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"What's that one?"
"Hmm?"
Brian's nose is all but buried in the strings of the Red Special. She's been uncooperative all day, groaning like a gremlin instead of singing like an angel and somehow managing to look stroppy while doing it despite not having a face. He's been giving her a severe reprimand, in the form of tuning and retuning while fairy-dusting his muttered soliloquy with profanities. If he listens closely enough (and deprives himself of enough sleep - no arduous task on the recording schedule they've found themselves occupying) Brian can almost hear her whining that she's not doing a bad job considering she's a jumble of knitting needles and radiator gauges.
When he doesn't look up immediately, Freddie jabs him in the ribs. He bats away the hand with an annoyed grunt as Freddie points towards the open window, black-painted fingernail glinting under the buzzing ceiling lights.
"That star, what is it?"
Brian blinks and wrinkles his nose as his eyes adjust to distance work. Once the sky saturates into focus, he feels a small smile settle across his lips.
"The massive one, I assume?"
Freddie nods, eyes glistening in anticipation.
"Sirius. Biggest and brightest in the night sky."
Freddie hums, leaning back contentedly as the sound leaves him. Brian watches curiously as the left side of his mouth begins to grin and then the other joins in. He sits up again, and cups his hand over Brian's jaw. His hand is warm and the touch feather-light.
"That's us," Freddie stage whispers, and his breath is warm on Brian's nose, "That's Queen. The biggest and brightest."
Brian chuckles breathily and guides Freddie's hand away from his jaw. The fingers latch onto his own and he doesn't pull them away.
(Something uneasy is settling in, nestling behind his left ear.)
"That's what you want us to be is it? The biggest and brightest?"
Freddie casts him a funny look, as though he'd said he was a banana tree. "Of course, love. Don't you?"
(Brian is trying not to think about supernovae. About how brightly they shine and how quickly they burn out.)
He runs his tongue over right canine and carefully schools his face into a warm smile.
"Yeah. Yeah, course I do."
***
It's John's turn in the box, recording a bass line where Brian had originally written a guitar solo. The pushback was new from him, though retrospectively it had been simmering for a while - snark bound in passive indifference. His objection was calm, cool, dignified. Where Roger would have thrown something and Freddie flounced until he got his way, John supplied a simple, "No. There's going to be a bass line there."
He'd smiled innocently as a chill settled across the room.
Brian was impressed.
With little to do for a while, Brian had folded himself into a window seat (nestled in a tangle of wires that he was sure someone must know the use for) to watch the rain fall onto the street outside.
Dragging his finger down the condensation forming on the glass, he finds himself thinking about the solar system, and about the band.
Despite his chosen moniker, Freddie isn't Mercury; that's Roger. Small and rapid, going at everything he does at a hundred miles an hour. Always closest to the biggest, brightest thing in the vicinity and warmed by the effect of being so.
Freddie is Saturn, adorned with golden rings, and feather light. Striking, imposing, and oh so different to everyone around him yet managing to slot in seamlessly; Saturn never looks out of place in the night sky.
John is Venus. Unassuming from the outside - Earth-like from all accounts - but hiding a multitude of hidden depths. The hottest surface temperature, an anti-clockwise orbit, the second brightest object in the night sky. Underestimate Venus at your peril.
Brian wonders what he is. He supposes it depends what day it was. Some days he is Mars, solid and steadfast and others he is Jupiter, volatile with a storm brewing. He's just glad not to be Pluto. Poor, cold Pluto always on the verge of not being let in.
As for the gravitational force that binds them all together... Well that's a mystery. Because they shouldn't work. The potential for any two (or three, or four) of their personalities to clash is gargantuan. What they have should be impossible. They shouldn't be able to work together, they shouldn't be able to produce anything decent and they certainly shouldn't love each other like brothers while they're at it.
Roger barrels through the door, yelling something about breaking sticks and absent pay checks, and launches himself enthusiastically into Brian's lap. They shriek in a thrilling two part harmony as they tumble to the floor. Freddie cackles as he follows and spreads himself on top of them - Roger gets a foot up his nose and spits out a "Fuck you!" around a laugh. Someone bellows "Mind the equipment!" from the box as John completes the pile, and they all laugh raucously, sleep deprivation and euphoria at the sheer magnitude of the sound that they're managing to create turning them into children.
They lie like that for an indeterminate amount of time, giggling like schoolgirls, and what they have doesn't seem so impossible anymore.
***
Sometimes, Brian gets lost in a starless patch of sky.
His entire world becomes his bed, the air around him grows stale and stagnant, and all thoughts that aren't about the nothingness that is his own personal little universe vacated.
He is morose by nature, and has convinced himself that these days - which are fine, because they are few and far between - are just an extension of that.
Roger is masterful at ignoring the problem. He perches on the edge of his bed and babbles for hours about this and that. He gives him a hearty, jovial pat on the back as he leaves the room.
John also ignores the problem, but in a more practical way. He sprays the room with air freshener and leaves plates of toast on the nightstand, as though enough dry bread can mop up whatever this viscous, oily blackness is.
Freddie, as usual, is the bravest of the lot.
He kneels down beside Brain and coaxes him to open his eyes. When he does, laboriously and sluggishly, he gives him a sorrowful smile closer to making him feel something than anything since he'd fallen into the empty sky.
Freddie strokes his thumb down his knife-edge cheekbone. "Where've you gone, sweetheart?" He asks quietly, sound nestling between the molecules in the air rather than disturbing them.
"M'here," Brian mumbled, as his eyes slide shut again.
He hears Freddie sigh.
"No, love. I don't think you are."
***
He drags himself out of the blackness after a few days, as he always does. Although this time, the underlying... Odd feeling doesn't shift as it usually does.
He blames the American diet, which for a Vegetarian is mostly fries (not even chips, Brian. Fries) and floppy fast-food lettuce. He gives this excuse to John, whose soft features are painted with concern after he'd had a dizzy spell at a sound check and had to lie on the floor.
One morning, he awakes feeling worse. A lot worse. His body doesn't feel like his own - he feels like he doesn't fit in it, and he's going to burst out without warning.
Every cell in his leaden body screams as he drags it towards the en-suite bathroom. When he sees himself in the mirror, he feels bile rise in his throat. He was right, his body isn't his own. This is some terrible caricature of him. Gaunt. Half dead. Yellow.
He doesn't remember passing out, but he must have, because he opens his eyes and he's on the floor, with Freddie above him talking rapidly to someone else that he can't make out.
The rest of his senses catch up, and his nerve endings alight. the pain the pain the pain the pain the pain the pain the pain the pain. It knocks every molecule of breath out of him and a noise like a stalling engine sounds at the back of his throat.
Freddie's hand is in his hair in an instant, twisting strands around his fingertips and gently stroking his thumb up and down his forehead.
"You're under the weather, darling," he says softly, breath warm against Brian's ear. "But no mind, you're going to be right as rain before you know it."
He wants to believe Freddie, he does. But he feels like a human bruise, an otherwise worthless vessel for agony, a rotting fruit, a ruin on legs. He lets the pain wash over him, bathing him in blood left over from the Biblical plague. He begins to cry silently, and he's not certain that all of the tears on his cheek are his.
Spots of light begin to cloud his vision and he drifts again.
Under the stars.
Always the fucking stars.
***
It had been with misty, tired eyes that Brian had told Roger about event horizons. His bare feet had been pressed against the glass of their stale-smelling tour bus, his long arms folded into the small of his back. He was stretched out (or as stretched out as he could possibly be with his willow-tree body) across the back row of seats. On the row in front, Freddie was curled up like one of his beloved cats, half in Roger's lap and half unconsciously tumbling out of it. John's head was bouncing against the front window in the passenger seat as he dozed, arms crossed across his midriff and lips set into a pout.
Roger hadn't really been listening and Brian knew it. He was rhapsodising mostly to the inky sky and its starry pinpricks, reminding them that he hadn't forgotten about them in his world-conquering plight. Imploring them to let him back in if this mad, wonderful thing that they had going didn't work out.
The plastic chair is as hard as a stick of Brighton rock and cold against his back. His right hand is wrapped around Brian's and his left tangled in his hair. He screws his eyes up to stop the tears from falling - they've all cried that night, but the time for tears is over. Their only chance is to be a tight, strong unit.
He wills himself to remember about event horizons. 'Black holes,' his mind mutters. They're to do with black holes. They're the point at which nothing can be done. If something is sucked in, it can't be sucked out again. It's gone, it's finished. It's past the point of no return.
Brian's liver is dying. Brian's arm is rotting from the inside out. Brian is pale, Brian is skin and bone, Brian looks like a corpse lying in the hospital bed.
An event horizon is of course, theoretical. There is no proof that this point of no return exists.
A doctor whose hands are cold to the touch pry his fingers away from Brian's as he's wheeled away to surgery, and he prays to God that he hasn't found some.
***
He pulls through, though it's touch and go for a few terrifying hours, and all four of his limbs do too.
The road to recovery is longer than the asteroid belt, and more treacherous.
His guitar playing is something it has never been so far - it's sub-par - and there's something dangerous in his stomach that he ignores until he can't anymore and he's back in hospital being treated for a long-dormant ulcer.
The boys visit him dutifully, tell him that everything will be alright and that they'd sooner disband than replace him as guitarist. (And of course they dick around and piss off both him and the nurses. They're not complete saints.)
He's not completely reassured until he's back on his feet.
("Pluto," he whispered to John on a particularly bad night when the blackness had threatened to set in and a vigil was required, "I feel like fucking Pluto."
John stroked his thumb up and down his wrist and didn't ask.)
But then he is. He is reassured. Because the album is fucking spectacular and the world is finally beginning to agree.
He doesn't know it, but it's only a whisper of what they're going to be.
By the end of 1974, they're Sirius.
Soon, they're going to be every fucking star in the sky.