I had to be honest, I wasn't paying that much attention to the openers, although I did stop by Blessthefall's merch table to get a poster for Jet. She'd freak at seeing Craig in his cute, tiny, arguably even more of a twink than Ronnie form while he was still with Blessthefall. I contemplated for a bit what would happen if he wasn't going to get recruited for Escape the Fate in this timeline -- I'd heard that he'd gotten kicked out of Blessthefall, but didn't recall why, so would that have happened? Either way, the appeal of seeing the archetypical scene rivals together, in a year when you'd never expect that to be happening, was deeply satisfying. Course, I'd never actually looked into anything Blessthefall had ever done in detail. Maybe I should have? Ultimately, a metalcore show was a metalcore show no matter what. I didn't feel anachronistic, or even like I was Ronnie's special little guy and the most important person in his life (at least in my opinion and that seemed to be how he treated me), in that crowd, even if I was at the front behind the ropes, close enough to smell the folks on stage. It mostly just smelled like sweat, spilled beer, and awful cologne, so not that different from shows in the 2020s. Less weed, though. When was it legalized, again?

In the back of the crowd, a young man decked out in multiple necklaces and black nail polish on top of his fully black ensemble pushed his way to the front. He was going to address Ronnie directly as soon as he got the chance, and the best chance to get to the front was while the opener no one cared about was playing. This wouldn't have been a particularly unusual event had it not been for the identity of this man. Whenever those in the crowd (at least who were there for Escape the Fate) recognized his face, they let him pass, some suppressing muffled gasps or high-pitched noises. His overall slight and androgynous build and the high pitch with which he growled under his breath at those he pushed back didn't in the slightest impede his mission, or immediate recognizability and the respect that he evoked from all in attendance. Security evidently wasn't paying attention as he went past the VIP barriers and ended up standing right next to me, grimacing and mumbling something under his breath. It took me a couple seconds to recognize him. I knew I'd seen him somewhere, and his voice sounded really familiar, but I couldn't place...

One of the guys next to me did my job for me, turning toward the newcomer with a look of something approaching awe.

"Uh, are you, by chance, Max from the old EtF lineup? Like, I wouldn't mind getting something signed. You were always my favorite...well, if you're not, sorry to bother you, but you do look a lot like him. Wait, you are a guy, right?"

"Yes." Max produced a permanent marker from one of the pockets of his cargo pants and signed the Dying Is Your Latest Fashion CD the other concert-goer presented. "Glad to see someone appreciates real talent. And understands that just because it's got Ronnie in it DOESN'T MAKE IT ESCAPE THE FATE!"

The rest of the pit turned in Max's direction in response to the sudden yell disturbing the concert environment. At least he wasn't interrupting any music since we were in the intermission between Blessthefall and Ronnie and the new lineup coming on.

"Yeah, that's right! I said it! You're all here in your fancy little shirts and your hairstyles that look just like him and you're just so excited to see them and to see him getting up there and performing songs that I wrote with him, and we're just pretending that it's still the same band and everything is fine?"

One person with purple hair and a somewhat faded Avenged Sevenfold shirt interjected. "I mean, I'd have loved to see Escape the Fate with you, but you didn't do any shows I could get to. This was the first one that worked for me! It's not that we think that the new lineup is better or anything -- I mean, we've never seen them so how are we supposed to know that? But it's not a slight at you that people still want to see your songs. If anything, shouldn't you take it as a compliment that Escape the Fate's image that you helped create persists?"

"You don't understand what this means to me, do you? The band's all you care about. It's just about hearing your stupid songs, no matter what happened to the soul behind them, right?"
"Uh...yeah. I'm not Ronnie's personal friend. I didn't know him like you do. I do only know him for the songs, and no matter how much I respect you as the band's co-founder, I'd appreciate it if you'd shut up so I can hear those songs. I think they're about to come on."
"...oh, I'll shut up, all right..."

All in attendance's eyes immediately darted to attention once drumbeats kicked up, along with the odd guitar chord. Evidently the equipment was getting tested out before Ronnie and the new lineup came on. Apparently I was visibly beaming enough that the person next to me turned and smiled.

"Yeah, same. To be honest, I was worried about him for a while. Looked like he was in a real dark place. Glad they've bounced back from it."
"I'm just really excited to see Dying Is Your Latest Fashion live. I mean, I really wanted to, but, well, it didn't work out because they didn't have any shows near me." This was true, in that Ronnie Radke's Three Ring Circus didn't go to Kanto (bands never did) and I didn't get disowned in time to catch them in Orre.

"I get that. I keep hoping that maybe they'll do a proper tour soon, but at least for now, it's all been local shows, so if you're not in or immediately around Vegas, you're gonna have a tough time. Hell, I drove down from Phenac City just for this!"

"Damn. That's, like, 3 hours, isn't it? I went from Sanctum to Mote for a different show once, but I ended up getting a hotel overnight because it really didn't seem worth it as a day trip. After the concert, I was wiped."
"...who the hell has money for that? I got here this morning and will probably drive back tonight, unless I end up sleeping in my car. Not like this is the kind of venue you can camp out by; it's maybe one step up from the bars and shit they used to play. Course, I might be better off sleeping in my car then trying to get across the regional border to Orre at night. They've been totally anal about letting anybody in and out at night ever since the whole thing with Shadow Lugia. Like, come on, it's not like I can traffic that many Pokemon in the back of my shitty car! They've got waystations at the borders to ransack all your shit for Pokeballs and everything. Makes me feel like I'm living in some kind of dystopia."

I kept forgetting about how much damage Cipher's Shadow Pokemon did. Not even the terror they inflicted upon the citizens of Orre, but how they along with the original Team Rocket Mewtwo pretty much killed off Pokemon biotech and animum studies as industries until Niantic came around, and how the flying between regions that kids did on their Chromatic Conference journeys back in the day is impossible. Even in my home timeline, decades after the fact, you still couldn't fly on Pokemon across regional borders or have Pokemon out of their balls inside train stations or airports, and forget about carrying any Pokemon beyond your team of 6. And if the PC box glitches out so you lose your extra Pokemon, sucks to be you, I guess. Of course, I wasn't totally sure if you not being allowed to have Pokemon out of their balls on planes, trains, or boats anymore was really Cipher. The last thing anybody wants is someone's cute little Pikachu freaking out because of the air pressure and shorting out systems.

I'd heard snippets of international news broadcasts about how right after the incident for about 2 years, Orre implemented tight border patrol with all their land borders, but it didn't feel "real" in any meaningful sense. I didn't catch the significance. And I definitely didn't expect it to intrude on my post-hardcore time travel fun times, but that's the thing with time: nothing exists in a vacuum. The 2005 when most relevant emo bands published their seminal albums, the 2005 in which the XD001 incident happened, and the 2005 where I was 7 years old and the main things in life I cared about were bugs, dragons, and computers (come to think of it, I guess that save the addition of Spark and Ronnie, that hadn't changed much?) were all the same year, and that was terrifying.

Regardless, all of that faded away, and I was fully engrossed in the past which was for the time being, my present, once the lights went dark and the opening riff of When I Go Out, I Want To Go Out On A Chariot Of Fire started. I almost couldn't hear it over the cheers from the crowd, which I was absolutely part of. Max, meanwhile, next to me, just looked towards the stage with an indiscernible look on his face. He was clearly trying to scowl and look all edgy and brooding and all, but his eyes glistened like he was about to start crying. It was adorable, and part of me briefly considered offering him a hug before I snapped back to attention at the sound of Ronnie's voice.

"Good evening, Vega City! So, uh, we're back. Had to make a couple of changes, but let's be real, I'm all you really care about, right?"

Ronnie exaggeratedly stuck his neck out and turned his nose up at the point of that last sentence, evoking laughter from the crowd. It wasn't something I would have been unsurprised to see my timeline's version do, although I'm confident his wouldn't be the slightest bit ironic. Honestly, I wasn't totally sure that this one's was, but the rest of the band members behind him seemed to take it in stride.

"So, we should probably introduce ourselves, right? Going from left to right, we've got Mike and Jesse on lead and supplemental guitar. Jesse also does some vocals that are a little high for me. Next up, James on drums and Craig on bass. Not Mabbitt. You just saw him with Blessthefall. Different Craig. No relation. So, let's play some songs!"

I stood there enraptured for an amount of time I couldn't determine, having every word of every song memorized (yes, including the completely new to any timeline ones that Ronnie had sent me as demos) and feeling them resonating through everyone in the crowd just as the speakers were close enough to me that I felt the bass vibrating through my whole body. It didn't feel anything like any of the times I'd seen Falling In Reverse. For one, I was by no means the most queer-looking guy there, and the attitude of vague contempt and that they mostly just wanted me to shut up that I'd felt at Falling In Reverse shows was completely absent. And for another, maybe it was my ego talking since he kind of was (I'm pretty confident that Violet Haze was specifically about me and based on the text file he'd sent me right after he returned to the past after his first arrival), but this Ronnie actually felt like he was singing to me. He actually bantered and acknowledged fans' holding up of signs and such, even outside of the VIP rows. Perhaps that was a smaller show, but this one actually felt like he was enjoying what he was doing, whereas Falling In Reverse had felt for a while like he was just going through the motions, and engaging with fans was secondary to bolstering his own ego.

Of course, while I might have been fully embraced by every note and every word, I gathered from the banter of the VIPs around me that they were much more focused on anticipation. Specifically, sentiments that boiled down to "okay, we know he's going to play Situations. When? He'd better not save it for an encore."

Honestly, as much fun as it was to sing and to reference, to the point that "honestly, that never happened / lying is your favorite passion" was one of the little verbal tics Spark and I had with each other, Situations was far from my favorite song from this era. It was fun, sure, but broadly standard for its genre and didn't quite capture my imagination in the same way. Hearing the otherwise impossible (presumably? I couldn't really find many surviving setlists) tracks which in my timeline, would have been on the EP, and the ones that even modern fans didn't much talk about, was a lot more interesting than the song that I'd seen a double digit number of people call "their favorite Falling In Reverse song", which had never not infuriated me.

My companions' prayers had been answered, since the telltale sharp guitar notes and weirdly vowel-enunciated intro kicked off at near equal volume, even amplified, to the cheers around them, heralded with "I know you all know this one. Go ahead, sing along."

The crowd proceeded to do just that, myself included. Was it my favorite song from Dying Is Your Latest Fashion? No. Did I think it really deserved to be the one song from that era everybody remembered? No. But was it still just an absolute blast? Yes.

However, no one got to immerse themselves in the song for long. Evidently Max had hit his breaking point, and had managed to smuggle in his own battery powered microphone without anybody noticing, so right before the first chorus where Ronnie paused with anticipation, he was abruptly interrupted.

"THAT WAS OUR SONG, YOU ASSHOLE!"

Eyes widened. Jaws dropped. The roughly half of the crowd whose phones could record video quickly flipped or slid theirs open, focusing in on the estranged ex-bassist. Meanwhile, Ronnie looked the most shocked of anyone, and the rest of the replacement band screeched to a halt, waiting to see what would happen next. Even through the heavy amplification, I could tell Ronnie's voice was shaky.

"Uh, hey, buddy. Great to see you, but I've got limited time on the booking here? They're gonna kick me off the stage at 10:30, so I can't really talk right now. You can find me, uh, backstage afterwards if you want..."

"Don't you -- come on! Don't act like this is a normal show! We had something special, Ronald, and you threw it away."

"Look, Max, you know we weren't good for each other. I didn't want things to turn out like this either, but if we kept going on like that, one of us, or the band, would have self-destructed."

"So why didn't you fucking tell me instead of just throwing everyone out?! We could have worked something out, you know! But no. Instead, you evidently decided that everything we'd built together was less important than THIS."

Max turned straight towards me, and I was frankly too stunned by the surreality of the situation (no pun intended) to realize what he was doing. Holy shit, he was beautiful. Even more so in person. For lack of a more eloquent description, he looked and sounded exactly like Max Green, and was in exactly the kind of scenario that I'd only read about second-hand years down the line. My own personal "if I could stay clean, I would have stayed with my band" moment, happening in real time, with one of the most beautiful human beings I had ever seen, the man who was as much of the core force behind EtF / FIR as Ronnie, barreling towards me with burning hatred in his eyes and lifting me up by my collar.

Holy shit, he's touching me.

"What the hell, dude? Yeah, that's right, don't think I didn't notice. You vanish for weeks, and then you come back, raving about your new best friend and how he showed you all these crazy epiphanies about yourself and you had some kind of fucking vision quest hallucination of punching some face-tattooed future version of yourself in the face, and then you decide you just can't live with me anymore and need to restart Escape the Fate?! And then there's some nobody who looks exactly like how you describe this [rhymes with 'maggot'] right up next to the stage where he can taste your fucking sweat, at your first show with the new lineup, squealing every time you play one of your [rhymes with 'guarded'] new songs."

Max turned me towards his face from my previous position of facing the stage.

"Yeah, that's right, fucko, don't think I didn't notice. You're not subtle. What does this -- thing -- give you that I don't?! How could you throw away everything we were together and replace me with this, and then have the gall to keep calling yourself Escape the Fate and playing OUR songs?"

A girl standing next to us in the VIP section spoke up. "Uh, Mr. Green? Sir? Didn't he technically replace you with that Craig No Relation guy?"

"Oh, you really think this is about playing the bass?"

"Well, yeah. What else would it be?"

Ronnie, meanwhile, was vibrating with rage and his sharp, methodical inhalations and exhalations echoed out through the stage speakers. Without the slightest bit of the reconciliatory shaking in his voice he'd started out with, he practically growled with a distrubingly incongruous monotone. For several inches around his body, the stage lights seemed to get sucked in, the area of his shadow expanding and projecting out from him in all directions, sending off tendrils of darkness like protruding spines. Combined with his all black stage outfit, the recently acquired red of his eyes and purple at the tips of his hair were the only colors that stuck out.

"Put him down. Now."

Max simply sneered, tightening his grip on my collar. I winced a little. The novelty of how pretty he was had begun to wear off.

"Make me."

Max and Ronnie stared at each other for several seconds before Ronnie snapped his fingers and still fully monotone, with the dark aura around him heavy enough he was barely visible, released one word.

"Security?"

I was abruptly dropped to the ground, barely managing to maintain my footing when I hit it, before having to step equally abruptly to the side as several heavy-set men in black turtlenecks with no adornment save an all-caps white "STAFF" strode into the cordoned-off VIP section. After he cussed them out several times when they first confronted him, they ended up literally carrying Max off kicking and screaming, the latter mostly consisting of profanities volleyed towards Ronnie, me, and everyone else attending the show, in order of frequency.

Everyone present, including Ronnie and the band, watched speechlessly as Max disappeared from sight and earshot, and we all stood stunned for a moment after that. The first movement was Ronnie literally jumping down from the stage, much to the complaint of his stationed venue rep, and rushing towards me. He stopped in front of me and grabbed my hand, still quite sweaty.

"Are you okay? Did he hurt you?"

"Uh, no. I don't think so. Honestly, I kind of feel sorry for him. He looked, and honestly even with the screaming sounded, like he was about to cry the whole time."

"Okay. We can talk about this later. I'd just...hate for anything to happen to you."

In that moment, concert lights all around us, Ronnie's sweaty hand grasping mine, everything else faded away in an instant...

...before abruptly fading back once we both noticed the expanding circle of phone camera flashes around us, punctuated with various intrigued and/or titillated noises. One enterprising person of indeterminate gender roughly 3 rows into the circle started chanting "Kiss!" repeatedly, and was soon joined by the rest of them. Based on vocal pitch, most of the chanters were girls, but not all. Ronnie soon went right back to his voice shaking.

"Um. Well. It seems that we've been voted as tonight's climactic concert kiss by popular demand. Wasn't really expecting to do this, but I guess that it is kinda part of Situations, so, eh, what the hell. What do you say?"

Still practically speechless and my face fully red with embarrassment, I couldn't let out much other than a squeak and some very enthusiastic nods. Ronnie presented an over-the-top exaggerated smile to the crowd before picking me up by the waist, lifting me up to be face to face with him, and fully embracing me before bending over for a thoroughly performative and exaggerated, but still quite tender kiss that would definitely be everyone's MySpace background the next morning. The crowd started applauding, although a surprising number simply stared at us, stunned. Ronnie smiled back at them, and then like nothing had happened, got right back up on stage and restarted Situations.

I can't say that I was very attentive for the rest of the show.

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Pub: 21 Sep 2025 01:26 UTC

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