Chapter Text
The show was over, finally.
He sat at the mirror in his dressing room, staring dully at his reflection.
It wasn’t any one thing, really. It wasn’t that he objected to makeup or jewelry or hair dye. He’d worn all those things voluntarily before now, just not to this degree, or in these colors.
It was just that this...didn’t feel like his face anymore.
“Killer show tonight, Luke!” Jagged boomed, bursting through the door.
“Luka,” Luka murmured under his breath, but he knew Jagged didn’t hear.
“The lighting effect on that jacket was killer, you looked fantastic! Now that was rock ‘n roll.”
That had been ridiculous. Luka was lucky he’d even hit the right chord in the dark, dazzled by the LED tubes sewn into his jacket. Though he’d had to prove he could do it to keep Bob Roth from playing a recording instead. Luka would rather have died.
“And you played the hell out of that set!”
Luka couldn’t handle anymore.
“Dad,” he said, and though his voice wasn’t strong, Jagged stopped talking. Luka took a deep breath, and lifted a trembling hand to lay it on top of the stack of papers next to him. “I’m not signing the contract.”
Jagged sucked in a sharp breath, and paused for a moment before he finally said, with very un-Jagged-like gentleness, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to get any more concessions than we have, son.” He came up behind Luka, putting his hands on Luka’s shoulders and looking at him in the mirror. Luka’s hand curled into a fist. Look at me , he wanted to say. Not him . “Maybe two more seasons,” Jagged urged, a hint of pleading in in his voice, and Luka could see in the way his brow pinched that he knew what Luka was about to say. “You just have to hang in there.
Luka took another steadying breath. “I can’t do this for two more years, Dad. I think I can hold out to the end of the current contract, but that’s it. I can’t—” His voice broke and he swallowed. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be him anymore.” He gestured at his reflection.
He saw Jagged’s lips press together, and waited for the usual argument. He’s you, Luka . There’s no difference except what you imagine there to be. Instead Jagged put his hands on Luka’s chair, and turned it around until Luka’s back was to the mirror, and crouched down until they were eye to eye. “Okay, son,” he said, and put his hand on Luka’s shoulder. “Okay, Luka .”
Luka leaned forward impulsively and hugged the older man. Jagged patted his back, and didn’t say anything about the way Luka’s shoulders shook under his hand, nor the smudge of makeup on the shoulder of his jacket.
When Luka sat back up, Jagged slapped his knee and then straightened. “All right, let’s figure out how to get you through the rest of this tour. Bob’s not going to like this, and he’s going to pull every dirty trick he can think of to get you back on stage, so we need to make sure we’re covering ourselves. I’ll get Penny.”
Luka passed the next few months in some kind of fugue state. He tried to pull himself together for his performances—he owed his fans that much at least—but the only thing really clear to him was the fight over the music he had been writing for his next album. It galled him, but eventually Luka agreed to sign the rights over to Roth Records in exchange for severing his contract without further penalty. He probably could have taken the label to court, but not only would that have most likely closed any future doors for him in the industry, it would have meant months of legal battles and being hounded by the press, and by that time Luka was just ready to go home.
The night before he left, Jagged’s stylist cut his hair as a farewell favor, shaving off all the colored tips to leave plain black instead. Luka put plain black studs in his ears and swapped clothes with the least trendy intern he could find that was about his size. There was no disguising his guitar case and he couldn’t bear to leave it behind, even to be shipped later, so he packed the rest of his belongings in a duffel bag and slung it on his back over the case, hoping it would disguise enough of it.
He was careful to act normal when he left. He kept his face slightly averted from the crowd of press, but otherwise, he tried to act like any other label employee heading home from a late night at work. His lips twisted in a wry smile when it seemed like he’d gotten away with it. It just went to prove his point, that Luke Stone and Luka Couffaine had become two such radically different people that no one even saw the real him anymore.
Luka got on the bus—a regular public transit bus, with cramped seats in tight rows and barely enough room to stow his guitar in the luggage rack—and took a deep breath, leaning his head against the window as he watched the city slide past. He didn’t feel as relieved as he expected...but he supposed that would come with time.