A/N: Ok, so this is my first real RENTfic; after being addicted to the fandom for quite awhile now, I finally decided to try to write some of my own, this being the end result of that decision. I'm a little nervous about posting it, but here it is. Please read and review, if at all possible. I love getting feedback, both positive and negative, so that I can make my stories as good as possible. However, if you do feel the need to flame, please do so in a constructive manner. I can't exactly make my stories better if you don't tell me what's wrong with them in the first place.
As for the story itself, it's M/R from Mark's point of view, although Mark's name is never actually mentioned. It's just a ficlet, and I have no plans to continue it. I apologize in advance to anyone who has used the basic concept of this fic before in their own work, but it's sort of autobiographical, and I felt the need to write it, despite its lack of originality, concept-wise. Also, many, many thanks to Kait, Sophi, Lola, Lalwende, koulagirl32, and everyone else at RENTfic 101 for your comments on this story; they were very much appreciated. Props to all of you! Anyway, onto the fic…
Disclaimer: I do not own RENT or any of its characters. Believe me, I'd like to.
High on Lullabies
By Angel of Harmony/Harmony/Jen
Sometimes I wonder what you would have been like without your music. I almost can't imagine it; you and music just seemed to exist in such perfect symbiosis, incapable of functioning without the other. Trying to conjure up a mental image of you without it is like trying to picture you without a leg or a head or a torso. Or, more appropriately, without a soul. Because that's what music was for you: your spirit, your essence, your entire being. Without music, you would have been an empty shell, deformed and twisted and ugly. Music was Roger, and Roger was music.
Maybe that's why I can still picture all those times so clearly in my photographic mind- more clearly, it seems, than anything else from that period in my life. They weren't especially glamorous or life changing, those evenings and afternoons. But they captured you, the real you, better than any other time I can think of. In their simple-and-genuine-yet-mysterious ways, they managed to capture everything you were- and, in even more enigmatic ways, everything I felt about you.
I can still lay out the entire scene in my mind as if it were my favorite part of a much-loved film: you, sitting on that old 3-legged coffee table that needed a pile of dictionaries and old phonebooks piled under it to stand, your faithful black acoustic strapped across you and resting in your lap; me, curled in a tight ball on the end of that lumpy, beat-up plaid couch I'd always despised, watching as you tuned and strummed, the pick held tightly between your teeth as you fussed over your instrument. Sometimes sunlight would still be coming in weakly through the one small, grimy window in the room, and a shaft would fall across your calloused-yet-somehow-still-smooth hands as you worked. Other times, the loft was dark, lit only by the distant moon and the practical-rather-than-fancy candles we kept around for those electricity-free nights we became so accustomed too, and the flickering would cast shadows across your face while still managing to light up your midnight-blue eyes, squinted as they were in concentration. But no matter what the time of day, the scene was always essentially the same, and the next part never varied: after fighting with your Fender for a good ten minutes, forcing it into one of the many alternate tunings you loved to write songs in and fitting the capo onto just the right fret, you'd finally begin to play.
Thinking back, I don't think I ever heard you finish a song. Whether it was caused by perfectionism or a short attention span, your process was always the same: start a song, stop, curse, start over, stop, curse again, give up, then start a different song, only to repeat the same steps all over again, an unending cycle. But it was a comforting cycle, at least for me. Perhaps other people may have found it infuriating, but after knowing you and living with you and loving you for so long, most of your formerly exasperating habits ceased to bother me.
Besides, perhaps the pauses were good for me. I'm not sure what would have happened if you'd just continued to play, nonstop, and left me to float eternally in the magic your music created. Because from the moment you'd strum the first chord of a song, I was lost. The physical plane no longer existed; all that was real was you and me and the music. I never filmed you; in fact, I think that those were the only times that I didn't have my camera poised in front of me. But the truth was, there was no way a film could ever truly capture who you were while you played, and I wasn't about to ruin that. Instead, I'd sometimes find myself staring longingly at your hands, your arms, your face, your hair, drinking in all that I loved about you and knowing that this you, the you sitting before me playing these beautiful melodies and singing from the very depths of your soul, was you in your purest, most natural form. Other times, though, and perhaps more often, I'd find myself closing my eyes and letting the music simply flow through me, putting my imagination into hyper drive and loading my mind with impossible images that at any other time I knew could never become reality but that, for those few precious minutes that you'd be singing, seemed almost to be within reach.
You probably thought it was just a quirky habit of mine that I liked to hold your old guitar on my lap while you played, that battered-scratched-and-stringless instrument you jokingly referred to as "Susie". But the fact was, by placing my hands on the smooth, hollow wood of this guitar while you played yours, I could feel the vibrations of the notes and therefore could "feel" the music, in both an emotional and physical sense. With "Susie" under my palms, the already trance-like state your music brought me to became stronger, and all of the images and wild thoughts my mind produced consequently became even clearer, more real feeling.
But it wasn't just your music that held me enraptured those evenings. Your lyrics, always so poignant and brilliant, full of imagery, symbolism, and, most of all, emotion, spoke to my heart in ways no other songs ever could. And even though I knew that every song you wrote was about the women you loved, that they were all about April, or, later, Mimi, I could still pretend, in those moments where I could convince myself that reality was not reality and the impossible could happen, that they were about me. That I was the one you loved, that I was the one you wrote the songs about, the one you thought about as you sang them in your clear, smooth, strong voice that never failed to send a thrill up and down my spine.
I've always been a realist, and I never had any delusions at any other time that you would fall in love with me, that you would somehow find a way to reciprocate my feelings despite my gender. As much as it haunted and tortured me, I knew we could never be together, and the unconditional quality of my love for you allowed me to encourage your relationships, to hope for you to fall in love with them, find happiness. I never gave any hint of my feelings, and I didn't ever plan to. But during those times that you played and I listened and you sang and I let myself get carried away in your music, those times when we were the only two people alive and there was no April or Mimi, no drugs and disease and lack of money, nothing else in the world, I could almost manage to convince myself that it could happen, that we could be in love and live happily ever after in some slightly twisted version of a fairy tale.
Your songs were almost like lullabies, in a way. Lullabies are songs used to comfort children with fantasies of a perfect world so that they can sleep in peace, and your music had the same effect on me: it allowed me to feel some comfort in my delusions to rest my usually troubled mind. And, strange as it may seem, fooling myself wasn't a bad thing. Realism is nice, but everyone needs an escape, a time to hope and dream and wish. And for me, those times were my escape. They were pure, true, and beautiful, all that the real world wasn't, and that's what I needed.
So maybe that's why I remember those evenings and afternoons so clearly: because they were my escape, the happiest moments of that point in my life. Or perhaps it's because of what I said earlier: the fact that, through some infinitely mystical way, those times seemed to perfectly capture everything there was in you and in me. But no matter what the reason, it's a scene I know I'll never forget, and one which will replay in my mind a million times more: you, soaring from your soul, playing and singing of love and emotion; me, high on lullabies, dreaming and wishing on hope and impossibility.