𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚜 // 𝚊𝚡𝚕 𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚎 [𝚒𝚗𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚝𝚎]

II: Life's Insanity

Thank you very much to @Rosegirl86 for voting on chapter 1! I hope you enjoy this chapter, everyone!

~

Axl POV

It was irrational, ridiculous, unfounded.

So why did Axl - or, more specifically, his poor heart - burn for the girl to turn around?

He'd seen her for 10, maybe 15 seconds. Known her for none. He didn't have a name, hell, he didn't have a face to put a name to. Yet something was drawing him to her. 

But something else was whispering for him to stay far, far away. Something else was telling him not to do this again, not to get into a painfully short love story again, and especially not with her.

"So, so you think you can tell...?"

A sweet, clear voice jarred the singer out of his head and heart and back to reality. It was the girl's voice, sure, but it was a sound that wasn't his crazily meandering thoughts. And that was all Axl needed to berate himself, turn on his heel and walk down the corridor.

~ 

As he stepped into his apartment, Axl checked his watch. 45 minutes and he'd have to be back to the studio with some material for them all to sort through. 

The singer began in the living area, cursing his messiness as he realised the sheer number of places the crumpled sheets of paper were and could be scattered. On the coffee table alone sat a pile of sheets, covered in mostly his messy but flowing scrawl, with notes in Slash's spiked scratch; Izzy's cursive; Duff's sloppy print; and Steven's block-capital shorthand.

Deciding he may as well start then and there, Axl flopped down onto the sofa and gathered the sheets, flicking through to check which were actual song lyrics, chords and the like rather than bills or whatever else he didn't want to think about. "My Michelle", he spotted at the top of one of them and smirked at the humorous memory. The second his friend Michelle found out he was part of a band once again, she'd pretty much demanded he write a song about her. Which he'd begun in earnest, then decided to make into a twisted version of her request. Well, it was still a song about her...

Yeah, Axl Rose was very good at ignoring the job to be done in favour of reminiscence.

"Shadow of Your Love," from his time in Hollywood Rose. "Welcome to the Jungle," the result of a vaguely serious writing get-together, based on his move to LA. More and more half-finished songs gradually appeared from various places around Axl's apartment, until a sizeable stack of papers lay in front of him, and he checked his watch - then cursed under his breath.

Who was he kidding? If that was under his breath, no one except perhaps the most hardcore of all metalheads wanted to know what talking loudly, let alone shouting, was.

In any case, he had minus 20 minutes to spare, since he was 10 minutes late already. Gathering up the papers, he shoved them hastily into the pocket of his jacket and headed towards the door.

~

The session had gone mostly without a hitch; better than any of them had expected for the trial run of, well, actually getting things done. 

However, the experience had left them all mentally drained and when they finally decided to call it a day at 6PM (after, Axl admitted to himself, 2 too many pizza runs out of 3), he decided to do what his brain had been conditioned by previous experience to do after such a day: go out to a club for the night and drink to a fun and useful music session. Not that Axl was a stranger to going out for the sake of it, but there was something more enjoyable about getting wasted and going home with a random girl if it was less akin to procrastination.

It took a while to get ready these days; everyone's hair was getting bigger and fashion choices wilder. A lot of that LA scene wasn't to his taste, but he pulled on a politically incorrect t-shirt and leather trousers with a gaudy cross necklace and leather jacket nonetheless. As he did so, Axl's gaze drifted  to the small plastic bag at the top of the open drawer. One of the band, he suspected, had left the white powder there a day or so ago now, and he didn't know what to do with it. He could hardly ask whose it was and give it back to them, supporting the habit, but it wasn't the sort of stuff you chucked in any old bin, either. Axl had only ever had coke once, in the back alley after some mind-numbingly boring school event that he and a couple of others had managed to excuse themselves from, and he'd sworn he'd never do it again.

Not after Layla. 

But he didn't think about that.

He could remember it, though, as much as he tried not to. The high, and then the crushing low.

But he didn't think about that.