns and neon-lit rest stops. He spent hours hunched over, his chin resting on the headstock of his guitar case, his eyes fixed on the white lines of the interstate. Exhaustion eventually won, dragging him into a shallow, feverish sleep where the smell of diesel merged with Angela’s incense. Every time the bus hit a pothole, he’d bolt upright and drift into sleep again. 

By the time they hit the California border, the air outside the window had changed. The damp, heavy mist of the North was gone, replaced by a dry, shimmering heat that felt like a reset button.

He was starving, he was cramped, and he probably smelled like a basement—but as the bus crested the hills leading into the valley, Mack finally felt the lump around his throat loosen. He wasn't a hockey player anymore. He was a musician now. A ghost—waiting for the bus to stop so he could start haunting a new city.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA

SEPTEMBER 1978 

It wasn’t exactly easy by any means to establish himself in a city like Los Angeles. He knew that the world was going to be brutal—just like Rick had said numerous times—but not like this. Mack had imagined that things would be different, almost fairy-tail-like, on his arrival in California. But in reality, it had been a slow, grinding war of attrition against the heat, the smog, and a city that seemed designed to swallow kids like him whole.

In Vancouver, the sky felt infinite, always in a beautiful shade of blue. In LA, it felt like someone had clamped a dirty glass lid over the entire basin. The mountains he could see in the distance weren't blue; they were a hazy, ugly green-brown that vanished into a thick, brownish-orange sky that sat heavy on the rooftops—Mack thought of it as the city’s own exhaust fumes being pushed back down into his throat.

The famous Hollywood sign could be seen from everywhere across the city if he squinted his eyes—and it was shredded to pieces. It didn't look like the movies had promised at all. It was a shredded, sun-bleached skeleton rotting on the side of Mount Lee. The white paint had long ago peeled away to reveal rusted sheet metal, and the letters were so jagged and broken they looked like a row of cracked teeth. If he squinted through the orange haze, he could see the 'H' was gone entirely, and one of the 'O’s had snapped in half, leaving the hillside to spell out a broken Ulywod. 

Scrambling back to his shithole, he had to dodge a few rats already partying on the lower landing of the fire escape—the rusted skeleton of a staircase he used to reach the third floor. He hadn't found the place through a realtor or a clean office. He’d found it in the back of a discarded LA Weekly he’d swiped from the counter of a donut shop in Echo Park. He had circled a tiny, three-line ad that promised "Low Rent / No Credit Check / Private Entrance." In his stupid logic, it sounded like a sanctuary. In reality, it was a vertical coffin in a peeling stucco building near the corner of Yucca and Wilcox—right in the ‘heart of the rot’, just a block north of the Boulevard. 

The sheer noise of the city felt like a constant screech in his ears. In Vancouver, silence was easy to find; here, silence was an expensive luxury he couldn't afford. Even at 3:00 AM, the city hummed with a growl of sirens, lowriders, and the distant throb of a world that never stopped to catch its breath.

From his rusted fire escape, Mack was less than a mile from the Capitol Records Building, that giant stack of concrete records that seemed to watch over the city like a silent god. The walk from Yucca was a slow immersion into the deep-end of the city. He’d leave the relative safety of his shithole and head south, hitting Hollywood Boulevard just as the shadows began to stretch. The Boulevard was a fever dream of grit and neon; it smelled of stale beer, burnt sugar, and the heavy, humid scent of too many people crowded into one space.

He moved past the street preachers screaming about the end of the world and the runaways who looked even younger than he was, their eyes darting like trapped birds. Every doorway seemed to hold a struggling musician—guys with battered guitar cases and hollowed-out expressions, leaning against the faded stars of the Walk of Fame. The names under his boots were being ground into the concrete by the heels of tourists who didn't realize they were walking on a cemetery of dead dreams.

But as he kept walking, heading west toward the Sunset Strip, something always changed. The air started to change.

The Strip was a sensory overload in every sense of the word. It was a three-mile stretch of asphalt where the air felt electric, vibrating with the low-frequency throb of bass lines leaking out of the Whisky a Go Go. Mack would always feel the real meaning of being starstruck right here. 

He looked up at the massive, hand-painted billboards that towered over the traffic. High above, the Rumours cover had been blown up to the size of a cathedral wall. Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks glowed in the spotlights, draped in velvet and lace, looking like ivory statues against the smoggy night. They weren't looking at the traffic or the filth on the sidewalk; their eyes looked right past the haze and into a golden, California future Mack couldn't see yet. He was engulfed by it—the chrome of the parked Ferraris, the flash of the paparazzi bulbs outside The Roxy, and the sheer, crushing weight of the legends. He was just another boy with crushed dreams standing in the shadow of giants, realizing that in Los Angeles, you were either the music or you were just the white noise waiting to be tuned out.

Mack was carrying a stack of flyers that he had printed himself that morning, the cheap ink smudging against his thumb. They were very simple. A blank page with black robust letters that read: 

The main thing was the fact that he was really tired of browsing the sessions of “Musicians Wanted” sections in every LA Weekly edition that he could get his hands on and still find nothing—sometimes it felt like no one in this world was looking for someone like him. At the end of every call, he would encounter bands that required a specific look that he didn’t have, a confidence that he most certainly didn’t have, or just voices on the other line that felt as hollow as him. So, it was time to bet on the flyers and plaster his name all over the strip. He’d spent nearly ten dollars of his dwindling cash just to broadcast his existence to a city that wasn’t listening.

When he closed his eyes sometimes to catch a breath under the heavy neon lights, he would go back exactly to the moment Rick had said he'd come crawling back. That just couldn’t happen. He’d prefer starving to actually letting that happen. He moved along the Strip with a staple gun in one hand and a roll of duct tape in the other. Every time he glued a poster, it felt like he was sending a big ‘fuck you’ to his parents, to Vancouver, to everyone that had ever tried to bruise his dreams. 

By the time the last flyer was stapled to a telephone pole that was so thick with overlapping notices it looked like it was wearing a shaggy coat of paper. He cleared a small space, tearing away a faded ad for a lost dog and a year-old gig poster, and slammed a staple into his own name. He stood back for a second and looked at the black and white paper that didn’t signal anything special. There was no way in hell this would work. Fuck.

From the corner of his eye, he watched a guy in leather pants glance at his poster, pause for a second, and then keep walking. The rejection was silent, but it stung worse than anything. 

He just needed to be patient. No one skyrocketed to fame in 3 months just like that. It would be okay. It had to be okay. He repeated the words like a mantra while strolling back to his apartment. It almost matched the constant rhythm of his boots hitting the pavement. 

Mack was back at Yucca in a blur, and when he least expected it, he came across the set of stairs on his rusty fire escape, the metal groaning in a familiar way, almost like a hug. When he reached his studio, all the windows were closed and a scorching heat refused to leave, even though the sun was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t turn on the light, deciding instead to let the flickering purple neon light from the liquor store across the street guide him through his mess. 

He collapsed onto the beat-up mattress his landlord—Saul—had provided for him with clear pity in his eyes. It was a lumpy slab of foam that smelled of stale cigarettes and a dozen other people’s desperate lives. Mack kicked off his boots and shed his clothes, letting the scorching heat engulf him in his own misery. The fan on the floor rattled, blowing nothing but hot steam against his skin. With his last remaining effort, he reached for the half-smoked joint on the bedside table. He lit it, watching the cherry glow in the purple dark, and finally let the smoke numb that jagged, sore spot in his chest. 

But his brain wouldn’t stop running even in times like these. 

Ten dollars for all the flyers. Fifty cents for a lukewarm hot dog at a stand somewhere on the Strip. Another month of rent looming like a shadow. The fifteen hundred dollars that had felt like a king’s ransom was now a rapidly shrinking number in his head. 

He finished the joint and placed it on the ashtray. It was time to face the facts. He was running short on money. He’d give it until December, and if things didn’t work by then, he would look for a job. He could survive on the dregs of his cash and a bit of hunger, but he wouldn't go back. He’d disappear into the concrete before he ever set foot in North Vancouver again.

As the city sirens wailed in the distance, Mack finally let his eyes shut, the chaotic pulse of Hollywood acting as a lullaby to his exhausted bones. 

The sound that broke his slumber wasn’t gentle by any means. A violent thudding echoed against his door, making it feel as if the whole apartment were shaking from an earthquake. 

“Hey kid! Vancouver!” Saul’s voice was muffled by the wood. The knocking got more and more insistent. “There’s someone on the phone looking for you. Says he saw your paper in a pole. Are you coming or what? I ain’t a secretary!”

Mack’s bolted upright, already sprinting toward the door. He didn’t even bother to put his clothes on, busting through the entryway in his black briefs just in time to catch Saul’s fist already moving for another hard knock. At least he wasn’t trying to break in like Rick. It was a gentle knock at best.

Saul was a short old man with a round face that somehow was always red. He had big brown eyes, and a few strands of black, greasy hair were scarce on his head—he was clearly balding, but it looked like he wasn’t ready to give up yet. He always wore a white shirt that stretched around his beer belly, covered in spots with holes in them; Mack thought they probably originated from his constant smoking and the way he would always let the embers fall on him. It happened a lot with Mack, too. Saul was also always spotted wearing only briefs—that’s why Mack didn’t even bother to put any clothes on.

He jogged towards the end of the hall directly to the small, grease-stained alcove near the stairs. The receiver was dangling from its cord, swinging like a pendulum. Saul stood nearby—Mack didn’t even notice he had walked behind him, the rat.

He grabbed the phone. The plastic was warm and smelled of Saul’s cheap cologne.

"Hello?" he rasped, his voice still thick with sleep from the day before. 

"Yeah, I'm looking for the guy with the 'Heavy Gear,'" a voice rumbled on the other end. It was deep, gravelly, and hummed with a confidence that Mack instinctively recognized. "The one who says he'll play 'whatever.' You still looking for a slot, Mack? Or did someone already snap you up?" 

Mack’s hand tightened around the receiver, his knuckles white against the plastic. The adrenaline was hitting him now. He tried to force the sleep out of his throat, reaching for something that didn't sound like he’d just spent the night breathing in cheap weed. This could be it. "I—I’m still looking. Yeah. I'm available." 

"Good," the voice rumbled. "Listen, I’m Will. We’re a trio—Teal Tale.”

Mack felt a flicker of recognition. He remembered eyeing a brief, blurry article about them in the LA Weekly while eating his dry, lukewarm noodles at his desk. He’d turned the page before even finishing the first paragraph.

God, the name fucking sucked.

"Teal Tale," Mack repeated, keeping his voice flat to hide the judgment. "Right."

“Yeah. Our lead player, Leno, is...” Will’s voice trailed off, replaced by the faint rhythmic hiss of the long-distance connection. Mack heard him exhale softly into the receiver. “...dealing with some personal shit right now. Doesn’t matter. Contracts are signed either way. We’re doing a mini-tour opening for Van Halen. We hit the road in ten days.”

Mack’s breath hitched. The hallway suddenly felt crooked beneath his feet. Opening for Van Halen? That wasn’t just some garage-band bullshit. That was real. That was the kind of opportunity people crossed state lines and ruined friendships over.

“It's a short run. Six weeks, maybe less,” Will continued casually, like he wasn’t detonating Mack’s entire nervous system over a payphone. “Depends how long it takes Leno to get his act together. Point is, this isn’t permanent, Mack. Don’t start picking out matching tattoos or anything. We just need somebody who learns fast, plays hard, and doesn’t piss himself when the lights hit.”

Generous. That word tasted like a lifeline. It meant no more counting quarters for stale cup noodles or wondering when Saul would finally get sick of him and change the locks.

"I—I've got a Marshall half-stack and a Fender," Mack said, his stutter finally giving way to a desperate, focused edge. "I can learn fast. I won't freeze." 

"I like the gear," Will said with a dry, gravelly chuckle. "But the gear doesn't play itself. We’re in a house over on Fountain, just east of Vine. Got a garage in the back where the neighbors don't complain unless we’re still playing past midnight. We’ll be there at six tonight. You show up, you plug in, and we’ll see. If you’re trash, you’re off the driveway before the first chorus. You got a pen, Mack?" 

Mack let out a short, low grunt of agreement, grabbing a sharpie that was sitting in the alcove together with a crossword magazine. He scribbled the address on the last page and promptly tore it off. 

"Fountain and Vine. Six o'clock," Will repeated, the gravel in his voice sounding like a final warning. "Don't be late. The neighbors might not complain about the noise, but I sure as hell complain about people wasting my time." 

The line went dead with a hollow click. 

Mack stood there for a second, the receiver still pressed to his ear, listening to the dial tone—the city’s own monotone hum. He was staring at a coffee stain on the wall that looked vaguely like a mushroom cloud. He had six hours. He had a hundred pounds of gear. And he had exactly zero ways to move it. 

He glanced at the clock propped up just beside the phone, the pointers were creeping past 4:30 PM, almost mocking him. How the fuck had he slept so much? Californian weed was too effective sometimes. 

Saul was still there, leaning against the wall, picking at a hole in his shirt.

"Got a gig, kid?"

"Maybe," Mack muttered, already pushing past him.

Mack sprinted back to his studio, the adrenaline finally burning off. He had a few hours, and if he was going to walk into a garage and claim a spot in a lineup, he couldn't look—or smell—like a runaway who’d been sleeping in his own filth. 

He grabbed a threadbare towel and headed for the shared bathroom at the end of the hall. The shower was a narrow, rusted stall that groaned when he turned the handle, spitting out a blast of lukewarm water that smelled faintly of pennies. He stood under the spray, scrubbing the Hollywood grime off his skin until his tan felt like it might peel away. 

By the time he stepped out, his skin was pink and his head felt clear for the first time since he'd crossed the border. He went back to the studio and threw on a pair of oil-stained jeans and a clean Sex Pistols t-shirt. He was clean, he was caffeinated on nothing but nerves, and he was ready. 

He looked at the Marshall stack. He looked at his Fender. 

"Right," he muttered, the panic starting to taste like copper in his throat. "Think." 

Back in Vancouver, hauling the gear across town had felt possible somehow. The shop was only a few blocks away, the air was cold, and adrenaline had turned his body into something numb. But Hollywood was sprawling, blistering, and unfamiliar. He had less than an hour to move nearly two hundred pounds of equipment across a city actively trying to melt him alive. If he tried carrying it all by hand, he'd either collapse halfway there or show up looking like a corpse dragged out of the gutter.

He headed down the fire escape, skipping steps until he reached the alleyway behind the liquor store. Luck was a rare currency in Hollywood, but today, he found a discarded treasure: a grocery cart sitting lopsided near a dumpster. It had a bent front wheel and smelled faintly of rotten oranges, but the wire frame was solid.

He didn't think twice. He grabbed the handle and pushed it toward the street, the wheels screaming a protest against the cracked asphalt.

As he pushed the cart back toward the entrance of his shithole, just below the stairs. He caught Saul still watching him from the closest window, a cigarette dangling precariously from his lip.

"You moving out, boy?" Saul asked, squinting against the white-hot glare of the afternoon sun.

"I'm moving up," Mack grunted, not looking back.

He scrambled back to his room, quickly heading to his closet and grabbing the blanket that he rarely used mostly due to the scorching heat. Locking his Fender into its case and pulling the strap around his shoulder, he turned to his amp and heaved it, his muscles straining with the weight. In the back of the cart, he tucked his essentials: a handful of extra strings, his neatly coiled cables, a roll of silver duct tape to kill any rattle, and a battered tin stuffed with heavy-gauge picks.

He paused at the threshold of the building, sweat already stinging his eyes. He checked the clock one last time: 5:12 PM.

"Do or die," he hissed.

Mack managed to get the gear down the stairs in a series of bone-jarring thuds until he reached the sidewalk where the lopsided cart was waiting. He draped the scratchy blanket over the wire frame to create a makeshift bed, then lifted the amp and placed it into the cart, the guitar case following close behind. 

He threw his weight against the handle, and the cart let out a rhythmic, metallic clack-clack-clack as he hit the pavement. He had roughly forty minutes to reach Vine under a scorching sun, pushing a hundred and eighty pounds of equipment in a cart that—to put it mildly—only had two working wheels.

The address led Mack to a sagging house just off Fountain, wedged crookedly between a tobacconist and a four-unit apartment building with bars over every window. The place looked less like a home and more like something that had survived a fire out of pure spite. Empty beer bottles glittered in the dead yellow grass. Music bled faintly through the walls. One of the front windows was patched with cardboard and duct tape. 

Mack’s white Sex Pistols t-shirt was translucent with sweat, clinging to his chest and back, and his forearms were throbbing from the constant vibration of the cart. The last stranger he’d asked for directions had told him it was 5:59 PM. Great. He reached into his pocket to check the crossword page that he had torn off one last time, searching for the house number again just to confirm this was it.

There it was. 271. 

Mack stood at the gate for a second. Sweat clung to the back of his neck. His palms hurt. His stomach hurt. The heat was making his vision swim.

This was a mistake, a complete fucking mistake.

He threw his weight into the handle one last time, the two working wheels letting out a final, agonizing clack-clack-clack as he rolled the cart straight up to their front door. 

Before he could even knock, a voice exploded from inside: "IF THAT’S THE PIZZA JUST LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR"

"WE DIDN’T ORDER PIZZA, DIPSHIT." Another voice yelled back immediately.

Jesus Christ. 

Mack stared at the door, paralyzed. Before he could rethink his entire existence and leave, the front door swung open. The guy standing there was shirtless, with dark hair and drumsticks tucked into his waistband. A golden chain hung around his neck. Sweat was shining across his chest like he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool. He blinked at Mack. Mack blinked back. Then the guy’s face suddenly split into a manic grin. 

"Oh shit," he said. "Marshall’s here."

Mack frowned. "What?"

"The guitarist guy." He pointed at the shopping cart. "Heavy gear."

"Oh. Yeah."

"You’re early."

"I thought six meant six" Mack rasped, trying to sound professional despite the sweat stinging his eyes. "Y’know, something about not wasting Will’s time and etcetera."

"Wasting Will’s time?" He barked a laugh loud enough to echo down the hallway. Already turning to call someone over his shoulder. "Holy shit, he’s polite."

Someone inside groaned dramatically. 

"Connor," another voice drawled, "If you scare him off already, I’m killing you."

Connor stepped aside immediately, grabbing the front of the Marshall before Mack could protest. "C’mon, man. Before Will dies from anticipation."

The house smelled like weed smoke, spilled beer, incense, sweat, and overheated electronics—the default smells. Guitar cables snaked across the floor like vines. Empty takeout cartons covered every available surface. Somebody had punched a hole clean through the hallway wall and had never bothered fixing it. 

A framed photograph near the staircase hung crookedly beside a crack in the plaster. Three guys stood in the picture. One of them had been scratched out so violently the surface of the photo had torn. 

Mack looked away quickly. 

Two men occupied the couch. One was sprawled lazily across the cushions with a cigarette dangling from his fingers, boots propped on the coffee table like he owned the entire fucking planet. Honey-blonde curls framed a face built for billboards. The hair dipped just low enough to brush the bridge of his small sculpted nose, but it didn't hide his eyes. They were a blue so intense and clear they looked like they’d been bleached by the Pacific. Silver rings adorned both of his hands. He was beautiful in the deeply irritating way some people naturally were. 

At the opposite end of the couch, the other man sat with a bass balanced across his lap, absently plucking the strings while he eyed Mack with suspicion. His dark eyes scanned Mack up and down. A low-slung cap shadowed his face, making it hard for Mack to catch his expression.

Nobody spoke for a second, then the blonde one smiled first. Mack immediately understood two things at once: This was Will. 

And he knew exactly what he looked like.

"Well," Will said slowly, eyes dragging over Mack like he was trying to solve a puzzle. "You look about twelve."

Connor snorted. It seemed like the only thing he knew how to do.

Mack tightened his grip on the guitar case automatically. "I’m not. I’m eighteen."

"Sure you are."

"I am."

Will grinned wider around the cigarette. "Oh, he bites too."

The bassist rolled his eyes. "Can we not do this right now?"

"Do what?"

"The thing"

"What thing?"

"The weird fucking peacocking thing you do every time you meet someone attractive."

Attractive? What the fuck were these guys were talking about? His grip tightened on the case strap. A man was calling him attractive—straight up, like it was a fact, like they were discussing the weather. Why is he saying it like it’s normal? Why is he smiling like that? Is this a joke? It’s probably a joke.

Will looked genuinely offended. "I don’t peacock."

Connor dropped the amp beside the wall with a loud thud. "I think it’s charming."

"You think arson is charming." The bassist muttered.

Mack stood there awkwardly with the guitar case still hanging off his shoulder, feeling like he’d accidentally walked into somebody else’s argument halfway through. The bassist finally sighed and stood. 

"Gabe," he said shortly, extending a hand. "Bass."

"Mack."

The handshake was firm but cautious. Still evaluating. "I know."

Connor pointed at himself proudly. "Connor. Drums. Resident genius."

“No you aren’t,” Gabe said, firing back immediately.

“Emotionally, I am.”

Will finally stood from the couch in one smooth movement, crushing the cigarette into an overflowing ashtray before crossing the room toward Mack. Up close, he was somehow worse—too handsome, too confident, and far too aware of the effect he was having. 

Will stopped directly in front of him, leaning into Mack’s space. His six-foot frame somehow looming over him—and Mack swore that he was, like, only a few inches shorter. Mack became painfully conscious of the sweat sticking his shirt to his spine.

“You hauled all that gear here by yourself?” Will asked.

“Yeah.”

“You own a Marshall half-stack at eighteen?”

Mack shrugged, his defensive edge sharpening. "I stole food instead. Priorities."

Connor made a strangled noise somewhere behind them. Gabe looked like he was trying not to laugh. Will stared at him for a long heartbeat, and then something subtle shifted in his expression—real interest. "Okay," he said quietly. "That's a better answer."

"Right." He clapped his hands once, his persona snapping back into place. "Let's see if you actually play as good as you advertise. Follow me."

Mack adjusted the guitar case on his shoulders and was already reaching for his amp when Connor leaned down and lifted with one hand. 

"I think you’ve carried this for long enough already. Let me help for a sec." He blinked playfully at Mack. Still grinning like a maniac.

Trailing behind the guys, they ended up in the garage just as Will had said. It sat behind the house beneath a flickering floodlight, its walls a patchwork of egg cartons and beer-stained carpet. Someone had spray-painted TEAL TALE across the far wall in dripping turquoise letters—a name Mack hated the second he saw it. Connor dropped his amp and disappeared behind his kit while Gabe adjusted his bass cable, his eyes still narrowed in suspicion.

Will remained in the center of the room, watching Mack unpack his guitar with an intensity that made every movement feel clumsy. 

"You nervous?" Will asked lightly.

"No." Mack said, his fingers almost slipping on the cable input. He plugged the Fender into the Marshall, and the familiar electrical hum finally grounded him.

“Liar.”

“Shut up.”

Will laughed at that, sounding amused. Gabe stayed quiet.

"We don't do charts, Mack" Will said, his voice a drawl that cut through the electrical hum of the equipment. He didn't reach for any paper. Instead, he kicked his own amp into gear, his Gibson letting out a low, predatory hiss. "I play, you follow. If you can't find the key by the second bar, don't bother finishing the song. Ready?"

Mack just nodded. Well, that was expected.

“So, the song goes like this. It’s a circular walk, Mack,” Will explained, looking at Mack to make sure he was following. “Start on the D, drop to the B minor, then hit the G and A. Don’t play the full chords—just the top three strings. Keep the rhythm on the up-stroke. Like a clock ticking.”

Will’s left hand gripped the neck of his Gibson, his fingers forming a sharp D major triad high up the fretboard. “If you play it like a folk song, I’ll kick you out of the garage myself. Make it click. Make it mechanical.”

Mack didn't blink. Will’s fingers were sliding through the chords with effortless precision. This guy was good. His eyes were locked on Will’s fretting hand, reading the movement of his knuckles like he used to read a defenseman’s hips on the ice. Without a word, he adjusted the strap of his black Stratocaster and mirrored the shape perfectly, his fingers finding the B minor before Will had even finished the first bar. 

"Give me the count," Mack said, his voice finally finding its floor.

Will didn’t wait. He just looked at Connor and gave a sharp single nod. Connor didn’t count with the sticks—he just detonated—a double assault that shook the entire garage with its sound. His arms blurred as the drums thundered beneath him. 

The result was a disaster. Connor rushed the tempo like he was trying to outrun his own nerves, and Will, somehow, looked like he was caught off guard by the start, and entered his verse half a beat too late. Gabe played a dirty bass, but he sounded lost, his eyes fixed on Mack with a guarded, skeptical glare that kept him from locking into the groove.

And Mack was playing through the whole thing like a rigid corpse. He was technically flawless, but he was clearly overthinking, trying so hard not to fuck up that the music sounded embalmed.

He could feel the suffocating weight of Will’s eyes on him. Will wasn't even looking at his own guitar; instead, his eyes tracked Mack’s every movement. He could feel his blue eyes like bleach on his knuckles—an intensity that felt almost predatory.

Suddenly, Will slammed his palm across the strings and dragged his pick violently up the neck of his Gibson. The amp let out a high, piercing screech that tore through the garage like a jagged blade, cutting the drums and bass dead in their tracks. 

The silence that followed was abrasive. Will stood there, chest heaving, his eyes still locked onto Mack’s with that same, unblinking stare. 

“You’re hiding inside the guitar.” Will leaned against the microphone stand casually; his Gibson draped across his hip. “You’re technically great, sure, but you’re playing scared.”

“I’m not scared.”

“You look like you’re waiting for permission to exist.”

The words hit like a slap, and the whole garage went silent. Fuck this. Mack felt something hot and immediate flare in his chest. Maybe it was exhaustion after walking miles with one hundred and eighty pounds of equipment under the scorching sun. Maybe the fucking humiliation of feeling like a child among these guys. Maybe Rick was still screaming inside his skull that the world would eat him alive. 

“Fine,” Mack snapped suddenly. “Then stop fucking staring at me.”

Will blinked at that. “What?”

“What? You keep looking at me the whole time instead of the song. My knuckles are literally burning from your eyes, dude.” 

Connor choked violently trying not to laugh and Gabe actually smiled for the first time all night. Mack was desperate to know what was so fucking funny. Will stared at Mack again for one long second. Then slowly—he grinned. Not flirtatious this time; at least Mack would like to think so. But this was far worse, was fucking dangerous.

“There he is,” Will murmured. He adjusted the microphone stand. “Again.”

The garage fell into a sudden silence this time. Mack tightened his grip on the neck of the Fender. Then Connor clicked the sticks together—one, two, three, four—setting a tempo that was a heartbeat faster than before. They were testing him, pushing him to see if he’d trip, the assholes. 

Mack didn't trip. Before he could even think, he was slamming the pick against the strings, reproducing the riff through pure muscle memory. He slid his hand up the neck of the black Stratocaster, finding a high, biting frequency that wasn't in the original structure. Adding a sharp, rhythmic chug to the riff, muting the strings with the palm of his hand to create a heavy, driving engine that pushed Connor’s drums even harder. 

This time they hit it off perfectly. Mack stopped trying to impress them and finally played the way he actually wanted to play—sharp bends, ugly distortion, notes that screamed instead of sang. His fingers tapped the fretboard in a way that Will had never seen before. He sounded like a synthesizer from another planet.

Gabe immediately adjusted around him instinctively, the bass locking beneath the guitar like they’d been playing together for years. Connor followed right behind them, reckless and explosive. They sounded messy, loud and mean. 

Alive.

Then, Will, fucking finally closed the distance between his beautiful mouth—Mack’s not fucking blind—and the battered microphone.

When he started to sing, Mack knew he was in trouble.

So many fish, here in the sea

I wanted you, you wanted me

There was just something hauntingly unique about Will’s voice. It wasn't polished by any means—it was brutal and honest, a thick rasp that seemed to vibrate in the back of Mack’s throat. It was raw. Every note sounded half out of control. Half dangerous.

Mack’s fingers slipped against the strings.

What the fuck?

He nearly missed the next chord entirely. His eyes snapped back to the fretboard—not because he needed to look, but because looking anywhere else felt like a catastrophically bad idea. His heartbeat hammered harder against his ribs than the drums ever could.

It’s just a phase, it’s got to pass

I was a train, moving too fast

Mack’s fingers tightened on the Fender. He understood the ‘train’ part. He’d spent his life as one, barreling down the ice, moving too fast for anyone to actually see him. But hearing Will sing it made it feel less like a metaphor and more like a warning. It felt like something else.

So many fish, here in the sea

She wanted him, he wanted me

The lyric hit Mack like a physical weight. He’d expected rock-star posturing, but this was messy. It was open. The honesty in Will’s voice was too much, too close, and Will was still staring at him—those eyes tracking Mack's reaction to the ‘he wanted me’ line with a predatory sort of curiosity. 

Mack felt a surge of heat crawl up his neck. He needed to lock the fuck in.  

He took the melody and wove a series of quick, liquid double-stops around Will’s vocals, making the guitar sound like it was arguing with the lyrics. It was the sound of a guy who knew he was the best musician in the room and was finally tired of pretending otherwise. 

Across the garage, Gabe’s eyebrows shot up. He shared a quick, wide-eyed look with Connor, who was practically vibrating on his stool. 

Will didn’t stop. If anything, he sounded exhilarated. He leaned back from the mic for a split second, a bright, genuine laugh coloring his next line. He was singing directly at Mack now, his eyes alive with the kind of excitement you only feel when you realize the person playing next to you is just as much of a freak as you are. 

And now I got a different view

It’s you..

The music finally bridged the gap. Mack stopped overthinking the rhythm and just let it pulse in his chest. He stepped forward, closing the distance between their amps, and finally met Will's gaze. The suspicion from earlier was gone, replaced by an honestly cute-as-fuck boyish grin that seemed to pull the rug right out from under Will's feet.

It felt like the song was over in less than fifty seconds, his brain not even absorbing the entirety of the lyrics besides the parts where Will was undeniably looking at him, being arrogant, selfish and brutally honest. The message was clear—he was much more intense than Mack had pictured him. Also, Mack immediately understood why they’d landed the tour. Will knew exactly what to do with a room. Even inside a filthy garage with cigarette smoke trapped against the ceiling, he sang like there were twenty thousand people watching him already.

Not technically perfect, but magnetic in a way that only rockstars were. 

When Mack finally gathered the courage to lift his eyes from the fretboard, he encountered Will's eyes still on him. Will was panting heavily, and he had this mesmerized look in his eyes that Mack knew would be imprinted on his brain forever. 

The oxygen available in this random garage on Fountain seemed too low to be normal. Somebody should look into that. It could be an anomaly.

The last distorted chord still rang faintly through the garage when Connor dropped backward against the drum stool dramatically, breathing hard. Mack was right there with him, chest heaving as he fought to pull in enough of the scarce air to keep his head from spinning.

“Jesus fucking Christ” he laughed breathlessly. “Where the hell did you even find this guy?”

“Telephone pole,” Gabe muttered from somewhere near the amps.

“Yeah?” Will said, his eyes still fixed on Mack over the neck of his Gibson. “Best thing I ever found stapled to public property.”

Mack snorted despite himself, wiping sweaty hair back from his forehead. “You say that to every guitarist you drag into your garage?”

“No,” Will said easily. “Most of them suck.”

Will was still staring at him with that same strange intensity from earlier—not judgmental anymore, just focused and curious, like he was trying to solve something. It should have made Mack uncomfortable; instead, weirdly, it just made him warm.

The garage buzzed with leftover adrenaline and amplifier static while everyone slowly started unplugging cables. Mack finally set the guitar carefully back onto his case, and the room suddenly felt too quiet without it in his hands. He snapped the latches shut, the metallic clack sounding like a final punctuation mark to the rehearsal. He hoisted the strap over his shoulder, the familiar weight settling against his back like a shield and clears his throat awkwardly.

“So, uh,” he muttered. “Anybody got a cigarette?”

Will looked up instantly, his mouth twitching slightly. Connor immediately dug through his jacket pocket before tossing a slightly crushed pack toward Mack. “Thanks,” Mack said, catching the pack one-handed. He pulled one free before pausing briefly. “...You guys got a light too, or is this band financially struggling?”

“Oh, he always has a light” Connor pointed toward Will. “Chronic smoker. Future lung cancer pioneer”

“Artistically committed” Will corrected lazily.

Mack stepped closer while Will dug a lighter from his pocket and flicked it open. For a second, the flame lit both of them gold. Mack leaned down slightly to light the cigarette, and Will watched him the entire time, not being subtle about it.

“Oh my god,” Connor groaned. 

Will rolled his eyes, but then he grabbed the guitar again. His movements were aimless at first, testing loose chords and half-formed thoughts through lazy strumming.

“Come in here, dear boy…” he sang quietly, almost to himself, testing the rhythm against the strings.

Connor’s eyes widened. “Oh, that’s bullshit”

Will blinked. “What?”

“That was good.”

“No, it wasn't.”

“Yes, it was,” Gabe admitted reluctantly.

Mack shook his head, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling. “You guys are dramatic as hell.”

Will’s gaze snapped back to Mack—really looking at him this time—and a sudden, sharp grin cut across his face. He leaned into the mic, pointing the neck of the Gibson straight  in Mack’s direction.

“You’re gonna go far,” he sang, the line slotting perfectly into the rhythm.

The garage went silent for half a second. Even Connor looked momentarily thrown by it. “Oh, fuck off”

“What now?”

“That one was also good.”

Will let out a surprised laugh, ducking his head as if even he hadn't expected the line to land. “Wait,” he muttered, his fingers moving instinctively to find the hook again. “Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar… You’re gonna go far…”

“You better write that shit down,” Connor urged, pointing a drumstick at him.

“Jesus,” Gabe muttered. “He’s been here twenty minutes and you already turned him into material”

Connor leaned back, a smirk playing on his lips. “Congratulations, Mack. You’re Will’s latest artistic obsession.”

“Muse,” Will corrected absentmindedly, his head tilted as he chased the melody.

Mack snorted. “Absolutely not.”

“Too late.” Connor said. “He’s attached now.”

Something tight and unfamiliar lodged itself directly behind Mack’s ribs. It felt stupidly deep and fast, hitting him with terrifying precision because Will had said it so casually, like it was already true. Nobody besides Angela had ever looked at Macklin Celebrini and spoken like there was actually a future waiting for him somewhere beyond survival.

“You guys are insane” Mack muttered quietly, but his voice came out weaker than intended.

“Well, you're twelve, but you're actually a beast,” Will drawled, a smirk playing on his lips. “Welcome aboard. I guess we run on child labor now”

Mack didn't flinch. He wiped a streak of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand—honestly he’d never seen a garage so goddamn hot— and met Will's gaze. He didn't look like a kid anymore; he looked like a guy who had spent his life being scouted by men much meaner than Will.

“If I were you” Mack said, his voice level and almost dangerously quiet, “I'd stop telling people I'm twelve. Considering the way you were just looking at me... it makes you look like a creep, Will.”

The garage went dead silent. Connor's manic energy evaporated instantly. Gabe's hand froze mid-coil on his cable. Will's smirk vanished; he stared at Mack for a long heartbeat before letting out a sharp, genuine bark of a laugh.

“Jesus” Will murmured, shaking his head. He looked at Gabe and Connor, his eyes bright with a new, sharper kind of respect. “He's got a mean streak. I was starting to think he was too polite for this shit.”

He reached over and grabbed a stack of cassettes, tossing them at Mack's chest. “The bus pulls out in ten days, like I said over the phone. We're doing a run of the States—coast to coast”. He paused, a teasing glint returning to his eyes. “Don't worry, kid. I'll make sure the manager stocks plenty of soda on the bus for you. Orange or grape?”

Mack caught the tapes. “I'll be back here at ten tomorrow morning” he said, finally allowing a small, sharp smile of his own. “I'll know the sets. And I'll know your bridges better than you do.”

He turned toward the door, then paused, his hand on the frame as he looked back over his shoulder. The smile didn't reach his eyes this time. “And Will? My gear stays here tonight, but if I come back tomorrow and a single pedal is missing, I’m breaking your fingers. Don't sell my shit.”

Will looked more delighted than insulted.

“Understood,” Will murmured.

“Good. And about the bus? Don’t bother with the soda,” Mack added. “I prefer the beer.”

Mack shifted the weight of the guitar case on his shoulder. He offered a final sharp nod toward Gabe and Connor, then stepped off the garage floor. As he passed the entrance of the house, his eyes snagged one last time on the photo by the door—the face scratched out so violently the paper was nearly shredded. He assumed it was the man he was replacing. It had to be. The jagged marks in the paper felt like a warning, but Mack stepped out into the cool air anyway, the rhythm still ticking like a clock in his brain.

He was starving for an identity, and he had a feeling he’d just found a very dangerous one.