âmes pétillantes ~ classic rock imagines

• Marc Bolan (II) •

This is loosely based on a dream I had a few months ago (because I love Marc Bolan just a little too much), and then it just geared completely off track as I started writing it! But, I quite like it, and I hope you do too! Since it's based on a dream and I wrote it pretty much as soon as I woke up, it's a bit different to things that I usually post on here, but you'll have to let me know what you think about it. Enjoy :)

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Nobody said the party was over, but everyone slowly started filtering out at around the same time. Once the rooms started emptying, I couldn't help but follow suit - I was tired and since the noise had died down the beginnings of a headache were settling behind my eyes.

It was mercifully easy to find Marc now there was space for me to squeeze through the clumps of people still clinging to the quickly dimming night, and I took him gently by the elbow to announce my presence beside him. He turned from Keith Morris with a wide grin, his hazel eyes dancing with much more than simple laughter, and said my name in an awestruck, breathy way.

I had to tell him multiple times that I was leaving because he kept on giggling at nothing and bopping his head to the Elvis song the record player was scratching out, but when he finally understood he gathered me up in the same warm hug he always did, mumbled something quietly against my shoulder that I couldn't hear, patted me on the back and, as he pulled away, announced to the room that I was leaving.

Sent back out of the door on a wave of chorused farewells that I shyly returned (every single person in that room was on a record sleeve in one way or another), I collected my coat and bag and left the house.

It was later than I thought - so late that if you awoke at that time, you would have said it was early. The sky was just beginning to lighten, fading to a bluer shade of black, and there were clouds rolling in to coat the winking stars. On the front lawn, which was stained with tyre tracks from inebriated guests on their tumultuous way out, there was a small group of people who I had seen leave at least 15 minutes before me lying on their backs and staring up above, huddled together like shivering penguins as they whispered and laughed to one another and pointed up at the stars with shouts of constellation names that, when I was sat in the privacy of my car, I couldn't trace in the sky.

I had seen things passed around inside the house that night that I couldn't even put names to, so they were lucky, I supposed, that all they were hallucinating were constellations.

My car was old and constantly acted like it, but Marc loved it. For someone who despised driving, he had an odd fascination with cars, at least the outside of them. He'd always had an obsession with image, and it seemed this obsession lay further than just within himself.

I drove a '67 Austin A60 Cambridge, a red one, an upgrade from a Mini that didn't feel too small for me until I was driving alongside a truck which came so close to falling on top of me as we swerved a corner that I felt the tingling rush of my own mortality and had to pull over until my heart stopped pounding.

Every time Marc saw it, he had something new to point out that he liked - the shape of the wing mirrors, the tiny sun visor above the wind screen, the stripes along the sides, the dice dangling from the rear-view mirror, the way the colour glistened in the sun.

I'd given him rides in it countless times, dropping him off at appointments or just taking him on excursions around the city, and he was a very entertaining passenger, but when I'd offered to let him drive it once, or rather insisted that he did so, he had blanched and quickly abandoned me in the middle of a car park.

I only had to drive down the road to catch up with him though, and he got back in without much persuasion. We never really spoke about it, only long enough for him to tell me he had never learnt how to drive, and never would. You often learn more about people from what they don't say - he didn't tell me why, I didn't ask.