Gilbert is away more now.
Always, always, it's the Balkans. He runs off to the Balkans to get himself involved in whatever petty skirmish is going to bring the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire crashing down around their heads, and Ludwig is all day off trying to work even more on the Clankers and figure out what makes them go — Roderich can't understand it, horrible loud things that they are, and Ludwig is such a quiet child —
— not a child. He's taller than Gilbert and he's filling out, at his age Roderich was already at a conservatory.
But still, he shouldn't be working with those. It's not…it's not right.
And Gilbert doesn't think so, he thinks Ludwig should be working with them because sooner or later it won't be Giannitsa, it'll be Budapest or Strasbourg, and — and it could be but acknowledging it —
— he won't.
His fingers slip on the keys, and Roderich winces and curses softly under his breath.
The sonatas are a little harder to play, now. It is no fault in Roderich's fingers, he knows, they are strong as ever; there is just something in the air, some undefinable thing that gets in the way of the notes as they slide from his eyes to the tips of his fingers.
There are people trying to fix this, trying new things with tones and scales and pulling music apart and Roderich goes to speak with them sometimes, the Second Viennese School. Although Roderich has never been much for social interaction, they are agreeable enough. Leaving the house seems to pull a little more life into his fingers. The streets are still the same as before (why would he have thought they would have changed?) and he is not worried. He is composed.
Vienna is quiet.
Vienna is quiet.
Roderich has never known it to be quiet, but it is, under the heavy pall of something about to happen.
He once went to London, when Ludwig was small, and the thick fog there hadn't been as bad as he'd heard it was before those…beast-things, but the muffling, stifling, oppressive weight of it…that is the same.
The piano cannot seem to break it, no matter how much the Second Viennese School draws him forward, loud loud loud but the silence will not break.
Only one sound ever does; but the steel footsteps of the Clankers don't so much break the silence as make it more obvious. They accentuate the deadening shroud, falling flat and lifeless as the old sonatas seem to now while the smothering inevitability of whatever-it-is settles in.
Schoenberg goes a little way towards alleviating it, but not enough, not —
— The piano crashes.
"Hey, was that part of the song?"
"Quiet," Roderich grumbles.
"No, it's a serious question," replies Gilbert. "I can't tell with this."
"For your information," he snaps back icily, "it was not."
"You sure?"
"I should think I would know."
Gilbert chuckles, leaning forward. "Am I to assume that I've just heard Roderich Edelstein fuck up?"
Roderich sighs. "Yes, Gilbert."
He returns to the beginning of the measure. His delivery is mechanical, he knows, mechanical and lacking, but maybe that's part of it anyway. Gilbert, with his muddy boots on the table (Roderich tells him, time and time again, to remove them, and time and time again Gilbert does not) and his knowledge of music that Roderich knows is microscopically detailed in the area of fife and bugle and simply microscopic outside of that, most likely sees no difference. If he does, he makes no comment.
"It'll be big."
Gilbert knows Roderich is listening, although he shows no signs of it.
"The next one. I can tell, I know these things. It'll be big."
He smiles, but there is no humor in it; and thinks to say it'll be great, but there would be no truth in it.
The silence settles, despite Gilbert's best efforts and Roderich's new music. It worries Gilbert as well, it's the silence that bodes ill for young men. Soon, he knows, it will be the sort of silence where ideas like dying for your mother country take root.
Gilbert has no intentions of dying for any country at all. He's seen it, and all it is is dying with added guilt, and he intends to live — for pay, if nothing else, but there's always something else, what would Ludwig do without him and only with Roderich, what would Roderich do without anyone to offer criticism on his piano playing?
Ludwig's been doing well without you, anyway, with only Roderich, and soon you'd better stop living for other countries or you'll die for them, says the voice that dogs him more with every battle.
The silence settles in bone-deep around Gilbert too.
What confuses Roderich more than anything else about Gilbert (a long list even at the best) is that he even survived the Balkans. Anyone as brash, as combative as Gilbert should have been, if not shot by a Turk, shot by an Albanian.
Yet, he returned. He always does. It is a fact of life: the sun rises and sets, Roderich can never make his Zemlinsky sound quite right, Gilbert returns from whichever skirmish he goes to help out in. He comes back and greets them both laughingly, asks Ludwig how're the tin cans and did you get taller, shit you got taller stop doing that and Roderich whether he moved from the piano at all Jesus man you need to leave it sometimes the world won't end if you do, even removes his worn-out but shined boots instead of tracking mud inside.
And Roderich worries, he worries constantly because there is not much else he can do (and if he could just do something besides sit in this old old house with its peeling wallpaper and dusty corners, could help could do anything could stop what looms over them all with a sonatina, with sheet music) and though Gilbert does laugh when Roderich worries over other things, never this. He doesn't laugh about things that worry them both.
