Disclaimer: I don't own Tin Man. Hopefully that should be enough so I don't get sued. Hopefully...
They haven't made the decision yet. Brain or no brain?
He has not been included in their discussions, as if the matter has nothing to do with him. He tells himself that he is grateful, that with so much rebuilding to be done he should consider himself lucky that the Royal family would go to such lengths to help him, to call in so many experts solely for his sake.
He tells himself this and tried to believe it. But he cannot shake his own feelings of doubt and apprehension that swirl around the issue.
Who was this Ambrose guy anyway?
In his more lucid moments he can recall images and flashes of emotion, but these brief glimpses into the past are not enough to construct a personality for the phantom called Ambrose, a phantom that was Chief Advisor to the Queen.
They do not let him in on their discussions so he has decided to reacquaint himself with the palace at Central City.
"You lived here," they tell him, and show him his old laboratory.
He gives them a small and dazed smile as he stares at the paper strewn room, at coating of glass shards from shattered vials containing who knows what, at the faint smell of rotting eggs. He thanks the attendant that showed him to the room and enters. He wishes he could remember the boy's name.
There is another door at the far end of the room. He wonders where it leads. "You lived here," they say, but he knows it was a lie. He knows at least that much. He has never lived here. He cannot remember the layout of the rooms, he cannot remember which stairs lead to the kitchen or the library or where the Grand Ballroom is. He wanders around with a comical expression on his face as he wonders what he was looking for in the first place until someone finds him and leads him back to his current room. He cannot remember his Queen's name.
Optimism was easy while they were travelling. He had a purpose, a goal, something to hope for and look forward too. Yet always, bubbling just below the surface, was that frustration and anxiety over his brain, his memory. Sometimes he would find himself staring at the woman with the strange blue eyes and wonder who she was.
Those were the moments he hated himself the most.
He walks through the laboratory to the far door, glass crunching under his feet.
The witch, he thinks. Destroyed it… wrecked it. All to discover Ambrose's secrets.
The door is covered in the same metal plating that coats all the interior walls of the room but it is not locked and opens easily, with only a weary groan to signal its long disuse.
The door opens onto someone's old living quarters. Ambrose's papers have been flung all around this room as well, stuffing torn out of throw pillows, books ripped from their shelves with their pages torn out, clothes thrown out of the closet. He sees that they are all uniforms like the one he has been allowed to wear now - Out of pity – just like the one he wore as he drifted around the O.Z. for years before it became nothing more than a set of rags.
There is another room to the left and its door is already open. He shuffles around a rather large overturned bookshelf and finds himself peering into an old bedchamber. What was that smell? Not rotting eggs this time… something sweet, like flowers or fruit.
No matter.
He passes over the threshold, looking around and hoping that something, anything, will jar his memory, that he can remember something from all the years they say he lived here. There is a large four poster bed, an armoire in the corner, overturned, various wall draperies that have been long since slashed and now hang haphazardly around the room, a small throw rug and another bookshelf, this one, mercifully, right side up.
Nothing strikes him.
He should leave. There must be something he forgot to do, or someone might be looking for him thinking he is lost once more and he does not want it to be DG. Not again.
But as he turns to go something half hidden behind a moldy and ragged hanging suddenly catches his eye. He walks over to it and throws back the offending cloth. Then his eyes widen.
So similar to what happened at the Northern Palace, with one crucial difference.
I remember?! I actually remember?
He quickly looks around the room for the bench and discovers it lying nonchalantly on its side next to the armoire. He returns it to its proper place and sits down upon it. He throws back the wooden slat that covers the keys and lays his long slender fingers over them.
Could it be?
White keys, smaller black keys. The name of the instrument he sits before still eludes him but for once that does not discourage. He presses, gently, a white key between two black and the note resonates throughout the derelict room.
D.
He smiles to himself, a true smile that is the first in what seems like days, and presses the next key in the sequence.
E.
The next? Not the white key… that would make the whole thing sound wrong, the whole… scale. The black key!
F – no. F sharp.
He continues, remembering as he goes along, rapidly progressing from scales to chords.
"She may have taken my brains, but not my rhythm," he had told Cain. "That comes directly from my soul."
It was happening again, just like it had happened when he fought the Longcoats. The ability to fight that had come not from somewhere inside his shattered memories, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere unknowable.
He is grinning now and his fingers have taken on a life of their own. They dance up and down the fine keys in a mad fandango of melody. Some keys are out of tune, he knows, but not so much as he would think, having been abandoned so long. The simple chords have become much more intricate and difficult, now there are harmonies and trills and grace notes and he remembers the names of all of them! The left hand plays in a different clef than the right, now his fingers are drooping slightly and he immediately raises them to achieve proper playing posture. Now he hits a sour note but it is trivial and unimportant. He keeps playing. In playing he can remember.
He wants to keep going, keep playing until he can remember everything about the instrument he plays upon and everything he ever once knew about it: the sacred art itself: music. He wants to, but the only thing that could possibly stop him suddenly does. He freezes, fingers still poised over the keys, as a warm hand lays itself on his shoulder. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't have to.
"H-hey… DG," he manages to stammer.
Of all the things he can actually remember, why does this memory have to surface now, the memory of yesterday?
He thinks he is in the upper floors of the palace but he is not sure. He could very well be in the basement for all he knows. All he does know is that the feeble light from the windows will soon be gone with the suns and there will be absolutely no other light source until the moon rises.
He does not like the dark.
Irritated at himself, he sets off in a random direction, hoping that somewhere in this veritable labyrinth of a castle he will find someone to point him towards his room. Or maybe just a candle. He will settle for a candle.
He does find someone, just as the last of the light slips away from the tips of the window panes. But it is not the sort of person he expected to find, not a servant or attendant or something of the sort. It is DG.
"There you are!" she exclaims upon seeing him. "We were all wondering where you were when you didn't show for dinner."
He smiles at her and tells her he got lost again, that he is sorry. She simply shakes her head and grins at him and tells him it's alright, she's just glad she found him. They walk downstairs - I was right about which floor at least - chatting idly about nothing in particular. The conversation drifts from DG's taste in dresses to the trip the royal family will be taking around the kingdom. DG says she wants him to come with them. And why should I
He keeps up with the conversation as best he can and they are soon standing at the door to his room. DG gives him one of her famous hugs and jokingly tells him not to scare her again.
And it is now that he realizes something. He is the one who is scared – terrified, even. He is scared about the surgery, he is scared of having the brain put back in and scared of keeping it out. He is scared for his future, scared about the mysteries of his past and scared that when he wakes up tomorrow he won't remember DG's name.
He is most scared of the last one, because he is pretty sure that even if the worst possible scenarios occur in the near future, he will somehow make it out okay if she is around, even if it is just on the fringe of his life.
As they begin to separate, he gives her the briefest of chaste kisses on her lips.
Then he pulls away, horrified, and stares at her.
It would be so much better if she yells, or hits him, or jumps back or says or does anything. But she just stares back at him with such a look of utter disbelief in her wide blue eyes that he would rather have been lost in the attics for the next five centuries rather than have her find him. He barely even manages to stammer out a weak "S-s-sorry!" before fleeing to the safety of his room.
"Just a kiss between friends, a kiss between friends," he murmurs to himself, all the while knowing that on his end it is completely untrue. He does not come out of his room all night, and does not sleep, worrying constantly about the implications of what he has done. It is not until the pale light of pre-dawn begins to creep into his room that he finally forgets enough of what he is worrying about to finally get to sleep. When he wakes up he will, unfortunately, remember.
The woman he has offended so is now standing over him, greeting him with an energetic hello.
"I didn't know you could play piano!" she says as she comes around his right side and sits down next to him. He moves more to the left to make room for her.
"Is that what it's called?" he asks, trying to sound as normal as possible. "I couldn't remember…"
DG just shrugs and smiles. "That's okay Glitch. They'll put your brain back in and you'll remember everything again."
He smiles thinly at her and turns back toward the keys.
"I could never play any sort of music, ever," she continues, "except for this one song on piano. I can't even play the whole thing, just the top part. I always needed to find someone with some actual skill to play the bottom."
She begins on F, and then dances down to a D and back up the scale to a G for three notes. It is a ridiculously simple song. He finds his fingers crawling to the lower end of the keys seemingly of their own accord, where they begin to play in perfect accompaniment to DG's.
"Hey!" she exclaims as she hears his entrance. "How do you know this song? It's from the other world!" But he just grins again, the real smile this time, and keeps playing along with her.
The notes are not all he remembers. Words suddenly emerge on the surface of his mind, shining like a candle in the night.
"Heart and soul," he sings softly. "I fell in love with you heart and soul…" he immediately drifts off as he realizes the meaning behind the remembered words.
"The way a fool would do madly
Because you held me tight
And stole
A kiss in the night"
He whirls his head around to look at her as she finishes the verse and she is staring back at him with a more muted smile than before. This smile is more private – shy, really. But it is still DG.
She doesn't mean the words, it's just a song, he says to himself.
"Don't you know the rest of it?" she asks as their fingers continue to play the simplistic song. He shakes his head no. Of course he does.
"Well I do," she asserts.
"But now I see what one embrace can do
Look at me it's got me loving you
Madly
That little kiss you stole
Held all my heart and soul."
The next time he turns his head to glance at her she is ready, and kisses him as gently as he did the night before. It is his turn to blush and stare in disbelief. His fingers slip off the keys and DG is left playing the top alone. It sounds empty.
"Why…" he begins, but is quickly interrupted.
"Why'd you stop?" she asks. His fingers immediately regain their places and fall into step once more.
"Didn't you get it before? Didn't you wonder why I was the one who found you nine times out of ten when you got lost? Or do I have to sing it again?"
He does not reply, and instead leans in for another kiss, still shy, but with a little more passion this time.
Down the empty corridor, past the ruined laboratory and through the decrepit sitting room there rings a silly and childish melody from a tinny sounding piano that is slightly out of tune. And along with the song there are two voices, singing softly…
"Heart and soul I fell in love with you heart and soul
The way a fool would do madly…"
A/N: I don't own "Heart and Soul" either. The lyrics were written by Frank Loesser and the music by Hoagy Carmichael. It was a popular song when it was published in 1938, two years before WWII which, if you read the description of the show, is when the O.Z. separated from the "Other World." Therefore I deemed it was perfectly plausible that a piano player in the O.Z. would know this song, as it is popular and really fun to play - as long as you have someone to play it with.