Chapter Text
My eyes shot open. Blinking quickly, I realized it was still the middle of the night, and felt around for Rhys, longing to snuggle against him and let his soothing touch chase away the nightmare I’d just had, but his side of the bed was cool, as if he hadn’t been there in hours.
I reached down the bond, finding a strange sort of sadness there, and leapt out of bed, determined to hunt down the source of his melancholy. As I made my way through our estate, I began to hear a tinkling of notes coming from the drawing room. As I approached, I could make out more of the reduced version of the symphony which Rhys was playing.
It was one of my favorites. One which we’d gone to see on multiple occasions when it was being performed in the Rainbow. And it never failed to bring tears to my eyes, evoking a raw emotion in me that was hard to place.
We’d bought the pianoforte when we’d moved in a few months ago, but it had been Mor’s idea and had really just seemed like a decoration for us until now. I hadn’t even realized Rhys knew how to play – and that he was so talented, on top of that.
I walked in a trance to him, pausing when I reached the doorway. From behind, I could see that he was still shirtless, having at least put a pair of loose pants on before wandering in here, and he was hunched over the keys, furiously pounding at the notes as he crescendoed towards the climax.
He was still fully unaware of my presence, lost in the soaring melodies. I crept up behind him, and pressed my torso up behind his, planting a kiss in his hair and wrapping my arms around him. He shivered at my embrace and finished out the last few lines of the piece before letting his head fall back against my chest.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I asked, voice still raspy in the after-effects of the nightmare.
“I saw it again,” he whispered, hardly able to force himself to say the words. “The day my mother and sister were murdered. I couldn’t fall back asleep, and I think I just needed to come in here. To play.” I moved to sit next to him on the bench and laid one hand on his back, stroking it, and trying to calm him. I knew these were some of the worst of his nightmares – it had been centuries, and they still haunted him. I hated that it was difficult for even me to comfort my mate and sent that thought down the bond, along with a loving caress.
“She taught me to play, you know?” I had no idea. A tear slid down his cheek. “When I was only five, I heard her playing a song once and thought it was the most magical thing I’d ever heard. I told her so, and she promptly scooped me up in her lap, and showed me the ropes.” He finally turned his head to face me, the tears flowing more freely now.
My heart broke at the sight of my mate in so much pain. I knew there was a happiness hidden there as he remembered her teaching him as a child, but the fresh pain of the nightmare was enough to hide it deep inside him.
Desperate for more contact with him, the only way I could imagine to get closer to him, I shifted into his lap, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing away the tears. The desolation in his violet eyes was destroying me, my own nightmares completely forgotten in the wake of his. He was silent for a minute, attempting to recollect his composure.
“After she taught me how to hold my fingers above the keys…” he unwrapped my arms from his neck, gently spun me to face the piano, and demonstrated by grabbing my hands in his own and delicately positioning them above ten ivory keys in front of me. Once mine were in place, he covered them with his own and began slowly guiding me through the motions.
“We’d sit for hours like this. She patiently taught me how to play my scales.” I fumbled some as his speed picked up a bit, as if he was lost in his reverie while guiding me through a scale. “Once I had a grasp of the basics, she began showing me how the keys I’d been pressing matched with the notes on the page. By the end of the month, I was able to play some short, simple songs. I continued honing my skill, and for years, every once in awhile, the two of us would sit down and perform a duet.”
He paused our playing and continued on, “Every time I play, I’m reminded of her. Sometimes I can go for months or years without playing. Other times I’m just compelled to play, and I can’t stop myself. There are just some emotions that can only truly be expressed when I’m playing music. I also try to lose myself in it…” A brief pause.
“After I returned from under the mountain, I was a wreck. Anytime I felt you through that bond, anytime I sensed you being intimate with…him, felt how much you loved him, I would winnow to my palace atop the Court of Nightmares and play non-stop for hours. I would slam my fingers against the keys so roughly, so fervently, that the notes would echo throughout the mountain range. Sometimes I lost myself so completely that I would forget to eat, to sleep. It helped me forget, but it wasn’t enough.”
Bile burned in the back of my throat at the thought of my selfless mate so affected, so wounded by my actions those few months. Before I came to the Night Court and found my true home. Here. With him.
“Teach me,” I breathed. I was unsure if it was completely intentional on his part as notes began to flow toward me down the bond, filling my head, and matching up with the way he had begun to guide my hands across the keys once again.
It was significantly slower and clunkier, but after a minute, I recognized the piece as the one Rhys had sent me in my cell under the mountain.
I turned and smiled at my mate, coaxing a small one out of him in return.
“I want to learn, to be able to keep up with you, so I can sit side-by-side with you when you have these nightmares, and be there for you.”
“I would love nothing more, darling.” He placed a kiss on my temple.
“But let’s begin for real tomorrow,” I murmured, yawning as I realized how exhausted I was now that my own fears weren’t plaguing me anymore.
He scooped me into his arms, and carried me back to bed, where he wrapped us in his wings, and I fell peacefully back asleep with him humming a tune in my ear.