a/n: Not the slash I promised, but it'll have to do, won't it.?
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I stand at the side of your grave, while all the time light rain flutters lazily down from the alabaster sky and brushes my face and clothes before continuing on its way down to the muddy ground. You lie below me; roughly six feet below me, on top of countless others, resting upon peasants' bodies crawling with lice and disease. You lie below me in a canvas sack, without wig, without fine clothes, without a shaven face. You are resting as you died, dear Wolfgang; I wonder if they bothered to close your eyes and shut out that fervent gleam lest it startle the worms who are to dine on you.
You lie below me now, blinded by death and that unsightly sack, unbreathing, unmoving, unmoved. Lime has been sprinkled upon you, and it rises, drifts up as lazily as the rain drifts down. Oh, Mozart, Mozart, Mozart – look what you have become! You have succumbed to death, you have lost your first and last battle! And what a battle to lose, dear Mozart. Now time will show who has truly triumphed. Is it Salieri, the man you openly mocked, the man you brushed off and then befriended when it seemed he could be in a position to help you – or is it little Mozart after all? Dead – murdered –at thirty five, leaving behind a wife and a son? Lieing in a pauper's grave! Leaving behind you your family and your Vienna. Leaving behind your debts, your stinking memory, your ever-echoing obscene giggle… leaving behind your legacy. Your music.
All of a sudden, a vision flashes in front of my eyes – I see myself as if from far off, a dark, sombre figure standing over an open grave. I remind myself too much of a carrion fowl, and, with a nod of the head to the dead body of the world's greatest musician, step once more onto the road, and make my way back to the city. But the faces of those attending the funeral flash before my eyes, and at once I know who has won.
To garner my "victory", I have widowed a young woman, killed a child's father. I have forced an innocent young girl to become a pawn in a game that she could not possibly comprehend until I had uttered "Checkmate!" and scattered the pieces. I have toyed with a soprano's emotions; have renounced the God that had taken me from poverty to aristocracy. I have murdered, drove to madness, the greatest musical genius the world had ever known. And for what?
Mozart still taunts me from his seat in Heaven. Amadeus – did you know it means "Beloved Of God"? Mozart laughes – giggles – down at me, seated on the right hand of the Lord.
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