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Lenore was at the piano again, playing with a quiet reverence that was perhaps meant only for herself. The notes, too light to stay contained for long, drifted through the connected rooms, sliding through the cracks of the doors to settle in forgotten nooks and crannies; behind a lamp, under a chaise. The trail of sugar led back up to the doorway, and that was where it grew bitter, stained with a lip-curling aftertaste.
Lenore had not yet noticed her; caught up in the music as she was, she simply could not. Her fingers danced over the ivory, so slender and sharp with bone that they may well have belonged to a corpse. Pulled by marionette strings to perform something beyond the scope of her own consciousness, led farther still by something unspeakable. They were red at the tips, sore from minutes that bled into hours, sharp against the dullness of the calluses that clung to the pads. Tick, tick, came the clock of the mansion- grandfather clock, solid mahogany- a metronome for her tortured movements that seemed to grow faster with the music.
Annabel Lee lingered at the door to watch, arms folded over one another and embracing herself at the waist. The lacy white of her gown stirred the floor, breathing terrible delicacy into the heat of the room, and the soft sound remained like an echo long after the piano came to a stop.
Lenore looked over her shoulder, and if Annabel had needed any further proof, it came in the form of comically wide eyes. “I didn’t-”
“I know.” Annabel allowed only mild amusement to spill into her voice. “I’ve not been listening for even a minute yet. You ought to have gone on.”
She wasn’t sure, precisely, why she lied so. Perhaps it was out of respect for Lenore’s clear desire for privacy; more likely, it was to keep herself in check, to remember the distance that she could never admit to crossing.
“... Well .” Lenore glanced down, brushing the keys one last time with her knuckles, as if to deliver a good-bye kiss. "There isn't anything left of the score, anyway."
"A pity." Annabel drifted closer, feeling the burn of Lenore's eyes all the while. It was something to be felt more than seen, after all, the way those eyes could pierce. "Is it incomplete?"
"What makes you say that?" Lenore frowned a bit, lashes brushing her sharp cheeks in a way that seized Annabel with the awful desire to brush them with her thumb, to give in to that pressing urge to touch.
She seated herself instead at the other end of the bench, leaving some amount of space between them. It was incredible, really, how a mere few centimeters was capable of seeming such terrible distance. "I don't mean any insult, pet,” and she smiled, swaying a bit closer to the piano, “but I'm afraid it's rather obvious."
Lenore cast her gaze away in time with a heaving sigh, but for once offered no objection. “It was never finished, no,” she answered shortly, lips pressing together, and elaborated no further, instead snatching the sheet music from the piano as if in a belated attempt to conceal it from Annabel.
It was too late; Annabel had already seen where the notes, blossoms of black ink with a certain flair to the penmanship, abruptly dropped off into an abyss of white. She had also seen the faint scrawls that followed in a less elegant hand, as if someone else had once attempted to finish the piece but had done their best to erase any evidence of it. Playing innocent, she peered after the tail end of the parchment anyway as if to catch some phantom glimpse. “Is that so? Forgive me, but I don’t recognize the style at all. Who is the composer, if I may…?”
She knew, of course, who it was, who it had been; it was no difficult guess, both from her own prior knowledge and from Lenore’s behavior, and yet the words still spilled out into the stiff air between them, somehow both unbidden and perfectly deliberate.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Lenore, sharpness tempered by the way she refused to meet Annabel’s gaze. Her eyes were fixated at a point just over her shoulder instead; Annabel nearly feared that if she were to turn and look as well, Lenore might have bored a hole through the wall through willpower alone. Clearing her throat, she went on, all in a rush: “He… you wouldn’t be familiar with the work of such an American contemporary, I daresay.”
“Hmm. You’re likely correct,” Annabel agreed easily enough, leaning a casual arm against the piano. She mulled it over for another beat, watching the flicker of Lenore’s eyes, just unsteady enough to betray her, and then: “Well, it’s beautiful.” Entirely candid for once, with the reward of Lenore’s full attention.
“....” Lenore’s gaze softened at last as they skimmed the pages, still clutched between her hands tight enough to wrinkle. Her lips parted as if she meant to speak, but no sound emerged; her fingers only stiffened, nearly ripping.
Annabel hesitated- shrugging her mass of curls back, feeling the familiar warning clench of her chest- and then reached over, placing her bare hand over Lenore’s. Lenore flinched a bit, surely thanks in no part to the fact that Annabel tended to run a bit cold (a fact she was only reminded of with the heat of another’s skin against hers), but after a sideways glance, unwound slightly, knuckles unclenching. The sudden flush of her pale skin was something unmistakable, though she played it off well enough, smoothing over the crinkled paper with a flick of her thumb. “My apologies. I’ve been having flare ups all day.”
Lenore was not a good liar, but she didn’t seem aware of that fact at all, simply setting the papers back, face-down now, on top of the piano. “Nothing too terrible,” she hastened to add, swinging her legs over the side of the bench as if to prove it, “I don’t require rest or anything of the sort.”
“I wasn’t going to suggest it.” Annabel tilted her head, letting the late afternoon sun caress her hair as it spilled in through the broad windows. Though it had rained earlier in the morning, leaving sparkling kisses of water scattered like stars among the plants, the day was calm now; only a gentle breeze skittered through the foliage, not even stirring the lake. Half of Lenore’s face was washed with the tender rays as well, highlighting the gauntness of her cheek even as she visibly relaxed.
“Annabel Lee,” she murmured, folding those slender hands slowly in her lap, one over the other. “I’m not insane, you know. Truly. I’m not. ”
I know, Annabel yearned to tell her. Yearned to reach out, to fit the sharp crook of Lenore’s jaw into the soft curve of her palm, imperfectly perfect pieces of a puzzle made only for each other; yearned to share her own troubles, to speak of the tightness of her throat, the terrible flutter in her stomach, the throbbing at the base of her skull, always on the brink of escaping. She knew, though, that she could not, or perhaps simply that she would not, and even as she squeezed Lenore’s hand one last time, still resting under her own, she was already pulling back. “Be that as it may, pet-” letting the corners of her lips quirk up in a practiced manner, just dry enough to suggest a different implication- “it’s undeniable that you’re prone to certain spells.”
Lenore exhaled, clearly frustrated, and flexed her hand against the rush of cool air as Annabel removed hers. “I’m-” She sagged a bit, too lost in contemplation to be quarrelsome and too apprehensive to risk being carted off by one of the maids. A silence coated the air, somewhat gloomy and settling heavy between them, and Annabel was distinctly aware of the fact that she had caused it.
It wasn’t as if she had a choice , she told herself, for there was no other path to a bearable ending for both of them; even as the nagging voice in the back of her mind pulled on her ear and tugged at her hair, laughing in an ugly cadence, and said, Is that true, Annabel Lee, or do you lie to yourself as well?
Annabel closed her eyes, barely holding back a shiver- not in front of Lenore, please- and regained herself in an instant, shifting her hand behind the puff of her skirts and curling it into a fist so tight that her nails dug crescent moons into her soft palm. She peeked at the sheet music again, laving a smooth finger over the still-crooked edge, praying that Lenore had been too swept up in her own troubles to notice anything amiss. “Would you play it over again?”
“What?” Lenore turned to glance at her, brows furrowing over the sharp bridge of her nose.
“Would you play it again,” Annabel prompted, nodding towards the score, and, daring to push further, barely missing a beat, “for me?”
“...” Lenore blinked slowly, lifting a hand to scrub at her face a bit as if that would remove the scarlet stain blooming over her cheeks- really, she was unfortunate to have such pale skin- and shifted on the bench. Lowered that hand, lifted her other, until they met in the middle, hovering over the keyboard. “Well. I.. suppose I certainly can, if you’d really like.”
“I’d like that very much, pet,” Annabel breathed out, and as the first notes began again, this time folding into a soft embrace as they surrounded her, she leaned over, resting against Lenore’s side. The notes faltered for a beat before picking up again with greater vigor than before, and Annabel smiled, a real smile this time, closing her eyes again; and even as the music started to draw back to its open conclusion, she lingered still, chasing the warmth at her shoulder, searching, aching for a way to make it last.