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The curtain dropped, and the applause faded as the actors straightened from their bow. Two encores the cast accepted from an adoring audience, and only then did the cheers falters, deadened by the red velvet parting them.
Dorothea’s feet ached from the last dance, and she winced a crack in her neck, heavy with the horned crown she wore. But as the diva, as one of the opera’s composers, she couldn’t rest yet.
She walked among the cast as they congratulated each other on a brilliant opening night, on dances with every step perfect, with every note hit, with every emotional cadence in place. She clasped hands with her colleagues, patted the heads of the child performers, kissed cheeks and embraced people she could call her friends.
Only as they whittled away to their dressing rooms while the stagehands shooed them away did Dorothea retreat to her own individual room. She was about to remove her crown when someone emerged from the shadow of a wardrobe that gaped open.
Her heart leapt into her throat, her hand rising as if to keep it in place. A man with wavy orange hair that streamed in a curtain to his shoulders approached her, in a fine maroon coat with gleaming buttons and a matching cravat. His lips curled into a smile as he approached her, and he wondered, “How was the show?”
The illusion shattered. Dorothea’s heart sank anew. She curled her hand into a fist before dropping it to her side again. “Oh, Paulo,” she greeted her fellow actor, and then she noticed things she hadn’t while shadows still engulfed his features: his nose too short, his shoulders too narrow, his figure too long and lanky, his voice so wrong.
Dorothea cast the frown from her face, cast it into a smile like the one she wore under the stage lights before the curtain fell. “It went amazing,” she assured him. She didn’t take his hand - she knew they would be too smooth, not the mark of a man that grew up wielding weapons he cleaned himself, not like the one he portrayed on stage - and instead clasped hers together. “You did so well! I had to catch my breath a few times during your solo on the bridge.”
The bridge…
She shook the memory away as Paulo grinned (wrong, all wrong). “Thank you, Miss Arnault,” he said. “I’m so glad to hear you say it! I’ll make first tenor yet, see if I don’t.”
Dorothea’s smile froze in place. She couldn’t give into the ache in her chest yet. “Work hard until then,” she said. “You have a long way to go before you catch up to the one we have.”
“Yes, of course!” He bowed to her, something quick and shallow, before rushing off to join the rest of the minor actors in their dressing room.
He tugged his orange wig off before disappearing inside.
Dorothea retreated into her own dressing room. Her shoulders sagged as she shut the door behind her, and she rested her forehead against it. She swallowed the lump in her throat, and frustration flickered within her.
She’d written this opera, for the sake of all that was still holy in Edie’s Fodlan! Why should it affect her so? Would it be like this for every night they performed it thereafter, forced to relive memories she preferred not to dwell on, forced to find familiar faces on the stage before the curtain dropped and the masks fell away to reveal her fellow actors?
And the bitterness of disappointment always fell with the curtain, a heavier burden than velvet and brocade, heavier even than this facsimile of the Emperor’s crown.
Dorothea finally removed it and rested it on her vanity. The horns curled more than Edie’s wartime crown did, a deliberate choice made by a stylist who wanted to emphasize it. She didn’t know how Edie’s true crown had been, but this one left an ache in her neck she doubted would fade after a single night’s rest, not when she’d have to don it again tomorrow night, and the night after, and twice the day after when they performed an additional matinee, and—
A soft knock sounded at the door. Dorothea opened it to accept a meal and tea from the troupe cook before sitting in her chair. She stared at the steam curling from the cup and eschewed honey for sweetness in favor of drinking it bitter.
It was never brewed as strong as she liked it (as strong as he used to brew it), but Dorothea could find no real reason to complain. Her life was…easy, perhaps too easy - and undeserved - after everything she’d seen and done.
But it was, as they say, history, and still the show must go on.
Even if poor Ferdie was now little more than a doomed, tragic minor villain in her opera.