3:00
Blues
By:
Hilary Fox
Disclaimers:
Trowa and Quatre don't belong to me... they belong to each other ^_^ The lyrics
and music to all the songs quoted herein are property of their respective
creators, but the heart and soul of "3:00 Blues" will always belong to
BB King and Bobby Bland ^_^
Rock
me baby, like your grandpa used to roll his wagon wheel--
3:00
BLUES
<<Where
in the name of all that's holy IS he?!>>
The
darkness waiting for him did not yield any answers, or clues for that matter.
<<It's
officially been five hours, thirty-four minutes, and sixteen seconds since he
left, and five hours, thirty minutes, eight seconds since he turned off his cell
phone>> Trowa ranted to himself as he stalked down the deserted street,
pulling his coat around him.
<<You'd
think he'd at least have the decency to keep his cell phone on, if he's run off
to sulk somewhere>> he thought to himself as he took a sharp right down a
godforsaken, damp, and unsavory alley.
<<So
I made fun of the fact that he listens to Jimi Hendrix when he thinks I'm not
listening>> Trowa continued silently, striding past a vaguely astonished
bouncer and proceeding straight through a rotting oak door and down a dismal,
cramped hallway. <<It's not like I was insulting
him...
I *like* Jimi Hendrix, but you'd think someone who knows the entire corpus of
the Baroque masters' works backwards and forwards would listen to... well,
something that is not Jimi Hendrix.>>
It
took considerable effort not to wonder at the logic of that statement, but the
hallway disgorged the brown-haired young man into a large, echoing room.
Trowa
scowled as he surveyed the smoky recesses of the bar, the weird dissonance of
neon lights drifting through the haze of nicotine and ash and the smell of
alcohol and stale cigarettes. The smoke burned his eyes and throat and made him
cough, each half-stifled wheeze sounding loud and intrusive into the hushed
silence.
Fortunately,
the bar's few patrons didn't stir out of their lethargy to pay him much notice;
they merely sat and stared at either the walls or their drinks or the small,
cramped stage set up in a distant corner where six men practically stood in each
other's laps to accommodate the bulk of an old piano and a hefty six-string,
upright bass. The unexpected brightness of a saxophone and trombone resting in
their racks shone from a corner of the stage.
Melting
ice clinked in someone's glass. Gin and tonic?
"Rum
and Coke," said the drink's owner mournfully as Trowa's head snapped around
at the unexpected noise. "Want some?" He offered the sweating glass to
Trowa, who shook his head negatively and moved away, heading for the refuge of
the bar, where the bartender awaited him with a
similarly
funeral look.
"Whatcha
want?" he asked, swiping a lethargic cloth along the insides of a beer mug,
gray eyes apprising Trowa from underneath ponderous eyebrows. "Coke?
Pepsi?"
"Red
Stripe," said Trowa shortly, dropping his fake ID on the bartop for
inspection- spending his life infiltrating various organizations on a day-to-day
basis had its advantages in civilian life.
The
bartender scrutinized the card for a moment before sighing, "They get
younger-lookin' every day" and turning away to seize a bottle from the
icebox. He popped the top off with an expert twist of a gnarled wrist and
plunked the bottle down in front of Trowa, who took a cautious first sip.
Surprisingly,
the beer tasted good- although, compared to the air which tasted of seventy
years' worth of unfiltered Marlboros, anything short of raw sewage would taste
good. Trowa drained about half of the bottle before deciding he needed to keep
some of his senses about him, however
badly
he wanted to lose them, and sat back to study the rest of the bar.
Aside
from the bustling on the stage, the rest of the vast cave drowned itself in
apathy. In a nearby booth, a bored woman encased in a tight blue dress sighed
responses to the incoherent murmurings of her much-older companion, a man in a
vintage suit at least as old as he was. A couple tables over was the sad
drinker, who gazed at the rest of the room
with
Bassett Hound eyes from over the rim of his rum and Coke. Two men sat in a
corner, waving cigarettes in silent conversation.
Then
there was Trowa, the bartender, and a balding man passed out on the other end of
the bar- Trowa supposed he didn't really count- and that was it. A distant sort
of silence settled over the room, broken only by the quiet rustling of the
performers and the abrupt, deafening shrilling of a microphone.
"Ladies
and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to tonight's performance," a
sonorous voice intoned over the hiss of feedback. Trowa looked up to see a large
black man regarding them benignly from behind the rise-and-fall of a huge
twelve-string electric guitar. "Hey, Jimmy, you
want
to check the levels on this mike for me?" the man asked, turning around to
address a person hidden in the back, who must have done something because the
hiss faded away to nothing. "Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're
havin' a good time tonight."
The
words sparked something in the anaesthetized group; the old man stopped drooling
on his date's arm, the sad-looking man brightened a little, the guy passed out
at the other end of the bar stirred a little, and even Trowa straightened on his
barstool. The endless circling of the
bartender's
cloth inside the beer mug paused for a moment before resuming.
A
quick riff of the cymbals ran through the air, followed by the saxophone's
tentative cry and an answering trill from the piano.
"Well,
we got a hot show tonight for you folks- some classics from way back when,
" the speaker continued, a large hand gesturing to the neatly-ordered ranks
of his fellow musicians behind him. "That sound all right with you
all?"
Nods
and murmurs of "yeah" and "sure" indicated the collective
assent. Trowa found himself nodding.
"So
I figured we'd start out kinda slow and kinda work our way up sorta gentle...
get to the hard stuff at the end, what do you guys think?"
More
half-word replies, and the man laughed a booming laugh that echoed almost
forever.
"The
good thing about blues, though, is that you get the fast and the slow in the
same song," he said, his voice deep and musing. "You sorta go along
and then... bam! It gets ya right between the eyes... Maybe we'll try that kind
out first. Haven't heard this in a while, but I guess a few of you might know
it- and hell, the good thing about blues is that we all know it, whether we know
it or not."
With
an unnerving sixth sense, Trowa had the feeling that the guitarist was talking
about *him*, that the large man's black eyes had zeroed in on him in particular.
He fought the urge to squirm under that imagined scrutiny.
The
drums picked up a slow, methodical, and heavy backbeat and pulled in the lighter
tones of the piano a few measures later. Each delicate, crystal note rippled
just underneath the heavy one-two count of the snare, never intruding into its
steady marching but skipping around the edges in its swift arpeggios.
Just
behind them, the saxophone and trombone came in, adding a vaguely ominous tone
before fading away into nothing and allowing a more meditative tone in the piano
and drums to come through, accented this time by
a
soft plunking from the guitar and the bass.
"I
know you been hurt by someone else," the guitarist sang in a strangely
faint, plaintive voice, his guitar dying as words replaced its instrumental
sadness, "I can see by the way you carry yourself, but if you let
me..."
Trowa
found himself pulled into the song, the quietly meditative air of it, his foot
tapping in time with the drums.
"Oh
Lord, I'll be right there beside you," pleaded the guitarist, staring up
into the smoky crossbeams of the bar as the sax and trombone wove harmony
underneath his voice. Slowly, the guitarist's words melted into the general
atmosphere of the music, melding with it to create more
sound
than sense- guttural mutterings that could mean something if only Trowa could
figure them out.
Fade,
fade... Trowa held his breath, waiting for something as the brasses, the bass,
and the pianos disappeared, the drums vanishing to the softest 'tap, tap' on a
platter cymbal.
Fade,
fade...
And
with a bang, it came right back. Trowa almost jumped in his seat as the song
stampeded into a final flourish and ended with one last triumphant crack of the
drummer's sticks across a cymbal.
Reflexively,
the crowd applauded, and the guitarist grinned his thanks before voicing them
and then starting in on the next song.
"I
heard it's three o'clock in the morning, and I can't even close my eyes,"
the guitarist warbled piteously, plucking out a few plaintive chords on his
guitar, which wailed sadly in response. The piano sounded right behind it along
with the drums, both combining to underscore the despair of both the guitarist
and the guitar.
"LORD!
It's three o'clock in the morning, and I can't even close my eyes.
Waaah-aahhh-ow! I can't find my baby and I can't be satistified..."
Trowa
grinned a little at the histrionics, but his grin vanished as he saw a pale hand
flash swiftly on the keys of the upper registers of the piano.
He
*knew* that hand.
"You
say
'Look
around me people-
My
baby she can't be found..."
<<Quatre>>
Trowa thought dimly. <<That's Quatre on the piano.>>
"Look
all around me people,
My
baby she can't be found
Don't
you know my number..."
The
crashing of the drums and the blaring brasses faded out as Trowa slipped off his
chair, almost knocking his drink over in his haste to get to the stage. He
brushed past the blue-dress woman who glared daggers at his back as he stepped
on an immaculate blue high heel and almost fell over his own feet getting up to
the side of the stage next to Quatre and the piano.
"Trowa!"
Surprise flashed across Quatre's face and his hands faltered momentarily before
regaining their pace. Grim determination replaced shock as the blond boy
returned his eyes to the keyboard and he hissed, "What are you doing
here?"
"I've
been trying to find you Quatre... I was worried that you'd gotten hurt when your
cell phone got turned off," Trowa answered, crouching uncomfortably next to
his lover and becoming acutely aware that his words were falling on deaf ears as
the impenetrable screen of blond hair blocked him off from catching Quatre's
eyes. "So I went looking for you, just to make sure you were okay, that you
weren't lying dead in a gutter somewhere."
"Har.
I'm sure," Quatre snorted, not missing a beat. Rather, the slender and pale
hands continued to pound the keys with rhythmic and brutal force as the song
swung into an energetic bridge punctuated by the shrieking of the trombone and
the sax.
"Damn,
kid!" the guitarist chortled over the crest of the music, fingers flying
across the guitar's fretboard. "That a lover or a keyboard you're killin'?"
he asked as he looked over his shoulder, looked Trowa in the eye, and grimaced
in empathetic pain.
Quatre
shot a dark glare over at Trowa. "It's going to be the lover in a minute,
if he doesn't quit making a scene," he said between gritted teeth before
turning back to his music.
"I
am not making a scene," Trowa stage-whispered hotly, and winced as the
guitar's amplifier screeched furiously right in his ear.
Quatre
smirked at seeing his lover's distress, and Trowa sighed at seeing the light of
malicious pleasure in Quatre's aqua eyes- it was going to take a lot to make
this up. He fought to keep his face neutral of any pain as the bridge of the
song led the guitar into further heights of
ectsasy
so that it screamed fit to snap his eardrums in two.
"Sure
you aren't," Quatre said sarcastically.
Trowa
fumed in silence for a moment.
"You
should have brought earplugs!" Quatre hollered, a pleased smile on his
face.
"I
wasn't counting on standing up on stage pleading my case!" Trowa shouted
back. Acute embarrassment crawled agonizingly up his back as the volume dropped
off halfway through the sentence.
"Then
sit down, for the love of God," Quatre muttered, still glaring fixedly at
the piano as his hands tripped over the keys. "You're breaking my
concentration."
Fortunately
for Trowa, the guitarist took that moment to intervene, turning back to the
microphone in order to exhort the audience, which had long since ceased paying
attention to the music and had instead redirected their interest to the two
young men in the corner of the stage. The blue-dress woman and her older
companion appeared to be making a bet, and the Bassett-eyed man beamed sadly
from over the rim of his glass.
"Goodbye
everybodyI do believe that she'll be in
LORD!
Goodbye everybody I do believe I'm turnin' in...
LORD!"
"Quatre,"
Trowa began hesitantly, steeling himself against any further manifestations of
the blond's fury, "I'm so sorry for teasing you like that. I, um, I
honestly hadn't expected you to get so upset when I asked you if you wanted a
hemp necklace or violin tablature for 'Red House' or 'All Along the
Watchtower..."
"Well
I did," Quatre mumbled, still not looking at Trowa. "And you kept
teasing me."
"And
I'm sorry, Quatre! C'mon... it's three in the morning, I'm tired, you're tired,
I just want to go home... I want to go home with you." Trowa tacked on this
last part in as persuasive and piteous a tone as he could manage, mixing in a
little naughtiness to see if Quatre would catch the innuendo.
Quatre
did, and sniffed disdainfully. "Nice try, Romeo."
"What
can I do to make it up to you?" Trowa pressed as the music wound down to a
pause again. He could almost feel the audience staring down his shirt in
anticipation, waiting to see what would happen.
The
voice of the guitarist broke into the silence.
"I
want you to tell my babyTo forgive me..."
The
guitarist and the rest of the band were staring at them, too.
"Quatre,
please, look... I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
"Forgive
me..." added in the saxophonist.
"Forgive
me..." supplied the drummer.
"Quatre?"
whispered Trowa as the guitar wound down to nothing and the drums crashed one
emphatic period-end-of-sentence.
The
music stopped completely. Quatre's hands froze on the piano.
"Okay,"
Quatre said finally into the silence.
"Forgive
me
Forgive
me...
of
my siiiiinnnns....."
THE
END ^_^
