Missing Parts

“The whole time?! The whole fucking time?!”

“Billie-”

“Fuck you!”

John watched, open-mouthed, as the raging guitarist lunged at the drummer for the second time, his swinging fists caught just in time by Mike, who had been grappling with him since the moment he had leapt from his seat.

He wasn’t going to lie; this was a surprise. Tre Cool, who had just barely managed to muster enough interest in the situation to remain upright, could not be responsible for a heist that had mystified London’s most notorious detective duo for almost three days. He looked at Sherlock, who was watching the scene in front of them unfold with a concern in his eyes that wasn’t quite enough to mask the twinkle of smug satisfaction. Alright… maybe he’d only managed to mystify one half of the duo.

“Fuck you, Tre,” Billie Joe spat again, as Mike turned his own glare on their bandmate and Pat stepped between the three of them with a dazed expression on his face.

The guitarist writhed in Mike’s arms, his fierce green eyes blazing with fury and his unkempt hair, still damp from the rain, falling messily across his forehead.

“You’re gonna believe him, just like that huh?” Tre challenged, stepping back towards Billie Joe, his eyes flashing. “You think I’m a thief?”

“Oh, don’t even…” Mike grimaced, managing to pin both Billie Joe’s arms to his side with just one of his own, using the other to point an accusing finger in Tre’s face.

“Give it up, Tre…” Pat sighed, wearily rolling his eyes, “That isn’t even your lunch.”

“Fuck lunch,” Tre spluttered, which wasn’t a phrase any of them ever considered would leave his mouth before, “You… you don’t even want proof, you just… you jump right on it, Billie Joe, and listen to your fancypants detective… who you spent more time talking to the past twenty-four hours than you spent talking to us all fucking year!”

John watched Billie Joe swallow, as Tre’s voice cracked with new emotion. His eyes briefly flickered with something half way between guilt and hurt, before it was replaced by that fierce animosity again, as if he had never felt anything else.

“Now you’re just being pathetic,” Mike growled at Tre, in disgust, as Billie Joe finally escaped from his arms and tackled the drummer to the floor.

“Christ…” John muttered, both he and Sherlock springing from their seats to assist Mike and Pat with separating the two brawling musicians who, within seconds, were laying punches into one another on the studio floor. Mike grabbed Tre’s arms and hauled him out from beneath Billie Joe, both he and Pat struggling with the drummer’s weight advantage, thankful at least that the crack on his eye seemed to have dazed him enough for them to take him by surprise.

“Stop,” Sherlock demanded, sternly, pulling Billie Joe up from the floor and twisting one hand in the front of his t-shirt, as he pushed him back against the wall with all the command and caring serenity of a kindergarten teacher separating a pair of squabbling four-year-olds. “It’s over.”

“Why, Tre?” Billie Joe shouted, desperately. It was almost as though he didn’t hear Sherlock, yet he didn’t struggle against him either. He wiped angrily at his own face, smearing a mixture of blood and tears, “Why in hell would you do this? It’s sick!”

“I’d had enough, Billie Joe!” Tre yelled, and the admission it itself was enough to make the group fall into a shocked silence. “I’d had enough of the fighting, of the attitude… I’d had enough of watching this project run off the damn rails! If you gave a shit about the record, well… you had me fooled. You both did! We were going through the fucking motions and if you think otherwise, you’re kidding yourselves!”

Tre’s hands were balled into fists at his side, his cheeks tinged with shame and fury. In the short time John had known him, those blue eyes had held nothing but benevolence and jest. Now they were cold, hollow, hiding none of his pain. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the heavy, laboured breathing of three band mates struggling to take in the new gravity of their situation and remain in control, before Mike’s voice cut in, fierce and biting, through gritted teeth.

“We have been here… every day… for three months!”

“And that’s what makes a great fuckin’ piece of music, huh?” Tre challenged, “Turning up for your nine-to-five? Fuck off, Mike. It was a disaster and you know it and if I had to listen to one more day of you two searching for new things to fight over to keep yourselves from fighting over where your fucking passion went, I was going to go crazy!”

“Fine!” Billie Joe yelled, blinking fresh tears from his eyes, “Give it to me straight, Tre! Don’t feel the need to keep it in anymore, just lay it all out on the fucking table… it was a piece of shit, right? I can’t write jack anymore and it was easier to cast away the fucking evidence than let me humiliate you both in front of the handful of fans that are still hoping I produce something worthwhile. Right?!”

“Billie…” Mike swallowed, as Tre attempted to take a step towards them both to find Pat’s vice-like grip on his arm held good. He shook him off, hard.

“Fuck it, Pat, I’m… I’m not going to hit anybody, alright? Jesus. That’s the last time I try fightin’ with him, anyway… I’ll be lucky if I ever get rid of these freakin’ spots in my eye.”

Pat hesitated, then gingerly let him go. He hovered close to his side, as Tre inched closer to Billie Joe and covered his face with his hands. He breathed into his fingers for a second, then dropped them from his eyes.

“You want it straight, Billie Joe? Fine. The album was okay. It was okay… it wasn’t horseshit, but it wasn’t going to be our fuckin’ White Album neither. I’m proud as hell of this band… you know? I love every record we ever made and… I didn’t love this. It wasn’t as good as any of them.”

“There were some good tracks on there, Tre…” Mike told him, shakily, folding his arms over his chest and staring down at the floor. “Just… stop.”

“No. It needs to be said and I’m saying it. I should have said it all along, I know that… I did a dumb, stupid thing because… I didn’t want to have this conversation instead. I didn’t want to make his face do that, for a start and… I knew we had all gotten into this toxic fucking headspace where… if the album was there… it was easier to just see it through and throw it out there than start over.”

“We can’t start over!” Billie Joe groaned, fresh anger charging his voice. Tre held up his hands, stepping backwards. “Can’t you fuckin’ see that, Tre? I can’t write hits anymore. I can’t write shit. You think if I start over it’s gonna be any different? We’re fucked.”

Billie Joe’s eyes squeezed shut tight with frustration and despair and he raised both hands to cover his face, too late to stop the words from flying out of his mouth. There was a morbid fascination, John realised, in seeing the guitarist crumble before his eyes. Up to now, he had been a careful picture of composure and false confidence, tightly wound and held precariously together for all to see. The cracks had been written all over him of course, he didn’t need to be Sherlock to see that and now they were breaking apart completely.

He hadn’t been the only one watching with intrigue. Sherlock had remained silent, standing behind Billie Joe with his arms folded, his eyes flicking, coolly, from one aggrieved musician to the other. John blinked, in disbelief, when he saw him reach out a hand and lay it over the guitarist’s shoulder. It was a strange sort of gesture, reassuring and protective, and the only reason that was strange at all was because Sherlock didn’t protect anyone. The contact made Billie Joe tense a little in surprise, and John felt himself do the same.

Mike kept his eyes on the floor and Tre let out a hard sigh of frustration.

“We’re a band!” he reminded them, angrily, “We’re supposed to be in this together! This isn’t Billie Joe and the Numbnuts… it isn’t your fault.”

Billie Joe dropped his hands and glared.

“Well, I don’t see you contributing anything!”

“You never ask! You just show up with lyrics that we aren’t allowed to read and tell us when to come in… and the point is we let you because we haven’t had any ideas of our own. We got lazy and we let it all rest on you and you folded, Billie and… anyone else would have done the same.”

“So you broke… into… the studio?” Mike seethed, his hands balling into fists. He released one to gesture, wildly, in Sherlock’s direction. “Do you know what he costs?!”

“I didn’t know Billie Joe had private detectives on speed dial!”

“I think he found us on the Internet, actually…” John clarified, tentatively.

Tre groaned.

“Whatever. I began to wish the whole project had never even existed. I knew neither of you would scrap it, you were too caught up in denial… and I knew you’d be too concerned with studio time wasted and saving face. I just wanted to start over and… when we had that power outage I spied my chance. I told you I was going to the bathroom but I… I came back up here. I didn’t know what I was doing or what I even wanted… I even thought about destroying the tapes but… I just couldn’t bring myself to do it to our work…”

Tre appeared to crack all of a sudden, sinking onto the couch under the weight of his admission. Billie Joe watched him with a dark frown, leaning back against the studio wall as though even standing up on his own was too much for him to deal with.

“… I knew if anything happened while you were right downstairs you’d know. Front desk has a list of who clocked in that day… and we were the only band recording that afternoon. It would be obvious it was an inside job… I knew I had to come in from the outside. I got the idea to shift the camera when I was looking right at it. I noticed it doesn’t, like, sweep and scan like the ones down in the lobby. I nudged it to the side whilst it was off… I thought nobody would notice. I didn’t think it through any further than that… I just had to strike while the iron was hot or whatever.”

“Then you thought it over…” Sherlock continued for him, beginning to pace the room again “… and came back the next night.”

Tre nodded.

“I was in Logan’s ‘till gone midnight. Mike and Billie’s fight had kind of bummed me out… and having Billie get hauled out of the bar by Adrienne didn’t help any. I didn’t feel like going home so I went back to the studio and climbed up the fire escape. It’s easy to get up on the roof from there… even after, like, ten beers. I like looking at the city from up there. It helps me chill sometimes, y’know? Anyway, you know the rest. I was pretty steamin’ drunk by then but I know that’s no excuse. I still had my sticks in the pocket and… I used one to get that metal thing off the vent. It was fuckin’ dark in there, y’know… I mean I was shitting my pants.”

Mike rolled his eyes.

“How fucking courageous of you.”

Billie Joe gave a dark chuckle, pushing himself off the wall and wiping his nose with his forearm.

“I don’t know how you ever expect me to trust you again,” he snapped, angrily, as he stormed past his bandmates and grabbed his jacket from the couch. “Fuck starting over. Fuck it.”

The door slammed behind him and Mike rubbed his face, wearily, for a moment, before starting after him, leaving Tre with his head in his hands, Pat staring at him in open-mouthed disbelief.

John cleared his throat, soaking up the awkward, disbelieving silence for a moment, then picked up his coat and tucked his phone into the pocket of his jeans.

He caught Sherlock’s eye, then gave Pat a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

“Well, erm… I suppose we’ll just leave it with you then, mate. Any chance of a lift to the airport?”