A/N: Okay, wow, thank you so much for the reviews, follows, and favorites! Oh my gosh! I really wasn't expecting any attention for this at all. Wow. Thank you so much.

I will update every Saturday and Tuesday, and my goal is to keep all chapters under 4,000 words.

Something that PHLeaz said prompted me to write out short definitions for the music terms in each chapter because sometimes I get carried away in my descriptions and end up using half my theory book of terminology. So, we have:

pianissimo: As quiet as possible.

Spiccato - a rough sound, like the notes are static-y

Pizzicato - plucking string instruments with your fingers, like a guitar

Strad - short for Stradivarius, legendary multimillion dollar violins. Something I will never have.

And that should be it!

I based Alex's practice of Danse Macabre in this (y'all should youtube the Chloe Trevor rendition, it's amazing) off of the time I played it, because I distinctly remember reading Scorpia Rising the same day that I preformed it.

Again, wow, thank you, I was shocked when my email had 8 new email alerts from ffnet.

Just.

Wow.

Danielle balled her hands into fists, just to keep them from trembling. The wailing sirens echoed in her ears as she jogged down the street, finally slowing down to a walk once she crossed what had to be the fifth crosswalk after the cafe. Her sudden halt brought her face-to-face with a man walking briskly in the opposite direction.

She managed to give him a small smile and dodge to the right.

He nodded in reply and stepped out to hail a cab.

The same interaction happened between hundreds of people in London mornings as Commuters swarmed the tube and the streets to hurry from one meeting to the next, from a comfortable bed to a job they secretly hated.

Danielle shook her head and smiled. She was lucky to love her job.

Her smile quickly faded, however, when she realized that Alex Rider wasn't behind her, and that her left wrist was beginning to positively throb from being pinned beneath her weight against the floor.

Shudders wracked her upper body and she had to force herself to keep walking, even though everything inside her wanted to curl up in the doorway of one of the dozens of shops and cry. Shattering glass had such a specific, grating noise. She knew she'd never forget the bang of gunfire either, not even if she lived for an entire century.

"Stupid!"

Bang!

"Worthless!"

Bang!

"WHORE!"

Bang!

Plaster and other pieces of the bedroom wall rained down on her head. Danielle hunched down against the floor, bent over with her head as far between her knees as she could get it. She squeezed her arms where they encircled her knees and tried, tried so hard, not to voice any of the choking sobs that crowded her mouth.

"Hey! Danielle!" footsteps rushed up behind her and a strong hand grabbed her arm. Danielle barely restrained herself from whirling around, instead turning calmly towards Alex, who despite having ran seven blocks didn't appear particularly fatigued or winded , though his shirt was rather rumpled.
"Sorry," his mouth quirked into a line. "Someone called."

"Do you always take phone calls right after you've been shot at?"

His eyebrows flicked up. "Depends on who's calling."

"And?"

"No one. Just the bank."

"Ah."

He nodded, even as he glanced around the surrounding area. "So, we were talking about Chopin? First pieces you learned were his?"

"No, we were discussing how you knew that someone had taken a gun into a cafe?" she gave him her best glower. "I signed up to play piano, not army."

"Technically the American SWAT would be a better comparis-"

"Alex."

"Fine," he sighed, running his fingers through his shaggy hair. "The other guy near him flinched, and I saw the metal glint."

"Really?"

"Yep. So, uh," his hands were in constant motion, tugging at his shirt, his hair, rubbing the back of his neck. No wonder he played violin; all those nervous ticks spoke of a pent-up well of energy deep inside his bones. "Are you okay? You're holding your wrist. . ."

Danielle hadn't noticed. "Oh! Yes, I'm fine. Old injury."

Curiosity sparked in his ice-blue eyes. "From what?"

"Fell off the monkey bars when I was eight."

"Ouch."

"Yes."

Danielle entered the folding doors of their flat building. She barely noticed they were still walking, too stuck in the cafe's events to pay attention to the street names and corners. Talking with Alex wasn't proving too awful either, perhaps this accompanist gig could work out; short of being a psychopathic killer, there wasn't much he could to do scare Danielle away from a paying job. The promise of funds for her dwindling bank account was incentive enough.

"How old are you?" he asked as he jabbed the button on the lift. She tried not to jerk away from the sudden movement.

"Nineteen."

"Me too. I guess they put us together figuring . . . age? Technique? Something for a selling point, I'm sure."

She couldn't help but grin. "Try 'desperate, starving musician needs money.' And by that I mean me."

"You have a flat here," he pointed out. "Hardly the slums."

She leveled a flat stare at him as the elevator doors dinged open and he gestured for her to step out first. "I also have three credit cards."

He whistled, long and low. "Damn."

Danielle shook her head, her eyes catching on the floor number: 14. Hadn't he said he lived on 13?

"My studio is here," Alex explained as if reading her mind. He splayed his arms out towards the only door in sight.

"My God," Danielle muttered, reluctantly following him as he struggled to find the proper key. "You have the penthouse. Bloody prat-"

Then she saw the inside, and her brain stopped working. Alex set his keys down on the small table and proceeded to fill two glasses with water, slid them onto the counter, and propped his chin on his hands.
The floor was covered in thick, plush carpeting that matched the beige of the sound-absorbing panels on the walls. Several music stands laden with scores, sheet music, and books were scattered throughout the space, which was surprisingly devoid of any walls except for a loo tucked away in the far corner. Large windows offered a spectacular view of the London skyline but even that paled in comparison to the sleek, gleaming Bechstein piano sitting in front of them.

Alex saw Danielle begin to examine the piano, but didn't pay much attention. He was more focused on not hurdling one of the glasses across the room out of sheer frustration.

What the bloody hell happened in that goddamned cafe? There weren't supposed to be anymore assassins - and this one didn't even try to be inconspicuous, which rattled Alex's pride in his former work - or anymore . . . anythings. All traces of him in relation to anything non-musical were erased.

And Danielle.. . .

She'd lied about her wrist; he'd seen the flicker in her eyes. She was his age, probably some sort of prodigy. However she broke it was probably an embarrassing story.

But the voice in his head continued to nag that something wasn't quite right with this day, well, besides the shooting.

He groaned softly, burying his fingers in his hair and gently tugging, tempted to see how much he could rip out. Could he ever get anything he wanted?

His phone vibrated against his thigh. He yanked it out, checked the caller ID (Unlisted - probably Jones or one of her cronies, better not to answer), promptly turned the device off and left it on the counter. He'd delay speaking with them for as long as possible.

Alex didn't want to admit how rattled he was. His hands were trembling so much that he had barely been able to fit the key in the lock back in the hallway. He couldn't remember feeling this nervous, not before a performance, not before a mission, and certainly not recently.

Hell, he didn't bother checking the streets before crossing anymore, having given up on caring whether he lived or died.

Music was a temporary salve for the pain.

Death was the much more permanent option.

Not that he wanted to die, not exactly. Some days he just felt . . . hollow. Not all days, though. It was better now than two years ago when. . . a shudder ran up his spine as he remembered the day he decided to leave the Pleasures and return to England.

It was for the best, he told himself. You're fine here.

A short A-minor trill from the piano jerked his mind from morbid paths.

Danielle was beaming at Bechstein with her fingers barely touching the smoothly polished keys. Her shoulders slumped, projecting a clean curve down her arms and to her fingertips, further blurring the line between human and ethereal sounds.

That was music, after all: becoming one with your instrument, laughing and crying and everything in between with melodies and harmonies that intertwined like lovers in an achingly fragile embrace.

The best musicians lived a symphony. Every step a measure, every breath a new variation on something repeated in earlier phrases. Every tear a spine-tingling chord, every laugh a bubbly trill.

"Would you like to rehearse?" Alex asked abruptly, jamming his hands into his pockets to stop himself from fidgeting. "My violin's in my flat. I'll get it."

Danielle nodded absently, and Alex hurried down to his flat - which was so far unmolested by MI6 or the police (or assassins, an added plus) - to fetch his instrument. Without bothering to zip up the case, he scooped it up and returned to the lift, catching it just as the doors started to slide shut.

When he returned to the studio, Danielle was no longer at the piano; instead, she stood at one of the many music stands he had for lack of sheet music storage with a book of Mozart in one hand and a crumpled, torn photograph in the other.

Alex's throat went dry, and it took him a few tries before he summoned enough voice to speak. The room spun and blurred around him, and suddenly the pale carpet was a tiled floor, his violin the shackles anchoring him to the chair, the ringing in his ears the echo of an explosion that left him as burnt-out as the bombed car - and the person inside.

The violin slid in his grasp and pitched towards the floor. He tightened his hold on this thing, this thing that echoed him to the current reality, the one that didn't loop over and over behind his eyes.

Alex cleared his throat.

"Danielle?"

She whirled around, arms crossed over her stomach, fingers curling into the fabric of her sleeves. "I'm sorry! I was curious - I saw the score, and wondered what Mozart you were playing, and the picture fell out-"
"It's alright," Alex replied with a tight smile, pretending like seeing even the outline of that picture didn't drive a knife through his chest. "I haven't played that piece since I was twelve."

Her mouth made a small O of surprise, and she set it down on the stand's edge as if it was going to implode. "Who is that?"

Alex clenched his jaw. "My housekeeper. Jack. That was - that was my first recital."

Danielle quirked her eyebrows up but remained silent, slowly uncurling her arms and leaning almost imperceptibly towards the piano. Her eyes were glued to the carpet.

"Still want to practice?" she quietly offered after a few seconds, dragging the toe of her sandal across one of the joining lines between carpet panels.

"Rehearse," he corrected automatically. "And yes." *Before MI6 kicks my door in.*

She located the scores for Danse Macabre and pulled out the piano bench, sitting with a relaxed kind of attentiveness, glancing at him as he quickly attached his shoulder rest and rosined his already tightened bow. Should've loosened that. Whoops.

Alex played a few minor double stops to warm up, finishing with a flourishing vibrato, and rolled his shoulders while breathing deeply. He adjusted the sheet music on the stand.

Danielle was watching. "You could play an entire concert of that and still be the best violinist in Britain."

He bit back a pleased grin, instead arching one eyebrow at her while flicking his eyes towards the music.

She turned back around and began to play.

Alex brought his bow down with such force that it crackled across the strings. He couldn't help but sway in place with the first repetition of the refrain as Danielle played the harmony with seemingly little effort. The piano chords wove between intense double stops and trills in the higher octaves with ease. His fingers stung during the pizzicato, but he gripped the frog of his bow tightly and focused on the oncoming runs, dozens of sixteenth notes increasing in pitch and intensity just like his heart did this morning at the cafe, and the rising volume and pounding piano keys like spiccato bursts of machine gun fire and -

Ssh.

He brought his volume down to pianissimo, carefully, quietly. Leaning in towards the notes that bled from his mind to his fingertips. His pulse thundered in his ears.

He stopped thinking. There was nothing, no room, no floor, no shooting, no nothing. Just music, layers upon layers of it as they unspooled into the air like birds off a wire.

His ears rang with the violent chords, his jaw vibrated from the sawed notes that rang out more like static and less like glass. Good. Glass was bad. Glass shattered.

Then, abruptly, everything stopped. The final notes slowed to a trickle and faded out into the soundproofed walls.

Only the shuffle of papers and their mingled breaths echoed in the quiet studio until Danielle arched her back, stretching, and glanced at him. "That was intense."

Alex tried not to look as dazed as he felt, still feeding off the high of finally, finally playing with someone else. "Yeah."

"Do you always play like you've gone fifteen rounds with a Strad and lost?"

He laughed before he had a chance to stop himself, doubled over, hands on his knees. The anxious tremors from earlier were gone from his fingers and stomach and he could finally breathe again without feeling guilty for stealing oxygen from someone who deserved to be alive.

"Yes. It's a stress reliever, of sorts. Do you always memorize pieces like that?"

She blinked. "No. I was sight reading."

Alex blinked right back at her. "You're joking."

"I rarely do."

I knew it. I knew she was a virtuoso.

"Hm. No wonder you got stuck with me."
Flipping her hair over her shoulders, she turned back to the piano. "Meaning?"

"Well," he seized a score of Chopin's Nocturne for Violin and Piano off the table next to him and tossed it towards her, belatedly realizing her back was towards him. "Ah, Danielle-"

She ducked. The papers plonked out an ugly chord as they landed somewhere around the keyboard. "Thanks, Alex."
"As I was saying before you decided to ignore my smoothly executed maneuver there, you're the only one who can keep up with me."

Ignoring her protests, he launched into the first line and left her to catch up as she wrenched the covers apart, frantically flipping to the fist page. She muttered to herself the entire time, and Alex had to force himself to concentrate enough to pull off some semblance of the correct timing.

The pressure in his chest, that mixture of grief-guilt-sorrow that lived inside him, lessened a little bit.

Alex and Danielle rehearsed for nearly four hours before realizing that, wow, it was noon and neither of them had eaten breakfast. Alex also realized that he should consider checking his phone for further missed calls and messages, just in case there was another shooting.

Guilt overcame him as he fumbled the zipper of his violin's case. He should have stayed at the cafe, should've tried harder to find the shooter before innocent people came into harm's way.

He should have been more alert in the first place and noticed the oddities of that man's behavior. Maybe the entire incident could have been avoided then.

But you got this, some hidden, selfish part of his brain spoke up. The music, the release. This is yours.

But the rest of England were sitting ducks.

Alex felt the anxiety again, the vise that gripped his lungs until they screamed for help, and tried to calm down by glancing for objects around the room. Music stand. Table. Panel. Music stand. Music sta- I need to find another system of organizing. He only felt slightly better, but trudged to the door and resigned himself to a stressful afternoon in his flat watching the local news for any new information. Danielle stepped into the lift and stuck out her foot to keep the door from closing.

"Want to have lunch with me?" Alex asked impulsively. He just didn't want to be alone, not for the rest of the day.

Danielle narrowed her eyes - which were a startling shade, somewhere between brown like oakwood and golden like rosin. God, Alex, you have to stop comparing people to instruments. "you can cook?"

"Yes. Yes, I can. I can also order a mean platter of Indian takeout."

"I'm in."

There were several things Alex expected to see when the lift doors slid open in front of his flat: his door, the rarely used brass knocker, the scuffed carpet torn from where the old renter's dog clawed at it.

However, he never expected to see the door already open. He swore he'd closed it behind him.

"Wait here," he murmured, holding his arm out to stop Danielle from leaving the lift. "Keep your foot in front of the door."
"What are you doing?" Her gaze slid to meet his, uncertain.

"Checking something." Alex stole softly over the carpet and peered through the opening between the door and the frame. Nothing inside had been disturbed as far as he saw; the furniture was intact, no windows were broken, and there weren't any wires or other detonators running from the door to an explosive. Nope.

Not rigged. Not trashed.

Motioning for Danielle to stay where she was, he silently eased the door open and slid inside, making no further efforts to be stealthy as he opened the drawer of the small desk in his foyer and pulled out a gun with a silencer screwed onto the muzzle. It sat heavy in his palm, denser than metal should be.

Alex did not think about the last time he held a gun.

Alex did not remember when he learned to click the safety off and let the handle sit loosely in his palm.

The floor creaked from somewhere in the living room.

Instead, he barely breathed at all as he strode down the hall, threw a glance into the kitchen, and pivoted sharply to square his shoulders into the living room.

The TV blared reruns of an old football match, and two men sat on his couch. One with inky hair and stubble on his angled jaw; the other with brown hair and soft eyes that hid a very capable soldier - well, former soldier now.

"What," Alex growled as his heart threatened to explode. "The hell are you doing in my flat?"

Special Agent Ben Daniels got to his feet and smiled grimly at Alex. "Jones sent me. I invited Luke-uh, Wolf."

The SAS soldier grunted a greeting but didn't deign to turn and look at Alex, who considered putting a bullet in the couch right next to his head.

"Well, you're here. Now you tell her that you visited and I was not interested."

"Alex-"

"Get out."

Wolf heaved himself off the couch with an aggrieved sigh. "Look, Cub-"

Alex huffed. "I do not care if Ben brought the entire SAS for backup. I'm done with Jones and her lot." He hoped that if he didn't allow them to finish sentences, they'd be frustrated enough to leave.

"This is about the cafe," Ben said in a tone just level enough to be dangerous. "We just want to-"
"No." Alex barely resisted the impulse to cross his arms over his chest, remembering that he was holding a deadly weapon, and clicked the safety back on to the gun almost as an afterthought. His voice rose to a yell. "You always want to talk, and before long I'm dragged into some other hellhole - Bangkok, Australia, Jakarta, and that one time to outer space-"

A soft gasp echoed behind him, but it seemed louder than all the shouting he did. Alex's blood ran with ice.

Danielle.

In his shock and irritation, he'd completely forgotten about his new accompanist, but there she stood with her arms crossed over her stomach and the color rapidly draining out of her face.

Her eyes weren't on his face.

She didn't even glance at Ben or Wolf.

No, her eyes locked onto the gun in his hand.

Alex immediately dropped it to the floor, wincing slightly at the clatter. "Danielle, I promise -"

"Alex." her voice trembled, impossibly soft, but it was her eyes that struck him, haunted and afraid. He knew that look. He saw it every time he looked in a mirror. "What are you?"

What.

Not who.

He hated himself in that moment more so than ever before as the roiling mass of self-hatred threatened to choke off all thought and memory of his world. He clenched his fists even though his nails dug into his palms with tiny darts of pain. He deserved it. God, he deserved a thousand torments for what he had done. For what he hadn't done. For what he should've done.

So the silence in the room stretched into eternity as the one normal person he knew looked at him like people stared at monsters.

Danielle blinked hard against the storm waiting inside her head. The two men there - who obviously knew Alex - stood like statues. One, who looked decidedly ill-tempered, glared at the floor as if he expected it to start smoldering.
The other let his arms hang loosely at his sides.

She breathed in. Then out. Then in again.

Obviously, no one else knew what to do, so it was up to her to act normal. Or, as normal as anyone who figured out that their new professional partner happened to have a gun lying around in his flat to point at any unannounced visitors could be expected to act.

She saw Alex staring into the kitchen. His eyes dulled, and for the first time she noticed the dark circles smudged beneath them.

"Um," she breathed the word out. Now she understood why Alex was always fidgeting: standing still felt so useless when everyone around was trapped in their own heads. "I'm. . . sorry?"

The man who wasn't trying to glare a hole in the floor gave her a sympathetic glance. "You would have found out at any rate. Due to recent events-" by that, Danielle guessed that he meant the shots at the cafe, "- your collaboration with Alex has been suspended." He seemed genuinely sorry, too.

Danielle pushed the fear to the back of her mind, as far as it could go without running into the storm there, and squared her shoulders. She knew men like these. They understood urgency and imperatives.

"I need this job," she said, trying to keep desperation from coloring her tone. "I have debts." And not just to the bank.

The scowling man glanced at Alex. "Something could be worked out-"

"No," Alex rasped, his voice hollow. "Danielle, leave."

"No-"

"Get out!" he snapped with the same ferocity that drew her into his flat in the first place. She leaned away from the verbal slap and saw him, saw the glassy film covering his eyes and threatening to spill down his face, the tightness of his posture, the fists he clenched as if he was holding something by the throat - no, as if he was holding himself by the throat.

And Danielle had seen enough, had felt enough, to know when someone was dying inside, so she stood her ground just this once to the wrong person, like she should have done four years ago before her wrist and dreams were shattered.

"No, Alex," she replied. "I'm not leaving." After a few seconds ticked by, she glared at both the men. "You're not firing me and throwing me out. This job is the only shot I have. I'm fighting for it."

Thank you for reading! Please continue to review!

~Katie