these pretty things; around the planets of our phase
Summary: When they move into a new house - every time they move into a new house - Edward gets a new piano.
Notes: Set in New Moon with references to the many decades before.
2005;
these pretty things, around the planets of our phase
When they move into a new house - every time they move into a new house - Edward gets a new piano. Decades ago they were gifts from Carlisle and Esme. Now they are established stepping stones of constancy in their family's unerring patterns.
While they unpack their worldly belongs, reorganizing for new lives, new lies, and whatever new color scheme Esme has outfitted the place with before they arrived, Edward plays in the background. The fingers of eighty years playing deceptively gentle and tentative. Each soft stroking through the lower keys when he begins to test something none of them have heard, and he has never played.
His wordless ministrations, an introduction between two unknowing works of art.
What they hear is the sound of themselves, slipping between his notes, as them. An adagio to the loss of the known, to both mistakes and to new chances. The timbre of newness soothed to unsettling only. Scattered flourishes of spring high registers, where hope and curiosity trumpet their soft, steady promise.
The melody a consistency, unchanged, always returned to. The deep well spring which echoes a dozens of things written for or to each person listening without becoming them. Each of their strains twined, glissando, together in some perfectly unpredictable ease into this harmony, this new piano, and this new house, and this new day.
And this, too, is only an established stepping stone of constancy in their family's unerring patterns.
~||x||~
Tonight, we're the sea and, the rhythm there
When Edward moves them, one fall in the early twenty-first century, it is sudden but not impossible.
A house can be found the same evening, compromising on design and not on location. They wind, andante, between the rise and fall of the wind, spiraling leaves not yet having lost their luster, into boxes. They have moved so many times with hours notice for the others throughout the near century. This is not different, obbligato, this rash survival that brooks no other tones.
It is an establishing stepping stone of constancy in their family's unerring patterns.
He arrives a day later than the others. The last, like a wraith that might slip past their eyes and their ears, even with Alice's warning. There is no pause for the shining unbroken grand that sits, tutto, in foyer between door and stairway. His steps softer growing softer, diminuendo, for each thought that contains that face, that voice, those memories.
Lento on the door which opens and then closes. Each shard that pierces, scherzo, the jester where no guard stands, where no door can be closed. There is no sleep. There is no waking. There is only the tacet reigning.
It is not the end of the music, they tell themselves, each other.
It is only the beginning of the silence; pray fermata.
De capo. Fine. Dal segno. Tenuto.