Our Song
A peak into that missing songwriting weekend where Luke and Julie finished Stand Tall.
Julie hasn't touched her songwriting notebook in a year, hasn't seen the point when she can't imagine herself finishing those songs without her mom. She never thought there would be anyone else she could trust with them. But with Luke? With Luke she just knows.
Written for the @jatpzine zine Bright Forever.
Julie clutched a notebook close to her chest, the butterfly stickers adorning its surface forming familiar shapes under her nervously gripping fingers. It was a notebook she hadn’t touched for more than a year, not since the last time she had worked on a song with her mom. She couldn’t believe that she was even considering showing it to anyone else. But that was just it...Luke wasn’t just anyone else. And ridiculous as it might seem to be so sure of that when he had just poofed into her life, Julie knew it to be true. She had known it ever since he found her in her kitchen, determined to motivate her with a wave of metaphors and almost violent compliments, a piece of his soul folded carefully in his back pocket as a gift.
Julie had known what it meant to him, “Mr. No Musician Would Ever Turn That Down”.
So after they had spent the last two days writing songs, it had suddenly occurred to Julie that maybe he was someone she could trust with the words and melodies her mom had left behind.
So she had excused herself to the house, making up an excuse about being thirsty but really making a beeline straight for her room and the forcibly forgotten back corner of her bookshelf where she had shoved her notebook a year ago. Now she was hovering just outside of the garage doors, anxiously shifting her weight as she tried to work up the courage to step inside and invite him to see a part of her even she hadn’t been able to look at for so long.
She forced a shaky breath into her lungs and stepped into their studio (when had she started to think of it as theirs). Her eyes immediately landed on Luke who had taken advantage of her absence to make himself comfortable on the couch, his back against the cushions, his legs stretching up towards the wall, his acoustic balanced precariously on his lap as he tapped out a rhythm against its body.
And just like that some of her nerves melted away as an involuntary burst of laughter escaped. His eyes snapped up to hers at the sound and a grin that definitely didn’t leave her breathless spread across his face.
“Comfy?” She asked, biting her lip in a futile effort to keep her expression neutral.
He continued grinning at her and let out a huff of air that blew one of those curls that rested against his forehead up and back to lay gently against his skin.
“I had this idea for a beat for the chorus of Great. I’ll have to run it by Alex obviously but what do you think of…”
His fingers paused mid-tap, his attention on the notebook still clutched in her hands.
“What’s that?”
Julie fought the irrational urge to hide it behind her back.
“It’s a song I was working on…before,” Julie admitted. “I thought we could look. Maybe.”
Luke’s eyes lit up and he was setting aside his guitar and leaping to his feat almost instantly. Before she could fully register his movement he was at her side, plucking the notebook from her fingers gingerly, already flipping it open and crossing to sink onto the piano bench across the room. He was getting way too good at holding solid objects and it was incredibly inconvenient.
“Stand Tall,” he practically hummed the title. “You wrote this for the piano, right?”
He smoothed out the pages while Julie walked over to sit next to him.
“Uh, yeah, we did.”
To his credit he froze at her words, glancing over first to the hands she was wringing together in her lap then up to her strained expression.
“We?”
Julie nodded, avoiding his soft gaze,
“My mom and I started it.”
There was a moment of silence during which Julie braced for the inevitable expression of sympathy, the offer to talk about her loss, the conversation that would carefully slot her back into her box as the “girl with the dead mom”.
“We should finish it,” Luke said simply, reaching behind his ear to grab the pen he had stashed there earlier (defying all logic about how ghost rules should work in the process).
The weight pressing on her chest slowly disappeared.
She had known he was someone she could trust with her mom’s last song.
But now she knew.
They worked on the song for almost an hour tossing ideas back and forth. The chorus had been pretty much finished between Julie and her mom, it was the verses that they never got around to. Luke had lots of great ideas, words that flowed around the melody in her mind perfectly. The problem was they still didn’t feel right.
Julie sighed.
“I don’t know, it's like…the song is supposed to be about never giving up, right? But…I did give up,” She forced out, trying to put the lingering ache in her heart into words. “More than once, and every time I thought I was making progress letting go it was back to the beginning.”
“So we start the song with that,” He told her eagerly, tapping the pen against the paper and bouncing a little in his seat. “One thing and it’s back to the beginning, cause everything is rushing in fast.”
“And it’s one, two, three, four times…going out of my mind…” Julie added, singing the words that had popped into her head and trying not to let herself get distracted by Luke’s slightly awed look when she did.
“Yes!” He snapped his fingers enthusiastically. “If standing tall was easy the song would be pointless. It’s about how hard it is and doing it anyway!”
He seemed to realize he had gotten carried away and reached up to rub awkwardly at the back of his head.
“Sorry, it’s your mom’s song. I shouldn’t be telling you what it’s about.”
Julie leaned over to bump her shoulder with his, the contact impossible in the end.
“It’s our song too, yours and mine.”
He bit his lip then graced her with one of those nods he only handed out when he really liked what she was saying.
“Our song,” He echoed.
It wasn’t the first song they wrote together and Julie had a feeling it wouldn’t be the last.
But it was the one when she knew.
And now that she knew…she would never forget.
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ayyyyyyyyy here’s my piece for the @jatpzine !! my assignment was “fantasy au” which of course means chainmail, horses, and walking through the woods hehe
[id: an illustration of alex, luke, julie, and reggie from julie and the phantoms on horseback, in an autumn wood, in medieval dress and armour. alex has a pink tunic under his chainmail and a dark purple cloak overtop, and his horse is grey with white markings. he is looking off to the left, watchful. luke is engaged in conversation with julie, and his tunic is blue. his horse is brown. julie is wearing a purple gown under a regal embroidered purple cloak, and she wears a gold circlet across her forehead and has gold and purple strands braided into her hair. her horse is pale gold. reggie’s tunic is red, and he is mid-bite on a large red apple. his horse is tan with a dark muzzle. all of them are illuminated by spotty, dappled sunlight. end id.]
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