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Incarcerated Heart
Back to: Three Strings Trio Next: The Raven Crowns
Incarcerated Heart


Cypress cursed. He didn’t know what time it was! He only knew it was way past the time he was supposed to have been at Battle of the Bands. It had already started! Even Nick with all his tardiness wouldn’t have been late for something as big as this. He prayed his band wasn’t playing an early set.

He had trouble finding good parking and as soon as his vehicle was stationary he jumped out and ran through the entrance. Lots of people were already there, many milling about the theater lobby still.

Cypress ran faster.

He was stopped and questioned by an event coordinator before he was allowed to enter the Theater’s back room where the musicians waited. After telling his name and band he played for, he was permitted to enter the Green Room.

He frantically scanned the room and found his band mates.

Orion looked like a nervous wreck and Nick looked to be trying to soothe him until Cypress approached. Both boys stared at him in surprise. Cypress gave an apologetic look and made a movement, more muscle memory than anything, to brush his hair away from his face.

But he didn’t have hair in his face anymore.


“You got a haircut!” Nick stated the obvious. Cypress was now sporting short, slightly gelled hair with some prominent sideburns that his longer hair had always hidden.

“Sorry I’m late. My errands ran longer than I thought they would and there was a traffic jam into Memosa Bay,” Cypress explained.

“But why did you get a haircut!? You were supposed to be our wild-haired, ruggedly handsome drummer!” Nick protested, seeming to ignore Cypress’s explanation and stay focused on the hair cut.

“It was too hot keeping it that long,” Cypress replied, then looked to Orion, “Besides, it felt like it was time for a change.”

Orion seemed to gulp nervously, wondering if Cypress meant something else by it, but also the fact he was going to be playing in front of a big audience still unsettled him, “We go on in five minutes; we tried to call you multiple times.”

Cypress winced and pulled his phone out of his pocket, “My phone battery died. I’m really sorry.”

“Well you’re here now, that’s all that matters,” Orion managed to smile and Cypress returned it. Nick still was griping about his cousin’s haircut but Cypress ignored the remarks.


They lingered in the room between the stage and the Green Room, awaiting an introduction. Orion had started bugging out, wringing his hands, covering his face in anxious anticipation.

"Just imagine the crowd is naked, I hear that helps," Nick suggested.

Orion just groaned in a sickly manner. Apparently, that thought wouldn't be of any help.

“Hey, hey,” Cypress grabbed his arm, trying to get Orion to pull his hands away from his face, “We’ve got this. You’re going to be fine. Don’t make me chase you down in the bathroom like last time.”

The latter part he was only joking, trying to lighten the atmosphere for Orion and get him to think about something else. Orion had always been dodgy in front of crowds. The first time was when they were forced to be in a classroom play in grade school in front of all the parents and Orion broke down crying in the middle of his lines.

Nicholas, with all his charm and confidence, had somehow convinced Orion to start a band and play in public. It had slowly gotten better, but they hadn’t played on a stage like this before, and not with as many people watching that were out there now.

Orion reluctantly met Cypress’s gaze and took a steady breath, “Okay.”

And then they heard their band announced.


Orion felt dread as the bright neon lights fell onto him. All the eyes in the theater were looking at him. He couldn’t mess this up. He took his bass in hand mechanically and forced a smile.

Cypress took a seat at the trap set and counted off, slapping his drumsticks together before bashing them into the cymbals and starting laying the foundation for the song’s beat.

Nick started playing his guitar, remembering the changes Orion had made to the song last practice, and moved his fingers across the neck of the instrument to hit the right notes. The notes…


He looked down at his guitar in abject horror.


The sound wasn’t right at all.


Orion had already started singing and Nick kept playing, trying to swallow his panic. He couldn’t let Orion know he was panicking or else Orion would probably dive off the stage and not in an attempt to crowd surf.

The guitar sound was jarring. It was like…like is amp wasn’t set correctly. He had configured it though! The bridge finally came to give Orion a break from singing lyrics and he leaned over, mouthing ‘What's wrong?’

Nick crouched next to the amp and gestured at it. Orion’s green eyes widened into impossibly large orbs, panic setting in fast. Nick could reconfigure but would need to play the guitar to check if it was right.

“Go to your solo!” Nick shouted to Cypress in a quick thought. Cypress probably didn’t hear him because of the loud drums but nodded, knowing the gist. He was going to take the lead.

Orion fell to his knees next to Nick and this drew a collective gasp from the audience, for they had no idea what was going on up there on stage. Cypress continued to move from drum to drum in quick succession, perfectly executing the drum solo Orion had written.




Orion had been playing music since he could speak. He eyed the knobs to Nick’s amp and deftly turned all the knobs he saw were incorrect. He knew what the amp configurations should be because he was the one who originally set them up when he taught Nick how to play.

He gave a shaky thumbs up to Nick and stood, grabbed his electric bass and followed up behind Cypress’s solo to some insane cheering from the audience. They loved that drum solo.

Nick began playing where he thought they were in the song, and the sound came out perfectly though he had to improvise a little to catch up. He knew the night would be electric but didn’t think his pulse could go any faster after that hiccup. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t confident that he would win.


The song ended and the audience cheered. It was uplifting but Nick was still confused on how the amp had been so wack.

“I think I’m gonna puke,” Orion held his gut as they left the stage and as soon as they were in the Green Room he took off to the bathrooms. Cypress gave a look of initial disgust but sighed and went after him.

“I was dying of second-hand embarrassment the way that sounded. Looks like I won’t have to go on a date with you after all,” Illyana teased as Nick passed.

Nick glared at her, suddenly coming to a very clear yet unpleasant conclusion. Illyana had always been super competitive and she must have had sabotaged his amp in the hopes it would make her band win. She knew there was no chance otherwise. It was suspicious not to mention coincidental that the last time he saw her before the Battle of the Bands, he had taught her about how amps could make or break the sound of a guitar and here it was his amp settings were jacked up. Just like hers had been before he helped her with them.


“Like I’d even want to go on a date with you now anyway,” Nick retorted in a hard, serious voice. Illyana’s expression turned to surprise, as if she didn’t know where his anger came from. “That was a shitty thing for you to do.”

“Nick, what are you talking about?” her eyes were suddenly round with concern.

“Like you don’t know! I thought we were friends!” He’d never been so angry at her in his life. Not even when she broke his new Action-Man action figure when they were seven because she threw it across the room to make it ‘fly’. It was so dumb. It was much more than possibly losing that made him so angry with her; he'd given up his plans for art school for this chance.

“Aren't we?” she replied, now holding frustrated confusion in her tone of voice. They had been hanging out earlier in the Green Room, chatting and laughing. It sure seemed like they were friends again. Heck, he was the one who asked if they could be friends again and even the one that insisted she not be mad at him when she lost.

“No, because 'we aren’t friends, after all',” he repeated the words she once said to him at the Laundromat and turned his back on her.

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