The Beautiful Truth

5 Years Earlier ☆☆ CODA

415, home again. As much fun as it had been, riding in a van up and down the west coast with Seth and Alex for the last six weeks, it was good to be home again. Sleeping in his own bed last night had felt even better than he'd expected. And here he was, playing for the home crowd. 415 had been one of the first places Michael's Mistress had scored a gig—all the way back before that other guy bailed and Alex Love turned up.

Actually, 415 is where Alex had joined the band—that other guy bailed right before their first show here, and Alex had been working as a sound guy. Seth dropped the bomb that the other guy wasn't there and wasn't going to be, and while Barton was busy flipping out, Alex was steady tuning up a guitar with a perfect rendition of one of their song's bass lines. His rage suddenly subsiding at the sounds of a familiar riff, Barton had pretty much demanded that Alex join the show that night.

And Alex'd stuck around ever since. Barton was lucky—in addition to having an apparent knack for being in the right place at the right time, Alex was usually the one who kept him from going homicidal on Seth.

Speaking of which, Seth was over in the corner, rolling a jay.

"Before the show? You know I hate when you do that shit," Barton muttered a complaint.

"Oh ye of little faith," Seth chided him before making a show of finishing his project, then stuffing it into his cigarette pack on the vanity table.

Barton rolled his eyes and pushed himself up from the raggedy couch that sat in their backstage dressing room. He strolled lazily to the edge of the stage and looked out from behind the curtain. Something felt different about tonight, but he couldn't quite place it. Actually, something had felt different all day. He thought maybe it had something to do with being home again, but this hadn't been the first time he'd come back from the road, and he couldn't remember feeling this way before.

There was just something...different.

To say that Barton knew he was cynical would have been an understatement. His most well-received song to date was one about having a 'black heart.'

But that didn't mean he didn't have a heart at all. He just kept it closely guarded, and behind several walls of rock, iron, ice and some sort of metaphysical force field that made it impossible for him to drop his guard. The last time he'd had a girlfriend was more than a year ago, and she didn't last very long. Apparently, he didn't care enough.

He rolled his eyes at the thought. She could thank his dad for that, he supposed. With people as disappointing as Michael Black walking around, it was easier to just not care.

He was halfway through their third song when he saw her. No, not his ex. Her. Admittedly, he was semi-annoyed—she'd been tapping something into her phone, presumably uninterested, while he knew he had the rest of the girls in the place in the palm of his hand, including the blonde one that was clearly here with her. But then she'd put her phone away and looked up with him with the brightest eyes he'd ever seen in his life. They were like stun-guns. Girl had stun-guns for eyes.

If he ever spoke to this girl, he'd have to come up with something more poetic before he revealed this to her, but that wouldn't be a problem. He did happen to be a songwriter. Pretty words were kind of his thing.

Backstage after the show, that 'feeling,' whatever it was, wasn't going away. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin, and well, there was at least one way to take care of that. Barton thought Seth shouldn't have made such a show of putting away that joint earlier, because he knew just where to find it now. He pulled it out of Seth's pack of Parliaments, grabbed his lighter, too, and headed for the door in the back of the room that would take him to the curb.