Brütal • Mötley Crüe •

Twenty • If Music be the Food of Love...

Warnings: Language, Drug & Alcohol Use

April 3rd, 1983
Somewhere in Arizona

12:16PM

"Turn that fucking shit off!" Nikki yelled, dramatically kicking the power button on the dash radio with the chunky heel of his boot. "If I ever hear that motherfucking song in my bus again, I'm going to lose my fucking shit on every single one of you!"

Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) had been the bane of Nikki's existence since it debuted on January 5th, 1983.

It spent six weeks at number eight in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and four at number one on the Top Tracks chart, but even when it fell from both it seemed to be the only thing radio knew how to play anymore.

Don't Stop Believin' had been the same way; overtaking the airwaves and grabbing ahold so tightly that still, to this day, you can catch it on any gas station or thrift store stereo system and every karaoke machine ever made.

Nikki was not a Journey fan.
Never had been, never would be.

They were watered down, Woolco versions of real rock gods that'd been twisted into whatever would make the machine the largest amount of money and he loathed every fucking note, every fucking word, they wrote.

Journey was formed from a heaping pile of bullshit, and Nikki fundamentally disagreed with everything they stood for.

But it wasn't Journey- or the song itself, even- that really bothered him.

It wasn't the bubblegum, pseudo-heavy guitar riffs. It wasn't the amateur, talentless drum fills. It wasn't the dull, basic synthesizer launching the disaster off into a rocky start. It wasn't Steve Perry's uncharacteristically deep voice that didn't match his goofy face that pissed Nikki off, either.

It was the lyrics that hit him like a goddamn freight train, torturing him to the point that he couldn't hear a single verse without feeling like tearing his skin clean off his bones.

You know I still love you,
Though we touched and went our separate ways

Every lick of every syllable struck his eardrums like the tip of an ice pick, too painful and too damn real.

And even when it wasn't on the radio it played through his mind on a loop, broadcasting from the inside of his skull like some sort of soundtrack from hell that he couldn't escape.

He'd gotten into the habit of dissecting every single line, pulling the words apart and applying them to his life as if they held some sort of solution for his problems.

Worlds apart, hearts broken in two

He was only a matter of states away from Halston, but it might as well have been a different world.

And his heart was most definitely broken in two, if not millions of tiny pieces slowly disintegrating into his chest cavity.

Losing ground, I'm reachin' for you

The ground had opened into a dark, empty abyss and pulled him under the moment she walked out on the night of his birthday.

He'd reached for her in pure desperation, begging and pleading for her not to go, but she turned stone cold and slapped him away as if he'd never been anything more than the dirt crusted onto the bottom of her shoe.