Title: "Tonight"
Summary: Peter and Emma watch "West Side Story" and exchange online messages.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.
Notes: I was listening to the title song and thought the lyrics fit Peter and Emma's story.
Emma flipped through the television channels in her apartment late at night. She didn't normally watch television, but she found it more interesting now that she could see the sounds coming from the screen. She settled on watching a broadcast of the movie musical "West Side Story."
Musicals were one thing she had never been able to fully appreciate with her hearing-impairment, but with captioning and her new ability, she found herself getting caught up in the song and dance numbers. The film had gone to commercial when she received a visual alert that someone had sent her an e-mail.
She checked the message, finding it to be from Peter. The message simply read, "Hi, Emma."
"Hi," she wrote back. She waited a minute, then refreshed her screen. Peter had replied back, sending her a chat invitation. She accepted it.
"What are you doing up?" he wrote.
"I'm watching a movie. You?"
"Couldn't sleep. What movie are you watching?"
"'West Side Story.'" She typed in the channel it was on, then clicked "Send."
Peter's reply came back a couple minutes later. "A classic. Oh, look, they're about to sing 'Tonight.'"
Emma glanced at her television and found that he was right.
Tony was outside Maria's balcony, and the two star-crossed lovers were soon singing about their love for one another.
Emma turned away from her laptop, mesmerized by the colors she saw. It was particularly spectacular every time the music and singing reached a high point.
When the song was over, she realized she had been holding her breath. She released it, then turned back to her computer to continue her conversation with Peter.
"That was beautiful," she wrote.
"It must have been something to see the colors for it," he wrote back.
She hesitated a moment before typing in her response. "Do you ever wish you could hold onto more than one ability at a time?"
Peter didn't answer for a few minutes. Just as she began typing an apology for asking her question, his reply came.
"I used to be able to do that," he said. "But I can't anymore. I'm kind of relieved, actually. It was…difficult for me, hanging onto so many powers at once. I had to learn how to control them, and I wasn't very good at it."
"So, it's safer this way?"
"It is. But…I do wish I could have seen the colors tonight."
"Maybe you'll be able to again. Someday," she added.
"Somewhere?" he replied, and she could picture his face, an amused grin playing about his lips.
She typed in a smiley face to show she got the joke. She felt a yawn coming on and covered it with one hand, while she bent down to scratch her cat behind the ears with her other hand.
Almost as if he had read her mind, Peter's next message read, "It's getting late. Guess we'd better get some sleep. Goodnight."
"Goodnight."
The final remaining lyrics for "Tonight" went through Emma's head, but she didn't have the courage to write them down and send them to him to read, so instead, she merely signed off her account and turned off her computer.
Little did she know that that night, Peter would dream of her anyway, just as she would dream of him.