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Storms and music are the same in a great many ways.
If there’s something Paula Turnip knows as well as the scarred back of her hand, it’s that the skies above Seattle don’t sing the way the clouds above Hades do. These new ones have a voice like rain, a heavy acoustic drone; there is none of the rage, the fury, the hyper incandescence of the persistent Hadean gloam.
But who knows. Maybe that was never really Hades at all. Maybe that was just Landry. In much the same way that smoke disperses into air, it’s always been hard to separate the two.
As much as the quiet of Seattle unnerves Paula, Landry’s silence is worse. It’s been nearly a whole season since she’s heard anything from him. And despite Landry’s communication these days being limited to the archaic and often confusing language of storms, she’s always found that if he has something to say, he finds a way to say it. The skies hold tints of his moods -- entertainments, grudges, annoyances, you name it. To look up at the Hades storm front is to see a banner of grandiose, opinionated commentary on any of the league’s latest events, major or minor. Both of which, of course, seem to happen every other day now.
Backseat driver. Guardian angel. Same thing, really.
Seattle’s skies clearly haven’t learned to speak Landry yet, because it’s done nothing but rain lifelessly here since Paula arrived, and she’s certain that if these particular clouds were at all an effective conduit for what remains of the Spirit of Violence, they would have split into an amused, thunderous grin. Because Landry would have laughed -- the bright, disbelieving kind that spewed lightning -- at the sight of Paula Turnip on the roster of the Seattle Garages.
‘Why, Paula, will I finally get to hear you sing? ’ he would have mused through the wheezing Tesla-coil-laced sound that meant he was well and truly entertained, and Paula would have known the tone of his voice enough to know that he might as well have asked ‘Has every circle of Hades deigned to freeze over at once? ’
She would have griped at him. “I’ll freeze Hades myself if it’ll shut you up for two seconds.”
The Seattle clouds aren’t in on the joke. They haven’t yet found a way to translate this particular projected, hypothetical squabble between a centuries-old spirit and a girl from the underworld who hasn’t felt this young and alone in years.
It’s terribly lonely looking up at a sky that doesn’t know you.
Seattle nights feel particularly long, and the kind-eyed-but-tired captain of the Garages has fallen asleep listlessly on the couch across the room from Paula.
Teddy’s been nice enough to let her crash here for a few nights while she works out her new setup, but she can see through the glamour of responsibility that Teddy isn’t quite equipped to be a host right now. She suspects that the dark circles under his eyes are left over from the loss of Randy. Or from the ongoing weight of Jaylen’s return. Or from holding his team together with what amounts to tape and string.
Or all of them. If there’s another thing Paula knows, it’s that you don’t get to pick and choose your grief.
One particular grief hangs on Teddy’s living room wall -- an old polaroid of Randy and Dominic, striking in familial resemblance. One face that must have known what was coming, and one that could never have known but dreaded it anyway.
Paula doesn’t envy either of them, and she counts it among the more morbid of her failures that she can’t figure out how.
Teddy’s snores are loud enough now that he doesn’t wake when Paula stands to leave. Doesn’t wake at the jingling of the apartment keys being placed back on their hook, or at the tinny clink when Paula takes a second set of keys down from the adjacent spot.
She’ll bring them back. She promises.
It’s the first promise she feels she’s made without a witness in a long, long time.
The keys to the Big Garage are labeled exactly that -- Big Garage -- and sure enough, one slightly rusty key opens the sliding door that reveals a single set of stairs leading up to the cluttered old attic above the band’s rehearsal space.
“It’s a mess up there, but we’ve got a ton of old instruments,” Teddy had said to her with a tired smile not 12 hours ago. “You can pick whatever you want. I’ll take you tomorrow, alright?”
She’ll apologize later for not waiting. For the fact that her restlessness had driven her here in the middle of the night.
“Jeez, Teddy, you weren’t kidding,” Paula coughs to herself, swatting away a cloud of dust that balloons up from a pile of cardboard boxes. “Looks like no one’s been up here since back when the league thought eating a bunch of peanuts would be the solution to everyone’s problems.”
The air rings silent, muffled with dust.
“Come on, V, that was a good one,” she grumbles. Evidently, Landry doesn’t think so. Or if he does, he’s being uncharacteristically silent about his opinions.
Teddy hadn’t been kidding about the dust, and neither had he been kidding about the abundance of instruments. Most of them, it seems, have been shoved haphazardly into boxes. There’s a few of the more delicate kinds -- acoustic guitars and a couple flutes -- that have been stored in individual cases atop a metal shelf, but the floor is littered with dismantled drum kits, boxes of tambourines, cymbals big enough to be frisbees for hellhounds. Paula doesn’t know what she came up here expecting to find, but she gets the feeling that if she’d come in here with any expectation at all, she would have been let down by her inability to filter through the clutter.
It’s a good thing, then, that all she wants to do is open boxes. To unpack something that isn’t hers.
What catches her eye in the end isn’t a box. It’s a long, worn black case, the kind made to hold a string instrument, and some past member of the band has clearly taken a bright blue marker to it. All over the surface, there are doodles of lightning bolts, neon in the dim fluorescent light of the room.
When the case is open, it’s a sleek, shiny blue electric violin that meets the hands of the Seattle Garages’ newest batter. The dusty prints that Paula’s fingers leave behind are a primer for her realization that nobody has touched this instrument in years, but under the blanket of dust, a smooth cobalt surface gleams. It’s a simple, looping design, hollow in the center, strings and bridge stretching across the open middle.
‘Now that is magnificent,’ the approximation of Landry in Paula’s head says with a grinning voice. ‘Forget everything I said before, Paula Turnip. You’re going to be electric.You are going to be Eurydice’s second escape from the underworld, mark my words.’
Paula rolls her eyes just a little bit. Any other day, she might have chided herself for the slightly self-serving mental Landry impression, but the truth is that Landry’s real-life dramatics had always been more than up to the challenge. Even when he spent his days as a formless tempest, he still managed to bring out the grand prestige in the most mundane of moments.
It had always been horribly annoying.
Paula misses it more than she has the energy to tell an empty room.
It turns out that a rainstorm is the perfect weather to practice music in; the steady, heavy droll of the constant downpour drowns out any other remnants of noise. The early morning traffic outside, the shuffle of someone opening the garage downstairs, the clatter of the stadium’s AC rattling to life. The rain is a more captive audience than Paula expected; it’s been a long time since she’s picked up an instrument.
She expects the rust to show in a horrible screeching of strings, discordant musical notes insulting one another, but instead the sound is… pleasant. Distantly, cautiously so, to be approached with non-threatening tact the way one might hold their hand out to a timid stray cat. But there’s a hopefulness to the notes. Enough to make Paula’s throat tighten and her eyes burn.
The fact remains that this violin, this blue contraption that feels as though it chose her as much as she chose it, doesn’t match anything else in this room.
Teddy has been, as consistently as she’s always known him to be, exceptionally kind, and had let her know that she’d be more than welcome to practice alone up here for as long as she wanted to. A couple weeks in Seattle have dragged out at the pace of tectonic drift, and the team has been remarkably accommodating to her requests for time alone to adjust. Paula wonders how much of that is empathy on their part, and how much of it is simply the exhaustion of the past couple seasons taking its toll on them as well.
It isn’t easy to see them. Any of them, really. There’s been an image of the Seattle Garages in Paula’s head since day 32 of season 7 -- an image of a rowdy, reckless team of hellraisers, blind to the consequences of their actions -- a team that Paula can be angry at.
That falls apart every single time she looks at one of them. Every time she sees the terror of their current reality reflected in any of their faces. It hasn’t been easy to swallow the realization that she has to share the grief that’s come to feel like a monument to her old team.
Landry would have understood. He might still, now, somewhere. Or he might not. Paula has only barely managed to stave off the thought that maybe this isn’t just distance from Hades. Maybe this silence isn’t just a struggling signal between two unconnected places. Maybe this is just what happens when someone’s been gone for as long as Landry has.
As untouchable as he’s always seemed, even in death, Paula as she knows herself now was practically born out of the reality that he was always as vulnerable as any of the rest of them. Even these days, he’s not Landry exactly. He’s raw fury and love and impulse, rooted to Hades through sheer force of magnetism -- a one-and-the-sameness that lets him roll over the layered atmosphere like fog on the surface of a lake.
He was always all of those things, of course. But Paula has never forgotten the first time she ever saw the form of Landry Violence -- saw that he had hands, eyes, a cocky grin. The first time she’d ever really understood Landry as having a form other than her own. No longer just a voice in her head or a cloud drifting menacingly around her shoulders, but a person. And not only that, but a person who wore, for some godsforsaken reason, low-rise jeans. It had made Paula both want to punch and hug him at once. Of course, she’d been too busy trying not to die to manage either.
The Spirit of Violence never dies. Until it does.
“As long as it’s not today”, Paula gripes to her inconvenient ghost, unwilling to let that particular dam break right now. “Don’t go away today, Landry, you gaudy fucker. You’re not allowed to die again yet.”
Paula waits for the thunder. The aptly-timed clash of electrified atmosphere that would reply ‘Give me a little more credit than that.’
It doesn’t come. Instead there’s only the rain, captive audience turned ravenous, gnawing at the air for more music. Gnawing at Paula for not being enough.
In Hades, Landry knows his way through storms, but not these. Not this new heavily shadowed city, which he can only see as though from under the lids of half-closed eyes.
Hades is emptier than it should be, and the Trench is crawling. Landry has felt this for what might have been days, or months, or years. A life without a body leaves little metric for understanding the passage of time.
All he knows is that Paula’s house is empty. Moody is gone. Scorpler is gone. Yazmin is gone. And Seattle is a mystery. The skies are so comfortable in grief that they’ve stopped seeing anger.
Not for the first time, he muses in his roundabout way over whether he’s only held onto Sixth Circle, onto the Trench, because he fears what happens if he lets go.
“V, come on, I thought you weren’t afraid of anything ,’ Paula might have told him.
‘I wish that were true,’ he answers in theory. Outside Hades, the world is tired. And he’s never been able to break through that, despite him having seen it occur in a nearly cyclical manner over the roaming span of his life. Resignation to pain, all shards of hope drawn out and tossed aside.
Landry has tried to send Paula a signal, so many times he’s lost count. She either cannot hear him, or cannot respond, or won’t.
So much loss has happened without him. So much weight for his family to bear. Perhaps when their fury gives way to resignation too, he’ll lose his tether for good.
A piece of Landry that feels more human than the rest worries a thumb over the surface of a thought. Perhaps Paula is angry with him for being silent.
Sadness and relief mingle in grey-red mist, as what remains of the Hades Tigers take the field.
Two seasons with the Garages has changed Paula, but not in the way she might have expected.
She likes playing with the band now. It’s more than a little weird with Dominic Marijuana’s dad hanging out in the dugout, not to mention seeing him play the drums, but there’s nothing much she can do about that. She still won’t look Jaylen in the eye, but no one expects her to. And she’s managed, despite every individual shitstorm of the past few seasons, to be a pretty damn good batter.
And the Garages in general, for the most part at least, have stopped treating her like they’re worried she’ll explode. Too much has happened since she’s joined them. So much that some days she almost forgets that it’s been years since she’s heard from Landry.
She still talks to him sometimes, mostly when she plays. Teddy’s been great about letting her book the garage for solo rehearsal, and there are times when she can hear something like a memory of Landry’s old voice in the song. Like the music is a replacement for rage in her blood. Bright and scathing and electrifying.
Season 10 has been long, and the league is a frayed version of its old self. It’s burned Paula through -- this much hurt coming from so many directions. She doesn’t have enough hands to hold all the others that need holding.
So instead, she uses the two she has to play the old tunes of Hades. It never quite feels like enough, but it’s all she can do.
“You used to hum that one,” she says out loud, lifting her bow away from the strings, the end of the final note still resonating in her ears. “And I won’t leave out the part where I’d tell you to shut the fuck up. Because I did do that. But in fairness, you were humming inside my head, so I think I get final say on possession etiquette here.”
As many days as have passed since she joined the Garages, there are still times when the violin weighs as much in her hands as it did the day she picked it up.
If the Tigers make it to the end of the season and win, they might go away. Without her. And then who would play in Sixth Circle? Who would be there, tending the trees? The gardens?
Would it just be Landry? Whatever remained of him, finally quiet and resigned?
She can't imagine it. Which of course makes imagining it hurt all the more.
“You there, V?” she whispers, staring down at the calluses on her fingers. The ones she now can barely remember what it felt like not to have.
She knows the answer isn’t the answer she wants, but Paula’s still confident in her ability to out-stubborn Landry. It’s something she’s always taken pride in, and something she used to derive a great deal of glee from hazing him over.
The Trench feels farther away than it ever has, and Paula isn’t sure if the fact that she knows Landry isn’t really there makes her feel better or worse. Staring at his name at the top of the Hall of Flame leaderboard does little to alleviate the fact that she fears he’s simply lost. Maybe too far lost.
“You know, I forget sometimes. I think about how much you used to talk, but… I forget that you were also a pretty damn good listener.” The studio lights buzz their usual half hearted response, and Paula sits, elbows braced on her knees, mid-conversation with the same no-one as always.
“I know you think you know everything, and I know how often I like to remind you that you don’t, but. Right now I really do wish you knew everything. Or even if not, just one of your standard bullshit answers would do great.” Paula’s voice sounds like a shell even to her own ears.
“I need to know. I need to know when tireless belief stopped being enough.”
The rain taps down on the rooftop, as woefully unprepared to answer the question as Landry might have been.
A bolt of rage runs like a shock through Paula’s body, and she stands, picks up a stray ball from the many lying constantly strewn around the studio and throws it full-force at the wall. It strikes rather feebly, bouncing back down behind a pile of boxes and disappearing from view.
‘And this is why you’re not a pitcher,’ approximate-Landry says in Paula’s mind, voice tinged with the smile she would always hear whenever he was trying to cheer her up.
She collapses onto the box again, pressing her hands to her forehead, laughter coming out like the afterthought of a sob.
“Landry, fucking answer me, you godsdamned nightmare, I need you right now.”
And then Paula realizes with a horrible sinking dread that if she could actually talk to Landry right now -- if he suddenly appeared in front of her, as solidly immaterial as he’d been before he died -- she wouldn’t even know what to say to him. She would have no idea where to start.
Apart from the obvious.
Sometimes , Paula thinks, I am so much angrier than I have the vocabulary for. It feels like there should be a separate set of words for this. Fury doesn’t cover it. Violence isn’t enough.
And what would Landry have said to that?
For all the time they’d spent with their thoughts connected, for once Paula cannot stretch the boundaries of her imagination large enough to invent a Landry-voiced answer to a question he never got to hear.
Rewind .
He stirs from something like sleep.
There’s music in the sky that Landry hasn’t heard in years. In the clouds, circling like a flock of birds, are notes. Whirling, ringing things, making their way home. Singing with a resonance that Landry feels right where his chest would have been.
Where did they come from? Why do they feel like splinters of him? Like they belong beneath a skin he no longer has? He doesn’t know. He hears so little these days.
But his heart -- the world, spread so thin it’s become nearly transparent -- echoes half a duet he can’t remember learning, muscle memory from vocal cords that no longer exist, and a wordless plea to be heard travels along a thread that Landry himself might once have called fate.
Far away from Hades, the strings on Paula’s violin, a flawed study in duality, hum with the effort it takes to harmonize.
Day X -- the second Day X -- fades in the background of its own aftermath.
The Hall Stars are disappearing. Yaz, Dom, Randy, Gloom, Morrow, Cali, all of them, gone before Paula gets the chance to memorize their faces again.
It’s just Landry in the middle of the field now, half-faded already, and she barely makes it with enough time to reach out for his hand before he’s gone too.
She doesn’t call out. She doesn’t cry. She simply stands, the afterimages of blue lightning blurring her view of the empty proving ground beyond.
The next time Paula visits Hades and takes her violin along (Dun and Zion were especially enthusiastic in requesting this), she doesn’t expect it to be the day the Spirit of Violence returns to the skies of Sixth Circle.
The air is filled with the typical soft Hades breeze, ruffling the pomegranate trees outside the stadium and carrying with it the comforting scent of home. Paula hasn’t been back here in a while, and it’s been too long since she’s made good on a promise to visit for real.
Yazmin’s around. She’s not quite the same as she always was, but she smiles the same. Paula sees her sometimes, silhouetted against the Hadean dusk, moving through the trees like they’re made of water. Cali’s gone back to the Garden, from what Paula’s heard from Beck. Randy and Dom are… somewhere, she thinks. They seem okay. Lenny even talks to them a bit, although from what Paula knows of Lenny, she imagines those are probably some very strange, very awkward conversations.
Almost all of them have… shown up. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve all come back.
Except Landry. Even the clouds are gone. They’re just regular old Hades smoke now, hanging in the sky, dormant and asleep.
Echoes of that old worry resurface again, scarred over this time -- the idea that Landry might just have let go.
Paula supposes that even the world’s most restless spirit should have gotten the chance to rest, if that’s really what he wanted.
The rest of her family is healing, she thinks. Dunlap smiles without thinking about it again, Zion is starting to re-tinker with the Iron Lion, even Plums -- who Paula admits she doesn’t know very well -- seems to be adjusting. It doesn’t feel right without Moody around, or Scorp, but Paula has already reached the acceptance that the world, for all its haunts, must keep finding new ways to feel like home.
Her audience hasn’t taken the field yet, but she still wants to practice. It feels more natural that way, just like she’s rehearsing for a set with the band. Her bow finds its favorite mark, the blue of the violin a vibrant contrast to the deep reds and browns of the landscape around her. The violin is weightless now, a symbiotic extension of her -- like she pulls the music from her own blood instead of from the strings.
She plays the first Hadean tune she ever learned, a sweeping, somber melody -- one that she’s always associated with the river Styx, with the endings and beginnings of cycles, and with the pride and the consequence of living so long that you bear witness to great tragedy and great joy in near-perfect balance.
Because Paula’s eyes are closed as she plays, she doesn’t see the way impulsive blue sparks have begun to fly out from her fingers, circling the neck and the scroll, darting from string to string like frantic moths around the only lamp in sight.
Weaving currents of supercharged notes rise up through the clouds into the slumbering sky -- and just like that, the sky wakes up.
A deafening CRASH fills the air, run through with a furious ripcord of an electrical current. Color spills into the atmosphere alongside a crackling explosion of light and sound, looming crimson waves of thunderclouds rolling over the walls of Sixth Circle, and the air fills with a bombastic symphony of blue bolts ricocheting out through roiling red smoke.
A tower of searing blue light strikes the ground, spraying pitch-black dirt and rocks out in a fan around it -- shock of impact frozen in time, the last note of Paula’s melody finally reaching apotheosis as a lightning rod.
When the plumes of red drift away, a figure stands in the center of the crater left behind.
“Missed me?” Landry Violence says with a wink and a spark-tinged grin, teeth crackling as though he’d just eaten a live wire.
The violin barely reaches the ground before Paula runs -- before Landry is real and solid and laughing and hugging her so tightly she can barely breathe.
“You jackass,” she whispers furiously into his shoulder, not bothering to think too much about how he got his old jacket back or why his eyes are different now or where in actual Hades he’s been all this time. “You dramatic-entry-loving, show-boating, fire-swallowing, cryptic-communication-for-a-decade jackass!”
Paula pulls back in an attempt to swat him on the arm, but she’s shaking too much from something between laughter and tears and she grips his forearms tightly -- steadying herself or him or possibly both.
“Forgive me, Paula, but I might need a few days to memorize my new nickname,” Landry considers, and Paula glares daggers into his eyes.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now.”
“Do I look like I’m kidding?” He smiles, and Paula is so, so tempted to make her answer ‘ well, yes, pretty much always ,’ but the weight of the realization of who has just come home runs like an aftershock through her blood. She's rooted to the spot.
Paula stares at him again. Making sure he’s real. “V. How did -- how did you--”
And there it is again. That breezy, easygoing Landry grin, lopsided enough to nearly make her forget that he’s quite literally old as hell.
“How did I make it back?” he theorizes.
Wordlessly, Paula nods.
“Easy. I followed the music.”
A bolt of indignance courses through Paula, and she folds her arms at him. “Easy?”
Landry raises a flaming eyebrow, and Paula huffs, pressing her still-shaking hands to her temples. “You’re infuriating,” she says with an exhale. “I’m already mad at you.”
Landry’s grin falters, and his demeanor of conviction loses just a slight bit of ground. “It took me so long.”
“How the hells did you manage to get lost, V?”, Paula asks him, embers of old anger stoking in her chest. “I tried so hard. There was just--”
Her voice catches, and she steadies herself by digging her fingers even more tightly into his forearms. “What happened?”
From the look Landry gives her, Paula knows the true answer to the question is far more complicated than the one he gives. “You said it yourself. I was lost.”
“Yeah, well, bring a fucking map next time,” Paula grumbles, but she’s already hugging him again, the realization sinking in that when Landry says ‘lost’, what he really means is ‘gone’.
“You didn’t look back, Paula Turnip,” Landry says, the usual pyre of his voice instead a proud hum.
Paula draws back and blinks at him, a wordless prompt to explain, but before she finishes uttering even the one silent syllable, she understands.
“Once a stripe, always a stripe,” he smiles.
“You followed the music,” Paula says in near-disbelief, as though he hadn’t said this already before. “You heard me.”
Landry nods in acknowledgment. “When you’re alone for as long as I was, you forget what home sounds like. Until you hear it again. Lightning finding ground is lightning coming home, Paula. I know you know what that’s like. It’s in your blood, after all.”
“Are you now? Home, I mean?” Paula studies his face as though he might be about to evaporate again. For all she knows, he could be. “For good?”
“Well, I can hardly keep playing blaseball. What else would I do but come home?”
“Gods, you’re gonna be bored,” Paula says emphatically, some of the tension in her shoulders finally easing. “What are you gonna do? Ask Esme to teach you to bake? Take up birdwatching?”
Landry’s eyebrows flare up in consideration. “I hadn’t thought about that. But it’s not a bad idea.”
“We’d better get you some binoculars.”
“This is new,” Landry says, pointing to Paula’s Garages jacket, an amused half-smile on his face.
“Your hair’s new,” Paula replies half-grumpily, pretty certain that didn’t come out quite the contrary retort that she would have liked it to.
“How’s Seattle?”
The genuine curiosity in Landry’s voice makes Paula’s throat tighten again. They have so much to catch up on.
“It’s not Hades,” Paula manages, glancing around Sixth Circle, the skies now the same lively thunderous red that feels as familiar to her as breathing. “But it’s... home for now.”
“When do you return?”
Paula sighs. “Tomorrow, actually. Band’s got a rehearsal, and I promised Teddy I’d be there. Teddy’s our captain now, and he... manages a lot of things alone. I don’t want him to manage this alone too, you know?”
“Understandable and admirable, Paula Turnip,” Landry says with a proud nod. “You’ve grown to be quite the league ambassador.”
“Oh, shut up, don’t ‘big brother’ me,” Paula grumbles, but she’s smiling all the same. “Hey. Thank you. Guess you’d better come visit Seattle sometime soon, huh? Catch a concert or two?”
“Once I learn to grasp the art of reading maps and an understanding of relative distance, then yes,” Landry says thoughtfully. “That’s a magnificent instrument, by the way.”
He nods towards Paula’s violin, which she doesn’t even remember setting down, and Paula’s smile widens enough that her cheeks cramp up. “I kinda had a feeling you’d say something like that.”
“It makes me glad to hear you’ve found a home in Seattle,” Landry muses. “I admit I had trouble finding… solid ground there. I may need to reassess it with a new perspective.”
“Well, we’ve got a lot of that going around.” Paula gives his arm a gentle punch. “The team’s gonna flip when they see you.”
His expression flickers -- a momentary reminder that even the Spirit of Violence sometimes gets a little overwhelmed. Paula doesn’t blame him. What do you say to people you’ve watched over for so many years when you’re finally able to stand next to them again?
“You okay, V?”
“I believe I’m… nervous,” Landry says limply, as though he’s growing accustomed to the fact that something so mundane as an admission of human emotion typically comes without a concerto of elemental orchestrals rolling in for background ambiance.
Paula braces her hands on his shoulders, a delayed realization hitting her as she does -- they’ve never really been this close in height before. And as tempting a source of fodder for verbal sparring as this might prove in days to come, right now it’s both a sobering and unifying reminder of the ways in which home works in cycles. As changed as they both are, like still calls to like.
“Landry. You big idiot.” It’s a reassurance, and they both know it. “Trust me. All that’s going to matter to them is that you’re home. The rest, we can figure out later. You picked a damn good time to retire.”
“Well, I wish I could take credit for that.”
Paula follows Landry’s gaze as he glances back towards the stadium’s interior gate -- beyond which, Paula knows, the rest of her teammates are finishing dinner and waiting to celebrate the homecoming of someone they love.
It’s funny, she thinks. How you can change the key, and yet still recognize the song. If you’d asked her a handful of years ago, she might have said that meant music was resistant to change. But perhaps music is just better at changing than anything else she knows.
An impish smile crosses Paula’s face, and she pokes Landry’s arm with her elbow. “Hey. You wanna sneak up on them?”
Landry laughs out loud at this, a satisfied laugh that still sounds a little like a roaring Hades bonfire. “Paula, Paula, I always had the feeling we’d get along.”
“Dude.” Paula stares, brows raised. “We’ve known each other for literally more than a decade.”
Landry grins at the comfort of settling back into an old shorthand. “You can’t forget, though, I’m--”
“Yes, yes, many many centuries old,” Paula huffs, practically dragging him by the arm through the gates of Sixth Circle. “Now come on, V, we’re about to pull the best prank in the world.”
The next time Paula plays her violin in the attic above the Garages’ rehearsal space, it feels both familiar and renewed. It’s the same violin, the same strings, the same notes -- but there’s a charge to her when she plays now. Echoes of little blue bolts spitting out of the tips of her fingers, like they’re escaping the sheer chaos of the music itself.
It feels, she thinks, something like fury repurposed.
It’s not every day your music becomes a homing beacon for an ages-old spirit who had lost his tether to the realities of mortal existence.
Paula plays without looking now, all of her music committed to memory. She prefers to shut her eyes and let her muscles and impulses take over. Carving chaos into control with every press of her fingers against one of the strings. With every stroke of the bow.
She’s going to have to get used to the fact that the Landry she knows now isn’t quite so superhuman as the one who died, or the one who had lived in the sky above her old home for so long. Of course, this Landry will still act like he knows everything, but she suspects that now they’ll be on a far more equal footing in that regard.
He was right about one thing, though.
Or, Paula realizes as she plays, she was right about one thing. Because although she’d pictured Landry’s voice, he hadn’t truly been the one to say it.
It had always been her.
“You’re going to be electric.”
Today, not for the first time, Paula Turnip from Hades understands a little better what it must be like to be a storm.