Work Text:
You’re seventeen, and that’s it.
There’s no nymph-like beauty to your blister-covered feet, no divine grace as they slice their way through the parterre. Your arms weren’t carved from marble, weren’t painted in mother-of-pearl, won’t ever inspire a single sonnet: all they’re good for is carrying your burden, oranges and sweets and a dozen little nothings, treats you trade for pistoles you trade for blander food. You’re seventeen, which means your thighs and ribs ache from pinching and slaps, but that too is a nothing that will fade in due time.
Just like your voice, straining over the capharnaum of barons and drunkards. Just like your voice, quiet when the curtains part — bleeding segments the audience feasts upon.
***
You’ve never heard this name before — three syllables that thunder and sing as loud as the trois coups.
Cyrano, you’ll whisper tonight, and every night after that, in the refuge of your too-hard bed; Cyrano, a strange name for a strange character. It caresses your tongue like honey, like wine, like neither of those things — beautiful, fleeting, unprecedented.
He must know the hold he has on women: précieuses sighing behind lace-adorned fans, buffet-girls trembling from something they can’t name. He exists so fiercely, so gently: how could he hope to escape his own glow?
You have very little, and you are even less; that doesn’t mean you’re not willing to share, and beg, and ache until he accepts your humble offering — a single grape, a glass of water fair, half a macaron. Cyrano’s gaze links with yours, his moustache brushes your sugar-coated hand, and for a split second, you live as boldly as he does.
***
Later, they’ll cut you out, rush you off the stage like he did Montfleury; your aching feet are nothing but a footnote, your loving arms lack the strength to hold the script over your head.
Now that you’re gone — carved out of alexandrins, painted over in expeditive prose — who will feed your gallant knight? In the desert of the silver screen, who will open their flask — who will pour water on his lips?
Once upon a time, in 1640 or 1897, you learnt what it meant to be a princess; then the clock struck twelve, the trois coups over and over again, and you were brought back to bruises and blisters. To the nothingness that clings to you.
You’re just seventeen
A single grape
A glass of water fair
Half a macaron
The rotting peel of a girl.