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Ashes of Dreams	By : ElleU Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Sum 41 Views: 1125 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the members of Sum 41. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
- 3
A/N: This is going to be a long, possibly boring chapter without much Sum41 action, but after some thinking I came to the conclusion that this was going to be a fun enough way to introduce AoD, and I had fun writing it. Enjoy and please review. I think the up-coming chapters are going to be better.

Disclaimer: I own Underdog/AoD, the events taking place, the story-line and not more. Don’t sure. Applies for all chapters.

Chapter 1 (anno 2005)

(Sum 41 tour bus)
“How long till we get there?” Steve asked, coming out of the toilet to drop down on top of Dave, who simply rolled his eyes in response to his band-mate’s antics.
“Around an hour,” Deryck answered, opening a can of beer.
“So we know MEST, but what do we know about that other band?” Cone asked from his seat across from Dave and Steve.
“Their name is Ashes of Dreams and they’re from Europe,” Dave said, shrugging.
“And they’re an all-girl band,” Steve added with a goofy grin on his face.
“I like the change of odds,” Cone replied.
“What odds?” Steve asked.
“This tour, including roadies, drivers and managers has so far consisted of twenty-two guys and two chicks out of which one is going out with Jeremiah and the other is about to turn forty. Now there are going to be probably three or four single, hopefully pretty and hard-partying girls of a nice age.” He smiled. “Those odds, Stevo.”
“Hey,” Deryck said suddenly. “There was an interview with them last night on MTV. I made Jake videotape it so we would at least be able to recognize them. We could watch it?”
“Jake who?” Steve asked as he got off to find the videotape.
“The driver, Steve,” Dave answered, trying to keep from laughing.
After a moment Steve returned with the tape and fed it to the VCR machine.

The program started up with a song none of them recognized, clearly rock and with a rather coarse girl’s voice singing out the lyrics. They seemed to be in the middle of a music video and at the obligatory performance part of it. In the middle was a girl with long, wavy red and black hair. She was wearing a regular red t-shirt underneath a spiked leatherjacket and a pair of large, worn to shreds jeans. Her dark blue eyes were framed by a thick layer of black eye-liner and both the slightly large nose and the full lips that were pressed against the mic were pierced. Her face was screwed up, probably from pushing her voice to reach the needed level of intensity, showing off deep dimples that gave sort of a cute, childish look to her otherwise rough facial features. Long, strong, tattooed fingers pressed against the strings of her bass as she managed the complicated bass pattern and at the same time keep her voice together. She was more than just slightly shorter than the guitarists on each their side of her. The one to the right was tall for a girl, probably 5’10’’ with naturally red hair, straight and shoulder-length, her body perfectly built and with more anonymous clothes, all-black and with a slightly classical look to it. This did not prevent her from being as pierced and tattooed as the lead-singer though, the guys noted as there was a shot of her performing a high jump as they entered what must be the chorus. The other guitar-player was around half-an-inch shorter and… well… a bit thin, wearing orange and black striped shorts, sneakers and a white vintage t-shirt. Her nearly-straight brown hair hung most of the way down her back. Only the ears were pierced and there were no visible tattoos, this along with the fact that she was wearing no noticeable make-up around the green eyes was making her slightly stand out from the two first. The drummer, it seemed, was bare-footed and wearing only a wife-beater and a chain-filled pair of shorts that looked like she’d nicked them out of a hip-hop store. Her hair was mid-ear-length, bright green and rather curly. A piercing adorned her left eyebrow, the silver metal creating contrast to the hazel eyes. Tribal symbols were running down her arms and up her neck, making her the most tattooed of the four.

“Sounds good,” Dave commented as the video slowly started transforming into one of MTV’s backstage rooms. The four girls on the couches were obviously the same as before although the clothes were different, the drummer’s hair pink and the lead-singer’s suddenly boyishly short.
Deryck nodded and Steve had put on a large grin. “They don’t look too bad either,” he commented, making Cone nod eagerly.

“Okay,” the MTV interviewer said from the screen. “I’m sitting here with the girls of Ashes of Dreams, a European nu-punk band just before their tour with Sum41 and MEST.” He turned to the band. “Hello, I’m Michael.”
“D-Sept,” the lead-singer/bassist said, nodding in greeting.
“Dev,” the drummer replied, obviously bored and picking at her nail polish.
“I’m Jo,” the red-headed guitarist said, flashing a would-be innocent smile.
“CC,” the other guitarist said with a far more genuine smile. “Nice to meet you.”
“Cute,” Deryck commented with a small laugh at the girl’s politeness.
“So…” the interviewer said. “I’m supposing those aren’t your real names.”
“No,” the drummer said, blowing a strand of pink out of her eyes. “Our real names suck. Would you believe my parents named me Angel?”
A collective laugh rose in the studio.
“It didn’t really fit, so we started calling her our little devil. That became Devil and that became Dev. We kept with that, it just fit so much better,” Jo explained with a laugh. “Mine’s simple, though. My real name’s Johanne. Annoying, long and hard to pronounce. To shorten it is just something I had to do, really.”
“Mine’s just my initials,” CC replied. “Christine Cameron became CC, quite a natural process, I reckon.”
“D-Sept?” The interviewer raised his eyebrows at the lead-singer, who had been momentarily distracted by the beer in her hand.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Almost the same thing. My name’s Deidre September Morgan. Deidre’s ugly and September sounds like something out of dirty magazine.” She ran her fingers through her already messy and spiked black hair. “It has nothing to do with deception, though, even though that’s what YM wrote.”
“YM blows,” Dev added.
The interviewer managed to keep a straight face and turned to the singer again. “D-Sept, people have been noticing the lack of hair. What happened?”
The girl grinned. “That’s a long story involving some friends of mine, who watch too many crappy horror movies,” she said, sending her band-mates a mock-angry glare.
“Actually it was pay-back,” Jo said. “Dee had a day in February where she called in sick and got out of every interview we had that day, leaving her to stay put alone in the hotel for a grand total of ten hours. Now, no matter how sick she is, that is not possible.”
Once more the short girl laughed. “It’s true, you know, I get restless, then I drink, then I get completely hyped and in the end I feel this need to trash… something…” she trailed off, leaving it to the others to continue.
“When we returned she was sleeping, probably sobering up, and all our hotel rooms looked like shit. The mini-bar in my room was tipped and broken and the contents were spilled on my bed,” Jo said.
“There was pizza and stuff stuck on the ceiling,” CC added.
“It totally sucked,” Dev said. “When Dee sets out to do something, she does a good job of it.”
“We had just watched ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’; you know that crappy teenage horror flick. You’ll remember that Sarah Michelle Gellar woke up and her hair was cut,” Jo grinned.
“That’s what we did to Dee,” CC exclaimed. “Only we cut it a lot shorter.”
D-Sept rolled her eyes, putting down the now empty beer can.

“These chicks are gonna be so much fun,” Steve said, laughing. “We have to do that to someone sometime.”
“Absolutely,” Cone agreed. “Only you’ll make me piss on them too.”
“Definitely,” the other countered. “Where’d the fun be otherwise?”
“AND we’ll bring a video camera,” Dave added with a grin. Suddenly he turned, noticing how quiet their singer had gone. “What’s up, Deryck?”
The shorter guy shrugged. “There’s just something about that girl. Something familiar.”
“Of course,” Dave said, smiling. “Because of her drinking and her friends’ liking of sucky scary movies she now has your old hair.”
Deryck shook his head. “It’s not the hair. At least not only the hair. I dunno.”
“Perhaps you fucked her,” Steve suggested.
Once again Deryck shook his head, making his black bangs fall into his eyes. “Never seen her before in my life.”

“Weird,” Cone muttered as they returned their attention to the interview.
“…sounds as if all of you prefer guys who are into music.”
“Definitely,” Jo said. “Actually it’s coolest if they play music themselves.”
“If they weren’t into it at all, that’d suck,” Dev added.
“My boyfriend’s a music teacher,” CC told, then blushed as the others laughed slightly.
“So to our three single girls,” the interviewer said with a grin. “What instrument would your perfect guy play?”
“For me either drums or that weird piano-guitar thingy,” Jo answered.
“Why?”
“’Cause drummers are completely fucked up. And the piano-guitar is so odd and un-cool it’s kind of cute.”
“A violinist or a cellist,” Dev said. “They’re all so fucking conceited. It would be awesome to get one of them to fall for you, publicly humiliate him and work him so hard he’d still stay with you until he’s gone from a conceited bastard to a whimpering piece of meat.”
“Did we mention that Dev is pro-slavery?” CC asked with an amused smile.
“Dee?” Jo asked, looking at her fellow band member with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.
“I guess I generally have a thing for my fellow bassists,” the girl said, shrugging.
“Once again, why?” the interviewer asked.
“Bassists are weird,” she said. “Nobody really gets us and our sense of humour other than ourselves.” She grinned smugly. “And my theory, which is based on experience, says that the guys whose instruments can reach the deepest notes usually have the longest…” She paused. “Since this is primetime that’s all the explanation you’re going to get.”

“And she’s so right, you know,” Cone said, leaning back with a satisfied smile, which lasted the five seconds it took before Steve jumped him.

“How have you taken to America?” the interviewer decided to ask.
“It’s really nice here,” CC said. “We’ve played around ten times now and I’ve got to say that both the venues and the kids are better here than in Europe, or will be when we got more of a following.”
“And we have some of the anonymity we haven’t had back in England for a few years,” Jo said. “Well… except for Dee,” she added.
“You’d think that a new hair-cut and a country where nobody really knows our name would be good if you don’t like to be recognized on the streets,” Dev grinned. “That plan went wrong.”
“What’s that about?” the interviewer asked D-Sept.
“Fact is that I’ve been recognized a couple of times here as well, only not as me.”
“How’s that?”
“One time I was going out for some aspirins back a short while after the whole hair-cut deal. I was still not too well and my voice was all deep and weird and shit and this kid comes running up to me, asking for my autograph and I was really surprised because I hadn’t counted on being recognized here. And she tells me how glad she is that I got my old hair back, which I did not understand at all since my hair’s always been long. Then the girl takes off her jacket and I swear it was fucking freezing and she asks me to sign on the chest of her shirt. This was slightly weird. I’m not homophobic, but I’m definitely not lesbian either, so I was rather uncomfortable, but in the end I wrote and she read it then she looked at me all weird and asked if I’d gotten myself a new nickname, because she was under the impression that I usually either signed with Bizzy-D or Deryck, which cleared it all up. She fucking thought I was Deryck Whibley. I was about to kick her arse when she said that my eyes looked weird. Well thanks for noticing the fact that I have blue eyes, not brown. She didn’t get a thing of it all so I fled. Other people’s fans are crazy.”

Everybody on the bus was laughing, except for Deryck, who merely put on a thoughtful face.
“That was one shitty fan,” Steve commented. “She must think you look like a girl, because that D-Sept obviously doesn’t look like a boy.”
“No,” Cone agreed. “I didn’t think someone with boobs like that could possibly be mistaken for a guy.”

As if voicing the guys’ thoughts, the young singer kept talking. “I actually took it as an insult. Not to my face, I mean, Whibley’s cute enough, but to my cleavage. I was wearing tons of sweaters and jackets, my being sick and it being winter, but it was still so stupid.”
“Fucking stupid,” Dev agreed.
“Hey,” D-Sept said. “CC would you pass me that bottle of something on the table,”
“It’s whiskey,” the other girl said, lifting her eyebrows.
“Gimme,” black-haired girl persisted.
“You don’t like whiskey,” Jo countered.
“No, but it’s booze, it’s free and it’s bad for my voice. Gimme.”
CC threw the bottle across the table to D-Sept, who caught it, opened it and started drinking from the bottle
“You admit it’s bad for your voice,” the interviewer said, a puzzled look on his face. “But you still drink it. You do realise that most singers would keep far away from it?”
“Of course, but where’d we be now if I took care of my voice?”
“We’d either be a fucked up pop group or just two-pound-hookers in London,” Jo agreed with a smile.
“Dee and I grew up in the same apartment block in Oxford Street, Soho, London and our mother’s were friends. They decided music was good and sent us to do church choir. I think we were singing there for four years, got our voices completely polished and shit. In fact Dee’s got a beautiful voice, but that doesn’t go well with the guitar-riffs since we’re not Evanescence and so, when she was thirteen and smoked her first cigarette, she realised that smoke had quite an effect on her voice. Later the alcohol followed for the same reason,” CC explained.
“Dee’s secret formula to a great voice is smoking and drinking day in and day out, although I’m willing to bet you anything that she really does it because she likes to get wasted,” Dev agreed. “The rest of us don’t have those excuses though, so Dee does it more than we do.”
“Dev smokes a lot and rarely drinks, I drink… ahem… a lot, but only smoke when Dee has some good tobacco stashed up. And only the water-pipe, which Dee is also completely addicted to,” Jo told the interviewer with a smile. “CC never does any of it. She’s the one who stays right, helps us to the toilet when our stomachs can’t take it, makes sure we don’t end up in the hospital and has painkillers ready for us every morning.”
“CC’s the good kid,” D-Sept said, nodding. “She’s the reason I finished my O-levels and stopped doing acid.”
“So none of you do drugs?” Michael asked.
“No,” CC said, looking almost scared.
Jo shook her head and D-Sept bit her lip-ring slightly.
“Actually,” Dev said, “in the case of Dee and me you’ll have to add an ‘anymore’. We had our phase a while ago.”
D-Sept nodded. “I think we did it for a year or so back when we were in-between labels. We did weed, acid, mushrooms…” she trailed off, thinking.
“E and coke,” Dev added.
“And I found a stash of speed sometime,” CC added.
“Yeah,” the drummer said. “We did that once or twice, too.”
D-Sept grinned. “We changed drug so much that we never got dangerously addicted to one thing, although the withdrawals were bad enough as it was.” She paused to take another gulp of whiskey. “Luckily I found out that if we put vodka in the water-pipe we’d get completely high and wasted anyway, only it’s just mentally addictive, not physically. And you don’t hallucinate.”
“Dee’s best friend is her beloved water-pipe, Smokey McPot, whom she bought when we had a show in Turkey,” Jo explained, smiling. “Dev and I’ve made friends with him too,” she added.
“Smokey McPot?” the MTV employee asked.
“Dude, I was drunk when I bought him and I was in a period of time where I reckoned ‘Dude Where’s My Car’ was the work of genius.”

“How about when they get here, we crash their bus and try out McPot?” Dave asked, an interested look on his face.
“Sure thing,” Steve said.
Once again Deryck merely nodded.
Cone had a doubtful look on his face. “It could be tons of fun, but I was going to find somewhere to buy ice cream. My stash is empty and I have withdrawal symptoms,” he said, jokingly referring to the interview unfolding before them.
“You can get that on their bus,” Dave said, grinning.
“How are you sure they have ice cream?” the bassist asked.
“I know girls,” Dave explained. “I married one. And what I know is that when they’re sad they eat ice cream. Girls always have some of it so it’ll be easy to get fat whenever they’re upset.”
“Oh.”

“So although you’re all born and raised in Soho, you’re geographical backgrounds are quite different, am I not right?”
“I guess you could say that,” Jo said, nodding. “Dee’s dad’s Canadian, which probably, rather than her being a bassist, is the reason for her being weird. I’m half-Scandinavian.”
“Half-Scandinavian?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m so tall. My dad’s half Swedish, quarter Danish and some other weird crap.”
“I’m part-Irish,” Dev said. “Actually I’m John Lydon’s great niece,” she paused. “And it’s true too,” she added, seeing the sceptical look on the interviewer’s face. “My full name’s Angel Moira Lydon.”
“It’s true,” CC confirmed.
“Oh,” Michael said, looking unsure. “Cool.”
“And I,” CC continued, “am a hundred per cent pure English meat, but I lived in Spain with my family from I was nearly two till just before I turned seven.”
“The Spanish press adores her,” Jo grinned. “They keep getting surprised that a kid who dropped out before she got into the equivalt of high school speaks fluid Spanish.”
“Now, if I may ask, what’s the thing with dropping out? Can you tell me a bit of your history?” Michael asked, looking only remotely interested.
“Me and Dev were born in ‘84, the two others in ’85, in London with parents and uncles and aunts who had been involved in the punk movement when they were young. They liked to think they’d grown up, but old LPs were still lying around everywhere. I think, growing up, all of us were greatly influenced by seventies’ and eighties’ punk and metal,” Jo told. “When we were nine or something like that Dee and I were in the same karate class. When you live in London you have to know how to take care of yourself or you’re completely screwed. After I got over the fact that I had been beaten over and over again by a scrawny short kid, we became fast friends. It seemed like the brightest solution to me since she was reaching the black belt very fast.”
Laughter spread through the room once more.
“We both sort of liked the same music and stuff and when we were twelve we formed the band ‘Underdog’ with a couple of our friends. That lasted for around ten months before our lead singer decided we were no fun and left us. We, meaning Dee, me and our first drummer, Bones, took a vote and much against her will Dee became lead singer rather than just doing back-ups. What happened then was that I got a job running errands. My dad’s a drunk who was constantly in between jobs, so if us kids wanted food every day we had to make our own money. As a result I couldn’t get to every practice because I worked afternoons and we were using the music class room at our school, which was only open during the afternoons. Since Dee and Bones didn’t think it was too much fun to play when you’re just a bassist and a drummer, we opted for a rhythm guitarist. Dee talked CC into trying and after a single practice section she was hooked.”
“Then Bones left,” D-Sept recalled, a remote look in her eyes. “Her parents moved up to Sheffield, and it was too far for her to stay in the band. At this time we were around thirteen and fourteen, hopeful, drummer-less and ready to move on as another kind of band. I think this was around the time we first were influenced by pop-punk or nu-punk or so-cal punk or whatever it is, meaning we got into Green Day, Blink, Rancid, the Vandals, NOFX, AFI, Social D., that kind of stuff. And we changed style a bit.”
“I think ‘a bit’ is an understatement,” CC said. “When I first joined you were doing a crossover between seventies’ punk, a bit Siouxie Sioux-ish and heavy metal á la Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. It was hilarious, but it wasn’t going anywhere before we got Dev, who sort of represents what we got into. Her brother had this place on Denmark Street, but he was in a band of his own and although they never hit it big, they were constantly touring northern Europe, so we were allowed to use his flat, two rooms, one which was practically a rehearsal room with equipment belonging in a music studio.”
“And we changed our name,” Jo added. “’Underdog’ really didn’t exist anymore since two of the members were changed from the original thing. I think ‘Ashes of Dreams’ came up when Dev and Dee got into the state where they first started to smoke weed, because Dee gets all dreamy when she smokes the shit.”
“It’s like walking in the sky with pink, fluffy things everywhere and then you just giggle non-stop until it wears off,” D-Sept explained.
“The point is that when Dee woke up from the dream-world only ashes were left. CC thought it was poetic and melancholic and liked it. And then it just stuck,” Jo said.
“That was the birth of Ashes of Dreams,” Dev laughed. “I still think it’s too fucking dreamy,” she added, snatching a collective laugh from the rest of the group.
“We dropped out of school after completing our O-levels almost five years ago,” CC said, “because we wanted…”
“You mean you and Dee dropped out of school. Dev and I were expelled,” Jo corrected.
“Kicked out,” Dev agreed, nodding. “We didn’t even get to finish our O-levels.”
“Jo was drinking in the break and Dev was with her when she got caught. The headmaster was convinced that the stupid Irish kid could not’ve been around without drinking too, so our sweet, innocent Little Devil got chucked out with Jo,” D-Sept continued the story.
“Mine and Jo’s parents took more kindly to us getting kicked out than your mother did to your dropping out, though,” Dev said, smiling.
“Yeah,” D-Sept agreed. “Your parents were used to crazy musicians in the family; Jo’s didn’t give a shit and CC’s parents just wanted her to be happy no matter what it took. If she wanted to throw away her perfect grades for an uncertain future in music, that was her choice. I got kicked out. My mother hasn’t talked to me since and I haven’t seen my father since I was six, so I consider myself kind of an orphan.”
“We take care of her, though,” CC said with a grin. “And back then she just moved into the spare room of Dev’s brother’s flat.”
“Suddenly I had to pay for my own food too and I spent the summer of 2000 on a tattoo/piercing course, having decided that until our music went somewhere, that would be a cool job” D-Sept recounted. “By September I was officially a licensed tattoo artist, one of the youngest to get a diploma that year. I got a job, which I had for a bit more than three weeks. Then we got signed for the first time.”
“Turned out to be a bummer, though,” Dev said. “They were a small company and they basically spent more money than they had. We recorded our debut album, but they could only afford to release 2000 copies, so we don’t even have one ourselves.”
“I’m going to buy one off of eBay sometime,” Jo said. “Sometime when I feel like using a hundred-and-something pounds on a bunch of shit.”
“They went bankrupt,” CC stated. “And we were back to nothing. We all lived in Dev’s brother’s flat at the time and we spent most of the time gigging, writing and partying.”
“And keeping Dev and Dee out of rehab,” Jo added.
“Then, finally, EMI England took us under their wings, and thing’s have been going great since,” Dev said.
D-Sept took a deep sip of the bottle, which was still in her hand. “Yeah, thing’s are good, I mean we’re like… like fucking celebrities back home.”
“At least you and Jo are,” CC said jokingly.
“Huh?” Jo looked up confused.
“Fucking celebrities,” CC repeated. “Oh sorry, it’s still primetime, isn’t it?”
“They’d better have a time delay,” Dev said. “Otherwise we’d suck to be watched by kids, right?”
“Sorry girls,” Michael said. “No time delay, so perhaps you should just think before you speak.”

“Mean guy,” Steve stated. “They aren’t nearly as bad as we’ve sometimes been, though.”
“Not at all,” Cone agreed. “The guy just sucks ass.”

The girls just flipped him off, waiting for the next question. “So…” The interviewer looked deeply into his papers. “What thing about your appearance would you change?” he asked, seemingly taken aback by the questions, which he had supposedly thought up on his own.
“I’d be a couple of centimetres shorter, I guess,” Jo said.

“Fuck you,” Deryck muttered in sync with the lead singer in the TV,
retrieving weird looks from his band mates. “Tall people should just learn to be happy about it,” he said, shrugging his shoulders in defeat.

“I’d put on ten lbs,” CC said. “It’s annoying to be skinny in this company,” she added, looking around at the three perfectly curved girls around her.
“Dee did her first tattoo on me,” Dev said, stretching out her arm for inspection. “’Nuff said.”
D-Sept sent her a mock hurt look, then seemed to be thinking for a moment. “Perhaps I’d be taller.” She contemplated. “Nah,” she said then. “Guys dig short girls. I think I’d opt for my nose,” she then decided. “My nose is horrible,” she stated, scratching it.
Michael the interviewer put on another laugh, then actually started to look happy. “The last question from us for tonight is: How does it feel to be going on tour with bands who inspired you?”
“Misunderstanding,” D-Sept said, her voice finally starting to slur, although she still seemed sober enough to stay in control of what she was saying. “MEST and Sum didn’t inspire us. We actually kind of released our first album in 2000, the same year as Sum put out Half Hour of Power. They’re great musicians and they seem cool, but we were well established style wise when they reached Europe. MEST got released slightly earlier, but they never had a hit in Europe. We didn’t know about them at the time, but it’s going to be fun touring with both bands.”
The other girls just nodded in general agreement as they all got up and headed for the door.

“So,” Dave said. “This is what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
“It’s gonna be so much fun!” Steve cried.
As Deryck opened another beer he couldn’t but think that he’d rather use words such as interesting, strange, scary, disturbing. He didn’t know why, but he had a feeling that big things were going to happen now. After this tour nobody would be the same as they were before. And most of it came down to the short lead-singer with the madly spiked hair, deep dimples, big nose and a knack for alcohol and trouble. Funny how familiar that description sounded.
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Ashes of Dreams