This is my alt-rock NA serialised story — the book my younger self needed, written by my older self who finally knows what to do with all the bruises.
New here? Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
Or you can go to the chapter index.
Drowning in Light, Thinking of Her Mouth
Dev
Music video shoots look glamorous from the outside.
From the inside, they’re twelve hours of sweat under lights that could grill a steak, miming your own song to playback until your jaw aches from pretending you still mean it.
“Blurred Edge” deserved better.
Instead, I was stood in a warehouse dressed like a Topman mannequin while a director barked about “gritty vulnerability” through a megaphone.
Mateo muttered, “This is giving major NPC vibes.” behind his bass.
Connor loved it, of course – spinning his sticks, mugging for the slow-motion cameras. Owen kept smoothing things over with polite smiles, the diplomat as always.
Me?
I just mouthed the words, again and again, watching the playback monitors flash back a version of me I didn’t recognise. Perfect lighting. Sculpted shadows. My face framed like a perfume ad.
Between takes, I pulled my hoodie back on and sat on a flight case, watching the chaos swirl. Hair touch-ups, powder on my cheeks, someone fussing about the collar of my shirt. I shoved them off.
The director clapped his hands. “Okay, let’s get the rain machine!”
Fucking kill me now.
Cold water hammered down while they filmed me slogging across a concrete floor, shirt clinging, hair dripping, like a budget James Dean. Every instinct screamed to walk off set.
Hours later, we watched the first cut in a sterile edit suite.
Flashbulb shots. Tight angles of my jawline. Mateo framed like a statue, Owen blurred in tasteful depth of field. Connor tossing his sticks in cinematic arcs. Simon brooding over his guitar.
I felt sick.
Then the background shifted – and there it was.
Sadie’s art.
Her stormed-out lines bleeding across the walls behind us, her blurred silhouettes dissolving into static. For a heartbeat, the video wasn’t hollow. It was raw. Honest. It was her.
The director paused the playback, beaming. “See? Cohesive. Marketable grit.”
I leaned forward, staring past him at the screen.
Her pencil lines – the only thing that didn’t feel like a costume.
When the meeting broke, I pulled out my phone.
Typed without thinking:
Only thing that felt real in the whole circus was your lines on the screen.
I stared at it.
Didn’t hit send.
Just shoved the phone back in my pocket, her images still burned behind my eyelids.
Thirst Trap Interlude
Sadie
The flat was quiet except for the scratch of charcoal and Gray’s occasional hiss of pain.
He was a week out from T-surgery, still bruised and stitched, so I’d been doing my art school work from home — charcoal studies, proportion drills, all the stuff I hated even when I wasn’t playing nurse.
The lighting was shit, my coffee was cold, and I was two minutes away from chewing my pencil in half.
My phone buzzed.
@wetstix. WTF? Who is wetstix?
Message: oi Pike. Connor here. ur basically Ruin’s creative director now so u get the behind-the-scenes premium content. don’t say i never do anything for u.
I snorted. Connor. Of course. Because I needed another Ruin lad blowing up my phone.
Photo: Dev slouched on a flight case, hoodie up, looking like he wanted to set the entire warehouse on fire.
Connor: frontman’s not lovin music vid life
I snorted into my sleeve. Gray leaned over, saw the screen, and grinned. “Christ. He looks like the saddest owl alive.”
Buzz. Another one.
This time Dev under a rain machine, eyeliner streaking, shirt clinging.
Connor: emo Jesus has entered the chat
I slapped a hand over my mouth.
Buzz. A video. Connor, shirtless, dripping wet, flexing dramatically for the camera. “For your viewing pleasure, Pike,” he purred, running a hand over his chest.
Offscreen: Dev’s voice, dry as sandpaper – “You vain wanker.”
Connor winked into the lens. “You’re welcome, Pike.”
Gray dissolved into wheezing laughter beside me. “This is the best day of my life.”
The laugh cost him. A second later he winced, clutching his ribs, breath going thin around the pain.
“Okay, easy,” I said, sliding the blanket back over his legs. His whole face had gone a shade too pale. “Maybe don’t rupture yourself over Connor’s thirst traps.”
“I hate this part,” he muttered, easing himself onto the couch the way a very old man might, one hand braced over his chest, careful of the bruising.
“You hate all parts that aren’t chaos,” I reminded him, tucking the blanket around his legs. He let me. That alone told me he wasn’t faking the tiredness.
My phone buzzed again.
Connor: update: frontman is now refusing wardrobe. send help. or popcorn.
Gray cracked one eye open. “Show me the owl.”
I held up the screen and he snorted so hard he winced. “Ow—fuck. This is homophobic.”
“Your surgery?” I asked. “Or Connor?”
“Both.”
I handed him his pain meds. He swallowed them, then sighed the sigh of a man resigned to the dramatic arc of his own recovery.
Buzz.
Another photo — Dev drenched again, glaring at the ceiling like it had just told him to ‘touch grass’.
Gray wheezed, softer this time. “He’s like… if a gargoyle got feelings.”
Buzz.
A video this time. Connor narrating like David Attenborough while Dev trudged through fake rain.
Gray actually covered his face. “Stop. I’m held together with surgical tape.”
I laughed until my ribs hurt, but underneath it was something else — the tiny twist in my chest when Dev came on screen and the whole world softened around him.
I ignored it.
Gray took my phone from my hand, flicking through the pics. “You know he likes you, right?”
I pretended to rearrange the blanket. “He does not.”
He gave me a flat, post-anaesthetic stare. “Sadie. I’m high, not blind.”
Buzz.
Connor: pike babe im sending u a compilation. FULL CHAOS MODE.
Gray groaned. “Oh god. Give it here. If I’m gonna be in pain I may as well suffer properly.”
–
On the bus to my mural job, more notifications rolled in.
A wide shot of the warehouse wall, my artwork projected massive across it – blurred edges glowing ten feet tall. Bigger than any mural I’d ever done.
My stomach lurched.
Then a second clip: Connor’s camera sneaking over to catch Dev seeing it for the first time. His posture shifted, hoodie sliding down, face softening like someone had let the air back into him.
Connor’s whisper on the mic: boner for your artwork, Pike.
I jammed the phone to my chest, heat rushing into my cheeks.
–
Later at Margot’s, on break, the flat was full of my people – music blaring, chips everywhere. I barely got through the door before Sam snatched my phone.
“What’s this then?” She hit play before I could grab it back.
The room howled at Connor’s wet-shirtless flex. Someone yelled, “Send it to me, I’ll make a gif!”
Then the clip of my work hit the wall-sized screen, and the laughter died down. Everyone leaned in.
“That’s yours,” Margot said, soft but certain.
And when Dev’s face came up on the playback – eyes locked on my lines like they were oxygen – nobody said a word.
Except Connor, his voice crackling out of the speaker, smug as hell: boner for your artwork, Pike.
The room erupted again. My face burned. I wanted to crawl under the sofa and never come out.
But underneath the mortification, there it was: the memory of Dev’s expression.
Not polished. Not posed.
Just a man who’d finally seen something real.
And it was mine.
Wanting Her is a Fucking Problem
Dev
The day ‘Blurred Edge’ dropped, a few weeks later, my phone went feral. Mentions, tags, DMs – a constant stream of noise I couldn’t switch off without someone from the label calling to “check in.”
The reviews hit first.
NME: “A bold, unexpected turn for Ruin.”
Mojo: “Polished, radio-ready, but missing the raw spark of his early work.”
The Guardian compared it to a designer leather jacket: expensive, flattering, but a bit too stiff to live in.
Fans weren’t much different.
Older ones kept it civil: “Not bad, but it’s no Blackbird Bones.”
Younger ones… well, they were eating it up. TikToks, edits, lip-syncs – the hook was already everywhere.
My chest tightened when I saw that Sadie’s artwork got a few mentions – a Reddit thread about the “raw sketches” on the cover, some fan blog claiming whoever drew this knows him. But mostly it was background noise to the main event: the music.
I should’ve been happy. The numbers were solid, streams climbing, the label sending over champagne I didn’t open. But every time I saw the cover, I got that same pull in my chest.
Her pencil lines. The unvarnished me. The only part of the whole thing that didn’t feel like a costume.
I called her that night. She sounded tired, but warm.
“So? How’s the world treating your shiny new single?”
“They’re here for the tune,” I said, leaning back in my chair, “but they’ll stay for your art.”
She laughed. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“It’s true,” I told her. Didn’t matter if anyone else saw it. I knew.
We talked about other stuff for a while.
She told me Gray was still in recovery, and it was “rough as guts.”
I asked questions – if he had good people around him, whether he was talking much, if she’d noticed the mood swings yet.
“Bossy much?” she teased.
“Comes with experience,” I said, then talked about Connor.
“The hardest part for him wasn’t the first few weeks. It was later, when the stitches were gone and everyone else thought he was ‘done.’ That’s when the crash hit. He’d look fine on the outside, but inside he was raw. Your body’s healing, but your head’s trying to catch up with the fact that it finally happened. It can feel… lonely, even when you’re surrounded.”
I could almost hear her take that in.
“Connor’s trick was keeping people close. Not just caretaking, but being present. Making sure someone was always around – laughing, cooking, talking rubbish, reminding him he wasn’t just a patient. That mattered more than the meds ever did.”
There was a beat of quiet, and I could almost hear her smile.
“Gray would like that. Except maybe the rubbish talking – he’d want to win every argument.”
On impulse, I said, “D’you wanna speak to him about it, Connor, I mean?”
A pause, then: “Yeah, alright. I mean, I feel like I know him already, after all the music video updates he sent me.”
I rolled my eyes. I wish I could be annoyed at Connor for pulling that shit, but I kinda loved that she got to see me in a wet shirt.
Five minutes later we were on a three-way video call. Connor was in his kitchen, hair sticking up like he’d been electrocuted, bare-chested under an open hoodie, making tea in a chipped Bowie mug. He had that easy charm that could win over bouncers, baristas, and the most cynical sound engineer in the world. Within thirty seconds, he had Sadie laughing – proper laughing – and promising to smuggle him a tray of muffins if she ever made it over to London.
They were bouncing off each other like they’d been mates for years.
I told myself it was good. Great, even. She could use another solid person in her corner – someone who got what Gray was going through in ways I never could.
When Connor hung up, she smirked and said, “Your friend’s hot.”
“Oi,” I said automatically, but my grin felt a little too tight.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she went on, all innocence. “I’m just saying, if Gray doesn’t want the muffins, Connor can have them.”
I made some noise that was supposed to be a laugh, but there was a prickling in my chest I couldn’t shake. Not quite annoyance, not quite… whatever the hell it was. Just something that made me want to get off the call before she noticed.
And I definitely didn’t tell her how her voice, even tinny through my phone speaker, settled something restless in me I didn’t want to look too hard at.
Or that the second her voice dipped, my brain handed me one filthy thought:
bet she sounds like that when I’m between her thighs.
Yeah. No. That was a thought I was not surviving.