"even without a voice"
Genre: Drama, Pre-romance
Rating: PG
Characters: V/Evey
Summary: She remembers this: that before Saint Mary's and Norsefire, the black bags and endings, there had been music. There had been laughter. She simply needed to be reminded.
Notes: A small viggie in honor of the Fifth. Happy V Day, my friends, as we all take a moment and remember. ;)
Disclaimer: Nothing is mine, but for the words.
"even without a voice"
by Mira_Jade
Her first few strikes against the piano keys were clumsy and curious. She played first one note, and then a next, a low tone and then one higher singing out into the air. The sound seemed to hesitate for but a moment before singing out, as if asking leave to break upon the silence.
Evey Hammond raised a brow at the instrument, wondering if the piano had a sixth. She wondered if it knew that a stranger played upon its keys. Intruder, the ivory bars seemed to exude. Imposter the black lacquer seemed to sneer. With their master gone above, the Shadow Gallery was hers alone, and everything V left behind seemed to know it. The shadows were heavy, lined with teeth. The stolen paintings stared at her with eyes of their own, as if appraising her worth to look on the stories they told. The weapons in their cases gleamed, as if only waiting for an opportunity. The piles of books, stacked from floor to ceiling seemed to lean towards her, as if judging her and finding her wanting.
. . . quite obviously, she had not had fresh air and sunlight enough these last few weeks, Evey decided, bristling at the imagined insult from the inanimate objects. But, for all of the childishness of her thoughts, there was an underlying truth to them. This place lived and breathed with V. Or, perhaps V lived and breathed with this place. Evey was nothing but an intruder, an unwelcome hostage buying her time until . . .
Just . . . until, she pressed her lips tightly together, making them a then line. She narrowed her eyes at the piano before trying to pick up a tune again – taking up the room's unspoken challenge. One note sounded, and then the next, the ease with which she played growing as her confidence mounted, until -
She heard the scrape of a boot sole against the stone. Even then, she knew that she had only heard him because he wanted her to hear. Abruptly, she cut off the melody, scrambling back from the piano almost guiltily, as if she had been caught doing something she had ought not.
"I am sorry," the words automatically rolled off of her tongue. She could tell no emotion from the Guy Fawkes mask before her – neither annoyance or amusement, but in the absence of expression, the graceful black lines of his body seemed to be at ease. She imagined that there was a smile in the way his head tilted. Just barely, her heartbeat calmed in reply.
She turned her back to the piano, even so. She was still close enough to feel the ivory of the keys against her fingertips when she laced them behind her back.
"Music expresses that which is impossible to be said and on which it is impossible to be silent (1)," he said instead of answering her apology, letting another's words speak for him. "Who am I to keep you from such an expression?"
"The shorthand of emotion(2)?" she returned, hoping she was phrasing the quote as it truly was, and not how she remembered it. She knew she had succeeded when the mask tilted slightly to the right; giving her tells to his expressions without consciously meaning to. She imagined that he was pleased, at least.
"I could not have phrased it better myself," V brought his hands together, nodding his head in reverence to her words. "And yet, why did you stop?"
Evey shrugged. The backs of her knees pressed against the piano bench.
"I don't play," she said. "Not really, anyway. I wouldn't want to be a strain on your ears." It seemed wrong to fill the Gallery with anything other than art, she wanted to say. Here, every imperfection seemed magnified by a hundred, bare and naked to the eye. But she kept those words to herself.
And still . . .
"My mother played," she said, the words tumbling from her mouth before she could hold them back in. "My brother picked up her talent from the time he was old enough to understand what the piano was, and our home was always full of music. Back then, at least. Before . . ." Saint Mary's. Norsefire and Chancellor Sutler. The black bags and endings. " . . . everything."
When he walked over to her, his stride was slow and thoughtful. His mask tilted in a way that said he was listening. "And you?" he asked. "Did you ever play?"
"I much preferred listening, even then," she tilted her head, unconsciously mimicking his tells. "My inner ear has always been rubbish."
But she danced, she did not say. She had spun in circles, imagining that she was a ballerina as her father waltzed her mother across the room to the sweet notes filling the air. She closed her eyes, and could hear laughter echoing from her memories. Real laughter, simple and thoughtless and sweet. She has not laughed like that in a long time, she thought with a hollow sort of pang. Come to think of it, she had not even heard laughter like that since then.
The truth is, there is something terribly wrong with our world . . . V's voice ghosted across her mind, and -
She opened her eyes, and found that V was standing very close to her. He had moved quietly, without a sound as she lost herself in her mind. Her skin pricked with sudden awareness, and while her heart picked up speed in her chest, she felt a curious lack of fear accompany its beat. She inhaled, and held her breath in the back of her mouth.
"What I heard was a melody not content with simply listening," he said. Although she could not see his eyes, she knew that they were studying her, looking for an answer to an unspoken question in the shape of her expression, the wary cast of her own gaze.
"Perhaps you were merely hearing what wasn't there," she whispered her reply. She sat down on the bench, feeling for her seat before she took it. Better was it to look up at him then look at the mask so close, she thought.
"It would not be the first time I have been accused of doing so; nor the last, I'd wager," he said, amusement coloring his voice. "And yet, if you would humor a queer masked man . . ."
He bowed gracefully with a gesture towards the grand piano. Slowly she turned back towards the instrument again. She was curious about his intentions, she admitted to herself, and like Alice, she was unable to say no. She rested her hands flat on the keys, but she did not play when he leaned over her shoulder to pick out his own melody. His fingers moved slowly – too slowly, she immediately saw. He let her see what he was doing as he started, before gaining speed with practiced and sure motions. Like a teacher, she thought, showing a pupil the proper way. Not for the first time was she struck with curiosity for the life he had lived before the mask and the knives and the vendetta . . .
The keys were cool and smooth beneath her fingertips, but she resisted the urge to press down a discordant note as his right hand softly played a gentle, three note melody. The same three notes played over and over again in a triplet formation, slow and mournful while his left hand thrummed a single key at a time . . . She felt a tightening on her chest at the simplicity of the sound; the memory of the song. She had not heard it play since a lifetime ago, it seemed, and . . .
She closed her eyes to better hold on to her memories. "Piano Sonata number 14," she whispered. "The moonlight sonata." She tried to laugh, but the sound came out forced from her throat. The sound was sad, even to her own ears. "What, no Toccata and Fugue?" she teased, and even though she could not see it, she imagined that the mask's smile turned a bit wider. A bit brighter.
He did not answer her for a moment. Instead he let the song speak; burrowing to rest between her rib-bones, sinking in deep to find the hollow in her chest that housed her heart. Her breath was shaky in her lungs.
"It is one of those poems the human language does not know how to quantify with words (3) . . . a nocturne for a mournful ghost, lamenting in the distance (4)," he finally said. His voice was a whisper, as if loathe to disturb the fragility of the song around them. "And yet, the composer merely scoffed and said, 'haven't I written better things?' (5) when faced with the enormity of his success in giving a mouth to a feeling that no words could ever express."
He was trying to tell her something, she thought. He often was when he spoke. But she was having a hard time sorting through the layers and meanings of his words when there was the music so open and raw before her. Her mother was smiling in her memory. Her brother hummed along as he played, almost too soft to hear.
The tips of her fingers itched. She could not keep them still.
Behind her, the mask was very close to the skin of her neck. Though she could not make out the shape of his eyes, she could feel the warmth of his breath, the steady in and out of his breathing. He was a man before her, even when the fake grin and the words built up like armor would say otherwise. The arm that reached past her was all elegant lines – an extension of the song, she thought – and she traced a black seam down until she found the black leather of his fingers, coaxing the keys to play. The piano seemed to sing for him as it had not for her. As if it understood, as if it knew . . .
She swallowed, her voice suddenly a stone in her throat. She could not breathe around it.
When he dipped into the more upbeat notes of the second movement he brought the song to an early, playing through only a measure or two before leaving the notes to die on the air, having said what he had wanted to say. As his fingers came to rest on the keys, hers picked up the melody where he had left it. Where he had been confident in his song, seemingly one with the instrument before him, her fingers were hesitant. She held her breath as she played.
But she remembered her parents dancing across the floor. She remembered her brother laughing in an easy, simple delight. She remembered spinning in place and tapping her foot to the rhythm that the dance and the song created. She remembered.
And so, she played.
It was only three notes, the simplest of melodies, but it was still a song. It was still a beginning. She leaned forward as he stepped away, suddenly determined, and curved her fingers against the keys. She closed her eyes, and started again.
(1) Victor Hugo, from Hugo's Works: William Shakespeare
(2) Leo Tolstoy
(3) Hector Berlioz, a French Romantic composer and contemporary of Beethoven
(4) Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven's pupils
(5) Ludwig van Beethoven