Yesterdays | Slaxl ❦

S I X

"Tell the Wind and Fire where to stop, but don't tell me."

Axl rested his head against the window, releasing a soft sigh as the plane trembled with turbulence. Dizzy sits beside him, knees propped up against the seat before them, his device angled horizontally as he tapped the screen with a concerning vigor.

"What the hell are you doing?" Axl asked after a moment of listening to the incessant noise.

"I'm trying to beat my daughter's high score on Flappy Bird! Can you believe she's gotten to 67?" Dizzy huffs, and Axl glances over at his screen, chuckling as he watches the blue bird descend to the ground.

"You scored 12. I believe you're just gonna have to accept defeat, man." Axl takes a deep breath, reclining his seat just a bit as he closes his eyes. Their flight to the next city was roughly elongated due to weather conditions, and although Axl wasn't averse to the idea of being stuck on a plane with his bandmates for the next seven hours, he was certainly inclined to the results of jumping off and plummeting to his death.

After being interrogated for his lateness to their recent show— which was also inclusive to Slash— Axl was blatantly tired. He recounted the scenes from earlier, how Slash's body had come together with his in such an inexplicable way, and how beautiful he felt as though the crowd yet to scrutinize him was just an illusion. Axl felt young again, and liberated as though Slash was his medicine all along, the one who made all of the bad thoughts wither away, and the one who made this feeling of insecurity bloom into confidence once had. Profound. The feeling was profound.

But as of now, Slash was somewhere around the back of the plane, listening to his muse vent away the happiest of the thoughts; the thoughts that weren't filled with grief for a love that ended once before, thoughts that only spurred optimism between them. And Axl was left listening to Dizzy tap his screen to keep a bird afloat, though feeling oddly desolated in a place full of people.

Yet once again, the story written by Charles Dickens calls his name, exposing his own thoughts and pains, concurrently giving him something valuable to relate his deepest desires to. He's read through each of the words, realizing that his atrocious life, once thought to be full of love, was instead a life where love only lingered in the prologue, not once melding into the chapters of his solitude and self-demise. But Axl's life was not a cliché, otherwise he'd be happier. There was no epilogue to this story, no foreseen happy ending where Slash belonged to him. In its place were miles and miles of unanswered questions, the What Ifs? and the spineless hypotheses. His book was full of elongated chapters in which conveyed his day-to-day struggles, and his book wrote the darkest thoughts in which the hopes of having Slash were for another story— a fantasy.

If there was no happy ending, Axl didn't understand the point of wishing for one.

He could hear the indistinct chattering around him, the airy laughs, and the amused clapping. Although, when he closes his eyes, he's not in a private plane but instead, a compacted van with Duff hacking recklessly at the steering wheel, groaning as the sweltering heat wallowed within the car like a vengeful ghost, and beside him, Izzy's picking away at the drying polish on his boots, gazing blankly at the road ahead of them in a dazed state, perhaps a high state. And in the backseat, Steven Adler lies down with his legs draped over Axl and Slash's laps, and the latter groans as he barely manages to fit his guitar in the back with them.

"Why couldn't we just strap Steven's stupid drums to the top of the car?" He grunts.

"And risk them falling off? I don't think so!" Steven fires back, and Axl moans in frustration as he leans his head back, irritated with the consistent bickering. He watches as the speedometer drops to the tens, and turns to give Duff a look of pure acrimony.