Extended Summary: Music is the brandy of the damned, and the town of St. Hetalia is about to have more than its fill, as a terrifying sweep of grisly murders strike a discordant note in the hearts of the community. Can Arthur Kirkland, Lieutenant Officer of St. Hetalia Police Department, work with Private Investigator Alfred F. Jones to solve this case before the final curtain call?
Authors' Note: This started out as a project between my brother, my girlfriend, and myself. The idea came to us while we were watching The Silence of the Lambs, and it soon blossomed into a whole plot outline with characters and events. After my brother wrote the first chapter, he lost inspiration to continue working on the project and left it in the hands of my girlfriend and I. She re-worked the first chapter, and now edits the chapters as I write them.
I'm so eager to post this that I'm actually posting ahead of schedule. Not all of the chapters are completed yet, but they are plotted out. Updates will depend on my own inspiration to work on chapters, but this hasn't really proved to be an issue thus far. With the first few chapters under our belts, things have started to progress much sooner.
With that, there's not much more to say about this. I hope that all of you enjoy.
Disclaimer: Hetalia Axis Powers does not belong to us. We make no profit off of this story, and only write it for the enjoyment of ourselves and other fans.
Warnings: This fic will contain MULTIPLE CHARACTER DEATHS, blood and gore, gay and heterosexual couples, mentions of sex (and perhaps even description of sex in later chapters), and fowl language. If any of these elements bother you, please do not continue reading. Thank you.
"It's been two months already, Clemenz."
The dark haired Austrian man muttered to himself, tugging a pair of dark leather gloves onto his hands. There was no one with Roderich Edelstein in the vast, stately music room, yet he continued to speak, soft and inflectionless, yet in some intangible way quietly pleading, "Why have you abandoned me, my muse?"
Roderich sighed, propping up his glasses with the blade of his palm, before offering a longing gaze to the elegant ebony instrument of his affections. The musician's eyes grazed over the large jet-black grand piano that he hadn't played - much to his dismay - in a little over two months. Playing it or not, he decided, he had to keep it tuned.
He peeled a small round sticker off the back of a flat, square envelope, sliding his hand into the package and gingerly pulling out a circle of bound wire. First using pliers that had been sitting on the floor near him to pry the small metallic band off of the wire, the Austrian set the tool back to the floor and pushed himself up to his feet, hands idly uncoiling the length of piano wire.
For as long as Roderich could remember, music had been his sanctuary. It was his blood, his life, his air, and never in the course of his existence had the Austrian been without a tune in his mind, a rhythm in his hands. That is, until a few months ago. Without warning, his muse had left him, abrupt and without explanation, depriving the Austrian of musical inspiration. The metronome in his mind went off kilter, the reason and rhyme flowing astray in fraying strands of wasted composition. Like a helpless babe, the Austrian had unsuccessfully pawed at his keys, fumbling to create what had been instinctive, and failing.
It was beginning to upset him to extreme levels. So unlike him, he had begun to have outbursts at his wife, as well as the part-time maid. Neither one of the females outwardly expressed any objection to his discontent, but the frustrated composer imagined that it would not be long before the rising tension would prompt him to snap.
As though the thought triggered fate itself, Roderich's attempts to tune the piano were suddenly interrupted, the newly disturbed wire bursting loudly in his hands with an ugly 'twang', provoking him from morbid abstraction. Roderich's face clouded, and it took all his will not to lift something heavy and blunt to his most prized possession. Luckily, he had more wire on hand, but that fact alone did little to stave his anger.
"I've brought you your tea, Mr. Edelstein," the feminine voice caught the brunet Austrian by surprise. His head jerked up, skull connecting with the piano cover and resulting in a loud, painful 'crack.' Letting out a low hiss of exasperation, Roderich took a few hasty steps back, rubbing his head as he turned towards the pale blonde woman who had silently entered the room.
"My apologies, sir. Are you alright?" The monotone voice and bored expression on the young woman's face contrasted with the intended concern, as she placed the tray containing teapot, cup, sugar, cream and spoon on a short table a little ways off.
"Fine. I'm fine," he gritted out, annoyed a bit too easily by the maid's mere presence, let alone her speech. He added more pressure to the bruise forming on his head as he turned away from the large instrument, chagrined that there had been a witness to his private despair. The world should just leave him to be alone with his passion, even if it was currently at a stand still. With this thought in mind, the Austrian walked over to retrieve his cup of tea, murmuring a curt gratitude and implied dismissal.
Instead, Natalia – as the maid was typically addressed by her first name – turned slowly, her eyes following her employer. Her incurious gaze traveled over the Austrian's well-dressed form, over the thick and very prim blue linen of the others' coat and down to his pants tucked into clean-cut boots.
She couldn't understand how this man, whom she had come to know and at times admire as refined, controlled, almost distant, could possibly be so easily affected by a pursuit as trivial – in her mind – as music. It was not that she at all disliked music; merely that she didn't understand the compulsion to obsess over what was, after all, simply the arrangement of different kinds of noise. There were, after all, more important things in life. Food on the table, a well kept home, a loving marriage. All things that Mr. Edelstein appeared to have, in yet, didn't appear to appreciate. It made a cold place in Natalia's heart just a little bit colder, and today, it prompted her to speak.
"Mr. Edelstein," she started, hands firmly clasped together near her lower back.
The male could feel his nerves being grated upon the longer she stayed in the room, but always trying to be civil rather than snapping, Roderich gave her his attention, taking a sip of his tea.
"Yes, Ms. Natalia?" he attempted in what he thought was an appropriate tone. He had a feeling that his irritation had shown through, however, from the way the Eastern European woman's icy blue eyes narrowed at him in what almost seemed to be contempt.
"If you're no longer playing, why even bother to keep it repaired?" she asked bluntly, turning her back on him and facing the piano, coolly assessing the instrument with a hint of a scowl, "Such a meaningless artifact, don't you think? Couldn't you simply hire someone to, perhaps, play for you and your wife? I mean, instead of bothering yourself to play."
The Austrian stared, wondering at first whether the maid was trying to make a sorry attempt at a sort of joke, belatedly realizing she'd yet to make a joke in his presence and coming to the conclusion she was being quite serious. He felt his right bottom eyelid form a tick as his finger clenched around the unused piano wire still in his right hand, indignation rising. The left, however, still held the teacup, which Roderich promptly set down before he ended up throwing it at the young woman.
"I was not my choice to stop playing, Natalia," the Austrian corrected, deliberately mastering his suddenly flinty voice, "I simply ran short of inspiration." Roderich hadn't wanted to admit this, least of all to himself, so his teeth clenched shut tightly. He glared at her for a moment longer before speaking again.
"And no, it is not a 'meaningless artifact', as you say. I find it very useful, and think it's a very expressive instrument, given a competent, and more than capable musician such. as. myself," he gritted his last words out, eyebrow rising of it's own accord.
She hummed tonelessly for a moment, walking from the man and straight towards the object of the conversation. Expression absolutely blank, the blonde forcefully drummed each of her fingers along four random keys. With each loud note, the man halfway across the room could feel his entire being twitch, each inconsiderate slam on the ivory keys, in that improper fashion, grating further and further onto his nerves. Why was she being so rude to his most prized possession?
"I really can't see it," she drawled in an aloof tone, quite unaware of her offense. "This thing is pointless."
That seemed to be the last straw for the older male. His fingers clamped down onto the wire in his hand for a moment, before suddenly pulling a length into his other hand as well, striding towards the girl with abrupt speed, his mouth curled in an alien snarl.
"Stop touching her!" he all but shouted at his lowly paid servant, arms lifting before he could stop them, anger towards her indiscretion driving his actions. He brought his arms back down, wire now in front of the young woman. Before he knew what he was doing, he was pulling on the thin but strong wire, pulling it flush against the others neck.
Natalia didn't have much time to react, barely managing gasp and raise a hand towards her throat before the force behind the instrument wire caused the thin skin of her neck to break. Neither of them noticed, truly, until the wire was slicing through the skin, through the muscle, suddenly stopping on bone due to the untrained hand of the wielder, the wire not quite landing between vertebrae.
The Austrian felt himself exhale in disbelief, blinking, before he relinquished the pressure, pulled the bloodied wire out of the others' throat, and stepped back, every motion exaggerated and slow to Roderich's shocked mind. The fragile frame of the female collapsed to its knees, falling forward onto the hardwood floor of his home's music room.
Her head fell to the side, wide ice-colored eyes traveling up to him, gazing at him with a silent mixture of disbelief, devastation, and desperation. Her mouth gaped weakly, her throat letting out a tiny, helpless gurgle, before the life left those eyes, rolling back into her skull and fluttering closed. Roderich found himself staring down at the corpse mind utterly blank with a sort of numb horror. But, just then, he finally felt what he'd been wanting for the past months. A soft tune buzzed throughout his head; his muse had given him something to play.
"Roderich? What was all that-" the man's wife, the beautiful Elisabeta, stepped into the room, a tray of food in her arms that was to be his dinner. The Hungarian stopped in her tracks, slack fingers releasing their grasp upon the tray and letting everything clatter to the floor.
"Racket? Roderich! What have you done?" she dashed over to him, hands placing themselves on his shoulders to turn him away from the corpse, mouth strained and frantic. Elisabeta took the piano wire from him, tossing it down onto the body before looking back to him, hands trembling on his shoulders as she tried to peer into his abstracted auburn eyes with her own anxious green. "What the hell's wrong with you? Roderich? Talk to me!"
"Parchment," he said quietly, shifting eyes unfocused as his right hand began moving back and forth, conducting a large mental orchestra. "I need parchment."
His wife stared at him for a moment longer, before pulling her hands off of him and rubbing her forehead in quiet exasperation. Once he got a song into his head, he wouldn't stop until it was written down somewhere.
"I put it all into storage last week like you told me to, my love," she sighed, looking at her husband with a small frown. Their storage unit was over two miles away, and there was no way she was going to let him go there at this time of night.
The man seemed unaffected by this as he turned and stared blankly at the corpse, the scales rising and falling in the air beneath his right hand.
"That's fine, Elisabeta. After all, she was my inspiration," a mixture of a smirk and a smile pulled at half of his lips, as he tilted his head, lifting his hand to his wife.
"Fetch me that knife; I have my parchment."
Notes: The title Blut Zwischen Den Skalen (Blood Between The Scales) is a sort of play on words that we came up with. I won't go into detail at the moment, but may explain it at the end of the story for those interested.
Clemenz - I believe - is the name of a German/Austrian muse, specifically one of music or composing. I could be wrong about this.
A/N: There you have it my sweets, the first installment of our morbidly entertaining story. We hope you enjoyed reading, and please drop us a review. It really inspires me to pump out chapters at a faster rate, and also they just bring smiles to our faces. 3
