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Andrew liked to watch Fletcher move. In silence and still, in trembling moments after final chords, in breathless anger and slamming violence, Fletcher was something otherworldly. Sometimes, Andrew mused, it was like being underwater. Time slowed and shimmered and all that you really could hear was the faint crash of drums and the wailing of trumpets. Holding them all in his hands in front of the room was Fletcher; hazy and out of focus, but in a tumult of constant motion. Everyone was held, tiny, in his palms, and if anything happened it all would stop in a cacophony of screeching and rolling terror. Fletcher would hold them so achingly still, and every tiny shift in his body seemed to scream, howl for Andrew run, run, run, before those eyes settle on you-
It was sort of funny, in a way. To an outsider, to someone passing by the music room during a rehearsal, what did they see? Sad, skinny college students caught up in some unknown euphoria of music making, and the man in the front of the room rapidly waving his arms as if he were the one projecting the sound. Andrew longed to disconnect from the room, from his body, and watch Fletcher from the eyes of someone not terrified of him. It would be a relief. Fletcher would be nothing but a man. Maybe Andrew could laugh at him, could poke fun at his age, at his weird habits and mannerisms.
In reality, Andrew could never be a stranger to Fletcher, not even in passing fantasy. Didn't he know the brutality and terror of the angles in that face? Didn't he know that when those eyes rested on you, fight or flight sputtered to life? Maybe in the beginning, Andrew hadn't realized the dangerous gravity of his director, but he was oh so quick to find out. Fletcher lulled him into a sense of security, of understanding, on the first day of practice. He asked gentle questions you’d expect an old music professor to ask. Andrew had loosened up and given information away easily, gladly.
The conversation ended with Fletcher’s hand warm on his shoulder and a smile kind enough to melt the last anxiety in Andrew’s body. He went into practice with the naiveté of the uninformed, and played the drums when it was his time. Then hell burst out from Fletcher’s mouth and caught Andrew like a rabbit in the tomcat’s paws. All the soft spots he’d shown earlier, the tender shame of his father’s failure as a writer, his own youth and unhappiness, were hit and hit hard.
Andrew just couldn't get the tempo right, and expected to be kicked out right then and there, but instead Fletcher threw a chair at his head. Andrew ducked, scrambled and breathless, looking up from the sprawled kit with the vague hope that maybe the chair was a mistake. Fletcher asked him, icy cold and growing colder, dragging or rushing the tempo ? Then slapped Andrew smartly across the cheek for every stutter. Andrew was stunned. His body betrayed him and left him a stuttering, tearful mess, crumbled under the tremendous weight of Fletcher’s wrath. So when practice ended, he went home, and everything changed. There was no time for naiveté in Fletcher’s world. There were only the best, and the weak were verbally gutted time and time again. The weak knew the shape of Fletcher’s hand intimately, knew when to flinch away. Or maybe it was just Andrew.
Andrew wasn't very good at dealing with fear in general. He wasn't an athlete, ready to be injured for the sport. He wasn't a writer, face to face with demons from his own mind. Andrew just played the drums. He liked jazz. He liked eating Gushers while staring out the bus window. Andrew was young and open, a fresh wound on the world, a paper cut.
Fletcher was a gaping, violent, blood-red slash. He was ancient and diseased, and swallowed all the air around him until you couldn't breathe. He was kind to children and taught music theory classes. He threw cymbals and chairs at Andrew’s head and left hand prints on his cheeks. Dichotomy, dissonance. Fletcher was just a man, Oh, but he wasn't just a man. He was a monster shifting beneath human flesh, and one day in the certain future when Andrew screwed up the tempo again, the monster would come clawing out and Fletcher wouldn't just throw chairs. Fletcher would kill him. Andrew knew it deep in the marrow of his bones, that one day he was going to be eaten alive by his director and all that would be left was his sad bloodstains on the drum kit.
It made Andrew want to scream, when the terror and adrenaline started to swirl in his belly like a sick perversion of excitement. No one else knew how empty his skin was, after Fletcher hit him. Not right , he had said. Play better. Do you know how easily I could replace you?
No one else curled in on themselves in shame when Fletcher looked at them. The opposite happened, actually. Musicians were happy to bask in the light of him. They introduced small children like passing moons, and Fletcher offered candy from giant hands and let them orbit him for a while. He gave praise and eye-crinkling smiles easily, and told them to grow up and play in his band one day. Come see me when you’re all grown up, okay? The tiny orbiting moons giggled and felt warm, before spinning away to their parents to continue on. Fletcher stood and groaned from the strain on his knees, and only minutes later screamed obscenities into Andrew’s face until the world dissolved around the edges and Andrew felt his head start to throb.
Yet.
Andrew liked to watch Fletcher move. He liked watching Fletcher’s throat constrict and shiver before he spoke. He liked watching his hands flow with the music. He liked when Fletcher was pleased with the performance and the hidden smile-lines suddenly flickered across his face. There was a lot Andrew liked about him, despite the violence so regularly given. Still, Andrew dreamt of picking up a cymbal, slamming it onto Fletcher’s head, and watching him shudder and fall like an ancient oak from the axe.
It was ridiculous. It was unnecessarily violent. Andrew played the drums, and Fletcher directed him. In the practice room at the end of the hall they existed together, in constant, vibrant tension. Sometimes, after sitting at his drum kit for hours of Fletcher’s drilling, Andrew could almost see his director in double. There was a ghostly split, and if Andrew squinted just so from under his sweaty bangs, he could see another version of Fletcher in the room. This version was diminutive in the background, slinking on the edges of vision. The double’s eyes pierced him, and Andrew felt himself hesitate before crashing back to the drums under his hands, and Fletcher’s booming voice telling him to keep tempo.
There was a sinking feeling in Andrew’s body as he continued on, in his orbital decay around Fletcher. The abuse he shouldered, in the tiny hope that maybe he was special, maybe he was great, because Fletcher pushed him so hard, started to feel heavier. In the split second moments after a song was finished, in the cut off vibrato of Fletcher’s hands, Andrew made eye-contact with his director. The eyes that stared back were bright and terrifyingly empty, and Andrew felt the familiar twinge of fear shudder down his spine. He couldn't last forever, beneath the heavy weight of expectation. He would have to learn to move with Fletcher, if was ever going to escape.
How long would he spend nights hunched over his drum kit, pounding faster and faster times until his hands bled? The music flashed in Andrew’s head before he went to sleep and came shivering back into his thoughts as soon as he woke up. When he wasn't lost in the torturous rhythm of his music, he was lost. There was only the drums, Andrew, and Fletcher holding them together. Everything else was a mournful and intangible dream.
Without Fletcher, Andrew would be nothing. He would still be in the dregs of the lower band, tearing at scraps of attention from the old director, bored and listless. There was no challenge in it, no glory. Andrew would rot there until he dropped out of college and ended up a lump in his father’s basement.
If Andrew didn't succeed in Fletcher’s band, if he let himself fail, there would be no way to become someone Great. There would only be scars on his hand and the slouch in his shoulders to speak of his time of a drummer. But was it worth it? Was his own desire to be someone memorable worth the pain of Fletcher’s words bouncing in his skull?
His father told him over dinner that Andrew could leave. Quietly, in that sad voice he had said why don’t you just let it go? All that Andrew could do in reply was dig his fingers into the wounds on his hands and shake his head. No one understood, I have to prove that I’m worth it, worth Fletcher’s time-
If he told the school that Fletcher was hitting him, no one would believe him. The school paid good money to keep such a famous musician in house, to have his name on plaques outside. No one else in the band would vouch for him, would confirm the source of the faint bruises along his jaw.
No, Andrew was in until the end. He would let his hands bleed like water, and offer up everything he could to Fletcher. If the moment came, and he was eaten up, there was no point worrying. Andrew was done wondering if he ever would be someone Great. He either would be, or die trying.
If he couldn't get there, one thing was certain: Andrew was taking Fletcher down with him.