Book 3: You Don't Want My Love (Slash FanFic)

Ch. 16: Heart of Gold

For some reason, I continued to have a lingering hope that Axl might still come back. It was a hope that clung to me long after he'd walked out and it was showing no signs of letting up anytime soon.

Part of me prayed that he wouldn't come back, as I was exhausted and simply burnt out from all of the constant bickering. But another part of me was anxiously awaiting his return, and that part was making itself pretty damn obvious. I kept peeking out into the hallway every time a nurse strolled by and jiggling my leg as I sat in my chair. The minutes ticked by as they normally would, yet still somehow managed to feel like an eternity.

I guess I was just having a hard time believing that it was all finally over, that the band was no longer together, and that we all were no longer friends. Worse still was the realization that Axl and I probably wouldn't be seeing each other again any time soon, which was arguably going to be the hardest pill for me to swallow.

Axl and I had been glued at the hip since the beginning, always the stars of each show and always soaking up the spotlight. Under the constant pressures of fame and the feeling of being under a public microscope, Axl understood me probably better than anybody else could at this point in my life, and that was a terrifying realization. It meant that I was now alone in this world. Completely and utterly alone.

A shiver travelled down my spine and I tried to be inconspicuous as I clutched my leather jacket closer to my body.

I kept replaying Axl's words over and over in my head, wondering just how much of it I could trust. If I truly believed him, that meant that I'd been wrong about Axl all along. Maybe he was right and we'd all gotten a little power-hungry, and maybe we had in fact started to implode without even meaning to. Money and power had been handed to us on a silver platter, and it certainly had changed us-that much I knew and couldn't even dispute to be true. But had we really changed as much as Axl claimed we had? Could we really have been so blind to our own demolition?

No, not blind, I thought bitterly. Indifferent.

I think we were all fully aware of what we were doing. I think the difference was that we just didn't care. We were just out to have fun and to make rock n'roll, but Axl had always been much more serious than the rest of us. Axl had a vision, a focus, and a dream. The rest of the band just wanted to have fun, make money, and do whatever we wanted because we could without any consequences once we were famous. We'd lost sight of the goal. Or rather, we'd reached that goal, and then we'd become comfortable with ourselves. Without the struggles of poverty to push us to our limits, what did we have to work for anymore? What did we have to make music about anymore?

"He's not coming back."

I thought Izzy had dozed off in the chair across from me. The brim of his hat was low over his eyes, and he had been hunched over and silent for some time now. I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sudden sound of his voice.

"Pfft...I know that!" I peeled my eyes away from the door and glared back at Izzy, folding my arms over my chest. Had he been secretly watching me this whole time? Could he sense my discomfort? Probably. Izzy had always been able to pick up on those kinds of things. Sometimes he knew how you felt about a situation before even you did. "I wasn't worried about that."

"No?" He lifted his chin to study me carefully, his eyes a steely grey as they flashed at me.

"I was just checking out the nurses," I lied, pushing kinky curls from my face with a frustrated clawing motion.

"Right. Me too." Izzy's eyes were calm as he gazed at me, and I felt uneasy under his stare. I quickly glanced away, only to have my eyes land on Steven's sleeping body, which only proved to make me feel even worse. I finally settled on staring out of the window at the sun as it set just over Izzy's shoulder.