read on for a solangelo band au!
this is chapter 1 of my solangelo au where nico is in a band for a competition run by naomi solace, and will is meant to be helping his mother out but gets a little distracted!
this is a late submission for @solangeloweek 2026!!
the rest will be posted on my a03, gold_standard , where I will update regularly! the link is: https://archiveofourown.org/works/88371931/chapters/234377856
Naomi Solace’s US tour - for her new album, APOLLO - meant that she would once again be able to be free. On the stage. Under the lights. Music in her chest, lyrics disentangling from it and crawling out through her mouth like a butterfly emerging from chrysalis.
Not that she was any less alive at home in Austin with Will, but there was a sense of certainty that came with performing. The certainty that she had made it. She had done it; she’d made her way up from her dad’s little Texan farm, replaced the back-burning early mornings with tipsy late nights, she’d distanced herself from the failed-daughter-come-pregnant-teen and had grown into the assured, bubbly woman she was today.
It had been hard, when she had no one to support her. Just her and her notebook and her Will, the latter often tucked just below her neck. Nights bent over her pen, singing to the mop of blond atop his head, gentle pushes and pulls of air caressing his sweet curls. She hated being so isolated from her parents, from those that were meant to love her.
It was for this reason that she loved Will so fiercely. She had vowed to support him in every which way that her own parents had failed to support her, to break the generational negligence. She would do everything to bring Will’s dream into fruition.
The dream to aid. It was fitting, for such a golden, Helios-kissed boy that he dreamt to be a doctor. It was evident if you looked at his face. He was young, 22 years old now, but, despite his age, had eyes that crinkled slightly at the edges, worn from laughter. He had a mouth that naturally seemed to upturn and eyes that radiated blue warmth. And Naomi loved him for it; he had grown into a man that cared.
So she had written an album for him.
Will had insisted on attending the APOLLO festival later today (“The album’s about me, Mom, it would be weird to see thousands of people singing along to songs about me if I wasn’t there!”), and she had dutifully let him, despite his upcoming exams. Lord knows it, she could get lonely on tour!
The tour festival was something that Naomi had been doing since her first album, BLUED - at one of her shows on the tour, local bands could sign up to perform, and Naomi would choose the outstanding band to perform with her for the remainder of the tour. It had a win-win outcome; the up-and-coming band received her mentorship whilst Naomi got to enjoy herself and support the local music scene. For APOLLO, she decided to hold the festival right in the heart of New York.
Naomi lazily stretched out her arms, basking in her self-fulfilment. She had made it, really. She was curled up in her chair, scribbling in her notebook for future song ideas, completely at ease, intermittently chatting to Will who had joined Naomi in her room today.
There he was, enveloped in a beanbag across the carpeted room, idly scrolling through the list of bands that had signed up to perform at the APOLLO festival on the Terpe’s - Naomi’s manager’s - iPad. Fingers brushed through Terpe’s email, glossing over several bands and their respective pictures.
There was a trio called Fire at Fester, the name neatly formatted under a picture of the group. It depicted two young women turning inwards to face a scrawny looking man, his mussed hazel curls just barely darker than his skin, an impish smirk lining his lips. His zealous expression was almost an aesthetic discrepancy, considering his short and narrow frame. The girl on his left was pretty; with full lips and velvety dark skin and inky short hair pressed in tight coils against her scalp. She was dressed in a monochromatic black, illuminating the ring emerging from the septum of her nose, gleaming in silver splays across the picture. She looked to be about the same age as the man next to her, around Will’s age. On the rightmost side of the picture, there was a young woman who, frankly, looked a little out of place. She had sharper features and her chin was upturned and slightly jutted out from under her upper jaw as if she had forced it there. She had thick eyebrows, drawn together at the bridge of her curved nose, meeting at a singular crease that worried her forehead. Her sienna skin stretched up this high forehead to meet a thick braid that had been drawn over one of her broad shoulders. She looked slightly older than her bandmembers, perhaps twenty-four.
Under Fire at Fester, there was another band, this time called Playthings. The photo that showed them was simple, of four people with their arms around each other: a lanky tanned boy with dark hair, a guitar slung from his shoulders; a taller, wider boy with stark black hair and a suspicious red stain around his mouth holding a bass by its neck; a girl with long brown hair accessorised by a single orange flower, twirling a pair of drumsticks; and a tall boy on the end, a slight brown goatee curling off his pointed chin, fingers looping around a small microphone.
Playthings, Will thought. They looked put together.
Will’s fingers dragged down the screen once more. His eyes caught on the picture first this time, rather than the name; it was a striking image. It framed four blurred musicians on stage, seemingly mid-performance. The background was quite pixelated, to the point where Will could just about make out two long taupe plaits hanging either side of a drummer’s narrow face, her arms flung wide across over the cymbal, as if gesturing to the audience. Standing slightly in front of her was a tall blond man, neck craned down to the neck of his guitar. He stood sure, feet sturdily planted parallel to his hips. Against him, a smaller figure - a girl, her afro a golden perimeter lining her face, body slightly tilted as if she were swaying to the music, a purple strap gently supporting her bass against her slanted hips. And then Will’s eyes shifted to the foreground. To the singer.
Like the rest of the picture, his body was fuzzy — but it was clear that he was mid action, his right hand pressing a microphone against his lips, his left hand clenching the wire by his thigh. His mouth was open, clearly mid-song, head tilted towards the roof. From what Will could tell, a slight wave streaked through his black hair, which just about allowed an eye to be seen. He looked loud.
Will mentally cursed the picture for being so blurry.
“Will, baby, would you be a dear and help Terpe brief security on the soundchecks and layout of the festival?” Naomi drawled out.
“Sure, Mom, see you on the other side,” Will grinned back, making his way out of the hotel room and down to the foyer to greet Terpe and the members of security.
Will knew his mom didn’t need him to help Terpe talk to security - she could be one scary woman when she had to be - but he had come to acknowledge Naomi’s need to be alone before going on stage. Of course, it wasn’t like one of her main concerts today, where she’d be singing on stage for the full 90 minutes, but she still had to sing a little - and most importantly, present the bands!
The only other one of his mom’s album festivals that Will had the chance to watch was for Naomi’s debut album, BLUED, though he couldn’t remember it very well - he was five years old at the time. So, Will was nervous. Nervous, as his mom had requested him to help judge the bands - something that he wasn’t experienced in. Will was no musician.
He attempted to steel his nerves by reminding himself of the previous festival winners he had met, who had also seemed so nervous before going on stage - his favourite being Delta, an electropop group starring Daedalus Devinia - who, after the tour had ended, remained in close contact with Naomi and Will, often coming over for dinners to grant Will advice and show him the latest beats he had been working on on his laptop.
Nevertheless, Will trudged downstairs as his mother requested, hands feeling for his phone in the bottommost pocket of his khaki cargo shorts. The time read 15.57; two hours and three minutes until the APOLLO festival started, meaning he had roughly an hour to kill before he had to get ready for the festival.
After all, he had his undergrad finals coming up soon for his Biochemistry course. Naturally, he had brought his flashcards with him - studying, over the past four years, had practically become second nature. Will had spent too many nights hunched over hefty textbooks, powered by caffeine and adrenaline, to give up studying now.
So why was it that all he could think about was a certain raven-haired singer?
It wasn’t like this was the first cute boy Will had seen. There had been Connor Stoll from his middle school maths class, who had first kissed him in an empty classroom, fingers curling around Will’s collar and long brown hair tickling Will’s cheeks. It was messy. Short-lived. Something that Will sulked over for way too long after getting dumped because Connor said that Will ‘wasn’t [his] type’.
There was Ethan Nakamura from his high school theatre club. They would hang out under the guise of ‘studying’, kisses hidden amongst flashcards and affectionate touches whilst line-learning for their high school production of Little Shop of Horrors. Love letters concealed as study tips. Will’s first time. It was thrilling.
Until Ethan said he wasn’t gay and was moving to Long Island. And Will never saw him again.
Five years later, Will hadn’t felt an attachment to a man since. Sure, he had the occasional hookup or first date - like with Charlie B, the burly guy from the Metallurgy department - but nothing had left that warmth lingering in the pit of his stomach.
Until this godforsaken picture of a short, black-clad man, eyes and nose scrunched, microphone pressing to his lower lip. Whose name he didn’t know, from a band he didn’t know.
Silly in the way that when he picked up his pen to draw a diagram of a macromolecule structure, his hand automatically traced the outline of a boy with spiky hair.
Silly in the at that when Will thought too much about the fibro-elastic network in the dermis, he could only picture the dermis of the hands of a certain rock band’s frontman, and how his hands would feel. Supple and agile, with the grace of a performer, or calloused and dense, the hands of a musician, from years of strumming guitars and handling drum kits?
Will packed up his flashcards. There was no point in trying when he was so miserably distractible.
He checked the time, once again. 16.32. Concluding that revision would be futile when the prospect of seeing a cute guy dangled so provocatively close to him, Will dissolved his study session and stood up with a groan.
After wandering around the hotel foyer aimlessly for about half an hour, nothing better to do, Will made his way to Hair & Makeup on the third floor.
He had barely sat down in the black chair neatly lined with ‘William Solace’ before Drew and Mitchell were crooning over him, all four hands placed on his face, Lacy with her respective two in his hair.
Will had grown to enjoy this process, the fussing over him, the outfit changes and the hairspray-flavoured air. So, he chatted lazily to the three as they worked on him, about med school and APOLLO and shades of eyeliner - “No, Lacy, you don’t get it. Golden dark shimmer totally complements his eyes better than dark brown. How about you keep your hands in Will’s hair and your nose out of my business!” - their small talk ending abruptly as Mitchell thrust a black garment bag hanging on a velvet hanger towards Will’s hands.
“Room in the back,” he commanded. “Change.”
And with that, Will did change - into a simple cream coloured button up shirt and matching baby blue trousers and blazer, with APOLLO emblazoned on his left breast pocket in signature crimson red cursive stitching.
Will stepped back out to allow the team to make their final touches to his avatar - a final swipe of mascara, an adjustment of the fabric on his shoulder - until Drew proudly took a final step back from Will and guided him to a full-length mirror.
He looked good, he thought. From his neck hung a simple gold pendant in the shape of a sun, similar to the gold studs on his ear lobes. Drew was right, the bronze on his waterline did complement the blue of his eyes, as did the blue of his suit. His hair hung natural, blond curling against his neck and forehead. Will tried not to think of what any black haired musicians would think about his makeup and how he was dressed…
“Thanks, guys, I look good,” Will beamed at the team.
“We know,” snapped Mitchell, though his eyes twinkled fondly.
After offering Will a small embrace, Lacy scurried off with the other two, no doubt to bother another poor APOLLO crew member.
He checked his cobalt watch, which read 17:48.
thank you for your time if you read until the end, and please let me know what you think of it!! check my ao3 for updates, as they will not be posted here on tumblr :3
comments and constructive criticism are all welcome :)
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