Chapter Text
It’s you.
Her breathing was labored, the words as distance as the iced-over look in her eyes. But in the silence of an ongoing tragedy, they echoed too loudly in his head. Billy slowly lowered his forehead to the barely conscious woman in his lap, his eyelids flickering shut as he focused on the sound of Daisy’s breath.
Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. One breath in, another millisecond she lived on.
And in those minutes before the doctors arrived, Billy walked the path of memories that led them to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor.
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A soul mark was no guarantee of happiness. Only immediate attraction, and a lifetime of shared pain.
Billy’s parents had soul marks, in fact. A shared squiggle of curved lines - one on his mother’s right bicep and its twin on his father’s left foot. His mother always joked to them that she got the short end of the stick.
“You know, I have to wear my love on my sleeve! Dad can just put a sock on it.”
He imagines that at one point, they must have been happy together. Maybe they met in school, blushing together under the bleachers for hours before heading home. Perhaps at their first jobs, where his mother was a secretary and his father handled the company books. Such details were trivial where true love was concerned.
Then, true love turned concerning. Little Billy and Graham shared a bedroom during those years, before they moved to downtown Pittsburgh. Their parents never argued very loudly; after all, what would the neighbors think?
But the furious muttering in the kitchen below rose through the vents that connected to the bedroom. He doesn’t remember too much about his childhood, but he knows that those conversations were dominated by their mother. Dad could barely sit upright after seven drinks, much less put up a coherent defense.
Graham would toss and turn from the moment his father came home on those nights. And while Billy wasn’t a nurturer, he wasn’t heartless either. His steps were silent against the parquet flooring as he slipped across the hall to the bathroom, filled a cup, and inched it towards Graham’s nightstand. By morning, the cup would be empty and returned to the kitchen sink.
Graham never talked about the water, never said thank you. But it never occurred to Billy to bring it up, either. Not when Graham was always in his corner, sticking to his side no matter what happened.
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Of course, his father never slunk too far away from the family he abandoned. Attraction wasn’t always romantic. Just a pitiful chain, yoking him to the periphery of the world he lost.
They didn’t get paid after Billy ruined the dance. But the opportunity to beat that fucker into the parking lot pavement was too tempting. It was a pity that Billy had people he needed to look out for now. His brother, his band - but most of all, Camila.
His soul mark appeared when he was 10, as it did for most people. It showed up in the crook of his elbow, an angular little design compared to his mother’s. After his dad left, he made sure to keep it covered up. Mom didn’t need to be reminded of a past that only ended too recently. When his classmates asked Billy to describe it, as all the middle schoolers played at finding their soul mate during recess, he would say that it looked like a lowercase y (although the angle where the two lines met was steeper on his).
And when he met a lovely girl with raven hair in the local laundromat, his soul mark was the last thing on his mind. Billy had no desire to repeat his parents’ tragedy - that was a one time play, a limited engagement. But he couldn’t help but feel that they’d known each other for hours after only their first conversation. Billy was pure motion, barreling through all obstacles without thought. An object in motion stays in motion until met by an opposing force; Camila was never passive or minced words. But she knew how and where to push, slowing him to a safer speed. An equilibrium, for a time.
Camila was a photographer, and an excellent one at that. Her favorite subject was Billy. Billy on his way to school in the morning, Billy as he’d come back.
Billy, shirtless, in the rays of the morning, after sneaking in through the backdoor at midnight. Billy, shirt on, playing with his band at the local bars.
It was in the same morning rays, after that awful, uncomfortable family dinner, when Billy noticed a little design behind Camila’s ear, usually hidden by her hair. A copy of his own soul mark. He’d kissed it gently, in worship of what the universe had given him, before telling Camila what he’d seen. They smiled, they cried, they felt; Billy and Camila were a them, no longer a him and her.
And that’s when Camila knew. She’d wanted to see California, anyway.
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The new girl was an absolute mess. And Billy hated that.
He had worked so hard to rebuild his life. No more liquor stores, or groupies with fantastic tits, or hard drugs to cope with the hard feelings. Camila and Julia were the only addiction he needed; the only one that wouldn’t lead him to ruin. But this new life required balance, and it was hard to avoid old vices.
Hard, but not impossible. It just meant that Billy would need to be careful.
But Daisy was anything but careful. She was a firestorm and Los Angeles was thousands of acres of dried kindling. She ripped up his lyrics, pulled apart the compositions, and forced her own melodies inside. The band liked that she wrestled some creative control back from Billy, but, if you had asked her, that was only a tangential benefit. Daisy was selfish and she wanted what she wanted.
And as they recorded Honeycomb and then Aurora , it became abundantly clear. She wanted to be a star.
Even the way she loved Billy was selfish. She craved intimacy, no matter if it was already given to another woman. But it made the music better, more passionate; bickering was the only outlet for all of the messed up shit in her heart. And when Billy fought back, she knew that he was showing that he cared. About her, about what they were creating.
There was only so much chaos that Billy’s new life could withstand. He could be as careful as he liked. It didn’t matter what he did when chaos danced right outside his door.
The worst bit was that he couldn’t help liking it.
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Touring brought more bickering, and eventually outright fighting.
Daisy’s husband was a prick, to put it lightly, and she was using more than she ever had before. And while Billy never would have admitted it, he was scared for her. He knew what it was like to lose yourself in the lifestyle, but at least he had Camila to pull him out.
Daisy had nobody to do that for her. It couldn’t be him; saving her would be an admission of everything she had accused him of, proof that the kiss wasn’t benign. Billy couldn’t do that to his soul mate and their child. Even when he lost himself in the partying so many years ago, it was to fill the hole that Camila’s absence left.
So as he hauled Daisy off stage, malice burning in her eyes, everything he said was a warning. To stop now, before she fell off the deep end. That bloody feet and foreheads would only be the beginning.
She was a star, then, along with the rest of the band. But maybe that coked-up astrology groupie from four nights ago was right. Stars were simply balls of fire; sometime, somewhere, they were bound to explode. It would be beautiful, but an explosion nonetheless. There was no other ending.
Eventually, Billy would look back on his words then and regret them. Daisy only ever met fire with fire; it was the only way that she knew to defend herself. But he refused to be ashamed of the feelings that drove them.
Deep down, he knew that those harsh words stemmed from something soft in his heart. Some small, tiny crevice that Daisy had invaded against his will.
But he wouldn’t be his father, no matter how bad Daisy got. He couldn’t do that again.
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Daisy’s breath hiccuped, a lurch in her otherwise soft, steady rhythm. To Billy, it was too big of a disruption in something so frail.
“No, no, no, no, no - don’t you give up on me yet,” He felt his blood run cold. “We’ve got a tour to finish, asshole. You don’t get to leave me here,”
The outsides of her pupils were so bloodshot, it was hard to believe that they had ever been white. But at least they were open.
“I told… you. I decide… when…I’m…done.”
Daisy ground her teeth together, before releasing the tension that seized her upper body. Her body slumped down, rumpling the top of her gauzy shift, revealing a small patch of skin on her left breast. On any other day, it could have been hidden by any number of garments; a bra strap, a shirt, or simply make up. But today it was bare.
A bare, tiny mess of black lines. In the shape of a y.
And as Rod rushed back through the door with a plain-clothed doctor behind him, Billy had only one thought in his mind.
Shit.