Time Passages (Queen or Freddie Mercury Fanfic)

37. The Last Word

Julia

Sal here. If you are confused about Roxie's importance in the first place, I encourage you to check out the two part story entitled "Closing Time". However, if you do not like spoilers and/or do not care one way or the other who Roxie is and why she matters, by all means, ignore what I just said. ;) Now, let us carry on...

I rubbed the back of my neck, watching my boy hightail it out into the drizzly morning. Had I heard correctly?

Did Danny just say Freddie had met Roxie before?

"How does that even work?" I muttered to myself.

Perhaps she attended one of their concerts at the Garden, I wondered. That would have been during the Hot Space tour, though, during their disco fail- uh, I mean, experiment. Besides, she's always been a country lover. I've never heard her say anything about liking Queen, or even bands comparable to them; it's always George Strait, Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers- and that guy who sang "Wildfire". There's no song she listens to that you wouldn't hear at a honky-tonk.

What was more, as my cousin had told me, she had never traveled abroad, unless you counted Canada (her third husband was a native of Quebec). However, Freddie did own a posh, high-rise apartment in New York City during the late seventies and early eighties- about the same time that Roxie was attending NYU, before she was forced to drop out toward the middle of her junior semester. I say forced, because her family was putting up about half the money for her school- but withdrew all assistance as soon as word went round of Roxie's "unspeakable" crime.

All the same, I couldn't quite see how Roxie and Freddie might have crossed paths. She had worked as a bartender for a time in restaurant -a mom and pop place called the Leather Tux, or something, it had closed down in the nineties to make way for an unsuccessful string of upstart boutiques till finally it was bought out and made into a hookah bar- but from what she had told me, Leather Tux was not at all the sort of joint that would attract someone like Freddie, certainly not the crazy party animal he was in those days.

But then, I myself was not exactly the standard Mr. Mercury magnet- and look what happened.

I didn't dwell on the news too long, however. At present, finding out if, and how, Freddie and Roxie actually knew each other was very low on my list of priorities.

For it was official: now John knew about Freddie.

And now that John knew- and believed, it was only a matter of time before word would reach Brian and Roger- assuming that Rubicon had not already been crossed, what with Freddie's radio escapades yesterday. Granted, John and the remaining half of Queen were still no closer to détente than they had ever been, but something as monumental as Freddie's "miraculous return" might just be the push they needed. Or perhaps not; despite his public reticence, Deacy was in truth quite stubborn (which illustrated at least one reason why my family and his got on so well together). Only time would tell.

What I could depend on, however, was Stuart's ire, once he realized how far this fiasco had truly gone. According to K, Freddie had taken social media by absolute storm. Even outlets like the Daily Mail were abuzz with speculation. So much for "Nowadays, everyone thinks he looks like Rami Malek."

Evidently, not enough people had forgotten the face of Queen, that timeless band of the seventies and eighties. Mr. Robot hadn't been convincing enough a stand-in to warp the public's memory of the real Freddie. For as many years as had passed, as much time as even Adam had spent moonlighting as Queen's frontman, nothing compared to he who transcended the generations, he who could not be pegged as anything explicable or mundane- he who on that sweltering July afternoon in 1985, literally held the world in the palm of his hand.