Only the Strong Survive (McFly FanFic)

My Tired Radio

“I’m so excited for tour Katie, you have no idea.” Ella gushed as we stood freezing at the bus stop after school.

“I have got an idea though El, you’ve been talking about it all day.” I smiled at her.

“Yeah, but...” she started, going off on yet another detailed account of how she had got the tickets and how excited she was. I checked my phone again.

2 new messages

I hadn’t read the one from earlier yet, so I opened them both up.

Kate, I can’t pick u up today, the first message read, Fletchs called me and T in 4 a meeting later. Sorry, I’ll find someone else to come and get u, love you sorry. Danny

It might sound harsh, in fact you might expect me to go off on one about how it wasn’t fair that his job came first, but I’m not going to. Danny worked a crazy schedule, and it was hard for him to fit ‘stealthily picking Katie up from the orphanage after school’ in every single day. To his credit, he normally managed it, and if he couldn’t he always told me beforehand. He’d often come on his way back from somewhere, so he didn’t draw attention to the fact he was going all the way out to an orphanage in Stevenage  and then home again every single day. But, at least once a week, sometimes more, I had to be picked up by someone else who knew what was going on. This would either be Danny’s girlfriend, Georgia, or one of the guys, Tom, Harry and Dougie, or one of their partners, Giovanna, Izzy or Lara. Very, very occasionally Danny’s sister Vicky would come out to get me, but that was a rare occurrence as she lived right in the heart of London, and didn’t like me very much.

Today however, it seemed Dougie would be picking me up, it was him who had sent me the second message.

Normal time. Normal place. Be there or be square. Butty.

“Katie!”

“Yes!”

“Are you even listening to me?!” Ella snapped, making a grab for my phone. I moved my hand away and cleared my inbox in one movement, yet again removing any trace that anything she didn’t need to know about had ever been there at all.

“Yes, I’m listening to you.” I sighed.

“You better have been...” she muttered darkly as our bus pulled up. We flashed the driver our passes and found some seats. Ella pulled her iPod out of her bag and passed me a headphone.

If you see Kate, tell her that I’m looking for her...she’s so fine...that girl’s been on my mind...

I squirming inwardly a little as Danny’s voice was blasted into my ear. He’d written the song barely a week before he met me. When he showed it to me a little while later he had said, “It’s a bit like fate isn’t it, you know how I wrote this about a Kate and then you turned up right afterwards like,” I didn’t point out that the song included references such as ‘pour yourself into my mouth’. Anyway, it had gone on the album and that was that, yet another way to make everything ten times more awkward if it all ever got out.

Finally the song finished and the opening riff to ‘Lies’ hammered into my head. I’d been forced by both my new school friends and my new dad’s friends to learn all the words to all the McFly songs ever written. It wasn’t all an act I put on for Ella and the others, I did like the music very much, I just didn’t like listening to it when I was with the guys themselves. It was just awkward. In my mind I didn’t think of them as McFly, I didn’t think of them as the people who took up an arguable chunk of my iPod and who my friends obsessed over.  To me, the four men who made up McFly were four completely different people to the ones who played the songs I liked.