davey
I realized I loved Jade at exactly the wrong time. Part of me had always known it, I guess… the part of me that leaned my head on his shoulder when I was tried, the part of me that led me to his arms when I was upset, the part of me that dared only hold him on stage because there could be no rejection there… part of me knew that my love for Jade didn’t stop at best friend and bandmate.
I didn’t admit it, though. Not until he met Anna. And as soon as he said that she might be the real thing, I realized he was the real thing. The one I loved, so much it hurt.
Three weeks later, he proposed to her. And two weeks after that, here I was. Straightening his tie that was already immaculately straight; he was a perfectionist, especially here, a tie-tying god. I never wore the damn things. They were too complicated.
His tie was dark, thick red silk, like Anna’s dress. They matched. So did her roses. Everyone else involved was in black. As weddings went, it wasn’t traditional, or frivolous, or poufy. It was simple and serious and beautiful.
Just like Jade.

jade
I kept waiting for God to smite me. I’m not a very religious person, so I didn’t expect thunderclouds and strokes of vengeful lightning, but I hadn’t ruled them out, either. I expected little things to go wrong- like Adam showing up drunk, or Davey going all weird and depressed on me, or Smith getting an interesting new haircut that Anna hated, or the wiring going crazy, or Davey’s cysts to come back, or Hunter’s “shin splints”, or something happening to one of my guitars… or me hurting Anna.
I’d rather die than hurt Anna. And that’s why I hope God strikes me down before I go through with this.
I don’t have cold feet; I’m not regretting anything (well, okay, I’m regretting everything, but that has nothing to do with Anna); and the bridesmaids don’t hate me. The best man’s my brother and Davey’s going to marry us (it seems fitting, Lord Havok the deity himself joining our souls in holy matrimony). Nothing can go wrong, and I love Anna so much…
There’s a slight problem, though. I don’t love Anna the way I should. The only reason I’m marrying her, this wonderful, smart, beautiful woman, is because she’s not Davey.

davey
At least it’ll be over soon. Jade will be married and I won’t even be able to dream about him anymore. I’ll have no choice but to move on.
I’m not going to be in love with forever. Am I? That’s stupid. Humans are creatures of hate, not of love. It’s not even possible that I keep loving him…
“Dave, shit, I just rubbed my eyeliner all over my face,” Jade interrupted my thoughts (as he so often did), sounding panicked. We were having the ceremony backstage at the Phoenix Theatre, a wistful dream of Jade’s Anna had gone along with. She didn’t seem to mind that she would be second to AFI, or that she was marrying a man who wore more make-up than she did. All that mattered to her was that she loved him and that they could be together.
I knew how she felt.
After the ceremony, we had a show to play. We’d go on in our tuxes; our kids would love it. They didn’t know about the wedding, for Jade and Anna’s own safety, but Jade had written a song for her. After ‘Catch A Hot One’, he was going to dedicate and play ‘For Anna’. She had a front row ticket, an amazingly gorgeous (if simple) dress, and would be the most beautiful girl there. Because she’d be his… anything that was Jade’s was impossibly beautiful.
“Davey? Help me?” Jade pouted, and I sighed. He’d always been perfectly capable of doing his own eyeliner, until now. I didn’t want to have to get any closer to Jade, to have to touch Jade. We were the only ones in this smaller dressing room, and that I couldn’t have him was about to kill me.
As I fixed his right eye, Jade laughed and quoted, “I challenge you to a make-out.” When I didn’t react, he added worriedly, “Remember, Davey?”
I nodded and kept working at his eye. Was he trying to hurt me? Of course I remembered. Even then my heart had skipped. “Stop moving,” I grunted.
“I just want you to smile, Dave,” Jade begged. “You’re never this quiet. I’m the shy one.”
I set down the pencil hard and angry words exploded out of my mouth. I couldn’t stop them.
“Not anymore, Jade! We can’t be that anymore! We can’t be Davey and Jade, we have to just be two guys in the band- everything’s different now, Jade. Everything’s changing!”
Jade’s big eyes opened even wider, looking more sorrowful than usual. He didn’t understand why I was yelling, didn’t know what he’d done wrong. He was like a puppy, and I’d just kicked him.
I sighed. I wanted to apologize, I really did. But I couldn’t. I had no words. There were only thirty minutes left till I had to marry them and I still wasn’t sure if I could do it.
“I’m gonna see if Hunter needs help wiring,” I snapped. “You stay here. Fuck around with your guitar or something.”
I was out of that room with the door slammed behind me before the tears in his eyes even registered in my mind.

jade
This wasn’t how Davey was usually angry. He usually got hung up about some inane little detail, but at least then you knew what was wrong. But this? I’d never seen this happen before.
Maybe he was mad about a typo in the program for the night’s show, or maybe he didn’t want to be our justice of peace- but if that was it, he’d say something. It was not like Davey to keep his mouth shut for any length of time. I could rely on him to tell me when I did something bad… he always told me what was wrong. He always had.
Was he worried that Anna would change AFI? Was that all? Because that couldn’t happen, we wouldn’t let it happen. The band was our baby, and it would stay the same. It had to. I was getting over Davey, because he would never love me, but that didn’t mean anything had to change.
What I needed was a drink. What I needed was to get completely wasted, trash my morals, and crash my wedding. That way neither Anna or Davey would ever want to see me again, and-
“Jade! Close your eyes!” Anna’s soft voice hissed into the room.
“What?” I asked dumbly, closing my eyes.
“You aren’t allowed to see me,” Anna laughed, and I felt her cool hands slide over my eyes. She kissed my lips and giggled.
“Where’s Buffy?” she asked. She was referring to vampiric Davey, refusing to accept that Buffy slew vampires. “I was worried about sneaking past him.”
“To do what?” I asked, smiling. Being around Anna made me happy. I’d never become so close to anyone so quickly, and I loved her like I loved my little sister.
“To be with you,” Anna said, lowering her hands and voice. “I haven’t seen you all day.” I squeezed my eyes shut and laughed.
“No! You leave. This is not allowed!”
Anna sighed and kissed me again. “I love you,” she said imploringly.
“I love you back,” I said teasingly, reaching out blindly and finding her shoulder. “Now get out!”

davey
Hunter was messing around behind the stage when I found him, smiling in the strangely distant way he gets when he’s around electronics.
“Whatchya doin’?” he asked me distractedly.
“Sulking,” I confessed. “I’m sick of playing best man. Smith can do Jade’s goddamn make-up.”
“Jade’s capable of doing his own make-up,” Hunter pointed out, unplugging an AV input cord and scowling at where he pulled it out from. “Idiots,” he muttered under his breath.
“Tell him that,” I said, laughing at the funny thing that hadn’t happened.
Anna came fluttering in behind us. “Jade’s being weird,” she announced. I could second that.
She was glowing, tan skin peering out of her low-cut strapless dress, sparsely scattered iridescent beads collecting at the bottom rim, rain collecting after a storm. Her brown hair was curled loosely and her green eyes were accentuated with a light dusting of eyeshadow and elegant swoops of liner, the makeover I’d been dying to give her since Jade first brought her into the bus. Her lips were tinted a soft rose color and she looked beautiful. As usual. I could see why Jade was so crazy about her, and she had a personality to match. He was lucky… we were all lucky, to have the privilege of knowing them. They were both amazing, gorgeous people. They deserved each other.
Hunter had abandoned the cords and was straddling one of the speakers, asking Anna which of her bridesmaids he had the best chances with.
“Mantha’s engaged but has a wicked lust for musicians,” Anna informed him. “She hits on Jade more than he hits on her, for God’s sake.” Jade hit on everyone. It was a habit of his. It was endearing, in some strange little way. Anna went on, “Lis has been trying to decide which one of Jade’s… uh… groomsmaids she can get in bed since she got fitted for her dress. Which leaves Paulie, who’s hot for Buffy.”
“First of all, Adam and I are secondary best men. We are not groomsmaids,” Hunter corrected. This meant they would have been pissed off if they hadn’t gotten to stand behind Jade, and Jade would have been pissed off if they hadn’t wanted to stand behind him, and Smith didn’t want to share his title. “Secondly, don’t use names. Blond hair, tattoo, or bad-taste-in-music? I met them this morning, cut me some slack.”
“Mantha’s the one who doesn’t like AFI,” Anna laughed. I don’t know why she was obliging. “Lis is the blue-haired gelled-up slut, and Paulie’s the blond. Your best bet is Lis.”
She also used surprisingly Hunter-friendly terms. He nodded. “Good, she’s hot.”
Anna shook her head, finally realizing what she was doing. “You’re actually gonna sleep with Lis?”
Hunter shrugged. “Well, yeah. If I didn’t get some at Jade’s wedding, I’d be letting us all down.”
“How ‘bout Paulie, Dave? She gonna get lucky?” Anna teased, giving up on the theory that Hunter might have a conscience. Or a soul.
I scowled at her. She knew perfectly well that I wasn’t interested in mindless sex. Besides, I was desperately in love with the man she was about to marry… though, to be fair, she didn’t know about that. “Paulie can slake her lust elsewhere,” I said stiffly. I sounded like suck a prude, which I guess it better than sounded like what I actually was: completely, one-hundred percent insane. “Get her too drunk to know the difference and sic her on Adam. He’s lonely,” I added, smiling wickedly.
Hunter leaped back up to fidget with more wiring. “Thanks, Anakin,” he said formally, using his new nickname for her and grinning hugely. It was just as creepy as it sounds. “Let’s get this show on the road. We’ve got to run a sound-check and get them married before Anna comes to her senses and falls in love with me.”

jade
I was getting married to prove I wasn’t gay, and for the first time since I’d proposed to the woman of everyone’s dreams it hit me just how funny that really was. When Smith came in to make sure I was ready, I was laughing hysterically.
People have been gay before. They never felt it necessary to do shit like this. I deserved to burn in an eternity of hells for being the absolute jerk that I was, and for some reason that was hilarious.
Smith didn’t see it that way. “What the hell are you laughing about? We’re low on time, Jadey. We gotta get this wedding out of the way so we can sound-check. We go on in forty-five, and you’re still in here pissing yourself. You don’t even know which guitar you’re gonna play.”
I nodded. My sides ached from laughing and my eyes were probably all smudged up again. “I don’t know,” I gasped, choking for air, “why I’m laughing. But I can’t marry her, Smith.” A fresh wave of laughter hit. “I can’t marry Anna!”

davey
We were doing our usual warm-ups, Hunter kick-boxing with Adam (in absence of his usual partner, Jade) who was trying very hard to ignore his and do a series of simple drills, and I was making the routinely horrible shrieking noises that the others denied could possibly be voice exercises. They mostly were; some of them, admittedly, served the sole purpose of freaking everyone else out. That’s when Smith came and got Anna, telling her to fuck wedding taboos because Jade needed her.
It was like being punched in the stomach. Jade didn’t need me, hadn’t even asked for me… he’d left me to miserably howl out my vocal exercises, running over my lines when I could convince Hunter and Adam to be stand-ins for the happy couple. While he went to Anna with his problems. Just like he should do… I wasn’t a part of Jade’s life, anymore.
And I never really was part of it, either. Not as I’d wanted to be…
“Please, Addy? One more time?” I begged. Adam rolled his eyes. Between me and Hunter, he wasn’t getting in any of his warm-up drills. I knew I shouldn’t be so nervous; it’s not like anyone special would be watching the wedding. It was just the four of us, our backstage and touring crew (they were fused to our beings from the time our tour kicked off till the time we finally escaped to either the Berkeley house, or our own private corners of the world), Anna, and her punk-culture bridesmaids.  She was giving up her wedding glamour to marry Jade here and now, without her family or ex-boyfriends or friends from high school. Neither of them could wait till the end of the tour to be married.
But I wasn’t nervous like this on stage. In front of people who could make, or break, my career. In front of people who expected something from me, who adored me… and here, in front of my friends that loved me unconditionally, and a few crazy girls, I was falling apart. I couldn’t handle that kind of stress, reciting some lines for the people I lived with.
“Davey? Are you sure you can handle this?” Adam asked me gently. I nodded firmly and yanked the chopsticks out of my hair. It fell loose and tangled and the back of my neck would sweat but it didn’t matter, right then I needed my hair to hide in. I chewed on my lip ring nervously, a habit I thought I’d broken a long time ago.
I was a nervous wreck.

jade
“Everything’s ready, Jade,” Anna’s soft voice came. “The lights, the people, the music. They’re all just waiting for y- us.”
I turned to Anna, looking her over for what felt like the first time. She’d never speak to me again, would she?
No. Yes. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go through with it but I couldn’t end it either.
Anna smiled warmly and wiped her thumb under my eye. My makeup was all over the place. It was less than drag, but more than usual. This was concert-wear. I hadn’t run through my usual preps, wrestling Hunter, stretching, and over-tuning my guitar; I’d been too busy getting ready, panicking, and finishing the song for Anna. Or at least, it was for Anna as long as I didn’t sing the words.
“Jade,” she whispered, snaking her arms around my waist and gently kissing my cheek. I shivered. “I can’t marry you,” she said into my ear.
I did not expect that.
“What?” This was God’s wrath, then. Crashing down around me. Something terrible was going to happen, wasn’t it?
She kissed my other cheek, nuzzling her head into my shoulder. “I love you,” she murmured.
“And I love you,” I said back numbly, tightening my arms around her.
“But you can’t marry me,” she said, voice thick with sorrow. She loved me, she really did. In a way that I could never love her.
“Why not?” I asked, voice small and pitiful. Because I did love her.
“For the same reason I can’t marry you, love,” Anna said. I heard pain in her voice and felt hot tears on my shoulder. “You love Davey.”
“I- I love you,” I said desperately, the weight of my love for her pressing down on my lungs even as she clung to me. I couldn’t hear her deny my love for her. I couldn’t hear her accuse me of the truth, not out loud-
“Not as you should,” she said, looking into my eyes. Tears were ruining her makeup.
I rubbed my thumb under each of her eyes and tipped up her face. I kissed her softly, for the last time, and said miserably, “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not too late for you, love. You owe it to me to tell Buffy how you feel.”
“You don’t hate me?” I asked sadly.
“I could never hate you, Jade Puget,” she said honestly, voice barely shaking.
“I will always love you, Anna Castiggio,” I promised, and my voice cracked.
“Good. Don’t think I’m just going to disappear from your life. You’re stuck with me now, you know. You’re gonna spend the rest of your life making this up to me.”
“Thank you, Anna…”
“You don’t deserve me, anyway,” Anna teased, and laughed, tears pushed aside now to work towards the greater good. Her own emotions didn’t matter till the end, that was just how she was. My Anna.
I promised myself, then, that at the end of the night, when she let her grief come, I would be there to hold her, to stand by her. To love her… because I couldn’t bear to lose her, anymore than I could bear to marry her.

davey
“Shit, we’re out of time,” Smith said under his breath. “Everybody on stage. We don’t have time for the wedding now, we’ll have to do it after, let’s go!” he ordered more loudly.
Hunter removed his tongue from the blue-haired bridesmaid’s mouth. “I’ll have to do you after,” he promised in a low voice, which for him was probably sexy, and laughing at his own clever little joke.
I was relieved. But worried. It was all a matter of concentration, the strength of my morals and resolve… the power of my soul. Darkness could take me under, if I let it. Apathy, hate, despair… any of it, at any moment, could come crashing down. Would I be able to give my all onstage, with this ceremony waiting? Could I let go of reality and fall into my fans?
I had to. They needed me.
“You ready, Havok?” Adam asked me seriously, stretching his drumsticks over his head. “We’re entering your element, my man… going under, Dave. Into the whispers.”
He was mocking me, in his quiet Adam way. The stage is my home. There is no place I would rather be, except in Jade’s arms- and even that might come second to the divine power I become onstage, living, breathing, ethereal life and death incarnate, echoing something that will play forever on, long after we have passed through this world… of course I was ready. It was ridiculous to have doubts. Our kids were waiting. We would not disappoint.
Jade didn’t show up at the soundcheck, and neither did Anna. Hunter checked the guitar and made a few amp adjustments that Jade would probably undo the second he heard the first chord.
“Jade gets to miss this to have sex, don’t know why I couldn’t,” muttered Hunter.
“It’s his wedding night,” Adam answered.
“You’re the only one who’s gonna have a cold bed,” Hunter shot back snottily. They were playing. Hunter was never serious, and rarely nice. Adam combated this well with his dead-serious honesty. Reserved, but occasionally scathing.
Jade still wasn’t there when we hid behind the curtains and they started letting in fans. I could hear their excited chatter. Adrenaline started to course through my veins.
Next thing I knew, Adam was behind his drum, instilling the heavy backbeat of the night’s intro, Strength Through Wounding, before Jade came jogging over to us.
“Where were you?” I demanded.
Jade shook his head. Hunter was already onstage. “No time,” he hissed, and then sprinted for his guitar.

jade
Davey was pissed, and I was terrified. How the hell was I supposed to do what Anna and I had decided I’d do? What she wanted?
But I lived through the first half of the show, all the way to the song before mine, and adrenaline pumped through me. I was fine; they were all screaming for me. I was a god on the stage, and they were all cheering out of love for us, me and everything I was a part of. They filled me with fire, and I leapt and twisted and danced and sweated and lived. Sometimes Davey touched me, sometimes he was in another world. I didn’t miss a note and my solos were life and love and death and blood at all once, pouring out of this guitar, and I was creating something unbelievable, so much more than I was, and nothing else mattered-
And then it was almost time for my onstage solo endeavor. I’d never played the song for anyone before but this glow, this wonderful stage euphoria, would carry me though it… Hopefully. I could just start the intro to our next song and skip it entirely; the fans wouldn’t know the difference…
Then I saw my Anna, suddenly separate from the rest of the living mass of worship and love before me. She was radiant, all in red, looking as perfectly gorgeous as ever, a single counterpart of the living, screaming, adoring black crowd writhing around her. She smiled at me and nodded, and I knew I could do what I had to do.
“This song is for the only person I’ve ever really loved,” I said, taking a deep breath as my hands began to slide across the neck of my guitar. I grinned shyly, ducked my head, and looked across the stage. He looked so alive, so beautiful and perfect and integral. And suddenly the future didn’t matter. What happened after the concert was inconsequential because at that moment, there was no after. There was only now, and that was all that mattered. I was surrounded by those I loved, and those who loved me. All that mattered, all that existed, was what I did and said and meant and played. The girl on the wall was waiting… Everyone was waiting, and I was- finally- ready to deliver. Let it carry me where it would. Strumming the first delicate chord, I added hoarsely, “This is for you, Davey.”
I closed my eyes and began to sing.