Summary: (AU) Anna, a scholar; Yoh, a lazabout. The fairy tale folds in about them, but fairy tales were made to break hearts…

Author's Note: I do not own Shaman King. That being said, this is not a sequel to the fairy tale – which never have sequels, only vague connections – but is a scene I wrote for the LJ Community (31 Days) that was about the both of them. This is neither before the beginning, after the end, but somewhere in the middle, when they're still getting to know each other. I didn't think the fairy tale was fleshed out enough anyway.

Expect more of these.

Sonatas in the Hall
3rd measurement in C

The concert hall was traditionally deserted, though Anna had never known why. It had something to do with ghosts, with a girl, and strangely, with pianos and marmalade. Being bothered by neither pianos nor preserves, and certainly not ghosts or girls, she had found it a convenient place to mark the papers of her students. It was quiet - better than could be said of the rest of the campus, which seemed to be full of students attempting to repopulate the earth all at once.

In earlier years, she had considered the myth of the girl, the ghost, with some anticipation. (Ghosts had never bothered her, and there had never been a time when she could have been persuaded to believe in a broken heart.) But years had corroded that expectancy until there was only a faint memory of it, a wisp that required only a hand to brush away the clinging cobwebs.

The hall itself would have never brought back the story: an unassuming room that had strove for grandeur once, worn down into the soft carelessness of dust. Its former splendour wakened only in occasional moments for a concert here, a recital there, left to disintegrate into old decadence again when they were gone.

She stepped into the overarching hall, and stopped. Music, twining, gliding, exulting, sounded out in the form of an elaborate waltz through the open chamber. Its notes rang with deception, guiding the ear past one pillar before dropping abruptly into the velvet seats and rising again from the carved, haunted, cherubs placed strategically (to frighten, she thought cynically) throughout the space. Swelling into sonorous finery, the sonata (it had to be a sonata; no other categories had the embroidered complexity, the determined convolutions) escalated, softened, descended again with distinct reluctance as the piece coiled to an end and she advanced into the hall.

And stopped again as the pianist tilted his head over to see her.

"What are you doing here?"

"Playing." He replied, in mild surprise, scrambling awkwardly to his feet. "I'm sorry; was I intruding on your time? Do you play here usually?"

"I don't play." She said coldly, and gestured to the instrument, which was a great deal more polished than she recalled. "Go on, if you must."

"But if you don't play the piano while you're here—" he began, then, catching sight of the thick folder of papers bulging out from beneath her arm, said, "Ah." and sat down again.

His hands hovered over the piano in a graceless inquiry. "Is there anything you want to hear while you're grading?"

"It doesn't matter." Anna said. "I don't listen to music while I grade."

"I wonder what the fail rate for your class is." He murmured, but straightened with embarrassment and wariness as she shot him neatly with a glare. "Are there any composers that you cannot abide, then?"

"Are there any that you like?"

"How unkind." But he spoke as if it were revelation rather than fact and he was pleased by it; a perversely irritating gesture.

"I have never wanted to be anything else." she retorted, making a particularly black and emphatic scribble next to the thesis of a student who, while having a rather self-satisfied and egotistical paper, did not entirely deserve the comment. "The unkind have it easier than anyone else in the country." But this was too close to truth, and though she did not lie as a matter of pride (and a certain amount of security in the knowledge of the stupidity inherent in others), neither did she offer truths so easily. "Why do you play the piano here?"

He tilted his head back, all embellished with the exaggerated smiles of a child. "Didn't you know that I could?"

She resisted the impulse to angle her head to match his, as if the world had turned with his view, and she must bend to follow it. "Your brother never talks about you. I knew nothing of you before you came."

"I didn't think he would." His fingers toyed idly over the higher keys, spidering in quick ivory trills before resuming the original sonata. Soft brown strands wavered in an obscure curtain over his face. The disorder of the movement made her fingers itch with the desire to tie it back. She wondered how he could stand it, the essential carelessness required not to stop in the middle of the melody to pull it out of the way. Or perhaps he had always recognized the futility of the action, the hairs too short to be kept in imprisonment for too long.

She waited through fifteen measures precisely, until he had reached the end of the movement, before saying, irritably, "The composer intended for that piece to be played in C."

Yoh glanced back in a gesture of polite enquiry as he hid a smile badly in the glimmer of his eyes. "Yes?"

Drumming the pen in absent rhythms over an unfortunate student's paper, she told him, "You played it in the key of A."

"So you were paying attention."

She threw a pencil at his head; it missed and he twisted to face her in triumph, only to be struck on the nose with a much-abused clipboard. "OUCH."

"You deserved it." She said evenly, and joined her hands neatly in the lap of her smoothed dress. "Play again – correctly, this time, if you can."

His hands clung to his nose a moment longer as a defensive mask before he dropped them to the piano, smiling gently at someone who did not smile back. "I thought it was appropriate." He responded easily. "You seemed to like papers on tragedies; I thought that converting a piece to one might suit you better."

"I don't like Schumann as a rule."

"But you know the piece."

"As scholars know to read. He's popular at the moment. Popular things are unfortunately hard to ignore."

He opened his mouth – perhaps to point out the flaw in her argument – but something in the way she was beginning to fold a paper into an exceedingly pointed airplane warned him. He closed his mouth again.

"Play it." She ordered.

"Only if you'll stay." He replied, and turned back to the piano before she could reply.

So she did – as did he.

end scene