Work Text:
Joey’d had fans eye his arm warmers before, generally when it was the dead of summer and they were about to play in the afternoon sun. Generally, it was the ones who’d be putting theirs back on before they got picked up. He always tried to somehow silently refute the knowing looks they gave him, ‘cause what do they know? Sunscreen is gross, the whole jumpsuit thing makes not sweating buckets a lost cause, and you can write poetry about shit other than your own life.
Tonight, though, half the people filing up for pictures are looking, and the other half are very obviously trying not to. At the end of the line is one of the kids who’d be looking anyway. He pulls her aside after her picture.
“Do you know why everyone’s staring at me?” Joey asks, voice low.
She’s practically vibrating, holding the spot where he’d touched her shoulder. “You mean besides that you’re really cute?” she blurts out, before looking like she regrets being born.
“Yes.”
She chews her lip. “Well, I don’t really wanna say, but just uh, just check any of the fansites, really.”
Oh, joy. He thanks her and heads off to find a computer, rolling his eyes as he imagines what someone’s cousin’s friend’s told them now.
He types in a URL he remembers, and is greeted with a picture of him with a blinking heart around his face above a list of tour dates. Yep, right place. He scrolls down, and he finds it.
There’s a photo of him walking around the buses, with PROPERTY OF SAMUEL B written diagonally across his body. The orange numbers in the corner indicate it’s from two weeks ago. Probably when he was heading to use the other bus’s toilet when Sid was learning his lesson about gas station sushi. It was hot, and they were on day three of broken A/C, and he was just going to the other bus.
Samuel B. has very helpfully added an inset zoomed in on his left arm.