Chapter Text
Nathan woke from a dark dream in the middle of the night. He was confused - disoriented. Something was wrong. Where was he? Some hotel? What country were they touring in again?
Go upstairs! The voice had told him. It was the same voice that had told him to destroy the record!
Go upstairs.
He listens for the sound of a fire alarm, or anything to suggest that there’s an actual problem. Why should he go anywhere? He turns over in his bed and pulls the covers over his shoulder.
Go upstairs.
He knows he won’t be able to ignore it. Even if he falls asleep, the whale will force him back up into wakefulness again. It’s not something he’s going to be able to avoid. So finally he gets up, grumbling the whole time, pulls on a robe, and stalks across the plush carpet to the door. They’re in the penthouse, but there’s a modest lobby outside with a service lift and fire escape tucked out of sight behind a potted plant. Go upstairs. He pushes open the fire exit and climbs the unadorned metal stairs. The door at the top’s got that long bar across it horizontally that you’re meant to push, but it’s busted. Already slightly ajar, it swings right open at his touch.
It’s not even that dark up here. In the middle of the city, there’s lights and noise everywhere, though they’re up far enough that the traffic below is little more than a dull hum. There’s not much up here: the hotel pools and gardens are on different levels, and the penthouse has private outdoor facilities. It’s just an undeveloped rooftop; to his left is the makeshift space cleared for their helicopter’s arrival tomorrow afternoon. Wind whips at the edges of his robe.
Pickles is sitting up ahead of him, on a low wall next to some big industrial air-con units. His back to Nathan, he’s drinking dark alcohol and when Nathan comes up alongside he looks rough.
“Came up for a smoke,” Pickles says, hoarse. “Go back to bed.”
There’s no butts, no ash, no lingering smell of cigarettes. Doesn’t seem like he’s got any on him at all. He’s only got a light grey shirt and thin jogging pants on, and his bare feet dangle over open air. He must be freezing.
Something in Nathan knows that he can’t go back alone.
That was it, right? There had always been something underneath, guiding them. You couldn’t always see it, sure, but it was still there, like something moving just under the surface of the water, or the inner workings of a clock, and it controlled them in some way that you couldn’t necessarily put into words.
It seemed like Pickles was never gonna die from drugs or alcohol, and on stage he always played a perfect show even when he was unconscious both immediately before and after. Skwisgaar fucked women like it would kill him not to, right – and maybe it really would. Nathan knew that something was obviously going on with Toki, and Murderface, too, probably, though he didn’t like to bother wasting time and energy on things he was never going to understand.
Nathan heard the voice. The whale. Relatively straightforward. She tells you what to do, and you make sure you do it. And things’ll go right. For you. Maybe not always for the people around you.
Right now he’s gotta be up here.
There’s nowhere else to go, so he sits down on the ledge, facing back towards the fire door and the stairs inside.
“I don’t want to hang out, Nate.” Pickles still hasn’t looked at him. “Go back to bed. Leave me alone, okay?”
“No.”
Pickles hisses, and then grinds his teeth. “Fuck you, Nathan. Can’t I get a break in the middle of the fucking night?” He goes to pick the bottle up again, misjudges, and knocks it with the back of his hand. Nearly empty, it topples and falls, and rolls towards the edge before Nathan manages to grab the neck.
“Jesus, be careful,” Nathan says.
“Why?” Pickles demands. “It’s trash anyway. You can let it go.”
“It could hurt someone.” He leans over just enough to see to the ground, and though he’s never considered himself to be afraid of heights, he’s still hit by a sudden wave of vertigo. It’s a long way down. People are walking underneath, too, even at this time of night. The thick glass of the bottle dropped from this distance would probably do as much damage as a brick.
“People get hurt all the time,” Pickles says, sullen. “Least it’d be quick. And they wouldn’t see it coming.”
Nathan takes a drink and Pickles puts his hand out for it back. Nathan keeps it out of his reach.
“Goddamnit, Nate, give it the fuck back.” He tries to make a grab for it and Nathan juggles it to his other hand, then puts it at his feet and kicks it so it skids across the ground.
“You’re such a fucking asshole.” Pickles is near yelling now, and maybe it’s because he’s tired, because he got woken up in the middle of the night, but Nathan doesn’t feel angry at all. He doesn’t feel anything.
Pickles keeps going, slurring. “I told you to leave me alone! Go the fuck back downstairs. Piss off back to your room. I don’t want you up here. I don’t wanna see you.” His breath hitches in his throat.
“No,” Nathan says. He feels a little hollow, like a puppet. He’s not here entirely by his own devices. Something else brought him up here. And he gets it, he thinks. If he goes back down now, alone, it’s going to be the end. Of all of it. The whole band.
It’s can’t be the end, yet – it’s not the right time.
“Fucking can’t stand this shit,” Pickles continues, and he twists and unsteadily gets to his feet before Nathan catches his arm, and pulls him a little too hard away from the empty air. He spits another curse and stumbles off the ledge onto the rooftop. But he doesn’t go to take a shot at Nathan, just wobbles in the direction of the bottle that still has a couple of mouthfuls left in it. The problem is that he can’t fucking walk. He veers immediately to the left and goes onto his hands and knees, keeps leaning left, catches himself before he falls, and leans heavily again to the side.
“Spinning?” Nathan asks.
“Course it is,” Pickles hisses. Clearly struggling, he tries to crawl a little way and has to give up, resting his forehead in his hands, face close to the grimy concrete. Nathan comes over to try and pull him to his feet: he’s cold all the way through. Pickles lurches and stumbles and keeps murmuring obscenities, but he lacks the strength to really fight Nathan and in the end, despite shoving and scratching and swearing and a few weak kicks, he ends up getting half-dragged and half-carried back to their suite.
“Go to sleep,” Nathan tells him, dropping Pickles onto his back on his bed. Still mad, but with difficulty, he rights himself and reaches to the side table, and starts throwing things at Nathan. His aim’s way off, though, and the ambiguous sculpture hits the wall two feet from Nathan’s knee, breaking into a few pieces. The alarm clock doesn’t even get that far, and bounces off the end of the big bed.
Someone is knocking on the door and Nathan leaves the room. It’s hotel staff, saying they’ve had a message and is everything ok? He tells them it’s fine and to leave them alone. It seems like none of the others have been disturbed at all. In his own room, Nathan picks up his phone and sees about 60 missed calls and texts from Offdensen. Just in the last hour and a bit. Because he always knows when something’s happening. While Nathan scrolls through messages it starts to buzz again in his hand, and he answers.
"Nathan, I've been trying to get hold of you---"
He knows what it sounds like when Offdensen’s panicking, and trying very hard to not let it be noticeable.
"Yeah, I see that.”
"Is everything alright?"
Nathan isn’t sure if it is. He doesn’t know what to tell him. So he says "Yeah, it's fine." It’s a totally normal, three-in-the-morning phone call. Just checking in.
You could argue that it was fine. Nothing really unusual had taken place.
"Are you alright?"
"Yeah."
"Pickles?"
"Yeah, he's..." Nathan had heard more shuffling and thumping for a bit, but he’s quietened down a little now. "He's okay, I guess."
Charles pauses. "And the others? Has something happened?"
Nathan needed more time to process things, and he wasn’t sure he would want to express his thoughts even so.
“Nothing’s happened.”
"You're all fine?"
Charles. I think maybe Pickles was gonna jump. "Yeah, uh. Can I talk to you in the morning?"
"--Sure. Yes, of course. I apologize for disturbing you so late."
"It's fine. I was up," he says.
"Okay, well. Just ... Look out for each other, okay?"
"Yeah."
"Goodnight."
"Night."
Pickles is sitting up when Nathan comes back in, his knees up, arms crossed, head down.
“You alright?”
"Nate,” he mumbles softly. “I'm gonna hurl.”
“Yeah.” He passes him a bin and Pickles chucks like it’s going out of style. Touching his back, still cold despite the sweat that’s gathering at his brow and starting to soak into his shirt at the base of his spine.
“Don’t feel good.”
“I know, man.”
Later, when he talks with Charles, in person – not on the phone that next morning, he decides he has nothing to say about the whole thing anyway – Nathan casually asks can he make sure their next hotel doesn’t have roof access, or that it’s properly locked, or whatever. Charles goes pretty still then. Looks like he wants to ask why.
Nathan. What makes you say that? Why would that be particularly important? And Nathan would shrug and say no reason.
But he doesn’t ask. He nods curtly, yes. Nathan thinks that Charles is pretty clever. He can figure things out on his own.