Nico plays with the amp turned down, barely listening to himself. He's trying to drive out all thoughts of everything & forget his misery, but it just isn't working. Jackie fills his head, he loves her, he misses her, he knows she's alone and unhappy right now, less than an hour from where he stands, but he can't go to her and there's nothing he can do to help her. Even his misery can't bring back her happiness. His brother comes in the room, and Nico stops playing. Andrea sits dejectedly on the girlish chair that looks too fragile to hold his athletic frame, "It's okay, Debbie had to go out, she has a photo shoot. You can keep playing if you want." Nicolas puts his guitar back in it's case, "Since when do you want to hear me play?" asks, trying for levity, but the atmosphere is just to heavy, and his brother sits in grim, angry silence. "Andrea, do you love our father?" Nico asks, thinking about Jackie. She doesn't talk often about the family she ran away from, but when she does, it's nothing but gall & hatred. The thought that Trillare might one day speak about him the way Jackie speaks about her father terrifies him. Because it makes him sick with wretched shame & fear now in hindsight, worse even than what he's done to Jackie, his sweet damaged angel has lived through things far worse than Nico's betrayal, he's just helped confirmed for her that the world is an evil place, and anything that seems good or beautiful is just an illusion that makes the bad things just so much more real. Trillare's life is just begun, and he's already stamped it with grief & heartbreak...Andrea raises his eyebrows at the question, frowns, and then answers, "I didn't mean to hit him as hard as I did, Nico, I didn't mean to put him in the hospital, I just wanted him to stop..." Nico looks away, out into the spot of blue sky out the window, away from all this pink. "That's not what I asked...Do you love our father, Andrea? Do you hate him?" Andrea's silence goes on forever. "Yes," he says finally. "I love Papa. And I hate him, enough to kill him if I stayed there any longer. Don't you understand, Nico...I don't know how to love him & our mother at the same time, I can't understand why she still loves him, or why every one of their sons has gone the same way...why you, Nicolas? What about you, do you love our father, do you love our mother? Do you love Jackie, do you love your daughter? What the hell happened to you? How do I stop it from happening to me?"

Andrea visits Jackie & Trillare every day, and Nicolas almost hates him for it, for being able to see them, touch them, when he cannot. Whenever his brother returns from these visits, Nico jumps on him, demanding every detail, how Jackie is looking, what does she say...Andrea's news is never good, Jackie is red-eyed & tired. Andrea is still there as her personal trainer, but tells Nico it's a half-hearted attempt at moving forward, she's distracted & exhausted, he purposely cuts the sessions short so as not to use up the little energy she's running on, and she doesn't even notice. And when Andrea goes to the nursery to spend time with his niece, he says, Jackie retreats into the studio. Nico assumed as much, strong feelings always come out in music; though he's got no studio here & can't ever really play loud enough to appreciate what he's doing, all Nico has been doing in these dark lonely days of separation from his love is express his shame & regret in song, a tune that sobs relentlessly in his head whether he's holding his guitar or not. If he tries to sleep, he has nightmares about leaving Jackie & Trill somewhere, and a disaster happening making him unable to go them, he dreams of them lost & desolate because of him, and there's no way for him fix it, and when he wakes, shaking & sweating, his reality is the same as his nightmares, and so much worse because there is no waking from it. So he doesn't attempt sleep anymore, he just sits in the uncomfortable pink chair & plays his unplugged guitar, hearing an aria of electric pain & amplified grief in his head, hearing notes that cry out in longing for the love he betrayed, shame for the betrayal & sorrow for the betrayed. As the tune takes shape, Nicolas starts to write it down, working on it every minute of every day, correcting, changing it, perfecting it. And then, it's finished. As finished as he can make it without Jackie's assistance. Nico's music has no words, he doesn't write lyrics in his own tongue, let alone try to translate these kind of emotions into English. Too exhausted to even copy out the finished composition on a fresh piece of paper, Nico folds up the worn sheet he's worked, erased & rewritten & brings it down to Andrea before he leaves for his daily visit with Jackie. Andrea frowns sternly at him, "I don't know if she wants this," Andrea warns. Nico sighs heavily, picturing Jackie tearing it up, unlooked at, "Ask her first if she wants it. Just please take it to her...please," he begs, and Andrea relents.

"Well?" Nico demands when Andrea returns. "Well what?" Andrea asks, scowling. Visiting Jackie always upsets him & he rightly blames Nico for it on his return. "Did she take it? Did she look at it?" Nico asks. "She took it, she looked at it. Please leave me alone now, Nico. I'm going to workout," Andrea says flatly, turning away to retreat into the rooms of this pink nightmare world that Nico won't venture into. He's heard Debbie has a store full of toys to keep Andrea entertained for hours in her personal gym...this place makes Nicolas nauseous, everything pink, sugary sweet like cake & icing. When Debbie is here, Andrea is in heavan, lapping up all this sweetness & cream from her pink manicured hands. Nico has given up the thought that Debbie is after anything other than Andrea himself, the girl clearly has done all right for herself & expects nothing from her man beyond his devotion. She's even introduced him to her own personal trainer and has started nudging him toward what could turn out to be a lucrative career in this city. Nicolas would choke & starve on her diet of pink & sugar, but she seems to be real sustenance for his brother. Nico is wretched here, he can barely eat, and doesn't sleep, and sometimes the stress & sickening pink sends him heaving & vomiting in her pretty porcelain bathrooms. It feels like a prison, like he's a child & they are the adults: he could leave any time, go to a hotel or even get a place of his own, a place with no pink, a place where he can plug in his guitar...there is no place he wants to go, except home. To Jackie, to Trill...that place isn't his anymore, and that makes every other place the same as this sugary hell, there will never be another place in this world he will call home. So he stays put & waits to be told he has to leave, to move on & try to live something like life again.

He sent her his song & she accepted it from Andrea. Nico doesn't need the music, he knows it by heart, because that is where it came from, and lodged itself in his head. He sits in the small spare bedroom, guitar on his lap & plays it again & again, imagining her reading it, wondering what she'll do with it...His brother comes in & hands him the phone, "Jackie," he explains & walk out the door. Jackie...Nico's hand trembles as he lifts the phone to his ear, he's thought of all the things he might say to her if she ever spoke to him again, right now all he can do is whisper her name..."I've been writing songs," she says brusquely, "Do you want to hear?" The music starts before he can say yes, so he says nothing, and listens. Nicolas can only write one song at a time, a melody will come out of him, and he'll run it through over & over, working it into a full song...but Jackie is completely different. Her songs start with emotions, her dark poetry giving birth to rhythms, several at a time like a pack of little tunes that need to be nurtured in full songs as a suite. She's been spending her time in the studio recording herself while these lyrics & rhythms explode from her, not stopping to work on any one, just releasing them all as they come to her. She plays three in a row through the phone, dark, heavy, fast songs full of raw, powerful rage. The sound quality is atrocious, Nico focuses intently, her lyrics screaming & moaning her outrage. After the third song, she stops the tape, and he can hear her breathing when she puts the receiver back to her lips. He waits a moment, not sure what response she's looking for, personal or musical. She just says, "Well?" expectantly. Usually, when she would play these kind of raw recordings for him, what she wants is for him to play the guitar, so she can hear the parts she can't play herself. She just blasted three at him in quick succession, but the rhythms were pretty basic & they are nowhere near being really complete songs yet. Playing them back to her, adding his more skilled interpretation, comes readily, so it's what he does, hoping she can hear him, unamplified, through the phone. "Can't you plug in?" she asks impatiently. Nico shrinks into himself as he explains he's not allowed to plug in after 7...he feels like he's 16 again. "God, that sucks," she exclaims, and Nico smiles, the first smile to crack his face since this whole thing came down. She sounded almost like herself..."Do you want to jam, Nico?" she asks. He doesn't think he even needs to answer that, all he wants in the world is to do anything with her, "I'll be right there," he says hurriedly, seizing the opportunity before she snatches it back..."Wait, Nico," she catches him before he hangs up...too late, he thinks, and feels his stomach shrink & quail. "Nico we're just going to play. I don't want to talk, okay?" Any, any condition at all...he'd let Andrea pummel him to death right on her beach if it would bring her her happiness back: being allowed the privilige of playing her songs with her is far, far too good for him...he agrees quickly & rushes out of there with his guitar, barely stopping to say goodnight to Andrea & Debbie, "She wants to jam. I don't know when I'll be back, ciao," and he's out the door.

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