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The first time Drift realized how weird his new bandmates were, he hadn’t even joined the band yet. They weren’t his bandmates. They were just Arcee and Rod’s friends he was meeting at a diner because they were about to go on tour without a bassist and one of them had heard him practicing on the couch. Drift was kind of expecting to get about five questions in before they figured out he wasn’t worth it and moved on.
What he got instead was the guy he was pretty sure he hadn’t met going, “So you’ve done tours before, right? You know you can handle it?”
“Yes,” Drift said, and got ready for it to fall apart as soon as they asked him about those tours.
“And double checking—you’re not using anything, right?’ the guy he was pretty sure he had met said. “Like, no shade, no harm, it’s not a problem, we just gotta know.”
“Using…?” Drift said, carefully.
“Drugs,” Rod elaborated from where he was playing games on his phone and stealing fries from the guy who must have been the one Drift had already met.
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Do you snore?” the guy he hadn’t met before asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah,” Arcee said. Drift tried not to wince. That didn’t seem like an answer they’d want to hear.
“Okay, you’ll bunk with Percy,” the guy he’d met before said. “So how this is gonna work is, we’ll run you through the schedule and the set basics and if it all sounds good, we’ll get you in to talk with our lawyer and—do you have an agent?”
Not anymore. Drift just shook his head, cautiously.
“—that’s fine, you can borrow ours. You can talk to them two and get the contract shit straightened out and call the first tour leg a trial run. Doesn’t work out, that’s fine, we can track down someone else and you can get back to your life?”
It went up at the end like a question. Drift was still trying to figure out what was going on. They hadn’t told him to leave yet.
“He’s in,” said Rod, who had managed to figure out how to interpret Drift’s blanking face in the past two months. “Hey, you should let me be your agent.”
“Don’t do that.” The guy Drift had just met today, whose name he would learn in short order was Impactor, pulled out a pen and grabbed a napkin out of the dispenser. “So here’s what the first few shows are going to look like—”
Drift had actually learned what band he was gigging for by the time the publicity circuit started. Seemed like the ‘Wreckers’ were pretty well known in the States. They had pretty regular radio interviews, and after they’d wrapped a very successful first leg of the tour and were starting to talk about him sticking around, they had him come along to one of them.
Drift hadn’t absorbed much of Springer’s rundown besides “Are you kidding me, that’s fucking hilarious, please say that,” when he checked if it would be okay for him to say that he’d never heard of the band before he joined if the interviewer asked. About the only other thing he’d tracked was “Oh, and if we all stand up, that’s a signal that the lady asked a walkout question and we’re getting the hell out of there.”
He’d assumed this was them trying to fuck with him and nodded accordingly. As such, it took him a couple seconds to notice when the rest of the group went silent in response to a question to Springer about some kind of anniversary.
“Welp,” Impactor said, and slapped his hands against his thighs. They were all standing now, and Drift scrambled to his feet to follow them out. The radio host was staring at them with baffled offense, but none of the rest of them even looked at her.
Whirl led the way out of the radio station at a confident saunter, losing his helmet that he wore for all official band business into his backpack in a quick slight of hand Drift couldn’t catch. That plus Perceptor’s sunglasses rendered them just about invisible, as a group.
“So, ice cream?” Whirl asked. “I’m feeling ice cream.”
“What was that?” Drift asked, still glancing back. No one was coming out of the station after them, not even Kup. Were they in trouble?
“I told you about walkout questions, right?” Springer asked. “Stuff about my dad who’s in jail qualifies.”
“...I thought you were joking.”
“Oh, super not joking.”
“It’s in the contract,” Perceptor said. “All of us have things we’d rather not discuss publicly. Some of the press don’t read it, or think that the ‘right to terminate immediately’ isn’t something we’ll actually exercise.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “Kup will take care of it. We haven’t had to show we’re not bluffing in a while.”
“Sorry, dude,” Impactor said, clapping Springer on the back.
“It’s whatever. Drift, you wanna put anything on the list? Shit people absolutely cannot ask about?”
He did. Might as well start big and let them help him figure out what was unreasonable, right? “My entire career before this.”
“Fuck yes,” Whirl said. “I love it. Walking enigma of a man number two. Do you want help making up a fake backstory or are we just calling it a void?”
Drift’s new bandmates were very weird, but he couldn’t say he minded.
They were through the second of three tour legs and taking a night to celebrate—both making it this far and that Drift had decided he’d be joining the band. They’d crammed into the same room, along with Rod and Arcee and a bunch of things from the game shop down the road that looked fun. Everyone except Impactor was drunk and Arcee had her head in Springer’s lap while he petted her buzzcut. Drift was pleasantly buzzed for the first time in a while
“Hey,” Arcee said, reaching out to pat Drift on the arm. “Hey. Hey Drift. If you’re with the band now. What’s your carsona.”
“What?”
“OH FUCK YES,” Whirl said, sitting up so fast he fell off the bed. Perceptor dropped a pillow on top of his face. It didn’t dampen the effect. “Did I tell you guys, I had the coolest fucking idea for the next one. First off, I’m going to need a bunch of guns—”
“What are you fucking talking about,” Drift said, because he’d learned that Whirl explaining one of his ideas could take an entire conversation’s worth of words and he didn’t want to move on without an answer. “Impactor?”
Impactor was already scrolling on his phone, and five seconds later he shoved it in front of Drift’s face. Drift could recognize the opening notes of Wreck and Rule before it even got four bars in, playing over an animated shot of a tank rolling down a deserted road. The song built to the opening fermata, and as the saxophone held out the note, the tank started to break into pieces and reform into a helicopter.
“What,” Drift repeated.
The helicopter launched into the sky as the bass dropped and the drums kicked in, and two cars shot off a ramp in the background to come crashing into frame as another helicopter dive-bombed the camera. An unsupported microscope flew through the air to keep up.
“What.”
The next three minutes featured car chases, helicopter acrobatics, and absolutely no concern for the laws of physics. It came to the end and Drift immediately dragged the video back to the beginning to watch it again, this time complete with commentary as everyone had to tell him which vehicle they were and why and the cool effects.
“What,” Drift said, helplessly, again, when it had finished. “Why is this a thing.”
“Percy’s idea,” Whirl said. “Because he’s a weeb.”
“Revolutionary Girl Utena is a masterpiece,” Perceptor said to no one in particular.
Drift hit replay on the video again, because he could. This was so weird. It was so cool.
“I wanna be a racecar,” he said, when it had finished again.
“ONE OF US,” Hot Rod cheered, and tried to wrestle him into a noogie. He failed, of course. Springer helped pin him down while Drift got his revenge.
“Hey,” Whirl said, somewhere during a long overnight drive on the bus when he and Drift were the only ones awake. “Do you like instrumental stuff?”
Drift looked up from his book. “Sure?”
Whirl waggled a pair of headphones at him. “Wanna give something a listen for me?”
“Sure.”
Drift knew Whirl did a lot of the band’s instrumentations, and that he got bored easy, so he was expecting this to be a new riff on one of the songs they’d been playing so far, or maybe a completely unknown song for the album that was scheduled for work when they were done with the tour. Instead, he got a string quartet.
Even with the tinny, unvarying tones of automated transcription software, it flowed. It was elegant, all the notes interlocking like clockwork, the instruments passing around the melody and making it their own. It cut off abruptly enough that Drift could feel how much he wanted more.
“Okay, this bit. Is the cello doing enough?” Whirl asked, and played the last thirty seconds again.
Drift hadn’t done instrumental music in years, but he had a pretty good understanding of bass parts thanks to this tour. “It’s kind of boring. Syncopate it, maybe?”
“Well, fuck you too,” Whirl said, and snatched the headphones back. He clicked something and scowled at his screen. “Fuck. You’re right.”
“You’re writing this?” Drift asked, instead of going back to his book.
“Side gig. Cyclonus listens to the classical music station all the time. I will get something on there. He can’t escape from me.”
Every time Whirl mentioned either of his housemates Drift wasn’t sure if he was dating them or not, and at this point Drift was honestly kind of scared to ask.
Drift was already nervous on the first day of recording for the new album. It was going to be the first time he’d been in a recording booth in almost a year. He might completely fail at this, and not know how to work with them, or not be able to adapt, and just stick to being a touring backup. Which he liked, it was great, but it wasn’t like he could live on that, and it was pretty damn unlikely that he was going to trip into gigging for any other bands the way he had for this one.
So his nerves were running high even before he let himself in with the code and wandered down a hallway towards the sound of raised voices and found Perceptor, of all people, having a shouting match with a stranger in the production booth. The rest of the band was in the recording booth, all doing things completely unrelated to music. Drift snuck in to join them.
“Uh…” At least it was quiet in here. “Are they…”
Impactor flipped a page in his motorcycle magazine. “They’ll need another couple of minutes.”
Drift decided to take a very long time tuning his bass.
Sure enough, a couple minutes later Percy stormed out of the recording booth and slammed the door open to join them. The stranger, grinning smugly, flipped on the mic to chat with them and waved. “Hey! You must be the new guy. I’m Percy’s ex-boyfriend.”
“I told you to stop telling people that!” Perceptor shouted at the booth. “He’s my husband,” he added in a far calmer aside to Drift.
“Oh,” Drift said. He’d vaguely known Perceptor was married, but he hadn’t really expected...this?
“Mwah!” The guy who must be Brainstorm blew a kiss at the booth. “Oh-kay, if you gentlemen would like to get this show on the road, I need some sound checks.”
“Our regular producer is your husband?” Drift asked Percy, quietly. He was pretty sure this wasn’t standard, even for the American music industry.
“He works for takeout,” Springer said, and played a rimshot.
Well. At least his nerves were gone.
The album recording process went...fine? It went fine. It went great, actually, Drift didn’t have to do any singing at all and finally understood enough about how they liked the bass to fit into their songs that he could improv some of his own parts instead of asking Kup for help or trying to follow Impactor’s increasingly incomprehensible whims. The album was coming together, they were creeping towards release and planning the next tour, the paparazzi still hadn’t figured out where he was, and he only slept on Rod and Arcee’s couch when he didn’t feel like going home after movie night.
They were doing their first show in a while, to build hype for the upcoming album, and Drift was wandering around the venue after sound check doing nothing in particular. Springer was nearby, challenging people to dance-offs with the camera guy who was doing a documentary for the upcoming tour and also enabling Springer’s burgeoning social media empire trailing behind him.
“Hey, Drift!” Springer waved at him. “Dance-off?”
Drift thought about it. He was less scared of being found than he had been a year ago. He liked it here, he liked his band mates, his old agency hadn’t tried to get in touch with him at all. He’d found a life after washing out of Kpop. Why not?
“Sure,” he said, and launched into an old routine. Not one of the ones from his last tour, that had ended with him falling off the stage, but one of the ones from before that when his health hadn’t been as bad. It wasn’t one of his flashier ones, but he’d drilled it a lot and it looked good close up.
It ended with him facing his audience, one hand outstretched, so he had a fantastic view of the shocked and delighted awe on Springer’s face two seconds before he tackled Drift into a nearby couch shouting “What the FUCK was THAT?”
Drift was going to assume he’d won.