Work Text:
Time is endless when you live in the dark.
The ticking of the clock loses its meaning when tick after tick minutes stretch into hours and hours into days with no end. There is no sound other than the random creaking of furniture and wooden paneling or the soft flutter of the candles’ burning flames. Sometimes when the air is completely still the lake water can be heard sloshing against the jetty, but it is such remote noise that it takes on the essence of an evanescent fantasy.
He hates silence.
It opens a gorge within him that fills with thoughts and memories. It forms a whirlpool of nightmares that drags him into despair, an inescapable Charybdis of the mind. His miserable life was marked from the moment he was born. His face determined his fate. Isolation, detested but inescapable, the only way to survive in a world that could not accept his being different.
He fights silence.
Since the moment he first heard music, he knew that he would live, and die, wrapped in it. It is the comforting blanket in life that will become the shroud to cover his body after he has exhaled his last breath.
Music gives him life when all he sees in the mirror, staring back with unmerciful cruelty, is death. Music lifts his spirit when the world has done nothing but sought to crush him. Music brings warmth to the realm he has built for himself below the Opera, a shelter against the cold of the world outside.
Music has left him.
He sits in front of his organ. The instrument he has painstakingly put together over the course of years. Piece by piece, pipe after pipe, key by key. His creature, his creation, his child, the only true and faithful companion he has ever had.
A wretched sheet of paper stares back at him, defying him, a majestic great stave adorning the first two lines. Empty, just like his soul. The quill, its tip half sunk in red ink - like spilt blood - stands unmoving, a silent witness to the battle of wills he is losing.
He stares on.
Willing the music to come back to him. Willing it to fight the damned thoughts. To fight the darkness that envelopes him and to conjure up those rays of light that he cannot feel on his skin, as normal people do. To clear the stale air and allow him to breathe with full lungs. He stares and waits. Waits for the fleeting melody that sang to him some time ago – minutes? hours? days? – to visit him again.
He closes his eyes.
Inhales. Relaxes. Breathes out. Contracts his hands to fists.
Da capo.
Music will come. He has to be patient. Music is not like human beings, inconstant in their feelings, prone to betrayal, ready to denigrate. Music is persistent and everlasting.
Music is like a capricious, but faithful lover. It may leave for a while, but it will always come back.
The clock ticks on.
He waits.