Don't Talk! (Freddie Mercury / Queen)

36. Phoebe's Fairy Tales.

A/N -
This is going to be a trek to read, I apologise ahhah. Enjoy!!

Phoebe
Munich, Germany
1984, April 12th

Oh come on... what do you all want from me now?

More updates? Stories? Can't you see all that I've been through already? Well once upon a fucking time Queen of the Night (Freddie Mercury) decided to fuck things up with Lord of All Darkness (Hayes Griffith) and make it everyone else's bloody problem! And they all lived to torture poor Peter Freestone for ever after. The bloody End!

...Right. I apologise. My boyfriend's been listening to a lot of early Queen stuff  lately and Freddie's behaviour is bloody getting to me. Yes, that's right, boyfriend. You'd all know that information if I wasn't just some carrier pigeon for gossip about Freddie and you actually took an interest in my life for once.

Whatever, it's fine. I don't care. Don't try and act like you're all interested now. Let's just bloody get on with it.

"Things could be worse Freddie."

I wish I could travel back in time to when I uttered those words to Freddie the day after him and Hayes ended things. If I could, I would smother myself with a pillow before I ever got a chance to open my mouth. I must have jinxed everything that day. Everything.

Things got worse. Much worse.

For two months, Freddie was able to pretend that him and Hayes weren't finished. He didn't tell anyone any different either. He was in a deep state of denial that he took a sort of crazy comfort in. That all changed when Hayes wrote... the review.

Miami had sat all of Queen down one rainy day to discuss the promotional tour that would predate the actual world tour. Well, not exactly world. After the 'I Want to Break Free' video was released, the American backlash was awful enough for the Queen boys to boycott the country completely. Aside from that, they were playing everywhere, even Sun City (after they had been heavily warned against doing so).

Usually, Miami didn't get all of the Queen boys together in one room, but this time around he had managed to wrangle them into the one office. Roger and Freddie had squeezed into one seat, whilst Brian and John leant against the wall along with me. I was privy to many Queen meetings, and believe or not, most were very boring. That was until I spotted the brand spanking new edition of Rolling Stone sitting upon the coffee table where Roger had his feet propped up. Eddie Murphy was splashed across the front cover, and it didn't look like a potential bomb. A safe read.

With a yawn, I attempted to casually pluck up the magazine. The Works had not yet featured in Rolling Stone's pages, but that wasn't exactly uncommon. Unless you had Hayes reviewing your album, it was likely you would be waiting two months before you had any word. Hayes always thought it was ridiculous that his colleagues did this, and it made sure any publicity that the review could stir up for the musician was now lost. So when a review for the Works didn't show up in March, Freddie breathed a deep sigh of relief and dismissed the possibility of Hayes writing anything about Queen. Maybe he just blackballed them, which would be better than being shredded into.

Hayes was rather ethical, which Freddie described in various ways, about a million bloody times to me when he panicked as I flipped through March's issue of Rolling Stone. With very few exceptions, he didn't write reviews if he knew the artist on a personal level, and when he did he was able to separate the art from the artist. Freddie went on a dreamy rant about it. Those were very common now. Too common.