He loved her, he supposed. As everyone does the first time they feel something. Even if that something is much smaller than they believe, it is bigger than they would like it to be. It feels so powerful at first, so smothering that they veer wildly away from it in the hopes that it won't diminish them. But he knows, he knows it can't be true love. Just a simple fancy he believes. So why is it then, when he is asked, a little too firmly, by his senior to play piano at that fine ball in that fine mansion, that he finds himself playing for her. She is beautiful, he knows that, all shockingly stunning and long fingered as she was in that midnight gown that hung so elegantly from one shoulder. But he knew her, in all her dullness, when her mahogany hair no longer shimmered or danced around her face but hung, lifeless as cold coffee in the mornings onto the endless papers that piled around her. He had seen her eyes look past him on days that were too still to remember and yet too unsettling to forget. The days when she'd go to him instead and the piano keys would always stick and sound just slightly sharp, but sharp enough to make every note seem painful. Those days were singular. Always singular. It was as though she learnt her lesson every time, knew it was a mistake to go to the other and she would settle back into her science and her knowledge and never look back. He always had to remind himself that the other, was not really the other but rather the only one as she had never actually gone to him. Though when he's alone and sitting and playing the piano and he knows she's just upstairs in the bed of that thing he can't help but feel cheated, as though he had some right to her that she has gone and stolen.
"Play. This party needs entertainment."
The keys feel smooth, like the trigger of the gun he carries to protect her. The gun he has used too many times before, always without thinking, but he wonders if he'd be able to now, with just an order, to kill someone. He knows that he felt insulted, the day he was told he was going to be a bodyguard. He wasn't a bodyguard, he was a lethal, powerful weapon of death. But he supposes now that he enjoys it, the quiet days in the mansion with the orchard just outside and the piano just before him. Though he knows he'd never really felt before, he'd only felt the rush of blood and steel and the clickclickclick as the trigger gives way beneath his twitching finger. But now he feels stillness. The feeling of the world existing around you and you are you and nothing else.
"But my music may be a bit too…melancholy for this occasion Sir?"
He sees her, as she's crying just a little way away, he's come to check on her, that she's not dead or dying and that he hasn't failed his job, but the soft sound reaches his well-tuned ears just before he makes himself known to her. He supposes that he felt pity, a pity that she was pushed to this state, crying alone in a lab, but he can't muster that feeling, he knows, that deep down, and it is very deep after all the burying he's been doing, that he felt an intense kind of sorrow that threatened to tear his heart out after every sob made their shaking way to his ears.
"Not at all. Just go in there and do your thing. Oh and look, there's Miss Crescent, your charge, you'll do well to impress her."
So he's sat, the melody washing over him, sending the whole room into these little spasms around him as that reality melts away to nothing but the music. But there's her, she won't fade out, and he wonders how she's doing it, how she has managed to turn her head to look at him and frown and smile and still look beautiful all at the same time. It catches him unawares and he almost hits a bad note, almost. But he won't allow the melody to be ruined, to ruin this perfect moment when somehow she has managed to stay existing with the music and everything else.
"Yes Sir. Understood Sir."
He knows he elevates her. Places her on a pristine pedestal that will someday be stained with all kinds of things, but he can't help it, he can't help it when she turns to him, her dress clinging as her body pivots, the way she moves so effortlessly towards him as he plays, and he silently wishes she won't come any closer but he begs that she will. But he supposes that the choice was never his, as the other intercepts her and he is just left with the piano and the music as she fades so elegantly into darkness with that other man. The other man that she will always go to, even when the music surrounds her and threatens to take her straight to him, the music is not stronger than the science, and so he is doomed to be alone with his music, with her just up the magnificent staircase with that other man.
"Good man Valentine. Now go play your damn music."
And how ironic he finds it, years later, as he sits before the piano once again and he stares at his left hand, that golden claw that was altered so effortlessly by the other in that lab down in that basement. When he had finally snapped and his anger had poured so harshly like cyanide onto the other man. He thinks that he finally got what he deserved, for just allowing himself to ignore what he knew was happening and what he knew was going to happen. For just giving himself to the music instead of giving himself to her. So now. He almost chuckles at the irony of how he believed that all he would have would be the music, when now, with his left claw the music is only halved, the higher part, the melody being the only part that can exist, and it sounds so lonely without the accompaniment. So that's it, he realises, he is not whole without her, and that pedestal has turned to crystal and instead of her being on it she is within it and he can do nothing but play the melodies he cannot forget and listen to her telling him she is sorry, when he knows, he knows it was all because of him.
All because of him and his damned music.