Status: 10/01/2014: I've been writing this for almost two years and I'm finally getting to the good bits. (Started: 12/23/2012)

Dreaming With a Broken Heart

save you

"I think everyone's downstairs," Sébastien said as he and Dash walked through the front door of the house that the boys of Simple Plan shared.

"Can I just go on down?" Dash asked, as she started walking through the front hall to the back kitchen where she knew the steps to the basement were located.

Sébastien chuckled. "Go on. I'll bring your suitcase up to the guest room and meet you down there in a second."

Dash grinned and nodded back at her cousin as he hoisted up her suitcase, carrying it up over the short flight of stairs to the second level.

She slowly made her way down into the basement that the boys had converted into a makeshift studio. A couple of different voices carried up the stairs. As she walked around the corner into the open room, she was immediately greeted by a familiar voice screaming her name, followed by a pair of arms being thrown around her and lifting her off the ground.

"Hello to you too, Chuck," Dash replied, laughing and giving the man a tight squeeze in return.

"I missed you ever so much, my little Dashery," complained the tall drummer dramatically. "My life has been an empty vortex of mundane-ness since your last visit."

Dash chuckled softly. "Always one for the dramatics, aren't you, Chuck?"

As she pulled away from Chuck - who quickly muttered something having to go upstairs and make some phone calls - Dash glanced around the large basement. The back section of the room was partitioned off by a glass wall, clearly the section of the room used for recording. The other half of the room was dedicated to a writing space: the walls were painted white and the only real furniture were a leather couch and love seat positioned in a L-shape in the middle of the room. A solid square coffee table sat between them. A line of guitars - a selection of electric, bass and acoustic - were lined up against one of the walls. There were scraps of discarded paper on the floor; clearly, Dash had arrived in the middle of a writing session.

She finally noticed two other men sitting on the couch. One, she knew. The other was a stranger to her. He was skinny and from what she could tell, was probably tall. His long sandy brown hair was tucked into a grey beanie - the ends sticking out from underneath - that matched his black and grey plaid shirt. Dash noticed that his eyes were dark and somewhat hidden under thick eyebrows. The familiar man, whose black hair was sticking off in crazy angles, raised his head at the commotion and smiled when he saw the girl standing in the room.

"Well, well, well," he said, laying the guitar that he had been playing next to him, "if it isn't little Dash McCafferty. Are you going to come over here and give me a hug, or what?"

Dash chuckled as she stepped around the coffee table to wrap her arms around the now-standing man. "It's good to see you, Pierre. I've missed you." She took a step back, smiling warmly at her friend. "It's been way too long since we've done this."

"I can't tell you how excited I was when Seb told us that you were coming out to visit," Pierre said as he sat back down. Dash pulled her grey band sweater that she had worn on the plane over her head and tossed it on the couch, revealing a black tank top, before she sat on the edge of the coffee table so that she was facing Pierre and the other man, who had remained silent up until this point.

"Clearly I'm not going to get an introduction from Pierre anytime soon," he finally said, laughing as he broke the silence that had settled. He pulled of his beanie and ran a hand through his untidy sandy brown hair before holding it out to her. "My name's Alex. Alex Gaskarth."

Dash smiled at the man and placed her own small hand in his calloused one. "It's nice to meet you, Alex. I'm Dash."

Alex grinned at her. "Dash. I haven't heard that one before."

Dash opened her mouth to respond to Alex's comment on her name, however Pierre interjected. "Dash is in a band that's also from Québec. They're called Hanging on for Hope. They actually just got back from Europe, wasn't it, Dash?"

She nodded, feeling a blush creep into her cheeks are Pierre listed the band's most recent accomplishment. "Yeah. We opened for Rise Against. It's no big deal, we were like, the second opener of three."

"Hey, that's still pretty awesome," Alex replied. "Rise Against is a huge band. I'm sure it didn't hurt to be exposed to that big of an audience."

"Dash is their lead vocalist," Pierre added. "She's got this crazy voice. Really raw. The guys and I have been trying to convince her to do vocals on a song for us for years, but she keeps turning us down. Maybe I'll finally be able to talk her into doing something while she's here." He shot her a sly wink.

"Pierre..." Dash murmured, chuckling softly.

"Dash, you know Alex is a vocalist too?"

"We're called All Time Low," replied Alex. "We completely suck but somehow someone has managed to get us on tour with Pierre and the guys in the new year."

"I'm sure you're not that bad," Dash said, smiling, as Sébastien came into the room. "These guys are so much fun to tour with too."

"Dash, I put your bags in the room next to Chuck's. We gave Alex your usual room before we knew that you were coming out. It would be horribly rude of me to kick him out, so I didn't figure you'd mind," Sébastien said as he sat next to Pierre. "So, what did you want to do on your first night here? We can order some horrible take-out and watch movies that I'm embarrassed to tell the guys I've seen as per our usual cousinly routine."

"You guys are so weird," Pierre muttered, scratching out some words on the front of him, while Alex watched the pair with an amused look on his face.

Dash laughed before saying, "not tonight, Baz. I'm kind of beat. I think I'll head upstairs, try to take a nap or something." She stood up, leaning over to kiss her cousin on the cheek. "Bonsour boys," she said before leaving the room.

Immediately after he heard the door to the basement close, Sébastien turned to Pierre. "That was weird, right? Tell me you noticed how weird that was?"

The black haired man nodded as he laid the guitar on the floor in front of him. Alex looked between the two boys. "I thought she was nice," he said, slowly, not understanding the dilemma.

Sébastien rolled his eyes at Alex's ignorance. "Oh yeah, she was plenty nice, but she was just so boring! She barely even spoke in the car on the way over here."

"Dash is one of those girls whose energy level is constantly at like, an eleven," Pierre tried to explain to the younger man. "She reminds me of Jack in that way."

"Kane said that she wasn't really the same way after the break up, but - Jesus Christ - I wasn't expecting this." Sébastien sighed heavily, running his hands over his face. "This isn't my Dash."

"Okay, can someone please explain to me what the hell you two are talking about?" Alex interjected. "I'm really fucking confused over here."

Pierre sighed, turning to Alex. "In a nutshell, Dash's boyfriend of five years recently broke up with her. They were like, the ideal couple, I guess you'd call them. Everyone thought they were going to get married and have this ridiculously cute bilingual kids."

"He didn't even have the balls to do it to her face," Sébastien added, scowling. "The coward left her a voice mail while she was out of the country. She didn't get it until she got back in Montréal. Asshole."

"That's tough," Alex murmured, immediately feeling a wave of pity for the small girl. "Is that why she came out here? To get away from him?"

Sébastien shook his head. "No, he lives in Ontario now, he took a new job. Dash is here because her band is supposed to be working on a new album and she's written absolutely nothing. I think she came out here hoping that working with Pierre would help her out."

"Do you think it'll help her out?" Alex asked, suddenly genuinely curious.

Pierre shrugged and grinned at the messy haired boy. "You thought I could help you," he teased. Alex rolled his eyes at the Frenchman and picked up the paper Pierre had been writing on.

"We're making great progress though," was his response.

Pierre shrugged, glancing at the bottom of the stairs where Dash had been moments ago. "Honestly, I don't know if I can help her, Alex. We've written great stuff together before - for their first album and even for our last one - but never when she's been in a funk like this. But I hope so. I really do."

The three boys were silent as each of them found their thoughts straying to the girl upstairs.

"I think I'll go try to talk Dash into Chinese and a movie," Sébastien said, breaking the silence and standing up. "Good luck with the writing."

"Thanks man," Alex said as Sébastien left the room. He and Pierre remained seated on the couch, looking back and forth at the papers they had been writing on and the acoustic guitar that was sitting on the floor in front of them. "You know, Sébastien shares a name with my dog," Alex said, thoughtfully. "And every time I see him, I think of my little Papillon."

Pierre laughed at the younger man, tossing a pen at him. "I'll be sure to let Sébastien know that he reminds you of a dog."

Alex grinned devilishly. "Fuck off, Bouvier."
♠ ♠ ♠
& no matter what i do
i can't make you feel better;
if only i could find the answer
to help me understand.

I want to send a huge thank you to everyone who has commented thus far:
Hannistic
InMyOwnWorld
noooona;
lonna
Paper Tigers.
Austin Carlile;

Know that I adore each of you.

To my seventeen subscribers, know that I love you. Even though the majority of you are silent readers. I have a habit of that too. So I get it.
I tried to use Alex as a way to better explain to my readers how Dash used to be, since you guys didn't really get much of a glimpse of that before her break up. Though, I am curious: have any of you taken notice to the difference between the Dash at the beginning of the first chapter to the Dash now?

I'm working on an original fiction at the present time as well. Go read it: Casually Cruel