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The whole thing starts because Alfons is a dork and a loser who somehow managed to get the date wrong.
Russell, whose cashier shifts overlap with his a statistically improbable eighty-five percent of the time, has been raving about this band called The Raging Bobcats for almost three months straight. For the last week or two, he’s been raving specifically about how the one time he has to go out of town for a family reunion, that’s the weekend they pick to do a show in his “number-one-fave” venue.
This is the perfect opportunity, of course, to go see them perform without Russell breathing down Alfons’s neck, telling him what to think and waiting for him to nod obligingly. He can develop his own opinion, and if it’s unfavorable, he’ll be prepared to couch his comments to Russell for the rest of eternity… or until the guy gets bored and moves on to a new “ultra-best-ever” group as soon as someone with an equally bizarre band name crawls out of the mud onto the music scene.
Alfons revels in the little victories, is all.
He gets his first clue that something is not fine, dandy, and hunky-dory as he’s heading in towards the door adorned (adoorned?) by a neon sign reading Office of the Box. All of the other people heading in towards the door in question are wearing torn-up jeans and some combination of leather, narrow chains, and silver spikes.
There are a few possible explanations for this phenomenon. The first is that Russell is secretly a crackhead who thinks that “indie” actually means “punk-screamo-hardcore-something”, and has been billing his taste incorrectly for the duration of their acquaintance. The second is that maybe all of these intimidating people are here for a band that’s performing after The Raging Bobcats, and they’ve just arrived early to get a start on politely browsing merchandise, enjoying some tame alcoholic drinks, and logistically planning out the contours of their moshpit for later in the evening. The third…
…the third doesn’t bear thinking about, and Alfons’s dodging route is shuttling him in through the door as he attempts to avoid getting trampled to death by a girl with half a dozen nose-rings who looks like she could crush an empire under her steel-toed boots, and a guy whose hair is more unicorn horn than mohawk and is dyed an interesting shade of red that’s probably titled blood of virgins.
Alfons doesn’t think the fact that he’s not a virgin is going to hold much sway around here. Especially since he’s wearing a cardigan. Why is no one else wearing a cardigan? The Raging Bobcats themselves must be wearing cardigans; he’ll just hand over his money to the cashier guy and redeem his ticket (which comes with some free bonus crumbs from the ticket guy’s sandwich) and creep down the hall past the amused-looking bouncers and scope out the crowd for someone who doesn’t look like they advocate for anarchy on a regular basis.
When he’s breached the main concert room, his heart sinks down into his Converse and stays there. The Converse might save his life, though; if he doodles “FUCK DA POLICE” on them with a Sharpie in the next twelve seconds, there’s a chance they might help him blend in enough to escape out the fire door without getting pummeled into pulp.
This can’t be right. Alfons spins in a slow, hopeless circle searching for someone, anyone, who isn’t Really, Really Intense. There is no one. In abjection he gazes down at the half-crumpled ticket in his hands.
It does not say “The Raging Bobcats”. It also does not say “Haha, Punk’d Your Dumb Ass, N00b!”, which was his next guess. It says “Northern Wall”.
Alfons was not born with an especially apt internal compass, but he’s fairly certain that the northern wall is the one on which they hang the ten-thousand T-shirts, of which some dozen are purportedly available for purchase at any given time. The eastern wall, then, is the one with the stage.
And the burgeoning baby moshpit between him and the Emergency Exit Only door.
Alfons is fairly sure that this qualifies as an emergency. Oh, God. Oh, God; oh, God; oh, God.
He has to stay calm. He can survive this. If he just keeps out of the way, no one will find him actively offensive enough to be worth an assault and battery charge, and they’ll leave him alone—right? As long as he’s not aggressively pathetic and nerdy and hispter-ish in everybody’s face, they’ll just curl their pierced lips at him and stomp on by—won’t they?
He feels like a lamb at a wolf convention that forgot to cater lunch.
Right as he retreats into a little corner by the T-shirt sales desk, there’s a flourish on the drums, and he looks up, and everyone cheers, and he almost jumps out of his skin, because it sounds exactly like the dinosaur FX roars in “Jurassic Park”. That is not natural and probably not safe.
But as he’s gazing up at the stage area in resigned terror, bracing his ears for the miserable, bleeding torment of their eary little lives… the guy with the guitar is gazing back.
It’s hard to see too much clearly from this distance, but he’s got pale hair in a ponytail and dark skin and strange dark eyes, and he is an absolute stud. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and fit and has a strong jaw and great hands, which are skimming up the neck of the guitar so smoothly that Alfons’s knees instantaneously turn to Jell-O. He tilts a secretive little smile at Alfons—at Alfons—and then he winks.
There will be no peace in Alfons’s universe after this. He should resent that. He should hate Mr. Gorgeous and Probably Also Talented But That Remains to Be Seen for a future of disjointed, abstract sex dreams and awkward mornings. He should despise the ridiculously fine specimen of humanity hiking a foot up onto the nearest speaker box and arching a pale eyebrow at him—at him—for the thousand hopeless baby fantasies spawning in the back of his brain, already wailing for attention and anticipating their own slow, tragic deaths.
Instead he tries to keep his heart still by force of will alone and manages a shaky smile back.
As it turns out, the small cadre of hardcore people (one of whom is, as previously noted, distinctly hunky-dory) known as Northern Wall are actually pretty… good. It’s not really the kind of music Alfons usually likes, but he’s genuinely enjoying listening to it—and every now and again, he gets that tingle of a melody or a moment or a lyric that just ripples right through him and burrows under his skin. And the super-hot guitarist is really something; he’s practically carrying on a threesome with the music and his guitar right there on the stage, in front of everybody—it honestly borders on pornographic, and Alfons can barely breathe.
It’s not even just the hot guitarist, though—their lead singer is a Valkyrie, and the four of them work like interlocking pieces of a single machine, and this band is… well, shit. They’re awesome.
The extremely scary woman with the long blonde hair has an amazing set of pipes, too, when she’s not just using them to scream at a register that would probably take down aircraft. Towards the end of the set, the moshing slows, and they do this ballad song—it’s quiet, and raw, and unlike anything else they’ve played so far, and as talented as the hot guitarist is, his part should have been on a piano for this one. The cell phones come out and up and start swaying back and forth, and Alfons fumbles for his lighter, hoping someone was smart enough to disable the smoke detector in preparation for moments like this.
The blonde sings Go on and play the victim; I know it’s your favorite game—but everything we fought against together, you became, and the guitarist looks directly at Alfons again, and the shiver gets stuck halfway down his spine and just trembles there, aching, so that his hand holding the lighter shakes.
The moment the set is over, he books it out and down the hall, and the guy at the ticket desk waves at him frantically. “Hey, jeez—don’t you want your stamp?”
If he doesn’t get the hand stamp, he can’t come back. If he does, then… he can postpone the decision until after he’s had a desperately-needed infusion of nicotine and night air.
“Sure,” he says, holding his hand out, “sorry—thanks—”
The guy rolls his eyes, but then there’s an influx of hardcore people pushing their wrist cuffs out of the way to make more stamp space, and Alfons flees the premises as fast as he can go.
Following the logic that other people will probably loiter around the front of the joint and judge him if he stays close to the door, he scrambles around the nearest corner and ducks into a disturbingly dank little alleyway off to the side. There’s a dumpster further down, but it’s far enough off that the smell isn’t overpowering from here, and there’s a hell of a lot of shadow to hide in.
Jesus, what’s he going to do? He kind of wants to go back and listen to the rest, but—well, he also wants to live to turn nineteen. On days he’s feeling ambitious, he even sets his sights on twenty-one.
He fumbles out a cigarette, fumbles out his lighter, fumbles to apply the latter to the former, fumbles the latter back into a pocket, and takes a deep breath followed by a deep drag. He doesn’t have to decide yet. And besides, he can always just stalk Northern Wall across the far reaches of the internet and keep track of them that way; it’s not like this is the only chance he’ll ever have to revel in the way they make a heretofore unpalatable genre so beautiful—
A door opens down the wall, and he almost has a heart attack—and, worse, almost drops the cigarette into one of the questionable pools of liquid Something not nearly far enough from his shoes.
“Got it,” a very pleasant voice says. A shoe appears in the crack of light. “Okay. Man, keep your pants on; I’ll be right back.”
Alfons should move—should run, really. There are other alleys. The city has a thousand unsafe hiding spots. Any of them would be better than here. He should make a break for it. If only he weren’t frozen with mortification and rooted to the spot.
And then… the guitar guy slips through the crack in the door, sticking a piece of duct tape over the mechanism on the lock. He glances up from his probably-illegal handiwork, sees Alfons standing there like an idiot and clutching his cigarette like it’s a child’s teddy bear, blinks in surprise, and… grins.
“Hey,” he says. “S’up.”
All of Alfons’s vital systems are rapidly failing. He tries to swallow, meets limited success, and scrounges around in his throat for the remainder of his voice. “…h-hi.”
Hot Guitarist Guy lets the door fall shut. The only light in this narrow prison of terrifying social interaction is the flickering streetlamp a little ways down the sidewalk and the tiny embers at the end of Alfons’s cigarette. His heart is almost as avid a drummer as the guy with the really long braid and the really strange mustache.
Hot Guitarist Guy pats at the pockets of his jeans, which are tight enough to leave very little to the imagination. He casts a mournful look down at his unfiltered cigarette, then at the back at the door, and then he gives Alfons an apologetic grin. “You got a light?”
“Sure,” Alfons’s voice says without his permission. His hands then completely fail to function, and he somehow forgets how fingers, pockets, and objects work all at once. Just as he’s starting to panic, Hot Guitarist Guy saunters close enough for Alfons to see that the odd dark eyes are red, and his brain explodes.
It is a marvel of modern medicine that he’s still on his feet.
He’s about to lose his cigarette again. One hand instinctively darts up to steady it as his mouth wobbles, and his face commences attempting to incinerate itself.
“You okay?” the guy asks softly, reaching out towards his shoulder.
OhGodhe’sgoingtodie.
“Yeah,” he says, sounding faint to his own ears, fighting not to tremble with anticipation of that hovering almost-touch— “J-just… long day. Y’know.”
Hot Guitarist Guy gives him a huge, cheesy grin. It’s the sort of giant dork gesture that should make him severely unattractive, except instead Alfons’s heart melts into fondue.
“Those hacks onstage can’t be making it any better,” Hot Guitarist Guy says.
It’s fortunate that all of the blood in Alfons’s body is currently localized in his flaming cheeks, because this guy is really just… too… much. “Well, I—I mean, I really like you guys. I d-didn’t think I would, but… I meant to come tomorrow. I only ended up here tonight on accident.”
Very, very gently, Hot Guitarist Guy catches Alfons’s wrist and holds it still. His hand is so fucking warm. His face is so fucking close. He lights his cigarette off of the end of Alfons’s, and his eyes smolder more than the paper does.
“I’m glad you did,” he says.
Alfons can’t even find enough air in his lungs to squeak out a Me, too with, so he just smiles stupidly.
“We’re back next Saturday,” the guy says. “You should come. I’ll comp you.”
“Can’t,” Alfons ekes out. It feels like he’s freezing to death and burning up at the same time, which is disconcerting and strange and wonderful and making it even harder not to stare into Hot Guitarist’s eyes. “I’m working all weekend.”
“Oh,” Hot Guitarist Guy says, and he looks so genuinely disappointed that—that it’s just—
“Stop by,” Alfons says. “I’ll comp you some curry or something.” The wildfire in his face is spreading to the tips of his ears and down his throat. Reporters are grimly telling the cameramen that there will be no survivors. “Um. If… you like… curry. Um.”
“I love it,” the guy says, grinning. “Where’s the place? I’ll be there.”
To the victor, the spoils; to the gutsy the glory; to the fearless doppelgänger of Alfons Heiderich that leads a parallel but much braver version of his own life in his head…
“Do you have a smartphone?” he asks. “I can just text you the address, and then you can map it from wherever you are.”
“It’s inside,” the guy says, gesturing back towards the stage door, “but let me give you my number.”
Alfons’s thumbs don’t seem to want to find the right letters, but he doesn’t even care—he is a conqueror, just for tonight.