Dance with the Devil

Picks up the morning of a meeting that could change everything for the band. No spoilers here about how that meeting goes.

The next morning came too early and too bright. It was the kind of LA morning that didn't care how little sleep anyone had gotten, it was going to smack you in the face with sunshine, and by God, you were going to enjoy it. The driver Roy sent was waiting in the lobby, same suit, same patience, same small sign that Ash insisted on carrying himself now, like a trophy he'd won fair and square the day before.

The lot Roy was working out of wasn't one of the famous ones. It sat behind a row of warehouses that all looked like they'd been built the same year and hadn't been updated since, the kind of place where the real work happened while the glossy stuff got filmed somewhere else entirely. The driver let them out at a side entrance with a reception desk and a couch that had seen better decades.

A TV hung in the corner, mounted too high, playing an old Batman movie on low volume. The receptionist didn't look up from her keyboard. The band didn't know whether they were supposed to sit or stand, so they did both, Ash pacing, Kevin sitting stiff-backed with his visitor badge clipped square to his shirt, Janey perched on the arm of the couch, Finn checking his phone without really reading it, Fletch leaning against the wall like he'd done this exact thing a hundred times, in some other life, in some other decade.

Ash pointed at the TV. "This is peak cinema."

Kevin didn't look up. "It's camp."

"It's art."

"It's both," Finn said, still not looking up either.

Janey watched the screen with the same expression she used at a soundcheck, curious, analytical, ready to be unimpressed. "Why's every building shaped like it's trying to kill somebody?"

"Drama," Ash said.

"Physics don't matter," Kevin countered, sounding slightly miffed at the audacity.

"World used to be fun," Fletch added, low, mostly to himself.

On the screen, the caped figure swung off a rooftop on a grappling hook that looked like it had been engineered by twelve very confident, very drunk men. Ash pointed at it like he'd found something personally validating. "That's me. I get one of those, I'm unstoppable."

"You'd die immediately," Kevin said.

"Heroically."

"You'd forget to charge it."

"He'd lose it," Finn said, still not looking up from his phone.

Fletch, finally, dry as anything. "He'd impale himself, trying to autograph it."

The receptionist glanced over once, unsure whether she should be concerned or entertained, and went back to her keyboard when nobody explained themselves.

The banter wound down the way it always did, on its own, no ending, just a slow settling, and the movie kept running underneath the quiet that followed, the museum scene now, the Joker cornering Vicki Vale with a can of spray paint and a boombox, Prince playing tinny and small through the TV's low volume.

Nobody was performing anymore. Ash had gone still against the wall. Kevin's leg had stopped bouncing. The room had the particular hush of five people all privately doing the same math, Roy behind that door down the hall, the meeting, what came next, none of it said out loud.

Fletch and Janey ended up watching it side by side without either of them deciding to, and somewhere around the part where the Joker leaned into his own reflection in a shard of broken glass, Fletch grinned. "Hum me that tune you've been working on."

She did, without thinking about it, the loose thread from the fire pit, still unclaimed after all these days of her turning it over, and Fletch fell right into harmony with her, low and easy, landing right on cue with the line rolling across the screen above them.

"Did you ever dance, dance, dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" He smiled, smug about it. "That's how you write a song."

"But the Joker just said that!" she protested.

"Exactly," he said, in his best Ash impersonation, which really wasn't very good at all.

Ash, catching only the tail end of it, straightened up off the wall. "Was that supposed to be me? That's slander."

"It's accurate," Kevin said.

"There's a difference."

"Not really."

Janey laughed, quiet, and the tension that had been sitting in the room loosened a full notch with it. She was digging for a pen before she'd decided to, and fished the boarding pass out of her jacket, still folded from the day before, and scrawled the line onto the back of it. Fletch watched her do it and didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

The door down the hall clicked open. "Mr. Morgan?" the receptionist said, still mostly looking at her screen. "They're ready for you."