All I Want Is Everything

Bad news

When you see your face in the mirror
Does it seem the end is gettin' nearer
All your life you spent as a wheeler
Now the hole you dug, it gettin' deeper

You're talkin' words
But they don't make the rhyme
You'll lose it all
Cause you can't draw the line

Cinderella, Nothin' for Nothin'

Ella wandered out to the front door slowly, wondering just what the hell Nat was up to. Well, if she was patient, she'd find out. She turned the doorknob at the knock and let the door swing into the house, looking at her former friend who seemed ill at ease.

"Hi, Ella," Nat said nervously. "May I come in?"

Ella, who could be a Grammar Nazi when provoked, nodded silently and stepped back, leading Nat back to her kitchen. She sat down at the kitchen table to finish breaking up the toffee and carefully place the bits in a Tupperware, the layers separated by parchment paper in case the chocolate melted.

"What's going on, Nat?" Ella asked carefully as she worked.

"Well, there's a lot, actually," she said, sitting tensely. "First, I was a shit for pursuing Bucky when I knew you were interested. Part of it was sheer meanness, I wanted to see if I could get someone you couldn't. Another part of it was his family." She bit her lip. "I think I told you that I grew up in foster care. I don't remember my biological mother or father. I was in a stable home until I turned eleven, something my foster parents did got them into a lot of a trouble and they went on the run. From there I spent a few years in a different home until puberty hit, then I had at least one new foster home a year until I aged out and went to college. Sometimes it was another foster kid, sometimes the foster father, but I was always the one who was moved on. I always wanted siblings. The foster family I was in at first had another girl, younger than me, but when the family was separated, that was the last I saw of her." She sighed. "Bucky has a really nice family. I didn't really realize it at the time, but I wanted to get a family through my boyfriend. And that wasn't fair to Bucky. He's a nice guy, he didn't deserve to be used like I did. The way we got together made his parents wary of me, and I don't think that Becca will ever be happy to see me.

"Bucky and I weren't very good together, Ella. We don't have much in common beyond the band, and the friendship we had through that and college. We had a lot of fun together, but it wasn't like a relationship for grownups, it was just kind of musician bullshit, sex, booze, drugs, a good time. That can't endure, and we broke up once that wore off. It hurt him, especially since he thought there was more to us than there was. We also argued about him starting to use heroin. It's not like coke is so much healthier for you, but he was toying around with injecting it and that scared the shit out of me. It's taken time and effort to mend the friendship, most of it rightly my work.

"So that's Bucky. I was kind of jealous of you, you came from a loving home, your dad thought the sun rose and set on you, you and your mom disagreed a lot but you still had a good relationship with her. You had your brothers. I felt sorry that you lost them in that accident. And you were right, I lied about my previous band to get into yours, because there was something special about it. I should have just told the truth," she said, shaking her head. "It wouldn't have hurt anything. I was grateful that you guys put so many resources into launching the band and getting us signed. I felt like it was the start of something big and creative, which it was. I started to get irritated with you because the label treated you like the golden girl, you were the star of the group. That irritated Steve a lot, who wanted his turn in the spotlight. So there was jealousy and resentment, and that fed on itself, pulled Bucky in. We fed it with irresponsibility and bad behavior, impaired our judgment with substances. It felt like we were flying high—and we were, in some respects—but you were like a millstone with your insistence on professionalism, the business of music. I wanted to be fun and cool, which is when I targeted Bucky. I wanted to have something you couldn't. And from there on we were out of control. We believed Steve when he said he could write our music, and one night we called Thor to tell him to fire you. We were all on the call, told him that it was unanimous, and that if he didn't, we could replace him too. I don't know why the hell we thought Sam would ever go along with it. Him turning us down alerted SSR that we were careening off into the void, they charted a course for us but we couldn't follow it. Mostly because while Steve is a competent guitarist and singer at this level, he doesn't have the inspiration or skill to write original music on his own.