Work Text:
She hummed a soft melody of winter, echoing through the empty walls of the dim café. It could be a forgotten song, trapped in her head since long ago before her life began. Or it could simply be a random tune she picked up from her many nighttime walks downtown, passing the fog of light and noise in the city that never sleeps. When her steps took her away from the darkness where she usually hid to the brighter side, she could drown in the crowd and disappear all the same. Alone was a clash of chaos and order, of people flowing down and up the street going nowhere. Alone was safe in New York City.
At this moment, alone was the muffled sound of the traffic through the window of her workplace. A mundane work she took to shed her dominatrix skin and blend with the ordinary people, some simple and mindless tasks to get her through the hours of the day. So much better than the unrest of staying inside her studio apartment to wait for the next phone call or email containing request for her expertise from a certain undisclosed client, forwarded by a dear friend in the CIA or even, in some cases where Brother Holmes had had too much on his plate already, the MI6.
It could be months before another work came up from that side of her double life, and she hated waiting.
There was a piano near the window, decently tuned and well-maintained. Once every two weeks a man would come into the café, with his hat in his seemingly frail hand and carrying nothing else, to sit on the piano. Every time, she joined him on his side and without exchanging any words other than the unspoken agreement in their eyes, he would accompany her while she sang. Every single song he played would be familiar for her, because somehow they had a way of understanding each other without communicating through the usual means of idle chatting about their shared interest in music.
They had shared a past at least, if not in this life maybe they met in a previous one. That much was certain to the audience who sat in the full-reserved café. How tragic or painful, they never knew. But every note she sang was shrouded in ringing mystery, bearing a question of doubt. He answered with a cantabile, a song of his own flowing out from his fingers, lifting the curtain of her cold façade and brought the Woman inside her into the surface. It was as if he taught her passion through his piano, and she loved the irony it bears.
The song would end eventually, and he would walk out to disappear again. She would move on too, ever glowing with the fading notes they were immersed in a moment ago, waiting for their next song with a newfound peace in her heart.
No one would ever recognise the man who played the piano if they ever saw him outside the café because no one ever dared to look straight at his dead eyes and study his corpse-like pale face, no matter how famous he actually was.
The dead man himself couldn’t be more satisfied at this treatment from those who didn’t understand him. His piano skills were getting better. Having a lot of free time had its perks, for only a few people with their common sense still fully intact would come to his door to consult the one and only dead consulting detective in the world nowadays.
Eventually for the dead man and the fading Woman, alone was bearing each other’s mark in their memories, be it the music or the feelings tangled within.