6/10/14

Ivories

part one
serendipity

—extra dimension of expression and emotion which strikes the heart—

[chapter one / sonata pathétique]

Eric Vinters was by no means a monster.

He had only ever wished for the best for his daughter, he really had. House Vinters was rich, extraordinarily so, although Eric and Maria had made it a point to never flaunt around their wealth. But Eric had access to a vast pool of assets, and what would he do with it if he did not spend it for his daughter's benefit?

So, he reasoned, so what if he didn't tell Elsa about the monetary nudges he gave the judges during her first few competitions? It was for her own good.

It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered, but for his daughter's success. The world of music was a competitive and difficult career path, and Eric would be damned if he didn't help Elsa achieve the enormous potential he knew she possessed.

So he taunted. He shouted. He taught.

He loved.

—

She shouldn't be having so much trouble with this piece.

She shouldn't be struggling with it, period: Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique, a song that packed a very sentimental punch with it, a song she counted among one of her personal favorites and one that she could play since she was ten.

The last song her mother had ever taught her.

She had been up since five in the morning, rehearsing this particular song, because she just wasn't getting it today. It was enough to cause her to want to tear at her hair in frustration—slam her palms down onto the Steinway grand's keyboard, let loose a scream that had lain curdling in her gut for over an hour by this point.

This rehearsal, it had become so mundane. It followed a never-ending cycle: she played, she was criticized, she was told to play again.

Stop.

Play.

Repeat.

"You were rushing again, Elsa."

His voice cut through the air like a white-hot switchblade, rupturing the concentration of the pianist and slashing through the train of melody. A set of chords broke off into a discordant jumble of notes as the classically beautiful blonde woman seated in front of the grand piano peeled her fingers away from the white and black keys, slowly sliding them off the lacquered wood even as her head dropped into her hands.

She stayed that way for a few more moments before heaving a deep sigh, forcing herself to look back up into the cold and unforgiving eyes of her teacher. Her piano maestro.

Father.

"...I," she said, "...yes. Okay."

There was a very frosty and very unforgiving pause. Elsa flinched under a steely gray glare.

"Ah, I mean...yes, Father. I know now."

"That last run was all speed," her father growled, leaning over the keyboard as if to intimidate her further—and if that was his intention, Elsa meekly thought, he very well succeeded in it—"there was absolutely no musical element to it; your playing was completely flat. You weren't counting correctly between the chords during all three of the Graves, and your technique suffered as well. Your right hand consistently came in before the downbeat and your left was uneven. You sounded like you were simply in a rush to get the movement over with."

Elsa was silent.

He didn't take his eyes from off her—cold orbs of lifeless stone, they were:

"Your concert is in a day," he flatly reminded her, as if she needed any reminding. "And there will be no mistakes. No slip-ups. Clean...as always."

And Elsa nodded robotically. She turned her hands onto the piano keyboard once more, already knowing what her father would say even before the word came out of his mouth.

"Again," he said, turning his back on her.

So Elsa played.

Stop.

Play.

Repeat.

And she had barely played five measures when her father cut her off again.

"This is useless," he flatly said. "You are useless." His words tore into her, white-hot knives pressed against her flesh and bone. "Get off the piano. Take the score and study it, and so gods help me, get out of my sight until you can play the damn song without stumbling every two notes you play."

Elsa took the score in silence and left the room.

—

She had her own preferences with music, of course. Beethoven's music had its virtues, truly, but she wasn't quite obsessed.

She thought Mendelssohn was the tiniest bit too superficial. Technically difficult; yet musically, his pieces were almost childish. Bach was a bit too dry for her taste and for whatever reason, she absolutely despised Mozart. Perhaps it was his sheer ubiquity, but she was borderline indifferent toward his music. Liszt's impromptus had a special place in her heart, Prokofiev she enjoyed when she wanted something a bit more on the wild side, and Beethoven was simply fantastic.

They had begun to call her, though, a Rachmaninoff specialist.

If Elsa could have married music, she would have married Rachmaninoff's in a heartbeat. He did tend to have some similar-sounding works, quite a few smashing chords, but Elsa loved the raw emotion behind them. It was almost like taking a look into either the darkest or most beautiful corners of the very human soul. Playing Rachmaninoff was the closest time she had ever come to wearing her heart on her sleeve. She had done a master class once, only about three months ago, when she had just turned seventeen (some of her "students" were older than her and it made Elsa feel terribly self-conscious) and played his Prelude in C-sharp minor as an introductory piece. She had recorded his sets of Morceaux de fantaisie and the Preludes in Ops. 23 and 32 with her record label, which upon its release was received with very positive reviews from music critics all around.

Elsa thought that he was simply so pure. He was so raw, and so open. The music, it could be angry. It could be desperate. It explored all the darkest corners of the soul, and not necessarily, well, angst either. His music was all the things Elsa could never hope to be, but she could sure as hell try.

She played him sometimes, in the dead of the night, in a pitch black piano room where she couldn't she her fingers and couldn't see the keys. She played him when she needed to unwind, she played him when she needed to lay bare her emotions if but for a moment, with nothing but the night as her witness. She played him when she needed to cry after a particularly taxing day—because you need not to cry, you do not need to let them know, her father always dictated, but you still must feel it, and you need to make your audience cry. You must not conceal, and you need to feel yourself, internally—where there was absolutely nothing judging her when tears splashed across her hands.

Yes, Rachmaninoff was good, Rachmaninoff was like water, it was life—

(Although it must have said something that she didn't play Rachmaninoff after she opened her guarded little heart to the only person she ever loved outside her family, after that girl took it and broke it apart in front of Elsa's own eyes.)

—

It was around three minutes to one o'clock when Elsa stepped out into the open air, a very welcome reprieve from the downright oppressive stuffiness of the concert hall, and her stomach was not in the best of moods.

She was hungry.

Her stomach gurgled its plaintive affirmation.

"...Shut up," she moaned pitifully to the rebellious organ.

Oh dear, what was it again? The first sign of insanity is...talking to yourself?

In her most flimsy defense, she was so burned out and miserable and distracted and still had her nose half-stuck in the stupid Beethoven sonata score that she didn't even notice the the poor member of the human race she had essentially walked right into, and also didn't notice the end of a large, felt-colored rectangular box almost wrecking her nether regions until around five seconds later, when said redhead was already in full ramble mode, apologies pouring out of her mouth like she was a human fountain that spewed out muddled-together words.

"—OhmygoshI'msosorrydidIhurtyou?!"

Elsa was sure that she instantaneously turned a bright shade of red that could have rivaled the profusely apologizing girl's hair. If Elsa had had a tomato for a mother, it would have been inordinately proud.

As it was, Elsa responded with the most intelligent word (or letter) she could formulate in her mind at the moment.

"I."

"No, no, no; I'm sorry, did I hit you—ah, excuse me—there?"

"Uh..."

Shut up, Elsa.

"Well, no." (Her upper left thigh painfully throbbed in protest.)

Shut up, Elsa.

"I mean...yeah, no."

Jesus Christ, Elsa, you dense idiot.

The redhead was picking up her case, which she had dropped noisily onto the cobbled street in the former confusion. Elsa now identified it as one that probably held either a violin or a viola. It was well-worn, indicating abundant use; it had a flap of black fabric hanging off from its belly that lazily waved around in the brisk wind.

The redhead was still apologizing when she looked up at Elsa's face, which was still uncannily similar to the color of an overripe strawberry; she blinked, and then her posture stiffened. Her former smile abruptly slid right off her face like oil set on water, only to be replaced by an oddly blank expression for a few moments; then the redhead hitched it right back on and continued smiling, although it was now passive.

Elsa froze too.

Shit. Shit, shit, shitty shit. What did you do?

"Alright, then," the redhead said, and her voice was almost forcibly cheerful now as she turned around, now appearing to make every effort to not look at the blonde in the eye. "I...well, uh, sorry for bumping into you."

"You didn't—no, I, um...you didn't bump into me. I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention, I bumped...into you..."

The redhead whirled around and said, almost in an accusatory tone of voice, "You're Elsa Vinters, aren't you?"

"Yes," Elsa said, still confused by the girl's slight vehemence. "I am..."

Her last words tapered off into an awkward silence as the girl gave a single, brusque nod of her head and walked quickly away.

Elsa buried her head in her hands and was very aware of the fact that the tips of her ears still felt like they had taken an impromptu vacation to the Sahara Desert and were now having fun being scorched off by the sun.

...Socially awkward freak, the voices murmured in her mind.

—

It was after her mother died when Elsa's life took a turn for the worse.

Well, not necessarily worse. But much more demanding. Much more taxing, and certainly less fun.

Maria Vinters was a bright soul, one of those rare people whose default facial expression was a brilliant and sincere smile. She was a gifted musician as well, at the same time managing to remain intellectual as well as emotional with each and every piece that was placed in front of her. Rumor had it that she was descended down from the old Arendelle royal line, the line that included Queen Aren the Founder-of-Arendelle-And-The-Very-First-In-A-Long-String-of-Aren's and King Edgar the Drunk Who Drove The Country Into Bankruptcy and that so-called ice queen who froze Arendelle in an eternal winter. (Elsa didn't like to hold very much by the last monarch; she was quite aware of what the media called her in newspapers.)

At least, that's what her history books said. Elsa didn't very much like history. Too many important figures and revolts trapped in dusty thick tomes, and those political ideas like capitalism and nationalism and manoralismthat all blended together into one confusing ideology whenever she read about that. Music was much easier to memorize than old facts about founders of countries and ice witches.

And much more useful.

Her mother and father, apparently, had met at the Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts when they were twenty-one, had that cheesy moment when they looked into each other's eyes and realized that they had found their one true love, married, had sex, and then boom, baby Elsa popped out screaming on the twenty-first of December. At least, that's how Elsa thought of it. That's how she preferred to think of it. She didn't care for the sordid details of her parents' personal life and she still wasn't quite sure if the creature she called her father nowadays was even capable of love anymore.

He hadn't always been so hard, hadn't always been so cold. It was like something shut down in him after Elsa's mother passed away, and he began to push Elsa toward playing the piano full time, playing it for her profession. And Elsa loved music, she loved the piano. She didn't complain. She didn't find fault with the fact that her father was pushing her to extremes that no ten-year-old should have to endure, but she what she did find fault with was his methods.

He withdrew her from public school and the public eye, for one. Kai was the portly old man whom her father hired as Elsa's private tutor, and he was certainly nice enough—at least, he allowed Elsa to scurry to the kitchens and nick chocolate whenever it had pleased her to do so. Father also dragged her through four grueling hours of practice a day, and then five the next year, and then six, and then seven, until she took three-quarters of a year off to finish the necessary credits for her high school diploma when most normal children would have still been in middle school. She didn't even realize she had missed practically the entirety of her late childhood until it was too late, until it had already became all about piano.

Then she entered that time period when she couldn't decide if she loved Daddy or hated him and she won her first junior competition. One victory became two and then four and suddenly she had been propelled into overnight Arendellian fame (which really wasn't saying much) when she won the Minnesota International Piano-e-Competition at fourteen-and-a-half years of age and completely upset the favorite hailing from Denmark, some Hans Westergaard or something. Elsa remembered thinking at the time that Hans's last name was funny.

She continued to attend several small-scale competitions, most of them international, and her first big break came when some big-name music critic from the highly influential New York Times happened to stumble in onto her playing at the Steinway Hall in New York City as prep for an upcoming recital in Carnegie Hall, and called her performance of Chopin's waltz in E-flat minor "one of the the most heart-wrenching renditions of the piece he had ever heard." Then she was invited to play for the new President of the United States of America at the White House. And it was a year and a few months later when the record labels came a-calling. And then Elsa's time began to go down a metaphorical drain. Practice, practice, practice. That's all she knew and it was all she did. Elsa groaned every time she thought about it.

What higher being ever decided to be so fucking evil and give us only twenty-four hours in a day...

—

When she came back to the piano hall, her father asked her if she had studied the score. Elsa thought about the redhead she had apparently insulted, the delicious roast beef sandwich she had enjoyed near the fountain in the center of Evigvinter's city square, and the score she had decidedly not looked at.

She lied through her teeth, answered in the affirmative to her father's inquiry, and played, flawlessly.

Apparently satisfied, her father left her to her own devices for the rest of the day and retired back to their rented apartment to do who knows what. Elsa had long since resigned herself to the fact that her father stayed up until about three in the morning, by her calculations, running calls and clicking madly away on his laptop. Sometimes, on a particularly restless night, she would merely lie in her bed and count the cracks in her ceiling while listening to the soft tap-tap of her father, clicking away on the computer's keyboard.

And when the door closed behind him, Elsa shook out her wrists, put her fingers across the glossy white-and-black keys, and played Rachmaninoff.

—

Anna was not having a good week.

There was that whole fiasco with running into the world-famous pianist Elsa Vinters in the most embarrassing and painful way possible, and honestly, Anna didn't quite know what to make of that woman now that she had become "personally acquainted" with her. She was really nothing short of socially awkward. She practically strung words together in a stammer, fingers worrying against themselves so much that Anna was positively sure they would fall off, and the blonde had absolutely refused to meet Anna's inquisitive gaze.

She didn't think too much on that though, when Mother informed her that it would be absolutely mandatory for Anna to attend the concert, because did Anna know how hard it was the get the tickets and she should really have more appreciation for one of the best young musicians of the age and for piano in general, which only reinvigorated Anna's slightly tempered annoyance at the gushing praise Vinters seemed to trail regardless of whether she was doing anything wonderful or not.

Unfortunately at the moment, she was quite occupied with other, more severe, un-Vinters-related problems that she had just been brought to realize by her academic dean:

"Are you telling me I'm failing Astrophysics?!"

Anna was very close to hyperventilating. It was practically the end of the third semester; she knew she hadn't been doing quite as well as she probably should have in her chosen science course, but she didn't think she was doing so badly as to the point of failing, and thus had never really bothered to check her grades on the iCampus portal.

Dean Arnbjørg pinched the bridge of her nose, counted to five, and tried very hard not to scream.

The fifty-seven-year-old couldn't deal with the raging redhead at the moment, she really couldn't. She had already had a rough day before her, having had to break up an outright fistfight between a few high school freshman who decided that they did not want to resolve an issue over who was copying who's biology homework in a civilized manner and a drop screen falling onstage during the sophomores' orchestral concert rehearsal while the viola section leader (who was very well known for overreacting when someone so much as even touched his very expensive and very precious instrument) was passively eating his raisins.

"Yes, Miss Engström, you are currently failing Astrophysics," Dean Arnbjørg said quite plainly. "I believe you are currently scraping a...sixty-two overall average in the class?"

Anna was very, very close to having a coronary and dropping dead from heart problems right there and then, onto the ugly brown-carpeted floor that blanketed the ground of the academic dean's office like a shaggy, mangy bear pelt.

Oh, dear gods, please, please, please tell me I'm in a fucking nightmare of a dream and I'll wake up soon. In a very comfortable bed, where I'm currently not failing one of my core classes, and...and other stuff, like things thatdon't involve me flunking science—

"Miss Engström, this is not a dream." The dean's irritated voice cut through Anna's hopeful train of thought, and the redhead visibly wilted.

"How'd you know I was thinking that?" Anna near-whined, sinking down further into her chair and burying her head in her hands.

Because the ugly fact remained that she needed to keep her grades up to even be considered for eligibility into the Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts. There was absolutely no fucking way she would be able to get into a prestigious university with a damned sixty-two in Astrophysics, unless she was some sort of Mozart musical prodigy—like maybe Elsa Vinters, and Anna drove the thought quickly out of her mind because why did everything in her life have to revolve back in some way to the darn concert pianist?—which, for all her practicing and as much as she begged and prayed and hoped to whatever higher beings there were above, she was decidedly not.

"...Miss Engström, look at me."

Anna let out a disgruntled noise that was halfway between a sob and a groan before she looked.

The dean's voice was softer now, "Listen, Miss Engström, I know how much getting into the Institute means to you, but you do know that you will need to pull up your Astrophysics grade to at least a ninety."

"That's a twenty-eight point difference," said Anna despondently, because for all it was worth she had a quick mind when it came to simple mental math. "Dean Arnbjørg, I've got literally, like...a little over two months left before graduation. How in the world am I supposed to pull it up thirty-eight points?"

"I'm sure that the professor is open to giving you extra credit work," the dean suggested. "In the meantime, I suggest that you start getting those other small grades up. Tests, quizzes, projects, homework...and all the like. Yes?"

Anna managed to crack a weak smile. "Um, yeah," she quietly said, moving to stand, "thanks."

She hefted her violin case up, which was sitting peacefully at the doorway, and exited the dean's office.

Oh, good gods, I am so fucking screwed.

End Notes / Why hello there character development. I apologize if it was horribly boring to suffer through, but it's necessary. And Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 is boss, and I recommend you listen to it ^^

Sorry for the late update. Had Bio SATs and AP World History DBQ and...oh, how ironic, a piano competition. That I completely bombed *_* We'll get back to more Anna next time. Thanks for the favs, follows, and reviews; you guys fucking rock.