FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Author's note: (After another long wait, I've finally found time to finish this chapter. I really hope you all like it. This chapter was inspired by my best friend who will change the world with his talent. Please leave feedback!)

Chapter 2

"Music and Love go hand in hand. Lovers in their own right."

Despite Cyrus' urging Ben to get prepared early, ("Ben, ten minutes!" "I know, just let me brush my teeth.."), they still left ten minutes late and missed the bus once, standing beneath the bus stop shelter in the pouring rain as they awaited the next bus to pass by. Ben did own an unpractical, large and lovely cherry red motorcycle, but his cousin Cody had recently finished driving it to a rowdy teen party, where it was submitted to the carelessness of morons. It was currently sitting in a repair shop and very slowly getting repaired. It would probably be another few weeks until the baby could even work anymore.

Cyrus finally hailed a taxi at ten-forty, one arm wetter than the other from sticking out from the shelter. For once, his feline face actually seemed tired when framed by the thick grey hoodie he wore. Twenty-two, taken, and employed, and with the look of near permanent exhaustion; the very sight of his better-off roommate made Ben wonder what he must look like in the eyes of an onlooker. It was another annoying few minutes of passing through the onslaught of rain and making forced conversation with the chatty taxi driver until the faint outline of the theatre was even in sight.

They finally skidded into the theatre at what was apparently an 'obscenely late' time, running in with newspapers over their heads and decidedly quite damp by the time they entered the strangely quiet theatre. As he opened the door, Cyrus reached over at Ben and ruffled his mane, "Play nice."

Ben scoffed at him, rushing in out of the rain with a cub's curiosity to see what his workplace looked like.

The theatre was decidedly modest, but well-sized enough for any production. It was shaped in a semicircle of escalating seats, and at the very bottom there was a medium-sized stage. People in bright, colorful shirts walked about the stage lazily, and more still people stood on the stage itself, preparing what looked to be a rather lush scene. Heads only began to turn when Cyrus entered himself, pulling back his hood and sighing loudly with relief at finally just getting there.

"Cyrus!" a tall, lithe otter wearing a red vest and t-shirt called from the stage area, rushing up the stairs and arriving to the playwright with healthy speed, eyeing him with severe-looking brown eyes. "You're late. The production's clueless without you or Adrian to direct them, you know that-"

Cyrus cut him off with an open paw in the air, and a sigh that had suddenly turned into a groan. Ben glanced between the two of them. "Uh.....so wait, you're director, too?" he asked sheepishly, eyeing his roommate.

There was an awkward pause in which everyone looked at everyone else with assessment, before Cyrus corrected, "Not exactly, the director's a bit.....lazy."

"Who's this?" interrupted the impatient otter.

Ben, looking at him, decided to himself that this guy was just freaking weird. Despite the otter's impatient and rude attitude, he had a goofy look plastered to his face like some random stranger who pretends to understand the conversations of those around him. Ben wasn't sure if this was a good or bad thing.

Cyrus, ignoring how his roommate was freezing up with wariness, smoothly introduced, "Zachary, this is Ben Blews. He's my roommate and a fantastic musician if I knew one. Seeing how we're lacking one in the production, I thought it would be a good idea to bring him in."

Zachary gave Ben an odd look, glaring at him up and down as if he had some sort vendetta against roommate musicians. Or maybe it was Ben's existence on the face of the earth- it was actually quite hard to tell by now. "A musician?"

Ben cast him a freezing smile. Suddenly he was reminded that the snapping threads of his rather lacking career seemed to rest on the very success of getting along with creepy potential co-workers.

"That's what I said," Cyrus muttered, his ears twitching. He unzipped his dampened hoodie to reveal the white shirt beneath it, and patting the worn messenger bag by his side. "I've got some more pages of drafted script here, so stop bothering with practicing the stage setup and let's just get directly to the intro scene." Here Zachary looked like he wanted to say something, but Cyrus interrupted him with a striking glare, "I know the proceeding scene needs help, Zach, but let's just do the opening, give Ben a feeling for the play."

The otter quickly shut up, and Ben came to have a slight sense of appreciation for this imperious mode he didn't know existed in Cyrus. Cyrus, in turn, grabbed a whistle that had been hanging off a nearby makeshift hook and blew it louder than Ben thought possible, causing the shrill screech to resound throughout the huge space of the theatre. "Round up!" the panther called out gruffly as the numerous heads turned. Zachary just shrugged subtly to himself and took a seat at one of the auditorium rows, watching as the handful of the cast and crew came and took nearby seats.

It turns out that a lot of the overall cast was also doubling as the crew, and at the moment it was impossible to tell who was what. The entire ensemble was more or less a medium-sized group, consisting of some twenty or so people that Ben had a feeling he'd get to know fairly soon. He and Cyrus stood at the top of the steps, overseeing as various people dropped whatever they were doing to gather. As they accumulated, Cyrus smiled fondly and turned to him, explaining:

"This play is actually the first try for a lot of the people here, but it's been our dream since college. We're all kind of passionate about it, even though ninety-five percent of us are amateurs, so we do things differently," he looked over at the still-gathering crowd, "and a lot of the actors have written their own dialogue for their characters. Which gives diversity and personality to the actual characters, but it gets messy sometimes," he chuckled.

"But you've got some experienced professionals here and there, right?" Ben enquired, looking at Cyrus in surprise. Sure, he'd lived with the playwright for the last five-something years, but Cyrus had never really confided him about the workings of the play he'd been occupied with. More or less, the hippie panther had kept to himself, seeming to lose his inspiration if he ever told anyone what he was working on and shutting himself in his room for hours at a time. That would be until he would emerge, tired and frustrated and pretty much resigned.

Curious, the lion cast a scanning eye over the cast and crew, fruitlessly trying to see who may be an experienced actor or crew member and who wasn't. Frankly, it was hard to tell.

Cyrus laughed harshly. "Yes. The lead actor and," he gestured to Zachary, who was talking detachedly to a Labrador, "the lead actor's manager. Plus of course, the director, who's almost never around. Jenrette is basically only director in name," he muttered as he shoved his paws in his torn jeans pockets, seeming to mark the end of the conversation as he turned to gaze over his cast and crew.

Ben swallowed what he said with distant nods, vaguely wondering how a huge bunch of amateurs, a group of tightly-knit friends, could compile a play they loved and then fork over the lead role to a pro outside of their circle of friends.

"Alright, all of you," Cyrus said, speaking up louder and more commanding than Ben knew possible,

"This is Ben, a good friend of mine since college and a damn good musician. If it's okay with all you guys, I'm recruiting him for lead musician. I know we're pretty much half-way through production, and we've got a few numbers already, but I was thinking it'd be great if we could have a good eye to look it over and make some new character songs, okay?" At this point he drew his paws out of his pocket and crossed his arms. "If anyone objects to this statement, speak up. You can all introduce yourselves as we go along. If there're no questions, we can move on to practice the first act."

One lanky, dark paw raised in the air- the paw of the Labrador who'd been talking to Zachary, and was currently straddling a theatre chair with one arm draped over it. "Question, teacher," he said, tone crossing dangerously between derisive and good-natured as he peered up at Cyrus with striking blue eyes, "I've been in charge of music the whole way lately, but does the inclusion of the Ben guy mean I'm resigning?"

Cyrus' eyes narrowed. Ben gathered from that that these two weren't exactly on good terms. "I suppose it does, Patrick," he said bluntly.

The lab, apparently called Patrick, snorted, but backed down. As soon as his long arm dropped out of the air that Cyrus had been glaring fiercely at, Zachary's came up.

"We can't begin the play, because the lead actor's not here."

"And where would he be?"

Ben blinked, startled. He'd seen Cyrus in many a foul mood before, but here the panther seemed to be bordering on plain, outright pissed off. He eyed his roommate with surprise.

Zachary just looked on with unperturbed bravery, apparently not bothered by the practical steam rising from Cyrus' ears. "He's sleeping in the backroom."

Cyrus nodded stiffly at this, shoulders relaxing but paws tightening. At first he was silent, seemingly injecting the air with a suspense that could only precede a long, angry lecture, but instead he commanded, "Patrick, fetch him, and show Ben around backstage. The rest of you, once-over your scripts and get ready for the opening scene, alright?" The cast and crew relaxed visibly and shuffled off, and Cyrus sighed into his paw, before pulling it off and smiling wearily at Ben.

Patrick rose from his seat, grinning widely. Ben just nodded and stared, a little overwhelmed and slightly scared that Cyrus had just left him with the guy he'd just replaced, but Patrick's smile might have been good-natured. It was hard to tell. "Ben, right? The name's Keys-Patrick Keys. Got it?"

The lion nodded mutely, unsure of what to say.

"I've actually heard about you from Cyrus. Come on, let's go wake our Sleeping Beauty," he said, pointing a digit in the direction of the stage and the backstage doors on each side of it. As he did so, a rainbow of myriad colored bracelets and wristbands bounced around on his tiny wrists. Suddenly, he stopped, giving Ben a much friendlier appraising look than the one he'd gotten from Zachary. "Hey, you're a musician, but what instrument do you play?"

The lion relaxed. Music is definitely something he could talk about. "Well I play piano and guitar, and I'm currently working on learning drums as well," The lion answered, "I like being able to play all kinds of music with multiple instruments."

The black lab gave a huge grin. "Sweet! That's awesome, dude. Guess we'll be getting an awesome sound for our production, then. I just play the guitar. There's the other guys on the music team: Roland on the keyboard, Andrew on the violin and Brendan on the trombone. Though, you don't see most of either Andrew or Brendan running around most of the time," he grinned sheepishly, "They spend a lot of time at work or working other projects."

Ben swallowed nervously, but nodded again. "Uh, Cyrus is always busy with the play, but I never heard much about it from him," he murmured as he struggled to follow behind Patrick's confident strides, like he was explaining himself for some sort of crime. "Could you, like, help me out and..?"

"Sure," the lab answered, bouncing from one step down to the next with so much self-assuredness that Ben was blatantly conscious of how he was stumbling slowly and taking in everything. "Well, the play's called 'On the Edge'. It's a sort of fantasy-drama thing," he explained as his white sneakers tramped down the stairs with muffled, rhythmic thump-thump_s. "Pretty suitable for the whole group of us," he grinned. "But the board of producers is kind of tentative, looking at the premise. We gotta make it some _awesome stuff if they're ever going to let us have an opening night, you know what I mean?"

The lion nodded, relieved when they finally reached the bottom of the steps, following as Patrick's long strides led them to the door to the backstage.

The door to the backstage area turned out to lead immediately into a rather claustrophobic-looking tunnel, lined with plain concrete, mostly unlit and with a few doors down each side. Carpeted floor suddenly cut off, turned into smooth slate tiling, and Ben had the sudden feeling that he was in some sort of mafia lord's warehouse. A few vaguely familiar faces passed them by, greeting Patrick and calling to Ben with approval and names like 'New Guy'. They walked down the hallway with alarming speed, passing right by a large door that could only lead to the immediate backstage, before slowly ambling into darker, deeper and even narrower depths of the backstage.

Ben was seized with a sense of relief when they finally reached a door, which was strangely labeled 'Janitor'. The lion raised an eyebrow. Just what kind of lead actor would hang out in a dank janitor's closet? Patrick laughed; noticing the questioning look Ben gave the door, and said, "He just puts that up there to ward off people. For your information, Sleeping Beauty's got enough sleeping issues to drive a person crazy."

Ben didn't quite understand, choosing to laugh nervously before pressing the door open.

The 'Janitor's closet' turned out to be larger than Ben had initially expected. The already barely-existent light in the hallway turned into pure, pitch-black darkness inside the room, but from the meager amounts of light that shone in Ben could see that it was a medium-sized room that was cleaner than one would expect. Shyly he snuck into the room, seized by the strange and abrupt scent of old paper and drying ink. He blinked when Patrick switched on the lights, eyes adjusting strained to the sudden onslaught of blinding fluorescent light.

To his right there was an obscenely large rack of foreign-looking costumes, and a dresser next to it loaded with makeup that Ben had once thought was for girls. But directly across him by the walls were a myriad of bookshelves that were unmistakably old, distinguished and wisdom-packed. In the dead center of the room was a desk practically painted with the uncountable leafs of paper spread across it, and further uncountable passages of handwritten paragraphs covering the unoccupied inches of said paper. Behind the desk was what could have been a sofa seat, but was completely obscured by a mountain of huge, soft-looking pillows, blankets, and a vague shape beneath them all.

Ben was, simply said, surprised. "That, uh," he stammered, elbowing Patrick and pointing to the indistinct outline of something beneath the paraphernalia, "that's the lead actor?"

The lab chose to ignore him, instead sauntering over to the mess and throwing off a wave of soft material. Ben stared as they soared into the air before crashing into the rack of clothes and draped themselves over said rack. "Wake up, Adrian dear, your public awaits," Patrick said sarcastically as he laboriously threw off another heap.

A muffled groan emerged from the heap, and an unmistakably arm pulled out of it, digging away the many-colored fabrics.

Ben suppressed a gasp- so there really was something breathing beneath all that.

Finally, a tall, grey wolf emerged from the pile of materials. The wolf was about 6 feet tall when he finally managed to straighten up. He looked about Ben's age, with stunning violet eyes and quite a lot of muscle hidden under his tight black t-shirt.

"Zach, unless you want to be- oh, Patrick," Adrian spoke, voice blurred on the edges from a very evident lack of sleep. "Zachary has been burying me in blankets since I fell asleep, again, I see," he remarked with contempt as he dug out of the tangle of sheets and stood, smoothing out his jeans and shirt. He could not have been more than twenty years old, really, and looked less healthy than he probably should have been.

"Rehearsal's beginning and you're sleeping at eleven-thirty in the morning," Patrick explained lackadaisically, as if the lead actor catching snitches of sleep in the middle of the day was a regular occurrence. Ben honestly had no idea by now. If this tired-looking young wolf was the lead actor and the only professional actor in the whole production, then Ben would understand why Cyrus thought the whole production was in jeopardy.

Adrian just nodded, apparently not caring much. Suddenly he caught notice of Ben, and turned and looked him up and down in rapid succession. "You're new," he stated simply, violet eyes peering at Ben shamelessly, if not contemptuously. His paw rose to cover the lower half of his face- was he sniffing? "I doubt that we've made acquaintance."

Ben caught himself staring in surprise, barely registering to the onslaught of thoughts rushing through his head. Alright- thought one quite easily acknowledged that this guy seemed to be a little more than a jerk. Thought two told him that those were the prettiest pair of eyes he'd ever seen, and Ben had seen a lot of pretty pairs of eyes in his life. Thought three was basically summarized as Damn, who is this guy? in a tone that was confusedly crossed between awe, dislike and surprise.

"Uh- yeah- you haven't," Patrick grinned, gesturing to the lion, "that's Ben Blews, Cyrus' buddy and the new guy in head of music. I don't care much that he's taken my place, by the way, seeing how this play's going to hell in a hand basket anyway," he added, giving Ben a snarky wink. "Ben, meet Adrian Taylor."

Adrian.

Ben definitely liked that name.

Ben ignored the sudden thought, tripping over himself as he slapped on a grin and exclaimed, "H-hey, great to meet you!" This was his career at stake, he remembered.

Zachary's voice suddenly called from beyond the door. "Adrian, are you awake? Rehearsal is starting."

He was still registering to the quick snap of "Yes," that Adrian quipped off unenthusiastically when the actor walked right past him like he didn't exist, disappearing behind the door a bit too suddenly. The wolf was gone before Ben could even blink or gather his thoughts, and he found himself just standing there with an offered, unshaken paw in front of himself.

Patrick frowned. "Adrian tends to do that. Don't mind him, he's a snob anyway. Pretty much looks down on every other actor in the production, since we're all amateurs anyway," he grumbled. As he spoke, the sudden clinging of music echoed off, coming from what must have been the stage. "Come on, they're starting rehearsal already. You're the new guy, so you can just watch for today, but you should get us some tunes written after today," he said, wiping the frown off his face in favor for a smirk that Ben was already getting used to.

The lion nodded. The encounter with Adrian had left something of a bad taste in his mouth. He'd had an awful history of a career, going from musical studio to musical studio in hopes that they would at least listen to his music, and it had been exactly the high-nosed, asshole-ish and dispassionate 'professionals' like the lead actor that had been the ones to turn down Ben before they even so much gave him as a second look. The musician felt slightly disappointed; as nice as the original crew had seemed, Cyrus being a great friend and Patrick being pretty cool so far, he had no idea what to think now that he'd met the lead actor.

He was started out of his reverie by Patrick setting a small paw on his shoulder, trying to gently get the lion's attention. Ben hadn't even realized he was cold in the unheated winter air of the backroom before the black lab's strangely warm paw ghosted against his neck, and he started in surprise.

Patrick chuckled, "Dude, snap out of it. I know Adrian's a bit of a jerk at first, but you'll get used to it. Once he starts working, you'll get an idea why he's called a professional." With that, he pulled off his paw and gave Ben a subtle shove. "Don't get spineless to the guy. Let's go."

Ben nodded, more than slightly disheartened, but let himself get dragged out of the room by Patrick, biting his lip. So this was the crew the Cyrus worked with almost daily. The musician wondered if he could get used to it himself.