Chapter 39
Underground and going deeper, I'm the keeper of my secrets…
Kieran
Three days. It had been three days since everything changed, and Kieran still couldn’t make the song work.
He sat cross-legged on their bed, his guitar balanced across his lap, surrounded by crumpled pages covered in half-finished verses and chord progressions that went nowhere. The intimacy song sprawled across his notebook like a puzzle with missing pieces.
Before, he hadn’t known how to finish it because he’d been too terrified to face what the words meant. Now he couldn’t finish it because the person who’d started writing it didn’t exist anymore.
“This skin don’t feel mine,
No comfort in your gaze.
My body’s tense when you’re close;
I’ve built these walls around a sacred space…”
The words were right. Raw and honest in ways that made him sick just reading them. But every melody he tried felt wrong, every rhythm pattern was either too aggressive or too gentle to capture the complex truth of what he’d experienced.
Kieran’s body still ached in places he tried not to think about, phantom sensations that reminded him of Vale’s hands whenever he shifted position. But that was over now. Everything was back to the way it was. The way that felt tolerable. Safe.
At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.
The bedroom door opened without warning
Kieran’s hands tightened on the guitar neck and he closed his eyes. “I don’t n-need help right now.”
“I wasn’t offering help. I was just checking in. You’ve been working on this for hours.”
Because every time I try to make it work, I remember exactly what inspired it and I can’t breathe properly.
“Maybe I could take a look at the chord structure,” Vale suggested. “Sometimes a fresh perspective—”
“No.” The word emerged sharper than Kieran intended. “I mean—I want to f-figure this one out myself.”
Vale’s expression shifted to something that might have been hurt if Kieran didn’t know better. “Of course. Your process, your timeline.”
The gentleness in his tone tightened Kieran’s throat with guilt. Vale was being patient and understanding, giving him space to work through the song.
Maybe he was overthinking this, maybe Vale really did just want to help with the music.
Stop it. Stop looking for ulterior motives when he’s being nice.
Two hours later, Kieran sat in front of the camera setup for what Vale called a “soft interview”—just him and a rapper in the UK named Lowe who specifically requested the interview to talk about writing lyrics rather than personal drama.
No medical emergencies, no traumatic revelations, just two artists talking shop.
The collar was off, gauze wrapped around his neck and torso in the familiar Thorn aesthetic. His Martin D-41 rested across his lap, fingers finding comfortable positions on strings he’d learned to trust.
“The thing that blows my mind,” Lowe was saying, “is how you blend styles that shouldn’t work together.
Like in ‘Temple of Flesh‘—you’re doing spoken word, then shifting into this almost operatic vocal line, all while maintaining guitar work that’s basically percussion.
How do you even approach lyrics to that structurally? ”
Kieran felt himself relax for the first time in days.
“Internal rhymes,” Kieran said, his confidence building as he warmed to the subject. “I love internal rhymes and d-double entendres because they let you p-pack multiple m-meanings into the same line, then you can ad-ad-adj—alter the vocals where y-you want without losing the core.”
“You have these incredible literary references too,” Lowe said. “Like, not just the religious language, but like the whole of ‘Wax Wings’ is an ode to Greek mythology. It made me look at the idea of Daedalus as someone sinister. Do you intentionally start a song by looking to literature?”
“I never got to go to c-college,” Kieran admitted. “I h-had to drop out of school at sixteen. Not because I was dumb—just n-necessity. So I read everything I could get my hands on and tried to educate myself through music and b-books.”
From his position off-camera, Vale watched with an expression Kieran couldn’t quite read.
“That self-education shows. The way you weave these concepts with slang and then use things we usually avoid, like inhales and clearing your throat—it creates this temporal collision that serves the emotional content. Plus the guitar work while doing all that is insane. Most people can barely walk and chew gum.”
Kieran laughed. “P-practice. Lots of practice. And embracing the fact that imperfection can be more interesting than technical p-perfection.”
They talked for another twenty minutes about rhythm patterns, about using stutters as deliberate stylistic choices, about the acoustic properties of different performance spaces. By the time Lowe thanked him and signed off, Kieran felt lighter than he had in weeks.
I can do this. I can be a real artist.
As soon as the stream ended, Vale was beside him, his hand finding the back of Kieran’s neck. “Perfect,” Vale beamed, his thumb stroking the sensitive skin behind Kieran’s ear.
He flinched at the initial contact—it seemed like an automatic response his body couldn’t unlearn—but then leaned into the touch, craving the approval that came with Vale’s gentle affection.
“I liked talking about that stuff,” Kieran said quietly. “Just the music, nothing else.”
“I could see that.” Vale’s fingers moved to stroke through his hair. “You light up when you discuss your process. It’s beautiful to watch.”
The compliment made Kieran’s cheeks warm with a feeling dangerously close to happiness.
This was, for all intents and purposes, the best case scenario.
Vale being kind, people liking his music enough to talk to him for almost an hour about it, and maybe when he finished the album, Vale would realize he didn’t have anything else to teach Kieran. No more lessons.
Maybe it can be gentle all the time.
Vale’s other hand found his chin, tilting his face up with gentle insistence. “If you can record a couple more songs in the next few days, I’ll take you out to a proper dinner. Somewhere you can order whatever you want instead of just picking at a salad.”
Like a date. Like we’re normal people who do normal things together.
“Really?” Hope bled through Kieran’s voice despite his attempts to stay guarded.
“Really.” Vale’s thumb traced his lower lip. “You’ve earned it, beautiful boy.”
Before Kieran could respond, Vale leaned down and captured his mouth in a kiss that tasted like coffee and promises. For a moment, Kieran’s body went rigid with muscle memory of things he’d rather forget.
It’s a kiss. Affection. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than this.
When Vale pulled away, he smiled. “Go work on your song. Take your time. No pressure.”
Kieran nodded, still tasting Vale’s mouth on his lips as he gathered his guitar and notebook.
I can make this work.
Sleep wouldn’t come.
Kieran lay in bed, staring at the ceiling while his mind circled endlessly around fragments of the song that refused to cohere into anything complete. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt it again. The terror. The pain. The want.
Think about something else. Anything else.
He slipped out of bed as quietly as possible, grabbing his notebook and padding barefoot toward the door. Vale’s breathing remained steady behind him, deep and even with sleep that seemed to come so easily to him—like someone who’d never learned to fear the dark.
The basement felt different at night—more honest somehow. Kieran kept the lights off, navigating by muscle memory to the studio booth where he found a pair of noise-canceling headphones.
He settled cross-legged on the concrete floor near the chair he had his first basement session in and opened the notebook to pages he’d filled with lyrics he memorized from before meeting Vale.
They were songs that lived only in his head that didn’t require guitar or piano, electronic pieces he’d never known how to produce but had written anyway because the words demanded their own rhythm.
‘Back to the Pit’.
The title stared back at him from a page covered in verses about self-destruction and cycles of behavior that felt prophetic now. He’d never tried to make it work as a song because it needed beats he couldn’t create alone, percussion that lived in his body rather than his instruments.
Kieran put on the headphones, cutting himself off from everything except the sound of his own breathing and the feel of concrete beneath his knuckles. He started tapping—simple at first, then building in complexity as he found the rhythm he’d been hearing in his head for years.
“Mind’s a fucking battlefield, thoughts like razor wire;
Every step I take just feeds into the fire;
Know it’s gonna hurt me, know it’s gonna sting,
But I keep coming back like it don’t mean a thing…”
The words came easier in darkness, flowing with the percussive patterns his hands created against the floor.
But the chorus remained elusive, the bridge between verses that had never quite worked no matter how many times he tried to force it. The old lyrics felt too abstract, too protected from the emotional core the song demanded.
I need to go deeper. I need to access the place this song is really about.
The bag sat in its familiar corner, black fabric synonymous with breakthrough performances and devastating honesty. Kieran stared at it in the darkness.
This is insane.
But maybe that was the point. Maybe he could use Vale’s tools to understand what Vale had done to him. Maybe if he put himself back in that sensory deprivation, back in the place where all of this started, he could make sense of the contradictions tearing him apart.
Already his hands were moving, reaching for the fabric that taught him what it meant to perform without protection. He pulled it over his head, surrendering to the enclosed, claustrophobic place he learned to breathe poison in.
In the darkness behind darkness, the words finally came:
“Back to the pit where the demons play,
Back to the place that steals my days away.
Sick and ashamed but I can’t break free;
From the cycle that’s destroying me.
Back to the pit, back to the pit,
Why do I love the things that make me sick?”
The chorus unlocked something in his rhythm patterns. Kieran’s hands hit the concrete harder, knuckles splitting against rough surfaces as he added layers of percussion with his knees, his forearms, his whole body becoming the drum kit the song demanded.
This is a hi-hat, this is a snare, this is the kick drum that drives everything forward.
Pain became texture, became timbre, became the authentic foundation for words about cycles of self-destruction and the terrible comfort of familiar damage.
Blood made his hands slip against concrete, but that added to the song’s honesty—art that cost something real, art that left physical evidence of its creation.
He lost himself in the repetition, in the building intensity of percussion and vocal delivery that felt more honest than anything he’d created since “Poison Saviors.” This was his song, his process, his choice to dive deeper into the pit that had always been waiting for him.
Strong hands caught his wrists, stopping the relentless rhythm mid-beat as the bag and headphones were yanked off.
“Kieran.” Vale’s face appeared before his, pale with fear, his eyes wide and his cheeks wet with tears.
When did he get here? How long have I been—
Kieran looked down at himself, blinking in confusion at the bright red welts covering his arms and legs, at knuckles split open and bleeding, at splatters of blood decorating the concrete around him. His own tears were streaming down his face, though he couldn’t remember when they’d started.
“Sweetheart, please talk to me. Are you—do you feel a seizure coming? Any aura? Dizziness?” Vale’s breath shuddered out of him, hands still trembling as they moved to cup Kieran’s face. “You hurt yourself. You came down here alone and you—”
The tears on Vale’s cheeks were real. The fear in his eyes was genuine. This wasn’t manipulation or strategic positioning. This was raw terror.
He really does love me.