(no subject)
Title: Dancing in the Dark o2
Pairing: vam, of course
Rating: pg-13 for now.
Summary: some surprise are the good kind.
Disclaimer: they still belong to eachother themselves.
Author's Notes: thanks to Lauri for fixing it up!
Most people are labeled as ‘morning person’ and ‘not a morning person’ - most people, that is, besides Ville Valo. Ville was a medium to both extremes, something that was extremely rare and hard to believe. Instead of being smiley and talkative when he woke up, he was quiet and tended to nod to everything. He wasn’t bitchy or whiny and he’d been known to nurse others’ hangovers and make coffee. It wasn’t even that he loved mornings, or even really liked them; he just understood that they were unavoidable. For the simple fact that he was neither giddy nor grouchy in the morning, he was always the person that people didn’t fear waking up. So when his phone went off at nearly seven in the morning, all he could do take it in stride (at least as well as a drowsy person could).
The ring tone pierced through the silence, waking him up instantly. It took a few seconds of blindly groping the couch for his phone, but he eventually managed to dig it out of the cushions where it had fallen in his sleep. His eyes still didn’t want to open, but after another few seconds of fumbling to open it he succeeded in answering and quickly put it to his ear. “Moi,” he spoke, his voice sounding as if it didn’t belong to him with how scratchy it was. All he could hear was breathing on the other end of the line; the person didn’t speak in return. “Hello?” He tried again, just in case the person didn’t understand Finnish or assumed they had the wrong number from his atrocious voice. When there was still no answer, he peeled open his eyes and held the phone up to his face to try and spot the name or number of the caller. The name shone boldly on the bright screen, almost hurting his eyes. “Jesse? Is that you?”
The phone call was starting to scare him a bit and he quickly sat up, already considering on waking up Migé. His friend was always the calm one and knew what to do under the most nerve-wracking situations. Just before he was about to stand, his younger brother’s voice stopped him. “Hei, Ville. It’s uh,” he coughed awkwardly in the middle of the sentence, “yes, it’s Jesse.” His voice sounded different since the last time he’d heard it a few weeks before, filled with an emotion that he couldn’t recognize. It wasn’t sadness, Ville had heard enough of that throughout the past few months to be able to recognize it right away. Far from anger and happiness, it had to be something caught within the middle of everything. He was just overlooking it without meaning to. “How are you?”
Jesse was only asking the question in order to fill space and be polite; he already knew the answer since the chances of it changing from the last time they talked were almost nonexistent. There was never usually anything bad enough going on in Ville’s life to make him put his life anywhere below the ‘average’ rank, but once Bam stepped into it and the relationship started, it tended to fall between ‘good’ and ‘amazing’. Relationships were what he was good at. Ville had always felt best when he had someone to focus on, but when it came down to it, Bam was a whole other story completely. A lot of people didn’t see it coming, a few of them didn't even believe it when they were told, but it ended up working out for the most part. They balanced each other and it was hard to find problems that they couldn’t sort out together. As shocking as it sounded to most, a rock star and a Jackass of a skater made a perfect couple. “I’m okay, but how are you?”
The silence that followed would've made any impatient person uncomfortable. Jesse had always been a decently quiet person when it came to his own life, something that the elder had gotten used to and knew how to deal with. While Bam would be on the edge of his chair for an answer, Ville only sat quietly and waited. He knew a response would come sooner or later. It wasn’t about when the answer would come, but rather what the answer was that started to peck at his mind. “I…” he started but stopped right after and fell back into silence once more. A few more seconds passed between them with nothing said, the sound of breathing the only noise connecting through the phones. It was starting to lean towards awkward when he finally spoke again, “can you come over tomorrow?”
It wasn’t what Ville had been expecting to hear, and he took it as a sign that something wasn’t okay with his brother. Even though his original plan was to tidy up his tower, he figured it was probably a better idea to visit Jesse instead. “Yeah, of course I can. Why? What’s going on?” His voice stayed calm even though his head was reeling to find an answer before anything was said. The boxer had only asked for him a few times before and it had always been Ville who had to set up plans to visit him, so this had to mean something important. Almost as if he had switched places with his boyfriend, he was suddenly very on edge with the waiting game and he needed to know what was happening. Everything had changed in the last few months, he understood that, but something seemed just a bit more off than usual.
“Nothing. I just need to talk to you.” Jesse’s voice didn’t betray a lie, but it also didn’t seem like the whole truth, either. The tone in his voice was telling Ville not to worry, but he was Jesse's older brother and wasn't worrying what older brothers are supposed to do. After a period of not talking and taking into consideration all that had happened, his younger brother calling at an early hour with a voice that made him uneasy gave Ville the right to be concerned. Jesse's tone only aided in making the worry spread into something much bigger; his imagination started to wander to places that it should never be. “Ville, it’s okay. It’s just something that,” he stopped, took a deep breath and continued, “it’s just something that can’t be said over the phone.”
All he wanted to do was tell him that no, it wasn’t okay because he had no idea what was going on. He wanted to yell at him and demand to know what was happening right now, not wait a whole twenty-four hours to find out face-to-face. Even though that’s what the singer wanted to do, he managed to reply with a short ‘okay’, his voice staying even and calm while he did so. Subconsciously, he knew it was better to remain calm or it’d end up being a bigger mess than it already was, but everything else in him wanted to panic. Bam was the one that lost his control, not Ville; the roles had completely reversed and he wondered if it was possible his boyfriend suddenly felt incredibly calm and collected. He probably would have called him later to ask if it didn’t make him sound like he was all kinds of mental.
“Ville?” Jesse’s voice called him out of his thoughts about switching bodies with Bam and forced him back to reality. The turmoil of feeling the emotions of his hyperactive skater was starting to seem a lot better than the tamed chaos at hand right now. Almost as if his younger brother had read his mind and realized he once again had his attention, he continued, “I understand that you’re busy and you don’t have to stay long, I just have something that you need to know. So if you could just stop over for a little bit, I’ll tell you and that will be the end of it.” Too busy for his younger brother when he needed him? Just the idea was absolutely absurd because Ville would fly across the world if Jesse were to ask. It came down to the question: did the boxer really believe that he didn’t need help or did he think people didn’t find him important enough for their time? He wanted to tell him that neither of those was true without seeming like he was talking down to the younger man.
“I’ll stay for a while. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you and we can use the time to just catch up.”
“We’ll see.” Again it was not the answer that he had been expecting. Actually, Ville had no idea what kind of answer he had been expecting at all since the phone call had thrown him through a loop. Nothing so far had reflected Jesse’s normal behavior or attitude, the words sounded hollow and it was starting to make the singer’s skin crawl. All he could imagine were horrible reasons for why Jesse’s voice would sound like that, why he would call like this. Ville had been there through some hard times - incredibly hard times - and he had never heard anything like this haunting his brother. There was a small noise in the background that he could just barely pick up through the phone. “I’ve got to go now but I’ll see your tomorrow. Come over whenever, I’ll be home.” Without another word, he hung up.
Subconsciously, Ville sighed out all of the breath that he didn’t even realize he had been holding in. His whole body felt tense, though he had a feeling that it wasn’t from how he had slept and was due more to the call he just had. Impatience was something that did tend to thrive in the Finn’s blood but often compared to Bam, his almost seemed nonexistent. Right now his impatience, his fear and his curiosity were being pumped out of his heart and he was quite sure that it was a deadly concoction. With such high doses of it running through his veins, it wouldn’t be long until he was drunk off of it and not in the right state of mind to bring his self down and face reality once more. How could he possibly, after all of that, clear his head and face his brother? His chest started to tighten, his throat constricted and the task of breathing started to become harder to keep up with.
“Ville,” with the call of his name, there were arms on his shoulders and something being pressed up against his lips. He had enough common sense to open as the first puff of his medicine was shot into his mouth, instantly relaxing his throat and chest back to their normal state. Smoking and asthma were not a safe mix and when you throw in a mini panic attack, he probably could have died if someone hadn’t been there. A mental note to kiss the ass of the person responsible for getting his asthma inhaler was set, a bright pink post-it note on the inside of his eyelids. Now that there weren’t chains around his lungs, he focused on breathing before attempting to reply to his lifesaver. The person must have understood what he couldn’t say because he felt the couch dip next to him, a sign that they had sat down to wait. There was only one person that had the patience not to ask him about the sudden asthma attack…
His suspicions were confirmed when he managed to raise his head a few minutes later and was met with light eyes and spidery dreads. The guitarists’ eyes were sleep-ridden and his dreads sticking out in odd places, waiting to be organized and placed in their proper spot on his head. Though Ville had gotten used to seeing his hair this way, that wasn’t to say he didn’t miss the long, silky hair that the blonde used to have. Seeing him after he’d woken up and hadn’t run a brush through his mane would easily conquer how he looked right now. “Lily,” he smiled and got a small one in return, “did I wake you?” Instead of getting a spoken answer in return, the elder only shook his head, leaving Ville to guess what exactly that meant. Linde had always been quiet, something that all of the band members had learned to be comfortable with, but none of them were exactly fluent in everything that their guitarist didn’t say. Given that they were better than most at guessing what he meant, they tended to only make dire mistakes a few times.
Minutes passed before the silence was broken, “who was on the phone?” He reached for the cell that Ville hadn’t even noticed he had dropped during the small asthma attack. Instead of opening it and checking the history for the answer himself, Linde set the obnoxiously pink device on the small table nearby. Another plus side for the guitarist is that he seldom pried into other's personal lives although he did tend to know a little too much about everyone in the band - quiet observers usually do. Sometimes it was nerve-wracking to know that without saying anything at all, Linde could get you to admit things you locked deep inside. It must have something to do with his eyes and how they could see straight through a person and the lies given. The way that his eyes never clouded over with emotions and he could see clearly instead of letting them control him. The constant calm that was easy to read in them resonated in ways that couldn’t be explained in words - like a wild animal staring you in the eyes, you can’t gauge its mood or how it will react if you move.
“It was just Jesse,” he found himself answering before he could think about it. It wasn’t that he feared Linde would do or say anything but this was his brother that they were talking about, something not talked about lightly anymore. Of course everyone in the band knew his brother just like they knew all that had happened to him, the good and the bad. No one but family members (and Bam) had seen Jesse in nearly a year, so the subject was always awkward to talk about to say the least. “He wants me to come visit him tomorrow before I fly back to the states. I told him I would.”
The guitarist nodded to the words, his eyes unfocused as he stared at the floor on front of them instead of at his friend. He clasped his hands on top of his lap, his long and callused fingers threading through each other easily. Thick silence coated over the two Finns as Ville waited for something to be said, knowing that it wasn’t his turn to talk. He’d often wondered why Linde chose not to speak as much as the average man, but he’d given up once he realized that it was a smart tactic; who would rather talk too much than not at all? The silent approach gave him a mysterious personality and only a few knew the man - hell, the singer had known him for years and still couldn’t tell you everything about him. “How did he sound?” He finally asked, cutting through the silence with a soft voice.
The question caught Ville off-guard merely because of the wording; it wasn’t “how is he?” or “what did he say?” because that would have been easier to answer. He knew that the guitarist was looking for a particular answer and not small talk because he asked how he sounded. No one else would have asked something similar to what his friend was asking, it was hard to see difference in the words. Years of writing had taught him what it meant and even more years of studying his friend told the Finn that he had to respond correctly. Ville wanted to lie and tell him he sounded okay and that he just wanted him to visit because it’d been months since they’d last seen each other. Instead he found himself saying, “I’m not sure. I’d never heard him talk like that before, not even when we were young. Not even when…” he cut himself off unintentionally.
Another small nod was all he got, indicating that Linde had understood what hadn’t been spoken between them. It was what everyone knew and tried to avoid saying out loud because knowing was already bad enough. Just when it felt comfortable enough to speak about it, they always lost their voice at the last second. No one had been able to say it not even Bam, who barely held shame towards anything. “Do you want me to come with you?” Linde asked, breaking the silence once more as he continued, “you know, when you go to see him tomorrow? Do you mind if I come?” Ville wasn’t sure if he was asking to tag along for his own sake or because the guitarist wanted to see how his brother was doing. Either way, though, he felt a rush of relief. Linde could act as his lifesaver.
“If you’d like to.”
“Ville?” His voice was still soft, although he wasn’t sure if it was because of the morning hours or not. He looked back up and met equally soft eyes, “you don’t think he’ll try to-”
“No!” It shot out of his mouth, the harsh tone cutting through all of the kindness that radiated off of the blonde. He hadn’t meant to yell, but just the thought of what he knew was going to be said made him react without thinking. Even with his raised voice, though, Linde didn’t seem phased as he shut his mouth and just looked at him. Ville knew that he was waiting for him to explain himself after his outburst - just like the older brother did, the guitarist now needed consoling on the issue. “He…” he cut off, sighing a bit out of habit, “he wouldn’t do that, okay? It’s impossible, he couldn’t. I know he wouldn’t because he promised me he wouldn’t.” And he promised her.
---------
sorry it took so long!
the plot comes out in the next chapter;
total d-d-d-d-drama.