2/8/15
Ivories
part one
serendipity
—up to the moment when a development seems due—
[chapter four / vorspiel movement]
April 2, 2014
Belle d'Amboise
Dean of Faculty Management
Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts
219 Main Street
Evigvinter, 617-90, Arendelle
Dear Dr. d'Amboise,
Thank you for offering me a position on your faculty. It is with great pleasure that I accept your offer to join the Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts as a visiting professor, under Dr. Fa. The goals you outlined for the position are indeed well-matched to my abilities, and I consider it a great privilege to join your staff, if only temporarily.
I believe that we will further discuss the issue concerning the total length of my tenure through e-mail correspondence. Thank you once again for extending an offer to teach at your esteemed institute, and I look forward to working with you and the rest of the faculty. In the meantime, feel free to call me at (891) 555 - 1782.
Best regards,
Elsa Vinters
—
April 4, 2014
Ms. Vinters,
Acceptance application received. We have sent you the paperwork finalizing your application, which should arrive within the week. It was our pleasure. You will be sent a letter around mid-July concerning the expectations attached to your position, your courses, and class schedule, so you may plan accordingly. I am sure you will prove a wonderful addition to our guest faculty, and I, along with the other professors here at AIPA, look forward to working with you!
Sincerely,
Dr. Belle d'Amboise
Dean of Faculty Management
Arendelle Institute of Performing Arts
219 Main Street
Evigvinter, 617-90, Arendelle
—
Monday morning found Elsa sprawled across her bed in the most undignified position possible, her limbs spread akimbo and mouth agape.
She had fallen asleep last night still riffling through the score of Liszt's Transcendental Études, all of which she had to learn by the coming December to record her next CD. And all things considered, Elsa was trying very, very hard to not cry and sink into the ground from apprehension, because oh my gods, Elsa didn't even know that notes could be arranged in such a way, or that her fingers could ever twist themselves into convoluted misrepresentations of themselves. She was tired even looking at the music, never mind playing it.
The first shafts of early spring sunlight began to leak into her living quarters through the sole window set in the back of the room, its white radiance pooling over the bedsheets and Elsa's own prone figure. The blonde's nose twitched almost imperceptibly. She cracked open an eye, a sliver of the brightest blue appearing amidst pale skin and platinum locks before she groggily propped herself up by the elbows, worrying at her eyes with a knuckle.
The sheets of the Transcendental Études lay slightly scattered all over her lap, from where she had been clutching them before she drifted off to sleep. Elsa picked some of them up and glared at them intently. She hoped against all odds that they would somehow float up and magically imprint themselves into her mind; it would relieve her of a lot of memorization and stress, in any case.
The papers sat calmly in her hands, and she swore that she had never seen a sheaf of sheet music look more smug. She was the cover of the slightly crinkled Étude No. 7 "Eroica" to sprout a mouth and begin laughing at her, like one of those obnoxious evil queens in Disney movies might.
In a moment of uncharacteristic desperation, Elsa informed the air, "Beethoven, you are a terrible composer and I hate you."
Besides the fact that the statement she had bluntly posed to it was totally untrue, the air did not bother to supply an adequate answer.
...I have clearly not slept enough if I am talking to the air as if it were a deaf and crazy man who is located thousands of miles away and is buried under six feet of dirt inside a coffin. And thinking about dead trees that have been pressed into thin sheets of white, dried pulp growing mouths and laughing at my absolute ineptitude learning these blasted songs.
Gathering the papers up slowly with a faint scowl, Elsa clumsily swung herself out of the bed before slowly padding toward the bathroom to wash up for the new day.
—
"Father?"
Eric Vinters didn't spare even so much as a glance upward to his only daughter, standing before his desk with her hands clasped respectfully in front of her.
"Have you come to me with your answer?" he brusquely asked instead, riffing through the mountainous sheaf of paperwork that were the result of Elsa attending so many competitions, performing concerts. He didn't have to ask to which question Elsa was to answer to, because both father and daughter already knew, even if Elsa hadn't delicately placed the sheet of cream-colored stock paper onto his desk.
"Yes, Father, I have accepted the position." There was a pause before Elsa quickly added, "With great honor."
"That is good to hear," Eric said indifferently, and he pulled out another two papers stamped with the AIPA seal. "You sign here and here"—jabbing his thumb at two different lines—"and then I will send it off to the university. The term starts August twenty-seventh." He finally deigned to look up from his work and glare at his daughter in the eye, his piercing blue gaze both scorching and freezing at the same time.
"Don't be late."
Elsa had to bite back a rebuttal; if her father had ever bothered to learn anything about her by this point, it would be that she was always, always punctual.
"Yes, father."
He didn't say anything in response after that and only continued to scribble at his desk. Heaving an internal sigh, Elsa took that as her cue to leave. She pushed out of the room and made sure that the door closed louder than it had to behind her.
Leaning against the wall, she pressed her fingers to her temples and tried to suppress the feeling of resentment boiling up inside her chest.
Her father had always been distant like that, cool and unfeeling. He was like one gigantic block of ice that Elsa couldn't chip away at no matter what she did. No matter how much she tried to appease him, he always ended up being dissatisfied with something else she would supposedly be doing "wrong". Sometimes, she wished he would offer some other expression other than his default cool indifference. Indifference toward everything she did, no matter how much she tried and how much she sacrificed in the name of her image. How hard could it be to acknowledge her with something more affectionate and motivational, something that was beyond a grim nod? How hard could it be for him to be a normal parent for once and encourage her with kindness and smiles rather than push with hard-fisted words and glares? How hard could it be to see her as something more than just a figurine from a music box, dancing to someone else's drumbeat while desperate to listen to her own?
It was just frustrating, to say the least. Elsa herself honestly couldn't care less about how the world's audience perceived her. It didn't matter to her whether a critic in Australia thought that she played Bach a little too much like how Chopin should be played, or that some random bystander at a concert in England grumbled that she was overrated and he hated her interpretations of Prokofiev. Audiences were, in short, impersonal.
And so it was the personal fallacies that really got to her performances, whether they be her hatred of her own fingers slipping to hit a wrong note or her reliance on pills to get her through exceptionally large concerts or what her father thought about her concerts. Her father's approval was something entirely different. Unlike the public's praise, his was something she craved but rarely ever got. It was like it was a delectable treat hanging in front of her face, so tantalizingly there, but never actually obtainable. And her father certainly cared about how the rest of the world perceived his prodigious pianist daughter; thus, Elsa fed off of those second-handed expectations and did her best to appear as the "brilliant musician" pitch her father sold to concert halls and every other conceivable person or place imaginable. She smiled something synthetic for flashing cameras and conducted interviews by answering questions the way she thought her father would want her to answer them.
Yet she still never got his full, one hundred percent approval. Only a short nod here, a tight smile there.
She hated it. Sometimes, she hated him for it. She hated that he was the key that made her turn to the right or to the left, the fact that she was so emotionally reliant upon him. Him and those gods damned pills, both.
But thinking these thoughts had never gotten her anywhere. So Elsa peeled herself from off the wall, straightened up, conjured up an approachable expression, and headed out to face the new day.
—
"I hate physics."
A crumpled paper ball that had been covered with hastily-scrawled equations hit the edge of the wastebasket, failed to teeter into the can itself, and proceeded to fall to the ground in a most pathetic fashion. It was now lying among around six others of its similarly treated friends.
"I hate astronomy."
A pencil thunked onto the wooden surface of a desk and bounced twice before settling to a halt near the edge of a large paper packet that was flipped to the third page (out of a hundred and sixty-four). The sound of a head hitting said desk followed not a moment later, and a string of curses floated into the air.
"Ambrose is a terrible human being and she should die in a fiery pit of death that's filled with really sharp knives, psychopaths brandishing bloody meat cleavers, and cream cheese."
"Anna, language!" Idun absentmindedly called as she hurried past her daughter's room, a sheaf of papers flapping breezily in her grip and she all but ran into her study to do gods-know-what.
"I hate science," Anna said into the desk to no one in particular. "I hate science and math and I hate astrophysics and MARSHALL GET YOUR SORRY ASS OVER HERE BECAUSE I NEED HELP!"
"Why don't you just ask me to stay?!" her brother grumbled, and his spiky-haired head popped into view at the edge of her doorway. "This is, what, the fifth time you've called me in — ?"
"Marshall get over here and tell me what in the world is a stellar parallax?!" Anna demanded without preamble, thrusting the packet into his face.
She was fuming, was the first thing he noticed. Somehow, she had grown even angrier in the span of the last ten minutes that he hadn't seen her, which he would have marked down as impressive if all that fire wasn't going to be directed towards him now. Her eyebrows were drawn together into this thin and angry line that spelled trouble for anyone who would even attempt to interact with her. There were prominent dark circles underneath her eyes that made her look like a very annoyed raccoon for all it was worth, and her hair was a veritable rat's nest of wayward strawberry blonde strands and pencil shavings.
In short, Anna had clearly been struggling over her astrophysics's extra credit packet ever since she had blown into the house like a whirlwind coming home from school, holing herself up in her room with an impossibly large stack of textbooks and a huff, and she hadn't stopped to take a single break since then. Marshall didn't even think that he had seen her down for dinner.
His sister was so, ridiculously stubborn sometimes, whether that sentiment was applied her passions (such as playing the violin) or her needs (such as passing astrophysics). The thing that Marshall had always admired about Anna was that she was tenacious to a startling degree, even about things she didn't like to do but she knew she had to, like homework — of which both Anna and Marshall plowed through ten thousand tons of on a daily basis. The difference was that Anna usually (always) finished before he did, because she literally didn't procrastinate.
Marshall had absolutely no idea whatsoever how she did it, but his sister did not procrastinate.
Anna did not procrastinate, and given her character, Marshall was both simultaneously shocked and not surprised at all. She was usually all head-in-the-clouds, often clumsy and sometimes oblivious to everything that was going around her. But she still got things done, somehow, in the midst of it all.
Jesus, she was so gods damned obstinate, and sometimes it came off in the weirdest way imaginable. Like with her homework completion.
However, a fuming Anna (like the one in display in front of him now) was not something that Marshall wanted to deal with, because she could be rather unreasonable when her emotions were overcome with her righteous fury. Whether it was because she got way too worked up over something, or she was still riding on the spluttering fumes of some violation she had to deal with, she was an absolute horror when angry, no questions asked.
Marshall peeled the paper from where Anna was forcefully grinding it into his nose and said in a long-suffering voice, "First of all, it's not 'what's a stellar parallax,' it's 'what's stellar parallax.'"
She pouted and snatched the papers from his grasp, nearly ripping the sheet clear off from the entire packet. "Could you please just help me? Seriously, I just want you to help me with this one question. And I did not call you over to correct my grammar!"
Marshall wisely decided not to answer and instead looked at the question that was causing Anna so much grief:
A star has a parallax angle p of 0.891 arcseconds. What is the distance to the star in light years?
"...Anna, the equation is literally just 'distance equals one over p', you just plug in the arcsecond value, and you've got your answer in parsecs. One parsec is three-point-twenty-six light years and...yeah."
"What? That can't be it." Anna glared at the question and tapped at a complicated-looking equation that was so twisted that Marshall didn't even know where it began and where it ended. "That's the thing that Ambrose was rambling about in class, or something. She spent a whole day on it. It can't be that simple."
He squinted at it for a moment, and then threw his hands up in the air.
"Because you're looking at the derivation of the stupid thing, of course it doesn't make any sense! And that's parallax error, not just parallax!"
Anna visibly deflated.
"...Oh."
"Yeah, 'oh.'"
"Shut up," she muttered, batting at him with a wayward hand while she penciled in the numbers. "No one asked you."
"You asked me for my help..."
"Shh."
Marshall rolled his eyes while Anna finished the problem.
And to his surprise, she threw the pencil down and turned toward him.
"I'm procrastinating," Anna bluntly announced, and she shoved the thick packet away. "I will procrastinate starting now and I hate astrophysics and I will procrastinate now."
"...Anna, you never procrastinate."
"Well, I'm gonna procrastinate now! Like, this thing isn't even due until next Friday or something."
Marshall blinked, and then clapped a hand to his forehead. "Seriously? Then why the hell are you even trying to do it all now?"
Anna spluttered.
He plowed onward. Show no mercy. "You're really weird sometimes, Anna, do you know that?"
Anna scowled. "I will go and watch cat clips now, so get out."
"In any case, you aren't supposed to say that you're procrastinating, you're just supposed to...procrastinate."
"Please get out so I can go watch YouTube videos of cute cats doing cute things and Taylor Swift being awesome while I drown in my sorrows."
"Taylor Swift isn't awesome," Marshall deadpanned.
A 'Very Dangerous Projectile' known as 'Anna's Pencil Case' came flying toward his head at what Marshall swore was subsonic speeds.
"DON'T YOU DARE INSULT TAYLOR SWIFT OR SO GODS HELP YOU GET OUT OF MY SIGHT."
Marshall rolled his eyes and let himself out, leaving Anna to turn to her laptop and open up Google Chrome.
She just didn't get it, was her thought when she opened up YouTube and rested her fingers on the keyboard, staring at the blinking cursor in the Search box. She tried hard with astrophysics, she really did. It wasn't as if she wasn't reading the textbook or anything like that; wasn't as if she didn't study even though she tended to fall asleep in the actual class itself. Anna applied herself to astrophysics just as much as she applied herself to mathematics or history or even her beloved violin-ing, yet she continued to fail horribly with astrophysics in a way that she wasn't doing so with trigonometry or the French Revolution (and definitely not music).
It was really annoying, to say the least. What was this thing about astrophysics that she just couldn't get, even when she applied to it the same kind of approach she applied to everything else? Like, Anna wasn't some child prodigy at the violin by any means. She may have been really great at it now, but it was the result of hard work and hours of practicing. By the same means, she should have at least been able to scrape up a passable grade in Astrophysics by doing her homework and reading the textbook and...well, working at it.
But the fact remained that it wasn't working.
This needled at her conscience more than it should have, and she turned back to her laptop with a huff. And so, in a fit of anger-induced procrastination, Anna Engström clicked on the Search box and vehemently typed in the following: "people failing at things."
(Well, she had to come up with some way to make herself feel better.)
As expected, a large list of videos and their descriptions soon popped up. Anna set about scrolling through them, languidly clicking on random links and watching with a sort of apathetic regularity that tempered her irritation, at the very least.
It had been about thirty minutes of her watching videos teenage boys riding skateboards inside their house and tripping over their fat cats or something only to end up with the head in the sink and feet in the air among various other stupid clips when she chanced upon a video wherein a dude was playing Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor. According to the description, he had been playing for eight years.
Wondering what could possibly be so terrible about this performance that it warranted being filed underneath YouTube's search query of "people failing at things," Anna clicked on the link and waited for the requisite five-second advertisement to finish, before clicking on the "skip to video" option.
The video started.
And the violinist appeared.
And the violinist began to play.
And Anna had to take a moment to digest the fact that this guy had been playing the violin for eight years.
Because he was fucking awful.
There was no other way to put it. Never mind the interpretation of the piece, the technical execution was simply horrible. It was saturated with screechy tones, out-of-tune notes, and an absolutely horrible posture. Anna stared at the video in horrified fascination for maybe two minutes before she violently X'd out of the tab, if only to save her musically-trained ears from annihilating themselves into a billion fleshy little bits.
That guy. Had been playing. The violin. For eight years.
Anna was even better than that dude when she was ten.
She stared at her desktop background for a few more moments, before shaking her head and pushing away from the desk, hopping to her feet.
Well, at least her seeing that guy utterly failing at playing the Bruch concerto (despite the flash of guilt that ran through her for even thinking the very thought) made her feel slightly better about her predicament with her astrophysics homework.
Sighing in resignation, Anna shut the laptop and wandered out of her room, meandering into the kitchen for some long overdue food.
End Notes / *bursts in seven months late with a new chapter* I LIVE~
(that last scene was totally character development) (at least, it'll be made clearer next chapter) (yes yes we have already established that I am a horrible human being and does it make it okay if I say sorry)
"Vorspiel: Allegro moderato" is the first movement of Bruch's Violin Concerto in G, or the thing that Anna's listening to in this chapter in her fit of pissed-off procrastination.
In any case, I do hope that the chapter was worth it. It was fun to write when I actually got around to it ^^" Apologies once more.