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chaoskirin · 4 years

Text

The Seven Seas--Final Chapter

Fandom: Queen Genre: Sci-fi/Gen Rating: PG Chapter 4 Word Count: 2003 TOTAL WORD COUNT: 8073

A couple notes: I originally outlined this for the inclusion in a zine. When that didn’t happen, I sort of set the project aside for a while... But after The Seven Seas of Rhye came up on my playlist recently, I decided to expand it a bit and write it. My original target for zine printing was 4 pages or 4,000 words, so I’ve expanded it a little. I hope you enjoy the end. Thank you for reading.

---

The magnitude of a concert can be outlined by several things.

First, the talent. In the case of Queen, this was largely a non-issue, as they were four of the most talented people on the planet. To be fair, this was Roger's assessment, and Roger possessed an ego roughly the size of a stack of thirty blue whales. For the purposes of comparing size, it might have been more logical to select something land-based, such as school buses or football fields. However, in dealing with an ego so large, one must delve into the outright ridiculous or downright strange--sometimes both at the same time. Therefore, whales.

Roger's ego was only surpassed by Freddie's, which no scientist has ever been able to measure.

Second, pizazz. No concert performed by Queen could ever be any less than a spectacular free-for-all of pyrotechnics. A smorgasbord of sparkles... Each properly calibrated to draw the most admiration from the crowd. Professionalism demanded a panel of lights so bright and hot that it could melt the cheese right off a hamburger from a whole kilometer away. If the entirety of the fire brigade wasn't on standby, the show just wasn't worth anyone's time. On the other hand, if the venue burned to the ground in the middle of the concert, it made for particularly bad press. It was a very fine line.

(There are other, more mundane things that go into making a concert a huge success, but this is not a bedtime story, and boring the readers to sleep would be far from ideal.)

But most of all, a crowd defined the magnitude of the concert. Without a crowd, nothing else mattered. That was Roger's expert opinion, at any rate. Which meant on the day of Queen's impromptu, unplanned, desperate, world-saving, hail-Mary concert, Roger Taylor delivered.

Though the fallow field stretched for acres in every direction, it was full to capacity, with people pressing in shoulder to shoulder, eliminating any space between them. Queen's stagehands--those they'd been able to rouse from their vacations--struggled to keep the crowd away from the makeshift stage. This task was hampered by a rather massive electronics rig that jutted out into every opportune space... much like an exploding flan.

John and Brian bent over it, whispering to each other as if they were the best of friends. If one could hear their words, though, one would understand that these were not the hushed intonations of friends--barbs abounded; when Brian called John an incompetent buffoon, John retorted by telling Brian in no uncertain terms that he was a technologically inept upside-down tortoise who couldn't wire his way out of a paper bag. When Brian noted that no one would need to wire their way out of a paper bag and that only an uncivilized rutting salmon wouldn't just tear through it to escape, John insinuated something terribly rude about Brian's dear mother.

In other words, they weren't friends at all. They were brothers.

"Five minutes," Freddie said for the thirteenth time. Delays, as always, remained a trick of the trade. "Is this thing gonna work or not?"

"The aliens are in place?" John asked. One of the lighting scaffolds dimmed, casting the shadows under his eyes into positively evil relief.

"Yes. All of them. Leader, Glasses, Arsehole, and their entire crew." Freddie gestured up onto the far corner of the stage, where they'd built a tiny set of bleachers for the occasion--so tiny that Roger had to squint to see them. The slug-like creatures undulated over them like... Well, like an exploding flan. One must never fail to re-purpose a simile where appropriate, after all. Their shining silver ship lay just behind them, reflecting the light of the setting sun.

John looked at Brian. Brian looked at John. Neither of them trusted each other, and yet they both trusted each other implicitly, with their very lives. They were and would always remain a true paradox in every sense of the word.

"You guys can make out later," Freddie said. "Is the thing ready?"

Brian rolled his eyes. "I can say with absolute certainty... That is, with nearly every resource available to us... Ah, there's a VERY strong likelyhood--and a very TINY possibility that... I guess what I mean is that were I a betting man, which I'm not. Well, I am occasionally, but there's a time and place for it, and it's probably not here. Let me put it this way. I believe, with every fiber of my being--"

As Roger wondered if Brian had an off switch, John interceded: "We're as ready as we'll ever be."

"Good enough," Freddie said.

Brian thanked John for his ability to summarize. John patted Brian on the shoulder. They all climbed onto the rickety stage as the crowd cheered.

The aliens also cheered. Probably. Never easy to tell when you were sitting behind a drum kit several meters away from something approximately the size of guitar pick. Freddie acknowledged the would-be invaders with a nod, put his hand over the mic, and turned to the others.

It was never a good idea when Freddie put his hand over the mic on stage.

"I've changed some of the lyrics, darlings, for this special occasion."

Roger, who would be singing backup, paled enough for Freddie to see, even in the shadows. Freddie smiled and flicked a dismissive hand. "Don't worry, dear. Everything still rhymes."

"But... rehearsals!" Brian argued. "Our chance at--!"

But Freddie had already turned back to the crowd, his microphone live. "We've got something special for you tonight I think you're going to love. A new song!"

He waited, as all great showmen did, for the crowd to both cheer uproariously and fall to silence. As they were taking just a bit too long to get to the silence part, Roger smashed one of his floor toms as close to his own mic as he could get, creating the wiggle of noise juuuuust prior to a sound system emitting feedback. It had the desired effect.

With a devious grin, Freddie sat at the piano and stared daggers at the aliens. In the few seconds between the stage hand whisking away the standing mic and the sound crew activating the mic at the piano, he said, "This is what you wanted. This is what you're gonna get."

Ominous.

Even from the opening piano riff, the crowd was hooked. On their feet. Cheering. And Freddie sang the Seven Seas of Rhye for the first time in public, with some modifications which would never be heard again:

"Fear me, you lords and lady creatures. I descend upon your earth from the skies. I command your very souls, you unbelievers. Leave me what is mine--The Seven Seas of Rhye." Not bad so far, Roger thought as he eyed the special red button just to the side of his bass pedal. Out of all of them, he alone could be trusted with the proper timing, and it had to be perfect. If it wasn't perfect--

Well, it would probably still be okay. But Freddie thrived on perfection, so perfection it was.

The second verse got a little weirder.

"Can you hear me, you slugs and sluggy counsellors? I stand before you naked to the eyes! I will destroy any snail who dares abuse my trust-- You'll leave me what is mine--The Seven Seas of Rhye."

Roger, whose eyesight was very bad to the point where sometimes he couldn't even be sure whether he was staring at his own drums or a series of giant, empty bowls, glanced over at the alien bleachers. He thought--he hoped--they were no longer cheering.

He eyed the red button again. Not yet. First, he had to try to keep up with Freddie's lyric alterations; at the last minute, he decided maybe it would be better to loudly hum into his mic instead, then--either out of charity or mischief--Freddie kept the lyrics exactly the same as he'd written them.

"Sister... I live and lie for you. Mister... Do and I die. You are mine, I possess you. I belong to you forever."

Roger didn't hear the next verse. At all. Brian took over singing along, and Roger played on shoddy muscle memory--After all, he'd only just learned the song, so no one could blame him for missing a strike or two on a cymbal.

If Roger knew anything, though, he knew timing so implicitly, so instinctually... and he knew exactly when...

"I'll come out alive," Freddie sang. His arm blazed with hidden pyrotechnics as he pointed directly to the aliens' home planet of Denmark.

And Roger smashed the button next to his bass pedal.

Freddie sang, "Be gone with you, you small and shady conquerors," and the sky exploded with the most precise of direct hits. As Brian had calculated, Denmark lay at an amazingly fortunate and perfect angle to explode from earth's northern hemisphere. At least, that's what Freddie wanted them to think--for a Queen explosion, this one was rather small, but it had to look real.

Despite their tiny size, Roger could hear the aliens' audible gasp even over his drumming.

Unwilling to break his stride, Freddie continued.

"Give out the good, leave out the bad evil cries. I've challenged the mighty Leader and his arsehole-- And taken what is mine. The Seven Seas of Rhye!"

Although everyone had doubts that the ploy would work given its absolute simplicity, the aliens still piled back into their ship, their slimy backsides squirming over each other like maggots in roadkill. As the ship lifted off to retreat, the stage crew covered their escape with a helpful volley of fireworks that exploded just a bit too close.

Roger turned his eyes to the sky just in time to see the silver saucer streak away into the sunset.

---

"Am I going to wake up at some point?" John queried hours later. Long after the concert ended and the crowds had filed out, Queen still sat on the stage as their crew cleaned up around them. "I feel like that should have been a dream. Was it?"

"I was thinking maybe we were dead," Brian answered, after which the two of them shared a private chuckle.

"No, we're not dreaming and we're not dead," Freddie said. "We've single-handedly saved the planet from annihilation, all thanks to yours truly."

Roger sighed. He knew this whole thing would go right to Freddie's head. Any attempt science made at measuring his ego now would backfire tremendously. People would die if they ever tried to figure out Queen's prodigy of a singer, and they would have been asking for it. No one could pin down Freddie Mercury and hope to survive.

"They'll be back," Brian said, after which John applauded him and handed him a certificate printed on expensive parchment. It was already framed.

Bran scowled. "This says, 'award for the most obvious statement ever,' and it's sealed by the prime minister and the queen."

"I've had that in my suitcase for the past year," John said. "Figured tonight you'd say something stupid enough for me to give it to you."

"But the queen," Brian stammered. John shrugged.

"Be that as it may," Freddie said, "Captain Obvious is correct. They'll be back, but I suppose that's a problem for the future."

Roger very much thought that was the right way to look at things. After all, the future wasn't real. It couldn't hurt them. And with every day that passed, the future technically got farther and farther away. By right of its very existence, the future could never be the present, and Roger preferred to live in reality.

As a dubious corollary, Roger also believed the past didn't exist, insofar as he couldn't get drunk in it. So maybe he wasn't the right person to ask.

"So now what?" Brian asked. "What do we do?"

With a smile and a flourish, Freddie said, "We play, darling. We play."

#queen #queen band #fanfic #freddie mercury #roger taylor #john deacon #brian may #ck writes #not bestiary

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