Chapter Text
“Sleep Token?” Sam repeats, not quite sure he would ever hear these words come out of the mouth of the person sitting across from him in his lifetime.
“Yeah?” Nick repeats in turn, blowing a decent cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. Spooked Liza offendedly licks her paw by the leg of his chair, then demonstratively flicks her tail toward the door — like, you assholes can deal with the shit you’ve stirred up yourselves.
Sam exhales, closes his eyes and rubs the bridge of his nose, lost in guesses and trying to scrape together the few crumbs of information he knows from the depths of his memory.
“Uhh, well, an anonymous band. There’s four of them, I think? Or five. They play prog… rock? Prog metal? Got pretty popular pretty fast — though honestly I’ve only heard a couple of songs, one of which I know from TikTok edits of BG3. Your Reddit friends in the threads constantly shit on them, they absolutely need to slap a sticker on everything: is this metal or not.”
On the last phrase he adds some humor to his voice. Nick doesn’t react to the jab at all, just keeps smoking and watching him with a half-sarcastic expression. Neither the face, nor the silence, nor the very essence of the request sits right with Sam. Someone like Nick would only ask about guys like Sleep Token if he was preparing a massive shitstorm online, and Hallett really doesn’t want to be part of it.
“They’ve got a pretty good drummer, right?”
Sam tries to recall what stuck with him from the little he’d heard.
“Yeah, that’s probably true. A guy I know mentioned him, and I trust his opinion. Can’t judge personally, I know too little.”
Nick finishes his smoke, flicks the stub straight into the ashtray on the cluttered paper-covered table, and pokes at Sam again, this time with a finger snap.
“Perfect. So go find out then? Dig up everything you can on him? On them?”
An uncertain chuckle, more like a polite cough, escapes Sam’s lips. He fucking knew some bullshit was brewing. Hallett tries to play it off as a joke.
“Well, what do you need Google for then? Or do you want a summary from private fan Facebook groups? I think some girl from your freelancers would have better luck with that.”
Nick puts his feet on the floor, very patiently licks his dry lips, then pushes himself closer to Sam with a loud squeak of the chair and takes his hands in his own. The look he gives Sam while lifting his face and stretching it into a smile doesn’t promise anything good. The smile doesn’t reach his eyes — they stay glassy, slightly glazed over. Up close, Nick smells like a fucking mix of everything: tobacco, weed, gin, some Thai takeaway, toilet freshener, pretentious perfume, cat piss, and the faint smell of a man who’s figuratively shat himself. Sam doesn’t feel any better because of it. Something’s going on in his boss’s life, and that combat blonde hair isn’t gonna fix it.
“No, I think you’re exactly the one who’s gonna help me here.” The fact that Nick drops his usual questioning speech pattern sends chills down Sam’s spine. “None of my freelancers have any real field experience, so to speak. Meanwhile you, as we can see, know half the heavy underground in the country and can worm your way under the skin of any metalhead if you pull the sticks out of your back pocket and the tongue out of your ass. Plus, a cute thing like you gets let in everywhere if you use your talents right. We’ve got six, maybe seven months, depending on when Download officially announces them. Are you even listening?..”
Sam has a lot of questions and very few answers, but for some reason the first thing he does is stupidly open and close his mouth. Worm under the skin? What the fuck is happening exactly?..
He doesn’t realize he said the last part out loud.
Nick, who was grandly rambling about some venues and mutual acquaintances, shuts up reproachfully when the remark interrupts his monotonous babbling.
“You’re seriously telling me you’re thinking about doing a piece on Sleep Token for Mayhem? And not just a piece — what? An investigation, like you said? Leaking info? What the fuck are you even planning to write about?.. Why do you need this at all, you used to spit on yellow press, and now you’re flushing your own website down the toilet for clicks and views?”
He throws off Nick’s hands — sweaty and sticky — and tries to stand up, but suddenly gets pushed back down quite roughly. Nick’s face, no longer smiling at all, hangs an inch from the tip of his nose.
“The whole world, for fuck’s sake, Sammy, is clicks and views. The whole world is attention and money. You get it? You fucking prick?.. Or did you somehow forget how those same clicks and views brought you a few quid so you could send them to whatever shithole you crawled out of?.. Or maybe you got lost in the textures when this very Mayhem actually started making some money, and thanks to who, exactly? Me?.. Who did you run to so they could wipe your ass when daddy was beating the shit out of that pretty face of yours? What, work the checkout at Tesco? No? No. Because you’re too fucking good for that, and London's obviously going to recognise your brilliance. Musician and writer, well, I'll be damned.”
After spitting out this whole tirade under Sam’s shocked gaze, Nick leans back and lights up again, this time a cigarette. The stinking smoke burns his eyes.
“In reality, you are incapable of doing anything else; that’s the truth,” Nick concludes and finally blows a stinking ring right into his face. “And your side gigs only bring enough for beer. Otherwise you wouldn’t be clinging to me.”
“Nice to know what you really think of me.”
Sam decides for a moment whether he should tell Nick that his website is complete shit and he’s hammering the last nails into his own coffin if he still dreams of proper online journalism. But no matter how much he wants to spit in Nick’s smug skinny face, he needs money — and right fucking now. And Nick is the only one who can realistically give it to him soon. The words about an advance get stuck in his throat like a lump, but his bitchy editor correctly reads the internal struggle written all over Sam’s face.
“I’ll pay you upfront. And well. Come on, Sammy, listen, I didn’t mean to be rude, okay?” He puts the dumb-asshole expression back on his face. “Maybe I got carried away about the lack of talent, but you do write well. Remember those couple of interviews you did? Some of the top viewed. The material you found for the podcast. You’re sharp, you know music, and most importantly, you play. You’ll pass as one of them. Fuck, you’re almost one of them already. You’re one of them, Sammy?”
“Why the fuck do you need Sleep Token?” Sam shakes his head at all the empty reassurances, even though there’s a grain of truth underneath — he writes decently and knows how to dig. “And how do you know they’re gonna headline Download?”
“A little bird.” Nick takes a deep drag. “Who else? You seriously underestimate how much they blew up in a couple of years. It’s insane. Over a million subscribers in a week or some shit like that. People want to read about them. Demand exists — no supply. Nobody knows shit except a couple of blurry facts from their bio, half of which are made up. And a couple of equally blurry photos. And the single interview on the entire internet, which they clearly wrote while tripping on acid and laughing their asses off behind the scenes.”
Apparently, appealing to reason isn’t going to work, because for that the opponent first needs to actually have some fucking reason.
“Okay, you do realize this is NDA, label, management, and all that shit, right? Even if you get some material in your hands — fuck, I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud — Mayhem is done. They’ll sue you, and you’ll drag me into it too. I’m out. Sorry. If this threatens to turn into a bigger lawyer bill than I can handle later, then I’m out.”
“It depends on how you use the material that ends up in my hands,” the boss dodges darkly, sending another stub after the first one. That tells Sam he’s not saying everything. And that he’s nervous. “Not everything that doesn’t fit Mayhem can’t be used somewhere else.”
“What the fuck did you get yourself into?” Hallett blurts out sincerely, and Nick snaps his head toward him. He studies Sam’s face for a few seconds, opens his mouth like he’s about to say a thing, but ends up spitting out something completely different.
“Look, are you a journalist or what? A reviewer? Then use your damn brain. I’m giving you money to study the most popular and controversial band on the current scene, one that’s about to get even bigger after the festival and whatever else they’re planning for the summer. The whole world is gonna be talking about the Tokens, and you’ll have the key to the info in your hands. Review their style. Write about their crew. About what the fuck gear they use. Where their roots are, who inspired them, what they even are. And if you’re lucky enough to get really close and do something that would make readers crash our server, we’ll find where to use it. And if they take you in as a second vocalist or a fucking pole dancer on stage, I expect a fat exclusive interview for the pod. No NDA. Nobody should even know who you are. Just… dig around.”
Gotta admit, he’s thought this through. Sam drags his hands hard down his face.
“I don’t want to become a stalker, Nick.”
“I’ll give you five grand upfront right now and another ten when the article’s done. If there’s more, ten per piece. If you dig up an exclusive — we’ll discuss rates separately.”
What the fuck?
“Where the hell did you get this money?” he asks in a hoarse voice. It’s not some insane amount for London, and definitely not for Nick himself, but the most Nick had ever paid him was a couple hundred.
“You’re offering more than you could ever make off the ads, no matter how killer the article turns out.”
“Consider it an early Christmas. You in or not?”
It would be enough to send Mikey some cash and pay for all the classes he wants. Maybe even buy decent mics or an interface for home studio, because his old Behringer has seen too much in its life and his YouTube videos lose hard in quality. Fuck it. Just… fuuuck.
“You don’t actually give a shit about guys like them,” Sam whispers into the void, mentally surrendering.
“I sincerely hope you don’t either. With that attitude everything will be much easier.”
He watches as triumphant sparks flash in Nick’s eyes behind his lashes when he lowers his head to roll him a spliff.
When Sam lights up too, his head is completely empty.
“I don’t know where to start.”
“In that case, start from the very beginning, my dear friend.”