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At night, the channel front is as silent as "the city that never sleeps" can be, moonlight pooling on cracked and dusted window sills. At this hour, the next loudest noise is the hum of idling trucks and the rustle of mice across the floor.
This corner of the bay occasionally, every now and then, falls quiet enough that one would need to stop and hold their breath to catch the soft sound of satin-wrapped shoes kissing dusty wood slats.
Miles isn't worried about Gwen for a brief, shining moment. The city, for once, has lulled. His ears don't ring with danger, and the gentle breeze flying past his mask warns of impending summer heat but whispers "not yet." It's the witching hour, but the ghosts and ghouls have taken a moment's rest, and Miles rides the high of a smooth patrol on gentle web arcs, content after a gentle goodnight to Gwen. He figures she's home and warm by now.
He lands and his breath holds just long enough to pick up on the tinny sound of violins bleeding through headphones from a nearby building.
It takes him ten milliseconds to register the music. It takes him another ten milliseconds to alter course with curiosity and a flick of his wrist that he can just hear Peter B. grinning at. With a quick layout, he set down lightly on the roof of a shoemaker-turned-art-gallery-turned-baby-clothes-store, aiming him directly at a wall of cracked and faded bay windows. Pooled moonlight spills onto warped and aging wood and across a shock of blonde hair he'd know blindfolded and tied upside down in rebar. Distantly, the occasional soft chock that had settled across his subconscious registers as the sound of pointe shoes landing on aged wood, joining the music of what he knows as "Le Départ des invités La Nuit" to display the night before him.
She's painted in starlight, and Miles can't quite catch his breath.
He remembers when she showed him this video. In the film, she's thirteen, all limbs and pinched shoulders and bright eyes, doused in a wisp of white that floats across a stage of glitter and gifts. Clara had been her debut role just weeks before she encountered her spider. When the night is quiet and rounds are done, and she's warm and soft in his arms, she whispers of the dream in pointe shoes the bite had destroyed.
Rising gracefully in front of him, she's eighteen and still wrapped in her suit, eyes wide open and fixed on what he knows, in her mind's eye, is a sparkling Christmas tree rising from the ground as her arms flutter up and down beside her, a delicate balance held on the tip of her shoes and years of well-trained ankles. She's breathing hard, and Miles guesses that he's rather late to this game, that her imaginary Fritz has already broken Clara's toy nutcracker, and that if Miles continues to observe, he'll watch her dive into the roles of fairies and flowers. Miles swings down a nearby fire escape and enters the service door of her building. Three floors down, he can just make out the sound of her gentle landings, and he recalls the smell of a nearby rose garden as he laid his head in her lap while her eyes got that faraway look she got when she talked about something she loved. He'd caught her looking at him like that once and hadn't stopped blushing for hours.
"Miles, she was so mean, Miles. So mean. Every other sentence was, 'in Paris,' this and 'in Paris,' that. If she could hear even the tiniest bit of your landing, she'd make you restart the whole piece. We'd spend ages banging our shoes against the walls. Some girls preferred to sew a cushion around the toes, and before shows, we'd all sit around, and Miles—"
She tilts his face up by the chin from where he rests in her lap, and it takes every ounce of his self-control to keep his hands from running through the sunlight haloing through her hair.
"...I swear, trying to get these expensive little death traps show-ready took nearly as long as the show itself." Her face is alight with memories as she reaches across him to play the video.
Sliding through the propped fire exit, he's made his way to lean behind a support pillar, where he decides the course of action that's least likely to get him strung up from the ceiling is to sit and watch.
Glancing through the fine haze of dust, he catches sight of her fingers as they graze a shaft of moonlight, her working leg strong and extended behind her, back impossibly arched, and expression turned heavenward. Miles files away the pride that surfaces for remembering this brief move as an arabesque for later before she swells with a small jump across the stage she's created. He couldn't stop his eyebrows from rocketing sky-high if he wanted to as she floats into a wide, full leg leap, her expression changing with the music Miles can pick up building in her ears. If thirteen-year-old Gwen in the video was elegant and graceful as she slid back from the ever-growing tree, eighteen-year-old Gwen is magical, creating a story out of plaster dust and stars and the backlit silhouette of the city. He catches the crescendo of cymbals as she folds to the ground, Clara caught off guard by the enormity of the tree that Miles can nearly touch.
A series of pirouettes - "...en dedans," she'd whispered in the park. "En dedans. For sure. Yeah. I know what that is." She'd huffed with laughter as her eyes returned to the phone in his hands, and he'd lingered on the curve of her mouth as she went back to running fingers gently over his curls. Miles is pretty sure it's her that smells like roses, not the garden. With a flourish of her arms, her curtains of dust close, and the act is finished. She steps back into a pane of moonlight, dusted in sweat and breathing rapidly but when she turns she's glowing, and the air has stilled along with the remaining air in Miles' lungs.
She faces the sky, bathed in light as she tilts her head back to take a drink, and Miles' gaze catches on the tear tracks that break a path through the exertion lining her face.
"I tried to go back. I tried so hard." Her face had been pressed to his shirt, and Miles was absolutely certain it was her hair that smelled like roses, no garden to be found. The air between them tasted like salt.
"Everything was still so loud, and I couldn't get it out of my head how these people, my friends, Madame Merault, were all my responsibility now, and I just can't... I can't let go of the future that vanished when I got bitten."
He'd reached down to find the source of the wet spot on his shirt, wiping warm hands across damp cheeks.
But this night, a smile graces her face as she releases the water bottle, and he can see her brushing at her face as she packs up, pulling her phone out. Miles' pocket buzzes, and in the time it takes him to read her message and glance back up through misty eyes, all he catches is a curl of dust and moonlight on the breeze.
"Love you too. <3"