Chapter Text
Two such powerful people were never meant to reside inside the same space without consuming one another. Inevitably they will find themselves ensnared by envy, lust, love, or something like it.
These are the destructive forces around which the universe itself rotates.
Only time will tell, of course, and that too can be corrosive.
But who's to say they have to obey it when it calls?
*
"You're beautiful, you know," Beca Mitchell says to seemingly no one in particular. Maybe she's talking to the night sky, but then something on the wind whispers back.
Just a tickle inside the shell of her ear, saying, "I know."
She smiles and tucks her hands away inside her pockets. Safer there.
If there is such a thing as safety. Largely it's just an illusion.
But then, most things are.
* * *
"You are destined for greatness," her father had said, not for the first or even the fifteenth time.
He said it so often that it had started to feel like nothing more than words.
That's all it really was, of course, but words have a way of sometimes becoming something greater. In ways and hows that most people don't fully understand, words can take on a life outside their syllables if given enough emphasis and the room to grow.
Perhaps that was the point -- to repeat the words so often that their strength began to fade. It wouldn't do, after all, to have an unfair advantage just because her father had already achieved so many of the things he imagined for her and thus somehow had the power to make it so just by speaking the words.
Where was the fun in that?
(This was, as she was so frequently reminded, intended to be fun.)
He had been famous once, and respected too. Back before most of their money had disappear into a seemingly endless parade of vices. Vodka, french cigarettes, and prostitutes.
These are the fruits of greatness, apparently, and her father makes a joke about ripeness -- obvious and dull, like all the (limp, powerless) words that come from his mouth lately -- before slapping the thigh of the woman sitting in his lap.
Beca pictures the gears inside a clock -- the tiny mechanisms of time as measured in physical space -- slowly turning in tight circles as the seconds, minutes, and hours creep forward at an agonizing pace.
Two more years until she's finally old enough to leave without a constable dragging her home.
*
As far as she knows, Beca's father has never killed anyone.
Not directly, at least.
In this small way, she is almost certain to surpass him.
Whatever comfort there is to be had in that.
*
"Again."
She knows before he even says it, but this is how it always goes. They've been doing this same routine for as long as she can remember, and it's always the same.
The longer it goes, the more frequent the mistakes, and--
"Again."
The more terse her father's voice. That anxious (loathing) twist in his expression. The bitter disappointment that settles in around his eyes.
He means well, she thinks. Maybe at first he thought it would be helpful to draw on a subject so near to Beca's heart. The most basic lessons, he'd once said, can be found inside biology. Many pupils learn by resuming the still heart of small animals back to beating. They heal seeping wounds and slow the frantic pulse of blood.
But Beca knows almost nothing about human anatomy. She couldn't tell you how a hand is assembled, but she can picture how it moves across the keys of a piano. She knows every inch of the inside of a grand.
And so.
"Again," he says, taping his foot at a slow and steady pace that sets her teeth on edge. He probably knows how much the condescension annoys her.
If there's one thing Beca doesn't need help with, it's rhythm.
She knows this song by heart, and could play it with her eyes closed without hitting a single note off-key. She could hum it in her sleep, and still not miss landing directly on the beat.
That's the easy part.
It's much harder to play from the other side of the room, using only your mind to manipulate the keys, especially when you are, let's say, less naturally gifted than some special individuals.
People like her father, for whom these skills were innate from birth, are considered natural talents. It's rare, of course. Most who understand these almost indescribable forces that the majority of people would call fiction have to resort to learning their skills from books and aiding themselves with symbols.
Like the one so very carefully etched along the inside panel of the piano -- hidden near the back, out of sight so that father won't notice. He is always so disappointed when he's reminded of his daughter's shortcomings.
Last time he saw her sketching a mark into a notebook, he'd carved it into the back of her hand where it had remained for days until she finally managed to heal the wound completely.
He had been so proud.
"… again."
*
Even in the times when they have almost no money at all, they are always welcome at parties. Her father has many admirers, most of them without any talent for (or even awareness of) the multiple layers of reality -- "the real world right in front of them," her father would say -- and they flock to see his "tricks."
The sorts of simple parlor tricks that impress these kinds of men ought to be beneath them -- yes, even Beca with her obviously lesser talents -- but the drinks are expensive and the women are beautiful.
Of course her father accepts every invitation.
He insists that she should come as well, and that she must make the dresses she will wear for herself, fashioned from thin air, or else risk being forced to arrive totally in the nude.
She can't tell if he's proud or disappointed when she shows up in trousers instead -- the collar of the shirt impeccably starched.
It is at parties like these -- and only then -- that Beca is actually allowed to touch the piano's keys. Her fingers fit against their intended groves, hands curving naturally and moving swiftly. In the same way her father can reach into the air around him and draw forth energy as simply and easily as most people slip into their slumber, Beca can create sounds that are equally as vivid and dark as any dreamscape.
Her father has given breath to injured birds, yes, but Beca has composed a minor symphony inside the window of a single afternoon with just as much life inside it.
She's never certain why one is considered more impressive than the other.
*
At ten years old, on a particular day when she is gripped by a great deal of almost adult ambivalence, Beca decides that she has no more patience for her studies.
And so, with a paradoxical amount of patience and calm, she carefully arranges the furniture so that the bookshelf will topple onto her hand. It does, the bones abruptly shatter, and she screams.
She claws the wooden floor with her other hand and kicks her legs, twisting, but her father picks her up easily in his big arms and caries her to bed.
The plan had been a break from her studies, a week or two of relief and leisure, but that would only come with doctor's orders and her father does not take her to any hospital.
"Do you think me very foolish?" he asks, fingers pressing firmly into the meat of her palm, the stinging center of the ache in her hand. Everything throbs.
"No," she gasps.
"What's that?"
"No, sir…"
The bones are healing. She is stitching them back together at a nearly frantic pace, clumsy and somewhat out of alignment but she doesn't care, just so long as he stops.
*
He does. Eventually, he does relent, and the pain slowly fades away.
Until he breaks the hand again, speaking calmly (but loudly) over the sudden sound of her jolting shout of pain, "Now heal them properly this time."
*
She never tries to find a day off from practice again.
*
Beca has never had many friends (none, actually), but it has never seemed to be much of an issue. She has such little need for them.
It's not as if she is overly naive, though many people seem to assume as much when they first meet her. It is perhaps this assumption that has had quite the opposite effect. So many kindly old gentlemen and eager young men at parties, asking after her father's secrets or slipping a gloved hand onto her thigh.
Even through the two layers of fabric, their touch makes her burn with such a depth of hatred that they draw back from the heat.
Her father would be proud of such a display of (natural) talent if she ever found the nerve to tell him.
But these men are his friends -- useless, you see -- and sometimes his patrons. They keep him in the kind of luxury he has become so accustomed to, and so what's a little discomfort among acquaintances.
Isn't the occasional imposition exactly what friends are for?
(She really wouldn't know.)
*
There are nights where Beca's father goes out on his own, returning much later. It's possible he's been drinking, or perhaps that candied scent upon his breath is from the women.
She doesn't particularly care either way.
The point is that he's gone, and there are enough bars to explore in whichever city they might happen to be in that her father would never frequent. He prefers a place with a bit of pretense of glamour, even if it isn't true. The only brothels he frequents all have satin pillows, even if they might not have been washed in over a week.
It's the illusions, so carefully maintained, that keep the world moving forward.
So Beca tucks her hair in around her collar just so, and hides the rest under a plain bowler hat. The seemingly unremarkable can be just as significant an illusion as anything else. Sometimes more so.
There are such specific details to seeming unspecific. The precise scuffs on the shoes and the patchy quality of the suit jacket must be enough to indicate a certain lack of wealth without drawing any extra attention. The better to seem like any other fellow -- for to go about in the dark streets unnoticed, one first must be a fellow -- out on a stroll in the night.
Perhaps she should be more frightened out on her own in a world her father has worked so hard to keep her from, but all Beca can feel is a strange jolt of excitement, twisting in her gut. She follows the sound of rowdy voices and singing to where drunkards spill out into the streets, laughing amongst themselves.
She offers her services. A few songs in exchange for a mug of ale and a couple coins. She doesn't ask for much, and one look at the suit tells them that this young man -- hair covered just so and hat pulled low -- surely needs the money. They don't ask questions apart from, "Can you play?"
So she does.
*
Only at her father's parties and these late nights alone in the dark and twisted backalleys of whatever terrible town they've wandered into do Beca's fingers touch the keys again.
It's a bit like coming home, which is a strange enough sensation since she has never actually known one. No single roof or familiar bed; just a couple suitcases and these well-scuffed shoes that she learned to ease out as she grew.
But the ivories are better than any white picket fence. For one thing, they're real.
Not illusionary or illusive.
Find any dive bar or pool hall. The finest theaters or some place her father might prefer where women reveal themselves for nearly as few coins as Beca plays for now.
There's always music somewhere. The trick is learning to look or listen.
*
She hears them on the walk home.
Her father could be home anytime within the hour, and the best strategy is to head straight back to the hotel they've been rooming in for the past three days.
But there's a beautiful sort of song coming from just beyond the edges of town -- in a lot that was vacant just hours ago, with strangers moving in the shadows. An expanse of fabric rippling between black and white stretches across the grass, slowly rising.
A circus city apart from the rest of the town, with hard working figures all in black as its only citizens.
Hard working and dutiful, yes, but singing too.
Her feet still in her tracks.
She doesn't know the song.
Of this she is certain. The words are unfamiliar, and she cannot hum along. And yet something about the music feels like a lost memory. Something from childhood, or somehow even earlier.
A feeling creeps up the back of her neck and she finds herself inching closer across the gravel, kicking up rocks along her way. Casually making as much noise as possible, so that she can't be accused of sneaking onto someone else's property, and stumbling just a few times to appear appropriately drunk for this time of night.
As mild and unassuming as she can possibly manage to seem in an almost vacant lot in the middle of the night. It doesn't occur to Beca until she's already too close to make a full retreat unnoticed that perhaps she is the one who should be frightened of these friendly people turning to her with easy smiles.
"You're early," one man close to the edge of the fence calls, and the other heads start to turn, as if only noticing Beca now.
It's strange. Normally she has to put in the effort to disappear from notice, and now she feels as if she is trying doubly hard just to stay stuck here in place. Present and fully aware.
The man smiles and she feels the air shift between them.
Not a man, no. A boy, closer to her own age than she'd realized at first. Lanky but sure-footed.
She is much closer to the fence than she had realized. She loops her fingers -- small and slender, too gentle for a man's -- inside the links and stares into his eyes. "Am I?"
"Most people don't see us this soon."
His hair is as dark as the swathes of black fabric rippling behind him, but his smile is as bright and open as the stars. Beca can't remember ever feeling so sentimental about anything she couldn't hear. "Most people only see what they want," she says, and wonders if she's talking about herself too. "… I like your song."
He blinks, and suddenly their hands are joined along the fence. She doesn't remember reaching out or feeling the precise moment when he made contact. She's certain she would have pulled away if only she'd noticed in time. "How do you know it's mine?"
Because, she thinks, his voice is like a memory of something lost, or never had. Like a single roof or familiar bed. Or friendship.
But what she says is; "I heard you, idiot."
When he laughs, she's certain. He's more than just familiar, and the way his fingers twist in hers shoots ripples through her stomach, pulsing faster than the shifting fabric of the tents rising up into the night sky.
*
Father is angry. Furious, in fact.
Where has she been. Where does she go.
They leave town the next morning, broken pieces of bottle in their wake.
*
Three towns later, he is there again, waiting in a field, singing his stupid song.
"Did you miss me?" she asks, as he climbs over the fence and lands with an awkward sort of grace at her side.
His suit is tattered in a less artful way -- the genuine article of a kind that only someone with so much experience faking can spot -- but he still moves with a flourish as he gestures broadly. "How could I possibly? I've seen you every night up in the stars." Even his pointing is done with excess. "That sort of dim and slanted one there, see?"
"Do women actually find you charming?"
He laughs. "Everyone finds me charming."
*
They stay another night in town, and she sees the circus for herself.
He sells tickets out front in a new looking suit, crisp and sharp, black as the night. He flashes her his teeth and offers a discount, but she insists on paying in full.
It is worth the cost of admission and more.
The suit is real, and the cider too. The people are all present in a way most people never are. They see more sharply than she is used to, and even notice her despite her best efforts to hide.
All the performers seem to pay her extra attention, smiling knowingly in this way that feels almost as familiar as Jesse's stupid song. The way they move is like a hand gesturing for her to come closer, and so she does, following one person after another into tent after tent.
She finds one near the back, small and secluded, with no one else around.
They are outside in a field with sky just above, but somehow the ground inside the tent is covered with slats of wood fit firmly together as if it were an ancient place. She feels the floorboards creaking as she moves, and thinks just that: floorboards. As if this is someone's home.
As if she knows anything about homes.
*
They have a piano, but no one to play it.
Jesse mentions this casually once or twice, but says nothing when Beca's fingers drift over the keys.
*
On her second night, still insisting that she pay full price, Beca finds that same piano -- formerly located in a busy tent close to the front -- has been moved to the creaking floorboards near the back. The room is isolated and empty in a way that ought to be lonely, but she finds the way that the music fills the room and echoes off of each wooden surface reassuring.
She plays until the sun begins to pierce through the fabric at her back, ignoring the quiet creaks of Jesse's feet crossing the length of the tent to sit down wordlessly beside her.
The music fills the room up like the space and the sound were made for each other, but all she can focus on is him breathing right beside her, anxious and uneven. His feet had moved with confidence -- the same smug charm he'd used when selling tickets out front both nights -- but now his hands are clumsy as he rubs his palms against his thighs.
"Don't go," he says at last, when she comes to the end of a particularly tricky measure; "or you won't be back tomorrow."
"Isn't that how a circus usually works?"
"We're not the usual kind of circus," he says, with more honesty than even this room is probably used to, and she feels her fingers trip over a few keys.
Missing the beat for the first time in her life. "I know what you are."
"And what about you?"
Her fingers lay still and motionless against the rows of keys, draped against them like rags against a picket fence.
He asks again (who are you, Beca), but she doesn't look up from the piano.
*
You can find music anywhere, if you learn to look and listen.
In brothels or bars, or even the sound of a glass shattered in a rage for the right reasons.
Her father's screams of frustration might have been music to Beca's ears, if only she had been there to hear them.
*
But all she hears for sure is the drumbeat of her heart. It's a cliche, isn't it, to think of your heart as a drum.
She's having her fill of many cliches today, and there's really no sense in stopping now. Not when a boy is leading her by the hand at sunrise, backing her up against a tree, and giving her a kiss -- her first kiss -- while birds sing overhead.
They might even be blue birds, but she doesn't bother to look.
For one perfect moment, all she can see is his smile, as open and bright as the sun rising behind him.
*
Father never comes. Either he isn't looking, or he simply doesn't see.
It doesn't matter. She's relieved, just the same.
*
She composes minor symphonies in the course of an evening, but no one applauds. They can hardly breathe, watching as though transfixed. The chord progressions fill the air, distorting their senses like a veil drawn before their eyes. The longer she plays, the quieter the crowd becomes, until you can hardly hear them breathing.
Some nights she thinks that if they were all to suddenly die, she might not notice until the sun came up.
*
A week passes quickly. No fatalities as of yet.
*
The further she gets from father and her past, the more reliable the illusions around herself become inside the circus. Her first night there, too many people had been able to perceive her clearly. It was unnerving, to be seen so thoroughly when she has spent so much time working against it; as though a snag had caught on her sleeve, tugging at a thread, causing it to slowly unravel until all that would be left is Beca, only herself.
She wouldn't be able to stand it.
But now, free from her father's relentless tugging and poking, the whispers begin to stop.
They see her as she wants again.
*
Give the people what they want, her father used to say. He had meant the minor illusions and lies. The simple tricks.
Beca thinks it's something more than that.
Give them the person they want you to be, the skin you wear like another suit, fresh and clean. Without stain or blemish.
Become that person so completely that you don't recognize yourself in the mirror without looking twice.
Give the people that part of yourself.
All of yourself.
*
Beca finds herself no longer looking in mirrors. Not often, at least. "How do I look?" she asks Jesse before leaving to find her tent in the back. (He always just shrugs his shoulders, waving his hand vaguely to approximate mediocrity.)
It's nice this way. Better.
Until the mirror comes to her.
"I know you, don't I?"
The voice comes from out of nowhere as Beca is practicing, and she feels her hands still against the keys before looking up.
She could attempt to lie, of course. It comes naturally to her, almost as easily as breathing. But she looks up into that face and knows right away that it would be useless.
They have met before.
One thing Beca Mitchell learned early on is that there are some people it's impossible to lie to -- not for any greater moral reasons, but because they simply excel at discerning the truth. Her father is one such person, drawn to any imperfections in a story through his natural, innate gift.
And Chloe Beale, it would seem, is just the same.
Beca realizes it right away, just looking into her eyes and their cool, calculated expression.
"Yes," she concedes. "We've met."