A/N: Another Tinder 'verse piece, because I do, in fact, still have feelings about this world.
I hope you enjoy it, and please review!
She has been slipping into her parents' lectures since she was fifteen. It started as an easy way to pass an hour or two after school, under the pretense of "studying" with Carina (the actual studying with Carina often devolved into shifting Carina, their hands burning through their blouses, fingertips tracing the lace edges of their bras and dipping under the waistbands of their skirts, but her parents have certainly never needed to know those details. Though from a couple of quirked brows her Dad gave her, and that time Mum made a poor attempt at not laughing, she suspects they knew anyway.) Then she took up nipping in during the February midterm, on the three days that Andriú had school but she didn't, and the habit sort of spiralled from there.
It's odd, and kind of nice, to see her parents the way other people must see them, as professors and authorities and experts, two highly intelligent people full of questions and theories and sometimes answers, and not just Mum who lies on the couch in fluffy socks correcting exams and snorts when she laughs and danced around the kitchen with her when she was little and who curses in fluent Portuguese and Swedish, and Dad who sang her to sleep at night when she was small (and even sometimes, Clíodhna will admit, when she was not so small), and sat her on his lap when he was at the piano so she could put her hands on top of his and feel out the notes as he played, and who sometimes shuts himself up in his office with his record player and who refused to read the last two Harry Potter books with her because they are Wrong.
(She'll admit she likes Remadora on its own merits, but that's mostly because she's had separate crushes on both Remus and Tonks since she was ten and she's read enough fix-it fics by now, and she doesn't care what anyone says, they're both hellaciously queer and beautiful for it and she wrote two songs for them.)
It makes Clíodhna feel warm inside, to see her Dad being clever and how happy it makes him to ramble about Erik Delacarte and Konstin Daaé to people who haven't heard it all a hundred times before, to see her Mum being a genius with her presentations on dictatorship and democracy and why other historians are Idiots to discount Salazar, and how none of it is as far away as people like to think.
(She couldn't help feeling proud, in a Big Sister sort of way, when Andriú first joined her when he was twelve, each of them wearing sunglasses and wrapped in big coats, their school jumpers stuffed into their bags. It was one of their Dad's, about how cowboy songs partially developed out of English folk music, and though Andriú has always favoured science over music, he was vibrating with excitement and she had to feed him two large hot chocolates from Starbucks to calm him down before they walked home.)
They're not expecting her home until tomorrow, because she intentionally told them the wrong date with Carina and Fiacha as her co-conspirators. But it's Mum's birthday today, and so help her but she wouldn't miss that, not even if it meant cancelling a gig in Times Square to be here.
It's been seven years since she started pretending to be a student, but for old times' sake she'll do it once more.
Besides, no one's going to recognise her dressed down as she is in skinny jeans and a knitted jumper even if her hair is dyed blue. She's wearing her glasses instead of contacts, and all of her tattoos are covered though of course she's wearing her silver ring splints (her knuckles have been exceptionally achy lately, probably because of the weather), and when the world doesn't expect to see her they won't see her, so she won't get waylaid by autograph seekers.
Besides, most people don't realise that the professor parents of Lia Valeria who lecture in history and music at an undisclosed university in Ireland are Erik and Christine Delafontaine. Even in interviews she plays Lia and takes comfort in being someone else for a while.
(She's considering, but she hasn't decided yet, asking her Dad to play on her next album, a song just for the two of them. It's not fair that he never got the chance to play for the world when he's the one who taught her all she knows, but he insists he's perfectly happy and content as he is, and she doesn't want to put the pressure of public scrutiny on him. It doesn't keep her from dreaming of playing with him on stage though, just so everyone can see she didn't spring from sheet music fully formed.)
Her Mum has a special box, full of things her Dad has given her, and not just jewellery, not even the pieces of jewellery he's given her but the other things, the little trinkets and ticket stubs of concerts and cards and odd slips of paper and printed copies of some of her favourite photographs along with her not-quite-an-engagement ring (and Clíodhna is contemplating giving Carina one, but she'd also have to give a matching one to Fiacha, and she hasn't settled on a design that would suit them both yet, and she can only marry one even though they're all in it together), and in it are two particular birthday cards from years past, one signed from baby girl from when they were expecting her, and the other from new baby from when they expected Andriú. Clíodhna can count on one hand the number of times she's seen them, has hesitated over touching them because of how precious they are, but the very fact they exist makes her feel fuzzy inside.
She's learned her parents' timetables, to ensure she's in a state of Constant Preparedness should she ever wish to drop in. Her Dad isn't lecturing today, only teaching one of his electives instead to about fifteen people (tops) and there's no way she could slip in there without his noticing. At least in a lecture hall there's some measure of anonymity. Mum does have a lecture, for her Spain and Portugal in the Twentieth Century module, but it's not for an hour and a half yet.
She has a book of old Irish myths in her bag – inspiration, hopefully, for her next album and she has about half the thread of a motif already – and the leather seats in Iontas have always been one of the best places to settle in and consider things.
She consults her face in the mirror, eases out the eyebrow stud she forgot to take out earlier, and stows it safely in her breast pocket. Then she takes the woolly cap from her bag and pulls it down over her ears, nodding at the effect. Iontas it is.
It's oddly comforting to be able to blend in, to become someone unremarkable. Sometimes, between the photographers and the fans and the journalists fishing for some hint of scandal around her (and there is none to find, because she makes damn sure of it, and because she'll never risk something flaring up from her condition she's never drank or smoked or taken something she shouldn't have. The most scandalous thing is her whole relationship with Carina and Fiacha, but it's not as if that's something shocking anymore, there must be loads of triples out there) it's as if she can never be alone again, can never do a single thing that doesn't get noticed.
But this, this hanging out the campus that still feels as magical and exciting as it did when Uncle Al (and yeah he's really her granduncle but what does that matter? She's always been close to him, always looked up to him, and when she was little he was like a god to her and maybe it's because he's openly gay and it's comforting to know that the grandfather she never knew, who died when her Dad was only small, would not be ashamed that she loves women as well as men) when Uncle Al first brought her here when she was four to distract her from her Dad being in hospital, and ever since this has been her secret, her private thing. Carina knows about it, of course, and Fiacha, but she has never brought either of them with her. Andriú is the only one she's ever allowed join her, and it feels right to just keep it in the family.
Andriú will probably not be skulking around the campus when his classes finish. He's in Leaving Cert and has become a very serious scholar, mostly because he refuses to allow anything to interfere with his chances of becoming a doctor and Clíodhna can admire his dedication. The only thing she's ever truly felt that for is her music.
It's ages since she's been back here — probably a year, maybe more — but her feet still know the way, guide her up past the library and across the road, under the trees that line the footpath and even now in the damp of November they dapple the concrete in shadows. She nips across the campus road, past the building that's still called new though it's older than she is, older than her parents' relationship. Past JH, with the lecture halls her Mum often holds court in and the academic bookshop where her heart fell in love as she browsed the history section and eyed a tall beautiful specimen of a man as she flicked through a book of American presidents (specifically hunting to see what it said about LBJ for a project, and the answer wasn't much). She visited every evening for a month in the hopes of seeing him again, but never did. And now there it is before her, Iontas, the bicycle racks along its side at the usual level of semi-full.
She passes through the automatic doors, and stops, breathing in deeply. It smells the same as ever, that unplaceable smell she has never found anywhere else, of carpets and paint and wood and leather, and it eases the throbbing in her heart that she never knew was there.
There's a crowd of students milling around the doors to the lecture theatre, waiting to go in, and she keeps her head down as she passes them because if there's anyone most likely to recognize her it's idle students bored out of their minds and for all she knows some of these might have been in her year at school.
She ducks down the hall, passed the stairs, and doesn't raise her head until she reaches the exhibition screens, the seats she's aiming for just beyond them.
And she stops.
There, on the screen in front of her, is a photo of her father. Her heart stalls. It's him. She'd know his gaunt frame anywhere, and then she blinks, and the photo comes clearer in her vision. Not her father. It's black and white and clearly late nineteenth-century, and the answer dawns on her. Not her Dad, but Erik Delacarte, the outlaw, and Fahim Iravani. She'd recognise them anywhere (even if she does, ocasionally, mistake them for people currently living). Her childhood was spent surrounded by photos of them and their friends, scraps of music. The first song she ever wrote was for their two best friends Henry Russell and Warren Stapp, because she'd read her Dad's notes on them when he was in hospital and she was lonely and Andriú was too quiet to be able to distract her (she was eight, she remembers it too well, it was an arrhythmia that made him faint and they had to fill him with drugs and shock his heart to get it beating normally again, and Andriú slept in beside her because he was three and scared even though he didn't quite know why he was scared and Uncle Al slept in the chair beside their bed because they didn't want to be alone, and she thinks, now, that he didn't want to be alone either).
Her fingers are trembling, and she flexes them, steps closer to the screen just as the photo changes to bullet points of text, about how Delacarte met Fahim, and when, and how they were together for forty years until Delacarte died, how he'd composed his own requiem years before and those of his friends and Fahim, and how it was played at the funeral by William Russell, the nephew of Henry. The screen changes again, text replaced by a picture of the collection of books her Dad and Kate and John Henry (and Kate and John Henry have always been more like an aunt and uncle to her than her parents' friends, along with Nadir and Michelle who really have been like a second set of parents) have written about Delacarte and his friends.
Photos of graves, photos of Arizona, more old black and white and sepia photos of Delacarte, of Fahim, of Henry and Warren and Etta and Philippe and Raoul and Carlotta and Sorelli and Christine (the other Christine, not her mother, like Erik Delacarte is not her father, they're just people who lived in another time and shared their names, or parts of them). Even Aubrey De Chagny, son of Etta and Philippe, and she had such a crush on him when she was nine and her Mum teased her about it but she spent the whole summer making sense of a book of his poetry, and his William. All these people she grew up learning about, making up stories starring them that she played out with toy horses and figurines. Stories about adventures and love and death and music and every time she had to write a story in school she used the same cast of characters until she could have bound them all together into books and books and books.
(She put them in ring binders, and they still live under her bed.)
The credits come up, mention her Dad and Kate, for their research and the music, and Clíodhna's fingers tremble as she scrambles to put on the headphones hanging from the display case and, yes, there it is, the familiar violin notes of the waltz Delacarte composed for Fahim for their thirtieth anniversary and played for him in San Francisco, that she sampled on the song she wrote for them when she was sixteen and figuring out how she felt for Carina, and trying not to think how it must feel to love someone for forty years in a world that tells you it's a sin, it's a crime, and then to lose them.
Tears prickle in her eyes, knowing that this is her father playing a piece that she has played, his fingers on the bow, his fingers on the strings, the fingers that have tucked back her hair and fixed her buttons when she was too small to and that enveloped her tiny hands and seemed so big, so long, though hers are as long now, those fingers playing a piece that was first played nearly a hundred and twenty years before she was born, by a man who'd reformed himself for the sake of his lover.
The waltz ends as the credits do, and there is a moment of buzzing silence as another piece starts, a turn-of-the-century nocturne if she remembers right, and the title card comes up on the screen ('Delacarte and his Circle of Queer Friends') as the exhibit loops back to the start.
Forget the myths. These people are what she needs to write about, these old friends of her youth that she's neglected in favour of stars and gods and nature and politics and her condition and loving Carina, loving Fiacha, loving them both at once.
How long she stands there, eyes closed, head tilted against the glass case of the exhibit, that music deep in her bones, winding through her brain, as the presentation loops back to the start again and again and again, as people come and go and stare and wonder, in and out of classrooms, in and out of the leather seats, she doesn't know, can't bring herself to care. The music throbs in her heart, fills her lungs, until she breathes it, sees it before her, each note and how it is formed on that hundred and fifty year old paper, her father's fingers on the violin, her own on violin and piano and guitar, her own setting down notes on yellow paper. The music is in her blood, in her throat, behind her eyes, deep in her ears, so deep it will never leave them again.
And when she comes back to herself, at last, it is to the brush of fingers like hers against her cheek, and a hand squeezing her shoulder.
She jumps, and the laughter that breaks through the sudden silence in the absence of the headphones is as familiar as her own name.
Her Mum grins at her, blonde curls twisted up, crinkles at the corners of eyes that she sees in the mirror every morning and night.
"I should have known you wouldn't stay away." Her tone is teasing, and Clíodhna blinks, still oddly disconnected from her body, her hands not her own, the last note of the waltz ringing in her ears.
"I—"
"I imagine you wanted to surprise us, yes?"
She jumps again, because that is her father's voice, from her other side, and she whips around, gaping at him, but he just smiles down at her (though he's not that much taller than her, and she still sometimes feels small beside him), flesh-coloured mask covering the bad half of his face, light catching the silver edges of his hair.
"I—"
"Of course, I can't blame you for getting distracted with the quality of the playing," he goes on, still smiling. "Terrible stuff. I can't think what they thought they were doing, hiring a player like that. You must have a thousand criticisms."
"Erik, don't tease her." Her mother is still smiling up at her. "She must have been mentally composing. You know she gets it from you. I'm sure if you ask her nicely she'll show you what she's come up with."
Clíodhna's ears burn. Her Mum's suggestion is closer to the truth that she's willing to admit to yet. "Mum—"
"Sshhh." And then her mother is pulling her into her arms, and her father is hugging them both from behind, and they're in a building on campus for crying out loud and she's not a little girl Goddammit but it's two months since she's been near her parents, since she's smelled her Mum's perfume, felt her Dad's mask pressed to her hair, and tears well in her eyes but she's home, she's home.
"I missed you." Her voice is thick, maybe too thick for them to understand her, but her Dad smiles into her hair.
"We missed you too."