tide.
idgun:
after making a few minor adjustments, he gestures for her to put her headphones back on for a listen. he slides his on too, dark hair tousling as he does before leaning back in his chair and clicking play, arms crossed loosely over his stomach. “you know, maybe you’re right,” he says as her chorus finishes with a hint of a smirk on his lips, clicking the pause button and sliding his headphones off to hang around his neck, “that’s probably as sweet as i can ever make you sound.”
it is exceedingly easy to misimagine juniper in the role that she has been given; fierce, fashionable, feral. the air of someone ever so slightly dangerous and imminently enviable, haughty and alluring. she plays the role of the unaffected, luxurious party girl as well as she does the role of the troublemaking socialite, despite being entirely none of those things - aside from, perhaps, something of a party prone sort. it is so easy to allow her the luxury of constructing this fierce girl crush persona for herself, to believe her to be untouchable and powerful.
and in her way, juniper would insist that she is in fact, quite powerful. but it’s a quieter power than anything as in your face as the brash and growling and fervent and frenetic performances she delivers. as if the huskiness of her voice and her resting lite-bitch face betray some truth to her, she allows these things to be built around her like a barrier, between the girl that is known to the public and the girl that is known to a few only.
gun has the luxury of knowing the latter. he knows her in the context of oversized sweatsuit sets and messy buns. he knows her between cotton sheets and in hotel rooms, knows her in muffled laughter and swollen lips, in stolen cigarettes and the brush of lips against a microphone, in frustrated tears four hours into a recording session, in perilous and paralyzing fear.
but, they both like to pretend that isn’t the case. to pretend she hasn’t seen him shaking and hasn’t seen him furious. to pretend she doesn’t know him in the rasping and raw voice of the early morning or the acrid black coffee of three am, of the trembling of his fingers after too much or too little of the many substances he relies upon. but he shuts down the memories of that time as easily as her foolish mind brings them up, leaves her rolling her eyes. “not that long ago,” she mutters beneath her breath, but he’s already sliding the headphones back on, and she follows suit.
it’s sounding pretty good. she’ll admit many things of him - that he’s an addict, that he’s a jerk, that he’s an idiot. but she’ll admit also that his talents can’t be particularly denied, that he adapts to each style demanded of him with incredible finesse. “so how on earth did you end up writing this?” she points out, slides it off her ears and flicks her middle finger up in his direction, eyes rolling at the insinuation. “i mean. it’s basically cotton candy and rainbows, did someone finally get conned into falling for you or did you just get the blowjob of a lifetime from some idiot rookie?” as if she hadn’t been such an idiot rookie once before.





















