InsaneJournal

Who: Fig and Alex
What: Laundry turns into jamming out
When: Late July
Where: Station Laundry Room
Warnings: Spoilers for Fantasy High season 2, but otherwise none
Status: Completed via GDocs


Before Fig had gone home, she had been struggling with writers block but after everything with Ankarna and Cassandra the words had been coming to her. She didn't have Gorgug or the band to back her up, but she could make it work. How many songs had she produced in hell? Of course, she didn't have any of the proper equipment here…

Fig sat in the laundry room of the building (it was the place with the best acoustics in the building). She cast a minor illusion of the bass playing the melody she had written moments before while she used her fingers on the folding table to try and drum out a little rhythm. She wasn't the best drummer, not as good as Gorgug anyway, but she did okay. She sang along little phrases, she hasn't actually narrowed down any lyrics yet. She was in her own head, she didn't notice anyone else.

Laundry was what brought Alex down, but the sound of music was what hurried his steps. It wasn't a song he recognized, but the clumsy drumming put him in immediate Must Help mode. When he finally saw Fig, it kind of clicked. They'd played in shows together, but he didn't really know her all that well. He set his basket of clothes on the nearest washer and waited for the fellow musician to notice him before calling out, "Crunchy bass, solid sound!"

Fig had stopped drumming long enough to make a few notes on the pad of paper she had with her. She noticed Alex during this time and she nodded at him. “Thanks,” she grinned, “It's hard to be a solo bassist. Especially when writing songs.” It really sucked not to have her band there, but she wasn't going to bring the mood down or make Alex feel bad that he had his.

“Needs a little more, so I am playing with it a bit.” She waved her hand to make the spell playing her bass come to a stop. “What are you up to?”

Alex chewed his lip for a second; he couldn't really imagine being a solo act. It didn't really work with drums anyway. Sure, busking was a possibility, but that wasn't the point at all. To distract himself and answer her question, he threw a thumb toward his basket. "Oh, y'know, just washing away the ol' boy funk."

He paused, then laughed. Hard. "I seriously don't know why I put it that way. Can we try to scrub that from our memories? I've gotta ask, though. I get that the acoustics in here are sick, but why don't you use the practice studio the band adults put together? You know you're welcome to it, right?"

Fig just raised her eyebrows at Alex, “Ol’ boy funk…” she repeated with a laugh. Oddly enough, it reminded her of Fabian… and the fact that he would just buy new clothing when he needed to because he didn’t know how to use a washer and his housekeeper was gone.

Fig just gave a half-hearted shrug of one shoulder. She didn’t have an answer for that. She felt weird about using someone else's space, especially when they would have… sort of been competition if her band was here… not that she considered them as such because it didn’t have to be a fight like that. “I don’t know. It’s not my space and I don’t want to… intrude, I guess.”

"That's not scrubbing it from our memories." Alex pouted, then chuckled. He'd walked right into that one, after all. If he'd said it around the Band (or Stiles), they also wouldn't have simply let it drop. Besides, if she wanted to tease him about it, it meant she was comfortable enough to do so, and that was pretty great from his perspective.

What was not so great was Fig's response, which made him frown slightly and shake his head. "Hey, no, that space isn't just for us. I mean, they put it together for the Band to be able to practice, sure, but at the end of the day, it's for everyone who lives here. And I'll talk it over with the others, but I know they'd be okay with you using the studio, too. Maybe I could even help out with the drums? Be your studio musician or whatever."

Fig made a movement of pretending to polish her forehead, “All scrubbed away— for now.” She teased him with a wink. “Unless I need to pull it out of my pocket another time.”

“Fuck, I miss having a band.” She chuckled slightly. “Usually I just… play my melody, and Gorgug picks up the drums and can just… get a solid beat, you know?” She shrugged again.”I can do a lot of instruments, pianos and almost anything stringed but…”

“All of that to say,” Fig chuckled a little, “I would love your help if you’re not too busy.”

If they hadn't been dirty, he would have lobbed a wadded up sock at her. Instead, he just laughed. "'For now,' she says. Y'know, Matt would call that 'intent'."

Sympathy pulled at Alex's heartstrings. Every time someone left, it reminded him that none of this was permanent. Even if he and the others lived the rest of their "natural" lives in this weird little pocket dimension, they'd still have an end.

Okay, okay, okay. No getting maudlin. "Yeah, of course! Wanna do it here, or head over to the in-house space? I still have a kit set up there. And it doesn't have to be now, of course. I do, however, always keep a pair of sticks in my back pocket at all times, so I can do here in the laundry room easy."

“Up to you,” Fig said with a shrug, “If you want to keep an eye on your laundry, we can just do it here. I don’t mind. I mean, I was here anyway.” She smiled. “Do you need help with your laundry?” She stood then and moved over to one of the machines, opening it up for him.

Fig was honestly just excited to be working on her music, things to go with Dawn of Justice on her new CD. She just had to figure it out first.

The idea of anyone else doing his laundry, let alone a girl he knew (nothing misogynistic about it, just Alex being a weirdo), caused a riot of nerves to hit his stomach. "Oh! No, no. No, that's cool. Everything I have is either secondhand or already so worn, all I really have to do is chuck it all in. We haven't upgraded to having band 'fits that need to be drycleaned yet."

Alex laughed and winked over at Fig. True to his word, he dumped the load in and measured out enough soap to start washer. Was he normally a little more fastidious about doing multiple loads? Yes. Did he just want to help Fig jam out and not worry about doing multiple changes? Very much yes. The kind of yes that totally overrode the first thing. "Play me what you've got so far?"

“Don’t, it’s a pain in the ass. Though when we were on tour, we mostly just wore jeans and t-shirts anyway, nothing too fancy.” She was 14 when she’d gone on tour, after all, and hadn’t really put much thought into her band aesthetic. “Plus, you don’t even have chronomancy or anything to help with that. It would drag things out, I think.”

Fig pulled the bass to her, it would have been easy to recast the spell she had used to play it for her earlier, but she preferred to play; she felt electric when her instrument was in her hands. She played the notes on the bass for a moment, humming along with it slightly, finding different pitches and melodies as she went.

"You were on tour?" Clearly Alex didn't know enough about his fellow musician, and that included some of the words she used. It didn't keep him from picking up the rhythm of the melody she was crafting, nor did the beat he started playing against the edge of one of the folding table keep him from also asking, "What's chronomancy?

Fig nodded, “The Summer between Freshman and Sophomore year,” she told him with a grin. Her music was less moralistic back then– more just a bunch of rebellion anthems, but she had loved the tour. She loved that she got to spend that time with her dad and with Gorgug. “My manager, Lola, she made it all happen. But after the Nightmare Forest, I had a hard time writing and she dropped me because I wasn't productive enough. She tried to pick me back up at the end of Junior year, but by then I had turned my domain of hell into a recording studio so I wouldn't ever feel the pressure to make my art productive again.” and, honestly, she had that luxury. She had the money from the tour and things, plus her parents and Ayda were supportive.

“Oh, Chronomancy, greatest form of magic. Let's you deal with time… like when you need to stop a dragon from swallowing your guidance counselor or like when you want to take your estranged daughter to see all of time to make up for years of emotional neglect.” She shrugged, “magic is wild.”

Just the teensiest bit of envy colored Alex's thoughts. When they'd been Sunset Curve, they'd played a lot of shows, but never got to the touring point. It was the next goal after playing the Orpheum. This nebulous future the four of them had had for the band. He hummed thoughtfully, but not loud enough to be heard over the song Fig was playing.

Every band's musical journey was different. It all came down to having different breaks.

Fig had what sounded like a cutthroat manager and a lot of freedom to explore her artistry. Sunset Curve and then Julie and the Phantoms had a lot of random coincidences and orchestrating a break or two for themselves. Alex got yanked out of his musings by one crucial bit of information, and he nearly lost the beat. "I'm sorry, what? You have a daughter? How? When? How?"

“What?!” Figs fingers singled over the cords as she tried to understand where Alex was coming from. “Oh! No, our principal, the man who taught us about Chronomancy, he used it to take his daughter to the past. They'd been gone almost the entire school year and I missed Ayda a lot. She is–was?--is my girlfriend.” Fig explained.

“But I do have Baby—well, his name is actually Wretchrot— he's a little imp that I created with blood and magic to help run Hell when I'm away, so that's kinda like a son.”

When the beat finally synched back into place—conversation-wise, not musically, Alex had to laugh. But only briefly. He could understand missing someone from home, for sure, and it sobered him. "I'm sorry about your girlfriend. Really. It sucks, for sure. But, like, you'd think with time travel they could just show back up when they left, but maybe it doesn't work like that? I dunno, I leave the super, super brainy stuff to all the geniuses who live around here."

He blinked at her again, his eyes not quite as wide as before, but still up there. "I guess blood and magic might be slightly less traumatizing than natural childbirth, but, again, I'm far from an expert on either part. Is everyone in your high school some kind of magical? Does everyone go on adventures like you and Adaine? What's the craziest thing you've done?"

“You would think, but that would be too convenient.” Fig said with a little bit of a chuckle. “She would leave me love notes through time though, it was very sweet.” Damn, she missed Ayda.

Alex smiled his sympathy at that. It sounded sweet. And heartbreaking.

“Not everyone at school is magical exactly, but everyone who goes there does go on Adventures. The size of the adventure depends though. We accidentally wound up on some crazy adventures that really don't seem like the sort of thing we should have been doing— we’ve saved the world like four major times.” Fig told him.

“It’s hard to say what the craziest thing is if you’re talking about the group— we defeated a dragon who was disguising himself as our Assistant Principal, we’ve stopped a cult from using a God to destroy things, released and then recaptured the Night Yorb, and stopped our mean Teacher from ascending to Godhood and killing us… while saving a second God in two years.” Fig said with a grin, “Wildest thing I've done… probably when I used to use my morphing abilities to make out with men. Or when I went to a trial in Hell and lied to the court to take over my dad’s domain so he wouldn’t get in trouble.”

Even without a shared world as context, the list was nothing short of impressive. He had no idea if he would have had the courage to live the kind of life Fig had. If he'd been who he was now, he didn't think so, but who knew what he might have been like on Fig's world. His ruminating derailed as the last little bit caught Alex unawares enough that he felt himself blush. "You kissed guys as a guy? Why? Like, as a distraction or something? Can you still morph? What's a Night Yorb? And you can totally tell me when I have too many questions. It's like the more you tell me, the more I have. All your friends have to be really brave. And awesome."

“I mean, I have, but I mostly kissed the guys as like adult women. Cause they were adults. But yeah, it was mostly just to distract the cops from looking too closely at stuff until my friends got away, or so I could sneak into the hospital after hours to check on a friend. Or, Dr. Keller– okay, that admittedly was just fun. He was a hot doctor, ok?” Fig giggled. She had spent so much of her freshman year overcompensating for who she really was. It was almost funny. “But yeah, I can still Morph… it’s in the music, that's where I get my magic from.” She nodded. She stopped playing the song and played a more familiar one, allowing herself to turn into Wanda Childa, her emo-pixie-girl persona. She shrank about a foot in height, and her hair shortened into a swooped spiky bob. Her voice took on a high pitch, but she spoke slower. She was an entirely different person.

“The Night Yorb was a monster who took the day. It was nighttime for the entire summer. Our friend accidentally summoned him by saying his name too many times. We trapped him in a sigil on the roof of our friend's van.”

Alex had a policy of trying not to judge people's actions, but he had to make just the tiniest of faces. Of course, next he factored in the kind of context he could only barely conceive, and that was just from the little he was learning from Fig. Sometimes running from threats and danger looked like manipulation for self-preservation. Consent got into a murky territory, and Alex felt instantly bad for the wrinkle of unease that had rolled through his head. It wasn't fair, and absolutely wasn't spoken aloud.

Besides, he was far too busy staring in wonder at her changed appearance. "Your life really has been something else, hasn't it. This place must be pretty boring by comparison, with, like, occasional bursts of excitement. What would you be doing if you weren't here?"

Fig hadn’t really noticed her change and face, and shrugged at his opinion. “It’s… different yeah. I have a hard time in school, back home and here.” Fig admitted, “At home, they let me drop out. My principal even said it was cool. But here— they won't let me.” Not that she held it against Jim and Una, they had their reasons. “Everything is very different here… we learn about our own magic skills and stuff at school at home, but here we are working on math and chemistry and stuff.” She shrugged, she barely understood school here.

“I would be running my record studio.” She told him, “At least thats the plan. And hang out with Ayda and the others.”

School hadn't exactly been difficult for him, although there had been enough changes in things in the past twenty-five years to make it a lot to keep up with. But he'd at least had some kind of introduction to the basic structure of the United States's education system. Sure, Luke had really struggled, but he'd also had exposure, and had gotten help in the end. Alex was sure the space explorers were also doing their best for Fig, but he couldn't help but offering, "I know I just graduated, and I'm not exactly a Rhodes scholar, but if there's any time you might want a hand in going over some stuff, you can totally ask. If I don't know something, I can always look it up. Or ask one of the geniuses around here."

His eyes widened along with his grin. "You should come look at our recording studio! I'm taking a class about the technical side of things this semester, but if you've been running one for a while, I'd love to show the setup to see if you can find things we should change for the better. And maybe we can help you lay down some tracks!"

“It’s just…” Fig paused, “I'm not dumb… I know how to read, I know the basics of things, but like… they just expect me to know chemistry, and geometry, and all these things just because I am a senior, but I’ve never had to memorize math equations or anything just because before. Maybe Gorgug does, because he has to use math to build some of his contraptions, but not bards. We learn music. And Paladin’s learn how to smite. Barbarians learn how to use their anger. It’s a thing.” She shrugged, “And don’t even get me started on History, it’s an entirely different world we’re in.”

“I would like that a lot.” Fig said with a grin, “I’ve been running a studio for a while now and I could definitely help you!” She said excitedly. She had honestly been excited to help other artists at home. “I don’t mind helping you.”

Alex's mouth twisted into a sympathetic and understanding frown, and he winced. Being from almost a quarter of the century in the past had nothing on Fig and Adaine's situation. "You'd think they would make allowances for being from another world, but my guess is they don't have the first clue about what to do in situations like yours. I'm so sorry, Fig. That really stinks, and I'm doubling down on the offer to tutor you or help you with your homework and studying."

There didn't seem much point in belaboring the issue when there were much happier prospects to consider. "Yeah! That would be awesome! And we can totally rock out someplace other than the one currently eliminating my boy funk."