Chapter Text
Bill Wilson had been listening to the hooded young lady next to him on the bus mutter to herself since she got on a few minutes ago. She had a massive black hoodie on with the hood low over her face, hunched over a notebook and mumbling to herself while scribbling with a pen. It was a very conspicuous and attention-grabbing way to attempt being quiet and inconspicuous.
Now, normally he would’ve minded his own business (that was a lie, once you got to a certain age you realized that being nosy was one of the great joys in life), but from what he could hear from her mutterings and see in the notebook, she was either writing poetry or lyrics. Bill found himself curious, as he was in a band himself when he was younger (forty years ago, give or take. Jesus, he was old). As he had nothing in particular to do, and with all the nosiness his age entitled him to, he decided to engage.
“What are you writing there?” he asked, and the girl jumped in her seat at being addressed. He immediately marked her as a squirrely one. She peeked up at him with big brown eyes, tugging at her hood like she wanted to keep herself hidden. He didn’t know why she was doing that, she seemed like a pretty young lady from what he could see, but he didn’t pretend to know the youth’s anxieties.
She was also Asian. Not that Bill had any problem with Asians; they tended to be hard workers. Most immigrants were, despite the moaning of a lot of his own generation. They usually came here to work, after all. It was the people who were born here who got lazy, thinking they were entitled to everything just because they were Americans. As if being an American wasn’t supposed to mean being a hard worker who earned your keep.
Bill had lost his train of thought.
Oh, right, the young Asian lady.
“Ah, song lyrics,” she said quietly, still glancing around like she was being hunted.
No accent. Probably not an immigrant, then. Not that it mattered either way, Bill just tended to notice these things.
His kids said he talked about it too much, but at least he wasn’t one of those old fools who went on racist rants at the dinner table and alienated his family. Bill had a black niece-in-law and several mixed grandnieces and grandnephews, and he would be damned before he made his own family feel unwelcome or unwanted. Idiots who decided to put their biases above their own family deserved to rot in the nursing homes they’d be left in. Bill knew his own family loved him enough that he’d never end up that way no matter how decrepit and dementia-ridden he ended up in a few decades.
He had lost his train of thought again. He never used to that. He really was old. He was a bit young for it, but maybe the dementia was already creeping in.
Oh, right.
“You’re a songwriter, then?” he exclaimed, a little excited. “Ah, I used to be in a band myself when I was young, and I wrote most of the songs. Do you sing what you write, or is it just for fun?”
At this the girl finally turned to face him so that he could see fully under the hood, her expression lighting up with so much enthusiasm that it could power a solar farm. It also confirmed that she had no deformities or anything he could notice, so he still didn’t know why she was so cagey about being looked at.
“You write songs too? That’s so cool! And, uh, yeah, my friends and I have a… band. That plays sometimes. I write the lyrics!”
“That’s nice,” he said honestly. “The fellas and I never really got off the ground, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. I’m glad some kids are still making good old fashioned garage bands and having real hobbies instead of being on their phones all the time.”
“Aha, yeah, I still definitely spend too much time on Tiktok,” she admitted sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck. Then she brightened again. “But yeah, being in a band is so much fun! Nothing has ever really made me feel as much like myself as I do when I’m making music with the girls and everything comes together. And the performances are great, it’s the best feeling in the world to know that someone heard what I wrote and felt a connection with it!”
Her energy was infectious enough that Bill couldn’t help smiling back at her.
“You clearly put a lot more into it than I ever did,” he chuckled. “Still, would you mind if I took a look at some of what you wrote? I’m rusty, but maybe I can give you some tips.”
“That’d be great! I’m always looking for more ways to think about lyrics,” she said, practically shoving her notebook at him. “Maybe you could tell me about some of the lyrics you wrote, if you still remember them? I don’t really talk to people your age, so I’d love to hear how you think about these things. New perspectives are how I've gotten through so many writer's blocks.”
Bill felt himself blushing a bit at her exuberant enthusiasm to hear what he had to say about the matter.
“W-well,” he coughed into his hand to hide his embarrassment. “You’re very kind, young lady. I’ll do my best to remember. I doubt it’s any better than what you can do, though, if you get real gigs. I never managed that myself.”
“I wouldn’t say that! Just because I’ve been more successful doesn’t mean what you’ve written is worse. Lyrics are art, and any art that comes from the heart is worth being seen and heard. I’ve found inspiration for lyrics in the weirdest places, like, I’ve found super obscure indie artists that totally changed the way I think about writing songs! Your stuff has as much merit as anything, so I wanna hear it!” She paused, then dipped her head in a very Asian gesture of greeting. “Oh, by the way, my name is Zoey!”
Having that whole speech ready, and to deliver it with such clear conviction, showed a passion for music that shone so bright that it was almost blinding for a tired old man like him. If this was the kind of person who got actual gigs, no wonder he and his friends never took off. They had fun messing around with music, but there wasn’t an ounce of the spirit that this girl had. It was humbling, in a way, to meet someone who was so clearly a true artist. It made sharing his own old lyrics feel a bit embarrassing, but he supposed that was exactly what she was saying he didn’t need to feel.
“Ah, alright. I’ll see what I can remember,” he gave in, flipping through her notebook. There were a lot of doodles and stickers and things in the margins and between the lyrics. “And I’m Bill, Bill Wilson. Nice to meet you, Miss Zoey.”
He offered a hand, which she shook with somewhat excessive energy. She had surprising grip strength for such a small girl, and he noticed she even had callouses on her hands. It made him wonder what else she did other than music.
Unfortunately there wasn’t really time to indulge his nosiness in that direction, what with Zoey so ably directing the conversation to the lyrics he was looking at and what little remained in his old brain regarding what he wrote in his youth. For all her shyness at first, she was an unstoppable social force once she got going, so he resigned himself to being swept away in her tide. He had no idea what he was unleashing when he started this conversation.
About half of her songs were in some Asian language he couldn’t read, and some of them were a bit too pop-y for his tastes (she said those were the ones more like what they actually sang), but she quickly directed him to some of her more personal songs that had a lot more genuine emotion in them. All of them had layers of meaning and wordplay that he didn’t even recognize until she pointed it out for him.
Bill felt like the feedback he gave her was pretty limp and uninspired. He had never really tried to look at lyrics critically in the way she did; he had always just wrote what he felt and decided it was good if it conveyed that. It made him even more hesitant to recall his own work, but she was unfailingly supportive when he did.
“You don’t need to spend hours fiddling with every word to make it all fit together perfectly. That’s just how I like to write. But if anything, simpler lyrics that are more off-the-cuff and less thought-out can be really genuine and emotional since it’s coming straight from the heart, ya’know?”
So despite feeling somewhat inadequate, her genuine and almost exclusively positive feedback made it easy to keep talking about it. She absorbed everything he said with such intent interest that he felt like he was the teacher here despite clearly being the amateur between them.
He was enjoying his conversation with a total stranger so much that he entirely forgot to pay attention to his surroundings until she glanced up at where they were.
“Oh, shoot! I gotta go, my stop is soon,” she hesitated, then reached in her bag and took out two slips of paper and thrust them at him. “Here! Tickets to our performance tomorrow, if you wanna come. No pressure. Here, I’ll write the address.”
She scribbled an address on a corner of her notebook and tore it out for him.
“The time and everything else is on the tickets, bring someone else with the other ticket if you want. It was nice talking with you, gotta go, bye!”
In just as much of a whirlwind as she swept him up, she swept away and out of the door, once again pulling her hood low over her face. Bill blinked at the sudden departure.
Young people. Always in such a hurry. She did seem like a busy girl, though, so he’d forgive it.
The tickets in his hand drew his attention. They were gold and had intricate designs and weird little bits on them, like on money, to stop forging. It seemed like overkill to him, but if she and her friends had fun making them there was no harm.
He decided he would go see Zoey's band perform. He was here in the city for a few weeks visiting family, so he had the time. And he was curious to see the music such a passionate girl would make.
He would pay her for the tickets, though. A young girl like her didn’t need to be giving him freebies; he had more than enough from his years of work, so she needed it more than him. And it would be good to support a real band with real people like hers, instead of some massive, soulless pop group.
A few stops later he got off the bus and made his way to his son’s house, carrying two golden tickets that could not actually be bought, but were easily worth thousands of dollars each if they could be bought, tucked casually in his back pocket.
As it turned out, Bill’s youngest grandson was going to a sleepover, the two teens were also spending the night with friends, and his son and daughter-in-law were both raring to have a date day (and night) without the kids running around. This meant he would be going to see Zoey’s band alone. A bit disappointing, but oh well. He knew what it was like to be a parent with a rare day off.
He had his son Liam help him set up the map app on his phone to tell him where to go (he still had trouble with the damn devices) and with that he set off on his little adventure for the day. There was a bus that would take him relatively close to the place she was playing, then he’d have to walk the rest of the way.
As he boarded, he wondered what kind of place it would be. He hadn’t actually checked. A bar, maybe? Or were they successful enough to be playing at a dedicated venue for bands? The tickets made him think that might be the case.
The streets got more and more crowded as his bus moved through the city. Hordes of people moved in the same direction, waving around some kind of merchandise, glowing sticks and t-shirts and whatnot. There was clearly some kind of big event going on. He hoped whatever it was wouldn’t draw attention away from Zoey’s performance. She deserved all the money she could get from a gig like this.
Eventually he spotted a massive poster with a logo similar to what a lot of the young folks had on their shirts and hats, allowing him to see what all the fuss was about. HUNTR/X, it said. Below it was a picture of a girl with ridiculous pink hair in twin ponytails, and a girl with even more ridiculous purple hair in the most massive braid he had ever seen, as well as strange purple tattoos all over her body. Both of them were wearing not much more than black sports bras. It looked like there was a third girl, but his view of her was blocked by another car, and by the time it moved he had stopped paying attention.
Bill shook his head disapprovingly. These modern bands with their weird names that weren’t even words and their weird, showy fashion. He much preferred someone more down-to-earth, like Zoey and her friends. Real people with normal hair colors who were presumably fully clothed in whatever posters they had managed to get printed.
She actually cared about the music, after all, and he assumed her friends felt similarly. Someone like Zoey would let her songs speak for themselves instead of needing bright colors and flashy outfits to bedazzle people into liking their mediocre music, like these Hunter X people.
Bill spent much of the rest of the trip lamenting the tastes of the youth. Though he was self aware enough that he could admit that his own generation wasn’t much better when they were young. The real artists, the Zoeys, rarely became famous both now and then.
Bill’s stop was unfortunately directly in the middle of the throng of shouting Hunter X fans. He cursed under his breath and pushed forward, following the map his son had set up on his phone. Zoey’s band was somewhere in the same direction as where all the Hunter X people were going, so at least he wasn’t going against the crowd for now. He tuned out the chattering of the young people surrounding him, not caring to hear them ramble about some celebrities that did not know or care about them, and who would suck every penny they could out of their fans if they could.
The crush of the crowd got worse as he went, and he started doubting whether he was going to the right place. Even if he didn’t know about this Hunter X event, surely Zoey did (young people were much better at keeping up with such things), and he didn’t think she would want to be so close to something that would draw away all the attention.
Then again, maybe it would actually let more people hear her, if she was somewhere near the crowd like this? He didn’t actually know. His band never got far enough to have to care about considerations like that.
People kept bumping into him and he was already getting sweaty from the sheer density of bodies around him on the sidewalk. He hated cities, and he hated events like this. He just needed to get to the location so he could find a nice place to sit down and rest. Fortunately, the app was telling him he was close.
Finally he emerged into a more open area into which the crowd was dispersing. Before him was a massive stadium, surrounded by an open plaza where a veritable market had been set up, full of stalls selling merchandise and wandering gaggles of fans. It was like a fair, if a fair was all about some pop band instead of anything worthwhile.
He wasn’t sure how he was going to find Zoey and her friends in all this, but that was when he was lucky enough to spot a familiar-looking girl with black hair in a pair of buns, standing next to a couple other girls who were probably her friends. He hadn’t gotten a great look at her hair under the hood, but the buns were fairly distinctive. She was wearing some kind of greenish tube top and pants, which wasn’t really what he had expected of her from how shy and hidden she had been on the bus, but he supposed young women would wear what they wanted to wear.
The crowd was more easily navigable now as he made his way over to maybe-Zoey, who was waving her arms around enthusiastically enough to be the right person.
“Excuse me- oh. Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” he said as soon as the girl turned around. The hair was clearly a wig upon closer inspection, and the girl wasn’t even Asian.
“You’re good!” she said cheerfully. “It’s cool to see someone so old at a concert like this. I guess everyone really can like Huntrix!”
“Ah, no, I’m not here for that,” he denied, though he tried to be polite since she seemed like a nice enough girl. “I’m here looking for… someone… named…”
Bill trailed off, staring at the massive screen on the side of the stadium behind her. The screen had started with a video of the purple-haired girl with the tattoos saying something, then the mean-looking pink-haired one, but now there was someone who looked disturbingly familiar, with a round face and big brown eyes.
“—so glad to be visiting your city for Huntrix’s newest World Tour! Please line up to enter the stadium in an orderly fashion, with standard ticket holders at the main entrance and V.I.P. ticket holders in the marked areas! Be kind to each other, be safe, and we can all have fun! Thank you! Zoey out!”
Zoey-from-the-bus’s massive image on the screen did some kind of gesture with her fingers before disappearing. The screen flipped to something else, but Bill stopped looking. He numbly looked around, actually paying full attention to the people around him for the first time, and—
Zoey on that man’s shirt. Zoey plushies in that booth. Several more people dressed up as Zoey. Zoey keychains. Zoey posters. Zoey hats. Vinyl records with pictures of Zoey on them. More screens displaying Zoey talking and dancing and doing interviews.
Bill didn’t know whether to be angry or to think this was the most hilarious joke anyone had ever pulled on him. Mostly he was in shock.
The young woman he met on the bus had undersold how popular her band was. Just a little.
“—you okay? Sir?”
He tuned back into the conversation, remembering he had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence. The nice girl had stepped closer to him, a concerned look on her face.
“Ah, I’m fine,” he reassured her. “I, uh… am in fact here for… Hunter X. My friend invited me.”
She grinned and stepped back, “Oh, that’s cool! Have you listened to their music before?”
“Just read some of the lyrics,” he said awkwardly. He was suddenly feeling very embarrassed about all the disparaging things he had thought about Hunter X and the other two girls who were apparently Zoey’s friends.
“Man, this’ll be such a cool experience for you, then! Hearing their songs for the first time in-person and everything! I’m kinda jealous!” she sighed wistfully, then straightened. “Oh, but, do you know where your friend is? Do you need help finding where you’re going? No offense, but you seem a bit lost. I can help if you want!”
And now he felt doubly embarrassed for thinking poorly of their fans when this girl was going out of her way to offer assistance to a stranger while she was here to have fun. Bill tried not to be one of those judgemental old people that he hated when he was younger, but apparently he still had some work to do in that department.
“Ah, well,” he scratched his cheek, not sure if he should explain the specifics of his situation, or even how he would go about doing so.
Yes, he met someone who was apparently very famous on the bus (oh, he just realized that was why she was hiding her face) and she invited him to this massive concert while letting him think her band was some small group of friends with a hobby, and so now he was reeling from the shock.
He decided not to explain all of that and instead just took out his tickets and showed them to the girl. “Ya see, I have these, and I think my friend is—“
“Whoa!” the girl interrupted him, her eyes bugging out. Her friends quickly gathered to peer at his tickets and also let out gasps and exclamations. “Those are friends-and-family tickets! They don’t actually sell these because only Huntrix and some of their staff can personally give them out! I only know about them because I’m a nerd and was researching them. How did you get these? Do you know someone who works for them?”
She looked up at him with awe-struck eyes, which made him internally squirm a bit. He hadn’t actually done anything. He hadn’t even realized they were important until just now.
“Ah, well, you see… I may have met Zoey yesterday and she gave them to me?” he finally came clean.
The gaggle of young women all gawked at him. He fidgeted at the attention.
“That’s… so freaking cool,” the Zoey lookalike squealed. “What was she like? Is she as nice in person as she acts in all her interviews and posts and stuff?”
“Well, I don’t really know what she acts like in interviews,” he said sheepishly. “But she was very nice. Very passionate about music. We had a long talk about her lyrics and such on the bus.”
“I knew it!” the girl cheered. “She seems so genuine, I knew it wasn’t fake! I feel like I can tell when a lot of celebrities are forcing it, ya know? But Zoey and the others always feel like they're being themselves.”
That made sense. He couldn’t imagine that girl not rambling about something she was passionate about once she got going.
“And you must be really cool too if she decided to give you those after just meeting you,” the lookalike went on with starry eyes in his direction. He coughed and looked away, feeling his face heat up. She giggled at him before taking mercy and moving on. “Oh, right! You don’t know what to do with the tickets. Basically they let you go straight backstage whenever you want. You can see all the behind-the-scenes stuff, avoid the crowd, and meet Huntrix! Though I guess you’ve already kinda done that last one. I’m so jealous!”
Oh, that was actually perfect. Bill hadn’t been sure how he would tolerate being in the middle of a jostling crowd full of hollering young people.
He looked down at his tickets. Two tickets. Only one him. None of his family around. He looked at the friendly young woman who was so excited about seeing Zoey and her friends, and who had been unfailingly helpful and kind despite not knowing him and having no obligation to talk to him.
“…I’m afraid I won’t really know where to go or what to do once I’m in there. Would you mind coming along to show me, miss? I’d hate for this to go to waste,” he said, holding out one of the tickets. She froze for a second. Stared at the ticket. At him. At the ticket. She switched so violently that her Zoey wig came half-off. Her actual hair was blonde, he noted.
After a quick discussion with her friends, who all encouraged her to go on the condition she took pictures for them, she accepted the ticket with all the awe of a knight being bestowed a holy sword.
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you,” she squealed, bouncing in place and clutching the ticket in her hands.
After a minute of discussion they split off from her friends, and she carefully dragged him towards the V.I.P. line. She explained the line was made up of all the people with more exclusive tickets, though very few if any with golden tickets like theirs.
“Pretty much nobody gets these, even less for concerts in other countries like this,” Natalie, who had given her name while they waited in line, explained. “They’re super selective about who gets them since it’s basically an all-access pass. It’s awesome that she just gave you these. They’re worth, like, easily thousands of dollars if they actually got sold.”
Bill was a man of integrity, which meant he always kept his promises, even promises only made to himself. Just this once, though, he decided to go back on his promise to pay Zoey for the tickets. She’d be fine without his money.
Besides, he thought it was insane to pay thousands of dollars to meet anyone. Especially someone who was as normal as Zoey. She had, admittedly, struck him as an impressive person even in their brief meeting, but she hadn’t struck him as the kind of superstar worth emptying your bank account over. She was just a kid. A passionate, energetic kid, but just a kid.
Though that did explain why she was so good at guiding the conversation once she was engaged. If people attached such importance to talking to Bill, he would also make sure he knew how to guide a conversation and keep it on task.
He and Natalie were in line for about an hour (much shorter than the normal line, she assured him). It gave him time to adjust to the new reality of the situation and settle on being both amused and annoyed by the fact Zoey had thrown him into this with no warning.
Shortly after this determination, they finally reached the door and were allowed in. After confirming their tickets were real, they were asked if they wanted to go backstage immediately or if they wanted to go into the normal V.I.P. seats first. Bill of course immediately said he wanted to go backstage (where he wouldn’t have to deal with any more crowds) and Natalie offered no objections. She was literally vibrating with excitement, he noticed. It seemed like overkill to him, even if Zoey and her friends were famous. Young people these days got so worked up over their ‘influencers’, getting so attached to people who did not and would never know them.
Then he mentally compared it to someone getting to meet the Beatles in person back at the height of their popularity, and realized his generation had no ground to stand on. Reminding himself of such things was a good way to keep himself humble, which he could admit he sometimes needed.
They were led backstage, and Bill prepared himself to meet Zoey-from-the-bus now that her secret was out. He still hadn't decided whether he wanted to lecture her about playing pranks on old men or if he wanted to laugh with her at his own ignorance.
Maybe both.