Cacow, Tala, 1silentmouse, Stripes93, Pherse Issac and skittleAstalker*cough*Cullen. Thank you very much for waiting patiently for this chapter (or forgetting about it completely, that's cool too.) I had a bit of the dread Writer's Block and I was also trying to work through my backlog of plotbunnies (which I am still working through. The Schutzengel verse has put a lot of projects on the back burner.) You may or may not have noticed the flood of stories I posted the other day.
Thank you for participating in this brief update on my life. We shall now proceed to the actual story, which is the real reason you heartless sods are here.
"Sisco?" Chiara whined, leaning against the door frame of her brother's room, "What have you done with my-"
Alto or not, and she was definitely alto, Chiara Lovina Vargas' screams could shatter glass.
It took two hours of the most frightening tantrum either Lovino or Antonia had seen for their youngest child to calm down enough to get any sense out of her, and her brother had to be kept in a separate room, or else she would attack him. He may have been two heads taller, and he may have been twice her width in muscle, but she was a force to be reckoned with. Especially when she was angry.
"Principessa," Lovino wheedled, "My little girl, what happened. You can tell your Papa," he stroked her hair while she clung to his arm, angry tears still streaming down her face.
"He! He! My Violin! His stupid Señor Tortuga – that dumb turtle! My violin! My violin is in the turtle tank! In the water!" she managed.
"There, there, Principessa, it's alright, Papa will buy you another one," he soothed, rubbing calming circles into her back, trying to eyeball some support from his wife.
"It's the Lady Blunt Stradivarius!" Chi's voice was hoarse and rough from screaming, but still strong enough to express her indignation and horror at her father's idiocy, "It's irreplaceable!"
"I'll get you another one, a better one, I promise, Principessa," he cooed, and she snuggled into his side, sniffling.
"Grazie, Papa," she smiled wanly; "I'm going to go wash my face now. It's all puffy," so saying she walked sedately from the room.
Antonia frowned as her daughter shut the door with a soft click, "She's planning something; I don't like it."
"Honestly, cara. She's sixteen. She'll probably egg his car at worst," Lovino scoffed, unwilling to believe that his little girl could do anything worse. His wife pursed her lips doubtfully.
Outside the door, Chi had paused to run disdainful eyes over her brother, who was lounging against the door-frame, a triumphant smirk pulling lazily at his features. He looked a lot like their mother, but Antonio Francisco Fernandez Carriedo Vargas was lacking in much of her compassion and in possession of all the instincts and characteristics that made her so good at what she did.
The girl adjusted her headband and raised an eyebrow challengingly,
"This," she hissed, "means war."
~====o)0(====~
Class was a catastrophe. For the first time in his entire life, Daniel was stuck for a music related answer and had to be fished out of his well of despair by Julchen and her irrepressible need to be better than everyone else (given that her father was Roderich Edelstein, it was probably genetic).
"Now, lads and lasses," Professor Kirkland announced, clapping his hands for silence, "I have been asked to inform those of you who signed up for the extra credit performance project, you have each been assigned a venue at which to perform. Please collect your locations from me after class, they have been assigned according to your instruments and will begin next semester. Dan, can I have a word when you fetch yours?"
Dan nodded once, before continuing to sweat nervous bullets. He hadn't the first clue how to impress a girl like Anne, and even though he knew that he wasn't really supposed to 'try and impress her', he really, really wanted to make a good impression.
"Professor Kirkland?" he asked the dirty-blonde man when he came to the head of the queue for assignments, "What did you want to talk to me about?"
"Nothing much, lad, I just wanted to recommend some songs for your assignment. An, er, an acquaintance of mine frequents the establishment, and he's quite partial to them."
Dan looked down at the piece of paper he had been handed. It had the school letter-head on it, his name, a few brief instructions and the name and address of his assigned location, The Queen Anne's Revenge.
"Sir, this is pirate ship. You frequent a pirate ship?" he asked, utterly confused. Peter Kirkland thought he was going to explode with laughter.
"Well spotted Dan. Yes, the Queen Anne's Revenge is the vessel of the legendary pirate Sir Edward Teach, but it's only a pub, lad. You'll be part of a band. Their guitarist just left for Surrey, and my acquaintance recommended our school, and I recommended you."
"Sir, you keep saying 'acquaintance,' and I get the feeling that this person is not an acquaintance."
"Perhaps not quite, though uncle Arthur is one of those people that I sometimes wish was an acquaintance. He can be a bit of an embarrassment. But the family resemblance is strong, so I might as well be straight about it," he grimaced. Dan frowned questioningly,
"An embarrassment how, sir, if you wouldn't mind me asking?"
"Oh, he can get quite uproariously drunk, and when he does he pretends that he's a secret agent. It's quite funny the first few times. And then there's his on-off, love-hate relationship with that American. I mean, his boyfriend is barely a year or two older than me," he shook his head, "Sorry, Dan. It always gets me riled up. The bastard goes to Italy for a year and comes back with a cowboy."
"He lived in Italy?" Dan chose to focus on the part of that sentence he could relate to, "I grew up in Italy."
"I thought you were Hungarian?" the professor pounced on the change of subject eagerly.
"That's where we enter a grey area. My father is German, my mother is Hungarian and I was born in Hungary, but I spend most of my time between Italy, where my dad works, and Germany, were my mother works. Well, where mom likes to work. But all my friends and family live in Italy, so I count myself as Ita-Hungarian. It makes about as much sense as the rest of my family." He glanced at his watch and blanched, "I've got to go, sir. I have a date, and I really like this girl."
"Best foot forward, young Daniel. Faint heart never won fair lady!" the older man called after him as he dashed from the lecture theatre.
~====o)0(o====~
"So, how long have you been playing the piano?" he asked, feeling jittery all over as they walked through the little flower garden that was tucked away in one of the many courtyards and quadrangles to be found in the historic building.
"Since I was two. That makes it twenty-three years as of my next birthday," she said. Her voice was still clipped and formal as though she was giving a formal speech, but her body language was slightly more relaxed, and she was even smiling faintly. But her words made Dan want to stick something long and dexterous into his own ear and wiggle it around until he figured out exactly what it was that was causing him to mishear and get it out of his head.
"Twenty-three years? That makes you twenty-"
"Twenty-five, yes. I do realise that I am older than you and our class mates," her posture righted itself and she once more seemed cold and intimidating, "But circumstances prevented me from enrolling."
Dan shrugged, digested the information and decided that it might be best to adopt the familial attitude of age-gaps-are-fun and just carry on talking, "Age doesn't matter unless you're a cheese," he smiled encouragingly at her, tactfully steering away from negative conversation topics, "I read that on a book-cover somewhere."
That perfect melody couldn't be laughter, could it?
"You should laugh more often, it's beautiful." For the first time, Daniel saw Anne blush. It stood out starkly against her pale skin and dark hair; making her look like Snow White made flesh.
"Thank you," she said; her voice less precise, "I haven't even had much reason to smile lately. I'm glad that you could make me laugh," she looked pointedly at a flowerbed full of bluebells, tucking a stray lock of hair back into the large stone hairclip that had bound it. The Austrian woman was just a font of conversational-landmines, wasn't she? "How is it," she said after a pause, "That a Hungarian speaks German?"
"I'm not pure Hungarian," he said, trying to cut down on the length of his explanation because he had already said it once this afternoon, "I was born in Hungary, and my mom is Hungarian and my dad is German, and though mom speaks Deutsch, dad doesn't speak Magyarok, so English is the go between. I grew up in a multilingual household, so I think I speak," he squinched up his face, thinking hard, "German, English, Hungarian, Italian and some Spanish and. . . Well, I don't really speak any decent kind of French."
Anne raised her eyebrows, "That's impressive. Did you have many tutors?"
"Not tutors as such. Just listening to my family, really. It was sink or swim; I either learnt what the languages or didn't understand anybody."
"You are different from the rest of them," Anne said, weighing her words, "You act as though you know the value of important things," she looked at him challengingly, and Dan cracked a broad grin. He knew the answer to this question and agreed with it whole-heartedly.
"Things aren't important. People are. I have my family and my friends, that is what is most important," she nodded her approval, shivering slightly as the last golden fingers of late afternoon sun faded, leaving the secret garden cool and tranquil. Seeing the shudder, Daniel shrugged off his jacket, warm, worn brown leather, and hung it on her shoulders. She blinked at him in surprise,
"But your jacket-?"
"People are important, not things."
Getting Anne to laugh twice in one date is what Dan considered to be an afternoon well spent.
~====o)0(o====~
After that wonderful afternoon, Dan's evening took a turn for the mildly worse and altogether more surprising when he found Julchen slumped against his dorm-room door.
She had her knees tucked up under her chin and her arms around her legs. In a terrifying contrast to her usual demeanour, she looked as though she was trying to take up as little space as possible.
"Jules?" he asked. Sadiq was at a party, that much he knew, and wouldn't be home until the small hours, which may have explained the white-blonde girl curled up on his doorstep, "What's up."
"I hate him," she snapped, her eyes puffy from crying, "I hate him, I hate him, I hate him. Can I come inside?" Dan held out a hand to help her up,
"Of course, who do you hate?" he asked, pulling her to her feet and unlocking the door.
"Roderich Edelstein."
Once the two were safely ensconced in his room – rules are made to be broken, right? – and Julchen was draped in a duvet to ward of the cold that her miniskirt did not, Dan managed to extract the full story.
"Usually that schlappenschwanz never calls me, and I never call him. But this afternoon, when I got back to my room – I'd left mein handy there to charge – I had four missed calls from him. So I called him back and he told me that my mother had left him and it was all my fault and – and – and – and that he'd keep paying for me, but that I – Ich – I-I can't come home. And mom hasn't called me and he didn't tell me her new number. I have nowhere to- to go! The semester ends on Friday! The school has me down as a termly boarder! What am I going to do?"
The Hungarian stared at her in a suspended disbelief; he didn't believe that a father could just shut his own daughter out like that without any warning, or how he could be so cruel.
"Give me a few minutes," he said, grabbing his phone, a plan brewing in his cranium. He dialled and stood in the corner – it was the best spot for signal in this otherwise tech-hating building.
"Hey, it's me. Where are you going to be when the semester ends? Perfect, can I bring a friend. No, dad, not that kind of friend!" Dan gave Julchen an apologetic glance and grimace, "Lieb! Danke Schön!"
The white blonde looked quizzically, hopefully at her Hungarian friend, "Was?"
"Julchen Edelstein," Daniel said with a mock bow, "I cordially invite you to spend your holiday at Chez Beilschmidt in Rome, Italy."
Her answering hug almost choked him.
Thank you very much for reading, I hope to update sooner. Please review?
~RutheLa