Chapter Text
There’s only so much the lower hornist can do to keep her composure and her tone during her warm-ups while she watches this new member of the orchestra astound the rest of them with her rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. Her hazel eyes were slipped shut, lithe frame embracing her instrument as her blonde curls danced with her delicate and strong fingers surely across the fingerboard. The lilting lines and deep warm low tones of the Allemande were entrancing as she watched the lady introduced to them as Miss Cormier move as one with the rich wood of her instrument, the bow an extension of her own arm. Cosima’s mouthpiece and copper-coloured horn left her lips and settled half-forgotten on her lap as she began to move to the soaring phrases in the cellist’s every bow stroke.
Her own eyes avert themselves as her cheeks flush when she is caught staring. The cellist has realised that she was being watched and listened to, and has opened her freckled eyes to figure out who. Hurriedly Cosima raises her horn to her lips and plays the opening strains of the theme in Till Eulenspiegel, before she sheepishly realises as her section mates give her a quizzical look that she is playing a part meant for solo first horn, and that she is playing the D Clarinet melody instead. She spies the cellist’s graceful hands still on her fingerboard after a tremulous strain of vibrato, and she continues to warm up with chorales. No embarrassing herself with music she has been playing since she first picked up a single horn as a child. Her trusty double does not disappoint, and she sees something akin to admiration in the cellist’s hazel eyes before they both return to their music, notes weaving between and around each other in a strange twist of fate.
Over the strains of the entire orchestra warming up for the practice that would begin once their conductor walked into the rehearsal hall, she heard the familiar jaunt of the witty solo horn line of Till, but with the timbre characteristic to a certain bowed instrument that she recognised. Cosima grinned inwardly, and flipped her folder of music open to the piece they would be rehearsing for the first portion of rehearsal. Turning to the other three hornists present at rehearsal, she motioned for them to begin their practice of playing the few bars of horn quartet in the music, her fourth horn part bending and yielding as it had to and soaring where it saw fit.
It would be a good rehearsal.
Without a doubt, Cosima thought, as she removed the slides of her instrument one by one to empty them before sliding them back in and placing her horn back into its case, that had been one of the best rehearsals they had had so far. The pieces were coming together, with the right blend of lower strings finally achieved with the addition of a new cellist. She could almost believe that she had played well that day as well, that her little low horn solo in Beethoven’s Ninth had not been too disappointing and anticlimactic. There had to be a better way of carrying out that conversation with the woodwinds.
She went red just thinking about it, pushing her heavy black spectacles back up her nose bridge. Carrying her horn case in her right hand, she swung her messenger bag over her shoulder and lifted her mouthpiece to her lips. It had been practice for her, since she had gotten this mouthpiece when she turned sixteen, to always buzz the measures that she had had most difficulty with during that rehearsal on the way home from the rehearsal hall.
On her way out of the hall she passed a pair of freckled hazel eyes, and a smile snuck onto her face. She could have sworn she saw a grin on the pink lips below those unbespectacled eyes as well. It struck her that she had never heard the cellist speak except the soft mention of her name and what she played when she first arrived. Even then, she knew that she had an accent almost as beautiful as the cello she played. French, Cosima thought, like her horn. Sometimes she made herself laugh; other times she tried.
The boys were laughing, she heard, as they walked alongside her. They had noticed when she had played the complete wrong melody warming up, and that she had been distracted. Knowing the hornists, she would have no peace for the next few weeks. Instead of taking some time to speak with them as she sometimes did, she chose to keep buzzing and striding swiftly toward the university dorms that she lived at while she was completing the last bit of her studies. In a month and eleven days she would be Doctor Niehaus. In eleven minutes she would be back in her dorm, a student rather than a hornist once again.
There had been something about the day’s rehearsal that stuck with her even through lectures and her labs, melodies weaving their way through her mind, entwining themselves with Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection, epigenetics and the like. Her roommate Elizabeth, an oboist, had murmured something about not missing the seven thirty a.m. orchestra rehearsals when Cosima had stepped through the door of their shared dorm room that morning, right before lessons started. Elizabeth was taking the year off orchestra to finish her criminal law degree, while Cosima stuck with it no matter what. She sure didn’t regret that now. Somehow, Cosima was always late for everything, but always early for rehearsal. For the rest of the day, that morning’s rehearsal had stuck in her mind, creating the most surreal experience she had had in her years separating the two parts of her so distinctly.
There was hornist Cosima, dedicated and disciplined, always on time and never forgetting anything. Then there was Cosima elsewhere, a student and a young adult, boisterous, strange and messy. Somehow she was both a hornist and a student during the course of that day, and it struck her. Maybe, just maybe, the two could coexist without her having to separate them so wilfully.
She simply couldn’t for the life of her figure out what had changed that day.