Chapter Text
"Oooh, you make me live... whenever this world is cruel to me--"
--Freddie paused the music and hummed, his eyes trained methodically soundboards. He and Deaky have been hunched over the soundboards for at least an hour now, trying to root out any imperfection for the track. Usually, John would be on the couch, leaning back leisurely and pretending to listen to Roger. However, John felt a special connection to the song-- He wrote it for his wife, Veronica (though she adamantly wished that he call her Ronnie), and he wanted it to be inarguably perfect when it came out. Freddie was simply up here because he was a natural perfectionist.
"Do I sound good? I don't sound very good, do I?" Freddie murmurs, breaking the pensive silence. His face depicted neither embarrassment nor pride. "Can I go back in? I'll record it again."
"You sound fine." Roger says drily, without managing to look up from his magazine.
They decided that it would be best to do some recording at night. If decided meant that all of them forgot about recording after excitedly running around the farm like a bunch of little boys and listening to old Jimi Hendrix tracks while Freddie informs you that he's totally not crying but that something got in his eye, and then feeling guilty about not doing any recording for the whole day and which causes you to start recording at 12:09 in the morning.
John makes a flat 'hmm' noise, leaning on his palm like some sort of philosopher. John was always quieter, though when he was thinking about music, no one could get him out of his little headspace.
Freddie stood with his arms crossed for a few more exceeding moments before promptly clapping his hands as if to wake everyone up from their apparent fatigue. "Well, I'm going in to record one more time, so rise and shine."
A collective groan chorused from all three other members of the group.
"Oh please. That's the price of being a musician, darl--" The rest of Freddie's sentence was cut off by the jarring sound of an unholy scream that could leave even the most stoic of people frazzled. Roger bumped his head on the couch in shock.
"What on Earth are you on about, Fred?" Brian tensed, his eyes wide from the sudden scream.
"Spider! There's a spider by the headset!" Freddie shrieked, now a great distance away from the dashboard. Deaky merely wheeled his rolling chair a foot or two back.
"Oh for God's sake, it's a bloody farm! You should be ready for a little bug here and there." John said, snorting. Roger let out a little snicker in reply.
"Fred, you have any other fears you need to tell us about? The dark? Heights? The company of a woman?" Roger taunts, but Freddie just shrieks ever the louder.
"It moved! It's moving! It can see me!" Freddie cried, now heedlessly grabbing onto Brian's jacket as protection.
"Bloody hell. It's just a spider," Brian says, rolling up his magazine to go kill it. "but if it's that much of a burden, then I'll kill it for you."
Brian saunters over to the area where Freddie anxiously pointed toward. His eye scans the soundboard for a moment until he comes in contact (with all eight eyes) of the spider. It was a great, monstrous thing that Brian couldn't fully appreciate from where he was sitting down. The spider's legs were twitching close to him, and he stood in fear until it crawled a few more inches toward him. Brian threw Roger's magazine (his weapon of choice) to the ground and booked it to the exit.
"Nope. Nope. Nope. Not today, Satan." Brian murmured to himself as he shut the door to the recording studio.
"You can't leave us with this... thing! Brian, you come back here--"
"He's halfway across the field." Deaky stated, looking longingly out the window.
"...Motherfucker." Freddie sighed.
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"Okay, maybe if we just don't make any sudden movements, we can book it out of here." Freddie stated throughout deep breaths.
Roger, evidently not listening, threw a throw pillow at the creature, triumphantly bellowing: "DIE DEMON SPIDER!"
The spider, instead of dying, responded by jumping on the floor and swiftly crawling around.
From that moment on, it was chaos.
Roger kept tossing whatever was in closest proximity to him at the spider; vinyl, cushions, glasses of water, his hat, Deaky's hat... you name it. Freddie was quite audibly crying above the ground on one of the speakers, babbling nearly anything, to be honest. 'I can't die yet, I haven't even got to shag Burt Reynolds!', 'If I had just minded my own fucking business I would've never been in this stupid band anyway.', or 'Take Roger instead! Blondes taste better!'. John seemed to be writing a letter, as he stood on a chair. Maybe it was to Ronnie, or maybe his mother. He never clarified.
Crash!
The room fell silent for a moment. Roger seemed to have thrown one of his snare drums, which crackled as it slammed right atop the spider. Freddie, John, and Roger all exchanged glances. Nobody was going to remove the drum. Nobody was going to tell anybody about what repulsive creature lived below. Maybe it would die of starvation and by the time it passed, everyone would have already forgotten it.
They were simply going to walk out, and never speak a word of this again.
And that's what they did.
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It wasn't until tomorrow afternoon that they finished the single.
The song, lovingly deemed "You're my Best Friend" delighted John and his wife, and even Freddie was proud of it too. It was a sweet little tune that was a wonderful way to start the long recording process of the rest of the album. The four members of Queen re-entered the music studio, ready to record their next song.
"So you say it's called I'm in Love with my Car...?" Brian snorts, skeptically. Roger nods enthusiastically.
John folds his arms and huffs. "He showed me the lyrics last night. It's weird, even for Roger weird." Freddie lets out a loud laugh at that.
Roger took offense to Deaky's remark, though his enthusiasm remained. He swung open the door and skipped over to his drum set as if he were a child on Christmas Day. He grabbed his drumsticks, only to find the absence of a snare drum.
"Hey, anyone knows where my snare drum would be?" Roger said absentmindedly.
Freddie eyes the snare drum lying ominously on the ground from yesterday. It hasn't moved an inch. Freddie cringes at the thought of that spider being secretly alive. What would it do? Would it jump? Would it eat Brian? "Rog, darling, how about you check the back for a spare?"
Brian picked up his guitar with a grunt and tuned the squawking instrument into it's normal, melodic self. "Why don't we just use the one on the floor right there?"
John and Freddie immediately pivoted at the sound of that, scurrying toward the drum.
"Brian, NO--"