Contains adult themes, drug use, and a messy post-show relationship dynamic.
🖤
Zack hit the room laughing, breathless with adrenaline and something meaner underneath it.
His pupils were blown black beneath smeared eyeliner, shirt half-unbuttoned and sticking damply to his chest. Somebody backstage had streaked silver glitter across his cheekbone and it flashed when he turned his head under the recessed lights.
Jasmine kicked the door shut behind them.
“Where the fuck were you?”
He ignored her completely at first, stalking across the suite toward the sound system built into the wall. One vicious jab at the controls and music flooded the room loud enough to make the glasses tremble.
Prince.
Of course it was fucking Prince.
“You vanished.”
“We just played to fifteen thousand people,” he shot back, grinning like the world might split open for him at any second.
“No one knew where you were for 40 minutes.”
That grin stayed there. God, she hated that grin lately.
The crowd was still inside him somehow, roaring behind his eyes. Fame had sharpened him into something brighter and stranger these past few months. Everybody wanted a piece now. Record executives. Journalists. Girls waiting outside service exits clutching vinyl sleeves and motel-room eyes.
And Zack —
Zack wanted all of it.
He turned toward her finally, still breathing hard from the stage.
“C’mere.”
“No.”
“Liar.”
She shoved him then. Hard enough to rock him back a step.
“You stink.”
Something flickered across his face too quickly to name. Then he was on her, catching her wrist and backing her hard against the wall beside the door before she could even draw breath.
“That’s better,” he murmured against her mouth.
His mouth crashed into hers hard enough to split thought clean in half.
Jasmine hated how immediate it was with him. One touch and her body forgot every smart thing her brain had spent the last hour trying to hold onto. The fight dissolved under heat and sweat and the familiar scrape of his rings against her hip as he pinned her there between the wall and his body.
God.
He tasted like whiskey and smoke and adrenaline. Like the stage itself.
His hand slid into her hair, tugging just enough to make her breath catch, and she kissed him back before she could stop herself — furious at him, furious at herself.
Zack made a low sound against her mouth when she bit his lip.
“Fuck, there you are,” he moaned. “Yeah, bite me again,”
And for one dangerous second she let herself melt into him the way she always did, because this was the trap of Zack: one touch and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter. His skin was hot against hers, damp with sweat and stage heat, and as his hand tightened in her hair the whole outside world seemed to dissolve — fifteen thousand people, backstage corridors, flashing cameras, all of it falling away until there was only this again: Zack’s mouth on hers, Zack’s body pinning her against the wall, the terrible gravitational pull they kept mistaking for love.
Then she breathed him in properly.
Beneath the smoke and whiskey and sweat was another scent entirely, sweet and expensive… and unmistakably feminine, still clinging stubbornly to his skin.
Jasmine froze.
Her eyes lifted automatically to his face and this close she could see the truth of him written everywhere now — the blown pupils, the restless energy crackling under his skin, the chemical sharpness underneath the adrenaline high from the show.
The rage came back so fast it made her dizzy.
She shoved him off her hard enough that he stumbled sideways into the minibar.
“You absolute fucking prick.”
Glass clattered as Zack caught himself against the counter. For a second he just stood there looking at her, chest still heaving faintly beneath his half-open shirt, then he laughed again — softer this time, something ugly curling around the edges of it.
“Jesus Christ, Jasmine.” He dragged a hand back through his sweat-damp hair. “You make it sound like I disappeared into a brothel.”
“You came back with coke pupils and another woman’s perfume all over you.”
“Oh, come off it.”
Six months ago he would’ve apologised. Lied, maybe, but sweetly. Wrapped it in jokes and kisses and songs until they both pretended to believe him.
Now irritation kept flashing through him faster and faster, surfacing in little tears beneath the charm, and Jasmine suddenly had the awful sense of watching someone disappear in real time beneath all the noise surrounding them. Stadium lights, magazine covers, thousands of people screaming his name like prayer.
Every new success seemed to pull him a little further out of reach, until even standing two feet away from her he sometimes felt strange and distant, like she was trying to hold water in her hands. She could already feel the damage spreading through them both, hairline cracks running silently beneath all the sex and music and wanting.
But Zack pushed off from the minibar and started toward her again, eyes dark and glittering under the hotel lights, and her body betrayed her immediately.
“Don’t,” she warned.
“Don’t what?”
“That thing you do.”
His mouth twitched.
“That narrows it down.”
“You think if you touch me I’ll forget about this.”
“Won’t you?”
The bastard.
He kept coming until the backs of her knees hit the sofa. Jasmine stumbled backward onto the cushions with a sharp breath, dress riding dangerously high as she landed.
Usually he would’ve followed her down immediately — all careless hunger and sweat and hands everywhere at once, covering her body like he could drown himself inside it.
But this time Zack stayed standing for a moment. Watching her.
Then, slowly, he dropped to his knees between her legs.
The shift in him hit her harder than being pinned down ever could. Something about the deliberate focus of it. The way the chaos seemed to narrow suddenly into a single point. Attention.
“Zack—”
He caught her thighs and pulled her closer to the edge of the sofa. Her pulse jumped violently.
“Still talking,” he murmured.
Then he shoved her dress up higher, exposing bare skin to the cold hotel air.
Jasmine’s breath changed timing as recognition sharpened.
Zack reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a black Sharpie and uncapped it with his teeth without ever taking his eyes off her face.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, already hating herself for how wet the words sounded.
His grin flashed — beautiful and terrible.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Zack lowered his head slightly as he tossed the cap behind him. The change in him was so subtle most people probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
But Jasmine did. She… always did.
The arrogance drained out for half a second. The performance loosening its grip on him. Suddenly not the man swaggering across stadium stages beneath white-hot lights, not the beautiful disaster grinning through interviews with pupils blown wide and lipstick on his collar.
Just Zack.
Twenty-one again in some freezing flat with a guitar balanced across his knees and ink stains on his fingers.
His hand settled against the inside of her thigh, steadying her leg almost absentmindedly as the Sharpie touched skin.
Jasmine sucked in a sharp breath. It wasn’t because of where he touched her, but because of how gentle he suddenly was.
The room pulsed around them — Prince still bleeding through the speakers, city lights smeared gold beyond the hotel windows, the whole suite humming faintly with aftermath and money and fame and ruin waiting patiently at the edges of everything.
But Zack bent over her thigh like the rest of the world had briefly stopped existing.
Then he started writing.
you loved me before they did
The words went crooked across her skin. He paused for a beat, pen hovering.
Jasmine could feel the faint tremor in his fingers now the adrenaline was dropping out of him. Could smell whiskey and smoke and someone else’s perfume still clinging stubbornly beneath it all.
Then he wrote again beneath the first line.
before the lights
Another pause, longer this time.
And when he looked up at her, she saw him clearly for the first time all night — tired, beautiful, fraying at the seams, and suddenly so young it hurt. The boy who used to write songs with his head in her lap because he thought music might save both of them.
before i learned to disappear
The last line looked rougher than the others, ink pressed hard enough into her skin to almost bruise.
“Zack…”
His mouth twitched with something more twisted than a grin this time. A sadder shape.
Then he bent forward and kissed the inside of her thigh directly beneath the words.
🖤
Written for Day 11 of the Halls of Pandemonium challenge, which asked us to build a story around a song. This one tangled itself around When Doves Cry by Prince and dragged me back into the Midnight Ashes years from the Rocking the Second Act universe — Zack and Jasmine before the world got its hands on them.
The other piece about early Midnight Ashes is When the Fuse was Lit, and is told by Aroha, before they became Kahu.
Your musical pairing for this piece.
can't disguise the pounding of my heart
It beats so strong
It's in your eyes what can I say
They turn me on
I don't care where we go
I don't care what we do
I don't care pretty baby
Just take me with you
Great stuff. Love Prince, too.