how soon is now? || w. a rose [i/v]

AXL XVII

Sometimes I think on that phone call you know, how everything kind of fell apart again. Again. I didn't realise that it would be possible for that to happen, I thought that I had been tested enough but obviously I hadn't.

I don't know why I didn't think that it was possible for it to get worse, he'd been in Intensive Care for months at that point and it's normally known that people don't just get up and walk out after that, I should have known that. He was in a terrible way and I just thought Matthew would plead for GBH and be done with it but then it was murder.

It's a lot harder to get someone out of that because it will always go to trial if you plead guilty to Manslaughter, suddenly this wasn't just going away at the end of the summer but it was going to drag into 1991. When I was going to be on tour, when Axl was going to be on tour and all the press in the world would see us and we'd be everywhere. There would be no place to hide.

What's even funnier was I thought that would be the biggest problem I guess of 1991.

// Chapter XVII, Council Housed and Violent, Adrianna Rose in her own words (2008)

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w. discussions of drug abuse, past child abuse, past domestic violence and adoption (don't know if that's a warning but i'm thorough)

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"Oh my God, your hair!" Adi was loud as the glass door closed behind him, her heels clicking against the sidewalk as she came to meet him. The sun was bright, burning the side of Axl's face and he reached down into his back pocket, fishing out his aviators without knocking out his wallet.

The metal frame had been scratched around the left side from where his keys had dragged past it a couple of months ago but the tinged glass was still intact. He'd had them since Appetite had first hit number one on the chart, the most expensive ones he could buy in the Department Store with the pay cheque.

Better than all the others who had used it to immediately buy the biggest stash of smack that they could, portioned and ready to be melted over broken and rusted spoons. Had they bought a new set of them as well, never mind the hundreds of needles. What the needle budget of Guns N Roses, Axl didn't know.

A pair of cat-eye sunglasses rested over Adi's nose, falling in place over the crook and her lips were a deep dark red. Her skin had slowly tanned over June, with her olive tone deeper in the bright sunlight, the metal of her bar and chain earring catching in the light.

"Not as dramatic as yours," He said, feeling her nails run through the ends of the freshly cut strands, resting just over his shoulders. It was the biggest cut in a while but it was also the longest that he'd let it grow for a few years. In 1988 he would have taken the scissors to his own hair, cutting through all the strands in front of the bathroom mirror, if it looked fine in the front then who gave a fuck what it looked like in the back.

That's what Izzy had always said when he was using black dye, dragging it through his hair in the dim light of the swinging light bulb of the Hell House. That had been a nightmare, black stains across the bottom of the linoleum, humped up due to the leaking damp from the broken faucet. And whatever the hell else that they shared their dwellings with, maybe rats, who knew? Slash had kept some for one of his damn snakes.

Axl had never liked anyone touching his hair, before Adi it had always been sharp pulls of his mother dragging him by the short strands, ripping at his scalp upwards with the sharp bristles of her hairbrush and clipping short around his ears. Any attempt to convince either her or Stephen for him to let it grow out longer had been waved away, waved away or punched away, whichever days he was too tired to not fight on.