#not to be in love with an npc i created but erin is my gf i plan on proposing to her soon

[fmdtaeyongarchive]

↬ talk to me.

date: september 2020.

location: ash’s shared studio w/ his npc Producer Crew^TM / ash’s apartment studio.

word count: 1,816 words.

summary: -

triggers no triggers for this one! let’s celebrate that!

notes: creative claims verification. appearance by npc Producer Crew^TM friend erin. mentions of san at the end.

ash isn’t planning on starting work on a new song when inspiration sparks. he’s working on the opener for his album, in fact, talking to kyung and kiha and erin about their experiences with break-ups to better grasp the negative, angry emotions he needs for that when a conversation with erin pries inspiration out of him.

their conversation has been as pleasant as ever, but not all that helpful in his mission to write a song about anger and resentment when she pipes up with a suggestion. “if you need other people to explain to you the feelings to write about for the song you’ve been working on, why not try something from a perspective you know better? what are your break-ups usually like?”

“what do you mean? they’re, uh, well, usually they’re sad.”

erin’s lip twitches and ash knows she’s holding back a laugh out of respect for his emotions. she doesn’t have to. ash is well-aware his answer had failed to give much by way of the kind of answer she’s looking for, but there’s a reason he works alone more often than he works with others on his lyrics. it’s a hell of a lot easier to put words down when he’s talking to himself than when he’s explaining himself to someone else. there’s more pressure there to make sense because even if the lyrics can be revised either way, like this, someone else still has to hear the mumble of keywords and half-thoughts that he gets the opportunity to hide away when he’s by himself.

“musically. if you had to describe the feeling musically, what would it be like? here.” erin pushes the keyboard that’s sitting in front of her over into ash’s direction and gives him an expectant look. use the music, not your words, she’s saying, and ash bows his head in a silent exchange of thankfulness that she’s found the solution before he’d had the chance to think of it.

ash’s fingers idle over the keyboard as he sorts his thoughts into categories in his head. he’s unaware of the time ticking by, whether it’s milliseconds or a handful of seconds at a time, but given the chance to process his own recollections, he eventually presses down a chord on the keyboard and then a second. it’s only the beginning of a bare bones chord structure, but in a short time, he’s created something, which is more than he could say he’d gotten from the talk he’d already had with kyung searching for answers.

he’s not even bothered that he’s been sent off track from the song he’d come here to write because his head is now swimming with fragments of his past instead of attempts at constructions of events he himself hasn’t experienced. this comes so much more naturally, writing from what he knows instead of what he has to teach himself. some might say that makes him a stagnating songwriter because he finds so much contentment in his own comfort zone, but he’s not much bothered by it as his eyebrows smash together and erin gives him an encouraging hum from where she sits a few feet away from him.

“this is right after a break-up,” ash claims, now having little trouble explaining what’s on his mind as long as he preludes it with notes and rhythms. he stops for a moment, then shakes his head. “no, this is right after a fight. you’re not sure whether it’s a final break-up or not or if you’ll be able to make up in the morning like nothing happened. it’s that night when you go home with only the freezer burn from a cold shoulder to hold onto and you stare up at the ceiling, unable to think about anything but the person you’re afraid of losing.”

when he looks up from the keyboard to erin’s round eyes this time, he’s not met with her telling him he doesn’t need to waste time explaining or an offer of her own opinions and thoughts like he expects. instead she remains silent, a supportive nod and softly smiling eyes her only response to his fragmented ramblings.

ash takes it as his cue to continue and his two chords grow into four interwoven series of notes pressed into the keyboard that grow more spaced out the more times he plays them to let them marinate in his mind. the emptiness in between is the distance between two lovers after a spat and he weighs out the beats in between for the best match to the feeling of being too far to touch but too close to ignore.

never in ash’s experience has fighting been a critical necessity of a relationship. kyung had mentioned to him, in his gruff and distanced voice in the few words ash had been able to get out of him before being told to go elsewhere, that two people aren’t meant to be together if they don’t have the passion to fight and ash had held his tongue from countering back that that sounded like an awfully toxic mindset to have.

ash has certainly had relationships that had burned out on the wick of fight after disagreement after argument, but there have been relationships that had ended due to unignited differences and ones that had ended due to unexplained silence and others that had ended in a simple agreement that everything wasn’t working.

his last relationship had ended with a quiet fizzling flame that ash had had the job of extinguishing. they’d never had a major fight in the two years of their relationship, and yet, they hadn’t been meant to last forever, so were fights a good sign or a bad one? kyung might not have been wrong after all. is the threat of losing something what someone needs to realize that’s what they want? it could be. almost certainly, that isn’t the case for every love story out there. none of the love stories he’d thought he’d been a part of, but ash ruminates silently on the thought for a long time, his fingers testing out progressions and melodies in the quiet of the room that it seems erin is happy to facilitate.

at some point, erin sets to work silently on a notebook, the two existing silently in their own worlds until they briefly cross again when ash asks if she can pass him over a guitar that had been propped up to the side of the studio.

when erin begins to pack her things up, ash’s attention is pulled away from the computer he’s now stationed himself at to turn his experiment into a song.

“are you leaving?”

“mhmm, it’s getting late. you should head home soon, too. get some sleep. or pretend to, for the sake of my concern for your sleeping habits.” the signature soft smile negates any forcefulness ash might have read into her words if she was anyone else.

“yeah, i’ll try. thanks, erin. i’ve got a new idea thanks to you.” he’d still have to find kiha and talk to him for the more pressing song at hand, but ash isn’t so bothered by the detour from the road he’s traveled down. “you’re a real one.”

a small extension of her smile is the response gets and she lowers her head in place of a verbal goodbye before breezing out of the studio door.

_____________________________________________________________

ash has other songs he needs to work on, but the one he’d started in the studio with one prompt from erin remains on his mind and he makes his way through the process of crafting it faster than almost any other song on his docket.

the track is complete when he only has a few of the lyrics ironed out, but once he sits down and sets his mind to it, those come to him without much trouble, too. the words that come to him lean into pleading, but gentle. desperation all built up through the act of loving and not wanting to lose.

it becomes a foil to that troubling song he’d started off the journey intending to write, not in happiness in contrast to anger or acceptance in contrast to resentment, but in honesty in place of denial and offer of understanding in place of refusal to admit wrongdoing. it’s almost seductive, he notices to himself one night. the way he’s chosen to put it together and the instruments he’s used aren’t too different from what he’s done with songs about intimacy in the past, but this song is more about the absence of intimacy than the wonders of it.

even as it grows more hopeless as the song goes on, ash tells himself the story isn’t written with an ending. it will remain up to the listener to decide if he’s asking for something he can never have or if persistence is a core virtue in love. the sensuous vocals and the despairing lyrics. much like in mending a broken relationship, the two come together in a sour-sweet contrast meeting somewhere in the middle for the truth.

it’s only late in the process that ash considers the idea of putting another voice on the song. he hadn’t wanted any features on his albums when he’d started. the idea is supposed to be to make this an album that’s completely his, touched by others’ whims and stylings only in ways he truly can’t avoid, but the second verse keeps nagging him as if it wants to be something he’s not letting it become. it has potential for more than he’s given it.

he restructures the song with the idea of another voice before he contacts anybody, but the more he finetunes the section where he can hear another voice, the more he begins to hear one specific other voice.

ash hasn’t written for san since they’d worked together for the creation of the other man’s album earlier in the year, but something about working with him had stuck with ash so that san’s voice is the only one he can hear taking the place of his own. their styles aren’t so far off, especially when they each lean more into their respective r&b-tinged natures, so he trusts san can handle the vocal delivery as he wants it.

the only thing in his way is his own pride. he wants an album to call entirely his own, but nothing makes it worth following his own artistic ego over remaining true to what his artistic mind tells him is meant to be, so he pulls up san’s number in his phone and sends him a text without any foreword.

hey, i have a song i’m working on for my next album and i think your voice might be just what it needs. take a listen and let me know what you think. it’s the second verse that i was feeling your voice for.