Hollywood: Lights, Ink, Entertainment!-Chapter 357: She Dies

....

"The film needs an end credits song." Regal said.

Zendaya nodded. "Okay."

That wasn’t surprising. Even though not for all his films, Regal was known for his end credit songs - particularly for [The Hangover].

Also almost all of his films’ background scores are quite literal, and had been a phenomena. In fact there is a fanbase for him in the music community that just discusses how he should stop making movies and start his career in music.

Still though... Zendaya wasn’t sure what this had to do with her specifically.

"I have been working on it separately from the script." He paused, his hand hovering over his phone. "It’s original, and written specifically for this film. Specifically for—"

He stopped and recalibrated.

"Actually, just listen first. I will explain after."

He pressed play.

....

The opening was slower than Zendaya had expected - this repeating piano pattern that felt less like a melody beginning and more like a room learning how to be quiet.

Like whatever was about to happen needed space to arrive.

Then the melody came in.

It was simple, that was her first thought.

But not simple like easy, simple like someone had spent months carving away everything that wasn’t essential until only truth remained.

"I am not the only traveler who has not repaid his debt.

I have been searching for a trail to follow again.

Take me back to the night we met."

A pause. A full measure of just piano.

Then:

"And then I can tell myself.

What the hell I’m supposed to do?

And then I can tell myself.

Not to ride along with you."

Zendaya had her jacket on, her bag was by her feet.

She had been ready to leave twenty minutes ago - had actually stood up twice before Regal mentioned the song.

Now she sat completely still, hands folded in her lap, listening with her whole body in that involuntary way that happened when something bypassed your brain and went straight to wherever feelings lived.

The chorus arrived.

"I had all and then most of you.

Some and now none of you.

Take me back to the night we met.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do...

Haunted by the ghost of you.

Oh, take me back to the night we met."

The second verse.

"When the night was full of terrors.

And your eyes were filled with tears.

When you had not touched me yet.

Oh, take me back to the night we met."

Something happened in Zendaya’s face at that line - just a small tightening around her eyes, a press of her lips. The kind of micro-expression that meant something had landed that she hadn’t seen coming.

She looked down.

At the tape on the floor. The yellow square where she had found where Sakura stands.

The song kept playing.

The chorus came back, and this time the left hand dropped out briefly, just melody, unaccompanied, bare, before the harmony returned underneath.

The absence made the return feel earned. Made the words hit differently the second time, because now you knew what was coming and knowing didn’t protect you at all.

"I had all and then most of you.

Some and now none of you."

The bridge with no lyrics. Just the piano building slowly, inevitably, toward something.

Zendaya wasn’t crying, but damn she was close.

She was doing that thing people did when they had decided not to cry and were holding the line through sheer stubbornness - breathing carefully, not blinking too often, keeping her gaze fixed on some neutral middle distance.

The final chorus.

"I had all and then most of you.

Some and now none of you.

Take me back to the night we met.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

Haunted by the ghost of you.

Oh, take me back to the night we met."

Then the outro - played slowly, drawn out, the melody dissolving into something that was almost more silence than sound.

"Take me back to the night we met...

Take me back...

To the night we met."

The last note hung in the air.

Then it was gone.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, completely indifferent to what had just happened.

Regal waited.

Zendaya sat with it, one second, two and five.

She pressed her thumb briefly to the corner of her eye, not wiping, just preventing, and exhaled slowly through her nose.

There was a lyric sheet on the table, face-down. Zendaya hadn’t noticed it before.

She reached over and turned it over.

Read the words she had just heard, and somehow seeing them on paper did something different - like the song could arrive from multiple directions at once.

She read it twice.

"’I had all and then most of you,..’" she said quietly, not performing it, just speaking it. "’Some and now none of you.’"

She looked up.

"She is watching herself lose him in real time. While she is still alive. She knows she is going to become someone he had, and then someone he had less of, and then—"

She stopped.

"Yes." Regal said.

Silence settled between them.

"...she is already gone when this plays?" Zendaya said. It came out quieter than she had intended.

Not a question, a realization that had been forming somewhere during the bridge and was only now finding words.

Regal looked at her steadily.

He didn’t confirm it, nor did he deny it.

He just held the space - that particular quality of attention he had, like whatever you were working toward, he was willing to wait for you to get there on your own.

She absorbed that, let it settle. "You gave us a different ending?"

"For now."

She looked at the lyric sheet again.

At the last line, Take me back to the night we met.

"Because of how Tom will play it?" she said, working it out as she spoke. "If he knows she dies... if he carries that knowledge... it changes everything before the ending. The hope reads differently. The way he looks at her reads differently."

"It reads like grief." Regal confirmed. "If Tom plays even a fraction of anticipatory grief." He went on. "....it changes the temperature of every scene. His eyes soften too early. His body language shifts. He starts holding onto her instead of living with her. That is not Elliot. Elliot isn’t bracing. He is building something."

Zendaya was quiet for a long moment.

"And me." she said finally. "You are telling me now."

"You already knew." He said it simply, like stating a fact that had been true for a while. "You guessed it at the read-through. I watched it happen."

He looked at her directly.

"And you knew again this morning, when you found where Sakura stands." A pause. "Lying to you any longer would have been a waste of both our time."

She almost laughed at that - not quite, but something that wasn’t quite a laugh moved across her face before settling back into something more serious.

"Okay." she said.

Then, after a beat: "She dies."

"She dies."

"And this song plays, from her perspective. Looking back at the night she met Elliot."

"Yes."

Zendaya looked at the speaker. At Regal’s phone, still connected to it. "You want me to sing it?"

She said it the way you said something you’d known for several minutes but needed to hear out loud to make it real.

Regal nodded.

"I am not a professional singer." she said.

"Well not totally true."

"I mean it. I have done some things - some recording, basic stuff. But nothing like this. Nothing that’s going to be in a theater, over a scene like that, at the end of a film where everyone in the audience has just watched–"

She stopped and looked at the lyric sheet again.

"I am not equipped for this."

"You heard the song." Regal said. "What did it do to you?"

She didn’t answer immediately.

When she did, her voice was quieter. "It made me feel like she was real. Like Sakura was a real person who had already existed and already lost everything, and I was just..." She trailed off. "Finding out about it."

"That." Regal said. "Is what a voice should do to this song, not technique, range or perfection."

He looked at her directly.

"You just told me more about Sakura in thirty seconds than three vocal coaches could convey in three months of technical training."

Zendaya sat with that.

"Recording it, knowing it’s going to be attached to the ending of this film and people will hear it right after they have watched—"

"Most probably."

"And you still want me to?"

"I want the person who almost cried in a rehearsal room with fluorescent lights and folding chairs." Regal said. "Yes."

A long silence.

Zendaya looked at the lyric sheet one more time. Read the chorus with just her eyes, her lips barely moving.

Then she folded it carefully, twice, with precise corners, and slid it into the front pocket of her bag.

She stood.

"Okay." she said.

The same word as before, but carrying a completely different weight now.

Something more like stepping through a door you knew you couldn’t step back through.

She picked up her bag. Adjusted the strap on her shoulder.

At the door, she stopped, but didn’t turn around.

"The song." she said. "When I hear it finished, with full arrangement, with everything... I am probably going to need a minute."

"Take however long you need."

She nodded once.

Then stepped into the hallway.

The door swung shut behind her with a soft click.

....

Regal sat alone in the rehearsal room.

The fluorescent lights hummed. The tape marks on the floor waited for tomorrow. The speaker sat silent on the table.

He looked at his phone. At the file labeled–

[The Night We Met - Demo Final].

It was the same song produced by Lord Huron in his past world. However, it was from the male point of view when he had [Purchased] it from the [System].

And he had to rewrite it slightly to female POV and also add more flavour that matched the films tone and setting.

....sigh. He exhaled.

He set the phone down and leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.

Honestly, this was always the moment he hated.

No. Not the feeling of purchasing things from the [System]. He had long back accepted it.

What he hates currently is - the space after a difficult conversation with his actors, where you wonder if you had done the right thing, said the right words, made the right choices.

He had known from the start - from the moment he had finished writing the script - that he would tell Zendaya the truth before filming began.

It wasn’t a choice. It was a necessity.

Because in the film, Sakura knows. From the very beginning, she knows she is dying. She knows her time with Elliot is finite. She knows she is building something she won’t get to finish.

...and even though he death wasn’t exactly Zendaya thinking it be, and was by a random stabbing by a killer on the loose.

It will still be something that will benefit her performance, which is again something you can’t play without carrying it.

You can’t pretend to know something that profound and have it not seep into every gesture, every glance, every moment of supposed normalcy.

Zendaya needed to know because Sakura knows.

That was the simple truth of it.

But Tom...

Tom was different.

Elliot also knows about Sakura’s condition - that was in the script, clear as day. He learns it early, processes it, decides to stay anyway.

But here’s the thing about Elliot: he doesn’t really believe it.

Not in the way Sakura does. Not in the bone-deep, cellular way of someone who is living inside the knowledge of their own ending.

Elliot knows the facts. He has seen the medical reports. He understands, intellectually, what pancreatic cancer means. What the timeline looks like.

But he is seventeen years old, and he is falling in love, and some part of him - the part that is still young and stupid and desperately hopeful - doesn’t actually believe she will die.

He thinks there will be more time. He thinks maybe the doctors are wrong. He thinks if he loves her hard enough, completely enough, somehow that will be enough to change the equation.

That’s not a delusion. That’s not denial.

That’s hope.

Irrational, illogical, heartbreaking hope.

And Tom needs to play that hope without knowing it’s false. He needs to believe in the possibility of a future right up until the moment that future is taken away.

Because that’s what Elliot does. That’s what makes the ending devastating - not that Elliot loses Sakura - and that too not from her terminal pancreatic illness.

Regal wants to capture the raw emotions from Tom, who learns she was murdered in an alleyway.

If Tom knows the ending - really knows it, carries it the way Zendaya will carry it - that hope reads differently. It reads as denial. It reads as willful ignorance. It reads as someone playing at optimism while knowing better.

And that’s not Elliot.

Elliot is genuinely, authentically hopeful. Even when that hope is foolish.

Especially when that hope is foolish.

So Tom gets the version of the script where they have a chance. Where the ending is bittersweet but open. Where maybe, just maybe, love is enough.

He will find out the truth eventually - probably during the final week of filming, when Regal would hand him the real ending and watch him process it in real time.

Watch him understand what he had been building toward without knowing it.

That was cruel, maybe.

But it was also necessary.

Because that’s how Elliot experiences it. In real time. With no preparation. No emotional buffer. Just the sudden, devastating understanding that all that hope was for nothing.

And there was something else. Something Regal had noticed during blocking but hadn’t mentioned to anyone yet.

Tom was playing Elliot as an extrovert.

Which made sense - Tom himself was an extrovert. Energetic, social, the kind of person who filled a room just by being in it. That was his natural register.

But Elliot wasn’t an extrovert.

Elliot was quiet, inward, and anti-social.

Elliot was lonely.

Not lonely because no one wanted to be around him - lonely because he had never quite figured out how to connect with people in a way that didn’t feel like performance.

Until Sakura.

That was the whole point of the film. Elliot finds someone who sees him - really sees him - and for the first time in his life, he doesn’t have to perform.

He can just be.

And then she dies.

And he is alone again.

But worse than alone - he knows what connection feels like now.

He knows what he has lost.

Tom could play that. Regal was certain of it.

Tom had it in him - that quiet, aching loneliness underneath all the energy and charm. You could see it sometimes, in unguarded moments, when Tom thought no one was watching.

The trick was getting him to access it. Getting him to turn down the natural brightness of his personality and find the darkness underneath.

That would take time. Take trust. Take Tom learning to be still in a way that didn’t come naturally to him.

But Regal had seen something three days ago - when Tom and Zendaya had watched Rowan Atkinson perform as Mr. Bean.

The way Tom had gone completely silent. The way he had leaned forward without realizing it. The way he had absorbed not just the comedy, but the profound loneliness underneath it.

Mr. Bean was lonely too. Disconnected. Watching the world from slightly outside it.

Tom had understood that. Had felt it. Had maybe even recognized something of himself in it.

If he could tap into that - that sense of being perpetually out of sync with the world around you - he would have Elliot.

Also there is still something he else he has:

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His [World-Class] level in [Direction], which he had been fiddling around constantly from the break he had taken.

It had always bugged him how during the filming of [Superman], to witness Stephen Hawking Sr. activate his [World-Class] skills without Regal himself unable to figure it out.

There is no way Regal could sleep with that notion. And now with that effort, he can also consciously activate it. It was not a 100% certainty.

But yeah, he can pull it off eight out of ten times.

So, Regal is positive that he can bring Tom to perform the loneliness that made Sakura’s presence so vital.

Tom would have the hope that made her loss so devastating.

That’s what the next few months were for.

Regal stood. Packed up the speaker. Turned off the lights.

Tomorrow they will continue.

Tom would keep working on finding Elliot.

Zendaya would keep carrying the weight of knowing. And slowly, scene by scene, moment by moment, they would build something that would break hearts.

....

.

[To be continued...]

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