Chapter Two: Variation
When he next attended the Nutcracker, Rei was by far better dressed in black trousers, a white button down, and a jacket. He had gotten a relatively better seat as well, having reserved it well over a month in advance (though no promises could be made for his wheelchair). His hair was combed down and neatly parted and his glasses had recently been replaced with fashionably red frames due to a happy accident - he'd been meaning to anyhow.
Oddly (at least according to his experiences), before the lights went down to signal the beginning of the ballet, a tall brunet man walked on stage, raising his strong arms for silence.
"Welcome," he said graciously, his voice gentle despite its loud volume to reach the corners of the theater, "to the opening night of The Nutcracker. I am the artistic director of this production, Makoto Tachibana. I am pleased to announce that our very Gou Matsuoka, is making her debut as a primary dancer tonight in the role of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Additionally, our Arabian Dancer, Nagisa Hazuki, is dancing his first role as a soloist. If we may, a round of applause for these two most accomplished dancers!" Hands thundered throughout the room, but no sound was sweeter than the ring of the young man's name in room - a soloist! He hadn't any idea of the implications, but Rei was most certain that he deserved it. "Please, enjoy everyone's dancing," the director continued, "and above all, enjoy this holiday classic!" Well, as far as speeches went, the accountant supposed his got to the point. It was effective, at least, and he was sure this Makoto was hired for his visionary skills rather than his speaking ones.
At last, as the artistic director made his way off stage, the lights dimmed and the curtains rose, taking away with them his breath. When last he came, he hadn't paid any heed to the story, the setting, or the dancers - he only listened to his self-pity. But tonight, the stage glowed with the warmth of a hearth as the scene opened upon a family party in the 19th century, with a magnificent Christmas tree in the center. Young children pranced about the stage, the girls dancing with the fathers and the boys dancing with the mothers. They were only interrupted the appearance of a mysterious figure - in the program, he was referred to as Uncle Drosselmeier. The man greeted each of the children, but chose one little girl to bestow upon the gift of a beautiful nutcracker. In a rage, her brother broke it, eliciting a sharp ache in Rei's heart, but the uncle gave him a sling. Eventually, the families made their exits, leaving the young girl, Clara, to fall asleep holding her nutcracker upon the sofa.
The next events came as quite a surprise to Rei - he certainly had not been paying attention last time! As she slept, an owl on a grandfather clock began to glow and the tree on the stage began to grow, reaching almost twice its original height. The girl was carted offstage and presented again upon a bed, though the scenery had changed from the warm home to a chilly, snowy night. A life-sized nutcracker fought and defeated a mouse king, only with the help of Clara's slipper, and before he knew it, the curtains fell to signal the end of the first act.
Why, Rei thought as intermission began, his dancer hadn't been there at all! And, as he reviewed the program, most of the plot had been finished already. All that was left was for the nutcracker to take Clara to the Sugar Plum Fairy's court and recount her bravery in saving him by tossing her shoe at the king's whiskery face.
When the intermission was finished, the accountant was still feeling rather miffed at the entire situation. He didn't see Nagisa Hazuki as a soloist among a group of dancers dressed like snowflakes, nor was he in the following change of scenery at the fairy's court as the nutcracker arrived with Clara. He was temporarily distracted by the Sugar Plum Fairy - her hair was red like cherries and her cheeks were high pink to match her sweet surroundings - but even that proved little solace. She beckoned forth her court, beginning with a mimicry of Spanish dancing called 'chocolate' and followed by Chinese 'tea'. This was of course followed by another food dish, some ridiculous 'coffee', according to the program -
Oh, he thought, as the cheery Chinese dance faded and the lights dimmed to red and gold, Arabian coffee.
A solitary dancer, draped in an opulent veil with pants clinging to his hips, slithered into the hot, yellow spotlight. On either side, the legs were torn and kept to the ankle by gold bracelets, and instead of a shirt he wore a feminine wrap around his chest. Rei could barely hear the mezzo piano music of the orchestra for the rhythm of his own heart, but the beat was kept by a clear, high chime from the young man's fingers as he tapped cymbals together with his fingers.
The dancer's body bent like a mirage to the spin of the clarinet and as the violins fluttered, his eyelashes would shiver around his rose-gold irises. He would sometimes land in a split, striking his brassy cymbals, and glance behind his bare shoulder to meet the audience with an unbroken, passionate gaze. His dance was quite unlike the others, Rei noted, full of exoticism, and, he noted as his eyes met the soloist's plush lips with a chime, lust.
It was an all too short four minutes before the sultry dance finished, transitioning to what the accountant recognized as the marzipan shepherdesses - the one in which his dancer had fallen - and from there to the waltz of the flowers and the final numbers. He was impressed with the pas de deux of the Sugar Plum Fairy, as well - Ms. Matsuoka was a skilled woman - but nothing could touch the elegance of the coffee dance.
As the ballet finished, Rei was pinned in place, trembling in awe of that sensuous dance, so much that he did not notice when everyone had left and a stagehand familiar to him shooed him off. When he closed his eyes, the luxurious image burned through his imagination and he reckoned the very word 'coffee' would never again be without its connotation.
For the next few weeks, Haruka heard nothing but the story of that dance. He never told Rei to stop, and the man reckoned that his younger partner treated it like white noise for concentration - whatever suited him, he supposed. He had purchased a small poster of the ballet, as a keepsake, that featured the Sugar Plum Fairy's Pas de Deux and the Arabian Dancer's solo - a token for his motivation, he rationalized.
Around this time, his local fame as a successful, independent investor had increased in leaps and bounds. He saw new, wealthy clients nearly every week at his rate and was able to hire an assistant, Nitori Aiichiro. He was young, fresh out of graduate school, and much as Rei had been prior to his accident (though perhaps a tad more self-aware).
One day, he asked of his employer in a quick breath, "Why do you keep so many things from ballets?" He was hesitant, and the shifting papers in his hands made the sound of a gentle breeze. His eyes fluttered around nervously, examining a ticket protected in a glass frame, and others pinned to the wall in a stripe beside his most recent acquisition. Even his young eyes perched gently upon the golden Arabian Dancer, peering quizzically through his downy bangs.
Rei took awhile to think, returning as far back as his salty tears in the sweet performance, where for a moment a shepherdess had fallen in front of a broken-hearted man. And yet in a fluid motion, he had twirled away from the gaping hole of failure like a hummingbird from a raindrop. And so, the older man told him, "Because he stood after falling when I could not."
In that moment, Rei had not seen the delicate dancer, but had peered into a heart as hard and precious as diamond and, like the boy before him, he was unwilling to surrender himself to fate. This was why he had kept on. This was why his heart, though soft and malleable as gold, still could beat, carrying the warmth of his blood throughout his entire body. He purchased his next ticket then for a production of Don Quixote to occur in four months.
He busied himself those next several weeks by moving their business into a rented office space, shared with similar departments. As soon as they saw the practically prodigious Rei, they had been keen on joining him in fact, but they had planned their discussions for April. A most unfortunate event, for he was out to see his next show (they, like the youthful Nitori, had wondered why on earth his office was decorated in pictures of such odd things without a hint of family at all).
On the day of the April ballet, he notified his customers that he would take that Friday off and to direct their calls to Nitori or Haruka. His older customers, previously having known him as a spry, forward young man asked why, and he told them in kind that it was time for him to see his next dance.
The story was somewhat sillier than those he was accustomed to watching and was about a man who thought himself a knight and his donkey-bound servant. The investor felt great deals of sympathy for him, he supposed - the primary dancer as Don Quixote chased an unreachable beauty, Dulcinea, deluded completely by his dreams of chivalry.
Nagisa Hazuki was listed in the program only as a Spanish dancer - it was a position that lacked glamour, from the sound of it, but Rei was excited nonetheless, for the beauty he would bring to it. His mind's eye played waves of red and yellow lights and a sultry tone and he established that he was most certainly eager to see something of that variation again.
In the second act, he was most shocked to find that this was not the case by any means. His dancer emerged in a court, dressed in a stiff, crimson leotard with classical decorations and a wide skirt. There was a graceful introduction of harp, to which he snapped out a fan, but it changed to charming plucks of the strings and spiking hums of the woodwinds. To this, the blond soloist charmingly pranced in little leaps, practically playing with a smile on his face. Here and there, he made grand running steps, shaking his fan open and closed to his every whim and fancy. He could not have been out there much longer than a minute, but the innocent display left Rei's cheeks pink with a trembling lip. How sweet it had been! And how unexpected!
The ballet later ended with the crazed Quixote's defeat and the promise not to unsheathe his sword for a year. He had only dreamed of dear Dulcinea, but he had been left without, and as he sat alone in the theater as the stagehands cleaned, poor Rei wondered when his pity had become a sad sense of empathy. The black stage loomed tall above his orchestral seat. Yes, she had been beautiful, hadn't she? That faraway star, the one Quixote swore was the moon itself.
He reserved tickets for the August performance of Cinderella not long later, before the cast had even been announced. He assumed the primary dancer, Gou Matsuoka, would be in it and he had found he'd rather enjoyed her as well, though she wasn't his star. In Don Quixote, she had been both Kitri and Dulcinea and he found her rather magnificent. As far as Nagisa went, he could simply hope day and night that he would see him once more - but he supposed a soloist was also often featured.
In these months, his company grew exponentially with the addition of their somewhat struggling companions that had shared their space. Statewide, he, Haruka, and Nitori were known for their teamwork and they soon added more partners - the particular acquisition being two energetic brothers by the name of Mikoshiba. They were placed in charge of what had initially been Rei's job - working with customers - as the brunet found himself promoted to CEO of their company, but of course they were not in business long before his rags-to-riches story attracted the attention of news outlets in the state. Well, Rei could not himself say he fancied being put on display, but the support was worth it, he learned. He received letters and emails after interviews, often from disabled people or their families, expressing gratification, and he felt at least that he had done some levels of good if others were inspired by him as he was by his dancer. To his chagrin, Haruka told the story in an interview once (the older man could've sworn he hadn't been paying attention in those early days) and likened the CEO's story to the upcoming ballet of Cinderella he would be attending (well, at least the dancer's name hadn't been mentioned, but what nerve!).
When he arrived one hot August evening, a large handful of people greeted him, informing him that they'd seen the interview themselves. Some even said they had decided to watch ballet because of his apparent passion for it! But, if it helped the ballet company, he supposed he did not mind. The performance was entirely sold-out and had sold quicker than both opening and closing nights, Makoto had announced at the beginning after introducing a new soloist, a young Ran Tachibana. He was temporarily concerned - was his dancer replaced after the humiliation of the story? Did the company want someone without a black mark on his record?
But his fear was unwarranted. In an unusual take for the story, but common in the ballet, after the godmother's appearance were four more fairies - one for each season. First was the spring fairy, played by the newest soloist, but it was the next that took his breath away.
Nagisa as the summer fairy was slow and delicate, gliding along in perfect sashays like a breeze interrupting the still air. He did not leap like the Spanish dancer, nor bend and break like the Arabian. With each movement he made, his long skirt would stay a moment after, like dust suspended in the sun, and his face was sleepy and gentle like dappled light. After his performance, Rei clapped the loudest, his sounds thunder rolling over the warm performance.
Over the months, the investor spent his funds on cheaper, more intermittent ballets, often more modern productions or collections of solos or pieces to perform. His time was otherwise consumed by work and even these shorter ones began to dig into his busy schedule. It had become such a problem that by December, he had been unable to reserve himself a ticket to the season's most popular ballet and his first, The Nutcracker, though how hard he tried to keep it for his birthday!
One night while examining the website online, he discovered that his dancer this time had been cast in a much longer role, the soloist for Waltz of the Flowers, and his heart shuddered and shrank like a leaf in fall. How he would have loved to see it and how it hurt him that he couldn't! But, when later examining photos, he imagined it might have been for the best. He could not unsheathe his sword and no matter how he cried, the moon could not hear him.
One year to the day, even in pain, Rei loved the ballet.