Work Text:
The carpeted floors of the music rooms collect more crumpled sheet notes and tangled threads of frustration than any sane person has the heart to bear. Percy knows this; can feel it in the uneven doorway he trips over every time he comes in, the walls with peeling paint that little by little reveal peeling wallpaper underneath— yellowed with time, and smudged with ink from students long since successful or settled or silent — the creak of the chairs, piano benches, even the plastic stools, stacked in the corner for the nursery school that borrows the space, creak and groan. Everything, he thinks, is ancient and wants the world to know. He’s half convinced if he personified the room it would just be a bunch of old men sitting on their porch yelling for children to “get off the lawn!”
There’s something comforting about it all, as if the same floor, and walls, and ceilings have witnessed kids become stars and stars become human and humans become themselves once more. If they could survive so many changes, maybe he could too.
Percy wanders into the piano room, one of many in the university— oh the wonders that occur when the arts are funded—, and collapses onto the leather-cushioned stool in front of the standing piano. Smooth wood, and well-used keys stare back at him.
The inscription— because inevitably in an old room lives an old piano undoubtedly donated by some or other benefactor before the university became an Institute™ and was then just “arts school” — is faded after years exposed to greasy fingers and scraping music sheets but still reads as lovely as it did all that time ago, in its perfect prime, “for with music, we may live and let live in unbridled joy. In loving memory of my daughter, Hazel Levesque.” A girl who had died too soon, a mother who had lost too unexpectedly, a school who had nearly crumbled before it could rise once more. The story of Hazel is famous across campus. They say she reincarnates every decade as a prodigy student, waiting to play under her favourite spotlight once more. Percy thinks it makes the school that much more charming. To have a child who loves music so much she lives on in others just to keep playing. His bandmates, Leo, on bass, and Frank, on drums, just think it’s creepy.
The world is quiet tonight, more so than usual even for eleven thirty on a Wednesday. But it’s just how he likes it. The night sky ready to eat up his notes, the stars flickering gently as if swaying back and forth to whatever creation he can let them hear. Even nocturnal animals will lull themselves to sleep so they can follow that music into the new day. His friends have often said he played like the very simplicity of poetry. Bedtime nursery rhymes, and sonnets about love. There is something serene in the way he plays. A lilt that gives ‘lyrical’ it’s meaning. A safety that gives ‘elysium’ it’s hope. A gentleness that gives ‘hands’ it’s hold.
With a single glance at the moon, in it’s crescent swing, he sets his fingers to the keys. And plays.
***
Jason Grace has finally mastered the sequence for the third act of their end of year ballet-theatre production and he couldn’t be prouder of himself if he had qualified for the olympics. Three weeks of non-stop gruelling practice, of glissades into pirouette, pirouette, baton, jete upstage right, grand jete to center and kneel for his Christine Daae to be caught between his arms, and he is finally collapsing onto the ground, chest heaving, legs quivering, and his heart beating to the same steps his feet are still twitching for.
He dangles over the stage, right leg swinging absently, left leg curled towards his chest. His eyes are closed to the headlights flooding the room but he can feel the bright glow, orange and warm, against his lids. Sweat drips down his back, in the crook of his elbow, across his temples. He hasn't worked this hard in a long time. He even feels the slight twinge in his left ankle. A torn ligament eight years ago that hasn't quite forgiven him.
He knows tomorrow when they run the sequence he will execute it perfectly. His choreographer will collapse into the sixteenth seat in the front row and throw their hands up in joy. The production’s producer will nod her head, a heady and silent praise. Christine Daae, aka Annabeth Chase, will wrap her arms around his neck and whisper she is proud of him! It will be hard for her to do but he will treasure it that much more because she says it anyway. And their phantom, the great Charlie Beckendorf, will slap him good naturedly on the back and say “it's about time Grace”.
But for now, before he can bask in praise not yet sung, he gathers his things, shoving them haphazardly into his bag and cursing the snag in his stocking for the hundred times as his fingers brush it tugging on his pants.
His feet ache in that delicious way that makes every step feel both like a stretch and a scream. As if he were running against a candy pulling machine. Arm gets caught in the hook and he's
s t r e e e t c h i i i n g g.
Leg hooks around bar and he's
e — o n g a t e d.
He hadn't realized how late it was but walking through the desolate courtyard with no light, save for the sad flickering building sconces, reveals hours past his bed time, hours passed everyone's bed time. The dance building is being swallowed by darkness behind him, but he is content to watch as the visual arts buildings start to appear in his vision as if stepping out from behind a smoke screen. And then the library, pillared and beautifully ancient. Sometimes if he stares at it for long enough he feels as if he's being pulled back into the past, witnessing monuments like the colosseum and the palace of the Pharaoh's being built. It's like hugging human creation itself.
In a mystical sort of daze he passes by and then he's nearest to the music rooms, the last set of buildings before the dormitories where all manner of being reside. Quirky theatre and emo flutist and unorganized sculptor. They are a carefully crafted gallery of only the finest kind of chaos. A mess created from rainbow essence and the smell of leaves after rain: petrichor, their signature perfume would be called.
He's smiling to himself about the whole ordeal when his ears pick up the faintest notes. Bells tinkling in the spring breeze. What he imagines fairies would sound like to the human ear. He's enchanted.
Without really knowing where or how he's drifting towards the soft music, notes like glass against flower petals.
The sound is coming from the ground levels, where the floor instruments are stored and generally played. Drums and piano and cellists. The first three rooms are empty, but oh how he discovers magic in the fourth.
All he finds at first when he stumbles across the door way is pitch black curls bouncing. But he swears he can see colours escaping like wisps of smoke from behind the piano. Hazy blues and sky pinks and lavender purples and buttercup yellows and sage greens and flame oranges and he knows whoever sits behind the keys must not be human at all. Not in any real way that matters anyhow.
Human yes, in two legs and thumbs for gripping and maybe a sharp jaw and pretty blue veins and clearly, hair but beyond that… they are at the very least the beginning of time and the first curl of smoke and the scent of nectarines on hot summer days. At most infinity, the making of stardust, what he suspects his heart has always called home.
The music drifts in and out of his skin surrounding him like warmth and childhood. He couldn't move if gravity stopped holding him to the ground.
He's not sure when the music stops, or even if it stops. He’s swaying on this uneven doorstep and then he's dancing, maybe. He doesn't know. His feet, legs, arms, arch of his back are moving but he feels suspended between planets. Cosmic belts wrapping around him. There's a possibility he's crying and it would surprise him if he wasn't.
He's rejuvenated and exhausted and awake and dreaming and living and dying and —
“You are the most exquisite person I've ever seen.”
“I'm in love with you.” Jason Grace gasps out. As if these words were the most important thing he could ever say to the person in front of him. As if he never said anything else to them ever at least he said this.
It's met with laughter as bright and perfect as the music still pouring through his ears.
“I think,” Eyes are green. Skin is dark. Brown brown brown. Jaw is sharper than cliff’s edge. And oh how this whole being is a vessel for enchantment. “I think I'm quite in love with you too.”