Chapter Text
there are some kinds of people who enter your life like a melody you have always known. not because you have heard it before, but because your silence has been waiting for it to arrive.
daniela andrea avanzini llorente discovered this truth on a random tuesday afternoon in a late october, when the zurich light fell through the conservatory windows like liquid gold, and the girl with the cello case on her back walked into room 114 as if she had always belonged there.
daniela had been practicing the chaconne from bach’s partita no. 2 — the one that made her feel like she was falling upward into something infinite — when the door opened without a knock. she was ready to scold whoever the fuck had just interrupted her peaceful practice, her bow hovering above the strings, and she turned her head.
the need of chastising the person who was ‘disrespecting’ her before; faded away almost instantly
‘the girl’ was tall. that was the first thing daniela noticed. tall in the way of willow trees and cathedral ceilings, with dark and straight hair that fell past her shoulders in careless waves, and eyes with the color of rain on cobblestones. she carried her cello like it was part of her body, an extension of her spine, and she wore a faded denim jacket covered in stains, probably because of the rain outside, there was a huge sticker of the philippines’ flag on her cello case, and some phrases in tagalog that daniela couldn't read.
"sorry," ‘the girl’ said, and her voice was high and warm, like honey stirred into jasmine tea that you will drink in the heated autumn mornings. "professor bannerman said I could use this room for storage...”
she stopped for a moment, then started speaking again with a shy smile like this was kind of embarrassing in some ways, “uhm—my usual practice space flooded."
daniela blinked. tried really hard not to smile because of ‘the girl’s’ bright-red face. her violin was still tucked under her chin, her fingers frozen on the fingerboard. "this is...i practice here."
"i see that." ‘the girl’ smiled slightly, and it was very different from the smirk before, this was the kind of smile that suggested she was always on the verge of laughter, even when nothing was particularly funny. "i’m sophia, by the way. sophia elizabeth guevera laforteza. but sophia is fine. or soph. and…hey-you-with-the-violin?"
"daniela."
"daniela," sophia repeated, and the way she said it, like she was tasting each syllable, turning it over on her tongue, made something strange happen in daniela's chest. a flutter. a shift.
"you play beautifully," sophia continued, setting her cello case against the far wall. "the chaconne. my grandfather used to play it on guitar, i didn’t know that we could play bach on a guitar?”
she raised one of her eyebrow and make a laugh that sounded like something was unbelievable.
“he said bach understood that grief and joy are the same emotion, just moving in different directions."
daniela lowered her violin. her heart was doing something inconvenient that she didn’t like really much. something that felt suspiciously like recognition. "your grandfather sounds wise."
"he was." Sophia's expression flickered, just for a moment, like a candle in a draft. "he died three years ago. this cello was once to be his. he gave it to me as a present for my eight-teenth birthday before he…you know—left me. it's even older than my mother."
there was a pause. the afternoon light shifted, spilling across the worn wooden floor, and daniela realized she was still staring at the woman, and she can felt something heated inside her two hollow cheeks. she looked away first, busying herself with rosin and the careful tightening of her bow.
"ohm..you know, you can store your cello here," she said quietly. "if you need to."
"so generous," sophia said, and daniela could hear the smile still in her voice. "i’ll try not to be a nuisance."
"you’re not." the words came out too quickly, too soft. daniela realized what she just did to a girl she met barely five minutes before,
what the fuck did i just say to her? the thought screaming inside her.
daniela cleared her throat. "i mean—yeah it's totally fine. the room is big enough for two instruments obviously."
and maybe, just the maybe of maybe, some treacherous and hidden part of her mind whispered, for two hearts as well.
she completely ignored it. she was good at ignoring things. she had been ignoring the ache in her wrist for months, the way her mother's voice sounded thinner and less excited on the phone each sunday, the fact that she had not written a single original piece in over a year because every time she tried, the page remained stubbornly, stupidly and terrifyingly blank.
but she could not ignore sophia.
that was the problem. and she did not know how to stop them from being a “problem”.
problem was solvable, problem can still be solved even when they’re hard. so what does this actually mean? she asked herself
—————————
they naturally fell into a rhythm, as these things tend to do. even though sometimes daniela would think about how to tell sophia to throw her a pencil because she was too lazy to walk there just to take it. even though sometimes sophia’s heart begged her to just walk to daniela, then sink down and sat next to her casually like they were not strangers at all. even though sometimes when sophia hit a wrong note, she would scream her throat out and made daniela’s soul nearly jumped out her body, and she would shouted at sophia: “what the fuck are you doing sophia laforteza?” or “please just tell me when you are about to scream to let me cover my precious ears.” or “you should attend the choir or vocal classes you know. leave my ears alone.”, and sophia would laughed so hard that she just tightly wrapped her hands around her belly and lay down, and daniela would pretend to be annoyed, even though she was smiling too.
daniela practiced from three to six every afternoon in room 114, and sophia began arriving at four thirty, her cello case thumping against her back as she walked so careless everyday, her presence filling the space like warm water filling a cold cup. she would set up in the corner, tune in silence. and then, without asking and without announcing (sometimes), she would join daniela’s playing smoothly after some rhythms of the metronome.
not in competition. never in competition. in conversation.
daniela would begin with something simple, a fragment of pärt, perhaps, or the opening bars of the koreanska vaggvisa—and sophia would somehow magically find the harmony beneath it, the shadow melody that daniela had not known was there before. they would play for hours and hours without speaking, the music weaving between them like a third presence, like something alive and breathing and impossibly tender.
daniela noticed on the fifth day that sophia’s rosin was cracked. a small thing, a hairline fracture across the dark amber surface, barely visible unless you were looking.
but daniela was always looking.
she didn't say anything. she simply bought a new cake of rosin—the good kind, the one sophia used, the one that came in a navy blue box from the shop near the wasse kirche, and left it on sophia's music stand.
no note and no explanation.
the next afternoon, sophia arrived with her cello and stopped mid-step when she saw the box. her fingers hovered over it, then she looked at her daniela.
daniela pretended to be very, extremely and suspiciously interested in her sheet music.
"you absolute idiot," sophia said slowly, "are impossible."
mind you, a single rosin cost about twenty dollars.
"i don't know what you're talking about. and was that first part necessary though?"
sophia just laughed—a small, breathy sound. she opened the rosin, ran her bow across it once, twice. then she set it down and walked to daniela's violin case.
when daniela went home that night, she found a single pink eraser tucked inside her case. the kind you use to erase pencil marks from sheet music. The kind she had mentioned it once (if she can still remembered, it was a long long long time ago) and that she could never find because they stopped making them or those erasers sold out at some point.
attached to the eraser was a tiny sticky note, quick and messy handwriting, there were six cats with big eyes everywhere around the note, it said: "now we're even."
daniela slept with the eraser on her nightstand.
she never erased a single note with it. it was too precious.
and so every morning—after the first few very awkward weeks, when they were just sitting as furthest as possible from each other, minding their own bussiness while trying not to dart their eyes over the other one because of curiosity—sophia arrived with two cups of coffee. honey for herself. oat milk for daniela.
but after two weeks, daniela noticed something: sophia’s cup was always full when she walked in, but daniela’s cup was never quite full enough. There was always a small gap at the top—room for something.
one day, daniela arrived early and watched sophia come through the door. sophia set the cups down, then pulled a small carton of oat milk from her jacket pocket. she poured a precise amount into daniela’s cup—not too much, not too little—and then tucked the carton away.
she did this every day. she carried oat milk in her pocket so daniela’s coffee would be exactly the way she liked it.
daniela’s chest ached.
—————————
the first time they spoke about something other than music was the day the rain came.
it rained like the first day they met each other. heavy, unpredictable and surprised.
it arrived without warning—a sudden deluge that turned zurich’s cobblestones into mirrors and trapped them both in room 114 long after their practice had ended. daniela stood at the window, watching the water cascade from the eaves, and sophia sat cross-legged on the floor, her cello resting against her shoulder like a sleeping child.
"my mother wanted me to be a doctor," sophia said, breaking the silence. her voice was casual, but daniela had learned to hear the things beneath it, the slight tension in her jaw, the way her fingers traced patterns on the floor. "she said music was a hobby, not a life. my father said nothing, because he never says anything, and my grandmother said I should follow the music because the music would never leave me, even when people did."
daniela turned from the window. "and your grandmother was right?"
sophia looked up, and her eyes were very dark in the gray light. "she died six months after I started conservatory. the music stayed."
there was a weight to the words, a grief so old and so familiar that it had become part of her, like bone or breath. daniela felt it resonate in her own chest, echo against her own losses: her father's absence, her family’s silence, the way her mother's love had always felt conditional on perfection.
"i’m sorry," daniela said.
"don’t be." sophia smiled, but it was a different smile than before, smaller, more honest. "grief is just love with nowhere to go. my grandfather told me that too. i’ve decided to let mine travel through my cello instead."
daniela crossed the room and sat down across from her, close enough to see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes, the faint scar above her left eyebrow, the way her lower lip was slightly chapped from the cold.
daniela was stunned by then, all of her eyes were locked on sophia’s face. even though she was sad, but the sad was so beautiful and vulnerable on her that made daniela’s heart ached in a way the cannot explained.
she freezed there for a whole thirty seconds.
which basically made sophia laughed helplessly.
“what?” sophia asked
“n-no, nothing. it’s just that—“
and then silence came. the window was opened of course, wind flew through the small peck of it and made some of sophia’s hair get tangled up.
daniela straightened it, tucked it behind sophia’s ears before realized what the heck she was doing and immediately back off with a really-great-heavy-bright-red face.
“it’s just what, daniela?”
“uhm..i think we should walk back now. it’s getting late, i don’t want you to be cold.”
daniela changed the subject almost instantly. she turned her back and put her violin into its case. avoid sophia’s eyes as much as she can because of her so-so-red face.
sophia didn’t say anything after. she was so lost at daniela’s beautiful and twinkling eyes the moment dani stopped the hair from interrupting her “view”.
she hate to be interrupted while was admiring. sophia thought. and smiled like an idiot, the one that made her eyes wrinkled, her lips pressed into a thin line, curved up a little, and her body slightly shaking because of embarrassment.
then they walked back together. with absolutely no particular destination. they both lived in dorms, same building and floor but different apartment.
but they didn’t walk back to that old and clacking place yet.
that was somehow the first stage to their mystery. where love was so big and precious that no word could possibly describe. where they heal each others’ wounds with an impossible sincerity and softness.
and so, walking around their university in the black sky of zurich,
their hands were locked together. with daniela’s thumb tracing a small circle at the back of sophia’s palm, sometimes she tightened it with a force that just enough to make sophia laugh a little and make daniela’s heart clench “a little” more.
im so so whipped. the sentence grew louder in daniela’s mind as she felt sophia moved their intertwined hands into her jacket’s pocket. and pretending nothing had just happened and how herself, sophia elizabeth guevera laforteza, can easily found daniela’s heartbeat under daniela’s wrist that was speeding up so fast she thought daniela might die.
—————————
december arrived like a held breath.
the conservatory prepared for the winter showcase—a performance that would determine which students were invited to study abroad in vienna the following years. daniela had been preparing for months, practicing the paganini caprice no. 24 until it lived in her muscles, in her dreams, in the space between her thoughts. it was opened for every students, and daniela had asked sophia about the reason why she didn’t attend. sophia just simply said that she wanted to stay in zurich, and that she had found her dream school — the zurich university of the arts.
but something had changed in daniela.
she found herself get distracted during practice, her eyes drifting to the corner where sophia sat, her fingers wandering into harmonies that were not written in the score. professor bannerman noticed. she said nothing, but her silences were louder than her own words.
"you’re playing differently," she observed one afternoon, after daniela had stumbled through a passage she usually played in her sleep. "more freely. more... emotionally. but less precisely."
"is that bad?"
manon bannerman considered the question. "it is different. whether it is bad depends on what you are trying to say."
daniela thought about this as she walked home that evening, her violin case heavy on her back, the december cold wind cutting through her coat. she was trying to say something, she realized. she had been trying to say it for weeks, but the words would not come, so she poured them into her playing instead, into the slight hesitation before a downbeat, the extra weight on a sustained note, the way she lingered on the silences between phrases.
she was trying to say: i think i am falling in love with you and i do not know what to do about it.
she was trying to say: when you play, my world makes sense in a way it never has before.
she was trying to say: please don't ever leave.
but she said none of these things. instead, she practiced. and practiced. and practiced, until her wrist ached and her mind blurred and she could no longer tell where the music ended and she began.
—————————
times gone by, the pressure was building up constantly and unstoppably.
daniela was in the middle of the paganini—the difficult variation with the left-hand pizzicato, the one that required her fingers to move faster than thought—when her e string snapped.
it was not the breaking that stopped her heart. strings break; it was the nature of the instrument, the price of passion. it was the sound: a sharp, high cry, like something wounded, and then silence.
she stood frozen, the broken string dangling from her peg, and felt something inside her crack along with it.
she felt everything snapped into her face one by one. the confusion. the yearning. the waiting. the depression. the fear. the weaknesses. the loneliness and also the love.
"i can't do this," she whispered.
sophia looked up from her cello. "what?"
"i can't—" daniela’s voice broke. she set down her violin with shaking hands, pressed her palms against her eyes, and tried to remember how to breathe. "i’ve been playing this piece for six months. six months, and it's still not right. it’s never going to be right. i’m never going to be good enough."
"daniela—"
"no." she turned away, her back to sophia, her shoulders rigid. "you don't understand. you are literally a distraction. you are always here and it distracts me so fucking much i can’t bear it. my mother expects me to win. my teacher expects me to win. everyone expects me to be perfect, and i’m not, i’m not, and the only time i feel like myself anymore is when i’m playing with you, but that's not—that's not real, that's just—"
"that’s just what?" sophia's voice was calm, but there was an edge beneath it, a tension that daniela had never heard before.
"that’s just me imagining things and that you are like a shield, running away from the things I'm supposed to be doing."
the words hung in the air, ugly and heavy. daniela waited for sophia to argue, to reassure her, to tell her she was wrong. but sophia said nothing.
when daniela finally turned around, sophia was packing her cello.
"what are you doing?"
"i’m giving you space." sophia’s movements were deliberate, unhurried, but her hands were trembling. "you clearly need to practice without distractions."
"you-you’re not a distraction. look, soph, i-i’m so-"
"aren’t i?" sophia looked up, and her eyes were bright—not with tears, but with something fiercer. something that looked like the beginning of heartbreak.
“daniela avanzini. you just told me that i was and i am your shield. and then before that, you said that i am a distraction to you. what the fuck does that supposed to mean?”
she nearly raised her voice. but the thought of making her daniela scared was unbearable, so she just quietly, calmly said it and shivered with every single words.
then she added.
“daniela, i sit in this room every day and watch you pour yourself into music that isn't yours. you play bach like you're trying to prove something to a ghost. you play paganini like you're fighting a war. and when you play with me…" her voice caught. "when you play with me, you finally breathe. but you don't even notice. or maybe you do, and it scares you."
"it doesn't scare me."
"then what the heck is this?" sophia gestured between them. "what are we doing, and what are we, daniela? because i can't—i can't keep pretending to not see anything. and i can’t bare the cruel words you just threw at my face. do you know how painful it is to be called a “distraction” by the most important person in your world? but i just can’t pretending i don't notice the way you look at me when you think i’m not watching. pretending i don't dream about your hands holding mine one more time. pretending that when you play, i don't fucking fall in love with you a little more every single time."
the room stopped.
not metaphorically, “livingly” and unrealistically. daniela felt time freeze, felt the air became solid around her, felt the weight of sophia’s words press against her chest like a physical thing.
"you’re in love with me?" she asked, and her voice was barely a whisper.
sophia laughed—a short, broken sound. "i’ve got no fucking idea why i was and i am in love with you. and i’m tired, daniela. i’m so tired of being careful. please just tell me to back off and i will. i don’t want to just keeping hopes and then burn it by myself. i am so so so exhausted."
daniela crossed the room in three steps.
she did not plan it. she did not think about it. she simply moved, like waves in the oceans and papers in the wind, without thought, without hesitation, following something deeper than logic. she took sophia’s face in her hands,
and she kissed her.
it was not a gentle kiss. it was desperate and uncertain and full of all the things she had been too afraid and terrified to say. sophia made a sound against her mouth—a small, surprised noise that turned into a sigh or a moan, daniela had lost track. sophia moved her hands to daniela’s shoulder, not pushing her away, pulling her closer.
they stood like that for what felt like hours, the broken string forgotten, the conservatory forgotten, the entire world reduced to the warmth of sophia’s lips and the steady beat of her heart beneath daniela's palm.
then daniela’s hands traveled to sophia’s waist, she pulled her even closer and felt sophia gasped in a shocking and surprising sound.
sophia’s hands didn’t uselessly stay there, it wrapped around daniela’s neck after what felt like an eternity because of hesitation.
she is so sweet, like morning and everything. daniela commanded after tasted the sweetness inside sophia’s lips.
oh i love her. in every ways that a human could possibly love. sophia smiled against the pressure of their mouth pressing together.
and when they finally pulled apart, sophia was smiling so hard her cheeks ached. it was the real smile, the one that reached her eyes, the one that made her look like she had just discovered something wonderful.
"okay," sophia said softly. "okay."
daniela rested her forehead against sophia’s with her hands still on soph’s curve waist. "i’m sorry i’m a mess."
"luckily, i like your mess."
"it’s a very large mess."
sophia kissed the corner of daniela’s mouth. "good thing i have very large hands together."
daniela laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her, bright and unguarded. and sophia's eyes lit up like she had just heard her favorite piece for the first time.
and then an idea popped up into daniela’s genius mind.
daniela looked at her violin, still sitting on its stand with the broken string dangling. she looked at sophia’s cello, half-packed in its case. and then she reached for the piano in the corner, the old upright that no one used because it was probably out of tune, daniela guessed.
i haven’t touched a piano in months, or maybe years. i have no idea. lost track of time i think so.
she sat down on the bench and placed her hands on the keys. thet were cold, chipped, uneven. but when she began to play, something shifted.
it was the piece she had been writing. the messy, uncertain, impossible piece that had no name and no form and no purpose except that it existed, because her mind was always thinking about sophia’s everything at night without stopping. she played it differently now, with sophia’s surprising eyes on her back and sophia's kiss still warm on her lips. she played it not as an apology or regret, but as an offering.
when she finished, the silence was different too. fuller. more alive.
"i didn’t know you could play a piano," Sophia said quietly. "why are you so beautifully and carefully created in this world?"
daniela turned on the bench. smiled so big that the muscles in her face was literally fighting against each other. then she asked, "will you help me finish it?"
sophia crossed the room and sat down beside her, their shoulders touching, their breath mingling in the cold december air. "i thought you'd never ask."
—————————
they worked on the piece for three weeks.
it was a strange collaboration. part composition, part conversation, part something neither of them had words for. daniela would play a phrase on the piano, sometimes add some violin into it, and sophia would hum a countermelody. sophia would write down a chord progression, and daniela would shake her head and rewrite it in a different key. they argued about dynamics and tempo and whether the second movement should be in a major or minor key. they argued until their voices were hoarse, until they were laughing, until they forgot what they had been arguing about in the first place.
and through it all, they fell deeper.
it was not the falling of fairy tales, not a single moment of surrender, but a thousand small ones. the way sophia tucked a loose strand of hair behind daniela's ear the same way daniela did before. the way daniela traced the scar above sophia’s eyebrow with her fingertip, asking without words, what happened here? the way they fell asleep on the practice room floor, curled around each other on the cold floor, with daniela’s hoarse voice echoed:
“professor bannerman probably thought we were just two ‘ordinary’ friends.”
with sophia’s answer with a giggling so cute that daniela had to hug her so tight after she finished the sentence.
“yeah probably. we’ve kissed each other the same amount as the amount of her hair. and she could not think that her precious and fellow student daniela andrea avanzini llorente was obsessed with a random cellist’s lips.”
“stop teasing me, soph.”
“no i won’t. you are so cute when you blush, you know that?”
“please stop.”
“i said no.”
then sophia would raise her head from under dani’s chin where it had rested. sophia’s hand would come up from where the had put it before — daniela’s heart, or daniela’s neck, or daniela’s waist to cup her face and pinch her heated cheeks.
their instruments silent witnesses to something neither of them had expected to find.
on christmas eve, the conservatory emptied. students went home to their families, their hometowns, their lives outside of music. daniela stayed. she had nowhere else to go, her mother was in geneva with her new husband, her brother had not answered her calls in months, and the apartment she rented felt less like a home and more like a waiting room.
she was practicing alone when sophia appeared in the doorway, wearing a red scarf and carrying a paper bag. her cheeks flushed because of the cold and she looked beautifully small and ‘huggable’.
you must have been cold, mi corazon.
"you’re supposed to be in manila," daniela said.
"i changed my mind." sophia set down the bag, act like a stubborn girl but more like a dani’s girl. and began unpacking its contents: bread, cheese, olives, a bottle of wine, a small box wrapped in gold paper. "my family will survive one christmas without me. besides, i couldn't leave you alone. you get sad when you're alone. you play minor keys and forget to eat."
daniela’s throat tightened. "how do you know that?"
"because I notice things." sophia crossed the room and took daniela's hands. “even though when you think it doesn’t matter. every piece of you matter to me.”
they ate dinner on the practice room floor, surrounded by sheet music and rosin dust and the ghost of every piece they had ever played. they drank wine from the bottle, cheap red that stained their lips, and talked about everything and nothing: their childhoods, their fears, their favorite books, the first time they realized music was more than just sound.
"i was seven," sophia said, leaning against daniela’s shoulder. "my grandfather played me the bach cello suites. not the whole thing, just the prelude to the first suite. and i remember thinking that this is what god sounds like. this is what it would feel like to be held by something infinite."
daniela pressed a kiss to her hair. "and now?"
"now i think music is officially a part of me. and that i don’t want to be anything other than a careless cellist who will have a chance to perform in a musical theatre and to travel around the world with her best friend."
“mi alma, yes you will and of course yes you can.”
“huh, “mi alma”, what’s that?”
“it’s a phrase in spanish that means like an exclamation, you know?”
“yeah?”
“use it when you talk to me. it shows respect.”
“if you say so.”
they were quiet for a while. not really, daniela was dying to hold back her laugh, her face was so red that she had to hide her face into sophia’s dark hair and breathe in the vanilla smell. the city outside was dark and cold, but inside room 114, something was and is still burning, a warmth that had nothing to do with the radiator and everything to do with the girl in daniela’s arms.
"open your present," sophia said finally, nodding toward the neatly wrapped box.
daniela unwrapped it carefully, savoring the way the paper crinkled, the way the ribbon came undone. inside was a small leather notebook, worn and soft, and a fountain pen with her initials engraved on the barrel.
"for your music," sophia said. the music that's yours. not bach's, not paganini's. yours."
daniela opened the notebook. The first page was blank. but the second page, the second page had words written in sophia's careful hand. different than before, her handwriting has always been really messy and quick that sometimes, her daniela cannot read a single word.
"for my daniela:
you are not too much. you are not too little. you are exactly the right amount of everything, and i will spend the rest of my life proving it to you if you let me."
daniela read the words three times. four times. a dozen. and then she closed the notebook, set it aside, and kissed sophia that was still in her lap. with sophia’s hands secured around daniela’s small waist. kissed with the intensity of all the desperation of someone who had just realized that some things: some people, were worth every risk.
daniela’s hands curved around sophia’s hips slightly. while the other rubbing her back. she deepened the kiss, her tongue touched sophia’s lips and the contact was so new that it made sophia gasped.
of course this is very new to sophia, even though she is older than daniela two years. of course she cannot take the subtle inquiry that daniela gave her. and so daniela laughed, just a small and private one, then said while was still focusing and taking sophia’s breath,
“mi amor, open your mouth a little.”
sophia was surprised, she sat in her girlfriend’s lap and stilled for a moment, just a tiny bit of a second. then she slightly parted her lips, and was even more shocked when she felt daniela’s tongue immediately touched her hot and wet inside mouth.
sophia felt her eyes immediately popped open and daniela’s quiet chuckle. she hit daniela’s delicate shoulder and gripped her shirt so hard that mde sophia’s own fingernails turned white. sophia felt dani pulled her even closer, she leaned on the daniela’s touch and slowly, so slowly “retaliating” what dani did in her mouth.
and so daniela felt sophia answered her in response, which made the whole situation even more intimidating. their tongues slided over each others’, the sound it made really got on daniela’s nerves that she just bit sophia’s lower lips. which forced sophia to create a sound—“umm..dani-“—that daniela thought was the most beautiful and heaven-sounded she had ever heard.
they broke the kiss when daniela heard sophia’s heavy and fast breath because of lack of oxygen. it was not quick — the separation — they broke it slowly and daniela just constantly stared at sophia’s red-rimmed eyes, swollen lips and heavy-red flushed cheeks. daniela’s hands were still on where it should have always been, but she moved her left hand which had always busy rubbing sophia’s back to her face.
“mi corazon, mi alma, mi amor, mi bebe, mi nina, mi belleza, mi todo. eres y has sido tan hermosa que me duele el corazon que late como el tuyo.” daniela said while cupping sophia’s face.
sophia was still heavily breathing, her chest moved up and down in a very fast speed. then she laughed.
“what did you say?”
“you don’t need to know, mi amor.”
“why?”
“do you know what mi amor means?”
“you said that ‘mi alma’ is like an exclamation, so i guess it must be another exclamation then?”
daniela giggled, she then cupped sophia’s face for another time.
“mi amor means my love, mi alma is my soul.”
sophia suddenly went quiet. she didn’t say anything.
then all of a sudden, sophia touch daniela’s hands which are still on her own face.
“gago ka, pero gago kitang aki.”
---
the winter showcase was on december twenty-eighth.
daniela woke that morning with her heart already racing, her hands already shaking.
but fear is not rational. fear does not care how many hours you have practiced. fear only cares that you have something to lose.
and daniela had so much to lose.
she arrived at the conservatory early, before the sun had fully risen, and found sophia already there—sitting in the dark, her cello in her arms, playing something so soft and so sad that daniela stopped in the doorway and held her breath.
"what is that?" she asked when the music stopped.
sophia looked up. her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks wet. "something I wrote for my grandmother. i play it when i miss her."
"play it for me. please."
sophia played. and daniela listened, and understood something she had not understood before: that love and grief were not opposites. they were the same thing, worn differently. that every beautiful thing in the world carried within it the seed of its own ending, and that this was not a tragedy but a miracle. that things could be temporary and still matter. that they could end and still have been worth everything.
when sophia finished, daniela crossed the room and knelt before her, taking her face in her hands.
"whatever happens tonight," she said, "i want you to know that meeting you was the best thing that has ever happened to me. not because of the music. because of you. because you make me feel like i’m allowed to be exactly who i am."
sophia’s lip trembled. "dani, don’t just say—"
"i’m not saying goodbye." daniela kissed her forehead, her eyelids, the tip of her nose. "i’m saying thank you. for seeing me. for staying. for loving me even when i couldn't love myself."
sophia pulled her close, buried her face in daniela’s neck, and held on like she was afraid the world might end.
it didn't end. not that night. but something else began, something that would carry them through everything that came after.
---
the concert hall was full.
daniela stood in the wings, her violin warm against her collarbone, her heart beating so loud she was certain that the audience could hear it. she could see soohia in the front row, sitting with the other cellists, her dark hair sprayed across her shoulders, her eyes searching the shadows for daniela’s face.
professor bannerman appeared beside her. "are you ready?"
no, she wanted to say. i’m terrified. i’m going to fail. everyone is going to see that i’m not good enough, that i never was, that the only thing i’ve ever done right was fall in love with a girl who plays cello like she's gonna die tomorrow.
but instead she nodded. and she walked onto the stage.
the lights were too bright. the silence was too loud. she took her place at center stage, raised her violin, take a deep breath, and began to play.
the paganini came out differently than it ever had before. it was still technically precise, but there was something else beneath the notes now. something softer. something more alive. she played the difficult variations not as a battle to be won, but as a conversation to be had. she played for sophia. she played for her carefree mother, for her absent father, for every version of herself that had ever felt like she was not enough.
she played, and the music became a prayer.
when she finished, the silence lasted for one heartbeat. two. and then the applause came, it was thunderous, overwhelming, standing ovation from people who would never know what it had cost her to stand on that stage.
she bowed. she smiled. she walked offstage and into the wings, where professor bannerman was waiting with something like wonder in her beautiful eyes.
"where did that come from?" she asked.
daniela thought of sophia’s hands, sophia’s voice, sophia’s kiss. "someone showed me what i was playing for."
---
she found her sophia in room 114 after the competition two days.
the room was dark except for the light from the window. it was moonlight, silver and soft, spilling across the floor like spilled milk. sophia was sitting on the piano bench, her cello beside her, her legs spread out freely, her face turned toward the window like a child.
"you were magnificent," sophia said without turning around.
daniela crossed the room slowly, patiently and sat beside her. "i was thinking about you the whole time."
"i know. i could hear it. you are not as subtle as what you thought."
daniela laughed quietly at the last sentence. them she reached out, wrapped her fingers around sophia’s.
they sat in silence for a moment, their shoulders touching, their breath fogging the cold air. outside, zurich glittered like a jewel, all golden lights and ancient stone and the distant sound of church bells.
"i got the letter," daniela said silently. "to vienna. they want me."
sophia turned to look at her. her expression was unreadable, it may be joy and grief and something else, something that looked like the beginning of an ending.
"that’s wonderful," she said. "daniela, that's—that's literally everything you've worked for."
"i know."
"you’re going to go."
it was not a question, but daniela answered it anyway. "yes. I have to."
sophia nodded slowly. her hand found daniela’s on the bench, their fingers intertwining, their palms pressing together like pages in a book.
"how long?" Sophia asked.
"two years. Maybe more."
"and after?"
daniela looked at their joined hands. she thought about the notebook in her coat pocket, the words sophia had written on the second page. she thought about the chaconne, and the way grief and joy were the same emotion moving in different directions. she thought about all the things she had been too afraid to say, and how love, a real love, was not about certainty. it was about choosing each other anyway, even when the future was a question mark.
"i don't know," she admitted. "but i know i don't want to lose you."
sophia squeezed her hand. "you won't. i promise you won't."
but howcome, daniela can still felt the shivering beneath it. the calm, the steady, the quiet of sophia’s expression.
"how can you promise that?"
sophia smiled, this time with the real smile, the one that reached her eyes, the one that made daniela believe in impossible things. "because i’m going to write you every day. i’m going to send you recordings of everything i play. i’m going to visit you every chance I get, and you're going to visit me, and we're going to figure it out. not because it will be easy. but because it will be worth it."
daniela leaned her head against sophia’s shoulder. "you make everything sound possible."
"that’s because I love you." sophia pressed a kiss to her hair. "and love is the only thing that has ever made anything possible."
they stayed in room 114 until the moon set and the sun rose, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold. they played music until their fingers ached, until they were too tired to play anymore, until the only thing left was silence and each other.
even though sophia was so scared. but she held a ‘more-afraid-daniela-avanzini’ anyway. they laid down on the floor, the floor where they first met and whispered silly things together.
and so when daniela was too tired to keep her eyes open, she started to murmur something in spanish that sophia had no idea what was that about.
sophia tucked daniela’s head into her chest, pressed about a seven hundred and thirty kisses to daniela’s hair.
“te amo, sophia.”
that was the last thing sophia heard before she fell asleep with daniela in her hands, with daniela’s hands placed on her heart, with daniela’s voice echoed through every nerves in sophia’s brilliant brain.