She creeps down the stairs with an almost feline slyness, bare feet silent on the icy marble, and stands with wide eyes as she clings to the banister and listens.
It is three in the morning. At the grand piano, drenched in chandelier light, sits a pale boy with dark hair who plays Chopin with such effortless grace she has half a mind to fall to weeping. If she were normally inclined to be swept up in sentiment, perhaps she might have done so; as it is, she known for her stoicism, and remains ostensibly unmoved.
The next few minutes pass her by like hours. She is careful not to lose herself to the music, the depth, the sound, but by the time the piece dies down in a quiet ritardando, she finds her breath caught in her throat. And she cannot speak—if she could, she wouldn't dare; some slight quiver in her voice would give her wholly away. Instead, she walks, wincing at the clumsiness of her own steps in comparison to the sweet arpeggios still ringing in her ears. He doesn't notice until her fingers grasp the edge of the newly sanctified instrument.
He starts when he sees her, and retracts his hands from the keys like he's embarrassed, and she doesn't understand until she realises he has just bared witness to some part of his soul. Now she feels the guilt manifest in a heavy, sickening deadweight in her lungs and blurts out, "I'm sorry."
His eyes, when she stares at them long enough, are a blue concentrated enough to make her dizzy. "For what?"
"For—um, seeing that, I guess. For staying. I'm sorry. I know you weren't expecting an audience."
He is taken aback by the apology. "Holly, you shouldn't ever be sorry for staying."
Silence descends and they are swept up in it like she was swept up in Chopin.
"It was beautiful," she says quietly, when she finds her words again.
The boy reddens with unexpected ferocity and drops his gaze down to the pedals at his feet. "Thank you."
Perhaps it is the romanticism of pale ivory at night, perhaps it is the settled air of impractical beauty; whatever it is, something causes that blush, and it is this same something that now compels her to sit herself beside him—a little too close, maybe, but it isn't enough to be definitively purposeful, and they can both easily dismiss it as an accident borne of fatigue. Surely that's it, yes. An understandable accident.
Perhaps it is the few stars that hang overhead in the Irish sky, twinkling through the too-tall windows that are, for some unclear reason, still exposed.
"I was supposed to draw them," he explains, upon catching her staring. "But it's nice out tonight."
"Sure is."
"Mm."
They watch the stars for a while.
"Cold, though," she says.
"Very."
"I guess there'll be snow soon. Winter wonderland and all that."
Eyes still lingering on the window, his fingers find his way to the keys of their own accord, pressing against the soft chords of the referenced song.
Her pointed ears twitch, newly alert—she wants to hear him play.
But he withdraws his arms almost at once, folds his hands in his lap and keeps them there, stiff. She glances down with the faintest twinge of disappointment.
"Why are you down here, Artemis?" she whispers softly, when he doesn't dare to meet her eye.
"Couldn't sleep," he says, and leaves it at that.
The silence draws on like so many multimeasure rests.
"And you?" he says at last.
"You woke me up."
"I'm sorry."
(She wonders, briefly, if this apology applies to all the nights the thought of him has kept her up.)
Gone now is whatever witty repartee they normally find between them. The stuff has all but dissipated into cold December air.
Her words now echo his with some sincerity. "You shouldn't ever be sorry for that."
He looks down and smiles. "I was just thinking about how lonely my Christmases used to be. How my mother—well. The Christmas my mother was sick, and I..."
"The Christmas you kidnapped me."
She says it with no trace of bitterness, for how could she ever give this—give him—up?
He stares at his own hands in some disbelief. "Yes. The Christmas I nearly got us all killed; the Christmas this whole—thing began—and now here we are, you and I, as friends, and my father is home and my mother is well, and I have brothers to buy presents for and so many people to share all this happiness with... I'm glad, you know, but I hardly think I deserve it."
"Oh, don't get started on that again—"
"But really," he says, in earnest. "I know I don't—not deserve it, I suppose, but as you've shown me, fact and feeling don't exactly... correlate."
"Hey," she says, taking gentle hold of his arm, "Hey. I know you deserve it." She feels those pent-up tears from moments earlier manifest, and she presses her forehead to his shoulder so he can't see her succumb to the base affection that so hastily threatens to unveil her. Her voice is muffled against the fabric of his shirt. "Look at you, Arty, you're my best friend—you've grown up so much, you've done so much—"
"We've done so much," he whispers into her hair, which is softer than he expected, and smells startlingly of uncut cinnamon.
She hugs his arm and half-laughs, half-cries into his sleeve. "But look at me; I'm a wreck, getting all mushy in front of you on Christmas."
"Ah, it's the moon," he murmurs, as he closes his eyes and takes in her impossible scent.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It's the moon," he says again, quietly daring to wrap both arms around her waist. When she makes no move to pull away, he breathes a sigh of relief and nestles his chin in her hair, watches the night through the pane of slowly frosting glass. "It refuses to stop romanticizing this barely-put-together world we live in—it makes fairies cry, entreaties men to sit up and play piano—it makes wrecks of us all."
"Poets," she says abruptly. Her cheeks are wet, but her tear ducts have stopped pooling. "It makes poets," she whispers, curling into his side, and he silently agrees.
The surrealism of the late-evening-early-morning suddenly strikes him. The sky is paling as if the sun is trying to reach up and cradle the moon, and he and Holly have somehow found themselves dangerously entangled at the piano bench, a knot of limbs and flesh and tired clothing. Neither finds the idea of being untied compelling.
He reaches an arm around her and the first few, identifiable notes to a Beethoven bagatelle ring clear.
Holly turns her head, leaning it against his shoulder so she can watch his fingers dance. "Who was she?" she asks, as she absentmindedly runs her hand down his arm (he tries not to shiver and fails).
"Who was whom?"
"Elise. That's the song, isn't it? Für Elise." She slips into German as easily as she slips into English, and he feels his throat constrict with the knowledge that this metre-tall miracle chooses to spend what little free time she possesses with him.
"No one knows," he answers, when he has found his voice. He still sounds choked, awed, incredulous. "Maybe it was a mistranslation."
Her next words are spoken in a way that makes him think no one else was supposed to hear them. "Is that all we're going to be?"
He wants to let it go but he can't. "A mistranslation?"
She grips his arm as if he might blow away on the wind if she didn't. "A few out-of-date files of Gnommish, data everyone is sure must be corrupted: oh, a Mud Man came into our lives and saved us—and everyone will laugh and no one will believe it, and we'll become stories. Legends. We'll be transcribed into something else altogether."
"Fairies live long. Perhaps we should let them have their transcriptions. Who's to say what we were—what we are—will matter in a few millennia?"
She frowns. "I just don't want them to forget," she says, "what humans can be."
Artemis's heart beats just a little bit faster. "And what can we be?"
She tilts her head to look him in the eye, and blue meets blue, and blue meets hazel. The way she looks at him—in reverence, in longing, in affection he can't for the life of him ever remember so blatantly seeing—it fills him to the brim with something foreign and ecstatic, makes him feel like bursting. "Brave," she smiles. "Clever. Humble. Martyrs. Friends."
He wants to cry because oh, to think he means all this to her. But out of his mouth tumbles, "Just friends?"
And she leans up and kisses him, tiny hands finding their place upon his cheek, and the fingers of his right hand lose all strength at her touch and smash against the piano keys in an impressive cacophony. His left ends up tangled in her hair, tugging at auburn roots.
She pulls back too soon, an almost-laugh playing on her lips, still clasping his face with splayed fingers as she presses her forehead to his. His eyes remain closed, his mouth parted; a near inaudible sound strains to make its way out of his throat. "I—"
He cannot bring himself to continue and a grin splits Holly's face. She brings him closer, letting him taste the expression before she whispers, "Now I don't think we can blame that on the moon."
a/n: merry christmas, everyone.