Said and Done

[Deamon]

((Cameron Herrig continued from Smoke On Her Face))

Cameron sat staring out the window.

Vanessa hadn't said anything since she had begrudgingly agreed to actually go to the tattooists. Cameron had been excited when she'd woken up, today was the day they had booked weeks ago. Today was the day she had sent off sketches for. Finally she was getting her two tattoos. One of a coyote head on her shoulder and the other an eye with a galaxy for the iris on the palm of her hand. They were heading all the way down to Phoenix to get them done, both of them had booked appointments. Cameron was seeing a guy called Earthgrasper, she had seen his art online and fallen in love with it, everything about it appealed to her, the colours, shading and designs.

Vans was getting one as well, although she had either forgotten or just didn't want to go. Cameron snuck a glance over at Vans driving; she still felt bad about everything and things had been awkward between the two of them ever since she had invited Coleen to join the band. The desert highway was breezing past as California Girls lurched from the radio.

"Can I plug my iPhone in to the aux? Got some new stuff I want to show you."

[Slam]

((Vanessa Stone continued from Smoke on her Face))

The blistering desert heat outside was in stark contrast to Vanessa's ice cold shoulder.

In the midst of all of the excitement of Cams stabbing her in the back by recruiting some scar-face singer to replace her, their plans to get tattoos together had somehow managed to slip her mind. She hadn't completely ignored Cams in those past two weeks, but compared to how often the two usually talked, she might as well have been dead to Vanessa.

In spite of all that, though, she'd still agreed to go and get the tattoos. In her head she had decided that she just wanted to complete her look already, but in her heart she'd missed hanging out with Cams just a little bit. You didn't just cut things off with your best friend over one fight, after all, no matter how big a fight it might've been.

That said, her head wasn't caught up with her heart yet, so the quiet anger continued to simmer.

"Whatever."

[Deamon]

At least she'd gotten a response, it was better than nothing. Cameron lent over to grab the aux cable, doing it so carefully you would have thought that Vanessa was about to lunge across the jeep and attack her. Once that was done she plugged her iPhone in and set Once More 'Round The Sun by Mastodon to play, she'd got the CD recently and had been wanting to share it with Vans ever since she'd first listening to it. It had a lot of things she thought her friend would like. Tweaking the volume a bit so the detail of the composition was noticeable but wasn't so loud as to be distracting she settled back into looking out the window.

About halfway through Tread Lightly the silence became so loud it was unbearable. Cameron was on a road trip to go and get tattoos, they couldn't just sit in silence or exchange one word answers the whole time. She missed talking to her best friend.

"You should come back...Not that you left or anything but...y'know it like wouldn't be the same without you."

Cameron Herrig, lyricist.

[Slam]

Vans took her eye off the road for the briefest moment to shoot Cameron a deadly look.

"Did you get rid of her?" she hissed, with as much venom as a rattlesnake. Of course she knew what the answer was, Cameron would've said something by now if Coleen had actually left, but Vanessa wanted to make sure that Cams really was just that clear on what the issue was. It would've been difficult for her to not know what the problem was, but Vans had known Cams long enough to know that she was some kind of Houdini when it came to making a problem disappear. It wouldn't have surprised if her if her BFF wanted to deny that the whole thing even happened.

"Cause y'know, it's not like I liked being a frontwoman or anything. Happy for some random bitch to take the stage out from under me with your thumbs up the whole time."

[Deamon]

Her suggestion was well-received.

She fiddled with a loose strand of hair as Vans went on her rant. Not that she didn't have any right too, Cameron had fucked up, she knew that. She recognised she had made a mistake, but she didn't want or enjoy her best friend throwing all of her venom and bile at her, she had seen Vanessa at her acidic peak before but had never personally been on the receiving end of it.
"Well..." She didn't know how to continue. "Fuck sake."

Cameron went back to staring out of the window, quietly thinking about what to say.

"You still have lead and can do backing vocals. I mean I know I fucked you over here. But it won't be Peyote Coyote without you and I wouldn't want to do it if you aren't there. It's our band and I'm rambling and I know I'm rambling. I fucked up I'm sorry but...fuck."

Then her phone fell off her leg.

"Fuck." Cameron hissed as she tried to pick it up, then it slipped out of her hand.

"Shit."

[Slam]

Vanessa groaned and rolled her eyes.

No, she didn't enjoy seeing Cams when she got like this. She actually really hated it when her best friend started having one of her panic attacks, because more often than not it led to really shitty things that she'd rather not think about. She definitely didn't enjoy knowing that she was at least partly responsible for it, if only indirectly and as a consequence of Cams' dick move that was bringing in Coleen in the first place.

She didn't enjoy Cams' offer either, though, because it had missed the point entirely.

"Calm the fuck down, will you?" she sighed, trying to offer her friend some kind of comforting smile, but only really managing a non-hostile glance.

What she wanted to do was explain why she was so pissed off and convince Cams to reconsider who was doing what in the band and what was the right way to go about these things.

She couldn't do that though, as putting together a concise and reasoned statement was not her forte when she happened to be in a bad mood, so instead she settled for trying to stop her friend from freaking out next to her with a hearty distraction.

"This track's not bad. What's it called?"

[Deamon]

"High Road. It's by Mastodon."

Cameron finally managed to retrieve her iPhone from the foot well.

"From their new album Once More 'Round the Sun. It's cool, you'd like it. Loads of killer riffs. You know that song we cover? 'Blood and Thunder'? That's by them too."

Her sentences were fast and clipped, almost like a firecracker, she was trying to get everything she wanted to say out.

"It's not a concept album like their last three though, which was a bit disappointing."

Cameron felt a certain sense of ease come over her as she talked about music with Vanessa. She knew that it was supposed to be distracting her from what from happening, she knew the tricks people used. But she also knew Vans was doing it to save her from herself. She appreciated that. It was part of why she liked Vanessa, sure she could be prickly but she helped anchor Cameron, without her things would just spiral out into eternity and there wouldn't be much left.

Maybe that was too melodramatic or deep. But the point was the same.

She wanted to keep the good times going though and she had something she wanted to unveil anyway. She looked out the window, watching as they kept their steady pace through the desert.

"I've written a concept album for the band you know."

[Slam]

"Oh?" she asked, her eyebrow peaked alongside her curiosity.

The band had done a few original pieces here and there, but it surprised Vanessa that Cams had summed up the energy to write an entire album for them, especially given everything else that was going on in her life at the time. With that in mind, Vanessa supposed that her BFF being pissed at her probably wasn't helping her cope with things like her parents imminent divorce all that much.

Then again, getting betrayed like that didn't help Vanessa much either, so there they were stuck at an impasse carved from Vanessa's own stubbornness and refusal to just let her friend be happy at her own expense.

"So, what's the concept?" she kept her eyes straight down the road as she spoke. It had been tricky enough to not shoot daggers at Cams the last time she'd turned her head, after all.

She really hoped it wasn't something miserable. 'My life is a shitstorm and my wrists bleed the pain' wasn't really a theme she wanted to provide the soundtrack for.

[Deamon]

"Okay, so..." Cameron stopped momentarily as she tried to think of a way to explain what exactly the concept album was. It wasn't that she didn't know per se, she just wasn't sure how to put the idea into words that made sense.

"It's called Merging and its about someone who's going home for the first time since...I'm not entirely sure, but they're going home because one of their parents has died and it's been so long they're a totally different person than they were when they left." Once she got going it wasn't as hard as she thought. Maybe she knew what she wanted from the album to begin with.

"So it follows their journey home and the idea is as they get closer the songs get heavier and its closer to the middle so everything converges at the point where they arrive home which is the heaviest song on the whole thing, then we spiral out from there and it steadily gets more dreamlike as they comes to terms with everything and the final songs are them letting all their baggage go and moving on."

The last part of the explanation came out as a steady steam of information. Cameron was surprised by how lucid and sensical the whole thing was. Sure it was tied up in the whole American myth and the journey home purposely mirrored that but she had been hoping for something that came across as more personal. Saying it all out loud to Vans was a good way of acknowledging that the idea had some legs, she'd written most the first parts of it after that night her and Vans sat in the desert. It had been steadily added to and refined since then.

Most of the songs were written and she had her first real attempts at lyrics written down.

She had just been delaying showing it to anyone out of fear they wouldn't like it.

"So...what do you think?"

[Slam]

Vanessa did not reply for a while.

You didn't need to be a musicologist to tell that Cams was projecting her own feelings onto this album, rather than it having anything to do with the band as a whole. The fact that Vans knew Cams so well only confirmed the theory to herself, and that riled her up.

Everything getting heavier? Parents dying? Changing people? How about a song about a giant neon sign saying "LOOK HOW TURBULENT MY LIFE IS AND HOW MUCH IT'S FUCKING ME UP".

It was distressing, because whilst Vans wanted the best for her BFF, sometimes she could be an overly dramatic spaz. Sure, her own parents were still married, but so what if they got divorced? People got divorced all the time these days, and it's not like her parents spent that much time together. That didn't mean she wanted them to get divorced, of course, but Cams' own situation had given her reason to at least consider the possibility, and she was pretty sure she could cope with it.

So why the hell was Cams making such a big fucking deal about it? Why couldn't she just be chill with it and not fuck herself up so much?

"Cams..." she started, but only managed to trail off.

Yeah, Cams said that it ended well, so she wasn't convinced that the entire universe was going to collapse in on itself. Still, all this bullshit in the middle felt so unnecessary by contrast. Why did she have to put herself through all this shit?

"Is this because of your parents?" she didn't really need to guess, since there was no way that she had written an entire album in just two weeks, not Cams. "Cause it sounds...bad. Like the first half is you going into a fucking black hole or something, and that sucks."

[Deamon]

"What? No it's not that." She stopped and glanced over at Vanessa. "I mean it doesn't matter...don't worry about it."

Truthfully it might have been that a little and as much as it hurt to admit to herself but Vans hadn't been there for her. She resented the idea that now she was getting over it Vans suddenly cared. Cameron knew her best friend meant well but it was too late; Vanessa had spent her time ignoring and being angry at her.

"It's fine. That's not the point of the album...and I don't want to talk about it."

She stared out the window for a while thinking of what to say next. How to approach a conversation she didn't want to have. She settled on the old reliable standby. Ignore the problem and hope it went away.

"Do you reckon it'd be a good album?"

[Slam]

Cams Houdini was putting on yet another performance, much to Vanessa's growing frustration.

Of course Cams didn't want to talk about it: she never wanted to talk about it. She just wanted to sit around freaking out and kill herself over these things, whilst Vanessa was supposed to just sit back from a distance and patiently watch the whole fucking show unfold. She was always there to help her get away from the scene with a quick distraction, but actually getting to the heart of the matter and being there for Cams? How was she ever supposed to do that when Cams always shut her out?

So it was that whilst Cams stared out the window, Vanessa also sat in silence again, concern turning back to annoyance. When Cams broke the quiet with her follow-on question, Vanessa only needed a few moments to sum up her thoughts.

"What am I supposed to think? I haven't heard any music, and the 'concept' part sounds fucking depressing. Why can't we just do an album about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, and all that shit?"

Cams was making it really fucking difficult to stay cool about the whole thing. Vanessa hesitated before she spoke next, but not for long enough to censor herself.

"You don't have to make life so fucking depressing, you know."

It was harsh, but it needed to be said. Being Cam's BFF was downright exhausting at times.

[Deamon]

Vanessa's words hit her like a slap to the face. She opened her mouth to say something then closed it. She let out a long sigh and rested her head back on the seat.

"You're right. I should just try and move on. You're wrong about the concept album though." She held up a hand to stop Vans from saying anything in case she felt like butting in. "It's all building up to the end which is a hopeful one."

She turned and looked at Vans, she had stuck with her through everything and in return she had brought a new lead singer into the band. Yeah, not her best move ever.

"Look Vans, I'm sorry. About like everything, you've been there for me through this and that can be exhausting and I kinda screwed you over with the whole Coleen thing. But you're still my best friend and I miss you. Can you promise me you'll give Coleen a chance? A show or two? If she bombs that can be it, she's gone and you take back the vocals. I just don't want to be in a band without you, playing with you is like, the most fun I've had in my life, you let me put all the paint on and go with it. Not many other people would do that. It means a lot to me."

It seemed like a fair deal to Cameron, but then again she had proven to be bad at the whole decisions thing recently.

"I also have some peyote and we have a lot of desert to get back through after this. So how about we start my new positive life off right?"

[Slam]

Vanessa also let out a long sigh. It was, in a way, cleansing.

If she wasn't driving, she would've taken that moment to slump her head over and let out an almost playful groan. Cams' spiel had managed to tug at her heartstrings, and if nothing else it helped to know that her BFF actually appreciated all the effort she put into things. She didn't try to make Cams feel better when she was screwing herself up for shits and giggles, after all.

"It's not like I haven't been a bitch about this whole thing either." she conceded, flashing Cams another attempt at a smile that came across just a little bit better. Avoiding her friend for two weeks wasn't going to fix anything, and she did acknowledge that. She still felt the wound from the knife in her back, but at least Cams had actually given a proper apology for it now, instead of just tripping up over her own words. The fact that she was still trying to placate her with more deals and offers was still kind of annoying, but at least Cams had put the ball in her court by acknowledging her own fault in the deal.

"It still wasn't cool of you, but thanks for saying sorry. Coleen's singing isn't shit, I guess, but she's still on probation." She'd leant back into her seat now, taking on a pose that was just a bit more relaxed. She didn't like conceding the deal with Cams, but she did want things to get back to normal between them and the band. Plus, there was still the hope that once she got out on stage, Coleen would freeze up like a piss stream in the North Pole.

For now, though, the fact that Cams had brought their favourite substance with her was making reconciling just that much more appealing.

"Tattoos, then we're getting inspired as fuck later."

[Deamon]

An honest smile played across Cameron's face. It felt good to have things almost settle back to normality.

"Hell yeah. Tattoos than getting some inspiration. Sounds like an awesome fucking day to me."

Cameron picked her phone up and flipped through the music app until she found her playlists, scrolling down she located one called "Riffasaurus Rex". It was a favorite of hers and Vans, for good reason. She hit shuffle and let the magic happen. Tres Brujas by The Sword kicked in over the speakers in Vans Jeep. She took that as a good sign for the way things were going to go.

"Alright." She murmured to herself, her grin turning into a smile.

It felt good to have Vans back. Cameron couldn't wait for them to all get back together and practice. Sappy as it sounded she felt hope that all of their problems were slowly going to drift away.

It was nice to feel hope again.

((Cameron Herrig and Vanessa Stone continued elsewhere...))