Work Text:
October 2, 1995.
A new Iron Maiden album, the tenth, is released. It is dark, melancholy and riddled with an undeniably bitter sadness. 2 years beforehand, the frontman for over 10 years had left the band. For the simple sake of his freedom and sanity, and with no regrets.
This same man now buys a copy of the album on cassette tape from a small music shop, both entering and leaving without a word. He sits alone as he snaps it into the hi-fi player, placing his cold beer beside him and shaking the bob-like mop of brown hair he still wasn't used to out of his face as he presses play.
His face is calm.
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Why am I meant to face this alone?
Asking the question time and again
Praying to god won't keep me alive
Inside my head I feel the fear start to rise
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The opening track. Alright. This was almost a dirge; Gregorian chants and dissonant echoes. An instant sombre tone saturated it, even as the tempo built to punctuate the end of the introduction. The vocals kicked in and Blaze Bayley's dark, oaky baritone rumbled through the verses with palpable grit and a hollow vibrato. It worked. The side of his lip twitched happily. Good.
It was long; an 11 minute epic exploring a painfully honest account of a crisis of faith. There was fear, too. Could blind belief simply be enough anymore? What if nobody is coming to save you this time? There was an uncertainly here that echoed reality, and he recognised it immediately. Like he was looking straight through the music and the words at a gaping hole he had left behind him. A mirror in which his reflection alone was empty.
The song sighed out into its' outro, coming full circle. The beer beside him was still untouched. He smiled sadly into the glass as he rectified this. He was impressed; but something pulled deep inside his chest at the same time. Some questions that he was reluctant to confront.
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Fate has brought me to these shores
What was meant to be is now happening
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Ah, track two was a real slice of the Maiden he knew. The riffs were punchy and the rhythm was infectious; the premise borrowed from the historical novel Lord of the Flies and blatantly named the same. Themes of adventure and exploration with the tantalising tinge of danger took him right back to all the fun they used to have writing together, back on their own journey filled with power and uncompromising conviction.
That was over. For him, unsustainable into the absolute.
It wasn't in him to resent an experience in his life, no matter how much pain and hardship it had meant for him. Nothing is wasted. A memory could be difficult to live with when that time in your life was nearly impossible to live with. There had been plenty of hardship, but plenty of adventure too. 'An experience doesn't have an agenda against you', he always told himself, 'it's an opportunity to learn and maybe, just maybe to surprise yourself again.'
His thoughts fired rapidly onwards and, as usual, had raced ahead and lapped themselves again in the time it took to register that the song was ending amongst the heavy buzz of static in his brain. Something woven into the drive of the song had comforted him, but he also had almost physically winced at the small pang of simultaneous loss.
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Is someone in heaven, are they looking down?
'Cause nothing is fair; just you look around
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He had known Blaze for a while in the few years leading up to his departure, and though they were more acquaintances than friends he knew instantly that this third track was all or mostly his. There was a pure, down-to-earth and charmingly clumsy quality to it that reminded him instantly of the gentle Birmingham-born singer. It was quintessential and it fit. The darkness was still there, but there was also playfulness and brevity; radiating from a man not burdened by the weight of loss, but the optimistic brightness of a man that was just happy to be there.
But it wasn't his business. It was nothing to do with him -- the choices they made -- anymore. But the more he listened the more he began to feel a tinge of concern, despite himself. Now; he wasn't arrogant. Not really. But he had the realistic self awareness to know that his shoes were not small ones to fill. They weren't going to forget their decade-plus of previous material overnight, and there would be little chance of vocal compromise from the Boss especially. Blaze's natural range was low and limited; nothing wrong with that, and it was perfect for a moody album: but there were songs in their catalogue that would be nigh on impossible for him. It wouldn't be fair.
It wasn't his business.
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Do you care if you live or die?
When you laugh are you really crying?
You're not sure what's real anymore
-----
The word 'melancholy' didn't even begin to cover this one. There was such torment in the sad, sweet twang of the strings. The vocals were soft like weeping, lamenting over and over as the repeating slow drive of the bass brought to life the perpetual nightmare of a trauma. Tossing and turning, then sleepwalking back into the same dream again, utterly alone. It was hard not to let his mind wander back to the last days he had spent with them; the way the nights seemed to torturously roll on over and over, getting neither harder nor easier. Just repeating, and repeating, and feeling like there was no end in sight.
Maybe he had made it harder. Maybe he'd been fair. He had been fair. He knew he had. Something much worse had been brewing, something which would have erupted and destroyed them all if he hadn't broken free. He could have taken everything down with him like the final act of a tragedy. But in his escape, maybe he'd created another prison for somebody else.
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Here is the truth
Deepest cut of all from you
Knife of the truth
Blade of hatred slicing through
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Hate was a thing he had a complicated relationship with. He wasn't sure he could hate as deeply as the word presented in reality; He knew he had hated, but did he hate like other people? How did it feel to them? Every experience is an opportunity to learn. Nothing is wasted. He didn't hate them, he never could. They probably hated him. Whatever that meant. HE definitely hated him. Had he really hurt him that badly? Had his disillusion made him truly selfish?
Don't get so daft. This isn't about you. Right?
-----
Each moment's like a year
I've nothing left inside for tears
-----
There was so much for him to do now, so many roads open to him, spreading vastly in all directions. The dizzying heights of his newfound freedom was intoxicating, if not terrifying in the most essential way. These songs blended together into a soft, trapped lament which felt like a million miles away from the beating of his wings as he flew further and further from that cage.
He wanted to do anything in the world but look back, but a part of him was connected as if by a red cord to their spirit, their resilience. He always would be, he supposed. They were fighters, every one of them. So much strength, trekking bravely through the night even when it was still perhaps a long time until the morning.
His beer is empty now.
-----
When you look back at your past
Can you say that you are proud of what you've done?
Are there times when you believe
That the right you thought was wrong?
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Pride, huh? A healthy dose of it is critical for keeping your feet just an inch or two off the ground; close enough that the fall would maybe just stub your toe. Pride will ensure your resilience and make you hungry for your success. Though even with resilience can always come uncertainty; and with uncertainty can always come fear. But without fear you can never understand the colossal achievement of a true strength. If he deigned to wonder about his past and his grand role in all of this, would he also begin to wonder how right he had been all along?
He could let the mistakes and decisions he had made give him pause about the future, had he not learned from every single one of them. Everything that had happened to him had been a lesson in some way, and he remembered the flavour of every experience in order to mix something sweeter in the next batch.
He hoped to God they could too.
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Sometimes it makes me wonder
Sometimes it makes me question
Sometimes it makes me saddened
Always it makes me angry.
-----
Anger he could relate to, of course. That emotion was ever-present, infused from childhood and put to rest on the tip of his blade. He'd collected his injustices like fireflies in a jar; a seething mass of spiteful insects with sneering faces speaking cruel words in the name of humiliation and mockery at whatever he had happened to offend with this time. His anger scared him, on occasion. His rage boiled white-hot like lava in his soul; primordial fires fuelled by the fireflies' perpetually savage flame.
Even if real hatred couldn't grip him, anger happily filled its' place instead. But he learned. Nothing can be allowed to consume you. But nothing can be denied either. Recognise your darkness and redirect it. Channel it. Make it safe.
Know yourself; and be happy.
-----
Where sat the warrior, the poet
Now lie the fragments of a man
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He had tremendous respect for the Boss. Tremendous. They absolutely did each others' heads in of course. They pulled in opposite directions whilst fighting desperately for control of the way forward. They were wildly incompatible people; different in a thousand ways. The oddest of people can converge over the love of something else. They had performed miracles together. Things they had written had already left their mark in history. They'd won. They'd fought and they'd laughed and they'd drank and they might never speak again.
He sighed into the sad scales dancing inside the song's riff; there was so much frustrated discord in these vocals screaming at the Heart of Darkness, the words telling a story faithfully in reality as well as the fictional unreality they had chosen to recount.
A man who has peered into the Heart of Darkness; and a man left in fragments.
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Hold on for something better;
That just drags you through the dirt
Do you just let go or carry on and try to take the hurt?
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Hold on for something better. For God's sake, hold on.
The gloom from 2AM's depressive drone permeated the air, palpable and all too real. This was TOO real. He could not understand it but he felt it. And it was the first time something akin to actual guilt stabbed at his conscience; even though his conscience was abundantly clear. It didn't feel right. He refused to take any blame. He couldn't help, and he hadn't done this. But his heart hurt all the same.
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Do you really want to face the truth?
Does it matter now, what have you got to lose?
-----
The final song faded. His thoughts flared like a roman candle and then finally quieted into the new silence; too much conflict in his head to achieve any semblance of coherency. The album was good. That simple fact at least was easy for him to process. Uncomfortably though, more than the music itself, the thing he was left with was the burden of a very human pain behind things he could not fix. Problems followed by solutions followed by actions; this was the way of things. He had to sit in the agony of the inability to start this process like his heart was screaming at him to do. Because it wasn't his business anymore.
Regardless of how he felt, he knew, somebody that was important to him might feel differently in return and there wasn't anything he could do about it. He was very likely hated by multiple people he cared about. A lot. People he wanted to be liked by.
It hurt, it did. But it wasn't his fault. He had been fair.
Had he abandoned them? Maybe he HAD abandoned them. Maybe it WAS all his fault. Maybe he'd destroyed the dreams of others in his desperation to finally, finally wake up. If he had, he would make peace with it. Nothing is wasted.
They would be okay. Maiden had to live on and she wouldn't let someone like him kill her. She had to live. And no matter the depths of his pain, he knew that Steve would not let her die.
-----
He took the cassette out of the hi-fi and slotted it carefully back into it's shiny new case, the tortured visage of their mascot leering at him from the cover. He nodded. He stood a moment with it in his hand, fingers gripping the plastic such that a single crack split through the centre. He squeezed harder and the thing shattered in his hand, sharp pieces littering the carpet below. He looked down and smiled warmly.
He would buy another tomorrow.