Chapter Text
There is a certain harmoniousness that always occurs within the ornate walls of the theatre, seconds before the first lift of the curtain and swell of the orchestra. Amidst the smell of hairspray and rosin, between each lithe body onstage, is a force greater than any one person.
Michael Warren, principal soloist-in-training at The Washington Ballet, lives for this harmonious force almost exclusively.
The applause he receives after a particularly daunting variation also helps, along with the deep aching within his muscles after a show. Mike, over his many years spent in studios and on stages, has learned that pain can sometimes be a beautiful thing.
Mike has never felt the pain of a tendon snapping in the middle of the third act of Don Quixote . Donnie Banks, veteran principal soloist at the Los Angeles Ballet, is not so lucky, however.
It doesn’t happen to Donnie in slow motion, the way it does in the movies. On the contrary, it happens remarkably fast; one minute, he has the incredible Lauren Kincaid, his long-time pas de deux partner, held above his head, gazing out into the mezzanine, forcing himself not to squint as the lights obscure the view of the crowd. The next, there’s an awful, audible snap as his hamstring gives out, and he just barely manages to get Lauren to the ground before he can feign a smile at the audience and hobble into the wings, exiting three eight-counts too early. He can’t summon the strength to go on.
All of Donnie’s cognition, his memory of his entrances and variations, is pushed to the very back of his mind as pure agony surges forward. After tumbling into a heap on the ground, he bites hard into the thin, silky sleeve of his costume to keep from crying out as the company’s medics shove concerned-looking corps dancers out of the way, forming a tight cluster around him.
Tears fall down Donnie’s face, hot and stinging, and he can’t even think clearly enough to be embarrassed by the sensation, gritting his teeth as a pair of latex-gloved hands descend on his leg. Every inch of contact feels like fire against Donnie’s skin, until another pair of hands, cold and manicured, softly caress his shoulders.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Lauren whispers, failing to hide the tremor in her voice. All Donnie can do is writhe and stifle his groans as more medics prod at his leg, murmuring jargon that Donnie really should be able to understand. It sounds more like another language to him.
Lauren steps back, the loss of contact feeling altogether unfathomable to Donnie. Black spots swim in Donnie’s vision as he tries to swat away the hands that are digging into his skin. Somewhere far away, he hears a voice counting to three. He doesn’t stay conscious long enough to hear the last word, and his body goes limp as the medics lift him and carry him out of the wings. They’ve done this a thousand times—Donnie feels like he himself has watched them do this a thousand times—but it is a new sensation to him nonetheless. He hates feeling helpless, but luckily he’s unconscious in the arms of the medics, which means he can’t feel anything at all.
Lauren watches the whole thing, fidgeting in her costume that now seems too tight, too restrictive, and hoping that everyone is too busy looking at Donnie to look at her. She glances up into the mass of fly cables and light rigs above the stage, blinking away her tears to keep them from ruining her makeup. She has to keep it together. For Donnie.
Horns in the orchestra pit swell as both he and the medics fade from Lauren’s view, and she can’t stay for long before she has to enter again, facing the audience that has, in an instant, forgotten all that she is and all that she has done. Lauren knows that the audience is only thinking about Donnie. She can only think about Donnie. Her movements onstage become robotic and hazy, and all she can focus on is making sure that her red-lipped, chemical smile doesn’t falter. Later, she will be told by a friend from the wings that it didn’t. She almost wishes it does; she almost wishes it was her hamstring that snapped on that stage and not her partner’s.
That night is both Donnie and Lauren’s last with the LA ballet. Mr. Clarke, the artistic director, pleads with Lauren to stay, even offers her a pay raise, but she’s made her choice: she either dances with Donnie, or she doesn’t dance at all.
And, with Donnie opting to recover from his injury with his family in Miami, Lauren has decided to come with him (for moral support, and because she doesn’t think she can last more than a week without him). They’ve never outright said it, but it’s been unanimously agreed upon that Lauren and Donnie are one hundred percent a thing . A hopelessly codependent, star-crossed thing.
When Lauren finds herself standing alone in her apartment—her and Donnie’s apartment—with her belongings scattered all around her, the only person she really wants to talk to is on the other end of the country, sleeping off a dose of egregious post-surgery painkillers. So she picks the next best option.
Lauren’s relationship with Paul Briggs is best described as… complicated. As her choreographer and mentor, she possesses an incredible amount of respect for him. As a person, she and Briggs don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on many things. Regardless, she needs company, and she knows she can count on Briggs. She doesn’t have many people to count on these days.
“So, you’re really leaving, huh?” Briggs asks as he sets down another cardboard box filled with various knick-knacks: one of Donnie’s hats, a pair of worn-out pointe shoes, a rolled-up poster from a band Lauren stopped listening to years ago.
“Yeah, I really am,” she affirms, her voice echoing around the now-empty kitchenette.
Briggs sighs, resting his forearms on the countertop. “We’re gonna have a hell of a time trying to replace you. Both of you.”
“I know.” The corners of Lauren’s mouth twist up as if forming a smile, but nothing changes in her eyes.
With a sense of finality, Briggs stands, straightening out his back with a sticky, dissatisfying pop. For all the times he’s drilled into his students the importance of posture, sometimes he can’t help but ignore his own advice.
“Well. We’ll miss you,” he says, pulling Lauren into a hug. “Tell Donnie we say hi.”
“I will,” Lauren sighs, and Briggs can almost hear her voice falter ever so slightly on those two syllables.
As fate would have it, several of the dancers affiliated with the LA Ballet live in the same apartment building, barely a block and a half from the main building housing most of the studio spaces. The commute to work is impossibly easy—plenty of dancers enjoy walking when the weather is nice—and the rent isn’t too bad for Los Angeles, all things considered. The gray-blue stucco exterior hides fairly recently updated amenities; the unusually bountiful floor space inside most of the apartments almost seems to have been provided with dancers in mind.
Briggs is among one of these residents. Sure, he’d like a bit of a bigger space, a fuller kitchen, a better view, but the location is just too damn convenient. He doesn’t get comfortable easily, but he’d be disappointed if he had to leave the place anytime soon.
Another one of these residents is Charlie DeMarco, a newly-retired soloist and Briggs’ old dance partner. It’s no coincidence, then, that (for economic reasons, Briggs argues) the two are now roommates, sharing the space the way they used to share the waxed wooden floors of a studio or a stage. Once you dance with a person for so long, you end up in perfect sync no matter what, and it can be a difficult habit to break. Briggs is still in the process of learning to accept this habit.
After descending a flight of stairs, lit by a moth-ridden lamp overhead, Briggs reaches his own front door, identical to Lauren and Donnie’s aside from the brass number affixed in the middle. He’s uncomfortable at the fact that soon, that identical door will belong to a stranger.
Once inside, Briggs takes himself through his usual routine: keys on the table, shoes off, hallway light on. There is no faint chatter of a television show or a phone conversation to be heard, just silence. Briggs is rather fond of silence.
For a second, Briggs thinks he’s alone, but then he sees Charlie.
In the dimly lit kitchen, Charlie stands at the stove, staring into a pot of pasta. Briggs lingers, keeping his distance as he leans against the wall, careful to leave the meticulously-hung frames next to him undisturbed.
He loves the moments in which Charlie is a loud blur of motion, an undulating Kandinsky painting in progress, but he loves the moments in which she is still, at peace and at rest, even more. She balances on one foot, her other crooked into a lazy passé against the inside of her knee. Even in the sparse light, the musculature of her legs is obvious; the supple curves and veins that cut along her thighs suggest a current of energy underneath that challenges the picture of idleness that Briggs sees before him.
“You know what they say about watched pots and never boiling, right?”
Charlie startles, stumbling back and aiming her wooden spoon at Briggs in defense. “Damn you,” she sighs, folding her arms.
Briggs can’t help but chuckle. Charlie relaxes, turning her attention back to the pasta, both feet now firmly planted on the floor. It can’t be more than a minute or so before the water starts bubbling violently, and Charlie curses as she moves the pot to another burner, steam rising from where drops of water have fallen onto the stove.
“Lauren’s actually leaving,” Briggs says.
Charlie scoffs. “Yeah, I know. She’s been telling everyone since Donnie got injured.”
“I kind of just thought it was, you know, Lauren being Lauren but… I just helped her pack up all her stuff.”
The eye contact between them remains minimal as Charlie drains the water from the pot. “Aren’t you chivalrous, huh?”
“I’m not Donnie,” Briggs retorts, situating himself behind Charlie, a hand tentatively climbing up her shoulder to rest on the muscular junction of her neck and collarbone.
“Like hell you aren’t,” Charlie snorts, wriggling away from Briggs and the kitchen sink with its pile of dishes.
That effectively finishes the riveting conversation, and Briggs settles for waiting at the dinner table in relative silence. The television is off; the curtains are drawn. This type of peace feels more fragile, more uneasy, than that found in Saturday morning adagios. This type of peace teeters on the tip of a satin box—one wrong move and the shank disintegrates from underneath it all.
In this case, the wrong move is the simple act of Charlie setting the table. The silverware clinks, so far from sounding harmonious.
“It’s not my great-great-grandmother’s recipe or anything,” Charlie sighs, sliding a bowl towards Briggs’ end of the table. “It’s, uh… Barilla.”
Despite the waves of steam emanating from the dish, Briggs takes a forkful. If it’s too hot, he doesn’t show it, instead nodding in appreciation. “Chuck, I’ve been eating takeout for the past week. I don’t care what it is, just as long as it’s not deep-fried.”
“Fair enough,” she replies, with no hint of humor in her voice.
Understandably, with the two principal soloists suddenly leaving the company, everyone has had to scramble a bit to tie up the many, many loose ends left behind. After painstaking days on end of re-blocking and rehearsing with understudies and corps, Briggs feels a bit like a wrung-out towel. Likewise, Charlie’s been taking up extra work sewing costumes and shoes for the corps as positions shift around and rehearsals are thrown into chaos. Really, a professional company ought to be more prepared, but Donnie was just about the last person anyone expected to have a career-ending injury. Now that the crutch has slipped, it’s up to people like Briggs and Charlie to hold everyone together.
“They’re sending a transfer over, from the company in D.C.,” Briggs changes the subject mid-bite, his words muffled through the spaghetti in his mouth.
Charlie just nods; if she’s surprised by this, it doesn’t show on her face at all.
“He’s won, I dunno, maybe two YAGP titles? Three?” Briggs continues, in hopes to sweeten the deal.
He’s met with an eye roll and a shrug. “And you’ve won it four times,” Charlie says, waving her fork at him. “Big deal.”
“Hey, it was less competitive in my day. Give the kid some credit.”
Having finished their meals, the conversation continues without the presence of scraping forks and mouth-full-of-food interjections. Neither Briggs nor Charlie make any move to clean up, comfortable where they are and afraid to lose a fleeting moment to something as mundane as dishes.
Charlie sighs, leaning back in her chair. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Okay, then. He’s starting next week.”
“What’s his name?”
“Michael,” Briggs says, hesitantly, as if he’s almost certain but can’t quite remember. “Michael Warren, I think?”
Standing up, Charlie puts an end to the conversation, punctuating its death with the screech of her chair against the tile floor. “I’ll have to look him up,” she says, reaching for Briggs’ empty bowl and silverware to put in the sink and neglect for a few more days.
“I’ve seen some of his stuff already. Technically speaking, he’s perfect.” Briggs chuckles as he says this, as if he’s planning on doing something to dismantle that perfection. Charlie knows him better than that, though, so she ignores it in favor of relaxing and combing through various videos online of this new kid.
“Damn,” she says, setting her phone down as the Satanella variation fades away. “No kidding.”
Briggs shoots her an I-told-you-so look as he sits down on the sofa next to her, feeling the ache in his lower back from helping Lauren move her furniture out.
“I hope they’re not bringing him in to replace Donnie, or make Lauren feel bad, or anything.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Briggs says, propping his feet up on the glass coffee table, adding to the gallery of smudges littering its surface. “Clarke actually told me something funny.”
Charlie raises an eyebrow, forcing herself to sit up straight instead of letting the couch cushions consume her.
“They’re transferring him here because they want me to train him.”