I’m not very experienced with fluff… I hope you like it anyway 🥰
Fade To Black
Description: The reader, newly in a relationship with James, discovers his hidden pain and offers him comfort, love, and the certainty that he won’t have to face his darkness alone.
I had no idea my life was about to turn upside down.
Me, the good student who always had her head buried in books, bored by routine, now dating the singer of a metal band. rock star. It wasn’t in my plans, it wasn’t even remotely conceivable… and yet here I am, traveling across states, living day by day, sleeping in recording studios and now even in Europe. In Copenhagen.
It’s all so absurd and wonderful at the same time.
There are highs, lows, moments when I feel like I don’t understand anything happening around us. New situations, challenging, a bit uncomfortable. But the truth is that with James by my side, everything makes sense.
Even when we’re broke, even when we eat sitting on sidewalks, even when we don’t know where we’ll be the next day or where we’ll sleep.
Happy in a way I didn’t know existed. I love every single moment with him.
We’re two free spirits, two kids who improvise, who get back up, who always start over. That’s what captivated me: his resilience, his way of reinventing himself every time life tries to bring him to his knees.
We’re sitting on a bench while we wait for Lars to come out of a shop. The Copenhagen air is cool, smelling a little like the sea and a little like rain, and I’m looking at James.
He’s sitting in that relaxed way only he has: legs open, stretched out, his large hands resting on his thighs. His body radiates warmth even without touching me. Just his nearness is enough to make me feel safe, protected, as if nothing bad could ever happen.
A lock of his blond hair falls onto his shoulder and without thinking, I brush it lightly with my fingers.
He startles a bit, as if I’d pulled him back to reality, away from some far-off thought.
“You’re quiet… what are you thinking about?” I whisper with a smile as he turns his face toward me. His eyes meet mine and suddenly it feels like the world around us disappears.
“Yeah… I’m thinking about a mix of things. Mostly practical stuff, about the album… Sorry, baby.”
His voice is low, almost tired, but warm. He takes my hand and squeezes it, and I feel his warmth seep through my skin and go straight to my stomach.
There’s a thin veil in his eyes, a melancholy I can’t decipher. It tightens something inside me for a second. I want to ask him what’s wrong, to get inside his head and undo that dark knot that seems to hold him back.
I care about him so much that knowing he might be struggling makes my soul tremble.
But I also know he needs his own time, his own space, I met him stubborn, quiet, mysterious.
When he wants to talk to me, he will. I shouldn’t force anything out of him.
I’m still lost in my thoughts when Lars comes out of the shop with a paper bag smelling of warm bread, and as soon as he hands it to us, we tear into the sandwiches with a fierce hunger, laughing at silly jokes and improvised comments, as if the world outside that little square didn’t exist.
Every time I turn toward James, I catch him looking at me. His eyes, that blue that seems to catch the light, have an intensity that shakes me.
His laugh, deep and contagious, lights up his face in a way that tightens my stomach. When he leans toward me, close enough that I can smell his skin and the worn leather of his jacket, his voice drops to a warm whisper: “You’re beautiful… I can’t stop looking at you.”
The world stops. A shiver runs up my spine, his words melt me like snow in the sun. I try to answer lightly, but the truth is that the way he looks at me is enough to make me forget to breathe.
When our improvised lunch is over, only crumbs and a few suspended laughs remain in the bag. We stand up almost at the same time. James stretches slowly while Lars grumbles something about being late, but still starts walking, humming.
And so, side by side, we head toward the studio: the sun behind us, the city buzzing around, and that inexplicable feeling of lightness.
While the guys start recording again, I begin tidying up the room where we all sleep. I try to make it as livable as possible: folding clothes, moving sleeping bags, putting order into that little chaos that has now become our home.
And then I see it. The edge of some pages sticking out of James’s sleeping bag.
I lower my gaze. And my heart jolts, sudden, deep.
I shouldn’t… or maybe I should?
My fingers move closer, slowly, as if those pages were made of thin glass. And in that instant, as I brush the paper, I feel that whatever I’m about to discover might change something. Even if I don’t yet know what.
The title stamps itself into my eyes like a warning. It intrigues me, yes… but it also unsettles me. And when I read the first lines, when the words slip into my mind like a thin blade.
Life, it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else..
He never told me. Not once.
I’ve been here for weeks with him, through endless rehearsals, improvised dinners on the studio floor, nights when I watch him laugh and get drunk with the guys, and sometimes it feels like nothing can really shake him. He’s big, strong, solid. A mountain that never moves. And yet those words… they’re a muffled scream. One I didn’t know existed.
I spend the whole afternoon with a weight pressing on my chest. I watch him from a distance as he jokes with Cliff, as he wraps a hand around a can and laughs at something Lars says.
Then he leans against the van, cigarette between his lips, smoke curling around his blond hair. And I see that shadow. A shadow that maybe has always been there, only I… I never really looked.
Maybe he didn’t want to worry me.
Maybe I don’t make him feel safe enough to confide everything.
That night I can’t sleep. I toss and turn in my sleeping bag while he breathes softly just a few feet away. Each breath of his calls to me, each sigh a hand pulling me toward him.
I need to feel him against me. To touch him. To know that he’s okay with me, that despite those dark thoughts, I am, even just a little, his light. The way he is mine.
I get up quietly, the fabric of my sleeping bag rustling just a little. I move toward him the way you step into a cold lake, one slow step at a time, holding my breath.
I slip into his sleeping bag carefully, hoping not to frighten him.
But he opens his eyes immediately.
As if he wasn’t really sleeping, as if he’d been waiting for me.
“Hey…” he murmurs, his voice rough with sleep and something else, maybe unease.
“You okay?” His arm lifts automatically to make space for me. He pulls me close as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
I don’t answer with words. I bring my lips to his neck and kiss him softly. No malice, just tenderness and care.
He, who is usually all sharp edges and loud laughs and kisses that make me lose my balance, is different this time, he isn’t rough, he isn’t eager, impatient. Instead, he melts slowly under every touch.
A deep breath escapes his chest and brushes my forehead. “James…” I whisper, my voice trembling a little. “Why have you never told me about Fade to Black?”
I feel him swallow, then inhale and let the air go slowly.
“It wasn’t the right time…” he says, in a voice that seems to struggle to come out.
A long, tense silence follows.
“It’s stuff from before I met you.” He goes on, looking away as if staying with that memory costs him something. “When they stole all our gear… I felt like shit. Lost. Like I had nothing to offer anyone. I was pissed at the world, at myself… and I didn’t want to drag you into that mess.”
I rest my forehead against his cheek.
It’s warm, alive. His scent fills my lungs.
“You don’t have to protect me from yourself.” The words come out on their own, soft but firm.
“I’m here with you, with everything you are. Even the darkness” I whisper, gently cupping his face with my thin fingers.
He inhales sharply, as if my words and my touch were loosening a knot he’d kept tied for too long.
He pulls me closer with a movement that’s a bit clumsy, almost desperate, but honest, painfully honest.
His hands slide down my arms with a new gentleness, as if he’s afraid of hurting me.
He says it softly, surprised, as if he hadn’t expected that truth. “I don’t know how you do it… but you make me feel at home. Even when I don’t know who I am. Even when I don’t know where I’m going.”
I hold him tighter, as if I could keep him together when he feels like he’s falling apart.
“I’m just scared… I guess,” he adds, and his voice wavers, cracks. “That this life will change you. That it’ll be too hard on you. And that one day you’ll wake up and walk away because you’ll realize this isn’t what you want.”
I close my eyes. It hurts to hear him say that, like someone tugged a thread straight from my heart.
“I’m happy, James.” I say it as I rest my lips softly on his shoulder.
“I don’t care about wandering around the world. I don’t care about sleeping in a sleeping bag. I don’t care about any of it, if you’re there. Having you beside me is enough…”
I don’t even finish the sentence before I feel his body moving closer to mine suddenly, as if he needed to merge with me to keep from slipping away.
His hand brushes my jaw with a tenderness that makes me tremble, then slides up through my hair, to the back of my neck.
His lips find mine, soft, warm, hesitant only for an instant.
The kiss is slow, full of tenderness.
There’s no hunger, no urgency.
There’s only him speaking to me without words, through touch, and my body answering him.
I let myself sink into it.
His warmth surrounds me, fills me, calms me. It’s like stepping into a suspended bubble, a fragile spell I don’t want to break.
For the first time since I’ve been with him…
I don’t desire him the way I usually do.
I don’t want to go further.
I just want this: his tenderness, his vulnerability, his body finally relaxing in my arms.
I want to lose myself in him like this, in his breath, in his need for me.
In the words he’s finally stopped hiding.
We stay like that, close, wrapped in our quiet.
He kisses my forehead, then my temples, then the corner of my mouth. I stroke his long wavy hair, his neck, the line of his jaw. We move slowly, as if afraid of breaking each other. There’s no need to say anything. No rush. Just our breathing intertwined and his scent filling my lungs.
We stay awake for hours, holding each other, touching softly, as if learning a new way of speaking.
“Tell me you’re not leaving… tell me you’re staying with me” he whispers in my ear gently before kissing me again, cradling my face in his hands as if trying to hold onto me.
My hands slide down his back under his thin shirt, holding him close, my legs tangling with his and in that quiet night, as he lets himself fall apart in my arms, I understand that the darkness he’s been through hasn’t disappeared completely.
But now he knows he doesn’t have to face it alone.
