This is a CrazyRickRiordanFan Challenge! you can chose ANY well known or popular song and make it into a story

e.g. Stupid Song by Olivia Rodriguo

Those stupid song writers, as if they know anything about teenagers. She thought to herself angrily as she walked home. Abruptly, she stopped and threw her phone to the floor, the glass shattering. Where's my fricking teenage dream? She screamed at the sky. Everybody should feel how I feel when somebody says his name! Tears started streaming down her cheeks. I'm a car, speeding down the boulevard without a brake and I want YOU MORE THAN ANY STUPID SONG COULD EVER SAY... to be continued.

I look forward to hearing your stories!

Robert would never describe his job as enjoyable: working for the Minister's guard is a hard job, but it puts bread on the table and keeps his pockets full enough that he doesn't have to worry about a rainy day. That is more than he can say for the rest of the people in the City.

Through his twenty years of dutiful service, polish brass revolver at his side, standing at attention while the Minister's staff shuffle past in their silk waistcoats, their pockets heavy with wealth the rats down below could never dream of holding, Robert has memorized every crack in the obsidian floor of the palace, every cogwheel that turns in the great clock above the throne room. He has learned to breathe like a machine, steady in the empty metallic cavern of his lungs. It is simply hydraulics, but his machine has been getting old from exposire to oxygen and the revolution tastes like rust on his tongue.

The butterfly came to him in dreams with wings of copper and mercury, fluttering against the cage of his ribs. He recognized it now as what the poets called conscience, that thing he'd trained himself to kill years ago. He realised then, that this butterfly was one he had birthed, fed, hungry in its brass chrysalis, growing with each casualty another body on the pile on the scale that weighed his ignorance against his conscience. A worker beaten unconscious for missing a shift at the factory. A widow evicted so developers could build another pneumatic tower. A child, no more than eight, crushed beneath the grinding gears of progress. Robert stood guard while the Minister signed the paperwork that dismissed it all as acceptable loss.

He would stand by no longer.

The revolution began in the sewer tunnels, where the pamphlets were pressed by hand, where worn hands passed around scraps that they devoured hungrily. He learned their names: Elena with the scarred fingers who designed the pipe bombs. Marcus who stole blueprints from the Minister's own office. Sophia, the printer's daughter who'd lost three siblings to the factories.

"You're the Minister's dog," Elena said the first time she saw him.

"I was," Robert replied.

The irony wasn't lost on him. For two decades, he'd served the machine. He'd been its gear, its oil, its faithful servant. And then one day, he simply stopped. When Elena's bombs went off, Robert was in three places at once: standing at his post in full dress uniform, looking straight ahead; running through the sewer tunnels with dynamite against his chest; and standing before the mirror in his apartment, barely recognizing the man looking back. The revolution will succeed. It will fail. It will transform into something new and corrupt. Robert knows these three facts as surely as he knows the weight of the rifle in his hands. But the butterfly inside him has finally learned to fly.

And some things, once released, can never be caged again.