A/N: Taking a break from Crossroads for this quick, 3-chapter AU. I've always loved Tchaikovsky, the composer of The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and The Sleeping Beauty. I've known the music all my life, but I only saw my first ballet recently (a rendition of The Nutcracker, of course). I decided to write a quick ballet AU story. There will only be three chapters. "Step of Two" is the literal translation of a dance that's common in ballets, called a "pas de deux".
Chapter One: Corps de Ballet
Rei fell in love with the ballet three years ago.
Three years and four months ago, he was a moderately successful accountant working in uptown New York for upscale clients living high class lifestyles, strolling from his office to the nearest subway stop. As a confident young man of twenty-seven or so, he was not paying attention to the now, but had his focus on the future. His clients' money and by extension his own was the horizon before him, so he did not notice the drunk driver coming toward him at break-back speed.
Three years and two months ago, Rei Ryugazaki awoke from a coma, paralyzed from the waist down.
The next sixty days were spent in a haze of readjusting to civilian life, but he'd lost his job from inactivity. Who would want a cripple for a coworker, after all? All of his money had been drained by hospital care and nursing and he hadn't any source of income. Here, at the end of his life, what was he to do? Go on living? Most certainly not. In a snap decision, he drained his funds to purchase tickets to the ballet - he didn't care which, he didn't care when, all the former accountant needed were those last images as a sign of his worthlessness to society.
And so, three years ago to the day, he attended his first viewing of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, going to die and leaving to live.
As he spent all but a fraction of his measly fortune, he had a stunning seat front and center, close enough to the stage that he could feel each dancer's sweat like hot rain upon his forehead. Throughout the first act, the night went very much according to plan: the graceful movements, the potency in every step they took before the fallen man, and the passion blinding them to their audience had his heart thoroughly destroyed.
The second act began by sickening him. The stage was dolled out in pretty sweets and decorated in frosted clouds to the extent that its false, powdery set made him want to puke out his sadness. What an artificial set-up, used to encourage dreams of a wonderland. Life was not that beautiful.
The stiff dancers entered on a mechanical cue, their starchy slippers thumping noisily in front of Rei. "Ha, ha, ha!" each step sang cynically, smirks pinned to the made-up faces of everyone before him.
In actuality, he did not see the moment, but rather heard it - the false laughter of those shoes were in a moment interrupted by the slap of skin upon the dark floor, looming before as a gaping black hole, a yawn in the ground to swallow them all. Rei glanced up and saw there at the mouth a young dancer, hair hidden by a ribboned cap, dressed in pastel to match a set of pretty rosegold eyes. The dancer had fallen. Distantly, the accountant realized that this must have been one of the marzipan shepherdesses - not the primary one, certainly - and he felt pity for the young thing before him for but a minute. A moment later, that sweet face incited his tears as with powerful arms the dancer pushed himself away, floating back to the background and away from the man's view.
He did not know why it made him cry, but as the shepherdess vanished from his sight, he could not stop saline tears from falling down. Even as the story progressed, they did not stop, and his thoughts never strayed from that dancer. Among the crowd, he could not pick him out, desperately though he tried. Was he all right? Would he lose all he had worked for? Of course, for that was how it went in the world of dance, wasn't it?
After the curtains collapsed upon the stage and the masses had passed him by, Rei wheeled himself to the edge of the black arena, gently calling for someone. He was answered by a disgruntled stagehand.
"What?" the woman snapped irritably.
"The dancer that fell," Rei pleaded, "is she all right?" Her look transitioned to slightly incredulous - she didn't believe anyone would truly care that much. His red glasses made bloodshot eyes stand out.
"Nagisa?" she repeated dumbfoundedly. "He's okay, sounds like another dancer pushed him." She asked him something else, but the man's aching heart was relieved and his damaged mind was calculating how much he would need to save to see another performance. Nagisa. What a beautiful name for a dancer that lived on.
In the next six months, he was unable to return to the theater to watch them dance again, though that was the thought that fueled him. He set up his own business as a private investor, garnering a host of wealthy clients that had previously been his since his tragedy and moved by that very story. He worked from home, mostly, having moved to a brownstone-styled, single-storey house close enough to the heart of the city. Stood upon his desk was a framed picture of the poster from the show that he'd seen, his ticket safely tucked into the front of glass with it. He kept the program as well, having found the dancer's name and circled it. Nagisa Hazuki. No matter what, Rei had promised himself, the next ballet he watched would have him in it.
That aside, despite his business' modest success, he was unable to attend another performance until August, and even then, it was more due to his blooming partnership with a brilliant young economist, Haruka Nanase. His views (and luck, perhaps) were unparalleled, but he hardly had the way with people like Rei did. Despite their mutual introversion, however, they became friends to the point where the bespectacled man did not feel shy in inviting him to the next performance. One evening, finally having scraped together nearly $100 for personal use, he called the man on his cellphone.
"Hello, Haruka?" he asked into the phone, staring at his computer screen where the ticket information was available on their summer "Firebird". It did not list the role of the dancers, but after an email to the company, he discovered that the young dancer was in fact cast.
"What?" came the muffled, disgruntled reply. Friendly though the two were with one another, he certainly could come off harsh.
"I was going to buy tickets to a ballet next month, if you'd care to join me," the older man offered, marking the date in his calendar.
"No," Haruka stated simply, hanging up and proceeding to do whatever it was he liked best. And so, once the month was up and July became late August, he dressed himself up in the better clothes he owned (though at this rate, it was still business casual - how embarrassing!) for the opening night of the Russian ballet. As soon as he collected his ticket and rolled into the lobby of the theater, he desperately tore through the program, searching for the dancer's name. 'Nagisa Hazuki' rang through his head as he examined each role.
At last, he found the boy's in a rather unexpected section - "Thirteen Princesses" was the header over his and many other names. He did mistake the young man for a woman at first, he supposed. It wasn't until the stagehand said otherwise that he'd noticed. Well, regardless, it wasn't as though he knew much about the story, but princesses normally were a feature role, weren't they? The warm glow of pride lit his heart however much he told himself the sentiment was quite inappropriate. He couldn't help it though - what a way to show them that he couldn't be kept down after being scornfully pushed aside!
So he thought, at the least. The night began diverging from his plan beginning with his seat. Due to the stairs in the theater, he found he couldn't even get to it. Bad enough that he would have been all the way in the back of the balcony with barely any view, but he couldn't even get there! When he addressed the problem with the theater, they haphazardly shoved him somewhere on the first floor in the middle of an aisle. What between moving for irritated audience members finding their seats and his conveniently dysfunctional brake, he was completely irate as the curtains rose.
They opened upon a man that was evidently hunting. Eventually he caught a woman in his arms - apparently the title role - and they spent a long while struggling until she tossed a feather at him and left. He couldn't quite understand the intricacies of the story, but once the intermission came, he read that the prince had caught a firebird and, as a bargain for her freedom, she had given him a feather for him to call her when she was needed. There was yet to be any mention of a princess. Or thirteen of them for that matter.
It was in the second act, after the prince was transported to a magical world, that the princesses were featured in a dance. From his vantage point, tangled in between seats and far from the front of the stage, he barely made out rosy eyes - he was the fourth one out and, it appeared, the shortest of the women on stage. Immediately, his tension melted away to the point that he actually released his chair and rolled forward far enough to tap the group in the chairs in front of him. Oh, how beautifully synchronized he was with the rest of the dancers on stage! What a vision he was of success, of triumph!
Every time the young dancer came on stage, a little bit of Rei's reservations about his own life broke away, though his appearances were few and far between. He wasn't even the princess that the prince fell in love with at the end. Again, the accountant remained in his seat until the last audience member had cleared out and the stagehands came to clean. He wanted to ask after the dancer, but he simply couldn't - not even when the woman from his first ballet glanced curiously his way. He left shortly thereafter.
Rei Ryugazaki spent his next four months incredibly focused on his work as he and Haruka allowed their business to expand all over the city. Seeing his dancer successful on stage, even after so bad and humiliating a fall had fueled his desire to succeed, despite his disability. Besides, he rationed, his intellectual abilities weren't at all limited and firing him the loss of his previous employers in the end!
As their clientele increased with word getting out, the accountant was able to store more and more of his money away for attending the ballet, so much so that the time it took between his attendances had been halved! He had missed a few concertos and the first performance of Cinderella, but when next he could go, it was to see the Nutcracker once more, in the dawn of December.
Two years to the day, Rei fell in love with ballet.