Work Text:
I think Knives’ piano Saw-trap in Trigun Stampede was neat, but I also feel like it probably messed up the tuning on his rig, you know? How do you attach a mechanism that makes the whole floor drop away to a piano without the sound getting distorted? Midvalley does not have a single priority in his life in the correct order, but he would think this is important and I agree with him.
For reference, the song Midvalley ends up playing for Knives: Stolen Moments
You have worked for plenty of men who said stupid things like “I’m something of a musician myself,” but you have never had to live with those men, and as it turns out, that’s an important distinction. You have learned this too late for it to be useful.
The kinds of men you used to work for plucked poorly strung violins or strummed bad guitars. Sometimes they sang. They generally offered only four to eight bars of music, clumsy with drink and nerves because it’s nervy stuff, playing music for people who play music, and the thought usually doesn’t occur to them until about the fifth note and your flat, polite smile.
The monster you currently work for knows much more than eight bars of music. He plays well, but he only knows the one fucking song, apparently, so on top of everything else, there’s that.
No one even bothered to tell you about the piano.
For weeks. For weeks. It woke you up, it stressed you out, it made you sit up and wonder why Hell had turned out to be so gentle. You spent a month thinking you were losing your mind before Leonef commented one day on the blessing of having beautiful music in the halls.
You grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “I haven’t been playing anything,” you cried. “They haven’t finished modifying my sax yet. What music? And what do you mean, beautiful? The goddamn piano’s out of tune.”
But there was the headline: the piano was real.
Because no one bothered to tell you about the piano before, you get the sense you’re not supposed to know about the piano, like a committee somewhere decided that the saxophone player is not allowed to touch the piano. Now that you know it’s real, you pace the halls with your eyes closed and your head cocked out like a roadrunner, trying to find the source of the noise and feeling insane.
Leonef says he can’t hear the bum note. You tell him he’s got lousy ears.
And even when you find the damn thing, you have to wait.
(“Wait” is a brave word for it. When you first figured out who was playing the instrument, whose music you’d been loudly complaining about to anyone who would listen, you spent a whole afternoon being violently sick. Finally, Leonef brought you water and bourbon and told you to stop being a child. You then spent many days pretending the music was fine, actually, but then you ran out of bourbon and Leonef wouldn’t give you any more.)
Beyond the presence of the monster you now work for, there’s a whole party happening in the room where the piano you didn’t know about gets played. It’s where Legato disappears to several times a day. Conrad goes in wringing his hands and comes out hanging his head. Elendira sticks a daring toe over the threshold and dances around the hall, waiting for him.
It’s a busy old room, the piano room, with lead team members and other faceless engineers coming and going all the time.
And what are they all doing in there? Not tuning the piano, that’s for sure.
When you get your chance, you're barely ready; you don’t even have tools. You are just raw-dogging this ill-advised, possibly illegal (?), completely suicidal piano tune-up.
The sight of the pipes jagging up to the ceiling gives you the latest in a long line of life-ending scares. But you quickly realize the pipes are just rigged up to look like an organ (an instrument you do not know how to tune; disaster) and the piano itself is still just a piano (an instrument you do know how to tune; result).
But the pipes aren’t finished giving you grief. They’ve displaced things, necessitated the rearranging of the layout of the whole instrument. You can’t get to the wires from above. Instead, you’ve got to dive below and worm your fingers up into the body.
Going under the piano means you can’t see the door or anyone who might come through it. But you only have this one shot, so it’ll have to do. You kick off your shoes, nudge the piano bench out of the way, and lay yourself under the beast.
You work.
Pianos are funny, even strange monster ones with decorative pipes attached. A horn can rest in your arms and connect to your lungs and live on you like an appendage, but pianos are a whole different beast. They’re bigger and smaller than they look, and they’re louder and quieter than you’d think. But it’s fine. You know you can’t understand it, so you don’t worry.
The work settles you in a way Leonef’s bourbon couldn’t. Despite it all, you forget everything (like an idiot). You’re calm.
After some indeterminate time (were you in a hurry? Surely not), the sound of flesh, heels and toes, padding on the marble floor beyond the piano comes to you, distorted. Elendira walks around barefoot, so it must be her steps augmented and burdened by the additional vibration of the body of pedals and wires hunkering over you. You tell her that you’re working and not to distract you.
The footsteps retreat, or at least they stop, and you’re not interested in much besides fixing the piano while you’ve got this rare minute to do it. You’ve become convinced in the past several minutes (hour?) that if you can fix the piano, you can fix everything else. You’re insane.
Then a bare foot—much bigger than the one you thought you heard—catches the tail of your jacket under its heel and drags you out from under the piano.
You stare up at Millions Knives. He stares down at you.
“I’ll be done with this in a minute,” you tell him, and you slide yourself back up under the piano.
You decide that didn’t just happen.
However: “Come out,” says Knives, “from under there. Now.”
You’re not done with tuning yet. But you do come out from under there and find the monster sitting cross-legged on the piano bench you moved aside before. You realize he’s been sitting there watching you for a while.
The monster—your boss—is giving you a look that normally sends you dry-heaving into the nearest cleaning supply closet.
But this time it’s different. This time, you have a piano.
He’s got the bench, but it’s fine, fuck the bench. You turn away and crouch to get level with the keys. You did this as a kid in clubs when you were first starting out, trying to make a name. You used to tuck the sax out of the way and plonk out a quick melody, to great effect. The sight of a musician switching instruments mid-gig makes people hysterical; you don’t know why. You’ve learned you don’t really have to understand much to get by.
You say, “Right. So. You have been playing this.”
You play his song, which is apparently the only song he knows; you've heard it enough times to learn it. You don't take it from the top because the introduction would take years and you find the whole first unit of the piece pretty self-indulgent. You just go from the bridge, the important part. The bit that’s been driving you mad is in the melody, but you go ahead and play the demented arpeggio underneath it as an afterthought; it’ll better highlight the discordant note that’s been killing you.
You play a truncated version of the full musical phrase, and then you repeat it, but slower. Then again, you deconstruct the measure containing the note, and then, for final emphasis, you hit the bum note hard, with support from the reconstructed chord below to support it. It’s awful every time; you don’t know how anyone on this sick ship can stand it.
You ask—you demand to know—how he is not hearing that.
Your boss says to stop. He says not to touch the bum key anymore. He says, “It’s for something you wouldn’t understand,” as if you’ve ever understood jack shit in your entire life.
And you say, “Well, it’s fucking up your piano.”
You go to play the note again to make your point, but your fingers, rather suddenly, have blades threaded between them. You’re penned in place but unharmed, for the moment.
This is the part you don’t get; this is the part from your recruitment day that’s distorted in your memory and still gives you night terrors. You don’t understand how the blades go where they go. You don’t understand how Millions Knives moves. You don’t understand what just happened. All you can think about is how you’re going to die playing the wrong instrument.
The monster says, “Play something else.”
When the blades retreat, they lift your fingers—gently, all things considered—and reposition them further down the keyboard.
On some primal instinct, you launch into ‘Stolen Moments’. You haven’t played it since you were a punk trying to show off (you are, in fact, currently a punk trying to show off). You think you can make it work without percussion (you’d fucking better make it work without percussion). You begin troubleshooting the limitations of your set arrangement on the fly.
The problems ahead of you become the very normal problems of a gig night. You’ve dug yourself into a bit of a hole by starting with ‘Stolen Moments’, which is the most advanced piano solo you know. The rest of your keyboard rep is pretty basic stuff compared to what you can do on your sax, literally covers of ‘La Vie En Rose’ and the like. A discerning audience would take issue. Is your audience discerning?
You risk a glance and see that the monster has settled his chin on his fist. He is watching your fingers with intense focus, eyes as wide as coins.
Well, damn. You could probably get away with ‘Chopsticks’.
You do end up playing ‘La Vie En Rose’ and blend it into ‘Autumn Leaves’. You work through the standards of the seasons in turn, aware that your repertoire is really not huge. You could branch out a little, get into the trainee’s classics (like ‘Claire de Lune’), but there are some songs to which you simply will not resort (like ‘Claire de Lune’), and some which to be perfectly honest you’re not actually that good at playing (like, dammit, ‘Claire de Lune’). ‘Night and Day’ is better anyway; ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ gives you time to think of more.
You forget everything else: your bare feet, your legs shaking under you, the monster watching you play. You are an idiot; you are calm.
You finally run out of steam on a cover of ‘What a Wonderful World’. At its close, you lift your fingers from the keys as though disarming a bomb. And there, you just hold, waiting. You don’t even look; you can’t.
The monster inhales deeply, as if awakening from slumber.
He rises and says, “Do not play that first song ever again.”
And because you are God’s perfect idiot—you genuinely did not understand the feedback and you are trying to make sure you got it—you say, brightly, “This one?” and noodle the first few notes of ‘Stolen Moments’.
“No.”
Your fingers flinch off the keys. Why he doesn’t rip you to pieces on the spot you never quite figure out. You will never figure it out; you are always waiting for it to finally happen.
But he just takes another of those deep, awakening breaths and says, “The first one.”
“Ah.” You keep your palms up as if he’s got a gun on you.
He leaves.
You stay in place until the muscles in your thighs remember that you’ve been crouched at the piano for ages, possibly years.
Then you faint.
Weeks later—when the incident is barely even relevant anymore—you hear a discussion that definitely wasn't meant for your ears, practically a whole committee deciding what to do with the saxophone player.
(No one's got the trick of your hearing down; no one's cared to understand it, frankly, which suits you fine.)
It's a lengthy, circular debate that you struggle to track, but it essentially boils down to your complete lack of nerve or devotion to the cause. There is also some lingering controversy about your impromptu concert, and you take that feedback on board: the saxophone player was not supposed to be allowed to touch the piano.
Packed up in the euphemisms is a clear death sentence. After so much time in Hell, there's an ending in sight. You can really see it, and you are calm.
That note of hope goes sour when the monster—your boss—says, "Yes, but he's better when he's playing. He'll be fine. Give him the assignment."
You don't stick around to find out what the assignment is. You spend the rest of the afternoon being violently sick as piano chords drift in and out of your hearing. Finally, Leonef brings you water and bourbon and tells you to stop being a child.