Work Text:
“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck — the places floating, finally legible.”
— Ocean Vuong
“You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?”
— Richard Siken
+
Lars vibrates the ball of his foot against the stool’s highest rung, shoe rubber sliding against metal. Scratches at the stubbly hairs on the back of his neck. He can feel the gaze of the camera; knows what it’s seeing like he’s looking at himself in third person, watching it live out of his own head; commentator, spectator, live studio audience.
Lars tries, again, to get some kind of resolution to this latest argument. To get James to turn around and face him. Face this — whatever this is, now.
“James.”
He doesn’t, of course.
Lars can see it through the camera eye: the anxious bounce of his leg. The defeated slump of his shoulders, leaning forward onto the breakfast bar with his elbows. The stiff expanse of James’ back.
“Hey, James.”
Lars hates this new version of James, all sobered up, and hates that he feels that way. How fucking shitty of him — James went through rehab. He’s better now.
He wants to be happy for James, he really does, but fuck, it’s hard. He barely knows the guy now. Or it feels like it, anyway. He’s already had this spiral: did he ever know James, was this always who he was supposed to be beneath all the booze, etc.
James was already drinking when they met. They were eighteen. They weren’t even people yet.
What is he supposed to do with that?
(The bottom of this spiral: same as the bottom of every spiral. Toilet water swirling away his newly-emptied guts. He watches the familiar detritus disappear down the drain and thinks about James. Guess he won’t be doing this anymore, huh?)
“James,” Lars tries. Again.
James looks over his shoulder, gaze sliding over Lars’ face like it’s part of the scenery, and then walks right out of the kitchen. Lars eats the rest of his lunch in silence. The food is long cold, and sits like lead in his gut.
+
James is supposed to be more open now, now that he’s been taken apart and put back together with fewer broken pieces to fit bottles into; more willing to bare himself.
And he’s bare all right — like any good marble statue, made of fucking stone.
An icon made to metal. To Metallica. (Except not really, right? Metallica, Alcoholica — who’s this guy? Doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t stomp around or throw things. This isn’t a metal guitarist, this is the guy that comes to their shows and then goes home to his cookie-cutter family in the suburbs.)
He’s inaccessible, stiff behind the unflattering glasses, staring at Lars like they work in the same office complex and not like they’re been practically joined at the fucking hip for most of the last twenty years. Lars doesn’t know how to deal with this familiar stranger; an unsmiling man with a different haircut and a whole new list of rules. He wants them clocking in and out, twelve to four, just like the fucking worker drones they decided as kids they were never going to be. Putting bars around their work, their art, their fucking livelihood. Four hours a day to build something from the ground up.
The Great Wall wasn’t built in a day, or even a lifetime, but at this rate they’d still be laying stones. Seriously, four pm? It’s like he doesn’t even want to fucking be here.
And Kirk’s no more help than he ever is, playing pacifist and hiding out at his big fucking ranch, or surfing. He nods along like he’s supposed to about the rules, James, Phil. Any protests he raises are about as flimsy as their status as a fucking band right now.
At this point, Lars feels like a real estate agent trying to sell this shit — them, Metallica, in the studio, making this fucking album — talking about the potential, needs a bit of help but don’t worry. It could work, you can make it work.
Nobody likes real estate agents.
+
“What the fuck is wrong with him?”
“He just needs time, man,” Kirk says soothingly, watching him pace a worn path back and forth through the kitchen floor.
Lars whirls around, nearly knocking Kirk’s salad off the counter. “Time? He’s had time! He’s had a whole fucking year!”
“Yeah, he’s been— that’s exactly it, he’s been gone a whole year, man, it’s gotta be a shock for him to like, come back.” Kirk gestures at him with his fork. A piece of lettuce falls onto the countertop. “Like, coming back’s gotta be really weird ‘cause we’re here and, y’know, he’s just been through rehab and shit, man. He’s coming from a different place.”
“You sound like fucking Phil.”
Kirk takes a bite. Sighs. “This is hard for all of us, man. It’s just a weird fucking situation.”
“I know, I know, it’s just—“ Lars lets out a wordless shout of frustration. He’s been trying to stop pulling at his hair, so he just runs his hands over his scalp and starts digging his fingers into the dip of muscle at the base of his skull. His nails are too blunt to make it sting the way he wants it to.
“Just give him time, man,” is Kirk’s final piece of invaluable wisdom. Lars leaves him to his salad, intent on doing something about this lashing, raging thing in the pit of his stomach.
More time. Okay, Kirk.
+
Lars runs in the morning because he’s on the wrong side of thirty-five and feels it, waking up with a new ache or fold every other week, and he hates it, hates the way his body is falling apart with every other fucking thing in his life. He’s actually getting old.
20-year old Lars would’ve laughed in your fucking face for telling him that. Who fucking cares about twenty years from now? We’re just trying to survive ‘til next week!
It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday.
Sometimes the past feels so close that he could reach out and grab it. Step into his old skin, fresh-faced and long-haired, sprint off down the road to the shitty little L.A. apartment he called home once.
He lives in Marin County now. It’s a long run home.
This morning the rhythm comes easy, aches blessedly silent, his body alive with surges of emotion. He looks out from his doorway and inhales the morning air. Bounces on the balls of his feet. Stretches, rolls his shoulders back.
The image of James surfaces in his mind as his foot hits the pavement.
Fuck.
James, the studio, the strangled atmosphere. Disapproving eyes, mouth flat and closed.
Fuck!
James’ back. The pointed not-slamming of the door behind him.
Fuck!
The soles of his shoes pattern a steady path of fuck, fuck, FUCK, into the ground. Something white-hot and frustrated wells up inside him until he feels like his chest is going to burst from it, lungs heaving, face red. The camera crew’s not here, but he still thinks about what he must look like to outside observers: face red, eyes burning.
Like Lars, from 20 years ago, vibrating in his tennis shoes and baring his teeth.
+
Lars screams in James’ face and the satisfaction is watery at best, because James won’t give him anything, won’t even slam the fucking door when he leaves.
Fuck.
(Lars screams in James’ face and it’s this big fucking performance, like everything else. Choreographed for maximum impact. He hisses out a litany of grievances and never stops moving, lets the frustration pull him in and away.
Commentator, spectator, live studio audience. It’s the closest he’s gotten to James in weeks. He almost wishes James had punched him.
And, scene.)
This is the worst part.
Lars prefers the histrionics to this. Would rather be fucking screaming himself hoarse at faces like stone walls, biting and biting back, all of them snarling and clawing like a pack of wolves, than what it ends up being, every time.
This: the embarrassing, pathetic fucking silence of a room after the argument’s done and one person’s stormed out and left the rest of them sitting there. Aging bodies dragging around too much history.
“Fuck,” he mutters one last time, under his breath. For the camera, even though it’s to himself.
(Is it for the camera? It feels natural, like something Lars might’ve done before, y’know… before.
It’s probably for the camera. Even when it’s for him, it’s for the camera.)
+
Lars says, “We need to talk about this,” and James says, “There’s nothing to talk about.”
Used to be, when he said that, it was Lars’ cue to pry it out of him, with time and booze and some patented Ulrich Charm. Now, James means it.
Lars wants to appeal to what they used to have, that old, easy friendship that’s starting to look more and more like a myth their fans made up the longer he squints back at it. But he remembers how James reacted the last time he said something like that. What he thought Lars was referring to when he talked about what they used to have.
(“That shit was a mistake,” James hisses.
Lars blinks, still thinking about friendship. His hackles are already up at James’ tone by the time he realizes what he’s talking about. So he gets mean. Curls his lip.
“You didn’t seem to think so at the time.”
“We were kids! We were young, and stupid, and you kept, fucking… grabbing at me—“
“Grabbing at you? Like you didn’t also—“)
So, yeah.
That was before, obviously, but Lars doesn’t think sobriety or rehab or fucking therapy can fix the tangled mess of hatred and shame James has carried around for as long as they’ve known each other. He remembers finding it funny a couple of years ago, messing around with Kirk where James could see it, when admitting he felt anything else about it would’ve been dangerous.
Now, though?
Now… Lars doesn’t really know. He has more important things to sell. An album to make. Press to deal with because — oh yeah, Jason fucking left.
He still doesn’t know how that happened.
(Or, he does, really. He’s seen the hard line of James’ shoulders too, and heard enough of Jason’s earnest requests devolve into frustrated appeals. And there’s the other stuff, too, on the periphery of his mind, but he doesn’t look there. Easier to think it’s all James’ fault, to reduce Jason to a character with fewer dimensions.)
No one was ever supposed to leave Metallica. They’re ride or fucking die, the closed fist, with only one way out. At least that’s how they always thought of it. Back then, there was no question. Simpler terms, simpler times.
Lars knows better, of course. History binds them together like a spider’s web; sticky and clinging, impossible to break or impossibly fragile depending on who you are: the trapped bug or the swatting hand.
Funny, Lars would’ve said Jason was a bug, not a hand. Except the tattered hole where he used to be — escaped, but the web intact — says he’s somewhere in between, and that’s so typically Jason that it’s not really funny at all.
He still got out, though. Maybe just in time.
When Lars pictures Jason now, it’s hard not to remember that grueling, brutal nine hour meeting where they dissected his exit from the band like a body in a morgue. The exhausted, resigned look he’d had, the final time he’d finally broken eye contact with James before walking out, looking down and away; not defeat, but surrender.
Lars feels bad for the guy, he does. Mostly, though, he feels bad for himself.
+
James says I want to be a good husband and a good dad and it’s interesting how a good bandmate never makes that list. Or a good friend. But playing nice with Lars and the other guys won’t give him the same ego trip as playing happy family will.
— And that’s an awful fucking thought, Lars knows. The kind of vicious, biting thing he tells himself he’s not going to ever say out loud and then invariably does, later, when anger sharpens his tongue.
It’s not a fair thought, either, because James really does want to be good. Lars knows because he’d told him as much, screamed it into Lars’ face back before he went to rehab and stopped screaming: I’m tired of hurting people. And Lars, cruel and hurting himself, had ignored it.
Steamrolled over it, screamed right back like he’d never heard it until it was buried under the rest of the insignificant fucking problem they’d had with each other that day. A fleeting moment of connection — of intimacy — crumpling under all the rage.
James wants to do better than that now. Phil wants them to do better than that.
So, they’re playing nice. Inside-voice screaming with bigger words and more names for the ugly tangle of emotion they’ve twisted themselves up with. Lars won’t put money on it working, ‘cause they’ve been doing this for months, but he can admit their previous choices for problem-solving were… limited.
(Honestly, Lars wouldn’t mind fucking it out like they used to. The flat wall of James’ face holds no appeal, but he watches the curl of his hands around a bottle of sparkling water and remembers what they can do. Lars considers trying to provoke him, see if he can’t get them alone somewhere where the cameras won’t find them, his room, James’ room, whatever, and make James take it out on him. Give Lars an excuse to kick and bite and rake his nails against his skin. Draw just enough blood to satiate.
But James is trying to be a good husband now, and Lars knows what that means. Kirk already taught him.)
+
Lars wants to do something with his drums. Change the sound, do something to make it sound like he isn’t just rehashing the last twenty fucking years of his career.
He fucks around in the studio and catches Bob listening, head at a production tilt, mouth pursed in thought. Fight starts gearing up within him, and Lars is ready to argue his case, wave his hands around and talk about the harshness, how it’s new, and innovative, how it’s supposed to be grating, angry and ugly and—
Bob doesn’t say a word. Lars sits there, tension coiling tight in his belly, wary behind his kit, but Bob just plucks at his bass, the way Jason always did when he wanted to keep his head down.
It’s almost frustrating. He’s got it all in his head, the sales pitch, the big speech. All these grandiose ideas of what it means. He wants to confront the audience’s idea of what the drums are supposed to do. What he’s supposed to do.
But at the same time it’s such a goddamn fucking relief that almost he wants to cry. He scans the room, sees nobody but them, and calls out, “Hey, Bob!”
“Yeah?”
“You wanna go out for drinks later?”
It’s one less fight, and Lars will take the victory as it is.
+
Out on some random Tuesday night with friends, he ends up at the same place he’d gone to see Jason’s new project that one time a couple months ago. The place is less crowded now, live band doing some ambient muzak-sounding thing over the dull roar of conversation. He sips his drinks, recounts the latest debate in the studio (Kirk’s solos), and tries not to squint in the dim mood lighting.
He remembers, after learning that Jason had dodged them and ditched, after Kirk and Bob had gone home, after the camera crew left; lingering at the venue, no longer humorously lamenting his very real fears but just standing in the quiet, alone.
The reverberations of Echobrain still bounce off the walls now, ringing in his ears. Something solid. A creation that actually happened.
Later that night he steps outside and the cool night breeze washes over his face softly, and he thinks about what James will and won’t allow. What gets to be made. He thinks about the four hour workdays, Jason’s resigned gaze at that meeting table, the pinched expressions Bob and Kirk wear when Lars starts pushing.
It’s all about James, isn’t it? Everything.
And he knows James can verbalize why now, why he always has to have the reins, why it’s always his final say — it’s the old fear of being left behind, the strangling reflex Lars is all too familiar with. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave.
Recalling the elated grin Jason wore up onstage that night, freedom dancing along the strings of his bass, the irony is almost more than Lars can withstand.
(Down the line, when they’re on speaking terms again, Lars will ask Jason where he went after the show, and he will try not to make it an accusation. Jason will shrug. “Just… home, man.”
“But why?”
“Long day.”
“Seriously? That can’t be it, c’mon, man, just fuckin’ say it!” Lars will laugh.
Jason will finally cave and tell him, “I didn't want to hear what you had to say about it,” and look him straight in the eye as he says it, which will tell Lars everything he needs to know about Jason's expectations. It hurts a little, in an absent way. He’d thought that whatever friendship they’d had would’ve lasted better than that, but he’s starting to realize that Jason might not look back on what they had and called it friendship.
Still, he’ll prod. Laugh again, and ask, “What did you expect me to say, man?”
“Nothing I wanted to hear.”
Lars will snort at the cop-out answer. “Can’t handle a little feedback from your old buddies?”
“I can handle it.” Jason will say what he’s always said. Then, what he hasn’t: “I was just… tired.”
Lars will hear what Jason’s not saying and pretend he doesn’t. And Lars will hold his tongue because they’re not bandmates anymore and Jason will hear it all anyway because they used to be.)
+
At some point Bob says, “I think you will never, ever, ever find a permanent bass player.”
Lars thinks he might have said something like that once. He’d like to think Jason wasn’t in the room to hear it.
+
The days bleed together. This whole thing starts to blur into months and months and Lars can’t see any end in sight. Nothing seems to be working, and they’re spending half of their allotted four hours picking each other apart, and he’s ready to tear his fucking hair out.
The camera watches them: Lars running his hands across his scalp, digging his nails in, too irritated to remember not to tug. Kirk rubbing his knee, uncomfortable. James sitting at the head of the table like a king, arms crossed, glorious in his marble rigidity.
Fucking therapy. Everyone’s got their deal; Kirk feels like he’s not listened to, James feels disrespected for his new sober lifestyle, Lars just wants to make the fucking album. (And it’s still weird that the list ends there, and in a way it feels like a confirmation that they really are falling apart, losing pieces as they go.)
Lars is trying to verbalize this sinking sensation, this notion that the band playing on the Titanic until it went under might have been Metallica, guitars screaming soundlessly into the water as the lifeboats turn away. It’s coming out all wrong, vicious and bitter, and James’ mouth is turning down at the corners.
“It feels like you’re trying to fuckin’, like, sabotage this. Us, I mean. This record. I feel like—”
“The fuck are you talking about? I’m not sabotaging this record. I want to work just as much as you guys do.”
“Doesn’t fucking seem like it! You’re not— you don’t want to let us work on it! We can’t have any more time ‘cause your schedule won’t let us, and we can’t stay after you’ve gone home ‘cause then we’re, like, betraying some fucking agreement we never actually made. It was just something you said.” Lars runs his hands over his head, nails burning lines down his scalp. “You’re not allowing us to even listen, just listen, to it.”
It’s the same argument. It’s always the same fucking argument, just further proof that they’re running in place, tiring themselves out for no progress at all. James glares at him, stern, disappointed.
“It was— the agreement was a proposal, by me, and none of you said anything against it. I’m trying to make sure we all contribute equally.”
Here, Lars stumbles a little, trying to fit the words right in his mouth. Getting to the core of the problem, which is James. Needing control. Like always.
He finally gets out, “No one’s taking anything away from you!” and then repeats it, so James will maybe finally get it. “No one’s taking anything away from you, James, you’re the one — you’re taking from us! You’re taking our time, time we could be spending working, and you’re telling us all to go home, and we can’t even listen to our own fucking shit when you’re not around, like it fucking belongs to you or something.”
James’ crossed arms actually drop in affront. “I’m not saying that. I’ve never said that. I— We all know that’s not true. It belongs to all of us.”
“Yeah, yeah, it belongs to all of us. Me and Kirk, not just you.” This time, he doesn’t miss the looks Kirk’s been shooting him for the last fucking decade, whenever he and James argue; Don’t rope me into this, man. Like Lars isn’t arguing for him, too.
“Yeah. That’s what I just said, I’m not—”
“You’re trying to make decisions for us. You always do.”
“What? No, I—”
“Who do you think handled everything when you fucking left?” Lars finally snaps, spitting out the sticking point that’s been grinding his gears since James got back. “The press, the fans, the record company? That was us. Me and Kirk. Jason fucking left, you fucking left. It was just us.”
James’ face closes like a door. Their meeting gaze, one singular point of contact, hardens, turns solid and heavy between them like a tunnel. Like a wall. He wonders if James is hearing his voice, from all those years ago, childish and raw and frustrated as it is now: I’m not some fucking kid. He can’t believe they’re still having the same argument today. That James still won’t take him seriously.
From the sidelines, Kirk speaks up. He looks so young, younger than either of them, but the lines of his face are weary. His voice is quiet as he peers up at James with dark eyes. “It was hard when you left, man. Really— it was really fucking hard.”
Lars watches James’ face crack open, someone peeking out from behind the chain bolt.
So he presses. “And now we’re telling you— we’re still here, we waited for you, and we’re telling you that we want to make this fucking album.”
The door slams shut again.
“And I understand that,” James says, and he doesn’t understand at all. Lars stares silently at him, furious and helpless, hearing the lock click. He doesn’t understand at all.
+
It’s a good story, something for the masses to eat up; misery and tension in buckets, filling up this whole fucking studio until they’re slogging through it, every day, just to go sit down at the same table.
Lars understands. He’s not a fucking idiot, okay? He knows what this documentary is going to be. And that’s exactly why it’s going to sell. Why go to your local theatre production of Hamlet when Metallica’s doing the same thing on the big screen?
+
(Of course it’s not all bad. Of course it’s not. There’s jokes and laughter and moments where their eyes meet across the table and something warm passes between them.
When James comes back into the studio and picks up a guitar again after all those months, and Lars’ chest feels so light he swears he’s floating behind his drum set. The first chords pick out into the expectant studio air and the room soars.
They’ve still got it. The human element, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Love inside the machine.
In the studio they sit together and create music, most days, and some days they’re even proud of it. They’re still Metallica. It’s not hopeless.
It just hurts. The heavy, aching kind of hurt deep in the pit of his chest that people say comes with age, and it turns out they’re right from a certain angle. Lars has been collecting hurts along the way, and now it all weighs heavily on his heart.)
+
James looks him in the eye and says, “When I walked in, I wanted to hug everyone in the room, but I didn’t want to hug you.” Tells him it’s not a lack of love, but mistrust. Twenty years of it.
So.
...yeah.
Fuck.
Not even the subsequent discussion with Phil and Kirk about vulnerability and defense mechanisms can help that particular pill go all the way down. Lars remembers that hug. It’d felt like hugging a brick wall, and yeah, he’d felt the awkwardness, the reluctance. He’d expected some of it. He’d mostly been jealous James hadn’t hugged him first.
But James not wanting to even fucking touch him… Jesus, that’s going to stick with him for a long, long while. (And it does, every time he looks over at James and measures the space between them that used to not be there. He lets James know he’s been listened to; always sits on a different couch, stands on the other side of the table, and it never comes up again.)
If he thinks about it too long, he feels a bit like he might cry, or throw up, so. He doesn’t. They’ve got a fucking album to make, anyway. Phil can keep the psycho babble bullshit — Lars doesn’t feel like putting this one on the table for public dissection.
+
Lars talks to the fans online and it’s good. Mostly, it’s good.
Most of them who bother to get on the computer do it because they care about Metallica, about the music, about how Lars and Kirk are doing and how James is getting along now.
Some don’t, of course, but that’s nothing new. Some hate Metallica, and some just hate him. Whatever.
He’s not unused to death threats. To being called cruel names, stupid names, to have the rage of complete strangers directed at him for any number of reasons. He’s heard it all by now. Nothing’s new but the format, and even then it isn’t, really. Words printed by strangers: that’s most of his career.
Still, the sheer vitriol settles somewhere within him and leaves him standing in the kitchen making his third cup of coffee, feeling wrong-footed and nervous, as if all that hatred could jump right out of the screen. Like those pixelated words could peel themselves off and stick to him, like old newspaper print, where everyone could see. Read it all right off his skin. It leaves his hands clenched around the ceramic mug, staring off into space until someone walks in and startles him out of it.
Kirk catches him by the elbow and startles the coffee right out of his hands. Lars hisses as the lukewarm wetness spreads down his ratty white t-shirt, staining it a milky brown. Kirk immediately apologizes, grabbing a couple paper towels for Lars to scrub fruitlessly at his chest with. Lars waves him off.
“You good, man?” Kirk asks.
“Yeah,” Lars mumbles, tossing the crumpled towel onto the counter and pulling the robe over his shoulders tight across his front, tying it off before cold can start creeping into the soaked fabric.
“You were a million miles away.”
Lars snorts. “You wish.” Kirk laughs back, but he’s still got those big, sad fucking doe eyes, watching Lars as he leans back against the counter. His hair is pulled back to the base of his skull, shiny with water that’s also visibly soaked in along his collar. Went surfing, probably.
“I read that spending all your time staring at screens is bad for you. Like, it makes your brain all weird with the unnatural light, makes it harder to sleep.”
Oh god, not this shit.
“I’m sleeping fine.” Lars turns to make another cup of coffee. He shoots Kirk a grin he half-feels and nudges his skinny ribcage with the coffee pot. Deflects. “How were the waves this morning?”
Kirk, always ready to let himself be distracted, lights up and starts describing a massive wipeout, like, paper-bag-over-head embarrassing, man, and the easy conversation flutters around Lars until the ugly words — beady eyed bastard rich greedy ass like a fallen god — start falling off and settling around his feet. He tucks himself further into the robe and chuckles into his mug.
“Does James know you stole that?” Kirk asks after a bit.
“Huh?”
“His robe, dude. I think he was looking for it earlier.”
Lars looks down and yep, right there, is ‘Papa Het’ embroidered over his heart. He rubs at the fabric, realizing suddenly that he can smell James on it. It’s just so familiar. They’ve been sharing clothes since… fuck, since forever. He hadn’t even noticed when he put it on.
When James catches him in it later, he doesn’t even give him a funny look, so maybe it’s not just Lars.
+
James initially makes a point of avoiding the cameras when he gets back. Dodges them like the pap, even though he helped hire Joe and Bruce in the first place. He hates that Lars is used to them. You’re always fucking posing for the camera.
Sure, why not?
What James doesn’t realize, of course, is that avoiding the camera is posing for it too. It’s a reaction, and a statement, and they’ll eat up anything he gives them because he’s James motherfucking Hetfield. Even beyond this documentary, there’s the rest of them waiting outside; reporters and journalists and fellow artists and fans, lens eyes blinking up at them hungrily.
Point is, they’re here to stay. Their presence is so constant at this point that even when they’re not there, they are in Lars’ mind, observing.
He goes home, alone, and feels the cameras still rolling on his back, watching him while he’s making nice with his kids and his wife. Taking calls. Sitting at the dinner table. Scribbling things in his notebook, tapping at his computer. Climbing into bed and laying awake. Always watching his face, catching each little expression and gesture he makes.
So he makes the right expressions and appropriate gestures. Even when the cameras aren’t there, Lars watches himself. And when they are, he watches himself be watched.
He’s not like James — he doesn’t avoid his own reflection. He knows what he looks like. Meets his own eyes in the mirror, in the car window, in the puddle of water at the bottom of the kitchen sink. He knows his own face better than the back of his hand; magazine slick and all up in lights, but at least it’s him. It’s almost too him.
+
Lars says something once about the cameras everywhere, maybe back on the Black Album tour. Or Justice. Things tend to blur. He’s coming down from a high, fading fast in the back of the tour bus, draped across the couch with his legs resting on Kirk’s drink-swollen stomach.
It’s stuffy. They’ve been in there a while. The air feels thick in his lungs, solid in his mouth. He’s mumbling, something about cameras and the way nothing seems quite real, anymore, unless they’re being seen doing it.
“It’s like they, uh, they have to watch, y’know, to like… make it real. Like it becomes, fucking, uh, like, physical, right? Like it’s more real… reality.”
Kirk nods sagely. “Like— like Videodrome.”
“What?”
“Dude, yeah, Videodrome! Exactly.” Jason pipes up from the floor. Lars had forgotten he was down there. He kicks at him, just to make sure it’s really him. The ow, fuck, seems as good confirmation as any.
“The fuck’re you talking about?” Lars asks.
“Y’know, like. Videodrome. Cronenberg. Uhh, the fuckin’, uhh…”
“‘S a movie,” Jason adds helpfully.
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” Lars has already started to forget what they were talking about. Cameras, reality, movie.
Jason keeps going, clearly the soberest of them. “What was it, um… Reality is less than — no, uh, yeah! Television is reality and reality is less than television. Or something.”
Lars laughs. Doesn’t know why. He mumbles it back to himself: “Television is reality…”
A fucking movie. It fits, though — it’s all on camera. Reality is less than television. Or movies, or whatever the camera sees. It’s all real, and less than real, and not real at all. Acting for the audience, the intangible mass. Like a show where the faces are silent and invisible and the stage never ends. Immortalizing their bodies and voices on a screen for endless, relentless consumption.
He stares up at the metal ceiling. Smiles, reflexively; the press smile. Camera smile. He thinks he’s been acting for a long time.
Kirk does end up showing him the movie eventually, tucked down beside him in Lars’ hotel bed after midnight, uppers and downers running up and down their bloodstreams. If there was a message in there somewhere, Lars missed it. He throws up less than halfway through and then the rest is white noise while he’s hunched over the toilet bowl.
Kirk is passed out by the time he stumbles back out of the bathroom, so he can’t ask him either. Later, he’s forgotten.
+
It hits Lars one day, completely out of the blue, that he might never get to hear James tell him he loves him again.
He’s sitting in the studio watching James lazily pick out a riff when James lifts his head and catches his eye. Lars shoots him a half-sarcastic grin and a thumbs up. The reserved flat of James’ mouth ticks up into a smile, but it’s subdued. Guarded.
And Lars realizes he’s been guarded since he came back. And then he realizes that he has no way to lower that guard anymore. It hits him like a brick, sinking rapidly in his gut. That he has no access to James anymore.
He can’t ply James with alcohol, tucked away together in the corner of some bar or some couch, until James is sloppy and warm with it, cheeks flushed, tongue loose. Can’t pry that confession, that he cares about him, out again. (It’s a story he holds in the cup of his palm like a baby bird: ‘forty-two’ beers. The two of them, alone, in his room. Heavy metal on his stereo. The brush of shoulders. A blinding smile, a drunken giggle. Dude, barely a mumble, I love you.)
“That sound good?” James asks. From behind his bass, Bob calls out an affirmative.
Despair coiling in his throat, Lars dismisses it with, “It’s got potential,” just to watch the way that earnest blue gaze goes a shade colder.
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It’s not a very good story, is it? All the crying and screaming and silence. Misery gets boring after a while. When the wounds are beneath the skin, there’s nothing to look at.
But Lars can’t make it into another story. Can’t make it into anything but what it is. Them, Metallica.
And there’s the fucking core of it, the truth Lars doesn’t want to admit:
It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not even Shakespearean. It’s a fucking tragedy, but not a real good one; something half-assed. Grad student on a three-day bender trying to finish something, not caring that it barely makes sense and nothing ever happens.
It’s too messy and too real, gratingly awkward in the way that only real life is. Lars wishes it weren’t real. He’d give anything for it not to be real.
They’re Metallica. They’re larger-than-life. They’re not real.
And suddenly, he hates the documentary. Hates being followed everywhere, looked at, watched. Hates Joe and Bruce. He wants to smash the cameras and burn the footage, destroy all the evidence and run before anyone else finds out what they are.
It’s not too late to call it off, Lars thinks. Except… James. He already agreed to continue it. And it’s all about James, in the end. Everything.
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“I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.”
— Richard Siken
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Lars sits atop the kitchen counter and watches James unwrap one of the fajitas Kirk’s brought from a local Tex Mex place, big hands deliberate around the foil and greasy paper, careful not to tear the tortilla. They’re maybe three feet apart, but they could be in different rooms for all James seems to know. There’s none of the usual cluster of gestures that indicates James even knows he’s there, the tilt of his head or the turn of his hips, and maybe James was right — intimacy? The fuck are you talking about?
Lately he feels like he’s been selling James them, their relationship; friends, business partners, bandmates. The house of their relationship, a giant, convoluted patchwork thing built up and battered, years of fires and floods. All the empty rooms.
This place was beautiful once. It really was.
“James.”
There’s a curt, non-committal hum. Lars hops off the counter and turns to face him. James’ glance is assessing, like he’s trying to decide if this is worth his time.
Evidently, it is, because he puts the half-unwrapped fajita down on the crumpled foil. “Lars,” he returns evenly, hands loose at his sides, stance neither welcoming or forbidding. His gaze is blank behind his glasses.
Lars gets up real close to him, to see him stiffen and clench his fists, tensing up for a fight; close enough to smell his aftershave, and it’s still the same kind he’s been using since the 90s.
The familiar scent slips past his defenses and brushes up against something delicate inside him. He lets himself fall into it, releasing all his breath in one explosive burst so that he’s deflated, anger gone out of him and shattering as it hits the weight of the thing between them.
Fuck.
He presses his face into James’ shoulder. An old motion.
James goes completely still against him, rigid as marble, but the warmth of his body betrays him as human. There’s a beat or two where they just stand there, unmoving, and Lars thinks about how he would only have been able to do this before if James was drunk. How Lars would pull away first because he was tired of James leaving him behind.
The worn material of his t-shirt is gentle against Lars’ forehead. There’s a softness to his chest that’s hardly new, but it feels like it. Everything feels raw right now.
It’s hard to look at what they’ve become, what they’ve let happen. Two decades of friendship twisted down into something ugly and unrecognizable. He can see the beast of Metallica laying on its side, breaths rattling.
And the blood, trailing back towards them.
There’s old fractures in those bones that cracked years ago and never fully healed — the crush of a tour bus on the body. It never caught in his throat the way it did in James’, but on rainy days it aches, like the bones didn’t heal quite right.
“Fuck,” he mumbles into the fabric. There’s a beat, and then an almost-there laugh, more like a sigh, rumbles against his cheek. James’ arm comes up to rest, heavy and familiar, over the line of his shoulders.
“Yeah,” James says.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck!”
Lars buries his face deeper. Like he’s hiding it.
“Yeah.” James’ arm pulls him tighter.
He sees, for a second, what they look like from the outside: two bodies, pressing together until they almost look like one hulking figure. Two aging men with too much history and too few words. A weird interlude in a shitty tragedy.
He wonders where Joe and Bruce would put this in the documentary, but there are no cameras here.
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