AU: Brook
'It's dark', while everyone scurried away, he mused. Worn scowls on all of their faces, making the old and the young, appear so similar and the same was his next observation. They opened paths and fled his sight as he came with music. Shutters slammed close as faint wisps of note wisped through the streets. The fluttering birds soaring through the noon sky, and it's fierce glare, soon his only companion other than the closed windows on dilapidated buildings.
Brook frowned. No, it was not good at all to shy away from music. Not at all. Then following with a smile, behind it an idea to save, the fiddler stepped into the raised platform at the center of town. The one that delivered the tragedy, after they had denied it themselves.
The gravel was deteriorated, the houses all gray and muted colors. The flowers upon the windows bowing and wilted, as wilted as the eyes that peered out of windows hateful. Yet fearing.
They watched the fiddler, the fiddler who smiled constantly, who was warm to their cold, humming and strolling to their slouched backs and furtive glances. They saw, or believed they saw, the fiddler who took their treasures, and who took their happiness.
He began, he laughed while he played. They wondered if he could call them back. The way they had left might be the way they come back, the muted grief upon them wondered. While the hate urged them to kill. Music did took their lives away, for it to come back so nonchalantly, a pungent attack. To the the day where they had all stopped smiling.
It started off sweet and crooning, more like a lullaby of a mermaid than a song of joy. Until it converted itself into sunlight, it flitted in emotions of remembrance. It danced on their ears, it called upon their souls, that song that reminded them of the summer days when they could still hear the youthful laughs, the inquisitive wide eyes asking, pleading, observing determinedly and pure.
It was hypnotization some tried fearing, attempting to resist the call of their tapping feets, of their growing smiles, foreign on their faces. The same hypnotization that might have taken their children away.
"No good will come from this" harrumphed the old man, rising from his old brown chair and carrying the story to remind them of the dangers. Of the dangers of music, reminding them, once again, and warning of what years upon years of grief couldn't truly forget, but might attempt if just to get rid of the gravity upon their hearts.
The oldest of them arrived at the center of the town, past closed bakeries, blacksmiths and candles. Candles for the lost everywhere. Burnt to puddles, most. He crossed a small bridge to the center of town. The dark green roofs observant to his slow grudging plodding.
He arrived just in time to see the discrepancy in the air, to feel the lowering air pressure bring them all to their knees. All the wide eyes, the shock of theirs riveted upon the wrinkle in the air, like heat would look like from a distance on a hot summer day. The musician had his eyes closed, and was the exemption to the effects of the air pressure, apparently.
The song had turned from affection to longing. The feelings he reflected from the populace that had shyly walked towards him, in tune with those feelings yearning for freedom from their chains and of the easing bitter coiled drawn in sensation. He they were lost and thus played to regret, yearning and hope. Because it is hard to keep a frown when you are flying. Since Brook could not feel the pressure, nor see the air splitting he was ignorant to the paradise that had opened upon in front of him. Though he could feel the wonder and the tentative joy blossoming into fervent passion and stampeding when the children in paradise were once again called by music.
The musician stopped playing as the children escaped from perfection. He slowly opened his eyes to the view of tears and blubbering. No one was exempted for the tears. Not the burly men or the aged young adults, sisters and brothers. Not even the old man who had the written warnings and complaints against the past fiddler was exempted from the tears. Though he was frozen in front of his grandchild, the brunette with her arms raised, the vision he thought he would never see again. So he was startled when the musician hummed himself by. Satisfied and patting himself, though not really, all in a day's work.