Secret Santa Fic
Written for Sandy for the incomparable charliechaplin2's senshi/shitennou Christmas Secret Santa event!
Title: Cadenza
Prompt: Winter - Tori Amos
Characters: A/Z
Rating: PG
Cadenza: (n) Ital. In music, a virtuosic, sometimes improvised solo passage toward the close of a concerto performed without orchestration.
Her father would always have music playing when he painted, something soft and indefinite. Ami can never quite remember the melodies-- they were indistinct, blurry with years and watercolour wistfulness and vague resentment, stylistically free-flowing things like reflections in rippled water-- but she remembers being lulled to sleep to the sound of Debussy on the jukebox and knowing that the next morning, there would be a new painting (or perhaps part of one) on the easel and a few more splatters on the same worn dingy-gray drop-cloth and the familiar smell of turpentine in the air.
Then the music falls silent and the paintings are taken away (or, those rejected and left behind like forgotten children covered up and put in storage), and the condominium is quiet, neat and unstained, and she turns to books for company instead on those late nights. The lonely world seems to fall back when she's living instead in someone else's world-- borrowing, if only for the space of a few hours, Hermes' flying shoes or The Lady of Shalott's magic mirror or Eowyn's armour-- fallacious protection, perhaps, but it's better than nothing.
She's thirteen when the music starts again.
It's a snowy winter day and silence has reigned for hours-- save for the sounds of her own breathing and the soft rustle of turning pages and the occasional whistle of the kettle when she replenishes her tea. Her mother's at the hospital-- it's a busy night, with countless children sick with colds and flu and accidents out on the icy roads-- but the knock on the door at midnight shakes her out of her reverie. A glance through the peephole reveals no one, but when she cautiously pulls the door open, there's a small parcel on the floor mat, wrapped simply in white paper and tied with string. When she unwraps it, it's a music box-- one of those old-fashioned wooden ones with roses lacquered on the lid, used for storing jewelry from a beloved-- and when she opens it, soft piano music pours out, clear and sweet and lonesome in the cotton-wrapped snowy silence of the night. It's not a song she recognizes, but for the first time in years she once again falls asleep to music and doesn't feel alone.
Of course, it's less than a year later that sleep itself takes a back seat because she meets a blonde chatterbox of a classmate with a black cat and everything is turned upside down. She has very little time to be lonely when her nights are filled with flashes of light and terror and the hope that all of them will live to see another sunrise. But with the risk comes friendship, understanding and acceptance-- video game competitions and not-always-productive study sessions and reluctant shopping sprees and decidedly unhealthy but delicious pastries shared over cups of tea in a Shinto shrine's meditation room-- and only in brief flashes of dreams does she hear the music. Always a piano, soft and yearning, crystal notes against cloudy skies. The music box sits on her dresser, not-quite-forgotten, empty of any jewelry, and the mystery of who sent it doesn't seem so important in comparison to the daily life stresses of energy-stealing youma and cram school and Usagi's abysmal test scores.
Everything is shattered upon the advent of Sailor Venus, and the destruction of the third of the Dark Kingdom's generals. That night, despite exhaustion and victory and several hours of Calculus earlier, she can't sleep, and on a whim, as a last resort, she flips open the rose-bloom lid of that old music box. As the melancholy piano cadenza fills the air, she finally finds herself able to rest. She half-dreams of cool, slim fingers brushing her cheek, but a tear traces the path of the phantom touch as snow begins to fall outside.
That night she dreams of a wintertime kiss beside a fountain, golden hair misted with water drops as warm lips cover hers. In the dream, snowflakes catch on her eyelashes and her dress is thin and blue, but she doesn't at all feel the cold.
The memories of Zoisite surface gradually, like notes that slowly come together to form a melody or the innocuous raindrops that can, together, cause a flood. The end is devastating; she shivers despite the summer heat and curls in upon herself in a fetal position as flashbacks of fire and blood explode behind her eyelids and the smell of sulphur fills her nose. She reads all the tragedies-- Juliet kissing Romeo's still-warm lips, Antigone hanging herself in her wedding dress, Tristan and Iseult consuming the potion that dooms them-- and it all still pales in comparison to the visceral remembrance of her own shipwrecked love. And still, despite the betrayal and the violence, a part of her still aches from emptiness-- the vacant other side of the bed, the space in the seat next to her on the bus, the silence waiting to be broken by a smooth-timbred voice or a gentle piano melody. The music box tune fills her mind even when the lid is shut. Out of nowhere one day, she remembers that on one of her visits to Earth, her love had given her a pink bramble rose, and stolen a kiss when she'd blushed.
The pain gradually fades from a stab to a patient sort of ache as new enemies and challenges surface. Ami grows up not unhappily as life goes on, and it's years after Zoisite died again in this life that she finally embarks on a journey overseas, in a world at peace at long last, and arrives in Europe for a term's study abroad. She learns the ins and outs of London's subway system and gets accustomed to the vastly-different food and uses Skype rather than a communicator to talk to her friends every day, conscientiously accounting for time zone differences and Usagi's fondness for sleeping in on weekend mornings. She knows, though scrupulously never-ever-mentions, that her first friend's fiancé keeps a certain wooden box containing four stones on his bedside table, and that those stones have been silent for years now. Usagi knows, though scrupulously never-ever-asks-why, that Ami brought a completely frivolous and unused music box with her all the way to Europe, packed carefully amidst medical textbooks and warm sweaters.
It's on a snowy evening approaching Christmas and final examinations that Ami ducks into a café on a street corner, and halts in her tracks as past, present and future collide in a cadenza of piano notes and bittersweet memories. The cheerful bells on the door chime as she walks in, the barista's greeting is friendly and immediate, but the only sounds that Ami can hear are the piano notes fluttering in syncopation to her own heartbeat. In the corner, by a window, sits a lithe figure at an old piano with a tangle of golden hair pouring out love and loss in chords and grace notes. There is no way that her gasp could have been heard over the conversations and chair-legs scraping the floor and clinking of ceramic cups against ceramic saucers, and yet destiny pauses and time slows to a crawl as the figure at the piano halts, stands, and turns around.
The smile on that beautiful face is familiar, thrilling. Ami has no recollection of taking so much as a step forward, and yet the next thing she knows, she's ensconced in wiry-strong arms, nose filling with the scent of snowfall and peppermint and wild roses. Slim fingers brush tears away from her cheeks even as her own fingers twine in riotous golden hair. A first kiss should, by all rights, feel novel and slightly awkward as someone else's lips press against hers for the first time, but instead, it feels like coming home, like warmth in winter, like the way her favourite love song sounds.
“You're the one who gave me the music box,” she whispers, gazing up into those vivid green eyes. “I think I sort of knew, all along.”
The smile on Zoisite's face is rueful. “I was already taken, and barely knew what I was doing. It's difficult to know what you're doing anyway, at sixteen, even without... everything else. She already had me, but something made me make that box, leave it at your door. I didn't know why, just then, I was so compelled to do so. It was just another fancy condominium with some nondescript mortals living inside. But...”
The fact that one of her beloved's last acts of free will had been to give her a gift with its hidden message of love warms her all the way from head to toe. She pulls back, then seats herself down next to the piano bench, and smiles up at Zoisite-- perhaps soon she'll find out an actual name, though that was hardly important, really. “Play it again,” she murmurs. “I'll never tire of hearing it.”
And so, as the clock strikes midnight for a brand new day, in a cafe in London, love triumphs against all odds not with a lot of fanfare, but with soft, lush piano song as the snow falls outside.
Title: Cadenza
Prompt: Winter - Tori Amos
Characters: A/Z
Rating: PG
Cadenza: (n) Ital. In music, a virtuosic, sometimes improvised solo passage toward the close of a concerto performed without orchestration.
Her father would always have music playing when he painted, something soft and indefinite. Ami can never quite remember the melodies-- they were indistinct, blurry with years and watercolour wistfulness and vague resentment, stylistically free-flowing things like reflections in rippled water-- but she remembers being lulled to sleep to the sound of Debussy on the jukebox and knowing that the next morning, there would be a new painting (or perhaps part of one) on the easel and a few more splatters on the same worn dingy-gray drop-cloth and the familiar smell of turpentine in the air.
Then the music falls silent and the paintings are taken away (or, those rejected and left behind like forgotten children covered up and put in storage), and the condominium is quiet, neat and unstained, and she turns to books for company instead on those late nights. The lonely world seems to fall back when she's living instead in someone else's world-- borrowing, if only for the space of a few hours, Hermes' flying shoes or The Lady of Shalott's magic mirror or Eowyn's armour-- fallacious protection, perhaps, but it's better than nothing.
She's thirteen when the music starts again.
It's a snowy winter day and silence has reigned for hours-- save for the sounds of her own breathing and the soft rustle of turning pages and the occasional whistle of the kettle when she replenishes her tea. Her mother's at the hospital-- it's a busy night, with countless children sick with colds and flu and accidents out on the icy roads-- but the knock on the door at midnight shakes her out of her reverie. A glance through the peephole reveals no one, but when she cautiously pulls the door open, there's a small parcel on the floor mat, wrapped simply in white paper and tied with string. When she unwraps it, it's a music box-- one of those old-fashioned wooden ones with roses lacquered on the lid, used for storing jewelry from a beloved-- and when she opens it, soft piano music pours out, clear and sweet and lonesome in the cotton-wrapped snowy silence of the night. It's not a song she recognizes, but for the first time in years she once again falls asleep to music and doesn't feel alone.
Of course, it's less than a year later that sleep itself takes a back seat because she meets a blonde chatterbox of a classmate with a black cat and everything is turned upside down. She has very little time to be lonely when her nights are filled with flashes of light and terror and the hope that all of them will live to see another sunrise. But with the risk comes friendship, understanding and acceptance-- video game competitions and not-always-productive study sessions and reluctant shopping sprees and decidedly unhealthy but delicious pastries shared over cups of tea in a Shinto shrine's meditation room-- and only in brief flashes of dreams does she hear the music. Always a piano, soft and yearning, crystal notes against cloudy skies. The music box sits on her dresser, not-quite-forgotten, empty of any jewelry, and the mystery of who sent it doesn't seem so important in comparison to the daily life stresses of energy-stealing youma and cram school and Usagi's abysmal test scores.
Everything is shattered upon the advent of Sailor Venus, and the destruction of the third of the Dark Kingdom's generals. That night, despite exhaustion and victory and several hours of Calculus earlier, she can't sleep, and on a whim, as a last resort, she flips open the rose-bloom lid of that old music box. As the melancholy piano cadenza fills the air, she finally finds herself able to rest. She half-dreams of cool, slim fingers brushing her cheek, but a tear traces the path of the phantom touch as snow begins to fall outside.
That night she dreams of a wintertime kiss beside a fountain, golden hair misted with water drops as warm lips cover hers. In the dream, snowflakes catch on her eyelashes and her dress is thin and blue, but she doesn't at all feel the cold.
The memories of Zoisite surface gradually, like notes that slowly come together to form a melody or the innocuous raindrops that can, together, cause a flood. The end is devastating; she shivers despite the summer heat and curls in upon herself in a fetal position as flashbacks of fire and blood explode behind her eyelids and the smell of sulphur fills her nose. She reads all the tragedies-- Juliet kissing Romeo's still-warm lips, Antigone hanging herself in her wedding dress, Tristan and Iseult consuming the potion that dooms them-- and it all still pales in comparison to the visceral remembrance of her own shipwrecked love. And still, despite the betrayal and the violence, a part of her still aches from emptiness-- the vacant other side of the bed, the space in the seat next to her on the bus, the silence waiting to be broken by a smooth-timbred voice or a gentle piano melody. The music box tune fills her mind even when the lid is shut. Out of nowhere one day, she remembers that on one of her visits to Earth, her love had given her a pink bramble rose, and stolen a kiss when she'd blushed.
The pain gradually fades from a stab to a patient sort of ache as new enemies and challenges surface. Ami grows up not unhappily as life goes on, and it's years after Zoisite died again in this life that she finally embarks on a journey overseas, in a world at peace at long last, and arrives in Europe for a term's study abroad. She learns the ins and outs of London's subway system and gets accustomed to the vastly-different food and uses Skype rather than a communicator to talk to her friends every day, conscientiously accounting for time zone differences and Usagi's fondness for sleeping in on weekend mornings. She knows, though scrupulously never-ever-mentions, that her first friend's fiancé keeps a certain wooden box containing four stones on his bedside table, and that those stones have been silent for years now. Usagi knows, though scrupulously never-ever-asks-why, that Ami brought a completely frivolous and unused music box with her all the way to Europe, packed carefully amidst medical textbooks and warm sweaters.
It's on a snowy evening approaching Christmas and final examinations that Ami ducks into a café on a street corner, and halts in her tracks as past, present and future collide in a cadenza of piano notes and bittersweet memories. The cheerful bells on the door chime as she walks in, the barista's greeting is friendly and immediate, but the only sounds that Ami can hear are the piano notes fluttering in syncopation to her own heartbeat. In the corner, by a window, sits a lithe figure at an old piano with a tangle of golden hair pouring out love and loss in chords and grace notes. There is no way that her gasp could have been heard over the conversations and chair-legs scraping the floor and clinking of ceramic cups against ceramic saucers, and yet destiny pauses and time slows to a crawl as the figure at the piano halts, stands, and turns around.
The smile on that beautiful face is familiar, thrilling. Ami has no recollection of taking so much as a step forward, and yet the next thing she knows, she's ensconced in wiry-strong arms, nose filling with the scent of snowfall and peppermint and wild roses. Slim fingers brush tears away from her cheeks even as her own fingers twine in riotous golden hair. A first kiss should, by all rights, feel novel and slightly awkward as someone else's lips press against hers for the first time, but instead, it feels like coming home, like warmth in winter, like the way her favourite love song sounds.
“You're the one who gave me the music box,” she whispers, gazing up into those vivid green eyes. “I think I sort of knew, all along.”
The smile on Zoisite's face is rueful. “I was already taken, and barely knew what I was doing. It's difficult to know what you're doing anyway, at sixteen, even without... everything else. She already had me, but something made me make that box, leave it at your door. I didn't know why, just then, I was so compelled to do so. It was just another fancy condominium with some nondescript mortals living inside. But...”
The fact that one of her beloved's last acts of free will had been to give her a gift with its hidden message of love warms her all the way from head to toe. She pulls back, then seats herself down next to the piano bench, and smiles up at Zoisite-- perhaps soon she'll find out an actual name, though that was hardly important, really. “Play it again,” she murmurs. “I'll never tire of hearing it.”
And so, as the clock strikes midnight for a brand new day, in a cafe in London, love triumphs against all odds not with a lot of fanfare, but with soft, lush piano song as the snow falls outside.